Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and Other Dramatists.

S.T Coleridge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429838361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book presents lectures and notes upon Shakespeare and other dramatists, including poetry, the drama and Shakespeare; order of Shakespeare's plays; notes on Shakespeare's plays from English history; and notes on some of the plays of Shakespeare, Johnson, Beaumont and Fletcher.

Section IV
Notes on Some other Plays of Shakespeare

The Tempest

THERE is a sort of improbability with which we are shocked in dramatic representation, not less than in a narrative of real life. Consequently, there must be rules respecting it; and as rules are nothing but means to an end previously ascertained—(inattention to which simple truth has been the occasion of all the pedantry of the French school)—we must first determine what the immediate end or object of the drama is. And here, as I have previously remarked, I find two extremes of critical decison—the French, which evidently presupposes that a perfect delusion is to be aimed at, an opinion which needs no fresh confutation; and the exact opposite to it, brought forward by Dr. Johnson, who supposes the auditors throughout in the full reflective knowledge of the contrary. In evincing the impossibility of delusion, he makes no sufficient allowance for an intermediate state, which I have before distinguished by the term, illusion, and have attempted to illustrate its quality and character by reference to our mental state, when dreaming. In both cases we simply do not judge the imagery to be unreal; there is a negative reality, and no more. Whatever, therefore, tends to prevent the mind from placing itself, or being placed, gradually in that state in which the images have such negative reality for the auditor, destroys this illusion, and is dramatically improbable.

Now the production of this effect, a sense of improbability, will depend on the degree of excitement in which the mind is supposed to be. Many things would be intolerable in the first scene of a play, that would not at all interrupt our enjoyment in the height of the interest, when the narrow cockpit may be made to hold

The vasty field of France, or we may cram

Within its wooden O the very casques,

That did affright the air at Agincourt.

Again, on the other hand, many obvious improbabilities will be endured, as belonging to the ground-work of the story rather than to the drama itself, in the first scenes, which would disturb or disentrance us from all illusion in the acme of our excitement; as for instance, Lear’s division of his kingdom, and the banishment of Cordelia.

But, although the other excellencies of the drama besides this dramatic probability, as unity of interest, with distinctness and subordination of the characters, and appropriateness of style, are all, so far as they tend to increase the inward excitement, means towards accomplishing the chief end, that of producing and supporting this willing illusion, yet they do not on that account cease to be ends themselves; and we must remember, that, as such, they carry their own justification with them, as long as they do not contravene or interrupt the total illusion. It is not even always, or of necessity, an objection to them, that they prevent the illusion from rising to as great a height as it might otherwise have attained; it is enough that they are simply compatible with as high a degree of it as is requisite for the purpose. Nay, upon particular occasions, a palpable improbability may be hazarded by a great genius for the express purpose of keeping down the interest of a merely instrumental scene, which would otherwise make too great an impression for the harmony of the entire illusion. Had the panorama been invented in the time of Pope Leo X, Raffael would still, I doubt not, have smiled in contempt at the regret, that the broom-twigs and scrubby bushes at the back of some of his grand pictures were not as probable trees as those in the exhibition.

The Tempest is a specimen of the purely romantic drama, in which the interest is not historical, or dependent upon fidelity of portraiture, or the natural connection of events—but is a birth of the imagination, and rests only on the coaptation and union of the elements granted to, or assumed by, the poet. It is a species of drama which owes no allegiance to time or space, and in which, therefore, errors of chronology and geography—no mortal sins in any species—are venial faults, and count for nothing. It addresses itself entirely to the imaginative faculty; and although the illusion may be assisted by the effect on the senses of the complicated scenery and decorations of modern times, yet this sort of assistance is dangerous. For the principal, and only genuine, excitement ought to come from within, from the moved and sympathetic imagination; whereas, where so much is addressed to the mere external senses of seeing and hearing, the spiritual vision is apt to languish, and the attraction from without will withdraw the mind from the proper and only legitimate interest, which is intended to spring from within.

