SOURCE: Amory, Hugh. “Shamela as Aesopic Satire.” ELH 38, no. 2 (June 1971): 239-53.

[In the following essay, Amory claims that Shamela satirizes Cibber's Apology, Middleton's Life of Cicero, and Richardson's Pamela, which Fielding thinks are testaments to the social and political corruption of the age.]

Who wrote Shamela? and who did Fielding suppose wrote Pamela? On these questions there is a surprisingly large literature, but until an article by Eric Rothstein in 1968, there had been little speculation on the aesthetic function of the mystery in which Fielding enveloped both subjects.¹ For the question, as Fielding poses it, involves more than a scholarly determination of the identity behind the pen; questions of responsibility are also involved. As Parson Tickletext ingenuously expresses it, “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?” (305).² If, as we may well suppose, Richardson's authorship was a more or less open secret by 1741, Tickletext's question squarely raises the problem of authority: what “spirit” guided the hand that held the pen? And to this, there are many answers.

From the title-page and the dedication, we learn his name, no more; the author is “Conny Keyber,” a portmanteau fiction that finely distributes the blame for Richardson's work between Colley Cibber and Conyers Middleton. The same ambiguity of authorship appears in the text, surrounded as it is by dedicators, editors and friends, any or all of whom may be the author or authors in disguise; and in particular, a “young baronet” detects Cibber's style in Tickletext's praise (306), while Shamela herself learns that her life will be written by a “parson who does that sort of business for folks” (337). Oliver obscurely elucidates the same confusion, distinguishing Shamela's contribution from the “composer's” by pointing to the “Ciceronian eloquence with which the work abounds.” I suppose that “the work” to which Oliver alludes is Pamela; he cannot mean, as Rothstein implies, that Shamela is herself guilty of “Ciceronian eloquence,”³ nor is Oliver, as both Rothstein and Sheridan Baker argue, necessarily glancing at any one Ciceronian “composer” in particular.⁴ The evidence for the complicity of any one individual or individuals in the composition of Shamela (or, as Fielding satirically supposes, of Pamela) is vague and even contradictory; as Rothstein points out, the preliminary authors—John Puff, Conny Keyber and all—are in no way responsible or perhaps even conscious of the startling reality eventually disclosed under the auspices of Parson Oliver. Behind these teasing ironies, however, is a firm satiric fiction: Pamela is the work of a corporation, variously described as prostitute and parson or parson and player. But this does not settle the question of “authorship,” for behind the ambiguity, we sense an insistent demand: who is really responsible for Pamela, on what “authority” is it written? And it is to Rothstein's credit to locate this authority in the corrupt combination (as Fielding saw it) of the state, the church and the arts, fostered by Walpole through such instruments as Conyers Middleton, Colley Cibber and Samuel Richardson, King's Printer.

In concentrating his attention on the “framework” of Shamela, however, Rothstein has neglected some important collateral evidence in support of his thesis, and has distorted the ultimate thrust of Fielding's satire. For the “real” author of Pamela, Fielding aesopically implies, is no other than Sir Robert Walpole himself, the “Magus” of the Dunciad, the “Cicero” of the London Magazine, fons et origo of “Ciceronian” eloquence, the colossal “Great Man” of Opposition prints, the “encircling, all-mastering spirit” of the age to whom Tickletext unconsciously alludes. This, at least, is what this article will attempt to prove, though the object of aesopic satire must always remain somewhat obscure. The evidence for my thesis lies in the formal interrelationships of Fielding's three explicit satiric objects, which Rothstein did not explore. For Cibber's Apology, Middleton's Life and Richardson's Pamela seem, at first sight, quite unrelated works. By yoking them by violence together, Fielding wittily implied that Cibber's Apology and Middleton's Life were little better than romances like Pamela; and in a literary sense, insinuated that Pamela was a party piece, whose moral teachings never rose above the level of faction. His literary program is thus intimately involved with a political statement.

These two satiric theses revolve about what—outside the satiric world, in the cool light of day—we would more justly call the accidental resemblance between Richardson's, Cibber's and Middleton's works. All three explain the success of parvenus by their superior moral merit and all three substantiate this contention from the very mouths of their parvenus, whose naive candor seems unquestionable. Middleton contrasts the Cicero of the familiar letters, writing for his friends, with the public orator and philosopher, whose utterances might be motivated by a desire for glory or intellectual superiority.⁵ Cibber, like Pamela, writes with a wisdom that is above reflection, in a spontaneous style that is designed to disarm suspicion. Behind this affectation of ingenuous, private confidence, however, both Middleton and Cibber insinuate an apology for Walpole, and it was this perversion of candor in particular that Fielding singled out for attack, using as his vehicle a parody of Pamela.

Reading Middleton in the context of the period, one is constantly invited to draw certain parallels, which only underline the political significance of the dedication to Lord Hervey. Cicero, like Walpole a novus homo and leader of (as Middleton sees it) a republican institution, the Senate, is confronted by a perverse gang of patricians, Catiline and Caesar, who draw their main support from the rabble—Bolingbroke, Argyll and Chesterfield, leaders of a disorderly opposition. Despite this affectation of popularity (the Opposition's constant appeal to “commonsense” and to ultra-liberal views of Church and State), Caesar and Catiline are dedicated to a dictatorship, a return to the age of kings and a destruction of the Senate (as their modern counterparts would bring back the king from over the water and sacrifice all the gains of the Glorious Revolution). Just as in Rome the institution of the Augustan principate ultimately led to an intolerable despotism in Church and State, so in England, Middleton fears, opposition to constitutional government will plunge the country into a second Dark Age, with the reception of Catholicism.⁶ These implications were duly noted by hostile contemporary readers,⁷ who were, no doubt, in part inspired by the sobriquet of “Cicero” under which the London Magazine had reported Walpole's speeches in the “Proceedings of the Political Club” (alias Parliament) since 1738.

Similar parallels meet us everywhere in Cibber's Apology, where his sentimental comedy, Love's Last Shift, is the first sign of a moral reform of the theater, corrupted by the patrician tastes of a mob of gentlemen that wrote with ease. This “revolution” in the government of the theater has finally been institutionalized in Walpole's Licensing Act, by which all blasphemy, bawdy and sedition will finally be eliminated from the stage—in explicit parallel to the Glorious Revolution, which eliminated these evils from the national government.⁸ In his pamphlet, The Opposition: A Vision (1741), Fielding specifically ridiculed this political parallel,⁹ and in Shamela, glancing at Cibber's notorious gambling and at his even more notorious daughter, Mrs. Charke, sardonically underlined the real state of morality at the “Old House” in Drury Lane. In his Apology, Cibber flattered himself that his sentimental comedies had forwarded a respect for the clergy that the indecorous parsons of Restoration drama had sadly undermined.¹⁰ The fact sufficiently explains why Shamela, raised in the “old House” under Cibber's sway, uncritically accepts the official moral authority of Parson Williams.

Cibber and Middleton, then, attempt to retort the Opposition charge that Walpole's plebeian birth and education “naturally” led to corruption by portraying the patrician leaders of the Opposition as a group who were properly denied any avenue to power because they had misused power in the past and would stop at nothing to regain it today. This answer, Fielding replies, is a convenient political myth, even though it is based on a narrative and documents whose candor seems to be above suspicion; and he “proves” his case by showing that the Apology and the Life of Cicero are variants of an “obvious” romance, which also purports to be based on authentic reality. Fielding's tactics force him to make two assumptions about Richardson's ewe lamb before leading it to the slaughter: first, that it conceals some authentic reality behind its romantic facade; and second, that this reality “explains” the moral hesitations and ambiguities of the romance. These satiric fictions may also be seen as literary assumptions concerning what we would, in one sense of the word, call Richardson's “realism.”

