Читать книгу The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and Why She Is a Hit in Hollywood - Paula Byrne - Страница 12

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.