The Borderers: Wordsworth’s addenda to Godwin

DONALD G. PRIESTMAN The Borderers: Wordsworth's addenda to Godwin Even before it was revised for the stage at Coleridge's instigation, The Borderers was a unique experiment for Wordsworth. Whether cast in the form of a play or closet drama, it represents, in all likelihood, an attempt on Wordsworth's part to find a style more direct than that of 'Salisbury Plain: later Guilt and Sorrow, to convey the full freight of his growing social philosophy while at the same time enlisting sympathy for the spectacle of human suffering presented by his characters. By December '797, the play had been rejected by the Covent Garden Theatre because of what was, according to the poet's relative, Elizabeth Threlkeld, 'the metaphysical obscurity of one character:' and almost four decades later the reviewer for The Athenaeum of the published version could still complain that Oswald stood 'too much on the extreme of evil.'2 The figure of Oswald has been at the centre of the 'metaphysical' aspect of the play in our own times also, but the principal question for twentieth-century critics has been whether The Borderers embodies acceptance of William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning PoliticalJustice or testifies to Wordsworth's rejection of it.' That critics should look to Oswald is natural enough inasmuch as it is he who acts and Marmaduke, the hero, who is acted upon. There is, nevertheless, a compelling case to be made for Marmaduke as a more Significant indicator of Wordsworth's attitudes towards Godwinism. In what follows, I shall show that the poet, in his treatment of Oswald, accepts Godwin but attempts to supplement him, while with Marmaduke he tries to show inadequacies in the philosopher's system. This rather ambivalent treatment by Wordsworth of Godwin's ideas led an earlier generation of critics to take up three basic positions which, though modified, are still maintained today. In a pioneering work, George McLean Harper maintained that both Guilt and Sorrow and The Borderers 'indicate that he [Wordsworth] was also imbued with Godwin's doctrine that "under the system of necessity the ideas of guilt, crime, desert, and accountableness, have no place".'4 For Emile Legouis, The Borderers represents Wordsworth's first turning away from Godwin's philosophy; while forH.W. Garrod, the play is not a rejection and the tragedy emerges as a result of Godwinism imperfectly applied.6 All of these views, contradictory as they may seem, possess merit, but I UTQ, Volume XLIV I Number I, Fall 1974 suggest that none of them has taken more than passing notice of the similarities which exist between Oswald and Marmaduke.7 It is an important point, because the structure of the play is designed to illustrate and have us meditate upon the dissimilar responses of two men to similar situations. Although the description of the 'young man' in the Preface to The Borderers refers to Oswald, its general outlines are, as we shall see, equally applicable to Marmaduke. Much of the similarity in action is deliberately contrived by Oswald, but only because he recognizes in his youthful chief an already existing similarity in character. Both men achieved distinction among their fellows when they were young. Each man, living on what Sharrock calls 'the moral frontier' - Oswald aboard a ship and Marmaduke on the English-Scots border - is tempted to judge by his own lights on the right of a fellow human being to Iive.8 In MS B (1797) the parallel is closer, for each victim is the father of a loving daughter who trusts the murderer." Each man employs exposure as the means of death after first planning to dispatch the victim with a blow. Finally, both Oswald and Marmaduke discover that they have acted upon false witness and, as a result, their hopes and ambitions are irrevocably ruined. Godwin's early contacts with and influence upon Wordsworth need not be rehearsed again'· The issue is whether, or to what extent, that influence persisted during the last months of 1796 and the early months of1797 while he was composing The Borderers, for as Wordsworth said of the published version in 1842, 'not the slightest alteration has been made in the conduct of the...