to rent a theatre may perhaps be accepted as proof that his profuse hospitalities had not completely exhausted his means.
The moment was a favourable one for a fresh theatrical experiment. The stage-world was split up into factions, the players were disorganised, and everything seemed in confusion. Whether Fielding himself conceived the idea of making capital out of this state of things, or whether it was suggested to him by some of the company who had acted Don Quixote in England, it is impossible to say. In the first months of 1736, however, he took the little French Theatre in the Haymarket, and opened it with a company which he christened the “Great Mogul’s Company of Comedians,” who were further described as “having dropped from the Clouds.” The “Great Mogul” was a name sometimes given by playwrights to the elder Cibber; but there is no reason for supposing that any allusion to him was intended on this occasion. The company, with the exception of Macklin, who was playing at Drury Lane, consisted chiefly of the actors in Don Quixote in England; and the first piece was entitled Pasquin: a Dramatick Satire on the Times: being the Rehearsal of Two Plays, viz. a Comedy call’d the Election, and a Tragedy call’d the Life and Death of Common-Sense. The form of this work, which belongs to the same class as Sheridan’s Critic and Buckingham’s Rehearsal, was probably determined by Fielding’s past experience of the public taste. His latest comedy had failed, and its predecessors had not been very successful. But his burlesques had met with a better reception, while the election episodes in Don Quixote had seemed to disclose a fresh field for the satire of contemporary
