‘A manner beyond courtesy’: Two Concepts of Wonder in Coleridge and Shelley

Abstract

Wonder’s locus classicus within the English literary tradition is found in the final act of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale when the statue of a wife killed by jealousy is called to life before her chastened husband. There is music to whet the audience’s appetite for the incredible but it competes with their growing knowledge that she isn’t really dead and that it is all a trick played out on Leontes to reinforce the matter of trust. Despite or perhaps because of this, it remains a wonderful moment. This is at once a rather critically prosaic statement – the scene is by turns inexplicable, touching and marvellously artful –and also a more complex thought, since as it stresses the false magic of theatre, the scene forces the audience to reckon with its own relationship with theatrical experience as a whole. For if the audience is asked tacitly to bear witness to an illusion in which Leontes is tricked into believing in the incredible, then they are also going along with a trick that stresses their own compact with the techniques of a theatrical spectacle that has been hoodwinking them all along: everything to which they have been witness from the start is itself, of course, a fictive illusion. One solution would be to walk straight out of the theatre but a wonder of art in general is the speed with which its various audiences are prepared to settle back into further illusions just as the terms of the last ones have been revealed. It is not a fool’s trust however and, for this reason, the scene that I am describing is only an extraordinary example of what happens throughout acts of engagement with art in all its forms – appropriately so since it is at the heart of a play that is all about the dangers of doubt. If so much of aesthetic experience is dependent upon the one kind of wonder – the sudden surprise of the soul in which the audience is taken away from itself into a peculiar form of faith in a new reality presented by signs and sounds – then a different kind of wonder emerges in the kinds of thought that take place once the experience is past, when the audience is moved to ask critically just what has taken place and why it matters to them to understand this. Although the two may often be in an uncertain tension, it is my contention here that as wonder is kept in play both as a visceral emotion and as a philosophical force, it is the bedrock of an ethical engagement with art. Romantic criticism, and in particular the thought of Coleridge, to which I shall turn in a moment, is helpful in drawing out the tension that I describe. There is nothing original in the observation that Shakespeare had wonder (and its connection with theatricality in general) much in mind in his late plays, especially in his female characters, (Hermione, Miranda,