Although he had helped Wordsworth write the prefaces for Lyrical Ballads in 1798 and 1800, and had also done some reviewing early in life, Coleridge first became famous as a critic because of the lecturing he did between 1808 and 1819. He eventually gave over seventy lectures on literary subjects, mostly in London and Bristol; the most famous were the eighteen or twenty lectures he gave in London between January and June 1808, on ‘The Principles of Poetry’ (in which he paid some attention to Shakespeare's plays), twelve lectures on Shakespeare and Milton given in London between November 1811 and January 1812, and finally ten more, mostly on Shakespeare, in London 1818–19.

Shakespeare lectures

In his stress on Shakespeare's judgement and intelligence in his 1811–12 series, Coleridge would be accused of plagiarising the German Shakespeare scholar August Wilhelm von Schlegel. In praising the intelligence of Shakespeare rather than his instinct, during his 1808 lecture series, he may, however, have coincided with (rather than have followed) Schlegel. It was at any rate a noteworthy moment for Shakespeare criticism, which had always tended to fall back on the notion of Shakespeare as untutored, natural genius. To have two of the great European intellectuals of the early nineteenth century insisting that Shakespeare possessed ‘a philosophic mind and power of judgement’ (LLi. 20) was a radical development in Shakespeare studies.