Cometh the hero? Alfred Lord Tennyson as the nation’s playwright

Abstract

Tennyson’s plays form nearly a third of his total poetic output.¹ Despite this, they have received scant academic exploration and what they have received has tended to be negative and critical. Henry James began the scholarly rejection of Tennyson’s drama, noting: ‘To produce his drama he has had to cease to be himself… in all these three hundred pages there is hardly a trace of the Tennyson we know.’² Significantly, the plays are full of figures who have forgotten to be themselves. Identity, as it is in Collins, is an important theme and this should alert us to a reading of the plays not as a loss of the ‘other’ Tennyson but as a deliberate recasting of literary identity, embued as it is with an anxiety about this very process. Tennyson explained that his first three plays, Queen Mary, Harold and Becket, and his last, The Foresters, treated moments of transition in English culture when the public were faced with a new paradigm of rule; as Leonée Ormond puts it: ‘he was attracted by points of change, when nations and culture were forged in the aftermath of conflict.’³ The concept of transition is also built into Tennyson’s creative movement from a readerly poetic narrative to a performative one. From this perspective, Tennyson’s plays inherently reflect the metamorphosis of poet to playwright. In addition, the plays articulate the tension between tradition and modernity in the theatre.