SOURCE: Rothstein, Eric. “The Framework of Shamela.” ELH 35, no. 3 (September 1968): 381-402.

[In the following essay, Rothstein shows how the framework of Shamela, beginning with the prefatory material, sustains the burlesque of the novel's action and satirizes English social, political, and religious life.]

Fielding, in his prudence, did not let his ward Shamela go out to make her literary fortune alone. Her letters appeared with three epistolary chaperons, three addresses that are variants of her own correspondence. First, we have the letter of dedication from Conny Keyber to “Miss Fanny, & c.”; next, two letters to the Editor, “puffs” of the novel; finally, a pair of letters between Parsons Tickletext and Oliver, the one a praise of Pamela and the other an answer that denounces Pamela as a moral and literal fraud and that produces the genuine correspondence of Shamela. These three addresses seem to contain a puzzling contradiction. While Keyber styles himself Shamela's biographer, Parson Oliver claims that the work is an unintentional autobiography. One can dispose of the difficulty by assuming that Keyber, as putative author, has merely reproduced, or even written, the parsons' letters. Yet it would be quite out of character for him to have done so, even if we suppose, as a narrative justification, that he is using the parsons' letters to support the superiority of his own Shamela over Pamela, the rival product. In fact, any narrative explanation is unlikely, since Keyber dotes on Shamela, while the parsons' letters denounce her.

Fielding might have handled this seeming contradiction simply by having Oliver send Tickletext a copy of Shamela as edited by Keyber. As an alternative, he might have omitted one of the three addresses, since only the two “puffs” burlesque Richardson directly. Keyber's address in particular bears no relation to the form of Pamela. None the less, Fielding put it first, in a position of special prominence, an exposed position, where any sloppiness of conception would reveal itself even to a hasty author or a laughing reader. His craftsmanship, so rarely in doubt, ought to be sure-footed here: from his youth, Fielding had dealt with framework on multiple levels of fictional reality in plays like The Author's Farce, The Tragedy of Tragedies, Pasquin, and The Historical Register. And just as “problems” in the framework of these plays cannot be disregarded, or the framework be plucked away from the burlesque without damaging a crucial relationship between literary parody and social reality, so in Shamela. The very presence of the framework in Shamela demands thought about the effect of framework and burlesque upon one another, and about the nature of the composite work that they make up. I should like to sketch in some detail what the results of such thought might be.

We may begin with the Dedication, which comes first; it is a ribald parody, setting the tone for Shamela's sexual innuendos, of Conyers Middleton's dedication of his Life of Cicero to Lord Hervey. How thoroughly Middleton left himself open to this sort of parody is clear from a pamphlet approximately contemporary with Shamela, The Death of M—l—n in the Life of Cicero. Middleton, wrote “an Oxford Scholar,” “creeps closer to his Patron, and begins to lay him on thicker and faster, 'till he has bedaub'd him all over … For shame, for shame Doctor. What talk to my Lord Privy-Seal, as if you was tattling to a pretty Miss? entertain a Peer of the Realm and a Privy-Counsellor with a Lulla-by Baby-by! Quite surfeiting!”¹ Fielding says the same thing through puns. Thus, when Middleton compares Hervey to Cicero, saying, “Your character would justify me in running some length into the parallel,” Keyber slips into double-entendre: “your Character would enable me to run some Length into a Parallel.”² “Intimately conversed” takes on overtones. And so on. The satire cuts because of Hervey's alleged hermaphroditism (a favorite charge of the Opposition's), which was made notorious by the nickname “Fanny,” a slang term from at least the middle of the preceding century for the female sexual organs. Should anyone miss the joke on account of the commonness of calling Hervey “Fanny,” Fielding not only prefaces the name with a “Miss,” but also follows it with an “& c.” that makes no syntactical sense, but that has the same slang meaning as does “fanny.”³

He further embellishes the joke by mentioning Dr. John Woodward. At first, the choice of Woodward seems odd, even though a professional chair in his name had been held by Middleton. The Doctor had been dead thirteen years when Shamela was written, and one might have expected Fielding to hit upon a more current medical butt, like Dr. George Cheyne, whose Essay on Regimen he had recently satirized. Not only did Cheyne “mangle and maul” English, but he professed notions not too dissimilar from Woodward's, in a slightly less flamboyant rhetoric.⁴ But Fielding was willing to give up the current for the perfectly appropriate. As early as 1710 the traveller Uffenbach was writing of Woodward: “In every respect he behaves like a female and an insolent fool. For a pedant he is much too gallant and elaborate. He is a man in the thirties, unmarried, but criminis non facile nominandi suspectus.”⁵ Englishmen found the suspicions easier to name. One, in 1719, refers to Woodward as a “great Lover of Boys”; and “Dr. Technicum,” writing in the same year about a pretended autopsy on Woodward, is hardly less blunt: the ladies, he says, “will be inquisitive of what Sex he dyed: The Account of his Dissection will inform them in that Particular; and altho' from the Softness of his Voice something may have been suggested to his Disadvantage in their Esteem, yet I know not whether that Constitution is not more eligible, that inclines one to the Goût of Italy and Spain, and gives a Man a stronger relish for the more manly Pleasures of those warmer Climates.”⁶ In the context of Keyber's remarks about “exciting the Brute … to rebel,” these quiet allusions make excellent sense, helping Fielding establish a connection between the naturalistic and the perverse. He is to make use of the connection in dealing with Shamela's conduct, naturalistic as a corrective to Pamela and morally perverse as its analogue.

