Diverse tragic thinkers influenced Coleridge: authors, critics, philosophers and performers. He was educated at Christ’s Hospital and Jesus College, Cambridge, attended lectures at Göttingen in 1799, was a famously voracious reader, and interacted with various stage managers, playwrights, actors and actresses during his life. Postponing Coleridge’s involvement with theatre for a dedicated chapter, I wish to discuss his reception of tragic influences in three loose contexts: his formal education at school and university, his reading of English tragedy and his debts to German literature and philosophy.
First I turn to Coleridge’s interest in Classical tragedy, by far the most neglected of the influences I discuss. Bruce Graver is correct to evaluate the lack of attention to Classics in modern criticism as ‘an extraordinary gap in Romantic scholarship’.1 Anthony John Harding has made several scholarly contributions on the subject of Coleridge’s Classical interests, most recently in the Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2009), but subjugates Classical literature and philosophy to religion. Harding is correct to observe that Coleridge ‘did not consistently separate his biblical theological studies from his work on Classical literature, nor either of these from his philosophical interests’ because he ‘remained unconfined by disciplinary boundaries.’2 Yet in some of Coleridge’s musings on Classics, religion is only evident as a limiting presence when he fears that his philosophical reach might breach Christian propriety. In other interactions with Classics, and tragedy specifically, the Bible has no relevance at all. The problem is not misconception on Harding’s part but that he, as probably the leading authority on Coleridge’s Classical reading, explores Classics primarily as a tangential interest of Coleridge’s theology. Elsewhere Harding has a chapter on Coleridge’s 1825 lecture on Prometheus Bound, but under the rubric of ‘reception of myth’ – as distinguished from drama – he is compelled to offer little commentary on Aeschylus’ play, while I find that the central problem of the lecture lies in Coleridge’s reception of the tragedy.3 Comparably, Elinor Shaffer alludes to the Prometheus lecture as ‘one of Coleridge’s most underrated and least discussed works’, but her primary interest is in Coleridge’s dialogue with German philosophy rather than anything Coleridge has to say about Aeschylus or tragedy.4
Among his peers Coleridge was recognized as an expert on Graeco-Roman thought and texts. A Prospectus appears in John Stoddart’s newspaper the New Times for one of Coleridge’s lecture courses in 1818 in which it is written that Coleridge possesses ‘classical attainments of the highest degree’.5 Of the broad selection of literary figures studied under modern canons of Romanticism, only the careers of Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley are documented in The Dictionary of British Classicists (2004). While the entry for Shelley offers rather a dour account of his Classical interests, the praise for Coleridge is strong:
Coleridge’s Classical learning […] pervaded every area of his intellectual life – from the most opium–induced poetic stanza to the most fleeting of marginalia or the most fully worked out of his literary or philosophical views. He edited no classical text or poem; he discovered no grammatical or prosodic law. Yet he was in many ways the most multiply talented, deep thinking and influential of that long line of English classicists who consecrated their profound erudition to our understanding of the sacred rather than the profane.6
Three aspects of studies in ancient drama during Coleridge’s lifetime have particular relevance to understanding his knowledge: the increased attention to tragedy within academic studies of the Classics; the salience of modern vernacular tragedies influenced by Classical drama in Europe; and in Britain the neglect of the original Greek tragedies outside of academic environments. The latter led Coleridge to complain in 1811 that ‘Pope’s popular translation [of Homer] was in the hand, nay, in the mouth of every person—while the translations of Sophocles of Æschylus, or Euripides were found only in the libraries of those who did not want them, scarcely making any impression on the community at large.’7
To British school students, Senecan and Greek tragedies were taught on curricula with the assumption that the ancient texts were morally beneficial. Dutifully, Coleridge reiterates this popular truism in a school exercise for James Boyer of 1790, perhaps with an air of having the teacher standing by him in the act of writing:
Few ever possessed an intimate knowledge of the Greek authors, who did not receive them as the Models, as well as the Fathers, of Poetry, History and the Drama—yet greater will be our veneration for them, if we conceive them as influencing the [art of] departments of life […]. Their systems of Morality bordered as near on Perfection, as the efforts of Humanity are able.8
