11
There may have been one other reason why Coleridge embarked on these lectures with such bravado. Just before they began, at the end of October, he received the astonishing and exciting news that his play Osorio had been accepted for a major production at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. The newly formed Theatre Committee, under the wealthy businessman and MP Samuel Whitbread, had admired it “exceedingly”. The commercial manager Mr Samuel Arnold was “confident of its success”.108 At last he would make his way.
It was an extraordinary opportunity. The Drury Lane Theatre had been owned by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the very man who had originally rejected Osorio in 1797. But it had burnt down in 1809 (thus bankrupting Sheridan, who sat by the blaze philosophically drinking a bottle of wine). The ambitious new management were launching their first season in a splendidly re-equipped theatre, with the latest in stage technology and lighting.
The market for new plays was extremely restricted and demanding. Only one other theatre, Covent Garden, was licensed for serious new works; all the rest could only show musicals, burlesques, operas or pantomimes. Few productions lasted more than a week, and no new verse tragedy had run for more than ten nights since 1777 (the feat achieved by Hannah More’s Percy). When Godwin’s best-selling novel Faulkner had been dramatized in 1807, Godwin had spent £800 on a house in expectation of certain success, and then lost the entire sum when the play immediately failed.109
The management’s choice of Osorio was therefore a carefully judged gamble, balancing both literary prestige and commercial considerations. The play was set in Grenada at the time of the Spanish Inquisition, and dealt in passion, mystery and menacing violence. Historical dramas of this kind were popular, and the Committee were particularly taken with the potential of its mis-en-scène, since the Peninsular campaign had brought everything Spanish into vogue. Its author was widely known in London through his lecturing, and the text offered spectacular staging opportunities. Above all, with Coleridge on hand to adapt the text, the production could be mounted speedily, as it had to be ready for staging in January 1813, less than two months ahead.
Coleridge announced his coup on the evening after his first lecture on 3 November. Dizzy with excitement, he told Crabb Robinson and other assembled friends that he had “five or six” other ideas for plays ready for the London stage if the first proved a success. Robinson was amused to see Coleridge in such a “strange burst” of high spirits, and noted how he was quickly carried away into extravagant behaviour. At one point in the evening he asked to borrow a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics, and surprised everyone by kissing Spinoza’s picture on the title page, and announcing that Spinoza was “his gospel”. But a few minutes later he was to be heard rapidly demonstrating that Spinoza’s philosophy “was, after all, false”. Robinson thought it an extraordinary display of his showmanship, and was even more surprised to observe that everyone seemed delighted with it, with one earnest cleric remarking afterwards that it demonstrated Coleridge’s “comprehensive faith and love”.110
The original version of the play, Osorio, had been written at Stowey in the spring of 1797, in the months before Wordsworth and Dorothy came to Alfoxden. The story concerns two brothers in love with the same woman, a distinctive Coleridgean theme. The drama was evidently still alive for Coleridge in 1812, and had the peculiar importance for him that it was a work written almost entirely independent of Wordsworth’s influence, although short sections of it (“The Dungeon” and “The Foster Mother’s Tale”) had been published anonymously in the Lyrical Ballads.
Like most Romantic verse drama of this period it was an uneasy attempt to combine two genres that were not really compatible: popular costume melodrama with a modern form of Shakespearean tragedy. The first required continuous colourful, theatrical action on stage, with the rapid unfolding of a thriller plot. The second depended on the slow, stately, interior evolutions of dramatic verse soliloquy. The model for such a play, but crushing in its brilliance, was of course Hamlet (also set at a time of war in Scandinavia); and the most successful contemporary version of it was not British, but German, as in Schiller’s Wallenstein (set during the Thirty Years’ War) which Coleridge had translated himself so effectively in 1800.*
The melodrama of Osorio was provided by the theme of fraternal betrayal, and the passionate rivalry for the love of the same beautiful woman. Its plotting has all the tortuousness of the genre, and sounds wonderfully absurd in summary. But it sets up some strange echoes. The good brother Albert is returning from a long sea-voyage to claim his bride Maria. The beautiful Maria has been waiting faithfully in the royal palace of Grenada, repelling the advances of the evil brother Osorio. Albert is shipwrecked on the coast of Grenada, and the scheming Osorio sends a Moorish captain to murder him in secret. Osorio then presses on with his treacherous seduction of Maria, confidently assuming Albert is dead.
