It is a commonplace of critical theory that certain ages bring about tragedy more than others. Raymond Williams studies ‘historical conditions of tragedy’, general circumstances in which the mode becomes prevalent:
Important tragedy seems to occur, neither in periods of real stability, nor in periods of open and decisive conflict. Its most common historical setting is the period preceding the substantial breakdown and transformation of an important culture. Its condition is the real tension between old and new: between received beliefs, embodied in institutions and responses, and newly and vividly experienced contradictions and possibilities.1
Williams’s conditions accord with George Steiner’s hypothesis of tragedy’s sporadic occurrence. Steiner examines the factors ‘favourable for tragedy’ and periods during which they have manifested successfully:
Over wide reaches of time and in diverse places, elements of language, material circumstance, and individual talent suddenly gather toward the production of a body of serious drama […]. Such high moments occurred in Periclean Athens, in England during the period 1580–1640, in seventeenth-century Spain, in France between 1630 and 1690.2
Similar claims were made in Coleridge’s time too; in a lecture of 1808 he anticipates Williams’s observation by explaining that drama originates ‘in a small state under a popular government, in a warlike and unsettled age.’3
In this chapter I study Coleridge’s reading of real events as tragedies. He depicts actual people as tragic heroes or villains and contemplates misery that is heightened and widespread in the world around him. To Coleridge history unfolds like a drama. The conditions that modern critics posit as stimuli for the creation of tragedy are themselves read as tragic by Coleridge. The French Revolution and its legacy of war satisfy Williams’s requirements of instability, uncertainty and transformation: ‘a time of revolution’, Williams writes, ‘is so evidently a time of violence, dislocation and extended suffering that it is natural to feel it as tragedy.’4 While Steiner bemoans the lack of good tragic drama written during the Romantic age, he speculates that actual events were so dire that people had neither wish nor need to witness catastrophe in the theatre also. The tragic mode was made obsolete by the tragedy of experience. Certainly, Edmund Burke finds that the vicissitudes of the period resemble the reversals of tragedy, although he is uneasy about the mean–spirited responses he detects to misfortune in real life. To Burke such insensitivity indicates that the beneficial morality of tragedy is not borne outside the theatre by auditors:
When kings are hurl’d from their thrones by the Supreme Director of this great drama, and become the objects of insult to the base, and of pity to the good, we should behold such disasters in the moral, as we should behold a miracle in the physical order of things. We are alarmed into reflexion; our minds (as it has long since been observed) are purified by terror and pity; our weak unthinking pride is humbled, under the dispensations of mysterious wisdom.—Some tears might be drawn from me, if such a spectacle were exhibited on the stage. I should be truly ashamed of finding myself in that superficial, theatric sense of painted distress, whilst I could exult over it in real life. With such a perverted mind, I could never venture to show my face at a tragedy.5
Moreover, the question for Burke is not whether the events of revolutionary Europe are sufficiently catastrophic to be considered tragic, but whether they would have made too gruesome and disheartening a spectacle for the standards of the ancients:
No theatric audience in Athens would bear what has been borne, in the midst of the real tragedy of this triumphal day; a principal actor weighing, as it were in scales hung in a shop of horrors,—so much actual crime against so much contingent advantage,—and after putting in and out weights, declaring that the balance was on the side of the advantages.6
Michel Foucault observes that history only has signification when we choose it to, and warns that the patterns historians identify tend to be ‘of their own making’.7 Karl Popper examines the ‘theistic historicism’ of the nineteenth century, and observes that some commentators of the time appear to interpret the sequence of history as a Shakespearean play written by God.8 Popper refers to Hegel specifically. As Jeffrey Hipolito argues, Coleridge is not a Hegelian politically or philosophically, but the historical scope of their thought is comparable, and Coleridge too views history as a process.9 In his late poetry (1829–30), Coleridge derives an epigraph from Troilus and Cressida in which he insists that there are lessons in history, not merely facts:
THERE IS A MYSTERY IN THE SOUL OF STATE,
WHICH HATH AN OPERATION MORE DIVINE
THAN OUR MERE CHRONICLERS DARE MEDDLE WITH.
(‘Epigraph Derived from Troilus and Cressida’)
There are two main reasons for Coleridge to read history and contemporary events as tragedy. One accords with a key point I made previously: that Coleridge needs to accommodate catastrophe within an optimistic philosophy. This is as true of Coleridge contemplating Britain’s war with France as it is of him reading tragic plays that impart lessons on ‘Atonement’. The second reason is that Coleridge is primarily a literary thinker. If this is an obvious comment, it surprises me how often critics divorce the political thinker from the poet, except in the case of the few significant poems connected explicitly with historical events. Admittedly, Coleridge himself seems to discourage the reader from paying close attention to the historical and political contexts of his most famous poetical works. For example, in Biographia Literaria Coleridge recalls his own contributions to Lyrical Ballads as primarily ‘directed to persons and characters supernatural’.10 In ‘Dejection: An Ode’, Coleridge regrets the extent of his dedication to dehumanizing, ‘abstruse research’ (‘Dejection’, l. 89). The prevalence of New Historicism equipped critics to detect the socio-political resonances even of poems that seem at first to be concerned only with very abstract or aesthetic matters. But that theoretical trend in Romantic studies seemed only to generate one-way traffic: rarely do scholars relate Coleridge’s overtly political and social works – particularly in prose pieces and lectures – back to his literary concerns. Dutifully the Princeton Bollingen editors of Coleridge annotate the sources of his abundant literary allusions and devices, but do not comment on the significance of how many there are, nor whether they have any cumulative effect. I think that they do. These references are evidence that, impelled by a need to interpret events, Coleridge turns to literature, and often tragedy specifically. This association is not a casual likeness of historical developments to a Shakespearean world-as-stage for their ability to surprise and trouble in the manner of drama. Instead Coleridge believes that ancient tragedy captures truths about crises in life with didactic purpose. These truths can be retrieved from drama to better comprehend life itself.
Coleridge’s attitude to Thomas Poole’s account of a notorious murder exemplifies his tendency to read real events as tragedy, and how he perceives the author’s duty to convey tragic import to an audience. Coleridge first heard the tale from Poole in 1797, and was still sufficiently moved by recollection of it in 1809 to request a manuscript for publication in The Friend: ‘Do, do let me have that divine narrative of Robert Walford.’11
The pathos of Poole’s account is typical of the rural tales that fascinated Wordsworth and Coleridge. In 1789 John Walford, a charcoal burner, murdered his estranged wife, but remained a sympathetic figure locally despite his crime. Walford’s wife, born Jane Sharney, was faulted in accounts of her death with having seduced Walford. Locals viewed Sharney as the saboteur of Walford’s engagement to his true love, Anne Rice of Adcombe, whose fidelity to Walford at the time of his execution added to the pathos of the episode.12 Due to increased incidents of murder in Somersetshire, the unusual decision was made to hang Walford in public and to display his corpse. In his exemplary death Walford was cast as a sacrificial victim. A deeper sense of Walford as a tragic figure emerges from the remarkably tolerant attitude towards the crime that Poole depicts in the community of Adcombe. While the seductress Jane Sharney seems to be at fault for her own death, Walford becomes a victim of circumstance, compelled to act as he did. Poole gives the account a fatalistic air; Walford’s execution is exemplary and satisfies the requirements of law, but opposes public sympathy.
In response to Poole’s narrative, Coleridge implies that to articulate such grisly subject-matter as the Walford murder initiates an author as a true artist: ‘That divine narrative of Robert Walford […] stamps you a Poet of the first Class in the pathetic & the painting of Poetry, so rarely combined.’13 In his preface to the 1816 publication of ‘The Three Graves’, which Coleridge took over from Wordsworth in 1797 but did not complete, Coleridge is keen to authenticate the poem’s origins: ‘The outlines of the Tale are positive Facts, and of no very distant date.’ Protesting against the unsettling events of the ballad that he ‘was not led to chuse this story from any partiality to the tragic’, Coleridge ennobles himself as obedient to the poet’s duty, which demands analysis of authentic hardship. The main concern of this chapter is to demonstrate how Coleridge turns tragic interpretations of reality to didactic purpose. In a lecture of 1795, Coleridge expresses the need for ‘a Revolution bloodless, like Poland’s, but not, like Poland’s, assassinated by the foul Treason of Tyrants against Liberty.’14 This hope permeates Coleridge’s dramatic and poetical works prior to the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads. In his Bristol lectures, Coleridge refers to diverse social issues to demonstrate the need for reform. He notes the plight of British soldiers abroad, the exploitation of workers, the practices of crimping and scalping, slavery and the related taste for luxury items. The young Coleridge invokes real-life suffering in poetry and plays to attack the government, and to suggest a general solution to Britain’s problems; that a new political system is required to establish a content society. By the doctrine of Necessitarianism Coleridge believes that revolution throughout Europe and Britain is inevitable. He uses the tragic to reassure his audience that a better society will emerge after the upheaval that instigates such change.
In political and religious lectures of 1795, Coleridge indicates the tragic potential of his age with a catalogue of social problems: ‘the oppressed feel and complain’; ‘the evil is great’; ‘the folly of the rulers of mankind becomes daily more wild and ruinous’; the war against France is ‘an Evil of […] incalculable magnitude’; ‘there is scarcely a Vice which Government does not teach us’.15 As he comments in a letter on how ‘sadly’ the Polish revolution proceeds, Coleridge anticipates that all of Europe will follow France to insurrection and prolonged unrest.16
I wish to examine the process by which Coleridge develops the intensity of such sentiments to achieve what Richard B. Sewall terms ‘tragic dissent’.17 Coleridge’s purpose is not solely to provide an aesthetic experience of tragedy, but to influence the political opinions of his audiences. Such a strategy is evident in The Fall of Robespierre, not solely in the text as it was published in 1794, but in the comments that Coleridge makes about it elsewhere. He intimates that the play is to be read neither as strict truth nor entirely as fiction. It is a blend of both modes whereby Coleridge uses invention to direct the reader’s association of tragic emotions of fear and pity with the real events depicted in the play. Additionally, the generic and creative contexts of The Fall of Robespierre (1794) not only demonstrate Coleridge’s evocation of the tragic in his portion of that play, but also the means by which he achieves tragic effect in other writings, particularly in his reliance on the Greek-tragic tradition of the woman’s lament.
While The Fall of Robespierre is a collaborative work, my focus is on the first act, composed by Coleridge alone, which is the only portion to include fictional elements. Robert Southey wrote the second and third acts, to which Coleridge contributed only minor revisions. Southey uses no invented characters or fictional incidents, but simply converts newspaper transcripts of Robespierre’s trial into blank verse. By contrast Coleridge reads history as tragedy. He signals this conflation with inconsistency over which classification should be applied to the play. The subtitle states that it is ‘an Historic Drama’. However, in correspondence from the year of composition, Coleridge refers to the drama six times as a ‘tragedy’ and never at all as ‘historic’.18 The ‘historic drama’ subtitle justifies the play by insisting upon the long-term significance of the French Revolution. Simultaneously, it places Coleridge and Southey’s drama subtly alongside such history plays as Shakespeare’s; perhaps an ironic gesture given the haste of the play’s composition and Coleridge’s claim that ‘such a Work’ was not worthy of attribution to two authors.19 However, the use of the term ‘tragedy’ for The Fall of Robespierre establishes Robespierre himself as a tragic figure to be contemplated alongside Prometheus, Oedipus, King Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet. Where a tragedy’s subject is historical, fictional elements may be introduced, such as in Aeschylus’ Persians – a play about the Battle of Salamis written by one of its participants – in which the ghost of King Darius rises and attributes his son’s invasion of Greece to mischievous daemons. In Coleridge’s works he imposes his inventions onto actual events to evoke tragic pathos. Real occurrences establish the relevance of Coleridge’s subject to his audience’s circumstances, while the emotional force of the tragic is a tool of dissent that urges political action.
Edward Kessler complains that ‘in the first act of The Fall of Robespierre […] generalities and abstractions such as Liberty, Conscience and Freedom seem like empty tokens moved about in a series of verbal exercises.’20 Richard Holmes dismisses the entire play as ‘a farrago of rhetorical bad verse.’21 I will assess the complaints of Kessler and Holmes in relation to a typical passage from the play; a speech in which Robespierre responds to Barrere’s fears with antirrhesis, and that culminates with the use of an image of the ‘tottering pillar’ borrowed from Milton’s Samson Agonistes:
Self–centring Fear! how well thou canst ape Mercy!
Too fond of slaughter!—matchless hypocrite!
Thought Barrere so, when Brissot, Danton died?
Thought Barrere so, when through the streaming streets
Of Paris red-eyed Massacre o’er wearied
Reel’d heavily, intoxicate with blood?
And when (O heavens!) in Lyons’ death-red square
Sick fancy groan’d o’er putrid hills of slain,
Didst thou not fiercely laugh, and bless the day?
Why, thou hast been the mouth-piece of all horrors,
And, like a blood-hound, crouch’d for murder! Now
Aloof thou standest from the tottering pillar.
(The Fall of Robespierre, I.168–79)
Robespierre’s speech is an eloquent arrangement of such rhetorical devices as apostrophe (to ‘Fear’), erotema (‘thought Barrere so […]?’), traductio prosonomasia (the phonetic repetition in ‘so’ and ‘Brissot’, ‘groan’d’ and ‘o’er’), and oxymoron (‘reel’d heavily’). This partly substantiates the comments of Kessler and Holmes, but nonetheless their disparagement of the play as no more than ‘rhetorical’ and ‘empty’ is disputable. I posit that Coleridge’s depiction of the French politicians is self-consciously ironic and hyperbolic. J.C.C. Mays acknowledges this possibility, detecting in the play ‘a mixture of committed radicalism and sly humour’.22 Similarly, William Jewett finds that Coleridge uses ‘Miltonisms’ as a means of ‘parodying and undermining […] the stilted and anachronistic classicism of French political rhetoric.’23 Therefore the characters’ ‘rhetorical’ speech and hollow citation of such Enlightenment principles as ‘Liberty, Conscience and Freedom’ parodies the politicians themselves, and also illustrates the tragic potential of France during the Reign of Terror. Vacuous, rhetorical monologue exists where productive discussion should, typifying the inability or unwillingness of the politicians to communicate with each other and demonstrating the dissolution of community.
That empty rhetoric can signify tragic discord is consistent with Gregory Dart’s claim that The Fall of Robespierre is ‘a modern version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar’. Coleridge invokes Shakespeare’s play to insist that the events of the Terror are tragic and to emphasize the politicians’ own self-identification with the Roman republicans.24 In The Fall of Robespierre, as in Julius Caesar, the varying implications of salient words in repetition characterize the government’s confused ideologies and indicate a political system in flux. Marvin Spevack observes that the word ‘constant’ occurs in various forms on 41 occasions in Julius Caesar.25 To Caesar, ‘constant’ represents an impartial and firm observation of law (III.i.65). He associates himself with constancy to exalt his own wisdom, his ‘unassailable holds on his rank’ and his entitlement to rule (III.i.74). Brutus urges ‘formal constancy’ to mean stoical perseverance in purpose and disguise of intention, regardless of tiredness (II.i.237). Portia intimates that ‘constancy’ entails passion and suffering for loved ones, at slight variance from the repression of emotion that Brutus recommends (II.i.311). In Coleridge’s act of The Fall of Robespierre, the word ‘patriot’ undergoes similar variations. Robespierre’s brother indicates that the sections utter ‘patriot’ ironically in allusion to the sophistry by which Robespierre justifies his position as ‘tyrant guardian of the country’s freedom’ (I.111–12). To Couthon, ‘patriot’ implies ‘pomp’ (I.125). Robespierre himself understands a ‘virtuous patriot’ as one to whom violence is ‘light’; such a person will commit atrocity for the benefit of his country (I.156). The effect of such inconsistency is that ‘patriot’ varies sufficiently in its implications to become insignificant. Vague usage of this word weakens the foundations of revolutionary discourse. Thus Coleridge establishes rhetoric itself as a tragic theme in the drama.
Nicholas Roe cites ‘Coleridge’s perception of an underlying similarity between Robespierre and Godwin’ predicated upon resemblances between Political Justice (1793) and French revolutionary rhetoric.26 This important connection is identified too by Paul Deschamps, who finds in The Fall of Robespierre that Coleridge attacks not only the vacuity of political tenets in Robespierre’s harsh regime, but also Godwin’s advocacy of dispassionate reason. Deschamps identifies this as an Enlightenment tradition, which has been warped dangerously by the fanatical Robespierre and the unscrupulous Couthon, who disregard human life in pursuit of their ideals.27 Coleridge expresses concern about the application of reason explicitly in a letter of 1794:
Reasoning is but Words unless where it derives force from the repeated experience of the person, to whom it is addressed.—How can we ensure their silence concerning God &c—? Is it possible, they should enter into our motives for this silence? If not we must produce their obedience by Terror. Obedience? Terror? The Repetition is sufficient—I need not inform you, that they are as inadequate as inapplicable.28
Here Coleridge discusses pedagogical practices to impart a love of reason to children. Tragedy, to Coleridge, has an educative function. Yet The Fall of Robespierre risks becoming ‘but Words’, a reiteration of the principles it attacks rather than a critique of them. Hence it is necessary to relate the play’s events to ‘the repeated experience of the person[s], to whom it is addressed’: the audience. This is accomplished using the character of Adelaide, the only fictitious character in The Fall of Robespierre. As a woman, Adelaide is excluded from participation in politics, but is thereby enabled as an external commentator on the politicians. In a dramatically simple scene that is tragically potent, Adelaide represents the experiences of the masses, and her lament marks the transition of The Fall of Robespierre from historical drama to tragedy.
