[In the following excerpt, Lockwood claims that, with its dramatic elements, Shamela shows the current of Fielding's theatrical imagination.]

What I mean by this title is not so much the Fielding who worked in theater as the Fielding in whom theater itself worked and kept on working, imaginatively, all his life. From his playhouse experience, he took or was taken by a certain deeply theatrical habit of imagination that bathes the material of his post-dramatic writing career and, in some cases, I would argue, underpins the creative structure of that writing. I am talking about something more or other than a dramatic imagination, which Fielding had in deficient supply at best, even when he was writing plays. So I use the word “theatrical” to suggest that this habit of imagination takes in the whole ensemble of stage, players, script, and author, and is defined in Fielding's case by a certain playhouse-derived form of distant intimacy (as it might be called) in the creative relation between the imagined stage of his print narratives and their imagining author—more particularly a form of separate yet shared identity of author and character, analogous to the relation between actor and part. All a bit remote and murky so far, I know, but I will try to explain and illustrate this idea in what follows.

I take it as a given that Fielding's post-dramatic work or, in other words, his novel-writing, is what has made him most interesting to us; and that, for the most part, we think of that earlier dramatic author only in reference to the later novelist—as if he had been waiting to become a famous novelist, killing time by writing plays.¹ This critical reflex is fair enough, given the historic triumph of the novels as against the plays, but it does obscure one vital point of interpretation, which is that his novel-writing career, so often seen as an unexpected or possibly forced departure from the theater work, may also be understood as an extension and transformation of that work, or even as an attempt to get back to it, indirectly and imaginatively, if not literally—though Fielding did in fact toy with the idea of reviving his theater career even after he had established himself in book authorship with Joseph Andrews (Battestin 359-62).

Beginning in 1728 when he was not yet twenty-one, Fielding spent the first decade of his working life passionately, if sometimes chaotically, absorbed in theater writing and (for the final two years) management. Even after that time, he can still be found regularly haunting the playhouse, literally and metaphorically, as he seems in a way also to have been haunted by it. For a very funny Champion essay (21 Feb. 1740), he recreates the scene of a dumbfounded first-night audience trying to figure out a James Miller play. He makes Mr. Wilson in Joseph Andrews tell the story of his troubles as a playwright (3.3). He famously sends Tom and Partridge to see his friend Garrick play Hamlet (Tom Jones, 16.5). In his last newspaper, he names himself after a ridiculous character in one of his favorite plays (Drawcansir, in The Rehearsal) and makes the theaters subject to his “Cognizance and Jurisdiction” in his make-believe Court of Censorial Enquiry (Covent-Garden Journal, 18 Jan. 1752). The imaginary stock of that playhouse world is present to him as vividly as ever, even in the final year of his life, when he is making his voyage to Lisbon and casting about mentally among the old stage comedies he grew up with for characters to compare with the ship captain who is driving him crazy.² This lifelong attachment to theater is obvious and perhaps understandable, given the intensity and excitement of his professional beginnings there—but what if anything does that attachment mean for the work that followed? He clearly never left the playhouse, in some sense—but in what sense?

It isn't that his novels reproduce anything particularly important from his plays, though you can certainly look through the plays and find anticipations of the novels there in story material or themes or characters—which indeed has been the traditional method of connecting these two parts of his career.³ More important I think is the question of how the stage taught Fielding to imagine the characters and speech he wrote into that space and would later write onto the pages of his books—and how it taught him to imagine himself in relation to that material, too.

His playhouse beginnings left him with a certain instinct for imagining his narrative material as something stageable. That much is evident in scene after scene of Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones and has often been noted: only think of Lady Booby trying to seduce Joseph (1.8) or the discovery of Square hidden “among other female Utensils” in Molly Seagrim's bedchamber (5.5). Beyond that natural after-effect of a career in stage comedy, however, there is something more in the provision he makes in narrative for a theatrically equivalent production or voicing of his material—especially characters and their speech—as if by means of a collaboration between represented character and representing author, who performs the part otherwise belonging to an actor. I see this as a fundamental form of imaginative expression in Fielding that never really came free of its theatrical roots, though it came free of the theater itself and indeed required that freedom in order to fulfill itself on the imaginary stage of Fielding's narrative. The result, as it seems to me, remains intensely theatrical, though we are no longer in the theater.

