Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE
- Lectures on Shakespeare 1811–1812
- Lectures on Shakespeare 1818–1819
- Lecture 1 Thursday, 17 December 1818 (The Tempest)
- Lecture 3 Thursday, 7 January 1819 (Hamlet)
- Lecture 4 Thursday, 14 January 1819 (Macbeth)
- A Portion of Lecture 5: Thursday, 21 January 1819 (Othello)
- Lecture 6 Thursday, 28 January 1819 (King Lear)
- Lectures on Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Spenser, Ariosto and Cervantes, 1819
- A Portion of Lecture 3: Thursday, 25 February 1819 (Troilus and Cressida)
- Appendix: A Hitherto Unnoticed Account of Coleridge's 1811–1812 Lecture Series
- Index
Lecture 3 - Thursday, 7 January 1819 (Hamlet)
from Lectures on Shakespeare 1818–1819
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 April 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE
- Lectures on Shakespeare 1811–1812
- Lectures on Shakespeare 1818–1819
- Lecture 1 Thursday, 17 December 1818 (The Tempest)
- Lecture 3 Thursday, 7 January 1819 (Hamlet)
- Lecture 4 Thursday, 14 January 1819 (Macbeth)
- A Portion of Lecture 5: Thursday, 21 January 1819 (Othello)
- Lecture 6 Thursday, 28 January 1819 (King Lear)
- Lectures on Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Spenser, Ariosto and Cervantes, 1819
- A Portion of Lecture 3: Thursday, 25 February 1819 (Troilus and Cressida)
- Appendix: A Hitherto Unnoticed Account of Coleridge's 1811–1812 Lecture Series
- Index
Summary
Hamlet was the Play, or rather Hamlet himself was the character, in the intuition and exposition of which I first made my turn for philosophical criticism, and especially for insight into the genius of Shakespeare, noticed first among my acquaintances, as Sir G. Beaumont will bear witness, and as Mr Wordsworth knows, though from motives which I do not know or impulses which I cannot know, he has thought proper to assert that Schlegel and the German critics first taught Englishmen to admire their own great countryman intelligently—and secondly, long before Schlegel had given at Vienna the Lectures on Shakespeare, which he afterwards published, I had given eighteen lectures on the same subject substantially the same, proceeding from the same, the very same, point of view, and deducing the same conclusions, as far as I either then or now agree with him.
I gave them at the Royal Institution, before from six or seven hundred auditors of rank and eminence, in the spring of the same year, in which Sir H. Davy, a fellow lecturer, made his great revolutionary discoveries in Chemistry. Even in detail the coincidence of Schlegel with my Lectures was so extra-ordinary, that all at a later period who heard the same words (taken from my Royal Institution Notes) concluded a borrowing on my part from Schlegel—Mr. Hazlitt, whose hatred of me is in such an inverse ratio to my zealous kindness towards him, as to be defended by his warmest admirer, C. Lamb who (besides his characteristic obstinacy of adherence to old friends, as long at least as they are at all down in the world) is linked as by a charm to Hazlitt's conversation, only under the epithet frantic—Mr Hazlitt himself replied to an assertion of my plagiarism from Schlegel in these words;—‘That is a Lie; for I myself heard the very same character of Hamlet from Coleridge before he went to Germany, and when he had neither read nor could read a page of German.’ Now Hazlitt was on a visit to my Cottage at Nether Stowey, Somerset, in the summer of the year 1798, in the September of which (see my Literary Life) I first was out of sight of the Shores of Great Britain.
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- Coleridge: Lectures on Shakespeare (1811-1819) , pp. 141 - 153Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016