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Early Re-Enactments

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Jane Austen and Performance

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Abstract

It is a truth yet to be universally acknowledged that Jane Austen made immense ripples in the world of theatre. The 1920s saw the emergence of numerous adaptations for amateur and school performance, especially of Pride and Prejudice. Austen soon made it into the new medium of the radio too after the establishment of the BBC in 1922. Radio and stage adaptations show how the conservative ideal of Englishness associated with Austen was literally performed into being. At the same time, the constant fragmentation of her texts (through brief sketches and isolated scenes) suggests the ultimate futility of the struggle to reconstruct an old form of national identity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The commentator gets his Austen characters wrong, claiming that “the bragging young man in ‘Northanger Abbey’ terrified Jane Morland”. This confusion between Catherine Morland and (presumably) Jane Bennet suggests that Austen’s characters had by this time become household names. Her fictional world had colonised the imagination of even the non-Janeite public, to which this reviewer probably belonged, and her novels constituted a cultural discourse that went beyond the realm of literature. “Georgian Coaches”, The Times, 19 June 1920, 11.

  2. 2.

    The general move towards nostalgia in early twentieth-century Britain obviously helped the Austen industry to thrive. As early as 1905, Henry James blamed “the body of publishers, editors, illustrators, producers of the pleasant twaddle of magazines; who have found their ‘dear, our dear’ everybody’s dear, Jane so infinitely to their material purpose, so amenable to pretty reproduction in every variety of what is called tasteful, and in what seemingly proves to be saleable, form”. James, “The Lesson of Balzac” (1905), in French Writers, Other European Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition, ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 115–38, 118 (James 1984). For a discussion of this rising industry (including descendants’ selling of the family heirlooms), see Kathryn Sutherland’s Jane Austen’s Textual Lives, Chapter 2. (Sutherland 2005)

  3. 3.

    For instance, Rose I. Patry’s Dramatic Scenes from Great Novelists, which included scenes from Sense and Sensibility, was printed in 1909, 1911, 1920 and 1924; Evelyn Smith’s Form-Room Plays: Senior Book, Compiled from English Literature, with a condensed version of Northanger Abbey, appeared in 1921, 1923 and 1926; and Margaret MacNamara’s Elizabeth Refuses, a stage version of Pride and Prejudice, appeared in 1922, 1926 and 1936. Rose I. Patry, Dramatic Scenes from Great Novelists (London: Allen & Unwin, 1909a) (Patry 1909a); Evelyn Smith, Form-Room Plays: Senior Book, Compiled from English Literature (London: Dent & Sons Ltd., 1921) (Smith 1921); and Margaret MacNamara’s Elizabeth Refuses: A Miniature Comedy from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (London: Williams, 1926). (MacNamara 1926)

  4. 4.

    “Armistice Day”, The Times, 10 November 1923, 14.

  5. 5.

    William Hubbard, “A Meaning for Monuments”, Public Interest 74 (1984): 17–30, 17 (Hubbard 1984); Bernard Barber, “Place, Symbol and Utilitarian Functions in War Memorials”, Social Forces 28 (1949): 64–68. (Barber 1949)

  6. 6.

    Josette Féral, “Foreword”, SubStance 31, no. 2/3 (2002): 3–13, 5 (Féral 2002).

  7. 7.

    Mary Medbery MacKaye, Pride and Prejudice: A Play (New York: Duffield and Company, 1906) (MacKaye 1906); A. R. Headland and H. A. Treble, “Pride and Prejudice”, in A Dramatic Reader, Book IV (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924), 69–141. (Headland and Treble 1924)

  8. 8.

    Devoney Looser, “The Cult of Pride and Prejudice and Its Author”, in The Cambridge Companion to “Pride and Prejudice”, ed. Janet Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 174–185, 180. (Looser 2013)

  9. 9.

    This period also saw several abridged editions of her texts for school use: for instance, H. A. Treble’s edition of Pride and Prejudice for secondary schools (London: Macmillan and Co, 1917); Benjamin R. Ward’s abridgement of the same novel (Chicago: Scott Foresman and Company, 1919); and Mrs Frederick Boas’s edition of Sense and Sensibility with aids for further study and sample essay questions (London: Macmillan, 1926).

  10. 10.

    Patry, “The Invitation to Cleveland”, in Dramatic Scenes from Great Novelists (London: Allen & Unwin, 1909b), 24–29. (Patry 1909b)

  11. 11.

    Patry, A Practical Handbook on Elocution, London, 1899. (Patry 1899)

  12. 12.

    Ibid., 29. (Patry 1909b)

  13. 13.

    Patry, “Mrs. Jennings Offers Her Sympathy”, in Dramatic Scenes from Great Novelists (London: Allen & Unwin, 1909c), 30–34. (Patry 1909c)

  14. 14.

    Evelyn Smith, “Northanger Abbey”, in Form-Room Plays: Senior Book, Compiled from English Literature (London: Dent & Sons Ltd., 1921), 131–173. (Smith 1921)

  15. 15.

    Ibid., 132; my italics. (Smith 1921)

  16. 16.

    Patry, “The Invitation to Cleveland”, 25–26. (Patry 1909b)

  17. 17.

    Patry, Dramatic Scenes from Great Novelists, 43. (Patry 1909a)

  18. 18.

    Oxford scholar R. W. Chapman has entered literary history as the “official” editor of Austen’s texts. He applied the standards and scrupulousness of Greek manuscripts to Austen’s work, and based his edition on the last version of the text revised by the author. His 1923 Clarendon edition of the novels is still largely the benchmark for Austen studies, having only recently started to be superseded by the Cambridge University Press editions. For a detailed discussion of Chapman’s editorial contribution, see (among many others) Kathryn Sutherland’s Jane Austen’s Textual Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 23–35. (Sutherland 2005)

  19. 19.

    The quotation comes from Milton’s 1644 prose tract Areopagitica: “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit”. Smith, Form-Room Plays, n.p. (Smith 1921)

  20. 20.

    In 1927, Shakespearean scholar Caroline Spurgeon insisted that Austen was “so characteristically English” that gathering information about her was “of intense and indeed of national importance”. Like Shakespeare, Austen was “intensely English in temperament and taste”. Spurgeon, “Jane Austen (Read 23 Feb. 1927)”, in Essays by Divers Hands: Being the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, ed. M. L. Woods. (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press for the Society, 1928) 7: 81–104, 81, 99. (Spurgeon 1928)

  21. 21.

    H. Philip Bolton, Women Writers Dramatized: A Calendar of Performances from Narrative Works Published in English to 1900 (London: Mansell, 2000), 206–207. (Bolton 2000)

  22. 22.

    Martin Wiener has argued that, in early twentieth-century Britain, there was a reaction against the values represented by the Industrial Revolution, as the middle and industrial classes tried to adopt pseudo-aristocratic lifestyles, leading to the formation of a gentrified bourgeois culture. See Martin J. Wiener’s English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) (Wiener 1981). Uses of Austen remediations as aspirational literature partly clash with the celebration of an apparently static social order, anticipating democratic forces that would become more evident after World War II, as Chapter 5 explores.

  23. 23.

    In the early twenty-first century, two volumes, both titled Jane Austen and the Theatre, by Paula Byrne and Penny Gay, respectively, have made the opposite argument.

  24. 24.

    Until 1968, the Lord Chamberlain had to approve new plays previous to their performance. However, this did not apply to amateur productions, which means that works for the professional stage have been largely preserved due to censorship (and are now held at the British Library), but amateur dramatisations are extremely hard to trace.

  25. 25.

    In her history of the first Women’s Institutes, Anne Stamper sees the movement as the first attempt to create a democratic woman’s organisation in rural Britain. Many of its leaders had been involved in the suffragist movement, and after the war they encouraged local women to play a more active role in their communities. For more information about the rapid growth of Women’s Institutes in 1920s Britain, see Stamper’s “Adding Country to Home—WI Members Entering Public Life—1919–1925”, http://www.thewi.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/11116/adding-country-to-home-wi-members-entering-public-life-1919-1925.pdf. Accessed 1 January 2015.

  26. 26.

    MacNamara, Elizabeth Refuses, 8–9. (MacNamara 1926)

  27. 27.

    Ibid., 10. (MacNamara 1926)

  28. 28.

    Ibid., 14. (MacNamara 1926)

  29. 29.

    A similar emphasis on the laughable and the ridiculous is present in Evelyn Smith’s adaptation of Northanger Abbey (Smith 1921), in which the comedy is at the expense of Mrs Allen, whose concern with muslins is substantially enlarged. In Austen’s novel, Mrs Allen discusses muslins mostly during their first meeting with Henry Tilney (NA Vol. I, Chapter 2). In contrast, in Smith’s play, most scenes conclude with Mrs Allen’s untimely remarks on clothing.

  30. 30.

