Free English Literature Essays - With specific reference to particular texts consider the ways in which some of the issues prominent in the Romantic period are reflected in its drama (e.g. imagination, nature, revolution, individualism, liberty etc)
As George Ross Ridge suggests in his The Hero in French Romantic Literature (1959), “Romanticism is the point of departure in modern literature” (Ross Ridge, 1959: p.1) and as such can be seen as heralding from a time of enormous social and political flux, representing also a similar departure in the psychology of the individual and the wider society.
In this essay I would like to look at this notion as it displayed in three of the era’s dramas: Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother (1768, 2000), Robert Southey’s Wat Tyler (1794, 2000) and Lord Byron’s The Two Foscari (1821: 2000). These particular plays, I think, are exemplars of the Romantic interest in both the internal space of psychosexuality and the external passion for politics and notions of individual freedom. As we shall see, in the Romantic imagination these two ideas were closely linked, what George Ross Ridge terms as being “personally involved in the spirit of the age” (Ross Ridge, 1959: p.2); the sexual and the revolutionary drive being symbiotically co-joined in an aesthetic celebration of being.
Horace Walpole’s play The Myserious Mother was considered by Henry Beers (1899) as being “more absurd than horrible” (Beers, 1899: p.241) and, as Baines and Burns point out in their Introductory essay to the Oxford edition:
“Coleridge called it ‘the most disgusting, detestable, vile composition that ever came from the hand of man. No one with a spark of manliness, of which Horace Walpole had none, could have written it”
However, a contemporary, Post-Freudian reading of the play reveals some remarkable insights in the text that, as Walpole himself asserted in the play’s Postscript, suggest comparisons with both Sophocles and Euripides (Walpole, 2000: p.65).
The narrative of Walpole’s drama weaves a complex network of interconnected strains that converge in the last scene. It is a play very much about the keeping of secrets and the problems that arise from deceit, especially as it relates to morality and psychosexual transgression. The central character of Edmund exists as the fulcrum between the two portraits of early Romantic womanhood, the binary that is studied so adroitly in Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony (1970), consisting of, on the one hand, the unobtainable beauty in the guise of Adeliza and the figure of evil sexual pleasure, the Countess.
Through the central motif of incest, both of these figures of womanhood become unobtainable, a clear signifier for the Romantic castrated psychosexual sense; the ecstasy of ‘la belle dame sans merci’ (Praz, 1970: p.97) that was so much a part of the Romantic imagination.
The character of Edmund is an everyman both in the Eighteenth century sense of being trapped by his own desires and also in a highly twentieth century sense through being trapped in an unresolved Oedipal triangle that threatens the stability of not only his own psychology but the socio-politics of his country:
“Edmund: Am I not Narbonne’s prince? Who shall rule here
But Narbonne? Have I sapped my country’s laws,
Or played the tyrant? Who shall banish me?
Am I a recreant knight?”
In this scene Walpole cleverly equates Edmund’s unconscious Oedipal situation with the politics of Narbonne, the ghost of his father is the unseen factor in both and, in fact, the entire play as the Countess’ feelings towards her husband and seeming hatred of her son is shown to be a mask for her true Oedipal desires. Edmund’s words at the end of Act III have a Freudian edge to them that elevates the play above the simply absurd or the “disgusting”:
“Edmund:…Why so adored the memory of my father,
And so abhorred the presence of the son?
But now, and to thy eyes I seemed my father –
At least for that resemblance-sake embrace me”
This reflects, I think, a vital strain in the Romantic imagination, that of the unattainable and tragic passion, what M.H. Abrams described as a state in which “man remains inescapably conditioned by passion and by chance and death and mutability” (Abrams, 1973: p.306). We see, perhaps in Walpole’s play the beginnings of this desire for both idealism and transgression of hitherto accepted boundaries, a desire that would manifest itself not only psychologically but politically as well.
Walpole’s drama explores the dangers of repressed knowledge and the horrors of innate desires that would, over one hundred years later, be given credence as an expression of the unconscious. The Countess’ declarations at the end of the play give a voice to phantasmatic primal fears about the nature of incest and familial sexuality:
“Edmund: Incest! Good heavens!
Countess: Yes, thou devoted victim! Let thy blood
Curdle to stone! Perdition circumvents thee!”
Walpole displays here the same fascination for primitive psychology that is displayed in his The Castle of Otranto (Walpole, 1986) and that was to form the basis of the Gothic novel (Napier, 1987).
Robert Southey’s Wat Tyler concerns itself with the questioning of nineteenth century socio-economic and political boundaries and borders. Tyler himself is more a symbol of an idealized Christ-like social conscience than a realistic portrait of early working class insurrection, as this extract shows:
“Tyler: And shall not these, through young, and hale, and happy,
Look on with sorrow to the future hour?
Shall not reflection poison all their pleasures?
When I – the honest, staid, hard-working Tyler –
Toil through the long course of the summer’s day.”
Southey, as Geoffrey Carnall writes, was a supporter of Jacobinism but held ethical qualms as to the violence employed by the French revolutionaries and it is this that we glean from the play, as revolution is mixed inextricably with spirituality and compassion. The ideals of Tyler are undoubtedly based in the Kantian notions of individual freedoms and Enlightenment political concepts as contained, for instance, in Thomas Paine’s The Right of Man (Paine, 1984) who asserted the right of every man to freedom and liberty:
“Men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights. Civil distinctions, therefore, can be founded only on public utility.”
