It is widely held that the romantic age was essentially undramatic and antitheatrical. Julie A. Carlson's original study focuses on the plays written by the canonical romantic poets, as contributions to political and aesthetic reform. Departing from the attention given by recent new-historicist studies to the theatricality of revolution, it asks instead how romantic theatre represents this connection and why it has been neglected by scholars of romanticism. Taking Coleridge as its representative case and the mid-point of his career as the central focus, the book modifies a number of standard assumptions about romanticism: that emphasis on imagination implies an antitheatrical aesthetic ; that early rejection of radicalism leads to a disengagement from politics; and that formulations of nationhood demand the separation of private and public spheres. By highlighting the period during which Coleridge wrote most extensively for and about the theatre, this book recovers a large body of unfamiliar texts and the genre that displays most prominently the tensions that threaten Coleridge's (and romanticism's) aesthetic and national thinking. The project of procuring the English public's identification with the reflective space of theatre as a site of nationalist politics ultimately founders, and not only in Coleridge's work. Professor Carlson reveals these plays' inability to find a role for women in the dramas of state as symptomatic of anxieties about women which drive the age's antitheatricality. Her re-examination of romantic bardolatry, theatre criticism by Hazlitt, Hunt and Lamb, and the history plays of the second-generation romantics, confirms the Coleridgean investment in contemplative male figures and the gender politics which underlie his drama, Remorse. Her conclusion is that romantic drama's "closeting" of Shakespeare, and the ultimate disavowal of its stakes in the stage, serve to preserve both poetry and masculinity from active bodies of women.
Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 5
IN THE THEATRE OF ROMANTICISM
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
General Editors:
Professor Marilyn Butler University of Cambridge
Professor James Chandler University of Chicago
Editorial Board J o h n Barrell, University of Sussex Paul Hamilton, University of Southampton Mary Jacobus, Cornell University Kenneth Johnston, Indiana University Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara Jerome McGann, University of Virginia David Simpson, University of Colorado
This series aims to foster the best new work in one of the most challenging fields within English literary studies. From the early 1780s to the early 1830s a formidable array of talented men and women took to literary composition, not just in poetry, which some of them famously transformed, but in many modes of writing. The expansion of publishing created new opportunities for writers, and the political stakes of what they wrote were raised again and again by what Wordsworth called those "great national events" that were "almost daily taking place": the French Revolution, the Napoleonic and American wars, urbanization, industrialization, religious revival, an expanded empire abroad and the reform movement at home. This was a literature of enormous ambition, even when it pretended otherwise. The relations between science, philosophy, religion and literature were reworked in texts such as Frankenstein and Biographia Literaria; gender relations in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Don Juan; journalism by Cobbett and
Hazlitt; poetic form, content and style by the Lake School and the Cockney School. Outside Shakespeare studies, probably no body of writing has produced such a wealth of response or done so much to shape the responses of modern criticism. This indeed is the period that saw the emergence of those notions of "literature" and of literary history, especially national literary history, on which modern scholarship in English has been founded. The categories produced by romanticism have also been challenged by recent historicist arguments. The task of the series is to engage both with a challenging corpus of romantic writings and with the changing field of criticism they have helped to shape. As with other literary series published by Cambridge, this one will represent the work of both younger and more established scholars, on either side of the Atlantic and elsewhere.
TITLES PUBLISHED
Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters
by Mary A. Favret
British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire by Nigel Leask Edmund Burke3s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political Economy in Revolution by T o m Furniss Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, 1760-1830 by Peter M u r p h y In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women
by Julie Carlson
Keats, Narrative and Audience
by Andrew J . Bennett
IN THE THEATRE OF ROMANTICISM Coleridge, Nationalism, Women
JULIE A. CARLSON University of California, Santa Barbara
I I CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521444286 © Cambridge University Press 1994 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1994 This digitally printed version 2007 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Carlson, Julie Ann, 1955— In the theatre of romanticism : Coleridge, nationalism, women / Julie A. Carlson, p. cm. — (Cambridge studies in Romanticism) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 521 44428 4 (hardback) 1. English drama - 19th century - History and criticism - Theory, etc. 2. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834 - Knowledge - Performing arts. 3. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1772-1834 - Dramatic works. 4. Schiller, Friedrich, 1759-1805. Wallenstein. 5. Nationalism in literature. 6. Sex role in literature. 7. Women in literature. 8. Romanticism. I. Title. II. Series. PR716.C37 1994 822'.709 - dc20 93-8038 CIP ISBN 978-0-521-44428-6 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-03963-5 paperback
Contents
Acknowledgments List of abbreviations
page x xi
Introduction: Commanding genius in English romantic theatre
i
1
Constituting bodies politic and theatric
30
2
Coleridge's German revolution: Schiller's Wallenstein
63
3 A stage for potential men 4
94
Romantic antitheatricalism: surveilling the beauties of the stage
134
Conclusion. A theatre of remorse
176
Notes Index
213 261
IX
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to many people who have facilitated the stages of this book. My deepest thanks is to James Chandler whose thought has shaped my thinking and whose thoughtfulness has sustained it and me ever since my graduate days at Chicago. I am also deeply grateful to Alan Liu for all the ways that he has fostered my work and life at UCSB. One measure of the influence of both of their work on mine is the space it opens up for an investigation of Coleridge and theatre. Another is the interchange it has provided all along the way. I also wish to thank several other romanticists who have read parts or all of this book and have enhanced the process of writing it: particularly Peter Manning, but also Jerome Christensen, Anne Mellor, Reeve Parker, and Susan Wolfson. For provocative exchange on historical, conceptual and theoretical matters, I thank the Workshop in Feminist Theory at the University of Chicago and, closer to home, Louise Fradenburg, Christopher Newfield, Laurence Rickels, and Everett Zimmerman. For research assistance I thank Frederick Greene. Institutional support has been forthcoming from UCSB in funding and relief from teaching; also in the intellectual and collegial support I have experienced from members of the English and German departments and the program in Women's Studies. In addition, I have benefitted from interaction with the UCLA-UCSB-USC Romanticist Reading Group in Los Angeles, the women's writing group in Santa Barbara, and from Murray Biggs and the Yale English Department's commitment to viewing romantic drama as theatre. I thank the latter both for allowing me to see these plays and for providing me with an early audience for ideas about them. Finally, I wish to thank those people whose influence on this book is without measure: Zelda Bronstein, Cynthia Brown, Virginia Dearborn, Louise Fradenburg, Beatrice Higman, Janel Mueller, Stephen Shenker, and Jerry Steinfink. In this spirit, I dedicate it with gratitude and love to my first teachers, Jacee and Walter Carlson.
Abbreviations
AE
AR
BL
BLJ
CCS
CL CJV
CSP
DC
DoW
Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. Ed. Elizabeth Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Aids to Reflection. The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 7 vols. Ed. W. G. T. Shedd. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1856. Biographia Literaria. 2 vols. Ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate. Volume 7 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bollingen Series 75. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Byron's Letters and Journals. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. 12 vols. Cambridge, M A : Harvard University Press, 197382. On the Constitution of Church and State According to the Idea of Each. Ed. J o h n Colmer. Volume 10 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bollingen Series 75. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 6 vols. Ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956-71. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vols. 1-4 Text, vols. 1-4 Notes. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. Bollingen Series 50. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973-90. Characters of Shakespeare's Plays. Volume 1 of The Collected Works of William Hazlitt in Twelve Volumes. Ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover. London: J . M. Dent and Co., 1902. Leigh Hunts Dramatic Criticism^ 1808-31. Ed. Lawrence Huston Houtchens and Carolyn Washburn Houtchens. New York: Columbia University Press, 1949. Schiller, Friedrich. The Death of Wallenstein. Trans. XI
xii
EOT
F
LA LoL
LS
Pice
Abbreviations Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 2 vols. Ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge. Vol. 2: Dramatic Works and Appendices. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912. Essays on His Times. 3 vols. Ed. David Erdman. Volume 3 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bollingen Series 75. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. The Friend. 2 vols. Ed. Barbara Rooke. Volume 4 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bollingen Series 75. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. Hazlitt, William. Liber Amoris or The New Pygmalion. Ed. and Intro. Michael Neve. London: Hogarth Press, 1985. Lectures 1808-ig: On Literature. 2 vols. Ed. Reginald A. Foakes. Volume 5 in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bollingen Series 75. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Lay Sermons. Ed. R. J. White. Volume 6 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bollingen Series 75. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Schiller, Friedrich. The Piccolomini. Trans. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 2 vols. Ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge. Vol. 2: Dramatic Works and Appendices. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912.
PW
RT
ShC
SH SM
The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 2 vols. Ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912. The Round Table. Volume 1 in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt in Twelve Volumes. Ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover. London: J. M. Dent, 1902. Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism. 2 vols. Ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor. London: Constable, 1930; rev. ed. London: J. M. Dent, i960. Jameson, Anna. Shakespeare's Heroines. London: George Bell and Sons, 1897. Statesman's Manual in Lay Sermons. Ed. R . J . White. Volume 6 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bollingen Series 75. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.
Abbreviations TT View WCML
xiii
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Table Talk. Ed. T. Ashe. London: George Bell and Sons, 1888. A View of the English Stage. Volume 8 in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt in Twelve Volumes. Ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover. London: J. M. Dent, 1902. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. 7 vols. Ed. E. V. Lucas. London: Methuen, 1903.
INTRODUCTION
Commanding genius in English romantic theatre
... Share with me, Friend! the wish That some dramatic tale, endued with shapes Livelier, and flinging out less guarded words Than suit the work we fashion, might set forth What then I learned, or think I learned, of truth, And the errors into which I fell {The Prelude, xi. 282-7)
In the Theatre of Romanticism dwells on the wish embedded in this narrative of the growth of a romantic poet's mind. It sees as characteristic Wordsworth's wish for drama in recounting his experience of the French Revolution and analyzes the impulse toward theatre in all five of the canonical poets when accounting for their illusions regarding national and aesthetic reform. Not only "less guarded" words but "livelier shapes" enhance the fancy-work of refashioning individual patriots and collective dreams.1 But this book also sees as symptomatic the disavowal of drama and theatre accompanying virtually every romantic accounting of mind. For Wordsworth's wish ignores the site that perpetually reveals the "errors into which [he] fell," not simply in applauding the drama unfolding in France but anticipating applause first at Drury Lane and then Covent Garden for his tragedy The Borderers} In linking revolution and drama, the wish of The Prelude captures the canonical poets' reactions to both. Their imagined futures recompose the past: either past errors in endorsing revolution and the stage (the task of the first generation), or errors of the past that, according to the second generation, necessitate social revolution and theatrical reform. Even more consistently, the wish that links revolution and theatre requires a closeted drama of mind. The wish is framed by a sociality - "share with me, friend"-meant to affirm one's singularity and is the collective dream of poetic minds in this revolutionary age.
2
Introduction
Some measure of the power of these poetic minds is how completely the dream of romantic antitheatricalism has become a reality. Canonized poets appear as alien subjects when considered in their role as playwrights. Imagine an introduction to "The Romantic Poets" that features The Borderers, not The Prelude, Remorse, not selected chapters of Biographia Literaria, Otho the Great, not the Great Odes, The Cenci, not Prometheus Unbound, Sardanapalus, not Don Juan.
Never mind that such imaginings founder immediately on the repressed of imagination - material conditions, this time represented by a visible absence of texts. Picture available, affordable texts. But what do we picture ourselves saying about them — simply that these plays are failures of imagination or not "romantic" at all? Yet even a cursory reading of these texts reveals the same preoccupations with the lyric, the imaginative, the masculine, the antitheatric that are associated with romanticism;3 it just makes them look like bad theatre. If we can postpone such evaluative reflexes or borrow from French feminism the notion that bad theatre is good politics, we discover in the content of these plays further challenges to the pleasures and discipline of romanticism.4 For one thing, under this spotlight history is not so much displaced by imagination as featured through action, however discursive. For another, lyricism becomes the stuff of heroism for certain young men. For a third, bourgeois women are visible, even active, presences in these productions. For a fourth, nation-building requires a contemplative stage. These conclusions emerge when we take seriously the affirmative side of Wordsworth's wish, that "dramatic tales" are best suited to representing experience of the French Revolution. This book argues that the content and aesthetic intents of romantic plays cannot be fully appreciated apart from debates of the time sparked by events in France. History plays by the canonical poets dramatize contemporary reformulations of action, sovereignty, and the proper relation between the sexes. Metaphysical plays set the preconditions for this analysis by anatomizing individual and public minds. Not simply their plays but their writings on drama and theatre reveal the indispensability of theatre for becoming acknowledged legislators in this age. As psychic structure, theatre embodies the challenges of political reform as the canonical poets see it: (dis)avowing the violence of representation; reconciling ideal and real. As cultural institution it reflects the difficulties of making a body out of its parts. No other poetic arena in this period reveals so clearly the tensions
Commanding genius in English romantic theatre distending these poets' aesthetic and national theories. No other body of their work exposes such tortured minds. Rivers articulates one project of romantic drama and an appropriate reaction to this book's recovery of it: " These are strange sights - The mind of man upturned / Is a strange spectacle" {Borderers 3. 2. 27-8). An even stranger spectacle is the antitheatricalism that these poets' writings for theatre struggle to achieve. The compensatory volubility of romantic mind on stage has fostered the conviction that these plays were not meant to be performed. But this view obscures much of the interest and insight of romantic plays, their commitment to embodying invisible processes as a way of facilitating national dreams. It also veils the masculinist advantages of affirming immaterialism and immateriality. Of a piece with broader projects to counteract despotism of the eye, these talking heads on stage render perceptible a despotism of the poetic I who is male. Self-anatomy turns out to be the most visible mark of sexual difference on stage; male characters reflect while female characters act, in and as parts that are rarely associated with mind. In this view as well, Wordsworth's account of a poet's mind suits his fellows. For, when poets think about London theatres, bodies of "shameless women" rise up (The Prelude vn, 344-400). Such spectacles not only drive poets from theatre but sanction bardolatry, the closeting of (a) male genius. Scholars of romanticism need not imitate this reflex. Affirming romantic antitheatricalism blinds us to these poets' need not to perceive certain "realities". By installing the drama of these poets within the theatre of romanticism, this book makes its own strange spectacle of romantic mind. Not only does romantic discourse cast mind as theatre and romantic discourse on theatre reveal the split nature of mind but drama becomes central to the (de) composition of these poets' literary lives. As Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron variously affirm, the process of defending poetry - not to mention England - turns on theatre. But this book also finds strange the resistance by scholars to a theatricalized romanticism. After all, romantic poets are not the only ones (un) covering connections between revolution and theatre. New historical analysis generally, and French Revolution studies in particular, share the propensity. While romanticists blur text and context in the process of theatricalizing revolution, they rarely attend to the poets' theatre or the London stage for insight into this process. In the Theatre of Romanticism takes us to these stages, not only to amend
3
4
Introduction
a romantic new-historical oversight. Entering romantic theatre prompts us to revise our notions of action and the gendered privileges of remorse. I
THE SUBJECT OF ACTION
Two types of cultural study broadly inform this investigation of romantic theatre: new historicist studies of the French Revolution and feminist analysis, particularly of performativity and spectacle. Forging more than an " a n d " between historicist and feminist inquiries is another crucial component of this book. Before exploring this (dis)junction, I wish first to bring together two strands of new historicist analysis, of renaissance drama and the French Revolution. 5 What both orientations share is focus on theatricality and its investments in power. What distinguishes them is that only renaissance new historicists consider theatricality in the context of theatre. While new historicists of the early nineteenth century attend to the differences in that period's deployment of absolutism, court ritual, and the dialectic of subversion/containment, they are silent about the striking non-analogy in the cultural visibility of theatricality's putative "source." 6 Somehow theatre, with all its (il)legitimate drama, has been lost in the transference of paradigms from renaissance to romantic new historical practice. To adopt Alan Liu's phrase, renaissance theatricality only has to "spill out" of one highly visible door to the house of Shakespeare.7 Romantic theatricality contends with at least two. Because its theatre is closeted, mind must be penetrated before theatricality can spill over into public theatres, let alone the streets. Surely we need not confine romanticists to renaissance "sources," even when they borrow renaissance paradigms. Until recently, new historicism has resisted formulation as a methodized or historicized theory, acknowledging only a commitment to particularity and to the interpenetration of "literary" texts and "historical" contexts. Both hostile and friendly criticism worries over the vagaries of its "method" and the contingency of its objects of inquiry.8 Still, it seems worth pondering the avoidance of theatre in readings of romantic theatricality, if only for what it reveals about new historicist programming. Questioning the viability of "its commitment to arbitrary connectedness" obscures an opposing reality: its choice of literary subjects seems fixed, for Shakespeare and Wordsworth are
Commanding genius in English romantic theatre hardly virgin territory (Cohen, " Political Criticism of Shakespeare," p. 34). Moreover, focus on Wordsworth displaces not only more dramatic writers but the literary form still manifesting what renaissance new historicists like to claim as their period's definition of "literature": that it does not know itself from politics.9 When made visible, then, theatre in the romantic age exposes the edge of subversion that was blunted in the age of Shakespeare. Or we can say that theatre in the romantic age fosters the critique of cultural criticism offered by Liu: it cannot tolerate the " thought of action " in its unspectacular dimensions. For what distinguishes romantic theatre in all the standard accounts of it if not that its action is "too slow, too bound by details of place and circumstance, too eroded by entropic rather than contestatory frictions" (Liu, "Wordsworth and Subversion," p. 65) ? Reinscribing theatre into historicist investigations of romanticism will not in itself advance the methodological reforms Liu calls for in his critique of new historicism. Nor will this study of the canonical romantic poets as playwrights change the names - though I hope that it changes the cast - of characters that we associate with the period. But it does further the "colloquy" between renaissance and romantic practitioners on the differences between their theatres as well as the differance of theatre, and it lays preliminary groundwork for rethinking the "subject" through "action," Liu's challenge to new historicists of all fields (Liu, "The Power of Formalism," pp. 733-40; "Wordsworth and Subversion," pp. 62—6, 87—8). On the most tangible, synchronic level, reinscribing theatre into romanticism aids in historicizing the new historicism. The "transition between mimetic and symbolist credos" can be "located most conveniently" in romantic theatre, where the "very notion of the Subject" literally becomes a problem of "Action" (Liu, "Power of Formalism," p. 738). Viewed diachronically, theatre as cultural institution enhances the problematizing of literary history that cultural critics endorse. Situated on the borders of high and low culture, text and context, it places systems of representation within structures of action and propagation. Writing for theatre is precisely a writing for — for a future representation and reception that may or may not occur. The delay of that future in the case of romantic theatre invites contemporary romanticists to scrutinize our resistance to thinking (literary) history apart from a phenomenology of the subject. Attending to romantic discourse on its own theatre allows " u s " to
5
6
Introduction
watch "them" attempting to contain subversive energies in an "intricately articulated, plentitudinous, pleasure-giving and 'productive' realm" (Liu, "Wordsworth and Subversion," p. 65). Along with reconfiguring the subject and action of literary history, focus on romantic theatre highlights a second "blind side" of new historicist criticism. It problematizes the gender of action more successfully than have new historicist inquiries to date. Critics were right to question the comparative neglect of feminist analyses, especially in the first wave of renaissance new historical studies. Lynda Boose, Walter Cohen, Peter Erickson, and Carol Neely all point to the fact that, far from forging obvious alliances with feminist practice, new historicists either tended to ignore gender altogether or displace it onto other issues, usually race or class.10 Judith Newton questions the masculinization of power in renaissance studies and in theory generally. How is it that new historicists disregard not only overlapping practices but the precedence of feminism in calling for a revision of what counts as "history"? 11 Feminists are also suspicious of the intellectual history of the movement as its best-known practitioners like to frame it. Both its alleged founders- "post-6os radicals " — and their characteristic affect — disillusionment over their powerlessness — suggest that this history is a partial reconstruction by and of a certain class of white men. Generally speaking, women and people of color have different feelings about the possibilities generated by the 60s. They neither feel particularly constrained by their new access to universities and publishing houses nor view as an index of impotence the conviction that writing is a political act.12 Besides learning from the mistakes of their " elders," romantic new historicists are in a better position to attend to the experiences of women — even if, with the exception of those working in French Revolution studies, they have not tended to do so.13 For one thing, they are not so polarized between " new historicists " and "feminists," primarily because romantic new historicists are such a diverse group. Unlike the situation in renaissance studies, romanticists have less initial harmony for feminists to "spoil." 14 Secondly, to the extent American romantic new historicists are identified with another country, they are associated more with France than England. Their primary contextual object is the French Revolution, their texts refracted through a prior decade of deconstructive analysis. Both situations are advantageous for the study of women and gender, particularly the former. French Revolution studies are commendable
Commanding genius in English romantic theatre in their focus on women and the gendered implications of power and class. Those romanticists who are interested can draw on substantial information regarding French women as historical and symbolic agents, even as they are confronted by a revolution - and democratic legacy — constructed against, not simply without, women.15 More debatable as an advantage for feminist study is romanticism's affiliation with deconstruction and "French" theory. By linking them, I mean neither to deny the influence of French theory on renaissance new historicists nor to imply that deconstruction's privileging of "femininity" says anything necessarily "feminist" about its (con) textual practice.16 Instead, I wish to see as symptom the occlusion of women from new historicist discussions of renaissance drama and to reflect on the advantages for feminist aims posed by romantic theatre. Whether viewed from a theoretical or historical angle, one recognizes as overdetermined the connection between theatre and women. A staple of antitheatrical diatribe throughout the ages is the perception that theatre, with its plays on identity and the body, threatens culture like a woman. Postmodern critics make the same connection, but they applaud it. Yet the consequences of their applause are mixed; as often as not, it ignores the acts of women. Those new historicists who are "embarrassed " by this charge cannot simply duck it by arguing that it belies essentialist thinking.17 It can but it need not. Rather, a focus on women follows from new historicists' own privileged categories: theatricality, marginality, action occurring on those "many quieter, social fronts flanking the point of obvious political or military event" (Liu, "Power of Formalism," p. 738). Still, nothing in renaissance theatre competes with the focus on femininity provided by romantic theatre. The latter's "advantage" is that no self-respecting, or self-fashioning, person wants to be associated with theatre, least of all those closeted playwrights who disavow their plays to a man. Whereas in renaissance studies, theatricality loses its "femininity" by spilling over from the house of Shakespeare, romantic theatricality descends from no such heights. Its theatre is perceived as low from the start, its culture popular, feminized. Moreover, material changes in theatre spotlight "actual" women. By this time, women represent women on stage and are increasingly writing, and translating, female roles.18 Whatever critics and viewers want to make of it, women playing women makes a difference, especially in the reception of Shakespeare. Scholars can
7
8
Introduction
no longer see a man underneath every (Shakespearean) woman nor analyze romantic bardolatry apart from sexual politics. A far more hazardous, and dubious, proposition is the desire to attach any fixed meaning to the difference that women playing women makes. For such desires can lead critics to deny the enabling "unknowability" of "woman" - that all identity is fractured, multiple, provisional - or that the following assessment captures a plausible version of phallocentric reality: "beneath or within differentiated individuals is a single structure, identifiably male" (Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, pp. 92—3). Our recovery of romantic theatre and its representations of women must not entail adopting the kind of psychological criticism that the period invented. Dramatic characters are not indistinguishable from human characters; action is not a subject for judgment so much as an object positioned to elicit judgment in particular ways.19 But this acknowledgment does not mean that theatre automatically subverts gender by exposing its fictionality. After all, romantic theatres are patented by the crown.20 Attending to the process by which role playing naturalizes social norms illustrates how firmly gendered identity is rooted in the "nature" of power. For these reasons, then, that they attend to concrete situations of women as historical actors as well as to the cultural politics of vision, French Revolution studies as they are inflected by French feminist thinking provide the most useful critical framework for analyzing English romantic theatre. Both fields of inquiry accentuate the underlying category of our analysis: representation. French feminism provides a transhistorical and intrapsychic account that serves as context for the political - and politicized - debates over representation prompted by the French Revolution. With its grounding in psychoanalysis, French feminism problematizes the role of representation in the constitution of the self, both in its analysis of unconscious processes generally and the unstable boundary between fantasy and reality. For this latter reason, as well as its formulations of the "other scene," the dynamics of narcissism, and the selfsplitting that facilitates self-regard, psychoanalysis has been drawn to the model and vocabulary of theatre (also to some of the most [injfamous plots of western drama). 21 But French feminism also turns the spotlight on psychoanalysis, exposing its interested representations of the unrepresentability of woman. The desire by classical psychoanalysis neither to see difference ("the woman is a little
Commanding genius in English romantic theatre
9
man") nor to see differently (woman as the object, not subject, of vision) has generated two decades of feminist revision of visual culture. These insights into the transhistorical alliance between representation and theatre, on the one hand, and representation and the invisibility — or nothing-to-see-ness — of women, on the other, inform our vision as we turn to consider historical debates over representation prompted by the French Revolution. Cultural analysts, both then and now, do at least some of this work in viewing the French Revolution as a form of governance and theatre. What enables this equation is the way that both realms struggle over representation.22 Rousseau articulates this equation and the paradox that underlies it in his writings on government and theatre: representation undermines as it promotes the new sovereignty of the people.23 While the revolutionaries adopted Rousseau's model for the "common sovereignty inherent in the general will," they failed to follow through on his rejection of the practice of representation (Baker, "Representation," p. 477). Instead, they followed Hobbes in situating the nation in the "collective person" of a society's representatives (Baker, "Representation," p. 490). This model, as Frangois Furet stresses, occasions a tremendous rush for symbolic power; revolutionary politics - and its theatre - become a " matter of establishing just who represents] the people" and who is capable of keeping that "symbolic position" [Interpreting the Revolution, p. 48). A similarly partial adoption of Rousseau's strictures against representation can be detected in readings that analyze the revolution as theatre. The two cultural sites most relevant to our project can be schematized according to their relative faithfulness to Rousseau. Revolutionary fetes, as Mona Ozouf describes them, are the most satisfactory enactment of Rousseau's models for national unity. Situated in nature with no fixed boundaries between representers and represented, these festivals render as self-evident the equality and virtue of the sovereign people (Ozouf, Festivals in the French Revolution, pp. 1-26). Transparency is their (anti)-symbolic message: "Make [spectators] actors themselves; do it so that each sees and loves himself in the others so that all will be better united. " 24 In contrast, Parisian theatres violate the letter of Rousseau's Letter to D'Alembert by representing the nation in an arena that undermines unity and virtue. Rousseau indicts public theatres for cultivating secrecy, isolationism, hypocrisy, and apathy. 25 Yet in the revolutionary
io
Introduction
period, outdoor fetes and public theatres are not as opposed as Rousseau suggests. At least as Huet and Noel Parker present it, revolutionary theatre is faithful to the spirit of Rousseau. For Huet, spectacle, no matter where it is held, creates " a public" out of isolated viewers {Rehearsing the Revolution, pp. 33-4). When held in institutional theatres immediately after the Revolution, new seating arrangements and representational fare allow that public to perceive itself as a republic. Released from censorship in January 1791, plays begin to feature lower-class heroes and prominent events of the day; they restage the most recent outdoor patriotic festivals and even announce the names of traitors executed that day.26 The Theatre de la Nation (formerly the Comedie Franchise) grants equal viewing opportunity by dismantling loges and balconies so that everyone comes together on the same level (Huet, Rehearsing the Revolution, pp. 43-4)These contrasting theatrical projects in France, and their degrees of allegiance to Rousseau, are a useful backdrop against which to analyze the situation of theatre in England. The fact that representation in its aesthetic and political dimensions is, according to James Chandler, the central problem in Burke's Reflections makes it inevitable both that theatre becomes a charged site for revolutionary deliberations in England and that Burke's representation of English theatre is opposed to every democratic feature associated with Rousseau.27 As a consequence, Burke presents an England able to contain theatre within theatres. Whereas "French theatricality," as Geraldine Friedman puts it, "insinuates itself" into "real life," English theatre "is restricted to the stage." 28 This not only means that English statesmen leave the business of acting to actors but that, on stage, adequate representation is limited to high tragedy and, in the audience, to an assembly of sober, chivalric, even nobly weeping men. Both as cultural institution and type of literature, English theatre "represents unequal representation unequally (that is, as an equality) " (Chandler, "Poetical Liberties," pp. 52, 53). It privileges the mediacy, not transparency, of social relations and arouses "natural" feeling by legitimating traditional rules. Two interesting situations become visible, however, if we refuse to view Burke in simple opposition to Rousseau. First, common ground emerges in their negative textual treatment of women. Both pin on women reservations about representation, however differently they envision it. Each implicitly rejects the other's theatrical model in
Commanding genius in English romantic theatre terms of that site's association with women. The problem Rousseau identifies with theatre is the problem Burke locates in Parisian streets, where women display their agency rather than confining themselves to the domestic sphere. But even their arguments for the theatrical forum of choice works to exclude women from public space and representation. Rousseau is never comfortable viewing women in (or as) wide open spaces.29 Burke applauds Sarah Siddons as a longsuffering mother in order to gain sympathy for the French queen. Whether envisioning open-air festivals or high tragedy in the service of democracy or constitutional monarchy, each restricts his view of woman to virgin, virtuous wife, or mother. Such alliances between political enemies are the "natural" consequences of the sexual politics of representation. By foregrounding the problematics of public women, romantic discourse on English theatre makes explicit the repression of women that underlies both liberal and conservative governance in the nineteenth century. A second benefit is that we begin to perceive analogies between (discourse regarding) English romantic theatre and French revolutionary fetes. Though aligned with more established interests, London theatre was not then, and should not now be, viewed simply as a site of containment in this period. Recognizing similarities between the two domains helps to account both for what drew romantic poets to theatre and what alarmed them once they were there. Except for Byron, canonical poets defend their recourse to theatre essentially on the same grounds as those advocating patriotic spectacles in France: theatre embodies and enables national unity by arousing patriotism, morality, and sympathetic identification.30 It also constitutes a similar aesthetic challenge of promoting transparency through palpable means. Other, more alarming, analogies suggest why romantic playwrights generally defend their "poetry" from an unreformed stage. As they see it, London theatres reflect the social realities of French festivals by granting control over taste to a wider audience. In advance of England's other representational bodies, London theatres not only foreshadow but reflect a more fully democratized and feminized nation to come. Only in theatre, poets lament, does the " m o b " dictate terms to their betters. Only in theatre does woman fuel the house even as she defends the home. This second situation makes theatre a particularly rich site for reflections on the revolutionary legacy in contemporary England. On the one hand, London theatre audiences pose a more direct challenge
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to myths of national "unity" than do other cultural bodies in England at the time. Between 1780 and 1840 London theatres experienced a rapid influx of middle- and lower-middle-class patrons who demanded satisfaction.31 Not only in terms of taste — though that was satisfied through the rise of melodrama, pantomime, and domestic tragedy.32 Social, economic, and political demands were frequent orders of the day. The Old Price Riots during the autumn of 1809 are the best-known manifestation of the people's power over London theatre managers and aristocratic patrons.33 Not only did audiences at Covent Garden stop the show for sixty-seven nights but also forced John Kemble to meet five of their demands: most importantly, lowering admission prices and demolishing the newly constructed private boxes and adjacent anterooms. When push comes to shove, English theatre spectators become actors who demand their rights to hear and be heard. Similarly, theatrical assemblies are viewed as national bodies in the minds of the audience and theatre reviewers.34 The permeability of these two houses of representation is particularly visible in the significance of 1832 as a date in the history of London theatre as well as parliamentary reform. From 13 June to 12 July 1832, Parliament conducted an inquiry into the state of dramatic literature at which thirty-nine experts testified on, and resoundingly against, the patent theatres' longstanding monopoly of legitimate drama. 35 On the other hand, the fact that this legislation was not enacted into law until 1843 indicates the many restrictions on diversity in London theatres. Concrete legal, economic, and literary regulations reinforce on a more palpable level the general work of surveillance and self-censorship that culturalist, especially Foucauldian, critics find operative in public spectacles.36 Analysis of the content and functions of romantic plays cannot exist apart from consideration of these extra-literary conditions. Indeed, it cannot acknowledge a meaningful distinction between context and text. Economic and legal conditions set the terms of dramatic literature more concretely than in other literary domains of the period. So much so, in fact, that discourse on theatre rivals Liu's candidate for rethinking the "activation" of literature and the notion of " containment" in this period — the voluminous proceedings of the sedition and treason trials of the 1790s ("Wordsworth and Subversion," pp. 68-9). For the law circumscribes the theatrical conditions that dictate the possibilities for dramatic literature, as Michael Booth has argued.37 It legislates what can be said, where it
Commanding genius in English romantic theatre can be said, and who receives compensation for saying it. One major difference represented by theatre is that whereas England abolished censorship of the press in 1695, it systematized censorship of the stage in 1737. After that point, all plays had to be submitted two weeks before performance to the Lord Chamberlain's office, where, to the extent that decisions had a rationale, all references to political, topical, religious, and sexual issues were removed.38 This fact alone casts provocative light on the privileged term of romantic new historicism: displacement. Perhaps the usurping imagination of lyric took its cue from theatre. The law also determined the locale for "legitimate" drama by granting exclusive rights to the Royal Theatres — Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Though significant inroads were made into their authority, these two theatres enjoyed a legal monopoly on spoken drama until 1843 (Ganzel, "Patent Wrongs," pp. 384-8). But as cultural discourse over just these two conditions indicate, there is no sure way to evaluate the effects of such restrictions. Whether they fostered or hampered creativity depends on how one defines it. One element of the "subversion" of theatre in the romantic age is that creativity was channeled toward resisting authority even more than producing literature.39 This book analyzes the theatre of the canonical romantic poets in light of these pressures of political, social, and theatrical history. Its broadest frame is cultural discourse on the French Revolution and its impact on England, particularly as these reflections lead to a more systematic formulation of action, nationalism, and " Englishness." Theatrical analysis of the revolution and England must take into account the shaping realities of London theatre. Reliable information regarding this second frame is hampered on several counts: lack of attention, particularly by literary critics; prejudice, even by historians of theatre; a general polarization among the fields of theatre history, theoretical investigations of theatre, literary studies of romanticism. This means that, in the case of theatre, romantic new historicists have more preliminary ground to cover than their counterparts in the renaissance. Yet significant work is underway, especially in the periods contiguous with romantic theatre.40 Moreover, the recent trend in theatre studies to analyze performativity in its political dimensions, coupled with an increasingly demystified notion of "literature" and renewed attention to romantic plays, makes it a matter of time before we have a fully nuanced picture of early nineteenth-century theatre. 41 This book contributes to that
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emergence by addressing its point of greatest resistance: the occlusion of drama and theatre from literary studies of romanticism.
2
MINDING THEATRE
Reading romantic theatre in the context of early nineteenth-century movements for political and theatric reform does more than revise notions regarding the relations among representation, action, and women in romanticism and culturalist investigations of it. It provides a framework for reassessing the content, functions, and failures of plays by the canonical poets. Writing in the wake of the Terror, poets compose " b a d " drama as part of their legislation of "good" politics. The interiority, sluggishness, and inactivity of romantic plays counter an impetuous, sensationalist, and Gallicized English public. Crucial to national reform, these poets contend, is an anatomizing of mind that is meant to be enacted for and imitated by theatre audiences. Indispensable to the health of that public mind is a theatre reform that places imagination center-stage. Simply to take these plays' commitment to self-anatomy as evidence of a bias against theatre is to ignore the theatrical nature of psychic processes and one of the most compelling questions evoked by romantic theatre. Why take to the stage in order to enact reservations about action and theatricality in a revolutionary age? To entertain this thesis regarding romantic drama requires the refutation of two longstanding scholarly assumptions: romantic poets were ignorant or disdainful of theatre, and they wrote their plays for the closet. Even those studies aimed at exploding the first assumption tend to justify their interest by shoring up the second.42 The most noteworthy book-length study of English romantic drama, Alan Richardson's A Mental Theater: Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the
Romantic Age (1988), overturns prior attacks on the static, monologic nature of lyrical drama by emphasizing its dynamic, interactive qualities. But it does so at the expense of theatre. Focus on that domain, where romantic plays apparently can only be judged as failures, diverts attention from the real accomplishments of lyrical drama: its status as a " new poetic form," its greater suitability to the exploration of consciousness, and its affinities with the psychological depths of (a closeted) Shakespeare (pp. 1-6).43 Similar antitheatrical bias underlies the work of another partisan of romantic drama,
Commanding genius in English romantic theatre Timothy Webb. In "The Romantic Poet and the Stage," Webb goes even further than Richardson in highlighting the scope and diversity of these poets' theatrical projects, listing twenty-four plays either completed or attempted and alluding to the wealth of essays, theatre reviews, public lectures, and epistolary reflections devoted to theatre. 44 In this light, his subtitle is startling: "A Short, Sad, History." But its rationale is standard fare. " [T]he dramatic tendency was important to the Romantic poets but... its central energies were derived from an engagement not so much with the external world as with the rich diversities and complexities of self" (P- I 3)This habitual drawing back from forming what seems an obvious, or equally plausible, conclusion - namely, that romantic poets wrote plays and discussed theatre because they were fascinated by theatre's double connection to mind and politics - is part of what intrigues me about the mental constraints informing study of these poet-playwrights. What is at stake, for romantic poets and romanticist scholars, in the belief that romantic plays serve only one master, mind? Except for Keats, who broadcasts his ambition to " make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting," all of these poets assert their genius by denying that they write for the stage (KL 2: 139). " Excepting for the money which would be gained if [Osorio] succeeded, I am not conscious of a wish relating to the piece. It is done: and I would rather mend hedges & follow the plough, than write another" (CL 3: 437). "As [The Borderers] was first written, and is now published, without any view to its exhibition upon the stage, not the slightest alteration has been made in the conduct of the story" (1842 Note, CB, p. 813). My interest is less in casting doubt on these assertions than underscoring their performative power; they, and not the plays themselves, have come to represent the truth about romantic theatre. Yet it would be hard to imagine a less reliable narrator than a romantic poet introducing his plays. He is trapped by his terms. Terms of admission associate him with all the dirty words of romanticism: senses, body, collaboration, labor, money, failure. Denial, though more romantic, is affixed to the piece of incriminating evidence. As one example of the critical pay-off to be gained by suspending belief in these authorial confessions, consider Wordsworth's retrospective account of the composition of The Borderers. (Characteristically, Coleridge covers himself more equivocally: " I am not
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Introduction
conscious of a wish relating to the piece.") Writing almost fifty years after the fact, during which time the play has lain "unregarded among my papers," Wordsworth claims direct access to the state of mind in which the play was composed: " (for I [the word 'never' is crossed out and above is written] had then no thought of the Stage)." Equally symptomatic is how he depicts his reaction to Covent Garden's rejection of the play: For myself I had no hope nor even a wish (tho' a successful Play would in the then state of my finances have been a most welcome piece of good fortune) that [Mr. Harris] should accept my performance so that I incurred no disappointment when the piece was judiciously returned as not calculated for the stage. In this judgement I entirely concurred, & had it been otherwise it was so natural for me to shrink from public notice that any hope I might have had of success would not have reconciled me altogether to such an exhibition (Fenwick Note, CB, p. 814, original emphasis). Though a rarer version of the egotistical sublime, it has similar effects. Much like the stance that Coleridge claims for himself during the mounting of Remorse, where he is known in the Green Room as the "amenable" or "anomalous Author" from his "utter indifference or prompt facility in sanctioning every omission that was suggested," indeed, in begging for more (CL 3: 428, 432), Wordsworth's preface does what it can to efface not his own but Coleridge's play and success from the record. Not only is precedence established - "Much about the same time, but a little after, Coleridge was employed in writing his Trajedy [sic] of Remorse"-but guilt ascribed. Manly, though modest, poets "shrink from public... exhibition," but not "Mr. Coleridge", whose "play was as is well known brought forward several years after thro' the kindness of Mr. Sheridan" (Fenwick Note, pp. 814-15). ("Well known" to those receptive to Coleridge's version is Sheridan's unkindness in seducing the young poet into submitting his play, betraying him by rejecting it, and humiliating him years afterward by quoting "ludicrous" lines from it to a company of respectable men [PW, pp. 812-13].) In this regard, both prefaces do introduce accurately the plots that follow: brotherly affection is lethal, wounds outlast the grave. Other terms of this preface unearth even deeper rivalries. " I incurred no disappointment when the piece was judiciously returned as not calculated for the stage." No doubt; for by those terms Wordsworth's play now measures up to Shakespeare's by adopting Charles Lamb's famous
Commanding genius in English romantic theatre antitheatrical tribute: Shakespeare's plays "are less calculated for performance on a stage, than those of almost any other dramatist whatever" (WCML 1: 99). For the romantic poets as playwrights, serving the master, mind, is indissociable from serving England's master mind, Shakespeare. And serving both in that age means distancing themselves from the calculations of theatre. But what accounts for the deep investments of scholars of romanticism in not recomputing the costs or benefits of romantic theatre, especially when present-day critical practice makes them suspicious of the "ideology" of poetry and the displacement of history by mind ? Ironically, these lurking resistances are beginning to offer themselves up for analysis because of a growing assault on this last stronghold of poetic mind, mental theatre. Aid comes from two quarters: general demystifications of mind enabled by new-historicist analysis; the staging of romantic minds as theatre at Yale. Two recent symposia suggest that romantic theatre is slowly emerging from the closet. On 12 November 1987, members of the Yale Theater Studies program, under the direction of Murray Biggs, presented the American premiere of The Borderers as part of a threeday symposium on "Wordsworth and the Borders of Romanticism."45 Less than three years later, on 29 March 1990, and again under the direction of Biggs, members of the Yale Theater Studies program presented Sardanapalus as part of another three-day symposium on "Byron and the Drama of Romanticism." Both events marked significant moments in the recovery of romantic drama and theatre and facilitated two grounding assumptions of this book.46 The first is that these plays profit from representation; it enlivens their discourse and inaction and provides a defamiliarizing yet familiar glimpse at the conditions of another age. As a longer-term consequence for analytic practice, emphasis on representation promises to effect two changes. It helps to alter how we measure the "success" of these plays, less by simply reversing prior assessments than by historicizing them in terms of evolving conditions of theatre. Many who viewed The Borderers at Yale were struck by its greater resonance on the twentieth-century stage. They not only began to hear modernist rather than Shakespearean overtones but were led to speculate on Wordsworth's foresight in theatre reform.47 Emphasis on representation also spotlights the insufficiency of our reading practices to date. Thomas Whitaker speaks from authority, as Lord Herbert, in challenging romanticists to combine textual and per-
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Introduction
formative analysis of drama. His "hypothesis" is that a dialectical relation between a "community of readers" and "performers" should be " a vigorous activity in the mind of every good reader of a dramatic text" ("The Unreadable ... the Unactable," p. 356). This book tests his hypothesis. The second assumption is that historicist approaches to romantic theatre enhance our appreciation of the work of these plays. As the conference papers on both occasions attest, analytic focus on these plays has finally widened enough to encompass something more than the poet's mind. In viewing The Borderers as a commentary on the French Revolution, William Jewett reminds us just what a revolution this represents in scholarship on the play.48 Sardanapalus takes critics even further afield, as Byron's borders "sway" between Orient and Occident, modern and feudal worlds, masculinity and femininity.49 That the new historicist focus apparent at Yale is part of a growing trend in romantic scholarship on drama is confirmed by the most recent collection of essays to appear on the topic, "English Romantic Drama: Historical and Critical Essays," edited by Terence Allan Hoagwood and Daniel P. Watkins.50 What links these essays is the conviction that critical methods and principles grounded in history rather than in "subjectivist and individualist categories" are far better at unfolding the "vitality, integrity, and importance of Romantic drama" (p. 119). The editors specify three areas of dramatic inquiry that promise to profit from historically informed scholarship and criticism: the "specific material conditions under which the drama was produced "; the " specifiable social and political ranges of reference that the dramas take for their meaning"; and the "practical interventions in the human world which the dramas themselves become" (p. 120). This book's use of the term " theatre," though not fully coincident, roughly covers the three directions of inquiry indicated by Hoagwood and Watson. It considers theatre as a cultural institution, as a type of literary production, and as a stage or structure of mind, both private and public.51 Critical assistance in exploring these domains has come primarily from romanticists working in the second category. But the work of two scholars has been of particular importance in helping me to forge the broader connections of this book. Reeve Parker's analyses of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's plays of the 1790s install romantic theatre within revolutionary polemics in England and revolutionary theatre in France.52 Loren Kruger's broad-ranging investigation of
Commanding genius in English romantic theatre the institutionalization of a national stage in England, Germany, and France constitutes a proleptic sequel to many of the issues raised in this book.53 Where my work departs most significantly from historicist investigations of romantic theatre is in its attention to the situation of women in, and as, theatre. Even this perspective owes its development to the symposia at Yale. Seeing The Borderers suddenly brought bodies into consciousness, not simply because theatrical representation employs body as "evidence" of mind. This play, with its reservations about "French" minds, gave body a kind of national precedence over and autonomy from mind. Morality was apprehensible as a physical property: though mentally seduced, Mortimer manifested an unconscious purity by keeping physically aloof both from Rivers and Herbert. What became equally visible was that gender inequality existed on precisely this front. No matter how outrageous, suspicions regarding Mathilda's body automatically manifested her guilt.54 This initial insight into the sexual difference thematized and figured by theatrical bodies on stage ultimately gave rise to my most unexpected discovery regarding these plays: that they are indispensable to an analysis of gender relations in the romantic age. In their plays, more than in any other kinds of writing, romantic poets address the issue of women's roles and their representation in the body politic. Not only that, these plays portray women as commanding action in the public sphere. Other scholars, notably Catherine Burroughs, Reeve Parker, Karen Swann, and Daniel Watkins, have attended to sexual difference in the assignment of agency, morality, and poetry on stage.55 But this book also employs feminist insights to account for the so-called antitheatricalism of the age. Though more engaged by theatre and for longer periods of time than has generally been recognized, romantic writers do withdraw from theatre at certain points in their career or under specific conditions. Some, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, abandon their playwrighting activity entirely by mid-career (much earlier in the case of Wordsworth). Others, like the best-known essayists on theatre, repudiate theatre only in the case of Shakespeare. In analyzing both reactions, my book revises the two most resonant accounts of romantic antitheatricalism: Mary Jacobus's now-classic argument that antitheatricalism expresses romantic interdictions on revolution, action, and commanding genius, and Howard Felperin's recent treatment of bardolatry as a
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Introduction
democratic, not elitist, reaction. 56 Attention to the historical conditions of the early nineteenth-century stage suggests instead that antitheatricalism is a misogynist reaction against the visibility of "public women" in theatre. For romantic poets turn to the stage to demystify commanding geniuses like Napoleon; and romantic essayists turn from it only when they are forced to picture Shakespeare embodied by women. London theatre is the cultural domain in England that most nearly embodies the sexual politics associated with France, where women, in their roles as over-sexed queens or under-class women, run the show. Bardolators' desire to closet Shakespeare saves him from psychological appropriation by women, even from his incarnation in the "incomparable," but undeniably female, Sarah Siddons. This closeting of Shakespeare and the public stage is key to masterminding the illusion of England. It aims to preserve the homosociality of romantic men by effacing the power of women, a power that is perceived as intellectual even more than erotic in this age. 57 In light of the long, "sad history" of denying the interest or efficacy of romantic theatre, there is a certain irony in choosing drama as the place to investigate romantic notions of power. Doing so uncovers another difference between renaissance and romantic new-historical analyses of theatre and a discernible logic grounded in inequities of gender. Hazlitt identifies the aesthetic problem that results from the democracy associated with romantic theatre: diffusion. Though Hazlitt endorses diffusion of power in the political realm, he laments it in the aesthetic. This is the timeless, if tragic, message oiCoriolanus. It is such a "store-house of political common-places" that "any one who studies it may save himself the trouble of reading Burke's Reflections, or Paine's Rights of Man, or the Debates in both Houses of Parliament since the French Revolution or our own." It is such a stronghold of poetry that it leaves defenseless the people and their drama. "The cause of the people is indeed but little calculated as a subject for poetry"; for poetry is "right-royal," its language "naturally falls in with the language of power" (CSP, p. 214). Accurate in the main as a description of where class loyalties lie in romantic promotions of poetry, Hazlitt here inculcates a belief that has dictated critical views on romantic drama and theatre ever since. Less romantic assessments of that domain find poets on the defensive: the power of poetry is wishful thinking aimed to dispel emergent forms of power in London theatres and the nation at large. Not only
Commanding genius in English romantic theatre
21
does the rise of "she-tragedy" and the popularity of pantomime, spectacle, and coups de theatre suggest that poetry is losing ground to more visible, visual forms of power but these new forms place lowerand middle-class women at the seat of power.58 Christopher Reid identifies a shift in eighteenth-century concepts of tragedy whereby pity, not pity and fear, is cultivated through isolated moments of pathos, not through the involutions of plot. With Laura Brown, he attributes this shift to the rise of the female protagonist. 59 Romantic writers deny this rendition of theatre's power by denigrating spectacle, "situation," pantomime, on the grounds that it robs drama of poetry. They then associate all these derogatory effects with women players. With few exceptions, their theatre criticism treats actresses as bodies, not minds; even more consistently, their plays ascribe action to female characters, poetry to males. The former are at best single-minded and unreflecting; the latter are self-divided but lyrical in their remorse. Ascribing "feminine" feeling to male dreamers means that the lines drawn between poetry and theatre must be firmer than ever. Affirming them is what romantic poets see as their surest weapon in the war between the sexes. While asserting the power of poetry misfires as a strategy to reclaim masculinity from its more vigorous, bourgeois incarnation, it does disarm the power of women. Apparently the willingness of romantic poets to relinquish the action of theatre to women is not too high a price to pay. At least romanticists have been buying this line ever since. 3
THE COMMANDING GENIUS OF COLERIDGE
Coleridge gives a name to romantic ambivalence about the poet's worldly power: commanding genius.60 In the version of it with which romanticists are most familiar, the definition recorded in Biographia Lite?aria, that ambivalence is largely underground. Or it is managed through the form of its presentation, that binary thinking - and in this case literal splitting of genius - that Coleridge manifests whenever he feels drawn to the wrong things. Here commanding genius comes with its antidote, absolute genius, sanctioning the recourse to binarisms that plagues Coleridge studies to this day: man of action versus man of contemplation; public hero versus private poet; Napoleon versus Coleridge. For "men of commanding genius," he explains, are those in whom the "impulse" to realize the "conceptions of the mind" is "strongest and most restless." Possessing
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Introduction
more than "mere talent," they "want something of the creative, and self-sufficing power of absolute Genius" (BL 1:31; original emphasis). That kind of genius "rest[s] content between thought and reality, as it were in an intermundium of which their own living spirit supplies the substance, and their imagination the ever-varying form"; commanding geniuses "must impress their preconceptions on the world without, in order to present them back to their own view with the satisfying degree of clearness, distinctness, and individuality" (BL 1: 32; original emphasis). Even in this version, however, Coleridge does not simply privilege the dreamer-poet and denigrate the activator. He splits commanding geniuses into two camps, those of "tranquil times" and "times of tumult," and describes the material activity of the former as types of poetry (BL 1: 32—3). In peacetime, they "exhibit a perfect poem in palace or temple or landscape-garden," or produce " a tale of romance in canals that join sea with sea." Only in times of tumult is commanding genius "destined to come forth as the shaping spirit of Ruin," destroying " the wisdom of ages in order to substitute the fancies of a day" (BL 1: 33). The Statesman's Manual names names. These are the "Masters of Mischief, the Liberticides, and mighty Hunters of Mankind, from NIMROD to NAPOLEON " (SM, p. 66). Embedded as these distinctions are in a discussion meant to disprove the "irritability" of men of genius, we are right to approach them with skepticism. The chapter encourages us to do so by displaying moments of categorical slippage, one of which threatens to undermine the worldly—otherworldly opposition that Coleridge is seeking to establish. The alleged irritability of genius follows from an "unjust distinction" between "literary, and all other property" (BL 1: 43). Establish a "Review" of "ribbon-weavers, calico-printers, cabinet-makers, and china-manufacturers" that takes the "same freedom with personal character, as [do] our literary journals" and the " irritability of trade would soon reduce the resentment ofpoets into mere shadow-fights in the comparison" (BL 1: 43; original emphasis) . Still, if Coleridge in this chapter waffles between defenses of the poet as dreamer or professional man, he stands firm on one boundary. Absolute genius opposes forces in the world that are solely invested in reality and that pursue their own version of reality without regard to means. I want to return us to earlier days when there was nothing absolute about genius for Coleridge. Not surprisingly, these are the days of
Commanding genius in English romantic theatre support for revolution, France, and Napoleon, the times when no apologies are needed for the poet or the man of action - or for the poet as the man of action. Each is deemed capable of "moving the world." I return us to these times neither to relive nor to mourn Coleridge's or romanticism's radical past but to suggest that scholars of romanticism have taken the subsequent breakdown of genius too literally. Ever since critics in the 1960s returned romantic poetry to its roots in revolution, romantic criticism has tended to evaluate poetry as an all-or-nothing affair. Either poetry transcends revolution and reality through its strength of mind or is no different from reality. 61 The early history of Coleridge's commanding genius tells a messier story of imaginative action and political dreams. It remains one of romanticism's valuable contributions to social studies, particularly because its history involves the terror of possibility and the reality of Terror. In addition, it advances new-historicist literary studies by foregrounding a textual object that "moves" rather than "means." The latter advantage hints at the special relation between commanding genius and theatre as well as the importance of distinguishing stages in Coleridge's use of this term. For the early days of Coleridge's commanding genius also occasion no apology for drama; at this time he opposes theatre neither to poetry nor to the real world. It is worth remembering that Coleridge's first sustained literary response to revolution resulted in a play, The Fall ofRobespierre (1794, co-authored with Sou they), and that one of the first, and most lasting, influences on his thinking about revolution is Schiller. Subsequent antipathy to revolutionary activity, France, and Napoleon cause the ensuing split in genius that we know so well; from 1802 on, Coleridge has nothing nice to say about commanding genius in the world. But that does not extend to commanding genius in and as theatre. One clue to this stage of Coleridge's thinking lies in the history of negative judgments regarding Coleridge's plays. The boredom that ensues from their inactivity and polarization of characters results from the effort to demystify commanding geniuses on stage. It is part of the lasting genius of Coleridge that his attitude toward commanding genius as theatre is not resolved until his final, clerical stage. Until then, demystification of commanding genius takes place in a commanding medium that keeps Coleridge in touch with — and reaction against — his own desires to command. Jacobus is right to emphasize how "commanding genius" links romantic discourse on revolution to discourse on theatre. But if we
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Introduction
view antitheatricalism as a theme in and a goal of romantic plays, we begin to perceive how theatre negotiates anxieties over revolution expressed by all of the canonical poets. Not every poet demystifies commanding genius by featuring heroes as inactive as Coleridge's, but they all approach the subject of revolution through lengthy discourse on dreams. Virtually every dramatic protagonist takes a moment to puzzle out the relation between vision and reality in these plays. Such moments contribute to their alleged failure as plays but also to the reform of post-revolutionary England. They offer more private consolations in working through disillusionment on several fronts by revising prior visions for the nation. Shelley even makes this into a strategy of composition. Into the dream world of Prometheus Unbound intrudes the "sad reality" of The Cenci. All of the canonical poets, then, view theatre as contributing to English reform by reconstructing a nation's dreams and analyzing their preconditions. But this book features Coleridge for reasons that are particular to him. The first reason acknowledges his leading role in poetic discussion of commanding genius. Not only does he name the problem for England in a play about revolution - his translation in 1800 of Schiller's Wallenstein trilogy-but his aesthetic writings portray theatre as a commanding for(u)m of dreams. On the one hand, theatre comes closer to "reality" in its "imitation of reality" than does any other poetic form. On the other hand, the "reality" that theatre exemplifies is the stuff, and psychic process, of dreams. Even more particular to Coleridge is the way that he lives the dilemma of commanding genius as personal tragedy. For Coleridge is a body wracked by its inability to distinguish phantom from reality; and his is a mind recovering from, by covering over, a jacobin past. Not genius but guilt is what ultimately distinguishes Coleridge from his romantic fellows in terms of the politics of theatre. Unlike the second-generation poets, who did not experience the French Revolution as young men, or Wordsworth, who invokes Shakespeare to relieve his terror, only the genius of Coleridge is arrested at the stage of his youthful dreams. Coleridge relives their historical outcome in nightly terror, where his "punishment" is to envision all "the Massacres, the furious Passions,... the bloody Persecutions and mutual Cannibalism" that could have eventuated from his "inflammatory" words and thoughts (CL 2: 1003). Guilt for this past turns him (in) to theatre, where, for a certain time, he finds relief in Remorse. The tensions embedded in Coleridge's commanding genius do not
Commanding genius in English romantic theatre divide but they distinguish him from his fellow poets turned playwrights. They also reshape his career, the second reason why my book focuses extensively on him. Investigating his commanding genius overturns two cardinal principles of Coleridge studies: emphasis on imagination necessitates hostility to theatre; rejection of revolution implies a full-scale retreat from political action. It also directs special attention to the creative production of his middle years (1807-16). For reasons normally attributed to Coleridge's sojourn in Germany, this period is usually analyzed in terms of Coleridge's prose, the theory being that Coleridge abandoned poetry for metaphysics shortly after his return to England. " Germany" also has a share in political presuppositions about this period. While abroad Coleridge discovers his patriotism and thereafter commits his work to the expression of a conservative idea and reality of England. But this middle stage of Coleridge's career is also the stage of theatre, the period in which he theorizes drama and theatre and mounts his one successful play. This stage is crucially shaped by German idealism but an idealism more invested in reality and theatre than is generally acknowledged (even by Coleridge). From Schiller, Coleridge learns to promote aesthetic play and its special relation to theatre as the antidote to impasses caused by revolutionary activity. From Schiller he learns to cast dramatic heroes as contemplative men dedicated to national reform. Armed with German idealism and theatre, Coleridge confronts the challenges of his middle stage. Chief among them is the feared loss of his "shaping spirit of imagination" and the desire to prove his legitimacy to speak as England's representative mind. More "systematically" than his other compositions, the varied theatrical projects of this stage facilitate both endeavors. Aesthetic writings on theatre aim to restore imagination by removing sensual attractions polluting the contemporary stage. Lectures on Shakespeare complement the task of the Biographia in promoting Coleridge's play for the status of England's native genius. Revisions to Osorio (performed as Remorse in 1813) mask a radical past while turning Coleridge into an overnight sensation. Composition oi2ja,polya (1815) celebrates the restoration of French monarchy and anticipates the restoration of Coleridge's literary reputation. But lurking in the shadows of each "success" are fears about the extent of Coleridge's genius and selfcommand. Commitment to theatre threatens both mind and England because of its alliance with bodies, women, crowds.
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Introduction
Why Coleridge ever leaves theatre and moves beyond this middle stage has to do with commanding genius's most submerged but crippling form: woman. This (anti-)form upends the balance of imagination safeguarded in drama and poetry. Woman as theatre casts her lot with reality and turns Coleridge's dreams into nightmares. Not only theatre's conventional status as a "feminized" form but the thematics of his later plays put Coleridge in the uncomfortable position of accentuating women's presence in the nation. His last, and most Burkean, play features three prominent female characters and depicts the restoration of the nation as dependent on a reversal of gender hierarchies. This is hardly a position that Coleridge elsewhere endorses, but it emerges from his desire to fashion contemplative men in a medium that privileges bodies in action. Put in terms of his categories of citizenship, it is one unintended consequence of theatre's ability to restore individuals to their moral status as "potential men." Promoting this aspect of theatre is Coleridge's most potentially liberating contribution to aesthetic-political thinking. If one disregards gender, what Felperin ascribes to bardolatry applies to Coleridge's theory of theatre in general: the premium on "human nature" accentuated in these plays means that one can be anyone.62 Or, as Coleridge puts it, the advantage of theatre is that it allows spectators to see their ideal selves. The problem is not with the potentiality Coleridge ascribes to theatre but with the "actual citizens" he seeks to educe through it. That category excludes precisely those types of people whose social power is threatening to become all too real in his day. As a consequence, potentiality is reserved for a certain class, color, sexuality, even poetics, of men. This is one failure of romantic theatre. Scrutinizing it provides insight into the equivocations of moving people through art. 4
PREVIEW
The following discussion falls into two parts. An in-depth investigation of the role of drama and theatre in Coleridge's program of nationalism, which occupies the next three chapters, opens back out into a discussion of romantic drama and theatre in the last two chapters of the book. The first section establishes Coleridge's theories of nationalism, investigates Germany's contribution to the formulation of his idealism and theories of play, examines the development of his thinking about theatre, and analyzes the content and function
Commanding genius in English romantic theatre of Coleridge's plays. The last two chapters interrogate the persistence of romanticism's reputation as an antitheatrical age by highlighting the history plays of the second-generation poets as responses to Remorse. By structuring the argument in this way, I do not mean to make Coleridge representative of the other poets' involvement with theatre. Rather, I spotlight him as symptomatic of the benefits of attending to the cultural "work" of romantic plays. Some benefits especially these plays' insights into the problematics of action, dreaming, power, and gender - are applicable to the other poets. Others are rooted in peculiarities of "Coleridge" and scholarly studies of him. In the case of Coleridge, the special charge of theatre is the torment it figures and the relief it affords him in manifesting the (in)consistency of his patriot mind. As a contribution to Coleridge studies, focus on theatre portrays an imagination suspended between real and ideal worlds throughout the middle stage of his career. Computing the psychic costs and benefits of theatre for the other canonical poets must await systematic analyses of their plays and representative interests. My hope is that the image of Coleridge that emerges from this study is of sufficient power to inspire further attention to the theatre of the other romantic poets. Chapter 1 proceeds from two unfamiliar and interrelated premises: Coleridge's writings are shaped by a troublesome theory and practice of nationalism, and Coleridge mediates his nationalist concerns in theatre more than in any other for(u)m. What link the two claims are the particular contours of imagination that emerge in its formulation as response to the French Revolution. Imagination not only educes the idea but determines the adequate representation of "England." It also reveals the play within theatre that enables Coleridge to consolidate England and his exemplary English mind. Three kinds of argument follow from this attention to theatre's place in the politics of Coleridgean imagination. As aesthetic state, theatre distinguishes itself by suspending the distinction between illusion and reality, thus fostering the re-creation of national dreams. As type of literature, Coleridge's plays confront the problem of action more systematically and sympathetically than do his other writings. As social institution, theatre demarcates the middle stage of Coleridge's openness to the people's role in England. Chapter 2 counteracts standard assumptions regarding Coleridge's alliance with Germany by making a case for the centrality of one of Coleridge's most neglected works, his translations of Schiller's
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Introduction
Wallenstein trilogy in 1800. It demonstrates the " Englishness" of Coleridge's ''German" mind by re-establishing Schiller's place in Coleridge's conceptions of Germany and theatre's role in idealism. Focus on these translations also grants access to what precedes and shapes Coleridge's middle stage. From Schiller Coleridge gains the benefits of "indirection" as an aesthetic response to political upheaval. He also receives an enactment of the problem of action during the period when Coleridge is most attracted to commanding genius. Tracing Coleridge's stylistic revisions of Schiller's plays and his changing opinions regarding them reveals the equivocal benefits found in theatre. Wallenstein allows Coleridge to identify with Napoleon and retrospectively deny his alliance with commanding men. Chapter 3 considers all of Coleridge's plays as a thoroughgoing investigation of action prompted by anxieties sparked by revolution, theatricality, and changing notions of gender. It highlights Remorse as central to Coleridge's literary-political career. The emphasis that Remorse places on moral argument specifies theatre's efficacy in restoring "potential men" as a precondition of national reform. Its success on stage reminds us that the interior focus of romantic plays does not necessarily belie interest in theatre. The composition history of Remorse, as a revised version of Osorio, charts the advantages offered by Coleridge's middle stage of theatre. The growing inactivity of Coleridgean heroes and their promotion of an anti theatrical aesthetic emerge as intended effects of theatre's "indifferent" intervention into politics. What also emerges is the partiality of critical perceptions of this inactivity, for female characters increasingly assume the burden of acting in Coleridge's second stage. This new prominence of female actors culminates in £apolya and its thematization of female leadership in the nation. It also eventuates in Coleridge's retreat from theatre to a National Church composed of an elite cadre of learned men. Chapter 4 considers the theatre criticism of William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Lamb in exploring further theatre's function as social institution. It reads theatre criticism as a response to two cultural pressures: concerns over public women associated with events in France coupled with contemporary assessments of London patent theatres as houses of prostitution. Against these hazards Hazlitt, Hunt, and Lamb domesticate roles for women and downplay actresses' physical charms. But what sets the limits to their support for
Commanding genius in English romantic theatre the stage is its representation of a female Shakespeare. For the first time in drama criticism, accounts of Shakespeare's "mastery" of character extend to his female characters. For the first time in theatre history, Shakespeare is incarnated in a woman. Siddons's exceptional status highlights theatre's general repression of female beauty at the same time that it aligns femininity with power, a trait thematized and embodied in Siddons's most famous role, Lady Macbeth. Romantic men seek to closet Shakespeare, then, in order to avoid the "tooclose-pressing reality" of women in theatre. The conclusion analyzes the history plays of the second-generation poets in relation to the sexual politics of Remorse. The regime of remorse constructs young men as heroes of lyricism and self-division, a situation which casts women, and places theatre, in a significant double-bind. Strikingly visible in characters like Beatrice {The Cenci) and Myrrha (Sardanapalus), women are forced to act in order to safeguard the nation, family, and masculinity. In so doing women forfeit their lives but also poetry: as actors, they are categorically excluded from remorse and the sympathy it generates. While secondgeneration plays distance themselves from the morality and antitheatricalism of Coleridge's remorse, they retain its legitimation of self-division as a principle of men. By teaching audiences to sympathize with male ambivalence, romantic drama plays an effective role in early consolidations of liberalism.
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CHAPTER I
Constituting bodies politic and theatric
In a series of remarks preparatory to analysis of Romeo and Juliet, Coleridge makes a surprising assertion, unravelling the logic of which constitutes the project of this chapter. Having already articulated several well-recognized prerequisites to the appreciation of Shakespeare, Coleridge finds it still "necessary" to "say something of the language of our Country" in order to " [aid] himself as well as others in judging of all writers of all countries." He then specifies the peculiar advantages of several European languages by way of arguing that "various languages arising from various circumstances of the
Constituting bodies politic and theatric 3
realm. " What has received less attention is imagination's place in contemporary discourses of nationalism and in the discourse and practice of English theatre. Yet Coleridge often associates imagination with England and, less frequently, England with drama, and he views all three as mutually constitutive arenas. The linchpin of their interconnection is Shakespeare, who himself embodies the foundation that England and drama share in imagination. From here it takes only a small step to see Coleridge jockeying for position as the new native genius of England. Assuming Shakespeare's role not simply as the imagination but the playwright of England would heal fractures of genius within Coleridge by uniting "the Poet & the Philosopher" (LoL 1: 230). Coleridge himself takes a larger step by evaluating whole species of poetry in terms of species of people. By using literature to affirm types of nationality, Coleridge transforms weapons of aggression into matters of taste.4 His explanation of what in English most " appropriate[s] it to the Drama" attests to the superiority of both. " In truth," English is the " harvest of the unconscious wisdom of the whole nation and [is] not the formation of particular individuals" (LoL 1: 292). Unconscious wisdom also characterizes Shakespeare and drama because both speak a passionate language of nature, not "borrowed from the Poets but adopted by them" (LoL 1: 292). Organic and communal rather than imposed and particular: this constitutes the natural superiority of English, Shakespeare, and drama. It is easy, and necessary, to criticize Coleridge's nationalist thinking for serving imperialist interests and to see it as part of romanticism's tradition of repressing difference. Recent theoretical scrutiny of nationalism, imperialism, and post-colonialism makes it difficult to do anything but castigate Coleridge, settling scores for the years he has served as representative of a universalist and benevolent aesthetics.5 It is also important to historicize his contribution to discourses of nationalism so as not to exaggerate his singularity in addressing this issue in his day. Coleridge is one of many writers in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe participating in what Benedict Anderson calls the emergence of nationalism as "cultural artefact." If we accept Gerald Newman's exploration of this emergence in England, he is doing so somewhat belatedly.6 Coleridge's projects to purify the English language, establish a national canon and English literary history, and revive England's native genius by eliminating French influence come after "extra-
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ordinary and unprecedented activity" in the 1750s to 1780s of "collecting, studying, and promoting everything pertaining to the national cultural heritage " (Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism, p. 112). What makes study of Coleridge's nationalism pertinent, I wish to argue, is his insight into imagination as the faculty that both enables and disables nationalism. Imagination facilitates national consciousness, even if its tendency to idealize results in the appropriations of nationalism. But its ability to "hover" between reality and ideality threatens to render fanciful any notion of self-determination. Focusing on the nationalism of Coleridge's imagination brings together insights drawn from three bodies of work. It reads earlier scholarly accounts of Coleridge's "idea of the modern state" in light of recent destabilizing accounts of the politics of imagination. 7 Linking the two highlights the partiality of the earlier studies. Both Alfred Cobban and David Calleo appear overzealous in defending Coleridge as a political theorist and over-rely on one text, On the Constitution of Church and State According to the Idea of Each (1830). Calleo
is especially partisan in arguing both that Coleridge, "even more than Burke," is the " true philosopher " of the " dynamic conservative tradition in English political thought" and that his "wonderfully suggestive theory of the modern state" is "an ideal that has haunted English political thought ever since" [Coleridge and the Idea of the Modern State, p. 6; see also pp. 136-47). Study of the "politics of Coleridge's imagination" turns the haunting back on Coleridge and relocates the tension Calleo identifies between Coleridge's national theory and universalist aesthetics within Coleridge's theories of nationhood, which his aesthetics reflect rather than transcend. In turn, reading accounts of the politics of Coleridge's imagination in light of his national thinking provides a more focused interpretation of the tensions that plague Coleridge's imagination and theories of it. In the latter case, conflicts between the idealizing and particularizing tendencies of imagination are imbricated in Coleridge's shifting ideas of England. In the former, they facilitate his claims to an exemplary English imagination. Read together, then, these two bodies of scholarship on Coleridge can make productive interventions into present-day accounts of the emergence of nationalism. They help to problematize the "foundation" that writers influenced by Benedict Anderson assume enables the cultural construction of nationalism. By defining the nation as "an imagined political community," Anderson presupposes the
Constituting bodies politic and theatric
33
faculty and capacity that Coleridge spends his lifetime educing [Imagined Communities, p. 15). Focus on Coleridge has this advantage for contemporary study of nationalism: it presents the formation of "nation" and "imagination" as mutually constitutive processes. Considering them as interlocking terms foregrounds the boundaries to, not boundlessness of, imagination's liberatory energies. Historicizing both is a necessary precondition to affirming imagination's role in identity politics.8 Theatre is indispensable to the analysis of "nation" and "imagination" because it plays up the tensions between them. This is particularly true of Coleridge's theory and practice of theatre, for political, aesthetic, and psychological reasons. As cultural for(u)m, early nineteenth-century London theatre becomes for Coleridge a microcosm of the nation and represents his unease with popular representation. As structure of mind, it accentuates the fantasmatic, specular, and material aspects of identity that imagination is generally committed to repressing and mirrors the scene of unconscious processes. To focus on Coleridge's theatrical activity, particularly as it constitutes England, is less to read against the grain of Coleridge than to dislodge ingrained associations of imagination with poetry so that we can see how deeply imagination is imbricated in theatre. True, Coleridge distrusts this imbrication and backs away from theatre time and again; but he occupies theatre, even revels in it, far more often than has been acknowledged. When Coleridge associates English with drama, then, he makes a "radical" case for English liberty. Though at times a conservative move, it none the less splits off theatre - and England - from the despotism of " Poetry." Whether it is useful, or possible, to distinguish the liberatory features of Coleridge's theatre from its fundamentalist and establishment dimensions is a question that study of Coleridge both forces and focuses. Precisely because theatre mobilizes the mind's subversive energies Coleridge is careful to censor it. This censorship targets the French, the lower classes, women - all those groups from whom Coleridge's England preserves itself. It also targets an enthusiastic Coleridge, whom " Coleridge the man " seeks to efface. Championing dramatic illusion becomes a potent Coleridgean alibi, a way to make a virtue - and turn a profit - out of ambivalence. But it also provides a way to liberate Coleridge from established images of him and to liberate identity from essentialist categories. Indeed, entrapment by the image is one thing Coleridge seeks to resolve in his writings on
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theatre and in the plots of his plays. Revisiting these scenes does not solve the problem for Coleridge, but those scenes foreground imagination as a problem of identity and for it. Present-day enthusiasm for the performativity of identity should pause over this insight gleaned from romantic theatre: to what extent is the unfixing of identity already fixed by the powers-that-be? I
IMAGINING THE NATION S POTENTIAL
Coleridge's discourses on nation and nationalism are usefully examined in terms of two distinctions: that between patriotism and nationalism, and that between a theory of the nation and nationalist practice. The former distinction highlights Coleridge's modernity, since commentators cite it as separating late eighteenth-century thinking about the nation from earlier manifestations. 9 The latter separates Coleridge from fellow romantic poets, for only he devotes himself to formulating a systematic theory of the nation. Yet what makes his accounts so difficult to explicate is that they consistently undermine these, and other, distinctions. Group identification is theorized in relation to a pre-existing "idea of England" and that "idea" is shaped in terms of Coleridge's desires. Given that nationalism by definition is a defensive formation, we should not be surprised to find Coleridge's theory driven by practice. 10 Worth examining, however, are the ways that imagination manages all these operations, from educing and imaging a nation to constituting and perpetuating England. Through this examination the personal advantages of Coleridge's nationalist imagination begin to emerge. Imagination distinguishes England's latest embodiment of genius by dissolving and dissipating his particular designs. Because of Coleridge's historical location, his thinking about England belongs to the discourse of nationalism, not patriotism, as Newman defines them. Whereas patriotism is " a group-oriented feeling or psychological predisposition which exists universally, wherever human beings are joined in societies," nationalism is a "much more complex, programmatic and historically conditioned elaboration of this simple feeling into patterns of demands and actions deeply affecting group policy" [The Rise of English Nationalism, p. 52; original emphasis). But the shift from patriotism to nationalism also characterizes accurately the evolution of his thought. For Coleridge's favorite image and explanation of national identification - con-
Constituting bodies politic and theatric centric circles - is originally employed as an argument against nationalism generally and England specifically. That is, Pantisocracy emerges from support for a " universal philanthropy " associated with France. Though Coleridge quickly disavows these ends, he never outgrows the concentric model underlying them.11 He simply begins to deny that "home-born affections" can survive in any meaningful fashion outside the "hedge-girdle of the State." What makes Pantisocracy consistent with subsequent ideas of nationhood is its antagonism to abstraction and commitment to society. What separates it is the " historic growth of a sense of active participation or citizenship in the individual as he relates himself to the group" (Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism, p. 52).
