Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017

Copyright © Paula Byrne 2002, 2017

Cover design by Heike Schüssler

Paula Byrne asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008225698

Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008225674

Version: 2018-06-06

Dedication

For Jonathan

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword to the New Edition

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

Part One: The Novelist and the Theatre

1 Private Theatricals

2 The Professional Theatre

3 Plays and Actors

Part Two: The Theatre and the Novels

4 Early Works

5 From Play to Novel

6 Sense and Sensibility

7 Pride and Prejudice

8 Lovers’ Vows

9 Mansfield Park

10 Emma

11 Why She Is a Hit in Hollywood

List of Illustrations

Picture Section

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Also by Paula Byrne

About the Author

About the Publisher

Foreword to the New Edition

Fifteen years ago, I published Jane Austen and the Theatre, a book whose central argument was that Austen’s comic genius was shaped by her love of theatre. Mansfield Park was the first Austen novel I read, and, like many readers, I was intrigued by the spectacle of the amateur theatricals at the heart of the plot. Stuck in the country and bored to death, the young people decide to stage a play. But, as with Hamlet’s ‘play-within-the-play’, the production is riddled with double meanings, intrigue and alarming consequences.

It seemed to me then, and does so now, that Austen’s play-within-a-novel operates as a wonderful vehicle for exploring illicit flirtations between the young people, especially in the absence of a reliable chaperone. The play Lovers’ Vows works as a meta-text for exploring important relationships between the characters. Edmund Bertram, the pious, shy clergyman, who is in love with a gorgeous, witty femme fatale, Mary Crawford, undertakes to play the part of a pious, shy clergyman who is seduced by a gorgeous, witty femme fatale, played by Mary Crawford. So many plot parallels, intrigues, allusions, moments of drama are contained in the amateur theatricals episode, which dominates the first quarter of the novel.

The play comes to a sticky end, and gives the reader one of the funniest moments in Austen’s canon (and, incidentally, the only moment in Austen without a woman present), when the master of the household, Sir Thomas Bertram, returns from his slave plantations in Antigua to find himself on a stage next to a ranting young actor, who is a complete stranger to him. It’s a beautifully orchestrated, highly comic scene, which humiliates Sir Thomas, giving him grave grounds for concern about the conduct of his children. His revenge is to burn all the unbound copies of the play. But the flirting doesn’t stop.

Nevertheless, I was puzzled by the critical consensus, which, following the influential critic Lionel Trilling, took the view that the Lovers’ Vows debacle meant that Jane Austen morally disapproved of theatre. Because Sir Thomas and the heroine, Fanny Price, disapprove of the play, then this must mean that Austen did too. This made no sense to me in the light of her letters and her other novels, which contain copious allusions to the theatre and to playwrights, from Shakespeare to Sheridan. Jane Austen wrote plays as a child and acted in amateur theatricals at home. She herself was said to be a fine actor, and played the part of Mrs Candour in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal with great aplomb.

Furthermore, it seemed to me that a writer with such comic gifts (often overlooked in the pursuit of the romantic courtship and marriage plot) owed a debt to the plays she watched and read. This book is my attempt to redress that misconception and to examine the roots of Austen’s comic genius. Her love for Shakespeare is well known (she pays tribute to him in Mansfield Park), but she also loved farce and comedies, especially those of now largely forgotten female dramatists, such as Hannah Cowley and Elizabeth Inchbald.

Some years ago, the book went out of print, partly the consequence of being with a small publishing house that no longer exists. Many of my readers have, over the years, expressed interest in the book, which was so generously reviewed. The bicentenary of the death of Jane Austen (2017) seemed to William Collins, the loyal publisher of my five subsequent books, a very good moment to reissue the book, with a new title and new material, as a companion to my full-scale biography The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things.

The extra chapter takes a distinctive look at Austen in Hollywood, exploring a number of stage and film adaptations, from A. A. Milne (creator of Winnie-the-Pooh) to Whit Stillman, who recently adapted the juvenilia for the silver screen. The vogue for stage adaptations of the novels began in the early 1930s, but the explosion of interest in recent years has seen her novels refashioned, reworked and updated on stage, on screen and in the ever-expanding world of the Internet.

Fascination with Jane Austen does not wane. The bicentenary witnesses the appearance of her image on the ten-pound banknote. There are exhibitions about her life and work in Hampshire, where she was born and where she died. But the popular image of her is too often that of a novelist interested only in romance and marriage. Of course marriage is the traditional endpoint of comedy, but what really interested Austen were the misunderstandings and incongruous encounters along the way, not the happy ending. This book is an attempt to place Jane Austen where she properly belongs: alongside Shakespeare as one of the world’s greatest comic writers. It was conceived as a love letter to the comic theatre of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which I began to explore twenty years ago during a magical year in the incomparable setting of the Huntington Library in Los Angeles. While I was there, I regularly crossed town to Pasadena, Burbank, Hollywood and Westwood, in order to watch the latest movie releases. Among them were Emma Thompson’s sparkling Sense and Sensibility and Roger Michell’s tender, sombre Persuasion. Then there came a day when my partner said that he was going to take me to a teen movie called Clueless that was set in Beverly Hills. He was a Shakespeare scholar, also researching in the Huntington, so this seemed a very peculiar choice – until five minutes into the film, when I realised what was going on. I leant over and whispered, ‘She’s Emma, isn’t she?’ Since the film did not explicitly acknowledge at any point that it was a reworking of Emma, I think he was rather impressed that I worked it out so quickly. Perhaps that was why, soon after, he asked me to marry him.

As Jane Austen said herself, ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can.’

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone, for permission to quote from Fanny Knight’s unpublished journals, and the Hampshire Record Office, Winchester, for permission to quote from Eliza de Feuillide’s unpublished letters and James Austen’s prologues and epilogues to the Austen family theatricals.

Abbreviations

SS – Sense and Sensibility (1811)

PP – Pride and Prejudice (1813)

MP – Mansfield Park (1814)

E – Emma (1816)*

NA – Northanger Abbey (1818)

P – Persuasion (1818)

All quotations of the above are from The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman, 5 vols (3rd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932–34).

MW – Minor Works

Quotations are from The Works of Jane Austen, vi, Minor Works, ed. R. W. Chapman, rev. B. C. Southam (London: Oxford University Press, 1975).

Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (3rd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) is cited throughout as Letters.

LV – Lovers’ Vows

Quotations are from Lovers’ Vows: A Play, in Five Acts. Performing at the Theatre Royal, Covent-Garden. From the German of Kotzebue. By Mrs Inchbald. (fifth edn, London, 1798), reprinted in Chapman’s edition of MP.

* Published December 1815.

Introduction

In 1821, four years after the death of Jane Austen, a critic in the Quarterly Review compared her art to Shakespeare’s. ‘Saying as little as possible in her own person and giving a dramatic air to the narrative by introducing frequent conversations’, she created her fictional world ‘with a regard to character hardly exceeded even by Shakespeare himself.’¹

In the Victorian era, Austen was dubbed ‘the Prose Shakespeare’.² George Eliot’s common-law husband, George Henry Lewes, developed the comparison in an influential Blackwood’s Magazine article on ‘The Novels of Jane Austen’:

But instead of description, the common and easy resource of novelists, she has the rare and difficult art of dramatic presentation: instead of telling us what her characters are, and what they feel, she presents the people, and they reveal themselves. In this she has never perhaps been surpassed, not even by Shakespeare himself.³

Yet another nineteenth-century writer, the novelist Thomas Lister, ascribed her genius to revelation of character through dramatic dialogue: ‘She possessed the rare and difficult art of making her readers intimately acquainted with the character of all whom she describes … She scarcely does more than make them act and talk, and we know them directly.’⁴

Austen herself had a strong sense of the importance of dramatic dialogue in the novel. She and her family, like many others of their class, loved to read aloud together. The Austen women ranked novels according to how well they stood up to repeated group readings. Thus Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote remained a firm favourite (Letters, p. 116), whereas Sarah Burney’s Clarentine failed the test: ‘We are reading Clarentine, & are surprised to find how foolish it is. I remember liking it much less on a 2nd reading than at the 1st & it does not bear a 3rd at all’ (Letters, p. 120).

Jane Austen also had strict notions about how characters in her own novels should be rendered dramatically. To her chagrin, her mother botched the dialogue badly when Pride and Prejudice was read aloud to some friends: ‘Our 2nd evening’s reading to Miss Benn had not pleased me so well, but I beleive [sic] something must be attributed to my Mother’s too rapid way of getting on – & tho’ she perfectly understands the Characters herself, she cannot speak as they ought’ (Letters, p. 203).

Perhaps Austen’s frustration stemmed from her own aptitude for dramatic renditions. Her brother Henry noted her skill in the biographical notice written soon after her death: ‘She read aloud with very great taste and effect. Her own works, probably, were never heard to so much advantage as from her own mouth; for she partook largely in all the best gifts of the comic muse.’⁵ Her niece Caroline Austen recorded in her Memoir. ‘She was considered to read aloud remarkably well. I did not often hear her but once I knew her take up a volume of Evelina and read a few pages of Mr Smith and the Brangtons and I thought it was like a play.’⁶

In Mansfield Park, it is typically tongue-in-cheek that Austen endows her villain Henry Crawford with her own gift for reading aloud. Edmund’s commendation of Henry’s reading of Shakespeare, ‘To read him well aloud, is no every-day talent’ (MP, p. 338), is seconded by Lady Bertram’s approving comment, which curiously prefigures Caroline Austen’s: ‘It was really like being at a play’ (MP, p. 338).

Austen’s nineteenth-century critics defined her genius in terms of her dramatic powers. Her great achievement was in character study. As in Shakespeare, the fools are as distinctive and perfectly discriminated as are the heroines, and all the characters reveal themselves, unhampered by an obtrusive authorial presence, through dramatic presentation and conversations – by a kind of ‘dramatic ventriloquism’.⁷ Yet in the twentieth century there was a common perception that Jane Austen had a deep distrust of the dramatic arts. This was principally due to the notorious amateur theatricals in Mansfield Park: the disruption caused to the household by the performance of Lovers’ Vows during Sir Thomas Bertram’s absence from home was taken as proof of the author’s own distaste for theatre.⁸

There are, however, a range of judgements upon ‘home representation’ in Mansfield Park, not all of them hostile. It is an error to assume that Fanny Price’s astringent judgement on the theatricals is Austen’s own; after all, Fanny is by no means a disinterested commentator. Unlike her demure creation, who has never seen the inside of a theatre and is manifestly afraid of ‘exposing herself’ on stage, Austen herself was fascinated by professional theatre, visited it frequently, and, far from condemning private theatricals, participated in them herself, both when she was a child and when she was a woman in her thirties. Strikingly, only two years before writing Mansfield Park, she took part in a private performance of perhaps the most popular contemporary play of the Georgian period, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal.

Jane Austen’s letters reveal that she was steeped in theatre. As a young woman, she wrote short plays. She copied her brothers in the writing of burlesques in the style of Sheridan and Henry Fielding. She even turned her favourite novel, Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, into a five-act comedy. Her interest in the theatre, both amateur and professional, and her lifelong preoccupation with the drama undoubtedly influenced her mature writing. She lived through a golden age of English stage comedy. Yet critics of Austen have barely touched upon this rich source, save in occasional nods to her extraordinary gift for theatrical dialogue and the creation of sustained comic characterisation.

This book offers the first comprehensive account of Jane Austen’s interest in the theatre, but, more than this, it also suggests that her play-going and her reading of plays were a formative influence on her comic art. Part One of the book reveals her interest in the world of theatre and drama, while Part Two suggests that there is something intrinsically dramatic about her vision of the world in many of her major novels – not only Mansfield Park, but also Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Emma.

I make a number of passing references to Northanger Abbey, in which the heroine, Catherine Morland, resembles the naive ‘country girl’ of the comic tradition in the theatre, but of course the main thrust of this book’s comedy is its parody of the Gothic novel. My argument about the importance of the theatre for Jane Austen is in no respect intended to diminish the importance of her engagement with the traditions of the novel. I draw attention to many neglected theatrical allusions in her work, but there are also many – frequently documented – allusions to eighteenth-century fiction. Indeed, it is an important part of my argument that from Fielding and Richardson through to Austen and her peers, especially Fanny Burney and Elizabeth Inchbald, there was vigorous two-way traffic between the new form of the novel and the ancient art of the drama. It must, however, be acknowledged that, unlike Inchbald and Burney, Austen never expressed the desire actually to write for the public stage.

Although Austen’s final works are less obviously theatrical than her earliest ones – I do not offer a detailed account of Persuasion⁹ – she participated in private theatricals well into her adult life, as may be seen from some fascinating and little-known passages in the unpublished journals of her niece Fanny Knight. She also took Fanny to the theatre whenever she got the chance. Her periods of residence in London, Bath and Southampton provided ample opportunities for theatre-going with her brood of nieces and nephews. In her letters she recorded her relish for the performances of the renowned tragedian Edmund Kean and the celebrated comic actress Dora Jordan, as well as her particular fondness for Robert Elliston, the star of the Bath Theatre Royal, whose fortunes she followed when he moved to the London stage. Even when in the country, when she was far away from the theatres, she maintained her interest by reading plays, both old and new. She also picked up theatre gossip from the newspapers and would have been able to keep up with reviews of new performances, for this was the age when professional theatre-reviewing grew to maturity.

Twentieth-century criticism was fixated on the assumption that Jane Austen was immovably attached to village life and deeply suspicious of urban pleasures – the theatre foremost among these.¹⁰ This book presents quite another picture: an Austen who enjoyed urban life, who attended the theatre whenever she could, and who took enormous pleasure in the theatrical scene. A recovery of the theatrical Austen makes it difficult to persist in regarding her as a supremely parochial novelist, much less as an isolated, defensive, class-bound or reactionary one.

The first part of the book establishes Jane Austen’s knowledge of the world of the theatre. The second part explores how that knowledge shaped her own art. It demonstrates how she makes allusions that assume considerable theatrical knowledge – of a kind now lost to us – on the part of her first readers. And it examines the ways in which the novels adapt a wide range of techniques from the stage tradition, including dramatic entrances and exits, comic misunderstandings, ironic reversals and tableaux.

A particularly important device is what I call the ‘set-piece’: chapters or episodes framed as set-pieces are often analogous in shape and length to a scene in a play. It is helpful here to cite a comment of Henry James, another nineteenth-century novelist much interested in scenic construction – and indeed in the writing of plays. His novel The Awkward Age was organised entirely on scenic principles. In his author’s preface, James pictured each of his episodes as a lamp:

Each of my ‘lamps’ would be the light of a single ‘social occasion’ in the history and intercourse of the characters concerned, and would bring out to the full the latent colour of the scene in question and cause it to illustrate, to the last drop, its bearing on my theme. I revelled in this notion of the occasion as a thing by itself, really and completely a scenic thing.¹¹

The building bricks of Austen’s novels were also dramatic scenes. This is one reason why they adapt so well to film representation.

We naturally think of Jane Austen as a pioneer of the nineteenth-century realist novel. But she also lived through a great age of English stage comedy. The aim of this book is to restore her to the company of such admired contemporaries as Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Hannah Cowley, while also setting her in the great tradition of English drama that stems from Shakespeare.

PART ONE

The Novelist and the Theatre

A love of the theatre is so general …

Mansfield Park

1

Private Theatricals

The fashion for private theatricals that obsessed genteel British society from the 1770s until the first part of the nineteenth century is immortalised in Mansfield Park. The itch to act was widespread, ranging from fashionable aristocratic circles to the professional middle classes and minor gentry, from children’s and apprentices’s theatricals to military and naval amateur dramatics.¹

Makeshift theatres mushroomed all over England, from drawing rooms to domestic outbuildings. At the more extreme end of the theatrical craze, members of the gentrified classes and the aristocracy built their own scaled-down imitations of the London playhouses. The most famous was that erected in the late 1770s at Wargrave in Berkshire by the spendthrift Earl of Barrymore, at a reputed cost of £60,000. Barrymore’s elaborate private theatre was modelled on Vanbrugh’s King’s Theatre in the Haymarket. It supposedly seated seven hundred.²

Private theatricals performed by the fashionable elite drew much public interest, and had profound implications for the public theatres.³ On one occasion in 1787 a motion in the House of Commons was deferred because too many parliamentarians were in attendance at a private performance of Arthur Murphy’s The Way to Keep Him at Richmond House.⁴ Such private performances often drew more attention in the newspapers than the theatres licensed for public performance.

From an early age Jane Austen showed her own mocking awareness of what the newspapers dubbed ‘the Theatrical Ton’. In a sketch called ‘The Three Sisters’, dating from around 1792, she portrayed a greedy, self-seeking young woman who demands a purpose-built private theatre as part of her marriage settlement (MW, p. 65). In Mansfield Park, the public interest in aristocratic private theatricals is regarded ironically: ‘To be so near happiness, so near fame, so near the long paragraph in praise of the private theatricals at Ecclesford, the seat of the Right Hon. Lord Ravenshaw, in Cornwall, which would of course have immortalised the whole party for at least a twelve-month!’ (MP, p. 121). Austen carefully distinguishes between the fashionable elitist theatricals of the aristocracy, of the kind that were mercilessly lampooned by the newspapers, and those of the squirearchy.⁵ While Mr Yates boasts that Lord Ravenshaw’s private theatre has been built on a grand and lavish scale, in keeping with aristocratic pretensions, Edmund Bertram shows his contempt for what he considers to be the latest fad of the nobility:

‘Let us do nothing by halves. If we are to act, let it be in a theatre completely fitted up with pit, box and gallery, and let us have a play entire from beginning to end; so as it be a German play, no matter what, with a good tricking, shifting after-piece, and a figure dance, and a hornpipe, and a song between the acts. If we do not out do Ecclesford, we do nothing.’ (MP, p. 124)

Edmund’s mocking comments are directed to his elder brother. But despite Tom Bertram’s efforts to professionalise his theatre, the Mansfield theatricals eventually fall back on the measure of converting a large room of the family home into a temporary theatre for their production of Lovers’ Vows. In reality, this was far more typical of the arrangements made by the professional classes and the minor gentry who had also adopted the craze for private theatricals. The private theatricals of Fanny Burney’s uncle at Barbone Lodge near Worcester, for example, took place in a room seating about twenty people. At one end of the room was a curtained off stage for the actors, while the musicians played in an outside passage.⁶

In 1782, when the craze for private theatricals first reached Steventon rectory, Jane Austen was seven. The dining parlour was probably used as a makeshift theatre for the early productions.⁷ The first play known to have been acted by the Austen family was Matilda, a tragedy in five acts by Dr Thomas Francklin, a friend of Dr Samuel Johnson and a fashionable London preacher. The part of the tragic heroine Matilda was later popularised by Mrs Siddons on the London stage. At Steventon the tragedy was acted some time during 1782, and James Austen wrote a prologue and an epilogue for the performance.⁸ Edward Austen spoke the prologue and Tom Fowle, one of Mr Austen’s Steventon pupils who later became engaged to Cassandra Austen, the epilogue.⁹

Francklin’s dreary play, set at the time of the Norman Conquest, dramatises a feud between two brothers. Morcar, Earl of Mercia, and his brother Edwin are both in love with Matilda, the daughter of a Norman lord. Matilda has chosen Edwin. Morcar separates the lovers, sets up plans to murder his brother, and tries (unsuccessfully) to win over and marry Matilda. The tragedy takes an unexpected twist with Morcar’s unlikely reformation: he is persuaded to repent of his crimes, reunite the lovers and become reconciled to his brother.

Matilda was a surprising choice for the satirically-minded Austen family. Its long, rambling speeches and dramatic clichés of language and situation made it precisely the kind of historical tragedy that Sheridan burlesqued in The Critic. The tragedy had only six speaking parts, however, and was perhaps manageable in the dining room.¹⁰ Jane Austen was surely only a spectator at this very first Steventon performance, but it is probable that she disliked the play, given the disparaging comment she makes in her juvenilia about another historical drama, The Tragedy of Jane Shore, ‘a tragedy and therefore not worth reading’ (MW, p. 140). Perhaps the manager/actor James felt the same, for after Matilda no more tragedies were performed at Steventon.

Matilda was followed two years later by a far more ambitious project. In 1784, when Jane was nine, Sheridan’s The Rivals was acted at Steventon. Once again James Austen wrote the prologue and an epilogue for the play performed in July ‘by some young Ladies & Gentlemen at Steventon’.¹¹ Henry spoke the prologue and the actor playing Bob Acres (possibly James himself) the epilogue. James’s prologue suggests that there was an audience for this production.¹² The play has a cast of twelve, and it seems that the Austens had no qualms about inviting neighbours and friends to take part in their theatricals. The Cooper cousins and the Digweed family probably made up the numbers.¹³ Biographers speculate that Jane Austen may have taken the minor role of Lydia Languish’s pert maid, Lucy, but perhaps it is more likely that she was a keen spectator.¹⁴

James’s prologue is unequivocal in its praise of satirical comedy, rather than sentimental tragedy:

The Loftier members of the tragic Lyre;

Court the soft pleasures that from pity flow;

Seek joy in tears and luxury in woe.

’Tis our’s, less noble, but more pleasing task,

To draw from Folly’s features fashion’s mask;

To paint the scene where wit and sense unite

To yield at once instruction and delight.¹⁵

Jane Austen was undoubtedly influenced by her Thespian brothers, and it is therefore unsurprising that one of their favourite comic writers was to have a major impact on her own writing. While Sheridan’s influence is discernible in Austen’s earliest works, his presence can be felt most strongly in her mature works, which, unlike the juvenilia, also set out to instruct and to delight, and sought to combine ‘wit and sense’. In particular, the influence of The Rivals can be most keenly felt in Austen’s own satire on sentimentalism: her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility. It is all the more bewildering that this aspect of her comic genius has been so sorely neglected.

It was shortly after the performance of The Rivals that Cassandra and Jane were sent off to boarding school in Reading. The eccentric headmistress of the school was a Mrs La Tournelle, née Sarah Hackitt, who (much to the amusement of her pupils) could not speak a word of French. She was notorious for having a cork leg, for dressing in exactly the same clothes every day, and for her obsession with every aspect of the theatre. She enthralled her young charges with lively accounts of plays and play-acting, greenroom anecdotes, and gossip about the private lives of leading actors. Plays were performed as an integral part of the girls’ education. The Austen sisters’ interest in the drama was fostered at this school. Jane later recalled their time here with memories of fun and laughter, reminding her sister of a schoolgirl expression: ‘I could die of laughter … as they used to say at school’ (Letters, p. 5).

When the girls returned home from school for good in 1786, they were delighted to be in the company of a real French-speaking person, their exotic cousin, Eliza de Feuillide, a French countess. Eliza had taken part in theatrical activities since she was a child and had also acted in private theatricals staged by her aristocratic French friends. In a letter to Philadelphia Walter (also a cousin of Jane Austen), Eliza regaled her cousin with tales of private theatricals: ‘I have promised to spend the Carnival, which in France is the gayest Season of the year, in a very agreeable Society who have erected an elegant theatre for the purposes of acting Plays amongst ourselves, and who intend having Balls at least twice a week.’¹⁶

Family tradition records that the Steventon barn was used on occasions as a temporary theatre, but probably not until the Christmas theatricals of 1787 when Eliza was a guest at the rectory.¹⁷ In a letter written in September of that year, Philadelphia Walter wrote: ‘My uncle’s barn is fitting up quite like a theatre and all the young folks are to take their part.’¹⁸

During September 1787 Eliza had asked her cousin to join her for the Tunbridge Wells summer season, and had requested that the comedies Which is the Man?, by Hannah Cowley, and Bon Ton: or High Life Above Stairs, by Garrick, be presented at the local theatre. Much to her delight, the house was full on both occasions.¹⁹ These two modern comedies were clearly great favourites with Eliza. Bon Ton was an amusing satire on fashionable French manners, while Which is the Man? depicted a fascinating young widow, Lady Bell Bloomer, on the brink of remarriage. Eliza clearly longed for an opportunity to perform these plays at Steventon. Later, Philadelphia Walter informed her brother in a letter that these plays were to be given at Steventon that Christmas: ‘They go at Xmas to Steventon and mean to act a play Which is the Man? and Bon Ton.’²⁰

Eliza had already made plans with the Austen family for the Christmas festivities. James was home from his foreign travels and keen to begin organising theatricals on a grander scale than before, egged on by Eliza. Both she and the Austen family wished Philadelphia to be part of the theatrical ensemble, but, like Fanny Price, the meek and timid Phila resolutely declined the offer: ‘I should like to be a spectator, but am sure I should not have courage to act a part, nor do I wish to attain it.’²¹ Eliza urged Phila, on behalf of the Austens, to take one of the ‘two unengaged parts’ that were waiting to be filled:

You know we have long projected acting this Christmas at Hampshire and this scheme would go on a vast deal better would you lend your assistance … and on finding there were two unengaged parts I immediately thought of you, and am particularly commissioned by My Aunt Austen and her whole family to make the earliest application possible, and assure you how very happy you will make them as well as myself if you could be prevailed on to undertake these parts and give us all your company.²²

In the same letter, Eliza assured her cousin that the acting parts set aside for her were ‘neither long nor difficult’, and reminded her that the acting party were well-equipped: ‘Do not let your dress neither disturb you, as I think I can manage it so that the Green Room should provide you with what is necessary for acting.’ At the close of the letter she tried another means to persuade her shy cousin: ‘You cannot possibly resist so many pleasures, especially when I tell you your old friend James is returned from France and is to be of the acting party.’²³

Eliza was clearly used to getting her own way. But Philadelphia’s firm resolve not to act surprised both Eliza and the Austen family:

I received your letter yesterday my dear friend and need not tell you how much I am concerned at your not being able to comply with a request which in all probability I shall never have it in my power to make again … I will only allow myself to take notice of the strong reluctance you express to what you call appearing in Publick. I assure you our performance is to be by no means a publick one, since only a selected party of friends will be present.²⁴

According to Eliza, Philadelphia’s visit to Steventon was dependent on her compliance with joining the acting party: ‘You wish to know the exact time which we should be satisfied with, and therefore I proceed to acquaint you that a fortnight from New Years Day would do, provided however you could bring yourself to act, for my Aunt Austen declares “she has not room for any idle young people”.’²⁵

Despite Eliza’s repeated assurances that the parts were very short, Philadelphia resisted her cousin’s efforts and stayed away. Eliza appears to have attributed this to Mrs Walter’s interference: ‘Shall I be candid and tell you the thought which has struck me on this occasion? – The insuperable objection to my proposal is, some scruples of your mother’s about your acting. If this is the case I can only say it is [a] pity so groundless a prejudice should be harboured in so enlightened [and so] enlarged a mind.’²⁶ The Austens showed no such prejudice against private theatricals and Bon Ton was performed some time during this period. There is a surviving epilogue written by James.²⁷

The first play that was presented at Steventon in 1787 was not, however, Garrick’s farce, but Susanna Centlivre’s lively comedy, The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714). As usual James wrote a prologue and an epilogue. The Wonder was an excellent choice for Eliza: she played the part of the spirited heroine, Donna Violante, who risks her own marriage and reputation by choosing to protect her friend, Donna Isabella, from an arranged marriage to a man she despises. The play engages in the battle-of-the-sexes debate that Eliza particularly enjoyed. Women are ‘inslaved’ to ‘the Tyrant Man’; and whether they be fathers, husbands or brothers, they ‘usurp authority, and expect a blind obedience from us, so that maids, wives, or widows, we are little better than slaves’.²⁸

The play’s most striking feature is a saucy proposal of marriage from Isabella, though made on her behalf by Violante in disguise, to a man she barely knows. Twenty-seven years later, Jane Austen would incorporate private theatricals into her new novel, and the play, Lovers’ Vows, would contain a daring proposal of marriage from a vivacious young woman.²⁹

The Austen family clearly had no objection whatsoever to the depiction in Centlivre’s comedy of strong, powerful women who claim their rights to choose their own husbands, and show themselves capable of loyalty and firm friendship. James’s epilogue ‘spoken by a lady in the character of Violante’ leaves us in no doubt of the Austens’ awareness of the play’s theme of female emancipation:

In Barbarous times, e’er learning’s sacred light

Rose to disperse the shades of Gothic night

And bade fair science wide her beams display,

Creation’s fairest part neglected lay.

In vain the form where grace and ease combined.

In vain the bright eye spoke th’ enlightened mind,

Vain the sweet smiles which secret love reveal,

Vain every charm, for there were none to feel.

From tender childhood trained to rough alarms,

Choosing no music but the clang of arms;

Enthusiasts only in the listed field,

Our youth there knew to fight, but not to yield.

Nor higher deemed of beauty’s utmost power,

Than the light play thing of their idle hour.

Such was poor woman’s lot – whilst tyrant men

At once possessors of the sword and pen

All female claim with stern pedantic pride

To prudence, truth and secrecy denied,

Covered their tyranny with specious words

And called themselves creation’s mighty lords –

But thank our happier Stars, those times are o’er;

And woman holds a second place no more.

Now forced to quit their long held usurpation,

Men all wise, these ‘Lords of the Creation’!

To our superior sway themselves submit,

Slaves to our charms, and vassals to our wit;

We can with ease their ev’ry sense beguile,

And melt their Resolutions with a smile.³⁰

Jane Austen’s most expressive battle-of-the-sexes debate, that between Anne Elliot and Captain Harville in Persuasion, curiously echoes James Austen’s epilogue. Denied the ‘exertion’ of the battlefield and a ‘profession’, women have been forced to live quietly. James’s remonstrance that ‘Tyrant men [are] at once possessors of the sword and pen’ is more gently reiterated in Anne Elliot’s claim that ‘Men have had every advantage of us in telling their story … the pen has been in their hands’ (P, p. 234).

There were two performances of The Wonder after Christmas. The evident success of the play was followed up in the new year by a production of Garrick’s adaptation of The Chances (1754), for which James, once again, wrote a prologue. This play was to be Eliza’s final performance for some time.

Once again James and Henry chose a racy comedy: originally written by Beaumont and Fletcher, the play had been altered by the Duke of Buckingham and in 1754 ‘new-dressed’ by Garrick. Although Garrick had made a concerted effort to tone it down, the play was still considered to contain strong dialogue. So thought Mrs Inchbald in her Remarks, which prefaced her edition of the play: ‘That Garrick, to the delicacy of improved taste, was compelled to sacrifice much of their libertine dialogue, may well be suspected, by the remainder which he spared.’³¹

The Austen family did not share such compunction. Like The Wonder, Garrick’s play depicts jealous lovers, secret marriages and confused identities. The two heroines, both confusingly called Constantia, are mistaken for one another. The first Constantia is mistaken for a prostitute, although she is in fact secretly married to the Duke of Naples. It is likely that the feisty Eliza played the role of the low-born ‘second Constantia’, a favourite of the great comic actress Mrs Jordan.

Eliza had played her last role, as the return of Mr Austen’s pupils in the new year signified her imminent removal from Steventon. Both James and Henry Austen were ‘fascinated’ by the flirtatious Eliza, according to James’s son, who wrote the first memoir of Jane Austen. Most critics and biographers accept that a flirtation between Henry and Eliza was begun around this time and resulted eventually in their marriage ten years later. Some critics have conjectured that the flirtation which the young Jane Austen witnessed between Henry and Eliza during rehearsals may have given her the idea for the flirtation between Henry Crawford and Maria Bertram in Mansfield Park.³² That the young girl was acutely aware of the flirtation seems clear from one of her short tales, ‘Henry and Eliza’, where there are a series of elopements including one by Henry and Eliza, who run off together leaving only a curt note: ‘Madam, we are married and gone’ (MW, p. 36).

By all accounts, Jane Austen was an intelligent observer of the intrigues, emotions and excitement of private theatricals; of rehearsals, the reading over of scripts, and the casting of parts. James-Edward Austen’s Memoir claims that his aunt Jane ‘was an early observer, and it may be reasonably supposed that some of the incidents and feelings which are so vividly painted in the Mansfield Park theatricals are due to her recollection of these entertainments’.³³

In Mansfield Park, Jane Austen devoted her creative energies to the rehearsal process rather than the performance. Furthermore the singular strength of the theatrical sequence lies in its depiction through the eyes of an envious observer. It has been suggested that in writing the Lovers’ Vows sequence Austen distilled some of her own experience as an outsider, a partially excluded younger sister.³⁴ There is, however, no evidence to suggest that Jane was excluded from the family theatricals. Even if her youth prevented her from taking part in the actual performances, she began, at this time, to write her own short playlets. These were probably performed as afterpieces to the main play.

Henry Fielding’s outrageous burlesque The Tragedy of Tom Thumb was ‘acted to a small circle of select friends’ on 22 March 1788 at Steventon, and this was followed some time later by ‘a private Theatrical Exhibition’. Regrettably, James’s prologue to the latter gives no indication of the play performed, though it imitates Jacques’s ‘seven ages of man’ speech. The prologue also satirises the hypocrisy of the sentimental age where ‘to talk affecting, when we do not feel’ is described as a form of ‘acting’.³⁵ The family perhaps wrote the entertainment themselves. It was probably at this time that Jane wrote and participated in her own burlesque playlet, ‘The Mystery’.³⁶

The last plays performed at Steventon in 1788–89 were The Sultan: or A Peep into the Seraglio, a farce by Isaac Bickerstaffe, and another farce by James Townley, High Life Below Stairs. Bickerstaffe’s farce was first performed in London in 1775, but had only been recently published, in 1784. It was yet another comedy that depicted a bold, spirited heroine, posing a challenge to male prerogative and authority. Roxalana is an Englishwoman who has been captured for the Sultan’s seraglio. She displaces the favourite concubine, Elmira, by winning the honourable affections of the Sultan. Moreover, she condemns his harem and demands the freedom of all his wives: ‘You are the great Sultan; I am your slave, but I am also a free-born woman, prouder of that than all the pomp and splendour eastern monarchs can bestow.’³⁷ James’s epilogue was yet another provocative declaration of female superiority over men, opening with the words,

Lord help us! what strange foolish things are these men,

One good clever woman is fairly worth ten.³⁸

Two of the most popular contemporary choices for private representation were Fielding’s Tom Thumb and Townley’s High Life Below Stairs. The Burneys acted Tom Thumb in Worcestershire in 1777, ten years before the Austens chose it for performance. The part of the diminutive hero Tom Thumb was often played by a child, whose high-pitched voice would add to the comic incongruity.³⁹

James Townley’s satire on plebeian manners, High Life Below Stairs (1759), depicts a household of lazy servants who behave as badly as their masters. They ape their masters’ manners, assume their titles, drink their expensive wine, gamble and visit the theatre. Like Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and Foote’s Mayor of Garett, Townley’s farce was a comedy that used low life to criticise high society. It was also an extremely popular choice for amateur theatricals. In part, this was because it was more prudent to poke fun at the lower orders in the safety of one’s own home than in the professional theatre house. In 1793 a performance of High Life Below Stairs in an Edinburgh public theatre incited a row between a group of highly offended footmen and their masters.

George Colman the Younger’s comedy about social transformations, The Heir at Law, was also a popular choice for the gentry to indulge themselves in stereotypical ‘low’ roles. Austen was to explore this contentious issue in Mansfield Park when the heir of Mansfield insists on staging The Heir at Law so that he can play the stage Irishman, Duberley.

Jane’s playlet, ‘The Visit’, dedicated to James, contains a quotation from High Life Below Stairs, which suggests that she composed it around the same time as the family performance of Townley’s farce, perhaps as a burlesque afterpiece. Austen repeats Townley’s phrase, ‘The more free, the more welcome’, in her play. The allusion seems to be a nod to the main play performed that day at Steventon. Austen’s habit of repeating phrases from the plays performed, or even merely contemplated for performance, at Steventon remained with her for a long time. Though Hannah Cowley’s play Which is the Man? was considered for performance, it was finally rejected. Yet Austen quoted a phrase from it in a letter dated 1810, some twenty-nine years later.⁴⁰

Which is the Man? is alluded to in Austen’s ‘The Three Sisters’, written around 1788–90 (MW, p. 65). In this story, a spoilt young woman demands to play the part of Lady Bell Bloomer, just as Eliza had wished to in the 1787–88 Christmas theatricals. Again, a quotation from Cowley’s popular comedy The Belle’s Stratagem appears in a letter of 1801: ‘Mr Doricourt has travelled; he knows best’ (Letters, p. 73).

Though Eliza was now in Paris and unable to partake in the Steventon theatricals, the Cooper cousins came to Steventon for Christmas 1788–89 and Jane Cooper filled the gap left by Eliza. In a letter to Philadelphia, Eliza had hastily, though wistfully, scribbled a last message: ‘I suppose you have had pressing accounts from Steventon, and that they have informed you of their theatrical performances, The Sultan & High Life below Stairs, Miss Cooper performed the part of Roxelana [sic] and Henry the Sultan, I hear that Henry is taller than ever.’⁴¹ No prologue or epilogue by James has survived for High Life Below Stairs, but the prologue he provided for Bickerstaffe’s comedy is (confusingly) dated 1790 and states it was ‘spoken by Miss Cooper as Roxalana’.⁴²

The Sultan and High Life Below Stairs ended the theatricals at Steventon, although there is a family tradition which claims that they were resumed in the late 1790s. The main reason why actor-manager James abandoned private theatricals seems to be that he was turning his mind to other literary interests, namely the production of a weekly magazine, The Loiterer. This periodical, like the theatricals at Steventon, was also to prove an important influence on Jane Austen’s early writings.

Henry Austen tells us in his ‘Biographical Notice’, published in the first edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, that his sister Jane was acquainted with all the best authors at a very early age (NA, p. 7). The literary tastes of Catherine Morland have often been read as a parody of the author’s own literary preferences.⁴³ Catherine likes to read ‘poetry and plays, and things of that sort’, and while ‘in training for a heroine’, she reads ‘all such works as heroines must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives’ (NA, p. 15): dramatic works, those of Shakespeare especially, are prominent among these. Twelfth Night, Othello and Measure for Measure are singled out. Catherine duly reads Shakespeare, alongside Pope, Gray and Thompson, not so much for pleasure and entertainment, as for gaining ‘a great store of information’ (NA, p. 16).

