Osorio/A Monograph on Coleridge's "Osorio."
A Monograph on
COLERIDGE'S "OSORIO."
In the summer of 1797 two of the greatest of modern English poets, Coleridge and Wordsworth, met for the first time at Racedown in Dorsetshire. Wordsworth was in his twenty-eighth and Coleridge in his twenty-fifth year, in the spring-tide of his creative faculty. He had come over on a visit to Wordsworth from Nether-Stowey in Somersetshire, where he had been engaged in writing the tragedy of Osorio. Wordsworth was also occupied with a tragedy, The Borderers, which was completed in the following November, offered to the managers of Covent Garden Theatre, and summarily rejected by them, and which only saw the light forty-five years afterwards.
The story of the fortunes and misfortunes of Coleridge's Osorio, with which alone we are concerned here, will take longer to tell.
Charles Lamb writes to Coleridge (June 13th, 1797):—"Lloyd tells me that Sheridan put you upon writing your tragedy. I hope you are only Coleridgeizing when you talk of finishing it in a few days. Shakespeare was a more modest man; but you best know your own power."
During the time of the visit above-mentioned, Miss Wordsworth writes from Racedown to a friend:—"After tea he (Coleridge) repeated to us two acts and a half of his tragedy, Osorio." Coleridge writing at the time of this visit to his friend Cottle (June, 1797) says:"He (Wordsworth) admires my tragedy, which gives me great hopes."
In a letter received by Cottle from Coleridge soon after, he says:—"I shall now stick close to my tragedy (called Osorio), and when I have finished it, shall walk to Shaftesbury to spend a few days with Bowles." This letter, as was usual, has no date, but a letter from Wordsworth determines about the time when Coleridge had nearly completed his play. Wordsworth says, under date September 13, 1797:—"Coleridge is gone over to Bowles with his tragedy, which he has finished to the middle of the fifth Act. He set off a week ago."[1]
In the meantime, Wordsworth himself was hard at work on The Borderers. Both the poets, however, were doomed to witness the disappointment of their hopes.
"William's play," says Miss Wordsworth (20th Nov., 1797), "is finished, and sent to the managers of the Covent Garden Theatre. We have not the faintest expectation that it will be accepted." On 21st Dec. she writes:—"We have been in London: our business was the play; and the play is rejected. It was sent to one of the principal actors at Covent Garden, who expressed great approbation, and advised William strongly to go to London to make certain alterations." "Coleridge's play," she adds, "is also rejected;" and for this she expresses great sorrow and disappointment.
In the following year (1798) two scenes from Osorio, under the titles of The Dungeon and The Foster-Mother's Tale, were published, together with other pieces by Coleridge, in the volume of Lyrical Ballads which he produced conjointly with Wordsworth. Here, with the omission of some of the opening lines of the latter scene, they continued to appear in the successive editions of 1800, 1802, and 1805.
"The manuscript of Osorio," says Mr. Gillman, "had been sent to Sheridan, who did not even acknowledge the receipt of the letter which accompanied the drama; he, however, observed to a friend that he had received a play from Coleridge, but there was one extraordinary line in the Cave Scene, drip, drip, which he could not understand: 'in short,' said he, 'it is all dripping.' This was the only notice he took of the play; but the comment was at length repeated to the author through the medium of a third party."[2]
In reference to this celebrated story, the accomplished daughter of the poet writes as follows:—
"The 'dripping,' whatever its unction may once have been, is stale enough now; but the story has freshness in it yet. Such neglects as that of Mr. Sheridan in not returning the MS. of Remorse are always excusable in public men of great and various occupation; but the lesson to the literary aspirant is just the same as if he had been ever so blameable.
"I repeat this story as told by Mr. Coleridge himself, because it has been otherwise told by others. I have little doubt that it was more pointedly than faithfully told to him, and can never believe that Mr. Sheridan represented a ludicrous line as a fair specimen of the whole play, or his tenacious adherence to it as the reason for its rejection. . . . . However, in lighter moods, my father laughed at Sheridan's joke as much as any of his auditors could have done in 1806, and repeated with great effect and mock solemnity,
"'Drip!—Drip!—Drip—nothing but dripping.'
