Jane Austen was fifteen when she wrote her short History of England in 1791, illustrated by her sister Cassandra with thirteen unrecognisable portraits. Jane said that ‘One of Edward IV’s Mistresses was Jane Shore who has had a play written about her, but it is a tragedy & therefore not worth reading’. It was a tragedy and it is worth reading, if only because Nicholas Rowe’s drama of 1714, The Tragedy of Jane Shore, was and remained for a long time amazingly popular in England, in the United States and in continental Europe. It also attracted a series of leading actresses, keen to take the roles of the heroine and her ‘friend’ Alicia, who closely resembled the ‘Mrs Blague’ of the ballads. Rowe’s play obviously made a major contribution to the popularity of the ‘she-tragedy’, as the author himself called this and others of his plays, mentioning the term in the prologue to The Tragedy of Jane Shore. It has remained a useful phrase ever since to academic and other critics writing about dramas or domestic disasters which were in themselves tragic enough for a few characters but could not strictly speaking be entitled ‘tragedies’ as Shakespeare’s had been classed.
As mentioned earlier there had already been two plays in England in which women were the undisputed heroines: the anonymous Tragedy of Mr Arden of Faversham of 1592, telling how the heroine and her lover succeeded, after various attempts, in killing her husband, and also The Yorkshire Tragedy of 1608 which is said to have been based on a series of contemporary murders. It should be added that when the former play was revived in the twentieth century, presented in the actual Faversham house where it was said to have originally happened, the modern audience felt no pity or terror, and were not all convinced that they were watching an early example of the ‘she-tragedy’. However, it seems the play has not been forgotten.
On the other hand, among the many writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries who concentrated on drama, Nicholas Rowe seems to have been neglected by many critics and others who enjoyed the theatre, perhaps because his themes were tragic, as Jane Austen indicated, unlike those popular successes by his contemporaries such as Wycherley or Farquhar whose entertainingly frivolous comedies, which followed the restoration of Charles II in 1660, are cheerfully enjoyable today. At the same time the remarkable Rowe was qualified to do many other things, both in and out of the theatre. He was born in 1674 in Little Barford in Bedfordshire, attended Westminster School and when he was fifteen his lawyer father entered him at the Middle Temple. The young man was called to the Bar in 1696 but did not enjoy legal work and soon took up creative writing, especially plays. He never had to live in Grub Street and did not need to spend his time anonymously rewriting work by others, although like so many of his contemporary dramatists he was happy to borrow from his predecessors if it suited him. When his father died he inherited a useful private income which allowed him to write without worrying about money or even performance. In this his destiny was totally different from that of the earlier Thomas Otway, whose celebrated Venice Preserv’d of 1682 was admired by Rowe and most other dramatists of the time. Sadly, Otway died in poverty at the age of thirty-three.
The year 1700 saw the production of Rowe’s first play, The Ambitious Stepmother, and in the words of Dr Johnson, it ‘was received with so much favour, that he devoted himself from that time wholly to elegant literature.’1 Two years later came Tamerlane, a political satire, also successful, followed by The Fair Penitent in 1703, about which Dr Johnson was almost lyrical in his praise: it was ‘one of the most pleasing tragedies on the stage, where it still keeps its turns of appearing, and probably will long keep them, for there is scarcely any work of any poet at once so interesting by the fable, and so delightful by the language.’2 The ‘fable’, which relied heavily on The Fatal Dowry by Massinger (c. 1618) is also described as a ‘she-tragedy’, the type of drama that, as mentioned above, was not in itself tragic, but usually emphasised the problematic role of a woman, inevitably ending with her unhappiness, suffering or death. This was the case of the ‘fair penitent’ Calista, whose lover, Lothario, was a heartless young seducer with a name that has remained familiar: Richardson’s Lovelace in Clarissa Harlowe of 1747/8 inherited his behaviour, and who could deny that the seducer attitude remains a persistent element in male psychology? Lothario possibly anticipated Casanova, who was born in 1725. Rowe’s tragedy was set in late medieval Genoa and again the problem of the arranged marriage was central to the theme, for Calista’s father, Sciolto, had arranged for her to marry Altomont and assumed she was ready to do so.