Quickly Coleridge dissociates the concentric model from cosmopolitan sentiments to establish it as the psychological foundation of nationalism. Far more gradual is his formulation of the nation and the proper relation between individual and citizen. While Coleridge's retreat from cosmopolitanism first places him in the "natural" company of Burke and Wordsworth, subsequent steps take him to Germany and an articulated "idea" of England. Coleridge's rejection of Wordsworth's sympathies for "rustic" life in the Biographia is simply his most public disavowal of his own prior equations of England with nature. In this respect, the progression in his national thinking mirrors the shifts associated with his aesthetic development: from poetry to metaphysics and from nature to mind. After Germany, mind remains central to his national theories but necessitates additional distinctions between the idea and the reality of England and between "potential men" and "actual citizens." The latter resolves an "apparent contradiction" between two assertions of equal truth: " 1. We must be citizens in order to be men: and 2. We must be men in order to be citizens" (CCS, p. 43n). The first formulation, "we must be citizens in order to be men," underscores the sociality of Coleridge's conception of identity.12 Even his Pantisocratic projects are grounded in the conviction that humans attain their identity and perfect their faculties through participation in a group. While in the 1790s the optimum size of society varies from six married couples to the entire human race, after Coleridge's disillusionment with France he most commonly associates "society" with "nation." The latter not only constitutes the widest natural boundary of human affections but informs, by literally giving form to, the self. Without the "resisting and returning outline" of the
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"Nation," the self is " a Phantom... lost in vague space, a mere striving at Being" (original emphasis). 13 A similar logic accompanies Coleridge's presentation copy of Biographia Literaria and Statesman's Manual to Lord Liverpool. "The subjects of Christian governments should be taught that neither historically or morally, in fact or by right, have men made the State; but that the State, and that alone makes them men" (CL 4: 762). Coleridge first makes this assertion in writings sparked by war with France. Substituting "patriots" for "citizens," the phrase appears in "On the Law of Nations" (The Friend, 15 February 1810), the historical context for which is provided in " Letters on the Spaniards " (a series published in the Courier between December 1809 and January 1810). In both instances, Coleridge is concerned to negotiate claims among individual, national, and international affiliations and to justify giving precedence to the middle sphere. Citing Greece as the historical example aimed at discrediting "citizens of the world" now associated with France, Coleridge asserts that individuals can only be " benefactors of all mankind " while " they are intense patriots " (F 1: 295). Not only do individuals render humanity "shapeless" when they claim primary allegiance to the largest sphere but "without local attachment, without national honour," they "resemble a swarm of Insects " rather than " Men " (F1: 297). From this it follows that when controversy arises over the claims of individual morality and national identity, the solution is clear. Since "in order to be Men we must be Patriots, and Patriotism cannot exist without national Independence, we need no new or particular Code of Morals to justify us in placing and preserving our Country in that relative situation, which is most favourable to its independence" (F 1: 296). Useful throughout his life for justifying whatever Coleridge deems necessary to forward English liberty, this fixed principle in the immediate context enables Coleridge's "complete defence of the Spanish contest" against Napoleon in 1808. Written as an appendix to Wordsworth's tract on the Convention of Cintra, which Cobban identifies as the " most systematic statement" of an emerging " theory of nationality," " Letters on the Spaniards " details the importance of maintaining national identity in war and peace. 14 By so doing, it elaborates the "simple feeling" of patriotism into "patterns of demands and actions deeply affecting group policy." In war, the power of concentric affections impels every patriot to struggle against tyranny: "the power of the insulted FREE-WILL, steadied by the
Constituting bodies politic and theatric
37
approving CONSCIENCE, and struggling against brute force and iniquitous compulsion for the common rights of human nature, brought home to our inmost souls, by being, at the same time, the rights of our betrayed, insulted, and bleeding country" (EOT 2: 52-3). In peace, the power of nationality sustains one's status as "patriot": the "language and peculiar customs" of a country, its "familiar sympathies, willing reverences and habits of subordination almost naturalized into instinct" (EOT2: 98, 84). Those who shape this invisible spirit know that "individual genius" depends upon national independence (F 1: 296). Those who imbibe it discover, in hours of national danger, a "power within [them], of which [they themselves] in ordinary times [are] not aware" (EOT 2: 52). In either case, placing the life of the nation within the lives of its inhabitants ensures that "selfish" and "patriotic" instincts are one. "The piercing outcry of the common mother awakens the filial instinct" because "actual men" cannot exist apart from her (EOT2: 53)Coleridge's second proposition, "we must be men in order to be citizens," foregrounds the political component to his life-long campaign for moral and metaphysical reform. What turns individuals into "men" and alone "give[s] meaning to our erect form" is the capacity to act as free agents by regulating personal conduct in accordance with ultimate ends (F 1: 190). Without ideas, or the "inherent aptitude and moral preconfiguration to" ideas, "men vanish " and only " animalfs] endowed with a memory of appearance and of facts" remain (CCS, p. 47; original emphasis). Citizens must be "men," then, in contradistinction to "brutes," "insects," "things," — not to mention "women" — because they must be free agents of whom it makes sense to talk about rights and duties (see CCS, pp. 15, 123). The prevailing tendency to advocate mechanistic, consequentialist, and prudential views of human conduct dehumanizes individuals and destroys the security of the nation. "On what other grounds but the cognateness of ideas and principles to man as man, does the nameless soldier rush to the combat in defence of the liberties or the honour of his country?" (SM, p. 25). Ascribing priority to ideas distinguishes Coleridge's version of nationalism from those of other social theorists of the day. This is the case whether he is challenging conservative or radical arguments and whether he is theorizing the origin, perpetuation, or reform of the nation. Both Cobban and Calleo pinpoint the importance of "the
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idea" as the way to differentiate between the conservatism of Coleridge's nation and Burke's.15 John Morrow sees in Coleridge's rediscovery of Platonism a critique of the landed gentry and of the "unalloyed traditionalism that Wordsworth shared with Burke." 16 Coleridge puts it more bluntly by claiming that "mere Experience (I mean a Statesman so endowed) " is like a " Cyclops with one eye, and that in back of his head" (SM, p. 43).17 In contrast, true statesmen are guided by the "fontal mirror of the idea." As a way of countering radical theorists, on the other hand, the prominence Coleridge gives to ideas represents a terminological as well as philosophical dispute. Desynonymizing "idea" and "reason" avoids apparent resemblances with revolutionary France. While in Coleridge's philosophy, ideas are "constituents of reason" and "themselves reason," in his politics ideas and reason are not the same thing. For French " reason " destroys English "ideas" and the idea of England. Coleridge rejects social contract theory not because he denies that individuals consent to be governed but because this formulation confuses the "Idea of an ever-originating social contract" with "the conception or theory of an original social contract" (CCS, p. 15). Subjects subordinate their interests to the state because they are "men" who determine "the will by ideas" without reference to "outward and separable consequences" (CCS, p. 124). Similarly, he refutes those who assert the primacy of reason in governance by arguing that politics is least accessible to reason and that reason is " actually " present in " no man and no body of men" (F 1: 193-4).18 Understanding, not reason, characterizes the proper faculty for governance, for it attends to contingencies of experience. Formulating the idea of England and discerning its legitimate historical incarnations is how imagination enters Coleridge's nation. In theory, it plays a necessary role in both processes; for, as the "Laboratory in which Thought elaborates Essence into Existence," imagination is necessary for educing the idea of England (CJV 2: 3158).19 As the faculty that organizes "the flux of the Senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the Reason," it envisions, and determines the legitimacy of, England's various historical incarnations (SM, p. 29). But in Coleridge's practice, imagination becomes sufficient for England. It is the distinguishing feature of the "great living dead men of our island" and what separates "spiritual platonic old England" from "commercial Great Britain." This is an imaginative and life-long performance: "Let England be Sir P.
Constituting bodies politic and theatric Sidney, Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Harrington, Swift, Wordsworth, and never let the names of Darwin, Johnson, Hume, furr it over!" (CM 2: 2598).20 Promulgating this idea of England involves more than rewriting national history. Equating England with imagination wages - and wins the — war against revolutionary France. Total lack of imagination is what makes France other than England as a historical reality and emerging republic. Grounding Coleridge's countless analyses of the mind(lessness) of France is its firm position beneath the line separating "mere" understanding from understanding "irradiated" by reason on the scale of mental powers.21 Allied to "the harlot, Understanding" or the "unenlivened generalizing understanding"; "usurping the name of reason" but acting as "the pander and prostitute of Sensuality" (SM, p. 75); confined to the " Present" (F 1: 423) and marked by a " thirst for the new " (EO T 3: 151); valuing metaphysical systems "not for their truth, but in proportion as they attribute to causes a susceptibility of being seen"; boasting a literature and language of lies, surface realities, and fancy; and at best distinguished by talent, cleverness, and wit (F 1: 421): France is a nation of "idolators," whose conceptions must be imageable and the strength of whose "evil genius," Napoleon, resides in "imaginations of men dazzled and blinded" by surface display (EOT2: 75). In a literal sense, then, France's and Napoleon's contemporary appeal in England constitutes a failure of English imagination, a sign that Coleridge's solitary fears for England went unheeded and now must be voiced more publicly in "Letters on the Spaniards" and his Literary Life. This provisional failure of contemporary English imagination is ascribed to two internal aliens against whom Coleridge campaigns throughout his adult life: empirical "psilosophers" whose lack of fixed principles readies the public for revolutions of state, and "Us the People" who enact these revolutions because they refuse to know their potential minds. The former group, by promulgating false ideas about the idea, disrupts the idea and reality of England according to familiar Coleridgean logic. Since the "true proximate cause" of all national events is found in "the predominant state of public opinion," and public opinion is determined by "the ascendancy of speculative principles and the scheme or mode of thinking in vogue," the rise of "Mechanical Philosophy" has disastrous consequences for any "lover of old England" (SM, pp. 13-14). It separates im-
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agination from "poesy," destroys the feeling of "being an historical people," and occasions "Despotism! Despotism! Despotism!" as instanced most recently in the "FRENCH REVOLUTION" (F i: 446-7; see also CCS, pp. 65-6). "Us the people" threaten the contemporary reality of England to the extent that they attempt to possess, rather than remain possessed by, England according to the idea (CCS, pp. 13, 16). Unable to rise above immediate circumstances and constitutionally lacking the "processes and results of imagination," the lower classes are denied a voice in the constitution and evaluation of England. Because modern " psilosophers" think unimaginatively and the lower orders lack imagination altogether, both are as alien to England as the "Mandarin Philosophers and Poets of China" (CAT 2: 2598). But the most deep-seated impediment to the security of English imagination comes from the psychological history of "citizen Samuel." The exemplary English imagination must face the reality not simply of having once supported France against England but attributing his expatriation to powers of imagination. This is the confession motivating his "Enthusiasm for an Ideal World" (F 1: 223—7). Reversing the narrative progress of Wordsworth's mind in The Prelude, Coleridge claims that although his "reason" remained untainted by the "jacobin system," his "feelings and imagination" were "kindled in this general conflagration" (F 1: 223). But, as with most of Coleridge's apologies, this becomes self-apology. Errors of imagination predict, when they do not attest to, imaginative health. The sign of error, that "strange fanc[y]," Pantisocracy, none the less "sheltered';' him from full-scale disruptions of mind-from the "fanaticism" of "less imaginative malcontents" and the false utopianism of idealists identifying with "mankind at large" (F 1: 223-4). This fortunate fall in youth is what constitutes Coleridge's appeal as statesman now, not only because Pantisocracy provided him with "my clearest insight into the nature of individual man, and my most comprehensive views of his social relations" (F 1: 224) but because his split allegiances speak to both sides of England's warring political parties. His "tones of sympathy" for men of genius make it possible for them to heed his warning not to succumb completely to the "fascinations" of "ideal worlds"; his "lucubrations" preserve "practical" men from an "incautious abhorrence" of change. Extremes meet, that is, in Coleridge's imagination. Warring factions, like warring self-images, are reconciled in that faculty which
Constituting bodies politic and theatric dissolves oppositions. In this mode of suspension, uniting England literally involves befriending his former selves, a process which exemplifies the imbrication of imagination in nation. For Coleridge, self-analysis dovetails with the analysis of England throughout his Literary Life and proceeds along two axes that reveal much about the tensions of imagination. On the one hand, Coleridge's status as statesman requires that partial-self effacement which imagination achieves by dissolving evidence to the contrary. In less defensive moments, Coleridge befriends that radical self by de-individuating himself and conducting an analysis of "youth." In this respect, imagination deserves its reputation for self-transcendence but not the corollary assumption of disinterestedness. Imagination is interested; in this case, particularly, in analyzing by idealizing a generation of young men. For what is youth if not the temporality of idealism, the license to approach human nature from "its golden side" without the constraints of realism? Or, as Coleridge puts it in his famous selfjustificatory letter to the Beaumonts, the "nature and beauty of youth" is the ability to "know what is right in the abstract" by an "intuition of the uncorrupted Heart," to "body it forth" in "beautiful Forms," and to "project this phantom-world into the world of Reality, like a catoptrical mirror[.] Say rather, to make ideas & realities stand side by side, the one as vivid as the other" (CL 2: iooo).22 The problem, and thus the special power of Coleridge's insights into imagination, is that, in his case, reality shattered the dream of youth for a generation of idealistic men. The lasting trace for Coleridge is a heightened consciousness of the super-egoic side of imagination's idealizing tendencies and thus the perpetual selfdivision that accompanies dreams. In this respect, Coleridge differs from contemporary critical accounts of Wordsworth, which see his imagination as a displacement of history. For Coleridge's imagination is riven by a history of Terror which literally allows him no rest, and his body assumes the pains of a body politic suffering the imagined results of his former dreams. "[W]hat fitter Purgatory can be imagined, than a Vision presented to thee & conceived as real, a Vision of all the Massacres, the furious Passions, the Blasphemies, Sensualities, Superstitions, the bloody Persecutions, and mutual Cannibalism of Atheist & Papist, that would have rushed in, like a Torrent of Sulphur & burning Chaos, at the Breach which thou thyself hadst made" (CL 2: 1003). Exhaustion as much as apostacy
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leads him to crave relief in a less enthusiastic imagination, as Coleridge begins to suspend the suspense of imagination in order to regain a more comforting reality. As an increasingly sober statesman, Coleridge manages the tensions he acknowledges in imagination in two ways. Now privileging formality over coadjunation, he monitors the sparks imagination ignites in making a nation more than an "aggregate of individuals. " For the nation cannot exist without some "swallowing up of self in an object dearer than self," but neither does it exist simply when "ten millions of men" unite in "calling for the same thing." Knowing when England is speaking legitimately becomes the task of imaginative men who confine England in ever-shrinking spheres. This confinement corresponds with the second lesson Coleridge gleans from (effacing his radical past, the necessity to leave the dreaming to experienced men. To legislate in the spirit of the statesman's manual means to restrict "the wantonness of luxuriant Imagination," to perceive the ideal within the real (CL 2: 1002). Nigel Leask traces this shift from a "participatory" to an "authoritarian" view of culture and argues that imagination becomes much less important to Coleridge after 1817.23 Yet because imagination remains the foundation of England and of his split identifications with it, Coleridge can neither fully admit nor mourn the loss of his shaping — even his inflammatory — powers. Remorse is what keeps (Coleridge's) imagination and youth alive.
2
SPHERES OF INFLUENCE
Imagination's role in actualizing the potential gives theatre precedence in Coleridge's aesthetic projects. Youth's catoptrical mirror is the special effect of theatre where semblance and substance "stand side by side." Imagination's role in making potential "men" actual citizens foregrounds theatre's efficacy as national institution. Its coordination of action through passion makes theatre an ideal place to re-form "men" and citizens. But Coleridge does not always view theatre in this light or applaud the nature or scope of its representation. Attending to his theatre both uncovers an underscrutinized activity of his imagination and delineates the "middle stage" of his openness to the people's role in constituting England. At stage left stands his radical phase of support for parliamentary reform, at
Constituting bodies politic and theatric stage right the reactionary days of a circumspect clerisy. The obvious differences among these stages highlight Coleridge's changing means to effect the same aim: strengthen the citizen's identification with the nation such that the people "can be calculated on" for the "promotion of its essential interests" (CCS, p. 54). Even in his most radical days, Coleridge superintends the spread of "general illumination." But he grows increasingly refined, if heavy handed, in attempting to contain potential "conflagrations." Coleridge's support of parliamentary deliberations published in the press represents his most expansive sentiments regarding general illumination in England. Between 1794 and 1802, Coleridge praises parliamentary assemblies for their ability to "reconcile] ambition with patriotism and virtue" within its chambers, "give the country a place at each domestic fireside," and, through the publication of their debates, "educate the people of England in the science of politics more widely and fundamentally than all the works of all our writers " (EO T 2: 65; 1: 179) .24 Crucial to the diffusion of a " general sense of rightful authority" and "public spirit" without which "the wisest measures would be advised to no purpose," these assemblies activate "men's" consciousness of their status as citizens and guarantee that the "filial instincts" will be aroused in times of danger. In the case of England, Coleridge shows his broadest support for the people's share in politics by endorsing parliamentary reform and acting as journalist to bring interests of state to the domestic fireside.25 In the case of Spain's resistance to France, he pins his hopes for success on the news that the Spanish Cortes will reconvene. Such confidence is based on the actual and potential power of parliamentary assemblies to regulate the public mind. In this period no "small number of individuals" can compare with the power of a representative assembly to inspire "general enthusiasm," guide public opinion, "rous[e], inform, and undeceiv[e] the people," or recall the "public mind from despondency" should national policy misfire (EOT2: 67). Bolstering Coleridge's enthusiasm for this " great organ of National Instruction" are several key assumptions. National events are dictated by the prevailing state of public opinion which the circulation of parliamentary debates fosters; the most effective correctives to sovereign authority are furnished by parliamentary proceedings where the "fulness [sic], the freedom, and publicity of discussion leave it easy to distinguish what are acts of power and what
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the determinations of equity and reason" (Coleridge is quoting Burke [F i: 193]); the moral strength of a nation resides in the people rather than the aristocracy or ruling elite (EOT 3: 100, 177). All three assumptions are later challenged as "mere probabilities], against which other probabilities may be weighed " (F 1: 193). What carries increasing weight with Coleridge is that there is no wisdom in numbers. Evidenced in his new belief that "men should be weighed, not counted" and thus that the nation's equipoise demands unequal power relations between its leaders and people, distrust of majorities causes Coleridge to restrict the scope of national illumination. Particularly apparent in his rejection of Sir Francis Burdett's movement for parliamentary reform (May 1811) and his disillusionment over the Spanish Cortes (September 1811), Coleridge comes to renounce parliamentary assemblies precisely because in such settings acts of power usurp equity and reason (EOT 2: 285-6). Reason dwells least in that "mixed multitude that makes up the PEOPLE " (F 1: 193); massive bodies inflame, rather than illumine, the nation (EOT2: 165). Containing the "contagion" of enthusiasm and "conflagrations" of imagination ultimately becomes the task of the National Church, or clerisy, which safeguards the church and state in Coleridge's later years. The new Watchman of the nation, the clerisy manifests the extent of Coleridge's discomfort with the participatory logic underlying broad representative assemblies and his ongoing support for the project of making "men" citizens. As its name and duties imply, this body too mediates between spiritual and political spheres by being consecrated to " the potential divinity in every man " and to diffusing "legality and civility" throughout the land (CCS, pp. 52, 54). But by shifting the moral center of the nation from the domestic fireside to "an accredited, learned, and philosophic Class," Coleridge circumscribes the number and kind of people fit to reflect the idea and reality of England. An obvious rejection of lower- and middle-class interests, the composition of Coleridge's clerisy also indicts the English gentry for its share in making England a "varnished," not a "polished" state (CCS, p. 42).26 Appropriating rather than counteracting the progressive, that is, commercial interests of the nation, the higher classes have failed to fulfill their calling to legislate in the name and spirit of the Statesman's Manual. Largely for this reason, the "learned of all denominations " and, within them, the theologians now must take the lead. Those moral and ideal truths constitutive of
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Coleridge's humanity no longer exist apart from religion. " [U]nder the name Theology" are comprised all the "main aids, instruments, and materials of NATIONAL EDUCATION ... which educing, i.e., eliciting, the latent man in all the natives of the soil, trains them up to citizens of the country, free subjects of the realm" (CCS, p. 48; original emphases). This shift to the clerisy as the legitimate voice of England implies several things about imagination's mature role in the nation. As the "nisus formativus of the body politic," theology assumes the mediating function and the historical work of imagination: facilitating "the doctrine and discipline of ideas" and superintending national tradition, "the momentous epochs, and revolutions of the race and nation " (CCS, pp. 48, 47) .27 But the clerisy also represents Coleridge's most extensive effort to repress the tensions between the coadjunating and particularizing features of imagination. The clerisy unites the nation by keeping individuals distinct. On one hand, national unity is achieved by pitting one group against another, as witnessed in Coleridge's terminological distinctions between "people" and "populace," "the nation" and "the people." 28 When employing the latter distinction, Coleridge is even willing to risk confusing his readers by using the same word ("state") to signify two different conceptions of state rather than letting them assume that "the nation" and "the people" are synonymous terms. "Doubtless, it would be better to adopt the word, NATION as the Prothesis [whereby] Nation = State + Church - , but alas! how few, even among the highly educated who must ever be the FEW, have learnt to distinguish the PEOPLE, which is a real living THING, from the Nation, which is an actual living IDEA!" (CCS, pp. 233-4). On the other hand, the nation depends upon an emerging individualism that exercises the same divisive effects. Much as the "true patriot will reverence" everything that binds individuals "more closely together as a people " - t h e "visible and invisible influences of religion, language, laws, customs, and the reciprocal dependence and reaction of trade and agriculture" - he "abhors that system of policy" which violates cultivation, or "all those virtues which make them happy and estimable as individuals" (F 1: 198-9). The National Church places limits on that "swallowing up of self" that was once deemed necessary to activate "filial instincts." By placing the nation in the clerisy, Coleridge ends the suspense of imagination. No longer "hovering" between thought and action or
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ideal and real worlds, imagination finally settles on, and settles for, a repressive, reflective state. By doing so, it fixes many of the unsettling features that accompany a people imagining a nation. For one thing, it takes creative powers out of the people's minds and hands. No longer the moral or imaginative strength of the nation, the people at best are "possessed by" England; political power belongs to those who possess the idea, as measured in the property, of England. For another, it eventuates in an elite body of not very imaginative men. A far cry from the enthusiasm of youth or even from the vigor of parliamentary speakers and statesmen, the clerisy is parochial, paternalistic, carrying a "germ of civilization " to every hamlet and domestic fireside. Effective in circumscribing the number, passion, and vision of those fit to represent England, the clerisy essentially interdicts representation altogether. As Coleridge's ever-expanding aids to reflection suggest, England according to the idea cannot tolerate the despotism of the eye. Sense must give way to spirit; symbolic to ideal imagination; evidence, even revelation, to mystery.29 Such a refined concept of vision promotes despotism of the I, whose enabling organ is the National Church: The National Church is no mere State-Institute. It is the State itself in its intensest
federal union] yet at the same moment the guardian and representative of all personal individuality... Our outward acts are efficient, and most often possible, only by coalition. As an efficient power, the agent is but a fraction of unity; he becomes an integer only in the recognition and performance of the moral law (AR, p. 291; original emphases). Once the precondition of national identification and the justification for collective activity, the moral sphere now fractures community by grounding England in a cult of the self. Before settling at this final stage, the most exclusive and seclusive of representative bodies, Coleridge dallies in a middle sphere that is more accommodating to representation in its aesthetic and political dimensions. This is the stage of theatre, a period I date from 1807 to 1816. By dating the stage in this way, I am denominating a modal more than a generic phase. I mean to deny the importance of neither the more familiar literary projects of this middle period nor the first stage of Coleridge's playwrighting activity (The Fall of Robespierre [1794] and Osorio [1797]). What the stage of theatre connotes, then, is the period when Coleridge theorizes drama and practices theatre in the service of a nationalist polemic. It thus requires prior elaboration
Constituting bodies politic and theatric
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of a theory of nationalism and of a mediated relation between politics and poetry. The middle stage dates from Coleridge's theoretical attention to drama, expressed in fragmentary essays on theatre, revisions to Osorio, and public lectures beginning in 1808. This is the period when Coleridge struggles most intensely with imagination and when his imagination still turns both ways: to reason and sense, potential and actual, inner vision and "outwardness," individuality and community. To use Laurence Lockridge's distinction, it encompasses the time before symbolic imagination gives way to ideal imagination - that is, before Coleridge abandons "mediation" as a political and aesthetic possibility and before he hands over the supervision of the nation to an elite "class" of men. 30 Prior to the category of " incarnation," theatre concretizes the poetic struggles Coleridge faces in his efforts to " clothe " the ideal. It also provides the best alibi for the consistency of Coleridge's mind, since dramatic illusion requires self-division and since the plays of his middle stage disguise a jacobin youth. Illusion is self-knowledge on the legitimate romantic stage, where spectators forget the "worthless thing we are" and assume more ideal identities. Coleridge's "middle stage" ends in 1816 when he abandons playwrighting altogether. But another way of marking the conclusion of this stage is to argue the "appropriateness" of the penultimate chapter (and " Satyrane's Letters") to Biographia Literaria. It is to say that in 1816 Coleridge cannot conclude his Literary Life without talking about theatre. Among other things, the theatrical triumph of Remorse in 1813 and more recent efforts on behalf of £apolya make the inclusion of "Satyrane's Letters" and the "Critique of Bertram" a more conscious choice, because a more "legitimate" part of his life (and Life), than is customarily thought. Certainly, a compelling case has been made for slighting these sections of the Biographia: they form no part of the original plan, are the product of page demands, are added at the last minute, and are not even composed for the occasion.31 Yet such excuses in other contexts become critical invitations. Besides, Coleridge's recourse to letters is a famous strategy for speaking out of both sides of his mouth. Rhetorical and substantive textual similarities combine with the fact of Coleridge's playwrighting activity to suggest that we take more seriously theatre's rightful place in the narrative of Coleridge's literary life. So do contextual accounts of his concurrent literary projects and the alternatives he initially proposes as suitable to "fill the gap" of the Biographia.
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Coleridge's correspondence during the composition of Biographia provides strong supporting evidence that theatre is particularly on his mind in this period. The most famous exchanges occur between Coleridge and Byron in 1815, when Byron claims that there is " never such an opening for tragedy" nor anyone who better fits the bill than Coleridge (CL 4: 563). Coleridge rises to the challenge, claiming among his "mass of Manuscripts" the "following, as connected with the Theatre — I do not include my Tragedy": 1. Two Acts and the Skeleton of the Remainder of a Tragicomedy entitled Love and Loyalty. - I wrote it with a view to Stage Effect - and that merit, I think, it would have 2. Laugh till you lose him - a dramatic Romance -. Putting all merit out of the Question, it is in the scheme more analogous to the Tempest than any other. The Songs, and one act written. 3. An entertainment in two acts — The Scene in Arabia — first act finished, and the Songs for a second. 4. The Three Robbers, a Mime or speaking Ballet - for Christmas. 5. A scheme at large for a Pantomime - from a Story in the Tartarian Tales, which delighted me when a Boy (CL 4: 606). The most detailed of his "proofs" of involvement with the stage (their questionable grasp on reality being part of what so attracts Coleridge to theatre), this epistolary exchange is not uncharacteristic of him in this period. In December 1812 Coleridge announces t5 Crabb Robinson his "hope & purpose to devote a certain portion of my Time for the next twelve months to theatrical attempts" and elsewhere offers his services to the comic actor, Charles Matthews, on the grounds that he is "one who has had already some connection with the stage, & may have more" (CL 3: 422, 501 ).32 However inflated, Coleridge's illusions about his theatrical competence are grounded in reality. By 1816, Remorse is a legitimate claim to fame and £apolya a struggling but potential contender. Perhaps to make this a matter of official record, Coleridge considers the texts of both as candidates for inclusion in Biographia: on 22 September he proposes to reprint Remorse and then, more persistently, the £apolya. Moreover, the disparate material he finally selects as "in every respect more appropriate" only makes a coherent pairing when viewed in terms of theatre. What the "Critique of Bertram" literally shares with the letters from Germany is Coleridge's exposure of "modern Jacobinical drama" for subverting "the natural order of things" (BL 2: 221, 190). Reprinting the text of^apolya would have
Constituting bodies politic and theatric
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been one way of restoring that order; exposing its rival as an "infamous Abortion of Ignorance and Jacobinism" turns out to be a more expeditious way of destroying the competition. The package deal of these additions establishes theatre's rightful place in any accurate accounting of the growth of Coleridge's mind. But these additions also foreground theatre's efficacy in accounting for the legitimacy of that mind. Like "Enthusiasm for an Ideal World," "Satyrane's Letters" compares a slightly older youth Coleridge with Coleridge the man by way of demonstrating his nationalist credentials. In this case, his letters from Germany reveal that he was "onto" jacobinism "eighteen years ago." "Annexed to" his "critique on the Tragedy of Bertram, written within the last twelve months," the two pieces are now printed together "in proof, that I have been as falsely charged with any fickleness in my principles of taste" as in his politics (the point of "reprinting" Condones ad Populum in the rifacimento of The Friend [BL 2: 208]). As
Engells and others have shown, this dating is tendentious. The "disquisition on the modern drama" in "Satyrane's Letters" was composed years after his return from Germany, probably for "the 1808 lectures or for The Friend (No. 16, 7 Dec 1809) " (BL 2: igon). But this dating is also symptomatic of Coleridge's recourse to theatre to set his past record straight. In the original letters, Coleridge simply states his political opinions directly; he ridicules the jacobin philosophy of the Dane, praises those Germans who "have published Abjurations of the French," and chronicles his own "intenser affection" for England. In the 1808-9 revisions, however, he expresses the political through the theatric, asserting that those who support the modern Jacobinical drama automatically expatriate themselves from "England." Theatre now "remedies" as well as reflects the health of the nation and Coleridge's mind. Occurring around the same time that Coleridge finds "Satyrane's Letters" in "every respect more appropriate" to the Biographia is another event that accentuates theatre's success at disguising jacobin youths. In February 1817 the radicals publish Southey's republican drama Wat Tyler (1794) in order to revenge themselves on Sou they for his advocacy of the suppression of seditious publications. Correctly perceiving this as an attack that hits home on many levels, Coleridge feels that his integrity is threatened both by public focus on Southey's play and the inadequacy of Southey's defense. By publishing an open "Letter to William Smith, Esq. M P " (Courier, 17 February 1817) in
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which he essentially " avow[s] the work and disclaim [s] its opinions," Southey violates a cardinal principle of Coleridgean self-defense: "Never yet did any human Being gain anything by self-desertion" {EOT 2: 45on). Coleridge's own series of letters in the Courier advocate self-division; readers need to distinguish between "the boy Southey" and "SOUTHEY, THE MAN," and between the sentiments of dramatic characters and the author who creates them. Not only does the man absolve the boy but The Fall of Robespierre atones for Wat Tyler. Proof of the boy Southey's quick study in respectability is his having written " two acts out of three " of The Fall of Robespierre "within a year after the composition of the Wat Tyler." (Actually The Fall preceded the fall by a year.) A second defense goes beyond the individual boys Southey and Coleridge to the problematics of youth and its catoptrical mirror stage. Those who view Wat Tyler as proof of Southey's seditious principles fail to perceive "how entirely a young Poet" lives in "an ideal world" where the "grandeur of liberty, compassion for the oppressed, indignation against the oppressors" are "as natural to him" as are "fidelity, loyalty, the majesty of law, and devotion, even to the death, for friend, or King, or Country." They also misunderstand that "criminality" consists not in the "thoughts or the feelings as generalities" but in the "misapplication of them to particular times and persons, for immediate purposes" {EOT 2: 470-1). But this argument not only reinstates imaginative suspension, it reverses itself by the end of these letters. The "numerous works" of "SOUTHEY THE MAN" are "proofs of the strongest and most glowing attachment to the Laws, Constitution, and established Religion of Great Britain" as "travel, reflection, and profound historical knowledge can give!" {EOT 2: 477). Providing the "most triumphant confutations ofJacobinism in all its disguises," works by the men Coleridge and Southey establish their loyalty to England and the propriety of their characters. The Biographia presents these mature traits as the proper subject (of) Coleridge, and in this respect" Satyrane's Letters " and the " Critique of Bertram" complement the life as Coleridge wishes to tell it. They also sustain the " gap " that is Coleridge's autobiography as well as his life. As late as April 1817, Coleridge denies the authorship of the letters on Bertram, even as he is preparing to insert them into his literary life.33 And "Satyrane's Letters" mime the payoff and pleasures of the more famous self-splitting by letter of chapter 13.
Constituting bodies politic and theatric "Take as a specimen" of the ease of self-composition, Coleridge writes to Curtis, " Satyrane's Letters" which " never received a single correction," or that "letter addressed to myself as from a friend, at the close of the first volume of the Literary Life, which was written without taking my pen off the paper except to dip it in the inkstand " (CL 4: 728). Such dissembling resemblances make these letters of a piece with the "impropriety" of the Coleridgean life as we have come to know it. Yet while they perpetuate the loss of self that Bradford Mudge traces in the shift from Autobiographia to Biographia Literaria
and the already shadowy identity of Jerome Christensen's "man of letters," "Satyrane's Letters" also bring into focus the still-hidden part of that improper story: how narcissistic disorders take and find refuge in the narcissistic order of theatre. 34 By attending to this stage of his story, we watch Coleridge elude his fate as a "man of letters." The Coleridgean self emerges as a property of theatre, the special conventions of which prop up the representative mind of England. 3
THE STATE OF THEATRE
Coleridge's praise of Shakespeare's eulogium of England in Act 2 of Richard II literally sets the stage in the process of making men citizens: Every motive, every cause producing patriotism was here collected without any of those cold abstractions which had been substituted by modern poets. If this sentence were properly repeated every man would retire from the theatre secure in his country if secure in his own virtue (LoL 1: 378). 35
Raysor's version stresses the location more explicitly: if these lines "were recited in a theatre with due energy and understanding, every man would retire from the theatre secure in his country if secure in his own virtue" (ShC 2: 142-3). The specification is worth highlighting because of the persistence with which Coleridge is associated with antitheatricalism and bardolatry. Yet Coleridge's praise of Richard II says precisely the opposite: Shakespeare's power, particularly the power of his drama to evoke nationalist sentiment, depends on its production on stage. Several fragmentary pieces of writing confirm the logic of this assertion: "Desultory Remarks on the Present State of the Higher Drama, as connected with the Stage" (1808), annotations (1808) to Richard Payne Knight's Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste, "Genius and Public T a s t e " (1812), and discussions of stage and
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dramatic illusion in Coleridge's public lectures (Lecture 3 of the 1811—12 series and Lecture 1 of 1818—19). 36 The chief argument emerging from these texts is that the " willing suspension of disbelief," so central to youth and poetic faith in general, is the special property of theatre. This state of mind, in which the comparing faculty is suspended so that poetic images appear as reality, is described most frequently in terms of the stage and is what theatre, better than any other poetic form, effects in its audience. The stage elicits the illusion that all "proper" literature is supposed to effect by bringing "semblance" closer to reality than in other forms. The "distinct" end of the stage " (in its Idea, or according to what it does, or ought to, aim a t ) " is to "imitatfe] Reality (Objects, Actions, or Passions) under a Semblance of Reality" (LoL 1: 133). This is the point of one of the annotations to Knight that describes the difference between reading literature and watching a play. While both require some degree of "continuous belief in the truth of fictitious stories in verse," the "helps which representation supplies" make audiences believe that "the scene before us is not the representation of a transaction, but the transaction itself, is not a shadow or reflexion but a substance " (Burwick, "On Stage Illusion," pp. 31-2). Coleridge puts it more bluntly in "Genius and Public Taste"; what "would appear mad or ludicrous in a book, [when] presented to the senses under the form of reality and with the truth of nature, supplies a species of actual experience" (LoL 1: 429). With the notable exception of Frederick Burwick's, critical discussions of Coleridge's ideas about stage illusion have tended to deflect attention away from theatre. They generally lead to Germany and the "borrowings" from Schlegel, the unities controversy in its relation to imagination, or the anatomy of Coleridge's dream states and his obsessional delusions. Yet not only is his definition of illusion rooted in theatre but it reveals the high value that Coleridge ascribes to acting. The "grand Privilege of a great Actor above a great Poet" is that " h e " - and that will be taken up later - renders art nature: "No part was ever played to perfection but that nature justified herself in the hearts of all her children" (LoL 1: 429). Moreover, the "truth" of "nature" which stage illusion presents is a universal human nature which the great actor activates. Whereas the scenic effects of theatre actually diminish the " degree of illusion experienced in reading," a "genuine actor" more than compensates for this distraction by making the representation not only "approach
Constituting bodies politic and theatric reality" but "be wholly merged or lost in it" (Burwick, "On Stage Illusion," p. 32). This power of the actor over the poet makes theatre the optimum site for fulfilling two other key poetic projects: severing head from heart and merging child with "man." The skillful actor allows spectators to "know the thing to be a representation" but to "feel it to be a reality" and thus assists the " m a n " in maintaining that "negative Belief" which is the "natural" gift of the child (Burwick, "On Stage Illusion," p. 33; Coleridge's emphasis; see also LoL 1: 134-5). Crucial for reviving "men," the stage has additional advantages for producing citizens. Its ability to potentialize the individual and revive the public mind constitutes its "never-to-be-[too-much] valued advantage" as a "delightful, yet most effectual remedy for th[e] dead palsy of the public mind" (LoL 1: 429). In Coleridge's diagnosis, theatre remedies a widespread tendency to judge works of art on the "authority" of convention rather than of "actual experience." Unlike Wordsworth who views contemporary drama as one more sign of the "savage torpor" of English minds, Coleridge sees it as counteracting the rage for extravagance arising from "the security, comparative equability, and ever-increasing sameness of human Life" (LoL 1: 428). Its "intermediate language" expresses "the reality of a thing" by being "itself a part of that which it manifests," which is the particular advantage of seeing legitimate drama on stage, "if only the Actors were what, we know, they have been" (LoL 1: 429). The democratic implications of Coleridge's endorsement of theatre are highlighted several lines later, when he says that theatrical representation speaks directly to the "hearts of all [Nature's] children." "There is no time given to ask questions, or pass judgements. [The actor] takes us by storm, & tho'
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Theatres." Without its embodiment on stage, through which it receives "living Comment & Interpretation," Shakespeare's works " must remain forever a sealed up Volume " unable to penetrate " the Heads & Hearts" of the "Mass of Mankind" {LoL i: 430). I dwell on these passages knowing that Coleridge does not. Soon he is all too eager to closet Shakespeare and monitor illusion according to the logic by which he has already discredited movements for parliamentary reform: " Let [the mob] only be close packed together, like hay in a rick, and a little wetted, and they will be sure to illuminate the whole country" (EOT 2: 165).37 But these passages are worth highlighting for what they imply about Coleridge's endorsement of acting, on the one hand, and the safeguards this endorsement requires, on the other. To neglect Coleridge's call for the representation of Shakespeare is to miss his clearest formulations of the citizen he is struggling to educe through theatre. If representing Shakespeare on stage makes the bard accessible to the masses, it also presents a bard who, in Coleridge's view, rejects the interests of that group. "Timeless" Shakespeare is a "philosophical aristocrat, delighting in those hereditary institutions which have a tendency to bind one age to another, and in that distinction of ranks, of which, although few may be in possession, all enjoy the advantages " (LoL 2: 272). Coleridge's Shakespeare neither transcends politics or theatre nor does Coleridge's bardolatry restore Shakespeare to a more democratic audience. Instead, in this stage Coleridge is closer to the views of Walter Scott and John Kemble whose Shakespeare, according to Nicola Watson, serves "the counter-revolutionary reformulation of English cultural identity." 38 Jonathan Bate's studies of the role of Shakespeare in the romantic period go the furthest in detailing his political appropriation and the difficulty romanticists have accepting a Coleridge who is sympathetic to acting. His Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism
I
73°~I^3° gathers evidence from prints, caricatures, theatre criticism, and the popular press to show that Shakespeare had become sufficiently well known by the mid-eighteenth century for allusion to his words to be appropriated for political purposes. Bate showcases Hazlitt as the model of this appropriation in romantic England, and, as in most instances when the two are invoked, his priority entails a conscious demotion of Coleridge. Coleridge's Shakespeare belongs to the "cult of the self," which is why Coleridge "is the father of twentieth-century apolitical practical criticism" and how Bate can
Constituting bodies politic and theatric justify "his near silence about Coleridge: this is a book about public appropriations of Shakespeare" (ibid., p. 133). Fortunately, once Bate steps out from under the shadow of Hazlitt, a different Coleridge becomes visible. Two of the central claims of "The Politics of Romantic Shakespearean Criticism: Germany, England, France," published a year later, are that Coleridge, like Schlegel, wrote his Shakespearean criticism "under the shadow of Napoleon" and that "in their essence, not merely in certain superficial details," Coleridge's Shakespearean lectures are deeply political.39 They "slide" between a "disinterested" and " a Burkean Shakespeare" and present Shakespeare's plays as lessons for the present age ("The Politics of Romantic Shakespearean Criticism," p. 14). In Coleridge's Macbeth, Shakespeare foretells the fall of Napoleon and in Caliban depicts "the passions and follies of a mob." By seeking to revive Shakespeare's plays on stage, Coleridge aims to "excit[e] a steady patriotism, a love ofjust liberty," and to reform " the hearts of Jacobinized Englishmen" (LoL 1: 545; 2: 272, 83). As do Watson and R. A. Foakes, Bate underscores the conservative actions Coleridge seeks to promote by having Shakespeare acted on stage. Yet his analysis also points up the chief obstacle to claims for the importance of acting to Coleridge: Hamlet. Even in an essay like Bate's that is attentive to politics, Hamlet undermines claims for Coleridge's commitment to action on any stage. While Bate distinguishes himself from most critics by noticing that Coleridge frames his analysis of Hamlet within attacks on Napoleon and praise for England, he reverts to the party line in considering Hamlet as an excuse for Coleridgean inaction. The familiar equation Hamlet = Coleridge = a "major strand of romanticism " sanctions the shift of the " realm of action and politics to that of thought and inner feeling " and the shift of theatre to the closet ("The Politics of Romantic Shakespearean Criticism," p. 15). But Coleridge in this "selfanalysis" is making the opposite points: the play demonstrates the "moral necessity" of acting and the practical necessity of the stage in promoting this truth.40 In wishing to "exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to outward objects and our meditation on inward thoughts," Shakespeare wants his audiences to judge Hamlet negatively and to recognize two "truths." (1) "No faculties of intellect, however brilliant," are valuable if they "withdraw us from, or render us repugnant to action"; (2) "action is the chief end of human existence" (LoL 1: 390).
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The twin foundations of Coleridge's political thinking, this twostep process has a paradoxical relation to the stage. Because social action is based on the proposition that right acting depends upon right thinking and because right thinking is currently threatened by Gallicized and fanciful minds, Coleridge's literary projects are aimed at restoring properly speculative states of mind. This mission comprises the patriotic service of the poet, who awakens "an activity of the intellectual faculties" and "originates action and conduct according to a principle." 41 Because of the synergistic relation of mind and action on stage, theatre can enact the two steps cyclically or sequentially. Either it characterizes proper mind through proper action or it refrains from action until proper minds have been restored. The former describes theatre according to the idea, the latter as a specific remedy for present ills. A "busy commercial people" in an age recovering from the spectacular activity of France, the English must regain their reflective capacities. Introspective characters like Hamlet show the way; in their "consequent proportionate aversion to action," they anatomize mind, thereby making theatre a reform school for the public mind. This process represents the appeal of Germany to Coleridge — " Deutschland ist Hamlet" — and the rationale behind the "passion plays" of the early Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Joanna Baillie.42 "To do was impossible with [all of] them but in determining what ought to be done they perhaps exceeded every [writer] of the globe" (LoL 1: 354). The practicality of enacting such reflections on stage can be questioned, but the attempt is instructive. Theatre allows Coleridge to analyze mental activity and, through reflection on the represented action on stage, inspire audiences to good deeds. The problem is that theatre's representation of acting makes Coleridge dependent on forces over which he has even less control. Inspiring good acts by portraying proper activity of mind necessitates that there be good actors on stage. In subsequent chapters we will analyze the frustration — and misogyny — elicited by this additional requirement; for now I simply note Coleridge's anxiety over seeing Hamlet, and most of Shakespeare, on stage: "if only the Actors were what, we know, they have been" (LoL 1: 429). Since Coleridge contends that contemporary actors are not what they have been, contemporary audiences are not seeing what they should be. Instead of being transported "to a sense of [their] possible greatness," audiences see their "poor pettifogging nature" and are "reconciled " with vice (BL
Constituting bodies politic and theatric 2: 186, 89). In order to recover active minds, then, theatres must conform to the specifications of idealism. For what the representation of Shakespeare reveals to Coleridge is that too much reality destroys the illusion of reality. According to Howard Felperin, Coleridge's emphasis on the psychological power of Shakespeare restores Shakespearean characters and texts to " everyman. " 43 But a " new multiplicity of subjective readings," let alone subject positions, is hardly the view of Shakespeare that Coleridge promotes. The "truest poet of England" invalidates the character and tastes of the majority of contemporary theatre audiences, under cover of effecting that "happy balance of the generic with the individual." Visible between the lines of Coleridge's public lectures on Shakespeare, social critique assumes center-stage in the "Critique of Bertram." "For the whole system of your [contemporary] drama is a moral and intellectual Jacobinism of the most dangerous kind. ...For the whole secret of dramatic popularity consists with you, in the confusion and subversion of the natural order of things, their causes and their effects" (BL 2: 190). Qualities of " liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour" are represented in "persons and in classes of life where experience teaches us least to expect them," unlike with Shakespeare's characters who preserve the "order of nature and propriety" (BL 2: 190). Moreover, Shakespeare owes his own success on stage to his having had "no idea of a mixed public." Or, since even Coleridge admits that this overstates the case, the public "was divided, in truth, between those who had no taste at all & who went merely to amuse themselves - and those who were deeply versed in the literature to which they gave encouragement" (LoL 1: 228). Just this division structures the debate on modern drama in the second of" Satyrane's Letters." A Coleridgean plaintiff squares off against a "spokesman of the crowd" to show how the plots, characterization, and scenic representation of the modern stage all combine to destroy "old England" (BL2: 189). Clifford Siskin has a phrase for this position in romanticism: the "unkind imagination," which replaces kind with degree. In a new world where poets are simply "men" speaking to "other men," unkind transactions are essential to maintaining a proper (im-) balance of power. Such transactions are even more crucial in theatre, where, simply by paying a fee, "every man of decent appearance" has "as good a right as the managers themselves not
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only to see and hear" but to "express audibly his approbation or disapprobation of what may be going forward on stage " (BL 2: 276). Precisely this right confounds the critic of Bertram who finds in theatrical, as in political, bodies the "right of suffrage" too "widely diffused" (BL 2: 257). The people's refusal to take a back seat in matters of taste finally provokes Coleridge to wish to exclude them from theatre altogether.44 Coleridge's rhetorical response to the extreme case of kind that theatre represents is to deny degree by making exceptions disappear — for example, his qualifier that in theatre nature speaks to "all her children, in whatever state they [are], short of absolute moral exhaustion or downright stupidity" (LoL 1: 429). These exceptions soon prove the rule just as what constitutes "decent appearance" becomes tautological. Of decent appearance are those men who foster the semblance of England. 4
APPARENT AND REAL POWER
If Coleridge's analyses of Shakespeare accentuate how imagination consolidates the nation, his treatment of commanding genius shows how theatre responds to revolution. Neither alliance leads to a simple closeting of mind; nor does the latter show Coleridge backing away from theatre or revolution because of their capacity to make things happen in the world. For at least half of his career Coleridge does not retreat from the commanding genius of theatre so much as enlist theatre to explore the problematics of commanding genius. Plays of his first stage anatomize commanders like Robespierre and Wallenstein, against the traits of whom plays of the second stage place viewers on guard. The next two chapters trace the process by which his plays eventuate in an antitheatrical mentality associated with heroic young men. But Coleridge's drama and theatre criticism also provides important reflections on revolution by containing Coleridge's most trenchant remarks on human identification with power. Because, after 1802, Coleridge's political writings are invested in denying the appeal of Napoleon, they fail to address one of the most troubling legacies of revolutionary experience: whole nations — and imaginations — "duped" by "enormous power." Coleridge's drama and theatre criticism keeps this question alive for at least another decade. Focusing on villain-hero protagonists by Shakespeare and fellow romantic writers allows Coleridge to admit human desires to submit and command.
Constituting bodies politic and theatric
59
"Indispensable" to the "complete defense" of the English and Spanish contests against France is an analysis "of what the main power of a remorseless tyrant, such as Bonaparte, consists." The answer: an "abandonment of all principle of right," which allows "the soul to chuse and act upon a principle of wrong, and to subordinate to this one principle all the various vices of human nature " (EO T 2: 83; see also F 1: 121). Aid in recognizing this type of character comes from viewing Shakespeare's villains. Unlike more moral characters, where faculties of mind are co-ordinated and subordinated to conscience and will, villains like Richard III, Iago, and Edmund — and their progeny Rivers and Osorio — give spectators the opportunity to "contemplate the intellect of man more exclusively as a separate self-subsistence" (BL 2: 217). For when intellect is severed from conscience, ends justify horrific means. But aid in counteracting the appeal of such figures is provided by theatre's willingness, first, to showcase it. The "co-existence of great intellectual lordship with guilt has never been adequately represented without exciting the strongest interest" (BL 2: 217). While in the "real" world Coleridge represses this appeal by imagining a union of men who are "bottomfed] on fixed principles," in theatre he unleashes it through the double logic of illusion. Viewers can " know " one thing but "feel" another. On such unsettled grounds Don Juan enters the "Critique of Bertram." Like Shakespeare's villains and their prototype, Satan, Don Juan is thoroughly evil and thoroughly irresistible. Coleridge concedes the "charm and universal interest" of this character and values the Atheista Fulminato for allowing audiences to "see clearly how [it] is formed." The "very extravagance of the incidents, and the super-human entireness of Don Juan's agency, prevents the wickedness from shocking our minds to any painful degree" (BL 2: 216). Double consciousness has its pleasures. " W e " do not see ourselves in "such a monster of iniquity" while getting to see ourselves as thoroughly irresistible. Other fantasies are satisfied for the " we " who is Coleridge: " To be so loved for my own self, that even with a distinct knowledge of my character, she yet died to save me! this, sir, takes hold of two sides of our nature, the better and the worse" (BL 2: 216). Only in theatre does Coleridge allow himself to suspend moral responsibility and acknowledge the attraction of criminality.45 However psychologically astute, the recognition of double con-
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In the theatre of romanticism
sciousness raises some troubling problems for Coleridge. For how does one distinguish "ideal" villains like Don Juan from "real" villains like Bertram and Napoleon? Coleridge's answer, in theatre and life, is to distinguish motives from consequences. But this distinction both necessitates a class-politics of imagination and sets the stage for his ultimate withdrawal from theatre. What keeps Don Juan, in contrast to Bertram, "a world's distance from the spirit of modern jacobinism" is that viewers separate desirable means from execrable ends and only identify with the former. While Bertram portrays "clumsy copies of these showy instrumental qualities, in order to reconcile us to vice and want of principle," the Atheista Fulminato "presents an exquisite portraiture of the same qualities, in all their gloss and glow, but presents them for the sole purpose of displaying their hollowness, and in order to put us on our guard by demonstrating their utter indifference to vice and virtue" (BL 2: 221; my emphasis). Indeed, viewers do not take his crimes seriously at all since they see that such acts form no part of Don Juan's essential character. His "constant interpoise of wit, gaiety, and social generosity" prevents "the criminal, even in his most atrocious moments, from sinking into the mere ruffian, as far at least, as our imagination sits in judgment" (BL 2: 220; original emphasis). Comparison with Hazlitt's treatment of Iago reveals how character analysis is aimed at contemporary assessments of Napoleon. Like Coleridge's villains, Hazlitt's Iago represents "diseased intellectual activity, with the most perfect indifference to moral good or evil," and thus instructs audiences in the sheer "love of power." But Hazlitt's Iago also reflects what Hazlitt admires in Napoleon - the emerging power of the self-made man. What distinguishes Iago from Richard II also distinguishes Napoleon from "the right divine of kings to govern wrong." Each is a "true prototype of modern Jacobinism, who thought that talents ought to decide [one's] place." 46 Coleridge's imagination perceives an opposing reality. From his perspective, seduction by a gentleman is infinitely preferable to that by an "abortion of jacobinism." Once English audiences learn to perceive this difference, they will see through Napoleon's "splendid robes and gaudy trappings" to the reality of an "upstart Corsican" and "arch ruffian" (EOT 2: 75). Coleridge's distinction between apparent and real power is bolstered by a second distinction equally invested in denying the "reality" of Napoleon's power. The Friend presents it as the
Constituting bodies politic and theatric
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" unconfoundable " difference between "an action" and "a series of motions," insight into which enables spectators to discern motives from general consequences: "as if an action could be either good or bad disjoined from its principle! as if it could be, in the Christian and only proper sense of the word, an action at all, and not rather a mechanic series of lucky or unlucky motions" (F i: 316). Initially proposed to resolve the legal conundrum of libel, in which the "degree makes the kind, the circumstances constitute the criminality," the distinction enters the revolutionary context when used to demonstrate the clear difference between killing a tyrant and killing a king (F 1: 78, 318—25). This latter issue is framed as an anxiety about mimeticism and theatricality: whether one has a duty to refrain from actions which, however laudable in one context, might be construed to condone evil acts, owing to "superficial resemblances" between the two. This question is itself prompted by a series of distichs explaining why a sculptural imitation of Brutus is left unfinished: "if one man may be allowed to kill another because he thinks him a tyrant," then "regicide will be justified under the pretence of tyrannicide" (F 1: 320). Unfazed by such apparent similarities, The Friend (speaking as "the Englishman") cuts to the heart of the matter. If such an act [as Brutus killing Caesar], with all its vast out-jutting circumstances of distinction, can be confounded by any mind, not frantic, with the crime of a cowardly skulking assassin who hires out his dagger for a few crowns to gratify a hatred not his own, or even with the deed of that man who makes a compromise between his revenge and his cowardice, and stabs in the dark the enemy whom he dared not meet in the open field, or summon before the laws of his country — what actions can be so different, that they may not be equally confounded? (F 1: 323). This is the most "visionary" aspect of Coleridge's enlistment of the visuality of theatre: his confidence in theatre's ability to manifest invisible distinctions. So that "whole nations" are never again "duped" by apparent "meteoric successes," similar motions must look as radically different to their spectators as the actions they represent. Coleridge's plays effect this instruction in a number of ways, at first by staging deliberately ambiguous representations (like the assassination painting and the conjuring scene in Osorio/Remorse) and then by resolving ambiguity through a polarization of character. In the way that he writes £apolya, only "frantic" minds could confuse tyrannicide with regicide (F 1: 320). But the dogmatism of this play
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In the theatre of romanticism
highlights the limitations of staging potentiality. Try as he does, Coleridge cannot move audiences to identify with impotent characters. If the schematic morality of ^apolya inadvertently ruins Coleridge's theatre, "the English nobleman" in The Friend closes it down altogether. Responding to the confusion expressed by the "Italian Cardinal" over "apparent resemblances" between Brutus and Ravilliac, "the Englishman" simply ''knows" the difference between tyrants and kings (F i: 321). To see that Brutus is not a Ravilliac or Don Juan a Bertram is to know when one is " dreaming " and is "broad awake" (F 1: 321). Apparently, Coleridge loses faith in dramatic illusion when it suspends not judgment but social hierarchy. Maintaining faith in that distinction now falls to the clerisy.
CHAPTER 2
Coleridge's German revolution: Schiller's
Wallenstein
To shift the site of Coleridge's nationalist activity from England to Germany seems to render the obscure perverse. Standard conceptions of Germany in the life of Coleridge undermine claims for his nationalism and activity through quips like Crabb Robinson's — "Coleridge's mind is more German than English" —and through Germany's alleged responsibility for his withdrawal from the "real world," his shift from poetry to metaphysics, and his penchant for copying rather than imitating. 1 Carlyle sets this image in place through his memorialization of Coleridge "looking down on London and its smoke tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle." He ascribes Coleridge's withdrawal to residence in a "Kantean haze world" complete with "vacant air castles and dimmelting ghosts and shadows." 2 Subsequent critics have perpetuated this view, drawing support from Coleridge's own paeans to German philosophy in Biographia Literaria and his praise for the Germans as a speculative people with whom "to do" is "impossible. " 3 Yet part of the nationalism and activity that underlies Coleridge's allegiance to Germany should already be surmisable from the foregoing discussion. As his version of the growth of a poet-philosopher's mind has it, "Germany" makes passive minds active. To Kant and Schelling Coleridge owes his liberation from the constraints of necessitarianism and empiricism, a shift of mind which he seeks to model for his compatriots. Contingencies of mind and history make contemporary Germany the only way back to " spiritual platonic old England " (CN 2: 3121). The representative English mind takes its turn through Germany to strengthen the imagination that characterized England up until 1660 (F 1: 419-23; CCS, pp. 65-6). On these foreign shores Coleridge rediscovers his native land and genius, the "truly heroic times" of Elizabeth and Shakespeare.4 Scholarly defensiveness about Coleridge's dependence on Ger63
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many generally seeks to protect his originality, the creativity of his imagination, and his political engagement. Threatening to all three is Germany's association with organic and idealist philosophy. Since Coleridge not only plagiarized the bulk of this material but in the process destroyed his "shaping spirit of imagination," to acknowledge Germany's importance is to admit something uninspired about Coleridge's mind.5 The threat Germany poses to notions of Coleridge's political engagement is a more recent charge, largely because the perception of Coleridge as politically engaged is relatively new. Those books that argue for Coleridge's activity as a political and literary agent must argue away the importance of Germany in his formation. For example, A. C. Goodson argues that readers who view Coleridge as the " English outpost of German idealist aesthetics " lose sight of the "responsive," even topical Coleridge.6 But this kind of argument ignores recent studies of the political work of eighteenthcentury aesthetic formations and restricts Coleridge's Germany to aesthetic philosophy, aesthetic philosophy to Kant, Schelling, and Schlegel, and Coleridge's Literary Life to chapter g.7 As Coleridge tried to convey in his earliest German projects and the penultimate chapters of the Biographia, there is more to Germany than mind. Or, as we saw in the preceding chapter, mind for Coleridge is inseparable from action and the activity of national reform. To begin with idealist philosophy is to miss the initial period of Coleridge's German enthusiasm and the most sustained and acknowledged "imitation" resulting from it: translation of Schiller. My point of entry into Germany is Coleridge's, and it grants access to a rather different space. It puts plays before and play within philosophy, the nation in theatre, Schiller before Kant, and Wallenstein before, during, and after Napoleon. Three preliminary misconceptions must be cleared away before we can see the Wallenstein translation as preparing the ground for Coleridge's nationalist activity: the way Schiller is perceived by early nineteenth-century English critics, by twentiethcentury English romanticists, and by Coleridge. To anticipate the latter, Wallenstein provides the background to Coleridge's middle stage by theorizing play and thematizing revolutionary action during the period when Coleridge posits the most direct correlation between political and poetic activity. In later years Coleridge blames his unsuccessful attempts to convey the mind of Germany to England on "the cloud [s] of Ignorance & Prejudice which to a disgraceful and even inhospitable and un-
Coleridge's German revolution: Schiller's Wallenstein grateful excess overgloom the mind of the learned Public with regard to German Literature " [CL 4: 664). It would be more accurate to say that the rage for German drama in England during the 1790s partially dissipated the cloud of ignorance only to strengthen the cloud of prejudice.8 For what the public associates with "sickly and stupid German tragedies" is precisely what Coleridge is seeking to abolish by transporting German thought to England in the first place - French jacobinism or the "confusion and subversion of the natural order of things, their causes and their effects" (BL 2: 190). Further complicating matters is the fact that Schiller stands in the English public mind of the period as the foremost progenitor of both. What "opened the floodgates" of German plays pouring into England in the 1790s was Henry Mackenzie's "Account of the German Theater " given in 1788, which "culminates in an extended celebratory resume" of Schiller's The Robbers? No other play so captures the poetic imagination of the period nor signals so clearly one's sympathy with "outlaw character. " Rosemary Ash ton cites several instances of the vehemence and persistence of this equation, the most famous being the Anti-Jacobin's own play The Rovers, which takes Schiller as the epitome of efforts by the "GERMAN STAGE" to "unhinge the present notions of men with regard to the obligations of Civil Society." In 1816, Hazlitt is still citing The Robbers as the best way to recall one's revolutionary youth.10 The associations Schiller, like Germany, evokes for English romanticists of this century generally move in the opposite direction. Habitual pairing of romantic Germany and idealist philosophy perpetuates ignorance of German plays and prejudice against German (in)action. It is striking that the one thing German that was familiar to early English romantic audiences is the genre least respected by scholars of English romanticism today and that the German writer most identified with literary and political radicalism, especially in the high-brow opinion of his day, is now seen to sanction escapist or totalitarian fantasies. Two names signal the divergent ways by which English romanticists have arrived at contemporary neglect of Schiller: Kotzebue and Carlyle. The most "popular" German playwright on the English romantic stage, Kotzebue effectively drowns out other, more "classical" voices.11 Andre Rault estimates that between 1790 and 1810 about 170 editions of Kotzebue's work appeared in England - almost half of the entire number of translations published in this period - and that of the
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thirty-six plays of his that were translated into English, twenty-two were performed.12 By associating the German stage with Kotzebue and Kotzebue with "low" art and ends, critics feel justified in their neglect of this phase of Germany's influence on England and thus of Schiller's place in English romanticism. Carlyle is primarily responsible for the cloud of prejudice surrounding Schiller in English studies, though toward Schiller the aesthete rather than Schiller the jacobin. Heidi Robinson argues that from the "victorian sages" to Raymond Williams critics have misinterpreted the political significance of Schiller's "culture of the inner man." The naivety of their perception, in her view, stems from Carlyle. For anyone who can translate "Spieltrieb" as "sport-impulse" and see only the spiritual workings of imitative art is unlikely to transmit the serious social relevance of Schiller's views on culture.13 In transmitting the latter view, Schiller finds a far more accurate translator in Coleridge. In part, as Coleridge himself contends, this acumen stems from his being uniquely at home in both cultures (CL 4: 666); in part, as Carlyle in spite of himself implies, it stems from Coleridge's resemblances to Schiller. Both in its details and reception history, Carlyle's depiction of Schiller mirrors his rendition of Coleridge: portraits of poets as withdrawn men. A. C. Dunstan confirms the impression that no other figure of this period looks so much like Coleridge as does Schiller. Both men are split between their poetic and philosophic allegiances, both are in rivalrous relations with the "greatest poets" of their age, both feel that the "study of poetry include [s] the whole range of mental and moral philosophy," both give "great attention to drama. " 14 In my additional contention that both turn to theatre to redress social upheaval resulting from the French Revolution, I mean to reverse the assumption that Germany fosters Coleridge's withdrawal from action. Not only are Coleridge's efforts on behalf of Germany prodigious but they are undertaken always with an eye toward national reform. In specifying Germany's negative effect on Coleridge, it seems more accurate to say that it isolates him in his literary activity. This isolation is intolerable for someone pathologically dependent on support from all quarters and triggers those defenses now associated with Coleridge and Germany: denial, contradiction, plagiarism. Yet it seems worth recalling that Coleridge's first responses to Germany were aroused by Schiller and were hardly conflicted. In the early days Germany figures as Coleridge's ideal friend - like-minded and magnanimous in its
Coleridge's German revolution: Schiller's Wallenstein intellectual and financial offerings. Before falling " dead-born " from the press, the translation of Wallenstein promises to yield profitable returns. It allows Coleridge to cash in on the rage for German drama while importing a play like Shakespeare's and a mind like his own that has "published Abjurations of the French." The humiliation of Wallenstein forces Coleridge's German projects underground, where they fester and erupt periodically in deeply ambivalent descriptions of Germany. But before this happens, they are acknowledged, even widely publicized, interests which are thoroughly above-board. Indeed, they comprise a good portion of the "plank" on which Coleridge "crossed over" to England and his "decided AntiGallicanism" {EOT 1: lxiv). Besides revising the big picture of Coleridge's international affiliations, exploring the context and content of Schiller's Wallenstein recovers important features of Coleridge's early career. It grants access to what precedes and precipitates the middle stage of Coleridge's politics of theatre by anticipating the philosophical and political rationale for imagination's "middle" or mediating state of mind. The aesthetic letters that surround Schiller's composition of Wallenstein influence Coleridge's subsequent idealist theories on poesy and art, particularly as he seeks to balance the real and the ideal in his thinking about theatre and England. Wallenstein thematizes these distinctions in the context of characterizing commanding genius and "the problem of action" in another revolutionary age (the Thirty Years' War). 15 At this point, commanding genius contains absolute genius, and drama is not at cross purposes with poetry. Wallenstein thus stages Coleridge's youth and provides a proleptic vocabulary and rationale for less enthusiastic reflections on revolution and theatre. I 1
SCHILLER
WALLENSTEIN'S AESTHETIC EDUCATION OR THE SOCIAL WORK OF PLAY
Wallenstein predates Coleridge's but ushers in Schiller's maturity. The Wallenstein trilogy returns Schiller to theatre after a ten-year hiatus and contributes to Germany's idealist response to revolutionary activity in France. After phenomenal success as a Storm and Stress playwright, Schiller takes leave of theatre in 1788 and devotes himself to writing and teaching history. In 1791 he decides to convert the
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Wallenstein material that he has been composing as history (in his History of the Thirty-Years War [1789-92]) into a play. He then tables his playwrighting activity for five more years during which time he explores aesthetic and philosophical questions and finally resumes his composition of Wallenstein in 1796. Completed in 1798, the first part of the trilogy (Wallensteins Lager) makes its debut on the Weimar stage in October, a debut commemorating Schiller's "new dramatic life" (as he writes to Goethe), the Weimar theatre's reopening, and the commitment of both arenas to facilitating political through theatric reform. Tracing this transition advances our understanding both of Schiller's revised conception of the relation between history and play and of Coleridge's politico-aesthetic development. L. A. Willoughby and Elizabeth Wilkinson identify one long-delayed connection between the two writers by suggesting that Coleridge's formulation of the National Church in Church and State fulfills Schiller's promise to provide a constitution for the Aesthetic State (AE, pp. 300, cliv). I suggest that the particular ways theatre stands behind Schiller's revised politics and aesthetics inform Coleridge's literary life after his trip to Germany until 1816. To put it schematically, the newly indifferent place of theatre in Schiller's aesthetic education influences the thematized antitheatricalism that separates the plays of Coleridge's first from his second stage. This view also revises the assumption that Coleridge's resemblance to Schiller follows from both men's interest in Kant. For Coleridge first thinks about Kant through Schiller.16 Two preliminary claims underlie an accurate perception of the aesthetic politics of Wallenstein. First, " play," as formulated in On the Aesthetic Education of Man, is offered as the antidote to revolutionary action and to Storm and Stress theatre. Second, Wallenstein marks the culmination of this understanding for Schiller and the harbinger of it for Coleridge. Complicating this assessment is the apparent wrongheadedness of the first claim for Schiller. Critics usually read "play" as a transcendental, not historical, category and view the Aesthetic Education as virtually silent on the subject of theatre. Both situations change, however, when we view Schiller's letters as a reply to Burke's.17 In this context, the prominence of play assumes political and theatrical features. As the only human state in which the psyche is "in a happy medium" between matter and form, the "realm of law and the sphere of physical exigency," play mirrors the psychic state of theatre and addresses France's failed attempt to
Coleridge's German revolution: Schiller's Wallenstein move from a state of compulsion to a state of freedom (AE, pp. 189, 105). Motivated as they are by the failed French experiment, Schiller's letters are more broadly concerned with the crisis of fragmentation associated with European "modernity." In this context, France is only the most obvious proof that political reform everywhere in the present age is "untimely." Thus beauty, the "object" of the playdrive, fulfills a general social function in restoring wholeness to fragmented psyches and societies. It also serves as remedy to the two major impediments to legitimate reform that Schiller identifies in the present age: current "barbarism" of mind and political constitution and the absence of reliable political leaders. In the first instance, Schiller pinpoints the most pressing form of contemporary psychic imbalance and a potential circularity in his reasoning. For humans can be "at odds" with themselves in two ways: as savages, when feeling predominates over principle, or as barbarians, when principle destroys feeling (AE, p. 21). Revolutionary events have foregrounded the dangers of savagery, but Schiller is even more upset by the effects of barbarism not only because class affiliations implicate him in this disorder. Barbarism's repression of feeling violates both sides of human nature, its thinking as well as feeling capacities. 18 Since both the practical and transcendental projects of transforming a natural state to a moral state require that morality function as nature, those who are fit to be " universal legislator[s] " must unite inclination and duty, head and heart (AE, P- 17)- I n short, Kantian rigor occasions Schillerian play. Because rationality results in cultural barbarism and lethargy in the cultivated classes, Schiller sees the development of feeling as "the more urgent need of our age" (AE, p. 53). What restores feeling while resolving the apparent circularity of arguing, first, that "all improvement in the political sphere is to proceed from the ennobling of character " and, second, that character cannot become ennobled when "under the influence of a barbarous constitution" is beauty, the one "instrument not provided by the State" and therefore free from the taint of whatever "political corruption" informs the day (AE, p. 55). Whether Schiller is analyzing the individual psyche or the collective mind of a historical society and whether he is tracing it in the transition from feeling to thought or of thought to feeling, the same process is required: 19 something must be found that is capable of prying the mind loose from immediate determinations by sense, reason, or history and
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restoring it to a "middle state" of pure determinability. This middle state is the aesthetic mode, which, in the midst of "the fearful kingdom of forces" and the "sacred kingdom of laws" builds a "third joyous kingdom of play and of semblance." Residence in this sphere removes "the shackles of circumstance " and "all that might be called constraint, alike in the physical and in the moral sphere" (AE, p. 215). Crucial, paradoxically, to political projects "in time" because the only condition that allows humans to be "reft out of time," the middle state of mind becomes a necessary condition for reliable political leadership. When this requirement is taken out of context, it easily renders Schiller's (and Coleridge's) political energies invisible by privileging the dreamer over the man of action. But as Schiller advises the "friend of truth and beauty" who seeks to determine legitimate reformers in the present age, this middle quality of mind is crucial to effecting positive action in the real world. Only those "who find enjoyment more in the feeling of total capacity than in any single action" and who can "tolerate" some length of time in a "state of indetermination," are, "provided they combine this capacity with a sense of reality, destined for wholeness and for great roles" (AE, p. 147). To suspend immediate ends and delight in potentiality is the only safeguard against demagoguery, fanaticism, and the cult of the hero. As its vocabulary of "great roles" suggests, it is also what links play to theatre and to Schiller's revised concept of the political and aesthetic ends of plays: indirection. The argument that contemporary plays, especially those of his radical youth, lie behind formulations of beauty in Schiller's aesthetic letters is suggested by more than Schiller's primary occupation as playwright and his preoccupation with Wallenstein during the time that he is theorizing play. It is visible in the way that indirection characterizes the method and point of Schiller's revised concept of theatre in Aesthetic Education. Method and argument come together in the tenth letter where, as Bernd Brautigam has shown, the antitheatrical Rousseau intervenes in the guise of "certain voices worthy of respect" to protest Schiller's optimism that beauty will redress contemporary ills.20 Why Rousseau disturbs Schiller's aesthetic reflections at this point is suggested by recalling Schiller's earlier directive to him in the 1784 lecture, "The Stage as Moral Institution." Its title alone indicates that this is a direct rebuttal to Rousseau's claim that theatres impede rather than lead to moral and
Coleridge's German revolution: Schiller's Wallenstein social action because they allow spectators to feel humane without having to do anything to be humane. In 1784 Schiller defends the stage by cataloguing its tangible political effects. The stage not only inspires patriotism, industry, and obedience in its subjects and humanity and patience in its leaders but, because it effects a "unaninimity of opinion" and union of all "classes and stations," it has the capacity to bring into existence the German nation. When Rousseau reappears in the tenth letter, this time protesting beauty's "soul-seducing" power to "induce in the mind a dangerous tendency to neglect reality altogether, and to sacrifice truth and morality to the alluring dress in which they appear," his presence registers Schiller's second thoughts about the sufficiency of his former reply (AE, p. 65). The problem is not that he has failed to spell out the moral effects of the stage but that he has been too explicit, too "enlightened" in his assumptions about the necessary transfer from cathartic feeling to compassionate act. Among other things, the French Revolution points up the naivety and dangers of such faith. Consequently, subsequent letters define art's value as precisely its suspension of end. The "true" aesthetic response is "indifference," not engagement, art's realm is "semblance," not "reality" (AE, pp. 195-9). Yet two claims in "The Stage as Moral Institution" bridge the aesthetic projects of the 1780s and 90s by highlighting the political reality of plays and play. Schiller here defines as unique to the stage what he later proposes as the effects of beauty overall. He also hints at the logic which underlies claims both for the stage's direct political efficacy in 1784 and for the political aims and effects of indirection in the 1790s. For even in this essay Schiller registers some anxiety about overstating the stage's salutary effect on the world. He retreats to the assertion that "even enemies of the theatre" concede its superiority over other forms of "entertainment and leisure." While here he only asserts that what the theatre accomplishes as entertainment is "more important" than one is normally led to believe, in the letters on Aesthetic Education he explains why this is so in a passage that should put to rest any equating of aesthetic with political indifference. To that "young friend of truth and beauty" seeking to reform his contemporaries, Schiller offers the following pointed advice: The seriousness of your principles will frighten them away, but in the play of your semblance they will be prepared to tolerate them; for their taste is purer than their heart, and it is here that you must lay hold of the timorous fugitive. In vain will you assail their precepts, in vain condemn their
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practice, but on their leisure hours you can try your shaping hand. Banish from their pleasures caprice, frivolity, and coarseness, and imperceptibly you will banish these from their actions and, eventually, from their inclinations too. Surround them, wherever you meet them, with the great and noble forms of genius, and encompass them about with the symbols of perfection, until Semblance conquer Reality, and Art triumph over Nature . 61). One of the clearest admissions of the lack of difference between disciplinary and "shaping" hands, this passage essentially collapses the distinction between despotic and aesthetic states. Despite beauty's ostensibly egalitarian regime, the Aesthetic State exists in "the proximity of thrones," where beauty works its Burkean effects. The difference is one of appearance: whether reason or taste is best able to deny doing the dirty work. Eagleton articulates the founding assumption of such rule in Ideology of the Aesthetic: individuals are "swayed" best through "consensual" rather than "bluntly coercive" means. Jerome Christensen extends this logic to Byron's theatre by showing how "swaying " in Sardanapalus refigures romantic conceptions of "sovereignty." 21 I suggest that Schiller and his imitator Coleridge instigate this "sway" by locating the nation in theatrical forums. But the play of semblance also bypasses authoritarian control, especially when embodied on the stage. Beauty's definition as "living form" makes it difficult to perceive theatre simply as an apparatus of state. Cultivating the "play of semblance" is a good way of characterizing the effect of the changes registered in Schiller's "classical" plays of the 1790s. His dramaturgical reforms are devoted to "banishfing] caprice, frivolity, and coarseness" from the stage. The shift to verse, the introduction of music, the universality and indeterminacy of his heroes, the return of the Greek chorus all suggest the lengths Schiller goes in distancing himself and spectators from the "reality" of theatre. 22 How much distance he effects in his own case is witnessed in his boasts regarding the "coldness" he now feels toward his dramatic material and his need to put literal distance between himself and theatre when composing his plays.23 Where once his plays revelled in "particularity," now they order themselves as a " totality " ; where once he regarded his spectators as so many " balls " to cast at whim toward "heaven or hell," now he respects, and works to revive, their autonomy; where once his theatre resembled a "madhouse," now it exists as a house of meditation. 24 Wallenstein
Coleridge's German revolution: Schiller's Wallenstein marks Schiller's aesthetic transition from enthusiasm to indifference. Familiarizing contemporary audiences with this semblance of theatre constitutes its major dramaturgical challenge. Schiller's handling of the thematic material of Wallenstein aids in this process by locating history in the realm of semblance, not fact. This is romantic history: proof burdens truth; poetic writing captures reality by never "coinciding" with it. Wallenstein amends historiography and presents history through its promotion of semblance. According to Golo Mann and Wilhelm Dilthey, for the first time in history Schiller's play resolves the historical ambiguity of Wallenstein.25 According to Schiller, resolving past history aids in the reformation of current conditions in the world and on stage. As he states in the Prologue (1798), the present ideal state of politics merits a "new era" for the stage.26 Political heroism should embolden contemporary poets to reject aesthetic traditions of the past. Naturalism must give way to symbolism, domestic to civic interests, prose to rhyme in order for theatre to liberate spectators from "des Biirgerlebens engem Kreis" (the narrow sphere of daily life). On the other hand, once theatric reform is accomplished on a broad scale, the stage stands ready to amend reality whenever it threatens to lose its sublimity — a threat in play ever since the Terror caused "French patriots" to take another look at revolution. But as Schiller's poem commemorating Goethe's production of Voltaire's Mahomet implies, aid ironically comes from the source of the problem: France. 27 Only French theatre can restore the order its politics have disrupted because "French" reality has taken over the German but not the French stage. Unlike in Germany, where reality has usurped art on stage because only images that are " true to nature" please, France is the land of art because it bans the "rude tones" of nature. Only in France, that is, does " wilde Phantasie " confine itself to enflaming the world but not the stage. This does not mean that Germany should enslave itself to French rules of art or wholly condemn the French Revolution. What Germany, as state and stage, must ward off is the too-close-pressing reality of rude life ("das rohe Leben"). 28 Because of its distancing potential, the play of semblance suspends the pressing business of the material world; as the Prologue concludes, "Ernst ist das Leben, heiter ist die Kunst" (Life is serious, art is joyful).
