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 theatricals, read aloud for family entertainment, or read for private enjoyment. While it is impossible to calculate the number of plays that she read as a young girl, since there is no extant record of Mr Austen’s ample library, the range of her explicit literary allusions gives us some idea of her extensive reading – references to over forty plays have been noted.45
Jane Austen owned a set of William Hayley’s Poems and Plays. Volumes one to five are inscribed ‘Jane Austen 1791’; volume six has a fuller inscription ‘Jane Austen, Steventon Sunday April the 3d. 1791’.46 Hayley was well known as the ‘friend and biographer’ of William Cowper, Austen’s favourite poet, though he fancied himself as a successful playwright. The most well-thumbed volume in Austen’s collection of Hayley was the one containing his plays. It contained five dramas in all: two tragedies, Marcella and Lord Russel, and three comedies in verse, The Happy Prescription: or the Lady Relieved from her Lovers; The Two Connoisseurs; and The Mausoleum.47
Like the Sheridan plays which the Austens adored, Hayley’s comedies depict the folly of vanity and affectation in polite society. By far the best of them is The Mausoleum, which dramatises excessive sensibility and ‘false refinement’ in the characters of a beautiful young widow, Sophia Sentiment, and a pompous versifier, Mr Rumble, a caricature of Dr Johnson. Lady Sophia Sentiment erects a mausoleum to house her husband’s ashes and employs versifiers to compose tributes for the inscription on the monument. The comedy explores the self-destructive effects of sensibility on the mind of a lovely young widow, who refuses to overcome her grief because of a distorted conception of refined sentiment. The tell-tale sign of misplaced sensibility is Lady Sophia’s obsession with black:
If cards should be call’d for to-night,
Place the new japann’d tables alone in my sight;
For the pool of Quadrille set the black-bugle dish,
And remember you bring us the ebony fish.48
But this sentiment is amusingly undercut by its correlation to hypocrisy and false delicacy:
Her crisis is coming, without much delay;
There might have been doubts had she fix’d upon grey:
But a vow to wear black all the rest of her life
Is a strong inclination she’ll soon be a wife.49
This comedy is of particular interest as the main character has the name that was adopted in a satirical letter to James Austen in his capacity as editor of The Loiterer. The letter complains of the periodical’s lack of feminine interest:
Sir, I write this to inform you that you are very much out of my good graces, and that, if you do not mend your manners, I shall soon drop your acquaintance. You must know, Sir, that I am a great reader, and not to mention some hundred volumes of Novels and Plays, have in the two last summers, actually got through all the entertaining papers of our most celebrated periodical writers.50
The correspondent goes on to complain of the journal’s lack of sentimental interest and offers recommendations to improve its style:
Let the lover be killed in a duel, or lost at sea, or you make him shoot himself, just as you please; and as for his mistress, she will of course go mad; or if you will, you may kill the lady, and let the lover run mad; only remember, whatever you do, that your hero and heroine must possess a great deal of feeling, and have very pretty names.51
The letter ends by stating that if the author’s wishes are not complied with ‘may your work be condemned to the pastry-cooke’s shop, and may you always continue a bachelor, and be plagued with a maiden sister to keep house for you’.