But of course Albert is not dead. He has been befriended by the Moor (and the Moor’s wife, Alhadra) after showing sympathy for their cause as persecuted aliens in Spain. With the Moor’s help, he returns in disguise to the court at Grenada to win back Maria and seek justice from his evil sibling. Albert proceeds by indirections and tricks. He adopts a disguise, avoids openly confronting either Osorio or Maria, and with psychological cunning slowly forces the one to admit his guilt and the other her true love.
In one crucial scene in Act III, Albert puts on “a sorcerer’s robe” and pretends to conjure up a ghost (amidst burning incense and claps of thunder). The ghost carries the keepsake picture of Maria belonging to the “dead” brother (really Albert himself, though at times this is hard to remember). However, by Act V Albert is reunited with Maria; Osorio, driven half-mad with guilt, has begged for forgiveness (“Forgive me, Albert! – Curse me with forgiveness!”); and Alhadra has led a successful Moorish insurrection against corrupt Spanish rule.
Clearly at this level the action is as much grand guignol as melodrama. The speeches are too long; the central device of Albert’s disguise is unconvincing; the subplot of Moorish persecution is confusing; and the stage business of ghosts, swords, poisoned goblets, seems close to pantomime. It was hardly surprising that Sheridan had rejected it as a farrago, wholly unsuitable for the stage at that date.
Yet Coleridge’s 1797 version had really been a cabinet play designed for reading, “a sketch of a tragedy” with the external plot “half-told”. As a piece of stagecraft he realized that “all is imperfect, and much obscure”.111 His conscious, artistic intention had been to use melodrama as a vehicle for a physiological study in tragic guilt. This was the Shakespearean dimension of the play, and it was a theme common to his ballads. His central interest lay in the character of Osorio, as revealed by his soliloquies. Osorio is a powerful, commanding man inwardly destroyed by guilt, but who refuses to recognize its moral force. He is guilty but not remorseful; agonized but not repentant. In the first version Coleridge felt he had not made this dramatically clear, or linked the inner tragic turmoil with the outward action. Other characters, notably the forceful Moorish woman Alhadra, who has some of the finest speeches in the play, inexplicably came to life while Osorio remained as colourless as his name.*
Coleridge’s acute summary of this central weakness also curiously suggests its Romantic appeal. “The growth of Osorio’s character is nowhere explained – and yet I had most clear and psychologically accurate ideas of the whole of it…A man, who from constitutional calmness of appetites, is seduced into pride and the love of power…and from thence, by the co-operation of envy, and a curiously modified love for a beautiful female (which is nowhere developed in the play), into a most atrocious guilt. A man who is in truth a weak man, yet always duping himself into the belief that he has a soul of iron.”112 In 1797 Coleridge had so little hope of finding a theatrical solution that he left his only remaining copy of the manuscript (although four were in fact made) to gather dust in William Godwin’s archives.113
Yet even in its first version, the play is oddly
gripping in its broad conception. The neurotic love-triangle, the suggestions of necromancy, the atmosphere of gloomy menace, the whole notion of spiralling inward darkness (prisons, caves, chasms, guilt) is arresting. Now, after a lapse of some fifteen years, tastes had changed and these gothic elements obviously struck the Drury Lane Committee as having tremendous potential. (The much odder fact that during that same lapse of time it also seems to have become a gothic variation of several events in Coleridge’s own life since his return from his sea voyage to Malta in 1806, is much harder to explain but adds greatly to its interest.)
