Dialectical irony in the plays of Henry Fielding

Critical studies of Fielding's plays generally rely on the assumption that Fielding exploited both satirical and sentimental models because he aspired to join the literary establishment represented by Pope and Swift but also wished to capitalize on the successes of sentimental writers such as Cibber and Steele. This assumption may be misleading. Fielding's plays, unpublished poetry, and journalism of the late 1720s and the 1730s indicate that Fielding increasingly rejected the reductive visions implied by Scriblerian satire and contemporary sentimentalism. My rereading of the plays leads to a concluding reconsideration of the satiric aims frequently claimed for Fielding's more familiar productions, the novels.;The conventional outline of Fielding's dramatic career traces a movement from early, unsuccessful attempts to imitate Restoration comedy toward more innovative, irregular productions that signal Fielding's allegiance to the satiric project of the Scriblerians. Elements of eighteenth-century feminism, elements of sentimentalism, and especially Fielding's juxtaposition of satiric and sentimental cliches in his plays call into question that conventional view. Examination of these features suggests that Fielding was moving from initial attempts to conflate satiric and sentimental models toward a rejection of both literary visions, a rejection expressed in the later plays' unresolved, ironic dialectics of perspectives.;The self-reflexiveness of the plays Fielding wrote in the final two years of his dramatic career, 1736-1737, and of his novels indicates that Fielding arrived at an alternative to Augustan aesthetics, satiric as well as sentimental. His alternative was an ironic, nonfundamentalist aesthetic mirroring his Latitudinarian moral outlook: he refused to privilege any particular aesthetic, even his own, and he refused to privilege the production of literary works over other human activities.