The Tragedy of Tragedies, or Tom Thumb the Great (1731)--Henry Fielding

The Tragedy of Tragedies, or Tom Thumb the Great (1731)-Henry Fielding

Before going on to write Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, among other novels, Henry Fielding wrote twenty-six plays before the age of thirty. I believe he may also have been a lawyer for a while. One suspects he demonstrated a similarly indefatigable and agreeable energy with the ladies as well. While it is hard to say that he is forgotten or undervalued as a writer, he seems not to have much of a presence in the contemporary literary-oriented imagination as someone people really like or consider to be one of the foremost models of all time of a good English style. The structure and pacing of the plot of Tom Jones are always given their dutiful praise in textbooks and critical histories, but it is one of those cases where it is so unique, so impressive and on such a large scale, that is actually impossible to understand how good it is unless you have read it, because there is not really another novel like it. A close semi-recent example would be something like One Hundred Years of Solitude (a book I wanted to dislike because the kinds of people who affect to love and relate to it tend to annoy me, but it is really very good). Thomas Pynchon is famous for this kind of madcap and convoluted plotting too but it is so encumbered with brainy matter as to be not so nimble in its flow and twists of narrative as these other books. It is bizarre that in creative writing schools, if we are going to have them, people like Raymond Carver and Grace Paley, along with many other modern short story authors, are studied and celebrated and emulated to the almost total exclusion of the likes of Henry Fielding, one of the great treasures of all English literature, and a staple of every competent writer in our language`s education for two centuries. Tom Thumb is my first encounter with a Fielding play. It is a very short satire on the absurdities and manglings of the language in the dramatic writing of the day, including dozens of footnotes with humorous commentary on ridiculous lines that were in some instances lifted entire from other contemporary works. I am surprised that it is not put on more, by amateur and school groups especially. Besides being extremely short and brisk it contains much humor, mostly of the absurd variety, which would be easily understood by middlebrow or unpractised theater audiences, and my impression is that it would be an excellent play for people who are not really good actors, nor have any talent for or pretensions towards becoming such, to put on in a still entertaining manner. While it is a minor work, it is the minor work of a decidedly gifted, and probably great author. Authors of this obviously rare type are less dependent on their subject matter and the cohesiveness and sense of their plots to be interesting than ordinary writers; they in fact bestow interest on subjects and stories by their manner of writing about them. When they do harness their talent for a major work and see it through, achievements of a very high order are in their grasp; though very few even of this already small group of authors manage to accomplish this.

 

Some favorite quotes from the play, most of which involve cruel jokes at the expense of dwarves, or lechery, two weak points in my cloak of mature propriety.

One of the Princess Huncamunca`s maids, Mustacha, on the absurdity on the princess` being in love with Tom Thumb (who has just defeated an army of giants in pitched battle):

`Tom Thumb the Great--one properer for a plaything than a husband. Were he my husband, his horns should be as long as his body.`

This one is actually from Nathaniel Lee`s Gloriana, a source of many ludicrous and hilarious verses which were referenced by Fielding in this play:

`Jove, with excessive thund`ring tir`d above/Comes down for ease, enjoys a nymph and then/Mounts dreadful, and to thund`ring goes again.`

Thumb`s rival, the courtier Grizzle, on Huncamunca`s breasts:

`Thy pouting breasts, like kettle-drums of brass/Beat everlasting loud alarms of joy/As bright as brass they are, and oh, as hard/`

Grizzle ridiculing Thumb:

`And can my princess such a durgen wed/One fitter for your pocket than your bed!`

He soon returns to his favorite subject however:

`One globe alone on Atlas` shoulders rests/Two globes are less than Huncamunca`s breasts/The milky way is not so white, that`s flat/And sure thy breasts are full as large as that.`

After dispatching of Grizzle, Thumb speculates on his enemy`s future prospects:

`With those last words he vomited his soul/Which, like whipt cream, the devil will swallow down.`

The last page of the play features six murders and a suicide, which Fielding boasts in a footnote beats the previous record of five corpses lying on the stage when the curtain falls, set in the play Cleomenes, which I believe is by Dryden.

In the entertainment world, there seems to be no more surefire way to popularity and a comfortable income than the introduction of a live midget to whatever one is doing. The audience falls for it every time. In recent memory alone we have witnessed the success of the Mini-me character in the Austin Powers movies, the minor cult that formed in honor of Fantasy Island sidekick Herve Villechez, the Webster television show (and star Emmanuel Lewis's briefly becoming part of Michael Jackson's entourage of freaks), perhaps Gary Coleman (my wife informs me however that he is not properly a dwarf). The career, or whatever it is, of the repulsive music industry figure Kid Rock was going nowhere until he incorporated a leprechaun alter ego into his act. The surviving actors who played Munchkins in the Wizard of Oz film, which came out in 1939, are still in demand and getting paid hard cash for personal appearances. The flamboyant boxer Sugar Ray Robinson back in the 50s kept a French dwarf in his entourage who was supposed to be his translator, though I am certain the keeping of translators was fairly uncommon among American fighters of that period. Before World War II hunchbacks seem to have been in competition with and frequently preferred over dwarves for these positions, but this condition has apparently become so rare in our time to have become grotesque and disturbing rather than riotous to modern audiences, as dwarves remain.