“Fanny,” of course, meant more than an obscenity. “Fanny (my Lord),” wrote Pope to Hervey, “is the plain English of Fannius, a real person, who was a foolish Critic, and an enemy of Horace: perhaps a Noble one … This Fannius was, it seems, extremely fond both of his Poetry and his Person … He was moreover of a delicate or effeminate complexion …”⁷ It is this Horatian reference that Pope thought of in contriving the name for Hervey, and that Fielding finds useful in Shamela. As Horace invokes him, Fannius emerges both a bad poet and a courtly sycophant. Satire 4 of Book I presents him as a vain and adored mediocrity. “Ce Fannius donc,” Dacier commented, “quoique méchant Pöete, avoit tant fait par ses intrigues & par une espece de cabale qu'il avoit ménagée en lisant ses Poësies en tous lieux & à tous venants, que contre toute sorte d'apparence & de justice, on avoit permis qu'il se procurât cet honneur [of having his picture and works placed in Apollo's temple], & qu'il portât luimême ses Ecrits & son portrait dans la Bibliotheque.” Dacier's note on Satire 10 of the same book fills out the picture further by telling us that Fannius was the parasite of a great man, one Hermogenes Tigellius.⁸ Gazing on the picture, the Opposition to Walpole saw a perfect Fannius in Hervey. He had pretensions as a writer, as Middleton's and Keyber's dedications mention. He was deeply involved in Walpole's cabals, especially as a soothing confidant of Queen Caroline's, and had been rewarded with the post of Lord Privy-Seal just a year before the publication of Shamela. And finally, he was advertised as a puppet of Walpole's. Above the sexual innuendo, then, is a thematic layer in which false art and false politicking are bound together by the connotations of “Fanny.”

Fielding develops this grouping throughout the Dedication. Hervey's politics, which according to Middleton measured the rival claims of royal prerogative and popular rights “both by the equal balance of the laws,” descend into the artistic image of the debutante Fanny's dancing: “you was observed in Dancing to balance your Body exactly, and to weigh every Motion with the exact and equal Measure of Time and Tune; and though you sometimes made a false Step, by leaning too much to one Side [i. e., royal prerogative]; yet every body said you would one time or other, dance perfectly well, and uprightly.” In line with this imagery, the king before whom Fanny dances is not George II but the King of Bath, the master of the Pump Room's artifice, Beau Nash. Fielding is touching here upon the Augustan belief that government and humane culture have complex and unbreakable relations with each other, a belief that justifies his using Fanny's shaky dance as a metaphor for—as well as a reduction of—Hervey's politics. As Shamela moves on, the connections between the lack of artistic control in Pamela and the consequent lack of moral and familial control are to become a crucial issue in the letters of Parson Oliver. In the meanwhile, Fielding also works upon another theme central to Pamela and Shamela both, the expression of spiritual functions (like political judgment) in physical terms (dancing askew). In attuning the reader to this sort of transference, he offers several analogous processes, such as the double-entendres of which we have spoken and the religious metaphors of which we will speak.

Hervey, tangentially and briefly addressed, could not by himself carry the broad moral and social implications of Fielding's satire. Therefore, Fielding mixed Middleton with Cibber and invented Conny Keyber. Keyber claims to have written Shamela; and Parson Oliver, reading the Cibberian puffs and Ciceronian eloquence of Pamela, suspects “him” of having written that book too. In introducing Cibber, Fielding continues from the Champion a series of attacks on his old adversary. Perhaps too, as has been suggested, he is enjoying revenge for Cibber's sneers at him in the Apology.⁹ But more important, he is forwarding the themes brought up by alluding to Hervey. For the Opposition, Cibber the poet laureate mingled political and poetical baseness, best typified by his sycophantic birthday odes. Less notorious, but as much to the point, is the dedication before his Apology. This fawning address “To A Certain Gentleman” ends with a comparison of the dedicatee to Cicero, which may well have suggested to Fielding the aptness of a conflated Conny Keyber: “This, Sir, is drawing you too near the Light, Integrity is too particular a Virtue to be cover'd with a general Application. Let me therefore only talk to you, as at Tusculum (for so I will call that sweet Retreat, which your own Hands have rais'd) where like the fam'd Orator of old, when publick Cares permit, you pass so many rational, unbending Hours … How many golden Evenings, in that Theatrical Paradise of water'd Lawns and hanging Groves, have I walk'd and prated down the Sun in social Happiness!”¹⁰ We can see that Conny Keyber is a logical amalgam if we pose the adulation of Middleton's address to Hervey alongside this of Cibber's, and furthermore realize that one of the contemporary criticisms of Middleton's book was that it falsified the life of Cicero to flatter Walpole's and Hervey's politics. To fix the amalgam, Fielding hit upon a Christian name that drew on both “Conyers” and “Colley,” and that in import related directly to “Fanny.” Ian Watt remarks that the name “Conny” has the “appropriate suggestions of ‘coney,’ a dupe, and possibly of ‘cunny,’ latin ‘cunnus.’” The obscene pun, I should think, is the more clearly appropriate of the two, and is certainly inescapable given that “coney,” “cony,” and “conny” were all pronounced “cunny” in Fielding's time.¹¹

Fielding had a reason for choosing Hervey, Middleton, and Cibber other than their appropriate names, biographical and dedicatory habits, and their support of Walpole. In these three men, he found representatives of the three cultural forms by which eighteenth-century society defined itself and its achievement: the state, the church, and the arts. Fielding had dealt with all three, admittedly with different emphases, in Pasquin. There he had made them aspects of the same kind of corruption. The political evils within the comedy that forms the first part of Pasquin appear as an equivalent of the artistic evils that are made clear through the use of the rehearsal technique. During the second part of Pasquin, the tragedy of Queen Common Sense, they re-appear along with the false religion of Firebrand as three congruent parts of Queen Ignorance's macabre reign. In Shamela, a similar reduction takes place. The political cleric and the political playwright blend into Conny Keyber, whose false worship and false art ape those of the sycophantic patron Fanny. Each has only the token of his integrity to offer, the “Vartue” symbolized by what Shamela happily calls “the dear Monysyllable.” Whether we label that integrity a conny or a fanny, it has the same function: prostitution, selling oneself.

Lives of Cicero, Cibber, or Shamela turn out at this level to be mere merchandising devices, ways of deceiving society by using the fictional past of false history. It follows that a Cibber or a Shamela may be substituted for a false Cicero—exchanges that the conflation and the parody imply—without making much difference. Such reduction and analogy leads us to look for the themes familiar from the framework in the text of Shamela's letters later on. She becomes both the triumph and the reductio ad absurdum of the prostitute, the player, and the politician. So smoothly does the allusory world of Fielding's London melt into the fiction of her correspondence that we can see why John Puff, in the second of the commendatory letters that precede the burlesque, thinks that anyone who could write the life of Shamela could do just as well with Walpole's. Nor are we surprised to find fiction melting back into reality at the end, as our heroine gets ready to have her life written by that expert clerical falsifier of biographies, Conyers Middleton, here lowered to the position of a mercenary through Fielding's generous hyperbole.¹² We are not quite sure whether that life is to be Pamela or Shamela—presumably the former, but it does not make much difference. The real world, made into self-serving fiction by the Herveys and their hirelings, turns into the fictional world that mirrors the real: art becomes a form of politicking. Once more Fielding offers a reduction, this one—so Parson Tickletext says—stamped for moral consumption by the Bishop of London, Edmund Gibson, Walpole's “lieutenant for Church affairs.”¹³ At every administrative level, the failures of art, church, and state show up as variants of a central failure in moral perception and in discrimination. Bishop Gibson's failure, like the others, is also to be sent forth in a letter, a pastoral letter.

The letter, as Fielding saw, is a composition both public and private, with claims to be true and possibilities of being a fiction, an advertisement for and a revelation of the self. It is a perfect vehicle for the themes that we have been discussing, for that complex traffic between a persona's aesthetic and moral follies which Lucian catches in tangles of sophistry, the Scriblerus group in projects and memoirs, and Fielding in various kinds of burlesque. By writing an epistolary novel, Richardson played directly into Fielding's satiric interests and tested abilities. In fact, Shamela is formally so much a clever combination of the gems that a Scriblerian might mine from the process of letter-writing, set with the analogical method that Fielding had used to unify his political plays, that one may wonder how different in intent it is from other Augustan burlesques. In very few of them is there much animus directed at any specific work; specific works, like the tragedies upon which Tom Thumb draws or like the parody of Middleton in Shamela, serve largely as convenient landmarks to localize the more general satire of the piece. Even at the cost of our losing the joys of much malice and gossip, I suspect that Fielding is using Pamela the same way. The satire on Pamela is much less his final cause than people, especially those who dislike Richardson, have been inclined to think. For one thing, the political motifs, which Fielding treats very much as he treats similar motifs in his plays, do not contribute to the attack on Pamela, not even as window-dressing. They say nothing about it that the burlesque omits, they distract the attention from the strict parody, and they also arouse expectations that the burlesque cannot fulfill, since Pamela is quite apolitical. One can, of course, insist that Fielding, on the hunt for Richardson, scatters some stray shot amid the miscellaneous foe; but Fielding is so rarely haphazard that this is neither a reasonable nor a flattering view. Furthermore, a second set of motifs, the religious, occupies a crucial position in Shamela, both in the burlesque and in the prefatory material, but is tangential to Pamela. Once again, Fielding seems to have his eye on something other than making sport of Richardson's gaucheries in telling a story or offering moral lessons; and once again, that something other is involved enough to require close analysis.

The most obvious religious satire in Shamela centers in the Methodistical Parson Williams, who preaches the convenient doctrine of the sufficiency of faith: “I purpose to give you [Shamela] a Sermon next Sunday, and shall spend the Evening with you, in Pleasures, which, tho' not strictly innocent, are however to be purged away by frequent and sincere Repentance” (Letter IX). In attacking the Methodists like this, Fielding was following the lead of his contemporaries, just as he did in his satire of Hervey and Cibber. These were fixed roots from which he could develop and ramify his fiction. In the case of the Methodists, one might trace the lines of attack to Swift's portrayal of the Dissenters and their barely masked sexuality, but one need look no farther back than the two years or so before Shamela was published. In 1740, for instance, the Vicar of Dewsbury had asked his flock: “What can we think of their nocturnal Assemblies, which, after their Field Matters are over, are held with the most profound Privacy, and into which none are permitted to enter, but such as are initiated into their Mysteries, and have received the Sign and Symbol of Admission?” And he had provided his own answer: “Associations of this Sort are seldom enter'd into merely upon a religious Account, but generally for contrary Ends and Purposes. When I reflect upon that monstrous Society of Bacchanals in the Grove of Stimula, which in the 567th Year of Rome was suppress'd by Postumius Albinus, I am apt to make ungrateful Comparisons …” His epigraph comes from Livy and refers to the grove.¹⁴ A less learned work, “The Methodists” of 1739, has much the same burden, with London replacing Stimula:

Cease ye Town Rakes old Ways t'explore,
Or aim at Gaiety to Wh-re;
Alter your Rules, new Methods try,
To your Instructor Wh-tf-d fly;
There learn to ogle, whine, and cant,
For Love and for Religion pant …

In this way, “The Spirit, makes the Flesh's Pimp.”¹⁵

Fielding's most immediately available source for such comments was “Richard Hooker's” Weekly Miscellany, a competitor of the Champion's. In 1739, Hooker's paper suspected the New Birth “to be a Lure for all the Gossips in the Kingdom, who will be curious to experience these Throws and Stirrings within them, and may not be without them, if their nocturnal Assemblies go on much longer,” and advised that Whitefield's interest in continuing his sect had led him to form a society of females who were to provide “a Supply of new Methodists for future Generations.” Its anti-Methodist campaign persisted until well after the publication of Shamela, running from direct denunciation and grave reservation to shocking historical anecdotes about the wicked Anabaptists of Munster.¹⁶ Such sexual allegations current about the Methodists perfectly suited Fielding's thematic treatment, and provided an easy bridge between the treatment of the Walpole men in the Dedication and that proper to Pamela's “luscious” scenes in the burlesque.

This bridge, which makes explicit the analogy between the framework and the burlesque, is fixed in Tickletext's letter. Overtones of Methodism in the name and enthusiasm of Tickletext are supported by his praise for the Whitefieldian Parson Williams and for the doctrine of grace. On this basis, Fielding can let him go on to a nearly blasphemous paean to Pamela: “Thou alone art sufficient to teach us as much Morality as we want. Dost thou not teach us to pray, to sing Psalms, and to honour the Clergy? Are not these the whole Duty of Man? Forgive me, O Author of Pamela, mentioning the Name of a Book so unequal to thine: But, now I think of it, who is the Author, where is he, what is he, that hath hitherto been able to hide such an encircling, all-mastering Spirit?” Here Whitefield's much-resented attack on The Whole Duty of Man—“the whole Treatise is built on such a false Foundation, as proves the Author to be no real Christian at Heart”¹⁷—joins with his insistence on the sufficiency of Scripture and acts of faith. Within this conventional satire, Fielding proceeds to imply through Tickletext's language that Pamela is somehow a substitute for the Bible itself. This is a religious version of his earlier implication that a Shamela is worth a Cicero, and further ties the social to the aesthetic, and the truth (when in the wrong hands) to fiction.

