Backstage in the Novel: Frances Burney and the Theatre Arts by Francesca Saggini (review)

The dramatic quality of Frances Burney's first novel, Evelina (1778), did not escape the notice of her first readers. Her authorship had no sooner been made public than her new friends Hester Thrale and Samuel Johnson were encouraging her to write a comedy for the stage. It was not long before Thrale had introduced Burney to Arthur Murphy, the actor and playwright, who urged her to write a comedy and offered his assistance. His advice was for Burney to write the play in secret and to stage it as an anonymous work except for the prologue and epilogue, which would be written by Johnson and himself respectively. As if this were not enough encouragement, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who was then manager at the Drury Lane theatre, similarly urged her to write a comedy and offered to produce it "Unsight, unseen" (Early Journals and Letters, 3:235). The upshot was The Witlings, a satire of the "female wits," a draft of which Burney had finished by 4 May 1779; after showing the first two acts to Murphy, she revised this play until the end of July before sending it to her father Charles Burney and close friend Samuel Crisp for a family reading.

The sad fate of the play at the hands of Burney's two "Daddys" has often been told, and Saggini repeats the tale in considerable detail in her third chapter, which analyzes The Witlings in order to measure Burney's familiarity with the formal requirements of writing for the stage. Locating the play in the context of the eighteenth-century debate over women's education and the stereotype of the promiscuity of female writers (especially playwrights), Saggini argues that there was more to Charles Burney's and Samuel Crisp's disapproval of The Witlings than fear of a hostile response from the Bluestockings, especially Elizabeth Montagu, who might have recognized themselves in the play's characters. Given Charles Burney's continued resistance to his daughter's attempts to stage the plays she had written, Saggini postulates a deeper motive, an anti-theatrical bias that he shared with so many of his contemporaries, as well as fear of damage to his daughter's reputation and loss of his own hard-won social status.

Despite the continuing recognition among readers and critics that the strength of Burney's novels lay in their dramatic qualities and despite what Saggini calls the "thick web of intertextual references" (1) between eighteenth-century novels and plays, there has been no extended study of Burney's novels in the context of theatrical conventions and techniques heretofore. Saggini's goal in this book is not, however, merely to identify the intertextual links between the genres, to compile a list of quotations, allusions, and borrowings between source text and target text. Rather, she wishes to examine how the novels render dramatic text into narrative, through what she calls a "transmodal adaptation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century plays" (3). To facilitate this end, she employs a complex method of "close semiotic analysis, intertextual comparison, and cultural contextualization" (8) to make explicit the dramatic conventions that permeate the novels.

Saggini calls Burney an "emblematic case" (6) with which to test her hypothesis that the eighteenth-century novel is a hybrid genre, an "intersemiotic form with strong dramatic characteristics" (5). Burney was not only a versatile and successful author but also an avid reader who engaged with and reworked into her novels other literary texts, forms, and models (a writerly reader in Barthesian terms). In addition, the reappraisal of Burney's drama initiated by the publication in 1995 of the Complete Plays ignited Saggini's interest in a novelist who, discouraged from writing directly for the stage, chose instead to incorporate the theatre indirectly into her novels.

An overview of the changes undergone by both serious drama and comedy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth...