British Romantic Theatre Salon

Covid-19 has cancelled a number of conferences, or at least driven them online. Last week, the British Association for Romantic Studies began its International Digital Conference, which runs until this Friday.

I've already Zoomed in for a panel on "Poetic Reckonings" that discussed Joanna Baillie, a panel on "Communicative Powers" that covered letters between Fanny Brawne and Fanny Keats, a panel on "Appropriations and Reworkings" that examined how German heroines were adapted for the London stage, and a panel on "Weaving the Gothic" that addressed the gothic tales of Percy Shelley.

Today's virtual salon on Romantic Theatre was the best, though. Sarah Burdett, from St. Mary's University in Twickenham, did an excellent job hosting the event. I was happy to find that she has a great interest in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's play Remorse and the actress Julia Glover who helped to make it such a success. I was also pleased to hear of other people who have taught Baillie's play De Monfort.

Though opportunities to see live theatre are still relatively few and far between, there are performances available online right now, and I discovered at the salon that Yale University's staged reading of the Horace Walpole play The Mysterious Mother is currently available on YouTube. Francesca Saggini, who teaches at Università degli Studi della Tuscia in Italy, is planning on doing some virtual readings of plays by Fanny Burney, which could be a lot of fun.

On Thursday and Friday, there will be more panels, including one on scandals around Lord Byron, and one on "Visuality and Self" that will cover Mary Robinson as well as other figures. Though it hasn't been as fun as attending the BARS Conference in Nottingham in 2019, I'm glad I've at least had some contact with other scholars of Romantic drama this summer.

The Rise of the English Actress

I just finished reading Sandra Richards's book The Rise of the English Actress. By its nature, the book is a rather general study, but it gives a wonderful history of women on the British stage.

Women appeared on stage during the middle ages, but by the Renaissance they were official banned from taking part in the public performances of plays in England. There were some exceptions, such as the infamous "Moll Cutpurse" who acted illegally, and the French actresses who were hissed at the Blackfriars Theatre in 1629.

It wasn't until the Restoration that actresses became the norm in England, and they quickly became an attractive novelty. Richards points out that in 1664 Thomas Killigrew staged an all-female performance of his play The Parson's Wedding. All-female casts were still being used a decade later when John Dryden's Secret Love was revived with only women on the stage.

By the early eighteenth century actresses were using playwrights to pen works especially for them. Richards cites Henry Fielding's Deborah and The Intriguing Chambermaid, written for Kitty Clive, and Colley Cibber's The Careless Husband and The Provok'd Husband, both vehicles for Anne Oldfield. Such collaborations did not always go well, though. Samuel Jonson blamed the failure of his play Irene on a sub-standard performance by Hannah Pritchard.

Perhaps the most celebrated eighteenth-century role created for a specific actress was Lady Teazle in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal. According to Richards, Sheridan wrote the part especially for Frances Abington. It was Abington who made the mob cap fashionable after she wore it on stage in James Townley's two-act farce High Life Below Stairs. The role she played, Kitty, was originally played by Kitty Clive, but Abington used it to create a fashion sensation that came to be known as the Abington Cap.

Women were instrumental in the creation of the benefit performance, and their earnings could top those of male actors. Richards notes that in 1792 the top-grossing benefit night belonged to Dora Jordan. That year, Jordan earned 540 pounds, while the tragic actress Sarah Siddons earned 490 pounds, and the leading male actor, John Philip Kemble, earned only 480 pounds. The Jordan-Siddons rivalry mirrored a debate over whether comedy or tragedy was the superior genre. The Dramatic Magazine in 1788 sided with Jordan, declaring she "fairly beat Melpomene out of the field."

The late eighteenth century also saw the remarkable career of Mary Robinson, the actress who in 1775 began publishing her poems under the patronage of the Duchess of Devonshire. Unfortunately, her 1794 play Nobody struck a nerve, and was hissed off the stage when it exposed the gambling habits of a number of prominent society ladies. Robinson allegedly dictated her poem "The Maniac" while under the influence of opium. As one might expect, Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw a kindred spirit in her and in 1800 declared Robinson "a woman of undoubted genius."

Robinson was famously painted by the major artists of the day, and as Richards puts it, it was in the eighteenth century that actresses "now became a means of establishing a painter's reputation when they allowed themselves to be portrayed." Portraits of actresses "were offered to the market by painters satisfying a public demand, and reflected how audiences saw female players." Richards specifically cites Thomas Lawrence, whose 1790 portrait of Elizabeth Farren catapulted the painter into fame and royal favor.

The great tragic actress of the late eighteenth century was of course Sarah Siddons, and Richards devotes an entire chapter to her. Drawing on Siddons's biography by Thomas Campbell, Richards points out that Siddons strove to be "natural" but by "natural" she meant credible for the character, rather than what we today might consider naturalistic. Siddons famously studied Egyptian and Greek sculpture, using it to help her achieve the exact poise and muscle tension she wanted to have.

In spite of her generally acknowledged superiority over her brother, John Philip Kemble, Siddons could not always enjoy her stardom. While Kemble was given a public dinner at the occasion of his farewell performance, Siddons received no such honor. She remarked to Samuel Rogers, "Well, perhaps in the next world women will be more valued than they are in this." Still, she left her mark on plays, and Richards notes that "Siddons's personality and bearing unquestionably informed and determined the role" of Jane de Monfort in Joanna Baillie's play De Monfort, which premiered in 1800.

Eliza O'Neill succeeded Siddons as the great British tragedienne of the early nineteenth century. O'Neill retired from the stage in 1819, though, and in the early Victorian period actresses like Helen Faucit and Siddons's niece Fanny Kemble took the reins. In 1837, Fanny Kemble wrote An English Tragedy, but William Charles Macready refused to stage the play, in spite of recognizing that it was "full of power, poetry and pathos."

The most famous Victorian actress was Ellen Terry, and Richards gives Terry her own chapter. Terry was most renowned for playing Lady Macbeth, wearing "a gown of soft green silk and blue tinsel edged with rubies and diamonds, draped by a heather velvet cape and decorated with flaming griffins and real beetle wings of green to achieve a metallic dazzle.” John Singer Sargent painted a portrait of Terry wearing the dress, helping it to become, in Richards's words, "the most famous costume in stage history."

Sybil Thorndike was one of the great British actresses of the early twentieth century. Richards considers her production of Percy Shelley's The Cenci in 1922 to be one of the most important of the actress's career. According to Richards, "Sybil's Beatrice established her firmly as a great tragic actress and Shelley as a great dramatist." At the time, George Bernard Shaw was trying to determine who should play the title character in his new play Saint Joan. After seeing Thorndike as Beatrice Cenci, Shaw informed his wife, "I have found my Joan." Thorndike later became closely associated with the role of Joan of Arc, which she did indeed originate in Shaw's play.

Richards continues the story of the English actress past Thorndike, writing for instance about Peggy Ashcroft, who played Desdemona opposite Paul Robeson in Othello. She goes right up to the present, discussing Harriet Walter, who I just saw play Prospero in an all-female production of The Tempest. All in all, this is a wonderful book for anyone interested in the history of British acting.

Romanticism (It's All in the Name...)

Three books, all with the same title, Romanticism, deal with the same topic. Indeed, all employ the same key word in discussing the art and philosophy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet each of the books' three authors, Aiden Day, David Blayney Brown, and Michael Ferber, understand the term "Romanticism" in slightly different ways.

Day's work, published as a part of the New Critical Idiom series by Routledge, begins its introduction by quoting heavily from M.H. Abrams, whose book The Mirror and the Lamp helped to illuminate Romanticism for the 20th century. In his first chapter, "Enlightenment or Romantic?", Day then sets up the dichotomy between Enlightenment thinking and Romanticism that is often rehearsed by scholars. On the Enlightenment side are figures like William Godwin, who "argued that human beings act in line with reason and that it is impossible for them to be rationally persuaded by an argument without their conduct being regulated accordingly." Romanticism, by contrast, in the works of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is a "celebration of subjectivity."

The second chapter looks at constructions of the term "Romantic" which first appeared in the 17th century. Thomas Shadwell wrote disapprovingly of all things "Romantick" in the preface to his 1668 play The Sullen Lovers. By 1820, debates over Romantic literature raged on the European Continent, but Lord Byron declared he saw no conflict between the "Classical" and the "Romantic" among English writers. Later critics latched on to the term "Romantic" to describe a variety of authors in Britain, but Day warns against dubbing movements in retrospect. "Literature is not" he contends "something which can be regarded as occupying a 'trans-historical' space, but something which must be read as subject to the discourses and ideologies of a particular time and place."

