First, before we begin, I should say that Emma is literally on the other side of the world. Where she lives it is already Thursday, November 10, so if she does not respond too quickly to comments below, it is not because she does not want to do so. That being said, permit me to introduce you to Emma Wood and “Mr Bennet’s Bride.” Personally, I loved this play, and I hope you will too.
From Marriage to Courtship: Looking Back
Pride and Prejudice is a novel that offers so much to the reader that to quantify it in a single sentence is simplistic in the extreme. But without doubt, it is deeply concerned with courtship and marriage. An array of engaging characters and plots present different models of this well-trodden pathway. Over time I became gripped with one couple in particular. To explain why it may help to look briefly at a few others.
Naturally, the relationship that develops between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy comes to mind as the most prominent example of a courtship. Beginning without intention on either side, then developing slowly with many twists and turns, and happily resulting in a marriage of equals in mind and heart; their story is the core of the novel. Jane and Mr Bingley, though shown to be a true match, navigate many hurdles before finally overcoming them to general satisfaction. Lydia and Wickham appear somewhat settled by the end of their tumultuous path to matrimony, but as the reader knows too well, theirs is only a superficial ‘happy ending’. Another view is offered through the marriage of Charlotte Lucas and Mr Collins. Made hastily and without love on either side, it is seen through Lizzie’s eyes to be a penury she could never submit to.
The author rewards the elder Bennet girls who hold out for love. Lydia’s recklessness results in a marriage far less satisfactory, although she is blessedly ignorant of present complexity and probable future unhappiness. In spite of Lizzie’s misgivings, sensible Charlotte is pleased to have achieved material security, and willing to bear the inevitable frustrations of being married to the ludicrous Mr Collins.
The novel shows vividly that marriage has varying outcomes depending on many factors: luck, timing, fortune or the lack of it, decision-making, behaviour, and what we might call these days ‘love-onomics’. Charlotte fairly accurately assesses her own worth in the marriage market and does indeed settle for the best prospect she is likely to be offered. She is a realist and accepts the limited terms that society sets for women and seems reasonably content with the outcome. Lizzie, idealistic and romantic, does the opposite and holds out for love at all costs, stating ‘I am determined that only the deepest love will induce me into matrimony.’
Each of these couples is depicted in their early adulthood, and mostly the journey to marriage is more closely examined than the destination. Each plot is brilliantly drawn, offering significant reflections on the theme of marriage. But there is another couple who matters greatly in broadening the understanding of Lizzie and others on marriage. Mr and Mrs Bennet kindle my greatest curiosity. Unlike the others, it is a marriage that has already endured decades, and any brief honeymoon period has long since been forgotten. Indeed, the opening chapter of the novel portrays the mismatched pair engaged in their customary game of cat and mouse, in which Mr Bennet continually takes delight. His provocation causes Mrs Bennet to cry on the second page of the novel:
‘You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion on my poor nerves.’
To which he perfectly responds:
‘You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these twenty years at least.’
This verbal jousting, in which he is always triumphs by virtue of his superior mind and steadier temperament, provides much amusement to both Mr Bennet and the reader throughout the novel – and in later screen productions provides wonderful comic opportunities for the actors.
Mr and Mrs Bennet are written with such theatrical flourish that their characters almost demand to be given life on stage or screen – and have been with delightful results in countless productions. Much of their story is conveyed through direct dialogue, a technique Austen utilises frequently in her novel, to great effect. Particular qualities of Mr and Mrs Bennet – her thoughtless, small minded and frequently melodramatic commentary, coupled with his dry, playful but provocative responses, make them a very lively sparring partners. The reader understands their relationship and all its dynamic failings with an immediacy that lends itself to dramatization.
But where did it all begin? What courtship was the prelude to this pairing?
While the story I began to envisage could have been written by a novelist, I am not one. I have a theatrical background: an actor, a director, a drama teacher, and recently a playwright of my first full length play, a modern drama called Water Child. The play won an award, produced some strong reviews, and I was inspired to continue. So when I sat down at the computer with Mr and Mrs Bennet burning in my brain, it didn’t occur to me to write a novel. I began a play.
I have conceived a prequel to Pride and Prejudice in the form of a full length play, entitled Mr Bennet’s Bride, set twenty-three years before the novel begins. The audience already knows how the courtship must end: so the mystery is how and why it began. The novel’s brief glimpse into their past allows so much room for speculation, that it was both a challenge and a delight to consider how this odd coupling began. In imagining their courtship, I have tried to emulate Austen’s ability to evoke both laughter and empathy. And much as the reader might enjoy the wit and ‘quick parts’ of Mr Bennet, and sympathise with his marriage to a woman of ‘mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper’, the match begs closer imaginative examination.
What of the world they inhabited as younger people? What of the previous generation? Did their parents encourage or discourage the match? Did the future daughters of this couple inherit their widely differing personalities from a colourful range of forbears? And how did Mr Collins of the novel come to inherit – what was his place in the family, and why had the fathers not spoken for decades?
