Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2:
….
Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1:
OPHELIA The king rises.
Mansfield Park, Chapter 20:
“…[Sir Thomas] had also
set the carpenter to work in pulling down what had been so lately put up in the
billiard-room, and given the scene-painter his dismissal long enough to justify
the pleasing belief of his being then at least as far off as Northampton. The
scene-painter was gone, having spoilt only the floor of one room, ruined all
the coachman's sponges, and made five of the under-servants idle and
dissatisfied; and Sir Thomas was in hopes that another day or two would suffice
to wipe away every outward memento of what had been, even to the destruction of
every unbound copy of Lovers' Vows in the house, for HE WAS BURNING ALL THAT
MET HIS EYE.”
INTRODUCTION:
Among the countless omissions
and wrong turns of mainstream Austen scholarship I‘ve collected and catalogued
over the past decade, one near the very top of the list has to be the belief
that one major reason why Jane Austen included the Lovers Vows episode in Mansfield Park, was to express her own strong disapproval
of the theatrical performance in general, and even more so of the “subversive” message
of Kotzebue’s controversial play as translated and adapted by Inchbald.
In my considered opinion, and
as I will explain why below, it is absurd to take (1) Fanny’s disapproval of the
family’s enactment of the play, and (2) Sir Thomas’s burning of every copy
thereof “that met his eye”, as being congruent with a similar disapproval
thereof by Jane Austen herself. It is as
absurd, in fact, as it would be if Shakespearean scholars widely believed that
Shakespeare himself strongly disapproved of theatre, and The Mousetrap (itself an adaptation by Hamlet of a supposed play
called The Murder of Gonzago) in
particular, because (1) Gertrude opines that the Player Queen protests too
much, and (2) Claudius gets really upset watching the performance thereof. Of
course, they don’t believe this, and I hope that my post today will be a first step toward bringing about a change in that same direction in
opinions about Lovers Vows in Mansfield Park.
DISCUSSION:
It also remains surprising
to me that I was, in 2006, apparently the first Austen scholar ever to realize,
as perhaps my placing the two quotations at the start of this post next to each
other may have already alerted you, that Lovers
Vows fulfills the exact same function in the shadow story of Mansfield Park as The Mousetrap does in Hamlet.
The only Austen scholar I
can find who even went so far as to understand that Sir Thomas’s conscience was
caught by Lovers Vows is the wonderfully
outside-the-box Barbara K. Seeber, who back in 2000 wrote:
“Lovers Vows brings to the surface exactly what Sir Thomas’s
discourse seeks to repress. The play exposes Baron Wildenhaim’s indiscretion;
illicit love has no place in Sir Thomas’s self-
definition as the benevolent patriarch. He reacts by burning ‘every
unbound copy of Lovers Vows’ and when
Maria exposes his failure as a patriarch, she too is purged…The play questions
the trading of one’s daughter to a rich fool, a fault that Sir Thomas is conscious
of committing in his deal with Mr. Rushworth…Brought face to face with Baron
Wildenhaim, Sir Thomas is made to look into a mirror, and he does not like what
he sees. Sir Thomas’s vision of himself is based on partial blindness…”
As excellent and ahead of
the curve as Seeber’s insight was in 2000, she was not outside-the-box enough to realize (1) the Hamlet connection, or (2) that it was not merely Sir Thomas’s
readiness to trade his daughter to a rich fool that he saw in the theatrical
mirror, it was the even more heinous sin
that Baron Waldenhaim committed twenty years earlier—that of seducing and then
abandoning an innocent young woman who loved him, leaving her to raise their illegitimate
son in poverty and scandal---that Tom Bertram, the Hamlet-like stage-director
who chooses Lovers Vows from among the
play candidates (which by the way include Hamlet!),
holds up to his father’s face!
