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Persuasions #15, 1993 Pages 37-41
Jane Austen’s Use of Measure for Measure in Sense and
Sensibility STEPHEN DERRY
Bishopston, Bristol, UK In Mansfield Park, Edmund Bertram declares that “one is familiar
with Shakespeare in a degree … from one’s earliest years. His celebrated passages are quoted by every
body … we all talk Shakespeare, use his similes, and describe with his
descriptions.”1 Jane Austen
certainly had a thorough knowledge of his work, and over the years a large
amount has been written about Shakespeare’s influence on her novels and the
significance of her allusions to his plays.
To cite just a few examples: Pride and Prejudice has been seen as
drawing on Much Ado About Nothing and Romeo and Juliet; the
significance of the allusion to Henry VIII in Mansfield Park has
been discussed, and the novel’s possible indebtedness to King Lear
explored; Emma appears to have been influenced by A Midsummer Night’s
Dream and Persuasion has been compared with Twelfth Night, The
Tempest, and the Sonnets.2
In Jane Austen’s last work, the uncompleted Sanditon, there may
be fleeting recollections of Shakespeare in the literary mélange spouted
by Sir Edward Denham, with his references to “samphire” (King Lear) and
“mariners … overwhelmed by the sudden tempest”3 (The Tempest). Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen’s first published novel, also
contains references to Shakespeare.
Willoughby promises to keep for Marianne’s use a horse named “Queen
Mab.” This name may have been intended
ironically. In Romeo and Juliet,
Mercutio says of Queen Mab that …
she gallops night by night Through
lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love.4 Mercutio states that “dreamers often lie” (I,
iv, 51);told “thou talk’st of nothing” (I, iv, 96) he replies “I talk of
dreams” (I, iv, 96). If the name “Queen
Mab” recalls this exchange, then the implications are that Marianne’s hopes of
future happiness with Willoughby will have all the substances of dreams, and
that they will come to nothing.
Dream-lovers like Willoughby, like dreamers, can lie. When Willoughby goes away unexpectedly from the
vicinity of Barton, he leaves unfinished his reading of Hamlet. Tony Tanner noted of this: “One guesses he
had perhaps arrived at the point where Hamlet inexplicably rejects Ophelia.”5 As a result of this rejection, Ophelia goes
mad, and commits suicide. Willoughby’s
rejection causes Marianne great emotional anguish and trauma, and she comes
close to both breakdown and death; later she says that had she died, “it would
have been self-destruction.”6
It may also be noted that the duel between Hamlet and Laërtes has its
equivalent in the off-stage duel fought by Willoughby and Colonel Brandon over
another of the former’s victims, Eliza.
Both the Shakespeare references therefore prefigure plot developments in
the novel. A play not mentioned in Sense and
Sensibility, but which appears to have influenced it, is King Lear. Cecil Seronsy has seen a parallel between King
Lear II, iv, and chapter 2 of Sense and Sensibility. In this scene in King Lear, Goneril and
Regan tell their father that they will not accommodate his one hundred
followers; they reduce the number that they regard as acceptable first to
fifty, then to twenty-five, then ten, then five, and finally to none. In chapter 2 of Jane Austen’s novel, John
Dashwood, who has promised his dying father that he will assist his
half-sisters and their mother, reduces this assistance, stage by stage, to
nothing at all, under the influence of his wife. Seronsy remarked that “common to both scenes are parsimony and
meanness and the circumstances of children acting in bad faith.”7 King Lear I, i, may have influenced
the first chapter of Sense and Sensibility: both deal with the unjust
decisions of a foolish fond old man, and the consequent disinheritance of the
virtuous. However, despite all the attention that has
been paid to Shakespearean sources, no critic seems to have noticed that the
play with the most parallels in Sense and Sensibility is Measure for
Measure, even though these parallels are considerable enough to suggest
strongly that Jane Austen had the play in mind when writing her novel. Marianne Dashwood resembles both Mariana and
Isabella. Like her near-namesake
Mariana, she is the victim of a heartless jilt. Like Mariana, too, she has been abandoned because her fortune is
insufficient. Mariana has withdrawn to
the melancholy environment of her moated grange, where she broods on her
desertion and her misery. Marianne reacts
in much the same way, hugging her unhappiness to herself, living as reclusively
as possible in London. Cleveland, the
Palmers’ house in Somerset, to which she goes after leaving London, becomes her
equivalent of the moated grange; there she indulges her misery with “solitary
