In response to my last
post re James Stanier Clarke as a real life Malvolio…
…which itself was a
followup to my post last week about Clarke as various fools from Shakespeare’s
plays, and how Jane Austen alluded to them in Emma….
… Diane Reynolds, in
Janeites & Austen-L, was generous enough to take the time to read both of
those posts all the way through, and here are some of her insightful comments,
and my further replies to same.
Diane: "I was very glad you included the scene from
Clarke's biography, where as a joke he
is forced to drink too much and then led to bed where a live donkey has been placed, all trussed
up. Again overtones of A Midsummer's Night Dream (not to mention cruel to the
donkey). This casting of Clarke as
Bottom does point to him as seen as getting above himself. It also shows
graphically, behind the polite words we usually get about the Prince Regent's
court as bawdy, how very out of control and cruel it was. As you point out,
this episode with Clarke and his disoriented, frightened
reaction, was widely publicized, apparently in a way that ridiculed him rather
than attacked the PR. No wonder JA despises the PR and balked at dedicating her
novel to such a complete callous asshole. What a jerk the man was."
Yes, as I suggested in my
earlier post about Knightley's spiked spruce beer receipt, the
Shakespeare-savvy Prince (recall that when he was young, he styled himself
Florizel to Mary Robinson's Perdita from The
Winter's Tale) not only obtained a "command performance" from
Clarke at Petworth not only as Bottom, but also as Christopher Sly from the Induction
frame story in The Taming of the Shrew. Had this occurred in 2014, the Prince would surely have taped it
all on his IPhone, and put it up on
YouTube before the night was over.
Callous asshole does seem
the right description--it was something out of
The Sopranos. No wonder JA
wrote to Martha Lloyd that she HATED the Prince Regent. He didn't just treat
his wife abominably, he spread the suffering around, and I would not be
surprised to learn of other examples of where
unfortunate underlings of his were made to suffer public humiliation when for
whatever reason the impulse seized the Prince.
Which suddenly makes me
connect the dots between Clarke's involuntary Petworth Frolicks (the title of the Cruikshank caricature) and the
following speech by Henry Crawford in Mansfield
Park:
"...Henry Crawford,
to whom, in all the riot of his gratifications it was yet an untasted pleasure,
was quite alive at the idea. "I really believe," said he, "I
could be fool enough at this moment to undertake any character that ever was
written, from Shylock or Richard III down to the singing hero of a farce in his
scarlet coat and cocked hat. I feel as if I could be anything or everything; as
if I could rant and storm, or sigh or cut capers, in any tragedy or comedy in
the English language.
Let us be doing something.
Be it only half a play, an act, a scene; what should prevent us? Not these
countenances, I am sure," looking towards the Miss Bertrams; "and for
a theatre, what signifies a theatre? We shall be only amusing ourselves. Any
room in this house might suffice."
"
JA published Mansfield Park in 1814--the incident at
Petworth occurred in October 1813. Don't you see, Henry Crawford in this moment
is the Prince Regent himself, always in search of " an untasted
pleasure" "in all the riot of his gratifications"! But it wasn't
just any room at Petworth that sufficed
that fateful night, it was the bedroom Clarke
slept in at Petworth!
And yet somehow it is
still mainstream Austen scholarship that JA was flattered in a modest way that
the Prince wanted her to dedicate Emma
to him? What other evidence would it
take to prove it, if this doesn't?
Diane: "However, given that JA was a compassionate
person who disliked the Miss Bates of the world ridiculed by those above them,
would this episode with the donkey have made JA more sympathetic towards
Clarke, rather than less? I think that there is a strong sense that she doesn't quite know how to deal
with him--deal with him she must, but I wonder if she's simply keeping him at a
distance. Is she not sending him the same disingenuous boiler plate she sends
to the Countess of Morley? At first I was taking it seriously, but now I wonder
if her over-the-top worries about Emma's
reception are a deliberate overplaying of her hand. "
I agree with you that
Clarke was not a true villain in JA's eyes, but he was most definitely a clown
and a fool in her estimation, and therefore worthy of sharp satire. It's clear
to me that she felt a strong contempt for him, precisely because he WAS such a
hypocrite, such a toady, so willing to go beyond all bounds of self respect, in
order to please the Big Boss. Hypocrisy
in a toady was a moral "felony" in JA's eyes, albeit a felony in the third degree---whereas
the Prince's wrongful actions, given his
enormous power, were all felonies of the first degree.
I forgot to reemphasize
one point that epitomizes Clarke's impossibly deep lack of integrity and self
respect. Did you notice that he actually mentions Petworth in Letter 132(A) to
JA?:
"On Monday I go to
Lord Egremonts at Petworth - where your Praises have long been sounded as they
ought to be."
Think about how abject
Clarke's self loathing must have been, for him to go out of his way to boast to
JA about his access to the very same place where, only 2 years earlier, he had
suffered what had to have been the worst humiliation of his life, in front of
the entire English nation yet! Did he think that JA lived in a cave and had not
read or heard about that incident?
Whatever sympathy she felt
for Clarke was, I think, overpowered by her contempt for his obsequious
willingness to do his master's bidding, his staggering blindness to how he
appeared to others.