The tropification that Coleridge uses in Adelaide’s scene has an antecedent in Hamlet. A messenger informs Adelaide that Tallien has refused her letter, evoking the scene in which Hamlet declines to accept returned ‘remembrances’ from Ophelia (III.i.92). In both plays, the trope of failed delivery, symptomatic of a broader inability to communicate, prefigures lamentations of senselessness. From Hamlet’s refusal to acknowledge his gifts and kind words, Ophelia infers that ‘a noble mind is here o’erthrown’ (III.i.148). This image of mental usurpation, coupled with Ophelia’s recognition that Hamlet is ‘th’expectancy and rose of the fair state’, reveals that the prince’s irrationality typifies a dysfunctional Danish court (III.i.150). Hence the later confusion and misapprehensions that cause the deaths of Polonius, Guildenstern, Rosencrantz and Gertrude. Similarly, in The Fall of Robespierre, Adelaide’s frustrated correspondence with Tallien anticipates a complaint whose implication is expanded – beyond the inability of lovers to communicate – to a broader allegory, by which the concerns of representative figures of the ‘father’ and the ‘mother’ are disregarded. Ultimately, Adelaide depicts revolutionary France as a country that has abandoned reason:
O this new freedom! at how dear a price
We’ve bought the seeming good! The peaceful virtues
And every blandishment of private life,
The father’s cares, the mother’s fond endearment,
All sacrificed to liberty’s wild riot.
The winged hours, that scatter’d roses around me,
Languid and sad drag their slow course along,
And shake big gall-drops from their heavy wings. (I.198–205)
Adelaide’s speech recalls the tradition of the captive woman’s lament, prevalent in Greek tragedy and particularly in the plays of Euripides, including Helen, Iphigenia Among the Taurians and The Suppliant Women. In a survey of the mode Casey Dué cites the salient features of the woman’s lament, which include a desperate tone and the contrast of a superior past with an unfortunate present state.29 Repeatedly, Coleridge’s view of his age is expressed in the mode of tragic lament.
Although the lament occurs in Old and Middle English literature, Coleridge’s expertise in the mode is likely to be derived from his study of Classical, Elizabethan and neoclassical tragedy. The captive woman’s lament enters English drama with the influence of Seneca, as John W. Cunliffe demonstrates.30 As Zabina, the wife of Baiazeth in Christopher Marlowe’s The Conquests of Tamburlaine (1587), longs for death, she bewails ‘infamous monstrous slaveries’ and the loss of ‘the former triumphs of our mightiness’ (V.ii.178, V.ii.189). In Titus Andronicus, Queen Tamora laments her bondage in Rome and the imminent death of her son, and petitions Titus for mercy (I.i.104–20). As Linda M. Austin demonstrates, ‘a rhetoric of lamentation surfaced at the turn of the eighteenth century’ for reasons that included the neoclassical revival of interest in ancient tragedy, and the compatibility of the lament with the emotional transport of the Romantic sublime.31 Austin’s claim is borne out by the frequency with which the lament occurs in Romantic works, including Blake’s Book of Thel (1789) and Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), Southey’s ‘A Lamentation’ for Robert Emmet (1803), Shelley’s ‘Lament’ and Adonais (1821), and Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ (1798), which culminates with the poet’s defense of his reason to ‘lament | What man has made of man’ (ll. 23–4).32
The mode of the lament recurs in Coleridge’s Osorio (1797), in which Alhadra recalls captivity, imposed on her by the ‘Holy Brethren’, the Spanish Inquisition (I.i.206):
They cast me then a young and nursing Mother
Into a dungeon of their Prison-house.
There was no bed, no fire, no ray of Light,
No touch, no sound of comfort! The black air—
It was a toil to breathe it! I have seen
The Gaoler’s Lamp, the moment that he enter’d
How the flame sunk at once down to the Socket.
O miserable, by that Lamp to see
My infant quarreling with the coarse hard bread
Brought daily: for the little wretch was sickly,
My rage had dried away it’s natural food.
In darkness I remain’d counting the clocks,
Which haply told me that the blessed Sun
Was rising on my garden.
(Osorio, I.i.208–221)
Coleridge employs Adelaide and Alhadra to provide sympathetic referents for political contexts; both fictional characters translate historical events into sympathetic human terms to evoke the tragic. Adelaide’s allusion to the sacrifice of ‘the father’s cares, the mother’s fond endearment’ personalizes the atrocities of the Terror. Adelaide shows that the family, the foundational unit of society, is under threat from violence committed in the name of freedom. With this risk to the structure of society, anarchy is possible.
Adelaide’s desire for peace, evinced by her song and her critique of the Terror, has alienated her from politicians and the populace, whom she terms ‘the tyrant’s creatures’ and ‘th’enthusiast mob, confusion’s lawless sons’ respectively (I.244, I.249). Moreover, as Robespierre professes adherence to a Rousseauvian conception of general will, Adelaide’s acknowledgement of discontentment reinforces her status as an outsider. As Carol Weber demonstrates, linguistic expression, particularly that of private feelings, was viewed with great suspicion in Revolutionary France.33 Thus Adelaide violates social duty, although as Gregory Dart argues, the vagueness with which principles of Rousseau’s Social Contract are invoked by the Revolutionaries does not offer a practical guide to civic behaviour in the Republic. This is another demonstration of the weakness of their rhetoric, and indicates that a primary cause of escalating violence is the lack of clear, legal demarcations of what constitutes dissent.34 Adelaide is an outsider for her deviation from the supposed general-will, but Robespierre advocates this principle only ostensibly. In Osorio, Alhadra exemplifies the persecution of Muslims under Philip II and the Inquisition in sixteenth-century Spain. Like Adelaide, Alhadra is at risk from supporters of bogus ideologies: she explains that she has formerly been imprisoned on suspicion of heresy due to her ‘complexion’ (I.i.207).
Contemporary comments on the laments in The Fall of Robespierre and Osorio indicate their transparency to their audiences: the laments are understood to be political, and their social commentary is transferable to Britain. Coleridge is not skilful enough a dramatist to embed this subtext into the plays subtly. In a letter of 1794 Coleridge admits that the character of Adelaide is overburdened as a medium for his own views; he terms her an ‘Automaton’.35 A similar conclusion is reached concerning Alhadra by Coleridge’s friend George Bellas Greenough, who writes on a manuscript of Osorio, next to Alhadra’s lament, ‘Does not Alhadra account for this rather too philosophically?’36 Likewise Coleridge’s dissent is apparent to modern scholars, who have tended to interpret Coleridge’s dramas politically since Carl Woodring’s study Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge (1961). The plays received further close attention, for example, in Nicholas Roe’s Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (1988). These critics examine the politics of dissent expressed through Adelaide and Alhadra, but how the characters achieve their effect dramatically also warrants evaluation. Jacqueline M. Labbe posits the sociological model of the possessive, masculine perspective termed the ‘prospect’ and its counterpart, the restricted, feminine locus of the ‘bower’. As the creative imagination attempts to traverse the gendered mental domains, Labbe discusses ‘the compelling fascination the bower holds as [male authors such as Coleridge] explore the complexities inherent in their attempted masculine appropriation of a symbol determinedly feminine.’37 It is indicative of how many functions the character is made to fulfil that Coleridge’s Adelaide occupies both of the figurative positions Labbe posits. To soothe Tallien, Adelaide sings a hymn that Coleridge composed separately from the play as ‘Domestic Peace’, a song of the bower:
In cottag’d vale she dwells
Listn’ing to the Sabbath bells! (I.220–21)
However, Adelaide’s lament is delivered from a prospect of broad political observation that encompasses both urban disorder and domestic impact. The sense of authorial ventriloquism is accentuated by her complaint that ‘the winged hours […] shake big gall-drops from their heavy wings’, whose language and symbolism is not delivered in the same voice as the optimistic and naïve hymn. Similarly, in Osorio our suspension of disbelief is jeopardized by the intrusion of Coleridge’s religious views when Alhadra departs from the misery of her incarceration to make general comments about Christians: ‘they never do pardon—tis their Faith!’ (I.i.202). Alhadra is slightly more skilfully crafted than Adelaide is; Coleridge’s political complaints are encoded in a credible narrative of individual female experience, although she too is without discernible character outside of her lamentation.
