“A reasonable woman's desire”

Designed primarily to amuse those who had enough money to buy off boredom, late eighteenth-century British private theatricals were often unabashedly elitist projects not only in the sense that many took place in exclusive environments but because they required — in addition to time — a great deal of money to arrange. Sybil Rosenfeld writes that Lord Barrymore's expenses for cake alone at the opening night reception of his private theater at Wargrave in 1789 were “rumoured” to be £20, small change after the £60,000 that was spent on the theater building itself. ¹ To overcome the luxury of boredom is the impetus behind the staging of Elizabeth Inchbald's 1798 translation of August von Kotzebue's Lovers' Vows (1791) in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), perhaps the best-known work of literature that features the late eighteenth-century phenomenon of amateur acting. The eagerness with which most of Mansfield's youthful residents embrace John Yates's proposal to put on a play is not only indicative of “a love of the theatre,” which the narrative labels “so general.” ² Yates arrives onto an already indolent scene embodied by the frequently supine Lady Bertram, and his proposal to do a private theatrical follows on a painfully aimless visit to Mr. Rushworth's country house during which each person's “spirits were in general exhausted.” ³