EDITION OF THE PLAYS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

10 October 1765

27. Johnson’s Proposals for his edition of Shakespeare

1 June 1756

From the Proposals for Printing, by Subscription, the Dramatick Works of William Shakespeare, which declared Johnson’s editorial intentions and promised the edition for 1757.

All the former criticks have been so much employed on the correction of the text, that they have not sufficiently attended to the elucidation of passages obscured by accident or time. The editor will endeavour to read the books which the authour read, to trace his knowledge to its source, and compare his copies with their originals. If in this part of his design he hopes to attain any degree of superiority to his predecessors, it must be considered, that he has the advantage of their labours; that part of the work being already done, more care is naturally bestowed on the other part; and that, to declare the truth, Mr. Rowe and Mr. Pope were very ignorant of the ancient English literature; Dr. Warburton was detained by more important studies; and Mr. Theobald,¹ if fame be just to his memory, considered learning only as an instrument of gain, and made no further enquiry after his authour’s meaning, when once he had notes sufficient to embellish his page with the expected decorations.

With regard to obsolete or peculiar diction, the editor may perhaps claim some degree of confidence, having had more motives to consider the whole extent of our language than any other man from its first

formation. He hopes, that, by comparing the works of Shakespeare with those of writers who lived at the same time, immediately preceded, or immediately followed him, he shall be able to ascertain his ambiguities, disentangle his intricacies, and recover the meaning of words now lost in the darkness of antiquity.

When therefore 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. When the sense is broken by the suppression of part of the sentiment in pleasantry or passion, the connection will be supplied. When any forgotten custom is hinted, care will be taken to retrieve and explain it. The meaning assigned to doubtful words will be supported by the authorities of other writers, or by parallel passages of Shakespeare himself.

The observation of faults and beauties is one of the duties of an annotator, which some of Shakespeare’s editors have attempted, and some have neglected. For this part of his task, and for this only, was Mr. Pope eminently and indisputably qualified: nor has Dr. Warburton followed him with less diligence or less success. But I have never observed that mankind was much delighted or improved by their asterisks, commas, or double commas;² of which the only effect is, that they preclude the pleasure of judging for ourselves, teach the young and ignorant to decide without principles; defeat curiosity and discernment, by leaving them less to discover; and at last shew the opinion of the critick, without the reasons on which it was founded, and without affording any light by which it may be examined.

The editor, though he may less delight his own vanity, will probably please his reader more, by supposing him equally able with himself to judge of beauties and faults, which require no previous acquisition of remote knowledge. A description of the obvious scenes of nature, a representation of general life, a sentiment of reflection or experience, a deduction of conclusive argument, a forcible eruption of effervescent passion, are to be considered as proportionate to common apprehension, unassisted by critical officiousness; since, to conceive them, nothing more is requisite than acquaintance with the general state of the world, and those faculties which he must always bring with him who would read Shakespeare.

But when the beauty arises from some adaptation of the sentiment to customs worn out of use, to opinions not universally prevalent, or to any accidental or minute particularity, which cannot be supplied by

common understanding, or common observation, it is the duty of a commentator to lend his assistance.

The notice of beauties and faults thus limited will make no distinct part of the design, being reducible to the explanation of obscure passages.

The editor does not however intend to preclude himself from the comparison of Shakespeare’s sentiments or expression with those of ancient or modern authours, or from the display of any beauty not obvious to the students of poetry; for as he hopes to leave his authour better understood, he wishes likewise to procure him more rational approbation.

The former editors have affected to slight their predecessors: but in this edition all that is valuable will be adopted from every commentator, that posterity may consider it as including all the rest, and exhibiting whatever is hitherto known of the great father of the English drama.

CONDITIONS

I.	That the book shall be elegantly printed in eight volumes in octavo.
II.	That the price to subscribers shall be two guineas; one to be paid at subscribing, the other on the delivery of the book in sheets.
III.	That the work shall be published on or before Christmas 1757.

28. From Johnson’s Preface to the first edition

1765

I can say with great sincerity of all my predecessors, what I hope will hereafter be said of me, that not one has left Shakespeare without improvement, nor is there one to whom I have not been indebted for assistance and information. Whatever I have taken from them it was my intention to refer to its original authour, and it is certain, that what I have not given to another, I believed when I wrote it to be my own. In some perhaps I have been anticipated; but if I am ever found to encroach upon the remarks of any other commentator, I am willing that the honour, be it more or less, should be transferred to the first claimant, for his right, and his alone, stands above dispute; the second can prove his pretensions only to himself, nor can himself always distinguish invention, with sufficient certainty, from recollection.

They have all been treated by me with candour, which they have not been careful of observing to one another. It is not easy to discover from what cause the acrimony of a scholiast can naturally proceed. The subjects to be discussed by him are of very small importance; they involve neither property nor liberty; nor favour the interest of sect or party. The various readings of copies, and different interpretations of a passage, seem to be questions that might exercise the wit, without engaging the passions. But, whether it be, that ‘small things make mean men proud,’¹ and vanity catches small occasions; or that all contrariety of opinion, even in those that can defend it no longer, makes proud men angry; there is often found in commentaries a spontaneous strain of invective and contempt, more eager and venomous than is vented by the most furious controvertist in politicks against those whom he is hired to defame.

Perhaps the lightness of the matter may conduce to the vehemence of the agency; when the truth to be investigated is so near to inexistence, as to escape attention, its bulk is to be enlarged by rage and exclamation: That to which all would be indifferent in its original state, may attract notice when the fate of a name is appended to it. A commentator has indeed great temptations to supply by turbulence what he wants of dignity, to beat his little gold to a spacious surface, to work that to foam which no art or diligence can exalt to spirit.

The notes which I have borrowed or written are either illustrative, by which difficulties are explained; or judicial, by which faults and beauties are remarked; or emendatory, by which depravations are corrected.

The explanations transcribed from others, if I do not subjoin any other interpretation, I suppose commonly to be right, at least I intend by acquiescence to confess, that I have nothing better to propose.

After the labours of all the editors, I found many passages which appeared to me likely to obstruct the greater number of readers, and thought it my duty to facilitate their passage. It is impossible for an expositor not to write too little for some, and too much for others. He can only judge what is necessary by his own experience; and how long soever he may deliberate, will at last explain many lines which the

learned will think impossible to be mistaken, and omit many for which the ignorant will want his help. These are censures merely relative, and must be quietly endured. I have endeavoured to be neither superfluously copious, nor scrupulously reserved, and hope that I have made my authour’s meaning accessible to many who before were frighted from perusing him, and contributed something to the publick, by diffusing innocent and rational pleasure.

