In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

It is widely held that the romantic age was essentially undramatic and antitheatrical. Julie A. Carlson's original study focuses on the plays written by the canonical romantic poets, as contributions to political and aesthetic reform. Departing from the attention given by recent new-historicist studies to the theatricality of revolution, it asks instead how romantic theatre represents this connection and why it has been neglected by scholars of romanticism. Taking Coleridge as its representative case and the mid-point of his career as the central focus, the book modifies a number of standard assumptions about romanticism: that emphasis on imagination implies an antitheatrical aesthetic ; that early rejection of radicalism leads to a disengagement from politics; and that formulations of nationhood demand the separation of private and public spheres. By highlighting the period during which Coleridge wrote most extensively for and about the theatre, this book recovers a large body of unfamiliar texts and the genre that displays most prominently the tensions that threaten Coleridge's (and romanticism's) aesthetic and national thinking. The project of procuring the English public's identification with the reflective space of theatre as a site of nationalist politics ultimately founders, and not only in Coleridge's work. Professor Carlson reveals these plays' inability to find a role for women in the dramas of state as symptomatic of anxieties about women which drive the age's antitheatricality. Her re-examination of romantic bardolatry, theatre criticism by Hazlitt, Hunt and Lamb, and the history plays of the second-generation romantics, confirms the Coleridgean investment in contemplative male figures and the gender politics which underlie his drama, Remorse. Her conclusion is that romantic drama's "closeting" of Shakespeare, and the ultimate disavowal of its stakes in the stage, serve to preserve both poetry and masculinity from active bodies of women.

Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 5

IN THE THEATRE OF ROMANTICISM

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM

General Editors:

Professor Marilyn Butler University of Cambridge

Professor James Chandler University of Chicago

Editorial Board J o h n Barrell, University of Sussex Paul Hamilton, University of Southampton Mary Jacobus, Cornell University Kenneth Johnston, Indiana University Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara Jerome McGann, University of Virginia David Simpson, University of Colorado

This series aims to foster the best new work in one of the most challenging fields within English literary studies. From the early 1780s to the early 1830s a formidable array of talented men and women took to literary composition, not just in poetry, which some of them famously transformed, but in many modes of writing. The expansion of publishing created new opportunities for writers, and the political stakes of what they wrote were raised again and again by what Wordsworth called those "great national events" that were "almost daily taking place": the French Revolution, the Napoleonic and American wars, urbanization, industrialization, religious revival, an expanded empire abroad and the reform movement at home. This was a literature of enormous ambition, even when it pretended otherwise. The relations between science, philosophy, religion and literature were reworked in texts such as Frankenstein and Biographia Literaria; gender relations in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Don Juan; journalism by Cobbett and

Hazlitt; poetic form, content and style by the Lake School and the Cockney School. Outside Shakespeare studies, probably no body of writing has produced such a wealth of response or done so much to shape the responses of modern criticism. This indeed is the period that saw the emergence of those notions of "literature" and of literary history, especially national literary history, on which modern scholarship in English has been founded. The categories produced by romanticism have also been challenged by recent historicist arguments. The task of the series is to engage both with a challenging corpus of romantic writings and with the changing field of criticism they have helped to shape. As with other literary series published by Cambridge, this one will represent the work of both younger and more established scholars, on either side of the Atlantic and elsewhere.

TITLES PUBLISHED

Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters

by Mary A. Favret

British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire by Nigel Leask Edmund Burke3s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political Economy in Revolution by T o m Furniss Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, 1760-1830 by Peter M u r p h y In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women

by Julie Carlson

Keats, Narrative and Audience

by Andrew J . Bennett

IN THE THEATRE OF ROMANTICISM Coleridge, Nationalism, Women

JULIE A. CARLSON University of California, Santa Barbara

I I CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521444286 © Cambridge University Press 1994 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1994 This digitally printed version 2007 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Carlson, Julie Ann, 1955— In the theatre of romanticism : Coleridge, nationalism, women / Julie A. Carlson, p. cm. — (Cambridge studies in Romanticism) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 521 44428 4 (hardback) 1. English drama - 19th century - History and criticism - Theory, etc. 2. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834 - Knowledge - Performing arts. 3. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1772-1834 - Dramatic works. 4. Schiller, Friedrich, 1759-1805. Wallenstein. 5. Nationalism in literature. 6. Sex role in literature. 7. Women in literature. 8. Romanticism. I. Title. II. Series. PR716.C37 1994 822'.709 - dc20 93-8038 CIP ISBN 978-0-521-44428-6 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-03963-5 paperback

Contents

Acknowledgments List of abbreviations

page x xi

Introduction: Commanding genius in English romantic theatre

i

1

Constituting bodies politic and theatric

30

2

Coleridge's German revolution: Schiller's Wallenstein

63

3 A stage for potential men 4

94

Romantic antitheatricalism: surveilling the beauties of the stage

134

Conclusion. A theatre of remorse

176

Notes Index

213 261

IX

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to many people who have facilitated the stages of this book. My deepest thanks is to James Chandler whose thought has shaped my thinking and whose thoughtfulness has sustained it and me ever since my graduate days at Chicago. I am also deeply grateful to Alan Liu for all the ways that he has fostered my work and life at UCSB. One measure of the influence of both of their work on mine is the space it opens up for an investigation of Coleridge and theatre. Another is the interchange it has provided all along the way. I also wish to thank several other romanticists who have read parts or all of this book and have enhanced the process of writing it: particularly Peter Manning, but also Jerome Christensen, Anne Mellor, Reeve Parker, and Susan Wolfson. For provocative exchange on historical, conceptual and theoretical matters, I thank the Workshop in Feminist Theory at the University of Chicago and, closer to home, Louise Fradenburg, Christopher Newfield, Laurence Rickels, and Everett Zimmerman. For research assistance I thank Frederick Greene. Institutional support has been forthcoming from UCSB in funding and relief from teaching; also in the intellectual and collegial support I have experienced from members of the English and German departments and the program in Women's Studies. In addition, I have benefitted from interaction with the UCLA-UCSB-USC Romanticist Reading Group in Los Angeles, the women's writing group in Santa Barbara, and from Murray Biggs and the Yale English Department's commitment to viewing romantic drama as theatre. I thank the latter both for allowing me to see these plays and for providing me with an early audience for ideas about them. Finally, I wish to thank those people whose influence on this book is without measure: Zelda Bronstein, Cynthia Brown, Virginia Dearborn, Louise Fradenburg, Beatrice Higman, Janel Mueller, Stephen Shenker, and Jerry Steinfink. In this spirit, I dedicate it with gratitude and love to my first teachers, Jacee and Walter Carlson.

Abbreviations

AE

AR

BL

BLJ

CCS

CL CJV

CSP

DC

DoW

Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. Ed. Elizabeth Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Aids to Reflection. The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 7 vols. Ed. W. G. T. Shedd. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1856. Biographia Literaria. 2 vols. Ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate. Volume 7 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bollingen Series 75. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Byron's Letters and Journals. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. 12 vols. Cambridge, M A : Harvard University Press, 197382. On the Constitution of Church and State According to the Idea of Each. Ed. J o h n Colmer. Volume 10 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bollingen Series 75. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 6 vols. Ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956-71. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vols. 1-4 Text, vols. 1-4 Notes. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. Bollingen Series 50. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973-90. Characters of Shakespeare's Plays. Volume 1 of The Collected Works of William Hazlitt in Twelve Volumes. Ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover. London: J . M. Dent and Co., 1902. Leigh Hunts Dramatic Criticism^ 1808-31. Ed. Lawrence Huston Houtchens and Carolyn Washburn Houtchens. New York: Columbia University Press, 1949. Schiller, Friedrich. The Death of Wallenstein. Trans. XI

xii

EOT

F

LA LoL

LS

Pice

Abbreviations Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 2 vols. Ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge. Vol. 2: Dramatic Works and Appendices. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912. Essays on His Times. 3 vols. Ed. David Erdman. Volume 3 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bollingen Series 75. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. The Friend. 2 vols. Ed. Barbara Rooke. Volume 4 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bollingen Series 75. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. Hazlitt, William. Liber Amoris or The New Pygmalion. Ed. and Intro. Michael Neve. London: Hogarth Press, 1985. Lectures 1808-ig: On Literature. 2 vols. Ed. Reginald A. Foakes. Volume 5 in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bollingen Series 75. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Lay Sermons. Ed. R. J. White. Volume 6 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bollingen Series 75. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Schiller, Friedrich. The Piccolomini. Trans. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 2 vols. Ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge. Vol. 2: Dramatic Works and Appendices. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912.

PW

RT

ShC

SH SM

The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 2 vols. Ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912. The Round Table. Volume 1 in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt in Twelve Volumes. Ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover. London: J. M. Dent, 1902. Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism. 2 vols. Ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor. London: Constable, 1930; rev. ed. London: J. M. Dent, i960. Jameson, Anna. Shakespeare's Heroines. London: George Bell and Sons, 1897. Statesman's Manual in Lay Sermons. Ed. R . J . White. Volume 6 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bollingen Series 75. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.

Abbreviations TT View WCML

xiii

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Table Talk. Ed. T. Ashe. London: George Bell and Sons, 1888. A View of the English Stage. Volume 8 in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt in Twelve Volumes. Ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover. London: J. M. Dent, 1902. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. 7 vols. Ed. E. V. Lucas. London: Methuen, 1903.

INTRODUCTION

Commanding genius in English romantic theatre

... Share with me, Friend! the wish That some dramatic tale, endued with shapes Livelier, and flinging out less guarded words Than suit the work we fashion, might set forth What then I learned, or think I learned, of truth, And the errors into which I fell {The Prelude, xi. 282-7)

In the Theatre of Romanticism dwells on the wish embedded in this narrative of the growth of a romantic poet's mind. It sees as characteristic Wordsworth's wish for drama in recounting his experience of the French Revolution and analyzes the impulse toward theatre in all five of the canonical poets when accounting for their illusions regarding national and aesthetic reform. Not only "less guarded" words but "livelier shapes" enhance the fancy-work of refashioning individual patriots and collective dreams.1 But this book also sees as symptomatic the disavowal of drama and theatre accompanying virtually every romantic accounting of mind. For Wordsworth's wish ignores the site that perpetually reveals the "errors into which [he] fell," not simply in applauding the drama unfolding in France but anticipating applause first at Drury Lane and then Covent Garden for his tragedy The Borderers} In linking revolution and drama, the wish of The Prelude captures the canonical poets' reactions to both. Their imagined futures recompose the past: either past errors in endorsing revolution and the stage (the task of the first generation), or errors of the past that, according to the second generation, necessitate social revolution and theatrical reform. Even more consistently, the wish that links revolution and theatre requires a closeted drama of mind. The wish is framed by a sociality - "share with me, friend"-meant to affirm one's singularity and is the collective dream of poetic minds in this revolutionary age.

2

Introduction

Some measure of the power of these poetic minds is how completely the dream of romantic antitheatricalism has become a reality. Canonized poets appear as alien subjects when considered in their role as playwrights. Imagine an introduction to "The Romantic Poets" that features The Borderers, not The Prelude, Remorse, not selected chapters of Biographia Literaria, Otho the Great, not the Great Odes, The Cenci, not Prometheus Unbound, Sardanapalus, not Don Juan.

Never mind that such imaginings founder immediately on the repressed of imagination - material conditions, this time represented by a visible absence of texts. Picture available, affordable texts. But what do we picture ourselves saying about them — simply that these plays are failures of imagination or not "romantic" at all? Yet even a cursory reading of these texts reveals the same preoccupations with the lyric, the imaginative, the masculine, the antitheatric that are associated with romanticism;3 it just makes them look like bad theatre. If we can postpone such evaluative reflexes or borrow from French feminism the notion that bad theatre is good politics, we discover in the content of these plays further challenges to the pleasures and discipline of romanticism.4 For one thing, under this spotlight history is not so much displaced by imagination as featured through action, however discursive. For another, lyricism becomes the stuff of heroism for certain young men. For a third, bourgeois women are visible, even active, presences in these productions. For a fourth, nation-building requires a contemplative stage. These conclusions emerge when we take seriously the affirmative side of Wordsworth's wish, that "dramatic tales" are best suited to representing experience of the French Revolution. This book argues that the content and aesthetic intents of romantic plays cannot be fully appreciated apart from debates of the time sparked by events in France. History plays by the canonical poets dramatize contemporary reformulations of action, sovereignty, and the proper relation between the sexes. Metaphysical plays set the preconditions for this analysis by anatomizing individual and public minds. Not simply their plays but their writings on drama and theatre reveal the indispensability of theatre for becoming acknowledged legislators in this age. As psychic structure, theatre embodies the challenges of political reform as the canonical poets see it: (dis)avowing the violence of representation; reconciling ideal and real. As cultural institution it reflects the difficulties of making a body out of its parts. No other poetic arena in this period reveals so clearly the tensions

Commanding genius in English romantic theatre distending these poets' aesthetic and national theories. No other body of their work exposes such tortured minds. Rivers articulates one project of romantic drama and an appropriate reaction to this book's recovery of it: " These are strange sights - The mind of man upturned / Is a strange spectacle" {Borderers 3. 2. 27-8). An even stranger spectacle is the antitheatricalism that these poets' writings for theatre struggle to achieve. The compensatory volubility of romantic mind on stage has fostered the conviction that these plays were not meant to be performed. But this view obscures much of the interest and insight of romantic plays, their commitment to embodying invisible processes as a way of facilitating national dreams. It also veils the masculinist advantages of affirming immaterialism and immateriality. Of a piece with broader projects to counteract despotism of the eye, these talking heads on stage render perceptible a despotism of the poetic I who is male. Self-anatomy turns out to be the most visible mark of sexual difference on stage; male characters reflect while female characters act, in and as parts that are rarely associated with mind. In this view as well, Wordsworth's account of a poet's mind suits his fellows. For, when poets think about London theatres, bodies of "shameless women" rise up (The Prelude vn, 344-400). Such spectacles not only drive poets from theatre but sanction bardolatry, the closeting of (a) male genius. Scholars of romanticism need not imitate this reflex. Affirming romantic antitheatricalism blinds us to these poets' need not to perceive certain "realities". By installing the drama of these poets within the theatre of romanticism, this book makes its own strange spectacle of romantic mind. Not only does romantic discourse cast mind as theatre and romantic discourse on theatre reveal the split nature of mind but drama becomes central to the (de) composition of these poets' literary lives. As Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron variously affirm, the process of defending poetry - not to mention England - turns on theatre. But this book also finds strange the resistance by scholars to a theatricalized romanticism. After all, romantic poets are not the only ones (un) covering connections between revolution and theatre. New historical analysis generally, and French Revolution studies in particular, share the propensity. While romanticists blur text and context in the process of theatricalizing revolution, they rarely attend to the poets' theatre or the London stage for insight into this process. In the Theatre of Romanticism takes us to these stages, not only to amend

3

4

Introduction

a romantic new-historical oversight. Entering romantic theatre prompts us to revise our notions of action and the gendered privileges of remorse. I

THE SUBJECT OF ACTION

Two types of cultural study broadly inform this investigation of romantic theatre: new historicist studies of the French Revolution and feminist analysis, particularly of performativity and spectacle. Forging more than an " a n d " between historicist and feminist inquiries is another crucial component of this book. Before exploring this (dis)junction, I wish first to bring together two strands of new historicist analysis, of renaissance drama and the French Revolution. 5 What both orientations share is focus on theatricality and its investments in power. What distinguishes them is that only renaissance new historicists consider theatricality in the context of theatre. While new historicists of the early nineteenth century attend to the differences in that period's deployment of absolutism, court ritual, and the dialectic of subversion/containment, they are silent about the striking non-analogy in the cultural visibility of theatricality's putative "source." 6 Somehow theatre, with all its (il)legitimate drama, has been lost in the transference of paradigms from renaissance to romantic new historical practice. To adopt Alan Liu's phrase, renaissance theatricality only has to "spill out" of one highly visible door to the house of Shakespeare.7 Romantic theatricality contends with at least two. Because its theatre is closeted, mind must be penetrated before theatricality can spill over into public theatres, let alone the streets. Surely we need not confine romanticists to renaissance "sources," even when they borrow renaissance paradigms. Until recently, new historicism has resisted formulation as a methodized or historicized theory, acknowledging only a commitment to particularity and to the interpenetration of "literary" texts and "historical" contexts. Both hostile and friendly criticism worries over the vagaries of its "method" and the contingency of its objects of inquiry.8 Still, it seems worth pondering the avoidance of theatre in readings of romantic theatricality, if only for what it reveals about new historicist programming. Questioning the viability of "its commitment to arbitrary connectedness" obscures an opposing reality: its choice of literary subjects seems fixed, for Shakespeare and Wordsworth are

Commanding genius in English romantic theatre hardly virgin territory (Cohen, " Political Criticism of Shakespeare," p. 34). Moreover, focus on Wordsworth displaces not only more dramatic writers but the literary form still manifesting what renaissance new historicists like to claim as their period's definition of "literature": that it does not know itself from politics.9 When made visible, then, theatre in the romantic age exposes the edge of subversion that was blunted in the age of Shakespeare. Or we can say that theatre in the romantic age fosters the critique of cultural criticism offered by Liu: it cannot tolerate the " thought of action " in its unspectacular dimensions. For what distinguishes romantic theatre in all the standard accounts of it if not that its action is "too slow, too bound by details of place and circumstance, too eroded by entropic rather than contestatory frictions" (Liu, "Wordsworth and Subversion," p. 65) ? Reinscribing theatre into historicist investigations of romanticism will not in itself advance the methodological reforms Liu calls for in his critique of new historicism. Nor will this study of the canonical romantic poets as playwrights change the names - though I hope that it changes the cast - of characters that we associate with the period. But it does further the "colloquy" between renaissance and romantic practitioners on the differences between their theatres as well as the differance of theatre, and it lays preliminary groundwork for rethinking the "subject" through "action," Liu's challenge to new historicists of all fields (Liu, "The Power of Formalism," pp. 733-40; "Wordsworth and Subversion," pp. 62—6, 87—8). On the most tangible, synchronic level, reinscribing theatre into romanticism aids in historicizing the new historicism. The "transition between mimetic and symbolist credos" can be "located most conveniently" in romantic theatre, where the "very notion of the Subject" literally becomes a problem of "Action" (Liu, "Power of Formalism," p. 738). Viewed diachronically, theatre as cultural institution enhances the problematizing of literary history that cultural critics endorse. Situated on the borders of high and low culture, text and context, it places systems of representation within structures of action and propagation. Writing for theatre is precisely a writing for — for a future representation and reception that may or may not occur. The delay of that future in the case of romantic theatre invites contemporary romanticists to scrutinize our resistance to thinking (literary) history apart from a phenomenology of the subject. Attending to romantic discourse on its own theatre allows " u s " to

5

6

Introduction

watch "them" attempting to contain subversive energies in an "intricately articulated, plentitudinous, pleasure-giving and 'productive' realm" (Liu, "Wordsworth and Subversion," p. 65). Along with reconfiguring the subject and action of literary history, focus on romantic theatre highlights a second "blind side" of new historicist criticism. It problematizes the gender of action more successfully than have new historicist inquiries to date. Critics were right to question the comparative neglect of feminist analyses, especially in the first wave of renaissance new historical studies. Lynda Boose, Walter Cohen, Peter Erickson, and Carol Neely all point to the fact that, far from forging obvious alliances with feminist practice, new historicists either tended to ignore gender altogether or displace it onto other issues, usually race or class.10 Judith Newton questions the masculinization of power in renaissance studies and in theory generally. How is it that new historicists disregard not only overlapping practices but the precedence of feminism in calling for a revision of what counts as "history"? 11 Feminists are also suspicious of the intellectual history of the movement as its best-known practitioners like to frame it. Both its alleged founders- "post-6os radicals " — and their characteristic affect — disillusionment over their powerlessness — suggest that this history is a partial reconstruction by and of a certain class of white men. Generally speaking, women and people of color have different feelings about the possibilities generated by the 60s. They neither feel particularly constrained by their new access to universities and publishing houses nor view as an index of impotence the conviction that writing is a political act.12 Besides learning from the mistakes of their " elders," romantic new historicists are in a better position to attend to the experiences of women — even if, with the exception of those working in French Revolution studies, they have not tended to do so.13 For one thing, they are not so polarized between " new historicists " and "feminists," primarily because romantic new historicists are such a diverse group. Unlike the situation in renaissance studies, romanticists have less initial harmony for feminists to "spoil." 14 Secondly, to the extent American romantic new historicists are identified with another country, they are associated more with France than England. Their primary contextual object is the French Revolution, their texts refracted through a prior decade of deconstructive analysis. Both situations are advantageous for the study of women and gender, particularly the former. French Revolution studies are commendable

