The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and Why She Is a Hit in Hollywood. Paula Byrne

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       Plays and Actors

      The year 1808 was a particularly busy one for Jane Austen. She spent most of the time travelling between her various brothers and family friends. After playing Mrs Candour in The School for Scandal at the Manydown Twelfth Night party, she visited the Fowles at Kintbury and in May she visited Henry and Eliza Austen at 16 Michael Place in Brompton. The latter two, whose love of the theatre went back to the home theatricals at Steventon, were delighted to live in close proximity to several famous London stars. The actress and singer Jane Pope lived next door to them at No. 17. She had been the original Mrs Candour in The School for Scandal, playing the part until she was in her sixties. By this time, she was the only member of the original cast left on the stage.1 Having herself played the part of Mrs Candour earlier that year, Jane Austen must have been amused to be living next door to the actress who had inspired the original role.

      At No. 15 Michael Place was Elizabeth Billington, the celebrated soprano singer. John Liston the comedian lived at No. 21.2 Jane Austen stayed until July, enjoying the rounds of dinner-parties, theatre trips and concerts arranged by Henry and Eliza. Henry Austen owned his own box at one of the illegitimate theatres, the Pantheon in Oxford Street.3 The Pantheon had originally opened in 1772 as a place of assembly for masquerades and concerts, which were all the rage in the 1770s.4 Boswell and Dr Johnson visited and admired the magnificent building in 1772, and Fanny Burney distilled her own experience of the new Pantheon into Evelina; her heroine is ‘extremely struck with the beauty of the building’ when she is taken to a concert there.5

      The Pantheon was converted into an opera house in 1791 but was destroyed by fire a year later, losing its hope of a royal patent to the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket. Thereafter the Pantheon was rebuilt and resumed its original function as a place of concerts and masquerades until 1812, when it reopened as the Pantheon Theatre, staging the usual mixed bill of burlettas and ballet to circumvent the licensing law.

      Henry Austen’s patronage of minor playhouses such as the Pantheon and the Lyceum, as well as the legitimate patent houses, suggests his unflagging interest in the theatre. Like his sister, he had no compunction about supporting the minor theatres. Unlike his brother James, who lost interest in the theatre after he was ordained, Henry’s passion for the theatre carried on into maturity; and, whenever Jane and Cassandra were in town, he was to be found arranging seats at the various London theatres. Although there are few surviving letters to fill in the details of Jane’s activities at this time (the letters stop altogether from 26 July 1809 until 18 April 1811), she surely took advantage of Henry’s and Eliza’s hospitality as she did in the following years. Starting at the latter date, there is a sufficient amount of information to provide a fair estimate of her theatrical activities up to 28 November 1814, the last time she is known to have attended a theatre.

      In order to be available for the proof-reading of Sense and Sensibility, she went to London in April 1811, staying with Henry and Eliza at their new home in Sloane Street. Shortly after her arrival she expressed a desire to see Shakespeare’s King John at Covent Garden. In the meantime, she sacrificed a trip to the Lyceum, nursing a cold at home, in the hope of recovering for the Saturday excursion to Covent Garden:

      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 … [Later on 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 – & we are to go on Monday to Macbeth, instead, but it is a disappointment to us both. (Letters, pp. 180–81)

      Her preference for King John over Hamlet may seem curious by modern standards, but can be explained by one of the intrinsic features of Georgian theatre: the orientation of the play towards the star actor in the lead role. Her disappointment in the ‘unlucky change’ of programme from ‘Hamlet instead of King John’ is accounted for in her 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, & all thought of it, were given up. I should particularly have liked seeing her in Constance, & could swear at her with little effort for disappointing me. (Letters, p. 184)

      It was not so much King John that Austen wanted to see as Siddons in one of her most celebrated roles: Queen Constance, the quintessential portrait of a tragic mother. In the words of her biographer and friend, Thomas Campbell, Siddons was ‘the imbodied image of maternal love and intrepidity; of wronged and righteous feeling; of proud grief and majestic desolation’.6 Siddons’s own remarks on this ‘life-exhausting’ role, and the ‘mental and physical’ difficulties arising from the requirements СКАЧАТЬ