Day's project is best summed up by the title of his third chapter: "Enlightenment AND Romantic." For Day, these two movements are inextricably linked. On the one hand, writers of the Romantic era continued to work towards the progressive social justice championed by Enlightenment figures like Godwin, while at the same time their focus did shift to that of the interior rather than the external world. A key figure here is Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose commitment to social change informed his "study of solitary imagination." Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein can even be read as a defense of Day's "and" proposition, since the broodingly interior Frankenstein must ultimately face the consequences of the creature he has unleashed onto the world. As Day puts it, "the writings of those who have formerly been defined as Romantic are not necessarily anti-Enlightenment in any simple sense."

Though that might seem a fitting conclusion, Day includes a final chapter on "Gender and the Sublime" analyzing some of the consequences of Romantic theory first postulated in the eighteenth century by Edmund Burke. Certainly, Burke genders the sublime as masculine and its companion "beautiful" as feminine. Day's point, however, is that this gendering continued to influence Romantic poets. For instance, Wordsworth gendered Nature as feminine, but the female Nature only aided him in apprehending a higher "invisible world." This higher world, Day argues, is associated with the interior mind of the poet, and is thus gendered as masculine. Such arguments break down when the author is a woman, but Day contends that female writers of the period were skeptical of feelings of the sublime and instead focused on nature herself.

David Blayney Brown takes a different approach to Romanticism. While Day focuses on poets and novelists, Brown is interested in painters. He begins his introduction with an examination of Eugène Delacroix's painting The Death of Sardanapalus. He claims the "moral vacuum" at the heart of the piece is "all the more shocking for ignoring the message of the play by the English poet Lord Byron from which he had taken his subject." Notice that Day, discussing literature, ignores drama, while Brown, examining the visual arts, pays close attention to the theatre.

Brown finds a literary parallel for Delacroix's Romanticism in Victor Hugo, whose 1827 preface to his play Cromwell "advocated a rich variety of expression and experience to reflect the complexity of the world and the self, rather than the cold formalism of classical drama, and recognized the value of the ugly or grotesque in engaging the senses, rather than beauty in winning only admiration." For Brown, The Death of Sardanapalus is a "pictorial equivalent" to Hugo's theoretical preface.

Day emphasizes the continuity between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, but Brown stresses how revolutionary the new movement was. He claims: "Not since the Renaissance had such a profound change come over the Western consciousness." Instead of incorporating a collective ideal, the Romantic artists "emphasized individual experience, feeling, and expression." This, of course, came from the French Revolution, which Day emphasizes, but also from the rise and fall of Napoleon. As Brown puts it: "Romanticism was born in opposition and sorrow, in social or national crisis and in individual trauma."

Brown traces the term "Romantic" to Friedrich Schlegel, who in the first issue of the journal Athenaeum in 1798, identified the Romantic with "progressive universal poetry" not based on "inherited and culturally specific forms." Schlegel was writing in the German university town of Jena, which became a hotbed of Romanticism. Though not in Jena, the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe contributed greatly to the movement as well, and Brown cites Goethe's 1789 play Torquato Tasso as an inspiration for Delacroix's Tasso in the Madhouse, painted fifty years later.

Tasso was a Renaissance poet and playwright, but more modern poets also provided inspiration to Romantic artists. Brown cites Thomas Chatterton, a poet whose suicide in 1770 inspired Henry Wallis (painting in the 1850s) to create the magnificent Death of Chatterton, now hanging in the Tate Gallery in London. The cult of Chatterton was not confined to England, either, as Brown observes that the French writer Alfred de Vigny turned the poet's story into the play Chatterton, which "was a hit in Paris in 1835."

So while Day is interested in Romanticism as a philosophical movement in dialogue with the Enlightenment, Brown sees it as an artistic movement born of political turmoil. Michael Ferber wrestles with both of these concepts in his Romanticism, which bears the subtitle A Very Short Introduction. For him, Romanticism is both an intellectual movement and an artistic movement, and while he sees both sides as distinct, he does not seem to emphasize one over the other. Both of these elements, the philosophical and the aesthetic, are present in the pre-Romantic movement Ferber identifies as Sensibility.

Sensibility is a term that was much more in use in the eighteenth century than "Romantic" or "Romantick." It was associated with such works of "storm and stress" as Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and with Gothic writers, including Horace Walpole and Matthew G. Lewis. Ferber also connects it to poets like Mary Robinson, as well as the hugely influential critic and novelist Madame de Staël.

While Ferber successfully traces elements of Sensibility into Romanticism, he definitely seems to be coming at Romanticism from a position of greatly misunderstanding the period's drama. I can overlook his calling Shelley's Prometheus Unbound the poet's "greatest work" as that is a matter of taste. Downright strange, however, is Ferber's comment that Byron's Manfred is "unperformable." Is Ferber really unaware of the many, many successful performances there have been of Manfred? Samuel Phelps was probably the most famous actor to produce the play, but Manfred became so popular that toy theatre versions were made.

For all its faults, though, Ferber's book does give a decent introduction to Romanticism. It attempts to be more balanced than either Day or Brown, gazing into the philosophical and the aesthetic alike. In the end, as Ferber suggests, neither side can be fully understood without the other.

Helen Faucit

The famed Shakespearian actress Helen Faucit was born in 1814, during the Regency, and died in 1898, at the end of the Victorian era. In many ways, her life reflects the tremendous social changes at work during that period.

I recently finished Carol Jones Carlisle's biography, Helen Faucit: Fire and Ice on the Victorian Stage. She corrects some of the errors made by Faucit's original biographer, her husband, Sir Theodore Martin. Sir Theodore made his wife younger than she really was, claiming she was born in 1817, a year after him. He also glossed over some rather unpleasant business with her family.

Faucit (who was baptized Helena, but always went by Helen) came from a family of actors, a profession not generally known for their chaste sensibilities (especially during a time when the Prince Regent was running around with assorted mistresses, including the actress and poet Mary Robinson). Her mother, Harriet Diddear, eloped with John Faucit when she was only 16, a fact she would use later on when she tried to sue her husband for an annulment.

John Faucit took to theater management while his wife took to the stage, famously playing Gertrude in Hamlet. She could not compete, however, with the brightest star of the Regency stage, Eliza O'Neill. After a couple of years, the talented but impetuous woman took up with a new man, William Farren, who already had a wife of his own. This was the Regency, though, so that mattered very little. The two set up house, undeterred by Mrs. Faucit's unsuccessful attempt in 1821 to terminate her first marriage.

Young Helen stayed with her mother, and Farren became a stepfather to her, in spite of the fact he was still married to another woman. While he might not have been a paragon of family values, he did have a keen business sense, and he helped Helen successfully navigate her early career on the stage. According to legend, the family was at the King's Theatre in Richmond when Helen and her elder sister Harriet decided to act out the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet upon an empty stage. The new manager, Willis Jones, overheard them, and decided to put the young Juliet in front of a live audience.

On September 30, 1833, Helen Faucit made her debut as Juliet, listed in the program simply as "A Young Lady". She was so nervous that she crushed the glass vial holding Juliet's potion, slicing open her hand and fainting in earnest. Still, she went on with the show, and the audience applauded her heartily. She repeated the performance the next night, this time using a wooden vial. The following month, she went on as Julia in James Sheridan Knowles' play The Hunchback, a part made famous by Fanny Kemble. In November, she appeared as Mrs. Haller in The Stranger, Benjamin Thompson's adaptation of a play by August von Kotzebue.

At the end of 1835, Faucit was given an opportunity to make her London debut on the stage at Covent Garden. Originally, she was supposed to play Juliet, but George Bennett, her prospective Romeo, was deemed too old for her, and Knowles himself was available to play the title role in The Hunchback. At the last minute, the play was switched, and Faucit found herself making her debut as Julia, not Juliet. On January 5, Twelfth Night, Faucit made her London debut. After a rocky start, she was a smash in the role, writing afterward in her diary, "Again and again, thank God it is over!"

Faucit later appeared as Belvidera in Thomas Otway's Venice Preserved, but predictably she suffered in comparisons to Eliza O'Neill, the standard in that role ever since the Regency. A few nights later she appeared on stage as Mrs. Haller in The Stranger, another role played by O'Neill. This time, however, she did something remarkable that set her apart. Instead of allowing the adulterous Mrs. Haller to be reconciled to her estranged husband at the end, she had the unfortunate woman embrace her children, then fall to the feet of her husband, spurned and rejected to the end.

Such a change, just a year before Queen Victoria's ascension to the throne, marks a shift in attitudes toward women, marriage, and sexual morality. During the Regency, Mrs. Haller could do her penance and reunite with her husband. In Victorian England, that would no longer be possible. Faucit, painfully aware of her own family's history, might have had personal reasons for making the change as well. After her mother's scandalous behavior, she herself wanted to be beyond reproach, and that meant no apologies for fallen women.

Faucit appeared as Lady Margaret in Joanna Baillie's The Separation. Then in March, she was at last allowed to go on as Juliet in London. The performance attracted some attention, and Faucit later found herself being invited to act with her hero, William Charles Macready in Thomas Noon Talfourd's tragedy Ion. Faucit worshipped Macready, but he remained cold toward her throughout their professional relationship. Still, she acted opposite him in a number of Shakespeare productions, including Othello, and Macready's landmark King John.

Amazing to me, Faucit originally did not want to play Cordelia in Macready's 1838 production of King Lear. She felt the part had too few lines and not enough opportunities for making a grand effect. Macready's production revolutionized the play, however, getting rid of the silly love story and happy ending introduced during the Restoration, and bringing back the part of the Fool. Critics rewarded Faucit for taking the role, praising her sweetness in the part. They complained, however, that she spoke too softly, perhaps another effect of her Victorian worldview.

Faucit had to play her fair share of unsuitable roles, including Mrs. Oakley in George Coleman the Elder's The Jealous Wife. However, the same year as Macready's Lear, she was given the part that would grant her the most fame, Pauline in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Lady of Lyons. The same author who had once begun a novel with the infamous line "It was a dark and stormy night" this time hit pay dirt for Faucit, and she would perform the part of Pauline over and over again for the rest of her career.

Later, Faucit appeared opposite Macready in Bulwer's play Richelieu, but that play was more of a vehicle for her costar. She found more success in Shakespearean roles, playing Rosalind in As You Like It, Miranda in The Tempest, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, as well as a formidable Lady Macbeth opposite Macready. Faucit's Lady Macbeth was not power mad, though, but rather ambitious only for her husband's sake. Victorianism strikes again.

When Macready left to tour America, the 28-year-old Faucit was left to develop her craft on her own. She toured the provinces, becoming a success in Dublin, Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. In 1844, she reunited with Macready in Paris, playing Desdemona to his Othello. Returning to Dublin, she appeared as Antigone, and was later painted as "The Greek Muse" by Sir Frederick William Burton.

In 1851 Faucit married Theodore Martin, whom Queen Victoria later knighted for completing a grand biography of Prince Albert. They set up house in London, neighbors to the Thackerays, and had a second home in Wales to boot. Still, Faucit didn't give up acting, and she kept her maiden name for billing purposes.

She did not perform as frequently after marriage, but Faucit kept acting until 1879, and even after her retirement from the stage, she took part in numerous fundraisers and public readings, often reading aloud multiple parts in scenes from Shakespeare.

At the instigation of her friend Geraldine Jewsbury, she began a series of published "letters" on characters she had played. These were later collected under the title: On Some of Shakespeare's Female Characters. A typical passage on Desdemona goes like this:

Making so small a part of her father's life, and missing the love, or the display of it, which would have been so precious to her, she finds her happiness in dreams of worth more exalted than any she has known, but which she has heard and read of in the poets and romancers...

So, too, did Helen Faucit, a child of a broken home from an earlier, more permissive era, dream of happiness. Only her happiness was one bound up in the stability and tranquility of wedded life. And fortunately for her, she found it.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Playwright

I've been reading Rosemary Ashton's biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a writer hailed in his lifetime as a great playwright as well as a great poet.

Even from a young age, Coleridge had a dramatic imagination. In 1792, he was spending much time at the home of his friend, Tom Evans, enjoying a sort of adopted family. In a letter to Tom's mother, the 19-year-old Coleridge wrote of his fondness for the family in metaphors of the stage:

You and my Sisters have the very first row in the front box of my Heart's little theatre--and--God knows! you are not crowded. There, my dear Spectators! you shall see what you shall see--Farce, Comedy, & Tragedy--my Laughter, my Chearfulness, and my Melancholy. A thousand figures pass before you, shifting in perpetual succession--these are my Joys and my Sorrows, my Hopes and my Fears, my Good tempers, and my Peevishnesses: you will however observe two, that remain unalterably fixed--and these are Love and Gratitude.

