In 1835, the year after her father’s death, Sara Coleridge wrote a diary entry on Thomas Noon Talfourd’s new play Ion, a florid drama set in Greece and modelled on Sophocles. While the play would be staged at Covent Garden in 1836, Sara commented on the published text:
The spirit of the piece is exclusively modern. People did not ‘sleep and brood o’er their own hearts’ in the days of Sophocles and Eschylus. But what could an imitation of a Greek Play by a modern Englishman be good for […]? A story really like the Oedipus Tyrannus or Antigone written at this time of day would be like an Automaton Venus made in leather, and moved by springs.1
While this sentiment recollects Coleridge’s own complaint from an 1811 lecture that ancient drama had ‘fallen into absurdity’ and the events depicted seemed ‘impossible’, Sara indicates a further and final separation of tragedy from Romantic theatre.2 Even when Greek tragedy is invoked explicitly, it has been made into something almost unrecognizable, a modern form of melodrama. Shakespeare’s plays suffered a similar fate, as mangled versions of the tragedies persisted on London’s stages for decades after Coleridge’s death.
While Classical tragedy was sidelined into esoteric academia, Coleridge invented ways to sustain the spirit of tragedy outside the university environment: by reinvention in other literary forms, as a cultural relic described in the lectures and criticism, as a philosophical tool and as a measure of historical events in political lectures and essays. It is regrettable that Coleridge never formulated an explicit theory of tragedy despite demonstrating a profound intuition of how Dionysian and Apollonian forces conflict, in addition to his vast scholarly knowledge of plays and poetry. As a lecturer Coleridge manifested his own famous complaint at Kean’s acting; he offered moments of brilliant illumination amidst obscurity. The commonplace that Coleridge was an immethodical scholar explains such inconsistency, but is unjust to his capability to grasp what he considered to be the most effective aspects of tragedy: the key-note struck by the opening scene of Macbeth, the empowerment over time and space that Shakespeare’s bare stage allowed him, the account of the origin of ancient drama which, while not original theoretically, is found by R.A. Foakes to be ‘much richer and more detailed than any single possible account so far traced’.3
One of Coleridge’s close colleagues speculated on what might have occurred had Coleridge been induced to write stage tragedies regularly. Robert Southey acknowledges the success of Remorse in correspondence of 1813, and senses his colleague’s desire for a career in theatre. Southey identifies Coleridge’s earlier rejection by Sheridan as a life-defining incident:
I never doubted that Coleridge’s play would meet with a triumphant reception. Be it known now and remembered hereafter, that this self-same play, having had no other alterations made in it now than C. was willing to have made in it then, was rejected in 1797 by Sheridan and Kemble. Had these sapient caterers for the public brought it forward at that time, it is by no means improbable that the author might have produced a play as good every season: with my knowledge of Coleridge’s habits I verily believe he would.4
Southey’s declaration that Coleridge would have produced a play every year – perhaps a sentiment he professed more strongly than he believed – is unusual, and Coleridge’s own letters do not suggest that he was so well-disposed to amend Osorio in 1797 as Southey implies. Yet it is possible that commercial success in one literary form might have encouraged Coleridge to persist with it, and that the tragic spectacle of Osorio, if accepted at Drury Lane in 1797, might have been followed by similar plays.
Novalis believes that the author of his age must harrow the audience with a Dionysian mix of passions: ‘The poet is the transcendental physician. Poetry works its ends by means of hurt and titillation, pleasure and pain, error and truth, health and sickness. It mixes all in its great goal of goals—the raising of mankind above itself.’5 The vivid sense Coleridge evokes in Biographia Literaria of the ancient Athenian audience – of people elevated above quotidian thought by the symbolic conflict onstage – indicates his pursuit of a noble literary ambition that was beyond his own creative power. Perhaps it was too ill-defined, or too mystical a goal to realize in any tangible, worldly manner. Perhaps it was an impossible anachronism. From contemporary German thought Coleridge apprehended the ambitious notion that tragedy might surpass use as an agent of moral instruction to constitute a spiritual rite of purification. This resembles Schelling’s call for a new mythology. Like Schelling’s idea, Coleridge’s vision of the tragic is frustrated, as Nicholas Halmi describes, by a sort of paradox; that the new mythology is an agent of amelioration, but the mythology itself requires improved conditions to thrive.6
My emphasis is not that Coleridge’s aim of universal improvement using tragedy is unattainable, but lies on the great success with which he adopted the tragic mode. Tragedy pervades his works, and it is necessary to understand tragedy in Coleridge to grasp his oeuvre fully. If Coleridge did not achieve his aim of a literature that could be an agent of universal amelioration, his tragic vision did yield tangible successes in his life. The extent to which tragedy is infused in his poetical and critical works is remarkable. In his self-conception as author, the search for benefit in misfortune made a proto-Beckettian survivor of Coleridge. By dramatizing himself as a tragic figure he endured difficult circumstances. To Coleridge, this persistence qualified him both as a sagely authority on tragic hardship and a legitimate heir of tragedy as a literary mode. His son Hartley attests to the conviction with which Coleridge assumed this role in a tribute composed in 1847:
The sage, the poet, lives for all mankind,
As long as truth is true, or beauty fair.
