Known primarily as a novelist, Henry Fielding(1707-1754) is no less interesting as a comedian playwright who went through a good school of writing, studying with prominent European playwrights. It was the experience of a comedian that helped Fielding to present a vivid characterological picture of contemporary England in his novels. Having lost his mother early, he was sent to study at the privileged Eton College by his father, who, in addition to the elder Henry, had eleven children, which did not prevent the widower from making a military career. Having received a university education, Henry began to earn money by writing plays, while not leaving the dream of a profitable marriage.
Fielding openly discussed on the pages of novels and in their prefaces exactly how and for whom works should be created, what principles the author should follow. Many of the principles and techniques of novel writing originate in the bright and original dramaturgy of the writer, who wrote twenty-five comedy plays of various genre modifications: comedies of manners, pamphlet plays, farces, adaptations, ballad operas. Fielding pays tribute to timeless literary images by engaging in dramatic reworkings of Molière's plays: in The Mock Doctor, or The Cure of the Dumb Lady (1732) by Molière's The Unwilling Doctor, in the farce The Seducer, or The Unveiled Jesuit (1732) Miser" in the comedy of the same name in 1733, whose character is called Lovegold (Lover of Gold). The farce The Servant Schemer (1733) uses the motifs of Beaumarchais's The Barber of Seville. Fielding's "co-authors" also turn out to be Ben Jonson, Cervantes and Shakespeare. Developing the moves and motifs of the works of great writers and playwrights, Fielding showed great wit and taste, high literary flair, entering into polemics with the authors of tasteless "alterations" that "correct" the masterpieces of the classics.
The traditions of Moliere can be traced in the early comedies right Fielding. In the very first of them "Love under different masks"(1728) and following it" The Goldfinch from the Temple»(1730) fathers, preoccupied with the profitable marriage of their children, do not pay attention to their heart inclinations. The name of one of the characters infected with the glitter of money, Evrys - Avarice (speaking names are typical for the characters of Fielding's dramatic works) - his behavior is guessed temperament Moliere's Garapagon. In the gallery of young people there are rakes, spenders and idlers (like Harry Wilding in The Goldfinch of the Temple), but there are also thoughtful and deep characters like Bellaria and Veromil. They find each other in the hustle and bustle of life and know how to win back their happiness. In the sketches of the characters and their arrangement, the techniques of the English dramaturgy of the Restoration, in particular the plays of Congreve, are noticeable, however, the function of referring to the characters of immoral rakes in Fielding is completely different: he never takes their side, on the contrary, he seeks to oppose them with thoughtful and capable of deep feeling heroes. . There is a trace of the sentimental comedy developed by Cibber and Style in the development of the love affair.
The connection with Molière is also indicated by the title of the play “A Lesson to a Father, or a Daughter Without Pretense”, which is in common with Molière’s “Schools”, in which, in addition to entertainment, the task was always to make the viewer look at themselves from the outside, to recognize their problems in those that rise in the play, and think about possible ways to resolve them in life. The heroine of the play, guided by very unintelligible arguments, prefers the footman Thomas to all the suitors, which is the motive of Molière's "Funny Pretenders". But her chosen one shows sharpness and temperament close to Figaro, and an unbiased "stupid" choice turns out to be very prudent.
Dramatic intrigue becomes more complex, but beautifully built into the play "Judge in his own trap, or Politician from a coffee shop"(1730), in the title of which characters are named, representing two main storylines. Each of them has its own "odd" - a property characteristic of the characters of English literature that make up the gallery of famous English eccentrics. "Politician" - a merchant, too keen on social events and very narrow-minded in everyday matters. A similar type was created at the beginning of the 17th century. Ben Jonson in the comedy "Volyuye, or the Sly Fox" - this is the projector Sir Politician Wood-B (Sir Politick Would-be), whose name in translation from English means either "one who could become a politician", or "that's what could happen." Reading newspapers becomes a sign of the times in Fielding's play. Fielding's character, carried away by newspaper news about political events, is unable to keep track of his own daughter, Hillaret, who runs away from home and, out of inexperience, falls into the clutches of the judge - bribe Squizem (to squeals- extort). Squizem's subordinate, Constable Staff (rod), dreams of having as many criminals as possible, because the extortionists' income directly depends on their number. A chance helps the girl to get out of an unpleasant situation: Squizem's wife finds her husband's love letter to Hilaret and exposes him publicly. A weighty end to the iniquities perpetrated by Squizem is put by Judge Worthy (Worthy). The emphatically moralizing tone of the finale also points to the tradition of Ben Jonson's comedy in Fielding's writings. The character of the active, pure, albeit making mistakes heroine is opposed to the too domestic and impeccably virtuous heroines of sentimental comedies.
In the genre of the comedy of manners, the plays "Old Libertines" (1732), "The Ladies' Man" (1734), "The Wedding" (1742) were performed.
A response to Fielding's contemporary literary situation was his farce plays. In particular, in Author's farce with a puppet show. Capital fun"(1830) Fielding will show how difficult it is to get a smart and honest author in life, while a swindler is in demand everywhere. The young playwright Lacles (Unlucky) is denied all theaters, simply because he is unknown. Suddenly, a piece composed by him for the puppet theater is picked up with a bang, in which the author goes through the genres that are relevant for the dramaturgy of his time and offers to plunge into the underworld of Achinea, where you can meet the personified Don Tragedy, Sir Comic Farce, Mr. Pantomime. But, according to Fielding, the bulky and clumsy Mr. Opera is most revered in the realm of Achinea. It was in the XVIII century. opera scenography has become pompous at times to the point of absurdity. At opera houses, actors were taught stamped gestures to convey the various states of the character. The conventions of the opera house began to interfere with the free development of the arts. A hindrance in the development of verbal creativity was the low-grade ephemera that arose in connection with the development of the press. Responding to the phenomena of modern cultural life of the era, in a grotesque-farcical manner, Fielding arranges the marriage of the Opera and Lady Pulp Fiction.
The grotesqueness of Fielding's images was translated into visuals by William Hogarth (1697-1764), who illustrated The Tragedy of Tragedies, or The Life and Death of the Great Thumb Boy (1730). The writer and artist had a good sense of each other's style and were friendly with each other. Fielding's main satirical thrust in The Tragedy of Tragedies was directed against the pomposity of classic tragedies, which left no room for the simplicity of earthly feelings. The fairy-tale hero Tom Tam (Thumb-Boy) in Fielding's parody play performs titanic feats, defeating a giant and winning the giantess's heart, saves King Arthur and dies after falling on the tongue of a red cow. Most of the text of the play at the same time consists of quotations - unsuccessful expressions taken from the works of English playwrights - Fielding's contemporaries.
The writer responds to another peculiarity of the literary situation of the 18th century. - the active development of the genre of the epistolary novel, which is reflected in the comedy Anonymous Letters, or A New Way to Keep a Wife at Home (1730), although the technique of using letters as a plot engine in a play was widely used in the dramaturgy of earlier periods, especially the stage of the high Renaissance (recall though would be a letter planted in the path of Malvolio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, or letters from The Merry Wives of Windsor). In one of the storylines of the play, two old husbands, Mr. Wisdom (Reasonable) and Mr. Softley (Mild), seek to force young wives to stay at home and, trying to arouse fear in them, write threatening letters on behalf of non-existent ill-wishers, which does not interfere with both, fooling their husbands , to survive novels of dubious quality, which correlates with the plays of the early Parisian stage in Moliere's work - "School of Husbands" and "School of Wives".
The same response to epistolary novels is contained in the genre ballad operas. False letters in the name of terminating servants' engagements and satisfying their love lusts are used by their young master - the character of the play Grub Street Opera, or At the Wife Under the Shoe (1731), performed in the genre of ballad opera in the tradition of John Gay's Beggar's Opera.
It is important that the play opens with a conversation between the actor and the author about the laws of success of the play and the tastes of the public. In accordance with the developed genre settings, inserted musical and song episodes are actively introduced into the everyday scenes of the play. The pamphletical nature of the work is reflected in the fact that the characters of the royal family and Prime Minister Walpole are guessed in the morals of the characters, so the play can be read both at the everyday level and at the pamphlet-allegorical level, depending on the life and literary experience of the viewer.
Features of the ballad opera are present in the farce "The Lottery" (1731), where Fielding responds to a new invention of businessmen and dodgers. In the play, it becomes especially obvious that cunning is a well-veiled stupidity. Here the author is more interested not in the raffled lots, but in the personalities of the organizers of the entertainment.
Elements of the ballad opera are preserved in the plays The Servant-Schemer (1733), The Old Man Taught Wisdom (1734) and Miss Lucy in the City (1742), which is connected with the plot.
Plays-pamphlets. Literary situation in the first third of the 18th century. is associated with the development of journalism and the demand for the pamphlet genre, which influenced poetry, prose and dramaturgy (the pamphletiness of Pope's Windsor Forest, Swift's Gulliver's Travels). In a number of Fielding's plays there is a fairly strong pamphlet element, in particular, and in ballad operas and stems from Fielding's desire to respond to contemporary political and social events.
A good experience, anticipating the transition from writing plays to writing novels, gives Fielding an appeal to the image of Don Quixote and the development of the traditions of Cervantes. The theme of quixoticism is present not only in Fielding's dramaturgy. Subsequently, it was developed in the novel The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his friend Abraham Adams (1742). "Don Quixote in England" (1734) - only the beginning of its development. Just like the Spanish writer at the beginning of the 17th century. transferred the character of a chivalric novel into the atmosphere of a picaresque novel, unusual for him, and in the second part of the novel he told about the travels along the roads of Spain by a recognizable literary character, Fielding, more than a century later, transfers the literary hero created by Cervantes to contemporary England. Don Quixote finds himself in a hotel in a town that is in a state of election campaign. The fathers of the city take the stranger who has arrived from nowhere for a candidate fighting for the votes of the electorate, and send a delegation to him in order to persuade him to leave the city, even if necessary, and at the cost of bribery, or to unfold events so that Don Quixote fulfills the role of the opposition candidate. Honest and direct Don Quixote does not understand for a long time what they want from him. The conversation seems to be in different languages - a traditional comedy technique. All knightly noble intentions of Don Quixote, such as "liberate the city from the quarters of foreign troops" are perceived as points of the election program. When, finally, Don Quixote understands the essence of the proposals presented to him, he bursts into a monologue in which he exclaims indignantly: “What are your chosen ones worth if they are sold for money!”
Dop Quixote's ideas about knighthood are destined to come true in the development of the play's love affair. The knight and his faithful Sancho Panza help the lovers Dorothea and Fairlove to marry, despite the desire of the girl's father Thomas to marry her for reasons of profit to the rich, but rude and uncouth Beger.
Having started writing the play as a university student, Fielding returns to it five years later. It is possible that the love collision of the play is an earlier version of it, and the scenes reflecting political events were introduced and developed in it later.
The theme of elections became one of the problems developed in the next pamphlet play “ Pasquin* (1736), although the most important in it is the discussion of aesthetic problems, which is done by Fielding through Shakespeare's move: a rehearsal of the play is presented on the stage. The rehearsals of the artisans in A Midsummer Night's Dream gave Shakespeare the opportunity to express his attitude to many problems of theatrical practice and dramaturgy, in particular to the problem of genre, to justified and unjustified genre mixtures, to what theatrical convention and trust in the spectator's experience and imagination are. Fielding presents in the play a rehearsal of two plays - farcically helpless and tasteless comedies and tragedies, which are discussed and commented on by the playwrights and critics present at the rehearsal, bearing speaking names: Trepwit mind), Fastien (author of the tragedy - Pompous), critic Sneeruel (Mockery). The material for Fielding's satire is both what is happening in the rehearsed comedy "Elections", and the way the events are reported, as well as the reaction of the author of the comedy to comments about the organization of the material in his play. In it, bribe-takers and politicians seek to triple their affairs, and in the fifth act, somehow very suddenly, lovers play a wedding. To all questions during four acts about when the action will begin to develop, the author of the comedy answers that everything will happen in due time. But it is precisely this timeliness, a sense of rhythm, as Fielding shows, that the play and its author lack, carried away by the political aspect to the detriment of the development of a love affair, although he fully mastered the effectiveness and efficiency of such a device as speaking names. In the rehearsed comedy, there are candidates from the court party - Lord Place (Position) and Colonel Promis (Promise), representatives of the country party - Sir Fox Chase (Fox Hunting) and Squire Tankard (Beer Mug). However, the underlying motive for an early marriage still exists. The daughter of the mayor - a supporter of the party of the country - dreams of the victory of the court party: then she will be able to move to London. When hopes of victory are shattered, she marries her father's political opponent, Colonel Pro-
misa, perhaps so insistent on the fulfillment of her desire for metropolitan life.
Fielding manages to show that the logic of the development of a work of art sometimes turns out to be beyond the control of the author, the text and the genre have their own laws that resolve seemingly hopelessly spoiled situations. Critical question: "When did they manage to fall in love with each other?" - in this context, it speaks, rather, about the inexperience and inattention of a thoughtlessly captious spectator than about the failure of the play. It is all the more annoying that such an incompetent spectator turns out to be an author-playwright and critic, who is called upon to reveal the artistic merits of works. It is even more absurd that the author himself is not able to see what he actually wrote. Responding to the remark about the inconsistency of what is happening, he justifies the suddenness of the marriage by saying that it was the result of what is happening behind the scenes, which is quite acceptable for a dramatic work.
At the rehearsal of Fastien's tragedy "The Life and Death of Common Sense" it turns out that the author of the tragedy, built according to the laws of morality, where two polar figures are clearly present - the queen of Common Sense and the queen of Ignorance - with her supporters - achieves the exact opposite of the tragic - the comic effect is tasteless a mixture of high and low: a high exclamation of "oh!" in relation to officials dealing with everyday problems, the appearance of reduced comedy and fairy-tale characters in the vision of a priest at the altar, which, according to all canons, should be sublime.
Away with the banners! Turn them away stars!
Hear me, O Physician and Lawyer!
I wrapped the temple with sacred incense.
The temple shook. Ghosts came:
Puss in boots danced in front of me
And the terrible dog played the violin.
I stood trembling at the altar.
(Translated by T. Rubinstein)
Fielding's fantasy is inexhaustible in the invention of ever new moves and forms to embody observations of the life of his contemporaries. The features of the pamphlet and the move with theatrical rehearsal are repeated in the review comedy "Historical Yearbook for 1736» (The Historical Register for the Year, 1736), consisting of five scenes. Responding to the events of the past year, Fielding gives an assessment of a number of social and cultural phenomena he noticed. The first and last scenes are devoted respectively to politicians and patriots. Politicians, under the guise of a broad view of the world, discuss European events, but they clearly do not understand anything about them and are not particularly interested in what is happening, trying to find only their own benefit in everything. Patriots, unlike politicians, are poor and upset by the situation in the fatherland, but in the end they are no less stingy and petty. The second and fourth scenes represent empty society ladies and theaters. Of particular interest is the theatrical scene, where Fielding responds to the widespread in the 18th century. Shakespeare's alterations, each time betraying, in Fielding's opinion, the bad taste or thoughtlessness of the playwright, who undertakes to "improve" Shakespeare.
The central third scene represents an auction - a kind of vanity fair of the 18th century, where outdated remains of political honesty, three grains of modesty, common sense, chastity, moderation, courage demanded by a warrior and stale wit, which are needed by the theater director and pamphleteers, are put up for auction. Success at court has the highest stakes.
The pamphlet plays are seen as a sharp satire on the Whig party, led by Prime Minister Robert Walpole. Voter buying, corruption, reliance on pensions and positions handed out by the government have come under fire from various quarters.
Thus, Fielding creates a kind of dramaturgy that is unlike anyone else, opposing the unbridled characters of the comedy of the Restoration and destroying them with laughter, while breaking Hobbes's assertion that laughter is personal superiority. He shows that the mocker can be ridiculed. Fielding's laughter, based on the triumph of common sense, has nothing to do with the sneers coming from the mouths of characters in the Restoration comedy. In battling them, Fielding does not slide into extolling the impeccable virtue and tearfulness of sentimental comedy, being more interested in public events than in private stories, putting common sense and honesty above external well-being and decency.
