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‘Man’ and ‘Monster’: Coleridge on Shakespeare

by Gregory Leadbetter

  

Some comparison was introduced between Shakespeare and Milton. He said “he hardly knew which to prefer. Shakespeare appeared to him a mere stripling in the art; he was as tall and as strong, with infinitely more activity than Milton, but he never appeared to have come to man's estate; or if he had, he would not have been a man, but a monster.”

 

William Hazlitt, quoting Coleridge speaking in 1798

(from ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, 1823)

 

Hazlitt does not interrupt the flow of his recollections to dwell on this enigmatic wisp of Coleridge’s conversation, and perhaps it is because of this that it remains so little known.  Once spotted, however, the Coleridgean radar goes haywire.  Not coming to man’s estate?  Transmutation into a monster?  Perpetual childhood withholding an alien maturity?  This neglected remark represents Coleridge at his most suggestive.

 

On one level, Coleridge is replaying the eighteenth century critical terminology that subsequently he came to reject.  Lecturing over ten years after his comment to Hazlitt, Coleridge attacked the tendency to regard Shakespeare as a ‘delightful Monster’ and a ‘wild, irregular, pure child of nature’[1].  Perhaps he had his own earlier views in mind when he did so; but within his replication of those terms, a distinctively Coleridgean note is sounded.  He records his own distaste at coming ‘to man’s estate’ in a notebook entry dated 18 May 1808: ‘the melancholy dreadful feeling of finding myself to be Man, by a distinct division from Boyhood, Youth, and “Young man” – Dreadful was the feeling – before that Life had flown on so that I had always been a Boy, as it were –’[2].  This bleak realisation is inseparable from the sense of existential disappointment that took hold on Coleridge in his middle years, the sense that alienation and frustration were to constitute the ‘settled fate,/Dark as it is’ that Shelley felt ‘all change would aggravate’[3].  On this level, to have become a ‘man’ was to have become a ‘monster’: the nightmare of unintelligible love and isolated vision.

 

Coleridge being Coleridge however, things are never that simple, and whatever may have become ‘settled’ in a biographical sense remained very elusive as a psychological principle.  Coleridge is casting Shakespeare’s genius as both a gift and a curse.  To warp Wordsworth a little: if the child is the father of the monster, then at some level, the monster is already at work in and through the child.  This daemonic quality – the daemonic quality of ‘myriad-mindedness’, of imagination itself perhaps – is a source of fascination for Coleridge and, in its apparent autonomy, a source of fear.  A dilemma is exposed: the self’s fear of becoming itself.  Should the ‘child’ curtail its creative activity to prevent the emergence of the ‘monster’?  Or would such a curtailment trigger the monster’s emergence?  In rejecting the ‘monster’, the ‘child’ would necessarily reject itself, and by extension the very source that endowed it with such an ambiguous fate; with inevitably tragic consequences, as Shakespeare knew:

 

That nature which contemns its origin
Cannot be bordered certain in itself;
[He] that [him]self will sliver and disbranch
From [his] material sap, perforce must wither
And come to deadly use.[4]

 

This dilemma of becoming never left Coleridge.  1798 would not be the last time that, from a twenty-first century perspective, a single turn of phrase in Coleridge would send up a flare over the whole of his life and work.  It’s an almost inexhaustible light.

 

Oxford Brookes University

gmleadbetter@brookes.ac.uk

© Gregory Leadbetter, 2006. 

Examples of Gregory Leadbetter's poetry can be found in:

• Poetry London
• Snakeskin Nov 05; issues 122 & 123 March & April/May 06
• Limelight 
• Heaventree Press New Poets Vol 4