Coleridge on Shakespeare's Villains

Abstract

HE Romantic writers have been accused, not merely by their enemies-the Babbitts and Mores-but even by their friends and by themselves of confounding good with evil, of writing so well of the devil because they were on the devil's side, and of leaving the wars of truth so they might uninterruptedly practice their slender lyric gift. But this thesis, of course, is factitious, and if their ethical standards did not always please their fellows or their critics, they were none the less concerned with morality if not with morals. English Romantic criticism of Shakespeare never tires of reminding us that he keeps the high road of morality, and Coleridge, adverting the opinion of a Greek writer . . . that none but a good man could be a great poet, . . . concurred, . . . and thought, moreover, that moral excellence was necessary the perfection of the understanding and the taste (MC, p. 225).1 For Coleridge, then, Shakespeare's moral nature was never suspect, and the mere fact that the plays delighted successive audiences proved, in view, that they and their author were rich in goodness (but not, he elsewhere indicates, in goodyness [MC, p. 427]), for it is impossible to keep up any pleasurable interest in a tale in which there is no goodness of heart (MC, p. 55). Thus, Coleridge's aesthetics are intimately related moral values, and we should not be surprised find that he is uneasy when in the presence of several of the plays which Willard Farnham has recently characterized as representing Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier. Some of the difficulties that critics encounter in these dramas, where the heroes are so deeply tainted that they cannot merely be said have a tragic flaw or miss the mark, may owe their origin the aesthetic inferiority of the works themselves, but we can clearly see that morality rather than aesthetics (however intimately the two may be related) is the cause of the embarrassment Coleridge exhibits in remarks on Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. Of the latter, his admiration of some parts . . . was unbounded; but he maintained that it was, on the whole, a painful and disagreeable production, because it gave only a disadvantageous picture of human nature, very inconsistent with what, he firmly believed, was our great poet's real view of the characters of fellowcreatures. .. . Coleridge could not help suspecting that the subject might have been taken up under some temporary feeling of vexation and disappointment (SC, I, 85). Surprisingly, however, Shakespeare's hero-villains were less of a problem Coleridge than were the out-and-out villains. And this was so, not only because the non-heroic villains act with unmitigated villainy, but also because the good characters, whose opinions we must, in general, honor and make our