Coleridge- Darker Reflections by Richard Holmes

Author:Richard Holmes [Holmes, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007378821
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

…My body bending forward, yea, o’erbalanced

Almost beyond recoil, on the dim brink

Of a huge chasm I stept. The shadowy moonshine

Filling the void so counterfeited substance,

That my foot hung aslant adown the edge…

When a boy, my lord!

I could have sat whole hours beside that chasm,

Push’d in huge stones and heard them strike and rattle

Against its horrid sides…114

In the final Act, the villainous Ordonio, rather than being swept off to prison, was to be stabbed to death on stage by Alhadra.

Coleridge conceded these lurid alterations without protest, and even with a kind of fascination at what popular taste apparently demanded of him. (The process was similar to a modern novelist watching his work adapted for Hollywood.) The brutal stabbing was the one contrivance that worried him, and was to be played on the first night without his permission. (He “absolutely had the Hiss half way out of my Lips” when he first saw it but then “retracted it”, when he registered its stunning effect on the audience.) For the rest, he said tactfully that everything was improved, and that he earned the reputation of “the Amenable Author” in the green room, from his willingness to cut and rewrite up to the last moments.115

The plot changes were largely a matter of clarifying what always remained a slightly hectic story-line. A new opening scene in Act I laid in the back-story of fraternal rivalry for the audience, and announced the psychological theme:

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