What now transformed the play was the perceived demands of the Drury Lane audience. The whole piece was revamped with an eye to the kind of popular fashion that Byron’s Eastern tales of illicit passion and inexplicable villainy had inspired. The actor-manager Samuel Arnold wanted a bold, well-carpentered action-drama, with plenty of opportunity for his lavish stage-sets and startling scenic effects. Far from seeking further psychological motives to Osorio’s character – which had been Coleridge’s instinct – he asked for cuts, dramatic simplifications and more external colour.
Character names became more explanatory – Osorio became Ordonio (suggesting force), Albert became Alvar (suggesting mystery), Maria became Dona Teresa (suggesting exotic romance). The play itself was re-titled and the first posters announced Remorse: A Tragedy in Five Acts, with a setting that promised bloodshed: “The reign of Philip II, just at the close of the civil wars against the Moors, and during the heat of the Persecution which raged against them.”
There was a tremendous new emphasis on the melodramatic elements. Alvar’s sorcery scene in Act III was to become a grand set piece, with full choir and orchestra rather than the humble “Celestina stop, or Clagget’s Metallic Organ” suggested in the original. A “Cavern” scene in Act IV was to have a dreadful chasm disguised in a pool of moonlight, down which Ordonio’s Moorish chieftain first imagines falling, and then actually falls (thrown by Ordonio). It was a classic “falling” nightmare come to life, with the peculiar overtones of one of Coleridge’s own opium dreams.
…My body bending forward, yea, o’erbalanced
Almost beyond recoil, on the dim brink
Of a huge chasm I stept. The shadowy moonshine
Filling the void so counterfeited substance,
That my foot hung aslant adown the edge…
When a boy, my lord!
I could have sat whole hours beside that chasm,
Push’d in huge stones and heard them strike and rattle
Against its horrid sides…114
In the final Act, the villainous Ordonio, rather than being swept off to prison, was to be stabbed to death on stage by Alhadra.
Coleridge conceded these lurid alterations without protest, and even with a kind of fascination at what popular taste apparently demanded of him. (The process was similar to a modern novelist watching his work adapted for Hollywood.) The brutal stabbing was the one contrivance that worried him, and was to be played on the first night without his permission. (He “absolutely had the Hiss half way out of my Lips” when he first saw it but then “retracted it”, when he registered its stunning effect on the audience.) For the rest, he said tactfully that everything was improved, and that he earned the reputation of “the Amenable Author” in the green room, from his willingness to cut and rewrite up to the last moments.115
The plot changes were largely a matter of clarifying what always remained a slightly hectic story-line. A new opening scene in Act I laid in the back-story of fraternal rivalry for the audience, and announced the psychological theme:
Remorse is as the heart in which it grows:
If that be gentle, it drops balmy dews
Of true repentance; but if proud and gloomy,
It is a poison-tree, that pierced to the inmost
Weeps only tears of poison!116
A fuller, and highly emotional “recognition” scene between Alvar and Dona Teresa was placed at the beginning of Act V to prepare for the violent climax. But where Coleridge was allowed to tinker with the verse, he added images of solitude and grief, drawing directly on his experiences in London over the last two years. In Act IV, waiting outside the “iron Dungeon gate” where Alvar is imprisoned, Dona Teresa is given lines almost directly transposed from Coleridge’s private Notebooks of 1811:
The moon is high in heaven, and all is hush’d.
Yet anxious listener! I have seem’d to hear
A low dead thunder mutter through the night,
As ‘twere a giant angry in his sleep…117
To Ordonio, Coleridge gave a short, new Shakespearean soliloquy on death (the echo is from Measure for Measure) which became a favourite not only with the actors, but with the stage-hands. “It was pleasing to observe, during the Rehearsal all the Actors and Actresses and even the Mechanics on the stage clustering round while these lines were repeating, just as if it had been a favourite strain of music.” Dona Teresa asks Ordonio where the body of his brother Alvar lies (assuming him to be dead). Ordonio replies with an image of the dark grave which really reveals his own dream-haunted darkness in life. The passage, though in blank verse, is indeed curiously musical and lilting, like a sinister lullaby, and again the autobiographical resonance was strong.
