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Historical Register for
the Year 1736
-Henry Fielding-
Satire and Burlesque
The Play's the Thing Wherein I'll Catch the Conscience of An Audience: a Look at Fielding's Satire in the Eighteenth Century
Written by Maureen Egan
Satire
is a favorite way of demanding reform without being directly offensive.
It is making a point with sharp wit and a blunted sword tip. It is
having a foolish man call a king tedious but allowing such a blunder
because of his character on stage.
Satire through the ages has been (more often than not)
sophisticated and well-executed. Eighteenth century satire takes its
cues from Old Comedy.
This classical comedic form has rigid, complicated parameters. In
modern plays when two characters interact (more specifically, when two
characters argue) that interaction is hand-to-hand or word-on-word. In
Old Comedy, the disagreements are accompanied by a chorus. There is
also a broad difference in structure: in the place of what is now
considered standard plot development, Old Comedy has a single
outrageous situation with swift exposition and subsequent scenes that
are loosely sewn together for the purpose of taking advantage of the
situation (Hartnoll 606). Old Comedy took icons of the era and put them
on stage to be laughed at through "a unique mixture of fantasy,
criticism, wit, burlesque, obscenity [and] parody..." (607).
Satiric writing in the eighteenth century, like that of
Old Comedy, had a specific purpose and form: "The tragic dramatist
found uses for satiric conventions when he wished to expose reality
beneath appearances or motives behind actions" (Paulson 8). There is
much support of this idea in the scholarly community. W.R. Irwin writes
about Henry Fielding's chief means of exposing the reality of flawed
character, saying that Fielding "regularly uses two devices for
ridiculing folly masked as learning. The first is comic etymology...he
traces words to absurd sources..." (173). This type of satire alludes
to Shakespeare's aptitude for wordplay. By having a character misuse a
common word, the entire audience can be in on the joke. Comedic
etymology pokes fun at the man who thinks he knows all but who is, in
reality, suffocating in his own ego. The other recipients of Fielding's
scathing satiric jabs are critics. Like the fool who plumps his
vocabulary with words whose definitions he does not know, the critics
Fielding attacks comment on theater without knowing a stage from a
chicken coop. The ostentatious critic, therefore, in Fielding's satire
makes ridiculous assumptions with no knowledge or evidence on which to
base them (Irwin 173).
As playwrites were removed from their stages, satire moved
in a new direction. With early novels, the physical comedy of live
performance found a new home in the pages of books. Still remaining
true to Old Comedy, the juvenile attempts at satiric novels were
"founded on the ridiculous. The quality in human action derives from affectation,
of which the main sources are vanity and hypocrisy" (Irwin 180).
Affectation, by nature, is usually achieved through outward appearance,
thus the quality of vanity. Burlesque, on the the other hand, is the
result of "diction...or sentiment" (181). Ronald Paulson and W.R. Irwin
are in agreement on the overwhelming goal of satire; says Paulson, "If
one aim of satire is exposure, another is to convince, at least
momentarily, that its world is real and that the evil it shows really
does exist" (19). Irwin adds that "[t]he aim of comedy was
traditionally ridendo corrigere mores--the amendment of the
offender and, more important, the warning of the innocent by a kind of
catharsis of laughter" (181). He goes on to say that even though the
characters within a satire are not real, audiences identify with them
nonetheless and thus make them real by association (183). When a reader
can see a burlesqued character in print and find a living example in
life, the author has done his job. The main job of the characters
within satiric pieces is education. How deep the education permeates is
questionable, but "they teach by example the fundamental moral truths,
well known but always deeding reiteration...the revelation of
affectation is essentially a process of stripping away appearance to
show reality so that the incongruity between the two...will be
immediately apparent to [the beholder]" (184).
Satire can be successful only when the audience realizes
what they are watching is, in fact, satire. If an audience is unaware
that they are laughing at an actual figure in society the author might
as well produce his work in a foreign language. Charles A. Knight has
said, "The essential force of satiric plays...lies in the audience's
recognition that the play's real subject is not the action it imitates"
(27). Once it is generally accepted that the object of satire "lies
significantly outside of the text itself" (30) an audience can "take
[guilty] pleasure in the discomfort of the victim" (33).
