Читать книгу The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and Why She Is a Hit in Hollywood - Paula Byrne - Страница 16

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.