The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731)

“Featuring an excellent introduction, extensive notes and a generous sampling of contextual materials, this splendid new classroom edition of Henry Fielding’s The Tragedy of Tragedies makes one of the most popular plays of the eighteenth century come alive for today’s students. It will be useful to teachers of eighteenth-century British literature as well as of drama or theatre surveys.” — Albert J. Rivero, Marquette University

“Fielding’s Tragedy of Tragedies provides a master comedian’s compact compendium of the heterogeneous sources of laughter and comic insight: farcical action and burlesque situations; literary parody; satire of bombast and pedantry; physical and verbal incongruities (a miniature hero and giant queen, diction that regularly plummets from lofty to low); mind-bending philosophical puzzles (a ghost threatened with death by sword); temporal inversions (footnotes asserting that lines from earlier plays have been cribbed from this one); reductions of poetic form (“Oh, Huncamunca, Huncamunca, oh”); and the bathos of compression and acceleration (seven stabbing deaths within ten lines at the play’s close).

The Broadview edition makes the play’s full array of comic techniques readily accessible to any reader: effectively edited and cleverly formatted as a facing-page edition, with Fielding’s mock-scholarly footnotes filling right-hand pages, the edition would serve equally well as the basis for uproariously funny stage productions and for study as a revealing print artifact from the Augustan Age. I recommend this edition as required reading for courses on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, The Age of Swift and Pope, theater history, eighteenth-century literature, book history, and literary theory—and as pleasure reading for anyone interested in drama, the novel, or a good laugh. ” — Jill Campbell, Yale University

Contributing Editor Darryl Domingo is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Memphis.