Despite Coleridge’s demonstrable intuition of how female characters might be used to relate the social constraints of their historical contexts, Adelaide and Alhadra illustrate his persistent problems with female characterization. This shortcoming is evident also in his readings of tragedy. In 1813 the Bristol Gazette reports Coleridge’s comments on women in Shakespeare’s plays:
Speaking of the character of the women of Shakespear, or rather as Pope stated, the absence of character, Mr. Coleridge said this was the highest compliment that could be paid to them: the elements were so commixed, so even was the balance of feeling that no one protruded in particular.38
There is a parallel in The Piccolomini, in a passage that Coleridge translates literally from Schiller, in which Thekla meditates on her perceived worthlessness without Max: ‘What was I | Ere his fair love infused a soul into me?’ (II.vii.83–4). Coleridge repeats the critical point in 1819:
In all the Shakespearian women there is essentially the same foundation and principle; the distinct individuality and variety are merely the result of the modification of circumstances, whether in Miranda the maiden, in Imogen the wife, or in Katherine the queen.39
It is under such a belief that Coleridge creates Adelaide and Alhadra; he denies women personality traits with the consequence that they become blank canvases for his own philosophies. Yet it is noticeable in the above lecture that Coleridge avoids the more complex of Shakespeare’s female characters. He does not mention the madness of Ophelia, the excessive honesty of Cordelia, nor Lady Macbeth’s ‘unsex me here’ invocation of evil (Macbeth I.v.39). Nor does Coleridge refer to the male figures in Shakespeare’s works, from clowns to messengers, who are functional and relatively characterless in the manner he associates solely with women. By contrast, in notes for a lecture of 1819, Coleridge writes that ‘the ancients knew no way of making their women interesting but by unsexualizing them, Medea, Electra.’40 Perhaps it is only at this point in his career that Coleridge realizes that women onstage can be ‘interesting’, although he never learns to write women well. I think Julie A. Carlson is correct in her assessment that Coleridge’s eventual solution to his inability to write women is to masculinize them, as in the later play Zapolya.41 Carlson’s apt observations on the characters of Sarolta and Glycine in Zapolya lead me to regret that she does not address the character of Adelaide to provide a complete study of how Coleridge’s depiction of women develops.
Despite my criticisms of how the character is formed, I think that Adelaide is the belletrist of The Fall of Robespierre. In Danton’s Death (1835), Georg Büchner departs from historical sources to invent a new, brutal speech for St Just, which is superfluous when placed with the similar dialogue he obtains from transcripts. I find that Coleridge’s characterization of Adelaide is a more effective mode of fictionalizing the repercussions of the Terror. Had Coleridge and Southey written the entire play together – rather than leaving each to compose his own portion – and retained Adelaide throughout, I think the drama would be greatly improved. Adelaide is the only sympathetic, human referent for the ‘empty tokens’ of Revolutionary oration and the brutality of the Terror. With Adelaide the historic events become palpable and tragic.
Like The Fall of Robespierre, the ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’ ostensibly takes as its subject the death of an eminent person, but Coleridge assigns to it tragic significance by his relation of individual failure to broader social problems. The ‘Monody’ too achieves this purpose with fictional elements and a sustained tone of lamentation. This is most salient in the text from 1794, whose modifications Coleridge conducted in the months after his composition of The Fall of Robespierre with Southey. Coleridge’s treatment of Thomas Chatterton’s death in his ‘Monody’ departs from what John Axcelson terms ‘the tragedy of Chatterton himself’ towards the ‘symbol of Chatterton as tragedy’.42 The former state refers to a certain dominant mode of presenting Chatterton; ‘to keep him a boy’, as David Fairer observes, and to ‘shut off his politico-satirical side and exploit the lyricism and sentiment instead’.43 This abstraction of Chatterton’s youth, literary achievement and melancholy death gives rise to Wordsworth’s ‘marvellous boy’ and to Keats’s ‘child of sorrow’ and ‘son of misery’ (‘Resolution and Independence’, l. 43; ‘To Chatterton’, l. 2). The premature death of Chatterton qualifies him as the representative of a ‘Romantic cult of youth’, as Linda Kelly opines wryly: ‘Death had given him charms that he would never have had in life. Cast in the role of the victim he had become a symbol of the isolation and incomprehension that the poet must suffer.’44 In Chatterton’s isolation, and the implication in the ‘Monody’ that the populace lacks representation, Coleridge’s tragic motif of ideological imprisonment recurs, continuing his preoccupation with the theme of restricted expression.
While Coleridge’s ‘Monody’ is inflected with the same anxiety of a poet who identifies himself with his unfortunate subject, versions of the poem from 1794 onwards articulate a relationship to Chatterton that differs from Wordsworth’s and Keats’s significantly. Rather than employing the image of Chatterton as solitary poet to shut off his ‘politico-satirical side’, Coleridge exploits the radical themes of Chatterton’s poetry to express his own social concerns. In the description of Chatterton’s suicide Coleridge emphasizes that he is a subversive figure:
CARE, of wither’d brow,
Prepar’d the poison’s death-cold power:
Already to thy lips was rais’d the bowl. (68–70)
Chatterton was believed to have committed suicide rather than poisoned himself accidentally. Coleridge depicts him as a passive figure, evoking Socrates’ acceptance of the bowl of hemlock. Chatterton’s suicide as re-enactment of Socrates’ implies a resignation to civic pressure rather than melancholy: the 30 tyrants who had seized control of Athens demanded Socrates’ sham trial and death. Additionally, Chatterton’s death repeats the expulsion of wisdom signified by Socrates’ death sentence.
Socrates provides a useful model for Coleridge’s presentation of Chatterton as a potential benefactor to mankind. The poem’s establishment of Chatterton as a literary, and specifically a British, tragic figure is predicated upon a complex system of invocation and the assumption of masks. Coleridge becomes Chatterton, and Chatterton becomes his own Ælla/Ella. Rather than preserving Chatterton as an abstract figure for contemplation, Coleridge wishes to summon his subject in reality: ‘still I view | Thy corse of livid hue’ (19–20). The invocative tone of the poem’s opening stanzas echoes Chatterton’s summons of Ælla to inspire his tribute: ‘Let this my Songe bolde as thy Courage bee | As everlastinge to Posterytie’ (‘Songe toe Ella’ (1768), ll. 3–4). Donald S. Taylor perceives the narrator of the ‘Songe’ as ‘an adulatory speaker who feels his own need for the spirit that moved Ella […] then feels still more urgently the need of the city for Ella’s courage and prowess.’45
Equally, Taylor could be describing Coleridge’s invocation of Chatterton, an act whose success is indicated by Chatterton’s manifestation in the present rather than the past tense from the fifth stanza of the ‘Monody’ onward: ‘he hastes along’ (35). The conventional idiomatic comparison of pen to sword allows Chatterton to assume the identity of Ælla, the champion of liberty: ‘her own iron rod he makes Oppression feel’ (48). Four lines place particular emphasis on Chatterton/Ælla as a social figure whose loss is tragic:
Friend to the friendless, to the sick man health,
With generous joy he views th’ideal wealth;
He hears the widow’s heaven-breath’d prayer of praise;
He marks the shelter’d orphan’s tearful gaze. (41–4)
Ælla’s suicide in Ælla: A Tragycal Enterlude; or Discourseynge Tragedy (1769) assists comparison of the character with Chatterton himself, but the implication that Chatterton’s Wilkite politics and locally controversial character attacks in verse are equivalent to the violent heroism of Ælla is unpersuasive. Similarly, the depiction of the solitary poet Chatterton as ‘friend to the friendless’ seems unlikely; this is because the lines were not actually composed for Chatterton. With little modification, Coleridge takes the passage from an ‘Epistle’ that he reports inscribing on the window-shutters of an inn that was once home to John Kyrle (1637–1724), known to Coleridge as the ‘Man of Ross’, in July 1794.46 Hence, the 1794 ‘Monody’ adapts Chatterton to a pre-existent anxiety that community lacks representation, and so revives a central theme of The Fall of Robespierre.
As in The Fall of Robespierre and Osorio, Coleridge blends fact and fiction to evoke tragic pathos in the ‘Monody’ in order to foreground his political concerns; Adelaide, Chatterton and Alhadra each become an ‘Automaton’ for Coleridge’s dissent. Throughout 1794, Coleridge continues to seek a champion for liberty where Kyrle, Chatterton and Robespierre have failed. Thomas Erskine, who attempted to have the treason charges against The London Twelve dropped by acting as their defence consul, is the subject of one of Coleridge’s poems in his series of Sonnets on Eminent Characters. The poem, published in the Morning Chronicle in 1794, places pressure on Erskine to become immortalized in memory as a hero, evoking the pietas of Aeneas, thereby creating a Republican subtext, with his use of religious language:
dreadless thou didst stand
(Thy censer glowing with the hallow’d flame)
An hireless Priest before th’ insulted shrine.
(‘To the Hon Mr Erskine’, ll. 4–6)
Erskine will be venerated for his ‘stream divine | Of unmatch’d eloquence’, but there is no indication of potential achievement following his bravery (7–8). Instead, the poem’s closing image of the posthumous hero’s stellar radiance intimates glorious failure rather than progress. Similarly, Coleridge assumes a tone of lamentation as he depicts the Polish revolutionary Thaddeus Kosciusko (1746–1817) as a martyr to the cause of freedom from Russia and Prussia:
O what a loud and fearful shriek was there,
As tho’ a thousand souls one death-groan pour’d!
Ah me! they view’d beneath an hireling’s sword
Fall’n KOSKIUSKO!
(‘Sonnet: To Koskiusko’, ll. 1–4)
Coleridge describes the site of the rebel’s death as ‘the dirge of murder’d Hope’, but in fact Kosciusko had not been killed, but merely wounded and captured (8). Although Coleridge later modified the sonnet stylistically, it remains factually erroneous in four editions of his poems in which it appears during his lifetime, the last in 1834 and long after any misconception about Kosciusko’s death could have been unnoticed by a person so interested in his career. Evidently Coleridge tolerates, and occasionally requires, factual inaccuracy in the evocation of tragic pathos.
The sonnets on Erskine and Kosciusko articulate unsuccessful genius, like the disappointments of Robespierre and Chatterton, and beg the question of what solution is available to humanity. Tragic reality serves as propaganda to Coleridge, whose literary works and correspondence in 1794 imply repeatedly that the answer to civilization’s difficulties might be a society founded upon newly defined humanitarian principles. Coleridge’s critiques of contemporary civilization in 1794 are always mindful of Pantisocracy, the system of self-government that he and Southey intended to establish on the banks of the Susquehanna. Thus, while the lamentation of Adelaide, the ‘Monody’, the lines on the Man of Ross, and the sonnets on Erskine and Kosciusko pose questions of how true liberty can be achieved, and how change can be implemented where great men fail, Pantisocracy has its ghostly presence in all of these texts as an answer. Where politicians fail, the abolition of government is implied. If people are made poor Coleridge plans aspheterism, the eradication of private property. Thus the tragic is articulated as a stimulant, as Coleridge’s inspiration to devise a means of social improvement, and a mode that he hopes will encourage others to do likewise.
In 1795, Coleridge’s use of tragedy to attack Pitt’s government becomes more explicit and earnest, particularly in response to the two ‘Gagging Acts’ of November 1795, which prohibited congregations of more than 50 people and deemed treasonous any publication that was critical of the government or the monarch. To these acts Coleridge replies with a published lecture, The Plot Discovered, or an Address to the People Against Ministerial Treason, which owes its title to Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved; or, A Plot Discovered (1682). The association of Pitt’s cabinet with Otway’s play, in which a suspected conspiracy is found to have been fabricated by governmental conspirators, is an attack on the legitimacy of the ‘Gagging Acts’. Coleridge suggests that the supporters of the Acts must necessarily be untrustworthy. Additionally, Lewis Patton and Peter Mann suggest that Coleridge’s title refers to the arrest, in May 1794, of The London Twelve, to imply that ‘the danger to be feared is not from Thelwall and his allies but from the very ones who cry out against plots, i.e. Pitt and his ministers, who conspire against the rights of Englishmen.’47
As in his depictions of the isolated Adelaide and Chatterton, Coleridge’s lectures articulate his concerns that the masses lack representation as tragic. The government’s error, Coleridge states, is that the ‘King is regarded as the voice and will of the people.’48 This discussion of a people silenced culminates in a quotation from Euripides’ The Suppliant Women in which Theseus, king of Athens, explains that freedom of speech benefits society, translated thus: ‘Liberty speaks in these words: —Who with good counsel for his city wishes to address this gathering? | Anyone who wishes to do this gains distinction; whoever does not keeps silent.’49 The quotation serves two purposes. Ostensibly, it demonstrates that while Coleridge fears the tyranny of politicians, he also believes that the masses’ inability to participate in politics might result in the mental atrophy of the populace. This, to Coleridge, is catastrophic, as it is to ignorance that he attributes the outbreak of violence in France.50 The danger is domestic because, Coleridge claims, the government conspires to maintain widespread ignorance in England and Ireland in order that their people might work like beasts.51 The second function of the quotation from Euripides is that it assists Coleridge’s self-identification with another dissenting tragedian: Milton uses the same lines from The Suppliant Women as the epigram to his Areopagitica: A speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing to the parliament of England (1644). In Coleridge’s lecture he also uses a quotation from Samson Agonistes to imply that the collapse of French society should warn England:
With horrible convulsion to and fro,
They tugg’d, they shook—till down they came and drew
The whole Roof after them with burst of Thunder
Upon the heads of all who sat beneath,
Lords, Ladies, Captains, Counsellors, and Priests,
Their choice Nobility!
(Samson Agonistes, ll. 1649–54, var.)
Coleridge implies that the blind Samson represents not a figure of authority, but the average citizen. This is typical of Coleridge’s tragic poems and plays, whose referents are not always the rulers and heroes of tragic tradition, but figures of lower social status, such as Adelaide and Alhadra. Geoffrey Brereton claims that this is a characteristic of modern tragedy, in which ‘the characters can be scaled down considerably without becoming non-tragic’, and the tragic protagonist ‘can be described as a “quite ordinary” man […] raised to tragic stature by virtue of the situation in which he finds himself.’52 This tragedy of ‘scaled down’ protagonists accords with Coleridge’s anticipation of a revolution that will yield an egalitarian society. Raymond Williams implies that the liberal politics of the Romantic period cause the ‘extension of the tragic category to a newly rising class’:
Its eventual effect was profound. As in other bourgeois revolutions, extending the categories of law or suffrage, the arguments for the limited extension became inevitable arguments for a general extension. The extension from the prince to the citizen became in practice an extension to all human beings.53
Without the benefit of hindsight by which later commentators such as Williams identify that the Revolution primarily advanced ‘bourgeois’ interests, the egalitarian principles he perceives in the French Revolution allow Coleridge to include all people in the domain of the tragic, including most importantly the social benefits that he hopes will follow strife. But as Coleridge becomes disillusioned with the French Revolution, and abandons Necessitarianism, he reverses his political application of the tragic. Coleridge no longer employs the mode to offer consolation for the hardships of a revolution he endorses, but to caution against insurrection.
Coleridge’s abandonment of radical politics is undeniable but, as Peter Kitson observes, ‘it is not easy to date the beginning of Coleridge’s passage from idiosyncratic dissenter to idiosyncratic conservative.’54 The attempt to assess Coleridge’s politics is complicated by his reluctance to commit to the policies of any one party. In 1801 he complains that ‘my heart swelled so within me at the brutal Ignorance & Hardheartedness of all Parties alike.’55 While Coleridge’s philosophical passage from radical to conservative may elude specification, he does signal the transition explicitly in public. With this change, Coleridge’s use of the tragic alters also: he evokes the mode with different emphases, for political purposes that are conservative rather than radical. Coleridge’s public attitude to France is markedly different following the French defeat of the Swiss at Berne in 1798, and it is with this demonstrative shift that he announces his new political position. The French victory was indicative of a force that aspired to build an empire, and was incompatible with the humanitarian principles that Coleridge had formerly admired in Revolutionary discourse.
Either from a progressive sentiment that the French have betrayed his faith in the Revolution –culminating with the French attack on Switzerland – or from a sense of social obligation to refute his former allegiance, Coleridge becomes critical of France in 1798. Thereafter he dismisses his previous support of the Revolution as erroneous. In ‘France: An Ode’, first published in the Morning Post under the revelatory title of ‘The Recantation’, Coleridge attacks French foreign policy:
O FRANCE! that mockest Heav’n, adult’rous, blind,
And patient only in pernicious toils,
Was this thy boast, champion of human kind!
To mix with Monarchs in the lust of sway,
Yell in the hunt, and share the murd’rous prey—
T’ insult the shrine of Liberty with spoils
From freemen torn! to tempt and to betray!
(‘France: An Ode’, ll. 78–84)
Coleridge’s recantation is necessary because, he claims, the task of France was not to conquer, but to ‘persuade the nations to be free’ (l. 61). In ‘Fears in Solitude: Written in April 1798, During the Alarm of an Invasion’, Coleridge’s disappointment develops into an apprehension that England will be invaded, and that it is a fate that is deserved as retribution for Britain’s war on France: ‘Therefore, evil days | Are coming on us, O my countrymen!’ (‘Fears in Solitude’, ll. 124–5). ‘The Story of the Mad Ox’, although a humorous account of the French Revolution and the reaction of the British Opposition, indicates serious concerns about the political chaos of Europe. This instability is evident in the pursuit of the ox, which represents the French, by an English parson and his clergy, the subsequent flight of the mob as the devil sits astride the ox, and the conclusive interruption of the narrative with (incorrect) news of Pitt’s injury in a duel.
While his earlier tragic writings urge political action, Coleridge displays a fear of political upheaval in works following Osorio. This new tragic emphasis is informed not only by Coleridge’s interest in international affairs in newspapers, but by literal, physical changes in perspective. Coleridge’s new caution is evident in his withdrawal from prominence as a dissenter, but also in his domestic relocation from the politically volatile Bristol to the quietness of Nether Stowey, and subsequently Germany and Keswick. These changes allow Coleridge to form detached opinions on British politics. Regina Hewitt depicts Wordsworth and Coleridge as proto-sociologists who turn from radicalism due to a realization of ‘the limited place of politics in a larger social system’ to observe society and understand its operation instead.56 The conservative-tragic position, as explained by René Girard, is that to threaten the structure of society invites chaos and catastrophe. Girard writes that ‘order, peace and fecundity depend on cultural distinctions; it is not these distinctions but the loss of them that gives birth to fierce rivalries and sets members of the same family or social group against one another.’57
Even ‘bloodless’ revolution would require a total upheaval of society to bring about Coleridge’s system of Pantisocracy, and it is evident that this could not occur without disorder. Girard encapsulates his point with a passage from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida in which Ulysses indicates the dangerous consequences of the loss of ‘degree’ or social status:
O, when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
The enterprise is sick! How could communities,
Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenitive and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows.