The romance opens with a busy scene, admirably appropriate to the kind of drama, and giving, as it were, the key-note to the whole harmony. It prepares and initiates the excitement required for the entire piece, and yet does not demand anything from the spectators, which their previous habits had not fitted them to understand. It is the bustle of a tempest, from which the real horrors are abstracted; therefore it is poetical, though not in strictness—(the distinction to which I have so often alluded)—and is purposely restrained from concentering the interest on itself, but merely as an induction or tuning for what is to follow.

In the second scene, Prospero’s speeches, till the entrance of Ariel, contain the finest example I remember of retrospective narration for the purpose of exciting immediate interest, and putting the audience in possession of all the information necessary for the understanding of the plot^*. Observe, too, the perfect probability of the moment chosen by Prospero (the very Shakespeare himself, as it were, of The Tempest) to open out the truth to his daughter, his own romantic bearing, and how completely anything that might have been disagreeable to us in the magician, is reconciled and shaded in the humanity and natural feelings of the father. In the very first speech of Miranda, the simplicity and tenderness of her character are at once laid open; it would have been lost in direct contact with the agitation of the first scene. The opinion once prevailed, but, happily, is now abandoned, that Fletcher alone wrote for women;—the truth is, that with very few, and those partial, exceptions, the female characters in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are, when of the light kind, not decent; when heroic, complete viragos. But in Shakespeare all the elements of womanhood are holy, and there is the sweet, yet dignified feeling of all that continuates society, as sense of ancestry and of sex, with a purity unassailable by sophistry, because it rests not in the analytic processes, but in that sane equipoise of the faculties, during which the feelings are representative of all past experience—not of the individual only, but of all those by whom she has been educated, and their

Mira. I should sin,
To think but nobly of my grandmother;
Good wombs have bore bad sons.

Pro. Now the condition, etc.

Theobald has a note upon this passage, and suggests that Shakespeare placed it thus:

Pro. Good wombs have bore bad sons—
Now the condition.

Mr. Coleridge writes in the margin: ‘I cannot but believe that Theobald is quite right’ - H. N. C

predecessors even up to the first mother that lived. Shakespeare saw that the want of prominence, which Pope notices for sarcasm, was the blessed beauty of the woman’s character, and knew that it arose not from any deficiency, but from the more exquisite harmony of all the parts of the moral being, constituting one living total of head and heart. He has drawn it, indeed, in all its distinctive energies of faith, patience, constancy, fortitude, shown in all of them as following the heart, which gives its results by a nice tact and happy intuition, without the intervention of the discursive faculty, sees all things in and by the light of the affections, and errs, if it ever err, in the exaggerations of love alone. In all the Shakespearian women there is essentially the same foundation and principle; the distinct individuality and variety are merely the result of the modification of circumstances, whether in Miranda the maiden, in Imogen the wife, or in Katharine the queen.

But to return. The appearance and characters of the super or ultra-natural servants are finely contrasted. Ariel has in everything the airy tint which gives the name; and it is worthy of remark that Miranda is never directly brought into comparison with Ariel, lest the natural and human of the one and the supernatural of the other should tend to neutralize each other; Caliban, on the other hand, is all earth, all condensed and gross in feelings and images; he has the dawnings of understanding, without reason or the moral sense, and in him, as in some brute animals, this advance to the intel-lectual faculties, without the moral sense, is marked by the appearance of vice. For it is in the primacy of the moral being only, that man is truly human; in his intellectual powers he is certainly approached by the brutes, and, man’s whole syst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• CONTENTS
• SECTION I. POETRY, THE DRAMA, AND SHAKESPEARE
• SECTION II. ORDER OF SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS
• SECTION III. NOTES ON SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS FROM ENGLISH HISTORY
• SECTION IV. NOTES ON SOME OF THE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE
• SECTION V. JONSON, BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, AND MASSINGER
• SECTION VI. NOTES ON BEN JONSON
• SECTION VII. NOTES ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER