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: Secondly, they – [Whispers.]
BAYES: At it still.
USHER: Thirdly, and lastly, both he, and they – [Whispers.]
BAYES: Now they both whisper. [Exeunt Whispering.]63
‘The Mystery’ is closely modelled on this whispering scene. Austen’s playlet is comprised of a series of interruptions and non-communications. It opens with a mock mysterious line, ‘But hush! I am interrupted!’, and continues in a similarly absurd and nonsensical manner:
DAPHNE: My dear Mrs Humbug how dy’e do? Oh! Fanny, t’is all over.
FANNY: Is it indeed!
MRS HUMBUG: I’m very sorry to hear it.
FANNY: Then t’was to no purpose that I …
DAPHNE: None upon Earth.
MRS HUMBUG: And what is to become of? …
DAPHNE: Oh! thats all settled. [whispers Mrs Humbug]
FANNY: And how is it determined?
DAPHNE: I’ll tell you. [whispers Fanny]
MRS HUMBUG: And is he to? …
DAPHNE: I’ll tell you all I know of the matter. [whispers Mrs Humbug and Fanny]
FANNY: Well! now I know everything about it, I’ll go away.
MRS HUMBUG & DAPHNE: And so will I. [Exeunt]
(MW, p. 56)
The play ends with a further whispering scene, where the secret is finally whispered in the ear of the sleeping Sir Edward: ‘Shall I tell him the secret? … No, he’ll certainly blab it … But he is asleep and won’t hear me … So I’ll e’en venture’ (MW, p. 57). In ‘The Mystery’, we are never told any information about the conversations between the characters, and it becomes as incongruous as Bayes’s own ‘new’ play, which he proudly insists has no plot.
Austen’s third playlet, ‘The First Act of a Comedy’, parodies musical comedy, an extremely popular mode of dramatic entertainment in the latter part of the eighteenth century.64 A satirical passage from George Colman’s New Brooms (1776) targets the vogue for comic opera:
Operas are the only real entertainment. The plain unornamented drama is too flat, Sir. Common dialogue is a dry imitation of nature, as insipid as real conversation; but in an opera the dialogue is refreshed by an air every instant. – Two gentlemen meet in the Park, for example, admire the place and the weather;
