Wordsworth and Shakespeare (1985)

Abstract

In his own time, Wordsworth had a reputation for being antipathetic to Shakespeare. There could be no symbolic starting point than the occasion recorded by both Leigh Hunt and Charles Cowden Clarke when Wordsworth criticised the repetition of the present participle in a line from Henry V, singing masons building roofs of gold (I.ii.198): This, he said, was a line which would never have written. Mr. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with the continued note of the singers, and that Shakespeare's negligence (if negligence it was) had felt the thing in the best (Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries [1828], p. 260). Not only does this imply that Keats was sympathetic to Shakespeare, Wordsworth to Milton, but it also shows the two poets reconstituting their forbears in their own image. Wordsworth conceives of as a meticulous poet, rejecting cacophonous or awkward lines as he sought to do himself by obsessively revising his own work; Keats's phrase for Shakespeare's manner of composition, instinctively felt the thing in the best manner, could as well be Keats on himself in one of the letters. Cowden Clarke in Recollections of Writers (1878) describes the incident, then generalises: more than once it has been said that Wordsworth had not a genuine love of Shakespeare: that, when he could, he always accompanied a 'pro' with his 'con', and Atticus-like, would 'just hint a fault and hesitate dislike' (p. 150). The balancing of beauties and faults, the belief that even Shakespeare himself had his blind sides, his limitations, (1) is indicative of an eighteenth century strain that runs through Wordsworth's criticism. The idea that Wordsworth imagined himself to be in the line of rather than Shakespeare is stated most forcefully by Hazlitt. Milton is his great idol, and he sometimes dares to compare himself with him, he writes in the Spirit of the Age: We do not think our author has any very cordial sympathy with Shakespear. How should he? Shakes-pear was the least of an egotist of any body in the world. He [Wordsworth] does not much relish the variety and scope of dramatic composition. 'He hates those interlocutions between Lucius and Caius' (Howe, xi, 92). The last phrase is in quotation marks because Hazlitt believed that Wordsworth made such a remark at some time; he adverts to it on several occasions, using it as shorthand for Wordsworth's supposed anti-Shakespearean sentiments. (2) Hazlitt's argument turns on the opposition between Wordsworthian egotism and dramatic impersonality. If one thinks in the terms of the Biographia Literaria, of Shakespeare as a poet who darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion; the one Proteus of the fire and the flood where attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own IDEAL, (3) then Wordsworth is undoubtedly a Miltonic, not a Shakespearean, genius. Keats clearly had this distinction in mind when he contrasted his own Shakespearean negative capability with the Wordsworthian egotistical sublime. But did Wordsworth really hold the beliefs that Hazlitt ascribed to him? His strongest rebuttal of the commonplace that he had little sympathy with Shakespeare has often been overlooked, perhaps because until recently it has only been available in manuscript, in Barron Field's unpublished memoir of Wordsworth. When Wordsworth found the passage from The Spirit of the Age quoted at length in it, he wrote in the margin: This is monstrous! I extol Chaucer & others because the world at large knows little or nothing of their merits. Modesty & deep [--] how superfluous a thing it is to praise Shakespere [--] have kept me often & almost habitually silent upon that subject. Who thinks it necessary to praise the Sun? (4) Deep feeling suggests that there was an intensity about Wordsworth's response to Shakespeare, modesty that it may not at first be apparent. …