Complete Plays of Frances Burney: Volume 1: Comedies. Volume 2: Tragedies 9780773565555, 0773513310, 0773565558

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THE COMPLETE PLAYS OF FRANCES BURNEY

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Frances Burney. From a miniature portrait by John Bogle, 1783. By permission of Miss Paula F. Peyraud.

THE COMPLETE PLAYS OF

FRANCES BURNEY VOLUME 1

COMEDIES Edited by

PETER SABOR Contributing Editor

GEOFFREY M. SILL

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston ® London ® Buffalo

© Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 1995 Introduction and notes © Peter Sabor 1995 ISBN 0-7735-1331-0 Legal deposit first quarter 1995 Bibliothéque nationale du Québec Published simultaneously in Great Britain by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited

Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Burney, Fanny, 1752-1840 The Complete plays of Frances Burney Includes bibliographical references. Contents: v.1. Comedies / edited by Peter Sabor ; contributing editor, Geoffrey M. Sill. — v.2. Tragedies / edited by Peter Sabor ; associate editor, Stewart J. Cooke. ISBN 0-7735-1333-—7 (set) .-—

ISBN 0-7735~-1331-0 (v. 1).-ISBN 0—7735-1332-9 (v. 2) [. Sabor, Peter IT. Sill, Geoffrey M., 1944ITI. Cooke, Stewart J. (Stewart Jon), 1954IV. Title PR3316.A4A19 1995 822’.6 €95-900059-3

CONTENTS COMEDIES

Preface Vil Short Titles {Xx

List of Illustrations vi

General Introduction xi Textual Introduction xl

Chronology xivi The Witlings (1778-80) 1

Love and Fashion (1798-99) 103 The Woman-Hater (1800-02) 19]

A Busy Day (1800-02) 287 Appendix: Literary Allusions in The Witlings and The Woman-Hater 398

Vv

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Frances Burney. From a miniature portrait Frontispiece by John Bogle, 1783. By permission of Miss Paula F. Peyraud.

2. The first page of Burney’s manuscript of The Witlings. 2 By permission of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox,

and Tilden Foundations.

3. Programme cover for A Busy Day, Show of Strength 288 Production, Bristol, 29 September—23 October 1993. By permission of Show of Strength.

v1

PREFACE This is the first collected edition of the plays of Frances Burney (17521840), best known as a novelist and journal writer. It contains her four comedies — The Witlings, Love and Fashion, The Woman-Hater, and A Busy Day — and her three completed tragedies —-Edwy and Elgiva, Hubert

De Vere, and The Siege of Pevensey — as well as a fragmentary fourth tragedy, Elberta. A farce, The Trumphant Toadeater, probably written either by Burney’s sister Charlotte or by her brother-in-law Ralph Broome (but in which she may have had a hand), 1s printed as an appendix. Only three of Burney’s eight plays have previously been published: two comedies, The Witlings and A Busy Day, and a tragedy, Edwy and Elgiva.

In recent years there has been a remarkable growth of interest in Frances Burney. Her novels are now all available in critical editions, a comprehensive edition of her early journals and letters, complementing the twelve-volume edition of her later journals, 1s in progress, and new books and articles on her writings are appearing every year. Since most of her plays, however, have never been published or performed, a major part of her oeuvre has been largely ignored. This edition will enable critics to take a broader view of Burney than before. It will also, I hope, provide readers with some unexpected delights as they encounter Burney 1n the role of witty comic dramatist and creator of violent, quasi-Gothic tragedies.

Burney can now be seen in the company of other late eighteenth-century

women dramatists, such as Hannah Cowley, Elizabeth Inchbald and Joanna Baillie, all of whose plays she herself read or saw on stage. Two of the tragedies in this edition, Hubert De Vere and Elberta, have been edited by Stewart Cooke, who has also contributed to the project in several other ways. Geoffrey Sill edited one of the comedies, The Woman-

Hater, and shared with me his thoughts on editorial method. He was aided, in the initial stages, by Paul D. Taylor, who made a preliminary

transcription of the text. | An anonymous comedy, The East Indian, was erroneously attributed to

Burney by James Boaden in his Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons (1827), and has since occasionally been listed as hers. There is no mention of The East

Indian, performed at the Haymarket theatre in July 1782, anywhere in Burney's copious letters or journals. Also commonly attributed to Burney is Tragic Dramas: Chiefly Intended for Representation in Private Families (1818), by her niece Frances Burney (1776-1828). Such apocrypha are, of course, excluded from this edition, as are various untitled scraps of plays by Burney surviving in manuscript in the Berg Collection. I was first asked to edit Burney’s plays three years ago by Lars Troide, Vil

Vill PREFACE director of the Burney Project at McGill University, who has been a valuable source of information throughout the life of this edition. I have

enjoyed the help of several editors at Pickering and Chatto: Melanie McGrath, Katherine Bright-Holmes, and Florence Hamilton. Philip Cercone at McGill-Queen’s University Press has also supported the edition. At Queen’s University I am indebted to George Logan, who as Head

for many years fostered the research of members of the Department of English, to my colleague F.P. Lock for generous help tn identifying quotations, to my former student Barbara Darby for sharing with me her own research on Burney’s plays, to Karen Donnelly and Kathy Goodfriend for their secretarial expertise, and to the Advisory Research Committee for financial support. During a sabbatical leave from Queen’s that enabled me to complete this edition, I was given working space and materials at Université Laval through the good offices of Anthony Raspa and the Département des Littératures. Most of the manuscripts on which this edition is based are held at the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations which has given permission to print Burney’s holographs 1n its possession. I thank Francis Mattson, Curator of the Berg Collection,

and other librarians and their institutions: John Bertram at the Osborn Collection, Yale University Library, Cynthia Copeland at the Huntington

Library, and F.H. Stubbings at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. I have also used the resources of the British Library, Cambridge University Library, and Queen’s University Library. Among Burney scholars my greatest debt 1s to Margaret Anne Doody,

both for her publications on Burney and for her generous advice and encouragement over the years. I am also indebted, for their pioneering work on Burney as dramatist, to Joyce Hemlow and to Tara Ghoshal Wallace, whose edition of A Busy Day I have drawn on frequently. Catherine Burroughs, Isobel Grundy, Janelle Jenstad, Kerry McSweeney,

Ruth Neufeld, Alvaro Ribeiro, Betty Rizzo, Emmi Sabor, and Mariopi Spanos have all shared ideas and provided assistance. Janice Thaddeus provided many helpful comments on the manuscript; I am grateful to her for her close and informed reading. Sheila Hannon and Alan Coveney of Show of Strength gave me a wealth of information about their company’s production of A Busy Day, including cast photographs, press chppings, and a copy of the acting text. My wife Marie has looked on tempests but is never shaken.

Kingston, 1994 PETER SABOR

SHORT TITLES Berg Collection The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

A Biographical Philip H. Highfill, Jr., Kalman A. Burnim, Dictionary of Actors and Edward A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800, 16 vols. (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern [Illinois University Press, 1973-93).

Burney, Camilla Frances Burney, Camilla: or, A Picture of Youth, ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).

Burney, Cecilia Frances Burney, Cecilia, or Memotrs of an Heiress, ed. Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody, with an introduction by Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Burney, Evelina Frances Burney, Evelina: or, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, ed. Edward A. Bloom with the assistance of Lillian D. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).

Burney, The Wanderer _—_ Frances Burney, The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties, ed. Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack and Peter Sabor, with an introduction by Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Burney, Early Journals The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Lars E. Troide et al., 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988— ).

Burney, Journals and The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney

Letters (Madame d’Arblay), ed. Joyce Hemlow et al., 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972-84).

Doody, Frances Margaret Anne Doody, Frances Burney: The

Burney Life in the Works (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1988). 1X

x SHORT TITLES Hemlow, Fanny Joyce Hemlow, The History of Fanny Burney

Burney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958).

Hemlow, ‘Fanny Joyce Hemlow, ‘Fanny Burney: Playwright’, Burney: Playwright’ University of Toronto Quarterly, 19 (1949-50), 170-89.

Hogan, The London The London Stage 1660-1800, Part 5: 1776-—

Stage 1800, ed. Charles Beecher Hogan

(Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968).

Hume, History of David Hume, The History of England, 1754—

England 62 (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1983).

Morrison, ‘Fanny Marjorie Lee Morrison, ‘Fanny Burney and Burney and the the Theatre’, Ph.D. diss., University of Texas,

Theatre’ Austin, 1957.

OED A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

Thrahana Thralhiana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (later Mrs. Prozz1), 1776-1809, ed. Katharine C. Balderston, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951).

GENERAL INTRODUCTION In autumn 1993 an English theatre company, the aptly named Show of Strength, mounted a production of Frances Burney’s comic drama, A

Busy Day (c. 1800-02). Directed by Alan Coveney at the Hen and Chicken Theatre, Bristol, the production played to full houses throughout its four-week run from 29 September to 23 October. In a programme note Coveney describes his discovery, in early 1992, of ‘Tara Wallace’s edition of the play, remaindered in a bookshop, and conveys his enthusiasm for ‘this wonderful play’, which ‘has lain dormant, waiting for a theatre to discover it and for actors to bring its marvellous characters to life’. The company, which could normally budget only nine hundred pounds for a new production, received a sixteen-thousand pound prize from London Weekend Television for A Busy Day, enabling it to construct elaborate sets, including one of Kensington Gardens, and to equip the cast in full period costume.

The attractive programme for the Bristol production, with a cover portrait of Burney by her cousin Edward Francesco Burney set against a reproduction of the first page of the play’s manuscript, describes A Busy Day as an ‘award winning comedy’,” deftly concealing the fact that while the Show of Strength company had been successful in its search for funds, Burney herself had won no awards or recognition for the play at all. A programme note by James Clarkson, who played Sir Marmaduke Tylney, compares A Busy Day to late eighteenth-century comedies such as John O’Keeffe’s Wild Oats (1791), to Restoration precursors such as Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676) and Vanbrugh’s The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), to later comedies such as Wilde’s The Importance of

Being Earnest (1895), and even to modern situation comedies. A claim was thus made that this 1s a major play in the English comic tradition, and that the audience was privileged to be present at its long-awaited premiere. Alan Coveney’s programme note speaks of ‘a feeling of great happiness and

freedom, a love of life and people’ communicated by the play: a feeling that the audience is tacitly invited to share. Reviewers of the production, both national and local, responded to Burney’s play with the same pleasure and respect it received from Coveney and Clarkson. Malcolm Rutherford in the Financial Times, for example, described it as ‘a fizzing production of a very funny play’, possessing ‘the pace of Fielding and the whimsy of Peacock’. Jeremy Brien in the Stage * See Illustration 3, below, p. 288.

xi

xi GENERAL INTRODUCTION wrote that ‘on the evidence of A Busy Day, Fanny Burney’s true metier was the stage. This is a portrait of English society of the late 18th Century at least as scathing as anything from Goldsmith — and considerably fun-

nier’. A.C.H. Smith in the Guardian preferred the second half of the performance, enlivened by its “essence of malice’, to the slower and wordier opening acts, and found the plot ‘as corny and confusing as most plays

of the period’. Wayne Stackhouse, in the Bristol Observer, however, compared A Busy Day favourably with the novels that Jane Austen was writing at the turn of the century: it ‘packs more of a satirical bite and has

a bawdy feel that Jane Austen lacks; this is a bit like Austen meets Ayckbourn’. Chris Allen in Plays and Players contended that ‘plot and moral may be conventional but the mordant wit and acute social satire which distinguished Burney’s novels give us vigorous and original characters instead of stock types’. And Helen Reid, in the Western Daily Press, observed that ‘with judicious editing’ A Busy Day ‘could become a national classic — few 18th century plays are as funny as this one’.*

With reviews such as these and with sold-out performances, it is not surprising that the production was revived in London nine months later, at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington from 29 June to 30 July 1994. Here it received a mixed notice by the Tzmes reviewer, Benedict Nightingale, who disliked the performance and found the play ‘amateurish and awkward’; ‘as a satire on snobbism the play still exudes the snobbishness of its period’. Nonetheless, Nightingale found A Busy Day ‘livelier than some betterknown examples of the genre’, and compared it to Wycherley’s The Country

Wife (1675), in which the heroine is also an ‘outsider’. Other London reviewers were more positive. Irving Wardle, in the /ndependent on Sunday , criticized Burney as a technician — ‘she has difficulty getting people off stage, and is apt to leave those who are on hanging around with nothing to do’ — but praised “her comic energy, her gift for satiric portraiture’. For

Paul Taylor in the Independent, the play was ‘shrewd and at times astringent’, ‘poking fun on an equal opportunities basis’. Michael Billington, in the Guardian, wrote of ‘a robust, well-plotted piece’, revealing Burney’s ‘sharp eye for metropolitan vanity’. And John Mullan in the Times Literary Supplement, who like other reviewers preferred the calculating characters to the virtuous hero and heroine, depicted Burney as ‘a true inheritor of the inventive cruelty of Restoration comedy’.” The only previous production of any Burney play was a performance of her tragedy Edwy and Elgiva nearly two centuries earlier, on 21 March 1795. The play, according to her own account, had been ‘instantly and

warmly’ accepted for production at Drury Lane theatre by the actormanager John Philip Kemble, when he was shown the manuscript in July * Financial Times, 2-3 October 1993; The Stage and Televiston Today, 11 November 1993; The Guardian, 6 October 1993; Bristol Observer, 8 October 1993; Plays and Players, November 1993; Western Datly Press, 30 September 1993. > The Times, 6 July 1994; Independent on Sunday, 10 July 1994; The Independent, 7 July 1994; The Guardian, 6 July 1994; Tynes Literary Supplement, 22 July 1994, p. 19.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION Xi11 1794.* The first reading of the play to the assembled cast in January 1795,

however, by Burney’s brother Charles, was inauspicious: ‘the Actors’, according to Hester Thrale Piozzi, “dropt silently off, one by one and left him all alone’.” Equally inauspicious was Burney’s failure to make any changes to the text of the play after this initial reading took place. Occupied by her infant son Alexander, born less than three weeks earlier, and in ill health, Burney could not fulfil her plan to make ‘divers corrections & alterations’ to the tragedy before its premiere.“ After a two-month delay, the play received only nine rehearsals in seventeen days before its opening.¢ In contrast to the Hen and Chicken and the King’s Head, both intimate

pub theatres with about one hundred seats, the Drury Lane theatre at which kdwy and Eigiva opened held some 3,600 theatre-goers. This cavernous building had been completed only a year earlier, replacing a smaller theatre demolished in 1791.° Given the vast size of the auditorium, in which those in the far-flung seats of the second gallery could barely see or hear the actors, spectacular entertainments were likely to eclipse plays demanding more subtle effects. The outstanding success of the 1794-95 season at Drury Lane was a pantomime by James D’Egville, Alexander the

Great; or, The Conquest of Persia, an afterpiece which opened in February, six weeks before Edwy and Elgiva. Rehearsals for this piece, as extravagant as the theatre for which it was composed, had begun three months earlier and reached a total of fifty-four before the opening night. A playbill justly noted that the work was ‘calculated to shew the extent and powers of the New Stage’.’ In addition to a cast of forty-six, together with some two hundred supernumeraries representing soldiers, slaves, priests, etc., the spectacle featured Darius’s carriage drawn by three white horses

and, astonishingly, Alexander’s carriage drawn by two elephants. The opulence of the production delighted theatre-goers, and held the stage for thirty-six performances that season. The premiere of Edwy and Elgiva, which was followed by a perform-

ance of D’Egville’s by now celebrated afterpiece, thus played to a full house eager to see, for the first time, a drama by England’s best-known living novelist, author of the immensely successful Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782), but also drawn by the fame of Alexander, with its horses, elephants, glittering scenery, and elaborate stage-effects.° Not surprisingly * Burney to Georgiana Waddington, 15 April 1795; Journals and Letters, II, 98. > Thraliana, II, 916. © Journals and Letters, III, 98.

, “ See the notes on William Powell’s set of playbills, vol. 4, British Library, and Hogan, The London Stage, V, cxhx. “ See Illustration 4 to Vol. II, below, p. 4. * See Joseph Donohue, Theatre in the Age of Kean (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), p. 23; and Hogan, The London Stage, V, cl. The playbill for Edwy and Elgiva, reproduced below, IT, 3, gives twice as much space to D’Egville’s ‘Grand Heroic Pantomime’ as to Burney’s play. © The Gazetteer review of Edwy and Elgiva notes that ‘the Theatre, as might be expected from the literary and personal respect commanded by the Author, was crowded throughout, and the Boxes chiefly with persons of distinction’ (23 March 1795).

XiV GENERAL INTRODUCTION the under-rehearsed tragedy, whose author had played no part in the crucial pre-production period when the text could be revised to suit the demands of the stage, proved to be a failure. Burney herself acknowledged

that ‘it was not written with any idea of the stage’, and that it appeared ‘with so many undramatic effects, from my inexperience of Theatrical requisites & demands, that when I saw it, I perceived myself a thousand things I wished to change’. Burney also, however, blamed the actors, who were ‘cruelly imperfect, & made blunders I blush to have pass for mine’. John Palmer, who played the part of Bishop Aldhelm, ‘had but 2 lines of his part by Heart! he made all the rest at random — & such nonsence as put

all the other actors out as much as himself’. With the exception of the principals John Kemble, Sarah Siddons, and Robert Bensley, in the roles of Edwy, Elgiva, and Dunstan, ‘a more wretched performance ... could not be exhibited in a Barn’.* The anonymous newspaper reviewers agreed with Burney’s assessment

of the performance. The Whitehall Evening Post, for example, declared

that ‘making Palmer a Bishop was an idea rather whimsical; he was extremely imperfect’. The Morning Chronicle noted that most of the actors

‘either knew not a line of their parts, without the aid of the Prompter, or seemed inclined to turn the whole into ridicule’. The Morning Advertiser was still more blunt: “The Acting was disgraceful to the Company, and shamefully injurious to the Author ... the Prompter was heard unremittingly all over the House. If the Piece was accepted, it should have been played’.

Combined with such criticisms of the cast were complaints about Burney’s lack of theatrical experience. The reviewer for the Oracle, who had appreciated the ‘dramatic power’ of Burney’s character-drawing in Cecilia, believed that ‘of the stage, this elegant writer knows nothing, and ... she appears to have had no friend who knew more’. The Morning Post lhkewise complained that the play was ‘one continued monotonous scene of whining between the two lovers, occasionally interrupted by the insolent Dunstan’,

that ‘the Author seems to have no idea of stage effect’, and that the ‘entrances and exits are 111 managed’. In addition, neither the prologue, written by Burney’s brother Charles, nor the epilogue by Burney herself, met with approval. The 7zmes described the prologue as ‘a tedious descant

on the Three Ages of Religion’, which ‘seemed almost an age in the delivery’, while the True Briton claimed that it took ‘nearly as long as the ordinary Act of a Play’.” * Journals and Letters, II], 99-100. > Twenty-two of these newspaper reviews, all from 22 and 23 March 1795, survive in the Burney Collection, British Library, and have been microfilmed. Another, in the London Chronicle, is missing from the Burney Collection but is quoted by Thomas Campbell in The Life of Mrs. Siddons (1834; rpt. New York: Blom, 1972), p. 266. Several of the newspapers print the same review in whole or in part. Excerpts from some of the reviews are printed in Journals and Letters, III, 366-67. In addition to the eleven daily newspapers with reviews listed there, the following, all in the Burney Collection, also contain reviews: St. James's Chronicle, Whitehall Evening Post, London Packet or New Lloyd’s Evening Post, The Courier

GENERAL INTRODUCTION XV Despite these and many other caustic observations, however, the theatre reviews were not entirely negative. ‘T'wo papers, the Review and the Gazetteer, commended Burney’s adaptation of her principal source, David Hume’s History of England, in depicting Edwy’s disastrous love for Elgiva. There was praise in the Telegraph for the confrontation scenes in Acts II and III between Edwy and Dunstan, ‘marked with an energy and eloquence much superior to any modern effort’, and for Burney’s ‘forcible and new’ sentiments, contrasted with the ‘nauseous bombast’ of other recent tragedies.* The Gazetteer believed that once the tragedy had been shortened ‘and the action of the play thus quickened’ it was sure to please: ‘it can require only to be seen to be successful’. Similarly positive was a later review in the European Magazine, declaring that the ‘construction of

the Play was entitled to applause, and the language was beautiful and poetical’. ‘The reviewer suggests that Edwy and Elgiva might still ‘afford much pleasure in the closet, and with a few curtailments and alterations might have claimed its place on the Theatre’.” At the end of the performance of Edwy and Elgiva, before the pantomime menagerie took to the stage, Kemble announced that the piece was ‘withdrawn for alterations’ — words that received more applause from the audience than any other in the play.“ The reviewers regarded this applause

as expressing approval of the withdrawal, rather than the prospect of revision, but Burney thought otherwise, telling her father in a letter of 13 May that ‘the Audience finished with an UNMIXED clap on hearing it was Withdrawn for ALTERATIONS, & I have constantly considered myself in the PUBLICLY ACCEPTED situation of having at my own option to let the Piece die, or attempt its resuscitation’. She was not, she wrote, ‘at all

without thoughts of a future revise’ of the play, although the infamous Palmer would have ‘to be so obliging as to leave the Stage’.“ In an enigmatic letter to her brother of 10 June, she continued to dwell on the possibility of a revival, and both she and her husband, Alexandre d’Arblay, made extensive revisions in their respective copies of the play.

For Edwy and Elgiva to have been revived at Drury Lane, either during the spring of 1795 or in the following theatre season, would not have been exceptional. First-night audiences expected that their verdict on a play would lead to changes, large or small, in subsequent performances. Twenty years earlier, Sheridan's The Rivals had opened at Covent Garden in January 1775. Reviewers were highly critical of Sheridan’s first play, chastising the actors for forgetting their lines and deploring the comedy’s

and Evening Gazette, The Sun, and The Star. The last two are wrongly said in Journals and Letters to be missing from the Burney Collection.

2 In printing an excerpt from this review, the editors of Letters and Journals wrongly suggest that the phrase ‘nauseous bombast’ was applied to Edwy and Elgiva itself .

European Magazine, 27 (Apmil 1795), 272. This review was reprinted in Walker's Hiberman Magazine, Part 1 (May 1795), 437. “ Kemble’s words are recorded in many of the newspaper reviews. 4 Yournals and Letters, III, 107, 108.

XV1 GENERAL INTRODUCTION excessive length, as they would with Edwy and Elgiva. In addition, both the characterization and casting of Sir Lucius O’ Trigger were condemned, and some indelicate language gave offence. Like Edwy and Elgiva, The

Rivals was at once withdrawn for revisions. Sheridan, however, set to work immediately; the production was shortened from about four to three

and a quarter hours, the characterization of Sir Lucius was thoroughly changed, the actors were all made to learn their parts, and a new Sir Lucius, with Lawrence Clinch replacing John Lee, was found. Only eleven days later the production reopened, and The Rivals became not only a resounding success during the 1775 theatre season but, together with The School for Scandal (1777), among the most popular of all English comic plays.*

It is, of course, unlikely that Burney’s tragedy would have reopened to similar applause, let alone become a staple of the theatre repertory. It 1s, though, significant that Richard Cumberland, who had been writing successful comedies and tragedies for thirty years and whose The Wheel of fortune delighted Drury Lane audiences in the same month that Burney’s tragedy failed, assured Burney, in an ‘extraordinary message’, of his confidence in her skills. ‘He knew’, she told her brother, that ‘the play would fail, by what he gathered from the players before performance; but that so well he thinks of it, that —— if I will either reform it for the stage, or write

a new one with my best powers, & submit it to his inspection before representation, he will risk his life upon its success — !’.> Burney wrote to her father that Cumberland’s “experience of stage effect’ and his ‘interest with players’ made her wish to put his ‘sincerity to the proof’,© yet she did

not take up his offer. Had the production of Edwy and Elgiva been revived, Burney would at least have made an initial impact as a tragic dramatist. With the practical experience that the staging of a play gives an author, she could have gone on to rewrite any of her three other tragedies — Hubert De Vere, The Siege of Pevensey, or the unfinished Elberta — for performance. And performances, in turn, would have created a readership

for her dramas. Sheridan, astutely, published the first edition of The Rivals only two weeks after the successful revival of his play.

Burney did contemplate the publication of kdwy and kEigiva as an alternative to further performances, and in this she was encouraged by ‘the

good & wise seer Richard Owen Cambridge and by the bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu, as well as by an anonymous correspondent. All three

urged her to print by subscription, Cambridge assuring her that ‘the Names, &c, would be splendid, etc also the consequence’.“ Alexandre d’Arblay also lent his support, urging Burney to shrug off remarks from hostile critics: ‘il faut qu’elle s’endurcisse d’avance contre les epines d’une "See John Loftis, Shendan and the Drama of Georgian England (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 59-61. 5 Letter of 10 June 1795; Journals and Leiters, V1, 110. © Letter of 13 May 1795; Journals and Letters, UI, 107. 4 Letter of 10 June 1795; Journals and Letters, UII, 110.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION XVil carriere qu'elle a jusqu’a present trouvée semée de roses’.* He also gave considerable practical assistance. While Burney made numerous changes to the manuscript of her copy of Edwy and Elgiva, d’Arblay both incorporated some of these changes in his transcript and listed them separately under the headings of the various parts. These corrigenda could thus be incorporated in the actors’ individual copies, were the play to be staged again. He also added copious further revisions of his own to Burney’s text, inserting them between the lines of his transcription and on blank leaves interleaved between the written pages.” Despite such assistance and encouragement, however, Burney neither published Edwy and Elgiva nor attempted to have it revived on stage. She may have found the suggestion of seeking publication by subscription attractive, but in 1795 and 1796 she was carefully cultivating the subscription list for her third novel, Camulla, and for her to have done the same for the play might have appeared indecorous. Burney’s father, a powerful force for over twenty years in suppressing her dramatic writings, wished her to put Edwy and Elgiva aside, and in this case, as in many others, his wishes were fulfilled.“ In January 1797, after the publication of Camilla, Burney’s thoughts turned to another of her tragedies, Hubert De Vere, which in 1793 had been accepted for production at Drury Lane; it was

Burney’s own decision to withdraw it in favour of Edwy and Elgiva. Burney was now resolved ‘never to essay it for representation’ but instead to publish it as a closet drama, ‘a Tale in Dialogue ... readable for a fireside’. Dr Burney encouraged her to proceed with the revision, but no fair

copy of the play seems to have been made, and no publisher was approached. As late as 1836, when she was in her mid-eighties, Burney looked at her manuscripts of Hubert De Vere once again, timing readings

of the five acts in both versions. She did the same for The Szege of Pevensey, which at two hours would have been the shortest of her plays. She never completed her fourth tragedy, E/berta, but she did return to it in 1814 or later, over twenty years after beginning work on the play.° Burney was thus occupied with writing or revising tragic dramas for a

large part of her life, yet this activity led to no more than a single performance of one play.

Burney also wrote four comedies, and as a comic dramatist she had much greater prospects of success on the late eighteenth-century stage. Comedies were more frequently produced than tragedies, and in general

* Letter of c. 22 March 1795; Journals and Letters, III, 97. ® For d’Arblay’s revisions to Edwy and Elgiva, see my “Altered, improved, copied, abridged”: Alexandre d’Arblay’s Revisions to Kdwy and Elgiva’, Lumen, 14 (1995), forthcoming. . See Dr Burney’s unpublished fetter to Frances, 2 April 1795; Berg Collection, quoted in Journals and Letters, III, 96, n. 1. ¢ Letter to Dr Burney, 26 January 1797; Journals and Letters, U1, 258. © For Burney’s late revisions and timing of the tragedies, see the headnote to each play below.

XVill GENERAL INTRODUCTION had longer runs.* In May 1779, when she completed a draft of her first play, The Withngs, Burney seemed on the brink of a brilliant theatrical career. At the age of twenty-seven, she had seen both reviewers and the reading public greet Evelina with remarkable enthusiasm. The first edition of 1778 sold out rapidly, and by the end of 1779 four more editions (one

pirated) had been published, as well as a German translation. In the literary world, the novel was admired by such formidable patrons as Hester Thrale, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan — then at the height of his fame after the opening of The School for Scandal in 1777.” After her triumphant debut as comic novelist, it was natural for Burney to turn to comic drama: she clearly possessed the gift of creating sparkling dialogue, and success as a

dramatist would help establish her place in literary society. She had, moreover, already experimented with drama: the bonfire that she made of

her juvenilia on her fifteenth birthday included ‘Plays, Songs, Stories, Farces, — nay, Tragedies’.“ Before even beginning to write The Witlings, she had received an assurance from Sheridan, manager of the Drury Lane theatre, that he would be interested in producing her comedy. And Arthur Murphy, almost as great a name as Sheridan in the theatre world of the 1770s, read at least the first two acts of The Witlings in May 1779 and pronounced himself ‘extremely pleased with it indeed’.® In August 1779, Dr Burney read his daughter’s play, at the Chessington home of a family friend, Samuel Crisp, to a small, largely female audience.” The result was as unfortunate as his son’s later reading of Edwy and Elgiva in the Green Room at Drury Lane. The listeners did not, like the actors, ‘drop silently off’, but both Crisp and Dr Burney voiced objections

strong enough to ruin all prospects for the play. In a letter to Crisp just before the fatal reading took place, Burney asked her ‘dear Daddy’, the sobriquet by which ‘Fannikin’ habitually addressed the much older and revered father figure, for his comments on The Witlings, reminding him that it was still ‘a play in manuscript, & capable of alterations’. She hoped that friendly criticism would enable her to give Sheridan a much improved play for production: at least ‘the manager will have nothing to reproach me with: is not that some comfort?’.' Instead, Burney received what she described as a ‘Hissing, groaning, catcalling Epistle’ jointly written by her * For the relative popularity of comedies and tragedies by women dramatists, see Judith Phillips Stanton, “‘This New-Found Path Attempting”: Women Dramatists in England, 1660-1800’, in Curta¢n Calls: British and American Women and the Theater, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1991), pp. 333-34. > For the reception of the novel see Evelina, pp. xii—xvill, and Early Journals, ITI, 1x—xi. © Memoirs of Doctor Burney (London, 1832), I, 124.