Fielding was running his own playhouse in 1736 and, early the following year, lifted by the immense success of Pasquin in 1736, even had plans to build a new house (Hume 224-28), as John Rich had done at Covent Garden by the help of The Beggar's Opera. Those plans came to nothing, but Fielding did carry through the imaginative meaning of that ambition in creating a form of theatrical representation answerable to the freer or more forbidden range of material he wanted to write about—a bigger and better theater, in other words. The most interesting examples of this imaginary theater writing occupy his borderland creative work of the early 1740s, when Fielding was still new to the experience of writing for production only on a printed page, rather than a living stage: Shamela (1741), Joseph Andrews (1742), Jonathan Wild (1743). I want to look at brief examples from two of these texts to illustrate some of the critical meanings I have in mind. And although neither of these texts is a play, the theatrical interpretation I argue for I hope will justify what otherwise would seem to be the rude gesture of writing about fictional narrative in an essay commissioned for a collection on drama.

SHAMELA ON STAGE

There was a stage version of Pamela and various stage and operatic adaptations of Tom Jones, like George Colman's The Jealous Wife (1761), and even a stage version of Joseph Andrews—though never of Shamela, for reasons that must be obvious.⁴ Yet Fielding in Shamela even so was never writing closer to his theatrical mentality except when he was literally writing plays, and part of what I would like to argue here is that the novelistic associations of Shamela—its origin in Pamela and creative sequel in Joseph Andrews—have made it much harder to see the theatrical meaning at the imaginative heart of this brilliant, if unstageable, little pamphlet.

Consider the character Fielding creates in Shamela Andrews. She and her little book in one sense are unimaginable without Pamela Andrews and her much bigger book. That book roused Fielding's critical and intellectual dislike but also, more importantly, roused a creative desire to rewrite the original. And though the result often copies or caricatures that Richardsonian original, Shamela herself, in her own true character, does not, and indeed owes nothing of importance to the heroine whose name she mimics. Her book is a mockery of Pamela's book, but she herself is not a mocking copy of Pamela so much as a rival original. She is made to resemble Pamela variously and closely, but purely in accidentals: living in the same household, wearing the same clothes, fending off the same master. In the essential attribute of personal and moral identity, however, she is no more like Pamela than she is like King George.

But if this character-creation does not come from Pamela, imaginatively speaking, where does she come from? To answer that question, I would go back to the Drury Lane playhouse of the mid-1730s and to Catherine Clive, the spectacularly gifted musical actress and comedienne for whom Fielding wrote the lead role in ten of his plays. And I would look particularly to the part he wrote for her as Lucy Goodwill, the ingenue heroine of his immensely popular afterpiece The Virgin Unmask'd (1735).⁵

Lucy is the not-quite-sixteen-year-old daughter of a rich and possessive old father who means to marry her according to his own wishes. But she, on the contrary, is guided by her own cheerful instinct for getting whatever she wants and appears in the play as an immensely engaging sort of barracuda virgin, descending from a line of innocently rapacious stage characters like Wycherley's Margery Pinchwife and Congreve's Miss Prue. She is entirely innocent of experience, and of disguise, but certainly not of desire. “Should you like to have a husband?” asks her father.

LUCY:
And am I to have a Coach?
GOODWILL:
No, no: What has that to do with a Husband?
LUCY:
Why you know, Papa, Sir John Wealthy's Daughter was carry'd away in a Coach by her Husband; and I have been told by several of our Neighbours, that I was to have a Coach when I was marry'd. Indeed, I have dreamt of it a hundred times. I never dreamt of a Husband in my whole Life, that I did not dream of a Coach. I have rid about in one all Night in my Sleep, and methought it was the purest thing!—
GOODWILL:
I tell you, Child, you must have no Coach with a Husband.
LUCY:
Then let me have a Coach without a Husband.
GOODWILL:
What, had you rather have a Coach than a Husband?
LUCY:
Hum—I don't know that—But, if you'll get me a Coach, let me alone, I'll warrant I'll get me a Husband.

