When I first stumbled upon Charlotte Nooth’s poetry, I actually encountered not her work, but a short description thereof on Orlando, a database dedicated to British women’s writing. At the time, I was looking for texts which could potentially support (or annihilate) my theory that British satire was undergoing a specific set of changes during the Romantic period. When I found an entry which described some of Nooth’s work as “satirical,” it raised my interest. I ordered a copy of her poetry volume through inter-library loan, and was surprised when I received the London 1815 printing of Original Poems and a Play published by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown. The boards had broken from the binding and the whole was held together with rubber bands. When I opened the volume, attempting to prevent further damage, I found a dedication to the Duke of Kent and an intriguing preface which indicated that Nooth’s need to publish her poems was predicated on a “domestic sorrow.”

Like Charlotte Smith, Felicia Hemans, and several other female authors and translators of the period, Nooth excused her publication by indicating her precarious financial state when left unsupported by a man. Edgeworth, Austen, Ferrier, and other women writers had male family members handle the business aspects of publication, at least initially. Women writers without such a handy male relation either risked their reputations by engaging directly in business (which was most commonly done only by lower-class writers), obtained a patron to guide them in business decisions (as Charlotte Smith did with William Hayley), or like Nooth published by subscription, which was less scandalous for a woman than dealing directly with a printer or publisher.

Nooth’s volume of poetry includes a 16 page list of subscribers, drawn primarily from the ranks of the gentry and nobility. Of the 777 subscribers, 57 clearly identify themselves by title to be noble; along with several lesser lords and ladies, Nooth’s work is supported by the Duke of Kent, the Marquis of Northampton, and the Earls of Chichester, Denbigh, Ilchester, Rosslyn, Roseby, and Spencer, as well as Countesses Spencer, Tankerville, Guilford, the Dowager Countess Paulett, and Vicountesses Hampden and Fielding. Several of these titles accompany estates in the south of England, relatively near Nooth’s home in Dorchester. It is probable that the patronage of the royal duke encouraged other members of local nobilty to patronize Nooth’s work as well. Nooth’s dedication to “His Royal Highness, the Duke of Kent” explicitly indicates that the duke’s support is solicited not for Nooth’s own talent, but out of “esteem for her father, late surgeon to his royal highness.” The dedication’s language follows the formulaic humility common to Romantic-era dedications, though it is more personal than Austen’s dedication of Emma (1816) to the Prince Regent, and possibly more sincere, since Nooth’s personal and financial circumstances led her to seek patronage, while Austen was manuevered into her dedication.

Nooth’s subscibers also include a variety of military officers (41), clergymen (46), and doctors (6) as well as many of their wives and daughters. The majority of Nooth’s male subscribers are untitled gentry of no discernible profession (170). Overall, 332 men and 445 women subscribed to publish Nooth’s poetry volume; several of these subscribers ordered multiple copies, so that 777 subscribers paid for 1072 copies. While most multiple-copy orders ordered two volumes, this is not always a case of a man buying a copy for his wife or daughter, though some instances fit that conjecture. More often, both the husband and wife order double copies (as did Sir and Lady Smith, Mr. and Mrs. Luard, and Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, among others), which may indicate a charitable intention to provide support for the author. It is not unusual for female writers of the period to combine subscription publication methods with prefatory pleas for financial aid, especially when they cast themselves as widows or orphans.  For instance, Rev. How and Mrs. How each subscribed for four copies, and a Miss How ordered two. Certainly the family does not need ten copies of Original Poems for its own household. But if they were bought as an act of charity, was the act of buying sufficient, or were they read? And when a family buys multiple copies, were the extras distributed to friends, family, or neighbors? Rev. J. Prower and Rev. M. Prower each ordered ten copies of Original Poems. While these clergymen may have ordered so many as acts of charitable support for the needy, they may also have bought so many with the intention to distribute them among their parishoners, whether or not they did so. The distribution of Nooth’s text is thus difficult to trace, despite the evidence of precisely who ordered volumes of Original Poems.

