The Duality of Heroic Identity in Fielding ’ s Tom

This paper examines Henry Fielding’s 1730 burlesque afterpiece Tom Thumb as a dual narrative performance which seeks to satirise the heroic tragedies of the 1710s and ‘20s while simultaneously presenting itself as a serious contribution to the same genre. The piece thus speaks to two audiences: an imagined audience who accept Tom Thumb as a genuine tragic hero, as well as a real audience who recognise the clichés of heroic tragedy and are consequently able to laugh at both the performance and the imagined audience. As such, I will look at the regularity of plot in Tom Thumb in spite of its absurd logic, overblown dialogue, and the counter-casting of a female child as an adult male hero. I will then consider how Tom Thumb both subverts and contributes to expectations of heroic appearance and behaviour, looking at his conduct when fighting, as well as discussing how the other characters view him. During the 1710s and ‘20s, the genre of heroic tragedy experienced a great revival on the stage. Shakespearean drama and the most popular tragedies of the Restoration vied with more recent works, such as Cato and Jane Shore, to appear in the London theatres. Although the locations of these plays were frequently separated by time and distance – ranging from classical Greece and the Roman republic (The Rival Queens, Tamerlane, and Cato) to late medieval Britain (Jane Shore and Richard III) and occasionally further afield, to India and the Americas (Aurengzebe and Oroonoko) – there were sets of values common to most of them. The importance of patriotic duty and public spiritedness was one of these (Kelsall 158). For example, Cato’s ‘What pity is it / That we can die but once to serve our country!’ (Addison IV:IV 80-2) is comparable with the bodily sacrifice of Jane Shore and Hastings, the latter of whom ‘die[s] with pleasure for my country’s good’ (Rowe III:I 262). Furthermore, popular tragic heroes rarely faced any real moral contradiction: their enemies were corrupt and self-interested The Duality of Heroic Identity in Fielding’s Tom Thumb Platform, Vol. 6, No. 2, Representing the Human, Summer 2012 62 while their supporters – Juba in Cato, Belmour and Dumont in Jane Shore – agreed with them almost fanatically. Inevitably, such a prevailing and influential genre garnered a parodic response, but in spite of numerous attempts to replicate the success of Buckingham’s The Rehearsal, the first real victory was Fielding’s Tom Thumb, a short burlesque written as an afterpiece to The Author’s Farce in 1730. Incredibly popular at the time – playing for thirty-three nights during its first run (Rivero 54) – this is a play that deserves discussion as an example of how serious and farcical examples of the same genre coexist. Set in the court of King Arthur, Tom Thumb mimics the basic plot structure and dramatic blank verse of heroic tragedies. Much of the play is made up of a patchwork of dialogue taken from authors ranging widely from Dryden to Gay (Morrissey 4). The title character is represented as a celebrated warrior who wins the hand of the princess following his triumph in battle. However, a jealous enemy, Lord Grizzle, plots against him. Although his schemes come to nothing, Thumb is swallowed by a cow, is revived as a ghost, and is finally killed again by Grizzle. The final scene sees a mass slaughter as each character in the play is killed by another before, finally, King Arthur kills himself. The burlesquing of the heroic genre lies in both the lowness of the subject matter and the deployment of Tom Thumb’s physical form; a female child was usually cast in the role, in the case of the initial run, a Miss Jones (Highfill Jr., Burnim, and Langhams 226-7). Here, Fielding ‘uses ridicule of a character’s compromised masculinity to associate that character with the compromising of traditional political, cultural, or social standards’ (Campbell 59). Campbell’s discussion of Tom Thumb is chiefly within the context of feminine intrusion upon conventional masculine roles, particularly on the subject of contemporary claims that Queen Caroline was attempting to rule England through George II. We can see that Queen Dollalolla’s special preferment of Tom Thumb mimics Queen Caroline’s perceived preferment of Walpole (Campbell 58; Morrissey 4). By using a deliberately unheroic hero in the place of the muscular warrior, Tom Thumb can be read as an attempt to draw attention to the absurdities of heroic tragedy, thus extending our understanding of compromised masculinity. Tom Thumb was a standard chapbook character who was