In Sense and Sensibility, Willoughby and the Dashwoods are to be found reading Hamlet aloud together. In Mansfield Park, the consummate actor Henry Crawford gives a rendering of Henry VIII that is described by Fanny Price, a lover of Shakespeare, as ‘truly dramatic’ (MP, p. 337). Henry memorably remarks that Shakespeare is ‘part of an Englishman’s constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where’. This sentiment is reiterated by Edmund when he notes that ‘we all talk Shakespeare, use his similes, and describe with his descriptions’ (MP, p. 338). Though Emma Woodhouse is not a great reader, she is found quoting passages on romantic love from Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Henry and Edmund agree on very little. It is therefore a fair assumption that, when they do concur, they are voicing the opinion of their author. Their consciousness of how Shakespeare is assimilated into our very fibre, so that ‘one is intimate with him by instinct’, reaches to the essence of Jane Austen’s own relationship with him. She would have read the plays when a young woman, but she would also have absorbed famous lines and characters by osmosis, such was Shakespeare’s pervasiveness in the culture of the age. She quotes Shakespeare from memory, as can be judged by the way that she often misquotes him. Her surviving letters refer far more frequently to contemporary plays than Shakespearean ones, but Shakespeare’s influence on the drama of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was so thoroughgoing – for instance through the tradition of the ‘witty couple’, reaching back to Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing – that her indirect debt to his vision can be taken for granted.

In her earliest works, however, Jane Austen showed a certain irreverence for the national dramatist. Shakespeare’s history plays are used to great satirical effect in The History of England, a lampoon of Oliver Goldsmith’s abridged History of England. Austen mercilessly parodied Goldsmith’s arbitrary and indiscriminate merging of fact and fiction, in particular his reliance on Shakespeare’s history plays for supposedly authentic historical fact. Austen, by contrast, is being satirical when she makes a point of referring her readers to Shakespeare’s English history plays for ‘factual’ information about the lives of its monarchs.⁴⁴ Just as solemnly, she refers her readers to other popular historical plays, such as Nicholas Rowe’s Jane Shore and Sheridan’s The Critic (MW, pp. 140, 147). The tongue-in-cheek reference to Sheridan compounds the irony, as The Critic is itself a burlesque of historical tragedy that firmly eschews any intention of authenticity.

From such allusions in the juvenilia it is clear that Jane Austen was familiar with a wide range of plays, although these are probably only a fraction of the numerous plays that would have been read over as possible choices for the private theatricals, read aloud for family entertainment, or read for private enjoyment. While it is impossible to calculate the number of plays that she read as a young girl, since there is no extant record of Mr Austen’s ample library, the range of her explicit literary allusions gives us some idea of her extensive reading – references to over forty plays have been noted.⁴⁵

Jane Austen owned a set of William Hayley’s Poems and Plays. Volumes one to five are inscribed ‘Jane Austen 1791’; volume six has a fuller inscription ‘Jane Austen, Steventon Sunday April the 3d. 1791’.⁴⁶ Hayley was well known as the ‘friend and biographer’ of William Cowper, Austen’s favourite poet, though he fancied himself as a successful playwright. The most well-thumbed volume in Austen’s collection of Hayley was the one containing his plays. It contained five dramas in all: two tragedies, Marcella and Lord Russel, and three comedies in verse, The Happy Prescription: or the Lady Relieved from her Lovers; The Two Connoisseurs; and The Mausoleum.⁴⁷

Like the Sheridan plays which the Austens adored, Hayley’s comedies depict the folly of vanity and affectation in polite society. By far the best of them is The Mausoleum, which dramatises excessive sensibility and ‘false refinement’ in the characters of a beautiful young widow, Sophia Sentiment, and a pompous versifier, Mr Rumble, a caricature of Dr Johnson. Lady Sophia Sentiment erects a mausoleum to house her husband’s ashes and employs versifiers to compose tributes for the inscription on the monument. The comedy explores the self-destructive effects of sensibility on the mind of a lovely young widow, who refuses to overcome her grief because of a distorted conception of refined sentiment. The tell-tale sign of misplaced sensibility is Lady Sophia’s obsession with black:

If cards should be call’d for to-night,

Place the new japann’d tables alone in my sight;

For the pool of Quadrille set the black-bugle dish,

And remember you bring us the ebony fish.⁴⁸

But this sentiment is amusingly undercut by its correlation to hypocrisy and false delicacy:

Her crisis is coming, without much delay;

There might have been doubts had she fix’d upon grey:

But a vow to wear black all the rest of her life

Is a strong inclination she’ll soon be a wife.⁴⁹

This comedy is of particular interest as the main character has the name that was adopted in a satirical letter to James Austen in his capacity as editor of The Loiterer. The letter complains of the periodical’s lack of feminine interest:

Sir, I write this to inform you that you are very much out of my good graces, and that, if you do not mend your manners, I shall soon drop your acquaintance. You must know, Sir, that I am a great reader, and not to mention some hundred volumes of Novels and Plays, have in the two last summers, actually got through all the entertaining papers of our most celebrated periodical writers.⁵⁰

The correspondent goes on to complain of the journal’s lack of sentimental interest and offers recommendations to improve its style:

Let the lover be killed in a duel, or lost at sea, or you make him shoot himself, just as you please; and as for his mistress, she will of course go mad; or if you will, you may kill the lady, and let the lover run mad; only remember, whatever you do, that your hero and heroine must possess a great deal of feeling, and have very pretty names.⁵¹

The letter ends by stating that if the author’s wishes are not complied with ‘may your work be condemned to the pastry-cooke’s shop, and may you always continue a bachelor, and be plagued with a maiden sister to keep house for you’. It is signed Sophia Sentiment.

It is highly probable that Jane Austen wrote this burlesque letter to her brother. It is very close in spirit to her juvenilia of the same period. Love and Freindship also has a sentimental heroine named Sophia. It seems plausible that The Mausoleum was among the comedies considered for performance by the Austens when they were looking at material for home theatricals in 1788. This may have been the time that Jane first became acquainted with the name Sophia Sentiment. If Austen was indeed Sophia Sentiment, by her own admission, she was a great reader of some hundred volumes of novels and plays.

Austen also owned a copy of Arnaud Berquin’s L’ami des enfans (1782–83) and the companion series L’ami de l’adolescence (1784–85). Berquin’s little stories, dialogues and dramas were much used in English schools for young ladies towards the end of the eighteenth century, being read in the original for the language or in translation for the moral. Berquin states in his preface to L’ami des enfans that his ‘little dramas’ are designed to bring children of the opposite sex together ‘in order to produce that union and intimacy which we are so pleased to see subsist between brothers and sisters’.⁵² The whole of the family is encouraged to partake in the plays to promote family values:

Each volume of this work will contain little dramas, in which children are the principal characters, in order that they may learn to acquire a free unembarrassed countenance, a gracefulness of attitude and deportment, and an easy manner of delivering themselves before company. Besides, the performance of these dramas will be a domestic recreation and amusement.

Berquin’s short plays and dramatic dialogues were intended to instruct parents and children on manners and morals, on how to conduct themselves in domestic life, how to behave to one another, to the servants, and to the poor, and how to cope with everyday problems in the home. Some were directed towards young women, warning against finery and vanity. Fashionable Education, as its name suggests, depicts a young woman (Leonora) who has been given a fashionable town education, ‘those charming sciences called drawing, music, dancing’, but has also learned to be selfish, vain and affected.⁵³ The blind affection of Leonora’s aunt has compounded her ruin. The moral of this play is that accomplishments should embellish a useful education and knowledge, not act as a substitute for them. A similar play, Vanity Punished, teaches the evils of coquetry, vanity, selfishness and spoilt behaviour.

Intriguingly, one of the playlets in the collection carries the same plot-line as Austen’s Emma. In Cecilia and Marian, a young, wealthy girl befriends a poor labourer’s daughter and ‘tastes the happiness of doing good’ when she feeds her new playmate plum cake and currant jelly:

Cecilia had now tasted the happiness of doing good. She walked a little longer in the garden, thinking how happy she had made Marian, how grateful Marian had shewed herself, and how her little sister would be pleased to taste currant jelly. What will it be, said she, when I give her some ribbands and a necklace! Mama gave me some the other day that were pretty enough; but I am tired of them now. Then I’ll look in my drawers for some old things to give her. We are just of a size, and my slips would fit her charmingly. Oh! how I long to see her well drest.⁵⁴

Cecilia continues to enjoy her patronage until she is roundly scolded by her mother for her harmful and irresponsible conduct. By indulging and spoiling her favourite, Cecilia has made her friend dissatisfied with her previous life:

MOTHER: But how comes it, then, that you cannot eat dry bread, nor walk barefoot as she does?

CECILIA: The thing is, perhaps, that I am not used to it.

MOTHER: Why, then, if she uses herself, like you, to eat sweet things, and to wear shoes and stockings, and afterwards if the brown bread should go against her, and she should not be able to walk barefoot, do you think that you would have done her any service?⁵⁵

Cecilia is an enemy to her own happiness and that of her ‘low’ friend Marian. She is only saved by the intervention and guidance of her judicious mother. In L’ami des enfans, mothers are often shown instructing, advising and educating their daughters: the plays were aimed at parents as well as children. In Emma, the variant on Berquin’s plot-line is a similarly meddlesome, though well-meaning, young woman who painfully lacks a mother figure.

Like Berquin, Austen wrote her own short plays and stories for domestic entertainment.⁵⁶ But, rather than teaching morals and manners, Austen’s playlets parody the moral didacticism of Berquin’s thinly disguised conduct books. There are three attempts at playwriting in Austen’s juvenilia. The first two, ‘The Visit’ and ‘The Mystery’ in Volume the First, were written between 1787 and 1790.57 The third, ‘The First Act of a Comedy’, is one of the ‘Scraps’ in Volume the Second and dates from around 1793.

As mentioned earlier, ‘The Visit’ was probably written in 1789, the same time as the Steventon performance of Townley’s High Life Below Stairs. The play depicts a dinner engagement at Lord Fitzgerald’s house with a party of young people. Dining room etiquette is satirised in this piece, as the characters pompously make formal introductions to one another, then promptly discover that there are not sufficient chairs for them all to be seated:

MISS FITZGERALD: Bless me! there ought to be 8 Chairs & there are but 6. However, if your Ladyship will but take Sir Arthur in your Lap, & Sophy my Brother in hers, I beleive we shall do pretty well.

SOPHY: I beg you will make no apologies. Your Brother is very light. (MW, p. 52)

The conversation between the guests is almost wholly preoccupied with the main fare of ‘fried Cowheel and Onion’, ‘Tripe’ and ‘Liver and Crow.’ The vulgarity of the food on offer is contrasted with the polite formality of the guests:

CLOE: I shall trouble Mr Stanley for a Little of the fried Cowheel & Onion.

STANLEY: Oh Madam, there is a secret pleasure in helping so amiable a Lady –.

LADY HAMPTON: I assure you my Lord, Sir Arthur never touches wine; but Sophy will toss off a bumper I am sure to oblige your Lordship. (MW, p. 53)

Banal remarks about food and wine lead irrationally to unexpected marriage proposals for the three young women at the table, who eagerly accept without a second’s hesitation.

On the surface, Austen’s parody of a dull social visit derives its comic impact from the farcical touches and the juxtapositions of polite formalities with vulgar expressions. The young heroine, Sophy, like so many of Austen’s early creations, is portrayed as a drunk who can ‘toss off a bumper’ at will. Above all, there is an irrepressible delight in the sheer absurdity of table manners. The Austens performing this play would, of course, be expected to maintain their composure when solemnly requesting ‘fried Cowheel & Onion’ and ‘Liver & Crow’ (MW, p. 53).

Austen’s playlet, deriding the absurdity and pomposity of table etiquette, provides a mocking contrast to the morally earnest tone of Berquin’s instructive playlets. His Little Fiddler also dramatises a social visit, where the exceptionally rude behaviour of a young man to his sister (Sophia) and to her visitors, the Misses Richmonds, leads to expulsion from the family circle. Charles, the ill-mannered brother and deceitful, greedy son, is eventually turned out of his father’s house for his treachery and lies, and for his cruel treatment of a poor fiddler. In Berquin’s play, the virtues of polite conduct are piously upheld:

SOPHIA: Ah! how do you do, my dear friends! [They salute each other, and curtsy to Godfrey, who bows to them.]

CHARLOTTE: It seems an age since I saw you last.

AMELIA: Indeed it is a long time.

SOPHIA: I believe it is more than three weeks. [Godfrey draws out the table, and gives them chairs.]

CHARLOTTE: Do not give yourself so much trouble, Master Godfrey.

GODFREY: Indeed, I think it no trouble.

SOPHIA: Oh, I am very sure Godfrey does it with pleasure, [gives him her hand.] I wish my brother had a little of his complaisance.

The stilted artificiality of such social visits is precisely the target of Jane Austen’s satire in ‘The Visit’. She seemed to have little time for plays which dictated appropriate formal conduct, preferring comedies which satirised social behaviour. Jane Austen mocks Berquin and simultaneously begins to explore the incongruities and absurdities of restrictive social mores.⁵⁸

As noted, a more direct source for ‘The Visit’ was Townley’s High Life Below Stairs. Austen’s quotation ‘The more free, the more welcome’ (MW, p. 50) nods to Townley’s farce, where fashionably bad table manners are cultivated by the servants in an attempt to ape their masters. Berquin wrote didactic plays instructing the correct ways to treat servants, both honest and dishonest. Townley’s hilarious farce of social disruption dramatises a lord who disguises himself as a servant to spy on his lazy servants, so that he can punish them appropriately for taking over his house.⁵⁹

Austen dedicated ‘The Visit’ to her brother James. Intriguingly, in her dedication, she recalled two other Steventon plays. These ‘celebrated comedies’ were probably written by James, since Jane describes her own ‘drama’ as ‘inferior’ to his:

Sir, The Following Drama, which I humbly recommend to your Protection & Patronage, tho’ inferior to those celebrated comedies called ‘The School for Jealousy’ & ‘The travelled Man’, will I hope afford some amusement to so respectable a Curate as yourself; which was the end in veiw [sic] when it was first composed by your Humble Servant the Author. (MW, p. 49)

James had recently returned from his travels abroad, so ‘the travelled Man’ may have been based on his adventures. The two play-titles echo the form of several favourites in the eighteenth-century dramatic repertoire: Goldsmith’s The Good-Natur’d Man (1768), Arthur Murphy’s The School For Guardians (1769), and Richard Cumberland’s The Choleric Man (1774), Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777), and Hannah Cowley’s School for Elegance (1780).

‘The Mystery’ was probably performed as an afterpiece to the Steventon 1788 ‘Private Theatrical Exhibition’.⁶⁰ Austen dedicated it to her father, and it may well have been a mocking tribute to one of his favourite plays. It has been suggested that the whispering scenes in this playlet were based on a similar scene in Sheridan’s The Critic.⁶¹ Jane Austen’s parody is, however, closer to Buckingham’s burlesque, The Rehearsal, which Sheridan was self-consciously reworking in The Critic.⁶² It is most likely that Austen was parodying the whispering scene in The Rehearsal, where Bayes insists that his play is entirely new: ‘Now, Sir, because I’ll do nothing here that ever was done before, instead of beginning with a Scene that discovers something of the Plot I begin this play with a whisper’:

PHYSICIAN: But yet some rumours great are stirring; and if Lorenzo should prove false (which none but the great Gods can tell) you then perhaps would find that – [Whispers.]

BAYES: Now he whispers.

USHER: Alone, do you say?

PHYSICIAN: No; attended with the noble – [Whispers.]

BAYES: Again.

USHER: Who, he in gray?

PHYSICIAN: Yes; and at the head of – [Whispers.]

BAYES: Pray, mark.

USHER: Then, Sir, most certain, ’twill in time appear. These are the reasons that have mov’d him to’t; First, he – [Whispers.]

BAYES: Now the other whispers.

USHER: Secondly, they – [Whispers.]

BAYES: At it still.

USHER: Thirdly, and lastly, both he, and they – [Whispers.]

BAYES: Now they both whisper. [Exeunt Whispering.]⁶³

‘The Mystery’ is closely modelled on this whispering scene. Austen’s playlet is comprised of a series of interruptions and non-communications. It opens with a mock mysterious line, ‘But hush! I am interrupted!’, and continues in a similarly absurd and nonsensical manner:

DAPHNE: My dear Mrs Humbug how dy’e do? Oh! Fanny, t’is all over.

FANNY: Is it indeed!

MRS HUMBUG: I’m very sorry to hear it.

FANNY: Then t’was to no purpose that I …

DAPHNE: None upon Earth.

MRS HUMBUG: And what is to become of? …

DAPHNE: Oh! thats all settled. [whispers Mrs Humbug]

FANNY: And how is it determined?

DAPHNE: I’ll tell you. [whispers Fanny]

MRS HUMBUG: And is he to? …

DAPHNE: I’ll tell you all I know of the matter. [whispers Mrs Humbug and Fanny]

FANNY: Well! now I know everything about it, I’ll go away.

MRS HUMBUG & DAPHNE: And so will I. [Exeunt]

(MW, p. 56)

The play ends with a further whispering scene, where the secret is finally whispered in the ear of the sleeping Sir Edward: ‘Shall I tell him the secret? … No, he’ll certainly blab it … But he is asleep and won’t hear me … So I’ll e’en venture’ (MW, p. 57). In ‘The Mystery’, we are never told any information about the conversations between the characters, and it becomes as incongruous as Bayes’s own ‘new’ play, which he proudly insists has no plot.

Austen’s third playlet, ‘The First Act of a Comedy’, parodies musical comedy, an extremely popular mode of dramatic entertainment in the latter part of the eighteenth century.⁶⁴ A satirical passage from George Colman’s New Brooms (1776) targets the vogue for comic opera:

Operas are the only real entertainment. The plain unornamented drama is too flat, Sir. Common dialogue is a dry imitation of nature, as insipid as real conversation; but in an opera the dialogue is refreshed by an air every instant. – Two gentlemen meet in the Park, for example, admire the place and the weather; and after a speech or two the orchestra take their cue, the musick strikes up, one of the characters takes a genteel turn or two on the stage, during the symphony, and then breaks out –

When the breezes

Fan the trees-es,

Fragrant gales

The breath inhales,

Warm the heart that sorrow freezes.⁶⁵

Austen, like Colman, satirises the artificiality of the comic opera, its spontaneous outbursts of songs, and distinctive lack of plot.⁶⁶ Austen’s playlet concerns the adventures of a family en route to London, and is set in a roadside inn, a familiar trope of the picaresque form popularised in Fielding’s novels Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones.⁶⁷ Austen’s play also nods towards Shakespeare’s comic scenes set in ‘The Boar’s Head’ in Henry IV, Parts One and Two. Three of the female characters are called ‘Pistoletta’, ‘Maria’ and ‘Hostess’.

Chloe, who is to be married to the same man as Pistoletta, enters with a ‘chorus of ploughboys’, reads over a bill of fare and discovers that the only food available is ‘2 ducks, a leg of beef, a stinking partridge, & a tart’. Chloe’s propensity for bursting into song at any given moment echoes Colman’s burlesque of the inanities of comic opera: ‘And now I will sing another song.’

SONG

I am going to have my dinner,

After which I shan’t be thinner,

I wish I had here Strephon

For he would carve the partridge

If it should be a tough one.

CHORUS

Tough one, tough one, tough one,

For he would carve the partridge if it should be a tough one.

(MW, p. 174)⁶⁸

As will be seen in the next two chapters, Austen clearly enjoyed musical comedy, even if, like Colman, she was conscious of its deficiencies as an ‘imitation of nature’.

The three playlets in the juvenilia are parodic and satirical, and a strong sense prevails that Austen was writing to amuse her sophisticated, theatre-loving brothers. Whether she was composing a mocking counterpart to Berquin’s instructive dramatic dialogues, or writing burlesques in the style of plays like The Rehearsal and The Critic, she endeavoured to impress her siblings with her knowledge of the drama. Two of her playlets, ‘The Mystery’ and ‘The First Act of a Comedy’, allude specifically to what was popular on the London stage, and mock it by drawing attention to its limitations and artificiality. ‘The Visit’ nods to the popular comedy High Life Below Stairs, so often dramatised for the private theatre, and begins to explore the incongruities and absurdities of genteel social behaviour.

