Staging Imagination: Transformations of Shakespeare in Wordsworth and Coleridge Patricia Marie ...

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Staging imagination: transformations of Shakespeare in
Wordsworth and Coleridge
O’Boyle, Patricia Marie
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Staging Imagination: Transformations of Shakespeare in
Wordsworth and Coleridge
Patricia Marie O'Boyle
Ph.D. Thesis
Department of English Studies
Durham University
The copyright of this thesis rests with the
author or the university to which it was
submitted. No quotation from it, or
information derived from it may be
published without the prior written
consent of the author or university, and
any information derived from it should be
acknowledged.
2008
Acknowledgements
This doctoral research could not have been completed without the
kindness, guidance, and always timely help of Professor Michael O'Neill,
to whom I give my warmest thanks and appreciation.
I would also like to thank Durham University Graduate School for their
support.
The thesis is gratefully dedicated to my family, especially my husband
Jim, my three daughters Jenny, Claire and Katherine, and my sister,
Clare.
ABSTRACT
This thesis examines the ways that Wordsworth and Coleridge transform the works of
Shakespeare, in order to stage the imagination as it functions in the lives of the
characters in their poetry. I look especially at the importance ofthe play A
Midsummer Night's Dream to their poetic project, and show how elements of the play
resurface in various poems, prefaces and prose writings of the two poets over a span
of nearly twenty years. I argue that Wordsworth's transformations of Shakespeare
contribute to a democratising of poetry, and a valorising of' our common human
heart'. Chapter one discusses Lyrical Ballads as a series of poems, which have
Theseus' speech on Imagination as their unifying theme, emulating Shakespeare's
staging of passion. Chapters two and three examine Alexander Tytler's Essay on
Translation as a 'negative' stimulus for Wordsworth's challenging poetic theories, and
a source for some of his earliest 'transformations' of Shakespeare. Chapter four is a
detailed survey of the critical background, and the Romantic reception of A
Midsummer Night's Dream, and examines key themes in the play to elucidate the
poets' poetry and prose. Chapter five is a comparison between 'The Last of The
Flock' and The Merchant of Venice, showing how Wordsworth 'imitates' the tale, and
transposes the 'tone' ofthe comic play into a quieter and sadder 'music'. Chapter six
analyses 'Michael', as a transformation of Gaunt in Richard II into the 'history
homely and rude' of Michael the shepherd. Chapter seven is on Coleridge's
Biographia Literaria, which re-tells the tale of the genesis of Lyrical Ballads, and
Wordsworth's transformative poetics, as a 'translation' of A Midsummer Night's
Dream. Chapter eight returns to Alfoxden, and Hazlitt's 'First Acquaintance with
Poets', to revisit the poets as the protagonists of 'the dream' that was, and became,
Lyrical Ballads. P. M. O'Boyle.
Contents
Introduction ................................................................................................................. 1
Chapter 1. Meetings and Divergences: Shakespeare as Presider. ........................ 26
Chapter 2. Translation as Practical Activity ..............................................5 7
Chapter 3. 'Imitating' Shakespeare: Imagination's Work of Translation ......... 82
Chapter 4. A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Poet's Eye, the Fairy Queen,
and Bottom. The Wordsworths and Coleridge in Alfoxden Wood ... 110
Chapter 5. Imitation and Transposition. The Transformative Poetics of
Lyrical Ballads ....................................................................................... 158
Chapter 6. Similitude in Dissimilitude: Michael, History, and Shakespeare. .... 192
Chapter 7. Comic Transformations in Biographia Literaria ........................ 223
Chapter 8 'I desire you of more Acquaintance Good Master Mustard Seed':
William Hazlitt's First Acquaintance with Poets ....................... 276
Bibliography .............................................................................................................. 303
Introduction
This thesis examines the relationship between the works of Shakespeare and
the poetry and prose of Wordsworth and Coleridge. I argue that in many of his poems
Wordsworth employs a transformative method by re-creating Shakespearean themes
and characters which often brilliantly disguises his original source material, and that
this is done for purposes that are essentially, politically as well as aesthetically, radical
in their intent. I examine particularly Lyrical Ballads 1798, The Prelude, Michael,
and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. The former poems I read closely as examples
of Wordsworth's transformative method, and the latter as Coleridge's attempted
exposition of their 'translations' of Shakespeare. I read this as Coleridge's implied
criticism of both Wordsworth's failure to acknowledge their debt to Shakespeare, and
his readers' and critics' inability to recognise it.
I read Coleridge in Biographia Literaria as taking translation as his leading
idea, staging its various functions and forms in each chapter, almost on every page,
(the very title stages it: Biographia Literaria or Sketches of my Literary Life and
Opiniom), and as using this to 'stage' both Wordsworth's translational method, and
Coleridge's own theory ofthe distinction between imagination and fancy. The
relationship of translation to both his theory of the imagination and what Kathleen
Wheeler has called Coleridge's metaphorical method,1in Biographia stems from
Coleridge's use ofthe translation of the Greek word metaphor into the renaissance
Latin rhetorical figure of 'translation', and is, therefore, only one form of the process
of translation amongst many which Coleridge uses in the book. It is the imagination
wbichJranslates and,thecfancy which transforms.-
1 Kathleen M. Wheeler, Sources, Processes and Methods in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
I argue, moreover, that in order to appreciate many of the nuances of
Wordsworth's poetry of the imagination and his debt to Shakespeare we should look
to Shakespeare's own staging of imagination and fancy, as well as 'the character of
the poet', in this case Bottom, in A Midsummer Night's Dream. I trace the influence
of this play on and in Wordsworth's poetry and Coleridge's theory.