¢ Burney to Susanna Burney, 11 January and 30 May-1 June 1779; Early Journals, III, 235, 282.

* For an account of the playreading, see Susanna Burney’s unpublished letter to Frances, 30 July 1779; Berg Collection, quoted in Doody, Frances Burney, p. 92. ' Letter of 29-30 July 1779; Early Journals, III, 343.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION XIX two ‘daddies’.* The metaphors are apt: instead of analyzing her play with a view to making it fitter for the stage, treating it as a work in progress, Crisp and Dr Burney had acted like a hostile first-night audience, determined that the play should be taken off the boards.

The correspondence between Burney and the ‘daddies’ that follows their rejection of The Witlings is painful to read. Burney, warned by her father to expect the collaborative epistle, assured him that though she had ‘little hope of ever writing what you will both approve’, she would be ‘a Beast & a monster not to do the best I can when I have two such Daddys for my Judges, & two such Friends for my Critics’.” Two long letters to her father and Crisp follow, in which Burney strives to express gratitude for the wisdom of their verdict while showing herself well aware that her

play could be staged and could succeed. In further letters to the two mentors, Burney considers ways in which the play could be revised, in particular softening the satire of the witlings which they feared would be taken as hits at Elizabeth Montagu and other prominent bluestockings. Sheridan, for his part, continued to take an interest in the play, telling Dr Burney that “he had much rather see pieces before their Authors were contented with them than afterwards, on account of sundry small changes always necessary to be made by the managers, for Theatrical purposes, & to which they were loath to submit when their writings were finished to their own approbations’. And Murphy, likewise, urged Burney to put The Witlings on stage, assuring her that ‘if it wants a few Stage Tricks, trust it with me, & I will put them in... I will promise not to let it go out of my Hands without engaging for it’s success’.“ Since Crisp and Dr Burney were determined that the play should not be staged, however, all such talk of revision was in vain. Crisp’s final verdict

was that ‘the Play has Wit enough, & enough — but the Story & the incidents dont appear to me interesting enough to seize & keep hold of the Attention’.? The extent of Dr Burney’s fears can be seen in his remark that ‘not only the Whole Piece, but the plot had best be kept secret, from every body” — as though even a report that his daughter was satirizing witlings

could damage her reputation. And Burney herself, in response to these reprobations, came to take ‘a sort of disgust’ to The Witlings, and was ‘most earnestly desirous to let it Die a quiet Death’.' Several modern critics have shared the two daddies’ concerns, expressing relief that Burney’s first play was kept from the stage. Michael Adelstein, for example, declares that ‘a performance of the play would have marred Fanny’s personal life. The formidable Mrs. Montagu would have

* Letter to Samuel! Crisp, c. 13 August 1779; Early Journals, 111, 350. » Letter to Dr Burney, 4 August 1779; Early Journals, I11, 343-44. © Frances Burney to Samuel Crisp, 22 January 1780; Early Journals, [V, forthcoming. ¢ Letter to Burney, 23 February 1780; Early Journals, IV, forthcoming. © Letter to Burney, 29 April 1779; The Letters of Charles Burney, ed. Alvaro Ribeiro (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), I, 280. ‘ Letter to Crisp, 22 January 1780; Early Journals, 1V, forthcoming.

XX GENERAL INTRODUCTION retaliated by lampooning and ridiculing Fanny in various ways’.* Surpris-

ingly, at least two feminist critics have taken a similar position. Ellen Moers writes that ‘had Dr. Burney allowed The Witlngs to go on the boards, his daughter would have been convicted of a tasteless gaffe equiva-

lent to, say, the submission by an aspiring young authoress of a nasty satire on Gloria Steinem to Ms. magazine’. And Katharine Rogers finds Burney’s ‘choice of subject ... singularly perverse, since the main object of satire is intellectual women’.” These critics, however, ignore the fact that Burney’s witlings are not a bluestocking group. The founding mem-

bers of the Esprit Club are Lady Smatter, Dabler, Mrs Sapient, and Codger, and Burney’s satire of the two men is no gentler than that of the two women. Such satire of would-be intellectuals, moreover, was a commonplace of

the eighteenth-century stage. Hester Thrale was relieved when the play was suppressed, since she felt implicated in the satire, yet she had the honesty to acknowledge that the play was ‘likely to succeed’.“ Oliver Goldsmith was urged by both George Colman and David Garrick, managers of Covent Garden and Drury Lane in 1771, to suppress She Stoops to Conquer, with its supposedly dangerous attacks on current theatrical fashions.” Had Burney, like Goldsmith, ignored such advice and risked Mrs Montagu’s wrath, she could have made her name as a playwright in the same decade as Goldsmith and Sheridan, and had her premiere produced by Sheridan at Drury Lane. Remarkably, the whole cycle of composition, would-be production and

suppression was repeated twenty years later when Burney wrote her second comedy, Love and Fashion. Like The Witlings, Love and Fashion was championed by a man of great theatrical experience, Thomas Harris,

the manager of Covent Garden, who described the heroine as ‘the first female character on the English stage’. His offer of four hundred pounds for the play and advice to Burney on making it more theatrical show that his intentions for the production, scheduled for March 1800, were serious.“

Once again, however, her father put a halt to the proceedings, this time without even having read the play. His pretext was the death of Burney’s sister Susanna in January 1800, which he felt made the production of a Burney comedy indecorous. The memorable letter that Burney addressed to her father in February, however, shows that despite his eternal objections * Adelstein, Fanny Burney (New York: Twayne, 1968), p. 60. © Moers, Literary Women: The Great Wnters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 117; Rogers, Frances Burney: The World of Female Difficulties (London: Harvester, 1990), p. 19. Rogers maintains this position in her recent edition of The Witlngs, writing of Burney’s ‘strange perversity’ in focusing her ridicule on the Bluestockings (The Meridian Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Plays by Women [New York: Meridian, 1994], p. 290). © Thraliana, I, 401. 4 See Tom Davis, ed., She Stoops to Conquer (London: New Mermaids, 1979), p. xv. © Charles Burney to Frances Burney, 30 October 1779; Berg Collection scrapbook, ‘Fanny Burney and family. 1653-1890’.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION xxl to her potential success as a playwright, she took pride in ‘doing what I have all my life been urged to, & all my life intended, writing a Comedy’. She could not confine herself to the Jess public genre of the novel, as Dr

Burney wished: ‘My imagination is not at my own controll ... The combinations for another long work did not occur to me. Incidents & effects for a Dramma did ... The chance held out golden dreams’. These golden dreams of theatrical fame, however, were to remain no more than dreams. Love and Fashion was withdrawn from production at

Covent Garden, and Burney’s hopes that it would be revived in the following season were not fulfilled. Burney returned to the play on several

occasions over the next forty years, as her surviving working papers indicate, but it was never again shown to a theatre manager or publisher, nor even, after 1801, mentioned in her correspondence. Burney’s last two plays, The Woman-Hater and A Busy Day, written shortly after Love and Fashion mm the first years of the new century, remained entirely private affairs. Although her tentative cast-lists for these comedies show that The Woman-Hater was intended for production at Covent Garden and A Busy Day tor Drury Lane, neither Thomas Harris nor Sheridan, still manager at Drury Lane, was made aware of Burney’s intentions. Her departure from England in April 1802 to join her husband in France put an end to any possible productions or publications of her plays, and after her return in 1812 she had no further dealings with theatre managers. Dr Burney had no need to suppress her final comedies, since he seems never to have been shown them or even told of their existence. Of Burney’s eight plays, therefore, four had a public existence of some

kind: the comedies The Witlings and Love and Fashion, both read by theatre managers, and the tragedies Hubert De Vere and Edwy and Elgiva,

the former accepted for production at Drury Lane and the latter actually performed. Burney’s other comedies, The Woman-Hater and A Busy Day,

and her other tragedies, The Siege of Pevensey and Elberta, were unknown during her lifetime and scarcely mentioned after her death until the 1950s. In a sense, however, all of Burney’s plays were private writings, manuscripts written for the stage but lacking the theatrical finish that the trials of production would have enabled them to acquire. Even Edwy and Elgiva, as Burney noted bitterly, was ‘certainly not heard, & therefore not really judged’.” In her later years Burney continued to work on most of her

plays, modifying characterization, timing the length of acts, and experimenting with new scenes. Elberta remained incomplete, but so, to some extent, did all of Burney’s dramas, works in progress until her death.

* Letter of 10 February 1800; Journals and Letters, 1V, 394-95. > Letter to Dr Burney, 13 May 1795; Journals and Letters, III, 108.

XX1i GENERAL INTRODUCTION II Burney’s involvement with the theatre dates from her childhood. Her father was himself the author of a translation of Rousseau’s operetta Le Devin du village (1752), produced at Drury Lane as The Cunning Man in 1766. In her old age Burney described the enraptured Burney children attending the premiere, seated in Mrs Garrick’s box, as they ‘openly bent forward, to look exultingly at the audience, when a loud clapping followed

the overture’.* Garrick, a close friend of the Burney family, gave them unrestricted use of his box from 1761; Frances could thus see him in his major roles for the next two decades, until his retirement in 1776. George Colman the Elder, manager of Covent Garden from 1767 to 1777, was also a friend of the Burney family; Burney thus had ready access to both of the great London theatres during her formative years. In her edition of A Busy Day, Tara Wallace lists some 170 plays that Burney mentions having read or seen in her journals and letters, and, as

Wallace notes, there must be many others that Burney did not record.” Among contemporary dramatists her favourite was Colman, whose The Clandestine Marnage (1766) she mentions more often than any other play, and whose An Occasional Prelude (1772) she saw ‘near a dozen times’.© She was familiar with many comedies by Samuel Foote, David Garrick, and Arthur Murphy, and read or saw all of Sheridan’s plays. Burney also took an interest in several contemporary women dramatists, such as Frances Sheridan, Frances Brooke, Hannah Cowley, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Joanna Baillie. She saw Cowley’s lively and inventive comedy The Belle’s Stratagem (1780) in a performance of February 1798, just as she was beginning work on Love and Fashion, and Albina, Burney’s original name for the heroine of Cecilza, may have been inspired by

that of the heroine of Cowley’s tragedy, Albina, Countess Raimond (1779). The Belle’s Stratagem was one of six recent plays that Burney saw in the winter season of 1797-98; the others were Frederick Reynolds’s Cheap Living (1797), Thomas Morton’s Secrets Worth Knowing (1798),

Thomas Holcroft’s He’s Much to Blame (1798), Colman the Younger’s The Heir at Law (1797), and Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre (1797). In a letter of April 1798 Burney remarks, ‘After my long abstinence from the Theatre, this was pretty full fare. We are both very fond of Plays & Operas, & very indifferent to all other public places’.* In her youth Burney also participated in amateur theatricals staged by

* Memoirs of Doctor Burney, I, 169. > Wallace, ed., A Busy Day (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984), pp. 195-99. © Early Journals, 1, 232, and Annie Raine Ellis, ed., The Early Diary of Frances Burney 1768-1778 (London: Bell, 1913), I, 68, n. 1. “ See Doody, Frances Burney, p. 120. “ Letter to Charlotte Broome, 3 April 1798; Journals and Letters, IV, 129.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION XXiil her family, and some of her roles are described in her early journals. In 1770, at seventeen, she refused to play the ‘quite shocking’ part of Tag in

a performance of Garrick’s Miss in Her Teens (1747). A year later, however, she played Lady Easy and Lady Graveairs in Colley Cibber’s The Careless Husband (1704), and, a few months after, Lady ‘Truman in Addison’s comedy The Drummer (1716). Her finest performances came in 1777, a year before she began work on The Witlings, when on the same night she played the contrasting roles of Mrs Lovemore in Murphy’s The

Way to Keep Him (1760) and Huncamunca in Fielding’s Tom Thumb (1730). In her journal Burney describes with some pride the makeshift theatre, ‘fitted up in a very Dramatic manner: with side scenes, — & 2 figures, of Tragedy & Comedy at each end, & a Head of Shakespear in the middle. We had 4 Changes of scenes’. She also describes her initial stagefright in her first tea-drinking scene as Mrs Lovemore, and her success as a haughty Huncamunca, declaiming her best lines with no want of ‘energy or imperiousness’.”

A further indication of Burney’s immersion in the theatrical world is

provided by her four novels, each of which contains accounts of the staging of plays. In Avelina the heroine sees performances of Benjamin Hoadly’s The Suspicious Husband (1747), with ‘the celebrated Mr. Garrick’ in the part of Ranger, Congreve’s Love for Love (1695), Colman’s afterpiece The Deuce 1s in Him (1763), described by Lord Orville as ‘the most finished and elegant petite piece that was ever written in English’, and two comedies by Samuel Foote, The Minor (1760) and The Commissary (1765). In both Evelina and Cecilia performances of operas at the Opera House in the Haymarket are described at length, and one of Mr Harrel’s ruinous expenses in Cecilia 1s the erection of a private theatre for Easter performances at his home, Violet-Bank. In Camilla a memorable production of Othello is put on by actors of ‘the lowest strolling kind’, with a Norfolk Cassio, a cockney Othello, a Somerset Brabantio, and a Worcestershire Desdemona all speaking their lines in dialect. And in The Wanderer (1814), the reluctant heroine is made both to act as prompter and to take the part of Lady Townly in an amateur performance of The Provok’d

Husband (1728), a comedy begun by Vanbrugh and completed after his death by Colley Cibber.” Passages such as these in Burney’s novels and the copious references to the theatre in her letters and journals reveal the extent of her interest in the stage: her lifelong fascination with both theatrical productions and plays

as printed texts. Nonetheless, in her quest to win fame as a playwright Burney faced obstacles that were to prove insuperable. The first of these, of course, was the ever-vigilant Dr Burney, aided, until the latter’s death in 1783, by Samuel Crisp. As Margaret Anne Doody notes astutely about * Early Journals, 1, 116, 159-63, 171-72; I, 235-51, > Evelina, pp. 25, 78, 82, 89-94, 188; Cecilia, pp. 60-71; Camilla, pp. 317-24; The Wanderer, pp. 67-97. The production of The Provok’d Husband m The Wanderer was originally intended for Camilla, see The Wanderer, Appendix VI, pp. 901-05.

XXIV GENERAL INTRODUCTION the suppression of Love and Fashion, ‘it was to be easier to smuggle antiRevolutionary manuscripts past Napoleon’s soldiers than to smuggle a comic play out to the public past Dr. Burney’s barriers’.* By the time Dr Burney himself died in 1814, just after the publication of The Wanderer, Burney was in her sixties and more preoccupied with family concerns than

with the writing of further novels or plays. , A second obstacle to Burney’s winning renown as a playwright was her sex. It was not impossible for women dramatists to succeed in Burney’s

time, but the odds were against them. Recent essays by Judith Phillips Stanton provide some useful data about the genres favoured by Restoration and eighteenth-century women writers. According to her findings, while 263 women published volumes of poetry and 201 published novels, only 97 wrote plays — many fewer than the 247 publishing letters and

autobiography or the 170 publishing religious works. About twelve to fourteen plays were written by men to every one written by a woman, not surprisingly, given the essentially public nature of drama. To become a successful playwright then as now entailed attending rehearsals and becoming part of the theatre world: for the exceptionally diffident Burney and for many other women dramatists, such close contact with the

playhouses was impracticable. During the 1770s, the decade in which Burney wrote The Witlings, only twelve comedies by women were published or produced for the first time. During the 1780s, when she began work on her tragedies, merely four tragic plays by women were newly staged

or published, although the number rose to seventeen in the following decade.°

Between 1747 and 1776, while Garrick was manager of Drury Lane, women playwrights fared relatively well at his theatre. As Ellen Donkin has shown, Garrick produced nine plays by women during this period for a total of 128 performances, in contrast to the three plays by women for a total of only twenty performances produced at Covent Garden.* Unfortunately for Burney, however, Garrick gave up his managerial position just three years before she wrote her own first play. His successor, Sheridan, was eager to produce The Witlings, but he lacked the influence in the Burney family that Garrick possessed. And although Sheridan was responsible for the production of Edwy and Elgiva at Drury Lane in 1795, he gave the tragedy none of the attention that Garrick habitually devoted to the plays he produced. Arthur Murphy, who offered to help Burney revise The Witlings, using his knowledge of what the ‘sovereigns of the upper Gallery will bear’,? seems never to have been shown the whole piece * Doody, Frances Burney, p. 312. > Stanton, ‘“This New-Found Path Attempting,”’ pp. 325-38; Stanton, ‘Statistical Profile of Women Writing in Engiand from 1660 to 1800’, Aighteenth-Century Women and the Arts, ed. Frederick M. Keener and Susan E. Lorsch (New York: Greenwood, 1988), pp. 247-54. © Donkin, “The Paper War of Hannah Cowley and Hannah More’, Curtain Calls, ed. Schofield and Macheski, pp. 144-45. d Burney to Susanna Burney, post 16 February 1779; Early Journals, U1, 246,

GENERAL INTRODUCTION XXV and thus could do little towards its reshaping. Burney did receive some useful advice from Thomas Harris over the planned production of Love and Fashion at Covent Garden, but the play was withdrawn before the revisions called for by theatre rehearsals could take place. ‘Thus for all her knowledge of contemporary drama and her social acquaintance with such

key theatrical figures as Garrick, Murphy, Sheridan, and Cumberland, Burney had no opportunity to test her playscripts against the practical requirements of the stage and no contact with theatre professionals who alone could have turned her manuscripts into acting plays: directors producing her dramas and actors and actresses performing the roles she had created. Compounding Burney’s own diffidence was what Donkin has termed the ‘negatively charged atmosphere’ for women playwrights in the late 1770s and 1780s, after the death of Garrick in January 1779.* Burney, as

her father and Crisp were all too well aware, was trying to launch her career as a dramatist at a particularly inauspicious time. Hannah Cowley’s

tragedy Albina, produced in July 1779 at the Haymarket — a summer theatre not normally associated with tragic drama — played together with Colman’s comedy The Separate Maintenance, which featured a witless woman playwright, Mrs Fustian. Three years later, Colman launched the dramatic career of his son, George Colman the Younger, by producing his first play, The Female Dramatist, at the Haymarket in August 1782. In this slight musical farce, the heroine is another would-be playwright, Mrs Metaphor, whose scribblings are an object of satire. Sheridan, Burney’s champion in offering to produce The Witlings at Drury Lane, nonetheless took an active part in this vogue for making sport of women dramatists. His epilogue to Hannah More’s The Fatal Falsehood, produced at Covent Garden in May 1779, takes note of the dangerous prevalence of ‘female scribblers’: For scene or history, we’ve none but these, The law of Liberty and Wit they seize In ‘Tragic — Comic — Pastoral — they dare to please.

Although the epilogue acknowledges the success that women dramatists have found, their activity is depicted as essentially unwomanly, interfering with their proper household tasks: Now while this Eye in a fine phrenzy rolls, That, soberly casts up a Bill for Coals; Black Pins and Daggers in one leaf she sticks, And Tears and Thread, and Bells and Thimbles mix.®

As well as being encumbered by this epilogue, The Fatal Falsehood became notorious in the ‘paper war’ between Hannah More and Hannah * Donkin, ‘The Paper War’, p. 153. > The Dramatic Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, ed. Cecil Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), II, 826-27.

XXVi GENERAL INTRODUCTION Cowley that was fought in summer 1779, just as Burney had completed the first draft of The Withngs. More was accused, first by reviewers and then by Cowley herself, of having plagiarised her tragedy from Cowley’s

Albina, which opened in July 1779 but had been written three years earlier. The protracted dispute between the two parties had, as Donkin observes, ‘the unfortunate side effect of further imperiling the precarious position of women playwrights generally by inviting all of London to witness divisiveness among them’.* The Witlings does not take part directly

in the contemporary satires of women dramatists or in the paper war between Cowley and More. Its female witlings are not dramatists but a critic, Lady Smatter, and a woman given to tired maxims, Mrs Sapient. Nonetheless, Burney herself claimed that after her daddies had made their objections clear, she ‘had taken a sort of disgust’ to her first play, and was ‘most earnestly desirous to let it Die a quiet Death’. In a final attempt to salvage the play for production by Sheridan, she even proposed, in a letter

to Crisp, ‘to entirely omit all mention’ of the witlings’ club, a sign of desperation since, as Crisp pointed out in his reply, this ‘seems to have been the main Subject of the play’.”

Itl After Burney’s death in 1840, her already little-known plays fell into still

deeper obscurity. Those few critics who discussed them at all did so without what might seem to be the necessary prerequisite of having read them. Macaulay, for example, in his long and highly influential essay on Burney of 1843, asserts that “The Witlings would have been damned, and that Murphy and Sheridan thought so, though they were too polite to say so’. He goes on to congratulate Crisp for ‘manfully’ counselling Burney against production of the play, thus acting as ‘a judicious, faithful, and affectionate adviser’. Surprisingly, after this bravura piece of pseudo-

criticism, worthy of Lady Smatter herself, Macaulay is more reticent about Edwy and Elgiva, admitting that ‘we do not know whether it was ever printed; nor indeed have we had time to make any researches into its

history or merits’.“ Austin Dobson, writing on Burney in 1903 in the ‘English Men of Letters’ series (Burney was one of the few women authors admitted to this collection as an honorary man), devotes four pages to The Witlings, again without the benefit of having read it, and concludes, like

Macaulay, that Dr Burney and Crisp were right to have suppressed the play. Turning to Kdwy and Elgiva, Dobson declares that ‘though at some * Donkin, “The Paper War’, p. 161. > Burney to Crisp, 22 January 1780, Crisp to Burney, 23 February 1780; Early Journals, IV, forthcoming. © Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘Madame D’Arblay’, Edinburgh Review, 76 (1843), 539, 558.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION XXVIl points there is a certain stir and action, the plot generally lacks incident and movement’ — although no copy of the play was available to him.*

There are, I believe, only two nineteenth- or early twentieth-century critics with first-hand knowledge of a Burney play. One, Evelyn Shuckburgh, who possessed a manuscript of Edwy and Elgiva, discusses the tragedy in some detail in an article of 1890. He pronounces it ‘ludicrously bad’, vitiated by ‘absence of movement and action’, ‘the incurable poverty of its stilted language, its commonplace sentiments, and its incorrect and inharmonious versification’, and he supports his case with textual quotations. Shuckburgh was not, however, aware that the pencilled ‘alterations

and improvements’ in his manuscript were not by Burney but by her husband, Alexandre d’Arblay; nor did he know of Burney’s having written any other plays.” Although the article provided Dobson with material for

his book, it made little subsequent impression. Joseph Grau, Burney’s bibliographer, mistitles it and lists it as ‘not seen’.*

Another exception to the rule of writing on Burney’s plays without reading them is made in Constance Hill’s The House in St. Martin’s Street

(1907). Hill transcribes part of Act IV of The Witlings from Burney’s manuscript, the first printing of at least part of any Burney play, and remarks that ‘we have read the play with much interest and amusement, though recognizing some of the drawbacks which struck Dr. Burney and Mr. Crisp so forcibly’. This and a reference to the comedy’s ‘bright dialogue’, faint praise though it is, is still exceptional; for once a critic had found a Burney play worthy of extensive quotation and of at least qualified approval.¢ An anonymous reviewer of Hill’s book in the Times Literary

Supplement, however, thought otherwise, stating that ‘we had always cherished a secret hope that ... Dr. Burney and Daddy Crisp were over severe when they counselled her against publication, but, from the specimen here given, it’s clear that they were right’.“

The modern rediscovery of Burney’s plays was made possible by the acquisition in 1941 of a huge number of her manuscripts, hitherto in a private collection, by the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.

This archive, which includes manuscripts of all of her plays, was made accessible to scholars in 1945.‘ The first critic to take advantage of the newly available material was Joyce Hemlow, who in 1950 published an article with what then must have been a startling title, ‘Fanny Burney: Playwright’. Hemlow offered, for the first time, an overview of the plays.

* Dobson, Fanny Burney (Madame d’Arblay) (London: Macmillan, 1904), 100-05, 185. > Shuckburgh, ‘Madame d’Arblay’, Macmillan’s Magazine, February 1890, p. 294. Shuckburgh presented the manuscript to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, its present location. © Grau, Fanny Burney: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1981), p. 147. * Hill, The House in St. Martin’s Street (London: Bodley Head, 1907), p. 153. © Times Literary Supplement, 9 November 1906, p. 376; quoted in Grau, p. 188. ‘ See Joyce Hemlow, A Catalogue of the Burney Family Correspondence 1749-1878 (New York: New York Public Library, 1971), p. xiv.

XXVIII GENERAL INTRODUCTION She found The Witlings disappointing, with ‘fewer comic transcripts of life than readers of Evelina might have expected’, but was more impressed by the later comedies, especially A Busy Day, ‘with its original scenes and its realistic and satiric comedy’. The tragedies Hemlow regarded as complete failures, typifying the weaknesses of ‘she-tragedy’, with its ‘falling into mawkishness’.*” Hemlow expanded this criticism in her biography of Burney in 1958, in which she further argued that these “experiments in blank verse, scarcely to be considered as poetry, had a deplorable effect on her prose style’. They gave rise, she claims, to ‘a flamboyant rhetoric’ and an ‘empty swollen manner’, that created a ‘peculiarly hollow, half-romantic, half-sentimental effect’ in Burney’s later prose.”

A year before Hemlow’s biography appeared, the earliest of these tragedies, Edwy and Elgiva, was published for the first time. Its editor,

Miriam J. Benkovitz, however, held it in no higher regard than did Burney's biographer. Her introduction constitutes a sustained attack on the play, with its ‘artificial pathos’, in which ‘feeling degenerates into mere

rhetoric ... the failure of Edwy and Elgiva 1s a failure in style’. Like Hemlow, Benkovitz associates the convoluted language of Edwy and Eigiva with an ensuing deterioration in Burney’s writings, contending that the play ‘marks the very point of decline’ in her career.° If this edition had been more widely noticed, 1t might have affected Burney's already low

reputation adversely. It was, however, ignored by reviewers, has long been out of print, and has seldom been cited by Burney’s recent critics.

Among the few critics other than Hemlow to take an overview of Burney’s plays is Michael Adelstein in his Twayne volume of 1968. Adel-

stein prizes The Witlings more highly than any previous commentator, contending that its suppression was ‘detrimental to [Burney’s] artistic development’. He regards Burney as a natural satirist, forced to abandon satire after The Witlings had been condemned. He is less impressed by two of Burney’s later comedies, Love and Fashton and The Woman-Hater, but in a panegyric on A Busy Day, Burney’s ‘Unpublished Masterpiece’, he

pronounces it ‘worthy of being read and acted today along with such eighteenth-century favorites as Sheridan’s School for Scandal and Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer’. It has, he believes, ‘an appealing freshness and sparkle found in few other eighteenth-century comedies’ :“ a position also taken by several reviewers of the Show of Strength production of the play. A Busy Day received further prominence when it was first published in Tara Ghoshal Wallace’s fine edition of 1984, An enthusiastic advocate

for Burney as comic dramatist, Wallace admires The Woman-Hater as much as A Busy Day, and believes that both ‘had every chance of success * Hemlow, ‘Fanny Burney: Playwright’, pp. 171, 189, 176. > Hemlow, Fanny Burney, pp. 220, 221. © Benkovitz, ed., Edwy and Elgrva (Hamden, Connecticut: Shoestring Press, 1957), pp. XU, XIV.

4 Adelstein, Fanny Burney, pp. 61, 112, 116.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION XX1X on stage’.* Reviewers, however, were unimpressed. Pat Rogers terms A

Busy Day ‘a mild comedy of manners, its action comfortably midAugustan in feel’, although the language is ‘recognizably more modern than anything in Fanny’s novels’. Lillian Bloom, in her review, contends that A Busy Day does not justify its editor’s labours; as a comedy of manners it is a ‘tattered copy’ of Sheridan and Goldsmith, marred by ‘dullness and confusion’.”

Had A Busy Day been published in the late, rather than in the mid 1980s, it might have met with a better reception. In recent years, Burney’s critical reputation has risen dramatically. At least ten full-length studies of her life and writings have been published since 1987, together with two

new editions each of Evelina, Cecilia and The Wanderer, and the first three volumes of her early journals and letters. By far the most important of these works for Burney’s reputation as a dramatist is Margaret Anne Doody’s Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (1988). In an essay of 1985, Doody had contended that Burney might ‘win posthumous reputation as a dramatist as her previously unpublished comic plays emerge into print’.© Her critical biography reinforces this claim with a detailed analysis of each of the plays. In The Witlings, she sees Burney as ‘a predecessor of Pinero or Ayckbourn’. Writing on the tragedies, Doody, like Benkovitz and Hemlow, finds a link between their style and subject matter and those of the later novels. Unlike these earlier critics, however, Doody regards the effect of the tragedies as beneficial to Burney the novelist: the ‘vision

of the depths’ in Camilla and The Wanderer grows out of the intense introspection of the tragic dramas. Doody also studies The Woman-Hater as a play closely related to Burney’s novels; she terms it a ‘nodal work’, attempting to resolve issues dealt with in Burney’s fiction, tragic dramas and comedies alike.* As a result of Doody’s seminal work, Burney’s plays can no longer be dismissed as a negligible part of her literary oeuvre, and now that A Busy

Day has proven its worth on the stage, productions of other Burney comedies are likely to follow. The first full-length study of Burney as a dramatist has recently appeared as a doctoral dissertation.* Critics of late eighteenth-century drama, however, have not yet discovered Burney’s * Wallace, ed., A Busy Day, p. 160.

> Rogers, Times Literary Supplement, 7 June 1985, p. 642; Bloom, The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography, n.s. 10 (New York: AMS, 1989), p. 576. © Doody, ‘Fanny Burney’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, 39, British Novelists, 16601800, ed. Martin C, Battestin (Detroit: Gale, 1985), p. 91. 4 Doody, Frances Burney, pp. 98, 198, 302. © Barbara Darby, ‘Family and Feminism in the Plays of Frances Burney’, Ph.D. diss., Queen’s University, 1994. Previous dissertations on or related to Burney’s plays include

Marjorie Lee Morrison, ‘Fanny Burney and the Theatre’, University of Texas, 1957; Elizabeth Yost Mulliken, “The Influence of the Drama on Fanny Burney’s Novels’, University of Wisconsin, 1969; Tara Ghoshal, ‘An Introduction to Fanny Burney’s Comedies’, M.A. thesis, University of Toronto, 1975; and Clayton Delery, ed., ‘The Witlings’, City University of New York, 1989.

XXX GENERAL INTRODUCTION plays. She is conspicuously absent from the standard surveys, such as those by Allardyce Nicoll and Richard Bevis, and the Revels History.* And feminist theatre historians, whose revisionist approach has contri-

buted much to our appreciation of the Georgian stage, have not yet engaged with Burney.

IV

Burney’s blank-verse tragedies are remote from modern taste, and even critics sympathetic to her novels and comedies have found it difficult to come to terms with her tragic plays. Michael Adelstein, for example, for all his enthusiasm for A Busy Day, finds ‘little literary value’ in any of Burney’s tragedies. Tara Wallace declares that ‘these tragedies, with their

contrived action and stilted language, do not add to Fanny Burney’s reputation as a dramatist’, and Judy Simons complains that ‘these dismal exercises in heroic drama deal yet again with female victimisation. Morbid women are unfairly treated, misjudged, confined, suffer and die in dreary circumstances’. Katharine Rogers calls Edwy and Elgtva ‘a dreary tragedy’,

which ‘deserved and met with humiliating failure’. The label commonly applied to eighteenth-century tragedies such as Burney’s featuring the sufferings of an innocent heroine is ‘she-tragedy’, a

term given prominence by Allardyce Nicoll in The Theory of Drama (1931). For Nicoll, ‘tragedy almost invariably stresses the masculine at the expense of the feminine elements’ because of ‘the hardness and sternness

... In the highest tragic art’. She-tragedy is thus, in Nicoll’s view, an anomaly; plays which insist on the feminine may be ‘pathetic and touching, but they are not tragedies’.© Nicoll’s views have been remarkably influential. Since most critics have relied on Hemlow’s account of Burney's tragedies, rather than reading the manuscripts for themselves, and since Nicoll’s concept of ‘she-tragedy’ underlies Hemlow’s approach, he has become, unwittingly, a potent silent partner in Burney studies. As Barbara Darby notes, however, Burney’s ‘revision of the tragic formula from a female point of view, ought not to make its claims irrelevant or uninteresting’. * Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660~1900, vol. III, Late Eighteenth Century Drama, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952); Bevis, English Drama: Restoration and Eighteenth Century, 1660-1789 (London: Longman, 1988); Michael R. Booth et al., The Revels History of Drama in England, vol. VI, 1750-1880 (London: Methuen, 1975). > Adelstein, Fanny Burney, p. 87; Wallace, ed., A Busy Day, p. 157; Simons, Fanny Burney (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1987), p. 133; Rogers, ed., The Meridian Anthology, p. 291.

e Nicoll, The Theory of Drama (London: Harrap, 1931), pp. 157, 158. The same passage appears in Nicoll’s earlier An Introduction to Dramatic Theory (1923). Darby, ‘Family and Feminism’, p. 88.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION XXX1 Burney’s tragedies can be best appreciated by dispensing with the rebarbative term ‘she-tragedy’, which has had so constricting an effect on

the study of Burney and other women dramatists, and considered in a quite different context: that of the Gothic dramas written in the wake of Horace Walpole’s pioneering The Mysterous Mother (1768). Burney became familiar with Walpole’s double-incest tragedy in 1786, two years before she began writing her own first tragedy Edwy and Elgiva. On hearing a dramatic reading, she recorded her admiration for the opening of

the play, with its ‘description of superstitious fear extremely well, & feelingly, & naturally depicted’, while deploring the double incest plot and the heroine’s ‘attrocious & voluntary guilt’.* Although the horrors of The Mysterious Mother were too extreme for Burney, her own tragedies drew on many of the devices used by Walpole, here and in his novel The Castle of Otranto (1764). Among these Gothic accoutrements in her plays are the

atmospheric use of the trappings of medievalism, claustrophobic castle settings, complete with dungeons and concealed passageways, guilt-ridden but powerfully oppressive villains, impenetrable disguises, haunted graveyards, monasteries, and gloomy forests. When Burney wrote her tragedies in the late 1780s and early 1790s, the vogue for Gothic drama was steadily

increasing. In 1795, for example, the year in which Edwy and Elgiva made its fleeting appearance on stage, three new Gothic plays were produced at Drury Lane and Covent Garden: Miles Peter Andrews’s The Mystenes of the Castle, Samuel Birch’s The Adopted Child, and James Boaden’s The Secret Tribunal. Four more were presented in 1796, including Colman the Younger’s The Iron Chest, three in 1797, including Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre, and a remarkable six in both 1798 and 1799, when the cult of Gothic drama reached its height in a season that included Sheridan’s vastly successful Pizzaro.” Edwy and Elgiva opens, as the stage directions indicate, in ‘a Magnifcent gothic Chamber’ in Edwy’s palace. A secret passage enables Edwy to move undetected between this chamber and the apartment of his wife Elgiva; access to the passage 1s made through ‘a private door, concealed by

gothic wood-work’ (I, i, 6 s.d.). On learning of Elgiva’s marriage to Edwy, her persecutor, Dunstan, penetrates her apartment through this same secret passage; the sexual symbolism 1s palpable. Later, reunited

* Journal for 29 November 1786; Horace Walpole: The Critical Heritage, ed. Peter Sabor (London: Routledge, 1987), p. 141. © For listings of Gothic plays see Bertrand Evans, Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1947), pp. 239-45; and Paul

Ranger, “Terror and Pity reign in every Breast’: Gothic Drama in the London Patent Theatres, 1750-1820 (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1991), pp. 175-79. See also the useful recent studies of Gothic drama by Jeffrey N. Cox, ed., Seven Gothic Dramas {789-1825 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1992), and Paula R. Backscheider, Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). The place of the Gothic in Edwy and Elgiva is noted by Doody, Frances Burney, p. 182.

XXXH GENERAL INTRODUCTION with his dying queen, Edwy 1s driven to insanity, and he declaims with the frenetic stridency characteristic of the Gothic hero: My Brain turns round — I know not where I am — Nor whom ~ nor what — O kind Distraction seize me! Merciful Madness! (V, xi, 41-43)

It is, however, notable that while creating such typically Gothic effects, Burney avoids the full-blown Gothicism of some of her contemporaries. Dunstan, for example, declares in a soliloquy: I have been visited by evil Spirits, Malignant Daemons have assaulted me By Day, by Night — (II, v, 50-52)

Yet significantly, these spirits and demons do not appear on stage; Dunstan speaks here and elsewhere of his ‘frequent visions’, but Burney 1s content to report rather than enact. A reviewer of the Drury Lane production, evidently familiar with the spectacular spectralism of James Boaden’s

Fountainville Forest, produced at Covent Garden a year earlier, found Burney’s cautious treatment of the supernatural undramatic: “The very evi spirits, which, mentioned, provoked a laugh at the imposter Dunstan, might have been shewn, by the magic of poesy, with the most awful effects, stimulating his cruelty and aggravating his horrors.” It is also striking that while Edwy envisages Elgiva’s sufferings during her captiv-

ity, the imprisonment itself takes place off stage. Burney creates a hypothetical Gothic through Edwy’s fevered speculations: Perhaps that lovely Form, Confin’d by villainous force in brutal fetters, On the damp, murky Ground of some cold Dungeon Inhales with every Breath a fell disease: While the dim light, through curved apertures, Displays a Scene to make e’en darkness enviable! (V, vii, 13-18)

Burney’s contemporaries, 1n contrast, aided by the elaborate fashionings of stage designers and scene painters, were putting the dungeons, illuminated by slanting shafts of light, directly before the audience, rather than limiting them to their characters’ imaginations. In Burney’s next tragedy, Hubert De Vere, a similarly controlled use of

the Gothic takes place. There is no castle setting here, but the Isle of Wight, described as ‘this small Isle’, to which the action is confined, provides something of the Gothic castle’s constraining, claustrophobic effect. De Mowbray, the villainous counterpart of Dunstan, employs spies to watch the movements of the eponymous hero (whose name alludes to ‘verité’, French for truth), and guards his designs with ‘fearful secresy’ (I,

* “Thespis’ in the Oracle, 23 March 1795. The review was not disinterested; the Oracle was edited by Boaden, and the reviewer was probably Boaden himself.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION XXXHi 39). Cerulia, the young heroine, in love with De Vere, follows him patiently through the island’s quasi-Gothic landscape: Each mossy Glade, each Wood, each tow’ring Hill, Each lonely valley, and each secret path That Fear might seek for shelter. (I, 227-29)

De Mowbray, like his precursor Dunstan, has several exclamatory soliloquies that reveal! his tormented mind: Avenging Powers! How Gulph on Gulph tremendous gapes before me, ... With sudden sparks, bursting, red hot and furious, With shock electric on my shatter’d brain. (II, 98-123)

De Vere speaks a similar language: as he tears open his garment crying ‘Flash, hght’nings, flash! / Consume me with your forked flames!’ (III, 234-35), it is difficult to distinguish Gothic hero from Gothic villain.

The final act of Hubert De Vere, set in ‘a Country Church Yard’, provides the highest Gothic of any Burney play. Cerulia, who has passed the night alone in a decaying church, describes at length the nightmarish vision in white that has haunted her: Meagre, yet stern; Holding a taper whose red flame illumined Three hideous Spectres that before me glar’d. ... While sulphurous sparks of fire whirl’d o’er my head. Come to thy task! It cried; thy work awaits thee! (V, 91-98)

Again, though, Burney chooses not to enact but to envisage the ghastly scene. Burning sulphur, filling the auditorium with pungent smoke, was a well-established stage device in Gothic drama. In Hubert De Vere, however, the ‘sparks of fire’ are confined to the heroine’s speech. The Siege of Pevensey, Burney’s third tragedy, is pitched at a lower level

of intensity than its predecessors, but it contains more of the Gothic staples than any of her other plays. There is a castle, not in ruins but under siege, equipped with the standard devices: guards, interlopers arriving in disguise, a secret passage (as in Edwy and Elgiva), a piercing

shriek echoing over the ramparts, and a nearby convent; the heroine, Adela, is threatened with a lifetime of ‘cloister’d solitude’ behind the convent walls (V, xu, 73). As in many other Gothic dramas too, comic relief is provided by an elderly retainer, Mowbray, who repeatedly attempts to restore order and decorum in situations fraught with tension. Again, however, having provided many of the Gothic ingredients, Burney withdraws from their full implementation. In Walpole’s novel, or in many of the Gothic plays that followed it, we would expect the hero to undergo arduous confinement before winning his beloved. In The Siege of Pevensey, Adela’s lover, De Belesme, calls aloud for such Gothic illtreatment —

XXXIV GENERAL INFRODUCTION O cast me in some dungeon of the foe, Consign me there to shackles, torture, Death, Or, worse than all, endless imprisonment, — (III, 11, 22-24)

yet he remains a free man.

Unlike Edwy and Elgiva, Hubert De Vere, and Elberta, The Siege of Pevensey has a comic resolution. The warring forces, with hero and heroine on opposite sides, are reconciled, and Adela overcomes her father’s objections to the marriage. The play concludes with Chester's blessing the lovers: And here, for once, let Earth behold the junction

Of Happiness with Virtue! (V, xvi, 6-7) Not surprisingly Alexandre d’Arblay, accustomed to the pure form of neoclassical French tragedy, was bewildered by this reversal, and declared in a note on the manuscript: ‘Il me semble qu’on ne peut appeler tragedie une Piece dans la quelle il n’y a pas une goutte de sang versée’.* Gothic drama, however, is itself an impure form, and Gothic elements can exist

in plays of various kinds: musical drama, comedies and melodrama, as well as tragedies. When Burney began writing Elberta in June 1791, she described it as a work of ‘deepest Tragedy , in contrast to The Siege of Pevensey which ‘was

not dismal enough’.” Like her predecessors Elgiva, Cerulia and Adela, Elberta undergoes physical confinement. At the opening of the play she ts imprisoned in her own castle, held captive by Offa who has slain her father. Despite Offa’s plans to transfer Elberta from one sequestration to another, making her ‘Prisoner of State’ held by Ceolric ‘in the ‘Tower he Governs’ (I, viii, 25), she succeeds in escaping from the castle. Hiding in a cave, she and her two children face the prospect of starvation before they are recaptured. Her despairing husband Arnulph dies in a rash assault on enemy troops, but Elberta survives, and despite the references in fragment

265 to her apparent madness, supplicating shadows (see the headnote below, II, 232), the heroine is remarkable for her composure. Her final words, after the death of Arnulph, are: I’m wondrous glad he’s dead — for now I’m calm —

"Tis marvellous how I’m changed! I grieve at nothing. (V, xi, 17-18)

Burney may have considered making Elberta the ‘mad wanderer’ depicted by Margaret Anne Doody,‘ but in the text of the play itself she created a more resolute heroine, whose intense concern for her children’s welfare keeps her from the mental breakdown experienced by Elgiva and Cerulia, or by Cecilia, Camilla, and Elinor in Burney’s last three novels.

“ Note at the end of Act ITT of The Siege of Pevensey manuscript, Berg Collection. > Unpublished journal entry, Berg ms. 4327. © Doody, Frances Burney, p. 192

GENERAL INTRODUCTION XXXV The stage directions for Elberta, incomplete though they are, emphasize the massive physical presence of the castle held by Offa. Act IT opens at a ‘Parade before a Tower’ and continues at a ‘walk before the Great Gate

of the Castle’ (II, vi, 1 s.d.). Hud the play been brought to production in the 1790s or early 1800s, scene designers would have constructed elaborate

sets for the castle and for the cave in which Elberta finds shelter. In addition, as in her previous tragedies, Burney evokes Gothic terrors through her characters’ speeches. Arnulph envisages Elberta ‘dejected and forlorn’ in his absence: Thy pallid face will be my nightly spectre And shrieks of Woe, or famine, ~ strike my Ears

Midst shouting multitudes that call to Battle. (II, vin, 17-19)

Ceoiric, embittered against Arnulph who has betrayed his trust, likewise imagines fit punishments for his enemy, who ‘merits to be tortur’d on the Rack’ (IV, xvii, 1), in broken lines that Burney failed to bring to completion: Q I could see him toiling in the mines, Consuming midst Writhing with agony in

Thus to betray... (IV, xvi, 5-8)

And both Offa and Informo conjure up spectres. For Offa, ‘mean Superstition’ is to blame: It forms vagaries of imagined warnings, Sees supernatural sights ~ hears Screams i'th/air, Is visited by menace of illuck = (IIT, xi, 11-13)

While Offa, however, is able to ‘view with scorn’ the terrors he evokes, the guilt-ridden Informo is haunted by ghosts: When wearied Nature call’d for soft repose — And now ... to close my Eyes becomes a curse I shout — see horrid phantoms— (IV, x, 16-18)

It is characteristic of the flexibility of the Gothic that Burney would later

use the supernatural for comic purposes in Love and Fashion, where several characters are haunted by the ghost that proves to be merely a ‘layman’, a painter’s model. In exploiting Gothicism for dramatic purposes, Burney took advantage

of the instabilities of an essentially unstable form. In contrast to the vaguely defined medievalism characteristic of Gothic fiction and drama — Walpole’s preface to the first edition of The Castle of Otranto, for example, places the work in a 150-year span between 1095 and 1243 — Burney’s tragedies all contain or refer to actual historical personages and are set at a particular date. Burney had read Hume’s History of England (1754-62) in

her teens, and she was also familiar with the histories of England by

XXXVI GENERAL INTRODUCTION Smollett (1748), Rapin (1725-31), and Robert Henry (1771—93).* She read Henry’s History of Great Britain at Windsor Castle in June 1790, shortly before completing the first draft of Edwy and Elgiva and beginning work on the other tragedies, having expressly borrowed the Queen’s copy; in her diary she writes that she is ‘extremely satisfied with the plan upon which it is written’.”

Burney’s sources for Edwy and Elgiva are the accounts by Hume, Henry and others of the conflict in 956 between Edwy, King of the West

Saxons, and Dunstan, Abbott of Glastonbury, over the legality of his marriage to Elgiva. A reviewer of the stage production observed that ‘the Story in English history, from which this Tragedy 1s taken, is surely too affecting to be unknown to but few, if any of our readers; it 1s very closely followed, and in some instances very happily’.® In her article on the plays, Joyce Hemlow notes the ways in which Burney modifies her sources for

Edwy and Elgiva ‘in the interests of dramatic motivation, unity, and effect’. A scene in which Elgiva is branded in the face ‘with a red hot iron’

is omitted, and she is not ‘hamstringed’ before her death; such actions were too violent for the eighteenth-century stage. Aldhelm’s role as wise tutor to Edwy is Burney’s own device, and Dunstan plays a larger part in her play than in any of the histories, which give more weight to Archbishop Odo. In her other tragedies, Burney draws more lightly on source material. Hubert De Vere takes place during the reign of King John (1199-1216), after the signing of the treaty between John and King Philip of France in

1200. ‘The names Robert de Vere and William de Moubray appear in Hume's fistory as two of the ‘conservators’ rendered ‘co-ordinate with the king, or rather superior to him’ by the Magna Charta,° but Burney’s De Vere and De Mowbray play quite different roles in her tragedy. Glanville,

whom Geralda had been forced to marry in Burney’s play, is named in some accounts as John’s Chief Justiciary, but Geralda and Cerulia are entirely Burney’s invention. The unusual setting of Hubert De Vere in the Isle of Wight must have been inspired by John’s retirement there in 1215 after the signing of the Magna Charta. Hume writes eloquently of John’s

plotting on the island, where ‘he meditated the most fatal vengeance against all his enemies’ and ‘secretly sent abroad his emissaries’;' in his brooding and scheming he resembles Burney’s De Mowbray. the Siege of Pevensey takes place in 1088, during the reign of William

* See Hemlow, ‘Fanny Burney: Playwright’, p. 177.

® Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, ed. Austin Dobson (London: Macmillan, 1905), IV, 408. © The Review, 22 March 1795. ¢ Hemlow, ‘Fanny Burney: Playwright’, p. 177; David Hume, History of England, 1, 95. The stage direction ‘tottering’, however, at the head of Act V, scene iii, is perhaps an allusion to Elgiva’s hamstringing. © Hume, History, I, 447.

' Hume, History, I, 448.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION XXXVI II. The siege itself is described in the various histories, and most of the characters in Burney’s play are historical personages — with the major exception of the heroine Adela. Thus every event in The Siege of Pevensey that concerns the heroine is Burney’s invention; only the framework of the play, not its substance, is historical. In Elberta, none of the stage characters has a historical counterpart. Like the other tragedies, however, it is set

at a specific time: in 1071, the year in which the Saxon Edgar Atheling finally submitted to William the Conqueror. Burney’s heroine, married to the Norman leader Arnulph, 1s said to be the daughter of Edgar Atheling’s second-in-command, Ethelbert. ‘The events of the play have no specific

historical source, although the account in Hume’s History of William’s ‘rigour against the inferior malcontents’, contrasting with his ‘acts of generosity towards the leaders’,* might have attracted Burney’s attention. In creating her heterogeneous tragedies, with their strange mixture of the other-worldly Gothic, the precisely historical, and even, in the case of The Siege of Pevensey, a comic resolution, Burney was writing as a Romantic dramatist, in tune with the changing climate of the 1790s. Barry Sutcliffe remarks that Colman the Younger and Thomas Morton, Burney’s near contemporaries, could create ‘within a single play a psychologically volatile blend of tragedy and comedy structured not to focus attention on a moral truth but to create a theatrical switchback nde of thrilling dips and

peaks’;” his account throws light on Burney’s tragedies too. Eschewing both neoclassical tragedy and high Gothic, Burney instead experimented with hybrid forms. And in returning repeatedly to the never completed

Elberta, as well as to her other tragic plays, she indicated both her dissatisfaction with these awkward, fractured works and their continuing significance in her creative life.

Vv

In January 1773, five years before Burney began writing The Witlings, Oliver Goldsmith published his famous ‘Essay on the Theatre’, subtitled ‘A Comparison Between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy’. Goldsmith’s ostensible purpose here 1s to attack a ‘new species of Dramatic Composition’ by the name of ‘Sentzmental Comedy, in which the virtues

of Private Life are exhibited, rather than the Vices exposed; and the Distresses, rather than the Faults of Mankind, make our interest in the piece’.© Goldsmith wrote the essay, however, as a puff for his own ‘laughing comedy’ She Stoops to Conquer, which opened two months later, * Hume, History, I, 210. > Sutcliffe, ed., Plays by George Colman the Younger and Thomas Morton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 11. © Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), III, 212.

XXXVI GENERAL INTRODUCTION and as Robert Hume contends, the distinction he makes is an artificial one: ‘the laughing-sentimental terminology which we have inherited ts an unsatisfactory way of characterizing the plays of the time’.* Few of Burney’s contemporaries wrote purely ‘sentimental’ or purely ‘laughing’ plays. Georgian comedies, including She Stoops to Conquer itself, were typically hybrids, designed both to cultivate their audience’s feelings and to make them laugh.

As Burney began work on The Witlings, she received contradictory advice from friends such as Hester Thrale and Samuel Crisp on how best to compose a successful comedy. In September 1778, Burney recorded ‘such a Conversation’, in which Thrale told her that a play ‘is the Road both to Honour & Profit’. Burney, continued Thrale, had ‘the right & true talents for writing a Comedy, — you would give us all the fun & humour we

could wish, & you would give us a scene or 2 of the pathetic kind that would set all the rest off’.> For Crisp, however, the task was not so simple. In a typically pedantic letter of December 1778, he warned Burney against the ‘very fine-Spun, all-delicate, Sentimental Comedies . . . brought forth, on the English, & more particularly on the French Stage’, which “are such

sick things so Void Of blood & Spirits! that they may well be call’d Comedies Larmoyantes!. Nonetheless, Crisp wanted Burney, for the sake of decorum, to avoid ‘lively Freedoms’: ‘it appears to me extremely difficult, throughout a whole spirited Comedy, to steer clear of those agreeable, frolicksome jeux d’Espnrit, on the one hand; and languor & heaviness on the other’.“ While Crisp wanted Burney to write a ‘laughing comedy’

and Thrale hoped for humour leavened with pathos, Burney’s sister Susanna, who heard The Witlings read at Chessington by Dr Burney, admired the play for its sentimentality: ‘the Serious part seem’d even to improve upon me by this 2d hearing, & made me for to cry in 2 or 3 places — I wish there was more of this Sort — so does my Father’.* The ‘Serious part’ of The Witlings that Susanna Burney enjoyed most is

also the aspect of the play least congental to modern readers. Burney’s satire of pretentious witlings, male and female, still seems fresh today: the

would-be poet Dabler, the pedantic Old Codger, the self-proclaimed arbiter of taste Lady Smatter, and the sententious Mrs Sapient are among her best comic creations. But the laboured romance between Cecilia and Beaufort holds less appeal; the sentiments that made Susanna Burney cry

are more likely to make us queasy. It is to Burney’s credit that she anticipates such a reaction within the play itself, making fun of her young lovers’ declamations as fast as they are declaimed. Thus in the final act the

impoverished Cecilia declares portentously, ‘sooner will I famish with want, or perish with Cold, — faint with the fatigue of labour, or consume “ Hume, The Rakish Stage: Studies in English Drama, 1660-1800 (Carbondale: Southern: Illinois University Press, 1983), p. 214. > Letter to Susanna Burney, 3 September 1778; Early Journals, III, 133. © Crisp to Burney, 8 December 1778; Early Journals, III, 187-89. ¢ Letter to Burney, 30 July 1779; quoted in Doody, Frances Burney, p. 92.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION XXX1X with unassisted Sickness, than appropriate to my own use the smallest part

of my shattered Fortune, till your — and every other claim upon it ts answered’ (V, 153-6). Her debtor, Mrs Wheedle, replies ‘Well, ma’am, that’s as much as one can expect’ (V, 157), turning the heroine’s flights of fancy into a precise financial settlement. Similarly, in response to Cecilia’s rhetorical question, ‘is, then, reason another word for baseness, falsehood

and Inconstancy?’, Mrs Wheedle returns to the matter at hand: ‘I only wish my money was once safe in my Pocket’ (V, 198-200). Scenes of ‘the pathetic kind’ play a larger part in Love and Fashion than in The Witlngs, but here too Burney keeps them in check. In the critical

fifth-act confrontation between the sentimental hero Valentine and the worldly heroine Hilaria, he admonishes her for wishing ‘to unite Love with Fashion’, a union that he pronounces impracticable: “The happiness

of true Love is domestic life: the very existence of Fashion 1s public admiration’ (V, 1, 83, 87-9). But the play itself proves him wrong; Hilaria

receives, just as she desired, jewels from Lord Ardville for the sake of fashion and the hand of Valentine for the sake of love. ‘Thomas Harris, the Covent Garden manager, who was obviously in touch with the taste of the times, delighted in the high-spirited Hilaria, but he seems to have prized

the play’s sentimentality too. His remark that ‘Mordaunt’s sensibility comes on too suddenly” suggests that he wanted Burney to write a less perfunctory, more lachrymose conversion scene for Valentine’s scapegrace brother. Among the criteria proposed by Frank Ellis for recognizing sentimental attitudes in comedy is ‘overawed respect’ towards a father, of the kind displayed by Belfond Jr in Shadwell’s The Squire of Alsatia (1688): ‘T beg your consent [to marry Isabella], for I will die before I Marry without it’. In The Woman-Hater, Joyce displays just such reverence towards her father in his presence. His ‘Poor fearful Girl! thy timidity subdues thy faculties!’ (II, 1, 28) seems an accurate characterization, until she bursts into life as soon as he leaves the room. Another young woman, Sophia, displays similarly pious feelings towards Old Waverley, whom she muistakes for her uncle, while he 1n turn mistakes her for a prostitute: SopuHra. Awaken not again the fears with which I first addressed you! OLp WaveERLEY (aside). O, she feared me, did she? I suppose she took me for the Justice!

Sopura. But which your gentleness has removed; for your goodness now opens to me such a support — O_p WaveERLEY (aside), A support? Bless my heart! — She thinks to take me.in to maintain her! I’d best be off. Good by to you, ma’am.

(IH, v, 59-65)

* Charles Burney to Frances Burney, 30 October 1799; Berg Collection scrapbook, ‘Fanny Burney and family. 1653-1890’.

» Ellis, Sentimental Comedy: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 12.

xl GENERAL INTRODUCTION What could have been high sentimentality instead comes close to those ‘lively freedoms’ feared by Samuel Crisp.

Significantly, Burney seems to have shown neither of her two final, boldest comedies to her father or to other family members. Dr Burney could hardly have condoned the depiction of Old Waverley, lusting after the girlish Sophia and hoping to pay off her mother as a procuress, or of Joyce, with her Romantic, quasi-revolutionary declarations of independence: ‘I’m all for Liberty! — Liberty, Liberty, Bob!’ (IV, vu, 28-9). And A Busy Day goes still further. Eliza Watts 1s all too ready to adopt the role

of doting daughter, restored to her parents after spending many years in India, but they fail to rise to the occasion: Exviza. Is that my Mother? — my dear Mother! —

Runs to Mrs. Warts with open arms. Mrs. Watts. Take care, my dear, take a little care, or you'll squeeze my poor new Handkerchief till 1t won’t be fit to be seen. And it cost me sich a

sight of money — (I, 393-6)°

A Busy Day 1s also subversive, at least in Dr Burney’s terms, 1n tts attitudes to race and class. Eliza’s black servant Mungo 1s one of the most effective characters never to appear on stage, provoking Deborah’s unconsciously significant comment: these Gentlemen mean no harm, I dare say; for after all, a Black’s but a Black; and let him hurt himself never so much, it won’t shew. It in't like hurting us whites, with our fine skins, all over alabaster. (1, 39-42)

The ‘gentlemen’ whose racial preyudice Deborah shares are waiters at the ‘notorious Gaming house’ in which Eliza accidentally finds herself. In A Busy Day Burney is concerned first to accentuate and then to break down class distinctions; here waiters behave like gentlemen and gentlemen like waiters. The play ends with Cleveland’s panegyric on City merchants such as the Wattses, ‘natives of that noble Metropolis, which 1s the source of our Splendour, the Seat of integrity, the foster-Mother of Benevolence and Charity, and the pride of the British Empire’ (V, 908-11). But Cleveland, like so many of Burney’s pallid young heroes, 1s hardly a reliable guide. The

Watts family, far from displaying integrity, benevolence, or charity, display the same affectations and prejudices as their social superiors. Perhaps the most telling scene in A Busy Day is that in which the lowly Joel Tibbs apes the expressions of Lord John Dervis, muttering “O the doose, and the devil, and the plague and consumed!’ to Lady Wilhelmina Tylney before throwing himself ‘full length upon the sofa’ (V, 682-3, 694). By the end of A Busy Day, trade and family, merchants and aristocrats, have come to form a common front. Lady Wilhelmina, with her horror of the impending marriage between Cleveland and Eliza, 1s a lonely dissenting voice.