The compleat explanation of an authour not systematick and consequential, but desultory and vagrant, abounding in casual allusions and light hints, is not to be expected from any single scholiast. All personal reflections, when names are suppressed, must be in a few years irrecoverably obliterated; and customs, too minute to attract the notice of law, such as modes of dress, formalities of conversation, rules of visits, disposition of furniture, and practices of ceremony, which naturally find places in familiar dialogue, are so fugitive and unsubstantial, that they are not easily retained or recovered. What can be known, will be collected by chance, from the recesses of obscure and obsolete papers, perused commonly with some other view. Of this knowledge every man has some, and none has much; but when an authour has engaged the publick attention, those who can add any thing to his illustration, communicate their discoveries, and time produces what had eluded diligence.

To time I have been obliged to resign many passages, which, though I did not understand them, will perhaps hereafter be explained, having, I hope, illustrated some, which others have neglected or mistaken.

[Johnson discusses his editorial procedure.]

Perhaps I may not be more censured for doing wrong, than for doing little; for raising in the publick expectations, which at last I have not answered. The expectation of ignorance is indefinite, and that of knowledge is often tyrannical. It is hard to satisfy those who know not what to demand, or those who demand by design what they think impossible to be done. I have indeed disappointed no opinion more than my own; yet I have endeavoured to perform my task with no slight solicitude. 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. In many I have failed like others; and from many, after all my efforts, I have retreated, and confessed the repulse. I have not passed over, with affected superiority, what is equally difficult to the reader and to myself, but where I could not instruct him, have owned my ignorance. I might easily have accumulated a mass of seeming learning upon easy scenes; but it ought not to be imputed to negligence, that, where nothing was necessary, nothing has been done, or that, where others have said enough, I have said no more.

Notes are often necessary, but they are necessary evils. Let him, that is yet unacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and who desires to feel the highest pleasure that the drama can give, read every play from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all his commentators. When his fancy is once on the wing, let it not stoop at correction or explanation. When his attention is strongly engaged, let it disdain alike to turn aside to the name of Theobald and of Pope. Let him read on through brightness and obscurity, through integrity and corruption; let him preserve his comprehension of the dialogue and his interest in the fable. And when the pleasures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt exactness, and read the commentators.

Particular passages are cleared by notes, but the general effect of the work is weakened. The mind is refrigerated by interruption; the thoughts are diverted from the principal subject; the reader is weary, he suspects not why; and at last throws away the book, which he has too diligently studied.

Parts are not to be examined till the whole has been surveyed; there is a kind of intellectual remoteness necessary for the comprehension of any great work in its full design and its true proportions; a close approach shews the smaller niceties, but the beauty of the whole is discerned no longer.

It is not very grateful to consider how little the succession of editors has added to this authour’s power of pleasing. He was read, admired, studied, and imitated, while he was yet deformed with all the improprieties which ignorance and neglect could accumulate upon him; while the reading was yet not rectified, nor his allusions understood; yet then did Dryden pronounce ‘that Shakespeare was the man, who, of all modern and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily: When he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned: he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare with him the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat and insipid; his comick wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him: No man can say, he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets,

Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi.’²

It is to be lamented, that such a writer should want a commentary; that his language should become obsolete, or his sentiments obscure. But it is vain to carry wishes beyond the condition of human things; that which must happen to all, has happened to Shakespeare, by accident and time; and more than has been suffered by any other writer since the use of types, has been suffered by him through his own negligence of fame, or perhaps by that superiority of mind, which despised its own performances, when it compared them with its powers, and judged those works unworthy to be preserved, which the criticks of following ages were to contend for the fame of restoring and explaining.

Among these candidates of inferiour fame, I am now to stand the judgment of the publick; and wish that I could confidently produce my commentary as equal to the encouragement which I have had the honour of receiving. Every work of this kind is by its nature deficient, and I should feel little solicitude about the sentence, were it to be pronounced only by the skilful and the learned.

29. George Colman, unsigned notice, St. James’s Chronicle

10–15 October 1765

Text from Colman’s Prose on Several Occasions, 1787, ii. 59f.
Colman (1732–94), the dramatist and essayist, was clearly ‘one who loved mischief (Boswell, Life, ii. 436); but he was also a scholar (he translated Terence and, later, Horace) and a seasoned critic. See Introduction, p. 26.

Johnson’s Shakespeare! published! When? —this Morning—What, at last! —vix tandem, ’egad! he has observed Horace’s Rule of nonum in annum. —Keep the Piece nine Years, as Pope says¹ —I know a Friend of mine that subscribed in Fifty-six—&c. &c. &c.

Such perhaps is the Language of some little Witling, who thinks his satirical Sallies extremely poignant and severe; but the Appearance of any Production of Mr Johnson cannot fail of being grateful to the literary World; and, come when they will, like an agreeable Guest, we are sure to give them a hearty Welcome, though perhaps we may have betrayed some little Impatience at their not coming sooner. Nor have the Public in general been deceived. None but Subscribers have a Right to complain; and they, I suppose, in general, meant to show their Respect for Mr Johnson, rather than to give themselves a Title of becoming clamorous Creditors.

But granting our Editor to be naturally indolent—and naturally indolent we believe him to be—we cannot help wondering at the Number, Vastness, and Excellence of his Productions. A Dictionary of our Language; a Series of admirable Essays in the Rambler, as well as, if we are not misinformed, several excellent ones in the Adventurer; an Edition of Shakespeare; besides some less considerable Works, all in the Space of no very great Number of Years! and all these the Productions of a mere Idler! —We could wish that there were a few more such indolent Men in these Kingdoms.

[quotes liberally from Preface; and concludes:]

After having finished the critical Examen of his Author, Mr Johnson next proceeds to a Recapitulation of his several Editors, accompanied with Remarks on their various Merits and Demerits. Of Rowe and Pope he speaks very candidly, and justly; of Theobald, (hitherto undoubtedly the most meritorious Editor of Shakespeare) we think that he speaks too hardly; and of Hanmer, much too favourably. Of the last Right Rev. Annotator² on our Author he speaks respectfully, though freely; and to atone for the Liberties taken with him, Mr Johnson sacrifices to his Resentment the Authors of the Canons of Criticism, and the Revisal of Shakespeare’s Text.³ In short, Mr J. treats Dr. W. as termagant Wives do their Husbands, who will let nobody call them to Account but themselves….

