[In the following essay, Greene notes similarities between a passage in Shamela and a passage in Fielding's translation of a work by Moliére, and suggests that this is evidence for Fielding's authorship of the novel.]

As a contribution to the vexed and as yet incompletely settled question of the authorship of Shamela (1741) may I offer the following parallel passage in Fielding's translation of Molière's Le Médecin malgré lui as The Mock Doctor: or, The Dumb Lady Cur'd (1732). It occurs in an added plot scene which is not found in Molière's original.

Dorcas is exulting over the fact that she is at last to be revenged upon her husband for the frequent beatings he has been administering to her:

I don't remember my Heart has gone so pit-a-pat with Joy a long while.—Revenge is surely the most delicious Morsel the Devil ever dropt into the Mouth of a Woman.¹

The parallel passage in Shamela occurs in a scene during which Shamela becomes enraged because Mrs. Jewkes has upbraided her for putting Squire Booby in a “pet” during which he thrashed two or three of his men. Shamela says:

Harkee, Madam, says, I, don't you affront me, for if you do, d—m me (I am sure I have repented for using such a Word) if I am not revenged.

How sweet is Revenge: Sure the Sermon Book is in the Right, in calling it sweetest Morsel the Devil ever dropped into the Mouth of a Sinner.²

This parallelism might be merely independent use by two authors of a proverbial expression; yet I find no record of the phrase in any of the more accessible collections of familiar phrases and proverbs.

Notes

1. Henry Fielding, Works, London, A. Millar, 1755, three vols., vol. ii, The Mock Doctor, p. 11.

2. An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, ed. Brian W. Downs, Cambridge, 1930, p. 35.