Home › | Jane Austen › | Austen Chat Podcast › | Austen Chat: Episode 24

Austen Chat: Episode 24

June 5, 2025

Jane Austen & Shakespeare: A Visit with Mary Floyd-Wilson

"'The course of true love never did run smooth'—A Hartfield edition of Shakespeare would have a long note on that passage.” —Emma

William Shakespeare Portrait Shakespeare's influence on Jane Austen can be seen throughout her novels and letters. She quotes him, mimics him, and echoes him in fascinating ways. In this episode, Professor Mary Floyd-Wilson helps us unpack and examine the many parallels between these two pillars of English literature.

Mary Floyd-Wilson is the Mann Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She specializes in Shakespeare and early modern literature, with works including English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama and Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage. Recently, she received the George H. Johnson Prize for Distinguished Achievement from the Institute for the Arts and Humanities.

Show Notes and Links

Many thanks to Mary for joining us on Austen Chat!

Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

[Theme music]

Breckyn Wood: Hello, Janeites, and welcome to Austen Chat, a podcast brought to you by the Jane Austen Society of North America. I'm your host, Breckyn Wood from the Georgia Region of JASNA. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears, because today we're talking about Austen and the Bard, aka William Shakespeare. My guest for this episode is Mary Floyd-Wilson. Mary holds the position of Mann Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She specializes in Shakespeare and early modern literature, with works including English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama, and Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage, and she is currently writing The Tempter or the Tempted: Demonic Causality on the Shakespearean Stage. Recently, she received the George H. Johnson Prize for Distinguished Achievement by an IAH Fellow from the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. In her own words, she's a Shakespeare scholar but an Austen fan, so she is the perfect person to chat with about the many parallels between these two pillars of English literature. Welcome to the show, Mary.

Mary Floyd-Wilson: Thank you so much, Breckyn. I'm really excited to be here. This will be fun.

Breckyn: I've been wanting to do a Shakespeare episode for a long time, so I am thrilled that you're here. Okay, Mary, let's get Shakespearean.

Mary: All right!

Breckyn: I want to start with this quote from Mansfield Park, and we can read it aloud together like a little play. So, I will play the part of Henry Crawford, and you can be Edmund Bertram. Okay?

Mary: Okay.

Breckyn: “Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman’s constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct. No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately."

Mary: “No doubt one is familiar with Shakespeare in a degree. . . from one’s earliest years. His celebrated passages are quoted by everybody; they are in half the books we open, and we all talk Shakespeare, use his similes, and describe with his descriptions; but this is totally distinct from giving his sense as you gave it. To know him in bits and scraps is common enough; to know him pretty thoroughly is, perhaps, not uncommon; but to read him well aloud is no everyday talent."

Breckyn: "Sir, you do me honor." End scene. That was great. What do you think of this quote, Mary?

Mary: Well, I think from certain perspectives, maybe with some qualifiers, they're both right. I mean, I would say that Crawford makes a point for a certain class of English men versus, say, Americans, and women now, I would say, too. By way of their education, they definitely have a lot of familiarity with Shakespearean quotations and characters—sometimes completely lifted out of context, right? And I have found this to be true when the English students—students from England—make their way into my classroom. I would say for American students, they also know Shakespeare in bits and pieces. They're going to know a little Hamlet or a little Romeo and Juliet without maybe even having seen the play or read it. They may know memes, right? A man in tights holding a skull, that kind of thing, or cartoons of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. I definitely think what Edmund says is very true. I think that even actors are not necessarily very good at reading Shakespeare.

Breckyn: There is a huge difference between watching Shakespeare done badly and Shakespeare done well. And you, as the audience, can tell whether or not the actors know what they're saying. It's astounding, the difference. I live near Atlanta, and we have the Atlanta—the Shakespeare Tavern, which—I love it. Those actors—they know Shakespeare, because I will watch it, and I will understand, even though I sometimes struggle with the Shakespearean language, because they are so good at, like Edmund says, giving the sense of what Shakespeare means.

Mary: I think that's absolutely right. I couldn't agree with you more. I've gone to productions where you could tell that the actors did not quite know what they were saying, or they had been trained simply to read with the rhythm of the speeches without really giving much sense to what the meaning—

Breckyn: Or when they end on the line, even though the sentence doesn't end at the end. You're like, "No, you got to keep going. You can't just end on the rhyme."