(Troilus and Cressida, I.iii.102–11)
Dionysian wildness can only be resolved by the merciless, corrective actions of Apollo; to invite further catastrophe than already exists would be folly. Hence, Coleridge begins to use the tragic to warn against revolutionary change, not to incite it. In particular I want to examine a period in 1802 when Coleridge devoted considerable interest to Greek tragedy.
In August 1802 Coleridge writes to William Sotheby in anticipation of a copy of Orestes, Sotheby’s version of Euripides’ Electra: ‘The newest subject—tho’ brought from the Planets (or Asteroids) Ceres & Pallas, could not excite my curiosity more than Orestes.’ Coleridge suggests that Sotheby writes a new tragedy on the character of Medea, to be based, it seems from the letter, on Seneca’s play:
There is a subject of great merit in the ancient mythology hitherto untouched—I believe so at least—but for the mode of the Death which mingled the ludicrous & horrible, but which might be easily altered, it is one of the finest subjects for Tragedy that I am acquainted with—Medea after the murder of her children fled to the Court of the old King, Pelias, was regarded with superstitious Horror, & shunned or insulted by the Daughters of Pelias—till hearing of her miraculous Restoration of Æson they conceived the idea of recalling by her means the youth of their own Father. She avails herself of their credulity—& so works them up by pretended magic Rites, and that they consent to kill their Father in his sleep, & throw him into the magical Cauldron—which done, Medea leaves them with bitter Taunts & triumph.58
Coleridge proceeds to quote from Medea’s letter of lamentation to Jason in Ovid’s Heroides. He reiterates Ovid’s rhetorical question on the relevance of Medea’s tale, and why one should revive the story of Pelias’ daughters, who wound their father innocently by their devotion, and hack his limbs with virgin hands:
Quid referam Peliae natas pietate nocentes
caesaque virginea membra paterna manu?
(Ovid, Heroides XII.129–30)
The answer, Coleridge implies, is the continued relevance of tragic art to reality. The letter to Sotheby not only reveals literary influences on Coleridge’s Buttermere articles, but evinces a method of articulating the tragic that is evident in Coleridge’s continuation of ‘The Three Graves’, his Wallenstein translation from Schiller’s German, and his account of Maria Eleonora Schöning’s death in The Friend. While the prose plot-summary of the proposed tragedy conforms to the pattern of morality that I find in other of Coleridge’s texts, his absorption in Medea in particular marks works that are contemporaneous with his response to Sotheby’s Orestes.
In October 1802 ‘Dejection: An Ode’ was first published. The poem articulates Coleridge’s melancholy over Wordsworth’s imminent marriage, his own marital dissatisfaction, and his infatuation with Sara Hutchinson. As such, the scope of the poem is not of tragic magnitude. Yet I think George Dekker is right to claim that a version of tragic catharsis occurs at a personal level in which ‘the experience of tragic art mediates, so far as mediation is possible, between the polar extremes of feelingful Joy or feelingless Dejection.’59 Furthermore, ‘Dejection’ rehearses the playing out of tragic forces, which also impel a series of articles Coleridge wrote the same month on the seduction of a local innkeeper.
In October 1802, Mary Robinson, a waitress at her parents’ inn, married ‘a Gentleman, calling himself Alexander Augustus Hope, Member for Linlithgowshire, and brother to the Earl of Hopeton.’60 Within weeks of the wedding, the bridegroom was revealed to be an impostor, a bigamist and a forger named Hatfield. Convicted of forgery, Hatfield was hanged at Carlisle in September 1803. Coleridge wrote a series of articles on the deception for the Morning Post and the Courier in 1802. Ostensibly Coleridge’s pieces on the scandal by the shore of Buttermere are typical human-interest journalism, but they also articulate his anxieties about tension in Europe, and the overall approach is derived from his recent reflection on the doomed love of Jason and Medea.
As I place Coleridge’s prose treatment of the Buttermere scandal within his tragic vision, I wish also to juxtapose it with Wordsworth’s account in The Prelude. On a visit to London, Wordsworth learns that Mary Robinson’s story has been adapted for the stage. The poet complains in the 1805 version that it is a ‘too holy theme for such a place’ (The Prelude, VII.318). In the 1850 text Wordsworth modifies his claim; the theatre is too ‘light’ a medium; popular melodrama is unsuitable for the presentation of such serious experiences as Mary’s (VII.295). Wordsworth addresses Coleridge in the 1805 version, and outlines the incident:
I mean, O distant Friend! a Story drawn
From our own ground, the Maid of Buttermere,
And how the Spoiler came, ‘a bold bad Man’
To God unfaithful, Children, Wife, and Home,
And wooed the artless Daughter of the hills,
And wedded her, in cruel mockery
Of love and marriage bonds. (VII.321–7)
Mary Robinson’s experience is personal to Wordsworth: ‘we were nursed, as almost might be said, | On the same mountains’ (VII.342–3). Ernest de Selincourt’s detection of an allusion to Milton’s Lycidas in these lines indicates that Mary has been absorbed into the Lake District as a source of inspiration for Wordsworth. Her tale forms part of the myth of the philosopher-poet’s mental development.61 By contrast, Coleridge renders the incident tragic with insistence that its importance is not solely personal but public and exemplary; thus in discussions of the same subject the two authors demonstrate the philosophical differences of their responses to misfortune.
Coleridge’s first article on the Buttermere episode appears in the Morning Post of 11 October 1802 under the title of ‘Romantic Marriage’. At the time of publication it was not known that Hatfield was an impostor, but there were suspicions about his identity in the Kewsick community. Hence, Coleridge’s piece assumes an ambiguous method that will allow it to be read retrospectively as tragic if Hatfield is found to be a fraud, but as romantic if he is not. This technique is predicated on the presentation of Mary. Initially, Coleridge dispels the popular conception of Mary’s great beauty: ‘she is rather gap-toothed, and somewhat pock-fretten.’62 Here Coleridge agrees with De Quincey, who recalls that ‘beautiful, in any emphatic sense, she was not.’ De Quincey also comments that Mary is ill-tempered, and that admiration of her ‘roused mere anger and disdain’.63 However, despite his recommendation that Mary might be better known as ‘the Grace of Buttermere, rather than the Beauty’, Coleridge decides that it better suits his purpose of evoking pathos to present Mary as a remarkably attractive woman.64 Hence in the same paragraph he claims that she ‘has long attracted the notice of every visitor by her exquisite elegance, and the becoming manner in which she is used to fillet her beautiful long hair.’ Subsequently, Coleridge refers to Mary Robinson as ‘the beauty of Buttermere’ four times in the same article without irony. For the same purpose Coleridge notes that Mary’s parents are ‘old’ and ‘poor’ and, in contradiction of De Quincey’s remarks on Mary’s ill temper, Coleridge states that his subject has ‘an irreproachable character’.65
By the time of Coleridge’s next four articles on the Buttermere scandal, Hatfield had been confirmed as an impostor.66 Coleridge recognizes in his own view of the episode a resemblance to a viewer of art, and conceives of his treatment of Hatfield’s story as ekphrasis, a ‘novel of real life’ on 22 October.67 Subsequently, in a notebook entry Coleridge claims that ‘Hatfield—Cruickshank—Πηνελοπη’ will be ‘characters in my novel.’68 In journalism Coleridge sets about defining Mary and Hatfield in tragic opposition, as simplified characters that represent good and evil. Scandalously, Hatfield ‘paid serious addresses to four women at the same time,’ ‘made light’ of his charge with forgery, and ‘never attended the church at Keswick but once.’69 In a letter of 1804 Coleridge explains that such a wrongdoer is a chameleon: ‘There are HATFIELDS—& likewise there are IAGOS—Whatever shape Vice can assume, Virtue will counterfeit.’70 The word ‘counterfeit’ is used by Milton to describe the disguised Satan’s infiltration of heaven, and equates Hatfield not only with Iago but with the arch-fiend (Paradise Lost, IV.117). This is appropriate for Coleridge’s hyperbolic summation of Hatfield’s correspondence: ‘never surely did an equal number of letters disclose a thicker swarm of villainies perpetrated by one of the worst, and miseries inflicted on some of the best, of human beings.’71
Coleridge insists on the Buttermere episode’s importance: ‘I cannot express the sincere concern, that every inhabitant in the country takes in the misfortune of poor Mary.’72 By broadening the scope of the incident from Mary’s life to imply that the entire nation is affected, Coleridge presents Hatfield’s crime as a phallic intrusion to spoil a virgin community rather than the deception of one woman alone; Hatfield’s actions are invasive. Coleridge exploits this sense of betrayed community to elevate the Buttermere incident to tragedy: ‘Poor Mary is the object of universal concern.’73
Jerome Christensen indicates that Coleridge’s journalism on the Buttermere scandal is permeated by a fear that the Peace of Amiens would be short-lived; that the eruption of scandal in a rural idyll prefigures the resumption of war that Coleridge fears. As Christensen indicates, the tentative Peace of Amiens creates an uneasy atmosphere in which Hatfield’s assumed and symbolic name of ‘Hope’ becomes ‘a misnomer or an alias for something that should in fact be feared’, forbidding political optimism.74 There are resonances of personal issues too: as Coleridge’s articles were written shortly after Wordsworth’s wedding, it is possible to detect irony in Coleridge’s departure from the title of ‘Romantic Marriage’ at the expense of his colleague.