He improves these connections by virtue of another common charge against the Methodists, that they misused English. For one thing, their enemies said, they were given to cant as a convenient means of clouding their bare dogmas and shocking intentions; for another, they dealt in “the abuse and miserable Perversion of Scripture Sentences”; finally, they expressed spiritual relationships in carnal metaphors.¹⁸ Fielding recognized these abuses as cousins of Cibberian neologisms, perversions of the classics, and confusion between idealism and self-seeking. The language of Methodism, then, created yet another corrupt work of art; Whitefield was the Cibber of piety. With this in mind, one can better understand why Tickletext fills his letter with unintended puns about the casting off of ornament and the father of millions, and also why he quotes so freely from the Cibberian puffs to the second edition of Pamela. Fielding first alerts us to the puffs by placing two parodies of them just before Tickletext's letter. The one picks up the theme of egoism, the second of venality and politics. Tickletext then quotes from doctored versions of the real Pamela puffs, extending these themes from the anti-Walpole Dedication into the anti-Methodist satire to follow. He begins with his own complacent barbarism, telling Parson Oliver that the clergy's “common Business here [is] not only to cry it [Pamela] up, but to preach it up likewise.” The jargon from the puffs follows, with “measured Fullness … that resembling Life, out-glows it,” and a “Posterity, who will not Hesitate their Esteem with Restraint.” Scripture becomes contorted by omission, as the puffs' bathetic use of Christ's parable of the mustard-seed recurs in a comparison of Pamela's “little, & c.” to Heaven. And throughout the letter come carnal expressions, either metaphors or quotations from Pamela's puffs, that balk at their intended function of symbolizing the spiritual, and thus turn a would-be advertisement into a tissue of self-revelations.

The reply to Tickletext is supplied by Parson Oliver. Cross theorized some years ago that Fielding had named his good parson after a boyhood tutor, although the (slim) evidence rather points to the tutor's having been otherwise enshrined, as Trulliber in Joseph Andrews.¹⁹ I should like to propose that the gentleman in Shamela, whose name seems genuine by contrast with the allegoric “Tickletext,” is christened after Dr. William Oliver of Bath, a close friend of Fielding's patron Ralph Allen's, and a chief sponsor of the hospital in Bath.²⁰ Whether Dr. Oliver had actually denounced Pamela, or whether Fielding was simply complimenting a friend and fellow-alumnus of Leyden, I do not know; but the choice was apt, for Oliver's public benefactions were well-known, enabling him to be set up as a spokesman for good works and charity. As doctor and practical moralist, he offered Fielding the chance of reversing the false ascent of the material to the spiritual which marks the parodies in the Dedication as well as Tickletext's metaphors, and which is carried out so thoroughly in the ethical structure of Shamela's adventures. Oliver as parson is a genuine spiritual extension of Oliver as doctor. In this double role, he can make real use of the first metaphor in his letter to Tickletext: the fad for Pamela is “an epidemical Phrenzy now raging in Town.” For the healing of his brother parson, he sends the copies of Shamela's letters—i. e., he prepares the truth with his own hand, in direct contrast to the “editor” of Pamela—as “an Antidote to this Poison.”

As the biographer transmits the facts and meaning of profane history, so the parson does of sacred history. The whole exegetical discussion about Pamela between Tickletext and Oliver, then, recalls glosses of Scripture as well as the biographer's care in shaping the past. The two themes are joined by the real parson-biographer, Conyers Middleton. In the early 1730's, Middleton had engaged notoriously in controversy with the orthodox cleric Dr. Waterland about the best way to answer the Deists. Because Middleton had made a reputation as a polemicist, and because Waterland's original reply to the Deists was kept currently in print through the time when Fielding wrote Shamela, Middleton's name was indelibly stained with religious scepticism in 1741; or, as The Death of M—l—n put it, “the Name of Divine would make him puke.”²¹ This religious scepticism had as a main tenet that it was proper to interpret Scripture by “desert[ing] the outward letter, and search[ing] for the hidden allegorical sense of the story.” The way to handle men like Tindal was to confute them with reason and the principle of utility, Middleton told Waterland, and he denounced the notion that “every single passage of the Scripture, we call Canonical, must needs be received, as the very word and as the voice of God himself.”²² The controversy thereby aroused dragged its slow length along, with the unhappy Middleton making things worse for himself. A Defence of the Letter to Dr. Waterland presented Moses as an able legislator, whose expert sense of propaganda led him to pretend that his laws were inspired and so to compel a refractory people to accept them. Others in turn wrote an Answer and a Reply to Middleton's Defence, snaring him in such intricacies as the medical dangers of circumcision; but he held firm, despite the charges of infidelity, in his claim that “the Scriptures are not of absolute and universal Inspiration.”²³ It is this clerical supporter of Moses' expediency and fraud, of secular bases for the central spiritual document of Christendom, and of the individual's duty to pass judgment on Scripture with the aid of reason alone—it is this Conyers Middleton with whom Fielding begins Shamela.

The parallels between these attitudes of Middleton's and those with which the Methodists were charged become still plainer in the light of Whitefield's famous sermon, “The Duty of Searching the Scriptures.” There he says: “It is because the natural Veil is not taken off from their Hearts, that so many who pretend to search the Scriptures, yet go no farther than into the bare Letter of them, and continue entire Strangers to the hidden Sense, the Spiritual Meaning, couched under every Parable, and contain'd in almost all the Precepts of the Book of God.”²⁴ Such tossing aside of authority was to lead to eclectic compilations of sound Anglican ideas like Ferdinand Warner's A System of Divinity and Morality, leveled against the deriders of the divine origin of Scripture and equally against the Methodists, who “recommend an amorous and enthusiastic sort of devotion,” and who, “by reasoning about the sense of [Scripture] from their own preconceived opinions … make any thing of any thing.”²⁵ Fielding, artist rather than compiler, turned to analogy to illuminate such doffing of authority for personal assertion. He makes us perceive, through Parson Oliver's censure of Pamela, the social chaos inherent in disrupting the established places of gentlemen, maids, and curates. He reminds us, through the Dedication, of government by sycophancy rather than by law and merit. And he shows the result, in Parson Williams, of an unrestrained personal interpretation of domestic, social, and religious modes of order.

