"Intimate by instinct": Mansfield Park and the comedy of King Lear (1).

Ford, Susan Allen

ALTHOUGH HENRY CRAWFORD reads from Shakespeare's Henry VIII to Fanny and the suddenly awakened Lady Bertram, he denies any particular knowledge of that or any Shakespeare text: "'Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with him by instinct'" (338). And indeed in Mansfield Park, as in no other novel by Austen, that theatrical instinct is pervasive. Not only Lovers Vows and Henry VIII but numerous other plays are either alluded to or considered for performance: The Merchant of Venice, Richard III, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Douglas, My Grandmother, The Gamester, The Rivals, School for Scandal, Wheel of Fortune, Heir at Law. But it is a play not named--moreover a play whose contemporary form satisfies the Mansfield players' demands for both comedy and tragedy--that contributes most to Mansfield Park. That play is King Lear.

John Wiltshire's recent book Recreating Jane Austen explores the relationship between Austen and Shakespeare. Part of the critical endeavor of tracing textual relationships, he suggests, is the possibly spurious pleasure for the critic/reader, "a delicious sense," of entering into a feeling of "deep communion with two great minds at once" (61). Such activity, he seems to argue, may be of limited usefulness. In a footnote to his discussion of that kind of critical attention, he speculates that "one might imagine similar relations between any Austen novel and any Shakespeare play. What about Mansfield Park and King Lear?" After efficiently and perceptively setting out the parallels, he asks, "Can the attentive reader of Jane Austen fail to detect the text's allusion to Lear here?" (150-51, n 27). And of course, other readers--including Claire Tomalin (316, n 14) and H. R. Harris--have noticed such a pattern. Wiltshire is less interested in the significance of specific correspondences between texts than in Austen's general "incorporation" of Shakespeare and the resultant principle of allusive structure that informs and enriches her fiction.

If, however, we trace the strategies of Austen's incorporation not merely of Shakespeare but of a particular play, King Lear, those strategies may support a more critically aware and artistically assured "incorporation" than Wiltshire suggests. Other contemporary revisions of King Lear, such as Amelia Opie's The Father and Daughter, a Tale in Prose (1801), focus on a father maddened by his daughter's apparent betrayal. Diane Long Hoeveler describes Opie's tale as "a closet epic tragedy, ... a large trunk whose misery gets unpacked and then stuffed again into the small space of a novella." For Hoeveler, that novel's crisis centers on the father's "struggles to recognize his daughter as a sexual woman." Mansfield Park's revision of Lear is rather different, focusing on the tyrannical rather than the maddened Lear. Sir Thomas easily recognizes Fanny as sexual but sees her sexuality only in terms of its social and political currency. Indeed, as it is for the actress on stage, the heroine's sexuality is highlighted by the comments of Sir Thomas and Edmund. In Austen's version of the Lear story, what Sir Thomas must struggle to recognize is Fanny as independent moral entity.

Shakespeare's King Lear seems to inform Mansfield Park at almost every level: plot, character, thematic issues, and imagery. In both works, the father/ king abrogates his responsibility for family/kingdom/estate and suffers as a consequence the ungrateful rejection of his two elder daughters even as he banishes the third daughter, whose honesty he fails to value. Further, the novel incorporates in its main plot the play's subplot: one son betrays his father and the virtues he stands for but fails fully to embody, while the other is revealed as the true inheritor of those paternal values. Even Austen's naming of her characters refers to, while inverting, Shakespeare's: Sir Thomas's pious younger son inherits the name of the Bastard Edmund, while his scapegrace brother assumes the name of Edgar's mad alter ego, Poor Tom. Both King Lear and Mansfield Park explore the issues of generosity and gratitude in the parent/child bond, self knowledge, and responsibility for the estate; and both are linked by images of silence vs. profession, seeing, and Nature. Finally, both examine issues of national identity, exploring the condition of England in the face of changing relationships, responsibilities, definitions. As Jane Austen enters into the eighteenth-century contest to re-define or appropriate King Lear, she enters into the discourses of power, nationalism, family and gender politics that this play provokes. In so doing, she questions readerly expectations of genre. Through this appropriation of Shakespeare's darkest and most passionate play in a novel whose title announces its affinities with examinations of Britain's estate, Jane Austen seems to be declaring with irreverent confidence her stature as a novelist.

