The Sublime and the Grotesque in Romantic Drama

Language Forum, Vol. 27, No. 1-2, Jan.-Dec. 2001, New Delhi, India

Abstract

The verse dramas of the early romantic period have recently been reconsidered for their
significance in reorienting our approaches to drama and performance. This article highlights
the closet dramas of the early British romantics as a subversive and ideological genre which
has inspired radical experimentalists in the field of dramatic theory and practice. In spite of
the old argument that these plays have no performance potentialities of their own, new
readings of them suggest that the early romantics were in search of new forms to challenge
the established norms of mimesis in drama. It is maintained that their exploitation of the
sublime and the grotesque as devices for such a challenge was rooted in their faith in science,
on the one hand, and in their strategy of subverting the prevailing norms of perception, on the
other. It has also been argued that these devices were the necessary consequences of dramas
which meant to portray disoriented people who were the first victims of a society that was
heading towards economic liberalism, a society that glorified energy and, at the same time,
was shocked by the terrors it inflicted on the bodies involved.

The Sublime and the Grotesque in Romantic Drama

Arn. Do you - dare you

To taunt me with born deformity?
Str. Were I to taunt a buffalo with this
Cloven foot of thine, or the swift drome-
dary
With thy sublime of humps, the animals
Would revel in the compliment.
...
...Thy form is natural: `t was only
Natures mistaken largess to bestow
The gifts which are of others upon man.1
(The Deformed Transformed, I, i, 100-112)

Milton, it will be remembered, has given

a clouded moon to paradise itself.
Wordsworth2

...confusion...can likewise serve as a representation

of the supersensuous and supply the mind with
upward impetus... . Schiller 3
 We have known the early romantics mainly as poets and not as dramatists.

Contemporary theatrics has only recently acknowledged its debt to the early romantics

contributions in this field. Research in the last three decades has suggested that their

dramas, invigorated by a language that had to be artificial, subversive, and socially

informed, attempted to interpret the universe as a phenomenon basically founded in

chaos and incomprehensibility rather than in a divinely ordained teleology4 It has also

been laid down that they retreated from representation to higher performative levels

such as parody, romance, farce and grotesque. This paper tries to establish the scene to

view the early romantics verse (closet) dramas -- a drama that happens primarily in

language and/or in the mind -- as prototypes of contemporary theatres. The early

romantics were bent on undermining the hegemonic discourse(s) of power which was

beginning to solidify itself in more concrete institutions. They felt the need for subversive

dramatic strategies to unravel the power-body mechanisms of their age; contemporary

dramatists such as Artaud, Grotowsky or Beckett, among others, never overlooked their

legacy.

It might sound strange that while this papers concern is body/politics, closet

dramas which were primarily written to be read should be foregrounded. The truth of

the matter is that the romantics were highly conscious of dramatic form as a socio-

political medium. We should also bear in mind that the term closet does not mean their

dramas were unperformable; it may also suggest a kind of rear-guard attack in a society

which was beginning to be afflicted with commercial theatres. In other words, closet

drama might as well suggest a kind of drama written for another age which was ready to

break the ground and move away from theatre to performance.

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 The romantic verse drama occurs within language. Language is thus a scene

which must ingest gestures and language resonances to put the body in a relational

situation between internal and external spaces. This type of drama, to borrow Sartres

remark, makes the whole world a part of language...the horizons, the obscure forces

which work within us and outside us.5 At the same time, we know that romantic irony

considers language a structured, rational system that by its very nature cannot capture or

articulate the unstructured and chaotic.6 Thus, language can only be considered as an

index registering interactions between the triangle of space(s), energy, and the body.

Such relationships demand a mode of perception which, as language becomes the

instrument through which the internal voice/ energy bends the dimensions of space and

body, can manifest itself in a more material way.

A close study of Shelley's The Cenci (1819) or Byron's The Two Foscari (1821)

and The Deformed Transformed (1822) or Wordsworth's only play, The Borderers (1796-

7), suggests that in all of these plays body is the locus on which energy hinges as we

watch power either (re)inscribe body or itself challenged by the body. The dramas of the

romantics is an arena in which the rules of mimesis are allegorically questioned by having

the individual and the institutions de-scribe and (re)inscribe power on the body,

respectively.

Speculating on the body and expressing sympathy with the outcast and the victim

of brutal judgment were rooted in the French Revolution and its campaign for slave

emancipation.7 It also became a part of the dramaturgy of the romantics. It is in the

nature of power to theatricalise and/or legitimize itself. This also was the lesson

disseminated to society by those who created the reign of terror in France. Therefore, as

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institutions of power tried to parcel the body of the dispossessed and their spaces out into

non-existence, the dramas of romantic poets revived social and symbolic topographies

by having their characters participate in a program of rethinking of [their] bodies and

[their] visions.8 Coleridges Alvar in Remorse and Shelleys Beatrice in The Cenci

are two instances of such characters who try to relocate their bodies. Optimistic as

Coleridge was, and unlike Wordsworth, Shelley, or Byron, whose revolutionary

reflections take tragic turns in their plays,9 he has Alvar re-claim his body, while in

Shelley's The Cenci and in Byron's The Two Foscari, the bodies of the protagonists get

eliminated.

