Backstage in the Novel: Frances Burney and the Theater Arts

Notes

245 Notes introduction 1. For the discourse of hauntology, see Derrida, Specters of Marx. Recent studies on the relation between eighteenth-century theater and the novel are Anderson, Eighteenth-Century Authorship and the Play of Fiction; Nachumi, Acting Like a Lady. Among the most helpful introductions to the eighteenth-century stage are Bevis, English Drama; Boas, An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Drama; Craik et al., The Revels History of Drama in English, vols. 5–6; Donohue, The Cambridge History of British Theatre, vol. 2; Nicoll, A History of English Drama, vols. 1–3. The introduction to The London Stage, 1660–1800 is also very useful. 2. Colman, “Advertisement” to The Jealous Wife: see Loftis, Sheridan and the Drama of Georgian England, 28. 3. As James Edward Austen-Leigh recalled of his aunt, “Every circumstance narrated in Sir Charles Grandison, all that was ever said or done in the cedar parlour , was familiar to her; and the wedding days of Lady L. and Lady G. were as well remembered as if they had been living friends”: Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, 331. Austen’s works lend themselves very well to the sort of metaliterary analysis that allows characters to display their moral characteristics. In Sense and Sensibility (chap. 10), the romantic lovers Marianne and Willoughby appreciate Cowper and Scott while admiring Pope “no more than is proper.” In Northanger Abbey (chap. 7), the boorish John Thorpe dismisses Frances Burney’s Camilla, one of Austen’s favorite novels. And in Persuasion, Captain Benwick praises the exaggerated sensibility of the romantic poets to such an extent that Anne “recommend[ed] a larger allowance of prose in his daily study”: Austen, Persuasion, 122. Austen’s own affective responsiveness as a reader is of course fully in line with eighteenth-century aesthetics, and particularly with Adam Smith’s theory of the sympathizing imagination . For a recent discussion, see Bray, The Female Reader in the English Novel, chap. 1. 4. Susan Staves uses the term “embedding” in an illuminating essay on eighteenth -century novelists’ appropriation of Restoration drama. She acutely observes that “the embedding of the Restoration play-texts in the eighteenth-century novels 246 Notes to Pages 3–7 reveals an appropriation by bourgeois women of sentiments and entitlements that had formerly been the property of the aristocracy. . . . Sometimes the words of the earlier drama allow later hearers, speakers or readers to possess intensities and kinds of feelings which the polite world stipulated they could not own more directly”: Staves, “Fatal Marriages?” 96. 5. Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, 566. 6. Noyes, The Neglected Muse, 5. 7. See Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting. 8. My analysis of transtextuality in Burney’s macro-text is deeply indebted to Genette, Palimpsests. 9. Colman, Polly Honeycombe, vii. 10. Among many descriptions of such readings, particularly suggestive are those that relate to Sarah Siddons’s dramatic readings at the Argyle Rooms, in Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, 457–62. 11. After great difficulty, Johnson’s tragedy Irene (written ca. 1737) was finally performed at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1749 but met with little success. Smollett’s tragedy The Regicide was written circa 1738 and was never performed. He later fictionalized his endeavors to stage the play in chapters 62 and 63 of Roderick Random (1748). 12. It is thanks to feminist criticism that Behn’s role as the first female novelist , if not the first novelist, has been reassessed: see the classic Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist. For further details, see Spengemann, “The Earliest American Novel.” In relation to the theater, see Zimbardo, “Aphra Behn.” Attesting to a longstanding inter-artistic dialogue, Behn’s Oroonoko was first dramatized by Thomas Southerne in Oroonoko: A Tragedy (Theatre Royal, 1696) and later by John Hawkesworth (Drury Lane, 1759). 13. Pagnini, Pragmatica della letteratura, 89. Translations from Italian in this volume are by Laura Kopp. 14. Barthes, S/Z, 15. 15. On the figure of the writerly reader, see ibid., 4. 16. De Marinis, “Dramaturgy of the Spectator,” 102. 17. This paradoxical classification of Burney’s writings was a late-Romantic invention, but its longevity was confirmed by the surprising discussion over the wording to be used for the memorial window to Burney in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. Paula Stepankowski, president of the Burney Society, remarked that “the listing of Fanny’s accomplishments” (as “novelist,” “diarist,” “playwright,” and “Daughter of Charles Burney, Mus. D.”) gave rise to a lively debate. “The problem, of course, is...