A chapter one might, in a more facetious spirit, have chosen to label ‘Shakespeare matters’
The idea of Johnson the hero is bound up with the Dictionary, which, even more than the Rambler, has the potential to illuminate his character. As he translates his vast programme of reading into a work of encyclopedic scope, there is plentiful evidence of his curiosity and learning, his tastes and priorities, the rareness of his judgement. Yet that evidence is not readily discernible because the details of the Dictionary’s entries, though cumulatively revealing, disclose only a modest amount about his state of mind and personal qualities when read one (or a few) at a time – and that has always been how most of the Dictionary’s audience have consumed it: in small doses rather than great gulps. Indeed, most have consulted not the data-rich pages of the whopping folio volumes (which originally cost £4 10s.), but one of the 120 abridgements or 309 miniature versions that followed. It is one of these condensed Johnsons that Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair flings from the window of her carriage as she leaves Miss Pinkerton’s academy. In having her do so, her creator William Thackeray means to show that this resourceful young woman is casting aside tradition and authority. For Thackeray, writing in the 1840s about events thirty years earlier, Johnson’s magnum opus was the embodiment of both stout Englishness and its compiler’s force of mind and personality.
From the moment the Dictionary appeared, and for the next hundred years, that was its prevailing image. But while it made Sam’s reputation, it failed to solve his money problems. Those would continue until 1762, when George III granted him a pension of £300 a year. A reward for his literary achievements, the pension was dreamed up by Alexander Wedderburn, a Scottish lawyer and MP. Wedderburn had put the idea to the Earl of Bute, his fellow Scot, who was then prime minister (a role he occupied for a mere ten months). The intention was to relieve Johnson’s financial distress, but the pension made him look like a docile servant of the monarch and the government. He knew he would be criticized for taking it, and soon enough the vitriol began to flow. The Gazetteer dubbed him ‘Mr Independent Johnson’ and sniffed at writers who ‘feast on state pensions’, while the Public Advertiser included in a list of spoof book titles ‘The Charms of Independence, a Tale, by Sam. Johnson, Esq.’. This kind of comment would not abate and became a trope of lazy journalism; among the more striking examples are an item in the London Evening Post in April 1771 that calls him ‘Dr Pomposo, Pensioner Extraordinary alias Extraordinary Pensioner’ (the name Pomposo had been coined by the satirical poet Charles Churchill) and one in the Morning Post in March 1777 that refers in passing to ‘the surly pensioned Dictionary-maker’.1 Inevitably, and insistently, the sneerers drew attention to his Dictionary definition of pension – ‘pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country’.
By the time the pension was offered, Sam longed to be free from financial anxiety. The years that followed the Dictionary were hard. In March 1756, he was arrested for a debt of £5 18s., and only when the novelist Samuel Richardson sent him six guineas was he spared a spell in a louse-ridden, fetid, violent debtors’ prison. The indignity of having no money was all the greater because he was surrounded by evidence of wealth. Grub Street, it’s true, was home to many penniless characters, and he had only to walk along Fleet Street to see droves of the down and out. But among his circle were people of means. An example was Sir Joshua Reynolds. Prolific and successful, he was able to collect the work of other artists – in 1756 he acquired a Rembrandt.2 In the year he accepted his pension, Sam could report in a letter that Reynolds was earning £6,000 a year, which we might tentatively equate to £600,000 today.
Whenever Sam received visitors, they were astonished to find him dressed like a beggar, rising at noon and breakfasting at one, surrounded by papers but with little furniture and few comforts, coughing amid the dust. Lodgers traipsed in and out of his quarters, and would continue to do so for the rest of his life. They contributed little and stretched his meagre resources. He was, in any case, reluctant to demand much of them. Hester Thrale relates that, rather than send Francis Barber to fetch oysters for his cat Hodge, Sam would lumber off to do so himself; even when it was inconvenient for him, he feared injuring Frank’s pride by sending him on an errand ‘for the convenience of a quadruped’.
In June 1756, he signed a contract for another substantial project, which he had been contemplating for a long time: an eight-volume edition of Shakespeare. As far back as April 1745, Edward Cave had brought out Sam’s Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth, accompanied by proposals for an inexpensive new edition, but within a week the scheme had collapsed. The Tonson family had published Nicholas Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare in 1709 and Alexander Pope’s eye-wateringly expensive edition in 1725 (£6 6s. a set); claiming that they still held the copyright in the plays, they warned Cave off, and he was daunted by the likely costs of a court case. Yet a decade on, after the remarkable achievement of the Dictionary, the mood was different. The Tonsons were now happy to be part of a group of booksellers backing his edition, who wanted the job done in eighteen months. The Dictionary had prepared him for this task, but, as before, he set out with too optimistic a view of how long it would take.
In an age when we tend to take for granted Shakespeare’s primacy among authors who have written in English, it is easy to lose sight of how much less secure his reputation used to be. At the start of the eighteenth century, readers and theatregoers commonly expressed admiration for his plays, but not much more than they did for the best of his contemporaries, such as Ben Jonson. It was in Sam’s lifetime that Shakespeare became a cultural icon. Beginning with Rowe’s six-volume edition, which came out in the year he was born, scholarly attention to Shakespeare’s works improved. Yet it was still far from unusual to believe that his phrasing could be tidied up. The same applied to his characters and plots; for instance, the conundrum-loving Fool was absent from productions of King Lear throughout the eighteenth century and did not return till 1838. Meanwhile, the appetite for staging Shakespeare owed something to expediency. The 1730s witnessed an increase in productions of his plays, partly thanks to the efforts of groups such as the Shakespeare Ladies Club, which urged theatre managers, in particular John Rich at Covent Garden, to promote him. But it was also because the Licensing Act of 1737, which meant that new plays had to be scrutinized by the censor, made older works easier to put on.
Nevertheless, by the time Sam embarked on his edition, talking up Shakespeare was a nationalist project. In 1753 the playwright Arthur Murphy could write of Shakespeare being ‘a kind of established religion in poetry’, and during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), which pitted Britain and Prussia against France and Austria, that religion took on political colour. Pride in British culture solidified. The history of French critics writing about Shakespeare in patronizing terms now met with a revulsion that was part of a broader, flag-waving hostility to all things French. Around the time of Sam’s edition, and boosted by Garrick among others, a Shakespeare industry was springing up. Its most dramatic moment of idolatry would be the Stratford Jubilee of 1769, and although that occasion, in no small part a celebration of Garrick, was ruined by bad planning and soggy conditions, subsequent Shakespeare festivities would ape its ritual silliness and cult of dubious relics.
Sam rose above such folderol. The context in which he interpreted Shakespeare was eternity, not the Seven Years’ War. His edition is now remembered mainly for its preface, written only in the last couple of months of a project that occupied him on and off for nearly a decade. Less well-known are his 5,500 notes on the text, about 15 per cent of which engage with the work of previous editors. He sees himself as an improver of the public understanding of Shakespeare, building on others’ endeavours, and in his many interventions to improve Shakespeare’s grammar, amend his stage directions and sharpen his punctuation, he seeks to enhance the plays’ immediacy. His approach is critical and informative, and his comments on individual plays contain smart insights as well as lucid explanations of tricky passages.3
He responded strongly to Shakespeare – to the plays, not the poems or the life. He likens them to a great forest, in which we can get lost, and one of the reasons he didn’t care to see them on the stage was that they were so alive in the theatre of his mind. Reading Hamlet as a child, he was terrified by the ghost and rushed out into the street ‘that he might see people about him’; the presence of real fleshly figures, some of whom he must have recognized, was enough to jolt him out of the spectral realm. Yet the play continued to transport him back there, and the ghost, he believed, always ‘chills the blood with horror’. The murder of Desdemona in Othello was ‘not to be endured’, and the shock of his first experience of Cordelia’s death in King Lear meant that ‘I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as editor’.
