Seeing Things (“As They Are”)

Coleridge is not best known as a playwright, or even as a theorist of the stage, in spite of the extended critique of late eighteenth-century theatre that is familiar to readers chiefly through his lectures on Shakespeare. Nevertheless, Coleridge did make serious attempts to write plays, largely in response to the state of English drama in the 1790s, which was perceived by Coleridge and by other public commentators, such as Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, to be in need of resuscitation. Contemporary plays were often dismissed as sentimental, formulaic, and highly melodramatic—or, as Wordsworth famously declared in his preface to Lyrical Ballads, “sickly and stupid German tragedies.” This dismissal derived from a highly idealized view of what theatre could accomplish, in political as well as dramatic terms. To reinvigorate the productions of the English stage would be not only to elevate it again to the level of its “golden age,” in Elizabethan and Jacobean culture, but to fulfill an agenda related to a nationalist impulse that, if not explicitly revolutionary, was often politically reformist. ¹ Thus the familiar narrative of Coleridge's involvement in the theatre focuses on his early radicalism (evident in so much of his work in the 1790s, not least in his 1797 play Osorio, and in The Fall of Robespierre, cowritten with Robert Southey), and with a sense of the theatre as an ideal space not only to represent and engage current events—chiefly of course the French Revolution and the English reaction to it, and thus larger questions of freedom and censorship—but also to influence public response to those events. Beyond this, though, the political ambivalence of Coleridge's maturity, and the critical pronouncements he would later make on the state of the theatre, tend to confirm the view that “highbrow” Romantic theatre was either fixated unproductively on old models, classical or Shakespearean, or obsessed by subjects that were fundamentally unsuitable for the stage—fit only for the closet, or specimens of what Byron was to call a “mental” theatre. ²