1 - Rewriting History: The Early Plays and Long Ago

Summary

The one duty we owe history is to rewrite it.

—Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist (1891)

Dare now to be tragic men, for ye shall be redeemed!

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872)

In the preface to their first published closet drama, Callirrhoë (1884), Michael Field proclaims, “this poem pleads guilty to anachronism” (xi). Indeed, much of their life’s work features anachronistic content and form. This chapter addresses the revisionary histories and poetics of Michael Field’s earliest verse dramas and their book of poems after Sappho’s fragments, Long Ago (1889), with the goal of more precisely understanding Michael Field’s method for producing anachronistic literature. How and why did Bradley and Cooper consume the past in order to heed their friends’ urging to “Be Contemporaneous”? How does experimentation with traditional literary forms and genres help Michael Field navigate the paradox of looking backward in order to achieve their stated goal: “We must be modern”?

Here I trace the affordances of anachronism, extravagant tragedy, violently passionate rhetoric, and the form/genre of the closet drama in Callirrhoë (1884), Fair Rosamund (1884), and Canute the Great (1887), and examine these early dramatic adaptations alongside their classical and early English referents. Then I turn to Long Ago (1889), a collection of verse that expands Sappho’s fragments, in order to reflect upon the affordances of the fragment and to suggest that the fragment facilitates Long Ago’s overarching theme of transformation. With a nod to some twenty-first-century thinking about queer temporality, queer affect, and presentism, this chapter examines Michael Field’s looking and feeling both backward and forward, demonstrates how their manner of doing so capitalizes on the affordances of their chosen forms, and explores how their revisionary poetics manifest phenomenological characteristics associated with Merleau-Ponty’s l’engrenage, that is, gearing into and taking up the unknown, which is also consistent with Bradley and Cooper’s Hegelian-Paterian views of history and Dionysian eros. The chapter’s consideration of anachronism, fragment, l’engrenage, and queer-feminist orientation in their early work will then function as a frame by which to read the rest of Michael Field’s oeuvre, and my subsequent chapters.