Like Berquin, Austen wrote her own short plays and stories for domestic entertainment.56 But, rather than teaching morals and manners, Austen’s playlets parody the moral didacticism of Berquin’s thinly disguised conduct books. There are three attempts at playwriting in Austen’s juvenilia. The first two, ‘The Visit’ and ‘The Mystery’ in Volume the First, were written between 1787 and 1790.57 The third, ‘The First Act of a Comedy’, is one of the ‘Scraps’ in Volume the Second and dates from around 1793.
As mentioned earlier, ‘The Visit’ was probably written in 1789, the same time as the Steventon performance of Townley’s High Life Below Stairs. The play depicts a dinner engagement at Lord Fitzgerald’s house with a party of young people. Dining room etiquette is satirised in this piece, as the characters pompously make formal introductions to one another, then promptly discover that there are not sufficient chairs for them all to be seated:
MISS FITZGERALD: Bless me! there ought to be 8 Chairs & there are but 6. However, if your Ladyship will but take Sir Arthur in your Lap, & Sophy my Brother in hers, I beleive we shall do pretty well.
SOPHY: I beg you will make no apologies. Your Brother is very light. (MW, p. 52)
The conversation between the guests is almost wholly preoccupied with the main fare of ‘fried Cowheel and Onion’, ‘Tripe’ and ‘Liver and Crow.’ The vulgarity of the food on offer is contrasted with the polite formality of the guests:
CLOE: I shall trouble Mr Stanley for a Little of the fried Cowheel & Onion.
STANLEY: Oh Madam, there is a secret pleasure in helping so amiable a Lady –.
LADY HAMPTON: I assure you my Lord, Sir Arthur never touches wine; but Sophy will toss off a bumper I am sure to oblige your Lordship. (MW, p. 53)
Banal remarks about food and wine lead irrationally to unexpected marriage proposals for the three young women at the table, who eagerly accept without a second’s hesitation.
On the surface, Austen’s parody of a dull social visit derives its comic impact from the farcical touches and the juxtapositions of polite formalities with vulgar expressions. The young heroine, Sophy, like so many of Austen’s early creations, is portrayed as a drunk who can ‘toss off a bumper’ at will. Above all, there is an irrepressible delight in the sheer absurdity of table manners. The Austens performing this play would, of course, be expected to maintain their composure when solemnly requesting ‘fried Cowheel & Onion’ and ‘Liver & Crow’ (MW, p. 53).
Austen’s playlet, deriding the absurdity and pomposity of table etiquette, provides a mocking contrast to the morally earnest tone of Berquin’s instructive playlets. His Little Fiddler also dramatises a social visit, where the exceptionally rude behaviour of a young man to his sister (Sophia) and to her visitors, the Misses Richmonds, leads to expulsion from the family circle. Charles, the ill-mannered brother and deceitful, greedy son, is eventually turned out of his father’s house for his treachery and lies, and for his cruel treatment of a poor fiddler. In Berquin’s play, the virtues of polite conduct are piously upheld:
SOPHIA: Ah! how do you do, my dear friends! [They salute each other, and curtsy to Godfrey, who bows to them.]
CHARLOTTE: It seems an age since I saw you last.
AMELIA: Indeed it is a long time.
SOPHIA: I believe it is more than three weeks. [Godfrey draws out the table, and gives them chairs.]
CHARLOTTE: Do not give yourself so much trouble, Master Godfrey.
GODFREY: Indeed, I think it no trouble.
SOPHIA: Oh, I am very sure Godfrey does it with pleasure, [gives him her hand.] I wish my brother had a little of his complaisance.
The stilted artificiality of such social visits is precisely the target of Jane Austen’s satire in ‘The Visit’. She seemed to have little time for plays which dictated appropriate formal conduct, preferring comedies which satirised social behaviour. Jane Austen mocks Berquin and simultaneously begins to explore the incongruities and absurdities of restrictive social mores.58
As noted, a more direct source for ‘The Visit’ was Townley’s High Life Below Stairs. Austen’s quotation ‘The more free, the more welcome’ (MW, p. 50) nods to Townley’s farce, where fashionably bad table manners are cultivated by the servants in an attempt to ape their masters. Berquin wrote didactic plays instructing the correct ways to treat servants, both honest and dishonest. Townley’s hilarious farce of social disruption dramatises a lord who disguises himself as a servant to spy on his lazy servants, so that he can punish them appropriately for taking over his house.59
Austen dedicated ‘The Visit’ to her brother James. Intriguingly, in her dedication, she recalled two other Steventon plays. These ‘celebrated comedies’ were probably written by James, since Jane describes her own ‘drama’ as ‘inferior’ to his:
Sir, The Following Drama, which I humbly recommend to your Protection & Patronage, tho’ inferior to those celebrated comedies called ‘The School for Jealousy’ & ‘The travelled Man’, will I hope afford some amusement to so respectable a Curate as yourself; which was the end in veiw [sic] when it was first composed by your Humble Servant the Author. (MW, p. 49)
James had recently returned from his travels abroad, so ‘the travelled Man’ may have been based on his adventures. The two play-titles echo the form of several favourites in the eighteenth-century dramatic repertoire: Goldsmith’s The Good-Natur’d Man (1768), Arthur Murphy’s The School For Guardians (1769), and Richard Cumberland’s The Choleric Man (1774), Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777), and Hannah Cowley’s School for Elegance (1780).
‘The Mystery’ was probably performed as an afterpiece to the Steventon 1788 ‘Private Theatrical Exhibition’.60 Austen dedicated it to her father, and it may well have been a mocking tribute to one of his favourite plays. It has been suggested that the whispering scenes in this playlet were based on a similar scene in Sheridan’s The Critic.61 Jane Austen’s parody is, however, closer to Buckingham’s burlesque, The Rehearsal, which Sheridan was self-consciously reworking in The Critic.62 It is most likely that Austen was parodying the whispering scene in The Rehearsal, where Bayes insists that his play is entirely new: ‘Now, Sir, because I’ll do nothing here that ever was done before, instead of beginning with a Scene that discovers something of the Plot I begin this play with a whisper’:
PHYSICIAN: But yet some rumours great are stirring; and if Lorenzo should prove false (which none but the great Gods can tell) you then perhaps would find that – [Whispers.]
BAYES: Now he whispers.
USHER: Alone, do you say?
PHYSICIAN: No; attended with the noble – [Whispers.]
BAYES: Again.
USHER: Who, he in gray?
PHYSICIAN: Yes; and at the head of – [Whispers.]
BAYES: Pray, mark.
USHER: Then, Sir, most certain, ’twill in time appear. These are the reasons that have mov’d him to’t; First, he – [Whispers.]
BAYES: Now the other whispers.
USHER: