Osorio (play)

Remorse met with considerable critical and commercial success when it was first performed in 1813: it ran for twenty nights at Drury Lane and was issued in print three times within the year.

[2] Historicist scholars, however, have identified a revolutionary viewpoint embedded within Osorio which Coleridge, disavowing his youthful radicalism, sought to dilute when he later reformulated the work to create Remorse.

[3] Set in sixteenth-century Granada, the play is notable for its use of Gothic elements such as a castle, dungeon, cave and the supernatural.

Coleridge's use of these may represent an attempt to elevate what he saw as the vulgar and sensational trappings of popular Gothic plays by situating them within a more refined form of poetic drama.

[5] Velez and Maria are interrupted by Francesco, an inquisitor, who has arrested and imprisoned a Moresco, Ferdinand, on suspicion of relapsing to Islam.

He has been ‘loitering’ in the area for three weeks with a view to arousing the pain of remorse in Osorio and Maria for jointly plotting to have him murdered.

[13] Alhadra and the Moors capture Francesco but are prevented from killing him by Albert's companion, Maurice, who has joined the group.

The creation of Osorio was prompted by a letter Coleridge received in February 1797 from W. L. Bowles through which Sheridan asked him "to write a tragedy on some popular subject".

[16] He began writing the work in March in Stowey, and on 6 June Coleridge read the first two and a half acts to William and Dorothy Wordsworth when he visited them at Racedown.

Two days later, Coleridge wrote to Joseph Cottle that "Wordsworth admires my tragedy - which gives me great hopes".

[17] Coleridge had difficulties completing the work, however, and it was not until October that two copies of the play were prepared and sent to Bowles and William Linley (Sheridan's brother-in-law) for consideration.

Coleridge thought of publishing the work with Wordsworth's drama, The Borderers, but instead printed two extracts, "The Dungeon" and "The Foster-Mother’s Tale", in Lyrical Ballads in 1798.

The fact that Coleridge acknowledged the help he received from Arnold and the actors in making the play fit for the stage supports this view.

[21] The revisions Coleridge made to Osorio to produce Remorse include the renaming of the characters and the rearrangement and supplementation of scenes and lines.

There is also confusion regarding which picture has been witnessed; in Remorse the image of Alvar's assassination is exposed amidst clashing music and stage effects to produce a shocking moment to which Valdez (Velez) reacts in horror.

Coleridge expressed indignation that his authorship was not acknowledged on the printed sheet music and that Sheridan had obviously suffered his manuscript of Osorio to "wander about the Town from his house".

[26] The second published setting of the Invocation Song is by Michael Kelly, the music supervisor at Drury Lane during the production of Remorse.

The plot of Osorio is clearly drawn from the story narrated by the Sicilian sorcerer in The Ghost-Seer in which Jeronymo, who is betrothed to Antonia, goes missing and is believed to be the victim of Algerian pirates.

Coleridge used this to furnish his drama with details to which the characters often refer, such as the prohibition of native Moorish dress, religion and customs.

[37] Such rewriting has also been regarded as a sign of Coleridge using a Spanish setting, influenced by the Peninsular War, to address national identity.

Albert asserts that it is Nature, not the punitive "friendless solitude" of prison, that most effectively heals the "wandering and distemper’d child".

[40] The supernatural sorcery episode and the scenes in a castle, cave and dungeon demonstrates Coleridge's engagement with the Gothic conventions that were popular with contemporary audiences.

Yet Coleridge, like Wordsworth, Hazlitt and Lamb, strongly disliked popular Gothic dramas because of their common emphasis on sensational spectacles rather than an audience's imagination.

Coleridge identified the merit of Monk Lewis’s successful Drury Lane production of The Castle Spectre, for instance, as deriving entirely from "situations" that were "all borrowed, and all absolutely pantomimical".

[41] Osorio and Remorse can therefore be seen as Coleridge's attempt to accommodate popular Gothic features within a form of Shakespearean poetic drama that he regarded as more dignified.