Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats: Great Shakespeareans: Volume IV 9781472555007, 9780826424365

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Series Preface

What is a ‘Great Shakespearean’? Who are the ‘Great Shakespeareans’? This series is designed to explore those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. Charting the effect of Shakespeare on cultures local, national and international is a never-ending task, as we continually modulate and understand differently the ways in which each culture is formed and altered. Great Shakespeareans uses as its focus individuals whose own cultural impact has been and continues to be powerful. One of its aims is to widen the sense of who constitute the most important figures in our understanding of Shakespeare’s afterlives. The list is therefore not restricted to, say, actors and scholars, as if the performance of and commentary on Shakespeare’s works were the only means by which his impact is remade or extended. There are actors aplenty (like Garrick, Irving and Olivier) and scholars too (Bradley, Greg and Empson) but our list deliberately includes as many novelists (Dickens, Melville, Joyce), poets (Keats, Eliot, Berryman), playwrights (Brecht, Beckett, Césaire) and composers (Berlioz, Verdi and Britten), as well as thinkers whose work seems impossible without Shakespeare and whose influence on our world has been profound, like Marx and Freud. Deciding who to include has been less difficult than deciding who to exclude. We have a long list of individuals for whom we would wish to have found a place but whose inclusion would have meant someone else’s exclusion. We took long and hard looks at the volumes as they were shaped by our own and our volume editors’ perceptions. We have numerous regrets over some outstanding figures who ended up just outside this project. There will, no doubt, be argument on this score. Some may find our choices too Anglophone, insufficiently global. Others may complain of the lack of contemporary scholars and critics. But this is not a project designed to establish a new canon, nor are our volumes intended to be encyclopedic in scope. The series is not entitled ‘The Greatest Shakespeareans’ nor is it ‘Some Great Shakespeareans’, but it will, we hope, be seen as negotiating

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Series Preface

and occupying a space mid-way along the spectrum of inclusivity and arbitrariness. Our contributors have been asked to describe the double impact of Shakespeare on their particular figure and of their figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, as well as providing a sketch of their subject’s intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider context within which her/his work might be understood. This ‘context’ will vary widely from case to case and, at times, a single ‘Great Shakespearean’ is asked to stand as a way of grasping a large domain. In the case of Britten, for example, he is the window through which other composers and works in the English musical tradition like Vaughan Williams, Walton and Tippett have a place. So, too, Dryden has been the means for considering the beginnings of critical analysis of the plays as well as of the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays influenced Dryden’s own practice. To enable our contributors to achieve what we have asked of them, we have taken the unusual step of enabling them to write at length. Our volumes do not contain brief entries of the kind that a Shakespeare Encyclopedia would include nor the standard article length of academic journals and Shakespeare Companions. With no more than four Great Shakespeareans per volume – and as few as two in the case of volume 10 – our contributors have space to present their figures more substantially and, we trust, more engagingly. Each volume has a brief introduction by the volume editor and a section of further reading. We hope the volumes will appeal to those who already know the accomplishment of a particular Great Shakespearean and to those trying to find a way into seeing how Shakespeare has affected a particular poet as well as how that poet has changed forever our appreciation of Shakespeare. Above all, we hope Great Shakespeareans will help our readers to think afresh about what Shakespeare has meant to our cultures, and about how and why, in such differing ways across the globe and across the last four centuries and more, they have changed what his writing has meant. Peter Holland and Adrian Poole

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Notes on Contributors

Felicity James is a lecturer in eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature at the University of Leicester. She held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (2005–2008) at Christ Church, Oxford, where she completed a doctorate on the early writing of Charles Lamb. Her book, Charles Lamb, Coleridge, and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2008. Her research currently focuses on Unitarian friendships and literary networks in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from the Aikin family to Elizabeth Gaskell. Beth Lau is Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. She is the author of Keats’s Reading of the Romantic Poets (University of Michigan Press, 1991) and Keats’s Paradise Lost (University Press of Florida, 1998). She has also edited Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (Houghton Mifflin, 2002) and the forthcoming collection of essays, Fellow Romantics: Male and Female British Writers, 1790–1835 (Ashgate). Uttara Natarajan is Senior Lecturer in English at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the author of Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense (Clarendon Press, 1998) and co-editor (with Tom Paulin and Duncan Wu) of Metaphysical Hazlitt (Routledge, 2005). She has published numerous scholarly essays on Hazlitt and is the editor of The Hazlitt Review. She is currently working on a monograph about the practices and forms of literary idealism in the nineteenth century. Adrian Poole is Professor of English at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His monographs include Shakespeare and the Victorians (Arden, 2003) and Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2005), and he has co-edited (with Gail Marshall) Victorian Shakespeare, 2 vols. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). In 1999 he delivered the British Academy Shakespeare Lecture, ‘Macbeth and the Third Person’, and he has written introductions to Romeo and Juliet and Henry IV, Part Two (Penguin, 2005).

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Note on References to Shakespeare

All references to Shakespeare are to The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd edn (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

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Introduction Adrian Poole

No writer of the Romantic age, indeed scarcely an artist or thinker of any kind, was untouched by Shakespeare. But just as Romanticism meant different things in different countries and cultures, for Goethe, Schiller and Hegel; for Stendhal, Hugo and Delacroix; and for Manzoni, Leopardi and Verdi, so too did Shakespeare. He stood for an idea of liberation, but liberation from what and to what ends? In the land of his birth he embodied many urgent questions about what it meant to be English at a time when national identities, both in continental Europe and across the Atlantic, were being spectacularly re-defined. He also represented particularly vertiginous ideas, as overwhelming as they might be inspiring, about the capacities of the creative imagination. And yet these were ideas, no matter how lofty, expressed in words that anyone might speak, or even write, a kind of verbal currency on which perhaps we could all get our hands, whoever ‘we’ were. The three writers addressed by this volume played a key role in the making of an early nineteenth-century English Shakespeare, one that would be influential on ideas of creative genius, on the relations between the page and the stage, on the possibilities of poetic language, for at least the rest of the century. Of course there were others, such as Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, the Gothic novelists, the painters of the popular Boydell Gallery, including Henry Fuseli, and a host of lesser artists: their work would not have been what it was without Shakespeare. Besides Lamb, Hazlitt and Keats, three other figures stand out and feature elsewhere in this series, namely, Coleridge (vol. 3), Kean (vol. 2) and Scott (vol. 5).1 Born in 1772 Coleridge was three years senior to Lamb, his school fellow at Christ’s Hospital, and collaborated with him in the 1790s. Six years older than Hazlitt, Coleridge enthralled the younger man but came to represent almost everything he disapproved of and disagreed with. Born in 1795, Keats was too much younger to fall directly under Coleridge’s spell, but Edmund Kean

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was a different matter, and Keats shared Hazlitt’s fascination with the turbulent, erratic actor (Lamb does not seem to have been impressed). If Hazlitt owes a good deal to Lamb and Coleridge, often in sharp reaction against the latter, then Keats in turn owes a massive though not passive debt to Hazlitt. His writings and lectures, especially on Shakespeare, had an intimate impact on Keats, as Beth Lau and Uttara Natarajan both discuss, on his idea of the ‘camelion poet’, on his antipathy to poets with a ‘palpable design on us’, on his admiration for ‘gusto’.2 Despite the near-generational difference in age between the young poet and the two older essayists, the connections between the three are close and the sense of live dialogue strong. Lamb helped Hazlitt to establish literary connections in London, and to employment as a journalist in 1812, at a point in his life (aged 34) when he was at risk of penury. Their friendship was shaken by political differences; Hazlitt was bitterly disappointed at Lamb’s failure to sympathize over Napoleon’s fall (Lamb was not alone). But Hazlitt’s Shakespearean criticism draws freely and explicitly on Lamb, and Characters (1817) was dedicated to him ‘as a mark of old friendship and lasting esteem’. Lamb reviewed Hazlitt’s Table Talk (1821) enthusiastically and, shortly before his own death in 1834, is supposed to have declared Hazlitt ‘worth all modern prose-writers put together’.3 One of the fruits of Hazlitt’s faltering early ambitions as philosopher and painter was a fine portrait of Lamb in 1804, dressed as a Venetian senator, in the style of Titian. (It now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.) Keats was personally acquainted with Lamb and Hazlitt. He owned a copy of Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets; Lamb reviewed Keats warmly and is said to have judged him the greatest of contemporary poets after Wordsworth.4 Keats marked and annotated his copy of Hazlitt’s Characters, and was moved to imagine its author looking like Ferdinand in The Tempest: ‘“in an odd angle of the Isle sitting” – his arms in this sad knot’.5 Felicity James argues persuasively for the sociable ethos of informal debate promoted by her subject Charles Lamb, his role in making Shakespeare ‘familiar’ – indeed, to draw on the line in Henry V from which Charles Dickens would lift the title of his periodical, ‘Familiar in his mouth as household words’ (4. 3. 52). Hazlitt’s essays and Keats’s letters are riddled with allusion to Shakespeare, as if his words were essential to the very way they thought and felt. Far-reaching questions arise about the effect of such allusion and echo in Keats’s own poetry or in Hazlitt’s most impassioned prose. But at the informal level – at which indeed all of Lamb’s and most of Hazlitt’s public writings are purposively pitched – the presence of Shakespeare’s affable familiar ghost provides an instructive contrast to the awesome

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unapproachable figure of genius. Lamb turned the ‘Feathers’ in Holborn into a ‘Boar’s Head’, and Falstaff was no less congenial to Hazlitt, who borrowed his abuse of Mistress Quickly and applied it with brilliant malice to the slippery Coleridge: ‘You can no more know where to have him than an otter’ (19: 210).6 Keats too drew inspiration and encouragement from Falstaff’s resilient bravado, though it is hard with hindsight not to find in these words to his friend J. H. Reynolds a terrible pathos: ‘Banish money – Banish sofa – Banish Wine – Banish Music – But right Jack Health – honest Jack Health, true Jack Health – banish health and banish all the world’ (Letters, 1: 125). On his deathbed Keats confessed that ‘Like poor Falstaff, though I do not babble, I think of green fields’ (Letters, 2: 260). Hazlitt often wrote admiringly of Shakespeare’s ‘magnanimity’, for example, – reflecting on the Bastard in King John, and his ‘spirit, invention, volubility of tongue’ – of ‘the heedless magnanimity of his [Shakespeare’s] wit’ in contrast to Ben Jonson’s ‘laborious caution’ (4: 311). Though Hazlitt was inclined to describe his own taste as ‘more saturnine than mercurial’ (4: 316), he was encouraged by the companionable Lamb to imagine himself on similar terms with Shakespeare himself, and he passed this benign idea on to anyone who cared to listen or read him, including the eager, attentive young Keats. Reflecting on the difference in their treatment of the Troilus and Cressida story, Hazlitt describes, as he sees it, Chaucer’s capacity to do just one thing at a time: His ideas were kept separate, labelled, ticketed and parcelled out in a set form, in pews and compartments by themselves. They did not play into one another’s hands. They did not re-act upon one another, as the blower’s breath moulds the yielding glass. There is something hard and dry in them. What is the most wonderful thing in Shakespear’s faculties is their excessive sociability, and how they gossiped and compared notes together. (4: 226) ‘Excess’ can rarely have seemed so forgivable. Lamb, Hazlitt and Keats have in common an appetite for Shakespeare partly deriving from the congeniality of their modest social origins and their distance from the seats of cultural and political power. Unlike Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley, they did not go to Cambridge or Oxford, and they enjoyed no independent income or wealthy patrons: they needed to earn their own living, as Lamb did for many years as a clerk for the East India Company. As the breach between Hazlitt and Lamb over Napoleon’s eclipse suggests, there were differences, both political and

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temperamental, between the two older men, yet they were both marked by the turbulent 1790s. Felicity James recovers much of the anxious context in which Lamb’s first writings were produced and received. It is of more than passing interest that the astonishingly durable Tales from Shakespear compiled with his sister Mary were published in 1806 by the radical William Godwin and that the Tory press viewed them with corresponding suspicion. The poetry of the upstart young Keats also excited the malign attention of journalists eager to keep ‘Cockney’ riff-raff in their place. When the blatantly ‘Jacobin’ Hazlitt published in 1819 a ferocious self-defence against the virulent assaults of William Gifford, Keats copied out page after page in admiration, so he told his brother, of its ‘style of genius’ and the ‘force and innate power with which it yeasts and works up itself’ (Letters, 2: 76). No wonder that they were drawn to the outsiders, underdogs and victims in Shakespeare (though, be it noted, mainly male: for a richer appreciation of Shakespeare’s women we must wait until a bit later in the century, for Anna Jameson, Mary Cowden Clarke and others; see vol. 7). Lamb sets the tone with his sympathetic response to Shylock (‘in the midst of his savage purpose, [he] is a man’), and his diatribe against the caricature to which contemporary actors reduced ‘the monster’ Richard III, as distinct from ‘the man Richard, whom Shakespeare drew’. No wonder the play seemed richer in reading than in such coarse travesty: ‘Nothing but his crimes, his actions, is visible; they are prominent and staring; the murderer stands out, but where is the lofty genius, the man of vast capacity – the profound, the witty, accomplished Richard?’ (4: 26, 1: 37, 1: 106).7 As for the great Romantic actor of the age, Edmund Kean, it was as Shylock and Othello that he dazzled most effectively. ‘Mr Kean’s Othello is his best character, and the highest effort of genius on the stage. We say this without any exception of reserve,’ began Hazlitt’s review for the Examiner, 7 January 1816, though typically he goes on: ‘Yet we wish it was better than it is’ (5: 271). The discovery of some previously unregarded inwardness to a familiar dramatic character invariably distinguishes the bright new theatrical phenomenon. But these keen theatregoers and readers believed they could see more than the stage of their times could ever offer, not least in the great models of passion, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear, of which this last, in Lamb’s influential hands, became a test case: [W]hile we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear, – we are in his mind, . . . ; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes of life, . . . (1: 107)

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‘Irregular’ is itself a regular enough word, but ‘immethodized’ is a brilliant coinage to match the aberration with which Lamb is identifying. Shakespeare was, for the Romantics and their Victorian successors, whatever banner they marched under, the measure of creative possibility, or impossibility. The young Matthew Arnold gives an early Victorian expression of this in a sonnet entitled ‘Shakespeare’ (1844): Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask – Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill, Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty, Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea, Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place, Spares but the cloudy border of his base To the foiled searching of mortality; . . . 8 Arnold is sketching an image of unscaleable elevation and impregnable opacity, directly derived from Romantic poetics and the idealist philosophical positions on which, broadly speaking, they are based. Nevertheless, however impressed by Shakespeare’s sublimity, Arnold’s Romantic predecessors were never quite as crushed and overwhelmed as this. The idea of sublime failure provides the perspective in which to view the Romantics’ influential statements about the essential incompatibility between poetry and performance and the intrinsic superiority of reading Shakespeare over seeing his plays in the theatre. The classic statement here is Charles Lamb’s ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare’ (1811), with its confession that ‘I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage, than those of almost any other dramatist whatever’ (1: 99). Hazlitt frequently echoes these sentiments, but it is important to read these declarations in the context of their first utterance. One wonders how many of those who confidently cite Lamb’s essay in particular as the epitome of anti-theatrical prejudice have actually read it. Felicity James positions Lamb’s essay, and indeed all his writings in the circumstances of their first production, and Uttara Natarajan shrewdly addresses the large philosophical context in which Hazlitt’s particular comments need to be seen. In reading Lamb and Hazlitt it is at the least important to know that they were both enthusiastic and knowledgeable playgoers (much more so than Coleridge). Whatever one’s allegiances in the arguments about ‘text’ and ‘performance’, their essays are still vital accounts of the endless rival claims for the imaginative

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freedom of reading against the limiting fixities of performance, for the liberating embodiment of textual potential on stage against the monocularity of singular reading and so on. Furthermore, whatever convictions about the self we may now hold or whatever fictions we may entertain, we should recognize the sheer excitement that comes through these writings – the discovery, as it seems, of whole new vast inner vistas to be charted and energies to be hailed. These revelations would go on to animate both the great introspective and lyric poetry of the nineteenth century and its most dramatic narrative fictions. Here it is worth juxtaposing Lamb’s reflections on the impossibility of adequately performing King Lear with the practice embraced in the Tales from Shakespear written in collaboration with his sister Mary. The Lambs stress their aim of introducing young readers to Shakespeare, ‘for which purpose, his words are used whenever it seemed possible to bring them in’ (3: 1). There is an important argument, well deployed by Natarajan, that the Romantic artist may trail a faint but genuine remnant of the sublime. An analogous case can be made for the whole activity of literary translation that will become so important to the nineteenth century. We might apply this idea to the Lambs’ ‘performance’ of Shakespeare. These narrative versions are of course not adequate to their sublime originals, yet they preserve a true trace of their divine source. Even more can be claimed for them, not merely that they trail clouds of glory from the past but that they make promises for the future. The Lambs explicitly make such a pledge, that the child will return as an adult to re-enter the original paradise and claim ‘the rich treasures from which these small and valueless coins are extracted’ (3: 1). The surface rhetoric may be one of apology for failure, but it harbours a promise of good things to come: Faint and imperfect images they must be called . . . and even in some few places, where his blank verse is given unaltered, as hoping from its simple plainness to cheat the young readers into the belief that they are reading prose, yet still his language being transplanted from its own natural soil and wild poetic garden, it must want much of its native beauty. (3: 1–2) Much, but not all – and imagine the wild poetic garden ahead. This emphasis on the future is no less important to Hazlitt, who takes inspiration from Romeo and Juliet (both the characters and their whole play) to challenge Wordsworth’s depiction of childhood, in what he calls

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the ‘Ode on the Progress of Life’ (normally known as the ‘Immortality Ode’). It is a classic statement of faith. It is not from the knowledge of the past that the first impressions of things derive their gloss and splendour, but from our ignorance of the future, which fills the void to come with the warmth of our desires, with our gayest hopes, and brightest fancies. . . . There is no occasion to resort to any mystical union and transmission of feeling through different states of being to account for the romantic enthusiasm of youth; nor to plant the root of hope in the grave, nor to derive it from the skies. Its root is in the heart of man: it lifts its head above the stars. (4: 250) It is true that Hazlitt’s impassioned ‘speech’ – as if incited by the spirits of the young lovers – continues on its ecstatic precarious course until it expires on the thought that love ‘withers and dies almost as soon [as it is born]!’ Hazlitt’s prose is itself so dramatic that it is easy to misrepresent by selection. But the point holds, that Hazlitt believes that ‘romantic enthusiasm’ is orientated towards the future, and more generally, that it is such passion that makes things happen, and that it is the mark of the greatest artists to depict such passion. Shakespeare’s characters and language may have been companionable familiar presences, but when it came to the mind that created them, the Romantics stood back in awe. And puzzlement. So familiar have their formulations become, especially Keats’s about ‘Negative Capability’ and the ‘camelion poet’ that we now tend to read them as more definite and confident than they were ever intended to be. Both Lau and Natarajan demur at identifying their authors too strictly with the pronouncements they make. Keats’s ideas about the ‘selflessness’ of the poet did not remain unchanged until the end of his short explosive career, Lau argues. Nor should Hazlitt’s ideas about power, will and selfhood, be confused with Keats’s, Natarajan proposes. There remains in all these memorable expressions something more tentative and provisional than the hardening effect of their endless repetition out of context allows. The essays in this volume will have done good service if they urge readers back to the original settings in which these ideas were framed or, as it often more accurately seems, tossed out. Those qualities that Hazlitt fondly attributes to Shakespeare, of a certain ‘heedless magnanimity’, a capacity for ‘running on’ – these characterize his own hazardous way of writing, one that is close to the erratic rhythms and spontaneous shifts of direction in unscripted speech. These

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are exactly the features that Hazlitt and Keats, and to a more muted extent Lamb, value in the artists they most admire. And yet who or what in the end was Shakespeare? On 27 January 1818 Keats went to hear Hazlitt lecture at the Surrey Institution ‘On Shakespeare and Milton’. He heard this, among other things: He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune, or conflict of passion, or turn of thought. (5: 47) No wonder that ‘protean’ is a word favoured by Hazlitt (and Coleridge) for this magical power of endless becoming, as if the ‘infinite variety’ with which Cleopatra is endowed were also the clue to her creator’s being. Keats certainly admired Cleopatra and her play, and Beth Lau makes a powerful case for taking very seriously the hint thrown out by B. W. Procter that Antony and Cleopatra may have been Keats’s favourite Shakespeare play. It is certainly evident that Keats recognized in Shakespeare a rivalry between competing perspectives for which the traditional terms that offer themselves are tragedy and comedy. For Keats himself these would more accurately be called tragedy and romance. This is the burden of the sonnet addressed to the experience of reading the tragedy Keats agreed with Lamb and Hazlitt in finding the most ‘intense’. In Characters, Hazlitt wrote: ‘Lear stands first for the profound intensity of the passion.’ (4: 186) A few days before hearing Hazlitt lecture Keats wrote the sonnet ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’ that begins: O golden-tongued Romance, with serene lute! Fair-plumed siren, queen of far-away! Leave melodizing on this wintry day, Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute. Adieu! Over the next ten days he went on to write another sonnet that deliberately invokes one or more of Shakespeare’s own: When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,

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Before high piled books, in charact’ry, Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain; . . . 9 In 1880 Matthew Arnold felt able to praise the ‘Shakespearian’ quality in Keats, ‘the fascinating felicity’, ‘his perfection of loveliness’.10 Lau reminds us that Arnold’s admiration was always qualified and, earlier in his career, more sharply so. Yet these terms of praise seem more applicable to Keats’s earlier than later poetry, too soft to do justice to the strength pulsing through the loveliness. ‘Absent thee from felicity awhile’, the dying Hamlet exhorts Horatio, ‘And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain . . . ’ (5. 2. 354–5) Keats knew about drawing one’s breath in pain and his greatest poetry mourns for mortality no less than it exults in loveliness. Charles Lamb had described King Lear as ‘too hard and stony’; no wonder people wanted love scenes and a happy ending (1: 107). It is something of this stony, wintry quality in Shakespeare’s art that all three of these great Shakespeareans intuited, not only of course in King Lear, nor ever without intense feeling for the tender human spirit at its mercy.

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Chapter 1

Charles Lamb Felicity James

Can we really know Lamb the Shakespearean? A great deal of Charles Lamb’s Shakespeare criticism seems to have existed in conversation, in the dark back rooms of London taverns or the ‘many lively skirmishes’ of the Lambs’ Wednesday and Thursday evening gatherings.1 ‘Many of his best remarks about Shakespeare’, as Jonathan Bate points out, ‘may therefore be lost to us’.2 What we do have, however, suggests how his work might have played a part in larger Romantic dialogues of creativity, sympathy, reader response and performance. It is also intimately bound up with his relationship with his sister, Mary, joint author of the Tales from Shakespear (1806): the Lambs’ engagement with Shakespeare is essentially sociable, not only familial, but also involving friends and other writers. This sociable engagement, however, took place against a backdrop of family tragedy. In September 1796, in what Charles would term a ‘day of horrors’, Mary Lamb killed her mother in a manic fit of violence, stabbing her in the heart.3 Once the verdict of lunacy was returned, Mary was bound over to the care of Charles. Thereafter, until Charles’s death in 1834, brother and sister lived together, successfully managing Mary’s mental illness, which twentieth-century biographers have tentatively diagnosed as manic-depressive in nature.4 She periodically spent time in private asylums, but otherwise lived a full and creative life. Her relationship with her brother was one of mutual care, since Charles was himself subject to depression and struggled with what he termed ‘my cursed drinking’ (Marrs, 2: 169). This was, as Jane Aaron has put it, a relationship in which ‘both partners appear to have functioned alternately as caretaker and cared-for’: a relationship which was mutually supportive and sustaining but which could also be constraining and highly difficult.5 It is surely not coincidental that their readings of Shakespeare – such as Charles’s play, John Woodvil (1799–1802), heavily influenced by his admiration of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama – are shaped by an intimate knowledge of tragedy and a capacity for sympathetic

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understanding. As we will see, there is also a persistent pattern of attraction towards creative freedom and imaginative possibility, coupled with a certain anxiety and desire for restraint: a double movement which will become particularly pronounced in the Tales from Shakespear, discussed in the concluding section. The creative sociability of the Lambs’ work on Shakespeare, then, was hard won, and heroically self-constructed: one reason, perhaps, for its enduring influence. Charles and Mary Lamb were brought up in the Inner Temple, where their father was employed by the bencher Samuel Salt: the close and mutually loyal relationship between lawyer and servant is celebrated in Lamb’s Elia essay ‘The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple’. It was Salt who enabled Lamb and his brother John to attend Christ’s Hospital. Mary, 10 years older than her brother, had only basic schooling, followed by an apprenticeship to a needlewoman, after which she became a mantua-maker. She did, however, derive benefit from the relationship with Salt – free access to his extensive library, ‘a spacious closet of good old English reading’, into which, in the words of Elia, she was ‘tumbled early’.6 Her love of reading would be life long, and she also frequently accompanied Charles to the theatre and took an active role in entertaining and conversing at their evening gatherings. This means that any discussion of Charles’s writing must also recognize Mary’s participation, the faithful Bridget-Elia. Although the main focus of this chapter is on Charles – who is referred to as Lamb in the main body of the text – this is not intended to exclude Mary. Though she comes to the fore only in my closing exploration of the Tales, she should be acknowledged as a constant, unspoken presence throughout. Through Charles Lamb’s theatre reviews, plays, selections of extracts and periodical essays, domestic and familial discussions about Shakespeare are opened to larger Romantic conversations, with Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hazlitt and Keats. Lamb’s engagement with Shakespeare spans his whole career, beginning with the Shakespearean language of his little-known sonnets of the 1790s, written in the first throes of admiration for Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Born in 1775, Lamb was almost 3 years younger than Coleridge and had attended the same school, Christ’s Hospital, looking up to Coleridge as a ‘Grecian’, or senior scholar. Lamb, by contrast, was not destined for university – his stammer meant he would, in any case, have been unsuited to a career in law or the Church – and left school at 14. By 1792, he was beginning his life-long career as a clerk at the East India House. Eager for literary and social stimulation, he began to frequent taverns such as the ‘Salutation and Cat’, where he grew close to Coleridge, and the ‘Feathers’, where he kept company with another Christ’s Hospital

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friend, James White, and helped him to write his bardolatrous parody, Falstaff’s Letters (1796). These 1790s engagements with Shakespeare through poetry and prose – marked by allusion and quotation, sometimes verging on appropriation – are early signs of Lamb’s intense interest in the relationship between reading and theatre, and the vexed negotiations between author, actor, audience and reader. This could manifest itself in adaptations which removed Shakespeare from the stage entirely, such as the Tales from Shakespear, and his selection of extracts from Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived about the Time of Shakspeare (1808). Yet he also had a life-long interest in the stage itself, considering theatre reviewing in the early 1800s, when he commented in depth on the performance of G. F. Cooke in Richard III, first to his friend Robert Lloyd in a letter of June 1801, then in a review in the Morning Post in 1802. Both pieces contribute to his famous essay ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare’ (1811), which has long been read as an anti-theatrical manifesto. However, his continued engagement with the theatre is evident in essays such as ‘Shakspeare’s Improvers’ (1828) and contributions to the London Magazine such as ‘On Some of the Old Actors’ and ‘On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century’ – as well as the knowing performance of his alter ego, Elia. This scattered body of work on Shakespeare and drama is often provocative and challenging. When considered as a whole, it may be seen to present an evolving, yet coherent critical attitude, as Roy Park has shown in his collection of Lamb’s criticism. Park has argued that Lamb is ‘with Hazlitt, the greatest critic of the drama of his own or any other age in England’.7 Certainly, despite his later fall from critical fashion, he seems to have exerted a powerful inspirational effect on his contemporaries. Lamb, claimed William Hazlitt, ‘has furnished many a text for C[oleridge] to preach upon’ (Howe, 12: 36); in turn, Coleridge himself asserted that he preferred Lamb’s ‘exquisite criticisms on Shakspeare’ to ‘Hazlitt’s round and round imitations of them’.8 Reading Lamb the Shakespearean, then, is in part an effort of reconstruction – recreating these larger dialogues and listening into lost conversations, like those recorded in Hazlitt’s vivid memory of Lamb at his evening gatherings: His jests scald like tears: and he probes a question with a play upon words. What a keen, laughing, hair-brained [sic] vein of home-felt truth! What choice venom! How often did we cut into the haunch of letters, while we discussed the haunch of mutton on the table! . . . ‘And, in our flowing cups, many a good name and true was freshly remembered.’ (Howe, 12: 36)

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Charles Lamb

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Shakespeare is at the heart of this sociable intellectual debate, since Hazlitt’s quotation is from Henry V, albeit slightly altered: Then shall our names, Familiar in his mouth as household words, Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester, Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d. (Henry V, 4. 3. 51–5) The line which is elided here gives us an insight into how Lamb and his circle treated Shakespeare: ‘Familiar in his mouth as household words’. What Lamb is constantly trying to create is a ‘familiar’ Shakespeare, in the sense both of a deeply known Shakespeare, constantly present through allusion and quotation – and also of Shakespeare as domesticated and brought into the family circle, as in the Tales from Shakespear and the Specimens of English Dramatic Poets. This domestication of Shakespeare was hugely successful, reaching far into the nineteenth century; it may be glimpsed, for example, in Charles Dickens’s Household Words, which continues this pattern of Shakespearean storytelling, appropriation and reinvention.9 Both the Tales and the Specimens were products of Lamb’s intimate relationships – familial and friendly – and both works in turn help to produce a Romantic and nineteenth-century sense of intimacy with Shakespeare. Tales from Shakespear was composed in collaboration with his sister Mary, and published by a friend, William Godwin: it encodes a familiar, household scene of shared creativity, when, as Mary described, ‘we often sit writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting) like Hermia & Helena in the Midsummer’s Nights Dream. or rather like an old literary Darby and Joan’ (Marrs, 2: 229). It then promotes a scene of family reading, as older brothers are asked to explain ‘to their sisters such parts as are hardest for them to understand’, and then to read aloud to them from the plays themselves, ‘carefully selecting what is proper for a young sister’s ear’ (Lucas, 3: 2). Specimens, similarly, bears the traces of long-running conversations, since it not only attempts to open up dialogue between Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but it also repeats extracts and comments Lamb had already shared with friends such as Robert Southey, and it was then in turn extensively used by Hazlitt in his Lectures Chiefly on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (1820). A copy of Specimens was among Keats’s cherished possessions, given to him by his friend Benjamin Bailey, and later passed on to Fanny Brawne. Through this cycle of gift giving,

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the book thus becomes a part of Keats’s own conversations of friendship, which are themselves carried on inside the book through the eager annotations of Bailey and Keats. One of Keats’s most enthusiastic comments comes next to Lamb’s footnote comparing Heywood to Shakespeare: Shakspeare makes us believe, while we are among his lovely creations, that they are nothing but what we are familiar with, as in dreams new things seem old: but we awake, and sigh for the difference.10 Keats underlined the comment, adding: ‘This is the most acute deep sighted and spiritual piece of criticism ever penned.’11 It is, as Helen Haworth has pointed out, the mention of the ‘familiar’ which seems to have held particular appeal for Keats – he and Lamb, she suggests, ‘have similar views of the aesthetic experience, that its beauty is not a surprise, but comfortingly familiar’.12 This ability to make us feel ‘familiar’ with a range of sensations is linked to Shakespeare’s capacity for sympathy. Keats and Lamb, like Coleridge and Hazlitt, try repeatedly to elucidate the ways in which Shakespeare can ‘go out of himself’, to quote Lamb’s Specimens. Lamb develops the point in a comparison between Chapman and Shakespeare: Chapman, he claims, ‘could not go out of himself, as Shakspeare could shift at his pleasure, to inform and animate other existences’ (Specimens, 98). As we will see, this helps Shakespeare imbue each character with significance and humanity, so that even Richard III ‘impresses’ Lamb ‘. . . with awe and deep admiration of his witty parts’ (Marrs, 2: 7). While the concept of Shakespeare as a humane, sympathetic author was by no means a new idea, it takes on a special significance for this group of writers, themselves struggling to articulate the relationship of art to larger ideals of humanity and sympathy. It is present in Hazlitt’s discussion of the ‘generic quality’ of Shakespeare’s mind, its ‘power of communication with all other minds’, in his lecture on Shakespeare and Milton. Shakespeare was in no way an ‘egotist’; his mind reflected all ages and all people, and his genius ‘shone equally on the evil and on the good, on the wise and the foolish’ (Howe, 5: 47). This lecture – itself informed by Hazlitt’s reading of Lamb – lies behind Keats’s definition of the ‘camelion Poet’, the poetic character which has ‘no self – it is every thing and nothing.’ Similarly, it makes no distinction of rank or morality, and ‘has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen’.13 The same idea, as Bate has explored, is also present in Coleridge’s assertion that Shakespeare ‘darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion’.14

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Charles Lamb

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Lamb was not only taking part in a larger Romantic dialogue about the nature of Shakespearean genius, he was also formulating a deeply personal view of creativity and attempting to define his own critical approach. As we will see, his ideal of creative writing and reading would be modelled on what he saw as the Shakespearean loss of identity – the author’s ability to ‘go out of himself’, prompting a corresponding creative sympathy in the reader. It is this conviction which informs, for instance, his comments on Wordsworth as ‘narrow and confined in his views’: ‘He does not, like Shakespeare, become everything he pleases, but forces the reader to submit to his individual feelings.’15 Later readers not only identified his writing as sympathetic with Shakespeare’s, but also used his own concept of Shakespearean sympathy to describe him as a critic. The young Henry James was struck by Lamb’s sociable fellow feeling with Shakespeare, and, in a letter to his friend Thomas Sergeant Perry in 1864, imagined himself transported to a convivial literary heaven, populated by Shakespeare, Goethe and Charles Lamb. ‘Elia,’ he wrote, ‘is delicious . . . He and W. S. have great times together. Elia is forever spouting out quotations from the Plays, which Shake never recognises.’16 Walter Pater offers another image of posthumous sympathy: ‘how must the souls of Shakespeare and Webster have been stirred . . . at his exquisite appreciations,’ he exclaims. What distinguishes Lamb’s criticism, for Pater, is the very ‘self-forgetful’ capacity Lamb had himself identified in Shakespeare, a ‘sort of boundless sympathy’ which stems from ‘immediate contact with what is real’.17 Similarly, E. M. W. Tillyard comments on Lamb’s ‘quality of self-surrender’ and his ‘intimate sympathy’ with Shakespeare.18 But can this ‘familiar’, sympathetic Shakespeare survive in the theatre? This is the central issue of Lamb’s famous essay ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare’: It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of Shakspeare are less calculated for performance on a stage, than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their distinguished excellence is a reason that they should be so. There is so much in them, which comes not under the province of acting, with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do. (Lucas, 1: 115) It is a sly and ambivalent piece, probing issues which fascinated Lamb throughout his life, such as the relationship between author, actor and audience; the nature of acting, watching and reading; and larger questions

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of the role of imagination in response. Early readers, such as John Wilson, reviewing Lamb’s Works in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, raised issues which continue to trouble critics. Wilson comments on the way in which Lamb ‘adopts a paradox’ in the essay and finds his own response to be something of a paradox, too. He finds himself convinced by Lamb on some levels, admitting that ‘some of Shakspeare’s finest plays must afford us greater delight in the closet than they possibly can do on the stage.’19 But he runs up against the problem that, after all, Shakespeare ‘wrote for the stage’ and it is, therefore, illogical to suggest that he should not be appreciated in his proper medium. Wilson’s hesitation between reading and performance foreshadows later divisions of thought about Lamb’s Shakespearean criticism. For critics such as Pater or A. C. Bradley, it was Lamb who, ‘reading, commenting on Shakespeare’ and his Elizabethan contemporaries, represented the ‘very quintessence of criticism’, and was, simply, ‘the best critic of the nineteenth century’.20 Bradley’s late Romantic strain of subjective, sympathetic criticism freely admitted its debts to Lamb; he expanded and furthered Lamb’s reading of particular characters and agreed that plays such as King Lear and The Tempest were ‘too huge’ for the stage. For Bradley, Lear – ‘one of the world’s greatest poems’ – was more akin to aesthetic experiences such as the Divine Comedy, Beethoven’s symphonies and the statues of the Medici Chapel than the theatre.21 Later twentieth-century responses, however, indignantly returned to Wilson’s contention that Shakespeare ‘wrote for the stage’ and must be judged in performance. Lamb’s views came to be seen as ‘baroque whimsicalities’ – the outdated and complacent misjudgements of an armchair critic.22 René Wellek’s comment is a fairly kindly example of this approach: [the] view that the ‘plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage, than those of almost any dramatist whatever’ can hardly be taken seriously except as a means of drawing our attention to the greatness of Shakespeare’s poetry and the diverse shortcomings of the stage in the time of Lamb.23 Contemporary theatrical limitations are certainly an issue for Lamb, as for Hazlitt and Coleridge. He frequently expresses his frustration at late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century theatrical conventions: revisions and alterations of Shakespeare’s texts by Nahum Tate and Colley Cibber, the huge space of the remodelled theatres which meant the actors had

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Charles Lamb

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to shout to be heard, a ‘star’ system of dominant actors and the insistence on spectacle and stage machinery. Lamb’s attitude towards Shakespeare in performance, however, goes beyond these constraints to explore the very nature of the relationship between audience and actor. His essay knowingly poses paradoxical questions to the reader, not least because of the way it seems at odds with his own fondness for theatre-going and actors. Lamb saw his first play in 1780 – Thomas Arne’s 1762 opera Artaxerxes, followed by Garrick’s pantomime Harlequin’s Invasion (1759) – and ‘left the temple a devotee’ (Lucas, 2: 114). Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833) – highly theatrical performances in their own right – contain evocative imagery of ‘the good old one shilling gallery days’ of playhouse visiting (Lucas, 2: 285–6) and of the effect of the play on a child’s imagination. While ‘My First Play’ charts his later disappointment with theatrical illusion, in other ways Lamb never lost faith in the theatre. The author of four largely unsuccessful plays – the first written in 1799, the last in 1828 – he persisted in attempting to have his work staged, despite having his only production, Mr. H-, hissed on its first night. Actors were also an intimate part of Lamb’s social circle: he proposed to Fanny Kelly, who was also a close friend of Mary’s, and knew actors such as Robert William Elliston and Charles Mathews well. As Elia, he almost idolizes actors such as Joseph Munden, whose ‘gusto’ – a Hazlittian concept most famously worked out in his 1816 essay ‘On Gusto’ in The Examiner, and knowingly appropriated by Lamb in his essay ‘On the Acting of Munden’, first published in The Examiner (1819) and reprinted with some changes in The London Magazine (1822) and Elia – is represented as something ennobling and morally sanctifying. Lamb’s essay imagines Munden ‘diffus[ing] a glow of sentiment which has made the pulse of a crowded theatre beat like that of one man’; he comes, argues Elia, ‘in aid of the pulpit, doing good to the moral heart of a people’ (Lucas, 2: 169). The feeling of admiration was mutual: Thomas Noon Talfourd gives a description of Munden’s last performance, when Munden found room for Charles and Mary Lamb in the corner of the orchestra, popping out between the end of the play and the beginning of the after-piece farce, to hand a glistening ‘huge porter-pot’ to Charles – nicely symbolic of the sociable interchange between actor and audience in which Lamb could freely participate.24 Lamb is decisively not, then, anti-theatre. Yet what are we to make of his criticisms of the ‘inherent fault of stage representation’, the ways in which Shakespeare’s speeches may be ‘sullied and turned from their very nature by being exposed to a large assembly’ (Lucas, 1: 116)? How should we read his conclusion that there is ‘something in the nature of acting which levels

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Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats

all distinctions’, and erases the distinct genius of Shakespeare (Lucas, 1: 121)? More recent criticism has found this implied elitism troubling. Jonathan Bate, for instance, has repeatedly put forward the view that Lamb’s – as opposed, say, to Hazlitt’s – is an enclosing, limiting commentary on Shakespeare, and implicitly (although Bate carefully does not use the term) conservative. As Lamb grew older, argues Bate, ‘he made the characteristic inward turn of the Romantic.’25 And making this turn, Bate adds, ‘he took Shakespeare with him,’ making him into something private and individualistic, removed both from the theatre, and from public consumption in the shape of appropriation, caricatures and parodies which could be deployed to radical ends: Lamb’s reservations about the stage, which Coleridge shared, are symptomatic of a far-reaching desire to repossess Shakespeare for the self and to remove him from the political appropriators. Some would praise Coleridge and Lamb for this; others would argue that the Romantics are themselves engaged in a political appropriation in the name of privacy and individualism.26 Bate’s argument is a powerful one, but leaves several key issues unexamined. First, we need to consider whether Lamb did make an ‘inward turn’ post1790s, or whether his interest in the inward, the private, had in fact always been a part of his political identity. James Gillray’s cartoon of 1798, illustrating the Anti-Jacobin poem, ‘New Morality’ gives us Lamb’s one public appearance among his radical contemporaries, placing him alongside Godwin, Coleridge, Southey, a gaggle of Whig politicians and Radical Dissenters. Here, Lamb and his collaborator Charles Lloyd are shown as frog and toad, croaking together from their volume of poetry, Blank Verse, as they gambol around a Cornucopia of Ignorance, containing books such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman. Blank Verse, however, was hardly a radical pamphlet. It is a volume of highly introspective, personal poems of sensibility and loss, repeatedly returning to the private scene, the secluded ‘cot’, the fire side, the home. Nevertheless, it was characterized by the AntiJacobin as ‘folly’ and ‘wickedness’ written in a ‘kind of baby language which they are pleased to term blank-verse’.27 David Fairer has superbly analysed how the simplicity and sympathy of this ‘baby language’ could be viewed as a radical threat, a challenge to existing power structures. Yet as he also points out, the volume simultaneously carries conservative implications, since all this introspective simplicity ‘contains within itself the germ of conservatism, nostalgia and retreat’.28 On one level, Lamb was obviously

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Charles Lamb

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viewed by the Anti-Jacobin as a threat, but at the same time he was not entirely identifiable with the radical community: ‘I know not what poor Lamb has done,’ commented Southey, ‘to be croaking there’.29 Southey’s uncertainty should continue to trouble our understanding of Lamb, whose political approach can never be easily categorized. On one hand, Lamb does shy away from overtly radical comment; his comments on performance and his efforts to control and direct the readers of Specimens and Tales may seem to be enclosing, limiting, conservative. Yet on the other hand, Lamb was always fascinated by the unsettling, subversive potential of reading. Even by the fire side, silently absorbed in the page, the reader may be challenging authority. The most recent work on his Shakespearean criticism has focused on his challenging concepts of creative response. Younglim Han, whilst exploring Lamb’s ‘elitism and individualism’, also makes the case for understanding his approach to Shakespeare as an ‘act of sympathetic imagination’, which may be considered alongside readerresponse theorists such as Wolfgang Iser.30 Janet Ruth Heller has also linked Lamb’s and Iser’s concepts of ‘author-reader interaction’, and urged a reading of Lamb as Shakespearean which focuses not on elitism or ‘antitheatricality’, but on his attempts to encourage imaginative freedom and urge readers (and writers) ‘to participate actively in the experience of literature’.31 Martin Buzacott argues from another angle for a reconsideration of Lamb’s ‘anti-theatricality’. Buzacott identifies what he sees as two distinct camps of Shakespearean criticism, with the Romantics – Lamb, Hazlitt, Hunt and Coleridge, accompanied by L. C. Knights and A. C. Bradley – pushed into the role simply of ‘close readers’, and set against ‘‘‘performance critics” who claim the theatre as the location of the “real” Shakespearean meaning’, such as Jonas Barish or Bernard Beckermann. This oppositional reading imposes, he argues, a one-dimensional anti-theatricality upon Lamb, when in fact his argument may be viewed as ‘pro-theatrical in the sense that it argues for the greater significance of theatrical characterisation’.32 To argue for Lamb’s straightforward trajectory from 1790s Jacobin to post-1800 conservatism and a correspondent ‘inward turn’ towards reading, privacy and individualism is, therefore, to over-simplify the issue. Reaching up to take a porter-pot from Munden, or attempting to recreate the comedian’s performance – as he ‘stands wondering, amid the common-place materials of life’ (Lucas, 2: 170) – in his self-consciously theatrical Elian essays, Lamb constantly negotiates the boundaries between theatrical illusion and reality, page and stage. Lamb was, moreover, always fascinated by the potential of individual reading and interpretation, and the persistent return to ideals of creative sympathy and sociability that he first explored in

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Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats

the 1790s should complicate our understanding of his Shakespearean appropriations.

Mrs. Siddons in the ‘Salutation and Cat’ A good example of Lamb’s complex negotiations with privacy and sociability, and the relationship between domestic and theatrical, between individual and communal experiences of Shakespeare, comes in his very first published response to Shakespeare on stage: a little-known sonnet dating to winter 1794, written collaboratively with Coleridge. The sonnet offers a vivid, sensuous portrayal of the theatrical experience, evoking and celebrating the spectacle of Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth. It was first published in 1794 as part of Coleridge’s series of ‘Sonnets on Eminent Characters’ in the Morning Chronicle, although it would later be republished as Lamb’s in Coleridge’s 1796 edition of Poems on Various Subjects. Although it was later reclaimed as Coleridge’s, it is evident from Lamb’s letters that its authorship was shared, and as such it gives us an insight into Lamb’s early conversation on Shakespeare: As when a Child, on some long Winter’s night, Affrighted, clinging to its Grandame’s knees With eager wond’ring and perturb’d delight Listens strange tales of fearful dark decrees Mutter’d to Wretch by necromantic spell Of Warlock Hags, that, at the ’witching time Of murky Midnight, ride the air sublime, Or mingle foul embrace with Fiends of Hell–– Cold Horror drinks its blood! Anon the tear More gentle starts, to hear the Beldam tell Of pretty Babes, that lov’d each other dear– Murder’d by cruel Uncle’s mandate fell: E’en such the shiv’ring joys thy tones impart;– E’en so thou, SIDDONS! meltest my sad heart!33 In focusing on Siddons’s evocative portrayal of Lady Macbeth, Lamb and Coleridge demonstrate the crucial importance of actors in mediating Shakespearean characters for eighteenth-century playgoers. ‘Garrick had led the way by startling audiences to an awareness that characters could be played in other than the traditional manner,’ as Joan Coldwell has pointed

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Charles Lamb

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out, ‘and for at least a century after his debut controversy raged around the validity of characterizations presented by such actors as Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, Cooke, Kean, and Macready.’34 The fascination with Siddons’s creation of Lady Macbeth foreshadows Lamb’s own enduring interest in character analyses and also underscores the way in which these interpretations were grounded in close observation of theatrical practice and the performance of particular actors. In many ways the Coleridge–Lamb sonnet is highly conventional in its homage to the moving quality of Siddons’s performance and its incredible power over her audience. Watching her play Jane Shore for instance, in Nicholas Rowe’s 1713–14 The Tragedy of Jane Shore, James Boaden recalled ‘the sobs, the shrieks’, the fainting fits, hysteria and tears she provoked in playgoers.35 Very often, evocations of her power as an actress centre on the spectator’s inability to act normally, or to exert self-control. ‘Literally the greater part of the spectators,’ wrote Boaden about her title role in Isabella, or, The Fatal Marriage (adapted and abridged from Thomas Southerne’s 1694 original by David Garrick in 1757), where she laughed as she plunged the dagger into her own breast, ‘were too ill themselves to use their hands in her applause’.36 ‘Even now, my agitation is so great, that I must lay by my pen,’ wrote the author of Letters from a Lady of Distinction to Her Friend in the Country, trying to express her emotions at seeing Siddons in the role of Belvidera, in Thomas Otway’s 1682 Venice Preserv’d.37 Her sentiments are echoed by Anna Seward, who struggled in the thick of a ‘terrible, fierce, maddening crowd’ in the pit to get a glimpse of her: Powers which surpass every idea I had formed of their possibility, press so forcibly upon my recollection that my pen has more than once stood still upon my paper, transfixed by the consciousness how poor and inadequate are all words to paint my Siddonian idolatry.38 Helen Maria Williams, in her ‘Sonnet. To Mrs Siddons’, also attempts to summon up Siddons’s overwhelming emotional effect through drawing attention to the limits of writing. To capture Siddons as Lady Macbeth – ‘when fierce ambition steels thy daring breast’ – is simply beyond the reach of description: who can trace The instant light, and catch the radiant grace! (ll. 13–14)39 A very similar consciousness of inadequacy is evident in a 1794 sonnet, ‘On Seeing Mrs Siddons the First Time, and then in the character of Isabella’ by

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Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats

a close friend and school fellow of Coleridge and Lamb, Charles Valentine Le Grice. Watching Siddons, Le Grice finds ‘all my senses flown’. The act of viewing leaves him powerless, his soul ‘suspended’ as his tears flow: My soul had fled it’s [sic] nook, and in my eye Suspended hung in tearful extasy.40 The Coleridge–Lamb sonnet, however, differs in its evocation of Siddons. Instead of her acting leaving the sonneteer powerless or overcome, it prompts a different train of creative thoughts entirely. Rather than call attention to Siddons’s physicality – her striking looks and mobile facial expressions, those ‘graces of personal beauty’ so frequently praised by other commentators – this sonnet somewhat perversely figures her as an aged beldam, holding the child spellbound with her stories of witchcraft. Judith Pascoe insightfully comments that the image the sonnet gives of Siddons is ‘both enthralling and disturbing’: The poem perfectly represents the complex of attraction and revulsion characteristic of male romantics’ responses to the theater and performance. Coleridge invokes both the sentimental bond between grandmother and child and the ‘foul embrace’ of witch and fiend.41 Pascoe is, I think, right to discern a basic ambivalence in the sonnet concerning Siddons’s performance as Lady Macbeth – she reads this mainly in the context of attitudes towards female performance, but it may also be read in terms of rival approaches to Shakespeare. For while the sonnet overtly pays homage to Siddons as an actress, it also takes her performance of Lady Macbeth off the stage and into the domestic circle. Other responses to Siddons document the writers’ inability to put pen to paper, to find the right words to describe her; this poem rejects the idea that acting overwhelms other forms of creative response, and replaces the stage with a scene of family reading and storytelling, foreshadowing those of the Tales from Shakespear. The spectacle is domesticated: Shakespeare is brought home. Over his career, Lamb would elaborate this idea in various ways – most famously, of course, in ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare’, when he specifically returns to Siddons’s performance and speaks of the possible problems of response it engenders: ‘We speak of Lady Macbeth, while we are in reality thinking of Mrs S’ (Lucas, 1: 114). Focusing too much on the specific traits of a successful actor, rather than on the words of Shakespeare, we find that we have ‘materialized and brought down a fine vision to the standard of

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Charles Lamb

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flesh and blood. We have let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance’ (Lucas, 1: 114–15). Only in the individual imagination can this fine vision truly be achieved; only in the act of reading can it be set free. Is this simply a case of Romantic conservatism? The sonnet offers a useful test case for the difficulty of untangling conservative and radical appropriations of Shakespeare. It appears to shy away from the power of the spectacle – and to display a particular wariness about the kind of ‘terrible, fierce, maddening crowd’ who, as Seward testified, might gather to see Siddons play. The fireside is altogether a safer place than the crowded theatre; the imagination safest of all. This would seem to correspond with Bate’s argument concerning Lamb’s ‘inward turn’ – that Lamb, like Coleridge, removes Shakespeare from the stage, and conducts his own ‘political appropriation,’ of Shakespeare, ‘in the name of privacy and individualism’.42 In this light, taking Siddons’s Lady Macbeth away from the stage and enfolding her in the bosom of the family, with children as her only auditors, may be seen as a shrewd anti-inflammatory move, especially significant in light of the post-Revolutionary significance of Macbeth. Macbeth himself might be seen, as Mary Jacobus has put it, as a ‘man of his troubled times’, his murder of Duncan unsettling ‘moral, social and natural hierarchies’ in ways which resonated strongly with the anxieties of the 1790s. Banishing his regicide acts from the stage, as she explores, carries a special political charge, ‘consigning Macbeth to the inner theatre or textual world of Romantic poetry, and effecting a palace revolution from which the reader emerges as the leading actor and the author’s only legitimate usurper’.43 Yet the power of the reader is hard to quantify or to control and may still carry a rebellious charge. To bring Shakespeare home may not entirely ‘remove him from the political appropriators’, since to domesticate is not necessarily to depoliticize. After all, the Mrs. Siddons sonnet first appeared in the context of radical political commitment, as one of Coleridge’s ‘Sonnets on Eminent Characters’. The first sonnet had praised Thomas Erskine’s ‘matchless eloquence’ in his defence of John Thelwall, Thomas Hardy and John Horne Tooke at the Treason Trials in October 1794.44 The other ‘Eminent Characters’ in the series were all figures whom Coleridge closely identified with Revolutionary debate, and included philosophers and intellectuals such as Joseph Priestley and William Godwin, and politicians such as William Pitt – scathingly attacked as a ‘dark scowler’ – and Edmund Burke.45 Through their very form and publication context, the sonnets make the case for the way emotive literature might play a part in political action. Moreover, both Lamb and Coleridge were at this point

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thinking about the place of the domestic and private in programs of reform: ‘I am not fit for public Life,’ runs Coleridge’s famous statement, ‘yet the Light shall stream to a far distance from the taper in my cottage window’.46 Domesticating Mrs. Siddons’s Shakespearean acting in this sonnet thus might not simply be a private or individualistic move, since it appears in a highly politically engaged series, and takes its place in a public postRevolutionary debate. The complicated example offered by this sonnet sets the tone for Lamb’s later views on Shakespeare, which similarly conduct a perpetual negotiation between the demands of reading and acting, home and stage, imagination and reality – and which also carry an ambiguous political charge. It allows us to read the preoccupations of works such as ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare’, the Tales and the Specimens, back into the 1790s, showing how we might detect continuities across Lamb’s critical work on Shakespeare.

