Pages from Coleridge's

Lectures and Notes on Shakspere

and

Other English Poets



[Lectures and Notes on Shakspere and Other English Poets was published in 1897, more than sixty years after Coleridge's death. It was compiled from other publications by Coleridge and from reports by those who attended his lectures. The pages reproduced on this part of the Hamlet Navigator site contain Coleridge's best-known comments about Hamlet. They also provide a sampling of Coleridge's rambling, eloquent prose style.]


Contents:

Pages 24-25: From the diary of H. Crabb Robinson: Robinson comments on Coleridge's difficulty in sticking to his announced topic, and on Coleridge's tendency to see his own problems as Hamlet's problems.

Pages 342-349: From lectures which Coleridge delivered in 1818: Coleridge defends himself against the charge that he took his ideas about Hamlet from Schlegel, a German philosopher, poet, and critic. || Coleridge's description of Hamlet as one in whom "we see a great, an almost enormous, intellectual activity, and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it." || Coleridge's commentary on the opening scene of Hamlet.

Page 531: From Coleridge's "Table Talk": Contains Coleridge's statement, "I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so."