IN OCTOBER I797 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE WROTE TO HIS FRIEND Thomas Poole about how his childhood reading shaped his understanding of the imagination and the limits of empiricism. Coleridge recounts that when his father first explained the physics of the cosmos, young Coleridge

was hardly surprised:

For from my early reading of Faery Tales, & Genii &c &c--my mind had
been habituated to the Vast--& I never regarded my senses in any way as
the criteria of my belief.... Should children be permitted to read
Romance, & Relations of Giants & Magicians, & Genii?... I have formed
my faith in the affirmative.--I know no other way of giving the mind a
love of "the Great", & "the Whole".--Those who have been led to the
same truths step by step thro' the constant testimony of their senses,
seem to me to want a sense which I possess--... and the Universe to
them is but a mass of little things.... when they looked at great
things, all became a blank & they saw nothing... & called the want of
imagination Judgment, & the never being moved to Rapture Philosophy! (1)

This letter, which coincides with the writing of Remorse's first unstaged iteration (Osorio), touches on themes vital to this article's claims about Coleridge's staging of Remorse (Drury Lane, 1813) and how it bears on his attitudes toward the dramatic form as a vehicle for public education. Coleridge affirms that those who rely solely on sensory observation perceive an aggregation of small data points and miss the greater meaning of our sublime universe. These ideas are not unique to Coleridge; other Romantic aesthetic productions, most notably William Blake's contemporaneous painting Newton (1795/C.1805), illustrate how intellectually constrictive over-reliance on material observation can be. What interests me here is Coleridge's suggestion that exposure to fantastical literature prompts and sustains understanding of "the Vast," because it demonstrates how ostensibly humble genres--the romance, the fairy tale--can expand one's imaginative and cognitive capacity. The letter suggests, by extension, that this knowledge remains accessible to the marginalized groups who typically consume popular literature: children, women, and the working class. (2)

During the Romantic Era, the Gothic and Orientalist spectacles often staged at the patent theaters (Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and summer Haymarket) served a similar function to the types of tales Coleridge describes. To be fair, some of these spectacle-driven performances are rather silly, but even the silliest of them, for example The Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh (Haymarket 1811), are self-conscious and smart as theatrical parodies. Yet a subset of these plays employing spectacle, including Remorse, have a further reach, providing a broad popular audience not only with entertainment, but also with opportunities to contemplate the metaphysical--that "Great" or "Whole" that Coleridge suggests challenges the reader/viewer to think beyond the narrow confines of empirical perception and to gain synthetic knowledge. Elsewhere, I have argued that these plays have important political content; here, I hope to demonstrate that Gothic drama can also raise important philosophical questions to a mass audience. (3)

My understanding of this form as elevated--as a vehicle for philosophical education--runs outside of prevailing critical wisdom about drama's place in the Romantic literary hierarchy. It also builds upon foundational work by Jeffrey Cox, Frederick Burwick, Julie Carlson, Jane Moody, Michael Gamer, and others, that asserts drama's centrality to Romantic-era culture. (4) As these scholars have demonstrated starting in the late 1980s, drama has been marginalized in Romantic Studies partly from an overemphasis on textual, rather than performative, analysis. For example, in a recent article on the harlequinade, Cox succinctly outlines the alternative method needed to discern a play's cultural impact. He argues that much of nineteenth-century drama can only be understood when performance texts are examined in conjunction with their other forms of meaning making, such as music, stage action, costumes, and sets. Further, one must broaden this context beyond the playhouse, using a play's paratexts, intertextual allusions, and reference to current events as clues to gauge a performance's cumulative effect on an audience. (5) Taking cues from this methodology, this article extends the context in which Remorse is approached, arguing that its performative meaning can only be understood in relation to the economics of the early nineteenth-century theater world and its emphasis on stagecraft.

The marginalization of drama within Romantic Studies extends to scholarship focusing particularly on Coleridge as a figure central to this period's aesthetic development. Despite the play's importance to Coleridge's career and biography, Remorse is excluded from teaching editions of his major works (Oxford World's Classics, Norton Critical; a short excerpt from the "invocation" is included in the Penguin). It retains only a small role in basic research texts. The Cambridge Introduction devotes only half a page to Coleridge's "Theatre Writing" dismissively suggesting that "one would not be surprised at being told that someone other than Coleridge... had written it [Remorse]." (6) The Oxford Companion edited by Frederick Burwick remains the notable exception, devoting significant space to both Remorse and Coleridge's translations of Schiller. In recent monographs, however, Coleridge's drama has been given more serious treatment. Reeve Parker's Romantic Tragedies devotes roughly one third of its analysis to Coleridge, with special emphasis on Remorse's unique sonic qualities in performance. (7) Chris Murray suggests that theories of tragedy are central to Coleridge's literary and philosophical outlook, while paying special attention to Coleridge's "neglected" plays and dramatic theory. (8) In concert with these extended studies, this article asks us to rethink not only drama's centrality to Coleridge's oeuvre, but also Remorse's impact on Romantic-era theatrical and literary culture.

The lack of attention to Coleridge's dramatic work takes its lead from Romantic-era critics themselves. Burwick, Carlson, and Gamer have revealed the complex and deeply ambivalent relationship the Romantics had with the patent theaters. (9) Serving as critics, poets often derided Drury Lane's and Covent Garden's productions, arguing that the theaters' immense size precluded poetic expression and encouraged mind-numbing spectacle. One of the most pessimistic views of the theater's potential can be seen in Henry Crabb Robinson's elitist reflections on Remorse's opening night: "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." (10) Crabb Robinson denies the potential for popular forms to serve as a means of civic education for a mass audience.

In some senses, Crabb Robinson is correct. The physical space of the theater rendered complex verbal communication difficult. With the renovation and enlargement of the patent theaters (Covent Garden in 1792 and Drury Lane in 1794) came economic pressure to fill between 3,000-3,600 seats per night with an often unruly crowd. (11) Productions emphasizing pantomime and special effects were the most successfully staged under these conditions. (12) Plays that depended upon the spoken word (Shakespeare's familiar works excepted) faced overwhelming obstacles in a large venue that would not see benefit from gas or electrical lighting until the end of the nineteenth century. (13) Actors had to rely on acoustics and voice projection to be heard.