I.e., it has been my
interpretation since 2006 that Sir Thomas, who is just returning from a very
lengthy stay in Antigua, where he presumably is the hands-on own of a slave
plantation, has (1) more than two decades earlier sired one or more children on
one or more of his African slaves there (much as occurred, by the way and not
coincidentally, with Lord MANSFIELD’s nephew, who appears to have sired Dido
Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, the heroine of the new movie Belle, on an African slave), and (2) now one of those children,
like Frederick in Lovers Vows, has,
like a proverbial chicken coming home to roost, returned to claim some
compensation from his father:
‘[Henry Crawford] was not
handsome: no, when they first saw him he was absolutely plain, BLACK and plain;
but still he was the gentleman, with a pleasing address. The second meeting
proved him not so very plain: he was plain, to be sure, but then he had so much
countenance, and HIS TEETH WERE SO GOOD, and he was SO WELL MADE, that one soon
forgot he was plain; and after a third interview, after dining in company with
him at the Parsonage, he was no longer allowed to be called so by anybody. “
Which is also as much to
say that I heartily approve of Rozema’s 1999 film adaptation of Mansfield Park, which depicts Tom
Bertram as an artist sketching visual nightmare images of watching his father rape
a slave, but even Rozema, for all her many catches of pieces of the shadow story
of Mansfield Park and making them
explicit, causing much unjustified gnashing
of
teeth among Janeites at large, did not connect Sir Thomas’s mysterious Antigua
career to the “plain and black” Henry Crawford, with his “so good” teeth and
his being “so well made” as if his teeth and physique were being evaluated at a slave auction at a
dock.
As you can gather from all
of this, then, my interpretation is not a complete departure from all prior
reactions to the Lovers Vows episode
in MP, so much as an extension of the ideas of two earlier pioneers.
And I will close by pointing
out that my connection of Hamlet to Lovers Vows is strongly supported by the
many veiled allusions by Inchbald to Hamlet
in particular, including but not limited to (1) the two times in Lovers Vows when Cottager’s Wife
paraphrases Hamlet’s famous “what a piece of work is man” line, which Mrs.
Norris then quotes in Mansfield Park, and also (2) (as I only noticed just
this past week) Inchbald’s Prologue, which in every line winks at Hamlet
as the primary allusive subtext of Lovers Vows, without ever stating
this explicitly:
POETS
have oft' declared, in doleful strain,
That
o'er dramatic tracks they beat in vain,
Hopeless
that novelty will spring to sight;
For
life and nature are exhausted quite.
Though
plaints like these have rung from age to age,
Too
kind are writers to desert the stage;
And
if they, fruitless, search for unknown prey,
At
least they dress old game a novel way;
But
such lamentings should be heard no more,
For
modern taste turns Nature out of door;
Who
ne'er again her former sway will boast,
Till,
to complete her works, she starts A GHOST.
If
such the mode, what can we hope to-night,
Who
rashly dare approach without A SPRITE?
No
dreadful cavern, no MIDNIGHT SCREAM,
No
rosin flames, nor e'en one flitting gleam.
Nought
of the charms so potent to invite
The
monstrous charms of terrible delight.
Our
present theme the German Muse supplies,
But
rather aims to soften than surprise.
Yet,
with her woes she strives some smiles to blend,
Intent
as well to cheer as to amend:
On
her own native soil she knows the art
To
charm the fancy, and to touch the heart.
If,
then, she mirth and pathos can express,
Though
less engaging in an English dress,
Let
her from British hearts no peril fear,
But,
AS A STRANGER, FIND A WELCOME HERE.
Inchbald is, I think it
clear, first alerting her savvy audience that she has redressed “old game” (i.e., Hamlet)
“a novel way”; more specifically, that she
has transmuted the Gothic horror imagery of Hamlet,
with its ghost/spirit who walks at midnight, into a domestic scene that nonetheless is still
horrible from a moral perspective—and how Austenian is that?
And then, to be sure her
hints were not ignored, that final line is a wink at another famous Kotzebue
play, The Stranger, but is also, as
the 1808 edition---surely therefore read by JA herself before while
writing Mansfield Park----of Inchbald’s plays, makes explicit, an allusion
to Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5, when the Ghost appears:
HAMLET And therefore AS A STRANGER GIVE IT WELCOME.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
CONCLUSION
I hope I have convinced
you, then, that there are more things, things of great importance, in Lovers Vows as interpreted and reinvented
by Jane Austen, than have been dreamt of in the philosophy of mainstream Austen
scholarship. I hope you agree that Jane
Austen took Inchbald’s multiple hints at Hamlet,
and, in turn, made a sandwich out of Hamlet
and Lovers Vows, and added her own
inimitable novelistic condiments, as only she could, to create the miraculously
meaty and delicious concoction—like Lovers
Vows, a domesticated Gothic horror--- she named Mansfield Park.
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
P.S.: The above will be
included in my presentation at the upcoming JASNA AGM in Montreal from October
12-14. If you attend, while I hope that I will convince my audience with my
arguments not only about the Hamlet, but
also the Julius Caesar, Troilus &
Cressida, and Titus Andronicus allusions
in Mansfield Park, you might just
observe some interesting reactions from some
members of the audience who may feel about my interpretations the way Sir
Thomas did about Lovers Vows, i.e., that they are so horrible that they need to be
burned!
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