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Jane Austen as ‘Prose Shakespeare’: Early Comparisons

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Abstract

In an 1821 review of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, Richard Whately compared Austen to Shakespeare on account of her ability to create characters who are universal types as well as individuals. In the 1840s and 1850s, Thomas Babington Macaulay and George Henry Lewes took up this point.

This analogy between Austen and Shakespeare continued during the rest of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and obviously boosted Austen’s reputation. This chapter examines the less obvious implications of such frequent comparison: on the one hand, it meant that Austen, a female practitioner of a genre generally considered inferior to poetry and drama, was aligned with the most elevated male poet/dramatist in English literature. On the other hand, this also induced some critics to identify the differences between the two. Austen was, for some of these critics, fully in control of what she attempted, but she did not attempt much.

It is these problematic implications of the Austen/Shakespeare comparison that the current chapter examines. It surveys the work of a range of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century critics. These critics’ studies bring into focus the question of how far writers’ works survive because they express putatively ‘universal’ aspects of human life.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    ‘Recent Novels, French and English’, Fraser’s Magazine 36 (December 1847): 687, in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage: 1811–1870, ed. B. C. Southam (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968), 124–5. There are still variant spellings of ‘Shakespeare’ in the nineteenth century, including in Lewes’s own usage, but the latter probably reflects the conventions followed by the different periodicals in which he published.

  2. 2.

    Review of The Fair Carew, Leader, 22 November 1851, 115, in Southam, Critical Heritage, 1811–1870, 130; ‘The Lady Novelists’, Westminster Review, 58 (July 1852): 134–5, in Southam, Critical Heritage, 1811–1870, 140–1; ‘The Novels of Jane Austen’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 86 (July 1859): 99–113, in Southam, Critical Heritage, 1811–1870, 153, 157.

  3. 3.

    ‘The Life and Letters of Madame d’Arblay’, Edinburgh Review 76 (July 1843): 560–2.

  4. 4.

    Ibid., 561.

  5. 5.

    Ibid., 561, 561–2. Macaulay was not in fact original in making this kind of comparison. Back in 1821, in one of the first substantial essays on Austen, Richard Whately had observed that Austen and Shakespeare shared the capacity to create characters who resembled one another, while at the same time carefully discriminating them. In Shakespeare, Whately points to the fools Slender, Shallow and Sir Andrew Aguecheeck as being differentiated from each other—just as his tyrants Richard III, Macbeth and Julius Caesar are obviously dissimilar. In Austen, Whately continued, her fools Mrs Bennet, Mr Rushworth and Miss Bates resemble each other as little as do her heroes Darcy, Knightley and Edmund Bertram. See his review of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, Quarterly Review, 24 (January 1821): 352–76, in Southam, Critical Heritage, 1811–1870, 98.

  6. 6.

    See Adrian Poole, Shakespeare and the Victorians (London: Arden Press, 2004), 90ff.

  7. 7.

    In his Critical Heritage, Brian Southam reproduces numerous texts that exemplify this tendency. One, for instance, is the contribution in 1891 by William Clymer to Scribner’s Magazine. See Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1870–1940, ed. Brian Southam (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1987), 198–202.

  8. 8.

    Brian Southam points to the frequent reiteration of this trope through commentary in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: The Critical Heritage, 1870–1940, 13–14.

  9. 9.

    This phrase was first cited in the ‘Biographical Notice of Jane Austen’, which her brother Henry appended to the posthumous publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in 1818: see Southam, Critical Heritage: 1811–1870, 78.

  10. 10.

    James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 147–54, 77–9.

  11. 11.

    For the lasting impact of the Memoir, see Southam, Critical Heritage, 1870–1940, Introduction, and Kathryn Sutherland, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 70ff.

  12. 12.

    Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 2 (1885), 260.

  13. 13.

    Most of the recent comparisons are textually localized. Especially interesting is Daniel Pollack-Pelzner’s article, ‘Jane Austen, the Prose Shakespeare’ (2013), which traces some of the history of the phrase, but concentrates on how it might help prompt a comparison between Shakespeare’s drama and Austen’s use of free indirect discourse. See also Jocelyn Harris, Jane Austen and the Art of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Penny Gay, Jane Austen and the Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, ‘Jane Austen, The Prose Shakespeare’, Studies in English Literature, 53. 4 (2013): 763–92.

  14. 14.

    George Lyttelton, Dialogues of the Dead, quoted in Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), 114 (Lyttelton’s emphasis).

  15. 15.

    Thomas Carlyle, from ‘The Hero as Poet’ (1840), in The Romantics on Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate (London: Penguin, 1992), 248, 255–6.

  16. 16.

    Cited in Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare, 223.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., 148–9.

  18. 18.

    Jane Austen, Mansfield Park [1814], ed. R. W. Chapman, in The Novels of Jane Austen, vol. 3, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), 338. The passage is in vol. 3, chapter 3 (or chapter 34).

  19. 19.

    Cf. Austen’s famous defence of the novel against other, more prestigious genres, in the fifth chapter of Northanger Abbey.

  20. 20.

    Southam, Critical Heritage, 1811–1870, 130.

  21. 21.

    W. Robertson, ‘Jane Austen’, Time 2 (February 1889): 197–200 (Robertson’s emphasis).

  22. 22.

    Southam, Critical Heritage, 1811–1870, 125.

  23. 23.

    Southam, Critical Heritage, 1811–1870, 153 (Lewes’s emphasis).

  24. 24.

    T. E. Kebbel, ‘Miss Austen and George Eliot,’ National Review 28 (October 1883): 273.

  25. 25.

