...assess Macready's new management of Covent Garden. Referring to Macready as "a classical man wishing to banish the wild beasts" of the less sophisticated performances in London, Carlyle goes on to defend the actor-manager's struggle to "gather 'Intellect' round him" in order to return the playhouse to Shakespeare and its former glory (Collected Letters 9: 343). Carlyle also admits that he has taken up Macready on his offer of free admission for the season, confessing that he attends about "once a week" to see "some Shakspear notability or the like" and "not without some enjoyment" (9: 343). While numerous critics have considered Carlyle's interaction with Shakespeare on the page, (1) very little attention has been focused on Carlyle's engagement with Shakespeare on the stage. By examining a number of factors in Carlyle's life, I hope to demonstrate that his interaction with performed Shakespeare also deserves attention. My examination focuses on 1.) Carlyle's notion of Shakespeare as hero; 2.) Carlyle's translation of Goethe and its effect on performances of Hamlet; 3.) Carlyle's intimate association with George Henry Lewes, the author of On Actors and the Art of Acting, and, finally, 4.) Carlyle's relationship with the actor-manager W. C. Macready. Ultimately, I will show that Carlyle influenced Shakespeare as much as Shakespeare influenced Carlyle.

Shakespeare played a prominent role in Carlyle's life from his earliest years. Even as an adolescent, he read the plays over and over again, and, unlike the other authors he was perusing, "Shakespeare's realistic stoicism expressed truths that seemed compatible with the religious vision that was the foundation of his parents' piety" (Kaplan 26). Later, while attending the University of Edinburgh, he kept the complete works of Shakespeare on the shelf in his small dormitory room. Constantly claiming Shakespeare to be his favorite author, Carlyle would also use him as the preeminent example of the hero as poet.

Carlyle's .correspondence also contains numerous instances of direct quotations, as well as allusions to Shakespeare's plays, including Hamlet, Cymbeline, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Othello, The Tempest, and The Winter's Tale. For example, in a letter to John Sterling, a close confidant, Carlyle ranted against the electoral process by borrowing from one of Hamlet's most famous soliloquies: "Most weary, flat, stale seem to me all the electioneerings ... that the Earth is filled with in these or indeed in any days" (9: 267). Carlyle also echoes Shakespeare in a more indirect manner. David-Everett Blythe perceptively argues that Carlyle's prose is "so thoroughly permeated with Shakespearean rhythm and rewording" that it is even worth examining echoes that do not quote Shakespeare word-for-word. Coining the term "buried insets" to describe such echoes, Blythe goes on to identify passages that, although not direct quotations from Shakespeare, are phrases that call to mind the work of the Bard (36). (2) Later in his life, Carlyle counted on Shakespeare for solace. A long-time friend, Carol Fox, visited him two months after Jane Carlyle had died in 1866, and she found him as "thin and aged, and sad as Jeremiah ... reading Shakespeare, in a long dressing gown" (qtd. in Origo 181). In 1879, just two years before his own demise, he reread all of Shakespeare in a single month. From his earliest years, then, to the year of his death, Carlyle turned to Shakespeare as a model for his own literary aspirations, as an English poetic hero, and as a literary comfort in times of need.

1. Shakespeare as Hero

Carlyle presented his ideas on the Hero in a series of lectures in 1840, published the following year. (3) As Carlyle admitted in his work, he drew on German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte's "theory of the literary man" for his ideas on what constituted a hero. Fichte (1762-1814), an important German philosopher situated historically between Kant and Hegel, had articulated his concepts at the turn of the nineteenth century. In the first lecture of the 1840 series on Heroes, Carlyle set out to define the topic of his talks:

We have undertaken to discourse here for a little while on Great Men, their manner of appearance in our world's business, how they have shaped themselves in the world's history, what ideas men formed of them, what work: they did;--on Heroes, namely, and on their reception and performance; what I call hero-worship and the Heroic in human affairs. (Heroes 1)

He then divides his presentations into six lectures, one on each "type" of hero: "The Hero as Divinity," "The Hero as Prophet," "The Hero as Poet," "The Hero as Priest," "The Hero as Man of Letters," and "The Hero as King."

The single most significant presentation for our purposes is the "The Hero as Poet," given Tuesday, 12 May 1840. (4) In this lecture, Carlyle reiterates the subject of looking to the past for heroic characters, but he distinguishes old heroes of Divinity and Prophecy from more recent ones. Proclaiming the ancient heroes "productions of the ages," he posits that they are "not to be repeated in the new," partly because of scientific knowledge. For them to exist, he adds, there needs to be "a world vacant, or almost vacant of scientific forms." He concludes that while "Divinity and Prophet" are past, we "are now to see our hero in the less ambitious, but also less questionable, character of Poet" (Heroes 78). Although Carlyle distinguishes between prophet and poet--claiming that the prophet "has seized that sacred mystery rather on the moral side," while the poet functions on what the "Germans call the aesthetic side" (81)--by invoking priests alongside poets, Carlyle anticipates Matthew Arnold' s stance by at least half a decade.

Carlyle's comments on Shakespeare in his lecture show his elevation of the poet above all other types of Hero, including monarchs. He claims, for example, that Shakespeare possesses "a true English heart" that "breathes, calm and strong" (110). Not only is Shakespeare a true patriot, but he is even more...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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