The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and Why She Is a Hit in Hollywood
A radical look at Jane Austen as you’ve never seen her – as a lover of farce, comic theatre and juvenilia. The Genius of Jane Austen celebrates Britain’s favourite novelist 200 years after her death and explores why her books make such awesome movies, time after time.Jane Austen loved the theatre. She learned much of her art from a long tradition of English comic drama and took joyous participation in amateur theatricals and her visits to the theatre in London and Bath. Her juvenilia, then ‘Sense and Sensibility’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Mansfield Park’ and ‘Emma’ were shaped by the arts of theatrical comedy.Her admiration for drama’s dialogue, characterisation, plotting, exits and entrances is why she has been dramatised so successfully on screen in the last twenty years – and these versions are at the centre of her continuing fame, culminating in her celebration on £10 note.From the stage adaptations of Austen’s novels (including one called ‘Miss Elizabeth Bennet’ by A. A. Milne) to modern classics, including the BBC ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Persuasion’, Emma Thompson’s ‘Sense and Sensibility’, and the phenomenally brilliant and successful ‘Clueless’, ‘The Genius of Jane Austen’ presents an Austen not of prim manners and genteel calm, but filled with wild comedy and outrageous behaviour.
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William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017
Copyright © Paula Byrne 2002, 2017
Cover design by Heike Schüssler
Paula Byrne asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008225698
Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008225674
Version: 2018-06-06
For Jonathan
Contents
Part One: The Novelist and the Theatre
Part Two: The Theatre and the Novels
Fifteen years ago, I published Jane Austen and the Theatre, a book whose central argument was that Austen’s comic genius was shaped by her love of theatre. Mansfield Park was the first Austen novel I read, and, like many readers, I was intrigued by the spectacle of the amateur theatricals at the heart of the plot. Stuck in the country and bored to death, the young people decide to stage a play. But, as with Hamlet’s ‘play-within-the-play’, the production is riddled with double meanings, intrigue and alarming consequences.
It seemed to me then, and does so now, that Austen’s play-within-a-novel operates as a wonderful vehicle for exploring illicit flirtations between the young people, especially in the absence of a reliable chaperone. The play Lovers’ Vows works as a meta-text for exploring important relationships between the characters. Edmund Bertram, the pious, shy clergyman, who is in love with a gorgeous, witty femme fatale, Mary Crawford, undertakes to play the part of a pious, shy clergyman who is seduced by a gorgeous, witty femme fatale, played by Mary Crawford. So many plot parallels, intrigues, allusions, moments of drama are contained in the amateur theatricals episode, which dominates the first quarter of the novel.
The play comes to a sticky end, and gives the reader one of the funniest moments in Austen’s canon (and, incidentally, the only moment in Austen without a woman present), when the master of the household, Sir Thomas Bertram, returns from his slave plantations in Antigua to find himself on a stage next to a ranting young actor, who is a complete stranger to him. It’s a beautifully orchestrated, highly comic scene, which humiliates Sir Thomas, giving him grave grounds for concern about the conduct of his children. His revenge is to burn all the unbound copies of the play. But the flirting doesn’t stop.
Nevertheless, I was puzzled by the critical consensus, which, following the influential critic Lionel Trilling, took the view that the Lovers’ Vows debacle meant that Jane Austen morally disapproved of theatre. Because Sir Thomas and the heroine, Fanny Price, disapprove of the play, then this must mean that Austen did too. This made no sense to me in the light of her letters and her other novels, which contain copious allusions to the theatre and to playwrights, from Shakespeare to Sheridan. Jane Austen wrote plays as a child and acted in amateur theatricals at home. She herself was said to be a fine actor, and played the part of Mrs Candour in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal with great aplomb.
Furthermore, it seemed to me that a writer with such comic gifts (often overlooked in the pursuit of the romantic courtship and marriage plot) owed a debt to the plays she watched and read. This book is my attempt to redress that misconception and to examine the roots of Austen’s comic genius. Her love for Shakespeare is well known (she pays tribute to him in Mansfield Park), but she also loved farce and comedies, especially those of now largely forgotten female dramatists, such as Hannah Cowley and Elizabeth Inchbald.
Some years ago, the book went out of print, partly the consequence of being with a small publishing house that no longer exists. Many of my readers have, over the years, expressed interest in the book, which was so generously reviewed. The bicentenary of the death of Jane Austen (2017) seemed to William Collins, the loyal publisher of my five subsequent books, a very good moment to reissue the book, with a new title and new material, as a companion to my full-scale biography