In response to these assumptions, Fielding thrusts aside all the qualifications that Richardson posed so delicately about the social tendency of his novel. Pamela is “really” the illegitimate daughter of a Drury Lane orange-woman, not the true scion of a gentle family fallen on evil times. Lady Davers, whose diatribes repeat the substance of Parson Oliver's critique, and whose example, in marrying into the nobility, more than authorizes Pamela's reluctant infringement of social taboos, never “really” existed, Parson Oliver claims. Parson Williams' interest in Pamela and his interference in his patron's affairs—for which, we should note, he duly apologized in the original—is the “real” method of a Methodist in the parody, plotting to eliminate the gentry's control of the clergy while availing himself of their patronage. By these and other brilliant satirical distortions, Fielding “politicalizes” Pamela into a fable about the struggle of the clever poor against the abysmally ignorant rich; and “moralizes” the resulting fable as a lurid tale of carnal freedom, spiritual corruption, and the subversion of all human society.

The dazzling effectiveness of this inversion of romance and realism in Pamela is not in doubt; but we must question the conclusion, so common in Fieldingite circles, that Fielding therefore understood Richardson's novel better than Richardson himself. To this, it should be a sufficient reply that Fielding never intended to make a serious criticism of Pamela. Parson Oliver, after all, did not himself find Pamela titillating (unlike so many later readers); he only asserted that the work might arouse an adolescent mind (and what will not?). I do not mean to deny that Richardson did not in fact express sexual and social feelings of which he himself was quite unaware; I simply mean that if he did, Fielding was as unaware of it as Richardson. Fielding was trying to create a “lewd and ungenerous engraftment.”¹¹

Even when they are conscious of Fielding's distortions, however, critics are prone to warp the point of Fielding's satire to prove the truth of his critical insight: for Rothstein, “the exploitation may be more devastating to Pamela than any exposé”;¹² for Battestin, “the distorted image mirrored in the parodist's glass is somehow closer to the truth than the original.”¹³ These paradoxes begin in their conviction that Fielding is attacking an antinomianism in Whitefield and Parson Williams in which Richardson unconsciously participates, a view of Richardson's achievement that ignores (with Fielding) the conclusion of Pamela, part 1, and the explanation of his novel's tendency that Richardson provided later in part 2. It also blunts the real thrust of Fielding's attack on Whitefield.

The point of his satire and the inaccuracy of his parody, however, equally glare in his treatment of Parson Williams, of which there is no hint in the original. Both Rothstein and Battestin connect this satire with earlier attacks on “enthusiasm” and on the antinomian implications of too literal a reliance on “grace,” citing abundant evidence from contemporary satire of Methodism and even from Fielding's own writings. But these were not the only objections to Methodism, nor was Fielding consistent in connecting Methodism and “grace.” In so far as this interpretation finds sexual irregularity to be the core of Fielding's satire in Shamela, moreover, the emphasis of Fielding's attack is distorted. For Parson Williams' exotic behavior is meant to parody Laudian, High-Church, Divine-Right principles—a program which, for contemporaries, led quite naturally to an alliance with the Knipper-dolings and the Müntzers of this world, but which was nevertheless distinct in interests and aims (both extremes, that is, hoped to dupe the other).

The essence of Williams' teaching, indeed, is that “the court side are in the right on't, and … every Christian ought to be on the same side with the bishops” (336). Williams' toast to “The Church et cetera” (335) alludes to Laud's “et cetera” oath, and, as a departure from the more usual toast to the Church and King, implies that Williams is a crypto-Jacobite. One cannot and perhaps should not rule out the sexual innuendo that Rothstein discovers in “et cetera,” here and elsewhere in Shamela, but this innuendo belongs on a distinctly secondary satiric level, to wit, the corrupt motives that determine Shamela's interest in her parson, which are relatively innocent compared to Williams'. Shamela is naively delighted to learn that one may fornicate without sin if one “repents”; but what she understands as a facile formality, Williams places at the core of his creed, the acknowledgement of the Church's authority to prescribe penance.