(‘Written on the Anniversary of our Father’s Death’, ll. 9–10)
Coleridge’s greatest commercial successes arose from tragedy too. He absorbed, reflected upon and reshaped tragedy in his own plays and the major poems. 1813 was the most financially successful year of Coleridge’s life, and it was the year in which he was most widely acknowledged as a tragic thinker. Remorse was staged and published, and obtained positive reviews and significant revenue, and Coleridge delivered important lectures on literature. In some of his most famous discussions he instructed non-Classicists on the origins and characteristics of ancient drama, called for higher standards in his comments on inferior plays from Beaumont and Fletcher to Koetzebue and changed the dominant critical interpretation of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Strangely, these achievements seemed to merge in Coleridge’s mind. In correspondence he described a dream-like movement from the tragic arena of the lecture hall to that of the theatre. This was Coleridge’s ideal tragic-world, with no division or transition between settings. He created one audience, and by implication one literary pursuit, as Timothy Webb observes:
It is almost as if the evening in the lecture room and the evening in the theatre had become one and Coleridge’s ‘Lecture Box’ and his box in the theatre had been fused by the synthetic powers of his imagination into a point of elevation for the receipt of admiration and applause.7
Webb acknowledges that to win ‘admiration and applause’ was not Coleridge’s only motivation, and interprets Coleridge’s letter as an expression of hope that ‘the contemporary stage could still be rescued from the vitiating influences and pressures of a more vulgar kind of popularity’.8 While Coleridge’s hopes for Romantic theatre to return to the ‘classical’ may have been misplaced, the correspondence is permeated by feelings of optimism, both spiritual and practical, that Coleridge derived from his experiences as a playwright and lecturer. Literature was capable of improving its audience as well as author, and from recent success Coleridge was able to provide for his family. Typically, Coleridge invoked grudging commentators to enhance his achievements, adding triumph over adversaries to intellectual and creative prowess. He entered and left to the ovations granted to a great actor. In this spirit of excitement it is understandable that Coleridge availed himself of a rare opportunity to boast to his wife:
I concluded my Lectures last night most triumphantly, with loud, long, & enthusiastic applauses at my Entrance, & ditto in yet fuller Chorus as and for some minutes after, I had retired. It was lucky, that (as I never once thought of the Lecture, till I had entered the Lecture Box) the two last were the most impressive, and really the best. I suppose, that no dramatic Author ever had so large a number of unsolicited, unknown, yet predetermined Plauditors in the Theatre, as I had on Saturday Night. One of the malignant Papers asserted, that I had collected all the Saints from Mile End Turnpike to Tyburn Bar. With so many warm Friends it is impossible in the present state of human Nature, that I should not have many unprovoked & unknown Enemies.—You will have heard, that on my entering the Box on Saturday Night I was discovered by the Pit—& that they all turned their faces towards our Box, & gave a treble chear of Claps. I mention these things, because it will please Southey to hear that there is a large number of Persons in London, who hail with enthusiasm any prospect of the Stage’s being purified & rendered classical. My success, if I succeed (of which, I assure you, I entertain doubts in my opinion well-founded, both from the want of a prominent Actor for Ordonio, & from the want of vulgar Pathos in the Play itself—nay, there is not enough even of true dramatic Pathos) but if I succeed, I succeed for others as well as for myself.9
1 The Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. by Peter Swaab (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 137.
2 LoL, I, p. 350.
3 Ibid., p. 43n.
4 Quoted in PW, III.1, p. 55.
5 ‘Aphorisms and fragments’, p. 69.
6 See Nicholas Halmi, The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 133–69.
7 ‘The Romantic Poet and the Stage’, pp. 18–19
8 Ibid.
9 CL, III, pp. 430–31.