The question of audience becomes more complicated when we consider who Nooth was writing for. Certainly in 1815 she needed money and arranged for subscription publication of these poems. But several original poems are dated years earlier (such as “Verses Addressed to the Rev. Dr. Valpy, on Occasion of his Birthday, Dec. 10, 1807), and the section of “Original” poems includes a couple transcriptions of poems composed by other writers (like Valpy’s response, “Sonnet to Miss Nooth, who presented some elegant Verses to the Author, on his Birthday”). Nooth’s poetry demonstrates a wide familiarity with poetic forms. Her original works include sonnets, elegy, panegyric, song, meditation, pastoral lyric, blank verse, and a type of soliloquy reminiscient of dramatic monologue. Her poems range from occasional verses addressed to specific persons to dramatic recitations addressed to a wider audience, to ostensibly personal lyric verse. She generally uses combinations of iambic tetrameter and pentameter. Much of her verse owes more to eighteenth-century poetic techniques than Romantic innovations; her poems often address or involve personified abstractions. But Nooth’s “The Student” bears resemblance to Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned.” Several poems contain epigraphs from or allusions to Spanish, French, Italian, or German literature.

But the original poems constitute only a portion of the volume. Nooth’s work includes a large section devoted to translations of Spanish, French, and Italian poems (Nooth was evidently well educated in languages and literature). Nooth’s translations often accompany transcriptions of the poem in its original language. She calls some of her interpretations “imitations” and others “translations,” but Nooth generally stays with the forms and meters she used for her own verse. She employs ballad-meter quatrains in a translation of Metastasio’s “The Farewell.”

Speaking of ballads, Nooth includes a section devoted to Irish ballads. However, her headnote to the section does not clarify whether she has copied the ballads from oral tradition, imitated ballads she heard, or written original ballads after a style with which she was familiar. The headnote says, “Written during a Residence of some Months in the Counties of Down and Antrim, in the Summer of the Year 1807, and in the Dialect spoken by the lower Classes of People in the northern Parts of Ireland.” Is this note saying that Nooth transcribed the ballads, or that she composed them? In the wake of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and other antiquarian ballad collections like Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802), conventions had been set for noting the transmission of oral ballads, and Nooth neglects to provide any of the information antiquarian ballad scholars generally provided.

The last section of the volume is a tragic drama. She acknowledges that her tragedy Clara, or the Nuns of Charity is inspired by the De Genlis novel Siege de Rochelle, an historical romance. While I find some of her poems to be most interesting, at the moment I’d like to consider Nooth’s play. Its plot is that of a gothic tragedy, with a sentimental heroine, Clara, who is blamed by her betrothed for the murder of his child, and who suffers paroxysms of guilt over betraying filial duty when she reveals that Montalban, whom she believes to be her father, was the murderer. She takes refuge in a cloister, only to there discover her own mother among the nuns, leading to the discovery that Montalban is not her father, and her betrothed’s son has been rescued and still lives. At the end of the play, Montalban dies, her parents are reunited, and her wedding is back on. While the play owes a great deal to the conventions of gothic novels, it also bears similarities to popular stage drama of the day, especially to sentimental domestic dramas such as those by Hannah Cowley and Elizabeth Inchbald. It bears a stronger resemblance to Joanna Baillie’s Orra (1812), also a gothic tragedy, though less sentimental.

Baillie’s plays were highly successful in print and occasionally staged; Nooth’s play was never staged, and likely did not circulate greatly in print. The early original poems, the translations, the ballads, and even the play have previously appeared in an alternative author-audience relationship, so there appear to be various, potentially overlapping publics for the volume’s contents. Despite knowing the names of at least 777 people who paid for copies of the volume, it is still remarkable difficult to track the play’s reading public. How might the play have fared if published on its own, rather than being bound with the poems? Is the combination of poems and play the result of Nooth’s limited access to alternative methods of publication, or might it indicate that the play was not intended for performance?  These and other questions arise from study of the material object.

–Veronica Goosey

Nooth, Charlotte. Original Poems and a Play. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown,1815.

What follows is a condensed version of a paper I read at the MLA Convention in Boston, January 2013. For questions and/or comments, please contact me at omarmiranda@nyu.edu

-Omar F. Miranda

===============================================================

In “Hymn to Surya” (1786), his song of praise to the Hindu sun god, William Jones depicts in part his scholarly endeavors in India during the 1780s. Learning Sanskrit and studying ancient texts, Jones posited that multiple Indo-European languages—including Greek, Latin, Persian, and Sanskrit—had one common origin. He also believed Indian civilization and thought were sources of the Egyptian and Greek culture to which Europe traced its own roots.