In contrast with Berquin and William Hayley, who self-consciously used their plays to instruct, Austen entertains. Furthermore, even as she abandoned plays and turned to fiction, she began an apprenticeship in the art of dramatic dialogue and quasi-theatrical techniques that was to distinguish her mature writing. Austen’s juvenilia reveals a deep familiarity with the most popular plays of the period: the works of Garrick, Fielding, Sheridan and Cowley.⁶⁹

The Steventon theatricals took place between 1782 and 1790, coinciding with the period in which Jane Austen’s juvenile literary works were written. Given the abundance of dramatic entertainment that she was exposed to at this time, it is not at all surprising that there were attempts at playwriting among her youthful literary efforts. Contrary to popular belief, however, it was not only in her childhood at Steventon that Austen developed her interest in the drama. In the period between the composition of the early versions of Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility and the completion of the mature novels, Austen was taking part in private theatricals, writing dramatic dialogues and turning her favourite novel into a five-act comedy.

Jane Austen took part in private theatricals in 1805 when she was thirty. The death of her father early in the same year had a profound effect on the lives of the three dependent women whom he left behind, who were not to find a permanent home until they settled at Chawton in 1809. Some time after her father’s death Austen may have redrafted and put the finishing touches to a short epistolary novel, Lady Susan. In June, the Austen sisters left Gay Street in Bath, collecting their niece Anna on the way, and set out for her brother Edward (Austen) Knight’s Godmersham home. During her time at Kent, Jane spent many hours amusing her favourite nieces, Fanny and Anna, with play-acting. It was here that Anne Sharp, the children’s governess, formed a friendship with Jane Austen that was to last for the rest of the latter’s life. In the Godmersham private theatricals, Miss Sharp played the male roles and was clearly a great success.

The unpublished diaries of one of those nieces, Fanny Knight, reveal that aunt Jane had no scruples about play-acting. Fanny records a game of ‘school’ in which her aunts, grandmother and governess dressed up and took part:

Wednesday 26 June. We had a whole holiday. Aunts and Grandmama played at school with us. Aunt C was Mrs Teachum the Governess Aunt Jane, Miss Popham the teacher Aunt Harriet, Sally the Housemaid, Miss Sharpe the Dancing Master the Apothecary and the Serjeant, Grandmama Betty Jones the pie woman and Mama the bathing woman. They dressed in Character and we had a most delightful day. – After dessert we acted a play called Virtue Rewarded. Anna was the Duchess St Albans, I was the Fairy Serena and Fanny Cage a shepherdess ‘Mona’. We had a bowl of Syllabub in the evening.⁷⁰

Although improvisational play was part of the fun, the small company of women also included their own plays in their repertoire. Virtue Rewarded may well have been composed by Anne Sharp, with roles written specifically for the children.⁷¹

The theatricals continued throughout June and July. Then on 30 July Fanny recorded two more amateur performances, including a play possibly written by Anne Sharp called Pride Punished: or Innocence Rewarded:72 ‘Aunt C and J, Anna, Edward, George, Henry, William and myself acted The Spoilt Child and Innocence Rewarded, afterwards we danced and had a most delightful evening.’⁷³ Bickerstaffe’s The Spoilt Child was a great favourite on the London stage, popularised by Mrs Jordan who played the cross-dressed role of ‘Little Pickle’, the naughty child of the title. If Fanny played the part of Little Pickle and Anne Sharp his father, it is plausible that Jane Austen took the role of the spinster aunt, Miss Pickle. The most popular scene in the play is when the naughty child catches his aunt and her lover in the garden reciting love poetry and planning their elopement, and sews their clothes together.

It was during the 1805 Kent visit that Jane Austen read Thomas Gisborne’s dour Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex. She would have been amused to discover Gisborne’s assertion that play-acting was injurious to the female sex through encouraging vanity and destroying diffidence ‘by the unrestrained familiarity with persons of the other sex, which inevitably results from being joined with them in the drama’.⁷⁴ Jane wrote to Cassandra, ‘I am glad that you recommended Gisborne for having begun, I am pleased with it, and I had quite determined not to read it’ (Letters, p. 112). This remark suggests a softening of her prior scepticism towards Gisborne, yet she clearly had no intention of putting his prescriptions into practice and giving up her involvement with private theatricals.⁷⁵ Jane Austen not only acted in plays at the same time that she was reading Gisborne, she also committed the grave offence of luring children into this dangerous activity, a practice that Gisborne particularly abhorred:

Most of these remarks fully apply to the practice of causing children to act plays, or parts of plays; a practice of which parents, while labouring to vindicate it, sometimes pronounce an emphatical condemnation, by avowing a future purpose of abandoning it so soon as their children shall be far advanced in youth.⁷⁶

Gisborne’s prejudice directly opposes Arnaud Berquin’s championing of the moral efficacy of family theatricals. Austen appears to have been more sympathetic to Berquin’s view, judging by her enthusiasm for private theatricals among Edward Knight’s young family at Kent. Perhaps she was rekindling memories of happier days at Steventon in her present uncertain state of home (she was to live at yet another brother’s home in Southampton before eventually settling at Chawton).

In the meantime she continued not only to act with the children, but also returned to drama writing. It may well have been at this time that, with the help of her niece Anna, she put the finishing touches to her five-act play, Sir Charles Grandison: or The Happy Man, a burlesque dramatisation of her favourite novel, Richardson’s The History of Sir Charles Grandison.⁷⁷

There are two more notable occurrences that reflect Austen’s interest in the drama. There still exists in the Austen-Leigh family collection a short unidentified document, untitled and consisting of two dramatic dialogues on the business of child-rearing in the early nineteenth century. From 1806 to 1809 Mrs Austen, her two daughters and Martha Lloyd were living in Southampton, for part of the time with Frank Austen and his newly pregnant wife Mary Gibson. As was the convention, the women read novels and plays aloud. This provided Jane Austen with another opportunity for the composition of amusing playlets on the subject of baby-care and motherhood.⁷⁸

In these dramatic dialogues, a first-time mother, Mrs Denbigh, is seen neglecting her child, and spending almost all of her time in the garden looking at her auriculas. She pleads ignorance in child-rearing as ‘I was just come from school when I was married, where you know we learnt nothing in the way of medicine or nursing’. The incompetence of Mrs Denbigh (and her Irish nanny) is contrasted with the sensible advice and practical skills of her friend Mrs Enfield:

MRS ENFIELD: [Endeavours to look at the back] Ah Nurse his shirt sticks! Do bring me some warm water & a rag.

MRS DENBIGH: [rising] I shall faint if I stay.

MRS ENFIELD: I beg you will stay till we can see what can be done.

MRS DENBIGH: [takes out her smelling bottle] I will try – how unfeeling [aside].

MRS ENFIELD: [applies a mild plaister] Now nurse you must change the plaister night & morning, spread it very thin, & keep a few folds of soft linen over it – Will you bring me a clean shirt.

NURSE: [going out] Yes Ma’am, if I can find one – I wish she and her plaister were far enough [aside].⁷⁹

The dialogues are didactic, as they are meant to be, but the selfish Mrs Denbigh is comically drawn. Her rattling conversations perhaps foreshadow the monologues of Miss Bates and Mrs Elton in Emma.⁸⁰

The other significant event in these later years took place in 1809. It was then, only two years before starting work on Mansfield Park, that Austen acted the part of Mrs Candour in Sheridan’s School for Scandal. In writing of Sir William Heathcote of Hursley Park, Hampshire, in 1898, the novelist Charlotte M. Yonge recalled: ‘His mother was Elizabeth, daughter of Lovelace Bigg-Wither of Manydown Park in the same country … She lived chiefly in Winchester, and it may be interesting that her son remembered being at a Twelfth day party where Jane Austen drew the character of Mrs Candour, and assumed the part with great spirit.’⁸¹

There is no reason to doubt this evidence. Jane Austen’s friendship with the Manydown family lasted all her life. Both she and Cassandra often used to spend the night at Manydown when they attended the Basingstoke balls as girls. Jane informed Cassandra of a twelfth day party at Manydown in her letter to Cassandra of 27 December 1808:

I was happy to hear, cheifly [sic] for Anna’s sake, that a Ball at Manydown was once more in agitation; it is called a Child’s Ball, & given by Mrs Heathcote to Wm – such was its’ beginning at least – but it will probably swell into something more … it is to take place between this & twelfth-day. (Letters, p. 160)

The postscript to her next letter (10 January 1809) suggests that she attended the festivities: ‘The Manydown Ball was a smaller thing than I expected, but it seems to have made Anna very happy. At her age it would not have done for me’ (Letters, p. 165). If this was the same party that Sir William recollected, then Jane Austen was acting in a Sheridan play only two years before she began writing Mansfield Park. This would seem to be still stronger evidence against the notion that the novel offers an unequivocal condemnation of amateur theatricals.

Jane Austen’s artistic development was clearly influenced by the vogue for private theatricals that swept Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Contrary to popular belief, it was not merely as a passive spectator that she was exposed to private theatricals as a young girl. Her plays show that she was actively engaged in the amateur dramatics at Steventon, and her involvement in private theatricals in Kent, Southampton and Winchester confirm an interest that was to be crystallised in the writing of Mansfield Park.

2

The Professional Theatre

In 1790 Jane Austen wrote Love and Freindship, a parody of the popular heroine-centred, sentimental novel. The cast of characters includes two strolling actors, Philander and Gustavus, who eventually become stars of the London stage. As a final joke, these two fictional characters are transformed into real figures: ‘Philander and Gustavus, after having raised their reputation by their performance in the theatrical line in Edinburgh, removed to Covent Garden, where they still exhibit under the assumed names of Lewis & Quick’ (MW, p. 109).

William Thomas (‘Gentleman’) Lewis (1748–1811) and John Quick (1748–1831) were well-known comic actors of the Covent Garden Company. The roles of Faulkland and Bob Acres in Sheridan’s The Rivals were created for them, and Quick was also the original Tony Lumpkin in Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. ‘Gentleman’ Lewis earned his appellation for his rendering of refined roles. A fellow actor, G. F. Cooke, called him ‘the unrivalled favorite of the comic muse in all that was frolic, gay, humorous, whimsical, and at the same time elegant’.¹ Leigh Hunt considered that ‘vulgarity seems impossible to an actor of his manners’,² and Hazlitt’s testimony ranked him high above the comedians of his day: ‘gay, fluttering, hare-brained Lewis … all life and fashion, and volubility, and whim; the greatest comic mannerist that perhaps ever lived.’³

Quick, conversely, was a fine ‘low’ actor, ‘the prince of low comedians’.⁴ He was a diminutive man who breathed life into the roles of clowns, rustics and servants before he became famous with his performance of Tony Lumpkin. Unsurpassed in playing old men, he was George III’s favourite actor.⁵ Hazlitt records that he ‘made an excellent self-important, busy, strutting, money-getting citizen; or a crusty old guardian, in a brown suit and a bob-wig’.⁶

By the 1790s Lewis and Quick were among the highest-paid actors in the Covent Garden Company.⁷ Austen’s reference to this comic duo reveals her knowledge of the contemporary stars of the London stage, and suggests the young girl’s eagerness to be included in the theatre-loving clan of her brothers and her cousin Eliza de Feuillide, to whom Love and Freindship was dedicated (MW, p. 76). The joke is more than merely a glancing and amusing allusion to an immensely popular pair of eighteenth-century comedians: it also reveals a striking and specific interest in the nuanced world of high and low comedy in the late Georgian theatre. This interest was to have a strong influence on Austen’s comic vision. As will be demonstrated, her sense of the interplay between genteel characters and low ones was an important part of her awareness of how comedy works.

The first reference to the professional theatre in Austen’s letters is a mention of Astley’s Theatre in London, in August 1796: ‘We are to be at Astley’s tonight, which I am glad of’ (Letters, p. 5). The history of this theatre, and its importance in the growth of the illegitimate stage, has been overlooked by Austen scholars.

Astley’s Amphitheatre was an equestrian theatre built on the south side of the river in Lambeth by Philip Astley in 1770.8 When first opened it was merely an open-air circus ring with covered seats. By 1780 Astley had roofed over the whole of his ring, which was now called the Amphitheatre Riding House. It was renamed the Royal Grove in 1784, when Astley obtained a royal patent, and in 1787, he added ‘burletta’ to his amphitheatre licence.⁹ It was popular not only for equestrian events, but for acrobatics, swordsmanship, musical interludes, songs and dancing. In 1794 the amphitheatre was burnt to the ground. It was rebuilt in the following year with the new name, the Amphitheatre of Arts.¹⁰ In 1796, when the Austens visited Astley’s, the entertainment was more elaborate than ever before. Thirty-five new acts were advertised, and, as a special attraction, two Catawba Indian chiefs performed dances and tomahawk exercises.¹¹ Astley’s Amphitheatre survived two fires and lasted until 1841.

As with many of the minor, unpatented London theatres, Astley’s circumvented the licensing laws by exploiting the ambiguity of the term ‘burletta’ and slipping in straight plays among the main entertainments.¹² The Licensing Act of 1737 confined legitimate theatrical performances to two patent playhouses in London, Drury Lane and Covent Garden. The Act prohibited the performances of plays elsewhere for ‘hire, gain or reward’ and gave the Lord Chamberlain statutory powers to examine all plays.¹³ The monopoly of the patents was broken in 1740, however, by Henry Giffard who re-established his theatre in Goodman’s Fields and avoided the ‘hire, gain or reward’ clause by claiming to charge only for the music and giving the play free. The authorities tolerated Giffard’s theatre until David Garrick joined the company in 1741. The unprecedented success of Giffard’s new actor ensured that both he and Garrick were offered engagements at Drury Lane, and Goodman’s Fields was closed once more.

Giffard had demonstrated that the law could be circumvented. Other theatre managers followed suit and found ways of evading the £50 fine and the threat of the loss of their licence. Samuel Foote sold tickets inviting the public to ‘drink a dish of chocolate with him’ at noon, and provided entertainments free of charge, thereby inventing the matinee. This led to his obtaining a summer patent for his Little Theatre in the Haymarket in 1766.14

Foote’s patent was followed by a number of patents for provincial theatres. In London, by the early nineteenth century, the proliferation of illegitimate theatres posed a formidable challenge to the patents. By 1800 there were seven minor theatres offering regular entertainment: Sadler’s Wells, Astley’s, the Royal Circus, the Royalty in east London, Dibdin’s Sans Souci, the King’s, Pantheon and the first Lyceum.¹⁵ In 1826 Edward Brayley included eleven minor theatres in his Historic and Descriptive Accounts of the Theatres of London, and F. G. Tomlins, in A Brief View of the English Stage (1832), listed thirteen minor theatres operating in London.¹⁶

Astley’s was not only visited by Jane Austen. It was also chosen by her as the location for a major turning point in Emma.¹⁷ It is Astley’s Theatre where Robert Martin meets Harriet and rekindles the love affair between them, thus clearing the way for Emma and Mr Knightley to be united. Scholars have assumed that Austen was referring to the equestrian amphitheatre by Westminster Bridge in Lambeth. But following the success of his amphitheatre, which only operated on a summer licence, Astley opened a new theatre on Wych Street in the Strand in 1806.18 He called his new theatre the Olympic Pavilion, but it was also known as Astley’s Pavilion, the Pavilion Theatre, the Olympic Saloon, and sometimes simply Astley’s.¹⁹ The theatre specialised in equestrian events, but Astley also obtained a licence, through the influence of Queen Charlotte, for music and dancing.²⁰

According to the testimony of one nineteenth-century theatre historian, though Astley conducted several other establishments, the new Olympic theatre was ‘par excellence, “Astley’s” – a name which has become historic’.²¹ It was an especially popular place to take children. Astley had built his new theatre from the remains of some old naval prizes that he had bought. The deck of the ship was used for the stage and the floors.²² The new theatre was built like a playhouse, with a stage, orchestra, side-boxes, galleries and a pit surrounding the ring. It was the largest of London’s minor theatres and accommodated three thousand people.²³ In writing about Astley’s in his A Brief View of the English Stage, Tomlins notes that it was ‘a name at which the youthful heart bounds, and the olden one revives. Jeremy Bentham pronounced it to be the genuine English theatre, where John Bull, whatever superior tastes he might ape, was most sincerely at home’.²⁴

Jane Austen was not absolutely precise about dates in Emma: the theatre visit takes place some time in late summer and Harriet marries Martin shortly afterwards, in late September. This opens up the possibility of the Astley’s reference being to either the summer amphitheatre in Lambeth or the winter Olympic house off Drury Lane. Strictly speaking, the summer season commenced on Easter Monday and closed about the end of September or the beginning of October.²⁵ Given that the Austens patronised the Lambeth Amphitheatre, Jane may well have intended the same theatre. On the other hand, the genteel John Knightleys visit Astley’s as a treat for their young boys, and Harriet, on quitting their box, is made uneasy by the size of the crowds. This suggests the superior Olympic Pavilion.²⁶ The Lambeth Amphitheatre also had its own separate entrance for the boxes and the pit, with the gallery entrance fifty yards down the road, so it would be more likely that Harriet encountered large crowds at the Olympic.²⁷

Nevertheless, whichever of Astley’s playhouses Austen intended when she was writing Emma in 1813, the allusion is of considerable interest, as the long-standing battle between the minor theatres and the patents had once again flared up that year, with the name ‘Astley’s’ at the centre of controversy. When Elliston opened up Astley’s in 1813 with the provocative name ‘Little Drury Lane Theatre’, he was almost immediately forced to close. He was able to reopen the theatre by reverting to its old name. In 1812 Astley had sold his theatre and licence to Robert Elliston for £2800.28 Almost as soon as the management passed into Elliston’s hands, he remodelled the playhouse in the hope of attracting a superior type of audience. He introduced a mixed programme of farce, pantomime and melodrama, all of course concealed under the term ‘burletta’. Though many of the minor theatres circumvented the law by similar methods, none had dared to do so in the direct vicinity of the patents. Perhaps Austen was sympathetic to Elliston’s crusade to compete against the patents, for he was one of her favourite actors, and, as we will see, she followed his fortunes throughout his career.

Astley’s was known for its socially diverse audience. It was ‘a popular place of amusement for all classes’.²⁹ A friendly and unpretentious theatre, its tickets were priced well below those of the patents.³⁰ The spectacle that it offered clearly appealed to families, and to people of all classes, much as the West End musical attracts thousands of people today. Austen had no compunction about visiting the minor theatres when she stayed in London, and her reference to Astley’s in Emma may indeed have been a gesture in support of them in their long battle to break the monopoly of the patents.

Given Jane Austen’s scrupulous sense of class and realism, and the particular concern in Emma with fine discriminations within social hierarchies, it is by no means fanciful to attach considerable weight to her choice of Astley’s for the reconciliation between Harriet and Robert Martin. Precisely because of its status as a minor, illegitimate theatre, it was a place where a yeoman farmer and a girl who is without rank (carrying the ‘stain of illegitimacy’, we are reminded in the same chapter) could mingle freely with the gentry.