The prefatory material to Shamela, in short, puts at our disposal two analogous spectacles, both satiric. One, which is predominantly political, lets us stare through a diminishing lens at representatives of the English court, clergy, and cultural life. Each turns out to be a prostitute, lowering himself for personal gain, which makes apt the diminution through sexual images and innuendos. Each too turns out to be a false artist, in the works of fact (biographies by Cibber and Middleton) and of imagination (literary efforts by Cibber and Hervey). The other satiric spectacle, the religious, presents us with Methodism on the one hand, rationalism on the other—a Tickletext and a Middleton. Like the objects of political satire, the religious follies are egoistic, materialistic, and corrupt both in reading (Whitefield's and Middleton's treatment of Scripture) and in writing (the abuse of words and metaphors). To these satiric views of the social and religious government of England—each containing its own warped version of the social, the religious, and the artistic—Fielding adds the artistic burlesque that is the center of Shamela. It—as it stands, and as the fraudulent Pamela—corresponds to, and is nominally the occasion for, the Dedication and Tickletext's letter. It therefore contains the same elements: thorough egoism, sexuality, and artistic falsehood (the existence of the cover-up biography called Pamela). And it presents a third spectacle that, like the other two, includes social, religious, and artistic spoilage. Fielding does not, of course, make all this so heavy-handedly regular as I am doing, for his genius consisted almost as much in his immense repertoire of relevant tones and emphases, rhetorical gesture and prestidigitation, as in his profound sense of moral correspondences. Those correspondences, however, are there and cannot be blinked.

Fielding's thoroughness in establishing them grows clearer if one looks not only at the analogous patterns, as we have been doing, but also at the parts of Shamela in their actual sequence. Viewed this way, the burlesque appears as the translation into action of the principles set forth by Keyber and Tickletext. The way this is true in gross is plain; the way it is true in fine provides constant surprise and pleasure. The very first letter tells us that Shamela's mother solicits in the Drury Lane Theatre (“the Old House”), Cibber's stamping-ground; Hervey is paid tribute by the name of her lodging, the Fan and Pepper-Box, which picks up the sexual connotations of “fan(ny)” and adds the appropriate note of venereal disease. The Christian name of Shamela's mother, Henrietta Maria Honora, may mock the highfalutin tone of “Pamela,” but probably also refers to the elaborately-named whore Teresia Constantia Phillips, for that lady's double-entendre of a nickname, “Con,” recalls Fielding's own play on “Conny” in the Dedication.²⁶ The semi-literacy of Shamela's letter, in this context, leads the mind back to the charges of ignorance and/or malapropism made against the three butts of the Dedication, whose false pretensions are thus tied to those of Richardson's servant girl with her preternatural literacy and learning. Finally, Fielding has Shamela end this first letter with an “O! How I long to be in the Balconey at the Old House!” which parodies Pamela's wish to come home “to my old Loft again” (Pamela, Letter XVIII). What Shamela has done, and what she does throughout the burlesque with her pious sententiae, is to interpret her prototype's cries so as to adapt them to her own circumstances; once more we are back, in an especially delightful way, to the serious belief of Middleton and Whitefield that (as Fielding saw it) the self should be the measure of moral truth.

Since Shamela is so thoroughly ignorant, Parson Williams, the Methodist exegete, takes over the theme of false learning. Her admiration for his scholarship (Letter IX) is betrayed when he describes Booby as having an “Ingenium Versatile to every Species of Vice.” As Battestin says, “the [Latin] phrase acquires additional ironic point if we recall the original context, Livy's praise of Cato: ‘his genius was so equally suited to all things that you would say that whatever he was doing was the one thing for which he was born’ (Livy, XXXIX, xl, 5).”²⁷ If one reads on in Livy, the joke becomes better yet, for the passage as a whole has to do with Cato's probity in the face of governmental corruption and power-seeking. As censor, Cato tried to restore the old morality, especially in purging the senate of one man who had abused his position out of favoritism to his male lover. Not only has Williams chosen a curious phrase to describe Booby, but he has chosen one that also bears relevance to the actions as well as the learning of Fanny and Keyber. His other Latin phrase, a claim of a clear conscience when Booby has him jailed for debt (Letter XII), is hardly more fortunate, for in the original, Horace's first Epistle of the first book, the poet is telling his patron Maecenas that virtue is better than money. This is no more Williams' position than Horace's relationship with Maecenas, marked by benevolence and gratitude, is Williams' with Booby. Moreover, Horace prefaces the line that Williams quotes with a schoolboy rhyme, the burden of which is that if one is good one will be king. Since Williams' hold on his master has been his vote and its importance for Booby's parliamentary career, the quotation implies blackmail. Once more, the social breadth of the Horatian allusion, the reference to patronage, and the matter of venality tie this piece of false learning to the Dedication.

Sometimes, Fielding maintains continuity by repeating thematic groupings in new guises. For an example, we need go no farther than the references to Booby's Parliamentary ambitions, which have nothing to do with Pamela but tighten satiric unity here. Throughout the burlesque, Booby's politics are linked with Shamela's sexual intrigues: because of politics Williams enjoys some degree of impunity as her lover (Letters IX and X, and his poaching for hare—coney—in the last letter) and only Booby's lust for her can override his ambition. In the last letter from Shamela to her mother, this thematic grouping is fixed. Shamela first details her new domestic rule over the uxorious Booby, and then moves on to the analogous matter of “Pollitricks,” where she complements the familiar pun on “et cætera” with a fresh one of Booby's “Burrough” (and “burrow”)—her et cætera is, as we have grown to expect, a sort of political surrogate. A political dinner follows, during which Williams takes over Booby's place at the head of the table and of the catch-singing borough corporation, just as he had earlier taken Booby's place in Shamela's et cætera and affections. The analogy is insisted upon by Shamela's counter-pointing her description of the dinner by her statements of sexual desire. Finally, before going dissatisfied to bed, she says that the only thing she knows about politics, “that the Court-side are in the right on't,” comes from Williams, who therefore usurps her husband's place as political advisor. Structurally, this reaffirmation of the analogy between politics and sex, and between domestic and national government, repeats—and prepares us for a return to—the “realer” world of the Dedication; and thus it is at the end of this letter that Parson Williams steps aside as biographer in favor of Parson Middleton. Or, for a simpler kind of thematic grouping, Shamela's library will do, for it contains, despite its seeming motley, only books about the domains of Middleton, Hervey, and Cibber—religion, politics and the playhouse. It includes a scandalous book about politics, the New Atlantis; a book about religious scandal, Venus in the Cloyster; and a play, Theobald's Orpheus and Eurydice, that Fielding had mentioned in the Champion for its varied views of Hell—this, in Shamela's library, directly follows “God's Dealings with Mr. Whitefield.”²⁸