By composing original hymns to nine Hindu deities in English, Jones created an accessible version of Hindu mythology for Western audiences; he also left an indelible mark on comparative philology and advanced the knowledge of “literary and linguistic pluralism” (Cannon 133). In “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures,” (2010) Aamir Mufti argues that Jones’s scholarship gave rise to an “emerging constellation of philological knowledge” (459). Jones influenced various scholars in India, Britain, Paris, and Germany, inspiring the “new [revolutionary] Orientalism” of the late eighteenth century by opening Europe up to a new world and India itself to historic traditions.

About a decade following the publication of Jones’s “Hymn to Surya,” Samuel Coleridge would produce the first version of his “opium-induced” Kubla Khan as a series of recitations he performed for his friends.[1] While select criticism from the past century has explored the connections between Coleridge’s text and Jones’s Asian scholarship (including Garland Cannon’s study of the Hymn to Ganga” from the 1950s), no study has yet elaborated upon the text’s relation to the “Hymn to Surya” nor the numerous implications concerning Orientalist knowledge production and cultural diversity such an examination yields.[2] I return to the Jones-Coleridge link by considering first the hitherto unexamined[3] parallels between this text and Kubla Khan.[4] Complicating the poem’s production history by challenging yet again Coleridge’s self-proclaimed notion that Kubla Khan came to him in a dream, the hymn serves as a blue print for a lot of the hybrid poem’s key thematic concerns and formal structures. It also offers additional clues perhaps that Coleridge was not only well acquainted with it but also inspired by it. More crucially, Jones’s “Hymn to Surya,” itself a fascinating though underexplored text, helps reformulate the way we think about knowledge production in Kubla Khan.[5] It also enhances the current scholarship on the poem’s colonial valences and transcontinental landscape, matters that Nigel Leask has thoroughly explored even though he excludes William Jones from his analysis.

In addition to their intriguing associations, both poems depict the remediation of ancient material from which, I contend, a few payoffs emerge. First, even beyond the likely case that Coleridge was influenced by Jones and by the “Surya” hymn in particular, this connection implies that Coleridge participated in the Orientalist revolution that turned its attention to India because of Jones. Second, if we accept the “Hymn to Surya” as a partly autobiographical exploration of Jones’s scholarly activities in Calcutta, including the “reappropriation” of ancient Sanskrit texts through his own original compositions, then Kubla Khan appears all the more like a recovery project invested in a diachronic representation of past and present. Indeed, the “Kubla” poet attempts to “revive” a foregone Abyssinian maiden’s song through his visionary prowess, revealing the synesthetic and Orientalist translations I see directly linked to Jones’s poem. Moreover, both texts’ central concerns with origins and sources—caves and fountains— bespeak a larger Orientalist project of remediation and reappropriation. Such an endeavor not only uses poetry as its medium; it specifically designates poetry (as well as exposes each writer’s anxiety regarding print) as the auspicious channel for this cross-cultural distribution of knowledge. Third, if India indeed lurks in the background of Kubla Khan, as John Drew cogently argues in his India and the Romantic Imagination (1987), then the links to “Surya” further reinforce the poem’s Hindu influences as well as advance a non-essentialist view of India well beyond the subcontinent; this view of Kubla Khan reconceives Alph’s sacred “Eurocentrism,” rather, as an Eastern “fountain” of knowledge. By proposing a new historicist reading of Kubla Khan, furthermore, I intend to nuance the poem’s already diverse transcontinental landscape. Specifically, this claim relates to “Surya,” the great icon of the Majapahit empire that warred against the Mongol empire under the actual Kublai Khan. This analysis expands both texts’ idea of “India” as a region of various subcultures, the influence of Hinduism across the area, and the geographical and cultural diversity.

In the longer version of this paper, I structure my discussion into three parts. The first carefully details the hitherto unexamined parallels between the poems–including common tropes, images, and diction (which I will forego here). The second part sheds light on their shared emphasis on and consequences of origins, caves, and fountains. I, then, conclude by exploring the new historicist reading followed by the implications of this pairing for eighteenth century Orientalist studies.

. . .

