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2. Wordsworth on the Heath Tragedy, Autobiography, and the Revolutionary Spectator What does Shakespearean tragedy have to do with Wordsworth’s origination of a new and revolutionary way of writing poetry in the wake of the French Revolution? In what way might Wordsworth’s poetic project be read in terms of an effort to succeed King Lear? From the perspective of standard literary history, these questions will appear eccentric. Wordsworth is traditionally considered the primary Romantic descendant in a line of English poets that includes Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton and that harks back to Virgil as classical model.1 Wordsworth himself supports this account, laying claim particularly to the legacy of Milton in references and allusions throughout his writings, most prominently in The Prelude and the Prospectus to The Excursion. In these latter works, Wordsworth explicitly announces his ambition to succeed Milton by updating visionary, prophetic epic for his own times, for the generations of readers who lived through and after the French Revolution, which was for him, as is well-known, far and away the paramount, defining event of his age. These questions may appear odd also when one considers the vast, even antipodal, difference in style between Wordsworth and Shakespeare. In Keats’s memorable formulation, Wordsworth is the poet of the ‘‘egotistical sublime,’’ unmistakably the hero at the center of his own poems, who seems even with his characters to be speaking in propria persona. Shakespeare, on the other hand, is the impersonal dramatist par excellence, who was ‘‘everything and nothing,’’ who could inhabit a variety of characters from Iago to Imogen without appearing in any way as the hero of his work.2 Yet, early in his career, before he inscribed himself into the legacy of Milton, Wordsworth composed in 1796–7 and revised by 1799 a tragedy in five acts that was obviously and extensively influenced by Shakespeare. The Borderers was Wordsworth’s one and only play and, significantly, his first major effort alongside his long narrative poem Salisbury Plain. Situated beyond his juvenilia and at the threshold of his mature oeuvre, The Borderers 81 82 Wordsworth is perhaps best described as a work of apprenticeship and has received critical attention principally for the light it can shed on Wordsworth’s later trajectory . He wrote it at a time when his closest peers were writing plays: Coleridge was writing his own tragedy, Osorio, later called Remorse, for submission to Covent Garden after he had already collaborated with Southey on The Fall of Robespierre.3 Wordsworth also submitted his completed play to one of the principal actors at Covent Garden for review but recalls it as having been ‘‘judiciously returned as not calculated for the stage,’’ although he would have appreciated its acceptance given the state of his finances at the time.4 The manuscript ‘‘lay nearly from that time till within the last two or three months unregarded among my papers,’’ as Wordsworth writes in 1842, ‘‘without being mentioned even to my most intimate friends’’ (‘‘1842 Note,’’ 813). In more than one sense, then, The Borderers was a ‘‘closet drama.’’ Forty-five years after completing the play, Wordsworth finally published it in 1842, changing the names of the characters and modifying passages but keeping the text otherwise substantially intact. The Borderers is set in the thirteenth-century reign of Henry III and the Crusades in the border territory between England and Scotland disputed in the Baronial Wars. There are four main characters, named in the 1796–7 version Mortimer, Rivers, Herbert, and Matilda.5 Mortimer is the leader of a band of border brigands who is manipulated by his associate Rivers into harming Herbert, the blind, old father of his childhood sweetheart, Matilda, whom Mortimer wishes to marry. Such, in nuce, is what takes place plotwise in this notoriously convoluted play that features numerous borrowings from King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, with significant parts of the action taking place on the heath, where the play ultimately ends. The relationship between Herbert and Matilda shows significant resemblance to the relationship between Lear and Cordelia, with lines given to Herbert coming almost verbatim out of Lear. The character Rivers, as Wordsworth acknowledges in a prefatory essay to the earlier edition, is based on Iago. And the setting is reminiscent of the landscapes of both Lear and Macbeth. What brought Wordsworth, at this point in his career, to write this play? And what led him to base it so extensively on Shakespearean tragedy? According...

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