Jane Austen was not absolutely precise about dates in Emma: the theatre visit takes place some time in late summer and Harriet marries Martin shortly afterwards, in late September. This opens up the possibility of the Astley’s reference being to either the summer amphitheatre in Lambeth or the winter Olympic house off Drury Lane. Strictly speaking, the summer season commenced on Easter Monday and closed about the end of September or the beginning of October.25 Given that the Austens patronised the Lambeth Amphitheatre, Jane may well have intended the same theatre. On the other hand, the genteel John Knightleys visit Astley’s as a treat for their young boys, and Harriet, on quitting their box, is made uneasy by the size of the crowds. This suggests the superior Olympic Pavilion.26 The Lambeth Amphitheatre also had its own separate entrance for the boxes and the pit, with the gallery entrance fifty yards down the road, so it would be more likely that Harriet encountered large crowds at the Olympic.27
Nevertheless, whichever of Astley’s playhouses Austen intended when she was writing Emma in 1813, the allusion is of considerable interest, as the long-standing battle between the minor theatres and the patents had once again flared up that year, with the name ‘Astley’s’ at the centre of controversy. When Elliston opened up Astley’s in 1813 with the provocative name ‘Little Drury Lane Theatre’, he was almost immediately forced to close. He was able to reopen the theatre by reverting to its old name. In 1812 Astley had sold his theatre and licence to Robert Elliston for £2800.28 Almost as soon as the management passed into Elliston’s hands, he remodelled the playhouse in the hope of attracting a superior type of audience. He introduced a mixed programme of farce, pantomime and melodrama, all of course concealed under the term ‘burletta’. Though many of the minor theatres circumvented the law by similar methods, none had dared to do so in the direct vicinity of the patents. Perhaps Austen was sympathetic to Elliston’s crusade to compete against the patents, for he was one of her favourite actors, and, as we will see, she followed his fortunes throughout his career.
Astley’s was known for its socially diverse audience. It was ‘a popular place of amusement for all classes’.29 A friendly and unpretentious theatre, its tickets were priced well below those of the patents.30 The spectacle that it offered clearly appealed to families, and to people of all classes, much as the West End musical attracts thousands of people today. Austen had no compunction about visiting the minor theatres when she stayed in London, and her reference to Astley’s in Emma may indeed have been a gesture in support of them in their long battle to break the monopoly of the patents.
Given Jane Austen’s scrupulous sense of class and realism, and the particular concern in Emma with fine discriminations within social hierarchies, it is by no means fanciful to attach considerable weight to her choice of Astley’s for the reconciliation between Harriet and Robert Martin. Precisely because of its status as a minor, illegitimate theatre, it was a place where a yeoman farmer and a girl who is without rank (carrying the ‘stain of illegitimacy’, we are reminded in the same chapter) could mingle freely with the gentry.
Austen does mention the patented theatres in her other novels. In Sense and Sensibility, Willoughby ‘ran against Sir John Middleton’ in the lobby of Drury Lane Theatre, where he hears that Marianne Dashwood is seriously ill at Cleveland. In Pride and Prejudice Lydia Bennet, in complete disregard to the disgrace that she has brought on the family by her elopement, can only prattle: ‘To be sure London was rather thin, but however the Little Theatre was open’ (PP, p. 319). Lydia’s elopement takes place in August, and, as Austen was aware, the ‘Little Theatre’ in the Haymarket was the only house licensed to produce regular drama during the summer season. This is a fine example of Austen’s scrupulous sense of realism working in conjunction with her knowledge of the London theatre world. It is also worth noting that her favourite niece, Fanny Knight, with whom she often went to the theatre, was particularly fond of the ‘little’ theatre in the Haymarket, as opposed to the vast auditoriums at Covent Garden and Drury Lane. In her unpublished diaries Fanny complained that ‘Drury Lane is too immense’ and that she preferred ‘the dear enchanting Haymarket.’31
There is only one other mention of playgoing in Pride and Prejudice, a vague reference to an ‘evening at one of the theatres’ in which Elizabeth Bennet and Mrs Gardiner talked over intimate family matters in what was presumably a theatre box, while the rest of the party watched the action on the stage (PP, pp. 152–54). In Persuasion, Austen includes only a few vague references to the Theatre Royal on Orchard Street in Bath.32 However, she uses the same theatre in Northanger Abbey to structure an important plot link between John Thorpe and General Tilney. It is at the theatre that Thorpe, ‘who was never in the same part of the house for ten minutes together’ (NA, p. 95), falsely boasts to General Tilney that Catherine is the heiress to the Allen fortune, thus encouraging the General’s plan to invite her to Northanger Abbey.
In Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey and Emma Jane Austen uses the forum of the public theatre to implement crucial plot developments. In this, she was influenced by Fanny Burney, whose novels about the London ton used the playhouses as important meeting grounds for the advancement of plot lines. For example, in Evelina the heroine first attends Drury Lane to see Garrick in The Suspicious Husband and is later reunited with Lord Orville at a performance of Congreve’s Love for Love. Here she is subjected to impertinent remarks by the fop Lovel, who compares her to the character of Miss Prue, an ignorant rustic young hoyden, a role made famous by the comic actress Frances Abington.33 As Burney and Austen demonstrate in their novels, the public theatres provided an arena for the exchange of news and gossip.
In Northanger Abbey there is a special irony at play, for Austen’s novel about an ingenue’s entrance into Bath society self-consciously mirrors Burney’s Evelina: or The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World. In one of the more subtle allusions to Evelina, Catherine quotes from Congreve’s Love for Love when she tells John Thorpe that she hates the idea of ‘one great fortune looking out for another’ (NA, p. 124). Like Evelina, Catherine delights in going to the play, though she has been told that the Theatre Royal Bath is ‘quite horrid’ compared to the London stage (NA, p. 92).
Northanger Abbey’s status as a burlesque Gothic novel has unwittingly deflected attention away from Austen’s parody of the heroine-centred sentimental novel popularised by female writers like Burney and Edgeworth. Instead of London’s beau monde, unfamiliar terrain to Austen, the resort city of Bath becomes her microcosm of fashionable high society. Northanger Abbey was written in 1798–99. As Jane Austen and her mother were at Bath during the later part of 1797 visiting the Leigh-Perrots, her account could well have been based on actual experience.
In 1799 Jane Austen revisited Bath, staying at Queen Square with her brother Edward Knight. This visit included a trip to the Theatre Royal: ‘The Play on Saturday is I hope to conclude our gaieties here, for nothing but a lengthened stay will make it otherwise’ (Letters, p. 47). She does not name the play, but the account in the Bath Herald and Reporter for 29 June 1799 reveals that she saw Kotzebue’s drama The Birth-Day and ‘The pleasing spectacle of Blue-Beard’