Yet poets persisted in their desire to retain the theater as a site of public intellectual intervention. In the Introductory Discourse, Joanna Baillie insists that "[t]he theatre is a school, in which much good or evil may be learned." She argues that drama performed before a mass audience has greater ideological impact than a closet piece accessed by the elite. "A play ... that is suited to strike and interest the spectator... who cannot read, is a more valuable and useful production than one whose elegant and harmonious pages are admired in the libraries of the tasteful and refined." (14) Coleridge too desires engagement with a popular audience. In Tragic Coleridge, Chris Murray undermines the myth that Romantic poets preferred the closet drama to the live theater, using Coleridge's aspirations to stage Osorio (1797) and Zapolya (1816) at Drury Lane as primary evidence. (15) Coleridge's own Lectures on Shakespeare and his documented ongoing love-hate relationship with Drury Lane, which I'll discuss in detail later, represent his ambivalence about the co-existing limitations and possibilities of the theatrical space. Beyond these theoretical concerns, Coleridge expresses a desire to see his plays produced to garner the financial rewards he witnesses accruing to "lesser" productions. (16)

In recent years, especially within the pages of SiR, scholars have begun to complicate Coleridge's attitudes towards performativity and democratized forms of education. Sophie Thomas argues that Remorse's visual spectacle should be read not as pandering to public taste, but as a vehicle for investigating truth versus illusion, "of seeing things 'as they are' with all the political force that phrase suggests." (17) William Christie makes a compelling argument about the theatricality of Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare, suggesting that they contribute to a broader social movement in which the public lecture functions as both "an alternative form of entertainment" and an " 'open' university, for many of the middle-class public." (18)

Remorse's staging provides a rich moment for analyzing the tension between commerce, aesthetics, and the role that dramatic verse plays in civic education. Remorse is good theater by most standards. As La Belle Assemblee suggests, Remorse "does great credit to the genius of Mr. Coleridge" and "holds out a promise that the Muse of Tragedy has not quite deserted the English stage." (19) In addition to being generally laudatory, the Morning Chronicle asserts that Coleridge is second only to Shakespeare in depicting complex characterization on stage. (20) The majority of Remorse's reviews, if perhaps less sanguine, were also quite positive. (21) At the same time, the play was an undeniable financial success, running for 20 nights and earning [pounds sterling]300 for Drury Lane in its first 1813 season. In total, Coleridge earned more money for Remorse than any other work: purportedly [pounds sterling]400. This artistic success and financial windfall came at a critical time for Coleridge. When Remorse opened, Coleridge faced exigent financial difficulties, was estranged from many lifelong friends (including Wordsworth), endured a waning poetic reputation, and was surrounded by scandal related to his opium addiction. Remorse, along with Coleridge's public lectures, contributed significantly to reviving his role as a public figure, artist, and leading intellectual. (22)

Evaluating Remorse's impact within Coleridge's oeuvre and the Romantic theater world offers an important opportunity to better understand both. Far from an aesthetic anomaly or commercial compromise, Remorse exemplifies Coleridge's attempt to apply his lifelong preoccupation with imagination and epistemology to the drama. Further, a careful, dramaturgical reading of Remorse demands a re-evaluation of Coleridge's attitudes toward the theater and suggests that he viewed it as an important, albeit imperfect, site of aesthetic, intellectual, and civic education. Like Sophie Thomas, I am interested in how this play's deployment of stage illusion addresses philosophical questions: what is real vs. unreal, what is knowable vs. unknowable. Yet rather than viewing commercial concerns as an impediment to exploring the play's themes, I argue that through deploying stage illusion, Coleridge finds a dramaturgical means to both engage epistemological questions and command audience attention.

By closely examining the economic reality of a Drury Lane production and the play's stagecraft, this article demonstrates that Remorse attempts simultaneously to entice and to educate a broad audience by combining spectacle with the linguistic sublime, specifically within the famous conjuring scene. In this scene, a sensory "cocktail" is created; music, special effects, lighting, and poetry work together to question the coexistence of the physical and the metaphysical and to investigate the foundations of both material and spiritual knowledge. This attention to staging has a profound influence on how one reads the play's meaning. Within the play, the hero's use of illusion fails to evoke the desired "remorse" from the villain. Instead, Ordonio's fear of discovery incites him to greater bloodshed. Yet Coleridge's use of stage illusion, by drawing attention to meta-theatricality, does prompt Remorse's audience to greater reflection about the nature of surfaces and interiors and the role of conscience in determining action.

Let Us Have No Illusions: Coleridge and Commerce

For all our careful attention to historical context, Romanticists still tend to romanticize the Romantics where money is concerned, approaching them as if they existed beyond banal pecuniary concerns. Yet when discussing the realities of staging a large production at Drury Lane, the issue of money cannot be avoided. Staging costs are prodigious. Multiple artists beyond the poet (actors, composers, designers) contribute to and depend upon the play's financial success. In the early nineteenth century, great competition for the public's slim entertainment budget existed, as the cheaper and more accessible non-patent theaters offered a plethora of non-spoken-word performances (tumbling, rope dancing, pantomime, equestrian spectacle, etc.) that appealed to a wide audience. (23)