Early Shakespearean Appropriations: Falstaff’s Letters and John Woodvil Sonnets like that on Mrs. Siddons are characteristic of Lamb’s early work, which owed a joint debt to Coleridge and to Shakespeare. His first independently published work, ‘We were two pretty babes; the youngest She’, written in 1795 and published in July 1796, is heavy with echoes which show just how far Shakespeare’s language had worked itself into Lamb’s poetic register. It is a meditation on the fragility of affection: ‘The time has been,’ says the poet, ‘We two did love each other’s company,’ but as the sonnet progresses, it becomes clear that the poet has left his companion, Innocence, to venture out into the world, thus losing her forever. The ‘pretty babes’ – who make their first appearance in the sonnet to Mrs. Siddons – are derived from The Comedy of Errors; the phrase ‘the time has been’ borrows, perhaps, from Macbeth’s meditation on the loss of his innocence as he waits at Dunsinane, hearing the women cry out over Lady Macbeth’s death. The most interesting Shakespearean connection of the poem, however, is its first publication context. It appeared in the Monthly Magazine, a respectable Dissenting periodical published by Joseph Johnson and Richard Phillips, and edited by John Aikin, distinguished by contributions from, among others, Coleridge, Charles Lloyd, Mary Hays and Anna Letitia Barbauld. There were, however, other literary endeavours occupying the Monthly in that issue: a few pages before Lamb’s first independent appearance in print, the periodical dryly notes the unmasking of William

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Henry Ireland’s spurious Shakespeare manuscripts: ‘a most laborious, but most impudent forgery’. Charles Lamb thus began his published literary career at a key moment for Romantic Shakespeare interpretation. News of these remarkable discoveries had been transfixing London over the preceding 2 years. In December 1794, William Henry Ireland – just the same age as Lamb – had forged the first of his many Shakespeare documents, a mortgage deed between ‘William Shakspeare’ and Michael Fraser, supposedly found by rummaging in a ‘great quantity of papers tied up in bundles’ in the house of a mysterious gentleman.47 They were eagerly seized on by his book-dealer father Samuel, an ardent bardolater, travel writer, and antiquarian. Doing his best to satisfy his father’s desire for Shakespeareana, William Henry supplied him with a nest of deeds, wills and, growing bolder, manuscript plays. Ireland senior established a small bardic shrine at his shop in Norfolk Street, where devotees, like James Boswell, could come to pay their respects to the originals; despite his son’s reluctance, he then insisted on publishing a lavish 4-guinea folio containing numerous ‘Shakespeare’ letters and play drafts. The hysteria culminated in a production of Shakespeare’s ‘lost play’, Vortigern, at Drury Lane – unluckily timed, since Edmund Malone’s scathing Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments, had emerged only a few days previously. The audience, apparently egged on by John Philip Kemble in the leading role, greeted it as a farce, with hisses, boos, catcalls and rotten fruit. As the Monthly Magazine put it, ‘Vortigern and Rowena was acted – and the mask fell off. The publications, and the whole transaction, will soon be forgotten; or will only be remembered, and preserved, as a monument of credulity.’ Having summarily dismissed Ireland’s presumption, the Monthly Magazine moved on to some genuinely ‘original poetry’ – including that of ‘Charles Lamb, of the India House’. As Ireland’s Vortigern failed, Lamb’s creative star began to rise. It was an appropriate beginning, since Lamb and William Henry Ireland shared several key interests. Both questioned authorial identity, genius and originality. Both engaged in complex games with the name and status of the author, interrogating and re-reading Romantic narratives of authorship and inspiration while they laid claim to their own versions of Shakespeare. Ireland claimed that his forgeries were prompted purely by the desire to ‘occasion a little mirth, and shew how far credulity would go in the search for antiquities.’48 One of Lamb’s earliest Shakespearean rewritings, similarly, plays with ideas of ‘mirth’ and credulity, albeit in more obviously parodic fashion: Original Letters, &c, of Sir John Falstaff and His Friends (1796). This was published under the name of James White, Lamb’s friend from Christ’s

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Hospital, but Lamb probably had a hand in the book, and certainly promoted it energetically among his friends.49 A play on the excesses of late eighteenth-century bardolatry and antiquarianism, Falstaff’s Letters provides a rumbustious background story for The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry V and the two Parts of Henry IV. The letters, embroidering Falstaff’s deer-stealing and carousing exploits, were supposedly ‘found by Mrs. Quickly, Landlady of the Boar Tavern in Eastcheap’, in a deliberate play on Samuel Ireland’s presentation of his son’s manuscript ‘find’: Miscellaneous papers and legal instruments under the hand and seal of William Shakespeare.50 Lamb and White, keen playgoers, may well have been in the Drury Lane audience to witness the performance of Vortigern being derisorily shouted down at the line: ‘And when this solemn mockery is ended’.51 ‘Put I will end with this solemn mockery,’ echoes White’s Captain Fluellin (who can never pronounce the letter ‘b’), knowingly quoting the fatal phrase.52 This is typical of the way in which Falstaff’s Letters constantly, gleefully, alludes to the whole Ireland affair. Its black lettered ‘Introduction’ is dedicated to ‘Master Samuel Irelaunde’, and encrusted with exuberant misspellings in mockery of his son’s manuscripts. Ireland is specifically directed to look at the frontispiece engraving of Falstaff dancing, ‘a ryghte venerable picture traunsmitted downewardes throughe our house forre foure hondredde yeares’, to find the name Ireland actually inscribed on Falstaff’s belt. Perhaps, suggests the introduction, ‘an ancestor of thyne was a maker of Trunke Hose or [. . .] Pantaloones’.53 This neatly skewers William Henry Ireland’s own outrageous ploy to write himself into Shakespeare’s forged will and demonstrates the book’s selfconscious questioning of historical authenticity and transmission – it is entirely appropriate that the actual responsibility of White or Lamb as authors is itself questionable. Falstaff’s Letters cunningly exploits the storm of denial and defence stirred up by William Henry Ireland’s presumption in faking Shakespeare. But it does not do so by reverting to the idea of Shakespeare’s unique and solitary genius – ‘so strangely irregular, and so different from that of every other Mortal’, in the words of William Duff’s An Essay on Original Genius (1767).54 Instead, it suggests an intertextual, imaginatively re-written response to Shakespeare, which parodies the idea of what it terms ‘your picked man of genius’.55 Its sympathetic character study of Falstaff also shows an awareness of another developing strand of Shakespearean criticism, highly popular in the latter half of the eighteenth century. From Thomas Whately’s Remarks on Some of the Characters of Shakespeare (written c.1768–9, published 1785) to Maurice Morgann’s Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777),

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emphasis shifted away from Shakespeare’s plots to focus on his characters – psychological constructs which helped refute neoclassical arguments over Shakespearean inconsistencies, so that ‘his supposed faults in dramatic design were shown to be intentional subtleties of characterization.’56 Falstaff’s Letters – albeit eccentrically – thus participates in major trends in Shakespearean scholarship and criticism, and, furthermore, links them to the developing creative dynamics of a particular group of friends. Lamb’s later promotion of the volume furthers this association between Shakespeare and friendship. In September 1819, for instance, Lamb contributed a review of the book to Hunt’s journal The Examiner, presenting the letters as ‘almost . . . kindred with those of the full Shakspearian genius itself’.57 Lamb’s reading of Falstaff’s Letters is bound up with his friendship with ‘my fine-tempered friend, J. W.’, whom he describes reading (significantly, not watching) Henry IV at Lamb’s recommendation: We remember when the inspiration came upon him; when the plays of Henry the Fourth were first put into his hands.58 This scene of Shakespearean inspiration is linked to drinking, talking and storytelling, ‘the pleasant evenings which ensued at the Boar’s Head, [. . .] when over our pottle of sherris he would talk you nothing but pure Falstaff the long evenings through’.59 Lamb turns the ‘Feathers’ tavern in Holborn, where he and other ex-Christ’s Hospital schoolboys White and John Matthew Gutch used to meet to drink Burton ale, into Falstaff’s inn, ‘the Boar’s Head’. Sociable, friendly conversation and reading with contemporaries becomes indistinguishable from sympathetic absorption in the literary past; White’s language is ‘kindred’ with Shakespeare’s genius. The conversation stretched to include later authors, too: in 1832 he gave a copy of Falstaff’s Letters to Walter Savage Landor, inspiring, as David Chandler has shown, Landor’s mock trial, Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare (1834).60 Lamb’s and White’s appropriation of Shakespearean language in Falstaff’s Letters, while it raises serious questions of canonicity and authenticity, has comedy at its heart. Lamb’s next Shakespearean experiment, however, had more serious intent: his play John Woodvil, begun in 1799. Falstaff’s Letters is a playful product of Lamb’s lively, sometimes rowdy male friendships in the mid-1790s; John Woodvil is a much darker work, shaped by Lamb’s experiences after the ‘day of horrors’ in September 1796. Probing the nature and limits of friendly and familial loyalty, the play reflects both Lamb’s experiences in caring for Mary, and his subsequent revaluation of his emotional attachments,

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including a quarrel with Coleridge – his one-time hero and mentor – resulting in a silence which lasted from 1798 to 1800. At the heart of John Woodvil is a shattered family – the Woodvils, divided both physically and emotionally by their different allegiances after the Restoration of 1660. Sir Walter, the head of the family, was a supporter of the old parliamentary regime; he has since fled with his son Simon and gone into hiding in Sherwood Forest. The ancestral home is now occupied by his other son John and is rapidly falling into decay and debauchery, witnessed sorrowfully by Sir Walter’s orphan ward, Margaret. Once courted by John Woodvil, Margaret is now abandoned, and harassed by John’s drunken Cavalier companions, and – in a reworking of As You Like It – decides to set off into the forest in disguise. However, the forest idyll is destroyed when, in a fit of drunkenness, John reveals his father’s hiding place to a supposed friend. The old knight is hunted down and dies; John is tormented by remorse and guilt and comes to find solace only in Margaret’s continued affection and loyalty. The play thus seems to appropriate and refigure events from Lamb’s own life; here, however, it is the sister who, patiently and lovingly, comforts the guilty, parricidal brother. If Lamb was appropriating and reworking events from his own life, he was also self-consciously remodelling favourite dramatists. ‘I go upon the model of Shakspere in my play, and endeavour after a colloquial ease & spirit something like him,’ he told Southey, quoting from Henry IV and Midsummer Night’s Dream to emphasize the parallels (Marrs, 1: 159). Lamb’s creative plunderings were not limited to Shakespeare. At the same time, he was sending Southey snippets of Marlowe – one extract, discussing The Jew of Malta in terms of ‘the terrible Idea our simple ancestors had of a Jew’ (Marrs, 1: 138), reappears in his Specimens of Dramatic Poets 9 years later – and discussing George Wither and Francis Quarles alongside Beaumont and Fletcher. Even as Lamb celebrates Shakespeare, he is drawing him into dialogue with other Elizabethan poets, and also with Lamb’s own contemporaries, as in Simon’s description of his joys in the forest: To see the sun to bed, and to arise, Like some hot amourist with glowing eyes, Bursting the lazy bands of sleep that bound him, . . . To view the graceful deer come tripping by, Then stop, and gaze, then turn, they know not why, Like bashful younkers in society. To mark the structure of a plant or tree, And all fair things of earth, how fair they be. (Lucas, 1: 473)

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This brings together Elizabethan vocabulary with an allusion to Southey’s poetry, playing with issues of authorship and originality. As Lamb told Southey: I love to anticipate charges of unoriginality; the first line is almost Shakespere’s; – ‘To have my love to bed & to arise’ midsummer nights dream I think there is a sweetness in the versification not unlike some rhymes in that Exquisite play – and the Last line but three is yours an Eye ‘That met the gaze, or turn’d it knew not why’ Rosamunds Epistle (Marrs, I: 160)61 Moreover, Hazlitt claimed that this passage had so deep an effect on Godwin that, forgetting where he had first heard it, he searched for the phrase ‘hot amourist’ among the Elizabethan poets, until ‘after hunting in vain for it in Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and other not unlikely places, sent to Mr. Lamb to know if he could help him to the author’ (Howe, 11: 183). This is the same kind of confusion which Falstaff’s Letters had prompted – re-workings which tease the reader into questioning the boundaries of authorship and period. In the late 1790s, then, following the violent debates over Shakespearean authenticity and authorship, Lamb was quietly practising his own forgeries and appropriations. Falstaff’s Letters not only mocks hoaxers such as Ireland and Thomas Chatterton – it also allows an important insight into the ways in which we might read the genesis of Lamb’s approach to Shakespeare. While it pays homage to Shakespeare’s language and characters, Falstaff’s Letters also questions Romantic narratives of genius and writes Shakespeare into a narrative of creative friendship. Similarly, John Woodvil plays with concepts of originality and authorship and mediates personal relationships through Shakespeare, as well as showing how Lamb would increasingly seek to place Shakespeare within a wider context of Elizabethan writing.

Theatrical Encounters John Woodvil has been received largely as poetry, or, in the words of Hazlitt, ‘a dramatic fragment, intended for the closet rather than the stage’ (Howe, 6: 346). Yet it was designed for performance, and unsuccessfully submitted

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to John Philip Kemble for production at Drury Lane Theatre. A subsequent play, the farce Mr. H-, was accepted by Richard Wroughton and produced at Drury Lane, but was hissed at its only performance in December 1806. Two later plays, The Wife’s Trial, sent to Charles Kemble at Covent Garden in 1827, and The Pawnbroker’s Daughter – offered to Charles Mathews for production at the Adelphi in 1828 – were also rejected. Lamb seems never to have given up his desire to see one of his plays produced, and these repeated attempts show that he continued thinking actively about the relationship of poetry to performance throughout his career. He had better success with the prologues and epilogues he wrote for other plays, including Godwin’s tragedies Antonio (1800) and Faulkener (1807), Coleridge’s Remorse (1813), and James Kenney’s farce Debtor and Creditor (1814). These familiarly mention well-known actors – Richard Suett (1755–1805) and Jack Bannister (1760–1836) who will reappear in the Essays of Elia – and remind us that Lamb was a regular and enthusiastic theatregoer. A vivid image of his response to contemporary acting comes in a letter to his friend Robert Lloyd – brother of Lamb’s collaborator Charles – reporting on George Frederick Cooke’s performance in Richard III. This marks the beginning of a series of pieces about actors and acting, reading and the stage, which gradually evolve and coalesce into his essay ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare’, and the Essays of Elia. Lamb’s criticism has two main foci: Cooke’s interpretation of the part, and Colley Cibber’s simplified and revised version of the play, which was hugely popular throughout the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Richard itself is wholly metamorphosed in the wretched Acting play of that name, which you will see: altered by Cibber. (Marrs, 2: 9) The two concepts – Cooke’s portrayal of the character, and Cibber’s changes – are intertwined. As Janis Lull has pointed out, Cibber ‘shrewdly exaggerated the play’s potential as a star vehicle, initially for himself’, giving Richard a greater proportion of the lines and streamlining him into a more easily comprehensible, villainous figure.62 Cibber’s rewrite furthered interest in the dominant, compelling figure of Richard, whom actors then seized on as an ideal showcase for their talents, comparable to Hamlet. Just as Cooke was following the celebrated examples of David Garrick and John Philip Kemble in the role, Lamb was therefore responding to a long tradition of intense focus on the play as character study. His letter to

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Lloyd, dated June 1801, launches straight into lively criticism of Cooke’s performance as ‘a perfect caricature’: He gives you the monster Richard, but not the man Richard. Shakespear’s bloody character impresses you with awe and deep admiration of his witty parts, his consumate [sic] hypocrisy, and indefatigable prosecution of purpose. You despise, detest, and loath the cunning, vulgar, low and fierce Richard, which Cooke substitutes in his place. (Marrs, 2: 7) Lamb develops the idea that Cooke’s acting, while ‘strong, coarse & vigorous’, can only engage the audience on one level. The essential ambivalence of Richard’s character does not emerge – the co-existence of the ‘monster’ and the ‘man’, and the ways in which a ‘bloody character’ might also have an engaging wit and liveliness. Lamb uses this as a basis for a re-reading of Richard’s character as a feeling and human character, who reveals a ‘deep knowledge of the heart’ (Marrs, 2: 9). This is perhaps the ‘first developed response to a sympathetic Richard’, and can be set alongside his searching and idiosyncratic analyses of other Shakespearean characters such as Malvolio, whom he examines in ‘On some of the Old Actors’ through the performance of William Bensley (1738–1817).63 Just as he argued for a humanized Richard, here Lamb – as Elia – argues for a romanticized Malvolio, whose frustrated dreams evoke a ‘kind of tragic interest’ (Lucas, 2: 155). But whereas the essay argues for the success of Bensley’s portrayal of Malvolio, Cooke’s performance cannot convey these different aspects of Richard, and, similarly, cannot do justice to Shakespeare’s poetry: ‘the lofty imagery and high sentiments and high passions of Poetry come black & prose-smoked from his prose Lips’ (Marrs, 2: 8). Lamb’s focus in the review remains essentially the same. He begins by paying homage to those who have taken on the role in the past and their enduring effect on spectators: Some few of us remember to have seen, and all of us have heard our fathers tell of Quin, and Garrick, and Barry, and some faint traditional notices are left us of their manner in particular scenes . . . Hence our curiosity is excited, when a new Hamlet or a new Richard makes his appearance, in the first place, to inquire, how he acted in the Closet scene, in the Tent scene; how he looked, and how he started, when the Ghost came on. . . .64 (Lucas, 1903, 1: 36)

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Hamlet and Richard exist in dialogue between generations of actors and theatregoers, and interpretation of plays is presented as a sociable, conversational activity, in which Lamb now participates, reporting that Cooke ‘“bustled” through the scenes with at least as much spirit and effect as any of his predecessors’ (Lucas, 1903, 1: 36).65 However, it becomes quickly clear that this is not a straightforward review, but rather a meditation on a central question: ‘whether that popular actor is right or wrong in his conception of the great outlines of the character; those strong essential differences which separate Richard from all the other creations of Shakespeare’. Before he begins his character analysis, Lamb deals severely with Cibber’s re-writing – an un-Shakespearean ‘compilation or a cento of passages extracted from other of his Plays’ – which he says makes the actor’s task harder by producing ‘an inevitable inconsistency of character’. Yet the actor should still adhere ‘as much as possible, to the spirit and intention of the original Author’: Lamb details several instances in which he feels Cooke has failed in this, revolving around the same distinction he had outlined to Lloyd, between ‘the man Richard, whom Shakespeare drew’ and the ‘monster Richard, as he exists in the popular idea’ (Lucas, 1903, 1: 37). Cooke’s Richard is not subtle enough: he is too glaring a hypocrite, his humour is absent and he shows self-disgust in his deformity, rather than ‘the joy of a defect conquered’. Similar complaints appear in the more conventional review which follows: Cooke’s performance as Lear is ‘too vigorous’, his manner and voice too ‘firm’, ‘clear and strong’, and he fails to excite pity in the audience (Lucas, 1903, 1: 398–400). These pieces directly feed into his most famous commentary on Shakespeare and the stage, ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation’. Although reprinted in his 1818 collected Works, it was first published in the last issue of Leigh Hunt’s Reflector, number IV (1811), under the title of ‘Theatralia. No. I. – On Garrick, and Acting; and the Plays of Shakspeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation’. The Reflector was a lively, confidently written quarterly magazine, with a clear political agenda, mirroring Hunt’s other periodical, the Examiner, in ‘speaking freely of all parties without exception’ and showing itself to be ‘most anxious for Reform’.66 ‘Politics, in times like these, should naturally take the lead in periodical discussion,’ claimed its ‘Prospectus’; moreover, it went on, political and artistic expression are intertwined, acting upon and reacting to one another.67 The state of the nation may be glimpsed in different art forms, including theatrical performances, which – properly performed – should ‘exhibit our virtues in social action’.68 Theatrical and literary criticism is

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interlinked with the Reflector’s intention to prompt serious consideration of politics among its readers. Hunt’s own Feast of the Poets – printed immediately following Lamb’s essay on Shakespeare – swipes at the pretensions of a vast range of contemporary authors, who, Hunt adds pointedly, after mentioning Coleridge and Wordsworth, ‘have lost the bloom of their political character’.69 Hunt was equally critical of the state of the theatre. He particularly disliked the huge royal theatres. Their size assisted in ‘the substitution of show for delicate acting’, and their fondness for spectacle reduced performances to ‘caricatures’, designed to provoke easy laughter, and ill-suited to deeper material: ‘When SHAKSPEARE appears now and then in the list of performances, he looks like a sage in a procession of merry-andrews, and is suffered to pass by with little more than a cold respect.’70 Yet this did not mean that Shakespeare had to be considered entirely seriously: the first issue contained a teasing piece by Lamb’s friend Barron Field, ‘Shakspeare sermons’. In a lengthy disquisition on the mention of an ass in ‘Much Ado about Nothing’, the piece mocks both the excesses of Shakespeare worship and antiquarian pedantry, and the ‘cant of methodist preachers’.71 It is no coincidence that this is followed by a letter ‘On the Pernicious Effects of Methodism in Our Foreign Possessions’, condemning ‘missionary mania’; the target of both pieces is intolerance and ‘the rage for proselytism’.72 The main thrust of the Reflector is to provoke free thought and to encourage a questioning attitude among its readers, and its articles very often mock extremism, cliché and different types of fixed views and prejudices. Lamb’s own contributions prior to his essay on Shakespeare follow this general line, repeatedly returning to the deceptive power of the visual. Since the essay is usually considered in isolation, it is especially important to remember its original context – as part of a series of pieces, often with a piquant personal edge, in which Lamb explores how first impressions and outward appearances may generate prejudice. His first contribution, ‘On the Inconveniences Resulting from Being Hanged’, is narrated by ‘Pensilis’, a figure of ‘stigmatized innocence’ who has been hanged and then, at the last moment, cut down. Quoting Thomas Brown’s A Comical View of London and Westminster, and its mock play-bill for a hanging – ‘Doleful Procession up Holborn-hill about Eleven . . . Show over by One’ – alongside Measure for Measure, the essay reinforces the performative aspect of a public execution.73 ‘Pensilis’ carries upon him the ‘fatal mark’ of his abortive hanging, visible to all, yet neither understood nor sympathized with by the idle spectators: ‘My griefs have nothing in them that is felt as

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sacred by the bystanders.’74 Moreover, the reference to the ‘fatal mark’ recalls Lamb’s own complaints that ‘poor Mary’s disorder, so frequently recurring, has made us a sort of marked people’ (Marrs, 1: 207). Thanks to the jury’s verdict of ‘lunacy’, Mary escaped hanging for the death of her mother, but she and her brother are still ‘in a manner marked –’ (Marrs, 1: 202) and constantly subject to the prejudice of onlookers. The swift, ‘senseless’ misjudgement of the public is again attacked in ‘On the Custom of Hissing at the Theatres, with Some Account of a Club of Damned Authors’, which of course also has a highly personal subtext, as Lamb recalls the painful damning of his own play.75 Again and again, the public readiness to pass judgement on the basis of outward show and first impressions is condemned, in pieces such as ‘On the Danger of Confounding Moral with Personal Deformity; with a Hint to Those Who Have the Framing of Advertisements for Apprehending Offenders’. Here Lamb emphasizes that ‘in every species of reading, so much depends upon the eyes of the reader’: we yearn to read morality from outward appearance, but continually ‘mistake . . . grossly concerning things so exterior and palpable’.76 Lamb often takes the part of those being judged, such as the stigmatized ‘Pensilis’, or even Guy Fawkes. His essay ‘On the Probable Effects of the Gunpowder Treason in This Country If the Conspirators Had Accomplished Their Object’ knowingly quotes Edmund Burke’s Letter to a Noble Lord as it sympathizes with ‘Guy Faux’ and blows social hierarchies sky-high, creating a comic, violent, imaginative ‘dream of universal restitution’.77 To some extent, the sociable performance of the periodical format interrogates the nature of other performances, social and theatrical, and provides a place for those who are misjudged – from the hanged man and Guy Fawkes to, as we will see, the villainous characters of Shakespeare – to find their voices. All this has a special significance for our understanding of Lamb’s essay on Shakespeare: its apparent ‘anti-theatricality’ must be read in this wider context of reflections on misreading, prejudice and visual confusion. ‘On Garrick, and Acting; and the Plays of Shakspeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation’ begins with an image of the essayist as spectator, looking at the statue of Garrick in Westminster Abbey. As essayist and actor stare at one another, the battle lines are being drawn over theatrical territory. Lamb – or, rather, his essayist persona – invites us to consider the confusion between outward appearance and inner content, between actor and author. Like his previous Reflector essays, this again raises the question of how to form accurate visual judgements, and seeks to emphasize how misleading the ‘instantaneous nature of the impressions

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which we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse’ can be, how ‘contagious the counterfeit appearance of any emotion is’.78 This is partly a problem caused by the very nature of the theatre. As in his objections to Cooke playing Richard III, Lamb complains that performance relies on broad strokes of enunciation and gesture which rely on immediate effect and cannot convey nuances of character. This was particularly galling for an early nineteenth-century audience who, after the expansion of Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres, had to put up with huge size, poor lighting and bad acoustics.79 A spectator at a distance, perhaps up in the ‘gods’, could not hope to appreciate all the finely detailed expression of an actor like Kean, and, as Hazlitt commented, ‘All strong expression, deprived of its gradations and connecting motives, unavoidably degenerates into caricature’ (Howe, 5: 284–5). Another problem was the audience’s fondness for spectacle and elaborate costume, and Lamb bitterly complained about the ‘elaborate and anxious provision of scenery, which the luxury of the age demands’ – particularly in plays such as The Tempest.80 However, specific problems of staging are not Lamb’s main focus. He also wants the reader to reflect on the particular aesthetic qualities of Shakespeare: I mean no disrespect to any Actor, but the sort of pleasure which Shakspeare’s plays give in the acting seems to me not at all to differ from that which the audience receive from those of other writers; and, they being in themselves essentially so different from all others, I must conclude that there is something in the nature of acting which levels all distinctions.81 As in Falstaff’s Letters, Lamb is, in his own way, developing and expanding the popular eighteenth-century argument about the special genius of Shakespeare. In part, as we will see in his notes to his Specimens, he is eager to reject Samuel Johnson’s view that Shakespeare may have had ‘faults’ and to defend the willed dramatic unity of the plays. He also rejects the incursions of ‘such ribald trash as Tate and Cibber’ – a point to which he would return in his 1828 essay ‘Shakespeare’s Improvers’, where he attacks Nahum Tate’s reworking of Coriolanus, Shadwell’s revisions of Timon of Athens, and a 1678 London acting edition of Macbeth in which ‘Lady Macbeth is brought in repentant’ (Lucas, 1: 379). Instead, he is eager to show that each aspect of Shakespeare’s plays has a special purpose. This might not always emerge on stage, but – as the character critics of the late eighteenth century argued – it becomes apparent in a close reading of the original. He is not, therefore, necessarily making the claim that Shakespeare should not be performed – but he is making a much larger

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claim for reading, and the relationship between author and reader. ‘I am not arguing,’ he states, ‘that Hamlet should not be acted, but how much Hamlet is made another thing by being acted’.82 The main problem with Hamlet on the stage is, Lamb feels, that full sympathetic identification with the character, and an appreciation of the part he occupies in the play as a whole, are lost. He gives an acute character description of Hamlet’s ‘soreness of mind’ and asperity in dealing with Polonius and Ophelia; these are ‘temporary deformities in the character’ the purposes of which become clear as the play progresses, ‘we forgive afterwards, and explain by the whole of his character.’83 Full sympathy with Hamlet can only emerge, suggests Lamb, through the consideration of the whole afforded by reading. He uses the same argument in discussing Lear. The appearance of an ‘old man tottering about the stage’ arouses pity, he argues, whereas ‘while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear’: Shakespeare’s sympathetic understanding of the character transfers itself to the reader (Lucas, 2: 308). Similarly, he describes the way in which spectators might feel prejudiced towards the appearance of Othello, ‘a blackamoor [who] in a fit of jealousy kills his innocent white wife’: For of the texture of Othello’s mind, the inward construction marvellously laid open with all its strengths and weaknesses, its heroic confidences and its human misgivings, its agonies of hate springing from the depths of love, they see no more than the spectators at a cheaper rate, who pay their pennies a-piece to look through the man’s telescope in Leicester-fields, see into the inward plot and topography of the moon.84 This sets up parallels with Wordsworth’s 1807 lyric, ‘Star-Gazers’, which depicts the same queue of spectators in ‘Leicester’s Busy Square’, eager to see the heavens through a showman’s telescope. When they have done so, however, they ‘seem less happy than before’; they ‘slackly go away, as if dissatisfied’, and the poem becomes an exploration of expectation and disappointment which can be read as a reflection on the relationship between author and audience. The crowd of spectators seems to summon up, too, Wordsworth’s fear of an anonymous, rapidly expanding urban readership. ‘Star-Gazers’ may be seen, as Lucy Newlyn has analysed, as an ‘exemplary expression’ of Romantic anxieties of reception, ‘anxieties that centre not just on the writer’s subjection to the invasive gaze of anonymous readers, but on the nature of reception itself, as it became divorced from oral culture’.85 Lamb’s use of the same image points to the ways in which the essay is in dialogue with Wordsworth; both men are struggling with anxieties over the

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commodification of culture, the ways in which mass culture might constrain and limit imaginative involvement with a star-like poetic genius like Shakespeare. However, in its very form and publication context, Lamb’s essay seems to offer a more optimistic solution. If performance forestalls sympathetic interchange between audience and author, then perhaps reading – particularly sociable reading, among friends, family or even in the periodical format – can restore a sense of mutual relationship. Lamb had been developing this sense of the potential of sociable reading since the 1790s, and his viewpoint had crystallized in an exchange with Wordsworth in 1801 following the publication of the second volume of Lyrical Ballads. Lamb had objected to the ‘diminishing’ effect of the 1800 ‘Preface’, which he thought tried to impose a particular interpretation upon its readers, instead of encouraging a mutual, democratic response, allowing for the ‘unwritten compact between Author and reader’ (Marrs, 1: 266). Lamb ‘noticed without approval a will to power in the work of his contemporaries’, in Jane Aaron’s words, repeatedly complaining about shows of egotism and attempts to limit and direct meaning.86 His complaints about actors who impose a particular interpretation by ‘eye, tone, or gesture’, allowing no room for the audience’s own imaginative response may, therefore, be seen not simply in terms of ‘anti-theatricality’, but also in the wider context of his ongoing attempts to negotiate questions of reception and sympathy. Lamb repeatedly returns to the ways in which a sympathetic relationship can be established between author and reader, artist and viewer, actor and audience. His essay ‘On the Genius and Character of Hogarth’ similarly circles around issues of representation and audience and probes the way in which the imaginative sympathy – the ‘meditative tenderness’ – of the spectator can be aroused.87 Hogarth’s pictures appeal not only to the visual sense: they ‘have the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words’.88 Specifically, it is Shakespeare’s words they recall, and Lamb develops a comparison – ‘moral’ and poetic – between Timon of Athens and the Rake’s Progress. Both, he says, mingle ‘the ludicrous with the terrible’: both use satire as a means to a moral end, which might lead on ‘to some more salutary feeling than laughter’.89 Both Hogarth and Shakespeare, too, practise a type of ‘imaginary work’ – Lamb has borrowed the phrase from The Rape of Lucrece (1594), to which he refers as Tarquin and Lucrece – which encourages reader response. In Lamb’s words, ‘where the spectator must meet the artist in his conceptions half way; . . . it is peculiar to the confidence of high genius alone to trust so much to spectators or readers.’90 If the popular prints of Hogarth can prompt this relationship between

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spectator and artist, so too can actors, in special circumstances. Lamb compares Munden, for instance – with his multiple facial expressions which work on the reader’s imagination like opium – to Hogarth (Lucas, 2: 169). Equally powerful artists, for Lamb, are comedians such as Jack Bannister (1760–1836) who can keep up ‘a tacit understanding’ with the audience, making them ‘unconsciously to themselves, a party in the scene’ (Lucas, 2: 185). Lamb himself, in the development of the essay form, is attempting something similar. The Reflector essays, with their elaborate narrative voices – ‘Pensilis’ and ‘Edax’ – and self-conscious references to their periodical context are calling attention to themselves as performances and inviting the reader to respond. That early reviewer, John Wilson, was right to note their ‘paradoxical’ nature, but these paradoxes are not the ‘baroque whimsicalities’ deplored by later critics, but, rather, ways of prompting an imaginative reaction and continuing the interchange between author and audience.91 The essayist asks us to reflect on the ways in which an audience may confuse reality and show – as, for instance, in his slighting discussion of The History of George Barnwell (1731) in comparison with Othello. A footnote, however, begs the theatre managers to stop the holiday performance of George Barnwell because it makes ‘uncle-murder too trivial’: ‘Uncles that think anything of their lives, should fairly petition the Chamberlain against it.’92 The footnote not only invites us to laugh at the essayist’s failure to distinguish the stage from reality, but it also creates a certain complicity with the reader, a form of periodical sociability which perhaps serves as a print substitute for those evening gatherings recalled by Hazlitt. This performative sociability is more fully developed in Elia and The Last Essays of Elia, where quotations and allusions to Shakespeare are woven into the essay, creating a sense of shared reading and mutual knowledge. Elia is alert to the ways in which London itself can function as a stage, which he peoples with Shakespearean characters – heirs to the sly, allusive ‘Falstaff’ originally created over a friendly ‘pottle of sherris’ in the 1790s. The clerks in ‘The South-Sea House’ are such characters: John Tipp is evoked through Fortinbras; Maynard is heard ‘in tones worthy of Arden’ chanting ‘that song sung by Amiens to the banished Duke’ (Lucas, 2: 6–7). By the close of the essay, Elia is asking the reader to consider the reality of such depictions: Reader, what if I have been playing with thee all this while – peradventure the very names, which I have summoned up before thee, are fantastic – insubstantial – like Henry Pimpernel, and old John Naps of Greece. (Lucas, 2: 8)

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In presenting the theatrical performance of his own essay in words borrowed from Shakespeare’s fantasies in The Taming of the Shrew, Lamb urges his reader towards an appreciation of different ambivalent performances within the city: in the periodical, in the workplace, in the streets. Chimney sweeps find an echo in Macbeth’s ‘apparition of a child crowned with a tree in his hand’ (Lucas, 2: 124). Beggars not only recall the ‘poor and broken bankrupt’ of As You Like It, but act out the Duke’s injunction to find ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones’ (2. 1. 16–17), since they are ‘the standing morals, emblems, mementos, dial-mottos, the spital sermons, the books for children’ of the city (Lucas, 2: 133). Elia himself becomes an actor, taking on various personae – at times borrowing Coleridge’s voice, at others quoting Falstaff, sometimes appearing as ‘a votary of the desk’, but then escaping to ‘Oxford in the Vacation’ to ‘play the gentleman, enact the student’ (Lucas, 2: 9–10). Elia, suggests Simon Hull, is ‘Lamb’s attempt at managing theatre on his own terms: by appropriating theatre’s illusory, emancipative qualities to the unspectacular figure of the periodical essayist’.93 Those multiple allusions and quotations show how Elia also functions as a skilful re-appropriation of Shakespeare which may be read not as a private, individualistic, enclosing turn, but as a rivalrous claim for the power of the periodical form. A brief passage in the London Magazine version of ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’ nicely demonstrates this rivalry, as Elia describes ‘the indignation of a crowd that was justling in with me at the pit-door of Covent Garden theatre, to have a sight of Master Betty – then at once in his dawn and his meridian – in Hamlet’ when they saw him reading the play: I happened to have in my hand a large octavo of Johnson and Steevens’s Shakspeare, which, the time not admitting of my carrying it home, of course went with me to the theatre. Just in the very heat and pressure of the doors opening – the rush, as they term it – I deliberately held the volume over my head, open at the scene in which the young Roscious [sic] had been most cried up, and quietly read by the lamp-light. The clamour became universal. ‘The affectation of the fellow’, cried one. ‘Look at that gentleman reading, papa,’ squeaked a young lady, who in her admiration of the novelty almost forgot her fears. I read on. ‘He ought to have his book knocked out of his hand,’ exclaimed a pursy cit, whose arms were too fast pinioned to his side to suffer him to execute his kind intention. Still I read on – and, till the time came to pay my money, kept as unmoved, as Saint Antony at his Holy Offices, with the satyrs, apes, and hobgoblins, mopping, and making mouths at him, in the picture, while

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the good man sits as undisturbed at the sight, as if he were sole tenant of the desart. – The individual rabble (I recognized more than one of their ugly faces) had damned a slight piece of mine but a few nights before, and I was determined the culprits should not a second time put me out of countenance.94 Here, the periodical essayist is almost violently at odds with the crowd – yet he is also one of them, a fellow theatregoer and (spurned) playwright. This little anecdote vividly sets in conflict two competing strands of Shakespearean appreciation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century: the rise of star actors such as the celebrated prodigy Master Betty, William Henry West (1791–1874), and increasing interest in scholarly editions of the plays such as the heavily footnoted Johnson-Steevens edition of 1773 (later reprinted and enlarged).95 The periodical essayist mediates between the two, literally making space for an act of reading in the theatre, and it is perhaps significant that when the essays make their transition into book form, this passage disappears. If – as we have seen – he has doubts about actors, so too is Lamb, particularly as essayist, sceptical about scholarly appropriations of Shakespeare. Elia tells us earlier in ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’ that he prefers ‘the common editions of Rowe and Tonson’ to more lavish productions such as Boydell’s engraved versions. He also strongly dislikes Malone’s whitewashing of the coloured effigy of Shakespeare at Stratford-on-Avon, which seems symbolic of scholarly ‘meddling’ with the popular version of the playwright. Steering a path between theatrical and scholarly claims to Shakespeare, Elia stands up for a sociable, popular Shakespeare who seems to exist between the two: ‘I have a community of feeling with my countrymen about his Plays,’ he claims, ‘and I like those editions of him best, which have been oftenest tumbled about and handled.’96 The essays were one way of expressing that ‘community of feeling’ about Shakespeare, so too were his Specimens and the Tales from Shakespear. Each of them had, as we will see, their own constraints and limitations, yet both attempted to argue for an imaginative, sympathetic, sociable response to Shakespeare.

Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakspeare Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakspeare was first published in 1808 by Longman. After a slow start,

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it proved popular, reprinted by Edward Moxon in 1835 and in at least five other editions during the nineteenth century. It was – yet again – a work created among friends, which would also go on to influence friends’ writing on Shakespeare. Its earliest beginnings may be glimpsed in a ‘little extract book’ of quotations from Beaumont and Fletcher, which Lamb burnt after the ‘day of horrors’ (Marrs, 1: 30). By 1804, however, we hear of a scheme by Southey to prevail upon Longman to publish a collection of extracts from the ‘scarce old English poets’: ‘my name must stand to the prospectus,’ he tells Coleridge, ‘and Lamb shall take the job and the emolument, for whom, in fact, I invented it, being a fit thing to be done, and he the fit man to do it.’97 The project then faltered, but seems to have begun again in 1806, possibly with some involvement by Wordsworth, and the volume was published by September 1808. By then it seems primarily to have assumed the function of a device to revive the Lambs’ fortunes after the disappointment of Mr. H-. ‘So I go creeping on,’ wrote Lamb to Thomas Manning about his work on the Specimens, ‘since I was lamed with that cursed fall from off the top of Drury Lane Theatre into the Pit something more than a year ago’ (Marrs, 2: 272). As so often with Lamb’s approach to drama, the collection thus represents a movement from the crowded and unpredictable theatre into the world of friendly readership. Once again, however, as we have seen with his earliest sonnets, this movement cannot be interpreted in purely conservative or limiting terms, since the collection seeks to increase public knowledge of obscure Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists and to make their work accessible to a wide audience. There is an afterword to the Specimens in 1827 in the shape of a series of contributions to Hone’s Table Book, Extracts from the Garrick Plays, which Lamb suggests should be considered as ‘after-gleanings’, ‘supplementary’ to the Specimens. These follow a very similar format, taken from the Garrick collection of plays at the British Museum, which Lamb – after his retirement from the East India House in 1825 – had more leisure to explore. In the ‘Preface’ to Extracts, he presents an image of the Museum reader as ‘having the range of a Nobleman’s Library, with the Librarian to your friend’: again, the emphasis is on opening obscure texts to a wider readership.98 Lamb’s collecting of the extracts repeats and furthers the democratizing endeavour of the British Museum itself. Just as the retired clerk is allowed entry to ‘a Nobleman’s Library’, so too are readers of Hone’s Table Book now permitted to access the old plays. Nevertheless, the readers of Lamb’s collections are not exactly allowed a free range of these ‘specimens’ and ‘extracts’, since in both the Specimens and the Extracts, Lamb imposes a strict structure and interpretive framework on his selections.

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Specimens includes extracts from Lamb’s old favourites Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, all of whom had been important influences on John Woodvil. There are also extracts from John Webster, John Ford, Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe, as well as lesser known curiosities such as The Merry Devil of Edmonton. The plays Lamb used were drawn partly from the collection at the British Museum, and also from Robert Dodsley’s twelve-volume Select Collection of Old Plays (1744–5). The purpose of Lamb’s selection of these dramatists was two-fold. First, he sought to convey an appreciation of Shakespeare’s context and an insight not only into the drama of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, but also into the preoccupations of the age. In selecting plays which focused on human interest, ‘life and manners, rather than masques, and Arcadian pastorals’, Lamb stated his intention ‘to illustrate what may be called the moral sense of our ancestors’, and with this in mind carefully chose passages which involved ‘scenes of passion’, ‘interesting situations’ and ‘serious descriptions’ (Specimens, vi). In giving an insight into the historical and emotional context of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Lamb hoped, he said, to show ‘how much of Shakspeare shines in the great men his contemporaries, and how far in his divine mind and manners he surpassed them and all mankind’ (Specimens, vi). Yet this bardolatry co-exists with an urge to break down strict canons and to encourage contextualization, since the second purpose of the volume was to bring together the most admired scenes in Fletcher and Massinger, in the estimation of the world the only dramatic poets of that age who are entitled to be considered after Shakspeare, and to exhibit them in the same volume with the more impressive scenes of old Marlowe, Heywood, Tourneur, Webster, Ford, and others: to show what we have slighted, while beyond all proportion we have cried up one or two favourite names. (Specimens, vii) Lamb’s ‘Preface’ seems, therefore, to posit a dual focus for the Specimens – at once supporting the pre-eminence of Shakespeare, but also proposing a re-opening and re-ordering of the canon. Lamb’s process of selecting and presenting the extracts shares in this ambivalence. On one hand the extracts encourage the reader’s imaginative response to the plays, since Lamb gives ‘entire scenes, and in some instances successive scenes’, rather than isolated quotations – ‘detached beauties’ – which split up the dramatic unity of the play (Specimens, v). On the other hand, these scenes are carefully managed and at times censored, not only by leaving out potentially confusing references or secondary characters, but

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also in expunging ‘without ceremony all that which the writers had better never have written, that forms the objection so often repeated to the promiscuous reading of Fletcher, Massinger, and some others’ (Specimens, v). For instance, his extracts from Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess pointedly exclude the ‘ugly deformity’ of Cloe, a ‘character of lewdness’: ‘Female lewdness’, comments Lamb scathingly, ‘at once shocks nature and morality’ (Specimens, 384). John Coates has gone so far as to argue that Lamb was creating a ‘kind of “conduct book’’’ through his excerpts; in Coates’s words, he ‘appears to have been concerned to a marked extent with a right way to do things’, both morally and socially.99 In his notes to Webster’s Devil’s Law Case, for example, Lamb comments on the duel between Contarino and Ercole as ‘a model of a well-managed and gentlemanlike difference’ (Specimens, 199); ‘a beauty and truth of moral feeling’ is evident in Middleton’s and Rowley’s portrayal of disputes in A Fair Quarrel (Specimens, 136). Lamb’s morally judgemental mode has a literary equivalent, since – as we will see – all the dramatists are read according to Shakespearean criteria, and a sense of literary hierarchy is taken for granted. ‘After all,’ Lamb concludes his note on The Maid’s Tragedy, ‘Beaumont and Fletcher were but an inferior sort of Shakspeares and Sidneys’ (Specimens, 351). Like the Tales from Shakespear, the Specimens thus has several overlapping moral and literary motives, and the collection simultaneously encourages and seeks firmly to control readerly response. Lamb was conscious that the mode he had chosen to present the extracts was already well established. As he pointed out to Manning, the idea of selecting ‘specimens’ was ‘becoming fashionable’ (Marrs, 2: 272); volumes such as The British Muse (1738), or The Beauties of the English Stage (1756), presented quotations and ‘different modes of theatrical Expression’ from Shakespeare to contemporary dramatists.100 However, Lamb felt he was doing something different in his attempt to interest readers in a broader Shakespearean context, closing an 1827 summary of his own career with the conclusion that ‘he also was the first to draw the Public attention to the old English Dramatists.’101 This was not quite true, since William Gifford, for instance, produced an edition of Massinger in 1805 (followed up in 1813) which ‘did much for the text and fame’ of the playwright.102 However, recent reassessment of the reputations of playwrights such as Jonson, Webster and Marlowe has nevertheless confirmed the importance of the Specimens. Tom Lockwood suggests that the volume fostered a widespread interest in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama: evident not only among the reading public but among the printers, publishers, and booksellers of Paternoster-Row and elsewhere in

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London: witness the editions of John Ford and of Beaumont and Fletcher edited by Scott’s amanuensis, Henry Weber, and more importantly, the decision of the publisher John Stockdale to venture in 1811 a single-volume edition of Jonson, which can clearly be seen as a commercial recognition of the climate of appreciation to which Lamb’s work had given rise.103 Bryan Waller Procter noted in his copy of Specimens that ‘most of the plays from which these extracts are taken’ had since been reprinted, citing collections such as The Ancient English Drama (1814–33), The Old English Drama: A Selection of Plays from the Old English Dramatists (1825), and the collected works of Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and copying out further extracts from Webster to supplement Lamb’s selection. Procter’s annotations were typical of the appreciative response the Specimens prompted to little-read authors such as Webster. Indeed, Don D. Moore salutes Lamb as the ‘critic who first looked closely at Webster, at the plays as literature’ and credits him with prompting nineteenth-century literary appreciation of the playwright: earlier interest in Webster, he argues, had mainly been antiquarian, and limited to ‘booksellers and anthologists’. The difference in the Specimens, claims Moore, is Lamb’s ‘genuinely critical acumen’, his ‘impressionistic approach to the plays as literature, not as antique curiosities’.104 Thomas Dabbs similarly sees the Specimens as ‘an important event in the study of old drama’, since Lamb’s arranging and glossing of exciting dramatic moments ‘lent artistic credence to dramas that many prior critics had found unrefined’ – a credence bolstered by Lamb’s repeated emphasis on their Shakespearean elements and affiliations, evident from the very title of the collection.105 The notes attached to the extracts persistently urge Shakespearean comparisons – very often to the detriment of the other dramatists. Extracting two speeches by Barabas from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, for instance, Lamb compares Barabas to Shylock, who ‘in the midst of his savage purpose is a man,’ whereas ‘Barabas is a mere monster brought in with a large painted nose to please the rabble’ (Specimens, 31). Middleton’s witches, from The Witch: A Tragicomedy, also compare unfavourably to those in Macbeth; the former ‘can hurt the body; those have power over the soul’ (Specimens, 174). A scene from The Merry Devil of Edmonton is commended for having ‘much of Shakspeare’s manner in the sweetness and goodnaturedness of it’ (Specimens, 53), whereas Fletcher is disparaged for showing a general preference for ‘unnatural and violent situations’: ‘Shakspeare had nothing of this contortion in his mind, none of that

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craving after romantic incidents, and flights of strained and improbable virtue, which I think always betrays an imperfect moral sensibility’ (Specimens, 404). The portrayal of love in The Faithful Shepherdess, similarly, is unfavourably compared to the ‘loves of Hermia and Lysander’, which are judged to be properly innocent (Specimens, 383). Lamb thus explores the ways in which Shakespeare’s characters might affect the reader, in terms of sympathetic response or imaginative arousal, and defends Shakespeare morally – a point which will become important as we explore how he situated himself against Samuel Johnson. Underpinning this is Lamb’s interest in the way in which Shakespeare composed and structured his scenes. Selecting a scene from Fletcher’s Thierry and Theodoret: A Tragedy, Lamb commends it as Fletcher’s ‘finest’: yet when ‘compared with Shakspeare’s finest scenes’, he concludes, it ‘is slow and languid’ (Specimens, 404). He develops this comparison between Fletcher and Shakespeare through a number of notes, culminating in his comments on The Two Noble Kinsmen, where he discusses the distinction between the two dramatists in detail: [Fletcher’s] ideas moved slow; his versification, though sweet, is tedious, it stops every moment; he lays line upon line, making up one after the other, adding image to image so deliberately that we see where they join; Shakspeare mingles every thing, he runs line into line, embarrasses sentences and metaphors; before one idea has burst its shell, another is hatched and clamorous for disclosure. (Specimens, 419) Mingling, hatching, clamouring: Lamb is participating in – and helping to create – a Romantic reading of Shakespeare which emphasizes his vital, active creativity. The point of the volume, it becomes clear, is not simply to contextualize Shakespeare’s plays and to discuss Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, but also to help formulate a coherent critical view of Shakespeare. In particular, Lamb seeks to rebuff neoclassical strictures on Shakespeare’s ‘irregularities’, such as his inattention to dramatic unities. Pedantic attention to these had always frustrated him – witness his ironic comments on George Dyer’s opinion of Shakespeare: ‘he calls him a great but irregular genius, which I think to be an original & just remark’ (Marrs, 1: 229). The theme is developed at greater length in Specimens, when Lamb attempts to rebuff the ‘vulgar misconception of Shakspeare, as of a wild irregular genius “in whom great faults are compensated by great beauties”’ (Specimens, 99). The quotation is not exact, but he is probably situating

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himself in relation both to Alexander Pope, and to Johnson’s views of Shakespeare, as put forward in his 1765 Preface: Shakespeare with his excellencies has likewise faults, and faults sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit.106 When Johnson’s Preface is read alongside Specimens, it becomes clear that it functions as a kind of shadow text to the later work, as indeed it does to Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817). Although – as will be discussed – Lamb does borrow several key Johnsonian concepts, many of Lamb’s points about Shakespeare seem to be developed in contention with the Preface. Lamb engages with two major, interrelated issues raised by Johnson: Shakespeare as moralist, and Shakespeare as dramatist. One of the main problems, as Johnson sees it, is that Shakespeare ‘seems to write without any moral purpose’ – whereas it is ‘always a writer’s duty to make the world better’.107 In Shakespeare’s comic scenes, moreover, Johnson objects to ‘gross’ jests and licentious pleasantry: ‘neither his gentlemen nor his ladies have much delicacy.’108 As we have seen, Lamb seeks to defend Shakespeare’s morality. Indeed, in certain notes, he seems to be directly answering Johnson’s accusation, as in his discussion of Helena in All’s Well That End’s Well, who reverses ‘the ordinary laws of courtship’. Despite this, Lamb argues, Shakespeare handles the subject with ‘such exquisite address’ that she retains her honour, ‘delicacy dispenses with her laws in her favour’ (Specimens, 351). Lamb also argues for a renewed appreciation of Shakespeare as a highly selfconscious, successful dramatist, rebutting Johnson’s reading of a Shakespeare who ‘seems not always fully to comprehend his own design’. Shakespeare’s plots are ‘loosely formed’ and ‘carelessly pursued’, argues Johnson, and the playwright thus ‘omits opportunities of instructing and delighting’.109 For Lamb, on the other hand, Shakespeare’s refusal to impose an overt moral runs alongside his aesthetic power. Looseness here – ‘he runs line into line’ – becomes a sign not of artistic lack of control but of creative genius. Lamb’s defence of Shakespeare is seconded by Wordsworth in his Essay Supplementary to the Preface (1815). Wordsworth quotes directly from the note in Specimens in his discussion of the ways in which German perceptions of Shakespeare’s genius and dramatic unity have out-stripped English criticism: The Germans only, of foreign nations, are approaching towards a knowledge and feeling of what he is. In some respects they have acquired a

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superiority over the fellow countrymen of the Poet: for among us it is a current, I might say, an established opinion, that Shakspeare is justly praised when he is pronounced to be ‘a wild irregular genius, in whom great faults are compensated by great beauties’. How long may it be before this misconception passes away, and it becomes universally acknowledged that the judgment of Shakspeare in the selection of his materials, and in the manner in which he has made them, heterogeneous as they often are, constitute a unity of their own, and contribute all to one great end, is not less admirable than his imagination, his invention, and his intuitive knowledge of human Nature?110 By Germans, Wordsworth is thinking particularly of A. W. von Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1808; translated into English in 1815). The way in which Wordsworth’s reference to Schlegel appears in the same sentence as his quotation from Lamb’s Specimens is particularly intriguing. Schlegel’s views on Shakespeare have, of course, a deep impact on the Romantic perspective, best seen in Hazlitt’s introduction to the Characters of Shakespear’s Plays. Hazlitt sets Schlegel’s perspectives on the aesthetic unity of Shakespeare’s plays in contrast with Johnson’s views, which he somewhat unfairly characterizes as dry and unyielding: ‘cast in a given mould, in a set form . . . made up by rule and system’ (Howe, 4: 175). This is obviously doing Johnson an injustice, since his criticism is deeply aware of ‘Shakespeare’s resistance to system’.111 But Hazlitt needs to set Johnson up as an opposition figure – he needs to put forward this concept of a hard ‘set form’ the better to elucidate his own dynamic, evolving, sympathetic approach. Johnson, suggests Bate, ‘is a great antithetic critic, where Hazlitt is a great sympathetic one’.112 Hazlitt’s approach is also distinctly sociable, sympathetically responding both to Shakespeare, and to a wider circle of contemporary writers and friends. If the sympathy of the Characters of Shakespear’s Plays is filtered through Schlegel, it is also equally powerfully indebted to the dedicatee of Hazlitt’s book, Lamb – since, in that image of Shakespeare forging his mingled materials into a dramatic whole, Specimens pre-empts Schegel. The image is mirrored by Coleridge’s Lectures on the Principles of Poetry, also given in the early part of 1808, from January to June, and his refutation of ‘the popular notion, that he was a great Dramatist, by a sort of Instinct’. He disparages those who talk of Shakespere as a sort of beautiful Lusus Naturae, a delightful Monster – wild indeed, without taste or Judgment . . . uttering amid the

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strangest follies the sublimest truths. In nine places out of ten in which I find his awful name mentioned, it is with some epithet of wild, irregular, pure child of nature, &c &c &c.113 That ‘wild, irregular’ suggests the interconnection with Lamb, whose Specimens would not be published until later in 1808, but who had, after all, been discussing Shakespeare with Coleridge since the mid-1790s.114 It is another instance of the ways in which the Romantic view of Shakespeare might be formed through ongoing conversation. The concept of Shakespeare’s unifying, inventive, imaginative power, and his aesthetic judgement, owes as much to the discussions within and around Specimens as it does to Schlegel – Lamb’s early attempts to refute Johnson’s neoclassical strictures make a powerful and long-lasting contribution to Romantic perspectives of Shakespeare. Yet it would be wrong to suggest that Lamb and Johnson are diametrically opposed, since they share a similar conception of the source of Shakespeare’s power. Both see him as ‘a poet of nature’, but develop the concept in different ways. Johnson sees both Shakespeare’s ‘excellencies’ and his ‘faults’ as stemming from this natural quality. On one hand, Shakespeare has a deep capacity to represent nature – his drama is ‘the mirrour of manners and of life’ – but he is also prone to faults of his own human nature.115 These can lead him both into a poor representation of morality – he carries his characters, for instance, ‘indifferently through right and wrong’ – and into dramatic sloppiness, including hurrying the conclusions of his plays, ‘shorten[ing] the labour to snatch the profit’, and getting carried away by a ‘quibble’: ‘the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career’.116 On the other hand, as a ‘poet of nature’ he is able to transcend conventions such as the dramatic unities, and successfully to bring comedy and tragedy together in what Johnson terms a ‘mingled drama’.117 Johnson’s use of the word ‘mingled’ perhaps inspires Lamb’s own assertion that ‘Shakspeare mingles every thing,’ in which he pushes Johnson’s original point further. Like Johnson, Lamb characterizes Shakespeare as inspired by nature: ‘Shakespeare chose her [Nature] without a reserve: and had riches, power, understanding, and long life, with her, for a dowry’ (Specimens, 409). This does not mean, however, that he is a purely ‘natural’ poet, but rather that he has an ability to reflect upon and recreate nature: ‘not Nature’s nature,’ he suggests in a note to the Extracts from the Garrick Plays, ‘but Imagination’s substituted nature’ (Lucas, 1903, 401). The point recurs in ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare’: It is common for people to talk of Shakspeare’s plays being so natural; that every body can understand him. They are natural indeed, they are

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grounded deep in nature, so deep that the depth of them lies out of the reach of most of us.118 Lamb is building on Johnson’s point: Shakespeare is not merely a ‘poet of nature’, but a poet who commands nature. This allows him both to create his own literary and critical conventions and also to convey his own morality. For just as the plays have an aesthetic unity and power, so too do they have a deep moral sense, even if we are not immediately able to see it at work. This leads into the final important point of difference between Johnson and Lamb: their perception of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Johnson concludes that Shakespeare had to contend with an age ‘yet struggling to emerge from barbarity’, where ‘literature was yet confined to professed scholars, or to men and women of high rank’: ‘Plebeian learning’, he maintains, was a matter of ‘adventures, giants, dragons, and enchantments’.119 Lamb’s intention, however, is to depict a full range of literary achievements of the period and to show the ‘gentlemanlike’ civilization and moral depth of this literature. Contemporary inability to appreciate different presentations of morality was a recurrent point of frustration for him. In an angry note to Middleton’s and Rowley’s A Fair Quarrel, for instance, he claims that the play’s ‘admirable passions’ would not be tolerated in early nineteenth-century theatre because of the ‘insipid levelling morality to which the modern stage is tied down’: Our audiences come to the theatre to be complimented on their goodness. They compare notes with the amiable characters in the play, and find a wonderful similarity of disposition between them. (Specimens, 136) Instead of encouraging a ‘delicacy of perception in questions of right and wrong’, Lamb claims, modern playwrights are better content to deliver the audience with ‘two or three hackneyed sentences’ of clichéd sentiment. This vehement support of Middleton and Rowley is comparable to ‘On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century’, which argues that contemporary audiences – spoilt by ‘the exclusive and all devouring drama of common life’ – have lost the ability to distinguish between drama and reality, and apply the same ‘moral test’ to both (Lucas, 2: 161). The comedies of Congreve and Farquhar are, therefore, judged licentious, since contemporary playgoers have lost the ‘middle emotions’ which would allow them to enter into the ‘imaginary freedom’ of the plays (Lucas, 2: 161–2). This then lends a special significance to Lamb’s stated aim in the ‘Preface’ of Specimens ‘to illustrate what may be called the moral sense of our ancestors’. Lamb’s carefully structured and argued notes attempt to

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create another sympathetic, imaginative relationship between playwright and reader which will allow the latter to appreciate the aesthetic unity and morality of these dramatists. As Gillian Russell has discussed, Lamb ‘mediates between the reader and the old play’.120 He opens up a way for the reader to appreciate – to become familiar with – the narrative structure, literary and dramatic qualities, and ‘moral sense’ of a distinctly different world. In doing so, he also emphasizes the imaginative power and aesthetic achievement of Shakespeare, inextricable from his deeper moral consciousness. And whilst being fiercely defensive of Shakespeare’s pre-eminence, the Specimens also awaken a larger interest in his literary world and urge a full-scale revaluation of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. They are also revealingly structured, negotiating between Lamb’s desire to afford the reader freedom, and his anxiety to control response. Like the Tales from Shakespear, the volume’s concentrated presentation of narrative and character in each of the plays gives ‘the specimen the intensity of a well-wrought short story’, carefully presented and directed.121 The plays are at once domesticated and set free; they are made accessible to the reading public and yet tightly controlled by their presentation as ‘specimens’. Their influence, too, was powerful, long-lasting, and to some extent limiting. As late as 1924, for instance, T. S. Eliot famously complains in his essay ‘Four Elizabethan Dramatists’ about the hampering influence of the Specimens, which, he claims, established ‘the accepted attitude towards Elizabethan drama’. ‘By publishing these selections, Lamb set in motion the enthusiasm for poetic drama which still persists’, encouraging a distinction which Eliot saw as ‘the ruin of modern drama – the distinction between drama and literature’.122 The packaging and presentation of Specimens, he claimed, exerted a strong influence not only over perceptions of Elizabethan drama, but also over the way drama itself, and its relationship to literature, was being considered in the early twentieth century. Eliot’s struggles to free his own drama from the patterns imposed by Lamb point to the power of Specimens through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The volume still deserves a full-scale reconsideration as a crucial intervention in Romantic and nineteenth-century perceptions of Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama. It also forms an indispensable companion piece to ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare’, with its similarly ambivalent and difficult approach to the relationship between poetry and play, reader and drama, audience and author. Both help us to understand the complex thinking behind Charles and Mary Lamb’s best-known Shakespearean appropriation, the Tales from Shakespear. This deceptively simple volume, which has never been out of print since its first publication

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at the very close of 1806, has not only shaped generations of first encounters with Shakespeare, but it has also had a surprising influence in mediating Shakespeare for audiences abroad. The Tales served to introduce Shakespeare to China in 1903, and they are still being pressed into service as Penguin English readers. They form, therefore, an appropriate conclusion – not only showing how the Lambs’ circle of sociability might have expanded across the globe, but also reminding us of the limitations, restrictions and careful negotiations of their view of Shakespeare. They also allow us a special insight into the dynamics of the Lambs’ family creativity – and into Mary Lamb’s views on Shakespeare, which, in this final section, come to the fore.

