Romantic Tragedies: The Dark Employments of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley 0521767113, 9780521767118

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ROMANTIC TRAGEDIES Troubled politically and personally, Wordsworth and Coleridge turned in 1797 to the London stage. Their respective tragedies, The Borderers and Osorio, were set in medieval Britain and early modern Spain to avoid the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship. Drury Lane rejected both, but fifteen years later, Coleridge’s revision, Remorse, had spectacular success there, inspiring Shelley’s 1819 Roman tragedy, The Cenci, aimed for Covent Garden. Reeve Parker makes a striking case for the power of these intertwined works, written against British hostility to French republican liberties and Regency repression of home-grown agitation. Covertly, Remorse and The Cenci also turn against Wordsworth. Stressing the significance of subtly repeated imagery, as well as resonances with Virgil, Shakespeare, Racine, Jean-Franc¸ois Ducis, and Schiller, Parker’s close readings – boldly imaginative and decidedly untoward – argue that at the heart of these tragedies lie powerful dramatic uncertainties driven by unstable passions, what he calls (adapting Coleridge’s phrase for sorcery) “dark employments.” re eve p ar ke r is Professor of English Emeritus at Cornell University, and is also a life member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM Founding editor professor marilyn butler, University of Oxford General editor professor james chandler, University of Chicago Editorial Board john barrell, University of York paul hamilton, University of London mary jacobus, University of Cambridge claudia johnson, Princeton University alan liu, University of California, Santa Barbara jerome mcgann, University of Virginia susan manning, University of Edinburgh david simpson, University of California, Davis 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 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 an 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 comment 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. For a complete list of titles published see end of book.

ROMANTIC TRAGEDIES The Dark Employments of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley

REEVE PARKER

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Mexico City 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/9780521767118 # Reeve Parker 2011 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 2011 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Parker, Reeve. Romantic tragedies : the dark employments of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley / Reeve Parker. p. cm. – (Cambridge studies in romanticism ; 87) isbn 978-0-521-76711-8 (Hardback) 1. Verse drama, English–History and criticism. 2. English drama (Tragedy)–History and criticism. 3. English drama–18th century–History and criticism. 4. English drama–19th century–History and criticism. 5. Romanticism–Great Britain. 6. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850–Dramatic works. 7. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772–1834–Dramatic works. 8. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792–1822–Dramatic works. I. Title. pr719.v4p37 2011 8220 .70 09–dc22 2010037674 isbn 978-0-521-76711-8 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgments

page viii ix

Introduction: “Prowling out for dark employments” part i

wordsworth

chapter 1 chapter 2 chapter 3 chapter 4

part ii

1 11

Reading Wordsworth’s power: narrative and usurpation in The Borderers

13

Cradling French Macbeth: managing the art of second-hand Shakespeare

33

“In some sort seeing with my proper eyes”: Wordsworth and the spectacles of Paris

62

Drinking up whole rivers: facing Wordsworth’s watery discourse

79

coleridge and shelley

107

Osorio’s dark employments: tricking out Coleridgean tragedy

109

chapter 6

Listening to Remorse: assuming man’s infirmities

141

chapter 7

Reading Shelley’s delicacy

180

chapter 5

Notes Bibliography Index

222 286 296

vii

Illustrations

Jean-Francois Ducis’s Macbeth Act iv Scene 4 Talma as Macbeth, Mme De Vestris as Fre´degonde (Engraving by Desenne and Lignon, from Oeuvres (1813) Vol. 2 (Paris: Bibliothe`que nationale, Imprime´s/Re´serve) page 42 Plate 2 Macbeth Act v, Scene ii, Fre´degonde’s series of passions, from Oeuvres (1813) Vol. 2 (Paris: Bibliothe`que nationale, Imprime´s/Re´serve) 45 Plate 3 Jean Francois Ducis’s Othello Act v Scene 4 Talma as Othello, Mme. Desgarcins as Hedelmone (Engraving by Desenne and Lignon, from Oeuvres (1813) Vol. 2 (Paris: Bibliothe`que nationale, Imprime´s/Re´serve) 64 Plate 4 William Wordsworth, “The Brigand” (Landseer engraving of Benjamin Robert Haydon’s 1818 pencil sketch. Reproduced by courtesy of the Department of Rare Books, Olin Library, Cornell University.) 78 Plate 5 Beatrice Cenci portrait attributed to Guido Reni (Galleria Nazionali d’Arte Antica a Palazzo Berberini, Rome). Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita` culturali/Art Resource, NY. 181 Plate 6 Head of Medusa attributed in Shelley’s time to Leonardo da Vinci (Florence: Uffizi Gallery) 212 Plate 1

viii

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of the following chapters appeared as essays in journals, and I thank the editors for permission to republish them in revised form: Chapter 1, “Reading Wordsworth’s Power: Narrative and Usurpation in The Borderers,” in English Literary History 54 (1987), pp. 299–331; Chapter 3, “‘In Some Sort Seeing with My Proper Eyes’: Wordsworth and the Spectacles of Paris” in Studies in Romanticism 27.3 (Fall 1988), pp. 369–90; and Chapter 5, “Osorio’s Dark Employments: Tricking Out Coleridgean Tragedy,” also in Studies in Romanticism 33 (Spring 1994), pp. 119–160. For bringing this dark employment, so long in the works, to fruition, I want to thank Cornell University for its remarkable commitment to the study of Romanticism. The generous legacy and ongoing example begun years ago by M. H. Abrams and sustained since by the non-hierarchical community of colleagues and graduate students since I joined the English Department decades ago have made Cornell an extraordinary place to teach, to write, and – above all – to learn. For the evolution and enrichment of the field of Romanticism through the flourishing at Cornell of the supreme fictions of critical theory and trans-European and further international and cultural perspectives I am especially grateful. In this project, the support and encouragement of colleagues, students, and friends has been crucial at various stages. To name but a few, I think especially of Jim Adams, Rick Bogel, Jeremy Braddock, Laura Brown, Marvin Carlson, Cynthia Chase, Jonathan Culler, Neil Hertz, Mary Jacobus, Rayna Kalas, Ken McClane, the late Scott McMillin, Stephen Parrish, Neil Saccamano, Harry Shaw, and Pete Wetherbee. Beyond that immediate community, I’ve benefitted from readings by and conversations with, among many others, Ian Balfour, John Beer, Susan Buck-Morss, Catherine Burroughs, Julie Carlson, Jim Chandler, Jean Chotia, David Clark, Ian Donaldson, George Erving, Jonathan Fortier, Anne-Lise Franc¸ois, Tim Fulford, John Golder, Paul Hamilton, Gail Host-Warhaft, Colin Jager, William Jewett, Theresa Kelley, ix

x

Acknowledgments

Jonathan Lamb, Nigel Leask, Alan Liu, Anne Mallory, Jill Matus, Jane Moody, Daniel O’Quinn, Bridget Orr, Adela Pinch, Marc Redfield, Jonathan Sachs, Jon Stallworthy, Gordon Teskey, Neil Vickers, Rebecca Schneider, Elinor Shaffer, Karen Swann, and Julia Swindels. I want to express my deep appreciation to the stimulating academic and cultural community of Clare Hall, Cambridge, where research and writing progressed while on leave for five successive spring semesters, thanks to Cornell’s generous phased-retirement contract. My special thanks to Liz Ramsden and to Cherlyn Evans at Clare Hall for providing study facilities in the Ashby Library, near the English Faculty Library and but a stone’s throw from the immense resources of Cambridge University Library. My research into theater history has prospered thanks to the resources and assistance of staff at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., the British Museum in London and its newspaper history branch in Colindale, the Bibliothe`que Nationale and the Bibliothe`que de l’Arsenal in Paris. At the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, thanks to the special courtesy of Giovanna Giusti, I was moved by a sustained dark encounter in the archives with the “Head of the Medusa.” Far and away, however, without doubt, my greatest scholarly resource has been the collection of materials and the extraordinary helpfulness of the staffs at Cornell’s Olin Library and Kroch Library, where the shelves of my faculty study have groaned so suppportively these many years. I am grateful to Bradley Depew, Dianne Ferriss, Hyowon Kim, Ramesh Mallipeddi, Danielle Mericle, Anita Nicholson, and Natalie Palmer. To Cambridge University Press for the thoughtful and constructive reports by the its anonymous readers, and to those at the Press who have been so helpful: Linda Bree, Elizabeth Hanlon, Thomas O’Reilly, and my copy editor David Watson, my special thanks. And, in a different vein, for the chance to play a minor role in a shrewdly slimmed-down production of Wordsworth’s The Borderers at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in April 2007, my gratitude to Professor Patrick Boyde. And seventeen years ago, as the producer of a concert reading of Shelley’s The Cenci at Queens College, Cambridge, directed by David Farr and starring Kelly Hunter and Gillian Beer, I learned, from rehearsals and the final performance, as much about the inscrutable dynamics of performing poetic language as I have from any other source, text or stage. Finally, I owe more than I can say to thank Mary Jacobus for her example as well as for her insightful support and abiding patience. Little did she know so many years ago what she was in for. It’s to her and to my children, Hannah, Jonathan, Frances, and Josiah, that I dedicate, with my love, this book.

Introduction: “Prowling out for dark employments”

The sustained readings offered in Romantic Tragedies make the case for substantial – and hitherto largely unappreciated – aspects of poetic power and dramaturgic finesse in four verse tragedies written by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley. All were originally intended for performance in the licensed venues of Drury Lane or Covent Garden, though only one was actually staged. Each experiments boldly with the aesthetics of dramatic performance, drawing on – and challenging – inherited traditions. Each also undertakes to address and thereby influence momentous public issues in England’s prolonged experience of social and political conflict during the French Revolution and its post-Napoleonic Regency aftermath. Bound up with those experiments and issues are significant traces of the playwrights’ passionately driven and deeply fraught personal relations, fired by ambition, admiration, rivalry, and even revenge. And each play, I argue, depends crucially on an essential effect of tragic drama: uncertainty. This brief Introduction serves in part to acknowledge the peculiar proportions of what follows. Part i consists of four chapters on the “Early Version” of The Borderers, the still seldom read and rarely performed tragedy that Wordsworth wrote before he became the celebrated lyric and narrative poet readers today know. Part ii consists of three chapters, the first two on Osorio and Remorse, the versions (fifteen years apart) of the tragedy Coleridge wrote, the first before he became the plethora of other things he’s famous for having been, and the second in the troubled wake of a rupture in his relation to Wordsworth. The final chapter focuses on The Cenci, the tragedy Shelley wrote in Italy during the annus mirabilis that produced, among other things, the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound. Of these tragedies, only Remorse was staged during the author’s lifetime – at Drury Lane in 1813 and at prominent venues elsewhere in Britain and America – a longer run with arguably greater public success than that of any other new tragedy in the decades we know as the Romantic period. 1

2

Introduction

The somewhat haphazard blend of close aesthetic reading with biographical and historical contextualization that follows leads me to conclusions that both reinforce and resist work by others on these tragedies. I think particularly here of arguments in William Jewett’s Fatal Autonomy (1997), Alan Richardson’s A Mental Theater (1988), Julie Carlson’s In the Theatre of Romanticism (1994), Sophie Thomas’s Romanticism and Visuality (2008), and, with particular regard to Shelley’s tragedy, Stuart Curran’s Shelley’s Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire (1970) and Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis (1975), and Michael Simpson’s Closet Performances (1998). Significantly, a large number of impressive books and essays published in the last fifteen years or so have focused on the works of other, contemporary playwrights – especially women – and their reception rather than on these tragedies by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley. I think specifically of the substantial body of distinguished work by Catherine Burroughs, Jeffrey Cox, and Susan Bennett on Joanna Baillie; by Julie Carlson on Baillie and Elizabeth Inchbald; by Daniel O’Quinn on Inchbald and Mariana Starke; by Ellen Donkin on seven women playwrights; by Jane Moody on “illegitimate” theater; and by John Golder and Susan Maslan on drama performed in Paris during the French Revolution. Their work has been instrumental in broadening and deepening awareness of matters concerning both gender and social and national politics in plays written for staging in public or private venues or for private reading. Many of their emphases and their insights in effect challenge aspects of what I offer here. I hope this will invite other readers all the more to sift the possibilities, and to value the uncertainties that such differing or even opposing readings generate. The preponderance of attention given to The Borderers reflects my fascination with its peculiar, equivocal centrality in Wordsworth’s verse writing in 1796–97, though drama was the road not taken after 1797 in his public career as a poet – arguably not taken largely for political reasons themselves bound up with personal circumstances. The far from solitary recluse of Grasmere who began to emerge three years later with the publication of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) was hardly in the offing in the mid-1790s. Financial need and career anxiety, as well as gathering uncertainties about employment, family, and his relation to Annette Vallon and their daughter in Orle´ans – in the context of England’s ongoing war with France – led him and his sister Dorothy to Dorset, and eventually, in 1797, to Alfoxden (and nearby Coleridge) in Somerset. Given his earlier experience of theater in Cambridge and London in the late 1780s and early 1790s and (as I argue in Chapters 2

Introduction

3

and 3) in revolutionary Paris in late 1792, and given, as so many historians have emphasized, theater’s prominent role in public life, the imagined road for The Borderers from Somerset to London’s theaters in 1797 must have had – as a solution to lack of funds and the wish for political influence – alluring if not fantastic appeal. The trick would be to disguise its political bearings by setting the tragedy back in “the reign of Henry III” on the “Borders of England and Scotland.” Overall, the four chapters of Part i focus on what I see as significant aspects of language and dramaturgy in The Borderers largely overlooked by readings that center chiefly on the figure of the villainous Rivers. In the first chapter, exploring the dynamics of narrative and what I call “usurpation,” my prompt is Wordsworth’s Joanna Baillie-like remark late in life to Isabella Fenwick about the “care” that he had “almost exclusively given to the passions and the characters, & the position in which the persons in the Drama stood relatively to each other, that the reader . . . might be moved & to a degree instructed by lights penetrating somewhat into the depths of our Nature.”1 Reflecting this emphasis in the first scene of the play is the “position” of blind Herbert in relation to his daughter Matilda as he recalls their experience years earlier at the battle of Antioch during his ill-fated campaign as a Crusader. Herbert’s tale of having saved her in infancy at the blazing gates of the city but becoming blind in the process breeds in her a grateful passion both for hearing the tale repeated and for saving him in his old age. As a child, further, she had repeated that tale to her companion, Mortimer – vicariously engendering in him a similar saving passion that leads him not only to the role he plays as captain of the band of borderers, in the absence of established authority to secure their lands from invading enemies, but also to a problematically trusting susceptibility to passionate narrative. I propose this as an “untoward” reading, yet one that nonetheless has an insistent plausibility in Wordsworth’s language sufficient to generate the uncertainty that I see as the essential hallmark of powerful tragedy. The slander of Rivers’s perfidious tales about Herbert rings paradoxically true, giving tragic force to the fatal plot those tales generate in Mortimer against Matilda’s pitiably blind father. Readings of The Borderers that focus primarily on how Rivers conspires to betray Mortimer into a murder (repeating the very crime Rivers subsequently claims that he himself as a youthful sailor was betrayed into by his shipmates) overlook how tales everywhere in the play work to bind their hearers into similar structures of repetition, generating in them passions that lead them to reenact not only the tales they are told but also to take on characters

4

Introduction

mirroring those of the tellers. This chapter concludes by exploring the significance of resonances in Wordsworth’s Herbert with one of Shakespeare’s problematic father-figures, Prospero. The latter’s insistent tales of enforced exile from Milan, in the process, as it were, saving his daughter Miranda and vehemently rejecting the islander Caliban as a “malignant thing,” are bound up with his own passionately repressive forgetfulness, not only about the abdication of ducal responsibility implicit in his pursuit of “secret studies” in Milan but also, remarkably, about his own role in engendering that “thing of darkness” he finally comes to “acknowledge mine.” The paternal uncertainties created in Shakespeare’s drama model similar effects in The Borderers. Chapter 2, “Cradling French Macbeth: Managing the art of secondhand Shakespeare,” focuses on Wordsworth’s several-week sojourn in Paris in autumn 1792, after leaving his lover Annette eight months pregnant in Orleans. His arrival in the seething capital of the Revolution coincided with the final performance on November 1 at the The´aˆtre de la Re´publique (the chief venue for Girondin theatricality, outside the National Convention) of a revival run of playwright Jean-Franc¸ois Ducis’s acclaimed 1790 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, with the newly celebrated – and somewhat histrionic – Franc¸ois-Joseph Talma in the title role. My speculation is that Wordsworth either attended that performance or obtained a printed copy of the play, or possibly both. Drawing on a complex network of intertextual resonances in The Borderers as well as on Wordsworth’s account in the 1805 Prelude Book x of his insomniac Parisian night spent reading “tragic fictions” and hearing the guilty cry “Sleep no more!” through the city, this chapter rereads moments in The Borderers against those in Ducis’s own appropriation, for his version of Macbeth, of passages in Racine’s Andromaque and Athalie narrating the fates of children at risk. (Ducis’s most bizarre swerve from Shakespeare’s tragedy stages infanticide by a sleepwalking Lady Macbeth – renamed Fre´degonde after the bloody Merovingian queen – mistakingly stabbing her own cradled child instead of Malcolm, the intended infant victim of her dream.) Behind both Ducis’s revolutionary and Racine’s neoclassical fictions in Wordsworth’s Parisian retrospective lies Virgil’s account, in the second book of the Aeneid, of the heroic Trojan refugee on his mission to found Rome, abandoning in effigy the grieving shade of his wife Creusa. These intertextual resonances suggest that Wordsworth’s abandoned, pregnant Annette was much on his mind during those autumn days in Paris, especially as what seemed more and more inevitable loomed: the execution of the imprisoned Louis xvi, with the likelihood of ensuing

Introduction

5

hostilities between England and France making reunion with her ever less likely. Taken together, Wordsworth’s unstaged tragedy and his unpublished autobiography perform a retrospective comeuppance to the long eighteenth century’s preoccupation with founding myths of heroic individuality and nation-building. Reading Wordsworth’s play in this richly intertextual context aligns it with the function Michael Simpson has recently argued for drama in early nineteenth-century England, akin to Shakespeare’s instrumentality “for focusing the existence of a national public.” The imperative that Simpson contends motivated that role for English drama was “the figure of France” – “An imperial competition with France is a precondition of national identity rather than the other way around.”2 Chapter 3, “‘In some sort seeing with my proper eyes’: Wordsworth and the spectacles of Paris,” explores the likelihood that, in addition to Ducis’s Macbeth, Wordsworth also attended – during the last days of his November/December stay in Paris – a performance at La Re´publique of Ducis’s adaptation of Othello, again starring Talma, as well as the performance of either or both of two linked French adaptations of Schiller’s Die Ra¨uber staged at the The´aˆtre de Marais: Robert, Chef de Brigands and Robert re´publicain, ou Le Tribunal redoutable. Aspects of Ducis’s Othello, which drew extensive coverage in both Girondin and Jacobin reviews – particularly the prominence of Brabantio’s opposition to his daughter’s liaison with the Moorish warrior – have strong affinities with the tense triangulation in The Borderers among Herbert, Matilda, and Mortimer. The ghostly presence in Ducis’s Othello of Desdemona remembering her dying mother’s prophecy of her wretched death (“tu mourras malheureuse”) has affinities with the role of Wordsworth’s female beggar in The Borderers. The two staged Parisian adaptations of Schiller’s Die Ra¨uber, as well as another, Les Voleurs, published in 1785 by Nicolas de Bonneville, a prominent Girondin whom Wordsworth may well have known personally and certainly knew of in 1792, also offer suggestive models for Mortimer’s deranged attempt in Act v to put Matilda out of the misery of loving her father’s assassin. Chapters 2 and 3 together provide theatrical contexts in which to uncover some of the minute particulars of the experience Wordsworth veiled in his often-cited note when he finally published his revised version of The Borderers in 1842: “During my long residence in France, while the Revolution was rapidly advancing to its extreme of wickedness, I had frequent opportunities of being an eye-witness of this process, and it was while that knowledge was fresh upon my memory, that the tragedy of ‘The Borderers’ was composed.”3

6

Introduction

Chapter Four, the final one on The Borderers, “‘Drinking up whole rivers’: facing Wordsworth’s watery discourse,” argues that the sway Rivers the “dramatic character” has held over so many readers is not unlike what he holds for much of the play over Mortimer. This chapter resists that sway, emphasizing – instead of that character’s psychology and philosophy – the significance of two apparently opposed and interacting tropes that pervade the language and action of The Borderers : those of perilous flux associated with water and those of fixity, especially the staring eye, associated with the face. The first section analyzes the watery language that makes Rivers’s name rhetorically dramatic in ways not previously noticed that inform the play’s central drama: the struggle between the forceful clarity of purposefulness and the undifferentiated confusion of pathos; between the orderly construction of reality and its dissipation in chaos and despair. Narratives of literal drownings and figurative expressions of whelming and sinking oppose manly standing and force. My argument associates such watery discourse with comparable imagery that so strikingly pervades Wordsworth’s early poems – from the unpublished Vale of Esthwaite through An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches – which Duncan Wu has recently contended manifest feelings of unresolved grief, betrayal, and guilt following the boyhood trauma of his parents’ early deaths. The second section of the chapter probes the recurrence in The Borderers of figures of seeing (and, especially, of beholding) the face, culminating in an enigmatic moment in the final act, when action and dialogue are suspended in a prolonged tableau, as specified by the talismanic stage direction: “Mortimer and Rivers mutually fasten their eyes on each other for some time.” Part ii of the book comprises two chapters on versions of a tragedy Coleridge first composed in conjunction with Wordsworth’s The Borderers, followed by a third and concluding chapter on Percy Shelley’s The Cenci. Chapter 5, “Osorio’s dark employments: tricking out Coleridgean tragedy,” argues for that 1797 play – refused by Richard Sheridan’s Drury Lane – a powerful spectral mode in which the language of haunting spirits conjures a dramaturgy to which even the barest Shakespearean stage could hardly have done justice. Set in sixteenth-century Granada during the reign of Phillip II, and obviously indebted to Schiller’s Die Ra¨uber and its depiction of Spanish persecution of the Moors, Osorio draws also on the vogue in the mid-1790s for Gothic fiction and drama, particularly in M. G. Lewis’s The Monk and The Castle Spectre. Physical disguises and spoken dissemblings generate a drama rich with radical uncertainties whose darker suggestiveness effectively undermines interpretations that

Introduction

7

would find only unadulterated virtue in one brother (Albert) and correspondingly opposing viciousness in the other (Osorio). The manifestly gothic trappings of the third act’s sorcery scene – a substantially altered version of which in Coleridge’s Remorse fifteen years later produced such popular effect for audiences at Drury Lane – are part of a deftly woven fabric of ghostly, animistic trickery, the likes of which no other play of the Romantic period attempts. At the heart of Osorio is a daring sense that the staging of bodies and words produces resonant moments of willful disguise and deception, naı¨ve self-deception, and possession – moments involving the narration of subtly interlaced memories and dreams, where self-deceiving idealisms are confounded with darker vengefulness. In the second chapter on Coleridge, my chief project at the outset is to read – that is, imaginatively to hear – Remorse, his substantial revision of Osorio performed at Drury Lane, through the resonant dynamics of voice. “Listening to Remorse,” then, means attending to its remarkable poetic dramaturgy involving specific moments of listening and hearing, particularly overhearing (the latter including but not limited to stealthy eavesdropping), and their disturbing, untoward consequences: starts, trances, mutterings, and uncanny recognitions linked to dreams, fancies, wishes, reveries, promptings, forebodings, and – especially – hauntings. Such staged effects – akin to what might happen in the mind of a reader or theatergoer – amount to this tragedy’s distinctive refrain. Coleridge pursues these moments to such a degree that they constitute a significant tropology of listening. If to a considerable extent the dramatic effects produced stem from the energies and occupations of his personality, and if they reflect also major aspects of his literary, philosophical, and political investigations in such contemporary publications as The Friend and public lectures on drama and Shakespeare, their operation in Remorse nonetheless produces a notably original literary and dramatic composition, one peculiarly – for the right audience drawn from the solitary confines of the closet – stageworthy. Buried in this claim is the argument that Remorse achieves its intensity and power as drama because it depends on its reflexive involvement with the dynamics of Coleridge’s own brilliantly articulated dreams and distresses. Crucial here are his troubled relations at Grasmere with Sara Hutchinson and Wordsworth, intensified after his return from Malta, his laudanum dependency uncured, and culminating – in the wake of Sara’s exhausting collaboration in producing The Friend – with her abrupt departure to Wales in March 1810, followed three months later by the turbulent rupture of his relationship to Wordsworth when Coleridge

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Introduction

moved to London. Drawing extensively on Coleridge’s notebooks (notably in passages where his distraught idealizings of ‘Asra’ resonate with his momentous fascination with the saintly tribulations depicted in The Life of St. Teresa) and on letters exchanged among members of the Wordsworth circle, I argue that Remorse’s fraught triangular dynamics among Alvar, Teresa, and Ordonio – the names in Osorio deftly altered both to conceal and to announce their personal bearings – became the business of assassination painting when Coleridge dispatched annotated copies to Grasmere. Despite Percy Shelley’s assurance from Italy to his nervous London publisher that his new play The Cenci had “no reference, direct or indirect, to politics, or religion, or personal satire,” Chapter 7, “Reading Shelley’s delicacy,” argues that the tragedy he hoped Covent Garden or Drury Lane would stage is thoroughly imbued with precisely such “references.” What Shelley called the “peculiar delicacy” with which he treated the “chief circumstance” of “incest” in the play involves dramatizing the relation of Count Cenci and his daughter Beatrice in language whose finesse invites seeing, in the mirror of Renaissance Rome, reflections of Shelley’s own embittered and satiric sense of Regency England’s political, religious, and literary culture. Symptomatic of that delicacy at the outset are covert but unmistakable resonances with Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” both in Count Cenci’s opening repudiation when Cardinal Camillo conveys the price for the Pope’s absolution for his crimes and later in the wildness of Beatrice’s responses to her father’s incestuous violence. At the heart of this reading is the uncertainty of what happens to Beatrice offstage. Crucial to Shelley’s drama is Beatrice’s tragic sense of herself as a divine “instrument” carrying out God’s will in perpetrating her father’s death, a mission for her devoid of moral duplicity. Bound up with that reading is the suggestion of Count Cenci’s impotence, along with the implication that his most horrifically diabolic violation consists not of carnal rape but of terrorizing Beatrice into being the instrument of his suicidal agenda. The chapter also argues for Beatrice’s need and will to resist the gentler but no less confining sway of “what remains behind” once Cenci is done in: that of the bondage of nature associated from the start with the figure of Lucretia, her morally ambiguous, “more than mother” stepmother. A following section probes the pervasive dramatic effects of language representing “eyes” and “looks,” generating powerful uncertainties that culminate in Beatrice’s fixing her eyes on Marzio in a performance of power that prepares the way for his last words defying the rack’s terrifying

Introduction

9

crudity: “a keener pain has wrung a higher truth / From my last breath. She is most innocent!” – a remarkably credible exoneration.4 The last part of the chapter, offered as a coda, focuses on passages from a number of verse and prose works Shelley composed more or less immediately before or after drafting The Cenci, and whose language particularly resonates with that of his tragedy: the lyric drama Prometheus Unbound, the stanzas he composed “On the Medusa of Leonardo in the Florentine Gallery,” some notes he made on sculptures also in the Uffizi, and “The Mask of Anarchy.” This final phase, then, of what has been aptly called Shelley’s “annus mirabilis,” resounds with tragedy. In each of the plays close reading offers new insights and theories about what could be called the dramatic agenda consciously – or in some instances doubtless unconsciously – undertaken by the playwright. Many of those insights involve the workings of the passions in ways that alter and disrupt one person’s relation to another: a child to a parent, a servant to a superior, a citizen to a nation, a cardinal to a pope, a Beatrice to a God. Often in these plays such disruptions take place across generations and across genders; in each they also challenge or even upset structures of established power, often also with unforeseen consequences. Read this way, these dramas ideally call for performance venues, skilled actors’ bodily diligence and creative fidelity to script, and audience attentiveness that will foster not only appreciation of crucial nuances but – bound up with them – a sense of passion’s crucial role in the essential uncertainties of tragedy: an impossible menu but nonetheless one worth attempting. Remorse’s anomalous “success” in cavernous Drury Lane, with a cast beset by deficiencies and an audience chiefly primed for extravagant spectacles, hardly filled the bill. And yet – like Joanna Baillie’s – the tragedies composed by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, each in their idiosyncratic ways, came as close as perhaps could be hoped to filling it.

part i

Wordsworth

chapter 1

Reading Wordsworth’s power: narrative and usurpation in The Borderers

The study of human nature suggests this awful truth, that, as in the trials to which life subjects us, sin and crime are apt to start from their very opposite qualities, so are there no limits to the hardening of the heart, and the perversion of the understanding to which they may carry their slaves. During my long residence in France, while the Revolution was rapidly advancing to its extreme of wickedness, I had frequent opportunities of being an eye-witness of this process, and it was while that knowledge was fresh upon my memory, that the Tragedy of “The Borderers” was composed. Wordsworth’s 1842 Note

Given the affective situations generally so prized by dramatists in the Romantic period in England, one might expect to find in that drama a congruence of interest in the powerful presence of voice and in the representation of character. Nor is it surprising, in criticism of Romantic drama, to find the text regarded as a transparency, providing as it were an image of the author, whose figure and “self” are discernible in the dramatic persons. But the fine early version of Wordsworth’s The Borderers, when read in the context of his succeeding works and of aspects we can reconstruct of his and Coleridge’s relationship, prompts considerations of the relation of work to author, of the shaping influence of dramatic representation, and of the role tale-telling voices play in art and life – considerations that call into question the adequacy of situational premises and familiar biographical analysis as critical and interpretive instruments. Late twentieth-century initiatives in criticism of the novel offer a helpful analogy. Influenced in part by Walter Benjamin’s reading of Goethe’s Elective Affinities, J. Hillis Miller has contended that in reading novels it is probably a mistake to think of the “self” of the writer as the “explanatory origin of the work. That origin, or rather the apparent origin, metaleptically reversing cause and effect, is another more genuine self. This self is made by the work. The self exists only in the work and in the work’s 13

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detachment from the ‘real life’ of the author.”1 The Borderers brings these issues to focus in the context of dramatic rather than narrative fiction, but by means of an unprecedented generic contamination that makes narrative itself an element of crucial dramatic moment. But this is not to say that readings of the play that regard it as an interesting document in Wordsworth’s political, psychic, or poetic development are misguided. The alleged failure of the drama is itself regarded as symptomatic, indicating that in composing a tragedy set in “the Reign of Henry III,” Wordsworth in 1797 was working out matters of great personal and political moment in the wake of his experience in France.2 One might even argue that the very composure and distance of the evasively allusive note accompanying the play when he finally published a revised version in 1842 licenses delving into the knowledge of the revolutionary process that was fresh upon Wordsworth’s memory when he wrote the first version. As a result, though virtually contemporary with one of his most widely admired poems, “The Ruined Cottage,” where many readers find Wordsworth’s full narrative and poetic powers displayed for the first time, the play has been most often treated as a window, read through rather than read. Correspondingly, many of the most imaginative responses to the text have dwelled on the figure of Rivers, who poisons Mortimer’s mind with lies about his beloved Matilda’s father Herbert; Rivers becomes a prototype of deranged or misguided intellectuality, his relation to Mortimer the playing out of bifurcating tensions in Wordsworth’s own mind.3 Wordsworth recalled in 1843 that his care in composing The Borderers had been “almost exclusively given to the passions and the characters, and the position in which the persons in the Drama stood relatively to each other.”4 He chose then not to publish the preface to the play he had composed in 1797, but its extensive hypothetical psychobiography of the villain Rivers has doubtless helped to distract some readers’ attention from “the passions and the characters” of the other persons in the play, especially as they stand “relatively to each other.” The Borderers is much more than a vehicle for Wordsworth’s dramatization of the Rivers hypothesis. Its intricate tragic structure develops through his elaboration of three interrelated premises: first, that character is engendered and shaped in passionate response to affecting narrative; second, that the person whose character is so formed in effect reenacts the material of the narrative and at the same time becomes an image of the teller; and third, that through their passions in such reenactment and repetition the persons of the drama become bound to the purposes that embody their

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characters and in that bondage become tragically vulnerable. This chapter proposes a revaluation of the play, partly by shifting the focus away from Rivers to the figures of Herbert and Matilda and to the role of narrative in the dramatic representation of the triangle they and Mortimer constitute. An extravagant, untoward, but I think essential reading of The Borderers would propose, then, that Rivers is right, that what gives tragic force to the action his sinister tales prompt in Mortimer is Wordsworth’s representation of Herbert’s relationship to Matilda. For all its apparent benevolence and innocence, that relationship has strong if shadowy elements of untoward and tormenting bondage – indeed of punitive tyranny and enslavement to passion – that mirrors the very sway Rivers comes, through his tales, to exercise over Mortimer. Focusing primarily on how Rivers conspires to betray Mortimer into a murder that repeats the crime he alleges he himself was betrayed into as a youth overlooks how tales everywhere in the play function to bind their hearers into similar structures of repetition, generating in them both passions that lead them to reenact not only the actions of the tales but also characters that mirror the characters of the tellers. Passions – or affections – are thus dramatized as the matrix and tales as the instruments of enslavement. Almost without exception in The Borderers, the characters of the persons in the drama develop or come into play through the tales they hear, and the relations of these characters, according to the premises defined above, form a ventriloquistic network. The stripling hero Mortimer becomes what the villain Rivers calls “a shadow of myself, made by myself” (v, i, 33) through the treacherous tales Rivers inflicts upon him, so that Mortimer reenacts Rivers’s own crime when he abandons Herbert on the heath. (Before that deed, the gulled Mortimer echoes Rivers’s own tales when he spins narratives about Herbert to his fellow borderers, manipulating their passions to the point of righteous, vengeful zeal.) Herbert likewise is a tale-teller, and his daughter Matilda is crucially the creature, from childhood on, of hearing his tale-telling voice. The Borderers owes much of its considerable power as drama, I think, to this untoward truth about Herbert figured, one might almost say “fathered,” in Rivers’s tales, a truth neither acceptable nor dismissible; a truth that keeps asserting itself in the reader’s mind as he views the relations of the other persons in the play. To hear in those tales such a truth is to bring into prominence the very elements that sentimentalizing accounts of the relationship of Herbert and Matilda – accounts that implicitly see her pity for her father as a Wordsworthian ideal – have tended to obscure. By a paradoxical corollary, hearing that truth might

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lead the reader to dwell less on Rivers “himself” as the solitary figure of evil who has dominated the psychobiographical interpretation that treats the play as a window on Wordsworth. In this regard, we might note that in the earliest drafts Rivers (or “Danby” as he then was named), figured much less prominently.5 Sentimentalizing Herbert and Matilda, in other words, is an unreaderly imposition, associated with an unduly naı¨ve emphasis on the exclusive villainy of Rivers. Viewing the relations of Herbert, Matilda, and Mortimer through the perspective of Rivers’s truth not only decenters Rivers as the exclusive focus of critical interest but works against the grain of that sentimentalization. If French Revolutionary theater diminished drama in the name of a republican political sensibility and the spectacles of pity, Wordsworth’s tragedy can be seen as using narrative to make the spectacle of pity into the elements of dramatic power. If pity, in Paul de Man’s phrase, was the “arch-passion” in the legacy of sensibility Rousseau left the French theater, Wordsworth found in tale-telling the way to dramatize that passion.6 i The exchange between Herbert and Matilda in the opening scene of The Borderers affords a glimpse of Rivers’s truth, not only in the dynamics of the relationship between father and daughter, but also in its rehearsal of the very process that generated those dynamics: Herbert, prompted by his agitated daughter, repeats once more the tale he told her again and again in infancy and childhood, the tale that wrought in her the pitying passion that shaped and now defines her character. Sentimentally regarded, Herbert’s is a simple, melodramatic tale of self-sacrificing rescue. Dramatically regarded – read, that is, as a version of Rivers’s own narrative treachery – it is the instrument by which a self-deceiving Herbert has created in his daughter, and even now at her own urging reinforces, the very bondage of gratitude and pity that has led her, reciprocally, to sacrifice herself in the passionate action of protecting and saving him in old age. Just a moment earlier, a brief exchange between Rivers and Mortimer has revealed that Rivers delivered to Mortimer a letter in which Matilda forswears their love-match because of her devotion to protecting her father, a letter wrung from her conflicted heart by loyalty to her father, whose opposition to the match has – unknown to her – been fed by Rivers’s malign characterization of her lover as a treacherous freebooter. In this scene, then, though Matilda protests her father’s continuing

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animus against her now-forsworn love for Mortimer, she reassures him of his priority in her heart, invoking the remembered burden of the tale she then urges him to repeat: think not, think not, father, I forget The history of that lamentable night When, Antioch blazing to her topmost towers, You rushed into the murderous flames, returned Blind as the grave, but, as you oft have told me, You clasped your infant daughter to your heart. (i, i, 144–49)

The “history” Matilda cannot forget is indistinguishable in her mind from the voice that has told it to her. As summoned by her ventriloquism, Herbert’s is a spectacular tale, full of mighty Marlovian excess, but the blazing, blinding sacrifice of his clasp is not without problematic pathos. Wordsworth’s dramatic resource here and elsewhere in the play is to endow what we are invited to take as the transparent language of straightforward narrative representation – here the image of the father literally embracing the infant daughter – with figurative or metaphorical meaning for that act of story-telling itself. Each time he has repeated his story to Matilda, Herbert has reenacted that threshold clasp, for his tale has the effect of binding her to him by rousing in her an obsessive, ruling gratitude: her character is so molded in response to the clasp of his passionately affecting narrative voice that she can live only for the consuming, pitying purpose of saving him, in living martyrdom dedicating her life to ongoing repetition of his original saving act. The language of his story, then, also supplies the language by which we are to read and interpret the drama of his story-telling. What might on a casual reading seem like a youthful playwright’s bathetic representation in Matilda of innocent filial gratitude becomes, through the mirroring and troping of the language of narrative action in the action of narrating, her tragically overdetermined response to Herbert’s suffocating, tale-telling embrace. We come to feel that there is more than poisonous treachery – that there is a shadowy truth – in Rivers’s insidious allegations to Mortimer that the now-aged Herbert has made his daughter’s virtues the very instruments with which to torture her, allegations that invite Mortimer “to see him thus provoke her tenderness / With tales of symptoms and infirmities” (i, i, 215–16). “Clasping” and its shadowy other, “bondage,” are among the governing images and metaphors of the text. Herbert clasps her to “his heart,” a psycho-pathological as well as physical embrace; and

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his clasp has, perhaps, sexual resonance in a context where, as we learn, the mother dies. His attachment to Matilda and her priority in his arms at Antioch certainly figure in the jealous economy that leads Herbert eventually to see Mortimer as his rival in Matilda’s heart. Read untowardly, Matilda’s priority at Antioch is the clasp that kills the mother and arouses in Herbert the single parent’s single-minded devotion. Matilda’s agitated invocation of her father’s oft-told tale at the outset of The Borderers moves him to yet another retelling, a headlong rehearsal that itself elicits a telling response from Matilda: h e rb e rt . Thy mother too – scarce had I gained the door – I caught her voice, she threw herself upon me, I felt thy infant brother in her arms, She saw my blasted face – a tide of soldiers That instant rushed between us, and I heard Her last death-shriek, distinct among a thousand. m a t i ld a. Nay, father, stop not, let me hear it all; ’Twill do me good. h e rb e rt . Dear daughter, dearest love – For my old age it doth remain with thee To make it what thou wilt. – Thou hast been told That when, on our return from Palestine, I found that my domains had been usurped, I took thee in my arms, and we began (i, i, 150–63) Our wanderings together.

Notable here are the details not only of the story but also of the fatherdaughter drama the storytelling sets in motion. Of peculiar moment is Matilda’s anxious interruption (“Nay, father, stop not, let me hear it all: / ’Twill do me good”). Impulsively intervening precisely when her father’s voice falls with the last death-shriek of her mother, Matilda apparently fears that his tale has stopped altogether – in unwonted, unfamiliar cadence – on that terrible note of loss. Her words function not as an interdiction but as a spur for Herbert to continue the full rush of narrative she so passionately craves, as though silence from him at this point would withhold an addict’s gratification. The gap of maternal loss is supplied, however compensatorily, by narrative. She desires, then, a tale that in the very unchecked movement of its telling will reenact its spectacular action, namely her father’s rushing (and self-blinding) deed of rescue, an act whose speed is itself mirrored in Herbert’s tale by the symmetrically opposing “tide of soldiers” which “that instant rushed between us.” The drama of protesting her father’s narratio interrupta figures Matilda’s role

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in the action of his tale. In a sense, then, her need as a listener also passionately reinscribes – and implicates her in? – her father’s desperate heroics. Moments later, Matilda’s drama is reinforced and ironically extended by Mortimer’s own impetuous outburst when, after Herbert and Matilda exit, he and Rivers emerge from their eavesdropping concealment: “This instant will we stop him – a father too!” (i, i, 197; emphasis added). For Mortimer as well as for Matilda (he is also cast, through her tales, in her father’s image), the agitating prospect of stopping reflects their involvement – or enslavement – in the tyrannical economy of Herbert’s passionate heroics. From childhood on, moreover, Matilda herself is also a tale-teller, repeating her father’s stories in innocent ventriloquism. So affecting are her tales that she reenacts in her audience the genesis-by-narrative of her own saving character. Hearing her voice, the child Mortimer and his playmates form a band whose common bond is pitying tears for the narrated plight of the infant Matilda and her exiled father. Initially in part resisting Rivers’s troubling allegations (“Nay, be gentle with him; / Though I have never seen his face, methinks / There cannot be a time when I shall cease / To love him”), Mortimer remembers when a Boy Of six years’ growth or younger, by the thorn Which starts from the old church-yard wall of Lorton, It was my joy to sit and hear Matilda Repeat her father’s terrible adventures Till all the band of play-mates wept together, And that was the beginning of my love. And afterwards, when we conversed together This old man’s image still was present: chiefly (i, i, 59–71) When I had been most happy.

“This old man’s image” has then a double reference: both to the figure of the old man depicted in Matilda’s tales and to the figure of Matilda herself as she, in her father’s voice, repeats those tales. Mortimer’s childhood bondage in pity in turn generates his character and prefigures his passionate career as captain of The Borderers, whose banded character expresses itself in acts to save and protect the wretched. (Operating on the borders, they reenact Herbert’s doorway rescue of his infant from the flames of his burning Antioch home.) By a nice irony of the plot, one of the early “victims” of Mortimer’s saving passion is Rivers himself, who is preserved by the borderers’ captain from violent death at their hands before the play’s opening scene; later, perversely repeating this saving

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act, Rivers triumphantly justifies his tale-telling treachery against Mortimer as a character-building intellectual rescue: Enough is done to save you from the curse Of living without knowledge that you live. You will be taught to think – and step by step, Led on from truth to truth, you soon will link Pleasure with greatness, and may thus become The most magnificent of characters. (iv, ii, 204–09)

Compounding the irony, Matilda in the final scene rushes onstage from a vigil over her dead father’s body, crying in vain as the borderers this time drag Rivers off to death, “Oh, save him, save him – ” (v, iii, 257), her character so bound in the passion of saving innocence that she includes in her pity even the monster whose treachery has killed her father. Though there are many other instances in The Borderers of tale-telling repetition, involving all of the major and minor characters, including the cottager couple, Robert and Margaret, and even the beggar woman Rivers suborns as a false witness against Herbert, one moment in particular warrants special consideration here, focusing all the relations of passion and character in the play’s most powerfully tragic moment of repetition and reenactment. Echoing Rivers’s earlier words to Mortimer unveiling his treachery as a youthful sailor against the captain of his ship (“I am a murderer” [iv, ii, 4]) and professing to Matilda in “most unusual fondness” his wish that she be “wise as I am,” Mortimer enacts his deranged intent to protect her from further misery by inflicting upon her what he hopes will be a fatally wounding confessional tale: “I am thy father’s murderer” (v, iii, 99n). If narrativity earlier in the play is associated with generation, with the birth of character, passion works here to transform tale-telling into a death-dealing act: crazed by remorse over Herbert’s fate, Mortimer exchanges roles with Matilda by “repeating her father’s terrible adventures” to her. Originally the very creature of Matilda’s tales, Mortimer is now transformed into the mercy-killing “monster” who tortures her. His succinct tale is thus an act of double ventriloquism: from the perspective of Matilda’s narrative agency, she has created in the blindness of her tale-telling childhood passion the very instrument of her undoing. In Mortimer’s murderous tale we hear his stabbing fulfillment of her earlier cry, “Oh could you hear his voice!” According to many readers, Wordsworth wrote autobiographically in The Borderers, projecting aspects of his subjective experience into the characters of Rivers and Mortimer. In Roger Sharrock’s words, Rivers

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and Mortimer are the two aspects of Wordsworth’s divided mind. His “partial sympathy” with his villain “is shown by the intimate touch with which he picks out the warp and woof of [Rivers’s] psychological development; this was a stage he himself could have taken.”7 That comment chimes with Wordsworth’s own remark to Isabella Fenwick that the Pedlar was “chiefly an idea of what I fancied my own character might have become in his circumstances.” Relevant also are the comments, cited in my epigraph above, that Wordsworth published in 1842 about composing The Borderers as a means of preserving processes of change witnessed during the early years of the French Revolution.8 Those comments have encouraged attempts to recover Wordsworth’s state of mind in 1792–93 and in 1796–97, among the most suggestive being David Erdman’s reading of The Borderers as a work he wrote to purge the warlike spirit that had impelled his soul to feed on vengeance, exulting in the violent deaths of both Louis XVI and Robespierre (the Robespierre whose corruption in power may have doubled in Wordsworth’s mind with the reckless career in France of the radical idealist John Oswald). The Prelude likewise was “undertaken to cure the poison at the heart of man by establishing a faith to overcome despair about France.”9 Such interpretations see the work as part of a purgative process, a sort of psychological cathartic, the reader seeking to discern the malaise or poison that occasioned the curing enterprise. The premise of such criticism is that the product reveals the author, whose figure thus recovered it tends to privilege over the work. In that tendency it is perhaps congruent with the impulse in Coleridge’s sharp decrying of the ventriloquism he heard marring the poetry occasionally of Wordsworth and typically of less gifted dramatic writers. Regarded thus negatively, ventriloquism leads us from the dummy back to the animator; and in his impatience with the perceived fault, Coleridge could even wish away the dummy altogether. As he said in Table Talk, “I am always vexed that the authors do not say what they have to say at once in their own persons . . . I have no admiration for the practice of ventriloquizing through another man’s mouth.”10 There may be some use, nevertheless, in a contrary but complementary criticism that, admiring ventriloquism, reinforces the popular tendency to be fascinated by the puppet as much as by the animator’s art. In one sense this reading would see “Wordsworth” as the creation of “Rivers” rather than Rivers as the product of Wordsworth. A slight – or sleight – difference; perhaps, as with M. C. Escher’s art, the chief pleasure derives from the interplay of one criticism with another.11 In any case, a ventriloquism focusing on the puppet can yield some pleasing fictions. Twice in

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the early version of The Borderers Rivers claims that his tales will make Mortimer into “the most magnificent of characters,” and in his words we can hear how much he resembles the playwright at work.12 The character Matilda and Rivers created prompted Wordsworth to submit to the Morning Post in December 1797 a poem called “The Convict” over the name we perhaps inaccurately think of as a pseudonym, “Mortimer.”13 Was Rivers then in some significant sense the author of Wordsworth? If we think of the figure of Rivers who emerges in the play and in the psychobiographical prefatory essay as the result of a heuristic ventriloquism that leads Wordsworth on to imagine the Pedlar in the various stages of the “Ruined Cottage” complex, we can then think of Rivers’s tales about himself and others as fathering not only “Mortimer” but the Wordsworth who grew out of the Pedlar, “sounding his dim and perilous way” through the lines of his next major work, The Prelude. Adapting from The Excursion the resounding words the Solitary uses to describe his experience of the French Revolution, I mean to gather that figure also into the cast of Rivers’s progeny, for it is in Rivers’s mouth originally that we first hear of distress spent in “sounding on / Through words and things, a dim and perilous way” (iv, ii, 102–03).14 The lineage is not so tenuous as it might seem: at the end of The Borderers, repeating with a difference Rivers’s originating sin, Mortimer “abandons” himself to just such a solitude as Wordsworth created for the darkly despondent hero of The Excursion. Rather than charge his survivors with the burden of drawing narrative breath in pain, he calls instead for a mute epitaph: Raise on this lonely Heath a monument That may record my story for warning –

(v, iii, 262–63)

And in his closing speech embracing suicidal exile, he repudiates the banded clamor of his borderers’ voices (“Captain!” they cry), thereby performing a final rejection of faith in the power of voice to set things right: No prayers, no tears, but hear my doom in silence! I will go forth a wanderer on the earth, A shadowy thing, and as I wander on No human ear shall ever hear my voice, No human dwelling ever give me food Or sleep or rest, and all the uncertain way Shall be as darkness to me, as a waste Unnamed by man! and I will wander on Living by mere intensity of thought,

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By pain and thought compelled to live, Yet loathing life, till heaven in mercy strike me With blank forgetfulness – that I may die. (v, iii, 264–75)

Biographical interpretations read The Borderers itself as a monument to Wordsworth’s experience in the French Revolution, veiled (however wittingly or unwittingly) as a dramatic representation of betrayal and suffering. Read another way, however, the play is a monument to a process of literary “self”-creation, whose story reverberates in other, subsequent works. Mortimer’s muteness prefigures the reticence, for example, of the “Wordsworth” who so oddly narrates the degeneration into imbecile muteness of Vaudracour in the tale that concludes Book ix of the 1805 Prelude. If Vaudracour is, as Erdman brilliantly argues, “Heartsworth,” he, like Mortimer, lapses, and it is the voice of Rivers that instead survives in the “self ” we hear narrating that poem and The Excursion, and, as we shall see, in the “Wordsworth” whose words so thoroughly struck Coleridge. Recalling Hillis Miller’s rendering of Walter Benjamin’s metaleptic notion of the more genuine “self” made by the work, we may find it useful to think provisionally of the “self” we associate with Wordsworth as being a product of the characters we ordinarily think of as “his.” The Wordsworthian Solitary and the Wordsworthian narrator of The Prelude are in a sense repetitions of earlier figures, Rivers and the Pedlar, at least in that each emerges in part through language initially used to represent the earlier figure. In “Michael,” Wordsworth’s narrator proclaims the agency of his tale, in collaboration with natural objects, in leading him to feel for passions that were not his own; he intends to relate the same tale, “for the sake / Of youthful Poets, who among these Hills / Will be my second self when I am gone.” The words recall Rivers’s boast that Mortimer will be “a shadow of myself, made by myself.” ii But what of Antioch as the locus of that Act i ur-drama between Matilda and Herbert? In that name, ostensibly so casual in Wordsworth’s play, the context of the late eleventh-century First Crusade asserts itself, as it does elsewhere in Herbert’s mention of a return from Palestine, in the usurpation of his baronial lands in England and, notably, in Rivers’s own autobiographical narrative (iv. ii), also set in Syria. The saving passion Herbert’s heroics generate in Matilda resonates with the Crusaders’ passion for saving the Holy Land. In displacing his play about the French

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Revolution onto that remote political culture, Wordsworth was not, however, simply indulging a misty, sentimentalized medievalism or an orientalist nostalgia for the empire of pity. Here it helps to invoke Gibbon, for whom the Crusades were spectacular texts in the abuses of enthusiasm and zeal. With the etiology of Matilda’s saving passion, weigh this excerpt from Gibbon’s own ur-narrative of the Crusades, his satire on the pilgrim Founder, Peter the Hermit: From Jerusalem the pilgrim returned an accomplished fanatic; but as he excelled in the popular madness of the times, Pope Urban the Second received him as a prophet, applauded his glorious design, promised to support it in a general council and encouraged him to proclaim the deliverance of the Holy Land . . . When [Peter] painted the sufferings of the natives and pilgrims of Palestine, every heart was melted to compassion; every breast glowed with indignation when he challenged the warriors of (?) the age to defend their brethren, and rescue their Saviour.15

Gibbon was not one to be seduced by the theatrics of history, and his text is a useful touchstone for Wordsworth’s own dramatization of heroic passion. Herbert’s mighty rendering of that “lamentable night” invokes, in his daughter’s ventriloquistic words, an Antioch become a text for the rehearsal of heroic self-pity. Juxtapose the rhetoric of that calamity with Gibbon’s account of the first siege of Antioch, for him the most notorious of the Crusaders’ engagements: A speculative reasoner might suppose that their faith had a strong and serious influence on their practice; and that the soldiers of the cross, the deliverers of the holy sepulchre, prepared themselves by a sober and virtuous life for the daily contemplation of martyrdom. Experience blows away this charitable illusion; and seldom does the history of profane war display such scenes of intemperance and prostitution as were exhibited under the walls of Antioch.16

Just so might Gibbon blow away charitable sentimentalizings of Herbert and Matilda. Reading the piteous spectacle of Herbert’s suffering at Antioch through eyes dried by such ironies points to a similarly ironic view of the home front during his crusading absence from the borders of England and Scotland. In such a counter-reading, the usurpation of his baronial domains is the emblematic result of abdicating domestic responsibilities (a familiar topos of quest chivalry), abdication that likewise places his family at risk. Herbert at the gates of Antioch then becomes a figure of a baron already usurped, but usurped by his own saving passion. Thus the odd, untoward – and not obviously inevitable – syntactic and semantic copula of Herbert’s

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compensatory paternal clasp: “when I found that my domains had been usurped, I took thee in my arms.” Read with similar extravagance, the sacrifice of Matilda’s mother (and infant brother) at Antioch is likewise Herbert’s doing: his self-usurping, crusading passion placed her in jeopardy and thus destroyed her, the “tide of soldiers” who at that instant rushed between them aptly figuring the dissolution of civic and domestic bonds entailed in the “heroic” Crusades. The illegitimacy of Herbert’s husbandry and fathering – the problematic bondage it imposes and the sacrifices it extorts – can be seen in the problematic way Matilda displaces the mother in her father’s arms. Perpetuated in his binding tale-telling, Herbert’s heroic clasp serves, then, a family romance that denies the mother. The genre of that romance is narrative, for with Herbert, tale-telling begins at Antioch. The tale of the loss of the mother, the embrace of the daughter with its covert plea for self-pity, is a screen to mask and displace the censored truth of selfusurpation. The birth of narrative is in an illegitimate appeal to pity disguising the self-usurpation of the tale-teller and coinciding with the illegitimate repression of the mother. The momentary emphasis on the loss of the mother in the drama of Herbert’s narrative sets up the contrivance by which the arch-storyteller Rivers clinches his treachery against Mortimer. Her Antioch death-shriek (“the infant brother in her arms”) voices the gap that the suborned beggar fills with her lying tale about selling her infant daughter to Herbert. Not surprisingly, since Rivers invents that lie as part of the cloak of “impostor” he wraps around Herbert, there is a truth to the beggar’s tale as well, a truth shadowed in the way she “rises up, rubbing her eyes as if waking from sleep – a child in her arms” (i, iii, 23sd), as though an apparition of the dead mother and son on a mission of vengeance from the past.17 Moments later she offers an updated tale about Herbert with a gloss like an Antioch wife’s complaint (“Why, now – but yesterday I overtook / A blind old grey-beard and accosted him – / I’ th’ name of all the saints and by the mass / He should have used me better” [i, iii, 71–74]); and Rivers supplements her deception with an accessory narrative that evokes the doorway circumstances of the ancient Crusades catastrophe: r i v e r s . I think, good woman! you are the very person Whom, but some few days past, I saw in [?] At Herbert’s door. beggar. Aye, and if the truth were known I have good business there.

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Reading Wordsworth’s power r i v e r s. I met you at the threshold, and it seemed (i, iii, 106–11) That he was angry.

The beggar conjured by Rivers to deceive Mortimer ventriloquizes the repressed truth that only the accusing shade of Matilda’s mother could voice, the figurative truth that Matilda is not Herbert’s daughter because Herbert is no longer himself. In Rivers’s subtle supplement, Herbert angrily rejects the ghostly truth about himself uttered in her threshold solicitations. Following Rivers’s script, the suborned female, in response to the pressure of Mortimer’s aggressive grilling, names and claims her daughter: “Matilda, as he [Herbert] calls her, but the girl / Is mine” (i, iii, 138–9). Mortimer’s confused rejoinder to these words marks the doubling of the beggar and the real mother and voices, in effect, a prophetic “recognition” of the repressed Antioch mother’s claim: “Yours! Woman! are you Herbert’s wife?” The dramatic brilliance of that doubling is underscored seconds later when Mortimer summons the beggar for further interrogation: Where is she? hola! [Calling the Beggar. She returns. (Looking at her stedfastly in the face) You are Matilda’s mother? Nay, be not terrified – it does me good (i, iii, 163–65) To look upon you.

His words here, echoing Matilda’s earlier “Nay, father, stop not, let me hear it all: / ’Twill do me good,” punctuate the continuing power of Rivers’s truth: the beggar’s tale ventriloquizes the words of the narrative repressed in Herbert’s original tale, the tale that shaped Matilda’s – and, through her retelling, Mortimer’s own – saving passion.18 For Mortimer, looking “stedfastly” at Matilda’s mother would do him the good of release from Herbert’s usurping power. This Antioch, then: the name resounds with the history of ancient, illicit romance. Gibbon, moreover, had a precursor: so came Shakespeare’s Gower, “assuming man’s infirmities,” to sing (as the opening chorus of Pericles) his old song about that city’s eponymous usurper: Antiochus the Great Built up this city for his chiefest seat The fairest of all Syria: I tell you what mine authors say. This king unto him took a peer,

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Who died and left a female heir, So buxom, lithe, and full of face As heaven hath lent her all his grace; With whom the father liking took, And her to incest did provoke. Bad child, worse father, to entice his own To evil should be done by none; But custom what they did begin Was with long use accounted no sin.19 (Chorus, 17–30)

These words surely ran in Wordsworth’s ear as he composed his revolutionary drama. Playing Iago-like on Mortimer’s susceptibilities, Rivers thus glosses Herbert’s insidious narratives: “What strange pleasures / Do we mortals cater for ourselves! / To see him thus provoke her tenderness / With tales of symptoms and infirmities” (i, i, 213–16, emphasis added).20 But the best and closest reader of Herbert’s and Matilda’s enigmatic threshold tale, standing with Gower and Gibbon behind Rivers, is Shakespeare’s Pericles himself, who, wishing his awful solution to the riddle of the tyrant’s daughter were not so, thus apostrophizes Antiochus: If it be true that I interpret false, Then were it certain you were not so bad As with foul incest to abuse your soul; Where now you’re both a father and son By your untimely claspings with your child, Which pleasure fits a husband, not a father. (i, i, 125–30)

Pericles’s very revulsion prompts his wishful equivocation, an equivocation that aptly figures an undecidability for Wordsworth’s reader, whose pleasure embraces the unthinkable alternatives of Rivers’s and Herbert’s clasping tales. iii Wordsworth’s fascination with the motif of forgetfulness derives, I think, in large part from The Tempest, much in his mind during his work on The Borderers.21 Prompted by the forcefulness of the motif in The Borderers, we can think of Prospero as a figure of urgent and purposeful action predicated on bondage to memory. The etymological associations of his name with the speed, hope, and forwardness of prosperity have no doubt contributed to persistently benign interpretations of his character, but they are everywhere linked with the acting out of a power that serves the past and is predicated on a wish for vengeance generated through

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bondage to memory. Prospero abusively castigates Ariel for forgetfulness; likewise, with untoward sternness, he admonishes Miranda to heed his tale of their past and his fatherhood. His sense of urgency is bound up with his sense of purpose; both derive from the powerful memory of usurpation he narrates thus to Miranda: Whereon, A treacherous army levied, one midnight Fated to th’ purpose, did Antonio open The gates of Milan; and i’ th’ dead of darkness, The ministers for th’ purpose hurried thence, (i, ii, 127–32) Me and thy crying self.

Prospero’s usurpation was a parricide of sorts, the attempt by the younger brother Antonio to supplant the older brother (father) Duke. What interrupts the spectacular revels of Prospero’s nuptial masque for Ferdinand and Miranda is his recollection of what he has forgotten, the time-bound plot against him by Caliban: “I had forgot that foul conspiracy / Of the beast Caliban and his confederates / Against my life: the minute of their plot / is almost come” (iv, i, 139–42). Caliban’s parricidal plot against Prospero is an attempt on the life of the improper father in him, the father whose tyranny on the island is bound up in his urgent, vengeful allegiance to the memory of the original usurpation in Milan. But the memory of that usurpation is a screen for the originating act of usurpation within Prospero himself, his turning of the power of government over to his surrogate Antonio, thereby abdicating his responsibility to rule as Duke in order to pursue his studies in the “liberal arts”: those being all my study, The government I cast upon my brother And to my state grew stranger, being transported (i, ii, 74–77) And rapt in secret studies.

Prospero’s terms – transportation and rape – suggest that his problematic devotion to studies was already a form of self-imprisoning conveyance even before its consequences were acted out in Antonio’s treachery and the ensuing enforced voyage to the Bermudas. Prospero’s island-bound, revenge-prone memory is itself predicated on having forgotten his selfusurpation, on having forgotten his ducal responsibilities in his passion for liberal arts. His fevered abuse of Ariel for forgetfulness can be read as displacing onto Ariel the very tendency he cannot acknowledge in himself.

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It helps here to dwell on the issue of parentage that figures with such odd prominence in both The Borderers and The Tempest. Rivers practices his poisonous treachery on Mortimer’s mind by recounting a tale he claims to have heard about the real Baron Herbert’s death (in a shipwreck [i, i, 46–48]). He then overcomes Mortimer’s resistance to the doubts his tales have planted about Herbert’s identity as Matilda’s father by suborning the beggar to tell Mortimer that, years before, she had sold her infant daughter to that very man. If Rivers’s and the beggar’s tales are lies, they nevertheless, as I have argued, express a shadowy truth about the bondage of pity Herbert’s own tales have imposed on Matilda: that the father in him has been usurped by the tale-telling tyrant, who, in Rivers’s extravagant words, “tortures” his daughter with tales of his infirmities. In the second scene of The Tempest, this exchange between Prospero and Miranda abruptly poses the issue of parentage: p r o s p e r o. If thou rememb’rest aught ere thou cam’st here. How thou cam’st here thou mayst. mir a nda . But that I do not. p r o s p e r o. Twelve year since, Miranda, twelve year since, Thy father was the Duke of Milan and A prince of power. mir a nda . Sir, are you not my father? p r o s p e r o. Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and She said thou wast my daughter; and thy father Was Duke of Milan; and his only heir (i, ii, 51–59) A princess – no worse issue`d.

This riddling rejoinder parries as much as it resolves, with the enigma grammatically expressed in the surprising transition from the first to the third person (“my daughter . . . thy father”). Prospero’s vengeance is predicated on Antonio’s usurpation, but it is also possible to say that in casting the government of Milan on his brother to pursue the liberal arts the prince of power had already ceased not only to be Duke but also to be himself, the victim of a perversely willed usurpation within. His artful response (emblematic of secret studies) to Miranda’s innocent question suggests Prospero’s own illegitimacy as a father. Shadowing the answer such rhetorical indirectness offers to her artless query is a succinct, though implicit, “No.” Prospero’s fixation on parentage and memory sounds again moments later when he tyrannically catechizes Ariel about Sycorax: p r o s p er o . Thou liest, malignant thing! Hast thou forgot The foul witch Sycorax, who with age and envy Was grown into a hoop? Hast thou forgot her?

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Reading Wordsworth’s power ariel. No, sir. prospero. Thou hast. Where was she born? Speak! Tell me! ariel. Sir, in Argier. prospero. O, was she so? I must Once in a month recount what thou has been, Which thou forget’st. This damned witch Sycorax, For mischiefs manifold, and sorceries terrible To enter human hearing, from Argier, Thou know’st, was banished. For one thing she did They would not take her life. Is not this true? ariel. Ay, sir. prospero. This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child (i, ii, 257–70) And here was left by th’ sailors.

The periphrastic diction of “one thing she did” signals Prospero’s repression of his own shadowy role in Sycorax’s pregnancy. Sycorax’s history mirrors that of the wizard duke (banished for mischiefs manifold); his “secret studies” come to roost with the hatching of Caliban, the child in question, who breeds rebellion on his island. It seems, indeed, that Prospero can’t let the issue of his (displaced) issue alone, as when, turning from Ariel, he first summons Caliban: “Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself / Upon thy wicked dam, come forth!” (i, ii, 319–20). And Caliban, himself obsessed with the idea of Prospero as a usurper – might we then speak of Caliban’s truth? – contributes his feisty clue to the occlusion of paternity when, trying to recruit Stephano to his own vengeful purpose, he maligns Prospero in words that pair him and his own sorceress mother: “As I told thee before, I am subject to a tyrant, a sorcerer, that by his cunning hath cheated me of the island” (iii, ii, 41–42). In Act iv, Prospero, apparently intending to cast out Caliban as ineducable by force of origin, names him “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick: on whom my pains / Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost! (iv, i, 188–90). The resolution of this enigmatically dispersed tale of paternity comes in the final scene, just after Ariel drives Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo onstage, when Prospero, his purposes of vengeance already accomplished in gestures of forgiveness and mercy to Alonso and Antonio, is free to explain to his audience just who Caliban is: This misshapen knave, His mother was a witch, and one so strong That could control the moon, make flows and ebbs, And deal in her command without her power. These three have robbed me, and this demi-devil (For he’s a bastard one) had plotted with them

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To take my life. Two of these fellows you Must know and own; this thing of darkness I (v, i, 268–76) Acknowledge mine.

Prospero can thus own Caliban as his offspring only when he has abandoned his powers (and the devotion of those powers to the purposes of memory-bound vengeance), in effect not only erasing the difference between his sorceries and those of his mate Sycorax, but also acknowledging that it’s the wise bastard who knows his father’s a usurper. In acknowledging that the nature as well as the nurture of Caliban was his own doing, Prospero acknowledges as well the (poetic) identity of his own and Sycorax’s moony powers. His abuse of Ariel for forgetting Sycorax ought then to have been directed at himself. Sycorax the sorceress is the dark spectre whose image supplants that of Miranda’s rightful mother, the “piece of virtue” Prospero’s all-too-purposeful self-usurpation in secret studies denied.22 As in The Borderers, the repression of the mother coincides with the usurping of self that gives birth to narrative. And the image in Prospero’s narrative that epitomized for Coleridge “The power of [Shakespeare’s] genius,” “the power . . . by a single word perhaps, to instill that energy into the mind which compels the imagination to produce the picture,” was the image of Miranda’s “crying” self.23 Narrative begins, then, in the response to loss called pity, the fiction that displaces the truth of selfusurpation. In The Tempest, the illegitimate potency engendered in Prospero’s self-usurpation is figured in this issue, Caliban, and Miranda’s pitying agency nurtures in Caliban the creature of vengeful purpose, her pains as teacher echoing the repressive vagueness of Prospero’s tale about Sycorax’s pregnancy (the “one thing she did”):24 I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage, Know thy own meaning, but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes (i, ii, 353–58) With words that made them known.

The tale of the foul witch is, in effect, the masking figure by which Prospero the god of purposeful power displaces (but through which we can read) the dark, Rivers-like truth of his own wizard nature. The harshness of Prospero’s telling catechisms of Miranda and Ariel, like his tyrannical enslaving of Caliban, reflects the atrocity against the legitimate father in himself and against the mother: as in Pericles and The Winter’s

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Tale the usurpation of the father in The Tempest entails the abandonment (or its counterpart, bondage) of the daughter, who can only be found or redeemed when what was repressed is brought to light and acknowledged. If Prospero’s rough magic is equivalent to Sycorax’s sorceries, how might the spectacles he raises bear on our understanding of the way The Borderers repudiates the theatricality of spectacle, as in dramatizing the failure of Mortimer’s spectacularly staged coup de graˆce by which he hopes to extinguish the suffering Matilda? To the extent that such spectacle serves the usurping father, as figured in the service of the confined Ariel, slave to the urgencies of his master’s mind (“Come with a thought! I think thee, Ariel. Come” [iv, i, 164]) and kept in that slavery by irascible threats of torment, we can understand Prospero’s revels as the debasing of theater, exercises of a god of power.25 In the register of tragedy, Mortimer’s final self-abandonment to Heaven’s merciful stroke of forgetfulness parallels Prospero’s abandonment of his powers, but it leaves in the place of purposeful, vengeful action not the prospect of restored civic and domestic order but the desolation of blankness. The Borderers dramatizes usurpation by the language of passion as the inevitable condition of purpose and purposeful action. Implicit in its tragic structure is the repudiation of all action: Mortimer’s final gesture of self-abandonment. Passionate action is spectacular action; as theater it is political in its use – or abuse – of power over others. Perhaps that’s the lesson Wordsworth read in Paris. The special power of his postrevolutionary backward glance into the politics of power is to give that truth force: to stage presence through dramatizing the language of narrative itself as part of the political economy of passion: especially the archpassion, pity.

chapter 2

Cradling French Macbeth: managing the art of second-hand Shakespeare

I must mention one thing, a Criminal was broket upon ye wheel three Days before our Arrival & he was upon ye rack for twelve hours before he dy’d & all his Crime was robbing a Smith of 7 Livres – the French can’t bear Murder upon ye Stage but rack Criminals for Small thefts, we can bear any Butchery upon ye Stage & hang only for ye greatest Thefts & Murder.* *The french delicacy & Sensibility extends only to Dramatic Executions. I think that Both carry their way of thinking too far. The Journal of David Garrick (1763)

Execution-wise, since the dismembering supplice of Damiens,1 France was England’s other, and vice-versa, in discourse about matters of theater and matters of state. From Voltaire’s visits to London in the 1740s and Garrick’s to Paris in the 1750s and 1760s, notions of how differently things were ordered in the two nations to achieve special dramatic and theatrical effect fueled discussion and debate on both sides of the Channel about the relations of discourse and “action” in dramatic performance. The latter term, “action,” encompassed, from writer to writer, meanings ranging from facial expression, bodily attitude, gesture, and movement – in a word, pantomime – to conduct of plot. The issues explored in this debate involved not only legitimate, licensed theater but other performance arts as well, from opera to boulevard pantomime and dance. What’s 33

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remarkable to a twenty-first-century reader in these discussions is not only the intensity with which the issues were framed and disputed and the vigorous proliferation of the debate in all kinds of literature, from august and official journals to the most scurrilous and suspect pamphlets, but also the very ways in which the issues of theater were bound up with and in reflexive relation to matters of politics, government, and public life. At the heart of these issues were questions about power and the control of public expression: what sorts of executions were permissible and bearable, and what ideologies informed judgments about bearability? Much has been written about the nature of the court and of court-sponsored spectacle in seventeenth-century England and France and about the ways in which the development of a print culture in the eighteenth century challenged the efficacy of court control; much also has been written about the “rise” of the man of letters as an independent social and political force. The intensity of literary surveillance through licensing and censoring instruments and the counter-intensity of resistance guaranteed that questions of theater were simultaneously questions of state. This chapter opens by inventing, elaborating, and exploring an exemplary moment in that cultural context – Wordsworth’s arrival in newly republican Paris in autumn 1792, after three extended visits, first, in Orle´ans for perhaps two months; then in Blois, for perhaps seven; and finally, during September and October, again in Orle´ans – an extended moment whose significance depends on imagining in it a conjunction of past and future, the culmination and anticipation of mutually depending and defining processes in French and English theater and politics in the period informed by the French Revolution. By focusing on this moment, I propose a ground for reading The Borderers as an exemplary work of English Romantic drama, read in the context of speculative issues and practical developments in theater and politics in England and France over the previous century and a half. The moment as I imagine it is radically fictional and luridly – almost meretriciously – spectacular. As narrated by a pre-modern autobiographer with a penchant for overwrought Spenserian romance, the opening words run thus: “This was the time in which, enflamed with hope, / To Paris I returned.” Readers of Wordsworth’s 1805 version of The Prelude recognize the passage, from “Book Tenth”: Again I ranged, More eagerly than I had done before, Through the wide city, and in progress passed The prison where the unhappy monarch lay, Associate with his children and his wife

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In bondage, and the palace, lately stormed With roar of cannon, and a numerous host. I crossed – a black and empty area then – The square of the Carousel, few weeks back Heaped up with dead and dying, upon these And other sights looking as doth a man Upon a volume whose contents he knows Are memorable but from him locked up, Being written in a tongue he cannot read, So that he questions the mute leaves with pain, (38–54) And half upbraids their silence.

Composed in 1804, these lines inaugurate a spectacular narrative encoded by the practice of French (Shakespearean) theater in the later eighteenth century. The Prelude’s evocation of revolutionary Paris at this juncture of political crisis – less than three months after the bloody upheaval at the Tuilleries on August 9 and 10, with the deposing and imprisonment of Louis XVI, and less than two months after the September massacres and the founding of the Republic – ventriloquizes retrospectively a performance of tragic sensibilite´ on the part of a narrator I would cast as an understudy of spectacular revolution, a would-be hero whose incendiary agency Wordsworth, drafting this passage in 1804 as a spot-of-time, repudiates.2 Though no record supports such precision, dramatic license would have it that Wordsworth arrived in Paris on November 1, 1792.3 The king and his family were imprisoned in the Temple, the volatile forces of the Paris Commune and the Jacobin Club were at large and vigilant, and the beleaguered deputies at the deeply divided National Convention, fully aware of the portent of their undertaking and the precariousness of their authority, were about to debate – and act upon – the question of his fate. Judicial regicide was in the air, and the Revolution itself, newly institutionalized as “la Re´publique,” was on trial. i As it chanced, November 1, the day Wordsworth arrived, saw the final performance at the The´aˆtre de la Re´publique of a revival run, begun in January of that year, of what was arguably the bloodiest play staged in Paris during the Revolution, Jean-Franc¸ois Ducis’s broadly skewed but highly wrought adaptation of Shakespeare’s regicide tragedy, Macbeth.4 In the lead was the young Franc¸ois-Joseph Talma, who had himself the previous year led a revolutionary secession from the bastion of ancien re´gime theater, the Come´die-Franc¸aise.5 Following the emancipation of

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theaters from royal licensing control in January 1791, Talma led a movement to establish a rival company at the The´aˆtre de la Rue de Richelieu (in the wake of August 10 renamed the The´aˆtre de la Liberte´ et de l’Egalite´ and, after September 30, again renamed the The´aˆtre de la Re´publique). The new company had soon eclipsed its remnant at the Come´dieFranc¸aise (itself renamed La Nation) as the leading Parisian group. These were, of course, performative renamings: the rivalry of La Nation and La Re´publique joined aesthetics and politics in the contest for power: power to embody – and perform – the sovereign revolutionary theater and to command (to borrow the discourse of Franc¸ois Furet) the power to speak for the people, to be de facto the legitimate voice of the Revolution. Opposite Talma as Fre´degonde (Ducis’s name for Lady Macbeth, after the bloody Merovingian queen of medieval French history) was one of his fellow secessionist come´diennes, Mme The´re`se Vestris. Talma and Vestris, the most celebrated tragedians of the day, were closely acquainted with members of the struggling Gironde faction, including Jacques-Pierre Brissot, some of whom we can guess Wordsworth also knew. The political and theatrical times are best epitomized for my purposes in the reports of an evening in mid-October, two weeks before Wordsworth reached Paris, when Talma and his wife lavishly entertained le monde Girondin at their elegant townhouse, in an after-theater reception in honor of Charles Franc¸ois Dumouriez, the general who had succeeded to the command of the revolutionary army when the deposition of Louis led to the defection of Lafayette. On September 20, Dumouriez had surprised Paris – and buoyed the Girondins, who were most in support of the war – by overseeing an extraordinary military success at the battle of Valmy against the invading Prussians, who in defeat withdrew from France; he was, however, already suspected by the more radical Jacobins of harboring constitutional monarchist sympathies like those of his predecessor. The elegant Talma soire´e was doubtless part of the politics of Dumouriez’s momentary reversal of ebbing Gironde fortunes; but it is especially memorable for the attempted intrusion of an uninvited guest, the scrofulous Jean-Paul Marat, who with two Jacobin partisans appeared at the door in what the historian Jules Michelet called “un coup de the´aˆtre,” intent on disrupting the evening by denouncing Dumouriez, only to depart humiliated when the assembled guests braved his zeal with apparent indifference and ridicule.6 The next day Marat launched his revenge in a savage attack on Dumouriez and his friends in his Journal de la Re´publique franc¸aise (formerly L’Ami du Peuple), a vendetta that included charges of conspiring to murder him. The headline read: “Details of the

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party given to honor the traitor Dumouriez by the aristocrats at the home of the actor Talma, with the names of the conspirators who meant to assassinate the friend of the people.”7 Among Talma’s guests that evening was the playwright Ducis. We can assume that the final Macbeth on November 1, 1792, occupied and created a different political moment from that of the opening performance of the revival run the previous January, that regicide and remorse played differently in Paris after August 10, the September massacres, and the proclamation of the Republic. To put the question narratively, can we imagine Wordsworth bedding down early that evening, however exhausted from journeying (“possibly on foot,” notes Mark Reed) from Orle´ans and ranging through the wide city, instead of seizing his last chance to watch Shakespearean regicide a` la mode ?8 The answer to that question lies in the continuation of The Prelude account of that first day of his enigmatic, several-week sojourn in Paris in the autumn of 1792 – when (as he recalled in 1842) “the Revolution was rapidly advancing to its extreme of wickedness.” The lines rehearse and enact a spectacular afterpiece of his own that evening, what we recognize as a spot of theatrical time: But that night When on my bed I lay, I was most moved And felt most deeply in what world I was; My room was high and lonely, near the roof Of a large mansion or hotel, a spot That would have pleased me in more quiet times – Nor was it wholly without pleasure then. With unextinguished taper I kept watch, Reading at intervals. The fear gone by Pressed on me almost like a fear to come. I thought of those September massacres, Divided from me by a little month, And felt and touched them, a substantial dread (The rest was conjured up from tragic fictions, And mournful calendars of true history, Remembrances and dim admonishments): ‘The horse is taught his manage, and the wind Of heaven wheels round and treads in his own steps; Year follows year, the tide returns again, Day follows day, all things have second birth; The earthquake is not satisfied at once’ – And in such way I wrought upon myself, Until I seemed to hear a voice that cried

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These lines – and the preceding ones about readerly bafflement in face of the blank vestiges of August and September Parisian violence – perform and solicit rhetorical rather than transparent reading; they baffle the notion that their importance lies in transcribing something that actually “happened.” Their narrative and poetic affinities with so many other spots in The Prelude both shape and obscure whatever took place in that hotel or mansion. It would be naı¨ve to imagine Wordsworth, in some “high and lonely” room on November 1, 1792, actually speaking what one reader calls the “magnificent apocalyptic lines”9 The Prelude places in quotes (70–74), just as it would be unreaderly to believe that any combination of “substantial dread” at the proximity of the September massacres and “remembrances and dim admonishments” conjured from “tragic fictions and mournful calendars of true history” would actually have wrought in his imagination an echo of the voice that Macbeth, fresh from regicide, imagines ceaselessly crying “Sleep no more” to all the guilty house.10 What the allusion in the voice produces is the illusion of analogy: of a Wordsworth freshly arrived in Paris in 1792, brooding “so brainsickly” – the epithet is Lady Macbeth’s – as to imagine himself at once guiltily complicit in a city’s yet-to-be-enacted-regicide and, such is the paradoxical effect of such dread, proleptically also associate in bondage with the victim.11 Whose or what voice, thus crying, produces a brainsick Wordsworth in 1792 as both Duncan and Macbeth? From the retrospective of the author composing that stretch of The Prelude in 1804 it was the voice of suspect, perhaps guilty, sensibility, carrying its way of thinking too far: the repressed unease of the would-be republican enthusiast making free of the “fierce Metropolis” (7), in an eager pomp of spirit, a ranging patriot enacting a solitary commemorative feˆte, a sovereign “progress” – the word has its royalist ironies – past the prison “where the unhappy monarch lay” (fallen majesty no longer positioned to perform such ceremonial tours).12 The voice also, we can surmise, ventriloquizes the more grinding fear and guilt – or should we call it remorse? – of the lover of Annette, and father of their eight-months-enwombed child, imprisoned as he may have felt in France, her (royalist) father’s house.

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We recognize the spots-of-time structure and sequence, the via negativa paradigm: eagerly expectant, even inflamed, progress; then bafflement; followed by unanticipated – in this case dreadful – epiphany. Exhilarated ranging produces not the anticipated readerly identification with the Republic’s claim before the world of a “high and fearless soul” (26) but, instead, bafflement at the dark and empty aftermath of triumphant revolutionary action, its silence eloquently voicing its inaccessibility to his ardent desire for performative participation in the “shew” of what the Republic was; bafflement over the day’s empty sights succeeded that night, not without pleasure, by overwrought, prescient terror. The doubling between the plight of the unhappy monarch who “in Prison . . . lay” and Wordsworth as he also “lay” abed in his “high and lonely” room, incarcerated by dread, not only suggests how much he felt unhappily victimized by his affections and his circumstances; it also suggests a reading of what Garrick thirty years earlier imagined as the theater of delicacy’s and sensibility’s “Dramatic Executions,” and of that theater’s absorption with the representation of all conjuring as self-conjuring, its preoccupation with tragic “character” over tragic action.13 Involved also here is the plight of the alien Englishman, the foreignness of revolutionary action and bloodshed figuring as a foreignness of things “French,” as a matter of linguistic imprisonment (“from him locked up, / Being written in a tongue he cannot read”) – though another Englishman, Pitt, could and did read that tongue, labeling the actions of English Jacobins as the performance of treason. To return to the figure of an “understudy,” the passage from Wordsworth’s Prelude x represents retrospectively his attempt in 1792 to read the sites of Parisian revolution as a baffled attempt to incorporate, to reproduce in himself, an essence of republican spirit by studying its traces, much as an actor or playwright of the theater of sensibility might have studied the attitudes and physiognomies represented in engravings after the designs of Charles Le Brun, or engravings offering souvenirs of, say, Garrick or Siddons in performance, in order to induce – or conjure? – in himself an otherwise inaccessible passion.14 ii Ducis (1733–1816) had launched in the late 1760s what would be virtually a career-long enterprise to bring Shakespearean tragedy to the French stage. With little or no English, he relied on translations by Pierre Antoine de LaPlace (1745–48) and by Pierre LeTourneur (1776–83).15 His earliest adaptations, Hamlet (1769) and Romeo and Juliet (1772), gave him the

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momentum to undertake, in the early and mid 1770s, what became his most taxing, prolonged, and exhausting project, the adaptation of Macbeth, what he called in the “Avertissement” to the 1790 edition “the most terrible of [Shakespeare’s] dramatic productions.” He applied himself from the outset to do away with “the ever revolting impression of horror, which surely would have caused the work to fail,” attempting thus “to lead the soul of my spectator up to the last degree of tragic terror, while blending there an art that could make it bearable.” Early – and arguably enduring – influences on Ducis’s sense of the possibilities of Shakespeare for the French stage were David Garrick’s dumb-show performances in Paris of “morceaux” from Shakespeare, not on the “legitimate” stage (he had little French, his audience less English) but in fashionable salons – most notably those of Baron d’Holbach, where Garrick was a regular – during three extended visits to Paris in the 1751, 1763, and 1764. Those morceaux (what in a British context were called “hits”) were typically pantomimed moments from Shakespeare, most famously Hamlet aghast at the ghost of his father or Macbeth beholding the apparition of the dagger. Not by accident these were also the very morceaux – or “arrested moments” of bodily action – often celebrated in paintings and published engravings by Johann Zoffany, Benjamin Wilson, and Angelica Kauffman, whose artistic careers Garrick, in his capacity as manager of Drury Lane, fostered as part of his vigorous entrepreneurial rivalry with Covent Garden. Here is one of the earliest eye-witness accounts of such a morceau, by a Parisian dramatist named Charles Colle´: July 1751. I dined yesterday, the 12th, with Garrick, the English actor. He gave us a scene from one of Shakespeare’s tragedies, in which we could easily perceive that the great reputation which he enjoys is by no means unjustified. He gave us a sketch of that scene where Macbeth thinks he sees a dagger in the air, leading him to the room where he is to murder the king. He filled us with terror; it is impossible to paint a situation better, to render it with more warmth of feeling, and at the same time to remain more master of oneself. His face expresses all the passions one after the other, and that without any grimace, although that scene is full of terrible and tumultuous movements. What he played before us was a kind of tragic pantomime, and from that one piece I would not fear to assert that that actor is excellent in his art. As to ours, he considers them all bad, from the highest to the lowest, and on that point we fully agreed with him.16

Though Ducis, the son of a drapery merchant brought up in Versailles and employed as secre´taire first to the Mare´chal de Belle-Isle and subsequently to Monsieur, younger brother of Louis xvi, never saw Garrick perform in those exclusive Parisian salons, he elatedly received from him

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in 1769, through the help of a well-heeled acquaintance, two engravings, one of a bust of Shakespeare, the other of Garrick as Hamlet, prompting him to write Garrick in London: “Your engraving in Hamlet and that of Shakespeare are both on my desk; without doubt it would have been too cruel a divorce to separate them.” Five years later, though unable to accept Garrick’s invitations to visit London, his playful, spirited adulation continued, finding in the actor’s performative gestures access to the playwright’s art: I am now busy with Macbeth. Why can’t I chat with you for half an hour and see you in the terrible morceaux of this admirable tragedy! I have to cope with a nation that demands much care when one wishes to lead it along the bloody paths of terror. In composing, my soul exerts itself to assume your vigorous attitudes and enter the energetic depth of your genius.17

Ducis’s soulful trials with that nation’s aesthetic politics took him through various experiments and changes over the years, with an initial, scuttled version at the Come´die-Franc¸aise in 1784, and, eventually a more successful version at the same venue in 1790. The revival of that version Wordsworth would have seen at the Re´publique on November 1, 1792, departs in major ways from the translations Ducis knew of Shakespeare’s tragedy.18 Most saliently, in the very opening scene, Duncan journeys to the hills to meet an elderly shepherd, Se´var, into whose hands years before, fearing rebellion in his kingdom, he had secretly placed in pastoral care his infant son Malcoˆme. Accompanying Duncan is Glamis, the ambitious courtier who mistakenly believes, along with the rest of Duncan’s world, that Malcoˆme died in infancy, the victim of an earlier rebel invasion of the royal palace, leaving Duncan heirless: as Glamis recalls, feigning unremitting grief, that “Malcoˆme, hardly born, / So soon, under your eyes, was in his cradle reaped!” (“Malcoˆme, he´las! a` peine ne´, / Fuˆt sitoˆt, sous vos yeux, au berceau moissonne´!”). As instructed by Duncan, Se´var has raised Malcoˆme in ignorance of his true lineage, and Duncan now returns to the hills to hear from the shepherd the result of that upbringing. Fostered in boldness and in passion for justice, the youth, Duncan learns, is worthy of the realm. Ducis’s recreation of Shakespeare’s Malcoˆme as a child raised by Se´var in the mountains, among children “de nos rochers, de nos foreˆts profondes, / Ne´s au bord des torrents, plus fougueux que leurs ondes” (“of our rocks, our thick forests, / By torrents born and livelier than their waves”) has, doubtless, an autobiographical cast. His own father was a

Figure 1 Receiving the crown from the Scottish warrior Lochlin, Ducis’s Macbeth imagines with horror seeing the ghost of the murdered Duncan.

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Savoyard, born in Tarantaise, who moved to Versailles and became a naturalized French citizen when Ducis was two years old; but, in Paul Albert’s words, there remained in his son “something of a man of the mountains, robust, upright, uncultivated, with an eye and spirit always straining toward the heights.” Nineteenth-century biographers disputed Ducis’s politics in light of their own views of the Revolution, but a number of letters beginning as early as March 1791 that he wrote to a Savoyard e´migre´ friend (“Monsieur Beau de Belletour, E´cuyers, PorteMainteau de Monsieur, Fre`re de sa Majeste´ Tre`s-Chre´tienne”), whose finances were impounded by the Legislative Assembly, suggests that Ducis himself viewed the course of the revolution’s violence in large measure through similar eyes: We are on the mouth of a volcano; and, in truth, it’s very fortunate, when I think about it, that its eruptions have so far been rather slight. But we hear its heavy noise and its threats, and in moments in the middle of the rages between the aristocracy and the democracy which foam and roar around me, it seems that I would raise my hands in gratitude to heaven if I lived hidden and obscure between a torrent and my parish, in our snows and our mountains of Savoy.19

It would be another nine years before Wordsworth would find in himself the voice of another hill-dwelling shepherd, Michael, likewise far from the madding capital. In another remarkable swerve from Shakespeare’s plot, Ducis’s Fre´degonde and Macbeth themselves have an infant son. Later in the play, with Duncan murdered and Macbeth crowned, the unexpected arrival in court of the grown Malcoˆme and Se´var, with proof of Malcoˆme’s royal lineage in the form of the original note to the shepherd written in Duncan’s hand, precipitates Macbeth’s remorseful falling out with Queen Fre´degonde. While he determines, in solitude, to surrender the crown to Malcoˆme and confess his guilt before the assembled nobles and warriors, Fre´degonde, suspecting his weakness, treacherously pursues her own vicious course, hiring assassins to murder Malcoˆme, thereby opening the way for her own son to inherit the crown. In the sleepwalking scene – Ducis’s most astonishing swerve from Shakespeare – a haunted and dagger-bearing Fre´degonde enters, while Malcoˆme and Se´var (like Shakespeare’s “Doctor” and “Gentlewoman”), concealed onstage nearby, watch her troubled display. In a striking piece of dramaturgy, it is Malcoˆme who announces at the outset what are in effect stage directions, audience response, and reviewer’s verdict at once:

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Cradling French Macbeth Je n’ai jamais senti de terreur si profonde. L’air tantoˆt caressant, & tantoˆt inhumain, Elle approche, un poignard un flambeau dans la main. Mais ce qui fait horreur, c’est quand son esprit veille, Que son corps a` la fois parle, agisse et sommeille. (59) [I’ve never felt a terror so profound. Her manner now caressing, now inhuman, She comes, dagger and candle in her hand. But what fills with horror, is while her spirit wakes, Her body at that time speaks, and acts, and sleeps.]

An extraordinary bit of drama ensues, unprecedented in Ducis’s Shakespearean sources: tableau and coup de the´aˆtre at once, rich with implications for the theater of Parisian revolution. Fre´degonde enters asleep, dagger in hand, then, seated, moves through what the spectators would recognize, in the bodily jargon Garrick’s dumbshow morceaux had introduced to France, as a “rapid succession of passions” represented by pantomimic facial expressions and gestures as well as words, meticulously specified in Ducis’s stage directions (see figure 2). As Marion Monaco comments, “her signs and her voice are to register an entire gamut of emotions from joy and tenderness to terror and ‘furious spite.’”20 An unrepentantly ambitious Fre´degonde – tormented by the suspicion that her remorse-driven husband plans to hand over his illicit crown to its rightful owner, the prince du sang – imagines, in a dream returning to the scene of regicide, that she must now murder Duncan’s infant heir Malcoˆme as well, and thus consolidate preemptively the royal line for her own progeny. By Ducis’s bold contrivance, she exits rehearsing in her trance the act of stabbing Duncan’s son, while the grown Malcoˆme, concealed, watches the dumb-show of his own infanticide, a pantomime rehearsal, as it were, of the very memory Glamis’s disingenuously sympathetic words to Duncan had in the opening scene conjured: “Fallait-il que Malcoˆme, he´las! a` peine ne´, / Fuˆt sitoˆt, sous vos yeux, au berceau moissonne´?”21 As I imagine it, a moment of extravagant revolutionary melodrama then followed the sleepwalking and rang down the curtain on that 1792 revival of Macbeth at the Re´publique. In an offstage meˆle´e, Macbeth defended Malcoˆme from Fre´degonde’s assassins but, mortally wounded himself, came onstage to announce to the court Malcoˆme’s identity as king and survivor of Fre´degonde’s plot, and then fell dead. At that point Fre´degonde, roused moments before from her somnambulism, came back onstage. The courtier Lochlin showed her Macbeth’s body and then

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Figure 2 The text of Ducis’s 1790 Macbeth, representing Fre´degonde’s dream of murdering the infant Malcoˆme.

confronted her with the failure of her assassination plot in Malcoˆme’s survival as Duncan’s heir, a moment of classic recognition: “Connais, connais, son fils!” But further: the crowning anagnorisis, launched by Loclin’s own stunned discovery: “Ciel! de quel meurtre encore ton bras est-il fumant?” (“Heaven! with what new murder is your arm steaming?”) Looking down in horror at her freshly bloodied hands, she cried out: Ah! courons vers mon fils. Ciel! son berceau sanglant! Je vois tout . . . mon sommeil . . . Le ciel, dans sa cole`re, (64) A massacre´ mon fils par la main de sa me`re! [O! run to my child. Heaven! his cradle bloodsoaked! I see it all . . . my sleep . . . heaven, in its fury, Has massacred my son by his own mother’s hand!]

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and rushed across the stage, toward a barely concealed cradle.22 Parting its curtains to reach for the body of its small occupant and crying out her last words, “Mort! mort! oˆ douleur! oˆ tourment! / Je le suivrai” (“Dead! Dead! O agony! O torment!/I’ll follow him!”), she then stabbed herself and fell beside the cradle. As the curtain fell on this grotesque scene, apparently to thunderous applause, a Montagnard warrior intoned a judgmental epitaph: Sa mort vient d’apaiser la terre. Le ciel s’en applaudit. [On entend le tonnerre rouler.] Entendez son tonnerre! Du souffle d’une impie il e´pure ces lieux: Sa voix parle au coupable, et dit qu’il est des dieux.23 (64) [Her death has just appeased the land. Heaven applauds its action. (They hear thunder rolling.) Listen to its thunder! It purifies these lands with impious breath; Speaking to the guilty, its voice is from the gods.]

Where Wordsworth sat in the Re´publique to watch this bizarre, horrific skewing of the sleepwalking scene he might well have known as performed in London by Sarah Siddons doesn’t really matter. From his position he couldn’t have seen into the cradle any more clearly than any of the Parisians in the audience, however much they tried, for French aesthetic decorum, even during the early, anything-goes journe´es of revolutionary theater, held that actually displaying to view a bloodied infant – or even a representation of one – at the spectacles would be unbearable. Hence the concealing berceau, that small theater of horrors, with elaborate curtains highlighting and veiling its – and theater’s – paradox: the grisly consummation of Fre´degonde’s ouvrage unrepresentably on display, the artful delicacy of the cradle barely containing the unspeakable crudity within. We may readily suppose, however, that it was after leaving the theater, ears still roaring with the echo of that thunder, that the father of the fetus Annette Vallon was carrying that evening in Orle´ans found his way back to his room high in the Paris mansion. There, under the sway of Ducis’s tragic fiction, he perhaps felt something like the acute pangs of guilt and remorse that a dozen years later, when reinventing that overwrought moment in The Prelude, he ventriloquized as the voice he heard crying to the whole city, “Sleep no more!”24 Fre´degonde’s closure was indeed a spectacle to behold, not least because of Ducis’s assiduous rhetorical and dramaturgical anticipation

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of the extraordinarily transgressive visual effect of this final curtain scene. The barely offstage metonymic cradle decorously withheld from the spectators’ eyes the climactic focus of dreadful anagnorisis for the infanticide parent. The cradle itself consummated a thickly woven fabric of deictic motifs earlier in Ducis’s text, cradles and infants as rhetorical icons for consolation from the horrors of battle, magical signs (“charmes”) to the returning warrior not only for domestic reunion but also for the fantasy of recovering an innocence else forever lost to war. In Act ii, Fre´degonde greets her spouse at Inverness after his defeat of the rebel thane Cador: “En sortant des alarmes, / Pour le cœur d’un guerrier la nature a des charmes. / Macbeth, voila` ton fils”, (“In leaving war’s alarms, / For the heart of a soldier, nature has its charms. / Macbeth, behold your son”) to which he responds, “Oui, ses graces, ses traits / Charment par leur candeur mes regards satisfaits. / Je vois avec plaisir son aimable innocence” (30) (Yes, his graceful looks, his features / Charm by artlessness my gratified gaze. / I see with pleasure his lovable innocence”).25 But the cradle as imagined haven from the terrors of warfare, also entails, from the very outset of Ducis’s tragedy – with Glamis’s “au berceau moissonne´” – the sense of its vulnerability to such violence and conflagration. In their opening encounter in the hills, even loyal Se´var, untainted by designs on royal power, nonetheless conjures for Duncan an ominous vision of Malcoˆme’s upbringing in the simple culture of loyal Montagnard warriors. There children imbibe bravery from the traces of battle they behold, martial spectacles that in their invasive display threaten the nursery, a fateful foreshadowing: dans leur simplicite´, Ces mortels belliqueux, ces montagnards terribles, Endurcis aux travaux, au seul honneur sensibles, Qui tant de fois pour vous ont brave´ le tre´pas, Soldats de`s le berceau, viellis dans les combats, Venant dans leur foyers, apre`s de longs services, Montrer a` leurs enfants leurs larges cicatrices. (16) [In their simplicity, These warlike beings, fearsome Montagnards, Hardened in labors, tuned only to honor, Who have for you so many times braved death, Soldiers from the cradle, in combat grown, After long service return to their hearths, To show to their children their massive scars.]26

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As a headstart regime for infants, such monstrances loom with fearful portent. iii If for Wordsworth the sites and sights of recent revolutionary upheaval and violence in Paris were “locked up . . . written in a tongue he [could not] read,” their presence in the opening lines of that Prelude x spot of time nonetheless figures in language evocative of other texts Wordsworth could have read or even seen performed in 1792. These texts, so goes the performance in the high Parisian hotel, were ones Ducis’s Macbeth may well have prompted Wordsworth to (re)turn to, tragic fictions by Racine and, behind him by many centuries, Virgil. What follows in this reconstructive reading of The Prelude passage is an intertextual fabric that I believe eventually informed crucial moments in The Borderers Wordsworth composed in 1797. Though the voice that cried “Sleep no more!” so theatrically through the whole city was Shakespearean, its pedigree was remarkably classical and neoclassical as well; the voice we think of as Wordsworth’s “own” in The Prelude derived in no small degree from inflections that were, ultimately, French and Latin. One element of that process of descent was doubtless a passage early in Ducis’s Macbeth, when Fre´degonde, already intent on her ouvrage of power and sensing in her agitated warrior-husband’s troubled rivalry with Glamis both an opportunity and an impediment, summons for his ears an elaborate recollection of a harrowingly incendiary moment when brigands invaded Inverness: Oublierais-je qu’ici, (souvenir plein d’horreur!) Des brigands dans la nuit re´pandant la terreur. D’un vaste embrasement, du meurtre & du pillage Par-tout a` mon re´veil je rencontrai l’image. J’e´tais me`re, Macbeth: dans son berceau bruˆlant, Je courus a` la flamme arracher mon enfant. Parmis les cris, les feux, les poignards homicides, Je le serrai tremblant de mes bras intre´pides. Il e´tait temps encore. Mais quand dans ce palais La fuite des brigands euˆt ramene´ la paix, Je songeai, cher Macbeth, que j’e´tais encore me`re; Quand revoyant enfin mon fils & la lumie`re, Lorsque je crus, he´las! au doux son de sa voix, Le faire naıˆtre encore une seconde fois, Dans ce trouble confus de mon aˆme oppresse´e, Glamis vint tout-a`-coup s’offrir a` ma pense´e. (32)

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[Could I forget that memory full of horror! Of brigands in the night spreading their terror. Everywhere, on waking, I met the image Of a vast inferno, murder and robbery. A mother, Macbeth, I ran through the flames To save my infant from his burning cradle. Amid cries, and flames, and murderous daggers I held him trembling in intrepid arms. It was just in time. But when in the palace Flight of the brigands had restored the peace, I dreamed, Macbeth, I was once more a mother; At last beheld again my son and light, Believed, alas! at his soft voice’s sound That I had given him birth a second time. Into this swirl of my oppressed soul, Himself swift offring to my thoughts came Glamis.]

This Lady Macbeth has not only a child but a cradled child at risk and (what may amount to the same thing) a peculiar drive to relive the experience of giving birth in a context of fatal terror. This never-never swerve from anything in the Shakespeare Ducis knew participates in a larger pattern of imperiled children, a pattern that culminates in the dreadful peripety and anagnorisis of Ducis’s final scene, perhaps the bloodiest comeuppance in revolutionary Parisian theater. Fre´degonde’s tendentiously rehearsed memory here conveniently centers attention not only on the prospect of Glamis’s threat to her husband’s pathway to the crown but even more on her attachment to her child, eventually – in her craving for power on his behalf – the one to supplant her remorseful warrior mate. “Le faire naıˆtre encore une seconde fois” (“To give him birth once more: a second time”) – Fre´degonde’s startling claim in Act ii – anticipates the cradled catastrophe of that comeuppance. The cradle itself, so uncannily just offstage in that finale, figures as a theatrical metonym for the parturient maternal body. Parting the fabric of its veils, Fre´degonde plays the horrific role of midwife to her own infanticide, gazing on its contents only to fall under the fatal curse of her ghastly handiwork. Her anagnorisis (“Le ciel, dans sa cole`re, / A massacre´ le fils par le main de sa me`re!” [“Heaven, in its anger, / Has slaughtered the child by the hand of its mother]”) precipitates the destiny hovering fatally in the earlier berceau moments: entranced by its curtains, we think of Glamis’s determined “Fallait-il que Malcoˆme, he´las! a` peine ne´, / Fuˆt sitoˆt, sous vos yeux, au berceau moissonne´?” (“Alas! Was it fate that Malcolm just born / Was killed in the cradle under your eyes?”). The barely offstage cradle as

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birth-giving metonymy serves, then, as a visible effigy not only of earlier deliveries but also of Se´var’s central gift of his note in Duncan’s hand, manually delivered to Macbeth. For some readers, as for some seated in La Re´publique that November 1, Ducis’s romance with the scenes of infancy, both verbal and visual, will have seemed unbearably excessive. For others, however, the burden of those effigy refrains appeals to the long tradition of the French tragic dramaturgy, whose most proximate patron and midwife was, of course, Racine. Despite Fre´degonde’s Merovingian name, she has literary and theatrical forebears closer to home in the coolly trenchant hexameter couplets of Racinian tragedy, with their relentless fixations on royal women fatally driven by passionate attachments of love, desire, and murderous vengeance, in some instances crucially involving the fate of children. Most proximate in this context among Racine’s formidable females are Andromaque and Athalie.27 The Inverness that flames in Fre´degonde’s spectacularly opportune memory-narrative depends most immediately for its poetic and dramaturgic power on effects of situation, diction, and meter first performed on the Parisian stage a century earlier, when Andromaque summoned (for her serving woman Ce´phise) a haunting recollection of the Greeks’ murderous torching and sacking of Troy, led by her subsequent captor and besotted suitor, Pyrrhus: Dois-je les oublier, s’il ne s’en souvient plus? Dois-je oublier Hector prive´ de fune´railles, Et traine´ sans honneur autour de nos murailles? Dois-je oublier son pe`re a` mes pieds renverse´, Ensanglantant l’autel qu’il tenait embrasse´? Songe, songe, Ce´phise, a` cette nuit cruelle Qui fut pour tout un peuple une nuit e´ternelle; Figure-toi Pyrrhus, les yeux e´tincelants, Entrant a` la lueur de nos palais bruˆlants, Sur tous mes fre`res morts se faisant un passage, Et, de sang tout couvert, e´chauffant le carnage. Songe aux cris des vainqueurs, songe aux cris des mourants, Dans la flamme e´touffe´s, sous le fer expirants; Peins-toi dans ces horreurs Andromaque e´perdue: Voila` comme Pyrrhus vint s’offrir a` ma vue; Voila` par quels exploits il sut se couronner; Enfin voila` l’e´poux que tu me veux donner. (iii, viii, 16–33) [Must I forget what he no more recalls? Must I forget, bereft of burial Hector, without honor dragged round our walls?

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Must I forget his father, at my feet, His blood upon the altar he’d embraced? Think, think, Cephisa, of that cruel night, For an entire people eternal night; Picture Pyrrhus to yourself, eyes glittering, The gleam of our burning palace ent’ring, O’er bodies of my brothers making way, Covered all with blood, through broiling carnage. Think of the victors’ cries, the dyings’ screams, In flames choking, perishing by the sword; Think by these horrors Andromaque bewildered, There’s how to my eyes Pyrrhus gave himself; By what exploits he knew to crown himself; And that’s the spouse you wish to give me now.]

At stake for Racine’s Andromaque is the fate of her child Astyanax, bound in her relentless memory as a living effigy of her husband Hector (“Ce fils que de sa flamme il me laissa pour gage” [“the son he left me, token of his fiery passion”]), himself slain and his corpse abused by Pyrrhus’s father Achilles, the boy with Andromaque held hostage and now a pawn in Pyrrhus’s lustful pursuit of his mother. Earlier, Pyrrhus has threatened, should Andromaque refuse him, to surrender Astyanax to the other Greek kings, who wish to do away with the prospect Hector’s heir poses as prince of a resurgent Troy. Now, in an even more brutally coercive move, Pyrrhus swears “le perdre a` vos yeux” (“to slay him before your eyes”). Andromaque’s passionate devotion to her son has the character of self-sacrifice – she soon agrees, with revulsion, to marry Pyrrhus but covertly plans suicide once he vows, in return, Astyanax’s safety – and of a nobility Ducis’s monstrously devoted Fre´degonde so lacks. Here turning again to the trope of Aristotelian anagnorisis helps underscore the force of these intertextual passages.28 It’s the shock effect of that recollected recognition (“Glamis vint tout a` coup s’offrir a` mon pense´e”) punctuating Fre´degonde’s dream-like admonitory narrative – Ducis’s invocation of Racine’s “Voila` comme Pyrrhus vint s’offrir a` ma vue” – that Fre´degonde relies on to goad (herself and) Macbeth to perform her ouvrage of regicide, just as it’s that effect Andromaque relies on to justify (to herself as well as to her handmaid Ce´phise) her initial refusal to surrender to Pyrrhus’s repellent desire. If Andromaque’s discourse about the destruction of Troy participates in the tragic force the plot generates, it’s largely because of its rhetorical charge, as in her thrice-repeated “Voila`.” Bidding her servant to “Songe, songe . . . songe . . . songe . . . / Peins-toi dans ces horreurs Andromaque e´perdue,” she seeks, perhaps

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unconsciously, to give words – and thereby enactive force – to her own inarticulate revulsion. As Leo Bersani argues, “Lying in Racinian tragedy is merely a secondary manifestation of a more general classical conviction: truth is never in language but behind it. French classical language is abstract, decorous, and ornamental; its peculiar resonance is due to the pressure, along its surfaces, of those turbulent feelings which it both masks and points to.”29 Put another way, Racine’s gift to tragedy is to recognize that even the speaker is the susceptible audience of his or her own way with words: such eloquence works as the self-goading instrument of terror. For his audience – and for Wordsworth? – Ducis’s charged curtain spectacle, culminating motifs of berceau and main, among others, woven so assiduously through the text of his tragedy, would have been all the more powerfully (and pleasurably?) disturbing – as it were, an intertextual anagnorisis – as a veiled effigy of Racinian tragedy. Here the text summoned most to mind, even more than Andromaque, is Athalie, Racine’s tour de force through the violent pre-Christian history of Judah and Israel, which Wordsworth had read, probably in 1792, certainly by early 1793. Though it was performed sixteen times in Paris at the The´aˆtre de la Nation (formerly Come´die-Franc¸aise) between 1789 and 1794, none of those was during Wordsworth’s time there.30 The covert plot of the dead (slain?) king’s hidden heir in Ducis’s Macbeth, highlighted retrospectively for the audience in Glamis’ unwitting double entendre (“au berceau moissonne´”) appeals unmistakably to Athalie. Se´var’s fostering of Duncan’s gently harvested infant Malcoˆme invokes for Parisian Macbeth the lurid legend of Joas. Rescued by his aunt Josabet from near slaughter at the merciless hands of his vengeful, heathen-worshipping grandmother Athalie and raised secretly, as the legitimate heir to David’s throne of Judah, by Josabet’s husband Joad, chief priest of the Temple in Jerusalem, he’s now at risk, given returning Athalie’s threatened siege. If Fre´degonde’s charged second-birth dream narrative of the violent invasion of Inverness by brigands led by Glamis chimes with Andromaque’s lament to Ce´phise, it just as forcefully invokes Josabet’s narrative in the first act of Athalie, Racine’s own refashioning, for that tragedy’s biblical context, of the language of invasion. And if the fate of Andromaque’s rescued child Astyanax hangs in the balance and gives desperate urgency to her recollection of the flaming Trojan terror, so does that of Joas, scarred and so nearly reaped by Athalie. In trepidation Josabet recalls for Joad the scene that haunts her memory:

Cradling French Macbeth He´las! l’e´tat horrible ou` le ciel me l’offrit Revient a` tout moment effrayer mon esprit. De princes e´gorge´s la chambre e´tait remplie. Un poignard a` la main, l’implacable Athalie Au carnage animait ses barbares soldats, Et poursuivait le cours de ses assassinats. Joas, laisse´ pour mort, frappa soudain ma vue. Je me figure encor sa nourrice e´perdue, Qui devant les bourreaux s’e´tait jete´e en vain, Et faible le tenait renverse´ sur son sein. Je le pris tout sanglant. En baignant son visage, Mes pleurs du sentiment lui rendirent l’usage; Et soit frayeur encore, ou pour me caresser, De ses bras innocents je me sentis presser. Grand Dieu, que mon amour ne lui soit point funeste. Du fide`le David c’est le pre´cieux reste. Nourri dans ta maison, en l’amour de ta loi, Il ne connaıˆt encor d’autre pe`re que toi. Sur le point d’attaquer une reine homicide, A l’aspect du pe´ril si ma foi s’intimide. Si la chair et le sang, se troublant aujourd’hui, Ont trop de part aux pleurs que je re´pands pour lui, Conserve l’he´ritier de tes saintes promesses, Et ne punis que de moi de toutes mes faiblesses. (i, ii, 241–64) [Alas! that dread state when God to me offered him Returns every moment, daunting my spirit. With slaughtered princes the chamber was filled. Dagger in hand, merciless Athalie Urged her barbarous soldiers to carnage, Pursuing along with her assassination. Left alas! for dead, Joas I suddenly saw. Still can I see his bewildered nurse, who’d Vainly thrown herself in the murderer’s way, And weakly held Joas clasping her breast. I held him all bleeding. Bathing his face, My tears somewhat revived his sense of feeling: Whether in terror, or to caress me, I felt myself held by his innocent arms. Great God, let my love not be for him fatal, Of David’s devotion the precious remains. Nursed in your house, and in love with your law, He still knows no father other than you. About to attack this homicide queen, If facing such danger frightens my faith,

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Cradling French Macbeth If my flesh and blood, so distraught today, Move too much the tears I pour out for him, Save the receiver of your sacred vows: Alone punish me for all of my weakness.]

This self-harrowing account of her rescue of the bleeding child, summoned, as she says, in dread at the prospect of Athalie’s return, evokes in her husband Joad only a resurgence of his priestly trust that in the power of Judah’s God alone lies the answer to such fears. That scarred infant becomes, for his foster-father, an effigy of God’s power. Fre´degonde, “poignard a` la main,” resembles, then, the shade of Josabet’s Athalie now sleepwalking toward her crucial victim Malcoˆme, sacred heir to Duncan’s crown, as Joas was to David’s. In Ducis’s evocation of Racine’s deadly queen, with Joas veiled under Joad’s sacred guard, the grown Malcoˆme, concealed under an arch, watches Fre´degonde’s scabrous pantomime of his own infanticide: he watches the effigy, knowing it spurious. Loclin’s stern address to the awakened Fre´degonde underscores – for her and for the audience – the complex anagnorisis: Va, Malcoˆme est vivant; va, Macbeth m’a remis Ce billet de Duncan; connais, connais son fils!31 [Begone, Malcoˆme lives; Macbeth has given me This note in Duncan’s hand; behold, his son!]

Wordsworth, as noted above, “almost certainly read Racine’s Athalie before returning to England.”32 It’s tempting to imagine that he turned to it in November, in the wake of attending the performance of Ducis’s Macbeth, recognizing on his own Ducis’s debt to Racine – or prompted to do so by some well-read French friend. (He might even have seen a performance of Athalie in Blois or Orleans. He quoted a passage from Athalie in his Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, composed in early 1793 but prudently withheld from publication.) In any case, reading Athalie seems to have coincided with rereading – or dipping back in memory to earlier readings – of Virgil’s Aeneid. Whatever the process of readings and recollections of readings, moments both in his own tragedy, The Borderers, and in his narrative in Book x of his return to Paris, summon scenes of invaded palaces “heaped up with dead and dying.” In that context, what I have called earlier the crucial ur-narrative of The Borderers, the “history of that lamentable night” collaboratively summoned in Act i by Herbert and Matilda, can be recognized also as Wordsworth’s Parisian effigy. Relocated to Antioch, the lines recall, most immediately,

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Fre´degonde’s goading dream narrative to her reluctant spouse in Ducis’s Macbeth and, beyond that, Racine’s neoclassical tragic fictions of Troy and Jerusalem. As with Ducis and Racine, traumatic memories figure as unforgettable: Matilda. But think not, think not, father, I forget The history of that lamentable night When, Antioch blazing to her topmost towers, You rushed into the murderous flames, returned Blind as the grave, but as you oft have told me, You clasped your infant daughter to your heart. Herbert. Thy mother too – scarce had I gained the door – I caught her voice, she threw herself upon me, I felt thy infant brother in her arms, She saw my blasted face – a tide of soldiers That instant rushed between us, and I heard Her last death-shriek, distinct among a thousand. (i, i, 144–55)33

iv Taking a cue from Matilda’s gesture, via Marlowe, toward the land of topless towers, I want now to turn to moments of the still earlier tragic fiction than those of either Ducis or Racine that arguably inform and resonate with their shapings in the passages cited above. That fiction is, of course, Virgil’s Aeneid, which Wordsworth knew well in both Latin and English versions from schooldays in Hawkshead and was also apparently rereading, in France or shortly after his mid-December return to England. More specifically, the fiction is Aeneas’s foundational narrative, in Book ii, of the sacking of the Trojan palace by the Greeks. Of particular note here are resonances not only with The Borderers but also with Wordsworth’s Prelude x account of his return to Paris, “enflamed with hope.”34 If that incendiary image, implying an exuberant expectation that tallies with the opening of so many paradigmatic spots of time in The Prelude, seems casual enough, it also tallies, more significantly, with the master image of Book ii of Virgil’s epic. There fires burn without and within, endangering both the city of Ilium and the capacities of its inhabitants – here especially Aeneas himself – to respond prudently in situations of such peril. Again and again, in fiery states of mind, they plunge recklessly toward self-destructive actings out of vengeful or despairing passion, only to be saved, if at all, by the intervention of protective

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spirits, human or divine. With the opening lines of the Prelude x spot, compare these lines late in Virgil’s second book, as translated by Dryden, when Aeneas narrates an impassioned return: In shining armor once again I sheath My limbs, not feeling wounds, nor fearing death; Then headlong to the burning walls I run, And seek the danger I was forced to shun. I tread my former tracks, through night explore Each passage, every street I crossed before. All things were full of horror and affright, And dreadful e’en the silence of the night. Then to my father’s house I make repair, With some small glimpse of hope to find her there. Instead of her, the cruel Greeks I met: The house was filled with foes, with flames beset. Driven on wings of winds, whole sheets of fire Through air transported, to the roofs aspire.35 (ii, 1018–31)

If Wordsworth’s narrative swerves from this Virgilian model, assuming the posture of the returning partisan tourist feverishly seeking revolutionary sights, the elided context of Aeneas’s narrative – spelled out in an immediately previous passage – would be lost on no reader as “intimate” with Virgil’s epic as he claimed he was in 1822. It’s the return Aeneas risks when he comes to his senses and realizes that his precipitous flight toward the city gates moments earlier, with Anchises on his back, has come at an agonizing price: Some hostile god, for some unknown offense, Had sure bereft my mind of better sense; For, while through winding ways I took my flight, And sought the shelter of the gloomy night, Alas! I lost Creu¨sa: hard to tell If by her fatal destiny she fell, Or weary sat, or wandered with affright; But she was lost forever to my sight. I knew not, or reflected, till I meet My friends at Ceres’ now-deserted seat. (ii, 998–1007)

Coleridge of course, the “Friend” to whom this elision was addressed, as well as Dorothy and, most tellingly, Mary, inmates of the Wordsworth circle, would have seen in the suppressed figure of Creu¨sa haunting The Prelude an unforgettable effigy of Annette Vallon, abandoned and pregnant, slumped down in Orle´ans. They would also have known what follows the precursor “effigy” passage in Virgil, where, as

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Aeneas, “with ungoverned madness, proclaim[s] / Through all the silent streets Creu¨sa’s name,” a grieving spectre appears, to ventriloquize a soothing absolution: Then, with ungoverned madness, I proclaim Through all the silent streets Creu¨sa’s name: Creu¨sa still I call, at length she hears, And sudden through the shades of night appears – Appears, no more Creu¨sa, nor my wife, But a pale spectre, larger than the life. Aghast, astonished, and struck dumb with fear, I stood; like bristles rose my stiffened hair. Then thus the ghost began to soothe my grief: “Nor tears, nor cries, can give the dead relief. Desist, my much-loved lord, to indulge your pain; You bear no more than what the gods ordain. My fates permit me not from hence to fly; Nor he, the great controller of the sky. Long wand’ring ways for you the powers decree: On land, hard labors, and a length of sea. Then, after many painful years are past, On Latium’s happy shore you shall be cast; Where gentle Tiber from his bed beholds The flowery meadows, and the feeding folds. There, end your toils, and there your fates provide A quiet kingdom, and a royal bride. There Fortune shall the Trojan line restore; And you for lost Creu¨sa weep no more.” (ii, 1044–67)

Wordsworth in 1804, looking back not only on the plight of Annette a dozen years earlier but also on what could be called the “peace of Calais” he negotiated with her and nearly ten-year-old Caroline in 1802, found an absolution he apparently needed to assuage whatever guilt remained: his Creu¨sa’s permission to marry Mary Hutchinson and found a Rome at Grasmere.36 If Dryden’s translation ran in Wordsworth’s mind as he composed Book x in 1804, it’s tempting to hear an echo in Creu¨sa’s last phrase of the voice from Macbeth he claimed to have heard “that cried / To the whole city, ‘Sleep no more.’” A perverted version of this effigy appears in The Borderers as the Beggar Woman Rivers suborns to rise up and accuse Herbert of abusing her infant daughter. With Aeneas, of course, no Rivers works villainy behind the scene. Hearing these words from Creu¨sa, however, weeping and wanting to say so many things, he still tries to embrace her:

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Cradling French Macbeth I strove to speak; but horror tied my tongue; And thrice around her neck my arms I flung, And thrice deceived, on vain embraces hung: Light as an empty dream at break of day, Or as a blast of wind, she rushed away. (ii, 1076–80)

One thinks here, again, of the Antioch threshold in The Borderers. I have argued earlier that Ducis’s Fre´degonde, inspired in her creator’s mind by Racine’s precursor queen Athalie, must have been a trouble to Wordsworth’s mind as he sat in the The´aˆtre de la Re´publique on November 1, 1792, and imagined the inflamed violence in the streets of Orle´ans that might in the next months claim the life of a defenseless newborn. If, however, mingling in his imagination along with French Macbeth was also Book ii of the Aeneid, it’s worth suggesting, additionally, that some of the most striking – and otherwise inexplicable – lines from the Prelude narrative of Wordsworth’s return to Paris, may also take their inspiration from Virgil. The fear gone by Pressed on me almost like a fear to come. I thought of those September massacres, Divided from me by a little month, And felt and touched them, a substantial dread (The rest was conjured up from tragic fictions And mournful calendars of true history, Remembrances and dim admonishments): “The horse is taught his manage, and the wind Of heaven wheels round and treads in his own steps; Year follows year, the tide returns again, Day follows day, all things have second birth; The earthquake is not satisfied at once.” And in such way I wrought upon myself, Until I seemed to hear a voice that cried (x, 62–77) To the whole city, “Sleep no more!”

That horse image has its immediate aptness in a Parisian revolutionary context: the delegates to the newly formed Convention governing the infant French Republic met in an equestrian training hall known as the Salle de Mane`ge. But these apocalyptic lines, framing what Wordsworth chose in 1804 to recall from the turmoil of those early Republican days in November 1792, reach out to a different equine context, again from Aeneas’s Book ii narrative, when the Trojans make the fatal move to bring the Greeks’ gift within their walls:

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Some hoisting-levers, some the wheels prepare, And fasten to the horse’s feet: the rest With cables haul along the unwieldy beast. Each on his fellow for assistance calls: At length, the fatal fabric mounts the walls, Big with destruction. Boys with chaplets crowned, And choirs of virgins, sing and dance around. Thus raised aloft, and then descending down, It enters o’er our heads, and threats the town. O sacred city, built by hands divine! O valiant heroes of the Trojan line! Four times he struck: as oft the clashing sound Of arms was heard, and inward groans rebound. Yet mad with zeal, and blinded with our fate, We haul along the horse in solemn state; Then place the dire portent within the tower. Cassandra cried, and cursed the unhappy hour; Foretold our fate; but, by the god’s decree, All heard, and none believed the prophecy. With branches we the fanes adorn, and waste In jollity the day ordained to be the last. Meantime the rapid heavens rolled down the light, And on the shaded ocean rushed the night: Our men, secure, nor guards nor sentries held; But easy sleep their weary limbs compelled.37 (307–31)

To readers long schooled in twentieth-century constructions of Romantic ideologies, it will seem counter-intuitive to discern in The Borderers such influences from artists of English and French neoclassicism as Dryden and Racine. All things, it could be said, in literary works, including drama, have second birth. But in dramatic performance, on the page or on the stage, as Joseph Roach has so suggestively argued, second birth inevitably entails what he calls surrogation, the uncanny production, through remembering and forgetting, of invented forms that obscure their origins.38 If the sorts of intertextual dynamics I have argued are of consequence for imagining the work called The Borderers in something like its context as a Wordsworthian as well as a potentially public performance in the mid and late 1790s, what, then, is the significance of French Macbeth? If it makes sense to imagine, as I have, Wordsworth in the audience at the The´aˆtre de la Re´publique on November 1, 1792, then aspects of stage performance as well as textual residue invite consideration. It’s one thing to claim that a well-read Parisian theatergoer would be attuned to Ducis’s intertextuality with works by Racine – and shaped by Racine’s own creative involvement

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with Greek tragedy – and quite another to argue that such effects would have been, had The Borderers played at Covent Garden, a significant aspect of the performance for a London audience in 1798. To the extent that Racine – and Virgil – matter in the ways I have argued, Wordsworth’s recollection of an evening of Macbeth at La Re´publique, as that recollection figures in his composition of The Borderers in 1796–97 and subsequently in his composition of Book x of The Prelude (and of Book ix’s Vaudracour and Julia narrative) in 1804, his relationship with Annette Vallon, and his abandonment of her, remain private, out of the ken of a Covent Garden evening as it might have been played. His disavowal late in life of having had “any view to its exhibition upon the stage” notwithstanding, it’s impossible to imagine the composition of The Borderers outside the context of the London and Paris stages – and the public culture of drama as it figured in the 1790s in England. Michael Simpson has most substantially argued the case for seeing drama as “fixated in early nineteenth-century England . . . because it has already been used and understood, in the extreme form of Shakespeare, as an instrument for asserting and for focusing the existence of a national public.” The imperative motivating such an instrumentality for drama, Simpson contends, is what he calls “the figure of France,” for “an imperial competition with France is a precondition of national identity rather than the other way around.”39 That Covent Garden refused The Borderers in 1798 must be seen, I would argue, at least partly in that context. Judgments about the aesthetic – or commercial – viability of plays offered to the patent theaters in England in the 1790s inevitably involved estimates of where they stood with regard to nationalistic ideology. In this regard, the influence on The Borderers of Ducis’s “imitation” of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, whether or not palpably sensed by a manager of London theater such as Thomas Harris, would have been felt as a dangerous swerve from the icon of national legibility that Shakespeare, under the influence of eighteenth-century British editors and stage managers, had so formidably become. “It is impossible,” Harris declared, that Wordsworth’s tragedy, “should succeed in the representation,” a judgment he hardly needed to have seconded by the censoring powers invested in John Larpent, the Lord Chamberlain.40 The problem with Wordsworth’s Shakespeare, as manifested in The Borderers, was its cross-Channel cultural politics. The diseased French “process” that Wordsworth in 1842, from the seniority of his Tory conservatism, represented himself in 1791–92 as disinterestedly “witnessing” would have called for rooting out – what one might call deracination.

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The genealogy of performance I would propose for the unperformed Borderers, then, derives less from Ducis’s profound admiration for Racine, as expressed in his inaugural Discours before the French Academy in 1779, than from his career-saving liaison with Franc¸ois-Joseph Talma, the sensational young actor who, as Macbeth, starred in the first major success of the rebel secessionist troupe he had led away from the Come´dieFranc¸aise in 1791. The paradox of Ducis’s linkage with Talma cannot be stressed enough in trying to comprehend the effect Macbeth would have had on the sensibilities of a young English republican enthusiast in November 1792. In the history of the French stage in the eighteenth century Talma himself looms as a major force for surrogation, and in this context he himself figures as an effigy of the actor who, more than any other in the long enlightenment history of the English stage, reinvented the performance of [Shakespearean] tragedy, David Garrick.

chapter 3

“In some sort seeing with my proper eyes”: Wordsworth and the spectacles of Paris

If it’s plausible Wordsworth was in the audience on November 1, 1792, at the The´aˆtre de la Re´publique’s final performance of Macbeth, is it likely he would have missed the much anticipated premie`re performance later that month, on the evening of November 26, at the same theater, of Ducis’s Othello? (Like Macbeth, the play had been originally accepted, in 1788, by the Come´dieFranc¸aise.) In the title role – again – was Talma, whose meteoric career, like that of his older friend the painter David, in many ways should be read through Revolutionary spectacles. Six weeks after the mid-October Dumouriez evening at the Talmas and Marat’s alarming attack in the Journal de la Re´publique, the notably anti-aristocrat, pro-republican adaptation of Othello may have served as a piece of timely Revolutionary rhetoric by Talma’s acting company at the Re´publique. Given the continuing ascendancy of Robespierre’s Jacobin politics, it would have manifested the republican bona fides not only of the author and the leading actor but also, perhaps, of General Dumouriez himself, as one might imagine him reflected in the military heroics of Ducis’s Othello.1 For a young English republican much attuned to the politics of the day, publicity in mid-November surrounding the potentially controversial political aspects of French Othello may well have drawn him all the more to that Re´publique opening.2 Salient in my imagining of this further evening of Parisian Shakespeare for Wordsworth in November 1792 are three extraordinary aspects of Ducis’s Othello. The first is his deliberate reduction of Iago to a villain whose sinister and pervasive agency is disclosed to the audience only in the final scene, a drastic suppression Ducis justified as necessary lest the spectators be distracted from the drama of sensibility played out between his Desdemona and Othello.3 As Ducis said of this figure, in his 1793 preface to the play, I have even thought that, if the audience had been able, in the course of the tragedy, even to suspect him, through his mask, of being the most villainous of men, since he is the most treacherous of friends, it would have destroyed the whole work, and that the predominant impression of horror that he would have 62

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inspired would certainly have deadened the interest and the compassion that I wished to call forth on Othello’s lover and on this brave and wretched African. Thus it is with a very determined purpose – in order not to revolt them – that I have carefully hidden this atrocious character from my audience.4

For Ducis in autumn 1792, Othello without Iago might well have been a safer Revolutionary play: as Lynn Hunt has argued, Revolutionary belief in the possibility and desirability of absolute “‘transparency’ between citizen and citizen” was paradoxically – though inevitably – accompanied by a “systematic and obsessive preoccupation” with conspiracy that “pervaded every aspect of public political life” in Revolutionary Paris.5 It might not have been prudent, given the volatility of Parisian theater audiences during the period, to have inflicted a representation of such sustained and pernicious treachery as Iago’s on audiences so prone to political paranoia, among whom might be Jacobins wary of, and watchful for, Gironde moderation. Suppressing Iago’s treachery as a pervasive dynamic of the tragedy is linked with a second striking shift in Ducis’s adaptation, his corresponding elevation of Desdemona’s struggle with Brabantio to the central and continuing complication of the plot. In Ducis’s altered Othello, though Brabantio doesn’t know it, the Moor and Desdemona are not yet married, and her aristocrat father’s vehement opposition to that consummation defines and dominates the action throughout, leaving her in an unresolvable (and, for Ducis, tragic) conflict of loyalties and passions, a conflict given fierce political edge when the Venetian Senate construes her father’s apoplectic hostility to Othello as madness endangering the republic.6 The heroine’s vulnerability is figured in her passionate, pitying loyalty to her father, whom she then moves to save from imminent political selfdestruction by sacrificing herself, in a betrothal he demands, to the Duke’s son. Her confused rejection of the Othello she professes to love plays into Iago’s hands and reduces Othello to a murderously jealous passion. The third – and in some ways the most intriguing – modification in Ducis’s Othello is the ghostly presence of the mother, whose dying prophecy years before to her daughter (“Tu mourras malheureuse!”) Desdemona reveals in a melancholy narrative to her confidante Emilia. The words haunt Desdemona’s memory as a curse about to be fulfilled in the tragic circumstances of her conflict between lover and father. It goes without saying that there is no hint of such a figure in Shakespeare; but she does have affinities with the female Beggar in The Borderers, who, suborned by Rivers, impersonates Matilda’s mother and who, as I have argued, figures as a ghostly reincarnation of the real mother who perished,

Figure 3 Talma as Othello, Mme. Desgarcins as Hedelmone in the opening of the final scene.

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shrieking, at Antioch, and whose subsequent absence defines the context in which Herbert’s possessiveness of his daughter borders on tyranny.7 If, measured against Shakespeare’s, Ducis’s Othello – like his Macbeth – seems a much altered and somewhat impoverished tragedy, it is nevertheless of moment as a text in the theater of the times, where the interests of an age of sensibility and the interests of uneasy republicanism converge.8 Indeed, Talma’s production of Ducis’s tragedy at the The´aˆtre de la Re´publique was the focus of a good deal of attention, some of it anticipatory in the press, and, if Wordsworth saw or knew of it, he may well have found, in the desperate triangulation of father, daughter, and lover, a model for the central action of his own tragedy, The Borderers – a model nowhere in Shakespeare’s Othello, Macbeth, or The Tempest, on which Wordsworth drew substantially, nor in other works, with the possible exception of Pericles, frequently cited as contributing in major ways to the shape of his drama, such as Schiller’s The Robbers (even in the French versions by Bonneville or LaMartelie`re discussed below), and Godwin’s Caleb Williams. One detail of Ducis’s plot, a letter Desdemona’s father forces her blindly to sign, renouncing her love for Othello, a letter the Iago-figure (Pe´zare) obtains, anticipates the letter from Matilda that figures in The Borderers, conveying her acquiescence to Herbert’s opposition to her marrying Mortimer. It’s that letter Rivers, the go-between, has handed to Mortimer in the play’s opening scene. Though I prefer the fiction that would place Wordsworth in the audience at the The´aˆtre de la Re´publique, for my purposes it is enough to say that Ducis’s version provides a telling work against which to read The Borderers as a response to the Revolution he had, as he said looking back in 1842, witnessed.9 It’s in the context of two other spectacles onstage in Paris in late 1792 that I want to return to the end of The Borderers as discussed in Chapter 1 and to Mortimer’s self-inflicted “doom”: wandering “compelled to live, / Yet loathing life, till heaven in mercy strike me / With blank forgetfulness – that I may die” (v, iii, 273–75). Forgetfulness, that significant topos in The Borderers, constitutes a possibly heuristic, though tragic, resistance to the bondage of narrative, which depends on memory. Herbert’s Antioch tale builds in Matilda a commemorative shrine that imprisons her sensibility. So Mortimer’s forgetting to leave Herbert the scrip of food when he abandons him on the heath to an ordeal at the hands of a potentially merciful “Providence” can be read as his resistance to the perverse bondage of the father’s narrative. Mortimer’s final doom sounds then an ironic echo of his earlier outcry when suddenly, with Matilda, he recalled that slip of the scrip: “Mercy of Heaven!”

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But Mortimer’s final words, that “heaven in mercy strike me / With blank forgetfulness – that I may die,” resonate most tellingly with his earlier guilt-ridden attempt mercifully to strike Matilda down – and thus end her misery – by a single, theatrical blow of succinct narrative, his confessional tale (in the passionate formation of his remorse crucially and deliberately exaggerating his agency in Herbert’s death) “I am thy father’s murderer.”10 The words of that tale themselves echo the introit of Rivers’s own confession to Mortimer in Act iv: “I am a murderer.” Mortimer’s desperate, theatrical attempt at narrative euthanasia – to inflict on Matilda a vocal coup de graˆce and thus spare her from suffering the living death of loving the man responsible for her father’s death – fails, though there is a brief space when he (erroneously) imagines it has succeeded (“Three words have such a power! This mighty burden / All off at once! ’Tis done, and so done too, / That I have cased her heart in adamant” [276]). The failure of that tale-telling blow prepares the way for the bleak resolve of his final doom and its repudiation of all narrative, of all voice, and for the irony of heaven’s merciful coup, delivering now not unbearable knowledge, but forgetfulness. The ending of Wordsworth’s play refuses the theatricality of Revolutionary spectacle and with it the politics and poetics of transparent, “readable” heroism that are the staple of such spectacle. Mona Ozouf argues, in her discussion of Revolutionary f ˆetes, that the very readability of such orchestrated festivals, their propagandistic intent to fix a commemorative pedagogy, entailed a denial and subversion of the Revolution as an ongoing political process. Its installation of Revolutionary heroism (and Revolutionary martyrdom – the public burial of Marat being a clear case in point) depended on a denial, a suppression, of the memory of the very complexities and peripeties of political process that fuelled the Revolution in every phase of its course.11 The more specific context I wish to invoke, however, is not the spectacle of Revolutionary feˆtes but that of Revolutionary spectacles, and especially of two French versions of a single play long supposed by readers of The Borderers to have influenced Wordsworth’s composition. The play is Friedrich Schiller’s tragedy Die Ra¨uber, first translated into English (as The Robbers) by Alexander Tytler in 1792. Mortimer’s failed euthanasia against Matilda and his final doom constitute a rewriting of the spectacular catastrophe of that play, a moment that stages Sturm und Drang heroism in a transparent coalescence of action and eloquence. In pursuing the French Revolutionary link between Mortimer’s coup – or failed coup – and Charles Moor’s climactic coup de the´aˆtre in Schiller,

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I want to go backward in time to the text that introduced Schiller to a British audience and, incidentally, inspired Tytler’s translation, a lecture delivered in April 1788 to the Royal Society of Edinburgh (itself no Revolutionary venue) by Henry Mackenzie, the man of feeling, and subsequently published and excerpted in 1790 under the unspectacular title “Account of the German Theater.”12 Mackenzie’s survey of recent German plays culminates in an extended celebratory re´sume´ of the end of Schiller’s tragedy. For Mackenzie, the heroics of Charles Moor’s captainship resides in the perfect identity of action and eloquence; likewise, the heroics of Schiller’s authorship authorizes the daring of the Scotsman critic/impresario in prizing the young German’s happy disregard of manners and regularity: [A]midst the cloistered ignorance incident to his situation, his genius, by its own native warmth and vigour, produced this wonderful drama, which shews indeed, as might be expected, a certain want of acquaintance with the manners, as well as a total disregard of dramatic regularity, but in which the author, fortunate, if we dare say so, in these defects, has drawn from the sources of an ardent and creative imagination, characters and situations of the most interesting and impressive kind, and has endowed those characters with a language in the highest degree eloquent, impassioned and sublime. (pp. 180–81)

For Mackenzie, then, strength of dramatic effect is bound up with outlaw strength of character. Schiller’s strength flashes out in the forcefulness of such situations as when, remorsefully contemplating suicide in the fourth act, “Moor remains alone, and walks to and fro, like the sovereign spirit of the night, revolving in his troubled, but daring soul, this world and the next”: His soliloquy is of that sublime and broken sort which expresses the agitation of a great but erring mind, yielding to remorse for crimes which have stained his life, but not corrupted his soul, and left him, amidst the outrages of violence and vice, the sentiments and the sufferings of virtue and of feeling. (p. 186)

The grandness of Mackenzie’s Schiller, epitomizing such heroics, culminates in what he calls the “barbarous heroism” of Moor’s dreadful Act V coup. The robber captain, on returning to his homeland from self-imposed exile, has released from a dungeon the wraith-like figure of his famished father, whose earlier curse, itself prompted by the lying treachery of Moor’s brother, had driven Moor into his criminal career. But remorse over past atrocities committed by him and his robber band prevents him from easy reunion with his father and his former bride-to-be, Amelia. As Mackenzie’s summary runs,

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Moor bids them check the expectation of happiness, and look only for desperation and horror. “Your paternal curse, says he, consigned me to perdition. These men you see are robbers – murderers – your son is their chief.” The exhausted strength of the old man cannot stand the shock; he expires in the arms of his son. His mistress still survives; and though dumb with terror and grief, folds him in her arms, and shews the most ardent affection for her Charles. Warm in his love, as in every other feeling, Moor had doated on her to distraction; he forgets himself in her embraces, and for a moment thinks he will live and be happy with his Amelia. (p. 190)

Seeing him on the verge of abandoning his chiefdom to a woman’s arms, thereby repudiating his vow to lead them forever, his band intervenes, “leveling their pieces at his head.” But, in Mackenzie’s words, “his soul is too proud to yield to threats. You are murderers, says he, and I am your chief. Down with these arms and know your master.” When the awed bandits lower their rifles, Moor then astounds them (and Mackenzie’s putative audience) by “plung[ing] his sword into the bosom of Amelia”: Struck with the barbarous heroism of the deed, his associates fall at his feet, acknowledge his unparalleled fidelity, and vow to be his slaves forever. “No,” says he, with a determined and petrifying calmness; “the destiny of Moor is accomplished. Thus far it was in human power to go, and thus far he has gone; but here his course is closed, and his genius cries out, ‘All is consummated.’” (pp. 190–91)13

Worth noting here is the coincidence of strikings: Amelia literally by Moor’s phallic sword, the robbers in awe by the horror of his deed, and Mackenzie (and his audience) by Schiller’s staging of this Gothic parody of marital consummation, with its blasphemous overtone of a self-sacrificial “consummatum est.” Just as Moor’s band fall enslaved at his feet, Mackenzie acknowledges the play’s “power over the heart and imagination,” citing an anecdote of the “scholars at the school of Fribourg . . . so struck and captivated with the grandeur of the character of its hero Moor, that they agreed to form a band like his in the forests of Bohemia . . .” (p. 191). If Mackenzie’s anecdote displaces the binding effect of the play’s power onto the scholars, thereby hinting his own superior, more detached witness, that implication is cast into doubt by the very frequency with which he resorts to the language of “power” to designate dramatic effect.14 Though Mackenzie earlier contends that he prizes in the German drama not “striking incidents, or . . . coups de the´aˆtre,” but “a minute development of feeling and sensibility; a refinement and eloquence of sentiment which one would imagine the bulk of the people could neither understand nor admire” (pp. 164–65), the romance in his own narrative with outbursts of force suggests how tenuous in practice the hierarchical

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opposition between coups and such tableaus of sensibility could be. At the heart of his aristocrat notion of Schiller’s dramatic genius lies his proclivity for highly charged stage situations that will have overwhelming effects on characters, audience, and readers alike, situations whose horrific force will result in them being “astonished,” “enslaved,” “captivated,” (and – one might add – feminized): If his genius can accommodate itself to better subjects, and to a more regular conduct of the drama, no modern poet seems to possess powers so capable of bending the mind before him, of rousing its feelings by the elevation of sentiments, or of thrilling them with the terrors of his imagination. (p. 192)

If Mackenzie is wary of the effects of such power on others – the Fribourg scholars, mythic heirs to the Geneva citizenry Rousseau imagined imperiled by theater and forefathers of television’s progeny – it is also clear that he himself most cherishes just such moments of ravishing intensity when reader and audience become so many rapt Amelias. It’s precisely such moments, and the theater fabricated upon them, that Wordsworth’s The Borderers repudiates. Mackenzie’s impresario account of Schiller confirms Joseph Donohue’s thesis that romantic tragedy in England generally prizes a dramaturgy of “character” centering on the audience’s sentimental identification with the viciousness of the protagonist at the expense of a more “balanced” and complicated concern with “the framework of a moral order in Shakespeare’s plays, within which a character’s speech and actions are made relevant to objective standards of good and evil.”15 Moor’s coup – the horrific “triumph” of plunging his sword into the bosom of Amelia – suffers, we might say, from transparent, sentimental readability: beyond the shock one might imagine in an audience at the hero’s murder of the heroine, there is much to admire but little to ponder in its emblematizing of Moor’s conflict, articulated in his defiance of his band just before stabbing Amelia: “There! what are you now, but children, and I – am free! – Moor must be free, in order to be great!” Schiller’s theatrical power is in contriving a “situation” (with its attendant visual configurations, stipulated in such stage directions as “encircling her waist with his arm” and “he places Amelia, who is almost insensible, on a stone”) to represent the conflict and to figure forth – and exalt – a moment of sublime destructiveness in the pursuit of heroic freedom.16 Mackenzie’s Moor, again: Call not that madness of which your souls want strength to see the grandeur. The greatness of despair is above the ken of wisdom. On actions such as these, reflection must follow, not wisdom pause. (p. 190)

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Mackenzie’s narrative representation of Schiller expresses no more than one might expect from a theater-going man of feeling in late eighteenthcentury Britain. But he himself knew no German: the plays he surveyed were French translations published in twelve volumes that appeared in Paris between 1782 and 1785 under the title Nouveau The´aˆtre Allemand. Die Ra¨uber appeared in the last volume as Les Voleurs, translated closely from Schiller’s stage version by Nicholas de Bonneville. That edition was the salient occasion in the 1770s and 1780s of a mounting German challenge to the aristocratic classicism of the French stage: bound up with the aesthetic terms of the critical arguments waged on both sides were broader issues of cultural and political ideology viewed by theater historians as a prelude to the French Revolution.17 No other play (not even Goethe’s Goetz von Berlichingen, also in the collection) drew more attention or was more controversially received by ancien re´gime readers. “Its dreadful success is well worthy of the play,” claimed one reviewer. “There are strokes of energy that rend you, while the manner of the play repels you” (“Il y a des traits d’e´nergie qui vous arrachent tandis que le genre de l’ouvrage vous repousse”).18 In 1788 L’Anne´e litte´raire “proclaimed the play ‘truly extraordinary, no taste, frightful tableaus, but sublime scenes’” (“vraiment extraordinaire; point du gouˆt, des tableaux affreux, mais des sce`nes sublimes”). Full of contradictions, the hero Moor is “astonishing, by turns righteous and villainous, barbarous and compassionate” (“e´tonnant, tour a` tour juste et sce´le´rat, barbare et compatissant”). “Performance of this tragedy,” concludes the reviewer, “would be very dangerous, but it announces a noble genius” (“la repre´sentation de cette Trage´die doit etre tre`s-dangereux; mais elle annonce un beau ge´nie”).19 But though published and widely discussed, Les Voleurs was never performed, before or during the Revolution: not surprising, given the strict licensing policies of ancien re´gime theater and reviewers’ fears that its effects might be incendiary (“dangereux”), and given the likelihood, even after the liberation of theaters from licensing controls in January 1791, that staging a tragedy with a hero so morally problematic as Schiller’s (and Bonneville’s) Moor might have played into counter-Revolutionary hands. Nevertheless, one French theater historian, tracing the reception of published translations of Goetz von Berlichingen and Die Ra¨uber, concludes that “a marvelous accord was established between the heroes of Goethe and Schiller and the young people of the Revolutionary epoch.”20 Among those young men, doubtless, was Schiller’s translator, Nicholas de Bonneville, whose career figures substantially in two overlapping

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studies of the early intellectual milieu of Revolutionary Paris, David Erdman’s Commerce des Lumie`res and Gary Kates’s The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French Revolution.21 Briefly sketching Bonneville’s early career will align it with the spectacles of Paris I imagine informing Wordsworth’s construction of the Revolution. He was a young Rouenese writer and aspiring philosophe, a student of D’Alembert who immersed himself in Rousseau22 in the early 1780s and who after translating Schiller spent time in London in 1786 and 1787, where, like Brissot, he formed friendships23 with such English “radicals” as Horne Tooke and David Williams, and participated in freemasonry. In the weeks before the fall of the Bastille, he played a crucial role in Paris as a political journalist and, briefly, as an electoral activist, arguing for a complete reorganization of political institutions around the Third Estate, “which [he argued] really is the whole nation in its entirety and the sole legislative authority [and which] creates or deposes officials and kings as it pleases.” He participated in forming the group of moderate, activist intellectuals that became the Cercle Social. From 1791 to 1793 he edited, with Brissot, and others, the Chronique du mois, which Kates has called the “paramount” journal espousing Girondin ideas, and was one of the founders of “the most prominent Gironde publishing company,” a central figure in “the Girondins’ most enduring attempt to develop a discourse that claimed to speak for the nation.”24 It’s hard to imagine a Revolutionary figure whose philosophical, cultural, and political orientation – whose ideology – would have been more proximate to Wordsworth’s than Bonneville. There is no evidence that Bonneville, translator of Les Voleurs, was among the Girondists Wordsworth met in Paris; but for readers of the 1842 text of The Borderers – the one Wordsworth did finally publish, with its renamed villain and the note pointing to the Revolution as its generating context – it’s worth adding that Bonneville’s close editorial associate and sometime foreign correspondent was the fiery, eloquent Englishman David Erdman wrote back into history, Colonel John Oswald. Schiller’s Die Ra¨uber did reach the Paris stage, however, but through the hands of a different translator, Jean Henri Ferdinand LaMartelie`re, whose “imitation” of the German source, Robert, chef de brigands, seemed more like a mutilation – at least to the eyes and ears of reviewers who knew Bonneville’s Les Voleurs.25 Yet it was performed more times – at the The´aˆtre du Marais – and had a popular success arguably greater than that of any other play staged during the weeks of Wordsworth’s return to Paris. For many contemporary reviewers and for many subsequent theater historians, no other play of the time seemed more to epitomize the

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tendencies of Revolutionary theater – or even of the Revolution itself – than LaMartelie`re’s melodramatic Robert. Judged “aesthetically” against the more strenuous energies and passions of Schiller’s Die Ra¨uber, Robert is enfeebled and sentimentalized. Nonetheless, during the early months of its long career on the stage in the 1790s, it came to have an uncannily specular relation to the spectre of regicide that, after the uprising at the Tuilleries on August 10, 1792, figured so crucially in the increasingly factional republican politics of the Revolution. In the words of the most astute scholar of the play, Edmond Eggli, LaMartelie`re’s melodrama “played two or three times a week on a major Parisian stage and on provincial stages, contributed certainly to familiarize the citizens’ minds with the idea of the condemnation of the king and with the institution of a Revolutionary tribunal.”26 This was, indeed, rehearsing the Revolution. The very shift from “voleurs” to “brigands” is ideologically laden: few other terms exemplify so fully as “brigand” Lynn Hunt’s contentions about the climate of political paranoia and the obsession with the opposed possibilities of transparent civic virtue and treacherous conspiracy that were the context of so much of the phrasing of Revolutionary slogans.27 At stake rhetorically in the figure of the “brigand” were the fundamentally volatile issues of the Revolution itself: criminality, law, justice, liberty, betrayal, legitimacy, judgment. Georges LeFevebre has emphasized how much the Grand Peur of 1789 depended on the proliferation of rumor: “tales of brigands” marauding the countryside were the narrative seedbed of what became a collective paranoia about the Revolution, linked with the obsession with conspiracy that came to dominate Parisian politics.28 At the center of that popular paranoia was the uncertain likeness of the brigand, his criminality masked by his guise as pedlar, wanderer, beggar, gypsy, and vagrant, the legioned itinerants that were the inevitable by-products of the economic instability and dislocation of the last decades of Bourbon rule in France. When Robert, chef de brigands was first performed, at Beaumarchais’ The´aˆtre du Marais, in March 1792, the royalist Journal de la Cour et de la Ville (whose political coverage at the time ran to uneasy, strident denunciations of “les brigands jacobins et autres sce´le´rats” in the region of Marseilles) attacked the play as “a school for brigandage” and “a perpetual apology for brigandage,” and assumed it had been staged “by order” as part of a political conspiracy to win support in the Legislative Assembly for a notorious recent amnesty for the “brigands d’Avignon.”29 At the other end of the spectrum, the vituperative Revolutions de Paris protested the remorse of the hero Robert “as if he had committed the very atrocities

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that, in the absence of laws, he had just punished . . . the morality of this play seems to be to slander indirectly and stigmatize the authors of the Revolution . . . to blame the Revolution, & to furnish the aristocrats with a pretext for regarding the people as a horde of brigands” (“comme s’il avoit commis les atrocite´s qu’il vient de punir au de´faut des loix . . . la moralite´ de cette pie`ce semble eˆtre de calomnier indirectement et de fleˆtrir les auteurs de la re´volution franc¸aise . . . c’est blamer la re´volution, & fournir un pre´texte aux aristocrats de regarder le peuple comme une horde de brigands”).30 But moderate Gironde reviewers in the Journal de Paris and the Journal des The´aˆtres offered the most succinct ideological critique of Robert, pointedly charting its departures from (Bonneville’s) Les Voleurs. If Schiller’s work was “monstrous” it had nonetheless a moral effect: “to evoke a profound horror for crime.” Robert’s hero, by contrast, is “a tyrannicide, an avenger of oppression, a new successor to Hercules. He has set up his assassinations as acts of republican virtue, his principles of destruction into laws, his ferocious accomplices into protectors of the weak against the strong” (“Robert est un tyrannicide, un vengeur d’oppression, un nouveau successeur d’Hercule. Il a e´rige´ ses assassinats en vertus re´publicaines, ses principes de destruction, en loix, ses fe´roces complices en protecteurs du foible contre le fort”).31 It’s the political enshrining of an outlaw morality, in other words, and the spectre of tyrannicide that seem not only to pervert Schiller’s morality but to threaten the social fabric: Robert’s troupe recalls “that secret tribunal which existed in Germany and whose unknown members committed to daggers and poison those it pleased them to suppose the law ought to have decapitated.” “Who would believe,” asked the reviewer, “that the maxims of liberty, poisoned in the mouth of the satellites of Robert, were loudly applauded by a number of spectators?” (“sa troupe donne une ide´e de ce tribunal secret qui a existe´ en Allemagne, et dont les membres inconnus, de´vouoient au fer at au poison ceux dont il leur plaisoit de supposer que la loi auroit duˆ frapper la teˆte . . . Qui croiroit que les maximes de la liberte, empoisonne´es dans la bouche des satellites de Robert, ont e´te´ hautement applaudies par un nombre de spectateurs?”).32 For the Journal de Paris, this is “the heroism of brigands. Such examples can give rise to dangerous applications” (“C’est l’he´roisme des Brigands. De tels exemples peuvent donner lieu a` des applications dangereuses”).33 From their post-Terror hindsight of 1802, the two most influential moderate historians of the day, seeing the aim of Robert to prove the justice and necessity of such a Revolutionary tribunal as the Jacobin Committee of Public Safety, inferred a link between the brigands of Robert and the judges of the

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September massacres at the Conciergerie, all true assassins: “We don’t hesitate to regard the representation of this play as one of the causes which destroyed in the people all sentiment of humanity and . . . drove a mob of distracted men toward crime and brought not a single one back onto the path of virtue” (“Nous n’he´sitons pas a` regarder la repre´sentation de cet ouvrage comme l’une des causes qui ont de´truit dans le peuple tout sentiment d’humanite´ et . . . a pousse´ une foule des hommes e´gare´s vers le crime et . . . n’en a pas ramene´ un seul dans le sentier de la vertu”).34 Robert was performed as many as five or six times during Wordsworth’s stay in Paris in November and December 1792, alternating with LaMartelie`re’s even more controversial sequel, Le Tribunal redoutable.35 In the same month that the deposed king was examined before the National Convention prior to the January trial and execution, Le Tribunal redoutable was denounced as royalist by the Faubourg St. Antoine orator Clement Gonchon in a challenge from the audience that apparently led to a summons for the author to appear before the Jacobin Committee of Surveillance and perhaps prompted a subsequent change of title (to Robert re´publicain).36 The prominence in both these plays of the banditvigilantes who establish themselves as a judicial tribunal pursuing an idealized agenda against tyranny and social injustice points, I think, directly to the plausibility of their influence on Wordsworth, whose borderers have a similar agenda and – crucial to his dramaturgy – display similar enthusiasm for the structures and trappings of institutionalized but summary judicial process. Schiller’s robbers – as Wordsworth would have known them in Tytler’s translation – reflect no such idealizing ethos.37 In LaMartelie`re’s most striking Revolutionary departure from Die Ra¨uber (and from Bonneville’s Les Voleurs), Robert chef de brigands suppresses Moor’s coup at the end: the very blow Mackenzie found the most sublime moment in the new German theater, when Moor’s monstrosity reached its spectacular consummation in the bosom of Amelia, was written out in a sentimental effort to make heroic brigandage safe for Girondin revolution. Robert becomes the virtuous, judicial outlaw, the idealized vigilante, who as such receives a pardon from the Emperor-ex-machina, unites with his Sophie, and, at the end, by his example pedagogically transforms his robber band into deputized guardians of the law under what amounts to a constitutional monarchy.38 It’s that idealized vigilante readers have made of Wordsworth’s Mortimer, fundamentally misapprehending the dramaturgy of The Borderers, and it’s that idealized, sentimentalized heroism I want to link with the spectral

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heroism, in Book x of The Prelude, of the notably Wordsworthian Jean-Baptiste Louvet (historically, likewise an associate of Bonneville), who figures as an embodiment of vocal heroics in the spectacular (and sentimental) politics of the Revolution. Louvet’s challenge to the defiant tyranny a bold Robespierre claimed to wield in the Convention figures in the narrative of The Prelude as a moment of mythic, singular heroism: the day When Robespierre, well known for what mark Some words of indirect reproof had been Intended, rose in hardihood, and dared The man who had ill surmise of him To bring his charge in openness. Whereat, When a dead pause ensued and no one stirred, In silence of all present, from his seat Louvet walked singly through the avenue And took his station in the Tribune, saying, “I, Robespierre, accuse thee!” ’Tis well known What was the issue of that charge, and how Louvet was left alone without support (x: 90–103) Of his irresolute friends

Robespierre sought to dominate the stage in the theater of the Convention; the moment is one of reducing the other citoyen-delegates to the passivity of spectators, to deny them their roles as actors in the republic. Louvet resisted by attempting a coup de the´aˆtre (“an unforeseen incident that occurs in action and suddenly changes the state of the characters,” according to Diderot), or so Wordsworth’s narrative has it.39 Louvet’s not exactly impromptu speech, delivered October 29, 1792, crystallized momentarily the spectacular politics of the Convention: the trope of spectacle here is denunciation of tyranny. Wordsworth’s fascinating narrative move is in fact at one remove: though biographers have guessed he attended, the previous December, one or more meetings of the Legislative Assembly and, perhaps, of the Jacobins (as he seems to have done subsequently at Blois), The Prelude account of his return to Paris entirely effaces whatever network of acquaintance he resumed or elaborated during those five or six weeks. That effacement serves the fiction of history as spectator sport, as stuff for observation, for eye-witness, history as spectacle, as material for disinterested or for passionate reading: Let me relate that now – In some sort seeing with my proper eyes That liberty, and life, and death, would soon

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Wordsworth and the spectacles of Paris To the remotest corners of the land Lie in the arbitrement of those who ruled The capital city; what was struggled for, And by what combatants victory must be won; The indecision on their part whose aim Seemed best, and the straightforward path of those Who in attack or in defence alike Were strong through their impiety – greatly I (x, 106–17) Was agitated.40

The point here is not so much by penetrating the mask of witness to discover the partisan activist – though the possibilities and ambiguities do fascinate: if Wordsworth was among the company of those who came together at “White’s Hotel” three weeks later to form the British Club and pledge to export republicanism, what might have been his role, measured against the more straightforward path of David Erdman’s recuperated Oswald? – as it is to discern in the paysage moralise´ the writer’s interest.41 Louvet here becomes, briefly, the tragic hero and his venue a spot of time, a Mortimer to Robespierre’s Rivers or, more proximately, the author of the Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, or, within that (unpublished) letter, the “citizen on the tenth of august” to Louis: “Tyran, voila` ton ouvrage.”42 Here the mediation of writing is crucial: the fiction of The Prelude is the hawkers’ greeting: Betimes next morning to the Palace-walk Of Orleans I repaired, and entering here Was greeted, among divers other notes, By voices of the hawkers in the crowd Bawling, Denunciation of the crimes Of Maximilian Robespierre. The speech Which in their hands they carried was the same Which had been recently pronounced (x, 83–90)

Louvet denounced Robespierre for grasping after supreme power; as Kates argues, for a time in late 1792 there was a concerted Girondin strategy to paint Danton, Marat, and Robespierre as crypto-aristocrats, or even quasi-royalists seeking exclusive authority, as power-hungry opponents of democratic republicanism. Louvet’s accusation, in the silence of all present, “when a dead pause ensued and no one stirred,” came like the voice of mountain (or, in this case, anti-Montagne) torrents. Resonating years later in Wordsworth’s imagination, the “speech . . . carried” far into the poet’s heart the message that rhetorical heroism was not enough.43 Louvet’s A Maximilien Robespierre et ses royalistes, published by Bonneville’s

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Imprimerie du Cercle Social, was a salient performance in the heroics of authorship, the ostensibly transparent voice of probity transcribed in the mode of denunciatory polemic.44 In this world of failed theater and enlightenment, the recourse of the passionate witness was for a deus-ex-machina-inspired international brigade of heroes, of pentecostally vocal, Aolian worthies: Yea, I could almost Have prayed that throughout earth upon all souls, Worthy of liberty, upon every soul Matured to live in plainness and in truth, The gift of tongues might fall, and men arrive From the four quarters of the winds to do For France what without help she could not do, A work of honour – (x, 117–24)

Crucial here – and crucial to the critique of revolutionary heroism and of the sentimental theater Wordsworth eventually would lodge in composing The Borderers – is the notion of the hero as the embodiment of vocal power, of capable speech as the index of moral and political presence, the dream of words-worthiness. It’s the dream mirrored in Matilda’s “Oh could you hear his voice” and resolutely refused, at the end of the play, by Mortimer’s self-inflicted doom. coda Figure 4 reproduces a Landseer engraving of the 1818 pencil sketch of Wordsworth by Benjamin Robert Haydon. Tradition has it that, drawn for Mary Wordsworth, it hung in the dining room at Rydal Mount until her death. It’s certainly a sketch of a Wordsworth that never was, at least never was in 1818 in the roles of famed Cumberland paterfamilias and Distributor of Stamps. A contemporary artist complained that there was “too much Haydon in it to make it valuable as a likeness.” In our own time, Beth Darlington, wanting an image of the man of (hitherto unsuspected) marital passion and sensuality she laid bare in her edition of The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth, not surprisingly chose Haydon’s sketch.45 Noting the contrast between the never-never swirl of that flaring collar and the more meticulous detail of the face itself, I’m inclined to speculate about the play of likeness and unlikeness here: “would the real poet bare his breast?” Was there something of the “other” in Haydon’s sketch? Of, say, Annette’s man captured, the outlaw brought home to Rydal and, thus prized, mounted? Two further bits of

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Figure 4 Benjamin Robert Haydon’s pencil sketch of Wordsworth.

information are at least suggestive of answers. First, that collar, which to English eyes might suggest that Haydon’s Wordsworth was cross-dressing with Shelley, came by the early twentieth century in Germany to be called “ein Schillerkragen,” after a well-known portrait of the young Schiller painted in 1780 by J.-F. Weckerlin.46 Second, Wordsworth himself found in the sketch, in the words tradition has accorded him, “the likeness of ‘the brigand.’”47

chapter 4

Drinking up whole rivers: facing Wordsworth’s watery discourse

“Rivers! oh! / The name has terror in it”

Virtually from the beginning, critical accounts of The Borderers have centered on what to make of Rivers. One such account comes as laconic hearsay about failure: in December 1797 Wordsworth learned that Thomas Harris, the manager of Covent Garden, had “pronounced it impossible that [the play] should succeed in the representation.” Shortly after, Elizabeth Threlkeld, a friend of the Wordsworths, supplied Dorothy with a gloss: “the metaphysical obscurity of one character, was the great reason of its rejection.”1 But Wordsworth himself, doubtless anticipating such an opinion and hoping to engage its premises, had already drafted, earlier in 1797, what in “The Fenwick Note” of 1843 he called the “short essay illustrative of that constitution & those tendencies of human nature which make the apparently motiveless actions of bad men intelligible to careful observers.” That brief essay, since its first publication early last century, has helped perpetuate and justify the emphasis on Rivers. Its invented, hypothetical psychobiography, like Coleridge’s contemporary note for Osorio, imagined a theater manager, an examiner of plays, an acting company, and ultimately – after anticipated publication – a [London] audience and reviewers who would apply it to the figure called Rivers in the play; toward the end, it explicitly encouraged seeing Rivers as susceptible to such analysis, a view that the rhetorical energies of the Early Version seem to me paradoxically to undermine or resist. My guess is that in composing the essay for such a public Wordsworth hoped to negotiate the gap between, on one hand, the Lord Chamberlain’s, the theater managers’, and the audiences’ expectations, as he imagined they would be, of such a person in the play and, on the other, the uncertain figure the peculiarly watery language of The Borderers actually generates. It’s notable, at the very least, that at no point in the essay did Wordsworth ground his discussion in the actual language of the play. 79

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The sway Rivers has held over so many readers of The Borderers is not unlike what he holds for much of the play over Mortimer. My project in this chapter is to resist that sway by arguing for the interaction of two pervasive and apparently opposed tropes in the language and action of The Borderers, that of perilous flux associated with water and that of fixity associated with the eye. The first section, then, explores the watery language in the play that makes Rivers’s name rhetorically significant. Drawing also on Duncan Wu’s recent work on the evidence in Wordsworth’s earliest verse of his traumatic experience following the deaths of his parents, my argument emphasizes how strongly watery diction characterizes many of the poems he wrote in the late 1780s and early 1790s, language that in effect culminates in the “Early Version” of The Borderers. The second section probes, as an example of the play’s signifying ocular dramaturgy, an enigmatic moment in the final act, in the context of figures of seeing – and, especially, of “beholding” – the face. i The name “Rivers” condenses the thick figuration in The Borderers of watery peril. If the 1842 version’s “Oswald” puts the informed historicist reader in mind of Colonel John Oswald and, through him, the Jacobin monster Robespierre he served, “Rivers,” with its unlikely plural topographic reference, gives a name – itself oblique, even devious – to the rhetorical figures through which The Borderers enacts its central drama, the struggle between the forceful clarity of purposefulness and the undifferentiated confusion of pathos, between the orderly construction of reality and its dissipation(s) in chaos and despair. Pervading the play, narratives of literal drownings and figurative expressions of whelming and sinking oppose accounts of ostensibly manly standing and force. Robert Osborn’s analysis of the earliest surviving drafts of The Borderers in the so-called “Rough Notebook” demonstrates that the figure who became Rivers in the 1797–99 Early Version developed from a much more limited figure named Danby, the Iago who deceives Mortimer, then called Ferdinand.2 Though because of missing pages the evidence in the “Rough Notebook” is inconclusive, the best guess may well be that the name “Rivers” replaced “Danby” when Wordsworth was reworking the original prose passage (designated by Osborn as part of the “Edge of a Heath Scene”) in which a distraught Ferdinand desperately hopes to find the abandoned Herbert still alive: Scene the edge of a heath – Enter Ferdinand his hair loose and dress disordered, his looks betraying extreme horror

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How many hours have I wandered night and day through every corner of this dreary heath – My eyes have been strained, my voice has called incessantly but in vain – I shall never be able to travel half a mile in the darkness of the night again. Not a bush or solitary tree did I meet but my heart leaped. This morning the huntsmen were abroad upon the moor. I halloed after them but they took no notice of me – There was something most horrible in the cry of those dogs – I think I shall hear it till the hour of my death – (And yet plaintively) The night was not cold There is still some hope what a fever have I about my heart – I could drink up whole rivers – Whither shall I betake me now – (casting his eyes about) ha! here is one from whom something may be learnt – (Enter Cottager)

Before this prose draft there’s little surviving indication of the watery discourse that eventually so saturates the Early Version. Revising this draft, also as prose in the Rough Notebook, Wordsworth amplified Ferdinand’s anguish about Herbert’s plight, brooding over the forgotten scrip of food and intensifying the crisis of thirst: the nights have not been cold. There is still some hope – His food – I have taken care of that. But when the mind is troubled the body does not ask its accustomed nourishment – I have not eaten since I left him – and I have not need of sustenance – Die of hunger! Never – A mortal thirst might seize upon his vitals – Aye that is terrible . . . What a fever have I about my heart I could drink up whole rivers.3

But two X marks in the notebook then delete the last two sentences. My guess is that the deletion resulted from the impulse to alter Danby’s name to Rivers. In the next phase of composition, Wordsworth turned to drafts for what Osborn calls the “Deception Scene” that roughly correspond to moments in Act i, Scene iii of the Early Version involving the female Beggar Rivers has suborned to assist in the plot to destroy his captain.4 In these drafts, for the first time, with Danby now Rivers and Ferdinand Mortimer, watery discourse surges in. Rivers supplants Danby as the agent of deception at just the time when Wordsworth begins to elaborate dramatically the process involved. In perhaps the earliest instance of that elaboration, in what Osborn identifies as the third draft for the scene, this time in blank verse, an anguished, despairing Mortimer – taunted and traduced by Rivers’s slyly tentative innuendoes about Herbert and Matilda, – cries out, “I am in hell . . .”: I am undone No living power can save me – sinking – Sinking And feel that I am sinking – would this body Were quietly given back unto the earth. . ..

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Did he cancel those last lines, especially the phrase “like a drowning man,” because they were too elaborately explicit? At another point in the early stages of that drafting, Mortimer says to Rivers, “I’d rather be a soul in hell / Without a drop to wet this tongue of mine / Than what I am . . . dost thou hear this[?]” (p. 363). Repetitions and cancellations suggest, moreover, the sudden intense fascination such discourse constitutes for the poet fashioning work for the stage. In the movement toward the Early Version, nowhere is Wordsworth’s watery diction more notable – and more dramaturgically suggestive – than in the interplay among expressions involving the image of “sinking.” Like a virus, in ensuing drafts it spreads, even figuring in a number of stage directions. Thus, in subsequent moments in the Early Version, Mortimer “Sinks against the scene exhausted” (ii, iii, 291 sd ); and later “sinks against the scene” (iii, v, 165 sd ). The cottager Margaret, after Mortimer has heard from her husband that Herbert is dead, says to him, “Sir! Your limbs sink under you; shall I support you?” (v, ii, 89). Also in the Early Version, the trope circulates well beyond Mortimer. The same peril afflicts Herbert, who “sinks down in a corner of the stage” (iv, i, 6 sd ); we soon read that Matilda “is sunk senseless on the floor” (iv, iii, 96 sd ), and later she sinks senseless on the ground (v, iii, 170 sd ); even Rivers himself, preparing Mortimer to be a shadow of himself, recalls in the treacherous narrative of his own betrayal that he “sunk into despair” (iv, ii, 78).5 Such sinkings present a problem for the actor and director, all the more as the stage directions frequently emphasize, as here, the solidity of the boards and of the sliding vertical “scenes” representing the background terrain. Such problems give comfort to skeptics about the viability of romantic drama in performance; but a choreographically gifted director might readily devise bodily action which would produce

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onstage what the directions evidently call for, a series of echoic effects visually linking these moments in a poetics deconstructing the tyranny of the boards. In the Early Version, Mortimer’s initial rush of sinking discourse results from his encounter with the babbling “female Beggar.” As he discovers, not all narrative streams yield reliable comfort. Put another way, the brooks that seem to promise comfort bring instead peril and dissolve foundations. Some tidings are brooks of whelming dissolution. (“Brook,” in the OED, means “a small stream; originally a torrent.”)6 The gossip Mortimer hears in the suborned Beggar is precisely that: the voice of one who runs on in a flow of seemingly idle dreams. Her initial tale about the foxglove offers an allegory of pernicious consolation: to drink up her gossip is to founder in the waters of pityengendering narrative. The mother who solaces her weeping child with digitalis is like the narrator whose tale turns to poison while the bee-mouth sips: Oh! Gentlemen, I thank you; I’ve had the saddest dream that ever troubled The heart of living creature. – My poor babe Was crying, as I thought, crying for bread When I had none to give him, whereupon I put a slip of foxglove in his hand Which pleased him so that he was hushed at once; When into one of those same spotted bells A Bee came darting, which the child with joy Imprisoned there, and held it to his ear – And suddenly grew black as he would die. (i, iii, 23–33)

Similarly, in her second anecdote, flowing impetuously from the first, the dog whose licking tongue promised comfort to the sleeping child “on a sudden / Snapped fierce to make a morsel of its head” (i, iii, 40–41). There is, then, no benignly idle discourse in Wordsworth’s tragedy. The gossip’s poisonous babble elicits from Mortimer the response of pity and “charity”: “Here’s what will comfort you. (Gives her money.)” (i, iii, 35)7 With this condescending coinage comes the credulity that itself signals a bondage to what seems. Drawn eventually into the chilling pathos of her tale, Mortimer reenacts the plight of the child “listening” while imprisoning the bee in the foxglove bell: “I must have more of this – you shall not stir / An inch till I am answered. Know you aught / That doth concern this Herbert?” (i, iii, 125–27). Just as ministering the slippery foxglove lenitive of digitalis to the child leads to death through the ear, so the

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Beggar’s burden of Matilda’s abuse at the hands of Herbert draws from Mortimer’s heart a fatal flow of despair: Sinking, sinking, And feel that I am sinking – would this body Were quietly given back unto the earth From whence the burthen came. (i, iii, 157–60)

Mortimer’s “sinking” here resounds against the earlier stage direction: “A female Beggar rises up, rubbing her eyes as if waking from sleep – a child in her arms” (I, iii, 23 sd ).8 “Burthen,” of course, especially in its archaic form, is rich with associations: childbearing and birth, produce of fertile soil, oracles (“a heavy load of fate” OED), and refrains, a motif of iterative rhetoric. The gossip’s suborned babble flows as a supporting tributary to Rivers’s lies, but in a wider sense it partakes of the watery discourse self-destructively pitying passions imbibe.9 Mortimer voices its effect: “The firm foundation of my life appears / To sink from under me. This business, Rivers, / Will be my ruin. – ” (i, iii, 181–83). Pursuing early on his scheme to poison Mortimer’s mind by framing Matilda’s father as an imposter, Rivers also spuriously vouches for the report by an alleged eye-witness that during a storm at sea, while en route home from crusading in Syria, the real “Baron Herbert perished in the waves / Upon the coast of Cyprus” (i, i, 48–49). Later, the blind Herbert recalls what he takes to have been an accident when his “friends” (Rivers and the incognito Mortimer), shepherding him, he believes, to the shelter of a convent but in fact to intended assassination in a castle dungeon, conducted him across a plank bridge “Hung o’er the torrent” where his “poor dog perished in the waters” (ii, iii, 24 and 112–13). “He must have perished – / The torrent would have dashed an oak to splinters,” Mortimer likewise recalls, protesting his companion’s gratuitous atrocity: “You should not, Rivers, / Have hurled the innocent animal from the precipice, / You should not – there was no occasion for it” (ii, iii, 35–36 and 43–45). Linked to other words in The Borderers denoting purposeful rejection or ejection (e.g.,“fling,” “dash,” and “cast”), “hurled” invites here a tropaic reading in which Rivers himself takes on the force of a “force,” a waterfall hurling from the precipice, its gratuitousness reinforced by the sense of a cascade surviving etymologically in Mortimer’s “occasion.” That metonymic slaughter establishes both Rivers’s (and thereby falling water’s) indifference to claims of pity and justice and Mortimer’s susceptibility to the throes of pathos.10 In the subsequent dungeon scene, Rivers himself brings to wry culmination this cento of

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rhetorical drownings when, rising to the challenge that Mortimer’s momentary immersion in pity for Herbert presents to their dark assassination scheme, he refuses to succumb in the watery mode of such victims: “Now may I perish if this be not joy to me. / A meaner spirit would be overwhelmed” (ii, iii, 293–94). Other figurative drownings proliferate: in Act v, Matilda, unaware of Mortimer’s complicity, pities his distress over her father’s death: “Alas, the thought / Of such a cruel death has overwhelmed him” (v, iii, 39–40); soon after, Mortimer, resisting that fate, vows the dreadful purposefulness of remorse: This little scrip when first I found it here – I sunk ten thousand fathoms into hell. I was a coward then – but now am schooled To firmer purposes. There doth not lie Within the compass of a mortal thought A deed that I would shrink from – and I can endure.11

(v, iii, 103–08)

Watery narratives and watery metaphors create a current of rhetorical discourse that flows under the “plot” as one might conventionally construe it (the agon of hero and villain), fusing and confusing those ostensible oppositions. Rivers and discursive emplotment share a significance; they participate in a meaning and a deconstructive fate, both promising directional flow, running a course of intent; yet both also confound that very direction and course, in the face of drowning risking loss of purposeful bearing. But there is also another way to read these narrated whelmings, a way that relates to what I’ve called Rivers’s truth. The “real” Baron Herbert – a putative mythic ruler whose landed property, “estate,” and lordly station are predicated on responsible enactment of civic power and domestic love – has perished in the waves of his own self-usurpation and absorption in a clasping career of indulgent self-pity.12 If we take Gibbon’s satiric account of the Crusades (cited in Chapter 1) as allegorically definitive of such misplaced pity, the empire Herbert exerts over Matilda by extorting her tears through narrative amounts itself to a whelming of sorts: after the rushing tides of the Antioch catastrophe, the submersion of the Baron Herbert takes place – he is figuratively liquidated – in her tears of pity.13 The question of Herbert’s overwhelmed, disordered state – and the possibility of its restoration – shadow also the brief flurry of “recognition” at the inn in Act 1, where the host voices for Herbert the possibility of comforting shelter linked with a watery agency of dangerous Spenserian courtesy: “’Tis never drought with us – St. Mary and her

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pilgrims, / Thanks to them! are a stream of comfort to us” (i, ii, 31–32). When Rivers greets Herbert at the inn with his duplicitously jaunty apostrophe, “Ha! as I live, the Baron Herbert,” the surprised host remarks, in a tellingly abject phrase, “For Heaven’s sake! / – Mercy, Sir, I did not know your Lordship – ” (i, ii, 41–42). His exclamation signals allegiance to the claims of pity; at the same time it indicates that the blind Herbert presents to him a disfigured presence, a veiled, failed nobility.14 Act v begins by evoking a precipitous setting similar to that of the plank bridge where Herbert’s dog “perished in the waters”: two Woodmen report to Rivers that a distraught Mortimer leaned upon the bridge that spans the glen And down into the bottom cast his eye That fastened there as it would check the current . . . Aye, Sir, he listened – As if he had heard such moaning in the water (v, i, 1–7) As we fear often after stormy nights.

Glimpsed thus in their narrative, this figure of fearful dementia contrasts with the god-like Mortimer Matilda invoked so ingenuously in Act i: His face bespeaks A deep and simple meekness; and that soul, Which with the motion of a glorious act Flashes a terror-mingled look of sweetness, Is, after conflict, silent as the ocean By a miraculous finger stilled at once. (i, i, 136–41)

Glory here entails a sternly commanding yet benevolent heroism, a sublimely idealized flashing action that modulates into self-control, notably figured as perilous water reduced to quiescence. Matilda’s fantasy of the benign dominion Mortimer’s powerful soul exerts over water sets the terms that Rivers’s copious energies confound. The spectral, Gothic rumor of the woodman’s “moaning in the water” links Mortimer here to Herbert – whose fate is yet unknown – and his drowned dog. Moments later, when Mortimer himself “appears crossing the stage at some distance – an expression in his eye which at last settles on the ground,” the very solidity of earth seems to dissolve into a watery grave beneath his frenzied stare: “The dust doth move and eddy at my feet” (v, i, 14). In the following scene, Robert paints for Mortimer an image of Herbert that not only recapitulates the imagined scene of the dog’s death but, oddly, invokes Rivers’s errand to gain the torrent’s brink for the draught of water the fainting Mortimer has begged:

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His head was bare – His staff was by his side; and near the brink Of a small pool of water he was laid, His face close to the water. As it seemed, He had stooped down to drink and had remained (v, ii, 29–34) Without the strength to rise.

The precipitating circumstance of the sea-voyage that Rivers’s ur-narrative springs from was, not surprisingly, a crisis over drink (“the water of the vessel was exhausted” [iv, ii, 12]), and on the bare inhospitable rock where the ship’s crew, captain, and Rivers landed with “no food, no drink, no grass, no shade, / No tree nor jutting eminence,” their desperate errand was “to dig for water” (iv, ii, 24–25, 29). So Herbert’s fate, discovered by Robert “near the brink / Of a small pool of water,” recapitulates that of the captain. And Mortimer, driven by his remorseful wish to end Matilda’s wretchedness as the lover of the man responsible for her father’s death, bursts forth – with brutal comfort – in a rush of self-incriminating narrative excess, as though Herbert were a dog: (his hand pointing to his heart ) O, that that eye of thine were present here! Now will I tell thee how I dealt with him – (v, iii, 134–36) Into a foaming torrent –

Water, then, is the medium of actual or virtual drowning, never more so than in the way the figure drifts when it offers itself as a source of comfort in acute malaise: as in that early draft of v, ii (“The Edge of a Heath” scene) when the disordered Ferdinand, exhausted after a night’s desperate quest to find Herbert alive, cries,“[W]hat a fever I have about my heart – I could drink up whole rivers.” Recall the moment from Herbert’s ur-narrative of the fiery Antioch catastrophe when he had “clasped [his] infant daughter to [his] heart,” at the brink of safety: Thy mother too – scarce had I gained the door – I caught her voice, she threw herself upon me, I felt thy infant brother in her arms, She saw my blasted face – a tide of soldiers That instant rushed between us, and I heard Her last death shriek, distinct among a thousand.

(i, i, 150–55)15

Part of the skein of torment Rivers wraps around Mortimer in the long confessional scene of Act iv involves his own watery tale of the daughter of the captain he marooned, her fate not only mirroring that of Lord Clifford’s victim as Rivers earlier rehearsed it but also by his design

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constituting a diabolical sketch of what Mortimer will dread is in store for Matilda. She had, he says, “conjured me / At parting never to forsake her father,” but when of his death The tidings reached her, from that very time She neither saw nor heard as others do, But in a fearful world of her own making She lived – cut off from the society Of every rational thing – her father’s skeleton.

(iv, ii, 82–89)

Treacherous tides and tidings mingle similarly in Book x of The Prelude, in the spot of Thermidor time when the poet recalls watching tourists at ebb-tide on Levens Sands (“Wading, beneath the conduct of their guide, / In loose procession through the shallow stream / Of inland water”) and first hearing the news that “Robespierre is dead”: Nor was a doubt, On further question, left within my mind But that the tidings were substantial truth – That he and his supporters all were fallen.16

Worth noting especially is the giddy language of the exuberantly vengeful “hymn of triumph” narrated as having immediately followed these tidings, language that elaborates the flood-tide of Robespierre’s career as task-minister of the Terror: Thus far our trust is verified: behold, They who with clumsy desperation brought Rivers of blood, and preached that nothing else Could cleanse the Augean stable, by the might Of their own helper have been swept away. (x, 545–49)

The figure of Hercules as revolutionary purifier, channeling rivers of blood through France but himself swept to perish in those waters, suggests not only Wordsworth’s familiarity with Jacobin appropriation of popular mythic icons but also his readiness in 1804 to resurrect metaphorically the watery name of his Borderers villain, undone by the flood of his unleashed tales.17 Worth remembering also in contemplating Wordsworth’s lurid figures is the dredging up, in the first months of the Thermidorian reaction against the violence of the Terror, in widely publicized and highly political “judicial” inquiries, of the details of atrocities perpetrated under Robespierre. Arguably the most notable revelations took place before the revolutionary Tribunal in Paris in November 1794, concerning atrocities committed during the reign of terror at Nantes in late 1793 under the

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administration of Jean-Baptiste Carrier. The National Convention’s representative of the people, en mission with the revolutionary Army of the West, Carrier was sent to Nantes to deal summarily, in collaboration with the local Revolutionary Committee, with royalist Vende´an rebels and their sympathizers. In addition to witness accounts and rumors of hundreds of guillotinings, shootings, and saberings of suspects and deaths by thousands in disease-ridden prisons, the most gruesome testimony before the Paris Tribunal held Carrier responsible for the deaths of thousands of “suspects” jailed aboard barges anchored in the river Loire, which were then scuttled. Newspapers carried the testimony of witnesses that the waters turned red. Drinking up whole rivers – the agonized figure of Ferdinand’s frenzied disorder in the Rough Notebook draft – resonates grimly with the Thermidorian epithet that, according to Bronislaw Baczko, “discredited the men of Year II”: “buveurs de sang.”18 Ultimately the insight dramatized in the watery rhetoric of The Borderers has to do with exposing the speciousness of language itself as a secure foundation for sympathetic communication. Here, of course, the figure most prolifically deployed is weeping. Tears signal affective immersion in pity. Those who weep under the force of narrative – Matilda preeminently, but at one point or another virtually everyone save Rivers – drown in their own watery effluence. (Robert to Margaret: “I have shed tears tonight, and it comforts me to think of it” [iv, iii, 30].) Here the siren lures are those of comfort and shelter, the quest for which takes its victims astray into caverns of error (such as the Old Pilgrim recalls in the tale he rehearses for Matilda),19 or leads them (Circe-like) to sip draughts of poison. Significantly, furthermore, what surges into the discourse of The Borderers is language that had coursed through much of Wordsworth’s earliest known verse. Duncan Wu’s Wordsworth: An Inner Life offers speculative readings of poems written in the mid and late 1780s and early 1790s as prompted in crucial ways by Wordsworth’s experience of grief and guilt in the wake of the deaths of both parents – especially the father – and the separation from his siblings, especially Dorothy, that followed, leaving him traumatized, unable to acknowledge repressed feelings of loss and guilty betrayal, and himself betrayed by the resentful uncle who took him in. Wu sees the influence of those feelings persisting through every stage of Wordsworth’s career, but most prominently in the decade ending with the composition of The Borderers and “The Ruined Cottage.” Finding The Borderers “a deeply

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personal work,” his discussion focuses almost entirely on Rivers, as in the following passage: The component parts of Rivers’ character are present in Wordsworth’s writing from the Hawkshead period onwards. The apprehension of being implicated in the death of his father is present in “The Vale of Esthwaite,” while the figure of betrayal came to play an important role in the poetry of 1792 onwards. Behind all this lies a weight of grief. Herbert observes of Mortimer that he “had some grief which pressed upon him,” and the motif of the traitor and his repeated calumnies is seen by Wordsworth as part of a twisted response to guilt. Part of Rivers’ motivation, Wordsworth reasons, arises from the fact that “the exhibition of his own powers [is] . . . almost identified with the extinction of those painful feelings which attend the recollection of his guilt.”20

Wu cautiously disclaims authority in psychoanalytic theory – and some readers have voiced skepticism – but the poems he draws his argument from intrigue me. Striking in virtually all of the Hawkshead and Cambridge poems is the prominence of watery diction and whelming circumstances, a saturation such as flows into the 1796 Rough Notebook Borderers drafts with the introduction of the character Rivers and especially into the Early Version, with the elaboration of Rivers’s account of his own betrayal by his shipmates having led him to abandon his captain to a death that anticipates Mortimer’s abandonment of Herbert.21 If Wu’s right to read early Wordsworth as laboring so emphatically in the trauma of betrayal and repressed guilt, it seems essential to recognize the way watery words flow into his tragedy with the conceiving and naming of Rivers. It’s also worth proposing that the “metaphysically obscure” dramatis personus who so dominates critical readings of The Borderers had its unfathomable genesis in a disturbed – even compulsive – poetics of trauma and guilt that felt like drowning. Shoring up that claim is the simultaneous renaming of Danby’s overwhelmed victim, Ferdinand: Mortimer’s etymology (en franc¸ais “mortemer” is “still water” or “dead sea”); fancifully, might we imagine as a Wordsworthian play morti-mer for death-in-water: drowning, short for drowning by rivers? Mortimer is also Wordsworth’s pseudonym or pen-name when he published two poems in the Morning Post in 1798.22 (See the appendix to this chapter for a selection of the poems Wu focuses on in mounting his argument.) ii “Ferdinand’s reason which had been disordered restored by the sight of Danby!” With that exclamation the Rough Notebook’s prose synopsis that constitutes Wordsworth’s earliest known framing of the final act of

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The Borderers “breaks off” (in Robert Osborn’s words) “at the moment of climactic confrontation.”23 By the time he had completed the Early Version, that climactic coup de the´aˆtre, with its miraculously instantaneous “restoration” (allegorizing in Mortimer the restoration of political order in the realm) and exclamatory punctuation, had undergone something of a sea-change. Toward the end of the scene that concludes that version, a protracted denouement where Wordsworth seems again and again to appropriate – while flying in the face of – contemporary theatrical conventions, action and dialogue are suspended in a prolonged tableau, as specified by the stage direction: “Mortimer and Rivers mutually fasten their eyes on each other for some time” (v, iii, 224).24 The challenge for a production of the play would be how to make that mute, apparently opaque tableau not only theatrically viable but – what ought to amount to the same thing – legible for the spectators as an articulate recapitulation and consummation of what has gone before. For a reader, this final staring-match claims its special significance, as so often elsewhere in the text of the play, through the wording of the stage direction itself, which appeals implicitly to the thick incidence in earlier dialogue and stage directions of language having to do with seeing; with the “proof” offered by the visible; with what the eyes behold and what inferences can be built upon such evidence; and with the way in which political rhetoric constructs itself on the unstable foundations of such figurative discourse.25 In this regard, one thinks of Wordsworth’s claim, in two notes dating from 1842 and 1843, for a primary connection between his tragedy (and the preface) and the processes to which he had been “eye-witness” during his long residence in Revolutionary France. From the Fenwick Note: In conclusion I may observe that while I was composing this play I wrote a short essay illustrative of that constitution & those tendencies of human nature which make the apparently motiveless actions of bad men intelligible to careful observers. This was partly done with reference to the character of Oswald & his persevering endeavour to lead the man he disliked into so heinous a crime, but still more to preserve in my distinct remembrance what I had observed of transition in character & the reflections I had been led to make during the time I was a witness of the changes through which the French Revolution passed.26

With notable insistence and redundancy, the author here portrays in himself the integrity and insight of a diachronically seamless detachment: as a witness long ago of the Revolution who “observed” transition of character; as an essayist able to convey the insight into human nature which, arming the vision of “careful observers,” would permit them to understand the otherwise unintelligible and “apparently motiveless actions of bad men”; and as a

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literary monument who even now, in dictating his retrospective note, quietly claims the privilege to “observe,” to offer in conclusion this (judicious) characterization of his former roles as witness, playwright, and essayist. Set over against this myth of disinterestedness in the detached, inert continuity of the author ab extra is the object of his steadfast gaze, the spectacle of energized, enactive villainy in Rivers/Oswald and in other “bad men” who, implicitly, resemble those nameless unstable persons in France whose characters went through such transitions. To act here is, like Rivers, to “lead” treacherously, to induce another into heinous crime. But what can we make of the odd doubling of language used to describe both the victim who is thus treacherously led into heinous crime and the observer who is also led – apparently by what he sees – to make reflections? Put another way, what submerged affinities give rise to the similarity between the deliberateness of this prose, with its iterative regard for careful observation on the part of the compositor, and the “persevering endeavour” of the villain? May we imagine that peering through the rhetoric of senior authorial stability is the spectre of another tendency whose displaced incarnation lies in those less composed characters whose motives his composition illustrates and dissects? Are we entitled to read here as it were deconstructively, to see in the author’s pose as detached, disinterested observer, in his idealized account of his “opportunities of being an eye-witness” of the process of the French Revolution, the suppression of a more active and aggressive power of surveillance – a power seamlessly complicit with the Jacobin villainy his illustration denounces – a disinterestedness belied by his redundant insistence on that stance? (As argued in Chapter 2, when he composed in 1804 the autobiographical narrative that became Books ix and x of The Prelude, Wordsworth was led to paint his role in the run-up to the execution of Louis XVI in the strikingly different, more lurid colors of “Sleep no more . . .,” a passage that builds to a disordered frenzy of fantasized participation in the bloodiest Shakespearean regicide. There the “witness” he bears is indistinguishable from the guilt-ridden figure of the assassin.) Rivers invokes just this language of witness when he sets about convincing Mortimer that seeing is believing, that appearances can be trusted, that what the eye sees can be the basis for responsible and just action. This power of surveillance also informs Rivers’s sinister confidence that he can forge Mortimer into a shadow of himself: “No, no, no, / I have an eye that will take care of him” (v, ii, 29–30). We have learned to read the “truth” of Rivers’s lies in the narratives of Herbert, Matilda, and Mortimer; do Wordsworth’s text and his note likewise authorize hearing a different

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vertu, bordering on a St.-Justian justice, in the author’s 1842 tale of such innocent probity on his part? (We might recall here the intensity with which, in 1812, Wordsworth pursued the chance to play the role of spectator ab extra at the execution of Spencer Perceval’s assassin.) The Mortimer who in the final scene fastens his eyes on Rivers is, of course, no disinterested author armed with observation and poised on the brink of composition; in a few moments the best he can do is bequeath his desolate, monumental wisdom to the onstage and “real” audiences, inviting them, like the “gentle reader” the poet of “Simon Lee” invokes, to “make a tale of it.” But it’s clear that Wordsworth intended this tableau as a prolonged moment of something like tragic recognition or resolution, in the aftermath of which Mortimer ultimately voices a doom which everything his earlier innocence and madness prepared him for but prior to which he was incapable of thus stepping outside the economy of passionately purposeful bondage.27 In saying that Wordsworth intended a tableau as a species of anagnorisis I do not mean, however, that he endorsed the ideology of the tableau and of the recognition scenes in the sort of theater earlier in the eighteenth century associated with Diderot’s campaign for drame se´rieux, especially where se´rieux entails a celebration of the “pathetic.” On the contrary, the staring match figures as a repudiation of tableau, miming the genre while emptying it of significance as a moment of “clarification.” The question, then, is just how to construe that oddly sustained match? On the theory that appropriate construction will entail registering a context against which similarities and differences are at work, we might think of other moments of visual encounter and confrontation. Within the play, its most immediate link would be to the simile-laden witness the two woodmen offer Rivers, as the final act opens, of the distraught “fastening” of Mortimer’s eye as he pursued Herbert’s trail across the heath, dreading to discover that death had already claimed the innocent old man: f i rs t w o od m an. He leaned upon the bridge that spans the glen And down into the bottom cast his eye That fastened there as it would check the current. rivers. He listened too? Did you not say he listened? s e co n d w o o d m a n . Aye, Sir, he listened – As if he had heard such moaning in the water As we fear often after stormy nights. f i rs t w o od m an. Then, as it seemed from some strange intimation Of things to us invisible, he turned And looked around him with an eye that shewed (v, i, 1–11) As if it wished to miss the thing it sought.

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This iconic image of distraction, the eye cast – as though an organ literally detached – in stony horror into the bottom of the glen and “fasten[ing] there as it would check the current,” might be construed allegorically as a moment when Mortimer, in futile desperation, tries to resist water’s force, a moment proleptic of his more effective resistance to Rivers in the final scene, resistance born in the purpose of selfabandonment. But the Woodman’s simile itself also appeals to the earlier transit of that other gorge, when, conducting Herbert across the plank, Rivers had with gratuitous atrocity hurled the old man’s dog into the torrent.28 For Mortimer in the desperate disorder of his remorse, to “check the current” is to attempt Canute’s task: to resist the torrent of Rivers’s tale, and with it the force of sentimental narrative that has till now driven his own passionately pitying career. (Recall Matilda, creature of pity, imploring her father to continue the familiar stream of his Antioch narrative, “Nay, father, stop not, let me hear it all” [i, i, 156].) The powerful narrative flow of the Woodman’s simile about the “fastened” eye intensifies with their response to Rivers’s predatory eagerness to hear also how Mortimer “listened”: their Gothic trepidation about “moaning in the water” voices not only a ghastly, demonic rumor linking Herbert’s fate to that of his drowned dog (see Mortimer’s [listening] “What an odd moaning that is!” [ii, iii, 31]), but also a harrowing, de profundis rejoinder to Matilda’s keen “Oh could you hear his voice!” a rejoinder disrupting the easy circuits of imagined sympathy. The moaning also links the paralysis Herbert’s fate works on Mortimer here to another fantasy of arrested purpose, which, as Rivers later rehearses it for Mortimer, his abandoned sea-captain’s vocal anguish wrought on him and the treacherous crew: “the groans he uttered might have stopped the boat / That bore us through the water” (iv, ii, 50–51). Behind that moment lie other, earlier moments of intense beholding that also help establish the legibility – the dramatic readability – of Mortimer’s final encounter with Rivers. Perhaps the most prominent of these moments concludes the sustained initial meeting between Mortimer and the woman Beggar. Orchestrated by Rivers – as the audience doubtless already suspects – the meeting culminates when the woman has left Mortimer “Sinking, sinking . . . sinking” under the burden of her (suborned) tale that years ago Herbert had bought the infant Matilda from her. Mortimer’s recovery – such as it is – from the shock of her revelation commences under the sign of pity for Matilda as the victim of Herbert’s viciousness: “(to himself ) ‘The cruel viper! – oh thou poor

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Matilda, / Now I do love thee’” (i, iii, 158–62). His asseverative emphasis confirms that, as with Matilda’s love for her piteously clasping father, it’s in the problematic throes of pity that Mortimer sounds the depths of his passion for Matilda. Spurred by that affect, which has driven so much of the relations of the characters so far, he summons the woman back: “(Looking at her stedfastly in the face) You are Matilda’s mother? / Nay, be not terrified – it does me good / To look upon you” (i, iii, 163–65). Here the fixity of Mortimer’s “stedfastly” pitying gaze signals the power of that passion to bind him, his “Nay, be not terrified – it does me good” itself also echoing Matilda’s plea to her father not to truncate the full rendition once more of the familiar tale that in childhood bound her to pity his blindness: “Nay, father . . . / ’Twill do me good” (i, i, 156–57). The good that both Mortimer and Matilda seek is “comfort.” For Mortimer, the career he has fashioned as captain of the band of borderers (“Rivers! I have loved / To be friend and father of the helpless, / A comforter of sorrow” [ii, i, 89–91]) replicates Herbert’s. At one level, the “good” he soon turns to seek from the Beggar perpetuates and extends his enslavement to Matilda as the piteous figure of her father’s narratives; at another level, attuned to the Beggar’s shadowy identity as the wandering spirit of the Antioch wife/mother, the comfort she offers Mortimer is the more substantial blessing of the maternal nurturing usurped in Herbert’s tyranny. Child that he is of Matilda’s repetition of her father’s tales and captain of the borderer band in whom her passionately self-sacrificing example is institutionalized, Mortimer’s gaze thus signals his kinship (also as child) to the Beggar/mother he has moments earlier so dismissively patronized.29 Rivers derides such susceptibility in a soliloquy that opens the next scene. For him, Mortimer’s pity for the Beggar ranks him among the “fools of feeling” (ii, i, 5) and leaves him vulnerable to artful practice: now For a few swelling phrases, and a flash Of truth enough to dazzle and to blind, (ii, i, 9–12) And he is mine for ever.30

At this point Mortimer enters, reporting that he has seen, standing at her cottage door, the “poor wretch” the libertine Lord Clifford had used and abandoned to madness, and that he has met a peasant who corroborates Rivers’s narrative (“he told me / These ten years she had sat all day alone / Within those empty walls” [ii, i, 18–20]). Rivers responds by working on

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Mortimer’s vulnerability with a swelling fabrication about his own raptly gazing surveillance of the same woman: Yes – I have seen her. Chancing to pass this way some six months gone, At midnight I betook me to the churchyard . . . a full half-hour did I Prolong my watch; I saw her pacing round Upon the self same spot, still round and round, (ii, i, 20–31, passim) Her lips for ever moving.

(His account has suggestive affinities with the old Man’s narrative, in “The Ruined Cottage,” of his itinerant visits to Margaret; the affinities point to how the language that dramatizes Rivers’s pernicious assault on Mortimer’s susceptibility to clasping pity could also serve to dramatize, in that subsequent narrative, the old Man’s peculiar and – for some readers, as well as the youthful narrator – unnerving equanimity as tutor in the art of beholding.)31 Later, by contrast, the Rivers who would disillusion Mortimer and initiate him into his own subsequent contempt for the weakness of such pity greets him thus as he emerges from the dungeon where, Rivers imagines, Herbert lies stabbed to death: “Well! ’tis all over then – don’t you laugh at your foolish fears? you have done it cleverly – sent him into the other world without a groan; never trouble your head about burying him – we’ll shove him into a corner” (ii, iii, 254–57). And in the final act, Robert, through whom such fears surge in torrents of superstition, voices his conviction of Mortimer’s murderous role in her father’s death by urging Matilda to monitor his visit to the corpse for signs of tell-tale reanimation in the presence of his killer: Lady, you will do well. He has been dead and silent many hours. If you should hear a groan or from his side He should uplift his hand – that would be evidence.

(v, iii, 41–44)

It’s partly from Mortimer’s steadfast look at the Beggar, then – with its informing frames not only of his unwitting enslavement to the collusive, seductive suasion of both her and Rivers’s tales about Herbert and Matilda but also of his bondage to Herbert’s tales as ventriloquized by Matilda – that the final staring match between Mortimer and Rivers, by contrast, draws its meaning. Such situations of seeing and beholding dominate the action from the outset of the Early Version. When Rivers, pursuing his plot against Mortimer, proposes surveillance of Herbert and Matilda (“Not yet in

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sight! We’ll saunter here a while; / They cannot mount this hill unseen by us” [i, i, 20–21]), Mortimer’s rejoinder resumes the motif of the authenticity of such ocular proof: “(a letter in his hand ) . . . ‘’Tis a strange letter, this. – You saw her write it?’,” as does Rivers’s treacherously sentimentalizing answer: “And saw the tears with which she blotted it”(i, i, 25–26). And shortly after, Rivers lodges a dissembling, Iago-like innuendo against Mortimer’s naive pity for Herbert’s apparent helplessness: “Thou knowest me for a man not easily moved, / But death! it stirs my very soul to think / Of what I witness’d” (i, i, 41–43). So too the fabricated and suborned testimonies by which Rivers shores up his deception rely on ocular witness: as when, feigning an urgent, imperious rigor, he cross-examines the Beggar (“In a peasant’s dress / You saw, who was it?” . . . “Lord Clifford! did you see him talk with Herbert?” [i, iii, 165–171, passim]) or when, feigning scrupulous doubt about his own allegations that Matilda’s father is an imposter (“But if the blind man’s tale / Should yet be true?”), he succeeds in eliciting Mortimer’s passionately rhetorical credulity, voiced in his appeal to yet another narrative of surveillance Rivers has earlier planted: Would it were possible! Did not the soldier tell thee that himself, And others who survived the wreck, beheld The Baron Herbert perish in the waves (i, i, 44–49) Upon the coast of Cyprus?

The climactic staring tableau between Mortimer and Rivers punctuates what seems, then, an almost obsessively pervasive concern in the text with ocular “proof,” with imagining the face of things, with matters of sight and insight, with the fascination of beholding, and with related questions of evidence, probation, interpretation, passionate (self-)deception, and entrapment. Whether the face can be trusted as an index of the character (or the motive) “within” and whether the rapt eye that “beholds” is a reliable witness are concerns that drive the play from start to finish. The telling paradox is that Matilda forms her own pitying “character” in keeping with her reading of her father’s “face” and her hearing of his “voice,” never acknowledging or even imagining that such immediate indices, in their very effect on her and others, could produce imprisoning rather than enabling passions. Matilda operates, in her entire ingenuousness, as one not only who trusts appearances absolutely but also whose own behavior and motives are keyed to an abiding faith in the face as a transparent sign of the heart.32 Trust with

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her is not a matter of motive or intention but of being or essence: such is the fiction Wordsworth’s drama offers the reader. At the outset she reads Herbert’s face exclusively under the aspect of his blindness and in the very terms his narrative voice, heard since childhood, has generated in her. Her sensibility – her “character,” to return to the terms I began with – is in transparent relation to seeing Herbert’s face as an icon, metonym for the narrative that is itself a transparent expression of his clasp: When I behold the ruins of that face, Those eye-balls dark – dark beyond hope of light, And think that they were blasted for my sake, The name of Mortimer is blown away. (i, i, 106–09)

And of Mortimer, to her father, she likewise contends: “His face bespeaks a deep and simple meekness.” Inherent in her trope – the figure of the speaking or signifying face – is an identity of face and voice as transparencies of the “one / All gentleness and love” she knows as Mortimer. The archaic “bespeak” (OED : “to speak of, tell of, be the outward expression of; to indicate, give evidence of ”), like “beheld” (“And others who survived the wreck, beheld / The Baron Herbert perish in the waves / Upon the coast of Cyprus” [i, i, 47–49]) signifies a condition of affective bondage, of seeing and hearing under the sign of pity. Matilda’s telling predilection for asseverative formations in “be-” like Mortimer’s own appeal to what the mariners “beheld,” inscribes her in the discourse of sublime raptness, a discourse The Borderers, as I read it, everywhere puts into question, dramatizing the dangers of being in the sway of spectacle. Iteration of “behold” in all its forms throughout the play registers Wordsworth’s sense of sublime pathos in the spectator as a selfinflicted wounding of the sensibility. Matilda’s passionately blind protest to her eyeless father, with its resonances of Samson Agonistes (“dark, dark . . .”), itself echoes later in the play when Mortimer rehearses for Rivers his failed mission to assassinate Herbert in the dungeon: ’Twas dark, dark as hell – yet I saw him – I tell thee I saw him, his face towards me – the very looks of Matilda sent there by some fiend to baffle me. – It put me to my prayers – I cast my eyes upwards, and through a crevice in the roof I beheld a star twinkling over my head, and by the living God, I could not do it – (ii, iii, 287–91)

And the mesmerizing power of that face suggests the fulfillment of Matilda’s promise that “the name of Mortimer is blown away”: “It must be – I must see / That face of his again – I must behold it – / ’Twere joy enough to end me” (ii, iii, 208–10). The compulsive iterations of “must,”

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the image of self-extinction in the raptness of ocular jouissance, and especially the context of other moments of faces beheld in (self-)blinding pity characterized by passionate supplication, all transform into something more problematic what might otherwise be seen as a move by an apprentice melodramatist to invest a moment of celestial illumination (the star’s rays shining through the crevice on the saintliness of Herbert’s countenance) with benign or even divine influence. Here the immediate appeal of Mortimer’s assertion of rapture is to the Spenserian narrative the Old Pilgrim repeats to Matilda (“No doubt you’ve heard the tale a thousand times” of the illumination that took place when she, Herbert, and the Pilgrim, overtaken by a storm in a “deep wood remote from any town,” found a cave, “a friendly shelter, and . . . entered in”: But ’twas an angry night, and o’er our heads The thunder rolled in peals that would have made A sleeping man uneasy in his bed. Oh Lady! you have need to love your father. His countenance, methinks I see it now, When after a broad flash that filled the cave He said to me that he had seen his child – A face – and a confused gleam of human flesh, (ii, ii, 25–48, passim) And it was you, dear Lady.

But more: for Matilda beholding the face – whosever face – is tantamount to surrendering the possibility of suspicion, of doubt, or even of independent judgment: even indeed of separateness. Correspondingly, she can only imagine blindness as deprivation from the immediate truth faces speak: to be cut off, like Herbert, from beholding the face of things is to miss their saving transparence and slip into gloomy fancies: “could you see the sun, / And look upon the pleasant face of Nature – ” (i, i, 118–19). And early on, caught up in the power of Rivers’s lies and roused in zeal to avenge what Matilda has suffered at the hands of her father, Mortimer imagines staging a scene of grotesque, theatrical retribution that not only parodies the archetypal scene of Matilda’s ingenuous trust but, in a notable confusion of criminal and victim, declares its own inflictive duress and viciousness: We will conduct her hither; These walls shall witness it – from first to last He shall reveal himself – his punishment (ii, i, 40–43) Shall be before her face.

Rivers’s hasty intervention prudently heads off the fulfillment of this vengeful scenario, but as an imagined atrocity against Matilda in

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the name of justice it anticipates Mortimer’s own haunted attempt, in the final scene of the play, to carry out the grim judicial mercy of ending Matilda’s agony by the fatal shock of his own brutally confessional tale: “Look on my face . . . I am the murderer of thy father” (v, iii, 97–99). The Borderers thus dramatizes as its central concern the potential (and potentially tragic) cleavage between what the “physical” eye can know by the face of things – what it can discern of “character” through visual appearance and visual gesture – and what lies concealed as the invisible reality within. (I’ll pass over for now the way this familiar formulation privileges the “within” as the site of the “real.”) Political and philosophical historians of the Enlightenment and its aftermath in Revolutionary France will recognize the bearing of this concern on the issue Jean Starobinski probes in Rousseau, namely “transparency,” whether conceived with regard to the individual subject and the possibility of authentic self-representation or with regard to the citizen as a member of the nation whose goal and destiny are to represent the “general will” of its citizens, where for the individual to oppose that will is treason (i.e., not to be a citizen) and for the representative of the citizens, the leader of the state, to transgress it is tyranny. As Starobinski has noted, permeating Rousseau’s language about self-knowledge and about relational communication is a vocabulary affirming ocular accuracy and interpretive authenticity: through veils, through cunning, through camouflage, the truth may still be seen: Since I have undertaken to reveal myself absolutely to the public, nothing about me must remain hidden or obscure. I must remain incessantly beneath the reader’s gaze, so that he may follow me in all the extravagances of my heart and into every last corner of my life. Indeed, he must never lose sight of me for a single instant.33

There are resonances with Rousseau’s paranoia in how Rivers, seducing Mortimer, characterizes Herbert: He dreads the presence of a virtuous man Like you, he knows your eye would search his heart, Your justice stamp upon his evil deeds (i, i, 238–41) The punishment they merit.

As Lynn Hunt has argued, the claim of transparent representativeness by those vying for power in the factional politics of the Revolution inevitably brought with it a paranoid obsession with the imagined treachery of those perceived in opposition: the cult of transparent vertu in citizens and leaders was expressed in a rhetoric of seeing and visibility that led ineluctably to the institutionalizing propaganda of the open-air

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revolutionary f ˆetes and to their savage counterparts in the Janus-faced politics of the Revolution, the spectacles of the guillotine. (Not without reason, in this regard, was it the Jacobin Committee of Surveillance before which the author of Robert, chef de brigands was summoned. Through its agents the Committee put itself in the place of the audience, as spectators before the spectacle, proclaiming its panoptic function: summoned before its scrutiny, director or actor was presumed to be transparently innocent or guilty, and the threat of being thus summoned loomed over the stage as an invisible manifestation of Jacobin power.)34 Gregory Dart has argued for a similar dualism involving Robespierre’s staging of the Festival of the Supreme Being on June 8, 1794, and the passing two days later by the National Convention of the Law of 22 Prairial, extending the power of the Revolutionary Tribunal and denying defense to those accused of treason.35 Ultimately, of course, as we have seen, the final tableau of The Borderers invokes the spectacularly ruined face of Herbert’s blindness, a disfiguration stemming from the catastrophe at Antioch (but emblematic of his alwaysalready self-usurped condition as a passionately crusading baron absenton-leave) and precipitating the crucial bondage of father and daughter. As Mortimer notes, Herbert’s blindness is an “obvious signal.” That blindness presides again and again as a determining dramaturgical circumstance in what Coleridge would have called the “conduct” of the play, as when Mortimer, about to abandon Herbert to his fate on the heath, pauses to read the inscription carved by Matilda on the old man’s staff: “I am Eyes to the blind saith the Lord, “He that puts his trust in me shall not fail.” Yes, be it so – repent and be forgiven – God and that staff are now thy only guides. (iii, iv, 150–53)

This is the same staff that Matilda herself, in the first act of the play, impetuous in her zeal to be her father’s sole stay, threatens to cast away: But cheerly, Father! That staff of yours, I could almost have heart To fling’t away from you; you make no use Of me, or of my strength; come, let me feel That you do press upon me. There. (i, i, 97–101)

Given how the emblem of Herbert’s face has dominated the foregoing action, its power continues appropriately to exert itself in the final scene, first in Mortimer’s brief visit to Herbert’s corpse in Robert and Margaret’s offstage cottage, from which he issues with the words, “The dead have but

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one face” (v, iii, 45). At stake in construing his remark is whether one imagines that offstage confrontation as one of beholding, that the dead face of Herbert presents itself to Mortimer’s eyes as a spell-binding spectacle. Since Mortimer’s earlier encounter with the sleeping Herbert in the dungeon – one he’s subsequently bound by (“It must be – I must see / That face of his again – I must behold it – / ’Twere joy enough to end me” [ii, iii, 308–10]) – involved beholding two faces (Matilda’s in Herbert’s), it’s reasonable to suppose that at the end Herbert’s dead face has lost that spectacular power, the power – cognate with that of his voice – born in his and Matilda’s narratives of pity. (Instead, if one imagines Mortimer gazing on Herbert’s dead face as merely an encounter of melodramatic and sentimentalized remorse, his remark seems pointless, without informing context.) The staring match dramatizes an emptying out of the power Rivers has held over Mortimer. If Rivers’s power has been akin to what the repressed exercises over the conscious self, then the staring match constitutes an ocular recognition of what previously Mortimer has not been able to name or identify, the power of the torrent of his past, the power of disorder, the power of the libidinal death-wish. Could it be that Rivers has no face? The ability to withstand the power of Rivers requires something like the power allegedly conferred by psychoanalysis. What then are we to make of Mortimer’s staring match as a nearly concluding moment?36 The iconic scenes repeatedly invoked in The Borderers have to do with voices and faces, or with the effect voices and faces “could” have on ears and eyes and on the minds of those who have them. That putative effect is always, for those who invoke it, one of illumination, of revelation, of clarification. “You couldn’t think that about Mortimer if you could hear his voice”; or, “you would see why I love Herbert if you could hear his voice” – but it’s crucial to recall that the appeal of such invocations is always to a previous effect on the speaker, not to a “proof ” that substantiates that effect. What Matilda wishes for Herbert is a repetition of what she has heard; likewise, what she has heard in Mortimer’s voice she has heard because of the foundational effect Herbert’s voice has had on her, because of the enslavement to the passion of pity it has wrought. The appeal, then, is to a specious anagnorisis, a flawed recognition, to what Wordsworth’s contemporary Henry James Pye called a misreading of circumstances linked to a disordering passion.37 It’s worth noting that the staring match constitutes an end-of-theline situation, that it takes its significance in the final act of The

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Borderers from the iconic power granted to faces and eyes earlier in the play, from all those moments when beholding the face has been claimed as a magical power to illuminate, to comfort, to save, to preserve from calamity. But to behold is to gaze at another while in the power of that other. Mortimer does not behold Rivers at the end, though Rivers may imagine he does; Mortimer’s final “fastening [his eye]” is an act of “seeing through” Rivers – even perhaps of deceiving Rivers, if one sees Mortimer pursuing the strategy of leading Rivers into a trap. The outcome of seeing through Rivers is an abdication on Mortimer’s part of seeing itself and of hearing itself, an embrace of solitude, of extinction; and, curiously, an embrace of forgetting, the very tendency that anagnorisis undoes; but it is also a proclamation of a strategy for providing the opportunity for recognition to others in the form of a monument. The monument is an anti-forgetting device, a mnemonic warning against the peril of forgetfulness. “Remember me” and you will not have to suffer my fate. The staring match as recognition and as a parodic, visual trope of “oh could you see his face” deconstructs the asseverative force of that cry, emphasizing that to see the face may be to be blinded to the character within.

Appendix “sonnet, on seeing miss helen maria williams weep at a tale of distress” She wept. – Life’s purple tide began to flow In languid streams through every thrilling vein; Dim were my swimming eyes – my pulse beat slow, And my full heart was swell’d to dear delicious pain. Life left my loaded heart, and closing eye; A sigh recall’d the wanderer to my breast. Dear was the pause of life, and dear the sigh That call’d the wanderer home, and home to rest. That tear proclaims – in thee each virtue dwells, And bright will shine in misery’s midnight hour; As the soft star of dewy evening tells What radiant fires were drown’d by day’s malignant power, That only wait the darkness of the night To chear the wand’ring wretch with hospitable light.

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Appendix the dog – an idyllium Where were ye nymphs when the remorseless deep Clos’d o’er your little favourite’s hapless head For neither did ye mark with solemn dread In Derwent’s rocky woods the white Moon’s beam Pace like a Druid o’er the haunted steep Nor in Winander’s stream Then did ye swim with sportive smile From fairy-templ’d isle to isle Which hear her far off ditty sweet Yet feel not even the milkmaid’s feet What tho’ he still was by my side When lurking near I there have seen Your faces white your tresses green Like water lilies floating on the tide He saw not bark’d not he was still As the soft moonbeam sleeping on the hill Or when ah! cruel maids ye stretch’d him stiff and chill.

[no title] Now ye meet in the cave Husband sons and all if ye’ve hands oh make a grave for she dies she dies she dies She wishes not for a grave bear into the salt sea, for Where you lie there she will lie. Oh bear her into the salt sea If you wish her peace [?oh] bear Bear her to the salt sea bear [ ] by The very spot where you do lie With your [?wives] by day In the coffins of the rock What has she [to] do with the churchyard.

georgics translation ix (adaptation of orpheus and eurydice passages) Still of his dear lost partner did he plain Giv’n to his arms from Death but giv’n in vain For which sad dearer office coldly spurn’d

Appendix The fell Ciconian Matrons inly burn’d [ ] to Bacchus as they paid Nocturnal orgies in the midnight shade Him mourning still the savage [maenads] found And strew’d his mangled limbs the plains around The head when from its neck of marble torn Was down the Oeagrian Hebrus slowly borne Then too upon the voice and faltering tongue Eurydice in dying accents hung Ah poor Eurydice it feebly cried All round Eurydice the [moaning banks reply’d] From [s]till small voices heard on every side.

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part ii

Coleridge and Shelley

chapter 5

Osorio’s dark employments: tricking out Coleridgean tragedy

There are sublime gestures that no oratorical eloquence can ever render . . . The sleepwalking Lady Macbeth . . . advances in silence and with eyes shut onto the stage, imitating the action of a person who washes her hands, as if hers had been stained with the blood of her king whose throat she had cut more than twenty years before. I know nothing so pathetic in discourse as the silence and the movement of the hands of this woman. What an image of remorse! (Diderot, Letter on the Deaf and Mute [1751])

[A] man who has real power at his command will not avail himself of trick: he will despise it. (Schiller, The Ghost-Seer or the Apparitionist [c.1786])

The remarkable stage success of Coleridge’s tragedy Remorse in early 1813 finished off the version called Osorio he had written fifteen years earlier and left its shade to hang in the seldom opened closet much of posterity for so long dismissively marked “Romantic Drama.” That gothic fate was sealed, ironically, by condescension to the very ideologies of stageability that had led Richard Sheridan, owner of Drury Lane, who had invited Coleridge to submit a tragedy, to reject Osorio late in 1797 because of “the obscurity of the last three acts.” This chapter offers Osorio a spectral airing, partly in the hope that it might come to haunt the imaginations of those engaged in efforts to breathe life into Coleridge’s frequently overlooked powers as a dramatist and on the role theater might play in times of political conflict and ministerial tyranny.1 Over thirty-five years ago, anticipating the polemics of the next decades, the irreverent pit-bull William Empson went after the romantic ideology in a pugnacious “Introduction” to an outre´ selection of Coleridge’s verse, claiming that the author of the original version of “The Ancyent Marinere” in 1798 was a closet devote´ not of orthodox – or Anglican – Christianity or even of Pantheism, but of “Animism”: the condensation of the universal spirit into local centers of experience, 109

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“animal Spirits” of variously benign and evil natures, and that under external and internal pressures over the ensuing years Coleridge turned it into the poem subsequent editors anthologize for schoolchildren’s consumption, with the spirits converted – in part by the 1816 gloss and in part by Gustave Dore´’s engravings – into what Empson satirized as “insufferably twee” Christian angels.2 Among the poems also included in Empson’s tendentious selection of Coleridge’s verse, shredded and patched to frame a congenial context for his mischief-making animist thesis, were “The Foster-Mother’s Tale” and “The Dungeon,” two fragments originally published in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads when Coleridge quarried them from the earliest version of his rejected Osorio. But in his polemic against the hypocrisies of traditional Christian “readings” that neglect the early versions of “The Ancient Mariner,” Empson omitted any mention of Osorio, a work he, perhaps, found dispiriting. This chapter is offered in part to supply that omission and, in part, as an amicus brief in the court of postmodern romanticist criticism for Empson’s reprobated and certainly neglected views. Empson’s target was an icon in the pious cant of institutionalized English studies: he would show, by his own sleight of hand, that the poem of “pure imagination” the New Critics had constructed out of “Symbolism” was in fact tottering on a foundation of quirky occultism. What has led many readers to be so dismissive of Osorio is in part a failure to imagine that in Coleridge’s first effort at a fulllength tragedy something like Empson’s notorious spirits might be alive and well. Their shadowy presences make themselves felt in a number of radically ambiguous or elusive – but dramatically haunting – moments in the play, moments that Coleridge took some pains to eliminate when, in 1807 and after, he set about the extensive revisions that produced Remorse, which ran for twenty performances at the colossal morgue of the new Drury Lane Theatre, “the longest run for a new tragedy in decades, and the greatest stage success for verse drama in the nineteenth century.”3 The fate of Osorio, on the other hand, is instructive: largely neglected by many serious Coleridgeans and disdained by modernist scholars who saw the democratic sympathies of writers of the 1790s as an impediment to significant literary performance, its aesthetic merits are nonetheless substantial. Recognizing them entails, paradoxically, seeing that the very elements at the heart of the play’s unconventional power made production at Drury Lane in the late 1790s unthinkable. The further irony is that later readers mistook those elements for the dreary gothic trappings of humdrum plays that were popular at that venue, plays that Wordsworth and Coleridge deplored as sickly and stupid.

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i Set in Spain “in the reign of Phillip the 2nd, shortly after the Moorish Rebellion, & during the persecution of the Moors,” Osorio is a cannily constructed appropriation and extension of the promiscuously circulating fashions in gothic fiction and in contemporary stagings in melodramas of spectacular tableaux, or “situations.”4 Coleridge discussed such libertine fashions with Wordsworth, during or shortly after their tandem efforts to write for the stage in 1797. In January 1798, seven weeks after Sheridan rejected Osorio, he wrote Wordsworth ridiculing Monk Lewis’s recent Drury Lane success, The Castle Spectre, which he had just read: This Play proves how accurately you conjectured concerning theatric merit. The merit of the Castle Spectre consists wholly in its situations. These are all borrowed, and all absolutely pantomimical but they are admirably managed for stage effect. There is not much bustle; but situations for ever . . . It would be [easy] to produce these situations, but not in a play so for[med] as to admit the permanent & closest beauties of style, passion & character. To admit pantomimic tricks the plot itself must be pantomimic – Harlequin cannot be had unaccompanied by the Fool. – 5

Drury Lane’s The Castle Spectre, Coleridge said, “struck [him] with utter hopelessness.” Well it might have, encountering Lewis’s text as he did on the heels of Sheridan’s rejection of Osorio, for in his tragedy he had set himself the formidable aesthetic goal of solving the problem posed by the apparent theatric merit of such plays as Lewis’s: how to “admit pantomimic tricks” without compromising the “higher” art of tragedy. To read Osorio thus against the aesthetic grain would be an enterprise congruent with ongoing efforts to demythologize romantic aesthetics, showing that in attempting to write high romantic tragedy Coleridge nonetheless fatally involved himself with the trappings, devices, and conventions of the reigning “low” theatrical tastes of the 1790s; in a sense that was the implicit undertaking of much twentieth-century derogation of the play. But such an account should be supplemented by drawing into view more explicitly the discernible political aspects of those trappings and devices when Coleridge wrote Osorio. Sheridan’s pocket veto at Drury Lane may well have helped obscure from adequate view a text whose ghosts were part of the shadowy afterlife of revolutionary sympathies that Pitt’s ministry had done so much to suppress in the years since February 1793, when England went to war against France. Coleridge’s vociferous disdain for the theater of pantomimic trickery and “situations” should be understood against the background of the

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challenge, earlier in the eighteenth century, to the ideological centrism of spoken discourse in the theater posed by burgeoning interest in and controversy over pantomimic representation of passions, in facial expression, bodily attitudes, and gestures. That centrism itself was the legacy of efforts by sponsoring and licensing powers in seventeenth-century France and England to institutionalize notions of a “pure” rational discourse as the appropriate reflection in theater of centrally administered royal power. Through contractual establishment of theaters and censorship, strict codes governing verbal and bodily expression were articulated and perpetuated, producing (neo)classic genres and theories in light of which particular texts and styles were reviewed, judged, and either sanctioned or prohibited. In this context, the arts of pantomime, associated culturally with companies of foreign actors who performed only in dumb-show and with the “lower” orders of society, flourished on and beyond the margins of legitimacy, often implicitly or explicitly challenging and satirizing the ideology of spoken discourse at the center.6 Associated with this challenge was a subversion or transgression of the hegemony of discourse itself as an expressive mode. In France, Diderot’s “I know nothing so pathetic in discourse as the silence and the movement of the hands of this woman” is of a piece with his interest in promoting the technology of tableaux: bodily utterance and effusions (tears, gasps, sighs, gestures) became coded with the values of directness, immediacy, and authenticity in expression; spoken eloquence, on the other hand, became coded with the values of artifice, of dissembling, disguise, falsification, and insincerity. The aesthetic ideology of sublime experience, characteristically prizing inarticulate, astonished, and immobilized bodily and mental activity, presents itself as the antithesis of such artifice. By the latter part of the eighteenth century, the rising trajectory of such values in the performing arts and their travestying mimicry of verbal complexity in portraying the “swift interchanges” or the “rapid succession” of states of mute passion came themselves to be institutionalized in the culture of sensibility with which Coleridge and Wordsworth, as budding dramatists, found themselves at such odds.7 Coleridge constructed Osorio and his brother Albert as representations of actors whose inveterate dissembling has much to do with the remarkable – and controversial – career of what he called “pantomimic tricks” on English (and French) stages in the eighteenth century and with the accompanying critical discourse about the role of pantomime, especially in the performance of tragedy. Along with Wordsworth’s Rivers, both Osorio and Albert are clear instances of characters conceived as

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dissembling performers. Though readers have tended to see them as moral opposites (and to find in that simplistic opposition a chief dramatic failing of Osorio when measuring Albert’s “virtue” against, say, the arresting mix of good and evil in Schiller’s Karl Moor), they are, in this respect at least, twins, and their respective pursuits of Maria entail virtually identical technologies of dissembling and disguise. Both are tale-tellers and dissemblers whose power to dominate and seduce others to their will and agency represents what Coleridge in Biographia Literaria called “intellectual” power or “great intellectual lordship.”8 That power drives the plot of Osorio, acting through consummate pantomimical artifice. I use the term pantomime loosely to invoke here the array of dramaturgical elements Osorio depends on to generate illusionary drama. Such effects involve what theorists of eighteenth-century dance and acting called “bodily eloquence,” a controversial technology of representation epitomized onstage by David Garrick’s virtuosity in facial expression and bodily gesture or “attitude” and in fiction by the consummately seductive performances of Rameau’s nephew.9 The discourse about pantomime that pervades Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment aesthetic debate is behind Maria’s vehement excoriation to Velez, her guardian/father, of Osorio’s “low imposture” during the central “sorcery” scene: Saw you his countenance? How rage, remorse, and scorn, and stupid fear, Displac’d each other with swift interchanges? If this were all assum’d, as you believe, He must needs be a most consummate Actor; And hath so vast a power to deceive me, I never could be safe. And why assume The semblance of such execrable feelings?10 (iv, ii, 109–16)

Taking a cue from Coleridge’s extensive discussion of Thomas Shadwell’s Don Juan in Chapter 23 of the Biographia, it helps to think of Maria here as voicing the plight of the libertine’s victim under her persecutor’s “bad and heterogeneous” sway, especially as the articulation of that plight also aligns her with late eighteenth-century discourse about the experience of the theater audience. Maria voices a fashionable fantasy of the day, that the audience might lose its detachment and autonomy, its sense of itself, in a frisson of vulnerability to a performance whose power to deceive would spill perilously across the limits of the stage. Claiming such power for Osorio suggests its striking affinities with Wordsworth’s dramatic enterprise in The Borderers. Though Coleridge’s brief preface singles out

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the eponymous Osorio for particular analysis, much of his attention in composing the play went to what Wordsworth in 1842, referring to The Borderers, called “the position in which the persons of the Drama stood relatively to each other.” My emphasis here will be in large part on Albert and Maria, figures whose positions in Osorio have much in common with the shadowy “truth” Wordsworth’s tragedy embeds in Rivers’s lies about Mortimer and Matilda. Understanding how Coleridge’s dramaturgy positions Albert and Maria helps frame his representation of Osorio.11 Tropes of deception and disguise govern Osorio, through such recurring signifiers as trick, sport, imposture, spell, charm, magic, wizardry, mummery, sorcery, painting, dream, fancy, frame, stain, pollution, tale, mask, veil, apparel, robe, and garment. Garments figure with special prominence in the action of the play, involving cultural masking and religious crossdressing (as well as figurative robing and disrobing), most notably early in the first act with Albert’s return after six years’ absence to the realm of his father Lord Velez, disguised in the robes of a Moresco, at a time when (as Coleridge explained, using brackets, in a manuscript note) “Phillip the second had prohibited under pain of Death.”12 If disguise promises, moreover, eventual disclosure of an identity “within” or “underneath” or “behind” the garment, typically in Osorio such identity remains crucially equivocal or even indeterminate. Albert’s “identity” beneath the Moorish robe proves to be an enigma whose implications resonate dramaturgically and thematically throughout the play. It eventually emerges that, prior to the action of the play, Albert – then betrothed to Maria, the orphan ward of Velez – was the intended victim, while abroad, of a secret assassination plot designed by his jealous brother Osorio. By a lying tale, Osorio had suborned Ferdinand, the Moorish husband of Alhadra, but himself “ostensibly a Christian,” into leading the assassins; his tale concealed from Ferdinand his brotherhood with Albert, depicting Maria as engaged to another but really in love with – and pregnant by – himself. As later a sadder and somewhat wiser Ferdinand, unwilling to assist Osorio’s sorcery scheme, reminds him: You know, you told me that the Lady lov’d you – Had lov’d you with incautious tenderness – That if the young Man, her betrothed husband, Return’d, yourself, and she, and an unborn babe, (ii, i, 48–52) Must perish.

At the outset, Osorio, confident this malign plot has succeeded and that Albert is dead, pursues his usurping designs both on Maria and on his

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older brother’s inheritance. It comes to light in the first scene that he has also long ago put about another lying tale, to Maria and to his father Velez, that while voyaging in search of his brother he saw him perish when Albert’s ship, captured as a prize by a Moorish pirate, foundered in a storm. But Maria resists Osorio’s importunate suit and, implicitly, the burden of his tale: “faithful to Albert, be he dead or living,” she clings to melancholy fantasies of his return, despite her guardian’s claim that she makes herself wretched, “with slow anguish” wearing away her life, “the victim of a useless constancy.” Obstinate in the face of Velez’s chiding lament, she defends the shadowy tricks of her ways, invoking the fantastic cross-dressing of one she once knew, (a crazy moorish Maid, Who drest her in her buried Lover’s cloathes, And o’er the smooth spring in the mountain cleft Hung with her Lute, and play’d the self-same tune He us’d to play, and listen’d to the shadow Herself had made) if this be wretchedness, And if indeed it be a wretched thing To trick out mine own death-bed, and imagine That I had died – died, just ere his return; Then see him list’ning to my constancy, And hover round as he at midnight ever Sits on my grave, and gazes at the moon . . . My Albert’s Sire! if this be wretchedness, That eats away the life, what were it, think you, If in a most assur’d reality He should return, and see a Brother’s infant (i, i, 30–50, passim) Smile at him from my arms?

Unknown to Osorio, however, in the play’s “most assur’d reality,” Ferdinand’s murderous mission against Albert was thwarted, or so we learn when the disguised Albert indeed returns. Pursuing his own impassioned plot to rouse the pain of remorse in his brother’s conscience, he encounters Maria and Alhadra, Ferdinand’s Moorish wife, on the seashore. Reading his forbidden garments, they voice alarmed solicitude for a Moresco at large in the land of the Inquisition. The encounter, we may note, is a deft piece of Coleridgean dramaturgy: unknown in his disguise to Maria, Albert himself unwittingly fulfills the scenario of melancholic imaginings of return she painted to Velez in her fetishistic constancy. Thrilled by the innocence of Maria’s voice (“That voice! that innocent voice! She is no Traitress!”), Albert momentarily unmoors his mask by

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blurting out her name: “Maria! you are not wedded?” (i, i, 274–76) in that impulsive slip voicing the very salutation that would, in her fantasies, have triumphantly vindicated her fidelity. In the face of her abrupt consternation at the liberty of such familiar questioning from an apparent Moresco (“What can this mean? How should he know my name? / It seems all shadowy!” [i, i, 279–80]), Albert then immediately dissembles, blaming his transgressive intimacy on his having “just started from a frightful dream,” which he then narrates, the fiction of his dream blending with the imagined death-bed trickery she in her melancholy enacts. His extended account of that “dream” plays on an ambiguity crucial to Coleridge’s dramatic enterprise throughout Osorio. Maria and Alhadra hear it as the tale of an actual dream Albert has just had during what they imagine to be his brief fainting seizure that punctuates their encounter on the seashore. But for Albert, who has feigned the faint, the dream he tells is a veiled allegory of his three years’ misapprehension about Maria’s treachery that the assassination plot, as revealed to him by a remorseful Ferdinand (himself gulled by Osorio about Maria’s complicity), had plunged him into, a delusion the seacoast encounter with Maria’s innocent voice has just dispelled: I dreamt, I had a Friend, on whom I lean’d With blindest trust, and a betrothed Maid, Whom I was wont to call, not mine but me, For my own self seem’d nothing, lacking her. This maid so idoliz’d, that trusted Friend Polluted in my absence, soul & body: And she with him, and he with her, conspir’d To have me murder’d in a wood of the mountains: But by my looks and most impassion’d words I roused the Virtues, that are dead in no man, Even in the assassins’ hearts. They made their terms, And thank’d me for redeeming them from murder. (i, i, 288–99)

We shall come back shortly to those “terms.” The focus now is on the exemplary nature of Albert’s claim that “by [his] looks and most impassion’d words / [He] roused the virtues, that are dead in no man, / Even in the assassins’ hearts.” That claim also sketches in advance a benign version of his own more darkly aggressive plot to “probe the conscience” of Osorio, a plot “to wake the hell within him” that culminates when Albert departs from his scheming brother’s nefarious script for the sorcery scene at the beginning of Act Three, a necromantic hoax staged to trick Maria into accepting the reality of Albert’s death. Such veiled narrations as

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Albert’s dream here to Maria and Alhadra are frequent in the dramaturgy of Osorio; typically they screen some imagined truth from their auditors (here that the teller is indeed Albert and that the assassination was his brother’s plot). At the same time, their darkness not only generates in those listeners some passionate response predicated on a dim intuition of that shadowy truthfulness; it also dramatizes in the teller, despite his claim of having shed the delusion, his continuing toil in the sway of an unstable and deforming passion. It’s that passion that Maria benignly calls his “not ungentle wildness” (i, i, 341) and that Ferdinand soon after describes to Osorio as the Moorish wizard’s lunatic behavior, “prowling out for dark employments” (ii, i, 134).13 The continuation of Albert’s dream-narrative relates the turbulent aftermath of making terms with the assassins, when “all things seem’d unreal!” and, roused by a midnight storm to a “tumultuous” and “clamorous agony,” he pray’d to the great Spirit that made me, Pray’d that remorse might fasten on their hearts, And cling, with poisonous tooth, inextricable (i, i, 318–21) As the gor’d Lion’s Bite! –

Maria aptly shudders under these overwrought words as “A fearful curse!” but the unswerving Alhadra hears them as the imperative summons to a bloody agenda: “But dreamt you not, that you return’d, & kill’d them? / Dreamt you of no revenge?” (i, i, 322–23). Albert’s rejoinder refuses Alhadra’s exhortation by fantastically elaborating the abhorrent consequences of such violent vengeance, painting a double-suicide catastrophe to what he imagined as Maria’s fatal complicity in Osorio’s guilty plot: She would have died, Died in her sins – perchance, by her own hands! And bending o’er her self-inflicted wounds I might have met the evil glance of Frenzy, And leapt myself into an unblest grave! (i, i, 323–27)

Albert’s hysterical, Hamlet-like scenario rings an unwittingly ironic change on the counterpart tale his echoing words summon, Maria’s earlier account of her wretched practice when she would “trick out my own deathbed, and imagine / That I had died – died, just ere his return; / Then see him list’ning to my constancy” (i, i, 37–39). As Maria proclaims – “My soul is full of visions, all as wild” (i, i, 330) – such dreamers are meant for each other. But what drives their fatal attraction remains, at this point in the play, obscure.

