This tumultuous period in the history of the theatre also happened to coincide with Jane Austen’s own birth and death. She attended the first performances of Kean and O’Neill, witnessed the transformations taking place in the theatre, and remained in touch with its nuances and foibles. Austen’s interest in the drama has been overlooked in the persistently mistaken notion that she was morally opposed to the theatre. Yet this assumption is in flagrant defiance of the evidence of the letters.
In the early part of 1814, in the middle of negotiations for the publication of Mansfield Park, and in the space of four days, Austen visited the professional theatre three times to see Kean, Jordan and Stephens. In the same short period she wrote of two more excursions to see Kean again and also his rival Young. It is a striking irony that the completion of Mansfield Park, the novel that has been viewed almost universally as Austen’s rejection of the theatre, coincided with a particularly busy theatre-going period for the author.94
Judging by Austen’s earlier theatre-going periods, visits in such close proximity were not unusual. Her visit to Henry and Eliza in 1811 was planned with the Lyceum on Thursday, followed by two more visits to Covent Garden on Saturday and Monday. In 1813 she was found at the playhouse two nights in a row. This was by no means untypical and is an acute reminder of the frequency with which the Georgians visited the playhouse. On average, there were about 180 nights each season on which the patent houses offered the play-going public some kind of dramatic entertainment. The two winter patent houses alone could command a total of four hundred performances per season.95 Whenever Jane made extended visits to town, she seems to have taken advantage of Henry’s close connections with the theatre.
Theatre in the late Georgian period became an essential part of fashionable middle-class life.96 One of the consequences of the system of stock companies was that the audience became familiar with the same actors, seeing them in a variety of different roles and plays of all types, coming to know not only their styles of acting, but the details of their private lives.97 The proliferation of stage-related literature meant that readers were able to know the intimate details of actors’ lives. In the words of one historian: ‘The public’s appetite for news, gossip and scandal about the stage was insatiable, its sense of intimate acquaintance with actors unique. A successful player could only have a public private life.’98 To sate the audience appetite for theatre there were actors’ diaries, journals, memoirs, biographies of playwrights and managers, histories and annals of the theatre, periodicals, and magazines. Between 1800 and 1830 some one hundred and sixty different periodicals devoted exclusively to the theatre came into existence in Britain.99
William Hazlitt, in the preface to his A View of the English Stage, describes the allure of the theatre in late Georgian England: ‘the disputes on the merits or defects of the last new piece, or a favourite performer, are as common, as frequently renewed, and carried on with as much eagerness and skill, as those on almost any other subject’.100 With Hazlitt’s words in mind, one of the most striking features of Austen’s letters is her discussion of the theatre as a part of everyday conversation, to be written about as she writes about other quotidian matters like shopping and gossip.
Austen’s letters are a neglected historical source for her interest in and love of the theatre. The fundamental place the theatre occupied in her life is revealed in the manner in which it can be joked about, admired, even be taken for granted. Her mock-insult to Siddons, ‘I could swear at her for disappointing me’, reflects the way in which the sisters often consoled one another for missing particular performers. Her tantalising observation that Mrs Edwin’s performance ‘is just what it used to be’ speaks a language of intimate theatrical knowledge that we can only begin to guess at.
There is something paradoxically casual and yet essential about the way that Austen ‘converses’ about the theatre. At times her letters reveal a striking language of precision and economy in respect to the drama; details of the seating arrangements are often as important as descriptions of the plays, sometimes a cursory remark such as ‘no skill in acting’ is enough for the sisters and nieces, who are in tune with one another; no further elaboration is necessary, but it still needs to be said, because the interest is there between them. That interest lasted throughout Jane Austen’s life and, as I will demonstrate, had a profound effect on her fiction.
PART TWO
She partook largely in all the best gifts of the comic muse
Henry Austen, ‘Biographical Notice’ of his sister
4
The impact of private theatricals and the vitality of the professional theatre in the late Georgian period gave Jane Austen a comprehensive and longstanding interest in the drama. From her earliest attempts at play-writing to the systematic incorporation of quasi-theatrical techniques into her mature novels, the influence of the drama rarely left her. Throughout the canon there is an abundance of resonances and allusions to eighteenth-century plays, many of which the author expected her readers to recognise. It is, however, in Austen’s juvenilia, written to amuse her family, and not intended for public consumption, where the marks of her early exposure to the drama can most clearly be seen.
Jane Austen’s chief literary tool in her early works was the art of burlesque.1 In this she was influenced by her brothers’ Oxford literary journal, The Loiterer, which ran for sixty numbers between 1789 and 1790, and made a duty of burlesquing ‘novel slang’ and the absurdities of popular fiction. Henry Austen’s burlesque of the literary conventions of courtship, entitled ‘Peculiar Dangers of Rusticus from the Attacks of a Female Cousin’, is particularly striking.2 In this parody of a sentimental novel, the unlucky hero is besieged by the attentions of his cousin. The hero of Henry’s sentimental tale is lured into seducing his fair cousin: ‘She begged me for the loan of an arm. My arm she accordingly took, and in the course of all her frights and false steps, pinched it so hard and so often, that it is still quite black and blue, through sheer tenderness.’ Following his cousin’s admission of loving ‘cropt Greys to distraction’, he is a lost man:
There was no standing this … I thought she never looked so much like an angel. In short, I know not where my passion might have ended, had not the luckiest accident in the world at once roused me from this rapturous dream of fancied bliss, to all the phlegm of cool reflection and sober reality. A sudden puff of wind carried off two luxuriant tresses from her beautiful Chignon, and left her (unconscious to herself) in a situation truly ridiculous. The delicate thread of sentiment and affection was broken, never to