The hitherto accepted borders of class and the divine right of the aristocracy can be seen to be questioned in Southey’s play, as both Wat Tyler and John Ball are portrayed as cogent, eloquent political thinkers who are sacrificed (again in Christ-like fashion) by the agents of socio-political power. John Ball’s last speech of the play, for instance, displays both socio-political and biblical imagery:
“John Ball: The Destined hour must come,
When it shall blaze with sun-surpassing splendour,
And the dark mists of prejudice and falsehood
Fade in its strong effulgence. Flattery’s incense
No more shall shadow round the gore-dyed throne;
That alter of oppression, fed with rites,
More savage than the priests of Moloch taught.”
This apocryphal conclusion to the play suggests Southey’s appreciation that the society he found himself in was undergoing change and redefinition. Unlike, say Shelley’s unequivocal political steadfastness as shown in poems such as The Mask of Anarchy (Shelley, 1944) and Men of England (Shelley, 1944) or plays such as Prometheus Unbound (Shelley, 1944) or even the early sonnets of Wordsworth on the French Revolution (Wordsworth, 1994), Southey’s brand of conservative political exegesis produced an altogether more complex and spiritual work, that fuses personal religion with national economics.
Writing of the Romantic artists in his Culture and Society 1780-1950, Raymond Williams asserts the importance of the symbiosis of art, psychology and politics in Romantic literature:
“Under pressure, art became a symbolic abstraction for a whole range of general human experience: a valuable abstraction, because indeed great art has thus ultimate power.”
Nowhere is this symbiosis more obvious than in Byron’s play The Two Foscari, a drama about both psychosexual passion and political idealism.
As Baines and Burns point out in their Introductory essay, the ending of the Venetian empire was of particular interest to the Romantic poets because, in 1797, Napoleon had “occupied Venice and received the resignation of the last doge” (Baines and Burns, 2000: p.xxviii). Byron displays the same political sense as Southey in the characters of Francis and Jacopo Foscari, as we are witness to not so much a representation of Medieval Venice as a symbolic interpretation of the importance of political constancy. The scenes between Jacopo and Marina, however, for instance in Act III remind us not of the politics of Southey but the passion of the early parts of Walpole:
“Marina: How are those worn limbs? Alas!
Why do I ask? Thy paleness-
Jacopo: Ti’s the joy of seeing thee again so soon, and so
Without expectancy, has sent the blood
Back to my heart, and left my checks like thine”
Here we arrive at what is, perhaps, the heart of the Romantic imagination. At this point in the drama, at least, Jacopo Foscari exists at the centre of a network of political and psychosexual signification. He is, at once, the idealistic lover and the victim of political fate, being a combination of both Walpole’s Edmund and Southey’s Wat Tyler. The prominent issues of the nineteenth century that centered around the French revolution and Kantian assertions of the importance of individual experience in aesthetics and judgment (Kant, 1972; Scruton, 2001) found artistic expression in not only the poems and novels but the plays of the English Romantic movement.
As we have seen, all three of these plays represent differing, although related, issues and leitmotifs of the Romantic era. As Raymond Williams asserts, in some senses we must approach texts like these in the manner in which they were composed; with an appreciation of the interconnectivity and complexity of the human experience. The sexuality of Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother, for instance, with its tropes and images of incest must be viewed in the same light as Southey’s class and socio-economic exegesis; both in their way represent a transgression, a pushing back of boundaries, a willingness and desire to question the existing status quo.
Of course, many Romantic poets sought to do this not only in their art but in their life also. The figure of Byron, as Peter Quennell asserts in his biography Byron: The Years of Fame (1974) was as much a romantic construct as the figure of Edmund or Jacopo Foscari and it is this, perhaps, the emergence of the artist as carrier of ideology, both aesthetic and political, both psychological and social, that we witness most in the era’s literature.
Works Cited
Abrams, M.H (1973), Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, London: Norton.
Baines, Paul and Burns, Edward (eds) (2000), Introductory Essay, published in Five Romantic Plays, 1768-1821, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Beers, Henry (1899), A History of Romanticism in the Eighteen Century, London: Holt and Company.
Byron, Lord (2000), The Two Foscari, published in Baines and Burns.
Carnall, Geoffrey (1960), Robert Southey and His Age: The Development of the Conservative Mind, London: Clarendon Press.
Kant, Emmanuel (1972), The Critique of Practical Reason, London: William Benton.
Paine, Thomas (1984), The Rights of Man, London: Penguin.
Praz, Mario (1970), The Romantic Agony, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Quennell, Peter (1974), Byron: The Years of Fame and Byron in Italy, London: Collins.
Ross Ridge, George (1959), The Hero in French Romantic Literature, Georgia: University of Georgia Press.
Scrutton, Roger (2001), Kant, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1944), The Collected Works, London: Dent.
Southey, Robert (2000), Wat Tyler, published in Baines and Burns.
Walpole, Horace (1986), The Castle of Otranto, published in Fairclough, Peter (ed), Three Gothic Novels, London: Penguin.
Walpole, Horace, (2000), The Mysterious Mother, published in Baines and Burns.
Williams, Raymond (1963), Culture and Society, 1780-1950, London: Penguin.
Wordsworth, William (1994), The Poetical Works, London: Wordsworth.
