SOURCE: Amory, Hugh. “Shamela as Aesopic Satire.” ELH 38, no. 2 (June 1971): 239-53.

In the following essay, Amory claims that Shamela satirizes Cibber's Apology, Middleton's Life of Cicero, and Richardson's Pamela, which Fielding thinks are testaments to the social and political corruption of the age.

Who wrote Shamela? and who did Fielding suppose wrote Pamela? On these questions there is a surprisingly large literature, but until an article by Eric Rothstein in 1968, there had been little speculation on the aesthetic function of the mystery in which Fielding enveloped both subjects.¹ For the question, as Fielding poses it, involves more than a scholarly determination of the identity behind the pen; questions of responsibility are also involved. As Parson Tickletext ingenuously expresses it, “now I think of it, who is the author, where is he, what is he, that hath hitherto been able to hide such an encircling, all-mastering spirit?” (305).² If, as...