When first written this play had been called Osorio, from the principal character, whose name my father afterwards improved into Ordonio. I believe he in some degree altered, if he did not absolutely recast, the three last acts after the failure with Mr. Sheridan, who probably led him to see their unfitness for theatrical representation. But of this point I have not certain knowledge. . . . . After all, I am happy to think that this drama is a strain of poetry, and like all, not only dramatic poems, but highly poetic dramas, not to be fully appreciated on the stage."[3]
On the stage, nevertheless, after a lapse of fifteen years, it was destined to be performed with brilliant success, at the very theatre where it had before been so ignominiously rejected. This happy result was owing mainly to the good offices of Lord Byron, whose interest at the newly-rebuilt house secured its acceptance. The generous aid so opportunely extended by the noble poet to his less fortunate brother is one of the pleasantest episodes in the history of the much-maligned author of Childe Harold.
In Crabb Robinson's Diary we find the following entry, under date Nov. 3rd, 1812:—"Coleridge informs me that his tragedy is accepted at Drury Lane. Whitbread admires it exceedingly, and Arnold, the manager, is confident of its success."
Under date "Keswick, Jan. 17, 1813," Southey writes to his friend C. W. Wynn:—"Coleridge's tragedy, which Sheridan and Kemble rejected fifteen years ago, will come out in about a fortnight at Drury Lane."
After its successful appearance, Southey wrote to Grosvenor Bedford (Jan. 27, 1813):—"I never doubted that Coleridge's play would meet with a triumphant reception. Be it known and remembered hereafter, that this self-same play, having had no other alterations made in it now than Coleridge was willing to have made in it then, was rejected in 1797 by Sheridan and Kemble. Had these sapient caterers for the public brought it forward at that time, it is by no means improbable that the author might have produced a play as good every season; with my knowledge of Coleridge's habits I verily believe he would."[4]
The tragedy, which had been remodelled with a view to stage effect, was performed for the first time, under the title of Remorse, at Drury Lane Theatre on Saturday, Jan. 23, 1813. The Prologue was written by Charles Lamb, and the Epilogue by the author himself. The success was immediate and decisive, and the play had a run of twenty nights. The cast of the characters was as follows:—
| Marquis Valdez, Father to the two brothers, and Donna Teresa's Guardian |
Mr. Pope. | |
| Don Alfar, the eldest son | Mr. Elliston. | |
| Don Ordonio, the youngest son | Mr. Rae. | |
| Monviedro, a Dominican and Inquisitor | Mr. Powell. | |
| Zulimez, the faithful attendant on Alvar | Mr. Crooke. | |
| Isidore, a Moresco Chieftain, ostensibly a Christian |
Mr. De Camp. | |
| Familiars of the Inquisition | ||
| Naomi | Mr. Wallace. | |
| Moors and Servants, &c. | ||
| Donna Teresa, an Orphan Heiress | Miss Smith. | |
| Alhadra, wife to Isidore | Mrs. Glover. |
Crabb Robinson thus records his presence on the first night:—
"Jan. 23rd, 1813.—In the evening at Drury Lane, to see the first performance of Coleridge's tragedy, Remorse. . . . . . My interest for the play was greater than in the play, and my anxiety for its success took from me the feeling of a mere spectator. I have no hesitation in saying that its poetical is far greater than its dramatic merit, that it owes its success rather to its faults than to its beauties, and that it will have for its less meritorious qualities applause which is really due to its excellences. Coleridge's great fault is that he indulges before the public in those metaphysical and philosophical speculations which are becoming only in solitude or with select minds. His two principal characters are philosophers of Coleridge's own school; the one a sentimental moralist, the other a sophisticated villain—both are dreamers. Two experiments made by Alvar on his return, the one on his mistress by relating a dream, and the other when he tries to kindle remorse in the breast of Ordonio, are too fine-spun to be intelligible. So when Ordonio enigmatically reproaches Isidore with his guilt, he tries the cunning of his audience to find out his drift. However, in spite of these faults, of the improbability of the action, of the clumsy contrivance with the picture, and the too ornate and poetic diction throughout, the tragedy was received with great and almost unmixed applause, and was announced for repetition without any opposition.