Complicating the issue of Austen's Shakespearean borrowings is the problem of determining not merely what she borrowed from Lear but from which Lear she borrowed. Shakespeare's own text is a history of transformations. Shakespeare's sources--which included Holinshed's Chronicles and a play entitled Leir and His Three Daughters--ended happily, with the restoration of Lear and his reunion with the triumphant Cordelia. His reshaping of this material resulted in a tragedy whose darkness was almost blinding to the Enlightenment world. The novelist Charlotte Lennox is one among many readers who objected to his revisions: "Had Shakespear followed the Historian, he would not have violated the Rules of poetical Justice; ... in the Play one Fate overwhelms alike the Innocent and the Guilty, and the Facts in the History are changed to produce Events, neither probable, necessary, nor just" (290-91). Jane Austen's beloved Dr. Johnson, too, was appalled, deeming Cordelia's death "contrary to the natural ideas of justice" ("King Lear" 704, my italics).

Indeed, so powerful and so general was such sentiment that during the eighteenth century, two different versions of King Lear--one on the page, the other on the stage--competed with each other. While Dr. Johnson was editor of an important and popular new edition of Shakespeare's plays, the Lear performed on stage until 1823, and even for a time after, was based on Nahum Tate's radical 1681 revision of Shakespeare. Tate had described Shakespeare's play as "a Heap of Jewels, unstrung and unpolisht" and set about to revise it into more "Regularity and Probability" (295). The result was a radically altered text in terms of both language and scene, the principal innovation of which--besides the elimination of the Fool and Gloucester's fall from the cliff--was its happy ending that included both the marriage of Edgar and Cordelia and Lear's investiture of Cordelia with his power.

Tate's revisions appealed to minds appalled by the unspecified motivations, the grotesque language of madness and foolery, the inequities of reward and punishment, the deeply pessimistic tenor of Shakespeare's play. As Dorothy E. Nameri has argued, "Neo-classical aesthetic theories, based on ideas of reason, progress, and perfectibility" assured the predominance of Tate's Lear through the eighteenth-century (123). Thomas Rymer in his 1692 'A Short View of Tragedy" offered that "Shakespears genius lay for Comedy and Humour. In Tragedy he appears quite out of his Element" (qtd. in Snyder 3), a judgment that seemed to resonate for eighteenth-century readers and playgoers. Samuel Johnson echoes Rymer: "His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct" ("Preface to Shakespeare" 69). Tate's revision, Johnson argues, is validated by its audience's vote of approval:

 In the present case the publick has decided. Cordelia, from the
 time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And, if
 my sensations could add anything to the general suffrage, I might
 relate, that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death,
 that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last
 scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.
 ("King Lear" 704)

There were dissenting voices. James Boaden in his Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, objects to the "inconsistency and absurdity" (235) of Tate's version, but allows that the marriage plot might possibly be effective: "though it breaks upon the filial singleness of Cordelia's mind, and the lover takes his turn to reign with the father there, yet female interest should be had for our audiences if it can be admitted without serious injury to the work" (236). Charles Lamb, however, with characteristic disdain for staged performance, is stronger in his condemnation of Tate's improvements:

 The play is beyond all art, as the tamperings with it shew: it is
 too hard and stony; it must have love-scenes, and a happy ending.
 It is not enough that Cordelia is a daughter; she must shine as a
 lover too. Tate has put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan,
 for Garrick and his followers, the show-men of the scene, to draw
 the mighty beast about more easily. A happy ending!--as if the
 living martyrdom that Lear had gone through--the flaying of his
 feelings alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of
 life the only decorous thing for him. (97)

As even one of its twentieth-century champions, Christopher Spencer, allows, "Tate makes Lear more rhetorical and less poetic, more worldly and less cosmic" (246).

