Celebrating the Intriguing Mrs Inchbald

But the Simpsons of Standingfield (modern Stanningfield) already had one of their sons on the stage as an actor with the Norwich Circuit, then managed by Richard Griffith. Then on 10 April 1772 Elizabeth, aged 18, packed her belongings, wrote a note to her mother and took the stagecoach to London. Once there she sought out various theatre managers (at least one of whom attempted the casting-couch routine), failed to acquire a contract for the stage, but succeeded in securing a husband.

He was Joseph Inchbald, nearly 20 years older than herself with at least two sons by previous relationships. He had met her before and was also a Catholic. They went through two marriage ceremonies, one conducted by a priest and the other by a minister of the Church of England (the Catholic one was illegal under the Penal Laws then in force). By all accounts it was a genuine love-match. Together they joined a summer company in Bristol, he to play supporting roles – and eke out his salary by painting both portraits and stage scenery – she to begin learning some of the young women’s parts.

Although she was good-looking, tall, slender and with a mass of reddish-blonde hair, Elizabeth had one great disadvantage. She stuttered badly. Today that might preclude any thought of a stage career but the large-gestured, slow declamatory style of the late 18th century theatre could accommodate such a disability. And Elizabeth had been well-educated by her mother, had read judiciously and had a way with words, especially on paper.

Walking on
From Bristol they joined West Digges’ company in Edinburgh – narrowly avoiding a spate of anti-Catholic riots – then toured to Glasgow and Aberdeen. In 1776 the Inchbalds joined Joseph Younger’s Liverpool circuit; there they met the Kembles – Sarah (married to William Siddons) and her brother John Philip. John Kemble was to maintain a close friendship with Elizabeth, perhaps even something more, for the rest of her life. Another new acquaintance which also blossomed into a close friendship was with Elizabeth Farren, who became first the star of George Colman’s Haymarket Theatre in London and then the Countess of Derby.

Actors were still vagabonds, traipsing the provinces when the London theatres were shut, but the mantle of also being rogues was beginning to be discarded. Not every young actress was “in keeping” with a rakish nobleman. Some theatre marriages were solid. Some drawing-room doors began to inch open as those of dressing- and green-rooms closed. After Joseph Inchbald died suddenly in 1779, Elizabeth refused to re-marry but kept her reputation intact through a whole series of close friendships with professional and middle-class families in and outside the theatre, women of letters and men who had something original to say for themselves.

In 1780, the year of the Gordon Riots in London which left 300 people dead, the property of known Catholics (especially embassy chapels) in ruins and Newgate Prison in flames, she joined Thomas Harris’ company at Covent Garden; she acted in this theatre’s winter seasons for the better part of nine years. In the summer, like most of her colleagues, she either joined one of the major touring companies – such as that of Tate Wilkinson – or stayed with her family, with whom she maintained close relations.

But once again she found herself not only playing secondary women’s roles but, much to her chagrin, having to walk-on in crowd scenes and seasonal extravaganzas such as pantomimes (still very much a topical or fantastical entertainment for adults). “Play as cast” is a contract clause with a very long history indeed. Her salary was not large and she needed to supplement it if she was to continue living in London in respectable rented accommodation where she could entertain her friends.

Money could be made by writing plays, for there was no tradition of the “long run” and any new piece which failed to “take” was quickly withdrawn and some other play substituted. An evening at the theatre was quite a lengthy affair with a two- or three-act farce or song-and-dance show following a five-act tragedy. There was, of course, no copyright as we understand it today but theatre managers paid outright for a new piece which would attract audiences and there was always the possibility of a publisher paying a largish sum to print it after the run at the commissioning theatre had ended.

Elizabeth had always been someone who read the whole play and not just the part she was to perform. She had strong views on, for example, Shakespeare’s characters and the historical or cultural milieu in which they were set down. So she began to craft her own plays, first accepting the necessity for endless rewrites to suit the manager’s requirements. After-pieces to conclude the evening’s entertainment were in particular demand and Harris paid £20 for the first of her farces (as she termed them) which he accepted. It was not, however, put into production.

From page to stage and back again
A Mogul Tale was staged at the Haymarket in 1784. It’s the (highly topical) story of some ballooners who find themselves in the harem of an Indian prince. The following year she had an even greater success with I’ll Tell You What, a complicated social comedy with strong female characters, one of which was played by Farren. This was also produced by Colman and from then on Elizabeth’s plays were staged at either Covent Garden (winter) or the Haymarket (summer) up to 1805. Richard Brinsley Sheridan was the manager of the rival Drury Lane Theatre and its resident dramatist, so there was little chance of a commission from him. Additionally, he was extremely lax about paying his actors’ salaries, a lapse which lost him the talents and box-office drawing power of Siddons and Kemble in 1798.

She wasn’t simply successful as a playwright, though both Appearance is Against Them?/i? and Maids As They Are, Wives As They Were brought full houses and guineas in her purse. As did the adaptations Animal Magnetism and The Midnight Hour. Elizabeth also wrote novels, and these had a even greater earning power, not to mention reaching a far wider audience than that for drama. From 1790 A Simple Story became a circulating library success and went through several editions, each one scrupulously corrected and amended by the author. It’s an intriguing story with a Catholic priest as one of the main characters. Nature and Art (1794) proved less popular however.

During her short married life both Elizabeth and Joseph had learnt French and visited the country. So adapting contemporary French plays for the London stage was never going to be a problem. But she didn’t read German and the 1798 Harris commission for an English version of August von Kotzebue’s Child of Love, to be based on an existing rough translation, provided her with the basis for Lovers’ Vows where the female characters become very much the outspoken and slightly opinionated young women in which she excelled (“the Inchbald women”).

If you know your Jane Austen} then you will recognise Lovers’ Vows as the play chosen for amateur performance by the young people in Mansfield Park. In the novel it never gets beyond the rehearsal stage but in London it notched up 45 performances and at least 13 reprintings when published.

Friendships and new work
Two men to whom Elizabeth showed her early drafts and from whom she accepted criticism were [Thomas Holcroft, an actor as well as playwright and pamphleteer, and William Godwin, a novelist and political radical. Goodwin has come down to us as a rather nebulous person, a little prone to woolly thinking and best known for his marriage to the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, when she was already pregnant with his child. Mary died in childbirth but her daughter survived to marry the poet Shelley and become the author of Frankenstein.
Although Elizabeth was generally on good terms with other women writers, her relationship with Mary was a spiky one. And she was moving into a territory which we would think of as editorial criticism with a commission to provide the commentary for the Longman’s play series The British Theatre. She brought out her Remarks between 1806 and 1808; those about Shakespeare’s plays – albeit in the version currently being stage rather than on the actual Quarto or Folio printed editions – are pertinent even today.

In 1809 Longman’s published the seven volumes of A Collection of Farces which included some of her own work as well as those she herself selected for publication. She had earlier turned down the opportunity to work editorially on the Quarterly Review. Gradually she came to rely more on her wide circle of friends and less with the theatre itself; her health was also uncertain. Elizabeth Inchbald died in London in 1821. As when she married, there were two services, one Catholic and one according to the rites of the Church of England.

But then, she always stayed within the law even if she played by her own rules.