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IDEAL STEPS TO THE REAL WORLD
Viewing the Wallenstein trilogy as detailing the two steps of the aesthetic mode highlights this play's relation to Schiller's philosophical investigations and their engagement with history. In its depiction of the mind's need to free itself from the determinations of reality, Wallenstein contributes to the immediate project of idealizing present history and theatre. It does so by featuring a hero who is both poet and military general and by exploring the problem of action as theme. But the trilogy also allows for a critical analysis of the aesthetic mode by exposing stumbling blocks to the theoretically smooth passages from ideal to real worlds. In this, it anticipates the splits that constitute Coleridge's mature genius and that move him to compose history as romance.29 Schiller's portrayal of Wallenstein as a Hamlet in military trappings illustrates this play's investment in representing the semblance of history. For more than half of the trilogy, Wallenstein dwells in the indeterminacies of the aesthetic mode. Up until his famous soliloquy in Act i scene 4 of Wallensteins Tod, Wallenstein's power has been presented as ideal in two respects. To the extent that it is enacted in the world, we only hear of its effects through the other characters; we never see Wallenstein in action. When we finally do see him, we meet a hero who locates the reality of power in its potential. As he tells Tertsky, " It delights me / To know my power; but whether I shall use it, / Of that, I should have thought that thou could'st speak / No wiselier than thy fellows" (Pice. 1. 8. 78-80). The ideal side of Wallenstein's character is further emphasized by the company he keeps. His friendship with Max and faith in the stars signal his attraction to intuitive forms of apprehension. Max describes Wallenstein as a lover and a poet who expands the boundaries of self by suspending the constraints of the "narrow" world (Pice. 2. 4. 110-37). I n these ways, Schiller accentuates in the military hero the traits of aesthetic reformers in the present age: only those who find enjoyment more in the feeling of total capacity than in any single action and who can tolerate some length of time in a state of indetermination are, "provided they combine this capacity with a sense of reality," destined for wholeness and great roles. Besides enabling some of the most lyrical poetry in the play — passages Coleridge claims are "almost my own" —the lengthy duration of Wallenstein's sojourn in the aesthetic mode allows
Coleridge's German revolution: Schiller's Wallenstein Schiller to accomplish the first step of his political agenda. As Barnouw suggests, Wallenstein's indeterminacy counteracts three erroneous systems of action that figure prominently in the play and contemporary cultural debates: necessitarianism, Kantianism, and Burkean traditionalism. The first, because it pictures a world governed solely according to the laws of nature, denies human agency and instead lets necessity, contingency, and utility rule the day. The least attractive position - indeed, it is presented in the aesthetic letters as the pre-human condition - is inhabited by Illo, Buttler, and Countess Tertsky, who champion necessity precisely because it absolves them from choice and moral responsibility.30 Kantianism, although more sympathetically portrayed in the letters and the play, is censured for its inhumane silencing of the heart. Despite being a loyal soldier and subject of the empire, Octavio is a bad friend whose total fixation on duty allows him to betray Wallenstein with a clear conscience and blinds him to alternative possibilities for action.31 Burkean traditionalism comes under fire for the collective passivity it sanctions. Manifested as "das ewige Gestrige" (the eternal yesterday), and characterized as the source of Vienna's political power because maintained by the people's unthinking compliance with the past, it denies humans their individual agency and the world its vitality and progress (Pice. 4. 4. 78-92). Wallenstein distances himself from all of these tendencies by existing in the middle state of the aesthetic mode. His unwillingness to act constitutes his heroism and his only just claim to rule. However, Wallenstein's poetic side is only half of the story, for his is a commanding genius. While his poetic nature allows him to "leave the sphere of the actual" to those ruled by "the intellect, which is at home there," it does not of itself guarantee that he will fulfill all of the requirements for true reform. As Schiller warns in the Aesthetic Education, " not everyone whose soul glows with this ideal was granted either the creative tranquillity or the spirit of long patience " required to embody it. "Far too impetuous to proceed by such unobtrusive means, the divine impulse to form often hurls itself directly upon present-day reality and upon the life of action, and undertakes to fashion anew the formless material presented by the moral world" (AE, p. 59). Whereas " b a d " characters criticize Wallenstein for his vacillations, "good" characters advise against impetuosity.32 Precisely this split between creative tranquillity and restless self-assertion accounts for the moral equivocations in Wallenstein's character. The
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ideal Wallenstein remains content to imagine, not realize, his power; the commander feels "annihilated" when unable to manifest his ambitions. This pressure by the actual is part of what Schiller has in mind when he writes, in his History of the Thirty- Tears War, that Wallenstein "fell not because he was a rebel, rather he rebelled because he fell." In the end, by choosing the active over the reflective, the commanding over the ideal, Wallenstein betrays his country and the semblance that makes reality beautiful. Despite what sounds like a renunciation of action, Schiller is not suggesting that heroes should never act in the world. The aesthetic mode is by definition an intermediate condition whose value is in annulling former habits or principles of action so that one can envision, and then effect, new alternatives. Managing this second step, however, constitutes the tragedy in Schiller's plays and the ambivalence of Coleridge's genius. In theory, "the step from the aesthetic to the logical and moral state" is "infinitely easier" than the "step from the physical state to the aesthetic," because the second step is accomplished "simply" by one's "own free will" rather than through the "grace of Nature" (AE, p. 163). In moral practice, the second step is more hazardous because of the seductions of reality and free will. Negotiating this step is the downfall of actors on every stage in this period. While Wallenstein successfully depicts the first step, it cannot effect the second one in a positive manner. The best it can do is analyze the impediments to realizing ideal action in the world. Hegel identifies the first impediment by ascribing the "real tragedy" of Wallenstein to the "becoming determined" of any decision.33 This is the problem that Wallenstein explores in the first part of the soliloquy that initiates his fall. Updating Hamlet, where not "to be" but now "to do" is the existential question, Wallenstein perceives that reality no longer acknowledges a distinction between thoughts in the mind and acts in the world. "Is it possible? / Is't so? I can no longer what I would? / No longer draw back at my liking? I / Must do the deed, because I thought of it, / And fed this heart here with a dream?" (Pice. 4. 4. 1-5). Not only does reality, by realizing the possible, necessarily limit potentiality but reality cannot tolerate ambiguity. It immediately converts possibilities into actualities and then judges acts by a literalism that blocks out other interpretations. It is as if Wallenstein sets into play all of the doubts about acting that Coleridge's desynonymization of "action" and "motion" struggles to resolve. He discerns the impossibility of
Coleridge's German revolution: Schiller's Wallenstein distinguishing fantasy from reality in the context of acknowledging theatricality as the human condition. In contrast to Max's faith that motive determines consequence and that he will never "act a part," Wallenstein comes to recognize "in the hour of acting" that identity is always less and more than its parts. 34 "Were I that thing, for which I pass, that traitor," Wallenstein would have acted differently - that is, he would have play-acted. But "being conscious of the innocence / Of my intent, my uncorrupted will," his "words" were "bold," because his "deeds were not" {Pice. 4. 4. 28—31). Unfortunately, the "equivocal demeanour" of his life "bears witness on my prosecutor's party" and sends his deeds "into the Foreign" where they "belong / For ever to those sly malicious powers / Whom never art of man conciliated " (Pice. 4. 4. 57-62). The deep pessimism - and modernity — of this play, and its "shadowy" influence on romantic tragedy in general, lies in its recognition of the incommensurability between agent and act and the indistinguishability of dreams and deeds. By acting, even for positive ends, humans alienate themselves from their ideal selves; by dreaming, they convict themselves of criminal deeds. The other obstacle is the reverse of the first in its refusal to acknowledge any limits to the self. This is the more familiar version of commanding genius, which Wallenstein both names and indicts.35 The indeterminacy of the aesthetic mode, which restores to individuals the "freedom to be what [they] ought to be," is brought to an end by the will which " decide [s] how far we wish to make this [freedom] a reality" (AE, p. 149). Wallenstein puts it more darkly: "The free will tempted me, the power to do / Or not to do" (Pice. 4. 4. 13-14). More often than not in these plays, the will becomes commanding once it frees itself from the restraints of reason or tradition. It violates the autonomy of others by choosing "restless self-assertion " over " creative tranquillity." In Wallenstein, this choice is naturalized in the gendered polarity of commanding father and ideal daughter, where, in relation to Thekla, Wallenstein exercises his patriarchal prerogatives (DoW 1. 4. 90-4, 102-7). But t n e trilogy complicates gender and generational paradigms by installing the split within Wallenstein and staging a triangulated dispute among fathers and son. Not only is Max poised between two fathers, the rigid, Kantian Octavio and the benevolent, even maternal Wallenstein, but his loyalty to Wallenstein requires that Max keep Wallenstein from becoming fully a man. 36 Having justified the singularity of Wallenstein's conduct to Octavio, Max must answer for
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it by curbing commanding propensities in him {Pice. 1. 4. 56-66). Max's plan of action is ideal. Once Wallenstein has granted peace to the empire, Max pictures him retiring to his private domains where he can "indulge without restraint" his "ruling passion to create the splendid" by giving "a princely patronage to every art" {Pice. 2. 4. 156-66). The key to maintaining the hero is to make him more of an artist and less of a man. However, Wallenstein grows increasingly manly, or "serious," during the course of his play, and the consequences of his conversion from semblance to reality are tragic. By the end of the trilogy, everyone except Octavio dies as a consequence of Wallenstein's actions, and Wallenstein's features change from the "countenance of a god" to a demon of will {DoW 2. 6. 48-52). But even though Wallenstein fails to effect the second step properly, he articulates the costs of having played out the commanding rather than absolute side of his genius. Embodied in Max, the loss is of poetry - or, as Coleridge would say, of the beauty of youth. The features of Wallenstein's maturity are sobering: "The bloom is vanished from my life. / For O! he stood beside me, like my youth, / Transformed for me the real to a dream, / Clothing the palpable and familiar / With golden exhalations of the dawn" {DoW 5. 1. 61-6). Although coming too late to make a real difference, this recognition is key to revolutionizing the world. Only when semblance conquers reality does it remain "bliss" to be alive. Despite the assurances of aesthetic theory, Schiller's plays depict the tragedy of romantic attempts at political reform. Attempts to realize the ideal, the modern substitute for the divine, founder either on the confines of reality or the unrestrained commanding will. While Schiller proposes play, then, as the antidote to contemporary psychic and political disorder, his plays expose the frustration of heroes whose vision simultaneously qualifies them for and disqualifies them from active leadership in the world. Yet Schiller's tragic vision of heroism is potentially liberating in two respects. First, the irreconcilability of heroic traits on stage awakens, in Shelley's phrase, a "restless and anatomizing casuistry" in the minds of its spectators. By denying them easy answers, it stimulates their imagination and restores aesthetic freedom.37 In this, Schiller achieves the sublimity of tragedy, whose appeal for the audience rests not "on the interest of reason, which would really have acted rightly" but "on the interest of imagination, which could have acted rightly." High tragedy thus
Coleridge's German revolution: Schiller's Wallenstein shifts the burden of acting to real players in the world. 38 Second, by positioning the conflict within a single character, Schiller theatricalizes the mind and liberates the stage from domestic and sensational drama on the one hand and closet drama on the other. This balancing act within Wallenstein is Schiller's riskiest accomplishment, an apparently conscious trade-off judging from his shift in interest, when converting his history to play, from the ideal Gustavus Adolphus to the rebel Wallenstein.39 Although Schiller risks philosophical (and attains critical) confusion by portraying Wallenstein in this contradictory manner, he enhances the play's dramatic effect. As we know from English romantic drama, it is hard to identify with inactive heroes. Embodying an ideal Wallenstein on stage might have reduced the number of casualties at the end of the trilogy, but it also would have reduced Schiller's stature as commanding playwright and his insight into the trouble of mind. II
COLERIDGE
Schiller is willing to subordinate philosophical to dramatic interest, portraying on stage a more complicated and compelling vision of poetic reality than his aesthetic reflections present. Coleridge increasingly sacrifices theatre to idealist philosophy on stage and off.40 To a large extent, this fact accounts for the difference between Coleridge's and Schiller's reputations as playwrights and for the theme and effect of Coleridge's plays: cultivating a "spirit of long patience." But this cultivation is also the direct consequence of Coleridge's engagement with Schiller, the lesson he draws, more unequivocally as time passes, from his having translated Schiller's trilogy. In the long run, Wallenstein sanctions Coleridge's preference for contemplation, informs the passivity of his later stage heroes, and serves as retrospective proof of his rejection of revolutionary activity. In the short run, it does the opposite; it grants Coleridge a fuller picture of commanding actors and a richer identification with them. One crucial difference in the historical circumstances of Schiller's and Coleridge's Wallenstein is Napoleon's decisive entrance on the world-historical stage. Although clearly anti-jacobin by this time, Coleridge's hopes for France are rekindled with Napoleon's appearance in 1798 and reach their peak in 1800.41 Translating Wallenstein at this moment fuses poet and commander in ways that motivate Coleridge's fleeting reference to poets and Bonapartes
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"mov[ing] the world." It fosters Coleridge's reflections on the revolution during his anti-Burkean stage when youthful actors, not sluggish statesmen, more adequately represent "old England." Charles Lamb's recollection that Coleridge dressed up "like a conjuror" while translating Schiller's plays at his home nicely captures the spirit of Coleridge's identification with Wallenstein. It helps challenge the prevalent view that Coleridge took no interest in this activity and forecasts the players with whom he will come to identify - Seni (the soothsayer) and Max, or absolute rather than commanding geniuses.42 Yet Coleridge bears significant responsibility for fostering the first impression, since the letters he writes during this period are filled with laments over this "irksome & soulwearying Labor" and vows to "never, never, never" be "so taken in again" (CL i: 587, 83, see 558-611). But English romanticists should not be taken in either and might profitably reconsider what moved Coleridge to take up Schiller immediately after his return from Germany. William Crisman has attempted to resurrect Coleridge's interest in Schiller by arguing that readers have wrongly ascribed Coleridge's "depression" to the boredom of translating rather than to the effect of his immersion in these plays. He claims that the content of these plays so distresses Coleridge that he is still trying to resolve it in the aptly named "Dejection Ode" of 1802. To my mind, Crisman goes too far in arguing away the manifest content of these letters (after all, denial of interest usually indicates the opposite for Coleridge). But he does not go far enough in specifying the "Dejection Ode" as the endpoint of this guide. Joyce Crick, and Paul Machule before her, have answered many questions concerning when and how Coleridge came to translate two of the three Wallenstein plays for Longman and Rees. 43 But many issues regarding why Coleridge took up this project remain matters for speculation. Crick and Lieselotte Blumenthal highlight the financial dimension in their general analysis of the speculative nature of German translating ventures in England during the 1790s. It is worth recalling that translations of Schiller not only bracket but are intended to underwrite Coleridge's sojourn in the land of speculation.44 Reckoning other components of the speculative appeal of Wallenstein is more difficult because Coleridge says very little, and even less that is consistent or positive, about what motivates this translation. What he does say generally works to disavow his interest in the translation, Schiller, or German drama. But as Ashton suggests,
Coleridge's German revolution: Schiller's Wallenstein such disavowals must be read in their specific poetic and political contexts; in 1800 Wallenstein represents an affront to Coleridge's translating ability and his anti-jacobin position. 45 Thomas Robinson links the two when he reports to his brother, Henry Crabb Robinson, that one sign and consequence of England's new "prejudice" against German drama is that "Coleridge's translation was a good deal ridiculed by the Reviewers" (Ashton, The German Idea, p. 33). That the poetic and ideological critiques are closely related is seen in the way that Wallenstein comes to assume more positive associations in Coleridge's mind - and about it. As more leading literary men of the day - among them, Percy Shelley, Crabb Robinson, Walter Scott, John Lockhart, Ludwig Tieck, A. W. Schlegel — praise Coleridge's translation, Coleridge grows more assertive about his accomplishment as translator and Schiller's accomplishment as playwright. His denial in 1801 that translating Wallenstein indicates admiration for " that play," let alone partisanship of "German Theatre," gives way to praise of "The Wallenstein [as] the greatest of [Schiller's] works," indeed comparable to "Shakespeare's historical plays." 46 This latter commendation signals Coleridge's growing admission of Schiller's genius and the contribution that Wallenstein makes to a nationalized project of idealist reform. Having been in Germany, Coleridge knows what Wallenstein represents in Schiller's career and Germany's literary and political history.47 Translating the "mature" Schiller in this case provides Coleridge with the means to restore England's native genius. For Wallenstein, he writes, is most like Richard II, which of all Shakespeare's history plays is the one best suited to make "Englishmen proud of being Englishmen" (LoL 1: 563, also 378-85). At once the most Shakespearean and, in Germaine de Stael's construction of Germany, the most "national" of German plays, Schiller's Wallenstein promises to regenerate Coleridge's idea of "England." Among other things, it anticipates his proposal to perform "Shakespeare's history plays every Christmas holiday" as "a fine national custom." 48 The problem is that the German Shakespeare looks for all the world - at least the world of English literary culture - like an "incorrigible Jacobin." This provides another reason to distinguish apparent from real resemblances in the "Critique of Bertram." Coleridge's explosion over the "so-called German drama" vents frustration over eighteen years of futile attempts to desynonymize jacobinism, Schiller, and German drama. His explosion not only sets
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the literary-historical record straight in terms of Germany's relation to Shakespeare, it displays the lengths Coleridge goes in his promotion of Germany as a way to restore "old England." This time Coleridge reassigns the jacobinism associated with German drama not to France but to England, arguing that "the so-called German Drama is English in its origin, English in its materials, and English by readoption "
(BL 2: 210-12; original emphases). Storm and Stress plays are legitimate offspring of Young, Harvey, and Richardson; and Kotzebue traces his ancestry to Beaumont and Fletcher. Not only must England "submit to carry [ing] our own brat on our own shoulders" rather than "pawning it off" as the product of German conception, but it must acknowledge the casualties of its propensity to embrace changelings at the expense of legitimate genius. Though the " Critique " is generally thought to be triggered by his humiliation over Drury Lane's rejection of £apolya, in it Coleridge publicly mourns the still-birth of Wallenstein while castigating that "abortion of jacobinism," Bertram. Coleridge's efforts to translate the mature fruits of Schiller distance him at once from his culture and his jacobin youth. Acknowledging that those "admirers of Schiller, who have abstracted their conception of that author from the Robbers, and the Cabal and Love," will be disappointed in their "perusal" of this series of play, the preface to The Death of Wallenstein goes out of its way to specify which Schiller Coleridge is transporting to England (PW 2: 724). Moreover, these plays' rejection of "extraordinary incident" links the Wallenstein project to that more famous experiment of 1800, the preface to which foregrounds aesthetic distance as one of the prime new tenets of poetic theory. Willoughby long ago pointed out Wordsworth's indebtedness, via Coleridge, to Schiller's review of Burger's poetry (1791) for his " emotion recollected in tranquillity," and Crick has reminded us how Coleridge helped Wordsworth compose the "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" while he was finishing the last pages of Wallenstein in the spring.49 This congruence not only places Schiller at the forefront of English romanticism but suggests how the semblance of poetry relieves the pressure of revolutionary events. But if Wallenstein helps Coleridge to glimpse this position in 1800, it also keeps him from fully realizing it at this stage. Changes Coleridge effects in his rendition of Wallenstein, as well as his other literary activities of the period, suggest that Coleridge is not nearly as indifferent to Wallenstein, Napoleon, or the people as (his) absolute genius requires.
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ACTS OF TRANSLATION!
"If ever I imagined myself a conqueror, it was always to bring peace" (CJVi: 1214)
The act of translating Wallenstein prompts Coleridge to defend against himself as a conqueror in more ways than one. Not only must he face up to his own identification with the global ambitions of Wallenstein and Napoleon but he must face down the insubordination of his dealings with Schiller. "Bound " or "free" are fighting words for all kinds of international negotiations in this period. In his prefaces to these translations, Coleridge takes pains to depict himself as duty-bound and thus eager to acknowledge those "two or three short passages" where he has "been guilty of dilating the original." Likewise, when commenting on Schiller's achievement, he confines himself to the " more decorous " path of " pointing] out excellencies " rather than "defects" (PW 2: 725). Scholars who have evaluated Coleridge's translation portray him as taking more liberties in both domains than he acknowledges. Yet here too we should proceed with caution, for, as Crick shows, both sides have tended to overstate the case. Early critics have ascribed too much liberty to Coleridge's translation by measuring it against Schiller's first printed version (by Cotta at the end of June 1800) rather than one of the acting manuscripts from which Coleridge actually translated. 50 While different manuscripts, not "liberties taken - or improvements made - b y Coleridge," account for the "main differences" between Coleridge's and Schiller's versions, they do not absolve Coleridge on all counts. Indeed, the one-up-manship of translation is literal as well as critical in this case: Coleridge's Wallenstein both " scoops " Schiller's printed version (to use Crick's term) and, in some "German" minds, supersedes the original. As Coleridge reports to Godwin in 1823, "Tieck thought his version better than Schiller's" and, as Coleridge tells it, Schlegel told him in 1828 that he " preferred the translation to the original". 51 My interest in considering Coleridge's interventions is not to come out on either side of translation's master-slave dialectic. Coleridge characteristically places himself in both positions at different moments, and subsequent theorists of translation assert the futility of evaluating translation in such terms. Instead, by interpreting Crick's stylistic analysis of Coleridge's translation, we can identify inter-
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textual and intercultural pressures that seem to prod Coleridge to rewrite Schiller in particular ways. One way of framing the issue is to consider how far Coleridge follows Schiller when the remedy for literary excesses leads back to France. To point to an answer, we might say that Coleridge adopts — at times even fathers — the idealism of Schiller's model characters without endorsing their neoclassical style. The bulk of Coleridge's acknowledged, and many of his unacknowledged, revisions turn on a desire to disassociate Schiller from France.52 Crick and others emphasize how Coleridge grows most expansive when in the company of ideal characters. Max's "aria on the poetic language of the heart," inspired by Thekla's description of Seni's astrological tower, "caught [Coleridge's] imagination, and he seems to have wanted to colour it with something of his own poetry, over and above translation's necessity" (Crick, "Some Editorial and Stylistic Observations," p. 54). Coleridge himself acknowledges, indeed promotes, this "Nachdichtung" by noting that "in truth, Max's reply after the first nine lines is almost all my own, as are the first seven lines of Thekla's description. The remainder I take a little pride in as a specimen of translation, fully equal, and in diction and rhythmic feeling superior, to the original" {PW 2: 648-9; see also 2:725). Although not in this context, where it applies generally to Coleridge's imitation of "our elder writers," Coleridge's claim to "superior" diction is another paean to Shakespeare. Not only does " Coleridge read out of Schiller more of the bard than was there " but he accentuates Shakespearean vocabulary and characterization in order to downplay the conventions of neoclassical France (Crick, "Some Editorial and Stylistic Observations," p. 58). One symptomatic consequence: Max's love-dallying with Thekla's glove provokes the scorn of "an English lover." The scene is "terribly childish" and a clear instance of "modern French comedy" ("-for which, by the by, we want a word to distinguish it from the toto caelo different Comedy which Shakespeare and his contemporaries worked up into their Tragedy with such felicity of action and reaction" [PW 2: 642; original emphasis]). Shakespearean diction, as Crick points out, is not the only translating language of these plays. Coleridge also employs "the 'Gothick' feedback of so-called 'German tragedy'" and "the new familiar style" of the Lyrical Ballads, a combination which accounts "to a large extent" for the "unevenness" of the translation (Crick,
Coleridge's German revolution: Schiller'*s Wallenstein " Some Editorial and Stylistic Observations," p. 37). But what seems incompatible from a linguistic perspective comes together on the literary-political front: all three vocabularies suppress neoclassical tendencies whenever they arise. The most instructive example is Crick's analysis of Coleridge's use of the "plain style," which she sees as tempering Coleridge's (very occasional) Gothic excesses and insistent Shakespeareanizing (ibid., p. 69). "Where Schiller is plain, it is with the abstract simplicity of the idealist style," which she characterizes as decorative or abstract metaphor, banal personification, circumlocution, and tormented syntax (ibid., pp. 74, 69). "Where Coleridge is plain, it is with the experienced exactitude of the 'real language of men,' itself now a literary style" (ibid., p. 74). Coleridge avoids Schiller's allegories and personifications, transforms stock imagery by infusing it with lived experience, and revives cliched Sentenzen by making them a part of one's character. In the last case, Coleridge turns Gordon "from a Vessel of Wisdom into the sort of person who is prone to quoting wise saws and proverbs " (ibid., p. 71). In this, the project of the plain style accords not with Shakespeare's vocabulary but his advocacy of "characteristic language," the assumption that universals are best expressed through particulars and that speeches must be suited to characters. Throughout his translation, Coleridge is critical of Schiller's tendency to place high rhetoric in the mouths of reprehensible characters. "With what propriety," he writes in the margins of De Quincey's copy, "is this speech of profound moral insight put in the mouth of that stupid, foolish Illo?" - a passage he then cites as an instance of "the defect classed No. 1 in the blank [fly] leaf": "The speeches are seldom suited to characters - the characters are truly diversified and distinctly conceived - but we learn them from the actions and from the descriptions given by other characters, or from particular speeches" (PW 2: 628, 598, 599). Shakespeare may never blunder in this manner, but other playwrights are less consistent. Composing "fine" speeches that are not suited to specific characters "is a common fault of a man of genius whose genius is not however creative but ideative. There is just such another in my Maria as described by Osorio, the Character exists only in the description" (PW 2: 629). Coleridge accentuates the Shakespearean features of Wallenstein in part to ensure that he is importing a "native" play. But when he compares the two explicitly, Schiller never measures up to Shakespeare. This is hardly surprising; worth noting, however, is that
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Shakespeare is associated with the stage while Schiller is criticized for an antitheatrical strain. From the start Coleridge laments to Southey that Schiller's plays are "Poems, full of long Speeches" and thus for "The Theatre! The Theatre! my dear Southey! —it will never, never, never do!" [CL i: 575). Later he questions the effectiveness of Schiller's characterization of Wallenstein, which, when compared to Richard III or even Macbeth, is found wanting in theatrical effect (PW 2: 599). In fact, as much as he understands it intuitively, Coleridge worries about the " theatric comprehensibility " of Wallenstein's character. "This passing off of his real irresolution and fancydalliance for depth of Reserve and for Plan formed within the magic circle of his own inapproachable spirits is very fine; but still it is not tragic - nay scarce obvious enough to be altogether dramatic, if in this word we involve theatre-representation" (PW 2: 625).53 Ultimately, we know, the censure is reversed. When for the "purpose of theatric comprehensibility" characters must materialize their potentiality and be "furnished with a set of outside motives that actually pass with the groundling for the true springs of action," it is time to reform the theatre and/or ascend to higher ground. But for Coleridge in this stage, plays, and especially Shakespeare's plays, are made to be acted. Moreover, involvement with Schiller allows Coleridge to forecast things to come. A more discerning critic of Schiller than of himself, Coleridge diagnoses the problems of depicting ideals on stage. In his account, Wallenstein is the last time that Schiller achieves an effective balance between real and ideal. While Wallenstein curbs youth's passionate energies, it does not give free rein to superannuated classical tendencies. However, after Wallenstein, "Goethe and other writers injure by their theories the steadiness and originality of Schiller's mind" (TT, 16 February 1833, p. 181). "Disgusted with Kotzebuisms," Schiller "deserts from Shakespeare" and "re-introduce[s]" the "French stage." 54 Coleridge does not follow Schiller to France, but ultimately he goes further than Schiller in curbing the reality of theatre. Here, however, he seeks in Schiller, Shakespeare, and himself a balance that is amenable to theatre. One final modification indicates a more psychobiographical pressure operating on these translations. Coleridge's treatment of the character of Gordon captures his sympathy for commanding genius at this stage. Crick reaches the opposite conclusion in her analysis of the liberties Coleridge takes with Gordon's character. She sees in
Coleridge's German revolution: Schiller's Wallenstein Gordon another Coleridgean "self-portrait" as Hamlet, "hesitant, well-meaning, deep-feeling, ineffectual" (PW2: 647; Crick, "Some Editorial and Stylistic Observations," p. 71). I see in Gordon a Coleridgean self riven by his ambivalence about moving the world. With Max dead, Gordon assumes his mediating position. Though he agrees that the duke deserves to die for "unlearnfing] submission" (DoW 3. 2. 42), he has trouble accepting the wisdom of this verdict. Arguing against duty is love between boyhood friends and the attractive singularity of commanding individuals. He walked amidst us of a silent spirit, Communing with himself: yet I have known him Transported on a sudden into utterance Of strange conceptions; kindling into splendour His soul revealed itself, and he spake so That we looked round perplexed upon each other, Not knowing whether it were craziness, Or whether it were a god that spoke in him. (DoW 3. 2. 101-10)
Even with Wallenstein's treason before him, Gordon struggles to condemn the hubris of dreams. "We in our lucky mediocrity / Have ne'er experienced, cannot calculate, / What dangerous wishes such a height may breed / In the heart of such a man" (DoW 3. 2. 45—8). Behind such "lucky mediocrity" we discern the defiance of youth refusing to submit to conventional standards. We also glimpse the "wise passivity" of an emerging statesman who leaves it to time to determine whether "craziness" or "a god" speaks in agents of change (DoW 5. 4. 35; 3. 2. 109-10).
2
THE TRIUMPH OF LOYALTY
Gordon's psychobiographical account of Wallenstein reminds us of the strong family resemblance among the heroes of Schiller's, Wordsworth's and Coleridge's early plays. In his description of the youth Wallenstein as page at the court of Bergau, Gordon traces the familiar features of Rivers and Osorio in their younger days. Striking portraits of young heroes unable to maintain a boundary between fantasy and reality, they show that within every rebel lies a poet who prophesies, enacts, and renounces war. Coleridge represents their mirror image at this stage: poet as rebel, associated with commanding genius and leading parliamentary figures of the day.
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Translating Schiller by day and Pitt, Fox, and Sheridan by night during January through April of 1800 must have been a heady experience for Coleridge. At no later point is Coleridge so eager to play to a crowd, so inclined to view the world as a stage, so receptive to Napoleon. This confluence can be discerned in the way his political journalism echoes the context and thematics of Wallenstein. Theatrical images and analogies pepper his political analyses, as Karen Swann has argued, but only in part, I think, because literary culture is reading the revolution as theatre (see EOT 1: 33, 52, 90, 96, 113, 118).55 Coleridge is translating revolution and theatre simultaneously, at a time when parliamentary debates not only are cast as theatre but analyze Napoleon in ways congruent with Schiller's characterization of Wallenstein. In his newspaper articles, Coleridge depicts contemporary reality as an "eventful drama performing on the stage of the world" {EOT 1: 118) and evaluates the three central players of the day - Pitt, Washington, and Bonaparte - in terms of their poetic heroics (see EOT 1: 131-3, 207-16, 219-32). Like the play's, Coleridge's commanding genius of 1800 both encompasses its subsequent division into "tranquil times" and "times of tumult" and includes its later opposite, the absolute genius of art and intellect. This coupling is why Washington and Bonaparte, the two commanding geniuses of the day, are both characterized as poets in this period. (Pitt falls under no category of genius.) Like Wallenstein, they retain their "escort from the ideal world" in their "prophetic consciousness of future being " and imaginative ability to " body forth lofty undertakings" {EOT 1: 131). But their kinship to Wallenstein also suggests why and how they part company, for Bonaparte and Washington embody as individuals the warring tendencies within Wallenstein. Bonaparte's restless self-assertion and disregard for the means to his ends puts him on the path of the real(ist) Wallenstein. Only Washington, who "neither rushed before his age and Country, nor yet attempted to under-act himself," actually realizes Wallenstein's poetic potential. His knowledge of when and how to retire, by founding a university and decreeing "joyful fountains to play in gardens," makes him Max's ideal Wallenstein and Coleridge's artistic Khan {EOT 1: 229, 133). In his writings of 1800 Coleridge turns military commanders into poets. Through writing, he makes the poet a national hero. Coleridge affirms his general power to shape, not simply reflect, parliamentary
Coleridge*s German revolution: Schiller's Wallenstein and international events to the point of imagining his words having a decisive influence over Bonaparte. It is not enough that Bonaparte is eager to read Coleridge's "Character" of him, but this eagerness foreshadows Bonaparte's embrace of tyranny. As Erdman describes it, Coleridge responds to his editor's announcement that Bonaparte "had been extremely impressed with the Character of Pitt, & very anxious to see his own" with the "sad" forecast that "any dictator ' so childishly solicitous for the panegyric of a Newspaper Scribbler' would ' prove a Tyrant, & the deadliest enemy of the Liberty of the Press'" [EOT 1: 227). Two things are noteworthy about Coleridge's prescience. Although in a letter written to his brother in October 1803 Coleridge attributes this insight to 1800, Erdman notes that he is "mistaken" about the date. Letters written during March of 1800 "do not despair of making Bonaparte as good as Pitt." In other words, during the time that he is translating Wallenstein, Coleridge still recognizes the positive side of Bonaparte's commanding genius and his own duty to monitor it. He thus not only plays Max to Bonaparte's Wallenstein but equates himself with Bonaparte in their ability to move masses: "Since the Time of Junius no single Essay ever made more noise in a newspaper than this" {EOT 1: 226).56 Second, ambiguity over whether Coleridge failed to write or merely refused to publish his "Character of Bonaparte" is partially resolved through this translation. In a very real sense, Coleridge fulfills his promise to make "Bonaparte as good as Pitt" by publishing his "Character" as Wallenstein. However, the fact that in October 1800 Coleridge is still promising that his "Bonaparte will not loiter" suggests that he is not fully satisfied with Schiller's or Bonaparte's (not to mention his own) character. And the fact that in late fall of 1800 Coleridge begins another historical drama about military heroes, the fragmentary The Triumph of Loyalty, suggests that theatre remains the place to explore and become commanding genius as well as to confront France via Germany.57 As Wilkinson notes, the idea for this play originates in Lessing's summary in Hamburgische Dramaturgic of a Spanish play about the English Duke of Essex.58 The irresistible appeal of this play originates in the challenge voiced in a footnote transcribed in both English and German: "And I think, there cannot be a greater Proof of the little Encouragement this Age affords to Merit, than that no [English] Gentleman possest of a true Genius and Spirit of Poetry, thinks it worth his Attention to adorn so celebrated a Part of History
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with that Dignity of Expression befitting Tragedy in general, but more particularly, where the Characters are perhaps the greatest the World ever produced" (CJV, p. 869). Coleridge rushes in to meet this challenge without waiting to complete the play. With less than one act finished, he boasts to Poole in December 1800 of his plans "to go to London, & make a faint Trial whether or no I could get a sort of dramatic Romance which I had more than half finished upon the stage" [CL 1: 650). Even before then he drafts a title page that commemorates its all-star cast - Kemble and Siddons play the leading roles — and its being "first performed with universal applause at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on Saturday, February the 7th, 1801 " (PW 2: 1060). Besides revoking almost immediately his own vows to "never, never, never" "translate" for the theatre again, the composition and imagined performance of this play pick up on unfinished business from Wallenstein. In fact, The Triumph of Loyalty picks up where the Wallenstein trilogy both began and left off. Unlike Lessing's account or Coleridge's notebook description of its source, Coleridge's actual first act dwells almost exclusively on military and political issues, only at the very end introducing the love intrigue which dominates the Spanish play. Almost as if Coleridge transports himself back to the military world of the early scenes of Wallenstein (perhaps even to the first play of the trilogy which he read but never translated), he is once again among soldiers who delight in the active life. But with a difference. Having already lived out that tragedy, Coleridge makes this protagonist declare the fixity of his principles from the start. Though a military hero fresh from victory, Earl Henry instructs his impetuous brother, longing for revenge, that "the noblest part of valour" is "To suffer and obey" (TL 1. 1. 237-8). Coleridge revises the beginning of Coaello's play to feature an absolute commanding genius who knows the virtue of "intense Repose." The one recollected love scene makes Earl Henry sound like an ideal Wallenstein and an absolute Khan: " O h ! there is Joy above the name of Pleasure, / Deep self-possession, an intense Repose. / No other than as Eastern Sages feign, / The God, who floats upon a Lotos Leaf, / Dreams for a thousand ages; then awaking, / Creates a world, and smiling at the bubble, / Relapses into bliss." Such new beginnings also grant Coleridge the opportunity to imagine alternative outcomes for all these characters. In Lessing's summary of Coaello's play, Essex is executed before his innocence is proven; hence its tragedy and its title, Dar la vida por su
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Dama 0 el Conde de Sex (A Life Sacrificed for his Mistress or The Duke of
Essex). Either Coleridge means his title ironically or in his version the Essex figure would have enjoyed a happier end. Although not enough of the play exists to be sure, the latter seems likely in light of his description of the play as a "dramatic romance" (CL 1: 650). Part of what Coleridge appears to be reworking from Schiller is the necessity of Schiller's tragic view of history. While both Schiller and Coleridge seek to model the real on the ideal in their plays, Schiller explores the practical and philosophical impediments to this project while Coleridge stages its possibility. Both The Triumph of Loyalty and £apolya are commissioned as tragedy and end up as romance. How this happens will be explored more fully in the next chapter, but preliminary insight is gained by viewing the evolution of Coleridge's attitudes to the significance of Wallenstein. We know that deflation of commanding genius becomes increasingly central to Coleridge's "romantic" view of history and that this deflation requires the cultivation of vision combined with respect for the past. Within the trilogy, these three mindsets are represented by Wallenstein, Seni, and Octavio respectively but in an ambiguous, even ambivalent, fashion. As time passes, however, Schiller's Wallenstein and Octavio lose their multidimensionality in Coleridge's mind; later works type-cast them in ways congruent with Coleridge's polarized political categories. Wallenstein no longer evokes both sides of the commanding genius of 1800; instead, he gets compared, to his disadvantage, to figures like Richard III and Macbeth. Rather than looking for remedy within the ideal side of Schiller's Wallenstein, Coleridge denies its presence in him. Wallenstein is only a "shaping spirit of Ruin," itself a quotation from The Piccolomini, which Seni and Octavio come to counter (BL 1: 33). 59 By combining a spirit of prophecy with respect for the lessons of the past, Coleridge links Seni with Octavio and renders himself at once more optimistic and conservative than Schiller. Whereas Schiller expresses major reservations over the function of astrology, asking Goethe whether he should even include the description of Seni's tower at all, Coleridge delights in these passages, taking "more liberty than in any other part of the play - except perhaps in Gordon's character of Wallenstein" (PW 2: 647). 60 Through such embellishments he amends another of the play's four chief defects while introducing the task of Statesman's Manual and subsequent plays: "astrology is made prophetic, and yet treated ludicrously: the
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author as philosopher is in compleat discord with himself as Historian" {PW 2: 599). Not that Coleridge advocates astrological "superstition "; elsewhere he cites contemporary disbelief in it as one legitimate sign of enlightened progress {SM, pp. 84-7). His point is that astrology is less of a threat than is a nation, or statesmen, without dreams. In this sense, we can discern the "logic" by which Coleridge, in the second section of The Friend, is " tempted to add a passage from my own translation of Schiller's Wallenstein, the more so that the work has been long ago used up, as ' winding sheets for pilchards,' or
extant only by (as I would fain flatter myself) the kind partiality of the trunk-makers." The passage he cites (Act 5 scene 1, lines 93-114, from The Death of Wallenstein) is meant to confirm two interlocking claims: Cicero's claim that there exists "no people or nation" who have not "deemed that there are antecedent signs of future events, and some men capable of understanding and predicting them" and his foresight and skill in translating Wallenstein (F 1: 428-9). 61 Coleridge's promotion of prophecy requires discerning who are those "some men" capable of interpreting dreams. He finds them in the path of "ancient ordinance"; men who interpret prophecy in light of past events. In this way, too, Coleridge modifies Schiller's ambivalence toward Octavio, who is presented in an unflattering light.62 Coleridge admires Octavio from the start ("Octavio is very grand" [PW 2: 599])-so much so that he excises most of Wallenstein's moving expressions of grief over Octavio's betrayal of their friendship.63 He also reprints parts or all of his speech on ancient ordinance in several places in his work. This is the only speech from the translations that he singles out for more than one reprinting. It not only forms the ground note for Zjoipolya but comprises the headnote to the essay on Sir Alexander Ball and the antidote to Napoleon in The Friend (^1:121-2, 565). Echoing Burke's reflections, Octavio explains to Max why patience and respect for the past are the only valid prerequisites for statesmanship: The way of ancient ordinance, though it winds, Is yet no devious way. Straight forwards goes The lightning's path; and straight the fearful path Of the cannon-ball. Direct itfliesand rapid, Shattering that it may reach, and shattering what it reaches. My son! the road, the Human Being travels, That, on which BLESSING comes and goes, doth follow The river's course, the valley's playful windings,
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Curves round the corn-field and the hill of vines, Honoring the holy bounds of property! ... There exists An higher than the warrior's excellence (F 1: 565; ellipses are Coleridge's).
A poetic rendering of Burke's familiar claim that because human nature is "intricate," it is "absurd to talk of [the rights of man] as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction," (Reflections, p. 74), this passage provides the rationale for the aesthetic state's new allegiance to indirection and for imagination's mediating role.64 The "true rights of men" reside in a "kind of middle," where representation is not "too widely diffused." In a broader sense, this passage and its reappearances trace Coleridge's assimilation of Burke's and Schiller's reflections on revolution and theatre. While Coleridge comes to enter Burke's camp he does so through Schiller's mediation, for Schiller shifts the site of Burke's "middling" preferences from empiricism to idealism. Moreover, by locating Burke's "middle" state in his "aesthetic" state, Schiller puts the nation in theatre. Through Schiller's theatre, purged of its pessimism, Coleridge finds the means to revive Shakespeare and to compose romances of England. Wallenstein initiates and accompanies the changes that constitute the native genius of Coleridge's German mind. It unleashes the commanding ambitions that eventuate in the brief triumph and life-long project of Remorse.
CHAPTER $
A stageforpotential men
No title in the Coleridgean canon characterizes its subject so succinctly as does the "Remorse" of 1813. Even more than Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale," a title Coleridge praises for presenting a "peculiarly" illuminating "bill of fare before the feast," the title and play "Remorse" is worth pondering as foretaste - and lingering aftertaste - of Coleridge's involvement in theatre. Why dish out remorse to an audience hungering for sensational fare? By what stretch of imagination can remorse satisfy an impoverished playwright or his political-aesthetic schemes? Seamus Deane establishes one context for approaching the first question by surveying the period's philosophical interest in this moral trait. Although he does not mention Coleridge, his discussion of remorse as signifying attitudes toward revolution and criminality sets the stage for Coleridge's Remorse.1 A profitable approach to the second question considers the positioning of this play in Coleridge's middle stage of theatre. With Remorse (1813) Coleridge atones for the youthful enthusiasm of The Fall of Robespierre (1794) and Osorio (1797). Representing Coleridge's maturity in theatre, Remorse puts moral states, not actual or potential men, center-stage. The wisdom of this shift has raised lasting doubts about Coleridge's merit as playwright, yet the psychic and theatrical payoffs of Remorse should encourage us to take a second look at it. Apparently at times Coleridge can turn theatre, like remorse, to his advantage. But before exploring the significance of making theatre out of remorse, I wish to pause over the theatrical triumph of Remorse, which has been slighted even by those hoping to salvage Coleridge's imagination from the dejection of 1802. Its success, whether weighed on financial, psychological, theatrical, or poetical scales of the day, is substantial and represents one of the few times that Coleridge's accounts of his public reception coincide with historical records of the 94
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event. Lawrence Wynn and Joan Mandell Baum have substantiated "the treble chear of Claps" that greeted Coleridge's ears on " entering the Box on Saturday Night" at Drury Lane (CL 3: 430-1). They remind us that Remorse ran for twenty nights in London, appeared simultaneously and subsequently in the provinces and in America, saw three printings in the year of its debut, and received extensive and generally favorable coverage in the press and among the literati. 2 Between January 1813 and December 1823, Remorse was performed more than forty times, and chosen five times for benefits by members of the cast, twice at Drury Lane (the first for the original Ordonio, Alexander Rae). Not only canonical poets but anonymous reviewers hailed in Remorse the benchmark of poetic accomplishment in theatre and the potential rebirth of the English stage. 3 One reviewer outdistances Byron and Shelley's confident predictions for Coleridge's future in theatre by remarking that the "fanciful description and impassioned sentiment" of Remorse guarantee new triumphs "even [if the next] hero should be Kant himself and should talk nothing but Kantian from the first act to the last" (cited in Wynn, "Coleridge's Remorse," p. 19). Coleridge seems pleased equally by the role of Remorse in reforming the London stage and his financial condition. " I t 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." It also pleases himself: " I shall get more than all my literary Labors put together, nay, thrice as much, subtracting my heavy Losses in the Watchman & the Friend - 400^: including the Copy-right" (CL 3: 430-1, 436-7). Particularly captivating are two recurring details in the many historical accounts of the performance of Remorse: its success as theatre because of its poetry; the haunting sense, articulated by Southey, that had Remorse been accepted fifteen years earlier when it was submitted as Osorio to Sheridan, Coleridge might have had an "entirely different career" and personal history as a "happier man." 4 Timing is everything for theatrical and remorseful men. Occurring too late in his career to fill the gap that by then constituted his literary life, the performance of Remorse fades too quickly to alter assessments of him as necessarily "undramatic" because poetic. Satisfactions of remorse, however, prove fleeting — not simply for Coleridge. Indeed, after 1823, public regret is expressed over a state of theatre that can no longer support poetic plays like Remorse. Scholarly regret persists over a Coleridge who wallows in remorse
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and fails to own up to his tragic limitations. Yet for the Coleridge of early 1813, Remorse triggers no feelings of the kind. For once, his creation strikes a balance between popularity and respectability, sense and spirit, seriousness and play - in large part because no subject is closer to Coleridge's heart. Coleridge highlights the centrality of remorse to his play and life in a letter to Sou they written during the "endless Rat a Tat Tat at our black & bruised door": By REMORSE I mean the Anguish & Disquietude arising from the Selfcontradiction introduced into the Soul by Guilt - a feeling, which is good or bad according as the Will makes use of it. This is exprest in the lines chosen as the Motto [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! (R 1. 1. 20-4)] & Remorse is every where distinguished from virtuous Penitence." (CL 3: 433-4) Meaning to direct Sou they's attention to the "simplicity and Unity of the plot," this passage calls our attention to its centrality to Coleridge's moral physiognomy and the relief provided by his second stage. "He that can bring the dead to life again" refers to more than the restoration of one brother's love for another or the "dead palsy" of the public mind (0 2. 1. 140;/? 2. 1. 164). It atones for guilt arising from the death-in-life of his revolutionary dreams as well as more recent experiences of penury, broken relationships, and tarnished reputations.5 By spotlighting remorse, Coleridge connects his moral theories to his theatre projects by way of restoring potential men. As moral condition, remorse signifies the presence of free will and individual agency, the features that validate "man's erect form." Prose works written after this play stress even more clearly the relation between remorse and will. They treat remorse as a synecdoche for moral free agency by associating it with virtuous penitence and opposing it to "regret." Whereas regret is triggered by evil resulting from the "compulsion of circumstances," remorse is occasioned by "evil which has its ground or origin in the agent" (AR, p. 271). This "difference in kind" is what the "doctrine of modern Calvinism" and Unitarianism ignore. By presenting " a will absolutely passive,
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clay in the hands of a potter," these doctrines "destroy all will" and support "the Necessitarian scheme" (AR, p. 206).6 Whether defined as in the play or subsequent prose versions, however, the capacity to feel remorse is the minimal condition of potential man. To arouse remorse is to activate one's moral nature and thus to stand at the crossroads of absolute or commanding will. By embodying remorse on stage, Coleridge's characters portray the first step in proper acting, and Coleridge gains a captive audience for his two-stage program of national reform. This embodiment presents inactivity as public policy; the "awakening of remorse" in Ordonio is inseparable from the "victory of the persecuted meek over the tyrannically powerful." Those critics who divide the two issues into public and private thematics miss the political point of Coleridge's contemplative turn. 7 They also miss the ways that Remorse reflects on theatre and is consistent with his early plays. For at least in one respect The Fall of Robespierre prepares us for the (in)action to follow. As Coleridge explains in his "Preface" to The Fall, his way into history is through analysis of language and mind (PW 2: 495). This anatomizing of mind continues in Osorio (and his companion's piece, The Borderers), where audiences watch as calm men turn commanding before their eyes (PW 2: 519).8 But the transformation of Osorio into Remorse also highlights the deepened significance of remorse in Coleridge's life. As moral trait, remorse now distinguishes absolute from commanding reactions and, as play, takes as its focus not "great bad actions" but active inner states (PW 2: 496). Remorse stages the contemplative state of Coleridge's middle stage as an action that blurs the distinction between internal and external states while promoting the statesmanship of inactive men. The thematics of Remorse underscore its potential to revive a nation suffering from revolutionary excesses and subsequent dead palsies of mind. But Remorse also functions as personal remedy for " the Anguish & Disquietude arising from the Self-contradiction introduced into the Soul by Guilt." As play, Remorse highlights the self-defense through self-splitting that comprises subjectivity as theatre. As revision, it establishes Coleridge's "self-consistency" by modifying his jacobin sympathies and prior antagonism toward remorse - the latter record of which proves harder to efface, stamped as it is on Coleridge's son Hartley. For in 1797 Coleridge has not yet "overthrown the doctrine of Association, as taught by Hartley, and with it all the irreligious metaphysics of modern Infidels" (16 March 1801,
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CL 2: 706). Nor has he "snapped" definitively his "squeaking babytrumpet of sedition" (15 October 1796, CL 1: 240; 10 March 1798, CL 1: 397). Thus in Alhadra's necessitarian arguments and calls to fight oppression we catch echoes of a youthful enthusiast who has not fully adapted himself to the sober sentiments of Remorse. To a remarkable extent, Remorse preserves the heresies of Osorio but offers them to different effect. In this respect, John David Moore's point about the political polyvalency of Gothic applies to Coleridge's theatre in general. As the conjuring scene of Act 3 suggests, Remorse plays to the "two sides" of human nature. It promotes "proper" sentiment through spectacular means and features internal states that are both more violent and more lasting than external acts. No writer knows better than Coleridge the secret of Alvar's "calm but commanding eye." Who needs revenge when remorse "clingfs] with poisonous tooth, inextricable / As the gored lion's bite" (R 1. 2. 310-12) ?
Scholars of Coleridge and romanticism should take a cue from the fate of Ordonio and his creator: inevitably we must face up to Remorse. Doing so foregrounds the work and play of Coleridge's theatre as a thoroughgoing investigation of action. This investigation is prompted by three sets of anxiety collected under the term, commanding genius: the French Revolution, the state of theatre, conventions of gender. Viewed in this context, the inactivity and antitheatricalism of Coleridgean heroes emerge as intended effects of theatre's mirroring of mind and intervention into politics. What also emerges is the increasing activity of female characters, registered even in the progression of titles from "The Fall of Robespierre " to "Osorio" to "Remorse" to "Zapolya." Once active men give way to contemplative positions, women are left to run the show. Some sense of the ensuing panic is captured in a subtitle to £apolya: "Usurpation Ended; or, She Comes Again."
I
A FAREWELL TO AVENGING ARMS
"What boots a weapon in a withered arm? I fix mine eye upon thee, and thou tremblest!" (#5- 1. 153-4)
Using dramatic action to critique revolutionary actors is not new with Coleridge, but it is relatively new to studies of him. It is no
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exaggeration to claim that all of Coleridge's plays were prompted by contemporary political events and that they frame their anatomies of mind within discussions of national reform. The Fall of Robespierre is only the most direct in acknowledging its historical intervention. Completed less than four weeks after Robespierre's death on 28 July 1794, The Fall of Robespierre critiques the events of 8-11 Thermidor through what will prove to be Coleridge's customary point of entry, rhetorical analysis — what he might call the action of speech. But Zjapolya is hardly less coy or rhetorical about its political motivations. Written a few months after Waterloo and subtitled "The Usurper's Fortune" and "The Usurper's Fate," £apolya commemorates the end of tyranny in France and the prescience of Burke's constitution of England. Osorio and Remorse displace the revolutionary focus of these plays only slightly and to the most predictable spot. Their emphasis on familial disfunction unearths the seeds of national unrest, which bear visible fruit in its " public theme," the Moors' persecution by the Catholic Inquisition and Spanish state. Reading backwards, we can say that Zjapolya confirms the concentric logic that governs the interchangeability of Coleridge's domestic and national scenes. In this last play, reuniting the nuclear family is restoring the legitimate king. Zapolya puts it the other way around by claiming that when a nation is ruled by a usurper tyrant, parents "have no joy in their young men" (£1. 1. 527). Or, in Lady Sarolta's pointed summation, "None love their country but who love their home" (£ 11. 4. 393).9 Opening and closing his playwrighting career with plays responding directly to events in France, Coleridge could hardly be more straightforward in highlighting the connection between revolution and theatre. Far less straightforward is what these plays indicate about Coleridge's attitudes toward revolutionary acts. Whereas Burke uses the idiom of theatre consistently to castigate the French Revolution, Coleridge composes plays that situate themselves on both sides of Burke's oppositions between tragedy and farce, aristocracy and democracy, statesman and actor, England and France. What is clear is that the more Coleridge favors a conservative idea of England, the more he endorses Burke's reservations about action through represented action on stage. I wish to examine the progressive development of these plays' diminishing support for action by way of emphasizing a general and a local point. Coleridge's plays examine the problematics of action in a revolutionary age more comprehensively than
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any of his other writings. The language in which Coleridge eventually foregrounds sluggish statesmen retains its German accent. Moore's analysis of "Coleridge and the 'Modern Jacobinical Drama'" puts us in position to connect these two issues. He highlights several conditions in Osorio that both occasion and complicate Coleridge's Remorse of 1813.10 For "it is odd," he remarks, "to find a man who had, since 1802, been exerting his talents to disassociate himself from past Jacobinism and who had turned against popular dramatic forms for pronounced political and moral reasons, suddenly reviving a play that, with its apparent debt to Schiller's seditious Die Ranker and its appeal to the expectations of audiences deluged with popular dramas, could easily have directed the public's attention to the very Jacobinical ideals that its author had disavowed" (Moore, ibid., p. 456). Moore attempts to resolve this paradox by arguing both that Coleridge was aware of the "political flexibility" of the Gothic format and that he objects less to Gothic elements in drama than to Jacobinical uses of them. On the first point, Moore follows Ronald Paulson in stressing the convenient ambiguities of Gothic form.11 "The Gothic villain [is] easily transformed from the tyrant aristocrat of the old order into the great upstart of the new order - Napoleon" (Moore, ibid., p. 449). Therefore, what in Osorio served to indict Pitt and the aristocratic tyranny of English rule condemns Napoleon and the Reign of Terror in Remorse. But Coleridge also modifies standard conventions of Gothic, particularly its focus on the returning outcast wronged by the usurping tyrant. Rather than imitate his prototype, Karl Moor, who claims vengeance as his trade, the hero of Osorio/Remorse arrives intent upon reform. In his first appearance he renounces revenge and determines to " rouse ... Remorse " in the soul of his oppressor. The importance of this renunciation becomes even more pronounced, but less related to Gothic, when viewed in relation to the plays of Coleridge's first stage. Despite the clear penchant in The Fall of Robespierre to stage what Reeve Parker terms "events of discourse" rather than revolutionary acts, the events which its discourse sanctions are commanding and unabashedly violent acts of patriotism.12 In fact, here Coleridge inverts the subsequent "natural" order of things by fearing oratory more than "avenging arms." 13 "Vengeance is mine" say all the good men in this state. "Sad memory" commands it as the spirit of Danton "pour[s its] daring vengeance in [Legendre's] heart" (FoR 1. 45) and the blood of his
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brother-in-law implores Tallien to wreak "vengeance on these patriot murderers" (FoR i. 237).14 Tallien proves his patriotism by swearing by "the holy poniard, that stabbed Caesar" to "probe" with his dagger Robepierre's "heart" (FoR 1. 272-3). Lest we miss it, he repeats the point to the Convention: " I too wear a dagger; / And if the representatives of France, / Through fear or favour, should delay the sword / Of justice, Tallien emulates [Brutus's] virtues; / Tallien, like Brutus, lifts the avenging arm; Tallien shall save his country" (FoR 2. 273-8). At this stage brave men trade in vengeance because it is authorized by the state through its assembled representatives. When Robespierre grows too commanding, the nation "call[s] aloud for vengeance" and, when finally purged of that "last worst traitor," "shall wield the thunder-bolt of vengeance - [France] shall blast / The despot's pride, and liberate the world!" (FoR 2. 245; 3. 211—13). Three years later, Osorio concludes on the same rousing note. Though no longer the unequivocal trait of goodness, hegemony, youth, or men, vengeance remains the play's last word. Alhadra voices it for all subordinated people: "Knew I an hundred men / Despairing, but not palsied by despair, / This arm should shake the kingdoms of this world ... Till desolation seem'd a beautiful thing, / And all that were and had the spirit of life / Sang a new song to him who had gone forth / Conquering and still to conquer" (0 5. 1. 311-13, 318-21). By the time he writes Remorse, Coleridge regrets these words and, though he does not retract them, he repositions them to a less prominent part of the play. In Moore's account, this is the only one of Coleridge's comparatively minor revisions that alters the "political tone" of Osorio by "extinguish[ing] what was a live spark retained from the Jacobinical fire of The Fall of Robespierre" and Die Rduber
(Moore, " Coleridge and the ' Modern Jacobinical Drama,'" p. 463). But this view misses two crucial points about the work of Remorse. It renders Coleridge far too passive in bringing Remorse to the stage, as if he simply contented himself with the flexibility of Gothic and his earlier rehabilitation of it rather than pursuing a course of revision that stretches from 1807 to 1813. And it misconstrues the nature of Coleridge's indebtedness to Schiller and thus the jacobin risk in mounting this play. By 1813 the "apparent debt [of Remorse] to Schiller's seditious Die Rduber" is, from Coleridge's point of view, precisely that: an apparent resemblance. Overshadowing the "first fruits" of Schiller's youth - " I had almost said of his boyhood" - is
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the mature produce of Wallenstein (BL 2: 210). Thus while Osorio reflects the stormy politics and poetics of the 1780's Schiller, Remorse features the Schiller of the 1790s and the Coleridge of a decade later. Most of the changes point to the pressure of Wallenstein on Coleridge's Remorse, even the change in title. When Coleridge explains to Southey what he means "by REMORSE," he draws on a cardinal, though equivocal, "law of Spirit" in The Piccolomini: "in the right / Is every individual character / That acts in strict consistence with itself. / Self-contradiction is the only wrong" (Pice. 4. 7. 191—4). In Remorse Alhadra and the Moors bear the brunt of Coleridge's change of heart regarding France, while Alvar and Teresa manifest the traces of Coleridge's allegiance to Germany. Soon we will explore Maria's transformation into Teresa, but for now we watch Alvar become a less commanding man. At this second stage, vengeful arms must "wither" so that the "voice of conscience " can be perceived. Though in both versions Albert/Alvar functions to oppose remorse to revenge, in 1813 Alvar's remorse is significantly toned down. With good reason, since the difference between the two is hard to discern in Osorio. Whereas there we first hear of Albert and remorse in the second scene, when he rehearses his curse in all its gruesome detail (0 1. 2. 319-21), in Remorse Alvar not only opens the play displaying his nationalist credentials-"Hail, Spain! Granada, hail! once more I press / Thy sands with filial awe, land of my fathers!" - he explains more dispassionately why it "behoves" him to "rouse within [Ordonio] / Remorse! that I should save him from himself"-or from a more commanding Albert (R 1. 1. 8-9, 18-19). The clearest indication of Alvar's intervening aesthetic education appears in the only new scene composed for the occasion, the second scene of Act 2. Here Alhadra visits the disguised Alvar before Ordonio's arrival and learns from him the error of her ways. Unaware of his true identity as the elder, and presumed murdered, son of Lord Velez, she mistakes his Moorish garb for what it is and claims "The oppressed brethren of thy blood have need / Of such a leader" (R 2. 2. 3-4). Alvar declines by according to time, not men, the capacity to reorder the world. ... Of this be certain: Time, as he courses onward, still unrolls The volume of concealment. [-] I sought the guilty,
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And what I sought I found: but ere the spear Flew from my hand, there rose an angel form Betwixt me and my aim. With baffled purpose To the Avenger I leave vengeance and depart! (R 2. 2. 8-10, 15-19)
Like all real friends of beauty and truth who impart to the world "a Direction towards the good, and [allow] the quiet rhythm of time [to] bring it to fulfillment [«£]," Alvar leaves vengeance to heaven and commanding actors to shift by themselves (AE, p. 59). The passivity of Alvar's character accentuates the femininity underlying romantic masculinity and the increasing polarization of absolute and commanding traits. Unlike Coleridge's early plays, Remorse is unwilling to tolerate physical violence, no matter how seemingly justified; the new hero refuses to take justice - certainly not Legendre's "fate-fraught tube of Justice" - into his hands (FoR 3. 83). Stressing this polarity is one point of the characterological differences between Alvar and Ordonio, who not only embody dichotomous reactions to physical activity but whose physical embodiment manifests contrasting internal states. Alvar's "calm" signifies a conscience in harmony with will while Ordonio's "restlessness" betrays his unacknowledged guilt.15 It is also the specific point of having Ordonio pronounce "vengeance" only in Remorse. In the most gratuitously violent scene in both versions, when Osorio/ Ordonio lures Ferdinand/Isidore to a cavern in order to murder him, Ferdinand's resistance allows Osorio to "kill [him] pleasantly" but Isidore's resistance arouses Ordonio's "vengeance" and "beckons" him onward "with a warrior's mien" (O4. 1. 143;/? 4. 2. 162-3). Yet despite the energy that Remorse invests in denouncing vengeance and the commanding logic that underlies it, in places the play stresses real resemblances between its structuring oppositions. Even in Remorse, Alvar is called "commanding," and in both versions Osorio/ Ordonio views death as less of a revenge than is living a life of remorse. These qualifications to the most clearly polarized figures in the play are intensified by its ambivalent treatment of the Moors. In true English imperialist fashion, the "Moors" are associated with the "wrong" side of every structuring opposition. They are epitomized in a sword-wielding woman whose first and last acts bespeak revenge. The first time we meet Alhadra she is "clutch[ing] a dagger" and restraining herself from "hurl[ing]" the Inquisitor "down the rugged precipice" (R 1. 2. 186-96). The last time we see
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her she is plunging that dagger into the man who has murdered her husband. A hold-over from earlier jacobin plays, Alhadra responds when her husband's sword "say[s] Vengeance!" (R 4. 3. 89-90). At this stage, however, she is clearly wrong to do so, especially after Alvar's careful instructions. On the other hand, compared to Ordonio's "motions," Remorse portrays Alhadra's as almost an "act." Ordonio's necessitarianism and misanthropism make him a brute, while Alhadra's maternal feelings almost make her a "potential man." Twice Alhadra stresses the concentric logic that requires her vengeful acts. If Ordonio had "sent [his] dogs of hell / To lap [her children's] blood" as well as her husband's, she would "have hardened / [Her] soul in misery, and have had comfort." Alhadra "need[s] the sympathy of human faces, / To beat away this deep contempt for all things, / Which quenches [her] revenge" (R 5. 1. 237-9; 4- 3- I I ~ I 3)- 1 6 1^ is some credit to Coleridge that he maintains such distinctions in 1813. To rouse revenge in the oppressed is to foster, not extinguish, hope, for its opposite is not remorse but despair. Unlike Ordonio, who scorns human life as a justification for revenge ("The death of a man - the breaking of a bubble - 'Tis true I cannot sob for such misfortunes"), Alhadra's revenge expresses social and parental commitments. Yet what Coleridge gives with the right hand, he takes with the left. However necessary, the Moors' acts can only be motions since they spring from fundamental errors of gender and faith. The Moors' doctrinal errors along with Alhadra's masculinity put them in league with their enemy - another instance of extremes meeting in both versions of this play. Owing to their joint faith in a commanding nature grounded in necessity, the Moors resemble Osorio/Ordonio and thus are "beasts in the shape of men." Portrayed more sympathetically than Osorio's brutish activity, their motions are condemned by the higher claims of Christianity. Fittingly, Albert's servant, Maurice, voices these claims in his plea for the Moors to spare the life of the Inquisitor. "He's a fallen foe! / Come, come, forgive him!... Nay, Mahomet taught mercy and forgiveness. / I am sure that he did!" (0. 5. 1. 82-3). Put this way, Remorse leaves no doubt about who wins this moral contest. In refusing to forgive Ferdinand, the Moors not only act unChristianly but imitate the French populace who, having "destroy'd their master," "know not yet what freedom means" (0 5. 1. 76-7). Yet doubt lingers, even in this revised version, in the words chosen to
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answer Maurice's appeal. Christian mercy may triumph in the spiritual world, but it is a poor substitute for action or the potency of men. Alhadra puts it most forcefully in Osorio, by characterizing the "soul of man" according to the "law of Mahomet": "ambition, glory, thirst of enterprize / The deep and stubborn purpose of revenge, / With all the boiling revelries of pleasure." Extrapolating from these traits, she ventriloquizes Mahomet's attitude toward Christianity: "And that Being / Who made us, laughs to scorn the lying faith, / Whose puny precepts, like a wall of sand, / Would stem the full tide of predestined Nature!" (0 5. 1. 85-95) • But t n i s critique remains audible in the revised version of the speech she gives to rally the Moors to avenge her husband's death. In order to "work / An honourable deed," these "warriors of Mahomet" must take off the "slave's garb" to display not their religious affiliations but their manhood. " Curse on these Christian robes! / They are spell-blasted: and whoever wears them, / His arm shrinks wither'd, his heart melts away, / And his bones soften" (R. 4. 3. 27-34). Coleridge's ambivalence about the "puny precepts" of Remorse fades, at least on the surface, in £apolya. Composed in the glow of time's apparent censure of commanding genius, ^apolya commemorates the closeting of Napoleon on St. Helena and Coleridge's renewed hopes for the stage. " [Zapolya] will not be as interesting in the Closet, as the Remorse - I mean, that it is less a Poem - but I hope, it will be proportionally more so on stage." Facilitating its interest, in the counter-intuitive way that Coleridge comes to define theatric interest, is the clarity of the distinctions /japolya makes between commanding and absolute genius, brute and potential man, tyrant and legitimate king. What divides the two camps is their attitude toward time: those who act impetuously versus those who "keep the life-spark warm of future action / Beneath the cloak of patient sufferance" (£1. 1. 120-1). Against Coleridge's better artistic judgment, he allows twenty years to elapse between Parts I and II in order to stress the merits of passing time.17 Act 3 memorializes this passing by retracting the most sacred words of revolutionary enthusiasm. To Bethlen's query "if haply I have come, the rightful heir / Of vengeance," the voice from the cave replies, " Retract thine idle spear, / And wait obedient!" Make "sacrifice" in the name not ofliberte, egalite\fraternite'but " Patience! Truth! Obedience!" (£11. 2. 1. 177-8, 182-3, !99)Such instruction, and its projected interest for the stage and state,
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is all the more striking given the thematic task £apolya sets itself. No mere analysis of potential men or the domestic sphere, Zjipolya sets an oppressed nation and king on stage and seeks to restore them without acts of vengeance. In Part i, following the king's untimely and suspicious death, Emerick defies his brother's appointment of Kiuprili, Queen Zapolya, and himself as co-regents of the realm and usurps the throne of Illyria. The rest of the action turns on regaining the throne for its rightful heir, the king's son, Bethlen/Andreas, who, new-born at the time of his father's death, has now arrived at maturity. The solution is tyrannicide, which, because of its " apparent resemblance" to regicide and its promotion of violence, is always a sticky subject for Coleridge.18 Coleridge handles it in his prose by instancing tyrannicide as the most unconfoundable of the unconfoundable differences between an action and a series of motions and by claiming that anyone who mistakes it for regicide is an unfit subject of the realm. The dramatic addition is to stage-manage it so that the action requires virtually no motion at all. Spectators are protected from misconstruing this act by several thematic prophylactics. First, only spectators fit for doctor or madhouse could fail to see that Emerick is a brute and Bethlen a potential man. Emerick's public usurpation stems from his violation of every private duty. He not only participates in the death of his brother (King Andreas) and attempts to kill his sister-in-law (Queen Zapolya) and his infant nephew (Bethlen/Andreas) in the first part of the play, he attempts the rape of his "dearest friend's" (Casimir) wife (Lady Sarolta) and Casimir's death in the second. In contrast, Bethlen pledges himself to find his lost mother, remains loyal to his adoptive father (Old Bathory), and defends the "outraged modesty" of village maidens from the "gross insults" of Casimir's servants (£11. i. i. 115-16). Yet to ensure that their difference is seen as acquired, not preordained, £apolya at one point reminds us that Bethlen and Emerick are cut from the same cloth. Lady Sarolta explains that Bethlen's foster-father "hid the secret" of his parentage from him, "For he perceived thy thoughts as they expanded, / Proud, restless, and ill-sorting with thy state!" (£11. 1. 1. 405-7). To show that Bethlen is finally "worthier of the throne / By virtue than by birth" he must prove his respect for elders and receptivity to divination. The youth obliges by following his (unknown) mother's command: "Leave then to Heaven / The work of Heaven: and with a silent spirit / Sympathize with the powers that work in silence!" (£ 11. 3. 1.
