CANONICAL APPROACHES TO SHAKESPEARE: DR. JOHNSON AND COLERIDGE
CANONICAL APPROACHES TO SHAKESPEARE: DR. JOHNSON AND COLERIDGE

Summary/Abstract: A canonical critical approach to a canonical author was defined by Harold Bloom as a combination of two critical standpoints. One aspect concerns the critic’s ability to solve formal and phenomenological issues which arise in a work of art. The other one refers to the critic’s capacity of making value judgments on literary works on moral grounds. My preferred approach in this presentation is of ‘the compare and contrast’ type, as critics from two different cultural paradigms (late Neoclassicism and early Romanticism) are weighed against each other. While Johnson is concerned with the issue of the three unities and with the moral dimension of Shakespeare’s plays, Coleridge attempts a reconstruction of Shakespeare’s original intention and builds on the hypothesis that as concerns poetry pleasure precedes truth. The main aim of this article is bringing together two critics having different personalities, united by a common interest: taking Shakespeare away from accessibly appreciatively-naïve criticism and promoting a truly critical approach to the author. Their views are also canonical as they understood and incorporated two of Shakespeare’s registers that are the sage discourse and the passionate language of nature. Apart from this, the two critics managed, I think, successfully, to build the basis of a tradition in literary criticism. Since the conference’s theme is labeled Genres and Historicity: Text, Cotext, Context, I thought it would be interesting to refer to the above mentioned aspects which mainly focus on criticism as an emerging genre.

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