“Staging Strangeness in Charles Robert Maturin’s Bertram”

Attacked by contemporary detractors as a work heavily influenced by Germany’s noxious dramatic models, Maturin’s popular tragedy Bertram (Drury Lane, 9 May 1816) centres on a single titanic character dominated by overreaching aspirations and self-destructive drives. This essay examines the play’s peculiarly extensive range of forms of strangeness, alienness, monstrosity and hybridity in order to re-evaluate it as one of most significant ‘texts of excess’ in the Romantic-period canon. This analysis focuses on the play’s hybridised form (its mixture of tragic and melodramatic features), as well as its textual ‘unconscious’ represented by the highly unsettling, and ultimately expunged, ‘Dark Knight’ scenes. As to the play’s construction of identity, the essay addresses the character of Bertram as both an alien and an alienated figure, an embodiment of the uncanny (he literally returns to haunt his own lands), a human being bordering on the non-human and the monstrous, and the bearer of a disturbingly 'unlocated' cultural and geographic otherness (the play is set in Sicily but Bertram is a wanderer who does not belong anywhere). Finally, Edmund Kean’s performance as the title-character in the play’s opening run is examined in order to show how it captured and conveyed this nexus of strangeness and otherness through an 'excessive' acting style. Offering new insights into the complexity of Bertram as a central text in Romantic-period drama, this essay promotes a reappraisal of its multiple forms of strangeness and monstrosity as a paradigmatic crystallization of tensions and anxieties and one of the most significant figurations of disorder in British Romantic-period culture.