This process of the body cast out and/or reclaimed is a common experience

among the early romantic playwrights. Francis Barker identifies this as a power-

mechanism which used to exclude the dispossessed and/or make use of them. It matures

in L`age classique and is consummated in the nineteenth century with the global triumph
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of the bourgeois class. The romantics verse dramas are strong socio-political

comments on the plights of a society disturbed and disoriented by some such socio-

economic catastrophes consequent on the rise of economic liberalism.11 And it was the

theatrical representation of such ordeals that forced the romantics to look for new devices

to enable them to foreground the complex manifestations of power/energy on body and

space. A representation of this kind which highlighted body-power relations chose to

contravene the tenets of the established theatre of the time by propounding sublime and

grotesque elements in the realm of perception. This call for change also came from

another quarter: interest in science in general and in optics in particular.

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 In the sphere of science which manifested itself in the workings of energy and

body, Frankenstein, among others, puts forth the polemics of an age concerned with

change and transformation by focusing on body. This novel has several undercurrents12

but, generally speaking, it can be viewed as a preoccupation with energy empowering

man to capture the so far uncaptured realms of mind and body.

One of the first preoccupations of Victor, the Swiss prodigy in Frankenstein, is

power. The morning after a thunder strikes an oak, he visits the tree and beholds that it

was not splintered by the shock, but entirely reduced to thin ribands of wood. He then so

casually mentions: I never beheld anything so utterly destroyed. To further our

knowledge of his peculiar nature -- which runs parallel to the workings of nature -- victor

explains how a man of great research who is, like Victor, excited by this catastrophe

tries to acquaint him with the more obvious laws of electricity, and enters on the

explanation of a theory which he had formed on the subject of electricity and galvanism,

which was at once new and astonishing to me.13

Victor, the embodiment of the scientist-demon-hero of the Renaissance

modernity, is not an accidental fictitious character molded by a distempered brain, but a

natural, and evidently ultimate, consequence of a new mode of perception that conceived

the universe as a flux of energy and as the overriding agent in any operations in nature, a

tendency which can be described as a strong longing for a new form of humanity.14

Before Mary Shelley, it was Wordsworth who acknowledged his faith in a new Being

who could serve as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man15 if man could

familiarize himself with science.

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 This thirst for relating energy to the workings of the mind and the body had great

enticement for Coleridge. In a letter to Henry Crabb Robinson (7 Dec., 1812), he requests

him to procure for him the perusal of Goethes work on Light & Color.16 What

interests him in this work is Goethes idea that light is the source of energy and motion.

Later, in his Notebooks (Aug. 1818), he identifies five powers to have plus/minus

features:

...,there are five distinct Powers, Gravitation, Light,

Magnetism, Electricity, and Galvanism... . Each of
the 5 have two Poles, or antithetic forces, + and -, or
posi- and nega- tive.

Grav.= centrifugal & centripetal = - and +

light, colorific and calorific = - and. +
Magnetism, attractive and repulsive = - and +
Electr.- contractive and dilative = - and +
Galvanism, separative & constructive = - and +

These are the cosmical Decad of the

Pythagoreans.17

Thus Coleridges acquaintance with light as energy with the intensifying heat at one end

of the spectrum and the intensifying darkness at the other end18 had great consequences

in his theory of perception. His use of light and darkness can best be illustrated in his play

Remorse where he stages extreme darkness with extreme light, a cinematic technique

which is of a high theatrical value.

This new mythology gained force as the matter-based physics of the eighteenth

century began to give way to the energy-based physics of the nineteenth century.19 If

science expanded its realm to cover the mind, then the polarities of electricity,

magnetism, galvanism had to inform the construction of mind and matter.20 Goethe

argued that all of us have some electrical and magnetic forces within us; and we put

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forth, like the magnet itself, an attractive or repulsive power, as we come in contact with

something similar or dissimilar.21 His praise for Napoleon best illustrates this new faith:

to Goethe, he was a man endowed at every hour with energy.22

Byron, Shelley, and Keats had their own preoccupations with energy and

matter/body. Harmony, framework, and structure are but known codes in the discourse of

order. On the other hand, energy-based perception affects the classical notion of framed

and fixed or bounded ideas or substances. In Romanticism, observes Gilbertson,

boundaries cease to be the immovable partitions between discrete substances, the walls

by which man determines his order and security among the categories of existence.23

Byron, however, by trespassing these boundaries, subscribes to a disorderly order not

to affirm chaos but to accentuate change that has a different set of codes. Byron, as

Garber observes, does not choose to stand against chaos but to stand with it, to give it a

fertilizing role in an encompassing scheme.24 His play, Sardanapalus (1821), in which a

king decides not to rule exploits the codes of a universe informed by the tenets of a chaos

rather than order. Landscape or space, for instance, in his works -- especially in Childe

Harold and Don Juan -- points to the polarities of energy: one extreme showing

agonized, corrupted, and spoiled nature -- nature elevated to the level of human history as

chaos, the other showing a Dionysian, innocent, and fertile nature -- nature considered

as sublime.