Coleridge enters this competitive marketplace during his own period of intense financial insecurity. He wanted and needed the money and name recognition that success at Drury Lane could provide. He could not support himself, let alone his wife or growing children, one of whom--the brilliant Hartley--was preparing for a costly university education. He had outstanding debts from his defunct periodical The Friend. His annual stipend provided by the Wedgwood brothers had been reduced by half ([pounds sterling]75). (24) His lectures, due to constant cancellations and postponements, were never as lucrative or regular as he had hoped. Plus, he struggled with a costly opium and brandy addiction that had grown particularly burdensome in the early 1800s. Richard Holmes, Coleridge's most thorough biographer, recounts Coleridge's borrowing and defaulting with friends and admirers during this period in granular detail. (25) Here, I will consider just one piece of historical evidence that places Coleridge's finances in perspective relative to that of his "cohort"--Wordsworth and Southey--whose stars were rising during this period. In 1796, James Martin applied to the Royal Literary Fund on Coleridge's behalf for financial assistance. Martin cites Coleridge's "extreme difficulties, proceeding from a sick family, his wife being ready to lie in, and his mother in law, whom he has supported, being, as it is supposed, on her death bed" while noting that the man himself is "quite unprovided for, being of no profefsions [sic]." The RLF subsequently awarded [pounds sterling]30 in consideration of Coleridge's "genius and learning." (26) The loan is routine and compatible with the RLF's general mandate to aid talented writers facing a temporary setback. What makes this application remarkable is that, despite establishing himself as one of the foremost intellects and artists in the interim, Coleridge remained unable to repay this debt until twenty years later in February of 1816. At different points between 1796 and 1816, he enjoyed celebrity and esteem as a poet and received several lucrative journalism, lecturing, and dramatic opportunities, yet he could never parlay that work into enough financial stability to repay [pounds sterling]30. (27)

This instability renders the theater an attractive option for Coleridge. A commercial venue, such as the patent theaters, might be adapted to his poetic sensibilities and his philosophical ideas. As the texts surrounding his script suggest, Coleridge wanted and needed this play to be staged, and he was willing to work within the constraints of the patent theaters and with other artists (set designers, actors, musicians) to make that happen. Coleridge attended rehearsals, making necessary script alterations and giving notes to the actors. (28) Previously, he demonstrated a talent for elevating lower but lucrative forms, such as journalism and lecturing, into politically and philosophically robust content. His most mercenary journalistic work was published while under contract with T. J. Street's conservative Courier in 1811. Coleridge published several uncritical, perhaps jingoistic, pieces for a weekly salary of [pounds sterling]4-5/week during a period of financial distress. (He was close to defaulting on his life insurance payment.) Yet when Street tried to muzzle Coleridge concerning issues of injustice--such as the reappointment of the Duke of York to the post of Supreme Commander of the British Forces--Coleridge imperiled his cushy situation and fought aggressively with Street, insisting on the importance of journalistic independence. (29)

Coleridge demonstrated even less willingness to pander to his lecture audiences. For example, he earned [pounds sterling]120 for the 20 lectures he gave at the Royal Institution in the spring of 1808. Although the lectures were aimed at what Richard Holmes calls "a large, mixed audience" of roughly 500 coming from the City and West End, the talks addressed abstruse topics, such as theories of taste and aesthetics, while sometimes drawing on extended and obscure readings. Holmes relates how the first lecture, in which Coleridge recited a 2,000-word excerpt from An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste "exhausted both lecturer and audience." (30) As William Christie suggests, the early nineteenth-century lecture circuit functioned as an "alternative form of entertainment." (31) Coleridge responded to the need to entertain. He changed up the style of his talks after his ho-hum debut at the Royal Institute--incorporating more extempore speech and anecdotal evidence--yet he retained the intellectual seriousness of their content. The "highbrow" nature of his talks extended to bookings at even more humble venues, such as The Surrey Institution in 1812-13, that catered to a less elite crowd: the petite bourgeoisie and women who sought these lectures as a substitute for the higher education they were denied. (32)

A reading of Coleridge's prefaces to the first two printed editions of Remorse gives insight into his concerns about the theater's management and his understanding of the work as a corporate production that relied upon multiple artists to reach its effulgence. Coleridge's attempts to have earlier incarnations of Remorse staged at Drury Lane were fraught with difficulty. Michael Gamer demonstrates in detail the "sour grapes" Coleridge expresses over Matthew Lewis's success with Castle Spectre (1797) when his own early iteration of Remorse, Osorio, was rejected for staging. (33) The first preface suggests that very little of this resentment had dissipated by 1813, as Coleridge devotes much of it to expressing his pique that Sheridan (whose redacted name is easily guessed) had ignored and unceremoniously dismissed the Osorio manuscript. (34) Coleridge's longstanding resentment is surprising given that by 1812 Sheridan had relinquished day-to-day management of Drury Lane, which was now run by Samuel Arnold and Samuel Whitbread with oversight by a committee of 5. (35) Yet by the second printing (also 1813), concurrent with Remorse's established success at Drury Lane, Coleridge has either repressed or forgotten those resentments. He briefly mentions Sheridan's ill-treatment, but deletes the original plaintive paragraph. (36)

Instead, Coleridge devotes the space to praising those who contributed to the success of the stage production with their artistic or managerial abilities. He lauds the Manager, Mr. Arnold, the Stage Manager, Mr. Raymond, and the actors playing the principal parts: Mrs. Glover, Miss Smith, Mr. Powell, et al. As J. C. C. Mays notes, Coleridge's letters document his enduring gratitude to Whitbread for his help in adapting the manuscript so it could succeed as a live performance. (37) The reader of the second edition senses that Coleridge is highly pleased with the final product and recognizes it as a collaborative creative effort.

