Enter the Novel: Prose Fiction in the Georgian Theatre

From the mid-eighteenth century onwards the novel becomes an important prop in the life of the theatre. Characters walk on stage reading novels, quoting novels, hiding them in household furniture, complaining that novels and the circulating libraries that made them available were pernicious influences. Novels and novel-reading were not only decried and mocked, novel plots were the sources for new writing for the stage. Prologues were delivered commenting that a stage work was bringing to life the pleasures readers had enjoyed in their closets. The mid-eighteenth century was the point at which the novel became respectable, a form of ‘licensed entertainment’ rather than a disreputable or salacious circulator of scandal in cheap print. The stage, newly subject to a licensing law of 1737 that had been introduced with the promise to reform theatres prone to incendiary political and ethical postures, sat up and took notice of a form of entertainment that looked set to rival its popularity, at least in the country’s capital. Audience numbers are a tricky comparator; in any one season in London about 1 million seats will have been sold in the theatres. The total number of copies of Samuel Richardson’s print sensation, Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded, between its first appearance on 6 November 1740 and the fifth edition of 22 September 1741, is estimated at 20,000; the average print run for a new novel title was 500 to 750 copies with a maximum of 1,500 for popular titles reissued. Nonetheless there is a discernible rise in the number of works of fiction published as ‘novels’ through the eighteenth century; James Raven charts an increase from a handful in the first decade of the century, to fifty in 1750 to over one hundred in a single year in 1769.

For authors, it was an easier market to break into than writing for the stage. The briefest of consultations of The London Stageperformance lists shows that the majority of works staged in the eighteenth century were tried and tested repertory works with only a handful of new plays rehearsed and brought to performance in any one season on the two licensed stages, Drury Lane and Covent Garden. The fact that a number of authors published their plays with prefaces commenting that the work had not made it to performance is one indicator of the intense competition for opportunity on the licensed stage. Take for example, a two-act work of 1758 entitled Angellica; or, Quixote in Petticoats, an adaptation of Charlotte Lennox’s very successful novel, The Female Quixote, of 1752, published with a preface by its anonymous author observing that David Garrick, the actor-manager of Drury Lane, had turned the work down for performance because of its resemblance to Richard Steele’s The Tender Husband (first produced in 1705 but still a favourite piece of the repertory). A decade later, the author of the novel from which this play was adapted, Charlotte Lennox, saw her own adaptation of another of her works of fiction, Henrietta (1758), performed at Drury Lane under the title of The Sister (LA 291). However, Lennox was an unusual case. This was an actor’s stage; most playwrights came from the world of theatre, and increasingly through the century, rather than novelists turning to playwriting, it was successful stage writers who turned to the novel as a side-line or when the political or cultural contexts of stage production became too hot to handle (Henry Fielding and Elizabeth Inchbald are two interesting examples now better known to us for their published prose fictions than the stage plays for which they were justly celebrated by their contemporaries).

This essay reviews the place of the novel in the stage plays of the eighteenth century. We look in particular at what the Larpent manuscripts of plays – whether written by novelists, adapted from novels, or featuring the novel as a stage prop – can tell us about the ways in which the stage was responding to the increasing popularity of the novel as a genre. These manuscripts often vary considerably from the printed versions of the plays which usually appeared only a few days after the first performance of a new play. Printed plays were themselves of course, competitors in the print market with the novel for the attentions of those with a penchant for fiction. A play text cost between 1 and 2 shillings to purchase whereas a bound duodecimo three-volume novel would set the purchaser back by 3 shillings a volume. Both forms of printed fiction could be borrowed from a circulating library at far less cost: an annual subscription mid-century amounted to about eleven shillings. The cost of entry to a night’s entertainment at one of London’s two patent theatres ranged from one shilling for the Upper Gallery to five for a seat in the boxes with the opportunity to enter for half price after the third act of the mainpiece. The status of the Larpent manuscripts in relation to performance and publication is notoriously difficult to determine. When their plays appeared in print, playwrights may have restored unedited pre-rehearsal versions of their texts after performance (elements of the play may have been strategically excluded for submission to the licenser because they were sexually, socially, aesthetically, or politically tendentious). Or they may have ‘novelized’ their playtexts for publication, adding stage directions. For instance, there are stage directions added to Leonard MacNally’s 1783 stage version of Laurence Sterne’s serialised novel Tristram Shandy to explain that Corporal Trim ‘exercises with his stick’ while the maid Susannah ‘reckons’ each word related to love she can think of for each subsequent letter of the alphabet ‘with the forefinger of her right hand upon her left hand’. The Larpent Manuscript provides none of this description which may have been derived from the stage performance or an explicit invocation of the significance of Trim’s stick as a narratorial device in the novel from which McNally’s ‘bagatelle’ was derived. Nonetheless, a Larpent manuscript, where there is no prompter’s copy, is usually our best witness to performance. Coleman O. Parson concludes that: