JOSEPH ANDREWS

By Henry Fielding

Adapted by P.M.Clepper

Performed at Mottisfont Abbey on 21st to 31st July, 1993

HENRY FIELDING was born in 1707, at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury. He was educated privately at first and then at Eton. In 1725 he attempted to abduct an heiress and was bound over to keep the peace. He then went to London, where, in 1728, he published a satirical poem, The Masquerade, and a comedy, Love in Several Masques. From 1728 to 1729 he was a student of literature at Leyden University, returning to London in the autumn of the latter year. Between then and 1737 he wrote some twenty-five dramatic pieces including comedies, adaptations of Molière, farces, ballad operas, burlesques, and a series of topical satires, such as Pasquin and The Historical Register, which lampooned Sir Robert Walpole and his government. It was partly because of this last play that Walpole introduced the Stage Licensing Act in 1737, which effectively ended Fielding’s career as a dramatist. After this he embarked on a career in the law and was called to the Bar in 1740, but he had little success as a barrister. In 1734 he married Charlotte Cradock, the model for Sophie Western and also for the heroine of his last novel,  Amelia (1751).

His novel-writing career began with Shamela in 1741, a burlesque written in reaction to what he saw as the smug morality propounded by Richardson’s Pamela. In the following year he published his own alternative conception of the art and purpose of the novel, Joseph Andrews, which achieved immediate popularity. His masterpiece Tom Jones, one of the great comic novels in English literature, was published in 1749. The Miscellanies (including Jonathan Wild) were published in 1743. After Walpole’s fall he wrote pro-government journalism, and he produced two weekly anti-Jacobite papers, The True Patriot (1745-6) and The Jacobite’s Journal (1747-8). Later he ran The Covent Garden Journal which contains some of his best satire.

In 1748 Fielding was commissioned as a justice of the Peace for Westminster and in the following year became Chairman of the Quarter Sessions of Westminster. He and his brother, John Fielding, were prominent in developing the police force, and between 1749 and 1752 Fielding wrote a good deal on urgent legal and social problems. For many years he had suffered from gout and in April 1754 ill-health forced him to resign his post and he left for Lisbon. He died on 8 October 1754.

CAST in order of appearance

With

         Clare Minns                  Lilli Picincu                               Derek Sealy

         Sean McCann               Davie McKee                           David Jupp