Tales from Shakespear The Tales from Shakespear had their origin not only in more than a decade of thinking and writing about Shakespeare, but also in a famous letter to Coleridge of 1802, when Lamb condemned the lack of good, imaginative books for children.123 ‘Goody Two Shoes’, he wrote, referring to the old Newbery classic of 1765, ‘is almost out of print. Mrs. Barbauld[’s] stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery.’ He and, he implies, Mary were out of patience with ‘Mrs. B’s & Mrs. Trimmer’s nonsense’: Knowledge insignificant & vapid as Mrs. B’s books convey, it seems, must come to a child in the shape of knowledge, & his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers, when he has learnt, that a Horse is an Animal, & Billy is better than a Horse, & such like: instead of that beautiful Interest in wild tales, which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child. (Marrs, 2: 81) This opposition between ‘the shape of knowledge’ and ‘wild tales’ is another version of Lamb’s plea for imaginative sympathy between writer and reader; children, too, deserve their freedom as readers. Yet it is also slightly unfair – ‘Goody Two Shoes’ was a highly moralistic work, and, conversely, Barbauld’s writing for children is imaginative, sympathetic and experimental in encouraging independent reading. Perhaps Lamb was already thinking of himself as a literary rival on the contemporary children’s market. Several years later, at the close of 1806, he and Mary published Tales from Shakespear with the Godwins’ ‘Juvenile Library’: twenty short, lively prose adaptations of the comedies, tragedies and late plays. The tales represent the first literary

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expression of their ‘double singleness’, since the writing was shared between them. Mary took the comedies; Charles, Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Romeo, Hamlet and Othello. They also, subtly, offer an insight into the Lambs’ creative relationship, and their familial bond. In their delicate attempts to control family readings of Shakespeare, the Tales also reveal the Lambs’ perpetual negotiations with their own family situation. On the surface, the little volume seems to be the vindication of that earlier desire to rouse the child’s ‘beautiful Interest in wild tales’. Their stories, although summarized and simplified, are designed to involve the child reader – first in terms of the portability of the original books. Each tale was first issued separately in a little child-friendly sixpenny edition, containing three illustrations, some said to have been done by Blake, before being repackaged and sold together as a small volume. This attention to the experience of the child reader is echoed by the imaginative way in which they are introduced, often directly, to Shakespearean language. Like Henrietta Bowdler’s Family Shakespeare of the same year, the Tales actively consider the ways in which children might engage with Shakespeare’s language, giving what the ‘Preface’ calls a ‘few hints and little foretastes’ of the Shakespeare they will later ‘read . . . at full length’ (Lucas, 3: 1–2). As F. J. Harvey Darton puts it in his classic Children’s Books in England, the Tales – like the Specimens the following year – try to give ‘something like a reality of the Elizabethan spirit’.124 The Tales may, therefore, be seen as heirs to that imaginative vision of the 1802 letter, opening up what the Lambs term in the ‘Preface’ the ‘wild poetic garden’ of Shakespeare’s language. Yet that ‘wildness’ is not entirely straightforward. The Lambs seem to be setting their book in neat opposition to didactic views of children’s literature, apparently fighting, as Paul Heins has it, against the ‘rise of a didactic, moralistic school of writing for children’.125 Yet – as in the Specimens – the Tales also demonstrate a desire to manage and direct the child’s reading of Shakespeare. Like the problems Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess posed for the Specimens, sexually charged and ambiguous plays such as The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well proved distinctly problematic for conversion into children’s narratives. Mary Lamb wrote to her friend Sarah Stoddart that All’s Well ‘teazed me more than all the rest put together’ (Marrs, 2: 235). The bed trick has to be replaced by a nighttime conversation, during which the ‘simple graces of [Helena’s] lively conversation and the endearing sweetness of her manners’ win over Bertram. Mary ingeniously attempts to extricate herself from the implausibility involved in this plot development by explaining that Helena’s extreme reverence for Bertram has previously left her ‘always silent in his presence’

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(Lucas, 3: 124). The ending of the tale, while not imposing a direct moral, replaces the ambiguity of the King’s speech with a conclusive assertion of Helena’s happiness as a ‘beloved wife’ (Lucas, 3: 126). There are numerous other changes and expurgations throughout the Tales: Mariana has had to be married off to Angelo, for instance, and Imogen’s cinque-spotted mole has moved to her neck, whereas even the Bowdlers’ Family Shakespeare keeps the original, ‘On her left breast’. For critics such as Jean Marsden, these changes, alongside the emphasis on feminine propriety, submission and ideal love, suggest that the Tales were designed not to free the ‘wild’ imagination of the child, but to ‘instill lessons regarding proper female behaviour’; an argument comparable to that put forward by Coates in viewing the Specimens as a form of ‘conduct book’.126 As we saw in the Specimens, the desire to structure and control might be an integral part of the Tales, whose imaginative ‘wildness’ seems inextricably intertwined with their didactic element. Charles’s assertion of the importance of ‘that beautiful Interest in wild tales’, is, after all, because the reading of such tales ‘made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child’. The concept of the ‘wild’ has, therefore, an important educational and moral role, subtly enforced. One of the most important features of the Tales’ appropriation of Shakespeare is the way in which Shakespearean language and dialogue is carefully enclosed and bounded within the third-person narrative voice. Joseph Riehl has termed this ‘their most original, pervasive, and informing contribution to the Tales’, subtly implying ‘the sort of authoritative moral vision which we associate with the novel’.127 We have seen an example of Mary’s negotiation with issues of sexual and emotional tension in the comedies; in a similar way, Charles, who took charge of the tragedies, tries to direct the child’s imaginative involvement. In Macbeth the witches’ brew is gleefully rendered in full: Their horrid ingredients were toads, bats, and serpents, the eye of a newt, and the tongue of a dog, the leg of a lizard, and the wing of the night-owl, the scale of a dragon, the tooth of a wolf, the maw of the ravenous salt-sea shark, the mummy of a witch, the root of the poisonous hemlock (this to have effect must be digged in the dark), the gall of a goat, and the liver of a Jew, with slips of the yew tree that roots itself in graves, and the finger of a dead child. . . . (Lucas, 3: 111) This is contained, however, within a clear narrative structure of judgement. The events take place, we are told in the first sentence, ‘when Duncan the

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Meek reigned king of Scotland’; the first introduction to Lady Macbeth is as a ‘bad ambitious woman’, reminiscent, incidentally, of Hazlitt’s description of her as ‘a great bad woman’ (Howe, IV: 188). This double movement is at the heart of the Lambs’ games with authority in the Tales – on one hand marked by imagination and inventiveness, on the other by the desire for control and direction. The ‘wildness’ of the Tales is a contested, divided concept, which should be considered from several different perspectives. It is invested with political and religious implications for the Lambs and their publishers, William and Mary Jane Godwin; it reflects anxieties over female reading and behaviour, and, lastly, it has special personal significance for the Lambs themselves, constantly aware of the dangers of insanity. The publishing context of the Tales, firstly, needs to be taken into account, since that ambiguous ‘wildness’ takes on a special charge when considered in relation to its original publication by the ‘Juvenile Library’ run by William Godwin and his second wife, Mary Jane. Godwin and Lamb did not meet until 1800, when, despite Lamb’s initial reservations, they quickly became close.128 However, others had drawn connections between their political views in the 1790s; they had, after all, appeared alongside one another in the Anti-Jacobin poem, ‘New Morality’. Although the Tales do not seem immediately to have a political subtext, their emphasis on the child’s imagination takes on a slightly different aspect in the context of William Godwin’s own approach to children’s literature, which encouraged imaginative engagement as a means of moral – and politically radical – education. The Godwins set up the ‘Juvenile Library’ in 1805, prompted by financial and personal reasons. After the death of his first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, in 1798, Godwin had not only to support his daughter by her, Mary (Shelley), but also Wollstonecraft’s first child, Fanny, by Gilbert Imlay, and his marriage to Mary Jane in 1801 brought her two children into the household also. A children’s bookshop not only seemed a way of taking advantage of a potentially lucrative and rapidly expanding middle-class marketplace, it also fitted in well with Godwin’s own experiments in educating the children of his own household, and, indeed, his larger aims. Pamela Clemit has shown how, for Godwin, intervention in the children’s book market was a profoundly ideological move: ‘far from withdrawing from public debate under the pressure of economic necessity, as is sometimes thought, Godwin turned to children’s books as a continuation of his radical program of the 1790s.’129 Just as his plays and novels – such as Caleb Williams (1794) – had attempted to popularize his political ideas, so too did Godwin use children’s

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literature as a way of fostering the autonomy of the young reader, with the larger aim of encouraging independent thought and challenging existing hierarchies, political and social. The ‘Juvenile Library’ brought out stories such as the Swiss Family Robinson alongside educational works, all the time paying shrewd attention to how, through pricing and marketing strategies, the child reader might be attracted and involved. That initial issue of the Tales from Shakespear ‘in single stories like the childrens little shilling books,’ as Mary Lamb puts it, was specifically designed to encourage a child’s own reading (Marrs, 2: 228).130 This emphasis on independent reading also carried political implications. Indeed, Godwin’s move into children’s publishing was regarded with suspicion by certain onlookers. A report on the ‘Juvenile Library’ by a government informer in 1813 condemned the ‘principles of democracy and Theophilanthropy’ it propagated, suggesting that its educational works were nothing more than an ‘insidious and dangerous’ indoctrination into ‘every principle professed by the infidels and republicans of these days’.131 The report even singled out the subversive nature of a School Dictionary of the English Language: ‘take the word “revolution,”’ it continues in indignation, ‘the meaning given is, “things returning to their just state.”’ Do the Tales share this subversive potential? Their emphasis on independent, imaginative reading does overlap with Godwin’s own interest in the ‘child’s exercise of free judgement’, encouraged through imaginative response and poetic language.132 In Godwin’s Bible Stories, for instance, it is not the child’s understanding of scripture, but the child’s power of sympathetic imagination – ‘the ground-plot upon which the edifice of a sound morality must be erected’ – which is foregrounded.133 Moreover, the Bible Stories are rendered in the ‘simple’, ‘dignified’, ‘natural’ and ‘impressive’ language of the ‘Authorised Version’, mirroring the Lambs’ desire to retain the ‘effect of the beautiful English tongue in which [Shakespeare] wrote’ (Lucas, 3: 1).134 Godwin also insisted that the child should also be allowed to select his or her own reading: ‘Suffer him,’ he wrote, ‘to wander in the wilds of literature’.135 That mention of the ‘wilds of literature’ looks forward to the Lambs’ description of the ‘wild poetic garden’ of Shakespeare’s language and Charles Lamb’s reflections to Coleridge on the power of ‘Tales and old wives fables’: Godwin and Lamb seem to have shared a conviction that imaginative stories could ‘quicken the apprehensions of children’ and arouse a larger moral sense.136 Indeed, Lamb could go much further than Godwin, as his angry response to the publication of the Tales in book-form shows. They were accompanied by illustrations which Lamb condemned, writing to Wordsworth that he

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held Mary Jane Godwin – the ‘bad baby’ – responsible for their ‘damn’d beastly vulgarity’ (Marrs, 2: 256). It was not merely the subjects which Lamb disliked, it was the fact that the scenes did not correspond properly to the tales: ‘no atom of authority was in the tale to justify it,’ he complains of one; another, of Hamlet and the gravedigger, ‘is not hinted at in the story’ (Marrs, 2: 256). Thus, attention to the visual could mislead a child reader: the same concern about deceptive appearance which would later surface in the Reflector essays. Lamb shows himself to be attentive to all aspects of the child’s response, alert to the ways in which imaginative involvement with the text might be prompted – or discouraged. Another disagreement with Godwin was prompted by Lamb’s second commission for the ‘Juvenile Library’, The Adventures of Ulysses (1808). Like the Tales from Shakespear, this is an adaptation designed both to open up the classics for children, and to celebrate Elizabethan poetry, since it is a version – sometimes very close – of George Chapman’s 1614 translation of the Odyssey. Lamb’s inventive, poetic retelling of famous aspects of Ulysses’ story retains some of Chapman’s strong and savage descriptions. Lamb’s Cyclops, for instance, seizes two of Ulysses’ men and makes ‘a lion’s meal’ of them, ‘lapping the blood’ (Lucas, 3: 244). Godwin was somewhat taken aback by such passages. ‘We live in squeamish days,’ he wrote to Lamb, urging him to curtail his language in light of female readers and their parents: ‘you exclude one half of the human species’ (Marrs, 2: 278). Lamb refused to back down, and the text remained largely unchanged. Introducing challenging ideas and poetic language to children, unleashing their imagination and setting them on the path to become questioning, alert adult readers; the Lambs’ children’s work, therefore, does seem to fit in well with the radical aspects of the ‘Juvenile Library’ – and even, in some cases, to surpass Godwin’s own boundaries. Yet in other ways, the Tales from Shakespear do seem to exhibit anxiety about their own imaginative potential, and their effect on female readers, a concern picked up by none other than the Anti-Jacobin Review, which still, in 1807, had its eye on Godwin and his circle: [W]e are not of opinion, that the tales of Shakspeare, though told, as they are by Mr. Lamb, as decently as possible, are very proper studies for female children. And we certainly object to the language of the preface, where girls are told, that there are parts in Shakspeare improper for them to read at one age, though they may be allowed to read them at another. This only serves as a stimulus to juvenile curiosity, which requires a bridle rather than a spur.137

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Perhaps in response to this, the second edition of the Tales (1809) carried an ‘Advertisement’ which promoted it as ‘an acceptable and improving present for young ladies advancing to the state of womanhood’. The whole book seems to be alert to questions of propriety, taste and gender, raised as early as the ‘Preface’ in the first edition – begun by Mary and finished off by Charles. Although the Tales were aimed at ‘very young children’, Mary Lamb explains that they were designed specifically with young ladies in mind, boys being ‘permitted the use of their fathers’ libraries at a much earlier age’. It is a brother’s duty to lend ‘kind assistance in explaining to their sisters such parts as are hardest for them to understand,’ and to read aloud to them from the original plays, ‘carefully selecting what is proper for a young sister’s ear’ (Lucas, 3: 2). Women’s appropriation of Shakespeare is thus bounded; on one hand they are allowed a possibly subversive glimpse of the paternal literary inheritance, yet on the other, it is made clear that this insight into what she terms the ‘manly book’ of Shakespeare should be determined and ordained by the male reader. This impression was unfortunately reinforced by the publication of the Tales under Charles’s name only. This was probably done to shield Mary from publicity, but it went against Charles’s original intentions; he complained to Wordsworth that Godwin had ‘cheated me into putting a name to them, which I did not mean, but do not repent’ (Marrs, 2: 256). Marsden reads this tension concerning female presence and authority pessimistically, concluding that the Tales are bounded by Mary Lamb’s ‘adherence to moral expectations’ and early nineteenth-century ideals of feminine behaviour: ‘The library door was unlocked, but the books themselves were out of reach.’138 Susan Wolfson has offered a more subversive reading. Her useful model of ‘divided energy’ shows how Mary Lamb’s tales seem at once to question, and simultaneously to collude with, conventional gender distinctions within and around Shakespeare. In the first place, argues Wolfson, her choice of the comedies enables her to discuss female characters who show a lively freedom in the face of patriarchy. Mary Lamb’s engagement with these plays thus places her in a situation of testing the possibilities, and what emerges are narrative treatments ranging from optimistic openness to a conservatism narrower than that of the Shakespearean original.139 There is a sly humour at work, for example, in Mary’s description of the marriage laws at the opening to A Midsummer Night’s Dream: [B]ut as fathers do not often desire the death of their own daughters, even though they do happen to prove a little refractory, this law was

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seldom or never put into practice, though perhaps the young ladies of that city were not unfrequently threatened by their parents with the terrors of it. (Lucas, 3: 13) However, at other points, the liveliness of the narrative voice is toned down. The mention of Katherine’s ‘ungovernable spirit’ at the beginning of The Taming of the Shrew (Lucas, 3: 126–7) bodes promisingly for a discussion of ‘wildness’, but the reader is quickly and firmly advised to sympathize with the ‘witty and most happy-tempered humourist’ Petruchio in his quest to control Katherine and tame her into ‘the most obedient and duteous wife in Padua’ (Lucas, 3: 135). The ‘Sly’ prologue is cut out, so that – as in Garrick’s adaptation – a certain level of interpretive ambiguity is removed, and we begin in a family setting, as Baptista and Petruchio discuss the marriage. Both examples demonstrate an alertness to the ways in which families work to contain – or constrain – their rebellious female children, which, though it may be gently mocked, is never challenged outright. This is not only a question of Mary Lamb’s careful negotiations with female reading and writing practices, however. It forms part of a more general awareness in the Tales of how family readings of Shakespeare might be directed and controlled. As we have seen, the Tales reflect their composition within a family setting, as brother and sister sat ‘writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting) like Hermia & Helena in the Midsummer’s Nights Dream’ (Marrs, 2: 229). The comparison with Hermia and Helena is an interesting one, since the structure of the Tales seems to privilege narratives of sibling and friendly relationship. Following the Folio edition, the Lambs begin with The Tempest, but then move to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, followed by The Winter’s Tale, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Merchant of Venice. From the image of Hermia and Helena, ‘growing up together in fashion of a double cherry’, to Leontes and ‘his dear friend and old companion’ Polixenes; the ‘strict friendship’ of Rosalind and Celia to the affection between Anthonio and Bassanio, ‘but one heart and one purse between them’, the cumulative effect is one of friendship and family affection often threatened but eventually strengthened (Lucas, 3: 19, 24, 45, 70). This is nicely paralleled by the way in which the Lambs construct their own relationship, ‘like an old literary Darby and Joan’, living ‘in a sort of double singleness’, to borrow the Elian phrase (Lucas, 2: 86). Yet the reverse side of the intense family affection they celebrate is the domestic horror of Mary Lamb’s insanity. Despite being her legal guardian, Charles often adopts the position of younger and morally weaker sibling.

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This mutual identification meant that the family was both a source of support and, during Mary’s recurrent periods of illness, torment. When Charles describes them as ‘wedded’, telling Dorothy Wordsworth, ‘I know that she has cleaved to me for better, for worse,’ the imagery of mutual attachment, the cleaving, might also be that of bondage (Marrs, 2: 169–70). He continues in imagery which seems, in its evocation of bereftness, to carry an echo of Lear: Meantime she is dead to me, – and I miss a [prop]. All my strength is gone, and I am like a [fool, bere]ft of her co-operation. (Marrs, 1: 169) This experience of ‘double singleness’ is another factor which shapes the double movement of the Tales. While they celebrate familial and friendly affection, even the comedies simultaneously show a deep understanding of the powerful or dangerous forces it can exert. The friends whom Mary Lamb evokes, Hermia and Helena, for instance, are haunted by the threat of family-imposed death, and, within their friendship, by ‘great anger’ and ‘disturbed and angry spirits’. Characters celebrated for the strength of their friendship such as Leontes and Proteus are then shown to be consumed by ‘ungovernable jealousy’ (Lucas, 3: 18, 22, 24). Similarly, bleakness and loss within the family is a feature of the tragedies, as in the ending of King Lear: as elsewhere, Charles rejects revised stage versions by including the death of Cordelia, although not directly confronting its cause. There is no comforting conclusion here, rather the ‘awful truth, that innocence and piety are not always successful in this world’ (Lucas, 3: 105). This ambiguity surrounding the theme of the family is linked back to the differing meanings of ‘wildness’, which may signify both a welcome imaginative freedom and also the dangers of madness and chaos. If we return to the central image of the Tales as having, in Wolfson’s phrase, a ‘divided energy’ – simultaneously radical and conservative, pushing against and maintaining boundaries – we can see how this might have become invested with personal significance for the Lambs. Their ambivalence towards ‘wildness’ may have reflected the way in which, in their own lives, they both continually strove to achieve a careful and necessary balance between freedom and confinement, between childhood and adult responsibility, between the sympathy of familial bonds, and the constraints they might impose. Perhaps, on a wider level, this also reflects the ambivalent nature of the process of adaptation itself. Adaptations such as the Lambs’ at once unleash new possibilities and new ways of reading Shakespeare; they simultaneously

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confine and limit the parent text. On one hand, the Tales open up Shakespeare for the child reader, acting as an important introduction to his language, characters and situations. On the other, they seek to control and guide the reactions of that reader towards an engagement with a print-based Shakespeare, which also becomes invested with the Lambs’ own preoccupations and ambivalences. How powerful these new readings of Shakespeare are, however, may be seen in the way in which the Tales have assumed an afterlife of their own, subject to constant re-makings and re-appropriations. From the start, they were popular, with a second edition issued within 2 years; this carries an approving comment from the Critical Review (May 1807), giving the Tales ‘first place’ in children’s literature, with the possible exception of Robinson Crusoe, and adding that they ‘stand unique, without rival or competitor’.140 They have since been widely translated, not only into European languages but also into Arabic and Samoan, and have inspired other adapters of Shakespeare for children: Edith Nesbit, for example, paid homage to her ‘recollection of Lamb’s tales’ in the preface of her own, family-based Shakespeare narratives.141 Leon Garfield’s Shakespeare Stories also owe a debt to Lamb, as does his script for the popular BBC series of the 1990s, Shakespeare: The Animated Tales.142 Furthermore, the Tales are constantly reissued in diverse formats, which serve to reflect and further their rich ambiguities. A recent Folio edition introduced by Katherine Duncan-Jones, for example, seems to act as a Romantic canonization of the Tales, placing them among other late eighteenth and early nineteenth century responses to Shakespeare through its illustrations: Fuseli’s Titania embracing Bottom and The Three Witches, and James Barry’s King Lear Weeping over the Dead Body of Cordelia.143 On the other hand, the Tales have a long history of use as an educational tool. Editions aimed at English-language learners have been popular since the late nineteenth century, a good example being Bholanauth Paul’s Notes on Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, Etymological, Grammatical, and Explanatory, with Extracts from Shakespeare and Other Standard Authors in Elucidation of the Text, and Questions to Test the Student’s Knowledge in English. This cheap, yellow-jacketed edition, sold by the ‘Canning Library’, Calcutta, helpfully questions the student on the distinction between corn and corns, or the use of the infinitive; it also points outward to a range of other English authors including Tennyson, Scott, Cowper and Milton, so that the Tales become a key to the English canon. The Tales are being pressed into colonial duty at the ‘Canning Library’: correctly understanding Lamb’s rendering of Shakespeare, suggests the edition, will provide access to a larger English

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tradition. Paul’s edition finds a modern equivalent in the Penguin Readers series, aimed at young English-language learners and extensively marketed worldwide. Cutting out much of the Lambs’ humour, this version emphasizes the ‘explicit moral purpose’ of the Tales and turns the Lambs’ didacticism in a new direction, to present and market a specific view of English literature and culture.144 Meanwhile, as Murray J. Levith relates, it was through the Tales that Shakespeare – transmogrified, revised, moralized – first entered Chinese culture, through a 1903 translation by Lin Shu (also known as Lin Qinnan) and Wei Chunshu (Wei Yi) entitled Strange Tales from Abroad.145 Perhaps most surprisingly, they still hold their place in the contemporary children’s market: one of the most interesting recent republications is the version issued by Capercaillie Books, which repeats the format of the sixpenny editions, issuing the tales separately in small child-friendly versions, each, like the Godwins’ originals, containing three illustrations. The books declare their intention to ‘keep faith with [the] sentiment’ of the Lambs’ ‘Preface’, and although they revise the Tales they do not simplify them.146 The changes made, such as the restoration of Lear’s desolate ‘O you are men of stone’ speech, return the child reader to Shakespeare’s text; the lively drawings by Gary Andrews, with their emphasis on the startling and the magical, similarly encourage imaginative involvement. The didactic and the ‘wild’ elements of the Tales, therefore, continue to co-exist – and to have an active role in shaping contemporary cultures of childhood. The Lambs’ Shakespeare, then, is still a ‘familiar’ part of contemporary culture, read at home and school. The ways in which Shakespeare might help us understand the Lambs has also prompted imaginative reinterpretations, as in Dorothy Parker’s and Ross Evans’s Shakespearean tragic homage, The Coast of Illyria, first produced in April 1949 in Dallas, but unpublished until 1990.147 Prefaced by a quotation from Mary Lamb’s retelling of Twelfth Night – ‘There were a brother and sister . . . who were shipwrecked off the coast of Illyria’ – the play takes place as the Tales are being written and is set in the Lambs’ ‘room in London’, furnished with a liquor cabinet and Hogarth prints, with their worktable, scattered with the half-finished Tales, permanently present on stage. Parker and Evans compress chronology, so that the play encompasses several main events in the Lambs’ lives – chief among them Lamb’s unsuccessful proposal to Fanny Kelly of 1819 and his receipt of a pension from the East India House in 1825. The play weaves together Shakespearean allusion with repeated Romantic quotations, primarily taken from the essays and letters of the Lambs, but also from Hazlitt, Coleridge and De Quincey. It thus interrogates both literary ownership and

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self-possession and continues the authorial games we first encountered in Charles Lamb’s own work of the 1790s. Sociability – literary and friendly – is at the heart of the play, just as it perpetually informs the Lambs’ own view of Shakespeare. Parker and Evans take their cue from Hazlitt’s ‘On the Conversation of Authors’ to recreate ‘all the talking, the drinking and the smoking’ of the Thursday night gatherings.148 Indeed, the Lambs’ Thursday evenings perhaps served, in the words of the play’s 1990 editor, Arthur F. Kinney, ‘as a nineteenth-century equivalent for – and so a measuring stick of – the Algonquin Round Table’.149 But – both for Lamb and for Parker – this sociability has a darker side of drink, depression and self-destructiveness. As Lamb attempts to placate Fanny Kelly’s (entirely fictional) disapproving mother, he is tormented by a series of nocturnal – in Lamb’s dreadful pun, ‘knock-eternal’ – guests: the hapless George Dyer, struggling about with one shoe; Coleridge, a ‘Prince Hamlet’ tormented by laudanum, self-pity and guilt; Hazlitt, equally melancholy; and the drug-soaked Thomas De Quincey. The friends – a regular ‘rat’s nest of drunkards and lunatics and divorced men’, in Mrs. Kelly’s appalled judgement – unwittingly destroy Lamb’s chances with Fanny. So too does the ever-present threat of Mary’s madness: ultimately, brother and sister cannot be parted, and the play closes with the realization that they must continue to care for one another. Although the play crackles with the combined wit of Lamb and Parker, it is acutely sensitive to the Lambs’ situation, in terms both of their achievements and of what might be termed their co-dependency. It is also, in Kinney’s estimation, ‘harrowingly autobiographical’, haunted by Parker’s self-identification with Mary Lamb, and her own sense of the sociability of artists as both creative and destructive.150 Mediated through Shakespearean and Romantic language, the play insightfully brings out the ‘dual loneliness’ as well as the creative fruitfulness of the Lambs’ lives – as well as the double sense of the Tales, hovering between wildness and restraint.151 Another allusive reinterpretation of the Lambs’ relationship through – and with – Shakespeare is Peter Ackroyd’s The Lambs of London (2004).152 This novel take on the Lambs in the 1790s forges a relationship between William Henry Ireland and Mary Lamb which borrows lavishly both from Shakespeare and from the Essays of Elia, setting the plays and essays in baroque, fictional dialogue. Ackroyd is a true ‘snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’, who loves – like Lamb in that letter to Southey – ‘to anticipate charges of unoriginality’ (Marrs, 1: 160).153 Scholars, as Ackroyd’s Samuel Ireland tells his master-forger son, ‘give too much thought to sources. To origins’.154 So Lamb’s essays and letters are chopped up and quoted without acknowledgement; biographical facts are gleefully reordered so

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that De Quincey replaces Coleridge, Mr. H– and the Elia essays appear in the 1790s; and, most seriously, Mary Lamb is killed off in the asylum in 1804, her letters, essays, poems and fiction written out of the story altogether. Ackroyd’s Mary dies in the midst of an asylum performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, expiring as Charles speaks the line ‘Ever true in loving be’.155 Ackroyd does not spend much time, however, on her true Shakespearean connection, allotting a brief paragraph to the siblings’ ‘stories taken from the plays of Shakespeare’ which ‘received much critical praise’.156 ‘I have invented characters,’ Ackroyd writes in his prologue, ‘and changed the life of the Lamb family for the sake of the larger narrative’. This narrative, however, is narrower than that of Parker and Evans, whose Mary is strong, creative and generous, ‘a prop for the giants’ who constantly reassures and guides her friends, and whose work as an author, forging the Tales out of a potentially shipwrecked life, is given full credit.157 In Ackroyd’s reading, Mary remains essentially a madwoman; Charles somewhat feeble-minded and often ‘sozzled’. Only William Henry Ireland, red-haired, impetuous, daring to recreate Shakespeare in his own image, emerges triumphantly. Both The Coast of Illyria and The Lambs of London testify to the powerful influence of the Lambs’ Shakespearean writing, and, particularly, to their ideal of imaginative sympathy. We have seen how Charles Lamb’s attitude to Shakespeare – sociable, sympathetic, at times subversive – feeds into key Romantic viewpoints, subtly shaping the tenets of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hazlitt and Keats. Through Pater, then Bradley and Tillyard, he passes into the mainstream of later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century criticism. Through the Tales, and their re-tellings, Mary too has helped shape approaches to Shakespeare among general readers. The Lambs’ appropriations and adaptations of Shakespeare, created in a sociable setting and bearing the traces of larger friendly conversations, continue to prompt response and reinvention in turn.

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Chapter 2

William Hazlitt Uttara Natarajan

Early Career When William Hazlitt (1778–1830) became a working journalist in the autumn of 1812, in the capacity of parliamentary reporter for the Morning Chronicle, he had at last found his métier, the profession which launched him in his most characteristic and successful genre, the informal essay. He was 34 at the time, and had already attempted, and failed in, two alternative careers. Traces of both survive in his subsequent work. His skills as a portraitist, that ‘great power as a Painter of Character Portraits’ to which Coleridge attested,1 are confirmed, not only in the well-known painting of Charles Lamb in the National Portrait Gallery, but also in Hazlitt’s brilliant achievements in verbal portraiture. The portraitist’s view, obviously relevant, for instance, to The Spirit of the Age (1825), is manifest, too, in Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817), another kind of portrait gallery. More generally, indeed, the impact of his artist’s training is discernible throughout Hazlitt’s works.2 By his own declaration, ‘They are not, then, so properly the works of an author by profession, as the thoughts of a metaphysician expressed by a painter’ (17: 311).3 In that comment, Hazlitt names the other unfulfilled vocation that had a lasting impact on his oeuvre. If painting influenced his practice as a writer, the intellectual weight of his essays derived from his philosophy. His first, and to himself, most important publication (1805), was a long philosophical treatise in the style of the eighteenth century, as he saw it, ‘an important metaphysical discovery, supported by a continuous and severe train of reasoning, nearly as subtle and original as anything in Hume or Berkeley’ (17: 312). Masked by a forbidding title, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action: Being an Argument in Favour of the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind. To which are added, Some Remarks on the Systems of Hartley and Helvetius is a persuasive and passionately argued theory of the creative mind. Falling,

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in the shape in which it was first published, ‘still-born from the press’ (17: 312),4 this theory migrated to Hazlitt’s shorter prose essays, to the foundations of his moral and critical judgements. Briefly, Hazlitt’s purpose, in his first published work, was to counter those philosophies that ground human responses in the senses and human motives in self-interest. His thesis is that all voluntary action begins in the imagination, that the senses have no part to play at all in any of our acts of will. The realm of the senses, he argues, is the immediate present, but the will reaches always towards the future: in willing, our object is that which, lacking in the present, we wish to gain in the future. In the instant of willing, then, the object of the will is always imaginary, and thus beyond the grasp of the senses. So-called self-interest is not based on sensory response at all, but a future (imagined) state of self-satisfaction, which, in the present, the imagination projects. But unlike the senses, which restrict us to ourselves alone, the imagination knows no limits, and, if it can project a future self, can also project other selves, those of our fellow beings. If one such imaginary object can motivate the will, then so can the other. Selfishness and benevolence, both springing from imagination, are both, on that common ground, natural to humanity. Hazlitt does not deny that we act selfishly, but he does deny that we can act in no other way. By his philosophy, creativity is fundamental to human action. The imagination is the seat of action, so that the mind or self is autonomous, driving from within. Most emphatically, the mind is powerful, not passively subject to external stimuli, nor mechanically bound to a narrow self-interest. Later, his ambitions in systematic philosophy long abandoned, Hazlitt’s philosophical beliefs irradiate words such as ‘genius’, ‘imagination’, ‘originality’ and ‘gusto’, words to which he returns again and again in conversational prose and literary criticism.

Hazlitt and Kean By the summer of 1812, Hazlitt had finished his last professional portrait, of Thomas Robinson, brother of the diarist, Henry Crabb Robinson; the latter recorded that the portrait ‘has somewhat of the fierceness of the Saracen’.5 If it did (it has not survived), it had this quality in common with the best of Hazlitt’s later prose. From January to April that year, he had also delivered his first series of public lectures, his last on the topic of philosophy. Late that autumn, he obtained his position at the Morning Chronicle, and he had been some months in this position when he published for the first time, in

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September 1813, a ‘familiar’ essay, ‘On the Love of Life’, afterwards the opening essay of the Round Table. Towards the end of 1813, he began to share the duties of dramatic critic of the Chronicle with the then incumbent, William Mudford, and by early 1814, had taken over from Mudford entirely. It is in the fitness of things that Hazlitt’s start in theatrical criticism, and the beginning of his reputation as a writer, were so nearly coincident with the entrance of Edmund Kean on the London stage. Reviewing Kean’s performances for the Chronicle, Hazlitt began to develop the critical positions that he maintained in all of his subsequent writing on Shakespeare. The view of Shakespeare contained in Hazlitt’s numerous reports of contemporary performances, Kean’s and others’, found its way in due course to the book-length compilations in which it became known most widely. Before these more canonical publications, his sequence of reviews of Kean’s first London performances, from January 1814 to March 1815, in the Chronicle to start with, then the Champion and the Examiner, may usefully be treated as a complete body of work in itself, Hazlitt’s first sustained exercise in Shakespeare criticism.6

The Shakespearean sublime The very first of the reviews, printed in the Chronicle on 27 January 1814, making it the first published response to the legendary debut, puts Hazlitt at the heart of English Romanticism. Celebrating Kean’s virtuosity, he enters a proviso: There was a lightness and vigour in his tread, a buoyancy and elasticity of spirit, a fire and animation, which would accord better with almost any other character than with the morose, sullen, inward, inveterate, inflexible malignity of Shylock. . . . The fault of his acting was (if we may hazard the objection), an over-display of the resources of the art, which gave too much relief to the hard, impenetrable, dark groundwork of the character of Shylock. (5: 179) This is a fine example of the way in which Hazlitt’s text so often reproduces the characteristic figures of Shakespeare’s (hendiadys, synonymia), but that is beside the point I am making here. In his exposure of the gap between text and performance, between the character of Shylock and Kean’s rendering of it, Hazlitt posits, not just a discrepancy, but a binary split, fundamental to romantic poetics: the split between the sublime and its representation.

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The markers of the sublime – though the word itself is not mentioned – theorized in Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), are recognizable in Hazlitt’s construction of Shakespeare’s characters, as they are in the canonical works of his romantic contemporaries. Hazlitt’s admiration of Burke, despite his antipathy to Burke’s politics, is expressed throughout his writings, and I have commented elsewhere on the pertinence of Burke’s aesthetics, particularly the sublime, to Hazlitt’s.7 Without entering in detail into Hazlitt’s complex relationship with Burke’s thought, we might register, in the present context, that Shylock’s sublimity is conveyed in the impression of magnitude or depth produced by Hazlitt’s epithets (‘inward’, ‘impenetrable’, ‘dark’); the sheer accumulation of those epithets expresses the overwhelming effect of the sublime. The aesthetic principle, that the sublime is diminished by representation, is contained in the contrast between the qualities of the representation (‘lightness’, ‘elasticity’, ‘animation’) and those of the original character (‘hard’, ‘inflexible’, ‘sullen’). Kean’s extraordinary power as an actor all the more makes the point, that the failings in his performances of Shakespeare are due, less to the actor’s limitations, than to the unattainability of his object. Hazlitt confirms as much in his review of Kean’s next part, as Richard III: ‘Why do we try this actor by an ideal theory? Who is there that will stand the same test?’ (5: 184).8 ‘Ideal’, in Hazlitt’s usage, tends to resonate both with Burke’s aesthetics and with Kant’s: the ideal, which cannot be realized, bears the attributes of the sublime, which cannot be represented.9 Simply put, the quality of the sublime is infinity, of the ideal, perfection. On the grounds of their magnitude, Shakespeare’s characters are sublime; on the grounds of their perfect identity with nature, they are also ideal, and in that sense, perpetually beyond realization. Nonetheless, the ‘ideal theory’ is present to Hazlitt in each of Kean’s Shakespearean roles. Thus, the character of Richard III ‘should have a little more solidity, depth, sustained, and impassioned feeling, with somewhat less brilliancy, with fewer glancing lights, pointed transitions, and pantomimic evolutions’ (5: 181). The relation of text to performance, as Hazlitt describes it here, is the antithetical relation of great to little, the substantial to the ephemeral. In Kean’s second performance as Richard III, ‘In pronouncing the words in Richard’s soliloquy, “I am myself alone,” Mr. Kean gave a quick and hurried movement to his voice, as if it was a thought that suddenly struck him, or which he wished to pass over; whereas it is the deep and rooted sentiment of his breast’ (5: 183). Again, depth is reduced to surface, the permanent to the passing. In Hamlet, changeability itself,

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engrained in Hamlet’s nature, becomes sublime: it ‘never loses its continuity. It has the yielding flexibility of “a wave of the sea.”’ In this case, Kean’s ‘too strong and pointed’ representation takes away from an infinitely fluid character, the infinitude and depth that make it sublime (5: 187). Being infinite, the sublime is also indivisible. In Burke’s analysis, ‘every thing great by its quantity must necessarily be, one, simple and entire.’10 Hazlitt finds that the unity of Shakespeare’s sublime characterizations is too frequently undermined by the variety of Kean’s dramatic resources. As Shylock, ‘The fault of his acting was . . . an over-display of the resources of the art, which gave too much relief to the hard, impenetrable, dark groundwork of the character of Shylock’ (5: 179). In Kean’s first appearance as Richard III, similarly, he ‘dissipated the impression of the character by the variety of his resources’ (5: 181); in his second, ‘The extreme elaboration of the parts injures the broad and massy effect’ (5: 184). Participating in contemporary Romantic aesthetics, at the same time, Hazlitt brings to his understanding of Shakespeare’s characterization, his own philosophical commitments. The unity of thought and action (all thought and action originate in a unified mind or imagination) and the innate power of the mind are present in his earliest theoretical formulations. In these comments on Kean, likewise, ‘hard . . . groundwork’, ‘impression’, ‘massy’, indicate not only the unity of character, but also its force. As well as singleness, moreover, Shakespeare’s tragic figures exhibit the singularity of mind or character. The tenet of ‘ruling character’, not only in Shakespeare’s creations, but in art and literature more generally, is well established by the time of Hazlitt’s reviews. Both Coleridge and Lamb make use of this tenet, in lectures and essays that predate the reviews.11 Absorbed into romantic aesthetics, especially in relation to Shakespeare, ‘ruling character’ asserts an inner principle of unity, the unity of character, which supersedes and negates the neoclassical unities, dismissed by the romantics as artificial and externally imposed. For Hazlitt, beyond this, the notion has a larger significance. The idea of a pronounced and distinct individuality, encapsulated in one dominant attitude or purpose, an idea central to the view of human nature set out in Hazlitt’s familiar essays, begins to be developed in his Shakespeare criticism. Shylock’s ‘one unalterable purpose’ (5: 179), Hamlet’s ‘natural bias of . . . character’ (5: 186), Iago’s ‘incorrigible love of mischief’ (5: 215), all support a notion of engrained character that pertains, in turn, to the emphases on individuality and innateness in Hazlitt’s philosophy of mind. The singularity of Shakespeare’s characters is treated at length in Hazlitt’s review of Kean’s Macbeth in the Champion, where the different traits of Macbeth and Richard III, two individuals in similar

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circumstances, as Hazlitt sees them, show Shakespeare’s separation of one creation from another by ‘the leading principle of the character’ or ‘peculiar trait of character’ (5: 205).12 In his review of Kean’s Hamlet, Hazlitt identifies the only exception to the rule of singular or biased human nature: Shakespeare himself. The mind or genius that imagines a variety of biased minds must itself be free of bias: The poet appears for the time being, to be identified with the character he wishes to represent, and to pass from one to the other, like the same soul, successively animating different bodies. By an art like that of the ventriloquist, he throws his imagination out of himself, and makes every word appear to proceed from the very mouth of the person whose name it bears. His plays alone are properly expressions of the passions, not descriptions of them. (5: 185) Behind Hazlitt’s observations is the established tradition of Shakespeare as the universal genius, the mirror of nature; Hazlitt explicitly draws on that tradition when he goes on to observe that ‘Each object and circumstance seems to exist in his mind as it existed in nature’ (5: 185). The related premise, that Shakespeare transformed himself into each of his characters, was favoured by both Coleridge and Lamb, as Hazlitt knew.13 For Hazlitt, however, this Protean quality has a particular relation to a theory of ‘bias’ that is distinctly his own. Shakespeare’s freedom from bias makes him the exception to the ordinary norms of humanity. In Hazlitt’s subsequent expositions, whether of creative genius or everyday human behaviour, he locates Shakespeare always outside of his general view of the mind and its workings. Performing Shakespeare My effort so far has been to outline, in Hazlitt’s early responses to Kean, an approach to Shakespeare that is both characteristically romantic and distinctively Hazlitt’s. Prizing the textual and conceptual (that the two are interchangeable in Shakespeare’s characters all the more confirms their ideal standing), this approach is nonetheless firmly grounded in Hazlitt’s spontaneous reactions to actual performances. Far from being unresponsive, he is, on the contrary, intensely responsive to the experience of theatre. Side by side with his construction of an unrepresentable ideal, we must set his close engagement with performance, and his awareness that a great

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actor could, and did, succeed in realizing, sometimes newly illuminating, Shakespeare’s text. Hazlitt’s delight in Kean’s acting bursts out all over the Chronicle reviews, making even blame look like praise. The fault of Kean’s Shylock is ‘a lightness and vigour in his tread, a buoyancy and elasticity of spirit, a fire and animation’ (5: 179); of his Richard III, ‘an exuberance of talent’ (5: 181); of his Iago, ‘extreme grace, alacrity, and rapidity’ (5: 190). Such judgements can only barely be seen to be critical. On the other hand, Hazlitt’s admiration for Kean is expressed in superlatives. ‘His style of acting is, if we may use the expression, more significant, more pregnant with meaning, more varied and alive in every part, than any we have almost ever witnessed’ (in Shylock, 5: 180); ‘we cannot imagine any character represented with greater distinctness and precision, more perfectly articulated in every part’ (in Richard III, 5: 181). ‘Mr. Kean’s representation of the character had the most brilliant success’ (in Hamlet; 5: 187). ‘There were . . . repeated bursts of feeling and energy which we have never seen surpassed’ (in Othello, 5: 189). Each time Hazlitt reiterates Kean’s failure to realize Shakespeare’s conceptions completely, he attests, at the same time, and more emphatically, to the extent of Kean’s success. In fact Hazlitt is peculiarly alert to the symbiotic possibilities of text and performance. Thus, in his report of Kean’s second performance as Richard III, he shows how the text can direct the actor, quoting Hastings’s description of Richard in act 3, scene 4 (beginning ‘His grace looks cheerfully and smooth this morning’) as ‘a perfect study for the actor’ (5: 181). In the same review, he then shows the converse, how the actor can enhance the text. Kean’s enactment of the courtship of Richard and Anne brings out the text’s literary genealogy, by turning the scene into a reworking of the original temptation myth: ‘He seemed, like the first tempter, to approach his prey, certain of the event, and as if success had smoothed the way before him’ (5: 182). Another instance, of acting that enriches the text, is in the last scene of the play, ‘The attitude in which he stands with his hands stretched out, after his sword is taken from him, had a preternatural and terrific grandeur, as if his will could not be disarmed, and the very phantoms of his despair had a withering power’ (5: 182). Sublimity is manifest here, not only in Shakespeare’s character, but also in Kean’s rendering of it. Hazlitt’s report of the performance becomes indistinguishable from his interpretation of the character, or, more simply, his description of Kean becomes a reading of Shakespeare. Elsewhere, Hazlitt recognizes how the actor’s (extra-textual) movements or gestures – what he sometimes calls ‘bye-play’ (5: 202) – can alter

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interpretation. In the part of Hamlet, Mr. Kean has introduced in this part a new reading, as it is called, which we think perfectly correct. In the scene where he breaks from his friends to obey the command of his father, he keeps his sword pointed behind him, to prevent them from following him, instead of holding it before him to protect him from the Ghost. (5: 188) Kean’s choice of gesture becomes an interpretation of Hamlet’s state of mind. Similarly, ‘the manner of his coming back after he has gone to the extremity of the stage, from a pang of parting tenderness to press his lips to Ophelia’s hand . . . was the finest commentary that was ever made on Shakespear’ (5: 188). Hazlitt goes further still in the review of Kean’s Iago, where he actually praises the licence of Kean’s interpretation, ‘preferring his liberal and spirited dramatic versions, to the dull, literal, common-place monotony of his competitors’ (5: 190). A successful performance excuses liberties with Shakespeare’s text, and Hazlitt acknowledges, ‘Besides, after all, in the conception of the part, he may be right, and we may be wrong’ (5: 190). All this must surely establish that the critical commonplace, that the romantic stance is against the performance of Shakespeare’s plays, hardly works for Hazlitt. His reputation and Kean’s were made together. The new theatre critic of the Chronicle attracted wide public notice with the impassioned prose in which he celebrated a rising star, and in so doing, played no small part in promoting and cementing the reputation of that star. Hazlitt’s enthusiasm for Kean’s performances was so strong initially that the rumour arose, with no other foundation, that he had been bribed £1,500 to secure the failing fortunes of the Drury Lane theatre.14 As familiarity bred censure, in the reviews from October 1814 onwards, Hazlitt’s awareness of the discrepancy between text and performance became more pronounced. But although he was ready to declare, in his March 1815 review of Kean’s Richard II for the Examiner, ‘that the reader of the plays of Shakespear is almost always disappointed in seeing them acted; and, for our own parts, we should never go to see them acted if we could help it,’ he was still careful to except ‘Mrs. Siddons and Mr. Kean – the former of whom in one or two characters, and the latter, not certainly in any one character, but in very many passages, have raised our imagination of the part they acted’ (5: 222). There is a profounder implication here. In a recent issue of the European Romantic Review (2007), the critic Emily Allen is especially concerned to

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celebrate romantic theatre as a form of ‘low’ romanticism, although she acknowledges too the instability of the distinction between the literary (‘high’) and the theatrical (‘low’) in the romantic period.15 My own interest, by contrast, is in the attributes of a ‘high’ romanticism in Hazlitt’s view of the contemporary stage, that is, in a quality of magnitude that emerges, at least where Shakespeare is concerned, not only from the literary text, but also from its theatrical performance. Uniquely in Hazlitt’s case, the actor gains rather than loses from the romantic relation between text and performance in Shakespearean drama. This is nowhere more manifest than in the Examiner review which I have just cited, where, having expressed his disenchantment with the acting of Shakespeare’s plays, Hazlitt goes on to theorize the dynamic of actor and author. Shakespeare, he argues, demands a greater effort from an actor than any other dramatist, because Shakespeare stimulates the faculties of the actor more . . . he [the actor] perceives how much he has to do, the inequalities he has to contend with, and he exerts himself accordingly; he puts himself at full speed, and lays all his resources under contribution; he attempts more, and makes a greater number of brilliant failures; . . . (5: 222) Attempting to realize Shakespeare’s conceptions, the great actor strains at the limit of his own potential; his failure is ‘brilliant’, because it arises from the magnitude of his aspiration. Hazlitt uses the distinctly romantic metaphor of the fragment or residue, to describe such a failure or partial realization: ‘If the genius of Shakespear does not shine out undiminished in the actor, we perceive certain effects and refractions of it in him. If the oracle does not speak quite intelligibly, yet we perceive that the priest at the altar is inspired with the god, or possessed with a demon’ (5: 223). The attempt, which, in failing, retains something of the infinitude of its object, is fundamental to romantic aesthetics; it takes a more abstract form, for instance, in the construction of the modern or ‘sentimental’ consciousness by the German romantic theorist, Friedrich Schiller. The sentimental poet, as Schiller describes him, ‘is constantly dealing . . . with reality as boundary and with his idea as the infinite’.16 His endeavour is perpetual because his goal is unattainable; thereby, his art is ‘the art of the infinite’.17 Schiller’s formulation suggests a useful paraphrase. At the broadest level of generalization, the romantic endeavour might be described as the attempt, or more pessimistically, the failure, to render the infinite – call it conception, nature, the sublime, or the ideal – by finite means. The poetry

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and prose of the romantics is frequently concerned with, at the same time that it embodies, this attempt or failure. Just such a concern emerges in Hazlitt’s responses to Kean, but also more than this. Hazlitt shows us in Kean a kind of romantic artist different from poet or essayist or painter: the romantic performer. That Kean was the exemplary romantic actor is by now accepted critical wisdom. Reinvigorating the cliché, we might elicit, from Hazlitt’s earliest notices of Kean, the idea of romantic performance, that which, attempting, and falling short of the ideal, still shows the reach and achievement, as it shows the failure, of human aspiration. Schiller declared that poetry ‘means nothing else than to give humanity its most complete expression possible’.18 Unaware of the echo, Hazlitt wrote in 1817, ‘Mr. Kean . . . shows us the utmost force of what is human’ (18: 261).

