In an 1808 lecture Coleridge muses on the destruction of the tragic hero. He explains that the hero is sacrificed to Dionysus, the god ‘representative of the <organic> energies of the Universe, that work by passion and Joy without apparent distinct consciousness—and rather as the cause or condition of skill and contrivance, than the result.’1 In 1813 he envisions Dionysus, ‘the symbol of that power which acts without our consciousness from the vital energies of nature,’ in opposition to Apollo, ‘the symbol of our intellectual consciousness’.2 When there is imbalance between these forces there is discord. Catastrophe follows, in which the hero is annihilated. For the tragedian to witness these conflicting energies evokes Coleridge’s description of the storm in King Lear:
Its ear-cleaving Thunder Claps, its meteoric splendors […], the contagion & fearful sympathies of Nature, the Fates the Furies, the frenzied Elements dance in and out, now breaking thro’ and scattering, now hand in hand, with the fierce or fantastic group of Human Passions, Crimes and Anguishes, reeling <on the unsteady ground> in a wild harmony to the Swell and Sink of the Earthquake.3
The tragedian must make sense of such confusion. He channels turmoil into art and interprets it morally and religiously, because it is his duty; or hers, for the Cumaean Sibyl appeals to Coleridge as a kind of tragic artist. Possibly the tragedian is divinely inspired, and possibly he is insane. The 1808 lecture series was on Principles of Poetry. To be a poet, as Coleridge conceives it, one remains true to the origin of the role in the ancient tragedian.
‘Romantic tragedy’ is a disputed term. In this introduction I survey critics who claim that there is no such thing as ‘Romantic tragedy’ and others who use the term only in reference to a small body of plays by the major authors. I suggest ‘Tragic Romanticism’ as an alternative to signify literature in the spirit of Classical tragedy, if not necessarily stage plays. The problem remains that ‘tragedy’ is its own word-puzzle of arguing critics and incompatible definitions. While this critical context is important, the tragic is a deeply personal concept to Coleridge. His solution to the lack of a consistently defined practice to follow in tragedy is to make innovative use of influences, philosophical precepts and written forms, but they remain essentially tragic.
‘The tragic’ I define as literature that depicts catastrophe and emphasizes pathos. Catastrophe is misfortune of widespread significance, not solely personal experience. Thus the lovers’ suicides in Romeo and Juliet are sad, but the play achieves tragedy in the depiction of an age-old feud that has involved innocent parties and death on the streets of Verona. Pathos is also a crucial characteristic of the tragic. Aeschylus’ tragedy Persians explores the mass bereavement following war, but while the epic Iliad also concerns war, pathos does not emerge as the dominant trait of a poem steeped in the details of combat and the nature of heroism.
As I offer the above formulation of the tragic I am obliged to place it in the tradition of scholarship on the subject, and to address possible objections. The original referent of the Greek tragodos – a song about a goat – is unknown, although goats as playwrights’ prizes, sacrifices and auditors might all be suggested. The legacy of this uncertainty is critics’ inability to agree on how tragedy should be defined. In recent decades this has manifested in some very tentative delineations of what constitutes tragedy. For example, Peter Brooks brings forth the cautious speculation that ‘some form of reconciliation to the Sacred is probably indispensable.’4 The solution of David Farrell Krell is to define tragedy in very general terms, which resonate with philosophical readings of tragedy but also seem to strip the tradition of any political or historical significance: ‘the ϕυσει οντα, the entire nature of the universe […] is […] in some sense itself tragic.’5 Terry Eagleton, who bemoans that ‘no definition other than “very sad” has ever worked’, does not make a distinction between academic and everyday uses of the word ‘tragedy’, and so risks leaving the future of literary studies in the hands of the tabloid press.6 Exasperated by such loose definitions, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz attempts to re-establish the magnitude of tragedy: ‘the word should at least be reserved for situations of great suffering.’7
