Coleridge wrote two plays intended for the stage, Remorse and Zapolya: A Christmas Tale. Both were produced during his lifetime. While the manager of Drury Lane, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, rejected the manuscript of Osorio in 1797, it was revised as Remorse, which opened at Samuel Whitbread’s renovated Drury Lane on Saturday, 23 January 1813. It became the most successful new play of the 1812–13 season. To put Coleridge’s achievement in perspective, Richard Holmes notes that ‘no new verse tragedy had run for more than ten nights since 1777.’1 After a run of 23 performances at Drury Lane, Remorse was staged in more than 20 locations from 1813–15. Venues included theatres royal, provincial stages and barns, in places such as Edinburgh, Bath, Bristol, New York, Boston and Philadelphia. In a production of Remorse in Exeter, the part of Alvar was played by Edmund Kean (1787–1833), the foremost tragic actor of his generation. Also to become prominent, Alexander Rae (1782–1820) established his acting reputation by his depiction of Ordonio. Rae chose Remorse for his benefit night at Drury Lane in 1817, and the play was revived for this purpose several times. Under the patronage of Sir Richard Bickerton, a commander-in-chief of the navy, Remorse was staged in Portsmouth in March 1813 for the benefit of a Mr Kelly. An advertisement in a local newspaper explains that Coleridge’s play was selected due to its ‘unequivocal success’ in London.2
Encouraged by the success of Remorse, Coleridge assumed that Zapolya would be staged at Drury Lane with the assistance of Byron, who served as a member of the theatre’s board. This did not occur, and Coleridge concluded erroneously that the staging of Charles Maturin’s tragedy Bertram, or the Castle of St. Aldobrand (1816) violated an agreement to stage Zapolya. Thus aggrieved, Coleridge composed a series of letters to The Courier in which he attacked Maturin’s play and the board at Drury Lane. This material was substantially reprinted to form Chapter 23 of Biographia Literaria. Coleridge complains that Whitbread did not fulfil his promise to save British theatre from ‘pernicious barbarisms and Kotzebuisms in morals and taste’. He embarks on an ill-spirited, rambling and unnecessary attack on Maturin’s rather inconsequential play, the primary error of which is presumably that it succeeded where Zapolya failed.3 It is remarkable that the experience with Osorio had not taught Coleridge to beware the whim of theatre managers. The pride brought by success with Remorse seems to have caused a much more dramatic response to the situation with Zapolya than the earlier disappointment with Sheridan.
In a letter of 1821, Coleridge informs Robert William Elliston (1774–1831), the current manager at Drury Lane, that he has not forgotten the perceived slight over Zapolya: ‘As a representative of the Drury Lane Theatre, though in no respect your own person and character, you owe me a little set off for the indignity, caprice and neglect shown by your predecessor to me with regard to Zapolya.’4 However, there is no evidence that the board at Drury Lane was aware of any arrangement to stage Coleridge’s play. Byron recalls an impression that Coleridge had ‘nothing feasible in hand’ when he asked for a new play, and the committee turned to Maturin and Bertram instead.5 But despite the disappointment of rejection by London’s patent theatres, a version of Zapolya was produced for 10 performances at the Surrey Theatre in London in 1818. Coleridge had no direct involvement with this production and made no comment on it that survives, but under Elliston’s management from 1809–19 the Surrey Theatre had, Jane Moody observes, ‘acquired a reputation as the most respectable of London’s minor theatres.’6
Although the financial successes of Remorse and Zapolya exceed the theatrical achievements of any of Coleridge’s contemporary Romantic poets, Coleridge’s staged plays have received relatively little critical attention. Even among professed Coleridge specialists his plays have commonly been ignored or dismissed. In Coleridge the Poet (1966), a title that declares a complete and authoritative evaluation of Coleridge’s poetical works, George Watson declares that ‘the oddity that [Coleridge] alone among the English romantic poets achieved a successful run on the London stage ought not to disguise the fact of total failure.’ From this convoluted utterance Watson proceeds to surmise of Remorse that ‘no one could wish to see it revived’.7 Zapolya is dismissed by Watson as a ‘feeble imitation’ of Shakespeare; an evaluation at odds with the Theatrical Inquisitor’s anonymous reviewer, who found that the play was ‘too good’ for the Surrey Theatre.8 Katharine Cooke offers a perceptive assessment of Coleridge as dramatist in Coleridge (1979), but this has not attracted significant attention to the plays.9 In the Cambridge Companion to Coleridge (2002), introduced by Lucy Newlyn as a volume that ‘does full justice to the many facets of Coleridge’s life’, only one reference is made to Remorse.10 In the volume’s biographical essay, Kelvin Everest acknowledges that the ‘the success of Remorse […] kept [Coleridge’s] reputation alive’.11 Yet neither Everest nor any of the volume’s other contributors expands on the claim, nor explains why a play of sufficient quality to sustain Coleridge’s literary ‘reputation’ during his lifetime is unworthy of analysis in a collaborative book by 16 experts. Ostensibly the more recent Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2009) addresses this deficit with a dedicated chapter on Coleridge as playwright, but disappointingly George S. Irving merely revives Carl Woodring’s political interpretation of the plays and discusses them in reference to the Gothic tradition. Erving’s argument has nothing to do with such matters as theatres, stages, actors, plots, audiences, dramatic structure and scenery.12 In a more positive contribution, Reeve Parker makes a credible, biographical analysis of Coleridge’s revisions to Remorse in production. Parker reads the new lines in relation to Coleridge’s anguish over his relations with Wordsworth and Sara Hutchinson. This is one of very few studies to join the poet and man to the theatre.13
Assisted by the availability of authoritative editions even of incomplete works, scholars of Coleridge tend now to adopt a comprehensive approach to his creative output rather than sole focus upon critical and poetical works deemed canonical. Slowly the plays are receiving recognition within Coleridge’s body of works, based primarily upon their relevance to his writings in other forms. For example, in observation of the evolution of Coleridge’s dramatic style, J.C.C. Mays indicates that Coleridge’s dramas ‘cry out to be incorporated within an understanding of his writing as a whole—which becomes more explicable, richer and more interesting as a result.’14 Similarly, Julie A. Carlson advises that ‘scholars of Coleridge and romanticism should take a cue from the fate of Ordonio and his creator: inevitably we must face up to Remorse.’15 Mays’s interest is stylistic, Carlson’s thematic, but both identify the plays as necessary for a broader interpretation of Coleridge’s creative mind. In this chapter I examine Remorse and Zapolya in relation to Coleridge’s tragic vision, but in doing so, I wish also to emphasize the quality of the plays in their own right. Remorse and Zapolya were popular entertainments in their time and are worthy of notice that is not only tangential to analyses of Coleridge’s major poems. Initially, a study of the plays necessitates a re-evaluation of Coleridge’s opinions on contemporary theatre, his goals as a playwright and his relation to critical concepts that are salient in the study of Romantic drama.
To introduce The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama (2003), Jeffrey N. Cox and Michael Gamer create a vignette of a visit to see Remorse in its original production:
Imagine yourself heading on foot through the largely dark streets of London on January 25th, 1813. Turning a corner, you see one of the few brightly lit buildings in the metropolis: the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane, where you hope to see the second night of a new tragedy, Remorse […]. The space […] is dazzling. Its gold, green and crimson interior illuminated by what seems a thousand candles set in burners and chandeliers throughout the theater, Drury Lane seats over 3,100 people. Tonight it is quite full, both with those interested in Coleridge’s play and those there to see the pantomime that will follow […], Harlequin and Humpo.16
The authors depict Regency theatre as a vibrant world. Yet Cox and Gamer’s essay also corroborates J.C.C. Mays’s argument that Coleridge’s plays pose an ‘embarrassment to admirers of his poems, and the few themes that are shared are small comfort to annotators. How could such a high Romantic poet be a crowd-puller in a Regency popular form?’17 Mays’s implication is that Humpo, Dumpo and the other evil dwarves of Dibdin’s pantomime provide unsuitable company for the visionary author of ‘Kubla Khan’. The populous theatre, frequented notoriously by prostitutes amongst other undesirables, is an unlikely location for the solitary metaphysician of the ‘Dejection’ ode. It is indicative of the modern, scholarly ‘embarrassment’ that Coleridge’s early and unstaged manuscript of Osorio has, ironically, received more critical attention than the widely staged Remorse. However, Osorio also fits comfortably the critical model of the radical closet-drama, a concept that is inconvenienced by Remorse and Zapolya; consequently, the staged plays have been overlooked.