Coleridge and Lamb The subject of performance is a convenient basis for a comparison between Hazlitt and his nearest contemporaries in Shakespeare criticism, Coleridge and Lamb. Hazlitt attended Coleridge’s 1811–12 lectures on Shakespeare and Milton at the London Philosophical Society, before he himself began to write on Shakespeare. He had also read and admired Lamb’s commentary on Shakespeare in Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (1808), and in the two Reflector essays of 1811, ‘On the Genius and Character of Hogarth’ and ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare’. In more than a few details, the coincidence of Hazlitt’s readings of Shakespeare with those of Coleridge and Lamb is manifest. I have mentioned already the principle of ‘ruling character’, as well as the contention that Shakespeare becomes the character he represents, a shared premise to which I will return more fully in due course. Numerous other indications, whether of influence or simply concurrence, can also be shown. On performance, however, Hazlitt departs considerably from his immediate precursors. Coleridge’s attitude to performance in the 1811–12 lectures belongs to an idea of Shakespeare to which is central the romantic claim that Shakespeare’s creations are the products of an inner faculty, the imagination, rather than the senses, which are controlled by the external world. The poet’s creativity attests to the human ability to surpass empirical response. In poetic creation, the mind is constitutive, not merely receptive. Hence Coleridge’s distinction between copy and imitation, the latter being ‘not the mere copy of things, but the contemplation of mind upon things’, and the related distinction, between observation and meditation: ‘Mere

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observation might be able to produce an accurate copy of a thing . . . : Meditation looked at every character . . . only as it contains something generally true.’19 In turn, Shakespeare’s creations stimulate a reader’s imagination, not a spectator’s senses. By addressing the reader rather than the spectator of Shakespeare’s plays, throughout the 1811–12 lectures, Coleridge promotes a standard romantic aesthetics that sets imagination against the senses.20 As he perceived it, the conditions of the stage in Shakespeare’s day ‘left Sh. to rely on his own imagination, & to speak not to the senses as was now done, but to the mind. He found the stage as near as possible a closet, & in the closet only could it be fully & completely enjoyed.’21 The reader in the closet actively engages with Shakespeare’s text; his imagination, free of sensory stimuli, fully participates in the act of reading. By contrast, the spectator in the modern theatre, his senses besieged by the physical paraphernalia of production, becomes passive, his scope for intellectual activity altogether curtailed. The ‘mere passivity of our nature’, Coleridge explains in Lecture 5, ‘must diminish in proportion as our intellectual faculties become active’.22 Coleridge’s treatment of Shakespearean composition and characterization in the 1811–12 lectures belongs to the model of imagination afterwards outlined in Biographia Literaria. His antipathy to performance is anchored in a Shakespeare criticism that is primarily theoretical, forming the basis for what is later set out as theory in Biographia. In the whole course of the 1811–12 lectures, no reference is made to any actual performance or production, and indeed, if we are to believe Crabb Robinson’s description of Coleridge’s preparation for these lectures, ‘C. cant be induced to read Shakespear.’23 Certainly from the title of the series, ‘A Course of Lectures on Shakespear and Milton, in illustration of the Principles of Poetry’,24 and from the records that survive, Coleridge’s method is not to draw a general principle from a textual example, but to adduce the example to illustrate a stated principle. In this respect, the kind of observation that he praises in Shakespeare, ‘the observation of that mind which having formed a theory & a system in its own nature has remarked all things as examples of the truth and confirming him in that truth’,25 might justly be attributed to Coleridge himself. Stage representation, on which Coleridge touches in passing and in the abstract, is the main focus, as its full title announces, of Lamb’s great essay of 1811, ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation’. Unlike Coleridge, Lamb is an inveterate playgoer, and like Hazlitt’s, his comments on performing Shakespeare

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are based on long experience. Yet for Lamb, the sheer pleasure of the theatre alerts him all the more to its danger, that of momentarily indulging the senses to the more lasting detriment of the imagination. In his attitude to Shakespearean performance, Lamb shares with Coleridge the fear that the stimulation of the senses curbs the freedom of mind, ‘operates upon the mind, to have its free conceptions . . . crampt and pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing actuality’.26 The inwardness of Shakespeare’s characters is perceptible only to the reader whose imagination is unhindered by the senses: ‘What we see upon a stage is body and bodily action; what we are conscious of in reading is almost exclusively the mind, and its movements.’27 Shakespeare’s characters ‘have . . . something in them which appeals too exclusively to the imagination, to admit of their being made objects to the senses without suffering a change and a diminution’.28 For Lamb, as for Coleridge, performance and text constitute an antithesis, that of the senses and the imagination, or surface and depth. But beyond the anxiety that Coleridge expresses, about the overpowering paraphernalia of the modern stage, Lamb derogates the very nature of acting itself. Shakespeare’s delineation is of the inner character; the actor portrays an exterior that has little or nothing to do with that inwardness. If Coleridge’s distinction is between imitation and copy, Lamb’s is between the authentic and the counterfeit, between the genius who understands the internal workings of the mind and the actor who is no more than a mimic of its outward expressions. ‘To know the internal workings and movements of a great mind, of an Othello or a Hamlet for instance, . . . seems to demand a reach of intellect of a vastly different extent from that which is employed upon the bare imitation of the signs of these passions in the countenance or gesture’29; Lamb’s ‘bare imitation’ is lesser even than Coleridge’s ‘copy’. Such is the instantaneous effect of the senses, however, compared to the slowness of the intellect, that this ‘bare imitation’ easily supplants the ideal original. Not as a theorist, like Coleridge, but as an ardent and lifelong theatregoer, Lamb warns, not only that the experience of the spectator is lower than that of the reader, but also that the pressure (and pleasure) of the actual destroys the reader’s pleasure in, and appreciation of, the ideal. Hazlitt’s commitment, from his first philosophical publication onwards, is also to the romantic subordination of the senses to the mind or imagination. But where for Coleridge and Lamb such a commitment translates directly to a dichotomy of text and performance, Hazlitt does not make this particular translation. To him, the text stimulates the actor’s imagination, as it does the reader’s. Expressing the relation between Shakespeare’s text and a great performance, Hazlitt turns, ultimately, from one kind of romantic

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figuration, the antithesis, to another, the remnant or residue. In other words, he departs from his contemporaries in his perception of presence in the actor’s effort. In the flawed performance of the great actor, something of his greater original, the character created by Shakespeare, might still be felt. At least in this respect, in Hazlitt’s perception of the possibilities of performance, he outstrips by far his two closest peers in Shakespeare criticism.

Models of Genius Kean showed Hazlitt ‘the utmost force of what is human’. In Hazlitt’s first miscellaneous collection, The Round Table, published jointly with Leigh Hunt in 1817, this ‘force’ or ‘power’ of the human mind, whether in ordinary human behaviour or in art and literature (the more frequent topic of the Round Table essays), emerges to the fore. That the mind is active and empowered, self-directed rather than subject to the senses, is the argument of Hazlitt’s early philosophical Essay on the Principles of Human Action. The mind’s power (‘imagination’) enables it to choose freely between selfishness and benevolence; contrary to the empiricist position, the mind is not automatically impelled to the first. Neither is it habitually directed to the second, as Hazlitt finds in the shorter literary and familiar essays that he starts to publish nearly ten years later. The abstract model of the mind in Hazlitt’s long Essay becomes, in these later essays, an ego, a self that delights in the exercise of its own power. The innate power of the mind, emphasized in his philosophical treatise only as the basis of the mind’s moral capacity, in the Round Table essays is separated from that capacity. Moral possibility is all too often unfulfilled, as the power on which it rests is directed to other ends. An extreme instance of this truth is Shakespeare’s Iago. This is Hazlitt’s main contention in the Round Table essay ‘On Mr. Kean’s Iago’, originally published as the first part of a two-part review in The Examiner. ‘The character of Iago, in fact, belongs to a class of characters common in Shakespeare, and at the same time peculiar to him – namely, that of great intellectual activity, accompanied with a total want of moral principle’ (4: 15). The conception of Iago indicates in Shakespeare, not only the practical morality of the universal genius, but also an intellectual grasp of an abstract truth or theoretical position. ‘Shakespeare . . . was quite as good a philosopher as he was a poet.30 He knew that the love of power, which is another name for the love of mischief, was natural to man’ (4: 15). Iago illustrates this

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philosophical knowledge, that the active power of the mind, which Hazlitt otherwise calls imagination, is not in itself a guarantee of moral action: [T]here is a natural tendency in the mind to strong excitement, a desire to have its faculties roused and stimulated to the utmost. . . . Iago is only an extreme instance of the kind; that is, of diseased intellectual activity, with an almost perfect indifference to moral good or evil, or rather with a preference of the latter, because it falls in more with his favourite propensity, gives greater zest to his thoughts, and scope to his actions. (4: 15–16) The mind’s power, in Iago’s case, finds its ultimate exercise in evil rather than good. The creative energy that makes Iago, in the second part of the original review (not reprinted in The Round Table), ‘an amateur of tragedy in real life’ (5: 215), elsewhere bears more fruitful results. In the works of Milton, ‘The power of his mind is stamped in every line’; ‘The quantity of art shews the strength of his genius;’ ‘His imagination has the force of nature’ (‘On Milton’s Versification’, 4: 37). Here, the mind’s urge towards the fullest exercise of its power creates the great literature which bears the impress of that mind, ‘stamped in every line’. Celebrating such literature, whose criterion is a strong authorial ego, Hazlitt’s emphasis is still on force, rather than moral function. Self-assertion, not the awareness of others, is the usual concomitant of creative power. In The Round Table, Wordsworth is an especially problematic case in point. His Excursion has an ‘overwhelming, oppressive power’; ‘An intense intellectual egotism swallows up every thing’; ‘The power of his mind preys upon itself’ (‘Observations on Mr. Wordsworth’s Poem “The Excursion”’, 4: 111, 113). Admiration and repulsion are conjoined in Hazlitt’s response to this particular poetic ego. Egotism, implicit in Hazlitt’s postulate of a natural or ruling bias in all human character, persists in, and is indeed fundamental to, his model of creativity in The Round Table. Devoid of such bias, Shakespeare is the sole exception to the rule. Shakespeare’s only singularity is his lack of singularity. In the essay, ‘On Posthumous Fame’, first published in The Examiner in May 1814, during the period of the Kean review series, Hazlitt reiterates Shakespeare’s protean quality, and its origin, the absence of ego: He seemed scarcely to have an individual existence of his own, but to borrow that of others at will, and to pass successively through ‘every variety of untried being,’ – to be now Hamlet, now Othello, now Lear, now

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Falstaff, now Ariel. In the mingled interests and feelings belonging to this wide range of imaginary reality, in the tumult and rapid transitions of this waking dream, the author could not easily find time to think of himself, nor wish to embody that personal identity . . . (4: 23) Sharing Coleridge’s and Lamb’s position, that Shakespeare becomes the characters he creates, Hazlitt insists, in addition, that Shakespeare himself has no discernible identity or ‘individual existence of his own’. His very being consists in otherness. Shakespeare’s freedom from that egotism that is elsewhere the criterion of poetic achievement, means that the Shakespearean self is undetectable. Shakespeare’s want of egotism entails a want, too, of ‘gusto’. The word ‘gusto’, made current as a critical term in Hazlitt’s day by its use in his aesthetics, expresses the creative energy of a powerful authorial or artistic self. In the Round Table essay ‘On Gusto’, ‘Gusto in art is power or passion defining any object’ (4: 77). ‘Michael Angelo’s forms are full of gusto’; Titian’s landscapes have a prodigious gusto’; ‘Rubens has a great deal of gusto’ (4: 78). In marked contrast, in Shakespeare’s works, the absence of a singular and biased authorial ego, in every other case the necessary condition of literary and artistic creation, shows in a corresponding decrease in gusto: ‘The infinite quantity of dramatic invention in Shakespeare takes from his gusto. The power he delights to show is not intense, but discursive.’ On the other hand, ‘Milton has great gusto. He repeats his blows twice; grapples with and exhausts his subject’ (4: 79). In The Round Table, Hazlitt’s critical theory and practical criticism emphasize the force of the creative mind. Intellectual power, which, by his philosophy, enables moral agency, in his familiar essays, is displayed independently of moral purpose. Manifest in the great works of art and literature, such power confirms, in these works, a strong authorial ego. In this respect, the difference between genius and ordinary minds, however great, is still merely a difference of degree. Alone in relation to Shakespeare, however, all other genius, with the rest of humanity, is rendered ordinary. The impact of Shakespeare’s characters, established in the reviews of Kean, is distinct from the personality, the authorial identity, of their creator. To Hazlitt, Shakespeare’s is the only difference of kind.

Magnum Opus Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, a landmark of romantic Shakespeare criticism, was published near the middle of 1817. By this time, Hazlitt’s

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reputation as a drama critic was established. From the Morning Chronicle, he had gone on to fill that office at the Champion, then the Examiner. The Examiner was also the venue, in the period from 1814 to 1816, for the greater number of the informal short essays that were later collated, with a few of Leigh Hunt’s, in The Round Table, published early in 1817. On the basis of his credentials as an art critic, moreover, Hazlitt had been commissioned in January 1816 to contribute an essay, ‘On the Fine Arts’, for the Encyclopaedia Britannica; it appeared in the Supplement that summer, and subsequently in the uniform issue, in which it remained till as late as 1842. From 1813 onwards, he had also been writing literary reviews for various periodicals, including, from 1815, the great Whig organ, the Edinburgh Review, under its magisterial editor, Francis Jeffrey. In this period, too, writing had increasingly become Hazlitt’s means to political expression, in numerous essays on political subjects; in his attacks on The Times; and in his notices of the contemporary poets, Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth. In Characters, Hazlitt drew on material he had already published, particularly in the theatre reviews of 1814–16, importing some of that material verbatim into the new volume, from the early sequence on Kean, which I have treated as a body for the purpose of this discussion, and from his many subsequent reports of Kean and other performers. He added to this material extensively, with close and exemplary analyses of Shakespeare’s text. The book combined a detailed reading knowledge of Shakespeare’s works with the practical experience of the seasoned theatre critic. Its energy and insight were manifest, and its popularity made Hazlitt, for the first time, a literary celebrity. English romantic Shakespeare Somewhere in the background of Characters, we might register Alderman John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, a collection of paintings on subjects from Shakespeare’s plays, commissioned for the purposes of a new illustrated edition and a separate folio of prints. Many of these paintings were by lesser artists, but the collection also included some of the great names of eighteenth-century British art, among them, Joshua Reynolds, Benjamin West, Henry Fuseli, John Opie, Angelica Kaufman; also Hazlitt’s friend, James Northcote. The gallery, which opened in 1789, closed, despite its immense popularity, for lack of funds, in 1805, but the print folio, published in 1805, was re-issued throughout the nineteenth century. In the late eighteenth century, Boydell’s collection contributed to Shakespeare’s popular appeal, and in general, the representations of Shakespeare in the visual

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arts both promoted, and profited by, his growing importance to English nationalistic pride. Aside from stage representation, Hazlitt was very much aware of this other mode of representing Shakespeare, and in his reports of contemporary performances, made the link to the Boydell Gallery: ‘Mr. Kean’s acting in Richard, as we before remarked in his Shylock, presents a perpetual succession of striking pictures. He bids fair to supply us with the best Shakespear Gallery we have had!’ (5: 184). Here, Kean’s performances excel Boydell’s pictures as renditions of Shakespeare’s text. In a later review (in which Kean does not figure), disgusted by a poor performance of The Tempest, Hazlitt exclaims, ‘Even those daubs of pictures, formerly exhibited under the title of the Shakespear Gallery, had a less evident tendency to disturb and distort all the previous notions we had imbibed from reading Shakespear’ (5: 234). In this case, the Boydell collection is a standard of failure against which an extremer failure shows up the more plainly. In Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, Hazlitt constructs his own Shakespeare Gallery, using another means of representation, a series of readings of the plays, especially their main characters. He appeals, as Boydell did, to the potent combination of Shakespeare’s popularity with nationalistic pride. The volume is dedicated to Lamb ‘as a mark of old friendship and lasting esteem’ (4: 167), and its Preface opens with a quotation from Pope, which Hazlitt endorses. The Preface goes on, however, to indict the failures of English Shakespeare criticism, mentioning Johnson in particular, whose shortcomings are set against the strengths of the German critic, A. W. Schlegel. Praising Schlegel at the outset, Hazlitt adds, ‘some little jealousy of the character of the national understanding was not without its share in producing the following undertaking, for “we were piqued” that it should be reserved for a foreign critic to give “reasons for the faith which we English have in Shakespeare”’ (4: 172). The implication is clear: the foreigner’s claim to a treasured national possession must be counteracted by an English criticism of equal or greater standing. Schlegel’s 1808 lectures on drama were published in English translation in 1815, under the title, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. The translator, John Black, formerly Hazlitt’s colleague at the Morning Chronicle, was by then a close friend. Hazlitt reviewed the translation, of which he had obtained an advance copy from Black, for the Edinburgh in February 1816, where, for the most part, he wrote admiringly of Schlegel. His reservations, given in the form of a contrast between the German and English national characters, were to do mainly with Schlegel’s tendency to

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abstraction, or to use Hazlitt’s word, ‘mysticism’. In Characters, Hazlitt declares himself the practical critic in relation to the German theoretician, ‘avoiding an appearance of mysticism . . . , not very attractive to the English reader, and . . . bringing illustrations from particular passages of the plays themselves, which Schlegel’s work, from the extensiveness of his plan, did not admit’ (4: 172). The moralistic and nationalistic note is audible, in the English claim to plain-speaking, against German obfuscation.31 The familiar topic of Shakespeare and nature runs through the volume, without, however, any startling new departures. Hazlitt does not concern himself, as Coleridge does in his distinction between ‘copy’ and ‘imitation’,32 with the precise character of the correspondent relation between nature and Shakespeare’s art. Readily endorsing a well-worn wisdom – ‘There can be little doubt that Shakespear was the most universal genius that ever lived;’ ‘his imagination borrowed from the life, and . . . produced a world of men and women as distinct, as true and as various as those that exist in nature’ (4: 239, 294) – Hazlitt tends to eschew a clearly defined relation between Shakespeare and nature, for a more fluid interaction: ‘The peculiarity and the excellence of Shakespear’s poetry is, that it seems as if he had made his imagination the hand-maid of nature, and nature the plaything of his imagination’ (4: 284). Shakespeare’s figures are original, not simply in the romantic sense, that they are self-generated, but in the sense that real people are; they make their impression upon us directly and at first-hand, as real people do, not as authors do, at second-hand through their creations: ‘Other writers give us very fine versions and paraphrases of nature; but Shakespear, . . . gives us the original text’ (4: 233). The emphases of Hazlitt’s earlier writings on Shakespeare, uniqueness (‘Shakespear’s genius alone appeared to possess the resources of nature,’ 4: 186, author’s emphasis) and alterity, remain. This last emphasis is so strong, indeed, that in the closing essay of the volume, on the ‘Poems and Sonnets’, Hazlitt finds that Shakespeare fails when he attempts to speak in his own voice, in the long poems, because the very essence of his genius is otherness: ‘In expressing the thoughts of others, he seemed inspired; in expressing his own, he was a mechanic. The licence of an assumed character was necessary to restore his genius to the privileges of nature’ (4: 358). The absence of the Shakespearean self allows the emergence of the reader’s. Autobiography, a mode later central to Hazlitt’s essayistic practice, is very much part of the critical practice of Characters, most perceptibly in the essay on Hamlet: ‘It is we who are Hamlet.’ This assertion is followed by one of Hazlitt’s characteristic long sentences, which, gaining momentum and intensity from

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clause after clause in its course, renders in cameo his own life – its disappointments, its lost ideals and defeated aspirations – as Hamlet’s: Whoever has become thoughtful and melancholy through his own mishaps or those of others; whoever has borne about with him the clouded brow of reflection, and thought himself ‘too much i’ th’ sun’; whoever has seen the golden lamp of day dimmed by envious mists rising in his own breast, and could find in the world before him only a dull blank with nothing left remarkable in it; whoever has known ‘the pangs of despised love, the insolence of office, or the spurns which patient merit of the unworthy takes’; he who has felt his mind sink within him, and sadness cling to his heart like a malady, who has had his hopes blighted and his youth staggered by the apparitions of strange things; who cannot be well at ease, while he sees evil hovering near him like a spectre; whose powers of action have been eaten up by thought, he to whom the universe seems infinite, and himself nothing; whose bitterness of soul makes him careless of consequences, and who goes to a play as his best resource to shove off, to a second remove, the evils of life by a mock representation of them – this is the true Hamlet. (4: 232–3) Similarly, in the essay on Romeo and Juliet, Hazlitt’s exposition of the nature of youthful love turns into a record of his own youthful consciousness (4: 250–1). ‘Romeo is Hamlet in love’ (4: 254), where Hamlet is already identified with Hazlitt himself. Less impressionistic, and more useful, perhaps, is Hazlitt’s attention to the internal coherence of the plays, to unifying patterns of action, imagery, and language. Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare had emphasized his ‘judgement’, so as to counter the neoclassical notion of the irregular genius who wrote spontaneously and without plan.33 To the same end, Schlegel had formulated the concept of innate or ‘organical form’, which ‘unfolds itself from within’34; he had also condemned, as ‘the most superficial and cheap mode of criticising works of art’,35 the eighteenth-century practice of displaying the separate ‘beauties’ of Shakespeare’s plays, without reference to a whole. Mindful, perhaps, of this admonition, Hazlitt, for all his prizing of favourite passages, remains keenly aware of schematic connections. In Cymbeline, with which he begins, ‘the principle of analogy’ links the unalterable fidelity of Imogen . . . the amorous importunities of Cloten . . . the persevering determination of Iachimo . . . the faithful attachment of Pisanio to his mistress . . . the obstinate adherence to his

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purpose in Bellario . . . the incorrigible wickedness of the Queen, and even the blind uxorious confidence of Cymbeline. (4: 183–4) If analogy is the organizing principle in Cymbeline, in Macbeth, it is contrast, inscribed as much in the details of language, as in the larger scale of action and passion: MACBETH (generally speaking) is done upon a stronger and more systematic principle of contrast than any other of Shakespear’s plays. . . . It is a huddling together of fierce extremes, a war of opposite natures which of them shall destroy the other. . . . This circumstance will account for the abruptness and violent antitheses of the style. . . . ‘So fair and foul a day I have not seen,’ etc. ‘Such welcome and unwelcome news together.’ ‘Men’s lives are like the flowers in their caps, dying or ere they sicken.’ ‘Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.’ . . . In Lady Macbeth’s speech ‘Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done’t,’ there is murder and filial piety together.’ (4: 191) The same attention to the connecting patterns inscribed in the details of Shakespeare’s text shows Hazlitt, in Antony and Cleopatra, that the first description of Cleopatra’s seductive power, in her barge, presages the second, also set on the water, that of the sea-fight, when Antony ‘leaves the battle, and “like a doating mallard” follows her flying sails’ (4: 229). Close focus, again, makes him notice, in The Tempest, that ‘even the drunken sailors, who are made reeling-ripe, share, in the disorder of their minds and bodies, in the tumult of the elements’ (4: 239). The descriptor ‘romantic’ becomes very much part of Hazlitt’s vocabulary for Shakespeare in Characters. In his review of Schlegel in the Edinburgh, Hazlitt had treated Schlegel’s distinction between classical and romantic, explaining that the ‘romantic’ pertains, not to the object of representation itself, but to its associative power. Furthermore, ‘the associations of ideas belonging to the romantic character, may vary infinitely, and take in the whole range of nature and accident’ (16: 61). In Characters, the epithet ‘romantic’ expresses just this infinite range of the associative imagination. Antony and Cleopatra shows us life as ‘a strange and romantic dream, long, obscure, and infinite’ (4: 231). Bottom ‘is the most romantic of mechanics’ (4: 244). Romeo and Juliet exhibits ‘the romantic enthusiasm of youth. . . . Its root is in the heart of man: it lifts its head above the stars’ (4: 250). In the essay on Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare’s ‘romantic grace’ leads Hazlitt to comment on how his ideas ‘play into one another’s hands’, ‘re-act upon

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one another’ (4: 226), and he recurs to this constant, instantaneous reaction and change in the essay on Romeo and Juliet: ‘it is not merely the force of any passion that is given, but the slightest and most unlooked-for transitions from one to another, the mingling currents of every different feeling rising up and prevailing in turn, swayed by the master-mind of the poet’ (4: 255). The infinite variety of the poet’s imagination ensures an infinite variability in the dramatic interactions, hence the perennial freshness of surprise, the ‘unlooked-for transitions’.36 To Hazlitt, the perpetual play of ideas in Shakespeare’s works, their volatility and dynamism, is enabled by a range of imagination that belongs to the protean genius which is Shakespeare’s alone. Such a range, with the concomitant absence of a determinate authorial ego, is, as Hazlitt suggested in the Round Table, to the detriment of Shakespeare’s ‘gusto’: a sustained intensity of effect, the effect of one idea or character rather than another. Celebrating the exceptional achievement of the great dramatist, Hazlitt is still half inclined to regret the trait that sets Shakespeare apart. The ambivalence is perceptible in the essay on Troilus and Cressida, in the comparison of Shakespeare with Chaucer: His genius was dramatic, as Chaucer’s was historical. He saw both sides of a question, the different views taken of it according to the different interests of the parties concerned, and he was at once an actor and spectator in the scene. If any thing, he is too various and flexible: too full of transitions, of glancing lights, of salient points. If Chaucer followed up his subject too doggedly, perhaps Shakespear was too volatile and heedless. The Muse’s wing too often lifted him from off his feet. He made infinite excursions to the right and the left. (4: 225) Shakespeare and the forms of power ‘Gusto in art’, Hazlitt had written in The Round Table, ‘is power or passion defining any object’. Shakespeare’s volatility detracts from his gusto, yet throughout Characters, Hazlitt’s sustained attention is precisely to ‘power’ or ‘passion’ in Shakespeare’s plays. At the outset, he takes the plays’ subject to be the ‘strong movements of passion’, beyond the scope of Johnson’s common sense (4: 175); later, it is reading Lear that establishes for Hazlitt that ‘the greatest strength of genius is shewn in describing the strongest passions’ (4: 271). There is little real contradiction here. The term ‘gusto’ in Hazlitt’s critical vocabulary refers to the impact of a representation, not of an actual individual or thing; ‘gusto’, that is, is an authorial attribute,

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displayed in the author’s compositions. In Shakespeare’s plays, passion, along with its force, belongs not to the author, but to his creations. Synonymously, the power of Shakespeare’s characters is that of the thing itself, the power of real people, not of texts. The locus of power, in Shakespeare’s works alone, is to be discerned in the creations, not the creator. Noticeably, therefore, ‘gusto’ is absent as a critical descriptor in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays;37 at the same time, Hazlitt’s engagement here is with the varying forms of individual power, of which Shakespeare provides the examples.38 Extraordinary power, in an individual, is the concomitant of an extraordinary self-will. Prospero’s ‘sense of preternatural power makes him arbitrary, tetchy, and impatient of opposition’ (4: 242). The Taming of the Shrew ‘shews admirably how self-will is only to be got the better of by stronger will’ (4: 341). An extremer instance than either Prospero or Petruchio is Iago, in whom, as I have already discussed, power and self-will are unallied with any trace of moral tendency. Hazlitt’s analysis of Iago, first published in his review of Kean in that role, and republished in The Round Table, appears again in the essay on Othello in Characters. In Richard III, too, he discerns the same combination, of power and moral lack: ‘The ground-work of the character of Richard, [is] that mixture of intellectual vigour with moral depravity, in which Shakespear delighted to show his strength’ (4: 300). The most compulsive example of ‘power’, signifying, as with Iago, a kind of terrible creative energy, detached from moral principle, is Lady Macbeth. Like Iago, ‘distinguished by her . . . inexorable self-will’, Lady Macbeth surpasses him in stature, her power so great that it lifts her into sublimity: ‘The magnitude of her resolution almost covers the magnitude of her guilt. She is a great bad woman, whom we hate, but whom we fear more than we hate’ (4: 188). Hazlitt’s terms, ‘magnitude’, ‘great’, ‘fear’, are standard descriptors of the sublime; fear or awe, by Burke’s influential aesthetics, is the characteristic response to the sublime. For all its loftiness, however, the power of mind owned and exercised by Lady Macbeth is only an extreme version of an ordinary human trait: as Hazlitt makes clear, Lady Macbeth shows the excesses of which humanity is capable. Her humanity makes her distinct from the witches, ‘who become sublime from their exemption from all human sympathies and contempt for all human affairs, as Lady Macbeth does by the force of passion!’ (4: 189). Her fault is no more than ‘an excess of that strong principle of self-interest and family aggrandisement’ (4: 189), a principle, that is, which is part of the common human condition. Because power inheres in the very nature of the human being, the exercise of such power, whether it is the creative energy of the poet, or that of a tyrant or a murderer, finds a responsive echo in its ordinary human

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audience, exactly the response produced by the sublime. To Hazlitt, the political implications of this truth are momentous, and they are spelled out in what is now perhaps the best-known of the essays in Characters, the chapter on Coriolanus. ‘The love of power in ourselves and the admiration of it in others are both natural to man: the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave’ (4: 215). In the essay on Coriolanus, the insights into the nature and effects of power, gained from Lady Macbeth, take on an explicitly political tenor. The essay treats the interconnection of aesthetics, politics and morals. The aesthetic response to literary or artistic genius – where ‘genius’, as I have shown, is ordinarily biased, exclusive and egotistical – is closely related to the normative response to other kinds of extraordinary individual power, that of the evil-doer, such as Lady Macbeth, or the despot, such as Coriolanus. The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power. The imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty: it takes from one thing to add to another: it accumulates circumstances together to give the greatest possible effect to a favourite object. The understanding is a dividing and measuring faculty: it judges of things not according to their immediate impression on the mind, but according to their relations to one another. The one is a monopolising faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of present excitement by inequality and disproportion; the other is a distributive faculty, which seeks the greatest ultimate good, by justice and proportion. The one is an aristocratical, the other a republican faculty. The principle of poetry is a very anti-levelling principle. It aims at effect, it exists by contrast. It admits of no medium. It is every thing by excess. It rises above the ordinary standards of suffering and crimes. It presents a dazzling appearance. Its shows its head turreted, crowned, and crested. Its front is gilt and blood-stained. Before it ‘it carries noise, and behind it leaves tears.’ It has its altars and its victims, sacrifices, human sacrifices. Kings, priests, nobles, are its train-bearers, tyrants and slaves its executioners. – ‘Carnage is its daughter.’ (4: 214) These much-quoted, frequently de-contextualized, comments first appeared in an essay, ‘Coriolanus’, published in The Examiner on 15 December 1816, and they belong with Hazlitt’s political commentary in this period. The outburst against poetry resonates, in particular, with the critique of the ‘spirit of poetry’ in another essay, published in The Examiner a week later, ‘Illustrations of “The Times” Newspaper: On Modern Lawyers and Poets’, later extracted in The Round Table under the title ‘On Poetical Versatility’.

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Despite the glancing reference to Shakespeare at the opening of the ‘Coriolanus’ essay (‘Shakespeare himself seems to have had a leaning to the arbitrary side of the question’; 4: 214, 5: 347), the similarity of sentiment in the two essays confirms that it is not primarily Shakespeare whom Hazlitt has in mind in these comments, but the ‘modern poets’ who are the subject of the second essay, the familiar targets of his political writings at the time, Southey, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Both essays belong squarely to the political moment in which they were written. Their purport is immediate and pressing, not general and remote, their critique of poetry, for all its forcefulness, contingent, not absolute. In the passage above, Hazlitt’s two quotations, the first from Coriolanus (2. 1. 158–9), the second from Wordsworth, so juxtaposed, specifically associate the damage wrought by Coriolanus with that by Wordsworth’s poetry. Earlier in 1816, Wordsworth had published his Thanksgiving Ode (‘Ode: The Morning of the Day Appointed for a General Thanksgiving. January 18, 1816’), containing his most abhorrent, and soon notorious, endorsement of the ruling power, in the lines that celebrated the slaughter at Waterloo as part of the ‘pure intent’ of God: ‘But Thy most dreaded instrument / In working out a pure intent, / Is Man – arrayed for mutual slaughter – / – Yea, Carnage is Thy Daughter!’ Encoded, then, in Hazlitt’s quotation of this last line is his own republicanism and ardent loyalty to Napoleon, with his excoriation of Wordsworth’s, and other contemporary poets’, support of the establishment. The very words of Wordsworth’s infamous proclamation become the words of Hazlitt’s indictment: the poet, not God, is charged with promoting man’s slaughter by man; carnage is his daughter. Partly at least, Hazlitt’s Shakespeare criticism becomes an extended forum for the principles and opinions he was expressing at the same time in writings more overtly addressed to contemporary politics and current affairs. His essay on Henry V is another example of the way in which he finds in Shakespeare a channel to the political situation of his day. The opening description of Henry recalls Leigh Hunt’s famous ‘libel’ on the Prince Regent in 1812: ‘He was careless, dissolute, and ambitious; – idle, or doing mischief . . . he seemed to have no idea of the common decencies of life’ (4: 285). In its general tenor, at least, this description is not far off Hunt’s account of the Prince Regent as ‘a violator of his word, a libertine . . . , a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps’.39 As the essay continues, Hazlitt’s opinion of the Napoleonic wars bears directly on his analysis of Henry’s war with France: ‘Because he did not know how to exercise the enormous power, which had just dropped into his hands, to

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any one good purpose, he immediately undertook (a cheap and obvious resource of sovereignty) to do all the mischief he could’ (4: 285). The comparison is then spelled out: The object of our late invasion and conquest of France was to restore the legitimate monarch, the descendent of Hugh Capet, to the throne; Henry V in his time made war on and deposed the descendent of this very Hugh Capet, on the plea that he was a usurper and illegitimate. What would the great modern catspaw of legitimacy and restorer of divine right have said to the claim of Henry and the title of the descendants of Hugh Capet? (4: 286) Here too, as in the essay on Coriolanus, Hazlitt fleetingly suggests the gap between Shakespeare’s politics and his own: ‘Shakespear . . . labours hard to apologise for the actions of the king’ (4: 285). For all his speculations about Shakespeare’s royalist leanings, however, Hazlitt’s comments on poetry at the opening of the ‘Coriolanus’ essay, of which so much is made by present-day critics, do not tell the whole story, whether about Shakespeare or the complex connections that Hazlitt draws between poetic and political power. More fully to unravel those connections, we might usefully relate the political commentary in the essay on Coriolanus to that in the essay on Julius Caesar. In the latter, arguing that ‘the whole design of the conspirators to liberate their country fails from the generous temper and overweening confidence of Brutus in the goodness of their cause and the assistance of others’, Hazlitt goes on, ‘That humanity and honesty which dispose men to resist injustice and tyranny render them unfit to cope with the cunning and power of those who are opposed to them. . . . Tyranny and servility are to be dealt with after their own fashion’ (4: 198). The distinction between ‘humanity and honesty’ and ‘tyranny and servility’ is recognizably the same as that between ‘understanding’ and ‘imagination’ in the essay on Coriolanus. Because tyranny and servility are allied with imagination, where humanity and honesty belong to the understanding, the appeal against tyranny, after its own fashion, has to be to the heart, not the head. ‘Cassius was better cut out for a conspirator,’ Hazlitt declares, because his ‘heart prompted his head’ (4: 198). The heart, not the head, responds with, and to, enthusiasm and excess. By implication, poetry is the fittest instrument against, as it is for, tyranny. To say that an unjust power is often poetical, or that poetry and such power are mutually readily suited, is not to say they are necessarily so. Explaining

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his remarks on Coriolanus some years later, in his Letter to William Gifford (1819), Hazlitt affirms ‘that poetry, that the imagination, generally speaking delights in power, in strong excitement, as well as in truth, in good, in right, whereas pure reason and the moral sense approve only of the true and the good’ (9: 37). As the imagination’s delight in power might be turned to the purpose of tyranny, its delight in good might be turned against that purpose. In Characters, in as many instances as he exposes the alliance of poetry and unjust power, Hazlitt also shows their opposition. Thus, in Lear, the excess of evil represented stimulates a proportionately excessive desire for good: ‘in proportion to the greatness of the evil, is the sense and desire of the opposite good excited’ (4: 272). Elsewhere poetry, which might choose to add allure to power, might also strip it of such allure. In Achilles’ slaying of Hector in Troilus and Cressida, ‘There is something revolting as well as terrific in the ferocious coolness with which he singles out his prey: nor does the splendour of the achievement reconcile us to the cruelty of the means’ (4: 224). This response, of revulsion or repugnance to the display of power, is most perceptible in relation to Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. In his essay on Henry VIII, Hazlitt takes the opposite position to that of his essay on Coriolanus. There, in the Roman play, Shakespeare might have seemed to side with the aristocrat against the rabble, but here, in his portrayal of recent English history, he is unequivocally the adversary of kings: Henry VIII’s power is most fatal to those whom he loves: he is cruel and remorseless to pamper his luxurious appetites; bloody and voluptuous; an amorous murderer; an uxorious debauchee. . . . It has been said of Shakespear – ‘No maid could live near such a man.’ It might with as good reason be said – ‘No king could live near such a man.’ (4: 305) In the Letter to Gifford Hazlitt writes, ‘I have said that Shakespeare has described both sides of the question, and you ask me very wisely, ‘Did he confine himself to one? No, I say that he did not; but I suspect that he had a leaning to one side, and has given it more quarter than it deserved’ (9: 36). The ability to describe both sides of the question is the exclusive characteristic of the great dramatist, as Hazlitt repeats over and over, and it shows itself in Shakespeare’s delineation of the allurements, as well as the evils, of personal and political power. The relations between these two kinds of power are complex and varying, and Hazlitt draws out this complexity from Shakespeare, as he does in his familiar essays and political journalism from the real world, his own social and historical moment.

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Stage and closet In Characters, as in Hazlitt’s theatre reviews, the performances of particular plays or parts are commended or disparaged with equal warmth. The problems of performance usually arise from the specific demands of a play or role, which exceed the capabilities of an actor. In the essay on Hamlet, for instance, Hazlitt’s stance is firmly against performance: ‘We do not like to see our author’s plays acted, and least of all, HAMLET. There is no play that suffers so much in being transferred to the stage. Hamlet himself seems hardly capable of being acted.’ Kean and Kemble both fail in the part: ‘Mr. Kemble plays it like a man in armour, with a determined inveteracy of purpose, in one undeviating straight line, which is as remote from the natural grace and refined susceptibility of the character, as the sharp angles and abrupt starts which Mr. Kean introduces into the part’ (4: 237). On the other hand, the performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream fails, not because of the difficulty of any one character, but because so much of the play is pure poetry, and ‘Poetry and the stage do not agree well together’ (4: 247). The case is different again with Lear. Hazlitt quotes verbatim Lamb’s strictures against the performance of the play, but he acknowledges, too, the poverty of all representations of Lear, his own commentary included: ‘All that we say must fall far short of the subject; or even of what we ourselves conceive of it’ (4: 257). Against such observations, we might set Hazlitt’s opinions on other of Shakespeare’s plays, which, in his view, work better on stage than as reading texts, as well as his sustained admiration, expressed throughout Characters, of his favourite actors, Siddons and Kean. The essay on Richard III opens with the comment that the play ‘may be considered as properly a stage-play: it belongs to the theatre, rather than to the closet’ (4: 298) and goes on to reiterate, from the theatre reviews, Kean’s brilliance in the part. The Winter’s Tale, again, is one of the best-acting of our author’s plays. We remember seeing it with great pleasure many years ago. . . . Mrs. Siddons played Hermione, and in the last scene acted the painted statue to the life – with true monumental dignity and noble passion; Mr. Kemble, in Leontes, worked himself up into a very fine classical phrensy; and Bannister, as Autolycus, roared as loud for pity as a sturdy beggar could do who felt none of the pain he counterfeited, and was sound of wind and limb. (4: 325–6) In more than one instance, Hazlitt’s interpretation of a character is significantly influenced by a favourite actor. Thus Lady Macbeth’s sublimity is

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inseparable from Siddons’s rendering of it. ‘In speaking of the character of Lady Macbeth, we ought not to pass over Mrs. Siddons’s manner of acting that part. We can conceive of nothing grander. . . . Power was seated on her brow, passion emanated from her breast as from a shrine; she was tragedy personified’ (4: 189). The contrast with Lamb, who complained that Siddons’s Lady Macbeth ultimately diminished his own conception of the character, is telling.40 Of Kean’s performance of Romeo, Hazlitt maintains that ‘He treads close indeed upon the genius of the author.’ Kean is an ‘able commentator on Shakespear’, and Hazlitt notes, in parentheses, that ‘actors are the best commentators on the poets’ (4: 256). In the essay on The Merchant of Venice, Kean’s view of Shylock, which Hazlitt had once criticized as being too elastic and variable, sends him back to the text, where he finds that Kean was right after all, that Shylock’s singleness of purpose is entirely compatible with mental agility: That he has but one idea, is not true; he has more ideas than any other person in the piece; and if he is intense and inveterate in the pursuit of his purpose, he shews the utmost elasticity, vigour, and presence of mind, in the means of attaining it. But so rooted was our habitual impression of the part from seeing it caricatured in the representation, that it was only from a careful perusal of the play itself that we saw our error. The stage is not in general the best place to study our author’s characters in. It is too often filled with traditional common-place conceptions of the part, . . . a man of genius comes once in an age to clear away the rubbish. (4: 324) There is another purport in these comments. Kean’s ability to ‘clear away the rubbish’ makes him anti-establishment, a challenge to entrenched error and the authority of tradition. The political inference is stated more plainly in an essay, published many years later in The Liberal, ‘On the Spirit of Monarchy’ (January 1823). Kean, writes Hazlitt in this essay, ‘is a radical actor. He savours too much of the reality. . . . How should those, who look to the surface, and never probe deeper, endure him? He is the antithesis of a court-actor’ (19: 257). Kean’s radicalism is in his commitment to the natural man, antithetical to that artificial entity, the monarch. The reality of feeling and character (the ground of human equality), as Kean displays it, is the reality hidden or suppressed by the system of monarchy.41 Once again, then, the juxtaposition of Hazlitt’s pronouncements against stage representation with his numerous declarations in its favour, precludes any simple or absolute hierarchy of closet and stage. In his finished work on Shakespeare, Hazlitt retains from his theatre reviews a dynamic

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engagement with performance. Shakespeare, as Hazlitt sees him, belongs in the present. Contemporary theatre and contemporary politics both sustain that conviction. Aftermath Characters of Shakespear’s Plays was the first of Hazlitt’s published works to sell well and immediately. The 1817 edition was followed by a second in 1818, which also sold rapidly, according to Hazlitt, till the Quarterly’s review brought sales to an end (8: 99). Unsurprisingly, the reviews were split along political lines. The Edinburgh Review praised the volume, although with some equivocation. Francis Jeffrey calls Hazlitt an enthusiast rather than a commentator, before going on to quote long passages with approval, including the ‘moral and political reflections’ on Julius Caesar and Coriolanus.42 Leigh Hunt’s three notices in The Examiner all proclaim Hazlitt’s critical ability.43 In another liberal periodical, The Champion, the reviewer, John Hamilton Reynolds, is the most fervent of all: ‘This is the only work ever written on Shakespeare, that can be deemed worthy of Shakespeare.’44 The Tory periodicals uniformly denounced the book. The New Monthly Magazine, at the time still staunchly conservative, found it blasphemous and profane.45 To the British Critic’s reviewer, the work is ‘stuffed with dull, common-place Jacobin declamation’. The reviewer is ‘caught, entrapped, surprised into reading tirades of democratic trash’. ‘Politics’, he warns, ‘lurk under every aphorism that the author enunciates, and the reader, in gathering the flowers of poetry, must constantly beware of the snake that lurks beneath it’.46 In similar vein, John Russell, in The Quarterly Review, deigns to notice ‘the senseless and wicked sophistry of this writer’, only ‘. . . to show how very small a portion of talent and literature was necessary for carrying on the trade of sedition’. This was the second of three attacks on Hazlitt’s works in successive issues of the Quarterly, the provocation, cumulatively, for his fiery Letter to William Gifford in 1819. Political partisanship notwithstanding, there is little doubt that Characters of Shakespear’s Plays established Hazlitt’s literary reputation. His pre-eminence as a commentator on Shakespeare secured the publication not only of the second edition of Characters, but also A View of the English Stage (1818). By this time, Hazlitt had gone on as drama critic from The Examiner to The Times, formerly the target of his bitterest polemic, but now under a new editor, Thomas Barnes. A View of the English Stage, a collation of reports of contemporary performances from the period 1813–17 (omitting most of the reviews from Hazlitt’s 8-month stint at The Times), ‘gave the almost

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unprecedented dignity of a book to a newspaper critic’s reviews of the theater’, as the Hazlitt scholar, John Kinnaird, has pointed out.47 The material on Shakespeare that it contains overlaps too substantially with the writings I have already treated to warrant separate consideration. This material aside, the book’s interest is in its extensive coverage of the London actors of the day, in Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean roles: apart from Kean, Sarah Siddons and John Kemble; also Charles Macready, Eliza O’Neill, Charles Young, William Abbott, John Emery, J. B. Booth, Sarah Booth and a host of others. The response of a contemporary reader, Mary Russell Mitford might be noted in passing: ‘I had seen most of them before, but I could not help reading them all together; though so much of Hazlitt is rather dangerous to one’s taste – rather like dining on sweetmeats and supping on pickles. So poignant is he, and so rich, everything seems insipid after him.’48

The English Canon At the end of Hazlitt’s stint as theatre critic of The Times in December 1817, another phase of his career came to a close, and a new one began, with a return to public lecturing. His fame was high when he gave his Lectures on the English Poets at the Surrey Institution in Blackfriars, London, during January and February 1818. The Institution was founded in 1808, to promote the spread of knowledge of the arts and sciences among a wider public, and the lectures delivered there were by the established authorities in their subjects. The audience at Hazlitt’s series on the English poets was large, and it included many writers and artists whose names are now well known: among the first, Keats, Godwin, John Hunt, Procter (‘Barry Cornwall’), Crabb Robinson and Thomas Noon Talfourd; among the second, the Landseers and William Bewick. On the conclusion of the series, Hazlitt was asked to repeat it, manifest proof of its success, and the lectures were duly delivered again in full, during April and May 1818, at the Crown and Anchor Tavern on the Strand. Publication followed almost at once, about a month after A View of the English Stage, and only days before the publication of the second edition of Characters by Taylor & Hessey, the same firm that published the lectures. Shakespeare, Milton and the question of morals Shakespeare is central to two lectures in the series. The first is the opening lecture, ‘On Poetry in General’. This is Hazlitt’s great poetic ‘defence’; its

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place, yet to be acknowledged, is in a generic tradition that begins with Aristotle’s Poetics and continues with Sidney’s A Defence of Poetry, and, closer to Hazlitt’s own time, Shelley’s Defence of Poetry. Hazlitt’s lecture belongs to this genre of prose essays that set out to vindicate the necessity and stature of poetry against the discourses and habits of thought inimical to it. But where the emphasis in Aristotle’s text, as in Sidney’s and Shelley’s, is on the morality of poetry, in Hazlitt’s the claim is not so much for morality as humanity. Poetry, as he celebrates it, is fundamental to the human condition, and Shakespeare gives him the means to illustrate this thesis. ‘Man is a poetical animal: and those of us who do not study the principles of poetry, act upon them all our lives’ (5: 2). In the lecture ‘On Poetry in General’, Shakespeare’s plays, which contain all of the natural man, the whole range of human passion, best exemplify the nature of poetry itself. The plays’ subject, as Hazlitt had already made clear in Characters, is the force of passion, and ‘Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions’ (5: 1). Poetry inheres in the union of imagination with passion, that is to say, in imaginative excess, and Shakespeare’s drama furnishes an abundant display of such excess. Hazlitt draws on Shakespeare to illustrate the same tendency that Ruskin was to deplore a generation later as ‘pathetic fallacy’, to Ruskin, the characteristic fault of romantic thought: the tendency of the imagination, under the influence of passion, to spill out of itself and absorb the world around it. What Ruskin censures, Hazlitt celebrates: ‘when he [Lear] exclaims in the mad scene, “The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me!” it is passion lending occasion to imagination to make every creature in league against him’ (5: 5). But Hazlitt also recognizes that hyperbole and pathetic fallacy are only one mode in which the force of passion finds its expression; a compelling simplicity is another: ‘the “So I am” of Cordelia gushes from her heart like a torrent of tears, relieving it of a weight of love and of supposed ingratitude, which had pressed upon it for years’ (5: 5). The lecture ‘On Poetry in General’ reiterates the version of catharsis that Hazlitt had formulated in Characters from his experience of reading Lear, that tragic suffering can rouse in us a proportionate desire for an antithetical good. Shakespeare’s tragedy promotes a humanitarian end because it makes us feel more deeply, ‘makes us drink deeper of the cup of human life; tugs at the heartstrings; loosens the pressure about them; and calls the springs of thought and feeling into play with tenfold force’ (5: 6). Yet Hazlitt is careful not to generalize this moral reaction. Poetry works because of its power, not its goodness; it ‘has its source and ground-work in the common

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love of strong excitement’ (5: 7). This propensity for excitement or action or power, quintessentially human, as Hazlitt sees it, neither precludes nor compels an attendant moral response. Shakespeare’s works show us the moral possibility inherent in the natural man; Milton’s, moral compulsion. In the third of the Lectures on the English Poets, Shakespeare is ‘the poet of nature’, Milton, ‘the poet of morality’ (5: 46). Or more precisely, Shakespeare’s stimulus is human nature, Milton’s, moral aspiration. The lecture sharpens and amplifies a contrast that Hazlitt had already emphasized in his commentary on Shakespeare in The Round Table. There Milton displays the gusto that Shakespeare wants. His is the ‘ordinary’ genius par excellence, a powerful, but determinate or biased authorial self, discernible throughout its works. Further arguing this position, the lecture ‘On Shakspeare and Milton’ presents, in its most cogent and expansive form, Hazlitt’s version of a duality central to romantic poetics. In the practice of the romantic poets, the duality of Shakespeare and Milton is perceptible in the double motivation to drama and epic. In literary theory, it figures prominently, for instance, in Coleridge’s 1811–12 lectures on Shakespeare and Milton (and later in Biographia Literaria), where Shakespeare is ‘seated . . . on one of the two Golden Thrones of the English Parnassus, with Milton on the other / – the one darting himself forth, & passing into all the forms of human character & passion, the other attracting all forms & things to himself, into the unity of his own grand Ideal’.49 For Coleridge, the distinction is between a dispersed and an encompassing creator, parallel, as the Coleridge scholar Seamus Perry has shown, to that between a pantheistic and an orthodox deity.50 Hazlitt’s lecture ‘On Shakspeare and Milton’ shares with Coleridge this characterization of Shakespeare’s genius as plural, where Milton’s is singular. The distinction for Hazlitt, however, does not derive, as it does with Coleridge, from contrary religious impulses. Rather, it is the secular, quite simple distinction between what we might call the sublime of nature and the sublime of art. The attributes of the poet of nature are those that Hazlitt had already described in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, variety and range, their enabling condition the absence of self (5: 46–7). Such variety goes hand in hand, as before, with speed and movement. Action and reaction are instant, ongoing and unexpected. In Shakespeare’s portrayal of character, ‘there is a continual composition and decomposition of its elements, a fermentation of every particle in the whole mass, by its alternate affinity or antipathy to other principles which are brought in contact with it’ (5: 51). Hazlitt’s

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first reviews of Kean had criticized the actor for making Shakespeare’s sublime characters too variable. Over time, however, this variability becomes central to his own conception of Shakespeare’s characters, and the same quality – rapid movement, the very antithesis to stasis – also distinguishes Shakespeare’s language. ‘He seems always hurrying from his subject, even while describing it’; his words ‘are struck out at a heat, on the spur of the occasion’ (5: 54). Nature simply is, art aspires. The characteristics of Milton’s works are morality and elevation, the attributes of art, not nature. In his creations we discern what is absent in Shakespeare’s – effort: ‘He always labours, and almost always succeeds. He strives hard to say the finest things in the world, and he does say them’ (5: 58). The authorial self capable of such effort is powerful, distinct and palpable: ‘In reading his works, we feel ourselves under the influence of a mighty intellect, that the nearer it approaches to others, becomes more distinct from them’ (5: 58). By as much as it is distinct and particular, however, this kind of intellect is also fixed and limited. Thus, where Shakespeare’s characterization is wide-ranging, ‘Milton took only a few simple principles of character, and raised them to the utmost conceivable grandeur’ (5: 51). Shakespeare’s genius is identical to nature, but in Milton, ‘The quantity of art in him shews the strength of his genius’ (5: 58). The words of the poet of nature ‘have all the truth and vividness of actual objects’ (5: 54); Milton ‘makes words tell as pictures’ (5: 59). His blank verse is ‘stately and uniformly swelling’, where Shakespeare’s is ‘varied and broken by the inequalities of the ground it has to pass over in its uncertain course’ (5: 54). An analogy may be elicited on this ground between Hazlitt’s comparison of Shakespeare and Milton, and the disparate romanticisms of the German philosophers, Schlegel and Schiller. In his seminal essay, ‘Schiller and the Genesis of German Romanticism’ (1948), the influential historian of ideas, A. O. Lovejoy, distinguishes the romantic thought of Friedrich Schlegel (with his brother, A. W. Schlegel) on one hand, from that of Friedrich Schiller, on the other, by their differing conceptions of the ideal.51 This difference is germane to Hazlitt in some, though not all respects; mainly, in the axes, horizontal or vertical, along which the two ideals are measured. Schlegel’s ideal is multiplicitous, Schiller’s is lofty; the first is characterized by its breadth, the second, by its height. Shakespeare is Schlegel’s exemplar. The correspondence with Hazlitt’s view of Shakespeare and Milton confirms the way in which his discrimination of genius both reflects and contributes to the diverse romanticisms of his day.52

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Other canonical contexts Hazlitt’s commentary on Shakespeare in his two further series of literary lectures is thinner and less noteworthy. The Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819) is his forum for a consideration of Shakespeare’s merits as a writer of comedy. In tragedy Shakespeare stands alone, but where comedy is concerned, ‘I cannot help thinking, for instance, that Moliere was as great, or a greater comic genius than Shakspeare, . . . I think that both Rabelais and Cervantes, the one in the power of ludicrous description, the other in the invention and perfect keeping of comic character, excelled Shakspeare’ (‘On Shakspeare and Ben Jonson,’ 6: 31). Comedy finds its sharpest edge, Hazlitt argues, in the exposure of vanity and affectation, which flourish ‘only in a highly advanced state of civilisation and manners’, rather than in the ‘state of greater rudeness and simplicity’ of Shakespeare’s day (6: 36–7). The stimulus to wit is folly, not so much the natural folly of an individual as the collective folly of a social group: ‘its lash is laid on with the utmost severity, to drive before it the common herd of knaves and fools, not to lacerate and terrify the single stragglers’ (6: 35). But although this critique turns out, predictably enough, to be praise (‘Shakespeare’s comic Muse is . . . too good-natured and magnanimous’; 6: 35), Hazlitt, who has Falstaff in mind, is still reluctant to take it too far. ‘I will not say’, he quickly concedes, ‘that he [Shakespeare] had not as great a natural genius for comedy as any one; but I may venture to say, that he had not the same artificial models and regulated mass of fashionable absurdity or elegance to work upon’ (6: 38). The ensuing comparison of Shakespeare with Ben Jonson is in Hazlitt’s characteristic mode, the antithesis, here deployed to set the ‘natural’ and spontaneous genius, shown in Shakespeare’s comic characters, against the studied, mechanical creations of Ben Jonson (6: 38–41). In the lecture ‘On Shakspeare and Ben Jonson’, Hazlitt’s perception of Shakespeare as a lone phenomenon is moderated by the awareness of his location within a culture, the social and historical conditions of his time. In his last series of literary lectures, again, in which he treats the achievement of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, he does so on the ground that that achievement, emerging from a shared social and cultural context, facilitates a better understanding of Shakespeare’s. The ‘Advertisement’ to the Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth (1820) announces that the lectures say ‘little . . . of Shakespear’ (6: 173). Nonetheless, the introductory lecture makes clear that the interest of the Elizabethan dramatists is in their relation to Shakespeare: ‘They are indeed the scale by which we ascend to the true knowledge and love of him. Our admiration of them does not lessen

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our relish for him: but, on the contrary, increases and confirms it’ (6: 181).53 Hazlitt’s surprising declaration here that Shakespeare ‘did not form a class or species by himself, but belonged to a class or species,’ and that ‘His age was necessary to him’ (6: 180), in fact hardly unsays his previous insistence on Shakespeare’s uniqueness. Shakespeare’s is still the single mind that includes, as it surpasses, all others: ‘his contemporaries, with their united strength, would hardly make one Shakespear’ (6: 181).

Familiar Style By the time Hazlitt had concluded and published his last series of literary lectures, the sustained hostility of the Tory press had taken its toll on his morale and reputation. Battle-scarred as he was, however, his best work was still to come.

The London Magazine Hazlitt returned to theatre reviewing on a regular basis in 1820, as drama critic of the monthly London Magazine, newly resuscitated under the editorship of John Scott. He wrote in this capacity a series of articles on the drama, reporting on past and established favourites, and new contenders for favour, among the actors of his day. A passion for the theatre illuminates these essays: The stage at once gives a body to our thoughts, and refinement and expansion to our sensible impressions. It has not the pride and remoteness of abstract science: it has not the petty egotism of vulgar life. It is particularly wanted in great cities (where it of course flourishes most) to take off from the dissatisfaction and ennui, that creep over our own pursuits from the indifference or contempt thrown upon them by others; and at the same time to reconcile our numberless discordant incommensurable feelings and interests together, by giving us an immediate and common topic to engage our attention and to rally us round the standard of our common humanity. We never hate a face that we have seen in the pit. (18: 273) Of the writing on Shakespeare in the London Magazine essays, the most stimulating pertains, again, to Kean, this time in the new roles of Coriolanus and Lear. Kemble’s performance of Coriolanus had been the occasion of

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Hazlitt’s commentary on the play in the Examiner in December 1816, later republished in the famous essay in Characters. In the Examiner article, ‘Mr. Kemble in the part of Coriolanus was as great as ever’ (5: 350). Kemble’s air of loftiness just suited the part; by contrast, ‘Mr. Kean’s acting is not of the patrician order; he is one of the people, and what might be termed a radical performer’ (18: 290). Kean’s style is spontaneous and immediate where Kemble’s is stately and distanced, and in Hazlitt’s notice in the London Magazine (February 1820), this too-human aspect of Kean’s performance gets in the way of his rendering of a character whose settled sense is of superiority to the common man. Mr. Kean, instead of ‘keeping his state’, instead of remaining fixed and immoveable (for the most part) on his pedestal of pride, seemed impatient of this mock-dignity, this still-life assumption of superiority; burst too often from the trammels of precedent, and the routine of etiquette, which should have confined him; and descended into the common arena of man, to make good his pretensions by the energy with which he contended for them, and to prove the hollowness of his supposed indifference to the opinion of others by the excessive significance and studied variations of the scorn and disgust he expressed for it. The intolerable airs and aristocratical pretensions of which he is the slave, and to which he falls a victim, did not seem legitimate in him, but upstart, turbulent, and vulgar. (18: 290, emphases in original) Kean’s volatility is presented here as revolutionary energy, which ‘burst . . . the trammels of precedent’, is ‘upstart, turbulent, and vulgar’. Such energy is wholly incompatible with the fixed, mechanical and deathly attributes of the tyrant or established power. Hazlitt’s adjective ‘legitimate’ is politically loaded; ‘legitimacy’, as in the extract from the essay on Henry V, which I cited earlier (4: 286) is his antithesis to natural right or justice, the basis on which the established authority claims its arbitrary power.54 Judging Kean’s performance to be a failure in dramatic terms, Hazlitt turns this failure into a political example, in which form, it becomes more valuable than success. Once again, the pretensions of kings are shown to be at the expense of humanity. Kean’s failure in Lear is less happy. Lamb’s declaration, endorsed in Characters, that ‘The LEAR of Shakespeare cannot be acted’ (4: 271), happened also to be a literal statement of fact during the Regency period: the obvious parallels between Lear and the mad king, George III, ensured an embargo on the staging of the play, lifted only on the king’s death in 1820.

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The performances that followed were subject, therefore, as much to the pressure of long anticipation as to the romantic idealization of the part. Nonetheless, in the London Magazine essays, Hazlitt’s conviction that the play is unperformable is at first qualified by his praise for J. B. Booth’s Lear at Covent Garden (‘There was no feebleness, and no vulgarity in any part of Mr. Booth’s acting, but it was animated, vigorous, and pathetic throughout’; 18: 328), and by his anticipations of Kean’s: ‘We had thought Mr. Kean would take possession of this time-worn, venerable figure, . . . and . . . shake it with present inspiration: – that he would set up a living copy of it on the stage’ (18: 332). Inevitably, however, the proportions both of Hazlitt’s conception of the character and his expectations of the actor doom Kean to failure. Playing Nahum Tate’s Lear rather than Shakespeare’s (in itself a disappointment to Hazlitt), ‘Mr. Kean chipped off a bit of the character here and there: but he did not pierce the solid substance, nor move the entire mass’ (18: 333). The main critical interpretation of note in this essay is Hazlitt’s reading of Lear’s cursing of Goneril – another instance, as he sees it, of passionate excess – which in turn dictates unusually specific directions to the actor: The very bitterness of the imprecations is prompted by, and runs upon, an allusion to the fondest recollections: it is an excess of indignation, but that indignation, from the depth of its source, conjures up the dearest images of love: it is from these that the brimming cup of anguish overflows; and the voice, in going over them, should falter, and be choked with other feelings besides anger. (18: 333)

Familiar essays The more expansive, more personal and intimate style of Hazlitt’s London Magazine articles matches that of the familiar essays he had begun to write in this last and greatest phase of his career, when he developed and brought to fruition the genre of which he was supreme practitioner. Hazlitt’s achievements in conversational prose furnish two extraordinary anthologies, Table-Talk (1821–2) and The Plain Speaker (1826); the essays that remained uncollected – among them, ‘The Fight’ (1822), ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ (1823), ‘On a Sun-Dial’ (1827) – might easily have made up a third. Sheer length, in the first place, sets these later familiar essays apart from those of The Round Table, but in subject, too, there is a perceptible shift, from art and literature to everyday life and experience.

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The occasional commentary on Shakespeare in Table-Talk or The Plain Speaker adds little to what Hazlitt had said already. The ambivalence about imagination, discernible in his earliest writings, grows progressively into the insistent exposure of its errors, and Shakespeare, again, is the only exception. In Table-Talk, the watchword is ‘common sense’, the test by which extremism and egotism of all kinds are judged. The two-part essay, ‘On Genius and Common Sense’, central to this collection, returns Hazlitt to the distinction between Milton and Shakespeare, the ordinary and the Protean genius, in terms that forcefully communicate a warning. In Milton’s works, he writes, ‘you trace the bias and opinions of the man in the creations of the poet,’ and he goes on, Shakespear (almost alone) seems to have been a man of genius, raised above the definition of genius. . . . He was the Proteus of human intellect. Genius in ordinary is a more obstinate and less versatile thing. It is sufficiently exclusive and self-willed, quaint and peculiar. It does some one thing by virtue of doing nothing else: it excels in some one pursuit by being blind to all excellence but its own. (8: 42–3) In the great moral essays of The Plain Speaker – sustained, stupendous pieces of prose – Hazlitt returns again and again to ‘bias’ as the defining principle of human character, referring in essay after essay to ‘the internal original bias’ or ‘the first pre-disposing bias’ or ‘natural bias’ or ‘first bias’ or ‘ruling bias’, or in a synonymous phrase, ‘ruling character’ (12: 230, 263, 275, 349, 152). Scott is the only instance, besides Shakespeare, of a genius without bias or ego, and in the essay, ‘Sir Walter Scott, Racine, and Shakespear’, this commonalty draws Hazlitt into an extended comparison. His view of Shakespeare is by now established, but the terms of the comparison, and the instances used to illustrate it, are still of some critical interest. Coleridge’s distinction between ‘copy’ and ‘imitation’ becomes the distinction here between Scott and Shakespeare: ‘It is the difference between originality and want of it, between writing and transcribing’ (12: 339–40). Another formulation embodies the transition that M. H. Abrams has made archetypal in romantic thought, from the mimetic to the expressive view of art, from art as mirror to art as lamp: ‘Shakespear’s spirit, like fire, shines through him: Sir Walter’s, like a stream, reflects surrounding objects’ (12: 340). Scott’s material is external – historical fact and established tradition – Shakespeare’s, internal; the absence of self in the first leads to mere replication, while the second, himself free of bias, is ‘a half-worker with nature’, rendering ‘ruling passion’ in numerous conditions of imagined extremity (12: 343).55

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Human beings, each uniquely characterized by one form or other of bias or ruling character, are naturally prone to the habit that Ruskin later termed ‘pathetic fallacy’ and that Hazlitt calls the ‘over-weening importunity of the imagination’ (12: 343). As in the Lectures on the English Poets, it is the particular mark of Shakespeare’s genius that he so finely and copiously illustrates this importunity, ‘which indeed is every where predominant (perhaps to a fault) in Shakespear’ (12: 344). So when Othello swears ‘By yon marble heaven’, the epithet is suggested by the hardness of his heart from the sense of injury; the texture of the outward object is borrowed from that of the thoughts; and that noble simile, ‘Like the Propontic,’ &c. seems only an echo of the sounding tide of passion, and to roll from the same source, the heart. (12: 344)

Shakespearean quotations My discussion so far has progressed, more or less chronologically, through Hazlitt’s treatment of the subject of Shakespeare, from his first theatre reviews of Kean, to his later, great, familiar essays. Another form in which Shakespeare stays present in Hazlitt’s text, even when he is not directly its subject, remains to be considered. Hazlitt’s extensive use of Shakespearean quotation is a characteristic aspect of his prose style. Quotation is fundamental to his practice as a writer, and by far the greatest number of his quotations, as Jonathan Bate has emphasized, are from Shakespeare’s works.56 More than one Hazlitt scholar has written insightfully about the nature and implications of his practice of quotation. In David Bromwich’s complex and subtle reading, quotation is part of the radical effect, the revolutionary energy of Hazlitt’s writing: it belongs to a quality of sublimity (by Longinus’ definition, ‘the echo of a great soul’) in his prose, whose effect is attested to by its impact on its audience.57 Jonathan Bate’s conclusions, in his useful survey, ‘Hazlitt’s Shakespearean Quotations’, are more routine. Quotation, Bate points out, is a version of sympathetic identification with a great precursor; moreover, Hazlitt’s quotations bring the archaic, though still powerful, language of Shakespeare, no longer current, into fresh and allowable use.58 More recently, Paul Hamilton has argued that quotation is the exemplary practice that embodies Hazlitt’s view of the continuity of private and public, of the enriching and endorsing of individual

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perception by its participation in, and renovation of, a shared cultural universe.59 Any discussion of Hazlitt’s Shakespeare criticism should register, especially, that quotation and allusion can become, too, modes of commentary; that quoting, as Bromwich has put it, is ‘a particularly compressed sort of interpretation which requires all the reader’s ingenuity to unpack’.60 For example, Hazlitt’s master work, The Spirit of the Age, begins, as Bate notes, with a quotation from Hamlet on the title-page: ‘To know another well were to know one’s self,’ amended to ‘For to know a man well, were to know himself’ in the second edition. Bate points out that Hazlitt quotes more frequently from Hamlet than from any other of Shakespeare’s plays, a fact that he connects, without taking it further, to Hazlitt’s identification of himself with Hamlet.61 The implications of any one such identification, however, are well worth pursuing. In the epigraph to The Spirit of the Age, we might register, beyond the quotation itself, the dual claim it contains: Hamlet’s modernity is attested to in his finding a continued existence in the person of the essayist; at the same time, Hazlitt’s portrayal of his contemporaries is announced as an exercise in self-analysis, a form of autobiography. Equally insightfully, the political content of Shakespeare’s plays emerges not only when Hazlitt makes that content explicit in his analysis of particular plays, but also indirectly, in his deployment of Shakespearean quotations throughout his essays on contemporary politics. Characters makes clear enough the political bearing of Coriolanus or Henry V, but Hazlitt’s political essays elicit such bearing from the whole range of plays from which they quote. To choose only one instance among many, the incident of Gloucester’s blinding in Lear becomes a potent simile, in Hazlitt’s radical polemic, for the assault on liberty. The enemies of the people ‘would tread out the eye of liberty all over the world, as Albany trod out the eyes of Gloucester. “Out out, vile jelly!”’ (The Examiner, 29 September 1816; 19: 165 – Hazlitt means Cornwall, not Albany of course), or in another iteration, ‘would tread out the eye of Liberty’ (the light of nations), like “a vile jelly” (The Yellow Dwarf, 7 March 1818; 7: 259). The class connotations – here turned into egalitarian assertion – of ‘vile’, in its old sense of ‘lowly’, are brought out by the context of Hazlitt’s quotation. Another quotation from Lear absorbed into the cause of the people is Edmund’s exclamation, ‘Fine word “legitimate”!’ (1. 2. 18). ‘Legitimacy’, as we have seen, is Hazlitt’s republican shorthand for unjust monarchical privilege and the divine right of kings, and the quotation enriches the shorthand: ‘Such is the old doctrine of Divine Right, new-vamped up under the style and title of

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Legitimacy. “Fine word, Legitimate!”’ (The Yellow Dwarf, 7 March 1818; 7: 260). Edmund’s scorn amplifies Hazlitt’s own, and the natural-born Edmund is transformed by the quotation into a spokesman for the natural man. Elsewhere, Hazlitt presses the close association between legitimacy and bastardy implied in the original, turning Edmund’s assertion that ‘Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund / As to th’legitimate’ into the terms of indictment: ‘That “fine word Legitimate” never produced any thing but bastard philosophy and patriotism’ (The Yellow Dwarf, 14 March 1818; 7: 269). Invariably, thus, the repetitions of the phrase remind us of the context of revolutionary aspiration in which it was originally uttered, despite the character of the speaker: ‘ . . . the base / Shall top th’ legitimate/’. Such examples are no more than a bare indication of the complexity and depth of Hazlitt’s quotations from Shakespeare, the greater number of which might fruitfully be unpacked in this way. The interest of these quotations is not only political. By absorbing into his prose, whatever its subject, Shakespeare’s words and phrases, Hazlitt keeps up a running commentary on Shakespeare, adding to, and extending outside the limits of, his more direct literary analysis. In so doing, he gains for Shakespeare’s works, a dynamic bearing on the immediate present, as he gains for himself, a powerful kind of shorthand, integral, as Bromwich has argued, to the energy of his prose. It must surely be with such gains in mind that he retorts to Gifford: ‘There is one objection . . . which you make to me which is singular enough: viz. that I quote Shakespear. I can only answer, that “I would not change that vice for your best virtue”’ (Letter to William Gifford, 9: 43).

Hazlitt, Keats and Shakespeare I want to close my discussion with the single most important instance of the dissemination of Hazlitt’s Shakespeare criticism. The impact of Hazlitt’s view of Shakespeare on Keats’s ideals of poetry and poethood has long been established by a succession of scholars.62 In particular, Keats’s reading of The Round Table can be shown to inform his famous comments on the ‘poetical Character’ in the letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818: As to the poetical Character itself, (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself – it has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich

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or poor, mean or elevated – It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosp[h]er, delights the camelion Poet.63 In a much earlier letter, September 1817, to John Hamilton Reynolds, Keats had already expressed his enthusiasm for The Round Table and its author: ‘How is Hazlitt? We were reading his Table last night. I know he thinks himself not estimated by ten People in the World – I wish he knew he is –.’64 Over a year later, in the letter to Woodhouse, the fruits of that reading are still perceptible. Hazlitt’s key critical term, ‘gusto’, from the essay ‘On Gusto’, is absorbed into Keats’s ‘it lives in gusto.’ The references to Iago and Imogen make it clear that it is Shakespeare with whose ‘poetical Character’ Keats is identifying his own, in terms which, as a number of critics have pointed out, recall Hazlitt’s characterization in the essay ‘On Posthumous Fame’: ‘He seemed scarcely to have an individual existence of his own, but to borrow that of others at will, and to pass successively through “every variety of untried being,” – to be now Hamlet, now Othello, now Lear, now Falstaff, now Ariel’ (4: 23). The phrase ‘wordsworthian or egotistical sublime’, too, was probably suggested by Hazlitt’s remarks on Wordsworth in the Round Table essay on The Excursion: ‘An intense intellectual egotism swallows up everything’; ‘He lives in the busy solitude of his own heart; in the deep silence of thought’ (4: 113). This last parallel is strengthened by the echo of the essay on The Excursion in another criticism of Wordsworth, also in a letter to Reynolds, 3 February 1818. Keats’s complaint, ‘We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us – . . . Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject,’65 matches Hazlitt’s declaration that ‘There is, in fact, in Mr. Wordsworth’s mind an evident repugnance to admit anything that tells for itself, without the interpretation of the poet, – . . . a systematic unwillingness to share the palm with his subject’ (4: 114). Earlier, I showed how two types of genius, Shakespeare’s and others’, the second including both Wordsworth and Milton, emerge in The Round Table. Exactly these two types are posited also by Keats, in his distinction between ‘that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member’ and ‘the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime’. Keats draws from Hazlitt, and in particular from the Round Table essays, the absolute distinction between Shakespeare and Wordsworth, as well as the basis of that distinction, the presence or absence of a powerful self or sublime ego. Hazlitt’s Shakespeare is instrumental in forming Keats’s own ideal of poethood, reiterated throughout his letters, as that which lacks or refuses a definable self.66

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Beth Lau’s chapter on Keats in the present volume treats Hazlitt’s influence on Keats in further detail, and there is little to be gained in my going over the same ground here. Instead, I want to highlight a kind of reverse effect of that influence: its impact, in turn, on the way in which Hazlitt has come to be read over time. The canonical status that Keats’s writing has attained has had a significant effect on the critical interpretation of Hazlitt. The identification of sources in Hazlitt for particular passages in Keats has gone hand in hand with the assumption that those sources represent the main thrust of Hazlitt’s thought also, both in philosophy and literary criticism. That is, the recognition that Hazlitt was a precursor to Keats has led, almost unanimously, to a reading of Hazlitt as a protoKeatsian. Roy Park’s study of Hazlitt finds, for instance, a ‘demand for imaginative sincerity, a concept that in Hazlitt’s writings fulfils a function somewhat similar to Keats’s use of negative capability’.67 If self-annihilation and the rejection of the egotistical sublime can be taken to summarize Keats’s ideal of poethood in his letters, then it is exactly such an ideal that is supposed to embody the cardinal points of Hazlitt’s literary theory. We can cite Bromwich’s analysis, ‘. . . the poet not confined to his own personality has the . . . advantage over the poet thus confined,’ or John Mahoney’s summary, ‘Poetry – and literature in general – . . . seeks to minimize personality.’68 Yet, as we have seen, the example of Shakespeare can hardly be taken to represent Hazlitt’s literary theory more generally. The ‘genius’ that emerges from his theory of imagination is ‘ordinary’; as described in the essays ‘On Genius and Common Sense’ in Table-Talk, ‘it is just the reverse of the cameleon; for it does not borrow, but lend its colour to all about it’ (8: 43). The contrast with Keats’s ‘camelion poet’ could not be more pointed. The chameleon is Hazlitt’s simile for the view of the mind that his entire metaphysics seeks to refute: ‘a chameleon, colourless kind of thing, the sport of external impulses and accidental circumstances’ (‘On Liberty and Necessity’, Lectures on English Philosophy; 2: 269). His own notion, of a partial and exclusive genius, belongs to a theory of innate ‘bias’, grounded, in turn, in the model of an empowered and active mind, directed from within, by the laws of its own fixed constitution. Where to Keats, selflessness is the key to poetic achievement, for Hazlitt, in any other instance than Shakespeare, the absence of a powerful self is the condition of artistic failure. Hence, for example, his praise for the characterization of Hamlet, ‘whom we may be said almost to remember in our after-years; . . . his speeches and sayings . . . as real as our own thoughts’ (4: 232), is expressed

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in the same terms as his criticism of Dr. Johnson: ‘His reflections present themselves like reminiscences; do not disturb the ordinary march of our thoughts’ (‘On the Periodical Essayists’, Lectures on the English Comic Writers; 6: 100). Hazlitt lauds in Shakespeare precisely the quality that he disparages in Johnson, namely, the absence of a strong authorial presence that dominates the reader’s. Walter Scott, in the Plain Speaker essay that I have already discussed, is another case in point. For Keats, on the other hand, Hazlitt’s observations on Hamlet become a prescription or ‘axiom’ for poetry in the letter to Taylor, 27 February 1818: ‘I think Poetry . . . should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance.’69 Tellingly, too, in his comments on ‘poetical Character’, he claims ‘gusto’ for the self-effacing poet, where Hazlitt tends to withhold it. By registering that Shakespeare, who is Keats’s rule, is Hazlitt’s single exception, we might admit the debt, without allowing it to obscure the consistency of Hazlitt’s thought. The theory of the imagination elicited from his analyses of literature and art is inseparable from the epistemological model at the heart of his philosophy: it is the theory of a powerful self, which cannot be exemplified by the sole, if glorious deviation from what he perceived to be the standard pattern of artistic composition.70 In summary, then, the truism, that Shakespeare and nature are one, is endorsed by Hazlitt, but its implications for him are far from truistic. Shakespeare stands both at centre and margin in Hazlitt’s critical thought. In the first position, his characters present the same range of humanity that Nature does, the material on which the essayist draws, as he draws on life itself, to illustrate his central tenets regarding human behaviour and social structures. As real people do, Shakespeare’s major characters embody, for Hazlitt, powerful, biased individualities, each distinct from the other. In Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, these individuals are the means to unfolding the workings of power, and especially, the complex connections between personal and political power, with immediate bearing on contemporary political developments. In Lectures on the English Poets, Shakespeare’s language, uttered by his characters, is the basis on which Hazlitt establishes that poetry – or imaginative plenitude – is fundamental to the very condition of humanity. Shakespeare is central to Hazlitt, too, in that, more than any other writer, he is part of the basic fabric of Hazlitt’s prose. However, although Shakespeare’s creations exemplify Hazlitt’s general view of the human condition, Shakespeare himself does not. As an author, Shakespeare is always Hazlitt’s exception, always outside of his theory of

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how the creative imagination ordinarily works. Hence, in the Round Table, he goes so far as to deny Shakespeare gusto, normally the hallmark of genius in his judgements of art and literature. As he explains it later in Table- Talk, ‘Shakespear (almost alone) seems to have been a man of genius, raised above the definition of genius’ (8: 42). Tantalizingly, ‘almost’ and ‘seems’ hint at other instances besides Shakespeare, but if Hazlitt had any in mind, he does not name them, here or elsewhere in his writings.

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Chapter 3

John Keats Beth Lau

It is common for poets to begin their careers admiring and imitating certain influential role models, but John Keats (1795–1821) is remarkable for the degree to which he looked to other great writers for inspiration and guidance. Each stage of his career is marked by the figures who were dominant in Keats’s literary pantheon at the time, and the development of his poetry to a large extent can be traced by studying the influence of Spenser, Leigh Hunt, Wordsworth, Milton, Dante and others on the style and themes of his work. Of all of Keats’s literary heroes, however, Shakespeare was supreme. Keats’s letters are filled with enthusiastic praise of Shakespeare’s achievement and sprinkled with quotations from the plays and sonnets, and two copies of Shakespeare’s plays containing Keats’s copious marginalia attest to his close, devoted study of his great predecessor’s works. Early on in his career, Keats expressed a belief that Shakespeare was his ‘good Genius’ or ‘Presider’, encouraging and aiding his poetic efforts.1 Other people, beginning with Keats’s friends and continuing throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have also perceived a special affinity between Keats and Shakespeare. Walter Savage Landor says that Keats ‘had something of Shakespear in him’; A. C. Bradley writes that Keats ‘was of Shakespeare’s tribe’; John Middleton Murry wrote an entire book based on the premise that Keats ‘was essentially like Shakespeare’ and that ‘a right understanding of Keats is the easiest, and perhaps the only possible, way to a right understanding of Shakespeare’; and Caroline Spurgeon similarly claims that ‘Keats and Shakespeare had a very unusual, a very close, and subtle relationship. They were alike in certain qualities of mind and art . . . and in some of these qualities they are unique among English poets.’2 Indeed, it has long been customary to regard Shakespeare as Keats’s primary forebear and Keats as one of Shakespeare’s closest literary descendants. And yet, obvious differences are apparent between the Renaissance playwright and the Romantic lyric poet. Although Keats aspired to become

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a dramatist, declaring that his ‘greatest ambition’ was ‘the writing of a few fine Plays’ (Letters, 2: 234), his one finished play, Otho the Great, written in collaboration with his friend Charles Brown, is widely viewed as a dismal production, full of static characters spouting ‘farragos’ of ‘Shakespearean phraseology’ but without the action, coherence, complexity of characterization or interest of Shakespeare’s own work.3 Keats cannot be entirely blamed for defects in the play, since Charles Brown dictated the plot to him, and most critics find the fragment King Stephen, which Keats wrote by himself shortly after Otho in fall 1819, an improvement in action and liveliness over his previous effort.4 King Stephen, however, is a mere four short scenes in length. However promising it might be considered, the fact remains that Keats abandoned his second attempt at the drama after barely getting started. Clearly Keats was not like Shakespeare in being a successful playwright. What then are the Shakespearean qualities in Keats’s work and character? What elements of Shakespeare’s plays and poems did Keats pay most attention to and draw upon for his own poetry and aesthetic principles? This chapter will address these questions as it explores some of the considerable evidence for Keats’s reading (or viewing) of and response to Shakespeare. The first section outlines when Keats became familiar with his ‘Presider’ and what friends and other sources contributed to his particular approach to Shakespeare’s work and image. The middle sections explore two major aspects of Keats’s response to Shakespeare: his focus on selected passages and images in the plays and poems and his celebration of Shakespeare’s ‘Negative Capability’. The final section provides an in-depth examination of one play, Antony and Cleopatra, in relation to central conflicts, characters and techniques in Keats’s poems.

Keats’s Reading of and Response to Shakespeare: Chronology and Context Keats probably was introduced to Shakespeare when he was a student at John Clarke’s school in Enfield, which he attended from the ages of 8 to 15. The earliest evidence of his familiarity with the plays comes from Edward Holmes, a schoolmate at Clarke’s school, who reported that Keats ‘must have read Shakspeare as he thought that “no one wd dare to read Macbeth alone in a house at two oclock in the morning.”’5 Charles Cowden Clarke, the schoolmaster’s son, became Keats’s first important mentor, both as a teacher and later as a friend after Keats left school and was apprenticed to the surgeon Thomas Hammond in nearby Edmonton. During this period

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(from 1811 until he entered Guy’s Hospital in London in October 1815), Keats used frequently to walk to Enfield to read and discuss literature with Clarke. Charles Cowden Clarke went on to have a distinguished career as a lecturer, editor and critic of Shakespeare; his wife Mary (Novello) Cowden Clarke compiled the first Shakespeare concordance and also edited the plays and wrote many books on Shakespeare, both on her own and in collaboration with her husband.6 Clarke provides an anecdote about the future poet’s reaction to Cymbeline from the period of Keats’s apprenticeship: ‘Once, when reading the “Cymbeline” aloud, I saw his eyes fill with tears, and his voice faltered when he came to the departure of Posthumus, and Imogen saying she would have watched him – “Till the diminution Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle; Nay follow’d him till he had melted from The smallness of a gnat to air; and then Have turn’d mine eye and wept”’. (1. 3. 18–22)7 Clarke notes that he frequently attended the theatre at this time, walking the 12 miles between Enfield and London to see the great actors and actresses of the day, including Edmund Kean, whom Clarke ‘saw . . . in all his first perfection’ when he ‘came upon the London stage’ and ‘electrified the town by his fire’.8 Since Kean ‘came upon the London stage’ in January 1814, Clarke probably shared his enthusiasm for Kean’s Shakespeare performances with his young friend, and indeed he reports that the latter ‘idolized’ Kean, though it is unlikely that Keats himself attended the theatre until he was living in London.9 Despite Keats’s opportunities for becoming acquainted with Shakespeare through Clarke, however, the playwright was not a special favourite during his years as a student and apprentice. As Clarke notes, Spenser was Keats’s first great poetic passion, and he ‘knew but little of [Shakespeare] till he had himself become an author’.10 Some of Keats’s earliest surviving poems contain general references to the plays. For example, ‘Imitation of Spenser’ (1814) describes a wondrous isle that could ‘rob from aged Lear his bitter teen’, and both ‘To a Friend Who Sent Me Some Roses’ (June 1816) and ‘To Charles Cowden Clarke’ (September 1816) mention Titania.11 In addition, Shakespeare is mentioned in the 1815 poems ‘Ode to Apollo’ (where Shakespeare appears along with Homer, Virgil, Milton, Spenser and Tasso in a pantheon of great ‘Bards’) and ‘To George Felton Mathew’ (where ‘warm-hearted Shakespeare’ greets Chatterton in the afterlife). Nonetheless, scholars agree that Keats’s serious

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study and appreciation of Shakespeare did not commence until 1817, after he became acquainted with a new set of friends who profoundly affected his poetic career: Leigh Hunt, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, and John Hamilton Reynolds, all of whom he met in October 1816. William Hazlitt, who Keats also met in the winter of 1816–17, did not become as close a personal friend as the others, but his writings and lectures were probably the single greatest influence on Keats’s thinking about literature in general and Shakespeare in particular.12 Leigh Hunt, whose liberal newspaper The Examiner Keats had been reading for years, participated in his age’s celebration of Shakespeare, but less so than the other friends Keats met in 1816. It is true that a 3 May 1820 Indicator essay on ‘Shakspeare’s Birth-Day’ is as fulsome an example of bardolatry as one is likely to find, saluting Shakespeare as ‘thou divine human creature’ from whose productions ‘a very spring and vernal abundance of all fair and noble things is to be found’.13 As Jeffrey Fleece argues, however, Hunt ‘never falls completely under the spell of the Romantic enthusiasm for Shakespeare’.14 For Hunt, as for the early Keats, Spenser was a greater personal favourite than the Renaissance dramatist. Hunt’s 1844 work, Imagination and Fancy, which consists, as the subtitle explains, of ‘Selections from the English Poets, with Markings of the Best Passages’, includes twentyfour passages from Spenser as compared to eight from Shakespeare. In a sonnet called The Poets, published in The Examiner on 24 December 1815, Hunt considers which poet he would choose ‘could I take but one’. His response is that he would take Shakespeare ‘as long as I was unoppressed / With the world’s weight’, but if he wished to ‘lay a wounded heart in leafy rest, / And dream of things far off and healing’ he would choose ‘Spenser’, and since this is the way the sonnet concludes Hunt’s overall preference for the latter seems clear.15 Hunt was an advocate for cheerful, soothing poetry that provides a respite from the ills of life, and Spenser (as he was read by Hunt and by Keats as well) answered this need more so than Shakespeare did. When Keats wrote his sonnet ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’ in January 1818, he makes the opposite choice, preferring the ‘fierce dispute’ of Shakespeare’s tragedy to the ‘fair plumed syren’ of ‘Romance’, chiefly associated for Keats with Spenser’s Faerie Queene. One perspective on Shakespeare that Keats is likely to have learned and to some extent absorbed from Hunt is the association of the playwright with liberal politics. Jack Lynch notes that, once Shakespeare became identified as the great English genius, people in the eighteenth and increasingly in the nineteenth century sought to ally him with their own political agendas.

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In 1812, the Whig Morning Chronicle and the Tory Morning Post engaged in a debate over Shakespeare’s political views, each side claiming that the plays expressed allegiance with its own position.16 Leigh Hunt clearly used Shakespeare in this partisan fashion. As Nicholas Roe demonstrates, Hunt frequently invokes Shakespeare ‘as presiding over “our liberties” in a liberal pantheon that included King Alfred, Chaucer, Milton, Sydney, and Marvell’. For example, in a 2 March 1817 Examiner article protesting the suspension of Habeas Corpus, Hunt seeks to rally his readers to resistance by addressing them as ‘FELLOW-COUNTRYMEN, Inheritors of Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights, Demanders of Constitutional Reform . . . Descendants of the ALFREDS, the RUSSELLS, the HAMPDENS, the SHAKESPEARES’. Roe claims that, when Keats used a portrait of Shakespeare for the frontispiece of his 1817 volume of Poems along with the epigraph ‘What more felicity can fall to creature, / Than to enjoy delight with liberty’ (from Spenser’s Muiopotmos; or, The Fate of the Butterfly), followed by a dedicatory sonnet To Leigh Hunt, Esq. – thereby linking Shakespeare, ‘liberty’ and the radical Hunt – he was declaring the liberal political affiliation of his book in a way that readers of the time would instantly recognize.17 Hunt along with Percy Bysshe Shelley also sought to enlist Shakespeare in the liberal cause by claiming that Shakespeare was not a Christian, since the church was associated with repressive politics and hierarchical social relations at the time. For several months in 1817, the members of the Hunt circle debated the question of Shakespeare’s religion, with Shelley and Hunt the main proponents of the non-Christian position and Benjamin Robert Haydon and Joseph Severn, both of whom were staunch believers, arguing for Shakespeare’s Christianity. Both sides used evidence from the plays to support their views. As Haydon records in his Autobiography, the debate commenced in January 1817 during a dinner at Horace Smith’s that included Hunt, his wife and sister, Shelley, Haydon and Keats. While Haydon, Hunt and Shelley fiercely argued for and against Shakespeare’s religious beliefs, Keats, Haydon notes, remained silent. Joseph Severn left a record of another occasion in which Keats was present when he (Severn) and Shelley disputed Shakespeare’s faith. Shelley ‘attempted to deny the great poet’s belief and quoted the sailor in “Measure for Measure”’ whereas Severn cited ‘counter quotations . . . from the utterances of Portia, Hamlet, Isabella, and numerous others’. Keats as well as Hunt on this occasion, Severn notes, ‘declared I had the best of the argument’.18 In a 10 May 1817 letter to Hunt, Keats makes his own contribution to the debate, citing one passage in support of Shakespeare’s Christianity (Measure for Measure, 2. 2. 72–5) and one against (Twelfth Night, 3. 2. 70–3; Letters, 1: 138). Despite

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the fact that Keats himself was a religious sceptic, he was not like Shelley and Hunt committed to allying Shakespeare with his own views. Instead, the position regarding Shakespeare’s beliefs that Keats appears to have held is that the plays are noncommittal or even contradictory and can supply evidence both for and against a Christian perspective. As we shall see, Keats’s belief in the works’ open-endedness and many-sidedness became central to his understanding of Shakespeare’s genius. Haydon was ardent in all of his beliefs and aspirations, and one of his primary passions was Shakespeare. Scholars agree that, to a greater extent than Hunt, Haydon was instrumental in inspiring Keats’s turn to Shakespeare in 1817.19 In a May 1817 letter Haydon urges Keats to ‘go on, dont [sic] despair . . . read Shakespeare and trust in Providence’ (Letters, 1: 135), and after Keats’s death he recorded in his diary that ‘I have enjoyed Shakespeare more with Keats than with any other Human creature!’20 Haydon encouraged Keats to immerse himself in Shakespeare and frequently read and discussed the plays with his young friend. The tone of Haydon’s Shakespeare worship is conveyed in a 4 March 1818 letter which reports that a ring supposedly belonging to Shakespeare was found in Stratford: ‘My dear Keats’, Haydon writes breathlessly, ‘I shall certainly go mad! – In a field at Stratford upon Avon, in a field that belonged to Shakespeare; they have found a gold ring and seal with the initial thus – a true WS Lover’s Knot between; if this is not Shakespeare who is it? – a true lovers Knott!! – I saw an impression to day, and am to have one as soon as possible – As sure as you breathe, & that he was the first of beings the Seal belonged to him – Oh Lord!’ (Letters, 1: 239–40). In the spirit of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bardolatry, Haydon hopes to acquire a relict of ‘the first of beings’; he regards Shakespeare as virtually divine.21 Keats catches Haydon’s style and attitude when he concludes a letter to the painter on 11 May 1817, ‘So now in the Name of Shakespeare Raphael and all our Saints I commend you to the care of heaven!’ (Letters, 1: 145). This is the same letter in which Keats imagines Shakespeare as his ‘Presider’, like a guardian spirit watching over him. Haydon had given Keats the idea of ‘a good Genius presiding over’ his own creative efforts (Letters, 1: 142), but in the letter to which Keats is probably alluding Haydon describes his relationship to great artists of the past somewhat differently from the way Keats does. ‘Often,’ Haydon writes on March 1817, ‘have I sat by my fire after a day’s effort . . . and mused on what I had done and with a burning glow on what I would do till filled with fury I have seen the faces of the mighty dead crowd into my room, and I have sunk down & prayed the great Spirit that I might be worthy to accompany these immortal beings in their

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immortal glories, and then I have seen each smile as it passed over me . . . in awful encouragement’ (Letters, 1: 124). Although Haydon could speak of great men of the past in religious terms, his own Christian beliefs ensured that God remained the ‘great Spirit’ or supreme deity to whom he prayed. Keats, however, who did not share Haydon’s piety, embraced wholeheartedly the religion of art, with Shakespeare as his god.22 The other friend Keats met in the fall of 1816, who encouraged his appreciation of Shakespeare, and whose influence in this regard has been largely overlooked, is John Hamilton Reynolds.23 The first letter in which conspicuous quotations from Shakespeare – from 1 Henry IV – appear is addressed to Reynolds (Letters, 1: 125), and thereafter many of Keats’s most significant comments on Shakespeare occur in correspondence to this friend. Reynolds’s references to Shakespeare are as worshipful as those of Haydon or Hunt but without the overlay of Christianity in the former or contemporary politics in the latter and, therefore, may have especially suited Keats. As his biographer Leonidas Jones writes, ‘Reynolds frequently used religious terms to express the extent of his devotion, on one occasion describing Shakespeare as the “divinity of the world of imagination.”’24 In a review of Edmund Kean in Richard Duke of York – an essay so similar in content and style to Keats’s writing that it was long thought to be his – Reynolds expresses the common Romantic belief that critics should not point out any faults in Shakespeare, who had none: ‘we feel that criticism has no right to purse its little brow in the presence of Shakespeare. He has to our belief very few imperfections, – and perhaps these might vanish from our minds, if we had the perfection properly to scan them.’25 Reynolds like Keats revered William Hazlitt and in July 1817 enthusiastically reviewed his Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, declaring, ‘This is the only work ever written on Shakespeare, that can be deemed worthy of Shakespeare.’26 As we shall see, Keats also acquired, read and annotated a copy of Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays in 1817. It is likely that Reynolds encouraged Keats’s belief that Hazlitt was the finest critic of the age as he (along with Hazlitt) encouraged Keats’s study and love of Shakespeare. In April 1818 Keats referred to ‘feast[ing] upon’ Shakespeare with Reynolds in the previous year (Letters, 1: 274). Reynolds was certainly one of the cluster of people who encouraged Keats to adopt Shakespeare as his primary literary role model and presiding deity. Without doubt 1817 was the year in which Shakespeare, in Douglas Bush’s words, ‘assumed the throne in Keats’s mind’.27 In particular, when Keats left Hampstead, where he was then living with his brothers, for the Isle of Wight in order to commence his first long poem Endymion, his letters suddenly

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blossom with quotations from and references to Shakespeare. It was at this point that Keats acquired his seven-volume edition of The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare, with critical notes by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens (Chiswick: C. Whitingham, 1814; hereafter referred to as the Johnson and Steevens edition). He wrote his name and ‘April 1817’ on the title page of volume 1, and all the volumes are filled with his markings and annotations, the evidence of his close study of the plays throughout this year.28 Keats’s first letter after leaving London reports to his brothers, ‘I felt rather lonely this Morning at breakfast so I went and unbox’d a Shakspeare – “There’s my Comfort,”’ quoting from The Tempest, 2. 2. 45, 55 (15 April 1817; Letters, 1: 128). Two days later he tells Reynolds that he found a portrait of Shakespeare he liked ‘extremely’ in the hall of his lodging-house and hung it over his books; his landlady kindly allowed Keats to take the portrait with him when he left, and it remained with him the rest of his life (Letters, 1: 130, 142; 2: 62). The same letter to Reynolds reports that ‘the passage in Lear – “Do you not hear the Sea?” – has haunted me intensely,’ after which Keats copies out his own sonnet ‘On the Sea’, probably his first poem to be inspired by one of Shakespeare’s plays. The letter to Reynolds continues the following day, proposing that ‘Whenever you write say a Word or two on some Passage in Shakespeare that may have come rather new to you; which must be continually happening, notwithstandg that we read the same Play forty times,’ and Keats cites several lines from The Tempest (1. 2. 326–8, 1. 2. 50) as examples (Letters, 1: 133). The letters to Hunt with evidence for and against Shakespeare’s belief in Christianity (10 May 1817) and to Haydon proposing Shakespeare as his ‘Presider’ (10, 11 May 1817), already mentioned, follow soon after. By mid-June Keats was back in Hampstead working steadily on Endymion, and he wrote few letters over the next several months. This summer, however, was probably when Keats ‘feasted on’ Shakespeare with Reynolds. Besides his seven-volume set, Keats may have read with Reynolds from two other Shakespeare texts. One is an 1808 facsimile of the first folio, Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, which is inscribed ‘John Keats / 1817’ and which also contains Keats’s markings and annotations.29 Another book Keats came to own was The Poetical Works of William Shakespeare (London: Thomas Wilson, 1806), containing the sonnets, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Passionate Pilgrim, and The Lover’s Complaint. The title page records that Reynolds gave this book to Keats in 1819, and it contains many markings in Reynolds’s and several other hands, though we cannot with confidence ascribe any to Keats.30 In a 22 November 1817 letter to Reynolds, Keats says that ‘One of the three Books I have with me is

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Shakespear’s Poems: I neer found so many beauties in the sonnets,’ and he quotes from sonnets 12, 13, 17, 19 and 21 as well as from Venus and Adonis, lines 1033–8 (Letters, 1: 188–9). This is probably the same copy that Reynolds eventually gave to Keats, which Keats had earlier borrowed from his friend. In September 1817 Keats stayed with Benjamin Bailey in Oxford, where he wrote his third book of Endymion. Bailey is best known for encouraging Keats to appreciate and study Wordsworth and Milton, but Shakespeare also came up in their literary conversations, as Bailey remembered that Keats was fond of reciting Ulysses’s speech in Troilus and Cressida that begins, ‘Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, / Wherein he puts alms for oblivion’ (Bailey quotes these and the following three and a half lines from 3. 3. 145–50). According to Bailey, Keats thought the speech was ‘pregnant with practical wisdom’.31 Bailey and Keats also made a pilgrimage to Stratford on Avon, which as Lynch notes had at this time become ‘a kind of literary Lourdes or Mecca’.32 They visited Shakespeare’s birthplace, where they signed their names on the wall along with ‘the “numbers numberless”’ already there, and also visited the Church of the Holy Trinity, where Keats admired the statue of Shakespeare.33 When Keats was approaching Robert Burns’s cottage during his walking tour of Northern England and Scotland in the summer of 1818, he anticipated that ‘I shall look upon it hereafter with unmixed pleasure as I do upon my Stratford on Avon day with Bailey’ (Letters, 1: 323). As mentioned previously, William Hazlitt was a major influence on Keats’s appreciation of and particular approach to Shakespeare. In his 11 May 1817 letter to Haydon, Keats declares that ‘I am very near Agreeing with Hazlitt that Shakspeare is enough for us’ (Letters, 1: 143); the source for this statement is unclear, but it was probably an essay from The Examiner or another periodical, which is where Keats had chiefly encountered Hazlitt’s writing at this time.34 In September 1817 Keats reports reading with Bailey Hazlitt’s Round Table, a collection of essays formerly published in The Examiner (Letters, 1: 166); as we shall see, a number of the Round Table essays bear on Keats’s subsequent remarks about Shakespeare. At some point in 1817, perhaps in early December, Keats bought and read Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, published in June of that year and reviewed by Reynolds in July. Keats’s copy of Hazlitt’s Characters survives, with notes and markings in the essay on King Lear, a brief note at the end of the essay on The Tempest, and quotations from Wordsworth’s Excursion and The Merchant of Venice (2. 2. 17–18) along with Keats’s signature on the title page.35 From January to March 1818 Hazlitt gave a series of lectures on the English poets

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(published in book form later that year), all but one or two of which Keats attended36; the lecture ‘On Shakspeare and Milton’ was especially influential. Keats’s admiration of Hazlitt’s criticism caused him to declare in January 1818 that ‘Hazlitt’s depth of Taste’ was ‘one of three things to rejoice at in this Age’ (Letters, 1: 203, 205). A 3 May 1818 letter which playfully indulges in a stream of associations links ‘Shakespear to Hazlitt, Hazlitt to Shakespeare’ (Letters, 1: 280), indicating that the two figures were closely connected in Keats’s mind. Even Keats’s habit of sprinkling his letters with quotations from Shakespeare may have been learned from Hazlitt, and some of those quotations could have struck him in Hazlitt’s writings rather than in the plays themselves.37 One of the fruits of Keats’s intense study of Shakespeare and the combined influences of his various friends and mentors in 1817 is the famous ‘Negative Capability’ letter of 21, 27(?) December 1817, which will be discussed in what follows. This may be the place, however, to bring up the importance of Edmund Kean for Keats. The ‘Negative Capability’ letter begins by stating that ‘I saw Kean return to the public in Richard III, & finely he did it’ (Letters, 1: 191). Further along in the letter he describes a dinner at Horace Smith’s where the company and conversation did not suit his taste. ‘They talked of Kean & his low company’, Keats writes; ‘Would I were with that company instead of yours said I to myself’ (Letters, 1: 193). Keats saw Kean in Richard III on 15 December 1817 (and again on 12 January 1818) and wrote a review of the performance for The Champion (substituting for Reynolds who was theatrical reviewer for the paper), published on 21 December 1817. Keats’s review adopts the style and many of the terms and concepts of Hazlitt, as well as of Reynolds imitating Hazlitt. Keats uses Hazlitt’s term ‘gusto’ (from the Round Table essay ‘On Gusto’) to describe Kean’s voice and weaves quotations from Shakespeare and other writers into his prose. The essay begins and ends by celebrating Kean as ‘a relict of romance’ who restores a measure of ‘chivalry’ and excitement to the present ‘unimaginative days’ (Hampstead Keats, 227).38 Throughout the review Keats enthusiastically praises Kean’s vivid acting, in particular the ‘elegance, gracefulness, and music of elocution’ in his voice. In reading Shakespeare, Keats writes, one perceives the ‘spiritual’ pleasures of verse and the ‘hieroglyphics of beauty’ expressed in ‘charactered language’. Kean’s performance, on the other hand, conveys ‘the sensual life of verse’. For Keats, as for Hazlitt as well, Kean was the rare actor who brings to life an aspect of Shakespeare’s text not available on the page, so that his performance, when experienced by someone who is already ‘learned in the spiritual portion

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of those lines to which Kean adds a sensual grandeur’, conveys the full weight and meaning of the play (Hampstead Keats, 229).39 Kean remained an important cultural hero for Keats; the actor was intimately connected with Keats’s aspiration to become a playwright himself. ‘One of my Ambitions’, he told Bailey on 14 August 1819, ‘is to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting’ (Letters, 2: 139). He wrote Otho with Kean in mind for the character Ludolph and was dismayed to learn that the actor was going on tour in America when he had hoped to have the play performed (see Letters, 2: 148, 186, 217). His abandonment of King Stephen may have been prompted by the news that Kean would be leaving the country. We recall that Charles Cowden Clarke said Keats ‘idolized’ Kean; Clarke added that Keats’s appearance reminded him of the actor, for ‘the two were not very dissimilar in face and figure.’40 As Peter Thomson explains, both were short men with ‘vivid eyes and restless energy’.41 Keats is likely to have identified with Kean not just because of their physical similarities but from the fact that Kean like Keats was an outsider striving to rise through talent alone in a society that still valued the kind of family and educational credentials both men lacked. Both Kean, the illegitimate son of a (probably) Jewish father, and Keats, ridiculed by conservative reviewers as an upstart Cockney versifier, experienced condescension and rejection by elite society and turned to art (and to Shakespeare) as a means of gaining distinction. Both men were also allied with liberal politics, Keats through his association with the Hunt circle and Kean through his connection with the Whig-leaning Drury Lane theatre, his formation of the ungentlemanly gentleman’s club ‘the Wolves’, and his preference for underdog, outsider roles like Shylock, Othello and Richard III. As Thomson remarks, ‘The emergent egalitarianism that was, in part, the English reaction to the French Revolution had, in Kean, its supreme theatrical representative.’42 Keats can be considered one of the major poetical representatives of the ‘emergent egalitarianism’ of the age, and his worship of Kean’s Shakespearean acting acknowledges the social as well as artistic ‘revolution’ in which both were engaged. When Keats tells Taylor on 27 February 1818, ‘thank God I can read and perhaps understand Shakspeare to his depths’ (Letters, 1: 239), he may be signalling that he has at this point completed his major period of reading and studying Shakespeare’s works. Important references to Shakespeare continue throughout the remaining few years of Keats’s life, but they become less frequent over time. White claims that Keats ‘outgr[ew] his buoyant idolatry’ of Shakespeare after 1817 and that by 1819 ‘the allusions to Shakespeare are few and far between.’ For that very reason, however,

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White claims that the Shakespeare allusions that do appear in letters and poems carry ‘great weight as the distilled residuum of what Keats’s memory retains as important to his own experience’.43 We can nonetheless assume that Keats continued to consult his copies of Shakespeare from time to time, and some evidence of such reading is available. His sonnet ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’, written in January 1818 in his folio Shakespeare (at the end of Hamlet, facing Lear), records one such occasion. Another occurred on 4 October 1818, the date Keats wrote in his folio Lear beside the phrase, ‘poore Tom’ (3. 4. 38), which he underscored.44 Keats was nursing his brother Tom, dying of consumption, when he made this brief, moving annotation. On 16 December 1818 he tells his brother and sister-in-law in America, ‘I shall read a passage of Shakspeare every Sunday at ten o Clock – you read one {a}t the same time and we shall be as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room’ (Letters, 2: 5). Whether or not Keats kept his word, the statement indicates his intention of maintaining a weekly schedule of Shakespeare readings. When Keats tells Bailey on 14 August 1819 that ‘Shakspeare and the paradise Lost every day become greater wonders to me – I look upon fine Phrases like a Lover’ (Letters, 2: 139), he implies some recent perusal of Shakespeare’s texts (this is the same letter in which he says he would like to ‘make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting’). Keats is still focused on his dramatic writing when he tells John Taylor on 17 November 1819 that his ‘greatest ambition’ is ‘the writing of a few fine Plays’ and explains that he is reading ‘Holingshed’s Elisabeth’ in preparation for composing a play based on ‘the Earl of Leicester’s historry [sic]’ (Letters, 2: 234). Keats also bought John Selden’s Titles of Honor in 1819, probably as a reference work to consult in writing historical plays.45 Perhaps Keats was modelling himself on Shakespeare by beginning his dramatic career with plays based on English history. If so, he may have re-read some of Shakespeare’s early history plays at the same time.46 These and other literary plans, however, were cut short by Keats’s illness, which became apparent when he experienced a haemorrhage from the lungs on 3 February 1820. From that point on he wrote no new poems, though Shakespeare remained an important presence to the end. He took both the Johnson and Steevens edition of the plays and The Poetical Works of William Shakespeare with him to Italy; he copied his ‘Bright Star’ sonnet into the latter book, on the blank leaf facing A Lover’s Complaint, while on board his ship the Maria Crowther.47 Keats bequeathed both books to Joseph Severn, who accompanied him to Italy; the seven-volume Johnson and Steevens set is now at Harvard and the Poetical Works at Keats House in

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Hampstead. The folio Shakespeare Keats gave to his fiancée Fanny Brawne before he left England is now housed at Keats House. Keats obviously found comfort from having his beloved Shakespeare volumes with him in his final illness, and one of the greatest gifts he could think of bestowing on the woman he loved was a copy of Shakespeare’s plays, enriched with his marginalia.48 Images and selected passages Keats’s letters, marginalia and poems reveal a number of significant patterns in his response to Shakespeare. One such pattern is his tendency to focus on discrete, isolated passages, often with little regard for the larger context. This approach is apparent in an 18 April 1817 letter to Reynolds, where he states, ‘Whenever you write say a Word or two on some Passage in Shakespeare that may have come rather new to you’ and cites as examples the lines from The Tempest, ‘Urchins / Shall, for that vast of Night that they may work, / All exercise on thee’ and ‘In the dark backward and abysm of time’ (Letters, 1: 133; emphasis in original). Keats gives no indication that the first passage (1. 2. 326–8) comes from an exchange between Prospero and Caliban, in which Prospero threatens Caliban with punishment for his hostility and unruliness. Likewise, the second passage (1. 2. 50) is extracted from Prospero’s and Miranda’s discussion of her recollection of their former life in Milan, but Keats makes no reference to the scene from which the line derives. Similarly, when he writes to Reynolds about his reading of Shakespeare’s Poetical Works he states, ‘I neer found so many beauties in the sonnets – they seem to be full of fine things said unintentionally – in the intensity of working out conceits.’ He then quotes the second quatrain of sonnet 12 – ‘When lofty trees I see barren of leaves / Which erst from heat did canopy the herd, / And Summer’s green all girded up in sheaves, / Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,’ followed by a reference to ‘cockled snails’ from Love’s Labour’s Lost (4. 3. 335), which brings into his mind a simile involving a snail in Venus and Adonis (1033–8). Keats’s letter continues, ‘He [Shakespeare] overwhelms a genuine Lover of Poesy with all manner of abuse, talking about – “a poets rage / And stretched metre of an antique song” – Which by the by will be a capital Motto for my Poem [Endymion] – wont it? – He speaks too of “Time’s antique pen” – and “aprils first born flowers” and “deaths eternal cold”’ (Letters, 1: 188–9). The various lines Keats quotes here come from sonnets 17, 19, 21 and 13. In none of these references does he consider the context of the quotation but merely seizes on isolated ‘beauties’ or ‘fine things’, often ‘conceits’ or similes and

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metaphors appreciated for their own sake rather than for what they convey about the subject matter of the poem. As White says, ‘The very fact that Keats can confuse the contexts between the Sonnets and Venus and Adonis, and also throw in the phrase “cockled snails” from Love’s Labour’s Lost, shows that he makes association through images . . . rather than having a rooted sense of literal context.’49 Shakespeare was not the only writer Keats read in this way; indeed, it appears that he typically read poetry as a series of striking lines and images. Charles Cowden Clarke notes that Keats ‘especially singled out epithets’ in his response to Spenser’s Faerie Queene.50 When he was ill and anticipating journeying to Italy for his health in July 1820, Keats told Fanny Brawne that he was ‘employed in marking the most beautiful passages in Spenser, intending it for you, and comforting myself in being somehow occupied to give you however small a pleasure’ (Letters, 2: 302). At this late stage in his career, Keats still approached The Faerie Queene as a collection of ‘beautiful passages’ to be enjoyed without reference to their larger contexts. Benjamin Bailey records that, when Keats visited him in Oxford in September 1817, he found the young poet deficient in his appreciation of Wordsworth, liking him ‘rather in particular passages than in the full length portrait, as it were, of the great imaginative & philosophic Christian Poet’, and he set about trying to teach Keats to better understand and value the ideas informing Wordsworth’s poems.51 Keats’s marginalia in his personal copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost reveal a similar pattern: he habitually marks descriptive passages, rich in visual and other sensory imagery, but ignores most of the major speeches in the poem that convey its central themes, plot and character development.52 His habit of reading poetry selectively, for isolated images, epithets and other striking phrases, may be one reason why Keats was unable to realize his ambition of writing ‘a few fine Plays’ and why his narrative poems too are often loosely organized and episodic (Endymion) or incomplete (from the early ‘Imitation of Spenser’ and Calidore to the two Hyperion poems).53 Matthew Arnold praised the verbal magic of Keats’s poetry and thought ‘No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness.’ Arnold is best remembered for what he says next. After citing Keats’s belief that ‘I shall be among the English Poets after my death’ (Letters, 1: 394) Arnold declares, ‘He is; he is with Shakespeare.’54 Arnold is hardly unqualified in his celebration of the connection between Keats and Shakespeare, however. According to Arnold, besides lacking ‘the faculty of moral interpretation which is in Shakespeare’, Keats also is deficient in ‘the architectonics of poetry’.55

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In several writings from the 1850s, Arnold is even more specific in describing the flaws he perceives in Keats’s verse, which he attributes to the Romantic poet’s misguided approach to Shakespeare. In a letter of 28 October 1852 Arnold writes, More and more I feel that . . . Keats and Shelley were on a false track when they set themselves to reproduce the exuberance of expression, the charm, the richness of images, and the felicity, of the Elizabethan poets. Yet critics cannot get to learn this, because the Elizabethan poets are our greatest, and our canons of poetry are founded on their works. They still think that the object of poetry is to produce exquisite bits and images – such as Shelley’s clouds shepherded by the slow unwilling wind, and Keats passim; whereas modern poetry can only subsist by its contents . . . it must not lose itself in parts and episodes and ornamental work, but must press forwards to the whole.56 Similarly, in the Preface to the first edition of his Poems (1853), Arnold declares Shakespeare a dangerous model for young writers, who absorb his ‘abundant, and ingenious expression’ but neglect other aspects of his work, with the result that in their own poems ‘the details alone are valuable, the composition worthless.’ Arnold gives as an example Keats’s Isabella, which he calls ‘a perfect treasure-house of graceful and felicitous words and images’. Nonetheless, Arnold concludes, ‘so feebly is it conceived by the Poet, so loosely constructed, that the effect produced by [the action], in and for itself, is absolutely null.’57 As Arnold’s remarks indicate, however, Keats was not alone in his approach to Shakespeare; many others of his time likewise isolated the ‘beauties’ of Shakespeare and other poets from their contexts and are likely to have influenced Keats in this tendency. Anthologies of passages from Shakespeare’s plays, such as William Dodd’s The Beauties of Shakespear, Regularly Selected from each Play (1752), were commonplace. Charles Cowden Clarke may have encouraged Keats to read selectively; his account of introducing Keats to Chapman’s translation of Homer describes how they ‘turn[ed] to some of the “famousest” passages’, and he lists several lines, images and metaphors that particularly appealed to Keats.58 The title of the sonnet Keats wrote in response to this occasion, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, suggests a cursory rather than sustained reading experience (‘looking into’). As Orrin Wang notes, ‘looking into’ also indicates the visual emphasis in Keats’s approach to poetry.59 Leigh Hunt definitely focused on selected passages in poems and compiled several anthologies of

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excerpts from longer works. Imagination and Fancy, mentioned previously, is one such compilation of extracts from various poets, including Shakespeare, with brief commentary on each. Hunt like Keats especially relished passages striking for their visual appeal. One section in Imagination and Fancy called ‘A Gallery of Pictures from Spenser’ provides quotations from The Faerie Queene and then proposes an artist who would be appropriate for depicting each scene described. Greg Kucich claims that Hunt ‘taught Keats how to read The Faerie Queene as a gallery of discrete, gorgeous pictures . . . instead of following [Spenser’s] narrative’.60 Hazlitt also praises Shakespeare’s imagery and dazzling verbal skill in a way that recalls Keats. In his lecture ‘On Shakspeare and Milton’, Hazlitt states that the ‘felicity [of Shakespeare’s images] is equal to their force. Their likeness is made more dazzling by their novelty. They startle, and take the fancy prisoner in the same instant’ (5: 54). Such remarks imply that the reader’s attention is arrested by certain passages, which stand out from the surrounding text. Shakespeare also ‘has a magic power over words’, Hazlitt writes. ‘His epithets and single phrases are like sparkles, thrown off from an imagination, fired by the whirling rapidity of its own motion. His language is hieroglyphical. It translates thoughts into visible images’ (5: 54–5). Like Keats, Hazlitt values ‘epithets’, ‘single phrases’, and ‘visible images’; he even uses the same term, ‘hieroglyphical’, that Keats uses in his December 1817 review of Kean, where he says that the spiritual aspect of poetry ‘is felt when the very letters and points of charactered language show like the hieroglyphics of beauty’ (Hampstead Keats, 229). Susan Wolfson believes that Hazlitt in this case is echoing Keats’s review, since it appeared before Hazlitt delivered his Lectures on the English Poets. If so, Hazlitt himself recognized the similarity between Keats’s and his own approach to Shakespeare’s poetry.61 An attention to striking phrases and images is more likely to occur when reading than when viewing plays, and in fact Hazlitt cites as a disadvantage of stage productions of Shakespeare the fact that [n]ot only are the more refined poetical beauties and minuter strokes of character lost to the audience, but the most striking and impressive passages, those which having once read we can never forget, fail comparatively of their effect, except in one or two rare instances indeed. It is only the pantomime part of tragedy . . . which is sure to tell . . . on the stage. All the rest, all that appeals to our profounder feelings, to reflection and imagination, all that affects us most deeply in our closets, and in fact constitutes the glory of Shakespear, is little else than an interruption and

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a drag on the business of the stage. . . . Those parts of the play on which the reader dwells the longest, and with the highest relish in the perusal, are hurried through in the performance. (A View of the English Stage, 5: 221–2) Hazlitt here expresses the common Romantic opinion that Shakespeare’s plays are better read than viewed in performance, a position most memorably stated by Charles Lamb in his 1811 Reflector essay ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare, Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation’. It is not known whether Keats read Lamb’s essay, though he knew Lamb slightly and owned a copy of his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets.62 Even if Keats did not read ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare’, however, its point of view was widely shared; Reynolds, for example, also claims that ‘We do not much like to see Shakspeare tortured on the stage.’63 Keats appears to express the same opinion of the inadequacy of theatrical productions when in his Champion review he provides the following qualified praise of Kean’s performance as Luke Traffic in Sir James Bland Burges’s Riches; Or, The Wife and Brother: Kean, says Keats, ‘acted Luke in Riches, as far as the stage will admit, to perfection’ (Hampstead Keats, 228). Certainly Keats’s copious marginalia reflect his intense study of Shakespeare’s texts, and his habit of citing isolated lines and images apart from their contexts is more consistent with a reading than a viewing experience of the plays. It may be telling as well that, as Jonathan Bate claims, the Shakespeare play that most inspired Keats’s own creativity was King Lear, which was not performed at all during the Regency period because the government feared it would remind British subjects of their own mad king.64 Despite Keats’s disparagement of the stage, certain aspects of Romantic theatre are in keeping with his own response to Shakespeare. His appreciation of pictorial effects in Shakespeare’s works is consistent with the highly visual emphasis in Romantic-era theatrical productions. The large sizes of Drury Lane and Covent Garden Theatres encouraged an emphasis on spectacle and scenery, and the actors were required to use exaggerated gestures in order to appeal to their vast audiences.65 Middle-class culture generally was characterized by a fascination with the visual, as reflected in the exhibitions, fairs, panoramas, phantasmagorias and other public entertainments common in London in the early nineteenth century. This visual culture— which Orrin Wang calls the pre-cinema, in that it contains the values and impulses that eventually blossomed with the emergence of film—carried over to the theatre, creating a fondness for spectacle and tableau.66 Richard Schoch describes how Victorian productions of Shakespeare ‘were . . .

