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S.T.
Coleridge, “Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and Other English Poets” (1818) It was the lecture on Hamlet given on 2
January 1812 that has influenced Hamlet studies ever since.
Before Coleridge, Hamlet was often denigrated and belittled
by critics from Voltaire to Dr.
Johnson. Coleridge
rescued Hamlet and his thoughts on the play are
often still published as supplements to the text. THESIS: Thought Sick Hamlet: “Hamlet is brave
and careless of death; but he vacillates from sensibility, and
procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy
of resolve.” ·
Who’s there? o
ordinary conversation
tends to produce the sense of reality, and at once hides the poet, and yet
approximates the reader or spectator to that state in which the highest
poetry will appear, and in its component parts, though not in the whole
composition, really is, the language of nature. ·
Hamlet’s wordplay:
A little more than kin and less than kind o
‘an exuberant activity of mind; the language of suppressed
passion, and especially of a hardly smothered personal dislike’ ·
‘Seems’, madam, Nay it is. I know not ‘seems’” o
‘[his]
aversion to externals… betrays his habit of brooding over the world within him, coupled with
a prodigality of beautiful words, which are the half embodyings
of thought, and are more than thought, and have an outness,
a reality sui generis, and yet
retain their correspondence and shadowy affinity to the images and movements
within. ·
"O, that this too too solid
flesh would melt, o
taedium vitae
caused by disproportionate mental exertion, which necessitates exhaustion of bodily feeling. o
the mind's appetency (longing for) of the ideal is unchecked… passion combines itself with the indefinite
alone o
‘He mistakes the seeing of his chains for the breaking them, delays
action till action is of no use, and dies the victim of mere circumstance and
accident.’ ·
Polonius: o
in inwardness and uncontrollable activity of movement, Hamlet's
mind is the logical contrary to that of Polonius ·
Hamlet's speech concerning the wassail-music –
o
so finely revealing the predominant idealism, the ratiocinative
meditativeness, of his character ·
Hamlet’s
reaction to seeing the Ghost o
The co-presence of Horatio, Marcellus and
Bernardo is most judiciously contrived; for it renders the courage of Hamlet and his
impetuous eloquence perfectly intelligible. The knowledge, – the unthought of consciousness, – the sensation, – of human
auditors, – of flesh and blood sympathists – acts
as a support and a stimulation a tergo (from the
rear), while the front of the mind, the whole consciousness of the speaker,
is filled, yea, absorbed, by the apparition. ·
“Hillo, ho, ho, boy! come bird, come" o
This part of the scene after Hamlet's
interview with the Ghost has been charged with an improbable eccentricity.
But the truth is, that after the mind has been stretched beyond its usual
pitch and tone, it must either sink into exhaustion and inanity, or seek relief
by change o
the
terrible by a law of the human mind always touches on the verge of the
ludicrous o
a
sort of cunning bravado, bordering on the flights of delirium. For you may, perhaps, observe that
Hamlet's wildness is but half false; he plays that subtle trick of pretending to act only
when he is very near really being what he acts. o
this
Ghost, as a superstition connected with the most mysterious truths of
revealed religion ·
“if the sun breeds maggots in a dead dog, o
"Why, fool as he is, he is some degrees
in rank above a dead dog's carcase; and if the sun,
being a god that kisses carrion, can raise life out of a dead dog, – why may
not good fortune, that favours fools, have raised a
lovely girl out of this dead-alive old fool?" ·
"The rugged Pyrrhus – he whose sable
arms," o
The fancy, that a burlesque was intended,
sinks below criticism: the lines, as epic narrative, are superb. ·
"The spirit that I have seen, o
See Sir Thomas Brown: "I believe
– that those apparitions
and ghosts of departed persons are not the wandering souls of men, but the
unquiet walks of devils, prompting and suggesting us unto mischief,
blood and villainy, instilling and stealing into our hearts, that the blessed
spirits are not at rest in their graves, but wander solicitous of the affairs
of the world." – Relig. Med. Pt. I. Sect. 37. ·
"That undiscover'd
country, from whose bourne o
surely, it were easy
to say, that no traveller returns to this world, as to his home, or
abiding-place. ·
"Ha, ha! are you honest?” o
the penetrating Hamlet perceives, from the
strange and forced manner of Ophelia, that the sweet girl was not acting a
part of her own, but was a decoy; and his after speeches are not so much
directed to her as to the listeners and spies o
Hamlet is beginning with great and unfeigned
tenderness; but perceiving her reserve and coyness, fancies
there are some listeners, and then, to sustain his part, breaks out
into all that coarseness. ·
"Now could I drink hot blood, o
“The utmost at which Hamlet arrives, is a disposition, a mood, to do
something… but what to do, is still left undecided, while every word he
utters tends to betray his disguise.” ·
“Now
might I do it, pat, now he is praying: o
Dr. Johnson's mistaking of the marks of
reluctance and procrastination for impetuous, horror-striking fiendishness! –
Of such importance is it to understand the germ of the character. But the
interval taken by Hamlet's speech is truly awful! ·
"Ros. Take you
me for a spunge, my lord? o
Hamlet's madness is made to consist in the free utterance of all the
thoughts that had passed through his mind before; – in fact, in telling
home-truths. ·
Hamlet’s
capture by pirates
o
This is
almost the only play of Shakespeare, in which mere accidents, independent of
all will, form an essential part of the plot, – but here how judiciously in
keeping with the character of the over-meditative Hamlet, ever at last determined by accident or by a
fit of passion! ·
"Queen. Your sister's drown'd, Laertes. o
Ophelia, – who in the beginning lay like a
little projection of land into a lake or stream, covered with spray-flowers
quietly reflected in the quiet waters, but at length is undermined or
loosened, and becomes a faery isle, and after a brief vagrancy sinks almost
without an eddy! ·
From the "Table Talk" (June 15, 1827): o “Hamlet's character is the
prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical.” |