Treatises. In the same year that the Historical Yearbook was published, Parliament passed a law on censorship, which imposed a number of restrictions on the choice of topics and methods of reporting them. Fielding considered it not interesting for him to continue the work of a playwright, took up the practice of law, journalism, and later received the position of justice of the peace.
The period associated with the release of the law on theatrical censorship includes the active journalistic activities of Fielding. In 1739-1741. he published the magazine "Wrestler" ("The Champion"), in 1745-1746. - the magazine "True Patriot", in 1741 - 1748. - Jacobite Journal. All publications had a journalistic orientation, responded to the events of the country's political life and published Fielding's articles and pamphlets.
Of particular interest are Fielding's journalistic treatises, which include "Letter from Bedlam", in which the traditional pamphlet move of proof by contradiction is used. From the perspective of a madman from Bedlam, the author expresses ideas known since the time of Thomas More about the destructive power of money - the root cause of corruption, wasteful luxury, depravity, robbery - and the ability to fix the world by freeing the life of the state from their tyranny. Then people will cease to seek high and burdensome positions, and the people will choose the most capable and force them to serve society. “Virtue, education, good-heartedness, honor will be reborn.<...>the only way to help the poor is to make it impossible for the rich to exist;<...>where no one owns too much, no one lives in need. Fielding is aware that the proposed project is not so easy to implement, and ends the letter with a story about how the author of the letter unilaterally begins to implement his plan, throwing his savings into the Thames. Only an insane person can act like this, says the title of the work. But by the strategy of the text, the author leads the reader to a completely different thought: how corrupted is the world in which such bright and sober ideas seem crazy and meaningless.
In the preface to The Modern Dictionary, Fielding asks the reader to agree with the need to correctly and accurately use words, understanding the meaning inherent in them, and then gives the meaning of words, with mocking directness, revealing in them the broken, distorted ideas and attitudes of contemporaries who confuse the high with the low, to a number of concepts. Thus, the word "greatness" - according to Fielding's observation - "when applied to a person often means meanness and insignificance" (recall the "History of Jonathan Wilde the Great"), "love" is understood no more than a commitment to any kind of food, but sometimes means other kinds of lusts, "knowledge" means knowledge of urban gossip, and "fool" turns out to be "a complex concept that includes poverty, honesty, piety and simplicity" .
« Treatise on Nothing is intended to change the reader's attitude to the common truth "out of nothing comes only nothing", embodied in the words of King Lear. Just as Shakespeare, with the whole system of the great tragedy, proved the inconsistency of the original statement and showed the birth of Something from Nothing, Fielding, with impeccable logic, is proving that Something is indeed born from Nothing, as the root causes of everything that exists. Conducting reasoning in the style of a philosophical treatise and reproducing the form of the genre, Fielding, without changing his ironic manner, interrupts them with insertions that are understandable to narrow-minded logic: if a person does not have at least something, no matter how much he hides behind lace and a title, he remains an empty nothing. Further, he sneers at the pompous and thoughtful readers, who will never admit that they did not understand what they read, getting acquainted with the most empty works of modern authors. More modest readers will consider that something has escaped them in idle talk, high-browed hypocrites will certainly find the great Nothing there and will claim that they have comprehended it. The depth of philosophizing over the great Nothing, according to Fielding, plays into the hands of rogues and bribe-takers who do their business, leaving Nothing at the disposal of the virtuous, educated and wise.
Fielding soon found new ways to express his judgments about the literary situation of his day, this time in the form of a parody novel.
In response to Richardson's "Pamela" (1740), Fielding creates " Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews"(The name of the heroine Shamela is consonant with English. shame- shame, disgrace and sham- pretense, simulation), in which he alters, parodying, the main outline of Richardson's work, and two years later appears from his pen "The Story of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His Friend Abraham Adams(1742), whose starting point is an unambiguous answer to Richardson about for whom and how novels are written.
A careful comparison of the style of the novels of Richardson and Fielding makes it clear that in the middle of the 18th century. in the literary environment there was a literary and aesthetic dispute about how to write novels. Fielding saw the incongruity of the literary devices proposed by Richardson, did not agree with the assessment of the actions and characterization of the characters, and developed his own, different from Richardson's, logic of the relationship between the author and the reader. It is as if he makes you see from the side the unpretentiousness of the reader's aspirations, the narrow-mindedness of his judgments, the tendency to exalt the ordinary, and helps to see the apparent mercantilism and pretense behind the external virtue of the heroine.
“The only source of the truly Ridiculous,” Fielding writes in the introduction to the novel, “is (I think) pretense.” He sees the far-fetchedness of the situation in which the virtuous maid discusses in letters to her parents how her relationship with the young master develops, and, finding her pretense ridiculous, develops, with much greater situational and psychological persuasiveness, what would seem to be a continuation of Richardson's novel: the story of Pamela's brother, Joseph, a strong and dexterous owner of a beautiful and gentle voice. But the intrigue of the novel indicates that Fielding has no desire to imitate Richardson, no respect, no envy for his literary success. He parodied the original situation of the novel: the unbearable position of a young servant who is subjected to the loving claims of the mistress. Richardson's master of Pamela is called Mr. B. Fielding deciphers the surname. Lady Bubi appears in his work (booby from English. - "a fool, a fool").
Having dealt with the principles of creating "Pamela" at the very beginning of the work, Fielding organizes the novel in accordance with completely different traditions. His work develops according to the principles of an adventurous picaresque novel, a “high road” novel, but the central characters in it are not rogues who strive to survive without regard to law and honor, but wonderful people: kind, open and conscientious. In such a placement of a character from a novel of upbringing in an adventurous environment unusual for him, of course, one can guess the move embodied by Cervantes in Don Quixote, where the hero of a chivalric novel - the bearer of high ideals - was brought into collision with the ordinary. Fielding tests the ideals, beliefs and virtues of his characters in tough confrontations with a deceitful and corrupted world, which in his own way develops the motif of Richardson's "Clarissa" with the same tests of the heroine's strength and stamina.
In prose, as in drama, Fielding strove to combine the serious and the funny, eventually creating what he called "prose comic epic." "Comic epic" sounds like an oxymoron, since epic has traditionally been associated with a heroic beginning. Fielding's "comic epic" is not at all connected with "epic laughter", which always expressed contempt for the death of a hero overwhelmed with a high sense of service to the people and the king. Although Fielding himself, when discussing the comic epic in the author's preface to the novel, does not give the names of his samples, we can recall the ancient "War of the Frogs and Mice" and closer to Fielding heroic comic poem A. Pope "The Abduction of a Curl". Fielding, developing the possibilities of the genre, creates a comic epic in prose, emphasizing the lightness and amusingness of its plot and the originality of the style, prone to burlesque, parodying the sublime, reducing it to the ridiculous.
The comic in The History of Joseph Andrews is akin to the comic in Cervantes. The text strategy chosen by Fielding is also similar to Cervantes's. Like Cervantes, he puts his wonderful characters in ridiculous, absurd positions and, revealing their purity and kindness, makes the reader ashamed that he could laugh with other characters at these holy people. Thus, the "comic epic" contained a kind of heroism - the heroism of the new time: to remain oneself, even being booed, even in the face of a hooting crowd.
Demonstrating new ways of developing prose, Fielding is actively involved in the ongoing literary debate, but always maintains a certain detachment and allows fierce debaters to look at themselves from the outside, presenting authors who adhered to different aesthetic positions, continuing to debate in Heaven. In chapter 8, "Journeys from this World to Another" (publ. 1743), Fielding presents the opportunity for readers to be present during the discussion of the interpretation of Shakespeare's line in the presence of Shakespeare himself. When the great playwright is asked which of the interpretations he agrees with and what he himself put into the words under discussion, he replies that he wrote too long ago and does not remember exactly what he actually meant. So Fielding makes it clear to the furious debaters who claim to be the only true understanding of the great Shakespeare, the failure of their attempts. (In addition to Shakespeare, Julian the Apostate and Anne Boleyn are honored with a detailed statement in the Journey.)
