An Active Imagination: Coleridge and the Politics of Dramatic Reform

Abstract

In his of Bertram, which appeared first in Courier (September 1816) and then in Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge draws what proves to be a crucial analogy between political and theatrical management. Hailing Samuel Whitbread's proposal to reform theater by limiting size of governing body of Drury Lane, Coleridge applies this wisdom to contemporary political affairs and suggests that in both cases the right of suffrage may be too widely diffused.' Although explicit analogy was dropped when Critique was inserted in Biographia, it nonetheless informs Coleridge's views of drama and contemporary stage. For Coleridge in his dramatic discussions consistently navigates between what he calls body politic and body theatric. To assert a crucial connection between politics and drama in Coleridge immediately invites two objections. The first sees Coleridge's residence in a Kantean hazeworld as precluding any significant engagements with political affairs of his times. Although still common, such an objection has been substantially countered by recent critical work and editorial focus of Princeton edition of his collected works.2 A second objection takes Coleridge's position as a romantic poet to imply both a lack of talent and a lack of interest in drama and contemporary stage. This implication has been challenged much less frequently than first, since it arises out of an entrenched view of romantic drama overall.3 Because we are in habit of viewing plays produced by romantic poets as artistic failures, we neglect to take seriously seriousness with which these poets wrote and theorized about drama. Worse, we overlook degree to which their conception of drama works against compartmentalizing of aesthetic and political concerns. In particular, Coleridge not only began his career as a playwright and earned more from his plays than from any other literary endeavor, he also wrote his plays and drama criticism expressly to reform stage and contemporary playgoers' states of mind.