Through my detailed analysis of these two texts, I attempt to make a big claim. I wish to show that “caves” and “fountains” operate as dominant metaphors in both poems as incongruous counterparts (like sun and ice, orient and occident, ancient and modern) that eventually coexist through each poem’s “mingled measure.” This harmonious reconciliation follows a diligent effort, however, a build up to each climactic moment that is symptomatic of the rigorous translational process carefully represented in each. Kubla Khan presents an initial barrage of discordant elements as the sacred river, Alph, runs its “mazy” course through the “measureless” caverns (ll. 3-4, my emphasis).[6] This sequence begins with Kubla’s despotic “decree” in the second line, escalates with the woman’s “[wail] for her demon lover” and culminates with the explosion of “huge” terrestrial fragments from the earth’s erupting fountain (ll. 16/20-21). The dissonance intensifies the poem’s climactic shift to song, resembling the opening structure in Jones’s hymn where the poet meets the “silence” of uncooperative Hindu gods who resist praising Surya (l. 8). Attempting to “sing” about the Sun’s powers through an Vedic “Brahman strain,”[7] Jones initially fails to generate a communal composition; instead, the moon “deserts” the already-lulled, “silent” sky and the other Hindu spirits “hear not” his “pray’r” to the Sun; “Indra with his heavenly bands,” for instance, “nor sings nor understands” as Jones feels consigned to “a passing dream” (ll. 13-17/l. 28).[8]

But the hymn’s celestial silence ultimately inspires the production of song and light through the poet’s “bursting” decree, a synesthetic portrayal paralleling Kubla Khan’s final section where the poet attempts to “revive” the Abyssinian maid’s song through vision. As the “Kubla” poet tries to enact his poetic powers so that “with music loud and long, [he] would build that dome in air,” [that sunny dome, those caves of ice] the lyric’s music inspires the visual qualities as “all who heard should see them there” (my emphasis). Here the aural enables the visual: music helps create the intangible dome as “hearing” permits “seeing” through the poets desire to sustain his “mingled measure” vision.

A similar synesthetic portrayal appears in Jones’s hymn. Placing his “passing dream” aside, Jones enjoins the gods to partake of his convocative praise to Surya, a trans-cultural triumph to which the poet alone gives life:

Burst into song, ye spheres;

A greater light proclaim,

And hymn, concentric orbs, with sev’nfold chime

The God with many a name;

Nor let unhallow’d ears

Drink life and rapture from your charm sublime (ll. 35-40)

Limiting the “drinking” of “life and rapture” to “hallow’d ears,” Jones demands that the spheres “burst into song” and thus “proclaim” a “greater light;” The hymn’s “spheres,” celestial bodies such as the earth, sun, and moon, unite “concentrically” and radiate “greater light” through an aural medium, mirroring the “sunny dome” that floats “in air” as a spectacular musical achievement.[9] The sudden “burst” of music, as it were, sparks the multi-sensorial effect resembling not only the fusion of Vedic and English lyric traditions but also the “burst” of “rebounding hail” abruptly discharged by Kubla Khan’s fountain source. The entranced poet feeds on “honey dew” and drinks the “milk of Paradise” to “build” the images that his auditors can now see—resembling Jones’s references to imbibing Amrita and Soma, the mythological nectars of immortality (ll. 46-48). Both poets reproduce an ethos of visual and aural stimuli in which the recreated aural domain gives rise to the reimagined visual “sphere.”

The textual climaxes thus bring about the harmony of synchronized caves and fountains springing forth knowledge from east to west. Jones sings Surya’s praises as the non-Brahman hymnodist from the “bosom of yon silver isle” who “pours . . . orient knowledge from its fountains pure/ through caves obstructed long” that he, in fact, “lisps.” His rigorous efforts in India bring him to the “obstructed caves” of pure knowledge, a rediscovery marking his crowning achievement. It is the translational work (across time and cultures) that constitutes the “pouring,” the flows and overflows worked out through his various levels of mediation including his translation from Sanskrit to English by way of Latin.

In Coleridge’s third stanza, the opening discord also shifts to a mellifluous apex with its alliterative countersigning: unlike forces converge to create a musical melody, a “mingled measure” that is “miraculous.” The text’s sinewy and tumultuous trajectory—well emblematized by Alph’s path—leads to the coexistence of caves and fountains. Reversing the “measureless caverns” and “obstructed caves,” both writers attempt to remediate ancient cultural material—Sanskritic and Abyssinian alike—from “obscure paths” cast off by temporal and linguistic barriers. Jones portrays the image of pure ancient “Eastern” knowledge carried across one solid and fluid “path” that “caves” now enable rather than impede. Both poets bring their respective “fountains” and “caves” together in one act of “mingled measure:” a reproduction wherein music and visuality serve one dominant impression aimed at recovering their respective “ancestral voices.”

. . .

