SOURCE: Thorp, Willard. “The Stage Adventures of Some Gothic Novels.” PMLA 43, no. 2 (June 1928): 476-86.

[In the following essay, Thorp discusses strategies employed by Gothic playwrights to minimize the effects of the horrors they were staging.]

The characteristic drama of the first years of the nineteenth century was, as everyone knows, absurdly romantic and sentimental. Incited by the extravagant Kotzebue and charmed into emulation by the new mélodrame from France, the first specimen of which reached England in 1802, the English playwrights supplied the stage with a variety of plots involving robber barons, victims of the Inquisition, captive maidens and sentimental villains. Frequently they seasoned these delicacies with supernatural horrors and garnished them with vaulted halls, sepulchral chambers, and dungeons.

Much in this episode of dramatic history can be designated by the word “Gothic”, and when one bears in mind that by 1800 the Gothic novels were in high favor with the reading public, it will be seen that native as well as foreign influences may have operated to produce it. Furthermore, many of these Gothic novels had reached the stage. But an examination of these dramatized versions discloses the curious fact that their authors seem to have taken pains to minimize the horrors of their originals rather than to utilize them for dramatic effect. Nor were they content even with this. They frequently perverted the terrors into comedy, by the way of concession to a public which was not yet willing to suffer a romanticized theater. An account of these adaptations, and of certain other plays in the same manner, makes an addition to the story of the Gothic novel and provides a commentary on literary and dramatic taste in the years just previous to the romantic revival.

The first dramatization of a “tale of terror” was an adaptation of Walpole's Castle of Otranto, entitled The Count of Narbonne, which appeared in 1781 (C. G. [Covent Garden] Nov. 17). The author was Robert Jephson. The project flattered Walpole; had not Bishop Warburton said the plan of the Castle was regularly a drama? He wrote to Jephson:

You, Sir, have realized his idea (i.e., Warburton's). … One cannot be quite ashamed of one's follies, if genius condescends to adopt and put them to sensible use.

(Jan. 27, 1780)

Both author and adaptor, however, were aware that they were dealing with dangerous material. The horrors must be eliminated or the audience would mutiny. So Jephson pruned with vigor and Walpole complimented him on having made a coherent story “without the marvellous, though so much depended on that part.” No vestige remained of the famous sword, the mysterious vizored knight, the gigantic leg, the plumed helmet, the picture that walks from its frame, or the skeleton wrapped in a hermit's cowl. The climax of the story when the castle is rent by a thunderclap and the form of Alfonso “dilated to an immense magnitude” appears in the center of the ruins, was not hinted in the play. Even the rolls of thunder and the groans were much reduced.

One speech, obviously betraying Shakespearean influence, serves to indicate the limits of Jephson's Gothicism:

COUNTESS
And are not prodigies then mighty reasons?
The owl mistakes his season, in broad day
Screaming his hideous omens; spectres glide,
Gibbering and pointing as we pass along;
While the deep earth's unorganized caves
Send forth wild sounds and clamours terrible;
These towers shake round us, though the untroubled air
Stagnates to lethargy:—our children perish,
And new disasters blacken every hour.
Blood shed unrighteously, blood unappeas'd,
Though we are guiltless, cries, I fear, for vengeance.

The effect of these alterations was to reduce the play to a romantic tragedy about a wicked Count who tries to put away his wife that he may marry his dead son's fiancée, and of the sufferings of his daughter who loves a mysterious stranger, later discovered to be the rightful possessor of the Count's estate. In its final form there is surely nothing that could have disturbed a common-sense audience. But Walpole was still uneasy and provided for the opening night a propitiatory epilogue in which the rude strength of the Gothic age is commended:

That author well deserves our warmest praise. …
Who, 'midst the placid murmurings of Ton
Rolls the rough tide of Gothick force along;
And when true worth seems withering at the root,
Turns the rich soil whence towering virtues shoot.

This precaution, however, was scarcely needed, for, as Walpole wrote Jephson after the first performance:

There was not the slightest symptom of disapprobation to any part, and the plaudit was great and long when given out again for Monday. … The prologue was exceedingly liked and for effect, no play ever produced more tears.

The Count of Narbonne continued popular in the repertory and was acted as late as 1807.¹

The next dramatic excursion into Gothic territory was made, curiously enough, by Harlequin. During a considerable part of the eighteenth century the pantomime had furnished a debased kind of entertainment to a large section of the theater public. Even great managers like Fielding, Garrick, and Sheridan found it necessary to make certain concessions to this universally popular amusement. The pantomimists, to the annoyance of their competitors, were constantly on the look-out for novelties; consequently their productions are useful as indications of contemporary taste in many matters. One is not surprised to learn, therefore, that Gothicism was assisted onto the stage by Miles Peter Andrews' pantomime, the Enchanted Castle (1785). The preface to the edition of 1786 is instructive in its implications:

The Novelty attempted to be dramatized To-night, takes its Rise from the Writings of Miss Aikin, and the Hon. Horace Walpole. The Castle of Otranto, and the fragment of Sir Bertrand, form the Basis of an Endeavour to bring upon the Stage somewhat of the Effects which may be produced by Midnight Horror, or Agency supernatural.² What may be the Result of this Experiment, To-night must determine, for hitherto the Experiment has not been made.

The Ghost of Hamlet and the Witches of Macbeth do not militate against the Assertion. Their Appearance, though out of Nature, was simple and not combined. The Clank of Chains, the Whistling of hollow Winds, the Clapping of Doors, Gigantic Forms, and visionary Gleams of Light, attended not their Effects upon the Stage. The firm Mind certainly may laugh at all this; but if ever, on a late Winter Evening, at a well-told Story of an Apparition, the Company have found themselves unusually attentive, and sometimes unwittingly looked back;—if they have felt no Wish to part;—if imperceptibly they have sat more closely together, and heard the Summons to Rest and Separation, the retiring to a lone Chamber with Reluctance, not to say Disquietude;—if all this has happen'd, then are we right in thinking there is somewhat of Enthusiasm or Superstition in these Matters, which Reason smiles at, but cannot prevail over.

Exactly what the terrors of the Enchanted Castle were is difficult to say, since only the libretto remains. The story concerns a necromancer who keeps a virgin (Columbine) in a trance to get her into his power. The benevolent Genius of the Wood effects her release by his magic sword and restores her to her lover (Harlequin). The cast calls for “sprites, phantoms, and giants” who are, one supposes, the terrors promised by the author. To judge from the scanty text, the amusing matter mixed in “to counteract the Gloom” predominated in the production.³

Andrew MacDonald ventured to introduce into his Vimonda (Haymarket, Sept. 5, 1787) a few Gothic embellishments. No more pathetic piece ever reached the stage. It recounts the woes of Vimonda, whose father has supposedly been murdered. One presently discovers that the man who attempted the deed was a kinsman who seeks marriage with her and is trying to throw his guilt on the man she loves. The spirit of her father, which has been seen haunting the vicinity of the action, suddenly comes to life—for it is no ghost at all but the man himself. An unnecessary last act riots in poisonings, confessions, reversals, and reconciliations. The first scene of the play takes place near a tomb and a “Tower, decorated with Arms and Sepulchral Figures”, where the ghost resides. At various times he escapes from his habitation and frightens the household. The audience is never permitted to see him, though a bell is tolled at intervals through the play to indicate that he is prowling about back-stage. The feebleness of MacDonald's Gothicism saved his play from disaster but not from contemptuous criticism. He had claimed for it originality of plot “raised by Fancy's power, in some silent solitary hour”. The notice in the Monthly Review (1788, p. 75) squinting at the ghost and other extravagancies, concludes with firmness:

We allow the Author the merit of invention; but it must be the merit of inventing improbabilities. He shocks belief, and appears to have entirely neglected that rule for dramatic composition,

Ficta voluptatis causa sint proxima veris.

James Cobb seems to have been the first to surmise that if an audience would not show a proper alarm at stage ghosts and horrors, they might be induced to laugh at them. His discovery, as later instances will prove, influenced considerably the course of Gothicism on the stage. The denouement of his opera, the Haunted Tower (D. L. [Drury Lane] Nov. 24, 1789), is accomplished by means of burlesque terrors. The Baron of Oakland has usurped the estate of Lord William; he also schemes to marry his son to the lady whom the rightful baron loves. Sir William arrives in disguise, resolved to oust the villain. A rumour has been spread that the Old Baron's ghost haunts the castle tower. The usurper, who is a great coward, credits this rumour and is thrown into a fright by strange voices, which echo his words when he is in the haunted tower. After he has been sufficiently wrought upon to make him an easy prey to deception, the supposed ghost is introduced.

A trumpet is heard at a distance. Lord William throws open the doors and walks with great solemnity in his father's armour. The trumpet is heard until he is quite off.⁴

Of course the audience knows this is merely a masquerade but the villain is properly frightened and yields without a show of defiance. All ends with a merry Finale and Sestetto of the principals. The public rewarded Cobb for his shrewdness in anticipating their preferences by demanding in two seasons more than eighty performances of the opera.

Mrs. Ann Radcliffe's second novel, A Sicilian Romance, made her a person of importance in the literary world. One is not surprised, therefore, to find the Sicilian Romance as well as her previous novel, A Romance of the Forest, transferred to the stage in the same season, the one on May 28, 1794 (C. G.), the other, under the title Fontainville Forest, on March 25 (C. G.).

James Boaden, in adapting the Romance of the Forest for the stage, discarded the romantic story of Adeline and Theodore which Mrs. Radcliffe had adorned with all the sentimental beauties at her command, and rejected all but a very few of the terrors. Adeline is permitted to discover the mouldering MS penned by her father before his awful death in the abbey; the thunder-machine roars in Act IV, and “through the distant windows one of the Turrets is seen to fall, struck by Lightning”. Boaden, encouraged no doubt by the increased interest in Gothic horrors, had the temerity, also, to introduce into Act III—very timidly to be sure—the ghost of the murdered Marquis.

The stage-treatment of this diffident and unassuming ghost illumines the state of public taste which was responsible for the curiously perverted stage-versions of the terrors already mentioned and for others yet to be discussed. In the first place, although Boaden devoted forty lines to the scene in which the apparition appeared, the management cut the scene to a scant fifteen lines. The phantom is first heard within the wings. The stage-direction orders it, at its entrance, to be “faintly visible and vanish soon into a dark part of the chamber”. The speech allowed the ghost consists of only six words. It is clear that author and producers were by no means certain that their ghost, even thus apologetically offered, would be tolerated. The Epilogue, spoken by Mrs. Pope, who as Adeline had conversed with the shy spirit, thus comments on the venture:

Before this awful crisis of our play,
Our vent'rous bard has often heard me say—
Think you our friends one modern ghost will see,
Unless, indeed of Hamlet's pedigree:
Know you not, Shakespeare's petrifying power
Commands alone the horror-giving hour?

The author, she says, justifies his spectre by the precedent of Shakespeare and declares he will die before he will “give up the ghost”. Kemble, Harris, and Boaden had conferred anxiously over this doubtful scene, on which, they agreed, the fate of the play depended. Kemble recommended a new costume, less cumbersome than the traditional armor worn by Hamlet the King, and Follett was selected for the part. But he, as it happened, though possessing the desired presence, was dear to the audience for his skill at eating carrots in the pantomime. Were he to speak the line,“Perish Here!” the play would certainly not survive the first night. So Follett was instructed to mime the part while Thompson spoke the words in the wings. An additional precaution was provided by a gauze curtain stretched before the scene.

When the great moment arrived, the care of the sponsors of the play was rewarded. Kemble says:

The whisper of the house as he [Follet] was about to enter, the breathless silence while he floated along like a shadow, proved to me that I had achieved the great desideratum.⁵

After the curtain fell, the applause was renewed again and again. Yet Kemble saw fit to revive the play only once (Jan. 8, 1796) and this time in a considerably shortened form. Genest's comment probably reflects the opinion of those in the audience who did not applaud the ghost: “The last scene of the third act is rendered contemptible by the introduction of a Phantom.”

Henry Siddons, who prepared the stage version of A Sicilian Romance, did not share Boaden's fondness for experiments in the horrific. He preferred to resort to Cobb's expedient of making his terrors grotesque—a proved means of insuring success. A short synopsis of the play will provide the necessary context. Ferrand, Marquis of Otranto, has put away his first wife and is laboring with his conscience for courage to kill her that he may marry the beautiful Alinda who is already in his power.⁶ With the aid of her lover she escapes and takes refuge in a monastery where the prior promises to shelter her from the villainy of Ferrand. He gains admittance, however, in the disguise of a friar. As he is about to carry off his victim, he is confronted by what appears to him at first to be an apparition, but is in reality a badly scared servant to whom Gothic burial chambers are far from congenial. Previous to the entrance of Ferrand, the fright of Martin the servant at finding himself in so terrible a place has afforded amusement to the audience:

Odds flesh! of all the frights I ever experienced, nothing was ever so bad as this—od—od—od! how my teeth chatter! Every whisper of wind and every crack of this damn'd rotten old mansion, makes me feel as if I had an icicle in my belly—I'm afraid to look around for fear of saluting a tall skeleton; and my great-grandfather's ghost in his jack boots seems bobbing among the pillars and grinning every moment. … 'Sdeath! what do I see in yonder aisle—a light! a Figure all snow! Oh, dear, as pale as death! Oh, Lord! its eyes are like two large steeples! Good Saint James.

(He kneels to pray in an agony of fear.)

The ghost he thinks he sees is only the piteous Alinda pursued hither by the villain. Ferrand, in turn, is frightened and diverted from his evil scheme by the ghastly appearance of Martin, who rises “pale and in white” from behind a tomb.⁷

The sub-title of Siddons' opera reads: The Apparition of the Cliffs. The phantom here alluded to is supposed to walk on the rocks at one in the morning. Gerbin, the Porter, wearing a suit of armor “put on in a ludicrous manner” staggers on half intoxicated in the fourth scene of Act I to prove his indifference to this ghostly visitation. He is delivering a mock-invocation to the “Spirit of this dread abyss” when Count Ferrand “muffled in a red cloak, with a dark lanthorn in one hand … stalks along the back part of the rock, unlocks and enters the tower (in which a blue light is burning).” Gerbin is frightened into a fit and runs off calling frantically for his cronies. This comic interlude is derived from one of the horror-laden episodes in the novel.⁸

A third Gothic drama inspired by Mrs. Radcliffe's romances is Miles Peter Andrews' opera, the Mysteries of the Castle (C. G. Jan. 1, 1795),⁹ to which her Mysteries of Udolpho contributed to some extent, although the actual borrowing extends no farther than the villain Montoni. One incident has been obtained from the Sicilian Romance. The prologue foretells the kind of drama one may expect—a cup of “various beverage;”

Music, pantomime and graver scenes,
Perhaps a dash of terror intervenes.

The plot concerns Julia, unwilling wife to Montoni, who has given out false news of her death and plans wantonly to kill her for refusing him conjugal rights. From this danger she is saved by the intervention of her faithful lover, Carlos, and by his follower, Hilario, who circumvent her foolish, unfeeling father as he is about to force her back into the arms of her wicked husband.

The “dash of terror” intervenes at the time of Julia's escape from the castle. Inspired no doubt by Mrs. Radcliffe's Mysteries, Andrews prescribes a subterranean passage, a tolling bell, a Gothic turret with a window where a figure with a dark lantern may appear. Act II shows an old room hung with tattered tapestry, destined by Montoni to be the scene of Julia's execution. The stage is a little darkened. “Thunder, and lightning flashes through the old walls.” Into this scene come the rescuers, entering by a trap from the cavern below. The dramatist has built up considerable suspense in the first part of this act, but he does not trust himself to carry the horrors farther. In order to forestall the laughter that he feared, he deliberately burlesques the scene after the hero goes out, leaving Hilario behind with orders to follow. Hilario is the buffoon of the piece, and Andrews at this moment of great suspense provides him with a bit of clowning which completely destroys the tension which had been created.

HILARIO (alone)
Follow! I'm numb'd, I'm petrified—I have not a limb to stand upon—soft—let me try (advances one leg)—yes, I have put my right foot foremost, no, let me take it back again. (Retreats a little—thunders again.) What, shall I leave my friend in the lurch? Let him grapple with old Ebony by himself? For shame, Hilario! After him, my boy! (Goes towards the doors in the scene, opens one on the right of that where Carlos entered, which discovers a Coffin standing on a bier, with a lamp upon it.) Wheugh! I'm dead and buried! A Coffin! (Shuts door.) And I dare say the sexton will be here before I can say my prayers.

A fourth novel of Mrs. Radcliffe's, The Italian, reached the stage as the Italian Monk (Haymarket, Aug. 15, 1797). The adaptor, again, was James Boaden. The play follows the novel in the main except for certain sentimental variations and a considerable condensation of the third book, which Mrs. Radcliffe spun out with interminable meetings of the Inquisition. Since no ghosts walk in the novel or in the play, a discussion of Boaden's work is not in order here. It is worth noting, however, that the mysterious figure of the Monk who eventually reveals the secret of Schedoni's crimes is retained in the play. His first entrance is made the occasion for a humorous demonstration of fear on the part of Paullo. Apparently by this time such scenes of mock-terror were become conventional.

The following year (Dec. 29, 1798) Boaden brought out at Drury Lane a version of Lewis' famous novel, The Monk,¹⁰ with the title Aurelio and Miranda. Of all the tales of terror it is, of course, the most extravagant. Lewis had enlivened his sensational story of rape, incest, murder, magic, and diablerie, with an obvious sensuality. The reviewers had in consequence raised the hue and cry against him; the Attorney-General was moved by a society for the suppression of vice to obtain an injunction against the sale of the book. The prosecution failed to materialize, but Lewis had in the meantime removed what he supposed objectionable, expunging, so he wrote his father, “every syllable on which could be grounded the slightest construction of immorality.” Naturally when the authorities learned of Boaden's projected presentation of so unsavory a work, they busied themselves in the interest of public morals. The licenser of plays obliged him to change his intended title (Ambrosio) evidently believing this would in some way take the curse from the subject. The public sat eagerly waiting to condemn the venture. But they were fated to disappointment, for when Kemble and Siddons presented it with Sheridan's commendation they found the play exceedingly tame. Boaden writes that the Duke of Leeds sought him out in the Green Room to present him to the Duchess in her box “though he candidly avowed that his religious feelings hardly allowed him to tolerate the powerful effects which he saw produced upon the stage.” Later, in Mrs. Siddons' dressing-room, Dr. Burney shook his head wisely and said the subject was fatal and would not do. Yet the play survived for six performances.

We must suppose his Grace and Dr. Burney were still under the spell of the novel when they cavilled at the play, for Boaden had completely purged away the indecencies and excised all the supernatural element. The crux of Lewis' story is the compact which the Monk makes with the devil in order that he may obtain his lewd desires. The instrument of his downfall is the lascivious Rosario, a female minion of Satan, who seduces him after gaining admittance to the monastery as a novice. Miranda, the Rosario of the play, loves the Monk with a pure and holy love; she has entered his monastery for no wicked end. In fact, when Aurelio (the Monk) makes improper proposals to her, she repulses him. Only when his high birth is revealed and he is thereby able to lay aside his habit and marry his fair “monitress”, will she listen to his importunings. Thus are Lewis' most horrible scenes of conjuration and devilry reduced to the requirements of the stage.

The Monthly Mirror (Jan. 1799) justifies Boaden's alterations by admitting that he has performed his task adequately. Just what that task was, in the opinion of the reviewer, it is profitable to examine. The themes of incest and matricide, it seems, are too horrible for the stage though they afford the romance fine dramatic possibilities. Likewise the appearance of the ghost to Antonia, the incantation in the cemetery, the proceedings of the Inquisition and the final interview between the Monk and Matilda when she appears in her true diabolical character, are not available for the dramatist. Though this supernatural machinery has an undeniable fascination, it is not transferable to a drama, “in which probability and morality are the chief objects of the poet.”

Thus at the very end of the century the critics were still insisting that the theater was no place for the creations of a romantic imagination. No one then could have imagined that Lewis, who was indirectly responsible for the innocuous sentimental Aurelio and Miranda, would in ten years' time become the leader among a new school of romantic dramatists and compel his audience to accept, unquestioningly, ghosts and goblins, bleeding nuns who walk at midnight, wood demons and other horrors which in the theater of Garrick would have caused a riot.

Notes

1. James Boaden, himself an adaptor of Gothic tales, commented significantly in later years on Jephson's tragedy. One needs to remember the drama of the romantic years between. “The supernatural was rather hinted than shown: the author seemed conscious that the stage, at all events, was cold to the wonders of the Gothic muse; that the scenic castle could no longer be haunted by the midnight spectre, nor be overclouded by a mysterious and avenging fatality.” Life of Kemble (1825), I, 277.

2. Sir Bertrand is not included in the Works of Anne Letitia Barbauld, edited by Miss Lucy Aiken in 1825, but Walpole thought it was hers and so, evidently, did Andrews. This bit of evidence may be added to arguments adduced by Birkhead, Tale of Terror, pp. 28-29.

3. One specimen of this “amusing matter” I cannot refrain from quoting. Scene ten is the “far distant town” of Boston.

   AMERICAN BALLAD

   Boston is a Yankee town, so is Philadelphia,
   You shall have a sugar-dram, and I'll have one myselfy.
   Yankee doodle, doodle doo, yankee doodle dandy.
   High doodle, doodle doo, yankee doodle dandy.

   Our Jemima's lost her mare, and knows not where to find her;
   She'll come trotting by, I'll swear, and bring her tail behind her.
   Yankee doodle, etc.

   Jenny Locket lost her pocket, Lukey Sweetlips found it.
   Devil a thing was in the pocket, but the border round it.
   Yankee doodle, etc.

   First I Bought a porridge pot, then I bought a ladle,
   Then my wife was brought to bed, and now I work the cradle.

   Boston is a silly town, and if I'd my desire,
   First I'd knock the Rulers down, and then I'd kick the Crier.

4. Genest believes Mrs. Cowley alludes spitefully to the success of this scene in the preface to the Town before You: “In a popular piece a great actor, holding a sword in his left hand, and making awkward passes with it, charms the audience, and brings down such applause as the bewitching dialogue of Farquhar pants for in vain.”

5. Boaden, Life of Kemble (1825), II, 119.

6. The alterations from the novel are of necessity many. Mrs. Radcliffe plagues her heroine with the attentions of a wicked Duke. Siddons eliminates him and makes Ferrand assume the double rôle of the Marquis Mazzini who has repudiated and imprisoned his wife, and of the Duke whose suit he encourages. As usual in her novels, the characters are constantly on the move, and the number of crumbling monasteries which they inhabit in the course of the romance is astounding. The drama is confined to the precincts of the castle and the monastery.

7. Mrs. Radcliffe by events in her twelfth chapter provides opportunity for this scene of mingled terror and buffoonery, but Siddons is alone responsible for it.

8. In the novel the servants of the Marquis have been aroused by the apparition in the south pavilion of the castle. Their master finally goes thither with them to prove that they are vainly superstitious. The novelist makes no attempt to mitigate the suspense she has created, and the reader is left quite in the dark until the denouement reveals the story of the incarceration of the Marquise. Mrs. Radcliffe always lays her ghosts before the last chapter is done, but she never laughs at her horrors as these dramatists do in their scenes of terror.

9. Frederick Reynolds assisted Andrews with this play as well as Better Late Than Never. Genest says Andrews was to have all the fame and Reynolds half the profits.

10. I have come on another version of The Monk of a far different sort—Le Moine, Drame fantastique, par L. M. Fontan, produced at the Odéon in 1831. In thirty-four years theatrical fashions have greatly changed. Fontan particularly stresses the devil-compact which Boaden had so carefully avoided. His Monk is to be pitied for the struggle with evil which he is made to endure. The figures of Faust and the Byron of the popular imagination loom near.

Bertrand Evans (excerpt date 1947)

SOURCE: Evans, Bertrand. “Gothic Survival in Literary Drama.” In Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley, pp. 216-38. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947.

[In the following excerpt, Evans discusses the use of Gothic elements in the plays of the major Romantic poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, and Shelley.]

The purpose of this final chapter is to suggest the extent and the nature of Gothic manifestations in selected plays by major romantic poets. There is no attempt here to present these dramas in all of their complex relationships. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, and Shelley brought to their works, from the age and from themselves, much that must be omitted here. Their dramatic works have been illuminated in other volumes and monographs by consideration of the currents and crosscurrents of the age, the literary and philosophical implications involved in the nebulous romanticism, and the intellectual and emotional inclinations, attitudes, and convictions of the poets.¹ I shall therefore view the plays in a light in which they have hitherto not been specifically examined. Strictly, the purpose is twofold: to extend an account of the Gothic into the literary drama of the early nineteenth century, and to resurvey certain literary dramas against the background of Gothic tradition on the stage.

LITERARY PLAYS BY WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

THE BORDERERS

Wordsworth's Borderers, like the other plays to be examined, has generally been related, but rather haphazardly, to Gothic tradition.² The reference has been, however, to Gothic fiction, not to Gothic drama. It seems more logical and proves more instructive, since the work is in dramatic form, to refer it to the dramatic tradition.

Of the major dramas of the romantic poets, this is one of the least Gothic. When it is viewed against its proper background, both the extent of Wordsworth's debt to the conventional Gothic materials, methods, motifs, and purposes, and the nature of his departure from these show clearly. The points of conformity to the usual pattern are obvious, and a short summary will suffice for them. The points of departure demand a somewhat closer analysis.

The familiar pattern is followed, first, in the deliberate development of mystery and the equally deliberate withholding of the solution. Until the second scene of the fourth act, when Oswald discloses the truth of the past event, the reader and all but one of the principal characters are excluded from knowledge of even the most essential facts. More than one critic has found Wordsworth dramatically inept because he failed to make everything clear in the preliminary exposition. But perhaps the poet should not be blamed, for he was following the prevailing dramatic technique of his time. Virtually every Gothic playwright after Walpole studiously withheld that secret which was the key to motivation, character, and action. In The Mysterious Mother the dramatist reserved it and compounded the mystery until the last scene of the last act; in other plays the truth was usually divulged somewhat earlier, but perhaps never in the first act and rarely in the second. When Wordsworth wrote his play, the Gothic species was at the very height of its popularity.³ Not the poet, then, but the kind of drama itself, in which exposition made only darkness visible, should bear the blame.

Second, the conventional pattern is followed in the settings. The most striking of these are “The Area of a half-ruined Castle—on one side the entrance to a dungeon,” and “A desolate prospect—a ridge of rocks—a Chapel on the summit of one—Moon behind the rocks—night stormy—irregular sound of a bell.” As in earlier plays, the surroundings become vital agents, closely involved in the thoughts and feelings of the characters.

Again, and very conspicuously, the pattern is followed in that the primary subject of the play is the agony of remorse. That the treatment of remorse differs somewhat from the conventional does not alter the essential fact that remorse is the subject.

Finally, it is followed in the use of a robber motif; in the presence of an unknown (Oswald) among the band of robbers; in the use of machinery such as creaking trees and tolling bells; in the theme of persecution of innocent and helpless individuals (Idonea and Herbert); in its portrait of a tyrant who inhabits a fearful castle (Lord Clifford, who, though he does not actually appear, is as effectively represented through description); and in numerous minor details.

The evidence of technique, settings, characters, and machinery suggests that Wordsworth sought to work out an idea within the established frame of the Gothic play. But in the very fact that he proceeded from an idea which he attempted thus to expound lies a principal cause for his departure from the traditional Gothic path. The fundamental difference between The Borderers and a typical Gothic play is that of purpose. The only idea which prompted Gothic playwrights was achievement of the utmost in mystery, gloom, and terror. For Wordsworth, on the other hand, the Gothic frame was a vehicle, not a destination. His use of the modus operandi of the Gothic school implies merely that he accepted the convenient contemporary fashion, perhaps without much thought, as a suitable way to communicate his more important idea.

Wordsworth was the first to use the Gothic mode for a purpose other than the mere exploitation of the elements which composed it. It matters little here what his purpose was.⁴ It is sufficient to affirm that it was a philosophical rather than a theatrical one. He aimed to expose and damn the Godwinian thinking of which he had earlier been a disciple. For this purpose, the Gothic school furnished backdrop and properties.

At the same time, The Borderers shows another, though related, difference from the conventional Gothic play. This lies in the treatment of remorse and in the involvement of the poet himself. In the typical Gothic play, the study of remorse—whatever may have been the deficiencies of its execution—had always been objective. The villain whose body and mind were made to show the ravages of conscience was an objective figure. He originated as an object of terror. He grew through decades of interpretation by famous actors. His gloom intensified to an agony that perhaps pleased the censor and invited sympathy from the public. Throughout the period of growth and change, he remained impersonal. He was a property of playwrights, no less than were a subterranean passage and a winding staircase. His remorse was a part of him, transferable with himself from playwright to playwright. The individual author projected his own mind and his own spiritual problems into this figure no more than he imposed his own personality upon a turret or a gallery. Whatever else he may have been, the Gothic protagonist was not a receptacle to be filled from a poet's self. He was a ready-made property upon which individual writers made only external alterations.

But in The Borderers the figure became subjective. As he used the framework of the conventional species as a structure within which to expound a philosophical idea, so Wordsworth used the Gothic protagonist as a receptacle for his personal remorse, perhaps over abandonment of Annette Vallon and his child.⁵ In identifying his own with the traditional remorse of a theatrical type, Wordsworth began the personalizing of the Gothic villain that was the final step in the evolution of the Byronic hero.

REMORSE

The focus of Coleridge's Remorse, like that of The Borderers, is on the special agony which had afflicted a generation of villains. In one way, the two plays, written at almost the same time, complement each other by approaching the same problem from opposite directions. Both are analytical studies of remorse. But while Wordsworth's problem was how to eliminate that agony, Coleridge's was how to awaken it in one who seemed incapable of feeling it. In The Borderers, Oswald's Godwinian project to render Marmaduke incapable of remorse failed, and Marmaduke's final declaration that he will suffer agony until death mercifully sets him free is Wordsworth's assertion that experience is important and valid, and his rejection of a system which taught how to escape the consequences of bitter experience. In Remorse, the position of the remorseless Don Ordonio is in direct opposition to that of Marmaduke. Oswald actively attempts to make Marmaduke incapable of remorse; Don Alvar, the hero of Remorse, strives to make his brother Don Ordonio capable of it. In Wordsworth's play, the villain tries to destroy the hero's remorse, and fails; in Coleridge's play, the hero tries to arouse the villain's remorse, and succeeds. Thus, proceeding from opposite directions, both poets reached the same conclusion. Philosophical analysis by two great minds approved the trait that had been for a generation a principal subject of dramatic spectacle.

Like Wordsworth, Coleridge took over the frame of the conventional Gothic play within which to work out his problem. A bare summary of the plot exposes more familiar trappings than are apparent in a comparable summary of The Borderers. The central figure is Don Ordonio, son of Valdez and brother of Don Alvar. “Long years” before, he had, as he supposed, caused the assassination of his brother. In reality, the Moor, Isidore, ordered to slay Don Alvar, had at the crucial moment discovered circumstances which caused him to stay his hand. Don Alvar, long captive on a foreign shore, returns at the opening of the play. Disguised as a Moresco chieftain, he has two goals—to find whether there is truth in the rumor of his wife's marriage to Don Ordonio, and to find a means of awakening remorse in his brother, “that I may save him from himself.” Isidore, commanded by Don Ordonio to appear as a sorcerer and convince Teresa that Alvar is dead, so that one of her objections to remarriage will be eliminated, directs the villain to “a stranger ner the ruin in the wood” who had issued a mysterious promise “to bring the dead to life again.” Don Ordonio fails to recognize the stranger as his brother, and Alvar agrees to come to the castle and execute the villain's commands. Instead, when Teresa, Valdez, and the villain are assembled, he presents an “illuminated picture” (not unlike those in “Monk” Lewis' plays) which shows his own “assassination.” The inquisitors interrupt the scene; Don Ordonio is thrown into “great agitation,” and Alvar is confined in a dungeon. Fearing that the Moor will disclose the truth, Don Ordonio entices him to a cave and murders him, but is observed by Isidore's wife. She leads the friends of her dead husband in an assault on the castle. Meanwhile Teresa, who had been caught by “something” in the aspect of the “stranger,” ventures, like a Radcliffean maiden, into the dungeons to free him. She finds and recognizes her husband, and the two have barely time to embrace before Ordonio enters. Though now much shaken by conscience, he attempts to slay his brother. The blow misses, and he attempts to kill himself, but is prevented by Don Alvar. The Moors break down the gates, and Isidore's widow slays the unresisting—and remorseful—murderer of her husband.