Austen does mention the patented theatres in her other novels. In Sense and Sensibility, Willoughby ‘ran against Sir John Middleton’ in the lobby of Drury Lane Theatre, where he hears that Marianne Dashwood is seriously ill at Cleveland. In Pride and Prejudice Lydia Bennet, in complete disregard to the disgrace that she has brought on the family by her elopement, can only prattle: ‘To be sure London was rather thin, but however the Little Theatre was open’ (PP, p. 319). Lydia’s elopement takes place in August, and, as Austen was aware, the ‘Little Theatre’ in the Haymarket was the only house licensed to produce regular drama during the summer season. This is a fine example of Austen’s scrupulous sense of realism working in conjunction with her knowledge of the London theatre world. It is also worth noting that her favourite niece, Fanny Knight, with whom she often went to the theatre, was particularly fond of the ‘little’ theatre in the Haymarket, as opposed to the vast auditoriums at Covent Garden and Drury Lane. In her unpublished diaries Fanny complained that ‘Drury Lane is too immense’ and that she preferred ‘the dear enchanting Haymarket.’³¹

There is only one other mention of playgoing in Pride and Prejudice, a vague reference to an ‘evening at one of the theatres’ in which Elizabeth Bennet and Mrs Gardiner talked over intimate family matters in what was presumably a theatre box, while the rest of the party watched the action on the stage (PP, pp. 152–54). In Persuasion, Austen includes only a few vague references to the Theatre Royal on Orchard Street in Bath.³² However, she uses the same theatre in Northanger Abbey to structure an important plot link between John Thorpe and General Tilney. It is at the theatre that Thorpe, ‘who was never in the same part of the house for ten minutes together’ (NA, p. 95), falsely boasts to General Tilney that Catherine is the heiress to the Allen fortune, thus encouraging the General’s plan to invite her to Northanger Abbey.

In Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey and Emma Jane Austen uses the forum of the public theatre to implement crucial plot developments. In this, she was influenced by Fanny Burney, whose novels about the London ton used the playhouses as important meeting grounds for the advancement of plot lines. For example, in Evelina the heroine first attends Drury Lane to see Garrick in The Suspicious Husband and is later reunited with Lord Orville at a performance of Congreve’s Love for Love. Here she is subjected to impertinent remarks by the fop Lovel, who compares her to the character of Miss Prue, an ignorant rustic young hoyden, a role made famous by the comic actress Frances Abington.³³ As Burney and Austen demonstrate in their novels, the public theatres provided an arena for the exchange of news and gossip.

In Northanger Abbey there is a special irony at play, for Austen’s novel about an ingenue’s entrance into Bath society self-consciously mirrors Burney’s Evelina: or The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World. In one of the more subtle allusions to Evelina, Catherine quotes from Congreve’s Love for Love when she tells John Thorpe that she hates the idea of ‘one great fortune looking out for another’ (NA, p. 124). Like Evelina, Catherine delights in going to the play, though she has been told that the Theatre Royal Bath is ‘quite horrid’ compared to the London stage (NA, p. 92).

Northanger Abbey’s status as a burlesque Gothic novel has unwittingly deflected attention away from Austen’s parody of the heroine-centred sentimental novel popularised by female writers like Burney and Edgeworth. Instead of London’s beau monde, unfamiliar terrain to Austen, the resort city of Bath becomes her microcosm of fashionable high society. Northanger Abbey was written in 1798–99. As Jane Austen and her mother were at Bath during the later part of 1797 visiting the Leigh-Perrots, her account could well have been based on actual experience.

In 1799 Jane Austen revisited Bath, staying at Queen Square with her brother Edward Knight. This visit included a trip to the Theatre Royal: ‘The Play on Saturday is I hope to conclude our gaieties here, for nothing but a lengthened stay will make it otherwise’ (Letters, p. 47). She does not name the play, but the account in the Bath Herald and Reporter for 29 June 1799 reveals that she saw Kotzebue’s drama The Birth-Day and ‘The pleasing spectacle of Blue-Beard’ on that occasion. In the eyes of the Bath newspapers, the new Kotzebue comedy was considered to be a vast improvement on his previous works, which were notable for their immorality:

If the German Author has justly drawn down censure for the immorality of his productions for the stage, this may be considered as expiatory – this may be accepted as his amende honoyrable [sic]; it is certainly throughout unexceptionable, calculated to promote the best interest of virtue, and the purest principles of benevolence: and though written in the style of Sterne, it possesses humour without a single broad Shandyism.³⁴

James Boaden, a professed admirer of Kotzebue, described the play as ‘the naval pendant to the military Toby and Trim’, and thought it contained ‘one of the best delineations of human nature coloured by profession’.³⁵

The Birth-Day, a comedy in three acts, was translated from Kotzebue’s play Reconciliation, and adapted for the English stage by Thomas Dibdin (1771–1841).³⁶ The plot is centred on a feud in a Bertram family. Twin brothers, estranged over a law suit, are finally reconciled on their sixty-third birthday by the efforts of their children, cousins who are in love with each other. The heroine, Emma Bertram, is devoted to her father and has vowed never to marry until she is finally persuaded by her cousin: ‘But if a man could be found, who would bestow on your father a quiet old age, free from every sorrow; who, far from robbing the father of a good daughter, would weave the garland of love round three hearts, who would live under his roof, and multiply your joys, by reconciling your father and your uncle.’³⁷

Two of the best comic characters in The Birth-Day are a boatswain, Jack Junk, and a meddling housekeeper, Mrs Moral, who has taken over Captain Bertram’s household and has contributed to the family estrangement for her own devious means.³⁸ Mansfield Park, in which a different Kotzebue adaptation is staged, shares with this other Kotzebue play not only the family name Bertram but also similar comic stereotypes in the persons of the bullying, interfering Mrs Norris and the rum-drinking, oath-swearing Mr Price.³⁹

In May 1801 Jane Austen moved more permanently to Bath to live with her parents. She stayed until July 1806. Owing to the absence of letters during this time, very little is known of her theatrical activities there.⁴⁰ Her residence in Bath coincided, however, with one of the most prosperous and exciting times in the history of the local stage. The period from 1790 to the opening of the new theatre in Beaufort Square in 1805 marked an unprecedented time of ‘prosperity, of brilliancy and of progress’.⁴¹

Bath was a fashionable resort town and was able to support a theatre of considerable standing for the society people who flocked there to take the waters. The theatre was run in tandem with the Bristol playhouse and was regarded as one of the best in the country. Provincial theatres in the Georgian era were not merely seasonal or summer playhouses, playing in the London off-season, but year-round operations. Their importance to the life and culture of their cities is suggested in the increasing numbers of royal patents granted by 1800.42 The Bath theatre had been patented in 1768, becoming the first Theatre Royal of the English provinces.⁴³

Outside London, Bath was one of the most important theatres, maintaining a regular company which was supplemented by London stars.⁴⁴ Many of the London stars had indeed cut their teeth in the Orchard Street playhouse. It was described variously as ‘a dramatic nursery for the London stage’ and a ‘probationary school of the drama to the London stage’.⁴⁵ Mrs Siddons had begun her career there in 1778, and retained such an affection and loyalty to the theatre that she often returned during the summer seasons.⁴⁶

One of the theatre’s main assets was Robert William Elliston (1774–1831). Intended for the church, the young Elliston ran away to Bath and made his first appearance in Orchard Street in 1793.47 Remarkably, he stayed until 1804, although ‘by permission of the Bath manager’ he was loaned to the London theatres, where he played once a fortnight, reinforcing the already strong links between the London and Bath playhouses. One of the reasons why Elliston refused to leave Bath, despite lucrative offers from both Drury Lane and Covent Garden, was his marriage. In 1796 he eloped with and married Elizabeth Rundall, a dance teacher, who, despite her husband’s success, continued her occupation.⁴⁸

Despite Sheridan’s efforts to hire him, Elliston refused a permanent engagement at Drury Lane. His new wife had recently gone into partnership running a dance and deportment academy, and Elliston enjoyed his position as Bath’s star attraction. Even when he was finally lured to Drury Lane in 1804, Mrs Elliston remained in Bath. Jane Austen was aware of the unusual arrangements of Elliston’s private life. In February 1807, she shared with Cassandra some Bath gossip gleaned from her Aunt Leigh-Perrot: ‘Elliston, she tells us has just succeeded to a considerable fortune on the death of an Uncle. I would not have it enough to take him from the Stage; she should quit her business, & live with him in London’ (Letters, p. 122). This remark, which has not hitherto drawn comment from Austen scholars, demonstrates her loyalty to Elliston, both in his professional and his private life. Even though Elliston was now based in London, Austen continued to take an interest in him, and she clearly disapproved of his wife’s determination to remain with her academy in Bath.

Elliston’s last engagement on the Bath stage, before leaving for London, was as Rolla in Sheridan’s adaptation of Kotzebue’s Pizarro.⁴⁹ Rolla was not a surprising choice for Elliston. His performance of the noble, virtuous warrior was one of his most acclaimed tragic roles. It was also the role that he played for his Drury Lane debut, later that year, when he took over from Kemble.⁵⁰

Another Kotzebue adaptation, Lovers’ Vows, was performed at least seventeen times in Bath from 1801 to 1806.51 This suggests that Austen was familiar with the play long before she used it in Mansfield Park. Elliston played the part of Frederick. Kotzebue adaptations such as The Birth-Day, Pizarro, The Stranger and Lovers’ Vows continued to flourish at Bath, despite objections by the Anti-Jacobin Review to ‘the filthy effusions of this German dunce’.⁵² In September 1801 Siddons played Elvira in Pizarro alongside Elliston at the Orchard Street Theatre.⁵³ Elvira, in particular, incited vicious attacks by the Anti-Jacobin Review which, with typically excessive rhetoric, described her as one of the most reprehensible characters that had ever been suffered to disgrace the stage. Such charges cut no ice with playgoers, who flocked to the Bath theatre to see Siddons as Pizarro’s dignified paramour.

Another comment suggesting that the Austens were theatregoers while living in Bath is to be found in a letter written by Jane’s mother to her daughter-in-law Mary Austen: ‘Cooke, I dare say will have as full houses tonight and Saturday, as he had on Tuesday.’⁵⁴ George Frederick Cooke (1756–1811) was the name of the Covent Garden actor whose brilliance as a tragic actor was overshadowed by his notorious drinking problem. He was one of the great actors of the English stage, the hero of Edmund Kean. After Cooke’s death brought on by hardened drinking, Kean arranged for his remains to be removed to a better location, and kept the bone of the forefinger of his right hand as a sacred relic.⁵⁵ Cooke’s reputation as a drunkard has obscured his acting abilities. His performances of Richard III and Iago were legendary, but he was considered to be an unreliable and erratic actor. One of his critics, to Cooke’s great mortification, described him in the following terms: ‘No two men, however different they may be, can be more at variance than George Cooke sober and George Cooke in a state of inebriety.’⁵⁶ At Covent Garden in 1803, while playing Sir Archy MacSarcasm in Love à la Mode, Cooke was so drunk that he was hissed off stage and the curtain dropped.

Like Kean and Siddons, Cooke started his career as a provincial actor before he became famous on the London stage.⁵⁷ In December 1801 Cooke returned to Bath where he played Richard III, Shylock and Sir Archy MacSarcasm. In that season, the same time that Mrs Austen was writing of him, he also played Iago to Elliston’s Othello. Cooke wrote in his journal: ‘I received the greatest applause and approbation from the audiences.’⁵⁸

The last five seasons at the Orchard Street Theatre before the opening of the new playhouse in 1805 saw the introduction of several London actors onto the Bath stage. The appearance of such London stars gave prominence to the playhouse, and, coupled with the allure of Elliston, ensured its reputation as a theatre of the highest standing. Austen was fortunate in residing in Bath at a time when the theatre was in ‘the zenith of its glory’,⁵⁹ and where she could see her favourite actor performing all the major roles. Elliston’s most famous roles in comedy were Charles Surface, Doricourt, Ranger, Benedick, Marlow, Lord Ogleby, Captain Absolute, Lord Townley and Dr Pangloss. In tragedy, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Douglas, the Stranger, Orestes and Rolla were just a few of the characters that her ‘best Elliston’ made his own.⁶⁰

Elliston was unusual in being a player of tragic and comic parts. Leigh Hunt declared Elliston ‘the only genius that has approached that great actor [Garrick] in universality of imitation’. Though Hunt preferred him in comedy, he described him as ‘the best lover on the stage both in tragedy and comedy’.⁶¹ Others praised his diversity. Byron said that he could conceive nothing better than Elliston in gentlemanly comedy and in some parts of tragedy.⁶² His obituary stated that ‘Elliston was undoubtedly the most versatile actor of his day’.⁶³ Even William Oxberry’s disparaging memoir conceded that ‘Mr Elliston is the best versatile actor we have ever seen’.⁶⁴ Charles Lamb honoured him with high praise in his ‘Ellistonia’: ‘wherever Elliston walked, sate, or stood still, there was the theatre’.⁶⁵

Elliston finally moved on to the London stage, where Austen saw him perform. She complained, however, of the falling standards of Elliston’s acting when she saw him in London. Austen’s observations on his demise reveal her familiarity with his work from the Bath years. With the majority of Austen’s letters from this time missing, destroyed after her death, much has been lost, for, as her London letters reveal, she was a discerning and perceptive critic of the drama.

When Austen left Bath in 1806 to live with Frank Austen and his wife, Mary, in Southampton, she was forced to make do with the French Street Theatre, a far cry from Bath’s Theatre Royal. It was also during the first few months at Southampton that Austen wrote her two little playlets on baby-care. Frank Austen’s young wife was pregnant with their first child, and writing the plays proved a welcome diversion during the winter evenings. Austen also attended the public theatre in Southampton. In her list of expenses for 1807 she noted that she had spent 17s. 9d. for water parties and plays during that year.⁶⁶

The French Street Theatre in Southampton was served mainly by provincial companies, but stars from the London stage made occasional visits. Sarah Siddons and Dora Jordan made visits of a few days in 1802 and 1803.67 The less talented Kemble brother, Charles Kemble, and his wife played there for a few nights in August 1808.68 John Bannister (1760–1836), one of the most popular comedians of the London stage, was also well known to the provinces. His Memoirs record that he played the provinces during the summer months from 1797 to 1812. In the course of his career he took on the roles of some 425 characters.⁶⁹

Although there is no record by Jane Austen of the plays that she saw at the French Street theatre, her niece recorded one of the performances that she attended with her two aunts. In September 1807 Edward Knight and his family visited his mother and sisters in Southampton. Austen’s attachment to her niece Fanny Knight is revealed in her description of her as ‘almost another sister’ (Letters, p. 144). Austen had amused her niece with private theatricals in 1805, and when Fanny came to stay they visited the playhouse. Fanny recorded in her journal that on 14 September 1807 the party saw John Bannister in The Way to Keep Him and the musical adaptation of Kotzebue’s Of Age Tomorrow for his benefit.⁷⁰

Bannister’s role in Arthur Murphy’s comedy The Way to Keep Him was Sir Bashful Constant, a man of fashion in possession of the shameful secret that he is in love with his own wife, his ‘Cara Sposa’.⁷¹ Jane Austen employed this fashionable Italianism to brilliant effect in Emma. For Emma, there is no clearer mark of Mrs Elton’s vulgarity than her references to her husband as ‘Mr E.’ and ‘my caro sposo’: ‘A little upstart, vulgar being, with her Mr E., and her caro sposo, and her resources, and all her airs of pert pretension and under-bred finery’ (E, p. 279). Scholars have debated the source of Austen’s use of the phrase, but no one has noticed its presence in Murphy’s comedy, where, spoken by the coxcomb Sir Brilliant Fashion, it surely got a laugh in the theatre.

Bannister was best known for his low roles. Leigh Hunt claimed that ‘no actor equals him in the character of a sailor’.⁷² The sailor, Jack Junk, in Thomas Dibdin’s adaptation of Kotzebue’s The Birth-Day was one of his best-loved roles. Bannister was also praised for his ability to transform himself into many different roles: ‘The greatest comedians have thought themselves happy in understanding one or two characters, but what shall we say of Bannister, who in one night personates six, and with such felicity that by the greatest part of the audience he is sometimes taken for some unknown actor?’⁷³ Leigh Hunt was thinking, in particular, of A Bold Stroke for a Wife, where Bannister transmigrated into five different characters. However the comic after-piece, Of Age Tomorrow, that Austen saw in Southampton was also used as a vehicle for Bannister’s versatility.

Thomas Dibdin adapted Of Age Tomorrow from Kotzebue’s Der Wildfang. Dibdin had already adapted Kotzebue’s The Birth-Day and The Horse and Widow.⁷⁴ Michael Kelly, in his Reminiscences, records that Bannister persuaded Kelly and Dibdin to adapt Der Wildfang for Drury Lane.⁷⁵ Kelly describes Of Age Tomorrow as a great favourite. The ballad ‘No, my love, no’, according to Kelly, was ‘the most popular song of the day … not only to be found on every piano-forte, but also to be heard in every street’.⁷⁶

Dibdin’s musical farce showed Bannister adopting three different disguises in his endeavours to woo his lover, Sophia, who is guarded by a dowager aunt, Lady Brumback, who stands to lose half her fortune if her niece marries. Bannister’s disguise as Fritz the frizeur was extremely popular, especially for his comic rendering of a story of his master breaking his leg over a bannister, to which Lady Brumback remarks, ‘Poor fellow! I wish there were no Bannisters in the world’.⁷⁷ Kelly wrote: ‘Bannister’s personification of the Hair Dresser, was excellent; had he served a seven years’ apprenticeship to the trade, he could not have been more au fait in it, nor have handled the comb, curling irons and powder puff, more skillfully.’⁷⁸ Bannister’s transformations into a Swiss soldier and a (cross-dressed) abandoned mother of a foundling child showed his powers of imitation at their very best.⁷⁹

The appearance of London stars at the French Street theatre may be attributed to the rising popularity of Southampton as a spa town. Charles Dibdin, the Southampton-born dramatist,⁸⁰ partly ascribed this transformation to the increasing number of ‘genteel families who have made it their residence’, and also to the tourists who came to Southampton for the sea-bathing.⁸¹ Though the theatre had acquired a poor reputation by the end of the eighteenth century, a new playhouse was opened in July 1803 by one John Collins.⁸²

The French Street theatre also housed amateur theatricals from the local grammar school. The school’s headmaster, George Whittaker, was passionate about the theatre and encouraged his pupils to stage amateur theatricals for charitable purposes. In 1807 Home’s famous tragedy Douglas was acted for the benefit of British prisoners of war in France, to ‘an uncommonly crowded house’.⁸³ In Mansfield Park, Tom Bertram’s comic remarks about the efficacy of schoolboys reciting the part of young Norval in Douglas may have been an echo to such performances lingering in Jane Austen’s memory of amateur theatricals.

Her comments a year later, in 1808, about the playhouse suggest that she had taken a dislike to its shabbiness: ‘Our Brother [James] we may perhaps see in the course of a few days – & we mean to take the opportunity of his help, to go one night to the play. Martha ought to see the inside of the Theatre once while she lives in Southampton, & I think she will hardly wish to take a second veiw [sic]’ (Letters, p. 155).

Another family descendant, Richard Arthur Leigh, observed that while Jane Austen was living in Southampton she became friendly with a Mr Valentine Fitzhugh, whose sister-in-law was an ardent admirer of Mrs Siddons who would assist her in dressing and make-up for her shows.⁸⁴ There is, however, no record of any conversation that Austen might have had with Fitzhugh about the theatre, which is hardly surprising given that he was so deaf ‘he could not hear a Canon, were it fired close to him’ (Letters, p. 160).