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If the unblest hysteria of Albert’s infernal fancy mirrors Maria’s melancholy travesty of hope, the alternative by which he then concludes his allegory escapes no further than the purgatorial darkness of passionately concocted dream-work: “I pray’d for the punishment, that cleanses hearts; / For still I lov’d her!” (i, i, 328–9). Here Maria’s parting words to the Moorish stranger on the seashore, groping after the meaning of echoes she can’t quite fathom, diagnose that darkness as the work of repression.14 She innocently refers him to Velez and Osorio as aggressive analysts armed and willed in the practice of bringing things to light, a gesture that further compounds the impression of her own transferential blindness: Stranger, farewell! I guess not who you are, Nor why you so address’d your tale to me, Your mien is noble, and, I own, perplex’d me With obscure memory of something Past, Which still escap’d my efforts, or presented Tricks of a Fancy pamper’d with long-wishing! If (as it sometimes happens) our rude startling, While your full heart was shaping out its dream, Drove you to this, your not ungentle wildness, You have my sympathy, and so farewell! But if some undiscover’d wrongs oppress you, And you need strength to drag them into light, The generous Velez, and my Lord Osorio Have arm & will to aid a noble sufferer, Nor shall you want my favourable pleading.15 (i, i, 333–47)

To disguise himself as a Moresco is for Albert to dissemble his (unruly) feelings, but it is also to signal passion’s attachment, the tyranny of desire laboring to fasten upon its origins. When, thus disfigured, he eventually meets Osorio and hears him identify himself as “son of the Lord Velez,” Albert groans aloud, for the designation tacitly enacts his own obliteration as son and heir; feelings of pathos threaten to overwhelm him to the point of wishing “to fall upon his [brother’s] neck and weep in anguish!” (ii, ii, 48), a fearful gesture that echoes the seashore betrothal. Disguise dissembles the “true” passion (here – if we can trust the afterlight of Remorse – the passion to forgive his brother): but read another way, it guards against threatened dissolution under the tyranny of passion. Passion’s bondage here figures as an intense embrace about the neck, cognate elsewhere in the play with other figures of grasping, clasping, fastening, and seizing: to forestall the risky impulse to fall on his brother’s neck (thus abandoning his disguise), Albert instead, as the stage direction

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has it, “grasps Maurice’s hand in agitation” (ii, ii, 45). Often, as we shall see, such charged embraces around or upon the neck suggest ties that bring with them the threat of bondage and suffocation. ii The central “trick” of the play – one that also involves dissembling – is set in motion when Osorio seeks to suborn an agent who, posing as a sorcerer and staging a sham se´ance, will produce as though by magic a token to persuade the reluctant Maria that her fiance´ is indeed dead. His first candidate for this impostor is his former instrument, Ferdinand, who – though appalled now by Osorio’s sinister motive – fatally dissembles his horror. Instead of denouncing Osorio’s proposition, Ferdinand begs off and, temporizing with darkness, directs him to the haunt of the wild Moresco stranger he has lately observed and taken for a wizard out of work: “some gaunt slave, prowling out for dark employments.” Unknown to Ferdinand, this stranger is the disguised Albert, who, as Ferdinand reports, when asked his identity by an officer of the Inquisitor, answered, “Say to the Lord Osorio, / ‘He that can bring the dead to life again’” (ii, i, 139–40). The token, as Osorio subsequently says in his dark embassy to recruit the stranger, is to be Maria’s keepsake portrait: If we could make her certain of his death, She needs must wed me. Ere her Lover left her, She tied a little portrait round his neck (ii, ii, 118–21) Entreating him to wear it.

Osorio has obtained the portrait from Ferdinand, having earlier ordered him to bring it back as proof of the accomplished assassination. But as the Moorish Albert’s dreamy seashore tale in Act i and Ferdinand’s exchange with Osorio earlier in Act ii have revealed, Ferdinand has himself duped Osorio. Having discovered, on the verge of assassination, when the victim’s valiant resistance “compell’d a parley,” that he was in fact Osorio’s brother, Ferdinand was stirred to “virtue” by Albert’s “looks and most impassion’d words.” Instead of murdering him, the would-be assassins came to “terms” with their victim, terms that included Albert’s surrender of the portrait so Ferdinand might return bearing the stipulated trophy. What Ferdinand doesn’t know is that in silently duping Osorio – and thereby failing to denounce and expose his malice – he remains fatally complicit in that malice.16 In effect he sets up the chain of circumstances and incidents whereby Osorio, when the sorcery scheme goes awry,

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imagines Ferdinand’s treacherous collusion with the “wizard.” In Act iv, acting vengefully on that suspicion, Osorio murders him. Through the juggling chicanery of Osorio’s plan for the wizard’s se´ance, Maria (as though in ironic fulfillment of one of her melancholy fantasies) is meant to behold “herself ” framed in the form of the “little portrait” on the sorcerer’s altar, an unwitting victim prepared for the sacrifice. Feigning acquiescence in Osorio’s trick, then, Albert the wizard also feigns readiness in the dark employment of playing the pander not only in his own cuckoldry but also in the sacrifice of Maria. But the disguised Albert has a trick of his own up his Moorish sleeve: to subvert Osorio’s scenario by substituting – for the portrait his beloved had “tied round his neck” – a picture which, he confides to his confederate Maurice, “I painted . . . / Of my assassination” (ii, ii, 156–7). Albert’s sleight-ofhand sting entails, however, a crucial paradox. Pricked to fury by the continuing treachery of Osorio – “That worst bad Man” – he wills his substitution to “wake the Hell within him, / And rouse a fiery Whirlwind in his Conscience!” (ii, ii, 161–63). Albert thus not only sets in motion a vengeful strategy to torture Osorio’s conscience (a dark agenda it’s hard to distinguish from the Inquisition’s practice of “probing” its victim’s guilt),17 he also introduces a piece of spurious evidence, for his painting offers crucially equivocal testimony. A “paint[ing] . . . of my assassination” by a surviving Albert who has bargained his way out of assassination would frame Osorio with false witness, alleging murder instead of conspiracy in a murder never carried out. Such trumped-up trickery – painting as perjury – calls attention to the prominence throughout Osorio of all “painting” as an ambiguous figure spawned in problematic desire or overwrought passion, the misrepresentation of “most assur’d reality” in “colors” that serve the agenda of a warped psyche – as in the self-indulgent Maria’s melancholy “painting” of her morbid fantasies in Act i.18 To his faithful attendant Maurice, Albert’s chief power as a painter is an escapist, consolatory “fancy” to “call up past deeds, and make them live / On the blank canvas,” a resurrectionist art in the service of passive, temporizing melancholy (ii, ii, 20–21). Painting his assassination is in effect Albert’s version of Maria’s problematic artistry, as when she licenses her fancy “to trick out mine own death-bed, and imagine / That I had died – died, just ere his return.” Albert’s temporizing “trick,” then, illuminates the willfulness implicit in Maria’s fanciful ruses (she prepares a false scenario for the purpose of enjoying, as a voyeur, Albert’s grief ). In a court of (non-Inquisitional) law,

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his trick is tantamount to tampering with evidence, to perjury. (Whether it amounts also to an attempted assassination of Osorio’s character is a matter for fine pondering.) Implicit in this (mis)reading, of course, is a moment of figurative pantomime in the dramaturgy of Act ii: when Osorio “returns” Maria’s portrait to Albert, the unwritten stage direction, in keeping with the spirit of Albert’s passionate gaze on the “holy image,” is “The wizard reties the portrait around his own neck.” Donning such an icon bears witness to one’s service in the bondage of desire. But a closet reader – or theater audience – might frame an even more extravagantly untoward construction of the “assassination” painting. “What if – ?” What if (to echo the wizard’s engage´ badgering of Osorio during the sorcery scene) Albert’s substitute painting is not a pretty piece of perjury but an “accurate” representation of what happened? Then one might read the account of the assassination plot in the “dream” he narrates to Maria and Alhadra in a different light. Recall that language: by my looks & most impassion’d words I rous’d the Virtues, that are dead in no man, Even in the assassins’ hearts. They made their terms, And thank’d me for redeeming them from murder. (i, i, 296–99)

Nothing here says in so many words that Albert was not murdered. The precise phrasing – “thank’d me for redeeming them from murder” – would be an (unColeridgean) solecism if the murder had been forestalled: one cannot redeem a sinner if no sin has been committed. (In their Act ii exchange, when Osorio puts the question directly to him –“And you kill’d him?” [ii, i, 102] – Ferdinand himself responds with an ambiguous silence.) With a similar license we may note that in the immediately continuing lines Albert’s narrative perpetuates this equivocation in a melancholy fantasy of an animist afterlife to his murder, resonating with Maria’s own earlier Act i “fancies”: On a rude rock, A rock, methought, fast by a grove of firs Whose threaddy leaves to the low-breathing gale Made a soft sound most like the distant Ocean, I stay’d, as tho’ the hour of death were past, And I were sitting in the world of spirits – (i, i, 303–09) For all things seem’d unreal!19

Just as these equivocations in the earlier narrative of his “dream” to Maria mirror the paradox of Albert’s substitution trick, Velez’s

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rapt reading of the painting, following the sorcery scene, voices a comparably reflexive undecidability: Calm, yet commanding! how he bares his breast, Yet still they stand with dim uncertain looks, As Penitence had run before their crime – A crime too black for aught to follow it Save blasphemous Despair! See this man’s face – With what a difficult toil he drags his soul (iii, i, 202–08) To do the deed –

Did their daggers then do their dark work, or not? And did the commanding Albert bare his breast in passive acquiescence? (The additional suggestion in the phrase “bares his breast” of a confessional shedding of the disguise of guilty misrepresentation only compounds the beholder’s hermeneutical dilemma.) If the assassins, penitence running before their crime, were redeemed from murder (rather than dissuaded from carrying out the murder), what happened to the corpus delicti? We can imagine – or fantasize? – that it was in some sense reanimated, that the disguised “Albert” who earlier has described himself as “loitering” on the seacoast of Granada is a body inhabited by the “spirit” of assassinated Albert: a wandering shade. If we construe the “looks” and “impassion’d words” to be those of the revenant spirit of the “murder’d” man, then the “terms” suggest a different, more portentous pact with Ferdinand, something like an infernal, Faustian parody of redemption, a piece of vengeance. By this (mis)construction, Albert’s brooding vow at the very end of Act i, when, passionately convinced of Maria’s “innocence,” he forswears further pursuit of his vehement agenda (“Nay, I will not do it. / I curs’d him once, and one curse is enough”), concludes with a ghostly metaphor that asks, in some sense, to be taken “literally”: I will die believing, That I shall meet her, where no Evil is, No treachery, no Cup dash’d from the Lips. I’ll haunt this scene no more – live she in peace! (i, i, 368–71, emphasis added)

Albert’s theatrical return to the stage in the sorcery scene of course breaks this vow, with fatal results. “Doubt, but decide not!” (iii, i, 10). The wizard’s rejoinder to Maria’s reproachful dismay at his participation in sorcery’s mockery of faith points to a central dramatic effect in Osorio: the suggestion that Albert is not “alive” but a revenant ghost, once raised, cannot be laid to rest. That same ghostly undecidability inhabits Velez’s tendentious remark,

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moments after the sorcery scene, when impatiently he chides Maria – “Still sad, Maria? This same Wizard haunts you” (iv, ii, 84). Hovering insistently in such discourse, then, is the possibility that “Albert” is a ghost of his former self, prowling out. The sorcery se´ance ends in a tumultuous coup de the´aˆtre, but one that chimes with Maria’s melancholy fancies. When, downstage, hearing Velez at the distant upstage altar cry out “a picture!” that the wizard has produced “her” picture – the keepsake she tied round Albert’s neck, “entreating him to wear it” – and thus that her lover has died, she swoons as though fatally, but then, responding to the alarmed wizard’s desperate ministrations, revives to voice her despair. The wizard eagerly presses to disabuse her of what he imagines she has seen: “Believe it not, sweet Maid! . . . / ’Twas a low imposture / Fram’d by a guilty Wretch” (iii, i, 129–31). But this importunate repudiation cuts two ways: the guilty wretch is both Osorio, who commissioned (“framed”) the fraudulent se´ance, suborned the wizard, and provided the portrait, and Albert “himself,” who, disguised as the wizard, perpetrated a “framing” of his own, substituting the “assassination” painting for the portrait. By this subtly contrived dramaturgy, Osorio reinforces the ambiguity of Albert’s revenant mission: has he come back alive to save Maria from Osorio’s vicious lust, which – by substituting a narrative aimed at exposing Osorio’s [failed] plot against him – he has now inadvertently blundered into abetting? Or has Albert’s shade returned on a plot of vengeance whose “guilt” is as damning as Osorio’s original crime? If the latter, then Albert’s and Osorio’s twin plots collapse into one endlessly proliferating villainy, and Albert and Osorio become demonic versions of each other, doppelga¨ngers in identical atrocities against Maria. The dramatic effect inheres in the ambiguity: neither alternative dispels the other, with the suggestiveness of the language alternately proposing each.20 This shadowy possibility also impels the dungeon encounter between Albert and Osorio that launches the Act v denouement. At one level of construction, the encounter reenacts the “failed” assassination attempt of Albert’s Act i dream narrative: this time Osorio himself arrives to carry out a murder which, in his ignorance of the wizard’s “true” identity, he does not yet know was previously foiled. But, by another construction – one focusing on Albert’s difficult toil – the dungeon struggle also plays itself off in the reader’s mind against the sorcery scene. At issue is whether “Albert” is still a ghostly version of himself – that is, whether he remains on the prowl for vengeance. The indications, not surprisingly, are equivocal: taunted by the murderous Osorio (who imagines the Moorish wizard

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has conspired in Ferdinand’s treachery) as a “Villain” and “Mountebank,” Albert responds by rehearsing – or is it repeating? – the accusations of the sorcery scene: “I fix mine eye upon thee, and thou tremblest! / I speak – and fear and wonder crush thy rage, / And turn it to a motionless distraction!” (v, ii, 78–80). Yet tempering the energy of rehearsal is an apparent calmness of manner, a self-command (recalling Velez’s description of the “painting of the assassination”), and with it an urgent appeal to “remorse” and to being “saved”: Thou blind Self-worshipper! thy pride, thy cunning, Thy faith in universal Villainy, Thy shallow sophisms, thy pretended scorn For all thy human Brethren – out upon them! What have they done for thee? Have they given thee peace? Cur’d thee of starting in thy sleep? or made The darkness pleasant, when thou wak’st at midnight? Art happy when alone? Canst walk by thyself With even step, and quiet cheerfulness? Yet, yet thou may’st be sav’d. . .. One pang – (v, ii, 81–91) Could I call up one pang of true remorse! –

But that appeal, and the wizard’s uttering “(almost overcome by his feelings)” the name “But Albert – ” instead spurs Osorio – fresh as he is from the murder of Ferdinand – to a frenzy of enraged contrition, a perverse, despairing, masochistically self-referential embrace of his own torturous guilt: Ha! it chokes thee in the throat, Even thee! And yet, I pray thee, speak it out – Still Albert! Albert! Howl it in mine ear! Heap it, like Coals of Fire, upon my heart! And shoot it hissing thro’ my brain! (v, ii, 101–05)

This phase of the encounter culminates when Albert, refusing vengeance, instead summons from childhood the time when Osorio saved him from drowning, “That day, when thou didst leap from off the rock / Into the waves, and grasp’d thy sinking Brother” (v, ii, 106–7), the word “grasp’d” playing off against the idiom of the Inquisition’s rude seizures. Albert then, worked by his own tale to a pitch of fraternal feeling, but crucially maintaining the disguise of third-person self-referentiality, subjunctively offers Osorio the possibility of a forgiving embrace from the assassinated brother: “O Heaven! how he would fall upon thy neck, / And weep forgiveness!” (v, ii, 113–14). Osorio’s response figures a hysterical recognition that doubles as a direct address to the Moorish wizard and as an apostrophe to a revenant ghost:

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Spirit of the dead! Methinks, I know thee! Ha! – my brain turns wild At its own dreams – off – off fantastic shadow! (v, ii, 114–16)

The turning of Osorio’s brain to the wildness of a fantastic surmise – that the dungeoned wizard and the ghostly spirit of the slain Albert might be one – recapitulates precisely the idiom that signals, in “The FosterMother’s Tale,” the original fall of the very learned youth, “poor Wretch – he read, and read, and read, / ’Till his brain turn’d – and ere his twentieth year, / He had unlawful thoughts of many things” (iv, ii, 44–46, emphasis added). It also recalls another deranged figure, the “crazy Moorish maid” of Maria’s melancholy, who, cross-dressed in wretchedness, “listen’d to the shadow / Herself had made” (i, i, 34–35).21 iii That construction doubtless wanders outside the bounds of what readers have come to expect from romantic drama. And yet Osorio’s language keeps playing at the extravagance of such license, in moments Coleridge himself did rule out when, years later, he reshaped the text for Remorse. Another moment of salient ambiguity in Osorio – one he took the clearest pains to erase in Remorse – also occurs in the sorcery scene. After a mirror-stage apostrophe when the wizard in sorcerer’s robes summons the “Soul of Albert” from “that innumerable Company, / Who in broad Circle, lovelier than the Rainbow, / Girdle this round Earth in a dizzy motion” (iii, i, 16–18), the canting Osorio, professing love for his lost brother, adds his own invocation, his apostrophe ironically summoning as well in the audience’s mind the very ghost of Albert, who stands before him in wizard’s robes. My Brother is in heaven. Thou sainted Spirit, Burst on our sight, a passing Visitant! Once more to hear thy voice, once more to see thee, (iii, i, 76–79) O ’twere a joy to me.22

This and the immediately succeeding exchanges launch a cascade of dizzyingly undecidable effects. Enraged by such hypocrisy, Albert abruptly hurls a vehemently satiric interrogation at Osorio, an aggressive rush of “what if” fantasies depicting a haunting visitation that in rhetorical structure constitutes an acerbic counterpart to Maria’s earlier gallery of melancholy paintings: A joy to thee! What if thou hear’dst him now? What if his Spirit Re-enter’d its cold corse, and came upon thee,

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Osorio’s dark employments With many a stab from many a Murd’rer’s poniard? What if, his steadfast eye still beaming Pity And Brother’s Love, he turn’d his head aside, Lest he should look at thee, and with one look Hurl thee beyond all power of penitence? (iii, i, 79–86)

The ghostly ambiguity pointed up by Albert’s “What if thou heard’st him now?” shades into a revenant extravagance in language, a painting that invites the gestural accompaniment of an actor’s pantomimic attitude, turning his head aside. Miming such a visitation, Albert-as-wizard “becomes” the “spirit of Albert” as summoned. But for ears sympathetic to the vibrations of ghostly speculation, the wizard’s revenant fiction perversely voices its reversibility: the figure in Moresco guise is already the “spirit of Albert.” Brushing aside Velez’s reproving “These are unholy fancies!” the wizard’s lurid painting – ekphrasis of the substitute canvas about to “appear” on the altar – then swerves from portraying a haunting spirit shunning its vengeance into what amounts to vehement self-indictment, in a peculiar catachrestic substitution turning on the phrase “this same brother”: a l b e r t. (still to Osorio) But what if this same brother Had lived even so, that at his dying hour The name of Heaven would have convuls’d his face (iii, i, 88–91) More than the death-pang?

Were it not for the clear alignment of that phrase’s rhetorical and grammatical reference with the veiled, third-person “self ” of the immediately preceding sketch, what follows could logically only designate and accuse the guilty Osorio. With the remorseful self-accusation voiced in these lines we glimpse again the subversive animism pervading the action and rhetoric of the play. Maria here – ever the naive auditor unable not to hear what subsequent readers have refused to imagine – registers the trick of the sorcerer’s shift, interjecting an ingenuous protest against what she hears as his slanderous indictment of her lost Albert: “Idly-prating Man! / He was most virtuous.” Her guileless spontaneity in defense of her lost lover ratifies the sense that the disguised Albert’s onslaught has unexpectedly and perplexingly swerved from Osorio to himself, and her words in turn spur the wizard to further veiled self-indictment, in terms that perpetuate the ambiguity of reference: a l b e r t . (still to Orsorio) What if his very Virtues Had pamper’d his swoln heart, and made him proud? And what if Pride had dup’d him into Guilt, Yet still he stalk’d, a self-created God,

Osorio’s dark employments Not very bold, but excellently cunning; And one that at his Mother’s Looking-glass, Would force his features to a frowning sternness?

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(iii, i, 92–98)

The burden of the sorcerer’s aporia is to assert the twinship – or the reversibility – of Albert and Osorio, to provoke the spectre of animistic demonism. Cast up by the conjurer’s catachresis is an Albert confessing to the pharisaical pride of the “self-created God” who, arrogating to himself the Almighty’s prerogative of vengeance, aptly characterizes Albert’s scheme of return in Act i, hovering round Granada in Moresco garments to probe his brother’s and his fiance´e’s guilt.23 The figure of rehearsal before the mirror reinforces the sense of the wizard’s onslaught as itself a piece of theatrical imposition. Such catachrestic effects do more than decorate Osorio as detachable ornaments: they comprise as much as anything else the literary dynamic of Coleridge’s dramatic undertaking. The crucially undecidable confusion of Albert and Osorio, carrying with it the inseparability in Albert of motives to virtue and vengeance, constitutes much of what Coleridgean drama is all about. It is this nexus that Coleridge focuses on in Chapter 23 of the Biographia when, in the passage cited earlier, decrying its absence in Charles Maturin’s Bertram, he broods on the relation of power to virtue: Without power, virtue would be insufficient and incapable of revealing its being . . . [O]f all intellectual power, that of superiority to the fear of the invisible world is the most dazzling. Its influence is abundantly proved by the one circumstance, that it can bribe us into a voluntary submission of our better knowledge, into suspension of all our judgement derived from constant experience, and enable us to peruse with the liveliest interest the wildest tales of ghosts, wizards, genii, and secret talismans. On this propensity, so deeply rooted in our nature, a specific dramatic probability may be raised by a true poet, if the whole of his work be in harmony: a dramatic probability, sufficient for dramatic pleasure, even when the component characters and incidents border on impossibility.24

Osorio’s “harmony” consists in the repeated effects of such metaphors as “haunt” and other tropes of catachresis. They tease the reader across the border into ghostly impossibilities that generate the drama of vengeance hovering throughout the play. iv Return now to the portrait of Maria: “She tied a little portrait round his neck,” says Osorio, recruiting the disguised Albert at the end of Act ii, “Entreating him to wear it” (ii, ii, 120–21). Moments later, when “alone”

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and “gaz[ing] passionately at the portrait,” Albert himself echoes this narrative detail in a vituperative spell of self-lacerating remorse. He vehemently indicts himself both for having believed, at the time of the “assassination,” what he now supposes to have been Ferdinand’s sinister lie – that Maria had conspired in Osorio’s treacherous plot – and for having faithlessly surrendered her keepsake portrait to the bearer of such a poisonous tale: And I did curse thee? At midnight? on my knees? And I believed Thee perjured, thee polluted, thee a Murderess? O blind and credulous fool! O guilt of folly! Should not thy inarticulate Fondnesses, Thy infant Loves – should not thy maiden vows, Have come upon my heart? And this sweet Image Tied round my neck with many a chaste endearment, And thrilling hands, that made me weep and tremble – Ah Coward dupe! to yield it to the miscreant Who spake pollutions of thee! I am unworthy of thy love, Maria! Of that unearthly smile upon those lips, Which ever smil’d on me! Yet do not scorn me – I lisp’d thy name, ere I had learnt my Mother’s! . . . (Gazing at the portrait) Dear Image! rescued from a Traitor’s keeping, I will not now prophane thee, holy Image! To a dark trick! That worst bad Man shall find A picture which shall wake the Hell within him, And rouse a fiery Whirlwind in his Conscience! (ii, ii, 141–63, passim)

This idolatrous apostrophe to his image of Maria – in its very excess overwrought with ironies – encodes more of Osorio’s dark, trick-laden subplot. The fetishistic cast (“Dear Image! . . . holy Image!”) of “this sweet Image / Tied round my neck,” so proleptic of the Ancient Mariner’s bird of [ill] omen, enacts the very blasphemy Albert forswears.25 It also resonates with a discourse of sensibility elsewhere in the play, in ways that make the love-token a thoroughly ambiguous burden, one that “made me weep and tremble.” We might think of the way the portrait of another chaste Mary, in Ambrosio’s room in The Monk – which Coleridge had reviewed the month before he began writing Osorio – hangs as a dear and holy fetish, a metonymic token as well as a spur for Ambrosio’s closeted lust.26 Rather than an enabling talisman, then, a badge of spiritual prowess, Maria around Albert’s neck suggests a licentious pact that unmans his strength, the badge of his

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continuing acquiescence in the thoroughly problematic economy of fear and mute entreaty. Writ large in the very excess of Albert’s remorse is not only his unworthiness of Maria’s “sweet” love but his susceptibility to being haunted by her smiling, unearthly practice. Put another way, the very intensity of Albert’s representation of her chastity creates her as a spectral visitation. What might it mean, in the throes of such remorse, subjunctively to wish that such a presence had “come upon” his heart? In this crepuscular psychic light, Albert’s dreadful, Alhadra-like vow against Osorio, in the last three lines above, voices the dark toiling trickery of a correspondent hell within. Osorio’s laconic Act ii narrative – “She tied a little portrait round his neck / Entreating him to wear it” (ii, ii, 120–21) – resonates with the tale that Lord Velez, Maria’s guardian, rehearses in the play’s opening exchange, when he remonstrates against useless constancy to her dead lover: Thy dying Father comes upon my soul With that same look, with which he gave thee to me: I held thee in mine arms, a powerless babe, While thy poor Mother with a mute entreaty Fix’d her faint eyes on mine: ah not for this, That I should let thee feed thy soul with gloom, And with slow anguish wear away thy life, The victim of a useless constancy! (i, i, 10–18) I must not see thee wretched.

These vignettes of bestowal collapse into each other: the infant Maria, hung round the neck of Velez by a mutely entreating female parent, constitutes a keepsake gift from the dying that is also a burden, or even – in the gothic convention that Coleridge’s scenario courts – a binding curse. (Maria reenacts against Albert, the son of Velez, what her expiring parents had done to Albert’s father.) Rehearsing the tale betrays in Velez the admonitory presence of a pressure around or from the imagined or denied grave. The give-away phrase thus encrypting the scene that haunts Velez’s memory is “comes upon my soul,” exactly the trope Albert uses in addressing his “dear Image,” the keepsake portrait returned by Osorio. At the end of the play, what finally brings Osorio to face the dreadful music of remorse is seeing the ghostly apparition of his victim Ferdinand: “That is he! / He comes upon me!” (v, ii, 151–52); recall also the sorcerer’s evocation of a Banquo-like shade: “What if his Spirit / Re-enter’d its cold corse, and came upon thee, / With many a stab from many a Murd’rer’s poniard” (iii, i, 80–82). The doubling, through such language, of the oath

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of binding bestowal with the fetish of fidelity that Maria’s thrilling albatross becomes for Albert prompts curiosity about those dying parents, so prominently and cryptically invoked by Velez’s narrative at the very outset of the play. “The Foster-Mother’s Tale” in Act iv bears, however obscurely, on that background. Encoded in this narrative (and oddly resonant with its own textual history) is a ghostly genealogy, a shadowy strain of outre´ dramaturgy that, we can guess, made the tale, according to Coleridge’s note in 1813, so “unfit for the stage” that, like the Winander boy whose uncanny experience took him from his mates, it was “taken from the Tragedy.” Thus lopped, the Tale then appeared originally in Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, but after that suffered further proscription and banishment (at Wordsworth’s hands): “it having been determined, that this with my other Poems in that collection (The Nightingale, Love, and The Ancient Mariner) should be omitted in any future edition.” But something in the very unfitness of this Coleridgean waif for such legitimating venues as those sponsored by Sheridan and Wordsworth licensed its return of sorts, interred as an appendix in the second and various subsequent editions of Remorse, where it marked the demise of a ghost that in its infancy had animated Osorio. In that 1797 plot, after Osorio murders Ferdinand in the cavern, the Tale intervenes, suspending the headlong rush to the events of denouement: Albert’s and Maria’s reunion, Albert’s and Osorio’s short-lived reconciliation, and, offstage, Alhadra’s and her band’s vengeful assassination of Osorio. However cumbersome the interruption, the FosterMother’s extended narrative works to raise a ghost that, in effect, rouses Maria (“wakes within [her] / More than a woman’s spirit” [iv, ii, 96–97]) to abandon the melancholic passivity of her dreaming posture and undertake a daring rescue of the imprisoned wizard whose manner has so haunted her. The Tale’s ghostly genealogy is embedded in a gothic antipastoral, a story of a baby “wrapt in mosses” found by the woodman Leoni, the Foster-Mother’s father-in-law, and brought up by him in nature “at the then Lord Velez’ cost.” A wild child, “but most unteachable,” the foundling “never learnt a prayer, nor told a bead” but, a precursor of the Winander boy, knew the names of Birds, and mock’d their notes, And whistled, as he were a Bird himself: And all the Autumn ’twas his only play To get the Seeds of Wild-flowers, and to plant them With Earth and Water on the Stumps of Trees . . . (iv, ii, 33–37)

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until a loving “Friar who gather’d simples in the Wood” introduced him to writing, literacy, and learning. But the brain of the very learned youth “turn’d” with too much reading to “unlawful thoughts of many things.”27 Calamity then came in the form of sudden betrayal at the hands of that “late Lord Velez” (who till then was never wearied with “his speech, it was so sweet”), when once, as by the North side of the Chapel They stood together, chain’d in deep discourse, The Earth heav’d under them with such a groan, That the Wall totter’d, and had well-nigh fall’n Right on their heads. My Lord was sorely frighten’d; A fever seiz’d him; and he made confession Of all the heretical and lawless talk Which brought this judgment: so the Youth was seiz’d (iv, ii, 51–59) And cast into that Hole.28

The parallel here with Albert’s recent fate – denounced by Francesco for sorcery, seized by the agents of the Inquisition and cast into the same Velez dungeon – is pointed by Velez’s sardonic quip when he enters precisely as the Foster-Mother finishes her narrative: “Still sad, Maria? This same wizard haunts you,” to which Maria – swayed by the force of the tale – answers, “O Christ! the tortures that hang o’er his head, / If ye betray him to these holy brethren!” The parallel focuses other affinities: Albert, likewise a free-thinker, has imparted to Maria a horror of the Inquisition’s tortures – “that their rude grasp should seize on such a victim” – so extreme as to rouse in her Lord Velez the signs of a similarly silencing seizure: ve l ez . Hush! thoughtless Woman! ma ria . Nay – it wakes within me More than a Woman’s Spirit. ve l ez . (an g ri ly ) No more of this – I can endure no more. f o s t e r - mo t h e r . My honor’d Master! Lord Albert used to talk so. ma ria . 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. (iv, ii, 96–102)

The denouement of the Foster-Mother’s narrative further underwrites the shadowy kinship of “spirit” between the persons and events of what Maria hears as her “sweet tale” and those of the main plot. The doting

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Leoni, grief-stricken and hearing once the imprisoned youth sing a doleful song about “How sweet it were on Lake or wild Savanna / To hunt for food, and be a naked Man, / And wander up and down at liberty,” defied death and penetrated the dungeon fastness by forging a cunning entrance, through which the youth escaped to sail with some bold voyagers to the new world. There – according to Leoni’s “younger brother,” who had accompanied the youth – having seized a boat, he set sail “up a great River . . . And ne’er was heard of more; but’tis suppos’d, / He liv’d and died among the Savage Men” (iv, ii, 64–83, passim). From just such a rumored fate aboard a ship, also narrated by a younger brother, Albert returns, disguised, at the beginning of the play. Implicit in this elaborate array of resonances with the main action of the plot is some bearing on Maria’s uneasy relation to her guardian “father,” Lord Velez (scion, we presume, of the “late Lord Velez” of the Tale), and, through her foster-mother, to Albert. Suppose then that, like Albert, the “poor mad youth” didn’t (as “supposed”) simply die – up the river among savage men – but returned, a generation ago, a revenant with a Medusa spouse bent on bestowing a haunting gift of vengeance upon the House of Velez? Thy dying Father comes upon my soul With that same look, with which he gave thee to me: I held thee in mine arms, a powerless babe, While thy poor Mother with a mute entreaty (i, i, 10–14) Fix’d her faint eyes on mine.29

Because Maria is her (real) father’s daughter, she cons Albert’s free-thinking lessons well and, at the appropriate moment, challenges her guardian father’s harsh law in her attempt to find the incarcerated “Morescoe,” to fathom his words’ puzzling resonances with those of the stranger on the beach and to rescue him from the fatal horrors of the Inquisition. Such a putative lineage for Maria’s spirit explains her own attraction to and for Albert, who “lisp’d [her] name ere [he] had learnt [his] mother’s” and whose fate throughout the play seems so bound up with the portrait she ties around his neck. The “more than woman’s spirit” that the foster-mother’s tale rouses in Maria also plagues Osorio, as her guardian charges: Was it not enough That thou has made my Son a restless Man, Banish’d his health and half-unhing’d his reason, But that thou wilt insult him with suspicion, (iv, ii, 118–22) And toil to blast his Honor?

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Velez’s “toil” here poses the kinship of Maria’s animated spirit with the “souls” – including Albert’s own – the wizard invokes at the sorcery scene, that innumerable company whose swift and vengeful “toils” wreak natural destruction in various forms. One victim they “perhaps” claim, by yet another maritime disaster, is the “Lapland wizard,” who drowns in a whirlpool and whose soul then “toils out” (iii, i, 36) to join that army.30 To “come upon” is to haunt: it is also to “seize” or “grasp” – words that proliferate in Osorio.31 As we have seen, Albert’s self-accusatory and remorseful apostrophe to Maria while gazing on her portrait reveals him as a toiling Velez of the spirit: And I believed Thee perjur’d, thee polluted, thee a Murderess? O blind and credulous fool! O guilt of folly! Should not thy inarticulate Fondnesses, Thy infant Loves – should not thy maiden vows, (ii, ii, 142–47) Have come upon my heart?

– and amounts in this register to invoking a haunting presence of unspeakable endearment. The very articulateness of the remorse Maria’s portrait inspires in Albert while he gazes passionately upon it is a fluency born in disability, the passion of being rendered infans. Tied around his neck like a succubus is an image that courts gothic hideousness, “that unearthly smile upon those lips,” frozen in an eternal skeletal grin. Life for her is death to Albert. The final note: “I lisp’d thy name ere I had learnt my Mother’s!” sounds less the benign intimacy of the nursery than the curse of a speech-act that in its very priority supplants the natural. To lisp her name before the mother’s is to find employment in the toiling ranks of the underworld. Binding himself so passionately to the image of such a beloved and wearing her portrait, Albert is the figure of a fallen spirit, and it is in this dark context that the various passages in the play that invoke their infant kinship invite construction. Thus Maria: “Were we not / Born on one day, like twins of the same Parent? / Nurs’d in one cradle–? – Pardon me, my Father!” (i, i, 97–99). Framed in the interrogative, Maria’s plaintive, submissive pathos here might itself be an overwrought rhetoric, the scene it paints an imposture, by spectral desire, of identity upon difference. It’s worth remembering that Maria and Albert are not – at least in the haunting tale Velez rehearses – “twins of the same Parent.” (Nor is Velez Maria’s father: her repeated insistence on that clasping, possessive address – “Pardon me, my Father” – signals her ghostly wish to lull Velez away from recollecting her dark provenance.)

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Binding him to his fetishized image of her, Albert’s idolatry also effaces difference, as the language of his dream has it: “I dreamt I had a Friend, on whom I lean’d / With blindest trust, and a betrothed Maid / Whom I was wont to call not mine, but me, / For mine own self seem’d nothing, lacking her!” (i, i, 288–91). With such a Maria, Albert is a narcissistic shadow of himself, made by himself. It’s this context of perilous, infatuating identification that gives substance (as well as excess) to his selfcastigation in Act ii: “O blind and credulous fool!” That same narcissistic idolatry dictates the revenge plot that drives the main action of Osorio, the plot that one might say mirrors the assassination plot and whose grim quest Albert voices when, disguised as a Moor, he shares his “dream” with Maria and Alhadra. Significantly, Albert’s rehearsal of that plot not only recalls his invoking a father in the world of Spirits but also envisions an action that mirrors the adhesive fastening of Maria’s portrait around his neck: Kneeling I pray’d to the great Spirit that made me, Pray’d that remorse might fasten on their hearts, And cling, with poisonous tooth, inextricable (i, i, 318–21) As the gored Lion’s Bite!

The problematic intensity of Albert’s fetishistic self-investment in desire for Maria (draping her around his neck) sounds most tellingly in the sorcery scene itself. At the climactic moment of that scene, Maria “swoons,” aghast at imagining that the sorcery that moments before, with uneasy disdain, she dismissed as a “trick” has suddenly produced what (hearing Velez cry out “A Picture!”) she fears to be “my picture?” In his frantic rush to resuscitate her, Albert, overflowing his Moresco guise, pours upon her a guilty deluge of necrophilic possessiveness: “My Love! my Wife! / Pale – pale – and cold! – My Love! my Wife! Maria!” Recovering, she identifies his voice in her swoon with the fantasies of his return in her earlier melancholic dreams but wakes to desolate conviction in his death, whereupon Albert, half resuming his guise and attitude as wizard, urges: “Believe it not, sweet Maid! believe it not, / Beloved Woman! ’Twas a low imposture / Fram’d by a guilty Wretch.” As we have seen above, these last words hover between accusation (blaming Osorio for concocting the sorcery stunt) and confession (imagining his own “assassination” trick has backfired, afflicting Maria with horror rather than Osorio with remorse). Albert’s phrase “low imposture” sounds again in the fourth act in Maria’s heartsick recoil when Velez impatiently re-urges Osorio’s suit (iv, ii, 105).

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The denouement – the untying – of this shadowy imposture has its own emblematic moment near the end of the play in the “recognition” scene between Albert and Maria in the dungeon where she comes to rescue him. At the level of the manifest plot, her twofold mission is to save the Moorish “stranger” that she still believes him to be from certain torture and execution for infidel sorcery at the grasping hands of the Inquisition (a different, though perhaps kindred, binding) and to discover “what thou know’st of Albert.” Her deeper psychological motivation, we are asked to believe, lies in the less articulate currents of intuitive sympathy stirred in her by such moments in their earlier intercourse as the disguised Albert’s narration of his dream. Here is the moment when Maria enters the dungeon: m a ri a . I have put aside The customs and the terrors of a Woman, To work out thy escape. Stranger! be gone – And only tell me what thou know’st of Albert. (Albert takes her portrait from his neck; and gives it her with unutterable tenderness) a lb e r t . Maria! my Maria! m a ri a . Do not mock me. This is my face – and thou – ha! who art thou? Nay I will call thee Albert! (She falls upon his neck . . .) (v, ii, 122–28)

To “put aside / The customs and the terrors of a Woman” is Maria’s moment of unveiling – one might say undressing. In the image of such emboldened nakedness is this play’s investment in the possibility of unmediated virtue and heroism, the veiling habit of gendered sensibility shed. Prompting Maria to this action are first, her encounter in the previous act with the Foster-Mother, whose Tale (about the escape into mythic oblivion in the New World of a free-thinking youth wrongfully seized and incarcerated by Lord Velez’s father) mirrors Albert’s plight; and second, her subsequent defiant expression to her guardian (the present Velez) of solicitude for the imprisoned wizard. (Her solicitation draws from Velez a salaciously sneering innuendo about her womanly attraction to the sorcerer: “A portly Man, and eloquent, and tender! / In truth, I shall not wonder if you mourn / That their rude grasp should seize on such a Victim” (iv, ii, 87–89). In the dungeon, Albert answers her unveiling declaration with a reciprocal divesting, as the stage direction has it: he “takes her portrait from his neck; and gives it her with unutterable tenderness.” He thus doffs his albatross, symbolically returning it to its unalienated and unalienating

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status. Presumably Maria now puts it on, no blind beggar, but a figure of transparent labeling. Implicit in Albert’s wishful gesture is the play’s overt commitment to the possibility of what the pre-poststructuralist 1960s called “commitment.” Unbound, he is now also ungagged. Whereas in Act i he had, under the impulse of her innocent voice, blurted out, through the disguise of his Moorish robe, “Maria! you are not wedded?” a lapse he then prays for the power to silence (“God of all mercy, make me, make me quiet!” [i, i, 276, 283]); and whereas in the Act ii apostrophe over her portrait when Osorio handed it to him he had lapsed into the nostalgia of infancy (“I lisp’d thy name, ere I had learnt my Mother’s!” [II, ii, 155]); and whereas in Act iii, in the sorcery scene, lapsing from the wizard’s role in a desperate frenzy that his portrait “trick” had finished off Maria, he had “rush[ed]” to her, a torrent of idolatrous possessives momentarily voicing the possessed condition he then swiftly again dissembles; now, at the end, he commands himself for the first time in a heroic, performative speech-act, direct address and recognition of the difference that licenses the ceremony of wedding: retying the knot, as it were: “Maria! my Maria!” Maria’s “who art thou? / Nay, I will call thee Albert!” recalls Albert’s own earlier moment of misnaming (and misrecognition), in narrating to her his dream: “I dreamt I had . . . a betrothed maid / Whom I was wont to call not mine, but me.” In falling (back) upon his neck, which we may read as an equivocal image, Maria acts out what a number of earlier moments in the discourse or stage directions figure more equivocally as the consummate gesture of tearful, desiring sensibility, a gesture of fraternal or filial reunion.32 Maria now enacts rather than suppresses that wish in what amounts to a real – rather than fantastic – iconic embrace. Paradoxically, this gesture invests the body with the aura of the spirit, a charisma, whereas in the ill-fated picture plot, the “image” betokens the imprisonment of the spirit in the pollution of the body. Coleridge’s plot, pausing at the end for this iconic moment of redemptive pantomime, then takes a final turn into fracas and – if a reader has been lulled at this point into an investment in the virtue of being thus blissfully tied – what amounts to tragic reversal. But reading still against that grain, we can hear Albert’s unutterable wish about womanliness in that gesture, investing the woman with an idealized integrity and strength, a garment to make the man whole. Complaisant with that unutterable (might one say unspeakable?) gesture, Maria takes on “her” image, but still the image Albert thrusts upon her: “Maria! my Maria!” Implicit in my comments, of course, is the role feminist theory,

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building on Freud’s account of fetishism, casts for art – and art about women – in a man’s otherwise wounded world. Reinforcing that interpretation, with its register of domineering wishfulness, is the hectic litany of possessives and imperatives that echoes through the next exchanges between Albert and Osorio: Albert: “Osorio, Brother! / Nay, nay, thou shalt embrace me! . . .”; Osorio: “My Brother, I will kneel to you, my Brother!”; Albert: “Call back thy soul, my Brother! . . .; Albert: “Draw thy sword, Maurice, and defend my Brother!” (v, ii, 145–162, passim). Dividing Albert and Osorio at this point and thwarting Albert’s fevered wish for a saving fraternal bondage is the haunting pollution of Osorio’s dark employment in the murder of Ferdinand, a crime which comes to light with the violent intrusion of Alhadra and her band, the fatal trick Maria can only guess at: “Some secret Poison, / Drinks up his Spirit!” (v, ii, 156–57). And lurking in that dark assassination for Albert, voiced in the “O horrible!” with which he greets Osorio’s defiantly submissive confession to Alhadra (“Yes! I murder’d him most foully” [v, ii, 168–69]) is his despairing realization that what drove Osorio to that vengeful deed was his own passionately driven trick, the whirlwind substitution of the assassination painting that confirms his and Osorio’s grim and tragic fraternity in vengeance. Could one say that Albert is then responsible for the tragedy all the principals are then caught up in? That would be, in one sense, to deny the role of ancestral fate, through the vengeful shade of Maria, in cursing and blighting Albert’s life. But if one looks beyond, or through, the wishfulness with which he idealizes “his Maria” and the investment he has in embracing an idealized version of his brother (“We will invent some tale to save your honour. / Live, live, Osorio!” [v, ii, 138–139]), one might speculate about its function as what Stanley Cavell, discussing Othello’s idealizing of a non-sexual perfection in Desdemona, calls a cover story.33 But a cover for what? The answer might be to focus on the possibility in Albert of a repressed homoerotic desire for Osorio: albert. Osorio, Brother! Nay, nay, thou shalt embrace me! o so r i o. (drawing back and gazing at Albert with a countenance expressive at once of awe and terror) Touch me not! Touch not pollution, Albert! – I will die! (v, ii, 136–37)

But the play is not over at that moment, nor does the putative wholeness of Albert and Maria (spectre and emanation delivered from

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the goadings of remorse and melancholy and restored to unfallen harmony) serve as a talisman to preserve Osorio from destruction at the hands of Alhadra and her band of Moorish avengers. Alhadra is the image of the Woman without Tricks, the woman whose uncomplaisant acuity penetrates the hypocrisies of Inquisitional Christianity, who doesn’t deviate from the terrible course of undisguised vengeance, who wears it openly. The drama of the final act opens with Naomi’s haunting sketch of her: “She moved steadily on / Unswerving from the Path of her resolve.” Her progress is, we might say, remorseless, and ends, appropriately offstage, with a dagger. Just before being swept offstage to his death by Naomi and the band of merciless Moors, Osorio has his moment of what Coleridge’s stage direction calls “great majesty”: O woman, I have stood silent like a Slave before thee, That I might taste the Wormwood and the Gall, And satiate this self-accusing Spirit, With bitterer agonies, than death can give – (v, ii, 196–200)

This moment should come upon us, with the force of anagnorisis, as a shocking tableau, for it reenacts the moment represented in Albert’s “trick,” the substituted “painting of my assassination” whose manifestation on the mountebank’s altar, though unseen at the time by either Osorio, Maria, or the theater audience, nonetheless culminated the sorcery scene. Subsequently, Velez’s words to Osorio described what the sorcerer’s canvas represented: Calm, yet commanding! how he bares his breast, Yet still they stand with dim uncertain looks, As Penitence had run before their crime – A crime too black for aught to follow it (iii, i, 202–06) Save blasphemous Despair!

The resonance of these moments – Osorio’s death and Albert’s “assassination” – suggests that Osorio’s “majestic” approach to his own comeuppance ratifies theatrically the deep, perplexing kinship that has all along informed and vexed his brotherhood with Albert, a kinship verging on identity. “Majesty” – that resonant political word – occurs elsewhere in the play only twice, and both times in reference to Albert. Just before describing the painting, Velez congratulates Osorio on the “most rare good fortune” of finding “A fellow that could play the Sorcerer, / With such a Grace and terrible Majesty” (iii, i, 159–60). And, even more

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tellingly, when Osorio earlier in the final scene “leaps from the nook and rushes towards Albert with his sword,” and Maria then “flings herself upon Osorio, arresting his arm,” Albert “with majesty and tenderness” offers to embrace his brother in reconciliation (v, ii, 129–136, passim). This moment, too, reenacts the “painting of my assassination.” In the final scene, then, Osorio’s achievement of unfeign’d “Majesty” signals a reconciliation of sorts that is also an identity. But if, on the other hand, we recall that Albert’s original “Majesty” is in a painting that feigns an assassination whose authenticity as an event is put radically into question, we may say that a similar ghostly indeterminacy hovers in Osorio’s final Majesty. This might be one way of thinking about the curious effacement, earlier in the final scene, of Albert, who has seemed so much the protagonist in the tragedy that bears, paradoxically, not his but his brother’s name. At the moment when Osorio, refusing Albert’s defense against the vengeful rush of Alhadra, confesses his murder of Ferdinand, Albert throws himself upon the Earth (v, ii, 168 sd ) and sinks into prostrate silence. The stage direction here echoes Osorio’s words seconds before (“I have flung away my Sword. / Woman, my life is thine!” [v, ii, 163–64]) and thus suggests that “Albert” has all along been a spectre generated by Osorio’s concealed violence and guilt: when he sheds his sword, the generations-long struggle that has divided “the sons of Velez” into warring brothers suspends itself and with it, perhaps permanently, the need for vengeance. Coleridge wrote, beginning the Preface to a manuscript of Osorio, In this sketch of a Tragedy, all is imperfect, and much obscure. – Among other equally great defects (Millstones round the slender Neck of it’s Merits) it presupposes a long story – & this long story, which yet is necessary to the complete understanding of the Play, is not half-told . . . In short the Thing is but an Embryo/& While it remains in Manuscript which it is destined to do, . . . the Critic would judge unjustly who should call it a Miscarriage. – It furnished me with a most important Lesson – namely – that to have conceived strongly does not always imply the power of successful Execution.34

Perhaps one could give this all-too-familiar apologetic fable a different inflection from what the grim wryness of its obstetrical rhetoric suggests, threatening to arrest forever the career of a defective fetus. (For one thing, Coleridge evidently couldn’t abandon his waif: even in talking about its defects he returns to one of its centrally haunting rhetorical tricks: “Millstones round the slender Neck of it’s Merits.”) The power of Osorio, paradoxically, is in its sketchiness as a tragedy. Or, put another way, the sketchiness of tragedy as a romantic genre is the basis of its power.

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Tragedy as a genre forever tries, unsuccessfully, to hover above its defects and its haunting obscurity, and in that failing inheres its power and its appeal. The figure of the defect in this fugitive preface is the “long story . . . not half told.” Glimpsed in utero in Osorio, firmly lodged in its obscure genealogical tales, is what gives this – and other tragedies – its impossibly possible life.

chapter 6

Listening to Remorse: assuming man’s infirmities

It is my intention, if I live long enough, to add to this work the passions Remorse, Jealousy, and Revenge. Joy, Grief, and Anger, as I have already said, are generally of too transient a nature, and are too frequently the attendants of all our other passions to be made the subjects of an entire play . . . Of all our passions, Remorse and Jealousy appear to me to be the best for representation. Joanna Baillie, “To the Reader,” Series of Plays (1812)

This chapter explores issues and problems posed by Coleridge’s Remorse. Performed twenty times before the Public at Drury Lane in early 1813 and soon after in various provincial and American theaters, reviewed with some favor, and printed versions admired by Byron and Shelley, it’s the only tragedy by a major writer of the period to achieve such public success. Yet, despite substantial and provocative critical reckonings in recent decades, it remains infrequently read and rarely if ever performed even in academic or coterie theaters, where productions of Shelley’s The Cenci, and even of Byron’s Sardanapalus and Wordsworth’s Borderers have come to life.1 More important, crucial aspects of its dramaturgy remain largely unnoticed and unappreciated, dark poetic employments that relate not only to Coleridge’s claims on our attention as a playwright at work with a theater company and as a theorist and critic of drama, but also to ongoing, intensified troubles in his life, particularly the agonizing upheavals in his relations with Sara Hutchinson and Wordsworth. If, bringing a revised Osorio to Drury Lane, he buried along the way some of the shadowy ambiguities crucial to generating that earlier version’s intriguing dramatic power, the Remorse that sprang from their interment itself also probed the capacity of an audience to attend to what, for Coleridge, mattered most in the theater, what in The Friend he spoke of as “language and situations which awe and delight the imagination.”2 My funereal figuration here itself springs from prominent veins of suicidal, graveside, and resurrection imagery in his poems and notebooks and, especially, in 141

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the text of the play itself. If Remorse matters today as tragic drama, it matters because it embodies what Coleridge praised in the “older dramatists of England and France,” its intellectual power as the work of a poet’s mind when that anguished mind turned to write for the stage. A deep paradox characterizes the creation of Remorse. When Coleridge the talker – he who so peculiarly could hold intimate as well as public audiences in thrall – became (again) Coleridge the playwright in 1812 and 1813, the dramaturgy of listening was just about everything. As a dramatic resource, stagings of nuanced voices and of carefully wrought poetic discourse were for him the essence of good theater, everything he (and Joanna Baillie) saw threatened by the ever-growing dependence of vast arenas like the newly rebuilt Theatres Royal at Drury Lane and Covent Garden on the obstreperous pseudo-clamor of visual spectacle and loud proscenium declamation. In revising Osorio, he further intensified theatrical effects of voice and listening already prominent in that version, adding especially moments when what’s overheard resonates unexpectedly with something previously heard. My chief project at the outset in this chapter is to read – that is, to hear – Remorse through the resonant dynamics of those effects of voice. Listening to Remorse, then, means attending to its remarkable poetic dramaturgy involving specific moments of listening and hearing, especially moments of overhearing (the latter including, but not limited to, the results of eavesdropping with unnoticed stealth) – and their disturbing, untoward consequences: starts, trances, mutterings, and recognitions linked to earlier dreams, fancies, wishes, reveries, promptings, forebodings, and – especially – hauntings. Such staged effects amount to this tragedy’s distinctive burden. If to a considerable extent the dramatic effects produced stem from the energies and occupations of what could be called Coleridge’s intensely narcissistic personality, and reflect also major aspects of his literary, philosophical, and political investigations in such contemporary writings as The Friend and in his public lectures on Shakespeare, their operation in Remorse nonetheless produces what ought to be recognized as a notably original dramatic composition, peculiarly – for the right audience drawn from the solitary confines of the closet construed as a place for reading – stageworthy. The dramaturgical innovation is, I would argue, profound, placing the audience as it were onstage with the burden of registering the moment(s) of anagnorisis the character herself enacts and in that process becoming identified with the character. That those staged experiences in Remorse involve crucially such moments based in hearing, with the audience member as it were overhearing what

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the tragic actor hears, epitomizes Coleridge’s innovation in theater. As I argue below in section one, according to Coleridge, the principal moment of such anagnorisis in Remorse went unnoticed by his audiences at Drury Lane until printed copies of the play became available in London, giving readers the chance to take in beforehand what constituted that moment. They then applauded what they already knew to listen for. (Because as readers they came to the theater prepared for the moment, in a strict sense they were not themselves experiencing the moment as one of genuinely startling anagnorisis.) I propose also that Remorse derives much of its intensity and power as drama because it depends on – and fails to rise “above” – its reflexive involvement with the dynamics of Coleridge’s own brilliantly articulated dreams and distresses. Crucial to this argument is the sense that the role of its heroine Teresa took shape in the turmoil of Coleridge’s impassioned mind in the context of Sara Hutchinson’s abrupt departure from Grasmere in March 1810 and of his reading, three months later, the Life and Works of St. Teresa, both experiences inseparable from the ongoing distress of his relation to Wordsworth, which reached its intense culmination in the sense of betrayal associated with his own move to London four months later. The moment of traumatic recognition for Coleridge came in late October when he apparently heard in Basil Montagu’s words the voice of Wordsworth calling him an “absolute nuisance.” I call this a moment of signature anagnorisis for Coleridge because he heard then the words that he must have already known in his own self-accusing mind and dreaded the force of their truth-value, a recognition all the more devastating when heard in the voice of a surrogate for Wordsworth. Remorse as we know it on the page, with its marked preponderance of listenings, came into being chiefly in what seems a concentrated, if fitful, period of experiment and composition in late 1812 and early 1813, after the play had been accepted by Drury Lane, when many of the moments involving enacted or narrated listening, especially moments of deliberate eavesdropping or unexpected overhearing, transformed the plot of Osorio into a more prominently patterned fabric of stealth, anxiety (“have we been overheard?”), and discovery.3 Such moments are particularly prominent in three newly added scenes. First, the introductory scene in Act i, when Alvar, covertly returning to his Spanish homeland after exile in the “Belgic states,” tells his Moorish confederate Zulimez of his secret seashore betrothal years before to Teresa and of his plan now, in disguise, to probe her innocence or guilt in the conspiracy to assassinate him. Second, the substantially modified opening of Act ii, when Alvar’s younger

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brother Ordonio tells his Moresco hireling Isidore, for the first time, of having stolen unnoticed to eavesdrop on that Alvar–Teresa betrothal, whereupon Isidore in response elaborates his own recent, stealthy surveillance of the Moorish Wizard near a ruin in the wood (“had follow’d him at distance, seen him scale / Its western wall, and by an easier entrance / Stoln after him unnoticed” [ii, i, 144–46]), including having overheard the Wizard’s interrogation by an agent of the Inquisition. Third, following the sorcery scene that opens Act iii, a newly created scene set in the adjacent chapel where Teresa unexpectedly overhears Ordonio’s darkly manic rationalization of the assassination painting, then confronts him directly to discover the whereabouts of “the corse of my betrothed husband.” It’s this third-act invention, discussed in greater detail below, that’s of primary interest to my argument overall in this chapter. Far from these additions being chiefly the work of closeted authorial composition, it’s tempting to think that the rehearsals themselves during those six weeks in December and January 1812–13, first in Drury Lane’s green room and then onstage, contributed crucially to their genesis, as Coleridge participated in the complex process, at times exhilarating, at times unsettling, of adapting his manuscript for effective production. He remarked in letters that he had become known as the “amenable Author” (or “Anomalous Author”) for his readiness to accept suggestions from the manager and the actors for altering the playscript.4 Despite his dismay at the performative shortcomings of crucial members of the cast, the giveand-take of such collaboration prompted momentary surges of confidence that catalyzed even further alterations and revisions late into the onstage rehearsals. Hearing the voices of others – actors – trying out the lines must have further spurred his already active interest in the phenomenology of onstage voices and especially the dramaturgy of hearing and overhearing. Evidence in letters, notebooks, marginalia, and public lectures supports such a guess. As a lecturer from 1808 on, Coleridge calls attention to the circumstance of speaking before an audience, before listeners; remarks in letters and annotations to copies of printed editions of Remorse confide concern about the inadequate voices of some of the Drury Lane cast.5 Likewise, the prompt copies and first printed editions brim with the parenthetic stage directions, many of which stipulate, in concert with references in the dialogue itself, special effects of voice: volume, inflection, tone, and informing passion. Voices muttered, hushed, whispered, and prompted, as well as lowered in asides, pervade the play, as does a plethora of vocal as well as gesturally mimed pauses, scoring a dynamics of voice virtually musical in structure. Listening to Remorse in rehearsal became the

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darkly concerted enterprise of refashioning the tragedy earlier called Osorio. The performers’ and managers’ savvy about the stage (and their apparent pleasure in Coleridge’s readiness to collaborate in additions and changes) evidently appealed to him, all the more perhaps because at this passage in his life, still weltering in anguish over the calamity two years before of his falling out with Wordsworth and over the deafening silence of Sara Hutchinson, he desperately needed reassurance that he was not an “absolute nuisance.” It’s tempting to think that, for once at least, Coleridge the talker took part in something like conversation. And yet the result of such collaborative composition in rehearsal can hardly be thought of as casual or incidental and certainly not in the service of so simplistic a notion as “clarification.” The patterned effects generated by the thick incidence of such voices and listenings built into the play during the 1812–1813 revisions call for careful critical reckoning, however tentative. By listening, figuratively, to Remorse, then, we listen best by attending as well to its low and barely audible articulations, the muted effects that in his idealizations he continually attempts to recuperate as strains of harmony, idealized “voices,” songs whose burdens are his refrains: what he otherwise refrains from saying, his digressions. Heard this way, Remorse’s abundant “asides” – the pauses, the stage directions, the appendices, and marginal annotations – become in a sense part of the play, part of the performance; and Remorse (its crying self ) is then itself heard as a telling “aside” in the dark theatrical employment we call Coleridge.6

i Some thirty days into the remarkable stage success of Remorse at Drury Lane in early 1813, Coleridge, writing in a copy of the newly published second edition of his tragedy, recalled a gratifying moment in rehearsal: It was pleasing to observe, during the Rehearsal all the Actors & Actresses, & even the Mechanics on the Stage, clustering round while these lines were repeating, just as if it had been a favorite Strain of Music. But from want of depth & volume of voice in Rae, they did not produce an equal Effect on the Public, till after the Publication – & then they (I understand) were applauded. I have never seen the Piece, since the first Night / S.T.C.7

The anecdote recalls a swerve from the hectic business of a production in process: performers and “Mechanics” shedding their roles as dramatis personae and as stagehands and “clustering round,” like an impromptu onstage audience, summoned less by the actor’s delivery (one might say

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that Alexander Rae, as Ordonio, lacked, in Coleridge’s idealizing mind, Wordsworth’s “deep voice”) than by the disembodied lines themselves as though magically – and magnetically – “repeating.” There’s an unimaginable touch of narcissistic sorcery in the account of those lines as it were running wild across the stage of the deserted cavern of Drury Lane: the anecdote itself cries out, “Coleridge!” What I call the “rehearsal moment” his note commemorates occurred sometime in the last three weeks before the play opened, when the production company was trying out onstage, doubtless for the first time, material they and the amenable author were devising for Act iii of the new tragedy emerging from the remains of Osorio. The lines that “were repeating” culminate an extended, complicated moment of listening and overhearing at the dramatic core of the newly added second scene. That scene includes, arguably, the most meticulously managed revisionary material in the play, material that, perhaps more substantially than any other alteration in the extended process of remaking Osorio for the stage, gives Remorse its special inflection as tragedy. The rehearsal moment itself came into being as a crucial part of the push in December and January to revamp the third act, especially the sorcerer’s spectacular necromancy and its immediate aftermath.8 In this last phase of production and doubtless under the pressure of the looming Drury Lane deadline, the long sorcery scene that had opened the third act of Osorio was divided in two, with the new second scene set in a chapel adjacent to the Hall of Armory. It’s to that imagined haven that the trembling Teresa withdraws, in the wake of hearing the disguised Alvar’s vehement and insistent “what if ?” interrogation of Ordonio and in her troubled reprobation of sorcery, what she calls “these lawless mysteries / This dark provoking of the Hidden Powers!” (iii, i, 116–17). She exits just before – and is therefore ignorant of – the spectacular sorcery climax when the suddenly blazing altar briefly discovers the assassination painting that Alvar, in his guise as a conjurer, has treacherously substituted for the “token” keepsake portrait of Teresa that Ordonio had suborned him to reveal as proof of her lover’s death. She hastens, as she says, “[t]o bend before a lawful Shrine, and seek / That voice which whispers, when the still Heart listens, / Comfort and faithful Hope!” (iii, i, 121–23). This new scene, though it begins with her relief to be in the “calm unwonted bliss” of that chapel refuge, eventually entails a more prominently dramatic and active role for the listener Teresa in that immediate sorcery aftermath than in any earlier version.9 The rehearsal moment thus lays the ground for her role – and the crucial part played by her “wild” fancies – in the rest of the play.

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By more prominently dramatic I mean that Teresa’s role as a listener – from the beginning of the play linked to what her guileless foster father Valdez reprovingly calls the “wild” indulgence of her melancholic fancies – comes to the fore in the new Act iii scene in ways that obviate the awkwardly prolonged passivity, in Osorio Act iv, of Maria’s listening to what in Lyrical Ballads became the “Foster Mother’s Tale.”10 Those ways also highlight, in the context of Teresa’s developing moral agency in the play, how deliberate and purposeful – though still perplexed and darkly apprehensive – her listening becomes. Her resolute, transparent listening distinguishes itself from the duplicity associated both with the narrative of Ordonio’s stealthy eavesdropping on the seashore betrothal and with Alvar’s own stealthy (and also problematic) reliance on disguise both as a Moorish stranger in the first two acts and as a sorcerer. Such listening also rehabilitates, at least with relation to the value of the “fantastic moods” that generate those earlier fancies, the implications of her “wildness.” The new scene opens in the chapel, with Teresa in soliloquy: When first I enter’d this pure spot, forebodings Press’d heavy on my heart: but as I knelt, Such calm unwonted bliss possess’d my spirit, A trance so cloudless, that those sounds, hard by, Of trampling uproar fell upon my ear As alien and unnoticed as the rain-storm Beats on the roof of some fair banquet-room, While sweetest melodies are warbling – (iii, ii, 1–8)

It’s an ambiguous opening. If she has retired from the mounting clamor of the Moorish sorcery employment to kneel in a Christian venue, her words seem hardly to invite theological construction. If her blissful, cloudless trance hints at saintly possession, she nonetheless likens it to the melodies of a secular banquet room in their power to render adjacent uproar “alien and unnotic’d.” Teresa’s heart-felt “forebodings” recall, moreover, Alvar’s words in Remorse’s newly minted opening scene of Act i, describing to Zulimez the seashore moment of their betrothal when she had tied “A portrait of herself with thrilling hand /. . . around my neck”: she had, he says, “procured” the portrait “by stealth / (For even then it seems her heart foreboded / Or knew Ordonio’s moody rivalry)” (i, i, 60–4, emphasis added). And her word “unnotic’d” resonates with Ordonio’s own account, to Isidore, of that secret betrothal, in the newly modified opening scene of the second act: he “had traced her, stoln unnotic’d on them, / And unsuspected saw and heard the whole” (ii, i, 56–7).

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What follows in the chapel scene, drawing in part on material in Act iii of Osorio between Velez and Osorio, gives the motif of stealthy overhearing intensified play. Valdez bursts into the chapel after the sorcery spectacle with words of hectic alarm and superstitious peril about the assassination painting (“O best Teresa! wisely wert thou prompted! / This was no feat of mortal agency!”) and agitated, racialist lamentation at the cruel irony he has registered (“That picture – Oh, that picture tells me all! . . . / Alvar! My Son! My Son! . . . / How often would He plead for these Morescoes! / The brood accurst! remorseless, coward murderers!” [iii, ii, 12–21, passim]).11 Teresa, for her part, “wildly” fumbles through his barely coherent uproar to its burden that, as Valdez finally puts it, Alvar “is no more!” and then, defending her intuitive disbelief, resists what she hears as his lamentable despair: “O sorrow! that a Father’s voice should say this, / A Father’s Heart believe it!” His abject repudiation of her resistance (“A worse sorrow / Are fancy’s wild Hopes to a heart despairing!” [iii, ii, 23–25]) elicits yet again only her resolute adherence to the trope of voice, appealing by analogy to the painted windows of the chapel: These rays that slant in thro’ those gorgeous windows, From yon bright orb – tho’ color’d as they pass, Are they not Light? – Even so that voice, Lord Valdez! Which whispers to my soul, tho’ haply varied By many a Fancy, many a wishful Hope, Speaks yet the Truth; and Alvar lives for me!12 (iii, ii, 26–31)

In the exchange that follows, Remorse continues to play out its dalliance with the drama of hearing and overhearing – and with the susceptibilities of faithfulness. What begins as yet another futile standoff, between Valdez’s distraught conviction about what he has seen depicted on the sorcerer’s altar and Teresa’s abiding (but retiring) disbelief in Alvar’s death, culminates when Valdez, in a gesture of absorption in his grief, “(turn[s] off, aloud, but yet as to himself )”: Accurst assassins! Disarm’d, o’erpower’d, despairing of defence, At his bared breast he seem’d to grasp some relict (iii, ii, 41–44) More dear than was his life –

an aside innocently overheard by Teresa who “(with faint shriek)” veers momentarily into a despairing anagnorisis intensified by her sense of dying Alvar’s fidelity (“O Heavens! my portrait! / And he did grasp it in his death pang!”), a despair from which she then recoils in a frantic cry: “Off, false Demon, / That beat’st thy black wings close above my head!”13 This last,

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instinctual repudiation of despair coincides, tellingly, with the entrance of Ordonio, “the keys of the dungeon in his hand.” At the sight of “the wizard Moor’s employer!” Teresa instantly links him to Valdez’s words about the assassination painting: “Moors were his murderers, you say? Saints shield us / From wicked thoughts – ” (iii, ii, 44–49). Briefly yielding to the prompting of her despair, Teresa then urges herself toward conjugal death with Alvar: Is Alvar dead? What then? The nuptial rites and funeral shall be one! Here’s no abiding-place for thee, Teresa. – Away! they see me not – Thou seest me, Alvar! (iii, ii, 49–53) To thee I bend my course.14

Here the apostrophe to the spirit of Alvar recalls and at the same time furthers a bodily drama initially staged in the second scene of the first act, in Teresa’s long account, to her reproving father Valdez, of the elaborate fancies and imaginings by which she whiles away her bereft existence.15 Whereas the fancies she then avowed were play-acting, imaginary tours de charade of wishful fidelity, her resolution now to “bend [her] course” (emphasis added) in the context of Alvar’s “seeing” her from beyond the grave, has become a fatal mission toward union, driven not by suicidal despair but by faith to rejoin him beyond the grave, a quest determined by her conviction that he “did grasp [her picture] in his death pang!” The dramatic irony, of course, is that the morbid charade, in the first act, of “the crazy Moorish maid” she benignly alluded to – and, in deference to her disapproving father, wryly distanced herself from – becomes what she herself now intends to perform in earnest. She is prompted by hearing the narrated evidence of a spurious “trick” itself perpetrated, unbeknownst to her, by the very lover she apostrophizes, decked out in what she now imagines are murderous Moorish clothes. But then, wishing to put “one question / One question to Ordonio” – evidently about where Alvar’s grave lies – she suspends her suicidally bent impulse and, limbs trembling, decides to withdraw in preparation: “There I may sit unmark’d – a moment will restore me,” and, as the stage direction pointedly puts it, again “(retires out of sight).” Dramatically, it’s recognizable as a characteristic, even reflexive, withdrawal for Teresa, one the audience has heard and seen twice before – and will see again in the last act. (First, on the seashore in Act i, caught off guard when the Moorish stranger, responding to her words of courteous solicitude, rouses himself to exclaim on “her innocent voice, / That voice, that innocent

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voice! She is no traitress!” she declares, “(haughtily to Alhadra.) Let us retire” (i, ii, 260); and second, as we have seen, during the sorcery scene itself, when “trembling at her own conjectures” about the bearing of the Moorish stranger’s aggressive, “what-if ” address to Ordonio and the unholy clamor of his conduct, Teresa resolves to withdraw from “th’ unholy rite . . . Let us retire” (iii, i, 121–3). In this new third-act scene, however, Teresa withdraws with a telling difference: if agitated, her retirement is also willed, pragmatic, and temporary – and without Ordonion stealth. To restore her nerves, she remains, briefly, just beyond earshot in a marginally offstage penumbra, unhearing but vividly present in the audience’s imagination. Retiring there thus sets the stage, crucially, for her return and the single most significant moment of deliberately enacted, onstage overhearing in the play, a moment that culminates in an unforeseen, electrifying recognition. Onstage, meanwhile, Ordonio attempts to cover up his earlier outburst of startled, guilt-driven rage (“dup’d! dup’d! dup’d!”) at the treachery of the substituted assassination painting. He produces, for his father’s benefit, a plausibly dissembling lie about his own agency being in the service of Monviedro’s Inquisition, claiming to have devised and staged the entire conjuring scene as a trap to expose the sorcerer as a heretic. But when Valdez asks his son what the sorcerer had meant by speeches addressed to him about “Pride, and Hypocrisy, and Guilt, and Cunning,” and why Ordonio “look’d pale and trembled” when the sorcerer pressed him “about the corse, and stabs, and murderers” in the painting, Ordonio’s guilty, vengeful rage bursts out again: “Dup’d! dup’d! dup’d! / The traitor Isidore!” (iii, ii, 71–2) only again to be covered over, this time by a more elaborately dissembling display of cynically manic argument. Spurred by his father’s continuing bewilderment about sorcery and about “these magic sights!” as a way of removing “the doubts of wild Teresa – by fancies quelling fancies!” Ordonio launches into a crudely satiric – and Rivers-like – theorizing about the action represented in the discovered painting: What? if one reptile sting another reptile? Where is the crime? The goodly face of nature Hath one disfeaturing stain the less upon it. Are we not all predestin’d Transiency, And cold Dishonor? Grant it, that this hand Had given a morsel to the hungry worms Somewhat too early – Where’s the crime of this? That this must needs bring on the idiocy Of moist-eyed Penitence – ’tis like a dream!16 (iii, ii, 96–104)

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“Wild talk, my son!” chides Valdez, but Ordonio surges on. The stage direction, meticulously specifying timing, highlights the drama of what then takes place: “Ordonio. (now in soliloquy, now addressing his father: and just after the speech has commenced, Teresa reappears and advances slowly.)” Drawn as by a magnet yet propelled by purpose, she overhears Ordonio’s sonorous, depraved voice cynically parading, in escalating wildness, his mock-hysterical confession, culminating in a grotesquely festering image of the mathematical sublime: Say, I had lay’d a body in the sun! Well! in a month there swarm forth from the corse A thousand, nay, ten thousand sentient beings In place of that one man. – Say, I had kill’d him!17 (iii, ii, 107–10)

At this, in one of those suddenly registered pantomimic reactions Remorse associates primarily with Ordonio, Teresa “starts, and stops[,] listening.”18 But shortly, as his manic calculus continues, she “moves hastily forwards, and places herself directly before Ordonio,” who, “(Checking the feeling of surprise, and forcing his tones into an expression of playful courtesy),” brazenly toys with her: “Teresa? or the Phantom of Teresa?” his derision betraying what Coleridge called the “proud and gloomy” malaise of guilty remorse. Though real in body, Teresa comes upon him – or upon the figure of distraught imagination his dissembling performs – with the undecidable force of a phantom, a haunting spectre confronting him directly (no aside here) with the falseness of his feigned levity. Her answer, at once innocent of guile yet canny and articulate, refuses either to condone Ordonio’s mockery or to capitulate to a despair that would abandon her dire resolve in suicide to rejoin Alvar. She thus puts Ordonio (and Valdez, no “father” here) on the spot. But she refuses, in her passion to fulfill long-nurtured fancies of reunion with Alvar, the errand of vengeance that phantoms legendarily perform: Alas! the Phantom only, if in truth19 The substance of her Being, her Life’s life, Have ta’en its flight thro’ Alvar’s death-wound – (a pause). Where – (Even coward Murder grants the dead a grave) O tell me, Valdez! – answer me, Ordonio! Where lies the corse of my betrothed husband? (iii, ii, 116–21)

Her fervor of transferential identification here (“her Life’s life”) mirrors the Moorish stranger’s dream of (“a betrothed maid / Whom I was wont to call not mine, but me”). It sets the stage for Ordonio’s feverish

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imposture and the “lines repeating” Coleridge overheard in the Drury Lane rehearsal moment he recalled in his marginal note: There, where Ordonio likewise fain would lie! In the sleep-compelling earth, in unpierc’d darkness! For while we live – An inward day, that never, never sets, Glares round the soul, and mocks the closing eyelids! Over his rocky grave the Fir-grove sighs A lulling ceaseless dirge! ’Tis well with him! (iii, ii, 122–28)

While these lines were repeating. The moment Remorse plays out here, arguably the most crucially dramatic moment in the entire play, itself depends on a complex performance of overhearing and recognition by the audience as Teresa, hearing the echo, penetrates the display of Ordonio’s hypocritical imposture. Staging his own momentary withdrawal (“strides off in agitation towards the altar, but returns as Valdez speaks”), Ordonio thereby misses Teresa’s startled, baffled anagnorisis. “([R]ecoiling with the expression appropriate to the passion),” she repeats his words – “The rock! the fir-grove!” – and turns in astonishment to Valdez, “Didst thou hear him say it?” She overhears and recognizes in Ordonio’s words his unwitting repeating of those precisely worded details in the lurid dream-narrative that the majestic Moorish stranger on the seashore in the first act had so tellingly – and disturbingly – produced for Teresa: On a rude rock, A rock, methought, fast by a grove of firs, Whose threaddy leaves to the low-breathing gale Made a soft sound most like the distant ocean, I stay’d, as though the hour of death were pass’d, And I were sitting in the world of spirits –20 (i, ii, 286–91)

Noteworthy in both passages is not only the juxtaposition of rock and firgrove but also the soft, dirge-like sound; and further, the situations both resonate with Teresa’s deliberately extravagant fancy to Valdez, earlier in that same Act i scene, about a crazy Moorish maid, Who drest her in her buried lover’s cloaths, And o’er the smooth spring in the mountain cleft Hung with her lute, and play’d the self-same tune He used to play, and listen’d to the shadow (i, ii, 30–35) Herself had made.

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The soft sound also has telling affinities with the figure of “whispering,” associated with Teresa’s retiring from the clamor of the sorcery to seek the voice she hears in the chapel. The Moorish stranger’s lines in Act i came as a prelude to the din of the “fearful curse!” she had then heard him, continuing his wild dream-tale, recall: I rose tumultuous: My soul work’d high, I bar’d my breast to the storm, And with loud voice and clamorous agony Kneeling I pray’d to the great Spirit, that made me, Pray’d, that remorse might fasten on their hearts, And cling with poisonous tooth, inextricable (i, ii, 298–304) As the gor’d lion’s bite!