Far from it: she was desperately in love with Lothario, who was not interested in marriage and believed in having a good time with any willing partner, but it was understood by both that the fun would have no future. He maintained that he had once asked Calista’s father for permission to marry her but had been turned down; however, this was not the whole story, for he had succeeded in seducing Calista during one exciting, unforgettable night – the modern word would be ‘torrid’ – and now of course, having lost her virginity, she was no longer a suitable bride for a respectable husband. In the early eighteenth century this situation fascinated women in particular; they were attracted by the idea but frightened of it at the same time. If it happened to them, whatever would they do? Naturally all parents were frightened too, especially those of the upper and middle classes, who continued to arrange marriages for their daughters; even if the girls were not always ready to accept the system, it was still hard to escape, for money and property were inevitably involved.
To return to Rowe’s play: it is, in one sense, a conflict for Calista between love and duty, a common theme in the earlier classical French plays by Corneille and Racine that would have been well known to the dramatist. Calista decides that she will be a dutiful daughter and marry Altomont but her father realises she has probably not given up Lothario. The play becomes a complex drama between the two families, one of them expecting to be united through Altomont and the other aware that the young seducer Lothario might cause trouble.
In the end Lothario is killed and the last act of the play3 opens with a stage-setting reminiscent of Gothic horror:
SCENE, is a room hung with black: on one side, Lothario’s body on a bier; on the other, a table with a skull and other bones, a book, and a lamp on it. Calista is discovered on a couch in black, her hair hanging loose and disordered.
After the performance of a sad song, Calista throws away a book from which she had hoped to learn about true penitence. Her father comes in, argues with her and even suggests that she kills herself, but then changes his mind. She does, of course, manage suicide in the end despite efforts to restrain her. The intended husband, the respectable but unloved Altomont, faints and is taken away. The trouble is obvious: Calista was never a true penitent and even gave up the idea of retiring to a convent. This drama or, in fact, melodrama, was a great success and Mrs Bracegirdle, the actress who played Altomont’s sister, Lavinia, spoke an epilogue after the premiere which many women in the audience must have enjoyed, for there are no kind words for husbands:
Had we the pow’r, we’d make the tyrants know
What ’tis to fail the duties which they owe;
We teach the sauntering squire who loves to roam,
Forgetful of his own dear spouse at home,
Who snores at night supinely by her side,
’Twas not for this the nuptial knot was tied.
The epilogue ends with a hopeful plea:
No foreign charms shall cause domestic strife,
But that ev’ry married man shall toast his wife.
Phillis shall not be to the country sent,
For carnivals in town to keep a tedious Lent:
Lampoons shall cease, and envious scandal die,
And all live in peace, like my good man and I.4
Such a civilised attitude had been far from current in Jane Shore’s day and the problem of how to help the situation of a wife, considered indirectly by Michael Drayton earlier, was to preoccupy Rowe later. A radical change was needed, and still is, for society could not, and still cannot, achieve a transformation quickly.
The success of The Fair Penitent, premiered at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in March 1703, encouraged Rowe to write four more tragedies during the next fifteen years before his early death in 1718. His one prose comedy, The Biter of 1704, was a total failure, to Rowe’s great surprise. When he was writing it he would laugh out aloud at his own jokes, but the theatre audience did not laugh nearly enough. In 1707 came The Royal Convert, which reflected the union of Scotland and England that year.
Rowe was so adaptable that in the next few years he applied himself to other work, first as secretary to the Duke of Queensbury and also to his valuable, but easily forgotten, editorial work on Shakespeare’s plays. He added a cast list to each one, for none had ever been printed with the text, and divided the plays into acts and scenes, which nobody had undertaken earlier. He even made some small editorial changes but at least Dr Johnson approved of the enterprise when the six volumes were published in 1709. Five years later Rowe was appointed Land Surveyor of the Customs by the new King George I.
