I

It’s surprising, in view of Johnson’s statement that biography “enchains the heart by irresistible interest,” that he neither wrote about Shakespeare’s life and character nor saw any parallels between the playwright’s life and his own. Yet the two authors had a great deal in common. Both were born in the Midlands; and Shakespeare’s Stratford, in Warwickshire, was only about thirty-five miles south of Johnson’s Lichfield, in the adjacent county of Staffordshire. Their fathers’ families were socially inferior to those of their mothers. Shakespeare’s father used leather for glove making; Johnson’s father used it for bookbinding. Shakespeare’s father was fined for engaging in illegal wool trade; Johnson’s father was fined for illegal tanning. Both fathers owned substantial houses in town; and both fathers, liked and trusted by their townsmen, held a series of municipal offices before becoming bailiff (or mayor).

Both fathers lost their social standing, through business failures and financial difficulties, just at the time their sons were becoming adults. Shakespeare was unable to attend Oxford; Johnson dropped out after a year. Both authors married older, wealthier wives, left their wives behind when they went to London, and were separated from them for long periods of time. Johnson’s statement that Shakespeare “came to London a needy adventurer, and lived for a time by very mean employments,” and Stephen Greenblatt’s account of Shakespeare, “a young man from a small provincial town—a man without independent wealth, without powerful family connections, and without a university education—moves to London in the late 1580s,” describes the countrified background and early careers of both authors.

In April 1745 Johnson had published his Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth, including his proposal for a new edition of the plays to be brought out by his old publisher Edmund Cave. This sixty-four-page pamphlet gave a sample of his editorial method, with notes on specific passages and general comments on Macbeth, that was intended to entice subscribers. But the project was blocked by the influential bookseller Jacob Tonson, who claimed that he owned the copyright of all of Shakespeare’s works and threatened to defend his valuable property with an expensive lawsuit in Chancery.

Johnson later reprinted his original notes on Macbeth, with a few changes, in his 1765 edition of the plays. He was drawn to the speech in which Lady Macbeth says, “Yet do I fear thy nature; / It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way” (1.5.17-19), and echoed the last phrase in two of his best-known works. In Rasselas, Imlac warns the hero not to “consult only our own policy, and attempt to find a nearer way.” And in one of his best poems, “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet,” Johnson concludes more positively: “Death broke at once the vital chain, / And free’d his soul the nearest way.”¹

Ten years after his first proposal for an edition, Johnson returned to this project and in June 1756 published his “Proposals for Printing, by Subscription, the Dramatick Works of William Shakespeare” (the poems were not included). This time Tonson, along with Longman and other publishers, sponsored the work of the now famous lexicographer. Johnson promised to finish his edition in eighteen months, but (as with the Dictionary ) he actually took nine years. While working on the Dictionary, he was writing the Rambler and Tetty died; while working on his Works of Shakespeare, he was writing the Idler and his mother died.

As with the early “Plan” and late “Preface” for the Dictionary, Johnson wrote early “Proposals” for Shakespeare and, many years later, a more substantial “Preface” to Shakespeare in October 1765. In his “Proposals” he sensibly stated that the business of the textual editor was twofold: to “correct what is corrupt, and to explain what is obscure.” Johnson’s primary task was to establish a correct text. During Shakespeare’s lifetime eighteen of his plays were published in Quartos, often with extremely corrupt texts based on the faulty memories of members of the cast. The First Folio of 1622-23 published thirty-six plays, eighteen for the first time, and arranged them into comedies, histories and tragedies. Three other Folios appeared, in 1632, 1663 and 1685. In the eighteenth century, editions of Shakespeare had been produced by Nicholas Rowe (1709), Alexander Pope (1725), Lewis Theobold (1733), Thomas Hanmer (1744) and William Warburton (1747). Johnson was the first editor to recognize the authority of the First Folio, and restored many passages from that superior text. But he did not compare all the earlier texts to determine which was closest to what Shakespeare actually wrote. A modern scholar noted that “although he had undertaken, in 1756, to make a completely fresh collation of the texts, Johnson did no such thing, but, like other eighteenth-century editors, printed from his predecessors’ texts, notably Warburton’s 1747 edition and the 1757 reissue of Theobold.”

Johnson succeeded very well, however, in completing the secondary task of explaining obscure words, expressions and allusions. The method announced in the “Proposals” was also clear and straightforward: “when any obscurity arises from an allusion to some other book, the passage will be quoted. When the diction is entangled, it will be cleared by a paraphrase or interpretation.” Of the 116,000 quotations in the Dictionary, about a third of the poetical ones came from Shakespeare. So the Dictionary was an essential source for his editing and supplied definitions for many of Shakespeare’s words. Previous editors had ignorantly and recklessly changed Shakespeare’s lines; Johnson’s unrivaled understanding of Elizabethan English enabled him to respect and preserve the text.

