The Borderers (Wordsworth)

Duration: about 70 minutes

Wordsworth’s name and the play’s intriguing title should guarantee an audience for this neglected masterpiece. Ten years before Walter Scott’s first runaway success, the poet transposed his contradictory responses to the French Revolution into the landscape of medieval Cumberland and drew on Othello and Iago to create characters who embody his own naivety and guilt, and much more besides. The result was painful and beautiful, but much in need of the pruning applied here.

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