Abstract
Several authors have noted the allusions to King Lear in Mansfield Park. This chapter does not dispute such reading, nor does it attempt to ascertain the degree to which Austen consciously cited Shakespeare. Instead, it complements these earlier studies by revisiting Mansfield Park through the eyes of a reader familiar with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Despite Mansfield Park’s explicit allusion to Shakespeare’s tragic and historic works, I suggest that there may be even deeper, if implicit, allusions to his comedy at work in the novel. In Mansfield Park, Austen alludes to the fickle emotions and wayward romances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and echoes its tortured courtship, competing rulers and self-consciously happy ending. Despite their differing historical contexts and genres, Austen and Shakespeare both portray the interchangeability of lovers and the fickle nature of romantic attachmentg in these works. Both artists combine tragic and comedic elements in their oeuvre to make an argument about the possibility of the harmonious resolution of romantic attachments within societal constraints. Through this lens it becomes apparent that Austen, like Shakespeare, is modelling a way in which to see the world.
The first version of this chapter was written in honour of Timothy Fuller’s fifty years of teaching at The Colorado College. Timothy Fuller was the first to inspire my interest in the connections between Austen and Shakespeare.
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Notes
- 1.
All citations from Austen’s novels are from The Novels of Jane Austen (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, [1923] 1988).
- 2.
While this connection has been mentioned by Isobel Armstrong , Clara Calvo , H.R. Harris and John Wiltshire , the best treatment is Susan Allen Ford’s ‘“Intimate by Instinct”: Mansfield Park and the Comedy of King Lear’, Persuasions 24 (2002): 177–97. See also Ford’s excellent summary of the similarities between Mansfield Park and Lear in ‘Working Out a Happy Conclusion: Mansfield Park and the Revision of King Lear’, Sensibilities 27 (2003): 95–110, especially 96–7.
- 3.
C. L. Barber built on Northrop Frye’s term (Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957: 181ff), incorporating the cultural significance and ritual sources of rural feasts and saturnalia in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press [1959], 2011). For Barber , outdoor romps and rowdiness exhibit ‘holiday license’ and move society ‘through release to clarification’ (40).
- 4.
Barber , Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 25 ‘We are led to feel the outgoing to the woods as an escape from the inhibitions imposed by parents and the organized community’ (ibid., 142).
- 5.
All citations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are from The Arden Shakespeare. (London: Methuen and Co., [1979] 1996).
- 6.
Henry even refers to the days before his return as a ‘dream’ : ‘It is as a dream , a pleasant dream !’ he exclaimed, breaking forth again, after a few minutes’ musing. ‘I shall always look back on our theatricals with exquisite pleasure’ (225).
- 7.
See Stuart M. Tave, Lovers, Clowns, and Fairies: An Essay on Comedies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 7–8.
- 8.
See Inger Brodey , ‘Avenues, Parks, Wilderness, and Ha-has: The Use and Abuse of Landscape in Mansfield Park’, in Approaches to Teaching Mansfield Park, eds. Marcia McClintock Folsom and John Wiltshire (New York: Modern Language Association, 2014), 175–89.
- 9.
Wilkes makes a similar point about Persuasion in Chap. 2 of this volume, citing the important passage near the end of the novel, where Anne eloquently defends women’s constancy to Captain Harville .
- 10.
Penny Gay has deemed the narrator’s intrusion at the end of Mansfield Park ‘as conscious as that of the actress who usually spoke a play’s epilogue’; Jane Austen and the Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2002) 24; she also implicitly draws a further connection between Puck and Austen’s self-conscious narrator.
- 11.
Barber , Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 142.
- 12.
Ibid, 102.
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Brodey, I.S.B. (2019). Tyrants, Lovers and Comedy in the Green Worlds of Mansfield Park and A Midsummer Night’s Dream . 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_8
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