On the whole, this Preface, as it is an elaborate, so it is also a fine Piece of Writing. It possesses all the Virtues and Vices of the peculiar Stile of its Author. It speaks, perhaps, of Shakespeare’s Beauties too sparingly, and of his Faults too hardly; but it contains, nevertheless, much Truth, good Sense, and just Criticism.

30. William Kenrick, unsigned review, Monthly Review

October-November 1765, xxxiii, 285–301, 374–89

Both the Critical Review (November-December 1765) and the Monthly Review expressed disappointment at Johnson’s overall performance. The former remarked: ‘Mr. Johnson has at last brought the child to light; but alas! in the delivery it has received so many unhappy squeezes, pinches, and wrenches, that the healthful constitution of the parent alone can prevent it from being lame and deformed for ever’ (xx, 321). But this reviewer was lightweight, a literary Sparkish compared with the Dennis-like rigour of Kenrick in the Monthly. Boswell is rather scornful and patronizing towards him; but though Kenrick was later the libeller of Goldsmith and Garrick, it would be foolish to underestimate his critical ability. See Introduction, pp. 5, 26.

It is a circumstance very injurious to the productions even of the best writers, that the public prepossession is up in their favour before they make their appearance; especially if such prepossession hath been kept any considerable time in a state of expectation and suspense: delay being in itself a kind of disappointment, which prepares the mind for a still greater mortification, and even disposes us to conceive ourselves disappointed if we are not gratified with something superior to what we had at first a right to expect. A number of apologies are ready, and various are the pleas admitted, in justification of a precipitated performance. Errour and inadvertence are imputed, as natural effects, to haste; and even ignorance itself finds a convenient shelter under the pretence of rapidity of composition. A very different fate attends on those works, whose publication, having been long promised and frequently deferred, is supposed to be delayed only to render them by so much the more valuable when they appear, as their appearance may have been procrastinated.

Under this disadvantage lies the present edition of Shakespeare; a poet, who least requires, and most deserves, a comment, of all the writers his age produced. We cannot help thinking it, therefore, a misfortune almost as singular as his merit, that, among so many ingenious scholiasts that have employed themselves in elucidating his writings, hardly one of them hath been found in any degree worthy of him. They all seem to have mistaken the route, in which only they could do honour to themselves, or be useful to the reader. Engaged in the piddling task of adjusting quibbles, and restoring conundrums, they have neglected the illustration of characters, sentiments and situations. Instead of aspiring to trim the ruffled bays that have a little obscured his brow, they have been laboriously and servilely employed in brushing the dirt from his shoes. Instead of strewing flowers, and planting fresh laurels, on his tomb, they have been irreverently trampling down the turf, that had otherwise covered his dust with perpetual verdure. From the present Editor, it is true, we hoped better things. But what shall we say? when he himself confesses, that, as to ‘the poetical beauties or defects of his author, he hath not been very diligent to observe them: having given up this part of his design to chance and caprice.’ This is surely a strange concession to be made by the author of the proposals for printing this work by subscription! We were by them given to understand, that the Editor would proceed in a manner very different from his predecessors; and were encouraged to hope that Shakespeare would no longer be commented on, like a barren or obsolete writer; whose works were of no other use than to employ the sagacity of anti-quarians and philologers. But perhaps our Editor found the task, of commenting on Shakespeare as a poet, much more difficult than he had conceived it to be. It might sound as harsh in the ear of the public, to tax a writer whom it hath so much honoured by its approbation, with want of capacity for writing such a commentary, as it doubtless would, in the ears of Dr. Johnson, to hear himself charged with want of application to it, when he acknowledges the great encouragement he has had the honour of receiving for that purpose. We should be very tender, be the occasion what it would, of laying any writer of acknowledged merit under the necessity of pleading guilty either to the charge of ignorance or indolence. But we cannot help subscribing to the opinion of a very ingenious critic, when he affirms, that ‘every writer is justly chargeable with want of knowledge when he betrays it on the subject he is treating of, let him be ever so capable of treating other subjects, or however justly founded may be his reputation for learning in general.’¹ It hath been observed, in some remarks already published on this occasion, that

our Editor’s notes, few and exceptionable as they are, lay claim to our admiration, if we reflect on the extreme indolence of the Writer; who is naturally an idler.² How far such a plea may be satisfactory to the purchasers of this edition, we know not; but we have too high an opinion of the Editor’s character, to think he will more readily acquiesce under the imputation of ingratitude than under that of incapacity. At the same time, however, we cannot but express our apprehensions, that every judicious reader, who may accompany us through a fair and impartial review of his preface and commentary, will think, with us, that there are many evident marks of the want of ingenuity or industry in the Commentator.

We find little in the first five pages of our Editor’s preface, but trite and common-place reflections, on our veneration for antiquity, and on the general talents of Shakespeare; delivered in that pompous style which is so peculiar to himself, and is so much admired by some kind of readers. In some places, however, he is less verbose; and then he is generally sensible, instructive and entertaining.

[quotes ‘Shakespeare is above all writers’ to ‘progress of the passions’.]

After bestowing this just elogium on Shakespeare, our editor proceeds to exculpate him from the censures of Rhymer, Dennis, and Voltaire; entering particularly into a defence of the tragi-comedy, or that mixed kind of drama, which hath given such great offence to the minor critics. He states the fact, and considers it thus:

[quotes ‘Shakespeare’s plays are not in’ to ‘pleasure consists in variety’.]

We do not feel the force of this reasoning; though we think the critics have condemned this kind of drama too severely. What follows also is to us a little problematical. Dr. Johnson prefers Shakespeare’s comic scenes to his tragic: in the latter, he says, ‘there is always something wanting, while the former often surpasses expectation or desire. His tragedy seems to be skill, and his comedy instinct.’ As this is a general assertion, unsupported by any particular examples, we cannot very easily controvert it; but we are apt to suspect it is founded in a great degree on the preference which the Editor himself may possibly be disposed to give to comedy in general. Different auditors, as he observes, have different habitudes; so that, were we to put this assertion to the proof by particular applications, we should possibly find quot homines tot sententiæ.³

After having enumerated the various excellencies of this great poet, our Editor proceeds to mention his faults; faults, says he, ‘sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit.^’ The first defect he charges him with, is, indeed, a very capital one; from which we should be glad, and shall endeavour, to exculpate him.

[quotes ‘His first defect’ to ‘independant on time or place’.]

‘No question,’ says our Editor, in another place, ‘can be more innocently discussed than a dead poet’s pretensions to renown.’ But, tho’ this be true, some tenderness surely should be felt for his probity. Shakespeare is here charged with ‘sacrificing virtue to convenience,’ for no other reason than that he seemed more careful to please than instruct, and to write without any moral purpose. But if it be admitted, as our Editor actually admits, that a system of social duty may be selected from his writings, and that his precepts and axioms were virtuous; we may justly ask, whether they are less so for dropping casually from him? Must a writer be charged with making a sacrifice of virtue, because he does not professedly inculcate it? Is every writer ex professo a parson or a moral philosopher? It is doubtless always the moralist’s duty, to strive at least, to make the world better; but we should think it no inconsiderable merit in a comic-poet, to be able to divert and amuse the world without making it worse; especially if he should occasionally drop such virtuous precepts and axioms, as would serve to form a system of social duty. We are, for these reasons, so far from thinking that the barbarity of his age cannot extenuate the fault here censured, that we think he stands in need of no other excuse than our Editor hath on another occasion made for him, viz. his ignorance of poetical composition. He did not know that the rules of criticism required the drama to have a particular moral; nor did he conceive himself bound, as poet, to write like a philosopher. He carries his persons, therefore, indifferently through right and wrong, for the same reason as he makes them laugh and cry in the same piece; and is justifiable on the same principles; it is a strict imitation of nature; and Shakespeare is the Poet of Nature. Were our Poet now living, and possessed of Dr. Johnson’s critical knowledge, we presume he would make no more nor greater sacrifices of virtue to convenience than his Editors may have done. Shakespeare, it is true, hath depicted none of

Those faultless monsters which the world ne’er saw;⁴

He did not presume to limit the designs of providence to the narrow

bounds of poetical justice; but hath displayed the sun shining, as it really does, both on the just and the unjust.

The next fault our immortal Poet is charged with, is the want of connection and consistence in his plots; from which charge, with all the aggravating circumstances enumerated by the learned Editor, we shall not undertake to defend him, any more than from the charge, of paying no regard to distinction of time or place. It is certain he makes no scruple of giving, to one age or nation, the customs, institutions, and opinions of another, not only at the expence of likelihood, but even of possibility. But surely our Editor will admit that the barbarity of his age may extenuate this fault; since, by his own confession, Shakespeare was not the only violater of chronology in his time: Sidney, his contemporary, who wanted not the advantages of learning, having, in his Arcadia, confounded the pastoral with the feudal times, the days of innocence, quiet and security, with those of turbulence, violence, and adventure.

Shakespeare is said to be seldom very successful in his comic scenes, when he engages his characters in raillery or repartee, or as Dr. Johnson more quaintly expresses it, ‘reciprocations of smartness and contests of sarcasm.’ Their jests, we are told, are commonly gross and their pleasantry licentious: nor will, it seems, the barbarity of his age excuse our Poet with regard to this defect, any more than the former. For our part, however, we think that Shakespeare is sometimes peculiarly happy in hitting off that kind of sheer wit; for which some modern writers, particularly Congreve and Farquhar, have been so generally admired. The reciprocations of smartness between Benedick and Beatrice in Much-ado-about-Nothing, are scarce inferior to any thing of the kind; and tho’ we cannot pretend that the dialogue of his gentlemen and ladies, is so delicate and refined, as that of Cibber and some other writers, it is full as witty, and not a jot more licentious, than what we frequently find in Vanbrugh and Congreve, who had not the barbarity of the age to plead in excuse.

As to the quirks and quibbles of Shakespeare’s clowns, which sometimes infect the graver parts of his writings, we cannot be of Dr. Johnson’s opinion. He affirms that ‘A quibble is to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures, it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever be the dignity or profundity of his disquisition, whether he be enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, whether he be amusing attention with incidents, or enchaining it in suspence, let but a quibble spring up before him, and he leaves his work unfinished. A quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. A quibble, poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to purchase it, by the sacrifice of reason, propriety and truth. A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose* it.’

Quaintly as all this is expressed, and boldly as it is asserted, we cannot be persuaded that Shakespeare’s native genius was not too sublime to be so much captivated with the charms of so contemptible an object. How poorly soever it might descend to trifle with an ignis fatuus by owl-light, we cannot think an eagle, soaring in the direct beams of the meridian sun, could be allured, to look down with pleasure on the feeble glimmerings of a rush-light. It is not impossible, indeed, that the necessity of accommodating himself in this particular so frequently to the humour and taste of the times, had rendered a practice habitual to him, which his own better taste and judgment could not fail to condemn. We do therefore readily adopt Sir Thomas Hanmer’s defence of Shakespeare, with regard to this point. It must be remembered, says that judicious Editor, that ‘our poet wrote for the stage, rude and unpolished as it then was; and the vicious taste of the age must stand condemned for the poor witticisms and conceits that fell from his pen; since he hath left upon record a signal proof how much he despised them. In his play of the Merchant of Venice, a clown is introduced quibbling in a miserable manner; upon which one who bears the character of a man of sense makes the following reflection: How every fool can play upon a word! I think the best grace of wit will shortly turn into silence, and discourse grow commendable in none but parrots. He could hardly have found stronger words to express his indignation at those false pretences to wit then in vogue; and therefore tho’ such trash is frequently interspersed in his writings, it would be unjust to cast it as an imputation upon his taste and judgment as a writer.’⁵

We shall leave our Readers to determine, whether what the present

Editor hath above advanced, is sufficient to invalidate this plea; or whether they will take the Editor’s word for Shakespeare, rather than Shakespeare’s word for himself.

In speaking of our poet’s faults in tragedy, the Editor says, ‘his performance seems constantly to be worse as his labour is more. The effusions of passion which exigence forces out, are for the most part striking and energetic; but whenever he solicits his invention, or strains his faculties, the offspring of his throes is tumour, meanness, tediousness, and obscurity.’ And again— ‘His declamations or set-speeches are commonly cold and weak, for his power was the power of nature; when he endeavoured, like other tragic writers, to catch opportunities of amplification, and instead of inquiring what the occasion demanded, to show how much his stores of knowledge could supply, he seldom escapes without the pity or resentment of his reader.’ It is a pity our Editor does not refer us to the particular passages, that justify these general assertions. For, admitting the truth of them, yet if it be very seldom, as we will venture to say it is, that Shakespeare appears reduced to the necessity of straining his faculties; if he be hardly ever endeavouring, like other tragic poets, at amplification, or to make an impertinent display of his knowledge, what shall we say to the candour of that commentator, who lays hold of a few defects, ubi plura nitent,⁶ on which to found a general charge against his author? Were we disposed to be as harsh and severe on the learned Annotator, as the Annotator himself hath been on his GREAT, INIMITABLE Author, we might here appeal to the public, to decide which of them most demands our pity or merits our resentment.