The following notice in the Examiner[5] we may suppose to have been written by Leigh Hunt:—"The fable is managed and developed with a rapidity which never languishes, an intelligibility which a child might follow, and a surprise which would keep awake the most careless attention. The skill, indeed, with which the situations are disposed, so as to create effect, would have done honour to a veteran dramatist; for this, we suppose, Mr. Coleridge is indebted to his acquaintance with the German drama, which, in the hands of Schiller at least, redeems all its faults by its excellence, and among its other striking beauties, abounds in the picturesque. We never saw more interest excited in a theatre than was expressed at the sorcery-scene in the third act. The altar flaming in the distance, the solemn invocation, the pealing music of the mystic song, altogether produced a combination so awful as nearly to overpower reality, and make one half believe the enchantment which delighted our senses. The characters most laboured by the author are Ordonio and Alhadra. Both are developed with a force of thinking and a power of poetry which have been long strangers to the stage, and the return of which we hail as the omen of better days. In none of his works has Mr. Coleridge exhibited so much of his sentimental and descriptive power, so little deformed with his peculiar affectations. His images have his usual truth and originality without their usual meanness: his tenderness is as exquisite as in his best pieces, and does not degenerate into his usual whining."
The following criticism of Remorse is from the Times of Monday, Jan. 25, 1813:—
"The drama was presented for the first time on Saturday, and called, or in the more scrupulous phrase of the author, is to be called, Remorse. The plot was singularly involved and laboured. . . .
"Mr. Coleridge is a poet, and it would be next to impossible that a work of his could be utterly destitute of poetic value; but he is one of a school whose conceptions scorn the bounds of humble taste, and his 'vaulting ambition hath o'erleapt them all.' There are, however, intermingled with those fierce ventures, occasional passages of true poetic cadence. The speech of the Moresco woman, describing her imprisonment, is a strong and deep picture of feelings that could scarcely be coloured too strongly. Her story of her husband's murder is finely told; her eager listening,—her hearing his last groan from the bottom of the chasm,—her finding his sword,—and her solemn determination to have blood for blood, did honour to the capacity that conceived and expressed them; and in defiance of the foolish blasphemy, in which she is made to talk about 'plucking the dead out of Heaven,' and other exploded plagiarisms from the German school, the whole dialogue of the part received great applause.
. . . . "We speak with restraint and unwil- lingly of the defects of a work which must have cost its author so much labour. We are peculiarly reluctant to touch the anxieties of a man who has already exhibited talent, and whose various acquirements and manly application of them deserve the favour of those who value literature. But to conceal the truth is only to do final injury, and it must be acknowledged that this drama has sins, nay, a multitude, almost beyond the covering of charity. Its first fault is its unwieldy length: it was almost five hours long. Its next is its passion for laying hold of everything that could allow an apology for a description. Murderers stop short with the dagger in their hands to talk of 'roses on mountain sides;' fathers start back from their children to moralise; and a lover, in the outrage of disappointed love, lingers to tell at what hour of the day he parted from his mistress,—how she smiled, and how the sun smiled,—how its light fell upon the valleys, and the sheep, and the vineyards, and the lady,—and how red her tears were in 'the slant beam.' This may be poetical, but it has no connexion with the plain, rapid, and living truth of the drama. There is an essential difference in those two branches of the art. With the mere poet, time is as nothing,—he may wonder and rest, and indulge his eye—like a pilgrim offer his hymn at every shrine by the way and then resume his sandals and his staff, and pace onward to the altar of his patron. To the dramatist, time is as everything. He has not a moment to waste,—he carries an important mission,—life and death are hanging on his steps,—and he must speed forward without venturing to turn his eye from that spot in the horizon which at every moment enlarges as he speeds, and where his coming is to agitate or appease so many hearts. We are slow to speak of faults as applied to this writer: but he has not yet learned this value of time. His plot is intolerably curved and circuitous, indistinct beyond all power of pleasurable apprehension, and broken beyond all reach of continued interest. . . . .
"The Prologue was, we hope, by some 'd———d good-natured friend,' who had an interest in injuring the play;[6] it was abominable. The Epilogue seemed to come from the same hand, and had precisely the same merits. It seemed to be composed for the express purpose of trying how many pure stupidities might be comprised in fifty lines, and how far Miss Smith's popularity might be proof against her performance. This specimen of her recitation was singularly lachrymose and lamentable. The applause was violent at the fall of the curtain."
The Morning Post of the same date says:—"The Epilogue is lively, and makes several happy hits at some of the reigning follies of the day."
The Theatrical Inquisitor for February, 1813, says:—"The Prologue and Epilogue were among the most stupid productions of the modern muse; the former was in all probability a Rejected Address, for it contained many eulogiums on the beauty and magnificence of the 'dome' of Drury; talked of the waves being not quite dry, and expressed the happiness of the bard at being the first whose muse had soared within its limits. More stupid than the doggerel of Twiss, and more affected than the pretty verses of Miles Peter Andrews, the Epilogue proclaimed its author and the writer of the Prologue to be par nobile fratrum, in rival dulness both pre-eminent."
On Feb. 14, 1813, Coleridge wrote thus to his friend Poole:—"The receipt of your heart-engendered lines was sweeter than an unexpected strain of sweetest music;—or in humbler phrase, it was the only pleasurable sensation which the success of the Remorse has given me. . . . . No grocer's apprentice, after his first month's permitted riot, was ever sicker of figs and raisins than I of hearing about the Remorse. The endless rat-a-tat-tat at our black-and-blue bruised door, and my three master fiends, proof-sheets, letters,—and worse than these—invitations to large dinners, which I cannot refuse without offence and imputation of pride (&c.), oppress me so that my spirits quite sink under it. I have never seen the play since the first night. It has been a good thing for the theatre. They will get eight or ten thousand pounds by it, and I shall get more than by all my literary labours put together; nay, thrice as much."
Two years after the success of Remorse, Lord Byron wrote to Coleridge from "Piccadilly, March 13, 1815," urging him to make a second attempt:—"In Kean there is an actor worthy of expressing the thoughts of the characters which you have every power of embodying, and I cannot but regret that the part of Ordonio was disposed of before his appearance at Drury Lane. We have had nothing to be mentioned in the same breath with Remorse for very many years, and I should think that the reception of that play was sufficient to encourage the highest hopes of author and audience."
With the calmer criticism which the lapse of half a century brings, Mr. Swinburne writes of Remorse in these measured terms:—"There is little worth praise or worth memory in the Remorse except such casual fragments of noble verse as may readily be detached from the loose and friable stuff in which they lie imbedded. In the scene of the incantation, in the scene of the dungeon, there are two such pure and precious fragments of gold. In the part of Alhadra there are lofty and sonorous interludes of declamation and reflection. The characters are flat and shallow; the plot is at once languid, violent, and heavy."[7]
In the original Osorio, however, these "fragments of noble verse" are much more numerous and frequent than in the play as remodelled to suit the exigencies of the stage. Speaking of the beautiful scene from the first draft of the tragedy, the Foster-Mother's Tale, and of another fragment omitted in the drama, but printed in an appendix to the later editions, the poet's surviving son thus writes:—"Both these scenes appear more or less necessary for the perfect understanding of the plot. If there were many such curtailments, or if for the sake of a more rapid action the reflective character of the piece were in any degree sacrificed, it might almost be regretted that the rejected Osorio, for such was the original title, had not been preserved as it came from the author's pen."[8]
Now that the original Osorio is at length given to the world, and placed beyond the chance of future loss, the reader will see that there were many such curtailments, amounting not only to innumerable verbal differences, all the most important of which are indicated in footnotes, but to the omission of whole scenes of great poetic beauty and the entire remodelling of others. Preserved from destruction by one of those strange and unaccountable freaks of chance or fortune which seem little short of miraculous, the transcript of Osorio, retained and treated with such contumely by Sheridan, and long supposed to be lost, has come forth from its hiding-place and reached our hands. In giving publicity to this interesting relic of one of the greatest of modern English poets, we shall be doing a service to all who love noble verse, and to all who honour and reverence the name of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
[The Publisher desires gratefully to acknowledge the kind suggestions received from the poet's son, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, in the course of the present undertaking.]
- ↑ Early Recollections, chiefly relating to the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, during his long residence in Bristol. By Joseph Cottle. Lond., 1837. Pp. 234, 235.
- ↑ Gillman's Life of Coleridge (Pickering, 1838), p. 265.
- ↑ Biographical Supplement to the Biographia Literaria (1847). By the late Sara Coleridge. Pp. 412—415.
- ↑ Southey's Life and Correspondence (Lond., 1850), iv., 12, 13.
- ↑ January 31, 1813.
- ↑ Poor Lamb! One can imagine the mingled dismay and amusement with which he must have read the above pleasant piece of criticism; and the jokes that were doubtless cut on the subject at his next Wednesday evening supper.-Ed.
- ↑ Swinburne's Essay on Coleridge (1869), xiv., xv.
- ↑ Preface to the Dramatic Works of S. T. Coleridge, by the Rev. Derwent Coleridge (1852).