During the Bath and Southampton years Austen’s writing was put on hold. She had produced three full-length novels before leaving Steventon in 1801, and began working on them again in 1809. Biographers and critics have been puzzled by Austen’s eight-year silence, attributing it to her evident unhappiness and displacement. But perhaps Bath and Southampton simply had more to offer in the way of public diversions and amusements than Hampshire and Kent. At Chawton Austen turned her mind once more to her novels and, with the help and encouragement of her brother Henry, began to think about publication. When Jane spent time in London with Henry, negotiating with publishers, she rarely missed a chance to visit the London theatres.

Had the majority of Jane Austen’s letters not been destroyed after her death in 1817, we would have had a much more detailed sense of her passion for the theatre. But there is enough evidence in the few surviving letters to suggest that she was utterly familiar with contemporary actors and the range and repertoire of the theatres. Her taste was eclectic; she enjoyed farces, musical comedy and pantomime, considered to be ‘low’ drama, as much as she enjoyed Shakespeare, Colman and Garrick.

3

Plays and Actors

The year 1808 was a particularly busy one for Jane Austen. She spent most of the time travelling between her various brothers and family friends. After playing Mrs Candour in The School for Scandal at the Manydown Twelfth Night party, she visited the Fowles at Kintbury and in May she visited Henry and Eliza Austen at 16 Michael Place in Brompton. The latter two, whose love of the theatre went back to the home theatricals at Steventon, were delighted to live in close proximity to several famous London stars. The actress and singer Jane Pope lived next door to them at No. 17. She had been the original Mrs Candour in The School for Scandal, playing the part until she was in her sixties. By this time, she was the only member of the original cast left on the stage.¹ Having herself played the part of Mrs Candour earlier that year, Jane Austen must have been amused to be living next door to the actress who had inspired the original role.

At No. 15 Michael Place was Elizabeth Billington, the celebrated soprano singer. John Liston the comedian lived at No. 21.2 Jane Austen stayed until July, enjoying the rounds of dinner-parties, theatre trips and concerts arranged by Henry and Eliza. Henry Austen owned his own box at one of the illegitimate theatres, the Pantheon in Oxford Street.³ The Pantheon had originally opened in 1772 as a place of assembly for masquerades and concerts, which were all the rage in the 1770s.⁴ Boswell and Dr Johnson visited and admired the magnificent building in 1772, and Fanny Burney distilled her own experience of the new Pantheon into Evelina; her heroine is ‘extremely struck with the beauty of the building’ when she is taken to a concert there.⁵

The Pantheon was converted into an opera house in 1791 but was destroyed by fire a year later, losing its hope of a royal patent to the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket. Thereafter the Pantheon was rebuilt and resumed its original function as a place of concerts and masquerades until 1812, when it reopened as the Pantheon Theatre, staging the usual mixed bill of burlettas and ballet to circumvent the licensing law.

Henry Austen’s patronage of minor playhouses such as the Pantheon and the Lyceum, as well as the legitimate patent houses, suggests his unflagging interest in the theatre. Like his sister, he had no compunction about supporting the minor theatres. Unlike his brother James, who lost interest in the theatre after he was ordained, Henry’s passion for the theatre carried on into maturity; and, whenever Jane and Cassandra were in town, he was to be found arranging seats at the various London theatres. Although there are few surviving letters to fill in the details of Jane’s activities at this time (the letters stop altogether from 26 July 1809 until 18 April 1811), she surely took advantage of Henry’s and Eliza’s hospitality as she did in the following years. Starting at the latter date, there is a sufficient amount of information to provide a fair estimate of her theatrical activities up to 28 November 1814, the last time she is known to have attended a theatre.

In order to be available for the proof-reading of Sense and Sensibility, she went to London in April 1811, staying with Henry and Eliza at their new home in Sloane Street. Shortly after her arrival she expressed a desire to see Shakespeare’s King John at Covent Garden. In the meantime, she sacrificed a trip to the Lyceum, nursing a cold at home, in the hope of recovering for the Saturday excursion to Covent Garden:

To night I might have been at the Play, Henry had kindly planned our going together to the Lyceum, but I have a cold which I should not like to make worse before Saturday … [Later on Saturday] Our first object to day was Henrietta St to consult with Henry, in consequence of a very unlucky change of the Play for this very night – Hamlet instead of King John – & we are to go on Monday to Macbeth, instead, but it is a disappointment to us both. (Letters, pp. 180–81)

Her preference for King John over Hamlet may seem curious by modern standards, but can be explained by one of the intrinsic features of Georgian theatre: the orientation of the play towards the star actor in the lead role. Her disappointment in the ‘unlucky change’ of programme from ‘Hamlet instead of King John’ is accounted for in her next letter to Cassandra:

I have no chance of seeing Mrs Siddons. – She did act on Monday, but as Henry was told by the Boxkeeper that he did not think she would, the places, & all thought of it, were given up. I should particularly have liked seeing her in Constance, & could swear at her with little effort for disappointing me. (Letters, p. 184)

It was not so much King John that Austen wanted to see as Siddons in one of her most celebrated roles: Queen Constance, the quintessential portrait of a tragic mother. In the words of her biographer and friend, Thomas Campbell, Siddons was ‘the imbodied image of maternal love and intrepidity; of wronged and righteous feeling; of proud grief and majestic desolation’.⁶ Siddons’s own remarks on this ‘life-exhausting’ role, and the ‘mental and physical’ difficulties arising from the requirements of playing Constance provide a striking testimony to her all-consuming passion and commitment to the part. Siddons records:

Whenever I was called upon to personate the character of Constance, I never, from the beginning of the play to the end of my part in it, once suffered my dressing-room door to be closed, in order that my attention might be constantly fixed on those distressing events which, by this means, I could plainly hear going on upon the stage, the terrible effects of which progress were to be represented by me.⁷

Though her part was brief – she appeared in just two acts – Siddons’s impassioned interpretation was acclaimed. Constance’s famously eloquent speeches and frenzied lamentations for her dead boy were newly rendered by Siddons, for she didn’t ‘rant’ and produce the effects of noisy grief but was stunningly understated, showing grief ‘tempered and broken’, as Leigh Hunt put it.⁸ While admitting that King John was ‘not written with the utmost power of Shakespeare’, Hunt nevertheless viewed the play as a brilliant vehicle for Siddons’s consummate tragic powers.⁹ Her biographer, Thomas Campbell, also claimed that Siddons’s single-handedly resuscitated the play, winning over the public to ‘feel the tragedy worth seeing for the sake of Constance alone’.¹⁰

Jane Austen certainly felt that ‘Constance’ was worth the price of a ticket. Though Henry Austen was misinformed by the box-keeper and Siddons had indeed appeared in Macbeth on Monday (22 April), Jane was less sorry to have missed her in Lady Macbeth than in Constance, which may imply that she had previously seen her in Macbeth. Sarah Siddons acted Lady Macbeth eight times and Constance five times that 1811–12 season, before retiring from the London stage, so perhaps Jane finally got her wish.¹¹

On Saturday (20 April) the party went instead to the Lyceum Theatre in the Strand, where the Drury Lane company had taken their patent after the fire in 1809.12 They saw a revival of Isaac Bickerstaffe’s The Hypocrite.

We did go to the play after all on Saturday, we went to the Lyceum, & saw the Hypocrite, an old play taken from Moliere’s Tartuffe, & were well entertained. Dowton & Mathews were the good actors. Mrs Edwin was the Heroine – & her performance is just what it used to be. (Letters, p. 184)

In The Hypocrite, the roles of Maw-Worm, an ignorant zealot, and the religious and moral hypocrite Dr Cantwell were acted by the renowned comic actors Charles Mathews (1776–1835), and William Dowton (1764–1851), singled out by Jane Austen for praise. Dowton was famous for his roles as Dr Cantwell, Sir Oliver Premium and Sir Anthony Absolute.¹³ Leigh Hunt described his performance in the Hypocrite as ‘one of the few perfect pieces of acting on the stage’.¹⁴

The great comic actor Charles Mathews was also a favourite of Hunt’s: ‘an actor of whom it is difficult to say whether his characters belong most to him or he to his characters’.¹⁵ Mathews was so tall and thin that he was nicknamed ‘Stick’; when his manager Tate Wilkinson first saw him he called him a ‘Maypole’, told him he was too tall for low comedy and quipped that ‘one hiss would blow him off the stage’.¹⁶

Mathews himself described the success of The Hypocrite at the Lyceum, and recorded his experiment in adding an extra fanatical speech for Maw-Worm, thus breaking the rule of his ‘immortal instructor, who says “Let your clowns say no more than is set down for them”.’ His experiment worked, and the reviews were favourable: ‘It was an admirable representation of “Praise God Barebones”, an exact portraiture of one of those ignorant enthusiasts who lose sight of all good while they are vainly hunting after an ideal perfectibility.’¹⁷ Jane Austen dearly loved a fool – in Pride and Prejudice she portrayed her own obsequious hypocrite and ignorant enthusiast, in Mr Collins and Mary Bennet.

Elizabeth Edwin (1771–1854), the wife of the actor John Edwin, performed the part of Charlotte, the archetypal witty heroine, for which she was famous.¹⁸ The Austen sisters were clearly familiar with Mrs Edwin’s acting style. She had played at Bath for many years, including the time that the Austens lived there, and she was also a favourite of the Southampton theatre, where the sisters may have seen her perform.¹⁹

Elizabeth Edwin was one of many actors from the provinces who had begun her career as a child actor in a company of strolling players. She was the leading actress at Wargrave at the Earl of Barrymore’s private theatricals.²⁰ She was often (unfairly) compared to the great Dora Jordan, whose equal she never was, though they played the same comic roles. Jane Austen’s ambiguous comment about Edwin suggests that she did not rate her as highly as Dowton and Mathews, whom she regarded as the ‘good actors’ in The Hypocrite. Oxberry’s 1826 memoir observed that although Edwin was ‘an accomplished artist … she has little, if any, genius – and is a decided mannerist’.²¹ She was an ‘artificial’ actress who betrayed the fact that she was performing:

Though we admired what she did, she never carried us with her. We knew that we were at a display of art, and never felt for a moment the illusion of its being a natural scene.²²

The preoccupation with the play as a vehicle for the star actor, popularly called ‘the possession of parts’, went hand-in-hand with the theatre’s proclivity towards an established repertory.²³ It was common to see the same actor in a favourite role year in, year out. Dora Jordan’s Rosalind and Little Pickle, both of them ‘breeches’ roles, were performed successfully throughout her long career. Siddons’s Lady Macbeth and Constance were staples of her repertory throughout her career, and, even after her retirement, they were the subject of comparison with other performances. The tradition of an actor’s interpretation of a classic role, which still survives today, was an integral part of an individual play’s appeal. Critics and the public would revel in the particularities of individual performances, and they would eagerly anticipate a new performance of a favourite role, though innovations by actors were by no means a guarantee of audience approbation.

In the early autumn of 1813, Jane Austen set out for Godmersham, stopping on the way in London, where she stayed with her brother Henry in his quarters over his bank at Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. On the night of 14 September, the party went by coach to the Lyceum Theatre, where they had a private box on the stage. As soon as the rebuilt Drury Lane had opened its doors to the public, the Lyceum had no choice but to revert to musical drama. The Austens saw three musical pieces. The first was The Boarding House: or Five Hours at Brighton; the second, a musical farce called The Beehive; and the last Don Juan: or The Libertine Destroyed, a pantomime based on Thomas Shadwell’s The Libertine. Once again, Jane Austen’s reflections on the plays were shared with Cassandra:

I talked to Henry at the Play last night. We were in a private Box – Mr Spencer’s – Which made it much more pleasant. The Box is directly on the Stage. One is infinitely less fatigued than in the common way … Fanny & the two little girls are gone to take Places for tonight at Covent Garden; Clandestine Marriage & Midas. The latter will be a fine show for L. & M. – They revelled last night in ‘Don Juan’, whom we left in Hell at half-past eleven … We had Scaremouch & a Ghost – and were delighted; I speak of them; my delight was very tranquil, & the rest of us were sober-minded. Don Juan was the last of 3 musical things; – Five hours at Brighton, in 3 acts – of which one was over before we arrived, none the worse – & The Beehive, rather less flat & trumpery. (Letters, pp. 218–19)

The Beehive was an adaptation of Kotzebue’s comedy Das Posthaus in Treuenbrietzen. Two lovers who have never met, but who are betrothed to one another, fall in love under assumed names. The young man discovers the ruse first and introduces his friend as himself; meanwhile the heroine, Miss Fairfax, in retaliation pretends to fall in love with the best friend. In the light of Emma, the conjunction of name and plot-twist is striking.

Austen clearly preferred the Kotzebue comedy to Five Hours at Brighton, a low comedy set in a seaside boarding house. Her ‘delight’ in Don Juan is properly amended to ‘tranquil delight’ for the sake of the upright Cassandra. Byron had also seen the pantomime, in which the famous Grimaldi played Scaramouch, to which he alludes in his first stanza of Don Juan:

We all have seen him, in the pantomime,

Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time.²⁴

Scaramouch was one of Grimaldi’s oldest and most frequently revived parts.

In her letter to Cassandra, Jane gives her usual precise details of the theatre visit, even down to the private box, ‘directly on the stage’. Again, the Austens showed their support for the minor theatres, and Henry is arranging trips to the Lyceum. Perhaps he had an arrangement with his friend Mr Spencer to share each other’s boxes at the minor theatres. Being seated in a box certainly meant that Jane could indulge in intimate discussion with Henry – as Elizabeth Bennet does with Mrs Gardiner in Pride and Prejudice.²⁵

As planned, the very next night the party went to Covent Garden Theatre, where they had ‘very good places in the Box next the stage box – front and second row; the three old ones behind of course’.²⁶ They sat in Covent Garden’s new theatre boxes, presumably in full consciousness that, at the opening of the new theatre, riots had been occasioned by the extra number of private and dress boxes.²⁷ The parson and poet George Crabbe and his wife were in London and Jane Austen joked about seeing the versifying vicar at the playhouse, particularly as the ‘boxes were fitted up with crimson velvet’ (Letters, pp. 220–21). The remark skilfully combines an allusion to Crabbe’s Gentleman Farmer, ‘In full festoons the crimson curtains fell’,²⁸ with detailed observation of the lavish fittings of the new Covent Garden Theatre, recently reopened after the fire of 1809. Edward Brayley’s account of the grand new playhouse also singled out the ‘crimson-covered seats’,²⁹ and described the grand staircase leading to the boxes, and the ante-room with its yellow-marble statue of Shakespeare.

The Austens saw The Clandestine Marriage by David Garrick and George Colman the Elder, and Midas: an English Burletta by Kane O’Hara, a parody of the Italian comic opera.³⁰ One of the attractions was to see Mr Terry, who had recently taken over the role of Lord Ogleby in The Clandestine Marriage.

The new Mr Terry was Ld Ogleby, & Henry thinks he may do; but there was no acting more than moderate; & I was as much amused by the remembrances connected with Midas as with any part of it. The girls were very much delighted but still prefer Don Juan – & I must say I have seen nobody on the stage who has been a more interesting Character than that compound of Cruelty & Lust. (Letters, p. 221)

Daniel Terry (1780–1829) had made his debut at Covent Garden on 8 September, just a few days before Jane Austen saw him.³¹ Sir Walter Scott was a great friend and admirer of Terry (who adapted several of the Waverley novels for the stage),³² and claimed that he was an excellent actor who could act everything except lovers, fine gentlemen and operatic heroes. Scott observed that ‘his old men in comedy particularly are the finest I ever saw’.³³ Henry Austen showed a little more tolerance than his sister in allowing Mr Terry teething troubles in the role of one of the most celebrated old men of eighteenth-century comedy.

Henry Austen’s faith in Terry’s capacity to grow into a beloved role reflects the performer-oriented tendency of the age. But Jane’s powerful and striking description of Don Juan is a far less typical response. Here a more discerning and discriminating voice prevails. Rather than the performer being the main focus of interest, she is responding to the perverse appeal of the character beneath the actor. The famous blackguard was still obviously on her mind, belying her earlier insistence upon ‘tranquil delight’ and ‘sober-mindedness’.

Jane Austen’s reference to Midas confirms that she had seen this entertainment at an earlier date. Garrick and Colman’s brilliant comedy The Clandestine Marriage had also been known to her for a long time. The title appears as a phrase in one of her early works, Love and Freindship, and, as will be seen, the play was a source for a key scene in Mansfield Park.

Austen was disappointed with her latest theatrical ventures, though had she stayed longer in London she might have been disposed to see Elliston in a new play, First Impressions, later that month.³⁴ When she wrote to her brother Frank, she complained of the falling standards of the theatres:

Of our three evenings in Town one was spent at the Lyceum & another at Covent Garden; – the Clandestine Marriage was the most respectable of the performances, the rest were Sing-song & trumpery, but did very well for Lizzy & Marianne, who were indeed delighted; but I wanted better acting. – There was no Actor worth naming. – I beleive the Theatres are thought at a low ebb at present. (Letters, p. 230)

Austen’s heart-felt wish for ‘better acting’, or, in Edmund Bertram’s words, ‘real hardened acting’, was soon to be realised.

Drury Lane had indeed reached its lowest ebb for some years when it was rescued by the success of a new actor, Edmund Kean (1787–1833), who made his electrifying debut as Shylock in January 1814. The story of his stage debut has become one of the most enduring tales of the theatre. The reconstructed Drury Lane Theatre, rebuilt after it was destroyed by fire in 1809, was facing financial ruin, greatly exacerbated by the ruinous management of R. B. Sheridan, when a strolling player from the provinces, Edmund Kean, was asked to play Shylock.³⁵ Kean, in his innovative black wig, duly appeared before a meagre audience, mesmerising them by his stage entrance. At the end of the famous speech in the third act, the audience roared its applause. ‘How the devil so few of them kicked up such a row’, said Oxberry, ‘was something marvelous.’³⁶ Kean’s mesmerising appearance on the stage was given the seal of approval when Hazlitt, who after seeing him on the first night, raved: ‘For voice, eye, action, and expression, no actor has come out for many years at all equal to him.’³⁷

The news of Kean’s conquest of the stage reached Jane Austen, and in early March 1814, while she was staying with Henry during the negotiations for the publication of Mansfield Park, she made plans to see the latest acting sensation:

Places are secured at Drury Lane for Saturday, but so great is the rage for seeing Keen [sic] that only a third & fourth row could be got. As it is in a front box however, I hope we shall do pretty well. – Shylock. – A good play for Fanny. She cannot be much affected I think. (Letters, p. 256)

The relatively short part of Shylock is thus considered to be a suitably gentle introduction to Kean’s powerful acting for the young girl. But Austen’s own excitement is barely contained in her description of the theatre party: ‘We hear that Mr Keen [sic] is more admired than ever. The two vacant places of our two rows, are likely to be filled by Mr Tilson & his brother Gen. Chownes.’ Then, almost as if she has betrayed too much pleasure in the absence of her sister, she writes: ‘There are no good places to be got in Drury Lane for the next fortnight, but Henry means to secure some for Saturday fortnight when You are reckoned upon’ (Letters, p. 256).

