The Complete Plays of Frances Burney ed. by Peter Sabor

Abstract

REVIEWS Peter Sabor, ed., The Complete Plays of Frances Burney (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995). Vol. 1: Comedies, with Geoffrey M. Sill, xlviii, 399. Vol. 2: Tragedies, with Stewart J. Cooke, vi, 329. Illustrations; both volumes $150.00 cloth. At the New Year 1735 Mary Jones of Oxford borrowed from Joseph Spence (a future Professor of Poetry) a copy of Mary Barber’s recent book of po­ ems. She was “highly delighted” with it: firstly with its appearance (“so pompous an Edition from a Person of my own Sex” ), and secondly with its contents. Today, though the word “pompous” does not spring to mind, it still seems appropriate to rejoice when a woman writer is so splendidly served by the academic publishing industry. Others have had to make do with facsimiles, or with annotation either sparse or over-enthusiastic, or with a penny-pinched air of being grateful for what they could get. Peter Sabor and McGill-Queen’s have done Burney proud. The paper is acid-free; the lines are numbered; the typeface and the binding each in its way stands up without strain when the volumes are studied or passed from hand to hand for reading aloud. The textual issues are lucidly explicated. The notes, drawing on an impressive range of familiarity with the small change of eighteenthcentury domestic life and material objects, explain and contextualize with grace, brevity, and due regard for Burney’s nuances of language. There is a helpful list of the authors with whom Lady Smatter unwarrantably claims acquaintance. Peter Sabor’s acknowledgement to his wife, Marie, is a delight: a model of the uses — or the shared pleasures — of allusion. But the greatest delight of all is Burney’s plays. Up to now only one comedy and one tragedy had been edited; only that tragedy (in its author’s lifetime) and one comedy (in 1993-94) had been staged. Apart from the manuscripts in the New York Public Library, apart from the quotations with which Margaret Doody backs her analysis in her literary biography of Burney, the rest has been unavailable. The appearance of this edition poses a problem now familiar as the canon writhes and bulges in an effort to accommodate more texts. Once we be­ lieved that the Restoration and eighteenth-century stage was monopolized English Stu d ie s in Ca n a d a , 23, 2, June 1997 by dramatists whose output, from Etherege to Goldsmith, was extremely slender. This made for confident and uninhibited generalizing about their work. Those now being rediscovered were more productive, and not least the women among them. Behn and Inchbald, at the period’s two ends, pro­ duced around twenty plays apiece. Prances Burney the novelist accounts for eight. Not one of hers follows the model of the one before. Every one invites attention, analysis, and embodiment in the varying concepts of directors and the varying interpretations of actors. Burney’s first play, The Witlings, has been the most reported-on during the years when it could not be actually read or seen. Most eighteenth-century specialists have “known” a highly dubious piece of literary history: that Burney’s father and honorary father-figure combined to suppress this comedy because it satirized the Bluestockings, especially Hester Thrale, who had befriended its young author at her house at Streatham. Peter Sabor quotes an impressive array of later Daddy-figures (Thomas Babington Macaulay, Austin Dobson, and an anonymous TLS reviewer of 1906) who were ready to endorse this condemnation of The Witlings sight unseen. In fact the “Esprit” party of this play has little in common either with the Bluestockings or with the Streatham circle (which was quite distinct from them). It represents men and women in equal numbers (two of each): Codger and Mrs Sapient for maxims, Dabler and Lady Smatter for verse. Codger, with his painful slowness to grasp or to utter ideas, is nothing like Samuel Johnson; Lady Smatter (who has turned to reading as an alternative source of flattery when beauty failed her, but who naturally loathes books, and reads as slowly as Codger speaks) is equally unlike the fluent Elizabeth Montagu or the mercurial Hester Thrale...