




                              *Shakespeare*

                                Ben Jonson

                          Beaumont And Fletcher

                            Notes and Lectures

                            by S. T. Coleridge

                               New Edition

                                Liverpool

                              Edward Howell

                                MDCCCLXXIV





CONTENTS


Shakespeare
   Definition Of Poetry.
   Greek Drama.
   Progress Of The Drama.
   The Drama Generally, And Public Taste.
   Shakespeare, A Poet Generally.
   Shakespeare's Judgment equal to his Genius.
   Recapitulation, And Summary Of the Characteristics of Shakespeare's
   Dramas.
   Outline Of An Introductory Lecture Upon Shakespeare.
   Order Of Shakespeare's Plays.
   Notes On The "Tempest."
   "Love's Labour's Lost."
   "Midsummer Night's Dream."
   "Comedy Of Errors."
   "As You Like It."
   "Twelfth Night."
   "All's Well That Ends Well."
   "Merry Wives Of Windsor."
   "Measure For Measure."
   "Cymbeline."
   "Titus Andronicus."
   "Troilus And Cressida."
   "Coriolanus."
   "Julius Caesar."
   "Antony And Cleopatra."
   "Timon Of Athens."
   "Romeo And Juliet."
   Shakespeare's English Historical Plays.
   "King John."
   "Richard II."
   "Henry IV.--Part I."
   "Henry IV.--Part II."
   "Henry V."
   "Henry VI.--Part I."
   "Richard III."
   "Lear."
   "Hamlet."
   "Macbeth."
   "Winter's Tale."
   "Othello."
Notes on Ben Jonson.
   Whalley's Preface.
   "Whalley's 'Life Of Jonson.' "
   "Every Man Out Of His Humour."
   "Poetaster."
   "Fall Of Sejanus."
   "Volpone."
   "Apicaene."
   "The Alchemist."
   "Catiline's Conspiracy."
   "Bartholomew Fair."
   "The Devil Is An Ass."
   "The Staple Of News."
   "The New Inn."
Notes On Beaumont And Fletcher.
   Harris's Commendatory Poem On Fletcher.
   Life Of Fletcher In Stockdale's Edition, 1811.
   "Maid's Tragedy."
   "A King And No King."
   "The Scornful Lady."
   "The Custom Of The Country."
   "The Elder Brother."
   "The Spanish Curate."
   "Wit Without Money."
   "The Humorous Lieutenant."
   "The Mad Lover."
   "The Loyal Subject."
   "Rule A Wife And Have A Wife."
   "The Laws Of Candy."
   "The Little French Lawyer."
   "Valentinian."
   "Rollo."
   "The Wildgoose Chase."
   "A Wife For A Month."
   "The Pilgrim."
   "The Queen Of Corinth."
   "The Noble Gentleman."
   "The Coronation."
   "Wit At Several Weapons."
   "The Fair Maid Of The Inn."
   "The Two Noble Kinsmen."
   "The Woman Hater."






SHAKESPEARE, WITH INTRODUCTORY MATTER ON POETRY, THE DRAMA, AND THE STAGE.




Definition Of Poetry.


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.
This definition is useful; but as it would include novels and other works
of fiction, which yet we do not call poems, there must be some additional
character by which poetry is not only divided from opposites, but likewise
distinguished from disparate, though similar, modes of composition. Now
how is this to be effected? In animated prose, the beauties of nature, and
the passions and accidents of human nature, are often expressed in that
natural language which the contemplation of them would suggest to a pure
and benevolent mind; yet still neither we nor the writers call such a work
a poem, though no work could deserve that name which did not include all
this, together with something else. What is this? It is that pleasurable
emotion, that peculiar state and degree of excitement, which arises in the
poet himself in the act of composition;--and in order to understand this,
we must combine a more than ordinary sympathy with the objects, emotions,
or incidents contemplated by the poet, consequent on a more than common
sensibility, with a more than ordinary activity of the mind in respect of
the fancy and the imagination. Hence is produced a more vivid reflection
of the truths of nature and of the human heart, united with a constant
activity modifying and correcting these truths by that sort of pleasurable
emotion, which the exertion of all our faculties gives in a certain
degree; but which 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.
This is the state which permits the production of a highly pleasurable
whole, of which each part shall also communicate for itself a distinct and
conscious pleasure; and hence arises the definition, which I trust is now
intelligible, that poetry, or rather a poem, is a species of composition,
opposed to science, as having intellectual pleasure for its object, and as
attaining its end by the use of language natural to us in a state of
excitement,--but distinguished from other species of composition, not
excluded by the former criterion, by permitting a pleasure from the whole
consistent with a consciousness of pleasure from the component parts;--and
the perfection of which is, to communicate from each part the greatest
immediate pleasure compatible with the largest sum of pleasure on the
whole. This, of course, will vary with the different modes of poetry;--and
that splendour of particular lines, which would be worthy of admiration in
an impassioned elegy, or a short indignant satire, would be a blemish and
proof of vile taste in a tragedy or an epic poem.