It was commonly believed in the eighteenth century that a Classical education would yield greater advancement in life, as Lord Chesterfield exemplifies in a letter to his son in 1748: ‘Dear Boy […], Classical knowledge, that is, Greek and Latin, is absolutely necessary for everybody; because everybody has agreed to think and to call it so. And the word illiterate, in its common acceptation, means a man who is ignorant of those two languages.’9 While such beliefs generally remained consistent, Coleridge’s education occurred during a period of significant changes in Classical scholarship. Academics granted Greek tragedy an unprecedented preeminence. First, it was in the eighteenth century that Latin ceased to be taught as a living language for conversation in schools and universities. Virtually all lectures at Cambridge were delivered in English rather than Latin at the end of the century, while the reverse had been the case at its beginning. Secondly, at the end of Coleridge’s schooldays, and the commencement of his university career, Classical studies underwent a very abrupt shift in emphasis. The assumption of Roman exempla by the French Revolutionaries caused British Classicists to favour Hellenism to the detriment of Latin scholarship.10 Hence, Greek studies were advanced in syllabi to occupy the spaces left by Latin scholarship as its popularity diminished. Within intellectual circles Greek tragedy acquired a new vogue. One zealous scholar even translated John Milton’s Samson Agonistes into ancient Greek in 1788.11 Over the course of the 1790s the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides gained their greatest prominence yet in the field of Classical studies, and as a Grecian – a member of the highest form at Christ’s Hospital – Coleridge undertook particular study of the Greek tragedians. Thomas Moore (1779–1852) became cynical of the fad for Greek drama that arose and continued during his lifetime. In a journal entry of 1819 he complains that some ‘ancients’ are given ‘deference […] far beyond what they really deserve.’ He concludes that ‘our admiration, in these cases, is become a sort of religion.’12
The increased scholarly attention to Greek tragedy in Britain is largely attributable to Richard Porson (1759–1808), Professor of Greek at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1792 until his death. Mischievously, Coleridge and Southey attribute authorship of their political satire ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’ (first drafted in 1799) to Porson, and throughout his career their victim attracted equal portions of reverence and ridicule. In a lecture of 1894, Ingram Bywater deems Porson ‘a model of caution and patience’ in his scholarship.13 Robert Garland esteems Porson ‘the greatest textual critic working in England at the end of the century.’14 Byron offers a less flattering depiction of his former professor:
Of all the disgusting brutes—sulky—abusive—and intolerable—Porson was the most bestial as far as the few times that I saw him went […]. He was tolerated in this state amongst the young men—for his talents—as the Turks think a Madman—inspired—& bear with him.15
A drunk, Porson was frequently impoverished, but was surrounded by supportive admirers, amongst whom he was venerated particularly for his capability of reciting passages of literature from memory. Hence C.O. Brink makes an assessment that is apt in the context of Coleridge studies, as he laments that Porson’s ‘marvellous promises’ yielded only a ‘small output’ of surviving work: ‘it should be no surprise if we find a certain family-likeness between Porson and the romantic artists of the early nineteenth century.’16 Although he abandoned work on the texts of Aeschylus for which he was commissioned by Cambridge University Press, Porson earned his reputation primarily by his editions of Euripides’ Hecuba (1797), Orestes (1798), Phoenician Women (1799) and Medea (1801). The Aeschylus plays were published posthumously, lacking notes but including more than 50 emendations to the texts, many of which have been retained in today’s editions. Samuel Parr (1747–1825), another prominent scholar of tragedy if not an instructor of Coleridge, is reported to have subscribed to a prospective volume of Coleridge’s imitations from Latin poets in 1794.17 Other accomplished Classicists in Coleridge’s various circles included Peter Elmsley (1773–1825), a friend of Southey at Oxford, a regular contributor to the Edinburgh Review and editor of several editions of tragedies; William Sotheby (1757–1833), a translator of Euripides, Homer and Virgil; Wordsworth, who made a partial translation of the Aeneid; and Thomas De Quincey, whose high ability with ancient Greek matched Coleridge’s.
The dry, critical apparatus in editions of Classical tragedy available to Coleridge were concerned almost exclusively with the technicalities of metre, dialect and establishing the authenticity of certain passages. How Greek tragedies were staged was subject to speculation. One recurrent topic of debate, for example, was whether or not Aeschylus had 50 Erinyes pursuing Orestes across the stage during the Eumenides.18 The standard critical tool for studying the structure and effect of tragedies was Aristotle’s Poetics. This applied to new plays as well as old. For example, Samuel Argent Bardsley assesses Pizarro – the adaptation from August Friedrich Ferdinand von Koetzebue (1761–1819) that was the most successful of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s tragedies – as part of an ongoing debate amongst intellectuals on whether the attention to the tragedy was deserved. Evidently, this matter was to be determined by the extent of the play’s adherence to principles described by Aristotle.19 Coleridge’s opinion of Aristotle is mixed. In critical lectures he scorns those who esteem Aristotle as an ‘infallible dictator’, and is particularly scathing towards predecessors who have made clichéd, patronizing and sometimes dismissive arguments about Shakespeare as an uncultured ‘child of nature’ because his plays do not conform to the ‘rules’ of Poetics.20 Most culpable of these forebears is Samuel Johnson, who determines the acceptability of a tragedy solely by the extent of its accordance with Aristotelian principles of tragedy. Typically of his inaccurate and unfair representations of Johnson – which are possibly attempts to dismiss a marketplace competitor as a commentator on drama – Coleridge terms this practice a ‘vile Johnsonian Antithesis of Black and White.’21 Yet Coleridge himself refers to Aristotle’s principles repeatedly in his lectures as demarcations of dramatic norms. He returns to the matter of unity of place and time in every course that discusses tragedy. Overall, Coleridge’s use of Aristotle – either when he accepts or rejects principles delineated in Poetics – betrays an erroneous assumption about the text that was prevalent in his age. Critics of the time often supposed that Aristotle insisted on how a tragedy should be written, while in actuality Poetics consists of observations of commonalities between a particular few tragedies that Aristotle revered. The persistence of this mistake in the Romantic period leads me to suspect that Aristotle’s doctrine was cited more often than it was read in the original text.
Themes and characters were relatively minor concerns in studies of the Greek plays. In response to the editions of tragedy familiar to him Coleridge would eventually comment that the verse of ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’ amounted to ‘almost a libel on the name of Porson, the tersest of writers’.22 If such scholarship seems unpalatable material by modern standards, it had many supportive exponents. For example an anonymous writer for The Eclectic Review makes a lengthy and impassioned defence of fastidious annotation:
In the conceptions of the uninformed and the inconsiderate, Verbal Criticism is an occupation fit only for the most dull and plodding intellects,—an anxious solicitude about letters and syllables, inflections and quantities, a tiresome endeavour to adjust the claims of minute variations, as useless in the result as it is perplexing in the toil. Little do they think what a universality and copiousness of knowledge, and what a philosophic habit of mind, are the indispensable prerequisites of critical eminence. Little are they aware, that the theory of language as the index of mind, the faith of history, the native forms of genius in eloquence and poetry, and even the INSPIRED RECORDS of heavenly truth, cannot be accurately brought to conception, without the aid of that poring, patient, close-eyed criticism which they despise.23
Coleridge demonstrates the dominance of this approach in a notebook entry in which he speculates ‘how little instructive any criticism can be which does not enter into minutiae’.24 When he comments on William Sotheby’s Orestes, from Euripides, Coleridge examines the text with terms such as ‘correctness’ and ‘appropriateness’, and he questions the ‘authority’ with which Sotheby draws out or interprets Euripides’ original language. All of these criteria are reminiscent of the discursive method imparted to grammar-school students in their textbooks of Classical tragedy.25 Of further significance in Coleridge’s education is that by reading the meticulous commentary of textual editors, and then undertaking exercises of imitative composition, the acts of poetic creation and critical assessment were closely linked. Yet overall Coleridge is ambivalent about such meticulous attention to textual minutiae. He complains in a marginal note on Joseph Rann’s edition of Shakespeare, for example, that little of the true intention is conveyed by the explanatory notes:
This Edition, and half a score others of this, & other great Poets, by their own Countrymen, furnish by their notes & explanations a good ground of analogy for the faith, we ought to pin upon the old Scholiasts of the old Greek Poets. Ex. gr./p.5. ‘wield the matter’—vide note—’describe, express.’ What a fine notion a foreigner would gather of the meaning of the plain English word, ‘wield’, from this gloss!!—And how unfathomably bathetic the Line of the Poet would become!!26
Despite the nominal presence of an authority on Greek drama at Cambridge, Coleridge received little formal instruction on tragedy at university. Mathematics dominated the undergraduate curriculum, and Classics would not regain status as a degree subject at Cambridge until the introduction of the Classical Tripos in 1822, the result of a campaign led by Christopher Wordsworth.27 Coleridge’s sole meaningful interaction with Cambridge’s most eminent expert occurred when Porson shortlisted him for a scholarship in 1792, then awarded the prize to another candidate. Furthermore, a sense emerges that schoolteachers were usually more competent scholars, or were more dedicated to their duties, than the professors at Oxford and Cambridge.28 In effect, following his departure from Christ’s Hospital and the tuition of James Boyer, Coleridge’s engagement with tragedy was entirely self-determined. It was thus in private reading, on his rudderless trajectory through Cambridge, that Coleridge discovered contemporary German tragedy.
In 1794 a friend loaned Coleridge a copy of Friedrich Schiller’s play The Robbers (1782) as translated by Alexander Fraser Tytler. Shocked by the brutality of Karl Moor and his men, Coleridge tells Southey of his need to cease reading:
Who is this Schiller? This Convulser of the Heart? Did he write his Tragedy amid the yelling of Fiends?—I should not like to [be] able to describe such Characters—I tremble like an Aspen Leaf—Upon my Soul, I write to you because I am frightened […]. Why have we ever called Milton sublime? That Count de Moor—horrible Wielder of heart–withering Virtues—! Satan is scarcely qualified to attend his Execution as Gallows Chaplain.29
In this response to The Robbers, it is peculiar that Coleridge fixates upon the sort of man he imagines the playwright to be rather than tragedy itself, as he does again in a sonnet on Schiller:
Ah! Bard tremendous in sublimity!
Could I behold thee in thy loftier mood
Wand’ring at eve with finely frenzied eye
Beneath some vast old tempest–swinging wood!
Awhile with mute awe gazing I would brood,
Then weep aloud in a wild extacy!
(‘To the Author of “The Robbers”’, ll. 9–14)
Michael John Kooy observes Coleridge’s interest in Schiller as a participator in sublime experience rather than a detached author of it, yet Coleridge knew very little of Schiller to substantiate such a perception of the man. Thus the sonnet portrays Coleridge’s conception of the ideal tragedian in Schiller’s name rather than Schiller himself.30 Coleridge’s fascination with Schiller as a man must have been piqued by Tytler’s introductory ‘Advertisement’. Tytler depicts Schiller as a young genius, a subversive political protestor facing the wrath of local government: ‘At the age of twenty-three, he wrote this piece, which procured him the highest reputation over all Germany; but the rigour of that institution, to whose discipline he was then subjected, being adverse to such pursuits, he was prohibited the use of his pen, under pain of imprisonment.’31
No other living dramatist of the period seems to have captured Coleridge’s imagination in the manner that Schiller did in 1794. Clearly the German author provided a model for Coleridge to produce a better attempt at a tragedy than The Fall of Robespierre (1794). Hence Osorio (1797) – like Wordsworth’s contemporaneous tragedy The Borderers – is markedly indebted to The Robbers in its Gothic tropes and political subtexts. As Joyce Crick explains, Schiller exerted a very different literary influence when Coleridge translated from the Wallenstein plays in 1800. While The Robbers is an early work typical of the fleeting cultural moment termed Sturm und Drang, the Wallenstein plays reflect Schiller’s mature interrogation of Shakespearean tragedy and commitment to the emergence of a national German literature.32 When Coleridge set to work as translator of Schiller with dictionary in hand, he paid the same meticulous attention to the German tragedy with which he had approached the Greek dramatists as a schoolboy.
In 1796 Coleridge associates his decision to learn German with Schiller explicitly:
I am studying German, & in about six weeks shall be able to read that language with tolerable fluency. Now I have some thoughts of making a proposal to Robinson, the great London Bookseller, of translating all the works [of] Schiller, which would make a portly Quarto, on the conditions that he should pay my Journey & wife’s to & from Jena, a cheap German University where Schiller resides—& allow me two guineas each Quarto Sheet—which would maintain me.33
Coleridge’s growing interest in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), like that in Schiller, was dualistic. Textual resonances from Lessing’s plays occur in Coleridge’s works, most notably in the sympathetic treatment of Muslims as opposed to the Christians of Osorio, which is indebted to Nathan the Wise (1779). But Coleridge has a greater fascination with Lessing as a role model. Stephen Prickett argues that even when Coleridge loses interest in Lessing’s thought, which Prickett attributes to Coleridge’s abandonment of Unitarianism, Lessing retains importance for ‘the way in which Lessing had managed to combine poetic, philosophic and theological concerns into a single career.’34 A projected biography of Lessing became another reason for Coleridge to travel to Germany. The visit did not progress in the manner Coleridge predicted. He completed neither a translation of Schiller’s works nor a biography of Lessing. However, his first encounter with Schiller’s work led Coleridge to choose a course of study that would make him a translator of German tragedy and a student of the German literary criticism that would shape his own lectures. Furthermore, it was during his time in Germany that Coleridge studied under one of the greatest Classicists of his time, Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812), Professor of Poetry and Eloquence at the University of Göttingen.
Coleridge first arrived at Göttingen in February 1799 and left that June. Scholars have tended to focus on Coleridge’s studies under the theologian Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1753–1827) and the physician and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), sidelining Heyne as an agreeable librarian who facilitated Coleridge’s book requests for the duration of his stay. True enough, Coleridge describes Heyne as ‘the Head-Librarian at Gottingen’, but he adds that the professor is ‘in truth, the real Governor of Gottingen’. Coleridge does not seem awestruck by a thinker he describes as ‘a little, hopping, over-civil, sort of a Thing who talks very fast & with fragments of coughing between every ten words’, but he attended Heyne’s seminars, which included studies of Classical tragedy and occasionally plays by more recent German dramatists such as Lessing.35 The scholarship required of participants in Heyne’s Seminarum Philologicum was strenuous, and composition and debate on Classical texts was conducted in Latin.36
Heyne’s lasting, published scholarship consists of his editions of Virgil (1767–75), Pindar (1773) and Homer (1802–03). It is regrettable that his thoughts on tragedy have not been recorded thoroughly, particularly as I feel that they have important relevance to some of the charges of plagiarism made against Coleridge. Another of Heyne’s pupils was August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845). Few critics have explored this commonality. In an old article A.C. Dunstan observes that the origin of sacrifice that Coleridge posits in his lectures – in which ‘the heroes of old under the influence of […] Bacchic enthusiasm performed more than human actions’– has a parallel in Schlegel’s lectures, but that both passages originate in Heyne’s Vorlesungen.37 Hence there may be truth in Coleridge’s famous defensive claim that he had not read Schlegel’s published lectures prior to the similar sentiments he delivered in his own course of 1812. The scholars may have been mutually indebted either to Heyne directly, or to ideas that commonly emerged in discussions at Göttingen and were not strictly the intellectual property of any single participant.38