Teresa: “Where lies the corse of my betrothéd husband?”
Ordonio: “There, where Ordonio likewise fain would lie!
In the sleep-compelling earth, in unpierce’d darkness!
For while we live –
An inward day that never, never sets,
Glares round the soul, and mocks the closing eyelids!
Over his rocky grave the fir-grove sighs
A lulling ceaseless dirge! ‘Tis well with him.”118
12
Even as Coleridge was settling into this intensive work, he was painfully reminded of how much depended on its success. On 9 November Josiah Wedgwood wrote from Staffordshire, announcing in a dry and almost curt letter that his business losses were such that he would probably be forced to discontinue his half share of £75 in Coleridge’s annuity, which he had been paying since 1798. Like many other British manufacturers, the high wartime taxes combined with the collapse of the home market, had left him running his Etruria potteries from an “annually diminishing” capital fund. While his brother Thomas Wedgwood’s share of the annuity was secured by his will, Josiah now asked Coleridge to consider whether in these circumstances he was “bound in honour” to continue his own share. “I hope you will write to me without reserve on this subject.”119
Coleridge was placed in an acute quandary by this letter. For a fortnight he gave his Surrey Institution lectures in a state of “nervous depression” and anxious indecision. Ever since 1804 he had been making the whole annuity over to Mrs Coleridge, thereby at least supplying his family with a secure basic income whatever the fluctuations of his own literary earnings. But the prospect of any other regular income was still remote. Both Wordsworth and Southey had relied on similar private annuities, though now in middle life their literary reputations had secured them better earnings. (Wordsworth’s post as Distributor for Stamps for Westmorland and Cumberland brought in between £200 and £400 per annum; and Southey – working immensely hard – earned two or three times that from the Quarterly. Even Hazlitt had recently secured a permanent post at the Morning Chronicle for a salary of 200 guineas.)120
At the same time, Josiah’s letter was obviously phrased in such a way as to allow Coleridge to plead the case of his family, and to beg for an extension of the full annuity at least for a year or so longer. He also suspected that news of the quarrel with Wordsworth, and the now widely circulated story of his “hopelessness” and opium addiction, had led Josiah to underestimate his professional efforts in lecturing and journalism, which was almost certainly true. Above all there was the Drury Lane production, which might persuade Josiah that he was still worth helping, or alternatively convince him that he could now fend for himself. How much s
hould he reveal of all these circumstances, and how far should he beg Josiah to honour his original promise?
The temptation to write a passionate, pleading and somewhat disingenuous letter was very strong. No one could do this better than Coleridge. He had often taken advantage of rich friends – Daniel Stuart and William Sotheby had experienced his insistent touch. Yet he was not feckless about money – his handling of the annuity, as well as the insurance premium for his wife, was exemplary – and he could be generous, not to say quixotic on occasions, as later events proved. In this instance, his quixotic side triumphed.
On 1 December he wrote handsomely to Josiah, releasing him from all further responsibilities in the half share of the Wedgwood annuity. He praised him and his “reverend Brother’s past Munificence”, and made no mention of the fact that he had steadily made over all these payments to Mrs Coleridge. (Her share would now be reduced to £67, after wartime income tax.)
He was frank about both the difficulties and the potential of his own position, and tried to reassure Josiah that he had continued the annuity much longer than could have been expected. “Permit me to assure you, that had The Friend succeeded…or had my Lectures done more than merely pay my Board in Town, it was my intention to have resigned my claims on your Bounty – and I am sure, that I shall have your good wishes in my behalf, when I tell you that I have had a Play accepted at Drury Lane…”
Coleridge- Darker Reflections Page 39