He goes on. ——‘It is incident to Shakespeare to be now and then entangled with an unwieldy sentiment, which he cannot well express, and will not reject; he struggles with it a while, and if it continues stubborn, comprises it in such words as occur, and leaves it to be disintangled and evolved by those who have more leisure to bestow upon it.’

We know not whether this incident might not be called with more propriety a misfortune rather than a fault, and be imputed with greater justice to the then imperfect state of our language than to Shakespeare. But be this as it may; certain it is, that if our poet be sometimes entangled with his sentiments for want of words, our Editor is not seldom entangled with his, through a multiplicity of them; or, if he may understand his own meaning, it is not always the case with his reader, who, as he says of the poet, struggles with it for a while, and if it continues stubborn,

leaves it comprised in the words that invelop it, to be disintangled and evolved by those who have more leisure to bestow upon it. It is possible that, in this, he may betray the want of patience, though we cannot admit that he betrays a want of judgment; being fully of opinion with our Editor, that where the language is intricate the thought is not always subtle, nor the image always great where the line is bulky. ‘The equality of words to things,’ as he justly observes, ‘is very often neglected, and trivial sentiments and vulgar ideas disappoint the attention, to which they are recommended by sonorous epithets and swelling figures.’

Having thus endeavoured to prove the faults of Shakespeare ‘sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit,’ our Editor attempts dexterously to change sides, and to stand up in his defence, against those who have accused him, of violating those laws, which have been instituted and established by the joint authority of poets and of critics; we mean, the unities of action, place and time.

‘From the censure, which this irregularity may bring upon him,’ says Dr. Johnson, ‘I shall with due reverence to that learning which I must oppose, adventure to try how I can defend him.’

It happens, however, very unluckily for our Editor, that, in spite of that respect which he is so notoriously ready to pay to his opponents, he shews himself to be as indifferent a pleaded for Shakespeare as he hath proved against him. Nay, we entertain some suspicion that the critical Reader will, on a due consideration of what is hereafter advanced, be apt to think Dr. Johnson too little acquainted with the nature and use of the drama, to engage successfully in a dispute of so much difficulty as that which relates to the breach or observation of the dramatic unities.

To begin with the first. If we except the historical plays of Shakespeare, where these unities are never looked for; in his other works our Editor says, he has well enough preserved the unity of action. ‘He has not indeed,’ continues he, ‘an intrigue regularly perplexed and regularly unravelled; he does not endeavour to hide his design only to discover it, for this is seldom the order of real events, and Shakespeare is the poet of nature: but his plan has commonly what Aristotle requires, a beginning, a middle and an end; one event is concatenated with another, and the conclusion follows by an easy consequence.’ All this, however, might be said of many simple histories, that make no pretences to unity of action. Their merely having a beginning, middle, and end, is not sufficient. Aristotle’s meaning is more distinctly explained by Bossu, thus: ‘The causes and design of any action constitute the beginning of it: the effect of such causes, and the difficulties attending the execution of such design, are the middle of it; and the unravelling or obviating these difficulties are the end of it.’⁷ It is not our business here to contend, whether Shakespeare be, or be not, defensible in this particular; it is enough for us to enquire how far our Editor hath actually defended him. Laying authorities however aside, we cannot, on the principles of commonsense, conceive, how any dramatic Writer can be justly said to have preserved the unity of action, who hath confessedly shewn no regard to those of time and place; with which we apprehend it to be very strictly connected. Certain at least it is, that, if any considerable time should elapse between, or space divide, the two parts of an action, we should be more apt to consider them as two distinct and different actions, than as united parts of one and the same action. This will be made more evident by our enquiry into the nature of these unities, and their essentiality to the drama. Before we enter on this point, however, we shall make some remarks on the supposed necessity, on which, Dr. Johnson conceives, the observation of these unities is founded. To enable the Reader fully to comprehend the subject in dispute, we shall quote the whole of what our Editor hath advanced on this curious topic; which we are the more readily led to do, on account of his own suggestion, that it is ‘not dogmatically but deliberatively, written; and may recall the principles of the drama to a new examination.’

[quotes ‘The necessity of observing the unities’ to ‘see their imitation’.]

Plausible as these arguments may at first sight appear, we will venture to say there is hardly one of them that does not seem false, or foreign to the purpose. We apprehend that the assumption, on which our Editor proceeds, is not true. The observation of these unities may be necessary without requiring the dramatic fable in its materiality (as this writer terms it) to be either credited or credible. It is not requisite, in order to justify the necessity of such observation, that the Spectator should really imagine himself one hour in Alexandria and the next at Rome; or that he should actually believe the transactions of months and years to pass in a few hours. The dramatic unities if necessary, are necessary to support the apparent probability, not the actual credibility of the drama. Our learned Editor may not probably distinguish the difference; but Cicero will tell him nihil est tam INCREDIBILE, quod non dicendo fiat PROBABILE:⁸ and if such be the power of oratory, can we

doubt that a similar effect is produced by theatrical representation? Now, it is the senses and the passions, and not the imagination and understanding, that are in both these cases immediately affected. We do not pretend to say that the spectators are not always in their senses; or that they do not know (if the question were put to them) that the stage is only a stage, and the players only players. But we will venture to say, they are often so intent on the scene, as to be absent with regard to every thing else. A spectator, properly affected by a dramatic representation, makes no reflections about the fiction or the reality of it, so long as the action proceeds without grossly offending, or palpably imposing on the senses. It is very true that a person, going to Drury-lane to see the Tragedy of Venice Preserved,⁹ knows, when he places himself in the pit, that he is in the theatre at London, and not in Venice. But the curtain is no sooner drawn up than he begins to be interested in the business of the scene, the orchestra vanishes, and the views of St. Mark and the Rialto dispose him (not to think how he came there but) to see and hear what is to be done and said there. When his attention is fully engaged to the fable, and his passions affected by the distress of the characters, he is still farther removed from his own character and situation; and may be conceived quatenus a spectator, to be rather at Venice than at London. The image of Mr. Garrick, it is true, is painted on the retina of his eye, and the voice of Mrs. Cibber mechanically affects the tympanum of his ear: but it is as true also that he sees only the transports of Jaffier and listens only to the ravings of Belvidera. And yet there is no frenzy, no calenture in the case; the man may be as much in his senses as Horace, when he supposed the same deception might happen to himself, under the like influence of theatrical magic:

Ille per extentum funem mihi posse videtur

Ire poeta; meum qui pectus inaniter angit,

Irritat, mulcet, falsis terroribus implet,

Ut magus; et modo me Thebis, modo ponit Athenis.¹⁰

The spectator is unquestionably deceived; but the deception goes no farther than the passions, it affects our sensibility but not our understanding: and is by no means so powerful a delusion as to affect our belief. There is a species of probability, which is necessary to be adhered

to, even to engage the attention of the senses, and affect our passions; but this regards the representation and not the materiality of the fable. The incredulas odi,¹¹ of Horace, hath been cited with too great latitude of construction. It can hardly be supposed that the poet should stigmatize himself for incredulity, merely because he could not believe that Progne was metamorphosed into a bird, or Cadmus into a serpent. Or, supposing he might, why should he use the verb odi? Why should he hate or detest a thing merely because he thought it incredible? It is natural indeed to hate whatever offends, or is shocking to, the senses. The truth is, these terms are directly applied to the form, or representation, and not to the materiality of the fable; as is evident on perusing the context. The whole passage runs thus;

Aut agitur res in Scenis, aut acta refertur,

Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem,

Quam quæ sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus, et quæ

Ipse sibi tradit spectator. Non tamen intus

Digna geri, promes in scenam: multaque tolles

Ex oculis, quæ mox narret facundia præsens.

Ne pueros coram populo Medea trucidet;

Aut humana palam coquat exta nefarius Atreus;

Aut in avem Progne vertatur, Cadmus in anguem.

Quodcunque ostendis mihi sic, incredulus odi.¹²

We find no objection made to the credibility of these fables in themselves, (for on this the auditor may not give himself the trouble to bestow a single reflection) but to the unseemliness or improbability that must necessarily attend their representation on the stage: by which means the senses would be offended with a palpable absurdity, not the understanding be imposed on by a falsehood. For he allows that the very same things may be agreeably related which will not bear to be represented. —But to return to our Editor. That the judgment never mistook any dramatic representation we readily admit; but that our senses frequently do, is certain, from the effect it hath on our passions. Nay, Dr. Johnson himself, after all the pains he takes to prove the drama

absolutely incredible, is reduced, for want of making this necessary distinction, to confess that it really is credited. ‘It will be asked,’ says he, ‘how the drama moves, if it is not credited? It is credited with all the credit due to a drama.’ The method he takes, to evade this evident contradiction, is, by adopting the sophistry of those philosophers, who strive to account for the emotions of pity, gratitude, generosity and all the nobler passions, from a retrospect to that of self-love. The drama is credited, says Dr. Johnson, ‘whenever it moves, as a just picture of a real original; as representing to the auditor what he would himself feel, if he were to do or suffer what is there feigned to be suffered or to be done. The reflection that strikes the heart* is not, that the evils before us are real evils, but that they are evils to which we ourselves may be exposed.’ Now nothing is more certain than that those spectators, who are most affected by dramatic representation are usually the least capable of making a comparison between the picture and the original. There are also few auditors that can put themselves in the place of the characters represented; and we believe still fewer who are moved because they reflect that they themselves are exposed to the evils represented on the stage. The audience are moved by mere mechanical motives; they laugh and cry from mere sympathy at what a moment’s reflection would very often prevent them from laughing or crying at all. ‘If there be any fallacy,’ continues our Editor, ‘it is not that we fancy the players, but that we fancy ourselves unhappy for a moment; but we rather lament the possibility than suppose the presence of misery, as a mother weeps over her babe, when she remembers† that death may take it from her. The delight of Tragedy proceeds from our consciousness of fiction; if we thought murders and treasons real they would please no more.’ In reply to this, it may be safely affirmed, that we neither fancy the players nor ourselves unhappy: our imagination hath nothing to do with the immediate impressions whether of joy or sorrow; we are in this case merely passive, our organs are in unison with those of the players on the stage, and the convulsions of grief or laughter are purely involuntary.

As to the delight we experience from Tragedy, it no more proceeds directly from a consciousness of fiction, than the pleasure we reap from Comedy; but is the physical consequence of having the transient sense of pain or danger excited in us by sympathy, instead of actually and durably feeling it ourselves. Hence that diminution of pain, which gives rise to the pleasing sensation, to which the ingenious Author of the Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, gives the name of delight.¹³ And hence it is that such persons, who are most affected with the distress of a Tragedy, are generally most delighted with its representation.

(discusses how actuality is related to drama, and the value of the unities.)

Dr. Johnson questions whether Shakespeare knew the unities and rejected them by design, or deviated from them by happy ignorance. It is impossible perhaps to determine this point; but we think it pretty clear, that, whether he learned the rules of the drama from the writings of the ancients or not, he was better versed in them than any of his successors that did. What should hinder Shakespeare from drinking knowledge at the fountain-head as well as the ancients? Must all knowledge be called ignorance, that is not obtained at second-hand, by means of books? It is proper for those, who cannot go alone, to be led by others; but Shakespeare was the fondling of Nature, and needed not the leading-strings of Aristotle. It does not follow, however, that the practice of the one, and the precepts of the other, are incompatible. It is by no means necessary that Nature’s strong and vigorous offspring should be confined to that strict regularity of diet and regimen which is requisite to support the weak and puny nurslings of art. They both, however, pursue the same objects, and attain them nearly by the same means. Hence, though it should be true, that Shakespeare was

——above the critic’s law,

And but from Nature’s fountains scorn’d to draw,¹⁴

he might not deviate essentially from the general law of the Stagyrite, although he did not servilely adopt his particular rules. Indeed the point is almost universally given up with regard to the unity of place; the preservation of which gives rise to more improbabilities than the breach of it. —But to return to that of action. There is no doubt but

Shakespeare hath taken many exceptionable liberties in this respect, for want of a due attention to the mechanical part of composition. And this he hath done in common with the first dramatic poets among the ancients*. Nor is he, in this particular, to be justified by any thing his Editor hath advanced: for the unity of action must not only be so far observed as to preserve the unity of character, but also so far as to preserve an apparent unity of design in the fable.