These questions and more were my canvas and provided so much to consider that it was hard to organise my thoughts. But I had a vision of the final moment of the play before I put pen to paper: a young Mr Bennet, having enthusiastically initiated a courtship with a woman entirely unsuited to him in temperament and ability, suddenly realises the outcome that will surely follow. The penny drops, and as the light dims, the dawning trepidation on his face is the last thing the audience sees. With this image as the destination point, young Mr Bennet became the protagonist. The other reason was that in sketching the details of their early lives, Mr Bennet inevitably became a more complex person. ‘…so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three and twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character.’ His behaviour toward his wife, and his daughters, with whom he is incredibly uneven in his treatment, had to be shown to be shaped by influences in his earlier life.
While the future Mrs Bennet (in my play, a young Miss Gardiner) is a delightfully energetic and vivacious stage presence, her character was inevitably simpler to conceive, in order to maintain credibility with the character in the novel. As Austen states in Chapter One:‘Her mind was less difficult to develop.’ This playwright echoes that sentiment!
I felt an enormous responsibility to create characters that would ring true to Austen fans, who already knew and loved them so well: it was in many ways daunting. But when the play was written, refined, rehearsed and performed, it was the greatest joy to hear the audience laugh and cry, and to hear them afterward discussing the younger characters I had developed as being just what they would have hoped for. The Newcastle Theatre Company (Australia) immensely enjoyed the box office records too! The connection to Ms Austen was, of course, gold.
The play offers a cast of 6F/4M, with both the Bennet and the Gardiner family seen in their respective houses as the unsuitable match is kindled and deepened. Mr and Mrs Bennet, the younger, you will recognise – but other characters I have taken the liberty of creating afresh.
The play is meant for the stage, but to the Austen enthusiast will offer an engaging read. It has been enjoyed thoroughly as a read aloud at book clubs – something to consider for a fun night in? Or if you enjoy it and have theatre connections – perhaps suggest it to your local company as a thoroughly enjoyable and highly marketable play – being quite unique in that it is a both ‘new’ and ‘period/classic’.
I welcome your comments and questions, but as I live in Australia we may be in very different time zones, so please bear with me if my response is not immediate.
To Purchase:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/emma-wood/mr-bennets-bride/paperback/product-22046504.html
Mr Bennet’s Bride by Emma Wood is set in the 1780s, 25 years before the novel Pride and Prejudice opens. The play concerns the ill-suited couple Mr and Mrs Bennet, portrayed with such humour in that famous novel, and examines how they met and decided to marry. When it debuted in 2014, at the Newcastle Theatre Company, its ticket sales were the third highest in the group’s sixty year history.
To see photos and reviews:
https://www.facebook.com/mrbennetsbride/
Performance Rights available at:
http://shop.stagescripts.com/categories/plays/full-length/comedic-drama/mr-bennets-bride.html (UK only)
http://www.davidspicer.com.au/shows/mr-bennets-bride (Australia/USA/worldwide)
To contact playwright directly: wood.emma.e@gmail.com
With the marriage of Victoria, Princess Royal, to the future Frederick III of Prussia, Queen Victoria turned her “matchmaking” skills upon her second daughter, Princess Alice Maud Mary. Although she promoted the idea of love matches for all her children, Victoria made certain the choice of spouses were limited to certain individuals and families. 
Willem, heir apparent to the Dutch throne as the eldest son of King William III, would have been Victoria’s first choice for Alice, but word was received early on at Windsor that the Dutch prince was besotted with an Austrian archduchess, who was, Heaven Forbid!, a Catholic. Nevertheless, Willem traveled to London in January 1860 to be inspected by Victoria and Albert. Little did he know, they had already rejected the idea of an alliance with the man. Thankfully, Alice also did not find him interesting. The prince fell in love with the 19-year-old Countess Mathilde von Limburg-Stirum in 1873. The relationship between the prince and his parents became very problematic, as his parents refused William’s wish to accept Mathilde as his bride in 1874. By the standards of the Dutch royal family, a marriage between a member of the royal family and a member of the nobility was considered unequal and therefore unacceptable. Also a rumor circulated that Mathilda was an illegitimate daughter of King William III and so William could be marrying his half-sister. The 33-year-old William wanted to marry, if necessary, without the consent of his parents. However, Mathilda was not yet twenty and so permission was needed from her parents too. Since they denied permission, the prince’s attempt to marry Mathilda failed. Disillusioned, Prince William then went into exile in Paris, where he threw himself into a life of sex, drinking and gambling. Ironically, he died, debauched, within months of Alice’s death in 1878
Louis made a second call at Windsor in November 1860.
