difficult. I do not think it was her rigid chastity, as Hazlitt put it, that made Isabella unattractive to Coleridge; it seems rather to have been her over-all character. Isabella is undoubtedly one of the most cerebral women in Shakespeare's works,6 and Coleridge did not like intellectual females. In fact, he praised Shakespeare's women because he thought them to be creatures of passion and feeling.7 That Coleridge felt Isabella was too analytical and too unfeeling is corroborated by a generally neglected comment made by J. Payne Collier8 in his edition of Shakespeare's plays: