Reading It Properly: The Poetics of Performance and Tennyson’s “Merlin and Vivien”

Farringford, Sunday, June 25 [1865]

Fine—at breakfast A. T. with his letters, one from D. of Argyll. Swinburne—Venables. Out and meet the Kings—Mrs. Cameron. Return to Farringford. Dinner (which is at 6:30 always). Sitting at claret in the drawing-room we see the evening sunlight on the landscape. I go to the top of the house alone; have a strong sense of being in Tennyson’s green summer, ruddy light in the sky. When I came into the drawing-room found A. T. with a book in his hand; the Kings expectant. He accosted me, “Allingham, would it disgust you if I read ‘Maud’? Would you expire?”

I gave satisfactory reply and he accordingly read “Maud” all through, with some additions recently made. His interpolated remarks very amusing.

“This is what we call namby-pamby!”—“That’s wonderfully fine!”—“That was very hard to read; could you have read it? I don’t think so.”

—William Allingham, A Diary 118

If there is anything in the collected letters, journals, and memoir accounts of Alfred Tennyson that rises above general expressions of awe for his voice, it is surely the gratification that Tennyson found in it himself. In the successive references of friends and family to his recitations, such as the one described by William Allingham, above, the laureate’s attachment to his own readings comes across consistently. Indeed, the number of these accounts has led to the poet’s voice-vanity being perhaps the most easily parodied aspect of his literary fame, from D. G. Rossetti’s surreptitious sketching of the laureate during a reading in 1855, to Max Beerbohm’s 1904 cartoon of “Mr. Tennyson, reading ‘In Memoriam’ to his Sovereign,” and even the garish semi-animated internet videos of the wax cylinder recording of “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”¹ What Allingham’s notes on his Tennysonian recitation experience call to mind, however, is perhaps a finer aspect of this mutual gratification of others and self than contemporary friends, current critics, and caricaturists alike have taken into account: a concern with performative accuracy. Reading Tennyson’s “interpolated remark” on the difficulty of reading his own verse is, of course, rather funny—not only because of his glib doubt of Allingham’s ability to read tricky lines, but also because Tennyson seems to take equal pleasure in his wily agility as a reader and his own trickiness as a writer of those lines. Playwright, performer, and audience all in one, Tennyson is a perfectly self-contained and self-contenting figure here, that very self-contentment being the real show—rather than the reading of Maud—to which Allingham is humorously witness. But the pleasure the poet takes in being both the creator and executor of a specifically performative kind of difficulty also points us toward a more critically interesting side of Tennyson’s recitations.

As critics such as J. Hillis Miller have frequently observed (and, since Auden, with no great sigh of regret), “Tennyson left no body of criticism” (Miller 134).² Trying to weave together a sense-of-a-theory from the sundry remarks gathered by Hallam Tennyson in his memoir, or from the morphology of manuscript changes, we achieve nothing that feels distinctive to a particular aesthetic philosophy, nor any profound or practical instruction for thinking about poetics more generally. What I would like to suggest in the present essay is that the critical search for and failure to find traces of Tennyson’s poetic theory is not, itself, a sign of Tennyson’s lack of interest in criticism (a separate matter from his frequent disdain for critics), but rather that perhaps we have simply been looking for traces of it in the wrong place—in textual comments, rather than performative ones. Can we conceive, I ask here, of a critical approach that grounds itself in a performative rather than textual engagement with Tennyson’s poetry—as the poet himself so often did? Both the accounts of his recitations and his critical commentary on theatrical performances reveal a faith in the connection between...