If one accepts the sort of reading of Shamela which I have offered, he is left with at least two questions that the reading poses. First, given the wonderful formal skill that Fielding demonstrates, why do we find two seemingly incompatible means of introducing the letters? Second, what relationship does Shamela bear to Pamela? Both questions are related to the genre of Shamela, and also to the rhetorical balance between the framework and the burlesque. In beginning to deal with them, let me once more invoke the example of Pasquin. This play seems to draw on the tradition of The Rehearsal, but it is really quite different. In The Rehearsal, a silly author is mocked for his silly play. In Pasquin, though, dreary comedy and tragedy together constitute a social indictment that is both comic and tragic, and in the context of which the incompetence of the two would-be playwrights becomes a general social failure. Observers differing in their wisdom look on at an absurd burlesque, and from both its form and its content draw their moral and artistic indictments. Shamela, which picks up the themes of Pasquin, also borrows its techniques, with one important change. Since the experiences of Shamela are supposed to be true, the two outside observers, Keyber and Oliver, must see them independently as two historians. Fielding presents these historians to us in the order that he does, only for formal reasons: Keyber's letter, coming before we know quite what to expect, can be less deliberately germane than Oliver's, and therefore can set up the full range of themes more conveniently; the movement from Keyber to Tickletext to Oliver can follow the pattern of first false and then true ascent from the secular to the spiritual. One may protest the lack of narrative consistency, and the reader who thinks of Fielding as chiefly burlesquing Pamela may be nonplussed by it. There is much less problem if one thinks of Pamela as a means of localizing and focussing a wide-ranging satire. I do not mean, of course, that Pamela is a mere literary bystander struck down in someone else's fracas—Fielding obviously disliked it. But Shamela is rather an exploitation than an exposé of its older soberer sister.

Paradoxically, the exploitation may be more devastating to Pamela than any exposé. In it, Fielding felt free not only to imitate and exaggerate, as in a close burlesque, but also to depart cheerfully from his text, treating the Richardsonians' tawdry Scripture the way he accused the Methodists of treating the Bible. The theme of Methodism itself is such a departure from Pamela, such a false gloss. Another, more involved, has to do with motives. Richardson's fiction turns on the possibility of distinguishing, morally, between conscious and unconscious motives. Fielding's, except where one motive directly undercuts the other (as with rationalization), does not. The Preface to Joseph Andrews, for instance, assumes that affectation is a conscious act, or rather, that one can use the language of conscious act for an affectation at any level of consciousness. This is because, in the early 1740's at any rate, Fielding used the ethos of a character as his moral measure. In other words, Fielding calls for judgment in terms of the character's essential nature, from which all his actions, conscious or not, are deduced.²⁹ Therefore, the hypocrites of Shamela, dealt with by Fielding, lack that inner life that Richardson valued and cultivated in Pamela. We never know when or whether Shamela, or even Parson Williams, sees through Williams' cant, picks up his blunders with the classics, or enjoys the full scope of his ingratitude to Booby. We do not know the balance of loyalties in Mrs. Jewkes. And we do not know how far Conny Keyber is an absurd, and how far a cunning, hypocrite. Such questions are irrelevant, as they would hardly have been if Fielding had felt himself limited to a caricature of Pamela alone, with its insistent nagging at moment-by-moment scrutiny of motives. The result of this lack of awareness in Shamela's characters is that, for all their vividness, they are flat and mechanical, like Popean Dunces or Swiftian Hacks. That very flatness offers Richardson an insult more stinging than does their coarseness, their inanity, or their abuse of his affectionate endowments.

Since Fielding did not alter his usual means of characterization to achieve this effect, I assume that its peculiar relevance to Richardson is serendipity, or a wise laisser faire. A related effect in Shamela is a trust in mechanical principles, and this sort of deadening of the will is carefully developed by Fielding, starting with the Dedication. We have already talked about some of its traces in discussing materialism there, but we can find more, beginning with the very act of parody, which entrusts set forms with the wrong content. In this conception of parody lies the logic of Keyber's final statement of indebtedness as he introduces his parody biography: “The Reader, I believe, easily guesses I mean Euclid's Elements; it was Euclid who taught me to write.” The Editor's eagerness to have fashionable puffs before his book, which leads him to include those dubious ones written by himself and an obvious mercenary, and Tickletext's doting on Pamela as a sort of moral amulet, carry this theme through in different ways. So do the barren formulas of cant.

In developing such mechanism, Fielding hits at Pamela in two ways. First, he attacks the moral education of Pamela, who infuses the rules of duty with her rising knowledge of the world and its specific trials. For her, the possession of real virtue demands creative and maturing action, so that she grows with her fortunes and can move smoothly from individual concerns before her marriage to social ones after it. Shamela's rules, from her mother and Williams, remain constant and quotable throughout; they are “methods,” appropriate for a young Methodist; and until the last sentence of Shamela, her faith in cant and a quick hand under the sheets seems to suffice. Secondly, Fielding destroys the uniqueness of Pamela by showing Shamela acting according to formulas. Her analogy with her mother, early established within the burlesque, and with Keyber and Tickletext, reduce her from an exemplar to a type. This is one of the most significant satirical reciprocities that the framework and the text of Shamela have, as “the matchless Shamela” and the matchless dedicatee diminish each other cumulatively and in retrospect. By this means, the sort of empathy that Pamela had received was further stifled, for empathy depends upon individuality. Fielding makes much in two ways of Richardson's blunder in drawing, as Owen Jenkins has put it, “universal morals from the experience of characters the author has begun by portraying as types but concluded by revealing to be exceptional individuals.”³⁰ By having Oliver object to the lessons of Pamela, he counters Richardson on Richardson's moral terms; by reducing Pamela—as Shamela—to a stereotype, working predictably according to the rules of others, he strikes a blow at Richardson's aesthetic achievement and personal affections.

Given Fielding's masterful use of continuity (through analogy) to expose the moral and aesthetic flabbiness of his satiric targets, it may seem especially witty of him to have created a striking effect through a sort of discontinuity within the framework and between the framework and the burlesque. I am thinking of a discontinuity of “realism,” or of verisimilitude. The adventures of Shamela are both realistic and preposterous, the one as a corrective to Pamela and the other as an exaggeration of Pamela. To make us keep both in view, Fielding institutes a range of idioms which replaces the careful verisimilitude adjusted by Richardson. This variety of idioms works around the fixed character of Shamela just as the developing character of Pamela works in terms of a fixed idiom—if they did not, the technical job of making us see Shamela's absurdity or Pamela's development would be very much complicated. Such a transfer of energies, as it were, makes the world of Shamela appear much less real (believable as a version of ours) than that of Pamela, although it is crammed with another kind of “realism” (candor) and with Realpolitik in a way that Richardson would have thought tasteless. Once more, the framework performs a necessary task. Here the reader is attuned to the conflicting “realisms” in the exceptionally fatuous Dedication, puffs, and letter from Tickletext: as grotesque as they all are, they also demand to be, and can be, closely related to our own world and its realities of fame and power. Furthermore, the reader is attuned at this point to the difference between the framework, which he sees at first-hand, and the burlesque, which is retailed at second-hand; the incompatible perspectives of Keyber's and Oliver's introductions to Shamela's letters, too, not only erect moral watchtowers but also remind one that narrative realism is shaky in Shamela as a whole. When we add to this structure of allusions, of foolery, and of incompatible the letter from Parson Oliver, with its contrasting good sense and genuine-sounding name, we can see that Fielding is inducing us to feel that corruption is somehow not quite real, however present and far from negligible it may be. This feeling is a traditional goal of moral comedy; almost incidentally in achieving it, Fielding splinters the created world of Pamela.

Shamela's vartue is at last rewarded: she loses her mother, then her husband, and with the publication of her letters, her reputation as Pamela. It is left up to us to reward the vartue of Middleton, Cibber, Hervey, and Pamela along the same lines. The analogical procedure, and the use of satiric targets so clearly exemplary, invite us to see every instance of selfish fraud as behavior less than human, than “real,” than uniquely shrewd. To respond in these moral terms is to reward Fielding's virtue, for such a response takes implicitly into account the astonishing formal control with which he handles his matched lampoons, making his effects cumulative and universal. As a schooling for his later fiction, Shamela also succeeds impressively; and perhaps the greatest compliment that one can pay it is that one can see Fielding moving plausibly from it, hasty as it is, to the generous and delicate orchestration of Joseph Andrews.

Notes

1. The Death of M—l—n in the Life of Cicero … By an Oxford Scholar (London, 1741), pp. 5-7. The Gentleman's Magazine lists this pamphlet for May, 1741, the month following the publication of Shamela. Whether Fielding was acquainted with its author, or he with Shamela, is unknown.

2. Conyers Middleton, The History of the Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero (London, 1741), I, ii. Quotations from Shamela come from the revised edition of 1741, and are identified, where necessary, by Letter.

3. For the slang meanings of “fanny,” see the entry in Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (5th ed.: London, 1961); although he lists no date earlier than the nineteenth century, the term goes at least as far back as 1662, when Robert Nevil's play The Poor Scholar included the young lady Uperphania. For “& c.,” see Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy (London, 1947), and Shamela's last letter to her mother. Charges against Hervey, including his effeminacy, are discussed by Martin C. Battestin, “Hervey's Role in Joseph Andrews,” PQ XLII (1963), 226-41.

4. The Champion for May 17, 1740, given still wider circulation in The Tryal of Colley Cibber, Comedian (London, 1740), accuses Cheyne of having “so mangled and mauled” the English language that when a critic “came to examine the Body, as it lay in Sheets in a Bookseller's Shop, I found it an expiring heavy Lump, without the least Appearance of Sense” (p. 34). The two doctors had similar notions about diet, Woodward declaring that “The great Wisdom, and the Happiness of Man, consists in a due Care of the Stomach, and Digestion …,” with which Cheyne agreed: “It is Diet alone, proper and specific Diet … which is the sole universal Remedy, and the only Means known to Art, or that an animal Machin, without being otherwise made than it is, can use with certain Benefit and Success, which can give Health, long Life and Serenity.” The State of Physick and of Diseases (London, 1718), p. 34; An Essay on Regimen (3rd ed.: London, 1753), p. x. Cheyne so obviously suggests himself for satire—he was even Hervey's physician—that Fielding's decision to use Woodward instead appears significant.

5. Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, London in 1710, tr. and ed. W. H. Quarrell and Margaret Mare (London, 1934), p. 178.

6. The Life and Adventures of Don Biloso de L'Estomac (London, 1719), p. 19. An Account of the Sickness and Death of Dr. W—dw—rd … By Dr. Technicum (London, 1719), p. 8. Once Fielding had Dr. Woodward on the hook, he used him as a blunt weapon against Richardson. Pamela's wedding-day snack of apple-pie and custard had already been made to sound aphrodisiac by having Shamela eat it—a hot buttered pie—to prepare for Booby's attack (Letter X). And Woodward had been teased for having called this dish, like the puddings and custards mentioned by Keyber, a stimulant—cf. A Letter from the Facetious Dr. Andrew Tripe at Bath (London, 1718), an anti-Woodward satire by Dr. Wagstaffe or Dr. Mead, which sneers: “the same Performance, contrary to the musty Rules of Horace, may contain a State of Physick and Diseases, and an History of butter'd Applepye and Custard,” and warns that the “ancient custom of feeding School Boys with Plumb-Cake and Applepye, is certainly of the most pernicious Consequence …” (pp. 25, 29).