Williams' insistence on repentance, moreover, alludes satirically to the reforms that Bishop Gibson envisaged in the suits pro reformatione morum and pro salute animae, which attempted to preserve the Church's moral authority by desacralizing the penalties;¹⁴ this program appears, as usual in Opposition satire, as a hypocritical plea in the name of divine institution for the solider reality of power.¹⁵ Not content with passive resistance, Williams is politically active in the affairs of Mr. Booby's borough, and threatens to make trouble unless Mr. Booby overlooks his failings (319). These self-serving activities are masked in “grace” and God's dealings with Mr. Whitefield; but in “reality” Williams asks for total ecclesiastical independence; it would be “sacrilege” to part Williams from the living which he, his father and grandfather owe to the kindness of the landed gentry, the Boobys.

Fielding thus makes no attempt to associate the doctrine of grace with its obvious protestant origins, nor—as many ecclesiastical critics of Whitefield, including Trapp and Gibson, did—to dwell on the danger that a religious revival would lead to seditious conventicles and a repetition of 1640.¹⁶ Instead, Fielding insinuates that Whitefield heads a movement within the Anglican Church back to Divine Right, Laud and Arminianism, bypassing the Glorious Revolution, reason, morality and common sense on the way. For Shamela, the implications of this movement are antinomian—fais ce que voudras; but for Williams, and, I believe, for Fielding, the more important implications are authoritarian, in this historical perspective. Williams is not a fanatic, but a Tartuffe.

This more real concern also appears in the epistolary framework of Shamela, which satirizes the unthinking enthusiasm of the lower clergy for Richardson's book. Alluding to Bishop Gibson's recent Pastoral Letters, urging the clergy of his diocese not to condemn Methodism too hastily (304),¹⁷ and to the similar though more critical view expressed by Joseph Trapp (319), Fielding tries to implicate the whole Church in a conspiracy to support Whitefield: many clergymen, like Parson Tickletext, are mere dupes, who should get free of the whole unsavory business as soon as they can; others, like Gibson, Trapp, Williams and (implicitly) Conyers Middleton, are actively promoting Methodism for their own purposes. Contrary to the real interests of the lower clergy, they are forming a scheme of ecclesiastical wealth and independence founded on a hypocritical advocacy of sincerity and candor and accompanied by equally hypocritical complaints of the “contempt of the clergy” and clerical impoverishment. The satire must have been particularly wounding because Gibson, Trapp and Middleton were liberal clergymen who were doctrinally quite opposed to “grace”; they feared Methodism because it seems to resemble Anabaptism or worse and they strongly supported the Hanoverians. In fact, Gibson and Middleton were latitudinarians, like Hoadly, whose Plain Account of the Lord's Supper Fielding praises.¹⁸

Fielding, in short, like many members of the Opposition, had other motives beside moral and theological ones for admiring “works”; this is strikingly exemplified in his “apology for the clergy,” a program whose moral and theological content Battestin has admirably expounded without, however, sufficiently considering its political context.¹⁹ Between 1730 and 1740, there was an astounding rise in anti-clericalism, largely forwarded by the manoeuvres of the Opposition; the movement climaxed in the Mortmain Act of 1736, a statute that effectively crippled the operation of the Commissioners of Queen Anne's Bounty, the first attempt to reform the pressing financial inequalities of the Anglican Church. As the Opposition saw it, Queen Anne's Bounty was an attempt to aggrandize the Church that could only end by taking all the land in England off the market, putting it in the Church's “dead hand,” and robbing the gentry of their proper voice in Church affairs. The insincerity of this attack on the Church's attempt to eliminate pluralism and non-residence is obvious, for it was voiced primarily by country gentlemen who saw no objection to removing their land from the market by the so-called “strict settlement,” and who were, moreover, the indirect reason for the poverty of the Church by their impropriation of Church livings.²⁰

Politically, the only remedy that Fielding proposed for the evils of pluralism and non-residence in 1739-42 was a return to true Christian poverty and humility, set forth in the positive example of Parson Adams as well as in such negative examples as Trulliber and Parson Williams. Of this “solution,” one can only say that it is as disingenuous as most Opposition proposals. Thus, we typically find the Opposition complaining about the exorbitant wealth of the bishops and suggesting that if the excess were redistributed among the lower clergy, non-residence and pluralism would vanish. If this proposal had been realized, of course, it would have reduced the patronage in ecclesiastical (and ultimately, in Walpole's) hands, and increased the patronage in the hands of the gentry (and ultimately, in the hands of the Opposition). The platform appeals to the unthinking lower clergy and to the dissenters at no cost to the country gentlemen; indeed, it directly benefits the lay impropriator by diverting still more of the Church's property for his use. Similarly, Fielding implies in Shamela and Joseph Andrews that if the clergy possess their souls in patience, they will be rewarded for their virtue by the Christian gentry, as Adams is rewarded by Mr. Wilson; if they intermeddle in affairs outside their function, even if, like Adams, they act with the best of intentions, they will come to grief;²¹ and knaves, like Williams, will be condignly punished for their presumption.

The amusing tendentiousness of this political romance should be stressed, for even if we recognize the continuity of the moral ideas that inspire Fielding's earlier and later fictions, with Battestin, we should also see the striking political differences that resulted when Fielding moved out of Opposition. In Amelia, Dr. Harrison openly intermeddles in the affairs of the Harris family, farms his extensive glebe for profit, and wields considerable, though honest, political power; these worldly activities, however, once the object of Fielding's sharpest satiric suspicion, now appear as the sine qua non of a clergyman's office. Harrison's worldly position allows him to impose a Christian order on his parish and to practise an active charity that is quite beyond Adams' means or ability. One may detect a parallel shift in Fielding's attitude towards “grace”: the antinomian implications of Methodist and even of Jacobite doctrine predominate over their authoritarianism in Fielding's later writings.

These variations in the political content of Fielding's work also point up the conflict in Shamela itself between his literary and political purposes. Ostensibly an attack on Richardson's doctrine of “virtue rewarded,” Shamela in fact promulgates far more rigid notions of poetic justice than any that Richardson then held or any that could possibly be substantiated elsewhere in Fielding's work. Parson Oliver's Catonic prescriptions, indeed, only barely accord with Fielding's own practice in Shamela itself, for how does Mr. Booby deserve to escape from Shamela's toils and the machinations of Parson Williams? Booby's only merit is to be a country gentleman, and yet this modest political status seems to outweigh all the moral and intellectual failings embodied in his name. He is at once a peculiarly obtuse victim of Walpolian corruption and yet its unwitting cause, a man who, for all his faults, belongs to the “Country Party” by reason of his social position and interest and must therefore be saved in spite of his worthlessness.

Reading Shamela in this fashion, one comes to see that it is not simply a hardheaded, realistic reply to Pamela, but a political romance, with peculiar powers of suggestion concerning the equally “real” but invisible reasons for the complicity of its victims in corruption. One kind of answer to the questions I raised at the beginning of this essay is “realistic”: Pamela is “really” no better than the letters that Parson Oliver discovers; but this is surely a very minimal view of the truth. Another kind of answer is “romantic”—Shamela, Williams and the rest are no more than unwitting tools of a gigantic but invisible “spirit,” the ultimate author of Pamela, Cibber's Apology and Middleton's Life. This not impossible he is implied not only by Tickletext but also by “John Puff, Esq.,” who writes:

Whoever the author be …, I would recommend to him, in his next performance, to undertake the life of his Honour [Walpole]. For he who drew the character of Parson Williams, is equal to the task; nay, he seems to have little more to do than to pull off the parson's gown, and that which makes him so agreeable to Shamela, and the cap will fit.

(303)

Can we resist the innuendo that Parson Williams has (and therefore is) the same character as Walpole? Like Robbing Bob the Butler in Fielding's Grub-Street Opera, Williams has climbed to power by petticoat politics, just as Walpole, in Opposition satire, had maintained his hold over King George by intriguing with Queen Caroline. Williams' arrest for debt and subsequent release (328-9) would then parallel the unsuccessful motion to impeach Walpole in 1741; while Mr. Booby's action against Williams in the spiritual courts might reflect Opposition hopes for the fall elections.

