Wordsworth at the theater: illegitimate spectacle in Book 7 of The Prelude

摘要

This article considers the ideological pressures at work in, and upon, Wordsworth's depiction of the playhouse in Book 7 of the 1805 Prelude. Focusing on the poet's visit to Sadler's Wells, it argues that theatricality in Wordsworth's London is a field in which a plurality of performances and discourses, and the array of political ideals and apparatuses they encode, come into contact with one another. Book 7 is not only a manifestation of the frictions inherent in this dynamic, but also a record of the poet's entry into it as both the ideologically alert delighted/terrified spectator and also the creator of spectacle, the writer who sees and stages rural maidenhood (Mary Robinson) as a means of crossing the cultural fault lines of the pantomimic metropolis in which he finds himself. I suggest that Wordsworth negotiates between, on the one hand, a spectacle that operates in the cultural margin and which implicitly serves to contest the regulation of language and the institutionalization of art through stagings of romance and fairy tales, and, on the other, a spectacle that functions through affect as a means of safely redirecting the energies of the crowd. The problematic of Wordsworthian theatricality, I want to demonstrate, is that it seeks to combine radical and conservative deployments of the theater.