* Doody notes that when ‘Eliza discovers her natural family, she discovers alienation . . . the reunion is entirely anticlimactic’ (Frances Burney, p. 296).

GENERAL INTRODUCTION xli Jeremy Brien’s contention that Burney’s ‘true metier was the stage” is doubtless a reviewer's hyperbole. But the more commonly held position, that Burney’s dramas form a negligible part of her writings, is surely due for reassessment. For too long Burney was regarded primarily as a journal and letter writer, who succeeded as a novelist with Evelina but whose later novels were best left unread. These novels — Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer — have all now found sympathetic critics, and in the wake of the Show of Strength production of A Busy Day, Burney’s plays are likely to find such readers too. Burney wrote twice as many dramas as novels, and although her plays gained her neither fame nor financial reward she was,

as she insisted, one whose ‘Muse loves a little variety: a pamphleteer, memoirist, journal and letter writer, novelist, and dramatist.

* Brien, The Stage, 11 November 1993. > Letter to Dr Burney, 10 February 1800; Journals and Letters, IV, 395.

TEXTUAL INTRODUCTION In an influential essay on the text of Tom Stoppard’s Night and Day (1978), Philip Gaskell points out that play texts typically go through three stages: There is first the script, the written version of what was originally intended to be said. Second, there is the performance text, what is actually said in one

or more performances. And third, there is the reading text, the version subsequently published by the author as a record of what might or should have been said.*

Recent editors of late eighteenth-century plays, mindful of Gaskell’s observation, have considered three potential sources of copy-text for their editions: the script, if it survives, as ‘what was originally intended to be said’; the Larpent manuscript,” as the closest approximation to the performance text, what was ‘actually said’; and the printed edition or editions overseen by the author, as the ‘record of what might or should have been said’.

In the case of Frances Burney’s plays, however, two of the three sources for copy-texts listed by Gaskell are in most instances unavailable. Since none of her plays was published in her lifetime, there is no question of using printed sources; far from overseeing publication of her plays, she seems never even to have approached a publisher about their possible appearance in book form. For Edwy and Elgiva, the only one of Burney’s

plays to be produced in her lifetime, a performance text of the 1795 production survives. And for A Busy Day, which received its belated premiere in 1993, there is likewise an acting text available: the version prepared by Alan Coveney for the Show of Strength production.© Apart from these two special cases, to which I shall return, the only available

sources for an edition of Burney’s plays are her own scripts. Jerome McGann’s remark that ‘literary works are fundamentally social rather than personal or psychological products” has not hitherto been true of Burney’s

plays, which having, with the exception of A Busy Day and Edwy and * Gaskell, ‘Night and Day: The Development of a Play Text’, in Textual Critecism and Literary Interpretation, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 162. > For more on the Larpent Collection of plays in the Huntington Library, see the headnote to Edwy and Elgiva below, II, 5. ° See the headnote to A Busy Day below, I, 291.

“McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Critictsm (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 43-44.

TEXTUAL INTRODUCTION xii Elgiva, been seen by none and read by few are fundamentally personal and psychological rather than social products. For five of the plays in this edition — The Witlings, Love and Fashion,

and A Busy Day among the comedies, and The Siege of Pevensey and Elberta among the tragedies — only a single manuscript has survived. Four

of these manuscripts are in Burney’s hand; that of A Busy Day is in the hand of Burney’s husband, Alexandre d’Arblay.* A collection of over four hundred fragments in the Berg Collection, “Miscellaneous Pieces of manuscript, 1772-1828’, contains various draft scraps related to some of these plays. Also in the Berg Collection are thirty pages of preliminary material

for Love and Fashion and one hundred pages of notes related to The Woman-Hater and to Burney’s other comedies. The copy-texts for these five plays, however, are necessarily the single surviving manuscripts. Although a case could be made for using the Show of Strength performance text for A Busy Day, on the grounds that this represents the play as it has finally reached a theatre audience, the fact that Burney had nothing to do with this version is a compelling reason for choosing the manuscript, as I have done in this edition. For three of the plays — Edwy and Elgiva, Hubert De Vere, and The Woman-Hater — two complete manuscripts survive, and in the case of

Edwy and Elgiva there is also a Larpent manuscript, in the hand of a professional copyist employed by the Drury Lane company. The relation-

ship among the three Edwy and Elgiva manuscripts is described in the headnote to that play. Burney’s holograph 1s used as the copy-text for this edition, since that was the version of the play that she continued to revise after its production in 1795. The manuscript in d’Arblay’s hand contains his textual revisions, which I have discussed elsewhere.” Although this is

the text printed by Miriam J. Benkovitz in her edition of Edwy and Elgiva,* it has less authority than either Burney’s holograph or the Larpent manuscript. The Larpent manuscript, as the ‘social’ form of the play, has claims of its own to be considered as copy-text. The stage directions in this

version, however, are briefer than those in the holograph, which also contains many additions and alterations developing the text beyond its state in the Larpent version. Moreover, since most of the cast was ‘cruelly imperfect’, the Larpent manuscript is by no means an accurate record of ‘what was actually said’ in the single stage performance of 1795.

There are two surviving holographs for both The Woman-Hater and Hubert De Vere. YVhe copy-text used by Geoffrey Sill in editing The

* The manuscript of The Triumphant Toadeater is in the hand of Burney’s brother-in-law, Ralph Broome, and is presumably by him or by his wife Charlotte, although Burney may have had a part in its composition; see the headnote below, II, 311. > See my article ‘“Altered, improved, copied, abridged”: Alexandre d’Arblay’s Revisions to Edwy and Elg:va’, Lumen, 14 (1995), forthcoming. ° See Edwy and Elgiva, ed. Benkovitz (Hamden, Connecticut: Shoe String, 1957). 4 Letter from Burney to Georgiana Waddington, 15 April 1795; Journals and Letters, III, 99.

xliv TEXTUAL INTRODUCTION Woman-Hater is the fair copy, which is much the more legible of the two and which represents a more developed form of the play. In the case of

Hubert De Vere, edited by Stewart Cooke, choosing between the two holographs is more problematic. The two versions differ considerably, and each contains numerous revisions. The first is presented as a closet drama, a “Tale in Dialogue’ or a ‘Dramatic Tale’ rather than an acting text,

and divided into parts rather than acts. The second, much more legible manuscript is used here as copy-text primarily on pragmatic grounds; the chaotic state of the first manuscript makes it an unviable source. Neither version is a fair copy; if such a copy was ever made, it has not survived. Although Elberta, also edited by Stewart Cooke, survives in only one manuscript, it too presents considerable editorial problems. There are, as

the headnote to this play indicates, over three hundred autograph fragments labelled Elberta in the Berg Collection, but their numbering 1s clearly out of order and some of the scraps are not related to Elberta at all. In this edition, a consecutive text for the play has been presented for the first time from the surviving verse fragments. Burney’s prose commentary on the play, consisting of summaries of scenes, suggestions for plot de-

velopment, etc., 1s given in the form of textual notes. Fragments that cannot be placed in the reconstructed text are printed as an appendix. For the other plays in this edition, textual notes record the alterations made by Burney 1n the various copy-texts. The text printed here repre-

sents, in each case, the revised version of the copy-text. The earlier readings of that text are recorded in the textual notes; thus whenever a word or passage is deleted, added, or revised, the original reading will be found at the foot of the page. Although many of these passages have been

heavily obliterated, in most cases it has been possible to recover the deleted material. Conjectural readings are placed in angled brackets. When Burney, through the use of symbols or square brackets, marked passages for possible deletion without actually cancelling them, these passages have been retained 1n the text with an accompanying textual note.

Mere corrections of slips of hand have not been recorded: thus when Burney or d’Arblay begin a word, delete it, and then write the word again, no textual note 1s provided. None of the plays in this edition is presented as an eclectic text. Burney

worked on the manuscripts of her plays at different times; to conflate passages from different manuscripts would create a hybrid with neither authorial nor social authority. No attempt can be made to reproduce Burney’s ‘final intentions’ for her plays, since in no case did her manuscripts reach a final form. Those plays such as The Witlings, Love and Fashion, and The Siege of Pevensey which survive in single fair copies were nonetheless

written with stage production in mind, and would doubtless have been considerably altered in the light of the theatrical response. Conversely, Edwy and Elgiva, much altered after its production, received no further performances which would in turn have led to further changes in the text.

This edition presents the plays in their most developed forms, while recognizing that Burney brought none of her plays to a state of completion.

TEXTUAL INTRODUCTION xlv In general, a minimal number of changes has been made to the spelling, punctuation, and capitalization of the manuscripts. Burney’s act and scene

divisions have been respected, although these differ greatly among the different texts; some of the plays have acts unbroken by scene divisions, while others have over twenty scenes 1n an act, in some cases with a single

speech divided between two scenes. Eighteenth-century or merely idiosyncratic spellings have been retained, as have different spellings of the same word, such as ‘Piccadilly’, spelled in three different ways in A Busy Day. We have, however, regularized the spellings of characters in the plays and corrected any obvious errors, recording the original manuscript reading 1n a textual note. Certain changes, similarly, have been made to punctuation and capitalization. Periods missing from the ends of sentences have been inserted, and

lower-case letters used to begin a sentence after a period have been changed to upper case. Dashes of different lengths have been regularized to the same length, and raised letters, used for abbreviations such as Mr., have been dropped. Other kinds of abbreviations have been written out in full: thus numerals are changed to words, the ampersand to ‘and’, etc. Running quotation marks have been replaced by quotation marks at the beginning and end of the passage in question. Catch-words, ornamental letters, different sizes of capitals, and other such features of the manuscript have not been reproduced. Lines within each scene have, for ease of reference, been numbered throughout. As is customary in editing plays from manuscript, more changes have been made to the presentation of stage directions than to the dialogue. Names of speakers preceding dialogue and within stage directions have

been capitalized throughout, and the directions have been printed in italics. In the manuscripts, the direction ‘aszde’ is often written after the passage to which it applies; in this edition it 1s printed before the passage, making it clear to readers that an aside has begun. It has not been found

necessary to add directions indicating that an aside has given way to regular dialogue.

In editing the plays for this edition, our intention has been to respect the form of Burney’s manuscripts while also providing a clear reading or acting text. To his description of literary works as fundamentally social products, Jerome McGann adds that ‘they do not even acquire an artistic form of being until their engagement with an audience has been determined’.* Such engagement is now possible, in the form of both private

readings and public performances of these hitherto little-known and undervalued texts. After two centuries, Burney’s plays have acquired their artistic form of being at last.

* McGann, A Critique, p. 49.

FRANCES BURNEY: A CHRONOLOGY 1752 Born in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, 13 June. 1760 Family moves to Poland Street, London. 1762 Death of mother, Esther Sleepe Burney (27 Sep.).

1767 Destroys juvenilia, including diaries, poetry, plays, and novel, “The History of Caroline Evelyn’, in bonfire on birthday (13 June). Father, Dr Charles Burney, marries Elizabeth Allen (2 Oct.). 1768 Begins new journal (27 March). 1770 Refuses to play the ‘quite shocking’ part of T'ag in family performance of Garrick’s farce Miss in her Teens (Feb.).

1771 Plays Lady Easy and Lady Graveairs in family performance of scenes from Colley Cibber’s comedy The Careless Husband (30 June). Plays Lady Truman in family performance of Addison’s comedy Zhe Drummer (29 Sep.).

1774 Family moves to Newton’s former house, St Martin’s Street, Leicester Square.

1777 Plays Mrs Lovemore in elaborate family performance of Arthur Murphy’s The Way to Keep Him, including an additional scene probably written by herself. On the same night plays Huncamunca in Fielding’s Tom Thumb (7 April). 1778 First novel, Evelina; or, A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, published (29 Jan.). Begins writing her first play, The Witlings.

1779 Completes first draft of The Withngs (4 May), encouraged by dramatists Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Arthur Murphy, as well as by Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, and Hester Thrale. After

reading a revised draft of the play on 2 August, her father and family friend Samuel Crisp urge her to suppress the play, for fear of offending the London bluestockings. 1780 Revises act IV of The Withings, with a view to showing the whole play to Sheridan (Jan.). Plans further revisions, but is persuaded by Dr Burney and Crisp to abandon the play. 1782 Second novel, Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Hetress, published (12 July). 1786 Begins five years of service at court, as Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte (17 July).

1788 Begins writing her first tragedy, Edwy and Elgiva (Oct.) during period of madness of King George III. 1790 Returns to kKdwy and Elgiva (4 April); completes first draft (August). Begins writing Hubert De Vere (August) and The Stege of Pevensey. xlvi

CHRONOLOGY xlvii 1791 Completes first draft of Hubert De Vere, begins writing Elberta (June). [ll health impels her to leave service of Queen (7 July); granted annual pension of 100 pounds. 1793 Meets Alexandre d’Arblay, exiled Adjutant-General of the Marquis de Lafayette (Jan.); secret courtship; marriage (28 July). Hubert

De Vere accepted by Kemble for production at Drury Lane (5 July); later withdrawn in favour of Edwy and Elgiva. Pamphlet, Brief Reflections Relative to the Emigrant French Clergy (Nov.); proceeds to charity.

1794 Revised version of Edwy and Elgiva accepted by Kemble and Sheridan for production at Drury Lane (Dec.). Birth of son, her only child, Alexander (18 Dec.).

1795 Edwy and Elgiva produced at Drury Lane, starring John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons, with prologue by brother Charles; withdrawn after one performance (21 March). Further revised by both Burney and d’Arblay (May-June). 1796 Third novel, Camilla, or, A Picture of Youth, published (12 July). Death of stepmother (20 Oct.). 1797 Begins revising Hubert De Vere as a closet drama. 1798 Writes second comedy, Love and Fashion, May have contributed

to a farce, The Triumphant Toadeater, by her brother-in-law, Ralph Broome.

1799 Love and Fashion accepted for March 1800 production at Covent Garden by Thomas Harris (30 Oct.). 1800 Death of sister Susanna (6 Jan.) causes Burney to withdraw Love and Fashion from production (Feb.). Probably begins writing The Woman-Hater and A Busy Day. 1802 Probably completes The Woman-Hater, tended for Drury Lane, and A Busy Day, intended for Covent Garden; neither produced. Burney and son follow General d’Arblay to France (April). 1811 Undergoes mastectomy for breast cancer, without anaesthetic, at home in Paris (30 Sep.). 1812 Returns to England with son. 1814 Fourth novel, The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties, published

(28 March). Death of father (12 April). Works on unfinished tragedy, Elberta. Returns to France, leaving son at Cambridge. 1815 Moves to Belgium while d’Arblay fights in army opposing Napoleon; returns to England with husband (Oct.). 1817 Death of favourite brother, Charles (23 Dec.). 1818 Death of General d’Arblay (3 May) at home in Bath. 1819 Son Alexander ordained priest in Church of England (11 April). 1832 Memoirs of Doctor Burney published (Nov.). c. 1836 Times readings of Hubert De Vere, The Siege of Pevensey, and Love and Fashion. [837 Death of Alexander (19 Jan.). 1840 Dies in London (6 Jan.), aged 87; buried in Wolcot Churchyard, Bath, beside husband and son.

xl viii CHRONOLOGY 1842-46 Nhiece Charlotte Barrett edits Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay (7 vols.).

1889 The Early Diary of Frances Burney 1768-1778, ed. Annie Raine Ellis (2 vols.).

1957 Edwy and Elgiva, ed. Miriam J. Benkovitz. 1972-84 The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d'Arblay) 1791-1840, ed. Joyce Hemlow et al. (12 vols.). 1984 A Busy Day, ed. Tara Ghoshal Wallace. 1988— The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Lars E. Troide et al. (12 vols. in progress). 1993. A Busy Day successfully produced by the Show of Strength company at Hen and Chicken Theatre, Bedminster, Bristol (29 Sep.— 23 Oct.). 1994 Show of Strength production of A Busy Day successfully revived at King’s Head Theatre, London (29 June—30 July).

The Witlings A Comedy

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And view the opening smile of dawning memory 35 That cries Ah! is it you, my mother? The soft entwining of their little arms Th’unutterable enchantment of their smiles —

Ixui30 Aric: ef. Act III, Scene i, where he is called Edwin. |

I xu 20-27 O leave ... little moment: from El. 8. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions. Ixn 30 /tttle: an insertion, replacing an illegible word. { xii 33 1m sweet: an insertion, replacing ‘their soft’. I xu 35 And vtew: “To see’ is given as an alternative. I xn 35 memory: three lines are deleted: That conscious recollects the early kindness That cries Ah! is it you, my Mother? Which first

I xii 27-38 Think of the danger ... their smiles: from El. 32. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions.

Act I ELBERTA 251 Scene x11 ELBERTA, ARNULPH.

Enter OFFA. ELBERTA. All that is female in me now of fears

Confusion, terror, and timidity I banish, to give place to firmer virtues. Slander calls forth a courage new to me,

A vigour that disdains to shield itself 5

Beneath the battery of a trembling nerve Seasons make all and calumny endur’d 1s deserv'd: Our sexe’s modesty becomes a traitor To honour, liberal worth, and noble feelings

Where it will sink us ’neath the sable shelf 10 That robs us of good Name Far from the praise retir'd of female modesty Be the mute silence that submits to slander Her fair unspotted chastity of fame.

Scene xi: El. 58 summarizes Scene xt as ‘Surprises them. Rage. Accuses Elberta of treason’. El. 9 provides a longer summary: Offa enters unexpectedly; starts — they are confounded. He challenges their business together.' He challenges their former acquaintance.” Arnulph says he may find a time to right a lady: she is silent.? Arnulph breaks forth in her defence: Offa says she is leagued with Malcolm to place Edgar Atheling on the throne,‘ and furious accuses her of treason. Arnulph fires.* Elberta takes courage, comes forth, and spiritedly defends herself .° El. 31 states more briefly: Arnulph boldly claims his wife supported by When she is arrested for treason — and he is sent to the army on a Commission. The dialogue is from El. 31. ' an illegible word and ‘villain’ are deleted. * an illegible word and ‘villain’ are deleted. * an insertion, replacing two illegible words. * ‘Offa says ... throne’ is an insertion, replacing ‘Offa, furious, says he will take his’ and an illegible word. > two illegible words are deleted. © ‘Her Father died in a loyal cause, and blessed his Exit so dying to’ is deleted.

252 ELBERTA Act I Scene Xiv

ELBERTA, ARNULPH, OFFA.

Enter SAXRED.

Scene xv ARNULPH, OFFA (manent).

ARNULPH. The Peace Orra. And now, sir, what were your commands with me? Summons each Chieftain to renew his Homage.

Scene xiv: there is no dialogue for Scene xiv. El. 58 summarizes it as ‘He confirms Treason, affirms Proofs. She retires indigna’. El. 39 provides a longer summary:

Offa enquires after suspicious papers. He avers that Informo picked them from the ground, falling from the robe of Elberta as she descended to walk. Fully containing proofs | of a league for Edgar Atheling promised by her late Father, and to be executed by her and

her friends. She exclaims — but refuses personal altercation, proudly, with such an antagonist, and committing her Cause to Arnulph and Truth, retires accompanied by Saxred.

' ‘accompanied by Saxred’ is an insertion, replacing ‘[an illegible word] Saxred [an illegible word]’. Several lines are then deleted: Arnulph haughtily tells Offa he may refer the matter to the King at Winchester! whither he has in order to command him on his fealty to pay new Homage and swear the succession to young Henry Plantagenet of Anjou.” The incensed Offa orders him back to answer as an accomplice, under arrest. Forced to withdraw, he assures Elberta of his protection. ' probably still the second largest city in England at the time and the seat of the treasury. According to Hume, Winchester was William’s ‘usual place of ... residence’ (History of England, 1, 222). 2 Matilda’s son; later Henry II (1154-89). Scene xv: El, 58 summarizes Scene xv as ‘Arnulph orders him to the King, menaces, and away’. El. 13 provides a longer summary: Arnulph haughtily tells Offa he may refer the affair to the King, from whom he has it in charge to command him instantly to Winchester at a grand meeting of Peers and Chiefs

upon the Peace with Scotland.’ Then bids him on his peril offer insult or affright,

meantime, to Elberta,* whom he shall return with higher authority to reclaim. ' ‘at a grand ... Scotland’ is an insertion, replacing ‘to renew his Homage, and swear allegiance to the young Henry of Anjou’. 2 ‘and away’ is deleted.

Ixvils.d. Arnuzpy, Orra: ‘SAxRED’ is deleted. Ixv 2 Peace: an insertion, replacing ‘amnesty’.

I xv 1 s.d.-3 Arnuzpux ... Homage: from El. 12. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions.

I xv 3 Homage: two lines are deleted: And swear allegiance to the appointed Heir Young Henry Plantagenet of Anjou.

Act I ELBERTA 253 OrFa. I will appeal — present your condemnation —

ARNULPH. Make your appeal. Mine also will be heard. 5 An Englishman shall never brook injustice — His spirit rises from th’oppressor’s rod And even when most he’s curbed and vex’d and chaf’d Like the fleet Courser who disdains controul

While, with fervent zeal, he burns to serve 10 The Monarch — patron of his rights, not spoiler, Something still whispers to his honest Heart Allegiance must be pair’d with Liberty.

scene Xv OFFA solo.

Orra. This fellow who, on chance alone of recompense Could burst the bond of trust — Ixv9 Courser: large, powerful horse. Burney uses the word anachronistically in the sense of a swift horse or racer, a meaning first current in the seventeenth century. I xv 10 While: before ‘While’, ‘Ev’n’ is deleted. [xv 10 fervent: an insertion, replacing ‘honest’. I xv 13 pazr’d with: ‘fed by’ is given as an alternative.

I xv 3-13 I will appeal ... Liberty: from El. 40. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions. Scene xvi: El. 58 summarizes Scene xvi as ‘Resolves all perjuries, and to commit Elberta to Ceolric’s Tower’. El. 41 provides a long summary: Rage and despair about Arnulph’s pretensions determined to carry all sooner than permit a marriage that demands [an illegible word] restitution. Civil War, misery to all from its vicissitudes! Even to those who have nothing precious to lose.

Forced to go, durst not leave Elberta lest Arnulph attempt her release: with this spy resolves to formally make her over to Ceolric, for his strong Tower, who, believing the tale or not, must equally guard her for further’ orders.

Then, accompanied by Saxred and Informo, to fly and lay the treason before the Conqueror,’ and get her confined for life, and his succession secured. And, meanwhile, harrassed with his casket, to deliver it also to the keeping of Ceolric, whom, though he hates, he knows to be one who durst not be dishonest. Whatever be the wishes of Ceolric, perchance, once in his Tower, she is a Prisoner of State, and cannot be removed but by order, under penalty of Treason. Sure of some Spy ~ Distrusts every one — Horrible state! The dialogue is from El. 35. El. 258, which is marked ‘if wanted for 2d. act’, dramatizes the transfer of the casket to Coelric: OFra, CEOLRIC.

Orra. Take this Casket Of value singular — pledge me thy oath To guard it safe — ' an insertion, replacing ‘her’. * an insertion, replacing ‘Stephen’.

254 ELBERTA Act I May surely be persuaded I dare not disappoint the treacherous wretch Lest he in vengeance If I trust Saxred

Some demon may seduce him to purloin 5

No, Ceolric’s the man His conscience is unhardened. He will not dare The smallest deviation from strict rule Would startle him in dreams — "Tis Ceolric

That will believe the matter to be true — 10 Why doubt? There’s proof. "Tis fortunate he’s here.

ACT Il Scene 1

CEOLRIC.

A Parade before a Tower.

Creouric. She false? She trait’rous? She immersed in Plots? I will believe it when this good right hand Subscribe me her accomplice. Times are bad, And Man 1s wicked: but so bad, so wicked

To give to deep hypocrisy and feint 5

The semblance of such virgin innocence. — -Mysanthropy itself Nature and Instinct govern Man within —

Without ... the motley habit which he wears |

Is not more artificial than his conduct — 10

Scene 1: El. 66, which provides a synopsis of each scene of Act II, describes Scene 1 as: ‘Resolves to protect Elberta’. El. 74 reads: ‘Disbelieves the assertions of Elberta’s guilt, yet rejoices he has her in custody, that he may soften her confinement till an explanation brings enlargement’.

Iliils.d.—7 Crozric. A Parade ... itself: from El. 75. Ili8-l0 Nature... conduct: from EI. 261.

Act II ELBERTA 255 Scene 11

CEOLRIC, SOLDIER.

scene i CEOLRIC, ARNULPH @s stranger.

ARNULPH. Five years since, When we were yet allies, not Enemies, I lov’d the beaut’ous princess — meant to claim her of Ethelbert Wilt thou not suffer me to once behold her?

Wilt thou not grant to a despairing Husband 5

One short, quick, fleeting moment of adieu? CEOLRIC. My life 1s in the charge.

ARNULPH. Mine, in thy will. CEOLRIc. How camst thou free? which way? by what permission? ARNULPH. The powerful Vortigern has broke the barriers —

Confusion in the army — loss — disorder 10 Have forced my stubborn Uncle to release me

II iti 9 Vortzgern: Hume writes that Vortigern, Prince of Dumnonium, persuaded the Britons to invite the Saxons to bolster their defence against invading Picts and Scots in 449 (History, I, 18). Burney may also have remembered William Henry Ireland’s forgery Vort:gern, alleged to be a newly discovered play by Shakespeare, which was performed at the Drury Lane theatre, 2 April 1796, and was published by Ireland’s father Samuel in 1799, Vortigern’s presence in this play is another of Burney’s anachronisms. Scene it: there 1s no dialogue for Scene ii. El. 66 summarizes Scene ii as ‘A stranger claims admittance’. Similarly, El. 76 says ‘A stranger desires admittance. Granted’. El. 77 adds ‘A man of mean array, but urgent speech claims instant parley’. Scene wit: El. 66 summarizes Scene 11 as ‘Begs interview with Elberta’. El. 78 provides a longer summary: Arnulph says the’ arts of Offa have prevailed for the present, tho’ truth must arise; and the

King resolves to keep her captive till the witnesses are heard: he himself is ordered instantly to join the army.* He conjures to see his wife first. Ceolric blames his hasty marriage. He relates meeting her and her Father in Exile, and there seeing her in simplicity of [an illegible word] united himself to her —- on her Father’s death, she came over and here, had?® lived retired five years, in disguise, — he visiting only by stealth and incognito. Fearing perjuries of Offa, durst not avow Children till her release and acquittal and dies to see before he goes.* Gives his word not to attempt her personal rescue; and is admitted. ' ‘valiant Envoy found his secret retreat from army’ is deleted. 2 an insertion, replacing ‘ordered to the continent, attending an Embassy — ’. > ‘meeting her ... over and here, had’ is an insertion, replacing ‘its [an illegible word] he took her prisoner after already loving her. Ceolric says he should have married her also so circumstanced. He married and they’. * ‘Envoy had aided his secret absence. He had confided in his friendship to the Father’s Memory’ is deleted.

lliils.d-li Ceorric, ARNuLPH... release me: from El. 88.

256 ELBERTA Act II To head once more his army to the West. No more against East Anglia will he trust me — The soldiers think me

The valiant Eric aided my empire, 15

And, thus disguis’d — hither I sped my way To beg one last dear word with my Elberta. Five years since —

| When first this arm knew victory - and routed

The forces of East Anglia — all combin'd 20 Beneath brave Ethelric, to call down vengeance On Mercia and on Offa for the slaughter Of Ethelbert — base and inglorious deed! —

"T'was then, an hapless fugitive, his Daughter

Whom all believed destroyed — the fair Elberta — 25 Ta’en by a common soldier, in her flight Unknown — all trembling — to my tent was brought —

Ah! when shall I forget With youthful terror — supplicating beauty —

Low at my feet she fell — I rais’'d — I knew her — 30

Quick re-assur’d her courage — pledg’d my Honour To guard her from her Father’s murderer — Offa, — And, ina lone, but [1 illegible word] village lodg’d her — There, all conceal’d, she dwelt — there, sacred bonds

Made her my own — there with two lovely Babes. 35 Ceovric. Is't possible — ARNULPH. Most true.

CEOLRIC. Two children.

ARNULPH. Ah hush! The sound alarms — O keep it sacred — Should the stern Offa learn

There breathes a little Heir to either Kingdom,

To Mercia — and East Anglia 40 How might my lonely Boy escape his rage? Who should secure his little Sister’s safety? O should he know the Grandson of that Ethelbert He slew in cold deliberate treachery ...