In some cases, his reaction was curt and unfavourable. Some of the plotting in Timon of Athens was ‘elaborately unskilful’, Julius Caesar was ‘cold and unaffecting’, the final act of Henry V suffered from ‘emptiness and narrowness’, and Cymbeline was with minor exceptions a work of ‘unresisting imbecility’. Sam is no one’s idea of a hagiographer, and his judgements can strike a modern reader, used to Shakespeare simply being praised, as alarmingly negative (or excitingly so). For instance, ‘He is not long soft and pathetic without some idle conceit or contemptible equivocation’, and ‘The plots are often so loosely formed, that a very slight consideration may improve them’. How about the claim that ‘trivial sentiments and vulgar ideas disappoint the attention, to which they are recommended by sonorous epithets and swelling figures’? Or the statement that his puns are a seductive and ruinous distraction, ‘the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world and was content to lose it’? Whether or not we agree, the attitude is instructive. Holding a writer in high esteem does not, in Sam’s view, require one to gloss over their faults. Nor does it preclude cutting the knots when their arguments are impenetrable. Undiscriminating admiration is not loyal, but ridiculous.
Given Sam’s personal take on his subject, it is no surprise that there are moments, as in the Dictionary, when a detail of his life intrudes. Sometimes this is a small matter, such as when his knowledge of Staffordshire dialect informs a note on a line of Edgar’s in King Lear.4 On other occasions he waxes philosophical, for instance prompted by a line in Measure for Measure to comment that ‘When we are young we busy ourselves in forming schemes . . . and miss the gratifications that are before us; when we are old we amuse the languor of age with the recollection of youthful pleasures or performances; so that our life . . . resembles our dreams after dinner, when the events of the morning are mingled with the designs of the evening’. Writing about Falstaff, he comments that ‘Every man who feels in himself the pain of deformity . . . is ready to revenge any hint of contempt’. Then there are times when he tells us more than he intends. In a note on King John about a character who muddles up his left and right slippers, he remarks, illuminating his own practices more than the rest of the world’s, ‘He that is frighted or hurried may put his hand into the wrong glove, but either shoe will equally admit either foot.’
More substantially, Sam’s edition and especially its noble preface put forward arguments about why Shakespeare is worth our time. He makes confident claims about Shakespeare’s whole body of work, rather than confining himself to a more gingerly discussion. His fundamental assertion is that the plays give pleasure because they contain ‘just representations of general nature’: although many of Shakespeare’s characters behave unusually, we are struck by their human traits, and in even his most extreme characters and their most extreme behaviours we see traces of ourselves. Those who want to mock fusty old Dr Johnson pretend that this means he thinks all Shakespeare’s characters are alike. In fact, he is quick to remark that ‘perhaps no poet ever kept his personages more distinct from each other’. The people who appear in Shakespeare’s plays are ‘the genuine progeny of common humanity’ – a common humanity, that is, teeming with weakness, folly and the potential for brutal, self-serving malignity.
Sam believes that the playwright’s skill lies in making familiar psychology seem blazingly vivid. There’s a rich understanding of behaviour in his observation that Lady Macbeth ‘urges the excellence and dignity of courage, a glittering idea which has dazzled mankind from age to age’, and in his picture of Polonius as ‘a man bred in courts’ and ‘proud of his eloquence’, who ‘knows that his mind was once strong, and knows not that it is become weak’ and is thus a perfect image of ‘dotage encroaching upon wisdom’. A long note on the personality of Falstaff includes the following insight: ‘At once obsequious and malignant, he satirizes in their absence those whom he lives by flattering.’ Tell me that you don’t know this person, and that these words don’t illuminate a whole swathe of human conduct.
What’s radical, then, in Sam’s understanding of Shakespeare, is his conviction that the plays show us that the world is enough. As one modern account puts it, ‘What he looks for in Shakespeare above all else is the power to deliver the mind from its restless desire to go beyond what life gives, the power to bring us home to our participation in that general human nature which unites us.’5 Instead of satisfying himself with the platitude that the plays are timeless – a word that should immediately put one on high alert, ready to be sold a bucketful of Ye Olde Crappe – he finds in them a fecund timeliness, the quality of always being in season and always having something to say to us, whether about ambition, ageing, indecision, betrayal, love, conflict or transformation. At the same time, in treating the plays as if they are alive, he prizes their openness – not just a capacity to inspire new readings, but an endless soliciting of fresh interpretation.