AN APOLOGY FOR THE LIFE OF MRS. SHAMELA ANDREWS (86 pp.) — Henry Fielding — University of California ($2.75).
When Samuel Richardson wrote the first modern English novel, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, a 1740 tearjerker about an innocent serving maid and her lecherous master, most of London enjoyed a good cry. But the plight of Pamela Andrews, often fighting with her back to the bedroom wall, seems to have given Richardson's friend and fellow-novelist, Henry Fielding (Tom Jones), a hearty laugh instead, or at least the idea for a bawdy satire. Within six months, he pseudonymously penned An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, a short but exact parody* written, like Pamela, in the form of letters. In it, he turned a drily realistic eye on Pamela's character and behavior. In Fielding's view, Richardson's Pamela was a sham, not so much the valiant defender of her virtue as its coy auctioneer, shrewdly holding out for the highest bid. Fielding's Shamela is an honest doxie who blats about her "Vartue" from time to time, but belongs essentially to the long line of fiction's profiteering amorists reaching to Scarlett O'Hara and Amber.
Low in four-letter words, Shamela nonetheless runs high in four-letter situations. Locked away for decades in the rare-books collections of university libraries and sometimes contested as to authorship, it has been newly edited and annotated by a University of Michigan English professor, Sheridan W. Baker Jr., and is now available to any reader who can stomach a well-hung bit of 18th century game.
When Shamela opens, Sham, unlike Pam, is not running from but gunning for the young squire, son of her late mistress, and writing her mother progress reports: " 'Laud,' says I, 'Sir, I hope you don't intend to be rude'; 'no,' says he, 'my Dear,' and then he kissed me, 'till he took away my Breath—and I pretended to be Angry, and to get away, and then he kissed me again, and breathed very short, and looked very silly; and by Ill-Luck Mrs. Jervis came in, and had like to have spoiled Sport."
Her mother, who sells oranges at the Drury Lane Theater, is not entirely pleased. "Why will you give such way to your Passion?" she chides. "When I advised you not to be guilty of Folly, I meant no more than that you should take care to be well paid beforehand, and not trust to Promises, which a man seldom keeps, after he hath had his wicked Will. And seeing you have a rich Fool to deal with, your not making a good Market will be the more inexcusable."
Taking mamma's advice to heart, Shamela is soon playing the untouchable so prettily that she sends the squire's temper as well as his temperature up, and he goes around raging, "Hussy, Slut, Saucebox, Boldface—come hither!" Shamela takes to her bedroom instead, but carefully leaves the door unlatched (Pamela always locked hers). When Pamela's door was forced, she would faint dead away, but when the squire comes "pit a pat into [Shamela's] Room in his Shirt," Sham flashes some impromptu but effective jujitsu.