Coleridge's Checklist for Ineffective Lecturing

I'm closing down on the deadline by which my edition of Coleridge's Lectures on Shakespeare has to go off to the press, and accordingly I've been trying to wrangle my intro into acceptable shape. Now, one of the main issues with which I have to deal where Coleridge's lectures are concerned is how unlike 'lectures' in the generally accepted sense of that word they are. I lecture for a living. My own education (last century, as an undergrad) entailed attending many lectures. I share with the rest of whatever constituency exists for Coleridge's prose writings—a constituency made-up, I would guess, almost entirely of professional academics and their students—a sense of what a good lecture is: a degree of comprehensiveness; a coherent structure; an accessible and engaging delivery in which key points are reinforced by the redundancy of varied repetition; supported by paratextual material such as handouts and powerpoint displays. From a very great number of guides as to what constitutes effective lecturing, I select one, pretty much at random—Stanford's ‘Teaching Commons’ Resources page, according to which the lecturer should amongst other things do the following:

Outline clear objectives for your lecture—both what students should know after the lecture and why it is important.

Develop a lecture outline and any audiovisuals.

Limit the main points in a lecture to five or fewer.

Create effective visuals, analogies, demonstrations, and examples to reinforce the main points.

Share your outline with students.

Emphasize your objectives and key points in the beginning, as you get to them, and as a summary at the end.

Integrate visuals, multimedia, discussion, active learning strategies, small-group techniques, and peer instruction.

Plan for diverse learners. Use verbal, visual, and kinesthetic approaches such as hands-on exercises and simulations.

Good advice, all; but a checklist of pretty much all the things Coleridge does not do in his Shakespeare lectures. His lectures on Hamlet and the Tempest do not provide an overview of the plays, do not situate either in its time or in a broader critical debate, do not work methodically through a small number of closely related points. Instead Coleridge isolates a few key scenes or speeches, almost always in these lectures from the opening Acts, and expatiates upon a series of sometimes only obliquely connected points related to them.

So: a fundamentally immethodical lecturer? You wouldn't be the first person to say so.

When Henry Crabb Robinson wrote that Coleridge's ‘pretended lectures are immethodical rhapsodies, moral, metaphysical, and literary, abounding in brilliant thoughts, fine flashes of rhetoric, ingenious paradoxes, occasionally profound and salutary truths,’ but not ‘an instructive course of readings on any one subject a man can wish to fix his attention on,’ he described a manner of presentation which continues to vex Coleridge's readers as it did at least one of his auditors. Far from developing a full body of Shakespearean criticism, Coleridge did not even give a detailed critique of any one play.

That's Peter Hoheisel’s summary [‘Coleridge on Shakespeare: Method Amid the Rhetoric’, Studies in Romanticism, 13:1 (1974), 15].  Now, Hoheisel bravely attempts to counter-argue, insisting that ‘contrary to Robinson, there is a method amid the rhetoric, and that method, to put it in a Coleridgean way, is to illuminate certain central principles which contain endless potentiality for development.’ Though my heart is with him, in terms of his desire to rescue Coleridge's often brilliant, circulating, sometimes obliquely rendered, thought-provoking meditations on Shakespeare from the charge of flat disorganisation, I can't say I'm fully persuaded by Hoheisel's defence here.

Maybe the problem has to do with how we frame these lectures. I mean, precisely, as 'lectures'. Of course, if it seems only fair to judge Coleridge-as-lecturer by the norms of contemporary academic praxis it may be because Coleridge is implicated in the creation of the academy itself. For one thing, the Biographia Literaria, or at least certain aspects of it (close reading most notably) proved foundational for the twentieth-century creation of ‘English’ as an academic discipline. For another, Coleridge argued for the need of a ‘clerisy’, an elite group of learned people, a caste of intellectuals and literati paid for out of public funds and tasked with the education of the nation as a whole. It’s common enough amongst academics (such as myself) to see in their professional life the practical manifestation of that ideal.

The truth, though, is otherwise. To go back to what Coleridge actually wrote about the ‘clerisy’ is to be struck by how unlike a modern Professor of English Literature the original concept was.

The CLERISY of the nation, or national church, in its primary acceptation and original intention, comprehended the learned of all denominations;—the sages and professors of the law and jurisprudence, of medicine and physiology, of music, of military and civil architecture, of the physical sciences, with the mathematical as the common organ of the preceding; in short, all the so called liberal arts and sciences, the possession and application of which constitute the civilization of a country, as well as the Theological. The last was, indeed, placed at the head of all; and of good right did it claim the precedence. But why? Because under the name of Theology, or Divinity, were contained the interpretation of languages; the conservation and tradition of past events; the momentous epochs, and revolutions of the race and nation; the continuation of the records; logic, ethics, and the determination of ethical science, in application to the rights and duties of men in all their various relations, social and civil; and lastly, the ground-knowledge, the prima scientia as it was named,—PHILOSOPHY. [Church and State, 47]

Coleridge is clear that the duties of the clerisy are largely pedagogic: primarily to dispose of ‘materials of NATIONAL EDUCATION, the nisus formativus of the body politic, the shaping and informing spirit, which, educing or eliciting the latent man in all the natives of the soil, trains them up to be citizens of the country, free subjects of the realm’. ‘Nisus formativus’ means the forming force, the formative urge; and ‘educing’ (Latin: educo ‘I lead out, I draw out; I raise up, I erect”; via e ‘from, out of’; and duco ‘I lead, I conduct’). But he is equally clear that this class, as its name makes clear, is an aspect of the church. He has in mind clerics rather than professors.

This is not to deny that one of the ways Coleridge’s clerisy idea developed was precisely into the expansion of the university sector, not just to broaden educational opportunities for the citizenry but to furnish the nation with an intelligentsia. Given the glowing terms in which STC talks of ‘the clerisy’, it would be hard for any latter-day inheritor of the mantle—such as myself—to talk objectively about it. (We’re liable to say: ‘of course the State should pay for our upkeep—and pay us handsomely!’) But I don’t think Coleridge had people like me in mind when he coined his term. It’s not just that I’m not religious, and it’s not that I’m part of a university system specifically set apart from the church. It’s that what we do (increasingly so, with the introduction of tuition fees) is simply not disseminated into every portion of the realm, eliciting the latent man in all the natives of the soil to be citizens of the country, free subjects of the realm.

This is one, practical reason why Coleridge models the clerisy on the clergy. The clerisy’s job is to educate the nation, practically and morally; and to do that it needs to go into every village, even into every home. Priests already do that. My sense is that Coleridge can’t imagine a secular organisation having that same access without it becoming a horrific secret-police-style invasion of privacy. The 1820s and 1830s, when Coleridge coined the term, saw fierce debate in Britain over the establishment of the Metropolitan Police Force, when what was seen as a French-style invasion of state apparatus of law, order and control into private life was fiercely debated and as fiercely opposed.

Now, clearly, a course of lectures on Shakespeare at which attendance costs two guineas (or three 'with the privilege of introducing a lady') is not calculated to ‘educe’ on this national, popular scale. But it is well to keep in mind that Coleridge’s idea of the ideal educator overlaps to a large degree with his idea of the ideal priest. This in turn leads us to reconsider which paradigm for ‘the lecture’ he was working from. Not, clearly, any anachronistic or modern-day model of Stanfordesque ‘effective lecturing’ (grand and lovely though that be); but from a different model altogether. The sermon.

Coleridge was a preacher before he was anything else. In the early 1790s he preached often, all around the country, and planned to become a Unitarian minister, until a no-strings-attached annuity from the Wedgwoods enabled him to concentrate on reading, thinking and writing. And the logic of the sermon informs much of what he then goes on to write. The Ancient Mariner is a preacher of rare power, and Coleridge's edition of his (verse) sermon includes, in its later iterations, a prose gloss elucidating the theological moral. In the middle of his stint as a lecturer-on-Shakespeare, Coleridge published two (of a planned three) Lay Sermons, addressed to the upper (1816), middle (1817) and—in the unwritten third—the working classes, and concerning the contemporary political situation. As R J White notes, these political pamphlets ‘were sermons. They begin with a text, and end with it, in the approved pulpit manner.’

Coleridge did it to the manner born. ‘Have you ever heard me preach, Charles?’ he once asked his friend Lamb. ‘N-n-never heard you d-d-do anything else, C-c-coleridge.’ He had begun as a young Radical at Bristol in 1795, lecturing at the coffee-house on the Quay on the ‘grand political View of Christianity’ … Next year he was among the Midland Charity Sermons. ‘The Sacred may eventually help off the profane—and my Sermons spread a sort of sanctity over my sedition’ John Thelwall, who was often in trouble over his Jacobin politics, remarked enviously that Coleridge ‘cannot preach very often without travelling from the pulpit to the Tower.’ The transition was easy. ‘Mount him but upon his darling hobby-horse, “the republic of God’s own making”, and away he goes, scattering levelling sedition and constructive treason.’ That he never became a Unitarian minister was not the fault of the Unitarians, but the consequence of Thomas Wedgwood’s offer of £150 a year as an endowment for the pursuit of poetry and philosophy for the greater glory of his country, an endowment (Hazlitt tells us) that Coleridge accepted while tying on one of his shoes. All the same, he continued even after 1798 to preach. [R J White (ed), Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lay Sermons (Collected Coleridge: Routledge/Princeton 1972), xxxiv-xxxv]

A lecture is not, of course, quite the same thing as a sermon. We might say that the latter is designed to establish or reinforce religious faith, where the former is supposed to establish or deepen knowledge of one or other discourse. But the parallels are closer than that, I think. Many more sermons are preached to people who already believe than to unbelievers, after all (I’m not sure we would even call attempts to proselytise and convert sermons, actually: does a sermon not imply a willing audience?) The phrases ‘preaching to the converted’ and ‘preaching to the choir’ exist to index a sense of what constitutes a bad sermon: a preacher who takes his or her audience for granted, who brings nothing new to the experience. By the same token, we might define a good sermon as one that deepens and enriches an already-existing faith, that makes the auditor consider things s/he already believes from a new light, that makes a portion of lived experience new. As for lectures, we might distinguish between two kinds. The elementary lecture is designed, and if well-delivered can be received, as an exercise in apprising an audience of the fundamentals of some body of knowledge. From such a lecture an auditor learns something she or he did not know before. This, though, does not really describe what Coleridge is doing in his Shakespeare lectures. These performances embody a different approach: one that presumes a certain knowledge of Shakespeare, but which attempts to inflect that knowledge in new ways, to correct previous errors of emphasis and interpretation and propose a new way of looking at a shared body of culture. In this respect these lectures, and others like them, have more in common with the logic of the sermon.

I am arguing, in other words, that there is more here than the fact that both sermons and lectures belong to what Robert H Ellison calls the ‘genre of oral literature’—a genre he identifies as both very important to nineteenth-century culture and as rather overlooked by critical study. Ellison says: '‘I believe we can regard the sermon as a genre of “oral literature”. Some scholars have objected to the use of this phrase … [as] paradoxical, even oxymoronic. Walter J Ong [calls] “oral literature” a “monstrous” term, arguing that it is “preposterous” to discuss the creative works of an oral culture in terms of a form that is, by definition, written. … I propose, however, that there is a place for this term in orality-literacy studies, that it may more properly describe genres like the sermon, which, more than any other form of nineteenth-century prose, is characterized by the often uneasy juxtaposition of oral and written traditions.’ [Robert H Ellison, The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken and Written Sermons in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press 1998), 14-15]. What Ellison argues of the sermon applies a fortiori for the lecture. Of course, it wouldn’t do to press the analogy too far. The emphasis in a sermon must be, in one sense, theological; and although Coleridge was committed to a paradigm of literary genius as informed by ‘the vision and the faculty divine’ his purpose in the Shakespeare lectures was literary-critical. Then again, his analysis reverts more often than not to an engagement with specifically moral questions, and Coleridge’s ethics cannot be separated from Coleridge’s faith.