To Alhadra’s vehement question (“Dreamt you not that you return’d and kill’d them? / Dreamt you of no revenge?”), the disguised Alvar (“voice trembling, and in tones of deep distress ”) had then offered a fantastic “vision” of a gruesome double suicide that Teresa heard as though in the vein of her own wild fancies: alvar. She would have died, Died in her guilt – perchance by her own hands! And bending o’er her self-inflicted wounds, I might have met the evil glance of frenzy, And leapt myself into an unblest grave! . . . teresa. My soul is full of visions all as wild! (i, ii, 306–13)

Teresa, in other words, finds herself in Act iii’s rehearsal moment thrust beyond her devotion to the intensity of her earlier (merely) compensatory fancies. And compounding her startled sense of Ordonio’s words repeating those of the majestic Moor’s dream is the sense that the dream thus related on the seashore, with its fantasy of a frenzied lover’s suicide, now itself seems an uncanny rehearsal of her own resolve, as she moments earlier had vowed, to join Alvar in death: “The nuptial rites and funeral shall be one!” (iii, ii, 50). The very keenness of her overhearing impels her to pursue its perplexing intimations. However dark the employment of the shadowy Moor in the sorcery scene, his earlier dream narrative, and the nobility of his “mien,” which even then on the seashore had “perplex’d me / With obscure memory of something past,” now promises that he, too, will know something crucial about the location of Alvar’s grave. Her troubled resistance, in this newly fashioned Act iii scene, both to Ordonio’s disturbing mockery and to his disingenuous playing up to his credulous father’s readiness to excuse his distemper, prompts her to seek,

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in the imprisoned sorcerer, “A better, surer light, / To guide me.” If Teresa becomes more of an agent in the latter part of the play it’s both because of the alertness of her feats of listening and remembering and because of her readiness to act upon the implications of the intense reverberations she hears. For Teresa, then, the moment of overhearing is uncannily charged with hauntingly proleptic uncertainty: whose voice to believe, and how to comprehend the echo. From Coleridge’s rehearsal anecdote we can suppose that anticipating this intensely dramatic moment being rehearsed onstage (as distinct from in the green room) for the first time was what prompted “all the Actors and Actresses and Mechanics” to cluster round.21 Hearing “the lines repeating,” they seemed, as Coleridge fondly recalled, as though mesmerized by a “favourite Strain of Music.” The difference here from Teresa’s response to the stranger’s narrated dream in Act i, moreover, is crucial to the fabric overall of Coleridge’s Remorse. For Teresa, the lines repeating in Ordonio’s voice are the hinge upon which she turns from the passionate wildness of her suicidal fancies as the means for a [heavenly] reunion with her beloved to the more resolute and purposeful quest for the imprisoned Moorish sorcerer (“my resolve is fixed! myself will rescue him, / And learn if haply he know aught of Alvar” iv, ii, 16–17). Bound up with hearing that echo are also her memories of the “dream” told on the seashore by that mysterious Moorish stranger – now dressed in a sorcerer’s robe – whose “mien is noble [and] . . . perplex’d me / With obscure memory of something past, / Which still escaped my efforts, / Or tricks of a fancy pampered with long wishing” (emphasis added). It’s a moment of complex drama, the chief dynamic of which draws upon the precarious susceptibility of the mind’s ear to voices heard and, especially, overheard. Implicit is the sense that the most intensely significant human hearing is always overhearing, where the “over” carries with it the sense of excess generated in the fanciful or driven desires and dreads of the listener – like Matilda in The Borderers, or, as I argue in the next chapter, like Beatrice in The Cenci – who can’t help hearing what she can hardly bear to hear. (What can an audience bear?)22 Such hearing closely relates to the phenomenon psychoanalysts call “transference” – and to what we might also register as hardly bearable “interference.” Valdez at this point also interferes. He clings, naı¨vely, to the sense that his son innocently commissioned the sorcery (with its ominous assassination painting) in order to dissolve Teresa’s obstinate refusal to abandon her wild faith in reunion with a living Alvar; he also generously believes

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that, in the process, Ordonio was himself overwhelmed by the actual spectacle he thus staged. Urging Teresa to “Pity him, soothe him! disenchant his spirit!” Valdez innocently misconstrues his son’s viciously raving words about Isidore’s treachery in having proposed the Moorish stranger as the sorcerer (“A tender-hearted, scrupulous, grateful villain / Whom I will strangle!”) as stemming from his struggle between his grief over Alvar’s death as told by the painting and the agony of “his hopeless love for you.” He contends, in what is nevertheless a tellingly resonant diagnosis, that Ordonio’s overwrought feelings “Distemper him, and give reality / To the creatures of his fancy.” Ordonio, disingenuously feigning assent, replies, with his own unwittingly resonant fiction: Is it so? Yes! yes! even like a child, that too abruptly Rous’d by a glare of light from deepest sleep Starts up bewilder’d and talks idly. (iii, ii, 137–146)

Floating through this discourse and paradoxically intensifying, by interfering with, its effects for the audience as well as for Teresa are the strains of two earlier moments in the drama: first, when Valdez badgered Teresa about the idleness of her clinging to fancies of Alvar’s survival; second, and more tellingly, when Teresa, having heard the narrative of the Moorish stranger’s seashore “dream,” directly confronted him in parting: Stranger, farewell! I guess not, who you are, Nor why you so addressed your tale to me . . . If, as it sometimes happens, our rude startling, Whilst your full heart was shaping out its dream, Drove you to this, your not ungentle, wildness – You have my sympathy, and so farewell! (i, ii, 315–24, emphases added)

If Teresa’s sense of purpose in the rehearsal moment – to resolve the haunting “perplexity” of overhearing in Ordonio’s voice the words of the Moorish stranger’s dream – draws her on, the resolution she seeks at what she imagines will eventually be Alvar’s gravesite seems threatened at the outset of Act v when she arrives in the dungeon to probe the dark resonance of that mysterious sorcerer’s employment. The scene opens with Alvar’s soliloquy, in lines drawn from Osorio.23 But where in that 1797 version Albert’s soliloquy was punctuated abruptly by Osorio’s entrance with the poisoned goblet, Remorse takes a different turn, notably transposing from Osorio’s third-act sorcery scene the exchanges between Albert and Maria that followed the apparition of the assassination

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painting. But as with so much else in the rehearsal spadework that intensifies Remorse’s drama of overhearing, to accommodate this exhumation Coleridge added lines to the end of Alvar’s soliloquy. He now seeks momentary respite in a secluded corner of the dungeon, a move that itself resonates ominously with Isidore’s initial quest, in the Act iv cavern scene, for a seat in the “little crevice” that, disguised by moonshine, itself concealed the gaping mouth of the “hellish pit!” (In that scene, Isidore, soon hurled into the pit by a jubilantly vengeful Ordonio, uttered his dying groans – groans overheard by Alhadra.) As Alvar “Retires out of sight,” he braces himself – with an almost pastoral confidence – for whatever the dungeon will bring: I am chill and weary! Yon rude bench of stone, In that dark angle, the sole resting-place! But the self-approving mind is its own light, And life’s best warmth still radiates from the heart, Where love sits brooding, and an honest purpose. (v, i, 31–35)

It brings, of course, Teresa, who “Enter[s] with a Taper.” Her words not only resonate with Alvar’s (though without his self-assurance), but also recall her own earlier disturbed withdrawal from the conjuring scene to the chapel’s haven. With Alvar offstage and out of earshot, however, the echoing dungeon hardly reassures: It has chill’d my very life – my own voice scares me; Yet when I hear it not, I seem to lose The substance of my being – my strongest grasp Sends inwards but weak witness that I am. I seek to cheat the echo – How the half sounds Blend with this strangled light! Is he not here? (Looking round.) O for one human face here – but to see One human face here to sustain me. – Courage! It is but my own fear! – The life within me, It sinks and wavers like this cone of flame, Beyond which I scarce dare look onward! Oh! (shuddering.) If I faint? If this inhuman den should be At once my death-bed and my burial vault? (Faintly screams as Alvar emerges from the recess.)24 (v, i, 36–48)

No merely gratuitous Gothic frisson or descent by Coleridge into gendered difference, Teresa’s scream voices the fear that her quest for a site where “the nuptial rites and funeral shall be one!” will abort in fatal solitude. And Alvar’s emergence continues to spin out the ramifications

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of this moment as a version of Teresa’s wild Act i fancies. Seeing her faint, he “(Rushes towards her, and catches her as she is falling.)” O gracious heaven! It is, it is Teresa! Shall I reveal myself ? The sudden shock Of rapture will blow out this spark of life, And Joy compleat what Terror has begun. O ye impetuous beatings here, be still! Teresa, best belov’d! pale, pale, and cold! Her pulse doth flutter! Teresa! my Teresa! (v, i, 49–55)

The restitching of material transposed from the fifth act of Osorio begins at this point, its own embellishments of voice taking on, in the context of Remorse’s intensified overhearings, virtually uncanny aptness. Teresa “(Recovering, looks round wildly)”: I heard a voice: but often in my dreams I hear that voice! And wake, and try – and try – To hear it waking! But I never could – And ’tis so now – even so! Well! he is dead – Murder’d perhaps! And I am faint, and feel As if it were no painful thing to die! (v, i, 56–61)

But more: the extended moment of Teresa’s fainting and wild recovery itself entails a particular dramatic resonance, recalling – and in effect answering – the moment on the seashore in the first act, after Alhadra had urged her to “Speak to him, Lady – none can hear you speak, / And not believe you innocent of guile,” when Alvar himself, hearing Teresa’s voice for the first time in six years, “tremble[d] strangely” and then “[sank] down and [hid ] his face in his robe.” At that point Teresa, who herself had earlier “drop[ped] her veil ”, “approaches nearer to him”, ministering to his condition: “I pray you think us friends – uncowl your face, / For you seem faint, and the night breeze blows healing” (i, ii, 250–55, passim). The dungeon scene then builds toward Alvar’s unveiling, though deferring it by still further recapitulation, as he counters her lament: Believe it not, sweet maid! Believe it not, Beloved woman! ’Twas a low imposture, Fram’d by a guilty wretch. (v, i, 62–64)

A telling ambiguity here: is the imposture the assassination painting itself, with Alvar the framer, now remorseful over the deception (including also his Moorish guise), or is his “guilty wretch” Ordonio, architect of the sorcery scheme? Hysterical uncertainty prompting Teresa to retire from

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him to “feebly support herself against a pillar of the dungeon,” her question launches a misfire of impassioned estecean stichomithy: t er es a. Ha! Who art thou? alvar. (exceedingly affected ) Suborned by his brother – t er es a. Didst thou murder him? And dost thou now repent? Poor troubled man, I do forgive thee, and may Heaven forgive thee! a l va r. Ordonio – he – t er es a. If thou didst murder him – His spirit ever at the throne of God Asks mercy for thee: prays mercy for thee, With tears in Heaven! a l va r. Alvar was not murder’d. (v, i, 64–72) Be calm! Be calm, sweet maid!25

One further delay produces yet another recapitulation, as Teresa – her wildness tamed by gazing into what she sees as “love and pity” in the eye of the “Mysterious man!” – once more seeks to fathom his enigma: “Well! Ordonio – / Oh my foreboding heart! And he suborn’d thee, / And thou did’st spare his life?” Her “foreboding heart” summons those Act i and Act iii moments cited above (p. 147). All this now points to the climactic moment of recognition that Remorse, from its very seashore beginning, has held in the offing, though its enactment here is subtly, unexpectedly designed, drawing on but modifying material explicit in Osorio. Alvar ultimately reveals his identity to Teresa not by shedding his Moorish garments but by removing from his neck the “relic” of her portrait and presenting it to her, a performative dramaturgy that reenacts onstage, now with telling difference, the twicenarrated scene of their initial seashore betrothal: t e r e s a . (receiving the portrait.) The same – it is the same. Ah! Who art thou? Nay I will call thee, Alvar! (she falls on his neck.)

(v, i, 87–88)

No faint here, her precipitous embrace literally incarnates the portrait just bestowed on her, as it were consummating the betrothal, she both performing and becoming his necklace.26 But Alvar, hearing “a sound as of removing bars / At the dungeon’s outer door,” like a dramaturg, stagemanages Teresa: “a brief, brief while / Conceal thyself, my love! It is Ordonio” (v, i, 89–91). She then, unwittingly miming – with a difference – Ordonio’s own earlier eavesdropping at their seashore betrothal, retires “unnotic’d ” to monitor Alvar’s attempt to “recall him to his nobler

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nature.”27 Only when that attempt produces in Ordonio a crazed fear that he is confronted by a “fantastic shadow,” the “spirit of the dead!” does she return, “(rushing out and falling on Alvar’s neck)”: “Ordonio! ’tis thy brother!” enacting yet again the betrothal to ward off his mistaken villainy.

ii What I have called the Drury Lane “rehearsal moment,” with its focus on Teresa’s crucial overhearing, epitomizes what happened to Remorse during revision in December 1812 and January 1813, in anticipation of opening night. But as Coleridge’s marginal account of the moment pointedly recalls, Ordonio’s voice lacked sufficient “depth and volume”: when “these lines were repeating” in the initial public performances at Drury Lane they failed to “produce an . . . Effect on the Public” equal to the effect they had on “all the Actors and Actresses, & even the Mechanics on the Stage” in rehearsal. It was not “till after the Publication – & then they (I understand) were applauded – I have never seen the Piece, since the first night/S.T.C.”28 But if he never went back to the performances at Drury Lane, his mind – and copies of Remorse – went elsewhere, one of them performing the service of another dark employment. The extensively annotated copy of “the Publication” that includes his marginal anecdote about the lines repeating went as a gift to Sara Hutchinson at Grasmere.29 As Asra or SAPA – coded names for her in his notebooks – she had been, for years dating back to late 1799, along with Wordsworth, his most idealized and burdensome audience – burdensome in that Coleridge turned again and again in the notebooks to brood on what she meant to him and to analyze his extraordinarily ambiguous and conflicted relation to her. The burden of Asra could be both grievous and joyous: in despair it could bring not only suicidal thoughts but, paradoxically, secret pleasures.30 A notebook entry from June 1810, three months after she had left to live in Wales and while he was in the Southey me´nage with his wife Sarah, offers one version of his sense of their intimacy: June 26. 1810. Keswick. – I most commonly do not see her with my imagination – have no visual image/but she is present to me, even as two persons at some small distance in the same dark room/they know that the one is present, & act & feel under that knowledge – & a subtler kind of sigh seems to confirm & enliven the knowlege (sic). SAPA.31

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Some four months later, another entry voices more strenuously the burden his need placed upon her – and upon himself. Symptomatic of the strain is the second-person apostrophe: I hold it . . . neither Impiety nor Superstition on the other, that you are the God within me, even as the best & most religious men have called their Conscience the God within them. But you, tho’ existing to my senses, have ever abode within me – you have been, & you alone have been, my Conscience . . . All evil has kept aloof – you have worked ceaselessly every where, at all times . . . and the sum of your influence & benignant Grace has been . . . the unconquerable necessity of making myself worthy of being happy in as as the one indispensable condition of possessing the one only happiness – your Love, your Esteem, and You.32

“[U]nconquerable necessity”: that last twist, virtually acknowledging Asra’s influence to be a supreme addiction of the psyche, confesses the doom his burden entailed. “[M]aking myself worthy”: the word itself inevitably invokes the phantom of the all-powerful Friend and the turbulent triangulation that, in Coleridge’s mind, condemned him to rivalry with Wordsworth for Asra’s affections.33 Whatever one might suppose about the ground in early childhood experience disposing him to such rivalry, unmistakable evidence survives, from the earliest years of his acquaintance with Wordsworth in the mid 1790s, of Coleridge’s readiness to saddle himself with self-denying admiration for that Friend, especially in the context of that Friend’s evident access to women, and to measure his own sense of self-worth in terms of worthiness conferred by their manifest regard for him – an impossible burden that Coleridge found also impossible to shed. With regard to Wordsworth, early on in the years after returning from Germany in 1799 the evidence of the burden accumulates. But the clearest indications of its intensity – especially with regard to its relevance to the revision of Osorio – come in the months and years following his return from Malta in late summer 1806.34 While in London in spring 1808 to give a lecture series that was abruptly terminated midstream, he apparently sent Wordsworth two upbraiding letters, the second rebuking him and Dorothy for “overlooking” Asra’s correspondence and for telling her that his [Coleridge’s] influence was a “poison entering into her mind” and that “she was ‘the cause’ of all his misery.”35 Offended, Wordsworth drafted – but prudently seems not to have sent – a severely caustic reply, [Sara] is 34 years of age and what have I to do with overlooking her letters! It is indeed my business to prevent poison from entering her mind and body from any quarter, but it would be an extreme case in which I should solicit permission to explore her letters to know whether such poison were contained in them.36

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The second letter from Coleridge also, apparently, brought up the hot-bed circumstances of a morning at the Beaumonts’ estate at Coleorton in late December 1806, when, he imagined, he had come upon William and Asra in bed together as lovers.37 Offended by these allegations, Wordsworth’s severely caustic reply, dismissed (without explicitly denying) their validity: There is more than one sentence in your letter which I blushed to read, and which you yourself would have been unable to write, could never have thought of writing, nay, the matter of which could never even have passed through your mind, had you not acquired a habit, which I think a very pernicious one, of giving by voice and pen to your most lawless thoughts, and to your wildest fancies, an external existence . . . and finding by insensible reconcilement fair and attractive bosom-inmates in productions from which you ought to have recoiled as monsters.38

It’s likely that Coleridge’s passion for Asra was driven, at some deep level, “between men,” by his neurotically envious idealizing of Wordsworth. Bound up also with all this were the ravaging effects of his bondage to laudanum. Doubtless, given her long exposure to the refrains of his idealizing – and eroticizing – adoration, Sara’s ears were well schooled to overhear even what the voice apostrophizing Asra in the secrecy of his notebooks was up to.39 Was the rivalry also then inevitably played out at some level in the revisions displayed by Remorse ? Though no surviving evidence indicates how “the lines repeating” played in the closet theater of Sara’s mind in February 1813 at Grasmere, we might say that Coleridge’s rehearsal-moment note, especially, underscored the message implicit in the gift itself: (Over)hear this! It seems plausible to add that what intervenes both in this situation and in the Drury Lane moment referred to in the “rehearsal note” is the impact of language: what STC writes in his notebooks, what he senses in Wordsworth’s (unsent) letter, and what the audience responds to once they’ve had the chance to read Remorse before seeing it onstage. The gift-giver of Remorse in February 1813 had not seen or, apparently, even heard from Asra for almost three years, a gap that seems, paradoxically, to have underscored her phantom power. In March 1810, ill with nervous exhaustion after her close collaboration for long months as his amanuensis on the anxiety-ridden project of The Friend made continuing domestic proximity with him unbearable, she had retired from Grasmere to take up what proved to be prolonged

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residence with her brother Tom and cousin John Monkhouse in Wales.40 Devastated, Coleridge fell deep into melancholy, in the throes of which he was unable to continue work on The Friend and became more and more an unwelcome burden to the household at Allen Bank, eventually in May deciding to retreat to his own family and the Southeys at Keswick. A morose notebook entry there in late June, punctuating Asra’s absence incommunicado, testifies to his fears and paranoid anxieties: SAPA ¼ [SARA MONKHOUSE.] Sunday Night or rather Monday Morning – a dream – that W.W. and D.W. were going down to Wales to give her away – I am persuaded, that the Sharpness of Sense will not, cannot, be greater in the agony of my Death, than at the moment when the insufferable Anguish awoke me. N.B. I could detect on awaking no bodily pain or uncomfortable sensation, in stomach, or bowel, or side, as giving origin to it/it was the entire offspring of Thought – O mercy, mercy, of prophetic Thought? – O no! no! no! let me die – tho’ in the rack of the Stone – only let me die before I suspect it, broad-awake! Yet, the too, too evident, the undeniable joining in the conspiracy with M and Δ to deceive me, & her cruel neglect & contemptuous Silence ever since! – 41

The debilitating nightmare fears and suspicions were soon compounded and intensified, when, himself in poor health and in quest of medical treatment for opium addiction and alcohol dependency, Coleridge left Keswick and Grasmere in late October 1810 with Basil Montagu and his wife to take up lodgings with them in London. He arrived there only to overhear, through his would-be host Montagu’s apparently anxious indiscretion, Wordsworth’s voice, calling him an “absolute nuisance” and “abandon[ing] hope” for him. Whatever Wordsworth had actually said in Grasmere to Montagu before they left about Coleridge’s unseemly and insupportable habits remains matter for speculation. Coleridge’s notebook entries suggest strongly that Montagu at least reported these notorious, devastating words: “No Hope of me! Absol. Nuisance!” Subsequently, both Henry Crabb Robinson, in his diary, and Robert Southey, in conversation with Wordsworth, reported Montagu saying, “Nay, but Wordsworth has commissioned me to tell you, first that he has no Hope of you.”42 Believing Wordsworth had poisoned Montagu’s ear, Coleridge spent many wretched days going about London spinning to his friends, the Beaumonts and Crabb Robinson among them, the tale of Wordsworth’s perfidy. To Richard Sharp he branded Wordsworth his “bitterest calumniator.”43 To Robinson he complained that Wordsworth had described him as a “rotten drunkard” who had been “rotting out his

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entrails by intemperance.” Coleridge’s own intemperate self-pity – at least as it can be heard between the lines of Robinson’s scarcely sympathetic diary – underscores how thoroughly capable he was of ventriloquizing Wordsworth’s voice at its prosopopoe[t]ic worst. W. J. Bate observes that “if the breach with Wordsworth was so long drawn out (in a sense almost permanent), it was because the indictment was really a self-indictment.”44 We may add that it took overhearing Wordsworth’s imagined voice to make the indictment so nearly fatal. Coleridge, as reported by Robinson: “I should have not been almost killed by this affair if it had not been that I loved Wordsworth as a great and good man.”45 If this sounds excessively morbid, there were answering thoughts from the other side. So exasperating was Coleridge’s conduct in blaming Wordsworth that even their mutual friends were driven to parti-pris bursts of passion. When Coleridge disappeared from view in London for eight weeks in early 1812, it turned out he had been to Keswick, Penrith, and Ambleside, even passing directly through Grasmere without so much as a word to the Allen Bank household. Catherine Clarkson waxed vehement to Robinson, revisiting Wordsworth’s alleged betrayal: So there is an end of the Friend & the articles for the Eclectic Review & most likely of his Lectures also – Will Wordsworth’s unkindness serve this turn I wonder? Heaven forgive my hard-heartedness but I think he had better follow poor Jebb Loffts example & put a pistol to his brains – Now I have written the sentence I turn sick at the thought – If you hear any more of the stories about W. & C. I wish you would express your belief that Wordsworth never could have used the vulgar expressions attributed to him.46

Clarkson’s comment, like a smoking gun, corroborates Coleridge’s worst fears. Resenting the nuisance Coleridge’s “scandalous conduct’ was causing, Wordsworth went to London in the spring of 1812 to heal the breach, but evidence in The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth leaves little doubt that the mission was grudgingly undertaken and brought him no pleasure. His letters reflect his distaste, even when a resolution seemed in sight: “This ugly affair of Coleridge, which I hope may now be considered as settled, has hampered me grievously, & defrauded me of many days and hours of days.” He complained indignantly that a series of lectures Coleridge had advertised was “a most odious way of picking up money and scattering about his own & his friend’s thoughts. Lady B[eaumont] has taken 30 tickets, which she will have to force upon his friends and where she cannot succeed must abide by the Loss.” The subject of the proposed lectures – significantly enough – was the drama, about which he

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and Coleridge had had intense conversation and correspondence in 1796 and 1797, while composing The Borderers and Osorio. On the eve of the first lecture, Wordsworth again predicted failure: “he has a world of bitter enemies, and is deplorably unpopular.”47 Earlier in the same letter, Wordsworth wrote Mary disappointedly about another, quite different public performance, a ticket for which, with foresight and prudence, he put himself to some trouble to get: The Assassin has not been executed in the Palace Yard as was first proposed; had that been the place I should this morning have been a Spectator in safety, from the top of Westminster Abbey: but he suffered before Newgate; and I did not think myself justified, for the sake of curiosity in running any risk. – I should have been miserable if I had brought my life or limbs into any hazard upon such an occasion. – We have not yet heard what passed at the Execution.48

The assassin was John Bellingham, a deranged Liverpool tradesman, who on May 11, 1812, had put a pistol to the heart of the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, at the entrance to the House of Commons. Coleridge’s lectures were postponed a week because of the assassination, but his pen was not idle. The Courier for Thursday, May 14, carried his obituary for Perceval.49 “Perplexed and confused by the crowd of thoughts and painful feelings which succeed the first stupor impressed by the awful event,” he wrote, echoing the language of Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs, “the mind almost of necessity seeks a resting place for itself.” We should not be surprised, given the turbulence of his own painful feelings as the victim of what he believed was Wordsworth’s character assassination, that Coleridge found his resting place in self-portraiture, by a familiar displacement, writing, in Perceval’s, his own death notice. His tribute to this “great and good man” rings with the intense, even paranoid, idealizings of his own public and private life that we know from notebooks and letters: A man . . . whose sweetness of disposition disarmed, at times, his most inveterate and acrimonious opponents . . . a man, to whom his bitterest enemies can attribute no other defect than that which his numerous and at least equally enlightened supporters honoured in him, as his appropriate excellence, a firm attachment to those principles and institutions religious and political, under which Great Britain has become the proudest name of history – This man, pierced to the heart, in the very manhood and harvest of his talents and labours by the pistol of a malcontent . . .

His nature “vibrating to the inmost heart,” Coleridge’s obituary closes with a telling vignette, imagining Perceval’s glorified spirit “already

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perhaps pleading before the Throne of his Maker for his murderer, and his slanderers, in the words of his Saviour – ‘Father! Forgive them! They know not what they have done.’ ”50 It’s a transcending gesture we may recognize. (Paired antithetically with Perceval in the Courier obituary is Napoleon, a figure of treachery who “destroyed the very hope of liberty for the nation which had trusted him,” leaving “thousands pining with broken hearts, amid the relatives of myriads, whose lives have been sacrificed to the grim idol of his remorseless ambition” (emphasis added). Is it too much to hear, in that last phrase, a submerged j’accuse against Wordsworth, whose consuming passion Coleridge decried openly only in the notebooks of 1808 and after? With Wordsworth, however, transcendence was out of the question. His disappointment at missing the execution soon gives way in the letter to Mary to a long argument rejecting the notion that the monster’s madness might exempt him from public justice. Bellingham was a detestable fanatic who had lurked at Parliament more than a fortnight “to perpetrate the execrable Deed.” Would it not be a horrible thing, that the extreme of a Man’s guilt, should be pleaded as a reason, why he should be exempted from punishment; because, forsooth, his crime was so atrocious that no Man in his senses could have committed it? All guilt is a deviation from reason. And had such an Assassin as this been acquitted upon the ground of insanity, the verdict would have held out an encouragement to all wicked Men, to transcend the known bounds of Wickedness, with a hope of finding security from law in the very enormity of their crimes.51

Wordsworth’s analysis resounds with the diction and tone of The Borderers’s villain pursuing his malicious plot against Mortimer and Herbert, the monster of his poisonous tales. Rivers had argued against the babyspirited impulse of mercy: The wiles of Women And craft of age, seducing reason first Made weakness a protection, and obscured The moral shapes of things. His tender cries And helpless innocence, do they protect The infant lamb? and shall the infirmities Which have enabled this enormous culprit To perpetrate his crimes serve as a sanctuary To cover him from punishment? . . . – We recognize in this old man a victim Prepared already for the sacrifice –52

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For all their erotic suggestiveness, scarcely glimpsed before in Wordsworth, the love letters make disquieting reading; they remind us too often of the man who in Robinson’s hearing one evening, deploring the Commons speech that might have inflamed Bellingham to act, answered a young radical who resentfully asked what the starving were to do. “Not murder people,” said Wordsworth, “unless they mean to eat their hearts.”53 In the letter to Mary just cited, the Rivers voice gives way, momentarily, to a softer muse: “And now my darling let me turn to thee, and to my longing to be with thee. Last night, and this morning in particular I had dream after dream concerning thee; from which I woke and slipped again immediately into the same course.” But the nuptial dreams are themselves interrupted by what, borrowing a Hollywood term, we might call a “voice-over” by the remorselessly derogatory Rivers: Coleridge begins his Lectures tomorrow, which I shall not be sorry to hear. I do not think, they will bring him much profit. He has a world of bitter enemies, and is deplorably unpopular . . . You cannot form a notion to what degree Coleridge is disliked or despised notwithstanding his great talents, his genius, & vast attainments. He rises every day between 8 & 9 or earlier, this I think a great conquest. But his actions in other respects seem as little under his own power as at any period of his life.54

Mary surely kept her husband’s confidence, but we cannot doubt – so sensitive were Coleridge’s ears – that Wordsworth’s voice and Asra’s reverberating silence found their devouring way to his heart in London. Little wonder, then, with the wounds of the quarrel barely patched and the poison certainly not purged, and with Wordsworth back home with Mary at Grasmere, that Coleridge soon found in himself the will and voice to undertake reworking Osorio for the dramatic performances that brought him – however briefly – his arguably greatest public success, Remorse. iii One moment of something like alleviation in that Grasmere silence, however, in early December 1812, bears comment. Unexpected letters came, from Dorothy and from William, with the distressful news of young Thomas Wordsworth’s death from measles, less than six months after their loss of his sister Catherine; with it came, explicitly from Dorothy, the perhaps surprising wish that Coleridge would come north to comfort her brother and his wife in their grief. His long reply to Wordsworth, was, as Richard Holmes puts it, “full of passionate

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sympathies and unresolved contradictions.”55 He declared himself at the outset powerless to come because “the Rehearsal of my Play commences this week,” but then added (doubtless ingenuously but nonetheless astonishingly, given the still open wound of the Montagu betrayal), “ – & upon this depends my best Hopes of leaving Town after Christmas & living among you as long as I live.” Several paragraphs followed, then this involuted – and insistently reflexive – farewell performance: Dear Mary! dear Dorothy! dearest Sarah! – O be assured, no thought relative to myself has half the influence in inspiring the wish & effort to appear and to act what I always in my will & heart have been, as the knowledge that few things could more console you than to see me healthy & worthy of myself ! – Again and again, my dearest Wordsworth!!56

All those earnestly proclaiming (and tellingly ranked) devotional salutations hardly cover over the truth peering through the theatricality of “to appear and to act.” With Coleridge such emphatic professing is always both a mode of excess and a mode of self-rehearsing; appearing is always acting; and a sense of being worthy of himself is always bound up with the imagined regard of an audience, in this immediate context a very specially invoked audience.57 What else are words – in a letter or a text, or in the margin of such a text – worth? So one may linger over the significance of such a copiously inscribed gift as the copy of Remorse, cast some six weeks later into that silence.58 Doubtless, as with all gifts, the motive was complex, overdetermined. The book offered a fanciful reflection of himself as “S.T.C.” might have wished her to see him, to “appear and to act . . . healthy and worthy of myself ”: author, at long last, of a published work of consequence – the first work, at forty, entirely his own and, remarkably, unburdened by the problematic pressures of sponsorship by subscription; no ordinary pride of authorship in this context, given the long years of anguish over his failure, in the public eye and in those of his dearest friends, to fulfill the promise that so illuminated – and exacerbated – their sense of him. But one might also discern a darker employment for the Grasmere audience, akin to Alvar’s, whose dream narrative on the seashore reaches a climax of sorts with what Teresa hears as “a fearful curse”: Kneeling I pray’d to the great Spirit that made me, Pray’d that Remorse might fasten on their hearts, And cling, with poisonous tooth, inextricable (i, ii, 301–304) As the gor’d lion’s bite !

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It may seem a wild fancy of critical conjuring to propose that the gift to Asra of Remorse was, in potential effect if not in fully conscious intent, an assassination painting. Ironically (?) the gift would have arrived in Grasmere at the point when expectations were mounting that the reported success at Drury Lane – especially after the fever of rehearsal activity had moored him in London – would free him to make his journey to them to share their bereavement over the deaths of the children. Its inscribed presentation to Sara – with none to Wordsworth: his copy came some weeks later – must have been received with disturbed surprise, a message to be lamented. Framing that argument would involve, at the outset, turning back to the thicket of notebook entries from late June 1810, composed at Greta Hall in Keswick. On “Monday, June 25th, 1810,” in the throes of his sense of Asra’s deceiving abandonment and his wild dream that she was about to become Sara Monkhouse – the feared surname itself bizarrely, if subliminally, suggesting she was spurning him for nunnery adventures in a Welsh abbey – he “Began to read the deeply interesting Life & Works of Sta Teresa.” Borrowing the books from Southey’s library, he plunged into annotating the margins, and even transcribed his most sustained – and wryly alliterative – observations about Teresa into the very notebook where, on adjacent pages, he confided his fears and suicidal anguish over Asra. She was indeed framed by nature & favored by a very hot-bed in a hot-house of Circumstances, to become a mystic Saint of the first magnitude, a mighty Mother of spiritual Transports, the materia prestabilita of divine Fusions, Infusions, and Confusions . . . This frame of such exquisite sensibility by nature & by education shaken & ruined by the violence done to her nature by her obstinate resolve to become a nun against her own and against her Father’s Will – out of a resolve of Duty/finishing in a burning fever, which ended in Madness for many months or a state very like it – & which left her Brain unsettled, as is evident from the frequent fainting fits, to which she was ever after subject – 59

“A very hot-bed in a hot-house of Circumstances.” How proximate the emotionally tropic climates of Philip II’s Inquisitional Spain and the young saint-to-be Teresa’s Avila were to that of the Wordsworth me´nage at Allen Bank before Sara Hutchinson left for Wales may be suggested by a notebook entry citing the “murmurs, & more than murmurs, articulate Complaints” that Coleridge recalled, in his embittered letters of May 1808, having “for the first time suffered . . . to escape from me, relatively to [Wordsworth’s] conduct towards me” and “his cowardly Mock-prudence relatively to his Friends.” Turning, in

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this note, to probe the causes of “this Over-prudence ,” he listed first of all High Self-opinion pampered in a hot bed of [Dor. & Mrs W’s Ideal] moral & intellectual Sympathy: . . . A blessed Marriage for him & for her it has been! But O! wedded Happiness is the intensest sort of Prosperity, & all Prosperity, I find, hardens the Heart – and happy people become so very prudent & farsighted – but they look forward so constantly as not to have ever glanced at the retrospect, at their own feelings, & the principles consequent on them, when they were themselves disquieted, & their physical & moral Instincts not gratified! – 60

Coleridge’s intense interest in St. Teresa in 1810 takes form in three ways. First, the affinities of her temperament and her experience with those he wrestled with in his idealizing attempts to comprehend and philosophize his anguished and deep, quasi-religious yearnings for Sara Hutchinson. Second, the intriguing resonances between St. Teresa and the figure he had called Maria in Osorio, who bears the name Teresa for the first time in the manuscript of Remorse submitted to the censor on January 5, 1813.61 Third, in the construction of St. Teresa, already underway in the notebook entries in 1810, as an absorbing case history of the development of the Will as a defining power in the struggle of the “moral Being.” Two notebook passages from June and October 1810 explore aspects, respectively, of Teresa’s strength of “moral being” and of Asra’s influence on Coleridge’s own sense of what he calls his “Conscience” or “what religious men call ‘the God within them.’” The final section of the long June entry tracing the sources of St. Teresa’s spiritual strength begins with a flourish of apologetic remorse, then proceeds to distinguish the essence of that strength from the error of idolatrous superstition: One other source it is almost criminal to have forgotten – Page the 12th of her Life has brought it back to my recollection – those Effects of the Gratified Conscience, effects I mean so supersensual that they might even with wise men venially pass for the supernatural, and so glorious for human nature that tho’ they be in truth our Humanity itself in its contra-distinction from animal nature, it is yet no wonder that if conscious of the sad & humiliating Weaknesses blended into one person with this noble Instinct, the Soul attributes* them to Divinity acting on us & from without. *(a mistake this of the sensuous imagination relatively to Place and to Space, rather than a misnomer of the thing itself, which is verily & in fact the [Greek : the Divine within us, God dwelling in us!]) the Effects, I say, of the moral Being after difficult Conquest, the total State of the Spirit after victorious Struggle, in and by which the Will has preserved its

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perfect Freedom by a deep and vehement Energy of perfect Obedience to the pure, practical Reason, or Conscience ! 62

Four months later, abandoned in London, he hovered in anguish between exalted analysis and a suicidally desperate spiritual yearning for, even prayer to, Asra: My love of [Asra] is not so much in my Soul, as my Soul in it. It is my whole Being wrapt up into one Desire, all the Hopes & Fears, Joys & Sorrows, all the Powers, Vigor & Faculties of my Spirit abridged into perpetual Inclination. To bid me not love you were to bid me annihilate myself – for to love you is all I know of my Life, as far as my Life is an object of my Consciousness or my free Will . . . I hold it therefore neither Impiety nor Superstition on the other, that you are the God within me, even as the best & most religious men have called their Conscience the God within them.63

One further link between St. Teresa and Asra, this one more startlingly intertextual and precisely metonymic, suggests how, in some darkly energized moods of his mind, they might even be interchangeable. “Page the 12th of her Life” (which occasioned his “recollection” above) begins with Teresa’s account of the harrowing experience of leaving her home to enter the convent: And I remember (to the uttermost of what I can call to mind, and in very truth) that whilst I was going out of my Father’s house, I believe the sharpness of sense will not be greater in the very instant, or agony of my death, than it was then. For it seemed to me, as if every bone which I had in my body, and had been disjointed from all the rest. And there being no such love of God in me at that time, as was able to quench that love which my heart carryed to my Father and Friends; all that which then I did, was with so mighty a violence, that if God had not given me great help, mine own consideration would never have been able to carry me on; but here he allowed me such courage, even against my self, that I had power to put my purpose in execution.64

Page the 12th was still open on the writing table in Coleridge’s prosopopoetic mind on June 25, 1810, as he recalled, for his notebook, waking that morning from his “Sara Monkhouse” nightmare, “persuaded, that the Sharpness of Sense will not, cannot, be greater in the agony of my Death, than at the moment when the insufferable Anguish awoke me.” Two notebook entries later, the same day, enciphered, he spelled out another suicidal fantasy: Should I cease to write the [Greek: “the names, hers and mine, at the head”] of the pages, if SAPA were indeed S – h M – – se?? – No Need – 65

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It‘s highly likely, then, that the charged linkage between St. Teresa and Asra provided much of the impetus to choose that anagrammatical name in anticipation of revising his drama. How much the ensuing development of Remorse’s Teresa from Osorio’s Maria during the revisions of 1812–13 owes to Coleridge’s engagement with The Works of the Holy Mother St. Teresa of Jesus may be suggested by such obvious resonances as these lines from the newly added opening scene, when Alvar, just returned to Spain from his exile in “the Belgic states,” recalls how his dreams of his beloved had cast doubt on her alleged role in the assassination plot against him: And still the more I mus’d, my soul became More doubtful, more perplex’d: and still Teresa Night after night, she visited my sleep, Now as a saintly sufferer, wan and fearful, Now as a saint in glory beckoning to me! (i, i, 81–85, emphasis added)

Some of Teresa’s proclivities in Remorse, especially early on as a figure characterized by strong allegiance to her fancies and by passionate expressiveness, were doubtless already seminal in Osorio’s Maria.66 But particularly intense moments in Remorse are haunted by resonances with more contemporary notebook entries. A startling example of this effect comes in the echo of this last notebook passage (“Should I cease to write? . . . unless Ghosts write”) in the lead-up to the rehearsal moment, when Ordonio’s mocking “Teresa? or the Phantom of Teresa?” prompts her evisceratingly sober reply: Alas! the Phantom only, if in truth The substance of her Being, her Life’s life, Have ta’en its flight thro’ Alvar’s death-wound –

(iii, ii, 115–18)

Coleridge’s attitude to St. Teresa, at least as reflected in the notebook entries, moves from wry curiosity to fascinated absorption as he traces her development from adolescent, hot-house errancies into a sturdier figure of Will and Conscience, a plausible model for the resolute agent Drury Lane’s Teresa becomes. The longest notebook entry, cited above, enumerates the ways that nature and a “very hot-bed in a hot-house of Circumstances” collaborated to produce “a mystic Saint of the first magnitude.” The following passage tantalizes in its affinities with the complicated dynamics in Remorse between Teresa’s wild fancies and the kindly, superstitious opposition of her father, Lord Valdez: 7. In the habit (and that too without the will or knowledge of the superstitious Father) of reading Volumes of Romance & Chivalry to her Mother/Spanish Romance & Chivalry, before Don Quixote’s appearance! – and that by herself all

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night long. 8. At 14 & 15 by the corruption of a light-minded but favorite Cousin, & her female servants, she opened her fearful heart to Spanish Sweetheartry, doubtless in the true Oroondates Style – and the giving audience to some dying swain thro’ the barred Windows, or having received a Lover’s Messages of Flames & flaming Conceits, & Anguish, and Despair – these seem to have been the mortal Sins of which she bitterly accuses herself – together with her aversion (at 15 years old) to shut herself up for ever in a Nunnery, to which her Father likewise was obstinately averse. He had doubtless sense enough, with all his superstition, to perceive how utterly unfit such a Nursery of inward Fancies & outward Privations were to a Brain, Heart, & bodily Constitution, like those of innocent, loving, & high-empassioned Theresa. What would come of it but a despairing anguish-stricken Sinner, or a mad Saint?67

In Remorse, names changed: Maria became Teresa; the too transparently pseudonymous Albert became Alvar; Velez became Valdez; and Osorio became Ordonio.68 What, then, of the name Ordonio? The close association in Coleridge’s mind of Teresa with Asra would argue that at work in his imagination was a disturbingly powerful investment in the Grasmere triangle, identifying Ordonio with Wordsworth, whose name and initials both he and Coleridge had toyed with over the years in so many contexts. If, as Kathleen Coburn suggested, Osorio in 1797 was an anagram for Southey so covert as to be private among a few friends yet deniable in public, what of Ordonio?69 Here the change might involve association with the family name, quietly shifted now, for deniability, to Valdez. Ordonio Valdez begins to sound more like a rendering, in freewheeling estecean Spanish, of Words Worth, the surname perhaps built on a fanciful participial formation from Spanish valor, “worth.”70 Informing the Teresa/Asra link are both the discourse of idealizing in the movement or progress from “fancies” to “Will” and “Conscience” and the twinned discourses of suicidal despair and grave-mates, all rife in the notebooks of the post-Malta years. Comparably, fostering an Asra-esque reading of Remorse’s Ordonio as in some sense Wordsworth, are resonances within a skein of words and dramaturgic devices that figure in the play and that occur again and again in the emotional melodrama of the notebooks and letters, language that prominently characterizes Coleridge’s troubled sense of his friend’s conduct toward him and Asra, even words that he heard – or imagined overhearing – the lurid luggage of pride and prudence: “remorse,” “poison,” “villain,” and “phantom,” words and tropes that flow thick and fast in the hectic action of the play’s denouement. How then, do these occupations point the way toward a reading of Ordonio in the fifth act, especially the passions as displayed in his attack on Alvar and in Teresa’s intervention; in his transfixing “vision” of the

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ghost of murdered Isidore (along with his confession of that killing); and, ultimately, in his suicidally resolute refusal of Alvar’s and Teresa’s protection in the face of Alhadra’s vengeance? Does Ordonio experience what Coleridge in one of the 1810 St. Teresa notebook entries calls “the heart-crash of remorse,” issuing ultimately in what may for the playwright’s ears have been the desperately longed for performative declaration, “Atonement”?71 Does Coleridge manage both to get rid of Wordsworth and to redeem him from Macbeth’s “mistranslation” as a tragic hero? Or is the way to put it that by endowing him with a heart-crash of remorse Coleridge manages both to find him guilty and to get rid of him, that is, to carry out the work of (character) assassination? When did Remorse become “Remorse”? Again, the recurrence of the word in notebooks and letters seems to intensify in the years following Malta. Chief witness here are the notes in all likelihood composed in early February 1808 in London, intended but never delivered as introductory remarks to the third of his “Lectures on Principles of Poetry,” notes distinguishing Remorse from Regret. The remarks were meant as an explanatory apology for what Coleridge felt was his disappointing performance in the second lecture when “thro’ a severe and still lingering bodily Indisposition . . . my faculties had been too confused to make a proper and compressive Selection from the mass of Papers containing the substance of this Course of Lectures as parts of an extensive Work . . .” One passage in this laborious effort to desynonymize remorse and regret stands out in this context: In cases . . . not only independent of our own will but out of ourselves, we find no difficulty in distinguishing Regret from Remorse – and in events that what regards our own selves, yet are which is not voluntary, the same distinction, one would think ought rationally to be made. Yet here commences a difference – we do not indeed in the latter more than in the former case, confound the two or lose the distinction; but yet in perhaps a majority of instances, however unconscious of Blame we may feel ourselves, yet a certain something more than Regret will mingle with the regret – a certain something will haunt and sadden the heart, which if not Remorse is however a phantom and Counterfeit of Remorse . . ..72

The urgent burden, then, of Coleridge’s gift to Allen Bank may have been an appeal to Sara to hear in Remorse – and to overhear in its “rehearsal moment” – a prompting to bring the dead to life again, to hear in the voice behind the play and in the inflections of the voices within the play the worthiness implicit in fanciful sensibilities, when drawn upon by an alertness to the possibilities of an independent view of the estrangement that had taken place. As a model held up for such worthiness, Remorse’s Teresa evolves from [chiefly?] consolatory absorption in her “wild” fancies at the outset to a

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figure whose agency in the aftermath of the crucial sorcery scene depends on her readiness not only to hear the perplexingly echoing words of the rehearsal moment – “The rock! the Fir-Grove!” – but to discern in them the basis for pursuing and resolving the enigma they constitute: how the majestic stranger, whose voice and “mien” on the seashore in Act i, Scene 2, had subliminally stirred her memories, could have “dreamed” circumstances that bear on the location of what she now sadly supposes is Alvar’s grave. Bound up with what I imagine as Coleridge’s fanciful hope that the gift of Remorse might have for Asra the rhetorical force of an assassination painting may well have been the exuberance he felt, with the play at Drury Lane in its fourth week of popular performance and the very feel of the book itself in its second edition bolstering both his confidence and, inferentially, hers in him, that he was indeed coming into his own. From the dreadful ravages of his opium addiction and all that made him seem an “Absolute nuisance,” a more socialized “amenable author” and lecturer might emerge, displaying a worthiness that until now had eluded him. And yet – and yet – bound up with that fancy, inevitably it seems, must have been strains of the corrosive anxiety that three years earlier had taken this form: Loving her I intensely desire all that could make the greatest & (be it viceless) the weak, if they be amiable, love me – I am so feeble that I cannot yearn to be perfect, unrewarded by some distinct soul – yet still somewhat too noble to be satisfied or even pleased by the assent of the many – myself will not suffice – & a stranger is nothing/It must be one who is & who is not myself – not myself, & yet so much more my Sense of Being than myself that myself is therefore only not a feeling for reckless Despair, because she is its object/Self in me derives its sense of Being from having this one absolute Object, including all others that but for it would be thoughts, motions, irrelevant fancies – yea, my own Self would be – utterly deprived of all connection with her – only more than a thought, because it would be a Burthen – a haunting of the dæmon, Suicide.73

Counteracting that anxiety would be the giver’s hope that Asra would be an intelligent enough – and loving enough – reader of and listener to Remorse to save him. Put another way, Remorse invited her to emulate St. Teresa’s display of “the Will [that] has preserved its perfect Freedom by a deep and vehement Energy of perfect Obedience to the pure, practical Reason, or Conscience!”74 In this sense, then, Remorse was indeed a “relic” he wore about his neck – and wished to hang about hers. If there is some biographical “truth” in this assertion, it speaks to a moment in the process Coleridge was undergoing in London in the years after 1810, a process whereby his awareness of his relation to the Grasmere world oscillated

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between anguish and grief, between a refusal to abandon hope, and something like aesthetic recollection, a process of uncertain transition from melancholy refusal to leave that world behind him to mourning its loss and recognizing – even with aesthetic pleasure – through recollection its tragic lineaments. iv Preparing his second lecture in a Bristol series on Shakespeare in late 1813, Coleridge turned in a notebook, in a section devoted to “Macbeth and Hamlet contrasted” to describe what he called Macbeth’s “recoilings”: Macbeth mistranslates the recoilings – and ominous whispers of Conscience into prudential and selfish Reasonings, and after the Deed the terrors of Remorse into Fear from external Dangers – like delirious Men, that run away from the Phantoms of their own Brains, or raised by Terror into Rage stab the real object that is within their own Reach.75

No lecture audience heard those musings, but overhearing them now in his notebook suggests that the experience of composing Remorse was still very much alive in Coleridge’s mind: overbalanced here, Macbeth tilts toward Ordonio, whose delirium drives him to murder Isidore and lunge with fatal impulse at Alvar. As for “recoilings” – with its powerful bodily rendering of passion – the word had haunted Coleridge’s imagination when composing and revising his tragedy. Recall, for example, how he directed Teresa to act when, at the rehearsal moment, she (over)hears Ordonio rave on about the “lulling ceaseless dirge” the “Fir-grove” sighs over Alvar’s “rocky grave”: “teresa. (recoiling with the expression appropriate to the passion.) The rock! The fir-grove!” (iii, ii, 129). And in the immediately following cavern scene that opens Act iv, he gave that word to Isidore, who tells Ordonio of his nearly fatal misstep: You see that crevice there? My torch extinguished by these water drops, And marking that the moonlight came from thence, I stept in to it, meaning to sit there; But scarcely had I measured twenty paces – My body bending forward, yea o’erbalanced Almost beyond recoil, on the dim brink Of a huge chasm I stept. (iv, i, 27–34, emphasis added)

In context, neither of these two recoilings amounts to a “mistranslation.” Teresa’s far from it: however “wild” her fancies, she’s never delirious,

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never rages. Isidore comes perilously close to doing himself in, a misstep formulated in words that curiously echo the moments earlier and later when Teresa, bending overbalanced in passionate purpose, comes close to suicidal culmination.76 But moments later in the cavern scene, and shortly before he disarms Isidore and hurls him down that chasm, Ordonio himself comes on with the word, in dialogue with Isidore, when he utters these “prudential and selfish Reasonings”: o r d o n i o . (Stands lost in thought, then after a pause) I know not why it should be! Yet it is – i s i d o r e. What is, my lord? ordonio. Abhorrent from our nature To kill a man. – i s i d o r e. Except in self defence. o r d o n i o . Why that’s my case; and yet the soul recoils from it – (iv, i, 82–85, emphasis added)

If the Bristol lecture note suggests that Coleridge’s Macbeth is a translation of Ordonio – or vice-versa – it also provides a context for his sense of Ordonio’s fate as Act v poses it. After the “Deed” of vengefully murdering the “Traitor” Isidore in Act iv, Ordonio, still mistranslating “the terrors of Remorse into Fear from external Dangers,” enters the dungeon to poison the Moorish sorcerer, who he thinks conspired with Isidore in producing the assassination painting.77 Still disguised but unaware that Ordonio has murdered Isidore, Alvar – with Teresa concealed in the darkness – confronts him and, foiling Ordonio’s attempt to poison him, launches his own campaign to “call up one pang of true remorse!” But Alvar’s words, urging Ordonio to recall his earlier love for his brother and rehearsing a childhood moment when Ordonio had rescued that brother from drowning, only goad Ordonio’s mistranslation to further homicidal wildness. Teresa, overhearing in his dementia that he is tormented by a phantom – the “fantastic shadow” of Alvar – rushes out, calling, “Ordonio! ’tis thy Brother.” Ordonio then (“like delirious Men, that run away from Phantoms of their own Brains, or raised by Terror into Rage stab the real Object that is within their own Reach”), “runs upon Alvar with his sword. Teresa flings herself on Ordonio and arrests his arm” (v, i, 195 sd ).78 In sudden terror as Alvar offers a brotherly embrace, Ordonio “attempts to fall on his sword ” but is prevented, only to lapse – in the face of Alvar’s forgivingness – into a trance of horrific, hallucinatory anagnorisis as the phantom of Isidore “comes upon me!” In the meˆle´e that follows, with the sudden incursion of Alhadra and her band of vengeful Morescoes,

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Ordonio, “fiercely recollecting himself, ” pulls back from the recoilings of mistranslation that took Macbeth to his death at Macduff ’s vengeful hands. He then surrenders, confessing Isidore’s murder, to Alhadra’s fatal sword, wielded by what Alvar recognizes as the “Arm of avenging Heaven!”79 No evidence survives of how, or even if, Sara Hutchinson read Remorse – or, for that matter, how Wordsworth himself read the copy Coleridge sent him shortly afterwards in March. Coleridge’s failure, even in the wake of its Drury Lane success, to respond to Dorothy’s request that he come minister to their bereavement would perhaps have made those copies seem like insensitive substitutes, alter egos, and his annotations – if read – overheard as uncaring, insouciant. Asra’s comment the previous year about his six-week visit to Greta Hall in February and March 1812 eloquently punctuates her silence: He is offended with William, or fancies himself so – and expected Wm to make some advances to him which as he did not he was miserable the whole time he was in Keswick, and Mrs C. was right glad to have him off again, for she had no satisfaction in him – and would have given the world, I dare say, to have had him well again with Wm.80

Holmes’s parti pris assessment of the silence is persuasive in imputing to Coleridge the sense that the exchange of letters in London in early May 1812 failed to convince him that Grasmere could ever be more for him than a scene of bereavement over the death that Asra’s silence spelled for whatever survived of his sense of her as his Conscience. As Crabb Robinson recorded, Coleridge said, “A Reconciliation has taken place – but the Feeling . . . can never return. All outward actions, all inward Wishes, all Thoughts and Admirations, will be the same – are the same – but – aye there remains an immedicable But.” Remorse itself survived, in regular London performances, until May and subsequently in numerous provincial stages in England and America over the next two years. And copies of Remorse found their ways into reviewers’ hands, and even into Byron’s, who soon, as a member of Drury Lane’s Committee, urged Coleridge on to future dramas. And an influential – one might even say inspirational – copy found its way into Percy Shelley’s and Mary’s hands in 1814, accompanying them in 1818 to Italy, where it was reread when, in May and June a year later, he began to compose The Cenci. Perhaps, in the spirit of Remorse, it’s worth raising the possibility that whatever Coleridge heard from Montagu in late October 1810 became for

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him “simply” a creation of his fancy, an aural hallucination, an imaginary performance prompted by his proneness to overhear in Wordsworth’s voice what was actually unspoken, like the dreamt Coleorton bedding of Asra and William in December 1806. Then we might regard Remorse as yet another of the mysteries that abound in Coleridge’s career, especially in the pre-Highgate decades, a celebrated success occasioned by the Drury Lane opportunity, a dark employment, generated in the thicket of private and public energies and distractions, responding to personal relations and public concerns, and arguably – particularly in its exploration of the aesthetics of listening – a worthy drama.

coda The Macbeth lecture note suggests one further Remorse-link between Ordonio and Wordsworth. In Chapter 2 above, “Cradling Macbeth,” I argued for the telling influence, on both Wordsworth’s Borderers and his “Residence in France” section in The Prelude, of Jean-François Ducis’s adaptation of Macbeth. That strangely remarkable Parisian production, which Wordsworth must have known from November 1792, represents a Macbeth haunted by remorse over the murder of Duncan, a Macbeth whose passionate mission in the final acts is to restore the crown to Malcoˆme, defying his wife Fre´degonde’s vehement intention that their own son become the king. Imprudently rushing to save Malcoˆme from the daggers of the assassins Fre´degonde has suborned to ambush him, Macbeth himself is fatally wounded. Perhaps we could say that Wordsworth’s evocation, when composing Book x in 1804, of the voice crying “Sleep no more” through the whole city, links Girondin guilt over anticipated regicide with his own prudent silencing – or mistranslating – of the whispers of remorseful conscience over having in effect abandoned pregnant Annette Vallon in her eighth month, the Trojan-war echoes aligning that abandonment with prudent Aeneas’s recollection of overhearing the phantom voice of his Creu¨sa proclaim a ventriloquized godspeed on his mission to Rome. Coleridge recalled – perhaps in the wake of the 1810 betrayal – in a notebook his May 1808 letters to Wordsworth when he “for the first time suffered murmurs, & more than murmurs, articulate Complaints, to escape from me, relatively to [Wordsworth’s] conduct towards me, and that of [?Mrs C & Mary & D Wordsworth].” He noted that he “did not mention the affair of [. . .] because that is too sore a

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point – and I am sure, will some day or other occasion him a public Pain which will prove the imprudence of this Over-prudence/.”81 It seems worth suggesting that the name (in editorial brackets) so prudently obliterated in the ms notebook by a later hand as to be unheard was that of Wordsworth’s Creu¨sa, Annette, whose pain didn’t go public for over a hundred years.

chapter 7

Reading Shelley’s delicacy

We visited the Colonna and Doria palaces, where the portraits of Beatrice were to be found, and her beauty cast the reflection of its own grace over her appalling story. Shelley’s imagination became strongly excited, and he urged the subject to me as one fitted for a tragedy. More than ever I felt my incompetence; but I entreated him to write it instead; and he began, and proceeded swiftly, urged on by intense sympathy with the sufferings of the human beings whose passions, so long cold in the tomb, he revived and gifted with poetic language. This tragedy is the only one of his works that he communicated to me during its progress. We talked over the arrangement of the scenes together. Mary Shelley, 18391

I am exceedingly interested in the question of whether this attempt of mine will succeed or no – I am strongly inclined to the affirmative at present, founding my hopes on this, that as a composition it is certainly not inferior to any of the modern plays that have been acted, with the exception of Remorse, that the interest of its plot is incredibly greater & more real, & that there is nothing beyond what the multitude are contented to believe they can understand, either in imagery opinion or sentiment. Percy Shelley to Thomas Love Peacock, July 25, 18192

Mary Shelley’s backward glance in 1839 to the moment in the Colonna Palace as the founding impulse for The Cenci elided for posterity, under cover of what might be called an attempt at aesthetic grace, a far more complicated process of personal and political motivation in the spring of 1819. Without disputing her account of that moment of beholding, this chapter seeks to recover a context that, one might say, led to the Colonna Palace and disposed Shelley to find in the momentous portrait (allegedly of Beatricia Cenci and attributed at the time to Guido Reni) a powerful ekphrastic vocation to popular drama. Mary’s narrative suggesting that in that instance of sympathetic Roman beholding the tragedy sprang 180

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Figure 5 The portrait, allegedly of Beatricia Cenci and attributed to Guido Reni, that Shelley saw in Rome in 1819.

composed, Minerva-like, from Shelley’s poetic gift has all the charm of simulated authenticity. Her narrative itself may have been inspired by the elaborate account of the Reni portrait Shelley included in the Preface he composed in late summer 1819 as he was preparing his tragedy for publication, anticipating its hoped-for production at Covent Garden. Reinforced by critical fascination with the resemblance that the Reni portrait (now hanging in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome) bears to Amelia Curran’s portrait of Shelley himself – painted shortly after the Shelleys’ and Claire Clairmont’s visit to the Colonna – The Cenci becomes, for many readers, an ekphrastic drama. As Mary Shelley wrote in 1839, wishing to distance the memory of Shelley from the reality of his radical politics, “Her beauty cast the reflection of its own grace over her appalling story.” Such reflections of grace may have helped foster readings of the tragedy that focus on characters – here chiefly Count Cenci and his daughter Beatrice – as psychologically conceived individuals whose conduct and fate largely transcend social and political contexts, either those of late

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sixteenth-century Rome or those of Shelley’s own Regency era. Those readings have dwelled chiefly on the viciousness of Count Cenci’s monstrous sexual abuse of his daughter and on Beatrice’s tragic mirroring of his guilt in both perpetrating his murder and subsequently, in the final act, callously denying her role in that very deed, at the cost, most poignantly, of tortured Marzio’s life. Shelley’s kinship with Beatrice was not, however, simply a late Gothic flowering but part of a more studied – and more political – undertaking. Rather than reading the resemblance between the Curran portrait and the Reni portrait as evidence simply of a cultivated personal narcissism on Shelley’s part, I see both portraits as informed by Shelley’s larger project, whose plot would not only take on Church and State in the reform politics of Regency England but also entail a satirical indictment of the major Lake poet, Wordsworth, whose role in the Westmoreland election of 1818 had exacerbated Shelley’s already conflicted view of him as both “the most natural and tender of lyric poets” and a political apostate.3

i For reasons that will become apparent, Shelley’s “delicacy” is my subject. It’s a word much on his mind in 1819. Writing from Italy in late July to Thomas Love Peacock – newly employed at India House, bastion of imperial respectability – to enlist his help in the quest to have The Cenci staged at Covent Garden, Shelley sent along with his letter a translation of the Italian Mss. on which my play is founded; the chief circumstance of which I have touched very delicately; for my principal doubt as to whether it would succeed as an acting play hangs entirely on the question as to whether such a thing as incest in this shape however treated wd. be admitted on the stage – I think however it will form no objection, considering first that the facts are matter of history, & secondly the peculiar delicacy with which I have treated it – 4

For Shelley in 1819, the context of incest was both personal and political. Responding in December 1817 to his publisher Ollier’s sudden demands, he had pared away the idealized brother–sister incest of Laon and Cythna, thereby compromising that poem’s politics when it appeared as The Revolt of Islam. Three months later, he and Mary, with Claire Clairmont, children, and servants, had left England for Italy, largely to escape ill health and the continuing legacy of gossip-borne scandal surrounding the circumstances of their relationships: the suicide of Fanny Imlay followed

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by that of Harriet Shelley, with the anguish and liability of the ensuing custody struggle in Chancery for Charles and Ianthe (Harriet’s and Percy’s children) raking up the infamy of Queen Mab; Shelley’s alleged me´nage a` trois with Mary and Claire; his ongoing alienation from Mary’s debt-ridden and hostile father William Godwin; and his painfully acute sense of literary rejection and political isolation. In June 1818, the Tory Quarterly Review’s anonymous lead article savaged Leigh Hunt’s collection of poems, Foliage, and denounced (though without naming him) Shelley’s “disgraceful and flagitious history,” alluding to his atheism and licentious sexual relations.5 In the context of Leigh Hunt’s public advice (in the three Examiner issues devoted to The Revolt of Islam) on the eve of his departure for Italy, to write with an eye toward more “popular” effect, Shelley’s concerted venture into stageable drama the following year reflects also a certain vehemence on his part linked to his circumstances as an exile in Italy, taking aim at his imagined enemies in the conservative British press and their literary collaborators.6 Recognizing that publication of The Revolt of Islam, like the earlier Alastor volume, was earning him no significant readership or broad critical approval, and without much basis for thinking that Prometheus Unbound would fare better with a public, he turned to write – anonymously – for the stage at Covent Garden as a forum both for the energetic pursuit of his agenda for political reform and for linked – and delicately wrought – personal redress. The first part of that agenda (previously developed most extensively and idealistically in the allegorical Revolt of Islam) was soon to be most clearly articulated in his prose treatise of late 1819, A Philosophical View of Reform.7 The Cenci, intended for Covent Garden, set him against the prevailing institutions of Church and State in England in 1819 and what he had seen, since at least the publication of The Excursion, as the moral and political apostasy of the poets of the preceding generation, those who had since become known in both the conservative and radical press as the “Lake” or “Mountain” poets, especially Wordsworth and Southey. At the same time, he seems also to have recognized that essential to successful dramatic art was an aesthetics of uncertainty, an aesthetics that called especially for “delicacy” of execution. The chief dramatic delicacy of The Cenci involves what happens to Beatrice offstage in between Acts i and iii, a delicacy that extends to the performance of her extraordinarily bold denial of guilt for the murder of her father, especially in confronting the assassin, Marzio, in the trial scene of the final act. In rushing, as it were, onstage with the cry of “rape,” critical readings of The Cenci have,

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I think, largely failed to appreciate the peculiar nature of Count Cenci’s violation of his daughter. A related uncertainty in The Cenci and a major issue in Shelley’s adaptation of the Relation’s narrative is how much in the course of her ordeal Beatrice comes to resemble her father; how much, that is, she is corrupted into the moral and spiritual viciousness and cynicism that define him from the outset. Here what I would call the motif of instrumentality plays a central role in generating that uncertainty. Prompted in part by Orsino, whose own lust for Beatrice leads him at the outset cynically to prevent her appeal for protection from reaching the Pope, she resolves that her father must die. In this resolve she sees herself as the instrument of divine atonement; and in that role her appeals to her Almighty God’s power resemble her father’s grotesque claims, in the first act, that his prayers for his sons’ deaths have been answered by God’s miraculous providence. In carrying out what she sees as her divine mission, she allows herself to be further guided by Orsino to “devise his death” by retaining the services of Marzio and Olympio as instruments or devices – in effect her daggers.8 When they momentarily falter in the assassination – when, as Marzio puts it, the sleeping Count cries out in a voice like “the ghost / Of my dead father speaking through his lips” – she moves literally to take up her daggers’ dagger, becoming herself more immediately the instrument of God’s vengeance, addressing that dagger: “Hadst thou a tongue to say, / ‘She murdered her own father,’ I must do it!” (In Shelley’s suggestive – if Gothic – dramaturgy, she raises the dagger just as her father at the end of Act i had raised the bowl of wine and at the end of Act iv raises his hand to deliver his fatal curse against her.) Her words at this point reinforce the sense of the interchangeability of humans and instruments. They also anticipate the accusation wrung by the rack from the wretched Marzio at the beginning of the trial scene (v, ii, 14–18). And when the assassination is “done,” her reward to Marzio culminates in a performative proclamation: “Thou wert a weapon in the hand of God / To a just use” (iv, iv, 54–55), a remark Beatrice repeats in the next scene when, questioned about Marzio by the papal legate Savella, she responds: That poor wretch Who stands so pale, and trembling, and amazed, If it be true he murdered Cenci, was A sword in the right hand of justest God. (iv, iv, 124–27)

In the trial scene of Act v, Beatrice’s extraordinarily bald denial, when confronted with the tortured Marzio (“We never saw him”), and her subsequent inducing him with the power of her eye and words to deny her

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guilt in assassinating her father – which many readings see as part of her atrocious descent to her father’s depravity – should also be read in the context of instrumentality, as I shall argue below. But there is still another dimension of instrumentality that complicates and enriches the power of Shelley’s drama: virtually from the outset, it’s possible to read the ultimate purpose of the Count’s calculated assault on Beatrice – an assault usually read as incestuous rape – as in the service of his even more hideous depravity, entailing a design even more vicious than such sexual violation itself: that of turning her into a parricidal instrument. In what he imagines to be the most monstrous violation of her innocence, she becomes in effect his suicidal dagger.9 At issue in many of the most substantial and extensive readings of The Cenci – for example, those by Earl Wasserman, Stuart Curran, and Jerrold Hogle – is whether the story of Beatrice’s tragic role, famously called in Shelley’s Preface as enacting the “pernicious mistakes” of “revenge, retaliation, and atonement,” is best understood as stemming either from her being caught in what Curran calls “inescapable cultural orientations – the total domination of Catholic thinking over her decisions” – or, conversely, from her consciously participating in the Girardian psychodynamics of what Hogle calls the process of “theatrical mirroring.”10 Put another way, the issues they debate are whether in the role she plays in her father’s murder Beatrice is to be judged as blamelessly imprisoned in a corrupt religious ideology or, rather, as morally responsible for a willful decision to descend to ruthless retaliatory vengeance. That debate is hardly resolved by Shelley’s contention in the Preface that if the historical Beatrice had seen that “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,” she would have been “wiser and better,” though such a person “would never have been a tragic character.”11 To this debate I would add the view Shelley’s Preface also offers, at the conclusion of his account of the portrait he encountered in the Colonna Palace: Beatrice Cenci appears to have been one of those rare persons in whom energy and gentleness dwell together without destroying one another: her nature was simple and profound. The crimes and miseries in which she was an actor and a sufferer are as the mask and the mantle in which circumstances clothed her for her impersonation on the scene of the world.12

It would probably be wrong to hear Shelley’s prefatory voice, in that first sentence, as slipping into Cardinal Camillo’s in the fifth act, when he

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intervenes in the judicial proceedings in order to appeal directly to the “Holy Father” on “behalf / Of these most innocent and noble persons” (v, ii, 186–87). And the terms of the debate are only muddied by the second sentence, which asks the reader – and perhaps the Lord Chamberlain – to think of the historic person behind the painted figure in the Colonna portrait in terms of a simile that itself evokes a Shelleyan – rather than a Diderotian – paradox of the comedian, where the syntax hardly bears the interpretation that the actor chooses her “mask and mantle.” To sort through Shelley’s metaphor, the sense of “circumstances” would seem to lie, in terms of moral responsibility, somewhere ambiguously between those of the custodian of the wardrobe and the Director. These two sentences gesture toward a Defense of Beatrice not unlike Shelley’s Defence of Poetry. I’ll return to the burden of Shelley’s ekphrasis later.

ii Shelley’s delicacy, moreover, involving the playwright’s close identification with Beatrice as a tragic heroine, also entails enlisting her ideals and her tragedy in the service of reform politics of Shelley’s England in 1819, campaigning against the powerful propertied interests of Parliament, with a particular animus against their landed literary advocates in the Lake District.13 That animus involved – in a vengeful minor key – a brilliantly delicate and covertly retaliatory indictment of the most publicly prominent Lake poet, Wordsworth, whose “Thanksgiving Ode,” celebrating the first anniversary of the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, had doubtless deepened Shelley’s sense of betrayal, a sense earlier expressed in Mary Shelley’s journal, in response to The Excursion (“He is a slave”), as well as in Alastor and the sonnet “To Wordsworth,” both published in 1816, and subsequently in Shelley’s December 1817 review of Godwin’s novel Mandeville: Godwin has been to the present age in moral philosophy what Wordsworth is in poetry. The personal interest of the latter would probably have suffered from his pursuit of the true principles of taste in poetry, as much as all that is temporary in the fame of Godwin has suffered from his daring to announce the true foundation of morals, if servility, and dependence, and superstition, had not been too easily reconcilable with Wordsworth’s species of dissent from the opinions of the great and the prevailing.14

In the opening scene of The Cenci, Shelley weaves, delicately – and with unmistakable innuendo – into Count Cenci’s initial bullying avowal of

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his diabolical ways to Cardinal Camillo, elements of Wordsworth’s “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” the poem that, with “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” arguably more than any other, voiced the sway Wordsworth’s earlier meditative rhetoric still claimed over the imaginations of Shelley’s poetic generation: All men delight in sensual luxury, All men enjoy revenge; and most exult Over the tortures they can never feel – Flattering their secret peace with others’ pain. But I delight in nothing else. I love The sight of agony, and the sense of joy, When this shall be another’s, and that mine. And I have no remorse and little fear, Which are, I think, the checks of other men. This mood has grown upon me, until now Any design my captious fancy makes The picture of its wish, and it forms none But such as men like you would start to know, Is as my natural food and rest debarred Until it be accomplished . . . No. – I am what your theologians call Hardened; – which they must be in impudence So to revile a man’s peculiar taste. True, I was happier than I am, while yet Manhood remained to act the thing I thought; While lust was sweeter than revenge; and now Invention palls: – Aye, we must all grow old – And but that there remains a deed to act Whose horror might make sharp an appetite Duller than mine – I’d do, – I know not what. (i, i, 77–101, passim; emphases added)15

As a juxtaposition of “Tintern Abbey” and Cenci passages indicates, Shelley’s satiric allusiveness here turns on subtle effects of cadence and diction, a far more delicate artistry than informs his earlier, balder appropriations of Wordsworthian language in “Alastor,” where such unmistakably hallmark phrases as “natural piety” and “obstinate questionings” punctuate the narrator’s fervent invocation, explicitly announcing a programmatic – and satiric – disputation with the argument of Wordsworth’s Ode.16 The art is more delicate even than in “Mont Blanc” and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” where the engagement with Wordsworthian discourse and argument is more sustained and more immediately apparent than in Count Cenci’s speech. For the most part in the

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Count’s language the gestures are more dispersed, less readily definitive, more ghostly, what one might think of as scarcely palpable, more murmured music than blatantly borrowed or mimicked phrasing.17 What do we make of these hushed, delicate resonances? For one thing, Cenci’s words, thus invoking Wordsworth’s, summon a discourse that bears as much on the dynamics of such artful composition as on the dramatic plot they more ostensibly further. When we hear, that is, in Cenci’s discourse many recognitions dim and faint of Wordsworth’s poetic art, the world of “Tintern Abbey” revives again. And with that revival comes the recollection that Wordsworth’s “Lines . . .,” from the outset so convincing as the transcription of a solitary – perhaps even interior – meditative utterance, end up being what we have come to call a dramatic monologue. With something like a small shock of recognition, we recall the surprising effect of the last phase of that poem, when the poet’s voice unexpectedly turns to address an Other who, apparently from the beginning, has been the poet’s silent auditor: For thou art with me, here, upon the banks Of this fair river; thou, my dearest Friend, My dear, dear Friend, and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while May I behold in thee what I was once, My dear, dear Sister! (116–22, emphasis added)

Wildness – indeed its power to bring back what he was – comes to seem the very essence of this cherished sister’s being for the poet, as he adverts further to her “wild ecstasies” and, yet again, to her “wild eyes.” The opening scenes of both Acts ii and iii of The Cenci find Lucretia responding in distraught – though largely ineffective – consternation over the extremity of Beatrice’s agitation, a wildness Shelley’s stage directions repeatedly underscore (“wildly, staggering towards the door”); (“She enters staggering, and speaks wildly”) (“More wildly”). Neither Lucretia (“My dearest child, what has your father done?”) or Bernardo (“Oh, sister, sister, prithee, speak to us!”) in Act ii can fathom, much less name, what Cenci has “done / Of holier outrage or worse injury.” Lucretia can only lament the extremity of Beatrice’s manner: “Thou are unlike thyself; thine eyes shoot forth / A wandering and strange spirit”).18 In “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth’s address culminates in a blessing that entails imagining for his sister a time “in after years, / When these wild ecstasies shall be

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matured / Into a sober pleasure,” a time when “solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief ” might be healed by remembering him and his exhortations. But the blessing ends with his own funeral: “when I should be where I no more can hear thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes those gleams / Of past existence.” What happens when Shelley transposes the Tintern discourse of “warmer love” and “far deeper zeal / Of holier love” to the Roman world of Cencian cursing? As with all such startling intertextual practices, Beatrice’s distraught wildness in the wake of her father’s curse reverberates backward, the language of The Cenci bidding fair to discover a vein of darker incestuous domination latent in the strongly gendered affect of Wordsworth’s poem. Just as Cenci and Beatrice seem to mirror each other, the fair sister in “Tintern Abbey,” under Shelley’s mimetic assault, is cast in that poet’s narcissistic self-image. To adapt Mary Shelley’s response to The Excursion, “Cenci and Wordsworth are slaves.” The extraordinary subtlety – and, I would argue, the indisputable deliberateness – of Shelley’s violation of Wordsworth’s meditative discourse should figure in any reading of his investment overall in The Cenci as a venture in popular drama. Fermenting in his mind since at least 1814 – and in all likelihood stemming first from his vexed meetings with Southey at Keswick in 1811–12 – was a sense of deep ambivalence toward Wordsworth, whose lyric gifts Shelley held in profound awe and, in the wake of The Excursion and the 1815 Collected Edition of Poems, whose emerging command of a considerable and sophisticated (though far from unanimously admiring) readership Shelley could not have helped brooding over, all the more by 1819 when his own hopes for a substantial popular audience had been so thoroughly disappointed. Add to this the sense of loss brought on by Shelley’s troubled, isolating exile in Italy, intensified by the hostility of the 1818 Quarterly attack and by Byron’s comments about Southey’s role in spreading the “League of Incest” rumors, a sense deeply compounded that autumn in Venice and late next spring in Rome by the harrowing deaths of his and Mary’s two children, the infant Clara and three-year-old William – whose name must have haunted Shelley that summer, given the ongoing vexation of his relation not only to his father-in-law but to that other father-figure named William – and the disposition for a shadowy satiric turn against Wordsworth seems unsurprising, if not inevitable. Shelley’s assault didn’t in fact end with the “Tintern” gestures. Among the political sonnets “Dedicated to Liberty” he knew well from Wordsworth’s 1807 Poems was “I grieved for Bonaparte,” lamenting what

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Richard Cronin has called “the moral deformity of those who have been educated only ‘in battles’”:19 ’Tis not in battles that from youth we train The Governor who must be wise and good, And temper with the sternness of the brain Thoughts motherly, and meek as womanhood. Wisdom doth live with children round her knees . . .

The devastation for the Shelleys of Clara’s death in Venice, followed so swiftly by that of William in Rome, must have made that last line unbearable. In that context, Cardinal Camillo’s dark upbraiding of the Count in the opening scene would have had a special resonance for the playwright: Oh, Count Cenci! . . . How hideously look deeds of lust and blood Through those snow white and venerable hairs! – Your children should be sitting round you now, But that you fear to read upon their looks The shame and misery you have written there. (i, i, 34–42, passim)

The image returns, again and again: b e a t r i c e . Bow thy white head before offended God, And we will kneel around, and fervently Pray that he pity both ourselves and thee. (i, iii, 157–59) l u c r e t i a . Nay, Beatrice; have courage, my sweet girl . . . For you may, like your sister, find some husband, And smile, years hence, with children round your knees . . . (ii, i, 80, 84–85)

g i a c o m o . It is my wife complaining in her sleep: I doubt not she is saying bitter things Of me; and all my children round her dreaming (iii, ii, 80–83) That I deny them sustenance.

What role, one might ask, does such a dark turn play in Shelley’s sense of the “sad reality” he set out to dramatize? How construe the assault on Wordsworth, especially given the unequivocal assertion in the Preface to The Cenci that “revenge, retaliation, and atonement are pernicious mistakes”? Is it appropriate to find that assault in any way morally comparable to what the Preface calls Beatrice’s retaliatory “revenge” against her father? Knowing what we think we know about Shelley’s idealization of the poet’s calling, how far short does he fall, say, from the vocation he defined in The Defence of Poetry?