While critical preferences for Tate's version or Shakespeare's were mixed, Tate's version certainly held the stage into the nineteenth century. Although David Garrick, George Colman the Elder, and John Philip Kemble (until 1792) all staged Lear "with restorations from Shakespeare," and although Colman did eliminate the Cordelia/Edgar love plot, the basic comic shape established by Tate remained. Not until 1823, when Edmund Kean's production restored the tragic ending for two performances, did that heap of jewels approach its original mass. The play became less a high tragedy, more a sentimental melodrama or domestic tragi-comedy with pathos at its center. And as Jonathan Bate and Michael Dobson have demonstrated, although Tate's version (with its elimination of the King of France and his armies) could still hold a political valence, it "could equally provide ways of rendering politics incidental" (Dobson 93).

In this essay I want to focus on Jane Austen's use of the two central figures of King Lear, the tyrannical Prodigal father and the resisting but loyal daughter, and the consequent generic play that these types generate. Alexander Leggatt defines two traditions in the depiction of the character of Lear: the titanic figure versus the frail human being, grand scale and sublime passion versus human pathos. Often allied to that choice is a related one, between Lear as king and Lear as father (1-3). During the Restoration and the first half of the eighteenth century, actors such as Thomas Betterton emphasized the power and magnificence of Lear, while Garrick's portrayal, dominating the stage from 1742 through 1776 and the popular memory thereafter, was designed to reflect both Lear's kingliness and his pathos, drawing as many and as frequent tears from the audience as possible. James Boswell arrived in the theatre more than two hours early, where he "kept [himself] at a distance from all acquaintances, and got into a proper frame. Mr. Garrick gave me the most perfect satisfaction. I was fully moved, and I shed abundance of tears" (257). Both Joshua Reynolds and Hannah More report that it took days (three for Reynolds, at least four for More) to recover from the experience of Garrick's final performance as Lear (Burnim 151, 141). Kemble's strength as an actor seems to have been the monumental authority he brought to roles such as Coriolanus, but Boaden reports that only one performance of Lear by Kemble in 1788 managed to capture the necessary grandeur as he thereafter emphasized the pathos inherent in the king's frailty: "Subsequently he was too elaborately aged, and quenched with infirmity the insane fire of the injured father" (Memoirs of Kemble 378).

Such experiment with Shakespeare's plays suggests more than an ideological and temperamental resistance. But such aesthetic discomfort might also gesture toward the resources and tastes of a more accommodating genre.

The novel--at least in Austen's hands--seems peculiarly suited to managing this problem of definition, especially so in Austen's development of Sir Thomas Bertram. Sir Thomas is both powerful land-owner and almost-broken father. The key is Fanny's perspective, which defines him in terms of her fluctuating relationship to him: now he is the figure of terror whose "displeasure increased; and getting up and walking about the room, with a frown, which Fanny could picture to herself, though she dared not lift up her eyes," he speaks "in a voice of authority" (317) meeting her "trembling wretchedness ... with a good deal of cold sternness" (318). Now pathos dominates: "she saw that he was grown thinner and had the burnt, fagged, worn look of fatigue and a hot climate, every tender feeling was increased, and she was miserable in considering how much unsuspected vexation was probably ready to burst on him" (178).

As her creation of the Lear-figure's alternating pathos and power suggests, Austen's most radical revision of Shakespeare is her moving of the wronged and redemptive daughter from the margins of the text to its center. Shakespeare's play, of course, puts the figure of the king/father at the play's center, as the line distributions indicate: in the Folio text, Lear has 729 lines, in the Quarto text 649, and in Tate's version 516. But what's more surprising is the relative unimportance of Cordelia--at least as reflected in the size of her role. The Folio gives her only 115 lines, the Quarto 89--fewer lines than Edgar, Kent, Gloucester, Edmund, the Fool, Goneril, Regan, or Albany and only a few lines--3 to 5--more than Cornwall (King 223-26)! In Shakespeare's version, of course, she is off-stage for most of the play, and when she is on in 1.1 she resists speech. Tate's version magnifies, almost doubling, her role: rather than leaving for France (since the King of France has been eliminated) she can wander about England, available to the Bastard's attempts at rape and Edgar's at rescue; and of course she can participate in the play's happy conclusion. In Tate's Lear, then, Cordelia speaks 210 lines plus the 26 line epilogue, still less than Lear but in line with the other major characters.

