Aw'd: Fielding writes that the Tragic Muse has awed the British stage for far too long. Why does he use the word "aw'd"? Again, the tone of this statement is slightly double--ironic, yet also sympathetic. Remember that Aristotle, in De Poetica, writes that tragedy "effect[s] the proper purgation" of the emotions of pity and fear "through pity and fear" (from Aristotle's De Poetica, translated by S. H. Butcher, chapter VI). For Samuel Johnson, poet and lexicographer of the eighteenth-century, to awe means "[t]o strike with reverence, or fear; to keep in subjection" (from A Dictionary of the English Language). Fielding seems to be playing on these uses of "fear"; fear is something that can "keep [one] in subjection" or cathartically purge one of such debilitating emotions. By many contemporary accounts, tragedy was a dramatic form that seemed alien to the eighteenth-century stage, though it was also held up and reverenced as that which had been lost. Many critics of eighteenth-centiry theater disparaged playwrights and audiences alike for flocking to the banner of the ridiculous and the farcical; such critics urged playwrights, theater managers, and audiences to shun such low, vulgar entertainment and return to Tragedy. Thus, the image of Tragedy has been built up, put on an aesthetic pedestal and idealized; it no longer exerts a "real" effect, but rather a symbolic one. The word "awe" also has a very dramatic, spectacular connotation--it seems overblown, somehow, like the bellowing "Heroick Actor" of lines 11-14. Later in this prologue, we will get Fielding's opinion on the overblown, the spectacular, and the excessive aspects of British tragedy. The image of tragedy represented by the Tragick Muse has long subjected her followers through fear, almost in a tyrannical way. At the same time, however, Fielding's use of the word "aw'd" is intensely ironic; in The Author's Farce, as we will read, the Poet Luckless tries and tries to loose serious plays upon the town, but the theater managers, actors, critics, and publishers of the day refuse to support such "trash." Finally, in order to make ends meet, he is forced to rewrite his serious play into a puppet-show, to which people flock simply because it is a puppet-show (no matter that Luckless lambastes the very tastes that will make his show a success). Thus, Fielding is also implying that Tragedy has not ruled the stage long enough; it is either tossed aside or bastardized by crass unthinking sentimentality ("ev'ry Lady cries"), bellowing "Heroick Actors," and spectacle ("ghosts, rapes and murders," "thunder" and sound). Even the critics are no longer paying attention; they sleep through performances they arbitrarily praise or condemn.