Another visit to see Kean was intended, and Henry’s acquaintance with the theatre world again emphasised. The party went to Drury Lane on the evening of 5 March, attending the eighth performance of The Merchant of Venice. Austen’s initial response to the latest acting phenomenon was calm and rational: ‘We were quite satisfied with Kean. I cannot imagine better acting, but the part was too short, & excepting him & Miss Smith, & she did not quite answer my expectations, the parts were ill filled & the Play heavy’ (Letters, p. 257). Hazlitt, too, frequently complained that one of the problems of the star system was filling up the smaller parts. In his review of The Merchant of Venice, he was only grudgingly respectful of the minor roles.

Kean was still very much on Austen’s mind, for in the same letter, in the midst of a sentence about Henry Crawford and Mansfield Park, she unexpectedly reverted to the subject of him with greater enthusiasm: ‘I shall like to see Kean again excessively, & to see him with You too; – it appeared to me as if there was no fault in him anywhere; & in his scene with Tubal there was exquisite acting’ (Letters, p. 258).

Jane Austen was conscious of the dramatic demands of Shylock’s scene, which required the actor to scale, alternately, between grief and savage glee. Her singling out of this particular scene was no doubt influenced by the reports of the opening night, where the audience had been powerless to restrain their applause. Kean’s biographer noted the subtle intricacies of the scene in the third act ending with the dialogue between Shylock and Tubal:

Shylock’s anguish at his daughter’s flight, his wrath at the two Christians who had made sport of his suffering, his hatred of Christianity generally, and of Antonio in particular, and his alternations of rage, grief and ecstasy as Tubal enumerated the losses incurred in the search of Jessica – her extravagances, and then the ill-luck that had fallen on Antonio; in all this there was such originality, such terrible force, such assurance of a new and mighty master, that the house burst forth into a very whirlwind of approbation.³⁸

For many critics, the greatest quality of Kean’s as Shylock was his ability to change emotional gear at high speed, to scale the highest points and the lowest. Thus Hazlitt:

In giving effect to the conflict of passions arising out of the contrasts of situation, in varied vehemence of declamation, in keenness of sarcasm, in the rapidity of his transitions from one tone and feeling to another, in propriety and novelty of action, presenting a succession of striking pictures, and giving perpetually fresh shocks of delight and surprise, it would be difficult to single out a competitor.³⁹

Kean’s acting style was hereafter characterised as impulsive, electric and fracturing. ‘To see him act’, Coleridge observed famously in his Table Talk, ‘is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.’⁴⁰

In contrast to her reaction to Kean, Jane Austen was disappointed with the performance of her old favourite Elliston. The programme that night included him in an oriental ‘melodramatic spectacle’ called Illusion; or The Trances of Nourjahad. The Austen party left before the end:

We were too much tired to stay for the whole of Illusion (Nourjahad) which has 3 acts; – there is a great deal of finery & dancing in it, but I think little merit. Elliston was Nourjahad, but it is a solemn sort of part, not at all calculated for his powers. There was nothing of the best Elliston about him. I might not have known him, but for his voice. (Letters, pp. 257–58)

Henry Crabb Robinson also saw Elliston as Nourjahad and wrote in his diary that ‘his untragic face can express no strong emotions’. Robinson admired Elliston as a ‘fine bustling comedian’, but thought that he was a ‘wretched Tragedian’.⁴¹ Austen’s observation that Elliston’s brilliance lay especially in his comic powers was a view shared by his critics and admirers. Charles Lamb thought so too, but was afraid to say so when Elliston recounted how Drury Lane was abusing him. Lamb recorded: ‘He complained of this: “Have you heard … how they treat me? they put me in comedy.” Thought I – “where could they have put you better?” Then, after a pause – “Where I formerly played Romeo, I now play Mercutio.”’⁴²

Austen’s ‘best Elliston’ was altered from his glory days at Bath and his early promise at Drury Lane as a result of physical deterioration brought on by hard drinking. His acting powers had steadily declined. From managing various minor and provincial theatres, he finally became the lessee and manager of Drury Lane from 1819 until 1826, when he retired, bankrupt through addiction to drinking and gambling.

Elliston’s acting talent suffered when he threw his energies into his multifarious business ventures. The London Magazine and Theatrical Inquisitor observed that in later years he had fallen into ‘a coarse buffoonery of manner’ and Leigh Hunt oberved that he had ‘degraded an unequivocal and powerful talent for comedy into coarseness and vulgar confidence’.⁴³

Three days after seeing Kean and Elliston at Drury Lane, Jane Austen went to the rival house Covent Garden to see Charles Coffey’s farce, The Devil to Pay. ‘I expect to be very much amused’, she wrote in anticipation (Letters, p. 260). Dora Jordan played Nell, one of her most famous comic roles. The party were to see Thomas Arne’s opera Artaxerxes with Catherine Stephens (1794–1882), the celebrated British soprano who later became Countess of Essex. She was, however, less excited by the opera than the farce: ‘Excepting Miss Stephens, I dare say Artaxerxes will be very tiresome’ (Letters, p. 260). Catherine Stephens acted Mandane in Artaxerxes, a role in which Hazlitt thought she was superb, claiming that he could hear her sing ‘forever’: ‘There was a new sound in the air, like the voice of Spring; it was as if Music had become young again, and was resolved to try the power of her softest, simplest, sweetest notes.’⁴⁴ Austen’s response was just as she expected: ‘I was very tired of Artaxerxes, highly amused with the Farce, & in an inferior way with the Pantomime that followed’ (Letters, p. 260). However, she was unimpressed with Catherine Stephens and grumbled at the plan for a second excursion to see her the following night: ‘I have had enough for the present’ (Letters, p. 260).

Neverthless, in spite of a cold, she joined the party to see Stephens as Mrs Cornflower in Charles Dibdin’s The Farmer’s Wife, a role created for her musical ability and her talent in low comedy:

Well, we went to the Play again last night … The Farmer’s Wife is a musical thing in 3 acts, & as Edward was steady in not staying for anything more, we were at home before 10 – Fanny and Mr J. P. are delighted with Miss S. & her merit in singing is I dare say very great; that she gave me no pleasure is no reflection upon her, nor I hope upon myself being what Nature made me on that article. All that I am sensible of in Miss S. is, a pleasing person & no skill in acting. We had Mathews, Liston and Emery: of course some amusement. (Letters, p. 261)

Though disappointed with Stephens, she enjoyed the performances of Mathews, Liston and Emery, who were three of the great comedians of the day. Tall and skinny, Charles Mathews was noted for his brilliance as ‘officious valets and humorous old men’.⁴⁵ His long-time friend and fellow-actor, the inimitable John Liston, often appeared alongside him.⁴⁶

Liston (1776–1846) was the highest paid comedian of his time.⁴⁷ Hazlitt described him as ‘the greatest comic genius who has appeared in our time’.⁴⁸ He was noted for his bumpkin roles and humorous old men. Leigh Hunt observed that his ‘happiest performances are ignorant rustics … he passes from the simplest rustic to the most conceited pretender with undiminished easiness of attainment’.⁴⁹ Liston’s grave and serious face added to the effect of his comedy, Lamb wrote: ‘There is one face of Farley, one of Knight, one (but what a one it is!) of Liston’.⁵⁰ For Hazlitt, Liston had ‘more comic humour oozing out of his features and person than any other actor’.⁵¹ He was a particularly fine Baron Wildenhaim in Lovers’ Vows.

John Emery (1777–1822) also played in the same line of old gentlemen and rustics, and was compared to Liston: ‘If our two stage-rustics, Emery and Liston, are compared, it will be found that the former is more skilled in the habits and cunning of rusticity, and the latter in its simplicity and ignorance.’ But Hunt later claimed of Emery that, in playing the countrymen, the field was ‘exclusively and entirely his’.⁵² Hazlitt also observed that ‘in his line of rustic characters he is a perfect actor’.⁵³

The Farmer’s Wife was a vehicle for the singing arts of Stephens and the comic talents of Mathews, Liston and Emery. It tells a rather tired tale of an innocent (Emma Cornflower) abducted by a debauched aristocrat (Sir Charles). Mathews plays a village apothecary, Dr Pother. Liston played a cunning London manservant to Sir Charles. This served as a comic contrast to Emery’s ignorant but good-hearted Yorkshireman, servant to Farmer Cornflower.⁵⁴ The play’s comic juxtapositions of high and low characters drew on a convention long associated with the stage: the contrast between town and country, a theme that Austen had been working on in Mansfield Park.

Jane Austen’s blunt assertion that Stephens had ‘no skill in acting’ is refreshing and to the point, in an age distinguished by its over-elaborate encomiums of actors and their roles. Furthermore her remark reveals a strong and discerning voice, one that knows what ‘good hardened acting’ is, and isn’t, and is confident in its own critical judgement without being unduly influenced by the current favourite of the stage. After revealing the details of the previous night’s theatre to Cassandra, she wrote of plans for yet another excursion to Covent Garden to see Kean’s rival, Charles Mayne Young (1777–1856), acting in Richard III: ‘Prepare for a Play the very first evening. I rather think Covent Garden, to see Young in Richard’ (Letters, p. 261).

Young had been the leading tragedian of the London stage before Kean challenged his supremacy in 1814. Young was in the Kemble school of acting, and was noted for his heroic, dignified acting style, though he was often compared unfavourably with his predecessor Kemble: ‘His most striking fault, as a tragic actor, is a perpetual imitation of Mr Kemble.’⁵⁵ He was often criticised for his lack of passion: ‘Mr Young never gives himself up to his feelings, but always relies upon his judgement – he never acts from the heart, but the head.’⁵⁶ Leigh Hunt was lukewarm about his abilities, describing him as an actor of ‘elegant mediocrity’, and Hazlitt was even more disparaging, especially of Young’s Hamlet: ‘he declaims it very well, and rants it very well; but where is the expression of the feeling?’⁵⁷ Since Cassandra was coming to London, and presumably accompanied her sister to see Young’s Richard, there is no letter describing Jane’s reaction to his rendering of the part. But the critical consensus was that the performance was not a success.

The opposition between the Kemble/Young and the Cooke/Kean school of acting was often couched as a conflict between reason and feeling, judgement and passion. It is striking that Austen, who is so often associated with ‘sense’ rather than ‘sensibility’, clearly admired Kean’s acting but seems to have had little enthusiasm for the Kemble school. Though she names most of the major stars of the London stage in her surviving letters, there is not a single mention of John Philip Kemble himself.

Jane Austen did see Young again, this time with the new acting sensation, Eliza O’Neill, who had made her triumphant debut a month earlier as Juliet and was heralded as the only tragedian worthy to take over the mantle of Sarah Siddons. Just as Drury Lane had been saved from the brink of financial ruin by the advent of Kean, so Covent Garden was desperate to bring forward its own star in reply.⁵⁸ Byron refused to see O’Neill out of his loyalty to Kean and Drury Lane, and for fear that he would like her too much: ‘No I’m resolved to be un-“Oneiled”’.⁵⁹ As with Kean’s debut earlier that year, audiences acclaimed O’Neill as a genius from the provinces; it was claimed that some spectators fainted under her spell.⁶⁰

Jane Austen’s last known visit to the professional theatre took place late in 1814. She was as keen to see Covent Garden’s new star as she had been to see Kean, and on the night of 28 November Henry and Edward arranged for her to see Isabella, a tragedy adapted by Garrick from Thomas Southerne’s The Fatal Marriage: or The Innocent Adultery, in which O’Neill played the leading female role. Jane, writing to her niece Anna Lefroy, was disappointed with O’Neill’s performance:

We were all at the Play last night, to see Miss O’neal [sic] in Isabella. I do not think that she was quite equal to my expectation. I fancy I want something more than can be. Acting seldom satisfies me. I took two Pocket handkerchiefs, but had very little occasion for either. She is an elegant creature however & hugs Mr Younge [sic] delightfully. (Letters, p. 283)

She shows discernment in her rather cool response to O’Neill’s performance. Even O’Neill’s most ardent admirers admitted that she was less good in maternal parts, like Isabella, but was more suited to playing innocent young girls, such as the lovesick Juliet, and repentant fallen women, such as Jane Shore and Mrs Haller: ‘She could not represent maternal affection; her love was all the love of fire, youth and passion.’⁶¹

Isabella, the tragedy of a devoted wife and mother who is persuaded to marry again only to find her beloved husband is alive, was considered to be one of Siddons’s finest roles. She had established herself on the London stage with her performance in the part. O’Neill suffered from the inevitable comparisons drawn between the two women. Even Hazlitt, who admired O’Neill’s Isabella, thought it lacked Siddons’s grandeur and power: ‘Nothing can be more natural or more affecting than her noble conception of the part. But there is not that terrible reaction of mental power on the scene, which forms the perfection of tragedy, whether in acting or writing.’⁶² Oxberry’s biography described her performance in Isabella as ‘artificial’ and suggested that it ‘savoured strongly of adoption from the style of Kean’.⁶³

Austen was clearly intimate enough with the theatre world to know about the nuances of O’Neill’s acting style. Her joking reference to her two pocket handkerchiefs alludes to O’Neill’s reputation as an actress of excessive sensibility whose magic was to ‘raise the sigh’ and who provoked tears rather than terror. O’Neill’s biographer observed that her ‘triumph, it has been justly said, is in tears’.⁶⁴ For Hazlitt, O’Neill’s power lay in her extraordinary ability to draw sympathy from the audience. It was her ‘reaction’ to Romeo’s death that characterised her unique acting style: ‘In the silent expression of feeling, we have seldom witnessed anything finer.’⁶⁵

The telling phrase ‘[she] hugs Mr Young delightfully’ suggests that there was a kind of intimate theatrical code between Austen and her niece. As they were both aware, coupled with O’Neill’s ability to elicit sympathy and tears was her reputation as a ‘hugging actress’. This appellation appears to have been given by Thomas Amyot, according to the testimony of Crabb Robinson’s diary: ‘Saw Miss O’Neill in Isabella. She was as Aymot well said, “a hugging actress”. Sensibility shown in grief and fondness was her forte, – her only talent.’⁶⁶

The deleterious effects of excessive sensibility are a recurrent theme of Austen’s fiction from her earliest jokes in Love and Freindship to Sanditon. Her joke about O’Neill’s sensibility is shared not only with Anna but also with her other favoured niece Fanny Knight:

I just saw Mr Hayter at the Play, & think his face would please me on acquaintance. I was sorry he did not dine here. – It seemed rather odd to me to be in the Theatre, with nobody to watch for. I was quite composed myself, at leisure for all the agitation Isabella could raise. (Letters, p. 285)

Austen’s ironic remark, ‘It seemed rather odd to me to be in the Theatre, with nobody to watch for’, comically portrays herself in the role of the chaperone of her young nieces, guarding their exposure to excessive sensibility or ‘agitation’. Earlier, we saw her worrying about Fanny’s agitation on seeing Kean. As indicated, both Kean and O’Neill were reputed to have the power of making their audience faint under their spell. Towards the close of this letter, Austen makes a striking reference to the two most famous tragediennes of the age, and uses the ardent acting style of O’Neill to express the contrasting natures of her young nieces:

That puss Cassy, did not shew more pleasure in seeing me than her Sisters, but I expected no better; – she does not shine in the tender feelings. She will never be a Miss O’neal; – more in the Mrs Siddons line. (Letters, p. 287)

This passage, perhaps more than any other single reference to the theatre, is revelatory of Jane Austen’s intimacy with the late Georgian theatre. As she was clearly aware, one of the current debates in the theatre world was the contrasting acting styles of Mrs Siddons and Miss O’Neill. The latter’s ‘extreme natural sensibility’ was played off against the former’s classical nobility. For Hazlitt, Siddons was the embodiment of ‘high tragedy’, O’Neill of ‘instinctive sympathy’.⁶⁷

O’Neill’s biographer, Charles Inigo Jones, complained of ‘the rather too invidious comparisons constantly kept up betwixt her and Mrs Siddons’, and yet proceeded to make his own comparisons, contrasting not only the acting styles of the two women but their physical attributes which, he believed, embodied their acting styles. Thus Siddons’s ‘grandeur and dignity are pictured in her appearance’, and O’Neill’s ‘excess of sensibility is predominant … and well pourtrayed in her countenance’.⁶⁸

One of the best comparisons of the two tragedians is made in Oxberry’s memoir of O’Neill:

Miss O’Neill was a lovely ardent creature, with whose griefs we sympathized, and whose sorrows raised our pity. Mrs Siddons was a wonderful being, for whom we felt awe, veneration, and a more holy love … Miss O’Neill twined most upon our affections, but Mrs Siddons made an impression on our minds, that time never eradicated.⁶⁹

Austen’s observations in the scanty correspondence that survives offer decisive, hitherto neglected, evidence of her deep familiarity with the theatre of Siddons and O’Neill. In addition, her manner of comparing social conduct to theatrical models such as her niece’s Siddons-like dignified behaviour denoting a lack of sensibility (‘the tender feelings’) betrays a striking propensity to view life through the spectacles of theatre.

In January 1801, Cassandra Austen was compelled to abandon a trip to London, where she had intended to visit the Opera House to see the celebrated comic actress Dora Jordan (1761–1816). Jane wrote to her: ‘You speak with such noble resignation of Mrs Jordan & the Opera House that it would be an insult to suppose consolation required’ (Letters, p. 71).

The King’s Theatre or Italian Opera House in the Haymarket had been built by Vanbrugh in 1705. The Opera House was destroyed by fire in 1789 and was rebuilt on a vast scale in 1791.70 On the opening night, Michael Kelly sang in The Haunted Tower and Dora Jordan performed in Kemble’s farce, The Pannel.⁷¹ In 1799 the interior of the Opera House was partly remodelled by Marinari, the principal scene painter at Drury Lane.⁷² Austen’s sympathy for Cassandra’s double disappointment was therefore equally distributed between seeing the new Opera House and seeing the great Mrs Jordan.

In 1801 Dora Jordan was at the height of her powers, and the star of Drury Lane. As Siddons was the Tragic Muse of the London stage, so Jordan was the Comic Muse.⁷³ Hoppner’s portrait of Jordan as ‘The Comic Muse’ was a huge success at the Royal Academy in May 1786.74 Not even Jordan’s long-term liaison with the Duke of Clarence (to whom she bore ten children over a period of twenty years) could stem the tide of ‘Jordan-Mania’ that swept the country in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her image was everywhere: in the theatre, in theatrical engravings in print shop windows, and in the numerous caricatures by Gillray and Cruikshank. Sheet music of the songs that she sang at Drury Lane were sold on the streets.

