Samia AL-Shayban
Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts, King Saud University. ORCID ID: 0000-0003-3229-0834. Email: samia700@hotmail.com
Volume 12, Number 2, April-June, 2020 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n2.05
Abstract
Ideologically, Fielding’s Author’s Farce is read as an attack on Sir Robert Walpole and his corrupt government. Dramatically, it is perceived as a play with two separate plots, a factor that denies it any literary merits. This paper attempt to read Fielding’s play as a disguised multifaceted attack against King George II of England who is accused of deliberately corrupting London’ s literary scene to secure the Hanoverian hegemony. Fielding achieves his design through complex dramatization of the Realms of the dead and living. At the center of both realism stand George II who is metaphorically presented by the poor poet Luckless who resides in the land of the living and Nonsense the underworld goddess. The comparison between George Augustus who later became Prince of Wales and crowned as George II is based on detailed biographical and ideological similarities. The biographical and ideological affinities lead to the conclusion that King George II is the originator and protector of literary corruption. To strengthen the attack against the king, the court of Goddess Nonsense which appeared in Luckless’ play that depicts the land of the dead is connected to George II’s court through the prominent presence of opera and ignorance. Thus, Fielding’s literary dramatization is used as a medium to expose the role of the King in devaluing the English literary scene and turns it into a circus that makes the public ignorant with no literary taste and resigns authors to poverty. The scene is the result a deliberate tactics designed to disempower authors and public as a way to spread the Hanoverian hegemony and silence criticism of the corrupt political system.
Keywords: Patriarchy, Margin, Center, George II, Power, Hobbes, Machiavelli.