The play's paratexts, the playbill, and the prologue give a cultural snapshot of just how important these other artists and managers were to the economic and aesthetic success of Remorse. The playbill does several important types of work (fig. 1). First, it documents how inconsequential the poet's name is when trying to convince over 3,000 spectators to pay hard-earned cash to see a "Tragedy" on a Saturday night. Although "REMORSE" is the night's principal entertainment, Coleridge's name is not listed as a selling point. On this particular bill, from the third performance, someone has helpfully written in "by S. T. Coleridge, the Poet." (38) This phenomenon suggests that either the annotator saw the lack of attribution as a serious omission that bears correction or that Remorse has been so separated in the critical mind from the rest of Coleridge's work that one needs reminding that it belongs to him. To be fair, authors' names do not frequently appear on playbills, but one from the previous Monday (the 18th of January) promoted a performance of the The Honey-Moon by marking it as "Tobin's Comedy" (John Tobin). Remorse's playbill names every other contributor to the production: the players, the composer, the set designer, and even the dressmaker. The bill highlights the production's corporate authorship and suggests that audiences are more interested in the creative talents of actors, musicians, and painters than they are in the poet's. Thomas Greenwood's or Michael Kelly's name is more of a draw than Coleridge's because the play promotes itself with sensory experience: "entirely new Scenery, Dresses, and Decorations," and, most important for this discussion, an "INVOCATION" that is to appear in Act 3. Thus, in marketing the play, the potential spectacle of the conjuring scene takes precedence over the poetry. Yet Coleridge capitalizes on that cold reality of the patent theater and uses this spectacle to enhance the sublimity of his verse, an idea that his friend, Charles Lamb, will emphasize in the play's prologue.

In the prologue, Lamb suggests that the supersized theaters' use of spectacle serves to strengthen, rather than to undermine, the dramatist's power, going so far as to suggest that Shakespeare would have liked to have staged his plays under such conditions:

Shakespeare, who wish'd a kingdom for a stage,
Like giant pent in disproportion'd cage,
Mourn'd his contracted strengths and crippled rage.
He who could tame his vast ambition down
To please some scatterr'd gleanings of a town,
And, if some hundred auditors supplied
Their meagre meed of claps, was satisfied,

Those scenic helps, denied to Shakespeare's page,
Our Author owes to a more liberal age.
Nor pomp nor circumstance are wanting here;
'Tis for himself alone that he must fear. (39)

With the levity characteristic of prologues, Lamb argues that by staging his play in a vast forum well-suited to spectacle, Coleridge has an advantage over Shakespeare. One is tempted to read these lines as highly ironic or, at the very least, in loyal service to a friend putting his reputation on the line. However, if we think about visual and aural stimulation working with--rather than against--the imagination, Lamb's assertions start to seem less suspect. He argues that audiences often blame the poet for their own failure of imagination, but Drury Lane offers "scenic helps" to supply those defects. Coleridge will not be held accountable for the intellectual limitations of his diverse and numerous audience.

Yet we must also read this prologue in the context of Coleridge's own vast writing on dramatic theory and the state of the Romantic stage. Coleridge's Biographia, Lectures on Shakespeare, and other writing articulate his concern over how the material theater has the capacity to eclipse an audience's imagination and even its power of reason. (40) Here, however, I'd like to build upon an argument made by Julie Carlson to suggest that, despite his misgivings, Coleridge saw great potential in the theater as a site of aesthetic, intellectual, and civic education. Carlson emphasizes how, for Coleridge, the materiality of the theater is paradoxically both a great advantage and a great hindrance. Her readings of Coleridge's letters and fragmentary pieces on "Genius and Public Taste" suggest that, for Coleridge, the problem with the contemporary theater is not spectacle itself, but the over-reliance on spectacle to the point that it supplants the imagination. (41)

What remains unclear, however, is who is at fault for this state of theatrical fallenness. Examining Coleridge's theatrical reviews, several critics have emphasized Coleridge's skepticism of the popular audience and what George Erving calls the "contradiction between his dramaturgical and critical practices." (42) In particular, Coleridge's "Critique of Bertram" which was first published in the Courier (1816) and slightly revised for the Biographia (1817), exemplifies his contempt for Drury Lane productions that promise tragedy but deliver morally suspect spectacle. (43) Remorse's "Invocation" scene--with its smoke, fire, and murder tableau--seems to anticipate the same expedients that Maturin later relies upon in Bertram. Yet, in that same critique, Coleridge outlines how poetics, combined with spectacle, can be dramatically deployed to impregnate the imagination:

... of all intellectual power, that of superiority to the fear of the
invisible world is the most dazzling. Its influence is abundantly
proved by the one circumstance, that it can bribe us into a voluntary
submission of our better knowledge, into suspension of all our judgment
derived from constant experience, and enables us to peruse with the
liveliest interest the wildest tales of ghosts, wizards, genii, and
secret talismans. On this propensity... a specific dramatic probability
may be raised by a true poet.... The poet does not require us to be
awake and believe; he solicits us only to yield ourselves to a dream;
and this too with our eyes open... ready to awaken us at the first
motion of our will: and meantime, only, not to disbelieve. (44)
(emphasis in original)

Much like Edmund Burke, Coleridge asserts terror's preeminent ability to capture the mind's attention and imagination. In the Invocation scene, he harnesses that "superiority to the fear of the invisible world" to incite epistemological and philosophical reflection. The staging invokes the dreamlike state that allows the poet to work his own magic.

Other moments in Coleridge's dramatic theory suggest that stage illusion can stimulate the audience's imagination in creative and intellectually productive ways. Those spectators who were attracted by the "entirely new Scenery, Dresses, and Decorations" promised in the playbill can, under the right conditions, be prompted to contemplate that "Great," "Vast," and "Whole" that Coleridge describes in his letter to Poole. For example, his Lectures on Shakespeare outline a much more democratic conception of the live audience that, in combination with poetry and material representation, is fundamental to the inception of the form. When imagining the origins of drama in Western culture, he posits:

Let two persons join in the same scheme to ridicule a third, and either
take advantage of, or invent, some story for that purpose, and mimicry
will have produced a sort of rude comedy. It becomes an inviting treat
to the populace... and the first man of genius who... reduced it into
form... by metre and music, is the Aristophanes of the country. (45)

At its most basic level, drama begins with two people acting out a narrative. Everyday ridicule evolves into a recognizable genre, comedy, with the addition of two elements: an audience, "the populace," and an author, a "man of genius," who imbues the narrative with form. While Aristophanes' genius elevates malicious gossip into social satire, the audience who appreciates his "inviting treat" does not necessarily have to be elite. Coleridge's word choice even suggests otherwise. He describes the audience as "the populace," that is, the ordinary people, not "citizens" or "Athenians" or any other word that would connote erudition or status. Thus, theater from its very beginning is made possible by the participation of a varied crowd, much like the one that collected nightly at Drury Lane.