Perhaps a more relevant parallel has to do with form. O C Edwards’ study of the different kinds of sermon that predominated in the long eighteenth-century identifies a number of older styles of preaching that persisting through the period—specifically, the Spanish ‘concetto’ style, the German ‘emblematic’ and the Puritan ‘plain style’ sermons—whilst also noting certain popular newer styles such as the Anglican preaching of Tillotson, the evangelical sermons of the eighteenth-century ‘awakenings’ as well as those of Lutheran Pietism. [See O C Edwards Jr, ‘Varieties of Sermon: A Survey of Preaching in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Joris Van Eijnatten (ed), Preaching, Sermon and Cultural Change in the Long Eighteenth-Century (Leiden/Boston: Brill 2009), 3-55] None of these have any close formal affinity with the mode of lecturing, as old as the Middle Ages, of the synoptic and systematic itemisation of terms of knowledge. And when we put it like that, it becomes easier to see the ways in which Coleridge’s approach takes a quasi-Germanic ‘emblematic’ approach to its topic, mixed with elements of the ‘inspired’ Tillotsonian or nonconformist tradition. There may have been reasons other than personal quirk that lead Coleridge to extemporise his lectures, rather than reading from a prepared text.

So for example. The second lecture of the 1811-12 series begins with a designedly amusing division of readers into four classes, characterised by their increasing acuity and retention. The lecture as a whole then goes on to make more serious points about the importance of precision in the use of words, the divisions of taste, a definition of poetry and a brief contextualising history of the English stage. The initial four-part distinction is not exactly the text upon which the lecture is then preached, but it does formally embody the shape the lecture then takes. The third lecture in series opens with Coleridge’s view ‘that poetry is no proper antithesis to prose—in the correct opposite of poetry is science, and the correct antithesis of prose is metre’, and then develops this with a series of meditations upon moral pleasure, metrical form, knowledge and truth to life, bringing-in (sermonically) the Bible as poetry and ‘religious controversy’ as a shaping influence on Shakespeare himself. The fourth lecture involves, in a manner of speaking, this principle upon itself: it starts by identifying the starting point of Shakespeare’s writing life, and goes on to close-read the ‘sweetness’ and organically satisfying imagery of the Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece. The lectures that follow, at least the ones that we have been able to recover, tend to read a specific Shakespearian play, and to do so by establishing an emblematic point at the beginning—often derived from the opening of the play—and then elaborating upon it as a way of unlocking the specific excellence of the text under review. Sometimes the connection between the one and the other is more intuitive and poetic—more, we could say, organic—than is common in lecturing. So, for example, the sixth lecture of the 1811-12 series opens, rather oddly, with comments on the undesirability of corporal punishment at school. The lecture itself soon moves onto Shakespeare, but the initial emblem animates the whole. This is, in part, because Coleridge’s point has to do with the foolishness of trying to apply any mode of procrustean schoolmasterish ‘rules’ to Shakespeare, whose plays grow like the ideal Rousseauian child by a natural genius, not by obedience t the Classical Unities. And the shadowy figure of the master’s stick or cane becomes itself transformed in Coleridge’s imagination, to:

The wit of Shakespeare is like the flourishing of a man’s stick, when he is walking, in the full flow of animal spirits: it is a sort of overflow of hilarity which disburdens, and seems like a conductor, to distribute a portion of our joy to the surrounding air by carrying it away from us.

Directly following this wonderful image, Coleridge reverts to questions of moral delinquency and moral freedom. The eighth lecture begins with the thought that that ‘religion is the Poetry of all mankind’, moves from this into a meditation on divine and human love, and then undertakes a reading of Romeo and Juliet in a manner that, with considerable nuance and sensitivity, juxtaposes the romantic love shared by the deuteragonists with the passion the lover of Shakespeare—such as Coleridge himself—feels for this art. The ninth lecture takes ancient sculpture as its emblem, moving on to a discussion of the Tempest as an artefact not of slavish imitation but of ‘the imagination …the scheme of his drama does not appeal to any sensuous impression of time and place, but to the imagination’. The twelfth lecture opens with ‘the anecdote of John Wilkes, who said of himself that even in the company of ladies, the handsomest man ever created had but ten minutes’ advantage of him’, and goes on to develop some of Coleridge’s most sensitively insightful character-readings of the dynamic between the inner and outer lives of Richard II and Hamlet.