The Making of the Romantic Shakespeare: Elizabeth Montagu and Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Abstract

This thesis explores the alliances between eighteenth-century Bluestocking readings of Shakespeare and the Romantic practice of literary criticism, focusing especially on Elizabeth Montagu’s Essay on the Writing and Genius of Shakespeare (1769) and Coleridge’s Shakespeare lectures (1808-1019). It relates the work of these two Shakespeare critics to contemporary developments in Shakespeare criticism in England and Germany. Montagu’s Essay was translated into German in 1771, at a time when the Sturm und Drang (‘Storm and Stress’) critics formulated new ideas regarding Shakespeare that would become foundational for the German Romantic movement. The German translation and reception of Montagu’s Essay have hardly been explored by scholarship up to today. As is well known, the connection with German Romanticism is also important for Coleridge’s development as a Shakespeare critic. By bringing the work of these two Shakespeare critics in dialogue with each other, this thesis explores the richness of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century network of Shakespeare criticism that is not represented in our canon of criticism. Furthermore, the examination of Montagu’s alliances with canonical criticism will touch upon the larger issues of women’s writing in the long eighteenth-century, of the stakes of both criticism and canon formation, and of feminist research and critique.