Commerce, Civic Education, and Romantic Drama: Stage Illusion in Coleridge’s Remorse

Abstract

Commerce, Civic Education, and Romantic Drama: Stage Illusion in Coleridge’s Remorse Ellen Malenas Ledoux (bio) In october 1797 samuel taylor coleridge wrote to his friend Thomas Poole about how his childhood reading shaped his understanding of the imagination and the limits of empiricism. Coleridge recounts that when his father first explained the physics of the cosmos, young Coleridge was hardly surprised: For from my early reading of Faery Tales, & Genii &c &c—my mind had been habituated to the Vast—& I never regarded my senses in any way as the criteria of my belief…. Should children be permitted to read Romance, & Relations of Giants & Magicians, & Genii? … I have formed my faith in the affirmative.—I know no other way of giving the mind a love of “the Great”, & “the Whole”.—Those who have been led to the same truths step by step thro’ the constant testimony of their senses, seem to me to want a sense which I possess—… and the Universe to them is but a mass of little things…. when they looked at great things, all became a blank & they saw nothing … & called the want of imagination Judgment, & the never being moved to Rapture Philosophy!1 This letter, which coincides with the writing of Remorse’s first unstaged iteration (Osorio), touches on themes vital to this article’s claims about Coleridge’s staging of Remorse (Drury Lane, 1813) and how it bears on his attitudes toward the dramatic form as a vehicle for public education. Coleridge affirms that those who rely solely on sensory observation perceive an aggregation of small data points and miss the greater meaning of our sublime universe. These ideas are not unique to Coleridge; other Romantic aesthetic productions, most notably William Blake’s contemporaneous [End Page 557] painting Newton (1795/c.1805), illustrate how intellectually constrictive over-reliance on material observation can be. What interests me here is Coleridge’s suggestion that exposure to fantastical literature prompts and sustains understanding of “the Vast,” because it demonstrates how ostensibly humble genres—the romance, the fairy tale—can expand one’s imaginative and cognitive capacity. The letter suggests, by extension, that this knowledge remains accessible to the marginalized groups who typically consume popular literature: children, women, and the working class.2 During the Romantic Era, the Gothic and Orientalist spectacles often staged at the patent theaters (Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and summer Haymarket) served a similar function to the types of tales Coleridge describes. To be fair, some of these spectacle-driven performances are rather silly, but even the silliest of them, for example The Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh (Haymarket 1811), are self-conscious and smart as theatrical parodies. Yet a subset of these plays employing spectacle, including Remorse, have a further reach, providing a broad popular audience not only with entertainment, but also with opportunities to contemplate the metaphysical—that “Great” or “Whole” that Coleridge suggests challenges the reader/viewer to think beyond the narrow confines of empirical perception and to gain synthetic knowledge. Elsewhere, I have argued that these plays have important political content; here, I hope to demonstrate that Gothic drama can also raise important philosophical questions to a mass audience.3 My understanding of this form as elevated—as a vehicle for philosophical education—runs outside of prevailing critical wisdom about drama’s place in the Romantic literary hierarchy. It also builds upon foundational work by Jeffrey Cox, Frederick Burwick, Julie Carlson, Jane Moody, Michael Gamer, and others, that asserts drama’s centrality to Romantic-era culture.4 As these scholars have demonstrated starting in the late 1980s, drama has [End Page 558] been marginalized in Romantic Studies partly from an overemphasis on textual, rather than performative, analysis. For example, in a recent article on the harlequinade, Cox succinctly outlines the alternative method needed to discern a play’s cultural impact. He argues that much of nineteenth-century drama can only be understood when performance texts are examined in conjunction with their other forms of meaning making, such as music, stage action, costumes, and sets. Further, one must broaden this context beyond the playhouse, using a play’s paratexts, intertextual allusions, and reference to current events as clues to gauge a...