One of the first serious literary attempts Coleridge made was a play about Maximilien de Robespierre he wrote in collaboration with Robert Southey. The two friends undertook the work as a sort of docu-drama, composing The Fall of Robespierre only weeks after the execution of the famed leader of the French Revolution. Robespierre had gone to the guillotine on July 28, 1794, and Coleridge and Southey wrote the play in August, using newspaper accounts of the events leading up to his precipitous fall from power. By the beginning of September they were shopping the play around to publishers, and it was released to the public in October. No grueling developmental workshops here!

Coleridge fell very much under the spell of the German playwright Friedrich Schiller. After having discovered Schiller's The Robbers, he wrote to Southey:

I had read chill and trembling until I came to the part where Moor fires a pistol over the Robbers who are asleep--I could read no more--My God! Southey! Who is this Schiller? This Convulser of the Heart? Did he write his Tragedy amid the yelling Fiends?

Later, in 1795, Coleridge wrote a political pamphlet called The Plot Discovered in which he attacked the government of Prime Minister William Pitt. One of the charges he leveled against the government was that it had suppressed productions of The Robbers.

For most people, Coleridge's name will forever be bound up with that of William Wordsworth. It was the two of them together who ushered in a wave of Romanticism with their joint publication of Lyrical Ballads. However, for their first in-person meeting after a period of admiring correspondence, Coleridge had tucked under his arm not poems but the first two and a half acts of his play Osorio.

Two passages from Osorio actually made their way into Lyrical Ballads as independent poems under the titles "The Foster-Mother's Tale" and "The Dungeon." My favorite of the two is the latter:

And this place our forefathers made for man!

This is the process of our love and wisdom

To each poor brother who offends against us—

Most innocent, perhaps—and what if guilty?

Is this the only cure? Merciful God!

Each pore and natural outlet shrivell'd up

By ignorance and parching poverty,

His energies roll back upon his heart,

And stagnate and corrupt; till changed to poison,

They break out on him, like a loathsome plague spot.

Then we call in our pamper'd mountebanks—

And this is their best cure! uncomforted

And friendless solitude, groaning and tears,

And savage faces, at the clanking hour,

Seen through the steams and vapour of his dungeon,

By the lamp's dismal twilight! So he lies

Circled with evil, till his very soul

Unmoulds its essence, hopelessly deformed

By sights of ever more deformity!

With other ministrations thou, O nature!

Healest thy wandering and distempered child:

Thou pourest on him thy soft influences,

Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets,

Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters,

Till he relent, and can no more endure

To be a jarring and a dissonant thing,

Amid this general dance and minstrelsy;

But, bursting into tears, wins back his way,

His angry spirit healed and harmonized

By the benignant touch of love and beauty.

Sadly, the Theatre-Royal at Drury Lane turned down Osorio. Coleridge disliked some of the popular fare that did make it to the boards. He derided Matthew G. Lewis's runaway hit The Castle Spectre as "Schiller Lewisized" with "not one line that marks even a superficial knowledge of human feelings."

In 1798, as Lyrical Ballads was being published, Coleridge set out to Germany, where one of his goals was to gather enough materials to write a biography of the playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. The book on Lessing never materialized, but Coleridge did learn enough German to translate the two main parts of Schiller's dramatic trilogy Wallenstein. These two works, The Piccolomini and The Death of Wallenstein, are now regarded as models of poetic translation.

After his return from Germany, Coleridge joined the circle of the English actress and poet Mary Robinson, nicknamed "Perdita" for the role she played in The Winter's Tale. (It was in this part that she attracted the attention of the Prince of Wales, soon becoming his mistress.) Coleridge read to her from his unfinished and unpublished poem "Kubla Khan." She recalled the scene in her own piece, "Mrs. Robinson to the Poet Coleridge" which she published in October of 1800, not long before her death.

During all this time, Coleridge was yet to have any of his own plays produced, He wouldn't have to wait forever, though. Though Drury Lane had turned down Osorio, Coleridge rewrote the piece as a new tragedy: Remorse. That play was the hit of the season in 1813, and is also the subject of tomorrow's blog post.