As to the unity of time, Dr. Johnson is also strangely mistaken, with regard to its essentiality in the drama. ‘A play read (says he) affects the mind like a play acted. It is therefore evident that the action is not supposed to be real, and it follows, that between the acts a longer or shorter time may be allowed to pass, and that no more account of space or duration is to be taken by the auditor of a drama, than by the reader of a narrative, before whom may pass in an hour the life of a hero, or the revolutions of an empire.’ Here again our Editor seems to betray a want of acquaintance with the conduct and effects of the drama. ——It is very certain that a longer or shorter time may be allowed to pass between the acts, provided the union of character be preserved, and nothing intervene between the two parts of the action but the lapse of time; there is yet a wide difference between the auditor of a drama and the reader of a narrative. Few things can be represented in the same time they are related; so that it would be impossible to represent the whole life of an hero, or the revolutions of an empire, in the same time as the history of them might be read. It is indeed impossible for the action represented to seem to be longer than the actual time of representation; for, as we before observed, it is the senses, and not the imagination, that is immediately employed on the representation.

Dr. Johnson indeed says, that ‘time is, of all modes of existence, most obsequious to the imagination; a lapse of years is as easily conceived as a passage of hours. In contemplation we easily contract the time of real actions, and therefore willingly permit it to be contracted when we only see their imitation.’

In this argument, however, as in almost all his other reasoning on the subject, the conclusion hath little to do with the premises. During the actual representation of an action, we are not contemplating, but observing; and it is impossible for us either to shorten or to prolong the time of such representation: but when it ceases, as at the end of an act, or even in shifting the scene, the attention of the senses being taken off, the imagination is at liberty to act during the interval; which, however

short, is sufficient for the purpose. And hence we see that the frequent shifting of the scenes, though it may break in upon the restrictions of action and place, it affords an opportunity of preserving that of time, together with the first and grand rule of probability. It is pleasant enough to see how the French critics, who affect to abide by the strictest observance of the unities, perplex themselves to excuse Corneille for the multiplicity of incidents in the Cid; the hero of which fights two duels, marches against the enemy, returns, is brought to a solemn trial; fights again, and finds means to reconcile himself to his mistress, whose father he had slain; and all this in the space of four and twenty hours. Now, it is certain, that all these actions, if properly disposed in succession, and judiciously divided, might be so represented as never to break in upon dramatic probability.

The French, indeed, in support of the unity of place, maintain that the stage never should be empty during the act; in consequence of their observance of this rule, however, they are guilty of much greater absurdities than would arise from shifting the scene. It is mentioned, as an instance of consummate skill in Corneille, that he hath provided, in one of his plays, for keeping the stage full, while one of the characters goes to the field to fight, and returns conqueror. Now had this supposed combat passed during the interval between the acts, or even during the shifting of the scene, it had not transgressed the bounds of dramatic probability, because it then had passed during the interlude of the imagination; but the audience would not fail of perceiving the improbability of a combat’s being fought while they had been listening to some twenty or thirty lines, spoken by the persons of the stage. The unity of time, is, indeed, so far essential to the drama, that the successive actions represented must be confined to the time of actual representation; although the intervals between them may be as long as the poet pleases, consistent with the preservation of the unity of character, and that of the design of the fable.

In respect to the unity of place; it appears more than probable, that the pretended necessity of it originally arose from the imperfect state of the ancient theatres, as it is plain that the French poets have absurdly involved themselves in the most ridiculous perplexities by adopting it to an unnecessary degree. There can be no doubt, however, that it is so far essential to the drama, as it is necessary to preserve the unity of action: for as the interval of time may in some cases be so great as to vary the personality, or destroy the unity of character, so the transition of place may be so great as to destroy the unity of the action. We should not be more vehement, indeed, than Dr. Johnson, in reproaching a poet who should make his first act pass in Venice, and his next in Cyprus, provided they were both so nearly related as when Shakespeare wrote his Othello; but we should have no great opinion of the dramatic conduct of a piece, the first scene of which should be laid in England, and the last in China. In any other respect, however, it is certain that the unity of place is unnecessary to the modern drama, as the attention of the spectator is always diverted from the action of the piece, and the imagination is at liberty during the change of the scene. —It appears, on the whole, that the unities are essential to the drama, though not in that degree as hath been asserted by the critics; so that the result of Dr. Johnson’s enquiries concerning them, is as erroneous as his supposition of the necessity on which they were founded.

[quotes Johnson’s remarks on Shakespeare’s general characteristics, and on previous editors.]

Our Editor proceeds next to give an account of what he hath done, or attempted to do himself, and to apologize for what he hath not done, or confessedly found himself unable to do. We cannot help being somewhat apprehensive, however, that the readers of this part of Dr. Johnson’s preface, will be apt to think he hath, in more places than one, betrayed a consciousness of the want of application in his pretended endeavours, as well as of the ill success attending them. There runs, indeed, through the whole of this preface, such a mixed and inconsistent vein of praise and censure respecting others; and of boasting and excuse regarding himself, that we think we discover it to be the production of a wavering pen, directed by a hand equally wearied and disgusted with a task, injudiciously undertaken, and as indolently pursued. We shall take our leave of it therefore with one more quotation, which may serve farther to confirm what is here advanced:

[quotes ‘Perhaps I may not be more censured’ to ‘I have said no more’.]

As to the work itself; the present Editor hath prefixed the several prefaces of Pope, Theobald, Hanmer and Warburton, as also the dedication and preface of Heminge and Condell, and Shakespeare’s life by Mr. Rowe. Of Mr. Pope’s notes the Editor hath retained the whole; in order, as he says, that no fragment of so great a writer may be lost. With Dr. Johnson’s leave, however, as Mr. Pope’s attempts on Shakespeare do so little honour to his memory, a future editor who affected to revere that memory ought to have suppressed them; at least those of them which were the most exceptionable. —Of Theobald’s notes, the weak, ignorant, mean, faithless, petulant, ostentatious Theobald, the present Editor hath generally retained those which he retained himself in his second edition; and these, we must acquaint our Readers, are not a few nor unimportant. —Of Sir Thomas Hanmer’s notes, Dr. Johnson professes, and we find no reason to disbelieve him, that he hath inserted them all. —To Dr. Warburton he is still more obliged than to any of the preceeding commentators, at least in point of quantity. — To the author of the Canons of Criticism he is also equally obliged in point of quality; but we know not to what cause we must impute it, that the Editor is so extremely sparing of confessing his obligations, from this quarter.

