The Author's Farce and the Pleasures of the Town is a play by the English playwright and novelist Henry Fielding, first performed on 30 March 1730 at the Little Theatre, Haymarket. Written in response to the Theatre Royal's rejection of his earlier plays, The Author's Farce was Fielding's first theatrical success. The Little Theatre allowed Fielding the freedom to experiment, and to alter the traditional comedy genre. The play ran during the early 1730s and was altered for its run starting 21 April 1730 and again in response to the Actor Rebellion of 1733. Throughout its life, the play was coupled with several different plays, including The Cheats of Scapin and Fielding's Tom Thumb.
The first and second acts deal with the attempts of the central character, Harry Luckless, to woo his landlady's daughter, and his efforts to make money by writing plays. In the second act, he finishes a puppet theatre play titled The Pleasures of the Town, about the Goddess Nonsense's choice of a husband from allegorical representatives of theatre and other literary genres. After its rejection by one theatre, Luckless's play is staged at another. The third act becomes a play within a play, in which the characters in the puppet play are portrayed by humans. The Author's Farce ends with a merging of the play's and the puppet show's realities.
The play established Fielding as a popular London playwright, and the press reported that seats were in great demand. Although largely ignored by critics until the 20th century, most agree that the play is primarily a commentary on events in Fielding's life, signalling his transition from older forms of comedy to the new satire of his contemporaries. Fielding's play within a play satirised the way in which the London theatre scene, in his view, abused the literary public by offering new and inferior genres. The Author's Farce is now considered to be a critical success and a highly skilled satire.
Plot Most of Fielding's plays were written in five acts, but The Author's Farce was written in three. The opening introduces the main character, Harry Luckless, and his attempts to woo Harriot, the daughter of his landlady Mrs. Moneywood. The play begins in much the same way as Fielding's earlier romance-themed comedies, but quickly becomes a different type of play, mocking the literary and theatrical establishment.Rivero 1989 pp. 35–36 Luckless is trying to become a successful writer, but lacks the income that would allow him to concentrate on his writing. Although others try to support him financially, Luckless refuses their help; when his friend, Witmore, pays his rent behind his back, Luckless steals the money from Mrs. Moneywood. In the second act, Luckless seeks assistance to help finish his play, The Pleasures of the Town, but is poorly advised, and the work is rejected by his local theatre. Luckless revises his play and succeeds in finding an alternative venue,Pagliaro 1999 pp. 70–71 leading to the third act, in which the work is performed as a puppet show, with actors taking the place of the puppets.Rivero 1989 p. 37
The third act is dominated by the puppet show, a play within the play. It begins when the Goddess of Nonsense chooses a mate from a series of suitors along the River Styx. All dunces, the suitors include Dr. Orator, Sir Farcical Comic, Mrs. Novel, Bookseller, Poet, Monsieur Pantomime, Don Tragedio and Signior Opera.Pagliaro 1999 pp. 71–72 The goddess eventually chooses a foreign castrato opera singer as her favourite — Signior Opera — after he sings an aria about money. Mrs. Novel then claims that she loved Signior Opera, and died giving birth to his child.Campbell 1995 p. 33 At this revelation, the goddess becomes upset, but is quick to forgive. The play within the play is interrupted by Constable and Murdertext, who arrive to arrest Luckless "for abusing Nonsense",Lockwood 2004 p. 282 but Mrs. Novel persuades Murdertext to let the play finish. Someone from the land of Bantam then arrives to tell Luckless that he is the prince of Bantam. News follows that the King of Bantam has died, and that Luckless is to be made the new king. The play concludes with the revelation that Luckless's landlady is in reality the Queen of "Old Brentford" and that her daughter, Harriot, is now royalty.Pagliaro 1999 p. 72 An epilogue in which four poets discuss how the play should end is brought to a conclusion by a cat, in the form of a woman.Hunter 1975 p. 54
Themes Fielding uses Luckless and The Author's Farce to portray aspects of his life, including his experience with the London theatre community.Pagliaro 1999 pp. 69–70 The plot serves as revenge for the Theatre Royal's rejection of Fielding's earlier plays.Koon 1986 p. 123 However, this and his being forced into minor theatres proved beneficial, because it allowed him more freedom to experiment with his plays in ways that would have been unacceptable at larger locations. This experimentation, beginning with The Author's Farce,Rivero 1989 p. 23 is an attempt by Fielding to try writing in formats beyond the standard five-act comedy play. Though he returned to writing five-act plays later, many of his plays contain plot structures that differ from those common to contemporary plays. To distinguish his satirical intent, Fielding claims that the work was written by "Scriblerus Secundus," which places his play within an earlier literary tradition. The name refers to the Scriblerus Club, a satirical group whose members included Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Gay, and John Arbuthnot.Rivero 1989 pp. 31–34 Fielding's use of the pseudonym connects his play to the satirical writings of the Scriblerus Club's members, and reveals their influence on his new style,Lockwood 2004 p. 189 such as incorporating in their work the styles of the entertainments that they were ridiculing. Fielding thus allows the audience to believe that he is poking fun at others, less discriminating than themselves, and less able to distinguish good art from bad.Rivero 1989 pp. 34–35 Fielding also borrowed characters from the work of the club's members, such as the Goddess of Nonsense, influenced by Pope's character from The Dunciad, Dulness, who is at war with reason.Pagliaro 1999 p. 71 Nonsense, like Dulness, is a force that promotes the corruption of literature and taste, to which Fielding adds a sexual element. This sexuality is complicated, yet also made comical, when Nonsense chooses a castrated man as her mate. Her choice emphasises a lack of morality, one of the problems that Fielding believed dominated 18th-century British society.Campbell 1995 pp. 32–34 Despite the link to Dulness, the general satire of the play more closely resembles Gay's Beggar's Opera than the other works produced by the Scriblerus Club.Warner 1998 p. 242
