Author's Farce

Before Henry Fielding became the author of Tom Jones, he was a struggling playwright who couldn't get his works published. So he did what any exasperated writer would do: he wrote a farce about exactly that problem and finally found success. Author's Farce is a deliciously meta theatrical romp that satirizes the desperate, scheming world of 18th-century Grub Street, where authors pawn their watches, grovel to booksellers, and claw their way toward notoriety. The play spirals into a play-within-a-play called "The Pleasures of the Town," performed by puppets (played by actors, which is exactly as bizarre and brilliant as it sounds), layering absurdity upon absurdity until you can't tell where the satire ends and the sheer joy of performance begins. Fielding skewers the vanity, greed, and precarious ambition of writers and theater people with a gleeful cruelty that only someone who's lived it could muster. It's the literary equivalent of laughing at your own heartbreak, and somehow that makes it funnier.