Frederick Burwick refers to a ‘lack of significant drama’ produced during the Romantic period.18 Timothy Webb surveys the genre under the self-explanatory title, ‘The Romantic Poet and the Stage: A Short, Sad History’.19 Daniel P. Watkins goes so far as to claim that an utter ‘collapse’ of drama occurred.20 These are typical surveys of Romantic theatre that posit that public taste and the creative practices of the major poets developed incompatibly during the Romantic period. While melodrama and spectacle rose to dominate London’s theatres, such arguments run, the Romantic poets adopted psychological foci that were difficult to represent onstage. Broadly these claims are correct, but some modern scholars have used such beliefs to originate arguments about Romantic authors that generalize and are wildly inaccurate, and reinforce their claims with selective quotations that can be misrepresentative. For example, Aileen Forbes is one of the more recent commentators to reiterate a common critical summation, one that presents the dramatic works of Romantic poets as adverse reactions to trends in contemporary theatre:
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron, for instance, begin to publish largely unactable plays that thereby give rise to the peculiar genre of ‘closet drama’—drama that asserts its status as literature, as drama to be read in the privacy of one’s ‘closet’ rather than seen and heard performed on a public stage.21
In fact, the closet drama is not an innovation of the Romantic period and has existed arguably since Seneca’s time. The definitive characteristic of the closet drama is that the author intends for it to be experienced in the privacy or ‘closet’ of reading rather than in the public context of staged performance. However, dramatic intention and results vary greatly between Coleridge and his contemporaries: not all Romantic plays were written for the closet, nor did all end up in it.
While mistaken entirely about the historic origins of the closet drama, Forbes demonstrates the persistence in scholarship of the conceptual Romantic closet-drama; allegedly a deliberate mode that stands alongside the greater Romantic lyric and the ‘conversation’ poem. I argue that the concept of the Romantic closet-drama is an inadequate critical tool primarily because it requires a definition of Romanticism that is now obsolete, that of the ‘Romantic Movement’. Just as the Romantic Movement of the ‘Big Six’ authors forced together writers with divergent beliefs, some of whom were even enemies, the idea of the Romantic closet-drama misleads by its collation of authors who write for different purposes. The hypothesis of Romantic closet-drama requires a crude reduction of different writers’ philosophies and practices to a simplistic notion of anti-theatrical prejudice. By examining the dramatic aspirations of some Romantic authors, I wish to discourage the application to Coleridge of the label ‘closet dramatist’ and to recommend its more cautious usage in Romantic studies.
While Wordsworth indicates a lofty disdain for theatre – for example, where he lambasts the drama based on the Buttermere scandal, as discussed in a previous chapter – it is possible that he does so to conceal an old disappointment. Despite claiming in 1842 that The Borderers was written ‘without any view to its exhibition on the stage’, Wordsworth felt sufficient desire for theatrical success in 1798 to travel to London. Dorothy Wordsworth reports that ‘William has been induced to come up to alter his play for the stage at the suggestion of one of the principal Actors of Covent Garden to whom he transmitted it.’22 Likewise, Coleridge hoped for success with Osorio when he received Sheridan’s invitation to submit a tragedy to Drury Lane. That both plays were rejected in identical terms indicates the inability, rather than necessarily the disinclination, of Wordsworth and Coleridge to write for the stage in their early careers. Their preoccupation with inner life makes poor theatre. In a letter of 1798 Elizabeth Threkeld informs Samuel Ferguson that Thomas Harris, the manager of Covent Garden, has rejected The Borderers due to ‘the metaphysical obscurity’ of the protagonist, Rivers.23 Coleridge attributes his negative response from Sheridan to the ‘the obscurity of the three last acts’ of Osorio.24
Byron, a sometime ally whom Coleridge believed would ensure that Zapolya was staged, has a more complex attitude to the theatre than Wordsworth or Coleridge. While Byron informs John Murray in 1821 that Marino Faliero is ‘for the Closet’, his comment is an irate reaction to Robert William Elliston’s criticisms of the play’s long speeches prior to its production at Drury Lane, not a dismissal of staged drama as a medium.25 David V. Erdman reasons that Byron ‘protests too much’ against the stage and argues that a lack of confidence in his stagecraft characterizes Byron’s attitudes to the theatre.26 In addition to Erdman’s argument I speculate that Byron might have felt an unwelcome contributor to the English stage after his ejection from the board at Drury Lane and his scandalized departure from the country in 1816.
In the introductory matter to Prometheus Unbound (1819), Percy Bysshe Shelley claims that he has not written the play with any intention of its performance. In his preface, Shelley indicates that Prometheus Unbound is directed at a more exclusive audience than the theatre-going crowd, and that he has made no attempt to write an entertainment, but aims to ‘to familiarize the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical reader with the beautiful idealisms of moral excellence.’ However, Shelley’s sentiments do not necessarily imply that he maintained a consistent disregard for stagecraft, as the same year he hoped The Cenci might be performed at Covent Garden, with Edmund Kean in the lead role.
Finally, I wish to acknowledge Joanna Baillie’s ‘Introductory Discourse’ to her Series of Plays (1798), quotation from which is a commonplace of modern criticism of Romantic closet-drama. Baillie claims that the printed drama, free from the embellishment of London’s directors, possesses ‘an advantage which, perhaps, does more than over-balance the splendour and effect of theatrical representation.’ However, Baillie also explains that she has made no effort to have her plays staged at the time of publication only because she lacks the necessary contacts with London’s theatres: ‘I possess […] no likely channel to the […] mode of public introduction.’27 Subsequently Baillie made sufficient connections for two of her plays to be staged during her lifetime, De Montfort in 1800 and The Family Legend in 1810.
The prior examples merely acknowledge the diverse attitudes of Romantic authors to the theatre. They demonstrate that the attempt to term a body of plays ‘closet-dramas’ is complicated by the range of circumstances that cause plays to remain unstaged. This is true even within Coleridge’s own corpus of dramatic works. The Fall of Robespierre was written for publication, and was not submitted to any theatre, but this might be attributed to the authors’ knowledge that plays with Jacobin sympathies were unlikely to be accepted by theatres, and that the work was of low quality. Coleridge’s The Piccolomini and The Death of Wallenstein were intended for a readership, but were designed as such because they were contractual translations conducted at the request of the publisher, Thomas Norton Longman. However, their status was not fixed: in a letter of 1817 Coleridge indicates an intention to rewrite the plays for the stage, ‘as an original work, & in one Play’. Thus a work produced for a select readership interested in German tragedy could be reinvented as popular entertainment. This process might be reversed too, as in 1817 when Coleridge allowed the publication of Zapolya, which had so far been declined by London’s theatres.
The mode of the Romantic closet-drama that is posited frequently in modern criticism is the product, according to some scholars, of a prejudice against the theatre common to many Romantic authors. Again, I present Aileen Forbes’s essay as a relatively recent example of a familiar type of argument. Forbes finds that an anti-theatrical prejudice amongst Romantic authors is epitomized by Charles Lamb’s essay ‘On Garrick, and Acting; and the Plays of Shakespeare, considered with reference to their fitness for Stage Representation’ (1812):
Foremost among these Romantic anti-theatrical voices is Charles Lamb’s […]. To Lamb’s chagrin, theater during the Romantic period is overwhelmed by sensory experience; it constitutes a sensational theater in which the organs of sense are excited at the expense of the mind […]. Shakespeare should not be performed but read.28
Lamb’s opinion of contemporary theatre is antagonized by the cult of celebrity evident in the star system, in which famous actors eclipse a play’s other components. He claims to feel ‘scandalised’ by the erection of Garrick’s statue next to Shakespeare’s in Westminster Abbey, which equates the actor with the great author. Lamb derides the belief that an actor/actress might possess ‘a mind congenial with the poet’s’; any person who thinks this ‘confound[s] the power of originating poetical images and conceptions with the faculty of being able to read or recite the same when put into words.’29 This repeats a point that Coleridge makes in a lecture of 1811, in which he despairs ‘to hear speeches usurped by fellows who owed their very elevation to dexterity in sniffing candles since all the inferior characters, thro’ wh. our poet shone no less conspicuously and brightly, were given them to deliver.’30 Coleridge does not assume so extreme a position as Lamb, who claims that to see Shakespeare’s plays staged destroys an ideal: ‘we have only materialized and brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood.’ Lamb claims that ‘the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted […]. The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual […]. It is his mind which is laid bare.’31
While aspects of Lamb’s criticism of the stage are negative, his essay is not exclusively so. Discussing Hamlet, Lamb explains that ‘I am not arguing that Hamlet should not be acted, but how much Hamlet is made another thing by being acted.’32 The complaint that earthly manifestation departs from ideal is applicable to any artistic representation and not theatre alone. This does not discourage artistic practice; Lamb himself ‘made another thing’ of Hamlet when he and Mary Lamb wrote their Tales from Shakespeare (1807). His observation that actors transform a play does not forbid nor even discourage their efforts. Roy Park emphasizes that Lamb ‘does not recommend closet drama, nor anywhere imply a preference for it.’33 Jonathan Bate also observes that Lamb’s essay ‘is not the unequivocal attack on the stage it is often taken to be’ despite being ‘nearly always the first cited text in support of a view that Romanticism was antipathetic to the stage.’ Bate proceeds to observe that Lamb ‘remained a keen theatre-goer throughout his life’.34 Furthermore, Lamb’s own drama Mr H was staged at Drury Lane in 1807. In this chapter I argue that a similar ambivalence characterizes Coleridge’s attitudes to and writing for the stage.
In notes for a lecture on King Lear of 1812, Coleridge responds to Lamb’s essay with a richly philosophical passage that is alive to the potential of theatre. Coleridge meditates on the symbolic power of language and its evocation of the sublime:
Men are now so seldom thrown into wild circumstances, & violences of excitement, that the language of such states, the laws of association of Feeling with Thought, the starts and strange far-flights of the assimilative power on the slightest & least obvious likenesses presented by Thoughts, Words, & Objects, & even by this their very power [thereafter] as strange but always certain return to the dominant Idea—these are judged of by authority, not by actual experience—What they have been accustomed to regard as symbols of this state, not the natural symbols—i.e. the self-manifestations of it—(Even so in the Language of man & that of nature) […]. The sound, Sun, or the figures, S U N, are pure arbitrary [modes of] recalling the Object, & for visual mere objects not [only sufficien]t, but have infinite advantages from their [very nothingn]ess per se; but the language of Nature is a subordinate Logos, that was in the beginning, and was with the Thing, <it> represented, & it was the Thing represented.35
Here Coleridge recalls a well-known notebook entry of 1805, which expresses his continuous effort to find an external representative of man’s divinity: ‘In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering thro’ the dewy window-pane, I seem to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing anything new.’36
Coleridge continues his 1812 lecture notes with an implication that language transcends its constituent words and letters best on the stage; the ‘Thing represented’ is not lost to Coleridge as it is to Lamb when an author’s play is ‘made another thing’ in production. To Coleridge, authorial intention and artistic representation can exist simultaneously onstage, and he is explicit that to watch a play is superior to reading it:
Now the language of Shakespear (in his Lear, for instance) is a something intermediate, or rather it is the former blended with the latter, the arbitrary not merely recalling the cold notion of the Thing but experiencing the reality of it, & as arbitrary Language is an Heir-loom of <the> Human Race, being itself a part of that which it manifests […and so!] What would appear mad or ludicrous in a book, presented to the senses under the form of reality & with the truth of Nature, supplies a species of actual Experience.37
Coleridge exalts the power of drama, but the realization of this power is compromised by the circumstance of its production. The stage Coleridge alludes to is logocentric, but the spectacular stage during his lifetime was not: his lecture implies a need for reform in theatres to fulfil the potential of the stage.
Like Lamb’s, Coleridge’s attitude to the stage is ambivalent; occasionally he praises contemporary theatre, and sometimes he is derogatory about it. Coleridge derides the hugely popular adaptations of Kotzebue on London’s stages as ‘pantomime’.38 In 1824 Coleridge complains that ‘our theatres […] are fit for nothing; they are too large for acting, and too small for a bull-fight.’39 Yet Coleridge, like Lamb, was a diligent attendant of the theatre at times. E.K. Chambers reports a claim that Coleridge attended Drury Lane as frequently as ‘four times a week’ in 1800.40
A number of Coleridge’s comments on contemporary theatre are double-edged, seeming laudatory and mocking simultaneously. The poem ‘To Eliza Brunton, on Behalf of Francis Wrangham’ (1794) mocks Wrangham’s conventional adulation of the addressee’s elder sister, the actress Ann Brunton (1769–1808):
That Darling of the Tragic Muse—
When Wrangham sung her praise,
Thalia lost her rosy hues
And sicken’d at his Lays.
(‘To Eliza Brunton’, ll. 1–4)
The remark of the comic muse Thalia, which ends the poem, acknowledges Eliza Brunton’s own acting talent, but also derides the lionization of actresses, who are implied to be commonplace and indistinct; there is a tragic Brunton and likewise a comic one:
‘Meek Pity’s sweetest Child, proud Dame!
The fates have giv’n to you!
Still bid your poet boast her Name—
I have my Brunton too.’ (9–12)
The 1795 sonnet on Sarah Siddons (1755–1831), which Coleridge wrote in collaboration with Lamb, concludes with an exclamation of the actress’s powers to elicit sympathy: ‘Thou, SIDDONS! meltest my sad heart’ (‘To Mrs Siddons’, l. 14). The comparison of the auditor to ‘a child […] clinging to its Grandam’s knees’ evokes the power of Siddons’s performance, but might also be interpreted as a slight on an actress who continued to play Shakespeare’s Juliet into her late thirties (1–2). Siddons is described as a ‘Beldame’, suggestive of the French ‘belle dame’, but with English referents that vary from a grandmother to a hag (10). Similarly, Coleridge’s appraisal of Edmund Kean in 1827 is an allegory that both flatters and rebukes with its implication of excitement mixed with impracticality: ‘His rapid descents from the hyper-tragic to the infra-colloquial, though sometimes productive of great effect, are often unreasonable. To see him act, is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.’41 Jonathan Bate infers that, to Coleridge, Kean’s method of delivering melodramatic ‘“hits” […] emphasized out of all proportion’ is detrimental to ‘the continuity of the play’.42
The Prologue to Remorse, written by Charles Lamb, and delivered at Drury Lane in 1813 by an unknown actor named Mr Carr, expresses much of the same ambivalence towards theatre. While Coleridge complains in a letter that ‘It is hard to say which was worse, Prologue or Epilogue’, Lamb’s Prologue was included in the texts of Remorse printed in 1813, from which Coleridge’s own Epilogue was omitted.43 In his Prologue Lamb criticizes the stage, but parodically uses staged performance as the medium for his attack. The Prologue is delivered in the person of an actor, and opens with a defence of England’s large theatres, but one that is reliant on the egocentricity of play-producers mindful only of door receipts. The irony of these lines was accentuated by the circumstance of its delivery, as the sole actor strained his voice to be heard by Drury Lane’s audience of more than 3,000 people:
There are, I am told, who sharply criticise
Our modern theatres unwieldy size.
We players shall scarce plead guilty to that charge,
Who think a house can never be too large.
(Prologue, ll. 1–4)44
Lamb sustains his irony with the speculation that Shakespeare, constrained by the size and facilities of the Globe Theatre, would share the mentality of nineteenth-century players, and would envy the commercial benefits of production for the Regency stage. This mock-Shakespeare gratifies himself by abstracting applause from the audience that gives it, and is thus equated with the avaricious producers of Regency theatre. The often rowdy crowds at Drury Lane are flattered as attentive:
Shakespeare, who wish’d a kingdom for a stage,
Like giant pent in disproportion’d cage,
Mourn’d his contracted strengths and crippled rage.
[…]
How he had felt, when that dread curse of Lear’s
Had burst tremendous on a thousand ears,
While deep-struck wonder from applauding bands
Return’d the tribute of as many hands! (21–31)
Lamb suggests an ironic juxtaposition of Shakespeare’s ‘rude’ audience and the superior crowd at Drury Lane, but attacks the latter with an implication that Shakespeare’s original auditors suspended disbelief with an ‘intellectual eye’ unknown to Lamb’s contemporaries, who are drawn to costumes and gimmickry (32, 45).
Lamb’s allusion to King Lear of the plays in Shakespeare’s canon not only confronts contemporary practices in stagecraft, but calls attention to the political contexts of drama in theatres. It was not possible to see the King Lear that Shakespeare wrote staged during Coleridge and Lamb’s lives because, from 1681 until 1838, Nahum Tate’s mangled version of the play was preferred by theatres. Tate omits the character of the Fool, provides a superfluous love story between Cordelia and Edgar and gives the play a happy ending. Additionally, from 1811–20 a tacit agreement existed between the London theatres not to stage King Lear at all due to the monarch’s insanity and ‘in order’, as Jane Moody surmises, ‘to avoid spectators drawing parallels between the tormented, irrational behaviour of Lear, and the illness of George III.’45 Hence a demand for King Lear on the stage is a confrontation of timid and compliant theatre managers. To resurrect Shakespeare and stage the proper King Lear would reinstate catharsis through suffering onstage, and readmit tragedy that provokes political discussion rather than censoring it. Such reforms, to Lamb, are as unlikely to occur as the necromancy necessary to summon Shakespeare in person at Drury Lane.
The Prologue ends with a proleptic defence against negative criticism of Remorse, a claim that Coleridge follows the tradition of ‘Severer muses and a tragic strain’ (52). While Lamb attacks the contemporary stage, he desires the play to be successful, and challenges the audience to respond favourably by demonstrating an appreciation of the tragic tradition. The literary subtexts of Lamb’s Prologue and Coleridge’s ‘tragic strain’ appeal to the tastes of learned auditors in addition to the masses drawn by the play’s use of spectacle. Coleridge’s desire to win over both these types of audience shapes his drama. The reviewer in The Sun who complains that Lamb’s Prologue ‘related more to the theatre than the play’ misses the point: Lamb makes explicit the existence of conflicting opinions on the contemporary stage, common to himself and Coleridge, that are evident within Remorse and Zapolya.46
George S. Erving wonders how a formerly rejected play went into production at all, and poses provocative questions on the staging of Remorse:
How is it that a play rejected by Sheridan for its obscurity should later become one of Drury Lane’s more successful productions? Was Sheridan merely mistaken, or did its positive reception reflect changes in the political environment, or changes in theatrical taste, or changes in the manuscript, or some combination of these?47
The play Remorse is not hugely different from Osorio, although Erving is correct to note that Coleridge tones down the character of Alhadra to quell some of the earlier draft’s radicalism. Sheridan was ‘mistaken’. This is clear from the commercial success of Remorse. As to the content of Remorse, a central argument of this chapter is that the audience simply enjoys the display in happy ignorance of the play’s philosophical ‘obscurity’, and that Coleridge knows they will. Furthermore, while the preoccupations of Erving’s essay are political readings and the Gothic tradition, I think that the reasons that Remorse was produced are more greatly attributable to realities of stage production than thematic matters. It was probably quite convenient, and relatively economical, for Samuel Whitbread to stage Remorse. Of his time on Drury Lane’s sub-committee, Byron complains of the scarcity of good plays:
The number of plays upon the shelves were about five hundred;—conceiving that amongst these there must be some of merit—in person & by proxy I caused an investigation.—I do not think that of those which I saw—there was one which could be conscientiously tolerated.——There never were such things as most of them.48
It seems likely that in such a scenario, as he planned the first season of the new Drury Lane, Whitbread recalled an acceptable tragedy by Coleridge and spared himself the task of looking through submitted manuscripts. Whitbread must have realized also that Remorse could be produced quite cheaply by using materials that already belonged to the theatre. Only one piece of new scenery was created for the play, aside from which stock scenery, costumes and props were used. Finally, Coleridge had acquired a good reputation as a lecturer when Remorse was accepted in 1812. His recognition as an authority on tragedy was an asset that he did not possess as a younger man who, within a year of writing Osorio, worried that the odium attached to his name might damage the reception of Lyrical Ballads.49
In The Hamlet Vocation of Wordsworth and Coleridge (1986), Martin Greenberg investigates the implications of one of Coleridge’s most famous self-referential remarks. As he evaluates Hamlet’s character in table talk of 1827, Coleridge indicates ‘the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical’ in Hamlet, and concludes with a dry suggestion: ‘I have a smack of Hamlet myself.’50 To Greenberg, the ‘Hamlet vocation’ implies ‘being “called” […] to a life of inwardness, introspection, mind […] with […] the dangers of the reflective mind split apart from the effective will’, and thus being parted ‘from human life and action.’51 Greenberg argues that Hamlet and Coleridge’s atrophy of the body leads to ‘a desert of inanition, paralysis, a falling below the level of nature, out of human life, into impotent intellection.’52 In Coleridge’s case, Greenberg argues, this neglect of the external world leads ultimately to death as a poet.
In a review of Greenberg’s study, Lucy Newlyn expresses scepticism that the ‘Hamlet vocation’ concept possesses ‘a meaning in the role-playing beyond the simple contrast that it sophisticates’ between the relatively unfulfilled Coleridge and the apparently more prolific and successful poet Wordsworth.53 Newlyn believes that ‘Greenberg distorts Coleridge’ to his end; that he simplifies Coleridge’s psychology to accord with the model provided by Hamlet at the expense of, for example, the possibility of joy imparted in the ‘Dejection’ ode.54
I wish to draw out both Greenberg and Newlyn’s arguments. Among the omissions of Greenberg’s reductive concept is a similarity between Coleridge and Hamlet that alters, and strengthens the credibility of, the idea of the ‘Hamlet vocation’: both men stage plays. Hamlet writes and directs a conscience-catching drama to test the villainous King, ‘The Murder of Gonzago’. Coleridge is not only the author of Remorse and Zapolya, but is present to advise actors at Drury Lane from 1812–13 and Calne in 1815, and coaches a Mr Bengough in the role of Ordonio at Bristol in 1814. Coleridge tailors Remorse to the abilities of the cast, and consequently he writes of the climactic scene that, ‘Spite of wretched Acting the Passage told wonderfully’.55 Joanna Baillie concurs in a letter to Sir Walter Scott: ‘we have a new Tragedy here by Colridge [sic.] called remorse which is going on prosperously under the disadvantage (I am told) of very bad acting.’56 Despite his doubts concerning the quality of actors available to perform Remorse in Edinburgh, Scott concludes in turn that ‘Coleridge has succeeded so well that I trust he will write again’.57 However, the major significance of the commonality of stage direction between Hamlet and Coleridge is that metadrama provides the impetus for Remorse and Zapolya. By this method Coleridge exploits and criticizes the practices of the Regency stage simultaneously. In doing so, if not to expose the usurpation of a monarch, Coleridge provokes his spectators to consider the nature of contemporary stagecraft.
The conjuring scene of Remorse III.ii was the main attraction to its original audience at Drury Lane. Ordonio has ordered the disguised Alvar, who purports to be a sorcerer, to produce a display that will convince Teresa of Alvar’s death. Ordonio hopes that Teresa will marry him, accepting the loss of Alvar. Instead Alvar reveals an image of his own intended assassination by Ordonio’s men, as though the attempt had succeeded. Coleridge’s conjuring scene shares several details with Schiller’s novel, The Ghost-seer (1789):
An altar, draped with a black cloth, had been set up in the middle of the circle, and under it was a stretched red satin carpet […]. A dense smoke of frankincense spread its dark vapours through the room and almost choked the flames […]. Suddenly we felt a blow like a thunderbolt, so violent that our hands fell apart; an abrupt clap of thunder shook the house, all the locks clattered, all the doors slammed to, the lid of the vessel fell shut, the light was extinguished, and on the opposite wall above the fireplace a human shape became visible, in a bloody shirt, pale, and with the face of a dying man.58
Coleridge’s incantation scene is set in the hall of armoury in the castle of Lord Valdez, a set designed by William Capon. This was the only new piece of scenery in the play for which Samuel Whitbread was willing to pay. In Schiller’s novel, the Sicilian achieves his flash of light using phosphorus, and Coleridge’s Alvar does likewise, introducing a new visual trick to the English stage, as Frederick Burwick notes.59 However, the grandeur of the conjuring scene was not only visual, but included an extravagant musical element. The singing of Maria Theresa Bland (1769–1838) was a particular attraction to the audience, as George Raymond attests: ‘Mrs. Bland was deservedly a permanent favourite with the public—the best English ballad-singer on the stage. Her popularity rested solely on her professional merits.’60 In his Reminiscences, composer Michael Kelly (1762–1826) describes his musical arrangement, which accompanies the scene, and its effect:
The chorus of boatmen chaunting on the water under the convent walls, and the distant peal of the organ, accompanying the monks while singing within the convent chapel, seemed to overcome and soothe the audience; a thrilling sensation appeared to pervade the great mass of congregated humanity, and, during its performance, it was listened to with undivided attention, as if the minds and hearts of all were rivetted and enthralled by the combination presented to their notice; and at the conclusion the applause was loud and protracted.61
Typically for the period, advertisements for both of Coleridge’s plays attracted audiences by reference to aspects of the production that made the strongest sensory impact, either in scenery or in instrumental score. In the playbill for the opening night of Remorse at Drury Lane, a specific reference is made to the play’s highlight: ‘In Act III, an INVOCATION by Mrs. Bland. The MUSICK, composed by Mr. Kelly.’ Similarly, the Surrey Theatre’s playbill for Zapolya alludes to the ‘Grand Entrance to the Castle & Palace of the King of Illyria’ and entices with the possibility that werewolves lurk in the ‘WAR WOLF’S CAVE’. Critics too emphasized novelties of production rather than the script. In a review of Remorse for the Morning Chronicle of 25 January 1813, an article commonly (but wrongly) attributed to Hazlitt until recently, the critic describes the incantation scene in Remorse as ‘one of the most novel and picturesque we have ever witnessed’. The reviewer for The Examiner of 31 January, who seems to ascribe the suspension of disbelief to sensory overload, reports that ‘We never saw more interest excited in a theatre than was expressed at the sorcery-scene in the third act’: ‘The altar flaming in the distance, the solemn invocation, the pealing music of the mystic song, altogether produced a combination so awful, as to nearly overpower reality, and make one half believe the enchantment which delighted our senses.’62
From the warm response to the conjuring scene in Remorse, Frederick Burwick infers that Coleridge’s audience ‘probably enjoyed [Remorse] for all the wrong reasons’. Burwick implies that the emphasis on the spectacular risks the play’s claim to participate in the tragic tradition.63 While I agree with Burwick’s speculation, I believe that Coleridge anticipates his audience’s focus on sensory grandeur in Remorse, and that this is evident in the play’s use of parabasis. While Burwick finds that self-referentiality may destroy dramatic illusion, I find that Coleridge addresses conventions of contemporary theatre and the expectations of its audience in a manner that is sufficiently subtle for the fictionality of the play to remain uncompromised.64
The invocation scene in Remorse III.ii is a theatrical power-struggle by which Coleridge criticizes the use of spectacle to ensure commercial success on the Regency stage, yet nonetheless uses it himself. The purpose that John S. Mebane detects in The Tempest and Marlowe’s Dr Faustus is also present in Remorse: metadrama is employed ‘in order to lead us to reflect upon the work of the theatrical artist as a specific instance of the attempt to control the world by influencing the human mind and imagination’.65 The attention paid to the medium of spectacle in Remorse indicates Coleridge’s concern with appropriate and inappropriate means of exerting influence on the mind in theatre, and the limitations of visual stimulation. Unlike the spells of Prospero and Faustus, the magic in Remorse is false; the audience knows it is mere show. Ordonio and Alvar each believes himself to be the director of the imminent action, the supposed invocation of Alvar’s ghost. To Ordonio, the intended audience of the display is Teresa, whom he wishes to persuade, by the sorcerer’s magic, that Alvar is dead. However, Alvar plans a different show from that Ordonio has requested. Alvar’s primary auditor is Ordonio himself, whose conscience Alvar wishes to stimulate. While Alvar believes that he directs the action, and not Ordonio, his theatrics are threatened. He is distracted repeatedly from playing his role as sorcerer by his wish to embrace his father – ‘I must not clasp his knees’ – and his love for Teresa, ‘full of faith | And guileless love’ (III.ii.5, 26–7). Teresa, whom Coleridge presents as an exemplary character in the Epilogue, eschews spectacle by leaving the scene of the invocation in favour of prayer: ‘At a holier altar I will bow down | And seek a surer light’ (III.ii.25–6). Teresa refuses to enter the contract of dramatic illusion; she will not suspend disbelief for the show before her. With implicit didacticism, her rejection of tawdry demonstration is a matter of morality as well as taste: prayer’s ‘surer’ light is of the ‘intellectual eye’ rather than the bodily eye that observes the display. Thus the watcher is implied to be blasphemous for his delight at mere spectacle.
After the departure of Teresa, Lord Valdez and Ordonio are the auditors of Alvar’s invocation. Ironically, spoken language produces Alvar’s desired effect, while his grand visual-stimuli fail. Alvar discomforts Ordonio with questions:
What if thou heardst him now? What if his spirit
Re-enter’d it’s cold corse, and came upon thee
With many a stab from many a murderer’s poniard?
What if (his steadfast Eye still beaming Pity
And Brother’s love) he turn’d his head aside,
Lest he should look at thee, and with one look
Hurl thee beyond all powers of Penitence? (III.ii.70–76)
The act of observation is perilous; by looking at Ordonio or averting his gaze, Alvar can condemn his brother to damnation ‘beyond all powers of Penitence’. The gaze empowers evil, but to turn the eyes away defeats it. By contrast, words alone have beneficial power, in prayer and conversation. Alvar’s speech causes Ordonio to ‘struggl[e] with his feelings’ (III.ii.77+SD.). Thus Alvar realizes his goal, to ‘rouse a fiery whirlwind in [Ordonio’s] conscience’ (II.ii.153). The visual aspects of the invocation represent, as Frederick Burwick observes, a ‘metadramatic exploitation and repudiation of stage trickery.’66 Alvar believes that he will stimulate Ordonio’s conscience with histrionics, and commands the music to rise. The chant of monks sounds offstage, and the magic show begins: ‘Gong sounds & the incense on the altar takes fire suddenly, and an illuminated picture of ALVAR’s assassination is discovered, and having remained a few seconds is then hidden by ascending flames’ (III.ii.100+SD.). However, Ordonio does not respond with remorse, but with anger against the failed assassin who has deceived him, ‘the villain Isidore’ (III.ii.101). The audience understands that the tragedy of Remorse is consequential to the failure of the spectacle: Ordonio, enraged rather than repentant following Alvar’s invocation, murders Isidore. This crime leads to Ordonio’s death by Alhadra’s sword. In addition to its condemnation of theatrical spectacle, the unexpected failure of Alvar’s incantation provides a plot twist that lessens the final scene’s focus on the conventional moment of recognition. There is relatively little notice to the revelation that Alvar is Ordonio’s long-lost brother, apparently back from the dead. Instead concentration centres instead on the pathos created by Ordonio, as Coleridge explains in a letter, punning on the name of the actor, Alexander Rae: ‘As from a circumference to a centre, every Ray in the Tragedy converges to Ordonio.’67 Joseph W. Donohue observes that with this climactic confluence of the play’s themes and plots, Coleridge emphasizes a commonality between villain and theatrical audience, as each instigates the play’s action in a sense:
We ourselves justify the danger of presenting gross immorality in the character of Ordonio by the interest we take in his mental problems. His imbalance produces the tragic action of the play, while his very imperfection leads us to see his thoughts and acts as analogous to our own. Because the illusion, to which we voluntarily submit, has been effected through the exercise of the ‘irremissive’ will of the artist, a mutual sympathy is produced, a kind of circularity which proceeds from the poet through the dramatic character to the audience and then back to the poet.68
Characters, auditors and the author are united in a process by which events onstage not only instruct, but also purge all who are within this connection. The Morning Chronicle critic demonstrates his sensitivity to Coleridge’s moral purpose, to present ‘a succession of situations and events that call forth the finest sensibilities of the human breast.’69
The positive reviews of Remorse at Drury Lane validate Coleridge’s opinion that it succeeded despite ‘wretched Acting’. In particular, Coleridge faults the over-acting of ‘the blundering Coxcomb, Elliston’ as Alvar, who marginalizes Rae. In turn, Rae lacks the required ‘volume & depth of Voice’ of a strong actor.70 These are typical assessments of the two actors’ abilities. Elliston became better known as a comic actor, and one obituary is frank about his tragic delivery:
In tragedy, for want of a strong sympathy for the serious, he sometimes got into a commonplace turbulence, and at others, put on an affected solemnity; and he was in the habit of hawing between his words […]. Unfortunately, he fancied that he was never more natural than on these occasions. He said once, at the table of a friend of ours, clapping himself on the knee, and breathing with his usual fervour, ‘Nature-aw, Sir, is every thing-aw: I–aw am always-aw natural-aw.’71
Lamb depicts an occasion in which Elliston complains that he has been forced out of tragic roles:
‘Have you heard,’ said he, ‘how they treat me? they put me in comedy.’ Thought I—but his finger on his lips forbade interruption—‘where could they have put you better?’ Then, after a pause—‘Where I formerly played Romeo, I now play Mercutio,’—and so again he stalked away, neither staying, nor caring for, responses.72
By contrast, Alexander Rae became a prominent tragic-actor, who according to the European Magazine ‘displays a classic intimacy with his author, and ornaments the character he represents by a good person, appropriate action, and polished deportment.’73 However, Rae was not universally respected. In disbelief Barry Cornwall lists plays in which a waning Kean starred alongside Rae, but in which the more prominent role was given to ‘the mouthing, ranting, inefficient Rae’. Cornwall surmises that Rae’s ‘head was intended for other purposes than for the comprehension of character’. He depicts a quiet and ponderous man who would quite easily have been made to exert a negligible presence by Elliston.74 It is tangible that their collaboration could threaten Coleridge’s purpose that all attention should ‘converge to Ordonio’. Thus the circumstances in which Remorse was produced seem to have justified and illustrated Coleridge’s misgivings about contemporary theatre, and with metadrama the work comments on its own production.
In Zapolya, as in Remorse, Coleridge alludes repeatedly to the play’s fictionality. In the play’s Advertisement, Coleridge introduces Zapolya as derivative, claiming that it has been written ‘in humble imitation of the Winter’s Tale of Shakespear’. As Adelaide represents Coleridge in The Fall of Robespierre, and Alhadra does in Remorse, Sarolta fulfils the same function in Zapolya. In a draft for a projected scene to link the Prelude to the main body of the play, Coleridge hints at Sarolta’s preternatural sensitivity to the plight of those around her, and terms her the ‘guardian angel’ of Illyria.75 To be cast as a presiding figure detaches Sarolta from the other characters of the play, of whom she demonstrates near-omniscience comparable to an author’s. In a soliloquy, Sarolta signals that the plot of the play will adhere to the conventions of the genre now termed ‘romance’. She predicts the recognition of Glycine’s noble parentage in a scene that bears the influence of Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest:
Something above thy rank there hangs about thee,
And in thy countenance, thy voice, and motion,
Yea, e’en in thy simplicity, Glycine,
A fine and feminine grace, that makes me feel
More as a mother than a mistress to thee!
[…]
Thou art sprung too of no ignoble blood.
(Zapolya, I.i.65–73)
After this prophetic speech, Sarolta initiates the sequence of events that leads to the revelation that the adopted Bethlen is actually Andreas, displaced heir to the throne of Illyria. Bethlen’s experience is a literary rite of accession, a process that commences with Sarolta’s words:
Be thou henceforth my soldier!
And whatsoe’er betide thee, still believe
That in each noble deed, achieved or suffered,
Thou solvest best the riddle of thy birth! (I.i.412–15)
Ultimately, Sarolta provides the opportunity for heroism that confirms the legitimacy of Bethlen’s claim to the throne, as Bethlen rescues her from Emerick’s intended rape. Consistent with the pantomime tradition, Sarolta’s calmness reassures the audience that she is not in great danger. Hence the main action of the play is to an extent orchestrated or ‘staged’ by Sarolta, who can predict that Andreas’s valour will protect her from Emerick’s villainy.
Coleridge uses metadramatic technique again to direct the plot of an incomplete drama set in Arabia, Diadestè; or, The Bait without the Hook: A musical Entertainment in one Act (composed 1811–15). The title alludes to a game between the married couple of Zelica and Kheder, in which one person’s omission of the word ‘Diadesti’ from the appropriate point in conversation results in deference to the other, who becomes ‘Sovereign of the Tent’ for one month (Diadestè, l. 21). This game is crucial to the resolution of the play’s action, as Zelica wishes to free Kheder’s English slave, Elizabeth. To accomplish this Zelica must subjugate her husband, which is only possible by the ‘Diadesti’. Although described by Coleridge as mere ‘musical Entertainment’, Diadestè examines the constraints of social decorum and gender politics. To manipulate Kheder into the submissive role Zelica must trick him into neglecting to say ‘Diadesti’. The word ‘Diadesti’ is crucial to the action of the play, but Zelica ‘scarcely know[s] what it means’ (10). Thus, Coleridge investigates the extent to which social interaction is scripted, and implies that truthful expression is restricted by the cant of polite behaviour and its conventional speech-patterns. The innovation in Coleridge’s plan for this work reflects his preoccupation with the power of language. The characters of Diadestè are compelled to employ a certain phrase in conversation, but Coleridge loads the expression with significance, as it enables the characters to attain social status. In empowering the meaningless word ‘Diadesti’ Coleridge provokes reflection on the nature of conversation and specifically the tendency to utter commonplace phrases without reflection on their implications. The force of language transcends the awareness of its users. Overall the project of such incisive commentary within a ‘musical Entertainment’ fails, as Diadestè is incomplete, but Coleridge’s fragment anticipates his successful synthesis of music and comedy with the tragic tradition in Zapolya.
