 To Albert Rivero, ten of the plays "mark significant moments in [Fielding's] theatrical life": Love in Several Masques, The Temple Beau, The Author's Farce, Tom Thumb, The Tragedy of Tragedies, Rape upon Rape, The Grub Street Opera, The Modern Husband, Pasquin, and The Historical Register. Similarly, Potter organised the plays by a general theme of developing libertine characters and believed that "Fielding's most successful group of plays followed Love in Several Masques both chronologically and thematically. 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."
