T. Coleridge on the Character of Shakespeare

“…the way I see myself in Shakespeare’s mirror. And as you look into my mirror, my mind-reader …”¹

“That celebrated Delphick Inscription, RECOGNIZE YOUR

-SELF, was as much as to say Divide your-self, or BE TWO. For if the Division were rightly made, all within would of course, they thought be rightly understood, and prudently managed.”²

Throughout his lectures on Shakespeare (1808-1819), one of S. T.

Coleridge’s preoccupations – which also found its way into his Biographia Literaria – was the attempt to draw a character of Shakespeare. Scholars had been working on this project for at least a century, with a zeal that had become more and more methodical; evidence was sifted, unreliable facts about Shakespeare’s life were eliminated, just as texts of questionable origin were brought to trial. But even as the publication of an “authentic” edition became conceivable, the portrait of the author remained incomplete, a fact that made Francis Gentleman remark in 1773: “As to his character, it must be fished out of his writings; from whence, though abundant outlines offer, it is very critical to ascertain a strict likeness.”³ Gentleman, perhaps daunted by the difficulties, did not perform the textual “fishing”, and suggested instead that Shakespeare must have resembled the actor David Garrick, at least in some respects. Faced with the same difficulties and as impatient with the scanty historical data as Gentleman, Coleridge generally refrained from drawing a parallel between Shakespeare and any other human being (although he did observe a similarity between his physiognomy and that of Cervantes, which he found revealing).⁴ Instead, he again and again surveyed

1 István Géher, Shakespeare (Budapest: Corvina, 1998 (1990)), p. 10 (my translation, VR).

2 Earl of Shaftesbury (Ashley Cooper), Characteristics of Men, Manners, and Opinions, 3 vols, ed. John M. Robertson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 1: 113.

3 Bell’s Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays (9 vols, 1773-4), in Brian Vickers, ed., Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, Vol 6, 1774-1801 (London, Boston and Henley:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 110.

4 “The resemblance in their physiognomies is striking, but with a predominance of acuteness in Cervantes, and of reflection in Shakespeare, which is the specific difference between the Spanish and English characters of mind.” Coleridge, Lectures

Shakespeare’s works in order to draw up an inventory of his “characteristics”, paying particular attention to what he termed the “symptoms” of his genius, which presented themselves in his earliest writings.

It was not by accident that Coleridge spent so much time on Venus and Adonis in nearly all his lecture courses, and that he chose to include this material in the Biographia Literaria. It was for the same reason that he paid particular attention to Love’s Labour’s Lost, which he thought to have been Shakespeare’s first play. As he wrote in a later note: “how many of S’s characteristic Features might we not discover by studying this play, ‘tho’ as in a portrait taken of him in his Boyhood”.⁵ As this remark suggests, Coleridge studied the poems and plays he considered early works with especial care, because he wanted to draw Shakespeare’s character from them, true to the manner that he believed Shakespeare himself had discovered: by tracing the character’s development or “philosophical history”.⁶ This approach prevented him from understanding character as something

“given”: on the contrary, its essence was in becoming. Moreover, character was not visible on the surface: it had to be “fished out” (to adopt Gentleman’s phrase) from the depths of texts, by reading signs that only the philosophical critic knew how to interpret or even how to notice. Coleridge thereby participated in a new Romantic discourse on character that started to take shape in the second half of the 18^th century, and that – as Deidre Lynch among others has persuasively shown – transformed novel reading and writing practices together with other cultural fields, such as Shakespearean criticism.⁷ But Coleridge did not merely analyse characters of Shakespeare – he attempted a “Philosophical Analysis” of Shakespeare’s character. In this, he was taking his cue from William Richardson, Professor of Humanities at the University of Glasgow, who published his first book under that title in 1774, and who elaborated his method in a number of further volumes of character criticism until the 1812 collected Essays on Shakespeare’s Dramatic Characters.⁸

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 2: 159. Further references to this edition will be indicated in the main text as LL.

5 Coleridge, Marginalia (Collected Works xii), 5 vols, ed. by H. J. Jackson and George Whalley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992-2000), 4: 783

6 Cf. the definition of “philosophical history”, which aims at “knowing how such a man became acted upon by that particular passion” (LL 1: 304). The point is developed in several ways, e.g. speaking of Richard III: “the character is drawn by the Poet with the greatest fulness and perfection, & he has not only given the character but actually shown its source & generation” (LL 1: 377).

7 Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), esp. 133-8.

8 The connection between Coleridge and Richardson was first pointed out by Richard Babcock in “The Direct Influence of Late Eighteenth Century Shakespeare Criticism on Hazlitt and Coleridge”, Modern Language Notes, Vol 45 No 6 (Jun 1930), 377-387, p. 383.

What Richardson offered in these works was a new and systematic form of critical inquiry, which bore the hallmarks of Scottish Enlightenment thought. His single most important contribution to Shakespeare criticism was to take character as his primary structural unit, instead of the more usual arrangement of critical discussions according to individual rhetorical figures or according to beauties and faults in a given work. Indeed, Richardson’s crucial move to focus on character above anything else can be considered as one of the founding gestures of modern British “criticism” in the stricter sense, which, as Neil Rhodes has recently argued, evolved in the second half of the 18^th century from the remnants of – but at the same time in contradistinction to – rhetoric.⁹ This does not mean, however, that Richardson’s character criticism was purely “literary”: he incorporated forms of inquiry from both philosophy and rhetoric. His ‘philosophical analyses’

were especially indebted to the moral philosophy of Hume and Adam Smith, and to the critical acuity of Henry Home, Lord Kames, the most influential proponent of the “new rhetoric” of the second half of the 18^th century.

Richardson’s usual procedure was to start by diagnosing a change in the given figure’s behaviour, which he then attributed to a change in his or her “inner constitution”. This could be explained, for instance, as a result of a change in the direction of the “ruling passion”, which affected the operation of faculties like the understanding or the imagination, or of the moral sense, so that the character became almost a different person. Richardson took great care to detect the earliest symptoms of the transformation, in order to explain what happened and why, and usually found the most telling signs in the characters’ language. Following Kames’s discussions in Elements of Criticism (1762), Richardson identified rhetorical figures in the plays that signalled strong passion and paid close attention to the syntax of the soliloquies (and especially where it broke down). Generally, he practised – to borrow a term from Paul Ricoeur – a hermeneutics of suspicion: what a character said was not necessarily what he or she meant, or, even more importantly, what he or she felt. A familiar example of this is Richardson’s defence of Hamlet’s apparent inconsistencies: the prince’s “jocularity”, his (real or fake) madness and, above all, his “inhuman” response to Claudius’s prayer. Richardson provides an explanation for all these by establishing a moral principle crucial to all his interpretations: “we deceive ourselves.”¹⁰ This justifies his consistent strategy of reading Shakespearean characters against the grain. As Margreta de Grazia puts it: “Interpretation delved below, mining the text for a justification concealed from and mystified by its surface. Inaudible and imperceptible, the essential meaning of [Hamlet’s]

words was stifled within the postulated inner regions of his soul.”¹¹

9 Cf. Neil Rhodes, Shakespeare and the Origins of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 189-208.

10 Essays on Some of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Characters (London: 1797), p. 132.

11 Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and

Coleridge was an even shrewder character critic than Richardson, as we can see not only from his lectures on literature, but also from the comparative analyses published in his periodical The Friend (most importantly, “Luther” and “Rousseau”), and from a number of other writings.

The weight character-drawing carried with respect to his own self-image can be estimated from a (probably self-created) legend according to which Napoleon himself waited anxiously for the “character” Coleridge announced he would give of him in the Morning Post. Even if he never produced a finished character of Shakespeare (or, for that matter, of Bonaparte), he kept collecting traits that might contribute to one.

In 1808, in preparation for his first lecture series, he drew up his first list based on Venus and Adonis, starting with a general observation: “An endless activity of Thought, in all the possible associations of Thought with Thought, Thought with Feelings, or with words, or of Feelings with Feelings,

& words with words” (LL 1: 66). The associations between thought, word and feeling were crucial, in Coleridge’s view, for the proper functioning of language as a medium between the subject’s interiority and the external world. They also justify Coleridge’s reading of character through his or her language: rhetoric, in this view, both conceals and reveals subjectivity. An example seemingly far from Shakespeare may put this into perspective. In an article entitled “Character of Pitt” (1800), which was originally meant to accompany the “Character of Napoleon”, Coleridge argued that William Pitt the Younger (Britain’s Prime Minister) lacked a proper character because in his earliest childhood he failed to associate feelings with feelings and associated words with feelings only in a limited sense: his “premature dexterity in the combination of words […] obscured his impressions, and deadened his genuine feelings”, for “he associated all the operations of his faculties with words, and his pleasures with the surprise excited by them”.¹² Pitt’s very dexterity with words bears witness to an atrophy of both thought and feeling: “One character pervades his whole being. Words on words, finely arranged, and so dexterously consequent, that the whole bears the semblance of argument…”¹³ Coleridge’s Pitt, then, is a “man of words” in the worst possible sense, and his very words betray his hollowness.