On 2 February 1714 The Tragedy of Jane Shore, dedicated to the Duke of Queensbury, opened at Drury Lane Theatre with Elizabeth Barry in the title role. Later, at the same theatre, the part was taken by Sarah Siddons, Mary Ann Yates and other leading actresses, while the play was so successful that it was performed regularly until the nineteenth century. Rowe described it as ‘written in imitation of Shakespeare’s style’, the predecessor whom he had studied and edited so carefully. Dr Johnson’s comment here was honest and straightforward: ‘In what he thought himself an imitator of Shakespeare, it is not easy to conceive; the numbers, the diction, the sentiments, and the conduct, everything in which imitation can consist are remote in the utmost degree from the manner of Shakespeare; whose dramas it resembles only as it is an English story and as some of the persons have their names in history’.5 One wonders, therefore, why the play was destined to have such an extended popularity, but the great critic made that clear: ‘This play, consisting chiefly of domestic scenes and private distress, lays hold upon the heart. The wife is forgiven because she repents, and the husband is honoured because he forgives. This, therefore, is one of those pieces which we still welcome on the stage.’6
Rowe’s five acts are not lengthy and move fast. King Edward is dead, and as Act I ends Jane entrusts her jewellery to Alicia, her close friend, who happens to be the mistress of Lord Hastings. Then she makes what can only be described as a feminist statement:
Why should I think that man will do for me
What yet he never did for wretches like me?
Mark by what partial justice we are judged;
Such is the fate unhappy women find,
And such the curse intail’d upon our kind,
That man, the lawless libertine, may rove,
Free and unquestion’d through the wilds of love;
While woman, sense and nature’s easy fool,
If poor weak woman swerve from virtue’s rule,
If strongly charm’d she leave the thorny way,
And in the softer paths of pleasure stray;
Ruin ensues, reproach and endless shame,
And one false step entirely damns her fame,
In vain with tears the loss she may deplore,
In vain look back on what she was before,
She sets, like stars that fall, to rise no more.7
If the word ‘feminism’, in its modern sense, was not used until 1895, Rowe, through Jane, was surely stating a feminist attitude here. He had not been led to support the cause of women as the result of any turmoil in his private life, he was merely forward-looking and presumably knew some contemporary women, the bluestockings as they were called, whose views must have interested him, including the poet Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, an unconscious feminist of the time.
Rowe was inventive in various ways, introducing new themes into the plot. Hastings has spoken to Gloucester on Jane’s behalf but he, still the ‘protector’, soon becomes hostile and ready to punish her. Rowe also gave his version of Shakespeare’s great scenes in the Tower (Act III, Scenes 4 and 5) where Jane is condemned to death, and Hastings of course is destined for the same fate. The audience knows, but Jane does not, that Hastings’ mistress Alicia, jealous of Jane, with whom Hastings has fallen in love, has betrayed her. Alicia pursues Hastings, still declaring her passion for him, but to no avail, it is too late. He will soon be dead.
The abandoned Jane comes to beg food from Alicia, who refuses to see her. Alicia’s servant Bellmour introduces Dumont, who is in fact Shore in disguise, still in love with Jane. Like Heywood before him Rowe changed the story to suit himself and presumably his audience: Shore does not die away from home, he has returned to London secretly and has been watching Jane closely, presumably hoping for a reunion. He has even rescued her from Hastings, who had tried to seduce her. But once more it is too late, for Jane is dying of hunger. The play ends with a melodramatic reconciliation scene in which Jane repents her desertion of Shore, who forgives her. He tries to feed her, but she is too weak to eat. Shore breaks away from the guards who have come for him (for he had disobeyed Richard by helping the destitute woman), and kisses Jane but she dies and he is led away. The dramatist had pleased the audience by inventing a kind of happy ending, even if Jane dies and her husband is destined to the same fate. No wonder Dr Johnson reported that this was ‘one of those pieces which we still welcome on the stage’. Towards the end of his essay on Rowe, in which he criticises him on various points, including the lack of high tragedy, he asks, ‘Whence then, has Rowe his reputation?’ His reply to himself and the reader is typical of Johnson and his age: ‘From the reasonableness and propriety of some of his scenes, on the elegance of his diction, and the suavity of his verse’.8 Johnson then makes it clear what aspects of his work he regards as valuable: ‘He seldom moves either to pity or terror, but he often elevates the sentiments; he seldom pierces the breast, but he always delights the ear, and often improves the understanding.’ He also adds a special mention of Jane Shore, for it portrayed the woman ‘who is always seen and heard with pity’. This play was, he thought, the one that truly had a marked effect on the audiences.
