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,