Being “theatrical” means summing up plot or character with a single gesture so that the audience can take it in and move on. That happens throughout Broadway musicals and is epitomized by Bert Lahr saying that a doctor’s office sketch should not begin with a long exposition of the motivations for being there but with the simple line “Here we are in the doctor's office”. The price of such brevity is that there is no development through dialogue and action of the mood and the circumstances that justify the situation that is to be unfolded through subsequent dialogue and activity. Irving Thalberg is supposed to have told a screenwriter that you don’t need ten pages of dialogue to establish that a man and his wife are not getting along; just show her giving him a glare when he gives a look at a pretty young woman getting out of an elevator the three of them have shared. Thalberg was praising theatricality but that doesn’t do justice to the drama of a situation, where there is an explanation of how people became embedded in their situations, that regarded as something of significant interest, that ten pages of dialogue about a couple on the rocks telling something about this particular relationship and about such relationships in general. Drama has to do with an appreciation of the nature of a conflict while theatricality simply reveals and maybe not very well that the conflict exists. I am thinking of the original production of John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” on Broadway in the Fifties. The first act opens with a woman in a slip ironing her boyfriend's shirt. The second act opens with a new girlfriend also standing in her slip at the ironing board. The audience laughed. They got the joke and the revelation that the girlfriend got treated the same way whomever she was. That was the heart of the drama and it was offered up with great theatricality.
Shakespeare everywhere violates the Lahr dictum, even though no one would deny him his theatricality. There is the obvious theatricality of the moment that Claudius shouts “Lights! Lights!” so as to interrupt the play which includes a murder much like the one he committed. That outburst confirms his guilt even if, in itself, it only confirms that he is being accused of murder. Then there is the moment earlier in the play which might not be considered theatrical because it is just a line of dialogue, though Shakespeare is capable of turning anything theatrical. Ophelia says of Hamlet that he had been the glass of fashion. That remark says something about the drama of Hamlet having fallen from his pinnacle but it also makes the audience realize in an instant a whole backstory in which the young Ophelia had been much taken with her playmate, the young Prince of Denmark, and may have compromised herself, as her father feared she would, and so makes additionally devastating how meanly Hamlet speaks to her at the time they both attend the play within the play. So much goes on at once.
Now apply what has been said to the way Jane Austen, in “Emma”, as elsewhere, combines drama with theatricality. As is usual with Austen, the pace of the novel quickens in its last third. In “Emma”, that happens after Emma’s attempt to marry off Harriet Smith to Mr. Elton has not paid off and the scene is set for romances between the major characters. The first dramatic incident which is highly theatrical takes place at the picnic on the hill that everyone goes to. It is there that Emma lets slip a devastating observation about Miss Bates while she is there at the picnic. Emma remarks that, in effect, she says only dull things. Emma is therefore disparaging Miss Bates’ character rather than on her manners. Miss Bates says trite things, and for pointing that out, letting it slip, one cannot be forgiven, for a person might repair their manners but not their character-- though that is just the project in which Mr. Knightly is engaged with when it comes to Emma. Emma immediately regrets having said it because she is not really a cruel person; she is just someone who has for a moment abandoned her manners, which means being polite to people so as not to hurt their feelings. Mr. Knightly, however, is not so quick to forgive what might be considered an indiscretion. He comes down hard on Emma, he who was quite familiar with her dismissive wit and had chided her to be more tolerant in the past. He lets her have it, which indicates that he has more invested in her than as just a friend of the family, the role he had played for so long. He cares whether Emma is living up to what he wants to think of her and is personally pained by her failure to do so. Moreover, rather than just rejecting the criticism as much too harsh, Emma takes it to heart. She does not want to appear badly in the eyes of Mr. Knightly and so her defenses against him are lowered, even if, in the past, he had been more a mentor and so a neutral party in trying to bring her up right, a role similar to that of her governess, in that someone had to take on that role because her father was too confused and limited to take on childrearing in his own right. So here we have a dramatic change, from being a mentor to being something else for Mr. Knightly, and a change in Emma from being a kind of a ward to Mr. Knightly to being something else, which has not yet been defined. And this is accomplished through the very theatrical device of using a piece of dialogue to help redefine Emma’s character in the negative and leaving the reader to wonder how Emma will respond to that: will she fall further into her obduracy or will she try to rescue herself from it, at long last, now that she is a grown woman rather than a young upstart toying with the people around her, not really taking them seriously except as objects to be manipulated. And this happens through the theatricality of that moment at the picnic which need not have happened or where it might have been quickly withdrawn were it not for Knightly having noticed it, but now important because it is a moment that represents a real crux of the whole drama, which is that Emma is an unfinished person, and how, if at all, that situation can be remedied.
There is another dramatic crux in “Emma” which is represented by a moment of theatricality. Harriet can’t find anyone to dance with her at the ball. Mr. Knightly goes over to her and asks her to dance because it is the gentlemanly thing to do, and so we are in the midst of a “The King and I” moment. What is to be made of this moment? Mr. Knightly regards his action as the polite, which is to say, moral way to behave: to be considerate of other people’s feelings without any self-interest. But why would he not take the moment to be what Harriet takes it to be: a romantic moment? He seems to be beyond such feelings or, at the least, not sufficiently adult to have such feelings. He tells Emma that he had danced with Harriet only out of social politeness, not because of any personal feeling for her, and Emma tries to get that point across to Harriet, who insists that there was more there than that, and so forms somewhat of an emotional entanglement with Mr. Knightly, she by misinterpreting what may be a failure of Mr. Knightly to be fully a man. So much is to be made out of that dance: is it or is it not an act of courtship?
Emma has a parallel moment in which she is mislead by what she would read into a relationship. She seems to have been courted by Mr. Churchill She thinks he is courting her when he is only being friendly because it will later turn out that he had always been interested in Miss Fairfax and had had to keep quiet about it until his aunt died and so he was free to conduct his own life, freed of all of these conventions which inhibit people, his irrepressible nature having perhaps gone too far when he flirted with Emma for whom, after all, this was her first try at courtship and so she did not know how to treat it. Austen is very aware of the fact that people do not get married to the first person to whom they are attracted, that they have to become seasoned in the ways of courtship, even if that does not mean, as it would today, to have numerous boyfriends with whom one has had sexual relations before settling on the “real” one. So Emma, for all her supposed sophistication, is like Harriet, the supposedly naive one, in that she is testing the waters and not yet up to judging its temperature.
Mr. Knightly is also testing the waters but his psychological growth proceeds by a different device than learning how to tell flirting from courtship. He notices the attention that Mr. Churchill is paying to Emma and notices that he is himself jealous of that, which means that he is thinking about her differently than as his ward, the person whose moral development he oversees. It is a moment out of “Gigi”, the older man, he having known Emma since she was a child, finding the young woman an object of adoration rather than someone becoming educated. From jealousy springs the suspicion of love and this knocks Mr. Knightly for a loop, he who had never before seen himself in that role. So he and Emma deserve one another in that both of them had been emotionally backward, and that explains how each of them related to the rest of the world, he out of morality rather than passion, she out of being a busybody rather than out of passion. It is to be noted that Emma herself had not been as observant of herself as Mr. Knightly now was of himself when her father told her, some way back, that Mr. Knightly might take a wife and Emma protested too much that Mr. Knightly was so settled in his ways that he had no need of a wife, Emma unable to recognize then that she wanted him all to herself.
So Jane Austen finds herself, as in other novels, to have deep insights into the male psyche, despite her own limited exposure to the way men feel about women. She may not have written about what men said to one another when out of the earshot of women, but she was willing to comment on their deepest feelings, so sure was she of her handle on human nature. She told her stories by using all of the devices of literature--irony, imagery, the rhythms of argument, the spaces and silences between people, the operation of time-- remember it is years before Darcy and Elizabeth get together or Emma and Knightly redefine their relationship-- but also ever aware of the nature of the dramatic and the theatrical because her art was founded and extending the drama beyond the Shakespeare she loved so that it might make use of the devices of the novel, such as multiple characters and points of view, changes of scene and scenery, plots and subplots, while yet abandoning the nature of the Eighteenth Century novel, which was mock epic and picaresque, so as to create something new: the social and psychological novel as we have come to know it ever since.