One common bullseye of English satire in the eighteenth century was nationalism.
According to Knight, "Simple nationalistic satire stresses the
distinction of one's own country from others by exaggerating their
negative qualities (490). English satire harpooned most violently the
French and Dutch; the reasons for such attacks were mostly differences
in culture. "The French provided contrasting images of an effeminate
aristocracy and a deprived peasantry: dandified and foppish lords were
set against poor, ignorant, and hungry commoners, in rags and wooden
shoes" (495). Knight examines the example of William Hogarth's painting
The Gate of Calais, or O! the Roast Beef of Old England,
finding the nationalistic satire in the image. Knight concludes "The
picture is organized around the gate...ones sees a religious
procession...a hunk of British beef, in contrast to French soup" (496).
The gate and slab of beef are prominent in the painting, seen below.
Knight continues, "Around the beef are the stereotypical images of a
fat Friar and a starving soldier; at the left a painter, Hogarth
himself, sketches oblivious of the hand about to arrest him...arbitrary
French tyranny (496). Hogarth is slightly hard to make out against the
busy painting, but he can be spotted over the shoulder of the soldier
just to the left of the gate's mouth. "The central images are in turn
framed by a proscenium arch, before which huddle a ragged woman and a Scot who has fled to France..." (496).
Taken from http://www.library.yale.edu/Walpole/BAC/Gate_of_calais-Z.htm on 20 March 2006
A final note about satire includes farce,
the twin sister to satire. Paulson believes farce can be thought of as
"a general metaphor for contemporary life, and the analogy between
living and acting is a natural one in which to express a concern with
either fashion or hypocrisy, the attempt to mask as what one is not"
(85). He continues to comment that the "figure of the satiric observer
is materialized in a commentator...in the frame of action [sits] around
and watches[s] the farce being played" (91). This is seen in Fielding's
Historical Register during the auction scene. After common sense
has been offered for auction, the buyers remain silent. Medley comments
to Sourwit that "...as valuable as it is, nobody bids...you see...no
one speaks against this lot...because everyone thinks he has it" (2.2).
This fits in perfectly with Paulson's observation that one commentator
of the farce is the author of the very farce itself. Here, as
throughout the Register, Fielding is speaking through Medley.
The satire employed in the eighteenth century has never
lost steam in its popularity and many of the same arrows are pointed at
the same targets today. The remarks Fielding made about politics, for
example, fit comfortably into the society of modern times. W.R. Irwin,
I believe, makes a poignant observation regarding satire that cannot be
more eloquently said:
"The figures of dramatic burlesques are only a satirist's
dummies, stuffed personifications of the grasping book-seller, the
irascible critic, the rattling author, and the like. Unreal themselves,
they exist in an unreal world...the unnatural is...the essence of
burlesque" (183).
Works Cited
"Affectation." Oxford English Dictionary. 2006. 23 March 2006.
"Burlesque." Oxford English Dictionary. 2006. 23 March 2006.
Hartnoll, Phyllis, ed. Oxford Comapanion to Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. 119.
Irwin, W.R. "Satire and Comedy in the Works of Henry Fielding." ELH, 13.3 (Sept. 1946): 168-188. JSTOR. Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, Pomona, NJ. 28 Feb. 2006.
Knight, Charles A. "Satire, Speech, and Genre." Comparative Literature, 44.1 (Winter 1992): 22-41. JSTOR. Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, Pomona, NJ. 28 Feb. 2006
Knight, Charles A. "The Images of Nations in Eighteenth-Century Satire." Eighteenth-Century Studies, 22.4 (Summer 1989): 489-511. JSTOR. Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, Pomona, NJ.
28 Feb. 2006.
"Nationalism." Oxford English Dictionary. 2006. 23 March 2006.
Paulson, Ronald. Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth Century England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968.
"Proscenium." Oxford English Dictionary. 2006. 23 March 2006.
"Satire." Oxford English Dictionary. 2006. 23 March 2006.
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