The novel is a sustained parody of, and direct response to, the stylistic failings and moral hypocrisy that Fielding saw in Richardson's Pamela. Reading Shamela amounts to re-reading Pamela through a deforming magnifying glass; Richardson's text is rewritten in a way that reveals its hidden implications, to subvert and desecrate it.[3][4]
Richardson's epistolary tale of a resolute servant girl, armed only with her 'virtue' to battle against her master's attempts at seduction, had become an overnight literary sensation in 1741. The implicit moral message – that a girl's chastity has eventual value as a commodity – as well as the awkwardness of the epistolary form in dealing with ongoing events, and the triviality of the detail which the form necessitates, were some of the main targets of Fielding's travesty.
Recent criticism has explored the ways in which Pamela in fact dramatises its own weaknesses. From this perspective, Fielding's work may be seen as a development of possibilities already encoded in Richardson's work, rather than a simple attack.[5] Another novel by Fielding parodying Pamela, albeit not so explicitly, is The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend, Mr. Abraham Adams (February 1742), more commonly known as Joseph Andrews.
Also, as the title and paratexts make clear, Shamela is also a spoof against Colley Cibber's Apology (An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, Comedian), published the same year, as well as a dig at Conyers Middleton, whose Life of Cicero, written at the request of John Hervey, 2nd Baron Hervey, was perceived by opposition authors as a panegyric of sorts for the controversial administration of Robert Walpole.[6]
Some critics have pointed out that the popularity of Richardson's Pamela and Cibber's Apology alerted Fielding to the possibilities of prose fiction for influencing the taste and morals of his contemporaries. Shamela, then, went far beyond satirizing Richardson and his supporters, for it allowed Fielding to rework, now in novelistic format, the topics that fascinated him as a satirical playwright, before the Licensing Act drove him away from drama.[7]