The Author's Farce is not a standard comedy; rather, it is a farce, and as such employs petty forms of humour like slapstick. Instead of relying on rhetorical wit, Fielding incorporates dramatic incongruities. For example, actors play puppets in a life-size version of a puppet play. Fielding's purpose in relying on the farce tradition was specifically to criticise society as a whole.Rivero 1989 pp. 38–41 Like others, Fielding believed that there was a decline in popular theatre related to the expansion of its audience, therefore he satirises it, its audiences, and its writers throughout The Author's Farce.Freeman 2002 pp. 59–63 Speaking of popular entertainment in London, Fielding's character Luckless claims, "If you must write, write nonsense, write operas, write entertainments, write Hurlothrumbos, set up an Oratory and preach nonsense, and you may meet with encouragement enough."Fielding 1967 p. 16 Luckless's only ambition is to become successful. Many of the characters in the play believe that the substance of a play matters little as long as it can earn a profit. Harriot believes that the only important characteristic of a lover is his merit, which, to her, is his ability to become financially successful.Rivero 1989 pp. 33–37 Fielding later continues this line of attacks on audiences, morality, and genres when he criticises Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel Pamela, in which a nobleman makes advances upon a servant-maid with the intent of making her his mistress.Warner 1998 p. 241Castro-Santana 2016 pp. 637–41
The blending of the fictional and real worlds at the end of the play represents the inability of individuals to distinguish between fictional and real experience.Freeman 2002 pp. 64–65 The final act of the play also serves as Fielding's defence of traditional hierarchical views of literature. He satirises new literary genres with low standards by using personified versions of them during the puppet show.Ingrassia 2004 pp. 21–22 In particular, Fielding mocks how contemporary audiences favoured Italian opera,Roose-Evans 1977 p. 35 a dramatic form that he regarded with contempt. Fielding considered it "a foreign intruder that has weaned the public from their native entertainments".van der Voorde 1966 p. 96 The character Signior Opera, the image of the favoured castrato singer within the puppet show, is a parody of the foreigners who performed as singers, along with the audiences that accepted them. Additionally, the character serves as a source of humour that targets 18th-century literary genres; after the character Nonsense chooses the castrato Signior Opera as her husband, Mrs Novel objects, declaring that she gave birth to his child. This act would be physically impossible because Opera is a castrato, and it pokes fun at how the genres and the public treated such individuals. Fielding was not alone in using the castrato image for humour and satire; William Hogarth connects the castrato singer with politics and social problems,Campbell 1995 pp. 33–34 and many other contemporary works mock women who favour eunuchs.Campbell 1995 pp. 32–36
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Many aspects of the play are drawn from Fielding's own experiences. During Act II, the characters Marplay and Sparkish, two theatre managers, offer poor advice to Luckless on how to improve his play, which they then reject. This fictional event mirrors Fielding's own life when Colley Cibber and Robert Wilks of the Theatre Royal rejected The Temple Beau. Cibber was an inspiration for the character of Marplay and Wilks for Sparkish, but Sparkish does not appear in the revised version of 1734, after Wilks's death. In his place Fielding introduces a character who mocks Theophilus Cibber, Colley's son, and his role in the Actor Rebellion of 1733.Pagliaro 1999 p. 70 Another biographical parallel involves the relationship between Luckless and Mrs Moneywood, which is similar to Fielding's own relationship with Jan Oson, his landlord during his stay in Leiden in early 1729. There Fielding incurred a debt of about £13 (equivalent to about £1,760 as of 2008), and a legal case was brought against him. Abandoning his personal property, Fielding fled to London; Oson's seizure of Fielding's possessions mirrors Mrs Moneywood's threats to seize those belonging to Luckless.Battestin and Battestin 1993 pp. 72–73 Other characters are modelled on well-known personalities of whom Fielding was aware though they were not personal acquaintances: Mrs Novel is Eliza Haywood, a writer, actress, and publisher; Signior Opera is Senesino, a famous Italian contralto castrato;Freeman 2002 pp. 62–63 Bookweight is similar to Edmund Curll, a bookseller and publisher known for unscrupulous publication and publicity;Rawson 2008 p. 23 Orator is John Henley, a clergyman, entertainer, and well-known orator; Monsieur Pantomime is John Rich, a director and theatre manager; and Don Tragedio is Lewis Theobald, an editor and author. Sir Farcical Comick is another version of Colley Cibber, but only in his role as an entertainer.Hume 1988 p. 64