Most important, in this same lecture, Coleridge argues that the creation of meaning within drama depends upon a delicate interaction between that crowd and what they view, between spectator and spectacle. Coleridge discusses the almost magical process in which a painted scene, such as a group of trees, becomes a forest in the mind's eye:

Its [stage scenery's] very purpose is to produce as much illusion as
its nature permits. These, and all other stage presentations, are to
produce a sort of temporary half-faith, which the spectator encourages
in himself and supports by a voluntary contribution on his own part,
because he knows that it is at all times in his power to see the thing
as it really is.... Now what pictures are to little children, stage
illusion is to men, provided they retain any part of the child's
sensibility; except that in the latter instance, the suspension of the
act of comparison, which permits this sort of negative belief is
somewhat more assisted by the will, than in that of a child respecting
a picture. (37)

This famous passage is the source material for the important literary concept of willful suspension of disbelief. Much has been made of Coleridge's ideas about the audience's will and his differentiation between delusion and illusion. (46) What is most pertinent to my argument, however, is how Coleridge imagines scene painter, musician, and poet working cooperatively to create the desired effect on the audience. Without the trappings of the material theater, which includes sensory stimulation, the audience cannot respond with imagination--that "part of the child's sensibility"--that turns a painted scene into a forest. These delicate relationships are all mutually dependent. In reciprocal terms, the poet's evocation of the imagination depends upon a live audience's willingness to suspend comparison when confronted with a material reality that falls short of mimesis. As Matthew Scott notes, "through an imaginative contribution from the spectator... theatre or poetic fiction attains the status that he [Coleridge] accords it." (47) Through both the poet's and the audience's efforts the play comes to its effulgence. In Remorse's conjuring scene, Coleridge unleashes his poetic talents to prime the audience to receive the play's sensory stimulation in service of the imagination, rather than allowing the spectacle to dull the mind.

Conjuring Civic Education Through Stage Illusion

These contradictions between Coleridge the critic and Coleridge the dramatist have generated several approaches to understanding the "Invocation" scene, which luxuriates in sensory stimulation and theatrical illusion. Some suggest that the scene should be viewed as an aesthetic compromise, a phenomenon Coleridge accepted so that the play could run. Jeffrey Cox refers to the Invocation scene as a "hoax," using Coleridge's marginal note from the unstaged Osorio to support his contention that Coleridge viewed this scene as "miserably undramatic." (48) Citing this same marginal note, William Jewett contends that the conjuring scene is "absurdly bad drama" that can only be understood as a dramatization of Coleridge's theories of the power of illusion. (49) Others read the spectacle as consistent with the play's thematic preoccupation with surfaces and interiors. For example, Sophie Thomas suggests that the attempted murder scene's dramatic reveal not only uncovers a hidden crime, but also announces the play's "ethical agenda." (50) These readings privilege a textual interpretation of the play and do not consider how much this scene's aesthetic effect depends upon its corporate authorship (as represented in the playbill) and its actual staging. More recently, Reeve Parker contends that Remorse can best be understood thematically by "attending to its remarkable poetic dramaturgy involving specific moments of listening and hearing"--echoes, mutterings, and overheard conversation. (51)

I extend Parker's emphasis on dramaturgy beyond the human voice to include visual special effects, instrumentation, and song. Approaching the play through this dramaturgical lens modifies its interpretive possibilities in important ways. Rather than the conjuring scene operating as a cheap trick that moves the plot forward to poetic justice, it creates multiple, nested illusions that prompt audiences to investigate the foundations of material and spiritual knowledge. The play offers visual and aural stimulation in conjunction with poetic imagery in a way that undercuts any kind of moral certainty about the desirability or achievability of remorse in a society without honor or honesty.

The invocation scene forms the dramatic center of the tragedy, occurring in the middle of Act 3, but its importance to the play's dramatic arc requires some explanation. Six years before the play's action, the villain, Ordonio, has ordered his underling, Isidore, to assassinate his older brother, Alvar. Isidore's attempt fails, but he never informs Ordonio. After a period of secret exile, Alvar returns to his home incognito. Rather than seeking revenge, Alvar hopes to inspire Ordonio to remorse and repentance by forcing him to witness a reenactment of the failed murder. The Invocation scene is that reenactment. Here, Alvar disguises himself as a Moresco sorcerer who ostensibly uses magic to conjure an image showing what "really" happened to the missing Alvar. However, rather than inspiring the titular "remorse," Alvar's ruse creates unintended lethal consequences.

As this brief recapitulation demonstrates, the play confronts the audience with multiple, nested delusions and illusions that require full explication. While delusions and illusions both deal with deceptions, for Coleridge's purposes, a "delusion" is being led to believe what is false, whereas an "illusion" is deceiving the bodily eye by false appearances. At the center of this nest is Alvar, the ostensible hero, who passes as a Moresco Sorcerer to his brother, father (Valdez), and childhood sweetheart (Teresa). The "Sorcerer" then perpetuates the illusion that he has conjured a ghostly reenactment of Alvar's murder, which never actually occurred. In essence, the disguised Alvar stages an imagined representation of what his death might have been. In response to this spectacle, Ordonio, fearing discovery, doubles down on his own illusion: that he is the bereaved brother of Alvar and the frustrated, earnest suitor of Teresa. Yet, as Frederick Burwick notes, the object of desire for both brothers, Teresa, does not even stay throughout the entire scene. (52) The performance script marks two possible exits: one before Alvar begins and another about midway through the scene after the second stanza of the "Song" sung by Mrs. Bland. One of the characters Alvar hopes to influence most is absent for most of his moralistic display.

If approached solely as a textual phenomenon, this scene could be perceived as farcical or simply baffling. However, we know from reviews that the scene is one of the most eerie and effecting of the play. For example, even a mostly unfavorable review in the Examiner concedes, "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." (53) Something occurred in the performance of this play that cannot be represented by text alone. It must be embodied, heard, seen, and felt simultaneously to create meaning.

The scene's sensory onslaught occurs simultaneously, but for the purposes of analysis, I discuss the aural then visual stimulants in turn. Before Alvar begins his uncanny speech, the stage directions call for "soft music from an instrument of glass or steel" that is "expressive of the movements and images that follow" (185). The choice of instrument is important in both material and symbolic terms. Often referred to as an "angelic harp," the glass harmonica makes eerie, high-pitched, yet pleasing notes that, as Olivia Reilly suggests, resemble the "flexibility of dynamic variation and ... pure timbre" of the human voice. (54) The music approximates a voice that has consciousness but is not human, an effect that is key for the audience to interpret the poetic imagery.

When the actor begins the incantation, the speech not only hails Alvar's soul, it also conjures the audience's creative imagination. He intones:

Soul of Alvar!
Hear our soft suit, and heed my milder spell:
So may the Gates of Paradise, unbarr'd,
Cease thy swift toils! Since haply thou art one
Of that innumerable company
Who in broad circle...
Girdle this round earth in a dizzy motion,
With noise too vast and constant to be heard:
Fitliest unheard! For oh, ye numberless,
And rapid Travelers! what ear unstunn'd,
What sense unmadden'd, might bear up against
The rushing of your congregated wings?
                                          (3.1.36-47)

The audience must imagine something beyond what occurs onstage, and the ensuing poetic images combined with sensory stimulus make that leap possible. In literal terms, the Sorcerer suggests that Alvar's soul has become one of a numerous body of angels who operate at frequencies beyond normal human perception. These angels' presence and utterances can only be perceived and understood by the other characters with the aid of his magic. The sorcerer's poetry makes perception possible. In symbolic terms, the speech suggests that multiple realities can exist simultaneously, that the spirits of the dead and the living occupy the same earthly space. Yet because of speed and distance, the spirits of the dead cannot be perceived. The other characters (and by extension the viewer) need only surrender their imaginations up to the Sorcerer's "dark employments" to experience this alleged reality--what, in the Biographia, Coleridge calls the "voluntary submission of our better knowledge" that constitutes an intellectual act.

The Sorcerer asks the auditor to "hear" with the mind what cannot in material reality be experienced, the sound of millions of angels' wings beating as they circle the earth. In fact, the Sorcerer/Alvar suggests that even if the ear could hear such a noise, the rational mind could not support it; no sense "unmadden'd" could "bear up" when confronted with the "rushing of... congregated wings." But the music the audience can hear--the unearthly strains of the "angelic harp"--approximates what those beating wings might sound like. Rather than supplanting the imagination, the angelic harp's near rendering of what cannot be heard points to the limitations of both the senses and the imagination. Neither the ear nor the mind can fully comprehend this music. Imagination too can only supply a shadowed semblance of what that music "truly" is. From this perspective, the aural stimulant (the harp) and the intellectual stimulant (the poetic image) are mutual aids in approaching the unfathomable. This moment is rather extraordinary, since Coleridge's dramatic criticism holds in contempt a poet's dependence on material stimulation. But here we see imagination and stage mechanics working together to approach the incomprehensible.

The audience's ability to forego disbelief is further bolstered by musical accompaniment that creates a somber tone for the scene. As the scene moves toward its conclusion, a song, which echoes the language of the 51st psalm, Miserere Domine or "Have mercy, oh Lord!" begins from behind the scenes. The disembodied voices of the chorus further the unearthly effect of the glass harp. According to composer Michael Kelly, Coleridge thought the music "every thing that he could have wished." Kelly felt this compliment particularly because Coleridge related to him that, when "he was in Sicily, and other parts of Italy [1804-1806], he had this 'Miserere Domine' set to music by different Italian composers, none of whom satisfied him by giving his poetry the musical expression that he desired." (55) Coleridge expresses delight in music's ability to add meaning to poetic expression.

The ongoing aural stimulation works in harmony with a brief but impressive visual spectacle in which a spontaneous fire reveals the tableau depicting the attempted assassination of Alvar. According to the stage directions, " [t]he incense on the altar takes fire suddenly, and an illuminated picture of Alvar's assassination is discovered, and having remained a few seconds is then hidden by ascending flames" (1106). This tableau, which is supposed to reveal "truth," operates as a stage illusion for the audience but as a delusion for the characters. The contrast between what the audience knows to be true in the story--that Alvar is still live--and what is displayed calls into question the relationship between surfaces and interiors, between what the eye perceives and what the mind knows.

Thus, it is not surprising that Alvar's speech preceding this spectacle provides a framework for how the audience should understand what they are about to see. As the family waits for the incantation to take effect, Alvar as Sorcerer implies that the real revelation will be about Ordonio's hypocrisy, not the means of Alvar's death. When Marquis Valdez argues that Ordomo is "most virtuous," Alvar ignores him. Instead, he continues to address Ordonio, disingenuously asking if "his very virtues / Had pamper'd his / swoln heart and made him proud? / And what if Pride had dup'd him into guilt?" Because the "Sorcerer" is really Ordonio's brother, he intimately knows Ordonio's character, and he supports his claims that Ordonio is "Not very bold, but exquisitely cunning" with childhood memories. Alvar asserts "that at his Mother's looking glass / [Ordonio] Would force his features to a frowning sternness" (3.1.102-13). There are many layers of masking and mirroring in this scene (and throughout the play) that deserve more extensive comment than this article allows. Here, I will linger on the image Coleridge creates of Ordonio looking into his mother's mirror and practicing his frowns, because it anticipates and adds nuance to the visual spectacle in ways that speak directly to the play's themes. The dramatic effect depends greatly on the actor as well as his lines. As J. C. C. Mays notes, Alexander Rae, who played Ordonio, was known for manipulating his facial expressions. At least two of the reviews praise this ability as key to embodying successfully the part of a hypocritical villain. (56) Coleridge's lines signal to the audience that Ordonio has long practiced the art of deception and even relishes it as a secret pastime. Thus, before the tableau is dramatically revealed, the audience experiences a moment of intense dramatic irony, knowing that Alvar's stratagem to induce remorse by shocking Ordonio into revealing his "true face" will fail. Ordonio is unlikely to have a "tell" since he has been performing a persona since childhood.

