Elizabeth Inchbald (1753-1821) was an actress before she became a playwright and her plays belong to the thriving theatrical culture of late eighteenth-century London. (1) From her years as an actress in her twenties and thirties she drew detailed knowledge of how theatre performances worked. She gained extensive early experience of much of the standard repertoire by playing sometimes major roles on provincial stages in Bristol, Liverpool, Birmingham, Dublin and Scotland, and on Tate Wilkinson's Yorkshire circuit. (2) From 1780, when she became a member of the Covent Garden company, she played supporting roles at Covent Garden and the Haymarket alongside the performers who, increasingly, were to form the casts of her own plays. (3) She saw new productions develop and, as a poorly paid actress who could not refuse walk-on parts in pantomimes, experienced the operation of the hierarchies of stage production: the ranking of genres and talents within the companies from tragedy down to musicals, from delivering Shakespearean verse down to singing ballads.

Inchbald moved from acting into professional writing gradually and quite deliberately, while employed by the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, during the 1780s. The move was founded upon a sustained programme of self-education, a regime of reading which began early and was logged, year by year, in notebooks. (4) Combining substantial first-hand stage experience with wide-ranging study, Inchbald achieved a professional style and status unavailable to the actress-playwrights of the eighteenth century who had preceded her. In the 1750s and 1760s, Susannah Cibber and Kitty Clive, for instance, had turned aside from acting only briefly to work up the occasional short afterpiece, creating exuberant roles for themselves for benefit nights; and Elizabeth Griffith, who published letters and novels as well as plays, had battled much harder and less successfully than Inchbald for a permanent place as a writer in the patronage of the theatre managers. (5)

While over a hundred women wrote plays in Britain in the eighteenth century, the years between 1770 and 1800, which included the major part of Inchbald's career as a playwright, saw a massive expansion in women's writing in general. During this period, many women tried their hands at writing a play or two, in part because writing for the stage, if successful, brought better financial rewards than other kinds of writing. (6) Inchbald is outstanding, however, for the continuity of the stage successes which resulted from her extensive output of twenty or so plays. (7) Her achievement of financial independence, social acceptability and a recognised career as a writer for the stage is exceptional. Looking back from 1831, James Boaden, who wrote biographies of several major theatre figures of Inchbald's time, saw only four women since the Restoration who had achieved eminence as comic dramatists: Aphra Behn, Susanna Centlivre, Hannah Cowley and Elizabeth Inchbald. (8) When the Longman publishing company sought a significant figure as editor of three prestigious anthologies of English drama, published in the early years of the nineteenth century, they chose Inchbald; a clear tribute to the position she had won. (9)

This picture of Elizabeth Inchbald as a figure closely identified with the late Georgian theatre is distinctly different from the image that until recently she has retained in literary studies. She has been noted in a small way as the author of one of the more interesting novels of sensibility, A Simple Story (1791), and of Lovers' Vows (1798), an obscure adaptation of a German melodrama, which was chosen by Jane Austen for the family theatricals in Mansfield Park. [Lovers' Vows is available at the BWP1800 site.] The privileging of prose fiction above popular theatre pieces evident in this judgement dates from Inchbald's own time. It was with a novel that Inchbald herself first approached a publisher; it was only after this was rejected that she found her first opportunity to write professionally in drama, which continued to pay much better. The novel was more respectable than the theatre, especially for a woman, and, as Inchbald herself noted in a light-hearted essay of 1807, gave the writer far greater autonomy and freedom of expression. (10) Boaden, himself a minor dramatist, would have agreed: in his 1833 biography of Inchbald he wrote, as if from personal experience, that success as a playwright was too much a matter of luck, of rapid labour pursuing the lure of spectacular earnings, at the mercy of the public's latest rage for a favourite performer (Memoirs of Mrs Inchbald, vol. II, p. 3). Devoting hundreds of pages to detailing the development of Inchbald's life as a playwright, to the staging and publication of most of her substantial body of plays, Boaden's monumental work nevertheless pronounces that it is her first novel, A Simple Story, 'which bears the highest testimony to the genius of Mrs Inchbald' (ibid. vol. I, p. 274)

Inchbald knew intimately this culturally fascinating performance medium, in which most writers were servants, not masters. Behind the texts which appear in this volume lie complex accommodations and compromises. Managers, performers, audiences and reviewers all influenced the ways in which the performance text of a play developed. Inchbald responded to them by making revisions, sometimes repeatedly, not only during rehearsals but also during early performances, which preceded the publication of the first editions. The Larpent manuscripts of the plays (copies of their texts sent to the lord chamberlain's office for licensing some days ahead of their opening nights) often differ from the printed versions and show that many changes were made. In addition, Inchbald's own manuscript of Such Things Are shows layers of rewriting both before and after the Larpent manuscript was copied. A whole range of factors could force changes, as the endnotes to this volume illustrate. Successful new effects were generated when particular roles interacted creatively with the personalities and repertoires of certain performers; see, for example, Inchbald's extra material for William Parsons as Don Antonio in The Widow's Vow, and for William Thomas Lewis and Isabella Mattocks as Twineall and Lady Tremor in Such Things Are. A play might be tailored to pick up on a topical event, such as the trial of Warren Hastings in the case of Such Things Are; scenes which proved ponderous in the early performances would be cut, as in The Child of Nature; and episodes which were attacked in the reviews for indelicacy or for striking the wrong tone might be dropped (Eleanor's proposal at the end of Next Door Neighbours is one of these; Lady Priory's business with the hat in Act II of Wives as they Were, and Maids as they Are is another). The enormous contribution of the players' own inventiveness is clear, not only from the acknowledgements made by Inchbald in some of the advertisements which preface the texts but also in the huge number of new stage directions written into the published versions in an attempt to capture some of the nuances conveyed by the stage business and the performers' by-play.

There was a hierarchical relationship between the three London patent theatres, based upon perceptions of both repertoires and audiences, which placed Inchbald, as a member of the Covent Garden company, somewhere in the middle ground. Her friends, the actor-manager John Philip Kemble and the famous actress Sarah Siddons, were installed majestically at Drury Lane, which was the most traditional of the theatres and the natural home of tragedy at this time. The Covent Garden repertoire was a little lighter than that of Drury Lane but the patrons in the boxes were often just as distinguished since Covent Garden was George III's favourite theatre and mounted the majority of royal command performances (productions acted at the request of the king), which attracted glittering audiences. Third in line was the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket, the first to stage Inchbald's work. This was a smaller theatre which operated in the summer months when the other two theatres were closed and many people of fashion were out of town. Reviews of Inchbald's Next Door Neighbours at the Haymarket in 1791 promoted it by mentioning the fashionable nature of the audience which it had already attracted ('The PRINCE of WALES, Mrs. FITZHERBERT, with all the "remnant fashion" of the Metropolis'); while one reviewer interpreted Inchbald's creation of the Figaro-like, outspoken, honest servant, Bluntly, as a shamelessly well-aimed appeal to the Haymarket gallery. (17)

every drama requires great alteration, before it can please a London audience, although it has previously charmed the audience of Paris. The gloomy mind of a British auditor demands a bolder and more varied species of theatrical amusement, than the lively spirits of his neighbours in France. The former has no attention, no curiosity, till roused by some powerful fable, intricate occurrences, and all the interest which variety creates - whilst the latter will quietly sit, absorbed in their own glowing fancy, to hear speeches after speeches, of long narration, nor wish to see anything performed, so they are but told, that something has been done. (19)

The adaptations reproduced below consistently treat their originals very much along lines suggested by this assessment of the character of British audiences: they reproduce comic events and quickfire exchanges almost verbatim but cut out soliloquies and reflection in favour of pace, action, bold stage effects and situations capable of releasing the talents of great comic players. They extend and vary the range of roles, chiefly in the direction of low comedy to offset sentiment, and cut explanations and elaborations, leaving more to be conveyed by the performers. (20) In Lovers' Vows, 'altered from the German of Kotzebue', Inchbald made different but equally essential modifications, reworking several aspects of the original play extensively because, as its preface explains, she judged it 'discordant with an English stage'. Her skilled assessment of what would work in a London theatre was completely vindicated: 'for Kotzebue's "Child of Love", in Germany, was never more attractive, than "Lovers' Vows" has been in England' (The British Theatre, vol. 23, p. 5).

I think your shuffling behaviour about the taking places to the comedy of the 'Will,' dishonourable to you. I think your conversation with her that night at the play base, cruel, and insulting. There were persons in the box who heard it, and they thought as I do. I think you know more of my wife than you are willing to acknowledge to yourself, and that you have an understanding capable of doing some small degree of justice to her merits. I think you should have had magnanimity and self-respect enough to have shewed this. I think that while the Twisses and others were sacrificing to what they were silly enough to think a proper etiquette, a person so out of all comparison their superior, as you are, should have placed her pride in acting upon better principles, and in courting and distinguishing insulted greatness and worth; I think that you chose a mean and pitiful conduct, when you might have chosen a conduct that would have done you immortal honour. You had not even their excuse. They could not (they pretended) receive her into their previous circles. You kept no circle to debase and enslave you. (41)

Here Godwin touches upon some of the basic principles of Jacobin philosophy, which impinge upon the critiques of fashion in Inchbald's plays of the 1790s: the primacy of personal honour, individual reason and independent principle; valuing others by their human worth, not by the status attached to them by any external authority; having the courage not to follow fashionable opinion, to resist intellectual slavery to the ideas and prejudices of others. But what Godwin perhaps does not understand is that the theatre must have been to Inchbald a very powerful 'circle': the social arena in which she had with great care and pains developed her professional and personal reputation. In its public, conventional space she could not exercise independent judgement in her own person; there was an imperative to conform which she could not ignore. Godwin expected her to show independence of mind in the very place where she could depict it, within limits, on the stage, but could least afford it herself.

Angela J. Smallwood is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature in the School of English, University of Nottingham. She has published Fielding and the Woman Question: The Novels of Henry Fielding and Feminist Debate 1700-1750 (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf and New York: St Martin's Press, 1989) and, in addition to the Inchbald edition excerpted here, a series of essays on late eighteenth-century women playwrights (details in endnotes to this essay). She is currently working on interrelationships between French and English eighteenth-century comedy in the work of women playwrights as her contribution to a collaborative five-year international project, 'European Intertexts: Women's Writing in English as part of a European Fabric'.

Notes