Given the affective situations generally so prized by dramatists in the Romantic period in England, one might expect to find in that drama a congruence of interest in the powerful presence of voice and in the representation of character. Nor is it surprising, in criticism of Romantic drama, to find the text regarded as a transparency, providing as it were an image of the author, whose figure and “self” are discernible in the dramatic persons. But the fine early version of Wordsworth's The Borderers, when read in the context of his succeeding works and of aspects we can reconstruct of his and Coleridge's relationship, prompts considerations of the relation of work to author, of the shaping influence of dramatic representation, and of the role tale-telling voices play in art and life – considerations that call into question the adequacy of situational premises and familiar biographical analysis as critical and interpretive instruments.