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92-102). By assenting to such lessons, Bethlen establishes his "paternity" as his mother's, not uncle's, child. For "after such long interval of hopeless and silent resignation," she has been "commanded, " by dreams in which " Heaven's especial hand " is detected, to return to the scene of Bethlen's abandonment (£11. 2. 1. 45-52). When, after awaiting the proper time, " [t]he light flash [es] from Heaven" and deeds must be done, Bethlen is restored to the throne primarily through the actions of others. Although his deeds are "gallant" enough to be manly, actual killing is done according to, and in order to re-establish, the proper order of things: by sons of warriors not contemplative men. Kiuprili's rebel son Casimir kills Emerick in order to atone for his "parricide" as well as his earlier treason to the state. His act restores his filial obedience, even his father's virility, and thus the motherland's "joy in its young men." Beyond this, though not technically responsible for Emerick's death, Bethlen implores his mother's pardon for his share in the deed (£ 11. 4. 1. 174-6). Not only Zapolya but £apolya absolves him from all responsibility in its otherwise unnecessary penultimate scene. Emerick is already dead when "with one voice" the "assembled chieftains" of the realm depose Emerick and withdraw "the protection of the law" from him. Backed by the nation, Emerick's death is legal and uncommanding, for justice is not the action of singular hands. The portrayal given by £apolya of the legitimate state lays to rest all the youthful enthusiasm of Coleridge's first stage. Queen Zapolya's parting words at the end of the Prelude sum up Coleridge's mature reflections on revolution and the logic of indirection that underlies his second stage (£ 1. 1. 530-6). With few noticeable regrets, 2ja,polya retracts the safeguards of The Fall of Robespierre by awarding to "heaven" the tasks of vengeance and of deliberative assemblies. What in The Fall made avenging acts lawful was that they enacted the will of the people. In ^apolya constitutional monarchy guarantees a liberty that effectually leaves its people not defenseless — for Emerick was deposed — but speechless. "By wholesome laws to embank the sovereign power" and by "prevention / Of lawless will to amass and guide the flood / In its majestic channel, is man's task / And the true patriot's glory!" It is also the playwright's challenge. Plays like £apolya seek to embank spectators' floods of emotion by portraying a less commanding image of sovereign power. When such plays fail, theatre must be abandoned altogether, for "men" are
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"least themselves in the mad whirl of crowds / Where folly is contagious, and too oft / Even wise men leave their better sense at home / To chide and wonder at them when returned" (£ i. i. 368-72).
2
THE PARTIAL SUBJECT OF THEATRE
"Act and appear, as time and prudence prompt thee: I shall not misconceive the part thou playest." (£1. 1. 122-3)
It is one thing to take to the stage to discredit commanding actions in a revolutionary age. It is quite another to do so by way of discrediting commanding media like the stage. Much like cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, the plots, not merely the unintended effects, of Coleridge's plays portray antitheatricalism as the ideal state of mind, stage, and state. Increasingly, Coleridge's critique of action is made through a thematized resistance to acting. What marks characters as evil is their status as actors, made manifest in their histrionics, impetuosity, and duplicity. In contrast, good characters are univocal, patient, and transparent, serving as models of mind to the extent that they do not let matter get in the way. Zjipolya pinpoints the challenge of embodying the legitimate subject of Coleridge's second stage on stage: "Be thy whole soul transparent! so the Light, / Thou seekest, may enshrine itself within thee!" (£11. 2. 1. 200-1). Yet transparency is hardly the effect of Coleridge's theatre nor even an unambivalent goal of its representations. The above oracular pronouncement is set in a Gothic scene of haunted forests, mysterious caverns, and werewolves, "wild, romantic, and somewhat terrible." 19 It is fair to say that Coleridge's theatre discredits theatricality by capitalizing on it. As contemporary accounts of Remorse attest, the strategy pays off; the conjuring scene steals but also secures the show.20 Sometimes Coleridge orchestrates this feature of his plays, sometimes it controls him. In either case, his plays endorse on a conscious level what their enactment refutes — that the best minds "rest content between thought and reality" and do not "impress their preconceptions on the world without" (BL 1: 32). This difference of genius not only distinguishes good characters from bad but comes under psychological discussion in these plays. Through their analyses of dream states and of the fine lines between fantasy
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and reality, illusion and delusion, Coleridge's plays thematize the subject of theatre in the process of analyzing subjectivity as theatre. 21 Such subjects, especially as they are imaged in these plays, threaten to spin out of Coleridge's control. To ignore the conflicts that these subjects enact and reflect minimizes the play, as well as the seriousness, of Coleridge and his plays. Coleridge, I believe, would lament this critical neglect of his periodic lapse of poetic control because the latter constitutes much of the relief he finds in theatre. His persistent stance toward theatre is closer to Burke's initial response to the French Revolution, "gazing with astonishment" without "knowing whether to blame or applaud." 22 His plays censure on one level what they applaud on another — doubling, illusion, loss of self in the hauntings of self. In this respect, Remorse renders perceptible Coleridge's gratitude to theatre generally for "bringing] the dead to life again." None the less, at their most proper, the plays of Coleridge's second stage do not have a good thing to say about theatricality. The legitimate heroes of this stage repress the questions that Wallenstein poses prior to his fall into action. To his doubts concerning boundaries between appearance and being, dream and act, motive and consequence, Coleridge's heroes affirm, "Act and appear, as time and prudence prompt thee. / I shall not misconceive the part thou playest." Their assurance is grounded in several dramatic revisions to Wallenstein. His inner conflict gets polarized and externalized in Ordonio and Alvar, Bethlen and Emerick.23 His concern that the world cannot distinguish between acting and being is laid to rest by these plays' insistence that only bad characters dissemble, only bad characters play-act. Ordonio's and Emerick's commanding genius has everything to do with their penchant for acting. Maria calls Osorio a "most consummate actor," whose "power to deceive" is "so vast" that she "never could be safe" (0 4. 2. 264-5), while Bethlen defuses one tangible consequence of such power, rape, with these magical words: King Emerick is an actor. Lady, be calm! fear not this king of the buskin! A king? Oh laughter! A king Bajazet! That from some vagrant actor's tiring-room Hath stolen at once his speech and crown. (£n. 3. 1. 3!5-18) Linking the critique of revolutionary action to an indictment of
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exhibitionism, seduction, and the stage clears the way for the absolutism of imagination. But even Coleridge's best characters reveal striking improprieties and, in so doing, admit other parts of the allure of theatre and the reality of subjectivity for Coleridge. The plots of Osorio, Remorse, and Zjapolya are obsessed with questions of identity, not simply mistaken identities but mistaking identity. Not surprisingly, given the gendered assumptions underlying the distinction between "being" and "appearing," female characters prove hardest to read in this regard. " Natural" dissemblers, even the most virtuous woman in Coleridge's plays resembles a "traitress" as much as an angel.24 But two less predictable consequences for men follow from Coleridge's version of the " undecidability of woman" in his plays. Firstly, the most moral men reveal themselves to be the worst readers of character, since bad men do not care about such distinctions and " simple, inexperienced " women "can see [men] as [they] are" (£ n. 4. 1. 70-1). Secondly, absolute genius is master of disguise. Critics have long been troubled by Alvar's blindness to Teresa's constancy, especially since his alleged insight into character authorizes his pursuit of his brother's reform.25 But what does it mean that the "voice of conscience" appears disguised? By donning Moorish robes at the height of the Moors' persecution, Alvar treats religious and ethnic oppression in a remarkably cavalier fashion. Alhadra's expression of good faith should rouse remorse in our hero's soul: "If what thou seem'st thou art / The oppressed brethern of thy blood have need of such a leader" (R 2. 2. 3-4). Once activated, remorse should also arise over the several "pious frauds" Alvar stagesdeceiving everyone about his identity, agreeing to "play the conjuror," and prolonging the tortures of anxiety suffered variously by his beloved and his brother. On one hand, a "wizard " who "plays the sorcerer" in order to "dupe" everyone; on the other, the play's leading moral man. Clearly, Coleridge, who himself dressed like a conjuror while translating Schiller's plays, is indulging in theatrical highjinks at everyone's expense. That Coleridge also takes Alvar's exemplarity very seriously, however, can be seen in revisions to Osorio and the efforts Remorse takes to dramatize the distinction between illusion and delusion.26 Remorse features a Coleridge so much less willing than in Osorio to acknowledge that posing is a part of subjectivity that, according to Reeve Parker, the stage version " kills" the interest of the earlier play.
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While Albert agonizes over the apparent discrepancy between what Maria seems and is, he registers no parallel anxiety about the real deception of his appearance. He "unfearingly / Trustfs] this disguise " as a necessary expedient in, and sign of the innocence of, his plot against Osorio (0 2. 2. 191-2). Just how innocently he views his being disguised is suggested by his censure of Osorio for relying on his: " [Osorio] doth believe himself an iron soul, / And therefore puts he on an iron outward / And those same mock habilments of strength / Hide his own weakness from himself" (O2.2. 161—4). By judiciously removing this speech and restructuring the scene, Remorse keeps the Moor from calling the Spaniard black. Immediately after Alvar rejects Alhadra's call to be a Moorish commanding genius, he renounces his disguise (though not in her hearing). At this point aware, and sorry, that everyone is under false pretenses, Alvar mistakes contingent for existential conditions in believing that more authentic ground lies elsewhere. "Yes, to the Belgic states / We will return. These robes, this stained complexion, / Akin to falsehood, weigh upon my spirit" (R 2. 2. 23-5). Frederick Burwick's main point that illusion, not delusion, is "the proper engagement of the imagination thematically endorsed and dramatized in Remorse" bolsters his conclusions regarding the morality of Alvar's character and the respectability of Coleridge's theatre (Illusion and the Drama, p. 268). The will's relative control over the mind, which, according to Burwick, distinguishes Coleridge's definition of dramatic illusion from SchlegePs, also differentiates "good" characters from " b a d " ones in Remorse (ibid., p. 197). Alvar and Teresa are opposed to Ordonio and Valdez who, by lacking "volitional control over their own fancy[,] fail to comprehend the rational clarity of perception of those who do" (ibid., p. 269). By assuming that he can compel belief in Alvar's death through staging a conjuration, Ordonio misjudges Teresa's fanciful nature and the proper effect of theatre: not belief but willing suspension of disbelief. In the event, only Valdez is duped by such spectacles. Teresa, by absenting herself from the scene, and Alvar, by directing and condemning it, demonstrate their control of their faculties. Teresa's response to Ordonio's leading question regarding her belief in "preternatural influence" makes the relevant affective distinction. " Say rather that I have imagined it / A possible thing: and it has sooth'd my soul / As other fancies have; but ne'er seduced me / To traffic with the black and frenzied hope / That the
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dead hear the voice of witch or wizard" (R 3. 1. 23—7; see Burwick, ibid., p. 275). Burwick's reading of the commentary on illusion and delusion provided by Remorse suggests one way that Coleridge's plays take up the subject of theatre. But in the process it oversimplifies the nature of subjectivity analyzed in these plays, for "rational clarity of perception" hardly describes any Coleridgean character.27 Moreover, any defense of Coleridge mobilized around "volitional control of the imagination" is bound to repress the play of his mind and theatre. In the case of Remorse, we see this play most graphically in discourse around the fact that Alvar paints. As Coleridge argues elsewhere, painting is the nearest correlative to dramatic illusion, for it too achieves that psychic state in which spectators know but do not feel the difference between semblance and reality. As represented in Osorio I Remorse, Albert/Alvar's painting is meant to signal the exemplary balance of his mind. In contrast to a Maria (or Teresa of Act 1) consumed by fancy and an Osorio/Ordonio consumed by guilt, what keeps Albert/Alvar unconsumed by "love, and grief, and indignation" is his ability to externalize it. In his servant's clumsy formulation, "You are a painter, one of many fancies! / You can call up past deeds, and make them live / On the blank canvas" (R 2. 2. 42—4). As a component of character, then, Alvar's status as painter preserves him from Coleridge's analysis of Macbeth's and Hamlet's physiognomy and fate. Alvar is neither trapped by " an insufficiently strong imagination in search of evidences of its strength," nor by an overheated imagination that takes no relief in "reality." 28 But what does it mean to cast painting in the guise of theatre by portraying the hero not as an actor but as an artist? And what does it mean that the picture that Alvar paints not only deludes Teresa but is itself a fabrication, as Parker points out? Before addressing these questions, we need to recognize how pervasive are such moments like these in this play. To focus on Alvar's status as painter suddenly brings into view a series of related visual images: Maria/Teresa's locket portrait, the assassination picture, Ferdinand/Isidore's nightmare, the conjuring scene. These are the most unruly elements of a play already noted for its imprecisions. In each case, they are offered to forestall misinterpretation by avoiding the equivocations of speech. Seeing is believing: the locket portrait "proves" Maria/Teresa's constancy and the death of her lover; the assassination picture reveals the true story of the plot against Albert/Alvar's life; Ferdinand/
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Isidore's nightmare warns him of his fate; the conjuring scene exposes Ordonio as a liar by substituting picture for story. Yet in every case, these images prolong the story, both for their author and the characters in Coleridge's play.29 Offered to bypass the play of language, they necessitate additional writing to make what is visible clear. The anxiety manifested in Coleridge's annotations to these scenes indicates how much is at stake and is beyond authorial control. "Velez supposes the picture which represents the attempt to assassinate Albert, to have been a mere invention contrived by Osorio with the most innocent intentions. Osorio supposes it of course, to be the portrait of Maria which he had restored to Albert!" (PW 2: 556). "This will be held by many for a mere Tragedy-dream — by many who have never given themselves the trouble to ask themselves from what grounds dreams pleased in Tragedy, and wherefore they have become so common. I believe, however, that in the present case, the whole is here psychologically true and accurate " (PW 2: 565-6). "The scene is not wholly without poetical merit, but it is miserably undramatic, or rather untragic. A scene of magic is introduced in which no single person on the stage has the least faith - all, though in different ways, think or know it to be a trick" (PW 2: 555). The repetition of these deceptive images reveals a playwright fascinated by theatre's dependence on and independence from the immediacy of sight. Remorse forces this recognition throughout the play: not only do images speak and require supplemental textual explanation but the most that seeing can elicit is verbal - and that means equivocal - reassurance. Nowhere is the play's doubts about vision made more obvious than in the " recognition scene " at the end of the play. Alvar offers to Teresa as visible proof of his identity not himself or his portrait but her locket image. And this is a speaking portrait.30 "Alvar. O let this portrait / Tell all - that Alvar livesthat he is h e r e ! " To which "Teresa (receiving the portrait)" replies,
"The same - it is the same! / Ah! Who art thou? / Nay, I will call thee, Alvar!" (i? 5. 1. 84-8). Another way that Remorse represents its skepticism about vision is by presenting visual images that are visually indeterminate - not, as in the locket portrait, by effacing sexual difference but, as in the assassination picture, by depicting a moment of potentiality. The "frame-up" of which Parker indicts this picture is based on a verbal (mis) appropriation. Crucial to Parker's verdict that the picture
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"fram[es] Osorio with a bum rap, homicide instead of conspiracy to commit homicide," is Albert's reference to it as " the picture ... of my assassination" ("Acting Out Coleridgean Heroics," p. 9). But Alvar no longer refers to the painting this way, and later footnotes to Osorio speak of " the picture of the attempted assassination. " This is the kind of vision that Coleridge's plays wish to cultivate and effect: where there is no discernible difference, but where everything depends on perceiving the difference, between the moment before murder is committed and before it is averted. Alvar's picture becomes a perfect example of the middle state of mind that "play " effects, that space of visual indeterminacy that gives access to the transparency of one's intentions. Besides the technical difficulties that promoting this vision presents for stage representation, there is the additional problem that Coleridge's metadramatic reflections take him beyond the plots of his play altogether. Coleridge allows these moments to undermine the consistency of his characters' characters because through them he seeks to shore up the consistency of his own character. For different reasons, Shelley's negative critique of Wordworth's genius applies particularly to the Coleridge of theatre. 31 Coleridge never gets beyond himself in his plays, not because he sees himself in every character but because his mind is preoccupied by its resemblance to theatre. (Dis) Avowing the reality of illusion and the degree to which the self is haunted by past affiliations and identifications is one of the most pressing concerns of Coleridge's life. At times these issues make their way back into his plays, as overdetermined visual objects or preachy passages on illusions of mind. More often, they underlie the play, emerging from time to time in footnotes and marginal annotations. The footnote to Alvar's assassination picture is a classic example of Coleridge's over-investments in theatre. Here he returns once again to the scene and the crime of youth only to recast youth as legitimized by the fine art of age. The footnote begins apologetically for its preservation of lines that have little to do with the picture and even less with the play. Without "disrespect to the Public," Coleridge chooses to "gratify my own feelings" by preserving the ensuing profile of the artist (and Coleridge's patron and friend), Sir George Beaumont. "No mere fancy portrait," he assures us, these lines preserve the "profile of one, who still lives" - and who lives in these lines to bring back the dead in a less enthusiastic guise {PW 2: 842
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ni). This present-day Titian, "like a second and more lovely Nature," reforms a "young enthusiast" through "the sweet mystery of lines and colours." The "absent" becomes "present" through the "magic mirror" of painting that reflects a safer because more informed vision than that provided by the catoptrical mirror of youth. Such a reformed youth no longer "scorn[s]" the "sage lessons / Which the gay, smiling old man gladly gave." And he is amply "requited" by an " a r t " of materiality - though, being of "noblest birth and ample fortune," the benefits remain immaterial. "Vivid" dreams of imagination can be domesticated through pleasing illusions of paint rather than wreaking havoc on the body politic and Coleridge's body theatric. There is no doubting the charge of this fantasy for Coleridge nor its indissociability from the play of remorse. But this version, even Coleridge recognizes, does not suit the stage. However legitimate the mind, theatre makes it a strange spectacle.
3
POTENTIAL MEN
"Was it then That timid eye, was it those maiden hands That sped the shaft, which saved me and avenged me?" (Bethlen to Glycine, £ n . 4. 1. 163-5)
Glycine's act of spearing herfianceLaska as he aims to kill Bethlen suggests the instability of gender relations in Coleridge's plays and their depiction of the romantic state. It also highlights the difference that sexual difference makes to the Coleridgean critique of action and theatricality. Refraining from acting apparently pertains only to good male characters. Female characters - good or bad, foreign or domestic - are constantly taking matters into their " maiden hands." Alhadra sets the commanding standard for feminine activity and articulates its rationale. Whereas she, a "young and nursing mother," withstands a lengthy confinement in the "prison house" of the Inquisition, even " a month's imprisonment would kill" her husband. A "gentle" lover of nature, he is "not stern enough for fortitude" and is "unfit for boisterous times" (0 1. 1. 208-9, 241-6). Though her color and religion disqualify her from exemplifying the play's dominant values, her avenging acts are repeated by more assimilated women in Coleridge's plays. Both Maria/Teresa and
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Glycine rescue their men at considerable physical risk. £apolya highlights the "weaker sex" as the way to reverse the nation's fortunes. Part I closes with the confident prediction that the son of "Royal Andreas" will restore the nation and "the palace of [his] fathers!" (£ i. i. 536-40). Part II ends "usurpation" when "She Comes Again." Such a slippage of gender identifies a major state of crisis animating these plays. Even a surface look reveals the difficulties both genders are experiencing in their struggle to assume roles as "potential men." Bethlen's strategy for dealing with Glycine's act is one familiar way to skirt the problem raised by all the "idle spears" and "withered arms" in these plays. He transfers the impotence to women by idealizing them. "Was it then / That timid eye, was it those maiden hands / That sped the shaft, that saved me and avenged me?" Bethlen's recourse to this strategy establishes him in an exclusive, though extensive, fraternity.32 More effectively than belittling women, idealization of them keeps women out of the company of men. Those few critics who have examined female characters in Coleridge's plays emphasize the prevalence and pernicious effects of this process.33 Catherine Burroughs argues that Coleridge's plays not only "yoke" different types of women "into one woman, the era's feminine ideal" but in so doing "relegatfe]" them "to his plays' periphery" (Burroughs, "The Repression of the Feminine," pp. 57, 52). Daniel Watkins uncovers the repressive mechanisms attending the "new femininity" thematized in Osorio. Focusing on Maria, the character in and over whom old-world sensibilities give way to new, Watkins shows how she remains victimized by patriarchal interests. By resisting the artificial tyranny of Velez, Francisco, and Osorio, the "natural" woman sounds the "death rattle" of aristocracy and its attendant authoritarianism, class privilege, and recourse to violence. But such natural authority only delivers her over to the new tyranny of bourgeois patriarchy. "Absolute constancy in matters of love" embodies "one of the means by which an inchoate bourgeois patriarchy controls women": their "imaginations and desires are entirely privatized," and "women themselves valorize that privatization" (Watkins, " ' I n that New World,'" p. 504). Without questioning the need for skepticism in addressing Coleridge's idealized treatment of women in his plays, I would argue that idealization appears less as a mechanism of defense than a subject of critique in these plays. Coleridge demonstrates the ineffectuality
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rather than the indispensability of idealization in the case of women by displaying the limits of ideal femininity and showcasing the commanding activity of female characters. This supposition is strengthened when we compare the female characters of Coleridge's second stage to those in Wallenstein and his first stage. Watkins's description of Maria's condition best suits Thekla's story. In Maria's transformation into Teresa, we witness the idealizing influence of Germany but also what limits it: the "living form" of "woman." Viewed in terms of their portrayal of the sexual revolution, Coleridge's plays appear increasingly radical in their inversion of the conventional order of things. Whereas the jacobin Fall of Robespierre features the most fully idealized and least regarded of his female characters, Adelaide, the monarchical £apolya restores the nation and stage by focusing attention on three women.34 After Wallenstein, ideal solutions to the French Revolution pertain only to English men. In its portrayal of reality, theatre shifts the focus onto women. Even in her appearances in Osorio, Maria does not fully conform to "the era's feminine ideal." Nor is she "never dirtied by the actual struggles against patriarchy " or " consistently shown in idealized and humane terms" (Watkins, " ' I n that New World,'" pp. 502, 503). Maria not only " put[s] aside the customs and terrors of a woman " by working out the escape of an Albert disguised as a sorcerer, but, once in the castle dungeon, she rescues him from Osorio's avenging arm (0 5. 1. 229). The stage directions orchestrate the dumb-show: "She falls upon his neck. Osorio leaps out from the nook [where he is hiding] with frantic wildness, and rushes towards Albert with his sword. Maria gazes at him, as one helpless with terror, then leaves Albert, and flings herself upon Osorio, arresting his arm." "Madman, stop!" she commands (0 5. 1. 233-4). Being "helpless with terror" does not stop Maria from braving brute systems repeatedly - and not simply on amatory grounds. Her renunciation of the convent, where Velez threatens to send her if she does not yield to Osorio's desires, comes straight out of Wollstonecraft: " O God! it is a horrid thing to know / That each pale wretch, who sits and drops her beads / Had once a mind, which might have given her wings / Such as the angels wear!" (0 4. 2. 302—4). The transformations Maria undergoes in becoming Teresa accentuate conflicting features of the period's "new femininity." On one hand, Remorse increases signs of the feminine subject's autonomous agency. As if to thwart Osorio's perception of her nature -
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"such ones do love the marvellous too well / Not to believe it" — and Maria's partial confirmation of it, Teresa leaves the conjuring scene consciously instead of unconscious (R 3. 1. 121-4). Compared to Maria, who anticipates Bethlen in the passivity of her agency, Teresa is much more assertive about rescuing (the disguised) Alvar. Maria first swoons, then complies with Albert's instructions to visit her foster-mother where she happens to spy, and hear the tale regarding, the secret passage to the dungeon. Once at the dungeon, she discovers and rescues Albert in less than seven lines. In contrast, Teresa's " resolve is fixed!" by Act 4 of Remorse and repeatedly articulated. To keep the focus on her agency, the play treats her discovery of the dungeon entrance offstage and as a narrated battle of wills. "Even Selma,... / My second mother, shuts her heart against me! / Well, I have won from her what most imports / The present need, this secret of the dungeon / Known only to herself" (R 4. 2. 3-7). Twice more she stresses the "unnatural" courage of her deeds. Her "horror" at the inquisition's "ghastly punishments" "wakes within [her] / More than a woman's spirit"; the thought of ensuing treachery against "this majestic Moor" banishes "womanish fears, traitors to love and d u t y - / I'll free him" (R 4. 2. 26, 33, 114-15). In this, and the following loaded phrase, Remorse makes no distinction between the "new woman" and the "Moorish" woman. Before her final commanding act and in contrast to her previous selection of" nature " as "friend and fit companion," Teresa echoes Alhadra in pleading for "one human face here — but to see / One human face here to sustain me" (R 5. 1. 41-2). Although, like Maria, Teresa's courage and insight fade in the presence of her beloved, one change shifts back the balance in her favor. Teresa thwarts Alvar's prolonged torture of Ordonio by stopping the show. Ordonio. Cheat! villain! traitor! whatsoever thou be I fear thee, man! Teresa [rushing out and falling on Alvar's neck). Ordonio!
'tis thy brother!
(^5- I- X93~5)
This time she is no longer helpless with terror as she " fling [s] herself on Ordonio and arrest[s] his arm." But there is another side to Teresa's character that strengthens Watkins's account of the "self-abnegation" underlying the "new femininity" as depicted in Osorio ("'In that New World,'" p. 503). Whereas in the first scene of Act 3 Teresa asserts herself by rejecting
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conjuration, in the second scene she deserts herself by planning to die by Alvar's corpse. By staging the fatality of heterosexual love, Act 3 of Remorse realizes the fancies of its and Osorio's first act. Maria only imagines her own death and Albert "hover[ing] round" her grave "listening to [her] constancy"; Teresa plans her death by questioning Ordonio about where "the corpse of my bethrothed husband" lies (0 1. 1. 39-40; R 3. 2. 121). In this, Remorse sounds the "death rattle" for the newly emerging bourgeois woman even more clearly than does Osorio. " Free " to choose her mate and to dissolve her being in his, Teresa sees correctly that "the nuptial rites and funeral [are] one!" "A better, surer light" guides Teresa "to the only place / Where life yet dwells for me, and ease of heart.... Detain me not! a dim power drives me hence, / And that will be my guide " (R 3. 2. 50, 157-60). A familiar enough ending for romantic heroines, the story does not end here for Teresa. What distinguishes this rendition of the fatality of love is its lack of connection to the acts that follow. Fully fated and resolved to die, Teresa is next seen living out a new resolve to save the conjuror from the Inquisition's tortures. This unexplained contradiction in plot can be partially explained by the fact that Act 3's tragic love story belongs to Thekla, not Teresa. The first words Teresa utters after accepting the "reality" of Alvar's death come from Wallenstein: "Off, false demon, / That beat'st thy black wings close above my head!" (R 3. 2. 45—6); ("Wallenstein. 'Now such a voice / Will drive away from me the evil demon / That beats his black wings close above my head'" [DoW 1. 4. 47-9]). Throughout the rest of the scene, Teresa adopts the resolve, the words, and the dark tone of Thekla. Her lines condense, as they repeat, Thekla's account of the costs of romantic love. " I t draws me on, I know not what to name it, / Resistless does it draw me to his grave.... There is no rest for me till I have left / These walls - they fall on me - A dim power / Drives me from hence" (DoW 4. 5. 50-1, 54-6). Before her words confirm it, self-desertion is audible even in the stichomythic manner in which Thekla speaks to Lady Neubrunn (DoW4. 5. 1—22). Besides living out the fatal logic of romantic love for bourgeois women by actually dying in the play, Thekla embodies more fully than Teresa another aspect of the "new femininity" Watkins locates in Osorio. This is the clash between worlds that arises over the topic and the feminine subject of romantic love. Thekla's declaration of independence provokes reaction in all the characters who surround
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her, even the most progressive. Max is divided over and by Thekla's l o v e - " M y heart revolts within me, and two voices / Make themselves audible within my bosom" (DoW 2. 9. 10-11). Her female advisors offer themselves as models of self-desertion: "Not to herself the woman must belong"; "she performs the best part, she the wisest, / Who can transmute the alien into self... / I and thy mother gave thee the example" (Pice. 2. 7. 60, 62-3, 74-5). But the chief goal in introducing the romantic subplot is to bring out the tyrant in Wallenstein, something that his advisors have been attempting unsuccessfully since the very first scene. In contrast to Velez and Osorio, whose allegiances are consistently old-world, only Thekla's desire for Max makes Wallenstein sound like an aristocrat. This upstart Friedland, whose entire army is dedicated to upward mobility, will not, "like a soft-hearted father, / Couple together in good peasant fashion / The pair, that chance to suit each other's liking." He has not "ascend[ed] this eminence... only to close the mighty part [he] play[s] / In Life's great drama, with a common kinsman" (DoW 1. 4. 102-4, 9 I - 4)- No wonder Thekla is so discouraged by love. Surrounded by women who counsel submission to men and by men who turn tyrants in matters of love, Thekla's "fore-boding bosom" is confirmed. "A heavy ominous presentiment / Revealed to me, that spirits of death were hovering / Over my happy fortune " (DoW 1. 2. 61, 64-7). She puts it more presciently in an earlier scene: "This is no theatre, where hope abides" (Pice. 2. 7. 112).
Coleridge's female characters are made to utter different sentiments. Hopeless in Act 3, Teresa revives before the fourth act and continues to assert herself right down to the play's final moment: Valdez. My Son! My Alvar! bless, Oh bless him, heaven! Teresa. Me too, my Father? Valdez. Bless, Oh bless my children! (R 5. 1. 280-4) Thekla's tragedy obviously attracts Coleridge enough to find its way into Remorse. But when he is not using her, he abuses her, claiming the "whole scene between Thekla and Lady Neubrunn might, perhaps, have been omitted without injury to the play" (PW 2: 793). 35 In the preface to The Piccolomini he instances as the fourth defect of these plays, "The character of Thekla = O " (PW 2: 599). Rather than construct such improbable heroines as the means to counter the threat of sexual difference, Coleridge's subsequent plays depict the
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threat and enlist more aggressively defensive measures to counteract it. But even in this latter respect they can be seen to imitate Wallenstein, whose absolute genius requires the negation of women. Like most commanders of the period, Wallenstein's heart is engaged by men.36 He seeks to enlist those hearts by eradicating any competing trace of women's influence. In his own case, women are at once superfluous to his absolute genius and to blame for arousing his commanding side. It turns out that his wife is not the original "Countess Wallenstein" nor the one "by whose side" he wishes to "repose in death" (DoW5. 10. 32-5). But his sister's "tongue" is the "weapon that destroys me. / I am routed, if a woman but attack me" (Pice. 4. 7. 6—7). In the case of Max's heart — since no other man in the play evinces any interest in women - Wallenstein seeks to eradicate his daughter's claims by rehearsing his own in the most primal terms. Wallenstein.
Max, remain with me. [when] thou Wert brought into my tent a tender boy... At that time did I take thee in my arms, And with my mantle did I cover thee; I was thy nurse, no woman could have been A kinder to thee; I was not ashamed To do for thee all little offices, However strange to me; I tended thee Till life returned; and when thine eyes first opened, I had thee in my arms. ... Thee have I loved: my heart, my self, I gave To Thee! They were all aliens: thou wert Our child and inmate. ... I have Held and sustained thee from thy tottering childhood. What holy bond is there of natural love? What human tie, that does not knit thee to me? I love thee, Max! (DoW 2. 6. 80-4, 88-106)
This feminization of men, far more than idealization of women, is the tactic that emerges in Coleridge's later plays. The first scene of Remorse depicts Alvar as the mother he earlier denies in Osorio, having "lisp'd [Maria's] name ere I had learnt my mother's" (0 2. 2. 173). Now "Teresa's perfidy" transforms him into a "famished mother" who "nurse[s] " the "sick babe" of "fond hope" at his "bosom" (R 1. 1.36-7). intensifies the scrutiny and repression of sexual difference.
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On one hand, and quite unusually for its day, Zj&polya features three female characters, "all prominent, though not equally so, and each altogether distinct from the other two." It "depend[s] almost for it's [sic] fate, certainly for it's success, on the talents of the Actresses - in an equal, perhaps, in a greater degree than on those of the Actors" (CL 4: 625, 617). On the other hand, it mobilizes even more offensive strategies than does Wallenstein in its campaign against women. Burroughs underscores disparities between the way "female characters are described and their actual behavior" and questions "what it means that Zapolya, the representative of the idea of a socially healthy polity, appears ridiculous for much of the play, at one point loses her mind, and speaks largely in gibberish" (Burroughs, "The Repression of the Feminine," pp. 58, 57). But she minimizes the anxieties at stake in ^apolya and the scope of its survey of them by assuming that Coleridge believes in the possibility, let alone the security, of "yok[ing]" together all three female characters. In my view, Glycine embodies the danger that Zapolya and Sarolta ostensibly diffuse, but even they serve more to challenge than affirm that there is any potential man, or angel, in the house.37 Despite the ending that solidifies gender relations under the concentric logic of "none love their country but who love their home," £apolya depicts a country where women act like men and are never at home. Of all the women in the Coleridgean canon, Glycine is the most vocal and unconnected about her rejection of domesticity. Unlike Thekla, who avoids sexuality by dissolving her identity in Max's, or Teresa, who maintains sexual fidelity by calling everything she desires Alvar, Glycine is bethrothed to one man while loving another and has no qualms about showing or telling it like it is. As her fiance Laska remarks, "Yes; gaze as if your very eyes embraced him!" (£11. 1. 1. 185). Indeed, the only time Laska proves of use to Glycine is in declaring her love to Bethlen. "Glycine [speaking to Bethlen]. 'Laska / (Yes, the base man, he says,) that I - I love you'" (£11. 1. 1. 260—7). As if to further mark her distance from Thekla, the play at one point puts Glycine in Thekla's shoes. Off to the woods to save Bethlen from the werewolves, she sings of the hopelessness of love ("'Adieu! adieu! / Love's dreams prove seldom true'" [£ 11. 2. 1. 74-81]). Even more than when put in Teresa's mouth, Thekla's song and tone are totally out of tune with Glycine's character. As becomes clear in her response to Sarolta's womanly counsel regarding "the duties of a wife," the "sweet bird" who sings this song is a mocking
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bird. " O h yes!" Glycine affirms, she knows what it means to be a wife: It is a wife's chief duty, madam! To stand in awe of her husband, and obey him, And, I am sure, I never shall see Laska But I shall tremble. Sarolta. Not with fear, I think, For you still mock him. (Z11- l- I- 60-4)
Scorning the self-effacement of Adelaide's and Thekla's love — "What was I / Ere his fair love infused a soul into me?" "He hath / A right to his own creature" (Pice 2. 7. 82—4) — Glycine is selfpossessed and a clear match for any man. True, as Burroughs asserts, Glycine's acts get cleaned up at the end of the play. By way of (re)assuring Bethlen that this "dear maid / Hath other and hereditary claims / Upon thy heart," she is reduced to " timid" body parts and discovered to be "sprung from no ignoble blood" (/^ 11. 4. 1. 191-2). But such discoveries clearly screen the more fearsome reality that "maiden hands" now have the upper hand, a state of affairs reinforced in more "old-fashioned" and idealized female characters, Queen Zapolya and Lady Sarolta. For all their domestic "gibberish," they too are involved in power plays over sexuality. £apolya makes this an issue from the start. Emerick usurps the throne because the realm can brook "No Changelings" (£ 1. 1. 149; see 1. 184-5). Though the play removes from doubt the question of Bethlen's legitimacy, it continues to suspect female sexuality throughout. The suspicions ^apolya expresses regarding the sexual constancy of women render more apparent the idealism of Schiller's women. Either "good" women desire nothing other than their male lovers' desires, or " bad " women exercise intellectual, but not sexual, power. The silence of Wallenstein on heterosexual warfare points up the extent to which Remorse and Zjapolya are preoccupied with it. Their strategies for dealing with it are hysterical: both plays deny in order to affirm female infidelity. In the case of Remorse, Teresa's father-in-law voices suspicions regarding where her "surer light" is heading: "To find a lover! / Suits that a high-born maiden's modesty? / O folly and shame! Tempt not my rage, Teresa" (R 3. 2. 157, 162-4). While Velez is discredited as an aristocratic tyrant, the play indicts her by undermining the constancy of her resolve.38 Even her ideal excuse "myself will rescue him, / And learn if haply he knew aught of
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Alvar" - i s contradicted by a prior scene in which she learns from Ordonio all that remains for her to know (R 4. 2. 16-17). Likewise, Zapolya absolves its ladies from contingent but not ontological suspicion. Symptomatic is Kiuprili's response to Emerick's "tale" regarding the fruits of Zapolya's sexual dalliance: he has "small faith in / A plausible tale told with a flitting eye," " a tale which, whether true or false, comes guarded / Against all means of proof" (£1. 1. 336-7, 342-3; my emphasis). Although Lady Sarolta is portrayed as a victim of Emerick's attempted rape, the rationale that prompts Emerick's attack and that guarantees his security in it threatens every bourgeois man. Emerick believes that he can win, not force, Sarolta's "love" out of her resentment over being confined at home. Not realizing that the lady "had else entreated" what her husband's "loving jealousy / Did but command," Emerick assumes that "vanity / And the resentment for a forced seclusion" will " [d]ecoy the wife!" (£11. 1. 1. 38-9, 505-7). Moreover, once she assents, she can then decoy the husband. "If the dame prove half as wise as she is fair, / [Casimir] may still pass his hand and find all smooth" (£11. 4. 1. 52). Against these threats, Zapolya intensifies its homosocial campaign. Male characters either take the offensive through excessive displays of domestic and sexual violence or defend themselves by becoming "actual men." Laska and Emerick represent the first response in their brutish portrayals of male power. Laska imagines the power relations underlying wedded bliss. "Mine, pampered Miss! you shall be; and I'll make you / Grieve for [Bethlen] with a vengeance. Odd's, my fingers / Tingle already!" (£11. 1. 1. 230—2). Emerick anticipates Count Cenci in the degree of violence he dreams of inflicting on ladies. "But that I mean to hear thee [Bethlen] howl on the rack, / I would debase this sword, and lay thee prostrate / At this thy paramour's feet; then drag her forth / Stained with adulterous blood, and - mark you, traitress! / Strumpeted first, then turned adrift to beggary!" (£11. 3. 1. 308-11). The moral characters take the second route, making potentiality actual. In the last act, the battle in the woods, young men return power to the patriarchs by restoring potency to their " erect forms." In ritual exchanges of sword, old men "feel in every sinew / A young man's strength returning" and young men " lift" their father's swords in their "country's cause." No longer acknowledging the heterosexual token that keeps a homosocial economy from recognizing itself, the last act of £apolya lets men
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arouse men in order to safeguard the state. This is the necessary precondition to the play's re-establishment of the concentric order of things. When potential men assume their old position as potent men, women must remain at home. But the deepest animus in £apolya is reserved for its eponymous heroine, whose character is debased only partly in the manner that Burroughs suggests. Her status as widow-queen suggests her resemblance to Gertrude, which Emerick discerns in Kiuprili's interest in her. "Fair Zapolya, / A provident lady— ... Offers at once the royal bed and throne!" ( £ L I. 399, 401). Even Hamlet, however, is more civilized in his desire and plan to discover the queen. Committed to searching out his mother in order to atone for having "bought" his life at her expense, Bethlen finds her in the monster's cave. A rare, a truly sensational, view of the animosity toward mothers that usually casts them out of Coleridge's plays, £apolya features a mother only to enact masculinity's abjection of her.39 To revise the Lady's explanation, Zapolya is the "inner man transformed." "Werewolves" are "beasts in the shape of" mothers (£11. 1. 1. 470-1). The final lines of Acts 2 and 4 silence the mother's protest articulated in the Prelude: "And when they cry: Lo! a male child is born! / The mother shall make answer with a groan" (£1. 1. 528-9). To Bethlen's query at the werewolves d e n - " H a v e I a mother?" — Zapolya "rushes out to embrace him," as "A wretched - Oh no, no! a blest - a happy mother!" (£11. 2. 1. 234). When the restored Bethlen catalogues his "debts" in the play's final scene, he passes over the mother in order to revive the man. ... Heroic mother! But what can breath add to that sacred name ? Kiuprili! gift of Providence, to teach us That loyalty is but the public form Of the sublimest friendship, let my youth Climb round thee, as the vine around its elm: Thou my support and I thy faithful fruitage. (£11.4. 1. 359-65) "Poor words" that but "check [the heart's] overswelling," they indeed "force wisdom on us all" (£11. 4. 1. 366-7, 389). Under such conditions Sarolta speaks accurately: a "woman's voice would mar the wondrous tale" (£11. 4. 1. 334-5).
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GOLERIDGE'S SECOND S T A G E : FEMININITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS
"This is no theatre, where hope abides" (Pice. 2. 7. 112) •
One underlying premise of the argument thus far is that Remorse culminates in Zjoipolya following the momentum of Coleridge's theatre and its two-step program of national reform. The triumph of Remorse inspires Coleridge to envision several projects for the stage between 1812 and 1816, one of which he actually completes and takes to London with high hopes for its performance and success (CL 4: 605). The reconstruction of potential men effected by Remorse readies the stage for the portrayal of actual citizens and legitimate kings. £apolya obliges by demystifying commanding genius and detailing the conditions of "England, according to the idea": renouncing the "people's choice," outlining the "true patriot's duty," restoring the legitimate king, and returning women to the domestic sphere. However, in contrast to the psychic relief Remorse provides Coleridge by solidifying his confidence as playwright, self-consistent moral agent, and loyal subject of England, £apolya ends Coleridge's playwrighting career and triggers the crises of 1816. I want to dwell on Zjapolya in this context, both because the play has been overlooked in the enumeration of causes for Coleridge's breakdown and because it helps to identify why Coleridge withdraws from theatre. To read Zapolya as a sequel to Remorse is to see Coleridge's eventual renunciation of theatre as a defense against women's visibility in the nation. The scrutiny on women in Zjapolya is an overdetermined consequence of Coleridge's theatrical critique of commanding genius. Since revolutionary polemics require male characters to renounce revenge for remorse, female characters assume the burden of acting and of " masculinity." Examining the female characters from The Fall ofRobespierre to Zjapolya demonstrates the increasing willingness of women to take matters into their vengeful hands. Such thematic requirements combine with more conventional engenderings of genre to make "women" even more closely aligned with theatre in this period. This association of women with theatre, however, hardly distinguishes Coleridge; indeed, as the next chapter argues, it is a large part of what makes him romantic. But what is peculiar about
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Coleridge is the ways that he exemplifies this connection in - even as - his literary life. In his plays far more than in his other writings Coleridge debates the role of women in England. In his accounts of his experiences with theatre, he makes the "woman problem" his own. When Coleridge offers critiques of his own plays, he tends to highlight his problems depicting female characters. To Daniel Stuart he confesses Miss Smith's justifiable dismay over the role of Teresa. " [T]he actors & actresses with exception of Miss Smith are pleased & gratified with their Parts. And truly Miss Smith's Part is not appropriate to her Talents, in kind at least" (CL 3: 426). Besides "labouring" up to the last minute to "make [her part] better," Coleridge composes an Epilogue that makes formal apology to her. Three years later, Coleridge finds himself in a similar position, dissatisfied with his characterization of Zapolya but still optimistic about improving it. To Byron he confesses that the "passiveness of Zapolya in the last Act seems to me the greatest" objection to his "Christmas Tale," but he adds, "if the first four [acts] were approved of, I doubt not, I could re-write the 5th, or rather re-plot it, so as to make the Mother (the Merope or Lady Randolph of the Play) more prominent" (CL 4: 627). With £apolya, moreover, dissatisfaction with his portrayal of female characters is deepened by proleptic despair over their adequate representation. "My reason, or rather necessity, for giving my Xmas Tale, to Covent-Garden is this ... there is not a single actress at Drury Lane" (CL 4: 625). From this perspective, it appears no accident that when Coleridge considers publishing £apolya he desires as its companion piece the "Essay on Dramatic Poetry exclusively in it's [sic] relations to Theatrical Representation" (CL 4: 637, 710). Coleridge turns contingent difficulties with female characterization into the problem of theatre " generally " and in relation to " the present state and circumstances " of "D. Lane & Covent Garden" (CL 4: 637). Other contextual evidence evaluates the association of women and theatre more positively. It portrays theatre as advantageous to the representation of female character and both as beneficial to Coleridge's literary life. Here I emphasize two under-analyzed details from letters of spring 1816 which suggest that Coleridge's hopes for upcoming literary successes are pinned on women. First, Coleridge depicts himself heading to London with great hopes for his play, a confidence based on its greater attention to female characters and its
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lesser poetry (CL 4: 617, 620; see also 625). Second, this confidence in women spills over to his poetry, inspiring the sale, and even refueling hopes for the completion, of Christabel. Although critics point to Byron's praise of Christabel the previous fall as largely responsible for Coleridge's decision to sell the poem to Murray in April, %apolya plays an interesting part in this fateful decision. It revives Coleridge's confidence in (completing) Christabel and encourages him to go public with this lady too. Scholarship inadvertently bears out this latter suggestion by dating Coleridge's agreement with Murray to publish Christabel according to Murray's endorsement of the autograph of Glycine's song from £apolya, "Given to me by Coleridge Apr. 12, 1816" {CL 4: 634). Connecting £apolya to Christabel sheds light on the disasters that follow from Coleridge's publishing the latter. As Coleridge tells it, and as most editors and critics agree, Hazlitt's attack on Christabel is the first of the "staggering blows" that cripples Coleridge and the final pages of the Biographia. But £apolya not only precipitates the blow but renders Hazlitt's "shocking" indictments redundant. As Hazlitt is well positioned to perceive, "there is something disgusting at the bottom of [Coleridge's] subject, which is but ill glossed over by a veil of Delia Cruscan sentiment and fine writing" (CL 4: 685). While in the case of Christabel Hazlitt must recover from an earlier manuscript what Coleridge's published version erases from public record - that Geraldine's "bosom and half her side" is "hideous, deformed, and pale of hue" — in Zjipolya evidence is in plain sight. Not Hazlitt but Bethlen uncovers the mother's monstrosity for all the world to view. In this context, then, it is hard to imagine a more appropriate token of exchange between these two texts and two men than Glycine's song (£11. 2. 1. 66-81). The song highlights the differences between Christabel and £apolya through the one thing they share: a moment of poetry and one caught up in prior idealizations of women. Glycine's song is not only her single lyric but her single " unrealistic " moment in the play. Moreover, it is the only time she constructs herself as a passive victim of love rather than an active agent of desire. In this, her song links her to "ladies" like Christabel who are conflicted about recognizing their sexual desires. But it also makes Glycine's difference from Christabel a matter of genre rather than behavior; except for her one moment of poetry, Glycine is bodily, single-minded, and unequivocal. More and more, this is what
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Coleridge comes to mean by the distinction between "poetry" and "theatre" in drama: 40 poetry bespeaks complexity, contradiction, ambiguity; theatre simplifies, schematizes, externalizes. One begins to perceive the advantages of using theatre to represent female character. Whereas Christabel fails as poetry because it seeks to unify a woman whose self-divisions are its "real" subject, £apolya "succeeds" as theatre because it splits female character into separate parts (CL 4: 625). Moreover, what makes ^apolya "less of a poem" than Remorse is its literal absence of remorse, a situation following from its extended focus on women. Remorse is a poetic disposition reserved for men, the one gender allowed to voice "anguish and disquietude arising from the Self-contradiction introduced into the soul by guilt." From the point of view of remorse, good women are indistinguishable from bad men. Both of them act and, in so doing, disqualify themselves from remorse. Not only that but they are punished for seeking revenge on the men whose anguish and disquietude spoil their show. Trading Glycine's song in the economy of these plays is protective of poetry, ladies, and the man who claims to value both. Those times when Coleridge actually links women with poetry, he wards off the guilt that accompanies more aggressive assessments of female power. Glycine's song thus repeats the literary and psychic maneuvers of the Epilogue to Remorse, in which Coleridge ostensibly apologizes for his mistreatment of Teresa. Two moves are characteristic - and apotropaic. By way of justifying what Coleridge concedes is improbable that "an heiress," with "sighing swains in plenty" remains constant to her lover during an absence of six years - he implores the audience to "think first of poor Teresa's education." Repeating a standard argument of the period, he argues that Teresa's character is shaped by the literary characters she favors: those found in " huge romances " with "stiff morals" rather than in "novels" which "undersap the heart!" (PW 2:818). Second, by way of apologizing for the improbability of Teresa, Coleridge casts himself as a hero of romance. He apologizes neither for the inconsistency of his portrayal of Teresa nor for the misogyny that considers inconstancy consistent with femininity. Rather, he begs "pity, not blame" for maintaining a belief in woman's constancy in the face of all contemporary evidence to the contrary. In this, Coleridge directs the misogyny aimed at Teresa toward his female viewers, who, in their "condemnation" of Teresa, demonstrate how far they have fallen from the ideal. " ' A six years'
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absence was a heavy thing!' / Heavy! - nay, let's describe things as they are, / With sense and nature 'twas at open war" (PW 2: 818). By fashioning himself as the chivalric defender of abused womanhood, Coleridge distracts attention from his plays' hostility toward women. He also diverts his attention from the nominal "women" who need his defense to the "woman" within him, outrages against whom consume his energies and masculinity. In defending abused womanhood, Coleridge befriends the " m a n " of his letters, "whom hundreds abuse and no one thinks it worth his while to defend" (CL 4: 701). No other romantic man feels himself so thoroughly "feminized " by hard-hearted men nor is so eager to publicize this as his line of defense. Though pleas for "pity, not blame" are the underlying appeal of the entire Biographia, they are the special effects of Coleridge's experiences with theatre and the femininity it represents. For one thing, the anguish of chapter 24 and its resulting self-defense are occasioned by attacks against literary ladies (BL 2: 238). For another, the role Coleridge assigns himself when portraying his difficulties in mounting his plays is a seduced woman. Only in this instance, moreover, does seduction and humiliation prove the innocence of the victim. In this respect, Coleridge's narratives regarding theatre bear out cautions voiced by feminist assessments of postmodernism: championing "femininity" is not the same thing as redressing the oppressed conditions of "women. " 4 1 The Preface to Remorse sets the scene for Coleridge's subsequent plays for sympathy. "Young as I then was and as ignorant of the world," this naive poet had the misfortune to fall into the bad hands of Sheridan. " Utterly ignorant of all stage-tactics " and entrusting his reputation and livelihood to a more experienced man, the young poet learns to his despair that one little "indiscretion" turns innocence into tragedy. Worse, his procurer goes public with the seduction, making it an evening's entertainment for a "company" of highly respectable men (PW 2: 812-13).42 It would be hard to determine what bothers Coleridge most about this episode: seduction, betrayal, humiliation, or exclusion from respectable men. For behind it lies a life's worth of anguish over what feels to Coleridge like persistent betrayals by men. No matter how skillfully Coleridge tells the tale of his "feminization" - and he has plenty of occasions to rehearse it he never masters the affect. In fact, his next run-in with a dishonorable man practically destroys his literary life and effectively shuts down his theatre.
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Hazlitt aims his blows at Coleridge's most vulnerable spots. Like Sheridan (not to mention Sou they and Wordsworth), Hazlitt, according to Coleridge, leads him on, wins his confidence, and then betrays him by publicly exposing him in various ways. In the case of Christabel, "when [Hazlitt] was reproached for writing against his own convictions, and reminded that he had repeatedly declared the Christabel the finest poem in the language of it's [sic] size - he replied — ' I grumbled part to myself, while I was writing — but nothing stings a man so much, as making people believe Lies of him'" (CL 4: 693). But what distinguishes Hazlitt's attacks from his fellows and accentuates their sting is their candor about the ways Coleridge uses "women." Not only is his "disgusting" treatment of women but "ill glossed over" by "Delia Cruscan sentiment and fine writing" but his "metaphysics" are a cheap cover for "potential infidelity" (CL 4: 686, 668). Coming from Hazlitt, this charge constitutes a double betrayal, for it repays a prior act of male bonding with total ostracism of Coleridge: "have I one friend?". "The man who has so grossly calumniated me in the Examiner and the Ed. Review is a Wm. Hazlitt, one who owes to me more than to his own parents -for at my own risk I saved perhaps his Life from the Gallows, most certainly his character from blasting Infamy" (CL 4: 692-3). Clearly, Hazlitt has no stake in championing the cause of women, as his experiences in the Lake District and with Sarah Walker make plain.43 But what Hazlitt refuses to countenance in Coleridge is the latter's faith in the unconfoundable difference between sexual and textual abuse of women. Hazlitt repays Coleridge for helping to cover up his physical assault on a woman by revealing the same propensities in the man of letters. This intrusion of reality, which is always Hazlitt's forte, robs Coleridge of one of his favorite modes of selfdefense : demanding such sympathy for his feminization that there is nothing left for the "actual" women who need it. Sarah Fricker Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson are the most prominent casualties of Coleridge's stakes in the feminine, but so is Mrs. Glover, the actress who, in playing Alhadra, makes Coleridge's fortunes in Remorse. Here absence of sympathy results not from her having stolen the show but having stolen his part in life. For Mrs. Glover is the epitome of abused womanhood: "duped into a marriage with a worthless Sharper... who now lives and feeds himself and his vices on her salary," and a "passionately fond mother" who buried her eldest child three days
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before playing Alhadra. " I do not much like her, in some respects" (PW 2: 8i5). Reeling from such public attacks on his character, Coleridge struggles to compose himself in the final pages of the Biographia. Part of his strategy is to defend against charges of "potential infidelity" by (re)calling as character-witnesses passages from £apolya. By charging him with infidelity, Hazlitt indicts Coleridge for political as well as sexual misconduct. Hazlitt exhibits as evidence the metaphysical obscurity of Statesman's Manual and sexual mystifications oiChristabel, In countering with £apolya, & play that restores the nation by affirming the moral leadership of women, Coleridge thinks to clear himself on both counts. But to support this reading of the play is to tamper with the evidence - another reason to view the final chapters of the Biographia as consistent with Coleridge's literary life. First, in establishing the charges, Coleridge only mentions Hazlitt's more decorous complaint. " I had the additional misfortune of having been gossiped about, as devoted to metaphysics, and worse than all to a system incomparably nearer to the visionary flights of Plato, and even to the jargon of the mystics, than to the established tenets of Locke" (BL 2: 240). He then cites as one of three examples of alleged "Coleridge[an] Metaphysics" Kiuprili's rejection of the people's choice in which he enjoins "men" to "saflier trust to heaven than to themselves." Not only does this passage make him into a pragmatic Burke rather than a speculative Plato, but it elsewhere is instanced by Coleridge as the "most theatrical as well as dramatic" part of the play (Coleridge is citing Byron's comment; CL 4: 704). The third example of "Coleridge's Metaphysics" addresses the charge hinted at in the tell-tale phrase, "having been gossiped about." By citing Casimir's idealization of his lady Sarolta, Zjapolya absolves Coleridge from any "disgusting" treatment of women. And yet Sarolta, simple, inexperienced, Could see him as he was and oft has warn'd me. Whence learnt she this? O she was innocent. And to be innocent is Nature's wisdom. [BL 2: 241) Even here, though, Coleridge identifies more strongly with the spokesman who merits sympathy. He attributes these lines to " an old and experienced Courtier, betrayed by the man in whom he had most trusted." It is appropriate that these passages from £apolya assert Coleridge's
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fidelity by renouncing theatre. The two passages Coleridge preserves from his play rule out theatre's effectiveness in consolidating England, even " according to the idea." The logic of the first passage, we have already seen, closets individuals. "Men saflier trust to heaven, than to themselves / When least themselves: even in those whirling crowds / Where folly is contagious." The second impedes theatre's idealizing effects. Cultivating that "fine sense" that "sees into the life of things " is blocked by the physicality of the women who are supposed to represent it. While theatre portrays his antijacobinism, it fails to display his potential manhood. More to the point, his most patriotic expressions of gender relations in these plays repeatedly expatriate him. Why fret over Hazlitt's low-blows or those recently dredged up from the Anti-Jacobin, that Coleridge " deserted " his wife and children by running off to Germany with Wordsworth ? Coleridge incriminates himself by affirming that "None love their country / But who love their home." In such a state of affairs, it is best to cancel engagements with theatre and manage affairs of state with a small body of learned men. The Statesman's Manual supports The Friend who says as little as possible about women in the Constitution of Church and State.**
CHAPTER 4
Romantic antitheatricalism: surveilling the beauties of the stage
Two results of the foregoing analysis of Coleridge's plays prove useful in evaluating theatre criticism by the best-known romantic writers on theatre, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Lamb. As with the content of plays in Coleridge's second stage, these men's theatre criticism evaluates acting and the proper nature of acts through categories of gender. Like the plays, it devotes special attention to the activity of female characters as part of cultural reflections on the French Revolution. But while Coleridge's plays arrive at their scrutiny on women through an interdiction on commanding geniuses like Napoleon, romantic theatre criticism departs from the fact that the most commanding performer of the day is a woman, Sarah Siddons.1 Both bodies of work register profound ambivalence toward the increased visibility of female actors in this age. Like £apolya, theatre criticism capitalizes on this visibility while seeking to eliminate it from the public sphere. The second result concerns the formal status of Zjapolya as Coleridge's most theatrical because feminocentric play and the play that terminates his involvement with theatre. It foregrounds the antitheatricalism of these men's writings on theatre and its inseparability from sexual politics. This strain in the work of Hazlitt, Hunt, and Lamb comes as more of a surprise than in Coleridge's, since, unlike with him, their enthusiasm for theatre is widely acknowledged. Equally surprising, perhaps, is the suggestion that misogyny shapes their antitheatrical impulses, for their antitheatricalism is generally restricted to the idea of representing Shakespeare. Analyzing this tendency puts these writers in the shadow of Coleridge in disturbing respects. Not simply is their bardolatry a disturbing indication of the misogyny of more liberal writers than Coleridge but these writers would be disturbed by the comparison with Coleridge, since their writings attempt to write Coleridge out of the Shake-
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spearean picture altogether. Usually they do so under cover of nationalist rivalries, claiming that England is dishonored by Germany's precedence in "truly appreciating" Shakespeare and thus that Schlegel has priority over Coleridge.3 Other times they spar on a psychosexual level, each protecting his own stake in the bard. Arguably the least controversial aspect of Germany's contribution to Coleridge's views on Shakespeare bears directly on the connection between women and theatre. We have already established that Coleridge's theorizing about theatre is spurred by his immersion in German idealism, particularly as it is embodied in the Wallenstein trilogy, and that, as play and dramatic protagonist, Wallenstein mediates the real and ideal. Precisely this mediation is what Coleridge comes to cherish in Shakespeare, whose observation is informed by meditation and whose characters blend the generic with the individual (LoL 1: 307-8). But for Coleridge this process is exemplified particularly in Shakespeare's female characters, who embody "that mixture of the real & the ideal which belongs to woman" (LoL 1: 298). Though Coleridge rarely expands on this description, or any other characteristic, of Shakespeare's female characters, it influences the composition of his own dramatic heroines and his efforts to closet Shakespeare from the "too close-pressing reality" of women in theatre. In contrast, Hazlitt, Hunt, and Lamb are far more accommodating to the idea and reality of women in theatre and more expansive on the topic of Shakespeare's female characters. But they too take their leave of the stage when its women, particularly in their impersonation of Shakespeare's women, refuse to know their place. Their bardolatry plays up Shakespeare's idealization of the feminine, which necessitates their playing down his suitability for the stage. Standard treatments of antitheatricalism, and its presence in romanticism, raise potentially valid objections to this argument. The most common explanation of romantic antitheatricalism would see as too limited my identification of this tendency with the "woman problem" in England. Instead, it is a much broader reaction against adverse material conditions of early nineteenth-century London theatres, conditions which are hostile to poetry. 4 Because theatre violates poetry, the argument goes, antitheatricalism preserves imagination and its representative, Shakespeare. Another challenge approaches from the opposite direction in finding the argument not historically specific enough. Antitheatricalism is a persistent sub-
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category of misogynist discourse; to reject theatre for its femininity tells us nothing particular about romantic antitheatricalism. 5 A final objection points to the privileging of gender as an explanatory category over class, race, and sexuality in determining the "otherness" that theatre and its players represent. 6 As historians of early nineteenth-century theatre attest, the so-called decline of the drama must be viewed as a reaction against perceived declines in the social composition of theatre audiences.7 As queer theorists attest, gender categories maintain heterosexism and theatrical practices bear an overdetermined, though underanalyzed, relation to gay sexualities. 8 My foregrounding of the "woman problem" is not meant to occlude these claims so much as to underscore how representations of " women " operate within them. 9 Romantic antitheatricalism seeks to efface what romantic discourse on, and practice of, theatre renders visible: the contradictions that structure the place of "women" in early nineteenth-century aesthetics, formulations of nationhood, and conditions of theatre. What links women, theatre, and nationalism in this period and makes antitheatricalism's hostility to women a specifically romantic reaction is the new prominence of beauty as a social and political category. Burke and Schiller initiate the trend in their epistolary reflections on the French Revolution by advocating beauty as the remedy to social upheaval. Whereas reason, now contaminated by France, undermines the nation because it dehumanizes and terrorizes individuals, beauty safeguards it by reconciling head and heart. Beauty restores alienated individuals and a warring body politic by grounding social cohesion in affect rather than rationality. Schiller accentuates the democracy of beauty by considering it the only place in this "barbaric age" where "true equality resides." Whereas "all other forms of perception divide man, because they are founded exclusively either upon the sensuous or upon the spiritual part of his being," and whereas "all other forms of communication divide society, because they relate exclusively either to the private receptivity or to the private proficiency of its individual members," only "the aesthetic mode of communication unites society, because it relates to that which is common to all" (AE, pp. 215-17). The nation secures allegiance through pleasing illusions and symbolic charms. Collective identification is a natural, not an acquired, taste. Shifting citizenship from a rational to an intuitive process gives artists and poets a leading role in the nation. Poets are legislators
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because they move people to find themselves adequately represented in traditional forms and governments. For Schiller, as we have seen, this social work of beauty has an exemplary relation to theatre, not simply because "play" gives rise to plays but because ideal plays call into existence the German nation.10 For Burke, theatre does not need to create but to re-create the English public. It restores them better than any other cultural institution because it is the " conservatory " of "natural human impulses." A "better school of moral sentiments than churches" in the present age, theatre guarantees that its audiences are " not yet graduated in the school of the rights of men." Unlike French and English calculators, English playgoers see what is right at "the first intuitive glance without any elaborate process of reasoning" (Reflections, pp. 94-5). Notwithstanding their more sympathetic positions on enlightenment, the French Revolution, and liberal politics, Hazlitt, Hunt, and Lamb share the rationale underlying Burke's and Schiller's promotion of theatre. For them, too, the beauty of the stage is its ability to remedy contemporary cultural malaise by serving as a conservatory of natural human impulses. Their theatre recomposes nature on both sides of the proscenium. It restores audiences to their feeling nature by bypassing judgment in appeals to the heart. It delineates what counts as nature by disseminating "authentic" portrayals of human nature on stage. By converting the "universality of precepts and general terms to the reality of persons, of tones, and actions," theatre functions as " a school of humanity." It is also "a test" of humanity, for, as Hazlitt says, "we do not much like any person or persons who do not like plays; and for this reason, viz. that we imagine they cannot much like themselves or any one else." 11 By seeing human nature in its essentials, viewers are reunited with themselves and " rally... round the standard of our common humanity." Playhouses "scatter egotism and collect sociality," according to Hunt, by "assembling] people together smilingly and in contact, not cut off from each other by hard pews and harder abstractions" (DC, p. 316). For this reason, that theatre channels selfish interests to "an immediate and common topic" and makes "the pulse of a crowded theatre beat like that of one man," Lamb " declar[es] " for all three " that a mob of happy faces crowding up at the pit door of Drury Lane Theatre" gives him "ten thousand sincerer pleasures" than isolated perusals of nature poetry (WCML !• 39)-
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However mystified, such appreciative renderings of theatre point to an interesting paradox. Why does the sociality these men ascribe to theatre, and the geniality with which they write about theatre, end when they address Shakespeare whom they describe as the quintessential facilitator of both? How do they reconcile praise for Shakespeare as "the least moral of all writers" with the moralism that underlies their interdiction on representing Shakespeare? In their accounts of contemporary representations of Shakespeare, they in effect become that "pedantic moralist" who delights in finding "the bad in everything" and who is put to shame when measured against Shakespeare, who always shows "some soul of goodness in things evil" (CSP, p. 347). For them, the stage is simply "an interruption and a drag" on the poetry of Shakespeare, acting is merely the accumulation of "low tricks" (A View, p. 223; WCML 1: 98-9). Reading this material indeed contradicts the alleged humanity of the theatrical experience. As readers, we find that we do not much like these writers, for they only like a Shakespeare who suits their desires. Loren Kruger focuses this issue by way of analyzing " The Ideology of the National Theatre" in England, Germany, and France. She argues that the "power of this ideal" of institutionalizing a national theatre in England "rests on a double assumption: that theatrical representation can make immediately manifest the exemplary nature of Shakespeare's work and that the nation as a whole will necessarily recognize this representation as exemplary." 12 Hazlitt, Hunt, and Lamb deny the first possibility as a way of indicating the divisions that exist in theatre audiences. Their England can justify its exclusion of the lower orders by asserting the latter's constitutional aversion to Shakespeare. Theatre historians confirm that class negotiations are particularly visible in early nineteenth-century writings on the stage. The lovely nation is being theorized during the period when "fashionable" audiences are vacating public theatres. Still, as a specific allegation against these writers, hostility toward the mob, however apparent, is not enough to drive them from theatre. Instead, they either drive others away or attempt to reform them by promoting imaginative plays and altering spectators' vision. Measured against Coleridge, moreover, Hazlitt, Hunt, and Lamb seem to welcome the new class of spectator. Lamb fancies the "happy faces" of the "mob," and Hunt blames managers for producing, not audiences for demanding, a craving for spectacle {WCML 1: 39).13
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Even Coleridge does not back away totally from the lower class of drama's patrons, primarily because he does not see himself as part of the crowd. Such detachment is more difficult to maintain when romantic writers consider themselves in the spectatorial position. By their own definitions, they cannot keep a similar distance from players. Unwillingness to see themselves in lower-class subjects on stage occasions two defenses: distinguishing the class of character represented from the class of character doing the representing, and elevating Shakespearean over sentimental and domestic plays. But preference for Shakespeare is where class-bias no longer suffices as an explanation of romantic antitheatricalism. The point is that these writers resist seeing Shakespeare as a woman. That they are encouraged to do so when viewing Shakespeare is the consequence of historical changes in the apprehension of the bard. For the first time in drama criticism, the exemplarity of Shakespeare is associated with his depictions of female character. For the first time in theatre history, Shakespeare is incarnated in a woman. It is hard to exaggerate the threat that this vision poses to England's potential men. Romantic discourse on theatre, not simply on Shakespeare, highlights this threat because of theatre's traffic in public women. But this threat exists in a less heightened form in aesthetic strictures on beauty that shape the lovely nation and social critiques of romantic theatre. An initial frame for our exposure of the sexual politics of romantic theatre criticism is provided by reviewing Burke's and Schiller's beauty in its relation to women and love. The precondition to the social state, this coupling disrupts the enabling illusion of theatre. Writers on theatre seek to restore the dramatic illusion of England by legislating women's natural place and monitoring their embodiment. Perceptible in all kinds of writing on London theatre, the surveillance of beauty is particularly visible in constructions of "Mrs. Siddons" as the undisputed queen-mother of the stage. She is the only exception to the general interdiction on impersonating Shakespeare's characters; but constructions of her exceptional nature ground the antitheatrical rule of romantic men.