Mary: That's right. Yeah. I'm very keen on reading Shakespeare aloud in my classroom. I'm sure—whenever we're analyzing a passage, I make sure that I read it aloud to them so that they can get a sense of what the meaning is before we dig into it, sometimes glossing along the way what the meaning is. And I also am very, very keen as well on having them watch good Shakespeare. I have them watch the Globe Theater productions. And I even tell them, "If you want to read along while you watch the play, that's a way to really get the meaning and grasp it on the first read-through."

Breckyn: And I would say I think the number one mistake that actors make when trying to do Shakespeare is they go too fast. I think they want to just rush through it because they're like, "I don't really know what I'm saying. I just want to get all the words out." I'm like, "No, you got to pause. You got to give the words space."

Mary: That's right. And they're having dialogs. I mean, they're having conversations. These are people that are being represented, and it should feel like people being represented, and not some stick figure that is spouting words.

Breckyn: Like cardboard cutouts.

Mary: Right. I also wanted to talk about this scene a little bit just in terms of the implications of what they're saying for what's going on in Mansfield Park.

Breckyn: Sure. Yeah. Let's talk about the Austen side now.

Mary: This is really the moment, I think—and you, I think, would agree—where Fanny comes the closest to actually really liking Henry, right?

Breckyn: Falling for him against her better judgment.

Mary: We may be nervous even on her behalf here. I think that it's because she's taking pleasure in his talent. And I think it's also really interesting that this is a moment in which Austen uses the word "charm," not just as being charming, but almost as though there's a magical hold on her listening to Henry do these parts so well, that, as soon as that book is closed, that charm is broken. I think the book is very—I mean, talking about Shakespeare in relation to Mansfield Park, we have to talk about how anti-theatrical the book is. It's very against what theater is in a number of ways. And of course, we're supposed to understand that Henry's—his facility with reading Shakespeare is somehow linked to his disingenuousness.

Breckyn: He's just an actor.

Mary: Yes. He can slip in and out of any part he wants to play at any time. And so, this is suspect. I thought it was really interesting, too, to reconsider how, for women in particular, you were not supposed to be involved in theatrics. The immorality of it for a woman was just even greater, that it was really compromising. And it's so interesting, too, because this is the start of the downfall of Maria, and it's also the only place where we do see Edmund's moral code softening in terms of getting involved.

Breckyn: There's so much happening with the theatrics. It's the web that Jane Austen is weaving. I do feel like Mansfield Park is the most Shakespearean, just in how complicated its plot is, and how many characters there are, and how many different things are happening. It's the only one where somebody actually goes somewhere far away. We've got Antigua in the background sort of influencing things, and that's kind of Shakespearean, too. I mean, for most of the time, Jane Austen's characters are all in one very small part of England. But that almost feels like The Tempest or something, right? Overseas, something is happening.

Mary: Forces also greater than what's taking place in the drawing room—that there are, whether we call these forces Fortune or Providence or what have you—that is quite Shakespearean to have these things taking place that are moving characters or changing the plot in some way that's beyond just gossip and conversation among family and friends.

Breckyn: Yeah. And that interesting use, the double use of Fortune, right? You're talking about Fate, but also his fortunes are tied up in the plantations and the enslaved people over in Antigua. I feel like that comes up a lot in Shakespeare, right? Certainly, in The Merchant of Venice, it's, like, their ships, are they going to crash? Are they going to lose all of their money? Like the family's fortunes are tied up in this thing that's controlled by Fate and by Fortune.

Mary: Exactly.

Breckyn: Well, okay. So, there's so much we could talk about, but to narrow the scope a bit, we've decided to focus on three Shakespeare plays and two Austen novels: King Lear, All's Well That Ends Well, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and then Emma and Mansfield Park. I'm reasonably familiar with Lear and Midsummer, but I know next to nothing about All's Well, so much so that I kept calling it As You Like It in our emails to each other and I had to Google and be like, "Wait, those aren't the same plays."

Mary: Funnily enough, I started thinking about As You Like It in Emma. I started coming up with things, but I'm happy to talk about All's Well.

Breckyn: Sure. Okay. Could you start by giving a brief overview of All's Well That Ends Well and explaining some of the links to Mansfield Park? For instance, I didn't even know until preparing for this that one of the main characters was named Bertram. That's really cool.

Mary: Yes. So All's Well That Ends Well—it's based on a story from Boccaccio, and it begins—I think it's important to know how it begins because that determines the trajectory of the whole play. It begins with the death of Bertram's father. He has just died. Bertram's father has just died, and his mother, who is the Countess of Narbonne [also known as Countess of Rousillon/Roussillon/Rossillion], is in mourning, grieving the loss of her husband, but she's also having to say goodbye to Bertram, her son, because, since he's lost his father, Bertram has now become the ward of the King, meaning the King is now his guardian, and the King basically gets to tell him what to do. So, he has to go to court. So, he's heading off to court. Meanwhile, Helena, who is the female protagonist—she lives in the same home, and the Countess, Bertram's mother, is her surrogate guardian. And we learn that she has also lost a father recently, so she seems to be in mourning, but it turns out that she's not really in mourning, she's just sad because she's secretly in love with Bertram, and he's leaving the court.

Breckyn: So, Helena is like the Fanny Price parallel, right?

Mary: Yes, that's exactly right.

Breckyn: She's the poor relation, falls in love with the rich son of the family. Named Bertram.

Mary: Yes. Unlike Fanny, I would say Helena is quite resourceful in how she goes about getting her way. She's very vexed at first by this class distinction between her and Bertram, and can't seem to figure out, "How can I surmount it?" And then she comes up with this rather—I mean, I've always found it to be a circuitous plan. Since her father was a doctor, she inherited all of his medical cures, and it turns out that the King is quite ill. So, she's going to follow Bertram to the court and offer to cure the King in exchange for him granting a request from her that she could choose anyone in the court to marry.

Breckyn: She's going to entrap him into marrying her? That is very unFanny.

Mary: Very unFanny. I mean, I would say that they share a kind of determinism, in terms of being like they are, I think, quite—they adhere in some ways persistently to their positions. Helena, once she decides she's going to get Bertram, is not going to waver. And, of course, Fanny in her moral rectitude, I would say, is quite fixed.

Breckyn: And her unwillingness—even if she's not going to pursue him, she is unwilling to consider any other options. Her heart is fully focused on Edmund.

Mary: Oh, yes. She will never stop loving Edmund; you're right. And I think that is another parallel. And so what happens is she cures the King. The King allows her to choose her husband. She chooses Bertram, and Bertram is not happy. And so Bertram pretends to be going along with it, then he runs off to war. They are married—technically married—but he leaves her in the court and sends back this note that's just—Bertram is just a really problematic character. But he sends this note to her that basically says that, if she can manage to get the family ring that he wears off her finger and bear a child by him, then she can have him. But if not, then—

Breckyn: But he refuses to consummate the marriage, so it's impossible, and he has to trick her—she has to trick him into getting into bed with her. It's very Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors.

Mary: Oh, yes. And so, she does then, by way of both a bed trick and pretending to be dead at one point—

Breckyn: That's always a good trick.

Mary: She manages to basically rope Bertram in at the end where he is compelled to accept her. But this is, I think, an important similarity between the two works is the audience dissatisfaction with the ending. People hate the ending of All's Well.

Breckyn: Oh, do they?

Mary: Yes. And I think that there's a very strong response to the ending of Mansfield Park, too. And the incestuous undertones of both, right, is that, basically, Bertram is a kind of sibling to Helena in the same way that Edmund and Fanny are sort of siblings. And for Bertram, it seems like he's the one who's really resisting this because of that. He's basically—he's also a snob. He does not want to be with her because she's poor in her birth. So that's another similarity, too—not coming, of course, from Edmund, but all of the slights and dismissals that Fanny gets because of her poor background. Helena does suffer from those as well, but the King has brought her up and said, "She's worthy if I say she's worthy," but Bertram doesn't think that she is.

Breckyn: So, does he sort of, reluctantly, say, "Oh, I guess you'll do"? Because that's how I feel Mansfield Park ends. It's like that line about he just has to learn to prefer blue eyes to brown just fills us all with rage. How dare you?

Mary: And, interestingly, Bertram's last few lines are phrased in a hypothetical. Basically, "if you can make me know this clearly, then I will love you ever dearly." It's like this, "If you can tell me, how did you achieve this? Then maybe I'll have to reconcile myself into this marriage, if you can explain how you managed to bring it about."

