The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Burwick Frederick

Author:Burwick, Frederick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

ZAPOLYA, A CHRISTMAS TALE (1817)

Encouraged by Byron to build upon the success of Remorse, Coleridge wrote what became his last play, Zapolya, in December 1815 and January 1816. Drury Lane rejected it, however, and it was not published until 1817, nor did it see the stage until February 1818 when it ran for ten nights at the Surrey Theatre before disappearing altogether, perhaps, as The Theatrical Review suggested, because it was ‘of too serious a cast for the frequenters of this Theatre, and …too good [or] at any rate … Too poetical’ (PW III (CC), 1331).

Though he began Zapolya as a tragedy, Coleridge shifted course to produce a Shakespearean romance in the manner of The Winter’s Tale, with twenty years separating its two parts and with thematic emphasis on the ability of pious and long-suffering patience to overcome political and familial divisiveness. As with Osorio and Remorse, Zapolya offers oblique commentary upon contemporary events by setting them in a remote and foreign historical past. Set (probably) during the civil wars of seventeenth-century Hungary, its first part, ‘The Prelude, entitled “The Usurper’s Fortune”’, puts the heroic military commander, Rab Kiuprili, who has returned from the front upon learning of the king’s death, in dramatic confrontation with the usurping King Emerick and with Kiuprili’s son Casimir, who has been duped by Emerick into believing that his bid for the throne is legitimate. Kiuprili is thrown in prison for challenging Emerick’s authority, but escapes with the deposed Queen, Zapolya, and her infant Andreas, the rightful heir. The second part, ‘The Sequel, entitled “The Usurper’s Fate”’, unfolds in four acts, culminating with the overthrow of Emerick, Andrea’s ascendancy, reconcilement between Kiuprili and Casimir, and the reunion of Zapolya and Andreas, who had been separated from one another since his infancy, she having been forced to live as a forest savage to avoid capture and execution by Emericks forces, and he having been raised by a peasant foster-father.

Critics have sometimes viewed the play as a celebration of Napoleon’s final defeat in June 1815, but by the time of Zapolya’s composition a half year later, Coleridge’s focus was upon post-war economic dislocations and social unrest, conditions that also prompted his Lay Sermons, written immediately after Zapolya.25 The second of these begins with the observation that ‘Peace has come without the advantages expected from Peace, and on the contrary, with many of the severest inconveniences usually attributable to War’ (LS (CC), 141). Coleridge’s diagnosis of the nation’s ills is less concerned with the problems of economic recession per se, than with the serious threat to peace posed by restive, unemployed workers and soldiers recently returned from war, who were susceptible, to the inflammatory rhetoric of ‘vile demagogues’ spreading ‘political calumny [and] private slander’ (LS (CC), 151). Such false physicians, ‘Mountebanks and Zanies of Patriotism’ (he doesn’t name names, but his letters suggest Cobbett, Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, among others) destroy ‘every principle, every feeling, that binds the citizen to his country, the spirit to its Creator’ (LS (CC), 151).

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