Spoiler alert: in Henry Fielding’s play Tom Thumb, the hero is swallowed by a cow ‘of larger than the usual size’. Before this tragic end comes a scene between Princess Huncamunca and Lord Grizzle, who declares: ‘Oh, Huncamunca, Huncamunca, oh! / Thy pouting Breasts, like Kettle-Drums of Brass, / Beat everlasting loud Alarms of Joy.’ At this the Haymarket Theatre roared, for Fielding was parodying a line widely mocked two months earlier, in February 1730, during the ten-day run of the tragedy Sophonisba by James Thomson, where Masinissa (King of Numidia) exclaims: ‘Oh! Sophonisba, Sophonisba, oh!’ It might not sound worth mocking now, but in 1730 theatre-goers, had to bear quite a lot of cod classicism.
Sophonisba was on my mind because Gian Giorgio Trissino, the Renaissance dramatist who first made a tragedy of her life, was particularly proud of his long poem L’Italia Liberata, and I have just stumbled across a splendidly laconic dismissal of it in the Monthly Review, 250 years after its composition, as ‘a tedious epopea, of which Belisarius is the hero’.
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