Commanding genius in English romantic theatre in their focus on women and the gendered implications of power and class. Those romanticists who are interested can draw on substantial information regarding French women as historical and symbolic agents, even as they are confronted by a revolution - and democratic legacy — constructed against, not simply without, women.15 More debatable as an advantage for feminist study is romanticism's affiliation with deconstruction and "French" theory. By linking them, I mean neither to deny the influence of French theory on renaissance new historicists nor to imply that deconstruction's privileging of "femininity" says anything necessarily "feminist" about its (con) textual practice.16 Instead, I wish to see as symptom the occlusion of women from new historicist discussions of renaissance drama and to reflect on the advantages for feminist aims posed by romantic theatre. Whether viewed from a theoretical or historical angle, one recognizes as overdetermined the connection between theatre and women. A staple of antitheatrical diatribe throughout the ages is the perception that theatre, with its plays on identity and the body, threatens culture like a woman. Postmodern critics make the same connection, but they applaud it. Yet the consequences of their applause are mixed; as often as not, it ignores the acts of women. Those new historicists who are "embarrassed " by this charge cannot simply duck it by arguing that it belies essentialist thinking.17 It can but it need not. Rather, a focus on women follows from new historicists' own privileged categories: theatricality, marginality, action occurring on those "many quieter, social fronts flanking the point of obvious political or military event" (Liu, "Power of Formalism," p. 738). Still, nothing in renaissance theatre competes with the focus on femininity provided by romantic theatre. The latter's "advantage" is that no self-respecting, or self-fashioning, person wants to be associated with theatre, least of all those closeted playwrights who disavow their plays to a man. Whereas in renaissance studies, theatricality loses its "femininity" by spilling over from the house of Shakespeare, romantic theatricality descends from no such heights. Its theatre is perceived as low from the start, its culture popular, feminized. Moreover, material changes in theatre spotlight "actual" women. By this time, women represent women on stage and are increasingly writing, and translating, female roles.18 Whatever critics and viewers want to make of it, women playing women makes a difference, especially in the reception of Shakespeare. Scholars can

7

8

Introduction

no longer see a man underneath every (Shakespearean) woman nor analyze romantic bardolatry apart from sexual politics. A far more hazardous, and dubious, proposition is the desire to attach any fixed meaning to the difference that women playing women makes. For such desires can lead critics to deny the enabling "unknowability" of "woman" - that all identity is fractured, multiple, provisional - or that the following assessment captures a plausible version of phallocentric reality: "beneath or within differentiated individuals is a single structure, identifiably male" (Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, pp. 92—3). Our recovery of romantic theatre and its representations of women must not entail adopting the kind of psychological criticism that the period invented. Dramatic characters are not indistinguishable from human characters; action is not a subject for judgment so much as an object positioned to elicit judgment in particular ways.19 But this acknowledgment does not mean that theatre automatically subverts gender by exposing its fictionality. After all, romantic theatres are patented by the crown.20 Attending to the process by which role playing naturalizes social norms illustrates how firmly gendered identity is rooted in the "nature" of power. For these reasons, then, that they attend to concrete situations of women as historical actors as well as to the cultural politics of vision, French Revolution studies as they are inflected by French feminist thinking provide the most useful critical framework for analyzing English romantic theatre. Both fields of inquiry accentuate the underlying category of our analysis: representation. French feminism provides a transhistorical and intrapsychic account that serves as context for the political - and politicized - debates over representation prompted by the French Revolution. With its grounding in psychoanalysis, French feminism problematizes the role of representation in the constitution of the self, both in its analysis of unconscious processes generally and the unstable boundary between fantasy and reality. For this latter reason, as well as its formulations of the "other scene," the dynamics of narcissism, and the selfsplitting that facilitates self-regard, psychoanalysis has been drawn to the model and vocabulary of theatre (also to some of the most [injfamous plots of western drama). 21 But French feminism also turns the spotlight on psychoanalysis, exposing its interested representations of the unrepresentability of woman. The desire by classical psychoanalysis neither to see difference ("the woman is a little

Commanding genius in English romantic theatre

9

man") nor to see differently (woman as the object, not subject, of vision) has generated two decades of feminist revision of visual culture. These insights into the transhistorical alliance between representation and theatre, on the one hand, and representation and the invisibility — or nothing-to-see-ness — of women, on the other, inform our vision as we turn to consider historical debates over representation prompted by the French Revolution. Cultural analysts, both then and now, do at least some of this work in viewing the French Revolution as a form of governance and theatre. What enables this equation is the way that both realms struggle over representation.22 Rousseau articulates this equation and the paradox that underlies it in his writings on government and theatre: representation undermines as it promotes the new sovereignty of the people.23 While the revolutionaries adopted Rousseau's model for the "common sovereignty inherent in the general will," they failed to follow through on his rejection of the practice of representation (Baker, "Representation," p. 477). Instead, they followed Hobbes in situating the nation in the "collective person" of a society's representatives (Baker, "Representation," p. 490). This model, as Frangois Furet stresses, occasions a tremendous rush for symbolic power; revolutionary politics - and its theatre - become a " matter of establishing just who represents] the people" and who is capable of keeping that "symbolic position" [Interpreting the Revolution, p. 48). A similarly partial adoption of Rousseau's strictures against representation can be detected in readings that analyze the revolution as theatre. The two cultural sites most relevant to our project can be schematized according to their relative faithfulness to Rousseau. Revolutionary fetes, as Mona Ozouf describes them, are the most satisfactory enactment of Rousseau's models for national unity. Situated in nature with no fixed boundaries between representers and represented, these festivals render as self-evident the equality and virtue of the sovereign people (Ozouf, Festivals in the French Revolution, pp. 1-26). Transparency is their (anti)-symbolic message: "Make [spectators] actors themselves; do it so that each sees and loves himself in the others so that all will be better united. " 24 In contrast, Parisian theatres violate the letter of Rousseau's Letter to D'Alembert by representing the nation in an arena that undermines unity and virtue. Rousseau indicts public theatres for cultivating secrecy, isolationism, hypocrisy, and apathy. 25 Yet in the revolutionary

io

Introduction

period, outdoor fetes and public theatres are not as opposed as Rousseau suggests. At least as Huet and Noel Parker present it, revolutionary theatre is faithful to the spirit of Rousseau. For Huet, spectacle, no matter where it is held, creates " a public" out of isolated viewers {Rehearsing the Revolution, pp. 33-4). When held in institutional theatres immediately after the Revolution, new seating arrangements and representational fare allow that public to perceive itself as a republic. Released from censorship in January 1791, plays begin to feature lower-class heroes and prominent events of the day; they restage the most recent outdoor patriotic festivals and even announce the names of traitors executed that day.26 The Theatre de la Nation (formerly the Comedie Franchise) grants equal viewing opportunity by dismantling loges and balconies so that everyone comes together on the same level (Huet, Rehearsing the Revolution, pp. 43-4)These contrasting theatrical projects in France, and their degrees of allegiance to Rousseau, are a useful backdrop against which to analyze the situation of theatre in England. The fact that representation in its aesthetic and political dimensions is, according to James Chandler, the central problem in Burke's Reflections makes it inevitable both that theatre becomes a charged site for revolutionary deliberations in England and that Burke's representation of English theatre is opposed to every democratic feature associated with Rousseau.27 As a consequence, Burke presents an England able to contain theatre within theatres. Whereas "French theatricality," as Geraldine Friedman puts it, "insinuates itself" into "real life," English theatre "is restricted to the stage." 28 This not only means that English statesmen leave the business of acting to actors but that, on stage, adequate representation is limited to high tragedy and, in the audience, to an assembly of sober, chivalric, even nobly weeping men. Both as cultural institution and type of literature, English theatre "represents unequal representation unequally (that is, as an equality) " (Chandler, "Poetical Liberties," pp. 52, 53). It privileges the mediacy, not transparency, of social relations and arouses "natural" feeling by legitimating traditional rules. Two interesting situations become visible, however, if we refuse to view Burke in simple opposition to Rousseau. First, common ground emerges in their negative textual treatment of women. Both pin on women reservations about representation, however differently they envision it. Each implicitly rejects the other's theatrical model in

Commanding genius in English romantic theatre terms of that site's association with women. The problem Rousseau identifies with theatre is the problem Burke locates in Parisian streets, where women display their agency rather than confining themselves to the domestic sphere. But even their arguments for the theatrical forum of choice works to exclude women from public space and representation. Rousseau is never comfortable viewing women in (or as) wide open spaces.29 Burke applauds Sarah Siddons as a longsuffering mother in order to gain sympathy for the French queen. Whether envisioning open-air festivals or high tragedy in the service of democracy or constitutional monarchy, each restricts his view of woman to virgin, virtuous wife, or mother. Such alliances between political enemies are the "natural" consequences of the sexual politics of representation. By foregrounding the problematics of public women, romantic discourse on English theatre makes explicit the repression of women that underlies both liberal and conservative governance in the nineteenth century. A second benefit is that we begin to perceive analogies between (discourse regarding) English romantic theatre and French revolutionary fetes. Though aligned with more established interests, London theatre was not then, and should not now be, viewed simply as a site of containment in this period. Recognizing similarities between the two domains helps to account both for what drew romantic poets to theatre and what alarmed them once they were there. Except for Byron, canonical poets defend their recourse to theatre essentially on the same grounds as those advocating patriotic spectacles in France: theatre embodies and enables national unity by arousing patriotism, morality, and sympathetic identification.30 It also constitutes a similar aesthetic challenge of promoting transparency through palpable means. Other, more alarming, analogies suggest why romantic playwrights generally defend their "poetry" from an unreformed stage. As they see it, London theatres reflect the social realities of French festivals by granting control over taste to a wider audience. In advance of England's other representational bodies, London theatres not only foreshadow but reflect a more fully democratized and feminized nation to come. Only in theatre, poets lament, does the " m o b " dictate terms to their betters. Only in theatre does woman fuel the house even as she defends the home. This second situation makes theatre a particularly rich site for reflections on the revolutionary legacy in contemporary England. On the one hand, London theatre audiences pose a more direct challenge