Shelleys interest in energy can be traced in his concern with music. Not only is

the transforming world a music that dissolves strain, but also, as he elaborates on the

role of language in A Defence, energy manifests itself best in language and the energy

latent in it. The huge machination of violence and atrocity, for instance, evoked in his

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play, The Cenci(1819), is done through a vibrating language the resonances of which

create bold outlines of the bodies which are either subjected to violence or subject others

to it

Keats, on the other hand, has always been known for his non-kinetic imagery

describing moments prolonged by the play of imagination. In a letter to George and

Georgiana Keats, he celebrates the latent energy in life as an Electric fire in human

nature tending to purify - so that among these human creatures there is continually some

birth of new heroism.25 His craze for the concrete world is proverbial and this

mesmerized attitude towards objects poses him in sharp contrast with Byron and Shelley

mainly because Keats solidifies the transient moments into static pictures, or rather

immortalizes objects, whereas Shelley, for instance, lets his eyes run with the flow of the

world. Yet Keats' method is another mode of creating tension by concentrating so much

energy in objects that their familiarity disappears. Thus poetic objects threaten our secure

world as he prolongs the length of perception whereby habit is replaced by desire.

Keats idea of an oscillatory and oscillating mind is central to the discussion at

hand. The germinal cause of the gothic (not in its modern popular sense which, in Coxs

words, supports institutionalized power),26 of the romantic sublime, and of the grotesque,

is an oscillatory mind which, like a champion of a non-despotic empire, always breaks

through systems associated with power, determinism, fanaticism. Such a mind prefers

self-imposed subjection to half-truths to prepare the ground for change.

Energy-based science was destined to have a direct impact on perception. The

early romantics propounded seeing as an agency-acquiring power. To them, beholding,

not passive on-looking, is a means in their long-term strategy of overcoming mimesis and

8
the psychology pertinent to it. It is evident in Keats and Charles Browns play Otho the

Great where Ludolph says:27

When I close
These lids, I see far fiercer brilliances,-
Skies full of splendid moons, and shooting stars,
And panting fountains quivering with deep glows.
( V, v, 43-47 )

Here conventional seeing is contravened; the eye -- a different eye -- becomes the

executive agent of the oscillating mind. It is this new organ that establishes a dome in

Xanadu or, when bestowed to an Ancient Mariner, disorients the fact-oriented young

man and creates polarity in the monotonous rhythms of a routine life.

It is this fascination with the eye which is directly related to the early romantics

preoccupation with the grotesque and the sublime which, in turn, affected romantic

theatrics. Their achievement in this field gave rise to bi-focal perception which, as a

theatrical means, has had a great impact on drama in general and on performance in

particular.

Among the British romantics European counterparts, Goethes contribution to

bi-focality is remarkable. In response to empirical psychology that assumes our senses

as passive recipients of external impressions, Goethe, establishes the idea of opposition

between the external world and our senses. Goethe asserts that colours produced in our

perception may be seeing colours produced by the eye itself. ...28 To enlighten

Eckermann, he says that our eye works according to the law of required change

perhaps to harmonize itself with our higher spiritual nature.29Fascinated by Goethes

Theory of Colors, Eckermann comes across yet another of Goethes laws which is

relevant to the law of required change:

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 On a clear winters day, and in the sunlight, the
shadows cast upon the snow frequently appear blue.
This is classed by Goethe,..., under the subjective
phenomena: for he assumes as a principle that the
sunlight comes down to us not perfectly white;
but, penetrating through an atmosphere more or less
misty, yellowish: so that the snow, when the sun
shines upon it, is not perfectly white, but tinged
with yellow, which charms the eye to opposition
production of blue. The blue shadow is, according
to this view, a demanded colour. ...30

This was in accord with Coleridges theory of perception. Goethes effort to explain

sensory perception as the link between subjective quality and objective quantity31 paved

the way, in Burwicks words, to a literary fascination with the dream-vision and the

trance.32 This looked more like the conspiracy of the senses to establish their own

visionary republic in which the material world is re-fused according to a high degree of

autonomy.

This he further emphasizes by referring us to Kants notion of time and space. In a

letter to Pryce (April, 1818), he praises Kants merit as a man who proved that Space

and Time were 1, neither general terms, 2. nor abstractions from Things, 3. nor Things

themselves; but, 4. the pure a priori forms of the intuitive faculty... . They are the acts of

the perceptive powers of which all particular acts of perception are modifications & c.33

If time and space are subjective entities within the subject, then perception which

must always be of things in space -- real or imaginary, static or dynamic -- is subject to

the momentum or synchronic potentialities of the subject. Perhaps when Byron in his

poem, The Dream(1816), says, ...- The mind can make / Substance, and people planets

of its own / With beings brighter than have been, and give/A breath to forms which can

outlive all flesh.(I, 19-22), he, too, celebrates this autonomy of the mind that creates its

10
own tyranny of pleasure and pain, (I, 14) because the mind expands its territory in

dreams and this distorts the present.

