What Jane Saw’s Recreation of the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery in 1796 (review)

Readers of Eighteenth-Century Fiction will be familiar with What Jane Saw, http://www.whatjanesaw.org/, a website created by Janine Barchas of the University of Texas at Austin. The site launched in 2013 with a digital recreation of the Joshua Reynolds retrospective exhibition as it would have looked when Jane Austen visited the British Institution, London, in 1813. Now, in time for the 400th anniversary this year of Shakespeare’s death, Barchas and her team have recreated John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, which was housed in the same exhibition space at 52 Pall Mall, as it looked in 1796. In viewing the Reynolds exhibition, we can follow in Austen’s footsteps, as we know from a letter to her sister Cassandra that she planned to visit on 24 May 1813. However, the connection between Austen and the Boydell Gallery is more tenuous. The What Jane Saw site acknowledges that no evidence proves Austen visited the gallery on a precise date, but claims that “it seems inconceivable that her relatives would not take the budding writer, theatre enthusiast, and devoted Shakespeare fan to tour the sensational Shakespeare Gallery.” An early Austen letter of 23 August 1796 places the writer at Cork Street, a short walk from Pall Mall, and that month is taken by the What Jane Saw team as the most likely time this visit would have occurred. Fixing on a particular year is important because the Shakespeare Gallery changed during the course of its existence: each year, new works were added, paintings were repositioned, and some canvases were even retouched.

Despite the lack of evidence that Austen visited the gallery, the connection between the two writers is well justified in the contextual material provided in the “1796 Shakespeare Gallery” (launched December 2015). A brief section explains that Austen’s life and career occurred at the height of eighteenth-century bardolatry, notes her childhood involvement in theatricals, and pinpoints some occasions on which she saw Shakespeare’s plays in performance. The work of Paula Byrne and Jocelyn Harris on Shakespeare’s influence on Austen is cited here, and we might add to this Penny Gay’s important scholarship in this area in Jane Austen and the Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Conversely, the text notes that Boydell’s project was not particularly interested in the stage dimension of Shakespeare: the paintings do not usually represent contemporary performers or the atrical practice. However, at least one of the Boydell engravings, one of the images for The Taming of the Shrew, in which Petruchio hastens Katharine away from her father’s house after their wedding, makes a nod to the eighteenth-century stage. The engraving of image number 15 places the scene in act two, scene two, which it is in Garrick’s adaptation Catharine and Petruchio, which held the stage between 1754 and 1844, but not in Shakespeare’s text, where it appears in act three, scene two, as the Boydell catalogue entry for the painting correctly identifies. This slippage in theatrical resonance between the painting and the engraving is intriguing.

The discussion of Austen and Shakespeare is presented along with other relevant information on a page entitled “About What Jane Saw in 1796,” structured as a kind of FAQ befitting the online environment. At approximately ten thousand words, this substantial piece of commentary is more than double the length of the comparable page of information for the 1813 exhibition. The history of the British Gallery is outlined, and Barchas reflects on the process of creating this reconstruction. The discussion of the challenges inherent in this ambitious project will be of interest both to digital humanists and to eighteenth-century scholars whose work engages closely with the interpretation of multiple archival sources.

Shakespeare famously crops up in Austen’s Mansfield Park (London, 1814), in which his works are declared to be “part of an Englishman’s constitution” (3:60). As Leah Price argues in The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From...