In response to the pyrotechnics, Ordonio "starts in agitation" but does not exhibit any signs of that much-desired remorse. Instead, the anticipated catharsis is precluded by the arrival of Church Inquisitors who break up the seance. Coleridge's choice to fragment this scene and to not let it reach its emotional conclusion slows the pacing of this five-act tragedy, but it also extends the uncomfortable period in which the audience understands Alvar's failure before he does. As the drama unfolds, it becomes clear that Alvar's stratagem has engendered more harm than good. Rather than feeling remorse, Ordonio is spurred to even greater crime by the possibility of discovery. He murders his erstwhile henchman, Isidore, so that no one can bear witness to his crime. The spectacle, though surely pleasing to the eye, underscores what Alvar already knows intellectually by his own admission, but does not realize spiritually: that his Christian impulse to stir Ordonio's conscience rather than seek revenge, is impracticable. Only after Isidore's widow, Alhadra, stabs Ordonio, does Ordonio cry out "Atonement!" as if her violence offers him a release that his conscience cannot. Alvar's concluding speech in which he touts the preeminence of individual conscience--his assertion that "Conscience rules us e'en against our choice" (5.1.274)--tastes like pablum after the rich intellectual fare the play has served up about what can be sensed and what can be known. The hero deploys sly expedients in the hope of bringing about his brother's redemption. But instead of prompting Ordonio's reformation, the conjuration provokes him to commit a real homicide.

I want to conclude by gesturing briefly toward ways in which this scene's content and dramaturgy are in conversation with the ongoing preoccupations of Coleridge's work, especially in narrative poems such as Christabel and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. First, both the Sorcerer's verse and its accompanying music suggest that human material life coexists with many other metaphysical forms that are often outside of perception and that defy qualification. In Christabel, we can see this strange coexistence in Geraldine who is ostensibly a hybrid girl-monster, but in reality, some type of entity who can only be known through accessing the unconscious mind: "A sight to dream of, not to tell!"--that is, something poetry is powerless to describe. In The Rime, this coexistence takes on a more literal telling as the mariner lives with the crew of Life-in-Death, but it also has more subtle features, as when we reflect on the Mariner's ability to "bles[s] [the water snakes] unaware." Lastly, all three of these works are thematically cohesive in that they explore the inability to recognize or to "know" evil. They are, of course, concerned with epistemology but most importantly they reflect on one's inability to rely on spiritual wisdom. These themes are well-discussed in Christabel and The Rime, but for the conjuring scene of Remorse, it is worth noting that the scene's intense dramatic irony--and the way that irony calls into question the feasibility or desirability of redemption--is created in large part by the visual spectacle. If one just reads the texts, this complexity is lost. The audience views Alvar dressed as a Sorcerer conjuring his own spirit to reveal a scene that intellectually he knows will not produce the desired result. Thus, what the viewing audience, as opposed to the reader, experiences is the power of Alvar's illusion, but also his own spiritual delusion: two phenomena that the play warns the viewer to guard against. Both the visual and the poetic rhetoric of this scene undermine the stability of empirically-based knowledge and temporality and, in paradoxically concrete ways, underscore the existence of an unknown reality that Coleridge's work always stretches toward understanding.

Rutgers University, Camden

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--. Playing to the Crowd: London Popular Theatre, 1780-1830. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

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--. Lectures Upon Shakespeare. In The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Volume 4. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1853.

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--. The Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Cox, Jeffrey. "'Illegitimate' Pantomime in the 'Legitimate' Theater: Context as Text." Studies in Romanticism 54, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 159-86.

--. In the Shadows of Romance: Romantic Tragic Drama in Germany, England, and France. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1987.

--. "Spots of Time: The Structure of the Dramatic Evening in the Theater of Romanticism." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 41, no. 4 (1999): 403-25.

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Jewett, William. Fatal Autonomy: Romantic Drama and the Rhetoric of Agency. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Kelly, Michael. Reminiscences of Michael Kelly of the King's Theatre and Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Volume 2. London: Colburn, 1826.

Lamb, Charles. Prologue to Remorse: A Tragedy, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama, 168-69. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2003.

Ledoux, Ellen Malenas. Social Reform in Gothic Writing: Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764-1834. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

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Mays, J. C. C. "Introduction to Remorse." In The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Volume 16, 1027-59. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

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Scott, Matthew. "Coleridge's Lectures 1808-1819: On Literature." In The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Frederick Burwick, 185-203. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Thomas, Sophie. "Seeing Things ('As They Are'): Coleridge, Schiller, and the Play of Semblance." Studies in Romanticism 43, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 537-55.

Vincent, David. Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750-10,14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

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(1.) Coleridge to Thomas Poole, 16 October 1797 in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works, ed. H.J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 503.

(2.) See David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1089), 177-80.

(3.) See my Social Reform in Gothic Writing: Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764-1834 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). George Erving lists how Remorse incorporates many elements of the Gothic mode in "Coleridge as Playwright," in The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Frederick Burwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 398-99.

(4.) Cox, In the Shadows of Romance: Romantic Tragic Drama in Germany, England and France (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1987); Burwick, Illusion and the Drama: Critical Theory of the Enlightenment and Romantic Era (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991); Carlson, In the Theater of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

(5.) Cox, "'Illegitimate' Pantomime in the 'Legitimate' Theater: Context as Text," SiR 54, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 159-86. See also Cox, "Spots of Time: The Structure of the Dramatic Evening in the Theater of Romanticism," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 41, no. 4 (1999): 403-25. For a recent monograph employing this contextual method, see Melynda Nuss, Distance, Theatre, and the Public Voice, 1750-1850 (New York: Palgrave Maemillan, 2012).