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BEAUTY THE
B(R)EAST
"No man thinks of his Eyes or of Seeing when he looks at a beautiful worn anything" (LoL 1: 28)
Burke's and Schiller's promotion of beauty needs to be interrogated for the ways that it relieves the pressure of women's presence in the nation. If beauty also suspends the pressure of the masses, as Schiller's Letters on Aesthetic Education make plain, its operations are doubly hostile to women because of beauty's conventional association with them. More specifically, if aesthetics is a powerful means through which the emerging bourgeoisie consolidates hegemony, then the bourgeois woman becomes the special site and victim of beauty's consensual energies.14 She functions as the moral center of the nation to the extent that she is absent from the public sphere. In this sequestering of bourgeois women, the lovely nation joins forces with the liberal state. But whereas liberal theorists essentially keep women from counting as " man " by denying them reason and affirming their "disorder" of body, romantic theorists also keep women from figuring as "woman," since they are invested in filling that place. 15 The aesthetic process has received less critical scrutiny for how its theory and historical practice affect the condition of women. Carole Pateman has uncovered liberalism's categorical exclusions of women, and Joan Landes, Lynn Hunt, and others have detailed its contingent operations in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution in France. Far less has been said about what happens to "women" in romantic England when the nation is grounded on an aesthetic base. Questioning beauty's dual relations to social consensus and women does more than uncover another instance of the "unkind imagination" of English romanticism. It points up the double-bind for women who attempt to act on any stage. Focusing on aesthetic theorists like Burke and Schiller paradoxically sheds light on why liberalism avoids the question of women. Their writings highlight both the contested nature of vision in modern formulations of the state and what Pateman identifies as the repressed story of contract theory. For romantic discourse on beauty not only explicitly genders the viewer as male but, by categorizing beauty as a "social passion" indissociable from love, scrutinizes the "natural" precondition to the social state. As an aesthetic and social category, beauty highlights the blindspots on which liberal thinking
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is based: the domestic sphere as a relevant political category, and the viability of consent as a concept applicable to women [Disorder of Women, pp. 33-9, 71-89). By reviewing romantic discourse on beauty, we perceive the necessity of the illusion of women's consent to love. Aesthetic foundations provide the pretext for forcing women to act and then condemning them for doing so. Burke is particularly useful because he both sets into play the most powerful image of the lovely nation and writes on women and beauty before the latter's promotion to a ruling category within the nation. His vision of Marie Antoinette hovering above the horizon in all the disembodied splendor of the morning star epitomizes beauty's superiority over cold, calculating reason in effecting patriotic feeling. As is well known, his defense of the queen is a decorous counter to the dehumanizing consequences of being schooled in the "rights of men" which, by tearing off" the decent drapery of life," expose a queen as "but a woman; a woman [as] but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order" (Reflections, p. 90).16 Bad enough for the queen, demystiflcation of public figures undermines the body politic. By embracing the principles of "mechanic philosophy," which refuse to embody institutions in persons "so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment," the revolutionaries render themselves incapable of inspiring loyalty in the citizenry. Reason alone does not move individuals to forfeit their interests; rather a "system of manners," by making "our country... lovely," makes "us love our country" (Reflections, p. 91). As familiarly "Burkean" as these reflections have become, they are quite foreign to the Burke of the Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1757). Indeed, one could say that the revolutionaries' assault on the queen shows how well they have internalized Burke's aesthetic " rights of men." Such rights scorn the beautiful and associate women with precisely those animals not of the highest order. Although beauty in the Enquiry evinces some of the positive features that will be accentuated later in the Reflections — that it "demands no assistance from our reasoning" and evokes greater consensus than reason — its "natural" association with women and love renders it an inappropriate sentiment for politics in the 1750s.17 While "both sexes are undoubtedly capable" of beauty, the "female" gives evidence "of the greatest" beauty while men are more generally associated with the sublime (ibid., p. 98). From this sexual division of affect, two conditions follow. Beauty "almost
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always carries with it an idea of weakness and imperfection," evidenced in beautiful women's penchant "to lisp, to totter in their walk, to counterfeit weakness, and even sickness" (ibid., p. 110). Consequently, the beauty which "engages our hearts" particularly when it is "in distress" is "of less immediate and momentous concern to society and of less dignity" (ibid., p. 113). "Those persons who creep into the hearts of most people ... are never persons of shining qualities, nor strong virtues." We "love" mothers because they "submit to us," we "admire" and thus "submit to" fathers. This extends to father substitutes in the nation, "kings and commanders," and mother surrogates in the home, "dogs." "Dogs are indeed the most social, affectionate, and amiable animals of the whole brute creation; but love approaches much nearer to contempt than is commonly imagined; and accordingly, though we caress dogs, we borrow from them an appellation of the most despicable kind, when we employ terms of reproach" (ibid., p. 67). Changes in Burke's attitude toward the sublime in politics, or more precisely toward experiences that "operate in a manner analogous to terror," make him more eager in 1790 to "incorporate into politics the sentiments that beautify and soften private society" (Reflections, p. 90; see Paulson, Representations of Revolution, pp. 67-72). But while his Reflections renovates beauty by making it a gentler, and more social, version of the sublime, it does not alter correspondingly demeaning assessments of women. Revolutionary men in France are condemned for their (false) sublimity, but English men now bear the positive features of beauty. They are "sober statesmen" who, like the "grandfathers" of the Enquiry, evoke in sons a "feminine partiality" (Enquiry, p. 111). Women in the Reflections tend to lose their beauty, even in the case of the queen. While she retains the affecting "distress" of beauty, she looks sublime, hovering above the horizon and apprehensible "qualities of bodies." The rest of the French female populace descends below the horizon, resembling "harpies" and "furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women" (Reflections, p. 85).
Read in light of these Reflections, and subsequent ones by Freud, the subliminal anxiety about sublimity's affinity with "femininity" in the Enquiry is difficult to miss.18 "Whatever is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime" (Enquiry, p. 57); "to make anything very terrible, obscurity seems to be necessary" (ibid., p. 58). These phrases evoke the enigma of "woman," relief from which is sought in beauty's
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lispings and totterings - what we now call woman's lack. To read Burke's depiction of the revolution, then, as an aestheticized oedipal struggle for the "beautiful, mediating, desired mother" is to blind ourselves to the bitch of the Enquiry}9 More precisely, it is to refuse to face our horror of femininity or what Kristeva terms the sublimity of pre-oedipal desire. Ronald Paulson's surprise over the female gender of Burke's subsequent depiction of the "hideous phantom" arising "out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in France" results from his blindness to Burke's earlier vision of beauty. Far from instilling composure, the sight of that "most beautiful part" of a "beautiful woman" turns Burke's head - and turns his Enquiry on its head. Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness, the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried [Enquiry, p. "5)Aesthetically predisposed to (dis)avow women's power, Burke's historical reflections simply bring it to light. His reaction to the women's march on Versailles effectively bares the breast of 1757.20 Jung's comment that Schiller's aesthetic letters have lain dormant for more than a century "like a Sleeping Beauty of literature " warns us that his beauty may be equally disabling to women.21 What his beauty reveals is the way that vision, illusion, and love are constructed to relieve the pressure of female sexuality. Because Schiller begins his aesthetic reflections after the revolution in France, he does not need to rethink the political or gender implications of the sublime and the beautiful after the negative object lessons of the Terror.22 From the start, the proper citizen unites the sublime and the beautiful; from the start, beauty is a category appropriate to men and women. But in order to maintain a beauty in harmony with male privilege, Schiller transfers it from a quality of body to mind. Whereas for Burke beauty resides in the body and is perceived naturally rather than being influenced by custom or will, for Schiller it resides in the "semblance " of the body and thus grants the viewer power over nature (Enquiry, pp. 14, 16, 103). Achieving this power requires the transcendence of empiricist notions of vision and love. The perception of beauty, like the process of seeing, becomes a mediated, not an immediate, process. Whereas " the object of touch is a force to which we are subjected, the
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object of eye and ear [is] a form that we engender" (AE, p. 195). In turn, the eye's formal activity provides the model for heterosexual love. Released from its dark bondage [to sense], the eye, less troubled now by passion, can apprehend the form of the beloved; soul looks deep into soul, and out of a selfish exchange of lust there grows a generous interchange of affection. Desire widens, and is exalted into love, once humanity has dawned in its object; and a base advantage over sense is now disdained for the sake of a nobler victory over will (AE, p. 213). Whereas Burke's love contains a "mixture of lust," Schiller's love frees the subject from desire. Lust necessitates that women consent to their domination, for these are the terms of ideal love.23 The noticeable absence of "she" in Schiller's description of the free union of erotic love is the "natural" consequence of the gender asymmetry in Schillerian notions of sublimity. The "nobler victory over will" is achieved in advance by denying autonomy and agency to women. What the sublime (and its corollary, dignity) registers is the exclusive ability of men to transcend nature at all. As beautiful object woman arouses the humanity of man, but as subjects women are by nature subjected to men in two ways. First, the aesthetic division of the senses sanctions the separate spheres of the sexes. Sight informs; touch submits. "We require grace of him who obliges, dignity of the person obliged" ("Grace and Dignity," p. 223). Second, the absence of sublimity from female constitutions means that, when women gain distance from body, the process is mindless at best. Although grace is the union of "bodily structure" with moral character, women's self-fashioning is preconscious, unwilled. "True grace ought always to be pure nature, that is to say, involuntary (or at least appear to be so)." When it becomes conscious, female beauty disappears; "all the harmonious charms of woman become only deception, an artifice of the toilet" and "theatre" ("Grace and Dignity," pp. 188, 210, 213). Whether they associate nature explicitly with women or simply with body, theorists of the lovely nation aim to "hold at arm's length the importunate pressure of mat(t)er" (AE, p. 193). They align women with touch rather than sight, love rather thanjustice, in order to deny them the distancing capacity that initiates full humanity. Having entrapped women in bodies, they then lament their absence of mind and transfer to men "undisputed rights of ownership" in the private and public spheres. Schiller may not view women as bitches
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but he holds them responsible for arousing the animal in men. To limit this obstacle to self-possession, "friends of truth and beauty" have two options. They can learn to "perceive nothing but sheer semblance in what is actually alive," or, better yet, while still "suckling[s] " be "snatch[ed] by some beneficient diety betimes from [their] mother's breast" (AE, pp. 199, 57). German idealist visions of women are conveyed into England primarily by Coleridge who, by naturalizing them in Shakespeare, foregrounds the theatrical dimensions of idealist reformulations of vision and love. Coleridge's Shakespeare not only simulates the proper form of seeing, his plays cultivate contemporary audiences by teaching them how to see and make love (LoL 1: 306). The importance Coleridge ascribes to this instruction helps to explain his critical fixation on Romeo and Juliet during the lecture series of 1811-12. As Crabb Robinson complains, "Now this will be the 4th time that his hearers will have been invited expressly to hear of this play, [sic] There are to be only fifteen lectures in the whole (half have been delivered) And the course is to include Shakespear & Milton the modern poets, &c!!!" (LoL 1: 340). While Coleridge excuses his "entering fully into [Shakespeare's] mode of displaying female characters and Love " by claiming to " defend " Shakespeare from the "most cruel of all charges against him," immorality (LoL 1:313), the initial frame for this lecture suggests instead that Coleridge's idea of England depends on "entering fully" into these topics. Coleridge's remarks on love are meant to discredit materialist philosophers and contract theorists by proving the progressiveness of human nature. Moral progressiveness requires an idealist conception of the body and, its institutional corollary, monogamy. The analogy Coleridge draws in depicting the relation between body and spirit suits as well the foundation of the social state: "Do we say that it was owing to a particular degree of fulness of blood that our heart leaped & our pulse beat? or do we not rather say that the regent the mind being glad, its slave the body, its willing slave obeyed it?" (LoL 1: 331). The "willing" slave is especially crucial to the sexual relation, since, by affirming it, Coleridge refutes Kant as well as the materialists in defining love as "an act of the will" (LoL 1: 333n). Just how freely women consent to this contract is registered in their textual invisibility or discipline. Not only does Coleridge instance as " human society" the "delightful intercourse between Father & child" (LoL 1: 330) but, as Pateman has specified of contract theorists in general,
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his originary society places the filial before the conjugal relation.24 Because "sisterly & fraternal" affections precede "conjugal affections," the latter are "rendered more pure, more even, & more constant: the wife has already learnt the discipline of pure love in the character of a Sister she has already benefited by the discipline of private life, how to yield how to command & how to influence" (LoL 1: 332). Apparently the sister emerges from the mind of the father in order to preserve his distance from mat(t)er. Fully grown, she then reflects back his beauty to that younger man who, in falling in love, immediately experiences a "complete change in his manners - a contempt & hatred of himself for having asserted that he acted by the dictates of nature" (LoL 1: 315). Properly remorseful, this beautiful man is now a fit patriarch in the domestic state. He is an English Romeo, no longer ruled by the despotism of the eye. "To express himself more accurately [Coleridge] should say that there is & has existed a feeling, a deep emotion of the mind which could only be called love momentaneous, not necessarily love at first sight, nor known by the being himself to be so but by many years of after experience" (LoL 1: 328). Coleridge's "love momentaneous," embodied in Shakespeare, is the founding myth of romantic men. Beauty assures male prerogatives in vision and love by transforming natural disempowerment into selfpossession. The eye is a male lover no longer subject to desire because its object is a "form that [he] engenders" by half creating what he half perceives. Shakespeare, and, in Coleridge's early days, not simply a closeted Shakespeare, maintains this self-possession of men. Thoughts on beauty lead Coleridge to thoughts on Shakespeare and theatre, as the associative logic of his 1808 lecture notes confirms. In determining the "fixed principles" of taste, whose object is beauty, Coleridge enlists Knight's Analytical Inquiry into Principles of Taste
(1805). As Burwick has argued, his annotations to Knight's Inquiry link beauty to dramatic illusion, a connection that Coleridge enforces by turning from beauty to drama in lecture two.25 Indeed, "Supplementary Records" models theatre on beauty. Its "distinct" end " (in its Idea, or according to what it does, or ought to, aim at) " is to "imitat[e] Reality (Objects, Actions, or Passions) under a Semblance of Reality" (LoL 1: 129, 133). Achieving a semblance of reality is what links theatre to illusion and love: "in proportion as our ideas are vivid they seek after something in which they may appear realized" (LoL 1: 335). "The Lecturer went on to notice the analogy between
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the operations of the mind with regard to taste and love, as with the former an ideal had been created which the reason was anxious to realize" (LoL 1: 337). But the illusion of "love momentaneous" is also what theatre, more than other for(u)ms of art, registers as delusion: "No man thinks of his Eyes or of Seeing when he looks at a beautiful worn anything." The criterion of good acting, like the sight of beautiful women, conflicts with the viewing pleasure of men as idealists like to represent it. Both disrupt self-possession, because both block the capacity for sublimation attributed to male eyes/Is. On the one hand, good acting restores humans to nature, for "no part was ever played to perfection but that nature justified herself in the hearts of all her children." But it does so by feminizing them. The "grand Privilege of a great Actor above a great Poet" is that "he takes us by storm." " There is no time given to ask questions, or pass judgements " (LoL 1: 429). Worse still, she takes " u s " by storm, confronting men with their dispossession by commanding actresses. The experience of good theatre becomes analogous to rape, making love a delusion. 26 Romantic writings on theatre underscore the difficulties of admitting the pleasures of surrender. Coleridge's quotation captures his characteristic response to whatever threatens to disabuse him of his illusions - denial. Hazlitt turns disillusionment into a Book of Love. This difference in coping strategies goes a long way toward explaining the wounds that generate and perpetuate disputes between these men. It also helps to differentiate their approaches to women and theatre. Coleridge ultimately retreats to the closet to preserve illusions about women and drama, whereas Hazlitt looks to theatre to provide compensation for love. Liber Amoris thematizes this transfer when Hazlitt sends Sarah Walker (and her mother) tickets to the theatre in lieu of his company. It accentuates the role of Shakespeare in negotiating romantic love by casting the main characters of Part One as various Shakespearean heroes. While critics usually dismiss this book, and stage, of Hazlitt's love as temporary insanity, it uncovers important truths about the violence that underlies romantic aesthetics and its views on love.27 The book's suggestion that theatre plays a central role in perpetuating domestic tragedies identifies another reason that romantic poets are drawn to the stage. As its subtitle, The New Pygmalion, indicates, this Book of Love harbors few illusions about the self-sufficiency of beauty or love's
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grounding in illusion. Instead, it depicts the cruelty that ensues when men are granted undisputed rights of ownership in the realm of semblance and the real world. By refusing to submit, Sarah Walker is reduced to the "witch," "bitch," and "whore" that she really is; by the end of the narrative, she has grown "common to my imagination as well as worthless in herself." Moreover, the text's real insight into the indissociability of image-, self-, and love-making is limited by its exclusive applicability to men. The male lover is free to construct beauty in his own image and, if that beauty refuses to comply, to seek some one else "with her shape and air, to supply the place of the lovely apparition " (LA, p. 177). But in realizing her own fantasies, the female lover "acts a part, a vile part," like "some young witch, without one natural feeling" (LA, p. 22). This is another indication of the gender bias shaping illusion. Women in love are actresses, capable of feigning all kinds of feeling (LA, p. 178). Trading on resemblances among women, prostitutes, and actresses is a standard maneuver in antitheatrical discourse. But the anxieties it generates in the writings of these men are overdetermined by material changes in theatre, historical changes in the body politic, and personal tragedies of love. The next sections detail how theatre criticism negotiates the stage's conventional associations with prostitution, which are exacerbated by cultural hysteria over public women in France and new conditions of London theatre. But the way that theatre intervenes in these men's personal histories of love accounts for much of the charge of their writings on the topic. Not simply in Liber Amoris does Hazlitt seek compensation in theatre for the domestic tragedies of his life. At the risk of oversimplification, he generally views the women he loves as "actresses" and the actresses he loves as real (wo) men. Having once hoped through Sarah Walker "to show the world what Shakespeare's women were," he assigns that task to Sarah Siddons (RT, p. 236). Siddons's art is the naturalness of her acting, whereas Walker's acting proves that her nature is artful. But threatening this opposition is the fact that beauty makes them into the same "idol" of Hazlitt's heart. Of the one he writes, "No expression was ever more soft or perfect. Her whole attitude, her whole form, was dignity and bewitching grace. I said to her ' You look like a queen, my love, adorned with your own graces!' I grew idolatrous, and would have kneeled to her" (LA, p. 134). Of the other, " the homage she has received is greater than that which is paid to Queens. The enthusiasm she excited had something idolatrous
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about it; she was regarded less with admiration than with wonder, as if a being of a superior order had dropped from another sphere to awe the world with the majesty of her appearance" {A View, p. 312). But of the three writers under consideration in this chapter, Lamb works the hardest at making honest women out of actresses. He gives actresses high marks when they "do not succeed in what are called fine lady parts " and accords his highest praise to moments when their acting is imperceptible altogether. Their "most graceful selfpossession is in fact a self-forgetfulness; an oblivion alike of self and of spectators" [WCML 1: 186). That this view establishes a sexual difference becomes apparent in Lamb's opposing account of comic actors. Munden and Bannister succeed precisely because of their "perpetual sub-insinuation" to audiences, their recognition that "comedians, paradoxical as it may seem, may be too natural" {WCML 2: 163—4). 28 That it facilitates a particular love interest is clear in his reviews of Fanny Kelly. Even Lamb acknowledges, though in true Elian fashion, that his public writings on theatre serve private ends. "We have been accused of flattering [Miss Kelly].... But what have we to gain by praising [her] " (WCML 1: 190; see also 1: 189)? It may be that "two or three more such" Kellys "would reform the stage" of those "Dalilahs" who direct "their whole artillery of charms " to " ensnare - whom? - why, the whole audience - a thousand gentlemen, perhaps" (WCML 1: 152). One such Kelly would reform Lamb's domestic situation, as he proposes to her in the famous letter of 20 July 1819. In many a sweet assumed character I have learned to love you, but simply as F. M. Kelly I love you better than them all. Can you quit these shadows of existence, & come & be a reality to us? can you leave off harassing yourself to please a thankless multitude, who know nothing of you, & begin at last to live to yourself & your friends ? As plainly & frankly as I have seen you give or refuse assent in some feigned scene, so frankly do me the justice to answer me.29 A few days after writing this proposal, he pens the following review: "Miss Kelly is not quite at home in Charlotte [in BickerstafFs Hypocrite]; she is too good for such parts.... She is in truth not framed to tease or torment even in jest, but to utter a hearty Yes or No\ to yield or refuse assent with a noble sincerity" {WCML 1: 188-9). I n the event, her " n o " is sincere and definitive, arising from a desire not to bring herself "into that atmosphere of sad mental uncertainty which surrounds his domestic life."30 Lamb's brief bout with
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"lunacy" in 1795—6 confirms the illusions — and illusory compensations — of theatre. During his stay in the asylum he suffers under the delusion that he is Young Norval, the hero of Home's Douglas, a condition allegedly brought on by an "unsuccessful adolescent courtship" terminated by his maternal grandmother "on the grounds that the Lamb family's ' bad blood' rendered him unsuitable for matrimony" (Aaron, A Double Singleness, p. 103). His sister's history exposes an even darker feature of romantic theatre. Matricide is the domestic tragedy of this stage. 31 2
NO COMMON WOMAN FOR THE COMMON MAN
Whatever personal fears and fantasies are fueled by seeing particular beauties on stage become magnified when these writers consider theatre as civic institution. Here doubts about self-control merge with anxieties regarding crowd control - not simply the panic occasioned by majority rule but by a majority ruled by erotic desires. Theatre's association with prostitution has long been a staple of antitheatrical discourse and rests on the twin notions that women who display themselves are shameless and that pleasure in theatre comes at a price. But in this period specific conditions of politics and of London patent theatres intensify the association between these public houses. Hazlitt refers obliquely to the cultural referent generating the suppression of public women when he describes Siddons and Walker as queens. Sir Walter Scott spotlights theatre's share in the controversy by equating London patent theatres with houses of prostitution. Lynn Hunt identifies the major historical referent in "The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette." Her account of the tremendous outpouring of pornographic representations of the queen reminds us that Burke's ethereal image is not the only one in circulation. The queen's body focuses the discussion of women and power in ways that resonate with English romantic writings on theatre. £apolya (dis)avows as much: the queen's misuse of her sexual powers points to a breakdown in private/public distinctions. As Hunt shows, underlying the many charges brought against the French queen at her trial is her failure to recognize personal and political boundaries. 32 She not only desires to sell-out France, both before and after events of 1789, but cuckolds the king and perpetrates incest on her son. Her "profane" means, moreover, are theatrical as well as erotic: "an especially
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important motif" of her trial is that the queen teaches the king how to dissimulate ("The Many Bodies," pp. 112, 109). Cultural discourse on the queen also shifts the focus onto the problem of political women generally, for, as Hunt puts it, the charges against her "reflect a fundamental anxiety about queenship as the most extreme form of women invading the public sphere" (ibid., p. 123).33 Although on opposing sides of the political conflict, both types of women are perceived as enemies to the nation. Moreover, the new danger posed by active women shifts theatricality from an aristocratic to "feminine" vice. Two weeks after the queen is beheaded (16 October 1793), the Convention outlaws the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women. On two counts these women subvert nationalist ends. They violate public space: " [sjince when is it decent to see women abandoning the pious cares of their households, the cribs of their children, to come to public places, to harangues in the galleries, at the bar of the senate?" (quoted in Hunt, "The Many Bodies," p. 125). They make a burlesque of revolutionary myths of transparency. By donning the symbols of national unity - the bonnet rouge, the tricolor cockade, trousers these women reveal that the vestments of equality only suit bourgeois men.34 The outcry over public women is less focused or sensationalized in England because the English neither try nor execute political women so openly in this period. But English reactions to events in France are articulated in terms of gender, as Burke's Reflections reflects. And these reflections on gender go hand-in-hand with critiques of theatricality in French politics or in English reactions to it. While each of these ways of viewing the revolution has been explored extensively, their interrelations have rarely been analyzed. Yet in England the penchant to view revolutionary politics as theatre gains force because its theatres attend to the problem of public women more directly than does English politics at the moment. No other cultural institution poses such an overt threat to the privileged terms of the lovely nation - its separation of private from public spheres and the necessary sequestering of women. This means that no other cultural institution in the period has developed such powerful defenses against the threats that its own productions pose to the body politic. Kristina Straub describes the sexual threats posed by theatre, and some of theatre's defenses against them, in her analysis of popular discourse regarding eighteenth-century players in England. Her
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work establishes important preconditions for our focus on theatre's legislation of women in the romantic age. First, she reminds us that the status of players as "sexual suspects" only arises around midcentury. Before then, they are social outcasts, defined largely in terms of class rather than gender or sexual positions. Second, in focusing on the player's gender and sexuality, theatre discourse participates in a broader cultural shift to conceive of "masculinity " and "femininity" as "dichotomous" and "relational" terms (Straub, Sexual Suspects, pp. 19—20). But from the start theatre impedes this project, in part because actresses by definition exceed emerging definitions of "femininity." In fact, the "sexually autonomous actress" subverts relational thinking altogether (ibid., p. 22).35 This fact makes theatre critics defensive and puts them on the offensive; the surveillance of actresses on stage and off becomes a categorical cultural imperative. Perceptible throughout the latter part of the eighteenth century, efforts to domesticate the sexuality of actresses reach "an almost hysterical urgency around 1800" (ibid., p. 94). Three theatrical practices display growing inequities along gender lines as the century progresses. In Straub's account, the practice of cross-dressing spotlights a gender asymmetry that exists from the time that actresses appear on stage. Once boys no longer play women's parts, cross-dressing for men is no longer possible. It is limited to travesty, to a clear recognition that men are playing at being women.36 But female cross-dressing and the sensations it arouses are applauded at least through mid-century. The pleasure of "breeches parts" apparently overrides whatever mixed messages are sent by this visible tampering with nature.37 By the end of the century, however, female cross-dressing is either condemned outright or confined to a parody that leaves gender distinctions unquestioned. At this point, national and domestic security demands that everyone perceive the clear difference between the sexes. If nature complicates this perception, second nature makes it unmistakable. "There is such a reverse in all the habits and modes of the two sexes, acquired from the very cradle upwards, that it is next to an impossibility for the one to resemble the other so as totally to escape detection" (William Cooke, quoted in Straub, Sexual Suspects, p. 133). The second change pertains to the players' status in society, their evolving respectability and professionalism during the second half of the eighteenth century. Here too the situation and consequences vary between the genders. For actors, claims to professionalism amend
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actors' ambiguous status as "somehow 'not-male'" by making them "masculine practitioner[s] of a 'science'" {ibid., p. 28). Beginning with Garrick, actors are considered "gentlemen" or members of a professional class, "on a par with or possibly better than lawyers" {ibid., p. 10). Professionalization tends to counteract the problem of reconciling the "specularized (and sexualized) male body" with emerging definitions of masculinity that "stress the spectatorial, seeing-but-not-seen nature of authority" {ibid., p. 27). This reconciliation is managed on stage by male characters exercising verbal control over their status as spectacle. The actor is a "professional exhibitionist who watches even as he displays himself" {ibid., p. 40). But this option is not available in the same way to actresses. Selfconsciousness about self-display only accentuates their moral depravity, just as claims to professionalism augment their association with prostitutes. Two social interdictions converge to damn professional actresses. "[E]mergent definitions of the middle-class woman as domestic and private, veiled from public eye" are undermined by a professionalism based in "public spectacle." Ambition is antithetical to female nature {ibid., pp. 98—100). A third practice attempts to correct perceived discrepancies between the nature of women and actresses by idealizing actresses' private lives. Accounts of their lives work to remove whatever doubts about character are raised by these women's appearance on stage. In this, as in so many things, "Mrs. Siddons" proves exemplary. Virtually every "Life" of hers attests to the respectability of her domestic relations, even with strong evidence to the contrary.38 But similar domestic whitewashings are extended to more publicized mistresses of theatre, like Dorothy Jordan or Eliza O'Neill. "While Nell Gwynn was cheerfully represented as the Protestant whore, unequivocally outside of domestic respectability," Boaden, in writing of Jordan, "struggles to relate her all-too-publicized sexuality to models of domestic femininity and (unsuccessfully) to gloss over her various illicit liaisons" (Straub, Sexual Suspects, p. 90). Visual and discursive strategies are at hand, then, when counterrevolutionary writers like Burke survey the situation in France. As Christopher Reid shows, by patterning Marie Antoinette after the "incomparable" Siddons, Burke restores respectability to the French queen and gains English sympathy for her role as suffering wife and mother. No friend to royalty generally, even Hazlitt is enamored by this image. For him, it is a mirror image: Siddons is queen, indeed,
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the only queen fit to rule the world. Apparently, beauty makes strange political bed-fellows in this period. In "On Beauty" (1816), Hazlitt places himself in Burke's company by instancing Burke's Marie Antoinette as the epitome of beauty. Moreover, he credits Burke's "very admirabl[e] " description of "the bosom of a beautiful woman " with teaching him everything he knows on the subject (RT, p. 72). But nobody is totally fooled by, or fully satisfied with, the enlistment of theatre against public women. Even Burke has to depict the queen as a young girl of seventeen; and Hazlitt in his notes to "On Beauty" refers to Marie Antoinette as a "Court Strumpet." In fact, the alliance between theatre and prostitution is intensified and politicized in this period: London patent theatres are instanced as containing the sexual threat being played out in the streets of Paris. The concern is less that actresses are literally prostitutes - although, as Tracy Davis shows, this assumption persists without much factual support throughout the nineteenth century, in part because the distinction between mistress and prostitute is not particularly nuanced in this period.39 Nor is it simply that actresses are prostitutes, figuratively speaking - although this anxiety, because of the increasing parallels between the two professions, gets strengthened throughout the century. The concern is more materially conditioned. Theatre's trade in sexuality becomes indissociable from the enlarged size of Drury Lane and Covent Garden. 40 Their new "cavernous" size encourages worse vices than exaggerated acting styles or even admission of the lower classes. It turns what Garrick considered the "house of Shakespeare" into houses of prostitution with royal sanction. Strict analogies between these two kinds of house apply only to patent theatres in the early nineteenth century. Macready is credited with "purifying" Drury Lane and Covent Garden from prostitution in the 1840s, and the practice is more or less tolerated in theatres of the eighteenth century. 41 To be sure, the recognition and condemnation of prostitutes in theatre audiences intensify during the second half of the eighteenth century. This is particularly because these "ladies" have the audacity to "mov[e] up in the world," occupying the upper side boxes, in full view of most spectators, rather than keeping to their old places in the pit or middle gallery. 42 The point is that from 1794 to 1843 their trade is considered to be indispensable to the survival of the patent theatres. Far from
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discouraging prostitution, management colludes with it, for enlarged spaces must be filled in some way.43 Managers expand theatre saloons, where prostitutes openly solicit customers, and facilitate their admission to theatre by selling them cut-price season tickets or admitting them without charge through the practice of " orders. " 44 Abolishing this latter practice is what gains Macready the reputation for restoring patent theatres' respectability. Before Macready steps in, much ink is spilt by politicians and artists over the threat to national morality posed by patent theatres. The "Select Committee on Dramatic Literature" of 1832 makes it a focus of parliamentary inquiry, arguing that "within the walls of the great monopolist houses" prostitution is "not only exhibited, but encouraged; not only encouraged, but defended, as a means of attraction far more potent than the charms of that fair incognita the 'legitimate' drama." 45 Sir Walter Scott highlights the topic in his " Essay on the Drama," written for the Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica (1819). For Scott's sweeping history of world theatre not only ends with an attack on the monopoly of London's patent theatres but blames the enlarged size of these theatres for ruining English drama and England's moral supremacy in world affairs. "The magnitude of these theatres has occasioned them to be destined to company so scandalous, that persons not very nice in their taste of society, must yet exclaim against the abuse as a national nuisance." Not only is "the best part of the house openly and avowedly set off" for the "reception" of " a certain description of females," but "no part" of these theatres is "free from their intrusions." This evil, if not altogether arising from the large size of the theatres, has been so incalculably increased by it, that, unless in the case of strong attraction upon the stage, prostitutes and their admirers usually form the principal part of the audience. We censure, and with justice, the corruption of morals in Paris. But in no public place in that metropolis is vice permitted to bear so open and audacious a front as in the theatres of London (Scott, " Essay on the Drama," pp. 392-3). In light of Scott's conclusions, Hazlitt is wrong to worry over his qualifications to write this essay for the Encyclopedia, even if the terms in which he rejects Macvey Napier's offer are psychologically astute. "To get up an article in a review on any subject of general literature is quite as much as I can do without exposing myself."46
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SHAKESPEARE'S
WOMEN
" Shakespear's women are not to be had every day, and the worst of it is that when they are to be had, or something that resembles them, the likenesses will not let themselves alone" (DC, p. 283)
Against mounting pressures by women Hazlitt, Hunt, and Lamb struggle to compose themselves and their compatriots by writing for the stage. Rarely do they address these issues directly and never as a systemic critique of femininity. At most, they tackle in a piecemeal fashion the political, aesthetic, or gendered consequences of theatre's alliance with public women. Hazlitt tends to dwell on the political ramifications, viewing plays and players in terms of contemporary events in England and France. His tributes to Siddons owe their urgency to visions of public women running (loose in) the body politic.47 Hunt focuses on material conditions of London theatre and their effects on contemporary audiences and dramatic fare. He views the tendency to attribute drama's decline to prostitution in patent theatres as a mystification of "fashionable" audiences.48 Lamb highlights theatre's personal attractions as compensation for love and supplement to identity. His descriptions of Fanny Kelly conform to his domestic desires and personal theatrics. In each case, however, these writers' positive assessments of theatre come at the expense of women on stage, in the audience, or in themselves.49 In this regard, Jonathan Bate's bemused comment about Hazlitt's theatre criticism applies to all three: " the treatment of women is about the one respect in which Hazlitt is not exemplary to an emancipated consciousness" (Shakespearean Constitutions, p. 155).
Underneath all the variety of these writings on theatre lies a persistent effort to impose masculinist visions of vision and love on everyone. Writings on theatre double as manuals of conduct not only because of the close identification between world and stage.50 They also surpass conduct books by legislating morality through appearance, not simply linking the two. For theatre critics, supervising beauty requires activity on two fronts, both of which function to regulate nature: drama criticism legislates what counts as human nature, theatre criticism determines how it should look. Because in both cases the argument concerns nature, it must appear as no argument at all. Self-evidence is part of the genial appeal of writings on theatre, as they simply place on record what " w e " all naturally
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feel. In this they adopt the coercions of Burke, who, in describing the reactions of English theatre audiences, prescribes them. His viewers "would see," "would then see," "would reject," "would not bear" the revolutionary drama unfolding in France (Reflections, pp. 94-5). Hazlitt, Hunt, and Lamb's writings on theatre enlist a similar nature, one that is in their making. Interpretive power sounds gentle while it strengthens the critic's shaping eye and hand. Above all what counts as and confirms human nature in the romantic period is Shakespeare, that most genial and indomitable master of character. His authority to prescribe moral conduct extends beyond the literary, for, from the late eighteenth century on, Shakespeare is valued as a philosophical psychologist.51 Moralists increasingly cite Shakespeare's plays as evidence of their theories, and drama critics analyze Shakespeare's characters as if they were actual human beings.52 But while Shakespeare's psychological authority pertains to both genders, claims regarding his mastery of female character are a new development in this age. Before then, "character analysis" meant analysis of male characters, with Hamlet and Falstaff attracting the greatest attention, followed by Macbeth and Richard III (Vickers, Shakespeare 1774-1801, 6: 21). Only in the romantic period do writers extend analysis to "Shakespeare's women," "Shakespeare's heroines," a shift in focus that can hardly be accidental. Nor is the latest sign of Shakespeare's genius: "the perfect refinement and delicacy of Shakespeare's conception of the female character" (CSP, p. 252). Establishing claims for Shakespeare's mastery of female character requires several overlapping critical maneuvers. One is removing the widespread " misperception" of Shakespeare's hostility to female characters and viewers. Hazlitt blames Collins for having "encouraged the common error on this subject by saying - 'But stronger Shakespear felt for man alone'" (CSP, p. 252). Coleridge ascribes to Dryden the view that "Shakespeare wrote for men only but Beaumont and Fletcher or rather the gentle Fletcher for women" (LoL 1: 297-8). Both men express " great pain " over this confinement of Shakespeare to masculine interests and identifications because it restricts Shakespeare's sphere of influence and his sphere of "perfection" (LoL 1:313). Not only did Shakespeare write for women as well as men but he surpasses all his contemporaries in the delineation of female character. Only Sidney, according to Lamb and Coleridge, holds a candle to Shakespeare in the sensitivity of his depictions of
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women (WCML 1: 53; LoL 1: 327). But "of all our writers [Shakespeare] alone had truly drawn the female character with that mixture of the real & ideal which belongs to woman" {LoL 1: 298). Hazlitt goes even further in affirming the ideal. "If the salvation of mankind had depended upon one of [Shakespeare's women], we don't know - but the Devil might have been baulked. This is but a conjecture!" (RT, p. 106-7). The foundation for Hazlitt's conjecture identifies a second critical assignment, whereby writers prove Shakespeare's superiority by detailing "what Shakespeare's women [a]re" (TT, p. 236). Naturally, they are the picture of beauty: retiring, composed, dispassionate (CSP, p. 180). Unlike Milton, whose Eve displays "conscious beauty" which makes her more " the mistress" than " the wife" of Adam, or Spenser, whose women are frequently " steep [ed] in pleasure, often not of the purest kind," the "peculiar excellence of Shakespear's heroines" is that they "seem to exist only in their attachment to others. They are pure abstractions of the affections" (RT, 107; CSP, p. 180). Even when they appear to invert nature by assuming male dress or prerogatives, Shakespeare " handle [s] " these "dangerous subjects" with "such exquisite address" that "nature ... seems content to suffer a sweet violation" (WCML 1: 53). The reassurance gained by critical efforts to domesticate Shakespeare's beauties is compromised by two kinds of argument to which this project gives rise. Among male critics it provokes rivalry over the superiority of each writer's view of- and love for- "Shakespeare's women" and efforts to stake interpretive claims on their favorite heroines. Despite the alleged "abstraction" of Shakespeare's women, they evoke very tangible responses in male analysts. Writings on Shakespeare's women strengthen the interpretation of reception studies of Shakespeare, that such studies reveal more about the analysts than the analysand — and, in this case, even less about the object that constitutes both parties' ostensible subject and subjectivity. It is as if male critics view Shakespeare's women as occasions to evaluate each other's character and erotic proclivities. Hazlitt bears the brunt of this propensity, long before he courts it in his Book of Love. While claiming to "love" Shakespeare and his women, he is the first to voice publicly his skepticism over Shakespeare's idealized portraits of female nature. Hazlitt's skepticism finds its fullest expression in analyses of Desdemona. His assessments of her anticipate his treatment of Sarah
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Walker and, like the latter, provoke fellow critics to distance themselves from his views. Against a tradition of instancing Desdemona as the epitome of wifely submission, purity, and suffering innocence, Hazlitt declares himself "of Iago's council." But for Iago, racial difference provides the damning evidence against femininity. " Fair" Desdemona's choice of a dark husband convicts her of " a will most rank, / Foul disproportions, thoughts unnatural" (A View, p. 217). For Hazlitt, Desdemona's "alibi" only uncovers the lascivious tendencies of womanhood in general. "If Desdemona really 'saw her husband's visage in his mind,' or fell in love with the abstract idea of ' his virtues and his valiant parts,' she was the only woman on record, either before or since, who ever did so." Instead, the "real" Desdemona proves women's bad faith in the sexual contract and the accuracy of Iago's definition of love: "merely a lust of blood, and a permission of the will." The idea that love has its source in moral or intellectual excellence, in good nature or good sense, or has any connection with sentiment or refinement of any kind, is one of those preposterous and wilful errors, which ought to be extirpated for the sake of those few persons who alone are likely to suffer by it ("Notes," A View, p. 519).
Though he neglects his own advice in subsequent idealizations of Walker, he passes this hint from Shakespeare to his son and compatriots: purity and grossness "sometimes 'nearly are allied'" when the subject is woman (A View, p. 217). Pressing as they do on a cultural sore spot, Hazlitt's remarks on Desdemona cause quite a stir. We have already identified his demystifying proclivities as contributing to the animosity between Coleridge and him, but even loyal friends dissociate themselves from Hazlitt's "observations" on love. Hunt is moved to respond from his cell in Surrey Jail - though not in defense of Desdemona, the critique of whom Hunt shares. "There always appeared to us, we confess, a more than usual superabundance of temperament in her composition," which makes Desdemona "as little qualified to go by the side of [Spenser's] Una as a wanton Italian by the side of one of the most perfect of our countrywomen " (DC, pp. 79, 80). He only objects to the sweeping extension, Hazlitt's "run[ning] out from particular instances of extremes into an assertion that all women are, as it were, Desdemonas" (DC, p. 80). In Hunt's eyes, Hazlitt is guilty of the same sin that Hazlitt sees in Coleridge's amatory descriptions:
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"metaphysics." By "confound[ing] the first natural movements of love, as a general law, with its direction and modification, as a particular passion," Hazlitt's metaphysics ignore the "redeeming qualities of love." They also compromise the grounds for Hazlitt's own "love of Shakespeare": that poets, even more than moralists, allow humans to "have a better idea of our nature" (DC, pp. 81, 82). Apparently Hazlitt's love for Shakespeare overrides his ambivalence toward Shakespeare's women. When he next treats Othello in Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, Hazlitt casts Desdemona as " t h e
innocent victim" and makes no mention of "Shakespeare's want of penetration" in characterizing women in love (CSP, p. 204). A second challenge to these idealizing assessments of Shakespeare's women is posed by a woman and departs from a literary-critical complaint. If critics wish to describe Shakespeare's women, particularly as an opportunity to critique contemporary women, then they should do so at greater length and in a less predictable and binary fashion. Anna Jameson levels and redresses this charge, by writing the first book ever to focus exclusively on Shakespeare's heroines (1833).53 As the introduction makes clear, her book adopts several of the strategies employed by male promoters of Shakespeare. It conforms to the practice of " illustrating]" moral positions by ''examples'' from Shakespeare rather than "fling[ing]'' these positions "in the face of the world in the form of essays on morality and treatises on education" (SH, p. 4). It agrees that Shakespeare's female characters are "in truth, in variety, in power, equal to his men" (SH, p. 17). But her version of Shakespeare and his women surpass the men's by displaying female nature in its variety and moral ambiguity. Unlike "those monstrous caricatures we meet with in history books" and theatre criticism, Shakespeare's women are neither angels nor demons. By thus diversifying and humanizing the field of femininity, this version of Shakespeare aids in the battle between the sexes.54 Jameson's Shakespeare enhances female moral development by providing models with whom contemporary women can identify. Because they are credible, Shakespeare's "wicked women" "frighten us into reflection" and his "amiable" ones "flatter us" into imitating them. These amiable ones also win critical battles. They "are not mere poetical abstractions; nor (as they have been termed) mere abstractions of the affections" (SH, p. 15). The third critical maneuver is the most delicate of all. It exacerbates existing conflicts over what Shakespeare's women are by
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directing attention to how they look and should look on stage. This issue is complicated by Shakespeare himself, who provides little assistance in the matter. Indeed, disinterest in appearance is one measure of the perfection of his women and his portrayal of them. " Shakespeare seldom tantalises the reader with a luxurious display of the personal charms of his heroines, with a curious inventory of particular beauties, except indirectly, and for some other purpose." " W e are acquainted with Imogen, Miranda, Ophelia, or Desdemona, by
what they thought and felt, but we cannot tell whether they were black, brown, or fair" (RT, p. 105). Indeed, seeing their visage in our minds is what it means to be faithful to Shakespeare. In viewing his women, "we think as little of their persons as they do themselves, because we are let into the secrets of their hearts, which are more important. We are too much interested in their affairs to stop to look at their faces, except by stealth and at intervals" (CSP, p. 180). But besides the fact that the critique of Desdemona has already depicted the female half of the audience as incapable of seeing beyond the physical, the exhibition of Shakespeare's women is an impossible paradox. What Shakespeare "presents" to "all the world " - t h a t women are "prevented [from] exhibiting themselves in public, and [are] confined to the relations and charities of domestic life " - i s contradicted by the representation of it (CSP, p. 180). The impossibility of depicting Shakespeare's view of female nature on stage casts a different light on Hazlitt's contradictory approaches to Desdemona. Assigning her character is different from viewing it. Whereas Characters asserts her suffering innocence, A View displays purity as near allied with grossness; whereas in Characters " her beauty and external graces are only indirectly glanced at" (CSP, p. 204-5), A View details her physical appearance. "If we were to cast the complexion of Desdemona physiognomically, we should say that she had a very fair skin, and very light auburn hair, inclining to yellow!" (A View, p. 217). Precisely this contradiction between nature and representation in the case of women accounts for these writers' refusal to see Shakespeare on stage. His incontestable mastery is threatened by two conditions of theatre: heterogeneous viewers will not "naturally" see nature his way; embodiment contradicts (second) nature when its subject is woman.
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THE INCOMPARABLE SIDDONS
" [I] should as soon have thought of making love to the Archbishop of Canterbury as to that magnificent and appalling creature, Mrs. Siddons. "55 Embodiment contradicts female nature except, that is, when the woman is "Mrs. Siddons." The undisputed queen of the stage in this period - indeed, to some Britain's greatest English-speaking actress ever - Hazlitt, Hunt, and Lamb lift their injunction against seeing Shakespeare on stage in the case of Siddons. They make this exception for no other tragic actress or actor in their day. Only rarely do they condescend to applaud Eliza O'Neill: " Miss O'Neill's Juliet, if it does not correspond exactly with our idea of the character, does not degrade it" {A View, p. 198). More frequently they admire the tragic actors, but with consistent qualifications. John Kemble has the stature and dignity but lacks the naturalness of Shakespeare, Edmund Kean captures Shakespeare's passion but neither his looks nor consistency. Siddons, then, is "the only person who ever embodied our idea of high tragedy" because "her mind and person were both fitted for it" (A View, pp. 198, 211). She not only eclipses everyone in the present generation but rivals Garrick, occupying his throne and dressing room.56 Even The Beauties of Shakespeare gives way to The Beauties of Siddons.
The terms with which writers on theatre affirm the exceptional nature of Siddons expose theatre's conflicts over beautiful women: the "incomparable Siddons" is "Mrs. Siddons" (a fit representation of more primal anxieties regarding maternal power). As the headnote - and its ascription to several different men — indicates, the idea of making love to Siddons is widespread and proscribed.57 Contemporary reactions to Siddons's roles and styles of acting enact the confusion Burke manifests in viewing that " most beautiful part of a beautiful woman," the breasts. Challenging descriptions of Siddons's maternity and self-abnegating domesticity are glimpses of female sublimity and phallic power. Siddons herself gets into the act, capitalizing from the start of her career on the power of motherhood to sanction professional ambitions. She presents as her "THREE REASONS" for quitting the Bath stage for Drury Lane her three children (with a fourth on the way).58 But she remains entrapped throughout her career by a cultural logic that acknowledges her beauty at the expense of sexual difference. In this, too, she provides
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the pictorial model for Burke's French queen, hovering above the horizon in disembodied splendor. Contemporary accounts of Siddons's performances confirm this impression by downplaying her body, when they do not disembody her altogether. Hazlitt's raptures, especially over her depiction of Lady Macbeth, represent the extreme case of these verbal and visual parallels. "It was something above nature. It seemed almost as if a being of a superior order had dropped from a higher sphere to awe the world with the majesty of her appearance" (CSP, p. 189). Less transcendent accounts achieve a similar effect by highlighting the simplicity of her appearance and opposing it to two stage practices. Siddons rejects the artificiality of the traditional costumes and gestures of tragedy by simplifying dress and by acting from the heart. She is credited with several innovations of costume: the first actress to wear her hair unpowdered and braided, rather than in the usual "elaborate, tormented" style, the first to exchange black flowing gowns for the white satin of insanity, and the first to "leave her hoops on the dressing-room floor."59 These sartorial changes complement the simplicity of her acting. In Siddons Boaden detects "no studied trick or start," "no laborious strainings at false climax," "no artificial heaving of the breasts"; in short, "none of those arts by which the actress is seen, and not the character" (quoted in Manvell, Sarah Siddons, p. 83). Second, the respectability of her demeanor protects against "unfeminine" display. Always the "lady," Siddons is unsuccessful in playing cross-dressed characters like Rosalind. Several biographers note the ridiculous extremes to which she is forced by refusing to play "breeches parts" in breeches (Kelly, The Kemble Era, p. 54; Manvell, Sarah Siddons, p. 131).
Unlike descriptions of other contemporary actresses, Siddons allegedly presents a femininity that is devoid of sexuality and " animal spirit." She does not disrupt imaginative pleasure because she manifests the formal over the sensual sides of beauty. But though her mothers and queens (allegedly) do not awaken sexual desire, they send other unsettling messages about women and power. " Power was seated on her brow, passion emanated from her breast as from a shrine; she was tragedy personified" (CSP, p. 189). Even in her most comforting roles as long-suffering mother, Siddons raises the stakes in discussions of female nature. Viewers perceive women's social and sexual disempowerment while experiencing a woman taking London by storm. Descriptions of Siddons's performances are marked by such
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paradoxical viewing pleasures, but no view of her so captures the conflicts aroused by her power than Siddons's most famous, and least characteristic, role of Lady Macbeth. As a character Lady Macbeth thematizes what Siddons as actress always represents: that "femininity" and power are closely allied. To view the character of Lady Macbeth in this manner, however, represents an interpretive advance facilitated by Siddons's performance of the Lady. For, from Garrick's era onward, critics had emphasized the fiendish power of Lady Macbeth at the expense of her femininity. In the process of transforming Macbeth into a "relative innocent," a "man of sensibility" driven to his fate, the Lady shoulders the blame for her husband's "virgin venturing" into murder (in Davenant's version the Weird Sisters are "unthinkable as serious tempters to murder"). 60 As a consequence, critical commentaries describe Lady Macbeth as a "fiend" who is "unsexed," "naturally cruel" (Cumberland), "invariably savage" (Richardson), and endued with "pure demoniac firmness" (Foster). 61 The players associated with these roles complement, indeed facilitate, this polarization of weak husband and powerful wife. Hannah Pritchard "towered even physically over" Garrick, presenting a "mind insensible to compunction"; far from sympathy, she flashes "angry and reproving looks" at the banquet scene and shows a total absence of remorse in the sleeping scene (Rosenberg, "Macbeth and Lady Macbeth," pp. 74-5). But during the romantic period writers begin to formulate different views of the Lady, as witnessed in the new, and opposing, characterizations by Hazlitt and Coleridge. However ambivalently, Hazlitt admires the Lady's "obdurate strength of will" and "masculine firmness," and sees "the magnitude of her resolution almost covering] the magnitude of her guilt." Not Lady Macbeth but the Weird Sisters are "exempt" in his view "from all human sympathy"; Hazlitt's Lady represents the tremendous "force of passion," the desire for "family aggrandizement" (CSP, 189). At the other extreme, Coleridge makes her into a tender mother. "So far is the woman from being dead within her, that her sex occasionally betrays itself in the very moment of dark and bloody imagination." Her "very allusion" to this "most horrible act which it was possible for imagination to conceive " - " ' p l u c k i n g her nipple from the boneless gums of her infant'" — shows that "she considered no tie so tender as that which connected her with her babe" (LoL 1: 532).
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Consistent with her general project, Jameson's account of Lady Macbeth unites these two perceptions in order to enhance sympathy for her character. 62 Her Lady is a "terrible impersonation of evil passions and mighty powers," but she " remains a woman to the last" (SH, p. 324). While Jameson does not minimize Lady Macbeth's power nor its evil consequences, she "divides the guilt more equally" between the two Macbeths and emphasizes the lady's superiority of will and intelligence. Jameson chides those who construct a "noble" Macbeth "bewildered and goaded on to crime" by pointing out that "the first idea of murdering Duncan... springs within his mind" (ibid., p. 324). She shares the view that the Lady is superior to her husband, but in intelligence, not wickedness. Moreover, the Lady's superiority comes with, not at the expense of, her femininity (ibid., p. 327). Even her ambition displays her "womanhood," since she is ambitious solely for her husband. "Although in the old story of Boethius we are told that the wife of Macbeth 'burned with unquenchable desire to bear the name of queen,' yet, in the aspect under which Shakespeare has represented the character to us, the selfish part of this ambition is kept out of sight" (ibid., p. 328). Both her superiority over her husband and her affection for him are displayed in the circumstances of her death. Though herself waking to remorse, she bears her mental torture in silence. Macbeth "leans upon her strength," " throws himself on her tenderness," while Lady Macbeth "would have suffered a thousand deaths of torture" rather than "utter a complaint." The sleeping scene, then, restores "justice" to her character. It demonstrates her remorse without damaging the strength of her character, and spectators experience " a feeling which Lady Macbeth in her waking strength ... could never have excited" (ibid., p. 334). Hazlitt, Coleridge, and Jameson all state explicitly that their analyses of the Lady's character are indissociable from Siddons's representation of it. Detailed accounts of her performance show that she is responsible for humanizing and feminizing the fiend. We not only have Siddons's own interpretation of the Lady's character but G. J. Bell's extensive notes on her performances of it in 1809.63 For the most part, Bell sees what Siddons wants him to see - a Lady who humanizes herself half way through the play. Referring to the third act, Siddons remarks, "Under the impression of her present wretchedness, I, from this moment, have always assumed the dejection of countenance and manners which I thought accordant to
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such a state of mind." From this point on, her Lady gives "striking indications of sensibility, nay, tenderness and sympathy" and "smothers her sufferings in the deepest recesses of her own wretched bosom" (Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, pp. 178-9). Bell notes the signs of this tenderness. "This is one of the passages in which her intense love of her husband animate[s] every word" (Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth, p. 58). As Bell's editor confirms, " It is curious to see by these last two notes, that Mrs. Siddons conveyed by her demeanor the impression of being already almost broken down, and quite as much in need of sleep as Macbeth" (ibid., p. 66). Both Bell's editor and Siddons recognize how much she is taking liberties with Shakespeare. "Though the author of this sublime composition has not, it must be acknowledged, given any direction whatever to authorise this assumption, yet I venture to hope that he would not have disapproved of it" (Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, p. 177; see also Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth, p. 66). Clearly disapproving of such departures are those who hold dear the memory of Pritchard. Siddons's most famous scenic innovations assure her femininity and her triumph over Pritchard. In the banquet scene, her Lady shares Macbeth's final vision of Banquo's ghost; her sleep-walking scene emphasizes the Lady's remorse as well as horror. Real life mirrors fiction in this case by depicting women as superior in will to men. Lady Macbeth sees the ghost but does not betray her anxiety before the guests; Siddons scorns Sheridan's last-minute pleas not to challenge Pritchard's interpretation of the sleep-walking scene and steals the show (Rosenberg, "Macbeth and Lady Macbeth," p. 78; Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, pp. 186—7). Hazlitt, Coleridge, and Jameson all interrupt their analyses of Lady Macbeth to consider "Mrs. Siddons's manner of acting that part" (CSP, p. 189). Not all of them like what he or she sees - either about the indissociability of the Lady and Siddons or what both reveal about the alliance between women and power. In fact, to applaud the alliance is to descry the indissociability because of the ways that Siddons's exemplarity is used against women. Since one of Jameson's purposes is to emphasize similarities between the Lady and contemporary women, she regrets critics' overidentification of Siddons with Lady Macbeth (SH, p. 322). True it is that the ambitious women of these civilized times do not murder sleeping kings: but are there, therefore, no Lady Macbeths in the world ? no women who, under the influence of a diseased or excited appetite for power
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or distinction, would sacrifice the happiness of a daughter, the fortunes of a husband, the principles of a son, and peril their own souls? (SH, p. 321)64 Besides, "the generation which beheld Mrs. Siddons in her glory is passing away." If viewers do not learn to perceive the Lady in women other than Siddons, they will revert to the "sagacity of critics" who consider the Lady as no woman at all. Owing to his admiration of the power of Lady Macbeth, Hazlitt is the only critic of Shakespeare whom Jameson exempts from scorn. "Nothing can be finer than his remarks as far as they go"; but his "masterly criticism stops short of the whole truth - it is a little superficial, and a little too harsh" (SH, p. 323). Implicitly, Jameson takes issue with two aspects of Hazlitt's analysis: denial of the Lady's "womanly" features and confinement of the Lady's character to its representation by Siddons. Indeed, the latter fact causes the former error. While it allows him to acknowledge the Lady's commanding power, it makes power exceptional to Siddons, not a potential trait of women in general. Even more reassuring is the masculinity of her beauty. " Grandeur was the cradle in which her genius was rocked: for her to be, was to be sublime!" (Manvell, Sarah Siddons, p. 304). To maintain this vision of Siddons requires highly selective viewing. It means that she should neither play the Lady often nor past her prime; the " preternaturality " of her appearance cannot bear the "weight" of body (A View, pp. 312-13). Coleridge takes the opposite approach in his view of both ladies. For him to see Lady Macbeth as a tender wife and mother requires that he not see Siddons at all. "He had seen Mrs. Siddons as Lady, and Kemble as Macbeth — these might be the Macbeths of the Kembles, but they were not the Macbeths of Shakespear" (LoL 1: 563). Either way these men view women on stage in the image of man: either different and submissive or similar and thus sublime. Frustration over persistent misrecognitions of her beauty causes Siddons to act out in several ways. It probably helps to explain Siddons's longstanding attraction to Thomas Lawrence, who from the start came under the erotic spell of her beauty. 65 It emerges in a more concrete fashion in her published scorn for idealized images of women. Speaking of Bertie Greethead's conception of a Siddonian heroine, she writes, "This woman is one of those monsters (I think them) of perfection, who is an angel before her time, and is so entirely resigned to the will of heaven, that (to a very mortal like myself) she
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appears to be the most provoking piece of still life one ever had the misfortune to meet" (quoted in Jonson, A Troubled Grandeur, p. 161).66 Moreover, her resentment over the "honours loaded on her brother" at his retirement expresses dissatisfaction over the gender asymmetry of fame. "Perhaps in the next world women will be more valued than they are in this" (quoted in Kelly, The Kemble Era, p. 202). But the most striking evidence of her rejection of romantic notions of beauty is provided by her impersonations of Lady Macbeth. Not only does she re-embody this " preternatural being " in 1794 by playing her while six-months' pregnant but in her " Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth" she envisions her as the beauty she cannot represent. "You will probably not agree with me as to the character of that beauty," she writes to all those who confine the Lady to images of her. But, "according to my notion," it is of that character which I believe is generally allowed to be most captivating to the other sex, - fair, feminine, nay, perhaps, even fragile ' Fair as the Forms that, wove in Fancy's loom, Float in light visions round the poet's head' (quoted in Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, p. 170)
Siddons joins Jameson (who, however, "cannot help fancying Lady Macbeth [as] dark" [SH, p. 332n]) in an effort to instruct the public in some fundamentals of beauty. (1) Ambition is not incompatible with "female nature." Indeed, only women who combine "energy and strength of mind" with "feminine loveliness" can "compose a charm of such potency" as to seduce heroic men (Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, p. 171). (2) Tender mothers can feel "natural" feelings and still perpetrate "unnatural" deeds. Nature, even in the case of women, can be overcome through will. (3) Women's power no longer resides simply in their sexuality. Tempters by virtue of their superior intellect, not erotic appeal, women now resemble Satan as well as Eve. 5
FIT FOR
THE
STAGE
The best-known antitheatrical text of the period, Lamb's "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation" (1811), rehearses the standard reasons why Shakespeare's plays are "least calculated" for stage representation. They reduce to one reason: the stage inverts all natural hierarchies by subordinating poet to player, forfeiting dreams
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for realities, privileging sense over imagination and action over intellect. To imagine Shakespeare in this context is to "level" England's native genius. Moreover, the content of Shakespeare's plays further limits Lamb's desire to see them on stage. What has the eye or ear to do with fairies or monsters, Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth? Imagining audiences seeing Macbeth on stage focuses the political anxiety, as Jacobus has shown. By embodying fancies and realizing collective desires, Macbeth doubles revolutionary energies, possibly even the number of murdered kings. But Lamb's argument and Jacobus's account of romantic antitheatricalism prompt revision when considered in terms of conditions of the early nineteenthcentury stage. Above all, gender hierarchies are inverted by Macbeth and its representation. Not Garrick but Siddons embodies Shakespeare in this age, not Macbeth but his Lady presses murder on sleeping kings. This overdetermination of females on stage gives " a pain and uneasiness" to romantic viewers of Shakespeare. On the face of it, Lamb's antitheatrical argument wards off a sexually undifferentiated body. The stage reduces dreams to " tricks" that Lamb finds particularly disturbing in the representation of Shakespeare's male heroes. But reading Lamb in terms of the incomparable Siddons reveals the extent to which body is coded as feminine. Hazlitt's description of Eliza O'Neill makes visible the masculinity that underlies Siddons's exceptional nature. The source of [O'Neill's] command over public sympathy lay, in short, in the intense conception, and unrestrained expression, of what she, and every other woman, of natural sensibility would feel in given circumstances, in which she, and every other woman, was liable to be placed. Her Belvidera, Isabella, Mrs. Beverley, etc. [Siddons's former roles] were all characters of this strictly feminine class of heroines, and she played them to the life. ... There was nothing in her acting of a preternatural or ideal cast - that could lift the mind above morality, or might be fancied to descend from another sphere.67
When actresses other than Siddons represent female character, they "naturally" play up the "dumb-show" part of tragedy. Actresses mimic Hazlitt's depiction of women in love, attracted by surfaces and "deal[ing] only in the pantomime of discourse, in gesticulation and the flippant byeplay of the senses." 68 This is O'Neill's distinction, which she sometimes carries to " a degree of physical horror that [can] hardly be borne" [London Magazine, p. 402). "We half begin to suspect that she represents the bodies, not the souls of women, and
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that her forte is in tears, sighs, sobs, shrieks, and hysterics" {A View, p. 284). Critics, on the other hand, can hardly go far enough in their surveillance of actresses' body parts. 69 Meant as a put-down when compared with Siddons, these actresses' association with the body is also an obvious source of attraction. When they are not worrying about Shakespeare, Hazlitt, Hunt, and Lamb admit their seduction by female charms on stage, the appreciation of which comprises a good portion of the "animal spirits" of their essays on theatre. Shakespeare, however, requires a more spiritual mode of vision. Pleasure resides in the text, not its embodiment, and even there significant energy is invested in legislating purity. Itself a part of the rationale for closeting Shakespeare, textual purity bears interestingly on the visibility of women. For so-called "improvers" of Shakespeare are castigated for inventing a "love interest" in places where Shakespeare has focused only on men. As Lamb puts it, these improvers make "the moral... to consist in showing... the superiority of woman's love to the friendships of men" (WCML 1: 322).70 Or, in Hunt's analysis of revisions to Lear, such improvers sacrifice "filial" to "amatory" interests. The "admirable Cordelia, the pattern of filial piety, is made to forget her old distracted father" through the "introduction of a love-scene" {DC, p. 20). Even here Siddons is preserved from theatre's accentuation of female interest on both a thematic and representational level. 71 Her genius renders her deficient in representations of love, just as the effect of her acting resides in viewers' minds, not senses. Hunt establishes the former virtue by arguing that Siddons "failed" in "every species of gentler tenderness, especially that of love. Her Belvidera was excellent where she had to complain of wrong or to resent injustice, but little less than distasteful in the amatory part of it" {DC, p. 74). Hazlitt underscores the latter by way of distinguishing female from male players generally. On the one hand, he recognizes that actresses' alliance with the body gives them the theatrical advantage over actors. They can "call to [their] aid, with perfect propriety and effect, all the weaknesses of [their] sex - tears, sighs, convulsive sobs, shrieks, death-like stupefaction, and laughter more terrible than all," whereas actors are required to "master" rather than "give way to" sensation. On the other, he makes actresses pay for their sensational appeal by being "less rememberable afterwards " {A View, p. 211). Out of sight, out of mind. "We have no hesitation
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in saying that Miss O'Neill has more popularity in the house than Mr. Kean. [But we are] quite as certain that he is more thought of out of it" (A View, p. 223; original emphases). Only Siddons rivals actors in the degree to which she is remembered. By "unit[ing] both the extremes of acting here spoken of, — that is, all the frailties of passion, with all the strength and resources of the intellect," she "fills the mind" and provides adequate "'food for the critics'" (A View, pp, 211,
223).
Yet with all her remarkable difference, Siddons's beauty, even as described by her admirers, still poses a threat to Shakespeare and to imaginative men's security in theatre. The heresy of " Siddonaltry " is that she rivals and betters the bard. The consistent strength of her acting "levels" Shakespeare's genius, for "who does not speak indifferently of the Gamester and of Macbeth as fine stage performances, and praise the Mrs. Beverley in the same way as the Lady Macbeth of Mrs. S?" {WCML 1: 104; see also A View, p. 223). More fundamentally, she challenges the founding tenet of bardolatry: Shakespeare's beauty is his self-sufficiency. "Shakespeare has embodied his characters so very distinctly, that he stands in no need of the actor's assistance to make them more distinct" {A View, p. 222). Not only are descriptions of her acting indistinguishable from descriptions of Shakespeare's writing but "in one or two characters" her acting has actually "raised our imagination" of the Shakespearean part she played {A View, pp. 198, 222). Raised it, moreover, in the least poetic way. Professor Bell's notes on her performances of Lady Macbeth assert the unimaginable. "Her words [that is, Shakespeare's words] are the accompaniment of her thoughts, scarcely necessary, you would imagine, to the expression, but highly raising it, and giving the full force of poetical effect" {Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth, p. 38). The bard's words are subordinated to woman's body. As Lamb laments, "Mrs. S. never got more fame by any thing than by the manner in which she dismisses the guests in the banquetscene in Macbeth " (WCML 1: 111). The nearest rival for fame is the way that she interprets the sleep-walking scene. An observer notes the aesthetic inversion: "her very body seemed to think" (quoted in Jonson, A Troubled Grandeur, p. 165).
In posing a threat to Shakespeare's self-sufficiency, the beauty of Siddons undoes romantic men. Not by its erotic appeal, all those "pretty instructive heavings of breast," but through a phallic power that places spectators "beside themselves." The power of her acting
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disrupts the gender identifications that her roles are meant to solidify. Judging from textual reactions to her performances, it is difficult to tell what one sees in Siddons: a powerful woman who acts like a man playing domesticated women? a beauty so sublime that it is preternatural ? a phallic mother? What is clear is that the effect of her acting feminizes audiences, particularly powerful men. Burke is not the only man who is proud of the "tears extorted from" him by Siddons. Seated with him is "Gibbon, Sheridan, Windham, and though last, not least, the illustrious Fox, of whom it was frequently said, that iron tears were drawn down Pluto's gloomy cheeks" (Siddons quoted in Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, p. 134). Even actors "were overcome" playing opposite to her, either by tears or terror (Kelly, The Kemble Era, pp. 21,134). By his own report, Crabb Robinson was so overwrought by her performance as Agnes in Lillo's Fatal Curiosity that, "losing all command of himself," he "broke into a shriek of laughter and would have been ejected from the theatre, had not a neighbour realised that he was in a fit of strong hysterics" (ibid., p. 134). Women too, of course, shared in the hysteria, as in the most famous case of Miss Gordon of Gight, the future mother of Byron (ibid., pp. 42-3). "Siddons's fever" was declared an official malady in Edinburgh during the summer of 1784, and "faintings and hysterics" became so "commonplace" that Siddons grew accustomed to playing "amidst shrieks and groans" (ibid., pp. 42, 22-3; see Manvell, Sarah Siddons, p. 83). But there is some suggestive testimony to Siddons having a more empowering effect on disenfranchised viewers. Although few first-hand accounts of their reactions have surfaced, we can discern them between the lines of more privileged reviewers. The Queen of England is not the only viewer to turn away from the stage when the distress of Siddons's characters grows too realistic (Jonson, A Troubled Grandeur, p. 103). But not everyone does so either. In such strength of suffering, some find their realities reaffirmed. "The whole of wronged womanhood spoke through her voice. ... Women had few enough legal rights at this time, but they had tongues in their heads and used them" (Manvell, Sarah Siddons, p. 123). In and through Siddons, early nineteenth-century viewers gain a destabilizing view of class and gender affiliations. According to Tate Wilkinson, the girl of strolling players is the spitting image of the queen, not only of France: "Were a wild Indian to ask me What was like a queen? I would have bade him look at Mrs. Siddons" (quoted in Kelly, The Kemble Era, p. 134).
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So well does she play the part that the aristocracy, and the royal family, pattern themselves after her. The queen asks Siddons to instruct her daughters in English diction and is surprised by Siddons's apparent comfort at court (Manvell, Sarah Siddons, p. 78; Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, pp. 136—7). In turn, the queen of the stage raises the status of her fellow actors and gives a powerful voice to those who are voiceless in society. Despite all that is said about and done to the beauties of the stage, romantic writers cannot face theatre when it feminizes Shakespeare and thus England's native genius. Female power presses too closely in theatre; attempts to distance themselves from it only intensify the pressure. But these writers go beyond Coleridge by at least partially admitting the problem. Coleridge's commitment to theatre allows him to probe the nature of commanding genius, but only as a male phenomenon. Except in his own plays, he associates commanding natures with intellectual villains like Iago and Richard II or heroic lovers like Don Juan. Even with firm gender boundaries installed, he further defends against commanding natures by containing them within an antitheatrical logic: desirable means are dissociable from "inhuman" ends, actions from "motions" by the transparency of poetry. Maintaining these distinctions keeps humanity's attraction to power " a world's distance from the spirit of modern jacobinism " (BL 2: 221). Less distant from modern jacobinism, Hazlitt, Hunt, and Lamb concede power to women through their experiences of theatre. But their strictures against actresses and exceptional construction of Siddons manifest their attempts at recovering "self-control. Unwillingness or inability to deal with their "woman problem" hampers the emancipatory energies underlying more radical romantic men's views on theatre. Siddons's exceptional nature is the most telling sign that these men's promotion of power is limited to revolutions of state, not gender. Hazlitt is clearest about his desires to effect a community of men, not simply in the indissociability of Siddons and Walker. What his idolization of both queens achieves is transport back to his real heroes, Napoleon and Shakespeare. The Book of Love conforms to theatre by scripting love for women as respect for men. The "bust of Napoleon" is discernible behind both Sarahs, as his 1828 depiction of Siddons and Walter Scott make clear. On the one hand, admiration for Siddons allows him to best "effeminate" poets who malign his commanding hero, Napoleon. "We declare that Mrs. Siddons appears to us the more masculine
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spirit of the two. Sir Walter (when all's said and done) is an inspired butler, a 'Yes or No, my Lord' fellow in a noble family. Mrs. Siddons is like a cast from the antique, or rather like the original, divine or more than human, from which it was taken." But as an actor Siddons is no match for Napoleon. "There [i]s but one person in the world who would have drawn the gaping gaze of curiosity from these and from all the crowned heads of Europe; and Sir Walter exults that he perished like a felon in the grasp of a jailor." Nor is she finally an adequate representation of Shakespeare, whom these men prefer to have for and on their own. The terms are reversible: " Shakespeare is national property" because he is the private property of privileged men. Two equivocal images from theatre history will (not) close off this investigation of the power of women in London theatre. Both turn on Siddons and highlight the problematics of apprehending commanding genius as a form of theatre, revolution, and gender. The first gives an explicitly nationalist cast to her canonization as actress. Assuming the pose of her Tragic Muse, Siddons appears as Britannia at a banquet hosted by Sheridan to celebrate the king's recovery from madness in the early spring of 1789.72 Political loyalties strained as they are by Sheridan's part in setting up a regency during the king's illness, the queen and the royal princesses make their appearance at Covent Garden, "ostentatiously ignoring Drury Lane." But that "scheming politician," Sheridan, knows how to command a performance when he wants to. He arranges a "splendid gala evening, with a concert, supper and a ball," culminating in Siddons, the king and queen's avowed favorite, reciting an ode composed in the king's honor. Concern for "adequate representation," as Chandler defines it, extends to the last details of Siddons's assuming " the exact position of the figure on a penny piece " (Kelly, The Kemble Era, pp. 76-7). But even such careful orchestration cannot ensure that everyone receives the same message. At least one critic in attendance hears in her ode a celebration of "radical tendencies" far more than of the king's restoration (Jonson, A Troubled Grandeur, p. 166). A woman representing England automatically signifies radical sympathies with France. Even before history provides the scenario, loyalists watch women dictating terms to the king. A second image returns us to the scene of Siddons's triumph, once again performing her starring role as Lady Macbeth. This role has
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great personal significance for Siddons, given that her first appearance in it (1785) put her career back on track. Hostile press of the previous summer had broadcast her avarice, callous indifference to others, and apparent unwillingness to risk playing Shakespeare. This time she plays under happier personal and public circumstances, for the opening of Macbeth commemorates the reopening of Covent Garden. Destroyed by fire in 1808 — and destroying with it Siddons's most prized wardrobe possession, several yards of lace from the toilette of Marie Antoinette - Covent Garden celebrates the splendor of its enlarged seating, private boxes, and higher prices in high Shakespearean style. But this time the public is not appeased. Suspicions over players' personal avarice are transferred to theatre management as a whole, who cater to aristocratic tastes and perversities at the common people's expense. Apparently, no Lady in all her illusion can compensate for this injustice, once it is felt and identified. That night Kemble and Siddons are reduced to dumbshow and are forced from the stage for six weeks until management concedes to the public's demands. Those who give voice to the voiceless are rendered speechless when the silenced find their voice.
