The play comes to a sticky end, and gives the reader one of the funniest moments in Austen’s canon (and, incidentally, the only moment in Austen without a woman present), when the master of the household, Sir Thomas Bertram, returns from his slave plantations in Antigua to find himself on a stage next to a ranting young actor, who is a complete stranger to him. It’s a beautifully orchestrated, highly comic scene, which humiliates Sir Thomas, giving him grave grounds for concern about the conduct of his children. His revenge is to burn all the unbound copies of the play. But the flirting doesn’t stop.
Nevertheless, I was puzzled by the critical consensus, which, following the influential critic Lionel Trilling, took the view that the Lovers’ Vows debacle meant that Jane Austen morally disapproved of theatre. Because Sir Thomas and the heroine, Fanny Price, disapprove of the play, then this must mean that Austen did too. This made no sense to me in the light of her letters and her other novels, which contain copious allusions to the theatre and to playwrights, from Shakespeare to Sheridan. Jane Austen wrote plays as a child and acted in amateur theatricals at home. She herself was said to be a fine actor, and played the part of Mrs Candour in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal with great aplomb.
Furthermore, it seemed to me that a writer with such comic gifts (often overlooked in the pursuit of the romantic courtship and marriage plot) owed a debt to the plays she watched and read. This book is my attempt to redress that misconception and to examine the roots of Austen’s comic genius. Her love for Shakespeare is well known (she pays tribute to him in Mansfield Park), but she also loved farce and comedies, especially those of now largely forgotten female dramatists, such as Hannah Cowley and Elizabeth Inchbald.
Some years ago, the book went out of print, partly the consequence of being with a small publishing house that no longer exists. Many of my readers have, over the years, expressed interest in the book, which was so generously reviewed. The bicentenary of the death of Jane Austen (2017) seemed to William Collins, the loyal publisher of my five subsequent books, a very good moment to reissue the book, with a new title and new material, as a companion to my full-scale biography The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things.
The extra chapter takes a distinctive look at Austen in Hollywood, exploring a number of stage and film adaptations, from A. A. Milne (creator of Winnie-the-Pooh) to Whit Stillman, who recently adapted the juvenilia for the silver screen. The vogue for stage adaptations of the novels began in the early 1930s, but the explosion of interest in recent years has seen her novels refashioned, reworked and updated on stage, on screen and in the ever-expanding world of the Internet.
Fascination with Jane Austen does not wane. The bicentenary witnesses the appearance of her image on the ten-pound banknote. There are exhibitions about her life and work in Hampshire, where she was born and where she died. But the popular image of her is too often that of a novelist interested only in romance and marriage. Of course marriage is the traditional endpoint of comedy, but what really interested Austen were the misunderstandings and incongruous encounters along the way, not the happy ending. This book is an attempt to place Jane Austen where she properly belongs: alongside Shakespeare as one of the world’s greatest comic writers. It was conceived as a love letter to the comic theatre of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which I began to explore twenty years ago during a magical year in the incomparable setting of the Huntington Library in Los Angeles. While I was there, I regularly crossed town to Pasadena, Burbank, Hollywood and Westwood, in order to watch the latest movie releases. Among them were Emma Thompson’s sparkling Sense and Sensibility and Roger Michell’s tender, sombre Persuasion. Then there came a day when my partner said that he was going to take me to a teen movie called Clueless that was set in Beverly Hills. He was a Shakespeare scholar, also researching in the Huntington, so this seemed a very peculiar choice – until five minutes into the film, when I realised what was going on. I leant over and whispered, ‘She’s Emma, isn’t she?’ Since the film did not explicitly acknowledge at any point that it was a reworking of Emma, I think he was rather impressed that I worked it out so quickly. Perhaps that was why, soon after, he asked me to marry him.
As Jane Austen said herself, ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can.’
I am grateful to the Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone, for permission to quote from Fanny Knight’s unpublished journals, and the Hampshire Record Office, Winchester, for permission to quote from Eliza de Feuillide’s unpublished letters and James Austen’s prologues and epilogues to the Austen family theatricals.
SS – Sense and Sensibility (1811)
PP – Pride and Prejudice (1813)
MP – Mansfield Park (1814)
E – Emma (1816)*
NA – Northanger Abbey (1818)
P – Persuasion (1818)
All quotations of the above are from The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman, 5 vols (3rd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932–34).
MW – Minor Works
Quotations are from The Works of Jane Austen, vi, Minor Works, ed. R. W. Chapman, rev. B. C. Southam (London: Oxford University Press, 1975).
Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (3rd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) is cited throughout as Letters.
LV – Lovers’ Vows
Quotations are from Lovers’ Vows: A Play, in Five Acts. Performing at the Theatre Royal, Covent-Garden. From the German of Kotzebue. By Mrs Inchbald. (fifth edn, London, 1798), reprinted in Chapman’s edition of MP.
* Published December 1815.
In 1821, four years after the death of Jane Austen, a critic in the Quarterly Review compared her art to Shakespeare’s. ‘Saying as little as possible in her own person and giving a dramatic air to the narrative by introducing frequent conversations’, she created her fictional world ‘with a regard to character hardly exceeded even by Shakespeare himself.’1
In the Victorian era, Austen was dubbed ‘the Prose Shakespeare’.2 George Eliot’s common-law husband, George Henry Lewes, developed the comparison in an influential Blackwood’s Magazine article on ‘The Novels of Jane Austen’:
But instead of description, the common and easy resource of novelists, she has the rare and difficult art of dramatic presentation: instead of telling us what her characters are, and what they feel, she presents the people, and they reveal themselves. In this she has never perhaps been surpassed, not even by Shakespeare himself.3
Yet another nineteenth-century writer, the novelist Thomas Lister, ascribed her genius to revelation of character through dramatic dialogue: ‘She possessed the rare and difficult art of making her readers intimately acquainted with the character of all whom she describes … She scarcely does more than make them act and talk, and we know them directly.’4
Austen herself had a strong sense of the importance of dramatic dialogue in the novel. She and her family,