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The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is Poetry. At such periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. The persons in whom this power resides, may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, the Power which is seated upon the throne of their own soul.20

And what of the pleasure the reader finds, identifying with an imagined Shelley, in the finesse of such vengeance? He abandoned delicacy a few weeks later, after reading in Florence the scathing assault on his sexual morals and atheism in the June 1819 Quarterly review of Laon and Cythna and The Revolt of Islam, which also pilloried him for presuming to imitate Wordsworth’s philosophy. Composing his frothy satire “Peter Bell the Third” on the heels of seeing that review in October, Shelley again invited his imagined readers to revisit the Tintern scene. Turning in Part Sixth to take openly mischievous measure of Wordsworth’s poetic practice by way of fancifully inventing reviewers’ intemperate sallies, he indulged himself in a boisterous stanza – eventually cancelled – voicing a fourth critic’s rage at Peter’s “next new book”: Another – ‘Impious Libertine! ‘That commits i___t with his sister ‘In ruined Abbies – mighty fine ‘To write odes on it!’ – I opine Peter had never even kissed her.

The retaliatory impulse in such language stands over against other passages in “Peter Bell the Third” – most notably in Parts Fourth and Fifth, before his “Damnation” in Part Sixth – where Shelley’s acute appreciation of Wordsworth’s peculiar power peers through the invective of the satire. And it takes on a rabid vehemence when Shelley shifts to a more aggressively and blatantly political attack, in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre, where the target is Wordsworth’s “Thanksgiving Ode”: Then Peter wrote odes to the Devil; – In one of which he meekly said: – “May Carnage and Slaughter, Thy niece and thy daughter, May Rapine and Famine, Thy Gorge ever cramming, Glut thee with living and dead!21

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Rapine and Slaughter, for all their rhetorical excess, are not so far from the world of Count Cenci and papal execution. Shelley’s hostility to the scandalous apostasy of Wordsworth’s post-Waterloo reactionary politics also figures in another “popular” poem in the wake of The Cenci, “The Mask of Anarchy,” composed in mid-September on hearing of the Peterloo massacre. There the political is front and center, but the sexual is not entirely absent: the vulnerable figure of the “maniac maid,” whose name was “Hope” but who “looked more like Despair,” sounds like Martha Ray as “She cried out in the air”: “My father Time is weak and grey While waiting for a better day; See how idiot-like he stands, Fumbling with his palsied hands! “He has had child after child And the dust of death is piled Over every one but me – Misery, oh, Misery!” Then she lay down in the street Right before the horses’ feet Expecting, with a patient eye, Murder, Fraud, and Anarchy.22

I’ll come back toward the end of this chapter to this supine figure and the vaporous Shape that intervenes. One further moment to consider here suggests the satiric richness of Shelley’s imaginative fascination with the possibilities of such popular political poetry for educated middle-class readers. With “Anarchy” dead and the “Horse of Death” having fled, its hoofs grinding “[t]o dust, the murderers thronged behind,” then A rushing light of clouds and splendour, A sense awakening and yet tender Was heard and felt – and at its close These words of joy and fear arose As if their own indignant Earth Which gave the sons of England birth Had felt their blood upon her brow, And shuddering with a mother’s throe Had turned every drop of blood By which her face had been bedewed To an accent unwithstood, – As if her heart had cried aloud:

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“Men of England, heirs of Glory, Heroes of unwritten story, Nurslings of one mighty Mother, Hopes of her, and one another; “Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number Shake your chains to Earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you – Ye are many – they are few. “What is Freedom? – ye can tell That which slavery is, too well – For its very name has grown To an echo of your own.23

Audible here, unmistakably in the mist of words, is his tribute (and dark rejoinder) to one of the most powerfully patriotic political sonnets by a younger – but in Shelley’s severe view, now apostaic – Wordsworth: It is not to be thought of that the Flood Of British freedom, which to the open Sea Of the world’s praise from dark antiquity Hath flowed, “with pomp of waters, unwithstood,” Road by which all might come and go that would, And bear out freights of worth to foreign lands; That this most famous Stream in Bogs and Sands Should perish; and to evil and to good Be lost for ever. In our Halls is hung Armoury of the invincible Knights of old: We must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold Which Milton held. In every thing we are sprung Of Earth’s first blood, have titles manifold.24

Wordsworth published this sonnet as a man of Britain in The Morning Post in 1803, after the lapse of the short-lived Peace of Amiens, to rally the nation to resist the renewed threat of Napoleonic empire. (The phrase in quotes – as Wordsworth acknowledged in an appended note – echoed Samuel Daniel’s 1595 Civil Wars: “And stately Thames, inricht with many a flood / Glides on with pompe of waters unwithstood.” When Shelley raided his sonnet in 1819, his Wordsworth had, as it were, freehold, if not title manifold, on “unwithstood.”)25 The “Mask of Anarchy” stanzas – which he hoped Leigh Hunt would publish [anonymously?] in The Examiner – were offered as a popular protest against the tyranny within, as though the older

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conservative poet’s earlier language about “British freedom” had come, like “freights of [words] worth” and even his name, to have what he and Mary had agreed, after reading The Excursion, a different ring: What is Freedom? – ye can tell That which slavery is, too well – For its very name has grown To an echo of your own.

iii Linked with the virtually universal critical focus on the certainty of carnal rape as the outrage Cenci has performed offstage between the acts is attention to patriarchal tyranny as the context and structure of Beatrice’s ordeal. “Reader, I murdered him,” her unspoken confession, resounds through her courtroom denial, and what Shelley’s Preface calls, in a phrase that has itself dominated discussion of her role in the death of Cenci, “restless and anatomizing casuistry” has focused exclusively on her wrongs at the hands of, and her crime of vengeance against, her father. But Shelley’s delicate vendetta against fathers, comprehending the institutions of family, church, and state and reaching beyond to include the institution of God the father, while certainly the most palpable, is nonetheless not the whole story of problematic relations in The Cenci. The risk of decoding or anatomizing the work as a mask figuring Shelley’s and his culture’s unacknowledged desires vis-a`-vis the father is further occlusion of The Cenci as a revolutionary tragedy. Nor is the sole business of the satire against the influence of Wordsworthian poetic discourse (its confining idiom and cadences) simply an ad hominem attack by a rebellious (or covertly desiring) son on the reigning patriarch of what would come to be known as British Romanticism. Much of the play’s satiric energy also comprehends a plot that has so far gone unrecognized, Beatrice’s need and will to resist the gentler but no less confining sway of “what remains behind” once Cenci is done in: that of the bondage of nature associated with the figure of the mother, a bondage enshrined in Beatrice’s dutiful allegiance to Lucretia, itself inseparable from her relation to what, in “Alastor,” Shelley’s earliest and baldest salvo against the Wordsworthian idiom, the narrator invokes as the “brotherhood.” So intent have readers been on the manifest generic differences that distinguish The Cenci as written for the stage from such poems as “Alastor,” “Adonais,” and “The Sensitive Plant,” that its deep continuities with the speculative skepticism

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of those works have been largely overlooked. When Shelley wrote for the stage and imagined its dramaturgical circumstances and demands, he did not turn away from what have been called the beautiful idealisms of his major non-popular writings. Lucretia’s sway sounds again and again in her discourse of possessive endearment, the hallmark of her impassioned but ineffectual wish to protect her (step)daughter from the transgressions of the father. Lucretia’s “my dearest child,” “my sweet child,” and “my dear, dear children,” signal an idiom that also frequently involves a discourse of pity. She performs indeed what Beatrice calls a “piteous office,” the second term in that phrase suggesting the affinity of her ministrations on her daughter’s behalf with those of the church, most notably Cardinal Camillo’s. And just as Camillo’s early interventions serve the “interest” of the church in ways that perpetuate Cenci’s fiendish behavior, Lucretia’s timid attempts to mollify Cenci in his outrages against Beatrice ring with a collaborator’s idiom (“Oh, husband! Pray forgive poor Beatrice, / She meant not any ill” [ii, i, 129–30]). Beatrice struggles with Lucretia’s allegiance to the ideology of mothering, with what Shelley’s narrator in “Alastor” resists, the Wordsworthian dictum of “natural piety.” The possessive endearments Lucretia so pityingly pours upon her and upon her brothers resonate, for example, again with “Tintern Abbey”’s moments of upbeat, asseverative, hyperbolic cheerfulness that other readers than Shelley have found ripe for ironic imitation: “Oh! yet a little while / May I behold in thee what I was once, / My dear, dear Sister! And this prayer I make, / Knowing that Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her” (“Tintern Abbey,” 120–24). The lulling sweetness of such reassurance is itself transgressive, and its mirroring discourse in Beatrice’s and Bernardo’s piety toward Lucretia voices the price of that bondage. Before she can free herself of her father she has also to place herself beyond that (s)mothering, compromising piety, to take on an impiety toward the (step)mother that, from the perspective of maternal nature, resembles deviance. Beatrice as parricidal imp is aided and abetted by her foster mother’s counsel and devising, but her boldness and defiance as conspirator in Cenci’s death entail a trajectory that implies what at the end figures not only as a repudiation, a resistance to and shedding of his sway, but also, however tentatively, as a transcending of her bonds of conventional duty to the maternal and fraternal. The most prominent – and paradoxical – manifestation of this matrix of issues is the recurrent figure of Lucretia as stepmother, “not” as she says “your true mother” but the foster nurse who, replacing the dead mother, became “more than mother” – apparently reversing the traditional

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witch-figure of myth and folklore. From the outset that inversion depends on the paradox that the bounty of maternal love Lucretia bestows on Beatrice and Bernardo serves as both shield and prison. In her wild disorder at the outset of Act iii, unhinged by Cenci’s unnamable offstage terrorizing, Beatrice answers Lucretia’s questioning (“My dearest child, what has your father done?”) in the idiom of bedlam: “Who art thou, questioner? I have no father. [Aside] She is the madhouse nurse who tends on me. It is a piteous office” (iii, i, 39–41). “Yet weep not,” Lucretia says earlier, stoically, when Bernardo wallows in pity over Cenci’s brutalities against her, “though I love you as my own, / I am not your true mother,” to which, ever the effusive child, he exclaims, “O more, more, / Than ever mother was to any child, / That have you been to me!” (ii, i, 6–9). The equivocation about Lucretia as both less and more than the mother, enforced again and again in the play, resonates each time Beatrice calls her “Mother.” It mirrors the other equivocation that permeates the text and is the focus of what seems, at best, to many readers Beatrice’s deplorable casuistry in defending herself against the accusation of the papal court. If Lucretia, not the mother, is nonetheless more than the mother, Cenci’s monstrosity calls into question his fatherliness. If the figure for the non-father that usurps Cenci’s fatherliness is the fiend that is in him, then Beatrice’s act of parricide is an act not against the father but against the fiend. The awe-struck duty to the “Mother” that informs Beatrice’s own pity for Lucretia goes hand-in-hand, then, with her horror-struck readiness to ascribe her father’s malevolence to the devil. Put another way, Beatrice’s readiness to call Lucretia “Mother” is linked to her penchant for referring to Cenci as “the man they call my father: a dread name.” That these two equivocations are not only crucial to the design of the plot in The Cenci but stem from one imposition in her mind is implicit in a strange, nearly imponderable moment in the opening of Act iii when Beatrice, after that moment of hysterical anagnorisis, recognizes Lucretia as her “madhouse nurse” and, narrating the horrors of her sick dreams about her father’s atrocities against her, arrives at the unutterable: “But never fancy imaged such a deed / As . . .” She then “Pauses, suddenly recollecting herself ” and in apparent lucidity addresses Lucretia: Who art thou? Swear to me, ere I die With fearful expectation, that indeed Thou art not what thou seemest . . . Mother! (iii, i, 56–58)

What do these words signify? What fearful expectation so terrifies her? Is “Mother!” here simply vocative, or is it also in apposition to “what thou

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seemest”? In dread that she is indeed “that wretched Beatrice” her father has so unspeakably mistreated, that “this woful story” is not all the horrible dream of a mad person, what does it mean if Beatrice asks Lucretia to swear that she is not the “Mother!” she seems? Does the dread come from some (deranged?) sense that Lucretia is the ghost of her dead mother – like Coleridge’s Teresa in Remorse iii, ii, confronting a surprised Ordonio – possibly a phantom on some errand of vengeance? After all, we know what Lucretia knows, that she is not what she seems, not the mother but the stepmother, and that her way of stepmothering is to seem to her (step)children “more than mother.” Lucretia’s response is, tellingly, to utter the protestingly smothering formula, “Oh! / My sweet child.” But in her next words (“know you . . .”), before Beatrice interrupts her, is she about to aver the truth – as she did earlier to Bernardo – that she is not the real mother but the stepmother? If Lucretia can by swearing persuade Beatrice that she is not her mother – if she can persuade her, that is, against the evidence of all her senses and her memory, against the apparent evidence of her entire being, then Beatrice can also persuade herself that “that other too” – the reality of her father’s malevolent being – is not the case, that she is (in her later word) “fatherless.” The paradoxes here seem endless: what would give Lucretia’s putative oath the force of truth would be the authority as mother that Beatrice’s very being invests her with, but the oath itself would repudiate that authority. Yet the basis of Lucretia’s authority as mother is her very unequivocating insistence that she is not the mother but the stepmother. In other words, it is the identity of the vocative and the appositive in Beatrice’s words that her plea to Lucretia would have her deny. Lucretia’s shadowy relation to the dead mother first surfaces in the opening scene of Act ii, in the context of Beatrice’s impassioned avowal of dutiful attachment to her, a duty which binds her to reject the idea of marriage and remain with her in Cenci’s domain: “Talk not to me, dear lady, of a husband. / Did you not nurse me when my mother died?” The death of the mother, which in the context of Cenci’s atrocities an audience will inevitably attribute to his tyranny, links up in Beatrice’s mind with Lucretia’s benign, protective nursing, so that she invokes the mother’s spirit when vowing her loyalty to her stepmother: May the ghost Of my dead Mother plead against my soul If I abandon her who filled the place She left, with more, even, than a mother’s love!

(ii, i, 94–97)

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Shelley’s language keeps generating such conundra. What on earth could be “more, even, than a mother’s love”? Barbara Gelpi, exploring the cultural ideology of maternity in the years of Shelley’s own upbringing, contends persuasively that a (wet-)nurse’s alien sustenance and bounty could never live up to the birth-mother’s. She argues that the young Shelley would have imbibed his culture’s fear that the wetnurse’s milk could be corrupting, that through it the nurse’s alien soul might enter the infant. Could it be that in the outre´ paradoxicality of such expressions lurk the ghostly elements of a plot involving Lucretia as the usurper, the dark, “angelic” counterpart to the fiend who, from the opening of the play, lurks within Cenci? In the bland fervor of Beatrice’s and Bernardo’s protestations of loyalty to Lucretia and her own fervently possessive responses, is there not something that turns the apparent sense upside down? ([Bernardo:] “oh, never think that I will leave you, Mother!” /[Lucretia:] My dear, dear children!”)26 In vowing such peculiarly insistent fealty to the motherly stepmother, do Beatrice and Bernardo bind themselves to the fate of the wrongs the text ostensibly attributes so exclusively to their fiendish father? Shortly after Beatrice and Bernardo voice their everlasting fidelity to Lucretia, Cenci bursts upon them with vehement onslaught against their disobedient insolence. His denunciation of Bernardo resounds with the now-familiar equivocations about his mother: “Thou too, loathed image of thy cursed mother, / Thy milky, meek face makes me sick with hate!” (ii, i, 121–22; my emphasis). His “loathed image” anticipates his later curse against Beatrice, first when he dooms her to “become (for what she most abhors / Shall have a fascination to entrap her loathing will) / All she appears to others” (i.e., a parricide); and second, moments later, when he explicitly curses her: “that if she ever have a child,” May it be A hideous likeness of herself, that as From a distorting mirror, she may see Her image mixed with what she most abhors, Smiling upon her from her nursing breast.” (iv, i, 85–87; 145–49)

He curses her with an offspring that will “hunt her through the clamorous scoffs / Of the loud world to a dishonoured grave.” By the paradoxical logic of Cenci’s own design to produce in Beatrice a parricide (and thereby afford him the “horrid joy” (iv, i, 167) of his own monstrous suicide), he curses her with a murderous child who will himself pursue her to what her pain and care produce as a dishonored

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(i.e., suicide’s) grave. If the mother here is the (dead) birth-mother, his “cursed” and his paranoid rant in Act ii accusing Lucretia of inculcating parricide in his offspring both suggest, darkly, that she may have suffered the same fate as the sons, Rocco and Christofano. But even more telling is the paradox that Bernardo seems in Cenci’s diseased imagination to resemble the birth-mother by virtue of the traces in his face of the supplanting (wet-)nurse’s supplemental nourishment. Again, Lucretia and the “true” mother are cast in some shadowy, imponderable liaison. One further passage, again in the opening scene of Act iii, raises the shade of the dead mother in the context of Beatrice’s inability to name to Lucretia the outrage Cenci has committed against, or upon, her. Lamenting that her “thought / Is like a ghost shrouded and folded up / In its own formless horror,” she asks Of all words, That minister to mortal intercourse, Which wouldst thou hear? For there is none to tell My misery: if another ever knew Aught like to it, she died as I will die, And left it, as I must, without a name. (iii, i, 109–116)

In this shadowy history or subplot licensed by Beatrice’s words, is it too much to suppose that what killed Beatrice’s mother was the smile of her nursing infant, replica as it must have been of the father’s fatal look? Is what she calls the “ghost shrouded and folded up / In its own formless horror” the ghost of the dead mother haunting and occluding her struggling mind, summoning her to a vengeance she cannot recognize or name? In the shadowy myths that offer themselves through the ceaselessly tropaic effects of Shelley’s language, is Beatrice always already a matricide, her fatal smile a terror of the earth, killing the mother in childbirth and opening the way for the nurturing bondage of Lucretia’s supplanting sway? One construction of these lines would identify Beatrice and her dead mother as silenced victims of Cenci’s unspeakable outrage.27 Toward the end of the final act, a remarkable moment between Beatrice and Lucretia in the prison cell sets the stage for Beatrice’s final passage beyond the weakening sway of her stepmother’s wet-nurse pity. Bernardo has awakened Beatrice with the heart-breaking news that the papal court’s torture has wrung confessions from Lucretia and Giacomo. Protesting there was nothing to confess, Beatrice laments that “white

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innocence” should “wear the mask of guilt,” whereupon, the judge entering with Lucretia and Giacomo, she first exhorts her stepmother and brother not to condemn both themselves and the eternal honor of their house to “infamy, blood, terror, and despair,” then pleads for passive resistance: O thou, Who wert a mother to the parentless, Kill not thy child! Let not her wrongs kill thee! Brother, lie down with me upon the rack, And let us each be silent as a corpse; It soon will be as soft as any grave. ’Tis but the falsehood it can wring from fear Makes the rack cruel. (v, iii, 45–51)

The judge, however, relentlessly determining their guilt and leaving them alone to await their sentence, Beatrice responds to Giacomo’s and Lucretia’s remorseful despair with cheering reassurance of their divine instrumentality: “The God who knew my wrong, and made / Our speedy act the angel of His wrath, / Seems, and but seems, to have abandoned us” (v, iii, 113–15). The moment that follows then, redolent of Shakespearean pathos, is a lullaby scene, with Beatrice now acting the mother’s part and Lucretia the child’s: O dearest Lady, put your gentle head Upon my lap, and try to sleep awhile: Your eyes look pale, hollow and overworn, With heaviness of watching and slow grief. Come, I will sing you some low, sleepy tune, Not cheerful, nor yet sad; some dull old thing, Some outworn and unused monotony, Such as our country gossips sing and spin, Till they almost forget they live: lie down! So, that will do. Have I forgot the words? Faith! They are sadder than I thought they were. (v, iii, 120–29)

The lullaby itself is a tour de force of enigmatic farewell, sadly and plaintively apostrophizing first “False friend,” (the ever-duplicitous Orsino?) then “Sweet sleep,” and finally “World!” Whatever else it does, it places Beatrice far beyond the duty of a daughter, and comes close to voicing the poised indifference of her farewell line, “We are quite ready. Well, ’tis very well” (v, iv, 165).

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iv Shelley’s delicacy about the nature of Count Cenci’s incestuous violation of his daughter Beatrice involves language that, virtually from the outset, raises doubts about his ability to enact the carnal rape that readers, nevertheless, inevitably assume he performs. (“True,” he brazenly declares to Cardinal Camillo in the opening scene, “I was happier than I am, while yet / Manhood remained to act the thing I thought; / While lust was sweeter than revenge . . .”) The “superstitious horror” Shelley recognized as essential to powerful drama has been, I think, significantly attenuated in readings that, on the one hand, simply declare that by the beginning of the third act, Cenci has “raped” Beatrice offstage, perhaps even more than once, and that, on the other hand, attribute to her, as the victim of such rape, a psychological and sociological subjectivity alien to Shelley’s portrayal of her as driven to parricidal revenge by her very allegiance to what he describes in the Preface as “the earnest and perpetual sentiment of the relations between God and man which pervade the tragedy.” Hers was the religion that in Shelley’s Italy “pervades intensely the whole frame of society, and is, according to the temper of the mind which it inhabits, a passion, a persuasion, an excuse, a refuge; never a check.” In depicting what his dedication to Leigh Hunt calls a “sad reality,” as distinct from the “visions which impersonate my own apprehensions of the beautiful and the just . . . dreams of what ought to be, or may be” in works he had thus far published, Shelley did not repudiate the visionary mode: after all, he had just finished – or so he thought at the time – Prometheus Unbound, which shares with The Cenci his dismay at that reality. Shelley’s delicacy, I would suggest, involves, paradoxically, an even more heinous violation on the Count’s part than carnal rape, that of using (sexual) terror to drive his daughter to the unspeakable horror of parricide. In the course of that reading, moreover, I want also to question and resist the view many readers argue is the essence of Beatrice’s tragedy: that she comes, during the course of the play, to resemble her father, that her conduct in the aftermath of his death marks her willed descent, in mimetic rivalry or what Hogle calls “theatrical mirroring,” to his level of corruption, cynicism, and brutality.28 “This story of the Cenci,” argues Shelley’s Preface, “is indeed eminently fearful and monstrous: any thing like a dry exhibition of it on the stage would be insupportable. The person who would treat such a subject must increase the ideal, and diminish the actual horror of the events, so that the

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pleasure which arises from the poetry which exists in these tempestuous sufferings and crimes may mitigate the pain of the contemplation of the moral deformity from which they spring.” What Shelley’s language does is to dramatize the effect of what happens offstage, and it does so through what he calls “the pleasure which arises from the poetry.”29 So peculiar is the play’s “delicacy” that the father’s offstage transgression is spoken about onstage, insistently, as though it were not only unhearable, unseeable, and unspeakable, but obscure, unknowable, and unimaginable. Beatrice’s response, in Act iii, to Lucretia’s insistent questioning, virtually identifies the unnamability of what she has suffered with the unknowability of what “is to be endured or done.” And in rejecting suicide (“no, that cannot be!”) for religious reasons, her discourse ironically echoes the language of her father’s earlier “but that there remains a deed to act / Whose horror might make sharp an appetite / Duller than mine – I’d do, – I know not what”: b e a t r i c e. Aye, something must be done; What, yet I know not . . . something which shall make The thing that I have suffered but a shadow In the dread lightning which avenges it; Brief, rapid, irreversible, destroying The consequence of what it cannot cure. Some such thing is to be endured or done: When I know what, I shall be still and calm, And never any thing will move me more. But now! – Oh blood, which art my father’s blood, Circling through these contaminated veins, If thou, poured forth on the polluted earth, Could wash away the crime, and punishment By which I suffer . . . no, that cannot be! Many might doubt there were a God above Who sees and permits evil, and so die: That faith no agony shall obscure in me. (iii, i, 86–102)

Ostensibly mirroring effects like these might seem to warrant reading Beatrice, as Hogle does, in her role as parricide as equally guilty with her father. Shelley’s delicacy, however, also supports a different reading: that Cenci’s project from the outset, given his [arguably] diminished or absent “manhood,” is to drive Beatrice to an even more hideous act: less that of enduring his violent carnal embrace than – out of horror at being subjected to such vengeful paternal violation – that of devising his death. How Shelley represents her role in that violation is the burden of what follows.

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Mary Shelley called the fifth act of The Cenci “The finest thing he ever wrote,” a judgment few readers since have endorsed. But consider Beatrice’s extraordinary conduct in the second scene when, led in by guards to be confronted by the rack-tortured and confessed murderer Marzio, she denies hiring him as an assassin and, eventually, with her words and eyes forces him to recant his testimony of her guilt. What some see as her duplicitous, self-serving ruthlessness in sacrificing Marzio to further torture and death represents for them her most reprehensible descent to her father’s level of moral degradation.30 What’s at stake, I’d argue, is the finesse or, to use Shelley’s term, the delicacy of the language in her process. Here – at some length – are telling excerpts from that scene, with Beatrice’s first words arguably the strangest, most unlooked-for moment in the entire play, a moment at face value so dramaturgically bizarre as to raise questions for some about Shelley’s gift for drama: f i r s t j u d g e. Guards, there, Lead forth the prisoners! Enter Lucretia, Beatrice, and Giacomo, guarded. Look upon this man. When did you see him last? beatrice. We never saw him. m a r z i o . You know me too well, Lady Beatrice. b e a t r i c e . I know thee! How? where? when? marzio. You know ’twas I Whom you did urge with menaces and bribes To kill your father. When the thing was done You clothed me in a robe of woven gold And bade me thrive: how I have thriven, you see. You, my Lord Giacomo, Lady Lucretia, You know that what I speak is true. [Beatrice advances towards him; he covers his face, and shrinks back. O, dart The terrible resentment of those eyes On the dead earth! Turn them away from me! They wound: ’twas torture forced the truth. My Lords, Having said this let me be led to death. b e a t r i c e . Poor wretch, I pity thee: yet stay awhile. (v, ii, 19–34, emphasis added)

What follows is a protracted enactment of Beatrice’s power to perform her innocence. She wins the Cardinal’s tearful sympathy, appealing to his “reputation for gentleness,” and asking if he himself – known to be excessively grieving over a “nephew’s” death – were “stretched upon that

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wheel,” wouldn’t likewise confess anything, even that he had poisoned “that fair blue-eyed child.” (Her knowing implication that the Cardinal had illegitimately fathered the child plays a part in moving him to intervene, overruling the judge’s sentencing Marzio to further torture.) She turns again to Marzio: Fix thine eyes on mine; Answer to what I ask. [Turning to the Judges. I prithee mark His countenance: unlike bold calumny Which sometimes dares not speak the thing it looks, He dares not look the thing he speaks, but bends His gaze on the blind earth. (To Marzio.) What! wilt thou say That I did murder my own father? m a r z i o. Oh! Spare me! My brain swims around . . . I cannot speak . . . It was that horrid torture forced the truth. Take me away! Let her not look on me! I am a guilty miserable wretch . . . (v, ii, 81–91, emphases added)

When Marzio begs her to “spare me! Speak to me no more! / That stern yet piteous look,” and begs the Judges to lead him away to death, Cardinal Camillo – who has himself just endured Beatrice’s poignant asseveration of her innocence – intervenes: ca m i llo . Guards, lead him nearer the Lady Beatrice, He shrinks from her regard like autumn’s leaf From the keen breath of the serenest north.31 (v, ii, 112–14)

Beatrice then subjects him to a relentless elaboration of what she endured from her father, a verbal ordeal eventually issuing in her question: “Am I or am I not / A Parricide?” which produces Marzio’s terse volte face: “Thou art not!” I have cited this sustained display of Beatrice’s power at such length partly in order further to engage and question critical readings – even those that celebrate the success of The Cenci as a tragedy – that almost universally find her guilty of a moral corruption, even viciousness, mirroring that of her father.32 But my related goal is to put on display the extraordinary prominence, in these exchanges, of words about seeing, about eyes and looks, about what has been or can be seen and what is hidden in the face. Adequate appreciation of the dramaturgy of that prominence in this particular scene, furthermore, depends crucially on recognizing in it the culmination of Shelley’s insistent deploying of such

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language from the outset of the tragedy. No other words so dominate the play’s discourse. They amount to what seems a brilliantly intensive fascination on Shelley’s part with how and what eyes can and cannot see; with how eyes look and how, in looking, they appear; with what such looks, in peoples’ eyes and in their faces, reveal or hide; and with what in such contexts at their extreme is either so hideous or hidden as to generate horror; or so frightening as to inspire terror; or, most paradoxically, so lovely as to shed what I imagine Shelley would have called grace. This seldom appreciated aspect of The Cenci has everything to do with his gift for creating the most profound poetic effects with the most ordinary of resources, simple words like “eyes,” “look,” “see,” and “face.”33 Read negatively, such pervasive and insistent repetition might be taken for a demotic drive/mania on the poet’s part, as it were a fixation scarcely in control, a kind – but what kind? – of inspired madness; yet closely observed in all its delicacy it seems again and again indicative of a peculiar and methodically executed intent, a means whereby the most fundamental aspects of human relations might be summoned and probed for all their disturbing instabilities, uncertainties, undecidabilities, and – thereby – dramatic power. A salient example from the opening exchanges of Act i, strikes a keynote: after Cardinal Camillo proposes, as chief justiciary of the Pope, an [unseemly] bargain to Count Cenci: “That matter of the murder is hushed up” if he will surrender to the Church his wealthy “fief . . . beyond the Pincian gate.” Camillo then goes on to voice his acquisitive Holiness’s unsavory misgivings that The glory and the interest Of the high throne he fills, little consist With making it a daily mart of guilt As manifold and hideous as the deeds Which you scarce hide from men’s revolted eyes. (i, i, 11–15, emphasis added)34

Cenci’s contemptuous response to this embassy of corrupt Papal pressure then prompts a further overture, this one from Camillo himself, “to reconcile thyself with thine own heart / And with thy God,” a plea charged with this elaborate lament: How hideously look deeds of lust and blood Through those snow white and venerable hairs! – Your children should be sitting round you now, But that you fear to read upon their looks The shame and misery you have written there.

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(i, i, 38–45)

Already here ambiguities abound, as it were a blazon of what’s to come. In that first (metaphoric?) “look,” do the deeds themselves somehow, like eyes, actively peer out “hideously” through Cenci’s white hairs, or are they thus figuratively beheld from without as “hideous” by the eyes of the world, marking their contrast with his “snow white and venerable hairs”? Likewise, are the children’s “looks” simply their wretched appearance as the Count might “read” it, or is there specifically in their eyes some actively accusing register of what his viciousness has inscribed upon their appearance? And are Beatrice’s “sweet looks” active so that whatever things (other than her father) she turns her eyes upon become thereby “beauteous,” or is there, in the Cardinal’s imagination (“Methinks”) some magically transforming power in her “sweet” appearance overall, rather than specifically in her eyes, something that by its nature might have lethal effect on the devil’s spirit within Cenci? (The Cardinal here surely has no sense that Beatrice might have a “Medusa effect”; such is Shelley’s sense of dramatic irony.) Camillo’s “Methinks,” then, anticipates the fatal role Beatrice will soon find herself devising and performing, a role insistently linked to expressions of how eyes and faces look or appear. And associated with so pervasive a metaphorical poetics of looking is a comparably frequent metonymic association of the “hideous” with what one might or might not “hide.” Thus Camillo at the outset to the Count, deploring how repeated papal hushing up of his sins transforms the Church into “a mart of guilt / As manifold and hideous as the deeds / Which you scarce hide from men’s revolted eyes.” Spinning so prominently from the start such webs of words, Shelley’s script returns again and again to extend and elaborate their effects. Cenci comes close in the opening scene to identifying his very being in all its monstrosity as a matter of ocularly figured mental experience: “As to my character for what men call crime, / Seeing I please my senses as I list . . .” Though he summons other senses as well, he – and other characters in the play – keep returning to the primary business of beholding what can be seen: Yet till I killed a foe And heard his groans, and heard his children’s groans, Knew I not what delight was else on earth Which now delights me little. I the rather Look on such pangs as terror ill conceals,

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The dry fixed eye ball, the pale quivering lip, Which tells me that the spirit weeps within Tears bitterer than the bloody sweat of Christ. (i, i, 106–13)

The result, early on, is that even what otherwise might seem the most casual occurrences of such discourse take on intensified dramatic effect. Some particular effects, moreover, are more than simply cumulative: specific moments echo others verbally, as when, in Act ii, Lucretia recalls her daughter’s boldness at “that dreadful feast” when Cenci exulted in announcing his sons’ deaths, You alone stood up, and with strong words Checked his unnatural pride; and I could see The devil was rebuked that lives in him. (ii, i, 43–45)

Her words recall Camillo’s to Cenci in the opening scene that Beatrice’s “sweet looks . . . might kill the fiend within you.” And sometimes such distinct resonances emerge through Shelley’s stage directions: as when, confronting Marzio in the Act v trial scene, Beatrice advances towards him; he covers his face, and shrinks back, his reaction precisely reverberating with hers early in the second act when Enter Cenci suddenly. cenci. What, Beatrice here! Come hither!” [She shrinks back, and covers her face.] Nay, hide not your face, ’tis fair; Look up! Why, yesternight you dared to look With disobedient insolence upon me, Bending a stern and inquiring brow On what I meant; whilst I then sought to hide That which I came to tell you – but in vain. (ii, i, 104–11)

And this moment, in addition to alluding to their offstage encounter following the banquet scene, itself also echoes Beatrice’s audacious challenge in that scene: c e n c i . Retire to your chamber, insolent girl! b e a t r i c e . Retire thou impious man! Aye, hide thyself Where never eye can look upon thee more! . . . – Frown not on me! Haste, hide thyself, lest with avenging looks My brothers’ ghosts should hunt thee from thy seat! Cover thy face from every living eye . . . (i, iii, 145–47; 151–54)

Likewise, particular facial expressions resonate: arguably, those most prominently repeated are smiles. Again Count Cenci, in the opening

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scene: an anecdote, to put the Cardinal on notice, “so we shall converse with less restraint”: A man you knew spoke of my wife and daughter – He was accustomed to frequent my house; So the next day his wife and daughter came And asked if I had seen him; and I smiled: I think they never saw him any more. (i, i, 61–65)

So Renaissance tyrants devised disappearing. Curiously akin to their normally opposing frowns, smiles in this dark world gesture, again and again, as ominous facial figures – or disfigurations – for such latent treachery. When Beatrice, at the opening of Act ii, suddenly enters (“in a hurried voice” ), she says to Lucretia and Bernardo, “Did he pass this way? Have you seen him, brother?” then, in terror: Thou, great God Whose image upon earth a father is, Dost thou indeed abandon me! He comes; The door is opening now; I see his face; He frowns upon others, but he smiles on me, Even as he did after the feast last night. (ii, i, 16–21)

Faced with their building alarm at her unwonted desperation, she elaborates, “(speaking very slowly with a forced calmness)”: “It was one word, Mother, one little word; / One look, one smile,” and then, recovering from a further bout of wildness: “He said, he looked, he did; – nothing at all / Beyond his wont, yet it disordered me.” Lucretia shortly after quizzes her: You talked of something that your father did After that dreadful feast? Could it be worse Than when he smiled, and cried, “My sons are dead!” And every one looked in his neighbour’s face (ii, i, 35–39) To see if others were as white as he?

Smiles conceal, deceive, or threaten. We think, along the way, of Orsino’s duplicity in Act iii, fearing “the imperious inquisition of [Cenci’s] looks”: “let me mask / Mine own in some inane and vacant smile.”35 The most hideous, and most pernicious, smile comes in Cenci’s phantasmatic “imprecation” in Act iv, that if Beatrice “ever have a child,” May it be A hideous likeness of herself, that as From a distorting mirror, she may see

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Her image mixed with what she most abhors, Smiling at her from her nursing breast. (iv, i, 145–49)

(Here I’d suggest that Cenci’s sense of “what she most abhors” in the child’s face could be either the image of himself (as incestuous begetter) or, more insidiously, the image of herself as parricide.) One smile, however – the final one – reverses this pattern of sinister dissembling by looking genuinely triumphant innocence. In the trial scene of Act v, a papal officer, reporting Marzio’s offstage death on the rack, answers the Judge’s question, “What did he say?”: Nothing. As soon as we Had bound him on the wheel, he smiled on us, As one who baffles a deep adversary; (v, ii, 180–83) And holding his breath, died.36

Far from supporting readings that would see in Marzio the agonized victim of callous, self-preserving torture on Beatrice’s part, this smile signals, I think, one way another powerfully resonant set of expressions also associated with looking might be read, though the tragedy of Beatrice’s own fate might argue for its undecidability. Count Cenci’s quietly sinister remark to Camillo in the opening scene, “I think they never saw him any more,” finds an echo in the last act when Camillo reports to Bernardo the Holy Father’s words in response to his embassy to “use his interest” on behalf of Beatrice, Lucretia, and Giacomo: “You are my nephew, You come to ask their pardon; stay a moment; Here is their sentence; never see me more Till, to the letter, it be all fulfilled.”37

These words both enact and threaten a double disappearing: in addition to banishing Camillo from further advocacy on behalf of pardoning Beatrice, “nephew” from the Pope’s mouth declares his specious patriarchal denial of having fathered the Cardinal, just as, earlier, in the trial scene, Beatrice alluded to the childhood death of Camillo’s own “nephew.” And the Pope’s “never see me more,” echoing Cenci’s in Act i, in addition to reinforcing the sense that the Count and the Holy Father are masters of such tyrannical disappearing, also invokes that other moment powerfully alive in the audience’s memory, in the trial scene shortly before: Beatrice’s own startling, unlooked-for performance of disappearing: “We never saw him.” Here I would question the conclusion that’s often – perhaps inevitably – been drawn: that in denying Marzio in

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the trial scene, Beatrice, by conscious theatrical mirroring, is no less duplicitous and ruthless than her father or Shelley’s Pope, her lying enacting her descent into a tragically compromised, vicious figure. Instead of such deliberate, pernicious dissembling, and by another reading that accords with how the remainder of this confrontation plays out, I would argue that Beatrice’s astonishing trial-scene denial voices her deeply religious, though in Shelley’s implicit terms tragically deluded, conviction that in her own – and in her dagger Marzio’s – devising she was acting without human motive: they perform as no more than blind instruments of what she thinks of as her Almighty God’s appropriately vengeful justice. She “never saw him,” in other words, as more than the dagger which she, as His instrument, wielded. Shelley’s poetic genius is nothing, at such moments, if not dramatic. Marzio’s last words, defying the Judge’s command to “drag him away to [further] torments,” suggest that Beatrice’s looks have subjected him to a pain altogether different from the rack’s, one it’s impossible to distinguish from the loveliness of a Shelleyan sublime: Torture me as ye will: A keener pain has wrung a higher truth From my last breath. She is most innocent! Bloodhounds, not men, glut yourselves well with me; I will not give you that fine piece of nature To rend and ruin. (v, ii, 163–68, emphasis added)

Marzio’s defiant smile, then, “holding his breath,” disappears no one but himself. Beatrice’s Medusa effect has killed the fiendish assassin within him and thereby transformed Marzio into an avatar of grace, his smile a display of the genuine forgivingness – that higher truth – Beatrice’s eyes have roused within him.38

coda Shelley wrote Thomas Love Peacock, newly at work at India House, London, in late July, 1819, describing the “tragedy” he had just written as “eminently dramatic” and asking Peacock “to procure for me its presentation at Covent Garden.” He enclosed “a translation of the Italian Mss. on which my play is founded,” indicating his intent that when the play was published, anonymously, “[t]he translation which I send you is to be prefixed . . . together with a print of Beatrice – I have a copy of her picture by Guido now in the Colonna Palace in Rome the most beautiful creature you can conceive – .”39

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His hopes for such a public staging certainly played a part in determining the delicacy of his composition, as in the final moment, when Beatrice and her step-mother Lucretia “bind up” each other’s hair, while Cardinal Camillo watches and the Guards hover to lead them to the offstage scaffold. Beatrice, serene in tragic command, in effect plays mother to Lucretia, her parenthetic “I see” saying all with quiet reverberation: 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 anymore. My Lord, We are quite ready. Well, ’tis very well. (v, iv, 159–165)

It’s a hauntingly subdued ending, appropriate to the “print of Beatrice” Shelley wished published with the play. His elaborate account of that portrait in his Preface, drafted in late August, evokes many of the painting’s details, especially the hair and the look of the eyes, in language rendered by the purposes of his imagination: There is a fixed and pale composure upon the features: she seems sad and stricken down in spirit, yet the despair thus expressed is lightened by the patience of gentleness. Her head is bound with folds of white drapery from which the yellow strings of her golden hair escape, and fall about her neck. The moulding of her face is exquisitely delicate; the eye brows are distinct and arched: the lips have that permanent meaning of imagination and sensibility which suffering has not repressed and which it seems as if death scarcely could extinguish. Her forehead is large and clear; her eyes, which we are told were remarkable for their vivacity, are swollen with weeping and lustreless, but beautifully tender and serene. In the whole mien there is a simplicity and dignity which united with her exquisite loveliness and deep sorrow are inexpressibly pathetic.

Elided in that serene ending, but doubtless much in Shelley’s mind as he composed his tragedy, and in the minds of the theater audience he anticipated, was the unstageable horror to follow, the beheading of Beatrice narrated in the conclusion of Mary’s translation of the Italian manuscript they had first encountered in Leghorn at the Gisbornes in May 1818, the Relation of the Death of the Family of the Cenci : While the scaffold was being arranged for Beatrice & whilst the brotherhood returned to the Chapel for her the balcony of a shop filled with spectators fell & five of those underneath were wounded so that two of them died a few days after. Beatrice hearing the noise asked the executioner if her mother had died

Figure 6 The Medusa, attributed to Leonardo when Shelley saw it in the Florentine Gallery in autumn 1819.

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well & being replied that she had, she knelt before the crucifix & spoke thus – “Be thou everlastingly thanked – o my most gracious Saviour, since by the good death of my mother thou hast given me assurance of thy mercy towards me” – then rising she courageously & devoutly walked towards the scaffold repeating by the way several prayers with so much fervour of spirit that all who heard her shed tears of compassion – ascending the scaffold while she arranged herself she also turned her eyes to heaven & thus prayed – “Most beloved Jesus, who relinquishing thy divinity becamest a man and didst through love purge my sinful soul also of its original sin with thy precious blood – deign I beseech thee to accept that which I am about to shed at thy most merciful tribunal as a penalty which may cancel my many crimes and spare me a part of that punishment justly due to me” – Then she placed her head under the axe which at one blow was divided from her body as she was repeating the 2nd verse of the psalm de Profundis at the words fiant aures tuae – the blow gave a violent motion to her body and discomposed her dress – The executioner raised the head to the view of the people and, in placing it in the coffin placed underneath, the cord by which it was suspended slipt from his hold & the head fell to the ground shedding a great deal of blood which was wiped up with water & sponges.40

Ten weeks after the July letter to Peacock – and some seven months after their encounter in Rome with the portrait of Beatrice attributed to Guido Reni – the Shelleys moved from Leghorn to Florence, where, in the Uffizi Gallery, Shelley soon came face to face with another portrait, this one at that time attributed to Leonardo da Vinci: “The Medusa.” The stanzas he composed, as though on the spot, invite the reader to see in the painting they describe, what Shelley could scarcely have failed to register, its disturbing relation to Guido’s Beatrice, itself according to his Preface to The Cenci “taken by [the artist] during her confinement in prison” and whose “beauty” (as Mary Shelley wrote in her note to The Cenci in 1839), “cast[s] the reflection of its own grace over her appalling story”: IT lieth, gazing on the midnight sky, Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine; Below, far lands are seen tremblingly; Its horror and its beauty are divine. Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine, Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath, The agonies of anguish and of death. Yet it is less the horror than the grace Which turns the gazer’s spirit into stone; Whereon the lineaments of that dead face

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Reading Shelley’s delicacy Are graven, till the characters be grown Into itself, and thought no more can trace; ’Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain, Which humanize and harmonize the strain. And from its head as from one body grow, As [ ] grass out of a watery rock, Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow And their long tangles in each other lock, 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. And from a stone beside, a poisonous eft Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes ; Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft, And he comes hastening like a moth that hies After a taper; and the midnight sky Flares, a light more dread than obscurity. ’Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror; For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare Kindled by that inextricable error, Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air Become a [ ] and ever-shifting mirror Of all the beauty and the terror there – A woman’s countenance, with serpent locks, Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks.41

Nothing is known about when Shelley composed the stanzas, or why he left them unfinished and unpublished. Intriguingly responsive to the details in the painting yet immensely hard to decipher as a reading of what’s represented, perhaps their most notable attribute is their insistent focus on effects of light and darkness linked, paradoxically, with both loveliness and horror, beauty and pain. Each stanza (except for the socalled “additional” one) arguably has as its primary burden attention to a powerful “shine,” “glare,” “radiance,” or “flare.” One reading of the poem, by W. J. T. Mitchell, says that “It describes what Perseus really saw when he beheld the Gorgon, and why he could not write it down. If ekphrastic poetry has a ‘primal scene,’ this is it.”42 But what are the implications of Mitchell’s tellingly quoted metaphor? Is a Freudian

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reading implicit, that in the face of the primal scene one is stunned, astonished, paralyzed, so that one can only repress – or as Shelley might have written, “hide” – less from its traumatic horror than its loveliness? (Is this what Karen Swann calls “stiffening”?)43 Does gazing on it render one astonished – “turn[ed] . . . into stone” – incapable of “thought,” of reflection, of reflectiveness, yet somehow, paradoxically, still capable of composing stanzas? Might one be reduced to the condition of the bat and the eft (“peep[ing] idly into those Gorgonian eyes”), as it were mesmerized, entranced? What is the force of the word “mock” in the third stanza? If the vipers’ “unending involutions shew / Their mailed radiance,” is that effect like a pudendum flaunted to daze, dazzle, and so disable “the torture and the death within”? (Is the effect one of “grace”?) Or does the word “torture” as a cognate to “tangles” and “involutions” suggest that “mock” means “imitate” in a more constructive or neutral sense? If we take the stanzas as a coda or postlude to The Cenci, written in the throes of Shelley’s fevered, Beatrice-like responsiveness (“Something must be done”) both to the news of Peterloo (compare his contemporary “Mask of Anarchy”) and to the assault on him in the Quarterly, what do they augur for a reading of Beatrice’s fate in the drama, in Shelley’s hopeful mind in mid-October, yet to be staged and published?44 Their keynote is struck by the first stanza’s “supine,” with its sense of inertness, idleness, passivity before the inevitable, all bound up in the idea of “loveliness.” (Loveliness has little to do with mere prettiness. Faces might be pretty but only countenances can be lovely.) Is Shelley’s response to Leonardo’s Medusa (over)determined by his sense of her relation to his own Beatrice Cenci? Are “supine’ and “serene” cognate in their suggestive blend of idleness and divinity? The argument of the second stanza is the most difficult to follow or paraphrase. Most published readings take the “gazer” (line 10) to be different from the Medusa’s head “gazing on the midnight sky,” and probably identical with or akin to the speaker of the stanzas. Crucial is the process by which “grace . . . turns the gazer’s spirit into stone,” upon which the “the lineaments of that dead face” are graven.45 Does that process culminate somehow in the ingrown – and readable – “characters” that nonetheless render the gazer without the capacity to think yet still able to compose stanzas? Further, how might one construe the last three lines of the stanza, which seem syntactically to parallel and poetically to elaborate the assertion of the first two lines, especially to amplify the sense of the “grace / Which turns the gazer’s spirit into stone,” with the rhyming word “thrown” suggesting how aggressively beauty’s “melodious

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hue” might counter the power of darkness and the glare of pain, resulting (paradoxically for a subject without thought) in a sense of human(e) music: ’Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain, Which humanize and harmonize the strain.

(Here it may be relevant to note Shelley’s use of forms of the word “harmony” no less than seven times in the fourth book of Prometheus Unbound [composed during the very weeks Shelley was visiting the Uffizi and saw the Leonardo “Medusa”] as an effect of “Heaven and Earth united now,” the two most memorable being the one attributing to “Man, one harmonious Soul of many a soul” and the one celebrating “Language [as] a perpetual Orphic song, / Which rules with Daedal harmony a throng / Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.”)46 A crude reading – but hard to dismiss altogether – of these stanzas, in the context of the tragedy Shelley had completed in early August, would see him responding to the Medusa’s head as the emblem of imminent revolution, the hoped-for (?) and perhaps inevitable aftermath of the grim triumph of established power embodied in the Pope’s sentencing Beatrice and her stepmother to death. Such a reading would focus (as in a recent essay by Barbara Judson) on the discourse of “vapour” associated in Shelley’s writings with political revolution.47 G. M. Matthews’s “A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley” – regarded by Reiman and Freistat as a “foundation” essay for Shelley studies – cites Shelley’s association of volcanic vapours in Vesuvius and Etna with early warning signs of “revolutionary activity in the external world and in the human mind – of irrepressible collective energy contained by repressive power.” Located deep within such a volcano is Prometheus Unbound ’s Demogorgon, embodiment of the power Shelley saw inherent in the “unrepresented multitude . . . a denomination which had no constitutional presence in the state.”48 In Act ii of that “Lyrical Drama,” as Matthews notes, Asia and Panthea, sea-nymphs, are borne by the strains of the spirits’ music to the realm Of Demogorgon, and the mighty portal, Like a Volcano’s meteor-breathing chasm, Whence the oracular vapour is hurled up, Which lonely men drink wandering in their youth And call truth, virtue, love, genius or joy . . . (ii, iii, 1–6)

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Embedded in Demogorgon’s name is the idea of the people as Medusa. In late twentieth-century color photographic reproductions of the then recently restored (but now utterly darkened) Uffizi Medusa, a vapour rises in spiraling shape from Medusa’s open mouth.49 Jerome McGann sees the “thrilling vapour” as “the central image in the painting . . . which issues from the Medusa’s beautiful dead mouth.” He reads it as suggesting both “the soul escaping the body at death and the condensed vapour of breath in cold air,” but goes on to find Shelley “deliberately making it an analogue for the mirror of Perseus,” thus placing us in the position of Athena’s champion. The vapour then becomes for him “the equivalent of the ‘Phantom’ in Shelley’s [‘England in 1819’] sonnet,” the Pegasus born from the slain Medusa “in the traditional legend, the new life prophesied in the [‘Ode to the West Wind’].”50 I want to turn now from the facial aspects of the Medusa to those bestial creatures in the painting (including the “hairs which are vipers” that grow from the head “as from one body”). Whereas some accounts see them as grotesque confirmations of Medusa’s transformation into a threatening monstrosity, I take my cue from Shelley’s stanzas and read them, like Medusa herself, less as embodiments of horror – of hideous monstrosity – than of what he calls “loveliness” or “grace.” In addition to the virtually uncountable vipers in what seems an ecstasy of writhing, there are – by rough count in the reproduction – at least three toads, two rodents, two flying bats, a lizard, and a [“poisonous”] eft: there may be more. McGann reads these creatures (Shelley’s “ghastly bat” and “a poisonous eft”) as facing “‘imminent destruction.’ This aspect of the Medusan gaze is not a grace or beauty but death and destruction.” They appear to me, however, less hideous than almost joyously entranced, charmed, or even (benignly) mesmerized, the creaturely equivalent of astonished: their eyes lit up in reflection of what Shelley calls the “mailed radiance” of the vipers. Here I’d hark back, as it were in Shelley’s mind, to lines from Act iii, Scene 4 of Prometheus Unbound – the final scene in the version of that poem five months earlier when, thinking it complete, he turned to compose The Cenci. In that scene, with the union of Prometheus and Asia accomplished, the child-like Spirit of the Earth delights its mother, Asia, with its account of the “happy changes” wrought in a once troubled world: Thou knowest that toads and snakes and loathly worms And venomous and malicious beasts, and boughs That bore ill berries in the woods, were ever An hindrance to my walks o’er the green world,

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Reading Shelley’s delicacy And that, among the haunts of humankind Hard-featured men, or with proud, angry looks Or cold, staid gait, or false and hollow smiles Or the dull sneer of self-loved ignorance Or rather such foul masks with which ill thoughts Hide that fair being whom we spirits call man; And women too, ugliest of all things evil, – Though fair, even in a world where thou art fair When good and kind, free and sincere like thee, – When false and frowning made me sick at heart To pass them, though they slept, and I unseen . . . And soon, Those ugly human shapes and visages Of which I spoke as having wrought me pain, Past floating through the air, and fading still Into the winds that scattered them; and those From whom they past seemed mild and lovely forms After some foul disguise had fallen – and all Were somewhat changed – and after brief surprise And greetings of delighted wonder, all Went to their sleep again: and when the dawn Came – wouldst thou think that toads and snakes and efts Could e’er be beautiful? – yet so they were And that with little change of shape or hue: All things had put their evil nature off . . . So with my thoughts full of these happy changes We meet again, the happiest change of all. (iii, iv, 36–85)

So I’d agree with McGann that the vapour heralds the change to the political world of 1819; I imagine Shelley delighting to find in the Leonardo “Medusa” the very creatures his Spirit of the Earth had represented, the festive writhing of the snakes and the rapture of the other creatures a radiant gift to celebrate. We know nothing about the particular occasion(s) of Shelley’s encounter with the painting on one (or more) of several visits to the Uffizi in October and November 1819, pursuing his “design of studying . . . piecemeal” the gallery’s collection: “one of my chief {aims} in Italy being the observing in statuary & painting the degree in which, & the rules according to which, that ideal beauty of which we have so intense yet so obscure an apprehension is realized in external forms.”51 As with the stanzas, he never published the results of that “design”; in the spirit of his frequent turn in prose and poetry to musical analogies, the notes he made seem like materials from which a harmonized strain might have

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grown. Perhaps the closest thing we have to that strain is The Cenci. The most extensive of the notes on sculptures suggest something of what he brought to the Uffizi from his recent composition of that work, and their emphasis, correspondingly, reinforces the complex sense of tragedy he built into the play, discerning in Beatrice’s Roman fate something of the Grecian spirit he found in the faces of the Uffizi statues.52 Arguably the statue he found most arresting in the collection is that of Niobe, protecting her last and youngest child from the murderous arrows of Apollo and Artemis: This figure is probably the most consummate personification of loveliness . . . It is a colossal figure . . . of a mother in the act of sheltering from some divine and inevitable peril, the last, we will imagine, of her surviving children . . . Niobe is enveloped in profuse drapery, a portion of which the left hand has gathered up and is in the act of extending it over the child in the instinct of defending her from what reason knows to be inevitable. The right . . . is gathering up her child to her and with a like instinctive gesture is encouraging by its gentle pressure the child to believe that it can give security. The countenance which is the consummation of feminine majesty and loveliness, beyond which the imagination scarcely doubts that it can conceive anything, that master-piece of the poetic harmony of marble, expresses other feelings. There is embodied a sense of the inevitable and rapid destiny which is consummating around her as if it were already over. It seems as if despair and beauty had combined and produced nothing but the sublime loveliness of grief.53

Later in the note Shelley returns to elaborate his sense of the effect of “loveliness” as imaged in Niobe’s face: “it is difficult to speak of the beauty of her countenance, or to make intelligible in words the forms from which such astonishing loveliness results.” In the diction and in the peculiar cadences of what follows, there are striking affinities with the language of the Medusa stanzas: The head, resting somewhat backward, upon the full and flowing contour of the neck, is in the act of watching an event momently to arrive. The hair is delicately divided on the forehead, and a gentle beauty gleams from its broad and clear forehead, over which its strings are drawn. The face is altogether broad and the features conceived with the daring harmony of a sense of power. In this respect it resembles the careless majesty which Nature stamps upon those rare masterpieces of her creation, harmonizing them as it were from the harmony of the spirit within. Yet all this not only consists with but is the cause of the subtlest delicacy of that clear and tender beauty which is the expression at once of innocence and sublimity of soul, of purity, and strength, of all that which touches the most removed and divine of the strings of that which makes music within my thoughts, and which shakes with astonishment my most superficial faculties.

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The sublimely careless involutions here of Shelley’s syntax (“which is . . . which touches . . . which makes . . . which shakes”) and the hallmark transition from the delicately divided strings of Niobe’s hair to the “delicacy . . . of all that touches the most removed and divine of the strings of that which makes music within my thoughts” make this as it were a gloss on the second Medusa stanza. But it’s an earlier note in the Niobe ekphrasis that startles in its resonance with the last moment of The Cenci, focusing on mother and daughter, and hair: The child terrified we may conceive at the strange destruction of all its kindred has fled to its mother and hiding its head in the folds of her robe and casting up one arm as in a passionate appeal for defence from her, where it never before could have been sought in vain, seems in the marble to have scarcely suspended the motion of her terror as though conceived to be yet in the act of arrival. The child is clothed in a thin tunic of delicatest woof, and her hair is gathered on her head into a knot, probably by that mother whose care will never gather it again.54

Powerfully summoned here is Shelley’s fascinated imagining of how the inertness of a marble form can evoke a sense both of what has just happened and of what is surely to come. The figure of hair “gathered” chimes with his subsequent descriptions of the drapery Niobe’s left hand has “gathered . . . in the instinct of defending her [child] from what reason knows to be inevitable” and of her right hand “gathering up her child to her.” I want to read Shelley’s Medusa stanzas in the contexts not only of the beheaded Beatrice and of the transformation of other writing by Shelley in 1819, including Prometheus Unbound, but also of the aftermath of his learning of the Peterloo Massacre. Shelley’s fascination with the horror of the Medusa, and the language through which he insists on its paradoxical loveliness and grace, ought to remind us again of the figure in “The Mask of Anarchy” that arises to shield the prostrate, vulnerable figure of the “maniac maid”: Then she lay down in the street, Right before the horses’ feet, Expecting, with a patient eye, Murder, Fraud, and Anarchy. When between her and her foes A mist, a light, an image rose, Small at first, and weak, and frail Like the vapour of a vale:

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Till as clouds grow on the blast, Like tower-crowned giants striding fast And glare with lightnings as they fly, And speak with thunder to the sky, It grew – a Shape arrayed in mail Brighter than the Viper’s scale, And upborne on wings whose grain Was as the light of sunny rain.

Writing these lines immediately in the wake of reports of Peterloo, Shelley may well have heard, from Peacock or Hunt, of the fortunes of two radical print journals in England, one called The Gorgon, the other The Medusa, both of which found themselves beleaguered by the Stamp Acts and the government’s hostility to dissent. The verbal affinities between his stanzas on (Leonardo’s) painting and the rousing energies of “The Mask of Anarchy” suggest powerfully the political context of the beheaded Medusa. With that context goes something nonetheless quite different, associated also with Shelley’s representation of Beatrice in The Cenci, something close to “the Medusa effect.” Her “Sweet looks” and words in Act v create in Marzio a figure of an aesthetic as well as moral character: his last words a tribute to Beatrice’s innocence.

Notes

in tro d uc tio n: “ p r ow lin g out f or da rk emplo yme nts” 1 William Wordsworth, The Borderers, ed. Robert Osborn (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 814. 2 Michael Simpson, Closet Performances: Political Exhibition and Prohibition in the Dramas of Byron and Shelley (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 33–36. 3 Wordsworth, The Borderers, p. 813. 4 In this regard, it’s worth emphasizing the insufficiently recognized affinities between Joanna Baillie’s imaginings of the roles of women – such as Jane in De Monfort – and the roles sketched by Coleridge for Teresa in Remorse and especially by Shelley for Beatrice in The Cenci, women who, in the face of authoritative reason’s discursive insistence on fancy’s uselessness, insist on playing out its possibilities, each in her way assuming the determination to defy feminine passivity such masculine tradition would prescribe.

c h a p t e r 1 : r e a d i n g w or d sw o r t h ’ s p o w e r : n a r r a t i v e a n d u s ur p a t i o n i n ‘ t h e b o r d e r e r s ’ 1 J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 11–12. 2 Wordsworth, The Borderers, p. 70. All subsequent quotations from The Borderers, unless otherwise indicated, are from the “Reading Text” derived from the fair copy of the “Early Version” made in 1799 by Dorothy Wordsworth and published for the first time as such in this edition. Quotations from stage directions are indicated by “sd.” 3 For a fertile and provocative expression of this approach to The Borderers see Alan Liu’s essay, “‘Shapeless Eagerness’: The Genre of Revolution in Books 9–10 of The Prelude,” Modern Language Quarterly 43 (1982), pp. 3–28, citing the 1842 version of the text: “The unstageable plot and style of The Borderers are themselves a turbulent river, a type of the disordered Oswald. When we as readers puzzle over plot, motive, and the sense of sentences, we enter into the character of Marmaduke asking Oswald, ‘What is your meaning?’ and exclaiming, ‘Oswald, the firm foundation my life / Is going from under me’ 222

Notes to pages 14–22

4 5

6

7 8 9

10

11 12 13

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(547–48). The narrative turbulence of the play refuses to let its readers stand at a safe distance: it is enactive” (p. 3). “The Fenwick Note” [1843], The Borderers, p. 814. See Robert Osborn’s argument that “the elevation of Rivers from his . . . role as the deceiver who triggers the action to the role of initiator in a special kind of perception, the central experienced commentator on the main psychological and philosophical themes in The Borderers,” came late in composition and that “this redirection greatly enlarged the intellectual scope of the play.” In earlier stages of that composition there was a correspondingly greater emphasis on what Osborn calls “the contrast between Herbert’s saintly passivity and the agonies of conscience accompanying Mortimer’s commitment to action” (“Meaningful Obscurity: The Antecedents and Character of Rivers,” Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies in Memory of John Alban Finch, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970], pp. 396–98). It was also relatively late, if not altogether after completing composition, that Wordsworth wrote the essay he described to Isabella Fenwick as “illustrative of that constitution & those tendencies of human nature which make the apparently motiveless actions of bad men intelligible to careful observers” (Osborn, “Introduction,” The Borderers, p. 15). There is no doubt that this “enlargement” has determined the main direction of critical response to the play. See de Man’s discussion of pity as “inherently a fictional process that transposes an actual situation into a world of appearance, of drama and literary language: all pity is in essence theatrical,” in “The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida’s Reading of Rousseau,” Blindness and Insight : Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 132. Roger Sharrock, “The Borderers: Wordsworth on the Moral Frontier,” Durham University Journal n.s. 25 (1963–64), pp. 175–76. The Borderers, p. 813. Erdman, “Wordsworth as Heartsworth or Was Regicide the Prophetic Ground of Those ‘Moral Questions’?” in The Evidence of the Imagination, ed. Donald Reiman et al. (New York: New York University Press, 1978), p. 33. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Shakespeare Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), vol. i, p. 73; vol. ii, pp. 124, 196; and Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (London: Constable, 1936), pp. 54, 90, 394, 411. Compare M.C. Escher’s “Drawing Hands”: www.mcescher.com/Gallery/ back-bmp/LW355.jpg. See also ii, i, 77–78 and, for a similar usage by Rivers about himself, iv, ii, 124–25. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Essays on His Times in the “Morning Post” and “The Courier,” ed. David V. Erdman, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), vol. iii, p. 286.

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14 See also William Wordsworth, The Excursion, ed. Sally Bushell, James A. Butler, and Michael C. Jaye. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007), Book iii, pp. 700–701. 15 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. vi, ch. 58, pp. 1046–47 London: Electric Book Co., c.2001. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ cornell/docDetail.action?docID¼10041361 16 Gibbon, Decline, vol. vi, ch. 58, pp. 1066–67. One further comment from Gibbon glosses an oddity in Wordsworth’s evocation of the scene at Antioch that might otherwise seem merely an inept contrivance of plot. Why is the Crusader Herbert attended at the siege of Antioch by his wife and infant children? Gibbon presents the company of the Crusaders thus: “Such were the troops, and such the leaders, who assumed the cross for the deliverance of the holy sepulchre . . . Their wives and sisters were desirous of partaking the danger and merit of the pilgrimage: their portable treasures were conveyed in bars of silver and gold; and the princes and barons were attended by their equipage of hounds and hawks to amuse their leisure and to supply their table” (vol. vi, ch. 58, p. 1063). 17 The shadowy presence of the Antioch mother in the figure of the Beggar is a resurrection (of sorts) of material in the fragmentary “synopsis” that survives from the earliest known plotting of The Borderers story, which Osborn reproduces in the Cornell edition (p. 48). The summary of the “Third Act” in that synopsis opens thus: “Matilda having executed her commission comes to a church yard – meets a pilgrim whom she discovers to be her mother.” A slightly later stage of composition substitutes a male Old Pilgrim for the mother; in what Osborn calls the “Churchyard Scene,” the Old Pilgrim’s encounter with Matilda and a Peasant over an infant’s grave suggests that in some quasiShakespearean way he was to be foster-father to Matilda. Her influence upon him is to draw him out of his fit of grieving abjection and “dreadful contrariety” (p. 52) to something like his former self. His mournful tale of mad wanderings with the lost infant evokes a relationship of oppressive confinement in parental suffering that mirrors what I have proposed as the “truth” of Herbert’s tyranny over Matilda. Why Wordsworth would have invested so much in the encounter between the Pilgrim and Matilda is hard to say, except that one could think of the scene as a reunion of sorts with her own father, that father the Herbert of Rivers’s truth had usurped. (Significantly, the Old Pilgrim is not in his “true and perfect mind,” and, as Osborn puts it, Matilda imagines he “might be cured by meeting with Herbert” [p. 134n]. The prospect of such a meeting suggests that the Old Pilgrim might be thought of as the Specter of Herbert, split from him in the moment of self-usurpation figured in the Antioch tale, their reunion under the curative sponsorship of Matilda amounting to an undoing of that usurpation.) In that context, one could see Matilda’s following lines as proposing a reunion of the three – Herbert, Matilda, and the Old Pilgrim (usurper, usurped, and spectre of the usurper?): “My Father waits for me: the good old man / Will clasp my hand and weep to hear you talk, / And he will bid me listen” (158–62; p. 53, my emphasis). The Old Pilgrim of the Early

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Version (1797–99) retains this foster relationship to Matilda, repeating to her in their encounter a tale from the period of Herbert’s wanderings with his tottering daughter; the lost male infant evolves into the Beggar’s boy-child. The Old Pilgrim no longer grieves over the death of an infant son. The evolution from the actual mother who encounters Matilda in the synoptic fragment to the accusing wraith of the lost Antioch mother we can recognize in the Beggar reflects a shift in dramatic conception from the illusionistic intrigue of a Gothic romance to the subtler metaphoric figuring of the usurpation theme that so dominates the Herbert–Matilda relationship in the Early Version. 18 It is tempting to hear an echo of Mortimer’s mistaken recognition of Matilda’s mother when Robert in the last act, interrogated by Mortimer about the circumstances of Herbert’s ordeal on the heath, guesses at his questioner’s identity: He only spake to me of a dear daughter Who, so he feared, would never see him more, And of a stranger to him, one by whom He had been sore misused – But you are troubled: (v, ii, 36–40) Perhaps you are his son? As Robert’s wife Margaret has said two scenes before, upon hearing his account of Herbert, “This old man may have a wife – and he may have children. Let us return to the spot; we may restore him and his eyes may yet open upon those that love him” (iv, iii, 90–2). The dramatic aptness of Margaret’s and Robert’s mistakes rounds out a shadowy family romance I discuss further in the third section of this essay. 19 Citations from Pericles, Prince of Tyre are from the Penguin edition of Shakespeare, edited by Philip Edwards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976); citations from The Tempest in the fourth section are from the Pelican edition of Shakespeare, edited by Northrop Frye (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1970). 20 See also Herbert’s own earlier reminder to Matilda of the aftermath of their post-Antioch wanderings together: Providence At length conducted us to Rossland. There Our melancholy story moved a stranger To take thee to her home; and for myself, Soon after, the good abbot of Saint Cuthbert’s Supplied my helplessness with food and raiment And, as thou knowest, gave me that little cottage Where now I dwell. – For many years I bore Thy absence, ’till old age and fresh infirmities, Now six months gone, exacted thy return. I did not think that during that long absence My child, forgetful of the name of Herbert, Had given her love to a base freebooter . . . (i, i, 163–75, emphasis added)

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Notes to pages 27–31

21 Osborn, The Borderers, p. 86n, points out that “the conversation between Herbert and Matilda (i, ii, 143–77) echoes the recapitulation of previous events in Prospero’s conversation with Miranda in The Tempest, I, ii,” but he proposes no interpretation of the echo. I would argue that resonances with moments in The Tempest pervade Wordsworth’s text in extraordinary and subtle ways, suggesting a more informing correspondence with the motifs and themes of that play than with any other text, whether Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Pericles, or Schiller’s The Robbers. The remainder of this chapter attempts to sketch in the most significant aspects of that correspondence, focusing on the relations of Prospero, Miranda, and Ferdinand as parallels to those of Herbert, Matilda, and Mortimer (originally called Ferdinand, though the name, as Osborn and others have suggested, could also have been inspired by Godwin’s Ferdinando Falkland in Things As They Are, or The Adventures of Caleb Williams [1794]). Additionally, I would note here that various particular details of language, especially those involving the fear of confinement and the doing of service, point to affinities between the cottager Robert and Shakespeare’s Ariel, especially as Mortimer attempts to command Robert to perform his business in the fourth act. Momentarily resonant in the life of Wordsworth’s text, such correspondences with The Tempest point to his finding in Shakespeare’s play a provocative dramatizing of the issues of power that most concerned him in composing The Borderers. 22 Earlier in the same scene, when Prospero delivers a subjunctive threat to Sebastian and Antonio, he repudiates not only vengeance but the specious self-exoneration of his earlier spec(tac)ular narratives: But you, my brace of lords, were I so minded, I here could pluck his Highness’ frown upon you, And justify you traitors. At this time (v, i, 126–29) I will tell no tales. Sebastian comments, “The devil speaks in him,” whereupon Prospero, intuiting the burden of that designation, succinctly rejoins, “No.” The exchange reinforces the implicit linkage throughout the play of “minding,” sorcery, the purposes of revenge, and tale-telling, and thus helps pave the way for Prospero’s ensuing acknowledgment of his monster. Stephen Orgel’s “Prospero’s Wife,” Representations 8 (Fall 1984), pp. 1–13, and Paul Brown’s “‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 48–71, also explore issues of power in The Tempest. Orgel ponders the significance of the missing mother and wife, finding in the play overall confirmation of a distinctly unstable family paradigm he refers in part to Shakespeare’s own family but also, and more persuasively, to “political structures in Jacobean England” (p. 8). 23 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespeare Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor, 2 vols. (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1960), vol. ii, p. 5.

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24 The authoritarian harshness of this speech has led some editors to resist the Folio authority and attribute it to Prospero rather than to Miranda, confirming the basis for hearing in these words Miranda’s resemblance, as pitying and usurping narrator, to her father. Whatever the textual resolution, Miranda/Prospero’s advice resonates with significance. Pity’s agenda is the usurping creation of meaning, and it operates through what we call education. Is it a schooling into light of shadowy truths there in posse or, in its racist condescension, itself a brutal imposition? Miranda/Prospero continues: But thy vile race Though thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou Deservedly confined into this rock, who hadst (i, ii, 358–62) Deserved more than a prison But more important: does Miranda/Prospero’s tale of nurturing point to the impossibility of language developing any self that is not (always) already a colonizing imposition? 25 In this context, the arguments of Stephen Orgel in The Illusion of Power (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, Press, 1975) and of Ernest Gilman, “‘All eyes’: Prospero’s Inverted Masque,” Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980), pp. 214–30, on the role of Renaissance court masques in inscribing the sovereign’s power on the audience link up with Foucault’s analysis in Discipline and Punish of the theatrical structures and the Enlightenment’s culture of capital punishment. On the breach between political and artistic power in Prospero, see also Julian Patrick, “‘The Tempest’ as Supplement,” in Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye, ed. Eleanor Cook (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), pp. 162–80: “In many of Shakespeare’s substitution plays, usurpation and time are also connected with self-consciousness and theatrical representation” (p. 165). c h a p t e r 2: cr a d l i n g f r e n ch ‘m a cb e t h’ : m a n a g i n g t h e a rt o f se co n d - h a n d s h a k e s p e a r e 1 Robert Franc¸ois Damiens (1715–57) was tortured, drowned, and quartered after his unsuccessful attempt to assassinate King Louis XV. 2 Whatever revolutionary sensibility Wordsworth had brought to France ten months earlier, his introduction then in Paris to the Jacobin leader JacquesPierre Brissot brought access to scenes (the Legislative Assembly and the Jacobin Club and eventually its affiliate in Blois) and to people whose Girondist politics were in the ascendancy in the early months of 1792: in Paris, the journalists Jean-Louis Carra and Antoine Joseph Gorsas and doubtless others of the Cercle Social who might have included Jean-Marie Roland; and in Blois, the constitutional bishop Henri Gre´goire and Michel Beaupuy). Brissot himself – at the king’s reluctant behest, given his rise to leadership in

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the Assembly – had formed the government’s chief ministry in March, with Charles Franc¸ois Dumouriez as foreign minister, Roland as minister of the interior, and Je´roˆme Pe´tion as mayor of Paris. But the Paris Wordsworth returned to on November 1 had seen in recent months a precipitous decline in Girondist fortunes, chiefly due to what proved a disastrous war launched on Brissot’s watch against the Prussian and Austrian royal powers, with military losses abroad fueling the fears of invasion that precipitated the assault by the sans culottes of the Paris sections on the Tuilleries. How detailed and how accurate whatever information Wordsworth would have gathered from friends (Beaupuy) and associates at the Jacobin Club and, especially, from the plethora of journals available in Blois and Orle´ans, it’s inconceivable that he was ignorant of the rise of Robespierre and the decline in public esteem of Brissot. And if he hadn’t heard already in Orle´ans of Brissot’s eviction from the Paris Jacobins on October 10 and his retaliatory pamphlet depicting Robespierre in pursuit of absolute dictatorial power, the report of Jean-Baptiste Louvet’s momentous “j’accuse” in answer to Robespierre’s challenge in the Convention on October 29, followed soon by the pamphlet A Maximilien Robespierre et a` ses royalistes, would have brought him up to speed. 3 The exact date of his arrival cannot be pinned down. Mark Reed’s guess, “probably October 29,” depends on the following passage from the 1805 Prelude (Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Early Years, 1770–1799 [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967], p. 137): Betimes next morning to the Palace-walk Of Orleans I repaired, and entering there Was greeted, among divers other notes, By voices of the hawkers in the crowd Bawling, Denunciation of the crimes Of Maximilien Robespierre. The speech Which in their hands they carried was the same Which had been recently pronounced – the day When Robespierre, well known for what mark Some words of indirect reproof had been Intended, rose in hardihood, and dared The man who had ill surmise of him (x, 83–95) To bring his charge in openness. The speech was reported in the daily newspaper Le Moniteur for October 30, but Wordsworth’s “recently pronounced – the day . . .” hardly implies “yesterday.” And “the speech / Which in their hands they carried” hardly suggests a newspaper, which of course would have had all sorts of other items as well. The speech did in fact soon appear also as a pamphlet, Accusation contre Maximilien Robespierre, issued by “l’Imprimerie Nationale” and bearing the notation “Imprime´e par ordre de la Convention Nationale. 1792.” Such swiftness into print as an official pamphlet the morning after would not have been impossible, but seems very unlikely. My constructive history, likewise

Notes to pages 35–38

4

5

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8 9

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depending on The Prelude account but preferring more deliberate speed on the part of the government printing house, opts instead for November 1, for reasons I suggest in the next paragraphs. See David Jordan, The King’s Trial: the French Revolution vs. Louis XVI (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 51–54. On Ducis’s career in bringing Shakespearean tragedy to the French stage, see John Golder, Shakespeare for the Age of Reason: The Earliest Stage Adaptations of Jean-Franc¸ois Ducis, 1769–1792 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1992); Mark Ledbury, “Visions of Tragedy: Jean-Franc¸ois Ducis and Jacques-Louis David,” Eighteenth-Century Studies. 37.4 (2004), pp. 553–80; and Marion Monaco, Shakespeare on the French Stage in the Eighteenth Century (Paris: Didier, 1974). Talma (1763–1826) had achieved overnight fame and notoriety in the highly controversial production at the Come´die-Franc¸aise of Marie-Joseph Che´nier’s Charles IX in November 1789. Unquestionably the most spectacular actor of the Revolutionary era in Paris, he had much to do with bringing to French audiences the exaggerated attitudes and passionate gestures he had encountered on the London stage in the early 1780s, when he lived with his father in England and participated in amateur theatrics. Marvin Carlson, The Theatre of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), pp. 135–40; Alfred Copin, Talma et la Re´volution, 2nd edn. (Paris: Didier, 1888), pp. 117–32; Jules Michelet, Histoire de la re´volution franc¸aise (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1952), pp. 1213–18; H. F. Collins, Talma: A Biography of an Actor (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), pp. 82–85. If in the clamorous rhetoric of the October and November Convention those charges recede into the lingua franca of hysterical denunciation, they loomed ominously once more a year later from the martyred Marat’s grave to haunt Talma when he was implicated briefly during the trials before the Revolutionary Tribunal that led to the summary guillotining of twenty-one Girondist deputies, including several present at the Talma soire´e. See Copin, Talma et la Re´volution, pp. 159ff. Reed, Wordsworth, p. 136. The characterization is Jonathan Wordsworth’s: William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1979), p. 362n. Among the “tragic fictions” Wordsworth may have read – whether or not he had earlier been at the The´aˆtre de la Re´publique – would have been one of the three 1790 editions of Ducis’s Macbeth, Trage´die en vers et en cinq actes printed in Paris by P. F. Gueffier. For a discussion of Wordsworth’s complicity in that voice, see John Hodgson, “Tidings: Revolution in The Prelude,” Studies in Romanticism 31 (Spring 1992), pp. 45–70. It’s worth noting that in his soliloquy at the opening of the fifth act, Ducis’s Macbeth broods remorsefully on his exclusion from the tranquility of the sleep Duncan has been dispatched to. Cf. “the eye and progress of my song,” Prelude vi, 526.