The metadramatic criticisms of the Regency stage evident in Remorse and Zapolya complicate examination of their tragic vision, as the extent of the author’s sincerity is uncertain. In Remorse, the interpretative attempt is complicated by Coleridge’s concessions to amend the script at the request of actors and managers. In 1813 Coleridge confesses this occurrence to Southey: ‘[I] am nicknamed in the Green Room the anomalous Author, from my utter indifference or prompt facility in sanctioning every omission that was suggested.’76 Although Coleridge derides the flaws of popular theatre, the artistic vision of his staged plays is subject to a desire to succeed commercially, to provide ‘Bread and Cheese’. However, while Remorse’s relation to the tragic mode is obscured by the various influences on its production – artistry and commerce – Coleridge signals explicitly that Zapolya is in dialogue with tragic tradition.
William Hazlitt’s dismissal of Zapolya indicates reasons for the subsequent neglect of the play among Coleridge’s works. To attack Coleridge in the Yellow Dwarf in 1818, Hazlitt quotes Raab Kiuprili’s defiant speech on Emerick’s usurpation (Prelude 355–72). Kiuprili dismisses the democratic concepts of ‘popular choice’ as ‘shallow sophisms’ (Prelude, 354). To Hazlitt the passage, an ‘exquisite morceau of political logic’, is a ‘dramatic recantation of the author’s popular harangues’.77 Influenced by this criticism, Carlson claims simply that Coleridge’s ‘composition of Zapolya celebrates the restoration of French monarchy.’78 The apparent simplicity of the play as political allegory allows for limited analysis in recent decades in which New Historicism has been prevalent. In this context Zapolya seems only the work of an elder Romantic poet, the product of a transparent conservatism that is unattractive to the later critic. Yet Kiernan Ryan argues that ‘genetic’ or historical analysis cannot provide profitable insights into romance plays: ‘The error to which genetic criticism is prone is that of dissolving the text into its contexts: looking for the significance of the text anywhere but where it is most likely to be found, which is in the language and the structure of the work itself.’79 Ryan’s argument corroborates Coleridge’s own comments on Zapolya, in which he prioritizes aesthetic principles and indicates no wish to create political allegory.
Of the play’s quality, Coleridge’s acknowledgement that Zapolya has been written ‘in humble imitation of the Winter’s Tale’ is not itself evidence that the work is unworthy of critical attention. Famously, Coleridge dismisses ‘Kubla Khan’ as a ‘psychological curiosity’, and ‘Christabel’ as primarily a ‘metrical experiment’. His comment has two effects on our interpretation of Zapolya. First, rather than confirming that the work is merely imitative, it demonstrates further Coleridge’s self-identification with Shakespeare, which poses a more complex question of influence and its anxieties rather than a case of simple duplication. Writing Zapolya is an exercise by which Coleridge assesses his own abilities as a dramatist, which, he concludes, are ‘humble’ next to Shakespeare’s. Secondly, Coleridge’s introduction to Zapolya places the play in the ill-defined genre of dramatic romance. Of Shakespeare’s romances, for example, Cymbeline was categorized as a tragedy in the First Folio, but The Winter’s Tale as a comedy. However, in the Advertisement for Zapolya, Coleridge cites Aeschylus as an influence on the play, and thus clarifies the place of romance in his tragic vision: ‘I have called the first part a Prelude instead of a first Act, as somewhat nearer resemblance to the plan of the ancients, of which one specimen is left us in the Æschylean Trilogy of the Agamemnon, the Orestes, and the Eumenides.’
Coleridge conjectures that all Greek tragedies were written in trilogies that, although the majority of the plays is lost, he believes were ultimately redemptive. Each tragedy of the trilogy, Coleridge explains in a lecture, corresponds to the individual act of a modern play. For Coleridge, to adopt the model of the ancient trilogy differs from conventional, modern tragedy because it dispenses with ‘Unity of Time’, an Aristotelian principle that Coleridge cites frequently in lectures as an essential characteristic of tragedy.80 ‘Unity of Time’ dictates that the events of a tragedy must take place within a given time-scale: in Classical tragedy this is 24 hours. The trilogy as a whole extends this period: while the events of each tragic play are limited to a single day, an interval can exist between the individual plays of the trilogy. Hence Orestes, an infant in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, takes revenge as an adult in The Libation Bearers.
Coleridge uses the interval in plot to demonstrate – rather than intimate – that redemption follows tragic occurrences. By collapsing the duration between catastrophe and redemption, a comprehensive depiction of both is possible. In Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Agamemnon’s death is depicted, but the establishment of law is evident only at the trilogy’s conclusion. In Zapolya, the use of the 20-year interval enables Coleridge to present Emerick’s usurpation and the suffering of Zapolya, but also the restoration of legitimate rule at the play’s end. In works such as The Fall of Robespierre, ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and Remorse only hints of an eventually positive outcome are possible. The benefits of Robespierre’s execution are difficult to detect, the enlightened Wedding-Guest is made melancholy by the Mariner’s instruction, and Alhadra’s claim that sacrifice will lead to liberation is overshadowed by the historic fact of Phillip II’s persecution of Muslims. By contrast, the model Coleridge derives from Aeschylus allows redemption to become tangible. It is an achievement noted by G. Wilson Knight, who observes of Zapolya that ‘the terrible is definitely incorporated into the immortal hope […] so good and evil interfuse’. While Wilson Knight hints at the conservatism of the work as it relates to Romantic politics, he also indicates its debt to tragic tradition. Wilson Knight argues that Zapolya is a process of reconciliation between ‘dark and Dionysian’ forces and Apollonian restoration of order. He indicates Coleridge’s continuous effort to make tragic art, and claims that the ‘possibilities of good-through-evil [are] glimpsed’ in ‘Fears in Solitude’, the ‘Ode on the Departing Year’, and ‘The Destiny of Nations’, in which St Joan is ‘able to bear and transmute the burden of world-evil.’ To Wilson Knight, this is ‘a synthesis most perfectly accomplished in Zapolya: hence the high place to be accorded dramatic literature and the supreme importance of dramatic action in the New Testament.’81 E.D. Forgues writes for the Revue de Paris in 1837 that Coleridge succeeded aesthetically with the publication of Zapolya, although he is unaware that a version of the play was staged. Hence Forgues reinforces the idea that Romantic authors wish to maintain a haughty distance from the popular entertainment of theatre. Thus while he praises it as the best drama for 20 years – and deems Byron’s plays inferior – Forgues effectively puts Zapolya in the closet.82
Wilson Knight shares Coleridge’s opinion that theatre, like religion, is a serious and instructive medium. In Zapolya, Sarolta, Bethlen, Zapolya and Raab Kiuprili provide examples of how to ‘transmute evil’. A similar pattern is detectable in the unfinished play The Triumph of Loyalty (1800–1801), based on Lessing’s synopsis of Antonio Coello’s El conde de Sex, o Dar la vida por su dama (1638). Coleridge’s title demonstrates that he wishes to revise Coello’s tale as ‘a sort of dramatic Romance’.83 All of Coleridge’s works for the stage retain the tragic principle of moral or spiritual education, and Coleridge’s dramatic compositions are littered with aphoristic didacticism. In The Triumph of Loyalty, Earl Henry criticizes the irate reaction of his brother, Don Curio, to the Queen’s muted reception of the returning army:
We are sunk low indeed, if wrongs like our’s
Must seek redress in impotent Freaks of Anger. (I.ii.68–9)
In Diadestè, Zelica warns Elizabeth that ‘merry trifles end in mournful earnest’ (3–4). Elizabeth advises that ‘Despondency is no Sharpener of the Wit’, and Zelica warns that flattery is ‘a rank, tho’ gaudy, Weed, which Friendship treads under foot, and Love himself will seldom stoop to pluck’ (MS2 ll. 40, 50–51). Remorse, critical of tawdry histrionics, strikes a key note that Coleridge repeats as the epigraph in published texts of the play:
REMORSE is as the heart, in which it grows:
If that be gentle it drops balmy dews
Of true repentance, but if proud and gloomy,
It is a poison-tree, that pierced to the inmost
Weeps only tears of poison! (I.i.20–24)
Repeatedly, Coleridge explores the instructive possibilities of the tragic in his plays, by use of themes and methods that are common to his poetical, critical and philosophical works. If one aspect of the plays is clever critique of theatres, they also represent the potential for staged drama to achieve the high symbolism that Coleridge identifies in his King Lear lecture. Hence while I have argued that the plays are worthy of study in their own right, I also feel that their importance in the comprehension of Coleridge’s canon is even more important than J.C.C. Mays and Julie A. Carlson claim. As a reader and author of tragedy Coleridge provides tools not only for the interpretation of his works but for how he perceived himself as an author and a man. The whole experience of staging plays typifies how Coleridge dramatizes himself as an embattled, tragic character who triumphs over adversity. He undergoes a melancholy struggle to have Remorse staged at all after the disappointment with Sheridan. At Drury Lane, Coleridge’s material generated strong reviews even though some members of the production were so inept that the wrong character killed Ordonio on opening night, due to misreading Coleridge’s handwriting.84 In his authorship of plays for the theatre, and his self-alignment with Hamlet, we glimpse under-explored aspects of Coleridge’s most lengthily constructed tragic creation: himself as sage.