But Ethelric, brave General of East Anglia, 45

Advances fast —

{1 iti 12 once more: an insertion, replacing ‘the Kentish’. Il itt 12-26 To head ...in her flight: from El. 88 versa. II iti 27-35 Unknown ... lovely Babes: from El]. 91. II i136) =Arnuzen: “Two Child.’ is deleted. II iii 36-46 9=Cerozric. Is’t posstble ... Advances fast: from El. 79.

Act IT ELBERTA 257 Scene iv ELBERTA Sola.

Scene v ELBERTA, CEOLRIC, ARNULPH disguised.

ELBERTA. O Arnulph, my lov'd Arnulph Where are our Children? What may now betide them Who may receive their

Ceoctric. There, still unknown, thy Children might remain

Yet there I'll place the Babes — there see and kiss them — 5 All I could raise, or part with unsuspected Is gone this morning to their secret use. —

ELBERTA. No matter — save them but — and leave all else To better times — or worse!

CEOLRIC. Times I defy

When thou and they are safe. 10

Scene 1v: there 1s no dialogue for Scene iv. El. 66 provides a one-word summary, ‘Despondence’, while El. 80 adds ‘despondence — fears for Children’. Scene v: El. 66 provides a short summary of Scene v: ‘Plan protecting Babes by Ceolric’. El. 82 provides a lengthy summary: Elberta expresses her agony for her Children. Asks if no news of Wilfrid? Says he may go to castle and get no information, by Offa’s acts, of her confinement. Children must be at the Cottage on the Moor. Arnulph would go to Cottage: but duty and necessity! call him

back to his post.* She supplicates Ceolric to let them know her fate, and give them courage. He yields. Promises to give money and directions to Acca to stay* with them there till further orders. But having promised to deliver a casket to Fortress for Offa — must defer

till morning. Arnulph entreats that commission, which he can execute in his way back, unknown. It was only to be delivered, with a paper’ from Offa, to a man of trust, there resident. He consents® to leave orders Wilfrid may see her if he comes. ' an insertion, replacing ‘honour’. * ‘He could by aid from Envoy. That would be too late’ is deleted. 3 an insertion, replacing an illegible word. * an insertion, replacing ‘note’. > ‘They separate’ is deleted.

Il v2 our: an insertion, replacing ‘my’. Il v2 What... betide them: an insertion, replacing ‘Who shall’ and an incomplete word. Il v1s.d.-3 Ezeerta, Ceovwric ... receive their: from El. 84. The speaker’s name is an editorial insertion.

Il v410 There, still ... they are safe: from El. 85. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions.

258 ELBERTA Act IT ELBERTA. [here they may wait, and wander, and expire —

O were they here! ... Their little Hands, uplifted, should implore — Should

With eloquence that distances all words — 15 The very picture distances all words — QO pity! pity! generous Ceolric!

CEeouric. By Heav’n an if I had an Heart Hewn out of Scyllas Rock

I could not but give Ear! 20 I'll save them!

ELBERTA. O most noble!

CEOLRIC. Yes! — myself! -

And — you shall kiss them still — ELBERTA. Sweet! sweet and good! — I cannot thank My o’er charg’d Heart —

Their little lips alone can. 25

ARNULPH. In this plain simple guise, none will suspect I have ought to guard — And fair Simplicity — Daughter of Truth Of innocence, of modesty, of candour.

Scene vi WILFRID.

A walk before the Great Gate of the Castle. WILFRID. This ts the heaviest news that ere I heard. IIv19 Scyllas Rock: a rock upon the Italian side of the straits of Messina, personified as a dangerous sea-monster with twelve feet and six heads, each with three rows of teeth. Ilv 17 generous Ceolric: 'Elb’ is deleted.

Il v 11-25 There they may ... lips alone can: from El. 86. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions. Il vy 29 Of: ‘lovely’ is deleted.

II v 26-29 In this plain ... of candour: from El. 83. The speaker’s name is an editorial insertion. Scene vt: El. 66 summarizes Scene vi as ‘Heavy grief at Elberta’s seizure’. El. 67 provides a fuller summary: He comes from the Castle wringing his hands, and lamenting this is the heaviest Day he has known. Too fatigued and weak to proceed, he seats himself beside the Castle Gate, in a desponding posture. Repines at illness that made him too late at last to see Elberta before her captivity. Certain of her innocence, and unlawful accusation. The dialogue is from E). 68.

Act If ELBERTA 259 Had my dear Lord yet liv’d, this would have gall’d him Beyond each sore affliction personal.

Scene vil

WILFRID, ENvoy , INFORMO.

Scene vii INFORMO.

Scene vii: there is no dialogue for Scene vii. El. 66 summarizes the scene as ‘Wilfrid and Envoy form a compact to secure Babes’. El. 69 provides a much longer summary: Wilfrid, seated, enter Envoy, also from the Castle, attended by Informo. He raves at missing Elberta; says he must see her whither soever she may be conveyed. Informo says her guilt must first be attoned. Envoy vows he disbelieves it — Wilfrid suddenly rises, and laying both his Hands on his arms, passionately thanks him, protesting he knows her to be innocent as the Babe unborn. Envoy enquires; hears ’tis his friend’s old Servant; embraces him for his fidelity. Envoy tells Informo to shut the Gate — and Wilfrid acknowledges’ the marriage and children.” Speaks of Babes — and owns they are at the Cottage on the Moor. He desires him

to return and guard them safely and in secret,’ with Acca,* as her Children, promising them his entire protection till their Parents can claim them, from love to Ethelbert’s memory, and detestation of Offa. Meanwhile, he undertakes to procure the release of Elberta from the King, or admission to see and counsel her. Ceolric he knows to be one of the bravest and most humane of men, and is sure she will be well treated — he will to Court, to plead her Cause, and curry her a second release. ' “to Envoy’ is deleted. 2 ‘Envoy was he says [an illegible word] which he had heard from Arnulph at Winchester. Wilfrid’ is deleted. > an insertion, replacing ‘to his own Seat’. * ‘still’ is deleted. Scene viit: there is no dialogue for Scene vii. El. 66 summarizes the scene as ‘Overheard, and

will pursue’. El. 70 provides a slightly longer summary: ‘Congratulates himself he has overheard the chief of their discourse, enough to pursue to Cottage on the Moor’.’ ‘Resents not having casket, or knowing where lodged’ is deleted.

260 ELBERTA Act Il Scene 1x INFORMO, SAXRED.

Scene x SAXRED solo.

SAXRED. Pretends he now to secresy with me? Why what becomes of him should I inform.

Scene ix: there is no dialogue for Scene ix. El. 66 summarizes the scene as ‘Says he will follow and spie’. El. 71 provides a lengthy summary: Informo tells Saxred he waited but his return to inform him he was off — and to follow’ Offa, and tel! him” that he was pursuing old Wilfrid, who had some deep scheme with Envoy, which he would fathom, and let him know the result. Resents not being trusted with Casket, asks if Saxred has it? No; neither know of it. Informo goes off grumbling, yet full of business and plan, and hope of profit. Bids him let Offa know his route, and where he will watch to receive orders. Says there are two children at the Cottage on the Moor -- Saxred? says they must inherit, ~ deepest importance to acquaint Offa with the intelligence. Informo appoints a spot where he can receive instructions what to do. Meanwhile, will watch, and if they quit Cottage, pursue. an insertion, replacing ‘tell’. * ‘and tell him’ is an insertion, replacing ‘should he return’. 3 ‘doubts’ is deleted. Scene x: El. 66 summarizes Scene x as ‘Resolves to search Profit, and turn honest’. El. 73 adds a longer summary: No faith or confidence in Offa — no pleasure or harmony. Longs to be emancipated from serving him. Wishes he could be found out without involving himself for vengeance. If there are Children doubts whether ’twill be worth while to abet Offa, who can then! no more possess for success than for failure ~ yet — so involved — The dialogue is from El. 72. ' ‘niether’ is deleted.

IIx lsd. Saxreo: before ‘Saxrep’, ‘Informo' is deleted.

Act Il ELBERTA 261 ACT ITl Scene 1

CoTTAGER, ROWENA, INFORMO.

A Cottage.

scene 11

CoTTAGER, ROWENA, INFORMO, ARNULPH disgutsed.

ARNULPH. My Elberta!

Couldst thou have shared the blessing of this moment. Who brought them hither? — say, what gentle Hand "Tis then my noble Ceolric

O Heaven! sweet Heav’n! show’r blessings on his head. 5

Scene 1: there is no dialogue for Scene 1, but El. 93 provides a summary: Informo sifts artfully who they have at the House; hears only two Children, and a Female who has the care of them. He asks if they have been sought by any one. Yes — this very night’ a Gentleman brought them money. Who? They know not, but he was very rich, for he gave them much,” only to let them stay till he sent or came again. He was so muffled in the Face, they should not know him if he came again. The woman delights in the Children.

The men, in the reward. Informo begs to stay the night. They consent. A knocking. Suppose some Traveller benighted — ' ‘have been sought ... night’ is an insertion, replacing ‘came by themselves? No’. 2 ‘money’ is deleted. Scene 1: El. 94 provides a brief summary of Scene u: Arnulph anxiously enquires for Children. Hears they are safe — trembles to see them —

represses — asks with whom! a female guard. Informo, starting, muffles up, and walks aloof. He cannot resist — and visits them. Returns enraptur’d.

Mliits.d-2 Corracer, Rowena... this moment: from EI. 94. IIT ui 3-5 Who brought ... on his head: from E]. 95.

262 ELBERTA Act III Scene til CoTTAGER, ROWENA, INFORMO walking aloof, ARNULPH.

Enter ACCA. ARNULPH. When there — abide there — Ethelric will receive — will

CoTTaGEr. How know I that? I have no word but yours And you? Who are you?

ARNULPH. If — at once — in hand — in sight — 5 This same reward —

This villain, this mercenary wretch Will serve me but for gain — yet —

Why do I call him mercenary villain

What claim have I upon his risk? his service? 10 Have I for him done ought? out! haughty Egotism. Because already I possess the most Must I of him who never knew my blessings

Demand...

Scene 11: El. 96 provides a long summary of Scene iit:

Acca comes to speak to him apart as he is going,’ asking directions: he answers, as repeating, they will soon be protected by Ceolric, and must have patience — and* demands what is become of Wilfrid? He saw them, slowly, to the appointed place, and left them to inform Elberta of their safety and sejour; They had not seen him since; but a Gentleman had come, and told News from her, and* bid them wait with hope and courage. Yes! he cries ‘tis the generous Ceolric. Acca hurries. Arnulph desires Cottager to take a note for him to Envoy. — He demands pay.*

Arnulph hesitates, and Acca says he had better be paid there, to avoid suspicion, and make him pass for a poor man — The man refuses. He raves — then pardons — and he is turning” to Informo who walks off, when a knocking alarms —

Dreads being known. Tells Acca he comes on furlough — stops opening door — The knocking more violent. Acca and Arnulph retire to Children’s room. ' ‘ag he is going’ is an insertion, replacing ‘before’. * ‘protected by ... patience — and’ is an insertion, replacing ‘fetched to Envoy’. > ‘conducted them to this Cot’ is deleted. * ‘first’ is deleted. > ‘he is turning’ is an insertion, replacing ‘is applying’.

HI i ls.d. Arnuzex: ‘CorTacer’s Son’ and ‘Spy’ are deleted. Ilia ls.d—4 Corracer ...Who are you: from El. 97. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions. IIT 118 gain — yet: ‘hold’ is deleted.

ItI i 5-21 If-at once ... render precious: from E]. 98.

Act ITT ELBERTA 263 Should he of me demand some active service 15 Some toil to take but one poor Day from life In his behalf — should I not stare at him As if Insanity or insolence Projected the strange wish?

And why? because to me he cannot offer 20 That which he has not! Nor can render precious That which I lack not?

QO, harried from reflection, what is man? How wide from Reason! how estrang’d from Justice.

Scene iv CoTTAGER, ROWENA, INFORMO.

Enter Wilfrid and Elberta. WILFRID. Is this your hospitality to Travellers Benighted and distressed? ELBERTA. Waste not an instant now in vain reproach Good Cottagers —

Say if two Children, lovelier than the morn 5 Sweeter than

Scene v COTTAGER, ROWENA, INFORMO, ELBERTA, WILFRID.

Enter ARNULPH. ELBERTA. Live then? — my little ones?

Tell me but if my lovely children live? EI itt 22-24 That which... from Justice: from El. 99. Scene iv: El. 100 provides a brief summary: “Wilfrid reproves for being kept — Elberta interrupts, to ask for Children’. The dialogue is from El. 101, The speakers’ names are editorial insertions. Scene v: El. 102 provides a brief summary: ‘Arnulph rushes in in a transport of surprise and joy. Elberta, embracing, calls for her Children — and rushes eagerly in to them’. The dialogue is from El. 103. The speaker’s name 1s an editorial insertion.

264 ELBERTA Act III scene vi CoTTAGER, Rowena, INFORMO, WILFRID, ARNULPH.

Scene vil CoTTAGER, RowENA, INFORMO, WILFRID, ARNULPH, ELBERTA.

ELBERTA. They are both at rest. Lovely they look in Infant innocence And with the sleep of angels seem Drest. How roseate on their Cheeks glows blooming Health!

How beauteous o’er their forms spreads native grace! 5

How sweet they look! Safety sits smiling o’er them. QO, I have lost all terror since I have seen them! What dimpling cheeks! My Arnuiph, I could trust them Scene v1; there 1s no dialogue for Scene vi. El. 104 provides a summary: Arnulph makes 100 enquiries, and hears briefly Wilfrid had missed Elberta at Castle, and met with Envoy, and his promised succour, and support of Children. That, arriving at the Tower, he was admitted without difficulty to Elberta, and found all so slightly watched, that he planned with ease, from the absence of Ceolric, her escape, that she might herself come to see her Children. Arnulph is dissatisfied for Ceolric — Scene vit: El. 105 provides a full summary: She comes back in raptures. He blames her flying Ceolric. She justifies by Edwin’s Illness; and next by fears of Offa’s acts prevailing.’ He has obtained a second furlough ~ but durst not be known. They both fear Offa’s hearing of their Babes. Informo listens insidiously. He purposed but to deliver Casket, — but could not resist using his furlough and freedom to take one view of his babes. He now fears being too late to go round to Fortress, and gives Casket to Wilfrid to deliver.* Horror lest Ceolric should be blamed. She offers to return to him, having seen Babes and Edwin well — ° Dread Offa should hear of two young Heirs. Informo approaches. Arnulph alarmed, asks who he 1s. Elberta recognizes him. He threats. They are forced to bribe. He goes off with extorting all they possess not to impeach Children. ' ‘Deep distress what to do’ is deleted. * several lines are deleted: Knows not where to leave her — how to part — She offers to return to Ceolric but he dreads Offa and Wilfrid thinks once in his power, he will suborn witnesses to destroy her.

> ‘Conflicts cruel’ is deleted. ,

[tI vu 8 dempling Cheeks: ‘cherub sleep’ is given as an alternative. III vii9 ravenous: an insertion, replacing “Tygers’.

ITE vii 1 s.d.-11 Corracer ... instinctive pity: from El. 106. The speaker’s name is an editorial insertion.

Act III ELBERTA 265 Fearless, midst ravenous wolves, and hungry Vultures,

Their unresisting helplessness would move 10 Even Beasts of prey to soft, instinctive pity. Thy uncle I could brave, with all his hardness, Thy soldiers I would meet with all their arrows So in my arms I could but hold those Innocents

And bid them, ere they struck — but once, survey them! 15 - _Blest prejudice! by Nature’s kindliest Laws Lent to sustain maternal tenderness! Without such fond credulity, what peace In such a world of wrongs, could sooth a mother?

ARNULPH. Elberta, from a strength of mind like yours, 20 So little spoken by its sexe’s weaknesses So open, noble, Could I expect this? Frivolous impatience Should have no weight in Honour’s scale

And where ts honour binding, if not here? 25

ELBERTA. He told me our sweet little one was ill — Ili, — suffering — and yet motherless! -O Arnulph —

So young, so tender, ~

ARNULPH. Til? — Edwin ill? — ELBERTA. Yes — Dost thou blame me, Arnulph? —

Was the decision easy? conflict light? 30

ARNULPH. I am glad I was not there! ELsBerTA. Ah, Arnulph! — See I not thy sympathy Yes! all the Father flushed in thy face!

Honour is noble... but

Is their a tie superior to paternal? 35

ARNULPH. Honour — the first tie of manly responsibility. ELBERTA. No Arnulph — Honour is indeed most noble But there something is of yet higher Cast — Innocence!

ARNULPH. My Honour — O Elberta

My Honour thus assaulted unrevenged — 40 My Honour seems to me already tainted ~

III vii 13. soldzers: an insertion, replacing ‘army’. II vii 14 2” wry arms: an insertion, replacing ‘to my Breast’. Til vii 17 tenderness: ‘What peace could’ is deleted. ITI vii 12-19 Thy uncle ... sooth a mother: from El. 106 verso. The speaker’s name is an editorial insertion. Hit vii 30 Was the: before ‘Was’, an illegible word 1s deleted. Iii vu 33 Yes: an insertion, replacing ‘Aye’. Til vii 20-35 Elberta, from a strength ... to paternal: from El. 108. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions. Iil vi 36 Honour — the first: before ‘Honour’, ‘than love’ is deleted. lil vii 38 there something ts: an insertion, replacing ‘is not Innocence’, THY vii 36-41 Honour — the first ... already tainted: from El. 244. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions.

266 ELBERTA Act Ill ELBERTA. If Saxred knew

That here the little Heir of Ethelbert The lawful Heir.

ARNULPH. Who 1s that man, who sitting there aloof 45 Heav’ns! is it... Uddolph?

ELBERTA. Is 1t then Uddolph: ARNULPH. Yes —

ELBERTA. O blight to every hope! Gain is his Idoi — INFORMO. How are you, my good General?

ARNULPH. Ha! Eric Thou base deserter! thou accursed Spy? 50 INFoRMO. Am I so naught! — And 1n your Eyes, too, General?

ARNULPH. Avaunt! —

INFORMO. Give me then something to support Existence. ARNULPH. Yes, this I give thee —

ELBERTA. Hold hold! Cruel is the death thy rage, tho’ just, inflicts — 55 ARNULPH. What? — reward such baseness — ELBERTA. Think of these little ones! betray’d — ARNULPH. Fellow! — take my purse —

INFoRMO. And 1s this all? 60 And heavy on thee fall its vile abuse!

Nay, I must yet have more — Had I told Saxred he had giv’n me more — O delirious wealth! How bright it shines!

This is a facile way to make a fortune — 65 To fright poor fools — If I should now tell Saxred I might double it —

ITI vii 46 Uddolph: t.e., Informo. HI vi052 avaunt: go away, depart. ITE vii 42-44 If Saxred ... lawful Heir: from El. 107. The speaker’s name is an editorial insertion.

HT vii 45-46 Who ts ... Uddolph?: from El. 109. The speaker’s name is an editorial insertion. IIT vii 46-48 fs 2t then ... Idol: from El. 110. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions.

II vii 49-61 How are you ... yet have more: from El. 111. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions.

HI vii 62-67 Had ! told ... double it: from El. 112. The speaker’s name is an editorial insertion.

Act Il ELBERTA 267 Scene vill COTTAGERS, ROWENA, WILFRID, ARNULPH, ELBERTA.

ARNULPH. O what a curse To see triumphant villainy! to know Where guilt resides, yet dare not punish it!

Scene vit: El. 113 provides a detailed summary: Arnulph’s rage at Informo’s success. Deep distress what course to take. Fears this wretch may play false doubly — Terror for Children once known to Offa. Desire to send them to King Malcolm till the turn of affairs be known, and think Elberta herself can there alone be safe, till’ But how? no money remaining. Elberta stript in Castle. Wilfrid and Acca have nothing — but what must pay Cottagers. Wilfrid proposes Casket. He resents. Says tis probably Elberta’s Wealth — They know not that — and ‘twas in Ceolric’s trust, which renders it sacred — Yet they must haste away — Ceolric himself must pursue — and to be taken, not [an illegible word]! — Wilfrid knows a Cave peculiarly formed where they may wait till Arnulph consult Envoy — or Ceolric.

They part for this. Arnulph from Door, — Elberta, and Cottagers, to Children King Malcolm receives well all the women friends and adherents of Edgar Atheling — El. 125 develops the idea of the cave: An artificial excavation is described by Wilfrid,” dug in remote times, and for secret residence or repository, by a rebel Baron — where they may be safe till they can proceed elsewhere and Arnulph can advise with Envoy. A fit of delicacy keeps them from Ceolric.? ' Desire to ... safe, till’ is an insertion, replacing: Desire to place them with Envoy. How? no money remaining. Elberta stript in prison Castle. Desire and the King 1s acquainted with their birth and claims. Think Envoy might be overpowered, but to Envoy because not acknowledged. * an insertion, replacing ‘Ceolric’. > several lines are deleted: Offa, upon the amnesty published, gives a casket of richest treasure to Ceolric to convey, unsuspected, to a Fortress to prevent its claim. To confine Elberta, invents forgeries of papers etc. IIT vin is.d.—3 Corracers ... punish it: from El. 115. The speaker’s name is an editorial insertion.

268 ELBERTA Act ITI Short is thy trrumph, villainy!

Wait but for Night and solitude — ’tis o’er. 5 How can distress unknown await relief? Durst I proclaim — Could I but safely and in secret place thee Where thy fair blaze of beauty were unnoticed —

Where our lov’d little ones might wile the Hours 10 Of absence, doubt, and fear — Then should I go So buoy'd with hope, by such fond views supported, That victory would hang upon my arm And lead me dauntless through an Host of foes.

But — if dejected and forlorn I quit thee, 15

Thy miseries will bow down my fiercest courage, Thy pallid face will be my nightly spectre, And shrieks of Woe, or famine, — strike my Ears Midst shouting multitudes that call to Battle

What! leave thee thus? 20 All unprovided ev’n with daily food: No known resource? no bidden entertainment. But day from day to hang on accident, On Charity? on chance? —

Sooner would I abandon Honour’s post 25

Sooner risk Death — nay, more, disgrace than bear it. WILFRID. Sir — thou knowst the booty —

ARNULPH. Ha! — speak not of 1t! WILFRID. Yet to starve — to perish —

With thoughts so perilous. 30

ARNULPH. Hist, Wilfrid hist! try not my tremulous faith WILFRID. Was’t not thy prowess obtain’d it? ARNULPH. Hist! hist! Reason not, I pray. Where Reason ballances the trembling scales That poise temptation against suffering

Trust not her arguments! — far safer yield 35 To instant impulse, — which by feeling sway’d,

Ii vii 29 «= Aitst: be silent.

ITI viii 4-5 Short... o'er: from El. 114. The speaker’s name is an editorial insertion. III viii 6-14 How can distress ... Host of foes: from El. 116. The speaker's name ts an editorial insertion. IIT viii 14 foes: ‘But if I quit thee, dejected and forlorn’ is deleted. III viti 15-19 But —if dejected ... call to Battle: from El. 116 verso. The speaker's name is an editorial insertion. ITI viii 25 Sooner: ‘As soon’ is given as an alternative. III viii 20-26 What! leave thee ... bear it: from El. 117. The speaker’s name is an editorial insertion. IIT vin 35 arguments: ‘sophistry’ is given as an alternative.

III viii 27~37 Sir — thou knowst ... yet unerring: from El. 118. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions.

Act IT] ELBERTA 269 Impels to Right, unconscious, yet unerring. To seize the treasure of another Because or I or mine want succour?

Why where’s the Highwayman — if this be reasoning 40 That reasons not as well — and estimates Stern probity as justly. If Honour on occasion rest, If it be held on ground so slight and Casual

It may give way to incident — Why then 45

How differs he who From he who thoughtless drags the plough Uncultur’d in all nobleness of sentiment, This Day, all kindness, aiding whom he loves,

The next, distemper’d, yielding all to self — 50 Since the vile perjury that thus pursues thee Talks of the state ... our noble Ceolric Is bound to search — and should he find, secure thee .. . Therefore — I dare not leave him the insignia

Where we may be addressed. 55 WILFRID. Not far from hence Within the forest fair of Endermay Hard by the borders of East Anglia. Hl vii 56 Exdermay: not further traced; probably fictitious.

III viit 38-42 To seize ... probity as justly: from El. 119. The speaker’s name is an editorial insertion. ITI viii 43-50 Jf Honour ... all to self: from El. 120. III viii 53 fired: ‘to’ is deleted.

III viii 51-55 Since the vile ... addressed: from El. 121. III vint 55-57 Not far... East Angha: from El. 122. Il] vii $7 East Angha: El. 123-24 offers a possibility not mentioned in the summary. The name of Arnulph’s friend is hard to decipher, both here and in the list of characters in El. 55, and is given conjecturally. He is described in El. 55 as a “General and Friend of Arnulph’. ‘With him ... spirits calm’ 1s from El. 124. ‘Serene our minds ... extremest roar’ is from El. 124 verso. The rest is from El. 123. ARNULPH. With him? no, no! I must not leave thee there I know A:shing>’s worth, his faith, his friendship: — But the base world, all-judging by itself, Might raise surmises to destroy our peace. Elberta no! that peace, which not the goods, The joys, the smiles of fortune know t'impart, That peace which, midst affliction, stills the mind, Which! parts calamity from turbulence, Misfortune from reproach, and woe from phrenzy, That let us guard, whate’er beside we lose. ELBERTA. Yes, my lov’d Arnulph, yes; that peace of soul Shall steer us still through the tempestuous blast, And, midst its whirlwind, keep our spirits calm, Serene our minds, compos’d our faculties, And teach us, with the fostering gale of hope Patient to stem the Storm’s extremest roar.

270 ELBERTA Act III Scene ix

A view of the Cottage at a distance. Enter OFFA. Scene x OFFA, INFORMO.

Orra. Bring me them quick — alive —- or ... even dead — For ... I have heard — fatigue is wond’rous speedy No, let us wander — hapless — harrass’d — worn —

Dragging with pain our weary Limbs along, Trembling with step infirm, shaking with fear Ev’n at the zephyr’s breath that wafts us on ~ Sole febrifuge allow'd our fainting labour; — Yet, in integrity, sure-footed,” firm, Impervious there, to danger, hazard, toil, Fatigue, distress — and more than all, Temptation. ' an insertion, replacing ‘And’. 2 an insertion, replacing ‘firm-footed’. Scene 1x: there 1s no dialogue for Scene ix. El. 126 states merely: ‘He thinks, by the direction of Saxred, that must be the spot’. Scene x: El. 127-28 provide a lengthy summary:

He’ has seen Saxred: and is just rode from his Company to hear news from Informo. Finding Elberta escaped he storms — and hearing of two Children, raves — and Arnulph — he will ruin — Bids Informo watch their proceedings, and dodge them from the Cottage to their retreat — and procure him if possible the Children. He will take care of them — their Memories are short, and they can tell no tales. As to Arnulph and Elberta, the Court is already so prepared, and Saxred so adroit, he fears not conquest. Encourages Informo to every hope: and bids him be vigilant, as all may be vanquished but young Heirs, who if once they escape them, render all else abortive, by setzing the whole revenue. Promises not to murder Children, at the request of Informo — but to secure them from interference. Tells him by these two Children he loses all. He has inserted Arnulph as an accomplice. Informo says without previous pay for absconding he will not seize Children, as he is known even to Acca, and cannot therefore re-appear. Offa says he has a Casket of rich Jewels, and money at a fortress, for which he will instantly give him a demand at’ sight of children — and with which he may be luxurious elsewhere for life. Says he will? shew him the spot where the Children must remain till dead of Night, then to be moved to a seaport, and shipped safely for other realms, as he will instruct him —

Bids him go round to meet him, that they may not accidentally be overheard, or observed together. ‘He has seen Saxred ... as an accomplice’ is from El. 127. The rest is from El. 128. 1 ‘hefore ‘He’, ‘Offa’ is deleted.

* ‘He insists on it immediately. Offa reluctantly complies. Gives it upon mention of opportunity’ is deleted. ‘Says he will’ is an insertion, replacing “Takes him apart to’.

MIIxisd—4 Orra... young Beings: from El. 129. The speaker’s name is an editorial insertion.

Act IT] ELBERTA 271

So young — 5 Sometimes to cut the little thread of life Of such young Beings —

Why what to them 1s existence? What know they, at that age, of life’s enjoyment? I will not hurt them — O no! — Yes! they shall live — though not, perchance, so

With all the luxury... 10 Why what of that? 1s luxury necessity? May not a man be happy who

Bring me them hither... .

Is of small moment — 15 Pll have the Children — that they live or die

Two Children said ye! Infamous indeed — Let me behold them — Think not I mean to — wrong — or injure them — No — I would merely —

I pray you is it known that they have Children? 20

INFORMO, No.

OFFA. What! not suspected! INFOoRMO. No. They have passed for Acca’s since her captivity —

Orra. Perchance they are not Elberta’s in good faith. INFORMO. O yes! I heard them say ...

OrFa. Out, fool! I say perchance they are not hers — 25 Dost thou not understand?

INFORMO. O...why...

Orra. Such frauds are common where Estates impend —

Scene x1 OFFA.

Orra. This fellow must away when all is o’er — It] x 5-19 So young ... | would merely: from El. 130. The speakers’ names are editorial

insertions. III x 20-27 I pray you ... Estates wmpend: from El. 131. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions. Scene x1: El, 132 provides a summary: Says he must manage this fellow a while, and then get rid both of him and Saxred, as they torment him to pay the troubles of their consciences. He must away to Castle, not to be seen in this vicinity, his situation being suspicious. ' He will go first for Casket, which is too rich for such a Ruffian, and must be lightened. Says he must escape him, to get round to the Fortress” unsuspected for arrangement. ' ‘He has’ is deleted. * ‘round to the Fortress’ is an insertion, replacing ‘the possession’.

HI xils.d—2 Orra... his cowardice: from El. 133.

272 ELBERTA Act ITI Not for his virtue — but his cowardice —

That wretch pretends, at times, such mawkish qualms As if not destitute of tender feelings —

Out on such hypocrites! a little pay 5

A bribery of some luxury or regale Makes all forgot —

Yet in those lower ranks mean Superstition Affects the airs of conscience, to impeach

Conduct and Sentiment. It fancies punishments 10

It forms vagaries of imagined warnings, Sees supernatural sights — hears Screams i’th’air, Is visited by menace of ill luck And deems prosperity flies even success —

For me — I view with scorn deserved such folly, 15 Such feeble fear of unfix’d chastisements —

Could my firm mind but trust in other Men As in my self — I were indeed invulnerable But there the mischief lies! — I dread mankind

At large and individually alike! 20 I know no comfort, no sweet babes greet While weak companions in my enterprize Have power to blast me!

Scene xi CoTTAGER, ROWENA, CEOLRIC.

The Cottage.

Ceovric. Gone? and together? — Iii x12 cowardice — : Followed by additional summary: ‘Says he must retreat, and on no account be found in vicinity of Children himself, his situation being suspicious’.

Il xi 3-23 «That wretch ... to blast me: from E\. 134. Scene xii: El, 135 provides a summary: Ceolric, coming from the inner Room, repeats Gone? with rage and amaze — hears all together — he is searching Elberta, a state Prisoner, for whom he is responsable. Hears Arnulph by description of party — curses them, and dooms them to perish. Hears their sadness, their tender meeting, and their soft Joy, and all appeased, vows to mislead his people, and suffer them to escape and be happy. The dialogue is from El. 137-38. El. 136 contains an alternative version of the scene: CEOoLRic. Gone?

All met? Nay then — I'll every way pursue, Nor rest till I succeed — Ingrates! — CotTacer. Sad they all seem’d — yet — strange to say! all happy —

And tender, kind and loving .. .

Act III ELBERTA 273 Let them all perish! I will inform — pursue —

CoTTAGER. They but expect it — wretchedness like theirs —

CEOLRIC. How? were they wretched! 5 Nay — what have I do to with pitying them They merit it — away — Yes, let them perish!

going.

CoTTAGER. And yet — amidst their woe — they seemed so happy! — Clung to each other — smiled so through their tears.

Wrapt in their arms their tender little ones, 10

And said — the world contained no love nor joy Like theirs — so they could live — or die together. CEOLRIc. How — were they happy? — Nay then — let them go!

And with them go my wishes, pray’rs, and blessings! 15 If happiness has dawned upon their sorrow I cannot blight it. Safe let them go! [ will mislead my troop to aid their safe«ty.> Can I press them

To seize the unhappy fugitives? — divide 20 Ties so endearing? — Husband — Children — Wife —

Ceouric. Were they all here? What, Husband — Wife, and Babes?

CotTacer. Yes — and all fondling, though in Tears, and smiling, etc. Ceovric. Let them then go! — I break not such a union Let every risk be mine — save that of cruelty O Sacred still be conjugal Paternal tenderness be their’s And all the joys of soft domestic peace. WY xin 1 s.d.—-18 Corracer ... atd their safety: from El]. 137. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions.

IY xu 19-21 CanI press ... Wife: from El. 138.

274 ELBERTA Act IV ACT IV Scene i ELBERTA.

Mouth of a Cave.

Scene t ELBERTA, ARNULPH.

Scene t; there 1s no dialogue for Scene 1. El. 240 provides a short summary: She comes forth from Cave seeking Wilfrid. Her Children want food. He is gone for it — and comes not — Inquietude for Arnulph, and if his return was in time — with him and her Children she could be happy in this desart place, if but free from alarm, and blest with competence for a modest existence. Scene 1: there is no dialogue for Scene ii. El. 242 provides a summary: He comes to her sadly — she flies to meet him — he enquires for Children — Wilfrid is gone to search them food, Wilfrid who has maintained them, with Acca! — She begs his history, and why he seems so gloomyly depressed? He answers, he has been arraigned, by vile Offa,

as an accomplice, and his Honour feels the deepest wound in not instantly presenting himself for trial: but he knew not how Elberta stood affected — could she bear the shock of the trial?

She could bear all that virtue could demand — that affection could wish — , But — would her Children be allowed her? — Arnulph adores — but trembles in accepting her noble consent — trembles most for the Children, and wishes first to convey them safe from Offa’s perjured cruelty - then present themselves — El. 235 provides a slightly more detatied, cancelled summary: She flies to welcome him. His sadness represses. He asks for Babes. She says they want food — He starts and will fetch — Wilfrid 1s expected. She asks his history? He was stopt by a messenger from Envoy, who told him he was implicated by Offa as a Traitor, he can scarce pronounce the word for indignation and inveighs against treachery, and animates for loyalty with fervour. His impulse was to present and vindicate himself, and brave his perjured accuser but ... he must then either have proclaimed where were wife and Babes, or have abandoned them to no known rescuers: and Envoy tells him the danger would be great of generally delivering themselves up, such is the power of Offa.

He means but to put them under the protection of Envoy, and then, by delivering himself up, prove his innocence, and demand justice for them all.

Act IV ELBERTA 275 Scene iit ELBERTA, ARNULPH, WILFRID. ELBERTA. O Wilfrid! give me food! —

O Wilfrid! have you brought my Children food? WILFRID. Have you not Eat? You look indeed most pallid —

ELBERTA. O for me —

But for these little ones — 5 If I am weak What may their little frames endure? O my good Wilfrid! And comst thou empty Handed? Heav'n!

Heav’n have mercy on my poor Children! 10 Scene Iv

Scene it: El. 139 provides a brief summary: Wilfrid enters sad and worn — She flies to him for food — he has none! terrified, she runs to see how her Children support themselves, beseeching Him to procure some at all events.

IV i1s.d.—7 Exvserta... frames endure: from El. 140. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions. IV 118-10 Omy good ... poor Children: from El. 141, which is marked A4 (i.e., Act 4). IV 2110 poor Children: El. 141 verso, also marked A4, contains the following cancelled lines: ELBERTA. Where 1s the food? - O Wilfrid! give me food! — Wivrrinp. In, in and hide thee! thy poor life is forfeit -. Scene iv: El. 142 and verso provide a lengthy summary: Wilfrid relates, he was met by a messenger from Envoy, who told him the flight of Elberta had occasioned her, through Offa’s representation, to be pronounced guilty: and there was no doubt she would suffer if taken perpetual captivity, if not death.

Inexpressibly wretched, to submit to this or to the stain on his own Honour by absconding with her! A cruel cry for justice! ~ Says they will go forward, and brave oppression and falsehood. But Envoy charges them all to fly to Scotland’ till he can give them better* relief and counsel.

Then resolves he will leave her and Babes, and deliver up himself, to prove his innocence, and make a cry against her accuser’s villainy. Wilfrid says — how live, then? he had observed a person who hid himself? hard by — he suspects it to be Informo — though disguised — he durst not go on, seeing himself dodged ~ nor yet durst give the alarm to Elberta — Arnulph praises him — Tenfold misery — durst not leave Wife and Babes unprotected if followed by that wretch — yet his honour hurt by every minutes delay.* He now must stay to see them safe — Wilfrid owns he has not delivered Casket, and begs its use — high anger and refusal? —

276 ELBERTA Act IV ARNULPH, WILFRID.

WILFRID. See and forgive my zeal, my noble Master!

See here the...

ARNULPH. Quick take it back! O tempt me not!

WILFRID. Thy wife, my lord, thy Children

ARNULPH., "Tis true

The cause appears the cause of Heaven: 5 To nourish those who owe to me existence — Guard The helpless innocence of infancy Protect I dare not go to look at them!

WILFRID. Now 1s the moment of auspicious time, 10 Now, when this booty — ARNULPH. I gave my Honour to repose it safely — Were it his own — twice nothing — he would joy The means were his to save

But — a trust! — repos’d, too, by a man he hates — 15 Nor serves, but as a subject of the State Officially, not friendlyly. Therefore more sacred In that no social tie claims partial favour,

Wilfrid hardly presses his seizing it for support — He durst not — he says ’tis illegally Offa’s — He hesitates — but resists — for the sake of justice to Ceolric for that of Honour to himself — No! he can clear it hereafter by saying he stayed to save wife and Babes — But a breach

of trust is never rendered pellucid. ,

Wilfrid says they can no where be safe but with Malcolm.°® ' ‘fly to Scotland’ is an insertion, replacing ‘remain concealed’. 2 ‘give them better’ is an insertion, replacing ‘come himself to their’. 3 ‘he had observed ... hid himself’ is an insertion, replacing ‘a wretch had robbed him’. * ‘Wilfrid presses seizing the booty’ is deleted. ° ‘Wilfrid owns ... refusal’ is an insertion, replacing ‘and send Wilfrid on with Casket’. ® ‘NB or instead of robbing — the proclamation’ is deleted.

IV iv ts.d.-3 Arnunex... thy Children: from El. 143. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions.

IV iv49 ‘Tis true... look at them: from El. 147. El. 148 offers an incomplete variant: The cause, ‘tis true, appears the cause of Heaven So The helpless innocence of infancy Claimant of universal.

IV iv 10-12 Now is... safely: from El. 144, marked A4. IV iv 15 repos’d: ‘for him’ is deleted. IV tv 13-15 Were it... he hates: from El. 145, which continues: Who sooner, therefore, may suspect design — A man he execrates — While he who does the deed, appears not in it — But casts the semblance of black treachery There where

Act IV ELBERTA 277 But duty, just though hard, demands each sacrifice Each strict observance — In 20 The Public Good, that cement of society Pure Patriotism Is deaf alike to enmity or friendship, Impervious or to flattery, or resentment,

Or interest — 25

And all is apathy Lest in one passion for the Public weal One sublime passion the whole man absorbs The Public good.

Nor Friend he seeks to serve, nor Foe to curb. 30 Scene v ARNULPH, WILFRID, ACCA.

WILFRID. When the small portion it but — ARNULPH. Ah Heaven! — well — take it hence — buy — purchase — sell —

Do what thou canst — save but their precious lives — And only pray — for me, good Wilfrid — pray

Madness or Death relieve me! - 5

WILFRID. Many and many a fair fine day, I hope, Will yet pay back this sadness with kind recompense — But for their lives — once gone — who may recall them?

ARNULPH. Honour? 10 The Guide, unpaid before-hand, will not take them.

Avaunt, thou phantom! — Nature take me wholly! — Yes! my sweet little ones! yes, my lov'd wife Take — take the Casket — fly — this instant fly —

rushes out. IV iv 25 imterest: the following lines are given as an alternative: Resentment personal, or private interest Shut up each avenue to

IV iv 16-30 Nor serves ... to curb: from El. 146, which begins by repeating ‘a man he hates’.

Scene vu: El. 149 provides a summary:

Coming hastily’ she exclaims* at sight of Wilfrid, and reproaches him bitterly for not seeking the food the Children are pining for — Arnulph starts at the information, exclaims a wild defiance of false Honour, gives the Casket to Wilfrid, and hurries’ him off — now to get food — then to convey all to Malcolm. ‘back’ is deleted. * ‘starts’ is deleted. > ‘out of sight’ is deleted.

IVvis.d-9 ARNuLPH ... take them: from El. 234. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions.

IV v10-13s.d. Honour... rushes out: from El. 150. IV v13s.d. rushes out: ‘the Cave’ is deleted.

278 ELBERTA Act IV Scene vi

ARNULPH. I will not tell her — I will not sully her pure sense of right, Lessening her hate of guilt — that guilt being mine! Nor will I owe to pity that fair love

Which now with nobler Honour is my mede. — 5 O my Elberta! Thy love for me would forfeit half its charm Did I not know the high esteem which fosters it!

Scene vil ARNULPH.

ARNULPH. Tis done — I have sent him for provisions —

And here ts what remains of the rich prize __ As yet by stealth untouch’d — By stealth? High Heaven! — By Stealth? — of whom? — of Arnulph? death and torture!

Destruction — Infamy! — a Robber! — oh! - 5

A Robber? — hah! For you, my little ones, — for thee, my Wife, Ye now may live — though never more sweet peace

Shall visit this torn Heart! O fiend like Honour,

How dost thou torture with fastidious gripe 10 Scene v1: El. 239 provides a brief, though slightly different, summary: ARNULPH, ACCA.

Charges her to say nothing of the casket to his wife. Amazed she promises and goes in. The dialogue, from El. 234 verso, while not addressed to Acca, seems to discuss the same topic. Scene vn: El. 236 provides a summary: Agitated, he rejoices to save Children but starts from the means — cannot name Ceolric — calls himself a robber — and with loud exclamation utters bitter self reproach. IV vii l ‘Tis done: El. 235 verso offers an alternative: What I have done — Necessity alone must justify.

Out! out! Has Arnulph done what needs apology? This is, indeed, some what that grates me home. IV viils.d.—5 Aarnucpn ... Robber! — oh! — : from El. 233, marked A4.

IV vi 6-17 A Robber... mercy: from El. 207.

Act IV ELBERTA 279 Thy erring votaries! away — away —

Hold me no more in thy preposterous fetters — Give me, since suffering through my Heart’s rich pores Nature’s severest pangs, give, give me respite —

Free me from sophystry of human weaving, 15

Imperious, adamantine, hard, inflexible, And cast me wholly on soft Instinct’s mercy. Well! I have now got rid of this fine bubble Of transient dazzle,

And I may live the better — and the wiser 20 That now I tread the Earth devoid of Shackles Natural man Uncumber’d with prescription’s manacles And the vain trammels of fantastic prejudice.

Scene vii ARNULPH, ELBERTA.

ELBERTA. What noise is that? Wake not my little ones — Again I have hush’d them Sweet little Lambs! they can but wake to weep, And weep again till Slumber brings them peace.

IV vu 19 Of: an insertion, replacing “This’. IV vii 22 Natural: before ‘Natural’, ‘A’ and an illegible word are deleted. IV vii 18-24 Well! ... prejudice: from E). 232. Scene vin: El. 231 provides a brief summary: Elberta comes forth to beg him not to’ awaken his Children — He tries to compose himself — she asks how long they may live without nourishment? deeply affected he sends her in —

In El. 230, Elberta asks how long the children can live without food but addresses Acca rather than Arnulph:

Evserta. Tell me, Acca, truly, How long can Nature struggle without nourishment? How long can such weak objects bear the gripe Of knawing Famine, ere to rest it sinks them! — To rest! — for Oh! sweet rest, soft downy rest Awaits their parting souls - Who knows how soon? O who shall count the labouring — fleeting minutes So slowly sad while passing, though so brief, Once o’er, to recollection and regret? The speaker's name is an editorial insertion. ' ‘visit’ is deleted. IV vin is.d.—4 ArRnuLpn... brings them peace: from El, 229.

200 ELBERTA Act IV ARNULPH. Give me in silence credit for my love — 5 O if thou knewest to what extent its fondness For thee and thine could urge me! —

Scene ix ARNULPH Solo.

ARNULPH. Factitious Honour, hence! hence, captious Reason! Ye schools, ye sophists hence! Declaimers subtle! Spin fine your wire-drawn texts, perplex, confuse The face of things, invert fair nature’s order,

Teach feeling, apathy, defy sensation, 5 Scare from her conscious rights all native simpathy — Refine, reduce, annihilate the senses — And then — what have ye done for frail humanity? What are your tenets to a Father’s Breast?

A Husband’s? To each charm of social life? 10 To one sweet smile of springing Infancy? To one endearing look of natural love? — O argument of soul! whose genial laws Level, yet elevate all human kind!

Whose silent powers entwine the captive Heart 15 Resistless, urging, or, persuasive, melting, Thine be my energies! to thee devoted My faculties, my life, — eloquent Instinct!

IV ix 2 schools: schoolmen or scholastic philosophers; an anachronism. IV 1x 2. sophists: those who use fallacious arguments; specious reasoners.

IV vii 5-7 Grve me in silence ... could urge me: from El. 228. The speaker’s name is an editorial insertion. Scene 1x: El. 227 provides a brief summary: Parental fondness reconciles him to what he has done — he disdains vain cavil — and deprecates factitious Honour for Nature’s nobler Instinct. IV 1x 10 charm: an insertion, replacing ‘joy’. IV ixls.d—-ll ARrnucen solo ... springing Infancy: from El. 237, marked A4. IV ix 12-18 To one endearing ... eloquent Instinct: from El, 237 verso.

Act IV ELBERTA 281 Scene x INFORMO.

(Changes to Cave).

INFormo. I do not zest employment against Children I thought it nothing when he gave the office — But when I see them ... I could find 1’my Heart

To foster sooner than despatch ...

Would Arnulph could reward me for betraying him — 5 Yet — now to fail ... I lose my mede for all — I will not look these Children in the face

Again... Perhaps, at last, he may not murder them —

If he to me should give the dire commission 10 I'll get some other to perform it...

I’ll find some starving wretch — such as myself Ere Offa gave me pay ... yet then I slept! — Yes, on the frozen Earth — or burning sand —

Unfed — unhoused — uncherish’d — I could sleep 15

When wearied Nature call’d for soft repose —

And now ... to close my Eyes becomes a curse I shout — see horrid phantoms —

Scene xi ELBERTA Sola.

ELBERTA. To common Eyes they look no more so beauteous —

Scene x: El. 225 provides a summary: He glides in, delighted at length to have discerned the abode — yet perplext how to get Children, and vext at the office. Prefers employ against men — less innocent and unoffending — Somewhat laments his own loss of what resembled them — innoxiousness — Again hopes when rich to expiate all. Must watch his moment of security for entering the Cave which will be night — The dialogue is from El. 224. IV xils.d. Scene x1: beginning with this scene, all scene numbers are editorial insertions. El. 223 provides a summary: She sees, trembling, her Children fading — she sighs, but submits to’ what must bring them to be angels. A noise alarms — should it be pursuit. The dialogue is from El. 222, marked A4. * ‘thus’ is deleted.

282 ELBERTA Act IV To mine they are all the dearer for the change. Yet, as I look at them, — and see them fading — All paler turning — losing from their Cheeks

Those rosy tints that, fresher than the morn 5

Salubrious glow’d, — drooping their little Forms With secret pining at their alter'd life, Which, all unknowing why, impressive proves Ev’n to their thoughtless Breasts, of sadd’ning simpathy,

Dear, innocent, sweet sharers of my woes! 10 O yet for you be happier Days in store!

Scene x11

ELBERTA, WILFRID.

Scene xiil

ENvoy and a party of soldiers. Envoy. She’s sure in this vicinity —

Scene xi: El. 221 provides a summary: He comes with food — but says a party of soldiers are in pursuit he fears, and bids her hide — she charges him to stay by her little ones within, and guard them — and she will watch without — She makes him fly in with food — then shivering with terror, she enters the mouth of the Cave! Should they rudely enter, it may affright' them to corrosive terrors — There is no dialogue for Scene xii. ' ‘their little’ is deleted. Scene xut: El. 220 provides a summary: Envoy says this must be near the spot — a soldier marks the mouth of the Cave — They are advancing — Elberta rushes forth — and says her life defends all’ entrance. They would brave — she says she is a mother, and defies them. They listen with respect — And Envoy challenges her — she owns herself, and desires to see him in private. The soldiers retreat and she supplicates he will find means to let her remain — He says he knows her marriage, and she had better remain, as Arnulph is in danger — she protests they will all live or die together — he consents to let her pass for another, and come himself to remove her and Babes by dead of night. He says he found she had escaped from Ceolric, and his command was to find her, under high penalty, having been surety for her faith and loyalty. Arnulph is strolling she knows not where. ' an insertion, replacing ‘their’.

IV xni 1 s.d—4 Havoy and ... evil purpose: from El. 215. The speaker’s name is an editorial insertion.

Act IV ELBERTA 283 We trac'd her from the Cottage on the Moor, And think her to be spirited away For evil purpose.

ELBERTA. Stay! Here if ye come —

Behold your passage! (opening her Bosom) 5

Here, if ye force your way This Breast must first be mangled, every Limb Be dislocate, and my life’s blood in torrents Rush from each vein to overwhelm my murderers. No! here ye enter not!

ENVoy. And who resists us? 10 A woman?

ELBERTA. Yes! that woman is a mother. A mother guardian of her Children. Know ye what may be stronger? Is’t not to such ye owe your proud existence?

And think ye such to brave? 15 No!

There is a voice innate to every Heart That robs your pride of force, your power of strength Though still and silent in the inward Soul

Man’s haughty policy refuse it utterance 20

That more than supplicates, commands respect For the fond mother who protects her Children. Envoy. Why thou art valiant — ELBeERTA. Were I a Lion rushing from this den

Could I be more? Think ye the cries of famine 25

Can sharper nerve the frame — or pierce the Heart With fangs more potent than the tender voice Of Childhood crying for support and shelter? Envoy. Well, can ye give us tydings, noble Dame

Of our fair captive Princess? Five long years 30

Elberta of East Anglia Missing to all, we deemed her midst the slain Of late we hear — IV xiii 4 Stay: an insertion, replacing ‘Hold’. ‘Here if’ is deleted and recopied on the next line.

IV xiii 9 Rush: ‘forth to’ ts deleted. IV xiii ll that woman ... mother: ‘A woman and a mother’ is given as an alternative. IV xiii 13 Know ye: before ‘Know ye’, one or two illegible words are deleted. IV xiii 4-22 Stay... protects her Children: from El. 218. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions. IV xiii 27 tender: an insertion, replacing ‘babes soft’. IV x11 28 support: an insertion, replacing ‘relief’. IV xiii 23-28 Why thou art... support and shelter: from E1. 219. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions. IV xiii 29-49 Well, can ye ... gripe the Heart: from El. 216. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions.

284 ELBERTA Act IV ELBERTA. What would ye with her? Envoy. Sole offspring of our loved and murdered King

Whose memory still must live, while goodness, honour, 35 Benignity and mercy pass for virtues

August and Kingly ... I’d give my very life to ransom her —

SOLDIER. And I — , Envoy. Yes, the whole Kingdom sighs to do her right 40

In reverence for ELBERTA. Is't even so? Know then, ye generous men Elberta of East Anglia — stands before ye! Ye start? Ye know me not?

Alas! the changes made by time are naught 45 To those of sorrow! The deprivation year on year What 1s it to the harrow of Affliction Where Terror joins with Grief to gripe the Heart?

Envoy. Noble Creature say’st Thou, so 50 If such thy charge — for al] that man can give Or all that man can seize in victory’s Car

I would not injure Thee! -

With our own patrole 55 If here thou durst to dwell —

We'll guard thy habitation —

ELBERTA. Good gentle sir — Let me then speak with you alone I pray you find some means to leave me here I wait a friend — one whom, perchance, in missing me May deem me lost ...

ENvoy. Lady, if ’tis thy husband ~— know — 60 ELBERTA. Think you I'll save myself by losing him? No! we will share alike — All Affluence were sorrow — Pi work — Pll labour —

My little ones Pil breed to hardest toil — 65 If hard the toil that keeps them with a Father — | O such a Father! —

IV xii 50-56 Noble Creature ... habttation: from El. 217. The speaker’s name is an editorial insertion.

IV xii 57-67 Good gentle ... such a Father: from El. 214. The speakers’ names are

editorial insertions.

Act IV ELBERTA 285 Scene Xiv

WILFRID.

WILFRID. O divine Nature! How wondrous are thy workings! "Tis not a minute since, feeble, subdu’d Feverish her habit, tremulous her frame,

She sunk — desponding — helpless — 5

Scarce keeping strength to bear shaking Limbs Behold the change! Danger now pressing for her little ones Behold — not strength restor’d — but vigour fresh,

And force, and energy — of sudden growth, 10 Till now unknown! And intrepidity Mental, of equal novelty and force, Turning aside The gentle stream that timid flowed

Through every vein ~ for the rough, tumbling torrent 15 Of more than manly force —

Scene xv ELBERTA. Yet — didst then —

Scene xiv: El. 213 provides a brief summary: ‘He leaves cave as Elberta enters it, marvelling at the courage given by maternal feelings’. El. 188 provides an even terser summary: “Wilfrid. amaze and alarm’. The dialogue ts from El. 212. The speaker’s name is an editorial insertion. IV xiv 5 sunk: ‘helpless’ is deleted. IV xiv 6) keeping: an insertion, replacing ‘seeming’ and an illegible word. [IV xiv 6 bear: ‘her’ is deleted. IV xiv 8 ow: an illegible word 1s deleted. Scene xv: El 198 provides a summary: She comes to seek — he turns from her 1n anguish silent and gloomy — says Well — have you fed your Children? says ‘tis with their Fathers Curses — his Infamy — Quits her amazed — The dialogue is from El. 197 and verso. The latter is marked A4. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions. El. 196 and verso provide slightly different but related dialogue. El. 196 is marked A4. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions: ARNULPH. Come - feed — here’s nourishment ELBERTA. Feed too — ARNULPH. I cannot — ’tis so long I’ve fasted —

236 ELBERTA Act IV ARNULPH. Why dost thou probe me thus with artful question? ELBERTA. My Love?

ARNULPH. Away! away! — ask me no more Be my last portion ignominy —

Be dire remorse the pillow of my exit 5

Hopeless my latest sigh If ere again [ answer these tormentings. ELBERTA. What have I said? O my poor Heart will burst. Why this disorder? O my Love! my Husband,

Stare not thus wildly? — If ‘tis I have hurt thee — 10

Pardon my ignorance! — O look not thus! — Lord of my Heart! behold me at thy feet — ARNULPH. Why? — what? wouldst make me mad? Your lives —

Made of your Father's infamy — no matter; — 15 Ye live! — my guilt Will not descend to you — my woe — my poverty —

And what of those? Lighter than the pure air Playing in Zephyrs round the Mountain tops

Compar’d with the dense atmosphere of guilt — 20

The thick, corrupted streams of fell remorse, Exhaling worse than pestilential fumes From the polluted conscience — Nay — go in — Why stayst thou in the cold? — go in — go in!

ELBERTA. Alas! I must obey! — but O! — be calmer — 25

ELBERTA. Prithee be cooler — why art thou thus impatient?

Arnu tpn. My! best love? ELBERTA. Ay — werefore thus disturbed? What should alarm thee? ARNULPH. And ask me not question — pray mark that! Have they both Eat? Then have they eaten up their Father's curses! Ha!* — nay, heed me not — I did but jest — ELBERTA. O jest not in such sort! ARNULPH. My love, I will not. Calm thy ruffled spirits — Be all s:eren>e — see how but it unhinges me To see weep —

No! weep, weep, weep! — Celestial Tears! — they flow From snowy sources of soft guiltless quiet!

I cannot weep such! - should I see thee die And both thy little ones hang o’er thy tomb, It would not move me to one Tear like thine! ’ before ‘My’, a word ending in ‘itle? —’ has been torn away. * before ‘Ha’, a word ending in ‘n!’ has been torn away.

Act IV ELBERTA 287 Scene xvi ARNULPH, WILFRID.

Changes to a Grove.

ARNULPH. Tell him to send me... Say if he will trust ... Trust? — ha! — trust, did I say? —

The hot blood mounts my Cheek with burning shame

Accursed moment! am I then so lost 5 I dare not beg — unblushing — to be trusted? Had I announced their wants — I might have died — And what of that? They would have been alive And I —a happier man, because an innocent

Had died unsullied — therefore died content! 10

If I had died — ’twere o’er — how soon forgot Ashes to ashes mix’d, and dust to dust — But here — O Infamy survives — Ay — but they too had died! —

Well! Heaven had then received them but the sooner. 15 IV xvi 12 Ashes to ashes ... dust to dust: echoing the Committal in the Order of the Burial of the Dead in the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England: ‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. The sources are biblical: ‘till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return’ (Gen. 3: 19) and ‘then shail the dust return to the earth as it was’ (Eccles. 12:7). The exact phraseology is, however, peculiar to the Book of Common Prayer and, hence, anachronistic here. See Stella Brook, The Language of the Book of Common Prayer (London, 1965), p. 200. Scene xvt: El. 178 provides a summary: He is sending Wilfrid to Ceolric, to relate the History, and say he will try to replace all in happier days, if from his dire necessity he will trust. Starts at word trust — and will not send at all — Wishes he had announced his Babes distress, and died for them. Sees the plain road at last the only one that has chance of success. Wilfrid tries to console’ — he does not hear — cannot listen to him — but goes on sadly moralising, now for Honour, now for Instinct.* Refuses to even look again at Casket — How indignant must be Ceolric, who will be accountable — and can only clear himself by impeaching his friend — What a friend! — O disgrace! Shame! Infamy! — Sends on Wilfrid — Wilfrid has heard his name is struck from the list of officers — and posted for a deserter. ' ‘A messenger comes — that Ceolric’ is deleted. 2 ‘Says he must respect’ is deleted.

IV xvils.d.-6 Aarnucpen, Witrrip... to be trusted: from El. 211. IV xvi 7-10 Had I announced ... dted content: from El. 208. IV xvi 11-15) If l had died ... the sooner: from EI. 203.