One effect of uncertain scholarship is that older critical studies have remained influential by their strength of conviction. An uncompromized definition is evidently more readily quotable than a hesitant one, and can achieve an air of authority by its neglect of dissonant opinion. George Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy is one such book, first published in 1961 and still exerting considerable influence. However, Steiner advances his hypothesis from a base of texts that misleads in its selectivity. Steiner does not comment on such plays as Sophocles’ Philoctetes or Euripides’ Helen, in which the reversal of fortune is from bad to good, the inverse of his tragic model. To achieve clarity Steiner devises an exclusive definition by which very few works can actually be termed ‘tragedy’. He declares that ‘tragedy is irreparable’, that ‘there can be no compensation’, and that the advent of Christianity allows ‘only partial or episodic tragedy’.8 Thus Steiner whittles away the canon with the key point that there can no longer be tragedy, an opinion which he derives from W.B. Yeats. Declaring that ‘it is no longer possible to write “The Persians”, “Agincourt”, “Chevy Chase”’, Yeats discounts the strife of his age as inglorious: ‘some blunderer has driven his car on to the wrong side of the road – that is all.’ I suspect that Yeats would have felt otherwise had Maud Gonne been in the passenger seat. At times his commentary is inconsistent with his own creative practice. Yeats’s claim that World War I poetry should be omitted from anthologies because ‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’ is curiously at odds with his work ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’ (1919) for Lady Augusta Gregory’s son, who died piloting an aeroplane for the RAF.9 ‘Passive suffering’ is a problematic phrase too; I am not certain how productively Prometheus could suffer while chained to a rock, and surely there was some human decision in the warfare and revolution of Yeats’s lifetime. Thus the criteria by which Yeats considers works to be tragic are questionable. One clear example of how diversely tragedy can be defined, and the critical problems that arise for that reason, occurs in a study of twentieth-century modern Irish tragedy. The title, Amid Our Troubles, is a quotation from Yeats endowed with significance by later political resonances of the word ‘troubles’.10 But crucially, the volume’s editors, who compare the ‘social and political’ conditions of Ireland to those of ancient Greece, specify what constitutes tragedy by reference to different criteria from Yeats’s voluntary agon and joyous annihilation.11 Thus the editors do not quite refute Yeats, but argue contrarily by defining the tragic on alternate but equally valid grounds by use of Yeats’s own terminology.
With such uncertainty over what formally constitutes tragedy, there is wisdom in the advice of F.R. Leavis to his students, as reported by H.A. Mason, that ‘tragedy is something you will have to invent for yourselves’.12 It seems most pragmatic for a scholar to cultivate a sense of tragedy, comparable to a sense of irony, which is better gleaned from a few choice examples from Macbeth than a rigid definition. This book concerns how Coleridge invents tragedy for himself, using materials from various literary and philosophical traditions. Many of his works manifest a tragic vision that is a philosophy of life as opposed to a mere collection of allusions to and derivations from predecessors. Before a discussion of how tragedy functions philosophically in Coleridge’s works, I want to give an overview of how he theorizes the mode in his criticism.
Unlike the later Steiner and his Death of Tragedy school, Coleridge does not believe that tragedy has finished. Nor does he confine it to the ancient past. Coleridge accepts that tragedy has changed over time, but it has not become an entirely different or a less authentic mode: ‘the chain was never wholly broken’, he claims in an 1808 lecture, ‘tho’ the connecting Links were often of baser metal.’ This sense of continuity is evident in Coleridge’s claim that Shakespeare ‘proceeded in the same process’ as the ancient Greek tragedians, despite his deviations from Aristotle’s ‘rules’. Comparably, Coleridge claims in 1812 that if Sophocles and Shakespeare could have switched places in history they would nonetheless have been eminent dramatists, as they had ‘shown a genius of the same nature’.13 Not all critics would corroborate such statements; A.C. Bradley for one finds fault with Coleridge’s discussion of Macbeth in terms of fates which he considers too Classical.14 Thus there is a simplification in Coleridge’s identification of commonality in great tragedians. Nor would all scholars allow Coleridge’s informal conception of tragedy; he does not confine tragedy to dramatic form. Coleridge refers to the collaborative ballad ‘The Three Graves’, for example, as ‘tragic’ in his introductory note to the poem. However, while he allows non-dramatic art forms to be considered tragedy, Coleridge has a scholarly reserve about the word ‘tragedy’, which he uses in relation to suffering of magnitude, but does not apply casually to mishaps or sad events.