CONCLUSION
A theatre of remorse
The plays of the second-generation romantic poets, especially of Shelley and Byron, have received more extensive treatment than have plays by Coleridge. Though still not placed on equal footing with their major poetic works, Shelley's and Byron's plays have been analyzed not simply as instances of mind but as important reflections on revolution, social history, and class and gender conflicts. This chapter draws on that body of critical work in its focus on the history plays of the second generation. But it examines selected features of those plays and scholarly accounts of them in light of this book's central focus on theatre. Such an orientation triggers the immediate observation that Shelley's history play, despite his stated intentions, never made it to the stage during this period and that one of Byron's, despite his intentions and actions, did. This observation constitutes a critical opportunity to do more than challenge the high drama of these writers' pronouncements about theatre. It invites us to analyze the relation of The Cenci (1819) and Marino Faliero (1820) to theatre in light of two conditions that shape the theatre of romanticism: remorse and women. In this context remorse identifies the psychic state of theatre generally and the play to which these two secondgeneration plays respond. Women activate the ambivalence toward theatre manifested by canonical poets of whatever political persuasion. Viewing second-generation history plays in the context of attitudes toward remorse and women establishes at once their distance from Coleridge and their congruence with him. To discern their differences requires that we first recall the difference that Coleridge's remorse represents as a moral, political, and theatrical category. For remorse signaled a vital complex of issues in its day that preoccupied more minds than Coleridge's. Seamus Deane presents remorse as a moral and epistemological touchstone for Enlightenment thinkers in 176
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England who are struggling to come to terms with their reactions to crime and punishment generally and to the French Revolution specifically.1 Joseph Donohue and Jeffrey Cox detail its relation to theatre by charting the rise of the villain-hero protagonist in this age.2 The same problem eventuates for philosophers and playwrights: what to make of remorse. Enlightenment efforts to understand the circumstances that lead to crime make moral censure difficult especially when those circumstances are "circumstantial." Theatrical success at evoking sympathy for such protagonists intensifies the conflict for those wishing to affirm the stage as moral institution. It is difficult to ensure that viewers identify with the remorse of the villain-hero rather than with the acts of power that necessitate remorse when that power is displayed on stage for most of the play. This broader context underscores the cultural service of Coleridge's middle stage. Not only does the new prominence of remorse signal his waning support for revolution but the antitheatricalism thematized in his plays aims to keep moral and dramatic interest working together. The only way to render criminality unambiguous is to "display the hollowness of showy instrumental qualities" on stage (BL 2: 221). We have seen how Coleridge's plays orchestrate this display in a number of ways. By making remorse the central subject of a play, Remorse censures the tendency to offer it as a last-minute concession to morality.3 ^apolya goes even further by polarizing characters such that there is no mistaking the intentions or appeal of good in relation to evil. "Good" characters render their whole souls transparent; their visible (in)action fully accords with their hidden motivations. "Bad" characters betray their evil through restlessness - a restlessness so thoroughgoing that no one in the play or watching it mistakes killing a tyrant for killing a king. This public service supplements the personal benefits Coleridge gains from Remorse. On one hand, Remorse showcases Coleridge's respectability and the "Englishness" of imagination; on the other, Remorse, as an only slightly modified version of Osorio, keeps him in touch with his radical youth. Given what we know about the second-generation poets' attitude toward revolution, we should not be surprised to find them challenging Coleridge's remorse. Indeed, schematizing attitudes to the connection between revolution and remorse is a quick way of confirming conventional distinctions between them. Though hedged with qualifications, the second generation supports social revolution
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Conclusion
throughout their lives and denounces remorse. Their objections are political and psychological as much as theatric. For them, the Coleridgean distinction between revenge and remorse is no distinction at all. Remorse is only a more efficient means of inflicting torture and thus maintaining social conformity.4 One advantage of setting their plays in earlier historical periods is that they can reexternalize the effects of contemporary hegemony. Subjects are not simply wracked by conscience or incapacitated by giving conflicting laws to themselves, they are placed on the rack of the state and of God. In addition, second-generation poets find remorse debilitating on a psychological level and object to the obsessive self-regard triggered by guilt. In Shelley's terms, both revenge and remorse impede the self-expansive nature of love, by which humans identify "with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. " 5 Keats would complain that both comprise positive impediments to negative capability. An inverse relation between the generations likewise exists in the politics associated with playwrighting activity. The second-generation poets write plays during their periods of greatest political activity. This coincidence is clearest in the case of Byron, whose playwrighting flourishes during his involvement with the Carbonari uprising in Ravenna. It is during this period that he also shifts from writing metaphysical to history plays.6 Neither Shelley's nor Keats's career manifests the same kind or degree of political involvement but their dramaturgical and political energies dovetail in a similar way. The year 1819 marks Shelley's entry into dramatic production and the composition of his Philosophical View of Reform.1 The same year Keats dreams of imitating Kean by effecting a "revolution in dramatic poetry" during the period when he expresses greatest interest in social reform in England, France, and America.8 Measured against the career trajectory we have established for Coleridge, the second generation returns us to Coleridge's first stage, where revolution and drama are acceptable goals - because commanding genius is. Either unwavering conviction or accidents of birth and death preserve them from entering a more indifferent stage. These psychological, moral, and political objections to remorse are registered most immediately in the type of dramatic protagonist featured in second-generation plays. In this instance, too, their plays return us to Coleridge's first stage which, even by titles, foregrounds his interest in villain-heroes {The Fall of Robespierre, Osorio). Plays by
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the second generation prolong this stage: Manfred, Beatrice Cenci, Ludolph, Marino Faliero, Jacopo Foscari, and Cain are cut from the same cloth as Osorio, Marmaduke, Rivers, and Wallenstein. They are all superior individuals seduced by circumstances into enormous ill. Except for one thing - sympathy for them depends on their retention of commanding natures, not their expressions of remorse.9 By and large, these are remorseless heroes who believe in the positive features of youth, action, and acting as states of being. Their commanding allegiances are visible in these plays' inversion of the physical traits that identify Coleridge's characters. Even a surface look at their faces belies his grounding assumption that external states manifest inner conditions and the specific conclusions he draws from this: that "calm" connotes age and that both are the best conditions for governing a nation.10 In the plays of the second generation, "calm" men are brutes beyond conscience or social appeal. "Restless" men display their eagerness to improve personal and civic conditions. Of even greater consequence is the second physical difference registered by the protagonists of second-generation plays. On occasion, these plays extend the role of commanding genius to women. In her starring role, Beatrice Cenci is one in a series of (potential) men who moves from a state of innocence into a state of experience. The Preface to The Cenci grants higher praise. In force of will, intelligence, and beauty, Beatrice resembles Satan. Supporting roles, too, cast women as commanding. Superior in love and battle, Myrrha in Act 3 of Sardanapalus assumes the station of command. As Sardanapalus puts it, "this night / Made warriors of more than me" (S 3. 1. 316-99). Servants obey her in violation of the king's orders (S 3. 1. 300), and even "real" men like Salamenes finally come around. Marina, too (The Two Foscari), bears the only discernible traces of a commanding mind. While both father and son are consumed by duty to the state, she alone remains defiant — not to mention the only one alive. "Accursed be the city where the laws / Would stifle nature's! ... And this is patriotism ? / To me it seems the worst barbarity " (TF 2. 1. 419-20, 427-8). Though beautiful women, their power resides in force of will more than force of person. Yet despite all these apparent differences, why do secondgeneration plays share the same (or worse) fate as Coleridge's and feel so similar to the plays even of his second stage? After all, these plays are all saddled with the reputation of being "relentlessly rumi-
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native," inactive, antitheatrical.11 Failure of discrimination, by romanticists otherwise attentive to the differences between the two generations, is not simply the product of a general neglect of romantic drama. Indeed, part of the interest in studying this body of work is pondering why these writers do resemble each other in their plays more than in any other of their writings. From the perspective of his drama, Byron sounds recognizably "romantic"; his cynicism shades to sympathy for the plight of mankind [sic]. Conversely, Keats becomes "Byronic" in his attraction to melancholy male heroes. The greatest similarities emerge between Shelley and Coleridge, whom Shelley resembles both in terms of the plays he writes and his theoretical views on drama. He makes a pair of plays out of the twin components of Coleridge's illusion and defends drama in "A Defence of Poetry" along Coleridgean lines.12 The underlying reason for such resemblances is a consequence of the strategies adopted by second-generation poets to bypass remorse. As we will see, they object to the moral thinking that underlies Coleridge's depiction of "potential men" only ultimately to accept his restrictions on who constitutes "actual citizens." Those differences in degree of sympathy felt by the second generation for the working classes and women are apparent, but not realized, in their plays. For all their liberal sentiments, plays like Sardanapalus and Marino Faliero are terrorized by the prospect of the masses taking control; The Cenci, Otho the Great, The Two Foscari, and Sardanapalus
are even more traumatized by the thought of individual women doing so. In their identification of the irreconcilability of possessive individualism and women, present-day feminist critiques of liberalism illuminate the peculiar thematic tensions of these plays. When power is feminized in a social economy that sways rather than subdues, women bear the additional burden of supporting the "effeminate" rule of men. In romantic drama, men's power resides in their minds, particularly their imaginations, leaving women to assume the action. By acting, women disqualify themselves from romantic terms of sympathy: introspection but also criminality are the distinctions of superior men. Theatre, however, tells a different story even as it plots against commanding women. By contradicting visually the sexual imbalance of poetic drama, it loses its appeal for newly feminized men. Poets like Byron and Shelley compose but refuse to see la bella parracida taking the house by storm.
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COMMANDING WOMEN
"Re-man your breast: I feel no such remorse" {MF3. i. 500)
Key to the resemblances among first- and second-generation male dramatic protagonists is the version of remorse that Coleridge delineates to Southey during the successful production of the play. "By REMORSE I mean the Anguish and Disquietude arising from the Self-contradiction introduced into the soul by Guilt - a feeling which is good or bad according as the Will makes use of it." One could say that second-generation plays retain the anguish and the self-division of male heroes but seek to avoid the guilt. Only "undivided" men are "brutes" like Count Cenci and the priest Beleses (Sardanapalus), who never vacillate in their pursuit of ill. 13 Vacillating heroes, on the other hand, temper their activity and avoid internalizing revolutionary " crime " as guilt. 14 This happens in two ways, one more characteristic of Shelley, the other of Byron. Shelley endorses revolutionary activity, but only so long as no one gets hurt. Prometheus must revoke his violent curse of Jupiter before social reformation can get underway; the papal legate arrives to arrest Cenci immediately after Beatrice has had him murdered in order to preserve the interdiction on "unlawful" forms of violence. Byron allows his heroes to take revenge when they must but to minimize their agency in doing so. In this skepticism regarding the primacy of will, Byron's plays come closer to the second term that Coleridge comes to oppose to remorse — not revenge but regret. Whereas remorse arises from "evil which has its ground or origin in the agent," regret is occasioned by evil resulting from the "compulsion of circumstances." Refusing to criminalize revolutionary enthusiasm by endorsing a poetics of remorse, second-generation plays avoid the crisis of masculinity showcased in Coleridge's second stage. "Curse on these Christian robes! / They are spell-blasted: and whoever wears them, / His arm shrinks wither'd, his heart melts away, / And his bones soften" (R 4. 3. 27-34). Yet by censuring violence or highlighting the power of circumstance, they end up worrying about the same thing - male impotence. The only difference is whether men will it or are controlled by it. Shelley expresses the Coleridgean version in Beatrice's advice to a remorseful Giacomo: "Make thine hard,
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brother" (C 3. 1. 390). Keats's men display castration anxiety, whereas Byron's heroes cast themselves as victims of circumstance even in this regard. It is striking the extent to which Byron's heroes flaunt their "effeminacy." They present themselves variously as "fated," "unmanned," or persistently ruled by "circumstance," in effect as far from "sovereign individuals" as men can get.15 This may seem a high price to pay to avoid feeling remorse, but Byron's heroes never tire of p(l)aying it. It is not difficult to see why. By stressing their victimization, they avoid the moral responsibility that distinguishes Coleridge's "potential man" but retain the social advantages reserved for his " actual citizens." Critiquing the Coleridgean concept of will falls to Byron's metaphysical plays, which pose the essential question: "Can circumstance make sin / Or virtue?" {Cain 1.1. 377—8). Both metaphysical and history plays answer in the affirmative, thereby undermining agency: the "mere instincts of the first-born Cain / ... ever lurks somewhere in human hearts, / Though circumstance may keep it in abeyance" (MF4.. 2. 56-8). The history plays then struggle with the problems of governance that ensue when grounds for acting are up in the air.16 Destabilization of class and gender hierarchies further complicate matters. These plays explore how to rule when man is not sovereign nor the sovereign a man (Sardanapalus) and how to obey when subjects are conceived as a general will rather than a sovereign individual (Marino Faliero). Departing from such problems of history indicates Byron's distance from Coleridge. So does his "philosophy" of history, as articulated in the preface to Marino Faliero. Rather than evincing fixed principles, Byron's notion of history asserts a radical contingency of will; public events spring from accidents of privacy, great men are ruled by domestic and erotic affairs. Unlike Coleridge's middle stage in which men struggle to imitate the (antitheatrical) will of God, Byron's history plays are " true" to history when they portray male heroes as governed by circumstance. No play thematizes so explicitly the contingencies of rule as does Sardanapalus. (Whether it dramatizes this contingency, as several critics have noted, is another matter that will be addressed shortly.) In his roles as aristocratic sovereign and "bourgeois subject" of love, Sardanapalus makes the most out of seeming to be " the very slave of circumstance and impulse" (S 4. 1. 330). Extreme as he appears, however, in his depiction of sovereignty Sardanapalus is hardly alone. He is one in a series of Byronic rulers who feel themselves
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oppressed by their power. This oppression takes several forms but reduces to a feminization of will. Rulers are either born king or "made" doge, but neither want nor seek this distinction. Faliero longs to be one of the guys, Sardanapalus one of the girls; both mourn being "cut off" from private life in becoming a public figure (MF 3. 2. 348-9). Moreover, once they are elected to power, they find themselves enslaved to their role; they must assume a foreign identity and pander to public opinion. This results in a third indignity, their theatricalization; rulers describe themselves as public spectacles, "pageants," "puppets," "stage-play Emperors." The underlying message of these various laments is that the ruler has little autonomy and even less power. In rulers' minds, "real" power resides elsewhere, usually in bodies of men — either in the patricians who exercise actual but corrupt power or the plebians whose potential power is on the rise. There is something appealing about these sovereigns who seek to rule by love, not force. Especially when comparing them to tyrants like Emerick and Cenci, we can hardly fault critics for sympathizing with, even idealizing, Sardanapalus.17 There is also something admirable in these quixotic efforts to dramatize the new terms of power. As Hazlitt suggests, democracy is antitheatrical; the desire to diffuse power conflicts with the conventional means of drama and stage heroics. None the less, in its exposure of the traditional gains to be made by a more "liberal" notion of governance, recent criticism of Sardanapalus offers insights that prove applicable to all of the second-generation history plays. As Jerome Christensen shows, Benjamen Constant sets the relevant terms of liberalism by substituting "commerce" for "war" as the means to "obtain by mutual agreement what one can no longer hope to obtain through violence."18 As ruler Sardanapalus seeks to ground his empire on shared pleasure, not domination; as lover he wishes to be mastered by his slave. The problem, however, is not simply that this desire subjects him to the ego ideal of his Myrrha but that sexual commerce unleashes the desire for domination in both genders. Sardanapalus's liberal masquerade meets its match in Myrrha, who as slave, as Ionian, as sexual woman reflects the power he seeks to disavow. Peter Manning and Susan Wolfson have unveiled Sardanapalus's use of this Myrrha to consolidate himself.19 A prophylactic against the conqueror in himself, Sardanapalus's effeminacy reaffirms the gender polarities that structure the play - as
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theatre, if not as drama. 20 As Wolfson argues, Sardanapalus plays at being a "she-king" as a latent, but actual, man. What activates this latency is his nightmarish dream image of Myrrha. Her name and place at the dream-banquet display the equivalence: Myrrha is embedded in that "he-queen" Semiramis, the negative-sublime of Burke's beauty: the phallic breast. Not surprisingly, this Assyrian Marie Antoinette consolidates her empire by incesting her son. While such dream-views are important demystifications of femininity and pacifist notions of love, they provoke violent defenses in the "real" world of the play. Neither Sardanapalus nor Sardanapalus can afford to maintain this destabilized view of gendered subjectivity. Male sovereignty gains the upper hand through the "purging" of Semiramis from the rest of the play and the burning of Myrrha in it (Wolfson, "A Problem Few Dare Imitate," pp. 888-9). Moreover, the play makes an issue of Myrrha's consent to this fate from start to finish. Sardanapalus's first word to Myrrha is "choose"; "Rule thy own hours, thou rulest mine"(5 1.2. 12, 17). So, more or less, are his last: "My Myrrha! dost thou truly follow me, / Freely and fearlessly?" (S 5. 1. 464). Not only is the slave Myrrha's consent qualified by her claims of "duty" and by Sardanapalus's desire to "rejoin" his "fathers," not her, in death (Manning, Byron and his Fictions, p. 135) but an intervening scene shows that she has already been burnt. This time expressly without her consent. "You here! Who call'd you? ... It forms no portion of your duties / To enter here till sought for" (S 4. 1. 437, 439-40). The slave gets put in her place precisely when the wife intervenes, the same wife whom Sardanapalus claims has no claims on his "love" because he married her in the old way — "as monarchs wed, for state" (S 1. 2. 213). But this is love in the liberal state and the problem for women when men refuse to own up to their power. Those categorically without power, not those who choose to forego it, are at the mercy of the would-not-be-sovereign's will or whim. Critical readings of Sardanapalus help to make visible similar conflicts over the nature of rule in other second-generation history plays.21 Indeed, the confusions that fracture Act 3 of Remorse become a ruling principle of these plays. Bourgeois notions of swaying and loving serve tyrannical sovereigns and aristocratic marriages; a discourse of individual rights and free choice for female characters conflicts with the law of the father and the heart of the son. Otho the Great extends this analysis by blurring distinctions between the ruling
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psychologies of father and son. Anticipating Sardanapalus, Otho fashions himself as a benevolent ruler only to encounter similar resistance from his subjects. His enemies, and especially his son, persist in misapprehending the existence, not simply the quality, of Otho's mercy. In spite of his impatience, loyal subjects refuse to speak anything but false flattery.22 Once again, it takes heterosexual love to bring out the tyrant in Otho. Otho, moreover, enacts the double logic of Wallenstein. On the face of it, Otho's objection to his son's desire for Auranthe over Erminia follows from his opposition to the idea of marrying for love, not for state — a tyranny that young Ludolph finds so objectionable that he joins with the rebels in open revolt against his father (OG 5. 5. 139-41). In reality, Otho fears heterosexuality altogether on the principle that it gives women the upper hand. Otho's view of his son's marriage confirms why he rules his empire alone. Otho. No, obstinate boy, you shall be kept caged up, Served with harsh food, with scum for Sunday-drink.
Ludolph. Indeed! Otho. And chains too heavy for your life: I'll choose a gaoler, whose swart monstrous face Shall be a hell to look upon, and she Ludolph. Ha!
Otho. Shall be your fair Auranthe. Ludolph. Amaze! Amaze! Otho. Today you marry her.
(OG 2. 1. 88-94)
Sardanapalus may consolidate power by flaunting effeminacy, but Otho strives to be mother, not emperor, of his realm. As with Wallenstein in his dealings with Max, Otho inverts the heterosexual and concentric logic that grounds the liberal state: "What are the cities 'yond the Alps to me, / The provinces about the Danube's mouth / . . . T o these fair children, stars of a new age?" (OG 3. 2. 18-19, 22). Ever in revolt against the father, Ludolph now rejects Otho's (non-) change of heart regarding Auranthe in terms that reveal the son's identification with the father. For twice in this scene Ludolph tries to escape from marrying Auranthe ("Amaze! Amaze!"). 23 First, he displays his unworthiness to receive such "bounty": "Punish me not with favour.... Then grant me loving pardon, but not else, / Good Gods! not else, in any way, my liege!" (OG 2. 1. 102, 109-10). When Otho proves that Ludolph in fact merits reward by admitting that he
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recognized Ludolph in "the Arab" who saved Otho during the rebellion, Ludolph again protests, " I must rejoice / For you, whose wings so shadow over me / In tender victory, but for myself / I still must mourn. The fair Auranthe mine! / Too great a boon!" (OG 2.1. 137—40). With such auspicious beginnings, her end is already in sight. " I , / The Priest of Justice, will immolate her / Upon the altar of wrath! She stings me through! - / Even as the worm doth feed upon the nut, / So she, a scorpion, preys upon my brain! / I feel her gnawing here! Let her but vanish, Then, father, I will lead your legions forth" (OG 5. 5. I53-9)- 24 True, Ludolph is sorely provoked, for the father's means of reconciling with the son involve "tarnished" goods. This drives Ludolph mad, but his ravings reveal just how many balances have shifted. First, the balance of power between the sexes is upended not only by Auranthe's former but continual sexual activity. Moreover, woman has assumed not only man's power but form of potency: she is a scorpion, a worm, a stinger. But her sexual aggression is only a complement to other masculine traits. Her paramour Albert delineates these from the start: "Auranthe - Heaven preserve her always fair! - / Is in the heady, proud, ambitious vein" (OG 1. 1. 145-6). The fantasy behind Ludolph's ravings is that he can turn back the hands of time: he seeks to restore the imbalance of male power, when men were tyrants and right was might, not a question of consent. "Let her but vanish, / Then, father, I will lead your legions forth, / Compact in steeled squares, and speared files / And bid our trumpets speak a fell rebuke / To nations drowsed in peace!" (OG 5. 5. 158—62). This is the same condition that Salamenes would " rouse " in Sardanapalus, not simply rule by force but love without women. Salamenes may be the "first casualty of the metamorphosis he encouraged " in Sardanapalus, but he is the only one to make it into the king's bed on stage (Manning, Byron and his Fictions, p. 134). Tensions in the representation of women and will reach their high point in The Cenci. Like the other plays, The Cenci stages a physical battle of wills between the sexes and a metaphysical battle over (gendered) will but adds a further demystifying twist. The "beauty" of consent here is not to love or marriage but rape. "No, 'tis her stubborn will which by its own consent shall stoop as low / As that which drags it down" (C 4. 1. 10). Exactly how we are to interpret Shelley's objective in framing the issue this way is difficult to discern. The jury on this, as well as on so many things in this play, is still out
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- even though Beatrice's head has long been off. One might plausibly adduce it as a further confirmation of Shelley's " proto-feminism," his protest that, under early nineteenth-century law, there is no discernible difference between marriage and rape. 25 What Beatrice is made to make of it is clearer: murder and innocence. "Who dares talk of guilt? My lord, I am more innocent of parricide / Than is a child born fatherless " (C 4. 4. 111-13). But critics are troubled by her words and actions almost as much as by the court's. If the trial is clearly bogus, Shelley's preface delivers a sentence against her: "Undoubtedly, no person can be truly dishonoured by the act of another; and the fit return to make to the most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance, and a resolution to convert the injurer from his dark passions by peace and love" ("Preface" to The Cenci, p. 240). On this logic, Beatrice is indicted on two counts: she murders her father and, in so doing, becomes him. As critics point out, she adopts his words, his deeds - even his absence of remorse.26 Others who feel trapped by the false binarisms of law render an aesthetic, not moral, judgment. Inability to reconcile Beatrice's character traits or our reactions to them is what Shelley intends by portraying her in this way; by "seek [ing] the justification of Beatrice, yet feel [ing] that she has done what needs justification," we expand our capacities for sympathy and enlarge our hearts. 27 But whose imagination expands under pressure to judge a woman fighting to preserve the illusion of will in the arms of omnipotent will? And why are " w e " the ones divided in the act of viewing her, while she, alone among villainheroes, remains undivided in her despair? Such questions force us to reconsider romantic notions of commanding genius from the perspective of sexual difference. Coleridge's efforts to idealize his characters in order to keep moral and dramatic interest working together have not proved possible in the case of la bella parracida. To Shelley's credit, the Preface to The Cenci seems to provoke this separation by stressing Beatrice's status as a "tragic" and "dramatic," and thus not a "moral," character. If she had repaid her father's rape of her with "kindness and forebearance" rather than murder, she would have been "wiser and better" - like her poetic companion Prometheus, who is " exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandisement. " But "she would never have been a tragic character" ("Preface" to The Cenci, p. 240). Shelley's explicitness in foregrounding Beatrice's inseparability from theatre does more than point up the inadequacy
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of moral interpretations of her character. It highlights the connection between women and theatre. The one play written expressly for the "multitude" features a woman whose story provokes "national and universal interest" which Shelley seeks to "bring home" to the "hearts" of his "countrymen" {ibid., p. 239). But this equation also brings into focus the different strategies that both Shelley and Byron adopt to avoid seeing their female characters on stage. To watch this process in action requires our viewing their opposing treatments of female character in The Cenci and Marino Faliero from the point of view of Remorse. Among other things, such a chain reveals women's exclusion from remorse and men's alignment with poetry both as subjects in drama and composers of it. There are residual profits, moreover, in departing from Remorse. By following Coleridge into theatre, Shelley and Byron retain their absolute genius in (not) being there. 2
SHELLEY AND BYRON S STAGE FRIGHT
In "The Slave-Woman in the Harem," Malcolm Kelsall makes several distinctions that prove useful in focusing our discussion of The Cenci and Marino Faliero. He locates the plays of Byron and Shelley in opposing strands of "liberationist ideology," the "liberal" (Byron) and the "totalitarian" (Shelley), and distinguishes between Sardanapalus and The Cenci on the basis of their treatment of female sexuality. Arguing that Shelley " equate [s] the crime of incest with male violence against women" whereas Byron, by associating Myrrha with Semiramis, highlights the destructiveness of female sexuality, Kelsall concludes that the "closest contextual analogues to Byron's tragedy are not the liberationist discourses of the Godwin/Wollstonecraft/Shelley circle" but "the tragedies Byron knew in which female sexuality threatens the patriarchal order and brings social catastrophe," Voltaire's Semiramis and Alfieri's Mirra (Kelsall, "The Slave-Woman in the Harem," p. 328). I would argue instead that the tragedies contributing to Byron's demystifying account of female sexuality include The Cenci and Remorse, and that insights regarding Byron's treatment of women in Sardanapalus help to resolve ambiguities regarding Beatrice's character in The Cenci and Byron's attitude toward the staging of Marino Faliero. For despite their more idealized depictions of female character, The Cenci and Marino Faliero place female sexuality on trial. The two plays clearly differ in their
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sympathy for the trials of femininity but deliver a judgment against it in both cases. Beatrice is condemned by others whereas the saintly Angiolina indicts herself: "Alas! And I have been the cause, the unconscious cause; / And for this funeral marriage, this black union, / Which thou, compliant with my father's wish / Didst promise at his death, thou hast seal'd thine own" (MF 5. 2. 7-10). Dramatic precedent is central to making the case against female sexuality as well as to seeing that this is the case in these plays. Prefatory remarks to Marino Faliero foreground its connection to The Cenci. There Byron places himself in the situation of Shelley as Shelley recounts his inspiration for The Cenci. Byron portrays himself as captivated by an episode in Venetian history "of universal interest" which is likewise signaled by a (non-)portrait. "The black veil which is painted over the place of Marino Faliero amongst the Doges, and the Giants' Staircase where he was crowned, and discrowned, and decapitated, struck forcibly upon my imagination. " Moreover, he dates his particular interest in the doge's story at 1819 in the Preface, whereas his letters record his fascination with this portrait as early as April of 1817 (BLJ 5: 203). " I went, in 1819, in search of his tomb more than once to the church San Giovanni e San Paolo" ("Preface" to Marino Faliero, p. 408). As sources for drama, Beatrice and Marino Faliero are linked by their portraits, as characters in the plays by their taking action to avenge sexual assault. Angiolina indicts both, then, according to the logic of Shelley's preface and Coleridge's play, for she is the aggrieved party and she eschews revenge. Playing Prometheus to Marino's Beatrice, Angiolina pits the moral against the dramatic and places herself a world apart from her female counterpart. Like Zarina, she is the "eternal feminine" in her role as fully self-abnegating wife. As Faliero is anxious to point out, "you had / Freedom from me to choose, and urged in answer / Your father's choice" (MF 2. 1. 322-4). In contrast, Beatrice surpasses Myrrha in her commanding genius. Proud, independent, in fact the only person in all of Rome who is brave enough to stand up to Count Cenci, she appears to everyone as heaven's "avenging arm." "Circumstances," however, ally Angiolina and Beatrice in ways that foreclose women's status as "potential men" in theatre. Angiolina's ability to rise above circumstance distinguishes her from her husband but makes her indistinguishable from Beatrice. Angiolina responds to Steno's "ribald" assault on her virtue by claiming
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"To me the scorner's words were as the wind / Unto the rock" (MF 5. 1. 420-2). In this she repeats the terms of Beatrice's refusal to accept guilt for her crime: "Consequence, to me, / Is as the wind which strikes the solid rock / But shakes it not" (C 4. 4. 50-2). The circumstance that unites and indicts Beatrice and Angiolina is the potentiality that they and all their sister heroines figure. The fact that women's innocence is indissociable from their chastity, and that this chastity is alienable with or without their consent, means that their autonomy — not to mention grounds for citizenship — lies in the hands of men. It feels cruel to equate the circumstances triggering the crimes in The Cenci and Marino Faliero, for Beatrice is the victim of repeated rape, whereas Angiolina is the target of an isolated instance of verbal - indeed, written - abuse. Yet this is not the only place where Byron approaches the " proto-feminism " of Shelley. Potential or actual sexual "misconduct" by women and, in the case of the latter, whether the result of consent or coercion, is the same "thing" because it has the same effect. Faliero voices the epistemological logic and its contradictory application to women. His assurance that history will reverse the negative judgment of him is based on the dictum that" true words are things" (MF$. 1. 289; original emphases). But when the subject is women's honor, false words are irreversible things and assume a life of their own: Doge. You know the full offence of this born villain... Who threw his sting into a poisonous libel, And on the honour of— Oh God! my wife, The nearest, dearest part of all men's honour, Left a base slur to pass from mouth to mouth Of loose mechanics, with all coarse foul comments, And villainous jests, and blasphemies obscene; While sneering nobles, in more polish'd guise, Whisper'd the tale, and smiled upon the lie Which made me look like them Ber. F. But still it was a lie - you knew it false And so did all men. Doge. Nephew, the high Roman Said, ' Caesar's wife must not even be suspected,' And put her from him. {MF 1. 2. 155, 157-65, 167-9) The preservation of Beatrice's innocence only doubles her guilt. She must murder her father in order to thwart his will not simply to rape
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her but to have her assent to his deed: "let her understand / Her coming is consent" (C4. 1. 101-2). But Beatrice also knows that this is too fine a distinction to trust to the world. As she points out, Orsino's "cold" counsel that she "accuse [her father] of the deed, and let the law / Avenge thee" cruelly misses the point. " [A]ye, lay all bare / So that my unpolluted fame should be / With vilest gossips a stale mouthed story; / A mock, a bye-word, an astonishment" (C3. 1. 152, 157-60). Both these plays confront the radical contingency of female innocence as their honor is passed from mouth to mouth of men. Those critics who see a "tragic flaw" in "[Beatrice's] idealization of virginity as the center of her moral life and nature " fail to admit that the flaw is in a "world" that anchors women's moral life in their virginity.28 The difference in Angiolina's and Beatrice's reactions to the "sad reality" of their sexual potentiality underscores Byron's and Shelley's agreement on the insufficiency of remorse — and Coleridgean morality in general — in theatre. Though for different reasons, Coleridge's remorse proves unworkable in both situations not simply because both women do not feel it. What keeps Angiolina unaffected by Steno's attack on her virtue is that she does not accept the terms of the world. "Why, what is virtue if it needs a victim? / Or if it must depend upon men's words? / The dying Roman said, 'twas but a name': / It were indeed no more, if human breath / Could make or mar it" (MF 2. 1. 57—61). Such a notion of virtue places Angiolina beyond remorse because beyond temptation, but also beyond rationality, autonomy, and agency. In response to her friend's inquiries whether she had ever felt attraction for a man other than her husband either before or since their marriage, she asserts, " I knew not / That wedded bosoms could permit themselves / To ponder upon what they now might choose, / Or aught save their past c h o i c e " - a choice, she has already made clear, determined according to her father's instructions to " single out what we should love in others" and "subdue all tendency to lend / The best and purest feelings of our nature / To baser passions" (MF 2. 1. 126—9, 95—8). Such transcendent calm removes Angiolina not only from sympathy, as critics have noted, but theatre. The one time that she is supposed to step into the realm of spectacle, she stumbles. When the Chief of the Council of Ten "requestfs] the princess to withdraw" from the court, fearing that "Twill move her too much to be witness to" her husband's execution, she replies, " I know it will, and yet I must
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endure it, / For 'tis a part of mine" (MF 5. 1. 468-71). In the event, she does not endure it, having fainted in domestic chambers. Like that other "moral" character, Prometheus, then, Angiolina does not belong in theatre. " [T]he few whom such an exhibition would have interested, could never have been sufficiently interested for a dramatic purpose, from the want of finding sympathy in their interest among the mass who surround them" ("Preface" to The Cenci, p. 240).
Beatrice, on the other hand, dominates the scene of her trial not only because her actions bring her there in the first place. The trial scene allows her to finally appear as what and who she " i s " : a commanding actress. Not only are all eyes on her but she literally captivates her audience. As the perjury and death of Marzio reveals, Beatrice's gaze is piercing. But Marzio is not the only man to feel her commanding effect; from the start, Orsino "fears" her "aweinspiring gaze, / Whose beams anatomize me nerve by nerve / And lay me bare, and make me blush to see / My hidden thoughts" (C 1. 2. 85-7). So does her father. Remorseless as he supposedly is, a large part of what motivates the rape of Beatrice is his desire to give her stage-fright. Stay, I command you - from this day and hour Never again, I think, with fearless eye, And brow superior, and unaltered cheek, And that lip made for tenderness or scorn, Shalt thou strike dumb the meanest of mankind; Me least of all. (C 2. 1. 116-20)
Even the assumption underlying this plot is mimetic: "She shall become (for what she most abhors / Shall have a fascination to entrap / Her loathing will), to her own conscious self / All she appears to others" (C 4. 1. 85-8). At least on this score, Beatrice proves her father wrong. Rape only intensifies her commitment to acting. The logic of her performance rests on two realities for Beatrice. Acting, or at a minimum feigning, is woman's only recourse when coming means consent and the end of her (self-) command - a lesson, moreover, which Beatrice attempts to pass on to other women. Beatrice. What is done wisely, is done well.
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Be faithful to thyself, And fear no other witness but thy fear. For if, as cannot be, some circumstance Should rise in accusation, we can blind Suspicion with such cheap astonishment, Or overbear it with such guiltless pride, (C 4. 4. 35, 40-7) As murderers cannot feign. Second, what enables the power of her performance, particularly in the trial scene, is that her conscious self entertains no doubts about the "truth" of her performance. Like Angiolina, Beatrice is "calm," her "brow" does testify to her "guilelessness," because she feels no "fear" that seeks to "disguise" itself "from its own shame" by donning "the mantle of thin remorse" (C 5. 1. 30-2). But Beatrice is "guilty" whereas Angiolina is "innocent," which increases her tragic interest but also the desire to condemn her. It is as if The Cenci challenges the "faith" of Remorse by dramatizing the calm that arises not from innocence but disavowal of guilt. To my knowledge, only Laurence Lockridge has pointed to this connection by way of accounting for Beatrice's "unheroic denial in court of patricide." " It is not out of cunning that she self-righteously forces Marzio" to "lie about her involvement" in Cenci's murder, even though this results in Marzio's torture and death. She has almost convinced herself, through these evasions, of her own noninvolvement. There is a split in her consciousness between being and doing - her being disclaims the doing as a desperate means of protecting what remains of her ego. Perhaps Shelley has Coleridge's play Remorse ... in mind, for The Cenci is written as if in qualifying refinement of Coleridge's conviction that acts necessarily stick to us because of conscience, no matter what our tactics of evasion or repression.29 I would go further on the question of influence and repression, both by recalling that Shelley is reading Remorse right before composing The Cenci and by including Zjipolya in Shelley's response.30 Considering both plays focuses the dispute on the relation between women and theatricality. The Cenci indicts Coleridge's plays for portraying "unrealistic" solutions to three social and moral problems posed in both men's plays: tyrannicide, false appearances, sexual violence. In contrast to Coleridge's faith that tyrants betray themselves by their restlessness so that there is an "unconfoundable difference" between killing a tyrant and killing a father/king, The Cenci raises significant doubts
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about the appropriateness of a remorseless woman killing a tyrannical and remorseless man. Second, in contrast to Coleridge's declared faith that innocent women see through evil characters because they do not dissemble themselves, The Cenci makes the most virtuous heroine a master dissembler. Beatrice's assurance that she and her mother "can blind / Suspicion with such cheap astonishment, / . . . As murderers cannot feign" overturns the justification for Casimir's praise of " simple, inexperienced " Sarolta. " O surer than Suspicion's hundred eyes / Is that fine sense, which to the pure in heart, / By mere oppugnancy of their own goodness, / Reveals the approach of evil" (Z11- 4- l- 78-81). Third, The Cenci scorns the faith that would offer this reassurance to impending rape. "Lady, be calm! fear not this king of the buskin!" (£11. 3. 1. 315). This is part of a broader discussion regarding the relation between sexual (in)fidelity and feigning. These parallels illustrate, first, how The Cenci consistently transforms moral questions into questions of theatre and, second, how this emphasis on theatre modifies Lockridge's astute assessments of The Cenci in two ways. As an explanation of Beatrice's character, the "doubleness, not duplicity, that has been characteristic of her throughout" applies, in my estimation, less to her psychology than to her status as actor ("Justice in The Cenci," p. 97). This suggests that critical efforts to judge Beatrice either as moral agent or self-conscious character are misguided. The former is the more common tendency, but several critics have taken the latter route by way of detailing Shelley's critique of self-anatomy. Besides the prefatory statements that censure acts of revenge, the comment most frequently cited as evidence of Shelley's disapproval of Beatrice's character is this one by Orsino: "It fortunately serves my close designs / That 'tis a trick of this same family / To analyze their own and other minds. / Such selfanatomy shall teach the will / Dangerous secrets: for it tempts our powers, / Knowing what must be thought, and may be done, / Into the depth of darkest purposes" (C 2. 2. 108-14). Crediting any statement of Orsino, particularly in relation to Beatrice, is hazardous since he has his own designs on her and never speaks a word in the play that does not advance them. Another reason for caution is that his words do not apply to Beatrice. They follow on his meeting with Giacomo and pertain to Cenci's and his own - that is, to male psychology, a subject to which we will return later. Whatever else we might say about Beatrice, temptation is not her temptation. She may
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mime Cenci's violence but she is neither "fascinated" by it nor subliminally drawn to it. There are more reasons than Cenci's to wish to transcend the "fit restraints of daily life," as Angiolina has shown (C3. 1. 210). The even more crucial challenge to Coleridge's moral philosophy that Lockridge rightly identifies in The Cenci should, however, alter what Lockridge sees as "unheroic" about Beatrice's courtroom denials. When no longer measured in moral terms, her performance appears "heroic" throughout. The problem is that it fails because her performance, however moving, is no match for the "actual power" that condemns or justifies character. Lockridge's general point that The Cenci demonstrates the limits of moral solutions to socio-political ills helps to account for what both Byron and Shelley were doing in theatre. By writing plays in which "the moral force of an individual" proves "insufficient to extreme situations," they show that "salvation" must come through "larger socio-political movemen t[s]." But by casting the evaluation of character in terms of acting rather than being, they also highlight theatre's indissociability from the social and vice versa. This is the object lesson of Beatrice, applicable to characters on stage and in the audience. Those without power in society cannot move the powers-that-be to act on their behalf. This is another salutary insight of a piece with the liberal, even revolutionary energies of second-generation plays. Theatre accents different "truths" because it appeals to a collective body and is "felt along the pulse" rather than processed in the brain. But why stress this point about performative power by spotlighting a beautiful woman who murders her father? And what is the effect of doing so? Arousing sympathy or fear? Critical ambivalence toward Beatrice has been present ever since Shelley scripted it into the Preface. Yet the fact that Beatrice provokes interpretive "casuistry" is striking when we compare her circumstances to those of fellow commanding geniuses. It is worth remarking that all of Beatrice's male precursors are moved to act under what turn out to be false pretenses or intentionally obscure causes. In The Borderers, Marmaduke leaves Herbert to die under the influence of Rivers's lies about Herbert's identity and Mathilda's innocence. In this, he repeats Rivers's history, for Rivers abandons the sea-captain under the influence of his shipmates' lies about him. In Osorio/Remorse, as Coleridge himself concedes, the motives behind Osorio's attempted murder of his
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brother are not fully developed, except for his alleged, and not very credible, "love" for Maria/Teresa. After two full plays, Wallenstein finally acts in The Death of Wallenstein because his equivocal behavior already convicts him of treason against the emperor. Manfred seeks his own death out of remorse for the fatal, but unidentified, consequences of his presumably incestuous alliance with Astarte. In striking contrast, Beatrice's motives for action are neither misguided nor solely in her head. Though perpetrated offstage, violence is done to her, repeatedly, intentionally, remorselessly. Byron presses this point by stressing the insubstantiality of the grounds for Marino Faliero's treason. The doge feels justified in revenging impure words not even directed at him. Even more disturbingly, those words are equated with Beatrice's rape by not being represented. This last factor highlights a second difference in dramatic representations of male and female commanding geniuses. In the case of male protagonists, seduction is a feature of mind that affirms their heroism because it proves their powers of imagination. It may constitute tragic heroism but none the less attests to the greatness of mind that has fallen. As Cox argues, the tragedy of romantic heroes is that they necessarily fail in the attempt of realizing their " beautiful ideals " in the world {In the Shadows ofRomance, pp. 17-25). But at least they have visions and, moreover, are deemed capable of dreaming as well as philosophizing on the nature and danger of dreams. In the rare instances that women dream in these plays, they have fanciful day-dreams, like Maria, or portentous night-dreams, like Alhadra and Zapolya, but their dreams are unambiguous and generally private affairs. At most, they advance the plot, not the psychological interest of the character. In contrast, men's dreams are big with history, even when, as in Sardanapalus, they involve primal family history. More to the point, male heroes are portrayed sympathetically as both subjects and victims of illusion. The former status establishes their legitimacy to rule, the latter extends the range of their rule by providing a convenient alibi when internal rule breaks down. Invariably, men's crimes are ascribed to overactive or underactivated imaginations. Wallenstein sets the modern theme- " I must do the deed because I thought of it / And fed this heart here with a dream? " - variations on which are repeated throughout these plays. Before Cenci's murder, Giacomo sounds a familiar plea, "Ask me not what I think; the unwilling brain / Feigns often what it would not; and we trust / Imagination with such phantasies / As the tongue dares not
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fashion into words, / Which have no words, their horror makes them dim / To the mind's eye" (C 2. 2. 82-7). After the murder of Cenci, he offers the following defense: " O , had I never / Found in thy smooth and ready countenance / The mirror of my darkest thoughts; hadst thou / Never with hints and questions made me look / Upon the monster of my thought, until / It grew familiar to desire" (C 5. 1. 20—4; also 3. 2. 155—61).31 As the verbal echoes make clear, these are up-dated interpretations of "the moral of Shakespeare's Macbeth." In Coleridge's rendition, When once the mind, in despite of the remonstrating conscience, has abandoned its free power to a haunting impulse or idea, then whatever tends to give depth and vividness to this idea or indefinite imagination increases its despotism, and in the same proportion renders the reason and free will ineffectual (MC, p. 293). There is no denying the anguish — or the modernity of the anguish — felt by heroes struggling to act in an incomprehensible universe where not only social but epistemological categories have broken down. But there is also no ignoring the gender of the speaker allowed to plea for sympathy in this way. The Cenci accords more space than any other romantic drama to the inner condition of a female protagonist, but that condition is associated with her sexuality and is gestured at in strikingly inarticulate ways. Not only is the word "rape" never spoken but Beatrice spends the bulk of her time disavowing speech. "If I try to speak / I shall go mad." "What are the words which you would have me speak? / I, who can feign no image in my mind / Of that which has transformed me" (C3. 1. 85—6, 108—10). In her case, the relation between thought and deed works in the opposite direction from that of male protagonists — not " I must do the deed because I thought of it" but "something must be done" that will "make / The thing that I have suffered but a shadow... destroying / The consequence of what it cannot cure" (C3. 1. 86-7, 90-1). Men justify their crimes by claiming that guilt is anterior to their deed; women act in order to insubstantiate the crimes that have been perpetrated on them. Yet however The Cenci as drama seeks to deny sympathy to female commanding genius by restricting Beatrice's opportunity to speak her mind, visualizing The Cenci as theatre achieves a different effect through the power of body language. We can only imagine the sensation of a Beatrice played by Eliza O'Neill, especially in light of
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the contradictory way that Hazlitt describes her in his View of the English Stage. On the one hand, we see a figure of feminine beauty along the lines that Siddons imagines for Lady Macbeth, "fair, feminine, nay fragile." On the other hand, we see a figure so (in)famous for her "tears, sighs, sobs, shrieks, and hysterics" that "we half begin to suspect that she represents the bodies, not the souls of women" {A View, p. 284). This same combination is registered textually in the most affecting scene of Beatrice's defense, when she claims to renounce speech altogether - though her words have been equivocal throughout the trial - in a domestic gesture of quiet resignation. "Here, Mother, tie / My girdle for me, and bind up this hair / In any simple knot; aye, that does well. / And yours I see is coming down. How often / Have we done this for one another; now / We shall not do it any more. My Lord, / We are quite ready. Well, 'tis very well" (C 5. 4. 159-60). Beautiful in its verbal simplicity, the visual effect is sublime. In the act of rebinding their hair, daughter and mother reinstate their chastity and stage a coup de theatre for female honor.32 No wonder Shelley reacts so strongly against seeing his own creation: "God forbid that I shd. see [Eliza O'Neill] play it - it wd. tear my nerves to pieces. " 33 Much as he claims to be writing a play for Covent Garden that includes "nothing beyond what the multitude are contented to believe that they can understand" (admittedly equivocal phrasing), the prospect of viewing this beauty curtails his comfort with the stage {ibid., p. 61). Not the "mind of man upturned" but the body of woman displayed is a dangerous spectacle. Here Shelley joins fellow liberal proponents of theatre in foreclosing the representation of active women on stage. Part of Shelley's fascination is perceptible in his description of the visual source for his play, the portrait of Beatrice "taken by Guido during her confinement in prison. " 34 Though most of his description accords with the period's beau ideal by dwelling obsessively on Beatrice's "golden hair," "tender and serene" eyes, and lips of "imagination and sensibility," the tell-tale phrase, that in Beatrice "energy and gentleness dwell together," alerts us to the terror evoked by la bella parracida. Shelley's captivation by this portrait captures the double logic of male romantic reactions to women on stage. As Groseclose has noted, Shelley literally sees himself in this picture, not simply in the pathos of (fe)male suffering but in Beatrice's actual physical features. Such identification with femininity comes with its defensive
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reaction, projecting the suffering but keeping the victimization for oneself. Moreover, Shelley may not see Beatrice in O'Neill on stage, but he finds her in another painting that captures his imagination during this period. His poem on "The Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery" suggests that, though dead, the "fair but terrible" Beatrice has not been sufficiently laid to rest.35 While "loveliness like a shadow" still lies upon "its lips and eyelids," those "hairs which are vipers" flow, and with "unending involutions shew / Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock / The torture and the death within, and saw / The solid air with many a ragged jaw." 36 This displaced vision restores a striking detail of the Cenci story that is effaced in The Cenci. The assassins kill the father by driving a nail through his eye (Groseclose, "The Incest Motif," p. 224). The reception history of "Guido's" portrait as Gloseclose presents it suggests the possible reception of Beatrice on stage in the early nineteenth century. Groseclose shows that after the publication of Shelley's play, the "trade in copies of Guido's portrait becomes virtually a mania after 1819. This is accompanied by a noticeable mutation of sweet to sensual in Beatrice's physiognomy," a "preoccupation with sexuality" that Groseclose attributes to Shelley's introduction of "the incest motif" in The Cenci ("The Incest Motif," p. 235). These mirror(ing) images of the fair but terrible Beatrice do not stand alone but are placed in a triptych featuring the veiled features of the doge Faliero. Whereas Beatrice's "Gorgonian eyes" silence poetry and turn the "gazer's spirit into stone," the doge represents pure potential ("On the Medusa," 11. 26, 10). The restoration of his reputation remains a possibility for the future, which the black veil enhances. The doge predicts that it "shall draw more gazers than the thousand portraits / Which glitter round it in their pictured trappings" (MF 5. 1. 504-5). The sexual difference represented in these opposing representations and their reception speaks volumes about the "sad reality" of female beauty on stage. It foregrounds the tendency to blame the victim of sexual violence and to make a profit from the spectacle of pain. An unveiled though "mutilated and disfigured" Marino Faliero does make it to the stage during this period, against Byron's ceaseless protestations.37 These protestations have been interpreted in contradictory ways, usually depending on the respective critic's interest in preserving Byron for poetry or enlisting him in the cause of theatre.38 Beyond dispute, though, in accounts of his relation to the
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stage are Byron's long-term interest in actors and acting, theatre reform, and playwrighting.39 Equally clear in the case of Marino Faliero is his vehemence against having his play brought to the stage and the contradictions and anxiety that accompany his remarks. 40 I want to explore a different approach to this controversy by attributing Erdman's sense of Byron's "stage fright" to the specific equation between women and theatre. Ever the "lord" in his scorn for unruly theatre audiences, Lord Byron appears like Count Cenci in his need to subdue women who assume command over men. 41 Unlike Shelley's, Byron's plays never feature a woman in a starring role nor affirm the connection between women and theatre in prefatory remarks. But the connection is visible in his remarks about theatre and in symptomatic moments in his plays. Byron himself pairs the two subjects in his blatant plays for sympathy in letters recounting Drury Lane's usurpation of his play: "Behold the blessings of a lucky lot! / My play is damned, and Lady Noel not." The plays thematize anxiety over women's control in commentary on "women's weapons" and the public realm's subjection to the private sphere. Concern over women's weapons is expressed in nostaglia for the days when prowess resided in "spears," not "words" (MF 2. 2. 114-19; 3. 2. 152—3; 4. 2. 15—29). Anxiety over the private sphere is manifested by locating the causes of history in men's subjection to circumstances, usually associated with beautiful women (MF 5. 1. 435—45). Both discussions depend on an equivalence between theatre and women. Contemporary governance, like public theatre, functions to "rouse," "sway," and "move" the populace, and in both public domains "swaying" means both to rule and to submit in the position of woman. Contemporary theatre, like active women, neglects distinctions between private and public. In this Marino Faliero presents an even darker light than Sardanapalus "to lesson ages": women's seclusion in the private sphere does not eliminate their influence on the world of men. However alarming, though, these thematic anxieties are not sufficient to associate the lord with the count. But if we view them in the context of dramatic precedents to Marino Faliero — particularly Venice Preserved and Antony and Cleopatra — and in light of details of
contemporary stage history, the count's words begin to sound attributable to Byron as well: "Never again, I think, with fearless eye, / And brow superior, and unaltered cheek, / And that lip made for tenderness or scorn, / Shalt thou strike dumb the meanest of
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mankind; / Me least of all." Manning's account of the play allows us to identify the most immediate object of the Byronic threat as Belvidera, the first victim of the assault Marino Falter0 mounts against waging all for love. To Murray's remark that Byron's "projected drama risked comparison with Venice Preserved," Byron responds, " I am aware of what you say of Otway — and am a very great admirer of his — all except of that maudlin bitch of chaste lewdness and blubbering curiosity Belvidera — whom I utterly despite, abhor, and detest" (Manning, Byron and his Fictions, p. 122). The woman for whom Jaffier betrays his friend Pierre and his commitment to revolutionary reform of the state, Belvidera in Byron's eyes is the "conscious cause" of her husband's death and, in Manning's, the "unconscious cause" of Byron's "stubborn resistance to Angiolina" (ibid., p. 122). Marchand's note to Byron's expressions of distaste for Belvidera facilitates the identification of a second recipient of "Count" Byron's threats. In noting that Belvidera is a "favorite part of Mrs. Siddons," he reminds us that views on dramatic characters are often intimately tied to reactions toward the actresses who embody them. So do references to her "fearless eye and brow superior." But I would argue that Byron's "stubborn resistance " is less to Angiolina or to Siddons's Belvidera than to O'Neill, the actress with whom the role is associated during the time that Byron pens these remarks. (O'Neill makes her debut in 1814, and Belvidera is her most popular role - she played it twenty-six times in her first season.42) While Byron claims that during this period he "would not go to see" O'Neill for "fear of weakening the impression made by the queen of tragedians," Byron's intimacy with the theatre especially during the season of O'Neill's command suggests that he knows her, and defends against her, as Belvidera, even if he refuses to "see" her. Contemporary accounts of her rendition of Belvidera show why. O'Neill would "divide" and "disturb" his "recollections of Siddons," at least as Arline Taylor presents both actresses in her stage history of Venice Preserved. For Taylor's description reinforces Hunt's general observation about Siddons, that she is "deficient" in the "quality of the 'amatory pathetic'" and is "simply not the grand amoureuse of the stage" (Taylor, Next to Shakespeare, p. 191). Consequently hers was not a "Belvidera persuading Jaffier to betray his comrades by the witchery of all-powerful love" but a Belvidera who goes mad.43 In contrast, O'Neill excels in the "amatory pathetic" and the "sentimental and
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suffering elements of tragedy." Her tears accentuate her beauty, as they " are poured from their crystal cups without muscular distortion of the rest of the face" (Taylor, Next to Shakespeare, p. 219). At least in 1814. Apparently if Byron had seen O'Neill in late 1815, he would have found even more cause, though different reason, to adopt the menacing terms of the count. Here "bodily agony" usurps "mental passion" so much so that O'Neill's feminine beauty is effaced. In Hazlitt's description, O'Neill's Belvidera provokes a reaction similar to the Medusan Beatrice. Despite her "delicacy of frame and truly feminine appearance," her "looks almost petrified the sight." "Miss O'Neill twice, if we remember, seizes her forehead with her clenched fists, making a hissing noise through her teeth, and twice is thrown into a fit of agonized choking. Neither is her face fine enough in itself not to become unpleasant by such extreme and repeated distortion" (cited in Taylor, Next to Shakespeare, p. 222). In either case, whether in her more "feminine" or "phallic" phase, Byron screens her from sight. Siddons is his cover: the only female actor who overwhelms audiences by a sublimity distinct from body and, in this respect, superior to the best of men. "Of actors, Cooke was the most natural, Kemble the most super-natural, Kean a medium between the two, But [sic] Mrs. Siddons worth them all put together, of those whom I remember to have seen in England" (Taborski, Byron and the Theatre, p. 98).
Byron's fixation on Siddons, then, ensures that Belvidera's femininity does not steal the show. She does not command JafHer through erotic "witchery," and she assumes responsibility for the "whole catastrophe." The Beauties of Mrs. Siddons presents this as Siddons's major innovation: "her madness is the result not of mere overstrained nerves and a pathetically broken heart but of a realization that she is the cause of the whole catastrophe" (Taylor, Next to Shakespeare, p. 194). Part of Byron's protestations against the staging of any of his plays is that, with Siddons retired, more "feminine" and seductive women will command the stage. Until he can reform the stage to his liking, he resorts to textual strategies to ensure that female actors do not "strike dumb the meanest of mankind - me least of all." When not dumbstruck themselves, they are silenced by Byron's campaign against love. " I understand what you want - you want me to write a love-play — but this were contrary to all my principles — as well as to those of Aristotle. — I want to simplify your drama — to render it fit for the higher passions" (BLJ 8: 223; original emphases). "Unless it
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is Love -furious - criminal - and hapless - it ought not to make a tragic subject" (BLJ 8: 57). In Marino Faliero, Byron's trivialization of love leads him to remove Angiolina from sympathy and to reject "jealousy" as the motive for Faliero's treason. Like love, jealousy is " an exhausted passion in the drama. " 44 Moreover, jealousy puts him in exhausting competition with "established writers, to say nothing of Shakespeare " ("Preface" to MF, p. 408). One appeal of Byron's classicism is its gynophobia, whereas a romantic Shakespeare is all for love-indeed, for "showing the superiority of woman's love to the friendship of men." His "improvers" make Shakespeare more fit for stage representation by playing up love interests and thus roles for women. Instead of jealousy, then, Byron gives the motivations for Faliero's actions a "more historical" and thus "higher" form. This means that Faliero's actions are triggered by women but conducted without, when not against, them. Angiolina and Zarina are the most extreme instances of Byron's desire not to share dramatic interest with women. But with Hazlitt's skeptical view of Desdemona in the air, Byron could not place much faith in textual, let alone visual, domestications of women. When it comes to female embodiment, purity with grossness is near allied. Christensen frames this potential a different way in his analysis of the pun on "come" that ends Sardanapalus. The play on promise and arrival signified by "to come" highlights the "open secret of the closet lurking suggestively in every performance on the British stage": gender equivocation. On stage, Myrrha "must be female," whereas in the closet Myrrha "can be and is as male as Salamenes. Her masculinization is the precondition of her capacity to consent" ("Byron's Sardanapalus and the Triumph of Liberalism," p. 353). This open secret is one key to interpreting romantic hostility to stage representation precisely because gender makes a difference in the epistemology of the closet as well as the hypervisibility of the stage. Textually the difference is registered in Myrrha's re-enslavement in Act 4; even more in The Cenci which thematizes coming as consent to rape. One could say that the open secret of the stage - that actresses command the house when they display their victimization — motivates the opposing characterizations of women in Byron's plays. On the one hand, Angiolina's virtue is contingent on her removal from spectacle and history. Being "true" to the latter is depicting men as victims of circumstance, that is, of active women. The preface affirms by inverting this truth: all of the "characters (except that of the
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Duchess) ...are strictly historical" ("Preface" to MF, p. 408). On the other hand, Myrrha's stage presence makes her indistinguishable from Semiramis. Because Byron composes Sardanapalus with at least one "secret eye" toward the stage, he might as well accentuate the terrifying features of female beauty. In this respect, Kelsall points us in the right direction by comparing Sardanapalus to Voltaire's Semiramis and Alfieri's Mirra. For both plays turn the tables - and Beatrice's "fearless eye" - on Count Cenci by having women pursue their incestuous desires toward men. Worse for Byron, they accord sympathy to women in doing so. As Wolfson shows, the portrayal of Semiramis in Lempriere's Classical Dictionary couples the "legends of monstrosity" with "her uncommon beauty," while Voltaire's Semiramis "makes her almost an entirely sympathetic, tragic figure" ("Sardanapalus and 'Effeminate Character,'" p. 901). In contrast, Byron vilifies Semiramis, invents a "solely male line" for Sardanapalus (whereas Diodorus Siculus "reports that Sardanapalus had daughters and sons"), and reserves the sympathy for an enlightened despot. This is a harrowing but instructive look at love in the liberal state which, unless it be "furious, criminal, and hapless," threatens to make women and their lower passions a center of interest. 3
O V E R V I E W : SOME PRIMAL SCENES OF ROMANTICISM
"Remorse is as the heart in which it grows" ( t f i . 1.20)
Thinking about romanticism as a theatre of remorse accents the ways that plays by the romantic poets theorize mind in relation to revolutionary action and combat each other's images of both. It registers the import of these plays within each poet's body of work but also among their poetic bodies and within broader cultural reflections on revolution. But here I wish to move beyond specific literary yields in expanding the canon and beyond literary-biographical gains in theatricalizing imaginative men to offer some final reflections on what theatre represents in romantic discourse on "mind" and what romantic theatre contributes to present-day critiques of identity. The growing attraction of theatricality and performativity as analytical constructs for refashioning identity gives some urgency to reconsiderations of the special effects, not to mention the predictable plots, of theatre. Because of its peculiar history as an anti-representational form situated in a historical moment that foregrounds the stakes of
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representation, romantic theatre advances this analysis in telling ways. In its day it showcased both the indissociability of the psychological from the social and the advantages of playing one off against the other. Its belated appearance in our own day restores important scenes of resistance to the identities we assume now. Theatre enters romantic discourses on mind through its association with psychology and typologies of character. Late eighteenth-century Shakespearean analysis was valued as much for its psychological as its literary insights. It categorized grounds for action through its investigation of character(s) and grounded the "self-evidence" of Shakespeare's genius in both domains.45 Though originally in the service of affirming Shakespeare's singularity, the equation between "dramatic" and "human" character comes to characterize the advantage of drama over other types of poetry in the romantic period. Romantic discourse on drama defines it "as a prismatic and many-sided mirror" that "collects the brightest rays of human nature" ("Defence," p. 491). Even more crucially, however, discourse on drama critiques drama's mirroring stages in terms that are familiar to a post-Freudian audience. Not only are these mirrors on character fictions of nature but their reflections prove enabling in their disfigurings. To put this in more romantic terms, drama provides idealized but not particularly flattering mirrors, illuminating "some of the most dark and secret caverns of the human heart" ("Preface" to The Cenci, p. 239). The dream of Sardanapalus uncovers some underlying terrors of romantic self-reflection: conquest is the mirror image of romance, fantasy of reality, masculinity of femininity, empire of incest. Such unflattering reflections reveal the demystifying nature of romantic theatre's insight into mind. More than other poetic discourses of the period, romantic theatre is proto-psychoanaly tic in its analysis of fantasy, seduction, self-splitting, desire. More specifically, theatre turns on romanticism's privileged category of mind, rendering imagination despotic and its incorporative properties cannibalistic. "Oh, had I never / Found in thy smooth and ready countenance / The mirror of my darkest thoughts; hadst thou / Never with hints and questions made me look / Upon the monster of my thought, until / It grew familiar to desire" (C5. 1. 20-4). But one must emphasize the "proto" as much as the "psychoanalytic" in specifying the inseparability of the psyche and the social in romantic plays and writings on theatre. Not only do their plays react to
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historical perversions of mind but they locate and analyze trauma in a generation of young men. The deliberate refusal of these plays to individualize pathologies of mind accounts for much of the alienation expressed by critics of romantic drama in this century. Yet psychology without individuation is precisely these plays' contribution to revolutionary history and to the historical emergence of another type of subject position being theorized in this age: those equally but socially determined subjects of Marxism. Representing these subjects arouses even more anxieties for playwrights and theatre critics, since both types of writers, though for different reasons, are unsympathetic to crowds. Romantic theatre's hostility toward this second class of subject becomes particularly apparent in its dramatization of remorse. This is not simply because remorse functions as synecdoche for reflections on, and rejection of, revolutionary characters nor because certain playwrights enlist remorse to distinguish themselves from the crowd. Rather, romantic theatre's treatment of remorse turns psychological analysis into discriminatory social activity, and this is how romantic playwrights seek to legislate their (st)age. For remorse as mental trait exemplifies the psychic state of theatre - double consciousness, or the ability to "know" one thing and "feel" another. Moreover, in recognizing that the desired effect of theatre is the distinguishing feature of the villain-hero, writers on theatre confront the criminality of mind and gain sympathy for it. Yet they can only afford to go so far in this demystification of mind. Criminality, and the remorse it occasions, become the distinguishing marks of privileged minds. Romantic playwrights' interest in the power of mind to repress and dominate evidence of its past history is used to justify the culture's repression of non-dominant social groups. In their plays, double consciousness becomes an argument either for perpetuating the subjection of the masses or subordinating women on grounds that they lack this distinction of mind. Marino Faliero facilitates the subjection of the masses in its differential treatment of the assignment of guilt and responsibility. On the question of motivation and guilt for their crime, the doge is no different from his fellow conspirators; both groups deny that their political acts mask " private vengeance." The difference comes in the play's assignment of responsibility for criminal action. In this case, only the individual sovereign is exempt from being a sovereign individual; only he need not assume the responsibility of will. Precisely because the conspirators are a
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collective body, they must be viewed as individual agents. A minor character voices the necessity: "It is the cause, and not our will, which asks / Such actions from our hands: we'll wash away / All stains in Freedom's fountain!" (MF 3. 2. 78—81). The allusion to Macbeth forces the issue: groups are beyond remorse. Without a concept of accountability, how can one restrain the populace? "how distinguish now the innocent / From out the guilty? all their acts are one" (MF 3. 2. 284-5; original emphasis). In alluding to the sentiments of Lady Macbeth, this quote introduces the second victim of romantic privileging of double consciousness. The case of Beatrice Cenci indicates how rigorously criminality is reserved for superior men. Alone among commanding geniuses, she is undivided in her guilt. Only " w e " highly imaginative readers are torn between sympathy and judgment, primarily because she is not allowed to poeticize her crime. Her status as female actor disqualifies her from the terms of sympathy extended to other villainheroes. Lamb specifies those terms for Shakespeare's male protagonists: "In Shakespeare, so little do the actions comparatively affect us, that while the impulses, the inner mind in all its perverted greatness, solely seems real and is exclusively attended to, the crime is comparatively nothing" (WCML 1: 287). Coleridge extends the favor to Don Juan. The "very extravagance of the incidents, and the super-human entireness of Don Juan's agency, prevents the wickedness from shocking our minds to any painful degree." Shelley replays it by distinguishing "sublime" from "pernicious" casuistry and ascribing the former to Godwin's Falkland (in Caleb Williams), the latter to Beatrice. Falkland is the product of "that sublime casuistry which is the parent of toleration and forbearance." Him we are "persuadefd] ... personally to love," but her we fear.46 It is not only that imaginative minds have no trouble sympathizing with libertines, murderers, incest perpetrators, and adulterers as long as they are superior men whereas they are conflicted about responding to a beautiful young woman who kills her father out of self-defense. The fact that, in the minds of most critics, Beatrice's act defines her character rather than temporarily opposes it suggests a second principle of division not available to women. We cannot distinguish her "true" or ideal self from the contingencies of her situation because women in theatre are defined by "circumstance" and reduced to body parts. Besides her vow of silence, much of what keeps us from " knowing " Beatrice's mind is that there are few female
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characters like her. Imaginative minds have not been schooled in the heroics of female suffering nor on the potential poetry of female criminality.47 Despite vast differences in their motivations and situations, Beatrice is read as Lady Macbeth. 48 This lack of subtlety in depicting female psychology is what Jameson seeks to counter in Shakespeare's Heroines. She not only defends Lady Macbeth by appropriating the terms extended to male villain-heroes - in this case, Dr. Channing's sympathy for Satan - but she critiques the entire tradition of drama for its simple-minded portrayal of female character. In general, when a woman is introduced into a tragedy to be the presiding genius of evil in herself, or the cause of evil to others, she is either too feebly or too darkly portrayed; either crime is heaped on crime, and horror on horror, till our sympathy is lost in incredulity, or the stimulus is sought in unnatural or impossible situations, or in situations that ought to be impossible (as in the Myrrha or the Cenci), or the character is enfeebled by a mixture of degrading propensities and sexual weakness, as in Vittoria Corombona. But Lady Macbeth, though so supremely wicked, and so consistently feminine, is still kept aloof from all base alloy (SH, pp. 337—8). While Jameson displays her own powers of repression by instancing incest as something that "should be impossible," she exposes male authors' generic repression of female character by showing how they remove women from the realm of poetry. Beatrice's condition inverts Shelley's poetic faith, whereby "the beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise, and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn " (" Defence," p. 487). Against her protestations, the critical tradition awards the power to Cenci by claiming that his plan prevails. By adopting violent means without a discernible twinge of remorse, Beatrice shows herself to be "an efficient machine of vengeance" like her father.49 In contrast, male protagonists in romantic drama and theatre criticism are accorded the poetry and thus the claims on sympathy. Their crimes are next to nothing compared to the space accorded their lyric minds. This shift to the interior means that male characters are associated with "drama" rather than "theatre," as Shelley defines it. "The drama, so long as it continues to express poetry," gives access to "the eternal, the infinite, and the one" ("Defence," pp. 491, 483). It "contains within itself the germ of a relation to
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whatever motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature" (ibid., p. 485). This means that male heroes are universal characters because they display more than a "germ of a relation" to every subject position. What need to identify with a female character necessarily circumscribed and circumstantial, especially when the modern male hero exerts his power by resembling the "feminized," the powerless? No wonder romantic poets were so drawn to theatre. Writing for it absolves them from, as it indicts them of, criminality. The thematics of Coleridge's plays register this double gesture: remorse over his revolutionary past culminates in Remorse, which allows him to relive and relieve that past. Plays by the second generation poets are less anguished over personal guilt for alleged involvement in historical crimes, yet they feel indicted as men and as poets seduced by theatre. "A Defence of Poetry" states the crime - and the implicit guilt by association — for poets of the "Satanic School." Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard, that Virgil was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was a madman, that Lord Bacon was a perculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poet laureate. It is inconsistent with this division of our subject to cite living poets, but Posterity has done ample justice to the great names now referred to. "Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins 'were as scarlet, they are now white as snow'" ("Defence," p. 506). One's status as poet is apparently sufficient evidence for self-defense. But there are more dramatic crimes than meet the eye in Shelley's "Defence." What provokes Shelley to defend poetry is Peacock's attack on contemporary drama in the last paragraph of the Four Ages of Poetry: "the day is not distant, when the degraded state of every species of poetry will be as generally recognized as that of dramatic poetry has long been." 50 The self-evident decline of drama heralds the eventual demise of poetry, according to Peacock, and these are fighting words for a poet who has recently devoted himself to theatre. Shelley responds with a two-pronged attack. Applying Machiavelli to a dramatic context, he argues that "life may be preserved and renewed if men should arise capable of bringing back the drama to its principles" ("Defence," p. 492). Then he produces the (self-) evidence. "We live among such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last struggle for civil and religious liberty" (ibid., p. 508). In this, "A Defence of
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Poetry" mirrors the Literary Life: theatre disfigures as it reveals absolute genius. Yet "A Defence of Poetry " is silent about one piece of Peacockian evidence ostensibly proving drama's decline - that theatre audiences no longer include the "thinking and studious and scientific and philosophical part of the community." "Red Shelley" ultimately proves no less sympathetic to theatre's constituency than Lord Byron or Coleridge, and all three set about to reform theatre audiences. But they all also imitate their villain-heroes by craving sympathy for their seduction and/or feminization by theatre. And they all seek to be rescued from the abject and dependent condition that comes with their association with theatre. Coleridge represents the extreme in his "Preface" to Remorse where he casts himself as a naive, vulnerable young poet ignorant of all "stage-tactics" and at the mercy of older and wiser men. Byron adopts a more manly but equally impotent response to the staging of Marino Faliero. "Since such an attempt to drag me forth as a Gladiator in the Theatrical Arena - is a violation of all the courtesies of Literature - I trust that the impartial part of the Press will step between me and this pollution" (BLJ 8: 90). Shelley not only trades on his feminization but underscores women's exclusion from this mode of defense. The lead-in to his defense of poets —"the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue" - echoes Beatrice's indictment of the court for stacking the deck against her: "Accuser, witness, judge, / What, all in one?" (C 5. 2. 174-5). The defender of poetry pleads special circumstances in assuming the "incompatible characters of accuser, witness, judge, and executioner" ("Defence," p. 506). Drama, " so long as it continues to express poetry," then, is crucial to affirming the genius of poets and their virtue as men. Indeed, involvement in drama plays up one's poetic credentials as Margaret Waller defines them for this (and subsequent) periods: marginality, melancholy, alienation from social and economic realities.51 Normally seen as a cultivated protest against emerging definitions — and actual powers — of bourgeois masculinity, poetry, so long as it conforms to the double consciousness of theatre, paradoxically displays these poets' congruence with liberal men. As Christopher Newfield has argued, the power of liberalism is the ability to "occupy both sides of an opposition simultaneously" and to enlist sympathy for one's conflicts and sufferings as men.52 Romantic drama foregrounds this "both/and" logic as distinctions of character and
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aesthetic effect. Recovering this body of work provides important pretexts to the liberal tradition of heroizing the sufferings of superior men. Analyzing the history of romantic drama as theatre promises to do even more. It registers several long-buried protests to the drama of self-divided men. Audiences of early nineteenth-century theatre protested against the self-interested nature of these plays through their own disinterest. Suffering masculinity does not play very well in this arena. Some in the audience prefer action, others the spectacle of bodies, both male and female. Moreover, the "popular" fare that theatre historians attribute to the "decline of drama" in this age suggests that theatre audiences were seeking not poetic but social justice in contemporary plays.53 With its black-and-white world view, melodrama may come closer to depicting the lived reality of power, even in an age where power is increasingly diffuse. Either you have it or you don't; which goes also for virginity. For those defined by these categories, indeterminacy - and the sympathy it generates - are not available options. In London theatres we catch the disgruntlement of those who both suffer and pay. This is not to say that early nineteenth-century theatre audiences do not also recognize and respond positively to imaginative poetry, or that they are incapable of identifying with dominant expressions of power — though it is to say that those with poetic and social power are invested in assuming this. Nor is it to offer theatre or theories of performativity as a solution to liberalism's consolidation of power even though romantic theatre usefully exposes the tedium of male ambivalence. After all, the double gesture is theatre, no matter how much romantic poets try to appropriate it to drama and restrict theatre to (female) body. Moreover, the realm of spectacle is hardly a subversive site for women since the visual register, as Freud exemplifies, accommodates femininity by consuming it. But the experience of romantic theatre offers more than a provisional critique of the fantasy of liberal consensus. In its day, it foregrounded active women and their visible influence in the nation, in part because it existed before the wholesale commodification of female bodies.54 While this emphasis intensified the need to survey the body and the techniques for doing so, theatre did not bypass, or allow romantic poets to bypass, the pressure of female representation. In our day, re-experiencing romantic theatre offers the possibility of moving beyond a politics of remorse. It encourages us to remove
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some of the social constraints that have accompanied the romantic "discovery" of divided minds. Inspiration, as the romantics teach us, comes with its attendant "sad realities." If we do not attend to both, illusion is only delusion. Leveling the superiority ascribed to divided minds in romantic theatre means extending to all subjects powers of imagination and the possibilities and responsibilities attendent on reimagining the nation. But it also means recognizing the rigorous, if indeterminate, logic of dreams: what is conceived as potential is shaped by realities of power. So too, critical applause for theatre's admission of the performative nature of identity must be balanced with analysis of its formulaic scripts. Besides, people have to want to pay to see these transformations, and those most in need of destabilization have the means to avoid it. Finally, arising as it does out of the French Revolution, romantic theatre accentuates the collective activity and terrorism of mind. Coleridge's Remorse captures more than personal pathology; romantic theatre forecasts psychological warfare and modern terrors of the theatre of war.55 We need sober but non-defeatist assessments of this process, for imagination remains active for good or ill. So long as "moving" remains the recognizable "grounds" for acting in the world, theatre has something important to say.
