Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

translated into many languages. Now, that whole thing would have seemed absurd to Coleridge, and to Coleridge’s Shakespeare. Coleridge imagined Shakespeare as an infinite substance similar to Spinoza’s God. That is, Coleridge thought that Shakespeare had not observed man, had not lowered himself to the mean chore of espionage, or journalism. Shakespeare had thought about what a murderer is, how a man can become a murderer, and that’s how he imagined Macbeth. And just as he imagined Macbeth, he imagined Lady Macbeth, and Duncan, and the three witches. He imagined Romeo, Juliet, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Desdemona, Banquo’s ghost, Hamlet, the ghost of Hamlet’s father, Ophelia, Polonius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, all of them. That is, Shakespeare was each of the characters in his plays, even the most insignificant. And in addition to all of them, he was also the actor, the businessman, the moneylender William Shakespeare. I remember that FrankHarris was writing a biography of Bernard Shaw, and he sent Shaw a letter asking him for facts about his personal life. Shaw answered him that he had almost no personal life, that he, like Shakespeare, was all things and all men. And at the same time, he added, “I have been all things and all men, and at the same time I’m nobody, I’m nothing.”
    So, we have Shakespeare compared to God by Coleridge, yet Coleridge in a letter to one of his friends confesses there are scenes in Shakespeare’s work that seem unwarranted to him. For example, he thinks it is unwarranted that in the tragedy
King Lear
, one of the characters has his eyes pulled out on stage. But he piously adds, perhaps with more piety than conviction, “I have often wanted to find errors in Shakespeare, and then I have seen that there are no errors, I have seen that he is always right.” That is, Coleridge was a Shakespeare theologian—like theologians are of God—and as VictorHugo would be later. Victor Hugo quotes some coarse passages from Shakespeare, some errors in Shakespeare, some of Shakespeare’s distractions, then majestically justifies them by saying, “Shakespeare is subject to absences in the infinite.” And then he adds, “When dealing with Shakespeare, I accept everything as if I were an animal.” AndGroussac says that this extreme view proves Hugo’s lack of sincerity. 13 We don’t know if Coleridge sometimes lacked sincerity, or if he really meant it.
    Today, we have looked at some of Coleridge’s prose. In the next class, we will examine, not all of Coleridge’s poems, which would be impossible, but the three most important ones, those that correspond, according to a recent Coleridge critic, to hell, purgatory, and paradise.

CLASS 14

    COLERIDGE'S FINAL YEARS. COLERIDGE COMPARED TO DANTE ALIGHIERI. COLERIDGE'S POEMS. "KUBLA KHAN." COLERIDGE'S DREAM.

    FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 1966
    Coleridge spent his final years in a suburb of London, a wild and rugged place. He stayed there in the home of some friends. He had long since had nothing to do with his wife and children, having abandoned them, and he had also cut off from the circle of friends he’d had. He pulled away from them and moved to the suburbs. So his world also changed. He now lived in a world solely of mental activity, in which he spent his time in conversation, as we have already seen of others. But Coleridge was never left on his own: his friends and acquaintances continued to visit him.
    Coleridge would welcome them and spend long hours conversing with them. He wrote in the garden of his friends’ house and conversed, and these conversations were essentially monologues. For example,Emerson tells about how he went to visit him and how Coleridge spoke about the essentially unitary nature of God, and that after a while, Emerson told him that he had always believed in the fundamental unity of God. He was a Unitarian. Coleridge said to him: “Yes, that’s what I think,” then kept talking, because he did not care about his interlocutor.
    Another person who went to visit him was the famous Scottish historian Carlyle. Carlyle said that he ruled over London from the heights of Highgate, where the commotion of the city, the noise and the multitudes of London, could be seen from above. He had the impression that Coleridge was up there, stuck fast above human commotion and lost in his own thoughts, as if in suspension, or in a labyrinth, we could say. By that time he was writing very little, though he was always