As perception expands its scope, our being divides, and thus, as the compound

eye divides transversely, the focal point is -- if not lost -- blurred, displaced, or softened.

This is irresistible to Goethe who was bent towards classicism. Goethe shows Eckermann

a lithograph done by Delacroix, a scene from Faust showing Mephistopheles and Faust

on their way to free Margareta from prison. Eckermanns account of the picture is

absorbing enough to be quoted here at length:

They ride so fast that Faust can scarcely keep his

seat; the wind has blown off his cap, which fastened
by straps about his neck, flies far behind him. He
has turned his fearful inquiring face to
Mephistopheles, to whom he listens.
Mephistopheles, on the contrary, sits undisturbed,
like a being of a higher order: he rides no living
horse, for he loves not what is living; indeed, he
does not need it, for his will moves him with the
swiftness he requires. He has a horse... that is a
mere bag of bones... . It is of a bright colour, and
seems to be phosphorescent in the darkness of
night. It is neither bridled nor saddled. The
supernatural rider sits easily and negligently, with
his face turned towards Faust in conversation. The
opposing element of air does not exist for him;
neither he nor his horse feels anything of it. Not a
hair of either is stirred.34

Eckermann is puzzled over Delacroixs art because he has made no figure like another,

but in each expressed some different part of the action.35 Goethe, it seems, is having

Ekermann understand bi-focality, a tendency central to romantic imagination.

A more brilliant passage on this same idea of de-centralization in works of art

can be found in another of Goethes essays. In discussing Leonardos The Last Supper

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he maintains that the artist, by dividing Christs devotees in groups of three, has given

more energy to the sides, leaving the centre almost empty. He then concludes if centre is

emptied or not accented, attention is concentered on the sides36 which can stimulate our

imagination.

No wonder, then, that Keats citizens on the Grecian Urn are emptying the town,

Byrons Don Juan and Childe Harold set out for a new life, leaving behind their centres

of family and tribe, Sardanapalus sheds the corrupt monarchy of his predecessors by

setting his castle ablaze to lesson the ages, Shelleys Prometheus sides with an unbound

growth to be materialized beyond the boundaries of a determined order/centre, and,

finally, a group of men oscillate between the borders of Scotland and England in

Wordsworths The Borderers. It is this legacy which has strengthened the epic element

in modern drama. The early romantics were among the forerunners of those dramatists

who, by accentuating fragmentation of plot, exploiting scenic methods of presentation

and inclining towards polyphony, are more intimate with contemporary dramatists.

This tipping over, this centrifugal or eddying movement has its unique

consequences. In the realm of the self one tends to be a negotiator with, if not an

annihilator of, its rigidity, a thing so crucial in the theatre of contradictions. Socially or

politically, one is apt to believe in a positive antagonism. And aesthetically, when one

shies away from the centre, one tends to deviate from the norms of beauty which are

usually centralized. Trespassing the boundaries of the received forms and norms, we

are at the threshold of the terrible, the awful, the boundless, and the ugly - all but names

for what has come to be called the sublime; which, in turn, widens the chasm between the

eddying self and the normal society.

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 The role that Schiller assigns to the sublime in mans life is one of overcoming

violence in nature. It manifests itself realistically or idealistically. To avoid natures

violence realistically or to impose our will upon it, we use science, but the way Schiller

suggests to deal with nature idealistically might sound odd: To destroy the very concept

of a force means simply to submit to it voluntarily.37 Schiller identifies two genii to

accompany us through life. The first conduces us to beauty and, its realm is the world of

sense only and beyond this its earthly wings cannot bear us.38 But when the second

approaches, it is tacit and solemn, and upon its powerful pinion we are borne across the

vertiginous depths.39 The sublime is further associated with rupture because it Not

gradually..., but suddenly and with a shock40 ushers us into an acquaintance aided by

the terrifying and magnificent spectacle of change which destroys everything and

creates it anew, and destroys again -.... To mankind the sublime is valuable with

reference to the pure daemon in him.41 Locke destroys will, and Schiller revives it in the

form of the sublime.

If the sublime is a yearning for what is not, Schillers sense of the sublime must

be one step ahead of Lockes psychology, on the one hand, and Freuds precursor in the

realm of the unconscious, on the other. As Weiskel says, Locke actually substituted

anxiety for the will. He concludes that since Locke says will arises from the perception

of absence,42 the consequence of such a perception is anxiety the antidote of which is the

sublime, or, in Freuds terminology, the defense mechanism known as sublimation.

Thus the romantic poets, with their emphasis on the expressive self, foreground

consciousness contact with, and wish for, what is not.

