Jane Austen and the Theatre (review)

128ComparativeDrama PennyGay.JaneAusten and the Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2002. Pp.xi + 201.$55.00 It is a great pleasure finally to see a thoroughgoing treatment of the rich theatrical investments ofone ofthe greatest novelists in the English tradition.Though the more obvious significance ofMansfieldPark's dramatic and metadramatic set piece—a family theatrical production ofKotzebue's popular Lover's Vows— has been addressed by many scholars, consideration of the theatrical practice and performance generally ends there as well. Further, for at least the past fifty years, Lionel Trilling's reading ofthis episode as an instance ofmorally dubious role-play has left most subsequent critics to assume thatAusten's mature fiction evinces an "anti-theatrical prejudice" (the subject of a classic and authoritative study by Jonas Barish). Since biographers and indeed any readers of Austen's famously spirited letters have ample evidence ofher appreciation oflive performance , Mansfield Park has provided the sense of a "defection" from her earlier love of the theater. In addition to correcting this error in scholarly judgment, Gay's study adds substantially to the critical discussion ofthis dark and complicated novel. But the larger case for Austen's oeuvre is persuasive precisely because Gay charts the play and performance ofthe theater world in all ofAusten's writing as well as in her life, both ofwhich emerge from a world that she claims the novelist sees as "inescapably theatrical" (ix). Beginningwith a useful reconstruction ofAustens own theatergoing experience and continuing through the Austen family's own recorded experience with amateur holiday theatrical productions, Gay constructs a convincing case for an author steeped in the dramatic literature, conventions, and performances of her age. Thus performances she attended as well as those in which she participated are relevant, with the latter category adding an additional source of material in their popular published editions for readers. Austen saw, read, and performed in plays, to be sure, but Gay cannily adds to these considerations an understanding of the performance of everyday life as well, rightly noting that "[m]uch ofAusten's social life took the form ofrituals in theatricalized spaces" (22). Following the practice of popular eighteenth-century novels like Evelina, the debut effort ofAusten's much-favored predecessor Frances Burney,Austen's novels replicate, dissect,and imaginatively inhabit the dailyperformance spaces of Bath and Bristol as well as the London high life she tasted and the quiet country retreats her fictions favor. Drawing on Austen's much-quoted epistolary remark about "3 or 4 families in a country village" serving as "the very thing" on which to base a novel, Gay observes that "[t]he country village is particularly easy to read as a culturally restricted corporeal space,or stage, theatrum mundi; the three or four fami- .Reviews129 lies provide, in fact, the average makeup ofthe cast of a comedy of the period" (24).And as we learn from Gay's persuasive reading ofAusten's letters as well as the dynamics of her novels, comedy is always Austen's chosen dramatic venue. Perhaps even more importantly,we see that the source ofthis comedy is largely drawn from contemporary plays and performances, much of it from other less familiarwomenwriters.Though Richard Brinsley Sheridan,David Garrick,Isaac Bickerstaff, and the sensational German import,August von Kotzebue are identified as important sources forAusten, Gay argues persuasively for the seminal role of women playwrights from Susannah Centlivre at the beginning of the century to Frances Sheridan, Hannah Cowley, and Elizabeth Inchbald (who also adapted Kotzebue) at the end. Additionally, the performance style of Edmund Kean and actresses like DorothyJordan and the famous Sarah Siddons are brought to bear on her sense of genre and gender performance. So, from Gothic theater to comedy of manners to the drama of sensibility and melodrama , Gay recovers the significance of the plays of this age, highlighting the ways in which they have a substantive life on the stage and on the page, as full appreciation of the genre's influence demands. Lest one anticipate a work consisting merely ofsource study and an argument for the influence of plays on the novelist's major works of fiction, Gay relieves us quicklyofthis concern. For evidence oftheatricality in Austen's...