Wordsworth's later regret that 'the hiding places of my power' seem 'closed' and
that 'when age comes on [he] may scarcely see at all '2 is a lament for the loss of a
former relationship with something or someone which he envisages as essentially
alien, as Kenneth Johnston also senses when he writes of the passages Wordsworth
wrote in Goslar for The Prelude and Nutting:
In each of them, it is not the part of the poem describing
Nature that makes them uniquely Wordsworthian, but
the parts he cannot describe, because it is not simply
'nature.' Each time he starts off 'going with nature,' but
then that movement breaks, and something far greater
than natural forms invades his consciousness ... Behind
these ordinary Lake District scenes there was a
landscape of imagination as threateningly alien as if it
were another planet. 3
This visiting muse, one accidentally met, rather than a constant source of inspiration
which may indeed be denied to him in future years, comes in the form of
enlightenment or revelation. Imagination is often a trespasser, a usurper upon the
senses who ambushes the poet 'unawares', and brings to Wordsworth the recognition
that' ... in such visitings/ of awful promise, when the light of sense/ Goes out in
flashes that have shown to us/ The invisible world, doth greatness make abode, there
~--- __ _,-~ ---
2 The Prelude 1805, XII 335-38.
3 Kenneth R Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York; London: W.W.
Norton, 1998). 460.
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harbours whether we be young or old. '4 This process, involving, as he writes in the
lines just prior to the above, in what for many critics is considered an intrusion, an
abrupt halt in the progress of his song, is a translation of a translation. Describing the
point when, on losing their guides in the mountains, Wordsworth and his companion
ask for directions from a Swiss peasant:
Hard of belief we questioned him again,
And all the answers which the man returned
To our enquiries, in their sense and substance
Translated by the feelings which we had,
Ended in this-that we had crossed the Alps. 5
This kind oftypically providential, accidental meeting so sensitively
illuminated by Frederick Garber in Wordsworth and the Poetry ofE ncounter, 6 is
celebrated by Wordsworth in The Leech Gatherer, and in those almost supernatural
encounters with all the lonely wanderers of the earth he meets in his poetry of human
suffering. Bottom's meeting with Titania in the woods could be read as Shakespeare's
staging ofthe poet's reluctant meeting with the muse of fancy, who politely refuses to
be seduced by her. In this account, the character of Oberon whose powers are
supposedly higher than those of Titania-having claimed the changeling boy from her
to 'trace the forests wild' (MND I i 25)-represents the imagination. Theseus, as a
philosopher of sorts, will rise above those 'level streams' of the valley bottom, as
Coleridge describes the aspirations of poets and philosophers driven to seek higher
truths than those understood by ordinary mortals. Their source, though, is 'far higher
4 The Prelude 1805, XI 533-37. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799. 1805, 1850: Authoritative
Texts, Context and Reception, Recent Critical Essays, eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and
Steph~ncGill (New York; London: Norton, 1979).216. AILsubsequent citations of.the 1805 ·version-are
-from this edition: .
5 Ibid. VI 520-24.
6 Frederick Garber, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Encounter (Urbana University of Illinois Press,
1971).
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and far inward' in the heart.7 I try to show how both Wordsworth and Coleridge took
on the roles of characters from the play, often in an almost comic re-enacting of the
psychomachic contest for the soul of the changeling boy, which Shakespeare stages as
a dream, and which Coleridge reformulates in Kubla Khan as a longing for 'a damsel
playing on a dulcimer.'
What Wordsworth fears is loss of vision, a loss of the power to see something
more in nature than nature, which others might not have seen had he not pointed it out
or re-disclosed it. Coleridge longs for the music of the vision, which in Biographia
Literaria he points to as an essential gift of poetic genius. This might be a not an
unfitting description of the differing key qualities of the poets. 8 When M.H. Abrams
declares the romantic mind to be figured in the image of the lamp rather than the
mirror, it is its illuminating power which he refers to, rather than the more familiar
mirror, the common epithet applied to Shakespeare's particular genius.9 Given that
both Coleridge and Wordsworth had met while both were intent on writing and having
plays produced in the manner of Shakespeare, the analogy of the mirror is apposite at
this stage certainly of Wordsworth's career. The failure to have their plays produced
may have steered the poets towards the creation of a lyric poetry, which is often
dramatic in its form, the ballad. Not in the sense of engaging in dialogue, though
many of the poems do, but in presenting dramatic situations without making the
action or situation the focus of interest, but the feeling engendered by or the state of
7 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vol. 7. Biographia
Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, Bollingen Series 75, eds. James
Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (London; Princeton: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Princeton
University Press, 1983). I, 238-39. Coleridge means in the 'heart' or love.
8 'But the sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift of imagination; and this
.. together~with:the"power'Of.reduc ing multitude' intO'Un ity ofeffect~and'modi f)ring·a series-oftfi.oughts ..
by some one predominant thought or feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but can never be learnt.'
Ibid. II, 20.
9 See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1953).
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