I now turn my attention briefly to another connection between “Surya” and Kubla Khan: the Majapahit empire, the last “Indianized” kingdom in Indonesia that adopted the sun, the Surya Majapahit, as its primary icon. Based in eastern Java, the empire flourished between the 13th and 16th centuries. In 1292, Mongol troops arrived in Java to avenge an insult to its emperor, Kublai Khan. In the end, the Mongol army was defeated and expelled from Java.

Locating the poem within the encounter between two medieval imperial cultures by way of Jones, this analysis further historicizes the poetic subject matter of Coleridge’s text by broadening the geographic landscape that Leask has scrutinized and accounting for its expansive Hindu influence. Though my proposal requires additional research to prove Coleridge would have known about this culture, the identification of particular Asian cultures appears specifically in Samuel Purchas’s seventeenth century Pilgrimage, one of Coleridge’s source texts. My hypothesis also informs anew the “ancestral voices prophesying war” that Kubla hears from the bursting “tumult,” revealing the historicity of two warring empires during the actual Kublai Khan’s reign. It details the text’s historiographical specificity within imperial history by detailing an “oriental” colonial world through the lens of an emerging British colonial authority; it also encapsulates some of the poems’ major concerns about reanimating and sustaining “ancestral voices” for a modern era within a distinct cultural context.

I conclude by exploring Jones’s representation of Surya himself, the sun, as the “one Eternal mind,” an ineffable and “effulgent whole” symbolizing caverns of “orient” knowledge and Jones’s own pursuits. As the “fountain of living light,” the sun becomes a metaphor for the problematic Orientalist flow of Eastern knowledge (l. 1/l.186/l.18, my emphasis).[10] Though the “rich and regal [sun] in his orient state” radiantly “sings” and “rises” as the one “daystar,” the inflamed “red east” emits “insufferable light” (ll. 157-158). Surya, however, becomes more “sufferable” as the sun approaches his “graceful” western setting: “What majesty, what grace/ Dart[ing] o’er the western meads” (ll. 157-158). The charting of Orientalist knowledge flows echo the sun’s diurnal trajectory from east to west: from a path “too long obscured” to an accessibly flowing fountain regenerated for Western consumption. The sun’s path, in other words, mirrors Jones’s remediation from east to west and adaptation of the “rich and regal” Oriental data (l. 102).[11] In this sense, ancient eastern knowledge is transmitted cross-culturally from east to west and cross-temporally from past to present. The “insufferable” bifurcated model of occidental and oriental knowledge structures appears to collapse as a result of this fluid process.

But Jones’s catalog description of Surya’s beams seem to suggest that the knowledge production process requires assiduous and meticulous efforts:

[Surya’s] swift and subtil beams,

Eluding mortal sight,

Pervade, attract, sustain th’ effulgent whole,

Unite, impel, dilate, calcine,

Give to gold its weight and blaze

Dart from the diamond many-tinted rays,

Condense, Protrude, transform, concoct, refine (ll. 6 – 12, my emphasis)

The lines link the effect of Surya’s rays to Jones’s Orientalist scholarship and editorial process: as multiple functions through its mediated capacity to “sustain” what I read as “th’effulgent whole” of Sanskrit literature to a manageable and accessible compendium.[12] This extensive list of actions invites Jones’s readers to his editorial process and prowess as the cross-cultural information gatherer and sharer between India and Europe.

If the sun serves as a metaphor for colonial knowledge production and Alph itself is regarded as a common source of ancient knowledge traveling from Asia to Africa, then both works are implicated in the recovery of ancient lore reconceptualized impurely via poetry.[13] This complicated approach could presumably yield two distinct interpretations. On the one hand, we could read into the pro-imperial valences, the Khan’s emphasis on materiality, as a reappropriation of the Western imperial project of conquest while Jones advances the intermingled nature of colonial rule. On the other hand, Kubla Khan could serve as a critique of colonial expansion given, for example, the earth’s resistance to the imperial palace and garden, as the poem’s statement on the evanescence of materiality and the unnatural “construction” of colonialism and despotism. In this sense, Kubla Khan responds directly against Jones’s colonial project and reappropriation of Hindu mythology, embracing an imaginative and transcendent alternative.

