target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_8be54f0e-bc65-5920-a6a1-b873a228a1e6">33London, E. H., ‘The Q&A: Adam Phillips. Poetry as Therapy’, The Economist, 29 March 2012, https://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/03/qa-adam-phillips, accessed 15 April 2016.
34Susie Orbach, In Therapy: The Unfolding Story (London: Profile Books, 2018), pp. 83–84.
THERAPY AND POETRY: WORDSWORTH, AFTER SENECA
Wordsworth and Seneca
William Wordsworth was 21 years old when he first travelled to France in November 1791. He discovered a country that had been radically transformed by a revolution that was still unfolding, and remained there for over one year. Jane Worthington argues that Wordsworth developed a particular interest in and understanding of Roman philosophy – and specifically Stoicism – while living in France. In Wordsworth’s Reading of Roman Prose she describes how the culture and philosophy of the Roman Republic had gained a new significance in revolutionary France: ‘The heroic figures of Rome were regularly set up as models of virtuous conduct. French republicans were constantly urged to imitate Roman simplicity of manners.’1 Worthington argues that in France, Wordsworth ‘learned that history, and particularly the ancient history of Rome, could be made to serve present ends. History had come to life.’2
While in France, amidst a new world of freedom, Wordsworth formed a relationship with a woman called Annette Vallon, with whom he had a daughter named Caroline. However, in December 1792, just before the Reign of Terror took hold of the country and war was declared between England and France, Wordsworth returned home, leaving Annette and Caroline behind. Immediately after returning from France, Wordsworth struggled to find relief from his own guilt, grief and sense of disillusionment in the revolution, in an intermingling of private and political feelings. In 1795 he began work on a text that was referred to until its eventual publication 48 years later simply as ‘a tragedy’. What eventually became known as The Borderers is a relentlessly bleak drama, which followed the template laid down by Seneca in that it served as an initial holding ground for the trauma – both individual and national – that Wordsworth had experienced in France.
The Borderers is a closet drama that was never intended to be acted out on a stage but exists in a strange in-between space between private and public discourse. As Byron said of his own closet drama Cain, it is ‘mental theatre’.3 The Borderers belongs to a cluster of plays written by Romantic poets in response to the French Revolution: Coleridge’s The Fall of Robespierre (1794) and Osorio (1797), Shelly’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) and The Cenci (1819) and Byron’s Cain (1821). Karen Raber establishes a link between these plays and the closet dramas of the English Civil War, the Restoration and the Renaissance. The Renaissance poets, in particular Coleridge’s favourite Samuel Daniel, are ‘often called “neo-Senecan” because they take as their model the domestic tragedies of the Latin poet Seneca’.4 Raber argues that during periods of instability or revolution, closet drama and specifically tragedy provided a more private space for writers to explore the psychological impact of political upheavals than the stage could afford. In the Fenwick note of 1843, Wordsworth explicitly sets out his aim in writing the tragedy: ‘To preserve in my distinct remembrance what I had observed of transition of character and the reflections I had been led to make during the time I was witness of the changes through which The French Revolution passed.’5
The Borderers is concerned with psychological rather than physical movement, mental transitions and incomplete internal changes which, privately existent only fleetingly between definite points of public action, are so difficult to observe. As Mortimer – the tragedy’s main character – says as he stands on the cusp of committing a terrible crime, ‘There is something / Which looks like a transition in my soul, / And yet it is not’.6 In The Borderers Wordsworth is concerned with identifying those points of transition which do exist, though lost in the moment of their very conversion into abrupt event. As Rivers, the villain of the tragedy, states in Act III:
Action is transitory, a step, a blow –
The motion of a muscle – this way or that –
‘Tis done – and in the after vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed.7
It was within that ‘after vacancy’ that Wordsworth had found himself writing The Borderers.
The tragedy is set in thirteenth-century England during the Baronial Revolts which turned the north of the country into a strange and lawless no man’s land. Wordsworth uses this historical setting as a testing ground, conducting an experiment to re-examine – within the controlled space of a five-act tragedy – his experiences of the Revolution and the effects of a lawless vacuum on human psychology. Wordsworth writes in the Fenwick note: ‘As to the scene and period of action, little more was required for my purpose than the absence of established law and government, so that the agents might be at liberty to act on their own impulses.’8 ‘At liberty’ hints at a more problematic freedom than the Liberté lauded in the slogans of the French Revolution.
There are three acts of desertion or betrayal in this tragedy. The first takes place in Act III when Mortimer abandons an old blind man called Herbert on a heath, having been manipulated by Rivers into believing him to be an imposter, posing as the father of the woman Mortimer loves. He leaves him ‘where no foot of man is found, no ear / Can hear his cries’.9 But the tragedy’s real psychological starting point and original model of betrayal is revealed in Act IV when Rivers tells the retrospective story of how, when sailing back from Palestine, he had been persuaded by the rest of the ship’s crew to turn against his captain and abandon him on a desert island. It is this act which is replicated in different forms – and each time with different configurations of guilt throughout the tragedy.
RIVERS: One day at noon we drifted silently
By a bare rock, narrow and white and bare.
There was no food, no drink, no grass, no shade,
No tree nor jutting eminence, nor form
Inanimate, large as the body of man,
Nor any living thing whose span of life
Might stretch beyond the measure of one moon;
To dig for water we landed there – the captain
And a small party of which myself was one.
There I reproach’d him for his treachery
His temper was imperious, and he struck me –
A blow! I would have killed him, but my comrades
Rush’d in between us – They all hated him –
And they insisted – I was stung to madness –
That we should leave him there, alive – we did so.10
There is a terrible simplicity to Rivers’s final three words, ‘we did so’, for like the firing of a starting pistol, they