A number of cultural forces further shaped the roles of Lear and Cordelia through the course of the eighteenth century. With the anointing of Shakespeare as the national poet and the simultaneous advent of the player/manager system, Garrick and Colman modified Tate's text with "Restorations from Shakespeare." While these revisions replace Tate's dull rhymes with Shakespeare's poetry, they also make the play into a star vehicle by enlarging Lear's role. According to J. S. Bratton, "the weight of the play fell more and more exclusively upon a monstrously concentrated version of the leading role. Lear became the occasion for a tour de force of tragic acting" (21). In Garrick's version, for instance, Cordelia's remaining suitor, the princely Burgundy, becomes one of the spectators for the test scene, obviating the need or the opportunity for Cordelia to speak in her own defense as she does in Shakespeare's play. In Shakespeare's version Cordelia speaks to her sisters: "I know you what you are; / And, like a sister, am most loath to call / Your faults as they are named" (1.1.312-14). Garrick, however, ends the scene with Lear's grand discarding of his daughter: "Then leave her, sir; for by the power that made me, / I tell you all her wealth.--Away!" (1.2.147-48). The tyrant's power clears the stage and silences the daughter's voice.

In addition, as Jean I. Marsden has argued, the shift from the partisan politics of the Restoration to the nationalism of the century that followed can be clearly seen in the re-definition of the daughter figure: "the family acts as a type of the state, the dutiful daughter becomes the pattern of national honour: ... the daughters of England stand responsible for the honour and peace of the nation" (20). The significant relationship is no longer the romance between Cordelia and Edgar but Lear's relationship with his daughter. Because of this re-focusing in both Garrick's and Colman's productions, Cordelia's role shrank--though it remained larger than in Shakespeare's Folio version. At the end of the century this effect was somewhat mitigated. While Kemble's 1788 performances used Garrick's version, when he played Lear from 1792 to 1801 and again from 1808 to 1810 (when Jane Austen might perhaps have seen it), he returned to the Tate version, possibly because it offered his sister Sarah Siddons more lines and scenes as Cordelia.

But although eighteenth-century versions gave Cordelia a greater role in the play, the nature of that role actually diminished her power. The emphasis was on a Cordelia who engendered pathos through her submissiveness and passive goodness (Figure 1). Francis Gentleman, in his notes to Garrick's edition of the play, describes a Cordelia who sounds prophetically, and eerily, like Fanny Price. "Cordelia is most amiable in principles and should be so in features and figure. There is no great occasion for strength of countenance nor brilliancy of eyes; she appears designed rather for a soft than sprightly beauty, yet considerable sensibility, both of look and expression, is essential" (Garrick 307, n 41). Thomas Davies describes the scenes of particular filial pathos: "the pious Daughter watching with impatience for a parent's returning intelligence. How affecting is Cordelia's supplication, when she kisses her sleeping father!" (316); and the prison scene (added by Tare) as performed by Susannah Cibber, "the most pathetic of all actresses, [in which t]he discovery of Lear, in prison, sleeping with his head on her lap, his hand closed in her's, whose expressive look spoke more than the most eloquent language, raised the most sympathising emotions" (320). Indeed, the power Shakespeare's play gives Cordelia was discomfiting to eighteenth-century audiences. Colman's elimination of Tate's love plot deprived Cordelia of what for some readers and viewers was her only virtuous motive in refusing her father, thus "preserv[ing] that unjustifiable, cynical roughness, which Shakespeare has stamped upon Cordelia" (Gentleman 353). And the power that Shakespeare's play gives her as leader of the military forces that would rescue her father is eliminated in Tate and Garrick. Shakespeare's play connects her to Christ militant: "O dear father, / It is thy business that I go about" (4.4.26-27). In contrast, Tate, Garrick and Kemble emphasize her feminine powerlessness: "as I may / With women's weapons, piety and prayers, / I'll aid his cause" (Garrick 5.2.73-75).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Piety and prayers are certainly her most constant recourse. Kemble's promptbooks with their handwritten stage directions define a Cordelia who "throws herself at King Lear's feet" in 1.2, kneels to Gloucester to entreat his care for her father in 3.2, and in the play's final scene successively "faints in [Edgar's] arms at the centre of the stage," "meets [the King] in the centre of the stage, & throws herself at his feet," and finally is lead by the King "into the centre of the stage--Edgar flies to meet her--they both kneel at the king's feet." Given the gestural grammar of the sentimental stage, it's little wonder that the Mansfield theatricals have such an effect on Fanny as she imagines her defense of Edmund: "She knelt in spirit to her uncle, and her bosom swelled to utter, 'Oh! not to him. Look so to all the others, but not to him!'" (185).

