by Paula Byrne
Jane Austen was there for a party the previous summer when there was dressing up and acting. Fanny recorded in her diary a game of school in which her aunts, grandma and governess, Anne Sharp, dressed up and acted:
Wednesday 26 June We had a whole holiday. Aunts and Grandmama played at school with us. Aunt C was Mrs Teachum the Governess, Aunt Jane, Miss Popham the teacher, Aunt Harriet, Sally the Housemaid, Miss Sharpe the Dancing Master, the Apothecary and the Searjeant, Grandmama Betty Jones the pie woman, and Mama the bathing woman. They dressed in Character and we had a most delightful day – After dessert we acted a play called Virtue Rewarded.16
Anne Sharp, Fanny Knight’s real governess, was clearly fond of taking on the cross-dressed roles. It was at this time that she met and forged a close friendship with Jane Austen, who no doubt relished playing the role of a teacher. That Godmersham summer Jane Austen also participated in performances of The Spoilt Child and Innocence Rewarded. Bickerstaff’s The Spoilt Child was a great favourite on the London stage, popularized by Dora Jordan who played the cross-dressed role of the child, Little Pickle.
It was during this visit to Kent that Jane Austen was reading Thomas Gisborne’s dour Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex. Gisborne was a close friend and Staffordshire neighbour of her Evangelical cousin Edward Cooper. No doubt she would have been amused to discover his assertion that play-acting was injurious to the female sex through encouraging vanity and destroying diffidence, ‘by the unrestrained familiarity with persons of the other sex which inevitably results from being joined with them in the drama’.17 He particularly recommended that children should not be allowed to act in plays. Jane had been determined not to read Gisborne, but professed herself rather coolly, maybe ironically, to Cassandra as ‘pleased with it’.18 But she did not share his views on the dangers of play-acting. It may well have been at this time that she helped Anna Austen with the writing of a five-act burlesque play, Sir Charles Grandison or the Happy Man. Much as she loved Richardson’s novel about a virtuous man, she could not resist the challenge of abridging its seven long volumes into a very short play and parodying its morality and sentimentality.
The lobby of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (where in Sense and Sensibility Sir John Middleton tells Willoughby that Marianne is dying)
Jane Austen was as avid a theatregoer as she was a participant in amateur dramatics. She loved nothing more than to take her nephews and nieces to see a show. The first surviving documented reference to her theatregoing sees her visiting Astley’s theatre in Lambeth in August 1796: ‘we are to be at Astley’s to night, which I am glad of ’.19 Astley’s was one of London’s so-called ‘illegitimate’ theatres – it did not hold a Royal Patent to perform serious drama, which was the unique preserve of the Theatres Royal at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, together with the Haymarket for the short summer season. Astley’s accordingly provided a wide variety of entertainment from pantomime, acrobatics and sword-fighting to musicals. Jane Austen had no snobbery about this kind of popular theatre.
It is revealing that she chose Astley’s as the location for a major turning point in Emma. It is there that Harriet Smith accidentally meets Robert Martin and they rekindle their relationship. Astley’s was known for its socially diverse audience: the genteel John Knightleys take their children there, alongside the farmer Robert Martin. It was friendly and unpretentious. 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’, as we are reminded in the same chapter) could mingle freely with the gentry. The setting of the scene is Austen’s way of ridiculing her heroine’s snobbery towards the kind-hearted Robert Martin.
In her journals, Fanny Knight complained that she found Drury Lane too immense and preferred ‘the dear enchanting Haymarket’.20 Haymarket or the ‘Little Theatre’ was the only theatre licensed to open in the summer months. In Pride and Prejudice Austen shows her scrupulous sense of realism when Lydia, who is in London for the summer season, remarks, ‘To be sure London was rather thin, but however the Little Theatre was open.’21 By contrast, when Elizabeth Bennet and her aunt Mrs Gardiner have a long and important conversation in London, it is in one of the boxes of the patented theatres, though we are not told whether it is Covent Garden or Drury Lane. Equally, Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility discovers the news of Marianne Dashwood’s serious collapse when he bumps into John Middleton in the lobby of Drury Lane. Fanny Burney had staged a vivid suicide at Drury Lane in Cecilia. Jane Austen refrains from melodrama of this kind, but still uses the theatre as a place where key encounters and important conversations take place. In Northanger Abbey it is in the Theatre Royal Bath that John Thorpe falsely informs General Tilney that Catherine is an heiress, and the same location is the background for a reconciliation between Catherine and Henry Tilney.
