Henry Fielding was one of the most interesting playwrights of his time because of his historical position, similar to that of George Bernard Shaw, and his awareness of what it meant to be a playwright at a time when the native dramatic tradition appeared to have settled down for a long sleep and when the only hope for an awakening lay in such low crowd-pleasers as farces, puppet shows, "laughing" tragedies, and ballad operas. By focusing on the plays themselves, Rivero tells the story of Fielding's dramatic career without burdening the reader with an exhaustive history of contemporary plays and playwrights. He provides us with a clear, critical account of Fielding's dramatic career in terms of trends in contemporary dramatic affairs that help to account for his artistic choices in individual plays.

Henry Fielding is most well-known for his monumental novel Tom Jones. Though not necessarily common knowledge, Henry Fielding started his literary career as a dramatist and eventually transitioned to writing novels. Though vastly different in their approach and subject, there is a common thread in Fielding’s work that spanned his career: marriage. Errors and Reconciliations: Marriage in the Plays and Novels of Henry Fielding explores this theme, focusing on Fielding’s fascination with matrimony and the ever-present paradoxical nature of marriage in the first half of the eighteenth-century, as a state easily attained but nearly impossible to escape.

"The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen traces the novel's relation to the theater over the course of the long eighteenth century, arguing that the familiar account of the novel as 'new' and distinct from other literary genres risks distorting a true reckoning of the form by failing to engage with the borrowings and departures from other more familiar genres, particularly drama. The Novel Stage traces the migration of tragicomedy, the comedy of manners, and melodrama from the stage to the novel. These genres were shared across print and performance, media that were not construed as opposites in a world in which individual silent reading took place beside playgoing, play-reading, amateur theatricals, and sociable reading aloud. The book thus expands an overly narrow conception of the novel as the genre of realism or domesticity whose highest achievement is its representation of characters' mental lives by describing the influence of the stage and its genres. Beginning in the later 1600s with Aphra Behn, The Novel Stage concludes with a chapter on some novelists of the Romantic period and a coda about Victorian novels. The Novel Stage's account of the novel provides an enriched, because more specific, sense of its formal accomplishments that drew on this ensemble of cultural forms and turns that lens back onto drama"--Provided by publisher.