Eighteenth-century paintings and illustrations of scenes from the play also indicate an intensifying spotlight on Cordelia but, even with their static quality, suggest some ambivalence about her stature. While Lear's mad scene in the storm is a favorite subject for illustration (both in paintings and in the early editions of the play), images increasingly depict the Lear/Cordelia plot: Cordelia's expulsion from the court, Lear's awakening to find her restored to him, and Lear's bearing in the body of the dead Cordelia (a scene not, of course, played on stage during the century). In the collection commissioned for Alderman John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery in Pall Mall (1789-1805), for example, four of the six paintings treating the play include, if not focus on, Cordelia: Henry Fuseli's King Lear Casting Out His Daughter Cordelia, Robert Smirke's Cordelia Departing from the Court and The Awakening of King Lear, and John Barry's King Lear Weeping Over the Dead Body of Cordelia.

Images of Cordelia from 1740 through 1780 depict a maiden in need of defense. In Cordelia Championed by the Earl of Kent (Figure 2), for example, the cowering Cordelia is almost edged out of the painting, and the energy moves between Lear and Kent, whose upraised hand intercepts the King's glare. In the earlier Pieter van Bleeck painting Mrs. Cibber as Cordelia, Cordelia holds onto her maid Arante for support as she is pursued by Tate's ruffians so that Edmund might rape her. And an engraving from the Universal Magazine shows Lear (in another scene from Tate) holding his weapon and leaning against his prison wall, having killed two or three other ruffians who would have murdered them, while an unusually exotic Cordelia sits behind him in a niche, brandishing her handkerchief (King Lear). This image, however, gets at the complexity of determining the effect of these depictions. Cordelia here, despite her placement, seems more martial than distraught. In Gravelot's rococo 1740 engraving to Theobald's edition, Lear is the focal point and Cordelia, though almost merging into the group of courtiers that surround him, protectively moves to encircle him. And in Burney's 1785 engraving for Bell's new edition ("printed complete from the best editions of Sam. Johnson and Geo. Steevens"), Cordelia, despite wearing military plumes, standing before tents and over text signifying her military role, looks more like a fashionable lady than a warrior.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Georgianna Zeigler has noted that in the paintings for the Boydell Gallery, Shakespeare's female characters appear usually "as suppliant or victim, occasionally as healer, and supporter, only rarely as heroic" (90); Cordelia, Zeigler argues, appears as either victim or nurturer (98). While such circumscription obtains as well outside the boundaries of the Shakespeare Gallery, there is still some interesting variation. Fuseli's painting of 1.1 (Figure 3), for instance, depicts an energetic and tyrannical Lear, needing the almost physical restraint of Kent. The force of his curse as expressed in the energy of his pointing finger seems almost to push Cordelia back into the arms of an attendant. But rather than cowering in the face of injustice, she turns away from conventional comfort and back toward Lear with eyes of love. In Smirke's painting of the end of this scene, Cordelia is gently assisted by France yet depends on her own power rather than his support. Smirke, as the two move away from the static group of Cordelia's sisters and their husbands, recalls the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden, absent the shame. And finally Gardiner's engraving to Harding's 1798 edition of the plays shows a Cordelia (with a rather oddly drawn arm pointing her way) whose energy, light, and bulk dominate the twined sisters she leaves behind.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

