Abstract
A resurgence of interest in Romantic drama has revealed the fraught relationship the period’s most influential poets had with the large, commercially-driven patent theatres (Drury Lane and Covent Garden). Theater scholars have also called into question the marginalization of Romantic drama more generally, given the theater’s centrality as a cultural space in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century London. Through a discussion of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Remorse (Drury Lane 1813), this article intervenes in these intertwined debates, arguing that Coleridge viewed the playhouse as an important, if imperfect site of aesthetic, intellectual and civic education. A careful, dramaturgical reading of the play reveals that instead of approaching the conventions of commercially-driven spectacle as an impediment, Coleridge harnesses their power to engage in the same kinds of epistemological questioning that form the thematic center of his lyric poetry. In Remorse’s famous conjuring scene, for example, Coleridge deploys sensory stimulation (smoke, fire, music) and the linguistic sublime in mutually supportive ways. Stage effect and dramatic verse work together to question the coexistence of the physical and the metaphysical and to investigate the foundations of both material and spiritual knowledge. This attention to staging and historical context has not only a profound influence on the play’s interpretation, but it also expands our narrow understanding of the role that the commercial theater had in shaping aesthetic and philosophical debates before a broad and diverse audience. Coleridge was undoubtedly one of the patent theaters’ harshest critics, yet we have yet to acknowledge that he was also one of its greatest innovators in using aspects of the emerging melodrama to revive interest in tragedy.