Overview

Novelist, lawyer, and satirical journalist, Henry Fielding was one of the great literary figures of the eighteenth century. Best known today for the novels Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, Fielding was just as renowned in his own time as a prolific and highly successful dramatist; at one point in 1730 successful productions of four different Fielding plays were running on the London stage. Among them was Tom Thumb—a farcical short play that Fielding eventually transformed into one of the most extraordinary parodies in English drama: The Tragedy of Tragedies; or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb.

Full Product Details

9781554811632

Table of Contents

Reviews

Fielding's Tragedy of Tragedies provides a master comedian's compact compendium of the heterogeneous sources of laughter and comic insight: farcical action and burlesque situations; literary parody; satire of bombast and pedantry; physical and verbal incongruities (a miniature hero and giant queen, diction that regularly plummets from lofty to low); mind-bending philosophical puzzles (a ghost threatened with death by sword); temporal inversions (footnotes asserting that lines from earlier plays have been cribbed from this one); reductions of poetic form ( Oh, Huncamunca, Huncamunca, oh ); and the bathos of compression and acceleration (seven stabbing deaths within ten lines at the play's close).The Broadview edition makes the play's full array of comic techniques readily accessible to any reader: effectively edited and cleverly formatted as a facing-page edition, with Fielding's mock-scholarly footnotes filling right-hand pages, the edition would serve equally well as the basis for uproariously funny stage productions and for study as a revealing print artifact from the Augustan Age. I recommend this edition as required reading for courses on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, The Age of Swift and Pope, theater history, eighteenth-century literature, book history, and literary theory--and as pleasure reading for anyone interested in drama, the novel, or a good laugh. --Jill Campbell, Yale University

Author Information

Contributing Editor Darryl Domingo is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Memphis.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available