Sparkish given in the first edition, were presumably intended for Cibber and Wilks, with whom, notwithstanding the “civil and kind Behaviour” for which he had thanked them in the “Preface” to Love in Several Masques, the young dramatist was now, it seems, at war. In the introduction to the Miscellanies, he refers to “a slight Pique” with Wilks; and it is not impossible that the key to the difference may be found in the following passage:—
“Sparkish. What dost think of the Play?
Marplay. It may be a very good one, for ought I know; but I know the Author has no Interest.
Spark. Give me Interest, and rat the Play.
Mar. Rather rat the Play which has no Interest. Interest sways as much in the Theatre as at Court.—And you know it is not always the Companion of Merit in either.”
The handsome student from Leyden—the potential Congreve who wrote Love in Several Masques, and had Lady Mary Wortley Montagu for patroness, might fairly be supposed to have expectations which warranted the civilities of Messrs. Wilks and Cibber; but the “Luckless” of two years later had probably convinced them that his dramatic performances did not involve their sine qua non of success. Under these circumstances nothing perhaps could be more natural than that they should play their parts in his little satire.
We have dwelt at some length upon the Author’s Farce, because it is the first of Fielding’s plays in which, leaving the “wit-traps” of Wycherley and Congreve, he deals with the direct censure of contemporary folly, and because, apart from translation and adaptation, it is in this field that his most brilliant theatrical successes were
