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 .............................................. 57

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 ~-

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The Prelude 1805, XII 335-38. 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 of Encounter, 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

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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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mind staged within the poem. A common element linking many of the poems, including those of Coleridge, is that they stage the many functions of imagination in ordinary experience as defined by Wordsworth in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads of 1800. Julie Carlson has documented the importance of theatricality to a proper assessment of Coleridge's theories of mind, in order to re-evaluate what has been for many, since critical recognition of its roots in revolution, Romanticism's supposed tum away from theatre, history, and action to a closeted and immured preoccupation with imagination and mind. Carlson demonstrates how Coleridge stages mind 'as theatre,' and in discussing his plays from Osorio to Remorse and Zapolya, tracks the development of a process of theorizing revolution to which she sees later canonical poets who tum to theatre responding. In her analysis of Coleridge's ideas on 'commanding genius', she focuses on the relationship between dreams and power: Not every poet demystifies commanding genius by featuring heroes as inactive as Coleridge's but they all approach the subject of revolution through lengthy discourse on dreams. Virtually every dramatic protagonist takes time out to puzzle out the relationship between vision and reality in these plays ... Not only does he [Coleridge] name the problem for England in a play about revolution-his translation in 1800 of Schiller's Wallenstein trilogy-but his aesthetic writings portray theatre as a commanding for(u)m of dreams. On the one hand theatre comes closer to 'reality' in its 'imitation of reality' than does any other poetic form. On the other hand, the 'reality' that theatre exeiriplifie~fis -thestiiff,~an