Settings include “The sea-shore, with a view of the Castle,” “A wild and mountainous country,” “A Hall of an Armoury, with an Altar at the back of the stage,” “The interior of a Chapel, with painted windows,” “A Cavern, dark except where a gleam of moonlight is seen on one side at the further end of it,” and “The interior court of a Saracenic or Gothic Castle, with the iron gate of a Dungeon visible.” These represent no departure from tradition.

Among the characters, Don Ordonio, Alvar, and Teresa are familiar. The villain is thus described by Teresa when Valdez urges marriage:

… I have no power to love him.
His proud forbidding eye, and his dark brow,
Chill me like dew damps of the unwholesome night.(6)

Before the audience knows of his villainy, a brief scene exhibits his guilty marks:

ALHADRA.
My lord, my husband's name
Is Isidore. (Ordonio starts) You may remember it:
You left him at Almeria.
MONVIEDRO.
Palpably false!
This very week, three years ago, my lord,
You were at sea, and there engaged the pirates,
The murderers doubtless of your brother Alvar—… What? is he ill, my lord?
How strange he looks!
VALDEZ.
(Angrily) You press'd upon him too abruptly
The fate of one on whom, you know, he doted.
ORDONIO.
(Starting as in sudden agitation) O Heavens!
I? doted?—(then recovering himself)
Yes, I doted on him. (Walks to end of stage)
MONVIEDRO.
The drops did start and stand upon his forehead …(7)

Alvar, the hero, closely resembles his predecessors. Like them, he is quickly removed to a dungeon, where he remains until the end. He has “that within” which identifies him, even through his wanderer's garb, as no commoner. Finally, like heroes, heroines, and other wronged Gothic figures, he is eager to bring to repentance and to forgive the vicious criminal who has injured him. As we have seen, it is this particular characteristic which becomes the subject of the play. Don Alvar's determination is not to have revenge, but to arouse in his brother's hardened heart the remorse that will save him from perdition. When the villain, sword in hand, approaches to kill him, the hero delivers a lecture on Gothic villainy in general:

What then art thou? For shame, put up thy sword!
I fix mine upon thee, and thou tremblest!
I speak, and fear and wonder crush thy rage,
And turn it to a motionless distraction!
Thou blind self-worshipper! thy pride, thy cunning,
Thy faith in universal villany,
Thy shallow sophisms, thy pretended scorn
For all thy human brethren—out upon them!
What have they done for thee? have they given
          thee peace?
Cured thee of starting in thy sleep? or made
The darkness pleasant when thou wak'st at midnight?
Art happy when alone? Can'st walk by thyself
With even step and quiet cheerfulness?
Yet, yet thou mayst be saved—(8)

It is somehow delightful to find Coleridge, who partially identified himself with his hero, doing exactly as we would expect—lecturing, even as an assassin approaches. Don Ordonio is literally talked into repentance by Alvar, whose care is “Chiefly, chiefly, brother, my anguish for thy guilt.” The villain is at last brought into line with all his dramatic ancestors; the agony that has been encased in him finds release, and he cries,

O horror! not a thousand years in heaven
Could recompense this miserable heart,
Or make it capable of one brief joy!

Teresa is in the Radcliffean tradition of the heroine who explores by dim light in dark places. Mysteriously attracted to the “sorcerer,” she visits the dungeons to release him:

(Enter Teresa with a taper)
It has chilled my very life—my own voice scares me;
Yet when I hear it not I seem to lose
The substance of my being—my strongest grasp
Sends inwards but weak witness that I am.
I seek to cheat the echo.—How the half sounds
Blend with this strangled light! Is he not here?
O for one human face here—but to see
One human face here to sustain me.—Courage!
It is but my own fear! The life within me,
It sinks and wavers like this cone of flame,
Beyond which I scarce dare look onward! Oh!
                                                                                                                                  (shuddering)
If I faint? If this inhuman den should be
At once my death-bed and my burial vault?
(faintly screams as Alvar comes from the recess)(9)

The direction “faintly screams” suggests one difference between Remorse and a typical Gothic play; in a “tragedy” by Lewis, the direction would likely have been “shrieks.” Like the other major poets of his time who attempted drama, Coleridge subdued the louder Gothic tones. Like them, also, he raised the Gothic above itself through finer poetry. And, like Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, he left certain very obvious marks of his own personality on the formerly impersonal dramatic kind.

SCOTT AND GOTHIC DRAMA

The main contribution of Scott to Gothic drama was indirect. Between 1816 and 1823 fifteen of his novels were adapted—some of them half a dozen times—by playwrights who frantically sought to capitalize on their popularity. Among the many adapters was Daniel Terry, whose version of Guy Mannering appeared at Covent Garden in 1816. After witnessing its performance, Scott referred to the dramatizing of his novels as the art of “Terryfying.” After several adaptations had appeared, he commented, “I believe my muse would be Terry-fyed into treading the stage even if I wrote a sermon.”¹⁰ The various adaptations have been studied elsewhere,¹¹ and though the author was not especially concerned with Gothic matters, his detailed discussions of setting, action, atmosphere, and technique have naturally included them. It is perhaps worth repeating that the adapters invariably emphasized not the realistic scenes and the character studies, but the wild and highly “romantic.” Very obviously, all of the adapters had been educated in the Gothic school. Scott's poems, too, especially The Lady of the Lake, were frequently adapted, and these dramatizations have been catalogued in the same study.

Scott's own first attempt at drama was a translation of Goethe's Götz, published unacted in 1799. Thereafter he assisted Terry in adapting Guy Mannering, and wrote Halidon Hill, Auchindrane, The Doom of Devorgoil, The House of Aspen, and MacDuff's Cross.¹² In all of these the Gothic heritage is apparent. In Devorgoil and Aspen, which I shall examine, it is dominant.

In these latter are mixed Scottish superstition, melodramatic technique which makes us think of Lewis' One O'Clock, German materials from Goethe, Schiller, and Kotzebue,¹³ and a great deal that is more strictly associated with the Gothic Revival. Ruins are prominent in both. The settings of Devorgoil include “A wild and hilly country—exhibiting the Castle of Devorgoil, decayed, and partly ruinous”; “A ruinous Anteroom in the Castle”; and various “decayed chambers.” The settings in Aspen are more elaborate. They include “An ancient Gothic chamber in the Castle of Ebersdorf”; “A woodland prospect … in the background the ruins of the ancient castle of Griefenhaus”; “The wood of Griefenhaus, with the ruins of the castle”; and “The subterranean Chapel of the Castle of Griefenhaus. It seems deserted and in decay. There are four entrances, each defended by an iron portal. … In the centre of the Chapel is a ruinous Altar, half sunk in the ground, on which lie a large book, a dagger, and a coil of ropes, beside two lighted tapers. Antique stone benches of different heights around the Chapel. In the back scene is a dilapidated entrance into the sacristy, which is quite dark.”¹⁴

Gothic haunted chambers and German diablerie are burlesqued in the early scenes of Devorgoil. The absurd Gullcrammer, foolish and conceited, is sent to bed in a chamber declared haunted and is especially warned to watch out for “Owlspiegle,” the fantastic goblin fond of shaving off hair and beards. Gullcrammer lies abed, wind rustles the tapestries, the lone taper flickers, and a bell tolls. With a fool instead of a distressed damsel as subject, the scene appears to ridicule Mrs. Radcliffe's favorite situation. Katleen and Blackthorn, for mischief, dress in weird costumes to represent Owlspiegle and an attendant goblin; they enter, shave Gullcrammer's head, sing comic-diabolical songs, and disappear through a trapdoor. To this point, the mood is hilarious; but as the pranksters are returning to their own apartments they pass through “A Gothic Hall, waste and ruinous,” where they encounter a real ghost:

BLACK.
Art thou not afraid,
In these wild halls while playing feigned goblins,
That we may meet with real ones?
KAT.
Not a jot.
My spirit is too light, my heart too bold,
To fear a visit from the other world.
BLACK.
But is not this the place, the very hall,
In which men say that Oswald's grandfather,
The black Lord Erick, walks his penance round?
Credit me, Katleen, these half-moulder'd columns
Have in their ruin something very fiendish …(15)

They hear a rustling, and “a figure is imperfectly seen between two of the pillars.” Blackthorn flees, but Katleen stands her ground, and the apparition addresses her:

I come, by Heaven permitted; quit this castle:
There is a fate on't—if for good or evil,
Brief space shall soon determine. In that fate,
If good, my lineage thou canst nothing claim;
If evil, much mayst suffer.—Leave these precincts.

