Lord help us! what strange foolish things are these men,
One good clever woman is fairly worth ten.38
Two of the most popular contemporary choices for private representation were Fielding’s Tom Thumb and Townley’s High Life Below Stairs. The Burneys acted Tom Thumb in Worcestershire in 1777, ten years before the Austens chose it for performance. The part of the diminutive hero Tom Thumb was often played by a child, whose high-pitched voice would add to the comic incongruity.39
James Townley’s satire on plebeian manners, High Life Below Stairs (1759), depicts a household of lazy servants who behave as badly as their masters. They ape their masters’ manners, assume their titles, drink their expensive wine, gamble and visit the theatre. Like Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and Foote’s Mayor of Garett, Townley’s farce was a comedy that used low life to criticise high society. It was also an extremely popular choice for amateur theatricals. In part, this was because it was more prudent to poke fun at the lower orders in the safety of one’s own home than in the professional theatre house. In 1793 a performance of High Life Below Stairs in an Edinburgh public theatre incited a row between a group of highly offended footmen and their masters.
George Colman the Younger’s comedy about social transformations, The Heir at Law, was also a popular choice for the gentry to indulge themselves in stereotypical ‘low’ roles. Austen was to explore this contentious issue in Mansfield Park when the heir of Mansfield insists on staging The Heir at Law so that he can play the stage Irishman, Duberley.
Jane’s playlet, ‘The Visit’, dedicated to James, contains a quotation from High Life Below Stairs, which suggests that she composed it around the same time as the family performance of Townley’s farce, perhaps as a burlesque afterpiece. Austen repeats Townley’s phrase, ‘The more free, the more welcome’, in her play. The allusion seems to be a nod to the main play performed that day at Steventon. Austen’s habit of repeating phrases from the plays performed, or even merely contemplated for performance, at Steventon remained with her for a long time. Though Hannah Cowley’s play Which is the Man? was considered for performance, it was finally rejected. Yet Austen quoted a phrase from it in a letter dated 1810, some twenty-nine years later.40
Which is the Man? is alluded to in Austen’s ‘The Three Sisters’, written around 1788–90 (MW, p. 65). In this story, a spoilt young woman demands to play the part of Lady Bell Bloomer, just as Eliza had wished to in the 1787–88 Christmas theatricals. Again, a quotation from Cowley’s popular comedy The Belle’s Stratagem appears in a letter of 1801: ‘Mr Doricourt has travelled; he knows best’ (Letters, p. 73).
Though Eliza was now in Paris and unable to partake in the Steventon theatricals, the Cooper cousins came to Steventon for Christmas 1788–89 and Jane Cooper filled the gap left by Eliza. In a letter to Philadelphia, Eliza had hastily, though wistfully, scribbled a last message: ‘I suppose you have had pressing accounts from Steventon, and that they have informed you of their theatrical performances, The Sultan & High Life below Stairs, Miss Cooper performed the part of Roxelana [sic] and Henry the Sultan, I hear that Henry is taller than ever.’41 No prologue or epilogue by James has survived for High Life Below Stairs, but the prologue he provided for Bickerstaffe’s comedy is (confusingly) dated 1790 and states it was ‘spoken by Miss Cooper as Roxalana’.42
The Sultan and High Life Below Stairs ended the theatricals at Steventon, although there is a family tradition which claims that they were resumed in the late 1790s. The main reason why actor-manager James abandoned private theatricals seems to be that he was turning his mind to other literary interests, namely the production of a weekly magazine, The Loiterer. This periodical, like the theatricals at Steventon, was also to prove an important influence on Jane Austen’s early writings.
Henry Austen tells us in his ‘Biographical Notice’, published in the first edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, that his sister Jane was acquainted with all the best authors at a very early age (NA, p. 7). The literary tastes of Catherine Morland have often been read as a parody of the author’s own literary preferences.43 Catherine likes to read ‘poetry and plays, and things of that sort’, and while ‘in training for a heroine’, she reads ‘all such works as heroines must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives’ (NA, p. 15): dramatic works, those of Shakespeare especially, are prominent among these. Twelfth Night, Othello and Measure for Measure are singled out. Catherine duly reads Shakespeare, alongside Pope, Gray and Thompson, not so much for pleasure and entertainment, as for gaining ‘a great store of information’ (NA, p. 16).
In Sense and Sensibility, Willoughby and the Dashwoods are to be found reading Hamlet aloud together. In Mansfield Park, the consummate actor Henry Crawford gives a rendering of Henry VIII that is described by Fanny Price, a lover of Shakespeare, as ‘truly dramatic’ (MP, p. 337). Henry memorably remarks that Shakespeare is ‘part of an Englishman’s constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where’. This sentiment is reiterated by Edmund when he notes that ‘we all talk Shakespeare, use his similes, and describe with his descriptions’ (MP, p. 338). Though Emma Woodhouse is not a great reader, she is found quoting passages on romantic love from Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Henry and Edmund agree on very little. It is therefore a fair assumption that, when they do concur, they are voicing the opinion of their author. Their consciousness of how Shakespeare is assimilated into our very fibre, so that ‘one is intimate with him by instinct’, reaches to the essence of Jane Austen’s own relationship with him. She would have read the plays when a young woman, but she would also have absorbed famous lines and characters by osmosis, such was Shakespeare’s pervasiveness in the culture of the age. She quotes Shakespeare from memory, as can be judged by the way that she often misquotes him. Her surviving letters refer far more frequently to contemporary plays than Shakespearean ones, but Shakespeare’s influence on the drama of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was so thoroughgoing – for instance through the tradition of the ‘witty couple’, reaching back to Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing – that her indirect debt to his vision can be taken for granted.
In her earliest works, however, Jane Austen showed a certain irreverence for the national dramatist. Shakespeare’s history plays are used to great satirical effect in The History of England, a lampoon of Oliver Goldsmith’s abridged History of England. Austen mercilessly parodied Goldsmith’s arbitrary and indiscriminate merging of fact and fiction, in particular his reliance on Shakespeare’s history plays for supposedly authentic historical fact. Austen, by contrast, is being satirical when she makes a point of referring her readers to Shakespeare’s English history plays for ‘factual’ information about the lives of its monarchs.44 Just as solemnly, she refers her readers to other popular historical plays, such as Nicholas Rowe’s Jane Shore and Sheridan’s The Critic (MW, pp. 140, 147). The tongue-in-cheek reference to Sheridan compounds the irony, as The Critic is itself a burlesque of historical tragedy that firmly eschews any intention of authenticity.
From such allusions in the juvenilia it is clear that Jane Austen was familiar with a wide range of plays, although these are probably only a fraction of the numerous plays that would have been read over as possible choices for the private