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13 See Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), for an argument about the shift in the burden of that Aristotelian term that pertains especially closely to the evolution of the aesthetics of tragedy in the late eighteenth century. 14 Mary Jacobus, discussing similar questions and citing Hazlitt, sees Macbeth “like the stage-struck Wordsworth of The Prelude Book vii” as a “type of an imagination self-seduced and self-betrayed. As with Wordsworth, what is in question is the source of his ‘shapings’ – within or without? Are they real, or hallucinatory and fantastic?” See also her remarks on the “Sleep no more!” moment in Book x: “Wordsworth’s apprehension of the Revolutionary Sublime mingles tragedy and history with apocalyptic prophecy. The implication is that he is not so much ‘wrought upon by tragic sufferings’ as wrought upon by himself, and it is the chilling proof of his success that makes him, if not exactly an accessory after the crime, at least the victim of his own theatrical imaginings.” “‘That Great Stage Where Senators Perform’: Macbeth and the Politics of Romantic Theater,” Studies in Romanticism 22 (1983), pp. 354, 360. The painter Charles Le Brun’s Me´thode pour apprendre a` dessiner les passions was published posthumously in 1734. 15 As John Golder notes, it was in his 1790 Macbeth that Ducis for the first time made subsantial use of the translation of Shakespeare’s tragedy by Pierre LeTourneur which had first become available in 1778; until then, in earlier versions, he relied almost entirely on the partial translation by Pierre LaPlace. Even in his 1790 text, Ducis drew more from LaPlace than from LeTourneur. Whereas LeTourneur’s was an “Integral” translation of Shakespeare, LaPlace’s was “partial,” describing rather than translating parts that were deemed too violent or in other ways unacceptable on the French stage. Golder, Shakespeare for the Age of Reason, pp. 167–68. 16 Frank A. Hedgcock, A Cosmopolitan Actor: David Garrick and His French Friends (London: Stanley Paul and Co., 1912), pp. 109–10. 17 “Je suis maintenant occupe´ de Macbeth. Pourquoi ne puis-je causer avec vous une demi-heure et vous voir dans les morceaux terribles de cette admirable trage´die! J’ai affaire a` une nation qui demande bien des me´nagements quand on veut la conduire par les routes sanglantes de la terreur. Mon aˆme s’efforce, en composant, de prendre vos vigoreuses attitudes, et d’entrer dans la profondeur de votre ge´nie.” Jean-Franc¸ois Ducis, July 6, 1774, Lettres de Jean-Franc¸ois Ducis, ed. Paul Albert (Paris: G. Jousset, 1879), pp. 19–20. 18 In imagining the version Wordsworth would have seen I rely on the text first issued in late 1790 by the Parisian publisher P. J. Gueffier, the version that became the text for all subsequent revivals (Golder, Shakespeare for the Age of Reason, p. 216). Page numbers following citations refer to that edition. 19 “Nous sommes sur la bouche du volcan; et en ve´rite´, il est bien heureux, quand j’y pense, que ses e´ruptions aient e´te´ jusqu’ici aussi peu conside´rables. Mais nous entendons son bruit sourd et ses menaces, et dans bien des moments au milieu des fureurs de l’aristocratie et de la de´mocratie qui

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e´cument et rugissent autour de moi, il me semble que j’e´le`verais mes mains au ciel de reconnaissance, si je vivais cache´ et obscur entre un torrent et ma paroisse, dans nos neiges et nos montagnes de la Savoie.” Ducis, Lettres, p. 94 (May 13, 1791). 20 Monaco, Shakespeare on the French Stage, p. 156. 21 In the “Avertissement” to the 1790 edition of his Macbeth, Ducis himself called attention to the power of Mme. Vestris’s performance as Fre´degonde (and to his own debt to Shakespeare) by summoning especially the memory of the sleepwalking scene and the trance-like state it induced in the spectators: Avec quelle suˆrete´ de jeu, quelle supe´riorite´ d’intelligence, quelle souplesse et quelle vigueur elle a rendu la bruˆlante ambition, l’infernale adresse et l’exe´crable fermete´ de ce personnage! comme elle a e´te´ sur-tout extraordinaire, au cinquie`me acte, dans sa sce`ne de somnambule, d’ou` de´pendait le sort de l’ouvrage; dans cette sce`ne singulie`re, hasarde´e pour la premie`re fois sur notre the´aˆtre! comme elle a frappe´ de surprise et d’immobilite´ tous les spectateurs! quelle attention! quelle terreur! quel silence! (With what sureness of acting, what superior intelligence, what suppleness and vigor she rendered the burning ambition, the hellish skill, and the execrable steadiness of this character! above all, how extraordinary she was in the fifth act, in her sleepwalking scene, upon which the fate of the work depended; in this remarkable scene, ventured for the first time on our stage! how she struck with surprise and immobility all the spectators! what attention! what terror! what silence!)

22 Golder, Shakespeare for the Age of Reason, p. 216, cites a manuscript, “list of proposed changes for the performance on 9 June [1790],” which calls for the cradle, which had in a 1789 manuscript been pushed onstage for the final scene, to be left in the wings. At the end of her sleepwalking scene Fre´degonde exits toward it (“Elle se retire toute endormie sous une des vouˆtes” [Golder, ibid., p. 214]). It is still there in the final scene: “One doesn’t see it, one supposes it hidden by a column, but one sees Fre´degonde’s gestures as she strikes the child’s body” (“On ne [le] voit point, on le suppose cache´ par une colonne mais on voit les gestes de Fre´degonde qui taˆte le corps de l’enfant”). A fascinating budgetary item survives in the archives of the 1790 production, indicating that meticulous and lavish care went into the design and appearance of the cradle, clearly the focus of the bloody denouement of Fre´degonde’s ouvrage: Une curieuse facture de tapissier, relative a` la reprise de 1790, mentionne tous les e´le´ments ne´cessaires a` la fabrication d’un berceau, toile et crin pour le matelas, toile royale pour les deux oreillers, serge verte pour la housse du berceau et celle d’un tabouret, rideau rouge. Une couverture de coton e´tait loue´e pour chaque repre´sentation. (A peculiar upholsterer’s invoice, pertaining to the revival of 1790, mentions all the materials necessary for making a cradle, cotton and horsehair for the mattress, royal cotton for the two pillows, green serge for the cover of the cradle and for that of a stool, a red curtain. A slipcover was rented for each performance.)

Sylvie Chevalley, “Ducis, Shakespeare, et les Come´diens franc¸ais: ii: Du Roi Le´ar (1783) a` Othello (1792),” Revue de la Socie´te´ d’Histoire du The´aˆtre 16.1 (1965), p. 22.

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23 Ducis’s lines, composed in 1790, anticipate the image in the 1792 lyric that became the national anthem: “May impure blood slake our soil.” Cf. “Son sang impur abreuva nos sillons,” the caption of an engraving “Ecce Custine” by Villeneuve, dated August 28, 1793, reproduced in Daniel Arasse, The Guillotine and the Terror, trans. Christopher Miller (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 1991), p. 117. Ducis’s lines would in November 1792 have summoned for at least some members of his audience at the The´aˆtre de la Re´publique an ominous resonance with what Arasse calls the work of the guillotine as a “portrait machine.” 24 Ducis’s fifth act opens with a distraught, sleepless Macbeth himself tormented by vengeful furies and pursued by Duncan’s ghost: He´ quoi! Ce sang verse´ Ne sa taira donc plus! Sous ces vouˆtes impies Je crois que la vengeance a poste´ les furies. Duncan me suit par-tout, il me glace d’effroi. Mort pour tout l’univers, il est vivant pour moi. Ah! Quand son fils repose, e´gare´, solitaire, Le sommeil pour jamais a fui de ma paupie`re: Et je l’invoquerais par des vœux superflus! Duncan m’a dit tout bas: “Tu ne dormiras plus.”(p. 53) What! This spilled blood Will never be still! beneath these impious arches I believe that vengeance has posted her furies. Duncan pursues me everywhere, he freezes me with fear! Dead for all the world, he lives for me. Ah! When his son rests, bewildered and alone, Sleep has for ever thus fled from my eyes And I summon it by useless vows! Duncan has whispered to me, “You will sleep no more!” (The Gueffier edition mistakenly reads “Macbeth has whispered to me . . .”) In linking Wordsworth with the production of Ducis’s Macbeth, one might also recall “Vaudracour and Julia,” the narrative he composed for The Prelude at approximately the same time in 1804 when he wrote the “Sleep no more!” spot of time commemorating his arrival in the Revolutionary capital. The latter part of the narrative returns again and again to Vaudracour’s intensely melancholy attentions to their infant child, after Julia was forced by her father to place the child with a “fit nurse” and take up her home in a convent. The account of these attentions involves an obsessive tending that borders on violence: “where now his little one was lodged he passed / The day entire, and scarcely could at length / Tear himself from the cradle to return / Home to his father’s house.” Shortly after, Vaudracour removed the child from foster care, transporting it in a surrogate cradle that becomes virtually a prison: He quitted this same town For the last time, attendant by the side

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Of a close chair, a litter or sedan, In which the child was carried. To a hill Which rose at a league’s distance from the town The family of the house where he had lodged Attended him, and parted from him there, Watching below until he disappeared On this hill-top. His eyes he scarcely took Through all that journey from the chair in which The babe was carried, and at every inn Or place at which they halted or reposed Laid him upon his knees, nor would permit The hands of any but himself to dress The infant, or undress. By one of those Who bore the chair these facts, at his return, Were told, and in relating them he wept. (ix, 872–88) Refused entry with such a burden at his father’s house, he retreats to a lonely lodge “that stood / Deep in a forest,” where It consoled him here To attend upon the orphan and perform The office of a nurse to his young child, Which, after a short time, by some mistake Or indiscretion of the father, died. (ix, 904–8) The hauntingly laconic understatement of Wordsworth’s subdued narrative suggests an attention so totalizing as to collapse into abusive neglect, the indiscretion of infanticide. 25 This exchange resonates with Macbeth’s own immediately previous farewell to the victorious Montagnard troops, heroic companions of his triumph over the rebellious Cador: “Pour vous . . . / Rentrez avec plaisir dans vos foyers rustiques; / Revoyez vos enfants” (p. 29) (“As for you . . . go home with pleasure to your rustic hearths; / See once again your children”). His Cincinnatian flourish itself follows an exchange, in the previous scene in the hills, between an old Montagnard peasant, Se´var, and his youthful fosterson, who both, momentarily setting aside their awareness of continuing auspices of rebellion in Duncan’s realm, vicariously imagine that Macbeth, on his homecoming, “au gre´ de nos souhaits /. . . dans ce grand jour va revoir ce palais . . . / Ciel! avec quel plaisir, apre`s sa longue absence, / Il va revoir son fils, caresser son enfance!” (p. 27) (“in accord with our wishes . . . / on this great day will see again this palace . . . / Heaven! with what pleasure, after his long absence / He’ll see once more his son, to caress his infancy”). To behold one’s child is to fondle its – and one’s own – innocence. The play en franc¸ais on “son enfance” fosters the ambiguity. 26 Ducis’s opening scene is fraught with resonances to his own dark imaginings, as expressed in letter after letter he wrote in Versailles and Paris during the

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Notes to pages 50–54 late 1780s and early 1790s, when the storms of the French Revolution were gathering and breaking: imaginings of a refuge in the mountains of his Savoyard father’s youth. Ducis’s career-long debt to Racine and Corneille, as the two greatest playwrights of French neoclassical tragedy was – to use the word he frequently turned to when expressing his admiration for Racine’s genius – “profonde.” His most extensive commentary on Racine occurs in his inaugural address to the Acade´mie Franc¸aise when elected to the seat left vacant on Voltaire’s death: “Discours prononce´ dans l’Acade´mie Franc¸aise le jeudi 4 mars 1779 par M. Ducis succe´dant a` Voltaire,” (Œuvres de J. F. Ducis, ed. M. Campenon, 3 vols. [Paris: A. Nepveu, 1826], vol. i, pp. 1–51). The inaugural was composed during the years of Ducis’s intensive and prolonged labors to adapt Macbeth for the Parisian stage. When it came to modifying Shakespearean plots to make them bearable for Parisian audiences accustomed to neoclassical decorum, Racine’s influence pervaded. Where Ducis found that in Voltaire’s dramas it was the men who had traits of energized, impetuous, and profound passion, with Racine it was the women who by their very nature were more susceptible to torments of passion, storms of the heart which upset and precipitate it in an instant, ebbing and flowing, toward contrary extremes. On the special sense of the verb connaıˆtre in this context, see Cave, Recognitions, pp. 338–39. Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), p. 43. Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading 1770–1799 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 114; Andre´ Tissier, Les Spectacles a` Paris pendant la Re´volution: Re´pertoire analytique, chronologique et bibliographique de la proclamation de la Re´publique a` la fin de la Convention nationale (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2002); and Emmet Kennedy, Marie-Laurence Netter, James P. McGregor, and Mark V. Olsen, Theatre, Opera, and Audiences in Revolutionary Paris: Analysis and Repertory (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 226. The denouement of Racine’s Athalie is, to be sure, more complicated than Ducis’s final scene. Athalie’s vicious intent to destroy the worshippers of Jehovah is compromised when she dreams of a child who seems strangely attractive and then, subsequently, catches sight of what seems the same child in the Israelite market. Joad, learning of this, agrees to allow her to interview Joas (who at this point is ignorant of his own royal identity as David’s heir and Athalie’s grandson) and when Athalie subsequently demands the child, Joad, sensing her susceptibility for a bargain, offers her, through an emissary Abner, not only the child but a “treasure” in exchange for abandoning her destructive mission against the worshippers of Jehovah. Meanwhile, he sets a trap at the Temple, an armed company of Levites. When she arrives to claim her prize, taunting Joad with her

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triumph, he unveils Joas as himself the treasure, the royal child of Judah, known by the scars of her earlier attempt to massacre him, and sets the Levites upon her. Joad’s unveiling words – “connais” and “reconnaissez” – underscore the extraordinary anagnorisis: Paraissez, cher enfant, digne sang de nos rois. Connais-tu l’he´ritier du plus saint des monarques, Reine? De ton poignard connais du moins ces marques. Voila` ton roi, ton fils, le fils d’Ochosias. Peuples, et vous, Abner, reconnaissez Joas. (v, v, 1721–25) [Appear, worthy infant, blood of our kings. Know, Queen, this heir of the holiest monarch? At least of your dagger you know these marks. Behold your king, the true son of Ahaziah. People – and you, Abner – recognize Joas.] 32 Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 1770–1799 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 114, notes that Wordsworth’s MS Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff directs his imagined reader to repudiate the prayer articulated by Racine that there be a restoration of the legitimate monarchy and, in an additional note, urging the reader to “See Athalie, Scene second,” then “copies out lines 278–82 and 292–94, where Joad is speaking.” See The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), vol. i, p. 33n. John Golder notes that “On Friday, June 24 [1791], the Chronique de Paris invited the theaters to support the Revolution . . . arguing that Athalie no longer seems the order of the day.” Shakespeare for the Age of Reason, p. 234. 33 See my reading of this exchange, in Chapter 1, as an Antioch invoking the Crusades and The Tempest’s opening exchange between Prospero and Miranda. It’s perhaps also worth noting the affinities between Wordsworth’s representation of Herbert and Matilda and Ducis’s account, in Oedipe chez Adme`te (published 1780) of Oedipus and Antigone: My lord, as I was passing by those cypresses, those arid rocks Where stands the temple we built, in our remorse, to the Eumenides All of a sudden, my respectful eyes Spied a stranger, an old man His eyes forever closed to the light of the heavens. A modest fair maid, in the bloom of her days Helped and guided this unfortunate old man Sustaining him with her generous aid. His face still bore the grain of his nobility His face was plain to see, but no trace of trouble or fear His long white hair, disheveled by the winds Covered his pensive brow, etched by his years

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I could see in his bearing, in his steadfast brow A quiet dignity in the midst of all his woes And, in sum, my lord, everything in him reminded me Of that famous exile, of whom you have spoken. The translation is by Mark Ledbury, in “Visions of Tragedy,” p. 563. 34 See Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, pp. 140–42. In what follows, I cite passages from Virgil as they appeared in Dryden’s translation, which Wordsworth certainly knew. Though Robert Osborn doesn’t address resonances in Prelude x, he does, commenting on the exchange between Herbert and Matilda in The Borderers, observe that “the whole dialogue of i, i, 145–55 is reminiscent of Virgil’s description of losing his wife while escaping from burning Troy.” The Borderers, p. 86n. 35 Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. John Dryden, ed. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 86–87. 36 It was probably no coincidence that, according to Robert Woof, it was while in France in 1802 that Wordsworth “probably” acquired a four-volume set of Racine’s works, of which three of the volumes are now in the Wordsworth Library in Grasmere. Duncan Wu notes that the “volume containing Athalie is now missing . . . This suggests firstly that Wordsworth did not possess his own copy of Athalie before 1802, and, secondly, that the volume containing Athalie was in such frequent use that it went missing.” Wordsworth’s Reading, p. 114. 37 Compare the Latin of Aeneid ii, 235–37: accingunt omnes operi pedibusque rotarum subiciunt lapsus et stuppea vincula collo intendunt. and 250–51: Vertitur interea caelum et ruit Oceano nox Involvens umbra magna terramque polumque Myrmidonumque dolos with iii, 375–6: Nate dea, nam te maioribus ire per altum auspiciis manifesta fides (sic fata deum rex sortitur volvitque vices, is vertitur ordo). 38 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966). 39 Simpson, Closet Performances, pp. 33–36; see also Linda Colley, Britons: The Forging of a Nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 40 See Ellen Donkin: “Most politically volatile plays never made it past the manager and consequently were never even submitted to the censor,” in Getting into the Act: Women Playwrights in London, 1660–1800 (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 5.

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c ha pte r 3 : “ i n so m e so r t se eing wi th m y p r op er e y es ”: wordsworth and the spectacles of paris 1 For brief accounts of Ducis’s republicanism, see Margaret Gilman, Othello in French (Paris: Editions Champion, 1925), pp. 55–71, and Monaco, Shakespeare on the French Stage, pp. 160–62. On November 16, ten days before the opening performance, the Girondist Journal de Paris ran an open letter to “Citoyen Talma” from “Citoyen Flins” (the playwright Carbon de Flins des Oliviers, an associate of Ducis at the The´aˆtre de la Re´publique and likewise a political moderate). Alluding ostentatiously to uneasiness Talma had supposedly expressed during rehearsals about how a Parisian audience would respond to “the foreign color of the theater of [Shakespeare’s] London,” Flins, sounding every inch a republican, linked neoclassical decorum with monarchist politics: “Louis XIV, whose age was that of the fine arts, enslaved the taste of artists as he enslaved the liberty of people. The gardens of Le Noˆtre and the tragedies of Racine were obliged to have that orderly magnificence with which a monarch loves to surround himself.” Chief among the departures from such decorum in Ducis’s and Talma’s Othello that Flins defended as appealing to republican sensibilities was the representation of the “young and beautiful” Desdemona as the lover of a Moor: “The men of the 10th of August, whose charity has fought to grant rights of citizenship to mulattoes, will not exercise an aristocracy of color; and they will highly approve that a white woman loves a man whose color differs a little from hers, when that man is handsome, young, and passionate.” As a public letter, Flins’s justifications (which he could of course have communicated privately to Talma) seem designed to construct a favorable republican reception. It’s likely that Talma, perhaps along with Ducis, conspired with “Citoyen Flins” to place the letter in the Journal de Paris and thus preempt the philistine sans culotte hostility that members of Talma’s company at the Re´publique had reason to fear. See John Golder’s account of Ducis’s Othello as a “dramatization of the philosophical underpinning of the ‘fundamentally liberal principles embodied in the Declaration of the Rights of Man,’” in Shakespeare for the Age of Reason, pp. 265–66. Flins’s remarks about rights of citizenship for mulattoes allude to the volatile situation in Saint-Domingue and with it the complex politics of republican race relations. The Declaration of the Rights of Man in August 1789 had produced agitation in Paris and in Saint–Domingue about equality for mulatto freemen. Though there was Jacobin pressure from the start for freeing the [black] slaves also, there was no broad support for emancipation in the National Assembly: as property, slaves were regarded not only as a sacred right of [white] citizens but, more important, as crucial to the enormous prosperity of Saint-Domingue, the most valuable New World colony of any European nation. In May 1791, the Assembly passed a decree establishing rights of mulattoes, but when slave rebellion threatened to engulf the island later that year it was repealed. Eventually, however, a second decree on April 4, 1792, by the Gironde-dominated Legislative Assembly reestablished full equality

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between mulatto and white freemen; it came in response to spreading racial wars and fears that the slaves and the mulattoes would form an alliance against the white propertied interests. Worth noting in this context is the anachronistic politics of Flins’s attributing credit for the April 4 decree to the “men of the 10th of August,” especially since it was those very “men” whose precipitous actions in deposing the king effectively wrested the revolutionary initiative from the Girondins and brought the end of the Legislative Assembly and the founding of the republican National Convention. Flins was no doubt walking a tightrope (as were Ducis and Talma) in claiming the mulatto question so pointedly for the republicans, since the radical Robespierre and other “true men of the 10th of August” were antagonistic to compromises that would keep the blacks enslaved. A mulatto Othello, on the other hand, would be far less threatening to Gironde sensibilities than an Othello modeled after Toussaint L’Ouverture. Alfred Copin’s account of the Dumouriez evening at the Talmas (see above, Chapter 2, pp. 36–37 and n.6) includes an anecdote that epitomizes Revolutionary politics of color: “Le fameux chevalier de Saint-George, qui s’e´tait fait une re´putation par son talent pour l’escrime, et qui accompagnait Dumouriez en sa qualite´ d’officier, voulait absolument se jeter sur Marat. Il e´tait plaisant de voir ce mulaˆtre, d’une force peu commune, se de´mener et montre le poing a` celui que Danton appelait son Boulle-dogue.” (“The illustrious chevalier de Saint-George, who had made a reputation for himself as a talented fencer and who in his officer’s capacity accompanied Dumouriez, wished to throw himself on Marat. It would have been amusing to see this mulatto, with his unusual strength, thrashing about in a fist-fight with the one that Danton calls his Boulle-dogue .”) Talma et la Re´volution, p. 128. Ducis’s interest in the mulatto question and in the racial politics of the republic can be taken for granted: when the third edition of Othello appeared, he dedicated it to his younger brother, “Citoyen Ducis de Saint-Domingue,” a plantation and slave owner. He also offered this telling observation about Othello’s color: “I believed I could dispense with giving him a black face, distancing myself on this point from the custom of the London theater. I thought that a yellow, copper complexion, suitable besides also for an African, would have the advantage of not revolting the eye of the public, and especially that of the ladies, and that this color would permit them better to enjoy the delights of the theater, that is to say all the charm that the strength, the variety, and the play of passions spread on the mobile and animated face of a young actor, fiery, sensitive, and intoxicated with jealousy and love.” Ducis, Œuvres, vol. ii, p. 168; my translation. 2 If Wordsworth wasn’t at the opening on the 26th, the prominent critical responses to that performance on the 27th and the 28th in the Journal de Paris, the Chronique de Paris, and the Moniteur universel might well have propelled him to the Re´publique for the second performance on the 28th. See John Golder, Shakespeare for the Age of Reason, p. 303. 3 In Ducis’s adaptation, as in his renderings of other Shakespeare texts, the names of many characters are altered: Iago becomes “Pe´zare,” Brabantio

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“Odalbert,” Desdemona “He´delmone,” and Emilia “Hermance.” For the convenience of readers unacquainted with Ducis’s text, I have substituted the Shakespearean names. 4 The date on the title page of the earliest printed text of Ducis’s Othello is simply: “An deuxie`me de la Re´publique,” i.e., sometime after September 22, 1793. In a gesture that sheds light on Ducis’s republican politics, he sent a copy of the newly printed play to He´rault de Se´chelles, then serving as president of the National Convention, with the following inscription: “Rec¸evez, mon illustre con-citoyen, le sans-culotte Othello. Ce bon et fier Africain n’a point de´plu a` nos compatriotes. On le donne aujourd’hui, de´cade, et j’espe`re que Talma continuera a` le faire rugir comme le lion du de´sert. Je vous embrasse en homme re´publicain.” Gilman, Othello in French, p. 69, citing Paul Albert’s edition of Ducis’s Lettres, p. liv. (“Receive, my illustrious fellow citizen, the sans culotte Othello. This fine and proud African has in no way displeased our fellow patriots. It will be performed a week from today, and I hope that Talma will continue to make him roar like a desert lion. I embrace you as a republican.”) This was hardly a casual salutation. The performance of the play Ducis’s note alludes to was doubtless the revival that took place on October 19, 1793, during the trial of the Girondin deputies (see note 7). With Talma’s name alarmingly implicated in the ominous proceedings under way in the Convention against the arrested deputies, the gift of the play – and perhaps even its timely revival at the The´aˆtre de la Re´publique – was in all likelihood Ducis’s move to help clear his friends and even, perhaps, to ward off a threat by association to himself. Talma also appeared in the role on October 31, the very day the Girondin deputies were guillotined. Henri Lumie`re (Le The´aˆtreFranc¸ais pendant la re´volution, 1789–1799 [Paris: E. Dentu, 1894], p. 207) cites a manuscript note by Talma commemorating that performance: “On joue mieux quand on a du chagrin. J’ai e´te´ plein d’inspiration, et le public m’a tre`s bien compris, le jour ou les Girondins ont e´te´ guillotine´s. Ce jour-la` je jouai Othello, et je ressentais toutes les fureurs du roˆle. Le chagrin excite le syste`me nerveux. Dans cet e´tat morbide, le cerveau est plus propre a` concevoir.” (“You perform best when you’re grieving. I was full of inspiration, and the audience understood me very well, the day when the Girondins were guillotined. That day I played Othello, and I felt keenly all the furies of that role. Grief excites the nervous system. In that morbid state, the mind is best able to imagine.”) 5 Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 41–45. 6 One peculiar detail of Ducis’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Venetian world doubtless evokes the seamier underside of anti-royalist politics of the preRevolutionary decade. His Brabantio reacts with particular rage when he first sees his daughter’s forehead adorned with the diamond headband (“bandeau de diamans”) bestowed on her by her adoring lover. As former secre´taire to Monsieur, Comte de Provence and brother of Louis XVI, Ducis would have been well schooled in the abundant rumors and libellist smut around Cardinal de Rohan, Queen Marie Antoinette, and the diamond necklace. No audience

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conversant with that scandal would have failed to hear its resonance in the ill-fated “bandeau de diamans” that Brabantio reads as an insulting emblem of her consummated marriage to a copper-skinned warrior beneath his class. As he abusively warns Othello shortly after, Tes mains ont attache´ le malheur sur son front. Crois-moi, veille sur elle. Une e´pouse si che`re Peut tromper son e´poux, ayant trompe´ son pe`re. Retiens ces mots. Adieu. (i, vi, p. 197) [On her forehead your hands have placed the curse. Trust me: watch out for her. A spouse so dear Can trick her husband, having betrayed me. Remember these words. Adieu.] Ducis’s affiliations were not, of course, with the smut-pedlars of the Old Regime Robert Darnton describes, but some of the libellists he cites (e.g., Brissot) became Girondistes during the years of the Revolution and were under attack at just the time when Ducis was bringing his Othello to the Re´publique stage in late November 1792. Robert Darnton, Literary Underground of the Old Regime, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 36. Ducis’s politics were those of Savoyard alienation from the manners of the nobility and the royal family, welcoming the ideals of Gironde liberty and equality, yet deeply troubled by the violence and carnage of recent months in Paris. 7 See Chapter 1, pp. 25–27. 8 Aesthetics of tragedy are of course culturally produced rather than metaphysically determined. If, as Stephen Booth argues (King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983], pp. 81–92), tragedy is the convention by which the representation of the unbearable is made bearable, the sense of what is unbearable in any time and place reflects in part the particular ideological preoccupations of its culture. In his preface, after defending the suppression of Iago, Ducis discussed the 1792 Parisian audience’s tumultuous response to Desdemona’s death by stabbing and again returned to the issue of what they could endure: “Though the public has the right, in all climates, to sketch out for authors the limits of terror and pity, those limits nevertheless are more or less distant according to the character of the different nations. My denouement hardly passed in Paris, and in London, the English bear very well that of Shakespeare. It is not at all with a dagger that Othello, on their stage, sacrifices his innocent victim; he pushes her down on the bed and with force, a pillow over her mouth, he presses and presses again until she dies. That is what French audiences would never bear.” 9 When I published my 1988 version of “In Some Sort Seeing with My Proper Eyes: Wordsworth and the Spectacles of Paris,” I had not yet come across Peter Manning’s superb “Reading Wordsworth’s Revisions: Othello and the Drowned Man,” Studies in Romanticism 22.2 (April 1983), pp. 3–28. His analysis of Wordsworth’s poetry, focusing largely on the various revisions of

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the drowned man episode first published in the 1799 Two-Part Prelude, resonates with mine. Manning briefly mentions the echo of Shakespeare’s Othello in what he refers to as Mortimer’s “idyll” in Act i of The Borderers, recalling when, as a seven-year old, “tranquilly surrounded by his friends,” ’Twas my joy to sit and hear [Matilda] Repeat her Father’s terrible adventures, Till all the band of playmates wept togther, And that was the beginning of my love. (I, i, 65–68) 10 Mortimer’s actual words in v, iii of the “Early Version” are “I am the murderer of thy father.” I prefer here the still earlier, cancelled phrasing (see The Borderers, p. 276). 11 Mona Ozouf, La Feˆte re´volutionnaire 1789–1799 (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1976). 12 Henry Mackenzie, “Account of the German Theatre,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1790), pp. 154–92. Citations from the work are given parenthetically in the text. See R. Pick, Schiller in England 1787–1960: A Bibliography (London: Goethe Society, 1961), pp. 1–3. 13 Mackenzie’s summary is in fact inaccurate here, since a significant aspect of Moor’s “daring” in this moment is his claim (in Tytler’s translation) to have “foiled his destiny,” not – as Mackenzie claims – to have “accomplished” it. Mackenzie’s misreading permits him to find in Moor’s “barbarous heroism” a “grandeur” of character that is predicated in part on his acquiescence in “destiny,” associated by Mackenzie with the Eternal. Instead of seeing “all is consummated” as a satanic perversion of “consummatum est,” he reads it as an ennobling approximation to the Christian model of sacrifice. “Hence,” for Mackenzie, “to some parts of an audience, the danger of a drama such as this. It covers the natural deformity of criminal actions with the veil of high sentiment and virtuous feeling, and thus separates (if I may be pardoned the expression) the moral sense from that morality which it ought to produce” (“Account of the German Theatre,” p. 192). 14 See Martin Meisel’s discussion of Diderot’s response to Fragonard’s painting Le Grand-Preˆtre Core´sus s’immole pour sauver Callirhoe´, in Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 86–87. Meisel emphasizes Diderot’s enthusiasm for the “theatricality that he perceives in the beautiful ideality of the painting and in its irresistible communication of emotion; a theatricality that lies also in the unexpected coup de the´aˆtre in the moment represented; in the dynamism of the lighting; perhaps in the union of that dynamism with the effeminacy of all the central figures (which Diderot admits as a fault), summed up in the mannerist twist of the suicidal priest dying in orgasm.” 15 See Joseph W. Donohue, Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 376, where the passage goes on to argue that this framework of moral order “has in this new era

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disappeared or at least been transmuted out of recognition, leaving the dramatic character itself as the only source of meaning. The character’s manifestation of great energy and power and his conscious awareness of the nature of evil, if not referable to a code of moral behavior implicit in the structure of the play itself, become exclusively expressions of his unique and therefore fascinating personality.” 16 Preparing his spectacular consummation, Moor becomes the playwright/ director, converting his band into so many spectators. (“He lifts her from the ground, and shews her triumphantly to all the band.”) In setting the stage for the sacrificial stabbing, Moor momentarily recalls and enacts a curiously feminized version of himself as youthful lover, even feigning the survival of that feminized self in his mock-deference to the band’s commandeering threat: Gaze on this beauteous sight! if ye be men! Felons! have ye hearts of stone? – Behold me here! I’m young – I’ve felt the power of love! I was beloved! betroth’d! – I had reached the gate of paradise! (In a tone of tender supplication.) and shall my brothers force me thence?

17

18 19

20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27

Having thus catered to their brutal manhood, he sheds the feigned passivity and shifts from the role of audience/female to actor/male: “Thus far hath Nature spoke! – Now the Man’s part begins! – I am a murderer, like you!” The Robbers, trans. Alexander F. Tytler and Lord Woodhouselee (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinsons, 1792), pp. 214–15. For a fuller account of those broader issues, see my “In Some Sort Seeing with My Proper Eyes: Wordsworth and the Spectacles of Paris.” Studies in Romanticism. 27.3 (1988), p. 377n. Imbert, Le Mercure 3 October 1787; see Rene´e Lelie`vre, “Le The´aˆtre allemand en France (1750–1789),” Revue de litte´rature compare´e 48 (1974), pp. 289–90. Anne´e Litteraire, vol. vii (Paris: Chez Mergot, 1788), pp. 240, 251, 256; see Lelie`vre, “Le The´aˆtre allemand,” p. 290, and Edmond Eggli, Schiller et le Romantisme Franc¸ais, 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie Universitaire, 1927), vol. i, p. 76. Lelie`vre, “Le The´aˆtre allemand,” p. 290. David V. Erdman, Commerce des Lumie`res: John Oswald and the British in Paris, 1790–1793 (Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1986), and Gary Kates, The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Kates, Cercle Social, p. 21. Erdman, Commerce des Lumie`res, p. 75. Kates, Cercle Social, pp. 21, 3, 10. Jean Henri Ferdinand LaMartelie`re, Robert Chef de Brigands, drame en cinq actes, en prose, imite´ de l’allemand (Paris: Maradan and Barba: 1793). Eggli, Schiller, vol. i, p. 104. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, pp. 19–51. See also Franc¸ois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge

Notes to pages 72–73

28

29

30 31

32

33

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University Press, 1981), pp. 49–57. Eggli calls Voleurs “a very inaccurate title that prejudices the reader against Schiller’s play” and notes that LaMartelie`re “denounced” it in the preface to his 1799 The´aˆtre de Schiller: “The word voleur drags in its train an idea of baseness and of infamy that Schiller was far from wishing to cast on the persons of this play. He who steals a purse is a voleur . . . But armed men, in a regiment and commanded by an intrepid chief, who, in broad daylight, with all the equipment of an army, declare war on the mighty ones of an empire, on oppressive princes, engage in combat with them, and triumph, such ones are not voleurs. Perhaps one can say that the greatness of the attack ennobles the crime.” Eggli, Schiller, vol. i, p. 70. LaMartelie`re’s comment reinscribes the ideology of heroism. Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, trans. J. White (New York: Pantheon, 1973). See also Lefebvre’s “Foules re´volutionnaires”: Etudes sur la Re´volution Franc¸aise, 2nd edn (Paris: A. Colin, 1932), pp. 371–92, and E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in the Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), pp. 13–39. On the role of rumor in ancien re´gime Paris, see Arlette Farge, La vie fragile: Violence, pouvoirs et solidarite´s a` Paris au XVIIIe sie`cle (Paris: Hachette, 1986). Journal de la Cour et de la Ville (March 22, 1792), pp. 175–76. LaMartelie`re answered the charge that the play had been performed “by order” in a letter published in the same journal on March 31: “An utter stranger to the great political interests that in this instant absorb everyone’s spirits, I desire only the return of peace, reason, and justice. I acknowledge that my play can lend itself to some allusions; but if that is a fault, it is not that of the author, it is that of the subject, or rather of the spectators, who often hiss or applaud wildly at the same passage, according to whether it flatters or opposes the side they have adopted.” See also Eggli, Schiller, vol. i pp. 98–99, commenting on the topicality of Robert in 1792, notes that the play could not help but suggest to the audience steady links with the events of the Revolution: “The flight to the forests was not at this time an imaginary thing: armed bands operated in the provinces, and one never knew if they were lawmen or bandits. At the very moment when Robert was performed in Paris, the newspapers were reporting the massacres in Avignon.” Re´volutions de Paris 145 (April 14–21, 1792), p. 131. Journal des The´aˆtres 22 (March 16, 1792), pp. 43–44. The review contains the longest account of the plot of “les Voleurs, dont l’auteur est M. Schillers [sic].” Journal des The´aˆtres 22, p. 44. The allusion to “ce tribunal secret qui a existe´ en Allemagne” probably reflects the reviewer’s acquaintance with the translation by J. N. E. de Bock of L. F. Huber’s Das heimliche Gericht (Le Tribunal secret [London: Metz, 1791]). According to Eggli, Schiller, p. 82, the first act of Bock’s translation had appeared in 1788 in Thalie Rhænane, the first two acts in Bock’s Œuvres diverses in 1789. Journal de Paris 73 (March 13, 1792), p. 298.

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34 C. G. Etienne et B. Martainville, Histoire du the´aˆtre franc¸ais (Paris: Barba, 1802), pp. 84–85. Eggli, Schiller, vol. i, p. 101, dismisses LaMartelie`re’s oftrepeated insistence that he did not intend Robert as a topical play, commenting that LaMartelie`re was reproached not for having brought about the Revolution but for “having created, or contributing to create, by the performances of 1792, a climate of opinion which rendered possible the events of 1792–93, notably that trial, the condemnation, and the execution of Louis xvi, and the establishing of the Revolutionary Tribunal.” 35 Tissier, Les Spectacles, p. 262, lists fifteen performances of Robert, chef de brigands at the Marais in 1792 after September 22. According to listings in Le Moniteur Universel, it was performed on November 8, 16, 25, 29, and December 2 and 16; Le Tribunal redoutable had its first performance (as Le Tribunal criminel ) November 10, the second and third on November 12 and 14. The fourth performance, announced on November 17 for “demain,” seems to have been cancelled, perhaps because of Gonchon’s threat or the Jacobin committee’s summons. (Eggli, Schiller, vol. i, p. 130n, cites Tycho Mommsen’s account of the Duke of Oldenbourg’s Parisian correspondent to the effect that “the work has been withdrawn from the theater by orders from above.”) Thereafter it was announced on December 3 (again for “demain,” though there is no listing on the 4th). The listing for December 6 is for Robert re´publicain ou Le Tribunal redoubtable, with subsequent performances on December 8, 10, and 15. The title(s) of LaMartelie`re’s sequel may well allude also to de Bock’s translation of Huber’s Das heimliche Gericht – see note 32 above. My argument assumes that Wordsworth stayed in Paris until early December. Mark Reed places his return to London “perhaps late Nov or early Dec, fairly certainly by December 22.” Wordsworth, pp. 137–38. 36 The Gonchon incident is reported in Re´volutions de Paris 176 (November 17–24, 1792): 413: At the third performance of this play, Gonchon, the orator of the faubourg SaintAntoine, stood up in the parterre to challenge the director. Threatened by the henchmen of the aristocracy, he responded like a man of the 10th of August: “The first one who attacks me will die.” In an exchange with the director, he put it to him that, if he staged the play again, he would bring back with him the entire faubourg Saint-Antoine.

The threat is eloquent. Bazire, at the Jacobin Club, reported that the Committee of Surveillance had summoned the director to notify him that he would have to answer for the consequences if he risked having the play performed again. 37 See Eggli, Schiller, vol. i, p. 89. The measure of Tytler’s own anti-Jacobin politics in 1792 comes in his rendering of Schiller’s catastrophe when Moor, his bond to his felon “wretches” cancelled by Amelia’s “bleeding corpse” – in a farewell speech that Mortimer’s self-imposed “doom” in The Borderers structurally parallels – delivers his “last command”: “Go, and devote what yet remains of life to mankind’s service, to your country’s cause. Go, serve

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a gracious king, who wages war to vindicate the rights of man! This be my benediction! Hence! – Farewell!” (218). Tytler’s parodic appropriation of Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1790 and Thomas Paine’s 1791–92 pamphlet titles for the cause of belligerent monarchy seems one of the more bizarre moments of revolutionary intertextuality. The other robber gang sometimes cited as a source of Wordsworth’s is the band Caleb Williams falls afoul of in Godwin’s 1794 novel. Though their leader professes justice, Godwin’s narrator comments parenthetically that “it is thus that the prejudices of men universally teach them to colour the most desperate cause, to which they have determined to adhere.” Caleb’s own estimate follows: “The persons who composed this society had each of them cast off all control from established principle; their trade was terror, and their constant object to elude the vigilance of the community. The influence of these circumstances was visible in their character. I found among them benevolence and kindness; they were strongly susceptible of emotions of generosity. But, as their situation was precarious, their dispositions were proportionally fluctuating. Inured to the animosity of their species, they were irritable and passionate. Accustomed to exercise harshness towards the subject of their depradations, they did not always confine their brutality within that scope. They were habituated to consider wounds, and bludgeons, and stabbing, as the obvious mode of surmounting every difficulty.” Caleb Williams, ed. David McCracken (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 216–18. 38 Eggli, Schiller, vol. i, pp. 97–98, discusses the likelihood that the denouement of Robert – certainly the most notable departure from Schiller – was one result of the alleged collaboration of Beaumarchais in the composition of LaMartelie`re’s play. 39 (“Un incident impre´vu qui se passe en action, et qui change subitement l’e´tat des personnages”), Denis Diderot, “Entretiens sur le Fils naturel,” Œuvres, Bibliothe`que de la Ple´iade 25 (Bruges: Editions Gallimard, 1985), p. 1211. See Kates, Cercle Social, pp. 223 ff., on the complex determinations of Louvet’s propagandistic politics, especially his sans-culottes origins (son of a Parisian baker), his frustrations in the quest for wealth through novel-writing, and his earlier polemical encounters with Robespierre at the Jacobins in January and March 1792. Louvet edited the Sentinelle, a Girondin broadsheet aimed at winning the support of the sans culottes to the cause of the Girondins’ sponsorship of the war declared in April. But note Kates, Cercle Social, 238: “Until the fall of 1792, neither the Sentinelle nor any other Cercle Social publication attacked Robespierre or any other radical Jacobin, save for Marat. Louvet spent all of his vindictive energy attacking the Feuillants, Lafayette, and the Court”; see also ibid., pp. 238–39, on the shift in the Sentinelle’s politics after the September massacres to attacking the Montagnards; “You no longer have to fight those who have ceased to be powerful, but you must repel those who aspire to become powerful.” See also John Moore, A Journal During a Residence in France from the Beginning of August to the Middle of December 1792 (London G. G. J. and J. Robinsons, 1794), vol. ii, pp. 298–99

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40

41

42 43

44

Notes to pages 76–77

and 305–9, for an account of Louvet’s denunciation of Robespierre in some ways more Wordsworthian than Wordsworth’s: “There was a profound silence; in the midst of which, a thin, lank, palefaced man stalked along the hall like a spectre; and being come directly opposite to the tribune, he fixed Robespierre, and said Oui, Robespierre, c’est moi qui t’accuse. It was Jean-Baptiste Louvet.” “Proper” here may allude to the notion developed in David Marshall’s discussion of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments of the “impartial spectator” as the “hypo-thetical, uninvolved witness,” as “the only lookingglass by which we can, in some measure, with the eyes of other people, scrutinize the propriety of our conduct.” The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 177. If so, then Wordsworth’s eye-witness of the Revolution, the spectator seeing with proper eyes, is also, paradoxically, the repository of the moral vision alone capable of heroic action or conduct. On Oswald’s leading role in the British Club in Paris in 1792–93 (and on Wordsworth’s possible participation), see Erdman, Commerce des Lumie`res, pp. 223–43. See also Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: the Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 80–83, and Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth (New York: W. W. Norton and Co, 1998), pp. 324–26. Wordsworth, Prose Works, vol. i, p. 32. Kates, Cercle Social, pp. 239–44; see Alan Liu’s remark that the Louvet– Robespierre encounter was a species of failed tragedy, Louvet a failed Macduff, in Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 378. It’s that ethos of eloquence The Prelude ascribes to the grieving Revolutionary narrator in the wake of Louvet’s failure: Mean as I was, and little graced with powers Of eloquence even in my native speech, And all unfit for tumult and intrigue, Yet would I willingly have taken up A service at this time for cause so great, However dangerous. Inly I revolved How much the destiny of man had still Hung upon single persons; that there was, Transcendent of all local patrimony, One nature as there is one sun in heaven . . . That, with desires heroic and firm sense, A spirit thoroughly faithful to itself, Unquenchable, unsleeping, undismayed, Was as an instinct among men . . . that a mind whose rest Was where it ought to be, in self-restraint, In circumspection and simplicity,

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Fell rarely in entire discomfiture Below its aim, or met with from without, A treachery that defeated it or foiled. (x, 132–57, passim) Such confidence in “the virtue of one paramount mind” to clear “a passage for just government / And [leave] a solid birthright to the state” (x, 179, 185–86) is the faith in the politics of heroic transparency that, as Lynn Hunt has argued, entailed so inevitably its rhetorical opposite, a politics of treachery, conspiracy, and denunciation. It may not be impertinent to suggest that The Prelude’s representation of the narrator’s “creed” in November and December 1792, with its comments about individual virtue, ignorance and immaturity, just government, and a solid birthright, also signals the displacement into the public arena of a “frame of mind” (x, 188) Wordsworth felt about the yet unborn child he had fathered in Blois. 45 Beth Darlington, ed., The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 37. 46 I have been unable to discover whether the Weckerlin painting, now in the Schiller-National museum in Marbach, was reproduced (or even known) in England by the time of Haydon’s pencil sketch. I am indebted to the late Eric Blackall for information about the Schillerkragen. The collar, according to Meyer’s Encyclopedia, was customarily worn by members of the “Wandervogel,” the important back-to-nature youth movement founded in the late nineteenth century. The Wandervogel grew to enormous popularity and influence at the time of World War I; subsequently it became more and more active politically until its dissolution by the Nazis in 1933. 47 William Knight, ed., Wordsworthiana: A Selection from Papers Read to The Wordsworth Society (London: Macmillan, 1889), pp. 37–39. See Frances Blanshard, Portraits of Wordsworth (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 59–60. Blanshard notes that Thomas Phillips did a portrait of Byron in an open collar in 1813. See also Darlington’s Love Letters caption, p. 37: “Drawn for Mary Wordsworth, the portrait was dubbed the Brigand and hung in the dining room at Rydal Mount until her death.”

c ha p t e r 4 : dr i n k i n g u p w h o l e r i v e r s: f a c i n g w o r d s w o r t h ’ s w a t e r di s c o u r s e 1 Robert Osborn, “‘Meaningful Obscurity’: The Antecedents and Character of Rivers,” in Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies in Memory of Albar Finch, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 393–94, argues that the “‘metaphysical obscurity’ of Rivers, the villain of The Borderers, so preoccupied Wordsworth that he prefaced the early text with an essay on the subject, and the complexity of Rivers’s character and motivation has been the center of attention for critics of the play ever since.” It’s notable that neither MS version of the essay has a title. See The Borderers, p. 437. 2 The Borderers, pp. 7–17.

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Notes to pages 81–84

3 For Osborn’s fuller transcriptions and analysis of the order of composition of these passages in the Rough Notebook, see The Borderers, pp. 409–11 and 423. See also p. 56. 4 “What the sample of Wordsworth’s work on The Borderers in the Rough Notebook strongly suggests – and it is only a sample – is that his work on the story of the consequences of Ferdinand’s deception by Danby preceded his work on the way in which that deception was achieved.” Osborn, in The Borderers, p. 13. See also pp. 355n and 361n. 5 The first surviving use of “sinking” occurs in the Rough Notebook in apparently one of the earliest drafts of the Edge of a Heath Scene, when Margaret remarks to Ferdinand, “You seem most wretched Sir / Your limbs sink under you shall I support you[?]” (Rough Notebook 50v, p. 403.) 6 Among the evocations of such ominously comforting brookside venues are Matilda’s very first words (“Dear Father, you sigh deeply; ever since / We left the willow shade, by the brook side, / Your natural breathing has been troubled” [i, i, 75–77]); Rivers’s description to Mortimer of the abode where the deranged, castaway victim of Lord Clifford’s libertine indulgence has fetched up (“You marked a cottage, / That ragged dwelling close beneath a rock / By the brook side” [i, iii, 5–7]); the manic fantasies of “philosophical” despotisms that Rivers’s salacious allegations about Matilda’s assignation with Clifford rouse in Mortimer (“One, a King, / General or Cham, Sultan or Emperor, / Strews twenty acres of good meadow ground / With carcases . . . / Another sits in the sun and by the hour / Floats king-cups in the brook” [iii, ii, 83–90]); and Herbert’s recollection of the landscape of his initial wanderings after the usurpation of his baronial lands (“So from the court I passed and down the brook, / Led by its murmur, to the ancient oak / I came” [iii, iii, 98–100]). By the logic of reflexive antinomies that governs so much of the topography of The Borderers, the comforts of dallying at the brookside are cognate with the perils of the torrent’s brink: the antinomies (sub)merge in the scene, as the cottager Robert evokes it, of Herbert’s death: “near the brink / Of a small pool of water he was laid, / His face close to the water” (v, ii, 30–32; see below, p. 87). 7 Compare Mortimer’s words to how the Host of the inn reassures Herbert about his worry that Matilda has left to continue her journey alone, without protection against “enemies that move my fears”: “’Tis never drought with us – St. Mary and her pilgrims / Thanks to them! are a stream of comfort to us: / Pity the maiden did not wait a little; / She could not, Sir, have failed of company” (i, ii, 31–34); and then Herbert’s remark to Rivers, thinking that Mortimer is no longer a threat to marry his daughter: “Well, this is comfort” (i, ii, 50). 8 The image of the child in the mother’s arms resonates with Herbert’s Antioch tale: “I felt thy infant brother in her arms, / She saw my blasted face – a tide of soldiers / That instant rushed between us, and I heard / her last death shriek . . .” (i, i, 152–55).

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9 The link of poison and narrative sounds most prominently, of course, in Mortimer’s vehement outcry interrupting the cottager’s tale of finding Herbert: “What damning fiend has poisoned thee i’th’ear?” (v, ii, 68). See also Rivers’s earlier “I suspect unworthy tales / Have reached his ear . . .” (i, i, 227–28). 10 See Ronald Paulson’s citation of Jacques-Louis David’s remarks about the occasion of his painting the Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons : “He says he has returned to France” (“this poor country”) “like a dog thrown into the water against his will, and who has to reach the bank in order not to lose his life.” Representations of Revolution (1789–1820) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 33. 11 Mortimer voices an access of strength after sinking such as Rivers earlier has claimed; but Mortimer’s self-assertion here rings differently. 12 In his seduction of Mortimer, Rivers deploys figures of a similar opposition: Yours is no common life! Self-stationed here, Upon these savage confines we have seen you Stand like an isthmus ’twixt two stormy seas That checked their fury at your bidding – ’Mid the deep holds of Solway’s mossy waste Your single virtue has transformed a band Of fierce barbarians into ministers Of beauty and order. – The old man Blesses their steps, the fatherless retires For shelter to their banners. But it is In darkness and in tempest that we seek The majesty of the Almighty. – Yes, Benevolence that has not the heart to use The wholesome ministry of pain and evil Is powerless and contemptible: as yet Your virtues, the spontaneous growth of instinct, From vigorous souls can claim but little praise. To day you will assume a character More awful and sublime – remember this, (ii, i, 60–79) And think hereafter – 13 On tears and pity, see Chapter 1, pp. 19–20. 14 The host’s words anticipate not only Mortimer’s later distraught “Mercy of Heaven!” (iii, v, 165) upon discovering still on his shoulder the scrip he had intended to leave with Herbert when he abandoned him on the heath, but also his final, abject “till heaven in mercy strike me / With blank forgetfulness – that I may die” (v, iii, 274–75). 15 See also Rivers’s “a fresh tide of crusaders / Drove past the place of my retreat . . .” (iv, ii, 99–100). 16 Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, Book x, 535–38. Unless indicated otherwise, all further citations will be from the 1805 version and included in the text.

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17 See Lynn Hunt’s discussion of the Revolutionary history of the Hercules myth in “Hercules and the Radical Image in the French Revolution,” Representations 2 (Spring 1983), pp. 95–117 and, in briefer compass, in Politics, Culture, and Class, pp. 94–116. As Theresa Kelley, citing Hannah Arendt, notes, Camille Desmoulins, “who aided revolutionary forces during the Fall of the Bastille but himself was guillotined by the Jacobins in 1794, called the Revolution a torrent re´volutionnaire which drowns its actors in its undertow.” Wordsworth’s Revolutionary Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 74–75. Kelley does not, however, address the watery discourse of The Borderers in her final chapter, “Family of Floods,” where she focuses on Wordsworth’s revisionary deployment of such figures as torrents and waterfalls in the context of his later political sonnets, especially those focusing on the fortunes of the Swiss in the Napoleonic years. 18 Bronislaw Baczko, Ending the Terror: The French Revolution after Robespierre, trans. Michel Petheram (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 142. Carrier arrived in Nantes in late October 1793 – just when the Girondins in Paris were being led to the guillotine – “furnished with unlimited power to save the Republic, conquer its enemies, ensure republican order, punish traitors, and mobilise all resources required by the armies.” Within five days of his arrival, in addition to “fabricating” the rumor of a “federalist plot” to arrest the representative en mission and hand the town over to the Vende´ans, the revolutionary Committee at Nantes had arrested 132 “leading citizens” and sent them, on foot, in a journey that would take forty days in early wintry conditions, to the revolutionary Tribunal in Paris. Baczko notes that in the very last weeks of the Terror, Robespierre himself had come to think of Carrier as “another example, along with Barras, Fre´ron or Fouche´, of a representative en mission who had soiled the Terror by his behaviour in the field: luxury, theft, extortion, tyranny, arbitrary violence, etc.” 19 The Spenserian cast of the Pilgrim’s narrative (“a storm o’ertook us / In a deep wood remote from any town. / A cave that opened to the road presented / A friendly shelter, and we entered in”) signals the peril that awaits those who seek comfort within: Meanwhile the storm fell heavy on the woods. Our little fire sent forth a cheering warmth And we were comforted, and talked of comfort. The visionary gleam that comes for the blind Herbert with the “broad flash that filled the cave” is part of the tyrannous economy of comfort into which Matilda is pressed: “Heaven be praised / That I have lived to be a comfort to him!” where the totality of her “lived” figures her submersion in the selfsacrifice of pity (ii, ii, 26–49, passim.). 20 Duncan Wu, Wordsworth: An Inner Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 92. 21 Among the poems and translations Wu cites, from Early Poems and Fragments, 1785–1797, ed. Carol Landon and Jared Curtis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell

Notes to pages 90–93

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University Press, 1997), are “The Vale of Esthwaite,” “The Dog – An Idyllium,” “Orpheus and Eurydice,” “Now ye meet in the cave,” “Sonnet on Seeing Miss Helena Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress,” “An Evening Walk,” “Descriptive Sketches,” and “How sweet the walk.” The poems are “The hour-bell sounds and I must go” and “The Convict.” The name may have originally come to Wordsworth’s mind from the staging, when he was in London, at the Haymarket in June and July 1791, of Francis North’s highly praised The Kentish Barons, with its villain-hero Mortimer, or from The Iron Chest, George Colman’s highly popular adaptation of William Godwin’s novel, Things as They Are, Or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, staged at Drury Lane in 1796. See Jeffrey Cox’s “Introduction” to Seven Gothic Dramas (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993), especially pp. 15–32, where he explores the affinities between such Gothic dramas and the festivals in Revolutionary France as analyzed in Mona Ozouf ’s Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). The Borderers, p. 8. The evolution of the moment of talismanic restoration in the Rough Notebook version into what I have called a tableau rehearses in effect the recipe for drama prescribed in Diderot’s Entretiens sur le fils naturel, where, in the conversation between Dorval and “moi,” the latter offers a definition of coup de the´aˆtre, a dramaturgical trick Dorval disapproves of, favoring instead the tableau. Coup is, according to “moi,” an unexpected incident which takes place in the form of action and which suddenly changes the state of the characters. (Denis Diderot, “Entretiens Sur le Fils naturel,” Oeuvres, p. 1211.) The Rough Notebook sketch calls for a climactic coup, apparently delivered by the talismanic “sight of Danby!” As such it constitutes a recognizably Aristotelian trope, anagnorisis, a moment of talismanic recognition, when by a sudden access of knowledge a burden of guilty awareness descends/drops. For other considerations of the role of the visual in The Borderers, see Murray Biggs, “Staging The Borderers: Dragging Romantic Drama out of the Closet,” Studies in Romanticism 27.3 (Fall 1988), pp. 411–17, and, especially, Melynda Nuss, “‘Look in my Face’: The Dramatic Ethics of The Borderers,” Studies in Romanticism 43 (Winter 2004), pp. 599–621. “The Fenwick Note”, The Borderers, p. 815; and see also the 1842 note published with the play. For a provocative discussion of the relation of spectacles within the play to the putative role of the spectators in a theatrical staging of the play, see David Marshall, “The Eye-Witnesses of The Borderers,” Studies in Romanticism 27 (Fall 1988), pp. 391–98. Cave, Recognitions, p. 134, offers the most sophisticated and provocative discussion of the fortunes of Aristotle’s trope anagnorisis in literary texts from the classics to the present. In arguing that Wordsworth’s staring match between Rivers and Mortimer functions as “something like tragic recognition,” I mean to suggest that the dramaturgy both draws upon a recognizable category and takes liberties with it. See also Alan Richardson, “The Borderers

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and the Drama of Recognition,” in A Mental Theater: Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the Romantic Age (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1987), pp. 20–42. 28 The exchange between the Woodmen and Rivers at the beginning of the final act derives virtually word-for-word from a conversation, in what Osborn calls the Ur-Borderers material in the Rough Notebook, between the cottager Margaret and her husband the Peasant at the beginning of the final act: m a r g a r e t . You said a sudden turning of the road Down in the neighbouring dingle to your eye Did first present him – p e a s a n t . And at such short distance That I could mark him well, myself unseen. He leaned upon the bridge that spans the glen And down into the bottom cast his eye, That fastened there as it would check the current; And so he stood for several minutes’ space. The[n] starting up, it seemed from intimation Of things to me invisible, he look’d All about him with an eye of fear As if it wished to miss the thing it sought. m a r g a r e t . But did he utter nothing that explained The cause of these appearances? peasant. Anon He smote his breast, the motion of his eye Settled upon the ground. I heard these words, the whole of what he spoke: “The dust doth move and eddy at my feet.” This was most strange, the air being dead and still. m a r g a r e t . ’Tis some poor wretch of a disordered fancy. p e a s a n t . So at first I thought, And meant to pass him there forthwith, unwilling To meddle with a business that might lead To dangerous issues. margaret. Then you mark[ed] him further? [pe asa nt .] That instant he spread out his arms, as ’twere To save himself from falling, and as far As judgement may be made from such impression, As I till then ne’er saw on human face, And such convulsive starts of joints and limbs As never seized before on mortal frame. I do believe some horrible phantom then Did pass before him, such as God will not Permit to visit any but a man Who has been guilty of a damning crime

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m a rg a re t . Alas poor man – p ea san t . Dear wife, [?once] it is known, As soon it will be, that I was the man Last seen with him who perished yesternight, Until the real murderer is found out I never shall be safe. I do believe This stranger has some business with the cause Of this my errand, and am now returned To plan with thee what it were best to do. (pp. 54–55) But see him coming – I will watch further.

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32 33

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Salient here, as I argue above, are the crucial elements of discourse that give rise to Rivers: the similes, the eye, surveillance, disorder, guilt. Most striking, of course, is the congruence of dramaturgy of this exchange between Margaret and her Peasant husband and the exchange in the “final” Early Version between Rivers and the Woodmen. See also Matilda’s later remark when, after her father’s death, she still doesn’t know that Mortimer abandoned him on the heath: “Alas! you too have need of comfort” (v, iii, 29–30). The remark resonates ironically later in Matilda’s jubilant embrace when, bearing the news of her father’s restored barony, she encounters Mortimer, ignorant that he has just abandoned Herbert to the mercies of the heath: “Now thou art mine for ever . . . / You shall relate the news to my good father, / Yourself shall tell it – it will be thrice welcome” (iii, v, 112–14). See Robert Osborn’s discussion of this passage in “‘Meaningful Obscurity’: The Antecedents and Character of Rivers,” pp. 422–23. The fabric of Rivers’s discourse here is also variously rewoven over the next two years, with implications that range from the stasis of the woman’s psychic trauma (in “The Thorn”) to the absorption of meditative insight in the “Boy of Winander” lines sent to Coleridge in 1799. See again Nuss, “‘Look in my Face.’” Jean Starobinski, Rousseau (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 190–91, especially for the incipient hostility informing this surveillance. See also Robert Morrissey’s “Introduction,” p xxi. Lynn Hunt, Family Romance and the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). See David Simpson’s citation of Jeremy Bentham’s proposals, first published in Arthur Young’s Annals of Agriculture in 1797–98, to build workhouses after the design of the famous panopticon. Among the advantages of this, Bentham lists: “14. Universal transparency. 15. Simultaneous inspectablity at all proper times. 16. On the part of the inspectors, the faculty of being visible or invisible at pleasure.” Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 168. Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 68 and 112.

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36 See Cave, Recognitions, pp. 213–15, citing Peter Brooks’s Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), passim: “‘Psychoanalysis, like melodrama, is the drama of a recognition . . . [t]he dynamics of repression and the return of the repressed figure the plot of melodrama (where the “return of the repressed” is what happens at the moment of recognition)’ [p. 202] . . . what is recognized in the end is ‘the very terms of melodrama, the effort to articulate the moral universe,’ [p. 52] and this turns out to be a form of lucidity in the face of an evil or apparently meaningless world. Recognition in this sense is the subject of melodrama: ‘melodrama has the distinct value of being about recognition and clarification’ [p. 206].” Cave goes on: “If our official contempt for melodrama, indeed for ‘plot’ itself, is the sign of a repression, a failure to recognize the impulses that make us connive in the intestine strategies of fiction, the critic’s task will be to cure us by bringing to the surface the hidden powers that have ensured the survival of the genre.” 37 Pye, A Commentary Illustrating the Poetic of Aristotle by Examples Taken Chiefly from the Modern Poets (London: John Stockdale, 1791), cited in Cave, Recognitions, p. 142. c ha p t e r 5 : ‘ o so r i o ’’ s d a r k em p lo y me n t s : t r i c k i n g o u t c o le r i d g e a n t r a g e d y 1 See the discerning readings in Julie Carlson’s In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 94–119, passim; in William Jewett’s chapter on Osorio in Fatal Autonomy: Romantic Drama and the Rhetoric of Agency (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 99–131; and in George Erving’s brief but splendid account of “Coleridge as Playwright” in The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Frederick Burwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 397–402. 2 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Verse: A Selection, ed. William Empson and David Pirie (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), pp. 13–100. 3 Jeffrey Cox and Michael Gamer, The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2003), pp. 165–66. 4 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Osorio, in Poetical Works, vol. iii: Plays, Part 1, ed. J. C. C. Mays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 150, 154. Further citations from this edition of Osorio are by page numbers parenthetically in the text. 5 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), vol. i, p. 379. Comparison of Griggs’s text with a photocopy of the MS letter in the Bristol Central Library prompts my emendation of Griggs’s “for[cibly]” to “for[med].” 6 See Daniel O’Quinn, Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); and David Worrall, Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship and Romantic Period

Notes to pages 112–13

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Subcultures 1773–1832 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) for further discussion of the issues involving non-licensed performance venues. See also Jackie Bratton, “Romantic Melodrama,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre 1730–1830, ed. Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 115–27. See Frederick Brown, Theater and Revolution: The Culture of the French Stage (New York: Random House, 1989), esp. Chapter 2, “The Speechless Tradition”; and Meisel, Realizations, esp. “Introduction.” “Of all power, that of the mind is, on every account, the grand desideratum of human ambition. We shall be as Gods in knowledge, was and must have been the first temptation: and the co-existence of great intellectual lordship with guilt has never been adequately represented without exciting the strongest interest, and for this reason, that in this bad and heterogeneous co-ordination we can contemplate the intellect of man more exclusively as a separate selfsubsistence, than in its proper state of subordination to his own conscience, or to the will of an infinitely superior being.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), vol. ii, p. 217. See also note 24 below. For a thorough account of the history of such pantomimic effects in the eighteenth century in England and France, see Angelica Goodden, ‘Actio’ and Persuasion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Maria’s phrase “swift interchanges” derives from what, in discussion after discussion of pantomime, contemporary theorists and critics refer to as the “rapid succession” of distinct (and even opposing) passions a virtuoso actor like Garrick could represent, say, in rendering Hamlet’s response to first encountering the ghost of his murdered father. See note 8 above and Coleridge’s elaboration of the basis of the dramatic power of the character of Don Juan in the tradition represented by the “old Spanish play” Atheista Fulminato and Shadwell’s The Libertine: “It is not the wickedness of Don Juan, therefore, which constitutes the character of an abstraction, and removes it from the rules of probability; but the rapid succession of the correspondent acts and incidents, his intellectual superiority, and the splendid accumulation of his gifts and desirable qualities, as co-existent with the entire wickedness in one and the same person. But this likewise is the very circumstance which gives to this strange play its charm and universal interest.” Biographia Literaria, vol. ii, p. 214. In Osorio, following the seance, Velez, anticipating what he imagines will be the success of the “trick” – the substitute painting of the assassination – in persuading Maria of Albert’s death, sportively congratulates Osorio thus: Do you think, I did not scent it from the first? An excellent scheme, and excellently manag’d – ’Twill blow away her doubts, and now she’ll wed you. I’faith, the likeness is most admirable. I saw the trick – yet these old eyes grew dimmer With very foolish tears, it look’d so very like him! (iii, i, 150–55)

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14 15

Notes to pages 114–18 It’s worth noting how close Velez’s diction here is to Coleridge’s satiric praise (cited above, p. 135) to Wordsworth of Monk Lewis’s The Castle Spectre in January 1798, four months after completing his own play. The two most provocative assessments of Osorio in relation to The Borderers are in Stephen M. Parrish’s The Art of the Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 70–79, and in Paul Magnuson’s Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 51–67. Parrish’s generally low estimate of Coleridge’s abilities as a dramatist stems from his chief aim – to refute the widely held view that Wordsworth had no substantial dramatic powers – and from a focus largely on the characterization of Osorio himself. Magnuson sees a more concerted relation between Osorio and The Borderers, proposing that in offering “our two Tragedies” to Joseph Cottle for publication as one volume in 1798 Coleridge and Wordsworth recognized a complementarity “in their sharing themes and in the sharp contrasts between the two works.” Magnuson stresses the difference between the 1842 version of The Borderers, in which Rivers offers Mortimer “temptation of intellectual freedom,” and the 1797 version’s emphasis on seeing in Rivers a “grand visionary freedom that leads to criminal violation of the natural social order” (57, 59). His reading of Osorio entails a salutary focus on the role of dreams (in Maria, Velez, Albert, and Ferdinand), though his summary formulation assumes too exclusive an opposition between dreams and reality: “Most of the characters in Osorio tell their dreams or visions, just as those in The Borderers tell their histories. The major difference is that the visions and the dreams in Osorio have no corresponding reality; they are admitted fictions of wish fulfillment” (64). The strength of Coleridge’s drama, as I read it, lies precisely in the way “dreams” and “reality” become implicated in each other, putting into question for the reader or audience the nature of the “reality” represented. Osorio: Appendix, pp. 153–54. For a suggestive discussion of Coleridge’s many speculations, in notebooks, letters, lectures, and published works about the relation between dreaming and dramatic experience, see Patricia M. Ball’s essay, “The Waking Dream: Coleridge and the Drama,” in The Morality of Art, ed. D. W. Jefferson (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969), pp. 165–74. For a comparable moment of beholding in The Borderers, see the account of the staring match on p. 102 above and endnote 36. Maria’s framing of her “perplexity” – as either a trace of some obscure but authentic event long past or a “trick” of her fancy’s long wish for Albert’s return – neatly compresses Freud’s account of the phenomenon of de´ja` vu. (Her word “tricks,” of course, recalls her earlier melancholic recitation to Velez of her “wretched” imaginings.) Her equivocation chimes with the audience’s perplexity throughout the play in face of the shadowy subplot the text offers up, still insistent, still escaping efforts to confirm its ghostly authority.

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16 In Act ii, finally resisting further complicity, Ferdinand explains to Osorio his earlier silence about having discovered his victim’s identity: “I could not tell you: / I thrust away the thought – it drove me wild” (ii, i, 70–71). But with crucial implications for the reading I offer below, Ferdinand’s timorous account of that discovery concludes with a silence that misleads Osorio and with an aside that equivocates about what then happened: f er d i nan d . . . At length I said (if that indeed I said it – And that no Spirit made my tongue his organ), That Woman is now pregnant by that Brother, And he the Man who sent us to destroy you. He drove a thrust at me, in rage. I told him, He wore her portrait around his neck – he look’d As he had been made of the rock, that propp’d his back; Ay, just as you look now – only less ghastly! At last recovering from his trance, he threw His Sword away, and bade us take his life – It was not worth his keeping. o s o ri o And you kill’d him? . . . f e r d i n a n d (aside) Were he alive, he had return’d ere now. The consequence the same, dead thro’ his plotting! (ii, i, 92–109) 17 See the moment in the second act when Albert, roused by Osorio’s suborning overture (“l love a lady . . .”), declares to himself, “Wretch! my softer soul / Is pass’d away! and I will probe his Conscience” (ii, ii, 89–90). 18 “Painting” thus declares its affinities with such more clearly pejorative terms as “staining” and “polluting” in representations of Osorio’s maleficence. 19 In his timorous interview with Osorio in Act ii, when Osorio tries unsuccessfully to recruit him for the role of wizard, Ferdinand first tells him what he had formerly suppressed, that at the scene of the assassination, “Hard by a grove of Firs” (ii, i, 80), he had discovered Albert’s identity as Osorio’s brother. 20 Also haunting Albert’s remark, “’Twas a low imposture / Fram’d by a guilty Wretch,” is the passionate exchange, turning and turning on the word wretched, between Velez and Maria in the opening scene. Resisting Velez’s urgent embassy on behalf of Osorio’s suit, Maria’s rehearsal of her closet theatricals (i, i, 35–6) is a veritable tour de force around that word, the effect of which is precisely to link her own low, melancholic impostures with the condition of wretchedness the wizard confesses to in the seance. 21 The linkage with the Moorish maid is reinforced by Coleridge’s MS note to that passage: “i.e. listened as if to her own Shadow Reflection (with that of her Loves cloathes), had been her real Lover – & to this shape she taught the Sounds.” Osorio: Appendix: Annotations, i, i, 30–35. The pedagogical figure here chimes with Maria’s later remark, when she welcomes the Foster-Mother’s protest at Velez’s anger over her constancy, just after the

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Notes to pages 125–28

Foster-Mother’s tale: “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” (iv, ii, 99–102). 22 Compare the moment in Schiller’s “The Apparitionist” when Lorenzo, about to wed the intended of his mysteriously deceased brother, whose patrimony he also stands to inherit, dies in agony after being taunted to toast “the memory of my dearly beloved brother Jeronymo.” Thomas Roscoe, ed., The German Novelists (London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1826). 23 The Remorse version sacrifices the brilliant dramaturgical confusion of the catachresis, presumably at the altar of a clarity aligned with the Drury Lane manager’s impoverished sense of drama. The sorcerer’s tautly ambiguous “But what if this same brother . . . ?” is replaced by a prosaically unequivocal “But what if he had a brother . . . ?” The spectre of Albert’s hovering identity with his brother vanishes as Maria’s protest is absorbed into Valdez’s flattened and chiding defense of Ordonio: a l v a r (Still to Ordonio.) But what if he had a brother, Who had liv’d even so, that at his dying hour, The name of heaven would have convuls’d his face, More than the death-pang? valdez Idly prating man! Thou has guess’d ill: Don Alvar’s only brother Stands here before thee – a father’s blessing on him! (Remorse iii, i, 95–101) He is most virtuous. 24 See note 8 above. The Biographia passage goes on to cite Shadwell’s The Libertine: “The poet does not require us to be awake and believe; he solicits us only to yield ourselves to a dream; and this too with our eyes open, and with our judgment perdue behind the curtain, ready to awaken us at the first motion of our will: and meantime, only, not to disbelieve. And in such a state of mind, who but must be impressed with the cool intrepidity of Don John on the appearance of his father’s ghost: g h o s t . – Monster! behold these wounds! d . j o h n. – I do! They were well meant and well performed, I see. g h o s t . – Repent, repent of all thy villanies. My clamorous blood to heaven for vengeance cries, Heaven will pour out his judgments on you all. Hell gapes for you, for you each fiend doth call, And hourly waits your unrepenting fall. You with eternal horrors they’ll torment, Except of all your crimes you suddenly repent. (Ghost sinks.) Biographia Literaria, pp. 217–18. 25 Since at least Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu, the question of Wordsworth’s contribution to the gestation of “The Ancient Mariner” in November 1797

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has over the years attracted the attention of readers interested in the nature of the creative process or in circumscribing the power of Coleridge’s poetic genius. Wordsworth himself claimed to have suggested not only the most famous incident – the shooting of the albatross – but also the mariner’s persecution by the spirits. In Lowes’s romanticizing chemistry Wordsworth’s suggestion of “spectral persecution” is the catalyst that “precipitated” what was held in solution in Coleridge’s brain into “the strange vengeance which overtook in haunted seas the slayer of a solitary albatross.” The prominent linkage in Osorio – completed in mid-October 1797 – of objects tied around the neck and narratives of ghostly vengeance suggests that Wordsworth’s role may have been limited to proposing the albatross as a novel additive to a compound whose properties were already established. 26 The Critical Review 19 (February 1797), pp. 194–200. Hovering in the association of a binding “Image” and the name Maria is perhaps also the shadow of a spectre from Coleridge’s youthful infatuation with Mary Evans. On July 14, 1794, on a walking tour through Wales, Coleridge sent Southey a sketch of a passionately afflicting episode that reads like a first draft of the disguised Albert’s encounter with Alhadra and Maria on the coast of Granada: At Wrexham Church I glanced upon the face of a Miss E. Evans, a young Lady with [whom] I had been in habits of fraternal correspondence – She turned excessively pale – she thought it my Ghost, I suppose – I retreated with all possible speed to our Inn – there as I was standing at the window passed by Eliza Evans, and with her to my utter surprize her Sister, Mary Evans – quam efflictim et perdite amabam. I apprehend, she is come from London on a visit to her Grandmother, with whom Eliza lives. l turned sick, and all but fainted away! – The two Sisters, as H[ucks] informs me, passed by the window anxiously, several times afterwards – but I had retired – Vivit sed mihi non vivit! – nova forte marita Ah dolor! alterius caraˆ a cervice pependit. Vos, malefida valete accensae Insomnia mentis, Littora amata, valete! Vale ah! formosa Maria! [Trans.: She lives but lives not for me – as a new bride perhaps / Ah misery! she has hung herself from the neck of another lover. / Farewell, you faithless gleams of a sleepless mind, / Beloved shores, farewell! Farewell, ah! lovely Maria!] My fortitude would not have supported me, had I recognized her – I mean appeared to do it! . . . I never durst even in a whisper avow my passion, though I knew she loved me – Where were my Fortunes? And why should I make her miserable? Almighty God bless her – ! her Image is in the sanctuary of my Heart, and never can it be torn away but with the strings that grapple it to Life.

And in “The Sigh” (composed in November 1794) the final stanza returns to the image: And though in distant climes to roam A Wanderer from my native home I fain would woo a gentle Fair

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Notes to pages 131–32 To soothe the aching sense of Care, Thy Image may not banish’d be – Still, Mary! still I sigh for thee!

(Collected Letters, vol. i, pp. 87–88, and 124) 27 Cf. Wordsworth’s Rivers’s first words in The Borderers : “This wood is rich in plants and curious simples,” to which Mortimer replies, “The wild rose, and the poppy, and the night-shade” (i, i, 16–17). One might also hear in Osorio’s narrative of a precocious foundling deranged by reading and writing a preliminary version of the material that soon took an autobiographical turn. See the account of “the events in his own Life” in the contemporary letters to Thomas Poole, especially that of 16 October 1797, the same day he sent off the finished Osorio, narrating the episode of the runaway seven-year-old waif lost overnight in the wet and cold and found on the morrow. That letter goes on to describe his early reading of “Faery Tales, & Genii &c &c . . . Should children be permitted to read Romances, & Relations of Giants & Magicians, & Genii? – I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative.” Collected Letters, vol. i, pp. 352–54. See also Velez’s tale, in Act iii, of Albert as a child lost: “after weary search / We found him in an open place of the Wood / To which spot he had follow’d a blind Boy / Who breath’d into a pipe of Sycamore / Some strangely-moving notes . . .” (iii, i, 61–64). 28 The narrative of this sudden catastrophe both underscores the Church’s antagonism to the youth’s wildness and obscures the late Lord Velez’s agency in precipitating the traumatic reversal. Does their deep discourse engender in the earth the heave that threatens to topple the chapel wall? Is Velez’s “confession” a product of delirious, terrified fever or of more deliberate resolve? Does the priest hearing the confession violate his sacramental role by seeing to it that the youth is seized and incarcerated? 29 Velez’s tale of the fixation of her eyes anticipates his later rehearsal to Osorio, after the sorcery scene, of a similar unswervingness in the gaze of the wizard at the “what if ” moment “when he fix’d his obstinate eye on you, / And you pretended to look strange and tremble” (iii, i, 174–75). The language of Velez’s account of what he assumes are the feigned attitudes of a charade for Maria’s benefit reinforces our sense, in the sorcery scene itself, of Albert’s own vengeful investment in his interrogation of Osorio. Velez’s account is at odds, dramatically, with the wizard’s own subjunctive description of a merciful withholding of that accusatory, haunting gaze: “What if, his steadfast eye still beaming pity / And brother’s love, he turn’d his head aside, / Lest he should look at thee, and with one look / Hurl thee beyond all power of penitence?” (553). Would the actor here mime the gesture of turning aside, only to revert then all the more passionately to fix his eye upon Osorio? In the opening of Act v, Naomi describes a similar fixity in Alhadra’s eye as she bends her vengeful course toward Osorio:

Notes to pages 133–36

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She moved steadily on Unswerving from the path of her resolve. Yet each strange object fix’d her eye: for grief Doth love to dally with fantastic shapes, And smiling, like a sickly Moralist, Gives some resemblance of her own concerns To the Straws of chance, and things inanimate. (v, i, 8–14) See also Albert’s agitated remonstrance to Osorio’s murderous display in the Act v dungeon scene: “What then art thou? For shame, put up thy Sword! / What boots a Weapon in a withered arm? / I fix mine eye upon thee, and thou tremblest! / I speak – and fear and wonder crush thy rage, / And turn it to a motionless distraction!” (591), a passage discussed on p. 124 above. 30 “Toil” as the restless labor of a passionately vengeful spirit enlists Maria in the same work force as the wizard she addresses at the opening of the necromancy scene: “Stranger! I mourn and blush to see you here / On such employments!” (iii, i, 4–5). And see Ferdinand’s earlier account, to Osorio, of that same “stranger” who, feverishly active, has the same naturalist proclivities as the foundling child in the Foster-Mother’s Tale, A Stranger, that lives nigh, still picking Weeds, Now in the Swamp, now on the Walls of the ruin, Now clamb’ring, like a runaway Lunatic, Up to the summit of our highest Mount. I have watch’d him at it morning-tide and noon, Once in the Moonlight. Then I stood so near, I heard him mutt’ring o’er the plant. A Wizard! Some gaunt Slave, prowling out for dark employments.