1 Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections (London: Harper Collins, 1998), p. 321.
2 The Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, 8 March 1813, p. 4.
3 BL, II, p. 208.
4 CL, V, p. 161.
5 Byron’s Letters and Journals, IX (1979), p. 35.
6 Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 35.
7 George Watson, Coleridge the Poet (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 55.
8 Ibid., p. 53; quoted in PW, III.2, p. 1331.
9 Katharine Cooke, Coleridge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 37–57.
10 Lucy Newlyn, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, pp. 1–14 (p. 5).
11 Kelvin Everest, ‘Coleridge’s Life’, in The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, pp. 17–31 (p. 27).
12 George S. Erving, ‘Coleridge as Playwright’, in The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, pp. 392–411.
13 Romantic Tragedies, pp. 159–75.
14 J.C.C. Mays, ‘Are Coleridge’s Plays Worth the Candle?’, The Coleridge Bulletin, n.s., 29 (2007), 1–16 (p. 15).
15 In the Theatre of Romanticism, p. 98.
16 The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama, ed. by Jeffrey N. Cox and Michael Gamer, Broadview Anthologies of English Literature (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2003), pp. vii–viii.
17 ‘Are Coleridge’s Plays Worth the Candle?’, p. 2.
18 Frederick Burwick, Illusion and the Drama: Critical Theory of the Enlightenment and Romantic Era (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987), p. 267.
19 Timothy Webb, ‘The Romantic Poet and the Stage: A Short, Sad History’, in The Romantic Theatre: An International Symposium, ed. by Richard Allen Cave (Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1986), pp. 9–46.
20 Daniel P. Watkins, A Materialist Critique of English Romantic Drama (Florida: University Press of Florida, 1993), p. 4.
21 Aileen Forbes, ‘“Sympathetic Curiosity” in Joanna Baillie’s Theater of the Passions’, The European Romantic Review, 14:1 (2003), 31–48 (p. 32).
22 Quoted in The Borderers, ed. by Robert Osborn, The Cornell Wordsworth (London: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 4; Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. by Chester L. Shaver, Ernest de Selincourt and others, 8 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967–93) I, p. 195.
23 Ibid., p. 5.
24 CL, I, p. 358.
25 Byron’s Letters and Journals, V (1976), p. 90.
26 David V. Erdman, ‘Byron’s Stage Fright: The History of his Ambition and Fear of Writing for the Stage’, in The Plays of Lord Byron, ed. by Robert F. Gleckner and Bernard Beatty, Liverpool English Texts and Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997), pp. 5–31 (p. 6).
27 Joanna Baillie, Plays on the Passions, ed. by Peter Duthie, Broadview Literary Texts (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001), p. 109.
28 ‘“Sympathetic Curiosity” in Joanna Baillie’s Theater of the Passions’, pp. 31–2.
29 Lamb as Critic, ed. by Roy Park (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 85–6.
30 LoL, I, p. 254.
31 Lamb as Critic, pp. 87, 96.
32 Ibid., p. 89.
33 Ibid., p. 24.
34 Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 129–30 and n.
35 LoL, I, pp. 428–9.
36 CN, II, § 2546.
37 LoL, I, pp. 428–9.
38 CL, I, p. 653.
39 In contrast with the ancients, who used ‘pipes’ to ‘convey the voice distinctly in their huge theatres.’ TT, II, p. 53.
40 E.K. Chambers, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Biographical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), p. 122.
41 TT, I, p. 41.
42 Shakespearean Constitutions, p. 141.
43 CL, III, p. 428.
44 Quotations from Remorse in this chapter are from the staged version; PW, III.2, pp. 1063–134.
45 Illegitimate Theatre, p. 58.
46 Quoted in PW, III.2, p. 1052.
47 ‘Coleridge as Playwright’, p. 403.
48 Byron’s Letters and Journals, IX, p. 35.
49 CL, I, p. 412.
50 TT, I, p. 61.
51 Martin Greenberg, The Hamlet Vocation of Wordsworth and Coleridge (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 1986), p. xi.
52 Ibid., p. xiii.
53 Lucy Newlyn, ‘Reviewed Work(s): The Hamlet Vocation of Coleridge and Wordsworth by Martin Greenberg and The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats by Charles J. Rzepka’, The Review of English Studies, n.s., 39:155 (1988), 450–52 (p. 451).
54 Ibid., p. 452.
55 CL, III, p. 434.
56 Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie, ed. by Judith Bailey Slagle, 2 vols (London: Associated University Press, 1999), I, p. 321.
57 Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. by Sir Herbert Grierson, 12 vols (London: Constable, 1932–37), III, pp. 399–400.
58 Friedrich von Schiller, The Ghost-seer: An Interesting Tale from the Memoirs of Count von O**, trans. by Andrew Brown (London: Hesperus Press, 2003), p. 19.
59 Illusion and the Drama, p. 268.
60 George Raymond, The life and enterprises of Robert William Elliston, comedian (London: Routledge, 1857), p. 206.
61 Quoted in PW, III.2, pp. 1104–5n.
62 Ibid., p. 1101.
63 Illusion and the Drama, p. 267.
64 Ibid., p. 97.
65 John S. Mebane, ‘Metadrama and the Visionary Imagination in Dr. Faustus and the Tempest’, South Atlantic Review, 53:2 (1988), 25–45 (p. 26).
66 Illusion and the Drama, p. 268.
67 CL, III, p. 434.
68 Joseph W. Donohue Jr., Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 302.
69 Morning Chronicle, XVIII (1813), p. 463.
70 CL, III, p. 436.
71 The Annual Biography and Obituary: 1832 (London: Longman, 1832), p. 55.
72 Charles Lamb, The Last Essays of Elia: Being a Sequel to Essays Published Under that Name (London: Moxon, 1833), p. 40.
73 The European Magazine, and London Review, 68 (1815), p. 292.
74 Barry Cornwall, The Life of Edmund Kean, 2 vols (London: Moxon, 1835), I, pp. 65, 56.
75 PW, III.2, p. 1426.
76 CL, III, p. 432.
77 The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. by P.P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent and Sons, 1930), XIX, p. 203.
78 In the Theatre of Romanticism, p. 25.
79 Kiernan Ryan, ‘Introduction’, in Shakespeare: The Last Plays (New York: Longman Limited, 1999), pp. 1–21 (p. 10).
80 LoL, I, p. 83.
81 G. Wilson Knight, The Starlit Dome: Studies in the Poetry of Vision (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), pp. 131–2.
82 Revue de Paris, XL (1837), p. 180.
83 CL, I, p. 650.
84 On the opening night of Remorse at Drury Lane, Naomi killed Ordonio, due to an error in transcription from Coleridge’s manuscript. In subsequent performances, Alhadra killed Ordonio. See CL, III, p. 428.