Attractive as this allegorization of Shamela is, however, it does not explain the role of the heroine, and neglects a second, less obvious innuendo, creating a parallel between Walpole and Shamela, that matchless young politician herself—for if we remove the parson's gown and change his sex, the cap (that “little rounderd's cap”) will fit. The suggestion of perversity in Walpole's allegorical relation to King George—notorious for his interest in the strapping young soldiers of his army is appropriate, and echoes the homosexual, or more precisely bisexual, relationship between “Lord Fanny” and “Conny Keyber.” Since Juvenal's third satire, bisexuality had imaged the mutually self-defeating relation of corrupt client and corrupt patron, and here “explains” what the Opposition regarded as Walpole's preternatural, perverse ability to keep King George's affection while exploiting him. Why does that mother's boy, Mr. Booby, so desperately want Shamela when, even though she is willing and even though Mrs. Jewkes is helping, he is unable to consummate the relationship? “Because” that is the traditional nature of political “vartue”—Shamela is “really” his mistress, not his wife, a female master, not a normally feminine servant. Like Lord Fanny, she is “now Master up, now Miss.”

The Grub-Street Opera again offers a useful parallel, despite the sexual inversion. Shamela holds precisely the same position as Robbing Bob, chief of a gang of servants that are pillaging their master, Squire Apshinken (alias King George). “We hang together, I believe, as well as any family of servants in the nation,” observes Lucretia Jervis (316), unconsciously commenting on the all-too-comprehensible cohesiveness of Walpole's party, in Opposition eyes. Shamela's lavish expenditure of her pin-money as rewards for her accomplices (330-31)—an inversion of Pamela's thriftiness—alludes to Walpole's political bribery, an unending theme of Opposition satire. Her interest in Williams, whose sexual endowments are matched only by his skill in casuistry, is natural, though corrupt, like the alliance of Walpole and Gibson; while her interest in Mr. Booby is merely artificial and contrary to his best interests, like the alliance between Walpole and King George. The title-page, glancing at Richardson's similarly placed puff, slyly insists that Shamela is “necessary to be had in all Families,” from which the King's servants and the Royal Family are certainly not excluded.

The resulting identification between Parson Williams and Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, merely points up the satiric identification between Methodism and Gibson's schemes for ecclesiastical reform; as the composer of the Codex iuris ecclesiastici anglicani (1713), Gibson had long been the butt of the Opposition, as a defender of what Fielding, in a Champion article, sarcastically called the Church's habenda.²² One might find an additional circumstance to substantiate the identification in the close connection between Williams and Mr. Booby's borough (335), for London is King George's borough par excellence. In general, therefore, the parallels between Mr. Booby and King George, Shamela and Walpole, and Parson Williams and Gibson are highly persuasive, and the resulting satire accords better with the “moral” appended by Parson Oliver than the overt political satire we have already explored.

The analogies between Shamela and the political scene of 1740-1741, however, are imperfect at best; the possible parallel between Shamela's recent incarceration in Lincolnshire and Walpole's impeachment seems forced, while William's arrest and the news that Mr. Booby intends to prosecute make most sense when Williams is identified with Walpole. Mrs. Jervis evokes no echo at all, much less Shamela's mother; and to pursue the political allegory too closely may, as in many readings of Jonathan Wild, divert critical consideration of the general satire,²³ on which Rothstein, in my opinion, quite rightly focuses. It is best to leave the question of personal applications, with Fielding, enveloped in highly suggestive obscurity, borrowing a hint from the late Professor Woods, who observes that Fielding's personal satire is often “double-barreled,” e.g., that both Wild and Johnson exhibit the nature of Walpole's politics, even though these two heroes, in the story, head opposing factions.²⁴ The ambiguity of Fielding's allusions in Jonathan Wild and in Shamela, moreover, seems to be a device for appealing beyond party personalities to a common political honesty on both sides. It is peculiarly aesopic, an ironic disclaimer that the satire has any personal application at all, except that “if the cap fits …” and the cap does fit an astounding variety of heads.