Imbued with a special journalistic pathos "The Life and Death of Jonathan Wilde the Great"(1743). In the title of the work there is a hint of "vitality", which contains the author's greatest sarcasm to the point of grotesqueness, since the "hero" of the story becomes an inveterate villain and criminal. Fielding refers to the events of 1725, when one of the last public executions took place in England, carried out in the city square at the request of the public, shocked by the cynicism of the leader of a gang of swindlers. In the first chapter of the work, preceding the story, Fielding contrasts the concepts of greatness and goodness, in the form in which they have developed, arguing that the greatness of Alexander the Great and Caesar is opposed to mercy and generosity and is associated with immeasurable domineering evil. After describing the "deeds" of Jonathan Wilde, Fielding makes a bold generalization, stating that, ideally, the story of any greatness should end at the scaffold. Behind such a statement is the idea that the exaltation of a person is always built on the humiliation and subjugation of other people. “The History of Jonathan Wilde the Great” Fielding pays tribute to the novels of the Newgate theme, describing in detail the customs of Newgate, the central prison in London, the internal laws of its life, the venality of the caretakers, executions, and the morals of the inhabitants.
From 1746 to 1749 Fielding worked on a grandiose novel in terms of volume. "The Story of Tom Jones Foundling"”, in which all his literary skill was affected. The novel is all the more interesting because Fielding does not hide the techniques he has developed, on the contrary, exposing them. The author shares with the reader thoughts on how novels should be built and how to select material for narration. It should be noted that quite soon the method proposed by Fielding will itself become the material of a parody for L. Stern, who will not agree with the length and degree of prescribed circumstances that influence the fate of the hero.
Fielding's huge novel of eight hundred pages consists of eighteen books, each of which is preceded by a chapter in which Fielding discusses the way the story is organized, its tone and pace. In the first chapter of the first book, speaking of the position of the writer who is interested in selling his work, Fielding offers a metaphor for a tasty meal that should be provided by the owner of the tavern to visitors; “And the provisions we have prepared are nothing more than human nature,” he explains. The writer, in his opinion, should be guided by the tastes of readers. In the future, the metaphor is developed.
Fielding's reflections on the writer's artistic selection of material, on what may be of the highest interest to him, and on the fact that different stages of a character's life can and should be described with varying degrees of detail are interesting. The author immediately confirms his theoretical reasoning with the text of the work, the first book of which is a detailed two-day investigation of the circumstances of the hero’s birth, and the second begins with the reader’s assurance that nothing remarkable happened in the first sixteen years of the hero’s life. Fielding argues that there may be events worthy of detailed description. Such a fateful conversation can turn out to be, each intonation and length of the pause in which is extremely important for understanding the essence of what is happening. This is how the conversation of Blifil, who is wooing Mr. Allworthy's sister, is written in detail on several dozen pages.
The development of the plot of the novel is dynamic, full of events, but the huge volume of the novel is dictated not by them, but by numerous author's digressions on various occasions. Having told an episode from the hero's life, Fielding embarks on a reasoning and discussion with readers of the principles of education, or the peculiarities of morals, or the specifics of climatic conditions that form character.
On the pages of the novel, Fielding contrasts the openness and directness of Tom Jones, his ability to act from the heart, to the insincerity and hypocrisy of the outwardly well-mannered and reserved Blifil Jr. Tom's straightforwardness helps him win the hearts of the whole neighborhood, while the decent Blifil is secretly disliked by everyone. Tom's impulsiveness sometimes gets him into trouble, but sincerity always saves and promotes quick forgiveness.
Most of the novel is connected with the misadventures experienced by Tom in London, where he went in search of Sophia in order to beg forgiveness for his rash acts. The events of this part are built according to the laws of a picaresque novel: the hero cannot manage events and make informed decisions, but becomes a toy in the hands of fate.
Opening the last, eighteenth book of his novel, Fielding compares the conversation with the reader with a joint trip in a stagecoach, where he would like to be an entertaining companion.
Two years after "Tom Jones" there is a novel "Amelia"(1751), in which Fielding shows that impulsiveness, forgivable and even attractive at a young age, becomes disgusting in maturity, if not combined with a sense of proportion, with responsibility for the results of actions, with prudence. The central character of the novel, Captain Boots, tyrannizes the heart of his lovely and loving wife, doomed to endure his endless adventures and betrayals. If the misdeeds of the gullible and sincere Tom Jones were excusable, then the behavior of Boots, who is aware that he hurts the woman he loves and yet always indulges his whims, is disgusting. Fielding shows that many insoluble contradictions that develop in families and in the country as a whole can be overcome only if a person recognizes the highest spiritual and moral values. The desire to satisfy the whims and momentary needs of one's own self should be replaced by an awareness of duty to relatives and the environment. It is the realization of higher laws that saves the hero. Fielding's last novel is considered sentimental, helped by the image of his touching and faithful heroine, which was highly appreciated by William Thackeray, who created under his impression the image of Emily Sadley in his famous Vanity Fair.
To be fair, Fielding's desire to explore the limits of what is permitted in the manifestation of impulsiveness and "loyalty to himself", which Fielding showed in "Tom Jones" and the adventures of Boots in "Amelia", makes him similar to similar searches, though regarding female characters, in "Sir's Story". Charles Grandison” by S. Richardson, in which the hero makes a choice in favor of a girl whose character and behavior are not extreme: she has neither excessive impulsiveness nor stiff restraint. Apparently, here, too, Fielding did everything in his own way, arguing with his eternal opponent.
The ability to see and feel the environment, empathize with the fate of the motherland and fellow citizens, inexhaustible wit and the invention of witty forms of embodiment of creative ideas, the accuracy of which contributed to maintaining the invariably genuine reader's interest, puts Fielding among the most widely read and famous English writers.
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FIELDING Henry (Henry Fielding, 1707-1754) - English writer, the most prominent representative of English realism of the XVIII century, one of the founders of the European realistic novel. F.'s father, an officer who rose to the rank of lieutenant general at the end of his life, belonged to the impoverished junior branch of the earl family of Derby. F. received his secondary education at Eton, one of the most aristocratic schools in England; but, apparently, the lack of sufficient material resources forced him to refuse to graduate from Leiden University, where he studied for about two years. Returning to London, in search of a livelihood, the young F. turned to dramatic work. In 1728, his first comedy Love in Various Masks (Love in Several Masques) appeared, which was followed by a number of other plays (in total, between 1728 and 1743, F. alone or in collaboration with other authors wrote 26 works for the stage, apart from the posthumous play The Fathers, or a Good-natured Man, found by Jones in 1776 and published with a prologue and epilogue by Garrick in 1798). F.'s plays, which were mostly imitations of Congreve and Wicherly (see), sometimes Moliere (The Mock Doctor, 1732, The Miser, 1733), have now lost their artistic significance. However, the socially accusatory motives and educational tendencies that already appear in these early works of Fielding make it possible to foresee the future F. novelist in their author. Dedicating his "Don Quixote in England" (Don Qvixote in England, 1734) to Chesterfield, F. stated that his task was to depict "the disasters brought on the country by general corruption." In a completely enlightening spirit, The Life and Death of Common Sense is sustained, which tells about the struggle of Queen Common Sense with the Priests and the Law, seeking her death - is part of the comedy Pasquin, a Dramatic Satire on the Times , 1736). In 1737, F. entered the Temple as a student and in 1740 received the title of lawyer. The beginning of his studies in journalism belongs to the same period. In 1739-1741 he published The Champion, an imitation of Addison's Spectator, and in 1745 published The True Patriot, an anti-Torian magazine. In recent years, the Jacobite's Journal (1747-1748) and The Covent Garden Journal (The Covent-Garden Journal, 1752) have been published. At the end of 1748, F. was appointed to the post of justice of the peace in Westminster, which he retained for the rest of his life. The work associated with this position absorbed all the strength of F. and finally undermined his health. In 1754, on the advice of doctors, he undertook a sea voyage to Lisbon, where he died shortly after his arrival (these last months of F.'s life are described by him in his posthumous Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, 1755).
