Henry Fielding: Eurydice Hissed or a Word to the Wise

This one-act farce opened at Fielding’s “Little Theatre” in the Haymarket on 13 April 1737, as an afterpiece to Fielding’s The Historical Register for 1736, just as the passage through the legislature of the Stage Licensing Act that would close Fielding’s theatre in June and exile him from the stage neared completion. Like the play it accompanied, it employs the “rehearsal format” in imitation of The Rehearsal (1671), the much admired masterwork of the Duke of Buckingham. This format here gets a very original and comically self-mocking twist in that what is rehearsed on the “Haymarket” stage by the Haymarket ac