Coleridge: Lectures on Shakespeare (1811-1819).

Coleridge’s Lectures on Shakespeare as such need no review. A new edition of them, making wide claims for user-friendliness and accessibility of information, certainly does. This edition differs from its predecessors, old and not so old, standard ones like Everyman, Raysor, Harbage and Foakes. It publishes the text of the Lectures themselves, whereas some of the editions just mentioned give a thematic account of Coleridge’s Shakespeare criticism on a play-by-play basis, extracted from Coleridge’s various writings. The editio princeps of the Lectures, by R. A. Foakes, is based on Coleridge’s notes and transcripts and, while definitive, is understandably hard to use by a more general readership, not least by potential students. Adam Roberts, while paying his respects to Foakes, as indeed he must, opts for Payne Collier’s transcripts of the 1811-12 series and adds those of 1818-19. There are, as he admits, risks here: Payne Collier had a reputation as a literary forger. But his transcripts and reconstructions, while not escaping the charge of being constructs, have the feel of a delivered text and have the advantage of being readable and accessible. The Foakes texts, by contrast, render Coleridge’s lecture notes as they have survived, not as he may have delivered them. This is a crucial difference, and Roberts is quite open about what he is doing. Textual scholars will need to take up the debate with him.