Black Erick's spirit leaves a key, admonishing the heroine to “wait the event with courage.” When “the event” arrives, the key prevents a catastrophe, and the “doom” of Devorgoil is averted in a spectacular scene involving a scroll, an old suit of mail, a mysterious iron door with a rusty lock, thunder, lightning, and unearthly music.

The House of Aspen belongs with plays which blend the secret-tribunal motif with Gothic settings, machinery, and characters.¹⁶ The preoccupation with Gothic ruins has already been indicated, and also prominent are a Byronic hero who “shuts himself up for days in his solitary chamber”; a persecution theme which involves a distressed maiden; and numerous elements of the traditional paraphernalia of terror. On the whole, this is perhaps the most elaborately Gothic play written by a major author.

Until the third act there hangs over the action that same dark mystery which had prevailed in Gothic drama since The Mysterious Mother; probably, if specific debt could be ascertained, Aspen would be found to owe most to that first of the species. Isabella's guilt in the assassination of her first husband—the past event which had long preceded the action of the play—had caused her to “drag out years of hidden remorse,” and her son, naturally inclined to gloom, is first agonized to find his mother guilty and then horrified to realize that as a member of the secret tribunal he must bring her to trial and certain execution. The last act is singularly devoted to theatrical spectacle, and suggests the strong influence of the most violent Gothic playwrights. George, the son, refusing to bring his mother to trial, accuses himself before the tribunal and is executed as an oathbreaker. The mother, blindfolded, is brought in, accused, and forced into the sacristy where her son's body lies. There she is to await the executioner's dagger. Rudiger, her present husband and the father of George, is dragged before the court. He is shown his son's body, and, as he watches, Isabella, wounded mortally, enters and throws herself on the corpse. Rudiger is thrust into the sacristy to await his own death, and Bertram, henchman of Roderic, the familiar gloomy villain, follows him. But at this instant the Duke of Bavaria, a deus ex machina, appears and saves the remaining victim.

In Scott's plays, as in The Borderers and Remorse, crude Gothic elements are refined by a surer hand. Though some of the most horrific aspects of action and machinery persist, superior poetry, keener analysis of motives, and deeper penetration into the human heart tend to raise the works from the class of subliterary concoctions into that of literary compositions. Scott's plays are nearer the Gothic tradition than are those by his great contemporaries, not only because he included more of the familiar materials, but also because he preserved the Gothic impersonality. Wordsworth, in his play, worked out a personal problem; Coleridge indulged his habit of analysis and lecture; Shelley idealized his principal characters; and Byron read himself into the whole Gothic tradition. Scott, in very conspicuous contrast, omitted himself entirely.

SHELLEY'S CENCI

It is not remarkable that Shelley's Cenci bears marks of the Gothic school.¹⁷ On the contrary, it is at first surprising that it does not bear more of them. As a child and as a student at Eton, Shelley devoured tales in the chapbooks picked up at the bookstalls.¹⁸ The influence of these “shilling shockers” remained until the end of his life and is demonstrable in all of his works excepting the shorter lyrics. Furthermore, he wrote four distinctly Gothic pieces: Zastrozzi (1810), St. Irvyne (1811), The Assassins (1814), a fragment of a romance, and The Coliseum (1818-1819), another fragment. These show full awareness of the native Gothic and the German traditions. The two completed works revolve about the center which attracted the poet's attention until his death—tyrannical persecution of the innocent and the defenseless. This had been a Gothic theme since Otranto.

The chapbooks read in youth were not the only forces which directed his mind to the tyrant-victim relationship. Shelley's political, social, and religious philosophy developed under the tutelage of his father-in-law. Godwin, in Caleb Williams, had expanded the tyrant-victim formula of the Gothic novel to serve a broader purpose.¹⁹ In the typical novels, tyrants persecuted unhappy ladies for the mere purpose of exciting terror in the reader. There were no broader implications, political, social, or otherwise: whatever they wrote, Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, and Ann Radcliffe did not write propaganda. But in Caleb Williams the simple tale of persecution was transformed into a social instrument. Personal persecution became social oppression. The tyrant-victim relationship became an oppressor-oppressed one.

In the Cenci manuscript Shelley saw, very naturally, the theme which Gothic fiction and Godwinian philosophy had alerted his senses to perceive. Beatrice's story conformed to the pattern he had traced in Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne. It accorded also with the more significant concept of oppressor and oppressed. He visited the Cenci palace, and his observations there reveal his association of that structure with the primary setting of Gothic romance:

The Cenci palace is of great extent; and … there yet remains a vast and gloomy pile of feudal architecture in the same state as during the dreadful scenes which are the subject of this tragedy. The palace is situated in an obscure corner of Rome … and from the upper windows you see the immense ruins of Mount Palatine half hidden under their profuse overgrowth of trees … One of the gates of the palace formed of immense stones and leading through a passage, dark and lofty and opening into gloomy subterranean chambers, struck me particularly.²⁰

He next studied a portrait which he believed to be that of Beatrice. He was moved by the fact that the subject seemed “sad and stricken down in spirit” and by “the fixed and pale composure upon the features.” This might have been a portrait of any imaginary Gothic heroine; to Shelley it was also a symbol of the oppressed:

The crimes and miseries in which she was an actor and a sufferer are as the mask and the mantle in which circumstances clothed her for her impersonation on the scene of the world.²¹

Shelley was therefore drawn to the subject of his tragedy through the channels of Gothic fiction and Godwinian philosophy. Theme, story, setting, and principal characters all accorded with his double background of terror-Gothic and social-Gothic. It was inevitable, then, that he should have been moved to retell the story, and equally inevitable that his retelling should bear marks of the Gothic school. So much is certain and even obvious.

But somewhat less obvious are the reasons why The Cenci, made from raw materials perfectly suited to Gothic composition and by a poet with an unusual Gothic background, does not more completely resemble the typical Gothic play. Probably the main reason is that Shelley, though he knew Gothic fiction, was ignorant of Gothic drama. Indeed, he knew almost nothing of any contemporary drama. Late in his life he saw some Italian operas, but earlier he had attended the theater perhaps half a dozen times in all. Kean's Hamlet infuriated him, and Peacock had to detain him forcibly in his seat after he had witnessed two acts of The School for Scandal. He never saw, and almost certainly never read, a Gothic play. He was therefore quite unequipped to dramatize a Gothic story in the contemporary fashion. The raw materials themselves suggested the mould into which the taste of the times would have liked them poured, but Shelley had no such mould. He attempted deliberately, as he wrote to Leigh Hunt, to write a drama “of a more popular kind,” but the specialized techniques of Gothic plays, developed in the preceding half-century, were unfamiliar to him. He lacked formula for the construction of that kind of play which both the nature of his materials and his own background indicated.

The theater's loss, of course, was literature's gain. Lacking acquaintance with Gothic dramatic models, the poet turned to others which he knew intimately—Greek and Shakespearean tragedies. The marks of Macbeth, especially, are so emphatic upon The Cenci that in certain passages a reader might momentarily wonder whether he has not picked up the wrong volume. The result of modeling upon dramatic masterpieces was a tragedy infinitely superior to the typical Gothic play, and doubtless superior to that which Shelley might have written had he been close to the Gothic theater; but the tragedy was not of the kind which the raw materials indicated and which the poet expressly aimed to write. Had he used the narrative form, he would likely have composed a Gothic novel along conventional lines. Unaware of the Gothic stage, however, and intimate with the highest dramatic models, he created a great tragedy in which the close affinity of the materials with the Gothic was nearly obscured.

A second force which tended to obscure the relation of The Cenci to the Gothic species was that of poetic genius. More than Wordsworth's, Coleridge's, or Scott's, Shelley's power of language and his rare imagination transmuted the gross materials. It is universally agreed that some passages in The Cenci are unsurpassed outside Shakespeare as dramatic poetry.

