“Be sure thou prove my love a whore”: Forged Evidence and Engines of Proof in Coleridge’s Shakespearean Politics

Abstract

COLERIDGE'S LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE'S DRAMAS HAVE LONG FIGURED as an important moment in history of Shakespeare criticism, but Shakespeare's contribution to Coleridge's own dramas has hardly been noticed, even by scholars participating in last decade's explosion of research on Romantic-era drama. As Greg Kucich has pointed out, Romantic-era critics strongly urged poet-dramatists to reform contemporary theater by emulating Renaissance masters who dominated Romantic stage, but discouraged them by exalting their predecessors' powerful talent. (1) Worse for reform-minded poets, conservative critics pursued process of mapping literary history that was thoroughly implicated in period's most bitterly contested sociopolitical struggles and entailed a presentation of old English dramatists as passionate supporters of rank and monarchy. (2) In theater, conservative actors and playwrights appropriated Shakespeare's plays through politically resonant productions, such as John Philip Kemble's 1796 Coriolanus, which gave noticeably greater emphasis to Coriolanus' nobility and populace's fickleness in this notoriously equivocal text. (3) Of equal or greater interest to Coleridge, other playwrights enlisted Shakespearean characters and plot elements in their own dramas. One virulently anti-jacobin drama, modeled partly on Shakespeare's plays and partly on Gothic melodrama, was Edwin Eyre's The Death of Queen of France, rejected by John Larpent, Examiner of plays, in 1794 but published as The Maid of Normandy in same year. Robespierre becomes an ambitious Gothic villain, uttering a soliloquy, says George Taylor, worthy of Richard III and crafting a plot against Louis XVI's heirs reminiscent of Macbeth's against heirs of Banquo. Eyre models Marat, second Gothic villain, on the hypocritical Angelo in Measure for Measure, depicting him as sexually stimulated by [Charlotte] Corday's righteous indignation. (4) Coleridge's 1797 tragedy Osorio (revised and performed in 1813 as Remorse) likewise engaged post-French Revolution political controversy through Shakespearean motifs and stage business. Constructing a more complex set of relations to Shakespeare than Eyre's play does, however, Coleridge's tragedy can be seen as an attempt to wrest Shakespeare from conservative control. One important consideration, as Jeffrey Cox points out, is that Eyre's play and other reactionary dramas were censored, as were pro-revolutionary dramas, for incorporating anti-monarchical, revolutionary language or action and thus giving audiences opportunity to enjoy moments of revolutionary exhilaration, despite anti-revolutionary tenor of whole. (5) This general point seems particularly pertinent to Shakespeare appropriation, given Jonathan Bate's observations on use of Shakespeare in political caricature: While political discourse ... tends to polarity, literary texts, especially Shakespearean ones, tend to multivalence. The risk, though also excitement and potential subversiveness, of Shakespearean allusions in political caricature is that they cannot be easily contained; to 'quote' Falstaff is to give new life to a set of values which governments generally prefer to restrain. (6) Larpent's strictness have made it difficult for playwrights in royal theaters to exercise relative freedom enjoyed by caricaturists in press; however, audience's familiarity with Shakespeare caricatures Bate describes (albeit predominantly conservative) meant that they would be quick to read plays metaphorically and discover covert meanings. (7) These observations suggest that conditions in major theaters were somewhat less than hegemonic. When Coleridge was writing Osorio, he was appropriating a Shakespeare who had certainly been turned to conservative political purposes through dramatic criticism and stage practice, but it was also a Shakespeare whose fertility in equivocation and repeated adaptation could support a multivalent message. …