Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T15:01:03.751Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Text of Coleridge’s 1811–12 Shakespeare Lectures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2007

Get access

Summary

When John Payne Collier moved house in Maidenhead in 1854, he discovered a set of shorthand notes he had taken more than forty years earlier at the lectures on Shakespeare and other poets given by S. T. Coleridge in 1811–12. He also, as he testified in the preface to Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton by the late S. T. Coleridge (1856), found ‘transcripts in long-hand of some of the said notes’, on turning out a ‘double chest of drawers’, although diligent search on a number of previous occasions had failed to locate them. Collier announced his discovery in a series of four short contributions to Notes and Queries in July and August 1854. In the first two he printed excerpts from a diary he had kept at the time he attended the lectures, asserting that ‘only fragments remain’ of it, and he also reprinted the prospectuses of both the 1811–12 and the 1818 lectures given by Coleridge. In the last two he included some passages from his notes of the lectures. Of his ‘memoranda’ of seven lectures (numbers 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 12 of the seventeen Coleridge gave in the series), he claimed that they were ‘generally very full, and in the ipsissima verba of the author’.

The publication of these extracts received favourable notice in The Athenaeum, which in turn provoked the retort of 'A Detective' in a pamphlet called Literary Cookery with Reference to Matter attributed to Coleridge and Shakespeare published in 1855. The editor of The Athenaeum, W. H. Dixon, like Collier himself a lawyer and antiquary, remained his loyal supporter, and had refused to print the contents of this pamphlet when the author submitted it as a letter to his periodical.

Type
Chapter
Information
Shakespeare Survey , pp. 101 - 112
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1970

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×