There was a Shakespearean element in The Tragedy of Jane Shore, as Rowe had made clear in his sub-title but he introduces a new theme by making Jane’s so-called ‘friend’, Alicia, the mistress of Hastings. Hastings’ attempt to seduce Jane, and her rescue by Shore in disguise was new, if improbable. Rowe’s play also provided roles for two actresses who both had to be first-class performers; that delighted the theatre audiences.
When Sarah Siddons played Jane the intensity of her acting must have been amazing: it brought about sobbing and shrieking from the women spectators, and men, after struggling to suppress their tears, ‘at length grew proud of indulging them’, as described by the memoir writer James Boaden, remembering the great actress in 1827.9 Ever since Elizabethan times the middle and upper classes had been shocked by the true story of how a middle-class woman had allowed herself to be seduced by a king and left her husband as a result. Then another king, her late seducer’s brother, had victimised and punished her as though she were a common harlot. Not even Shakespeare’s exclusion of her from his King Richard III lessened the concern about her fate expressed by so many ordinary readers and spectators, as her developing legend proves so clearly. Rowe, with the help of his actresses, had presented her story with inescapable realism, or so he hoped. The choice of Jane as a heroine never seemed to fail. Although he had many useful friends, including the young Alexander Pope and Richard Addison, Rowe suffered a few hostile critics, especially the journalist Charles Gildon, who at least noted the audience reaction to the Jane Shore play and its successor, the sad story of Lady Jane Grey, which ended with her execution. Gildon wrote that ‘The Whore found more favour with the Town than the Saint’. Hardly surprising, surely in fact inevitable.
The story of that unfortunate nine-day queen was perhaps too close in time for the audiences to relish it, especially the melodramatic realistic ending, when Lady Jane walked towards the scaffold, which could be seen on the stage. Her young husband had already been executed.
It may seem strange that a fifteenth-century young woman should mean so much to an eighteenth-century lawyer, classicist and Shakespearean editor, and that his work should later find so much success abroad, from Mexico City to Boston and Philadelphia, but Rowe was obviously a farsighted man who knew both political and literary history and also foresaw certain social changes. His career continued, and he was created Poet Laureate in 1715 in place of the poverty-stricken Nahum Tate, who had been reduced to living in the Royal Mint, presumably at public expense. Rowe had one more triumph although, unfortunately for him, the work concerned was not published until after his early death. This was the verse translation of the best, if unfinished, work by the Latin poet Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, AD 39–65) known as the Pharsalia, which recounts the civil war between Caesar and Pompey.
To return to The Tragedy of Jane Shore: after the play was a success in London it brought about an amazing amount of related writing, from more ballads, additional reviews and comments of various kinds to the Epilogue written by Anne Finch which had been spoken by Mrs Oldfield the day before the public premiere. Various rewritten versions of More’s early account of Jane were published and in 1719 there was a new send-up of the story, which was bound to happen at some time. ‘Jane Shore. A Celebrated Droll’ was followed by an immensely long title, ending ‘With the Comical and Diverting Humours of Sir Anthony Noodle, a Foolish Courtier, and His Man Weezel.’ Unfortunately no text for this intriguing piece has survived, but it was performed at least during the years 1719, 1723, 1727, 1733 and 1745. So Jane was not only a tragic figure, she could be good for a laugh too, as ‘Hudibras’ Butler had possibly discovered earlier. As for Jane, described earlier as the ‘merriest’ of Edward’s mistresses, she might possibly have been amused by her appearance as a ‘droll’.
It is hardly surprising perhaps that several of Rowe’s plays remained popular in England for a long time, but not as easy to understand the lasting success of Jane Shore abroad. However, news of its many performances in London crossed the Channel and in 1771 a German translation appeared, Jane Shore, ein Trauerspiel von Nicholas Rowe, Esqr. The translator’s name appears only as ‘S’, and there is no indication that the play was performed, although it was published in Lindforschen Schriften. In 1784 came the first translation into French, the work of the Baronne de Vasse, published in Paris, while performances in France had to wait until the next century, after three more translations had been published. That of 1797 acknowledged ‘Mr Row’ but was entitled ‘Jeanne Shore, or the triumph of fidelity to the country, and to royalty, tragedy in five acts’. The translator is acknowledged only by a set of initials.
The play continued to attract translators and in 1824 a French dramatist well known at the time was impressed by the story: this was a man with a grand name, Louis-Jean-Népomucène Lemercier (1771–1840), famous for the utterly boring quality of his many works. This did not prevent his success, including later election to the Academy, and in fact it might have helped him. Lemercier seems to have been left over from the eighteenth century. As a young man he had received the patronage of Marie-Antoinette’s friend Madame de Lamballe, who was torn to pieces by the mob for supporting the unpopular queen, but Lemercier had a first triumph in the theatre when he was only seventeen: he had written a tragedy about Meleager, the Greek poet. He then entitled his new play Richard III and Jane Shore, historical drama in five acts and in verse, in imitation of Shakespeare and Rowe. The manuscript of what is presumably the second edition, also in 1824, has been preserved in the French National Archives, but the name of Richard III was dropped from the title.
In one sense, Lemercier’s life and character were much more interesting than his plays, for he at least thought for himself and would not accept obedience to any monarch who revealed dangerous signs of tyranny: he refused to take the oath to Napoleon. He based his whole existence on the ideas of the eighteenth-century philosophes and had perhaps been impressed by Jane’s independent decision to desert her husband and also by the tyranny of Richard III, which it was his duty to condemn. When Lemercier died his place in the Academy was taken by Victor Hugo.
Another translation of Rowe’s drama appeared in 1824, prepared by a captain in the royal artillery, and also preserved in the French National Archives. It was apparently produced at the second of the two national theatres in the same year: in fact this was Jane Shore’s year in Paris, for 19 April saw what must have been an extraordinary event at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin: this was a ‘melodrama in three acts, à grand spectacle’, complete with music, a ballet and special scenery. Such an adaptation of Jane’s story may have pleased the Parisian public, for this was the Romantic period and all was grist to the theatrical impresarios of the time: any highly coloured dramatic theme could be made popular. England too was popular in some ways, for three years later Rowe’s drama was included in a series of ‘English plays produced in Paris’. Further translations into French are listed at the British Library, and there was further travel for Jane, Shakespeare and Rowe, when Lemercier’s play took the fancy of opera composers and librettists in Italy. One Ferdinando Livini wrote an opera libretto which was published in 1829, and the same year saw Giovanna Shore, melodramma serio in tre atti produced at La Scala with a libretto by Antonio Fontana and music by Carlo Conti.
After the Italians, the Spanish were impressed by the dramatic story of Jane, and Felice Romani composed another melodramma serio, again with a libretto by Antonio Fontana. This was produced in Mexico City at the Teatro Principal in 1827, and one edition of the work was printed with Spanish and Italian text on facing pages. For this production the music was composed by Lauro Rossi, an immensely prolific composer. Professor Harner, who has bravely explored all these post-Rowe developments, has also noted three other operas entitled Giovanna Shore, two of them in Italian and one in French. (Details can be found in The Dictionary Catalogue of Opera and Operettas edited by John Towers and published in 1910 with a New York reprint in 1967.) These seem to be the last-known adaptations of Jane Shore’s story as dramatised by Rowe but it should not be forgotten that on 30 October 1819 the play had been performed at the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia and it was also published there. It is amusing to note that the performance was followed by ‘the comic opera of Love laughs at locksmiths’. Perhaps the audience needed some light-hearted entertainment after the sadness of Jane’s repentance and death.
The next century, however, was to add further new dimensions to Jane’s past existence which persistently returned to the present. As late as 1901 in France a play was written about her by Eugène Morand, a popular dramatist, Vance Thompson and Marcel Schwob. The latter was a well-known intellectual of the time who became a friend of the writer Colette. Described by Maria M. Scott as ‘a melodramatic tour de force of hysterical proportions’, it was never published or performed but has survived through a manuscript deposited in the Library of Congress in 1901.
But this was still not the end of the Jane Shore story.