Later on, in the “Preface,” Johnson explained why the texts of the plays were so unreliable. Shakespeare, indifferent to fame, had published no collection of his works in his lifetime. Since it was always easier to alter than to explain, Johnson’s predecessors had corrupted many passages in the plays. Johnson himself, reluctant to make emendations and remaining faithful to the original texts, hoped to get closer to Shakespeare’s real words and true intentions. The “Preface” also set forth Johnson’s ideal standards: “In perusing a corrupted piece, [the editor] must have before him all possibilities of meaning, with all possibilities of expression. Such must be his comprehension of thought, and such his copiousness of language. Out of many readings possible, he must be able to select that which best suits with the state, opinions, and modes of language prevailing in every age, and with his authour’s particular cast of thought, and turn of expression.” In 1910 Walter Raleigh praised Johnson’s editorial principles: “the whole duty of a Shakespearean commentator and critic is here. The complete collation of early editions; the tracing of Shakespeare’s knowledge to its sources; the elucidation of obscurities by a careful study of the language and customs of Shakespeare’s time; the comparison of Shakespeare’s work with that of other great poets, ancient and modern.”²

Johnson realized the difficulty of his task, and in a noble passage, which compared the progress of knowledge to a contest between light and darkness, observed that “the tide of seeming knowledge which is poured over one generation, retires and leaves another naked and barren; the sudden meteors of intelligence which for a while appear to shoot their beams into the regions of obscurity, on a sudden withdraw their lustre, and leave mortals again to grope their way.” He concluded by justly summarizing his achievement: “not a single passage in the whole work has appeared to me corrupt, which I have not attempted to restore; or obscure, which I have not endeavoured to illustrate.” But, with a characteristic metaphor of struggle, he modestly admitted his limitations: “in many [places] I have failed like others; and from many, after all my efforts, I have retreated, and confessed the repulse.” Though Johnson was not always able to fulfill his editorial ideals, he came closer than any of his predecessors to achieving his ambitions.

Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare drew him back into Garrick’s world, and their relations, as always, were rather strained. They had diametrically opposed ideas about Shakespeare. Johnson wanted to preserve the most accurate text; Garrick changed the plays at will. As the leading producer and actor of his time, Garrick was instrumental in reviving, interpreting and popularizing Shakespeare. At Drury Lane, between 1747 and 1776, “Garrick averaged forty-four performances of Shakespeare annually . . . produced twenty-eight different Shakespearean plays, and he himself assumed eighteen Shakespearean roles.” Garrick constantly avowed his admiration for Shakespeare’s genius, yet cut and chopped the plays to suit himself.

A modern critic wrote, “Garrick’s attitude towards Shakespeare was as inconsistent as it was reprehensible. When, in 1756, he compressed The Winter’s Tale into the limits of an afterpiece (styled Florizel and Perdita), he mendaciously avowed in his prologue: ‘’Tis my chief wish, my joy, my only plan, / To lose no drop of that immortal man.’ ... His abbreviation of The Taming of the Shrew held the stage to the utter exclusion of the original for a century.”³ Garrick thought his own versions of the plays were superior to Shakespeare’s. He cut out the Fool and wrote a happy ending to King Lear, in which Edgar marries Cordelia. He also boasted, when he put on Hamlet, “I rescued that noble play from all the rubbish of the 5th act. I have brought it forth without the grave Diggers, Ostrick, & the Fencing Match.” As the great classical scholar Richard Bentley said of Pope’s translation of the Iliad, though “it is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, you must not call it Homer.”

Johnson also quarreled with his old friend about using Garrick’s valuable collection of Shakespeare’s plays. The bookseller’s son was notorious for his rough treatment of books. He wrote in them, bent back their spines, threw them face down on the dusty floor, stained them with food and failed to return them to their owners. Garrick did let Johnson use his library while working on his edition and also helped by reading the proof sheets. But Johnson nevertheless resented Garrick’s prudent unwillingness to lend his precious rare books. When Boswell asked why Johnson didn’t thank Garrick in his “Preface,” Johnson, touchy as ever, bombarded him with many reasons for his refusal: “I would not disgrace my page with a player. Garrick has been liberally paid for mouthing Shakespeare... He has not made Shakespeare better known. He cannot illustrate [“explain”] Shakespeare. He does not understand him. Besides, Garrick got me no subscriptions. He did not furnish me with his old plays. I asked to have them, and I think he sent me one. It was not worth while to ask again.”

In September 1769, four years after the publication of Johnson’s Plays of William Shakespeare, Garrick staged an extravagant, vulgar and rather dismal Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford. (Boswell drew attention to himself and added to the absurdity by appearing in the outlandish regalia of a Corsican chieftain.) Brian Vickers pointed out that the Jubilee “was not a serious cultural event—there was no theatre in Stratford, and no Shakespeare play was or could be performed. With a firework display, an oratorio, a public breakfast, a ball, an elaborate procession of 217 people, 170 of them dressed as Shakespeare’s characters, it was more like a popular pageant or annual festival.”⁴ Several of the events were ruined by fierce thunderstorms and heavy floods. Johnson, the greatest living authority on Shakespeare, foresaw the foolishness and was notably absent from the festivities.

II

In the “Preface” to his edition of Shakespeare, completed in the summer of 1765, Johnson magnificently rose to the occasion, defining the art and spirit of Shakespeare more fully and sympathetically than anyone had done before. He began by asking why, despite all Shakespeare’s imperfections (according to contemporary notions of drama and taste), his work had had such enduring appeal. Johnson’s Shakespeare is a dramatic realist who mingles tragic and comic styles, a master of character and of the English language, whose poetry was written by a man who “sees with his own eyes.” Yet Johnson does not hero-worship his subject. The essay works so well because he engages so completely with Shakespeare, applying his own cultural and moral biases, finding plenty to criticize, and developing fruitful and fascinating contradictions. Many of his ideas—innovative and original in his own time—have been so completely assimilated into our thinking about the plays that they now seem familiar, even obvious.

For Johnson, Shakespeare is the creator of living characters with real feelings. He is “above all writers . . . the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life.” Contrasting Shakespeare with contemporary dramatists, who focus on love alone, Johnson praises his realization that all human passions can inspire great drama. His characters endure because they are a species, while in other authors they are merely individuals. His characters are so credible and his stories so representative that his plays guide us in the conduct of our lives. No matter what the setting or story, “Shakespeare approximates [brings closer] the remote, and familiarizes the wonderful.”

Confronting the vexed question of genre, Johnson defends Shakespeare against critics like Voltaire, who accused him of violating the Aristotelian unities of time, place and plot. The mixture of comic and tragic scenes, he argues, is intrinsic to Shakespeare’s realism, and his comprehensive genius allows him to violate every rule and get away with it. Johnson learned from his own experience with the disastrous Irene, and realized the limitations of severely constricted plays like Addison’s Cato. Appealing to common sense, he writes that since the theater is a real, not illusory, place, it was dramatically acceptable to break the stranglehold of the unities: “the truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players... The different actions that compleat a story may be in places very remote from each other; and where is the absurdity of allowing that space to represent first Athens, and then Sicily, which was always known to be neither Sicily nor Athens, but a modern theatre.” Johnson acknowledged that the play existed not only for readers of the page, but also for spectators in the theater.

Johnson believed the comedies were more intuitive than learned and superior to the tragedies. “In tragedy,” Johnson wrote, “Shakespeare is always struggling after some occasion to be comick, but in comedy he seems to repose, or to luxuriate, as in a mode of thinking congenial to his nature. In his tragick scenes there is always something wanting, but his comedy often surpasses expectation or desire. His comedy pleases by the thoughts and the language, and his tragedy for the greater part by incident and action. His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct.” In a perceptive comment that illuminates Johnson’s humane preference, W. H. Auden noted, “the difference between Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies is not that the characters suffer in the one and not in the other, but that in comedy the suffering leads to self-knowledge, repentance, forgiveness, love, and in tragedy it leads in the opposite direction into self-blindness, defiance, hatred.”⁵

Living in what he believed to be a more refined society than Shakespeare’s, Johnson maintained that “the English nation, in the time of Shakespeare, was yet struggling to emerge from barbarity.” His cultural bias explains his criticism of what he took to be Shakespeare’s faults: his gross jests and licentious repartee, particularly between men and women; his pompous and overelaborate diction, and tendency to let puns and wordplay run away with him; his loosely designed and frequently improbable plots; and, most important, his lack of explicit moral instruction. “He makes no just distribution of good and evil,” Johnson remarked. “He sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose.”⁶ Yet Shakespeare must be given credit, he argued, for arousing the interest of both illiterate and learned audiences. In a sense Johnson admires the teeming characters and meandering plots, the “hustle” on stage that makes the plays successful.

The “Preface,” though shrewd and illuminating, is full of unintentional contradictions. The Elizabethan age was barbaric, yet Shakespeare represents the very pinnacle of English literature. He did not offer moral instruction, but his plays guide the conduct of our lives. The comedies were superior, yet Johnson was more deeply affected by the tragedies. The tragedies were forced and wanting, yet were unendurably moving. He knew the stage and actors were not real, yet could scarcely bear to see the most tragic scenes.

In addition to the “Preface,” Johnson’s major contribution to Shakespeare studies was his elucidation of difficult passages (many of them now incorporated into the explanatory notes of modern editions) and his concluding comments on each of the plays. Some of his remarks were surprisingly personal. His comment on the tailor in King John, who hastily puts his shoes on the wrong feet, said more about Johnson’s slovenly dress than about his critical insight: “he that is frighted or hurried may put his hand into the wrong glove, but either shoe will equally admit either foot.” He said the lines in Cymbeline—“Your Highness / Shall from this practice but make hard your heart,” spoken by the herbalist to the queen, who intends to test poisons on animals—required no explanation. But Johnson could not resist elaborating his comment and reaffirming his angry protest, in Idler 17, against cruelty to animals. Shakespeare’s “thought would probably have been more amplified, had our authour lived to be shocked with such experiments as have been published . . . by a race of men that have practised tortures without pity, and related them without shame, and yet suffered to erect their heads among human beings.”

Johnson concluded his remarks on the far-fetched plot of Cymbeline —which includes a secret marriage, improbable wager, attempted murder, sexual disguise, revival after death, a headless corpse and prophetic documents—with his most exasperated and extreme condemnation of any play: “to remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon irresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.”⁷

It’s fascinating to see Johnson’s adventurous intellect grappling with the complex and often elusive meaning of the major tragedies. He found scenes that were unbearable to read even more unbearable when acted on stage. The greater the performance, the more excruciating the effect on him. As a boy, he’d been terrified by reading the ghost scene in Hamlet that “chills the blood with horror,” and had rushed outside to calm his fears. As a man, he was still frightened and overwhelmed by the power of his own vivid and hypersensitive imagination. He wrote that in the description of night in Macbeth—with its dead nature, wicked dreams and rampant witchcraft—“nothing but sorcery, lust, and murder, is awake... He that peruses Shakespeare, looks round alarmed, and starts to find himself alone.”

In his discussion of the scene in King Lear when Edgar and the blind Gloucester are supposedly on the cliffs of Dover, Johnson vividly reveals how Shakespeare achieves his effects by placing the tragic characters in the context of men and nature: “he that looks from a precipice finds himself assailed by one great and dreadful image of irresistible destruction. But . . . the enumeration of the choughs and crows, the samphire-man and the fishers, counteracts the great effect of the prospect, as it peoples the desert of intermediate vacuity, and stops the mind in the rapidity of its descent through emptiness and horrour.”

Johnson repeatedly asserted that the most horrific scenes in Shakespeare were so shocking that one could hardly bear to read or see them. He noted that extreme horror risked alienating the audience, who might reject the scene as unrealistic, even absurd. The tearing out of Gloucester’s eyes in King Lear “seems an act too horrid to be endured in dramatick exhibition, and such as must always compel the mind to relieve its distress by incredulity.” He was deeply disturbed by the hanging of the virtuous Cordelia at the end of King Lear, which was “contrary to the natural idea of justice,” and added a personal note: “I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise [“re-examine”] them as an editor.” In a similar way, he wrote of Othello’s murder of the innocent Desdemona, “I am glad I have ended my revisal of this dreadful scene. It is not to be endured.”⁸

Johnson’s characterization of Polonius in Hamlet—the rather pompous windbag, father of Ophelia and Laertes—first elevated him with praise and then deflated him with a final alliterative description: “Polonius is a man bred in courts, exercised in business, stored with observation, confident of his knowledge, proud of his eloquence, and declining into dotage.” His analysis of the tragic characters in Othello is valuable for both its sublime style and its critical penetration, which suggests the depth of meaning in the play. Othello and Desdemona were fatally entwined, and contrasted with Iago by the word “artless”; and Johnson himself shared the hero’s boundless confidence, ardent affection for his friends and inflexible resolution:

The beauties of this play impress themselves so strongly upon the attention of the reader, that they can draw no aid from critical illustration. The fiery openness of Othello, magnanimous, artless, and credulous, boundless in his confidence, ardent in his affection, inflexible in his resolution, and obdurate in his revenge; the cool malignity of Iago, silent in his resentment, subtle in his designs, and studious at once of his interest and his vengeance; the soft simplicity of Desdemona, confident of merit, and conscious of innocence, her artless perseverance in her suit, and her slowness to suspect that she can be suspected, are such proofs of Shakespeare’s skill in human nature, as, I suppose, it is vain to seek in any modern writer.

Johnson had been awarded an honorary M.A. degree from Oxford just before the publication of the Dictionary; in July 1765 he received an honorary LL.D. degree from Trinity College, Dublin (which had refused to grant him a degree in 1739) just before the publication of his Plays of William Shakespeare. The edition, eight volumes in octavo, had a first printing of 1,000 copies. The unconscionably long delay in publication left Johnson vulnerable and provoked his enemies. Portraying Johnson as the unscrupulous Pomposo, the satiric poet Charles Churchill penned some wicked couplets in The Ghost (1762):

He for Subscribers baits his hook,
And takes their cash—but where’s the Book?
No matter where—Wise fear, we know,
Forbids the robbing of a Foe,
But what, to serve our private ends,
Forbids the cheating of our Friends?⁹

This attack seemed to have had a positive effect, rousing Johnson from his sloth and encouraging him (three years later) to fulfill his contractual obligations.

When the edition finally appeared, Johnson amusingly but disingenuously—since the publisher must have known who the subscribers were—told Boswell why he hadn’t followed the common practice of the time: “I have two very cogent reasons for not printing any list of subscribers [in the book];—one, that I have lost all the names,—the other, that I have spent all the money.” For his arduous editorial work, he received the modest sum of £375 for the first edition, and an additional £100 for the second edition in 1768. He revised both the 4th edition of the Dictionary and the 3rd edition of the Plays of William Shakespeare in 1773.

Though Johnson’s editing surpassed his eighteenth-century predecessors, he did not add much to our knowledge of Shakespeare’s life, contemporaries or theater. Yet the “Preface” remains an influential landmark in Shakespeare studies. Johnson’s majestic abstractions and formal criticism fell out of favor in the next century, and in 1817 the Romantic critic William Hazlitt wrote condescendingly, “we have a high respect for Dr. Johnson’s character and understanding, mixed with something like personal attachment: but he was neither a poet nor a judge of poetry.” By contrast, the French novelist Stendhal paid silent tribute to Johnson by incorporating a considerable portion of his “Preface” into his romantic manifesto, Racine et Shakespeare (1822). In a balanced judgment, the modern scholar Jacob Isaacs has justly concluded, “the faults of his edition are atoned for by his magnificent critical preface and comments on individual plays, [and] by his pioneer recognition that only the first of the folios has textual authority.”¹⁰

III

Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare solidified the reputation that he’d built with the Rambler, the Dictionary and Rasselas, and he was in great demand in the fashionable world. No man in the highly stratified society of eighteenth-century England moved more easily than Johnson from his own humble household to the exalted sphere of bishops, lords and kings. The literary lion and weird eccentric dined out as frequently as Henry James did in Edwardian England. During the week of January 11, 1771, between bouts of copious bleeding by his doctors, he was engaged seven times—with his personal physician, Dr. Thomas Lawrence, and with Reynolds, Langton, the poet Thomas Warton, the bishop of Chester and two ladies, wives of an MP and of a prosperous tallow-chandler.

