issa_ and Greek tragedy are directed mainly to illuminating the
tragic rather than the specifically dramatic qualities of the novel. But
it is clear that he regarded his work as being closer in every way to
the drama than to the epic.

The basic distinction between drama and epic (or any other form of
narrative) had been drawn by Aristotle:

The poet, imitating the same object ... may do it either in
narration--and that, again, either by personating other characters,
as Homer does, or in his own person throughout ... --or he may
imitate by representing all his characters as real, and employed in
the action itself.[23]

Le Bossu, in his _Treatise of the Epick Poem_, gives his own restatement
of this, and amplifies it by pointing to the particular virtues of the
drama: by presenting characters directly to the spectators drama 'has no
parts exempt from the Action,' and is thus 'entire and perfect'.
Fielding was familiar with the _Treatise_, and it is possible that
Richardson had also looked at Le Bossu to prepare himself for dealing
with the epic theory of his rival.[24]

There were also precedents for placing the novel in the dramatic rather
than the epic tradition. Congreve, when he wrote _Incognita_ (1692),
took the drama as his model. 'Since all Traditions must indisputably
give place to the _Drama_,' he wrote in the Preface, 'and since there is
no possibility of giving that life to the Writing or Repetition of a
Story which it has in the Action, I resolved ... to imitate _Dramatick_
Writing ... in the Design, Contexture, and Result of the Plot. I have
not observed it before in a Novel.'[25] The analogy with drama had also
been drawn by Henry Gally in his _Critical Essay on
Characteristic-Writings_ (1725), who, after maintaining that 'the
essential Parts of the Characters, in the _Drama_, and in
_Characteristic-Writings_ are the same,' goes on to praise the _Tatler_
and the _Spectator_ for the 'excellent Specimens in the
Characteristic-Way' that they offered their readers.[26] Such
acknowledgments of the dramatic potentialities in prose fiction were,
however, unusual. The romances were modelled on the epic (Fielding, in
fact, describes _Joseph Andrews_ in his Preface as a 'comic Romance');
and the picaresque mode in which Smollett wrote had no obviously
dramatic qualities. Richardson's advocacy of the novel in which action
is presented rather than retailed seems, indeed, curiously modern: i