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Introduction

to myths of national "unity" than do other cultural bodies in England at the time. Between 1780 and 1840 London theatres experienced a rapid influx of middle- and lower-middle-class patrons who demanded satisfaction.31 Not only in terms of taste — though that was satisfied through the rise of melodrama, pantomime, and domestic tragedy.32 Social, economic, and political demands were frequent orders of the day. The Old Price Riots during the autumn of 1809 are the best-known manifestation of the people's power over London theatre managers and aristocratic patrons.33 Not only did audiences at Covent Garden stop the show for sixty-seven nights but also forced John Kemble to meet five of their demands: most importantly, lowering admission prices and demolishing the newly constructed private boxes and adjacent anterooms. When push comes to shove, English theatre spectators become actors who demand their rights to hear and be heard. Similarly, theatrical assemblies are viewed as national bodies in the minds of the audience and theatre reviewers.34 The permeability of these two houses of representation is particularly visible in the significance of 1832 as a date in the history of London theatre as well as parliamentary reform. From 13 June to 12 July 1832, Parliament conducted an inquiry into the state of dramatic literature at which thirty-nine experts testified on, and resoundingly against, the patent theatres' longstanding monopoly of legitimate drama. 35 On the other hand, the fact that this legislation was not enacted into law until 1843 indicates the many restrictions on diversity in London theatres. Concrete legal, economic, and literary regulations reinforce on a more palpable level the general work of surveillance and self-censorship that culturalist, especially Foucauldian, critics find operative in public spectacles.36 Analysis of the content and functions of romantic plays cannot exist apart from consideration of these extra-literary conditions. Indeed, it cannot acknowledge a meaningful distinction between context and text. Economic and legal conditions set the terms of dramatic literature more concretely than in other literary domains of the period. So much so, in fact, that discourse on theatre rivals Liu's candidate for rethinking the "activation" of literature and the notion of " containment" in this period — the voluminous proceedings of the sedition and treason trials of the 1790s ("Wordsworth and Subversion," pp. 68-9). For the law circumscribes the theatrical conditions that dictate the possibilities for dramatic literature, as Michael Booth has argued.37 It legislates what can be said, where it

Commanding genius in English romantic theatre can be said, and who receives compensation for saying it. One major difference represented by theatre is that whereas England abolished censorship of the press in 1695, it systematized censorship of the stage in 1737. After that point, all plays had to be submitted two weeks before performance to the Lord Chamberlain's office, where, to the extent that decisions had a rationale, all references to political, topical, religious, and sexual issues were removed.38 This fact alone casts provocative light on the privileged term of romantic new historicism: displacement. Perhaps the usurping imagination of lyric took its cue from theatre. The law also determined the locale for "legitimate" drama by granting exclusive rights to the Royal Theatres — Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Though significant inroads were made into their authority, these two theatres enjoyed a legal monopoly on spoken drama until 1843 (Ganzel, "Patent Wrongs," pp. 384-8). But as cultural discourse over just these two conditions indicate, there is no sure way to evaluate the effects of such restrictions. Whether they fostered or hampered creativity depends on how one defines it. One element of the "subversion" of theatre in the romantic age is that creativity was channeled toward resisting authority even more than producing literature.39 This book analyzes the theatre of the canonical romantic poets in light of these pressures of political, social, and theatrical history. Its broadest frame is cultural discourse on the French Revolution and its impact on England, particularly as these reflections lead to a more systematic formulation of action, nationalism, and " Englishness." Theatrical analysis of the revolution and England must take into account the shaping realities of London theatre. Reliable information regarding this second frame is hampered on several counts: lack of attention, particularly by literary critics; prejudice, even by historians of theatre; a general polarization among the fields of theatre history, theoretical investigations of theatre, literary studies of romanticism. This means that, in the case of theatre, romantic new historicists have more preliminary ground to cover than their counterparts in the renaissance. Yet significant work is underway, especially in the periods contiguous with romantic theatre.40 Moreover, the recent trend in theatre studies to analyze performativity in its political dimensions, coupled with an increasingly demystified notion of "literature" and renewed attention to romantic plays, makes it a matter of time before we have a fully nuanced picture of early nineteenth-century theatre. 41 This book contributes to that

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Introduction

emergence by addressing its point of greatest resistance: the occlusion of drama and theatre from literary studies of romanticism.

2

MINDING THEATRE

Reading romantic theatre in the context of early nineteenth-century movements for political and theatric reform does more than revise notions regarding the relations among representation, action, and women in romanticism and culturalist investigations of it. It provides a framework for reassessing the content, functions, and failures of plays by the canonical poets. Writing in the wake of the Terror, poets compose " b a d " drama as part of their legislation of "good" politics. The interiority, sluggishness, and inactivity of romantic plays counter an impetuous, sensationalist, and Gallicized English public. Crucial to national reform, these poets contend, is an anatomizing of mind that is meant to be enacted for and imitated by theatre audiences. Indispensable to the health of that public mind is a theatre reform that places imagination center-stage. Simply to take these plays' commitment to self-anatomy as evidence of a bias against theatre is to ignore the theatrical nature of psychic processes and one of the most compelling questions evoked by romantic theatre. Why take to the stage in order to enact reservations about action and theatricality in a revolutionary age? To entertain this thesis regarding romantic drama requires the refutation of two longstanding scholarly assumptions: romantic poets were ignorant or disdainful of theatre, and they wrote their plays for the closet. Even those studies aimed at exploding the first assumption tend to justify their interest by shoring up the second.42 The most noteworthy book-length study of English romantic drama, Alan Richardson's A Mental Theater: Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the

Romantic Age (1988), overturns prior attacks on the static, monologic nature of lyrical drama by emphasizing its dynamic, interactive qualities. But it does so at the expense of theatre. Focus on that domain, where romantic plays apparently can only be judged as failures, diverts attention from the real accomplishments of lyrical drama: its status as a " new poetic form," its greater suitability to the exploration of consciousness, and its affinities with the psychological depths of (a closeted) Shakespeare (pp. 1-6).43 Similar antitheatrical bias underlies the work of another partisan of romantic drama,

Commanding genius in English romantic theatre Timothy Webb. In "The Romantic Poet and the Stage," Webb goes even further than Richardson in highlighting the scope and diversity of these poets' theatrical projects, listing twenty-four plays either completed or attempted and alluding to the wealth of essays, theatre reviews, public lectures, and epistolary reflections devoted to theatre. 44 In this light, his subtitle is startling: "A Short, Sad, History." But its rationale is standard fare. " [T]he dramatic tendency was important to the Romantic poets but... its central energies were derived from an engagement not so much with the external world as with the rich diversities and complexities of self" (P- I 3)This habitual drawing back from forming what seems an obvious, or equally plausible, conclusion - namely, that romantic poets wrote plays and discussed theatre because they were fascinated by theatre's double connection to mind and politics - is part of what intrigues me about the mental constraints informing study of these poet-playwrights. What is at stake, for romantic poets and romanticist scholars, in the belief that romantic plays serve only one master, mind? Except for Keats, who broadcasts his ambition to " make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting," all of these poets assert their genius by denying that they write for the stage (KL 2: 139). " Excepting for the money which would be gained if [Osorio] succeeded, I am not conscious of a wish relating to the piece. It is done: and I would rather mend hedges & follow the plough, than write another" (CL 3: 437). "As [The Borderers] was first written, and is now published, without any view to its exhibition upon the stage, not the slightest alteration has been made in the conduct of the story" (1842 Note, CB, p. 813). My interest is less in casting doubt on these assertions than underscoring their performative power; they, and not the plays themselves, have come to represent the truth about romantic theatre. Yet it would be hard to imagine a less reliable narrator than a romantic poet introducing his plays. He is trapped by his terms. Terms of admission associate him with all the dirty words of romanticism: senses, body, collaboration, labor, money, failure. Denial, though more romantic, is affixed to the piece of incriminating evidence. As one example of the critical pay-off to be gained by suspending belief in these authorial confessions, consider Wordsworth's retrospective account of the composition of The Borderers. (Characteristically, Coleridge covers himself more equivocally: " I am not

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Introduction

conscious of a wish relating to the piece.") Writing almost fifty years after the fact, during which time the play has lain "unregarded among my papers," Wordsworth claims direct access to the state of mind in which the play was composed: " (for I [the word 'never' is crossed out and above is written] had then no thought of the Stage)." Equally symptomatic is how he depicts his reaction to Covent Garden's rejection of the play: For myself I had no hope nor even a wish (tho' a successful Play would in the then state of my finances have been a most welcome piece of good fortune) that [Mr. Harris] should accept my performance so that I incurred no disappointment when the piece was judiciously returned as not calculated for the stage. In this judgement I entirely concurred, & had it been otherwise it was so natural for me to shrink from public notice that any hope I might have had of success would not have reconciled me altogether to such an exhibition (Fenwick Note, CB, p. 814, original emphasis). Though a rarer version of the egotistical sublime, it has similar effects. Much like the stance that Coleridge claims for himself during the mounting of Remorse, where he is known in the Green Room as the "amenable" or "anomalous Author" from his "utter indifference or prompt facility in sanctioning every omission that was suggested," indeed, in begging for more (CL 3: 428, 432), Wordsworth's preface does what it can to efface not his own but Coleridge's play and success from the record. Not only is precedence established - "Much about the same time, but a little after, Coleridge was employed in writing his Trajedy [sic] of Remorse"-but guilt ascribed. Manly, though modest, poets "shrink from public... exhibition," but not "Mr. Coleridge", whose "play was as is well known brought forward several years after thro' the kindness of Mr. Sheridan" (Fenwick Note, pp. 814-15). ("Well known" to those receptive to Coleridge's version is Sheridan's unkindness in seducing the young poet into submitting his play, betraying him by rejecting it, and humiliating him years afterward by quoting "ludicrous" lines from it to a company of respectable men [PW, pp. 812-13].) In this regard, both prefaces do introduce accurately the plots that follow: brotherly affection is lethal, wounds outlast the grave. Other terms of this preface unearth even deeper rivalries. " I incurred no disappointment when the piece was judiciously returned as not calculated for the stage." No doubt; for by those terms Wordsworth's play now measures up to Shakespeare's by adopting Charles Lamb's famous