Breckyn: Well, that's interesting, but I would like to move into a play that I actually know something about. I think more people will be familiar with King Lear since it's one of the biggies. Proud foolish king divides his kingdom between his two eldest daughters. He dispossesses his youngest daughter because she won't flatter him. Chaos ensues. Everybody dies, yada, yada, yada. I have never before noticed the parallels between Lear and Mansfield Park. I never really thought about it. But, since reading some of your work and that of other Austen scholars, they're everywhere. Can you share some of the similarities between those two? We're going to stay on Mansfield Park, and then we'll transition to Emma later.

Mary: Yeah, sure. I think that it's been a pretty commonplace recognition among critics to see some parallels. I think the parallel comes mostly in the Cinderella structure of the play and book—that you have these two, quote, unquote "bad daughters" and the "good daughter." I think the resonance of Cordelia with Fanny is the main correspondence, I would say. I mean, some people do see a little bit of Lear's tyrannical nature in Mr. Bertram.

Breckyn: In Sir Thomas.

Mary: Sir Thomas, yes. But I'm not sure that I would push that that far. I mean, he comes across as gruff, but, I mean, Lear is terrible.

Breckyn: Lear is just a bad person.

Mary: Yeah. I think another way in which maybe the works intersect beyond that character/plot structure is I think they're both very interested in nature versus nurture. What is it that produces good moral character? Why is Cordelia so good and her sisters so bad? In their case, they were all brought up the same way. With Fanny, we have, okay, she was born to different circumstances, and then—how old is she? Ten, nine when she arrived?

Breckyn: Yeah, she's about that age.

Mary: Yeah. When she arrives at Mansfield Park. And we do get to see her childhood, and we can assess, maybe, how it's maybe less nurture than nature in her resistance, really, to some of the things that she experiences in the household. We don't get that vision, of course, in Lear. We have to conjecture as to what the childhood of Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia may have been like. There's some reference to it. We do hear Goneril and Regan discussing their father and an assessment of his character—that he has always "slenderly known himself", and he's always had a bad temper, and that Cordelia has always been the favorite.

I do think some of those things could shape, perhaps, how siblings would relate to one another, and maybe produce different moral characters. I think, though, that in King Lear there's also a sense of astrological determinism, too, or the question of whether the stars themselves condition who we are.

Breckyn: Well, and that question of nature versus nurture that you brought up, I think is so interesting because it does seem on the surface that Fanny is just fundamentally dispositionally different from Maria and Julia Bertram. They, she's—I don't want to use unflattering terms because I really like Fanny, but she's very quiet. She's a little mousey. She's scared. She's anxious. I mean, those all do seem internal. But Jane Austen is very deliberate in the narration, multiple times pointing out that, no, the reason that Fanny is different from Maria and Julia is because of how she was treated, because of how she was educated. Maria and Julia were indulged in everything. Nobody ever told them no. They got everything they wanted. Mrs. Norris is always building them up and puffing them up, and just crushing Fanny under her boot. And so there—I mean, it's in the text. Jane Austen will say Fanny received a moral education or sought one out herself, whereas Maria and Julia were just left to their own devices and were never made to have any sort of self-control, or self-discipline, or humility, or gratitude, or any of those—she calls them, "less common virtues".

Mary: Well, their father is the one who really decides that that's the case, right? In his moral reassessment at the end of the book where he's reviewing what he thinks—where things went awry with his daughters, and he does conclude that that is the case.

Breckyn: Well, okay. We're already dancing around this, but I want to—you gave a presentation, and in it you mentioned how sibling conflict is at the heart of a lot of Shakespeare's plays—specifically the puzzle that children from the same parents can be so completely different, which is what we've been talking about. You have this great quote from Miranda from The Tempest when she says, "Good wombs have born bad sons." It was such a great line, and I immediately thought of many examples in Jane Austen. So, what does Shakespeare have to say about sibling rivalries, and why does this keep coming up, and why are siblings from the same womb so different and so at odds with each other?

Mary: Yeah. I think that it's a mystery in some ways to Shakespeare. I think he puts it at the center of several tragic or potentially tragic conflicts in the plays. All you have to do is think of Claudius and Hamlet Sr., Richard III and his brothers, Edmund and Edgar in King Lear, but also Goneril and Regan in King Lear. As You Like It has two pairs of brothers who are at odds: Orlando and Oliver, and Duke Frederick and Duke Sr.. Antonio and Prospero in The Tempest, the Prince and Don John in Much Ado About Nothing, Bianca and Kate in Taming of the Shrew. What I find really fascinating about these rivalries—particularly, I think, in some of the ones between brothers—is that Shakespeare seems to be very interested in investigating what it is that produces evil? Where does a certain very strong animosity or hatred come from? And I do think there's some allusion in many of these pairings to Cain and Abel, and that there's kind of a root of—I think with Hamlet, in particular, for example, it is the very root of the corruption in Denmark that a brother has killed a brother.

Breckyn: That almost original—not original sin, because that was in the Garden of Eden, but the next one, like the second original sin.

Mary: Well, Shakespeare uses the word primal in relation to it, so that it's a primal sin. And so, I think there's an exploration in Shakespeare's plays about that kind of evil and is it completely fixed? Does it just erupt in some people in a predetermined way? You might think about The Tempest where Prospero has been so—maybe with some good reason, but still—so horribly betrayed by his brother, and he seeks revenge over losing his place, his dukedom, but also to get back at what his brother has done in that betrayal. But he does not ever get Antonio's repentance. It's Prospero who has to forgive without actually getting any kind of real emotional response from him.

Breckyn: In Mansfield Park, the reconciliation between the Bertram brothers is Tom getting really sick, right? I think that's probably a common trope. That's what finally knocks some sense into Marianne in Sense and Sensibility. You get deathly ill, you're at death's door, and it makes you examine your life, and examine your choices, and maybe think that you should have done things a little bit differently.

Mary: Right. And I think one of the things that the narrator says in Mansfield Park is that he had never suffered before, Tom. And so, it was necessary, in a sense, for him to suffer in order to find some sort of moral compass.

Breckyn: None of his choices had ever had consequences before. Well, just to go back to the siblings a bit and the nature versus nurture, what came to mind for me was also the Ferrars brothers, Edward Ferrars and his younger brother, Robert, in Sense and Sensibility. You know, Edward is so kind, and so charming, and such a good man, and his brother is just this coxcomb. He's a total fop. He's insufferable. But you wonder, how did,—oh, and also their sister, Fanny Dashwood, is just the worst. She's so selfish and awful. And so, you wonder, "How did Edward come from this family of just selfish, arrogant, self-centered monsters?" But then we get another line in the narration where Robert is saying that, "Oh, yeah, actually, the reason that Edward and I are so different is because I had a public education." He went out to school, whereas Edward was privately tutored. I don't know if you can actually attribute it to that, because it was also what led Edward to getting engaged to Lucy Steele and that causing him a bunch of problems. But I think it’s interesting; Jane Austen isn't willing to just ascribe it to nature or nurture.

The same with Shakespeare, like, "Let's leave it gray." There's always a question there or a bit of a mystery.

Mary: I mean, you could say, I guess, similar things about the Bennet sisters, right? Some major differences there.

Breckyn: Absolutely. Well, let's talk about—those are some heavy dark ones. Let's talk about Emma now, because Emma is really fun, and we'll talk about Midsummer, too. So, here is a quote from Emma. Emma is talking to Harriet Smith. She says, "You and Mr. Elton are by situation called together. You belong to one another by every circumstance of your respective homes; your marrying will be equal to the match at Randalls. There does seem to be a something in the air of Hartfield, which gives love exactly the right direction and sends it into the very channel where it ought to flow." The course of true love never did run smooth."—A Hartfield edition of Shakespeare would have a long note on that passage." Emma is, of course, wrong here, as she almost always is, because things are not going to go smoothly for poor Harriet. But what do you think of that quote of Midsummer Night's Dream? What do you think of that allusion?

Mary: Well, I do think that it is a signal, a sign that Emma is yet again wrong and that we are in for some real chaos and more misperceptions. You know she's—Emma constantly believes that people are in love who are not in love at all. One thing that I think is interesting is going back to the full conversation that Lysander and Hermia are having in A Midsummer Night's Dream in relation to this quote, when he offers this up because he then goes on to name—they both do—the various obstacles that do get in the way of lovers. And I think it actually anticipates the conflicts in Austen's novels to some degree. They say that couples can be mismatched because they are, quote, "different in blood, too high to be enthralled to low, or else misgraffèd in respective years, too old to be engaged to young, or else it stood upon the choice of friends to choose love by another's eyes, or if there were a sympathy in choice, war, death, or sickness did lay siege to it." So, I think that in thinking about the ways in which Emma has meddled in Harriet's love life, it is her conceiving of matches certainly that are too different in blood.

It's also that she errs in thinking that she can choose who her friend should love. I think perhaps the quotation from A Midsummer Night's Dream that Austen's readers might have thought of in response to this is, "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" Which is what Puck, of course, says about the mismatching and chaos that erupts.

Breckyn: Everybody running after the wrong person. So that's why I had, again, never thought of the parallels between Emma and Midsummer. I guess I just—I haven't lined up Shakespeare and Austen next to each other. But once you do, the papers write themselves. But somebody pointed out that, it's just—Emma is different pairs of lovers who are misunderstanding each other and running after each other in the wrong direction. But then in the end, it all—it is a comedy of sorts. Everybody gets married in the end, and everything works out in the way that a Shakespeare comedy: everybody gets married in the end, it all works out. I thought that was a really interesting parallel, that they're sort of acting out another version of Midsummer at Hartfield in Emma, unintentionally.

Mary: Yeah, I think, too—I mean, certainly the thrust of the comic drive towards marriage is very strong in both Austen and Shakespeare. I mean, Shakespeare is often complicating it by suggesting that, in fact, that's a social drive and not necessarily a natural drive, which I'd be curious to think maybe a little further as to whether Austen has a similar perspective on that or not. But one thing I did want to say that I think is an interesting intersection between Midsummer and Emma is the reader or audience's perspective. In A Midsummer Night's Dream—and this isn't necessarily true for all of Shakespeare's plays, but in this one—the audience is so privileged in what they get to see. They see beyond—they see into the spirit world. They see all the machinations of the fairies. They see every element of it, and so that the lovers then are these confused, blundering mortals. They are recognized, and the audience gets to laugh and see that, but they're not tricked. The audience is not tricked.

Breckyn: The dramatic irony is turned up to 11.

Mary: Yes. I think that's also true with Emma. We see where Emma is making blunders. We know at times that Emma has misconstrued something or misperceived something. We have that privileged position, I think, in relation to Emma.

Breckyn: What I think is interesting about that is that, if you managed to have never seen any of the movies and you don't know about it, you could read it the first time and fall into all of Emma's traps, because it's so interesting the way that Jane Austen has written it, and her use of that free indirect discourse that she does so well, weaving Emma's thoughts fluidly into the narration. So you're like, "Wait, is Jane Austen saying this? Is the narrator saying this? Who is saying this? Is this true or not?" And again, John Mullan, who—he's an Emma expert—he points out this part where Emma comes across Mr. Elton and Harriet having their little tête-à-tête, and it says, "The lovers were by the window." And it's like, "They're not lovers!" But it's not in quotations. It doesn't even say, "Emma thought the lovers were by the window." It's put there, and you get to decide. So, I think it's easy, if you don't have any preconceived notions, the very first time you read Emma, you could totally be taken in and be just as surprised as she is when Mr. Elton proposes or when all of these other things are revealed. Certainly, I think it would be easy to never guess the secret of Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill.

Mary: Only on a second reading could you guess that, because she does—

Breckyn: There are so many little hints.

Mary: —she does put clues in. There are hints, but you're absolutely right, you can easily fall into—and I think it's fascinating that the book in some ways, as I think many Shakespeare plays do, demands a second reading.

Breckyn: Absolutely. There are always—there are new layers every time you read it. So, I just think that that's so interesting that she's written a work that has to be reread in order for you to get everything from it. There's no way that even the best, most insightful reader—you're not going to pick up on it all until everything has been revealed at the end, and then you start back over at the beginning.

So I want to end on Austen and Shakespeare's legacies and their afterlives, because I think that's another really interesting parallel between them. From the time that Austen died, critics were already comparing her to Shakespeare. In 1821, Richard Whately said that her dialogs are written with "a regard to character hardly exceeded even by Shakespeare himself." And Tennyson said that she was "next to Shakespeare" in her "realism and the lifelikeness of her characters." Do you think that that's a fair comparison?

Mary: I do. I think they both really do create complex characters. I was thinking about these authors together, and I noticed then, in rereading Mansfield Park, that the narrator refers to her characters as having soliloquies. If we go back to thinking about reading Shakespeare aloud, I also think it's quite effective to read Austen aloud because she gives her characters such distinct voices, and they all differ in intonation, and vocabulary, and tone. That mastery that you were talking about is of free indirect speech. When the narrator's voice shifts into the character's voice, we know it's the character's voice, so that the complexity of that—

Breckyn: She has all these linguistic markers that are so subtle, but when you start to study them, it's fascinating.

