Introduction
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was one of England's great Romantic poets and critics. After leaving Cambridge in 1794, Coleridge met Robert Southey and planned to establish a democratic community in America. As part of the plan he was to marry Southey's fiancée's sister, Sara Fricker, but when the plan fell apart, Coleridge went through with the marriage. He met William Wordsworth in 1795, and their poetic collaboration was an important moment in English literary history. In 1798 they published the influential Lyrical Ballads together. Eventually they settled in the Lakes District.
All his life, Coleridge suffered from severe physical pains. He was prescribed laudanum, a mix of opium and alcohol, and became a drug addict. He became estranged from his wife, and later also from Wordsworth, in 1810, after a bitter argument. Coleridge eventually settled in London.
Between 1808 and 1818 Coleridge gave a number of lectures on literature in London, and he was considered one of the greatest Shakespeare critics. The lecture on Hamlet, from which this excerpt is taken, was first given in 1818, and first published in 1883. In this lecture, Coleridge focusses on what he perceives to be the excessive intellectual nature of Hamlet.
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