Images of Lear's awakening to discover his forgiving daughter are more varied in their effects. William L. Pressly has pointed to the difference between Smirke's painting of the scene and Benjamin West's King Lear and Cordelia (19). Smirke's painting (Figure 4) focuses on the still kingly Lear (he awakes in a throne rather than a bed); we see only the kneeling Cordelia's profile. Dressed in blue and white, the colors of the Virgin, she is less an individual than the figure of the comforting daughter. West's painting, by contrast, is all energy, and that energy belongs largely to Cordelia. The weak and pathetic Lear, whose flaccid, skeletal hands seem a metonymy of his condition, seems almost to cower in his chair while Cordelia is foregrounded, brighter and bigger than Lear, grasping his hand in passionate and active attachment. Other images do capture some of the power of West's Cordelia: Buck's 1801 engraving of Kemble and Mrs. Siddons pictures her kneeling and a Lear more powerful than Smirke's or West's but balances the two so that neither dominates; John Thurston's 1805 engraving (Figure 5) for another edition shows Cordelia supporting the supine Lear as she holds him to her. Later images by Corbould and Wright, however, stress Cordelia's sweetly submissive filial devotion, Wright's Cordelia even kneeling over Lear's hand, bathing it with her tears.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

Even images of Cordelia's death, while depicting her at the moment she is most a victim, can emphasize her symbolic and very physical presence. Most engravings of this scene (e.g., Richter and Howard) emphasize the still human, Lear himself, while Cordelia's dead and pretty passivity is reasserted. But Barry's massive painting depicts a warrior's death, and the bodies he paints--including hers--have weight. Goneril and Regan lie almost underfoot, and Edmund is lowered out of the painting, while Cordelia is elevated. The position of her body recalls not only the Pieta but also heroic paintings like West's The Death of General Wolfe or John Singleton Copley's The Death of Major Peirson. Fuseli's image of the same scene (Figure 6) increases the sense of Cordelia's massiveness. Lear strains, and there's no one around in this barren landscape to help him.

In Mansfield Park, Austen's narrative design mirrors and intensifies the spotlight that eighteenth-century stage productions and visual representations had trained on Cordelia: Austen constructs Fanny gradually as the center of the novel's consciousness, delaying her full definition and suppressing her voice through the novel's early chapters, but ultimately filtering all events and judgments through her vision. And yet, except for the size of the part, Austen's heroine has more in common with Shakespeare's than with Tate's. Shakespeare's Cordelia defines herself as a woman whose love for her father is "[m]ore ponderous than [her] tongue" (1.1.87), who "want[s] that glib and oily art / To speak and purpose not" (1.1.258-59). Tate provides a motivation for Cordelia's silence grounded in the love plot: Lear wants her to marry Burgundy rather than Edgar, so she "with cold speech tempt[s] the chol'rick King / Rather to leave me Dowerless, than condemn me / To loath'd Embraces!" (1.1.93-95). Fanny is neither so simple nor so calculating as Tate's Cordelia. Rather, her silences variously reflect her depth of feeling, her powerless situation in the Bertram family, her inability to express her feelings in accord with rules of decorum, her sense of herself as victim. Fanny's conversation with Sir Thomas after Henry Crawford's proposal is characterized by a Cordelia-like resistance as well as by complex motives: a dislike and distrust of Henry Crawford, a fear of betraying her disapproval of her cousins' behavior to their father, and a determination to conceal her love for Edmund.

"Am I to understand," said Sir Thomas, after a few moments silence, "that you mean to refuse Mr. Crawford?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Refuse him?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Refuse Mr. Crawford! Upon what plea? For what reason?"

"I--I cannot like him, Sir, well enough to marry him."