In 1808, Jane Austen visited Henry and Eliza Austen at 16 Michael Place in the London suburb of Brompton. The famous actress and singer Jane Pope lived next door to them at number 17. Pope had been the original Mrs Candour in The School for Scandal, that role which Jane Austen took on in an amateur production the following year. On the other side, at 15 Michael Place was Elizabeth Billington, a celebrated soprano singer. The comedian John Liston lived just along the road at number 21. Jane stayed until July, enjoying the rounds of dinner-parties, theatre trips and concerts arranged by Henry and Eliza.
Henry owned his own box at one of the illegitimate theatres, the Pantheon in Oxford Street.22 The Pantheon was a fine building, often used for masquerades and concerts. Henry’s passion for the theatre endured throughout his life. Whenever Jane (or Cassandra) was in town, he was to be found arranging seats at the various London theatres. Had the majority of Jane Austen’s letters not been destroyed after her death in 1817, we would have had a much more detailed sense of the passion that she shared with the brother who was closest to her. But there is enough evidence in the surviving letters to suggest that she was utterly familiar with contemporary actors and with the range and repertoire of the theatres.
In April 1811, when she was in London, staying with Henry and Eliza again – they had now moved to Sloane Street, though his bank was in Henrietta Street – she expressed a desire to see Shakespeare’s King John at Covent Garden. She was unwell so she sacrificed a trip to the Lyceum Theatre in the hope of saving her strength for something special:
To night I might have been at the Play, Henry had kindly planned our going together to the Lyceum, but I have a cold which I should not like to make worse before Saturday … Our first object to day was Henrietta St to consult with Henry, in consequence of a very unlucky change of the Play for this very night – Hamlet instead of King John – and we are to go on Monday to Macbeth, instead, but it is a disappointment to us both.23
Her preference for King John over Hamlet may seem curious by modern standards, but it can be explained by one of the intrinsic features of Georgian theatres: the orientation of the play towards the star actor in the lead role. Her disappointment is accounted for in the next letter to Cassandra: ‘I have no chance of seeing Mrs Siddons. – She did act on Monday, but as Henry was told by the Boxkeeper that he did not think she would, the places, and all thoughts of it, were given up. I should particularly have liked seeing her in Constance, and could swear at her with little effort for disappointing me.’24 It was not so much King John she wanted to see as the great Sarah Siddons in one of her most celebrated roles as Queen Constance, the quintessential portrait of a tragic mother.
Austen’s phrase ‘I should particularly have liked seeing her in Constance’ suggests that she had seen her before in some other role: perhaps as Lady Macbeth, which she performed several times that 1811 season. That she had seen Siddons perform is also suggested in a comment she made about her Knight nieces: ‘That puss Cassy, did not shew more pleasure in seeing me than her Sisters, but I expected no better, – she does not shine in the tender feelings. She will never be a Miss O’neal;
– more in the Mrs Siddons line.’25 This comment also shows how fully aware she was of debates in the theatre world. Miss Eliza O’Neill was London’s new acting sensation, heralded as the only tragedienne worthy to take over the mantle of Siddons as the queen of the stage neared her retirement.26
It was rumoured that some audience members fainted under the spell of the divine Eliza, who was slim and beautiful, which could not by this time be said of Siddons. Jane Austen was keen to see the new star and in late 1814 she was granted her wish. She went with Henry, Edward and his daughters to see O’Neill in the tragedy of Isabella. She joked to her niece Anna that she took along two pocket handkerchiefs. This was a reference to O’Neill’s reputation as an actress of extreme sensibility: ‘I do not think that she was quite equal to my expectation. I fancy I want something more than can be. Acting seldom satisfies me. I took two Pocket handkerchiefs, but had very little occasion for either. She is an elegant creature, and hugs Mr Younge delightfully.’27 The latter phrase suggests an intimate shorthand between Jane and her niece: O’Neill was known to the cognoscenti as a ‘hugging actress’, so the comment suggests real awareness of the gossip of the theatre world.
The Mr Young who had the privilege of Miss O’Neill’s hugs on this occasion was the great rival of Edmund Kean, the star of tragedy who burst on to the London theatre scene in that very year of 1814. Jane had written, with great excitement, to tell Cassandra that they had been successful in getting tickets for Richard III: ‘Prepare for a Play the very first evening, I rather think Covent Garden, to see Young in Richard.’28 The management at the Garden were bringing forward Young in order to try to win audiences back from Drury Lane, which was packed out night after night as a result of Kean’s electrifying debut performance as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and his follow-up as the charismatically villainous Richard. The news of Kean’s conquest of the stage had quickly reached Jane Austen, and in early March 1814, while she was staying with Henry during the negotiations for the publication of Mansfield Park, she made plans to see the latest acting sensation: ‘Places are secured at Drury Lane for Saturday, but so great is the rage for seeing Keen that only a third and fourth row could be got. As it is in a front box however, I hope we shall do pretty well. – Shylock – A good play for Fanny.’ They duly saw Kean on 5 March, but Jane complained to Cassandra that there was too little of him for her taste: ‘We were quite satisfied with Kean. I cannot imagine better acting, but the part was too short.’ Later she wrote, ‘I shall like to see Kean again excessively, and to see him with You too; – it appeared to me as if there were no fault in him anywhere; and in his scene with Tubal there was exquisite acting.’29 She had high standards for what she called ‘real hardened acting’ and Kean fulfilled her expectations, unlike Eliza O’Neill.
Though she relished a big performance in tragedy, comedy was her true love. She had very particular tastes. ‘Downton and Matthews were the good actors,’ she remarked after seeing Isaac Bickerstaff’s Molière adaptation The Hypocrite.30 Charles Mathews was a comic genius, most famous for a ‘monodramatic entertainment’ called At Home – that is to say, the first one-man show, in which he played all the parts.
Each new actor who appeared on the London stage was sized up with careful scrutiny. When Daniel Terry took over the role of Lord Ogleby in The Clandestine Marriage, Jane Austen was not quite convinced: ‘the new Mr Terry was Ld Ogelby, and Henry thinks he may do; but there was no acting more than moderate’.31 Strikingly, she was more wrapped up in the character of Don Juan in a pantomime version based on Thomas Shadwell’s The Libertine: ‘I must say I have seen nobody on the stage who has been a more interesting Character than that compound of Cruelty and Lust.’32 Here is another unusual glimpse of Jane Austen in the equivalent of an ‘off-Broadway’ theatre, relishing the performance of Cruelty and Lust.
She was fortunate enough to see the superb comic actress Dora Jordan, star of Covent Garden and mistress to the Duke of Clarence, playing the part of Nell in The Devil to Pay, one of her most famous roles. Nell is a timid cobbler’s wife who is magically transformed into an aristocratic society mistress who makes a better wife to her husband, Sir John, and a kinder mistress to her servants than the irascible Lady Loverule. Because of her success in this role, Dora was known as ‘Nell of Clarence’. Jane was ‘highly amused’ – strong praise from a woman with her standards. Back in 1801 she had commiserated with her sister when Cassandra was compelled to abandon a trip to Covent Garden to see the celebrated comic actress: ‘You speak with such noble resignation of Mrs Jordan and the Opera House that it would be an insult to suppose consolation required.’33
Her judgements on actors were always acute and sharply observed: ‘the parts were ill-filled and the Play heavy’, she said of a production of The Merchant of Venice; Catherine Stephens was ‘a pleasing person’ but with ‘no skill in acting’; a comedy featuring ‘Mathews, Liston and Emery’ provided ‘of course some amusement’. Of Elizabeth Edwin, star of Drury Lane, and leading actress in the Earl of Barrymore’s private theatricals at Wargrave, she was coolly dismissive: ‘Mrs Edwin was the Heroine – and her performance is just what it used to be.’34
