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Reference
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Cambridge History
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The Victorian Age, Part One
>
Nineteenth-Century Drama
> Charles Robert Maturin
Richard Lalor Sheil
H. H. Milman
CONTENTS
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VOLUME CONTENTS
·
INDEX OF ALL CHAPTERS
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BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes
(190721).
Volume XIII. The Victorian Age, Part One.
VIII.
Nineteenth-Century Drama
.
§ 3. Charles Robert Maturin.
Hazlitts last lecture on the dramatic literature of the age of Elizabeth is largely concerned with German influence on the tragedy and romantic drama of his day. That influence can be clearly discerned in the plays of Charles Robert Maturin, an Irish clergyman, whose three tragedies
Bertram; or, The Castle of St. Aldobrond; Manuel;
and
Fredolfo
were produced in London in the years 1816 and 1817.
Bertram
was a famous and successful play in its time. It was brought to the notice of Edmund Kean by Walter Scott and Byron; it was the object of an attack by Coleridge in
The Courier,
which, in its turn, roused a notorious attack by Hazlitt on Coleridge. The ridicule of
The Anti-Jacobin
had not opened the eyes of the public to the shortcomings of the drama of Kotzebue; and Coleridges translation of
Wallenstein
appears to have had no corrective influence on taste. Maturins
Bertram,
with its gloomy Byronic herovillain, its strained sentiment, its setting in castle and monastery and its attempt at the portrayal of frantic passions, has all the vices of a vicious order of tragedy. Nothing, to the modern reader, seems real; nothing inevitable. In Hazlitts words: There is no action: there is neither cause nor effect. The passion described does not arise naturally out of the previous circumstances, nor lead necessarily to the consequences that follow. This is true, also, of
Manuel;
and
Fredolfo,
a piece of romanticism run mad, shocked the first and last audience that ever saw it with a display of villainy which even that age could not stomach. Maturin, in later years, admitted that his acquaintance with life was so limited as to make him dependent on his imagination alone (and he might have added the imagination of other dramatists) for his characters, situations and language. He was, however, a better poet than Sheil. For all his excess in physical horror, his verse shows sensibility and has some beauty.
7
CONTENTS
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BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
Richard Lalor Sheil
H. H. Milman
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