Further, Shelley's habitual idealization of character, here especially invited by the closeness of the subject to his heart, led him to lift out of type the principal figures in the tragedy. The idealization of villainy in Count Cenci and of persecuted innocence in Beatrice wrought changes upon the conventional types of villain and heroine. Though Count Cenci's actions are those of the typical Gothic tyrant, his reactions are not. The consequences of evil, emphasized so heavily by Gothic playwrights, are not represented in any of his words or through any physical manifestations.²² Being evil incarnate, Cenci takes pleasure in evil, and the torture of remorse so characteristic of the Gothic villain is quite unknown to him. Beatrice, who is at once victim and rebel, is similarly exalted and thus lifted out of type. She does not and cannot know the terror which it was the original function of the Gothic heroine to feel and to transmit. Though her position is precisely that of the harassed maiden, idealization raises her above a capacity for terror. Only during the scenes directly before and after Count Cenci's assault, when she is momentarily stripped of idealization, does she closely identify herself with the familiar type of persecuted heroine.²³

This much, to summarize, may be stated of the relation of The Cenci to Gothic drama. The theme of persecution aligns it with Gothic tradition in both fiction and drama. The principal characters are Gothic types idealized. Some scenes, especially those before and after Cenci's attack on Beatrice, would fit unaltered into a Gothic play. Several descriptive passages paint settings which were favorites of Gothic writers after Mrs. Radcliffe.²⁴ But Shelley's unawareness of the contemporary theater, his intimacy with dramatic masterpieces, and his poetic power prevented full achievement of his lower aim to write a play “of a more popular kind.” Aided by Shakespearean and classical drama, his art elevated the Gothic to such an unprecedented height that, though it achieved triumph, it suffered obscuration.

BYRON'S MANFRED

Though it was composed before The Cenci, Manfred has been reserved for final discussion because it best represents the high romantic expression, in dramatic form, of the Gothic spirit. Manfred, in some measure at least, gives point to the study of many earlier theatrical pieces which are intrinsically worthless, and toward review of Manfred my examination of these has more or less naturally been aimed. Byron's tragedy might be described as a consummation of Gothic evolution on the stage. The crude Gothic machinery seems, as we look backward, to have been building toward the high romanticism of these Alpine summits, mists, and spirits. The crude Gothic protagonists of nearly fifty years passed into this most striking portrait of the Byronic hero.

It is with this hero, who has remained both baffling and fascinating, that we are chiefly concerned, for it is Manfred who is the play, and to interpret his agony is to interpret both him and the tragedy.

What ails this Manfred, then, alone at midnight in his Gothic gallery:

My slumbers—if I slumber—are not sleep,
But a continuance of enduring thought,
Which then I can resist not: in my heart
There is a vigil, and these eyes but close
To look within.(25)

Poised to leap from a Jungfrau precipice:

                                                            To be thus—
Gray-hair'd with anguish, like these blasted pines,
Wrecks of a single winter, barkless, branchless,
A blighted trunk upon a cursed root,
Which but supplies a feeling of decay—(26)

Offered a cup of “ancient vintage” to thaw his veins:

Away! away! there's blood upon the brim!
Will it then never—never sink in the earth?(27)

What ails him, that the Dependant voices doubt and mistrust:

… night after night, for years,
He hath pursued long vigils in this tower,
Without a witness … to be sure, there is
One chamber where none enters: I would give
The fee of what I have to come these three years
To pore upon its mysteries.(28)

And that he cries of

The innate tortures of that deep despair
Which is remorse without the fear of hell.(29)

What ails Manfred? In answer, the play offers only hints which veil rather than expose; there is a broken-off, deliberately unended line:

The sole companion of his wanderings
And watchings—her, whom of all earthly things
That lived, the only thing he seem'd to love,—
As he, indeed, by blood was bound to do,
The lady Astarte, his—(30)

There is an agonized self-reproach, a shriek of anguish the cause of which is left undescribed:

If I had never lived, that which I love
Had still been living; had I never loved,
That which I love would still be beautiful,
Happy and giving happiness.(31)

These are half-answers only, which darken, not illuminate, the mystery.

From outside the play, from Byron's life, letters, and other compositions, we learn of Weltschmerz, of the poet's lame foot and hurt pride, of incest, Faust, and Chateaubriand's René.³² Were these the sources of Manfred's agony? They are not the only ones. To them must be added the most important of all—Manfred's dramatic ancestry. More specifically, must be added his inheritance from the Gothic villain whose half-century of theatrical agony evolved him. The shadowed places in the delineation of Manfred can best be lighted by understanding of that heritage.

The essentials of Manfred are visible in the history of this villain. His manner of feeling, thought, and action was patterned before Byron was born. The motive for his agony is more readily perceived by examination of the protagonist in any one of a dozen plays before 1800 than by analysis of Manfred itself or by compilation of the facts and legends of Byron's life. Manfred, a theatrical figure which Byron knew well³³ and with which he identified himself, could have been essentially as he is represented in the play even though the poet's foot had been sound and his pride unhurt, and though there had been no Faust, no René, and no incest. It is true that he might have been an objective rather than a subjective creation, though Wordsworth had earlier changed him in that respect. He would certainly have lacked some qualities imposed by Byron's personality, but in all essentials he could have been as he is.

It is not in Byron's life, then, or in the tragedy itself that we shall find the cause of Manfred's agony. Byron's own “explanation” of the character must itself be interpreted by reference elsewhere: “… a kind of magician, who is tormented by a species of remorse, the cause of which is left half unexplained.”³⁴ The other half must be sought in dramatic tradition.

Over each play examined in preceding chapters the same question hovered, and no playwright permitted the audience to forget or to relax investigation: What ails the villain? This was asked by Martin, a friar, concerning the protagonist of the first Gothic play:

What is this secret sin, this untold tale,
That art cannot extract, nor penance cleanse?
… Then whither turn
To worm her secret out?

It was in Solerno's mind in Greatheed's The Regent, as he tells how the villain had stood,

… with folded arms
And forehead all convulsed, and quiv'ring lip.

Characters and audience alike asked it of Ferrand, Boaden's villain in Fontainville Forest, who cried,

Now every heart with glowing rapture beats
Save mine alone, where like a vulture, guilt,
Continual gnawing, keeps me on the stretch.

It was precisely the question for which the provost in Julian and Agnes demanded answer from Alfonso, the strange wanderer who

… commun'd with his soul and talkst with guilt
Lonely on unknown heights, where none ere gazed.

And it was asked of Bertram by the prior in Maturin's Byronic drama:

… full well I deemed no gentler feelings
Woke the dark lightning of thy withering eye.
What fiercer spirit is it tears thee thus?
Show me the horrid tenant of thy heart!

For all of these sufferers except the last, the answer was the same: secret knowledge of past evil. One had committed incest with her son. Another had assassinated his benefactor. Another had chained his wife to a rock and left her to die. Another had married two women and slain the brother of one. In the period between Walpole and Byron scores of similar figures had perpetrated similar acts, contained their guilt in their bosoms, and suffered cruel remorse. In every case the full truth of the past event, though deliberately withheld by the dramatist as long as his skill allowed, was ultimately divulged—not “left half unexplained.” Why did Maturin and Byron resort to vagueness?

So long as the Gothic protagonist remained a villain, it was possible finally to expose his guilt fully and clearly. It was even possible, however unspeakable his crime, to win a portion of sympathy for him by magnifying the personal effects of his remorse. Thus a villain could become a hero-villain, no matter how black his crime, if the dramatist smote him with sufficient remorse to compensate and if a great actor made a magnificent show of that agony. But when the villain was transformed, through this very agony, to hero, the dramatist was confronted by a seemingly insoluble dilemma. How could a creature guilty of such crime as Gothic villains committed be offered as a hero? And if he were not guilty of enormous evil, how could that remorse which was his distinguishing quality be motivated?

Lewis, as we have seen, found one solution. His Adelmorn believed himself guilty of murder, but was in the end proved innocent. Thus the playwright motivated the exhibition of intense remorse, and at the same time was able to keep Adelmorn's title of “hero” unimpeachable. But the device required to make Adelmorn think himself a murderer was so elaborate as to be impracticable; despite the playwright's care, we are never convinced that the hero could really have thought himself the cause of his uncle's death. And had a second playwright immediately borrowed Lewis' deceptive method, the Drury Lane audience, always quick to be enraged, might have given him cause to doubt whether his trouble had been worth while. A third might have fared even worse.