Probably her favourite actor of all was Robert Elliston, star of the Theatre Royal Bath. He was known as ‘the fortnightly actor’, as he was loaned to the London theatres, where he played once a fortnight. Despite lucrative offers from Covent Garden and Drury Lane, he refused to leave Bath because of his wife’s business. She ran her own dance and deportment Academy in the city and he would not leave her. Eventually in 1804, he was lured to London, while his wife Elizabeth remained in Bath. In 1807, Jane Austen shared with Cassandra some Bath gossip gleaned from her aunt Leigh-Perrot: ‘Elliston, she tells us has just succeeded to a considerable fortune on the death of an Uncle. I would not have it enough to take him from the Stage; she should quit her business and live with him in London.’35 The remark demonstrates her loyalty to Elliston, in both his professional and his private lives. She clearly disapproved of Elizabeth’s controversial decision to continue her own career without her husband. Elliston played the part of Frederick in Lovers’ Vows several times during his tenure at the Theatre Royal Bath when Jane Austen was in residence.36
Austen was fortunate to live in Bath when the Theatre Royal was at the ‘zenith of its glory’.37 The appearance of London stars, coupled with the allure of Elliston, ensured its reputation as a theatre of the highest standing. Elliston was unusual in being a player of both comic and tragic roles. Jane Austen followed his career and saw him on stage in London, but complained of the falling standards of his acting following his move to the ‘great Metropolis’. She saw him perform in an oriental ‘melodramatic spectacle’ called Illusion; or the Trances of Nourjahad, but she was disappointed with her old favourite: ‘Elliston was Nourjahad, but it is a solemn sort of part, not at all calculated for his powers. There was nothing of the best Elliston about him. I might not have known him, but for his voice.’38 She clearly preferred him in comedy, a view shared by most critics. Jane Austen may or may not have known that he was by now a hardened drunk and addicted to gambling (Kean would follow the same road to ruin), but her comments about his changed physical appearance suggest his sad decline.
Jane Austen especially loved plays where social roles were turned topsyturvy. For example, The Devil to Pay exemplifies the comic theatre’s obsession with social mobility and its endless play on rank and manners. Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer was probably her age’s finest comedy of class divide and social stratification: the Georgians revelled in comedies that depicted scenes in which a person crossed the boundary from ‘low’ life to ‘high’ or vice versa.
Jane Austen was particularly attuned to the discrepancies between rank and manners within the tightly circumscribed social structure of her world. That understanding was profoundly shaped and informed by her interest in the drama. Dramatic confrontations such as that between Elizabeth Bennet and Lady Catherine de Bourgh could have come straight ou
t of comedies such as The Devil to Pay. Lady Catherine is a Lady Loverule. Highly charged battle-of-the-sexes scenes between Elizabeth and Darcy are reminiscent of those in the comic tradition that reaches back through Congreve and the Restoration dramatists to the banter of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing, as some of Jane Austen’s earliest critics perceived. Austen’s superb art of dramatic dialogue in Pride and Prejudice owes much to the influence of both contemporary and Shakespearean comedy: that is one reason why the novel adapts so well to stage and screen.
Astonishingly, for many years critics and readers of Jane Austen believed that she disapproved of the theatre and the drama. The reason for this was that they mistook Fanny Price’s distrust of private theatricals for her own. The truth is much more complex: for the theatre-loving Austen, the debacle of the private theatricals in Mansfield Park is not so much an occasion to moralize as an opportunity to give her fictional characters licence to reveal their secret sexual desires through acting.
The theatrical episode is erotically highly charged. The character who voyeuristically observes and guides our response is Fanny Price. She perceives that the young people are using play-acting to engage in ‘dangerous intimacies’. The plot of Lovers’ Vows parallels the main plot in the novel: the prohibited love between a dull but respectable clergyman and a beautiful coquette (Edmund plays the clergyman Anhalt and Mary Crawford the coquette Amelia). Another plot-line involves a fallen woman (Agatha, played by Maria Bertram) and a dangerously attractive soldier (Frederick, played of course by Henry Crawford). Like her stage counterpart, Maria eventually becomes a social outcast through sexual misconduct.