288 ELBERTA Act IV Would I had rather suffered them to starve — O no! o no! — a thousand Deaths were nothing — Exposure — Shame — Dishonour — Ignominy —

What are ye all to one such innocent life?

Ye tender pledges of my Heart’s dear love! 20 Ye soft Entwiners round my soul’s affections, Live — and be blest! Live to console — restore The hapless Partner of my life’s sad fate — The Pattern of all worth —

How clear — but o, alas! how late I see 25 The line of duty still 1s strait Had I sustain’d my port — Stood firm against temptation and distress ... O what of bliss were mine by this soft amnesty!

It may not be! I have lost the purpose of life, 30

The spur of action, the fair pride of Fame, All that supports the inward man, that dictates Repelling courage to assailing scorn, Contempt of poverty, firmness in woe —

O Honour! Thou art then at last no phantom 35 Unquestionable tie of man to man, Unbidden monitor of human claims As conscience of divine! thou noblest spur To generous efforts, casting still behind

All lurking littleness, each narrow feeling 40 And all the base prerogative of self — O not alone the bond of man to man, Man to himself thou bind’st, by stronger chains

Than law can forge, authority, or arms,

Entangling ev’n volition! — chains impervious 45

To vulgar Eyes, but to the Just transparent! Alas — the trammels of the World’s prescriptions Vainly we strive to scatter and disband! Honour! —

QO lost to me! — Vain now were fortune’s smiles — 50 1V xvi27 port: behaviour, conduct. IV xvi 16-24 Would I had ... of all worth: from El. 204, marked A4. IV xvi 28 distress: ‘Now might this amnesty’ is deleted. [V xvi 25-29 How clear... soft amnesty: from El. 209. IV xvi 30-34 Jt may not be... firmness in woe: from El. 206, marked A4. IV xvi 39 behind: ‘Each narrow feeling’ is deleted. IV xvi 40 All: an insertion, replacing ‘Each’. IV xvi 35-41 O Honour ... prerogative of self: from El. 210, marked A4. IV xvi 42-46 Onot alone ... Just transparent: from El. 210 verso. IV xvi 47 Alas: before ‘Alas’, ‘Come to the Children come, if’ is deleted. IV xvi 47-55 Alas... internal war: from El. 205, marked A4.

Act IV ELBERTA 289 Prosperity unacceptable —

Then still, calamity, retain thy bitterness! Mock me not now with one vain pitying turn — What can the world of peace — ease — joy — import

To him whose Mind wages internal war! 55 scene Xvii OFFA solo.

Scene xviii CEOLRIC, OFFA.

Changes to the Tower.

CEOLRIc. He merits to be tortur'd on the Rack. IV xvi 1 the Rack: fifteenth-century instrument of torture consisting of a frame with a roller at one or both ends to which the victim’s legs and hands were tied. By means of pulleys

and levers, the ropes were tightened until the victim’s joints were dislocated. Its mention here ts an anachronism.

Scene xvtt: there is no dialogue for Scene xvii, but El. 238 begins with the following cancelled summary: Informo says he discovers they have the Casket. Offa says this will do, for he can bring them to ruin through their friend — he will demand it of Ceolric — and force him to impeach Arnulph — who then may pay the forfeiture of the felony, and so rid him of such a rival at once and openly. Informo objects [an illegible word]. The rest of the summary is uncancelled: No casket delivered! — is Ceolric a felon? has he discovered the Treasure was of Ethelbert and purloined it for Elberta? He will not undeceive Informo, who is so mercenary, he might refuse to act, and who merits the disappointment — but he will seize Ceolric, and recover his property, or be avenged by his life with stamped dishonour.

Out witted by a thing that passed for a dupe to every Knave he met with! - O intolerable! —

Suspects tis taken by Ceolric to support Elberta in her flight — and her progeny — Out! out! He will seize him — El. 6 provides an alternative cancelled summary:

Informo brings word the Casket has never been delivered at the Fortress. Enraged, he rushes to claim it of Ceolric. Fears he has opened, and detains it as Elberta’s property — resolves to protest he meant to secure it as such for her use upon leaving home. Resolves to watch for seizing Children himself — he is unknown to Acca, with whom they are left, while Elberta and Arnulph wander, and Wilfrid seeks food, as Informo says. Scene xvi: El, 226 provides a summary: Offa demands Casket. Ceolric answers ‘tis delivered to Fortress. He denies it. Ceolric enrages. He proves it ts not there. Ceolric becomes confounded.

290 ELBERTA Act IV Orra. Who?

CEOLRIC. No matter. Had I not seen those helpless little ones — OFFA. What sayst thou? —

CEo.uRIc. O I could see him toiling in the mines, 5 Consuming midst Writhing with agony in

Thus to betray... OrFa. I see he’s dup’d — for on his brow 1s writ

Something of deep concern amidst his anger 10

That argues earnest disappointment; Such as befits a novice in deceit.

Scene xix ARNULPH, COTTAGER, ROWENA.

He accuses him of guilt. He storms in his own defence. Offa says who then, what, or how? Clear yourself. He grows sullen. He says finally, he has taken measures coercive; he must produce the treasure, or be arrested. He 1s arrested. Unhappy, guilty Arnulph! he exclaims, I cannot forgive this treachery! -— thou wert a friend, and trusted — But thou art a Husband — a Father — distressed and persecuted — and I cannot betray thee! Offa, accused it was treasure of Ethelbert, says yes, it was to guard it for Elberta. El. 178 verso offers a similar cancelled summary: Scene at Tower Offa claims casket of Ceolric saying it is not at Fortress. Ceolric enraged — will not give up Arnulph. Offa says must deliver it, or be arrested — He is arrested.

IV xviii 1 s.d—8 Cerozric, Orrs ... betray: from El. 241. The speakers’ names are editorial insertions.

IV xviii 9-12 J see he’s... in deceit: from El. 262. Scene xtx: there is no dialogue for Scene xix. El. 202 provides a summary: Arnulph, perceiving Cottager and his wife, retreats.’ She says she must take breath, he answers they may be too late, ... speak of the grand Trial,’ of pity great folks should be thus rapacious — never satisfied — however splendidly superior — name dishonour® and a General — They are going —

Arnulph ventures forth — and asks what Trial* they speak of! The Generals. What General? Ceolric. Great Powers! What is his crime? He purloined rich treasure of Jewels and Money from Offa — Thunderstruck, he says They lie! -— Affrighted, they retreat — ' ‘They’ is deleted. * an insertion, replacing ‘procession’. * an insertion, replacing ‘Treason’. * an insertion, replacing ‘execution’.

Act IV ELBERTA 291 ocene xx ARNULPH.

ARNULPH. What him? the noblest Friend that man e’er own’d — The soul of goodness — Hah! for me — for mine — Forfeit his precious Fame? For deeds of mercy Be paid with Ignominy? For pity’s softest kindness

Sustain the stigma of foul treachery? 5 Of ‘Treason? — of dishonour? —

What may he say? — All ways he is lost. "T'was me? — how came I by’t? —

No, he must seem himself the violater

Or me betraying, be yet more betray’d. 10 And is it thus I pay the generous daring His friendship urg’d? the nobly trusting courage, Tribute to virtuous faith tn spotless Honour. O I am sick within! — This cannot prosper! —

No! — I must speed to him what I have done! 15

Ah! punishment severe the degradation Of such avowal! — words are wanting to convey it Without disgrace! New Language must be coin’d.

Scene xx: El, 201 provides a summary: In deepest anguish at news of seizure of Ceolric,' resolves to avow instantly, and save him from own suspicion — yet his wife* — his Children — yet — he must go and know the whole, whatever be the risk — The dialogue is from El. 199-200. El. 199 is marked A4. ' ‘resolves debate what to do?’ is deleted.

*‘His wife [an illegible word] — [an illegible word] he has not (three or four illegible words] how’ is deleted.

IV xx 3. ame: an insertion, replacing ‘life’. IV xx 4 Jgnominy: an insertion, replacing ‘death’. IV xx 1s.d.6 ARNuLPH... of dishonour: from El. 199. IV xx 13. Honour: ‘held undoubted as invulnerable’ is added in pencil. IV xx 7-18 What may he say ... be coin’d: from El. 200.

292 ELBERTA Act V ACT V Scene 1

ARNULPH.

Cave. ARNULPH. When I behold that cave — the gloomy refuge Yet sole receptacle from Death — from Treachery — Where my sweet Children — artless of all wrong Yet to all ill expos’d —

Yes — now suspense is o’er — 5 But dire — not soft the calm it leaves! Well! — be tt as it may for happiness My Nerves and fortitude once more are brac’d. My Tale is told — I die.

One little doubt alone 1s worth a balance. 10 Shall I or seek — or shun a last adieu?

My wife — my Babes —

Act V: El. 264 provides a summary entitled “Scene Grande’. The first five lines describe events occurring earlier; the remaining events take piace in Act V: Elberta rushing from Cave to guard Babes. Arnulph meeting unprepared his wife at Offa’s. Offa surprising Elberta and Arnuiph. Arnulph’s entering disguised to Ceolric at ‘Tower. Elberta and Wilfrid forcing Cottage doors upon Arnulph. Arnulph rushing forth to arrest execution of Ceolric. Elberta avowing herself to the troop — Elberta entering at Arnulph’s dying scene. Elberta rushing forth to demand her Children. Wilfrid seizing the Dagger of Informo. Arnulph discovering himself to Envoy — Scene 1: El. 191, marked 5 (i.e., Act V), provides a summary: He resolves on Death — to save Ceolric.

He looks tenderly at the Cave ~ he hesitates whether to take leave or not — at length resolves to bless himself with one last embrace — but not to let them know tis final but leave his sad tale with Envoy for their vindication and refuge.

Vils.d—4 Arnutpu ... ill expos’d — : from El, 189, marked A5. The speaker’s name 1s an editorial insertion.

Vill adieu: two lines are deleted: My wife [an illegible word} I must not think after My Babes — jet me take them from my thoughts. Vi5-12 Yes —now suspense ... my Babes — : from El. 19), marked A5.

Act V ELBERTA 293 Scene ii ARNULPH, ELBERTA, WILFRID.

ARNULPH. We sure shall meet again —

ELBERTA. Again? ~ What means my love? ARNULPH. I think so!

ELBERTA. You but think it?

ARNULPH. Nay — I trust! ELBERTA. You trust?

ARNULPH. Yes — in high Heaven! —

Exit.

ELBERTA. Come! to thy Children come — if not to me!

Live! for thy Children Live — 1f me thou hatest! 5 Scene ill ARNULPH, WILFRID.

Scene iv ARNULPH Solo.

ARNULPH. O for a moment now to man myself

Scene a: El. 187, marked 5, provides a summary: He tears himself away from her ~ unexplained ~ but most tenderly — blessing her and her Children — charging her not to follow — and prepare for beginning the journey to Scotland at night — ‘Then turning round — Who, he says, can carry little ones? — ah! — forces her in —

The dialogue, in which their parting is not as tender as the summary suggests, is from El. 185-86. El. 185 is marked 4. Viui3 Heaven: ‘Mean you we meet — or that you trust in Heaven?’ is deleted.

Vuils.d.~3s.d. ARNuuPH, Ereerta... Extt: from E), 185. Vu4t5 Come... thou hatest: from El. 186. Scene i: there is no dialogue for Scene iti. El. 183 provides a summary: Arnulph charges him, at all hazard, to precede him to Envoy, with whom he must speak — and to conduct his wife and Children by dead of night toward Scotland. Scene tv: El. 182, marked 5, provides a brief summary: He arms himself with fortitude for death after unconscious leave-taking of his Wife and Children — says he must to Envoy on secret purpose previous — The dialogue is from El. 181, marked A5, and El. 192, marked for either A5 or 2.4 (Act IT, Scene 1v).

294 ELBERTA Act V From the sharp scenes of exquisite distress So tearing to my soul! — and yet so dear! —

How little think they that these wretched arms

Have giv’n their last embrace! Yet how they wept! 5 Unknowing half their woe! And I the wretcheder Knowing the fatal all, to see their ignorance. Yet — had they known me as I am — just going — A parting Husband — and a dying Father —

How had I borne the tender last caress 10

That riv’d my secret Soul, thou giv’n Let me not dwell on them! — Come, higher Come, energy! to noblest Friendship due! Come, Firmness! Honour! Gratitude! and Truth!

Since these demand the sacrifice of Life. 15

O Death! Thou solemn refuge of Despair! How would this wearied frame solicit thee, Call for thy rest to still its grievous sufferings, Quiet this throbbing Pulse, these feverish pains,

Were not the inward agony of soul 20 Ev'n yet more dire! an agony that cries Loud to the Breast maternal Die not yet! Support thy labours, prop thy aching Limbs, Think what thou leav’st — and fear for what thou sav’st!

Scene v ELBERTA Sola.

Viv 3 So: an insertion, replacing ‘Most’. Viv5 giv’n: a word beginning ‘unc’ is torn away. Viv 12. Aigher: a word is torn away. Vivisd—-15 Arnucpu ... sacrifice of Life: from El. 181. Viv 16 Despair: an insertion, replacing an illegible word. V iv 16-24 ODeath... thou sav’st: from El. 192. Scene v: there is no dialogue for Scene v. El. 177 provides a brief summary: Comes to Arnulph — he is gone’ — alarmed and dismayed, resolves to endeavour to trace his footsteps, in fear and horror of some desperate resolution yet distantly, and unperceived — till she can meet with Wilfrid to follow him —

'*Comes to Arnulph — he is gone’ is an insertion, replacing ‘Comes forth, and finds Arnulph gone’.

Act V ELBERTA 295 Scene vi INFORMO.

Scene vu INFORMO, ACCA.

INFORMO. Come hither, my good Woman — Thou hast two doughty Children in thy charge — Bring them me — "Tis meet they change the air — Seest thou not they are sickly?

AcCA. O alas! 5 ACCA. For why? INFORMO. Well — bring them here.

INFoRMO. Bring them — and instantly.

ACCA. Me? — bring them? Never! — How durst thou ask? Who gave thee such command? InForMo. Look at this little Instrument —

ACCA. O Heaven —

ACCA. Ah! mercy! — 10 INFORMO. How dost thou like its mien?

Scene v1: there is no dialogue for Scene vi. El. 176 provides a summary: Comes forth, rejoicing to have seen Arnulph, Elberta, and Wilfrid severally depart — makes to seize Children without delay. He has a place prepared, secret, yet not distant, for their immediate reception, whence he’ may wait* further directions with them — agitated and uncertain what they may be — There, he says, they may lie, while he claims of Offa his treasure, lest he should be disappointed — not trusting him except while he has power over

him, and intends to possess before he removes the Children further, or obeys any commands. ' an insertion, replacing ‘Informo’. * this’ is deleted.

Vvuils.d. /nFrormo: an insertion, replacing ‘Orra’. Scene vtt: El. 175 provides a summary: Just entering the Cave, as Acca comes out, calling upon Elberta to appease her little ones — He demands the Children of her instantly. She refuses — he shews her a dagger, and swears it shall be plunged in her heart if she utters a scream. He follows her into the Cave. The dialogue is from El, 174. 'The speakers’ names are editorial insertions.

Vvuils.d. JNFormo: an insertion, replacing ‘OFFA’. Vvu2 doughty: an insertion, replacing ‘little’. V vu 10 mercy: two lines are deleted: INFORMO. Bring me the Babes!

ACCA. O do not — do not -.

296 ELBERTA Act V INFORMO. What think you should it enter in your Breasts. Acca. QO do not! — do not fill me thus with terror What have I done? -

INFORMO. Bring me the Children!

Acca. O no! o no! —

INFORMO. This instant — or receive Deep in thy Heart this weapon! —

ACCA. O pity! pity! — INFORMO. Bring them, I tell thee, woman! — 15

Scene viii

Envoy, ARNULPH. Changes to a Castle. ARNULPH. Thou see’st before thee one — who ... erst! — was deem'd A Knight of spotless Name, and well tried valour: A Knight of fame untainted, and of valour seeming A man

To Honour unindebted; to reproach 5

A Stranger; Who in the front of Day could meet his foe Fearless of danger fight, of slander, pardon, Such, — erst! — was ... Arnulph!

ENvoy. Arnulph? ARNULPH. He. Though now A fugitive from man, and from society 10 Scene vi: El. 173 provides a lengthy summary: He says — discovering himself, ‘tis Arnulph, the unhappy Arnulph stands before him. He means to challenge Offa for his base calumny, and supplicates him,’ should he fall to protect his hapless wife and Children — Envoy promises all and with honourable warmth of feeling — and will convey the lady and Children to Malcolm, till the Conqueror can hear the

whole history — and receive them, with the rest of Atheling’s friends who have surrendered, with’ his same soulless self — (fitting for women and Children says Ceolric) Arnulph calls upon him to second his honourable vindication, not mar it — and retires —

Since he has the command at Ceolric’s doom.

The dialogue is from El. 152, marked 5. ‘The speakers’ names are editorial insertions. ' ‘ag he is a man, and a soldier to forbear punctilio as a Governour’ is deleted. * before ‘with’, there is an opening parenthesis. V viii 10 soczety: ‘From man a fugitive; from fair society’ is given as an alternative.

Act V ELBERTA 297 An outlaw. Yet is he still the same — unchanged, unaltered, No vilifying passion warps his reason, No arts of sophystry debase his reason

No vilifying passions snare his Heart 15 Unwrapt his reason by degrading passion Untouch’d his Heart by tenets of corruption.

Scene 1x ELBERTA, ACCA.

Changes back to Cave. ELBERTA. Acca! why standst thou here? Thus all alone? — Sleep my beloveds? — Thou lookest all aghast — Are they not well?

Acca. How ever may I tell these dreadful tydings?

V viii 1S = snare: ‘warp’ is given as an alternative. Scene ix: El. 172, 171, 169, and 168 provide brief summaries: ELBERTA Sola.

Enters seeking Husband, sick of Life.

Evperta, ACCA She stands at head of Cave — asks after her Children — no answer — she rushes into the Cave.

Acca Bewails how to tell dire tydings of Children’s seizure. ELBerTA, ACCA.

Rushes wildly from Cave to demand her Children — runs off Acca vainly comforting and calming, pursuing her. The dialogue is from El. 170.

298 ELBERTA Act V Scene x

WiILFrRib, Acca, INFoRMO. Changes to Grove. WILFRID (producing a pistol — craftily takes from Informo). Now then, villain! — Most desperate, hardened villain! now deliver Thy charge — where are the destin’d Innocents Vxis.d. prstol: an anachronism by approximately five hundred years. Scene x: El. 166, 165, and 164 provide a summary: WILFRID.

Says sentence passed, and all preparing for execution of Ceolric. Dreads the effect upon Arnulph —

WILFRIDb. Acca.

She asks if he has seen Elberta? No — she has fled, and seeing a crowd, plunged headlong into it, demanding her Children, and breaking through all ranks from velocity of frantic sorrow. He supposes she has joined the multitude that gather to see the dread execution — will hasten to protect her — asks why she seeks Children? Acca relates their seizure. She shrieks ~ ‘Ah! there’s the murderer! — let me hide for pity!’ and runs aside —

Wivrrip, Acca (apart). INFoRMo. Informo is hastily crossing, saying he must instantly see Offa — when Wilfrid joins him — and pathetically demands Children. He denies all knowledge of them’ — Wilfrid instantly offers him all the treasures of the Casket for the Babes’ preservation — he exclaims* How Is not the Casket at the Fortress? did Offa delude me thus infamously? Wilfrid adds, with energy, he cannot be so well paid any other way, as the Children must be immediately* pursued, and he cannot get his reward, and be off in time to save life and recompence. Informo enraged at Offa, resolves to take it, and betray him — asks if ‘tis ready — Wilfrid says yes, and produces it — he looks at it — and finds it irresistible — he accepts it, provided he will go to the place where the Children are, and there remain till he can abscond — He believes he shall be better paid than by the rapacious and parsimonious Offa — Wilfrid pleads impossibility with two Infants to be speedy, even if willing. Informo says ‘tis true -

Wilfrid gives it ~ Informo, in putting it up, discovers the hilt of a dagger: Wilfrid, pretending to aid him, snatches it — he then bids him re-deliver the Casket, and shew him that moment to the Children, and accompany him for Confession‘ on pain of instant death — terrified he obeys — and Wilfrid calls on Acca to attend, and take Children, while he guards Informo. The dialogue 1s from El. 163. ' ‘but says Wilfrid has the Casket’ is deleted. * an insertion, replacing ‘listens’. > an insertion, replacing ‘ultimately’. * ‘to the place of Ex’ is deleted. Vx1 = Now then: an illegible word is deleted.

Act V ELBERTA 299 The victims of thy avarice and barbarity?

This instant yield them — or the breath of life 5 Which now protects thee from the Hell thou meritst Cut short, shall

Scene xi

Scene changes to Parade before the Tower.

Scene xii

Scene xt: there is no dialogue for Scene xi. El. 162, marked 5, provides a summary: Grand procession — drums — dead March Ceolric is on the point of Execution — Arnulph rushes in, and declares himself culpable of the robbery of the Casket. The soldiers would seize him — he resists — They are intimidated by his desperation — he attacks Offa, calls him villain, and insists on reparation for his honour and his wife’s, that he may leave the world untainted by so foul a murder — He pathetically recommends to Envoy and to Ceolric his wife and Children. Envoy would interfere — Ceolric charges him to suffer so just a cause — he ts half won, half surprised — Offa, compelled to draw — they fight — Offa falls —

The soldiers are then ordered, reluctantly, by Envoy to seize him — he resists — and is wounded to Death.’ He supplicates Envoy, as he 1s a man and a soldier, to forbear punctilio as a Governour. He is overpowered. * the says’ is deleted.

Scene xu: El. 160, marked 5, provides a summary, which seems to offer two different possibilities:

Arnulph has received the fatal wound — as Elberta rushes in... he falls. Tenderly takes leave of her but exults in death that ends such a warpt existence. Elberta enters crying out for her Children, frantic — seeing Arnulph recovers her — The dialogue, which fits the first possibility, 1s from El. 157, 161, and 180. The following dialogue, from El. 167, dramatizes the second possibility: ELBERTA (entering wildly)

-Eveperta. Where are my Children? Are they all gone? And died he with his Children? O yes! they are dead! they murdered — Tell me but one thing more — Tell me the grave that holds their sweet remains Charge them they look not on their wretched mother Taint not their pure joy

With such a sight of woe — , Ah yes ... I see them — They mount the upper regions of the air Ah See! — they beckon me! -

300 ELBERTA Act V ELBERTA, ARNULPH.

ELBERTA. Hold! Stay! See! — ’tis his wife!

Her from whom every error had it’s cause, Her who or saves — or by his side expires — ARNULPH. Cheaply, I sell my life ~ ’tis nothing worth —

Behold my bosom bare! But yet most dearly 5

I sell my Honour! —- Huh! — my Honour, said [? Proud fool! — tis lost! — No, ‘tis my children’s Honour, My chaste wife’s dignity I dearly seil. I will not, by an ignominious end

Shame them in Death — howe’er in life [ have blasted them. 10

Why what without them were prolong’d existence? No! I have borne affliction as a man — "Tis mortal destination — But shame — disgrace — Avaunt! make way for Death!

Adieu, then, lov’d — lost Partner of my Heart! 15 O might the remnant of thy sorrowing Days Pass in thy gemial Home, with soften’d suffering My little ones — adieu! Cling, cling not th«us>

See you not that sweet smile? How oft that charm’d me from That loved, soft smile, that in this nether world So oft has robb’d my Soul of’ bitterness, Chac’d from my cares their power I come, my gentle loves! I see your soft arms opening to entwine Your happy mother’s neck — see those sweet cheeks On which my lips have dwelt till time and spa And woe and all — but Arnulph — was forgot. Arnulph? — O where is Arnulph? Can you not tell me? Is yonder his pale corse? — A similar though briefer speech is found in El. 291: Evserta. Tell me then, guickly — have you murder’d them? Where are they? —

O do but lead me to their little graves Let me but spread on them a few poor flow’rs. ' ‘all its’ is deleted.

Vxnis.d.-3 Exaerta, ARNutPH ... his side expires: from El. 137, marked A5. The speaker’s name is an editorial insertion.

V xu 4-10 Cheaply ... blasted them: from El. 161, marked AS. Vxn10 blasted them: the following lines are added in pencil: Tis only by this much I can redress them This proof of wakened sensibility To nature. V xii 11) Why: before ‘Why’, ‘What, what with’ is deleted. V xii 11-20s.d. Why what... dying: from El. 180, marked AS.

Act V ELBERTA 301 Around my tortur’d Heart —

Away! sad Images! Come, sterner Frost. 20 dying

Oh Death! to me thy pain Is all unmixt with bitterness! I’m now as blest to die — as, erst, to live.

Scene xiii

ARNULPH, ELBERTA, WILFRID, Acca, Two CHILDREN, CEOLRIC. ARNULPH. Live, Live! O Live To guard — protect — these little ones —

Dies. ELBERTA. Ha! is he gone? Absolve me from my word I will not live! —

WILFRID. "T'was the last sound he «made.» It seemed to soothe his exit. —

V xii 21-23 Oh death ... erst, to live: from El. 159. Scene xi: El, 156 and 154 provide a summary. The dialogue up to ‘die! die! die!’ is from El. 156; the remainder is from El. 154: Arnulph is dying — when Wilfrid and Acca enter with the two Children — He just has voice to pronounce his blessing on them, and his charge that they obey and Cherish their mother — and to conjure her to live for their sakes — and expires. Wilfrid says he has rescued them. Informo brought in a Prisoner — offers to impeach. Bid Peace! at this awful moment. And too blasted to be saved by mean treachery since Offa already is slain — and Saxred fled.

Impeachment accepted to clear Ceolric — Discovers the Casket to be spoil of Elberta’s Father — now lawfully her own — Elberta says why live ye now, ye little ones? O die! die! die!

Evserta. WiiFrip. Acca. Two CHILDREN. CEOLRICc. ARNULPH dead.

Elberta feels too wretched for existence — she calls on her Children to weep for her but to weep no more for their Father — he is happy! and she must follow — Ceolric calls upon her to remember her promise to live for his sake — She asks if he attended to it? Yes, Wilfrid says, twas the last sound he heard, and seemed to compose his parting breath. She will hold it then, she says, sacred. They press her away — She begs to wait by his Corpse — but they force her off, accompanied by her weeping and affrighted Children. Ceolric ends the Piece by a Moral on Strict Conduct Through all temptation and Trial of adversity.

302 ELBERTA Act V ELBERTA. Then ‘tus s 5

And I will live! — will torture out exist«ence> With more than murdering misery — My C

My little ones! - Why look ye there? - Come Weep not for him — he’s gone — ’tis true — but

He’s gone to sweet forgiveness — O my Children 10

For me, for me your tender tears let fall He’s gone where penitence is lost in To pardon most benign — and tenderest mer See The London Stage, V, 2087.

THE TRIUMPHANT TOADEATER 313 Our tender joys to double, That now in prospect lie. Adieu adieu adieu adieu adieu.

By including the duet in the farce, the author could take advantage of the current popularity of Kelly’s new song. There is nothing to indicate, however, that Broome (or his possible collaborators) ever attempted to have the play published or performed.

Men

Sir Nat Nonsuch a poor Knight Mr Mawkin a Gentleman Women

Mrs Torment a widow Bewitched Miss Backfriend her Toadeater Miss Roundabout a Horsegodmother

Toadeater: a humble companion, dependent on another. The term, deriving from the practice of charlatans’ attendants being employed to eat (or pretend to eat) toads, is applied to the heroines of Evelina (p. 294) and The Wanderer (p. 400). Horsegodmother: a large, coarse-looking woman.

Scene a garden

Act I Scene 1

Enter Miss ROUNDABOUT and Miss BACKFRIEND

Miss RoUNDABOUT. Mawkin returned? do you really think you saw Mr Mawkin in this wood yesterday?

Miss BACKFRIEND. [’m sure [| did. I have eyed him too often to be mistaken. Poor gentleman! so handsome as he 1s, it would be hard indeed if I did not remember his face though its so long since I have 5 seen him. I have owed a grudge to that old hunks his father ever since he took him abroad to make him forget you. [ll answer for it the young Mawkin only thought of you the more out of spite, at least it 1s what I would have done myself in his place. And now I am persuaded that he

is come over to England to carry you off nolens volens to Scotland. 10 Miss ROUNDABOUT (laughing). Oh dear! Miss Backfriend do you think

so well it won't be nolens volens I promise you, for I shall be ready enough to go. I almost wish my Uncle Torment was at home, for he was quite on the Mawkin side of the question, to plague his Wife, and would

not suffer her to lead me such a weary life about that little whipper 15 snapper knight Sir Nat Nonsuch, who is deeply smitten with my fortune and still more with my prospects, for he has taken care to make sure that my aunt will leave every thing to me if { marry with her approbation. I received one of his odious epistles this morning which I

put into the fire as usual unopened. But how came all these queer 20 fancies into your head about Mr Mawkin and me? I never gave you any hint of our attachment. Miss BACKFRIEND. Oh! your aunt tells me every thing she knows about people; for indeed (ontry noos) she can keep nothing to herself. And

then what with peeping at letters, listening at doors, and keeping 25 constantly on the watch for what I can gather from winks and other intelligent signs, I get a great deal of useful information, which enables 116 hunks: a surly, stingy old person. 1110 xolens volens: willing or unwilling; willy-nilly. 1i10 to Scotland: 1.e. to Gretna Green; see below, p. 316, and The Withings, p. 70. 1i24 ontry noos: 1.e. entre nous, between ourselves. 1i27 which: an insertion, replacing ‘and’.