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committed to a pictorial mise-en-scène’ and presented the plays as ‘animated painting[s]’. Schoch notes that such pictorial tastes were shaped by ‘a century-long tradition of reading illustrated editions of Shakespeare’s plays and looking at painting, prints and engravings [of] . . . the playwright’s characters’.67 Indeed, paintings of scenes from Shakespeare proliferated in the Romantic period, most notably in the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, which ran from 1786–1802 (after which many of the paintings were published in the form of engravings). Keats’s friend Joseph Severn in 1817 painted a scene from Midsummer Night’s Dream depicting Hermia and Helena embroidering together and affixed the relevant lines from the play (3. 2. 203–8) to the painting when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1819. The same passage is thought to have influenced a description of Endymion’s sister Peona, relaxing with playmates in her bower, in Keats’s poem (Endymion l. 431–5).68 Keats’s highly visual poetry participates in the pictorial aesthetic of his time, which no doubt helped to shape his focus on imagery and conceits in Shakespeare’s works. Keats’s idol Edmund Kean was a highly visual actor, known more for his graceful and animated movements than for his voice. Hazlitt said his performance in Richard III ‘presents a perpetual succession of striking pictures. He bids fair to supply us with the best Shakespear Gallery we have had,’ thereby linking Kean’s acting to the paintings in Boydell’s exhibit (A View of the English Stage, 5: 184). In addition, Kean was famous for memorable ‘points’ in his Shakespeare performances, or moments when he struck an impressive pose, delivered his lines in a forceful and original manner, or engaged in some noteworthy stage business. Such highlights, which audiences came to expect from Kean, were usually followed by bursts of applause in a way that must have interrupted the flow of the performance.69 In this sense, Kean like Keats emphasized particular moments in the plays, detached from their larger contexts. Keats seems to recognize and appreciate this quality of Kean’s acting when he says in his Champion review, ‘Other actors are continually thinking of their sum-total effect throughout a play. Kean delivers himself up to the instant feeling, without a shadow of a thought about any thing else’ (Hampstead Keats, 231). As Thomson notes, Keats recognized that ‘It was always the detail rather than the whole of a part that drew the best out of Kean.’70 Keats also lists a number of memorable lines spoken by the actor and concludes, ‘We could cite a volume of such immortal scraps, and dote upon them with our remarks’ (Hampstead Keats, 230). Just as he ‘look[s] upon fine Phrases like a Lover’ when reading Shakespeare, Keats dotes upon ‘immortal scraps’ of dialogue when viewing the plays, especially as performed by Kean.

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In his focus on striking individual passages and images in Shakespeare, Keats clearly participated in tendencies shared by his culture. The fact that others in the nineteenth century regarded Shakespeare’s gift for striking phrases, imagery and epithets as central to his genius is further indicated by remarks comparing Keats to Shakespeare. Walter Savage Landor in 1828 wrote of Keats that ‘in none of our poets, with the sole exception of Shakespeare, do we find so many phrases so happy in their boldness.’ In 1847, William Howitt declared that ‘there is no poet, living or dead, except Shakspeare, who can pretend to anything like the felicity of epithet which characterizes Keats.’ David Masson in 1853 allied Keats with Shakespeare (and Milton) in the way their poetry ‘teem[s] with accumulated concrete circumstance’ and abundant imagery that sometimes verges on the excessive. Even Matthew Arnold, as we saw, praised Keats’s verbal ‘felicity’, which he found like Shakespeare’s.71 For all of these critics, Keats’s poetry is Shakespearean in the elements Keats himself most relished in Shakespeare’s poetry: its verbal facility, imagery and epithets. In the twentieth century, critics have continued to characterize as Shakespearean Keats’s diction and imagery, which relishes the concrete and particular and draws upon various senses. A. C. Bradley in 1909 thought Keats, like Shakespeare, was ‘a master of magic in language’. Walter Jackson Bate (1963) links the quatrain in sonnet 12 quoted by Keats in his 22 November 1817 letter to Reynolds – ‘When lofty trees I see barren of leaves / Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,’ and so on – to Keats’s own development of powerful pictorial images that contain a sense of process, of a present that includes the past or of ‘energy caught in momentary repose’ in poems such as The Eve of St. Agnes, the odes and the Hyperion poems. Bate also believes that ‘Keats reminds us of Shakespeare’ in his use of vivid imagery that combines several senses. Jack Stillinger (1982, 2006) claims that ‘Keats is definitely “with Shakespeare”’ (quoting Matthew Arnold) in the ‘particularity and concreteness’ of his ‘diction and imagery. . . . There is a striking quantity of things in [Keats’s poetry], things that can be visualized or that stimulate the auditory and other senses.’72 Virtually everyone who writes on Keats and Shakespeare agrees that the rich, sensuous imagery, the striking epithets and condensed language that characterizes Keats’s best poetry are reminiscent of the same qualities in Shakespeare’s verse and are likely to have been influenced or enhanced by the Romantic poet’s in-depth study of his Presider’s works. If Keats did not realize his ambition of writing successful plays like his great predecessor, he drew on the qualities his poet’s temperament best understood and responded to in Shakespeare’s

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works and produced his own lyric and narrative poems replete with memorable imagery and ‘fine Phrases’. Negative Capability and dramatic character Keats’s most famous contribution to Shakespeare criticism is his coining of the term ‘Negative Capability’ to denote ‘what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare posessed [sic] so enormously’ (Letters, 1: 193). Keats’s concept of Negative Capability involves a number of implications, one of which is that the true poet has no fixed identity but instead projects himself into the identities of his creations. Just a month before the Negative Capability letter Keats tells Benjamin Bailey that ‘Men of Genius are great as certain ethereal Chemicals operating on the Mass of neutral intellect – b[ut] they have not any individuality, any determined Character’(Letters, 1: 184). In a 3 February 1818 letter to Reynolds, Keats castigates Wordsworth, Byron and other contemporary writers he labels ‘Egotists’, whose subjective poetry expresses their personal ‘li[ves] & opinions’, comparing it unfavourably with the Elizabethans’ ‘great & unobtrusive’ works (Letters, 1: 223–5). In a 27 October 1818 letter to Richard Woodhouse, Keats describes ‘the poetical Character . . . (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself – it has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated – It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosop[h]er delights the camelion Poet’ (Letters, 1: 386–7). Woodhouse, commenting on this definition of the poet to John Taylor, agreed with Keats’s account, and added that ‘Shakspr was a poet of the kind above mentd – and he was perhaps the only one besides Keats who possessed this power in an extry degree, so as to be a feature in his works’ (Letters, 1: 390). Although Keats coined the term ‘Negative Capability’, the idea that poets project themselves into their creations by means of what was called the sympathetic imagination developed in the eighteenth century and was common in the Romantic period. Moreover, it was customary to cite Shakespeare as the chief representative of this ability.73 Coleridge compared Shakespeare to Proteus and contrasted Milton, who ‘himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost’, to Shakespeare, whose ‘poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakespeare.’74 Keats’s mentor in critical matters, William Hazlitt, likewise extolled Shakespeare as ‘the

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least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become.’ Shakespeare, Hazlitt states, ‘may be said, for the time, to identify himself with the character he wishes to represent, and to pass from one to another, like the same soul successively animating different bodies. By an art like that of the ventriloquist, he throws his imagination out of himself, and makes every word appear to proceed from the mouth of the person in whose name it is given’ (5: 47, 50). These remarks were delivered in Hazlitt’s lecture ‘On Shakspeare and Milton’ on 27 January 1818, shortly before Keats criticized Wordsworth and the modern poets as ‘egotists’ and praised the ‘unobtrusive’ Elizabethans in his letter to Reynolds.75 Reynolds himself had earlier contrasted the objectivity of Shakespeare to the subjectivity of other poets in his essay ‘On Egotism in Literature’, published in the 2 June 1816 Champion. Like Hazlitt and Keats, Reynolds believes that ‘Shakspeare certainly was no egotist. He never shines through his characters. All his persons speak like real men and women, and their conversation seems to spring up from the circumstances of the moment.’76 Keats shares with and probably learned from contemporaries the idea that Shakespeare’s genius involves his ability to project himself wholly into his characters. Not only do members of Keats’s circle share his view of Shakespeare as a chameleon, Proteus or ventriloquist, but many of them believe that Keats like his Presider possesses this quality to an uncommon degree. Woodhouse’s comments in his letter to Taylor have already been cited. Woodhouse makes similar points in his 8 June 1818 Champion review of Endymion. He claims that, unlike most of ‘our modern poets’ who ‘give to every thing the colouring of their own feeling’, ‘Mr Keats goes out of himself into a world’ of his own creation. Like Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, Woodhouse writes, Endymion provides ‘a representation and not a description of passion. Both these poems would, we think, be more generally admired had the poets been only veiled instead of concealed from us. Mr Keats conceives the scene before him, and represents it as it appears. This is the excellence of dramatic poetry.’77 In his letter to Taylor, Woodhouse gives another example of Keats’s own Negative Capability: ‘He has affirmed that he can conceive of a billiard Ball that it may have a sense of delight from its own roundness, smoothness volubility. & the rapidity of its motion’ (Letters, 1: 389). Charles Cowden Clarke also claimed that ‘Keats, like Shakespeare, and every other real poet, put his whole soul into what he had imagined, portrayed, or embodied.’ Clarke provides an example of Keats’s ability to imaginatively enter into a scene as he recounts Keats’s description of a bear-baiting. Keats’s ‘personification of the baiting, with his position – his legs and arms

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bent and shortened till he looked like Bruin on his hind legs, dabbing his fore paws hither and thither, as the dogs snapped at him, and now and then acting the gasp of one that had been suddenly caught and hugged – his own capacious mouth adding force to the personation, was a remarkable and as memorable a display.’ Clarke goes on to make a connection to Shakespeare: ‘I am never reminded of this amusing relation,’ he writes, ‘but it is associated with that forcible picture in Shakespeare, in “Henry VI.:” – “. . . As a bear encompass’d round with dogs, / Who having pinch’d a few and made them cry, / The rest stand all aloof and bark at him.”’78 Later critics have concurred that Keats, like Shakespeare, is a supreme exemplar of Negative Capability. Bernice Slote cites Woodhouse’s account of Keats’s ability to imagine what a billiard ball feels and Clarke’s report of Keats’s impersonation of a bear, among other examples, to argue that Keats did possess a dramatic temperament much like Shakespeare’s.79 David Perkins also states that Keats’s poetry is ‘essentially dramatic’ in that ‘Keats does not come forward in his own person in any direct way; he merely presents or narrates. Even in the lyrics, a form in which by definition and convention the author directly expresses his own feelings and reactions, Keats often remains in the background.’ Jay Clayton similarly claims that Keats, like Shakespeare and like his contemporary Jane Austen, is ‘essentially dramatic’ in his focus on ‘his subject, not on his own feelings’. W. J. Bate asserts that Keats’s ‘gift for empathic concentration of image’, whereby the poet fully identifies with the objects or scenes described, ‘develop[ed] to a degree hardly rivaled since Shakespeare himself’.80 Certain qualifications nonetheless can be made to the claim that Keats demonstrates the same quality of Negative Capability he assigns to Shakespeare. Significantly, all of the examples of Keats’s ability to enter into his own creations cited above involve animals, natural scenery or even objects rather than people, as Shakespeare does in his plays. Certainly, as noted in the previous section, Keats’s poetry is dense with vivid imagery and sensory details, but it contains few if any memorable characters. As Grant Scott notes, ‘figures like Saturn [in Hyperion], Porphyro [in The Eve of St. Agnes], and Autumn are defined less in terms of conventional character psychology and motivation than they are in terms of ekphrastic principles and rhetoric’; they are presented in pictorial terms, like sculpture or figures in a tableau, rather than as dynamic, three-dimensional human beings.81 Jonathan Bate also claims that ‘the kind of empathy Keats achieved in his own poems was very different from that of Shakespearean drama,’ and that Keats ‘throws himself into the nightingale and the urn’ in his odes ‘more fully than into Otho the Great and Ludolf’ in his play.82

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Not only was Keats unsuccessful in creating well-rounded characters in his own poetry, but he appears not to have paid much attention to this dimension of Shakespeare’s plays. Moreover, in this tendency Keats deviates from most of his friends and other contemporaries, who celebrated and delighted to analyse the unique individuality of Shakespeare’s characters. In fact, interpreting the distinctive personalities of Shakespeare’s people was probably the dominant critical approach to the plays throughout the nineteenth century. Coleridge and Hazlitt, influenced by A. W. Schlegel, emphasized the originality and psychological complexity of Shakespeare’s dramatis personae, and Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays is devoted to illustrating this principle, as the Preface explains, citing Schlegel as a precedent (4: 171–4). John Hamilton Reynolds, who extolled Characters of Shakespear’s Plays in his review of that work, likewise insisted that ‘Macbeth, and Lear, and Othello are real beings’ and, in Leonidas Jones’s words, ‘felt that the critic’s primary duty lay in interpreting personalities and motives’.83 Charles Cowden Clarke published Shakespeare-Characters, Chiefly Those Subordinate in 1863, a book devoted to analyzing the minor figures in the plays. Mary Cowden Clarke also contributed to the critical tradition of character analysis in her series of articles for Sharpe’s London Magazine (1848–51) ‘On Shakespeare’s Individuality in His Characters’.84 Keats, by contrast, as we have seen, concentrates on isolated beauties in the language of the plays, often divorced from their contexts, and seldom comments at length on the characters. When Keats does refer to Shakespeare’s characters he often focuses on their visual appearance, as when he quotes (to the painter Haydon) Enobarbus’s description of Antony, ‘He’s walking in the garden – thus: and spurns the rush that lies before him, cries fool, Lepidus!’ (Antony and Cleopatra, 3. 5. 16–17, emphasis in original; Letters, 1: 144). In another letter to Haydon Keats refers to Shakespeare and other writers to convey his sense of a heroic painting: ‘large prominent round and colour’d with magnificence – somewhat like the feel I have of Anthony and Cleopatra. Or of Alcibiades, leaning on his Crimson Couch in his Galley, his broad shoulders imperceptibly heaving with the Sea – That [for ‘What’] passage in Shakspeare is finer than this “See how the surly Warwick mans the Wall”’ (3 Henry VI, 5. 1. 17; Letters, 1: 265). These passages highlight characters’ posture or gestures, or what Keats in a marginal note to Paradise Lost termed the ‘stationing’ of figures, as if they were subjects of a painting or tableau.85 Keats comments on a number of Shakespeare’s female characters, as when he tells Jane and Marianne Reynolds, ‘I sincerely believe that Imogen is the finest Creature; and that I should have been disappointed at hearing

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you prefer Juliet. . . . Yet I feel such a yearning towards Juliet and that I would rather follow her into Pandemonium than Imogen into Paradize – heartily wishing myself a Romeo to be worthy of her’ (Letters, 1: 157–8). He also describes an attractive woman he meets as ‘not a Cleopatra; but she is at least a Charmian. She has a rich eastern look; she has fine eyes and fine manners. . . . I believe tho’ she has faults – the same as Charmian and Cleopatra might have had.’ Keats goes on to distinguish between ‘two tempers of mind in which we judge of things – the worldly, theatrical and pantomimical; and the unearthly, spiritual and ethereal – in the former Buonaparte, Lord Byron and this Charmian hold the first place in our Minds; in the latter John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child’s cradle and you my dear Sister [Georgiana Keats] are the conquering feelings. As a Man in the world I love the rich talk of a Charmian; as an eternal Being I love the thought of you. I should like her to ruin me, and I should like you to save me’ (Letters, 1: 395–6). Although Keats is clearly fascinated with Imogen, Juliet, Cleopatra and Charmian and regards them as distinct types of women, the terms in which he characterizes them are fairly broad and do tend to classify the women as types, even stereotypes, such as the ‘good’ moral woman and the ‘bad’ sexual one, rather than analyzing them as unique individuals. It is telling that he does not distinguish between Cleopatra and Charmian but instead classifies them together, only seeming to regard Charmian as different in degree rather than in kind from her mistress. Moreover, Keats treats these women as beings with whom he personally would like to be involved. Although this demonstrates that Keats like Hazlitt or Reynolds regards Shakespeare’s characters as living beings, he does not like those and other Romantic critics analyse their personalities and motives in the plays but instead emphasizes his own personal response to them. Similarly, Keats often speaks of his identification with male characters such as Troilus and Hamlet, as when he tells his brother and sister-in-law that ‘I throw my whole being into Troilus and repeating those lines, “I wander, like a lost soul upon the stygian Banks staying for waftage”, I melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate that I am content to be alone’ (Troilus and Cressida, 3. 2. 9–10; Letters, 1: 404), or when he bitterly tells Fanny Brawne, whom he suspects of being emotionally unfaithful to him, ‘Hamlet’s heart was full of such Misery as mine is when he said to Ophelia “Go to a Nunnery, go, go!”’ (Hamlet, 3. 1. 120, 128–9, 136–7, 139; Letters, 2: 312). Keats here refers to the feelings of Shakespeare’s characters as a means of expressing his own, rather than demonstrating his ability to identify with characters different from himself. Whatever quality of Negative Capability Keats possessed,

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it did not involve an empathic projection into other people in a way that prompted him to analyse complex literary characters or create them himself. Tensions in Keats’s celebration of Negative Capability also arise from the fact that the poet did not consistently extol selflessness but at times speaks of the importance of identity and a strong sense of self. In his 3 May 1818 letter to Reynolds, Keats develops an analogy of life as a ‘Mansion of Many Apartments’ that he says parallels Wordsworth’s account of human development in Tintern Abbey, and he decides that Wordsworth ‘is deeper than Milton – though I think it has depended more upon the general and gregarious advance of intellect, than individual greatness of Mind’ (Letters, 1: 280–1). After unfavourably comparing Wordsworth and the moderns to Shakespeare and Milton in his 3 February 1818 letter to Reynolds, Keats now reverses his assessment and finds Wordsworth’s subjective verse, which explores individual growth and experience, superior to Milton’s epic poem. On 21 April 1819, Keats describes to his brother and sister-in-law a ‘system of Salvation’ to replace the Christian scheme. The purpose of our world of suffering, according to Keats, is to act upon the mind and the heart of each individual for the purpose of developing a soul or identity. ‘I say . . . Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence’, Keats writes, ‘There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions – but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself’ (Letters, 2: 102). Whereas Keats had previously regarded a lack of identity as the mark of ‘Men of Genius’ or ‘a Man of Achievement’ (Letters 1: 184, 193), here he considers the development of identity as the goal of every individual, a form of secular salvation. Relevant to this shift in values is the way Keats revised Hyperion as The Fall of Hyperion. The first version of the poem presents a narrative of the fallen Titans and the new sun-god Apollo, after the manner of Paradise Lost or, in its depiction of the dethroned Saturn, King Lear. The Fall of Hyperion, by contrast, presents the same story through the perspective of a first-person poet-narrator, whose personal growth and education is fostered by the tale of the old and new gods (and in fact little of that tale is presented in The Fall of Hyperion, which is chiefly composed of the framing account of the poet-narrator’s spiritual journey). In August 1819 Keats tells Taylor that his current state of ‘Pride and egotism will enable me to write finer things than any thing else could,’ and to Reynolds he writes, ‘The more I know what my diligence may in time probably effect; the more does my heart distend with Pride and Obstinacy,’ adding that this ‘is the only state for the best sort of Poetry’ (Letters, 2: 144, 146–7). A year later, on 16 August 1820, he tells Percy Bysshe Shelley that an artist ‘must have

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“self concentration” selfishness perhaps’ (Letters, 2: 322–3). Instead of deploring egotism in poetry as he formerly did, Keats now regards it as essential to the creative process.86 One can even note instances in which Keats ascribes self-expression rather than self-annihilation to Shakespeare. On 19 February 1819 Keats declares that ‘A Man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory – and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life – a life like the scriptures, figurative. . . . Lord Byron cuts a figure – but he is not figurative – Shakspeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it’ (Letters, 2: 67). Although Keats contrasts Shakespeare to the image-conscious Byron, the former’s works are nonetheless said to be autobiographical. The difference between Byron and Shakespeare seems a matter of style and emphasis rather than of substance; both express their identities in their works but the latter is more subtle and conveys his inner life rather than a public persona. On 9 June 1819 Keats tells Sarah Jeffrey that ‘The middle age of Shakspeare was all c[l]ouded over; his days were not more happy than Hamlet’s who is perhaps more like Shakspeare himself in his common every day Life than any other of his Characters’ (Letters, 2: 115–16). Here Shakespeare, instead of disappearing into diverse characters, creates one much like himself who expresses his own mood and circumstances. One conclusion that can be drawn from the contradictions in Keats’s statements about identity is that, as Keats himself recognizes in his 3 May 1818 letter to Reynolds (when he says that Wordsworth’s superiority to Milton ‘has depended more upon the general and gregarious advance of Intellect, than individual greatness of Mind’), poets are the products of their time and culture and inevitably reflect the style and values of their age. Keats could not escape being a subjective Romantic poet. Whether as a result of temperament, historical conditioning, or both, Keats is primarily a lyrical or meditative rather than a dramatic or narrative writer.87 Despite his celebration of Shakespeare’s Negative Capability, his own bent was not to create a cast of diverse characters as Shakespeare did. Jonathan Bate states that ‘On the matter of entering into his creations, Keats was least Shakespearean in his plays and most empathic in his least Shakespearean form, the ode.’88 The ode’s introduction into English literary history is usually dated from 1629, with Ben Jonson’s ‘To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of That Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison’ and John Milton’s ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’. The form became increasingly important throughout the eighteenth century, flowering in the Romantic period with such works as Coleridge’s ‘Dejection’, Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ and Shelley’s ‘Ode to

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the West Wind’. Moreover, the ode is associated with the rhapsodic expression of an inspired bard and, in the Romantic period, with the poet’s struggle over a personal crisis.89 Historically and aesthetically, the ode is far removed from Shakespeare’s dramatic art. Nonetheless, Keats’s odes can be considered Shakespearean in a number of ways. As noted in the previous section, Keats draws from Shakespeare what serves his own lyrical needs best as he fills his odes with vivid, concrete images of objects and scenes from the natural world. Moreover, the odes do achieve a dramatic effect, not from the interactions and oppositions of various characters as is usual in the drama but from the self-conflict of the speaker, as he debates the value of an eternal versus a time-bound state (especially in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’). The odes also successfully draw upon Shakespeare in that they contain many echoes of the plays but in an unobtrusive fashion that incorporates Shakespeare’s words into Keats’s own distinctive voice. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in particular contains about fifty Shakespeare allusions.90 Keats’s desire to drink wine and ‘fade away’ with the nightingale, forgetting ‘The weariness, the fever and the fret’ of human life, and his invocation of death as a means of escaping the pain of existence, have been linked with both Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ and ‘O that this too too solid flesh would melt’ soliloquies (3. 1. 55ff., 1. 2. 129ff.); with the Duke’s ‘Be resolute for death’ speech (Measure for Measure 3. 1. 5ff.) and Claudio’s ‘I will encounter darkness as a bride’ and ‘Ay but to die, and go we know not where’ speeches in the same play (3. 1. 82–3, 3. 1. 117ff.); and with a number of passages in Antony and Cleopatra celebrating wine or drugs and death.91 Keats’s two ‘Adieu’s’ to the nightingale at the end of the ode suggests the Ghost in Hamlet’s repeated ‘adieu’, and many other echoes have been detected from The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Othello. The quantity of Shakespeare allusions in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is even more striking when one realizes that the poem is also filled with allusions to other writers, including Coleridge, Milton, Hazlitt and Horace. My own study of Keats and Wordsworth determined that ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ contains more allusions to Wordsworth’s poems than does any other of Keats’s works.92 One of Keats’s distinctive achievements is the way in which he could absorb passages from other writers and meld them into a voice uniquely his own. In this way, it can be said that Keats draws upon Shakespeare and other writers to enable his own verse but avoids a servile imitation that would highlight his own belatedness and dependency. Similarly, by incorporating references to Shakespeare’s plays in his own lyric poems, in a form never used by his great Presider, Keats achieves greater originality than he

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would if he had followed Shakespeare more closely by writing dramatic works (or than he did in fact achieve in his plays Otho the Great and King Stephen).93 ‘To Autumn’ has frequently been characterized as Keats’s most Shakespearean poem, even though it contains few direct parallels to Shakespeare’s works. Murry finds ‘To Autumn’ ‘deeply Shakespearean . . . in its rich and opulent serenity of mood . . . in its lovely and large periodic movement’ and in the way it expresses ‘the truth contained in the magic words: “Ripeness is all”’ (King Lear, 5. 2. 11).94 Murry describes a mood or outlook as the Shakespearean quality in Keats’s ode, rather than pointing out specific verbal echoes. Helen Vendler similarly believes that Shakespeare is one of ‘the great Presiders’ of ‘To Autumn’ although ‘there are no echoes so overt as to be outright allusions.’ According to Vendler, the ode follows Shakespeare’s example in his sonnets of ‘working out conceits’ (Letters, 1: 188), letting the metaphors unfold without the kind of direct allegorizing Keats used in many previous poems. Jonathan Bate sees a connection between the masque of Ceres in The Tempest (4. 1. 60–138) and ‘To Autumn’, though not in explicit echoes but in such stylistic effects as ‘a fullness of vocabulary’ and ‘copious compounds and adjectives formed from nouns’.95 William Flesch interprets ‘To Autumn’ as a poem that actually wrestles with the oppression of Shakespeare’s intimidating example. For Flesch, the figure of Autumn in the poem represents Shakespeare, whose overwhelming plenitude threatens to paralyze the speaker. That threat is dealt with by the ode’s depiction of Autumn’s decreasing abundance in each stanza, suggesting Keats’s ‘refusal of [Shakespeare’s] wealth and hence of the obligation it marks’.96 In various ways, critics find Keats most successful in drawing upon Shakespeare when he does so obliquely, adapting passages and techniques to his own uses as he maintains a balance of indebtedness to and independence from his great predecessor. Negative Capability: masking power Another way to understand the apparent contradictions in Keats’s alternate celebrations of selflessness and selfhood is suggested by the fact that his definition of Negative Capability involves the paradox that by negating his identity, a poet becomes ‘a Man of Achievement’ like Shakespeare. Although Keats contrasted ‘Men of Genius’ to ‘Men of Power’, the former of whom have ‘not any individuality, any determined Character’ (Letters, 1: 184), the genius’s annihilation of self can be regarded as a means of gaining power, especially for those like Keats who lack the privileges of birth and education

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required for the status of gentleman in his society. This strategy has been observed in the work of other writers such as Thomas Chatterton, the eighteenth-century attorney’s clerk who tried to pass off his own pseudoMedieval ‘Rowley’ poems as the work of a fifteenth-century Bristol monk. Many scholars engaged in the Rowley controversy wondered why Chatterton would ascribe his poems to someone else if he could claim them as his own. The reason, as Bridget Keegan explains, is that by coming before the literary establishment as the possessor and editor of valuable manuscripts rather than as a youth from the provinces trying to make a name for himself as an author, Chatterton could ‘hide behind a more authoritative voice than his own to gain access to a literary world from which he would have otherwise been excluded’.97 Chatterton paradoxically acquires more power by assuming the identity of someone else than by writing as himself. Jane Austen was often compared to Shakespeare in the nineteenth century for her ability to create a range of wholly believable characters while remaining herself invisible. Richard Whately, for example, writes in 1821 that Austen follows ‘the important maxim . . . illustrated by Homer, and afterwards enforced by Aristotle, of saying as little as possible in her own person, and giving a dramatic air to the narrative, by introducing frequent conversations; which she conducts with a regard to character hardly exceeded even by Shakspeare himself’. George Henry Lewes in an 1859 Blackwood’s article similarly states that ‘instead of telling us what her characters are, and what they feel, she presents the people, and they reveal themselves. In this she has never perhaps been surpassed, not even by Shakespeare himself.’ Lewes twice uses ‘dramatic ventriloquism’, the term Hazlitt used for Shakespeare’s ability to inhabit his characters, to describe Austen’s similar power.98 D. A. Miller has recently argued that Austen’s celebrated impersonal narrative style, the source of her ‘godlike authority’ as a novelist, derived from her social anxiety. Austen disappeared into her characters, Miller claims, in order to escape her own marginalized status as an unmarried female. ‘Behind the glory of [Austen’s] style’s willed evacuation of substance lies the ignominy of a subject’s hopelessly insufficient social realization, just as behind [her] style’s ahistorical impersonality lies the historical impasse of someone whose social representation doubles for social humiliation’ (emphasis in original).99 Keats, like Chatterton and Austen, has been viewed as a writer who hid behind masks or assumed the voices of others in order to gain an authority he did not possess as a middle-class youth trained as a surgeon-apothecary. Thomas McFarland argues that Keats adopts in his poems what McFarland calls the masks of Camelot and of Hellenism, both of which were settings

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already popular in literature of the Romantic era. ‘The whole point of the Keatsian masks’, McFarland writes, ‘was to convert a felt inadequacy in the author into a visage that could be readily accepted by the reading public of his time’. ‘Unlike Wordsworth’, according to McFarland, ‘Keats achieves his greatness not through the truth-telling of a primary self, but through the masks of a presented self speaking from the worlds of Camelot and Hellas.’100 Keats can be said to assume the voices of others not by literally pretending to be another person as Chatterton did but by his habit of imitating the styles of various literary role models. Marjorie Levinson calls Keats’s poetry ‘aggressively literary’ (emphasis in original) to the point of being parodic. According to Levinson, Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ model of literary relationships does not apply to Keats but only to those writers who regard themselves as legitimate heirs of their national literary tradition. The ‘Cockney’ Keats, as he was labelled by conservative reviewers, paradoxically had to establish his legitimacy by proving his derivativeness from more respected literary figures such as Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth and, of course, Shakespeare.101 By composing poems like ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ filled with allusions to other writers’ works, Keats succeeded in earning a place ‘among the English poets’ (Letters, 1: 394); by surrendering his identity, he became ‘a Man of Achievement’ like his hero Shakespeare. In this sense we can qualify the point made previously and say that Keats is both a subjective, lyric poet and a self-distancing, dramatic one.102 Keats’s strategy for achieving status and fame by cultivating self-loss is also a trait he shares with Edmund Kean, another socially discredited Romantic artist who gained recognition by assuming the identities of Shakespeare’s characters. Hazlitt in his Round Table essay ‘On Actors and Acting’ describes players as the ultimate practitioners of Negative Capability, always inhabiting other people, so that ‘The height of their ambition is to be beside themselves’ and ‘To-day kings, to-morrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves, that they are nothing’ (4: 153). As Peter Thomson notes, however, it may be more accurate to place actors ‘in the camp of the “egotistical sublime”’ rather than that of the ‘camelion poet’. Certainly Kean was ambitious, even megalomaniacal according to some.103 The fact that his favourite Shakespeare roles were those of underdogs and marginalized figures like himself also challenges the idea that Kean was a chameleon who disappeared into the identities of other characters; instead, he can be said to have chosen roles that would permit him to express his own feelings and perspective. It is interesting that Keats in his December 1817 review of Kean states that ‘He feels his being as deeply as Wordsworth, or any other of our intellectual monopolists’ (Hampstead Keats, 5: 231). As he praises

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Kean’s skill in inhabiting Shakespeare’s characters, he also ascribes to him a core identity as authentic and inalienable as that of the ‘egotistical’ Wordsworth. When Keats says that he wishes to make ‘as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting’ (Letters, 2: 139), he aspires to the kind of fame (and wealth) acquired through assuming other identities that Kean’s example illustrated. Of course it could be argued that Shakespeare himself participated in the same strategy of practising self-loss in order to achieve fame, wealth and social status. As the son of an upwardly mobile glover, who himself sought to establish a genteel family estate and lineage, the chameleon Shakespeare was obviously socially ambitious. The fact that he was ridiculed in the 1590s as an ‘upstart Crow’ by the university-educated Robert Greene reflects the resistance he encountered from members of more privileged classes, who resented a mere actor’s and social inferior’s success as a playwright. In Keats’s own time, Shakespeare’s humble background was often stressed. Hazlitt, in a passage Keats copies into a 13 March 1819 letter to George and Georgiana Keats, states that Shakespeare in Coriolanus reflects a fascination with power and an indifference to the common people ‘perhaps from some feeling of contempt for his own origin’ (Letters, 2: 74). The ‘peasant poet’ John Clare commonly linked Shakespeare and Chatterton to the point that, as John Goodridge remarks, for Clare Shakespeare ‘never seems to be too far away when Chatterton is on the agenda’. Keegan proposes that Clare associated (and identified with) the two writers because ‘both Shakespeare’s and Chatterton’s less-than-perfect pedigrees invited some readers to question the authenticity of their literary production – much as Clare’s detractors distrusted the achievements of a “peasant poet.”’104 In August 1819, Richard Woodhouse gave £50 to Keats because, as he told Taylor, ‘Whatever People regret that they could not do for Shakespeare or Chatterton, because he did not live in their time, that I would embody into a Rational principle, and . . . do for Keats’ (Letters, 2: 151). Woodhouse here links Shakespeare, Chatterton and Keats as disadvantaged writers without the gentleman’s luxury of a private income. Keats himself associated Chatterton and Shakespeare, first in ‘To George Felton Mathew’, where the persecuted Chatterton is greeted by ‘warm-hearted Shakspeare’ in the afterlife (57). Both writers, along with others mentioned, demonstrate ‘the fearful dearth of human kindness / To those who strove with the bright golden wing / Of genius, to flap away each sting / Thrown by the pitiless world’ (62–5). In the original Preface to Endymion, Chatterton (to whom Endymion is dedicated) is called ‘the most English of Poets except Shakspeare’ (Poems of John Keats, 738). Keats, like Clare and Woodhouse, classifies Shakespeare

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with Chatterton as struggling geniuses insufficiently appreciated by their societies. A. C. Bradley in 1909 remarked that Keats ‘was at a disadvantage in intellectual training and acquisitions, like the young Shakespeare among the University wits’.105 By celebrating Negative Capability as the quality that ‘went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare posessed so enormously’, Keats may well have identified a strategy he shared with his Presider and with others who came from middleclass backgrounds or marginalized groups and paradoxically succeeded in literature or the arts by effacing their own identities. What Shakespeare accomplished by disappearing into his characters Keats accomplished both by empathically entering into the scenes and objects he describes and by absorbing and reproducing the styles of other writers, including Shakespeare himself.

Antony and Cleopatra Despite the widespread agreement that Shakespeare was one of Keats’s most important literary precursors, surprisingly few studies have explored in-depth parallels between the two writers’ works. R. S. White’s and Caroline Spurgeon’s are the only books on Keats and Shakespeare, and both specifically treat Keats’s marginalia rather than the broader topic of Shakespeare’s influence on Keats’s poetry (J. M. Murry’s Keats and Shakespeare, despite the title, is chiefly a study of Keats’s life and poetic career with periodic, rather impressionistic references to parallels between the two writers). Jonathan Bate’s two chapters on Keats in Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination provide probably the most extensive treatment of the subject, but one would assume that much more could be written on such a rich topic. The majority of publications on intertextual relations between Shakespeare’s plays or poems and Keats’s work have been articles or notes pointing out isolated echoes of the former in the latter.106 This fact may indicate the extent to which Keats did focus on particular passages in Shakespeare rather than on larger matters of theme, structure or characterization. Nonetheless, a few plays – particularly King Lear and Hamlet – have been identified as more substantial sources of influence on important concepts, figures and motifs in Keats’s poetry.107 Another play that may have had a significant and pervasive impact on Keats’s work but whose influence has received relatively little attention is Antony and Cleopatra.108 There is abundant evidence for Keats’s close reading of and interest in the play. He mentions to Haydon on 11 May 1817 that he has recently been

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reading Antony and Cleopatra and quotes six passages from the text (Letters, 1: 144). According to White, Antony and Cleopatra has ‘the highest actual number of markings in the Johnson-Steevens edition’; it also contains the longest marginal note Keats wrote in this seven-volume set of Shakespeare’s plays.109 Another marginal note in the same edition quotes ‘Your Crown’s awry / I’ll mend it’ (5. 2. 318–19) in response to one of Johnson’s commentaries on the play (Hampstead Keats, 278–9). Several other of Keats’s references to the play have already been mentioned: his comparison of an attractive woman he has met to Charmian and his conception of a heroic painting as ‘large, prominent, round and colour’d with magnificence – somewhat like the feel I have of Antony and Cleopatra’ (Letters, 1: 395–6, 265). Keats also mentions Cleopatra in a 9 July 1818 letter to his brother Tom (Letters, 1: 320) and in the poems ‘Welcome joy, and welcome sorrow’ and ‘Fragment of Castle-builder’. Perhaps the most significant and intriguing piece of evidence for Antony and Cleopatra’s importance to Keats is Bryan Waller Procter’s (‘Barry Cornwall’) statement in an 8 May 1820 letter to John Scott that this was Keats’s favourite play. Leonidas M. Jones, who reports the statement, claims that Procter ‘probably heard of Keats’s preference for Antony and Cleopatra from Keats himself’, since he had met Keats several times in 1820, beginning in March.110 Jones, however, is sceptical of the validity of Procter’s information, noting that Keats refers to Hamlet and King Lear more frequently than he does to Antony and Cleopatra, and he concurs with W. J. Bate’s assessment that Lear should be considered the ‘central Shakespearean influence’ on Keats. After all, Jones claims, ‘Keats wrote no “On Sitting Down to Read Antony and Cleopatra Again” to separate escapist romance from “the agonies, the strife / Of human hearts”’.111 Although Jones cites ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’ to demonstrate the superior importance of Lear over Antony and Cleopatra for Keats, the sonnet actually points towards a major parallel between the latter play and Keats’s poetry that has been overlooked in Keats scholarship. The conflict Keats describes in this sonnet between ‘Romance’ or a literature of sensuous luxury, remote from familiar existence, characterized as an exotic, deceptive woman (‘golden-tongued Romance, with serene lute! / Fair plumed syren, queen of far-away!’), and a literature that confronts the harsh facts of life and exhibits traditionally masculine qualities of judgment and self-determination (‘Let me not wander in a barren dream. . . . Give me new phoenix wings to fly at my desire’) was central to Keats’s career. In fact, Keats’s career is often described as an evolution from Romance or ‘the realm . . . Of Flora, and old Pan’ to a more tragic or realistic mode that

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accepts ‘the agonies, the strife / Of human hearts’ as Keats characterized the two types and stages of poetry in ‘Sleep and Poetry’ (101–2, 124–5). The Shakespeare play that itself is structured around similar conflicts between a feminine world of luxury and emotion and a masculine world of stoicism, duty and reason, however, is not King Lear but Antony and Cleopatra. To the extent that this play informed Keats’s own treatment of the competing attractions of ‘sensations’ and ‘thoughts’ (see Letters, 1: 185), romance and reality, or masculine and feminine attributes, one would have to consider its influence significant indeed. As the lines from ‘Sleep and Poetry’ indicate, Keats’s conflict between opposing value systems and literary modes is apparent from the start of his career. It is especially conspicuous in his narrative poems which feature love relationships, usually between a mortal man and a supernatural woman. Endymion is the first major work in which these conflicts are central (and it was the poem Keats began writing when he first reports reading Antony and Cleopatra). Subtitled ‘A Poetic Romance’ and based on the myth of a Greek shepherd who was loved by the moon goddess, visited by her in his dreams, and eventually immortalized, it appears to have been intended to validate the power of love and imagination to provide escape from the common, mortal world to a finer realm of existence. In the first book Endymion, who is a ‘shepherd prince’ (2. 43) or man of authority in Keats’s poem rather than a mere shepherd, defends his obsession with a visionary woman to his sister Peona. In an impassioned celebration of love, Endymion declares the supreme happiness to be a ‘fellowship divine’ in which two beings ‘Melting into [love’s] radiance . . . blend, / Mingle, and so become a part of it’ (1. 778, 810–11). ‘Aye, so delicious is the unsating food’ of love, Endymion claims, ‘That men, who might have tower’d in the van / Of all the congregated world . . . Have been content to let occasion die, / Whilst they did sleep in love’s elysium’ (1. 816–23). Powerful men who might have gained renown for their heroic deeds happily abandon their ambitions in order to sleep, merge and mingle in union with their beloveds. At the beginning of book 2, the narrator prioritizes love over masculine exploits in terms similar to Endymion’s, as he claims that tales of tragic passion such as Romeo and Juliet, Cymbeline and Hero and Leander are superior to epics of battle and adventure such as The Iliad, The Odyssey and The Aeneid (2. 1–43). Despite these defences of love, dream and bliss over action and ambition, the poem expresses doubts about the validity and worth of Endymion’s quest for his visionary lover. Such scepticism is first voiced by Peona, whose response to her brother’s account of a meeting with the moon goddess is to

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chide him for neglecting his proper duties and his chance to make a name for himself in the world; ‘Why pierce high-fronted honour to the quick / For nothing but a dream?’ she concludes (1. 759–60). Not only does Peona believe that Endymion is shamefully neglecting his masculine responsibilities for preoccupations more suited to a lovelorn maiden (see 1. 723–36); she suspects that the woman he loves is a mere figment of his imagination. Near the end of the poem, Endymion agrees with her as he forswears his quest and declares that ‘I have clung / To nothing, lov’d a nothing, nothing seen / Or felt but a great dream!’ (4. 636–8). In the course of the poem, other developments challenge the premise that a relationship with a goddess is worth sacrificing all other earthly rewards for. In book 3 Glaucus, who has many similarities with Endymion, enters into a sensuous, idyllic union with a seductive woman who ‘did so breathe ambrosia; so immerse / My fine existence in a golden clime. / She took me like a child of suckling time, / And cradled me in roses’ (3. 454–7). To his horror, however, ‘this arbitrary queen of sense’ to whom he ‘bow’d a tranced vassal’ (3. 459–60) turns out to be Circe, who transforms her lovers into beasts. This episode raises the fear that surrendering oneself to a powerful, exotic woman could prove deadly, as the woman may be a witch who betrays her emasculated lovers. In book 4, a new complication is introduced when Endymion meets and falls in love with an Indian maid and is torn between his desire for both a mortal and an immortal woman, for life in the human world of flux and sorrow and for a permanent state of bliss. The conclusion of the poem miraculously solves Endymion’s dilemma by making the moon goddess and the Indian maid one and the same woman, but few readers have been satisfied with this abrupt, artificially convenient outcome. Shortly after he finished Endymion Keats wrote his King Lear sonnet, bidding farewell to ‘syren’ Romance and embracing Shakespearean tragedy. Keats’s conflicts between love and ambition, romance and reality, took on new urgency in 1819 after the poet fell deeply in love for the first time. The experience of love thus became more palpable to Keats than ever before, but it also exacerbated his insecurities and what he admitted was his ‘Prejudice’ and ‘not . . . right feeling towards Women’ (Letters, 1: 341–2). Keats’s anxieties about his attractiveness to the opposite sex and distrust of women probably stemmed both from his short stature, so that he does not suppose women ‘care whether Mister John Keats five feet hight [sic] likes them or not’ (Letters, 1: 342), and from his relationship with his mother. Keats was 8 years old when his father died suddenly; his mother remarried just over 2 months after the funeral, leaving John and the other children

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with her mother; she later returned to the family ill with tuberculosis and died when Keats was 14. As Leon Waldoff argues, Keats thus lost his mother twice, and the experience is likely to have left him with a distrust of women’s constancy and a fear of being abandoned by them.112 Such attitudes are expressed in Endymion by the Circe episode in which a lovermother figure (‘She took me like a child of suckling time / And cradled me in roses’) turns out to be a deadly witch, and by both the moon goddess’s and the Indian Maid’s habit of vanishing just when Endymion believes he possesses them. Certainly Keats was never confident in Fanny Brawne’s love but was haunted by ‘the fear of [her] being a little inclined to the Cressid’ as he wrote to her in February 1820 (Letters, 2: 256). His relationship with Fanny brought to the fore his suspicions of, and anxieties about, women, as is made clear in the many passages in his letters to her expressing jealousy, possessiveness and doubts about her love for him (e.g. Letters, 2: 123,132, 290–1, 303–4, 312). At other times, Keats declares his absolute devotion to her, as when he writes, ‘I will imagine you Venus tonight and pray, pray, pray to your star like a Hethen [sic]’ and ‘Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you. . . . You have ravish’d me away by a Power I cannot resist’ (Letters, 2: 133, 223–4). As his letters to Fanny Brawne attest, Keats also regarded his love for her as a threat to his poetic ambitions. ‘Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom,’ he writes in July 1820 (Letters, 2: 123). Keats throughout the summer and early fall was working on Otho the Great, Lamia and The Fall of Hyperion in a desperate bid for literary and financial success. His writing, he says, requires determination, focus and repression of romantic desire, though the latter is always threatening to overpower him. ‘Thank God for my diligence!’ he writes to Fanny on 5 August 1819, ‘were it not for that I should be miserable. I encourage it, and strive not to think of you – but when I have succeeded in doing so all day and as far as midnight, you return as soon as this artificial excitement goes off more severely from the fever I am left in’ (Letters, 2: 137). A few weeks later he apologizes to her for an ‘unloverlike’ letter, saying he is too busy to indulge in thoughts of love, and ‘My heart seems now made of iron.’ By the end of the letter, however, his resistance to tender feelings and erotic desire begins to break down: ‘it seems to me that a few more moments thought of you would uncrystallize and dissolve me – I must not give way to it – but turn to my writing again – if I fail I shall die hard – O my love, your lips are growing sweet again to my fancy – I must forget them’ (Letters, 2: 141–2). In this passage, Keats is clearly torn between his ambition as a poet and his love for Fanny Brawne, which he regards as

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mutually exclusive commitments. His reference to being ‘uncrystallized’ and ‘dissolved’ by thoughts of Fanny are reminiscent of the mingling, melting and merging in love’s radiance that Endymion celebrates. At this point, however, Keats both desires and fears that dissolution of identity. In fact, Margaret Homans believes that Keats’s shift from celebrating the selfless chameleon poet to valuing identity and a stable sense of self was prompted by his relationship with Fanny Brawne. Fearing her power to ‘absorb [him] in spite of [him]self’ (Letters, 2: 133) Keats, according to Homans, reverts to the assumption of ‘a specifically masculine authority and subjectivity’ as ‘a necessary . . . antidote to [Fanny’s] threat to his identity – a sense of identity he scarcely thought he wanted, until he felt she would take it from him’.113 In Antony and Cleopatra, Keats would have found strikingly similar conflicts between a realm of love, sensuality and abandonment to another, represented by Cleopatra’s Egypt, and the Roman world of duty, self-discipline and masculine reputation and power in the public realm, presided over by Octavius Caesar. Antony is frequently derided by other men for forsaking his duties as he luxuriates in Egypt and allows Cleopatra to dominate him. As Philo contemptuously remarks in the first scene, ‘The triple pillar of the world [is] transformed / Into a strumpet’s fool’ (1. 1. 12–13). In the second act Pompey, leading a rebellion against Rome, hopes that Antony will remain out of the way in Egypt and characterizes his life there as an orgy of sensual gratification: all the charms of love, Salt Cleopatra, soften thy wan’d lip! Let witchcraft join with beauty, lust with both, Tie up the libertine in a field of feasts, Keep his brain fuming – Epicurean cooks Sharpen with cloyless sauce his appetite, That sleep and feeding may prorogue his honor, Even till a Lethe’d dullness. (2. 1. 20–7) Antony himself later calls for wine to ‘[steep] our sense / In soft and delicate Lethe’ (2. 7. 107–8), a passage that has been associated with ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.114 Egypt is a world of pleasure, appetite, emotion and languorous ease, presided over by the wanton Cleopatra, who appears witchlike in her ability to captivate and enfeeble warriors, much like Circe in Keats’s Endymion. Her world is also similar to ‘the realm . . . Of Flora, and old Pan’ and of ‘golden-tongued Romance’ in Keats’s poetry.

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Throughout the play Antony is torn between the worlds of Egypt and Rome. In the first scene he dismisses the latter and commits himself to the former as he declares, ‘Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch / Of the rang’d empire fall! Here is my space, / Kingdoms are clay. . . . the nobleness of life / Is to do thus [embracing] – when such a mutual pair / And such a twain can do’t’ (1. 1. 33–8). Like Endymion in book 1 and the narrator in book 2 of Keats’s poem, Antony prioritizes love over war and ambition. After a messenger brings news of military and political developments in Rome, however, Antony resolves to return there, saying, ‘These strong Egyptian fetters I must break, / Or lose myself in dotage’ (1. 2. 116–17) and ‘I must from this enchanting queen break off’ (1. 2. 128). Suddenly he fears being emasculated and entrapped by a powerful, ‘enchanting’ woman, much as Glaucus in Endymion wakes from his idyllic tryst to discover that he has become the ‘tranced vassal’ (3. 460) of an evil woman with supernatural powers, or as Keats fears that Fanny Brawne has ‘entrammelled’ him and may sabotage his poetic ambitions. Antony frequently doubts Cleopatra’s loyalty to him. These suspicions come to a head when his naval fleet defects to Caesar and Antony holds Cleopatra responsible, declaring, ‘This foul Egyptian hath betrayed me’ (4. 12. 10). In his anger he loads her with derisive epithets, calling her a ‘Triple-turn’d whore’, ‘false soul of Egypt!’, ‘grave charm’, ‘gypsy’ and ‘witch’ (4. 12. 13, 25, 28, 47). He also says that Cleopatra ‘has robb’d me of my sword’ (4. 14. 23), implying that she has stolen his virility. In a passage that Keats both underlined and quoted in a marginal note, Antony refers to the shifting and dispersing shapes of clouds to characterize his own sense of self-dissolution after what he believes is Cleopatra’s betrayal, saying, ‘here I am Antony, / Yet cannot hold this visible shape’ (4. 14. 2–14).115 Like Keats who fears that thoughts of Fanny Brawne will ‘uncrystallize and dissolve’ him, Antony believes that his love for Cleopatra has undermined the integrity of his own identity.116 When Mardian tells him (falsely) that Cleopatra has killed herself, however, Antony once again commits himself to her and decides to die in order to ‘o’ertake thee, Cleopatra, and / Weep for thy pardon’ (4. 14. 44–5). Like Keats in his letters to Fanny Brawne, Antony is torn between allegiance to a masculine world of heroic deeds, reputation and fixed ego boundaries and self-dissolution in erotic abandonment to the woman he loves. Besides representing emotion and sensuality, Cleopatra also is allied with art and the imagination in contrast to Roman reason and empirical reality. After Antony’s death, Cleopatra tells the Roman soldier Dolabella that she ‘dreamt there was an Emperor Antony’ (5. 2. 76) and goes on to describe

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the Antony of her dream in grandiose terms in a passage beginning ‘His legs bestrid the ocean, his reared arm / Crested the world’ and including the lines, ‘For his bounty, / There was no winter in’t, an [autumn] it was / That grew the more by reaping’ (5. 2. 82–92), which Flesch believes Keats alludes to in ‘To Autumn’. Cleopatra asks Dolabella if he believes ‘there was or might be such a man / As this I dreamt of?’ to which he responds ‘no’, denying that such an ideal being could actually exist (5. 2. 93–4). She, however, asserts that her vision of a larger-than-life Antony is true. As Janet Adelman notes, the passage demonstrates the way love ‘creates its own imaginative versions of reality’. The conclusion of the play overall, in which the two lovers declare they will meet and love forever in the afterlife, is expressed in such gorgeous, moving language that we are left with ‘the feeling of assent in spite of all logic’.117 Keats early in his career famously declared that ‘The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth. I am the more zealous in this affair, because I have never yet been able to perceive how any thing can be known for truth by consequitive reasoning’ (Letters, 1: 185). Keats here speaks like Cleopatra in declaring the power of the imagination to make one’s dreams a reality, even if this belief defies the way truth and reality are defined by ‘consequitive reasoning’. The story of Endymion likewise is based on the premise that an ideal woman encountered in dreams can turn out to be real if one persists in pursuing and believing in her. White believes that Antony and Cleopatra gave Keats ‘precedent for believing in the truth of imagination’ in that the principal characters ‘do not allow literal reality to dislodge their imaginative conceptions of each other’, citing Cleopatra’s ‘His legs bestrid the ocean’ speech as illustration.118 In the play, however, the lovers’ visions are opposed in numerous ways. Antony as we have seen is criticized for ‘mak[ing] his will / Lord of his reason’ (3. 13. 3–4) by following Cleopatra. Enobarbus, who speaks the above line, frequently deflates Antony’s romantic declarations with cynical remarks, many of which Keats underscored in his copy of the play.119 The self-disciplined, pragmatic Caesar proves victorious over the lovers, thereby calling into question the validity of their beliefs. Keats’s work also expresses distrust of the imagination, especially a visionary form that transports one away from the familiar world to a timeless realm of bliss. If he declares his faith in the truth of the imagination in the November 1817 letter to Bailey, in March 1818 he tells Bailey, ‘I am sometimes so very skeptical as to think Poetry itself a mere Jack a lanthern to amuse whoever may chance to be struck with its brilliance’ (Letters, 1: 242). As we have seen, Endymion in various ways calls into question the protagonist’s commitment to his visionary

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goddess, denouncing her as ‘nothing but a dream’, and Keats’s King Lear sonnet rejects Romance, which creates an ideal but false portrait of existence, for art that depicts a more painful but accurate version of human life. In his odes, Keats challenges the ideal world of art and the imagination, finds it false and cold, and increasingly embraces the empirical world he initially sought to transcend. Keats’s poems, like Antony and Cleopatra, frequently juxtapose belief in and distrust of dreams and the imagination. Several critics have claimed that one of the major elements in Shakespeare’s plays to which Keats responded was their many contrasts and oppositions, a principle that is also central to Keats’s poetry.120 Of all Shakespeare’s plays, Antony and Cleopatra may be the one most conspicuously structured around contrasting perspectives. Carol Cook states that it is ‘arguably the most schematic of Shakespeare’s plays. Though Shakespeare uses schematic oppositions throughout his dramatic corpus . . . the detail with which the oppositions are worked out in Antony and Cleopatra is exceptional, as though binariness itself . . . is offered to our attention.’121 Moreover, the particular oppositions the play treats – imagination and reality, emotion and reason, love and work, self-loss and self-affirmation, sensation and thoughts, luxury and stoicism, feminine and masculine – are those that most haunted Keats’s work. The special distinction of Antony and Cleopatra, however, is not simply its binary oppositions but its radical ambiguity. The question of which world and value system, that of Egypt or Rome, is privileged in the play has been exhaustively debated, and most critics now concur with the view that neither prevails over the other but that the play presents the pros and cons, the validity and hollowness, of both.122 The play’s ambiguity centres around the motives and personalities of the major characters, especially Cleopatra. As we have seen, various characters in the play, including Antony, both condemn her in the harshest terms as a whore, a witch and a gypsy and also praise her as a goddess, a ‘great fairy’ (4. 8. 12), and ‘a lass unparallel’d’ (5. 2. 316). Not only is she perceived as both benign goddess and demon but in her ‘infinite variety’ (2. 2. 235) she appears as a larger-than-life, supernatural being and as a common woman. Keats marked Cleopatra’s jealous desire to learn how tall Antony’s wife Octavia is (2. 5. 118), a passage White says reflects Keats’s interest in the ‘petty humanity’ of ‘grand, heroic’ characters.123 Keats also asterisked Antony’s remark to Cleopatra, ‘Fie, wrangling queen!’ (1. 1. 48), and wrote his longest note in the Johnson and Steevens volumes in response: ‘How much more Shakespeare delights in dwelling upon the romantic and wildly natural than upon the monumental – see Winter’s Tale, “When you do dance.” &c’ (Hampstead Keats, 278). Keats’s

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comment, as White states, celebrates the ‘uncontrollable turbulence of the emotions of the lovers’, but as Spurgeon emphasizes it also relishes the way Antony’s remark humanizes the lovers and brings them ‘down to the normal and natural’.124 Cleopatra as Keats recognized is a complex, ambiguous figure whom others perceive as alternately ideal, depraved and approachably human. She is both romance and reality, like the moon goddess and the Indian Maid combined. If Cleopatra’s character and motives are in question, however, so are Antony’s. He too is a mixed figure, ‘painted one way like a Gorgon, / The other way’s a Mars’ (2. 5. 116–17). As is the case with Cleopatra, some characters in the play praise him extravagantly (Agrippa calls him ‘The god of Jupiter’ and ‘Arabian bird’ [3. 2. 10, 12]), while others abuse him for his folly, weakness and degradation. Moreover, if Antony has reason to suspect Cleopatra’s love and faithfulness to him, she likewise has reason to doubt his loyalty to her. When the play opens, he is married to Fulvia, who Cleopatra believes has more power over Antony than she does (1. 3. 22–3). Of herself she says, ‘O, never was there queen / So mightily betrayed’ (1. 3. 24–5). As she goes on to reason, ‘Why should I think you can be mine, and true / (Though you in swearing shake the throned gods), / Who have been false to Fulvia?’ (1. 3. 27–9). Since Antony is cheating on his wife in his affair with Cleopatra, the latter has good reason to suspect that he will not be faithful to her either. Her doubts are confirmed when Antony returns to Rome and, his wife Fulvia having died, marries Octavia in order to cement his alliance with Caesar. In this case, his bond with a powerful man and desire for political influence supersede his love for Cleopatra. Antony proves no more constant to Octavia or Caesar than he does to Cleopatra, however, for despite his protestations of loyalty to both, he soon is in conflict with Caesar and has abandoned Octavia and returned to Cleopatra in Egypt. Even this action may not be motivated purely by his love for Cleopatra, however, for he only decides to return to Egypt after a soothsayer tells him that he will always have ill luck when Caesar is nearby.125 Certainly there is abundant evidence of the instability of Antony’s devotion to the Egyptian queen, so that she may well be justified for her impulses to distrust him and look out for her own safety. Octavius Caesar is also an ambiguous character whom some readers admire for his temperance, pragmatism and ability to rule passion with reason but whom others find ‘cold, Machiavellian, mean-spirited, and a little priggish’.126 Caesar does defeat the forces of Antony of Cleopatra, but for many readers the lovers ultimately prove victorious over him in the grandiosity of their passion, which appears to transcend death as

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well as Caesar’s political schemes. As with the other principal characters, the play generates conflicting perspectives on Caesar’s motives, virtues and flaws. Even the genre of Antony and Cleopatra has provoked controversy. For many commentators, the play contains too many comic and satiric elements to be considered a tragedy, and some feel that it anticipates Shakespeare’s romances in its celebration of the power of love and imagination to create their own reality. Adelman argues that Antony and Cleopatra occupies a middle ground between tragedy and romance. In Shakespeare’s romances, the marvellous literally becomes real, as in The Winter’s Tale when Leontes’s kiss awakens Hermione from her condition as a statue. In Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra’s kiss does not save Antony from death as she desires (4. 15. 39–40), but both of the lovers speak so passionately about reuniting in the afterlife that we partly believe in their eternal union, even though we are never given proof of it. Instead, all that we witness at the play’s end are Caesar and his men viewing and commenting upon the dead bodies of Cleopatra and her attendants. ‘The symbolic pattern of reunion’, Adelman writes, ‘begins to take precedence over any literal-minded questions about how precisely the lovers plan to be together. At these moments, the modes of tragedy and romance are competing; and we must be willing to acknowledge the claims of both.’127 Another dimension of Keats’s concept of Negative Capability is relevant to the rich ambiguity of Antony and Cleopatra. Keats’s defines Negative Capability (‘which Shakespeare posessed so enormously’) as that condition ‘when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason – Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge’ (Letters, 1: 193–4). The truth of human experience is complex, Keats suggests, and those who wish to come closest to understanding and conveying it must remain open to new information and be comfortable with loose ends and grey areas rather than neat conclusions and fixed opinions. A similar point of view is expressed in a 24 September 1819 letter in which Keats explains a flaw in his friend Charles Dilke’s personality. ‘Dilke’, Keats writes, is ‘a Man who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he has made up his Mind about every thing. The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up ones mind about nothing – to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts. Not a select party. . . . Dilke will never come at a truth as long as he lives; because he is always trying at it’ (Letters, 2: 213). Truth for Keats is best acquired by open-mindedness, by discarding

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preconceived notions and entertaining multiple points of view. The greatest artists, exemplified by Shakespeare, create works that reflect this Negatively Capable embrace of multiplicity. All of Shakespeare’s plays can be said to have this quality, but Antony and Cleopatra is arguably his most indeterminable work and the one most productive of competing readings. Deats calls it Shakespeare’s ‘most anamorphic drama, a judgment validated by 350 years of vehemently conflicting interpretations’.128 Keats’s narrative love poems of 1819 most closely parallel the method and achievement of Antony and Cleopatra. The Eve of St. Agnes and Lamia present multiple perspectives in their treatment of male–female relationships, creating a rich ambiguity much like that of Shakespeare’s play regarding victims and predators and competing value systems.129 Homans believes that, however empathetic Keats was generally, he was unable to enter into the feelings of women but instead preferred to keep them at a distance as ‘objects of vision’.130 Although this conclusion may be valid based on the evidence of Keats’s letters, it does not accurately characterize the poems. In his best works Keats achieved the open-minded Negative Capability he praised in Shakespeare. As has frequently been noted, The Eve of St. Agnes is indebted to Romeo and Juliet, featuring as it does young lovers whose families are mortal enemies, a nurse who assists the lovers and a number of other plot parallels and verbal echoes.131 The poem also has important similarities to Antony and Cleopatra, however, which have gone unremarked. Like that play, St. Agnes is structured around contrasts – youth and age, cold and warmth, sensuousness and asceticism, love and hatred, belief and scepticism – which signify competing values and experiences. On one hand are the young lovers, who are associated with images of heat (‘across the moors, / Had come young Porphyro, with heart on fire / For Madeline’ [74–6]), warm colours (‘Full on this casement shone the wintry moon, / And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast . . . Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest / And on her silver cross soft amethyst’ [217–21]) and rich food (‘candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd; / With jellies soother than the creamy curd, / And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon’ [265–7]). When Porphyro ‘melt[s]’ into Madeline’s dream the two unite in a ‘Solution sweet’ (320, 322), much as Endymion ‘melt[s]’ into love’s radiance in his ecstatic encounters with the moon goddess. Opposed to the lovers are the severe winter weather, the elderly Beadsman who denies himself all pleasures of the flesh and Madeline’s father the Baron and his ‘warrior-guests’ (373) who would attack Porphyro if they caught him in the castle. As in Antony and Cleopatra, a world of passion and sensuality at the centre of which is a beautiful, desirable

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woman is contrasted to a world of harsh conditions, stoicism and violence presided over by powerful men. The plot of Keats’s poem revolves around the legend of St. Agnes’ Eve, according to which a young woman who follows certain rituals will dream of her future husband. When Porphyro learns that Madeline is engaged in these rituals he decides to play along and appear in her bedroom as the lover of her dream. In fact, Madeline not only dreams of Poryphro but then wakes to find him at her bedside. Earl Wasserman interprets this incident to reflect Keats’s faith in the imagination, as expressed in his November 1817 letter that declares ‘the Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth’ (Letters, 1: 185). Wasserman also argues that when Porphyro unites with Madeline – ‘Etherial, flush’d, and like a throbbing star / Seen mid the sapphire heaven’s deep repose; / Into her dream he melted’ (318–20) – he enters a heavenly state.132 Like Cleopatra whose dream of Antony as a mythic figure she declares to be true, Madeline’s dream of her ideal lover is realized. Like both Antony and Cleopatra who imagine an eternal life together beyond the grave, the lovers in Keats’s poem are transported by their passion to a heightened reality beyond the ordinary, empirical world. And yet The Eve of St. Agnes, like Antony and Cleopatra, is filled with jarring elements that call into question its ostensible celebration of love and the imagination. Jack Stillinger in an influential reading interprets Porphyro as a calculating seducer who takes advantage of Madeline’s credulous belief in a superstitious ritual in order to have sex with her while she is not fully awake. Madeline herself, according to Stillinger, is a self-deluded figure whose belief in dreams renders her the victim of an unscrupulous man. In Stillinger’s reading of St. Agnes the imagination is false and untrustworthy, and the poem advances the claim that ‘an individual ought not to lose touch with the realities of this world’. Stillinger elsewhere characterizes the major poems of 1819, including The Eve of St. Agnes, as ‘anti-romances’ and ‘skeptical lyrics’ that reject the visionary and marvellous for a firm grounding in the here and now.133 Some readers have discerned in Madeline not a victim of Porphyro’s ‘stratagem’ (139) but a seducer herself. Mary Arseneau points out various ‘threatening aspect[s] of Madeline’ that ally her with femmes fatales in other Keats poems, especially Lamia and the fairy lady in ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. Most significantly, when Madeline undresses she is described as ‘Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed’ (231). As both Arseneau and Fleming McClelland observe, mermaids traditionally are malign supernatural females who often lure men to their deaths. Arseneau further notes that

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when the lovers unite, it is Porphyro who is appropriated by Madeline rather than vice versa. He ‘melt[s]’ into her dream ‘as the rose / Blendeth its odour with the violet, – / Solution sweet’ (320–2). Porphyro’s identity dissolves into and blends with Madeline’s, much as Keats in his letters to Fanny Brawne speaks of being ‘absorb[ed]’ by her, his own selfhood ‘uncrystallize[d]’ and ‘dissolve[d]’ into her being.134 Porphyro also resembles Antony, who feels his identity disperse like shifting clouds. Various readings of Keats’s poem portray Madeline, like the ambiguous Cleopatra, as by turn a divine being, a deadly seductress and the victim of an unscrupulous man. Porphyro, like Antony, is a passionate lover, a cruel ‘traitor’ (Eve of St. Agnes, 330), and the victim of a powerful woman who absorbs his identity in a love union that is both feared and desired. Also like Antony and Cleopatra, The Eve of St. Agnes is composed of multiple generic conventions and shifts in tone. It contains elements of romance and of anti-romance, of tragedy and comedy, and of satire and sentiment. Madeline’s loss of virginity, the realization of which causes her to lament ‘alas! alas! and woe is mine! / Porphyro will leave me here to fade and pine. – / Cruel! What traitor could thee hither bring?’ (328–30), is a serious matter befitting a tragedy, and critics have discerned allusions in Keats’s poem to the rape of Philomel, the rape of Clarissa Harlowe in Richardson’s novel, the villainous Iachimo gazing on the sleeping Imogen in Cymbeline and Satan whispering in the ear of Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost.135 The lovers do not die, however, nor does Porphyro abandon Madeline but runs off with her presumably to make her his bride. Then again, we never learn what happens to the lovers after they ‘fled away into the storm’ (371), and Herbert Wright proposes that they may very well have perished in the hostile elements.136 Porphyro in some passages appears to be a calculating villain but in others he is a sentimental lover, as when he ‘grew faint’ at the sight of Madeline’s purity (224). Elsewhere he comes across as a comic figure; in his dramatic entrance (‘He ventures in: let no buzz’d whisper tell: / All eyes be muffled, or a hundred swords / Will storm his heart, Love’s fev’rous citadel’ [82–4]) he reminds Stuart Sperry of a campy hero of opera or melodrama.137 The harsh note on which the poem ends, with its description of the sleeping revellers’ grotesque nightmares and the report that ‘Angela the old / Died palsy-twitch’d, with meager face deform’ (375–6), ironically undercuts the breathless account of the lovers’ escape from the castle, and in lines his publisher refused to print Keats intended to make the conclusion even more stark and satirical. The poem as revised by Keats reminded Richard Woodhouse of Byron’s comic satire Don Juan, with its ‘style of mingling up sentiment & sneering’ (Letters, 2: 163). As is

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the case with Antony and Cleopatra, the complexity of Keats’s poem results in part from its blending of genres and tones. In Anne Mellor’s words, The Eve of St. Agnes ‘exquisitely balances enthusiasm with skepticism. Everything in the poem is qualified: Keats undercuts his romance with cynicism, his cynicism with romance, his seriousness with comedy, his comedy with seriousness.’138 Mellor’s comments could just as aptly be applied to Antony and Cleopatra without changing a word. Of all Keats’s poems, Lamia, written in the summer of 1819 when his conflicts over love and ambition were at their peak, most closely resembles Antony and Cleopatra. The poem is based on a story related in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, the relevant passage from which Keats included in his 1820 volume. As Burton narrates, a lamia or serpent woman ‘in the habit of a fair gentlewoman’ seduces a young Greek man, ‘a philosopher, otherwise staid and discreet, able to moderate his passions, though not this of love’, who eventually marries her. One of the wedding guests is Apollonius, who exposes the lady and her house as ‘mere illusions . . . and thereupon she, plate, house, and all that was in it, vanished in an instant’ (Poems, 475). Burton’s tale in a number of respects parallels Shakespeare’s play: both feature a rational man who is ruled by his passions when he becomes involved with a beautiful but deceptive and sinister foreigner (she tells him she is a Phoenician but turns out to be of a different species altogether). The lamia is associated not only with love or lust but also the imagination in her ability to change shapes and create illusions. Apollonius, like Caesar, is a cool, self-possessed figure who is immune to the lady’s charms; condemns her as a depraved being; and conquers her and her domain. If the story as narrated by Burton already resembles Antony and Cleopatra, however, several aspects of Keats’s development render it even more Shakespearean.139 Keats’s poem, like Shakespeare’s play, sets up contrasting worlds that reflect opposing values. Lamia’s home is a ‘purple-lined palace of sweet sin’ (2. 31) where she and Lycius dwell in luxurious repose. In opposition to her sensuous, imaginary realm is ‘the noisy world’ (2. 33) Lycius has forsaken, the public arena presided over by his former philosophy teacher Apollonius, a male authority figure associated with scientific rationalism. Lycius, like Antony, vacillates between these two worlds and may be said to perish as a result of his inability to commit himself to either unreservedly.140 In part 2, his idyllic life with his beautiful lady is disrupted when there came a thrill Of trumpets – Lycius started – the sounds fled, But left a thought, a buzzing in his head.

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For the first time, since first he harbour’d in That purple-lined palace of sweet sin, His spirit pass’d beyond its golden bourn Into the noisy world almost forsworn. The lady, ever watchful, penetrant, Saw this with pain, so arguing a want Of something more, more than her empery Of joys; and she began to moan and sigh Because he mused beyond her, knowing well That but a moment’s thought is passion’s passing bell. (2. 27–39) Just as Antony is struck by ‘a Roman thought’ (1. 2. 83) that suddenly makes him dissatisfied with his sensuous life in Egypt with Cleopatra, so Lycius is roused from his ‘long love dream’ (Endymion, 3. 440) by sounds from the busy world that make him eager to re-enter it. Lamia watches her lover’s reaction with uneasiness as she realizes that the pull of the masculine, rational, public realm will alienate him from her. ‘You have deserted me; – where am I now? / Not in your heart while care weighs on your brow: / No, no, you have dismiss’d me’ (2. 42–4), she laments, much as Cleopatra regrets Antony’s abandonment of her when his Roman allegiances become uppermost in his mind. Besides featuring a similar central conflict and trio of major characters, Lamia resembles Antony and Cleopatra in its radical ambiguity and complexity. Whereas in Burton the three principal figures are presented straightforwardly as wicked and false (the snake woman), misguided by passion (Lycius) and triumphant in his ability to discern and banish illusion (Apollonius), in Keats’s poem as in Shakespeare’s play the characters have mixed attributes that make them alternately admirable and deplorable, victim and predator. Most significantly, Keats’s Lamia is much more complex and sympathetic than Burton’s. On one hand, we see Lamia transformed from a serpent into a beautiful woman, waylay Lycius on his journey home from ‘Egina isle’ (1. 225) and tangle his life ‘in her mesh’ (1. 295), seeming to employ malign supernatural powers to ensnare the young man. In one passage she is said to have a ‘Circean head’ (1. 115) and in another she is called ‘The cruel lady, without any show / Of sorrow for her tender favourite’s woe’ (1. 290–1); in other words, she is a belle dame sans merci. She withers and vanishes when Apollonius confronts her and declares her to be ‘A Serpent’ (2. 305), and Lycius perishes as a result of his involvement with her. Many details, however, qualify the impression of Lamia as a sinister being. For one thing, we do not even know for certain if she truly is a serpent. Although we first see her as a snake, she tells Mercury, ‘I was a woman,

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let me have once more / A woman’s shape, and charming as before’ (1. 117–18). According to this account, she was originally a mortal woman who was transformed into a snake, so that when she takes on the appearance of a lovely lady she has resumed her true nature rather than a deceptive disguise. In part 2, the narrator directly states, ‘The serpent – Ha, the serpent! certes, she / Was none’ (2. 80–1). When Lamia first encounters Lycius, he regards her as a goddess and she refers to herself as such, but she eventually ‘threw the goddess off, and won his heart / More pleasantly by playing woman’s part’ (1. 336–7). The statement suggests that she is merely acting the role of a mortal woman, but it could also be construed as implying that the goddess role was the false one, since she discards it easily. Like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, Lamia is alternately an evil supernatural being, a goddess and a common woman. In addition, Lamia’s stated reason for wishing to assume a woman’s form is that she ‘love[s] a youth of Corinth’ (1. 119), and the narrator also explains how she ‘fell into a swooning love’ of Lycius (1. 219). We are not given evidence of any malicious intentions she harbours toward Lycius, and her behaviour throughout the poem suggests that she is truly devoted to him. When he decides he wants to marry her in a public ceremony, she ‘Beseech[es] him, the while his hand she wrung, / To change his purpose’ (2. 68–9), for she knows that she risks being exposed and their life together destroyed, but when he refuses to change his mind she generously agrees to conform to his wishes. In this scene, Lamia appears to be the victim of Lycius’s unfeeling tyranny. When she implores him not to go through with his wedding plans He thereat was stung, Perverse, with stronger fancy to reclaim Her wild and timid nature to his aim: Besides, for all his love, in self despite, Against his better self, he took delight Luxurious in her sorrows, soft and new. His passion, cruel grown, took on a hue Fierce and sanguineous . . . (2. 69–76) Just as Antony at times betrays and hurts Cleopatra, so Lycius here is cruel to Lamia and exercises power over her rather than vice versa. As stated previously, Apollonius is a rational, self-possessed male authority figure like Caesar in Shakespeare’s play. Apollonius condemns Lamia and

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calls Lycius a ‘Fool’ and a ‘serpent’s prey’ (2. 291, 295, 298), much as Antony is derided as a ‘strumpet’s fool’ (1. 1. 13). With his cold, unflinching gaze, Apollonius conquers Lamia, thereby demonstrating the triumph of unsentimental reason and empirical reality over passion and illusion. As Lamia withers and fades ‘with a frightful scream’ (2. 306) under Apollonius’s stern gaze, however, she comes across as a sympathetic victim and he as a heartless oppressor. The narrator offers the following condemnation of the world-view and values Apollonius represents: Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine – Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade. (2. 229–38) As others have noted, the critique of Enlightenment rationalism in this passage is similar to that in Keats’s review of Edmund Kean, where Keats calls on Kean to ‘Cheer us a little in the failure of our days! for romance lives but in books. The goblin is driven from the heath, and the rainbow is robbed of its mystery!’ (Hampstead Keats, 232). Both passages are indebted to Hazlitt’s claim in his lecture ‘On Poetry in General’ that ‘the progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry’ (5: 9).141 In Lamia as in Antony and Cleopatra, reason triumphs over romance and the imagination, but in dying the lovers gain more sympathy for their point of view than does the man who defeats them. Also like Antony and Cleopatra (and The Eve of St. Agnes), Lamia is unusual in its mixture of tones and generic conventions. Probably in reaction to the hostile reviews of Endymion, Keats wanted in Lamia to ‘use more finesse with the Public’ and write a poem that ‘cannot be laugh’d at in any way’. He felt ‘There was no objection of this kind to Lamia’ and had ‘great hopes of success’ with the poem ‘because I make use of my Judgment more deliberately than I yet have done’ (Letters, 2: 174, 128). The poem reflects this concern to forestall ridicule with a knowing, satirical narrator who

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often makes worldly-wise, cynical remarks, such as this at the opening of part 2: Love in a hut, with water and a crust, Is – Love, forgive us! – cinders, ashes, dust; Love in a palace is perhaps at last More grievous torment than a hermit’s fast: – That is a doubtful tale from faery land, Hard for the non-elect to understand. (2. 1–6) The initial description of Lamia as a snake is bizarre and comic, rather than ominous: she is ‘Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard, / Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr’d,’ with a serpent’s head but ‘a woman’s mouth with all its pearls complete’ (1. 49–50, 60). The narrator’s flippant comments often render the main characters silly or foolish and prevent readers from engaging with them fully. And yet, the narrator seems sincere when he condemns ‘cold philosophy’ in part 2, and the poem’s tragic conclusion does arouse sympathy for Lamia and (to a lesser extent) Lycius. The deaths of the protagonists ally the poem with tragedy, though its supernatural elements are more consistent with romance. As with Antony and Cleopatra, comedy, tragedy, satire and romance intermingle in Lamia, contributing to the work’s many-sidedness and ambiguity.142 Keats’s direct allusions to Antony and Cleopatra are not particularly revealing and by themselves might not suggest that the play was especially important to him. In addition, compared to some other Shakespeare works, we find relatively few verbal echoes of Antony and Cleopatra in Keats’s oeuvre. Nonetheless, Keats’s poems, especially his love narratives, have striking parallels with major features of Shakespeare’s tragedy. The play’s central conflicts – between passion and reason, love and ambition, luxury and discipline, the imagination and reality, selflessness and identity, masculine and feminine, belief and scepticism, realism and romance – are integral to many of Keats’s works. In addition, the central characters in Shakespeare’s play—an exotic woman who alternately appears sinister and divine, loving and treacherous; a man who wavers between adoring and condemning the lady and who himself appears cruel and disloyal at times; and a rational, successful man firmly in control of himself and his fate – have corollaries in Endymion, The Eve of St. Agnes and Lamia. Finally, the radical ambiguity of Antony and Cleopatra, which has generated a remarkable number of opposing interpretations, is likewise characteristic of Keats’s best poems. In these works, Keats demonstrates the dimension of Negative Capability

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that involves remaining open to divergent viewpoints without ‘irritabl[y] reaching after’ a single, unified perspective. This quality, ‘which Shakespeare posessed so enormously’, is particularly on display in Antony and Cleopatra, his ‘most anamorphic drama’.143 If this work informed Keats’s own tendency to structure his poems around central conflicts and contrasting figures and images, which never resolve themselves into fixed conclusions but instead generate radically different responses from readers, we have good reason to accept Bryan Waller Procter’s claim that Antony and Cleopatra was Keats’s favourite Shakespeare play.

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Notes

Introduction 1

2

3

4 5 6

7

8

9

10

Born in 1771, Scott belongs to the same generation as Coleridge, Lamb and Hazlitt, but his novels, beginning with Waverley in 1814, become such an enduring presence through the rest of the nineteenth century that he is more appropriately partnered in vol. 5 by Dickens, Eliot and Hardy. The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1: 386–7 and 224. Hereafter cited in the text as Letters. Lamb as Critic, ed. Roy Park (London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 300. Park, Lamb as Critic, 243. R. S. White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare (London: Athlone Press, 1987), 32. Quotations from Hazlitt are from The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent, 1930–4); references are to volume and page. Cf. King Henry IV, Part I, 3. 3. 122–8. References are to The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 7 vols (London, 1903–5); to volume and page. Arnold: The Complete Poems, ed. Miriam Allott (London and New York: Longman, 1979), 39–40. Keats’s poems are quoted from The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); here, page 225. Essays in Criticism, 2nd Series (London: Dent, 1964), 291.

Chapter 1 1

2

3

4

5

‘On the Conversation of Authors’, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London, 1930–4), 12: 35. Hereafter cited in text as Howe; references are to volume and page. Jonathan Bate, ‘Lamb on Shakespeare’, Charles Lamb Bulletin 51 (1985, July): 76–85 (77). The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, 3 vols (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 1: 48. Hereafter cited in text as Marrs. The original spelling and punctuation of the Lambs’ letters has been retained. See Mary Blanchard Balle, ‘Mary Lamb: Her Mental Health Issues’, Charles Lamb Bulletin 93 (1996): 2–11. Jane Aaron, A Double Singleness: Gender and the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 3.

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Notes 6

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The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 8 vols (London: Methuen, 1912), 2: 87. Hereafter cited in text as Lucas; references are to volume and page. This edition is generally cited as standard. However, there is also an earlier edition, The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. by E. V. Lucas, 7 vols (London: Methuen, 1903–5), a large format edition which contains additional material, including several theatre reviews by Lamb, as well as the full texts of Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived about the Time of Shakspeare (1808). This will also be occasionally cited in the text as Lucas, 1903. Lamb as Critic, ed. Roy Park (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 18. 6 August 1832, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, 2 vols, vol. 14 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series 75 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 2: 417. As Valerie L. Gager has noted, Dickens was familiar with Lamb’s Shakespeare and theatre criticism as well as the Tales, commenting, for instance, on how Lamb ‘gossips so delightfully’ about Twelfth Night. See Gager, Shakespeare and Dickens: The Dynamics of Influence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 135. Charles Lamb, Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived about the Time of Shakspeare: With Notes (London: 1808), 112. References will be to the first edition and will be cited in text as Specimens. Helen E. Haworth, ‘Keats’s Copy of Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poetry’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 74 (1970): 419–27 (422). Ibid. Letters of John Keats, ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1: 387–8. Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. J. Bate, 2 vols, vol. 7 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series 75 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2: 27. Jonathan Bate was among the first to notice the ways in which Coleridge’s distinction between Shakespeare and Milton mirrors Lamb’s earlier comparison between Chapman and Shakespeare; he also posited a ‘less direct’ link with Keats which can now, with the publication of Keats’s annotations on Specimens, also be substantiated. See Jonathan Bate, ‘Lamb on Shakespeare’, 80–2. Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1938), 1: 17. Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne (London: Penguin Classics, 2001), 3. Walter Pater, Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan, 1901), 109–11. A Selection from the Literary Criticism of Charles Lamb, ed. E. M. W. Tillyard (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1923), ix, xi. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 3 (April–September 1818), 607. Pater, Appreciations, 75–6; A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1909), 105. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 208. W. K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Knopf, 1957), 494.

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162 23

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27 28

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36 37 38

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Notes

René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, Vol. 2: The Romantic Age (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 192. Thomas Noon Talfourd, Memoirs of Charles Lamb, ed. Percy Fitzgerald (London: 1892), 129–30. Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 132. Ibid., 132. Jonathan Arac, in ‘The Media of Sublimity: Johnson and Lamb on King Lear’, Studies in Romanticism (1987): 209–20, similarly argues that Lamb ‘attacked the public and relied instead on an elite of individual readers’ (212). Anti-Jacobin Review (1798), 178. David Fairer, ‘Baby Language and Revolution: The Early Poetry of Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd’, Charles Lamb Bulletin 74 (1991): 33–52 (35). The Life and Correspondence of the Late Robert Southey, ed. C. C. Southey, 6 vols (London, 1849), 1: 345. Younglim Han, Romantic Shakespeare, from Stage to Page (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001), see ch. 1 and 3, and pp. 135 and 143. Janet Ruth Heller, Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), see ch. 5, and pp. 119 and 127. Martin Buzacott, The Death of the Actor: Shakespeare on Page and Stage (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 91. Morning Chronicle, 29 December 1794. Published with some minor changes (the ‘Warlock hags’ become simply ‘those hags’, for instance) in Poems 1796 and Poems 1797, attributed in both instances to Lamb. However, in the 1803 edition of Poems on Various Subjects, published by Longman and Rees, where Lamb’s work does not appear at all, this poem is reprinted and attributed solely to Coleridge. Joan Coldwell, ‘The Playgoer as Critic: Charles Lamb on Shakespeare’s Characters’, Shakespeare Quarterly 26: 2 (1975, Spring): 184–95 (184). See also Peter Holland’s essay on Garrick in vol. 2 of this series, Garrick, Kemble, Siddons, Kean: Vol. 2, ed. Peter Holland (London: Continuum). Quoted by Michael R. Booth, ‘Sarah Siddons’, Three Tragic Actresses, ed. Michael R. Booth, John Stokes, Susan Bassnett (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 18. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 19. Anna Seward, The Swan of Lichfield, ed. Hesketh Pearson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937), 68. See Judith Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 19. ‘Sonnet, to Mrs. Siddons’. In Helen Maria Williams, Poems, by Helen Maria Williams. In Two Volumes (London, 1786), 179–80. Charles Valentine Le Grice, The Tineum. Containing Estianomy, or the Art of Stirring a Fire: The Icead, a Mock-Heroic Poem: An Imitation of Horace (Cambridge, UK: B. Flower, 1794), 45. Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality, 32. Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions, 134. Mary Jacobus, ‘“That Great Stage Where Senators Perform”: Macbeth and the Politics of Romantic Theatre’, Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference: Essays on the Prelude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 37–8.

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Morning Chronicle, 22 December 1794. For details of the arrests and trials see John Barrell and Jon Mee, Trials for Treason and Sedition, 1792–1794, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006–7), 1: xxvii–ix. 1, addressed to Erskine, appeared on 1 December 1794; 2, to Burke, on 9 December 1794; 3, to Priestley, on 11 December 1794; 4, to Fayette, on 15 December 1794; 5, to Kosciusko, on 16 December 1794; 6, to Pitt, on 23 December 1794; 7, to Bowles, on 26 December 1794; 8, to Siddons, on 29 December 1794; 9, to Godwin, on 10 January 1795; 10, to Southey, on 14 January 1795; 11, to Sheridan, on 29 January 1795. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), 1: 277. W. H. Ireland, An Authentic Account of the Shaksperian Manuscripts, &c. By W. H. Ireland. (London: 1796), 12. Ireland, An Authentic Account of the Shaksperian Manuscripts, 3. Southey, for instance, thought that White and Lamb were ‘joint authors’ of the book; John Matthew Gutch, for instance, suggested that Lamb had given White ‘incidental hints and corrections’. See the (anonymous) introduction to James White, Falstaff’s Letters [...] with Notices of the Author Collected from Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt and Other Contemporaries (London: 1877), xix. Original Letters: &c. of Sir John Falstaff and His Friends; Now First Made Public by a Gentleman, a Descendant of Dame Quickly, from Genuine Manuscripts Which Have Been in the Possession of the Quickly Family Near Four Hundred Years (London: 1796), xii. For more on the William Henry Ireland scandal, see Nick Groom, The Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature (London: Picador, 2002), 218–55 and Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Picador, 1997), 83–91. Jeffrey Kahan, Reforging Shakespeare: The Story of a Theatrical Scandal (London: Associated University Press, 1998), deals in detail with William Henry Ireland, his family and the staging of Vortigern. Original Letters of Sir John Falstaff, 122; see also T. W. Craik, ‘Jem White and Falstaff’s Letters’, Charles Lamb Bulletin 91 (1995): 118–29 (121). Original Letters of Sir John Falstaff, ix. William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (1767; rpt. New York: Garland, 1970), 287. See also Robert Macfarlane, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 20. Original Letters of Sir John Falstaff, xxiii. For a general discussion, see Brian Vickers, ‘The emergence of character criticism, 1774–1800’. In Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 34 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11–22 (16). The Examiner, 5 September 1819, 569–70. Ibid., 570. Ibid. David Chandler, ‘Lamb, Falstaff’s Letters, and Landor’s Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare’, Charles Lamb Bulletin 131 (2005): 76–85. See also Chandler’s essay on the authorial games of the volume, its allusions and later uses: ‘Charles Lamb, James White, Shakespeare’s Papers, and John Warburton’s Cook’, Doshisha University Academic Repository, , accessed 1 May 2009.

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164 61

62

63

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65

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85

86 87 88

Notes

The quotation is in fact taken, slightly altered, from Southey’s poem ‘Rosamund to Henry; Written after She Had Taken the Veil’, published in his collaborative volume with his friend Robert Lovell, Poems, Containing ‘The Retrospect’ (London: Bath, 1795), 85–96. ‘Introduction’. King Richard III, ed. Janis Lull (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 25. Coldwell, ‘The Playgoer as Critic’, 188. Coldwell notes how Lamb’s character readings of Richard shaped the criticism of Tillyard and John D. Wilson, and discusses his view of Malvolio at length. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. by E. V. Lucas, 7 vols (London: Methuen, 1903–5), I: 36; this will hereafter be cited as Lucas, 1903. This may be a conscious allusion to the disparagement of Garrick by his rival Charles Macklin, discussed by Peter Holland in his essay on Garrick in vol. 2 of this series. ‘Garrick huddled all passions into strut and quickness,’ commented Macklin, ‘– bustle was his favourite. In the performance of a Lord Townly he was all bustle. In Archer, Ranger, Don John, Hamlet, Macbeth, Brute – all bustle! bustle! bustle!’ Lamb’s self-conscious quotation marks seem to point back to this earlier controversy and Macklin’s assertion that the ‘whole art of acting, according to the modern practice, is compriz’d in – bustle!’ ‘Prospectus’, The Reflector, 2 vols (1811), 1: v. Ibid., 1: iv–v. Ibid., 1: vi. Ibid., 2: 322. Ibid., 1: vi. Ibid., 1: 30. Ibid., 1: 35–43. Legacy for the Ladies [...]With a Comical View of London and Westminster, ed. Thomas Brown (London: 1705), 116. Reflector, 1: 381. Ibid., 2: 124. Ibid., 1: 424–7. Ibid., 1: 434. Ibid., 2: 299; 303. See Wayne McKenna, Charles Lamb in the Theatre (Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1978), 19–36 and John I. Ades, ‘Charles Lamb, Shakespeare, and Early Nineteenth-Century Theater’, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 85: 3 (1970, May): 514–26. Reflector, 2: 311. Ibid., 2: 305. Ibid., 2: 302. Ibid., 2: 304–5. Ibid., 2: 304. Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 16. Aaron, Double Singleness, 145. Reflector, 2: 73. Ibid., 2: 62.

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92 93

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Ibid., 2: 62, 64. Ibid., 2: 65. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 3 (April–September 1818), 605; Wimsatt and Brooks, Literary Criticism, 494. Reflector, 2: 303. Simon Hull, ‘The Ideology of the Unspectacular: Theatricality and Charles Lamb’s Essayistic Figure’, Romantic Spectacle, ed. John Halliwell and Ian Haywood, Romanticism on the Net 46 (2007). Hull’s excellent essay differs from my viewpoint here in arguing for a distinct ‘difference in attitude towards theatre between the pre-Elian and Elian Lamb’, whereas I see a continuity between Elia and Lamb’s earlier exploration of essayistic voice in the Reflector periodicals and appropriations of Shakespeare. The London Magazine (July–December 1822), 36. See Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen, Shakespearian Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), and Colin Franklin, Shakespeare Domesticated: The Eighteenth Century Editions (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1991) for a discussion of the evolution of eighteenth-century editions and their critical practice. London Magazine (July–December 1822), 34. To Mrs. Southey, May 1804; to S. T. Coleridge, 11 June 1804; The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey (1855), 180–1. For a full account of Southey’s and Wordsworth’s partial involvement in the volume, see Marrs, 2: 255n. In quoting from the Extracts, I use the text reprinted in E. V. Lucas’s large format edition of The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, 7 vols (London: Methuen, 1903–4), 4: 397, cited in text as Lucas, 1903. I use the first edition of Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakspeare: With Notes (London: 1808), cited in text as Specimens. John Coates, ‘Lamb’s Bias in Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets’, Charles Lamb Bulletin 39 (1982): 125–43 (126). Gillian Russell, ‘Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets: The Publishing Context and the Principles of Selection’, Charles Lamb Bulletin, 65 (1989): 1–8 (3). Biographical sketch written for William Upcott, 10 April 1827, Lucas, 1: 376. Martin Garrett, Massinger: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 21. While drawing attention to the high standards of Gifford’s editing, Garrett suggests that Gifford’s Massinger is essentially an ‘establishment’ figure – perhaps a contributing factor in Massinger’s declining popularity. Tom Lockwood, Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 85–6. Don D. Moore, John Webster: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 49, 8. Thomas Dabbs, Reforming Marlowe: The Nineteenth-Century Canonization of a Renaissance Dramatist (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1991), 31–6. ‘Preface’. In Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vols 7 and 8 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 7: 71. Ibid. Ibid., 7: 72.

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166 109 110

111 112 113

114

115 116

117 118 119 120 121 122

123

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Ibid., 7: 71. Essay, Supplementary to the Preface (1815), The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 3: 69. Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions, 148. Ibid. ‘“Lecture 4,” 1808 Lectures on Principles of Poetry’. In Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, V, Bollingen Series, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 1: 78–9. A notice is published in the Monthly Literary Advertiser for July 1808 (p. 50), but as Marrs remarks, this is probably premature; he notes that the firm’s ledgers point to its publication in early September (Marrs, 2: 255). Sherbo, Johnson on Shakespeare, 7: 62. Ibid., 7: 71–4. Even as far back as Falstaff’s Letters, there is a parodic allusion to this passage, when the ‘editor’ comments on the man of genius who turns aside to ‘catch at a Golden Apple’; The Original Letters of Sir John Falstaff , xxiii. Sherbo, Johnson on Shakespeare, 7: 67. Reflector, 2: 303. Sherbo, Johnson on Shakespeare, 7: 81–2. Russell, ‘Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets’, 4. Ibid., 6. ‘Four Elizabethan Dramatists’. In T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), 109–10. Parts of this section have already been published as an article, “‘Wild tales” from Shakespeare: Readings of Charles and Mary Lamb’, Shakespeare 2: 2 (2006, December) < http://www.informaworld.com> accessed 1 May 2009, and I am grateful to the publishers for permission to include the material here. F. J. Harvey Darton, Children’s Books in England. Five Centuries of Social Life (1932), 3rd ed., rev. Brian Alderson (Newcastle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1999), 191. Crosscurrents of Criticism: Horn Book Essays 1968–1977, ed. Paul Heins (Boston, MA: Horn Book, 1977), viii. Jean I. Marsden, ‘Shakespeare for Girls: Mary Lamb and Tales from Shakespeare’, Children’s Literature, ed. Francelia Butler, Margaret Higonnet and Barbara Rosen, vol. 17 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989): 47–63 (51). Joseph E. Riehl, Charles Lamb’s Children’s Literature, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 94 (Salzburg, Austria: University of Salzburg Press, 1980), 178. Disturbed by Political Justice, Lamb had been generally hostile to Godwin and his ‘cold hearted well bred conceited disciple[s]’ (Marrs, 1: 22) during the 1790s; however, when the two met in 1800, Lamb recorded himself ‘a good deal pleased’ with Godwin, ‘a well behaved decent man’ (Marrs, 1: 185–6). Pamela Clemit, ‘Philosophical Anarchism in the Schoolroom: William Godwin’s “Juvenile Library,” 1805–25’, Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 9: 1/2 (2000–2001): 44–70 (45). See Brian Alderson, ‘“Mister Gobwin” and His “Interesting Little Books, Adorned with Beautiful Copper-Plates”’, Princeton University Library Chronicle 59 (1998): 159–89 and David Foxon, ‘The Chapbook Editions of the Lambs’ Tales from

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133

134 135 136

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Shakespear’, Book Collector 6: 1 (1957): 41–53, for a full discussion of these very rare small sixpenny editions. Clemit, ‘Philosophical Anarchism in the Schoolroom’, 45–6. William Godwin, ‘Autobiography’. In The Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, vol. 1, ed. Pamela Clemit, Maurice Hindle and Mark Philp, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), 1: 42. William Godwin, Educational and Literary Writings, vol. 5, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin Series, ed. Pamela Clemit and Mark Philp, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), 313–14. Godwin, Educational and Literary Writings, 315. Godwin, ‘Autobiography’, 42; Educational and Literary Writings, 142. C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols (London: H. S. King, 1876), 2: 119. Anti-Jacobin Review (1807), 298. Marsden, ‘Shakespeare for Girls’, 60. Susan Wolfson, ‘Explaining to Her Sisters: Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespear’. In Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare: On the Responses of Dickinson, Woolf, Rich, H. D., George Eliot, and Others, ed. Marianne Novy (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990): 16–40 (23). Tales from Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (London: 1809). Edith Nesbit, Children’s Stories from Shakespeare (London: Raphael Tuck & Sons Ltd, 1897), 14. Leon Garfield, Shakespeare Stories (London: Victor Gollancz, 1985); many thanks to Leon Garfield’s sister, Karen Gunnell, for kindly introducing me to these stories and the animated Tales. Tales from Shakespeare, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: Folio Society, 2003). Tales from Shakespeare, Penguin Readers, Level 5 (London: Pearson, Longman, 1999). Murray J. Levith, Shakespeare in China (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 4. Tales from Shakespeare, ed. Kay Strang, illustrated by Gary Andrews (Blairgowrie, Perkshire, UK: Capercaillie Books, 2002). Dorothy Parker and Ross Evans, The Coast of Illyria: A Play in Three Acts, introduced by Arthur F. Kinney (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1990). Kinney comments that Parker was probably responsible for the writing of the play; she gave her collaborator and partner at the time, Evans, ‘primary credit for helping her research the play and for going to the library for the countless books which she said she consulted’ (29). Parker and Evans, The Coast of Illyria, 87. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 159. Peter Ackroyd, The Lambs of London (London: Chatto and Windus, 2004). Ibid., 98. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 215.

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Ibid., 211. Parker and Evans, The Coast of Illyria, 136.

Chapter 2 1

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Letter to Thomas Wedgewood, 16 September 1803. See S. T. Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), 2: 990. The best analysis of the importance of painting in Hazlitt’s thought and writing is Roy Park’s Hazlitt and the Spirit of the Age: Abstraction and Critical Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). All quotations from Hazlitt are taken from The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent, 1930–4). References are by volume and page. The phrase echoes David Hume’s famous comment: ‘my Treatise of Human Nature . . . fell dead-born from the press’ (Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1985), xxxiv). Hazlitt’s seemingly self-mocking remark, once it is recognized as a version of Hume’s description of his own first philosophical publication, is revealed to be a coded assertion of pride. The allusion suggests that the cold reception of Hazlitt’s treatise is comparably at odds, as in Hume’s case, with the real worth of the work. P. P. Howe identifies this as Hazlitt’s last attempt in professional portraiture: see P. P. Howe, The Life of William Hazlitt, intro. Frank Swinnerton (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1947), 132. For Crabb Robinson’s diary entry, see H. C. Robinson, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, ed. E. J. Morley, 3 vols (London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd, 1938), 1: 104. This section on Hazlitt and Kean, with the ensuing section on Coleridge and Lamb, is largely taken from my article, ‘Hazlitt and Kean’, The Hazlitt Review I (2008): 17–26. See my Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense: Criticism, Morals, and the Metaphysics of Power (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), especially 24–6, 29–31. Failing in Shakespeare, Kean succeeds more completely in parts that are close enough to Shakespearean roles to bring out his skills, without exposing their shortcomings. Just outside the period of the review sequence under discussion, in the character of Zanga in Edward Young’s Revenge, ‘his general style of acting is . . . completely adapted’ to the part (5: 227). As Bajazet in Nicholas Rowe’s Tamerlane, ‘Mr. Kean did justice to his author, or went the whole length of the text’ (18: 205). In Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense, I argue the parallels between Hazlitt’s idealism and Kant’s, but without any claim that Kant directly influenced Hazlitt. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (2nd ed. 1759; rpt. Menston, UK: Scholar Press, 1970), 264. For instance, Lecture 12 of Coleridge’s 1811–12 lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, some or all of which Hazlitt attended, begins with the ‘ruling impulse’ or ‘reigning impulse’ in Shakespeare’s characters. See S. T. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Samuel

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Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen series 75, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 1: 377. In his 1811 essay, ‘On the Genius and Character of Hogarth’, Lamb also refers to the ‘ruling character’ of Hogarth’s works, immediately before he goes on to compare Hogarth with Shakespeare. See The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas (London: Methuen, 1903–5), 1: 70. Further references to Lamb are to this edition. Pope, in a passage from his Preface to Shakespeare that Hazlitt quotes at the opening of Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, is probably Hazlitt’s source here: ‘every single character in Shakespear, is as much an individual, as those in life itself; it is as impossible to find any two alike; and such, as from their relation or affinity in any respect appear most to be twins, will upon comparison, be found remarkably distinct.’ See The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, Vol II: The Major Works, 1725–1744, ed. R. Cowler (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 13–14. In Lecture 12 of the 1811–12 series, Coleridge also draws on this passage, when he makes it a ground of Shakespeare’s superiority to other dramatists, ‘that this great man could take two characters which seem to be the same (at first sight) and yet when minutely examined are totally distinct’ (Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, 1: 378). Shakespeare’s Protean ability is posited by Coleridge in his 1808 lectures at the Royal Institution, as well as throughout the 1811–12 lectures at the London Philosophical Society, including Lecture 3, at which Hazlitt was certainly present. See Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, 1: 69, 225; Hazlitt’s attendance at Lecture 3 of the 1811–12 series is confirmed by J. P. Collier’s records (Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, 1: 232–3). Lamb’s version of the premise can be found in a note to his selections from Chapman, in Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare (1808), as well as in his 1811 essay, ‘On the Genius and Character of Hogarth’ (Works, 4: 83 and 1: 78). According to A. G. L’Estrange, in an annotation to a reference, in one of Mary Russell Mitford’s letters, to Hazlitt’s reviews of Kean in the Chronicle: ‘The belief of the time was, that Hazlitt received 1500l. from the management of Drury Lane for those articles. They made Kean’s reputation and saved the theatre.’ A. G. L’Estrange, ed., The Life of Mary Russell Mitford, Related in a Selection from her Letters to her Friends, 3 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1870), 2: 47n. Emily Allen, ‘Section Introduction: The Low-Down on Romantic Theater’, European Romantic Review 18: 2 (2007, April): 135–8. Friedrich Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, trans. H. WatanabeO’Kelly (Manchester, UK: Carcanet New Press, 1981), 42. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 39. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, 1: 225, 289. Coleridge draws the distinction between copy and imitation in his 1808 lecture series (ibid., 1: 83), and repeatedly in the 1811–12 series (ibid., 1: 223, 289, 349). Janet Ruth Heller’s Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1990), offers an overview of the way in which the distrust of the senses informs the romantic critics’ attitude to drama, and of the intellectual origins of that distrust from the aesthetics of Plato and Aristotle onwards. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, 1: 254.

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170 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

32

33

34

35 36

37

38

39

40 41

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Ibid., 1: 270. Ibid., 1: 410. Ibid., 1: 179. Ibid., 1: 306. Lamb, Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1: 99. Ibid., 1: 108. Ibid., 1: 108. Ibid., 1: 98. There is an echo here of Coleridge’s reiterated emphasis on the union of poet and philosopher in Shakespeare (see, for instance, Coleridge, Lectures 1808– 1819 on Literature, 1: 230, 267). Germanic ‘mysticism’ is a fault that Hazlitt elsewhere also attributes to Coleridge, and might account, perhaps for the absence of any mention of Coleridge in Characters. Another reason, personal and political animosity aside, might have been that Hazlitt judged Coleridge’s commentaries on Shakespeare, then unpublished, and with which he was familiar mainly from his sporadic attendance at Coleridge’s lectures, to be too disembodied to warrant mention. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, 1: 225. Coleridge draws the distinction between copy and imitation in his 1808 lecture series (ibid., 1: 83), and repeatedly in the 1811–12 series (ibid., 1: 223, 289, 349). See, for instance, Lecture 2 of the 1811–12 series, where Coleridge declares that Shakespeare’s judgement is the ‘most wonderful’ of his powers (ibid., 1: 210); this insistence on Shakespeare’s ‘judgement’ is found throughout Coleridge’s commentary on Shakespeare. A. W. Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black, 2 vols (London: Baldwin & Co., 1815), 2: 94. Ibid., 2: 128. Philip Davis’s excellent essay, ‘“The Future in the Instant”: Hazlitt’s Essay and Shakespeare’, in Metaphysical Hazlitt: Bicentenary Essays, ed. U. Natarajan, T. Paulin and D. Wu (London: Routledge, 2005), 43–55, offers a detailed account of Hazlitt’s sense of the ceaseless dynamic of action and reaction in Shakespearean drama. The single exception is Theseus’ description of his hounds in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (4. 1. 119–27), of which Hazlitt remarks, ‘Even Titian never made a hunting-piece of a gusto so fresh and lusty’ (4: 247). Here, too, however, ‘gusto’ is the character’s (Theseus’), rather than the author’s. David Bromwich finds that ‘Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays is misleadingly titled in one sense; though it contains unforgettable sketches of many individual characters, the larger concern of the book is power.’ See his ‘Hazlitt on Shakespeare and the Motives of Power’, The Hazlitt Review I (2008): 5–15, 5. ‘The Prince on St. Patrick’s Day’ (22 March 1812) in The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt, Vol. I: Periodical Essays, 1805–14, ed. G Kucich and Jeffrey N. Cox (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), 221. Lamb, Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1: 99. Hazlitt’s sense of Kean’s radicalism is in line with Kean’s own political sympathies. For an account of Kean’s radical leanings, see Peter Thomson’s essay on Kean in vol. 2 of the present series.

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Notes 42

43

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45 46 47

48 49 50

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Francis Jeffrey, ‘Hazlitt on Shakespeare’, Edinburgh Review 28 (August 1817): 472–88; see 480–2 for the extracts from Hazlitt’s essays on Julius Caesar and Coriolanus. The Examiner, 26 October 1817, 683; 2 November 1817, 697–8; 23 November 1817, 746–8. J. H. Reynolds, Selected Prose of John Hamilton Reynolds, ed. Leonidas M. Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 113. The New Monthly Magazine viii (August 1817), 51. The British Critic ix (January 1818): 15–22, 19, 21. John Kinnaird, William Hazlitt: Critic of Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 166. L’Estrange, Life of Mary Russell Mitford, 2: 47. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, 1: 244. See Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 209–11. A. O. Lovejoy, ‘Schiller and the Genesis of German Romanticism’. In Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1948), 207–27, esp. 220–7. Here, as in other instances of concurrence between German romantic thought and Hazlitt’s, my claim is not influence, but only analogy or correspondence. Cf. Lamb’s announcement in the Preface to his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets of his intention ‘To show . . . how much of Shakspeare shines in the great men his contemporaries, and how far in his divine mind and manners he surpassed them and all mankind’ (Works, 4: xii). In Jane Moody’s admirable summary, ‘in the years following Waterloo, legitimacy came to define its corrupt inversion: that form of government not legitimated by the consent of the people’ – Jane Moody, ‘“Fine Word, Legitimate!” Towards a Theatrical History of Romanticism’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 38: 3/4 (fall/winter 1996): 223–44, 231. See also Moody’s analysis, far more detailed than mine, of Hazlitt’s complex response to Kean’s Coriolanus (ibid., 235–7). I have already suggested (Note 12) that Pope was Hazlitt’s source for the notion of ‘ruling character’. The phrase ‘ruling passion’, well known in Hazlitt’s time from Pope’s Essay on Man and his Moral Essays enables us to locate the origins of Hazlitt’s notion of ‘bias’ also to some extent in Pope’s psychological theory. In the Essay on Man, ‘So, cast and mingled with his very frame,/The Mind’s disease, its ruling passion came’ (Epistle II, ll. 137–8), and in the Moral Essays, Pope laments that ‘The ruling Passion, be it what it will,/The ruling Passion conquers Reason still’ (Epistle III, ll. 155–6). For Hazlitt, however, ‘bias’ is more than merely ‘The Mind’s disease’; as we have seen, it is as much the enabling as it is the limiting condition of human endeavour. Jonathan Bate, ‘Hazlitt’s Shakespearean Quotations’, Prose Studies 7:1 (1984 May): 26–37. David Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1999), esp. 275–9. Jonathan Bate, ‘Hazlitt’s Shakespearean Quotations’, esp. 28–30. Paul Hamilton, ‘Hazlitt and the “kings of speech”’, in Metaphysical Hazlitt, 68–90.