Sir Henry Wotton
Anthony Munday
Munday wrote at least 17 plays, of which only a handful survive. He may be the author of Fedele and Fortunio (c. 1584), an adaptation of an Italian original; it was performed at court and printed in 1585. His best-known plays are two pseudo-histories on the life of the legendary outlaw hero Robin Hood, The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon and The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon (both 1598). He was probably the main author of Sir Thomas More (c. 1590–93), a play that William Shakespeare assisted in revising. Munday ceased to write plays after 1602, but during 1605–23 he wrote at least five of the pageants with which the lord mayor of London celebrated his entry into office. A friend of the chronicler John Stow, he was responsible for enlarged editions of Stow’s Survey of London in 1618 and 1633.
In Anthony Munday and the Catholics 1560-1633 by Donna Hamilton, Ms. Hamilton “offers a major revisionist reading of the works of Anthony Munday, one of the most prolific authors of his time, who wrote and translated in many genres, including polemical religious and political tracts, poetry, chivalric romances, history of Britain, history of London, drama, and city entertainments. Long dismissed as a hack who wrote only for money, Munday is here restored to his rightful position as an historical figure at the centre of many important political and cultural events in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. In Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560-1633, Hamilton reinterprets Munday as a writer who began his career writing on behalf of the Catholic cause and subsequently negotiated for several decades the difficult terrain of an ever-changing Catholic -Protestant cultural, religious, and political landscape. She argues that throughout his life and writing career Munday retained his Catholic sensibility and occasionally wrote dangerously on behalf of Catholics. Thus he serves as an excellent case study through which present-day scholars can come to a fuller understanding of how a person living in this turbulent time in English history – eschewing open resistance, exile or martyrdom – managed a long and prolific writing career at the centre of court, theatre, and city activities but in ways that reveal his commitment to Catholic political and religious ideology. Individual chapters in this book cover Munday’s early writing, 1577-80; his writing about the trial and execution of Jesuit Edmund Campion; his writing for the stage, 1590-1602; his politically inflected translations of chivalric romance; and his writings for and about the city of London, 1604-33. Hamilton revisits and revalues the narratives told by earlier scholars about hack writers, the anti-theatrical tracts, the role of the Earl of Oxford as patron, the political-religious interests of Munday’s plays, the implications of Munday’s reports on the execution of Campion, the relationship of the chivalric romances to changing religious and political events, and the role of city government in the religious political controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This study resonates not only for literary scholars, but also for researchers interested in the political and religious history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.”
Raphael Holinshed
Eventually, James Edward Stuart married Maria Clementina Sobeiska, godchild of Pope Clement XI. She presented her husband a son, Charles Edward Stuart, who came to be known as “Bonnie Prince Charlie.” Acting as his father’s Regent, Charles led a small force to restore his father’s claim to the English throne. He landed on the West Coast of Scotland on the island of Eriskay. In August 1745, Prince Charles Edward raised his father’s standard at Glenfinnan, beginning of the Rebellion of ’45. The most powerful clans in the Highlands supported the idea of James Stuart as king. They Jacobites fought brilliantly until they knew defeat at the hands of the Duke of Cumberland at Culloden. 
In gratitude, Prince Charlie presented the Mackinnon family his secret formula for his personally crafted liqueur, an dram budbeach, which means “a drink that satisfies” in Gaelic. Today we know the liqueur as “drambuie.” This recipe would have included a concentrated tincture of essential oils intended to be used to flavor spirits, likely brandy. The Mackinnons guarded the secret of the drink for more than 150 years. They made only very small quantities of the liqueur, and it was served reverently at the annual Gathering of the Clans. 
Malcolm sold twelve cases of the mixture that first year. But the next saw an influx of orders from fellow Scotsmen, who wished to taste Scotland’s first commercially produced liqueur. In 1916, the cellarman of the House of Lords presented ®Drambuie its seal of special approbation. The legend has it that the family secret is still locked away. And supposedly, a member of the Mackinnon family are the only ones permitted to mix the formula. Four small vials of the mixture can create 1200 gallons of Drambuie.
Harriet Smith in 1996’s Emma
rcy in Death Comes to Pemberley
ets, as well as Mr. Bennet in Lost in Austen and Mr. Rushworth in 1999’s Mansfield Park
November 18
November 25
Rand Wheatly, reclusive would-be timber baron, shelters a woman on the run. Now she’s gone again. Can he save her and himself as well?
John Fletcher
Nicholas Breton
According to 
Morris was previously a London merchant with an aristocratic clientele. He took advantage of the demand for “Russian mode” cigarettes initiated by British soldiers returning from the Crimean War to Victorian London. Morris hired on a group of expert “rollers” imported from Russia, Turkey, and Egypt. These workers turned out expensive brands: Philip Morris Cambridge, Oxford Blues, and Ovals, and they were snapped up the populace. These workers were some of the best in London, and they could turn out some 3000 cigarettes in a typical 10-hours’ day. 
American stockholders bought the firm in 1919, and the image created by Philip Morris in that first shop on Bond Street was a major sale point. The company grew in the competitive tobacco industry. 
Every Woman Dreams... 