As I have tried to make clear, it is the fluidity of impure knowledge from stagnant caves to prolifically springing fountains in Jones’s “Hymn to Surya” that have inspired my new reading of Kubla Khan. Less a cultural exchange than a unidirectional diffusion from east to west, the various strata of mediation involve a reconceived product sustained primarily through its poetic form. Each text’s rehabilitative attempt convokes various traditions and landscapes that infuse its revival with an Orientalist verve that Jones helped initiate. Even though this joint analysis requires further reckoning, and my reading now joins the other multiple analyses of Coleridge’s famous vision, I contend that my view radically alters the fragment’s textual and contextual implications and reignites scholarly attention to both Jones’s neglected “Hymn to Surya” and its generative pairing with Kubla Khan.

Works Cited

“amrita.” Dictionary of Hindu Lore and Legend, Thames & Hudson. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002. Credo Reference. Web. 11 December 2011.

Cannon, Garland H. “A New Probable Source for ‘Kubla Khan’.” College English 17.3 (1955): 136-142.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson and Raimonda Modiano. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004.

Drew, John. India and the Romantic Imagination. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Jones, William. The works of Sir William Jones [electronic resource] : In six volumes  printed for G. G. and J. Robinson; and R. H. Evans (successor to Mr. Edwards), London :  1799

Khan, Jalal Uddin. “Shelley’s Orientalia: Indian Elements in his Poetry.” Atlantis. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 30.1 (2008): 35-51.

Leask, Nigel. “‘Kubla Khan’ and Orientalism:The Road to Xanadu Revisited.” Romanticism 4.1 (1998): 1-21.

Lowes, John Livingston. The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of Imagination. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1927.

“measure, n.”. OED Online. September 2011. Oxford University Press. 6 December 2011 <http://oed.com/view/Entry/115506?rskey=bI8C0q&result=1&isAdvanced=false&gt;.

Ober, Warren U. “Southey, Coleridge, and “Kubla Khan”.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 58.3 (1959): 414-422.

“rude, adj. and adv.”. OED Online. September 2011. Oxford University Press. 3 December 2011 <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/168501?rskey=O7dDN3&result=3&isAdvanced=false&gt;

Continuing our discussion of Romantic era dramas and dramatic practice, this post will examine an early and neglected voice regarding the period’s complicated relationship to stage production, William Godwin.

In his landmark 1793 work Political Justice, Godwin banishes theatrical exhibitions and musical performances from his imagined ideal society.  Godwin derides the theater and questions what benefits such an institution can possibly offer: “Shall we have theatrical exhibitions? This seems to me to include an absurd and vicious cooperation. It may be doubted whether any men will hereafter come forward in any mode to repeat words and ideas not their own?”^[5] For Godwin, theatrical exhibitions are “absurd and vicious” and simply facilitate repetition. The theater is not only detrimental to the actors who step forward and speak “words and ideas not their own,” but also to the theater audience. The stage, according to Godwin, encourages “the inactivity of our own faculties.”[6] Summarizing the chief goals of Political Justice, Mark Philip echoes these sentiments when he claims that, for Godwin, “as people become more fully autonomous, rational and benevolent,” “such invidious practices as concerts and theatrical performances” will “fall by the wayside.”^[7] The repetition of past compositions and performances falls in line with Godwin’s political anxieties, most notably his fear that the French revolutionaries wrongfully attempted to legislate for all time.

A thorough examination of Godwin’s writing career, however, troubles the political thinker’s outright dismissal of theatrical exhibitions. In 1783, Godwin moved to London to start his writing career and turned to a variety of genres: “Godwin’s anonymous publication from 1783 to 1784 define his entire writing career: a historical biography, two political pamphlets, two sermons, three novellas, an educational piece and a collection of literary parodies called The Herald of Literature.”[1] The breadth of interests does indeed reflect the broad scope that would come to define Godwin. “The writing career” that scholars have identified has come to focus primarily on Political Justice and Caleb Williams.  The young Godwin, still experimenting in 1790, wrote his first play, St. Dunstan. The play predates his most famous texts and dramatizes the effort to repeal the Test and Corporation Act, a piece of legislation that granted full civil rights only to members of the Anglican Church. David O’Shaughnessy points out that “it is entirely unsurprising that his [Godwin’s] first full dramatic effort should be focused on the question of enfranchising non – conformists.”[2] What is surprising is the fact that Godwin turned to the theater and the stage.

In addition to St. Dunstan, Godwin wrote Antonio in 1796, which was performed at Drury Lane one night only in 1800; Abbas, King of Persia in 1801, which never made it to the stage; and Faulkener in 1804, which would make it to Drury Lane in 1807. We begin to see a discrepancy between theory / discourse and actual practice. Many critics have argued that Godwin and his circle – including Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Thelwall, and others –share a “profound mistrust of the theater and theatricality in general.”[4] Perhaps we have been too willing to accept writers like Godwin at their word.