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63

64 65 66

67 68

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Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, 278. Jonathan Bate, ‘Hazlitt’s Shakespearean Quotations’, 34. See, for instance, C. L. Finney, The Evolution of Keats’s Poetry, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936); R. T. Davies, ‘Keats and Hazlitt’, KeatsShelley Memorial Bulletin 8 (1957): 1–8; K. Muir, ‘Keats and Hazlitt’, in John Keats: A Reassessment, ed. Kenneth Muir (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1958), 139–58; W. J. Bate, John Keats (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), esp. 239–40, 244–5, 254–9; H. M. Sikes, ‘The Poetic Theory and Practice of Keats: the Record of a Debt to Hazlitt’, Philological Quarterly 38 (1959): 401–12; Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, 362–401; R. S. White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare (London: Athlone Press, 1987), 31–55. Beth Lau’s chapter on Keats in the present volume is the latest study of Keats’s engagement with Hazlitt’s Shakespeare. The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1: 386–7. Ibid., 1: 166. Ibid., 1: 224. In her chapter on Keats, Beth Lau argues persuasively that Keats’s emphasis on self-effacement is qualified by indications elsewhere in his writings that selfassertion is the condition of creativity. Admitting the qualification, by Lau’s own showing, the importance of the ideal of self-annihilation for Keats, and Hazlitt’s impact on that ideal, still remain. Park, Hazlitt and the Spirit of the Age, 6. Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, 131; J. L. Mahoney, The Literary Criticism of William Hazlitt, 2nd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1981), 104. Rollins, Letters of John Keats, 1: 238. For a fuller analysis of the alignments of Hazlitt, Keats and Shakespeare in relation to each other, see my ‘Power and Capability: Hazlitt, Keats, and the Discrimination of Poetic Self’, Romanticism 2: 1 (1996): 54–66.

Chapter 3 1

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The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1: 142 (11 May 1817). Quotations from Keats’s letters (and from some of his correspondents) are to this edition, referred to in the text as Letters. Walter Savage Landor in G. M. Matthews, ed., Keats: The Critical Heritage, (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), 261; A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 2nd ed. (1909; rpt. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1961), 211; John Middleton Murry, Keats and Shakespeare: A Study of Keats’ Poetic Life from 1816 to 1820 (London: Oxford University Press, 1925), 5, 7; Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Keats’s Shakespeare: A Descriptive Study Based on New Material, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), 53–4. Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 187. On Otho’s shortcomings see also Douglas Bush, ‘Keats and Shakespeare’, in Shakespeare: Aspects of Influence, ed. G. B. Evans (Cambridge,

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MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 81; Andrew Motion, Keats (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 422. Bernice Slote provides arguments both for and against Otho’s merits as a play (Keats and the Dramatic Principle [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1958], 108–12). See Slote, Keats and the Dramatic Principle, 113–15; Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 188. Murry, who champions the Keats– Shakespeare connection more unreservedly than any other critic, believes King Stephen is more like Shakespeare’s early history plays ‘than anything ever written by another hand than Shakespeare’s’ (Murry, Keats and Shakespeare, 202). Andrew Motion states the contrasting view when he declares that King Stephen, like Otho, is ‘too frankly derivative, too quick in its narration, and too stiffly theatrical’ (Motion, Keats, 429). The Keats Circle, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2nd ed., 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 2: 164. For information on the Clarkes see Richard Altick, The Cowden Clarkes (London: Oxford University Press, 1948). Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers (1878; rpt. Fontwell, Sussex, UK: Centaur Press, 1969), 126. The passage from Cymbeline is part of the quotation from Clarke (with his emphasis). Elsewhere in this essay Shakespeare’s works are quoted from The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 14. Ibid., 123. Slote believes Keats first began attending the theatre after he came to London as a student at Guy’s Hospital in October 1815 and that he became ‘a regular’ theatre-goer in the 1816–1817 season (Slote, Keats and the Dramatic Principle, 44). Keats’s response to Kean will be discussed further as follows. Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 156. On Spenser as Keats’s ‘first love, in poetry’, see 126–7. Keats’s poems are quoted from The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). Hazlitt’s importance for Keats is widely acknowledged and discussed; see, for example, Kenneth Muir, ‘Keats and Hazlitt’, in John Keats: A Reassessment, ed. Kenneth Muir (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1958), 139–58. For Hazlitt’s influence on Keats’s thinking about Shakespeare see R. S. White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), chap. 2; Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 161–65; and Uttara Natarajan’s essay in the current volume. Leigh Hunt, ‘Essays and Miscellanies Selected from The Indicator and Companion’, in Works, 4 vols (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1859), 4: 207. Jeffrey A. Fleece, ‘Leigh Hunt’s Shakespearean Criticism’. In Essays in Honor of Walter Clyde Curry (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1954), 189. The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, ed. H. S. Milford (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), 239. Jack Lynch, Becoming Shakespeare: The Unlikely Afterlife That Turned a Provincial Playwright into the Bard (New York: Walker, 2007), 138 and ch. 5 passim. The Morning Chronicle and Morning Post debate is discussed by Jonathan Bate,

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‘The Romantic Stage’, in Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History, ed. Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 106–7. Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 209–10, 109. The passages from both Haydon and Severn are quoted and discussed by Robert Ryan, Keats: The Religious Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 91–3; see also 144. On Haydon’s importance for Keats’s interest in Shakespeare in 1817 see Ryan, Keats: The Religious Sense, 144; also Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the Romantic Imagination, 158–9. The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Willard Bissell Pope, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960–3), 2: 318. Lynch documents the way in which Shakespeare came to be spoken of in religious terms, with accompanying relicts and shrines, during the 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee (249–52). Although the term ‘bardolatry’ was coined by George Bernard Shaw in 1901, it aptly characterizes the worship of Shakespeare pervasive since the late eighteenth century. Ryan also notes how Keats responds to Haydon’s explicitly Christian references by using similar language to express his own religion of art, converting ‘God into Shakespeare’ (Ryan, Keats: The Religious Sense, 106–7). Neither Jonathan Bate (Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination) nor White mentions Reynolds as an influence on Keats’s response to Shakespeare in the crucial year 1817, though both discuss other men’s influence. Robert Gittings (John Keats [1968; rpt. London: Penguin, 1971], 185, 218) and Andrew Motion (Keats, 160) briefly mention Reynolds along with Haydon in this capacity. Leonidas M. Jones, The Life of John Hamilton Reynolds (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1984), 81; the phrase comes from Reynolds’s review of Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays. Selected Prose of John Hamilton Reynolds, ed. Leonidas M. Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 208. Jones, Selected Prose of Reynolds, 113; see also Jones, Life of Reynolds, 82–3. Bush, ‘Keats and Shakespeare’, 73. See also Murry, Keats and Shakespeare, 33; Spurgeon, Keats’s Shakespeare, 3; Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 157; White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 16. All of these works provide surveys of Keats’s major references to Shakespeare throughout 1817 and early 1818. See Frank Owings, Jr., The Keats Library: A Descriptive Catalogue (London: Keats– Shelley Memorial Association, 1978), 57. See Owings, The Keats Library, 55. Gittings believes that Reynolds and Keats read from this folio edition in the summer of 1817 (Gittings, John Keats, 218). No complete edition of Keats’s Shakespeare marginalia exists, but several sources provide selections. Spurgeon (Keats’s Shakespeare) reproduces all of Keats’s notes and markings in five plays: The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure and Antony and Cleopatra from the Johnson and Steevens edition, and Troilus and Cressida from Keats’s folio Shakespeare. R. S. White does not provide any transcriptions of the marginalia in Keats’s two copies of Shakespeare, but he

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31 32 33 34 35

36 37

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quotes from and analyses them extensively. Elizabeth Cook prints the annotations in Keats’s folio Shakespeare (John Keats, ed. Cook [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990], 333–6). All of Keats’s notes and a few of his markings in both the folio and the Johnson and Steevens editions are included in The Poetical Works and Other Writings of John Keats: Hampstead Edition, ed. Harry Buxton Forman, rev. Maurice Buxton Forman, vol. 5 (New York: Scribner’s, 1939), 280–6. This work is hereafter referred to as Hampstead Keats, and quotations from it will be documented in the text. Spurgeon (Keats’s Shakespeare, 39) assumed that most of the markings in this volume were by Keats, but Gittings (John Keats, 280) and Owings (The Keats Library, 53) more persuasively ascribe the majority to Reynolds. Even if Keats is responsible for some of the markings, it would be extremely difficult to pick out his from the multiple hands appearing in the book. Rollins, Keats Circle, 2: 285. Lynch, Becoming Shakespeare, 255–6. Rollins, Keats Circle, 2: 271–2. See Rollins, Letters, 1: 143, n. 6, and Owings, The Keats Library, 27. Owings, The Keats Library, 27. Keats’s notes and markings in Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays are printed in Hampstead Keats, 280–6. Walter Jackson Bate believes that Keats acquired his copy of Hazlitt’s Characters in December 1817 (John Keats [1963; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966], 262). On which lectures Keats missed, see Muir, ‘Keats and Hazlitt’, 143. So Rollins suggests (Letters, 2: 228, n. 6). See also Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 172. Hazlitt frequently describes the past as a more propitious age for the arts than modern times, as in his Round Table essays ‘On Modern Comedy’ and ‘Why the Arts Are Not Progressive.’ He repeats the point in his first lecture on the English Poets (‘On Poetry in General’). See The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–4), 4: 10–14, 160–4; 5: 9–10. Quotations from this edition will hereafter be documented in the text. For further discussions of Keats’s review of Kean, including its indebtedness to Hazlitt, see Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 166–7; White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 89–90; John Kandl, ‘Plebian Gusto, Negative Capability, and the Low Company of “Mr. Kean”: Keats’ Dramatic Review for the Champion (21 December 1817)’, Nineteenth-Century Prose 28 (2001): 130–41; and Jonathan Mulrooney, ‘Keats in the Company of Kean’, Studies in Romanticism 42 (2003): 238–43. Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 123. Peter Thomson, ‘Edmund Kean’, in Great Shakespeareans, 2: 16. Thomson (‘Edmund Kean’, 4). In addition to Thomson, Jonathan Bate, ‘Romantic Stage’, treats Kean’s association with radical politics (106–10). On the significance of Kean’s class status and political affiliation for Keats, see also Kandl (‘Plebian Gusto’) and Mulrooney (‘Keats in the Company of Kean’). White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 190–1. Owings, The Keats Library, 55. Ibid., 51.

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176 46

47 48

49

50 51 52

53

54

55 56 57

58 59

60

61

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63 64

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According to White, Otho and King Stephen chiefly reflect the influence of Macbeth (Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 131–2). Owings, The Keats Library, 53. When Fanny Brawne learned of Keats’s death, she wrote her name and the date, ‘April 17 1821’, next to ‘Finis’ at the end of As You Like It in the folio Shakespeare. Joanna Richardson, Fanny Brawne: A Biography (New York: Vanguard, 1952), 89; see also 72. White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 43. Spurgeon notes that Keats’s marginalia reveal that ‘epithets and imagery’ especially attracted him in the plays, and she gives many examples of such passages marked in his copies of Shakespeare (6, 17). Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 126. Rollins, Keats Circle, 2: 274. See Beth Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998), 36–49. On this point see also Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 200–1. Introduction to Keats selection in A. W. Ward’s English Poets (1880), in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, vol. 9 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1973), 215. Murry uses Arnold’s statement, ‘He is; he is with Shakespeare’ as an epigraph to his book and cites it approvingly on 4 and 10. An 1889 edition of three essays by Keats also uses Arnold’s statement as an epigraph (Hampstead Keats, 225). See also Spurgeon (Keats’s Shakespeare, 54). Another example of a critic (Jack Stillinger) who invokes Arnold’s comment is cited in the following. Super, Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, 215. Matthews, Keats: The Critical Heritage, 326. Ibid., 327. Arnold regards Endymion as ‘so utterly incoherent, as not strictly to merit the name of a poem at all’ (327). Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 129–30. Orrin N. C. Wang, ‘Coming Attractions: Lamia and Cinematic Sensation’, Studies in Romanticism 42 (2003): 475, n. 24. Greg Kucich, Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 150. Elsewhere Kucich describes Hunt’s practice of reading Spenser ‘for discrete passages of beauty to the exclusion of narrative or allegorical continuity’ (‘Leigh Hunt and Romantic Spenserianism’, Keats-Shelley Journal 37 [1988]: 119). John Keats, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (New York: Pearson-Longman, 2007), 74, n. 4. White attributes both Hazlitt’s and Keats’s interest in particular details, especially pictorial effects, in Shakespeare to their shared empirical bent and Romantic preference for the individual and concrete over the universal and abstract (Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 33–7, 41–3). See Helen Haworth, ‘Keats’s Copy of Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library 74 (1970): 419–27. See Jones, Life of Reynolds, 84; Jones, Selected Prose of Reynolds, 153. Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 168. Lear was performed on 24 April 1820 with Kean in the title role, but Keats was ill at this time and confined at Hampstead.

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Notes 65

66 67

68

69

70 71

72

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76 77 78 79 80

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See Timothy Webb, ‘The Romantic Poet and the Stage: A Short, Sad History’, in The Romantic Theatre: An International Symposium, ed. Richard Allen Cave (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1986), 34–7. Wang, ‘‘Coming Attractions’, 461–74. Richard W. Schoch, ‘Pictorial Shakespeare’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 59. See Amy Lowell, John Keats, 2 vols (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 1: 348–9; Spurgeon, Keats’s Shakespeare, 15. On Kean’s points see Thomson (‘Edmund Kean’), 13, 20–1; Webb, ‘The Romantic Poet and the Stage’, 37. On Kean as an actor known for his appearance rather than his voice, see Thomson, (‘Edmund Kean’), 29, and Mulrooney, ‘Keats in the Company of Kean’, 237, 240. Thomson, ‘Edmund Kean’, 12. For Landor, Howitt and Masson, see Matthews, Keats: The Critical Heritage, 259, 312, 357; Super, Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, 215. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 239; W. J. Bate, John Keats, 245–6, 411; Jack Stillinger, ‘What Keats is About’, in Romantic Complexity: Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth [Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 2006], 16; rpt. of Introduction, John Keats: Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1982). See James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 151–5, 213. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. J. Bate, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2: 27 and n. 2; Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 1: 125. Hazlitt also refers to Shakespeare as a ventriloquist in ‘Mr. Kean’s Hamlet’, originally published 14 March 1814 in The Morning Chronicle and reprinted in 1818 in A View of the English Stage (5: 185). Other essays in which Hazlitt extols Shakespeare’s selflessness and castigates Wordsworth’s egotism that Keats could have read before he wrote his Negative Capability letter include ‘On Posthumous Fame – Whether Shakespeare was influenced by a Love of it?’ and ‘Observations on Mr. Wordsworth’s Poem The Excursion’, both included in The Round Table. Jones, Selected Prose of Reynolds, 59. Matthews, Keats: The Critical Heritage, 89. Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 149, 145. Slote, Keats and the Dramatic Principle, 13–20. David Perkins, The Quest for Permanence: The Symbolism of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 196; Jay Clayton, Romantic Vision and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 74–5; W. J. Bate, John Keats, 254. Grant F. Scott, The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995), xiv. Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 172–3. Charles Rzepka also notes Keats’s preference for projecting his imagination into animals, natural scenery, or inanimate objects rather than people and explores reasons behind this impulse (The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986], 169–72).

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178 83

84

85 86

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88 89

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94 95

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Reynolds, ‘Manuel’ (Champion, 16 March 1817), in Jones, Selected Prose of Reynolds, 178; Jones, Life of Reynolds, 82. On Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke’s publications, see Altick, The Cowden Clarkes, 195–8, 133–5. Leigh Hunt like Keats deviates from the predominant Romantic approach to Shakespeare’s characters, in that he treats them more as generalized types than unique individuals. See Fleece, ‘Leigh Hunt’s Shakespearean Criticism’, 185, 191–5. Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost, 142–3; see also 27, 38–9. A number of critics have noted conflicts in Keats’s attitude toward self and selflessness. See for example Bush, ‘Keats and Shakespeare’, 83–5; Muir, ‘Keats and Hazlitt’, 157–8; Engell, The Creative Imagination, 288–92; Margaret Homans, ‘Keats Reading Women, Women Reading Keats’, Studies in Romanticism 29 (1990): 352–5; Beth Lau, ‘Protest, “Nativism”, and Impersonation in the Works of Chatterton and Keats’, Studies in Romanticism 42 (2003): 537–8. So also conclude Bush, ‘Keats and Shakespeare’, 88–9; Helen Vendler, Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 46; and Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 173. Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 173. For histories of the ode see Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 63–84; John Creaser, ‘John Keats, Odes’, in A Companion to Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 239–41. The number provided by Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 192. He traces many of these allusions on 193–7. See also Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 85, 93, 100, 102, 105, 306–7, n. 8; White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 141, 147. White (Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 141) cites 2. 7. 104–6 and Vendler (Odes of John Keats, 307) 4. 15. 80–2 of Antony and Cleopatra in relation to ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. Other relevant passages in Antony and Cleopatra are 1. 5. 4–6, 4. 2. 44–5, 4. 14. 99–101, 5. 2. 243–4, 281–2, 294–6, 309–10, 356. Lau, Keats’s Reading of the Romantic Poets (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 28. On Keats’s ability to incorporate allusions to Shakespeare and other writers into his own distinctive voice, see White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 21, 106–7, 195 and ch. 1 passim; Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 177–9, 183, 188, 190; Lau, Keats’s Reading of the Romantic Poets, 28, and Keats’s Paradise Lost, 4. Murry, Keats and Shakespeare, 189. Vendler, Odes of John Keats, 274–7; Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 199–200. William Flesch, ‘The Ambivalence of Generosity: Keats Reading Shakespeare’, ELH 62 (1995): 149–69; the passage quoted is on 150. Bridget Keegan, ‘Nostalgic Chatterton: Fictions of Poetic Identity and the Forging of a Self-Taught Tradition’, in Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, ed. Nick Groom (New York: St. Martins, 1999), 214. Marjorie Levinson notes the perplexity of eighteenth-century scholars as to why Chatterton would choose

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‘the inferior reputation of translator-editor’ if he could claim that of author (Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of A Style [Oxford: Blackwell, 1988], 10–11). See also my essay, ‘Protest, “Nativism”, and Impersonation’, 532–3. Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, ed. B. C. Southam, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1968), 97–8, 157, 162. D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 31, 28. I compare Keats’s and Austen’s practice of negating the self in order to gain literary authority in ‘Jane Austen and John Keats: Negative Capability, Romance and Reality’, Keats-Shelley Journal 55 (2006): 107–9. Thomas McFarland, The Masks of Keats: The Endeavour of a Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3, 18. Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, 5, 10; see also Lau, ‘Protest, “Nativism”, and Impersonation’, 535; Lau, ‘Jane Austen and John Keats’, 108–9. Another critic who claims that Keats is self-distancing rather than personally revealing in his poems is Susan J. Wolfson, The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 199–202. See Thomson, ‘Edmund Kean’, 17, 43. John Goodridge, ‘Identity, Authenticity, Class: John Clare and the Mask of Chatterton’, Angelaki 1.2 (1993–1994): 137; Keegan, ‘Nostalgic Chatterton’, 211. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 212. There are scores of such studies, but the following are representative examples: R. F. Rashbrook, ‘Keats and “Hamlet”’, Notes and Queries 195 (1950): 253–4; Stuart M. Sperry, ‘Madeline and Ophelia: A Source for “The Eve of St. Agnes,” XXVI, 4–7’, Notes and Queries 4 (1957): 29–30; D. G. James, ‘Keats and “King Lear”’, Shakespeare Survey 13 (1960): 58–68; Howard Felperin, ‘Keats and Shakespeare: Two New Sources’, ELN 2 (1964): 105–9; J.-C. Sallé, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnet 27 and Keats’s “Bright Star!”’, Notes and Queries 14 (1967): 24; Bruce E. Haley, ‘The Infinite Will: Shakespeare’s Troilus and the “Ode to a Nightingale”’, Keats-Shelley Journal 21–22 (1972–3): 18–23; Barry Gradman, ‘King Lear and the Image of Ruth in Keats’s “Nightingale” Ode’, Keats-Shelley Journal 25 (1976): 15–22; Willard Spiegelman, ‘Keats’s “Coming Muskrose” and Shakespeare’s “Profound Verdure”’, ELH 50 (1983): 347–62; John Kerrigan, ‘Keats and Lucrece’, Shakespeare Survey 41 (1989): 103–18; Cedric Watts, ‘Keats’s “Bright Star” and “A Lover’s Complaint”’, Notes and Queries 53 (2006): 320–2. White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate (Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination), Helen Vendler (Odes of John Keats) and W. J. Bate, among others, treat the importance of King Lear and Hamlet for Keats. Several scholars have explored connections between Antony and Cleopatra and Keats’s poetry, though none have done so extensively. White analyses Keats’s markings in Antony and Cleopatra along with those in Troilus and Cressida and Romeo and Juliet in a chapter on Shakespeare’s ‘Tragedies of Love’. William Flesch argues for Cleopatra’s reference to her ‘salad days / When I was green injudgment’ (1. 5. 73–4) and her praise of Antony’s generosity, which had ‘no winter in’t; an [autumn] it was / That grew the more by reaping’ (5. 2. 87–8) as key passages for understanding Keats’s ‘To Autumn’. He also treats the play’s influence on Hyperion. See also Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic

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113 114 115

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Imagination, 197–8; Greg Kucich, ‘Keats and the Shards of Antony and Cleopatra’, American Notes and Queries 1.2 (1988): 56–8; Adrien Bonjour, ‘From Shakespeare’s Venus to Cleopatra’s Cupids’, Shakespeare Survey 15 (1962): 74. White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 135; Spurgeon observes that Keats’s marginal note in response to Antony and Cleopatra, 1. 1. 48 (‘Fie, wrangling queen!’) is the longest he wrote in this edition (33). This note will be discussed further in the following. Leonidas M. Jones, ‘Keats’s Favorite Play’, ELN 15 (1977): 43–4. On Keats’s meetings with Procter see also W. J. Bate (John Keats, 642–3). Jones, ‘Keats’s Favorite Play’, 44. As explained below, ‘The agonies, the strife/Of human hearts’ is quoted from Keats’s ‘Sleep and Poetry’, 124–5. Leon Waldoff, Keats and the Silent Work of Imagination (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 27; see also 28–30, 86–91. Others who discuss Keats’s complex feelings toward women include Susan J. Wolfson, ‘Keats’s “Gordian Complication” of Women’, in Approaches to Teaching Keats’s Poetry, ed. Walter H. Evert and Jack W. Rhodes (New York: MLA, 1991), 77–85; Wolfson, ‘Feminizing Keats’, in Critical Essays on John Keats, ed. Hermione de Almeida (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1990), 325–30; Homans, ‘Keats Reading Women’, 341–70; Mary Arseneau, ‘Madeline, Mermaids, and Medusas in “The Eve of St. Agnes”’, Papers on Language and Literature 33 (1997): 228–31. Homans, ‘Keats Reading Women’, 354–5. See White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 141. Ibid., 413: White notes Keats’s underlining of the passage in which ‘Antony’s uncertainty about identity . . . [is] expressed in the image of shifting clouds.’ Keats quotes ‘Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish &c’ (4. 14. 2) in the margins of Z. Jackson’s Shakspeare’s Genius Justified (Hampstead Keats, 288). In other lines from this passage, Antony says, describing the clouds, ‘That which is now a horse, even with a thought/The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct/ As water is in water’ (4. 14. 9–11). These lines are reminiscent of the phrase Keats chose for his epitaph, ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water,’ and could possibly be a source. Another source that has been proposed is Henry VIII, 4. 2. 45–6 (‘Men’s evil manners live in brass, their virtues/We write in water’). See A. M. Muirhead, ‘Keats’s Epitaph’, TLS, 28 January 1926, 63. Janet Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), 106, 159. Adelman treats the association of Cleopatra and Egypt with art and the imagination and Rome with reason, empiricism and scepticism throughout ch. 3: ‘Nature’s Piece ’gainst Fancy: Poetry and the Structure of Belief in Antony and Cleopatra’. Sara Munson Deats cites others who have made these connections (‘Shakespeare’s Anamorphic Drama: A Survey of Antony and Cleopatra in Criticism, on Stage, and on Screen’, in Antony and Cleopatra: New Critical Essays, ed. Deats [New York: Routledge, 2005], 4). White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 146. Ibid., 145. See Slote, Keats and the Dramatic Principle, 24, 29–30; White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 44–5. Carol Cook, ‘The Fatal Cleopatra’, in Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 250.

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123 124 125

126 127

128 129

130 131

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Deats, ‘Shakespeare’s Anamorphic Drama’, 1–34, provides a helpful survey of critical debates on the ethos and characters of Antony and Cleopatra. For those who advocate the play’s ambivalence, see 10–12. White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 136. Ibid., 139; Spurgeon, Keats’s Shakespeare, 34. Adelman, The Common Liar (191, n. 6) questions Antony’s motives and cites Matthew N. Proser (The Heroic Image in Five Shakespearean Tragedies [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965], 187), who believes that Antony leaves Octavia and returns to Egypt ‘for political reasons and as a matter of honor’ rather than for love of Cleopatra. On Antony’s possible treachery to Cleopatra see also David S. Berkeley, ‘Of Oversimplifying Antony’, College English 17 (1955): 96–9. Deats, ‘Shakespeare’s Anamorphic Drama’, 3; see also 32–4. Adelman, The Common Liar, 168, 52; see also 49–52, 103, 164–7. For surveys of criticism on the mixed generic conventions of the play see Adelman, 190, n. 2, 199–200, n. 37, 227, n. 49; and Deats, ‘Shakespeare’s Anamorphic Drama’, 2, 12–14. Ibid., 1. The same points can be made about ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, but in the interest of space I shall omit that poem from my discussion and concentrate on the longer romances. Homans, ‘Keats Reading Women’, 345. See Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 186–7; White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 161–8. Jack Stillinger usefully surveys other critics who link Romeo and Juliet and The Eve of St. Agnes (Reading The Eve of St. Agnes: The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], 58–9). Earl Wasserman, The Finer Tone: Keats’ Major Poems (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953), 101–12. Jack Stillinger, ‘The Hoodwinking of Madeline: Skepticism in The Eve of St. Agnes’, in The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats’s Poems, 87; ‘Keats and Romance: The “Reality” of Isabella’, in The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats’s Poems, 45. Arseneau, ‘Madeline, Mermaids, and Medusas’, 231–41; the direct quotation is on 231. See also Fleming McClelland, ‘Does Madeline Sleep, or Does She Wake? The Hoodwinking of Porphyro’, Keats-Shelley Review 10 (1996): 33–4. Stillinger, ‘Hoodwinking of Madeline’, 76–81; Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 186. Herbert G. Wright, ‘Has Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes” a Tragic Ending?’ Modern Language Review 40 (1945): 90–4. Stuart M. Sperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 201. Stillinger notes various ‘touches of humor’ in the poem (‘Hoodwinking of Madeline’, 83). Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 89. My student Sean Sepko in his MA thesis first brought to my attention core similarities between Lamia and Antony and Cleopatra. One conspicuous difference between the two works may be noted: in Keats’s poem the lovers are

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younger than Apollonius, whereas in Shakespeare’s play the lovers are older than Caesar. Lawrence Bowling argues that Antony’s fatal flaw is his inability to choose between the worlds of Rome and Egypt (‘Antony’s Internal Disunity’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 4 [1964]: 239–46). See Muir, ‘Keats and Hazlitt’, 145; Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 167. On Lamia’s radical ambiguity see Charles I. Patterson, Jr., The Daemonic in the Poetry of John Keats (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 185–9; Wolfson, The Questioning Presence, 333–43. Deats, 1. Stillinger compares Shakespeare and Keats as writers notable for the ambiguities, contradictions and inexhaustibility of their works (Reading The Eve of St. Agnes, 127–9; ‘The “Story” of Keats’, in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. Susan J. Wolfson [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001]; rpt. in Jack Stillinger, Romantic Complexity, 118). My points here may seem to contradict my previous claim that Keats does not exhibit the same Negative Capability he found in Shakespeare; however, I believe a distinction can be made between the different implications of this concept as Keats employed it. Keats does not demonstrate Shakespeare’s ability to lose himself in other identities as he creates psychologically complex, memorable characters. Figures such as Madeline and Porphyro, Lamia, Lycius and Apollonius, I contend, are not fully realized human portraits such as most of those found in Shakespeare’s plays. They do reflect a variety of attitudes, beliefs and values, however, and Keats demonstrates the Negative Capability to consider a range of such perspectives without privileging one over the others. One of the reasons Antony and Cleopatra may especially have appealed to Keats is that its protagonists are more opaque, their inner lives less fully revealed than those in Shakespeare’s other tragedies, and some critics have argued that the play ‘becomes a more unified and explicable whole if it is read as a lyric poem or an allegory to which questions of character are largely irrelevant’ (Adelman, The Common Liar, 19; see also 15–18).

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Select Bibliography

Aaron, Jane. A Double Singleness: Gender and the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Ackroyd, Peter. The Lambs of London. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004. Bate, Jonathan. ‘Hazlitt’s Shakespearean Quotations’. Prose Studies 7.1 (May 1984): 26–37. ——--——. ‘Lamb on Shakespeare’. Charles Lamb Bulletin 51 (1985): 76–85. ——--——. Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. ——--——. Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730–1830. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Bate, Walter Jackson. John Keats. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Bromwich, David. Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1999. ——--——. ‘Hazlitt on Shakespeare and the Motives of Power’. In The Hazlitt Review 1 (2008): 5–15. Bush, Douglas. ‘Keats and Shakespeare’. In Shakespeare: Aspects of Influence, edited by G. B. Evans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. Buzacott, Martin. The Death of the Actor: Shakespeare on Page and Stage. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Chandler, David. ‘Lamb, Falstaff’s Letters, and Landor’s Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare’. Charles Lamb Bulletin 131 (2005): 76–85. Clarke, Charles Cowden and Mary Cowden Clarke. Recollections of Writers. (1878) Reprinted Fontwell, UK: Centaur Press, 1969. Coldwell, Joan. ‘The Playgoer as Critic: Charles Lamb on Shakespeare’s Characters’. Shakespeare Quarterly 26:2 (1975): 184–95. Coleridge, S. T. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by E. L. Griggs. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71. ——--——. Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature. Edited by R. A. Foakes. Vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen series 75, 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Davis, Philip. ‘“The Future in the Instant”: Hazlitt’s Essay and Shakespeare’. In Metaphysical Hazlitt: Bicentenary Essays, edited by Uttara Natarajan, Tom Paulin and Duncan Wu. London: Routledge, 2005. Davies, R. T. ‘Keats and Hazlitt’. Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin 8 (1957): 1–8, 139–58. Flesch, William. ‘The Ambivalence of Generosity: Keats Reading Shakespeare’. English Literary History 62 (1995): 149–69. Hamilton, Paul. ‘Hazlitt and the “kings of speech”’. In Metaphysical Hazlitt: Bicentenary Essays, edited by Uttara Natarajan, Tom Paulin and Duncan Wu. London: Routledge, 2005.

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Han, Younglim. Romantic Shakespeare, from Stage to Page. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001. Haworth, Helen E. ‘Keats’s Copy of Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poetry’. Bulletin of the New York Public Library 74 (1970): 419–27. Hazlitt, William. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Edited by P. P. Howe. 21 vols. London and Toronto: J. M. Dent, 1930–4. Heller, Janet Ruth. Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1990. Howe, P. P. The Life of William Hazlitt. Introduction by Frank Swinnerton. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1947. Hull, Simon. ‘The Ideology of the Unspectacular: Theatricality and Charles Lamb’s Essayistic Figure’. In Romantic Spectacle, edited by John Halliwell and Ian Haywood, Romanticism on the Net 46, 2007. Keats, John. The Poetical Works and Other Writings of John Keats: Hampstead Edition. Edited by Harry Buxton Forman, revised by Maurice Buxton Forman. Vol. 5. New York: Scribner’s, 1939. ——--——. Letters of John Keats. Edited by H. E. Rollins, 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958. ——--——. The Poems of John Keats. Edited by Jack Stillinger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Kinnaird, John. William Hazlitt: Critic of Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Lamb, Charles. A Selection from the Literary Criticism of Charles Lamb. Edited by E. M. W. Tillyard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923. ——--——. Lamb as Critic. Edited by Roy Park. London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. Lamb, Charles, and Mary Lamb. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. Edited by E. V. Lucas. 7 vols. London: Methuen, 1903–5. ——--——. The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb. Edited by Edwin W. Marrs. 3 vols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975. Lau, Beth. Keats’s Paradise Lost. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998. Levinson, Marjorie. Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of A Style. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. Mahoney, J. L. The Literary Criticism of William Hazlitt. 2nd ed. New York: Fordham University Press, 1981. Marsden, Jean I. ‘Shakespeare for Girls: Mary Lamb and Tales from Shakespeare’. In Children’s Literature, vol. 17, edited by Francelia Butler, Margaret Higonnet and Barbara Rosen. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Matthews, G. M. (ed.). Keats: The Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971. McFarland, Thomas. The Masks of Keats: The Endeavour of a Poet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. McKenna, Wayne. Charles Lamb in the Theatre. Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1978. Moody, Jane. ‘“Fine Word, Legitimate!” Towards a Theatrical History of Romanticism’. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 38, 3/4 (fall/winter 1996): 223–44. Muir, Kenneth. ‘Keats and Hazlitt’. In John Keats: A Reassessment, edited by Kenneth Muir. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1958.

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Murry, John Middleton. Keats and Shakespeare: A Study of Keats’ Poetic Life from 1816 to 1820. London: Oxford University Press, 1925. Natarajan, Uttara. ‘Hazlitt, Keats, and the Discrimination of Poetic Self’. Romanticism 2:1 (1996): 54–66. ——--——. Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense: Criticism, Morals, and the Metaphysics of Power. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Owings, Frank, Jr. The Keats Library: A Descriptive Catalogue. London: Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, 1978. Park, Roy. Hazlitt and the Spirit of the Age: Abstraction and Critical Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Parker, Dorothy, and Ross Evans. The Coast of Illyria: A Play in Three Acts. Introduced by Arthur F. Kinney. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1990. Reynolds, John Hamilton. Selected Prose. Edited by Leonidas M. Jones. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. Riehl, Joseph E. Charles Lamb’s Children’s Literature. Salzburg Studies in English Literature. Salzburg, Austria: University of Salzburg Press, 1980. Rollins, H. E. (ed.) The Keats Circle. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Schlegel, A. W. A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. Trans. John Black. 2 vols. London: Baldwin & Co., 1815. Sikes, H. M. ‘The Poetic Theory and Practice of Keats: the Record of a Debt to Hazlitt’. Philological Quarterly 38 (1959): 401–12. Spurgeon, Caroline F. E. Keats’s Shakespeare: A Descriptive Study Based on New Material. 2nd ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1929. Stillinger, Jack. Romantic Complexity: Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Vendler, Helen. The Odes of John Keats. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Waldoff, Leon. Keats and the Silent Work of Imagination. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985. White, R. S. Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Wolfson, Susan J. The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. ——--——. ‘Explaining to Her Sisters: Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespear’. In Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare: On the Responses of Dickinson, Woolf, Rich, H. D., George Eliot, and Others, edited by Marianne Novy. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

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Index

Aaron, Jane 10, 37 Abbott, William 93 Abrams, M. H. 101 Ackroyd, Peter 62–3 Adelman, Janet 147, 150, 180, 181, 182 Aikin, John 24 Allen, Emily 71–2 Andrews, Gary 61 Aristotle 94, 137, 170 Arne, Thomas 17 Arnold, Matthew 5, 9 Arseneau, Mary 152 Austen, Jane 130, 137, 179 Bailey, Benjamin 13–14, 117, 119, 120, 122, 128, 147 Bannister, Jack 30, 38, 90 Barbauld, Anna Letitia 24, 51 Barish, Jonas 19 Barry, Elizabeth 31 Barry, James 60 Bate, Jonathan 10, 14, 18, 23, 47, 102, 103, 125, 130, 134, 136, 140, 161, 174, 175–6, 178 Bate, Walter Jackson 127, 130, 141, 175 Beaumont, Francis 28, 29, 41, 42, 43, 44 Beckermann, Bernard 19 Beethoven, Ludwig van 16 Bensley, William 31 Berkeley, George 64 Betty, Master (William Henry Best) 39, 40 Bewick, William 93 Black, John 80–1 Blake, William 1, 52 Bloom, Harold 138 Boaden, James 21 Booth, J. B. 93, 100 Booth, Sarah 93 Boswell, James 25

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Bowdler, Henrietta 52, 53 Bowdler, Thomas 53 Boydell, John 1, 40, 79–80, 116 Bradley, A. C. 16, 19, 63, 109, 127, 140 Brawne, Fanny 13, 121, 122, 132, 144, 145, 146, 153 Bromwich, David 102, 104, 106, 170 Brown, Charles 110 Brown, Thomas 33 Burke, Edmund 23, 34, 67–8, 85 Burns, Robert 117 Burton, Robert 154, 155 Bush, Douglas 115 Buzacott, Martin 19 Byron, George Gordon Lord 1, 3, 128, 132, 134, 153 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de 97 Chandler, David 27, 163–4 Chapman, George 14, 56, 123, 161, 168 Chatterton, Thomas 29, 111, 137, 138, 139–40, 179 Chaucer, Geoffrey 3, 84, 113 Cibber, Colley 16, 30, 32, 35 Clare, John 139 Clarke, Charles Cowden 110–11, 119, 122, 123, 129–30, 131 Clarke, John 110 Clarke, Mary Cowden 4, 131 Clayton, Jay 130 Clemit, Pamela 54 Coates, John 43, 53 Coldwell, Joan 20, 164 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1–2, 3, 5, 8, 11–12, 14, 18, 19, 20–4, 30, 33, 39, 41, 47–8, 55, 61, 62, 63, 64, 68, 69, 73–6, 78, 79, 81, 82, 87, 95, 101, 128, 131, 134, 135, 150, 160, 161, 162, 168, 169, 170

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Index

Congreve, William 49 Cook, Carol 148 Cooke, George Frederick 12, 21, 30–2, 35 Cowper, William 60 Dabbs, Thomas 44 Dante Alighieri 16, 109 Darton, F. J. Harvey 53 Defoe, Daniel 60 Delacroix, Eugène 1 De Quincey, Thomas 61, 62, 63 Dickens, Charles 2, 13, 160, 161 Dilke, Charles 150 Dodd, William 123 Dodsley, Robert 42 Duff, William 26 Duncan-Jones, Katherine 60 Dyer, George 45, 62 Eliot, T. S. 50 Elliston, Robert William 17 Emery, John 93 Erskine, Thomas 23 Evans, Ross 61–3 Fairer, David 18 Farquhar, George 49 Field, Barron 33 Fleece, Jeffrey 112 Flesch, William 136, 147, 180 Fletcher, John 28, 29, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 52 Ford, John 42, 44 Fuseli, Henry 1, 60, 79 Gager, Valerie L. 161 Garfield, Leon 60 Garrick, David 17, 19–20, 21 30, 31, 32, 41, 48, 58, 164 George III, King 99 Gifford, William 4, 43, 89, 92, 104 Gillray, James 18 Gittings, Robert 174, 175 Godwin, Mary Jane 51, 54, 56, 61 Godwin, William 4, 13, 18, 23, 30, 51, 54–7, 61, 93, 166 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1, 15

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Goodridge, John 139 Greene, Robert 139 Gutch, John Matthew 27, 163 Hamilton, Paul 102 Han, Younglim 19 Hardy, Thomas 23 Haworth, Helen 14 Haydon, Benjamin Robert 112, 113–15, 116, 117, 131, 140, 174 Hays, Mary 24 Hazlitt, William 1–9, 11–20, 29, 35, 54, 61, 62, 63, 64–108, 112, 115, 117–19, 124–5, 126, 128–9, 131, 132, 135, 137, 138, 139, 157, 168–72, 173, 175, 176, 177 An Essay on the Principles of Human Action 64, 76 A View of the English Stage 92, 93, 125, 126 Characters of Shakespear’s Plays 2, 46, 47, 64, 78–92, 95, 115, 117, 131, 169, 175 Lectures on English Philosophy 106 Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth 13, 97 Lectures on the English Comic Writers 97 Lectures on the English Poets 95, 97, 102, 106, 117, 124 Letter to William Gifford 89, 92, 104 ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ 100 ‘Observations on Mr Wordsworth’s Poem “The Excursion”’ 77, 177 ‘On a Sun-Dial’ 100 ‘On Genius and Common Sense’ 101, 106 ‘On Gusto’ 17, 78, 118 ‘On Milton’s Versification’ 77 ‘On Mr Kean’s Iago’ 76–7 ‘On Poetical Versatility’ 86–7 ‘On Poetry in General’ 93–5 ‘On Posthumous Fame’ 77–8, 105, 177 ‘On Shakespeare and Milton’ 95, 169 ‘On the Conversation of Authors’ 62 ‘On the Fine Arts’ 79 ‘On the Love of Life’ 66 ‘On the Spirit of Monarchy’ 91

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Index ‘Sir Walter Scott, Racine, and Shakespeare’ 101 Table-Talk 2, 100, 101, 106, 108 ‘The Fight’ 100 The Plain Speaker 100, 101, 107 The Round Table 66, 76–8, 79, 84, 85, 86, 95, 100, 104, 105, 108, 117, 118, 138, 179 The Spirit of the Age 64, 103 Hegel, Georg William Friedrich 1 Heins, Paul 52 Heller, Janet Ruth 19 Heywood, Thomas 14, 42 Hogarth, William 37–8 Holland, Peter 162, 164 Holmes, Edward 110 Homans, Margaret 145, 151 Homer 56, 111, 123, 137 Hone, William 41 Horace 135 Hugo, Victor 1 Hull, Simon 39, 165 Hume, David 64, 168 Hunt, John 93 Hunt, Leigh 19, 27, 32–3, 76, 79, 87, 92, 109, 112–14, 115, 116, 119, 123–4, 176, 178 Imlay, Fanny 54 Imlay, Gilbert 54 Ireland, Samuel 25, 62 Ireland, William Henry 25–6, 29, 62–3, 163 Iser, Wolfgang 19 Jacobus, Mary 23 James, Henry 15 Jameson, Anna 4 Jeffrey, Francis 79, 92 Jeffrey, Sarah 134 Johnson, Joseph 24 Johnson, Samuel 35, 40, 45–9, 80, 84, 107, 116, 120, 141, 148 Jones, Leonidas 115, 131, 141 Jonson, Ben 3, 29, 42, 43, 44, 97, 134 Kant, Immanuel 67, 168 Kaufman, Angelica 79

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189

Kean, Edmund 1–2, 4, 21, 35, 65–73, 76–80, 85, 90–1, 93, 96, 98–100, 102, 111, 115, 118–19, 120, 124, 125, 126, 138–9, 157, 168, 169, 171, 173, 175, 176, 177 Keats, George 139 Keats, Georgiana 132, 139 Keats, John 1–9, 11, 13–14, 63, 93, 104–8, 109–59, 172–82 ‘Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art’ 120 Endymion 115–17, 121, 122, 126, 129, 139, 142–8, 151, 155, 157, 158, 176 ‘Fragment of Castle-builder’ 141 Hyperion 122, 127, 130, 133, 170 King Stephen 110, 119, 173, 176 ‘Imitation of Spenser’ 111, 122 Isabella 123 ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ 152, 181 Lamia 144, 151, 152, 154–8, 182 ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ 127, 130, 135, 148 ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ 127, 130, 135, 138, 145, 148 ‘Ode to Apollo’ 111, 127, 130, 135, 148 ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ 123 ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’ 8, 112, 120, 141 ‘On the Sea’ 116 Otho the Great 110, 119, 130, 136, 144, 173 ‘Sleep and Poetry’ 142 The Eve of St. Agnes 127, 130, 151–4, 157, 158 The Fall of Hyperion 122, 127, 133, 144 ‘To a Friend Who Sent Me Some Roses’ 111 ‘To Autumn’ 127, 130, 135, 136, 147, 148, 180 ‘To Charles Cowden Clarke’ 111 ‘To George Felton Mathew’ 111, 139 ‘Welcome joy, and welcome sorrow’ 141 ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’ 8–9

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Keats, Tom 141 Keegan, Bridget 137, 93 Kelly, Fanny 17, 61–3 Kemble, Charles 30 Kemble, John Philip 21, 25, 30, 90, 98–9 Kenney, James 30 Kinnaird, John 93 Kinney, Arthur F. 62, 167 Knights, L. C. 19 Kucich, Greg 124, 176 Lamb, Charles 1–9, 10–63, 64, 68, 69, 73–6, 78, 80, 90, 91, 99, 125, 160–8 ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’ 39–40 Essays of Elia 11, 12, 17, 19, 30, 38–40, 62, 63 Extracts from the Garrick Plays 41, 48 Falstaff’s Letters 12, 24–9, 35 John Woodvil 10, 27–30, 42 Mr. H– 17, 30, 41, 63 ‘On Garrick, and Acting’ 34–5 ‘On Some of the Old Actors’ 12, 31 ‘On the Acting of Munden’ 17 ‘On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century’ 12, 49 ‘On the Custom of Hissing at the Theatres’ 34 ‘On the Danger of Confounding Moral with Personal Deformity’ 34 ‘On the Genius and Character of Hogarth’ 73 ‘On the Inconveniences Resulting from Being Hanged’ 33 ‘On the Pernicious Effects of Methodism’ 33 ‘On the Probable Effects of the Gunpowder Treason’ 34 ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare’ 5, 12, 15–16, 22, 24, 30, 32–7, 49–50, 73–4, 125 ‘Salutation and Cat’ 20–4 ‘Shakspeare’s Improvers’ 12 Specimens of English Dramatic Poets 2, 12, 13, 19, 24, 35, 40–51, 52, 53, 73, 125

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Tales from Shakespear 4, 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, 19, 22, 24, 40, 50–63 The Adventures of Ulysses 56 The Last Essays of Elia 17, 38 The Pawnbroker’s Daughter 30 The Wife’s Trial 30 ‘We were two pretty babes’ 24 Lamb, John 11 Lamb, Mary 4, 6, 10–11, 13, 17, 34, 50–63 Tales from Shakespear 4, 6, 10, 11, 50–63 Landor, Walter Savage 27, 109, 127 Landseer, Charles 93 Landseer, Edwin Henry 93 Le Grice, Charles Valentine 21–2 Leopardi, Giacomo 1 Levinson, Marjorie 138, 179 Levith, Murray J. 61 Lewes, George Henry 137 Lin Shu 61 Lloyd, Charles 18, 24, 30 Lloyd, Robert 12, 30–2 Lockwood, Tom 43 Longinus 102 Lull, Janis 30 Lynch, Jack 112, 117, 174 Macready, William Charles 21, 93 Mahoney, John 106 Malone, Edmund 25, 40 Manning, Thomas 41, 43 Manzoni, Alessandro 1 Marlowe, Christopher 28, 42, 44 Marsden, Jean 53, 57 Marvell, Andrew 113 Massinger, Philip 42, 43 Mathews, Charles 17, 30 McFarland, Thomas 137–8 McLelland, Fleming 152 Mellor, Anne 154 Middleton, Thomas 43, 44, 49 Miller, D. A. 137 Milton, John 8, 14, 60, 73, 74, 77, 78, 93–6, 101, 105, 109, 111, 113, 117, 118, 122, 124, 127, 128, 129, 133, 134, 135, 138, 153, 161, 169

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Index Mitford, Mary Russell 93, 169 Molière 9 Moore, Don D. 44 Morgann, Maurice 26 Motion, Andrew 173, 174 Moxon, Edward 41 Mudford, William 66 Munden, Joseph 17, 19, 38 Murry, John Middleton 109, 136, 140, 173, 176 Napoleon Bonaparte 2, 3, 87 Nesbit, Edith 60 Newlyn, Lucy 36 Northcote, James 79 O’Neill, Eliza 93 Opie, John 79 Otway, Thomas 21 Parker, Dorothy 61–2 Pascoe, Judith 22 Park, Roy 12, 106 Pater, Walter 15, 16, 63 Paul, Bholanauth 60 Perkins, David 130 Perry, Seamus 95 Perry, T. S. 15 Phillips, Richard 24 Pitt, William 23 Pope, Alexander 46, 80, 169, 171 Priestley, Joseph 23 Prince Regent, The 87 Procter, Bryan Waller (‘Barry Cornwall’) 8, 44, 93, 141, 159, 180 Quarles, Francis 28 Quin, James 31 Rabelais, François 97 Reynolds, Jane 131–2 Reynolds, John Hamilton 3, 92, 105, 112, 115–17, 118, 121, 125, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, 174, 175 Reynolds, Joshua 79

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191

Reynolds, Marianne 131–2 Richardson, Samuel 153 Riehl, Joseph 53 Robinson, Henry Crabb 65, 74, 93 Robinson, Thomas 65 Roe, Nicholas 113 Rowe, Nicholas 21 Rowley, William 43, 49 Ruskin, John 94, 102 Russell, Gillian 50 Rzepka, Charles 178 Salt, Samuel 11 Schiller, Friedrich 1 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 47, 48, 80–3, 96, 131 Schlegel, Friedrich 96 Schoch, Richard 125–6 Scott, Grant 130 Scott, John 98, 141 Scott, Sir Walter 1, 60, 101, 106, 160 Selden, John 120 Severn, Joseph 113, 120, 126, 174 Seward, Anna 21, 23 Shadwell, Thomas 35 Shakespeare, William Characters Angelo 43 Anthonio 58 Antony 83, 140–59 Ariel 78, 105 Bassanio 58 Bertram 52–3 Bottom 60, 83 Brutus 88 Caliban 121 Celia 58 Charmian 132, 141 Claudio (Measure for Measure) 135 Cleopatra 8, 83, 131, 132, 140–59 Coriolanus 86–9, 98, 99 Don John 164 Duke, the (Measure for Measure) 135 Edmund 103, 104 Falstaff 3, 12, 24–9, 35, 38, 39, 78, 97, 105 Ferdinand 2

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Index

Shakespeare, William Characters (Cont’d) Goneril 100 Hamlet 4, 9, 30, 31–2, 36, 39, 52, 56, 62, 67–71, 75, 77, 81, 82, 90, 103, 105, 106, 107, 113, 132, 134, 135, 140, 141, 164, 179 Helena (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) 13, 58, 59, 126 Helena (All’s Well) 46, 52–3 Henry V 88 Hermia 13, 45, 58, 59, 126 Iago 14, 68, 70, 71, 76, 77, 85, 105, 128 Imogen 14, 53, 82, 105, 111, 128, 131, 132, 153 Isabella 113 Juliet 6, 132 Lady Macbeth 20–3, 54, 85, 86, 90–1 Lear 13, 32, 36, 59, 60, 61, 77, 94, 98, 99–100, 105, 111, 131 Leontes 58 Macbeth 4, 23, 24, 68, 131, 164 Mariana 53 Miranda 121 Ophelia 36, 71, 132 Othello 4, 36, 70, 75, 77, 102, 105, 119, 131 Polixenes 58 Portia 113 Prospero 85, 121 Richard II 71 Richard III 4, 12, 30, 31, 32, 67, 68, 70, 80, 85, 118, 119, 126, 164 Romeo 6, 72, 132 Rosalind 58 Shylock 4, 44, 66, 67, 68, 70, 80, 91, 119 Titania 60, 111 Troilus 132 Ulysses 107 Plays and Poems A Midsummer Night’s Dream 13, 28, 29, 57–8, 59, 63, 90, 126, 135 All’s Well that Ends Well 46, 52–3

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Antony and Cleopatra 8, 83, 110, 131, 140–59 As You Like It 28, 38, 39, 58 Coriolanus 30, 35, 86–9, 92, 98, 99, 103, 139 Cymbeline 53, 82, 83, 111, 142, 153, 173 Hamlet 9, 30, 31–2, 36, 39, 52, 56, 62, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 75, 77, 81, 82, 90, 103, 106, 107, 120, 132, 134, 135, 140, 141 Henry IV, Part I 3, 26, 27, 28, 39, 115 Henry IV, Part II 3, 26, 27, 28, 39 Henry V 2, 13, 26, 87–9, 99, 103 Henry VIII 89, 180 Julius Caesar 88, 92 King John 3 King Lear 4–5, 6, 9, 16, 36, 52, 59, 112, 117, 120, 125, 133, 135, 136, 140, 141, 142, 143, 148 Macbeth 4, 20–4, 35, 39, 44, 52, 53–4, 110, 131 Measure for Measure 33, 52, 53, 113, 135 Much Ado about Nothing 33, 58 Othello 4, 36, 38, 52, 70, 75, 77, 85, 102, 105, 119, 131, 135 Richard III 4, 12, 14, 30–2, 35, 67, 68, 70, 85, 90, 118, 119, 126 Romeo and Juliet 6, 52, 82, 83, 84, 142, 151 The Comedy of Errors 24 The Lover’s Complaint 116 The Merchant of Venice 4, 58, 91, 117, 135 The Merry Wives of Windsor 26, 135 The Passionate Pilgrim 116 The Rape of Lucrece 37, 116 The Sonnets 81, 109, 116–17, 121–2, 136 The Taming of the Shrew 39, 52, 58, 85 The Tempest 2, 16, 35, 58, 80, 83, 116, 117, 121, 136 The Two Gentlemen of Verona 58, 59 The Two Noble Kinsmen 45 The Winter’s Tale 58, 59, 148, 150

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Index Timon of Athens 35, 37, 52 Troilus and Cressida 3, 83, 84, 89, 117, 132, 175, 180 Twelfth Night 31, 61–2, 113 Venus and Adonis 116, 117, 121, 122, 129 Shelley, Mary 54 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 1, 3, 94, 113, 114, 123, 133 Siddons, Sarah 20–4, 71, 90, 91, 93 Sidney, Sir Philip 43, 103 Slote, Bernice 130, 173 Smith, Horace 113, 118 Southerne, Thomas 21 Southey, Robert 13, 18, 19, 28–9, 41, 62, 79, 87 Spenser, Edmund 109, 111, 112, 113, 122, 124, 138 Sperry, Stuart 153 Spurgeon, Caroline 109, 140, 149, 176, 180 Steevens, George 39, 40, 116, 120, 141, 148 Stendhal 1 Stillinger, Jack 127, 152, 181 Stoddart, Sarah 52 Suett, Richard 30 Talfourd, Thomas Noon 17, 93 Tasso, Torquato 111 Tate, Nahum 16, 35, 1000 Taylor, John 128 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 60 Thelwall, John 33 Thomson, Peter 119, 126, 138, 177 Tillyard, E. M. W. 15, 63

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Titian 2 Tooke, John Horne 23 Tourneur, Cyril 42 Vendler, Helen 136 Verdi, Giuseppe 1 Virgil 111 Waldoff, Leon 144 Wang, Orrin 123, 125 Webster, John 42, 43, 44 Wei Chunshu 61 Wellek, René 16 West, Benjamin 79 West, William Henry (see Master Betty) Whateley, Thomas 26 Whately, Richard 137 White, James 12, 25–7 White, R. S. 119–20, 122, 140, 141, 147, 148–9 Williams, Helen Maria 21 Wilson, John 16 Wither, George 28 Wolfson, Susan J. 57, 59, 124 Wollstonecraft, Mary 18, 54 Woodhouse, Richard 104, 105, 128, 129, 130, 139, 153 Wordsworth, Dorothy 59 Wordsworth, William 1, 3, 6–7, 11, 15, 33, 36–7, 41, 46–7, 55–6, 63, 77, 79, 87, 104, 105, 109, 117, 122, 128, 129, 133, 134, 135, 138, 139, 177 Wright, Herbert 153 Young, Charles 93

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