Wordsworth’s The Borderers, Early and Late

Jeffrey N. Cox, “Wordsworth’s The Borderers, Early and Late” (pp. 106–133)

William Wordsworth’s sole tragedy, while written in the late 1790s, did not appear until 1842, in his last volume of new poetry, Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years; including the Borderers, A Tragedy. In the back matter are two series of advertisements: one for the other six volumes in the newest edition of Wordsworth’s poetry and the other for his publisher Edward Moxon’s “Dramatic Library,” which includes volumes of plays by key playwrights from Shakespeare to Congreve, with the editors spanning the Romantic movement. One set of these print paratexts places Wordsworth’s play within his life’s work, but another group relates the play to the dramatic tradition from the early modern to the Romantic periods. While scholars have mainly been interested in The Borderers for what it tells us about Wordsworth’s intellectual and aesthetic development as a poet at its point of composition, this essay is more interested in thinking about it, first, in relation to the drama and theater of the 1790s and then, more briefly, as a cultural act in 1842, as Wordsworth seeks to define his place one more time on the literary scene. This essay explores The Borderers as an intervention in the theatrical world of the 1790s, particularly as Wordsworth responds to the contemporary melodrama, and as a bid late in his life to establish himself as a dramatic precursor to younger writers, particularly Byron.