The description of Heyne’s seminar offered by Ulrich Schindel is indicative of a new mode of analysing Classics in Germany in which tragedy was prominent. Unlike his English contemporaries, Heyne would regularly reach a stage in each class at which he would call an end to evaluation of metre and diction: ‘“Nun kömmt der Tichter” (“now comes the poet”) was his constant remark when he felt that he had sufficiently clarified the verbal meaning and the factual data and set himself to fathoming the venustates of the text and their causae.’39 Heyne’s profound reading of drama indicates the advent of tragedy as a philosophical mode rather than solely a literary form. Another of the key thinkers in this development was Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854), a major influence on Coleridge, who established the philosophical possibilities of the tragic in his Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1795). In Coleridge’s thought, Schelling provides a bridge between tragedy and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Schelling avails himself of Kant’s renewal of interest in the sublime, and posits that the aesthetic experience Kant promotes in nature can likewise be found in tragedy as the highest form of art. Thus Dennis J. Schmidt concludes that the elevation of tragedy to high philosophy, led by Schelling, is essentially facilitated by Kant, although this requires the catachresis of transferring Kant’s principles from the natural to the artistic realm.40 I have indicated that Coleridge’s sense of the potential for tragic experience to benefit its audience is Schillerian. My broader point – discussed in subsequent chapters in terms of Coleridge’s debts to individual authors – is that his use of tragedy as a tool to address philosophical matters follows a trend that is new to his time and German in origin. Hence the subjects that Coleridge engages with using tragic thought, either critically or in poetical works, are often those that preoccupy his German influences too. These include the nature and purposes of suffering, the possibility of human freedom, the expression of the tragic in non-dramatic forms and the literary fragment.
Finally I acknowledge Coleridge’s English influences, a vast subject that is well covered by modern scholars, but particular aspects of which I want to accentuate here. Charles Mahoney has recently reassessed Coleridge’s critical interest in the nature of Shakespeare’s genius and the psychology of his characters.41 In effect Shakespeare provides Coleridge with two of his career paths: in many of his critical lectures Coleridge adopts Shakespeare as his primary subject. Secondly, when composing his own tragedies, it is notable how literal-minded Coleridge is in emulation of Shakespeare’s example. While Osorio is tangibly infused with Schillerian dissent, its expression, as Jonathan Bate notes, is blank verse that is cobbled together from Shakespeare’s plays that ‘apes the language and rhythms of Shakespeare without making each speech part of a unified linguistic pattern’. The preface to Zapolya is candid in its admission of ‘humble imitation’ of Shakespeare. Bate suggests that Coleridge’s inability to match Shakespeare’s writing eventually brings about his decline in poetical output and increased critical prowess. Bate makes a credible point here, although I suggest different reasons for the transition in my final chapter.42 Related to the spell cast over Coleridge by Shakespeare is his frequent citation, by contrast, of plays by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, upheld by Coleridge as paradigms of how tragedy should not be written. To the text of The Prophetess: or, The History of Dioclesian Coleridge appends this note: ‘No man can have formed a just idea of possible tragic Drama […] & not find in this Trag[edy] of Valent[ian] a convincing proof, that the Writer, was utterly incapable of Tragedy.’43 The inverted influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Coleridge parallels that of Koetzebue, whose work dominated the British stage because translated plays from Europe were more cheaply available than original works in English. Hence Koetzebue is repeatedly a target of abuse for Coleridge, who complains that ‘Koetzebue is the German B. & F., without their poetic powers’, with the reservation that his sense of tragedy ‘was too low for the age, & too unpoetic for the genius, of Beaumont & Fletcher.’44
The importance of John Milton to Coleridge is well-documented by contemporaries in addition to modern critics. In a review of an 1813 lecture, a journalist for the Bristol Gazette gratifies the affinity Coleridge wishes to establish in his imitative poetry:
Were Milton to return among the living, and to select from our poets him, who from profoundness of thought and unworldly abstraction of feeling, joined to the prodigality of fancy in glowing conceptions the nearest resembled himself, he would probably fix his choice on the author of ‘The Nightingale’ and ‘Fears in Solitude’.45
