Although we usually think of Henry Fielding as a novelist, he was a prolific and innovative playwright who published twenty-one plays before his first novel, Joseph Andrews (1742). His plays capture the excitement, creativity, and upheaval of the London theatrical world of the 1730s, and they range from conventional types to outrageous experiments. The theater was Fielding's choice of occupation; he worked at it seriously and diligently. He had successful plays at the Theatres Royal in Drury Lane and Covent Garden, and he made the Little Theatre in the Hay-Market famous. He invented several new forms of drama, and in 1737, the year of his highly successful Historical Register For the Year 1736 and the year after his Pasquin ran sixty nights, managers and the public expected him to continue to produce hits and to dominate the profession for another twenty-five years. Fielding's plans to build a theater for a company...