Free English Literature Dissertations - Lear’s Power Is Stripped From Him But Still ‘only We Shall Retain / The
Lear’s power is stripped from him but still ‘only we shall retain / The name[of] a king’ (Shakespeare King Lear in Proudfoot p.636 Act I Scene I l.136-137). Coleridge’s lecture notes yoke Shakespearean text to the politics of the day surprisingly explicitly, paradoxically commending the ‘impartiality of Shakespeare’s politics’ (in Foakes vol. I p.390) and his devotion to ‘patriotism’ (ibid.) of the kind exhibited by the monarchist Duke of Wellington, rather than the ‘pompous philosophy’ (in Foakes vol. I p.386) of the likes of the egalitarian Thomas Paine. In this way, Shakespeare himself became, for Coleridge, a King Lear-type figure, an authoritarian literary giant ‘enthroned on a double headed Parnassus’ (in Foakes vol. I p.563).
The systematic theorizing and attempts to formulate general rules for society which was undertaken by the likes of Paine and Robespierre was held up in unfavourable contrast to Shakespeare’s ‘faithfulness to human variety’ (David Simpson in Curran p.4). Paradoxically for a group of critics focussed on the ‘idea’ of an individual character or play, the Romantics are frequently given to breaking the ‘variety’ of the Shakespearean canon up into favourite quotations and bon mots. This, ironically, seems to be a product of the emphasis placed on the plays as text, since a text, unlike a theatrical performance, can be studied over time, referred back to or browsed. They can also be annotated and glossed in a manner that is simply not possible in performance, they are abstract and not constrained by time in a way that concrete performance is. There are obvious reasons why fragmentation should appeal to the Romantics as a movement. This ‘variety’, however, sits in a paradoxical relationship to the unity of the Shakespearean canon described in Biographia Literaria where ‘Shakespeare becomes all things, yet ever remaining himself’ (in Hopkins p.112). Again, though Coleridge, like his contemporaries, was given to fragmenting the texts to analyse metre, diction, character, poetical and psychological effects, treating each scene, each character, as an independent whole, his purpose in doing so seems to be to construct a comprehensive overall vision of the ‘idea’ of each play and its place in the canon. In Literary Remains Coleridge describes each play in terms of an overall mood or colouring, of
a keynote which guides and controls the harmonies throughout. What isRomeo and Juliet? It is a spring day, gusty and beautiful in the morn, and closing like an April evening with the song of the nightingale
(in Hopkins p.113)
In works such as A Treatise on Method (1818) Shakespeare’s poetic abilities are placed by Coleridge on a par with this ability for psychological observation and realisation of a character, a Protean faculty not only to ‘suit theword to the action’ (Shakespeare, Hamlet, in Proudfoot p.311 Act III Scene II l.19), but also to the character.
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