HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS OF PAGES OF THE BOLLINGEN COLLECTED Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge are given over to Coleridge's notes, comments, reflections, marginalia, and lectures on Shakespeare. These testify en masse to the remarkable gregariousness of Coleridge the Shakespearean. The poems and plays, like so much else that Coleridge read, sponsored earnest, lifelong pedagogical relations between Coleridge and his family, friends, readers, and audiences. (1) It fell to Coleridge first to understand then to explain Shakespeare. What he read, he could not help but talk about. And talk about. (2) He is relentlessly analytical, even when he experiences pleasure. Indeed, analysis itself was a source of pleasure: the best poetry stimulates the best reader to "be carried forward ... by the pleasureable [sic] activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself." (3) Time and again, where there is evidence of Coleridgean pathos, hard on its heels, even antecedent to it, there may be found a measure of logos and a dose of ethos. In his notes on interleaved sheets in the two-volume Ayscough edition of The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare (1807) which he took with him into the lecture room at the Crown and Anchor Tavern, Coleridge's initial response to lago observing Cassio take Desdemona "by the palm" then planning to "ensnare" him in "as little a web as this" is a burst of sheer enthusiasm: "O excellent." (4) This is the stock in trade of a huge warehouse filled with Shakespeare marginalia; it expresses either knowing connoisseurship or it is the unself-conscious gasp of sudden recognition, the utter delight familiar to every reader of Shakespeare. However, no sooner does this pleasurable shiver register than Coleridge probes its cause. To write, "O excellent. The importance given to fertile trifles ..." is for Coleridge to begin to expose the logic--the compositional strategy--that intensifies the shudder. The wit of the playwright, no less than the villain's, consists of making terrors of trifles. Then, for Coleridge to develop his gloss just one phrase further ("O excellent. The importance given to fertile trifles, made fertile by the villainy of the observer--"), is for him to acknowledge the ethical dimension of his own, perhaps also Shakespearean, pathos. Coleridge's pulse appears to quicken to the fecundity of villainy, but the full glossarial trajectory--from felt impression to analysis to evaluation--is the distinguishing mark of the reader Coleridge at work. He may ask what a Shakespearean passage means; he often asks what a particular editorial crux actually says; but implicitly or explicitly, he most wants to know "[h]ow is it done?" (John Payne Collier's notes). (5) Here is another instance: not much farther along in the play, reading in 3.3, Coleridge writes "Divine!" (CM 4.868) in response to the way Othello's "If she be false, O, then heaven mocks itself!" cues Desdemona's entrance. Once again, because of the pressure of a pedagogical imperative, an exclamation is not suffered to stand alone, as it undoubtedly would in the margin of any casually annotated volume of the plays. Coleridge has to explain. His exclamation point measures the duration of feeling before it gives way to clarification: "Divine! the effect of innocence & the [bitter/ better?] [? genius]" (the conjectures are Foakes's in CLect 2.319; Jackson and Whalley give "better genius" without comment in CM). Coleridge infers that his involuntary affect, his!, has been triggered by a Shakespearean display of technical virtuosity (the exquisite collision between Othello and innocence plus better genius, or between Desdemona's innocence and Othello's bitter genius) enacted by characters who for Coleridge are always "a medium for value." (6)
