The Tragedy called _Remorse_ was written in the summer and autumn of 1797, but not represented on the stage till 1813, when it was performed at Drury Lane--on the authority of an old play-bill of the Calne Theatre, "with unbounded applause thirty successive nights." On "the success of the _Remorse_," Mr. Coleridge wrote thus to his friend Mr. Poole, on the 14th of February, 1813:
"The receipt of your heart-engendered lines was sweeter than an unexpected strain of sweetest music;--or in humbler phrase, it was the only pleasurable sensation which the _success of the Remorse_ has given me. I have read of, or perhaps only imagined, a punishment in Arabia, in which the culprit was so bricked up as to be unable to turn his eyes to the right or to the left, while in front was placed a high heap of barren sand glittering under the vertical sun. Some slight analogue of this, I have myself suffered from the mere unusualness of having my attention forcibly directed to a subject which permitted neither sequence of imagery, nor series of reasoning. No grocer's apprentice, after his first month's permitted riot, was ever sicker of figs and raisins than I of hearing about the _Remorse_. The endless rat-a-tat-tat at our black-and-blue bruised door, and my three master fiends, proof sheets, letters (for I have a raging epistolophobia), and worse than these--invitations to large dinners, which I cannot refuse without offence and imputation of pride, nor accept without disturbance of temper the day before, and a sick aching stomach for two days after--oppress me so that my spirits quite sink under it.
"I have never seen the Play since the first night. It has been a good thing for the Theatre. They will get £8,000 or £10,000 by it, and I shall get more than all my literary labours put together, nay, thrice as much, subtracting my heavy losses in _The Watchman_ and _The Friend_, including the copyright."[49]
The manuscript of the _Remorse_, immediately after it was written, was shown to Mr. Sheridan, "who," says my Father, in the Preface to the first Edition, "by a twice conveyed recommendation (in the year 1797) had urged me to write a Tragedy for his theatre, who, on my objection that I was utterly ignorant of all stage tactics, had promised that _he_ would himself make the necessary alterations, if the piece should be at all representable." He however neither gave him any answer, nor returned him the manuscript, which he suffered to wander about the town from his house, and my Father goes on to say, "not only asserted that the Play was rejected because I would not submit to the alteration of one ludicrous line, but finally, in the year 1806, amused and delighted (as who was ever in his society, if I may trust the universal report, without being amused and delighted?) a large company at the house of a highly respectable Member of Parliament, with the ridicule of the Tragedy, as a _fair specimen_ of the _whole_ of which he adduced a line: