83

these to be all of a piece, the closer he comes to revealing his intuition of the
center of centers, the "genius" which develops the play from within,
modifying with a single energy each component part (SCI, 5, 224). Thus, in
the first scene of Hamlet:

The Center of Coleridge's

Shakespeare Criticism
Kenneth Watson
Duke University
The distinction from which Coleridge's criticism of Shakespeare dt:pends
is by now a familiar one: ''the distinction, or rather the essential difference,
betwixt the shaping skill of mechanical talent, and the creative, productive
life-power of inspired genius."1 The opposition between "mechanical"' and
"organic" form is a commonplace of Romanticism, and the question of the
genesis of this opposition in Coleridge's thought and in the general
development of Romanticism has been widely discussed. Coleridge's
application of the organicist metaphor in his ciriticism of Shakespeare has its
own, internal oppositions which have received far less attention.2 Yet these
have important bearing upon present day critical theory and practice;
Coleridge, in keeping with the organicist metaphor, looks for what he
calls the "germ" of the "seed" of a work, and then exfoliates the work from it.
The sustained critical attention that Coleridge devoted to Shakespeare
provides a model for this project. This model is most useful for the fact that it
is self-regarding; it exposes its own assumptions and criticizes its own
procedures. Coleridge's ordinary method can be swiftly outlined with
reference to the Shakespearean play he has marked most forcefully with his
interpretations.
"Hamlet was the play...in the intuition and exposition of which I first
made my turn for philosophical criticism, and especially for insight into the
genius of Shakespeare" (SCI, 18).The words "intuition" and "insight" are the
necessary description of the initial act. After the central "germ" has been
intuited, seen in to, then exposition may procede.3This desiderata can be set
next to Paul Rocoeur's statement: "The first time, understanding will be a
naive grasping of the meaning of the whole. The second time, comprehension
will be a sophisticated mode of understanding, supported by explanatory
procedures. In the beginning, understanding is a guess."4 A guess is more
likely to be a reflex of habit than anything else.
Coleridge's exposition of the organic unity of a Shakespeare play
typically looks to opening or culminating scenes, to major characters, and
finally to the minutiae of the language employed. The more he is able to show
...
82

the armour, the dead silence, the watchfulness that first

interrupts it, the welcome relief of guard, the cold, the
broken expressions as of a man's compelled attention to
bodily feelings allowed no man,-all excellently accord
with and prepare for the after gradual rise into tragedy
(SCI, 20).
Of Hamlet's first entrance and his early speeches, Coleridge notes:
how the character develops the aversion to externals,
the betrayed habit of brooding over the world within him,
and the prodigality of beautiful words, which are, as it
were, the half embodyings of thoughts (SCI, 38).
Out of these germs Coleridge unfolds what he conceives to be the play's main
import:
to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between
our attention to outward objects and our meditation on
inward thoughts-a due balance between the real and
imaginary worlds. In Hamlet this balance does not exist...
Hence great, enormous, intellectual activity and a
consequent proportionate aversion to real action
(SCI, 37).
Finally, through a nearly line-by-line commentary, he is able to assert: "All is
growth, evolution each line, each word almost, begets the following-and
the will of the writer is an interfusion, a continuous agency, no series of
separate acts."5
Coleridge's typical procedure can be described in short hand as a
movement towards, and then an unfolding from, the center. That Coleridge
has not successfullyidentified that center or unfolded it correctly is the usual
ground for complaint. That the center might not exist is a much less usual
objection. What gives Coleridge's search for a center of coherence peculiar
importance is that the center's very existence, let alone the certainty of its
identification, remained for him problematic. Even if the exfoliation of the
center is carefully tested against the text of the play, the initial identification
remains intuitive- and its establishment is an act of will, of de-sacralized
faith.
Everyone remembers the phrases with which Coleridge described his
part in the Lyrical Ballads. His aim was ''to transfer from our inward nature a

84

85

human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these

shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment,
which constitutes poetic faith."6The idea of a willingsuspension of disbelief is
developed in the context of his work on Shakespeare, where it had points of
contact with eighteenth century theories of dramatic representation:
I find two extremes in critical decision: the French, which
evidently presupposes that a perfect delusion is to be
aimed at-an opinion which needs no fresh confutation;
the opposite, supported by Dr. Johnson, supposes the
auditors throughout as in the full and positive reflective
knowledge to the contrary. In evincing the impossibility
of delusion, he makes no sufficient allowance for an intermediate state. (SCI, 129).
The intermediate state Coleridge analogizes with dream consciousness.
If the intuition of the center procedes through an act of will,it is ultimately to
be associated with the "infinite I AM" of the primary imagination desscribed
in the thirteenth chapter of the Biographia. Dream images, though,
possess a power in, and of themselves,independent of that
act of judgement or understanding by which we affirm or
deny the existence of a reality correspondant to them... We
neither believe it, nor disbelieve it. With the Will the
comparing power is suspended, and without the
comparing power, any act of judgement, whether affirmation or denial, is impossible. The forms and thoughts act
merely by their own inherent power.7
The effectofthis analogy can be made clear by returning to the organicist
metaphor. If a play is like a plant, it grows from a central seed whose nature
can be inferred from the manefestations of its development. If a play is like a
dream, it is an un-centered, incoherent, and emotionally over-powering
experience. During the representation of a play, the Will is suspended by its
own choice-it wills not to will. Without the Will that says I AM, the
copresent. IT IS which establishes the organic center disappears. The
original centering, organizing project collapses.
Each experience of the play, each representation or reading, becomes a
new experience, more or less unrelated to the previous experience, or related
randomly to other experiences. At its most extreme, isolated similes, figures
of speech, single lines and words become each "the luminary of a sphere of its
own." At this farthest remove from the project outlined in Colderidge's
criticism of Hamlet, there is no possibility of a central internal coherence
which the act of interpretation can reveal. "There can be no galaxy in poetry;
because it is langauge, ergo successive, ergo, even the smallest star must be

seen singly." (MC, 343). This adumbrates a counter-project, calling for the
proliferation and celebration of detail rather than the generation of a unified
whole. Traces of this counter-project survive in Coleridge's marginalia on
Shakespeare, where single lines receive commentary in terms of association
with other, non-Shakespearean texts, instead of in terms of their place in the
play's organic form. To assimilate these linesinto the organicist project would
be to make a galaxy of them-to pattern what must be seen "singly."
In a series of notes Coleridge wrote for a lecture on the history plays, this
same trope of stars and galaxies is used again:
I. The theory of the historical plays: it is the conversion
of the epic into the dramatic. Differences between the epic
and dramatic: both are composed of the same elements,
free will and fate, but in inverse proportion. Comparison
between the historical drama and the constellation
(SCI, 152-153).
To see the full implications of this, Coleridge must be allowed to elaborate
upon his highly elliptical note. Coleridge, following Schlegel, associated the
epic with the rule of an inscrutable Fate:
The prominent character is ever under this influence, and
when, accidents are introduced, they are the result of
causes over which our will has no power. An epic begins
and ends arbitrarily (SCII, 278).
The epic then is least susceptible to the organicist reading, because it is a
mimesis of unorganized, and un organizable, experience. The Will of the
reader, as well as the Will of the "prominent character," can exercise no
patterning insight into its events.
Tragedy, on the other hand, is uniquely suitable to the organicist
reading, because "in the tragic, the free-will of man is the first cause" (SCII,
278):
In the drama, the will is exhibited as struggling with fate...
and the deepest effect is produced, when the fate is
represented as a higher and intelligent will,and the opposition of the individual as springing from a defect (SCI, 138).
The representation of fate "as a higher and intelligent will" encompasses a
model of both the reader's and the poet's activity in the organicist project. The
role of the text in much criticism is that of the defective individual.
These models of reading are apparently at logger-heads. The location
and exfoliation of the organic center is an ahistorical act, a closure of the work
from everything external to itself. The organic form unfolds itself in a time
outside history or the experience of history. The work is given a definitive

86

87

point of origin in the germ of genius at its center, a germ which is always
present. The time in which the work unfolds is in constant reference to this
ever-present center, so that the work's narrative past and future are seen at
once.
The counter-project has the effect of breaking down the coherence of the
literary text as the organicist project would reveal it. The text isdeprived of an
ever-present, organizing center, and in the same stroke its distinction from all
other texts is lost and the ahistorical autonomy of the organicist reading is
dispelled. What is it exchanged for? My present answer is that it is exchanged
for a reading which is in some sense historical. By this I do not mean that it
finds its place in relationship to historiography, always a more or less
deliberate structuring of history toward particular ends. Rather, it gives an
experience of time that is without source, cause, or purpose, governed by an
arbitrary fatality. The text is reintegrated with all other texts, and becomes
inexplicable. Its effects are sensory and emotional, and can only be described.
Coleridge frequently aduces historical arguments in support of his
organicist project, but this is not really anomolous. For instance, Love's
Labor's Lost strikes Coleridge as "whimsical," until he is able to explain away
its air of whimsy by reference to the supposed audience to which it was
addressed (SCI, 93-94). The upshot is that although Love's Labor's Lost is a
"juvenile drama" unusually dependent on what Coleridgetakes to be the taste
of the age in which it was written, we can still discover in it the germ of the
mature genius "as in a portrait taken of him in his boyhood" (SCI, 92).
Coleridge has broader historical arguments in support of his organicist
project. There is a manuscript fragment headed "The Origins of Modern
Drama" which presents a progress of playwriting from classical Greece
through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance-all for the purpose of
establishing Shakespeare as the supreme exemplar ofthe art (SCI, 189-198).
This is an organicist history, structured and centered around Shakespearean
drama in a precise enactment of the structuring and centering of that drama
around the germ of the organic genius.
The relationship of the organicist project to its counterproject is very
much that of a galaxy or constellation to the stars which make it up.
Appropriately, Coleridge developed this trope's potentials in the course of
meditating on the history plays. These plays themselves present a model of
reading, a way of dealing with the chronicles of English history with their lists
of dates and events and their various biases. Present and relativelyrecent time
presents a whirl of events, and these events:
are too well and distinctly known to be, without plumb
inverisimilitude, crowded together in one night's exhibition. Whereas, the history of our ancient kings-the events
of them, I mean-are like stars in the sky: whatever the real

interspaces may be, and however great, they seem close to

each other (SCI, 139).
The history play organizes these events, makes constellations of these stars.
"It takes, therefore, that part of real history which is the least known, and
infuses a principle of life and organization into the naked facts, and makes
them all the framework of an animated whole" (SI, 139).The irreducible word
or experience, the "naked fact," is reconciled to the demands ofthe organicist
project, just as history itself is explicity re-arranged.
John Beer has recently called attention to a letter Coleridge wrote to an
unknown correspondant in 1819.8The process that makes it possible for
Coleridge to read from both these standpoints at once can illuminated by
reference to this letter:
From my very childhood I have been accustomed to
abstract and as it were unrealize whatever of more than
common interest my eyes dwelt on; and then by a sort of
transfusion and transmission of my consciousness to
identify myself with the Object (LIV, 974-975).
In order for the history plays to be written, history had also to be
"abstracted." The density in which history exists in situ had to be stripped
down and patterned. In order for the plays to be read organically, the
fragmentation, incoherence, and density which characterizes the experiential
counter-reading must undergo a similar transformation. Later in the same
letter, Coleridge again tropes on stars, and in so doing describes the
consequences if the experiential counter-reading prevails:
All around me fixed and firm, methought as my own
substance and near me lofty Masses, that might have
seemed to hold the Moon and Stars in fee; and often in
such wild play with meteoric lights, or with the quiet
Shine from above which they made rebound in sparkles
or disband in off-shoots and splinters and iridescent
Needle-shafts of keenest glitter, that it was a pride and a
place of Healing to lie, as in an Apostles shadow, within
the Eclipse (LIV, 974-975).
This violent celestialdisplay might be called an anarchic play of signification.
To Coleridge it is finally insupportable, a sensory overload which must be
stripped down and patterned if any reading-or writing-is to be done.
In his lectures of 1813-1814,Coleridge is reported as saying:"As distance
is destroyed by the telescope...by the force of imagination we see in the
constellations, brought close to the eye, a multitude of worlds" (SCII, 278).
But for the ability to abstract, select, and pattern, through an act of will, the