Dora Jordan was unparalleled in comedy.⁷⁵ She appealed to both the critics and the theatre-going public who flocked to see her. Coleridge, Byron, Hazlitt and Lamb were among her admirers.⁷⁶ Hazlitt described her as ‘the child of nature, whose voice was a cordial to the heart, because it came from it … whose laugh was to drink nectar … who “talked far above singing” and whose singing was like the twang of Cupid’s bow’.⁷⁷ Leigh Hunt also singled out her memorable laugh and melodious voice: ‘Mrs Jordan seems to speak with all her soul … her laughter is the happiest and most natural on the stage.’⁷⁸

Jordan’s extensive range was unusual in an era during which actors tended to be restricted to specific kinds of role. She played genteel ladies, such as Lady Teazle and Widow Belmour, and romantic leads such as Lydia Languish and Kate Hardcastle. She was also famous for her ‘low’ roles, playing chambermaids, romps and hoydens to much acclaim. Miss Prue, Miss Hoyden, and Nell in The Devil to Pay were among her favourites. She was also famous for her ‘breeches roles’, playing the cross-dressed Hippolita, Harry Wildair, Rosalind, Viola, and Little Pickle in the farce The Spoilt Child. The theatre chronicler John Genest claimed that she ‘sported the best leg ever seen on the stage’.⁷⁹

Jordan’s performance as the innocent country girl in Garrick’s adaptation of William Wycherley’s highly risqué Restoration comedy The Country Wife combined the role of a hoyden with a ‘breeches part’. She played the Country Girl for fifteen seasons at Drury Lane from 1785 to 1800. In one of the most memorable scenes, Peggy takes a walk in St James’s Park, disguised as a young boy, as her jealous guardian is determined to protect her from other men. In a letter of 1799, Austen uses the notion of the ‘Country Girl’ to express doubts about the behaviour of an acquaintance, Earle Harwood, who had married a woman of obscure birth:

I cannot help thinking from your account of Mrs E. H. [Earle Harwood] that Earle’s vanity has tempted him to invent the account of her former way of Life, that his triumph in securing her might be greater; – I dare say she was nothing but an innocent Country Girl in fact. (Letters, p. 48)

Austen’s instinctive and imaginative way of using stage characters as a point of reference in her letters, coupled with her habit of weaving in quotations from favourite plays, offers yet another striking example of the range and extent of her familiarity with the drama. She is viewing the world around her through the spectacles of theatre, and, simultanously, showing her awareness of the intricacies and nuances of the kinds of social stratification reflected in the drama. The invention of ‘Country Girl’ innocents out of low-born characters in order to reflect favourable light upon the inventor is precisely the kind of dubious behaviour that Austen fictionalises so adroitly in Emma.

The life of the low-born and illegitimate Dora Jordan echoed the theatre’s predilection for plays depicting social metamorphosis. From her humble, obscure origins, she had risen to be the mistress of a prince and a royal estate.⁸⁰ Epilogues were written for Jordan with pointed reference to her private circumstances. In 1791, when the Duke was stepping up his courtship of Jordan, she played for her benefit an adaptation of Fletcher’s The Humorous Lieutenant called The Greek Slave: or The School for Cowards.⁸¹ Jordan played the part of a slave girl who is in love with a prince, and is eventually discovered to be of noble birth. The epilogue drew attention to her assumption of genteel roles, both on and off stage:

How Strange! methinks I hear a Critic say,

What, She the serious Heroine of the Play!

The Manager his want of Sense evinces

To pitch on Hoydens for the love of Princes!

To trick out Chambermaids in awkward pomp –

Horrid! to make a Princess of a Romp.⁸²

The epilogue also drew attention to the fact that, while she was acclaimed for her ‘low’ parts, her roles in polite comedy were often condemned. It seems that Jordan, even among her admirers, was considered to be a ‘natural’ at low parts. Even her adoring biographer Boaden described her low parts as ‘natural … the genuine workings of nature within her’.⁸³ Leigh Hunt believed that Jordan was at her best in low comedy, and declared that she was ‘all deficient in the lady’ and unable to bring off genteel roles because of her lack of ‘a certain graceful orderliness, an habitual subjection … of impulse of manner’, claiming, however, that ‘If Mrs Jordan were what she ought to be in the lady, we more than doubt whether she could be what she is in the boarding school-girl or the buxom woman’.⁸⁴

Hunt’s remarks betray a consciousness about the ease with which actresses could play the lady on stage and cross social boundaries off stage. Perhaps this was because so many former actresses married into aristocratic circles. Famously, one of Mrs Jordan’s co-stars, Elizabeth Farren, quit the stage to marry the Earl of Derby.⁸⁵ Catherine Stephens married the Earl of Essex and Miss O’Neill retired early to become Lady Wrixon Beecher. Jordan’s rise from illegitimate child-actor to royal mistress, crossing almost every social barrier, added an extra comic dimension to her role as Nell in Charles Coffey’s farce The Devil to Pay.

In 1814 Jane Austen saw Jordan in this play, in what was perhaps her most famous role, that of a timid cobbler’s wife who is magically transformed into an aristocratic society mistress.⁸⁶ Jordan played the part of the downtrodden wife who makes a better wife to Sir John, and a kinder mistress to her servants, than the irascible Lady Loverule. Lady Loverule’s metamorphosis into the cobbler’s wife eventually brings about her moral transformation. The rough treatment she experiences at the hands of the cobbler is partially responsible for the change in her attitude towards her exalted position:

There’s nought but the devil

And this good strap

Could ever tame a scold.⁸⁷

The comedy had long amused the public, who enjoyed seeing Jordan’s metamorphosis from rags into riches, just as she herself had been transformed, seemingly, by her liaison with the Duke of Clarence. Jordan was dubbed ‘Nell of Clarence’ by Horace Walpole, who intended a reference to her famous predecessor as royal theatrical mistress, Nell Gwynne.

By the time that Jane Austen saw The Devil to Pay in 1814, however, Jordan was separated from the duke and had returned to the stage.⁸⁸ Austen declared herself ‘highly amused’ with the farce. She was in good company – Hazlitt described Jordan’s Nell as ‘heavenly’:

Her Nell … was right royal … Miss Kelly is a dexterous knowing chambermaid: Mrs Jordan had nothing dexterous or knowing about her. She was Cleopatra turned into an oyster-wench, without knowing that she was Cleopatra, or caring that she was an oyster-wench. An oyster-wench, such as she was, would have been equal to a Cleopatra; and an Antony would not have deserted her for the empire of the world!⁸⁹

The Devil to Pay, the play that was so closely associated with Dora Jordan, exemplifies the drama’s obsession with the concept of social mobility, and its endless play on rank and manners. The metamorphosis of a timid country girl and a termagant wife and society mistress highlighted the same sort of class tensions initiated by the unprecedented success of Richardson’s Pamela. Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer was another favourite eighteenth-century comedy that examined uneasy social stratifications by a series of ironic reversals.

It is striking, but perhaps not surprising, that Austen favoured comedies where social roles were turned topsy-turvy, such as Coffey’s The Devil to Pay, Townley’s High Life Below Stairs and Colman’s The Heir at Law.⁹⁰ Such comedies were popular with a wide and varied audience. Theatre historians have shown how the need for public theatres to appeal to a socially diverse audience of box, pit and gallery led to a mixed programme of entertainment.⁹¹ The opposition between ‘high’ and ‘low’ became a perennial theme in eighteenth-century comedy, depicting the dramatic situations and comic scenes that arise when a person crosses the boundaries from low life to high, or vice-versa. The device of bringing together contrasting types, whereby different styles of action and language are attached to different classes and ironically juxtaposed, allowed the writer to exploit the comic potential of ‘high’ and ‘low’ life in Georgian England, and please the upper galleries as well as the pit.

Pleasing the upper galleries and the boxes was, however, only part of the intention. Writers for the theatre also knew that fashionable comedy was genteel, and that its audience was predominantly middle class; therefore farces that criticised aristocratic manners and poked fun at ‘low’ characters were particularly successful. The increasingly frequent appearance of wealthy merchants, sympathetically treated in the plays of the 1790s, has been ascribed to the development of ‘middle-class’ attitudes.⁹²

Ever since the success of Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, writers for the stage had used low life as a means of satirising high. In Cowley’s Which is the Man? one of the ‘low’ characters duly exclaims: ‘He must be a Lord by his want of ceremony.’ In The Devil to Pay, Nell’s gentle manners and innate dignity reflect badly on Lady Loverule. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen was also to depict the moral defeat of a high-ranking aristocrat (another Lady Loverule?) by a young woman ‘of inferior birth … without family, connections, or fortune’ (PP, pp. 355–56). In Mansfield Park the rendition of Fanny’s ‘low’ family in Portsmouth exploits the dramatic situations and comic scenes resulting from a woman’s movement across the boundaries between high life and low. Yet, in the end, it is the lower-ranking Price children (William, Fanny and Susan) who turn out better than the high-bred Bertrams.⁹³

It is evident throughout her work, distinguishable even from the early reference to Lewis and Quick, that Jane Austen was particularly attuned to the discrepancies between rank and manners within the tightly circumscribed social structure of her world. That understanding was shaped and informed by her interest in the drama. Her special interest in social metamorphosis, with its comic interplay between high and low types, was stimulated by the influence of eighteenth-century comedy.

The year 1814, in which Mansfield Park was published, saw the birth of a new age in the English theatre. Between the years of Kean’s birth in the late 1780s and his death in 1833 the theatre underwent unprecedented change. The two patent houses had been closed by catastrophic fires in 1808–9 and had then been rebuilt on a more lavish and grander scale than had been seen before. Kemble’s raised prices had incited sixty-seven nights of rioting in Covent Garden until he was forced to capitulate to the demands of the rioters. Edmund Kean and Eliza O’Neill had taken over the mantle of Kemble and Siddons, bringing to the stage a new style of intuitive acting characteristic of the ‘Romantic’ era. The rise of the illegitimate theatres and the impact of a ‘theatrical revolution’ in the advent of Kean (cemented by the praise of the cockney young literary radicals, Keats, Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt) marked a new age of vitality in the theatre.

This tumultuous period in the history of the theatre also happened to coincide with Jane Austen’s own birth and death. She attended the first performances of Kean and O’Neill, witnessed the transformations taking place in the theatre, and remained in touch with its nuances and foibles. Austen’s interest in the drama has been overlooked in the persistently mistaken notion that she was morally opposed to the theatre. Yet this assumption is in flagrant defiance of the evidence of the letters.

In the early part of 1814, in the middle of negotiations for the publication of Mansfield Park, and in the space of four days, Austen visited the professional theatre three times to see Kean, Jordan and Stephens. In the same short period she wrote of two more excursions to see Kean again and also his rival Young. It is a striking irony that the completion of Mansfield Park, the novel that has been viewed almost universally as Austen’s rejection of the theatre, coincided with a particularly busy theatre-going period for the author.⁹⁴

Judging by Austen’s earlier theatre-going periods, visits in such close proximity were not unusual. Her visit to Henry and Eliza in 1811 was planned with the Lyceum on Thursday, followed by two more visits to Covent Garden on Saturday and Monday. In 1813 she was found at the playhouse two nights in a row. This was by no means untypical and is an acute reminder of the frequency with which the Georgians visited the playhouse. On average, there were about 180 nights each season on which the patent houses offered the play-going public some kind of dramatic entertainment. The two winter patent houses alone could command a total of four hundred performances per season.⁹⁵ Whenever Jane made extended visits to town, she seems to have taken advantage of Henry’s close connections with the theatre.

Theatre in the late Georgian period became an essential part of fashionable middle-class life.⁹⁶ One of the consequences of the system of stock companies was that the audience became familiar with the same actors, seeing them in a variety of different roles and plays of all types, coming to know not only their styles of acting, but the details of their private lives.⁹⁷ The proliferation of stage-related literature meant that readers were able to know the intimate details of actors’ lives. In the words of one historian: ‘The public’s appetite for news, gossip and scandal about the stage was insatiable, its sense of intimate acquaintance with actors unique. A successful player could only have a public private life.’⁹⁸ To sate the audience appetite for theatre there were actors’ diaries, journals, memoirs, biographies of playwrights and managers, histories and annals of the theatre, periodicals, and magazines. Between 1800 and 1830 some one hundred and sixty different periodicals devoted exclusively to the theatre came into existence in Britain.⁹⁹

William Hazlitt, in the preface to his A View of the English Stage, describes the allure of the theatre in late Georgian England: ‘the disputes on the merits or defects of the last new piece, or a favourite performer, are as common, as frequently renewed, and carried on with as much eagerness and skill, as those on almost any other subject’.¹⁰⁰ With Hazlitt’s words in mind, one of the most striking features of Austen’s letters is her discussion of the theatre as a part of everyday conversation, to be written about as she writes about other quotidian matters like shopping and gossip.

Austen’s letters are a neglected historical source for her interest in and love of the theatre. The fundamental place the theatre occupied in her life is revealed in the manner in which it can be joked about, admired, even be taken for granted. Her mock-insult to Siddons, ‘I could swear at her for disappointing me’, reflects the way in which the sisters often consoled one another for missing particular performers. Her tantalising observation that Mrs Edwin’s performance ‘is just what it used to be’ speaks a language of intimate theatrical knowledge that we can only begin to guess at.

There is something paradoxically casual and yet essential about the way that Austen ‘converses’ about the theatre. At times her letters reveal a striking language of precision and economy in respect to the drama; details of the seating arrangements are often as important as descriptions of the plays, sometimes a cursory remark such as ‘no skill in acting’ is enough for the sisters and nieces, who are in tune with one another; no further elaboration is necessary, but it still needs to be said, because the interest is there between them. That interest lasted throughout Jane Austen’s life and, as I will demonstrate, had a profound effect on her fiction.

PART TWO

The Theatre and the Novels

She partook largely in all the best gifts of the comic muse

Henry Austen, ‘Biographical Notice’ of his sister

4

Early Works

The impact of private theatricals and the vitality of the professional theatre in the late Georgian period gave Jane Austen a comprehensive and longstanding interest in the drama. From her earliest attempts at play-writing to the systematic incorporation of quasi-theatrical techniques into her mature novels, the influence of the drama rarely left her. Throughout the canon there is an abundance of resonances and allusions to eighteenth-century plays, many of which the author expected her readers to recognise. It is, however, in Austen’s juvenilia, written to amuse her family, and not intended for public consumption, where the marks of her early exposure to the drama can most clearly be seen.

Jane Austen’s chief literary tool in her early works was the art of burlesque.¹ In this she was influenced by her brothers’ Oxford literary journal, The Loiterer, which ran for sixty numbers between 1789 and 1790, and made a duty of burlesquing ‘novel slang’ and the absurdities of popular fiction. Henry Austen’s burlesque of the literary conventions of courtship, entitled ‘Peculiar Dangers of Rusticus from the Attacks of a Female Cousin’, is particularly striking.² In this parody of a sentimental novel, the unlucky hero is besieged by the attentions of his cousin. The hero of Henry’s sentimental tale is lured into seducing his fair cousin: ‘She begged me for the loan of an arm. My arm she accordingly took, and in the course of all her frights and false steps, pinched it so hard and so often, that it is still quite black and blue, through sheer tenderness.’ Following his cousin’s admission of loving ‘cropt Greys to distraction’, he is a lost man:

There was no standing this … I thought she never looked so much like an angel. In short, I know not where my passion might have ended, had not the luckiest accident in the world at once roused me from this rapturous dream of fancied bliss, to all the phlegm of cool reflection and sober reality. A sudden puff of wind carried off two luxuriant tresses from her beautiful Chignon, and left her (unconscious to herself) in a situation truly ridiculous. The delicate thread of sentiment and affection was broken, never to be united.³

Henry Austen’s burlesque technique of juxtaposing a serious and sentimental reflection with a quasi-farcical action is echoed throughout Jane Austen’s Volume the First. Also typical is the taste for absurd detail and witty aphorism. Henry’s tale ends with a description of the hero’s unsuccessful attempts to be rid of his cousin; getting ‘completely cut’ and spilling lemonade over her dress prove fruitless: ‘But she wouldn’t be provoked, for when once a woman is determined to get a husband, I find trifling obstacles will not damp her hopes or sour her temper.’⁴

The Loiterer was not the only influence on Jane Austen. As has been shown, she was writing burlesque sketches at least two years before its publication, during the time of the Steventon private theatricals.⁵ James and Henry’s taste for satirical comedies ensured that she was exposed at a very early age to those masters of burlesque plays, Henry Fielding and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Fielding’s Tom Thumb: or The Tragedy of Tragedies (1730) and Sheridan’s The Critic (1779) were two of the most successful examples of eighteenth-century theatrical burlesque. Jane Austen alludes to both plays in her juvenilia.

Fielding had been hailed as a master of political satire after the commercial success of his theatre burlesques, The Author’s Farce, Tom Thumb, Pasquin and The Historical Register. His repeated attacks on the Whig government came to a head in The Historical Register, where he was more openly hostile to Sir Robert Walpole than he had been in his earlier burlesques. The success of this play finally provoked the government into passing the Theatre Licensing Act of 1737, whose long-term repercussions were to include the growth of closet drama and a transfer of creative energy from the theatre to the novel.⁶ Fielding gave up writing and turned to the law, until the publication of Richardson’s Pamela (1740) provoked him into writing again. Once again he used burlesque to ridicule literary pretension and hypocrisy: Shamela and Joseph Andrews are different burlesques of the same book.

Fielding’s theatre burlesques relied upon a subtle blending of theatrical and political satire. Tom Thumb: or The Tragedy of Tragedies, which the Austens acted at Steventon on 22 March 1788, was chiefly a parody of contemporary tragedy, although Walpole was implicitly satirised in the portrayal of Tom Thumb, ‘the great man’. It was intended to be ludicrous and nonsensical. The original audience was delighted by the incongruity of a ‘tragedy’ designed to make them laugh. Fielding was satirising the way in which modern tragedy was unintentionally absurd.

Set in King Arthur’s Court, Fielding’s travesty ruthlessly caricatured conventional heroic tragedy. The play contains the full panoply of Neoclassical tragedy, but the superhuman giant-killing hero, Thumb – ‘whose soul is as big as a mountain’ – is a midget. The other ‘noble’ personages of the court are just as ridiculous. The royal couple are a quarrelsome pair. The noble King Arthur is bullied by his wife Dollalolla, a queen ‘entirely faultless, saving that she is a little given to drink’, and in love with the captive queen, Glumdalca, a giantess, who is in love with the dwarf, Thumb. The romantic sub-plot common in heroic tragedy is also parodied in the love triangle of the gluttonous Princess Huncamunca and her rivals, Lord Grizzle and Tom Thumb. The King’s loyal courtiers, Noodle, Doodle and Foodle, are foolish and inept, and the play ends with a ludicrous massacre of all the characters.

Burlesque appealed to Austen, for her main concern in her early writings was to excite laughter. She approved of its uncomplicated aim to raise laughter by comic exaggeration and from the sheer absurdity of language and image. But, like Fielding, she was aware that parody acts as a form of criticism, a way of elucidating the absurdities and limitations of a particular art form.

Austen shared Fielding’s irreverence for literary and artistic convention. Her characters are no more heroic than Fielding’s, and often as physically odd or repulsive. In a deliberate echo of Tom Thumb, Austen set her stories in villages called Pammydiddle and Crankhumdunberry. Like Fielding, she took the clichéd situation and rendered it absurd. In ‘Frederick and Elfrida’ she parodied the novelistic convention of depicting two antithetical sisters, one beautiful and foolish, the other ugly and clever. In this topsy-turvy world it is the ugly Rebecca who charms the hero:

Lovely & too charming Fair one, notwithstanding your forbidding Squint, your greazy tresses & your swelling Back, which are more frightful than imagination can paint or pen describe, I cannot refrain from expressing my raptures, at the engaging Qualities of your Mind, which so amply atone for the Horror, with which your first appearance must ever inspire the unwary visitor. (MW, p. 6)

In Tom Thumb, Princess Huncamunca is confounded by the ugliness of Glumdalca: ‘O Heaven, thou art as ugly as the devil.’ Queen Dollalolla, meanwhile, is permanently drunk:

Oh, Dollalolla! do not blame my love;

I hoped the fumes of last night’s punch had laid

Thy lovely eyelids fast.⁷

Just as Fielding’s heroes are characterised by their unheroic qualities, such as physical ugliness, drunkeness and violence, Austen’s earliest characters are also drunkards, murderers and adulterers. Jealous sisters poison each other, landowners beat their workers with a cudgel on a whim, and children bite off their mother’s fingers. Austen’s letters suggest that she long continued to find physical ugliness, illness and death amusing.⁸