ABSTRACT
Coleridge wrote two plays intended for the stage, Remorse and Zapolya: A Christmas Tale. Both were produced during his lifetime. To put Coleridge's achievement in perspective, Richard Holmes notes that no new verse tragedy had run for more than ten nights since 1777. The pride brought by success with Remorse seems to have caused a much more dramatic response to the situation with Zapolya than the earlier disappointment with Sheridan. In a review of Greenberg's study, Lucy Newly expresses scepticism that the Hamlet vocation concept possesses a meaning in the role-playing beyond the simple contrast that it sophisticates between the relatively unfulfilled Coleridge and the apparently more prolific and successful poet Wordsworth. Thus the circumstances in which Remorse was produced seem to have justified and illustrated Coleridge's misgivings about contemporary theatre, and with metadrama the work comments on its own production.