–R. A. Sessler

Our collaborative effort with Red Bull Theater suggested that we should take Byron the dramatist seriously and examine the implications of staging works of mental theater. This blog post continues that conversation by examining a critical work that treats William Wordsworth’s The Borderers, as a piece of drama intended for and invested in stage production. For many critics, including Alan Richardson and Daniel P. Watkins, the play marks an early instance of what would come to be known as mental theater. However, Wordsworth attempted to have the early version of the play, which was completed in 1797, staged. Unable to find a willing stage manager, Wordsworth would go on to return to his play with surprising frequency before eventually publishing a revised version in 1842. If the play was never intended to be staged, as Wordsworth himself claims in 1842, then why wait 45 years to turn to publication? Wordsworth was indeed a meticulous editor, a fact readily seen by the size of the texts in the Cornell Wordsworth series, but this seems an insufficient answer.

Melynda Nuss persuasively shows that the play’s preoccupation with sight and physical presence reveals a Wordsworth interested in at once reaching the stage and calling for certain types of theatrical reform. As Watkins and others have shown, Rivers, the play’s antagonist, is able to deceive others and indeed himself through the use of tales. Instead of looking at what is directly in front of them, characters are tricked and deceived by listening to abstracting and unverifiable tales. Nuss rightly points out that Rivers’s powers of persuasion vanishes when other characters are physically present and it is only when characters are absent “that Rivers’s tales can work their magic” (606). According to Nuss, “Wordsworth makes it clear that the characters get the knowledge they have about each other simply by looking at the body – by being in each other’s personal space” (606). The stage then, or, in Nuss’s terms, “the performance medium,” would allow Wordsworth to examine the power of presence and direct contact.

The play also uses Rivers to comment upon the position of contemporary theater audiences. Instead of observing what is in front of him, Rivers  “observes from above and beyond, as if standing on a mountaintop, pointing out the “might objects” that “do impress their forms / To build up this intellectual being” and ignoring the more pressing objects closer to home” (610). Many critics have drawn attention to the fact that such vision can be read as an indictment of Godwinian abstraction and independent intellect. Nuss puts forward a new possibility by pointing out that “the theater of Wordsworth’s day was a theater that imposed on its viewers precisely the sort of vision that Wordsworth condemns in Rivers: the audience watches from a distance, helpless to affect the spectacle” (616). This claim situates The Borderers as a participant in the longer history of the concept of the imprisoned spectator (thinking here of Mandeville and Rousseau especially and later Burke).

With these observations in mind, should Wordsworth’s only play be seen as an attempt to dramatize and display the problems inherent in contemporary theatrical productions? And, if so, does that disrupt its current classification as a piece of mental theater or should the 1797 early version and 1842 published version be treated as works belonging to two different mediums?

–R. A. Sessler

Lauren Neefe, a graduate student at SUNY Stony Brook, attended the performance of Sardanapalus by Red Bull Theater last month and here provides her take on the production.

On Monday November 12, Red Bull Theater staged a reading of Lord Byron’s closet drama Sardanapalus as part of its Obie-winning series Revelation Readings. The series presents rarely performed classic plays as well as new works invested in classical themes and forms. When the NYU Romanticism Research Group proposed Byron’s late verse drama about the notoriously decadent Assyrian king—only putatively the last king of the empire—Red Bull Theater found a spot for the play in its 2012–13 lineup, which also includes Jonson’s The Alchemist and Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer.

Gaye Taylor Upchurch directed the performance. Among her many theatrical achievements, Upchurch served as associate director under Sam Mendes on several productions for the Bridge Project, which New Yorkers will remember from its recent three-year run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The Bridge Project was Kevin Spacey’s attempt to promote greater commerce between the New York and London theater communities; and although the cast of Sardanapalus was not strictly speaking transatlantic—all but three or four of the actors are red-state natives—its presentation of postcolonial identities holds in play the question of empire that is always implicated in any commerce between the once and future metropoles.