As for her overplaying her
hand, I don't agree. I'd say that Twelfth
Night shows what it means to really overplay one's satirical hand. Look at
what Maria & Co do to Malvolio in Twelfth
Night--They don't just yuck it up by observing him make a fool of himself
in courting his boss the Countess Olivia. They waste no time and proceed to ratchet up
from leaving the fake letter for him to find, about five levels, to where they
falsely imprison him in the dark, and try their best to make him believe he is
insane. To the point where Olivia, at the end of the play, when she becomes
aware of what the pranksters have all done to Malvolio, expresses real dismay.
And of course Malvolio
curses them roundly. But Clarke never said to the Prince anything resembling
"I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you." And I think JA thought
that somehow, he ought not to have continued to fawn on the Prince as he did,
both before and after that dreadful experience.
But, in contrast to what
happens to Malvolio in Twelfth Night,
JA clearly stopped at the first stage---her joke on Clarke was a private joke,
of which he was, as far as we can know, never even aware---he can hardly suffer
today from the world's realizing in the 21st century the full extent of JA's
joke at his expense-just as Mr. Collins never knows that Mr. Bennet has been
getting his jollies letting him make a fool of himself.
That's what takes what JA
did out of the realm of true cruelty, for me. She knew she had stumbled upon a
real life man who made Mr. Collins look like an amateur, because whereas
Collins only got next to Lady Catherine, Clarke had succeeded in getting
himself close to the most powerful person in England. So he became the King of
the Toadies, if you will.
She simply could not
resist the challenge of constructing the matrix of satire that I have now
fleshed out. For those who had eyes to read the Jane Austen Code, this was her
message, saying, being powerless does not mean you have to surrender all
self-respect.
Diane: "As for
Clarke, the letter he sends to Austen, which I take as sincere, also does have
the fawning quality of a professional courtier. He may be one these people who
can only understand people as above him or below him, never as equal humans. That
would irritate Austen ... I have to think more about this. My tendency would be
to think her feelings about him are not black and white, and that while she
might well doublespeak to him, perhaps mirroring back a bit of his fawning in her
own over-the-top self-effacement, I don't think that she would mimic the PR's
cruelty."
As I suggested above, her
joke was a private joke, I don't see any sign that she felt the need to let any
of the targets of her often savage satire know that they had been
"shot". It reminds me of the
line from Steve Winwood's great Traffic song, The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys:
But today you just read
that the man was shot dead
By a gun that didn't make
any noise
But it wasn't the bullet
that laid him to rest was
The low spark of
high-heeled boys
Jane Austen's satirical
guns did not make any noise (except to the "dogs", i.e., the sharp
elves, who could hear the "frequency" her satirical messages were
transmitted on).
Diane: "Twelfth Night, a night of carnival, as
well as Midsummer's Night, another
night of carnival, both provide a good context for understanding Emma, which
with JA's sleight of hand, is both completely realistic and yet can be read
completely upside down as a fantasy in which women do reign supreme, especially
if Miss Bates is pulling all the strings. Your contextualizing of the lines
from the courtship riddle about woman reigning supreme as a commentary on the
Twelfth/Midsummer's Night theme of the novel works quite well. "
Thank ye!
Diane: "Now, as for
Mr. Elton. I do--and have in the past-- wondered that John Knightley slips into
the carriage with Mr. Woodhouse, leaving Mr. Elton and Emma alone together. I
am sure he does this on purpose--but to what purpose? It is possible he has
encouraged Mr. E to get drunk on spruce beer, and he certainly has quickly
figured out that Mr. E is interested in Emma, not Harriet. But might he
contrive this carriage encounter out of mercy--to get the proposal over with
and hence put Mr. E out of his misery, as Emma has made it clear she is not in
the least interested in Mr. E? That would make sense to me. "
The primary purpose, in my
opinion, was Step One in George Knightley's very systematic campaign which he
first articulated, in part, to Mrs. Weston:
"She always declares
she will never marry, which, of course, means just nothing at all. But I have
no idea that she has yet ever seen a man she cared for. It would not be a bad
thing for her to be very much in love with a proper object. I should like to
see Emma in love, and in some doubt of a return; it would do her good. But
there is nobody hereabouts to attach her; and she goes so seldom from
home."
The part Mr. K did NOT
make explicit to Mrs. Weston, however, was that his own covert (and very
deceitful) goal was to make Emma marry HIM! In order to do that, she had to be
broken down, step by step, so that her (healthy, self-protective) independent
streak would gradually be dismantled, brick by
brick. And in the end she would been melted down helpless in a puddle on the
ground, only too grateful, in her fear and panic at getting abandoned by
everyone she knew at Highbury alone with her father, to have herself scooped up and rescued by the
a white Knight(ley)---ALL puns
intended!
And so Knightley seized on
the fortuitous opportunity presented by Emma's obsession with matchmaking Harriet
with Elton, when Knightley knew perfectly well that Elton had his eye on Emma
all along.
The Christmas dinner
carriage ride was Step One--to scare the living c-p out of Emma, and take her
down a few pegs in the process. And it worked.
The Final Step, as i bet
you've now already anticipated, was Harriet's calmly telling Emma that SHE
(Harriet) was going to marry Knightley. That's
when Emma melted into that puddle.
And that's when Knightley
acquired his " cash cow" .
Remember the Auden
poem......
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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