In Table Talk Coleridge indicates the different model of authorship offered by Milton as opposed to Shakespeare: ‘Shakespeare’s character is characterless; that is, does not reflect the individual Shakespeare; but John Milton is in every line of the Paradise Lost.’46 While the reception and reinvention of Paradise Lost is ably assessed in Lucy Newlyn’s Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (1993), Jonathon Shears builds upon Newlyn’s work in his recent study of how Romantic authors misread Milton, particularly in Coleridge ‘trying to empty out the theology from the poetry’ in lectures, with the consequence that ‘the feature of Paradise Lost to suffer in his appraisal is the story’.47 In short Coleridge takes what he wants from Milton, and I am indebted to the more recent scholars who have informed this sense, departing from Harold Bloom’s older depiction of Coleridge in awe of Milton’s ability. I find Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ a suspect theory for its inapplicability to any author with more than one role-model. Nor am I convinced by Bloom’s depiction of Coleridge in an Oedipal Freudian battle with Milton, with whom he is allegedly in thrall and competition simultaneously.48 While Coleridge’s tragic sense is heavily indebted to Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes also has a salient presence in Coleridge’s works. In particular, as I discuss subsequently, Coleridge invokes Samson Agonistes when he wishes his audience to interpret events of political upheaval as tragic by contextualizing current events in the world of Milton’s play.
Wordsworth is the last of Coleridge’s English influences I wish to mention here, and I acknowledge his roles as literary figure, collaborator and supportive friend. Wordsworth does not share Coleridge’s tragic vision, which I find to be an alternative to the Wordsworthian sublime. Wordsworth transcends suffering in encounters with the Old Cumberland Beggar (1800) and the leech-gatherer (1798). He achieves philosophical elevation by overcoming circumstance in recognition of the universality of experience. By contrast, Coleridge engages with suffering directly in search of redemption. This difference is clearer when the two writers treat the same subject, such as their accounts of the scandal at Buttermere, which I discuss in Chapter 3. Nonetheless Wordsworth encouraged Coleridge’s explorations of the tragic. Osorio was inspired by Wordsworth’s draft of The Borderers (1796–97). When both plays were rejected, Coleridge resumed his exploration of tragic themes in various verse forms in the collaboration of Lyrical Ballads. Where he claims that readers of Lyrical Ballads ‘should ask themselves if it contains a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents’ in his Advertisement of 1798, Wordsworth demonstrates his provision of an alternative to the Classical knowledge and rigid Miltonisms evident in Coleridge’s early work. Thus Wordsworth influences Coleridge’s experimentation with contemporary and more accessible expressions of the tragic. The Wordsworths accompanied Coleridge to Germany initially, and Wordsworth’s work continued to provide stimulation for Coleridge’s critical thought on how poetry should address the pathetic. The extent to which they desire to approach the misery caused by catastrophe differentiates the two authors, and in transcending it in most of his works Wordsworth is fairly termed an ‘anti-tragic idealist’ by Terry Eagleton.49 In Coleridge’s thought I argue that explorations of violence, strife and anguish are essential to his sacrificial philosophy; hence it is moments of catastrophe in his works that I wish to examine initially.
1 Bruce Graver, ‘Romanticism’, in A Companion to the Classical Tradition, ed. by Craig W. Kallendorf (Oxford: Blackwell Books, 2007), pp. 72–86 (p. 73).
2 Anthony John Harding, ‘Coleridge: Biblical and Classical Literature’, in The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Frederick Burwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 455–72 (p. 456).
3 Anthony John Harding, The Reception of Myth in British Romanticism (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1995), pp. 230–59.
4 Elinor Shaffer, ‘Coleridge’s Dialogues with German Thought’, in The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, pp. 555–71 (p. 563).
5 Quoted in LoL, II, p. 27.
6 The Dictionary of British Classicists, ed. by Robert B. Todd and others, 3 vols (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004), III, pp. 884–5; I, p. 189.