F.'s wide literary fame is not based on his dramaturgy and journalism, but solely on his three great novels: The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, 1742), "The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling" (The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, 1749) and "Emilia" (Amelia, 1751), to which should also be added his satirical story "The Life of Jonathan Wilde the Great "(The life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great), which was included in the collection" Miscellanies ", released by F. in 1743.
The impetus for the creation of "Joseph Andrews" was Richardson's "Pamela". Making the hero of his novel the imaginary brother of Pamela, who, like her, is in the service and is subjected to the same attacks on his virtue, F. venomously parodies Richardson's sentimental and didactic style. However, the literary and historical significance of "Joseph Andrews" goes far beyond mere parody. Already in this novel, written almost impromptu, F. realizes and proclaims himself the creator of a new literary genre - “a comic epic in prose, which differs from comedy in the same way that a serious epic differs from tragedy in that its action is wider and more detailed, that it encompasses much more numerous and varied characters." This new genre - a real realistic epic of bourgeois society - is opposed to them in equal measure by the baroque pastoral-historical novel of the 17th century. and the sentimental family novel of the Richardsonian school.
The innovative principles outlined already in "Joseph Andrews" received a detailed expression in F.'s masterpiece "Tom Jones". The introductory theoretical-aesthetic chapters of Tom Jones are a real manifesto of Enlightenment aesthetics. The artist's task is to draw his material from the "great book of Nature"; truthful imitation of nature is the only source of aesthetic pleasure. The imagination of the writer must be strictly closed within the boundaries of the possible; “with extremely rare exceptions, the highest subject for the pen of ... historians and poets is man” (“Tom Jones”, book VIII, 1). The educational and journalistic significance of literature - from Fielding's point of view - is enormous; the fight against social abuses, with human vices and hypocrisy - the task that Fielding himself set himself in each of his novels. Laughter, from his point of view, is one of the most powerful means of the artist in this struggle.
F.'s "comic epic" had its predecessors both in the form of the Spanish picaresque novel of the 16th-17th centuries and in the form of the French "comic novel" of the 17th century. (Sorel, Scarron, Furetier). However, the new theme they introduced into literature - the life of the plebeian "lower classes" of society - is used by them almost invariably in terms of the grotesque. In the work of F. the bourgeois enters literature in the prosaic costume of Mr. Allverty and Tom Jones, in the usual guise of an ordinary citizen of bourgeois England of the 18th century. Not without reason, in the struggle for the dignity of the new bourgeois themes and the new bourgeois “comic-narrative” genre, F., giving the definition of his “comic epic”, so persistently distinguishes it from burlesque and caricature, from everything “absurd and monstrous”.
This striving for maximum everyday authenticity was contradictory in its artistic results. Being, on the one hand, a step forward towards a more realistic depiction of reality, it at the same time had as its consequence the inevitable narrowing of the realism of the bourgeois artists of the 18th century. Suffice it to compare F.'s work with the works of the great realists of the Renaissance - Shakespeare, Rabelais - who least of all cared about the everyday authenticity of their work, boldly turning to fantasy and burlesque and nevertheless creating the broadest realistic generalizations. By the time of F., this era of the "titans", which "were anything but bourgeois-limited" (Engels), was entirely in the past. In England, which had already survived the revolutionary battles of Cromwell's "Great Rebellion" and the inglorious compromise of the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, bourgeois narrow-mindedness was already coming into its own, even where it was about the most advanced and truthful art of that time. True, in his appeal to experience as the only source of true art, F. is infinitely far from the petty empiricism of the epigones of bourgeois literature. In the aesthetic-theoretical chapters of Tom Jones, F. more than once turns to the artist with a demand to abandon the flat photographic depiction of life, insisting that his novel, in contrast to all sorts of empirical "biography" and "apologies", is a "history ”, i.e., an artistic generalization of events. However, it is precisely in this maximum generalization of his observations on “human nature”, which is a guarantee of the breadth of his realistic outlook, that at the same time his limitations are most clearly manifested, narrowing the social basis of F’s realism. It is in this contradiction that the inner tragedy of F’s creativity lies. lies and hypocrisy, in whatever circles of public life they met him (Lady Bellaston, Lord Fellamar ("Tom Jones"), "noble lord" ("Emilia"), Lady Booby ("Joseph Andrews"), Jonathan Wilde, etc. d.), F. opposes them - as an ideal model - human nature in general.
The problem of human nature is the main problem for the entire bourgeois enlightenment of the 18th century. - occupies a central place in F.'s work, especially in Tom Jones, filling his novels with new moral and philosophical content. “Human nature itself is far from bad,” says one of Fielding's characters. - Bad education, bad habits and customs corrupt our nature and direct it to vice. Its rulers are responsible for the depravity of our world, including, I am afraid, the clergy” (“Emilia”, book IX, 5). The final pages of Tom Jones's conversation with the Mountain Hermit (Tom Jones, Book VIII, 15) breathe the same enlightening optimism, where Tom Jones, with all the ardor of his youth, contrasts his master's misanthropy with a deeply optimistic faith in human dignity.
However, according to F., virtue in itself is just as insufficient as the mind, divorced from virtue, is insufficient. The victory of Tom Jones over Blifil is revealed not only as a victory of abstract Virtue over abstract Vice, but also as a victory of the owner of a good heart (even though he has violated all the rules of bourgeois morality) over the one-sidedness of bourgeois prudence. This appeal from reason to feeling, from prudence to a good heart in the work of F. already makes one anticipate the upcoming criticism of bourgeois society in the works of sentimentalists.
"Tom Jones" marks the pinnacle of F.'s work. The last period of F.'s work that followed, with "Emilia" in the center, is characterized by a weakening of the writer's realistic talent and his satirical sharpness.
If only a certain potential possibility of a transition to sentimentalism was contained in Tom Jones, then Emilia, F.'s last novel, shows that a shift in this direction has already managed to really materialize in his work. Despite the presence of a number of vivid satirical images (Judge Thrasher, Mrs. Ellison, the nameless "noble lord", etc.), the overall color of the book differs sharply from previous novels by F. ("This book is sincerely intended to contribute to the defense of virtue and to the exposure of some of the most brazen abuses that are now desecrating both the public and private life of our country") are achieved, unlike "Joseph Andrews" or "Tom Jones" , not so much by means of realistic satire, but by means of sentimental-moralistic didactics. The image of the resonant pastor Garrison (to a certain extent analogous to Allworthy's "Tom Jones") is brought to the forefront of the novel, correspondingly lowering the specific weight of the image of Captain Booze, a weak imitator of Tom Jones. Typical of the new stage in F.'s work is the final "appeal" of Buzsa, who allowed himself to doubt the omnipotence of Providence (after reading Barrow's sermons in the arrest house). The very structure of the novel differs substantially from Fielding's earlier books; unlike "Joseph Andrews" and "Tom Jones", the detailed composition of which gave the artist the possibility of a wide coverage of reality, the action of "Emilia" is concentrated around the narrow family world of Emilia. Starting his career with a parody of Richardson ("Joseph Andrews"), F. in "Emilia" is noticeably closer to him. Characteristically, while "Joseph Andrews" and "Tom Jones" were condemned for "rudeness" and "immorality", Fielding's "Emilia" had to be defended against diametrically opposed charges of excessive sentimentality and flatness (see "Covent-Garden Journal" , 1752).
An article on "Reading" ("Covent-Carden Journal", 4/II 1752), written after the appearance of "Emilia", confirms the change in the philosophical and aesthetic principles of F.; in this article he renounces Aristophanes and Rabelais, whom he recently admired in Tom Jones, and makes an attempt at reconciliation with Richardson, speaking positively of him as "the witty author of Clarissa".
“Religious hypocrisy and stupidity of the English respectable middle class” (Engels) contributed to the creation in English criticism and in the minds of the general readership of a “legend” about F., unconditionally identifying him with his heroes (in particular, with Buzs from “Emilia”), which turns F. ... into a moth-like, thoughtless, frivolous artist, and his novels into purely "entertaining" works. Attempts to restore the true appearance of F. and his work have been undertaken over the past decades by some Western literary critics; the actual fulfillment of this task will be the work of Marxist literary criticism. Bibliography:
I. The first collected works of F. in 4 vols. published in a posthumous edition edited by Arthur Murphy, 1762. Collected novels were published by Walter Scott, 1821. Critical edition of the collected works of F. to the present. no time. Of the collected works available, the best are: Works, edited with biographical essay by Lesli Stephen, 10 vls, L., 1882-1883; Works, edited by George Saintsbury, 12 vls, L., 1893-1899 (so-called "Temple Fielding").
A bibliography of Russian translations of Fielding, published in the 18th century, is in the book: Sipovsky V.V., From the history of the Russian novel and story (Materials on bibliography, history and theory of the Russian novel), part I, 18th century, St. Petersburg, 1903 ( by index). Under the name of Fielding, translations of the books "The Adventures of Rodrik Random", 2 hours, M., 1788, and "The Journey of Gunry Clinker", 3 hours, St. Petersburg, 1789, owned by Smollet, were published. Tom Jones, translated by A. Kroneberg, St. Petersburg, 1849; the same, under the name "The Story of Tom Jones the Foundling", vols. 1-3, ed. A. S. Suvorin, St. Petersburg, 1893; the same, ed. "Young Guard", M. - L., 1931 (abridged translation); same, tt. I-II, ed. "Academia", M. - L., 1935.
II. Thackeray W. M., Lectures on the English Humorists of the Eighteenth century, L., 1853; Lindner, F. H., Fieldings dramatische Werke, Dresden, 1895; Dobson A., Fielding (English men of letters), L., 1909. Late. ed. 1925; Godden G. M., H. Fielding: a memoir, including newly discovered letters a. records with illustrations from contemporary prints, L., 1910 (actually 1909); Cross W. L., The History of H. Fielding, 3 vls, New Haven, 1918; Frohlich A., Fieldings Humor in seinen Romanen, Diss., Lpz., 1918; Digeon, A., Les romans de Fielding, P., 1923, English. translation, L., 1925; His own, Le texte des romans de Fielding, P., 1923; Blanchard F. T., Fielding the novelist, L.-Oxford, 1926 (extensive literature given); Radtke B., H. Fielding als Kritiker, Phil. Diss., Lpz., 1926; Baker, E.A., The History of the English novel, vol. IV, Intellectual realism from Richardson to Sterne, L., 1930; Banerji H. K., H. Fielding, Playwright, Journalist a. Master of the art of fiction, his life a. works, Oxford, 1929; Voorde F. P., van der, H. Filding critic and satirist, Amsterdam Diss., Taara, 1931; Thornbury E. M., H. Fielding's theory of the comic prose epic (Univ. of Wiskonsin studies in language and literature, N. 30), Madison, 1931; Gray E. W., The Fielding - Smollet tradition in the English novel from 1750 to 1835, Sat. Harvard University. Summaries of theses (1931), Cambridge, 1932; Bissell Jr., F. O., Fielding's Theory of the novel, Ithaca, N. Y., 1933; Jones B. M., H. Fielding, novelist and magistrate, L., 1933. Gettner G., History of general literature of the 18th century, vol. I. English literature (1660-1770), St. Thackeray V. M., Collected works, vol. XI, St. Petersburg, 1895, article “English humorists of the 18th century”; Oblomievsky D., Fielding (in the collection "Early Bourgeois Realism", Goslitizdat, Leningrad, 1936).
Literary encyclopedia. - In 11 tons; M .: publishing house of the Communist Academy, Soviet Encyclopedia, Fiction. Edited by V. M. Friche, A. V. Lunacharsky. 1929-1939 .
fielding
(Fielding) Henry (1707, Sharpham Park, Somerset, England - 1754, Lisbon), English writer. He studied ancient Greek and Roman literature at Eton College, entered the University of Leiden in Holland, and was forced to return to England due to lack of funds. In London he began to write for the theater: in 1728-37. wrote more than 20 satirical comedies and became the most prominent playwright, opened his own theater, but the law that limited the number of London theaters to two (1737) undermined the writer's precarious well-being. In 1737, Fielding began to study law and in 1740 became a lawyer, combining literature with the practice of law until the end of his life. Fielding's first satirical novel, The History of the Life of the Late Jonathan Wilde the Great (1739, published 1743). The novel The Story of the Adventures of Joseph Endrus and His Friend Abraham Adams (1742) was conceived as a parody of S. Richardson's novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, but became a real comic epic that combined the panorama of 18th century English life. with juicy details of life. "The Story of Tom Jones, a Foundling" (1749) - a comic novel imbued with a accusatory spirit, became a new type of novel in which the protagonist is a person depicted in accordance with nature (reality). Fielding considered it necessary to combine narrative with an educational impact on the reader. The epigraph to "The Story of Tom Jones" - "I saw the customs of many people" (a quote from Horace's Poetic Art) - indicates this feature of the story. Fielding was perhaps the first in English literature to use living spoken language in his novel and achieved great skill in building dialogues. Each book is prefaced with an introductory chapter, so the novel combines an engaging narrative with a treatise on the novel. In 1754, Fielding went to Portugal for treatment, where he died. The impressions of the trip are reflected in the "Diary of a trip to Lisbon" (published posthumously).
Literature and language. Modern illustrated encyclopedia. - M.: Rosman. Under the editorship of prof. Gorkina A.P. 2006 .
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Plan
Introduction
1 Biography
2 Pieces
3 Novels
4 Literary style
5 Meaning
Introduction
Henry Fielding Henry Fielding, April 22, 1707 Scarfam, Somerset, England - October 8, 1754, Lisbon) - the famous English writer and playwright of the XVIII century, known for his worldly humor and satirical skill, and also as the author of the novel " The Story of Tom Jones, the Foundling". One of the founders of the European realistic novel.
In addition to his literary achievements, Fielding has a significant place in the history of law enforcement, creating (with his brother John) what is called by many the first police unit in London, The Bow Street Runners, using his powers as a judge.
1. Biography
Fielding Henry, English novelist and playwright, publicist. Born April 22, 1707, presumably in Sharpham Park (Somersetshire). His father was a well-born nobleman, he served in the army, in 1711 he retired with the rank of general. Until the age of twelve, Henry lived mainly in East Stour (Dorsetshire), the rich estate of his maternal grandfather, a member of the Court of King's Bench.
Fielding received his secondary education at Eton (1719-1725), one of the most aristocratic schools in England. At Eton he formed a strong friendship with William Pitt the Elder. His younger sister, Sarah, also became a successful writer. After a love affair with a young woman that got him into trouble with the law, Fielding went to London, where he began his literary career. In 1728 he went to Leiden to study classical art and law at the university. But, apparently, the lack of sufficient material resources forced him to refuse to graduate from Leiden University (1728-1730), where he studied for about two years, and forced him to return to London. Returning to London, in search of a livelihood, the young Fielding turned to drama. He began to write for the theatre, some of his works being severely criticized by the government under Sir Robert Walpole.
Theatrical censorship law 1737 is said to be a direct result of his activities. Specifically, the play that led to the Theater Censorship Act was "Golden Tail" (The Golden Rump), but Fielding's satire set the tone. Whereas theater censorship law was approved, political satire was virtually impossible and the playwrights whose works were staged were under suspicion. For this reason, Fielding left the theater and pursued his career in law and, in order to support his wife Charlotte Cradock and two children, in 1737 Fielding entered the Temple as a student and in 1740 received the title of lawyer. The beginning of his studies in journalism belongs to the same period.
He lacked a sense of money, which meant that he and his family often went through periods of poverty, but he was also helped Ralph Allen, a wealthy benefactor who later served as the prototype for Squire Allworthy in the novel Tom Jones". After Fielding's death, Allen provided support and education for his children.
Fielding never stopped writing political satires and satires on contemporary art and literature. His Tragedy of tragedies Little Thumb (for which William Hogarth designed the frontispiece) was, for example, a fairly good success for a printed play. He also published a number of works in dailies. Fielding writes for Tory periodicals, usually under the pseudonym "Captain Hercules Vinegar" ( Captain Hercules Vinegar). In the late 1730s and early 1740s, Fielding continued to expound his liberal and anti-Jacobite views in satirical articles and newspapers. Almost by accident, envying the success of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, Fielding began writing novels in 1741, and his first major success was Shamela, an anonymous parody of Samuel Richardson's melodramatic novel. This satire follows the model of the famous "conservative" satirists of the previous generation (in particular, Jonathan Swift and John Gay).
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The novel followed Joseph Andrus(1742), an original work supposedly about Pamela's brother, Joseph. Although the work was conceived as a parody, it developed into a full-fledged novel and is considered a kind of starting point, Fielding's debut as a serious novelist. In 1743 Fielding published the novel in a third collection. Miscellaneies. It was romance" Life Story of the Late Jonathan Wilde the Great This novel is sometimes considered his first novel because he almost certainly started writing it before he wrote the novels. Shamela" And " Joseph Andrews". This is a satire on Walpole that draws a parallel between Walpole and Jonathan Wild, a notorious gang leader and highwayman. He indirectly compares the Whig party in Parliament to a gang of thieves led by Walpole, whose constant desire to become a "Great Man" (a common epithet for Walpole) must only culminate in the antithesis of greatness: being hanged.
His anonymously published in 1746 " effeminate spouse » ( The Female Husband) is a fictional account of a famous case in which a transvestite woman was convicted of forcing another woman into marriage by trickery. Although this theme occupies an insignificant place in Fielding's creative legacy, it is consistent with his constant preoccupation with fraud, deceit, and pretense. Fielding's best work, Tom Jones(1749) is a carefully crafted picaresque novel that tells intricately and amusingly how a foundling achieved success. Fielding's wife, Charlotte, who inspired the characters in Tom Jones and Amelia, died in 1744. Three years later, Fielding, defying public opinion, married Charlotte's former maid, Mary, who was pregnant.
Despite this, his consistent anti-Jacobism and support for the Church of England helped Fielding to be appointed Chief Justice of London a year later, and his literary career took off. Teaming up with his younger brother John, he helped form, in 1749, The Bow Street Runners, referred to by many as London's first police force. According to the historian M. Trevelyan, they were the best judges in London in the eighteenth century, and did much to improve the judicial system and the conditions of prisoners. Fielding's influential pamphlets and requests included a proposal to abolish public hangings. This does not mean, however, that Fielding opposed the death penalty as such, as evidenced, for example, by his presidency in 1751, at the hearing of the famous criminal James Field, he was found guilty of robbery and sentenced to the gallows. Despite being blind, John Fielding succeeded his older brother as Chief Justice and became known as Bow Street's "Blind Beak" for his ability to single-handedly identify criminals by their voices. In January 1752, Henry Fielding took up periodicals, a bi-weekly magazine called covent garden", which he published under the pseudonym " Sir Alexander Droucancier, CST. UK Censor until November of the same year. In this journal, Fielding challenged the "Grub Street Army" and contemporary writers of periodical dailies. This conflict eventually led to the Paper War of 1752-1753 ( Paper War of 1752–1753).
Fielding's ardent commitment as a great humanist to the cause of justice coincided with a rapid deterioration in his health, to the point that in 1754 he went abroad to Portugal in search of medical treatment. Gout, asthma and other ailments led to the need to use crutches. Henry Fielding died in Lisbon two months later. His grave is located on the territory of the city, English cemetery (Cimeterio Inglés). The last months of Fielding's life are described by him in the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, 1755.
In 1728, his first comedy, Love in Various Masques, appeared, followed by a number of other plays (in total, between 1728 and 1743, Fielding alone or in collaboration with other authors wrote 26 works for the stage, not counting the posthumous play The Fathers, or a Good-natured Man, found by Jones in 1776 and published with a prologue and epilogue by Garrick in 1798).
Fielding's plays, which were mostly imitations of Congreve and Wycherly, sometimes Moliere (The Mock Doctor, 1732, The Miser, 1733), subsequently lost their artistic significance. However, the socially accusatory motifs and enlightening tendencies that already appear in these early works of Fielding make it possible to foresee in their author the future Fielding-novelist.
Dedicating to Chesterfield his "Don Quixote in England" ("Don Qvixote in England", 1734), Fielding stated that his task was to depict "the disasters brought upon the country by general corruption." In a completely enlightening spirit, “The Life and Death of Common Sense” is sustained, which tells about the struggle of Queen Common Sense with the Priests and the Law, seeking her death - is part of the comedy “Pasquin, a dramatic satire on modernity” (“Pasquin, a Dramatick Satire on the Times", 1736).
Title page of The Stories of the Adventures of Joseph Endrus and His Friend Abraham Adams
Fielding's wide literary fame is not based on his dramaturgy and journalism, but solely on his three great novels: "The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams" , 1742), “The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling” (“The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling”, 1749) and “Emilia” (“Amelia”, 1751), to which should also be added his satirical story “The Life of Jonathan Wilde the Great "("The life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great", included in the collection "Miscellanies", published by Fielding in 1743.
Henry Fielding is an outstanding English prose writer, playwright, the largest figure of the English Enlightenment, one of the creators of the realistic novel genre. He remained in history not only as a writer: Henry Fielding and his brother John became the creators of the first police unit in the English capital. Henry Fielding was born April 22, 1707 in Sharpham Park (Somersetshire), was the son of a nobleman who rose to the rank of general. The childhood of the future writer was spent in the grandfather's estate East-Stour.
During the years 1719-1725. he was educated at the privileged Eton College. In 1728, Fielding became a student at Leiden University, but studied there for about two years - most likely due to financial difficulties.
Returning from Holland to London, Henry Fielding began to write plays to earn money. The novice playwright succeeded so much in satirical denunciations of public mores and members of the government that, in fact, because of him, the law on theatrical censorship was passed in 1737, which turned into an insurmountable obstacle to further fruitful activity in the field of drama.
By this time, G. Fielding had a wife and two children. To provide for them, after studying at the Temple, where he entered in 1737, he received a bar in three years. In the same period of his biography, he began to engage in journalism, published in daily magazines, not forgetting the genre of satire.
Having subsequently become famous for writing novels, the writer and publicist began to write them almost by accident - either because of envy, or admiration for the success of S. Richardson's novel Pamela. In 1741, Fielding himself began writing novels, and the first published work of this genre, Shamela, which became a parody of Richardson's novel, was received very favorably. The novel "Joseph Andrews", which was released the following year, became the starting point for G. Fielding's activities as the author of "serious" novels. In 1743 the novel The History of the Life of the Late Jonathan Wilde the Great was published, which, according to some scholars, was actually conceived and begun before the rest.
In 1744, Henry Fielding's wife died, and three years later he married her former maid, who was "in position." This turned public opinion against the writer. Nevertheless, a year later, Fielding was appointed Justice of the Peace in Westminster - this was largely facilitated by the anti-Jacobin position and support provided by the Anglican Church. He was to serve in this position until his death. Henry and his brother John were considered in London the best judges of the entire 17th century; they did a lot to make the judicial system more perfect, and the conditions of detention more humane.
The work became a source of great life experience, later successfully used in literary works, but it also took away his health. In 1754, on the recommendation of a doctor, Fielding left for Portugal for treatment and two months later, on October 8, 1754, while in Lisbon, he died; was buried in an English cemetery.
Fielding's works were of great importance for the development of realism in European literature, they became the forerunner of C.
The first undisputed masterpiece of the English novel is Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. He gave the novel an additional comic flavor and made it a kind of synthesis of the epic and the dramatic, fused with the realism of everyday life. Compared to Richardson, who is darker, pedantic and strict in his depiction of human relations, Fielding exudes a buoyant cheerfulness and shows a knowledge of the integrity of the human experience. “Reading it after Richardson,” Coleridge remarked, “is like stepping out of a stuffy sick room onto an open lawn on a clear May day.”. Fielding's childhood, his education, the study of law, his extensive knowledge of life in both the upper and lower strata of society, as well as the experience of a playwright who later devoted himself to the novel, represent an ideal combination of personal virtues and a general cultural environment favorable for the establishment of the novel as a genre in England, rivaling poetry and drama. The final establishment of the novel as the dominant artistic medium owes much to Fielding's ability to curb his comic imagination and adapt it to the flexible and suitable form of the novel for depicting any spheres of life.
