Keats’s Shakespeare

John Keats, as a creative reader who was also a great poet in history, mentioned Shakespeare not only as one of his greatest literary models, but also as his guide in his poetic career. This thesis is based on the study of the evidence concerning Keats’s understanding of Shakespeare’s plays. By analyzing Keats’s letters, annotations and markings on his books or texts of Shakespeare1, as well as his critical principles, the present thesis means to deal with the question how Shakespeare influenced Keats’s poetry both in a broad and specific aspects. It would be impossible to describe every element or angle of Shakespeare; however, we may dig out the hints and suggestions from Keats’s understanding of him. This is what is meant in the present thesis.The first part is a brief introduction of the whole thesis, and also makes a summarization of critical views about Keats and Shakespeare and their inference of the relationship between the two writers. Via this review we could find that although Keats embodies Shakespeare’s things less than his former critics, it does not mean that he had abandoned Shakespeare. Keats achieved his high summits by a comprehensive blended use of his own experience and creativity, mixing the cultural background.The second part will analyze the importance of reading Shakespeare, especially to Keats. For instance, he usually recognized the difference emotion from common readings, like finding the active and optimistic mood from tragedies and figuring out some distressing or cynical sentiments from comedies. Although Keats did not have traditional education in literature or criticism, he lived in a crucial century during which many great changes of literary theory took place. That is why it is necessary to discuss Hazlitt, Keats’s favourite critic, the one who had a silent transforming influence on Keats’s knowledge of literature. In this chapter, I will also use Hazlitt’s theory about Shakespeare in order to contribute some guidelines for understanding Keats’s dominating interest when he read Shakespeare, and the frame would mainly talk about Hazlitt as a leader of Keats’s reading Shakespeare from four aspects.If there are no some exact examples, this thesis would be unconvincing. In the next three chapters, I’d like to analyze the influence of Shakespeare’s comedy and tragedy on Keats as two instances strengthen my point. The topic of this chapter will be the comedies in general. We could make sure that Keats has read through all comedies of Shakespeare, for every play has been marked to a greater or lesser extent. And in Keats’s poetry and letters, he also mentioned plenty of sentences or words quoted from Shakespeare’s comedies, which makes the difficulty of figuring out all his markings on comedies which may cause something unprofessional in this thesis. So we pick up Keats’s markings and quotations from Love’s Labour’s Lost as example, combining with other comedies he also marked and quoted, to conclude that Keats can even discover the depress, melancholy and hopelessness from Shakespeare’s comedies. Just because Keats’s different feelings and findings, his poetry could be sensitive and exquisite as "snail horn touch".It is no exaggeration to say that King Lear represented for Keats a momentous experience each time he read or thought about it. Its influence lies behind many of his meditations on poetic creativity and upon human suffering. The text in his folio contains more markings of this play than any other, as well as several annotations. Since we have at our disposal so much information about what Keats found significant in King Lear, in the antepenultimate paragraph we will put it as an example in our exploration of what interested him in Shakespearean plays in general. The chapter is divided into three parts:Keats’s markings of King Lear; the language in King Lear noted by Keats and King Lear and Keats’s creativity.Hamlet, as one of the most important plays which can lead us to know more about Keats, will be shared with numerous marks made by Keats and its influence on Keats’s central, personal ideas in the last but one chapter. We know that Keats usually mentioned it and quoted its sentences or words, and he paid more attention to its consideration of human affairs rather than aesthetic theories, and it seems to be a representative of his consideration about Shakespeare’s works. Sometimes Keats liked the melancholy prince Hamlet, and he may have believed this play to be close to his own life. In this chapter, we will treat Hamlet as a whole text instead of dividing it into several portions, and of course, the main body of this chapter will be composed by Keats’s reading markings.The last chapter which is also the most crucial part, will conclude the whole essay according to evidences and narrations above. As a reader Keats carried numerous ideas from some critics and fellow poets of his time, such as Hazlitt, Coleridge, even Byron, however, he went far more from Shakespeare’s works directly. His primary interest was not only the words chosen nor the masterly designing of plots, but also the presentation of character, the vividness of figurative language and the feeling states aroused in the individual reader. He also adopted the central idea that poetry is important to the reader in helping formulate his own ideas and philosophies about moral s and experience. By means of his studying, imitating and understanding Shakespeare’s works, he could find a plurality of meanings in his own words, and be a creative poet. Not being blinded as those bardolatry, while admiring the beauties and magic of Shakespeare’s words, Keats found his own way; Shakespeare was only treated as his tutor or supervisor, instead of some one he should follow all the times.