Ultimately, tragedy is a positive mode for Coleridge. In his introduction to his play Zapolya (1818) he refers in general terms 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.’15 In lecture notes of 1813 Coleridge writes a scheme of how he believes the individual parts of The Oresteia correspond to one modern tragedy:
1st. Act would be the Usurpation of Aegisthus, and Murder of Agamemnon.
2nd. Revenge of Orestes, and Murder of his Mother.
3rd. The Trial of Orestes before the Gods.16
Here Coleridge assumes that all Greek tragedies formed trilogies which, like Aeschylus’ trilogy The Oresteia, ended in reconciliation. The belief that Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound was but the first play of a lost trilogy that ended in liberation and celebration was held in Coleridge’s time as it is now. Yet it was not a widespread belief that all tragedies ultimately ended well, which is the ‘plan of the ancients’ that Coleridge extrapolates from The Oresteia. There is nothing demonstrably wrong with Coleridge’s speculation on the tradition of the trilogy in Greek tragedy: so few of the ancient texts have survived that Classicists must often rely on conjecture, and Coleridge’s conjecture is learned. But he posits belief in a general practice that not many theorists would venture. David Hume is one major influence on Coleridge who reminds the reader that tragedies can ‘end happily’.17 The philosophical importance of Coleridge’s belief that tragedy is a positive mode is that his apprehension of a beneficial purpose to tragic sacrifice renders it compatible with Christianity. This parallels the manner in which Coleridge turned to the Early Christian Fathers, via Ralph Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), to reconcile Greek philosophy with his theological position by arguing that the Greek thinkers were taught by Moses.18 In a letter to William Sotheby of 1802 on the subject of Euripides, Coleridge insists that ‘Atonement is altogether in the Spirit of Paganism, but Repentance is <Eternity> altogether Christian’; he detects a connection, although the type of metal varies, that connects disparate concepts in his philosophy.19 I proceed to argue that eventually Coleridge becomes uneasy with tragedy even as a redemptive mode. In time he relinquishes tragedy because he doubts whether the positive ends of the trilogy really are compatible with the orthodox Christianity he has by then adopted. Comparably, I think it is for his lack of philosophical interest that Coleridge has very little to say on the satyr play, which concluded the presentation of tragedies in ancient Greece, and he does not indicate a supposition of any connection between it and the tragic trilogy other than being staged together.
Tragedy could and did exist during the Romantic period, but rarely in the form of stage tragedies. More often it is detectable as an inflection, a Tragic Romanticism. Steiner concedes that the ‘Romantic mode […] is a dramatization’ at whose heart he identifies ‘an explicit attempt to revitalize the major forms of tragedy.’ But because he restricts the mode to a paradigm of stage tragedy Steiner concludes with a declaration of ‘total mechanical failure’ in Romantic attempts to execute tragedy.20 Rightly, Jeffrey N. Cox indicates Steiner’s excessive conservatism: ‘any author offering an “innovative tragedy” will be seen as contributing to the death of the form’. It is the ‘tragic vision’ rather than form that Cox argues unites Romantic authors:
[They] protested against the idea that any set of formal rules defines the tragic. They sought to replace a definition of the form of tragedy with a definition of the tragic vision […]. The tragic was no longer identified with a particular aesthetic form, but rather with a vision or philosophy of life.21
While Cox studies the tragic vision broadly, with concentration on European Romanticism, I think that his argument can be teased out into different examples of how tragedy was reinvented during the British Romantic period. For example, in Canto III of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1816), Byron achieves tragic pathos in a literal occurrence of apostrophe in which he sets aside personal grief to consider the widespread hardship of the Napoleonic wars:
I turn’d to thee, to thousands, of whom each
And one as all a ghastly gap did make
In his own kind and kindred, whom to teach
Forgetfulness were mercy for their sake.
(Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, III.xxxi.1–4)
Arguably the most accomplished novel of the period, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (1818) is a philosophical reworking of Aeschylean drama, in which it is the product of promethean fire, rather than an affronted deity, that persecutes the protagonist. John Keats, whose tragic vision of all Romantic authors is closest to Coleridge’s as I define it, argues in a letter of 1819 for the beneficial experience of strife in ‘the Vale of Soul–making’. Notwithstanding the clichéd arguments that Keats is impeded by a lack of Classical scholarship, he perceives the essence of tragic experience as it occurs in works from Oedipus at Colonos to King Lear: ‘Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to School the Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!’22 ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819), like the example from Childe Harold, rises from individual melancholy to tragedy to contemplate the ‘hungry generations’ through history (‘Ode to a Nightingale’, l. 62). To Thomas McFarland, ancient Greek thought – albeit acquired in translation – provides Keats with ‘the mask of Hellas’, which the poet assumes to acquire a guise of authority and to experience beauty.23 For Coleridge the tragic functions differently: Coleridge’s Greek tragic influences are not invoked solely for personal reassurance, but as a tool with which a troubled thinker analyses the universe in poetical works and philosophy.
In a sonnet of 1825, Coleridge writes on the impossibility of functioning in a spirit of negativity:
WORK without Hope draws nectar in a sieve;
And HOPE without an Object cannot live.
(‘Work without Hope’, ll. 13–14)
It is pointless to speculate on whether Coleridge has made an incorrect deduction about reconciliatory Greek trilogies, or whether his parallel of ‘atonement’ in tragedy and ‘repentance’ in Christianity is viable to scholars of theology or tragedy. The real crux of his attitude is that he needs tragedy to be a positive mode. Coleridge would not engage so frequently with tragedy if he could not extract a positive philosophy from it. In Table Talk, Coleridge claims a lasting dedication to hopefulness, even in consideration of the historical tumult during his lifetime: ‘I was an optimist, but as I could not but see that the present state of things was not the best, I was necessarily led to look to a future state.’24 In this book I study tragedy as Coleridge’s engagement with catastrophe in search of philosophical benefit. As an author he identifies with the ancient tragedians, whose audiences Coleridge imagines are edified by the human destruction they witness, as he portrays in Biographia Literaria (1817):
They wished to transport the mind to a sense of its possible greatness during the temporary oblivion of the worthless ‘thing, we are’ and of the peculiar state, in which each man happens to be; suspending our individual recollections and lulling them to sleep amid the music of nobler thoughts.25
Here Coleridge adopts a sense of shared aesthetic experience derived from Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), who writes of tragedy as a mode that ‘weakens the feeling of our individuality by constantly referring to universal laws, that teaches us to lose our miniscule selves in the context of a larger whole.’26 But in Coleridge’s works the tragic effect is not limited to stage tragedies, and the shared experience can be between author and reader, or speaker and auditor. This reflects a relaxation of the restrictions of literary form, ‘a shift in culture’, as John Beer describes it, ‘by which the literary arts had become more intertwined with one another.’27 Coleridge also has inherently dramatic qualities as a histrionic and performative person, to the extent that it is no surprise that the tragic touches all manner of works. Hence too Coleridge’s interest in psychologies of tragic experience, which gives rise to some of his best Shakespearean criticism and the theory of dramatic illusion, and reflects a relatively new debate over how the tragic gives what Edmund Burke terms ‘a very high species of pleasure’, a matter that Hume also explores.28 Coleridge is not drawn to analyse the formal constituents of tragedy at length, but is more interested in such philosophical applications. Repeatedly in poems, plays, letters, notebook entries and studies of tragedy in critical works, Coleridge articulates his philosophy of tragic sacrifice: that catastrophe must yield benefit, whether in works of fiction or real events.