(ii, i, 127–34)

31 The contexts range from arrest by the “rude grasp” of Francesco, the Inquisition’s martinet, to the incident Albert urgently recalls to Osorio when, in the final scene, he tries to embrace and dissuade his adamantly despairing brother from further acts of remorseless viciousness: That day, when thou didst leap from off the rock Into the Waves, and grasp’d thy sinking Brother, And bore him to the Strand, then, son of Velez! How sweet and musical the name of Albert – (v, ii, 106–09) A yet unwritten section of this is essay would pursue the implications of Albert’s, Osorio’s, and Ferdinand’s animism “between men” and what it is to be (homoerotically) haunted. 32 In Act ii, in his guise as a Moor, upon his first encounter with Osorio, Albert confides to Maurice, his confidant, his wish “to fall upon [Osorio’s] neck and weep in anguish!” (ii, ii, 47). See also Albert’s aside, in the sorcery scene, hearing Velez’s tale of his childhood: “My tears must not flow – / I must not clasp his knees, and cry, my Father!” (iii, i, 74) and his veiled appeal to

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Notes to pages 137–45

Osorio, earlier in the final scene, on behalf of “Albert”: “O Heaven! how he would fall upon thy neck / And weep forgiveness!” (v, ii, 113–14). 33 Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays by Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 138. 34 Osorio: Appendix: Annotations, i, i, 30–5, Collected Works, pp. 149–50. c h a p t e r 6 : l i s t e n i n g t o ‘ re m o r s e ’ : a s s um i n g man’s infirmities 1 Far and away the best recent reading of Remorse, emphasizing its context in British theatrical responses to Spanish politics in the early decades of the nineteenth century, is Diego Saglia’s “Spanish Stages: British Romantic Tragedy and the Theatrical Politics of Spain, 1808–1823,” European Romantic Review 19.1 (2008), pp. 19–32. 2 Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara. E. Rooke, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), vol ii, pp. 216–17. 3 Here I am indebted to J. C. C. Mays’s thorough and judicious interpretation of the evidence of various manuscripts and printed editions in Parts 1 and 2 of volume iii of Coleridge’s Poetical Works. As Mays cautiously puts the case: “I am inclined to think that the revisions [of Osorio] in 1800–1 and 1806–8 were piecemeal, and that they became extensive and systematic only after the play went into production. Such a supposition cannot be proven, but it fits the known facts.” (Part 2: Remorse, “Stage Version,” Introduction, p. 1028.) Unless otherwise indicated, further citations in my text and endnotes (referred to here after as “Mays”) are from the second printed edition, reproduced in Mays’s Part 2 as Remorse (Printed). 4 See Coleridge, Collected Letters, vol. iii, pp. 427–28, to John Rickman, 25 Jan 1813; p. 432, to R. Southey, 8 [9] Feb 1813; and vol. v, p. 179, to Thomas Cromwell, 30 Sept 1821. 5 Mays, pp. 1068 and 1114. See also S. T. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), Vol. i, pp. 63–64. 6 Catherine Burroughs, commenting on Joanna Baillie’s theorizing of drama in the three prefaces published between 1798 and 1812 in the ongoing editions of Plays on the Passions, calls particular attention to Baillie’s interest in the effects, vocal and gestural, of “the solitary musing of a perturbed mind,” to be heard, or overheard, in the intimate space of the closet, emphasizing especially such effects as mutterings, pauses, starts, rapid and abrupt transitions, effects that “scorn all harmony of measured verse, all method and order of relation.” It’s from Baillie’s 1812 edition that my epigraph for this chapter comes. Catherine Burroughs, “Joanna Baillie’s Prefaces to Plays on the Passions,” in Re-visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 274–96. In this context it’s significant that Wordsworth on June 4, 1812, wrote to his wife Mary about Coleridge: “I have seen

Notes to pages 145–47

7

8

9 10

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nothing lately of the Montagu’s – and shall not see much more of Coleridge – but he dines here tomorrow with Sergeant Rough and Christr. He dined also here on Tuesday with Joanna Baillie. He does not talk of Keswick and Grasmere.” Darlington, ed., Love Letters, p. 232. Editorial commentary to Remorse (Stage Version) iii, ii, 89–95, Mays, pp. 1110–11. As Mays notes (p. 1031), Coleridge, in a letter to Thomas Poole in Nether Stowey (Feb 13, 1813), lamented that “Nature has denied [Poor Rae] Person & all volume & depth of Voice.” Assuming that the manuscript submitted to James Larpent, the Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner, on January 5 – two weeks prior to the scheduled opening – reliably reflects ongoing changes to January 1, when the play moved from the green room to onstage rehearsals, that push gathered momentum sometime in the last three weeks onstage before the actual opening performance on January 23. See Mays, “Introduction,” pp. 1036–40. The scene was not included in the copy submitted to the Examiner on January 5. See Mays, Appendix A, pp. 1136ff, especially 1165–71. “Fancy” figures prominently in Remorse, in Teresa’s efforts to solace herself with dreams of Alvar’s return or his survival despite Ordonio’s claims that he was drowned: i, ii, 25–29: “If it be wretched / To watch some bark, and fancy Alvar there, / To go through each minutest circumstance / Of the blest meeting, and to frame adventures / Most terrible and strange, and hear him tell them . . .”; or i, ii, 284–85 (to the Moorish stranger): “From morn to night I am myself a dreamer, / And slight things bring on me the idle mood!”; and i, ii, 313 (in response to Alhadra’s question to Alvar: “And you dreamt all this?”) Teresa says, “My soul is full of visions all as wild!”; and i, ii, 317–20 (to Alvar): “Your mien is noble, and I own, perplex’d me / With obscure memory of something past, / Which still escaped my efforts, or presented / Tricks of a fancy pampered with long wishing”; and iii, i, 23–27 (in response to Ordonio’s “Believe you then no preternatural influence? / Believe you not that spirits throng among us?”), she says, “Say rather that I have imagin’d it / A possible thing: and it has sooth’d my soul / As other fancies have; but ne’er has seduced me / To traffic with that black and frenzied hope / That the dead hear the voice of witch or wizard.” And in iii, ii, 23, when, in response to Valdez’s “He is no more!” Teresa says, “O sorrow! That a Father’s Voice should say this, / A Father’s Heart believe it!” Valdez then replies, “A worse sorrow / Are Fancy’s wild Hopes to a heart despairing,” drawing her reply iii, ii, 28–31: “Even so that voice, Lord Valdez! / Which whispers to my soul, tho’ haply varied / By many a Fancy, many a wishful Hope, / Speaks yet the Truth: and Alvar lives for me!” Later in that scene, Valdez innocently praises Ordonio for his inspiration in using the sorcery painting “to remove the doubts of wild Teresa – by fancies quelling fancies!” (iii, ii, 92–93). It’s tempting to imagine that the thick incidence of “fancy” associated with Teresa in Remorse may have influenced Mary Shelley’s composition in July (?) 1819 of the early draft, called Fields of Fancy, of what later that year became Mathilda. Though that draft has its more obvious resonance with Mary

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Notes to pages 148–51

Wollstonecraft’s Cave of Fancy, both Mary and Percy were reading Remorse in the summer of 1814(?) in the Alps, and there’s evidence that Percy himself had Remorse nearby when he set about composing The Cenci in July and August 1819. On Fields of Fancy and Wollstonecraft’s Cave of Fancy, see Julie Carlson’s England’s First Family of Letters: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). 11 Valdez’s “wisely wert thou prompted” – the second of four occurrences of that theatrical idiom – suggests Coleridge’s fanciful linkage of the voice of the offstage prompter, uttering sotto voce the author’s will, and the guiding voice of the interior spirit. 12 Teresa’s visual figure here pointedly echoes – for an audience with keen ears – the words Alvar speaks for his servant Zulimez’s ears in the play’s new opening scene on “the seashore of the coast of Granada,” when he recalls, years before, parting at dawn on the same shore, from his betrothed Teresa: We were alone: the purple hue of dawn, Fell from the kindling east aslant upon us, And blending with the blushes on her cheek Suffus’d the tear-drops there with rosy light. There seem’d a glory round us, and Teresa (i, i, 50–55) The angel of the vision!

13

14

15 16

17

The resonance there with the ending of Coleridge’s meditative poem, “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” (“the mighty orb’s dilated glory”), also summons Wordsworth’s sense in the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” of departed glory. That Alvar, designing the assassination painting with the aim of probing Teresa’s conscience, included as a detail the portrait of her around his neck, knowing that he, in surrendering the portrait as part of his bargain with the assassins, was breaking his vow to her, reinforces the sense of Coleridge’s genius for dramatic nuance. Heard here is resonance with other bendings, Teresa’s to Valdez, “These were my Alvar’s lessons, and whene’er / I bend me o’er his portrait, I repeat them” (iv, ii, 36–7), culminating in the stage direction “Alvar and Teresa bend over the body of Ordonio” at the end (v, i, 264). i, ii, 18–50. “The goodly face of nature / Hath one disfeaturing stain the less upon it.” – The diction here gestures in anticipation toward the still disguised Alvar’s dark words to Teresa in Act v: “I can endure no more. The Moorish sorcerer / Exists but in the stain upon his face” (v, i, 81–2). And Ordonio’s dismissive “like a dream” recalls Teresa’s far other response in Act i on the seashore to the Moorish Stranger’s tale of his dream. Compare/contrast this with Mortimer’s deliberate “confession” (misrepresenting his agency) to Matilda: “I am the murderer of thy father” – and, in Shelley’s The Cenci, Beatrice’s denial of her role as parricide: “I am not the murderer of my father – but the instrument that has murdered the fiend they

Notes to pages 151–56

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19

20

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22 23 24

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call my father.” Coleridge’s intense interest in bringing, via Remorse, delicate effects of voice to Drury Lane – especially the subtleties of voice Drury Lane audiences were encouraged by spectacles to be so indifferent to – reflects an imagining of the domain of drama akin to Joanna Baillie’s. There might be a telling linkage between the investment he has in dramatizing the roles Alvar’s “dream” and Teresa’s fancies play in resisting the dominating tones associated in the plot with the proud oppressive voice assumed by Ordonio, the voice that denies the very impulses associated with the moment when he “starts.” The wording and punctuation of the stage direction here varies, as Mays notes, from edition to edition; its meaning may confuse a modern reader; but Coleridge’s intent can only be “Startled, Teresa stops, listening,” i.e., that at some point during this speech Teresa begins deliberately to overhear Ordonio’s words. Note the crucial “if ”: if she can see proof of Alvar’s death-site, then despair about a living reunion would overwhelm her fancies. For Julie Carlson’s fine argument about “the transformations [Osorio’s] Maria undergoes in becoming Teresa” and the influence of Coleridge’s translation of Schiller’s Wallenstein trilogy in modifying his earlier tendencies to endorse idealization of femininity by showcasing the commanding activity of female characters, see In the Theatre of Romanticism, pp. 116–22. No reader of Remorse since that mid-February 1813 Drury Lane audience has registered the crucial dramaturgy of this moment. Readers should also recall that Ordonio not only has seen the rock and fir-grove represented as the incriminating venue in the sorcerer’s assassination painting, but had still earlier, in the second act, heard the same words in Isidore’s slyly misleading narrative of the assassination (when he gulls Ordonio into believing the murder has been carried out: ‘“We met him in the very place you mentioned, / Hard by a grove of firs” [ii, i, 95–6]). The elaborate complexity of this new scene, culminating in the moment of confrontation between Ordonio and Teresa, might be compared with the scene in The Borderers when Mortimer “confesses,” by claiming – falsely, and in particularly brutal words calculated to kill Matilda and thus put her out of her misery – his own deliberate agency in the terrible death of her father Herbert. Stephen Booth’s opening chapter in King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy probes similar onstage and audience responses. The lines also appeared, as Mays notes, p. 1310, “in a slightly different form under the heading The Dungeon in Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800.” With Teresa’s agitated state and fainting fit here, see Coleridge’s notes from June 1810 when he “began to read the deeply interesting Life & Works of Sta Teresa,” clearly the inspiration for Maria’s new name in Remorse. The saint’s sensibility fascinated him, fueling further his interest in states of dreaming and semi-consciousness: “This frame of such exquisite sensibility by nature & by education shaken & ruined by the violence done to her nature by her

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26

27

28 29

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Notes to pages 158–59

obstinate resolve to become a nun against her own and against her Father’s Will . . . how almost impossible it was, that a young Spanish Maiden so innocent, & so fever-kindled by disease & its occasions, & thus so well furnished with the requisite images & preconceptions, should not mistake, & often, the less painful and in such a frame the sometimes pleasurable approaches to bodily Deliquium, and her imperfect Fainting-fits for divine Transports, & momentary Union with God – especially if with a thoughtful yet pure psychology you join the force of suppressed Instincts stirring in the heart & bodily frame, of a mind unconscious of their nature/ and these in the keenly-sensitive body, in the innocent and loving Soul of a Teresa, with ‘all her Thirsts, and Lives, and Deaths of Love.’” The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), vol. iii, Text, entry 3911, f58–f59v, passim. Hereafter cited as CNB. Passages from the companion volumes with Coburn’s notes will be cited as CNBn. Teresa’s “Dids’t thou murder him . . . I do forgive thee, and may Heaven forgive thee!” performs what only he and the Grasmere readers of the volume sent to Sara might hear: an echo of Matilda’s distraught question to Mortimer, “Did you murder him?” in the final scene of The Borderers, followed, after she “sinks senseless on the ground ” by Mortimer’s “she will wake and she will weep for me / And say no blame was mine” (v, iii, 165 and 176–77). How conscious might Coleridge have been of associations of necklaces and jewelry in general with female vanity and repressed female desire? For thoughtful discussion of such associations in the Victorian period, see Jill L. Matus, “Saint Teresa, Hysteria, and Middlemarch,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1.2 (1990), pp. 224–25. Teresa’s approach to recognizing the majestic Moor as Alvar incorporates lines transposed from the Act iii sorcery scene in Osorio, a substantial dramatic shift from Maria’s trajectory in that earlier version. Alvar’s language here, “A brief, brief while / Conceal thyself . . . But a brief while retire into the darkness” (v, i, 90–91, 101), aligns this moment dramatically with the earlier moments when Teresa has withdrawn. “Publication” meant that among those who applauded were people who, having read the play, came to Drury Lane anticipating the moment. See Mays, “Introduction,” pp. 1233–34. There were two editions of Remorse printed while the play was in production, the first by January 25, the second by February 17. Coleridge sent copies of each edition to Southey; he sent an annotated copy of the second edition, dated February 20, to Sara Hutchinson. CNB 3913: “Dear Book! Now my only Confidant, my only faithful Friend. – What I lately began to do out of prudence, I now do with pleasure, as an act of affection & the sacred shame of a fond affection – lock it up carefully, and never write in it but when alone!” For a thoughtful account of Coleridge’s first acquaintance with Sara Hutchinson, see Frances Wilson, The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), pp. 122–24.

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31 CNB 3915. 32 CNB 3996. This entry dates from the onset of the crisis brought on by Coleridge’s sense of abandonment by Wordsworth in late October 1810. See pp. 162–63 above and n. 42. 33 Compare CNB 3547: “Yes! Yes! I knew the horrid phantasm to be a mere phantasm: and yet what anguish, what gnawings of despair, what throbbings and lancinations of positive Jealousy! – even to this day the undying worm of distempered Sleep or morbid Day-dreams – Again – [in cipher: a mother of my children] – how utterly improbable dared I hope it! How impossible for me (most pure indeed are my heart & fancy from such a thought) even to think of it, much less desire it! And yet at the encouraging prospect of emancipation health & activity of mind & body, worthy of the unutterably [in cipher: dear one], it is felt within me like an ordinance of adamantine Destiny!” 34 See Richard Holmes’s overview of Coleridge’s situation upon his return from Malta: Over the next two years, Coleridge would try to reestablish himself as a professional man of letters, with a steady determination that was often disguised by the lurid chaos of his emotional entanglements and the regular descents into opium. His struggles to separate from his wife, to look after his children, to resolve his relationship with Asra, and above all to find a way of living, or not living, within the overpowering sphere of Wordsworth’s magnetic influence, would consume much of his energies. Frequently they would appear to reduce him to a kind of passive despair, a mere hulk upon the stream of circumstance, “rudderless and hopeless” as he so often said himself, washed from one temporary harbour to the next. But in reality the struggle and the determination always continued. The record of it still bursts out of his Notebooks, letters and poetry. Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804–1834 (New York: Pantheon, 2003), p. 65.

35 Holmes, Darker Reflections, pp. 117–40. 36 William and Dorothy Wordsworth, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, arranged and ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd edn, revised by Mary Moorman, 8 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967–88), vol. ii, part i, p. 244. Wordsworth’s diction (“poison,” “wildest fancies,” “recoiled”) indicates how much the language of Osorio and its eventual successor Remorse reflected the everyday discourse of Grasmere and Keswick. 37 See CNB 2975, 2998, 3134, 3138, 3303, 3304, 3555, and 3708. Whatever (“nightmair”?) Coleridge “saw” or hallucinated at Coleorton that morning continued to surface in his memory during times of stress over the next five years. See Holmes, Darker Reflections, pp. 83–4 and 138–41. (Unfortunately, the reference notes in this part of Chapter 3 of the Holmes biography are misnumbered.) 38 The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, p. 240. 39 For a probing account of the strains between Coleridge and Asra during the years following his return from Malta, see Holmes, Darker Reflections, pp. 107–353 passim. On the matter of the triangulation, see especially pp. 111–13, in the context of Coleridge’s four-week stay in Bristol with

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Notes to pages 162–64 John Morgan, his wife Mary, and her sister Charlotte. See also CNB passim, e.g. 3386, cited Holmes, Darker Reflections, p. 149: “If [Asra] still felt ‘a real preference of Love’ for himself, how could he explain ‘her evidently greater pleasure in gazing on’ his friend?” In Kathleen Coburn’s words, “Sara, fatigued beyond endurance with transcribing The Friend and probably with conflicts and pressures in the Allan Bank household, had gone to Wales for a rest” (CNB 3995n). On April 12, 1810, five weeks after she had left for Wales, Dorothy wrote to her friend Catherine Clarkson a scathing account of what had precipitated the decision to leave: “Our gladness [that she is not here] proceeds from a different cause. [Coleridge] harassed and agitated her mind continuously, and we saw that he was doing her health perpetual injury. I tell you this, that you may no longer lament her departure.” Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, vol. ii, part i, p. 398. CNB 3912. “M” and “Δ” refer to Mary Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth. Soon after, two more entries confide suicidal fantasies: e.g., CNB 3915: “Should I cease to Pwrite [in Greek: “the names, hers and mine, at the head”] of the pages, if APA were indeed S__h M___se?? No need – ” CNB 3997. See Earle Leslie Griggs’s “re´sume´” of the circumstances, letters, and conversations relating to what Montagu said. Coleridge, Collected Letters, vol. iii, pp. 296–97. Ibid., p. 389. Walter Jackson Bate, Coleridge (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 125. Edith J. Morley, ed., Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, (London: J. M. Dent, 1938), vol. i, p. 71. Ibid, p. 68. On March 10, Clarkson, having heard from Dorothy Wordsworth about the crisis with Coleridge, wrote to Robinson about Coleridge’s ill treatment of the Wordsworths, lamenting that he had not yet sent a copy [of Remorse ] to William and Dorothy; a second letter, on March 23, included these remarks: “By the by the first copy of the Play was sent to Southey – written upon with his own hand & none for Grasmere. – However he has sent copies since – when all was right amongst them they wd have had no unpleasant feeling from this circumstance.” Ibid., pp. 71, 73. For an account of Coleridge’s time in the Lake District, staying with his family and the Southeys at Greta Hall, see Holmes, Darker Reflections, pp. 288–97. Darlington, ed., Love Letters, pp. 148, 125, 161–63. Ibid., p. 161. Two days earlier, to Mary: “[T]he Country is in a most awful state. The Monster is to be executed on Monday Morning I hope to procure, by means of the Poet Bowles a stand upon The top of Westminster Abbey whence I may see the Execution without risk or danger. It takes place on Monday Morning. I long to be with you for this London life does not agree with me because If I am ever thrown out I cannot find leisure to recover.” Ibid., p. 158. One wonders whether, in his yearning for leisure during that feverish week of summary public justice and efforts through Bowles for a

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ticket to the execution, Wordsworth recalled lines from the last stanza of Adventures on Salisbury Plain, a poem written (he said in 1795) “partly to expose the vices of the penal law and the calamities of war as they affect individuals.” They left him on high in iron case, And dissolute men, unthinking and untaught, Planted their festive booths beneath his face; And to that spot, which idle thousands sought, Women and children were by fathers brought. 49 David Erdman notes that Coleridge was that paper’s “mainstay for important obituaries.” Coleridge, Essays on His Times, vol. ii, p. 347. 50 Ibid., pp. 347–8. 51 Love Letters, p. 162. 52 The Borderers (1799), ii, iii, 388–401. 53 Thomas Sadler, ed., The Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, 2 vols. in 1 (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1877), vol. ii, p. 247. 54 Love Letters, p. 163 55 Holmes, Darker Reflections, p. 334. 56 Coleridge, Collected Letters, vol. iii, p. 425. 57 Julie Carlson, citing the occurrence in Coleridge’s Zapolya of the phrase “act & appear,” comments: 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. 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 “impose their preconceptions on the world without.” (Biographia Literaria, vol. i, p. 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 and reality, illusion and delusion, Coleridge’s plays thematize the subject of theatre in the process of analyzing subjectivity as theatre. 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 plays censure on one level what they applaud on another – doubling, illusion, loss of self in the hauntings of self. (In the Theatre of Romanticism, pp. 108–9)

58 There is no surviving indication of how Asra or the household at Allen Bank received the SH copy. It’s possible – even probable – that it was read but not closely, its annotations skimmed but not closely remarked or brooded upon. Not that, in other circumstances, the reception of the gift might have been

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more reflective and considered, but that the Wordsworth household was still distracted from such ordinary possibilities by its severe abjection in grief over the loss, within six months, of the two children, Catherine to a convulsive nervous disorder and Thomas to measles. CNB 3911. CNB 3304, dated, perhaps retrospectively, as the occasion of these complaints. On the matter of Wordsworth’s prudence, the entry concludes: “O human Nature! – I tremble, lest my own tenderness of Heart, my own disinterested Enthusiasm for others, and eager Spirit of Self-sacrifice, should be owing almost wholly to my being & having ever been, an unfortunate unhappy Man.” See Holmes’s account, Darker Reflections, pp. 83–84, of the anguished notebook entries (CNB 2975, 3148, 3328, 4537) remembering what Coleridge (may merely have) imagined seeing that late December morning at Coleorton. Mays, p. 1139; see also pp. 1028–29. CNB 3911. The text in brackets is Kathleen Coburn’s translation of what she calls Coleridge’s “frequently repeated” Greek phrasing. CNB 3996. Is it critical extravagance to hear in these words a resonance – or resemblance – to the opening lines of Alvar’s account of his “frightful” seashore dream? I dreamt I had a friend, on whom I leant With blindest trust, and a betrothed maid, Whom I was wont to call not mine but me : For mine own self seem’d nothing, lacking her. (i, ii, 271–74, emphasis added)

64 CNB 3911n. (italics added) 65 CNB 3912, 3914. 66 Kathleen Coburn remarks that “Teresa became the name in Remorse of the character Maria in Osorio, a portrait of a ‘lone enthusiast’ and lover of marvels he had drawn as long ago as 1797. No wonder the confirmation of it now fascinated him when he read St Teresa’s Works” (CNB 3907n). In this regard, aligning Remorse’s Teresa with her historical Spanish namesake as represented in the Life and Works illuminates the dramatic aspect of her role in the tragedy, at least with regard to her problematic dependence on her fancies in response to the comparably problematic pressures – laid upon her by her father and Ordonio – to abandon her hope for Alvar. On the question of the congruity between Asra and Teresa, see Mays’s suggestive note on the lines in Alvar’s speech in Remorse, i, i, 54–55, recalling to Zulimez the seashore betrothal: “There seem’d a glory round us, and Teresa / The angel of the vision!” Noting the coincidence between these lines and lines 42–43 of “To William Wordsworth,” describing Hope, “herself a glory to behold, / The Angel of the vision,” Mays comments, “The coincidence might, in some complicated deep-rooted way, suggest that the struggle between Alvar and Ordonio over Teresa came to reflect C’s sense of rivalry with WW for the affections of SH at the time he revised the play following his return from

Notes to pages 172–76

67 68

69 70

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Malta” (Mays, p. 1241). His abandonment by SH and the rupture with WW in 1810 deeply aggravated the agony of that rivalry. CNB 3911. In the “Preface” to Remorse, which was, according to Mays (p. 1053), probably written in late January 1813, Coleridge recalls, after briefly summarizing the fate of Osorio, that “in the close of last year I was advised to present the Tragedy once more to the Theatre. Accordingly having altered the names, I ventured to address a letter to Mr. Whitbread.” My guess is that he may have imagined “Ordonio” as early as 1810, when, in conjunction with his falling out with Wordsworth and his distress over Sara Hutchinson’s abandoning him, he changed Maria’s name to Teresa. CNB 2928n. Had he retained the Osorio surname, Ordonio Velez might have seemed, to Grasmere and some other readers, too obvious a satiric version of Wordsworth. It’s worth pointing out, of course, that Valdez was the name used in one of Coleridge’s sources, Robert Watson’s The History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain (2 vols., 1774) – see Osorio “Introduction,” Poetical Works, vol. iii, part i, p. 53. For Coleridge’s readiness to play fast and loose with Spanish pseudonyms, see his publication in The Courier on Dec 10, 1807, of a dream vision poem, “The Two Sisters, A Wanderer’s Farewell,” by “Siesti” (stirring “Sisters,” “Siesta,” and “C., S. T.”). CNB 3925. See v, i, 254. Coleridge, Lectures, vol. i, p. 64. CNB 3148. Cf. above, note 62: Whom I was wont to call not mine but me : For mine own self seem’d nothing, lacking her.

74 CNB 3911. 75 Coleridge, Lectures, vol. i, p. 529. E. H. Coleridge copied this passage from material from a notebook, now lost, into a notebook of his own now in the Victoria College Library, University of Toronto, MS BT 8 f47. There is no evidence in reports of Lecture 2, devoted to Macbeth, that this material was actually delivered. See Coleridge, Lectures, vol. i, pp. 524–33. 76 On the motif of being “o’erbalanced,” see CNB 3907: “[T]o prove with a pen of fire the fusion of Love, and Piety, melting down and blending into transient harmony the most intractable and discordant materials/Read Sta Teresa’s Life & Tracts . . . Not what may be drawn, but what is – determines on the character of the Individual – not what has been in particular instances and under antidote & over-balances particular, but what would naturally follow, considering the thing per se or Lord of the Ascendant, must determine the character of a doctrine.” Here “over-balances particular” seem aligned with Isidore’s and Teresa’s momentary, particular impulses toward self-destruction: in other words a momentarily precarious but not fatally damning impulse when seen in the context of the prevailing tendencies of the Will.

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77 As Ordonio announces in soliloquy at the close of the rehearsal moment scene his plan is to silence Isidore by disappearing him in the cavern and then to poison the sorcerer, leaving his body, with Teresa’s portrait, so that his death looks like a suicide, the coward’s avoidance of the Inquisition’s torture: Isidore safe and silent, and the portrait Found on the wizard----he, belike, self-poison’d To escape the crueller flames------My soul shouts triumph! The mine is undermin’d! Blood! Blood! Blood! (iii, ii, 172–75) 78 The language of this stage direction – and of the ensuing Act v action leading to Ordonio’s surrender to Alhadra’s vengeance – recalls the moment, in Isidore’s Act ii narrative to Ordonio about the assassination attempt, when, after the intended victim had identified himself as Ordonio’s brother, Isidore had said, in response, (if that indeed I said it, And that no Spirit made my tongue it’s organ,) That woman is dishonor’d by that brother, And he the man who sent us to destroy you. He drove a thrust at me in rage. I told him, He wore her portrait round his neck. – He look’d As he had been made of the rock that propt his back – Aye, just as you look now – only less ghastly! At length recovering from his trance, he threw His sword away, and bade us take his life, (ii, i, 108–18) It was not worth his keeping. 79 In the final scene of Act iv, Alhadra’s narrative, to her Morescoe followers, of how she discovered her husband’s death by Ordonio’s hand, involves a dramaturgy of overhearing that, with precise irony, echoes Isidore’s narrative in Act ii, when he described to Ordonio how he had “followed . . . at distance” the stranger (the disguised Alvar) and had “Stoln after him unnoticed.” Alhadra’s tale begins with her account of her husband’s rising at night to journey to the cavern (“This night your chieftain arm’d himself, / And hurried from me. But I follow’d him / At distance” [iv, iii, 52–54]); arrived in the cavern, at the edge of the chasm into which Ordonio hurl’d him, she ends with a strain of “listenings” to Isidore’s dying groans: O Heaven! I heard a groan, and follow’d it; And yet another groan, which guided me Into a strange recess – and there was light, A hideous light! his torch lay on the ground; Its flame burnt dimly o’er a chasm’s brink. I spake: and whilst I spake, a feeble groan Came from that chasm! it was his last! his death-groan! . . . I stood in unimaginable trance

Notes to pages 177–83 And agony that cannot be remember’d, Listening with horrid hope to hear a groan! But I had heard his last; my husband’s death-groan!

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(iv, iii, 70–81)

80 Sara Hutchinson, The Letters of Sara Hutchinson, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 1954, pp. 45–6. 81 CNB 3304.

c h a pt e r 7 : r e a d i n g s h e l l e y ’ s d e l i c a c y 1 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Harry Buxton Forman, reissue with the notes of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (London: Reeves and Turner, 1882). 2 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), vol. ii, p. 102. 3 Leigh Hunt’s three-part review of The Revolt of Islam, in consecutive issues of The Examiner on the eve of the Shelleys’ and Claire Clairmont’s departure for Italy in March 1818, included – after citing Shelley’s remarks about the “‘moral ruin’ of some eminent spirits among us” – attacks on “the Lake School, as they are called” for being “as dogmatic in their despair as they used to be in their hope.” The Romantics Reviewed, ed. Donald H. Reiman (New York: Garland, 1972), vol. i, pp. 433–37. Given Hunt’s close association with the Shelleys in previous months, there’s no doubt that the Examiner comments reflect views about Wordsworth and Southey they shared. Shelley wrote to Thomas Love Peacock from Italy in July 1818: “The news of the elections, especially that of the metropolis, is highly inspiriting. I received a letter, of two days’ later date, with yours which announced the unfortunate termination of that of Westmoreland. I wish you had sent me some of the overflowing villany [sic] of those apostates. What a beastly and pitiful wretch that Wordsworth! That such a man should be such a poet! I can compare him with no one but Simonides, that flatterer of the Sicilian tyrants, and at the same time the most natural and tender of lyric poets.” Letters, vol. ii, p. 26. 4 Ibid., p. 102. The manuscript source, the Relation, had been copied and translated by Mary in 1818. 5 Shelley saw the Quarterly in October 1818, while visiting Byron in Venice. There, in addition to what he’d heard from Peacock earlier, he read about himself as “a man, who perverts his ingenuity and knowledge to the attacking of all that is ancient and venerable in our civil and religious institutions”; about his marital infidelity and – apparently in an allusion to Laon and Cythna – about his belief in brother–sister incest. The Quarterly also cited at length the incident reports of which had evidently circulated with some notoriety: when, after experiencing the sublime glories of the Alpine heights (with Mary and Claire Clairmont) in 1816, Shelley had signed various lodging registers in makeshift Greek, as “democrat, philanthropist, atheist” and

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indicating that their destination was in “Hell.” Romantics Reviewed, vol. ii, pp. 759–60. About Southey, Byron wrote to John Cam Hobhouse on November 11, 1818, “The Son of a Bitch on his return from Switzerland two years ago – said that Shelley and I ‘had formed a League of Incest and practiced our precepts with &c.’ – he lied like a rascal – for they were not Sisters – one being Godwin’s daughter by Mary Wollstonecraft – and the other the daughter of the present Mrs. G[odwin] by a former husband” George Gordon Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (London: John Murray, 1973), vol. xi, p. 76. 6 Hunt’s third Examiner review of the Revolt of Islam (see note 3) concluded with a dire warning and strenuous counsel to Shelley: Mr. Shelley’s defects as a poet are obscurity, inartificial and yet not natural economy, violation of costume, and too great a sameness and gratuitousness of image and metaphor, and of image and metaphor too drawn from the elements, particularly the sea. The book is full of humanity; and yet it certainly does not go the best way to work of appealing to it, because it does not appeal to it through the medium of it’s common knowledges. It is for this reason that we must say something, which we would willingly leave unsaid, both from admiration of Mr. Shelley’s genius and love of his benevolence; and this is, that the work cannot possibly become popular. It may set others thinking and writing, and we have no doubt will do so; and those who can understand and relish it, will relish it exceedingly; but the author must forget his metaphysics and sea-sides a little more in his future works, and give full effect to that nice knowledge of men and things which he otherwise really possesses to an extraordinary degree. We have no doubt he is destined to be one of the leading spirits of his age, and indeed has already fallen into his place as such; but however resolute as to his object, he will only be doing it justice to take the most effectual means in his power to forward it.

Hunt’s Examiner prescription – and its public embrace of Shelley – may well have triggered the hostility of the anonymous Quarterly author, identified by Donald Reiman as John Taylor Coleridge. Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers (New York: Garland, 1972), part C, vol. ii, p. 770. 7 “Popular” did not for Shelley convey a sense of trivial purpose. He wrote on August 15, 1819, to Hunt that, in the wake of thinking Prometheus Unbound was “finished,” he was “on the eve of completing another work, totally different from any thing you might conjecture that I should write; of a more popular kind; &, if any thing of mine could deserve attention, of higher claims” Letters, vol. ii, p. 108. The idea of writing for a more “popular” audience surfaced again, in the immediate wake of the Peterloo massacre, in Shelley’s unsuccessful September attempt to persuade Hunt to publish “The Mask of Anarchy” in the Examiner. Shelley wrote on May 1, 1820 – again to Hunt – asking “if you know of any bookseller who would like to publish a little volume of popular songs wholly political, & destined to awaken & direct the imagination of the reformers. I see you smile but answer my question.” Ibid., p. 191.

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8 On Beatrice’s mistaken sense of herself as an instrument of “Almighty God,” see the argument in A Defence of Poetry about instruments: Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be “the expression of the Imagination”: and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an everchanging wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody. But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Freistat (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2002), p. 511. (Hereafter cited as SP&P.) See also the discussion of instruments in “On Life” (SP&P, p. 507) and, of course, Stuart Curran’s fine discussion of that passage (“Shelley and the End(s) of Ideology,” ibid., p. 604), the point being the difference between a passive instrument and active agent. Curran (ibid. pp. 604–5) cites William Keach’s Shelley’s Style, on Shelley’s “distrust of language . . . rooted in the poet’s obsession with signs as the instruments of ideology.” 9 Stuart Curran also sees Count Cenci as suicidal, though he stops short of arguing that Beatrice is his instrument: “Ultimately and profoundly, as his actions at the banquet suggest, Cenci is suicidal.” He does, however, refer to Beatrice as “an instrument of God’s justice on earth.” Shelley’s Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 86, 94. Ann McWhir sees Cenci as “the arch-conspirator in his own death, making all things work through his plot to poison Beatrice’s soul and will . . . This is close to being a summary of what happens in the rest of the play, as if Cenci himself were constructing the plot as co-author as well as demonic manipulator.” “The Light and the Knife: Ab/Using Language in The Cenci,” Keats-Shelley Journal 38 (1989), pp. 152–53. More recently, Marc Redfield also argues that “in The Cenci paternal power is also bound up with self-destruction . . . [E]ach evil deed . . . represents a modest step toward the dream of self-annihilation that fuels his villainy.” The Politics of Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 165. 10 In his powerfully elaborated sense of Shelley’s “process” – certainly the most thoroughgoing conceptual thesis about the development of Shelley’s oeuvre – Jerrold Hogle places consistent emphasis not only on what he sees, psychoanalytically, in Beatrice’s resistance to her father’s villainy, as a transferential “mirroring,” but also, again and again, on her consciously choosing, among other options, that (pernicious?) response. “There can be no question that her words and her actions frequently summon to the reader’s mind those of her villainous father.” Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 147–62. Mark Canuel’s analysis of Beatrice’s role finds her innocence compromised

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14 15

16

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by her deviousness and duplicity. Citing Cenci v, ii, 93–101, he argues that “Time after time, her attempts to excuse herself only look like selfincrimination . . . Beatrice has suddenly described her ‘nature’ differently: not, this time, as guileless and innocent, but with a surfeit of cunning that might have led her to cover up evidence of her guilt.” Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 254–55. SP&P, p. 142. Ibid., p. 144. Shelley’s theatrical metaphor (“the mask and mantle in which circumstances clothed her for her impersonation on the scene of the world”) may well have been designed to ward off the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain. “Circumstances” – such as the Pentridge incident in November 1817 when three working-class rebels were hanged and beheaded – involving fears of imminent political upheaval should not be invoked to bar the licensing of performance at Covent Garden of a play designed to inculcate in the audience a thoughtful appreciation of the philosophical urgency of reform in order to forestall the violence of revolution. Shelley was hardly ignorant of how frequently in the recent past such political “circumstances” had been cited as the justification for banning plays at Covent Garden and Drury Lane. For the complexities of Shelley’s radicalism, involving some aristocratic as well as agrarian biases, see Donald Reiman, “Shelley as Agrarian Reactionary,” SP&P, pp. 589–99. Reiman, Romantics Reviewed, part C, vol. i, pp. 431–32. Underscored words also occur, sometimes more than once, in “Tintern Abbey,” cited below, note 17; articles, conjunctions, and state-of-being and auxiliary verbs are not included. As G. Kim Blank has argued, the first distinct evidence of Shelley’s explicit poetic engagement with Wordsworth’s poems, and especially “Tintern Abbey,” dates from early 1812, while visiting Southey at Greta Hall in Keswick, in entries in the Esdaile notebook, where Shelley both transcribed and, in blank verse compositions of his own, imitated Wordsworthian diction, cadences, and moods. His more substantial engagement with Wordsworth’s verse came later in 1812 under the influence of his correspondence with Godwin, when Shelley began ordering books from London booksellers, including the 1802 Lyrical Ballads and the 1807 Poems. Wordsworth’s Influence on Shelley: A Study of Poetic Authority (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 28–44. There are, nevertheless, among the cadences, some audible outcroppings of words (as indicated in italic type) in these lines from “Tintern Abbey”: Though absent long, These forms of beauty have not been to me, As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din

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Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration . . . Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burden of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world Is lightened – that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on . . . And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again; While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with the pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years . . . I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite: a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, or any interest (Lines 23–84, passim; emphases added) Unborrowed from the eye. 18 The full force of Shelley’s subtle satire on Wordsworth’s language in “Tintern Abbey” depends in part on insistent verbal echoes (“wildly”) found chiefly in The Cenci ’s stage directions, echoes therefore unavailable to those in a theater audience who had not read the play beforehand. Shelley took pains in Italy to have 250 copies of his play prepared for shipping to London, as he wrote to Peacock, in the “belief that the seeing it in print wd. enable the people at the theatre to judge more easily.” The copies went to Charles Ollier, his bookseller, in time to market, in the event of acceptance by Covent Garden, for opening-night audiences, including, one might emphasize, readers who might also be reviewers, such as the Quarterly’s, who with officious reprobation presumed to lecture Shelley for his imitation of Wordsworthian discourse in such works as The Revolt of Islam: Mr. Shelley is indeed an unsparing imitator; and he draws largely on the rich stores of another mountain poet, to whose religious mind it must be matter, we think, of

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Notes to pages 190–98 perpetual sorrow to see the philosophy which comes pure and holy from his pen, degraded and perverted, as it continually is, by this miserable crew of atheists or pantheists, who have just sense enough to abuse its terms, but neither heart nor principle to comprehend its import, or follow its application. Reiman, Romantics Reviewed, part C, vol. ii, p. 771.

One might say that his dedicatee, Leigh Hunt, whose Examiner specialized in theater reviews, was his ideal audience; that the satirist in Shelley – knowingly or not – wrote for an audience of the converted. His letter on October 15 to alert Ollier that the copies about to be sent were not to be opened, pending further instructions about its publication, includes a passage clearly calculated to deflect the nervous Ollier’s possible suspicions about its true contents: “Meanwhile, assure yourself that this work has no reference, direct or indirect, to politics, or religion, or personal satire, and that this precaution is merely literary” (emphasis added). Letters, vol. ii, pp. 119 and 127. Shelley no doubt smiled when he wrote that menu of disavowal. 19 Richard Cronin, Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), p. 118. 20 SP&P, p. 535 21 As James Bieri suggests, Shelley had read in the August 22 [1819] Examiner Leigh Hunt’s rousing editorial excoriating the Tory government as “these Men in Brazen Masks of Power” who led “thousands of human beings to slaughter and be slaughtered for the greater security of a corrupt Government.” Hunt concluded by quoting the infamous line by “a pathetic court poet,” Wordsworth, supporting Tory warmongering: “Carnage is God’s daughter,” a line Shelley parodied in his notebook:

22 23 24 25 26

A Poet of the finest water Says that Carnage is Gods daughter This poet lieth as I take Under an immense mistake As many a man before has done Who thinks his spouse’s child his own. Percy Bysshe Shelley, a Biography: Exile of Unfulfilled Renown, 1816–1822 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), p. 484. SP&P, p. 319. SP&P, p. 320, emphasis added. William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 276, emphases added. Shelley would have known this sonnet when it reappeared in Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) and Poems (1815). The ghastly fervor of Beatrice’s oath disavowing the thought of abandoning her stepmother can be seen as bound up with – and displacing – her own dread that she has been abandoned by God the Father. Barbara

Notes to pages 199–202

279

Charlesworth Gelpi’s splendid analysis of the motif of abandonment in Shelley’s imagining of his relation to his mother argues that, as the insecure eldest child, he experienced the threat of his mother’s betrayal (in producing other children, in taking the side of his father, in refusing to supply his infantile needs) as a powerful element in his psyche, driving him to preemptive gestures of betrayal and abandonment of her. Shelley’s Goddess : Maternity, Language, Subjectivity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 111ff. 27 In this context it’s worth recalling that Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin brought to her liaison with Shelley the burden of having been the child, the fatal gift from the father, whose birth occasioned her mother’s death. Years later Mary Shelley’s “Note on the Cenci” recollected that when “in Rome, in 1819, a friend put into our hands the old manuscript account of the story of the Cenci . . . Shelley’s imagination became strongly excited, and he urged the subject to me as one fitted for a tragedy.” Did Shelley in effect imagine for Mary the words she could not write or speak, that she had been the instrument of her mother’s death? 28 Hogle, Shelley’s Process, p. 150. 29 Mary Shelley, in her 1839 note, commenting on the passage in Shelley’s letter to Peacock in 1819 about his “peculiar delicacy” in treating what he called “incest in this shape,” cited his remark that “In the course of the play, he had never mentioned Cenci’s worst crime. Everyone knew what it must be, but it was never mentioned in words – the nearest allusion to it being that portion of Cenci’s [Act iv] curse beginning – ‘That, if she have a child,’ etc.” Mary herself, in the wake of Percy’s finishing The Cenci, wrote her own incest novel, Mathilda, where the climactic transgression by the father against his daughter has striking verbal affinities with the delicate language of Shelley’s play: [Her father] Do not urge me to your destruction. I am struck by the storm, rooted up, laid waste. One word I might speak and then you would be implicated in my destruction; yet that word is hovering on my lips. Oh! There is a fearful chasm, but I adjure you to beware . . . I was led by passion and drew him with frantic heedlessness into the abyss which he so fearfully avoided . . . I demand that fearful word; though it be as a flash of lightning to destroy me, speak it . . . [Her father] Now I have dashed myself from the top of the rock to the bottom! Now I have precipitated myself down the fearful chasm! . . . I was transported by violent emotion, and rising from his feet, at which I had thrown myself, I leant against a tree, wildly raising my eyes to heaven. He began to answer with violence: “Yes, yes, I hate you! You are my bane, my poison, my disgust! Oh! No!” And then his manner changed, and fixing his eyes on me with an expression that convulsed every nerve and member of my frame – “you are none of all these; you are my light, my only one, my life. – My daughter, I love you!” The last words died away in a hoarse whisper, but I heard them and sunk on the ground, covering my face and almost dead with excess of sickness and fear: a cold perspiration covered my forehead and I shivered in every limb –

280

Notes to pages 203–4 The Mary Shelley Reader: Containing Frankenstein, Mathilda, Tales and Stories, Essays and Reviews, and Letters, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 200–01.

It seems worth saying that in such moments the language of Matilda, when compared to that of The Cenci, falls short of giving the sort of “pleasure” Shelley claimed “arises from the poetry which exists in these tempestuous sufferings.” 30 See Stephen Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 151, and Terry Otten, The Deserted Stage: The Search for Dramatic Form in Nineteenth-Century England (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1972), pp. 20–24. 31 Camillo’s words resound when, in the next scene, Bernardo wakes Beatrice with the news that Lucretia and Giacomo, tortured on the rack, have confessed, and she responds: Ha! What was there to confess? They must have told some weak and wicked lie To flatter their tormentors. Have they said That they were guilty? O white innocence, That thou shouldst wear the mask of guilt to hide Thine awful and serenest countenance (v, iii, 21–27, emphasis added) From those who know thee not! What I have been calling the inflection such language prompts – what differentiates its representation of Beatrice from the discourse around Cenci’s patriarchal viciousness – may come clearer through its unmistakable affinities with the language invested in the discourse around the summit of Mont Blanc : Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky, Mont Blanc appears, – still, snowy, and serene – . . . The wilderness has a mysterious tongue Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild, So solemn, so serene, that man may be, But for such faith, with nature reconciled, Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood By all, but which the wise, and great, and good Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel . . . Mont Blanc yet gleams on high: – the power is there, The still and solemn power of many sights . . . Winds contend Silently there, and heap the snow with breath Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home The voiceless lightning in these solitudes Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods Over the snow. (SP&P, lines 60–61, 76–83, 134–139, emphases added)

Notes to pages 204–10

32 33

34 35

281

Beatrice’s white innocence, associated by such discourse with the uncanny signs of the Power flowing from beyond the sublime summit of Mont Blanc, does not then so much “mirror” – and therefore implicate her in – her father’s hideous “snowy white” aspect as repeal or transcend it. See, e.g., Curran, Shelley’s Cenci, pp. 108ff., and Hogle, Shelley’s Process, pp. 147–62. One exception to this overlooking of the significance of eyes in The Cenci is Young-Ok An’s essay “Beatrice’s Gaze Revisited: Anatomizing The Cenci,” Criticism 38 (Winter 1996), pp. 27–68. Jerrold Hogle and Stuart Curran also give substantial attention to ocular dynamics. See also Bieri Percy Bysshe Shelley, pp. 462–63 and 471–73, on gazing and eyes in Prometheus Unbound. In this and the following passages cited from The Cenci, italicized words indicate my emphasis. Orsino’s soliloquy at the end of the second act includes a moment when voicing his vicious frustration he imagines himself at the mercy of such facial expressions: Oh, fair Beatrice! Would that I loved thee not, or loving thee Could but despise danger and gold and all That frowns between my wish and its effect, Or smiles beyond it! There is no escape . . . Her bright form kneels beside me at the alter, And follows mine to the resort of men, And fills my slumber with tumultuous dreams So when I wake my blood seems liquid fire . . . (ii, ii, 128–32)

36 The power of Shelley’s language to summon up the visual in the audience’s mind, so crucial overall to the hallmark dramaturgy of The Cenci, would be vitiated by such stagings as the Old Vic’s in London in 1959, which famously introduced an onstage rack upon which Marzio was bound. 37 Cf. Camillo’s report, opening the tragedy, to Count Cenci of the bargain of absolution he has negotiated from the Pope for a murder Cenci has committed: “It needed all my interest in the conclave / To bend him to this point” (i, i, 4–5). 38 My phrase “Medusa effect” derives from Nigel Leask’s argument about what he calls “Shelley’s Magnetic Ladies,” among them being Earth in Prometheus Unbound, the lady in The Sensitive Plant, and, of course Jane Williams in “The Magnetic Lady to Her Patient.” As Leask notes in his account of the practice of magnetism Shelley knew (and even subjected himself to – with Medwin as the mesmerist), the magnetizer “operated by means of manual ‘passes’ over the body of the subject, or by means of the fixity of the gaze.” “Shelley’s ‘Magnetic Ladies’: Romantic Mesmerism and the Politics of the Body,” in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Text and Context, 1780–1832, ed. Stephen Copley and John Whale (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 53–78.

282

Notes to pages 210–14

39 In the letter (c. July 20, 1819) to Peacock he added, “Write to me as soon as you can on this subject because it is necessary that I should present it, or if rejected by the Theatre, print it this coming season lest some body else should get hold of it, as the story which now exists only in Mss begins to be generally known among the English – The translation which I send you is to be prefixed to the play.” Letters, vol. ii, pp. 102–3. The “translation” did not appear when the play was ultimately published in April 1820 (after it had been refused by Covent Garden), but it seems likely that Shelley intended it to be included when he drafted the Preface, as indicated by his comment to Peacock in a letter of September 21 that he would send the 250 copies of the play he had had printed in Italy, out of “a belief that the seeing it in print wd. enable the people at the theatre to judge more easily.” Letters, vol. ii, p. 119. 40 Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts X, ed. Betty T. Bennett (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 233–36. As Leigh Hunt noted in his July 26, 1820, Indicator review (“On the Destruction of the Cenci Family, and Tragedy on that Subject”) “The curtain falls on the parties as they go forth to execution, – an ending which would hardly have done well on the stage, though for different reasons, any more than the nature of the main story. But through the medium of perusal, it has a very good as well as novel effect. The execution seems a supererogation, compared with it. The patience, that has followed upon the excess of the sorrow, has put the tragedy of it at rest.” Reiman, Romantics Reviewed, part C, vol. ii, p. 476. Hunt’s judgment, preferring the imagined reader’s reception to the likely effect on a Covent Garden audience, seems odd, but surely right about actually staging what he calls a “supererogation.” Mary Shelley’s translation of the manuscript Relation includes, after the passage describing Beatrice’s execution, the following description of Beatrice’s appearance when alive: Beatrice was rather tall of a fair complexion and she had a dimple on each cheek which especially when she smiled added a grace to her lovely countenance that transported everyone who beheld her – Her hair appeared like threads of gold and because they were extremely long she used to tie it up & when afterwards she loosened it the splendid ringlets dazzled the eyes of the spectator – Her eyes were of a deep blue – pleasing & full of fire – to all these beauties she added both in words & actions a spirit & a majestic vivacity that captivated everyone – she was twenty years of age when she died.

41 What scholars have called an “additional” stanza appears in the manuscript; it has marked affinities with the first stanza, however, and may have been composed as an alternative opening to the poem. It is a woman’s countenance divine With everlasting beauty breathing there Which from a stormy mountain’s peak, supine Gazes into the night’s trembling air. It is a trunkless head, and on its feature Death has met life, but there is life in death.

Notes to pages 214–16

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The blood is frozen – but unconquered Nature Seems struggling to the last – without a breath The fragment of an uncreated creature. The phrase “harmonize the strain” that concludes the second stanza is notably resonant with a phrase in the opening salvo of John Taylor Coleridge’s “savage” 1818 Quarterly Review of Laon and Cythna and The Revolt of Islam, which Shelley read in mid-October, 1819, in Florence. (Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley, pp. 343, 91, and 496): This is one of that industrious knot of authors, the tendency of whose works we have in our late Numbers exposed to the caution of our readers – novel, poem, romance, letters, tours, critique, lecture, and essay follow one another, framed to the same measure, and in subjection to the same key-note, while the sweet undersong of the weekly journal, filling up all the pauses, harmonizes the whole strain. Of all his brethren Mr. Shelley carries to the greatest length the doctrines of the sect. (Reiman, Romantics Reviewed, part C, vol. ii, p. 770, emphasis added)

42 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” Romantic Circles: Electronic Editions on the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci. www.rc.umd.edu/editions/ shelley/medusa/index.html. 43 Karen Swann, “Shelley’s Pod People,” Romanticism and the Insistence of the Aesthetic Romantic Circles Praxis Series, www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/aesthetic/ index.html. 44 Shelley to his publisher Charles Ollier, August 16, 1819: “I was anxiously [waiting to] hear how the Country will express its sense of this bloody murderous oppression of its destroyers. ‘Something must be done . . . What yet I know not.’” 45 See, for example, Carol Jacobs, “On Looking at Shelley’s Medusa,” in Uncontainable Romanticism: Shelley, Bronte, Kleist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1989), pp. 2–18. 46 Prometheus Unbound iv, 400 and 415–18. It’s notable also that in the scathing Quarterly review of The Revolt of Islam that Shelley saw in Florence that autumn, Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, which had earlier celebrated The Revolt, was sardonically attacked: This is one of that industrious knot of authors, the tendency of whose works we have in our late Numbers exposed to the caution of our readers – novel, poem, romance, letters, tours, critique, lecture and essay follow one another, framed to the same measure, and in subjection to the same key-note, while the sweet undersong of the weekly journal, filling up all the pauses, strengthening all weaknesses, smoothing all abruptnesses, harmonizes the whole strain. (Reiman, Romantics Reviewed, part C, vol. ii, p. 770)

Shelley’s stanza might well be thought of as a rejoinder designed to “humanize and harmonize the strain” of the “darkness and the glare of pain” the Quarterly sought to inflict. Compare The Defence of Poetry: Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which

284

Notes to pages 216–18 move it by their motion to ever-changing melody. But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody, alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them.” (SP&P 511)

47 Barbara Judson, “The Politics of Medusa: Shelley’s Physiognomy of Revolution,” English Literary History 68 (2001), pp. 135–54. See also W. J. T. Mitchell, On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, www.rc.umd.edu/ editions/shelley/medusa/index.html. 48 G. M. Matthews, “A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley,” English Literary History 24 (1957), pp. 191–228; reprinted in large part in SP&P, citations, pp. 555, 563. 49 Because of its deterioration – likely attributable to the very chemicals used in the restoration process – the painting is no longer hung on display but stored instead in the Uffizi’s archives. 50 Jerome McGann, “The Beauty of the Medusa,” Studies in Romanticism 11 (1972), pp. 8–10. Is there, in the image of the vapour, a warrant for Carol Jacobs’s reading: “[w]hat the Medusa contemplates, then, and it is indeed enough to rob one of one’s senses, is the evershifting image of herself gazing into a mirror formed of a vapor that arises from her own mouth”? Does that reading tally with the opening of Shelley’s poem: “It lies, gazing on the midnight sky, / Upon the cloudy mountain peak, supine”? Jacobs, “On Looking at Shelley’s Medusa,” pp. 13–16. As Barbara Judson argues, “For Jacobs the Medusa’s gaze is preeminently self-referential, a perspective which endows femininity with the selfconsciousness requisite to moral agency and the analysis of its own suffering.” Instead, citing lines from Shelley’s poem, Judson claims that “the exquisite countenance is transformed into a lower body out of which grow Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow And their long tangles in each other lock, And with unending involutions show Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock The torture and the death within, and saw The solid air with many a ragged jaw. For her the passage suggests “the sexually charged violence intrinsic to the unconscious, an energy dangerous to others as well as fatal to feminine subjectivity, which is eradicated in its turbulent coils. An ambivalent formation, the Medusa figures both feminist agency and its torrential selfannihilation, the refinement of physiognomy as well as the uncouth bristling of anatomy.” Judson’s reading is, of course, in the long line of readings that associate the threat of the Medusa’s tangled vipers with the atropaic display of female genitalia. Here a foundational essay is Neil Hertz’s “Medusa’s Head: Male Hysteria Under Political Pressure.” Representations 4.1 (Fall 1983), pp. 27–54. 51 Letters, vol. ii, p. 126 (October 15, 1819). Mary Shelley recorded three of his visits to the Uffizi on October 11, 13, and 20; in a letter to Marianne Hunt in

Notes to pages 219–20

285

late November she wrote that “he often spends many hours of the day at the gallery admiring & studying the statues & pictures – There are many divine ones – he says . . .” The curled brackets { } indicate a word Shelley’s editor has supplied where the manuscript letter was torn, probably when the letter was opened. 52 See Alan Weinberg, Shelley’s Italian Experience (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), p. 269: “It is no coincidence that the three works of art which elicited the deepest response from Shelley at this time were the ‘Niobe,’ the ‘Minerva,’ and the ‘Medusa’: these are all representations in the Uffizi of female Greek mythological figures, whose nobility enables them to withstand acute distress. There seems little doubt that in the closing moments of The Cenci, Shelley attempted to approximate the tragic intensity of Greek and Italian art.” No Shelley manuscript of the notes survives; they were first published in 1879 by H. B. Forman. For the complex issues surrounding Forman’s practice as an editor, see E. B. Murray, “Shelley’s Notes on Sculptures: The Provenance and Authority of the Text,” Keats-Shelley Journal 32 (1983), pp. 150–71. 53 David Lee Clark, Shelley’s Prose (London: Fourth Estate, 1988), p. 352 (emphasis added). See also from “A Statue of Minerva,” p. 349 (emphasis also added): The face uplifted gives entire effect to the perfect form of the neck, and to that full and beautiful moulding of the lower part of the face and the jaw, which is in living beings the seat of the expression of a simplicity and integrity of nature. Her face uplifted to Heaven is animated with a profound, sweet, and impassioned melancholy, with an earnest, fervid, and disinterested pleading against some vast and inevitable wrong. It is the joy and the poetry of sorrow, making grief beautiful, and giving to that nameless feeling which from the imperfection of the language we call pain, but which is not all pain, those feelings which make not only the possessor but the spectator of it prefer it to what is called pleasure, in which all is not pleasure. It is difficult to think that the head, though of the highest ideal beauty, is the head of Minerva, although the attributes and attitude of the lower part of the statue certainly suggest that idea. The Greeks rarely in their representations of the Divinities (unless we call the poetic enthusiasm of Apollo, a mortal passion) expressed the disturbance of mortal feeling; and here it is deep and impassioned grief, animating a divine countenance. It is indeed divine, as Wisdom which as Minerva it may be supposed to emblem, pleading earnestly with Power, and invested with the expression of that grief because it must ever plead so vainly . . . The drapery of the statue, the gentle beauty of the feet, and the grace of the attitude are what may be seen in many other statues belonging to that astonishing era which produced it – such a countenance is seen in few.

54 See Letters vol. ii, p. 186 (April 20, 1820) to Thomas Jefferson Hogg: “I spent the winter in Florene, and dedicated every sunny day to the study of the gallery there; the famous Venus, the Minerva, the Apollino – and more than all, the Niobe and her children, are there. No production of sculpture, not even the Apollo ever produced on me so strong an effect as this Niobe.”

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Index

Albert, Paul, 43 Anagnorisis or recognition, 7, 26, 34, 37, 39, 44–55, 85, 90–103, 124, 152, 164–66, 175–76, 183–204 Antioch, 16–18, 19, 23–27, 54–58, 94–95, 101 Baczko, Bronislaw, 89 Baillie, Joanna, 3, 9, 141–42, 222, 262 Bate, Walter Jackson, 163 Beaumont, George, 161, 162 Belle-Isle, Mare´chal de, 40 Belletour, Beau de, 43 Bellingham, John, 164–66 Benjamin, Walter, 13 Bersani, Leo, 52 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 189 Bondage, 8, 15–19, 25, 27–29, 32, 35, 38, 65, 83, 93, 96, 98, 101, 119, 121, 137, 161, 194–95, 199 Bonneville, Nicolas de, 70–71 Imprimerie du Cercle Social, 77 Nouveau The´aˆtre Allemand Les Voleurs, 70–73 Brissot, Jacques-Pierre, 36, 71, 228 Brun, Charles Le, 39 Byron, George Gordon, Lord Sardanapalus, 141 Canuel, Mark, 275 Carlson, Julie, 254, 264, 265, 269 Carrier, Jean-Baptiste, 88–89 Cavell, Stanley, 137 Clairmont, Claire, 181–82 Clarkson, Catherine, 163, 268 Clasping, 17–18, 25, 27, 53, 55, 85, 87, 95, 96, 98, 118, 133, 224, 261 Coburn, Kathleen, 172, 268, 270 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor “The Ancient Mariner”, 109, 128 Wordsworth’s role in the composition of, 259

296

“The Dungeon”, 110 “The Foster-Mother’s Tale”, 110, 125, 130–35, 147 Biographia Literaria, 113, 127 Coleridge’s troubled relation to Wordsworth, 177 His response to the deaths of Catherine and Thomas, 166 His sense of Wordsworth’s imprudent affair with Annette Vallon, 179 The Coleorton dream that Wordsworth and Sara were bedded lovers, 161, 178 The falling out in 1810: “Absolute Nuisance”, 162 The gift copy of Remorse sent to Asra, 167 Notebooks.See Kathleen Coburn Osorio Albert as ghost and the drama of vengeance, 120–27, 139 Albert’s painting of his assassination, 119–20 Alhadra’s passion for revenge, 117 Deception and disguise, 114–20 Maria’s constancy and fidelity to Albert, 115, 117 Narcissistic idolatry, 134 Osorio’s suborning and murder of Ferdinand, 114, 116, 137 Prowling out for dark employments, 117, 119 Sorcery scene, 7, 113, 114, 116, 119–39, 144–57 passim, 174, 176 Trickery, 109, 111–12, 115–16, 116–21, 126, 128–29, 134–36, 137–38, 139 Remorse Added scenes in revision of Osorio, 143 Alvar’s plan to probe Teresa’s innocence, 143 Coded references to Wordsworth and Sara Hutchinson, 159–75

Index Coleridge’s reading of The Life and Works of St. Teresa, 168–75 Dramaturgy of listening and overhearing, 143–45, 152–57, 159 Mistranslation, Ordonio and Teresa, and Coleridge’s sense of Macbeth’s ”recoilings”, 175–77 Rehearsals and the “rehearsal moment”, 144–45, 146, 152–75 Sorcery scene, passim, 144–57, 174, 176 Table Talk, 21 The Friend, 7, 141, 142, 161–63 Colle´, Charles, 40 Copin, Alfred, 238 Cox, Jeffrey, 251 Cronin, Richard, 190 Crusades, 24–25 Curran, Amelia, 181 Curran, Stuart, 185 D’Holbach, Baron (Paul-Henri Thiry), 40 Daniel, Samuel Civil Wars, 193 Danton, Georges Jacques, 76, 238 Darlington, Beth Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth, 77 Dart, Gregory, 101 de Man, Paul, 16, 223 Diderot, Denis, 112 Letter on the Deaf and Mute, 109 Rameau’s Nephew, 113 Donohue, Joseph, 69 Dore´, Gustave, 110 Dryden, John Translation of Aeneid, 56–58 Ducis, Jean-Franc¸ois Macbeth, 35 Fre´degonde, 36, 43–49 Infanticide, 44, 47, 49, 54 Othello 62–65 Relation to Racine, 48–227 Dumouriez, Charles-Franc¸ois, 36–37, 62 Eggli, Edmond, 72 Empson, William, 109 Erdman, David, 21, 23 Etienne, C. G. and B. Martainville Review of Robert, 74, 244 Fenwick, Isabella, 3, 21 Forgetting, 4, 27–22, 49–59, 65–68 French Revolution, 1–2, 16, 20–23, 34, 66, 70–71, 91–92, 100–1 Festival of the Supreme Being, 101

297

Jacobin Committees of Public Safety and of Surveillance, 73 Law of 22 Prairial, 101 National Convention, 4, 35, 74, 89, 101, 238, 239 September massacres, 35, 37–38, 58 Furet, Franc¸ois, 36 Garrick, David, 33, 39, 40–41, 44, 61, 113 Gelpi, Barbara, 198 Gibbon, Edward, 24–25, 26 Gironde, 36, 63, 71, 73 Godwin, William, 183 Mandeville, 186 Things as they are, or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, 65 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 13, 70 Golder, John, 230, 231, 235, 237 The Gorgon, 221 Harris, Thomas, 60, 79 Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 77 Hogle, Jerrold, 185 On Shelley’s “process” of “theatrical mirroring”, 275 Holmes, Richard, 166 Hunt, Leigh, 193 Foliage, 183 The Examiner, 183, 193, 273 Hunt, Lynn, 63, 72 Hutchinson, Mary, 57 Hutchinson, Sara, 7, 141, 143, 145, 159–62, 166–75 Coleridge’s inscribed gift of Remorse, 159, 174 Imlay, Fanny, 182 Incest, 8, 26–27, 182–84, 201, 202, 209, 273 Jacobus, Mary, 230 Jordan, David, 229 Journals Journal de la Cour et de la Ville, 72 Journal de la Re´publique franc¸aise, 36 Journal de Paris, 73–74 Journal des The´aˆtres, 73–74 L’Ami du Peuple, 36 L’Anne´e litte´raire, 70 Quarterly Review June 1818 review of Leigh Hunt’s Foliage, with an attack on Shelley, 183, 189 June 1819 review of Laon and Cythna and The Revolt of Islam scathing assault on Shelley’s morals, 191 Revolutions de Paris, 72–73 The Courier Coleridge’s obituary for assassinated Spencer Perceval, 164

298

Index

Journals (cont.) The Examiner, 183, 193, 273 Review of The Revolt of Islam, 183 The Morning Chronicle, 193 Kates, Gary, 71, 76 Kauffman, Angelica, 40 Lafayette, Marquis de, 36, 245 LaMartelie`re, Jean Henri Ferdinand Le Tribunal redoubtable, 74 Robert re´publicain, 74 Robert chef de brigands, 71–74 LaPlace, Pierre Antoine de, 39 Larpent, John, 60, 263 LeFevebre, Georges Review of Robert chef de brigands, 72 LeTourneur, Pierre, 39 Lewis, M. G. The Castle Spectre, 6, 111, 256 The Monk, 6, 128 Louis XVI, 4, 21, 35, 40, 92 Louvet, Jean-Baptiste, 74–77 A` Maximilien Robespierre et ses royalistes, 76 Mackenzie, Henry “Account of the German Theatre”, 66–69, 74 Magnuson, Paul, 256 Marat, Jean-Paul, 36 Matthews, G.M., 216 Maturin, Charles, 127 Bertram, 127 Mays, J. C. C., 262, 263 McGann, Jerome, 217–18 The Medusa of Leonardo, 9, 213–18 Mercy, 20–27, 52, 53, 66, 86, 135–38, 158–75, 213, 260, 281 Michelet, Jules, 36 Miller, J. Hillis, 13, 23 Milton, John Samson Agonistes, 98 Mitchell, W. J. T., 214 Monaco, Marion, 44 Monkhouse, John, 162 Montagu, Basil, 143, 162–67, 177, 263 Niobe, 219–20 Osborn, Robert, 81, 91 Oswald, John, 21, 71, 80, 92 Ozouf, Mona On revolutionary feˆtes, 66 Pantomime, 33, 40, 44, 54, 111–21, 126, 136, 151 Parrish, Stephen M., 256

Peacock, Thomas Love, 182, 221 Perceval, Spencer, 93, 164–65 Peter the Hermit, 24 Peterloo Massacre, 191, 192, 220 Pitt, William, 39, 111 Pity, 15–20, 23–25, 29, 83–85, 94–99, 195–96, 223, 227, 240, 248, 250, 260 Racine, Jean, 4, 48 Andromaque and Athalie, 50–55, 234–35 Rae, Alexander, 145–46, 263 Reed, Mark, 37, 228 Repetition, 4, 14–23, 51, 82–102, 124, 127, 133, 145–61, 184, 188, 205–13 Roach, Joseph, 59 Robespierre, Maximilien, 21, 62, 75–76, 80, 88, 101 Festival of the Supreme Being, 101 Law of 22 Prairial, 101 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 162 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 69, 71 Salle de Mane`ge, 58 Saving, 3, 16–25, 49, 55, 61, 63, 81–103, 121–24, 135–38, 174, 178 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von Die Ra¨uber, 66–71, 113 Moor and Amelia, 66–70 The Ghost-Seer, or The Apparitionist, 109, 258 Shadwell, Thomas, 113 The Libertine, 255 Shakespeare Pericles, 26–27 The Tempest, 4, 27–22 Prospero, 27–32 Sharp, Richard, 162 Sharrock, Roger, 20 Shelley, Clara, 189–90 Shelley, Harriet, 183 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 177, 180–83, 186, 189, 194, 203, 211, 213 Shelley, Percy Bysshe “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”, 187 “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Valley of Chamounix”, 187, 281 “On the Medusa of Leonardo in the Florentine Gallery”, 213–14 “Peter Bell the Third”, 191–92 “Thanksgiving Ode”, 186 “The Mask of Anarchy”, 192–94 “To Wordsworth”, 186 A Defense of Poetry, 186 A Philosophical View of Reform, 183 Alastor, 186, 187 Laon and Cythna, 182

Index Prometheus Unbound, 183 Queen Mab, 183 Relation of the Death of the Family of the Cenci, 211 Review of Godwin’s Mandeville, 186 The Cenci Cardinal Camillo, 186, 204–6 Cenci, Beatrice “Eyes,” “looks,” “face”, 196 As instrument of divine atonement, 184 Her performance of innocence in interrogating Marzio, 204 Preface, 185, 276 Reni, Guido Portrait of Beatricia Cenci in Colonna Palace, 182, 210, 213 Cenci, Count Count Cenci as satiric indictment of Wordsworth, especially of “Tintern Abbey”, 182 Violation of Beatrice, 184 Cenci,Beatrice Reni, Guido Portrait of Beatricia Cenci in Colonna Palace, 182 Delicacy of discourse, 182 “Children sitting round your knees”, 190 Seeing, eyes, and facial looks, 204–11 Lucretia Distraught, ineffective consternation over Beatrice’s wildness, 188 The ideology of her mothering, 200 Marzio, 183, 203–4 The Revolt of Islam, 183 Shelley, William, 189–90 Sheridan, Richard, 6, 109, 111, 130 Siddons, Sarah, 39, 46 Simpson, Michael, 60 Southey, Robert, 159, 162, 183, 189 Starobinski, Jean, 100 Swann, Karen, 215 Talma, Franc¸ois-Joseph, 35, 61 Teresa of Avila, Saint, 168–74 Theatres Come´die-Franc¸aise, 35, 41, 62 Covent Garden, 1, 8, 40, 60, 79, 142, 182, 183, 210, 276, 277, 282 Drury Lane Theatre, 1, 6–8, 9, 110, 111, 141–46, 159, 168, 171, 174, 177, 276 The´aˆtre de la Nation, 52 The´aˆtre de la Re´publique, 58–60 The´aˆtre du Marais, 5, 71–72, 244 Threlkeld, Elizabeth, 79 Traumatic experience, 55, 89–90, 143, 215

299

Truths, untoward or discovered, 13, 99–100, 117, 143, 167, 174, 197, 203–4, 210 Rivers’s truth, 85, 92, 114 Tytler, Alexander The Robbers, 66 Uffizi Gallery, x, 9, 213, 216, 218 Uncertain effects crucial to drama, 1–222, 183–205 Usurpation, 3, 23–22 Vallon, Annette, 38, 46, 56–57, 179 Vaudracour, 23, 60, 233 Vestris, The´re`se, 36 Virgil The Aeneid, 55–59 Creu¨sa, 56–57 Wasserman, Earl, 185 Weckerlin, J.-F., 78 Wilson, Benjamin, 40 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 2, 56, 79, 89, 160, 166–67, 177 Wordsworth, Jonathan, 229 Wordsworth, William “I grieved for Bonaparte”, 189 “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey”, 186–89 “Thanksgiving Ode”, 191 “The Convict”, 22 “The Ruined Cottage”, 14, 22, 89, 96 “The Thorn” (Martha Ray), 192 1843 Note to Isabella Fenwick, 3, 14, 21, 79 Essays Upon Epitaphs, 164 His role in composing “The Ancient Mariner”, 259 His troubled relations with Coleridge, 159–66, 263 The execution of John Bellingham, 164–66 Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, 54, 76 Lyrical Ballads, 2, 110, 130, 147 The Borderers 1842 Note on The Borderers, 13, 91 Beggar woman, 25, 57, 83, 94–95, 97 Early drafts: the “Rough Notebook”, 81, 91 Eyes, witnessing, and visual discourse, 80–100 forgetting/forgetfulness, 17, 23, 27–29, 55, 65–66 Herbert and Matilda’s relationship, 15–17 Herbert’s blindness, 85–86, 95–103

300

Index

Wordsworth, William (cont.) Mortimer’s “I am thy father’s murderer”, 20 Oswald, 92 Rivers, sinking, and watery discourse, 80–90 Tale-telling and the formation of character, 13–32, 66

The Excursion, 22, 183, 186, 189 The Prelude, 21, 22, 34–38, 74–77 Wu, Duncan Wordsworth An Inner Life, 89–90 Zoffany, Johann, 40

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM General Editor james chandler, University of Chicago 1. Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters mary a. favret 2. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire nigel leask 3. Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, 1760–1830 peter murphy 4. Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution tom furniss 5. In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women julie a. carlson 6. Keats, Narrative and Audience andrew bennett 7. Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre david duff 8. Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 alan richardson 9. Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 edward copeland 10. Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World timothy morton 11. William Cobbett: The Politics of Style leonora nattrass 12. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 e. j. clery 13. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 elizabeth a. bohls 14. Napoleon and English Romanticism simon bainbridge 15. Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom celeste langan

16. Wordsworth and the Geologists john wyatt 17. Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography robert j. griffin 18. The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel markman ellis 19. Reading Daughters’ Fictions, 1709–1834: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth caroline gonda 20. Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774–1830 andrea k. henderson 21. Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition: in Early Nineteenth-Century England kevin gilmartin 22. Reinventing Allegory theresa m. kelley 23. British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832 gary dyer 24. The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824 robert m. ryan 25. De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission margaret russett 26. Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination jennifer ford 27. Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity saree makdisi 28. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake nicholas m. williams 29. Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author sonia hofkosh 30. Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition anne janowitz

31. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle jeffrey n. cox 32. Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism gregory dart 33. Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 james watt 34. Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism david aram kaiser 35. Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity andrew bennett 36. The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere paul keen 37. Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830 martin priestman 38. Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies helen thomas 39. Imagination under Pressure, 1789–1832: Aesthetics, Politics, and Utility john whale 40. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation, 1790–1820 michael gamer 41. Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species maureen n. m c lane 42. The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic timothy morton 43. British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740–1830 miranda j. burgess 44. Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s angela keane 45. Literary Magazines and British Romanticism mark parker 46. Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage: Theatre and Politics in Britain, 1780–1800 betsy bolton

47. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind alan richardson 48. The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution m. o. grenby 49. Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon clara tuite 50. Byron and Romanticism jerome mcgann and james soderholm 51. The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland ina ferris 52. Byron, Poetics and History jane stabler 53. Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 mark canuel 54. Fatal Women of Romanticism adriana craciun 55. Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose tim milnes 56. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination barbara taylor 57. Romanticism, Maternity and the Body Politic julie kipp 58. Romanticism and Animal Rights david perkins 59. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History kevis goodman 60. Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge timothy fulford, debbie lee and peter j. kitson 61. Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery deirdre coleman 62. Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism andrew m. stauffer 63. Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime cian duffy

64. Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845 margaret russett 65. Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent daniel e. white 66. The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry christopher r. miller 67. Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song simon jarvis 68. Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public andrew franta 69. Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 kevin gilmartin 70. Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London gillian russell 71. The Lake Poets and Professional Identity brian goldberg 72. Wordsworth Writing andrew bennett 73. Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry noel jackson 74. Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period john strachan 75. Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life andrea k. henderson 76. Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry maureen n. mclane 77. Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850 angela esterhammer 78. Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain, 1760–1830 penny fielding 79. Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity david simpson 80. Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 1790–1890 mike goode 81. Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism alexander regier

82. Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770–1840: Virtue and Virtuosity gillen d’arcy wood 83. The Truth about Romanticism: Pragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge timothy milnes 84. Blake’s Gifts: Poetry and the Politics of Exchange sarah haggarty 85. Real Money and Romanticism matthew rowlinson 86. Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745–1820 juliet shields 87. Romantic Tragedies: The Dark Employments of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley reeve parker 88. Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness susan matthews