The xenophobic wariness of Coleridge’s treatment of the Buttermere scandal reflects a fear that catastrophe occurs as a consequence of violations of ‘degree’ or social order. Hatfield, a newcomer to Keswick, is the object of Coleridge’s suspicion even prior to confirmation of his crimes. Like Medea and Orestes, the newcomer Hatfield is inherently threatening. If Hatfield is, as he claims, Alexander Augustus Hope, his intended marriage to the lowly Mary transcends class structures in a manner that alarms Coleridge. When Medea, a princess, arrives in Corinth, her status is lowered to that of a barbarian, and Jason’s desire to marry a Corinthian princess initiates the tragedy of Euripides’ play. In Sotheby’s (and all versions of) Orestes, Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus’ attempt to assume monarchical control through adultery and murder brings further catastrophe. Hence, in order to accept Hope’s marriage to Mary Robinson, Coleridge seeks to negate their class division. He accomplishes this, in anticipation of his own Zapolya (1817), with an unsubstantiated suggestion that Mary is of noble origin: ‘It seems that there are some circumstances attending her birth and true parentage, which would account for her striking superiority in mind, and manners.’75 As Hope is actually an impostor, he has attempted to violate the social order, and catastrophe follows. Similarly, both in the continuation of ‘The Three Graves’ and Coleridge’s translations of Wallenstein, tragedy arises from the defiance of authority, and transgressions of ‘degree’ are committed. In the ballad, Mary’s mother desires her daughter’s lover, and in the Wallenstein plays, the eponym refuses the Emperor’s orders to return his war-weary army to battle.
Coleridge uses the occult, by which natural law is transcended, to accentuate the violation of social order that occurs in ‘The Three Graves’ and Wallenstein, recalling Medea’s association with witchcraft. In Coleridge’s portion of the ballad, the effects of the mother’s curse are seen, and she utters a second imprecation on Ellen. The curses succeed due to the confusion of natural order. As a mother should be virtuous, it is assumed that her prayers will be answered, as she should not pray for what is not just:
Beneath the foulest Mother’s curse
No child could ever thrive:
A Mother is a Mother still,
The holiest thing alive.
(‘Continuation of The Three Graves’, ll. 37–40)
Wordsworth complains that Coleridge’s tragic elaboration of the tale renders it unpalatable: ‘he made it too shocking and painful, and not sufficiently sweetened by any healing views.’76 Coleridge makes comparable alterations in his translations from Schiller. In the context of a religious war, Wallenstein’s preoccupation with astrology and the supernatural signifies his deviation from the will of the Holy Roman Emperor. In Coleridge’s version of The Piccolomini, he expands one of Wallenstein’s soliloquies with an implication that his refusal to follow orders is directly related to his occult interests:
No road, no track behind me, but a wall,
Impenetrable, insurmountable,
Rises obedient to the spells I mutter’d
And meant not—my own doings tower behind me.
(The Piccolomini, IV.iv.22–5)
As in ‘The Three Graves’, the folly of occult interests signals the character’s unnatural desires, which threaten the structure of society. Thus, Coleridge builds on the magical aspects of Schiller’s play to make a judgment of Wallenstein as a historical character and to emphasize that he is tragically misguided.
Coleridge’s depiction of Wallenstein’s decline also foretells the downfall of Napoleon, about whom Coleridge contributed a series of articles for the Morning Post in March 1800, when he also translated Schiller’s plays. Coleridge complains in a marginal note on his manuscript that Wallenstein, lacking ‘Strength’, is ‘not tragic’: ‘Schiller has drawn weakness […] hence W[allenstein] evaporates in mock-mysterious speeches.’ To add the quality of ‘Strength’, to imply that Wallenstein is admirable, and therefore that his downfall is a tragic loss, Coleridge explains that he ‘forms a character of Buonaparte’, with the result, he claims, that Schiller’s version is ‘a little improved’:77
A youth who had scarce seen his twentieth year
Was Wallenstein, when he and I were friends:
Yet even then he was a daring soul:
His frame of mind was serious and severe
Beyond his years; his dreams were of great objects.
(The Death of Wallenstein, III.ii.98–102)
The anxiety of political upheaval that persists in Coleridge’s versions of the Wallenstein plays expresses his desire that the French monarchy should be restored without the violence of ‘a revolution of property’. Like Wallenstein, Napoleon is ‘a man of various talent, of commanding genius, of splendid exploit.’78 Additionally, Coleridge’s fear that Napoleon possesses an impractical idealism informs his depiction of the indecisive Wallenstein:
[Napoleon] has hitherto supported the part of a man ambitious of greatness: too intensely preoccupied to be otherwise than austere in morals; too confident in his predestined fortune to be suspicious or cruel; too ambitious of a new greatness for the ordinary ambition of conquest or despotism.79
To his death Wallenstein dismisses evidence of his imminent fall. He places his faith in prophecies of his ‘predestined future’. Coleridge’s depiction of Wallenstein as a version of Napoleon implies that his opponent, the Holy Roman Emperor, represents Pitt. Both Napoleon and Wallenstein make ‘pacific overtures’ but fail to secure peace. Pitt, like Ferdinand, desires conflict: ‘Our Minister seems to have been animated with the spirit of an angry woman, who shuts the door with a fling against a rival.’80 War could be averted if Pitt possessed a superior temperament.
By 1810 Coleridge’s conservatism has advanced sufficiently to criticize France with the name ‘Misetes’ (‘hater’) and praise Britain as ‘Pamphilus’ (‘Loved by All’).81 However, both in tragic and non-tragic writings Coleridge’s exhortations against civil disobedience become consistent. In The Friend Coleridge recounts his journey from ‘foul bye roads of ordinary fanaticism’ as a youth to an appreciation of ‘common sense’ in maturity.82 It is ‘common sense’ to which Coleridge’s tragic writings appeal after Osorio and his abandonment of Pantisocracy.
Both Francophobia and the newer, moderate political perspective are evident in Coleridge’s fascination with the executed Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet (1778–1803). The same kind of self-identification that Nicholas Roe detects in Coleridge’s attitude to Robespierre underlies this interest. Coleridge was a minor political figure; Emmet was a gifted speaker and sometime poet. Coleridge writes that he was once ‘like him […], very young, very enthusiastic, distinguished by talents and acquirements and a sort of turbid eloquence.’83
In 1801 Emmet had travelled to Paris, funded by Napoleon, to discuss the possibility of French assistance in an Irish uprising. However, Napoleon was simultaneously in negotiations with Britain for a peace treaty. Suspicions reached Emmet that Napoleon considered betraying the Irish plans in order to strengthen French relations with Britain. Unimpressed by Napoleon and French foreign policy, Emmet was reticent during his stay in Paris. He avoided the parties to which he was invited, but took the time to study military tactics and to meet Kosciusko. With the treaty of Amiens signed in March 1802, hopes of French intervention in Ireland faded. Rumours of French infidelity divided the United Irishmen, and Emmet imagined that even if a successful rebellion occurred with Napoleon’s aid, it would only replace British oppression with French neo-imperialism.84 For fear that his plans would be discovered, Emmet hurried the uprising, which failed disastrously as a consequence of poor organization. Emmet was hanged and decapitated, and reports of the display of his head may have reminded Coleridge of John Walford’s body. However, Coleridge also had a personal interest in Emmet. When in Dublin, Southey spoke with a close friend of the rebel. Southey declared later that ‘God almighty seldom mixes up so much virtue and so much genius in one, or talents as ennobled.’85 Hence Coleridge and Southey followed reports of Emmet’s trial closely in the Morning Post. The newspaper accounts included transcripts of Emmet’s famous speech from the dock, censored carefully to omit calls for Irish liberty and to highlight Emmet’s contempt for the French.
Coleridge’s admiration is that afforded to a tainted hero, one who, Marianne Elliott explains, appeals to the ‘gothic tradition’ and engenders his own legacy of ‘tragic romance’.86 Southey’s poem ‘Written immediately after reading the speech of Robert Emmet’ depicts a Chattertonian ‘Youth, Genius, generous Virtue’ (l. 41). In a notebook entry, Coleridge writes that ‘Emmet=mad Raphael painting Ideals of Beauty on the walls of a cell with human Excrement.’87 Timothy Webb notes Coleridge’s perception of a tragic flaw in Emmet: ‘Madness subverts the very basis of his own artistic genius.’88 Coleridge’s juxtaposition of ideal beauty and refuse bestows a tragic duality upon the man, a brilliant figure who is also self-destructive.