rambles” (303) and “twilight walks” (305) in damp weather. Like Isabella, Marianne is very young (they
are actually about the same age) and has all the absolutism of youth;
Marianne’s very decided and rather unrealistic ideas about romance are the
equivalent of Isabella’s pronounced, somewhat unworldly views on chastity. Isabella’s religious enthusiasm – she is a
novice nun – has its parallel in Marianne’s sensibility, her “passion for dead
leaves” (88). Both women experience a crisis
which challenges, and indeed shatters, their world-view. Isabella finds she cannot trust either
Claudio or Angelo; Marianne is betrayed by the man she has trusted totally,
Willoughby. In Measure for Measure, Angelo is
outwardly respectable; so too is Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility. Angelo is both a jilt and a would-be seducer;
Willoughby seduced Eliza in addition to jilting Marianne. Angelo calls Isabella a “saint,” Willoughby
says Marianne is an “angel.” In both
works, their guilty secrets are known to an older man – the Duke, Colonel
Brandon – who, nevertheless, delays exposing them. At the end of the play, Angelo is married to
Mariana, the woman he has jilted. In Sense
and Sensibility, Willoughby’s marriage to Sophia makes it impossible – even
were it desirable – for him to marry Marianne.
However, Elinor does feel a brief wish that he might be free to make
amends, when he pays his remorseful visit to Cleveland; for a moment, the end
of Measure for Measure is glimpsed.
(Jane Austen will use it, but with a different emphasis.) Willoughby describes his wife as being like
the “devil” and declares that “domestic happiness is out of the question”
(332). Jane Austen is here using
marriage as a kind of punishment, and this recalls the end of Measure for
Measure, where the Duke punishes Lucio by marrying him to a whore. Isabella marries the Duke, an older man and
a figure of authority, who has been handing out rewards and punishments in the
final act. Marianne marries Colonel
Brandon, a man twice her age, who has punished Willoughby by duelling with him,
and who has rewarded Edward Ferrars for his constancy by bestowing a living on
him. Maliciously comic unexpected substitutions
occur in both works: by the “bed-trick” Angelo sleeps with Mariana rather than
with Isabella; Lucy marries Robert rather than his brother Edward, deceiving
the Ferrars family and sending a spitefully ambiguous message to Elinor. These substitutions save Isabella and Elinor
from what they each, respectively, fear most – Angelo’s touch, Edward’s
marriage to Lucy. In both works, too,
the villain repudiates and humiliates a woman he has wronged in a public place:
Willoughby when he encounters Marianne at a party, Angelo when confronted by
Isabella before the assembled cast in the final act. Both the Vienna of Measure for Measure
and the London of Sense and Sensibility are capitals that are centres of
cynicism and corruption; both the play and the novel depict darkly comic worlds
in which money and illicit sex are dominant motivating factors. (Possibly the name “Lucy” was suggested by
“Lucio” – both are cynical worldlings.)
The shadow of death hangs over a character in both works – Claudio,
Marianne. Critics of both the play and the novel have
objected to their endings, and in similar ways. Charlotte Lennox, the eighteenth-century novelist and critic (whose
work on Shakespeare Jane Austen possibly knew8) remarked that Measure
for Measure was “absolutely Defective in a due Distribution of Rewards and
Punishments.”9 John Halperin
recently wrote that “There is no wholesale meting out of poetic justice at the
end of Sense and Sensibility …
The evil continue to prosper as unfailingly as the virtuous.”10 (It is possible to argue with both of these
judgements: what is pertinent is their similarity.) Reviewing the general critical tradition regarding Measure for
Measure, Rosalind Miles noted that “Shakespeare has often been rebuked for
distorting his characters in order to bring about a mindless and meaningless
‘happy ending’.”11 Tony
Tanner has spoken for a number of critics of Sense and Sensibility when
referring to “the weakest part of the book – the way Marianne is disposed of at
the end. She is married off to Brandon
to complete a pattern … Her energy is
sacrificed to the overriding geometry.”12 It is possible that Jane Austen, writing a tragicomic novel, was
deliberately imitating a Shakespearean tragicomedy in giving her work such an
“unsatisfactory” ending. Alternatively,
assuming that she had recognized that there was a problem with Measure for
Measure, she may have thought that she had solved her corresponding
difficulty: after all, Marianne has long been aware of Colonel Brandon’s
devotion, she has been chastened by illness, and is perhaps coerced by her
family; in contrast, the Duke’s offer of marriage is sprung upon Isabella as
unexpectedly as it is upon the audience.
