The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and Why She Is a Hit in Hollywood. Paula Byrne
time’.48 He was noted for his bumpkin roles and humorous old men. Leigh Hunt observed that his ‘happiest performances are ignorant rustics … he passes from the simplest rustic to the most conceited pretender with undiminished easiness of attainment’.49 Liston’s grave and serious face added to the effect of his comedy, Lamb wrote: ‘There is one face of Farley, one of Knight, one (but what a one it is!) of Liston’.50 For Hazlitt, Liston had ‘more comic humour oozing out of his features and person than any other actor’.51 He was a particularly fine Baron Wildenhaim in Lovers’ Vows.
John Emery (1777–1822) also played in the same line of old gentlemen and rustics, and was compared to Liston: ‘If our two stage-rustics, Emery and Liston, are compared, it will be found that the former is more skilled in the habits and cunning of rusticity, and the latter in its simplicity and ignorance.’ But Hunt later claimed of Emery that, in playing the countrymen, the field was ‘exclusively and entirely his’.52 Hazlitt also observed that ‘in his line of rustic characters he is a perfect actor’.53
The Farmer’s Wife was a vehicle for the singing arts of Stephens and the comic talents of Mathews, Liston and Emery. It tells a rather tired tale of an innocent (Emma Cornflower) abducted by a debauched aristocrat (Sir Charles). Mathews plays a village apothecary, Dr Pother. Liston played a cunning London manservant to Sir Charles. This served as a comic contrast to Emery’s ignorant but good-hearted Yorkshireman, servant to Farmer Cornflower.54 The play’s comic juxtapositions of high and low characters drew on a convention long associated with the stage: the contrast between town and country, a theme that Austen had been working on in Mansfield Park.
Jane Austen’s blunt assertion that Stephens had ‘no skill in acting’ is refreshing and to the point, in an age distinguished by its over-elaborate encomiums of actors and their roles. Furthermore her remark reveals a strong and discerning voice, one that knows what ‘good hardened acting’ is, and isn’t, and is confident in its own critical judgement without being unduly influenced by the current favourite of the stage. After revealing the details of the previous night’s theatre to Cassandra, she wrote of plans for yet another excursion to Covent Garden to see Kean’s rival, Charles Mayne Young (1777–1856), acting in Richard III: ‘Prepare for a Play the very first evening. I rather think Covent Garden, to see Young in Richard’ (Letters, p. 261).
Young had been the leading tragedian of the London stage before Kean challenged his supremacy in 1814. Young was in the Kemble school of acting, and was noted for his heroic, dignified acting style, though he was often compared unfavourably with his predecessor Kemble: ‘His most striking fault, as a tragic actor, is a perpetual imitation of Mr Kemble.’55 He was often criticised for his lack of passion: ‘Mr Young never gives himself up to his feelings, but always relies upon his judgement – he never acts from the heart, but the head.’56 Leigh Hunt was lukewarm about his abilities, describing him as an actor of ‘elegant mediocrity’, and Hazlitt was even more disparaging, especially of Young’s Hamlet: ‘he declaims it very well, and rants it very well; but where is the expression of the feeling?’57 Since Cassandra was coming to London, and presumably accompanied her sister to see Young’s Richard, there is no letter describing Jane’s reaction to his rendering of the part. But the critical consensus was that the performance was not a success.
The opposition between the Kemble/Young and the Cooke/Kean school of acting was often couched as a conflict between reason and feeling, judgement and passion. It is striking that Austen, who is so often associated with ‘sense’ rather than ‘sensibility’, clearly admired Kean’s acting but seems to have had little enthusiasm for the Kemble school. Though she names most of the major stars of the London stage in her surviving letters, there is not a single mention of John Philip Kemble himself.
Jane Austen did see Young again, this time with the new acting sensation, Eliza O’Neill, who had made her triumphant debut a month earlier as Juliet and was heralded as the only tragedian worthy to take over the mantle of Sarah Siddons. Just as Drury Lane had been saved from the brink of financial ruin by the advent of Kean, so Covent Garden was desperate to bring forward its own star in reply.58 Byron refused to see O’Neill out of his loyalty to Kean and Drury Lane, and for fear that he would like her too much: ‘No I’m resolved to be un-“Oneiled”’.59 As with Kean’s debut earlier that year, audiences acclaimed O’Neill as a genius from the provinces; it was claimed that some spectators fainted under her spell.60
Jane Austen’s last known visit to the professional theatre took place late in 1814. She was as keen to see Covent Garden’s new star as she had been to see Kean, and on the night of 28 November Henry and Edward arranged for her to see Isabella, a tragedy adapted by Garrick from Thomas Southerne’s The Fatal Marriage: or The Innocent Adultery, in which O’Neill played the leading female role. Jane, writing to her niece Anna Lefroy, was disappointed with O’Neill’s performance:
We were all at the Play last night, to see Miss O’neal [sic] in Isabella. 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 however & hugs Mr Younge [sic] delightfully. (Letters, p. 283)
She shows discernment in her rather cool response to O’Neill’s performance. Even O’Neill’s most ardent admirers admitted that she was less good in maternal parts, like Isabella, but was more suited to playing innocent young girls, such as the lovesick Juliet, and repentant fallen women, such as Jane Shore and Mrs Haller: ‘She could not represent maternal affection; her love was all the love of fire, youth and passion.’61
Isabella, the tragedy of a devoted wife and mother who is persuaded to marry again only to find her beloved husband is alive, was considered to be one of Siddons’s finest roles. She had established herself on the London stage with her performance in the part. O’Neill suffered from the inevitable comparisons drawn between the two women. Even Hazlitt, who admired O’Neill’s Isabella, thought it lacked Siddons’s grandeur and power: ‘Nothing can be more natural or more affecting than her noble conception of the part. But there is not that terrible reaction of mental power on the scene, which forms the perfection of tragedy, whether in acting or writing.’62 Oxberry’s biography described her performance in Isabella as ‘artificial’ and suggested that it ‘savoured strongly of adoption from the style of Kean’.63
Austen was clearly intimate enough with the theatre world to know about the nuances of O’Neill’s acting style. Her joking reference to her two pocket handkerchiefs alludes to O’Neill’s reputation as an actress of excessive sensibility whose magic was to ‘raise the sigh’ and who provoked tears rather than terror. O’Neill’s biographer observed that her ‘triumph, it has been justly said, is in tears’.64 For Hazlitt, O’Neill’s power lay in her extraordinary ability to draw sympathy from the audience. It was her ‘reaction’ to Romeo’s death that characterised her unique acting style: ‘In the silent expression of feeling, we have seldom witnessed anything finer.’65
The telling phrase ‘[she] hugs Mr Young delightfully’ suggests that there was a kind of intimate theatrical code between Austen and her niece. As they were both aware, coupled with O’Neill’s ability to elicit