316 THE TRIUMPHANT TOADEATER Act I me to entertain my friends agreably, which makes my company always prefered to that of those dull and selfish mortals who are wrapped up in

themselves and their own humdrum affairs. 30 Miss RouNnDaBoutT (aside). What a string of impertinence! 1f this is the

case the less you know of my affairs the better (aloud) really Miss Backfriend my aunt would be quite delighted to hear what pretty things you say of her ontry noos as you call it! and on one condition I promise not to inform her of it. And that is if you will prove that you can keep 35 something to yourself, and don’t mention Mr Mawkins return to England to her.

Miss BacKFRIEND. Oh! not for the world! if she knew it she would immediatly force you into a marriage with the threadbare Sir Nat, who wants her to fill his purse for him, and for that purpose is always paying 40 his court to her. He would soon run out your fortune as he has done his own with his horses and dogs and nonsense I'll answer for it. But I hope

you will take my advice, dissapoint them both and elope with Mr

with him some night. 45 Mawkin. I will give you all the assistance in my power if you will go off

Miss RounDABOUT. Yes — that would furnish you with agreable conversation for three months at least. But seriously Miss Backfriend you do

not think I would be so wicked as to go to gretna green with Mr Mawkin, and marry him without my aunts consent. But say no more

about it for I hear somebody coming. 50

Miss BackKFRIiEND. Lest it should be Mrs Torment [ll make my escape

for she ts in a terrible humour to day. Adieu mon chére remember Gretna green and command my services.

When it is too late to thwart you, the old Bugbear will forgive all depend upon it. And she cannot take your own fortune away do what 55 you will.

Exit Miss BACKFRIEND. Air Miss ROUNDABOUT. Miss ROUNDABOUT.

I'll heave no more sighs, and I'll shed no more tears. For all shall be gay, when my Mawkin appears. Then haste lovely swain, and revive my sad heart.

For thy presence to Roundabout Joy will impart. 60 Exit Miss ROUNDABOUT.

1152 Adieu mon chére: good-bye, my dear.

Act I THE TRIUMPHANT TOADEATER 317 Scene ii Enter Miss ROUNDABOUT, followed by Mk MAwWKIN.

Mr Mawkin. This meeting is fortunate indeed! most adorable of Women! and almost repays me for my inconceivable sufferings since our last melancholy parting. Knowing as I did that my father had jilted Mrs Torment I had not the courage to approach her house; but have wandered incessantly about these woods, since my returnto England, in ‘5 the faint hope of catching a distant glimpse of you, that I might seize the opportunity to die at your feet! Yes — barbarous Miss Roundabout — your cruelty has broken a faith-

ful heart which was intirely devoted to you. Behold the unhappy the injured Mawkin come to breathe forth his last sigh in your presence. 10 Would that the happy Nonsuch had never been born, and that your heart still remained as unchanged as your person. Miss ROUNDABOUT (aside). What beautiful language! I dare say that speech came out of some play (aloud) I have a rod in pickle for you Mr

Mawkin. How dare you accuse me of barbarity, when I wrote you [15 don’t know how many love letters which you never thought proper to answer. It is for me to wish that your heart remained as unchanged as your person Mr Mawkin. Mr Mawkin. Charmer of my heart! you wring my soul! What is it you

tell me? not receive my letters? 20

Miss RouNDABOUT. Not one oh Mr Mawkin did you really write to me?

| into what perfidious hands have these letters fallen? what was their purport?

Mr MawkiIn. They would have expressed to you my angel half the wretchedness I experienced in your abscence, how unable I was to bear 25 so cruel a separation. They would have conveyed to you a faint idea of suffering too poignant to be fully described. The treacherous Torment

has had the barbarity to conceal them we have been betrayed my charmer and cruelly decieved; read that letter and if you can help me to discover the author of it, I am now convinced that it came not from you. 30 Miss RoUNDABOUT takes the letter and reads

1114 a@ rod in pickle: proverbial for a scolding or punishment in store.

li 21 did you ...me: an insertion. I ii 22 these letters: an insertion, replacing ‘they’. Ii 22 was: an insertion, replacing ‘were’. Iii 30 am now ... not: an insertion, replacing ‘know your hand too well to think for a moment that it came’.

318 THE TRIUMPHANT TOADEATER Act I Miss ROUNDABOUT.

To Mr Mawkin Esar Sir, I am much surprized to find that you still persist in troubling me your letters contrary to the orders of Sir Mathew Mawkin and Mrs Torment.

I know too well my duty to a beloved and respected aunt to be in any

danger of following so bad an example even if I wished it. But rest 35 assured sir that absence has cured me of the little love which I once foolishly felt for you, and that any future billy doos from you wall be condemned to the flames. Margaret Roundabout

P.S. Sir Nat Nonsuch 1s the happy man who will succeed you in my 40 affections.

What unheard of impertinence! this writing is Miss Backfriends my aunts Toadeater. And billy doos is quite in her stile. I have no doubt about the authoress, and she shall feel my resentment. The young minx flatters herself probably that she will replace me in your affections, and 45 aspires to the honor of becoming Mrs Mawkin. Mr Mawkun. What! that low creature aspire to my hand! impossible! But do not throw all the blame on her. she is only the wretched tool of your inexorable aunt, who has no doubt dictated that letter. You see how it 1s my angel. My constancy to you has made me as hateful to your aunt as_ 50 my father is from his inconstancy to her. I have now no hopes of gaining

her consent to our union, and with many bitter tears resign myself patiently to my hard fate and bid you an eternal farewell — weeps.

Miss ROUNDABOUT (aside) What a mean coward! (aloud) Hold Mr Mawkin! do you think I will part with you thus? can you tamely submit 55 to such base treachery, and quietly leave me to revenge it, while you sneak off in safety?

Mr Mawkin (aside). Bless me! I’m in a scrape. (aloud) What can I do

Miss Backfriend? 60

my charmer? command your slave, would you have me fight a duel with

Miss ROUNDABOUT (sulkily). I have no objection to it sir. but then my aunt would still remain unpunished. Mr Mawkin. Perhaps you will wish me to try my skill again with her?

Miss RounpDasout. I’m in no humour for joking Mr Mawkin. So tell me [137 billy doos: i.e. billets-doux ; love-letters. lu51 father... imconstancy: an insertion, replacing ‘fathers inconstancy made him’.

[153 patiently: an insertion. I i153 an eternal: an insertion. Tu545 (aside) ... Mawkin!. an insertion, replacing ‘Hold Mr Mawkin! (aside) what a mean coward’. 11158 Bless me: an insertion, replacing ‘Zounds’.

1ii61 (sulksly): an insertion.

Act I THE TRIUMPHANT TOADEATER 319 instantly whether you will agree to take a little trip with me to Gretna 65 green? that will be sport to us and death to them, and no duel in the

after us? 70 question, Hey Mawkin what makes you look so down in the mouth?

Mr Mawkin. I confess I’m rather timid about venturing on such a wild scheme my angel suppose Mrs Torment should send Sir Nat Nonsuch

Miss ROUNDABOUT, Paltry scruples! fear nothing; 1f you don’t make him repent his insolence J will. I’ll hear no more excuses, but will be here to meet you as soon as it is dark. Promise to be here.

Mr MawkiIn (aside). I dare not refuse (aloud) most willingly, and thus I seal my promise. (Kisses her hand.) Till then farewell! most adorable of 75 women.

and Exeunt. Duett Adteu by Kelly.

scene 111

Enter Mrs TORMENT and Miss BACKFRIEND.

Mrs TorRMENT. That [ll be bound he is; but I would not advise him to

shew his puppys face within my garden walls, for I shall make no scruple of giving him the second part of the same tune I gave his father

old Sir Mathew when he was just such another stripling. He with nothing but his title to recommend him to jilt a young Lady of my 5 fortune and attractions, who was a wife for one of the greatest Lords in the land, if they could but have had the wit to discover it. I wonder that my father ever proposed me to such a numbskul but that was all by my own desire to be sure for I thought of nothing but his title then and did not find out that he was such a Jackanapes. Well it shan’t be my fault if 10 there is not a Knight in the family however. And if they do marry Pll

not leave the Jade a farthing of my money. Where did you see them together? Miss BACKFRIEND. Here 1n this wood. I could not get near enough to

pick up what they said, and only peeped occasionally from behind the 15 trees at them. I was obliged at last to make off in haste as they kept a sharp look out to see if any one was near. 111 76s.d. Duett Adieu by Kelly: Michael Kelly (1762-1826), an Irish actor, singer, and composer, wrote this duet for the production of Isaac Bickerstaffe’s comedy Lionel and Clarissa at the Haymarket Theatre on 5 July 1798; see above, p. 312.

J 1175-6 most... women: an insertion. I 111 6 ome of: an insertion.

119 thought of ... and: an insertion.

Lin 10-11 zt shan’t ... And: an insertion

320 THE TRIUMPHANT TOADEATER Act I

his sight. 20

Mrs Torment. I flattered myself that the letter we sent him would have made him despise her too thoroughly to suffer him to bear her again in Miss BACKFRIEND. I fear he shewed her that letter, for I saw him give her one to read. But if he taxes me with it [ll deny it till I’m black in the face.

Mrs TorMeEngT. Pray Miss Jenny give me leave to put in a word about my own affairs. It don’t become you to be so meddling, though now [ think 25

weeks. 30 of it ’'m tired of the subject, and shan’t worry myself any more about that unruly minx and her impertinent sweetheart. I’ve enough to do to

think of my own lovers. ‘They give me trouble enough one way or other.

There’s Mr Niggerly a sorry Knave has not been near me these six

Miss BACKFRIEND. No! to be sure ma’am, Miss Polecat will take care of

that; she thinks she has him safe provided she keeps him out of your way. But she is no match for him for she has not wherewithal to keep a

dog from starving. How many mean tricks she has played as I have heard from her maid to secure him. But it won’t do depend it upon it 35 ma’am you'll conquer at last.

Mrs Torment. Well Jenny I must say that you're a cute creature and seem to know all things. I never met with your match for that. Pray can you tell me any thing about Captain Killall? for he has dropped even my

correspondence? , 40

Miss BACKFRIEND. Captain Killall! bless me did you never hear that story about his running away with Mrs Badenough? Mrs TorMENT (angrily). Where did you pick up such scandalous lies or when did you invent them Miss Chatterbox! Captain Killall would not dare play me such a trick knowing as he does the great regard I have for 45 him. it is all your own invention to plague and mortify me. but I'll keep

my temper in spite of you. Mr Torment never could put me out of temper 1n his life.

Miss BACKFRIEND (aside). Except for the day you boxed his ears and

threw the inkstand at his head. 50

Mrs TorRMENT. What was that? Miss BAcKFRIEND. I said that I thought I saw Sir Nat Nonsuch coming Ma’am.

worth thinking of. 55

Mrs Torment. I hope it 1s; for he’s the only man in the world thats Miss BACKFRIEND. Except your husband you forgot to add that.

Mrs Torment. True Jenny; but you know absence is a cure for love in Yin 29 Noggerly: niggardly. I ii 31 Polecat: a contemptuous term for a woman, often applied to a prostitute.

I in 33 she is no match: the ms. reads ‘she no match’. [iti 41 never hear that: the ms. reads ‘never that’. I i144 Chatterbox!: ‘Puppy as he is’ is deleted. Jin 52-3 coming Ma’am: an insertion.

Act I THE TRIUMPHANT TOADEATER 321 all cases. But in my sad case Mr Torments presence had the same effect and was a most effectual cure for or rather a preventative to the tender passions. But talk no more about him I desire. But let me compose my 60 countenance that [| may be fit to be seen out of doors, I look so blowsy and have no glass to take a peep at myself in. What will he think of me Jenny?

Miss BACKFRIEND. He'll think you never looked better in your life ma’am, your walk (aszde or your rouge) has given you a most becoming 65 Colour!

Scene iv

Mrs TorMENT, Miss BACKFRIEND, SIR NAT NONSUCH.

Str Nat. My dear Mrs Torment I am overjoyed to see you out this fine day. You are really looking irresistible. Your servant Miss Backfriend — (To Mrs TORMENT) may I enquire after the health of your lovely niece the charming Miss Roundabout?

Mrs TorMENT. What can’t you exist a moment without her? To what 5 purpose then am I looking irresistible? oh Sir Nat I fear there are sad doings in that quarter; that whining Mawkin has taken advantage of Mr

Torments absence to return and pester us with his love letters and visits. He durst not put his foot upon my threshold but that does not satisfy me, I must get you to kick him out of this neighbourhood Sir 10 Nat.

Sir Nat. That I will with unfeigned pleasure the first time I meet with him. I’ll shew him what metal I’m made of, and send his Jolterhead head to the devil or my name is not Nonsuch. Zounds! does he think [’ll

submit to be the rival of such a Maukish milksop! (struts up and down 15 the stage.) Mrs TorMENT. Pray Sir Nat don’t fluster yourself about them, I shall send for the child presently and she shall satisfy all your doubts. Here Jenny why don’t you take the hint? go and fetch her immediately, but don’t hurry her, as I have something particular to say to Sir Nat. [iv 13 Jolterhead: a blockhead. Liv 15 Mauktsh: mawkish, or sickly; playing on the name of ‘Mawkin’.

1 iit 59-60 and was... passtons: an insertion. Liv 1-2 out this fine day: an insertion. Liv 2 You are: an insertion, replacing ‘you're’. liv 2 irresistible: ‘today’ is deleted.

liv 6 looking: an insertion. ITiv 9 vasits: ‘my house’ is deleted. I iv 18 why don’t you: an insertion, replacing ‘do you’. IT iv 19 ker: an insertion.

322 THE TRIUMPHANT TOADEATER Act I Miss BackFRIEND (aside). You want to have a tét o tét I see you old 20 coquette, but I'll make it a short one. Mr Torment shall hear of all this before I die. Exit Miss BACKFRIEND.

Scene v

Mrs TorMEnT and Sir Nat Nonsucu. Mrs TorMeEnT. Those were sweet lines you sent me Sir Nat. But you are a sad flatterer indeed. I have made my niece Roundabout set them to

music, and she sings them prettily enough. The girl has a sweet pipe and some notion of music, I'll make her sing to you. But if you say they

are your verses she will despise them immediately from the bottom of 5 her soul: so have a care Sir Nat as you value her good opinion of your talents. And who knows but she may take it into her silly head to be jealous of me (szrking). Sir Nat. Perhaps my too amiable friend there is more reason for jealousy than she is at present aware of (takes Mrs TorRMENT’s hand) Miss 10 Roundabout would do well to hasten instead of retarding our nuptials. ‘If she will not when she may, when she will she shall have nay.’ for if I live to see you a widow — I’m a lost man.

Air Torment of my life and Soul!

Compassionate the Pangs I feel 15

Thy dreaded frown inflicts a wound Thy sweetest smile can never heal 2

But I alas! must bear the smart My love conceal and hide my woe.

The hidden secret of my heart 20 Oh! Torment may’st thou never know.

Mrs TorMENT (aside, sighing bitterly). Would I was free indeed! (aloud) My dear Sir Nat you are come too soon. My first husband Mr Torment still lives to plague me. Where he is, let those enquire who wish to know — as for me I have something else to think of than where 25 liv 20 tét o tét: i.e. téte a téte; a private conversation between two persons.

Ivi12 If she will... nay: proverbial. Iv il retarding: an insertion, replacing ‘retard’.

Act I THE TRIUMPHANT TOADEATER 323 he’s kicking up his heels. But as a letter he wrote to my niece lately give

me reason to suspect that he ts at present above ground, I must resign you Sir Nat. And exhort you to bear this trial with fortitude (weeps) and when you look at my Niece think of her once loved aunt, and give the poor girl a small portion of the love you have felt for me. and if fortune 30 should ever be in our favor, 1f Mr Torment and his niece should one day leave us free, remember — there 1s one alive who does not hate you.

Sir Nar (aside). I must tie a knot in my handkerchief to remind me (aloud) oh! bitter moment! (weeps), (aside) What the devil shall I say to her? (aloud) yes dearest Madam, if the kind future should ever smile 35

on us, think not that your charms will be neglected; some ten years hence perhaps —

Mrs TorMeENT (7m a passion). Ten years! vile stripling base Jackanapes do you dare to laugh at me?

Sir Nat. Laugh Madam! witness these tears (kneels and kisses herhand) 40 Mrs Torment. Rise and dry them quickly here come the children.

Scene vi

Enter Miss ROUNDABOUT, and Miss BACKFRIEND, grinning. Mrs TorMENT (in confusion to Miss ROUNDABOUT). I was Just giving Sir Nat my blessing my dear but I will take it from him again and give

it to you if you behave as you ought, and do not disgrace me (my education of you I mean) for you’re no more a relation of mine than Jenny Backfriend here (knocking off Miss BACKFRIEND’s hat with her 5 garden fan). Mr Torment must bear the disgrace of you, if you are bent upon playing the fool with that stupid Mawkin whom you know I have

the best reason in the world for hating. You have heard how his hair brained father Sir Matthew jilted me just as the young puppy means to do you. I did not think child that you would be so easily gulled. Formy 10 part (Sir NaT smiggers) I have been unfortunate ‘tis true with regard to the tender passion, but always knew what I was about and who [ had to deal with.

Miss Rounpasout. Except Mr Niggerly aunt, Captain Kullall, and Sir Mathew Mawkin, to say nothing of your husband. You have often told 15 me that you were gulled by them all. Sir Nat (aside). I could add another to that honorable list.

Mrs TorMEnNT (2m a loud key). I was never gulled in my life Miss Iv 38 Yackanapes: a ridiculous upstart. IvilO gelled: duped; deceived.

Ivi5 hat: an insertion, replacing ‘cap’. Ivill been unfortunate: the ms. reads ‘been been unfortunate’.

324 THE TRIUMPHANT TOADEATER Act I Impertinence; but I'll teach you to respect me before I’ve done with You, you great horse godmother. Go into the house, you are unworthy 20 of the husband I intended for you, but you shall have him for all that, so come back and mend your manners. I’ll have my own way at last. Such a child as you to choose a husband for herself indeed! I’m too good to let you have one at all. You deserve to die an old maid for your pertness like Jenny Backfriend there (throws her glove at Miss BACKFRIEND who 25 returns 1t to her) who is pennyless except what she gets from me. Miss BACKFRIEND (weeping). Air

Oh! dear what will become of me Dear dear what will become of me

Oh dear what will become of me 30 If I should die an old maid! Have pity have pity upon a poor damsel sirs Say did you ever hear such a hard case as hers Leading for ever of nasty vile apes and curs

Oh! let her not die an old maid. 35 Mrs TorMEnT (angrily). If Miss Backfriend was to keep in the back ground, she would be more in her place, and I should be able to get in a word myself now and then in the course of a morning. Sir Nat I’m quite ashamed that you should see me in this taking, but these young Minxes put me almost beside myself, and make quite a different crea- 40 ture of me to what I am in general.

Sir Nat (aside). Your money’s the same and that’s enough for me. (aloud) Oh Madam! the gentleness of your nature 1s too well known for there to be any danger of my mistaking for a moment dignity and spirit, for ill humour and caprice. But (27 a whisper) suppose you were to leave 45

me with Miss Roundabout, and I'll answer for driving Mawkin out of her head, and placing Sir Nat Nonsuch there in his stead. Mrs TorM_EntT (with fury). What Sir, do you want to turn me out of my own garden? I protest I’ve never been so treated since the hour Mr

Torment run away from me! 50 Sir Nat (aside). Hell and Tommy! help me out of this scrape. (whispering Mrs TorMENT) After all that has passed between us my dear Madam, this supposition 1s barbarous. I vi 27 Air: based on the anonymous eighteenth-century song ‘Oh dear what can the matter be’.

[vi34 Leading ... vile apes: from the proverbial ‘old maids lead apes in hell’; see above, Love and Fashion, p. 174. Ivi5l Hell and Tommy: the earliest example of this phrase in OED is from 1832-34: ‘to play hell and tommy with’, meaning to cause confusion. I vi 38 a@ morning: an insertion, replacing ‘an evening’. I vi 40 almost: an insertion, replacing ‘quite’.

Act I THE TRIUMPHANT TOADEATER 325 Mrs TorMeEnt (aside to Sir Nat). No Sir Nat, I cannot suspect you of indifference towards me. (aloud) Jenny come with me, Sir Nat Non- 55 such has something very particular to say to my niece. Exit Mrs TorMENT and Miss BACKFRIEND. Miss ROUNDABOUT. But as your Niece has nothing very particular to say to Sir Nat Nonsuch, she will lose no time in making a speedy retreat. Exit Miss ROUNDABOUT.

Sir Nar. Atr I ne’er a Horsegodmother saw in my life

So bearish, and so little formed for the Wife 60 Of the sprightly ingenious Sir Nat We shall never agree for a day or a night For she'll henpeck me, scold me scratch quarrel and fight. We shall live in short like dog and cat.

Exit Str Nat.

Act Il scene 1

Enter Miss ROUNDABOUT followed by Sir Nat NoONsuCH.

Miss RouNDABOUT. Here 1s this officious man again! And I'll again escape him if [ can. gozng.

Sir Nat. Cruel fair one stay! grant me at least one moment to pour forth my soul at your feet. Miss RouNDABOUT. I am not disposed to give you ‘my blessing’ Sir Nat, 5 so you will rise as unworthy as you kneel.

Sir Nat. Barbarous insinuation! 1s it possible that jealousy can be the cause of your coldness towards me? are you not satisfied that you possess my whole heart? must I renew those protestations of eternal

Constancy which I have repeated so often? 10

Miss RounbDasoutT (dmly). You are at liberty to repeat them as often as you please sir, provided you do not expect me to stay here to listen. If you want an auditor I'll make Miss Backfriend come forward, for she is I vi58 speedy: an insertion, replacing ‘timely’.

326 THE TRIUMPHANT TOADEATER Act I]

to you presently — going. 15 Sir Nat (detaining her). Hear me Miss Roundabout! by thus trifling as usual upon the listening order behind one of the trees. Pll bring her

with my feelings you will drive me to desperation, neither Mrs Torment or her Toadeater have or ever shall have any place in my heart which here on my knees I dedicate to you for ever. (Kisses her hand). Miss ROUNDABOUT. If you value your life Sir Nat fly this instant here is 20 Mr Mawkin come to protect me 51r Nat. Oh! the valiant Mawkin approaches does he? I'll shew him the length of my sword presently.

Scene 11

Enter Mr MAWKIN

Sin Nat. Valiant Mawkin come on! defend your cause bad as it is. Now Roundabout for ever! Mr Mawkn (aside). Lord help me! I’m in another scrape! my heart’s in my breeches (aloud) — Come on Sir —

They fight. Mawk1n pretends to be wounded and falls. He drops his sword which Miss ROUNDABOUT picks up and drives Sir Nat off the stage with it.

Sir Nat. He’s dead as a herring. Poor Mawkin! I'll make my escape out 5 of the Kingdom.

Exit Sir Nat.

Scene iii

Miss RouNDABOuT. Why how now Mawkin are you wounded man?

Mr MawkiIn (rtsing). No thank god! that was a stratagem my dear creature to save my life. I feared it was all over with me. Miss RounpbaBovutT. Bless me Mr Mawkin I am surprized at your want

of spirit. Why I should beat you all to nothing in a battle. 5

Mr Mawkin. I hope you'll never try your skill upon me my dear. You are a brave girl truly, and if ever I’m drawn in to fight another duel you shall be my second. But now we have put our enemy to an ignominious (liiS dead as a herring: proverbial. 11119 for ever: an insertion.

Act IT THE TRIUMPHANT TOADEATER 327 flight tell me quickly Goddess of my Idolatry, has mother Torment

found out our little jaunt to Gretna green? 10

Miss RounpDaBoutT. Rest assured oh! valiant Mawkin that 1s a most profound secret. Though I confess that if your wonder working sword had not given me such timely assistance, I was on the point of con-

fideing it to Sir Nat to get shot of him at once. We must break it to Mrs Torment soon, or I shall be married to the poor Knight nolens volens. 15 For he is impatient to fill his purse with my money. But there is Miss

Backfriend sneaking away, I'll make her come and explain the letter business.

runs off and returns in haste. Oh Mawkin! it is my Aunt — hide yourself behind the trees.

Scene iv

Enter Mrs TORMENT 2m a passion.

Mrs TorMENT. Miss Backfriend sneaking indeed! she’s no more given to sneaking than myself. Its very hard indeed if I cannot walk in my own grounds without being suspected of listening to your billing and cooing. But you have done for yourself Miss Roundabout. Every penny I have

in the world shail go to Jenny Backfriend, my Toadeater in future I 5 shall consider as my heir apparent. Ah you have reason to cry and sob,

for I know all your tricks. A worthless couple you are as ever were linked together. Miss ROUNDABOUT (kneeling and weeping). Yes Aunt I cannot deny it —

Mawkin and I are one. Oh! pardon me this once. 10

Mr MawkiIn (kneeling). Dear Mrs Torment give me your blessing. Mrs Torment (knocking their heads together). There is the only blessing

you will ever recieve from me, so be thankful for it. (Mr and Mrs MAwKIN squall)

Scene v

Mrs TorMenT Mrand Mrs MaAwkIn Sir Nat NonsucuHand Miss BACKFRIEND. The two latter run on and kneel to Mrs TORMENT.

Mrs TorMeEntg. What another couple just arrived from Gretna Green? | IT itt 14 «shot of hem: rid of him.

IT i110 =saunt: an insertion, replacing ‘tour’.

328 THE TRIUMPHANT TOADEATER Act I had need be made of honey and sugar to bear all this. Do you want my blessing too Rabscallion?

Sir Nat. Dear Madam have patience and hear me with your usual sweetness. The lovely Miss Backfriend whom I understand from 5 herself is now your heir apparent, has this moment offered me her hand; need I add that your approbation to our union alone is wanting to complete our happiness. Mrs TorMENT (with emotion). Rise Sir Nat! false and fickle, mean and

avaricious as you are, rise. You have proved yourself unworthy even 10 of my Toadeater, but I give her to you nevertheless. She shall become Lady Nonsuch and shall triumph over the headstrong Mrs Mawkin, who shall for ever rue the day when she refused you. Miss RouNDABOUT. Believe me aunt, when I have exposed Miss Back-

friend’s underhand conduct towards you and us all, you will find that 15 she is backbiter general and less deserving of your favor than even the fickle knight.

Mrs TORMENT. The more conspicuous their baseness, the greater my

revenge on you and Mr Mawkin, who are a still more worthless couple. Such as they are they shall enjoy my fortune; for your 20 disobedience has brought on you my eternal wrath. Jenny Backfriend shall replace you in my affections. But what courier so quickly carried you the news of your promotion Jenny? Miss BacKFRIEND. I was taking the air in the wood ma’am and overheard all that passed between you and the Mawkins, and a great deal 25 more which you shall be informed of anon. Mr MawkIn (to Mrs TorRMENT). Will you suffer this insolence Madam? Mrs TorMENT. Suffer it Sir? I delight in it: it is quits to me to hear you

affronted. The name of Mawkin has long been odious to me; you have completed its disgrace. I find sir that you inherit all your Fathers 30 impertinence, it will be well for you if you inherit his fortune; for I again repeat that you have nothing to expect from me. Sir Nat. Let me intreat you Madam not to renew this unpleasant subject, but let us dedicate this happy day to Joy and festivity. give me leave also to intercede for Mr and Mrs Mawkin. The former I had once the 35 honor to kill.

Mrs Torment. I will oblige you so far Sir Nat, as just to command my temper and forget my injuries to night. Though I cannot but think it hard that I am to sit down contented on this joyful Wedding day, with II v 16 backbiter general: chief slanderer. {1 v7 alone: an insertion, replacing ‘only’. If v 12 the: an insertion, replacing ‘my’. Il vy 15 sunderhand: an insertion.

IIv 15 and us all: an insertion. Hv 15-16 that she is ... and: an insertion, replacing ‘her’. liv 27) to Mrs TorMeENT: an insertion. Ii v 35-6 The former ... kell: an insertion.

Act II THE TRIUMPHANT TOADEATER 329 only my usual husband (and not even him now) and to go living on in 40 the old humdrum way, to be sure nobody ever was so often crossed in love as I have been; I have always found that the more love I felt the

less I inspired; and I dare say Mr Torment would have had the insolence to reject me if I had liked him. But I have not forgot my promise to you Sir Nat, I'll command my temper — through this day 45 if these people will let me, as to night we will have a Ball, which [ll lead off with you. I have not danced these five and twenty years, and it will be an excellent practice for me. I will forgive even the two

Mawkins for the present. (she gives Mr and Mrs MawkiIn her hands to kiss) Air — A Fig for the treasures.

Mr MawkINn

Then let us be happy and chace away sorrow 50 Since we of forgiveness are only to taste.

Mrs MawkIn And driving away all our cares till tomorrow In grief let us not the time foolishly waste. Mr MaAwkIN

What Torment can vex me now Roundabouts mine? Mrs MawkKIN

What Backfriend perplex me since Mawkin I’m thine? 55 Duett Mr and Mrs MawkiIn Then aloud while we’re blessing this thrice happy day We'll not envy the Toadeaters triumphant sway

Grand Chorus. But will all join our hands and our hearts while we may And forgetting our quarrels be friends for to-day. The Curtain Drops. I] v 49s.d. Aw-—A Fig for the treasures: not identified.

II v 40 ze: an insertion.