The Circulation of Romantic Creativity: Coleridge, Drama, and the Question of Translation

This essay, which will move on to a discussion of Coleridge's translations of Schiller's tragedy Wallenstein, arises out of some general work on the relationship between the writing of drama in the period, and the translation of German texts between 1790 and 1805. In this, two points go almost without saying: first, that Coleridge is a central figure in the relationship described; second, that for a long time, there has been a critical neglect of the drama in the period. Recent critical attempts to address this neglect have, for the most part, taken their cue from Renaissance New Historicism, and as such have attempted to deal with the drama in fairly non-evaluative terms, stressing instead the social and political implications of writing drama in the first place, while looking to the latent ideological content of the plays under examination. My own interest in the subject grows from the very different, perhaps politically naive, ground of thinking about the way in which the questions of genre and influence interrelate. The most recent study in the area, Julie A. Carlson's In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women, which is very strongly influenced by New Historicism, provides an extraordinarily rounded examination of Coleridge's dramatic activities, and their effect on subsequent writers. Nevertheless, for reasons which I shall come onto, the study in its entirety may be less attractive than its individual chapters. When viewed together under the auspices of a political agenda, Coleridge's different works stand as a unity which belies their individuality. But one might instead be inclined to take 'a backward glance over travelled roads', and attempt, in more formalist terms, to suggest reasons for the specific attractiveness of the individual work. In this case, my interest in Coleridge's translations of Wallenstein stems from a belief that they constitute an exciting artwork in their own right, while focusing attention both upon questions of aesthetic autonomy and literary influence, and upon the issue of genre. The Californian cultural melt-down out of which New Historicism to some extent arises, appears to me either to ignore questions of genre, preferring instead to deal with all artworks as cultural, and hence political, artifacts, or to concentrate simplistically upon a particular genre, fixing it with specific usable cultural values. Ultimately, both paths led to the same end, which, in formal terms, means dealing with genre with unproblematically. This provides an unsatisfactory starting point for any understanding of what artistic excitement means. I do not see this as an imbalance which needs necessarily to be redressed, rather different readers must do different things. In this paper, I wish to point to a number of issues which converge in these texts without, inevitably, dealing with any completely. Carlson observes in the introduction to In the Theatre of Romanticism that "[c]anonized poets appear as alien subjects when considered in their role as playwrights," and she goes on: "Imagine an introduction to 'The Romantic Poets' that features The Borderers, not The Prelude, Remorse, not selected chapters of Biographia Literaria, Otho the Great, not the Great Odes, The Cenci, not Prometheus Unbound, Sardanapaulus, not Don Juan." Carlson's point is an important one even if it is, perhaps, easily countered. While it may be true that the real breadth of the period is vicariously signified for most readers by a select group of texts that are affordable and which confirm a pre-defined essence of 'Romanticism', it is nevertheless true to say, I think, that any attempt to re-invigorate the study of the unread work of the canonical writers, upon aesthetic …