Coleridge: Lectures on Shakespeare

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Adam Roberts (Editor)

This volume comprises a freshly composed edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1811-12 Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton and 1818-19 Lectures on Shakespeare.

Genres: Shakespeare, Literary Criticism

248 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1856

About the author

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was an English poet, critic, and philosopher who was, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and one of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as his major prose work Biographia Literaria.

Reviews

[Mark Fulk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing reader-oriented yet scholarly edition. Reading this reminds me why I've been fascinated by Shakespearean criticism in the nineteenth century in Britain since the beginning of my graduate studies. I read what remains of these lectures twenty years ago and love them even more now. Will definitely figure in my teaching of Shakespeare and the first generation of British Romanticism.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Coleridge was not only a genius poet, but he also a great critic. He was one of the greatest of poet-critics that England has ever produced. He was a genius, and when he was inspired, when the mood was upon him, he could create works of the highest order, but he was incapable of sustained and persistent labour. He could work only by fits and starts, with the result that the ‘Ancient Mariner’ is the only complete thing that he has left behind him. The remainder of his work, both in poetry and and prose, is fragmentary, disordered, and faltering. ‘Lectures on Shakespeare and Other Poets’, were delivered by Coleridge at intermissions between 1808 and 1819. As he did not like to give a written lecture, they are resplendent with detours and recurrences, and as they were not published within his lifespan, countless of them have been misplaced, and only about one-third of the entire yield has come down to us. "It is unfortunate", says Albert, "that they were never prepared for publication by Coleridge himself. and that we have to rely on the imperfect records, prepared from notes and reports by his daughter in 1836, and by Payne Collier in 1856." Consequently, the lectures, as we have them, lack the finish of works correctly organized for publication. Nevertheless they show Coleridge as a giant in the ranks of English critics. His inspection of Shakespeare's plays, and of poems by other writers, gives us something more than an acute, judicious dismemberment, along the lines of certain prearranged canons; it is delicately redolent, stimulating the reader to keener perceptions, and formulating for him his own vague, half-crystallized reactions. Every work of art, Coleridge sees as an organic, developing whole, subject only to the laws of its own existence. A true romantic, Coleridge rebellions against the Augustan notion of poetry as an art to instruct. For him the intention of poetry is to provide pleasure, "through the medium of beauty." The Lectures are impressionistic, romantic criticism of the highest order. Coleridge is neither judicial nor legalistic, rather he gives his own reactions and responses to the works of Shakespeare, a born prodigy. Coleridge's work on Shakespeare has never been bettered, and he is regarded as the ancestor of the greatest modern Shakespearean critics.

[Aaron Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure."

"...truths of nature and the human heart... can only be felt in perfection under the full play of those powers of mind, which are spontaneous rather than voluntary, and in which the effort required bears no proportion to the activity enjoyed."

"...what has man of his own to give to his fellow man, but his own thoughts and feelings, and his observations, so far as they are modified by his own thoughts and feelings?"

"He entered into no analysis of the passions or faiths of men, but assured himself that such and such passions and faiths were grounded in our common nature, and not in the mere accidents of ignorance or disease. This is an important consideration, and constitutes our Shakespeare the morning star, the guide and the pioneer, of true philosophy."

"Another excellence of Shakespeare, in which no writer equals him, is in the language of nature. So correct is it, that we can see ourselves in every page."

"Shakespeare is an author of all others the most calculated to make his readers better as well as wiser."