4 - ‘Dramatick Satire’: 1736–1739

Summary

According to the Daily Gazetteer, Walpole's principal organ of propaganda, ‘The Election, (a Comedy in Pasquin), laid the Foundation for introducing Politicks on the Stage’. While Fielding, citing Aristophanes as a precedent, attempted to deny the charge, there can be no doubting that Pasquin is a political play, ‘full of Sarcasm from one End to the other’. Its political significance is more difficult to describe, however. While some opposition journalists talked up Fielding's play as more likely to damage Walpole's credibility than any number of sober diatribes condemning his allegedly corrupt and incompetent regime, others were not so sure, and the sanguine hopes of a journal with the meaningful title, the Old Whig:

There are such strong Strokes in this Satire, that if it continues to be follow'd with the crowded Audiences it has now had for above 40 Nights together; some Gentlemen will feel its Influence more effectually, and be more hurt in the Esteem of Mankind, than by a Thousand Examinations, tho’ ever so well writ, to expose their Schemes …

should be compared with the more jaundiced view of the Grub-Street Journal which, observing that ‘The design of the Comedy is to ridicule the Election of members of Parliament representing the Candidates of both Parties as bribeing [sic] their Electors’, found fault with the apparent moral:

In the two Parties, it seems of Court and Countrey [sic], the Elected and the Electors are both equally corrupt, the one bribing and the other bribed; and therefore it is foolish and ridiculous, for a person out of love to his country, to ingage himself in any dispute about the Election of Members of Parliament. An admirable moral!

Although this is not out of line with the stance taken by the Grub-Street Journal on Fielding's entire output from his return to Drury Lane in 1732 onwards, as an interpretation of the ‘moral’ of ‘The Election’ it seems strained. True, Pasquin does insinuate that bribery and corruption is widespread, and a newspaper advertisement announced the author's intention to ‘lay about him with great Impartiality’.