Shakespeare’s “first” poem, by contrast, reveals the poet to be the exact opposite: employing “all the possible associations” between word, thought, and feeling, and thus displaying an “endlessly active” intellect.

In his 1808 notes, Coleridge subsequently calls attention to the power of Shakespeare’s Imagination (as something that can “produce and reproduce” the effects of passion and of the “poetic feeling”), and then lists, with quotations from the poem, a number of other traits, like the “Sense of Beauty”, “Love of natural Objects”, “Fancy, or the aggregative Power”,

12 Coleridge, Essays on his Times (Collected Works iii), ed. by David V. Erdman, 3 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969) 1: 219

13 Essays on his Times 1: 224. The “Character of Pitt” is discussed in connection with Coleridge’s views on language in Paul Hamilton, Coleridge’s Poetics, pp. 109-111.

“Imagination” (“modifying one image or feeling by the precedent or following one”), and Shakespeare’s capacity to describe “natural objects by clothing them appropriately with human passions” (LL 1: 66-8). Most of these are related to the affective component in Shakespeare’s art. With the final point, however, Coleridge returns to his first observation:

8. Energy, depth, and activity of Thought without which a man may be a pleasing and affecting Poet; but never a great one. Here introduce Dennis’s – enthuse: & vulgar pass: – & from the excess of this in Shakespere be grateful that circumstances probably originating in choice led him to the Drama, the subject of my next lecture – (LL 1: 68).

The reference to John Dennis’s criticism is significant here. Dennis, whom Coleridge had already cited in his notes to the previous lecture, was among the first to base his view of poetry on the principle of passion and the association of ideas.¹⁴ He also revived Milton’s definition of poetry as “simple, sensuous, and passionate” stating that “Poetry is Poetry, because it is more Passionate and Sensual than Prose.”¹⁵ As the editor of Dennis’s works E. N.

Hooker pointed out, both Wordsworth and Coleridge had been avid readers of Dennis in their early years.¹⁶ However, while Dennis’s importance for Wordsworth has been studied in depth and from various perspectives, the nature of Coleridge’s reliance on his theories has been rarely treated.

What did Coleridge mean by referring to Dennis’s distinction between the “enthusiastic” and the “vulgar” passions in poetry, and which of the two informed Shakespeare’s work according to him? At first sight, the predominance of the ‘vulgar’ seems more likely – this is indeed what R. A.

Foakes, the editor of Coleridge’s lectures suggests in his note (LL 1: 68n).

Dennis states that “vulgar passion”, which is attached to objects in ordinary life and to everyday conversation, informs the writing of dramatic dialogues.

Moreover, it “is preferable [to the enthusiastic passion], because all Men are capable of being moved by the Vulgar, and a Poet writes to all”.¹⁷ The enthusiastic passion, on the other hand, takes pleasure in the indefinite and the half-comprehended; it belongs to the higher sphere of religious and moral sentiment. However, this is also the passion which Dennis links to

14 Cf. Martin Kallich, The Association of Ideas and Critical Theory in Eighteenth-Century England: A History of a Psychological Method in English Criticism (The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1970), pp. 35-45. See also Timothy Clark, The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 67-8.

15 The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701), in The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. E. N. Hooker, 2 vols (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939),1: 197-278, p. 215.

16 The Critical Works of John Dennis, 2: lxxiii.

17In The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), in The Critical Works of John Dennis,

thought and meditation, and this should give us pause, because meditation is one of the key-words in all versions of Coleridge’s account of Shakespeare.

Dennis writes: “Enthusiastick Passion, or Enthusiasm, is a Passion which is moved by Ideas in Contemplation, or the Meditation of things that belong not to common Life. Most of our Thoughts in Meditation are naturally attended with some sort and some degree of Passion; and this Passion, if it is strong, I call Enthusiasm.”¹⁸ Is it possible that Shakespeare’s great “activity of thought” in Venus and Adonis betrays his propensity for this more sublime, but also potentially dangerous passion?