(6.) John Worthen, The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 36.

(7.) Parker, Romantic Tragedies: The Dark Employments of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

(8.) Murray, Tragic Coleridge (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013); Frederick Burwick also includes a chapter on Coleridge's lesser-known Christmas play, Zapolya (Surrey Theatre, 1816), in Playing to the Crowd: London Popular Theatre, 1780-1830 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 53-69.

(9.) Burwick, Illusion and the Drama; Carlson, In the Theater of Romanticism; Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic.

(10.) Crabb Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1898), 261.

(11.) See Joseph Donohue, "The London Theatre at the End of the Eighteenth Century" in The London Theatre World, 1160-1800, ed. Robert Hume (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 337-70.

(12.) See Jeffrey Cox and Michael Gainer, Introduction to The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2003), vii-xxiv.

(13.) Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth-Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 193-206.

(14.) Baillie, "Introductory Discourse," in Plays on the Passions, ed. Peter Duthie (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2001), 104, 109.

(15.) Murray, Tragic Coleridge, 96-98.

(16.) See Gamer, Romanticism, 103-5.

(17.) Thomas, "Seeing Things ('As They Are'): Coleridge, Schiller, and the Play of Semblance," SiR 43, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 541.

(18.) Christie, "Res Theatralis Histrionica: Acting Coleridge in the Lecture Theater," SiR 52, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 486.

(19.) Review of Remorse: A Tragedy, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, La Belle Assemblee 42 (1813): 81.

(20.) Reviews of Remorse: A Tragedy, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Morning Chronicle 25 January 1813, reprinted in Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, ed. J. R. de J. Jackson (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), 113.

(21.) Other positive reviews include Morning Post 25 January 1813, European Magazine (February 1813), Literary Panorama (February 1813), and Universal Magazine (February 1813). Notable exceptions include a scathing unsigned review in The Times 25 January 1813, the Examiner 31 January 1813, and the Theatrical Inquisitor (February 1813). The vituperative nature of the first two can be attributed to Leigh Hunt's influence.

(22.) Cox and Gamer, Romantic Drama, 165-66.

(23.) See Joseph Donohue, "The London Theatre," 337-70.

(24.) Edmund Gosse, English Literature: From the Age of Johnson to the Age of Tennyson (London: Macmillan, 1904), 51.

(25.) Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834 (New York: Pantheon, 1998).

(26.) S. T. Coleridge. 1772-1834. n.d. MS Archives of the Royal Literary Fund 41, World Microforms, Nineteenth Century Collections Online, http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/GZuEX, accessed 11 June 2014.

(27.) Using a historic standard of living measurement, this amount in 2015 would be roughly equivalent to [pounds sterling]2,660 or $3,484. See Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson, "Five Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a UK Pound Amount, 1270 to Present," Measuring Worth, 2016, http://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/, accessed 30 January 2016.

(28.) J. C. C. Mays, "Introduction," in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 16 (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1036.

(29.) Holmes, Coleridge, 242-43.

(30.) Holmes, Coleridge, 117-18.

(31.) Christie, "Res Theatralis Histrionica," 486.

(32.) Christie, "Res Theatralis Histrionica," 488.

(33.) See Gamer, Romanticism, 103-5.

(34.) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Remorse: A Tragedy, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 16 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 1063-66. Subsequent references are to this edition, cited in the text.

(35.) J. C. C. Mays, "Introduction," 1027.

(36.) S. T. Coleridge, Remorse: A Tragedy, in Fawcett's Collection of 18th- and 19th-Century English Drama, vol. 46, issue 1 (London: W. Pople, 1813), iv.

(37.) J. C. C. Mays, "Introduction," 1038.

(38.) The playbill for the opening night, 23 January 1813, uses similar language and does not name Coleridge. My gratitude is due to Moira Goff, Librarian at the Garrick Club, for this information.

(39.) Charles Lamb, Prologue to Remorse, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Romantic Drama, eds. Cox and Gamer, 168-69.

(40.) See Carlson, "An Active Imagination: Coleridge and the Politics of Dramatic Reform," Modern Philology 86, no. 1 (August 1988): 22-33, 28.

(41.) Carlson, "An Active Imagination," 28.

(42.) Erving, "Coleridge as Playwright," 399, and Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic, 101-2.

(43.) For an extensive discussion of the national political context for this critique vis-a-vis Remorse, see Carlson, "Active Imagination," 22-33.

(44.) Coleridge, The Major Works, 459.

(45.) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures Upon Shakespeare, vol. 4, The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1853), 79.

(46.) See, for example, Frederick Burwick, Illusion and the Drama, 191-230.

(47.) Scott, "Coleridge's Lectures 1808-1819: On Literature," in The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Frederick Burwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 201.

(48.) Cox, "Spots of Time," 413.

(49.) Jewett, Fatal Autonomy: Romantic Drama and the Rhetoric of Agency (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 99-100.

(50.) Thomas, "Seeing Things," 540.

(51.) Parker, Romantic Tragedies, 142.

(52.) Burwick, Illusion and the Drama, 268.

(53.) Examiner 31 January 1813: 73-74. The Morning Chronicle 25 January 1813, and Morning Post 25 January 1813 comment variously on the scene's stunning visual and auditory effects.

(54.) Reilly, "Music in Colendge's Remorse," ed. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass, Romantic-Era Songs, http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/douglass/music/alburn-remorse.html, accessed 2 February 2016.

(55.) Kelly, Reminiscences of Michael Kelly of the King's Theatre and Theatre Royal Drury Lane, vol. 2 (London: Colburn, 1826), 309-10.

(56.) J. C. C. Mays, "Introduction," 1031.