It is remarkable, by the way, that Milton in three incidental words has
implied all which for the purposes of more distinct apprehension, which at
first must be slow-paced in order to be distinct, I have endeavoured to
develope in a precise and strictly adequate definition. Speaking of
poetry, he says, as in a parenthesis, "which is simple, sensuous,
passionate." How awful is the power of words!--fearful often in their
consequences when merely felt, not understood; but most awful when both
felt and understood!--Had these three words only been properly understood
by, and present in the minds of, general readers, not only almost a
library of false poetry would have been either precluded or still-born,
but, what is of more consequence, works truly excellent and capable of
enlarging the understanding, warming and purifying the heart, and placing
in the centre of the whole being the germs of noble and manlike actions,
would have been the common diet of the intellect instead. For the first
condition, simplicity,--while, on the one hand, it distinguishes poetry
from the arduous processes of science, labouring towards an end not yet
arrived at, and supposes a smooth and finished road, on which the reader
is to walk onward easily, with streams murmuring by his side, and trees
and flowers and human dwellings to make his journey as delightful as the
object of it is desirable, instead of having to toil with the pioneers and
painfully make the road on which others are to travel,--precludes, on the
other hand, every affectation and morbid peculiarity;--the second
condition, sensuousness, insures that framework of objectivity, that
definiteness and articulation of imagery, and that modification of the
images themselves, without which poetry becomes flattened into mere
didactics of practice, or evaporated into a hazy, unthoughtful,
day-dreaming; and the third condition, passion, provides that neither
thought nor imagery shall be simply objective, but that the _passio vera_
of humanity shall warm and animate both.

To return, however, to the previous definition, this most general and
distinctive character of a poem originates in the poetic genius itself;
and though it comprises whatever can with any propriety be called a poem
(unless that word be a mere lazy synonym for a composition in metre), it
yet becomes a just, and not merely discriminative, but full and adequate,
definition of poetry in its highest and most peculiar sense, only so far
as the distinction still results from the poetic genius, which sustains
and modifies the emotions, thoughts, and vivid representations of the poem
by the energy without effort of the poet's own mind,--by the spontaneous
activity of his imagination and fancy, and by whatever else with these
reveals itself in the balancing and reconciling of opposite or discordant
qualities, sameness with difference, a sense of novelty and freshness with
old or customary objects, a more than usual state of emotion with more
than usual order, self-possession and judgment with enthusiasm and
vehement feeling,--and which, while it blends and harmonizes the natural
and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature, the manner to the
matter, and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the images,
passions, characters, and incidents of the poem:--

"Doubtless, this could not be, but that she turns
Bodies to _spirit_ by sublimation strange,
As fire converts to fire the things it burns--
As we our food into our nature change!

"From their gross matter she abstracts _their_ forms,
And draws a kind of quintessence from things,
Which to her proper nature she transforms
To bear them light on her celestial wings!

"_Thus_ doth she, when from _individual states_
She doth abstract the universal kinds,
_Which then reclothed in divers names and fates_
_Steal access thro' our senses to our minds_."




Greek Drama.


It is truly singular that Plato,--whose philosophy and religion were but
exotic at home, and a mere opposition to the finite in all things, genuine
prophet and anticipator as he was of the Protestant Christian aera,--should
have given in his Dialogue of the Banquet, a justification of our
Shakespeare. For he relates that,