.~

88

constellations would not exist. Bring them close to the eye, and view them
singly; only the "force of imagination"-the will-perceives them as "a
multitude or worlds," by definition centered and highly organized. Otherwise
they are a display of inexplicable "off-shoots and splinters" without a central
irradiating core. To "abstract and as it were unrealize" and then "by a sort
oLtransmission of my consciousness to identify myself with the Object"
means to assert over the irreducible datum of experience "the higher an(i
intelligent will" which then becomes the renewed basis of the organicist
project.
Still, the datum of experience remains irreducible, likely to reassert its
unorganized presence at any point. The final result of this opposition in
Coleridge's Shakespeare criticism is an interweaving of both models of
reading, each continuously displaying the other, so that the central germ out
which the plays exfoliate never absolutely vanishes, but instead is itself
displayed-moved from line to line, scene to scene, character to character, and
most pointedly, from play to play. If we select a different star as central, we
will draw a different constellation radiating from that center. And in fact,
Coleridge left in manuscript three full scale chronologies of the works of
Shakespeare, each of which he claims to have developed without referenceto
external evidences,yet each substantially different in the shape of career they
present (SCI, 237-241).External evidences- the datum of experience in other
texts-must have had their impact in the years intervening between the
formation of these chronologies, and in consequence displaced the organic
center of the plays.
I began by noting that Coleridge looks for the "germ." The various
twentieth century critical vocabularies may begin by identifyinga "governing
metaphor," around which all other details of the work find their place. Or
they may assert the identity of the work with the consciousness which
produced it, and develop a means of grasping or revealingthat consciousness.
Or they may speak of the work as a collocation of "codes," one or another of
which becomes predominant. All of these, like Coleridge's "germ," are placed
at the center of the work, and determine the shape the work takes, the sort of
unity it is said to possess. The demand for unity is so privileged that it is
extremely unlikely for a work to be assimilated into institutionalized critical
discourse and become canonical unless it can be argued that the work has a
palpable center and a demonstrable unity proceding from that center.
Coleridge's own work, suggestively only recently published as a large
bulk of it is, offers a distinguished case in point. LA. Richards could not
locate a center in Coleridge's thought, and so spoke of it as "a huge ill-assorted
fabric of philosophicaland theological beliefs."9In 1969Thomas MacFarland
issueda defense of Coleridge which is concerned preciselyto demonstrate that
Coleridge's thought has unity and coherence in the highest degree.1OThe
identification of a center which can be unfolded discursivelyto demonstrate a

o.-a"""".

".'~:-.~/.i~~~

89

work's unity seems to be the continuously renewed project of the act of

interpretation as it has itself unfolded in the past two hundred years.
But the conclusion that it has not often been as self-regarding in this
attempt as Coleridgewas is hard to escape. Jonathan Culler has characterized
the establishment of centers of coherence as "a blatantly prescriptive and
ideological move."11It can be that, although it is more likelyto be latently (or
even lazily)so. Like Coleridge, Culler does not see how this moveis finallyto
be avoided. The most that can be done, when the delay of the moment of
establishment becomes insupportable, is to be as fully aware of what we are
doing as language will allow.
IS.T. Coleridge, Shakespeare Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor, 2 vols. (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, (930), I, p. 5. Henceforth cited in the main body of the text as SCIand
SCII.
2The only book-length study of Coleridge's Shakespeare criticism is M.M. Badawi,
Coleridge: Critic of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). See especially
pp. 52-66.
JRichard Harter Fogle, The Idea or Coleridge's Criticism (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1962), p. 15 confirms this point.
sPaul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth,
Texas: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), p. 79.
sS.T. Coleridge, Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (London:
Constable, 1936), p. 89. Henceforth cited in the main body of the text as Me.
6S.T. Coleridge, Blographia Llteraria, ed. J. Shawcross (London: Oxford University Press,
1907), II, p.6
'S.T. Coleridge, Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), IV, p. 641.
Henceforth cited in the main body of the text as LIV.
sJohn Beer, Coleridge's Potic Intelligence (London: MacMillan, 1977), p. 215.
91.A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination (London: Kegan Paul, 1934), p. 10.
IOThomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1969).
IIJonathan Culler, Structuralist
Poetics: Structuralism,
Linguistics, and the Study of
Literature (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 242.