Mansfield Park

Synopsis: Television adaptation, heavily abridged, of Jane Austen’s novel. The scene in Chapter 34 in which Henry Crawford endeavours to recommend himself to Fanny Price by reading aloud from various characters in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII is here replaced by Lorenzo’s lines to Jessica in The Merchant of Venice which are addressed to Fanny. The lines quoted are V i l2444-9 ‘In such a night as this/When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees...Where Cressid lay that night’. Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram comment that the play must be one of Henry’s favourites and he admits that he likes to have an audience. Crawford says ‘I’ve often resolved to make good my neglect of Shakespeare but it would take regular study and I am not constant in my habits’. In the novel Henry says ‘But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman’s constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere, one is intimate with him by instinct.- No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays, without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately’. [With acknowledgment to Susanne Greenhalgh].
Language: English
Country: Great Britain
Medium: Television
Technical information: Colour / Sound
Keywords: Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)