LAUSR

ABSTRACT Maria Edgeworth’s Patronage is one of a number of novels by women published in 1814 that refer to private theatricals, the most famous of which is Austen’s Mansfield Park. Edgeworth was familiar with the custom of private theatricals in Ireland where her family performed plays and she also attended a performance at the celebrated season of amateur performances in Kilkenny that began in 1802 and lasted until 1819. In this article, I discuss the relevance of these Irish contexts for the intertextual and intertheatrical dimensions of the play staged in Patronage, Aaron Hill’s 1735 tragedy Zara. A translation of Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732), Hill’s tragedy was a stock piece in the theatrical repertoire and was included in the influential 1808 collection of plays entitled The British Theatre, edited by Edgeworth’s friend Elizabeth Inchbald. I explore the relationship of Zara with another early Georgian tragedy mentioned in Patronage as a possible choice for the performers, Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713). The theatricals episode is important for Edgeworth’s exploration in Patronage of a number of intersecting themes that resonate with Edgeworth’s own literary celebrity around 1814: the relationship between the novel and the theatre, gender and genre, and cosmopolitanism and translation.