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 The romantic sublime, however, should not be confused with irrationality, for,

more than anything else, it was rather anti-rationalist or a critique of reason as defined by

the Enlightenment. To destroy or challenge the constructs of the age of Enlightenment,

Romanticists had to develop their own discourse. They, for instance, were critical of the

boundary strategy of the eighteenth century mentality. Gilbertson sees this metaphoric

meaning of boundary functional from feudalism to the eighteenth century

Enlightenment. In feudalism, Gilbertson informs us, boundary designated the social and

economic distinctions attendant to landed property. And the Enlightenment conventions

that established cultural boundaries to define the conventions of thought and action, and

therefore of personal identity,43 seemed to romanticists not that much remote from the

fetters used in the Feudal age. Thus, the sublime must be redefined as transgressing the

borders, a campaign against the status-quo with metaphors of aggression and

transgression.

Schiller sees the same power struggle in world history, where prosperity and

order without freedom reduce man to an obedient cog in a machine. Only when

freedom contradicts this procession of the physical order, Schiller believes, world

history appears to me a sublime object.44 It, therefore, must be noted here that the appeal

of history -- as a moment of confusion or catastrophe -- for the romantic dramatists has

its roots in such a notion of history .

The classical notion of beauty emphasized verification, a tenet which supported

order and decorum to establish a conservative order. To the classicist Goethe ancient

literature borders on the serious and dignified, while romanticism is an unnatural and

original thing but artificial, recherch, heightened, exaggerated, bizarre, to the point of

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 45
travesty and caricature. On the other side, there is Lessing, who recognizes the

sublime in nature where everything is interwoven, everything changes with everything,

everything merges from one into another. But he, like Goethe, maintains that for us --

fine spirits that we are -- to witness this state of enjoyment in nature, we should be

able to set up arbitrary limits... to eliminate and to guide46 our enjoyment at will.

In dealing with the sublime, the romantics needed an autonomy which they

ultimately found in Kants aesthetics. After analyzing different kinds of the sublime and

the effect of each on the subject, Kant observes that the sublime in nature is improperly

so called, and the sublimity should in strictness, be attributed merely to the attitude of

thought... .47 Thus Kant provides the license for Coleridge to make his pleasure dome in

Xanadu or for Wordsworth to go dreaming disguised as Peter Bell. If reason cloaked the

discourse of confinement with decorum, symmetry and harmony, romanticists counter-

balanced this strategy by declaring theirs the subversive discourse of the oppressed,

which gives priority to a-symmetries deemed inappropriate for the stage by the canons.

This is why their mirrors are almost never plane but convex or concave ones and, thus,

the image rarely the classical life-size portraits, but broken, dull, vague, and agonized

fantasies of the self, and very rarely the determined self itself. The irony in romantic

process of making is that it is at the same time an unmaking process and these,

making and unmaking... are the essential gestures in that wary cooperation with chaos

which defines the romantic ironist.48

But if the sublime crosses the borders of decorum, of what can its essence be

comprised? Of the great, the unlimited, the colossal, the astronomical only? Does it

comprise only positive aspects or should we speak of a negative sublime? In other words,

15
does romanticism neglect impure elements in the sublime? In spite of the fact that Kant

sees the sublime as the attitude of thought, he shows his reserve of mind by setting a

limit to the limitless products of the mind. He allows the artist to show Furies, disease,

devastations of war,... as evils in a very beautiful manner. But with regard to one kind of

ugliness he cautions us and it is that which excites disgust. Because, to him, this feeling

destroys all aesthetic delight, and consequently artistic beauty... .49 Both Shelley and

Schiller, however, transgressed such limits, the former in The Cenci and the latter in The

Robbers.

Likewise, F. Schlegel owns that impurity is a part of mans soul. Just as pure

oxygen is not good for breathing and is mixed with nitrogen, shunning from the impure

is the essence of foolishness. And when discussing the novel and psychology, he

considers it illogical...to shrink from even the most painstaking and thorough analysis of

unnatural pleasure, horrible tortures, revolting infamy, and disgusting physical or mental

impotence. 50

The road to this mode, ironic though it may sound, had previously been paved by

Lessing. In Laocoon ( 1766) he shows his surprise when he comes across terror, extreme

pain and the disgusting in art. Gerald Gillespie observes that in this set of statues Lessing

recognized two mixed sensations, the ridiculous and the horrible, springing from

incongruity or deformation. Lessing, says Gillespie, realized that sentiments of disgust

for the corporeal state of character, but respect for his spirit, could combine to produce a

different new sensation, not the desire to laugh, but rather a feeling of sympathy and

fascination.51

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 Elsewhere, Schiller is quite alert to the value of intensity. To Schiller theft in a

tragedy could, morally speaking, be considered as something vile but, aesthetically, the

artist will discard it. But a vile action can be reinstated in our aesthetic estimation, if

the artist can raise it to the level of a crime, say a murder. He confronts us with a

contradiction here: our moral judgment does not like the terrible, while our aesthetic

judgment seeks to be masked by a strong impression.52 Schiller resolves this

contradiction by saying that terror finally serves on the side of moral judgment in that our

mind switches from the quality of crime to thinking about its consequences.

The sublime is also a component of romantic irony. To Schiller, it can also consist

of confusion. He does not limit the sublime to what is unattainable for imagination, the

sublime of quantity, but what is incomprehensible for the understanding, confusion,

which can elevate the mind provided it advances to greatness and announces itself as a

work of nature... .53 Burke also considers obscurity as a sublime element. Clarity for him

is an enemy to all enthusiasms whatsoever and dark, confused, uncertain images have

a great power on the fancy... .54

From the above discussion it is clear that in the aesthetics of the late eighteenth

and early nineteenth centuries the sublime began to include the caricature and the

grotesque. Beside ontological and psychological reasons for this development, one should

not neglect its socio-political dimensions. Erich Auerbach suggests that this mixing of the

genres, this elevation of the low to the sublime is a result of the collapse of the classical

creed that each subject had its own scale or level of representation: All that contributed

to the stability and greatness of the state... was portrayed in the high style, while the rest

was considered as reality or domestic aspect.55 The contempt of the higher class for

17
this reality, according to Harpham, is because reality had a darker side, connected with

the vulgar and possibly orgiastic growth processes in the depths... . Because of this,

decorum is shaken and, in Harphams words, as the mighty shiver on their thrones...

diction becomes overburdened and harsh... .56

To believe that the romantic imagination breaks the boundaries and camps forever

outside the limits of the self and society is a mere misconception. To them, the self

renews itself permanently, but this renewed thing comprises of those broken pieces put

together again: the difference is the fractures and the missing pieces now supplied with

other materials. Besides, the structure of the romantic works can also suggest a return in

which the glittering eye -- exposed to the terrors of vastness -- relocates the self and

society; a relocation which is also a displacing of the received forms of the past.

Byrons play Cain: A Mystery (1821) exemplifies this. It has three-acts, of which the

middle one occurs in The Abyss of Space and the first and the last occur on The land

without paradise. In the last act, after his abysmal journey in the second act, Cain sees

things not as they were but as new things that have a displaced or corrupted aspect.

This is because, in his wifes words, ...that proud spirit, who withdrew thee hence,/ Hath

saddened thine [eyes] still deeper... (III, 44-46).

Related also to the sublime and the grotesque is the romantic poets preoccupation

with images and after-images. Here again we are confronted with Platos The Parable of

The Cave, but this time shadows or the phantasmagorical figures of this world do not

move us away from essence. Now, they themselves are but essences that enhance the

dance of the silhouettes. The mind is the cave or grotto out of which grotto-esque

shapes emerge. In other words, perception is now willing to probe into the nocturnal side

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of life. This was one of the long term programs of the romantics for subverting the

empirical view of perception. If Schelling discusses the effects of Galvanic, electric, and

magnetic forces on our perception, Schubert, observes Burwick, makes us think of

perception and the night-side of our planet:

...Schubert declares that it is not merely the

darkness that makes us see things differently at
night. The energy from the sun now radiates
through the earth and reflects from the moon and
planets rather than shining upon us directly; on the
night-side of the planet, too, we are exposed to
starlight unseen by day.57
Thus, we are subjected to an altered perception by which we become aware of

influences obscured by the daylight demands on our attention. In interpreting

Schuberts concepts, Burwick concludes that the old faith in the supernatural now is

reinterpreted as the inner...world which must stand in harmony with the outer world,

something roughly synonymous with Abramss sense of natural supernaturalism.

In Non-Aristotelian Drama, Madland seems to be arguing that eighteenth-century

German poets like Lenz, did not turn their backs to the cave but were fascinated by the

struggle of light with darkness: The camera obscura or darkened chamber has a fissure

or crack, the image of which is reflected is no longer clear, but becomes diffused and

distorted. Madlands understanding of Lenzs argument that the artist has the freedom

to portray a figure as he sees it - as an individual or as a caricature 58 is essential to our

discussion here because the dominant metaphor for the mind among the romantics is the

metaphor of the cave, typically representable in Keats letter to H. Reynolds (3 May

1818) in which he compares mans life to a large Mansion of many apartments the first

being Thoughtless Chamber and the last the Chamber of Maiden Thought whereby

vision becomes darker and the poise between good and evil gets distorted.59

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 Darkness is an element that Burke considers to be sublime. It is because

imagination is baffled or terrified. Yet romantic imagination, which identifies the mind as

a cave, by letting some light break through from the fractures in this cave, or what Locke

called Camera Obscura, substituted the material determinism of the natural world with

split characters, demon-heroes, marginal ghosts who, in Gillespies words, all of which

can be a variation of the discovery of a mysterious linkage between modern liberated

creativity and the shadow side of existence.60 This shadow side of existence is

sublime, yet because the characters or images appear displaced, corrupted or

absurd, we can say that sublime has another side, the grotesque.

Coleridge has both a taste for, and a simple definition of, the grotesque. The Odd

or the grotesque, to him is when words or images are placed in unusual juxta-position

rather than connection,...the occasional use of which in the minor ornaments of

architecture is an interesting problem for a student in [the] psychology of the Fine

Arts.61 Wordsworths inner eye (Prelude, V, 453), also suggests his concern with

fantasies rather than copies. Keats sense of grotesque is best seen in his letter to George

and Georgiana Keats (1818-19), in which he admires cartoons for being grotesque to a

curious pitch...as there was left so much room for imagination.62 Keats proves that he is

well aware of caricature and the grotesque as highly charged images which cause an

electric shock in the reader. Madland believes that the grotesque is not an idealized

reality. In contrast to classicism which shows nature in a perfect condition which calms

the reader or spectator, the grotesque has a tendency to disturb him or her.63 The

equivalent for Madlands idea that the grotesque tends to disturb is Keats idea that it

leaves so much room for imagination, which undercuts the well-formed works and

20
questions their validity. Even Kant votes against stiff regularity because it is

inherently repugnant to taste. But further on, what he says anticipates Keats taste for

the cartoon and the grotesque: On the other hand, anything that gives the imagination

scope for unstudied and final play is always fresh to us.64

In fact when we consider the definitions of the sublime and the grotesque, we can

see that they overlap in many points. Weiskel knows the sublime to be cognate with the

experiential structure of alienation. ... Alienation also presupposes the bathetic collapse of

the signifying relations which make a social order. The sublime also does not satisfy

understanding completely because it comes down to the claim that the failure to

understand something has the very highest meaning.65

Whats more, there has been a tendency to set the grotesque in opposition to the

beautiful. However, both Burke and Kant provoke us to reconsider the definition of

deformity. The former does not consider deformity as the antonym of beauty because, in

his view, deformity is opposed not to beauty, but to complete common form. Burke

further argues that it is a prejudice in favor of proportion which sets a well-shaped

object in contrast with a deformed one and takes the former as a beautiful object.66

As stated earlier, the early romantics, with their organic approach towards the soul

and imagination, could not exclude or discard the abysmal world as the impure or

demonic layer of mans consciousness because they considered the ugly an aspect of

humanity. Among the romantic plays Byrons Manfred, Cain, and The Deformed

Transformed, Shelleys The Cenci, Wordsworths The Borderers, and Coleridges

Remorse do have elements of the sublime and the grotesque, yet none stands as unique as

The Cenci, a play not so popular in its own time for its impurity.

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 In this play Shelley does not demarcate the sublime and the grotesque; on the

contrary, he pauses on each so long that one flows into the other. In fact had he

demarcated them, he would have contradicted himself because in A Defence of Poetry he

knows drama to be a prismatic and many-sided mirror( 121). If to him this is the

essence of poetry in drama, the manner of representation must very precisely take care

of it. Elsewhere in A Defence he admires Milton as a genius for treating both God and his

Devil equally. Milton, he says, mingled... the elements of human nature as colours upon

a single Pallet, and arranged them in the composition of his great picture according to the

laws of epic truth... ( 130). Shelley achieves this objective in The Cenci by creating a

bi-focal view in portraying his characters. As, for instance, we look at the conflicts

between a cruel father and a resisting daughter, Shelley makes us consider power as

inside-out energy which deforms and disorients both the oppressor and the oppressed.

Shelley knows drama to be the best vehicle to usher us into the shocking moment

when energy/power inscribes itself on the body. His fascination with terror is reminiscent

of Schillers where he says, sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen

expressions of an approximation to the highest good ... tragedy delights by affording a

shadow of that pleasure which exists in pain. ...67

The early British romanticists failed to communicate with their own audience.

They were looking for a heightened language which could let the body move more freely

according to emotions, negative or positive. This eventually led to some stylized actions

that would reduce actions to gestures including both realms of the sublime and the

grotesque. The fact that Stanislavsky chose Byrons Sardanapalus and Grotowsky went

for his Cain, and Artaud re-wrote The Cenci to stand as his manifesto for the Theatre of

22
Cruelty corroborates the claim that the early romantics had a lot in stock to offer to the

posterity to enable them to experiment with forms as some radical gesture in modern

theatre.

NOTES

1
Frederick Page, ed., Byron: Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).
2
W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, eds., The Prose Works of William Wordsworth
(Oxford: At The Clarendon Press, 1974), II, 192
3
Friedrich von Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, trans. Julius A Elias ( New
York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1966 ), 204
4
Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1980),
vii.
5
Jean-Paul Sartre, Myth and Reality in the Theatre, Gambit, Vol. 3, No. 9, 64.
6
Mellor, English Romantic Irony, 10.
7
Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 237
8
Johannes Birringer, Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1991), 28.
9
Julie Carlson, Command Performances: Burke, Coleridge, and Schillers Dramatic Reflections
on the Revolution in France, Wordsworth Circle, Vol. 23, No. 2, 127.
10
Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984),
13.
11
See, Marjean D. Purinton, Romantic Ideology Unmasked (London: Associated University Press, 1994.)
The reader is also invited to look at some plays written by radical British dramatists of the last three
decades of the twentieth century in which these dramatists identify themselves and their own age crazed
with privatization and market economy with the social life and institutions of the early romantics. Howard
Brentons (1942- ) Bloody Poetry (1984) and Edward Bonds(1934- ) The Fool (1976) are but two
outstanding examples.
12
Bette Londons reading of this novel in her essay Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the
Spectacle of Masculinity PMLA, Vol. 108, No., 2, 253-267 gives the major role to the male body
as spectacle. A body that is seen, nonetheless, grotesque and on the threshold of
decomposition.
13
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1993), 32.
14
Eric Bentley, The Modern Theatre (London: Robert Hale Limited, 1950), 25.
15
The Prose Works of W. Wordsworth, I, 141.
16
E. L. Grigs, ed., Collected Letters of S.T. Coleridge, 6 Vols. (Oxford: At The Clarendon Press,
!956 ), III, 442.
17
K. Coburn, ed., Notebooks, 3 vols.,(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), III, 1808-1819.
Ent. 4420, Aug., 1818.
18
F. Burwick, The Damnation of Newton: Goethes Color Theory And Romantic Perception (
Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986), 226.
19
F.Burwick, The Haunted Eye: Perception and The Grotesque in English and German
Romanticism, ( Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1987), 76.
20
Ibid.
21
Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann, trans. John Oxenford, ed. J. K.
Moorhead( London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1930 ), 234.
22
Ibid., 245.
23
Philip Gilbertson, Boundaries and the Self in Romanticism, in English and German
Romanticism: Cross-Currents and Controversies, ed. James Pipkin (Heidelberg: Carl Winter,
1985), 150-51.

23
24
Frederick Garber, Byron, Schelegel, and the Ironists Lucid Contours, in English and German
Romanticism: Cross-Currents and Controversies. ed., James Pipkin (Heidelberg: Carl Winter,
1985), 175.
25
H. Buxton Forman, ed., The Complete Works of John Keats, 5 vols. (Glasgow: Gowars and
Gray, 1901), V, (Letters 1819-1820), 37.
26
Jeffrey N. Cox, ed., Intro., Seven Gothic Plays ( Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992 ), 18.
27
Also quoted by Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (London: Faber and
Faber, 1968), 319.
28
Eckermann, 168.
29
Ibid., 169.
30
Ibid., 298.
31
The Damnation of Newton, 9.
32
Ibid., 210.
33
Collected Letters of S.T. Coleridge, IV, 852.
34
Eckermann,135.
35
Ibid.,135.
36
Goethe, The Relief from Phigalia, in Goethe on Art, ed., John Gage (London: Scholar Press,
1980), 98.
37
Naive and Sentimental Poetry & On the Sublime, 195.
38
Ibid., 197.
39
Ibid., 198.
40
Ibid., 210.
41
Ibid.
42
The Romantic Sublime, 18.
43
Boundaries and The Self in Romanticism, 145, 146, 148.
44
Naive and Sentimental Poetry & On The Sublime, 206.
45
Eckermann, 70-71.
46
G. E. Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Helen Zimmern. Intro. by Victor Lange ( New York:
Dover Publications, Inc., 1962 ), 171.
47
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: At the
Clarendon Press, 1973), 134.
48
Frederick Garber, Byron, Schelegel, and the Ironists Lucid Contours, 179.
49
Ibid., 173-74.
50
F. von Schlegel, The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous works, trans. E. J. Millington, (London:
Henry G. Bohn, 1849) , 419, 11, 34.
51
Gerald Gillespie, Romantic Irony and Anti-Theatre, in English and German Romanticism, ed.,
James Pipkin (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1985), 200-201
52
F. Schiller Reflections on The Use of The Vulgar and Low Elements in Works of Art (1793) in
Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowsky, ed. B. F. Dukore (New York: University of
Hawaii, 1974 ), 470-71.
53
Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, 205.
54
Edmund Burke, The Works and Correspondence, VIII vols. (London: Francis and John
Rivington, 1852), II, 600, 602.
55
See, G. Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of contradiction in Art and Literature
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982 ), 73.
56
Ibid.
57
Burwick, The Haunted Eye, 58.
58
Madland, Non-Aristotelian Drama ( Main: Peter Lang, 1982),134.
59
The Complete Works of J. Keats, (Letters: 1814-1819), 109.
60
Romantic Irony and Anti-Theatre, 205.
61
Notebooks, III, 4503.
62
Letters, IV, 202.
63
Non-Aristotelian Drama, 183.
64
The Critique of Judgment, P.88.

24
65
Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of
Transcendence (London: The Johns Hopkins University, 1976), 35, 36.
66
Burke, 629.
67
P. B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in The Complete Works of P. B. Shelley, 10 vols., eds. Roger
Ingpen and Walter E. Peck ( New York: Gordian Press, 1965 ), VII, 248.

25