high. In Cowley’s Which is the Man? one of the ‘low’ characters duly exclaims: ‘He must be a Lord by his want of ceremony.’ In The Devil to Pay, Nell’s gentle manners and innate dignity reflect badly on Lady Loverule. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen was also to depict the moral defeat of a high-ranking aristocrat (another Lady Loverule?) by a young woman ‘of inferior birth … without family, connections, or fortune’ (PP, pp. 355–56). In Mansfield Park the rendition of Fanny’s ‘low’ family in Portsmouth exploits the dramatic situations and comic scenes resulting from a woman’s movement across the boundaries between high life and low. Yet, in the end, it is the lower-ranking Price children (William, Fanny and Susan) who turn out better than the high-bred Bertrams.93
It is evident throughout her work, distinguishable even from the early reference to Lewis and Quick, that Jane Austen was particularly attuned to the discrepancies between rank and manners within the tightly circumscribed social structure of her world. That understanding was shaped and informed by her interest in the drama. Her special interest in social metamorphosis, with its comic interplay between high and low types, was stimulated by the influence of eighteenth-century comedy.
The year 1814, in which Mansfield Park was published, saw the birth of a new age in the English theatre. Between the years of Kean’s birth in the late 1780s and his death in 1833 the theatre underwent unprecedented change. The two patent houses had been closed by catastrophic fires in 1808–9 and had then been rebuilt on a more lavish and grander scale than had been seen before. Kemble’s raised prices had incited sixty-seven nights of rioting in Covent Garden until he was forced to capitulate to the demands of the rioters. Edmund Kean and Eliza O’Neill had taken over the mantle of Kemble and Siddons, bringing to the stage a new style of intuitive acting characteristic of the ‘Romantic’ era. The rise of the illegitimate theatres and the impact of a ‘theatrical revolution’ in the advent of Kean (cemented by the praise of the cockney young literary radicals, Keats, Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt) marked a new age of vitality in the theatre.
This tumultuous period in the history of the theatre also happened to coincide with Jane Austen’s own birth and death. She attended the first performances of Kean and O’Neill, witnessed the transformations taking place in the theatre, and remained in touch with its nuances and foibles. Austen’s interest in the drama has been overlooked in the persistently mistaken notion that she was morally opposed to the theatre. Yet this assumption is in flagrant defiance of the evidence of the letters.
In the early part of 1814, in the middle of negotiations for the publication of Mansfield Park, and in the space of four days, Austen visited the professional theatre three times to see Kean, Jordan and Stephens. In the same short period she wrote of two more excursions to see Kean again and also his rival Young. It is a striking irony that the completion of Mansfield Park, the novel that has been viewed almost universally as Austen’s rejection of the theatre, coincided with a particularly busy theatre-going period for the author.94
Judging by Austen’s earlier theatre-going periods, visits in such close proximity were not unusual. Her visit to Henry and Eliza in 1811 was planned with the Lyceum on Thursday, followed by two more visits to Covent Garden on Saturday and Monday. In 1813 she was found at the playhouse two nights in a row. This was by no means untypical and is an acute reminder of the frequency with which the Georgians visited the playhouse. On average, there were about 180 nights each season on which the patent houses offered the play-going public some kind of dramatic entertainment. The two winter patent houses alone could command a total of four hundred performances per season.95 Whenever Jane made extended visits to town, she seems to have taken advantage of Henry’s close connections with the theatre.
Theatre in the late Georgian period became an essential part of fashionable middle-class life.96 One of the consequences of the system of stock companies was that the audience became familiar with the same actors, seeing them in a variety of different roles and plays of all types, coming to know not only their styles of acting, but the details of their private lives.97 The proliferation of stage-related literature meant that readers were able to know the intimate details of actors’ lives. In the words of one historian: ‘The public’s appetite for news, gossip and scandal about the stage was insatiable, its sense of intimate acquaintance with actors unique. A successful player could only have a public private life.’98 To sate the audience appetite for theatre there were actors’ diaries, journals, memoirs, biographies of playwrights and managers, histories and annals of the theatre, periodicals, and magazines. Between 1800 and 1830 some one hundred and sixty different periodicals devoted exclusively to the theatre came into existence in Britain.99
William Hazlitt, in the preface to his A View of the English Stage, describes the allure of the theatre in late Georgian England: ‘the disputes on the merits or defects of the last new piece, or a favourite performer, are as common, as frequently renewed, and carried on with as much eagerness and skill, as those on almost any other subject’.100 With Hazlitt’s words in mind, one of the most striking features of Austen’s letters is her discussion of the theatre as a part of everyday conversation, to be written about as she writes about other quotidian matters like shopping and gossip.
Austen’s letters are a neglected historical source for her interest in and love of the theatre. The fundamental place the theatre occupied in her life is revealed in the manner in which it can be joked about, admired, even be taken for granted. Her mock-insult to Siddons, ‘I could swear at her for disappointing me’, reflects the way in which the sisters often consoled one another for missing particular performers. Her tantalising observation that Mrs Edwin’s performance ‘is just what it used to be’ speaks a language of intimate theatrical knowledge that we can only begin to guess at.
There is something paradoxically casual and yet essential about the way that Austen ‘converses’ about the theatre. At times her letters reveal a striking language of precision and economy in respect to the drama; details of the seating arrangements are often as important as descriptions of the plays, sometimes a cursory remark such as ‘no skill in acting’ is enough for the sisters and nieces, who are in tune with one another; no further elaboration is necessary, but it still needs to be said, because the interest is there between them. That interest lasted throughout Jane Austen’s life and, as I will demonstrate, had a profound effect on her fiction.
PART TWO
She partook largely in all the best gifts of the comic muse
Henry Austen, ‘Biographical Notice’ of his sister
4
The impact of private theatricals and the vitality of the professional theatre in the late Georgian period gave Jane Austen a comprehensive and longstanding interest in the drama. From her earliest attempts at play-writing to the systematic incorporation of quasi-theatrical techniques into her mature novels, the influence of the drama rarely left her. Throughout the canon there is an abundance of resonances and allusions to eighteenth-century plays, many of which the author expected her readers
