Romantic Tragedies: The Dark Employments of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley by Reeve Parker (review)

Not surprisingly, Romantic Tragedies: The Dark Employments of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley possesses both the verbal clarity and intellectual scope we expect of a book appearing in the inestimable Cambridge Studies in Romanticism series. Like Julie A. Carlson’s In the Theatre of Romanticism (1994) and Betsy Bolton’s Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage (2001), Reeve Parker’s new work significantly amplifies what we know (assuredly still too little) of dramaturgy and stagecraft during the British Romantic era. Parker renders cogent interpretations of William Wordsworth’s The Borderers, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Osorio (later performed at Drury Lane as Remorse), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci through a versatile approach that blends close reading with historical and intertextual analysis. Romantic Tragedies is a work of confidence and courage, a fresh and important contribution to Romanticism studies by an author who shows alacrity in taking risks for the sake of achieving insights.

When I claim that the author takes chances, I have principally in mind his willingness to highlight what seems especially unsettled in the plays under consideration. Indeed, Parker habitually foregrounds uncertainties, and not simply because his subject invites this emphasis; as he suggests, “uncertainty [stands] as the essential hallmark of powerful tragedy” in any age (p. 3). Parker relies not only on his deep understanding of Romanticism but also on his gifted imagination to clarify the more nebulous aspects of the pieces in question.

The Borderers—initially composed circa 1797 but unpublished until 1842 (a year before Wordsworth’s Poet Laureateship)—anchors the study’s first part. Chapters 1 and 4—entitled “Reading Wordsworth’s Power: Narrative and Usurpation in The Borderers” and “Drinking up Whole Rivers: Facing Wordsworth’s Watery Discourse,” respectively—present sophisticated close interpretations of the play, while Chapters 2 and 3—“Cradling French Macbeth: Managing the Art of Second-Hand Shakespeare” and “‘In some sort seeing with my proper eyes’: Wordsworth and the Spectacles of Paris”—posit the possible impact on Wordsworth, the poet-dramatist, of his time in Revolutionary France and of his familiarity with European authors. This point merits elaboration, as readers who take up Romantic Tragedies without having encountered Wordsworth’s bandits beforehand will find both an accessible treatment of the play’s plot and characters and a brilliantly argued genealogy of the work’s literary relations, a family tree including Shakespeare (Macbeth, Othello, Pericles, The Tempest), Jean-François Ducis (whose adaptations of Shakespeare Wordsworth may have seen while he was in France), Jean Racine (Athalie and Andromaque), Friedrich Schiller (Die Räuber), and even Virgil (The Aeneid). Taken together, these chapters impress me as the best examination of The Borderers since David Bromwich’s Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s (1998).

Two chapters in the book’s second part concern Coleridge’s startlingly popular 1813 play Remorse and its source, 1797’s Osorio—a work originally declined by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who fretted about how his London audiences would respond to the script’s myriad ambiguities (p. 109). But in “Osorio’s Dark Employments: Tricking out Coleridgean Tragedy” and “Listening to Remorse: Assuming Man’s Infirmities,” Parker celebrates the play’s “haunting obscurity” and sees its “sketchiness” as a reason why, with time, this piece found success (pp. 140, 139). He also demonstrates the ways in which Coleridge’s “corrosive anxiety” (p. 174), especially in his feelings toward Sara Hutchinson, may have affected the revisionary process that yielded Remorse. Less intertextual than his Wordsworth section, Parker’s Coleridge material soundly explicates Coleridge’s playwrighting as a stylistic challenge and as an opportunity to confront the uncertainties of his life and his art.

Romantic Tragedies closes with a look at The Cenci, an “ekphrastic drama” (p. 181) inspired as surely by Shelley’s picture of Wordsworth after the 1818 Westmoreland election as by Guido Reni’s painting of a young woman Shelley took to be Beatrice Cenci. In “Reading Shelley’s Delicacy,” Parker...