Commanding genius in English romantic theatre antitheatrical tribute: Shakespeare's plays "are less calculated for performance on a stage, than those of almost any other dramatist whatever" (WCML 1: 99). For the romantic poets as playwrights, serving the master, mind, is indissociable from serving England's master mind, Shakespeare. And serving both in that age means distancing themselves from the calculations of theatre. But what accounts for the deep investments of scholars of romanticism in not recomputing the costs or benefits of romantic theatre, especially when present-day critical practice makes them suspicious of the "ideology" of poetry and the displacement of history by mind ? Ironically, these lurking resistances are beginning to offer themselves up for analysis because of a growing assault on this last stronghold of poetic mind, mental theatre. Aid comes from two quarters: general demystifications of mind enabled by new-historicist analysis; the staging of romantic minds as theatre at Yale. Two recent symposia suggest that romantic theatre is slowly emerging from the closet. On 12 November 1987, members of the Yale Theater Studies program, under the direction of Murray Biggs, presented the American premiere of The Borderers as part of a threeday symposium on "Wordsworth and the Borders of Romanticism."45 Less than three years later, on 29 March 1990, and again under the direction of Biggs, members of the Yale Theater Studies program presented Sardanapalus as part of another three-day symposium on "Byron and the Drama of Romanticism." Both events marked significant moments in the recovery of romantic drama and theatre and facilitated two grounding assumptions of this book.46 The first is that these plays profit from representation; it enlivens their discourse and inaction and provides a defamiliarizing yet familiar glimpse at the conditions of another age. As a longer-term consequence for analytic practice, emphasis on representation promises to effect two changes. It helps to alter how we measure the "success" of these plays, less by simply reversing prior assessments than by historicizing them in terms of evolving conditions of theatre. Many who viewed The Borderers at Yale were struck by its greater resonance on the twentieth-century stage. They not only began to hear modernist rather than Shakespearean overtones but were led to speculate on Wordsworth's foresight in theatre reform.47 Emphasis on representation also spotlights the insufficiency of our reading practices to date. Thomas Whitaker speaks from authority, as Lord Herbert, in challenging romanticists to combine textual and per-

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Introduction

formative analysis of drama. His "hypothesis" is that a dialectical relation between a "community of readers" and "performers" should be " a vigorous activity in the mind of every good reader of a dramatic text" ("The Unreadable ... the Unactable," p. 356). This book tests his hypothesis. The second assumption is that historicist approaches to romantic theatre enhance our appreciation of the work of these plays. As the conference papers on both occasions attest, analytic focus on these plays has finally widened enough to encompass something more than the poet's mind. In viewing The Borderers as a commentary on the French Revolution, William Jewett reminds us just what a revolution this represents in scholarship on the play.48 Sardanapalus takes critics even further afield, as Byron's borders "sway" between Orient and Occident, modern and feudal worlds, masculinity and femininity.49 That the new historicist focus apparent at Yale is part of a growing trend in romantic scholarship on drama is confirmed by the most recent collection of essays to appear on the topic, "English Romantic Drama: Historical and Critical Essays," edited by Terence Allan Hoagwood and Daniel P. Watkins.50 What links these essays is the conviction that critical methods and principles grounded in history rather than in "subjectivist and individualist categories" are far better at unfolding the "vitality, integrity, and importance of Romantic drama" (p. 119). The editors specify three areas of dramatic inquiry that promise to profit from historically informed scholarship and criticism: the "specific material conditions under which the drama was produced "; the " specifiable social and political ranges of reference that the dramas take for their meaning"; and the "practical interventions in the human world which the dramas themselves become" (p. 120). This book's use of the term " theatre," though not fully coincident, roughly covers the three directions of inquiry indicated by Hoagwood and Watson. It considers theatre as a cultural institution, as a type of literary production, and as a stage or structure of mind, both private and public.51 Critical assistance in exploring these domains has come primarily from romanticists working in the second category. But the work of two scholars has been of particular importance in helping me to forge the broader connections of this book. Reeve Parker's analyses of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's plays of the 1790s install romantic theatre within revolutionary polemics in England and revolutionary theatre in France.52 Loren Kruger's broad-ranging investigation of

Commanding genius in English romantic theatre the institutionalization of a national stage in England, Germany, and France constitutes a proleptic sequel to many of the issues raised in this book.53 Where my work departs most significantly from historicist investigations of romantic theatre is in its attention to the situation of women in, and as, theatre. Even this perspective owes its development to the symposia at Yale. Seeing The Borderers suddenly brought bodies into consciousness, not simply because theatrical representation employs body as "evidence" of mind. This play, with its reservations about "French" minds, gave body a kind of national precedence over and autonomy from mind. Morality was apprehensible as a physical property: though mentally seduced, Mortimer manifested an unconscious purity by keeping physically aloof both from Rivers and Herbert. What became equally visible was that gender inequality existed on precisely this front. No matter how outrageous, suspicions regarding Mathilda's body automatically manifested her guilt.54 This initial insight into the sexual difference thematized and figured by theatrical bodies on stage ultimately gave rise to my most unexpected discovery regarding these plays: that they are indispensable to an analysis of gender relations in the romantic age. In their plays, more than in any other kinds of writing, romantic poets address the issue of women's roles and their representation in the body politic. Not only that, these plays portray women as commanding action in the public sphere. Other scholars, notably Catherine Burroughs, Reeve Parker, Karen Swann, and Daniel Watkins, have attended to sexual difference in the assignment of agency, morality, and poetry on stage.55 But this book also employs feminist insights to account for the so-called antitheatricalism of the age. Though more engaged by theatre and for longer periods of time than has generally been recognized, romantic writers do withdraw from theatre at certain points in their career or under specific conditions. Some, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, abandon their playwrighting activity entirely by mid-career (much earlier in the case of Wordsworth). Others, like the best-known essayists on theatre, repudiate theatre only in the case of Shakespeare. In analyzing both reactions, my book revises the two most resonant accounts of romantic antitheatricalism: Mary Jacobus's now-classic argument that antitheatricalism expresses romantic interdictions on revolution, action, and commanding genius, and Howard Felperin's recent treatment of bardolatry as a

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Introduction

democratic, not elitist, reaction. 56 Attention to the historical conditions of the early nineteenth-century stage suggests instead that antitheatricalism is a misogynist reaction against the visibility of "public women" in theatre. For romantic poets turn to the stage to demystify commanding geniuses like Napoleon; and romantic essayists turn from it only when they are forced to picture Shakespeare embodied by women. London theatre is the cultural domain in England that most nearly embodies the sexual politics associated with France, where women, in their roles as over-sexed queens or under-class women, run the show. Bardolators' desire to closet Shakespeare saves him from psychological appropriation by women, even from his incarnation in the "incomparable," but undeniably female, Sarah Siddons. This closeting of Shakespeare and the public stage is key to masterminding the illusion of England. It aims to preserve the homosociality of romantic men by effacing the power of women, a power that is perceived as intellectual even more than erotic in this age. 57 In light of the long, "sad history" of denying the interest or efficacy of romantic theatre, there is a certain irony in choosing drama as the place to investigate romantic notions of power. Doing so uncovers another difference between renaissance and romantic new-historical analyses of theatre and a discernible logic grounded in inequities of gender. Hazlitt identifies the aesthetic problem that results from the democracy associated with romantic theatre: diffusion. Though Hazlitt endorses diffusion of power in the political realm, he laments it in the aesthetic. This is the timeless, if tragic, message oiCoriolanus. It is such a "store-house of political common-places" that "any one who studies it may save himself the trouble of reading Burke's Reflections, or Paine's Rights of Man, or the Debates in both Houses of Parliament since the French Revolution or our own." It is such a stronghold of poetry that it leaves defenseless the people and their drama. "The cause of the people is indeed but little calculated as a subject for poetry"; for poetry is "right-royal," its language "naturally falls in with the language of power" (CSP, p. 214). Accurate in the main as a description of where class loyalties lie in romantic promotions of poetry, Hazlitt here inculcates a belief that has dictated critical views on romantic drama and theatre ever since. Less romantic assessments of that domain find poets on the defensive: the power of poetry is wishful thinking aimed to dispel emergent forms of power in London theatres and the nation at large. Not only

Commanding genius in English romantic theatre

21

does the rise of "she-tragedy" and the popularity of pantomime, spectacle, and coups de theatre suggest that poetry is losing ground to more visible, visual forms of power but these new forms place lowerand middle-class women at the seat of power.58 Christopher Reid identifies a shift in eighteenth-century concepts of tragedy whereby pity, not pity and fear, is cultivated through isolated moments of pathos, not through the involutions of plot. With Laura Brown, he attributes this shift to the rise of the female protagonist. 59 Romantic writers deny this rendition of theatre's power by denigrating spectacle, "situation," pantomime, on the grounds that it robs drama of poetry. They then associate all these derogatory effects with women players. With few exceptions, their theatre criticism treats actresses as bodies, not minds; even more consistently, their plays ascribe action to female characters, poetry to males. The former are at best single-minded and unreflecting; the latter are self-divided but lyrical in their remorse. Ascribing "feminine" feeling to male dreamers means that the lines drawn between poetry and theatre must be firmer than ever. Affirming them is what romantic poets see as their surest weapon in the war between the sexes. While asserting the power of poetry misfires as a strategy to reclaim masculinity from its more vigorous, bourgeois incarnation, it does disarm the power of women. Apparently the willingness of romantic poets to relinquish the action of theatre to women is not too high a price to pay. At least romanticists have been buying this line ever since. 3