I say “holds in play” because it is not coincidence that the fate of empire—a preoccupation of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature—already frames the plot of Byron’s drama. Thus the out-of-costume representation of characters and scenario, led by Amir Arison, Mahira Kakkar, Bhavesh Patel, and the Shakespearean inflection in Sam Tsoutsouvas’s delivery, confronts the audience with the dramaturgical problem raised by NYURRG’s very own Veronica Goosey, Omar F. Miranda, and R.A. Sessler: “If, as [Alan] Richardson suggests, the drama of the Romantic poets is not intended to be staged, what happens to the drama when it is fully performed with elaborate sets and direction?”

Intention never fails to be a sticky wicket, since our overdetermination (as well as interpellation) by language ensures that we always mean more than we intend. In new historicist rather than psychoanalytical terms, this is to say that a culture always exceeds a poetics, even as the two are, to quote Dorothy Parker on a related ontology, “woven in a crazy plaid.” By either rubric, we end up where Wimsatt and Beardsley landed us in “The Intentional Fallacy”: before the reality that “critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle.” So let us move past the allure of intention to the spur of mediation and see how it unsettles our inquiry.

As the previous posts have explained, a “mental theater” has, intentionally or not, served for nearly two centuries as the primary medium of performance for Sardanapalus. The two “fully performed” nineteenth-century productions (Macready’s in 1834, Kean’s in 1853) were not particularly well received, possibly owing to the preference of contemporary audiences for the sensational feats of spectacle over the psychological turns of tragedy. The interiority the Romantic poets attempted to dramatize in their plays, lyrics, and elsewhere was then naturalized with the adoption of silent reading over the course of the nineteenth century. The fate of any play is today as likely to be realized in a silent reading as in a theatrical performance; consequently, the rhetorical potency of “mental theater” diminishes with the primacy of the stage as a medium for dramatic texts. In other words, it is now commonplace to regard the act of reading as the activation of a mental theater. In this light, the Red Bull Theater’s November 12 performance of the play does the important work of reanimating reading as a necessary third term in this collaborative exploration of print and performance and, on a greater scale, mediation.

While it would slight the players to suggest that their play was not “fully performed,” the production was not, let us say, theatricalized. (See the earlier NYURRG post, “Romantic Drama: Experiments, Mental Theater, and Media,” in which Daniel P. Watkins’s “drama-theater distinctions” are discussed.) There was indeed a set, but it was in some state of rehearsal disarray for another production. The actors wore their own plain clothes. All but two sat on the edge of the stage when their characters weren’t in the scene (of the other two, one sat in a chair off stage right and the other waited backstage); when their characters were in the scene, the actors stood at black music stands that cradled the spiral-bound one-sided typescripts from which they read. This is not to say that the actors kept their hands to themselves. In fact, one occasionally sensed that they had to restrain themselves from declaiming their parts more “fully,” as in Arison’s comic interpretations of the title character’s “voluptuousness” and Patel’s emphatic expressions of the noble brother’s frustration with his king. Yet without question and after all, this performance of Sardanapalus was a “staged reading”: conceived as such, announced as such, realized as such. As such, it raises for me a different version of the question on the table: to what extent does it reproduce (might we say remediate?) the scene of Romantic reading?

To read the rest of “Sardanapalus onstage and Out of Mind,” among several statements in a survey of Romantic media studies, visit mediageist.wordpress.com, a preview of the Romantic Media Studies panel at MLA 2013 in Boston (Sunday, January 6, 8:30–9:45am, Hynes 203).

Lauren Neefe
Stony Brook University (SUNY)

Last year we played with the idea of collaborating with a local theater company to produce the performance of a Romantic drama; this semester, the project is on!

The Romanticist Research Group of NYU’s Department of English is collaborating with Red Bull Theater, a New York City theater company that specializes in classic plays of heightened language. We will be producing Byron’s Sardanapalus (1821) this November (see Red Bull Theater’s Revelation Reading series for performance information).

This performance will provide an opportunity to consider what happens when a play is remediated, or taken from a written text to a dramatic performance. While we are interested in seeing how the textual object is transformed by the performance process (and will be posting about each step of that process!), we are also interested in examining how the disciplines of literary and performance studies engage the object of study, and what these disciplines might be able to say to each other. We plan to discuss the process not only with scholars of both disciplines, but also with the directors, dramaturg, and actors of Red Bull Theater, and the theater audience.  Following the performance, we will post some interviews with members of the academic and theatrical communities concerning this experiment.

This blog will record our engagement with this project and track its development over the course of the Fall 2012 semester. We hope you will join us for the performance and invite you to contribute to the discussion!