Yet the lessons Coleridge draws from Emmet’s death are typically reliant on misconception and convolution. He is quick to brush aside Emmet’s revolutionary ambitions as evidence of ‘madness’, although nothing of the sort afflicted Emmet in reality. In epistolary reflections Coleridge announces – with some naivety – that Emmet could have grown to love Britain if his desire for reform had been appropriately channelled: ‘O if our Ministers had saved him […] we might have had in him a sublimely great man, we assuredly should have had in him a good man, heart & soul an Englishman!’89 While Coleridge proposes that tragedy would have cured Emmet, that a vision of the catastrophic consequences of uprising would have altered his aspirations and methods, it is Emmet’s tale itself that forms a cautionary tragedy to oppose revolutionary politics.90 The treatment of Emmet – an Irish rebel distorted into an English patriot – exemplifies again Coleridge’s tendency to manipulate his real-life sources to politicize his tragic works. In this Coleridge is true to the tragic, which has been an inherently politicized mode from the anti-Theban plays of ancient Greece to modernity. Coleridge is also an unreliable historian. In his depiction of real events he displays factual looseness that suits the rhetoric of his political journalism. He prioritizes pathos rather than accuracy.
Coleridge’s article on Maria Eleonora Schöning of Nuremberg possesses similar overtones concerning the application of reason to avert catastrophe. In contrast with Godwin’s radical Caleb Williams, which implies that the tragically corrupt legal system should be abolished, in Coleridge’s account of Schöning – who has been orphaned, raped and driven to insanity – a merciful magistrate represents the potential for justice to be administered fairly.91 As the magistrate does not avail himself fully of the opportunity to assist Maria, catastrophe follows, which justifies the educative tragedy of Coleridge’s journalism. Opposite to Godwin’s suggestion in Caleb Williams that the judicial system is corrupt, archaic and irreparable, Coleridge wants courts to have greater wisdom and power. Hence Maria’s plight is symptomatic of a people under ‘the guardianship of a wolfish and merciless oligarchy, proud from ignorance.’92
Frequently Coleridge indicates that ignorance is a chronic social problem: ‘The Happiness & Misery of a nation must ultimately be traced to the morals and & understandings of the People.’93 While early works suggest revolution as a means to end ignorance, Coleridge later reverses the model: mankind’s improvement, he implies, must occur first on an individual level. Political reform will occur consequentially and peacefully. To find the ideal medium for this visionary, tragic didacticism, Coleridge experiments with various literary forms. While I believe the general critical precept that certain conditions give rise to tragedy, it is also important to note that details of these contexts are very different in each period. Basic similarities are identifiable between the historical circumstances of the ancient Greek tragedians and those of Shakespeare, but their worlds were also greatly dissimilar, and this affects tragedy significantly. Hence I think that Péter Szondi is correct to claim that historical crisis not only occasions tragedy, but causes the mode to be reinvented.94 It is in such an atmosphere that Coleridge experiments with tragedy formally.
1 Modern Tragedy, pp. 53–4.
2 The Death of Tragedy, pp. 106–7.
3 LoL, I, p. 43.
4 Modern Tragedy, p. 64.
5 Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp. 119–20.
6 Ibid., pp. 120–21.
7 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by A.M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock Publications, 1972; repr. Abingdon: Routledge Classics, 2007), p. 3.
8 Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies II: Hegel and Marx (Abingdon: Routledge Classics, 2003; repr. 2006), p. 300.
9 Jeffrey Hipolito, ‘Coleridge’s Lectures 1818–1819: On the History of Philosophy’, in The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, pp. 254–70.
10 BL, II, p. 6.
11 CL, III, p. 235.
12 For Thomas Poole’s account of Walford’s story see David Worthy, A Quantock Tragedy: The Walford Murder of 1789, 2nd edn (Over Stowey: Friarn Press, 2004), pp. 29–44.
13 CL, III, p. 235.
14 Lects 1795, p. 7.
15 Lects 1795, pp. 18, 48, 54, 221.
16 CL, I, p. 86.
17 Richard B. Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959; repr. 1969), p. 85.
18 CL, I, pp. 98, 102, 104, 106, 110, 121.
19 Ibid., p. 106.
20 Edward Kessler, Coleridge’s Metaphors of Being (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 125.
21 Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772–1804 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989; repr. Flamingo, 1999), p. 74.
22 PW, III.1, p. 9.
23 ‘The Fall of Robespierre and the Sublime Machine of Agency’, p. 432.
24 Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, 32 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 171.
25 William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. by Marvin Spevack, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988; repr. 1989), p. 25.
26 Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years, Oxford English Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 219.
27 Paul Deschamps, Le Formation de la Pensée de Coleridge (Paris: Libraire Marcel Didier, 1964), p. 348.
28 CL, I, p. 120.
29 Casey Dué, The Captive Woman’s Lament in Greek Tragedy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), pp. 10–14.
30 John W. Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy: An Essay, repr. (New York: G.E. Stechert & Co., 1925).
31 Linda M. Austin, ‘The Lament and the Rhetoric of the Sublime’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 53:3 (1998), 279–306 (p. 280).
32 See Scott Simpkins, ‘“The Book of Thel” and the Romantic Lament’, South Central Review, 5:1 (1988), 25–9.
33 Caroline Weber, Terror and its Discontents: Suspect Words in Revolutionary France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 17.
34 Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism, p. 19.
35 CL, I, p. 125.
36 Quoted in PW, III.1, p. 153.
37 Jacqueline M. Labbe, Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1998), p. 96.
38 Quoted in LoL, I, pp. 555–6.
39 Ibid., II, p. 270.
40 Ibid., II, p. 409.
41 Julie A. Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 121–5.
42 John Axcelson, ‘Saving Chatterton: Imagining Historical Transmissions in Coleridge’, The Wordsworth Circle, 36:3 (2005), 126–33 (p. 126).
43 David Fairer, ‘Chatterton’s Poetic Afterlife: A Context for Coleridge’s Monody’, in Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, ed. by Nick Groom (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1999), pp. 228–52 (p. 229).
44 Linda Kelly, The Marvellous Boy: The Life and Myth of Thomas Chatterton (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), p. 84.
45 Donald S. Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 110.
46 CL, I, p. 87.
47 Lects 1795, p. 283n.
48 Ibid., p. 295.
49 Euripides, The Suppliant Women, in Electra and Other Plays, trans. by John Davie, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin Books, 1998), p. 106.
50 Lects 1795, p. 6.
51 Ibid., p. 70.
52 Geoffrey Brereton, Principles of Tragedy: A Rational Examination of the Tragic Concept in Life and Literature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 18.
53 Modern Tragedy, p. 49.
54 Peter Kitson, ‘Political Thinker’, in The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, ed. by Lucy Newlyn, Cambridge Companions to Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 156–69 (p. 164).
55 CL, II, p. 711.
56 Regina Hewitt, The Possibilities of Society: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Sociological Viewpoint of English Romanticism, The Margins of Literature (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 45.
57 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. by Patrick Gregory (London: The Athlone Press, 1988; repr. Continuum, 2005), p. 52.
58 CL, II, p. 857.
59 George Dekker, Coleridge and the Literature of Sensibility (London: Vision Press Ltd, 1978), p. 231.
60 EoT, I, p. 357.
61 William Wordsworth, The Prelude: The 1805 Text, ed. by Ernest de Selincourt, Oxford Standard Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 282.
62 EoT, I, p. 357.
63 The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. by Grevel Lindop and others, 21 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000–2003), X (2003), ed. by Alina Clej, p. 316.
64 EoT, I, p. 61.
65 Ibid., pp. 357–8, my italics.
66 The last two of these articles were reprinted in the Courier on 12 November 1802 and 1 January 1803 respectively.
67 EoT, I, p. 374.
68 CN, I, § 1395.
69 EoT, I, pp. 374–5, 409.
70 CL, II, p. 1121.
71 EoT, I, p. 415.
72 Ibid., p. 375.
73 Ibid., p. 391.
74 Jerome Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 135.
75 EoT., I, p. 376, my italics.
76 Barron Field, Memoirs of Wordsworth, ed. by Geoffrey Little (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1975), p. 100.
77 PW, III.1, p. 174.
78 EoT, I, p. 208.
79 Ibid., p. 211.
80 Ibid., p. 213.
81 Friend, I, p. 304.
82 Ibid., p. 224.
83 CL, II, p. 1002.
84 Patrick Geoghegan, Robert Emmet: A Life, 2nd edn (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan Ltd, 2004), pp. 101–15.
85 Quoted in Robert Emmet, p. 91.
86 Marianne Elliott, ‘Robert Emmet: The Making of a Legend’, British Academy Review, 8 (2005), 24–7 (p. 24).
87 CN, I, § 1524.
88 Timothy Webb, ‘Coleridge and Robert Emmet: Reading the Text of Irish Revolution’, Irish Studies Review, 8:3 (2000), 303–23 (p. 312).
89 CL, II, p. 522.
90 Ibid., p. 1003.
91 Friend, I, p. 348.
92 Ibid., p. 342.
93 CL, II, p. 720.
94 Péter Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama, trans. and ed. by Michael Hays, Theory and History of Literature, 29 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 3–10.