Henry Fielding was born in Somersetshire, in southwestern England, which he later makes the setting for his "comic epics". His father, an officer who rose to the rank of general at the end of his life, belonged to an impoverished noble family.
However, Pushkin, not without reason, considered Fielding a raznochintsy writer. To use the apt expression of the English novelist himself regarding the division of all mankind into "two great categories - those who use the labor of their own hands, and those who use the hands of others", we can say that he belonged precisely to the first category. His whole life was spent in hard, hard work. Literature was for him not fun, not an elegant "gentleman's" pastime, but an urgently needed profession.
The childhood of the future writer was overshadowed by financial strife and legal red tape. After the death of Fielding's mother, his father and grandmother litigated for several years over whose custody the boy should be.
Fielding, who was at enmity with his stepmother and fled from Eton School to get rid of his father's arbitrariness, by the age of fourteen had already experienced all the delights of civil litigation in the Chancellor's Court, similar to those that were described a century later by Dickens in Bleak House.
Having entered the philological faculty of the University of Leiden in Holland, Fielding was forced to leave the university in his second year of study, apparently due to lack of funds. Returning to England, the young man, as he himself later jokingly recalled, faced a choice: to become "a hired cab driver or a hired scribbler." This playful remark does not at all contradict the fact that already in his youth Fielding took literary creativity with deep seriousness and highly valued the title of a writer.
Even before leaving for Leiden, in 1728, Fielding managed to stage his first comedy, Love in Various Masks, on the stage of the Drury Lane Theater in London. It was still a purely amateur, largely imitative experience.
Upon his return from Leiden, Fielding began working for the theater as a professional playwright. In total - alone and in collaboration with other authors - he wrote two and a half dozen plays; the vast majority of them belong to the years 1730-1737, when Fielding's life was entirely connected with the theater. It was during these years that comedies that have not lost their significance to this day were created, such as “The Tragedy of Tragedies, or the Life and Death of a Great Thumb Boy” (1730), “The Politician from the Coffee House, or the Judge, Caught in His Own Trap” (1730) , Don Quixote in England (1734), Pasquin (1736), Historical Calendar for 1736 (1737).
The talent of the young Fielding as a playwright took some time to mature; the writer gradually freed himself in his first comedies from the influence of the traditional methods of the comedy of the Restoration, not yet having, as he himself later admitted, sufficient knowledge of life and people in order to diversify characters and situations. Later, looking back at the first, dramatic, period of his literary activity, Fielding judged him rather harshly: “I finished writing for the stage when I should have started,” he said.
His career as a playwright came to an end in 1737 with the censorship and limitation of the official theaters, brought about by Fielding's plays attacking the Walpole government. Fielding entered the Middle Temple to study law, and a career as a lawyer, through which he traveled all over the country, widened his knowledge of English life and introduced him to the clergy, doctors, actors, writers, lawyers, squires, merchants and criminals. After 1748, Fielding became one of Bow Street's most famous judges, coming face to face with the human suffering and moral issues that consumed his attention and were reflected in his critical writings.
Fielding's novels were inspired by the publication of Samuel Richardson's first novel, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, in 1740. Constructed in the form of letters from the heroine Pamela Andrews, Richardson's novel tells how the maid Pamela is besieged by the rake Mr. B., whose dishonorable intentions are eventually defeated by true love for the virtuous heroine. Fielding is considered the author of the parody novel Shamela (1741), in which the virtue of the heroine is only a means to inflame the lover and lure him into the network of marriage. A similar travesty of Richardson's sentimentality, judging from the initial irony, should have been Fielding's novel Joseph Andrews (1742). In Fielding's comic parody, Pamela Richardson is already married to Squire Booby, and the virtue of her brother, Joseph Andrews, is endangered by Booby's sister. However, Richardson's comically inverted plot becomes secondary to Pastor Adams' story. Fielding, who was greatly influenced by Cervantes' work, portrays the ingenuous, good-hearted, if slightly ridiculous English version of Don Quixote as a pastor, and social events are filtered through the prism of the idealistic sanity of Pastor Adams. What begins in Shamel as a satire on the generally accepted limited and hypocritical sentimental virtue grows in Joseph Andrews into one of the first great English satirical novels, in which Fielding's good nature and sympathy are extended to broader comic notions of human nature as a mixture of vices and virtues, flaws and pure thoughts. In the preface to the novel, Fielding speaks of his intention to make it a new point of reference in art, "which in our language has not yet been addressed by anyone." He supplies his "comic novel" with a classical pedigree, deriving its origin from epic and drama, but not forgetting to mention that it differs from earlier prose novels and crude comic burlesques:
“So, a comic novel is a comic-epic poem in prose, different from comedy in the same way that serious epic differs from tragedy, its plot is wider and more comprehensive, it contains more events and depicts more diverse characters. It is distinguished from a serious novel by the plot and action: if in one they are serious and solemn, then in the other they are light and funny; its characters are distinguished by the fact that among them there are persons of low rank and, consequently, vulgar manners, while a serious novel presents us with the most worthy; and finally, it differs in mood and style, emphasizing the funny instead of the sophisticated."
On the classical foundation of Fielding, the novel became a kind of hybrid, borrowing elements of epic and drama, introducing more diverse pictures and images and ordinary characters and scenes acceptable in comedy. As Sheridan Baker noted, referring to the novel "Tom Jones", although this statement applies to all Fielding's novels, "it generalizes modern English life, partly comparing it with knowledge of the past,
At the same time, the English novel for the first time becomes truly literary. This is a union of comedy and romance, by the grace of the classics, giving rise to an extremely fresh and ironic worldly wisdom.
In Jonathan Wilde the Great (1743), Fielding turns the story of a notorious criminal (executed in 1725) into an ironic hymn to crime. His comedy asserts indirectly the moral rules of the novel, not by the example of the admirable Pastor Adams, but by demonstrating the injustice and lawlessness reigning everywhere and everywhere, especially in courts and prisons, through ironic descriptions. As in all of Fielding's novels, his comic imagination paints a vast social fabric, holding its individual elements together with the help of common sense and good humor.
In the novel The Story of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), Fielding's desire to create a comic epic is realized in the most virtuoso way. Its plot, which Coleridge called one of "the three most ideal plots in existence" (along with the myth of Oedipus and the story of the warlock Faust), takes the hero and heroine, the foundling and mischievous Tom and the determined Sophia, on an unforgettable journey through English society. Compared to Fielding's other novels, Tom Jones is a panorama work, replete with amazingly faithful portraits of people from all walks of life, which serve both to reflect social life and to reveal the essence of the laws of human existence. The whole action is directed by the narrator, on behalf of whom the narration is narrated, and his sympathetic sympathy insistently affirms the accepted norms of morality, including all human weaknesses and virtues, and accepts the world as it is, even if it lacks the common sense that imbues the novel. Fielding made the novel as comprehensive, inclusive in its portrayal of society and as ironic as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was, and it is this breadth of views that has become the most valuable legacy for writers like Dickens and Joyce.
In Fielding's last novel, Amelia, the mood of his comedy changes noticeably, becomes more strict and gloomy, his characters, compared with the characters from Tom Jones, lose their complexity and ambiguity, turn into more holistic moral types. However, the gallery of social portraits in the novel is still remarkable, although it is losing its former cheerfulness. On the whole, Fielding's novels are one of the best sources of information about English life and traditions of that period. As Leslie Stephen argued in Eighteenth-Century History of English Thought, “A fair critique of eighteenth-century English fiction would place Fielding at its very center and measure the merit of other representatives of the time by how far they are removed or close to his works.” Fielding remains the central creative figure who defined the main traditions of the novel as a grandiose critique of life.