7 LoL, I, pp. 226–7.
8 SWF, pp. 6–7.
9 The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, ed. by Bonamy Dobrée, 6 vols (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1932), III, pp. 1154–5.
10 Christopher Stray, ‘The First Century of the Classical Tripos’, in Classics in Cambridge: Curriculum, Culture and Community, ed. by Christopher Stray, Supplementary volume xxiv (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1999), pp. 1–14 (p. 3).
11 George Henry Glasse, Sampsōn Agōnistēs: Johannis Miltoni Samson Agonistes græco carmine redditus cum versione Latina (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1788).
12 Memoirs, Journal and Correspondence of Thomas Moore, ed. by John Russell (London: Longman, 1860), p. 108.
13 Ingram Bywater, Four Centuries of Greek Learning in England: Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford on March 8, 1894 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1919), p. 17.
14 Robert Garland, Surviving Greek Tragedy (London: Duckworth Academic and Bristol Classical Press, 2004), p. 125.
15 Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. by Leslie A. Marchand (London: John Murray, 1973–81), VI (1976), p. 12.
16 C.O. Brink, English Classical Scholarship: Historical Reflections on Bentley, Porson and Housman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 108.
17 CL, I, p. 101.
18 Thomas Webb, Elements of Greek Prosody and Metre, compiled from the Best Authorities, Ancient and Modern (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1819), p. 79.
19 Samuel Argent Bardsley, Critical Remarks on Pizarro: A Tragedy, taken from the German Drama of Kotzebue, and Adapted to the English Stage by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, with Incidental Observations on the Subject of the Drama (London: Cadell and Davies, 1800).
20 LoL, I, pp. 78–9.
21 CN, III, § 3952.
22 CL, VI, p. 830.
23 The Eclectic Review, 4:8 (1815), p. 356.
24 CN, III, § 3970.
25 SWF, pp. 114–20.
26 CM, V, p. 768.
27 ‘The First Century of the Classical Tripos’, p. 2.
28 For the quality of Classical scholarship in Coleridge’s lifetime see M.L. Clarke, Greek Studies in England 1700–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945).
29 CL, I, p. 122.
30 Michael John Kooy, Coleridge, Schiller, and Aesthetic Education (London: Palgrave, 2002), p. 25.
31 Friedrich Schiller, The Robbers: A Tragedy, trans. by Alexander Fraser Tytler (London: G.J.J. & J. Robinson, 1792), p. v.
32 Joyce Crick, ‘Something on William Shakespeare occasioned by Wallenstein’, The Coleridge Bulletin, n.s., 29 (2007), 31–42 (p. 32).
33 CL, I, p. 209.
34 Stephen Prickett, ‘Coleridge, Schlegel, and Schleiermacher: England, Germany (and Australia) in 1798’, in 1798: The Year of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’, ed. by Richard Cronin, Romanticism in Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 170–84 (p. 173).
35 CL, I, pp. 472, 475.
36 Classical Scholarship: A Biographical Encyclopedia, ed. by Ward W. Briggs and William M. Calder III (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1990), pp. 170–82.
37 A.C. Dunstan, ‘The German Influence on Coleridge’, The Modern Language Review, 18:2 (1923), 183–201 (p. 195).
38 CM, V, pp. 836–7.
39 Classical Scholarship: A Biographical Encyclopedia, p. 178.
40 Dennis J. Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life, Studies in Continental Thought (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 73.
41 Charles Mahoney, ‘Coleridge and Shakespeare’, in The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, pp. 498–514.
42 Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 53, 69–70.
43 CM, I, p. 367.
44 Ibid., p. 718.
45 LoL, I, p. 489.
46 TT, I, p. 125. Coleridge confuses this point by claiming that Milton also ‘stands ab extra’.
47 Jonathon Shears, The Romantic Legacy of ‘Paradise Lost’: Reading Against the Grain, The Nineteenth Century Series (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), p. 100.
48 Harold Bloom, ‘Coleridge: The Anxiety of Influence’, Diacritics, 2:1 (1972), 36–41.
49 Sweet Violence, p. 24.