The basic device of such satire is that the cap should always sit awkwardly; there are always reasons why the victim should try it on and always reasons why he should take it off and try it on someone else. The logic of the satirist's claim that he had “no body” in mind when he designed the cap is therefore not an ironic lie so much as a paradoxical device for shifting the burden of proof. The accuracy of the satire appears as much from the victim's outraged protest that the fit is “bad” as from the innocence with which the satirist observes that the fit is “good.” The nature of the fit is both physical and moral, and the satirist speaks no more than truth when he observes that it is a good thing that the victim does not want to wear a cap which fits him, and therefore that it is doubly fortunate that the cap was not made for him. Should the victim claim (as is often the case) that the cap was “made for him” but does not fit, he must fall into impossible self-contradiction.

Extending this dialectic of innocence and guilt, moreover, we may come to feel that just because “no body” is responsible, “some body” must be behind it all. For it is surely no accident, Fielding implies, that three such similar works as Richardson's, Cibber's and Middleton's all appeared around 1740; “some body”—the “real” author of Pamela—lies behind this surprising unanimity in corruption. The complicity of society in the existence of such ideas—the shadows of a shadow of a shadow—may even extend to the satirist himself, who is, it seems, too confused, too kind, too uninformed or too unintelligent to analyse the real nature of the satiric subject. He is, in short, a slave, like Aesop. One might detect such a satirist in the narrator of Jonathan Wild and in Parson Oliver, whose views are confined to literary and moral objects, and who has no conception of the possible political applications of his story. Only from “outside” the satiric world can the reader feel that just because Shamela completely “fits” neither Pamela, the Life of Cicero nor the Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, it is “meant” for all and none of them—and therefore it is meant for other “heads” as well, on all of whom it awkwardly but suggestively perches.

Notes

1. “The Framework of Shamela,” ELH, 35 (1968), 381-402; for a review of speculations about authorship, see Charles B. Woods, “Fielding and the Authorship of Shamela,” PQ, 25 (1946), 256-72 and Rothstein, p. 388, n. 12.

2. Page references, in parentheses, are to Martin C. Battestin's edition of Joseph Andrews and Shamela (Boston, 1961). For similar problems of authorship and authority, see my forthcoming article in SEL, “The Problem of Authority in Fielding's Later Writings.”

3. Rothstein apparently alludes to this passage when he says that “Parson Oliver claims that the work is an unintentional autobiography,” p. 381.

4. Rothstein, p. 388, n. 12, citing Baker, sees this as additional evidence for Middleton's supposed authorship of Shamela, against Wood's sponsorship of Thomas Birch. The solution to the debate seems to me to depend not so much on what parson biographers Fielding might have had in mind as on what he meant by “Ciceronian.” Both the Gentleman's Magazine and the London Magazine inclined to Ciceronianisms in reporting Parliamentary debates, and the reports were much too favorable to Walpole for Opposition tastes, for example; and with Walpole figuring as “Cicero” in the London Magazine, “Ciceronianism” might easily come to mean a pro-Walpole attitude, though I have no concrete evidence that it did so. The fact that “Conny Keyber” transparently alludes both to Cibber and to Middleton, however, seems to preclude any single identification such as Rothstein, Baker and Wood propose.

5. Cf. the preface to The Life of Cicero, 4th ed. (London, 1750), I, xx, where Middleton proclaims that Cicero's letters are the “memoirs of the times” that “lay open the springs and motives” behind public events; that is, they are a “secret history” that lay bare the arcana imperii.

6. Ibid., II, 102-3; it is symptomatic of the shift in Fielding's later politics, discussed below, that he would quote this same passage with evident approval in the Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers (1751), in Complete Works of Henry Fielding, ed. William E. Henley (London, 1903), XIII, 17-18.

