Almond, C. 2014

265 Pages·2014·1.2 MB·English

Rehearsing Modern Tragedy:
A Benjaminian Interpretation of
Drama and the Dramatic in
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
Writings.

Clare Louise Almond

A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of
English Literature at the University of
Newcastle upon Tyne

May, 2014
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Abstract

This thesis offers a reappraisal of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s dramatic
theory and writing. Although critical interest in Coleridge’s dramatic work
is relatively small in comparison to other areas, it is increasing. A central
aim of the thesis is to add to this field of criticism by suggesting a greater
significance of the dramatic in Coleridge’s oeuvre. This is an area of
Coleridge’s work that can be illuminated by way of its interpretation using
Walter Benjamin’s reassessment of dramatic genres in The Origin of
German Tragic Drama.

A key assumption of the thesis is that Coleridge’s dramatic work extends
beyond the parameters of his activity as a playwright. It therefore positions
key moments of his critical theory and poetic writing as dramatic. In
viewing selected works in this way, a greater coincidence between
Coleridge and Benjamin’s work emerges most significantly through their
shared themes of truthful representation and correct interpretation.

A short introduction highlights common themes between Coleridge and
Benjamin and proposes a view of the two writers that follows Benjamin’s
concept of the ‘constellation’. Chapter One draws together key critical
interest in Romantic drama. It also aims to connect Coleridge’s dramatic
theory and works with key themes in On German Tragic Drama. Chapter
Two explores Coleridge’s dramatic theory in his Lectures before 1812 and
offers a reading of the ‘Critique of Bertram’ that seeks to reassert the
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importance of this piece. Chapter Three aims to reveal a dramatic current
running through ‘The Eolian Harp’ and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
The thesis culminates, in Chapter Four, with a reading of Remorse informed
by Benjamin’s critical model of the Trauerspiel in The Origin of German
Tragic Drama.

In conclusion, the thesis offers up aspects of Coleridge’s works that can be
termed as dramatic so as to reveal their anticipation of a Benjaminian
modernity. In this sense, it proposes that drama should be accorded more
significance within Coleridge’s oeuvre as it reveals a better understanding
of some of his lesser known material and highlights some of his most
original thinking.
For mum and dad
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Contents

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………vi

Introduction. Towards A Literary Constellation: The Relevance of Walter Benjamin to
Samuel Taylor Coleridge…………………………………………………………..........1

1. Chapter 1. Drama and the Dramatic in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Walter
Benjamin

1.1 The Debateable Romantics of Coleridge’s Drama………………………...…...17
1.2 The Visual In Romantic Drama……………………………………………...…26
1.3 The Generic In Romantic Drama…………………………………………….…39
1.4 The Benjaminian turn: Coleridge’s Drama and its Connection to Modernity…49
1.5 Genre and the Constellation in The Origin of German Tragic Drama………...56
1.6 Trauerspiel and Tragedy in The Origin of German Tragic Drama……………65
1.7 Allegory and Trauerspiel………………………………………………………74

2. Chapter 2. Towards Modernity in Coleridge’s Dramatic Theory

2.1 Introduction: The ‘True Theory of Stage Illusion’…………………………….80
2.2 The Significance of the Middle Ages in Coleridge and Benjamin’s
Understanding of the Dramatic…………………………………………………89
2.3 Coleridge’s Theory of Dramatic Illusion……………………………………….96
2.4 The Commanding Genius and the Intriguer………………………………..…108
2.5 The Dramatic Motif of Remorse……………………………………………...123
2.6 The ‘Critique of Bertram’: Literary Anti-Jacobinism……………………...…128
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3. Chapter 3. The Dramatic Turn In Coleridge’s Poetry

