Seeing things ("as they are"): Coleridge, Schiller, and the play of semblance.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-04

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COLERIDGE IS NOT BEST KNOWN AS A PLAYWRIGHT, OR EVEN AS A THEORIST of the stage, in spite of his sustained critical assessment of late eighteenth-century theater--itself familiar to readers chiefly through his lectures on Shakespeare (this is to gesture toward the alleged "anti-theatricality" of his general position). Nevertheless, Coleridge did make serious attempts to write plays, largely, it seems, in response to the abysmal state of English drama in the 1790s, as it was then perceived not only by Coleridge but by other public commentators as well, such as Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. Contemporary plays were often dismissed as sentimental, gothic, formulaic, and highly melodramatic--or, as Wordsworth famously declared in his preface to Lyrical Ballads, "sickly and stupid german tragedies." These comments need to be understood in terms of a highly idealized sense of what theater could accomplish, in political as well as dramatic terms. To reinvigorate the productions of the English stage would be not only to elevate it again to the level of its "golden age," in Elizabethan and Jacobean culture, but to fulfill an agenda related to a nationalist impulse that, if not explicitly revolutionary, was politically reformist. (1) Thus the familiar narrative of Coleridge's involvement in the theater begins with his early radicalism (evident in so much of his work in the 1790s, not least in his 1797 play Osorio, and in The Fall of Robespierre, co-written with Robert Southey), and with a sense of the theater as an ideal space not only to represent and engage current events (chiefly of course the French Revolution and the English reaction to it, and with it, issues of freedom and censorship), but also to educate the public response to those events. On the other hand, the political ambivalence of Coleridge's maturity, and the critical pronouncements he would later make on the state of the theater, did nothing to counter the general sense that "highbrow" Romantic theater was either fixated unproductively on old models (classical or Shakespearean), or obsessed by subjects that were fundamentally unsuitable for the stage--fit only for the closet, or specimens of what Byron was to call a "mental" theater. (2)

It is in this loosely-sketched context, though, that we may now consider the following event. In 1813, Coleridge's play Remorse, a highly successful revision of his 1797 play Osorio, was performed to considerable acclaim, and ran for nearly three weeks at Drury Lane. As far and away the most financially rewarding production of Coleridge's career (he is thought to have made 400 pounds out of it), this turn of events was remarkable enough. But more remarkable still, though rarely mentioned in discussions of Coleridge's theory of dramatic illusion, is how a play, written by such an adamant critic of Georgian stage-craft could unreservedly accept and deploy its conventions. (3) The paradox here draws from Coleridge's assertion that while Shakespeare's stage was effectively bare--merely "a naked room, a blanket for a curtain"--his appeal to the imagination fitted it out as "'A field for monarchs.'" (4) Theater productions of Coleridge's day, on the other hand, including those of Shakespeare's plays, appealed not to the imagination, but to the senses, through an emphasis on visual display and special effects, and were thus deemed inappropriate not only for Shakespeare's genius, but for any serious drama. Meanwhile, the 1813 production of Coleridge's own play, at the newly rebuilt Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, was state of the art: the theater itself had been re-equipped with the latest in lighting and stage technology, and for Remorse, there were to be lavish sets and startling effects, in keeping with the kind of exotic popular fashion created by Byron's Eastern tales (Holmes 321, 325). The play may have been vilified by many critics for its awkward emphasis on description in place of action (what we might construe as an emphasis on the written over the visual) and for its attendant abstractions, but it was unanimously appreciated for its stage effects, and particularly for the "coup d'oeil" of the famous "sorcery" scene. Thomas Barnes, writing in the Examiner, exclaimed:

We never saw more interest excited in a theatre than was expressed at the sorcery scene in the third act. The altar flaming in the distance, the solemn invocation, the pealing music of the mystic song, altogether produced a combination so awful, as nearly to overpower reality, and make one half believe the enchantment which delighted our sense. (5)

Coleridge was no stranger to contradictory impulses, of course, nor to revisions both of his radical past and his past work (usually at the same time), but the moment of Remorse appears to implicate both potentially divisive tendencies and to suggest their interdependence. On the one hand, he distinguished, as we have seen, between imaginatively created dramatic illusion and mere stage illusion, created by stimulating and tricking the senses--a distinction that, taken to a limit, suggests that the most thorough dramatic illusion is a function of reading rather than performance. On the other, the revisions required of Osorio were part and parcel of Coleridge's well-documented attempts to disavow his radical political past--to create, in effect, an illusion of a rather different kind about himself and his convictions. This is not to suggest that Coleridge engages in cheap stage trickery about his own life, or to suggest that an analysis of the political implications of his revisions to the earlier play is lacking, for this has been ably undertaken (indeed is the very thing the criticism most discusses). (6) What the juxtaposition seeks to suggest, though, is that Remorse opens up questions about the relationship of dramatic illusion to the politics of truth-telling, or, to put it differently, about the relationship of "play" to ideas about reform in matters of personal, philosophical, and national significance. (7)

These ideas take palpable shape around one of the play's most important and fascinating scenes, the climactic "incantation scene" of Act Three (that famous "sorcery scene" to which Thomas Barnes refers) in which a complex deception about past events is to be revealed. The play's hero, Alvar, presumed dead by his family, returns home in disguise, and with a plan to confront his brother over his misdeeds and lawless ways (these involve not only creating the illusion of Alvar's death at sea, but also a real attempt to have him murdered--an attempt the palpably evil younger brother, Ordonio, believes was successful). Alvar (in disguise) connives to have himself hired by Ordonio, who has hatched a plan to conjure up the spirit of his dead brother (i.e. Alvar himself) for the benefit of Teresa. Teresa is Alvar's betrothed and Ordonio hopes that with definitive proof of Alvar's death before her, she will be prevailed upon to transfer her affections from Alvar to him. Several threads of the plot converge here, but the scene was felt by contemporary viewers to be, on its own terms, the most astonishing of the play. Certainly it was the most visually dramatic. In a darkened corner of the stage, the figure of the sorcerer is to be seen working before his altar, accompanied by eerie music, a chanting, incantational song, and smouldering incense. All of these details are emphasized by the reviews, as in the Barnes example cited above. But there is more: suddenly and unexpectedly, a brilliant flash of phosphorous illuminates a large and imposing painting suspended over the altar. The painting depicts the murder attempt, and is intended to reveal the hidden truth that underlies the play's plot, as well as what one might call its ethical agenda.

Coleridge's use of a painting as an agent of representation--of a past action, and within a play--is for those very reasons extremely complex. Whether or not the detailed contents of the painting were visible to the audience is unclear (certainly they could be readily inferred); and it seems no information survives about the actual painting that was used in performance. The fact of the painting is astonishing enough, not because the deployment of an image-within-a-play was unique (for one might think of instances of this in The Tempest, where questions of memory and recantation, or renunciation, are also at issue), but rather in the context of remarks...

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