Coleridge, Lecturer.

Rather than clog-up my other blog with scattered Coleridgeana, I thought I might as well start a new one. Nothing worse than a clogged blog.

My current research project entails the making of a new edition of Coleridge's 'Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton' (1811-12) and his 'Lectures on Shakespeare' (1818-19) for Edinburgh University Press, a companion volume to this EUP edition of the Biographia Literaria. Copies of the latter are still available, incidentally, for the low-low price of £150. Buy one today!

Coleridge's work on Shakespeare is one of his major achievements as a critic. Indeed, of the three great pre-20th-century Shakespeareans—Johnson, Schlegel and our man—he is arguably the one whose work has proved the most influential. (Latterly there's been a critical impetus to add Hazlitt's name to that triumverate, even from some quarters the insistence that Hazlitt is a better critic that Coleridge. Maybe he was, though I don't think so; but he was demonstrably less influential than Coleridge). The odd thing is that during his life Coleridge never published, or even so much as wrote-up, his lectures. This means that making a workable readers' edition of his lectures involves a rather unique set of editorial challenges.

The closest we have is a book published by John Payne Collier in 1856 called Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton. As a young man Collier had attended the 1811-12 lecture series, and made copious shorthand notes of what Coleridge said. Decades later he discovered these notes when moving house (or so he said), transcribed them and published the result. The problem is that Collier is not what one might call a trustworthy individual. In addition to various other literary-critical endeavours, he claimed to have a rare 1632 Folio of Shakespeare that included 117 marginal annotations and emendations by an actor from the Bard's own troop, which he published. It turns out that these marginalia are all in Collier's own handwriting. Oops! Still, there is good reason to believe that his shorthand actually does provide a pretty fair record of what Coleridge said.

The standard edition of Coleridge's Shakespeare Lectures is by the eminent Coleridgean F A Foakes. His monumental two volume set Lectures 1808-1819: On Literature is volume 5 of the the Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Foakes collates newspaper reports, prints what few scrappy notes for his own lectures Coleridge himself made (he did not write-out and recite his lectures, but extemporized broadly from brief notes, and by no means all these latter have survived) and reproduces Collier's own notes. He doesn't print Collier's own smoother-to-read prose renditions of these, since he considers them untrustworthy. But my job is to make not a compendium of notes but rather a reading edition; and so, with all the necessary lector-caveats in place, I am working from the 1856 volume and revising it as and when.

Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman have written a lengthy study, John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century (Yale University Press, 2004).