But many critics have obviously still found the ending, despite the
rationale, objectionable or unconvincing. References to Shakespeare are frequent in
eighteenth-century fiction, but not many novels are actually structured in imitation
of his plays. However, when Jane Austen
first drafted Sense and Sensibility in 1795-96, and when she rewrote it
in 1797-98 (the generally accepted dates: undoubtedly some revision was done
later), she would have had the examples of two recent Gothic novelists to draw
upon. Ann Radcliffe’s works are
saturated with Shakespeare, especially with the tragedies. Shakespeare’s influence is especially
notable in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Even more pertinently, in between drafts Jane Austen could have
read Matthew Gregory Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796) – a work praised by
John Thorpe in Northanger Abbey.
Ambrosio, the hero-villain of the novel, is beyond doubt modelled upon
Angelo. The extent to which Jane Austen
rewrote Sense and Sensibility – originally entitled Elinor and
Marianne and supposedly told in epistolary form – in 1797-98 is uncertain;
it is possible that the idea of drawing upon Measure for Measure may
have been a response to a reading of The Monk. Whatever the truth, it is both an interesting comment upon the
nature of literary indebtedness, and upon Shakespeare’s influence on the
imaginations of two of his most creative readers, that two such different
novels as The Monk and Sense and Sensibility should draw heavily
upon the same source. NOTES 1 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. R. W. Chapman, 3rd edn.
(London: Oxford U.P., 1934), 338. 2 For Much Ado About Nothing and Pride and Prejudice see
Juliet McMaster, “Love and Pedagogy,” Jane Austen Today, ed. Joel
Weinsheimer (Athens, Ga: U. of Georgia P., 1975), 64-92, and Jocelyn Harris, Jane
Austen’s Art of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1989), 109-10; for Romeo
and Juliet and Pride and Prejudice see Alan Hertz, “Dancing, Romeo
and Juliet, and Pride and Prejudice,” Notes and Queries, ns
29 (1982), 206-08; for Henry VIII and King Lear and Mansfield
Park see Margaret Kirkham, Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction (Brighton:
Harvester, 1983), 112-16; for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Emma
see David Kubal, The Consoling Intelligence: Responses to Literary
Modernism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U.P., 1982), 33-51, and Harris,
169-87; for Twelfth Night and Persuasion see Richard Simpson,
“Jane Austen,” North British Review 52 ( 1870), 144; for The Tempest
and Persuasion see Nina Auerbach, “O Brave New World: Evolution and
Revolution in Persuasion,” ELH 39 (1972), 112-13; for the Sonnets
and Persuasion see Harris, 192. 3 Jane Austen, Minor Works, ed. R. W. Chapman (London: Oxford
U.P., 1954), 398. 4 Romeo and Juliet, I, iv, 71.
All quotations are from: William Shakespeare, The Complete Works,
ed. Peter Alexander (London: Collins, 1951).
Subsequent references are incorporated into the text. 5 Tony Tanner, “Introduction,” Sense and Sensibility
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 24. 6 Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. R. W. Chapman, 3rd
edn. (London: Oxford U.P., 1933),
345. Subsequent references are
incorporated into the text. 7 Cecil C. Seronsy, “Jane Austen’s Technique,” Notes and Queries, ns 3 (1956), 305. 8 Jane Austen certainly knew her fiction; she refers to Charlotte
Lennox’s novel The Female Quixote in a letter of January 1807; she had
obviously read it before. See Jane
Austen’s Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others, ed. R. W. Chapman, 2nd
edn. (London: Oxford U.P., 1952), 173. 9 Charlotte Lennox, Shakespeare Illustrated, 3 vols. (London,
1753), I: 36-37. 10 John Halperin, The Life of Jane Austen (Brighton:
Harvester, 1984), 84. 11 Rosalind Miles, The Problem of Measure for Measure (London:
Vision, 1976), 22. 12 Tanner, 31. |
