Bertram

The author of Melmoth the wanderer (1820) was an Anglican curate in Dublin struggling to maintain his family when Bertram, with the support of Scott and Byron, was produced at Drury Lane. It is a play of violent and excessive emotions. Kean played the title role, one of those villain-heroes descended from Schiller's Moor, and made the part his own. There were opportunities for elaborate stage effects, notably the storm in the first act. The audience was in the mood for Gothic melodrama, and the production was a resounding success, making for its author about $1,000. Coleridge (whose Remorse three years earlier earned $400) wrote a destructive critique of the play: though audiences of today's Theatre of Cruelty, used to drama dealing in emotional states rather than character and narrative, are unlikely to find his criticisms as devastating as Maturin did at the time. And the language, mocked by Coleridge, in its quieter passages has a steady power.


Genre: Literary Fiction