Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher

Coleridge lectured on Shakespeare and his contemporaries between 1808 and 1819, and this Liverpool edition of 1874 collects what survived: lecture outlines, his own working notes, and reports taken down by people who heard him. He begins with first principles, arguing that poetry stands opposed not to prose but to science, and describing stage illusion as a half-faith the audience keeps up on purpose, never mistaking the painted forest for a forest. The bulk of the volume works through Shakespeare one play at a time, from The Tempest and Twelfth Night to Romeo and Juliet, Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and the English histories. Notes on Ben Jonson and on Beaumont and Fletcher follow. Running through it is his case that Shakespeare wrote by judgement, not by untutored instinct, an argument that reset how English critics read the plays.