Book Description

In treating of Shakspeare, said one of the best of Coleridge's critics, "he set the sun in heaven." The present volume, imperfect record as it is, contains the greater substance of all that the most inspired English critic said, whether casually or deliberately, of the most inspired poet. Its contents are those of the two posthumous miscellanies of notes for lectures and reports of lectures, which were prepared by Henry Nelson Coleridge and his wife-Coleridge's daughter, Sarah-in 1836, and by Payne Collier in 1856. The first deals principally with the lectures given by Coleridge in 1818, but it contains many notes and memoranda which belong equally to the earlier period. And one suspects Payne Collier's contribution of the 1811-12 lectures, although he was a less unreliable recorder than is usually supposed, to have been in some instances from the earlier publication. Perhaps the best way to read in this double collection is to turn up first the Notes upon Shakspeare's plays-" Hamlet" for preference, in which Coleridge (who was himself an intellectual Hamlet) used to perfection the subtle mirror afforded by his own mind; and then from that to work through the maze of his lectures and poetic homilies. It must be remembered that the whole book, as here constituted, is the telltale memorial of the Coleridge who was too indolent to make good his harvest. He had a magnificent intellect, a superb imagination, but no corresponding will-power. The consequence is that his lectures on Shakspeare were imperfectly prepared, often ill-delivered, and left in the end to the mercy of careless reporters. But to those who can discern the god in the cloud, these transcripts are of inestimable value. Intermittent flashes of creative criticism break continually through the misty envelope, and the brilliance is according to the assimilative or the refractive quality of the reader. For, as Coleridge quotes and says, "we are not all Mogul diamonds, to take the light." There are readers that are sponges, and others that are sand-glasses or strain-bags, who let the creative element escape, and retain only the dregs. There are plentiful dregs in these pages..