ABSTRACT
In 1818, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine carried the first of a series, ‘Letters on Shakspeare’, penned by ‘T. C.’ 1 ‘No. I. – On Hamlet’ offers a high Romantic account of Shakespeare’s play: ‘when I single out the Tragedy of HAMLET, I enter, as it were, into a wilderness of thought where I know my soul must soon be lost, but from which it cannot return to our every-day world, without bringing back with it some lofty and mysterious conceptions, and a deeper insight into some of the most inscrutible recesses of human nature.’ 2 ‘T. C.’ ‘entertain[s] a kind of religious faith in [Shakespeare’s] poetry’ and offers a Coleridgean account of the construction of Hamlet’s character and Shakespeare’s comprehensive vision: ‘These springs rise from an unknown depth, and in that depth there seems to be a oneness of being.’ 3 Perhaps paradoxically for a Blackwood’s article, ‘T. C.’ sets out an almost Hazlittian conceptualisation of his mind: ‘how unlike the action of Shakspeare’s mind [is] to our own, – how deep and unboundedly various his beholding of men’s minds,... how wonderful his celerity of thought, the dartings of his intellect, like the lightning-glimpse, to all parts of his whole range of known being.’ 4 Though this is an exemplary piece of Romantic period Shakespearian criticism, it is entirely likely that Patmore was unusually familiar with the essay for rather more mundane reasons, given that one of his earliest published works, the imitative and eulogistic ‘Sonnets to Mr Wordsworth’ 5 immediately followed it in the February 1818 number of Maga.