In Rambler 21 Johnson wrote, “acquaintance with the great is generally considered as one of the chief privileges of literature and genius.” In February 1767, five years after receiving his government pension, he was accorded this supreme privilege. He was a friend of Frederick Barnard, natural son of the Prince of Wales and royal librarian, and had often used the library, which was open to scholars, for his work on Shakespeare. King George III had expressed a desire to converse with him on his next visit. At that time, before he contracted porphyria, went mad and lost the American colonies, the king was personable, well educated and quite rational. A modern historian described him as “tall, well made, with a fair fresh coloring, blue eyes, good teeth, and light-auburn hair”—though his eyes were protuberant and his jowls fleshy. Unlike his Hanoverian predecessors, he spoke good English and had excellent manners.

After informing the twenty-nine-year-old king of Johnson’s presence and finding the monarch at leisure, Barnard led the way by candlelight through a suite of rooms and entered the library by a private door, to which the king had the key. The magnificent library of 65,000 volumes, each one finely bound and stamped with the royal coat of arms, was located in the queen’s house, on the present site of Buckingham Palace. It had a high vaulted ceiling decorated with rosettes, towering twelve-foot-tall stacks, expansive reading tables, a huge map case and a high white marble fireplace.

Johnson was deep in study when Barnard bent over to whisper, “‘Sir, here is the King.’ Johnson started up, and stood still. His Majesty approached him, and at once was courteously easy.” The king, in fact, was more nervous than Johnson himself, and had approached the interview, like a schoolboy to his task, with a mixture of eagerness and reluctance. Their wide-ranging talk concerned Johnson’s recent visit to Oxford, the state of the university libraries, his extensive reading, the learned bishop William Warburton, Lord Lyttleton’s recently published History, the fashionable quack Dr. John Hill, literary journals, and learned publications like the Journal des Savans and the Philosophical Transactions.

The most important part of the conversation, Boswell reported, focused on Johnson’s work. The king asked if he were writing anything, and Johnson replied he was not. He had told the world what he knew and now had to stock his head with more books to acquire more knowledge. He thought he had already “done his part as a writer. ‘I should have thought so too, (said the King), if you had not written so well.’” When asked if he replied to this compliment, Johnson answered, “No, Sir. When the King had said it, it was to be so. It was not for me to bandy civilities with my Sovereign.” Knowing Johnson’s greatest strength and wanting to encourage him, “His Majesty expressed a desire to have the literary biography of this country ably executed, and proposed to Dr. Johnson to undertake it. Johnson signified his readiness to comply with his Majesty’s wishes.”¹¹ Thus were planted, in the royal palace and a decade before he actually began work, the seeds that eventually grew into The Lives of the Poets.

Two years later Johnson moved from polite conversation in a palace to desperate maneuvers in a prison. He had known Giuseppe Baretti, the distinguished author of the standard Italian-English Dictionary, since Baretti had first arrived in London in the early 1750s. On the night of October 6, 1769, while walking in the Haymarket, Baretti was accosted by a prostitute who, as he said in court, “clapped her hands with such violence about my private parts, that it gave me great pain.” Frightened and hurt by her aggressive way of soliciting business, the nearsighted Baretti struck out at her. The woman screamed for help and he was attacked by three ruffians. Baretti tried to run away, but was pursued and caught by the men who were (he said) “continually beating and pushing me.” Surrounded and threatened, he pulled out his knife, “gave a quick blow to one who beat off my hat with his fist” and stabbed him in the chest.

After the brawl, Baretti rushed into a shop, called for help and was arrested. Accused of assaulting and wounding one of his attackers, Evan Morgan, he was committed to prison to await trial. Two days later, Morgan died of his stab wound and Baretti was charged with murder. An Italian scholar, one of his visitors in prison, subjected him to a bit of gallows humor. He asked him for a letter of recommendation, which he planned to present to Baretti’s former pupils after he was hanged. “You rascal,” replied the furious prisoner, ready to commit another murder, “if I were not in my own apartment, I would kick you down stairs directly.”

The situation looked grim for Baretti, who seemed to be the classic example of a treacherous Italian armed with a hidden stiletto. In his address to the court, possibly written by Johnson, the fifty-year-old scholar argued that despite his concealed weapon, he was merely defending himself and certainly had no murderous intent: “I hope your Lordship . . . will think that a man of my age, character, and way of life, would not spontaneously quit my pen to engage in an outrageous tumult. I hope it will easily be conceived, that a man almost blind could not but be seized with terror on such a sudden attack as this. I hope it will be seen, that my knife was neither a weapon of offence or defence: I wear it to carve fruit and sweetmeats, and not to kill my fellow-creatures.”¹²

All the leading members of the Club—Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, Goldsmith, Garrick and Beauclerk—loyally rallied round and turned the prison cell into their meeting room. Hester Thrale noted the emotional scene: “when Johnson & Burke went to see Baretti in Newgate, they had small Comfort to give him, & bid him not hope too strongly:—Why what can he fear says Baretti, placing himself between ’em—that holds two such hands as I do.”