THE COMMANDING GENIUS OF COLERIDGE

Coleridge gives a name to romantic ambivalence about the poet's worldly power: commanding genius.60 In the version of it with which romanticists are most familiar, the definition recorded in Biographia Lite?aria, that ambivalence is largely underground. Or it is managed through the form of its presentation, that binary thinking - and in this case literal splitting of genius - that Coleridge manifests whenever he feels drawn to the wrong things. Here commanding genius comes with its antidote, absolute genius, sanctioning the recourse to binarisms that plagues Coleridge studies to this day: man of action versus man of contemplation; public hero versus private poet; Napoleon versus Coleridge. For "men of commanding genius," he explains, are those in whom the "impulse" to realize the "conceptions of the mind" is "strongest and most restless." Possessing

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Introduction

more than "mere talent," they "want something of the creative, and self-sufficing power of absolute Genius" (BL 1:31; original emphasis). That kind of genius "rest[s] content between thought and reality, as it were in an intermundium of which their own living spirit supplies the substance, and their imagination the ever-varying form"; commanding geniuses "must impress their preconceptions on the world without, in order to present them back to their own view with the satisfying degree of clearness, distinctness, and individuality" (BL 1: 32; original emphasis). Even in this version, however, Coleridge does not simply privilege the dreamer-poet and denigrate the activator. He splits commanding geniuses into two camps, those of "tranquil times" and "times of tumult," and describes the material activity of the former as types of poetry (BL 1: 32—3). In peacetime, they "exhibit a perfect poem in palace or temple or landscape-garden," or produce " a tale of romance in canals that join sea with sea." Only in times of tumult is commanding genius "destined to come forth as the shaping spirit of Ruin," destroying " the wisdom of ages in order to substitute the fancies of a day" (BL 1: 33). The Statesman's Manual names names. These are the "Masters of Mischief, the Liberticides, and mighty Hunters of Mankind, from NIMROD to NAPOLEON " (SM, p. 66). Embedded as these distinctions are in a discussion meant to disprove the "irritability" of men of genius, we are right to approach them with skepticism. The chapter encourages us to do so by displaying moments of categorical slippage, one of which threatens to undermine the worldly—otherworldly opposition that Coleridge is seeking to establish. The alleged irritability of genius follows from an "unjust distinction" between "literary, and all other property" (BL 1: 43). Establish a "Review" of "ribbon-weavers, calico-printers, cabinet-makers, and china-manufacturers" that takes the "same freedom with personal character, as [do] our literary journals" and the " irritability of trade would soon reduce the resentment ofpoets into mere shadow-fights in the comparison" (BL 1: 43; original emphasis) . Still, if Coleridge in this chapter waffles between defenses of the poet as dreamer or professional man, he stands firm on one boundary. Absolute genius opposes forces in the world that are solely invested in reality and that pursue their own version of reality without regard to means. I want to return us to earlier days when there was nothing absolute about genius for Coleridge. Not surprisingly, these are the days of

Commanding genius in English romantic theatre support for revolution, France, and Napoleon, the times when no apologies are needed for the poet or the man of action - or for the poet as the man of action. Each is deemed capable of "moving the world." I return us to these times neither to relive nor to mourn Coleridge's or romanticism's radical past but to suggest that scholars of romanticism have taken the subsequent breakdown of genius too literally. Ever since critics in the 1960s returned romantic poetry to its roots in revolution, romantic criticism has tended to evaluate poetry as an all-or-nothing affair. Either poetry transcends revolution and reality through its strength of mind or is no different from reality. 61 The early history of Coleridge's commanding genius tells a messier story of imaginative action and political dreams. It remains one of romanticism's valuable contributions to social studies, particularly because its history involves the terror of possibility and the reality of Terror. In addition, it advances new-historicist literary studies by foregrounding a textual object that "moves" rather than "means." The latter advantage hints at the special relation between commanding genius and theatre as well as the importance of distinguishing stages in Coleridge's use of this term. For the early days of Coleridge's commanding genius also occasion no apology for drama; at this time he opposes theatre neither to poetry nor to the real world. It is worth remembering that Coleridge's first sustained literary response to revolution resulted in a play, The Fall ofRobespierre (1794, co-authored with Sou they), and that one of the first, and most lasting, influences on his thinking about revolution is Schiller. Subsequent antipathy to revolutionary activity, France, and Napoleon cause the ensuing split in genius that we know so well; from 1802 on, Coleridge has nothing nice to say about commanding genius in the world. But that does not extend to commanding genius in and as theatre. One clue to this stage of Coleridge's thinking lies in the history of negative judgments regarding Coleridge's plays. The boredom that ensues from their inactivity and polarization of characters results from the effort to demystify commanding geniuses on stage. It is part of the lasting genius of Coleridge that his attitude toward commanding genius as theatre is not resolved until his final, clerical stage. Until then, demystification of commanding genius takes place in a commanding medium that keeps Coleridge in touch with — and reaction against — his own desires to command. Jacobus is right to emphasize how "commanding genius" links romantic discourse on revolution to discourse on theatre. But if we

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Introduction

view antitheatricalism as a theme in and a goal of romantic plays, we begin to perceive how theatre negotiates anxieties over revolution expressed by all of the canonical poets. Not every poet demystifies commanding genius by featuring heroes as inactive as Coleridge's, but they all approach the subject of revolution through lengthy discourse on dreams. Virtually every dramatic protagonist takes a moment to puzzle out the relation between vision and reality in these plays. Such moments contribute to their alleged failure as plays but also to the reform of post-revolutionary England. They offer more private consolations in working through disillusionment on several fronts by revising prior visions for the nation. Shelley even makes this into a strategy of composition. Into the dream world of Prometheus Unbound intrudes the "sad reality" of The Cenci. All of the canonical poets, then, view theatre as contributing to English reform by reconstructing a nation's dreams and analyzing their preconditions. But this book features Coleridge for reasons that are particular to him. The first reason acknowledges his leading role in poetic discussion of commanding genius. Not only does he name the problem for England in a play about revolution - his translation in 1800 of Schiller's Wallenstein trilogy-but his aesthetic writings portray theatre as a commanding for(u)m of dreams. On the one hand, theatre comes closer to "reality" in its "imitation of reality" than does any other poetic form. On the other hand, the "reality" that theatre exemplifies is the stuff, and psychic process, of dreams. Even more particular to Coleridge is the way that he lives the dilemma of commanding genius as personal tragedy. For Coleridge is a body wracked by its inability to distinguish phantom from reality; and his is a mind recovering from, by covering over, a jacobin past. Not genius but guilt is what ultimately distinguishes Coleridge from his romantic fellows in terms of the politics of theatre. Unlike the second-generation poets, who did not experience the French Revolution as young men, or Wordsworth, who invokes Shakespeare to relieve his terror, only the genius of Coleridge is arrested at the stage of his youthful dreams. Coleridge relives their historical outcome in nightly terror, where his "punishment" is to envision all "the Massacres, the furious Passions,... the bloody Persecutions and mutual Cannibalism" that could have eventuated from his "inflammatory" words and thoughts (CL 2: 1003). Guilt for this past turns him (in) to theatre, where, for a certain time, he finds relief in Remorse. The tensions embedded in Coleridge's commanding genius do not

Commanding genius in English romantic theatre divide but they distinguish him from his fellow poets turned playwrights. They also reshape his career, the second reason why my book focuses extensively on him. Investigating his commanding genius overturns two cardinal principles of Coleridge studies: emphasis on imagination necessitates hostility to theatre; rejection of revolution implies a full-scale retreat from political action. It also directs special attention to the creative production of his middle years (1807-16). For reasons normally attributed to Coleridge's sojourn in Germany, this period is usually analyzed in terms of Coleridge's prose, the theory being that Coleridge abandoned poetry for metaphysics shortly after his return to England. " Germany" also has a share in political presuppositions about this period. While abroad Coleridge discovers his patriotism and thereafter commits his work to the expression of a conservative idea and reality of England. But this middle stage of Coleridge's career is also the stage of theatre, the period in which he theorizes drama and theatre and mounts his one successful play. This stage is crucially shaped by German idealism but an idealism more invested in reality and theatre than is generally acknowledged (even by Coleridge). From Schiller, Coleridge learns to promote aesthetic play and its special relation to theatre as the antidote to impasses caused by revolutionary activity. From Schiller he learns to cast dramatic heroes as contemplative men dedicated to national reform. Armed with German idealism and theatre, Coleridge confronts the challenges of his middle stage. Chief among them is the feared loss of his "shaping spirit of imagination" and the desire to prove his legitimacy to speak as England's representative mind. More "systematically" than his other compositions, the varied theatrical projects of this stage facilitate both endeavors. Aesthetic writings on theatre aim to restore imagination by removing sensual attractions polluting the contemporary stage. Lectures on Shakespeare complement the task of the Biographia in promoting Coleridge's play for the status of England's native genius. Revisions to Osorio (performed as Remorse in 1813) mask a radical past while turning Coleridge into an overnight sensation. Composition oi2ja,polya (1815) celebrates the restoration of French monarchy and anticipates the restoration of Coleridge's literary reputation. But lurking in the shadows of each "success" are fears about the extent of Coleridge's genius and selfcommand. Commitment to theatre threatens both mind and England because of its alliance with bodies, women, crowds.