3.1 Introduction…………………………………………………………...………150
3.2 Symbol and Sociability in ‘The Eolian Harp’………………..……………….153
3.3 The Sociability of ‘The Eolian Harp’: Sound, Symbolism and Sara………….159
3.4 Sound and Vision in ‘Effusion XXXV’: Coleridge’s Dramatic
Theory in Waiting……………………………………………………………..169
3.5 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: Imagination and Interpretation……...…....174
3.6 Robert Penn Warren: ‘A Poem of Pure Imagination’…………………………180
3.7 Jerome McGann: Coleridge’s Literary Ballad……………………………..….184
3.8 The Ancient Mariner as Storyteller: Historical Materialism and Drama in
The Rime……………...……………………………………………………….188

4. Chapter 4. ‘To the Avenger I leave Vengeance and depart!’ The Competing
Discourses of Tragedy and Trauerspiel in Remorse

4.1 Introduction……………………………………………………………...……204
4.2 Coleridge and the Gothic Vision of the Georgian Theatre……………...…….207
4.3 Albert/Alvar…………………………………………………………………...221
4.4 Teresa: The Heroine of Poetic Faith……………………………...………….. 229
4.5 The Competing Dialogues of Remorse and Revenge……………………...….237

Conclusion………………………………………………………...…………...……...246

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………...…...252
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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisors, Dr. Michael Rossington and Dr. Anne Whitehead
for the unlimited support, wealth of knowledge and patience they have offered over the
long course of this thesis. They taught me at undergraduate and post-graduate level and
I owe them, and the Newcastle University English Department, a debt of gratitude for
the richness of my Higher Education.

I am grateful to the Killingley Memorial Trust of Newcastle-upon-Tyne for offering me
the springboard with which to start the PhD in the form of the Postgraduate fund. The
challenges of continuing the research as a self-funded student, although tough, have
been rewarding in many ways. Had I not followed this path, I would not have gained
the intellectual support and the friendship of Barbara, Angie, Anne, Alison, and
especially Pip, my teaching colleagues. I would also like to thank Louise, Jen and Jay
for their long-standing friendship. I am very grateful to Katie Harland for proof reading
my thesis and to Simon for his I.T. support.

My mum and dad have guided, supported and encouraged me in an infinite number of
ways in everything I have done, and they continue to do so. The thesis is dedicated to
them for giving me the freedom to pursue my interests and to achieve my ambitions. I
am extremely lucky to have Helen, my sister, who I know is always there to share the
fun and give me a helping hand whenever I need it. Finally, I want to thank my
husband, James, who has supported me, reassured me and remained interested in my
work from start to end. Both James and our daughter, Annabel, make me happy every
day.
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Introduction.
Towards a Literary Constellation: The Relevance of Walter Benjamin
to Samuel Taylor Coleridge

[Walter Benjamin] was a library-cormorant and devourer of ancient
print quite in the manner of a Coleridge […and it was as] a
metaphysician of metaphor and translation as was Coleridge, that
Benjamin accomplished his best work.1

Literary criticism and the ‘question of representation’ lie at the heart of this project.2
Both Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Walter Benjamin are known for their studies of
philosophy, language and politics but it is the preservation of their focus upon
literature—and within this specifically, their interest in ‘the ability to tell a tale’—that
highlights a connection between them.3

Casting Coleridge and Benjamin’s works together within a constellation—Benjamin’s
historico-critical term to express a spatial rather than linear understanding of time—
allows for the revival of a theory built around drama that remains ostensibly latent in
Coleridge’s oeuvre. Benjamin’s conception of the constellation is expressed most fully
in Theses on the Philosophy of History, in which he puts forward a method of historical
documentation that departs from historicism, which simply (and ineffectively) records
information. Instead, Benjamin is interested in methods that allow past events to remain
alive and vital in a connection with the present as ‘a constellation which [one] era has

1 George Steiner, ‘Introduction’, in Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, introd. by
George Steiner, trans. by John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 7-24 (p. 9; p. 20).
2 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, introd. by George Steiner, trans. by John
Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), p. 27. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the
text using the abbreviation OGTD.
3 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’ in Illuminations, ed. and introd. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry
Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), pp. 83-108. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in
the text using the abbreviation S.
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formed with a definite earlier one’.4 The constellation works, as Hannah Arendt
explains, with reference to Benjamin’s mosaic technique of criticism, by ‘tearing
fragments out of their context and arranging them afresh in such a way that they
illustrate[d] one another and [are] able to prove their raison d’être in a free-floating
state’.5 Theses is, of course, Benjamin’s meridian cultural statement; a critique of the
modern condition structured in the manner of a materialist historiographical record
offering, in both its form and content, a ‘revolutionary chance to fight for the oppressed
past’ (TPH, p. 254). As one of Benjamin’s final works, it carries within it strong
influential lines of revolutionary political thinking and, in its practical urgency, may be
considered to ‘articulate a politics, not an aesthetics […] of redemption’.6 Nonetheless,
its theoretical heritage is rooted in Benjamin’s early critical undertaking, not least in the
ambitious Habilitation project, which sought to establish a new critical framework that
would redeem lost works and revive their interest in a liberated cultural canon. This
thesis is concerned with Benjamin’s interest in reasserting the influence of what may be
termed an underclass of literature by judging it immanently, through its own artistic
references, rather than under the application of an external set of artistic rules inherited
from the literature of previous epochs. Therefore, it locates, in Coleridge’s
experimentation with Romantic drama, a call to judge his dramatic writing under its
own literary, historical and cultural conditions. However, the thesis is not a purely New
Historicist reading of Coleridge’s work as I aim to highlight a literary engagement with
the historical in his dramatic writing of the kind that Walter Benjamin advocates in The
Origin of German Tragic Drama. Hugh Grady articulates the advantages of using

4 Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations (see note to ‘The Storyteller’,
above), pp. 245-55 (p. 255). Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text using
the abbreviation TPH.
5 Hannah Arendt, ‘Introduction’ to Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (see note to ‘The Storyteller’, above),
pp. 7-58 (p. 51).
6 Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 247.
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Benjamin’s approach to drama as a way of returning the form to critical analysis located
within literary, rather than historical and social, theory. He aims to
bring out other qualities of [Benjamin’s] methods relevant to the
present conjuncture in Shakespeare studies as the field searches for
methods that go beyond an almost exhausted New Historicism […]
Benjamin's project has a historicizing dimension, but history for him
is always a construct of our present moment, and he is also deeply
interested in aesthetic issues of form and genre as expressions of
historical moments.7

This Benjaminian methodology has recently become a fruitful aspect of Shakespearean
studies as Andrew Benjamin and Luis-Martinez Zenón have joined Hugh Grady in
providing Benjaminian interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays.8 This thesis extends the
interest shown in applying Benjamin’s work on the mourning play into the new territory
of nineteenth-century drama by highlighting its relevance to, and illumination of,
Coleridge’s dramatic theory and practice.

It is not surprising that both Coleridge and Benjamin engaged with a cultural critique of
history, or the representation of historical events. Neither Coleridge nor Benjamin
worked comfortably within the boundaries of their own cultural epoch. Even
Coleridge’s most recognised works divided, and at times eluded, his fellow writers, and
Benjamin’s arguably most scholarly work was rejected for a Habilitation (teaching
qualification).9 Not only were the two writers working outside their cultural moment,
but central to their work is also the theme of temporal dislocation; it is this theme that
George Steiner touches upon with reference to both writers’ profound understanding,

7 Hugh Grady, ‘Hamlet as a Mourning Play: A Benjaminianesque Interpretation’, Shakespeare Studies, 36
(2008), 135-65 (p. 137).
8 Andrew Benjamin, ‘Benjamin and the Baroque: Posing the Question of Historical Time’, in Rethinking
the Baroque, ed. by Helen Hill (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 161-183, and Luis-Martinez
Zenόn, ‘Shakespeare’s Historical Drama as Trauerspiel: Richard II and After’, ELH, 75 (2008), 673-706.
9 For an introduction to the reception of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in the nineteenth century, see
Richard Haven, ‘The Ancient Mariner in the Nineteenth Century’, Studies in Romanticism, 11, 4 (1972),
360-374. For a brief introduction to the background of Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic
Drama, see Gilloch, pp. 60-65.