Mary: Yeah, you can track the shift. She's really inviting the readers to do so and is a master, I think, of creating these complex characters through voice, which is something that Shakespeare, too, is a master at, so that nobody speaks like Falstaff, and nobody speaks like Cleopatra. These are unique characters with very particular voices. So, yes, I think that is a fair comparison.

Breckyn: And also, the fact that both of them have had their works made and remade on stage and in films over and over again. They're enduringly beloved, and they both—they wrote these plots and characters that transcend their time, and they transcend English culture. You can take Romeo and Juliet and set it in 1920s Chicago, or you can take Pride and Prejudice and set it in modern day India, and it totally tracks. It's mappable onto many different human experiences, and geographies, and cultures. I think that that is what puts them in the same class as well.

Mary: I would agree. I think that, in part, it comes from the trust that they put into their audience. I think they really do invite their audiences to participate in what they're doing and making the works' meaning. And I think that's an invitation that transcends place and time. I mean, in Austen's case, her work is somewhat didactic, but it's very subtle, and complex, and pleasurable because we at times are charmed by those who are morally corrupt, or were annoyed by the morally upright. But we also do take from it the lesson that's intended, and that's part of the labor but the pleasure of reading Austen. Shakespeare is less didactic but he's very similar in inviting the audience to come to their own interpretation. As a businessman, he was quite interested in having his plays please everyone, please all people. So it's no accident that he does call a play As You Like It, or subtitles Twelfth Night, or What You Will. He's giving this to the audience, to the spectators, to find the meaning in the play that resonates with them.

Breckyn: That is such an excellent point and so well put. I love that idea of authors who invite us to—they're not just talking at us, but with us. They're in dialog with us. Even now, 200, 400 years later, we are still talking about it.

Mary: Yes, absolutely.

Breckyn: This has been such a great conversation. Thank you for coming on the show today, Mary. Where can listeners learn more about you and your work?

Mary: I guess they can go to my web page at UNC. I have a departmental web page, and it lists the scholarship that I've published on Shakespeare. So, yes, they're welcome to go there. I want to just repeat how delighted I am to have had this opportunity to talk about Austen. It was really a lot of fun.

Breckyn: Thank you so much. I had a great time.

Mary: Thanks.

Breckyn: Mr. Bingley "meant to be at the next assembly with a large party." Do you mean to be at JASNA's annual assembly, the AGM, in Baltimore in October? We're planning our biggest party ever to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth, and it is an event not to be missed. Details about the speakers, workshops, activities, tours, and registration options are now available on the AGM website—just in time to help you get ready for the opening of registration on June 19th. The hotel room block opens on June 23rd.

You can visit the 2025 AGM website at jasna.org/baltimore2025, and for a behind-the-scenes look at this exciting gathering of JASNA members, check out the new recording "Planning Your AGM: Insights from the Organizers." In a special interview, AGM Coordinator Jenn Jones, Registrar Debbie Duncan and VP for Conferences Jane Boltz talk with me and answer common questions and share helpful tips for registering. The "Planning Your AGM" recording is posted in the AGM Update Center and on JASNA's YouTube channel.

Breckyn: Now it's time for In Her Own Words, a segment where listeners share a favorite Austen quote or two.

Annette Wilkinson: I'm Annette Wilkinson from the Georgia Region of JASNA. One of my favorite quotations is from Mansfield Park. It is spoken by that fascinating and flawed character, Mary Crawford: "I see no wonder in this shrubbery equal to seeing myself in it."

Now, I've discovered that if you replace the word "shrubbery" with any word for a situation, a location, or a state of mind, you cannot fail to sound witty, learned, and intelligent. Try it!

Breckyn: Dear listeners, I just wanted to end today's episode by saying thank you. Austen Chat now has over 100 five-star reviews on Apple Podcasts. We are thrilled and so grateful for everyone who has left a review. If you haven't left a review yet, please consider giving the show five stars on Apple Podcasts. The more reviews we get, the easier it is for new Janeites to find us. Join us again next month for another episode. In the meantime, I remain yours affectionately, Breckyn Wood.

[Theme music]

Austen Chat: Episode 24

June 5, 2025

Jane Austen & Shakespeare: A Visit with Mary Floyd-Wilson

Show Notes and Links

Transcript

Austen Chat Podcast

“A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.”

About JASNA