(9)

From the breathlessly eager Lucy it is not far to a breathlessly eager Shamela:

O! Bless me! I shall be Mrs. Booby, and be Mistress of a great Estate, and have a dozen Coaches and Six, and a fine House at London, and another at Bath, and Servants, and Jewels, and Plate, and go to Plays, and Opera's, and Court; and do what I will, and spend what I will.

(26-27)

But Shamela, though she must unquestionably trace her parentage in part back to the irrepressible Lucy, is a book character more than a stage character, since it is only from the book that we can have what the perfect enjoyment of her character requires, which is free access to her mind (such as it is) and to that treasuretrove it contains of Shamelesque meditations, like the memorable thought she expresses while dusting off her hands after she has bullied her new husband into submission on the subject of her personal cash flow: “It would be hard indeed that a woman who marries a man only for his Money should be debarred from spending it” (45).

For that as well as more practical reasons of taste, Shamela could not very well go on a stage, though she of all characters belongs there, who play-acts to live. She is also the best Catherine Clive part that Fielding ever wrote—unfortunately not playable, but still, in some transferred imaginative sense, the ultimate scripting of that ever-adaptable role. The history of Clive's work on Fielding's stage shows a certain steady progression in the personality of her roles, from more to less restrained, more subdued to more freewheeling: beginning with Chloe, the giddy but confident heroine of The Lottery in 1732, through Isabel in The Old Debauchees (1732), and then the brilliant maidservant characters who anchored his adaptations of Molière and Regnard, including Dorcas in The Mock Doctor (1732), Lettice in The Intriguing Chambermaid (1734), and especially Lappet, in The Miser (1733), “the Glory of all Chambermaids,” as Ramilie calls her in the play (3.4). Two years later came Lucy Goodwill, closer still to the spirit of Shamela, though, like the other characters, still more or less respectable.⁶ Hence my argument that the vital spark for Shamela came not from Richardson's novelwriting but from the momentum of Fielding's own theater work. Against that background, it will appear that Shamela is not, as she might at first seem, a coarsened Pamela Andrews but, rather, a coarsened Lucy Goodwill—and not only coarsened but, ideally, heroically coarsened: a princess of vulgarity and selfishness.

All of which is just to say again that such a character, however her ancestry might be traced from Fielding's stage, could never actually be produced on a stage without setting it ablaze with scandal. She could be produced on a page, however, and what Fielding found in the writing of Shamela, besides this classic part for Clive, was a means of seeing the part performed, and the character realized, without a performer or, more precisely, without the performer who had effectively been his collaborator in the creation of all those earlier roles in the pre-Shamela vein. In other words, Fielding found a means of writing for imaginary stage production, so to speak, where the great creative novelty was his rediscovery of speech and dialogue and the writing of speech and dialogue in the freely indirect style of narrative.

The talking of Shamela is not like the live and literal talking of a stage production. It is indirectly, not directly, represented and figuratively, not literally, audible. But Shamela nevertheless seems theatrically vivid and exciting because of the new freedom of imaginative representation that carries it, and its author, along:

So, truly, I resolved to brazen it out, and with all the Spirit I could muster up, I told Mrs. Jewkes I was vastly pleased with the News she brought me; that no one ever went more readily than I should, from a Place where my Vartue had been in continual Danger. That as for my Master, he might easily get those who were fit for his Purpose; but, for my Part, I preferred my Vartue to all Rakes whatever—And for his Promises, and his Offers to me, I don't value them of a Fig—Not of a Fig, Mrs. Jewkes; and then I snapt my Fingers.

(38)

There is something of the theater lingering in this—undoubtedly something fitted for an actressy performer and a noisy audience—yet something utterly non-theatrical, too, in the intimacy of our imaginative possession of this stage and the character who occupies it. What Shamela says here can be heard as if from a real stage; but it is always with that narrative difference of an indirect or filtered presentation, as in the speech just quoted, where the moral freedom of the inimitable heroine (as it could be called) gives to the indirectly represented speech a peculiar charm and resonance that cannot quite be produced in a theatrical medium—yet that hardly could have been imagined without the theater and Clive's Lucy Goodwill.

Fielding was certainly indebted to Richardson for the epistolary form of Shamela, which enabled him to write dialogue again without requiring him to give it to a player to be spoken or even to put it in quotation marks. And in that sense, too, Richardson made it possible for Fielding to write dialogue far wilder and nastier than any playwright would dream of putting into the mouths of characters on a live stage. But for Shamela herself, and the genius and vitality of her presence, the creative honor is Fielding's alone. She belongs to one of the most powerful parts of his own theatrical past, as I have tried to suggest; and it seems equally certain that, for him, she was also the indispensable opening to a creative future of professional novel-writing whose theatrical habit of imagination is nowhere more vividly on display than here. …

Notes

1. Though recent scholarship has helped put Fielding's dramatic career in better focus; see Lewis, Rivero, Battestin 55-234, and (superbly) Hume.

2. “… the finicalness of Sir Courtly Nice, with the roughness of Surly”: Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, 29.

3. See, e.g., Rogers, Goggin, Hassall, Trainor. But Rawson in Order from Confusion Sprung (201-310) brilliantly showed an entirely different and much more convincing side of that relation, and, like many other students of Fielding, I am greatly in his debt for the important opening he created on this whole subject. And, more recently, see also Pettit for an illuminating and likewise unteleological approach as applied to the case of Jonathan Wild, which he reads for a complex and mutually influential generic relation between drama and novel.

4. James Dance, Pamela; or Virtue Triumphant (1741); for the Fielding adaptations, see Blanchard 170-75.

5. Originally titled An Old Man taught Wisdom: or The Virgin Unmask'd, but usually played in repertory under the subtitle.

6. Fielding possibly intended Lucy to be less respectable or sympathetic than she became in Clive's rendition of the character: see Hume 188.

Works Cited

Battestin, Martin C., with Ruthe R. Battestin. Henry Fielding, A Life. London: Routledge, 1989.

Blanchard, Frederick T. Fielding the Novelist. New Haven: Yale UP, 1926.

Fielding, Henry. The Champion. London, 1741.

———. The Covent-Garden Journal. Ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1988.

———. Jonathan Wild. Miscellanies. Ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar and Hugh Amory. Vol. 3. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1997.

———. Joseph Andrews. Ed. Martin C. Battestin. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1967.

———. The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. Ed. Tom Keymer. London: Penguin, 1996.

———. The Miser. London, 1733

———. Shamela. London, 1741. New York: Garland, 1974.

———. Tom Jones. Ed. Martin C. Battestin and Fredson Bowers. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1974.

Goggin, Leo P. “Development of Techniques in Fielding's Comedies.” PMLA 67 (1952): 769-81.

Hassall, Anthony J. “The Authorial Dimension in the Plays of Henry Fielding.” Komos 1 (1967), 4-18.

Hume, Robert D. Henry Fielding and the London Theatre 1728-1737. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988.

Lewis, Peter. Fielding's Burlesque Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1987.

Pettit, Alexander. “What the Drama Does in Fielding's Jonathan Wild.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 6 (1994): 153-68. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Henry Fielding. Ed. Albert J. Rivero. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. 21-34.

Rawson, C. J. Order from Confusion Sprung. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985.

———. Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal Under Stress. London: Routledge, 1972.

Rivero, Albert J. The Plays of Henry Fielding: A Critical Study of His Dramatic Career. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1989.

Rogers, Winfield H. “Fielding's Early Aesthetic and Technique,” Studies in Philology 50 (1943), 529-51.

Trainor, Charles. The Drama and Fielding's Novels. New York: Garland, 1988.