In any event, Lewis did succeed in motivating remorse without having to convict his hero of a villain's crimes. In contrast, Maturin evaded the problem altogether. The remorse of Bertram made spectacular but unmotivated histrionics. Bertram was guilty of no past crime. He suffered merely because his dramatic forbears proved attractive in suffering. That these had legitimate cause and Bertram none the playwright seems to have considered irrelevant.

Byron's solution in Manfred was more effective than either Lewis' overelaborate device or Maturin's complete evasion, and was obviously inspired by Gothic tradition. To move the unsurpassed and prolonged agony of his hero, the poet needed to suggest a crime of immense proportions. A minor infraction such as would not blacken the hero's name would have been absurdly out of ratio. Byron's way was to leave the cause of remorse “half unexplained.” It was to extend the familiar Gothic technique to the very last lines of the tragedy: to hint, break off, and hint again, but never to speak the ugly fact in unmistakable words. Walpole's countess in The Mysterious Mother, after five acts of veiled suggestion and mysterious implication, at last says bluntly that she yielded her body to her son. Just so, the crimes of villains in other Gothic plays were ultimately divulged, after long speculation, in naked words. Manfred's deed, we are led to suppose, was as appalling as any of theirs, who were villains; yet Manfred remains a hero, whose heroic reputation was preserved by extending the traditional Gothic ambiguity. Byron never lifted the dark veil which envelops him and the past event where the truth lies, and thus what might have been irreparably ugly, when boldly displayed, retained the fascination of profound mystery. Fleeting glimpses by half-light revealed a hero where full illumination would have disclosed a villain.

Manfred, intriguing in his “half unexplained” remorse, is the theatrical villain transformed into a hero and enriched by his passage through the mind of Byron. Struggling on precipices, conversing with spirits, and invoking demons, he is quite at home among the properties of Gothic machinery which had evolved with him. Projected into a rarer atmosphere by the imagination of a great poet, the crude conventional figure and the crude conventional paraphernalia which over several decades had gathered around a castle ruin achieve distinction and triumph. The objective tyrant of tradition, who was invented as an agent of terror whose sole function was to frighten sensitive maidens in galleries and vaults, is here subjective and poetic, a receptacle which contains some of the personal being of the immediate creator. The original mechanical properties of haunted rooms and fearful ghosts have here become mystic properties of a metaphysical realm, their grossness obscured by Alpine clouds. Yet only the height to which they have at last ascended is new. Neither the transformed villain nor the lovelier machinery through which he now moves is essentially changed. The emphatic and unmistakable marks of half a century of theatrical tradition remain to dominate them both.

Notes

1. I have found most useful E. S. Bates, A Study of Shelley's Drama The Cenci (Columbia Univ. Press, 1908); [s.c.] Chew, [The Dramas of Lord Byron (Johns Hopkins Press, 1915.)] op. cit.; E. de Selincourt, Oxford Lectures on Poetry (Clarendon Press, 1934), chap. vii; [Allardyce] Nicoll, Early Nineteenth Century Drama; [2 vols. (Cambridge, 1930).] and U. C. Nag, “The English Theatre of the Romantic Revival,” 19th Century, CIV, 384-398. Besides these, and the more general accounts of English drama, are chapters on these plays in critical biographies of the individual poets.

2. But the main emphasis has been on its relation to the poet himself, as though the play occupied no position with regard to any tradition. It seems to me that this kind of study needs to be supplemented with outside references, even though the play is of importance chiefly because it portrays a stage in the poet's evolution.

3. In the two years, 1795-1797, a dozen Gothic plays were performed at the Covent Garden and Drury Lane theaters, including some of the outstanding specimens.

4. For discussions of Wordsworth's purpose, see O. J. Campbell and P. Mueschke, “The Borderers as a Document in the History of Wordsworth's Aesthetic Development,” Modern Philology, XXII, 465-482, and Selincourt, op. cit., pp. 157-179.

5. For opposite points of view, see Campbell and Mueschke, op. cit., who argue in the affirmative, and George W. Meyer, Wordsworth's Formative Years, pp. 174 ff., where a contrary opinion is stated. See also E. Legouis, William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon (London, Dent, 1922).

6. Remorse, [5 acts. S. T. Coleridge. Drury Lane. January 1813.] I, 2.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., V, 1.

9. Ibid.

10. John Lockhart, Life of Scott (Boston, Houghton, 1901), Vol. 2, p. 233.

11. H. A. White, Sir Walter Scott's Novels on the Stage (Yale University Press, 1927). I have included in the appended list of Gothic plays only a few of the adaptations, in which Gothic qualities were so prominent that it seemed they must be included. Perhaps as many as twenty or twenty-five titles might have been listed as Gothic melodramas.

12. All were published between 1822 and 1830, and all are contained in Scott's Poetical Works (Boston, Houghton, 1900), Vol. 5.

13. Scott acknowledged great influence from the German writers (House of Aspen, preface). His plays had been written around 1800, and he gave as reason they had not been staged at once the opinion that the burlesque The Rovers had laughed German drama from the stage. At about the same time, Joanna Baillie disclaimed all German influence on her “Plays of the Passions.” The works of both suffered from the effects of The Rovers, and erroneously, for that burlesque ridiculed the “real” German drama, not that Gothic drama to which “German” became attached. It was partly the confusion of terms, prevalent then as now, which kept Scott's plays from the stage.

14. It is perhaps superfluous to draw attention once more to the conventional settings of Gothic drama. Yet these are the most striking features of Scott's two Gothic plays, and clearly indicate their line of descent. These are not the settings of the German drama which was ridiculed by Canning and Frere. Except for the confusion of terms, The Rovers should not have kept Scott's plays from being acted.

15. The Doom of Devorgoil, [Walter Scott, 1830] III, 1.

16. After Boaden had introduced the Secret Tribunal to the Gothic stage, several playwrights seized it, and apparently attempted to outdo one another in showing its horror. Unquestionably the most elaborate and terrifying exploitation of this institution was achieved by Frederic Reynolds, author of many horrific plays, in The Edict of Charlemagne; or The Free Knights (C. G. Feb. 1809). Compared with it, Scott's play is mild.

17. Bates, op. cit., the most detailed examination of The Cenci, indicates no awareness that the drama is related to Gothic tradition. The study of the tragedy has generally centered on its relation to the poet's mind, and its revelation of his views.

18. See W. W. Watts, Shilling Shockers of the Gothic School (Cambridge, Mass., 1932), and of course Dowden's Life of Shelley, 2 vols. (New York, 1896), for discussions of the poet's early reading.

19. Caleb Williams was adapted for the stage by Colman the Younger as The Iron Chest (D. L. March 1796). The social purpose is virtually lost in the stage version. There is merely the spectacle of a hero (Wilford) hounded by spies of the man on whose black secret he had stumbled.

20. Quoted by Bates, op. cit., p. 19.

21. Ibid.

22. Note:

    I love
    The sight of agony, and the sense of joy,
    When this shall be another's and that mine.
    And I have no remorse and little fear …

    And:

    I am what theologians call
    Hardened; …

    (I, 1)

    No Gothic villain ever talked or thought so.

23. The Cenci, II, 1, and III, 1.

24. Note especially Beatrice's description of the pass in which Count Cenci was to be ambushed (III, 1); also the officer's report of finding “this ruffian and another” (III, 4).

25. Manfred, I, 1.

26. Ibid., I, 2.

27. Ibid., II, 1.

28. Ibid., III, 3.

29. Ibid., III, 1.

30. Ibid., III, 3.

31. Ibid., II, 2.

32. For the sources of Manfred, see Chew, op. cit., chap. iv. These are summarized in the following statement: “Study of the sources of Manfred has shown that there are three chief elements in the character of the protagonist, distinct but related to each other. These are the themes of Prometheus, Don Juan, and Faust.” (Pp. 74-75.)

33. Byron's service on the Drury Lane committee should not be forgotten. He could scarcely have avoided familiarity with the traditional Gothic villain. When he wrote to Scott (who then sent him Bertram), he referred to five hundred plays, no one of which he “could think of accepting.” Among these were undoubtedly a great many of the Gothic species.

34. To John Murray; dated Venice, February 15, 1817.