Well known for his short fuse, Baretti had previously characterized himself as “something of a savage and fearless wild beast . . . a fiery fellow who turns savage in a moment and whose hand flies to his sword.” So the witnesses testifying for Baretti were forced to stretch the truth to free their friend. At the murder trial of Richard Savage in 1727, the witnesses (according to Johnson) had portrayed him as “a modest, inoffensive man, not inclined to broils, or to insolence, who had, to that time, been only known for his misfortunes and his wit.” At the Old Bailey trial Johnson, an impressive witness, described the self-styled “savage beast” as a sober, tranquil and terribly shy scholar: “I began to be acquainted with Mr. Baretti about the year ’53 or ’54. I have been intimate with him. He is a man of literature and a very studious man, a man of great diligence. He gets his living by study. I have no reason to think he was ever disordered with liquor in his life. A man that I never knew to be otherwise than peaceable, and a man that I take to be rather timorous.”¹³ Recalling, no doubt, the line about the dangers of the city in his poem London—“Their Ambush here relentless Ruffians lay”—Johnson added in his cross-examination:

Question: Was he addicted to pick up women in the street?

Dr. Johnson: I never knew that he was.

Question: How is he as to his eye-sight?

Dr. Johnson: He does not see me now [from this distance], nor do I see him. I do not believe he could be capable of assaulting any body in the street, without great provocation.¹⁴

Johnson’s testimony that Baretti was a mild, inoffensive character and carried a knife merely to cut fruit at dinner was not true. No Englishman carried a knife for that purpose. A naturally violent man, sorely provoked by a whore, Baretti probably overreacted and tried to kill his assailant. (We don’t have the story of the two surviving ruffians, which would not, in any case, have carried much weight in court.) But after the judge heard the character references of his eminent friends, who justly argued that when trapped and beaten by a gang of criminals he was forced to defend himself as best he could, Baretti was acquitted.

While Baretti was being tried, Johnson was in the process of composing a series of law lectures for his friend Robert Chambers. In the eighteenth century most attorneys were considered rogues and cheats; and Johnson himself had inaugurated several centuries of lawyer jokes when he wittily said of a gentleman he’d met in an eating-house, “I do not like to traduce any Man—but I suspect he is an Attorney.” Yet he’d once aspired to become an attorney and—hoping to improve social conditions for slaves, debtors, prostitutes and petty criminals threatened with capital punishment—took a keen interest in the law. He’d first met Robert Chambers when the shy, learned scholar was still an undergraduate at Oxford. In 1766 the insecure twenty-nine-year-old Chambers had succeeded the great jurist Sir William Blackstone as the second Vinerian professor of law at Oxford. To paraphrase the satiric couplet on Sir John Pringle, who succeeded Isaac Newton at Cambridge, “Chambers sat in Blackstone’s chair / And wondered how the devil he got there.” Overwhelmed and paralyzed by Blackstone’s writings and reputation, and unable to fulfill his academic responsibilities, Chambers secretly sought Johnson’s help in preparing the sixty lectures he was required to give each year.

Like many academics, then and now, Chambers wanted the prestige and benefits of the job without actually doing much work. Always willing to help a friend, Johnson agreed that Chambers, having assumed the Vinerian chair, was not morally or professionally obliged to write his own law lectures, any more than John Taylor had been obliged to compose the sermons that he preached. (Similarly, Americans today, though obsessed by plagiarism, don’t believe that politicians or corporate executives are obliged to write the words they speak.)

Johnson had great difficulty beginning his own work, but was able to jump-start the law lectures for Chambers. Between 1766 and 1770, in London and in Oxford, he discussed, supervised and dictated many passages of the Vinerian lectures, an encyclopedic survey of British constitutional law, amounting to two stout volumes of more than 350,000 words. Though Hester Thrale was made privy to the pact, the ever-inquisitive Boswell was not told of Johnson’s work. In fact, the secret was kept for two centuries, until E. L. McAdam brought out Dr. Johnson and English Law (1951), which tried to define Johnson’s contribution on stylistic grounds. Johnson’s work was not published until Thomas Curley’s edition of the Johnson-Chambers Course of Lectures in English Law, 1767-1773 (1986).

Curley wrote that “in all likelihood Johnson lacked the detailed technical learning to play the leading role in drafting the Vinerian course,” and that “Chambers adapted any Johnsonian dictation to suit the style and sentiments of his discourses.” In a useful summary, Curley noted that the ambitious lectures covered

in four parts the basic concepts, traditions, and statutes making up the British constitution. An eloquent Introduction of four lectures sets forth the metaphysical and quasi-utilitarian foundations of all law as well as the Saxon and Norman roots of the common law. Then follows Part I on the public law tracing the ancient and modern structure of the British government in sixteen lectures, which, like the preceding Introduction, contain legal assumptions found in Johnson’s later political writings. Part II catalogues the criminal law in fourteen lectures, which, except for the underlying thesis of human malignity, seems generally contrary to Johnson’s humane views on the subject. Finally Part III reviews the private law of property and equity.

A lecture on the nature of punishment in criminal law seems to express Johnson’s views. He listed three objects of punishment: benefit to the offender through rehabilitation, benefit to the suffering party through reparation and benefit to the general public through increased security. He specifically condemned the right of private vengeance as “a principle so opposite to quiet, order, and security that every nation may be considered as more civilized and every government as nearer to perfection in proportion as it is more effectually repressed and extinguished.”¹⁵ After delivering these partially ghostwritten lectures, Chambers went on to a distinguished career in India. He was appointed to the Bengal supreme court in 1774, was knighted in 1778 and served as chief justice from 1789 to 1799.

IV

While Johnson was helping Chambers with his law lectures, he became involved in a sensational political controversy that concerned a vital question of constitutional law. His opponent was John Wilkes, whom he’d called “an abusive scoundrel” during his first meeting with Boswell in 1763. The son of a wealthy distiller, Wilkes was born in 1727 and educated at Leiden University in Holland. He bought the parliamentary seat for Aylesbury in 1757 and became a colonel in the Buckinghamshire militia. Edward Gibbon said Wilkes had “infinite wit and humour, and a great deal of knowledge; but [was] a thorough profligate in principle as in practice.” Well known for his geniality, charm, flamboyance, irreverence and bravery (he’d fought in a duel), he became the most popular politician of his time.

Wilkes’ troubles started when he was arrested in April 1763 for seditious libel of King George III in number 45 of the North Briton. He edited this journal with the poet Charles Churchill, who’d satirized Johnson as Pomposo. In February 1764 Wilkes fled to France to avoid trial for sedition and for publishing (but not writing) a parody of Pope’s Essay on Man, the pornographic Essay on Women. The thirteen copies of this pamphlet, privately printed for the rakish and dissolute members of his Hellfire Club, featured a title page with an erect penis, an address of a “Dying Lover to His Prick” and a blasphemous skit on Veni creator spiritus (“Come, Holy Spirit, Creator Blest”), one of the most widely used hymns in the church. The House of Lords condemned this pamphlet, which seemed to imitate the most outrageous poems of the Earl of Rochester, as a “scandalous, obscene and impious libel.”

Pressed for money and still an outlaw, Wilkes risked returning to England in March 1768. He remained a popular hero and was elected to Parliament for the county of Middlesex. But in April he was arrested and convicted of the old charge of seditious libel and obscenity, fined £1,000 and sentenced to twenty-two months in prison. His imprisonment provoked cries of “Wilkes and Liberty” and considerable mob violence in London. Believing he’d lose his political influence if he were deprived of his seat in Parliament, the House of Commons expelled him in February 1769, annulled each of his three reelections and seated the opponent he had defeated.

Edmund Burke supported Wilkes in this controversy, in which the power of the people to elect Members of Parliament opposed the power of Parliament to determine its membership. As Burke’s biographer wrote, “he was on the side of the people, who needed to be protected from a corrupt Court which was dead to all decency and shame. Burke took an active part in organizing petitions and protest meetings against the action of the House of Commons in the Middlesex Election dispute.” Burke’s Thoughts on the Present Discontents (April 1770) “defended the popular discontent, declaring that ‘in all disputes between the people and their rulers the presumption was at least upon a par in favour of the people.’”¹⁶

The Whig prime minister Lord Bute called on Johnson to support the government’s campaign against Wilkes, a task for which he was temperamentally and intellectually well suited. As the historian John Cannon wrote, “he was unsentimental about the past, disturbed by the present, and apprehensive for the future.”¹⁷ To Johnson, religious freethinkers, sexual libertines and political anarchists were the external manifestations of the dangerous chaos within him. “When sedition and uproar have once silenced law, and confounded property,” he’d thundered in Sermon 23, “then is the hour when chance [rather than reason and order] begins to predominate in the world.” His four major political pamphlets of the early 1770s, Roger Lonsdale observed, passionately defended his political ideals: “defence of government, obedience to lawful authority, subordination, and custom against Satanic forces of disorder, violence, irrationality, and rabble-rousing faction in the name of ‘liberty’ and ‘patriotism.’” Johnson was surely thinking of Wilkes, whom he also attacked in The Patriot (1774), when in 1775 he called patriotism “the last refuge of a scoundrel.”¹⁸

Johnson’s The False Alarm (January 1770) was an attack on the mob’s cry for liberty, which he thought an essentially mistaken concept. He argued that despite Wilkes’ victory in the Middlesex election of April 1769, the House of Commons was the only judge of its own rights and had unlimited power to expel undesirable members. He asked, in a loaded question, “whether Middlesex shall be represented or not by a criminal from a jail,” and violently condemned Wilkes’ character and politics: “lampoon itself would disdain to speak ill of him of whom no man speaks well. It is sufficient that he is expelled [from] the House of Commons, and confined in jail as being legally convicted of sedition and impiety... The expelled member cannot be admitted. He that cannot be admitted, cannot be elected, and the votes given to a man ineligible being given in vain, the highest number for an eligible candidate becomes a majority.”¹⁹

In A Letter to Samuel Johnson (February 1770), his bitter response to The False Alarm, Wilkes attacked him for recanting his early denunciations of the Whig government, and wrote that in the Life of Savage he was “contented—in the open air—to growl at the moon, and Whigs, and [Sir Robert] Walpole, and the [German] House of Brunswick.” Mocking Johnson’s elephantine style and groveling to the present government, Wilkes called him “the spitter forth . . . of servility and bombast . . . [in] sesquipedalian documents,” and condemned his “ignorance and absurdity,” his “wicked, or ridiculous” principles. In a final twist of the knife, he accused Johnson of betraying his beliefs for a bribe: “the wages of prostitution, once tasted, are too delicious to be relinquished... By a well-placed pension of three hundred pounds a year he has expiated his own sins and those of his country.”²⁰ Despite physical ugliness, religious nonconformity, considerable debt (paid off by wealthy friends), criminal conviction and time in jail, Wilkes, acting as spokesman for the radical elements in the City, was elected alderman of London in 1769 and lord mayor in 1774. That year he was again elected to Parliament and finally regained his seat for Middlesex.

Johnson disliked Wilkes more intensely than any man he knew. But as a depraved and charming scoundrel, he must have reminded Johnson of similarly rakish friends who boldly acted out the impulses he forced himself to repress. Boswell loved to orchestrate volatile situations that set off Johnson’s sparks and ignited his explosions. When Boswell wanted him to meet the controversial Whig historian Catherine Macaulay, Johnson—clouds gathering on his brow—saw through the ruse and replied: “No, Sir; you would not see us quarrel, to make you sport. Don’t you know that it is very uncivil to pit two people against one another?”

Nevertheless, Johnson had dined with the cheeky actor Samuel Foote, whom he later threatened to thrash if Foote dared to mimic him on stage. He told Boswell how Foote’s irresistible humor gradually melted his defensive sulkiness: “having no good opinion of the fellow, I was resolved not to be pleased; and it is very difficult to please a man against his will. I went on eating my dinner pretty sullenly, affecting not to mind him. But the dog was so very comical, that I was obliged to lay down my knife and fork, throw myself back upon my chair, and fairly laugh it out. No, Sir, he was irresistible.”

Using his consummate diplomatic skills, Boswell arranged the potentially traumatic meeting between Johnson and Wilkes. He dared not make the proposal directly, for if he’d asked Johnson to dine with his adversary, he would have said, “Dine with Jack Wilkes, Sir! I’d as soon dine with [the hangman] Jack Ketch.” But he persuaded Johnson to accept any company at dinner and overcame the obstacle of Johnson’s previous engagement with Anna Williams. “When I had him fairly seated in a hackney-coach with me,” Boswell wrote of his captive, “I exulted as much as a fortune-hunter who has got an heiress into a post-chaise with him to set out for Gretna-Green” (just over the border in Scotland, where legal marriages—without license, banns or priest—could be quickly arranged).

At the publisher Charles Dilly’s house and using Johnson’s gargantuan appetite as a lure, Wilkes, determined to charm and please him “against his will,” played the attentive and obsequious servant. Boswell described the dinner, on May 15, 1776, as if it were a seduction scene in a witty Restoration comedy by William Wycherley or William Congreve:

Mr. Wilkes placed himself next to Dr. Johnson, and behaved to him with so much attention and politeness, that he gained upon him insensibly. No man eat more heartily than Johnson, or loved better what was nice and delicate. Mr. Wilkes was very assiduous in helping him to some fine veal. “Pray give me leave, Sir:—It is better here—A little of the brown—Some fat, Sir—A little of the stuffing—Some gravy—Let me have the pleasure of giving you some butter—Allow me to recommend a squeeze of this orange; —or the lemon, perhaps, may have more zest.” “Sir, Sir, I am obliged to you, Sir,” cried Johnson, bowing and turning his head to him with a look for some time of “surly virtue,” but, in a short while, of complacency.²¹

Boswell brought this comic scene to life by describing Wilkes cunningly creeping up on his prey and playing on the great man’s weakness; by the delicious details and ingratiating tone; by transforming Johnson, fattened by food and flattery, from surly to sociable and even pleasant. Johnson, of course, saw through Wilkes’ deception, but enjoyed being seduced by the villain. By meeting Wilkes man to man, he was able to overcome their personal and political differences.

In March 1771, fourteen months after the controversy with Wilkes, Johnson published another major political pamphlet, Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland’s Islands. The dispute was a complicated residue of the Seven Years’ War. After a quarrel over these remote and barren islands in the South Atlantic Ocean, 300 miles east of the Strait of Magellan, Spain had agreed to give up Port Egmont in the Falklands, which she’d recently captured from the English settlers, but did not grant sovereignty of the islands to Britain. Some chauvinistic British politicians, who felt Spain had insulted the navy, wanted to declare war on Spain to preserve “national honour.” Johnson, always opposed to colonial adventures and foreign wars, argued that the government wanted to start a pointless war and gain useless land for no other reason than commercial profit: “the whole system of European empire can be in danger of a new concussion, by a contention for a few spots of earth, which, in the deserts of the ocean, had almost escaped human notice.”

Warming to his subject, he majestically described the Falklands as “a bleak and gloomy solitude, an island thrown aside from human use, stormy in winter, and barren in summer; an island which not the southern savages have dignified with habitation; where a garrison must be kept in a state that contemplates with envy the exiles of Siberia.” Emphasizing the human cost of war, which politicians habitually ignored, Johnson described the fate of soldiers and sailors in recent wars with France and Spain. After a horrible death, they were denied a proper burial and a lasting memorial, and “were at last whelmed in pits, or heaved into the ocean, and without notice and without remembrance.” ²² In the end, Johnson’s views prevailed, though not on rational or humanitarian grounds. Spain backed down after France refused to support her; Madrid renounced the actions of Spanish officials in the Falklands, and the useless, unprofitable islands reverted to wasteland .²³