Join us on a literary world trip!
Add this book to bookshelf
Grey
Write a new comment Default profile 50px
Grey
Subscribe to read the full book or read the first pages for free!
All characters reduced
The Author's Farce - "Neither great poverty nor great riches will hear reason" - cover

We are sorry! The publisher (or author) gave us the instruction to take down this book from our catalog. But please don't worry, you still have more than 500,000 other books you can enjoy!

The Author's Farce - "Neither great poverty nor great riches will hear reason"

Henry Fielding

Publisher: Stage Door

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

Summary

Henry Fielding was born at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, in Somerset on April 22nd 1707.  His early years were spent on his parents’ farm in Dorset before being educated at Eton. 
An early romance ended disastrously and with it his removal to London and the beginnings of a glittering literary career; he published his first play, at age 21, in 1728. 
He was prolific, sometimes writing six plays a year, but he did like to poke fun at the authorities. His plays were thought to be the final straw for the authorities in their attempts to bring in a new law. In 1737 The Theatrical Licensing Act was passed.  At a stroke political satire was almost impossible. Fielding was rendered mute.  Any playwright who was viewed with suspicion by the Government now found an audience difficult to find and therefore Theatre owners now toed the Government line. 
Fielding was practical with the circumstances and ironically stopped writing to once again take up his career in the practice of law and became a barrister after studying at Middle Temple.  By this time he had married Charlotte Craddock, his first wife, and they would go on to have five children. Charlotte died in 1744 but was immortalised as the heroine in both Tom Jones and Amelia. 
Fielding was put out by the success of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded.  His reaction was to spur him into writing a novel.  In 1741 his first novel was published; the successful Shamela, an anonymous parody of Richardson's novel. 
Undoubtedly the masterpiece of Fielding’s career was the novel Tom Jones, published in 1749.  It is a wonderfully and carefully constructed picaresque novel following the convoluted and hilarious tale of how a foundling came into a fortune. 
Fielding was a consistent anti-Jacobite and a keen supporter of the Church of England. This led to him now being richly rewarded with the position of London's Chief Magistrate.  Fielding continued to write and his career both literary and professional continued to climb. 
In 1749 he joined with his younger half-brother John, to help found what was the nascent forerunner to a London police force, the Bow Street Runners. Fielding's ardent commitment to the cause of justice in the 1750s unfortunately coincided with a rapid deterioration in his health.  Such was his decline that in the summer of 1754 he travelled, with Mary and his daughter, to Portugal in search of a cure.  Gout, asthma, dropsy and other afflictions forced him to use crutches. His health continued to fail alarmingly. 
Henry Fielding died in Lisbon two months later on October 8th, 1754.
Available since: 01/02/2019.

Other books that might interest you

  • Augmented Realities - cover

    Augmented Realities

    Zachary Phillips

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    This book celebrates a dark night of the soul. Shines light into the shadow. Offers hope. Augmented Realities melds human poetry with artificial intelligence generated artwork to create something truly unique, taking readers on a journey of triumph over adversity through radical self-acceptance and the embracing of silence and stillness in an increasingly fast paced world.
    Show book
  • Multilingual Poetry Collection 011 - cover

    Multilingual Poetry Collection 011

    Various Various

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    In LibriVox’s Multilingual Poetry Collection, LibriVox volunteers read their favourite public-domain poems in languages other than English. (Summary by David Barnes).
    Show book
  • Decade (NHB Modern Plays) - cover

    Decade (NHB Modern Plays)

    Various Various

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Two towers. Ten years. Twenty plays.
    Ten years after 9/11, twenty international writers respond to the defining event of our times.
    Published here are their individual plays, which woven together formed the basis of Decade, an immersive theatrical production from Headlong theatre company.
    The writers: Samuel Adamson, Mike Bartlett, Alecky Blythe, Adam Brace, Ben Ellis, Ella Hickson, Samuel D. Hunter, John Logan, Matthew Lopez, Mona Mansour, DC Moore, Abi Morgan, Rory Mullarkey, Janine Nabers, Lynn Nottage, Harrison David Rivers, Simon Schama, Christopher Shinn, Beth Steel, Alexandra Wood.
    'dazzling... a bold experiment in engaging with history, realised with flair' - Evening Standard
    'astonishing... deeply moving... illuminated by humour and a strong sense of human resilience.' - Telegraph
    Show book
  • The Complete Plays of T S Eliot - cover

    The Complete Plays of T S Eliot

    T. S. Eliot

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    The collected dramatic works of the Nobel Prize winner, from Murder in the Cathedral to The Elder Statesman.   T. S. Eliot’s plays—Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party (which won a Tony Award for its Broadway production), The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman—are brought together for the first time in this volume. They summarize the Nobel Prize winner’s achievements in restoring dramatic verse to the English and American stages, an effort of great significance both for the theater and for the development of Eliot’s art.   Between 1935, when Murder in the Cathedral was first produced at the Canterbury Festival, and 1958, when The Elder Statesman opened at the Edinburgh Festival prior to engagements in London and New York, Eliot had given three other plays to the theater. His paramount concerns can be traced through all five works. They have been said to be closely related, marking stages in the development of a new and individual form of drama, in which the poet worked out his intention “to take a form of entertainment, and subject it to the process that would leave it a form of art.” What Mark Van Doren said, in reviewing Murder in the Cathedral, is true of all these plays: “Mr. Eliot adapts himself to the stage with dignity, simplicity, and skill.”
    Show book
  • Next Door to the Dead - Poems - cover

    Next Door to the Dead - Poems

    Kathleen Driskell

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    “A collection of poems that are bold, inviting, charming, different, humorous, and irreverent. Often, they slip the bonds of common expectation.” —Northern Kentucky Tribune 
     
    When Kathleen Driskell tells her husband that she’s gone to visit the neighbors, she means something different than most. The noted poet—whose last book, Seed Across Snow, was twice listed as a national bestseller by the Poetry Foundation—lives in an old country church just outside Louisville, Kentucky. Next door is an old graveyard that she was told had fallen out of use. In this marvelous new collection, this turns out not to be the case as the poet’s fascination with the “neighbors” brings the burial ground back to life. 
     
    Driskell frequently strolls the cemetery grounds, imagining the lives and loves of those buried beside her property. These “neighbors,” with burial dates as early as 1848, inspire poems that weave stories, real and imagined, from the epitaphs and unmarked graves. Shifting between perspectives, she embraces and inhabits the voices of those laid to rest while also describing the grounds, the man who mows around the markers, and even the flocks of black birds that hover above before settling amongst the gravestones. 
     
    Next Door to the Dead transcends time and place, linking the often disconnected worlds of the living and the deceased. Just as examining the tombstones forces the author to look more closely at her own life, Driskell’s poems and their muses compel us to examine our own mortality, as well as how we impact the finite lives of those around us. 
     
    “Driskell has written her path to the Kentuckian sublime.” —Shane McCrae, author of Sometimes I Never Suffered
    Show book
  • Still Still with Thee - cover

    Still Still with Thee

    Harriet Beecher Stowe

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Librivox volunteers bring you ten readings of Still, Still, with Thee by Harriet Beecher Stowe. This hymn written by the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin was the weekly poem for December 14 - 21, 2014. - Summary by Rachel
    Show book