25

26

Introduction

Why Coleridge ever leaves theatre and moves beyond this middle stage has to do with commanding genius's most submerged but crippling form: woman. This (anti-)form upends the balance of imagination safeguarded in drama and poetry. Woman as theatre casts her lot with reality and turns Coleridge's dreams into nightmares. Not only theatre's conventional status as a "feminized" form but the thematics of his later plays put Coleridge in the uncomfortable position of accentuating women's presence in the nation. His last, and most Burkean, play features three prominent female characters and depicts the restoration of the nation as dependent on a reversal of gender hierarchies. This is hardly a position that Coleridge elsewhere endorses, but it emerges from his desire to fashion contemplative men in a medium that privileges bodies in action. Put in terms of his categories of citizenship, it is one unintended consequence of theatre's ability to restore individuals to their moral status as "potential men." Promoting this aspect of theatre is Coleridge's most potentially liberating contribution to aesthetic-political thinking. If one disregards gender, what Felperin ascribes to bardolatry applies to Coleridge's theory of theatre in general: the premium on "human nature" accentuated in these plays means that one can be anyone.62 Or, as Coleridge puts it, the advantage of theatre is that it allows spectators to see their ideal selves. The problem is not with the potentiality Coleridge ascribes to theatre but with the "actual citizens" he seeks to educe through it. That category excludes precisely those types of people whose social power is threatening to become all too real in his day. As a consequence, potentiality is reserved for a certain class, color, sexuality, even poetics, of men. This is one failure of romantic theatre. Scrutinizing it provides insight into the equivocations of moving people through art. 4

PREVIEW

The following discussion falls into two parts. An in-depth investigation of the role of drama and theatre in Coleridge's program of nationalism, which occupies the next three chapters, opens back out into a discussion of romantic drama and theatre in the last two chapters of the book. The first section establishes Coleridge's theories of nationalism, investigates Germany's contribution to the formulation of his idealism and theories of play, examines the development of his thinking about theatre, and analyzes the content and function

Commanding genius in English romantic theatre of Coleridge's plays. The last two chapters interrogate the persistence of romanticism's reputation as an antitheatrical age by highlighting the history plays of the second-generation poets as responses to Remorse. By structuring the argument in this way, I do not mean to make Coleridge representative of the other poets' involvement with theatre. Rather, I spotlight him as symptomatic of the benefits of attending to the cultural "work" of romantic plays. Some benefits especially these plays' insights into the problematics of action, dreaming, power, and gender - are applicable to the other poets. Others are rooted in peculiarities of "Coleridge" and scholarly studies of him. In the case of Coleridge, the special charge of theatre is the torment it figures and the relief it affords him in manifesting the (in)consistency of his patriot mind. As a contribution to Coleridge studies, focus on theatre portrays an imagination suspended between real and ideal worlds throughout the middle stage of his career. Computing the psychic costs and benefits of theatre for the other canonical poets must await systematic analyses of their plays and representative interests. My hope is that the image of Coleridge that emerges from this study is of sufficient power to inspire further attention to the theatre of the other romantic poets. Chapter 1 proceeds from two unfamiliar and interrelated premises: Coleridge's writings are shaped by a troublesome theory and practice of nationalism, and Coleridge mediates his nationalist concerns in theatre more than in any other for(u)m. What link the two claims are the particular contours of imagination that emerge in its formulation as response to the French Revolution. Imagination not only educes the idea but determines the adequate representation of "England." It also reveals the play within theatre that enables Coleridge to consolidate England and his exemplary English mind. Three kinds of argument follow from this attention to theatre's place in the politics of Coleridgean imagination. As aesthetic state, theatre distinguishes itself by suspending the distinction between illusion and reality, thus fostering the re-creation of national dreams. As type of literature, Coleridge's plays confront the problem of action more systematically and sympathetically than do his other writings. As social institution, theatre demarcates the middle stage of Coleridge's openness to the people's role in England. Chapter 2 counteracts standard assumptions regarding Coleridge's alliance with Germany by making a case for the centrality of one of Coleridge's most neglected works, his translations of Schiller's

27

28

Introduction

Wallenstein trilogy in 1800. It demonstrates the " Englishness" of Coleridge's ''German" mind by re-establishing Schiller's place in Coleridge's conceptions of Germany and theatre's role in idealism. Focus on these translations also grants access to what precedes and shapes Coleridge's middle stage. From Schiller Coleridge gains the benefits of "indirection" as an aesthetic response to political upheaval. He also receives an enactment of the problem of action during the period when Coleridge is most attracted to commanding genius. Tracing Coleridge's stylistic revisions of Schiller's plays and his changing opinions regarding them reveals the equivocal benefits found in theatre. Wallenstein allows Coleridge to identify with Napoleon and retrospectively deny his alliance with commanding men. Chapter 3 considers all of Coleridge's plays as a thoroughgoing investigation of action prompted by anxieties sparked by revolution, theatricality, and changing notions of gender. It highlights Remorse as central to Coleridge's literary-political career. The emphasis that Remorse places on moral argument specifies theatre's efficacy in restoring "potential men" as a precondition of national reform. Its success on stage reminds us that the interior focus of romantic plays does not necessarily belie interest in theatre. The composition history of Remorse, as a revised version of Osorio, charts the advantages offered by Coleridge's middle stage of theatre. The growing inactivity of Coleridgean heroes and their promotion of an anti theatrical aesthetic emerge as intended effects of theatre's "indifferent" intervention into politics. What also emerges is the partiality of critical perceptions of this inactivity, for female characters increasingly assume the burden of acting in Coleridge's second stage. This new prominence of female actors culminates in £apolya and its thematization of female leadership in the nation. It also eventuates in Coleridge's retreat from theatre to a National Church composed of an elite cadre of learned men. Chapter 4 considers the theatre criticism of William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Lamb in exploring further theatre's function as social institution. It reads theatre criticism as a response to two cultural pressures: concerns over public women associated with events in France coupled with contemporary assessments of London patent theatres as houses of prostitution. Against these hazards Hazlitt, Hunt, and Lamb domesticate roles for women and downplay actresses' physical charms. But what sets the limits to their support for

Commanding genius in English romantic theatre the stage is its representation of a female Shakespeare. For the first time in drama criticism, accounts of Shakespeare's "mastery" of character extend to his female characters. For the first time in theatre history, Shakespeare is incarnated in a woman. Siddons's exceptional status highlights theatre's general repression of female beauty at the same time that it aligns femininity with power, a trait thematized and embodied in Siddons's most famous role, Lady Macbeth. Romantic men seek to closet Shakespeare, then, in order to avoid the "tooclose-pressing reality" of women in theatre. The conclusion analyzes the history plays of the second-generation poets in relation to the sexual politics of Remorse. The regime of remorse constructs young men as heroes of lyricism and self-division, a situation which casts women, and places theatre, in a significant double-bind. Strikingly visible in characters like Beatrice {The Cenci) and Myrrha (Sardanapalus), women are forced to act in order to safeguard the nation, family, and masculinity. In so doing women forfeit their lives but also poetry: as actors, they are categorically excluded from remorse and the sympathy it generates. While secondgeneration plays distance themselves from the morality and antitheatricalism of Coleridge's remorse, they retain its legitimation of self-division as a principle of men. By teaching audiences to sympathize with male ambivalence, romantic drama plays an effective role in early consolidations of liberalism.

29

CHAPTER I

Constituting bodies politic and theatric

In a series of remarks preparatory to analysis of Romeo and Juliet, Coleridge makes a surprising assertion, unravelling the logic of which constitutes the project of this chapter. Having already articulated several well-recognized prerequisites to the appreciation of Shakespeare, Coleridge finds it still "necessary" to "say something of the language of our Country" in order to " [aid] himself as well as others in judging of all writers of all countries." He then specifies the peculiar advantages of several European languages by way of arguing that "various languages arising from various circumstances of the 95. 224n4 Kean, Edmund, 15, 162, 178, 202 Keats, John, 2, 15, 178, 2 5 7 ^ 3 Otho the Great, 180, 182, 184-6, 255~6n8; and Wallenstein, 185 Kelly, Fanny, 149, 156, 2 4 8 ^ 8 , 250-1 n49 Kelsall, Malcolm, 188, 204 Kemble, John, 12, 54, 90, 162, 167, 202 Knight, Richard Payne, 146 Kotzebue, August von, 65-6, 82, 86, 231m 1 Kristeva, Julia, 143 Kruger, Loren, 18, 138 Kubiak, Antony, 222n5i Lamb, Charles, 16, 28, 80, 248^1 and Fanny Kelly, 149, 248^8, 250-1 n49 theatre criticism, 134-9, 156-75 passim, " O n the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation," 168-9 Lamb, Mary, 248^1 Landes, Joan, 140, 255^2 Lawrence, Thomas, 167, 253n64 Leask, Nigel, 42, 227n2O, 227^7 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 89, 90 liberalism, 29, 195, 210-11, 26on52 exclusion of women, 140-5 feminist critiques of, 140-1, 145, 180 and heterosexual love, 184, 204 and Sardanapalus, 183-4 Liu, Alan, 4, 5, 6, 7, 12, 2 1 4 ^ , 215m 2 Lockridge, Laurence, 47, 193, 194, 2 2 7 ^ 0 Longman and Rees, 80 Machule, Paul, 80 Mackenzie, Henry, 65 Macready, William, 154, 155, 25on43 Mann, Golo, 73 Manning, Peter, 183, 201, 256m 9 Marie Antoinette, 141, 142, 150-1, 153-4, 163, 175, 184, 247n2O, 248-9^2 Marshall, David, 2i8n25

265

Index masculinity, romantic and femininity, 152 as feminized, 103, 116, 121, 185, 211 and poetry/drama, 188, 208-9, 2 I ° Matthews, Charles, 48 mechanical philosophy, 39-40, 141, 145 mind anatomizing of, 14, 56, 97, 99, 194 criminality of, 50, 77, 180, 205, 206—9 French, 39 and Germany, 63-4 romantic discourse on, 204-10 seduction of male, 196 as spectacle/theatre, 3, 18, 33, 109, 204, 205-6, 222n5i Moore, John David, 98, 100 Morgann, Maurice, 151-2^2 Morrow, John, 38, 226ni6, 2 2 7 ^ 5 Mosse, George, 251^0, 254-5^2 mother/matriphobia, 125, 128, 142, 162, 164, 168, 185, 247n24 Mudge, Bradford, 51 Murray, John, 128, 201 Napier, Macvey, 155 Napoleon, 55, 64, 105, 173, 174, 237-8^9 appeal in England, 39 as commanding genius, 20, 21, 22, 23, 28, 58, 59, 60, 61 as poet, 88 and Remorse, 100

narcissism and theatre, 8, 51 National Church, 28, 44-6 nationalism, 30—62 passim, 225nio, 2 5 1 ^ 0 emergence of, 31-3, 2 2 4 - 5 ^ and imagination, 30-4, 38-47 vs. patriotism, 34 necessitarianism, 63, 75, 97, 98, 104 Newfield, Christopher, 210, 223^7, 260^2 new historicism, 4, 6 and feminism, 6—9, 2i5nio, 216m 4 renaissance, 4-5, 7, 213-14^ romantic, 4-5, 23, 2 1 4 ^ on romantic theatre, 17-18 Newman Gerald, 31, 34, 224n6 Newton, Judith, 6 Old Price Riots, 12, 218-19^3 O'Neill, Eliza, 153, 162, 169, 197—99, 201-2 Otway, Thomas Venice Preserved, 200-2

