whichever of Astley’s playhouses Austen intended when she was writing Emma in 1813, the allusion is of considerable interest, as the long-standing battle between the minor theatres and the patents had once again flared up that year, with the name ‘Astley’s’ at the centre of controversy. When Elliston opened up Astley’s in 1813 with the provocative name ‘Little Drury Lane Theatre’, he was almost immediately forced to close. He was able to reopen the theatre by reverting to its old name. In 1812 Astley had sold his theatre and licence to Robert Elliston for £2800.28 Almost as soon as the management passed into Elliston’s hands, he remodelled the playhouse in the hope of attracting a superior type of audience. He introduced a mixed programme of farce, pantomime and melodrama, all of course concealed under the term ‘burletta’. Though many of the minor theatres circumvented the law by similar methods, none had dared to do so in the direct vicinity of the patents. Perhaps Austen was sympathetic to Elliston’s crusade to compete against the patents, for he was one of her favourite actors, and, as we will see, she followed his fortunes throughout his career.
Astley’s was known for its socially diverse audience. It was ‘a popular place of amusement for all classes’.29 A friendly and unpretentious theatre, its tickets were priced well below those of the patents.30 The spectacle that it offered clearly appealed to families, and to people of all classes, much as the West End musical attracts thousands of people today. Austen had no compunction about visiting the minor theatres when she stayed in London, and her reference to Astley’s in Emma may indeed have been a gesture in support of them in their long battle to break the monopoly of the patents.
Given Jane Austen’s scrupulous sense of class and realism, and the particular concern in Emma with fine discriminations within social hierarchies, it is by no means fanciful to attach considerable weight to her choice of Astley’s for the reconciliation between Harriet and Robert Martin. Precisely because of its status as a minor, illegitimate theatre, it was a place where a yeoman farmer and a girl who is without rank (carrying the ‘stain of illegitimacy’, we are reminded in the same chapter) could mingle freely with the gentry.
Austen does mention the patented theatres in her other novels. In Sense and Sensibility, Willoughby ‘ran against Sir John Middleton’ in the lobby of Drury Lane Theatre, where he hears that Marianne Dashwood is seriously ill at Cleveland. In Pride and Prejudice Lydia Bennet, in complete disregard to the disgrace that she has brought on the family by her elopement, can only prattle: ‘To be sure London was rather thin, but however the Little Theatre was open’ (PP, p. 319). Lydia’s elopement takes place in August, and, as Austen was aware, the ‘Little Theatre’ in the Haymarket was the only house licensed to produce regular drama during the summer season. This is a fine example of Austen’s scrupulous sense of realism working in conjunction with her knowledge of the London theatre world. It is also worth noting that her favourite niece, Fanny Knight, with whom she often went to the theatre, was particularly fond of the ‘little’ theatre in the Haymarket, as opposed to the vast auditoriums at Covent Garden and Drury Lane. In her unpublished diaries Fanny complained that ‘Drury Lane is too immense’ and that she preferred ‘the dear enchanting Haymarket.’31
There is only one other mention of playgoing in Pride and Prejudice, a vague reference to an ‘evening at one of the theatres’ in which Elizabeth Bennet and Mrs Gardiner talked over intimate family matters in what was presumably a theatre box, while the rest of the party watched the action on the stage (PP, pp. 152–54). In Persuasion, Austen includes only a few vague references to the Theatre Royal on Orchard Street in Bath.32 However, she uses the same theatre in Northanger Abbey to structure an important plot link between John Thorpe and General Tilney. It is at the theatre that Thorpe, ‘who was never in the same part of the house for ten minutes together’ (NA, p. 95), falsely boasts to General Tilney that Catherine is the heiress to the Allen fortune, thus encouraging the General’s plan to invite her to Northanger Abbey.
In Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey and Emma Jane Austen uses the forum of the public theatre to implement crucial plot developments. In this, she was influenced by Fanny Burney, whose novels about the London ton used the playhouses as important meeting grounds for the advancement of plot lines. For example, in Evelina the heroine first attends Drury Lane to see Garrick in The Suspicious Husband and is later reunited with Lord Orville at a performance of Congreve’s Love for Love. Here she is subjected to impertinent remarks by the fop Lovel, who compares her to the character of Miss Prue, an ignorant rustic young hoyden, a role made famous by the comic actress Frances Abington.33 As Burney and Austen demonstrate in their novels, the public theatres provided an arena for the exchange of news and gossip.
In Northanger Abbey there is a special irony at play, for Austen’s novel about an ingenue’s entrance into Bath society self-consciously mirrors Burney’s Evelina: or The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World. In one of the more subtle allusions to Evelina, Catherine quotes from Congreve’s Love for Love when she tells John Thorpe that she hates the idea of ‘one great fortune looking out for another’ (NA, p. 124). Like Evelina, Catherine delights in going to the play, though she has been told that the Theatre Royal Bath is ‘quite horrid’ compared to the London stage (NA, p. 92).
Northanger Abbey’s status as a burlesque Gothic novel has unwittingly deflected attention away from Austen’s parody of the heroine-centred sentimental novel popularised by female writers like Burney and Edgeworth. Instead of London’s beau monde, unfamiliar terrain to Austen, the resort city of Bath becomes her microcosm of fashionable high society. Northanger Abbey was written in 1798–99. As Jane Austen and her mother were at Bath during the later part of 1797 visiting the Leigh-Perrots, her account could well have been based on actual experience.
In 1799 Jane Austen revisited Bath, staying at Queen Square with her brother Edward Knight. This visit included a trip to the Theatre Royal: ‘The Play on Saturday is I hope to conclude our gaieties here, for nothing but a lengthened stay will make it otherwise’ (Letters, p. 47). She does not name the play, but the account in the Bath Herald and Reporter for 29 June 1799 reveals that she saw Kotzebue’s drama The Birth-Day and ‘The pleasing spectacle of Blue-Beard’ on that occasion. In the eyes of the Bath newspapers, the new Kotzebue comedy was considered to be a vast improvement on his previous works, which were notable for their immorality:
If the German Author has justly drawn down censure for the immorality of his productions for the stage, this may be considered as expiatory – this may be accepted as his amende honoyrable [sic]; it is certainly throughout unexceptionable, calculated to promote the best interest of virtue, and the purest principles of benevolence: and though written in the style of Sterne, it possesses humour without a single broad Shandyism.34
James Boaden, a professed admirer of Kotzebue, described the play as ‘the naval pendant to the military Toby and Trim’, and thought it contained ‘one of the best delineations of human nature coloured by profession’.35
The Birth-Day, a comedy in three acts, was translated from Kotzebue’s play Reconciliation, and adapted for the English stage by Thomas Dibdin (1771–1841).36 The plot is centred on a feud in a Bertram family. Twin brothers, estranged over a law suit, are finally reconciled on their sixty-third birthday by the efforts of their children, cousins who are in love with each other. The heroine, Emma Bertram, is devoted to her father and has vowed never to marry
