Lovers’ Vows from the German by Elizabeth Inchbald

Lovers’ Vows (1798), which has had an enduring afterlife due to its importance in the plot and themes of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), was the sixteenth of the nineteen plays by Elizabeth Inchbald (née Simpson, 1753–1821). After an early career as an actress, from 1784 onward Inchbald had increasing success writing for the London stage. Responding to fashionable English “Kotzebue-mania” for the sensational dramas of the German Romantic writer, she transformed Kotzebue’s Das Kind der Liebe (Paul Gotthelf Rummer, Leipzig, 1791) into a witty and sentimental comedy that catered to the tastes of the English public. The roles of Amelia (the ingénue) and her putative suitor, Count Cassel, were rewritten as familiar types of English comedy. The Count presents himself as an “epitome” of the rich but foolish young gentleman who undertakes the Grand Tour. Amelia is revised to fit into the popular English concept of the comic heroine—warm-hearted, amusing, and unconventionally forthright in her opinions. The excessive verbosity of Kotzebue’s moralizing is severely pruned.