Durham E-Theses Staging imagination: transformations of Shakespeare in Wordsworth and Coleridge O'Boyle, Patricia Marie How to cite: O'Boyle, Patricia Marie (2008) Staging imagination: transformations of Shakespeare in Wordsworth and Coleridge, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/2549/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 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 ~- -- ___,-~ --- 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. 2 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 ofEncounter, 6 is celebrated