7. Rothstein, p. 386.

8. The theme begins in Chapter 3: “At this crisis [1688], you cannot but observe that the fate of King James, and of the Prince of Orange, and of so minute a being as myself, were all at once upon the anvil” (Everyman ed., n. d., p. 36). Thereafter, Cibber's fate follows the fate of the nation. There is a theatrical union of the two companies in 1707, paralleling the Union of England and Scotland (p. 155), and bringing an analogous settled state to the theater, which is disturbed by the appearance of rival companies and the opera in 1725, paralleling the emergence of the Opposition in national affairs at the same period. The position of Cibber, as manager of the united companies, is that of Walpole (p. 210), and so forth.

9. Works, XIV, 322: “The Accident which, as I apprehend, gave the first Rise to my Vision was this: I lately opened a large Quarto Book, intituled, An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Comedian; where I had not read many lines, before the following remarkable Expression occurred, Here I met the Revolution.” Martin C. Battestin has cogently argued that this pamphlet marks Fielding's desertion of his former party, “Fielding's Changing Politics and Joseph Andrews,” PQ, 34 (1960), 39-55, but the evidence is conflicting and difficult to evaluate. In any case, Cibber's claim might have appeared as absurd to a supporter of the Administration as to a “Patriot.”

10. Cibber, p. 143, complacently notes the “very wholesome effect upon those who writ after this time” brought on by Collier's criticism, no doubt remembering Collier's praise of Love's Last Shift; and he uses Collier's plea for abolition as an a fortiori argument in favor of a licensing act.

11. Richardson's famous characterization of Joseph Andrews, to Lady Bradshaigh, [Dec.], 1749, in Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Anna Laetitia Barbauld (London, 1804), IV, 286.

12. P. 399.

13. Introduction, p. xiii. In both writers, one detects a yen to place Fielding and Richardson in opposed camps, on which see generally William Park, “Fielding and Richardson,” PMLA, 81 (1966), 381-88, and the interesting thesis of Robert Alter, Fielding and the Art of the Novel (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), relating modern reactions to Fielding, favorable and unfavorable, to an “inverted Puritanism.” Alter's thesis could easily be extended to current views of Richardson.

14. George Every, The High Church Party, 1688-1715 (London and New York, 1956), pp. 156-62.

15. The standard Opposition parallel between Gibson and Laud is discussed in Norman Sykes, Edmund Gibson (Oxford, 1926).

16. Joseph Trapp, The Nature, Folly, Sin and Danger of being Righteous Overmuch, 3rd ed. (London, 1739), p. 38; Sykes, pp. 305-14.

17. Also used by Hogarth in the Harlot's Progress for the same symbolic purpose; Sykes, however, suggests that Hogarth means the pastoral letters that Gibson had issued against the Deists in 1730-1, p. 255, which had also come in for Opposition attention. The usual satiric connection between Methodism and female enthusiasts, however, suggests that Gibson's more recent efforts are meant.

18. The term “latitudinarian” is as wide as its etymology: for Dryden it meant the party of Toleration; for Gibson, it meant the party of Comprehension. Battestin is not aware of this breadth of meaning, as Donald Greene notes, “Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century,” SEL, 1 (Summer, 1961), 136, but if we take the term to mean a general liberalism of outlook and an emphasis on works with Battestin, Gibson and Middleton are surely as latitudinarian as Hoadly.

19. It may be pointed out that the view of the Georgian Church given by Battestin was the product of Opposition propaganda as well as of Methodist criticism, and descended more or less intact to the early twentieth century in authorities such as Abbey and Overton. There are real problems of historical relevance here: should we follow the views in which Fielding “believed” or the reality that he could not completely ignore? I have chosen the second alternative, but have no wish to conceal my obvious debt to Professor Battestin's researches, even if I differ from his conclusions.

20. For this paragraph, see G. F. A. Best, Temporal Pillars (Cambridge, 1964), p. 95 f.

21. Joseph Andrews, II. 8.

22. Works, XV, 118 (25 Dec. 1739).

23. The debate since J. E. Wells, “Fielding's Political Purpose in Jonathan Wild,” PMLA, 28 (1913), 1-55, on the specific applications of Fielding's allegory has been notably inconclusive.

24. Woods, p. 268.