From " A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians . . . Contrasted with Real Christianity " ( 1797 ) : " For Wilberforce the theater is a place haunted by debauchees bent on gratifying their appetites, from which modesty and regularity have retreated,'while riots and lewdness'are invited to the spot'where God's name is profaned, and the only lessons to be learned are those Christians should shun like the pains of hell ."
32.
Comedies and burlesques such as " The Author's Farce ", " The Tragedy of Tragedies ", " The Old Debauchees ", and " Pasquin " made Fielding the most popular playwright of the 1730s, and all of these plays contain characters, situations, and dialogues that invoke libertine philosophy in some way, thought they vary in the explicitness of the depiction . " In his biography of Fielding, Pagliaro declares that " Between 1727 and 1737, by which time he was only 30 years old, Fielding became England's most successful living playwright ."
