Lanterna Rally

Author: Henry Fielding

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2015-06-15

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 9781330309834

Excerpt from The Tragedy of Tragedies or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great: With the Annotations of H. Scriblerus Secundus The Tragedy of Tragedies is interesting first of all because it is inspired with the vitality of Fielding's genius, even though that genius had not, at the age of twenty-three and four, broadened and expanded into the maturity and freedom which ten and fifteen years later produced the great novels. The little play has, however, other sources of interest; its long and interesting stage history, and its thoroughgoing burlesque of the heroic play. The business of this present study is the development of these two points. The circumstances under which Fielding wrote, the development from the slight Tom Thumb of 1730 into The Tragedy of Tragedies of 1731, the anonymous interpolation called The Battle of the Poets, and the stage history of the play itself and of its adaptations, occupy the first two chapters of the introduction and the appendices. The nature and the period of the plays burlesqued, and the method with which Fielding worked out a comprehensive burlesque of the heroic play are developed in the third chapter; and the conclusions here drawn are supplemented and enforced in the notes, in which Fielding's allusions and references are checked, and the correspondence between The Tragedy of Tragedies and the plays it assails is established as far as possible by further quotation. Probably the most interesting point in relation to the texts is the development of the version of 1730 into that of 1731. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.