    Walter Raleigh, A History of the English Novel (London: John Murray, 1894), 262.

  26. 26.

    S. P. B. Mais, ‘The Centenary of Jane Austen’, Fortnightly Review 102 (August 1917): 264.

  27. 27.

    New Quarterly Magazine, 8 (January 1877): 7.

  28. 28.

    Ibid., 29.

  29. 29.

    Anon., Saturday Review, 25 October 1913, 527.

  30. 30.

    ‘G.Y,’ The Bookman, 7 (November 1894): 52.

  31. 31.

    Walter Frewen Lord, ‘Jane Austen’s Novels’, The Nineteenth Century and After 52 (October 1902): 665.

  32. 32.

    Devoney Looser, The Making of Jane Austen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 153ff. Before being published, Lord’s criticisms of Austen were presented to an all-male club.

  33. 33.

    Frewen Lord, ‘Jane Austen’s Novels’, 665.

  34. 34.

    Ibid., 667.

  35. 35.

    Miss Annie Gladstone, ‘Another View of Jane Austen’s Novels’, The Nineteenth Century and After, 53 (January 1903): 113–21.

  36. 36.

    Southam, Critical Heritage, 1811–1870, 153.

  37. 37.

    Anon., ‘Lady Novelists’, Eclectic Review 15 (October 1868): 305.

  38. 38.

    ‘Jane Austen’, in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, vol. 2, collected by H. C. Beeching (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 21.

  39. 39.

    Bradley, ‘Jane Austen’ In Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, vol. 2, collected by H. C. Beeching (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 17.

  40. 40.

    For instance, Simpson was a liberal Catholic, and part of his interest in Shakespeare arose from his theory that the dramatist had also been a Catholic in a Protestant country. See David R. Carroll, introduction to his edition, Richard Simpson as Critic (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 14–15.

  41. 41.

    ‘Memoir of Jane Austen’, North British Review 52 (April 1870), 129–52, in Southam, Critical Heritage, 1811–1870, 245.

  42. 42.

    Ibid., 246.

  43. 43.

    Ibid., 250.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., 247.

  45. 45.

    Pollack-Pelzner notes that Simpson actually researched the origin of the phrase ‘prose Shakespeare’, and discovered that it had been first applied by Charles Lamb to Shakespeare’s dramatist contemporary, Thomas Heywood: see Simpson, ‘Memoir of Jane Austen’. North British Review 52, April 1870, 129–52, 243, and Pollack-Pelzner, ‘Jane Austen, the Prose Shakespeare’, 774.

  46. 46.

    ‘Memoir of Jane Austen’ in Southam, Critical Heritage, 1811–1870, 243.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., 243.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., 246–7.

  49. 49.

    Ibid., 249. William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor [1986], 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 809.

  50. 50.

    ‘Memoir of Jane Austen’ in Southam, Critical Heritage, 1811–1870, 255.

  51. 51.

    Ibid., 256.

  52. 52.

    Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or What You Will, in Wells and Taylor, Complete Works, 730.

  53. 53.

    ‘Memoir of Jane Austen’ in Southam, Critical Heritage, 1811–1870, 256.

  54. 54.

    Ibid., 256.

  55. 55.

    Ibid., 257.

  56. 56.

    Ibid., 257.

  57. 57.

    ‘Jane Austen, ob. July 18, 1817,’ Quarterly Review, July 1917, in Southam, Critical Heritage, 1870–1940, 250–1.

  58. 58.

    Ibid., 251.

  59. 59.

    Ibid., 250.

  60. 60.

    Ibid., 246.

  61. 61.

    Ibid., 249.

  62. 62.

    Ibid., 250.

  63. 63.

    Ibid., 250.

  64. 64.

    ‘Jane Austen [Read February 23rd, 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), 82.

  65. 65.

    Ibid., 102, 100, 99–101.

  66. 66.

    Ibid., 104. (Spurgeon’s emphasis)

  67. 67.

    For Austen, see Marina Cano, Jane Austen and Performance (London: Palgrave, 2017), 41ff. As for Shakespeare, in 1921 he was judged by a committee (tasked to review education at all levels throughout Britain) to be central to the idea of Englishness, and hence to the curriculum. See Robert Shaughnessy’s introduction to the fourth edition of Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), xvi.

  68. 68.

    Spurgeon, ‘Jane Austen [Read February 23rd, 1927]’, 93. Forster’s essay was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly 137 (January 1926): 30–7, and reprinted in his collection Abinger Harvest (London: Edward Arnold, 1936), 3–14.

  69. 69.

    Sense and Sensibility, volume I, chapter 2, in The Works of Jane Austen. Edited by R. W. Chapman (London: Oxford University Press, 1933–88).

  70. 70.

    Spurgeon, ‘Jane Austen [Read February 23rd, 1927]’, 94–5. Claudia L. Johnson has also discussed Spurgeon’s characterization of Austen’s Englishness, but with a different emphasis from mine—see her Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 124–5.

  71. 71.

    Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929), in A Room of One’s Own; Three Guineas, ed. Morag Shiach (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 87–8.

  72. 72.

    Virginia Woolf, ‘Jane Austen’ [1925], in The Common Reader (London: Hogarth Press, 1951), 171.

  73. 73.

    See Chap. 14 in this volume.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, Drama and Writing Studies, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Joanne Wilkes

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Marina Cano

  2. University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain

    Rosa García-Periago

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Wilkes, J. (2019). Jane Austen as ‘Prose Shakespeare’: Early Comparisons. In: Cano, M., García-Periago, R. (eds) Jane Austen and William Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25689-0_2

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