Ozouf, Mona, 9 Paine, Thomas, 20 Pantisocracy, 35, 40, 2 4 3 ^ 4

Parker, Noel, 10 Parker, Reeve, 18, 19, 100, n o , 112, 113 parricide, see patricide Pateman, Carol, 140, 145, 2 4 7 ^ 4 patricide, 107, 187, 190, 199, 207 Paulson, Ronald, 100, 143 Peacock, Thomas Love Four Ages of Poetry, 209-10

performance theory/performativity, 4, 8, 13, 34, 204, 211-12, 2i7n2O Pitt, William, 87, 88 Plato/Platonism, 38, 132 players professionalism of, 152—3 sexuality of, 150, 152 poet as criminal, 209 as legislator/national hero, 56, 58, 88, 136 poetry and masculinity, 3, 21, 129, 208-9, 210 vs. theatre, 20-1, 53, 113, 129 potential men, 28, 96—7, 105-6, 115-25 passim, 126, 182 vs. actual citizens, 26, 36, 51, 53, 182 women as, 104, 189 potentiality, 70-6, 199 power apparent vs. real, 59-61 sovereign, 107 and women, 115, 160-2, 168, 195, 201 Pritchard, Hannah, 164, 166 prostitution and actresses, 148, 154-5, 249^9 and antitheatricalism, 150-5 and London patent theatres, 154-5, queenship, 20, 141-2, 150-1, 172-3, 2 4 9 ^ 3 queer theory, 136, 2 4 5 ^ Rae, Alexander, 95 Rault, Andre, 65 reform, national, 38, 42-4, 97 and romantic theatre, 2-3, 14, 24-6, 28, 97 Reid, Christopher, 21, 153 remorse, 176, 188, 206—12 passim and criminality, 94, 181, 206 and masculinity, 129, 181, 188 vs. regret, 96-7, 181 vs. revenge, 98-108 passim, 178, 181 and revolution, 94, 177-8 and second-generation poets, 181-8 passim, 206-12 passim

266

Index

and will, 111, 112 and women, 176 representation, 8, 17, 19, 33, 211 Revel, Jacques, 248-9^32 Richardson, Alan, 14, 22on43 Robinson, Heidi, 66 Robinson, Henry Grabb, 48, 63, 81, 145, 172, 234n40 Robinson, Thomas, 81 romanticism, ideology of, 2-4, 4-9, 14-15, 17,63-4 romantics, second-generation, 176, 178-9, 180 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 9-11 Satanic School, the, 209 Schelling, Friedrich, 63, 64 Schiller, Friedrich, 64-79 passim, 2 32m 8, aesthetic mode, 70, 74, 2 3 3 ^ 8 and anti-jacobinism, 81 on beauty, 69-70, 71-2, 136-7, 140-1, 143-5, 247n23, 247n26 and Burke, 68, 75, 93 dramaturgical reforms, 72-3, 2 3 2 ^ 3 and English romanticism, 82 and the French Revolution, 71 indirection, 70 influence on Coleridge, 23, 25, 68, perception of, 64-6 and play, 66, 68-70, 78, 137 and Rousseau, 70-1 and the sublime, 144 and theatre, 71, 73, 79 on tragedy, 78-9, 2 3 4 ^ 9 Works On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, 68, 70, 71, 72, 75, 140 Cabal and Love, 82 History of the Thirty-Years War, 68, 76

The Robbers, 65, 82, 100, 23ong "The Stage as Moral Institution," 70-1 Wallenstein trilogy, and action, 67, 74-9; and aesthetic mode/politics, 68-79; and commanding genius, 67, 75-8; composition and reception of, 67-8, 233n26, 234n4o; and gender, 77; and Hamlet, 74, 76; and history, 73-4; influence on Coleridge, 79-80 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 52, 55, 64, 81, 83, 236n5i, 245n3 Scott, Walter Sir, 54, 81, 150, 155, 173, 174 Select Committee on Dramatic Literature, 12, 155,

self-division/self-splitting, 29, 41, 47, 50, 97 109, 234n39 see also remorse semblance, see illusion sexual violence in The Cenci, 186-7, J 9^~7J J 9 9 in Marino Faliero, 187, 189, 190 in Zjapolya, 124

Shakespeare, William and antitheatricalism, 16-17 and English nationalism, 17, 31, 51, 53~7> !73> 174 and female character, 28, 135, 139, i57-6i,173 and Germany, 63 improvers of, 170, 203 and misogyny (romantic), 20, 28-9, 203 as philosophical aristocrat, 54 as philosophical psychologist, 57, 157, 205, 25in52 and romantic criticism, 134-9, 156-71 passim, 2511151, 251-2^2 Works Antony and Cleopatra, 200 Coriolanus, 20 Macbeth, 197, 208 Richard II, 5 1 , 81 Romeo and Juliet, 30

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 78, 81, 95, 114, 194, and Coleridgean remorse, 181,193-4 on drama/theatre, 197-8, 209-10, proto-feminism, 187, 190, 2 5 7 ^ 5 Works The Cenci, 24, 176-212 passim; character of Beatrice, 187, 192-3, 198-9; and commanding women, 179, 180, 186-7, 188-93, J95> 197; as imagined performance, 197-8; as response to Coleridge, 193-4 "A Defence of Poetry," 180, 209-10 "The Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci," 199 Prometheus Unbound, 24

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 16, 87, 95, 166. 174 Siddons, Sarah, 11, 20, 90, 153, 162-75 passim, 252^6, 253^4, 253-4^5, on beauty, 167-8, 198 as Belvidera, 201—2 as Lady Macbeth, 29, 163, 164-7, I74~5= 198 and maternality, 162, 163

Index phallic power of, 134, 139, 162, 163, 167, 171-2 and queenship, 148, 149, 150, 153-4, 156, 162-8, 172-3, 174 and Shakespeare, 20, 169, 170, 171-2 style of acting, 148, 163, 252-3^9 as Tragic Muse, 252-3^9, 254-5^2 Siskin, Clifford, 57 Slote, Bernice, 2 5 7 ^ 3 Smith, Adam, 251^1 social contract theory, 38, 140, 145 Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, 151 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 26on54 Southey, Robert, 23, 49-50, 85, 95, 96, 181 spectacle, 10, 12, 21, 211, 247n2O Sperry, Stuart, 257^2 Straub, Kristina, 151, 152, 253-41165 Stuart, Daniel, 127 sublime, the, 141-2, 142-3, 144 Swann, Karen, 19, 88, 237^6, 241 n27 Taborski, Boleslaw, 258-9^9 Taylor, Arline, 201 theatre audiences, London and class, 136, 138-9, 172-3, 2i8n3i-2, 246m 3 feminized, 11-12, 147, 172 reform of, 126, 210 theatre, romantic, 22in46 mental theatre, 14, 17, 222n5i as mind, 18, 109, 204, 205-6 as national institution, 11, 42, 51, 53, 136-9, 150 patent theatres, 11-13, 28, 154-5, and prostitution, 3, 154-5, 2 49 n 39 as proto-psychoanalytic, 8-9, 205, 209 Storm and Stress, 67, 68, 82 and visuality, 112-15 and women, 19-21, 126-33 passim, 147, 191-2, 193 Theatre de la Nation, 10 theatricality, 2 1 4 ^ and femininity/sexuality, 7, 150 French, 10-11 and power, 4, 61, 147, 201 and rule, 183, 200 and subjectivity, 77, 79, 108-15 passim Thorslev, Peter, 225nio Tieck, Ludwig, 81, 83, 236ns 1 tyrannicide, 193 vs. regicide, 106 villain-heroes, 58-9, 178—9, 195-6, 207, 2 55n2

267

Voltaire, Frangois Marie Arouet Mahomet, 73 Semiramis, 188, 204

Walker, Sarah, 131, 147, 148, 150, 158, 159, 173 Waller, Margaret, 210 Washington, George, 88 Watkins, Daniel P., 18, 19, 116, 118, 119 Watson, Nicola, 54, 55 Webb, Timothy, 14, 237^6 Wedgwood, Josiah, 239ns Weissman, Stephen, 243-4^9 Wellek, Rene, 236n49 Whitaker, Thomas, 17 Wilkinson, Elizabeth, 68, 89, 231m3, Wilkinson, Tate, 172 Willoughby, L. A., 68, 82, 231m3, Wollstonecraft, Mary, 117, 188 Wolfson, Susan, 183, 204, 256m 7 women defined, 242-3^2 public women, 11, 19, 28, 139, 148, 150-5. 156 and representability, 8-9 in/as theatre, 19, 26, 126-7, 128-33, 144, 188 and undecidability, n o Woodring, Carl, 237ns 7 Wordsworth, Thomas, 239ns Wordsworth, William The Borderers, 1, 2, 15-16, 17-18, 19, 97, 195, 2i3n2 and Burke, 35, 226m 7 on contemporary drama, 53 and imagination, 41 "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," The Prelude, 1, 2, 3, 40 on Remorse, 16

82

working classes romantic poets' views on, 40, 44, 54, 206 ' and theatre audiences, 11-12, 137-9, 172-3 Wynn, Lawrence, 95, 2 3 9 ^ Yale Theater Studies Program, 17-18, 19 youth analysis of, 41, 50, 65, 87, 114-15 catoptrical mirror of, 41, 50, 115 Zerilli, Linda M. G., 247n20