Notes
INTRODUCTION I COMMANDING GENIUS IN ENGLISH ROMANTIC THEATRE
1 Hazlitt's "Mr. Wordsworth" makes the same connection not only between poetry and revolution but between drama and less guarded words: "Perhaps for want of light and shade, and the unshackled spirit of the drama, [The Borderers] was never brought forward" (The Spirit of the Age [London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966], p. 141). 2 Wordsworth's "good hopes" for showing his play to Sheridan (thenmanager of Drury Lane) are based on Coleridge's writing Osorio at Sheridan's invitation. When disappointed, Wordsworth sends The Borderers to Thomas Harris at Covent Garden. The rest is history: "it is impossible" that The Borderers "should succeed in the representation" (see "Introduction," The Borderers, ed. Robert Osborn [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982], pp. 3-6; hereafter abbreviated CB in the text). 3 See Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 4 Luce Irigaray is usually credited with theorizing the unrepresentability of woman in phallogocentric discourse and thus her "appearance" as a structure of mimesis or theatre (Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985]). More recently, Judith Butler has drawn attention to the performative "nature" of all gender identities (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [New York: Routledge, 1990], especially pp. 128-41; see also "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist T h e o r y , " in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case [Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990]: 270-82). 5 Renaissance new historicism subdivides along national lines into " cultural poetics " (associated with the Representations-school in America, especially Patricia Fumerton, Stephen Greenblatt, Richard Helgerson, Leah Marcus, Louis Montrose, Steven Mullaney, Stephel Orgel) and "cultural materialism" as practiced in Britain (Catherine Belsey, Jonathan Dollimore, Katherine McLuskie, Peter Stallybrass [now in the 213
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US]). For important distinctions between the two, see Jonathan Dollimore, " Introduction: Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism and the New Historicism," in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural
Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985): i-viii; Walter Cohen, "Political Criticism of Shakespeare," in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology',
ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (London and New York: Methuen, 1987): 26-47. In romantic studies, new historicism subdivides into several categories with critics often occupying more than one area: deconstructive materialists, history-of-ideas practitioners, cultural historicists, and Marxian historicists. The best-known romantic new historicists include Marilyn Butler, James Chandler, Kurt Heinzelman, Mary Jacobus, Jon Klancher, Marjorie Levinson, Alan Liu, Jerome McGann, Reeve Parker, Clifford Siskin, and David Simpson. "Newwave" practitioners of French Revolution studies include Francois Furet, Marie-Helene Huet, George Armstrong Kelley, and Mona Ozouf. Two critical overviews of new historicism, both of which call for more rigorous theorization of its "method," have been particularly helpful: Howard Felperin for renaissance debates, "'Cultural Poetics' versus ' Cultural Materialism': The Two New Historicisms in Renaissance Studies," in The Uses of the Canon: Elizabethan Literature and
Contemporary Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990): 142-70, and Alan Liu, "The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism," ELH 56 (1989): 721—71 (also "Wordsworth and Subversion, 1793—1804: Trying Cultural Criticism," Tale Journal of Criticism 2/2 [1989]: 55-100). Not simply because we work in the same literary-historical field, I owe the largest debt to Liu. 6 On the two former categories, see Lawrence M. Bryant, "Royal Ceremony and the Revolutionary Strategies of the Third Estate," Eighteenth-Century Studies 22/3 (1989): 413—50; on the latter, see Liu's review of David Simpson, Wordsworth?s Historical Imagination: The Poetry
of Displacementin Wordsworth Circle 19 (1988): 172-81, and "Wordsworth and Subversion," pp. 81-8. 7 Both in "Renaissance studies and its Romantic counterpart," theatricality "starts in the actual theater but then aggressively spills out of doors to make mise-en-scene, social drama, playfulness, improvisation, rehearsal, tragedy and illusion the master tropes of culture" (Liu, "Power of Formalism," p. 723). 8 See Richard Levin (" Unthinkable Thoughts in the New Historicizing of English Renaissance Drama," NLH 21/3 [1990]: 433-49) and M. H. Abrams {Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory
[New York: W. W. Norton, 1989]). For friendlier critiques, see Felperin and Liu, both of whom consider new historicism "less than fully or clearly principled in its hermeneutic practices" ("'Cultural Poetics' versus 'Cultural Materialism,'" pp. 148, 154-6; "The Power of Formalism," pp. 733-44).
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9 See Louis A. Montrose: "During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the separation of 'Literature' and 'Art' from explicitly didactic and political discourses or from such disciplines as history or moral and natural philosophy was as yet incipient" ("The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text," in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986], pp. 332-3). 10 Lynda Boose, "The Family in Shakespeare Studies," Renaissance Quarterly 40 (1988): 707-41; Walter Cohen, "Political Criticism of Shakespeare," pp. 22, 32-3; Peter Erickson, "Rewriting the Renaissance, Rewriting Ourselves," Shakespeare Quarterly 38/3 (1987): 327-37; Carol Thomas Neely, " Constructing the Subject: Feminist Practice and the New Renaissance Discourses," English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 5-18. Cohen makes an important qualification; his critique is of the "political confusion" underlying "new historicist treatments of gender," not their avoidance of the topic. In fact, as he says, "no other group of male Shakespeareans has taken problems of gender as seriously or produced work with as great a potential utility for feminism" ("Political Criticism of Shakespeare," p. 37). Boose's point is that male Shakespeareans tend to privilege gender at the exclusion of women. 11 Judith Newton, "'History as Usual?': Feminism and the 'New Historicism,'" Cultural Critique 9 (1988): 87-122, especially pp. 90-101. 12 Prominent examples of these intellectual histories of disillusionment are found in Montrose, "The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text," pp. 331-2; Stephen Greenblatt, "Invisible Bullets," Shakespearean Negotiations:
The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance
England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), p. 39. Both Klancher and Liu claim that romanticists are less likely to conflate past with present moments, at least since McGann's strictures against doing so in Romantic Ideology (Klancher, "English Romanticism and Cultural Production," in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser [New York and London: Routledge, 1989], pp. 77-8; Liu, "The Power of Formalism," pp. 750-4). But Liu's own reification of the "postmodern intellect" and distinction between "high" and "low" postmodern cultural criticisms suggest that his model, too, privileges a specific cohort of post-6os intellectuals (" Local Transcendence, Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail," Representations 32 [1990], p. 77). 13 A notable exception is Mary Jacobus, "Incorruptible Milk: BreastFeeding and the French Revolution" in Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, ed. Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 54-78. 14 I do not mean to minimize the important differences in new historicist renaissance studies, which have been catalogued by Jonathan Dollimore (" Introduction," in Political Shakespeare), Howard Felperin ("'Cultural Poetics' versus 'Cultural Materialism'"), and Don E. Wayne ("Power,
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Politics, and the Shakespearean Text: Recent Criticism in England and the United States," in Shakespeare Reproduced, pp. 47-67). I mean to reemphasize the greater diversity among romantic practitioners of new historicism and to object to the way that feminists are cast as troublemakers in review essays of renaissance new historicism. 15 Joan Landes makes the latter point in Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 7, see also pp. 203—5. For other important studies of women as historical and symbolic agents in the French Revolution, see Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789-1880,
trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Carol R. Berkin and Clara Lovett, eds., Women, War, and Revolution (New York and London: Homes and Meier, 1980); Bernadette Fort, ed., Fictions of the French Revolution (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991); Lynn Hunt, ed., Eroticism and the Body Politic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983); Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, Mary D u r h a m Johnson, eds., Women in Revolutionary Paris 1789-1795, Selected
Documents (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979); Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 16 See Frances Bartkowski, "Feminism and Deconstruction: A Union Forever Deferred," enclitic 4/2 (1980): 70-7; Nancy Fraser, "The French Derrideans: Politicizing Deconstruction or Deconstructing Politics?" New German Critique 33 (1984): 127-54; Elizabeth Grosz, "Modern French Philosophy," in Sexual Subversions (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989): 1-39, especially pp. 26-39; Mark Krupnick, ed., Displacement: Derrida and After (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, X 983); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Feminism and Deconstruction, Again: Negotiating with Unacknowledged Masculinism," in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Teresa Brennan (New York: Routledge, 1989): 206-24; Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). 17 Though he does not mention this reason, see Liu on the various embarrassments of new historicists, "The Power of Formalism," pp. 740-52; see also Dollimore, "Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism, Feminism, and Marxist Humanism," NLH 21/3 (1990): 471-94, especially pp. 473-9. 18 On the latter, see Stuart Curran, "The I Altered," in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988): 185-207; for the effects of the latter on Shakespeare's women characters, see Jean I. Marsden, "Rewritten Women: Shakespearean
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25
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Heroines in the Restoration," in The Appropriation of Shakespeare: PostRenaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991): 43-57. Several feminist new historicists of the renaissance are now analyzing the function of femininity, not its essence or meaning, in depictions of female characters: especially Kathleen McLuskie, "The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measurefor Measure," in Political Shakespeare (see note 5): 88-109, especially pp. 95-7; Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Jacqueline Rose, "Sexuality in the Reading of Shakespeare: Hamlet and Measure for Measure," in Alternative Shakespeares•, ed. John Drakakis (London and New York: Methuen, 1985): 95-118. Rose is especially helpful in linking "anxiety about aesthetic or representational cohesion" to "sexual reproach" of women ("Sexuality in the Reading of Shakespeare," p. 105). To a certain extent, this caution approaches the "bad reading" of the last chapter of Gender Trouble of which Judith Butler complains in a subsequent interview with Liz Kotz ("The Body You Want," Artforum [November 1992]: 82-9). Still, performative notions of gender identity tend to oversimplify the historical consequences of "acting out" as well as theatre's history as an apparatus of state. Moreover, some of this work misconstrues the unconscious nature of identificatory processes in its celebratory assumptions about role-playing. Barbara Freedman stresses the "longstanding debt of psychoanalysis to classical drama and the centrality of the Oedipus to both disciplines" in "Frame-Up: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Theatre," Performing Feminisms (see note 4): 54-76, especially p. 56. See Angelica Gooden, "The Dramatising of Politics: Theatricality and the Revolutionary Assemblies," Modern Language Studies 22/3 (1984): 194-212; Marie-Helene Huet, Rehearsing the Revolution, trans. Robert Hurley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982); and Hans-Wolf Jager, "Gegen die Revolution: Beobachtungen zur konservativen Dramatik in Deutschland um 1790," Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 22 (1978): 362-403. See especially Franc, ois Furet, Interpreting the Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 46-61, and Keith Baker, "Representation," The Political Culture of the Old Regime, ed. Baker, vol. 1 in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, ed. Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987): 469-92. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theatre, trans. Allan Bloom (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, i960), pp. 125-6. See David Marshall, "Rousseau and the State of Theater," Representations 13 (Winter 1986): 84-114, especially pp. 88-90; Jean
218
26
27
28 29
30 31
32
33
Notes to pages 9-12
Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 93-6. Marshall's larger point, however, is that at stake in the Letter is "less the presence of a theater in Geneva than the possibility of Geneva as theater" ("Rousseau and the State of Theater," p. 88). Noel Parker, Portrayals of Revolution: Images, Debates and Patterns of Thought on the French Revolution (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, *99o)> pp. 4 J -2. James Chandler, " Poetical Liberties: Burke's France and the 'Adequate Representation' of the English," in The Transformation of Political Culture iy8g-1848, ed. Furet and Ozouf, vol. 3 in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, ed. Furet and Ozouf (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989): 45-58, especially p. 52. Geraldine Friedman, "History in the Background of Wordsworth's 'Blind Beggar'," ELH56 (1989): 125-48, especially p. 132. See Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); Mary Jacobus, "Incorruptible Milk," in Rebel Daughters (see note 13). I deal with Byron's ambivalence toward theatre in the concluding chapter. On the social composition of early nineteenth-century London audiences, see Clive Barker, "A Theatre for the People," in Nineteenth Century British Theatre, ed. Kenneth Richards and Peter Thomson (London: Methuen, 1971): 3-25, especially pp. 13-15; Allardyce Nicoll, Early Nineteenth Century Drama 1800-1850, vol. 4 in A History of English Drama 1660-igoo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), pp. 7-21; The Revels History of Drama in English 1*750—1880, ed. Michael Booth, Richard Southern, Frederick & Lise-Lone Marker, Robertson Davies (London: Methuen, 1975), pp. 3-29; Ernest Bradlee Watson, Sheridan to Robertson: A Study of the Nineteenth-Century London Stage (Cambridge, M A : Harvard University Press, 1926), pp. 3-19, 97-134. Virtually all of the studies cited in the preceding note attribute the rise in popularity of these forms to changes in the social composition of theatre audiences. See also Marilyn Gaull, "Romantic Theater," Wordsworth Circle 14/4 (1983): 255-63 and Chapter 4 in English Romanticism: The Human Context (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1988), pp. 81-108. Two recent treatments of this episode are particularly informative, though not always coincident with my reading, Gillian Russell's " Playing at Revolution: The Politics of the O. P. Riots of 1809," Theatre Notebook 44 (1990): 16-26; and Elaine Hadley's "The Old Price Wars: Melodramatizing the Public Sphere in Early Nineteenth-Century England," PMLA 107/3 (May 1992): 524-37. Hadley points to the overlap between political and theatrical arguments as an important instance of cultural redefinitions of the nation. At stake in these riots was
Notes to pages 12-13
34 35
36
37
38
39
219
the people's resistance not only to management's alignment with aristocratic interests but to the entire notion of stratifying and classifying the nation. But her emphasis on the conservatism and traditionalism underlying these revolts seems belied by countervening factors, among them that the riots were read as associated with the Radical cause and that melodrama, though promoting a paternalistic, hierarchical form of society, is critical of the higher orders. Michael Booth argues that melodrama provides " the richest material in English dramatic literature for the study of a rebellious class spirit in action" and underscores the class hatred that permeates this form (Booth, Prefaces to English NineteenthCentury Theatre [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980], pp. 27-8). Moreover, the language that Hadley uncovers in her readings of these events suggests "French" influence, particularly its location of value in a "language of truth and justice" spoken by "the universal voice" ("The Old Price Wars," p. 531). Hadley, "The Old Price Wars," pp. 525-8. See Dewey Ganzel, "Patent Wrongs and Patent Theatres: Drama and the Law in the Early Nineteenth Century," PMLA 76 (1961): 384-96; Barker, "A Theatre for the People" (see note 31), pp. 5, 12. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979); Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution (see note 15), p. 11. "Where the theatre went the drama followed ... Thus the theatrical legacy of the nineteenth century seems more significant than the d r a m a t i c " [Prefaces to English Nineteenth-Century Theatre [see note 33], pp. 3-4)See Robert Justin Goldstein, "Political Censorship of the Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Europe," Theatre Research International 12/3 (1987): 220-40. Theatre historians agree that George Colman, Examiner of Plays from 1824 *° J ^37J w a s particularly capricious in his censorship activity. Booth records a marked increase of censorship activity in the early decades of the nineteenth century, culminating in Colman, who "struck out any address to the deity, any mention of heaven or hell, any 'damn' (even though his own plays had been full of these things, and he swore constantly himself); a lover could never call his mistress 'angel'" ("Public Taste, the Playwright, and the Law," in The Revels History of Drama in English [see note 31], pp. 39-40). There are various ways that London theatres evaded these restrictions. The most familiar involves the increasingly permeable boundaries separating legitimate from illegitimate fare. The invention of the "burletta," that is, the addition of music and song to the regular dramas of English literature, allowed London houses of entertainment to encroach on patent theatres' legitimate domain. Theatres also profited from a loop-hole in the 1737 law. Since that law only pertained to performances "put on for 'hire, gain or reward,'" theatres not licensed
220
40
41
42
43
Notes to pages 13-15
for the legitimate stage offered "supposedly 'free' performances," as Goldstein notes. That is, they invited patrons to "tea at 6:30" or to share in a "dish of chocolates," on the understanding that "interested persons would obtain their tickets by paying an exorbitant price at a nearby shop for tea or peppermints or would pay an admission fee only for a concert or an ' auction of pictures' with a play thrown in at no cost" (Goldstein, "Political Censorship," p. 231). See Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Michael Booth, Victorian Theater (University Park, PA, and London: Pennsylvania State University, 1992); and Tracy Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1990See "Introduction" (ix-xix) and Bruce A. McConachie, "New Historicism and American Theater History: Toward an Interdisciplinary Paradigm for Scholarship" (265-71) in The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics, ed. Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinelt (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991). See Michael Booth, Prefaces to English Nineteenth Century Theatre (see note 33), pp. 6-12; Richard M. Fletcher, English Romantic Drama iygj-1843: A Critical History (New York: Exposition Press, 1966); Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660-igoo, vol. 4: Early Nineteenth-Century Drama, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), pp. 191-208. One notable early exception is Joseph Donohue's Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 157-61, which argues against maintaining this separation. Along with Richardson's emphasis on the "psychic interaction" and dynamism of these plays, I share another of his "principal concerns" in stressing the manner in which these texts interact with each other (A Mental
Theater: Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the Romantic Age
[University Park, PA, and London: Pennsylvania University Press, 1988], p. 9). But Richardson never explains why he fails to include Coleridge in his examination, whose Osorio set, or at least shared with The Borderers in setting, the paradigms that shape his book. Moreover, analysis of Osorio /Remorse would allow Richardson to be less "startled" by resemblances in The Cenci, Cain, Manfred, and Death's Jest-Book to an unpublished The Borderers (p. 4). Also unconvincing is his reason for dismissing a "third critique" of the "shift from stage to text" that "sees the abandonment of theatrical performance as politically reactionary" (P-3)44 Webb's list is impressive. Completed plays include Wordsworth, The Borderers (1796-7; pub. 1842); Coleridge, The Fall of Robespierre (with Southey, 1794), Osorio (1796-7), translations of Schiller's The Piccolomini and The Death of Wallenstein (1800), Remorse (revision of Osorio, 1812-13),
Notes to pages 15-18
221
Zapolya (1815); Byron, Manfred (1817), Cain (1821), Heaven and Earth (1821), Marino Faliero (1821), The Two Foscari (1821), Sardanapalus (1821), Werner (1821-2); Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (1819), The Cenci ( 1 8 1 9 ) , Oedipus
Tyrannus
or Swellfoot
the Tyrant
( 1 8 2 0 ) , Hellas
(1821),
translation of Euripides, The Cyclops] Keats, Otho the Great (1819). Fragments or uncompleted plays include Coleridge, The Triumph of Loyalty, Diadeste the Arabia Rite) Byron, The Deformed Transformed) Shelley,
Charles the First, "Fragments of an Unfinished Drama"; Keats, King Stephen ("The Romantic Poet and the Stage: A Short, Sad History," in The Romantic Theatre: An International Symposium, ed. Richard Allen Cave
[Totowa: Barnes and Noble Books, 1986], pp. 13-22). 45 I would like to express my gratitude to Alan Liu and Alan Bewell for facilitating my attendance and informal presentation at this conference on very short notice. 46 See SiR 27/3 (1988) and 31/3 (1992). The Yale performance of The Borderers constituted its American premiere, but it had been staged twice before at Grasmere (in 1970 and, in a "stripped-down version," in 1983). The Yale production of Sardanapalus was the first in English for nearly a hundred years. Unlike The Borderers, it enjoyed a vigorous stage life in the nineteenth century (see Boleslaw Taborski, Byron and the Theatre [Salzburg: Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1972], pp. 153-4). The Cenci is the play most frequently performed in the twentieth century (see Stuart Curran, Shelley's "Cenci": Scorpions Ringed with Fire
[Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970], pp. 183-256, and Bert States, Jr., "Addendum: The Stage History of Shelley's The Cenci," PMLA 72 [1957]: 633-44). According to Lawrence Wynn, 26 April 1884 was the last time that Remorse saw the stage ("Coleridge's Remorse: Poetic Drama on the Romantic Stage," Interpretations 15/1 [1983], p. 20).
47 See Thomas Whitaker, "The Unreadable ... the Unactable," SiR 27/3 (1988), pp. 365, 359; see also Biggs on the "relatively easy" decision not to try to replicate conditions of the early nineteenth-century stage ("Staging The Borderers," SiR 27/3 [1988], pp. 412-13); and Julie Carlson, "A New Stage for Romantic Drama," SiR 27/3 (1988), p. 421. 48 William Jewett, "Action in The Borderers," SiR 27/3 (1988), p. 399. Besides the work of Reeve Parker, recent exceptions to this account include Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 225-310; Marjean D. Purinton, "Wordsworth's The Borderers and the Ideology of Revolution," Nineteenth-Century Contexts 51/2 (1991): 133-42. 49 Marilyn Butler, "John Bull's Other Kingdom: Byron's Intellectual Comedy," SiR 31/3 (1992): 281-94, and Jerome Christensen, "Byron's Sardanapalus and the Triumph of Liberalism," SiR 31/3 (1992): 333-60. See also Susan Wolfson, " ' A Problem Few Dare Imitate': Sardanapalus and 'Effeminate Character,'" ELH58/4 (1992): 867-902.
222
Notes to pages 18-ig
50 This collection of essays first appeared in abbreviated fashion in Nineteenth Century Contexts 15/2 (1991) and, several months later, restored to its original form, in Wordsworth Circle 23/2 (1992). 51 On the last structure, see Antony Kubiak, The Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as Theatre History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). For Kubiak, theatre exists before history proper; as the site of specularity, seduction, and misrecognition, theatre belongs to the realm of the Imaginary, unlike drama, which belongs to the Symbolic. Consequently, his work takes issue with historicist studies of "power in the theatre, as well as the very theatricality of power" by claiming "a certain priority for a theatre which precedes power - a theatre that is the precondition of socio-political power, a sociopolitical power that is impossible without some implied and already recognized structure of performance" (p. 5). His chapter on the mental theatre of the romantics ("The Body's Revision in the Theatre of the Mind ") launches a radical attack on the way that this genre is normally read. Not only does Kubiak treat as the "most significant theatre" of the period the certifiably "mental" cases, Prometheus Unbound and Manfred, but he argues that "romanticism did not inhabit the 'space' of mind with its theatre, nor did it recreate theatre as a mental activity - instead romanticism recreated its own particular mind space, the mind space of Imagination, as theatre" (pp. 101, 97). This assertion, along with his distinction between the " ontologic theatre " (the " theatre that is thought") and the "ontic theatre" (the "theatre that represents the theatre that is thought") is particularly helpful in characterizing the paradox Coleridge faces in adopting an idealist notion of theatre from Germany. Moreover, Kubiak's account of the terror that theatre names resonates with the logic underlying Coleridge's "middle stage." 52 See Reeve Parker, "Reading Wordsworth's Power: Narrative and Usurpation in The Borderers," ELH54 (1987): 299-331;"' In Some Sort Seeing With My Proper Eyes': Wordsworth and the Spectacles of Paris," SiR 27/3 (1988): 369-90; "'Quelle image du remords': Acting out Coleridgean Heroics," paper given at "Byron and the Drama of Romanticism," Yale University, 30 March to 1 April 1990; "Staging Robespierre," paper given at "Revolution '89," University of California, Santa Barbara, 13-15 May 1989. 53 See Loren Kruger, The National Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); " ' O u r National House': The Ideology of the National Theatre of Great Britain," Theatre Journal 39/1 (1987): 35-50; "Attending (to) the National Spectacle: Instituting National (Popular) Theater in England and France," in Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism, ed. Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991): 243-67. 54 See Carlson, "A New Stage for Romantic Drama" (note 47), pp. 423-5.
Notes to pages 19-26
223
55 See Catherine Burroughs, "The Repression of the Feminine in Coleridge's Plays," The CEA Critic 52/1-2 (1989-90): 51-61; Parker, "Reading Wordsworth's Power" (see note 52); Karen Swann, "Coleridge's Tainted Endeavors: Osorio, the Morning Post Essays, and 'Christabel'" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1984); Daniel Watkins, " ' I n that New World': The Deep Historical Structure of Coleridge's Osorio," Philological Quarterly 69 (1990): 495-515; Sara Suleri, "Beatrice Cenci and the Drama of Forgiveness" (unpublished talk given at the Yale conference on "Byron and the Drama of Romanticism"). 56 Mary Jacobus, "'That Great Stage Where Senators Perform': Macbeth and the Politics of Romantic Theater," SiR 22 (1983): 353-87. Felperin addresses the removal of Shakespeare's texts from "proprietorship of an aristocratic and literary elite," but he does not consider Shakespeare's embodiment on stage ("Bardolatry Then and Now," The Appropriation of Shakespeare [see note 18]: 129-44). 57 For important distinctions among the terms "feminization," "homosociality," and "homosexuality," see Christopher Newfield, "The Politics of Male Suffering: Masochism and Hegemony in the American Renaissance," differences 1/3 (1989), pp. 59-66. 58 On the rise in "bodily eloquence," see Angelica Gooden, Action and Persuasion: Dramatic Performance in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1986); see also Peter Brooks, "The Revolutionary Body," in Fictions of the French Revolution, ed. Bernadette Fort (see note l 5)> PP- 43-759 Christopher Reid, "Burke's Tragic Muse: Sarah Siddons and the 'Feminization' of the Reflections" (unpublished paper), pp. 4-8, 17-20; he cites Laura Brown, "The Defenseless Woman and the Development of English Tragedy," Studies in English Literature, 22/3 (1982), pp. 429-32. 60 See Carl Woodring, Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961); Jacobus, "Macbeth and the Politics of Romantic Theater" (see note 56); R. A. Foakes, "Coleridge, Napoleon, and Nationalism," in Literature and Nationalism, ed. Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991): 140-51. 61 For critical histories of these developments, see Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (see note 3), pp. 1-66, and Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense
of History (see note 48), pp. 32-54. 62 By ascribing Shakespeare's genius to his insight into human psychology, virtually anyone gains the authority to interpret the bard. Felperin ascribes this argument to Coleridge ("Bardolatry Then and Now" [see note 56], pp. 129-30, 133).
224
Notes to pages 30-1 I
CONSTITUTING BODIES POLITIC AND THEATRIC
1 See Matthew Corrigan, Coleridge, Language, and Criticism (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1982), pp. 9-13; Julie Ellison, " Rousseau in the Text of Coleridge: The Ghost-Dance of History," SiR 28/3 (Fall 1989): 417-36, especially pp. 423-6, 429-33. 2 Inquiring Spirit, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), p. 156. 3 See "Coleridge: The Politics of Imagination," ed. Carl Woodring, SiR 21 (1982): 447-76. I use this phrase more broadly to invoke new historicist work on Wordsworth and Coleridge and theoretically inflected studies of Coleridge's imagination: especially James Chandler, Wordsworth's Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Nigel Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge's Critical Thought (London: Macmillan Press, 1988); Alan Liu, Wordsworth and the Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); David Simpson, Wordsworth's Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (New York: Methuen, 1987); Frederick Burwick, ed., Coleridge's Biographia Literaria: Text and Meaning (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989); Christine Gallant, ed., Coleridge's Theory of Imagination Today (New York: AMS Press, 1989); Richard Gravil, Lucy Newlyn, and Nicholas Roe, eds., Coleridge's Imagination: Essays in Memory of Pete Laver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). The last quoted phrase comes from Leask, The Politics of Imagination, p. 1. 4 Critics have explored the way that Kant's new science of taste complements the formation and control of public opinion. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), and Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). On the issue of how Coleridge wards off aggression in his writing, see Julie Ellison, Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 133-60. 5 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990); Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Oxford and Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986); Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990); Andrew Parker, et. al., Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1991). 6 Newman departs from those whom Anderson calls the "founding fathers of academic scholarship on nationalism" by seeing the mid-1740s to the mid-1780s as the " critical years in the launching of English nationalism " (Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism 1740-1830 [New York:
Notes to pages 31-4
225
St. Martin's Press, 1987], p. 67). Most other scholars date its emergence to the end of the eighteenth century, congruent with the French Revolution. See Alfred Cobban, The Nation State and National SelfDetermination (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1970); Carleton J. H. Hayes, Essays on Nationalism (New York: Macmillan Co., 1926) and The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York: Macmillan Co., 1931); Aira Kemila inen, Nationalism: Problems Concerning the Word, the Concept and Classification (Jyvaskyla: Kustantajat, 1964); Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan Co., 1944) and Prophets and Peoples: Studies in Nineteenth Century Nationalism (New York: Collier Books, 1966). 7 See David Calleo, Coleridge and the Idea of the Modern State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), and Alfred Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century: A Study of the Political and Social Thinking of Burke, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1929). Particularly helpful on Coleridge's political thought generally are John Colmer, Coleridge: Critic of Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959); Carl Woodring, Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961); John Morrow, Coleridge's Political Thought (London: Macmillan Press, 1990). 8 At stake here are two issues, raised especially by feminist and postcolonialist critiques of identity. First, there is the need to problematize identity in a responsible manner for groups whose historical invisibility has excluded them from the advantages of "bourgeois individualism." Terry Eagleton gives some helpful formulations of national identity in this light in his contribution to Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (see note 5), pp. 24-6, 29-34. See also the " Introduction" to Nationalisms and Sexualities (see note 5), pp. 3, 7—8. The second is the advisability of championing imagination as a way to bypass patriarchal constructions of the rational self. Both French feminists and feminist writers of color have privileged imagination and poetry in their constitutions of feminine identities and sexualities. Such optimism needs to be qualified by investigation of the appropriative history of imagination - for example, Hazlitt's sense that imagination is a "monopolising" and "aristocratical" faculty ("Coriolanus," CSP, p. 214). 9 See Leonard Doob, Patriotism and Nationalism: Their Psychological Foundations (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 6-9; Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 137-40; Gerald Newman, The Rise ofEnglish Nationalism (see note 6), pp. 52—4. 1 o Anderson points out that although nationalism is a defensive formation, it is not necessarily a reactionary one (Imagined Communities [see note 5], p. 15; see also Nationalisms and Sexualities, p. 5). Peter Thorslev exposes some of the "peculiar conclusions" to which Newman's treatment of nationalism as an ideology, " not as a sentiment," leads (" Post-Waterloo Liberalism," SiR 28/3 [Fall 1989], pp. 450-1).
226
Notes to pages 35-8
11 In the early 1790s, Coleridge argues that there is no necessary conflict between specific attachments and universal philanthropy (see letters to Southey in 1794 and "Lectures on Revealed Religion" [1795]). 12 See Anthony Harding, "The Social State," in Coleridge and the Idea of Love: Aspects of Relationship in Coleridge's Thought and Writing (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 195-267. 13 "Human faculties cannot be fully developed but by society and a man per se is a contradiction; he is only potentially a man, not actually" (quoted from Notes Theological in Harding, Coleridge and the Idea of Love, p. 266). 14 Alfred Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century
(see note 7), p. 137. 15 See ibid., p. 67. Under "idea," Calleo argues, Coleridge binds together "three distinct but closely related principles that inform his whole view of the state: (1) The essence of a State is psychological; the State exists primarily as an Idea in the minds of its citizens. (2) The institutional structure or ' Constitution' of a State reflects the Idea of that Constitution held in the minds of the citizens from one generation to the next. (3) The Idea of the Constitution is a particular reflection, within a distinctive national tradition, of an ideal universal Constitution arising out of human n a t u r e " (Coleridge and the Idea of the Modern State [see note
7], p. 76). The latter claim gets significantly compromised in Coleridge's dealings with France. For a particularly telling instance of this reflex, see his " Internationalism: the Humanities " in Inquiring Spirit, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), pp. 343~416 John Morrow, Coleridge's Political Thought (see note 7), p. 163. To my thinking, Morrow pushes the case a little too far when he objects to Cobban's account on the grounds that "comparisons between Burke and Coleridge which depend on a shared antipathy to democracy are invalid" (p. 69). Coleridge objects precisely to the "unideal" or "mechanical" form of democracy. 17 In the immediate context, Coleridge isolates " Mr PITT " and normally contrasts him to a "scientific statesman" like Burke. But Coleridge also critiques the blindness of Burkean traditionalism through his attacks on Wordsworth's high estimation of "rustic life" in Biographia. For the Burkean underpinnings to Wordsworth's thinking, see Chandler, Wordsworth's Second Nature (see note 3), pp. 158-62. 18 For fuller accounts of Coleridge's arguments with Rousseau, see Calleo, Coleridge and the Idea of the Modern State (see note 7), pp. 64—9; Seamus Deane, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England 1789-1832
(Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 58-71; Julie Ellison, "Rousseau in the Text of Coleridge" (see note 1), pp. 417-36; Morrow, Coleridge's Political Thought (see note 7), pp. 79-85. 19 See Appendix C of SM, p. 69; Owen Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), pp. 92-115.
Notes to pages 39-47
227
20 If not explicitly called imagination in every case, all these figures exemplify "Method" which, as Leask argues, increasingly takes the place of imagination after 1817 (The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge's Critical Thought [see note 3], pp. 76, 143). On Bacon as the British Plato, see F 1: 467—93; on Harrington, F 1: 154. 21 For the scale of mental powers, see Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (see note 19), p. 95. French "psilosophers" are defined as "nominal Philosopher[s] without Imagination." Stating that England and Germany are characterized by Genius and France by Cleverness, Coleridge notes, "Imagination is implied in Genius" (F 1: 421). 22 See Robert Sayre's account of this letter, "The Young Coleridge: Romantic Utopianism and the French Revolution," SiR 28/3 (1989): 397-4I523 The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge's Critical Thought (see note 3), p. 5. 24 The practice of printing parliamentary debates was instituted in 1771 (Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism [see note 6], p. 195). 25 See "Lectures on the Two Bills," in which Coleridge supports "government by" (not "over" or "with") the people and states as an ultimate goal having only one estate in the nation, " the people." In this stage, as John Morrow argues, he claims that the British parliamentary system will become corrupt if it excludes a "degree of popular participation through freedom of speech, publication, assembly and petitioning" {Coleridge's Political Thought [see note 7], p. 34). Coleridge claims that his own parliamentary reporting not only disseminates but shapes national policy. 26 Morrow argues that after 1811 Coleridge becomes increasingly hostile toward the landed classes (ibid., pp. 111-21). 27 Leask argues that Coleridge's transference of culture "from a civic to a religious sphere entailed the rejection of imagination as mediator between reason and experience. ... The politics of imagination became authoritarian, static, and class defined" (The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge's Critical Thought [see note 3], p. 143). 28 Distinguishing between people and populace determines the "comprehensibility" of "all political theory." See especially, "Who are the Friends of the People?" EOT y. 247. 29 On the implications of Coleridge's recuperation of mystery, see Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge's Critical Thought, pp. 159, 173. 30 See Lockridge, " Coleridge and the Perils of Self Realization," Coleridge's Theory of Imagination Today (see note 3): 257-74, especially pp. 263, 269, 262. Lockridge, however, warns against positing a full-scale demotion of imagination in the years following Biographia Literaria. See also A. C. Goodson, Verbal Imagination: Coleridge and the Language of Modern Criticism
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 120-50. 31 W. J. Bate's detailed account of the publication history of Biographia sanctions dismissive treatments of these insertions (BL 1: lviii-lxvii).
228
Notes to pages 48-56
32 See also CL 4: 617-18, 643-4; a n < ^ Timothy Webb, "The Romantic Poet and the Stage," The Romantic Theatre: An International Symposium, ed. Richard Allen Cave (Totowa: Barnes and Noble Books, 1986), pp. 14-15, 18-22.
33 See CL 4: 720. The persistent delay in publication makes firm dates difficult to establish, but on 22 September 1816 Coleridge writes that he will "commence next week" with the material that he has been "forced by the blunder " of his printer to " add to the ' Literary Life'" and on the 24th instructs Gillman's assistant to send him the roll of papers on Bertram. Although Coleridge does not say why he requests these manuscripts, the very next day he expresses his "hopes that the volumes of my literary work [and] Sibylline Leaves will be out by the end of October" {CL 4: 679-83). 34 Bradford Mudge, "The Politics of Autobiography in the Biographia Literaria," South Central Review 3/2 (1986): 27—45; Jerome Christensen, "The Mind at Ocean: The Impropriety of Coleridge's Literary Life," Romanticism and Language, ed. Arden Reed (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984): 144-67, especially pp. 159-67. 35 Jonathan Bate complicates the Coleridgean reading in Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730-1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 102. 36 Determining precise dates for some of these pieces is difficult. "Genius and Public Taste" comes from manuscript pages which bear the date 1805 in the watermark, although both Griggs and Foakes set the date of composition at 1812 (LoL 1: 424). My use of the annotations to Knight's treatise on taste is indebted to Frederick Burwick, " O n Stage Illusion: From Wordsworth's Marginalia to Coleridge's Lectures," Wordsworth Circle 19/1 (1988): 28-37. Burwick argues that although the marginalia is in Wordsworth's hand, "content and style suggest that these notes were dictated by Coleridge for use in his lectures" (pp. 30-1). 37 Covent Garden's and Drury Lane's destruction by fire in this period adds force to this image. 38 See Nicola Watson, "Kemble, Scott, and the Mantle of the Bard," in The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991): 73-92, especially p. 74. 39 Jonathan Bate, "The Politics of Romantic Shakespearean Criticism: Germany, England, France," European Romantic Review 1/1 (Summer 1990), pp. 3, 16. 40 Although my conclusions vary from his, Martin Greenberg provides the most moving articulation of Coleridge's identification with Hamlet in The Hamlet Vocation of Coleridge and Wordsworth (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), pp. 1-90. 41 Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. T . M . Raysor (Cambridge, M A : Harvard University Press, 1936), p. 162. 42 Bate cites this phrase, the title of Ferdinand Freiligrath's poem of 1844,
Notes to pages 56-63
43 44
45 46
229
in his analysis of Schlegel's reading of Hamlet. The Coleridgean echoes are obvious: "The Germans are a speculative people; in other words, they wish to discover by reflection and meditation, the principle of whatever they engage in. On that very account they are not sufficiently practical" ("The Politics of Romantic Shakespearean Criticism" [see note 39], p. 6). Howard Felperin, "Bardolatry Then and Now," The Appropriation of Shakespeare (see note 38), p. 130. Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 15-36. Contemporary and present-day accounts of theatre in the romantic age suggest that Coleridge is not unusual in linking arguments about aesthetic taste and social class (see the Introduction, notes 31-2). The implications of this strategy and effect of theatre are discussed in the Conclusion. See " Othello," CSP, p. 206; also " Mr. Kean's Iago," A View, p. 212. The analogies to Napoleon are particularly clear in Hazlitt's "Preface" to The Life of Napoleon: "He did many things wrong and foolish; but they were individual acts, and recoiled upon the head of the doer. They stood upon the ground of their own merits, and could not urge in their vindication 'the right divine of kings to govern wrong'" (quoted in William Hazlitt: Selected Writings, ed. Jon Cook [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991], p. 230). Hazlitt is even better than Coleridge at isolating the question of power as the psychological problematic of revolution and drama. Despite his pro-revolutionary leanings, Hazlitt confronts head-on the relation among imagination, power, and aristocracy, especially in " Coriolanus." I return to the differences, and intensity of the differences, between Coleridge and Hazlitt in Chapter 4.
2 C O L E R I D G E ' S GERMAN R E V O L U T I O N : SGHILLER'S WALLENSTEIM
1 To Mrs. Clarkson, 29 November 1811, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Thomas Sadler, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1869), 1: 226. 2 Works of Thomas Carlyle in Thirty Volumes, ed. H. D. Traill (London: Chapman and Hall, 1897), 11: The Life of John Sterling, pp. 52, 57. 3 Despite an over-emphasis on German philosophy, I have found the following discussions of Coleridge's relation to Germany particularly informative: Rosemary Ash ton, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought 1800-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 1-66; James Engell, "Editors' Introduction," BL 1: lxvii-xcvii; Nigel Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge's Critical Thought (London: Macmillan Press, 1988), pp. 77-146; Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) and Originality and Imagination (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 31-59; Gian
230
4
5
6
7
8
9
Notes to pages 63-j
Orsini, Coleridge and German Idealism: A Study in the History of Philosophy with Unpublished Materials from Coleridge's Manuscripts (Carbondale, I L : Southern Illinois University Press, 1969). Coleridge's endorsement of Germany's precedence and prescience in appreciating Shakespeare varies to the extent he feels included or excluded by such claims. As the chief transmitter of the German mind to England, he can validate himself by honoring them as " the first to feel truly, and to appreciate justly " the mighty genius of Shakespeare. When "friends" like Wordsworth deny him this honor by implying that he copied rather than instigated this recognition, he reverses his tribute and asserts his priority in recognizing Shakespeare's judgment as well as his genius. See Norman Fruman, Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel (New York: George Braziller, 1971); for rebuttals, see Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (see note 3), pp. 1-52 and "Coleridge's Plagiarisms Once More: A Review Essay," Tale Review 62 (1974): 252-86. Despite its aggressive tone, Fruman's argument, in my opinion, has been too quickly and defensively dismissed. To me, a more interesting line of inquiry is how "copying" suits Coleridge's theory and practice of imitation and how Germany augments, even instigates, Coleridge's nationalist pursuits. A. C. Goodson, Verbal Imagination: Coleridge and the Language of Modern Criticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 115-19. 133-5To modify the former oversight, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, " Axiologic Logic," Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectivesfor Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1988); Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990); and Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). Goodson at one point mentions that Coleridge "followed" Schiller on the aesthetic education of man, "though to little distinct effect" (Verbal Imagination, p. 116). But Schiller's effect went "beyond" aesthetics to the plays and politics that undergird it. See Ashton, The German Idea (see note 3), pp. 1-26; Frederic Ewen, The Prestige of Schiller in England, 1788-1859 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932); Violet Stockley, German Literature as Known in England, 1750-1830 (London: Routledge, 1929); F. W. Stokoe, German Influence in the English Romantic Period 1788-1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926). See Reeve Parker, " ' I n Some Sort Seeing With My Proper Eyes': Wordsworth and the Spectacles of Paris," SiR 27/3 (1988): 369-90, especially pp. 372-3. The Robbers was translated into English by Alexander Tytler in 1792 but was not performed on the English stage during this period.
Notes to pages 65-8
231
10 See Ashton, The German Idea (note 3), pp. 7-8; and Hazlitt, "On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth," The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930-4), 17: 196-7. 11 Schiller is seen to appeal to the poetic as well as popular consciousness, whereas Kotzebue's appeal is only allowed to be popular. Theatre critics in England and Germany voice alarm over Kotzebue's perceived command of the German stage. For Germany's reactions against Kotzebue as an unfair "representative" of German drama in England, see the letters of the London-based German correspondent to Wieland's Neue Teutsche Merkur, especially April 1797, February 1799, April 1799, and July 1799 (as referenced in Carlson, "Unsettled Territory: The Drama of English and German Romanticisms," Modern Philology 88/1 [1990]: 43-56, especially p. 45). For a less tendentious account of Kotzebue, see Oscar Mandel, August von Kotzebue: The Comedy, The Man
(University Park, PA, and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), pp. 1-64. 12 Andre Rault, "Die Spanier in Peru oder die Deutschen in England: Englisches und deutsches Theater, 1790-1810," Wissenschaftliche £eitschrift der Ernst-Moritz-Arndt Universitdt 32/3-4 (1983): 83-9, especially p. 86. 13 See Heidi Robinson, "Der gesellschaftsfeindliche 'innere' bzw. 'ganze Mensch': MiBdeutungen in der englischen Rezeption und Uberlieferung von Schillers Kulturtheorie," Arcadia: J^eitschrift fur Vergleichende
Literaturwissenschaft 15/1 (Walter de Gruyter, 1980): 129-48, especially p. 132. L. A. Willoughby and Elizabeth Wilkinson make the same negative point about Carlyle in their introduction to the English translation of Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. cliii, clvi. 14 A. C. Dunstan, "The German Influence on Coleridge," MLR 17 (1922): 272-81, especially p. 273. 15 See Jeffrey Barnouw, "Das 'Problem der Aktion' und Wallenstein," Schiller Jahrbuch 16 (1972): 330—407, to which this discussion is indebted. 16 See "Editors' Introduction," AE, pp. xci, xxv and Wilkinson's notes to 1705, 1710, 1717 of CN. See AE, p. cliv for discussion of what texts of Schiller Coleridge read (see also "Appendix A: Coleridge's Knowledge of German as Seen in the Early Notebooks" in CN 1: 451-4). The point of this chapter is not to argue that Schiller is more central to Coleridge's thinking than Kant, Schelling, and Schlegel but to argue that we should take more seriously Coleridge's point of entry into Germany and its embeddedness in theatre. Coleridge's subsequent silence about, or downplaying of, Schiller is linked to the humiliation of Wallenstein and the persistence of Schiller's association with The Robbers. 17 See Barnouw, "Das 'Problem der Aktion' und Wallenstein" (see note 15); Dieter Borchmeyer, Tragodie und Ojfentlichkeit: Schillers Dramaturgic
232
18
19
20
21
22
23
Notes to pages
68-y2
im ^usammenhang seiner desthetisch-politischen Theorie und die rhetorische Tradition (Munich: Fink, 1973); Verlorene Klassik, ed. Walter Wittkowski (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1986); Wilkinson and Willoughby, "Introduction" to AE, pp. xv-xx. See Heinrich Mettler, Entfremdung und Revolution: Studien zu Schillers Brief en " Uber die desthetische Erziehung des Menschen " im Hinblick auf die Begegnung mit Goethe (Bern and Munich: Francke, 1977), p. 19. What prevents people from benefitting from the advances of Enlightenment are their "indolence" and "cowardice of heart" (AE, p. 51). A further complication is a lop-sided view of the nature and genesis of reason. For Schiller, enlightenment not only reacts upon character but "proceeds from " it, since " the way to the head must be opened through the heart." Strengthening our feelings thus "provides the impulse for bettering our insights" {AE, p. 53). Schiller not only explores three distinct topics of development - mankind in general, the single individual, and a single act of perception - he does so in terms of three "moments" or "epochs" of development through which each of these subjects must pass: the physical, in which one "merely suffers the dominion of nature," the aesthetic, in which one "emancipates" oneself from this dominion, and the moral, in which one "acquires mastery" over it (AE, pp. 95-7). In the present case, the transition from feeling to thought is anthropological, the transition from thought to feeling contingent; that is, the first state depicts the shift from "savage" to "human," the latter the way around impasses of enlightenment. " Rousseaus Kritik Asthetischer Versohnung: Eine Problemvorgabe der Bildungsasthetik Schillers," Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 31 ( I 987)- I 37-55Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (see note 7), pp. 102-19; Jerome Christensen, "Byron's Sardanapalus and the Triumph of Liberalism," SiR 31/3 (1992): 333-60. Schiller describes how verse and rhythm contribute to a distancing effect in Dichter fiber ihre Dichtung: Friedrich Schiller, ed. Bodo Lecke (Munich: Heimeran, 1969), pp. 276, 277. Isle Graham provides a helpful discussion of Schiller's "generic" characters and their relation to his aesthetic views in Schiller: A Master of the Tragic Form: His Theory in His Practice (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1975), pp. 135-48. Schiller declines Schroder's invitation to move to Hamburg in order to be " near the stage for which he writes " by claiming that such proximity tempts one to sacrifice lasting form to immediate effect and destroys the mystery of stage illusion (Henning Rischbieter, Schiller II [Velber bei Hannover: Friedrich, 1969], p. 93). His comments during the composition of Wallenstein confirm this interdiction. In order to ensure its poetic truth, Schiller delays thinking about stage representation (see Dichter uber ihre Dichtung [note 22], pp. 279, 288).
Notes to pages 72—j
233
24 On totality, see Dichter fiber ihre Dichtung, pp. 2, 251; on audience manipulation, see his description of Fiesco cited in Heinrich Mettler, Entfremdung und Revolution (see note 18), pp. 39-40. Theatre as madhouse is evident in reviews of The Robbers, cited in Alan Leidner, " Karl Moor's Charisma," in Friedrich von Schiller and the Drama of Human Existence, ed. Alexej Ugrinsky, Contributions to the Study of World Literature 25 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), p. 57. 25 Golo Mann, "Schiller als Historiker," Jahrbuch der Schiller-Gesellschaft (i960); Wilhelm Dilthey, " Wallenstein," (1895) in Schillers Wallenstein, ed. Fritz Heuer and Werner Keller (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1977): 74-103. 26 Only the first play of the trilogy, Wallensteins Lager (Wallenstein^ s Camp), was performed at the Weimar opening. Coleridge never translated this play, but he might have seen the prologue reprinted in the Allgemeine Zeitung when he was in Germany (since Coleridge's manuscript copy of Wallensteins Lager has never resurfaced, we do not know if the prologue was included with it). 27 See Dieter Borchmeyer, "'Dem Naturalism in der Kunst offen und ehrlich zu erklaren,' Zu Goethes und Schillers BiihnenFeform," Unser Commercium: Goethes und Schillers Literaturpolitik, ed. Wilfried Barner, Eberhard Lammert, Norbert Oellers (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1984): 353-60. 28 Schiller's vocabulary of "pressure" connects his aesthetic to his social concerns. Schiller advocates form (and its correlates, semblance and art) as a way of detaching oneself from material reality, which is usually described as "rohe Stoff," "blinde Macht," "rohe Leben," "rohe Gewalt." But this is also how Schiller describes the masses and their power, which form (or art) seeks to defuse. This connection becomes explicit in his defense of the chorus in The Bride of Messina ("Uber den Gebrauch des Chors," Friedrich Schiller: Sdmtliche Werke [Munich: Carl Hanser, 1965], 2: 820). 29 For Jeffrey Cox all of Schiller's plays " attempt" but fail " to plot history as a heroic romance in which the fragmentation of modern life is overcome and the rebel is revealed as a hero" (In the Shadows of Romance : Romantic Tragic Drama in Germany, England, and France [Athens, O H : Ohio University Press, 1987], p. 68). 30 For Illo, see Pice. 1. 2. 114-19; DoW 3. 6. 65; DoW 3. 8. 41-51; for Countess Tertsky, Pice. 4. 7. 119-23, 218-20. 31 Virtually all of the exchanges between Octavio and Max turn on this issue; sec Pice. 3. 1. 205-340; 5. 5. 105-11; 5. 6. 1-90; DoW 2. 7. 113-40. 32 The Duchess of Friedland's only significant function is to highlight this side of her husband's character (DoW 1.3. 18-25). 33 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, "Uber Wallenstein (um 1800)," in Schillers Wallenstein (see note 25): 15-16. 34 Max and Octavio are distinguished by their belief in authenticity (Pice. 2. 5. 19-20; 3. 1. 195, 206-12, 217-21; 3. 2. 6-15). Wallenstein adopts
234
35 36 37 38
39
40
41 42
Notes to pages yy-8o
Octavio's position during the course of the play. To the advisors who warn him against Octavio, Wallenstein offers Max's logic, but ultimately he tries to convert Max to the "realistic" way of thinking (Pice. 5. 2. 36-40). Max names it in Pice. 1. 4. 31—43; see Carl Woodring, Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), p. 87. For a more detailed discussion of these two fathers, see Dieter Borchmeyer, Macht und Melancholie: Schillers Wallenstein (Frankfurt am Main: Athenaum, 1988). The gender warfare behind this vision of liberation is explored in the final chapter. As Michelle Gellrich notes, in "Uber das Erhabene" Schiller distinguishes between the "sublime of disposition or spiritual capacity" and the "sublime of action" and finds the former the more appropriate to aesthetic ends (Gellrich, Tragedy and Theory: The Problem of Conflict since Aristotle [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988], pp. 253-4). In this she supports Use Graham's more detailed account of why Schiller's plays prefer to depict moral potential over moral character (Schiller: A Master of the Tragic Form [see note 22], pp. 126-39). This is where Graham's persuasive argument about the structure of Schiller's tragedies seems inappropriate to Wallenstein. While Wallenstein manifests the "contemplative stance" she identifies as the chief trait of the Schillerian protagonist, he does not embody the need to externalize in another character the psychic element missing in his own nature. In her account, Max serves this function. But Max neither represents the traits that she claims he externalizes for Wallenstein instinct and passion - nor is he clearly opposed to Wallenstein throughout the play. In my view, Wallenstein embodies his own self-division; all the supporting characters reinforce one side or the other of his psychic splits (see Schiller: A Master of the Tragic Form [note 22], pp. 82-98, 120-6). In many ways Schiller's playwrighting career follows the same trajectory I am suggesting for Coleridge's. In rejecting Schiller as a dramatist but "lauding" him as a philosophical poet, Crabb Robinson evaluates Schiller in the same way that critics have evaluated Coleridge (Frederic Ewen, The Prestige of Schiller in England ij88-i8$g [see note 8], p. 30). See EOT 1: lxxxvi-cxiii. When discussed at all, Wallenstein is made to epitomize the dissipation, loss of creativity, and general shift in interest from poetry to metaphysics associated with Coleridge's trip to Germany. However, notable exceptions exist in the work of Joyce Crick, to whom this discussion is indebted, and William Crisman. See especially Crick, "Some Editorial and Stylistic Observations on Coleridge's Translation of Schiller's Wallenstein," English Goethe Society: Papers Read before the Society ig8j-84
(1985): 37-75; "Coleridge's Wallenstein: Available Dictions," Second
Notes to pages 80-2
235
Hand: Papers on the Theory and Historical Study of Literary Translation, ALW
43
44
45 46
47 48
49
Cahiers 3 (1985): 128-60; "Coleridge's Wallenstein: Two Legends," Modern Language Review 83/1 (1988): 76-86; and Crisman, "Coleridge's Wallenstein Translation as a Guide to his Dejection Ode," Wordsworth Circle 18/3 (1987): 132—6. Crisman calls our attention to Lamb's recollection as recorded by E. K. Chambers {Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Biographical Study [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938], p. 128). However, Crisman states that Coleridge "would dress up as Wallenstein" (Crisman, "Coleridge's Wallenstein," p. 133) whereas Chambers claims " Coleridge would sit in a dressing-gown and look like a conjuror, while he was translating Wallenstein" (Chambers, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p. 133). This confusion is part of the subject of this chapter. See Crick, "Some Editorial and Stylistic Observations," pp. 40-4, "Coleridge's Wallenstein: Two Legends," pp. 76-86; Paul Machule, "Coleridge's M^/Z^^Vz-Ubersetzung," Englische Studien 31 (1902): 182-239. See Lieselotte Blumenthal, "Geisweiler und Weimar: Zur Rezeption deutscher Dichter in England um 1800," Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 11 (1969): 14-46. Coleridge is introduced to Schiller, that "convulser of the heart," through reading Tytier's translation of Die Rduber in 1794. In May 1796 he writes to Thomas Poole that he is learning German and scheming " a proposal to Robinson, the great London Bookseller, of translating all the works [of] Schiller, which would make a portly Quarto, on the conditions that he should pay my Journey & wife's to & from Jena, a cheap German University where Schiller resides" (cited in Ashton, The German Idea [see note 3], p. 30). The German Idea, pp. 27-35. The first quote is from Coleridge's letter to the Monthly Review (33 [November 1800], p. 336) protesting its negative review of his translation of the first part of Wallenstein (Monthly Review 33 [October 1800], pp. i27ff). The second is from Table Talk, 16 February 1833. See Ashton for discussion of the complicated cultural context of this translation and her sense that Coleridge acknowledged Wallenstein "only when he heard that [it] had been publicly praised by others" (The German Idea, pp. 27-36). See Crick, "Some Editorial and Stylistic Observations," pp. 37, 57-67. For de Stael's comment, see Ewen, The Prestige of Schiller in England ij88-i8$g (see note 8), p. 107. As Coleridge sees it, reviving these history plays "could not but tend to counteract that mock cosmopolitism [sic] which under a positive term really implies nothing but a negation of, or indifference to, the particular love of our country" (ShC 1: 139—40). See L. A. Willoughby, "Wordsworth and Germany," German Studies Presented to H. G. Fiedler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), pp. 443-6; and Crick, " Some Editorial and Stylistic Observations " (see note 42), p. 68. Elizabeth Wilkinson defends Willoughby's position against skeptics
236
Notes to pages 82-6
like Rene Wellek in" Coleridge undDeutschland, 1794-1804,"Forschungsprobleme der Vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte, ed.
Fritz
Ernst
and
Kurt Wais (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1958): 7—24, and Willoughby and Wilkinson summarize this debate in their introduction to AE, pp. clxvii-clxix. Provocative tangential support to Willoughby and Wilkinson's position is provided by Coleridge's odd letter to William Taylor (25 January 1800). There he reprints passages from his and Wordsworth's letters to each other in Germany debating "the merits of Burger" and his challenge to Wordsworth's "disappointment" over the German originals. Curiously, what Coleridge recounts as Wordsworth's criticism of Burger nicely anticipates his assessment of Wordsworth: " I do not perceive the presence of character in his personages. I see everywhere the character of Burger himself; and even this, I agree with you, is no mean merit. But yet I wish him sometimes at least to make me forget himself in his creations" (CL 1: 566). 50 For various comparisons of these texts, see H. N. Coleridge, " The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge," The Quarterly Review 52 (1834): 1-38;
G. H. E., "Schiller's Wallenstein, Translated by S. T. Coleridge," Westminster Review 53 (1850): 348-65; Walter Grossman, " The GillmanHarvard Manuscript of Schiller's Wallensteins Tod," Harvard Library Bulletin 11 (1957): 319-45; Paul Machule, "Coleridge's WallensteinUbersetzung" (see note 43); B. Q. Morgan, "What Happened to Schiller's Wallenstein" MLJ 43 (1959): 195-201. Crick explains the difficulties in reconstructing the version from which Coleridge translated The Piccolomini, for Coleridge's manuscript copy of this play has not been found ("Some Editorial and Stylistic Observations" [see note 42], pp. 42-6). 51 The Piccolomini appeared in April 1800 and The Death of Wallenstein in
June. See Crick, "Some Editorial and Stylistic Observations," p. 42 on Schiller's exasperation. For Schlegel's and Tieck's praise, see Ashton, The German Idea (see note 3), p. 189. Schlegel and Tieck's role as the translators of Shakespeare, whose translation has also been seen to rival the original, makes their endorsement all the more fitting. 52 This is the same strategy as in Coleridge's negative remarks on contemporary theatre in the Biographia. What prompts his critique is his decision to "go to the French comedy" which he finds even "worse than our modern English plays" (BL 2: 183). What the footnote tells us, however, is that this play is a French translation of a German play, Der Graf von Walltron oder die Subordination (1776) by Heinrich Friedrich
Moller. 53 This is another instance in which theatre allows Coleridge to explore more subtle psychological processes. Whereas Wallenstein's vacillations in general have been read as tragic by Germanists for the reasons that Hegel outlined, Coleridge here suggests that they are self-serving. 54 See also CN 22: 2598.
Notes to pages 88-gi
237
55 See Karen Swann, " Coleridge's Tainted Endeavors: Osorio, The Morning Post Essays, and 'Christabel'" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1984), especially pp. 106-14. 56 Swann cites another relevant passage from Coleridge's letters, "Yet it is not unflattering to a man's Vanity to reflect that what he writes at 12 at night will before 12 hours is over have 5 or 6000 readers!... Then to hear a favorite & oft urged argument repeated in almost your own particular phrases in the House of Commons, - & quietly in the silent selfcomplacency of your own heart chuckle over the plagiarism as if you were Grand Monopolist of all good Reasons!" (CL 1: 569 in Swann, " Coleridge's Tainted Endeavors," p. 106). The only occasion that rivals this opportunity to be an immediate sensation is Coleridge's experience of attending Remorse at Drury Lane: " 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.... 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 " (CL 3: 430-1). Timothy Webb cites this passage in the course of arguing that the theatre and the "Lecture Box" are fused for Coleridge. I agree that Coleridge's public lectures constitute a third public arena, but there the audience is much less "popular" ("The Romantic Poet and the Stage," in The Romantic Theatre, ed. Richard Allen Cave [Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1986], P. 19)57 See Woodring, Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), pp. 209-11. Obviously I question the plausibility of his assertion that "boredom with the drudgery of translation, even more than renewed desire for theatrical success, drove [Coleridge] to produce [The Triumph of Loyalty], perhaps at first surreptitiously, to revise Osorio, and possibly to conceive in a general way the drama on Hungary that became £apolya" (p. 209). 58 Wilkinson, "Coleridge und Deutschland" (see note 49), pp. 18-20. 59 Coleridge usually refers to Wallenstein in the context either of depicting or defusing commanding genius. For statements regarding the dangers of this character, see especially BL 1:33; BL 2: 213; F 1: 121-4; LoL 2: 306; EOT 2: 44; EOT 2: 75. The last is a particularly instructive example of Coleridge's creative citations. In the process of describing in order to condemn Napoleon, he cites a passage from Wallenstein which he himself had condemned in a footnote to his translation as too "blasphemous a sentiment" to risk putting "in the mouth of any character" (PW 2: 777). But precisely this blasphemy, which conceives of a human being as a "wire-worked puppet / Of the blind power" who is denied "free action" and led by " a dread necessity," describes contemporary adherents of Napoleon. "The error, which of all others most besets the public mind ... is an inward prostration of the soul before
238
Notes to pages gi-$
enormous POWER ... as if man were only a puppet without reason and free will, ...a puppet played off by some unknown power!" (PW 2: 775). For various forms of antidote, see F 1: 428-30 on cultivating the inner sense, F 1: 565-80 on respecting the past, and BL 2: 23-4 on idealizing poetry. 60 See the debate between Schiller and Goethe over the astrological motif {Walienstein: Erlduterungen und Dokumente, ed. Kurt R o t h m a n n [Stutt-
61
62
63
64
gart: Philipp Reclam, 1977], pp. 224-60). See also Barnouw, "Das 'Problem der Aktion' und Wallenstein" (see note 15), pp. 399-402; and Crick, "Some Editorial and Stylistic Observations" (see note 42), pp. 48-56. What Coleridge fails to mention is that Wallenstein's speech regarding presentiment is undermined in the next scene when he is murdered in his sleep. But what makes this citation even more symptomatic is that it echoes his distinction between an action and a series of motions. For here Wallenstein takes courage from the absence of a presentiment like Henry IV's when he "felt in his breast the phantom of the knife, / Long ere Ravillac arm'd himself therewith " (F 1: 429n). Goethe criticizes Octavio in his review of The Piccolomini for the Allgemeine Zeitung (25-31 March 1799, which Coleridge might have read while in Germany). See "Die Piccolomini, Wallensteins Erster Teil (1799)," in Schillers Wallenstein (see note 25), p. 6. Coleridge does note his omission but, as is his wont with passages of Shakespeare he does not like, justifies it by claiming that "We find a difficulty in believing this to have been written by Schiller" {PW 2: 754). See Crick's conviction that "Octavio's considered conservatism gave Coleridge an opportunity to explore imaginatively and without commitment a moral and political position which he was later to make his own" ("Two Legends" [see note 42], pp. 82-4). Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France and Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1973), p. 74. 3 A STAGE FOR POTENTIAL MEN
1 See Seamus Deane, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England
iy8g-i8j2 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 95-129. I return to the broader implications of Deane's argument in the Conclusion. 2 See Lawrence Wynn, "Coleridge's Remorse: Poetic Drama on the Romantic Stage," Interpretations 15/1 (Fall, 1983): 13-25;Joan Mandell Baum, The Theatrical Compositions of the Major English Romantic Poets
(Salzburg: Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1980), p. 62n. For texts of additional contemporary reviews of Remorse as acted play and printed drama, seej. R. de J.Jackson, ed., Coleridge: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1970), pp. 111-98.
Notes to pages gj-g
239
3 See especially criticism attributed to Strout in Blackwood*s Edinburgh Magazine 10 (August-December 1821), p. 731; and Blackwootfs 18 (December 1825), P- IX 94 This is not to say that contemporary reviews never stressed its poetic at the expense of its dramatic or theatric qualities. As Wynn shows, several did. But it is to say that the two were not mutually exclusive and that the success of Remorse was attributed both to its poetic and its theatrical nature - particularly the conjuring scene in Act 3. Besides this scene, several reviews praise Remorse for situations "strikingly calculated for dramatic effect" (25 January 1813, Morning Post), for its "union of the requisites of tragic drama" in presenting characters as "natural agents" and dialogue in "the true dramatic spirit" (February 1813, La Belle Assembled), its impact as "honourable to the genius of its author and reputable to the discernment of the managers of the new theatre" (February 1813, Literary Panorama) (Wynn, "Coleridge's Remorse," pp. 17-18). The Analectic Magazine is not alone in making the poetic nature of Remorse the cause of its theatrical success (Philadelphia, 1813, pp. 533-4). See the Letter to Wade Browne, 18 March 1813, New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 2: 202 (cited in Baum, The Theatrical Compositions, pp. 64-5)5 Letters surrounding the rehearsals and performances of Remorse highlight several of the burdens the play is meant to alleviate: new financial hardships occasioned by Josiah Wedgwood's withdrawal of his half of the annuity granted Coleridge in 1798 (a loss of £75 a year) as well as renewed doubts about his character and proficiency as an author triggered by this withdrawal (CL 3: 420-1); sorrow over the death of Thomas Wordsworth (on 1 December 1812) and the more painful reminder of the death of his friendship with William {CL 3: 423-5); the public's and critics' inability and unwillingness to understand Coleridge (CL 3: 427-35). 6 See also LS, p. 182. 7 See Carl Woodring, Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), p. 204; John David Moore, "Coleridge and the 'Modern Jacobinical Drama': Osorio, Remorse, and the Development of Coleridge's Critique of the Stage, 1797-1816," Bulletin ofResearch in the Humanities 85 (1982): 443-64, especially p. 452; Donald Priestman, "Godwin, Schiller, and the Polemics of Coleridge's Osorio," Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 82 (1979): 236-48. 8 "On the Character of Rivers" presents the same type as Coleridge's description of Osorio (in The Borderers, ed. Robert Osborn, The Cornell Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Parrish [Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1982], p. 62). 9 Because Coleridge divides his play into two parts, a one-scene Prelude and a four-act play, lines will be referenced first with 1 or 11 indicating the
240
10 11 12
13
14 15 16 17 18
Notes to pages 99-108
part from which the passage is taken. Only line numbers will follow 1, whereas 11 will be followed by act, scene, and line numbers. See Moore, "Coleridge and the 'Modern Jacobinical Drama 5 " (see note 7). See Ronald Paulson, " Gothic Fiction and the British Revolution," ELH 48(1981)1532-54. Parker, "Staging Robespierre," unpublished talk at the "Revolution '89" conference, University of California, Santa Barbara, May 1989; see also " ' O h , Could You Hear His Voice,'" in Romanticism and Language, ed. Arden Reed (Ithaca: Cornell University Press): 125-43. Actually the play sets up an opposition between unlawful, that is intentionally manipulative, speech and the "sacred right" of public debate. What makes acts of vengeance patriotic acts is that they express the will of the nation's assembled representatives. By "destroy[ing] the freedom of debate," Robespierre reveals himself to be a tyrant and thus an enemy of the state (FoR 2. 42-6, 212-22). Robespierre articulates his objections to determining the general will through public debate in a passage that anticipates Coleridge's rejection of parliamentary reform: "Long time the well-turn'd phrase, / The high-fraught sentence and the lofty tone / Of declamation, thunder'd in this hall, / Till reason midst a labyrinth of words / Perplex'd, in silence seem'd to yield assent" (FoR 2. 14—19). However, at this stage, Coleridge's sentiments are best expressed by Legendre and Freron: " Heed we well / That justice guide our actions ... I move St. Just be heard. / Inviolate be the sacred right of man. / The freedom of debate" (FoR 2. 190-3). Whether or not an act contains a change of scene, the lines are numbered consecutively throughout the act. Consequently, references to FoR contain only act and line number. Osorio/Ordonio seeks to silence this guilt through (heavy-handed) necessitarian argument (0 2. 1. 114-16, R 2. 1. 130-2; 0 3. 1. 213-21, # 3 . 2. 95-104; 0 5. 1. 144-8, 155-6, R. 5. 1. 111-16, 122-3). See also R 4. 3. 17-24. See his "Advertisement," which quite uncharacteristically invokes the "plan of the ancients" to justify his "callfing] the first part a Prelude instead of a first Act" (PW 2: 883). For Coleridge's discussions of tyrannicide, see F 2: 318-20 and EOT 2: 211-18.
19 This is the phrase Coleridge uses to describe Osorio in 1797. Despite dramatic changes in politics and aesthetic ideology, it remains appropriate as a description of Remorse and ^apolya. Critics acknowledge this, but "explain" it in a Coleridgean spirit - that in the later plays he employs Gothic conventions in order to train audiences to see through them (see Moore, "Coleridge and the 'Modern Jacobinical Drama'" [note 7], p. 461-2). 20 "We never saw more interest enacted in a theatre than was expressed at the sorcery-scene in the third act. The altar flaming in the distance, the
Notes to pages 108-12
241
solemn invocation, the pealing music of the mystic song, altogether produced a combination so awful, as nearly to overpower reality, and make one half believe the enchantment which delighted our senses" {Coleridge: The Critical Heritage [see note 2], p. 132; see also p. 117; for the contrary view, p. 132). 21 On the "dreaming mind" and dramatic faith, see Patricia M. Ball, "The Waking Dream: Coleridge and the Drama," The Morality of Art: Essays Presented to G. Wilson Knight by his Colleagues and Friends, ed. D. W.
22 23
24
25
26 27
28
Jefferson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969): 165—74, es~ pecially p. 170. Frederick Burwick analyzes Remorse in terms of its metadramatic discourse in Illusion and the Drama: Critical Theory of the Enlightenment and Romantic Era (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), pp. 267-79. Edmund Burke to Lord Glaremont, Correspondence, ed. Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 6. See Reeve Parker on ambiguities between Osorio and Albert ("'Quelle image du remords': Acting Out Coleridgean Heroics," Yale conference on "Byron and the Drama of Romanticism," March 1990, p. 12). See also R 3. 1. 99-102 which makes clear whose portrait is speaking. I detail this claim below, but it applies to Maria (Osorio), Teresa (Remorse), Sarolta, Zapolya, and Glycine (£apolya). Basically, the only women cleared of this charge are Adelaide (The Fall of Robespierre) and Alhadra (Osorio/Remorse). Since Alhadra is under obvious suspicion because of her color and religion, only Adelaide, who hardly figures in the play, is guilt free. See Parker, "Acting Out Coleridgean Heroics" (see note 23), pp. 14-21; Karen Swann, "Coleridge's Tainted Endeavors: Osorio, The Morning Post Essays, and 'Christabel'" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1984), pp. 32-3; Frederick Burwick, Illusion and the Drama (see note 21), pp. 269-70. Parker and Swann also point out the irony of Albert wearing a disguise. See Burwick, Illusion and the Drama (note 21), pp. 267—79. Burwick's rationalist reading of Teresa depends on revisions to her characterization in Remorse. Even still, the preservation of her fancies in Act 1 makes Karen Swann's reading of Maria relevant to the latter play, too. For Swann, Maria shows that "imaginative activity" is "originally improper, excessive, mutated "; and that Maria is the obvious counter to "specular egoists" like Osorio ("Coleridge's Tainted Endeavors" [see note 25], pp. 35-9, 25-7). This picture of mind correlates Coleridge's reading of Macbeth with his portrayal of Osorio/Ordonio, particularly in the terms Jacobus sets for Macbeth. What she calls Macbeth's "dangerously progressive equation" from "head to hand" is the story Osorio/Ordonio tells of himself: "Something within would still be shadowing out / All possibilities;... With this human hand / He gave a substance and reality / To that wild
242
29
30
31
32
Notes to pages 112-16
fancy of a possible thing" (R 4. 1. 113-14, 124-6). Yet Albert/Alvar's artistic abilities show that this play is not endorsing the Hamlet mode, nor censuring Osorio categorically because he acts. His alliance with Macbeth is more specific - and equally Goleridgean. It is not that he acted but that before he acted, "conscience hid herself in selfish prudential fears"; not that "head" moved to "hand" but to an avenging arm (ShC 1: 75). See Jacobus, "'That Great Stage Where Senators Perform': Macbeth and the Politics of Romantic Theater," SiR 22 (1983), p. 356. Coleridge intervenes with an explanatory footnote or by revising the passage every time these images appear. Determining the logistics and "meaning" of Maria/Teresa's portrait is remarkably difficult, even with the explanation offered in Remorse (R 2. 1. 50-7). Details surrounding Albert/Alvar's assassination picture are similarly murky and change from manuscript to manuscript. One early version of Osorio has Alhadra in possession of it in the very first scene, while Remorse "preserves" in a foonote lines that are not published elsewhere. Besides trying to clarify these images, additions to Remorse play up their theatrical features. Ordonio's explanation of how he knew of the locket portrait, as Burwick points out, draws attention to his position as an unsuspected "audience" (Illusion and the Drama [see note 21], p. 273). Earlier, Alvar's portrait speaks to Teresa. "These were my Alvar's lessons, and when'er / I bend me o'er his portrait, I repeat them, / As if to give a voice to the mute image" (R 4. 2. 35-8). (Compare the formulation in Osorio: "Yes! my mother! / These are my Albert's lessons, and I con them / With more delight than, in my fondest hour, I bend me o'er his portrait" [0 4. 1. 250-4].) "He had a mind which was somehow / At once circumference and centre / Of all he might or feel or know; / Nothing went ever out, although / Something did ever enter. / He had as much imagination / As a pint-pot: - he never could / Fancy another situation / From which to dart his contemplation, / Than that wherein he stood" ("Peter Bell the Third," lines 294-303, Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald Reiman and Sharon Powers [New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1977]). See Karen Swann, "Harassing the Muse" (pp. 81-92), Alan Richardson, "Romanticism and the Colonization of the Feminine" (pp. 13—25), and Marlon Ross, "Romantic Quest and Conquest: Troping Masculine Power in the Crisis of Poetic Identity" (pp. 26-52) in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988); Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Mary Jacobus, "The Buried Letter: Feminism and Romanticism in Villette," Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 41-61; Jacobus, "Behold the Parent Hen," in Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference (New York and Oxford:
Notes to pages 116-25
243
Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 239—6. In what follows the quotes around "women" signal the constructed nature of this category. That is, what is being called "woman" or "women" in this period is a fantasy pertaining only to white, middle- and upper-middle-class women. On the need to historicize "women" as a particular discursive category, see Denise Riley, " Am I that Name " : Feminism and the Category of" Women " in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 1-18, 44-52. 33 See Catherine Burroughs, "The Repression of the Feminine in Coleridge's Plays," The CEA Critic 52/1-2 (Fall 1989-Winter 1990): 51-61; and Daniel Watkins, " ' I n that New World': The Deep Historical Structure of Coleridge's Osorio," Philological Quarterly 69 (1990): 49534 Adelaide only appears briefly in the first act and is the lone female voice of the play. Her dramatic function essentially is to know her place: " In a cottag'd vale she dwells / List'ning to the Sabbath bells." This treatment of women accords with the sexual conservatism underlying Pantisocracy. Though committed to communism and aspheterism, Pantisocracy was hardly devoted to the liberation of women. Sarah Fricker Coleridge is the casualty of Pantisocracy's alliance with marriage, monogamy, and exclusion of divorce - in short to what Stephen Weissman calls its status as a "tribe of brothers" (His Brother's Keeper: A Psychobiography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge [Madison, C T : International Universities Press, 1989], p. 47). 35 The omission, of course, has considerable advantages for Remorse. Without instancing this passage, Coleridge elsewhere admits his borrowings: "As to my Thefts from the Wallenstein, they were on compulsion from the necessity of haste - & do not lie heavy on my Conscience, being partly thefts from myself & because I gave Schiller 20 for one I have taken" ( ^ 3 : 4 3 5 ) . 36 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 37 We first meet Lady Sarolta in the guise of a "mountaineer," one whose physical stamina is superior to the younger Glycine (£11. 1. 1. 1-4). This speech aligns Sarolta with Alhadra to the physical detriment of natureloving men. 38 But Coleridge establishes Velez's credibility in his preface to Remorse, where, in complimenting the actors, he commends " Mr. Pope's accurate representation of the partial, yet honourable Father" (PW 2: 815). 39 Stephen Weissman presents a convincing summary of Coleridge's effort to cast out his mother from his life. Besides the facts that Coleridge visited his mother "no more than two or three times once he became a grown man," that "even when Anne Coleridge lay on her death bed in 1809, Sam would make no attempt to see her, although there was ample time for him to do so," that he made no recorded remark about her death,
244
Notes to pages 125—33
and that only one letter survives from him to his mother (a letter "striking in its coolness, its formality, and its emphasis upon duty rather than love"), Coleridge's childhood "recollections" also go out of their way to express antipathy toward her. Besides portraying himself as his father's favorite, Coleridge likes to depict his father as "an Israelite without guile; simple, generous " and with " so little of parental ambition in him, that he had destined his children to be blacksmiths" (CL 1: 355, 54). His mother he depicts as pushy, driven by "pride and spirit of aggrandizing her family" (CL 1: 354). As Weissmann shows, however, John Coleridge was "remarkably ambitious and encouraged and expected the same from each of his sons." The "artificial neatness" of depicting his father as a "warm-hearted dreamer" and his mother as "the shrewdly calculating manager" raises "the suspicion that the future mythmaker was engaging in caricature rather than portraiture" (His Brother's Keeper, pp. 12-13, 4-5). For other investigations of Coleridge's poetic depictions of mothers, see Margery Durham, "The Mother Tongue: Christabel and the Language of Love," in The (M) other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Shirley Nelson
40 41
42 43
44
Garner, Claire Kahane, Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985): 169-93; Barbara Schapiro, "Christabel: The Drama of Ambivalence," in The Romantic Mother: Narcissistic Patterns in Romantic Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983): 61-92. In annotations to Wallenstein and Osorio, Coleridge implies that "theatric" interest has to do with the " comprehensibility " of the action (see PW 2: 625, 555). See Christine Di Stefano, "Dilemmas of Difference: Feminism, Modernity, and Postmodernism," in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York and London: Routledge, 1990): 63-82; Nancy Fraser, "The French Derrideans: Politicizing Deconstruction or Deconstructing Politics?" New German Critique 33 (1984): 127-54; Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, "Social Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter Between Feminism and Postmodernism," in Feminism/ Postmodernism, 19-38. Coleridge's private note appended to this public accusation accentuates the sexual implications of this humiliation (PW 2: 813). Both experiences are memorialized in Hazlitt's Liber Amoris, the first in Richard Le Gallienne's 1893 Introduction to the text, the second in the text "proper" (Liber Amoris, introduction by Michael Neve [London: The Hogarth Press, 1985], pp. 195-6); see also Hesketh Pearson, The Fool of Love: A Life of William Hazlitt (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1934)Julie Ellison's argument about the gender implications of Coleridge's generic choices is provocative corroboration of this claim (Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding [Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1990]).
Notes to pages 134-7
2
45
4 ROMANTIC ANTITHEATRIGALISM SURVEILLING THE BEAUTIES OF THE STAGE
1 Although Siddons retires from the stage on 29 June 1812, her presence dictates theatre criticism for at least another decade. Every subsequent tragic actress "inspires" comparison with her. 2 Hazlitt was not the only person to cast doubt on Coleridge's familiarity with Shakespeare. Crabb Robinson also voices his doubt that Coleridge had read the plays on which he was lecturing (see LoL 1: 233). 3 See Wordsworth's 1815 "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface" and Hazlitt's "Preface" to Characters of Shakespeare's Plays. Both single out Schlegel for praise and thus cast their lots against Coleridge. " Certainly no writer among ourselves has shown either the same enthusiastic admiration of [Shakespeare's] genius, or the same philosophical acuteness in pointing out his characteristic excellences" (CSP, p. 172). 4 See notes 31-5 of the Introduction. 5 See Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 49-50, 282-6. 6 See especially Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 26-8. 7 See notes 31-2 of the Introduction. 8 For formulations of the first tenet, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 1-34; Teresa de Lauretis, "Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities: An Introduction," differences 3/2 (1991): iii-xviii, especially iv-xi; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 1-90, especially pp. 27-35. For the second, see Michael Moon and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Divinity: A Dossier, A Performance Piece, A Little-Understood Emotion," Discourse 13/1 (1990-91): 12-39, especially p. 21; and Carole-Anne Tyler, "Boys Will Be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag," inside/out, ed. Diana Fuss (New York and London: Routledge, 1991): 32-70, especially pp. 51-8. 9 This formulation does not address adequately the legitimate critique by queer theorists that focus on gender usually supports the heterosexual matrix. But my investigation is animated more by the theatrical problems raised in representing the " unknowability" conventionally associated with "woman" than by the "economy of 'knowingness'" that Sedgwick argues underlies western homophobia in the twentieth century (Epistemology of the Closet, pp. 33-4). One fruitful intersection not explored sufficiently in this book is the epistemology of closet drama. 10 "The Stage as Moral Institution," The Works of Friedrich Schiller, ed. Nathan Haskell Dole, 5 vols. (New York: National Library Company, l 0< 9 *)> 5 : 53> 5911 "Essays on the Acted Drama in London Contributed to The London
246
12 13
14 15
16
17 18
19
Notes to pages 137-43
Magazine (1820)" in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt in Twelve Volumes, ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (London: J. M. Dent, 1903), 8: 384. Loren Kruger, " ' O u r National House': The Ideology of the National Theatre of Great Britain," Theatre Journal 39/1 (1987): 35-50, especially p. 44. Lamb finds " the interest excited at a playhouse to bear an exact inverse proportion to the price paid for admission" and associates "the Boxes" with "frigid indifference" and "impenetrability to pleasure or its contrary" (WCML 1: 159). Hunt claims that " [t]he managers and the public thus corrupt each other; but it is the former who begin the infection by building these enormous theatres in which a great part of the spectators must have noise and shew before they can hear or see what is going forwards. In time these spectators learn to like nothing else" (DC, p. 48; see also pp. 28, 282). See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, !99O)> P. 3See Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989) and The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). For an earlier critique, see Zillah Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (New York: Longman, 1981). There have been many powerful readings of the political-aesthetics of Burke's Reflections, especially Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (see note 14), pp. 52—62; Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (ij8g-i82o) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 57-73; Christopher Reid, "Burke's Tragic Muse: Sarah Siddons and the 'Feminization' of the Reflections" (unpublished paper); Neal Wood, " The Aesthetic Dimension of Burke's Political Thought," Journal ofBritish Studies 4/1 (1964): 41-64; Linda M. G. Zerilli, "Text/Woman as Spectacle: Edmund Burke's 'French Revolution,'" The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 33/1 (1992): 47-72. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. and intro. by James T. Boulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), pp. 92, 107, 24. See Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Neil Hertz, "The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime," The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Patricia Yaeger, "Toward a Female Sublime" (pp. 191-212) and Lee Edelman, "At Risk in the Sublime: The Politics of Gender and Theory" (pp. 213-24) in Gender and Theory, ed. Linda Kaufmann (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989)Paulson, Representations of Revolution (see note 16), p. 69.
Notes to pages 143-7
2
47
20 Zerilli argues that "what comes apart in the French Revolution" is a "gendered, semiotic code, outlined in Burke's 1757 Enquiry." She also argues that Burke's depictions of the queen are meant to counter the "unfamiliar, sublime images of [revolutionary] women" ("Text/ Woman as Spectacle," p. 50). But these instabilities are already present in the vision of the breast depicted in the Enquiry and manifested subsequently in the sublimity of the queen's beauty. 21 G. G.Jung, The Integration of the Personality, trans. S. M. Dell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1940), p. 281. 22 Schiller begins "On Grace and Dignity" (The Works ofFriedrich Schiller [note 10], 5: 168-210) and "On the Sublime" (ibid., 5: 122-38) in May 1793 and writes On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (ed. and trans. Elizabeth Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967]) between July 1793 and June 1795. 23 Burke's Enquiry is more hospitable to sex, if not to "the sex," primarily because Burke views lust as controllable by reason and men as in control of reason. Since the "generation of mankind is a great purpose," it is "attended with a very high pleasure; but as it is by no means designed to be our constant business, it is not fit that the absence of this pleasure should be attended with any considerable pain" (Enquiry, pp. 41-2). To the extent men need aid in civilizing their lust, they find it in beauty, which inclines them toward monogamy. " Men are carried to the sex in general, as it is the sex, and by the common law of nature; but they are attached to particulars by personal beauty" (p. 42, original emphasis). See Schiller's horrified vision of (the bad form of) sex, especially how the "eye," during the "moment of sensuous desire," "protrudes from its socket with I know not what glassy haggardness" ("Grace and Dignity," p. 201). 24 Pateman's analysis provides a broader context for understanding the absence of mothers in romantic plays. "The patriarchal image of political fathers (here in Locke's words) is that of' nursing Fathers tender and careful of the publick weale.' The patriarchal story is about the procreative power of a father who is complete in himself" (Disorder of Women [see note 15], p. 38). 25 Frederick Burwick, Illusion and the Drama: Critical Theory of the Enlightenment and Romantic Era (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), pp. 199-208. 26 Schiller emphasizes the connection between love and illusion. What distinguishes love from lust and esteem is that the latter two "are never deceived." With love the possibility for deception increases in proportion to the strength of the fantasy life of the individual (" Grace and Dignity" [see note 22], p. 227). Coleridge favors this argument in analyzing his attachments to Sarah Fricker and William Wordsworth. 27 One notable exception is Marilyn Butler's " Satire and the Images of Self in the Romantic Period: The Long Tradition of Hazlitt's Liber Amoris,"
248
Notes to pages 147-50
in English Satire and the Satiric Tradition, ed. Claude Rawson assisted by
Jenny Mezciema (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984): 209-25. Butler emphasizes the "self-dramatizing" and "stage-managerial" features of this text. 28 The distinctions Lamb draws in "Stage Illusion" point up the gender asymmetry in his remarks on the nature of acting. The conventional understanding of scenic illusion, that "the actor appears wholly unconscious of the presence of spectators," is "indispensable" to tragedy. Thus Lamb consistently censures tragic actors and actresses for their "cleverness," by which he means their desire to "play to the gallery" and draw attention to themselves (WCML 2: 163). But, as his remarks on Mr. Emery indicate, naturalness is not the goal of comic actors. The "same degree of credibility " is not required in comedy as in tragedy. In large part, this difference explains Lamb's delight in "the artificial comedy of the last century," where, through its obvious artifice and improbability, spectators are distanced from the "all devouring drama of common life" (WCML 2: 142). Yet elsewhere Lamb praises comic actresses for the opposite features. His favorite comic actresses, Dorothy Jordan and Fanny Kelly, fail in "fine lady parts" because they are invested in acting like nature (WCML 1: 186). In contrast, though the comic actor Munden is similarly praised for "not acting," this is because he " impress [es] upon an audience an idea" (WCML 1: 342). "A tub of butter, contemplated by him, amounts to a Platonic idea. He understands a leg of mutton in its quiddity" (WCML 2: 149). 29 Cited in Wayne McKenna, Charles Lamb and the Theatre (Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe Limited, 1978), p. 8. 30 See Jane Aaron's account of these circumstances in A Double Singleness: Gender and the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1991), p. 167. 31 As is well known, Mary suffered repeated bouts of insanity, during one of which ( 22 September 1796) she stabbed her mother to death. But Charles also suffered from periodic disorders, and in the winter of 1795-6 spent six weeks in an asylum (Aaron, A Double Singleness, pp. 94-5). Even the mother interest is suggested by Charles's identification with Norval, since the tragedy results when the new husband of Norval's mother misconstrues the nature of the bond between mother and son. 32 Hunt also demonstrates that the maintenance of this distinction distinguishes the queen's from the king's trial. Whereas his remained "entirely restricted" to political matters, hers dwelt on private, sexual matters (Lynn Hunt, "The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution, " Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed. Lynn Hunt [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990]: 108-30, especially pp. 108-11). Indeed, one of the most damning pieces of evidence against her, according to Jacques Revel, was her desire to "live her life as she wanted
Notes to pages 150-4
33
34 35 36
37
38
39
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to and to impose a private sphere at the heart of the court" ("MarieAntoinette in her Fictions: The Staging of Hatred," in Fictions of the French Revolution, ed. Bernadette Fort [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991], p. 119, original emphasis). For powerful analyses of anxieties regarding queenship in earlier historical periods, see Women and Sovereignty, ed. Louise O. Fradenburg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992). Several of these essays remind us of the need to exercise caution in advancing claims for the newness of women's power in this age. J o a n Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 146-8. Landes makes a similar point (ibid., p. 75). The growing body of literature on cross-dressing suggests important qualifications to Straub's argument. See, for example, Anne Hollander's acerbic review (The New Republic [31 August 1992]) ofMarjorie Garber's Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992). Tracy Davis confirms Straub's point and extends it into the Victorian period. "Usually, the purpose of men's cross-dressing was comic" while the "raison d'etre of women's cross-dressing was allure" (Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture [London and New York: Routledge, 1991], pp. 113-14). See also Jean Marsden, "Rewritten Women: Shakespearean Heroines in the Restoration," in The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 43-4; Pat Rogers, " T h e Britches P a r t , " in Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Paul-Gabriel Bouce (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982): 244-58. For discussion of the Galindo affair and Siddons's alleged infidelities, see Linda Kelly, The Kemble Era: John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, and the London Stage (New York: Random House, 1980), pp. 150-3. Several changes in theatre conditions in the mid-nineteenth century make Davis's evaluation of the working conditions of actresses less applicable to early nineteenth-century theatre: the revocation of the Licensing Act in 1843 which ended the patent theatres' monopoly on the "legitimate" drama and created "hundreds of jobs" for "lower-class performers" (Actresses as Working Women, p. 77); marked increases in the ratio of female to male performers (from 27 to 100 in 1841 to 108 per 100 in 1881 [ibid., p. 40]); and the disintegration of the stock system in the 1860s. She shows how all three changes had significant, though mixed, consequences for actresses (ibid., pp. 78—86). Elsewhere Davis discredits the equation between actress and prostitute, while also exploring the "parallels" between the two professions ("Actresses and Prostitutes in Victorian London," Theatre Research International 13/3 [1988]: 221-34, especially p. 227).
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Notes to pages 154—6
40 When Drury Lane was renovated in 1794, it increased its seating capacity from 2,500 to 3,611. Destroyed by fire, Covent Garden reopened in the fall of 1809 with a seating capacity of more than 3,000 [The Revels History of English Drama in English 1750-1880, ed. Michael Booth, Richard Southern, Frederick & Lise-Lone Marker, Robertson Davies [London: Methuen and Co., 1975], p. 109). 41 See ibid., pp. 12-13 and Ernest Bradlee Watson, Sheridan to Robertson: A Study of the Nineteenth-Century London Stage (Cambridge, M A : Harvard University Press, 1926), p. 104. 42 Leo Hughes, The Drama's Patrons: A Study of the Eighteenth-Century London Audience (Austin, TX, and London: University of Texas Press, 1971), p. 167. 43 See Dewey Ganzel's report of testimony before the 1832 Select Committee on Dramatic Literature: "Let the question be fairly asked and answered, whether an extensive brothel-department is not part and portion of the legitimate houses as much as lawn sleeves are of a bishop and whether architectural and upholstering provision is not made for carrying on Pompey Bum's profession, with only the substitution of ice and orgeat for the legitimate 'stewed prunes.'" "Had the management any desire to rid the theatre of [prostitutes'] presence it could have done so very easily - as Macready did when he was manager of Covent Garden from 1837 t o ^ 3 9 " ("Patent Wrongs and Patent Theatres: Drama and the Law in the Early Nineteenth Century," PMLA 76 [i96i],p. 391). 44 See Eric Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalens (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976), pp. 108-9. 45 Quoted in Dewey Ganzel, "Patent Wrongs and Patent Theatres," p. 39146 The Letters of William Hazlitt, ed. Herschel Moreland Sikes (New York: New York University Press, 1987), p. 185. 47 In this, I modify Jonathan Bate's reading of Hazlitt's views on Siddons. While it is true that Hazlitt tends to fit contemporary actresses into domestic, not political, roles, it is not true that Hazlitt's admiration for Siddons means that he supports an "apolitical Shakespeare" (Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730-1830 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989], pp. 139-43). 48 Usually Hunt's comments regarding the physical conditions of London patent theatres refer particularly to the female part of the audience, whether his concern is theatre renovations, private boxes (DC, p. 34), saloons (ibid., p. 154), lighting (ibid., pp. 154, 183), or the wearing of hats (ibid., p. 265). Though Hunt does not deny the presence of prostitutes in the theatre, he rejects the view that their presence accounts for the absence of the upper classes (ibid., pp. 282, 336). 49 Lamb's "Elian" treatment of Kelly in "Barbara S" is symptomatic of the phenomenon. Not only does he ascribe her power as an actress to a
Notes to pages 156-7
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childhood incident that reveals her to be "by nature a good child" but he effaces her "real identity" by ascribing the anecdote she tells him to "the late Mrs. Crawford" (WCML 2: 202-7). Less characteristic is that she records her resentment over such treatment. "Much as I venerate the wonderful powers of Charles Lamb as a writer - grateful as I ever must feel to have enjoyed for so many years the friendship of himself and his dear sister, and proudly honoured as I am by the two exquisite sonnets he has given to the world as tributary to my humble talent, I have never been able thoroughly to appreciate the extraordinary skill with which he has, in the construction of his story [of Barbara S], desired and contrived so to mystify and characterize the events, as to keep me out of sight, and render it utterly impossible for any one to guess at me as the original heroine" (WCML 2: 430). 50 Without instancing theatre criticism, George Mosse establishes the relevant context by arguing, first, that nationalism "played a crucial role" in establishing the "respectabilities we now take for granted," particularly regarding "control over sexuality" and, two, that "respectability became entrenched during the first decades of the nineteenth c e n t u r y " (Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual
Norms in Modern Europe [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985], pp. 1-9). Nancy Armstrong, among others, has stressed the importance of conduct books in this process (The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard
Tennenhouse [New York: Methuen, 1987]). My argument is that theatre criticism provides an underscrutinized but equally crucial site for the legislation of roles, actions, and manners. 51 According to Joseph Donohue, Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) exercised an "undoubted influence" on this type of Shakespearean criticism (Theatre in the Age of Kean [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975], p. 164). Writers in this period most associated with analyzing Shakespeare's characters in terms of the motives for their actions are Thomas Whately, William Richardson, and Maurice Morgann. For examples of their analysis, see Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage: 1774-1801, ed. Brian Vickers, 6 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 6: 118-24, J 64-8o, 351-69, 407-29, 490-9, 627-8. None of these excerpts dwells at any length on analysis of a female character. 52 Maurice Morgann makes a related point in justifying his recourse to evidence not present in the text when interpreting characters. "Those characters in Shakespeare, which are seen only in part, are yet capable of being unfolded and understood in the whole.... If the characters of Shakespeare are thus whole, and as it were original, while those of almost all other writers are mere imitation, it may be fit to consider them rather as Historic than Dramatic beings; and when occasion requires, to account for their conduct from the whole of character, from general
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55 56
57
58
59
Notes to pages 157-63
principles, from latent motives, and from policies not avowed " (Vickers, Shakespeare [see note 51], 6: 169; original emphases). Interestingly, the first (1833) a n d second (1888) editions of her book made no reference to Shakespeare in the title. They were called Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical, and Historical. Only the third edition bears the name Shakespeare's Heroines, which, the publisher notes, was adopted because it was the title "by which [the book] has since become more popularly known" ("Publisher's Note," Shakespeare's Heroines [London: George Bell and Sons, 1897]). Shakespeare is also invoked to protect England from imitating France in its revolution. Medon establishes several analogies between current English society and French society immediately before the Revolution ("Introduction," SH, pp. 18, 23). Roger Manvell, Sarah Siddons: Portrait of an Actress (New York: G. P. Putnam's Son, 1970), p. 342 (see note 57). Siddons was moved into Garrick's dressing-room after her (second) London debut (Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons [New York: Benjamin Blom, 1972; first published London, 1839], p. 90). Even the king stated to Fanny Burney that "there was never any player in my time so excellent - not Garrick himself, I own it" (cited in Manvell, Sarah Siddons: Portrait of an Actress [see note 55], p. 131). Roger Manvell ascribes the sentiment to Byron ("Byron said he should as soon think of going to bed with the Archbishop of Canterbury as with Mrs. Siddons " [Sarah Siddons (note 55), p. 342]); Linda Kelly ascribes it to Sheridan (in response to Samuel Roger's comment to Sheridan that "your admiration of her is so high, that I wonder you do not make open love to her," Sheridan replies, "To her! To that magnificent and appalling creature! I should have soon have thought of making love to the Archbishop of Canterbury " [The Kemble Era (see note 38), p. 53]); Marian Jonson simply to " an elegant young man " (" La! an affair with Mrs. Siddons? One might as well make love to the Archbishop of C a n t e r b u r y " [A Troubled Grandeur: The Story of England's Great Actress, Sarah Siddons (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, and Co., 1972), p. 92]); and Andre Maurois to " a certain rake" ("Mrs. Siddons? I would as soon talk about love to the Archbishop of Canterbury " [Mape: The World of Illusion, trans. Eric Sutton (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1926), p. 178]). " These are the moles that bear me from your side; / Where I was rooted —• where I could have died ... Have I been hasty ? Am I then to blame; / Answer, all ye who own a parent's name" (Manvell, Sarah Siddons [see note 55], pp. 63-4). According to Jonson, Siddons's decision to go on stage with "her hair loose and free of powder" resulted in Reynold's famous portrait of the Tragic Muse (1784). These changes also result in Siddons's winning away from Mrs. Crawford one of her most famous parts, Lady Randolph
Notes to pages 163-y
60
61 62
63
64
65
253
in Home's Douglas (A Troubled Grandeur [see note 57], pp. 124-5). Jonson ascribes Siddons's "rebellion" against "false fashion" to sympathies with France (ibid., p. 114). These phrases are taken from Rosenberg's essay, "Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries" (in Focus on Macbeth, ed. John Russell Brown [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982], pp. 73-86), a summary of arguments made in his expansive The Masks of Macbeth (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978). This is Jameson's resume of male accounts of Lady Macbeth's character (SH, p. 335)Jameson objects to the critical habit of treating Lady Macbeth either with reference to her husband or as the instigator of action, but never as a complicated instance of human psychology. She defends her sympathy for Lady Macbeth in ways that echo male poets' justification of their villain-heroes (a topic explored in the next chapter): "effects are mistaken for causes, qualities are confounded with their results, and the perversion of what is essentially good with the operation of positive evil" (SH, pp. 320-1). Sometime around 1815 Siddons writes her "Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth," which Campbell transcribes in his Life of Mrs. Siddons (see note 56), pp. 170-87. H. C. Fleeming records Bell's notes on Siddons's performances in Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth and Queen Katharine. Papers on Acting HI (New York: Dramatic Museum of Columbia University, 1915). Besides other obvious parallels, this rhetorical question is probably aimed at Siddons herself. Throughout her life Siddons weathered unflattering accounts not only of her personal ambition and avarice she was frequently referred to in the press as "Lady Sarah Save-all" (Manvell, Sarah Siddons [see note 55], pp. 111-15; Jonson, A Troubled Grandeur [see note 57], pp. 125-9) ~ D u t of her poor performance as a wife and mother. Mrs. Galindo, for example, accused Siddons of stealing away Mr. Galindo's affections and deserting her daughter on her death bed (Kelly, The Kemble Era [see note 38], p. 152). In November 1807 William Siddons placed a notice in the London papers offering a thousand pounds' reward for "information leading to the perpetrator of these 'most wicked and injurious slanders' that Sarah and [Thomas] Lawrence were lovers" and that the Siddonses were seeking a divorce (Jonson, A Troubled Grandeur, p. 220). Though an avowed admirer of Siddons, Jameson frequently engages in textual sparring with her, particularly over Lady Macbeth. The delicacy, when not special-pleading, with which biographers handle this episode in Siddons's life is a good example of Straub's claim that early nineteenth-century biographies of actresses are driven to establish their respectability. Most biographers attempt to elicit sympathy for
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67 68
69 70
71
72
Notes to pages 16J-J4
Siddons by stressing her isolation and alienation from her cold-fish and opportunist husband, William. According to her most "feminist" biographer, Siddons resonated with parts that featured "erring" wives (Jonson, A Troubled Grandeur [see note 57], p. 198). More cautious biographers "explain" her triumph as Mrs. Haller (The Stranger) or Elvira (Pizarro) by arguing that the strength of her acting "raised [such women] into respectability" (Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons [see note 56], p. 299). "Essays on the Acted Drama in London Contributed to The London Magazine" (see note 11), p. 397. In seeking to prepare his son for more amatory success than he himself has experienced (this letter being composed at the height of the Sarah Walker affair [February or March, 1822]), Hazlitt stresses the importance of making a good initial impression on women. "Richardson calls them ' an eye-judging sex'; and I am sure he knew more about them than I can pretend to do.... What chance, then, can [authors] have with women, who deal only in the pantomime of discourse, in gesticulation and the flippant byeplay of the senses, ' nods and winks and wreathed smiles,' and to whom to offer a remark is an impertinence, or a reason an affront?" (to William Hazlitt, Jr., Letters [see note 46], pp. 232-4). See, for example, Hunt on Ellen Tree's leg (DC, p. 228). Strictly speaking, Lamb applies this "moral" to "another improver," Shadwell in his "version of Timon of Athens." But he cites it as substantiation of motives underlying Shakespeare's improvers, the title and main subject of his essay. "So impossible did these blockheads imagine it to be, to interest the feelings of an audience without an intrigue, that the misanthrope Timon must whine, and the daughterly Cordelia must whimper, their love affections, before they could hope to touch the gentle hearts in the boxes! Had one of these gentry taken in hand to improve the fine Scriptural story ofJoseph and his Brethern, we should have had a love passion introduced, to make the mere fraternal interest of the piece go down" (WCML 1: 322; original emphases). Coleridge stresses the connection between theatrical and female interest in his remarks on Richard II. About his projected adaptation of Richard II for the stage, he comments, " I had intended to have introduced a female Character, & to have attempted the giving a theatrical Interest to a Play, which for the closet is already among the most perfect of Shakespeare's." Or again he writes that, of Shakespeare's history plays, Richard II is the "least representable in the present state of postulates of the stage" because of "the entire absence of female Interest," the "length of the speeches" and " (with one splendid exception) its want of visual effect" (CL 4: 590, 598-9; original emphases). Read in terms of Mosse's argument that the early nineteenth century witnessed an intensive search for "male and female national stereotypes," this episode suggests several interesting things about cultural
Notes to pages 174-8
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investments in Siddons (Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality [see note 50], pp. 15-16, 98). I would argue that romantic writers treat her as a feminine ideal for England and that the way that they describe her confirms the sexist paradigm that critics like Lynn Hunt and Joan Landes see in the national symbolics of France. For whereas John Bull is particularized, even down to details of dress, Britannia "has a classical quality, removed from time and space" (Mosse, ibid., p. 98). Whereas Shakespeare appears as John Bull in the popular press, as Bate notes (Shakespearean Constitutions [see note 47], p. 106), Siddons is rendered as a classical "muse of Shakespeare" and Britannia. CONCLUSION : A THEATRE OF REMORSE
1 Seamus Deane,
The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England
iy8g-i8j2 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 95-129. 2 Donohue locates the rise of this development in mid-eighteenth-century analyses of Shakespeare's "great tragic figures," which in the romantic period provide an "index to dominant contemporary intellectual interests" (Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age [Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1970], pp. 189-90). Cox ascribes to the Gothic drama the development of " a more complex, inwardly divided figure," the villain-hero, who he claims was "destined to enter the romantic drama and become the Byronic hero" (In the Shadows of Romance: Romantic Tragic Drama in Germany, England, and France [Athens,
O H : Ohio University Press, 1987], p. 113). 3 See John David Moore, "Coleridge and the 'Modern Jacobinical Drama': Osorio, Remorse, and the Development of Coleridge's Critique of the Stage, 1797-1816," Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 85 (1982):
4 5 6 7
443-64, especially pp. 455-6. Foucault gives the standard account of this process in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, !979)> PP- 290-310. "A Defence of Poetry," in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald Reiman and Sharon Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 487. See Daniel Watkins, "Byron and the Poetics of Revolution," KeatsShelley Journal 34 (1985): 95-130, especially p. 96. See Deane's analysis of 1819 as a watershed in Shelley's political and poetic production (The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England [see
note 1], pp. 118-19). 8 See Vincent Newey, "'Alternate Uproar and Sad Peace': Keats, Politics, and the Idea of Revolution," The Yearbook of English Studies 19 (1989): 265-89; "Keats and Politics: A Forum," SiR 25 (Summer 1986): 171-229. None of these writers mentions, let alone analyzes, Otho the Great, even though it is the most straightforward of Keats's analyses
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11 12 13 14
15 16
17
18
19
Notes to pages 178-83
of revolutionary activity and even though the famous "political" letter of 22 September 1819, in which Keats announces his intention to write " on the liberal side of the question," is addressed to Charles Brown, with whom he wrote Otho. As we will explore below, Beatrice is a kind of odd-man-out in terms of sympathy. Marino Faliero pushes this logic to its extreme by portraying an older man whose tragic flaw is his being "too much moved." The Cenci indicts the count's and the pope's calm in their pursuit of ill. In denying Beatrice's plea for clemency, the cardinal reports of the pope, "He looked as calm and keen as is the engine / Which tortures and which kills, exempt itself / From aught that it inflicts; a marble form, / A rite, a law, a custom: not a man" (C 5. 4. 1-5). See Martyn Corbett's refutation of this phrase, Byron and Tragedy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), p. 10. Shelley's "Defence" is explored in the final section of this chapter. The resemblance works in the other direction, too, as we have seen, for focus on Coleridge's plays reveals a more radical Coleridge. Both characters eschew remorse, the count by naming i t - " I have no remorse and little fear, / Which are, I think, the checks of other men" (C 1. 1. 84-5) - Beleses by calling it " Sardanapalus " (S 2. 1. 362-9). See Coleridge's self-justificatory letter to the Beaumonts, " O my heart give praise, give praise - not that I was preserved from Bonds, or Ignominy or Death But that I was preserved from Crimes that it is almost impossible not to call Guilt!" (CL 2: 1002). See the final scenes of Marino Faliero for the curious entrance of fate (MF 5.2.42-4,47-51,67-73). Cox makes a related distinction: " I would suggest that in his mysteries Byron sought tragedy in the fall from a providential order and in his histories he explored the tragic collapse of a hierarchical social order" (In the Shadows of Romance [see note 2], p. 128). Susan Wolfson identifies critics whose sympathetic response to Sardanapalus's pacifism and mercy obscures his more "problematic" characteristics in " ' A Problem Few Dare Imitate': Sardanapalus and 'Effeminate Character,'" ELH58 (1991), pp. 880-1, 898n. See Jerome Christensen, "Byron's Sardanapalus and the Triumph of Liberalism," SIR 31/3 (Fall 1992): 333-60. Christensen establishes several points that are germane to our discussion; in particular, the play's embeddedness in an emerging liberalism in England, Sardanapalus's status as enlightened despot, and the gender equivocation that structures romantic drama in its sway between closet and stage. See Peter Manning, Byron and his Fictions (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), pp. 123-35. The argument of this chapter has profited from his continued insights into the gender problematics of this play.
Notes to pages 184-Q8
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20 Ghristensen's reading of this play depends on the distinction between closet drama and theatre, which I modify below. 21 See also Malcolm Kelsall, " The Slave-Woman in the Harem," SiR 31/3 (1992): 3 I 5"32. 22 Gersa is introduced to affirm Otho's mercy and the difficulties Otho has in changing his subjects' perceptions of him as emperor (OG 1. 2. 86-120). 23 The fact that Keats's impending marriage to Fanny Brawne is one of the main financial motivations adduced for his collaborating on Otho makes these passages even more disturbing. Bernice Slote associates the two in Keats and the Dramatic Principle (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1958), pp. 104-5. 24 Textual echoes suggest that the son speaks for the father, too, by having Ludolph invert Otho's prior self-presentation immediately preceding this speech. "Thou shalt see / A deed to be applauded" (OG 5. 5. 147). Sons are in the realm of the theatrical, now that power based in might is no longer in vogue. 25 Nathaniel Brown introduces and justifies the term " proto-feminism " in Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1979). Jerrold Hogle provides a qualified endorsement in Shelley's Process: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Work (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). My position is closer to Barbara Gelpi's who rejects the term for Shelley on these grounds: " [T]he problem lies behind [Shelley's personal] attitudes and actions in the conceptualisation of women's subjectivity that characterises the 'liberal' social theory to which Shelley ardently adhered " (" The Nursery Cave: Shelley and the Maternal," in The New Shelley: Later Twentieth-Century Views, ed. G. Kim Blank, [London: Macmillan, 1991], p. 250). 26 See John F. Schell, " Shelley's The Cenci: Corruption and the Calculating Faculty," The University of Mississippi Studies in English Series 2/2 (1981): 1-14, especially pp. 8-10. 27 See Joseph Donohue, Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age [see note 2], pp. 179-84; Stuart M. Sperry, "The Ethical Politics of Shelley's The Cenci," SiR 25/3 (1986): 411-27, especially pp. 422-5; Stuart Curran, Shelley's Cenci: Scorpians Ringed with Fire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). 28 See, for example, Sperry, "The Ethical Politics of Shelley's The Cenci" (see note 27), pp. 427, 420. 29 Laurence Lockridge, "Justice in The Cenci," Wordsworth Circle 19/2 (1988): 95-8, especially p. 97. 30 Mary Shelley records in her journal that Percy is reading Remorse in June of 1819. 31 See also the diabolical logic of Cain: 1. 1. 164-5, 226-7; 2. 2. 355-6. 32 Sperry notes that the "wearing of one's hair bound up " is the " metonym
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35 36
Notes to pages ig8-2oo
or symbol of the exchange value of virginity " {Shelley's Major Verse: The Narrative and Dramatic Poetry [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988], p. 135). These lines echo The Death of Wallenstein: "See, the tie knot here is off- This hair must not hang so dishevelled." In the classical play, though, mother supervises daughter. Letters, 1818 to 1822, ed. Roger Ingpen, vol. 10 in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in Ten Volumes, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter Peck (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), 10: 62. Barbara Gloseclose points out that the painting is now accepted neither as a portrait of Beatrice nor as taken by Guido Reni ("The Incest Motif in Shelley's The Cenci," Comparative Drama 19/3 [Fall 1985]: 222-39, especially p. 223). See William Hildebrand, "Self, Beauty, and Horror: Shelley's Medusa Moment," in The New Shelley (see note 25): 150-65, especially pp. 155, 160-4. "The Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery," Poems, vols. 1-4 in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in Ten Volumes, ed.
Roger Ingpen and Walter Peck (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), 3: 298. 37 The quoted phrase is taken from one critic's review of the play in The Courier (cited in Boleslaw Taborski, Byron and the Theatre [Salzburg: Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1972], p. 166). See Thomas L. Ashton, "The Censorship of Byron's Marino Faliero," Huntington Library Quarterly 36/1 (November 1972): 27-44, especially pp. 34-41, for an account of this "mutilation." In describing the some 1,500 lines excised from Marino Faliero (44 per cent of the play), Ashton concludes that "political and moral considerations" account for most of the cuts. 38 Ashton asserts unequivocally that Marino Faliero was written for the stage, the only question for him being what version of it was seen ("The Censorship of Byron's Marino Faliero" [see note 37], p. 29). David Erdman is considered the first to doubt the veracity of Byron's statements regarding his dramatic productions ("Byron's Stage Fright," ELH 6 [ X 939] : 2I 9~43)- Margaret Howell's appendix, "Byron's Stage Fright," is the most sustained refutation of Erdman's position {Byron Tonight: A Poet's Plays on the Nineteenth Century Stage [Windlesham, Surrey: Springwood Books, 1982]). Most recently, Martyn Corbett confirms Howell's doubts in "Lugging Byron Out of the Library," SiR 31/3 (1992), pp. 362-3. 39 Taborski's Byron and the Theatre remains the most comprehensive treatment of this subject. Particularly interesting for our purposes is his citation of this early remark of Byron's during the period of his own acting "career": " I am going to get up a play here [Newstead Abbey]; the hall will constitute a most admirable theatre. I have settled the dram. pers. and can do without ladies, as I have some young friends who will make tolerable substitutes for females, and we only want 3 male
Notes to pages 200-8
40
41
42
43 44
45
46
47
48
259
characters, besides Mr. Hobhouse and myself, for the play we have fixed on which will be the Revenge" (p. 27). Also intriguing is the allegation that Myrrha was written for Mrs. Mardyn and " taught her by Byron," the actress whom the public made a scapegoat in the Byron separation drama (p. 50). On Byron's contradictions, see Ashton, "The Censorship of Marino Faliero" (see note 37), pp. 29-30; Corbett, Byron and Tragedy (see note 11), pp. 81-4; Manning, Byron and his Fictions (see note 19), p. 109; Taborski, Byron and the Theatre (see note 37), pp. 159—60. See Wolfson for similar evasive statements regarding the politics, not the staging, of Sardanapalus, " Sardanapalus and 'Effeminate Character'"(see note 17), pp. 876, 882. Byron's sentiments against London theatre audiences are well known and appear particularly incongruous in the letters of the Ravenna period, sitting side-by-side as they do with his support for the revolutionary cause in Italy. See Arline Mackenzie Taylor, Next to Shakespeare: Otwafs Venice Preserved and The Orphan and Their History on the London Stage (New York: A M S Press, 1966), p. 218. In Taylor's account, the sublimity of Siddons's mad scene steals the show all the same {Next to Shakespeare, p. 194). The wish behind this statement is clear too from the letters, for Byron is exhausted by Guiccioli and the way that heterosexual love saps his political energies [BLJ 8: 214). Hazlitt is quoting Pope but the sentiment is his as well: "Every single character in Shakespear, is as much an individual, as those in life itself" ("Preface," CSP, p. 171). Shelley makes this remark in a review of Godwin's novel Mandeville, which he compares unfavorably to Caleb Williams for lacking a character like Falkland with whom the reader can sympathize. Stuart Sperry cites this passage in "The Ethical Politics of Shelley's The Cenci" (note 27), p. 424. The work of Louise Fradenburg on the heroization of male suffering in medieval, especially Chaucerian, literature suggests that we are dealing with a time-honored tradition (see Fradenburg, "'Oure Owen Wo To Drynke': Loss, Gender, and Chivalry in Troilus and Criseyde," in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde: subgit to allepoesye: Essays in Criticism, ed. R. A. Shoaf [Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992]). Several critics have pointed to the analogies between The Cenci and Macbeth and between Beatrice Cenci and Lady Macbeth. See, for example, Paul Cantor, " ' A Distorting Mirror': Shelley's The Cenci and Shakespearean Tragedy," in Shakespeare: Aspects of Influence, ed. G. B. Evens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976): 91-108; Beach Langs ton, "Shelley's Use of Shakespeare," Huntington Library
260
49 50
51
52
53
54
55
Notes to pages 208-12
Quarterly 12 (1949): 163-90; D. Harrington-Lueker, "Imagination versus Introspection: The Cenci and Macbeth," Keats Shelley Journal 32 (1983): 172-89, especially p. 178. See Carlos Baker, Shelley's Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948); and Ronald Lemoncelli, "Cenci as Corrupt Dramatic Poet," ELN 16 (1978): 103-16. The way that drama disrupts the order of Shelley's arguments intensifies my claim that it motivates his "Defence." Not that the text is highly organized otherwise, but drama is the only genre that provokes acknowledged and unacknowledged digressions (see "A Defence of Poetry" [note 5], pp. 489, 490, 500). See Margaret Waller, The Male Malady: Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic Novel (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993). Waller's argument is influenced by Marlon Ross's analysis of the colonization of the feminine by English romantic poets. Newfield's analysis of Dimmesdale leads to the following description of hegemonic power. "Weakness owes its strength to... a power of doubleness.... Dimmesdale comes to Prynne, in effect, from inside her, as the law of her own desire. Hegemonic masculinity must not appear to a woman as male authority but as authority that is male and female at the same time, and that can belong to the ' woman' without excluding the strength of' man.' When Dimmesdale avows his castration, he does not lose the phallus, but offers it to a woman who will offer it back: in accordance with the logic of hegemony, they will each see the phallus as belonging on both sides of any gender or class difference " (" The Politics of Male Suffering: Masochism and Hegemony in the American Renaissance," differences 1/3 [1989], pp. 61-2). Peter Brooks identifies jacobin with melodramatic discourse by showing how both privilege an "either/or" logic and refuse a "middle position" ("The Revolutionary Body," in Fictions of the French Revolution, ed. Bernadette Fort [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991], p. 37)Drawing variously on histories of nineteenth-century French painting of the nude and on staging of English ballet, Abigail Solomon-Godeau and Tracy Davis trace the shift from the eroticization of the male body to the female body in the mid-nineteenth century (see Solomon-Godeau, "Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation," Art History 16/2 [1993]: 286-312, and Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture [London and New York: Routledge, 1991 ], pp. 108-21). See Laurence Rickels, "Faust, Freud, and the Missing Entries into War," Assemblages (forthcoming).
Index
Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher, 82, 157 Beaumont, George, Sir, 41, 114, 256m 4 beauty and breast, 143, 153-4, 184 politics of, 69-70, 140-5 as social remedy, 136-7 surveillance of, 156-75 passim and theatre, 137-47 and women, 140-3, 198 Bell, G.J., 165, 166, 171 Biggs, Murray, 17 Blumenthal, Lieselotte, 80 body, the Coleridge's, 24, 41 female, 144, 169-71, 202, 207, 2 6 0 ^ 4 onstage, 19, 148-55, 197-8 Booth, Michael, 12, 2 1 9 ^ 3 , 2 1 9 ^ 8 Brautigam, Bernd, 70 Brooks, Peter, 26on53 Brown, Charles, 255~6n8 Brown, Nathaniel, 2 5 7 ^ 5 Burger, Gottfried August, 82, 235-6^9 Burke, Edmund, 20, 92, 93, 99, 132 on beauty, 72, 136-43 on English theatre, 10—11, 157 and Hazlitt, 153-4
action and gender, 6, 115-25 passim, 126, 134, 196-7 and Germany, 63, 65 vs. motion, 61, 76, 104, 106, 238n6i theories of, 5, 55-6, 70, 76 actress and body, 134, 169-71 and prostitution, 148, 150-2, 154-5 sexuality of, 150-5 working conditions, 2 4 9 ^ 9 and £apolya, 122
Alfieri, Vittorio, Count Mirra, 188, 204 Anderson, Benedict, 31, 32, 224n6, 225nio Anti-Jacobin, 65, 133
antitheatricalism, romantic, 1-4, 15-17, 137-8, 168-75 passim as critique of action, 108-10 and gender equivocation, 203-4 and misogyny, 7, 19-21, 134-9, 161-2, 168-75, J 98 scholarly treatments of, 135-6 and Shakespeare, 138-9, 161-2, 168-75 Armstrong, Nancy, 2 5 1 ^ 0 Ashton, Rosemary, 65, 80, 235^6, 258n37~8 Atheista Fulminato, 59, 60
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 141,
Baillie, Joanna, 56 Ball, Alexander, Sir, 92 bardolatry, 3, 7-8, 168-75 and English nationalism, 20-1 and misogyny, 134-9, 161-2, 169-75 see also antitheatricalism Barnouw, Jeffrey, 75 Bate, Jonathan, 54-5, 156, 2501147 Bate, Walter Jackson, 227^1 Baum, Joan Mandell, 95
142, 143, 247n23 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 10,
92-3, 141-2, 151 and Rousseau, 10-11 traditionalism, 35, 75 and women, 10-11, 140-3 Burroughs, Catherine, 19, 116, 122, 123, 125 Burwick, Frederick, 52, i n , 112, 146, Butler, Judith, 2 1 3 ^ , 2i7n2O
26l
262
Index
Butler, Marilyn, 2471127 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 2, 11, 48, 95, 128, 259^44, 258-9n39 and Coleridgean remorse, 181, 191 effeminacy of male heroes, 182 gynophobia, 200-4 and theatre, 199-200, 258^7, 259^1 Works Cain, 182 Manfred, 196 Marino Faliero, 176-212 passim; and female sexuality, 188—93 '•> ^ e a r °f masses, 180, 206-7; performed at Drury Lane, 199-200, 210; philosophy of history, 182 Sardanapalus, 196, 203-4; and gender politics, 179, 180, 183-4; performed at Yale, 17-18; and sovereignty, 72, 182-5 Two Foscari, The, 179, 180
Calleo, David, 32, 37, 226m5 Carlyle, Thomas, 63, 65, 66 censorship of drama/theatre, 12-13, 2 1 9 ^ 8 Chandler, James, 10, 174, 226m 7 Ghristensen, Jerome, 51, 72, 183, 203,
and imagination/English imagination, 25-6, 27, 31-4, 39-40, 41-2, 46-57, journalism, 88-9, 2 3 7 ^ 6 on Lady Macbeth, 164, 165, 167 on love, 119-21, 145-6 middle stage, 42, 46-7, 67, 177 and misogyny, 129-33, 243-4^9 and Napoleon, 82-3, 88-9, 2 3 7 ^ 9 and nationalism, 30-62, 81-2, 93, 226m5 people, the, 40, 44-6, 57-8, 2 2 7 ^ 5 reform, political, 38, 42-4, 126, 226ml remorse, 42, 96-7, 115, 176, 181, 206 and Schiller, 66, 68, 91-3 on Shakespeare, 51, 53-7, 81-2, 134-5, and Sheridan, 16, 130 and Southey, 49-50 as statesman, 27, 40, 87 and theatre, 26, 27, 28, 42, 46-57, 86, 93, and theatricality, n o , 115-33 and withdrawal from theatre, 126-33 on women/female character, 98, 103-5, 115-25, 126-33, 206 Works Biographia Literaria, 21-2, 25, 35, 36, 39,
Cobban, Alfred, 32, 36, 37 Coleridge, Anne, 243-4^9 Coleridge, Hartley, 97 Coleridge, John 2 4 4 ^ 9 Coleridge, Sarah Fricker, 131, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor on action, 98-100, 103-10, 115-25, 126-33 on actors/acting, 52-4, 55, 56 and anti-jacobinism, 42, 81-2, 99-100, 133 and antitheatricalism, 108-10 and Burke, 32, 35, 99, 226m 7 and the clerisy, 44-6 and commanding genius, 21-6, 28, 87-8, on Don Juan, 59-60, 173, 207 and double consciousness, 59-60 dramatic illusion, theory of, 52-6, 62, 109, 146, 206 feminization of, 127, 130-3 and the French, 30, 38-9, 104 and French Revolution, 22-3, 24, 98-100 and Germany/German idealism, 25, 26, 27, 63-7, 80, 135, 145, 23on5, 234n42 and Hamlet, 55-6, 86, 112, 125 and Hazlitt, 54, 128, 131-3, 134-5, 164 on idea, 37-8
41, 47-8, 63, 64, 128, 130, 132, 228n33; "Critique of Bertram," 47, 48, 50.57.58,59,60-1,81,82; "Satyrane's Letters," 47, 49, 50-1, 57 "Character of Bonaparte," 89 Christabel, 128, 131, 132 On the Constitution of Church and State, 32, J 33 "Desultory Remarks on the Present State of Higher Drama," 51 "Enthusiasm for an Ideal World," 40 "Essay on Dramatic Poetry exclusively in its relations to Theatrical Representation," 127 The Fall of Robespierre, 23, 50, 94, 97, 99,
100-1, 107, 178, 24oni3 The Friend, 36, 49, 60, 61, 62, 92, 133 "Genius and Public Taste," 51, 52 "On the Law of Nations," 36 Lectures on Shakespeare, 145-6, 245n2
"Letters on the Spaniards," 36, 39 Osorio, 94, 101, 102-3, no—n, 117-19, 178 "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," 82 Remorse, 16, 24, 25, 28, 29, 47, 48, 61, 93, 94-133, 177, 184, 195, 209, 210, 212, 239n4~5, 240-1 n2O, 242^9-30, 2431135; benefits of, 94, 96, 97, 177;
Index and The Cenci, 188-94; and Marino Faliero, 188-93; a n d Schiller, 101-2, 109; theatrical triumph of, 94-5, 239n4; and the visual, 112-15, 2 4 2 ^ 9 Statesman's Manual, The, 22, 36, 91, 132, 133 Triumph of Loyalty, The, 89, 90-1 translation of Wallenstein trilogy, 24, 27, 28, 64, 80, 83-7, 120, 196, 235n44, 236n5o-i, 238n63; and female character, 119-21; importance of, 66-7, 80-1; and Shakespeare, 84, 85-6 Zapolya, 25, 28, 47, 48, 61, 94-133 passim, 177; abjection in, 125, 128; and Christabel, 128-9, I32l anc ^ commanding genius, 105-8; and female character, 121-5; and French Revolution, 99, 107; and homosociality, 124-5; rejection by Drury Lane, 82; and Shelley, 193; as tragedy, 91, 92 commanding genius and acting, 109-10 vs. absolute genius, 21-2, 98, 103 and second-generation romantics, 178-9 and sexual difference, 187, 196 and theatre, 23-6, 58-60, 98, 126 and women, 25—6, 29, 117-25, 127-33, 179, 180 Colman, George, 2 1 9 ^ 8 Covent Garden, 1, 12, 198 and Old Price Riots, 12 reopening of, 175, 25on2O and £apolya, 127 see also patent theatres Cox, Jeffrey, 177, 196, 233^9, Crick, Joyce, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 234^2 criminality, 61, 206-9 heroism of, 59 and remorse, 177, 181 and romantic poets, 209 and sexual difference, 180, 197, 207-9 Crisman, William, 80, 234^2 cross-dressing, 152, 249^6-7 Davis, Tracy, 154, 249^9, 26on54 Deane, Seamus, 94, 176 democracy and bardolatry, 19 Coleridge's antipathy toward, 42-6, 226m 6 and theatre, 9-12, 183 De Quincey, Thomas, 85 de Stael, Germaine, 81
263
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 73 Donohue, Joseph, 177, 2511151, 2 5 5 ^ dreams/dreamer, 22, 23, 24, 41, 92, 96, 196 see also illusion Drury Lane, 1, 90, 127, 137, 162 Marino Faliero performed at, 200 Remorse performed at, 95 renovation of, 2 5 0 ^ 0 see also patent theatres Dunstan, A. C , 66 Eagleton, Terry, 72, 225n8 Ellison, Julie, 2 4 4 ^ 4 Engell, James, 49 Erdman, David, 89, 200 Felperin, Howard, 19, 26, 57, 2 1 4 ^ , feminist theory French, 2, 8-9, 225n8 and new historicism, 6-9 and performativity, 4, 8 Foakes, R. A., 55, 223n6o Fox, Charles James, 87 Fradenburg, Louise, 2 4 9 ^ 3 , Freedman, Barbara, 217n21 French Revolution, 3, 24, 212 and England, 13 fetes of, 9-11 and remorse, 41-2, 177 and theatre, 1, 2, 3, 9—11, 23-5, 58-62, 98-9, 107, 134 French Revolution Studies, 4-9, 2 1 4 ^ Freud, Sigmund, 142, 205, 211 Friedman, Geraldine, 10 Fruman, Norman, 23on5 Furet, Francois, 9 Ganzel, Dewey, 2 5 0 ^ 3 Garrick, David, 154, 162, 164, 169 Gellrich, Michelle, 2 3 4 ^ 8 Gelpi, Barbara, 2 5 7 ^ 5 Godwin, William, 83, 188, 207 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 86, 91 Goldstein, Robert Justin, 219-20^9 Goodson, A. C , 64, 23on7 gothic, 98, 100, 101, 240m 9 Graham, Use, 232n22, 234^9 Greenberg, Martin, 228n40 Greethead, Bertie, 167 Groseclose, Barbara, 198, 199, 2 5 8 ^ 4 Hadley, Elaine, 218-19^3 Hazlitt, William, 20, 28, 54, 134-40, 155, 183,
264
Index
and Burke, 153-4 and Coleridge, 54, 128, 131-3, 134-5, 164 on Desdemona, 158—60, 161 on Iago, 60 on Lady Macbeth, 164 on poetry, 20 on Siddons, 148, 150, 153, 156, 163, 164, 173,250^7 theatre criticism, 134-9, 156-75 passim and Sarah Walker, 131, 147—8, 173 Works "On Beauty," 154 Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, 160, 161
Liber Amoris, 147-8, 158, 173 A View of the English Stage, 161, 198 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 76 Hoagwood, Terence Allan, 18 Hobbes, Thomas, 9 Hogle, Jerrold, 2 5 7 ^ 5 Home, John, 150 homosociality, 20, 124, 173, 2 2 3 ^ 7 in Wallenstein, 120-1 in Zapolya, 124-5 Huet, Marie-Helene, 10 Hunt, Leigh, 28, 159—60 theatre criticism, 134-9, 156-75 passim, Hunt, Lynn, 140, 150, 151, 248^2, 255^2 Hutchinson, Sara, 131 idea, 34, 37-8, 226m 5 identity politics, 33, 204, 225n8 illusion, 47, 52, n o , i n , 114, 196 vs. delusion, 110-12, 147, 149—50 and heterosexual love, 143—4, 146, 147, vs. reality, 52, 71, 73, 78, 108, 112, 146, imagination, 25—6, 205, 212, 225n8, 227n2O politics of, 30-4, 57-8, 140, 187, and theatre, 25, 33 imperialism, 31, 103 incest, 188, 199, 208 indirection, 28, 70-1, 93, 107 Irigaray, Luce, jacobinism Coleridge's repudiation of, 49, 81-2, 99-100, 133 and German drama, 65 Jacobus, Mary, 19, 23, 169, 241—2n28 Jameson Anna on Hazlitt, 167
on Lady Macbeth/Siddons, 165, 166-7, 168, 208, 253n62 Shakespeare's Heroines, 160, 165-8, 208, 2521153 Jewett, William, 18 Jordan, Dorothy, 153, 2 4 8 ^ 8 Jung, Carl, 143 Kant, Immanuel/Kantianism, 63, 64, 68, 69, 75> 95. 224n4 Kean, Edmund, 15, 162, 178, 202 Keats, John, 2, 15, 178, 2 5 7 ^ 3 Otho the Great, 180, 182, 184-6, 255~6n8; and Wallenstein, 185 Kelly, Fanny, 149, 156, 2 4 8 ^ 8 , 250-1 n49 Kelsall, Malcolm, 188, 204 Kemble, John, 12, 54, 90, 162, 167, 202 Knight, Richard Payne, 146 Kotzebue, August von, 65-6, 82, 86, 231m 1 Kristeva, Julia, 143 Kruger, Loren, 18, 138 Kubiak, Antony, 222n5i Lamb, Charles, 16, 28, 80, 248^1 and Fanny Kelly, 149, 248^8, 250-1 n49 theatre criticism, 134-9, 156-75 passim, " O n the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation," 168-9 Lamb, Mary, 248^1 Landes, Joan, 140, 255^2 Lawrence, Thomas, 167, 253n64 Leask, Nigel, 42, 227n2O, 227^7 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 89, 90 liberalism, 29, 195, 210-11, 26on52 exclusion of women, 140-5 feminist critiques of, 140-1, 145, 180 and heterosexual love, 184, 204 and Sardanapalus, 183-4 Liu, Alan, 4, 5, 6, 7, 12, 2 1 4 ^ , 215m 2 Lockridge, Laurence, 47, 193, 194, 2 2 7 ^ 0 Longman and Rees, 80 Machule, Paul, 80 Mackenzie, Henry, 65 Macready, William, 154, 155, 25on43 Mann, Golo, 73 Manning, Peter, 183, 201, 256m 9 Marie Antoinette, 141, 142, 150-1, 153-4, 163, 175, 184, 247n2O, 248-9^2 Marshall, David, 2i8n25
265
Index masculinity, romantic and femininity, 152 as feminized, 103, 116, 121, 185, 211 and poetry/drama, 188, 208-9, 2 I ° Matthews, Charles, 48 mechanical philosophy, 39-40, 141, 145 mind anatomizing of, 14, 56, 97, 99, 194 criminality of, 50, 77, 180, 205, 206—9 French, 39 and Germany, 63-4 romantic discourse on, 204-10 seduction of male, 196 as spectacle/theatre, 3, 18, 33, 109, 204, 205-6, 222n5i Moore, John David, 98, 100 Morgann, Maurice, 151-2^2 Morrow, John, 38, 226ni6, 2 2 7 ^ 5 Mosse, George, 251^0, 254-5^2 mother/matriphobia, 125, 128, 142, 162, 164, 168, 185, 247n24 Mudge, Bradford, 51 Murray, John, 128, 201 Napier, Macvey, 155 Napoleon, 55, 64, 105, 173, 174, 237-8^9 appeal in England, 39 as commanding genius, 20, 21, 22, 23, 28, 58, 59, 60, 61 as poet, 88 and Remorse, 100
narcissism and theatre, 8, 51 National Church, 28, 44-6 nationalism, 30—62 passim, 225nio, 2 5 1 ^ 0 emergence of, 31-3, 2 2 4 - 5 ^ and imagination, 30-4, 38-47 vs. patriotism, 34 necessitarianism, 63, 75, 97, 98, 104 Newfield, Christopher, 210, 223^7, 260^2 new historicism, 4, 6 and feminism, 6—9, 2i5nio, 216m 4 renaissance, 4-5, 7, 213-14^ romantic, 4-5, 23, 2 1 4 ^ on romantic theatre, 17-18 Newman Gerald, 31, 34, 224n6 Newton, Judith, 6 Old Price Riots, 12, 218-19^3 O'Neill, Eliza, 153, 162, 169, 197—99, 201-2 Otway, Thomas Venice Preserved, 200-2
Ozouf, Mona, 9 Paine, Thomas, 20 Pantisocracy, 35, 40, 2 4 3 ^ 4
Parker, Noel, 10 Parker, Reeve, 18, 19, 100, n o , 112, 113 parricide, see patricide Pateman, Carol, 140, 145, 2 4 7 ^ 4 patricide, 107, 187, 190, 199, 207 Paulson, Ronald, 100, 143 Peacock, Thomas Love Four Ages of Poetry, 209-10
performance theory/performativity, 4, 8, 13, 34, 204, 211-12, 2i7n2O Pitt, William, 87, 88 Plato/Platonism, 38, 132 players professionalism of, 152—3 sexuality of, 150, 152 poet as criminal, 209 as legislator/national hero, 56, 58, 88, 136 poetry and masculinity, 3, 21, 129, 208-9, 210 vs. theatre, 20-1, 53, 113, 129 potential men, 28, 96—7, 105-6, 115-25 passim, 126, 182 vs. actual citizens, 26, 36, 51, 53, 182 women as, 104, 189 potentiality, 70-6, 199 power apparent vs. real, 59-61 sovereign, 107 and women, 115, 160-2, 168, 195, 201 Pritchard, Hannah, 164, 166 prostitution and actresses, 148, 154-5, 249^9 and antitheatricalism, 150-5 and London patent theatres, 154-5, queenship, 20, 141-2, 150-1, 172-3, 2 4 9 ^ 3 queer theory, 136, 2 4 5 ^ Rae, Alexander, 95 Rault, Andre, 65 reform, national, 38, 42-4, 97 and romantic theatre, 2-3, 14, 24-6, 28, 97 Reid, Christopher, 21, 153 remorse, 176, 188, 206—12 passim and criminality, 94, 181, 206 and masculinity, 129, 181, 188 vs. regret, 96-7, 181 vs. revenge, 98-108 passim, 178, 181 and revolution, 94, 177-8 and second-generation poets, 181-8 passim, 206-12 passim
266
Index
and will, 111, 112 and women, 176 representation, 8, 17, 19, 33, 211 Revel, Jacques, 248-9^32 Richardson, Alan, 14, 22on43 Robinson, Heidi, 66 Robinson, Henry Grabb, 48, 63, 81, 145, 172, 234n40 Robinson, Thomas, 81 romanticism, ideology of, 2-4, 4-9, 14-15, 17,63-4 romantics, second-generation, 176, 178-9, 180 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 9-11 Satanic School, the, 209 Schelling, Friedrich, 63, 64 Schiller, Friedrich, 64-79 passim, 2 32m 8, aesthetic mode, 70, 74, 2 3 3 ^ 8 and anti-jacobinism, 81 on beauty, 69-70, 71-2, 136-7, 140-1, 143-5, 247n23, 247n26 and Burke, 68, 75, 93 dramaturgical reforms, 72-3, 2 3 2 ^ 3 and English romanticism, 82 and the French Revolution, 71 indirection, 70 influence on Coleridge, 23, 25, 68, perception of, 64-6 and play, 66, 68-70, 78, 137 and Rousseau, 70-1 and the sublime, 144 and theatre, 71, 73, 79 on tragedy, 78-9, 2 3 4 ^ 9 Works On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, 68, 70, 71, 72, 75, 140 Cabal and Love, 82 History of the Thirty-Years War, 68, 76
The Robbers, 65, 82, 100, 23ong "The Stage as Moral Institution," 70-1 Wallenstein trilogy, and action, 67, 74-9; and aesthetic mode/politics, 68-79; and commanding genius, 67, 75-8; composition and reception of, 67-8, 233n26, 234n4o; and gender, 77; and Hamlet, 74, 76; and history, 73-4; influence on Coleridge, 79-80 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 52, 55, 64, 81, 83, 236n5i, 245n3 Scott, Walter Sir, 54, 81, 150, 155, 173, 174 Select Committee on Dramatic Literature, 12, 155,
self-division/self-splitting, 29, 41, 47, 50, 97 109, 234n39 see also remorse semblance, see illusion sexual violence in The Cenci, 186-7, J 9^~7J J 9 9 in Marino Faliero, 187, 189, 190 in Zjapolya, 124
Shakespeare, William and antitheatricalism, 16-17 and English nationalism, 17, 31, 51, 53~7> !73> 174 and female character, 28, 135, 139, i57-6i,173 and Germany, 63 improvers of, 170, 203 and misogyny (romantic), 20, 28-9, 203 as philosophical aristocrat, 54 as philosophical psychologist, 57, 157, 205, 25in52 and romantic criticism, 134-9, 156-71 passim, 2511151, 251-2^2 Works Antony and Cleopatra, 200 Coriolanus, 20 Macbeth, 197, 208 Richard II, 5 1 , 81 Romeo and Juliet, 30
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 78, 81, 95, 114, 194, and Coleridgean remorse, 181,193-4 on drama/theatre, 197-8, 209-10, proto-feminism, 187, 190, 2 5 7 ^ 5 Works The Cenci, 24, 176-212 passim; character of Beatrice, 187, 192-3, 198-9; and commanding women, 179, 180, 186-7, 188-93, J95> 197; as imagined performance, 197-8; as response to Coleridge, 193-4 "A Defence of Poetry," 180, 209-10 "The Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci," 199 Prometheus Unbound, 24
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 16, 87, 95, 166. 174 Siddons, Sarah, 11, 20, 90, 153, 162-75 passim, 252^6, 253^4, 253-4^5, on beauty, 167-8, 198 as Belvidera, 201—2 as Lady Macbeth, 29, 163, 164-7, I74~5= 198 and maternality, 162, 163
Index phallic power of, 134, 139, 162, 163, 167, 171-2 and queenship, 148, 149, 150, 153-4, 156, 162-8, 172-3, 174 and Shakespeare, 20, 169, 170, 171-2 style of acting, 148, 163, 252-3^9 as Tragic Muse, 252-3^9, 254-5^2 Siskin, Clifford, 57 Slote, Bernice, 2 5 7 ^ 3 Smith, Adam, 251^1 social contract theory, 38, 140, 145 Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, 151 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 26on54 Southey, Robert, 23, 49-50, 85, 95, 96, 181 spectacle, 10, 12, 21, 211, 247n2O Sperry, Stuart, 257^2 Straub, Kristina, 151, 152, 253-41165 Stuart, Daniel, 127 sublime, the, 141-2, 142-3, 144 Swann, Karen, 19, 88, 237^6, 241 n27 Taborski, Boleslaw, 258-9^9 Taylor, Arline, 201 theatre audiences, London and class, 136, 138-9, 172-3, 2i8n3i-2, 246m 3 feminized, 11-12, 147, 172 reform of, 126, 210 theatre, romantic, 22in46 mental theatre, 14, 17, 222n5i as mind, 18, 109, 204, 205-6 as national institution, 11, 42, 51, 53, 136-9, 150 patent theatres, 11-13, 28, 154-5, and prostitution, 3, 154-5, 2 49 n 39 as proto-psychoanalytic, 8-9, 205, 209 Storm and Stress, 67, 68, 82 and visuality, 112-15 and women, 19-21, 126-33 passim, 147, 191-2, 193 Theatre de la Nation, 10 theatricality, 2 1 4 ^ and femininity/sexuality, 7, 150 French, 10-11 and power, 4, 61, 147, 201 and rule, 183, 200 and subjectivity, 77, 79, 108-15 passim Thorslev, Peter, 225nio Tieck, Ludwig, 81, 83, 236ns 1 tyrannicide, 193 vs. regicide, 106 villain-heroes, 58-9, 178—9, 195-6, 207, 2 55n2
267
Voltaire, Frangois Marie Arouet Mahomet, 73 Semiramis, 188, 204
Walker, Sarah, 131, 147, 148, 150, 158, 159, 173 Waller, Margaret, 210 Washington, George, 88 Watkins, Daniel P., 18, 19, 116, 118, 119 Watson, Nicola, 54, 55 Webb, Timothy, 14, 237^6 Wedgwood, Josiah, 239ns Weissman, Stephen, 243-4^9 Wellek, Rene, 236n49 Whitaker, Thomas, 17 Wilkinson, Elizabeth, 68, 89, 231m3, Wilkinson, Tate, 172 Willoughby, L. A., 68, 82, 231m3, Wollstonecraft, Mary, 117, 188 Wolfson, Susan, 183, 204, 256m 7 women defined, 242-3^2 public women, 11, 19, 28, 139, 148, 150-5. 156 and representability, 8-9 in/as theatre, 19, 26, 126-7, 128-33, 144, 188 and undecidability, n o Woodring, Carl, 237ns 7 Wordsworth, Thomas, 239ns Wordsworth, William The Borderers, 1, 2, 15-16, 17-18, 19, 97, 195, 2i3n2 and Burke, 35, 226m 7 on contemporary drama, 53 and imagination, 41 "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," The Prelude, 1, 2, 3, 40 on Remorse, 16
82
working classes romantic poets' views on, 40, 44, 54, 206 ' and theatre audiences, 11-12, 137-9, 172-3 Wynn, Lawrence, 95, 2 3 9 ^ Yale Theater Studies Program, 17-18, 19 youth analysis of, 41, 50, 65, 87, 114-15 catoptrical mirror of, 41, 50, 115 Zerilli, Linda M. G., 247n20
