3 - ‘Court Poet’?: 1732–1735

Summary

On 27 November 1731 Read's Weekly Journal mentioned ‘three new Plays now on the Stocks … which are to be acted one after the other with all Speed’ at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane: ‘a Tragedy by Mr. Aaron Hill; a Comedy of Captain Bodens; and another by Mr. Fielding, the Author of Tom Thumb’. Whether the ‘Comedy … by Mr. Fielding’ thus anticipated was The Lottery. A Farce, a one-act ballad opera premièred on 1 January 1732 as an afterpiece to Addison's Cato, or, as Battestin has suggested, The Modern Husband, staged in February, Fielding had managed to find a venue for his plays. As in the case of his move from Drury Lane to Goodman's Fields and thence to the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, previous commentators have speculated about the kind of constraints on form and subject-matter to which he would have had to agree in order to have his plays produced by the King's Company. If he was not forced to turn from politics – a ‘retreat’ which, according to Cleary, ‘was near-total, conscious, and obvious’ – then at any rate ‘he was made to give up, or at least modify his satiric experiments’. Some critics have gone further to argue that ‘in the move to Drury Lane, the dedication to The Modern Husband, and the epilogue to The Modish Couple Fielding unmistakably and publicly aligned himself with the Walpole camp’. Indeed, Battestin, while quite rightly referring to Fielding's ‘triumphant’ return to Drury Lane, goes on to suggest that in these months ‘he openly declared himself to be Walpole's man’.

In analyses such as these, insufficient weight tends to be given to the pragmatic element in Fielding's career, especially in the early 1730s. As I explained at the end of the previous chapter, the Little Theatre in the Haymarket had effectively been closed off to him. While the theatres in Lincoln's Inn Fields and Goodman's Fields provided other options, Drury Lane was the most prestigious theatre in London.