Coleridge certainly claims that Shakespeare does not participate in the passion of the lovers which he so masterfully describes in Venus and Adonis.¹⁹ But if we assume that, according to Coleridge, Shakespeare’s inspiration is enthusiastic in its origin (in the sense that it derives from contemplation as opposed to ordinary life), then his subsequent turn to the drama must be explained as occurring not because, but in spite of, this original tendency. If this was indeed Coleridge’s surmise, then he could be identified as one of the first critics to introduce drama into Shakespeare’s hypothesised creative process. Shakespeare, in this interpretation, becomes himself a character with inner depth, someone who had gone through the foundational change which, in William Richardson’s analyses, makes for a character’s interpretability and thoroughgoing ambiguity at the same time. A Shakespeare conceived along these lines may become a legitimate subject of analysis and of critical “treatment”. Although this interpretation of Coleridge’s Shakespeare is based on conjecture, it seems to be supported by a note Coleridge made for his following 1808 lecture, where he reiterated Shakespeare’s characteristics:

Lastly, he – previously to his Drama – gave proof of a most profound, energetic & philosophical mind, without which he might have been a very delightful Poet, but not the great dramatic Poet/

but this he possessed in so eminent a degree that it is to be feared &c

&c – if –

But Chance & his powerful Instinct combined to lead him to his proper province – in the conquest of which we are to consider both the difficulties that opposed him, & the advantages

(LL 1: 82)

18 The Critical Works of John Dennis, 1: 338.

19 For Shakespeare’s aloofness in Venus and Adonis, see for instance Coleridge’s 1811 notes: “It is throughout as if a superior spirit more intuitive than the Parties themselves not only of every motion, look and Act but of every subtile Thought and feeling, the whole flux and reflux of the Mind, were placing the whole before our view, yet himself all the whole unparticipating in the passions & actuated only by that pleasurable excitement and emotion which is connected with the fervid successful activity, the energetic fervour, of his own Spirit as vividly exhibiting what it had so accurately & profoundly contemplated.” (CN 4115)

What Coleridge suggests here is that Shakespeare’s excessively philosophical mind could have led him into some danger, although he does not spell out what kind of danger he means. We might recall that philosophy (or metaphysics) appears in Coleridge’s own poems as a cause for anxiety, as in

“The Eolian Harp” or in “Dejection”, where the “habit” of abstract thinking is presented as potentially deadly. Jon Mee has recently argued that

“Enthusiasm in Romantic poetics provided both poison and cure”; in other words, that Romantic poetics were defined in contradistinction to enthusiasm (which had been long theorised as a form of mental disease), while retaining some of its key elements.²⁰ Coleridge’s Shakespeare is certainly not enthusiastic in the sense of being driven by a religious ardour, with its potentially radical (and communitarian) implications. But he might have been conceived as enthusiastic due to the predominantly philosophical and meditative passion which Coleridge detects in his work. Moreover, Coleridge seems to say that this passion – perhaps akin to what he calls the

“thinking disease” in his notebooks (CN III: 4012) – in itself might have led him astray, had he not found his ‘proper province’ on the stage.

Shakespeare escaped from the consequences of his own original passion thanks to “chance” and a “powerful instinct” that made him turn into a new direction. With the same move, he discovered his own “character” as a dramatist. To translate this into Dennis’s terms: Shakespeare’s antidote to his own enthusiasm was precisely the artistic cultivation of “vulgar passion”, which is necessary for stagecraft. Coleridge’s account of this transformation seems to be related to an argument he made repeatedly, according to which an overabundance of ideas “naturally” seeks relief in definite forms. Hamlet’s passion for thought leads to his love for words, the “half-embodyings” of ideas which give them “outness” (LL 1: 540). Coleridge seems to have intimated that something similar happened, on a larger scale, to Shakespeare himself, namely that his meditative mind turned to the opposite principle of dramatic embodiment as a way of averting its own penchant for the indefinite. According to Tomalin’s report of a lecture from 1811, Coleridge described the process by which Shakespeare found his “proper” self as a kind of psychomachia between the poet and the abstract philosopher:

With regard to his education, it was little more than might be expected from his character. Conceive a profound metaphysician & a great poet, intensely occupied in thinking on all subjects, on the least

With regard to his education, it was little more than might be expected from his character. Conceive a profound metaphysician & a great poet, intensely occupied in thinking on all subjects, on the least

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