To establish how Coleridge’s tragic vision functions philosophically I draw attention to two studies that are not primarily concerned with what tragedy is formally, but offer invaluable theories of why it arose and thus how tragic thought operates. The first is René Girard’s aetiological study of sacrifice, Violence and the Sacred (1972). While I cannot do justice to the nuances of Girard’s book in synopsis, as introductory matter I acknowledge my debt to his study of the protective function of tragedy. Girard proceeds from a Freudian perspective that law arises from actions that society deems unacceptable retrospectively. He hypothesizes that in tragedy a collective attempts to prevent the occurrence of violence by diverting it to a sacrificial victim, although in the representative rather than literal context of theatre. Thus tragedy aims to complement the restrictive force of law by channelling destructive energies. The assumption underlies this effort that the inclination to conflict can be purged in shared experience. To Girard tragedy evolves endlessly as society refines a cathartic mechanism for humanity’s inherent potential for violence, which is the cause of crisis. At times Coleridge accords with or anticipates Girard’s study, and at others he does not, but their common belief in the social function of tragedy is essential to my argument.
A useful supplement to Girard’s anthropological account of sacrifice is Geoffrey Brereton’s analysis of the development of tragic narratives in Principles of Tragedy (1968). Brereton posits the historical figure of the Corn King as an archetypal victim of tragic sacrifice:
The King […] is appointed for a fixed term, during which he receives all the respect and honour due to his royal standing. At the end of the term he is taken out and ceremonially slaughtered and his blood is sprinkled on the fields as an offering to the mysterious powers which determine the quality of the crops […]. The transgressions of the community are transferred symbolically to the sacrificial King, who goes to his death loaded with excellence and sin.29
Brereton identifies the sacrifice of the Corn King as a practice that originated tragedy, and he cites Christ as the greatest agent of redemption in that tradition. Further commonplaces of tragedy are evident in this account: the great leader brought low; the scapegoat for collective guilt. The ritual of the Corn King is re-enacted in the fall of tragic protagonists like Prometheus, Oedipus and Antigone. Subsequently I will study Coleridge’s characters as they revive and vary this tradition – such as Robespierre, Osorio/Ordonio, Cain, and the Ancient Mariner – but as a predicate for my argument I emphasize humanity’s primal need for redemption as Brereton posits it. This is the existential origin of Coleridge’s tragic vision.
Coleridge’s criticism includes no complete theory of tragedy, and his poetical works do not enact a tragic process with consistency, but the impulse to seek redemption in crisis is common to many of his creations in various forms. In Chapter 2 I examine suffering in Coleridge’s works and argue that he intends the reader or audience to experience it vicariously for the purpose of spiritual benefit. This aim accords with the function Coleridge identifies in Greek tragedy, and where he depicts catastrophe in his works, often he uses devices found in ancient drama. The tragic tradition provides Coleridge with tools to analyse the problems of evil and responsibility for transgressive actions. Tragedy relates also to philosophical interests such as free will, Necessitarianism and animal magnetism. In Chapter 3 I examine Coleridge’s tendency to read history and contemporary events as tragedy: he identifies processes of crisis and redemption for political purposes. While I address the rejection of Coleridge’s play Osorio (1797) initially in Chapter 4, I argue that Coleridge’s response to the incident instigates lifelong patterns of salvaging doomed literary projects. I raise such critical themes as synecdoche, the literary fragment and reader-response theory in relation to Coleridge’s reinvention of ancient tragic structures and devices. In Chapter 5 I turn to Romantic theatre. I challenge a popular notion in modern scholarship that Coleridge was prejudiced against theatre. I demonstrate that, in his two staged dramas, he criticizes the conventions of contemporary theatre, but also exploits them. Coleridge does not endorse the mode of ‘closet drama’ but calls for a reform in the conventions of staged tragedy. In Chapter 6 I argue that Coleridge’s assumed authority as a tragic thinker is related to his lifelong efforts to establish himself as a sage. From youth Coleridge depicts himself as an embattled, prophetic figure, and likens himself to Cassandra. With reference to W.B. Yeats’s depictions of Coleridge as sage, I examine the various techniques Coleridge employs to establish himself as a survivor of and commentator on catastrophe. He achieves his desired status in three books published from 1816–17: Sibylline Leaves, Biographia Literaria and The Statesman’s Manual. Finally in Chapter 7 I contend that the later Coleridge, settled into orthodox Christianity, abandons the tragic philosophy. He expresses fears that suffering might be in vain, and therefore that catastrophe should be avoided both in reality and as a literary theme. Ironically, Coleridge clarifies this change in a lecture on Aeschylus.
I do not read events of Coleridge’s life as tragic, because the magnitude of suffering therein does not accord to my definition of the mode. That Coleridge himself would have audiences believe that he is a tragic figure, as I discuss later, is a different matter, and is not reliant on particular occurrences but rather a mixture of self-perception and melodramatic social-performance. The domain of my study thus established, I wish to refine what I mean by Coleridge’s tragic vision by assessment of his key influences within the mode.
1 LoL, I, pp. 44–5.
2 Ibid., p. 518.
3 Ibid., II, p. 376.
4 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 107.
5 David Farrell Krell, ‘A small number of houses in a universe of tragedy: notes on Artistotle’s περι ποιτικηs and Holderlin’s “Amnerkungen”’, in Philosophy and Tragedy, ed. by Miguel de Beistegui and Simon Sparks, Warwick Studies in European Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 88–116 (p. 95).
6 Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), p. 3.
7 Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Greek Tragedy, Blackwell Introductions to the Classical World (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), p. 13.
8 George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber & Faber, 1961), pp. 8, 129, 332.
9 The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, ed. by W.B. Yeats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. xxxiv.
10 Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedies, ed. by Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton (London: Methuen Drama, 2002).
11 J. Michael Walton, ‘Hit or Myth: The Greeks and Irish Drama’, in Amid Our Troubles, pp. 3–36 (p. 35).
12 H.A. Mason, The Tragic Plane (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 1.
13 LoL, I, pp. 48, 201, 432.
14 A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, 2nd edn (London: The Macmillan Press, 1905; repr. 1978), p. 287.
15 PW, III.2, p. 1338.
16 LoL, I, p. 518.
17 David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, Dover Philosophical Classics (Mineola, New York: Courier Dover Publications, 2003), p. 262.
18 See Ian Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature, Oxford English Monographs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 18ff.
19 SWF, p. 120.
20 The Death of Tragedy, pp. 108, 123, my italics.
21 Jeffrey N. Cox, In the Shadows of Romance: Romantic Tragic Drama in Germany, England and France (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1987), pp. xi–14.
22 The Letters of John Keats 1814–1821, ed. by Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1958; repr. 1976), II, p. 102.
23 Thomas McFarland, The Masks of Keats: The Endeavour of a Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
24 TT, I, p. 489.
25 BL, II, p. 186.
26 Friedrich Schiller, ‘On the Art of Tragedy’, trans. by Daniel O. Dahlstrom, in Essays, ed. by Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom, The German Library, 17 (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1998), pp. 1–21 (p. 4).
27 John Beer, ‘Coleridge’s Dramatic Imagination’, The Coleridge Bulletin, n.s., 29 (2007), 43–9 (p. 43).
28 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (Abingdon: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958; repr. Routledge Classics, 2008), p. 44.
29 Geoffrey Brereton, Principles of Tragedy: A Rational Examination of the Tragic Concept in Life and Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 49–50.