    Phosphor Mallam, Mr. Collins Proposes & Lady Catherine is Annoyed with Elizabeth Bennet (London: Curwen, 1912) (Mallam 1912a, b); Guy Pertwee, “Lady Catherine’s Visit”, in Scenes for Acting from Great Novelists (London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1913), 29–42 (Pertwee 1913); and Nigel Playfair, “An Evening of Plays”, BBC Radio, 15 January 1924. (Playfair 1924)

  31. 31.

    There is none until 1930: Edith Brown’s Susan Price; Or, Resolution (London: John Lane, 1930) (Brown 1930). The sequel explores Susan’s adventures as Lady Bertram’s companion and her romance with her elder cousin Tom. Susan Price; Or, Resolution, Brown’s third novel, is notably more developed and reader-friendly than her completion of The Watsons.

  32. 32.

    Looser, “The Cult of Pride and Prejudice”, 175. (Looser 2013)

  33. 33.

    This is, of course, Simon Langton’s 1995 adaptation for the BBC with a script by Andrew Davies, consisting of six episodes of 55 minutes each. In the 1990s, the comic release was obviously less pressing than in the post-war period.

  34. 34.

    Patry, “The Invitation to Cleveland”, 24. (Patry 1909b)

  35. 35.

    Ben Webster played Mr Darcy; May Whitty was Mrs Bennet; and Ellen Terry was Mrs Long. A. B. Walkley, “Pride and Prejudice”, The Times, 25 March 1922, 8. (Walkley 1922)

  36. 36.

    Eileen and John Squire, Pride and Prejudice: A Play in Four Acts (London: Heinemann, 1929), performed in 1922. (Squire and Squire 1929)

  37. 37.

    Ibid., 118. (Squire and Squire 1929)

  38. 38.

    Ibid., 120. (Squire and Squire 1929)

  39. 39.

    Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”, in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale and David M. Halperin (London: Routledge, 1993), 307–320. (Butler 1993)

  40. 40.

    Ibid., 315. (Butler 1993)

  41. 41.

    Ibid., 316. (Butler 1993)

  42. 42.

    Asa Briggs points out that as the BBC grew, something happened to British society and British government: the BBC acquired a place in the organisation of British society, affecting people’s way of thinking, feeling and relating to one another. Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volume I: The Birth of Broadcasting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 4. (Briggs 1961)

  43. 43.

    Thomas Hajkowski, The BBC and National Identity in Britain, 1922–53 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 3. (Hajkowski 2010)

  44. 44.

    Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, 15. (Briggs 1961)

  45. 45.

    Hajkowski, The BBC and National Identity in Britain, 7. (Hajkowski 2010)

  46. 46.

    “Reading from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice”, BBC Radio, 24 May 1927, 2.55–3 p.m.

  47. 47.

    Lady Sandhurst, “Reading from Jane Austen’s Emma”, BBC Radio, 2 June 1928, 8–8.30 p.m. (Sandhurst 1928)

  48. 48.

    Briggs, The History of Broadcasting, 18, 228. (Briggs 1961). Passages from Pride and Prejudice had been read on the wireless before, but this novel had not yet been serialised in its entirety: for instance, on 30 September 1926, Trevor Clark read Mr Collins’s proposal (15 minutes). Selections from Pride and Prejudice were later read by a Miss Margaret Hines. The non-aristocratic status of these two readers contrasts with that of Lady Sandhurst. Trevor Clark, “Interlude from Studio: Mr Trevor Clark reading ‘Mr Collins’ Proposal’ from ‘Pride and Prejudice’ by Jane Austen”, BBC Radio, 30 September 1926, 8.55–9.10 p.m. (Clark 1926); “Margaret Hines Reading from Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen); Concert (continued); Suzanne Bertin; Virginia McLean; Hardy Williamson; Murray Lambert”, BBC Radio Daventry, 7 January 1928, 9.30–10.30 p.m.

  49. 49.

    Andrew Wright, “Jane Austen Adapted”, in Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30, no. 3 (1975): 421–453, 443. (Wright 1975)

  50. 50.

    This time it was her birthday that was commemorated. According to The Times, Filippi’s play had also been performed in 1923 at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but no records seem to survive. “The Bennets”, The Times, 28 April 1923, 8.

  51. 51.

    Wright, “Jane Austen Adapted”, 443. (Wright 1975)

  52. 52.

    Briggs, The History of Broadcasting, 14. (Briggs 1961)

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  1. University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Marina Cano

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Cano, M. (2017). Early Re-Enactments. In: Jane Austen and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43988-4_4

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