The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and Why She Is a Hit in Hollywood. Paula Byrne
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’. It is signed Sophia Sentiment.
It is highly probable that Jane Austen wrote this burlesque letter to her brother. It is very close in spirit to her juvenilia of the same period. Love and Freindship also has a sentimental heroine named Sophia. It seems plausible that The Mausoleum was among the comedies considered for performance by the Austens when they were looking at material for home theatricals in 1788. This may have been the time that Jane first became acquainted with the name Sophia Sentiment. If Austen was indeed Sophia Sentiment, by her own admission, she was a great reader of some hundred volumes of novels and plays.
Austen also owned a copy of Arnaud Berquin’s L’ami des enfans (1782–83) and the companion series L’ami de l’adolescence (1784–85). Berquin’s little stories, dialogues and dramas were much used in English schools for young ladies towards the end of the eighteenth century, being read in the original for the language or in translation for the moral. Berquin states in his preface to L’ami des enfans that his ‘little dramas’ are designed to bring children of the opposite sex together ‘in order to produce that union and intimacy which we are so pleased to see subsist between brothers and sisters’.52 The whole of the family is encouraged to partake in the plays to promote family values:
Each volume of this work will contain little dramas, in which children are the principal characters, in order that they may learn to acquire a free unembarrassed countenance, a gracefulness of attitude and deportment, and an easy manner of delivering themselves before company. Besides, the performance of these dramas will be a domestic recreation and amusement.
Berquin’s short plays and dramatic dialogues were intended to instruct parents and children on manners and morals, on how to conduct themselves in domestic life, how to behave to one another, to the servants, and to the poor, and how to cope with everyday problems in the home. Some were directed towards young women, warning against finery and vanity. Fashionable Education, as its name suggests, depicts a young woman (Leonora) who has been given a fashionable town education, ‘those charming sciences called drawing, music, dancing’, but has also learned to be selfish, vain and affected.53 The blind affection of Leonora’s aunt has compounded her ruin. The moral of this play is that accomplishments should embellish a useful education and knowledge, not act as a substitute for them. A similar play, Vanity Punished, teaches the evils of coquetry, vanity, selfishness and spoilt behaviour.
Intriguingly, one of the playlets in the collection carries the same plot-line as Austen’s Emma. In Cecilia and Marian, a young, wealthy girl befriends a poor labourer’s daughter and ‘tastes the happiness of doing good’ when she feeds her new playmate plum cake and currant jelly:
Cecilia had now tasted the happiness of doing good. She walked a little longer in the garden, thinking how happy she had made Marian, how grateful Marian had shewed herself, and how her little sister would be pleased to taste currant jelly. What will it be, said she, when I give her some ribbands and a necklace! Mama gave me some the other day that were pretty enough; but I am tired of them now. Then I’ll look in my drawers for some old things to give her. We are just of a size, and my slips would fit her charmingly. Oh! how I long to see her well drest.54
Cecilia continues to enjoy her patronage until she is roundly scolded by her mother for her harmful and irresponsible conduct. By indulging and spoiling her favourite, Cecilia has made her friend dissatisfied with her previous life:
MOTHER: But how comes it, then, that you cannot eat dry bread, nor walk barefoot as she does?
CECILIA: The thing is, perhaps, that I am not used to it.
MOTHER: Why, then, if she uses herself, like you, to eat sweet things, and to wear shoes and stockings, and afterwards if the brown bread should go against her, and she should not be able to walk barefoot, do you think that you would have done her any service?55
Cecilia is an enemy to her own happiness