"This is very strange!" said Sir Thomas, in a voice of calm displeasure. "There is something in this which my comprehension does not reach." (315)

In Austen's scene, the verbal center of gravity rests on the daughter, not the father. Fanny's repeated "'Yes, Sir,'" quiet, deferential, but finally affirmative and resisting, has replaced Lear's nihilistic and thundering "Nothing." As in Shakespeare's play, the patriarch's lofty disbelief is succeeded by accusations that the daughter is selfish and ungrateful. "'You think only of yourself.... You do not owe me the duty of a child. But, Fanny, if your heart can acquit you of ingratitude'" (318-19). But Austen's heroine preempts the words of Shakespeare's chastened tyrant. Her response to Edmund's wish that she "'prove [her]self grateful and tender-hearted, ... the perfect model of a woman'" is an echo of Lear's despairing words over the body of Cordelia: "'Oh! never, never, never; he never will succeed with me'"--spoken "with a warmth which quite astonished Edmund" (347).

Austen's construction of Fanny suggests a further revision of the Cordelia of the eighteenth-century stage. Tate's Cordelia is neither rescuer of her father nor rectifier of the family's and nation's wrongs but a sentimental heroine, a victim ultimately preserved by the physical powers of her father and her lover. Austen reverses this stage history by creating a character who is not the perfect model of a woman but who develops a moral authority that directs her own actions. And, significantly, while Austen begins by defining Fanny's consciousness through the negative "'No, indeed, I cannot act'" (145), Fanny soon enters the domestic stage with certain though hesitant step, and on cue: "after pausing a moment for what she knew would not come, for a courage which the outside of no door had ever supplied to her, she turned the lock in desperation, and the lights of the drawing-room and all the collected family were before her. As she entered, her own name caught her ear. Sir Thomas was at that moment looking round him, and saying 'But where is Fanny?'" (177). This heroine acts and speaks with a sense of self and others that aligns her with Mary Wollstonecraft, a quite different model than Edmund and others have in mind:

"I should have thought," said Fanny, after a pause of recollection and exertion, "that every woman must have felt the possibility of a man's not being approved, not being loved by some one of her sex, at least, let him be ever so generally agreeable. Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain, that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself.... How then was I to be--to be in love with him the moment he said he was with me? How was I to have an attachment at his service, as soon as it was asked for? His sisters should consider me as well as him." (353)

Fanny will not remain a victim. This new Cordelia becomes a new kind of heroine for Mansfield Park's drama.

As Austen reforms the gender politics of King Lear, she also exploits its inherent generic instabilities. Susan Snyder's examination of the comic frameworks of Shakespeare's tragedies is particularly useful in defining the disorienting generic effects of King Lear. As Snyder argues, Shakespeare's use of comic structures--Lear's love story, the multiple plotting, its organization of characters around youth vs. age, the importance of women, its move to the green world, its elastic sense of time, the reliance on Fortune and the apparent evasions of Death--raises "false expectations of a comic resolution so as to reinforce by sharp contrast the movement into tragic inevitability" (5). Snyder, like Johnson and others, further argues that Cordelia's death "is shocking, incongruous, an affront to all our preconceptions about fiction. The author has broken the rules" (156). As a result, "Lear creates a special kind of inevitability, one of absurdity rather than of logic, by revealing underneath an apparently redemptive comic pattern of action a patternless universe" (12). When Tate restores the comic ending of Shakespeare's source, he, with the aid of the show-men Lamb excoriates, makes the play manageable, decorous, domestic, and sentimental. He lets the genie out of the bottle.

