Keats and The Stranger at Inveraray

On Friday 17 July 1818, Keats and Charles Armitage Brown arrived at Inveraray in Scotland, midway through their Scottish walking tour. Here Keats, a passionate theatre-goer, saw for the first time Augustus von Kotzebue’s play The Stranger at a makeshift playhouse inside a barn. Although Keats dedicated a long letter and a poem to this experience the precise location of the barn has never been located, nor has there been discussion of how this performance of The Stranger contributed to Keats’s theatrical experience. In this article I show that the barn-theatre at Inveraray still survives, and suggest how the Stranger performance at Inveraray, heavily ridden with Scottish inflections not present in the playscript, left an impression on Keats. I also point to traces of The Stranger found in later poems such as ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’.