7. Alexander Pope, “A Letter to a Noble Lord” in The Works, ed. Warburton (London, 1751), VIII, 262-63. As Battestin suggests (“Hervey's Role in Joseph Andrews”), Fielding probably had not yet seen this letter of Pope's, but he did know Horace and the Horatian commentators.

8. Œuvres d'Horace en latin, traduites en françois par M. Dacier et le P. Sanadon (Amsterdam, 1735), V, 191, 383.

9. For instance, by Martin C. Battestin, in his introduction to his edition of Shamela and Joseph Andrews (Boston, 1961), p. xiii; an edition to the notes of which this article is indebted.

10. An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, ed. Robert W. Lowe (London, 1889), I, lxx.

11. Ian Watt, “Shamela,” in Fielding: a Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ronald Paulson (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1962), p. 46. For the word, see the entry in Partridge, Dictionary of Slang; for the pronunciation, see OED, under “cony.”

12. Sheridan Baker, in his edition of Shamela (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1953) identifies “the Gentleman who writes Lives” with Middleton, supporting his argument from Parson Oliver's detecting “Ciceronian Eloquence” in Pamela (p. xxvi). I agree with him, finding myself unconvinced by the candidacy of Dr. Thomas Birch, which was first advanced by Charles Woods in “Fielding and the Authorship of Shamela,” PQ, XXV (1946), 248-72, and repeated in his review of Baker's Shamela, PQ, XXXIII (1954), 273-74. Professor Woods argues that even allowing for exaggeration, the description of the busy venal biographer in Shamela does not fit the scholarly Middleton, biographer only of Cicero. Yet, aside from the “Ciceronian Eloquence,” there are reasons for accepting Baker's reading. Birch has no advantages over Middleton as a satiric target, but Middleton has over Birch. Whereas Fielding would be unlikely to bring in a fresh and distracting allusion at the very end of his satire, a reference to Middleton makes sense: he has been satirizing Middleton as a biographer; he is ready at this point to return from the burlesque to the real world, and therefore to recur to the world set up at the beginning. Better yet, to read the biographer as Middleton, makes Pamela, puffed in the Cibberian vein and written in the Middletonian, the rival of Keyber's Shamela, an analogue and corrective by Doppelgänger. As to the exaggeration, it is quite in keeping with the rest of Shamela, particularly inasmuch as Middleton's Life was charged with inaccuracy and with dragging in contemporary overtones for Walpole's benefit.

13. J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole: the Making of a Statesman (London, 1956), p. 69.

14. The Imposture of Methodism Display'd: In A Letter To The Inhabitants Of The Parish of Dewsbury … By William Bowman (London, 1740), p. 79.

15. “The Methodists, An Humorous Burlesque Poem.” (London, 1739), pp. 19-21.

16. Weekly Miscellany for August 21, 1739. For other anti-Methodist attacks, see Weekly Miscellany for May 12, September 22, and December 15, 1739; August 30, and September 27 to November 29 passim, 1740.

17. A Letter from the Rev. Mr. Whitefield … shewing the Fundamental Error of a Book Entituled The Whole Duty of Man (Charlestown, S. C., 1740), p. 4.

18. The Reverend Mr. J. Tucker, Minister of All-Saints, Bristol, quoted in The Life and Particular Proceedings of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield … By an Impartial Hand (London, 1739). The charge of misusing language was less common in Fielding's time than it later became; “The New Bath Guide” and The Spiritual Quixote both use it directly, Humphry Clinker indirectly.

19. Wilbur Cross, The History of Henry Fielding (New Haven, 1918), I, 22-23. Arthur Murphy is the authority for tracing Trulliber to Fielding's tutor.

20. Unfortunately, we do not know when Fielding met Allen, and perhaps through him, Dr. Oliver. Battestin (“Hervey's Role in Joseph Andrews,” p. 236) places Fielding's invitation to Allen's Palladian house, referred to in Joseph Andrews, in the autumn of 1741. There is no reason to doubt that he had known Allen for six months or a year before that visit—he began riding the western circuit in 1740.

21. The Death of M—l—n, p. 41.

22. Conyers Middleton, A Letter to Dr. Waterland; Containing some Remarks on his Vindication of Scripture (London, 1731), pp. 21, 44-45.

23. Conyers Middleton, Some Remarks on a Reply to the Defence of the Letter to Dr. Waterland (London, 1732), p. 79.

24. George Whitefield, “The Duty of Searching the Scriptures” (London, 1739), p. 15.

25. Ferdinand Warner, A System of Divinity and Morality (2nd ed.; London, 1756), I, vi.

26. The anonymous author (“an Oxford Scholar”) of The Parallel; or Pilkington and Phillips Compared (London, 1748) says, with some exaggeration, that Mrs. Phillips' “Actions have now employed the Trump of Fame almost thirty Years” (p. 30). Her name was distinctive enough to have prompted Fielding's readers to recognize an allusion to it. Honora is close in sense and tone to Constantia; and as for the first names, Henrietta Maria and Theresia, the accession of Maria Theres[i]a in October, 1740, perhaps made Theresia sound regal, so that Fielding matched it six months later with the name of another Catholic Queen, and Englishwoman. Henrietta Maria fit his satire, since she had been involved with the theatre—Pryne had had his ears clipped for accusing her of whoredom after she had acted in private performances—as Fielding might well have known if the Licencing Act drove him to do any research into attacks upon the stage.

27. Battestin, ed. of Shamela and Joseph Andrews, p. 369.

28. Fielding mentions the views of Hell in Orpheus in the Champion for May 24, 1740. The essay goes on to a Lucianic vision of the Styx which includes a mild censure of Whitefield for his self-righteousness.

29. See John S. Coolidge, “Fielding and ‘Conservation of Character’,” in Fielding, ed. Paulson, p. 160: “the essential reality of a person [in Fielding] is a certain idea which is his nature and to which he has a kind of duty to conform.”

30. Owen Jenkins, “Richardson's Pamela and Fielding's ‘Vile Forgeries’,” PQ, XLIV (1965), 203.