In Mansfield Park, Jane Austen reverses some of these generic inversions of King Lear--both Shakespeare's and Tate's--while playing with others. The love plots seem to be moving nicely toward their separate but divergent conclusions. The tensions between youth and age, exemplified in the "spirit of independence" that both Sir Thomas and Mrs. Norris declaim against, have a recent and ominous historic referent in the upheavals of the French Revolution. The pre-eminence of women in the sentimental novel is no guarantee of a satisfactory conclusion. Sir Thomas's banishment of Fanny moves her from the green world to the city, a world of deprivation and the potential for disease. The chance, fortune, and accident of comedy seem to belong elsewhere: this novel's action seems to be governed by the tragic logic and inevitability of maturity. Death has claimed the Reverend Mr. Norris, Mary Crawford's aunt, and Fanny's sister Mary, and seems likely to claim Tom Bertram as well. At the end of Mansfield Park's penultimate chapter, except for the "delight" (454) Fanny feels at Edmund's loss of Mary Crawford, all is "misery" (451), "pain" (452), "agonies" (453), "family affliction" (453). The heroine can offer "comfort" (444) and "consolation" (449) but not redemption.

But if eighteenth-century stage versions of King Lear push Shakespeare's story from tragedy to sentimental melodrama, Austen's version more subtly--and more playfully--transforms its potentially tragic plot through its comic conclusion: "Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery" (461). Here it's the pen of the contriver, assisted by the "liberty" of her readers, that determines the "natural" progress toward the happy conclusion by offering an escape from the ever narrowing claustrophobia of tragedy's temporal logic.

 I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that every
 one may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of
 unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments,
 must vary much as to time in different people--I only
 intreat every body to believe that exactly at the time when it was
 quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund
 did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to
 marry Fanny, as Fanny herself could desire. (470)

Just as the comic elements of Shakespeare's tragedy highlight the tension between a sustaining pattern and a terrifying patternlessness, so Austen's narrative pyrotechnics highlights the artifice and ambivalence of her novel's conclusion. That sudden chasm in the fiction of realism, coherence, and decorum that governs the novel sends readers scurrying back from the brink and tempts them into the process of revision: simplifying Fanny and Edmund, reinventing their progress toward romance. With Tate, Austen ends her novel in comedy and marriage; with Shakespeare, she asserts her own narrative power to reshape that material against our expectations and to her own ends.

Those eighteenth-century readers and play-goers who objected to Shakespeare's ending wanted the luxury of tears followed by a conclusion that would reward virtue and punish vice. Delicious pathos resided in the spectacle of a wronged daughter and a chastened and suffering father, and certainty in their just restoration to happiness. Instead, Austen provides the discomfort as well as the pleasure of both sympathy for and resistance to her characters. And although in this novel, more than in any of her others, Jane Austen metes out justice, she refuses to let her reader believe that such a conclusion is "natural."

While Shakespeare's play ends with a litter of corpses and only Edgar to take control of "the gored state" (5.3.386), Austen's novel ends with the reformation of Sir Thomas and his discovery that "Fanny was indeed the daughter that he wanted" (431), with reward unproportioned to the deserts of her characters or the logic of the narrative, with the assertion of a daringly comic conclusion. From 1811, King Lear was not performed in England because of its untimely reflection of a king's madness and a disastrous Regency. And yet precisely at this time of political and social crisis Austen was beginning Mansfield Park, her first Regency novel and the first novel wholly of her maturity. Through her skillful and irreverent re-invention of one of Shakespeare's greatest and most repressed works, a play, moreover, about the constitution of the national estate, we glimpse an author quite different from the conventionally-defined miniaturist-delineator of "three or four families in a country village." Here is a Jane Austen who establishes herself as a novelist able and willing to question--if not improve--England's literary as well as monarchical estate while at the same time daring to imagine--in despite of the odds--a happy ending. This is what happens when such instinctive intimacy with Shakespeare is redefined--in despite of Henry Crawford--as a conscious part of an Englishwoman's constitution.

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NOTE

(1.) I am most grateful for the generous and immensely valuable help I received from Georgianna Ziegler and Erin Blake of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Annette Fern of the Harvard Theatre Collection, the staff of the Shakespeare Centre Library, and Cynthia Earman of the Boston Public Library.

Susan Allen Ford is Professor of English and Writing Center Coordinator at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. She has published essays on Jane Austen and her contemporaries, detective fiction, and the Gothic. She recently designed a course on Emma for Barnes and Noble.