As to the Editor’s own notes, it possibly will not be expected they should be so numerous, or so important, as those he had an opportunity of borrowing from his predecessors: the Reader will meet with some of them, however, here and there interspersed among the rest, and like the rest, bona quædam, mala, mediocra. If the Reader should complain that these are too few and insignificant, we can only impute their paucity and want of importance to a notion entertained by the Editor (the most unfortunate sure that ever entered into the head of a commentator!) that the Reader is more, and better pleased with what he finds out himself, than with what the most sagacious scholiast can point out to him. But this plea, if admitted, would of course be urged too far, and even supersede the task of any commentator at all. Indeed Dr. Johnson seems full as little solicitous about the success of his annotations, as he could possibly be about the composing them; it is to be wished, however, for the sake of his own reputation, that he had always treated the poet with the same candour as he professes to have observed toward his brother commentators.

31. William Kenrick, Review of Johnson’s Shakespeare

November 1765

Extracts from the Review, 1765, iv–v, x–xvi, 82–90.
The full title of this book-length attack is: A Review of Doctor Johnson’s New Edition of Shakespeare, in which the ignorance, or inattention of that editor is exposed, and the poet defended from the persecution of his commentators. Kenrick’s strictures were confined to the first three volumes of the edition; more were promised on the other five; they never appeared. See Introduction, pp. 5, 26–7.

…the intent and design…is plainly what is set forth in the title, viz. to defend the text of Shakespeare from the persecution of his commentators.

The Reviewer is well aware that Dr. Johnson’s self-sufficiency may suggest a more sinister view. For, he doubts not, that gentleman thinks of himself, what he has said of Dr. Warburton, that he has ‘a name sufficient to confer celebrity on those who can exalt themselves into antagonists;’¹ and hence he may possibly impute the present work to the motive which he insinuates to have actuated the opponents of that writer. The allusion, also, of the eagle and owl, which he quotes from Macbeth, may, with a very little latitude of construction, be applied as well to himself and the Reviewer, as to Dr. Warburton and his antagonist.

An Eagle, tow’ring in his pride of place,

Was, by a mousing owl, hawk’d at and kill’d.²

For tho’, Dr. Johnson having neither preferment in the church, nor post in the state, the word place may seem to want that strict propriety the critics require; yet, if we reflect how nearly places and pensions are allied,

there is not one of Shakespeare’s commentators who would make any scruple of substituting one word for the other, reciprocally, and alternately, as he thought the case might require. There is no doubt also that, on this occasion, the word pension would be preferred; as a pension must be universally allowed, cæteris paribus, to be better than a place, to a man so fond of doing but little; as it is apprehended the reader will think is the case with Dr. Johnson….

The republic of letters is a perfect democracy, where, all being equal, there is no respect of persons, but every one hath a right to speak the truth of another, to censure without fear, and to commend without favour or affection. Nor is the literary community of less dignity than the political. Popularity and influence, indeed, may be obtained, for a while, by sinister means in both; but though birth and wealth may confer eminence and power in the one, not the descent of an Alexander, nor the riches of Crœsus, confer prerogative or authority in the other.

In the primitive state of society, a superiority of intellectual abilities was the foundation of all civil pre-eminence; and hence the sceptre continued to be swayed by superior wisdom through a succession of ages. The acquisitions of science and learning were held among the ancients, in no less esteem than those of conquest, and in as much greater than the possessions of royalty, as a chaplet of laurel was preferred to a coronet of mere gems and gold. Xenophon reaped more honour from his Cyropædia, than from the famous retreat of the ten thousand; and Cæsar still more from his commentary, than from all the military exploits recorded in it. As to the examples of modern times; to say nothing of James and Christina, lest it be objected that one was a weak man, and the other a foolish woman, we have seen the kings of Prussia and of Poland, the Alexander and the Nestor of our age, ambitious to become authors, and be made denizons of our little state. Frederick hath been more than once heard to say, he would give his crown, and Stanislaus, if he had not lost it, would have given another, to possess the scientific fame of Leibnitz, or the literary reputation of Voltaire.

Is it, by the way, then, to be wondered at, that a private individual, like Samuel Johnson, should be even preposterously elated at finding that homage paid to him, which has been in vain solicited by sovereigns, and is refused even to the King on his throne? Graduated by universities, pensioned by his prince, and surrounded by pedagogues and poetasters, he finds a grateful odour in the incense of adulation; while admiring booksellers stand at a distance, and look up to him with awful reverence, bowing the knee to Baal, and holding in fearful remembrance the exemplary fate of Tom Osborne; presumptuous Tom Osborne! who, braving the vengeance of this paper-crowned idol, was, for his temerity, transfixed to his mother-earth by a thundering folio!³ It may be a pity to disturb Dr. Johnson from so pleasing a reverie, and to dissipate so agreeable a scene of delusion; he will exclaim doubtless, with the honest citizen of Argos.

Pol me occidistis——

————cui sic extorta voluptas,

Et demptus per vim mentis gratissimus error.⁴

But, if the interests of our literary state require it, it cannot be doubted that the mere gratification of an individual ought to be given up for the good of the whole community.

But to proceed to the third and last head of our discourse: the object of which is the effects or consequences of the following Review. These, like the subject of our preface, may be divided also into three parts. In the first place, it is presumed the injuries done to the name of Shakespeare will be in a great measure repaired, and the lustre of his tarnished honour restored. In the second, it is feared Dr. Johnson will suffer not a little in his literary reputation; and in the last, it may be suspected, that the proprietors will be injured in the sale of the work.

In regard to the first; the pleasure, which it is presumed every true Englishman will feel, at the attempt to do justice to his favourite poet, will sufficiently exculpate the author, had it been necessary to practise a still greater severity in effecting it.

With respect to the second, it may not be improper for the writer to offer something in his justification.

[argues that critics should not hesitate to expose ‘unworthy’ writers ‘for fear of depriving an impostor of the reputation on which he plumes himself’.]

As to the last point, viz. the interest of the proprietors; the Reviewer thinks it very problematical whether this will be affected either way. He hath indeed known books sometimes sell the better for being publicly censured: but, be this as it may, he can truly aver that he meant them no harm; for, though it is possible that one or other of them may have sometimes failed a little in that respect to the writer, which he thinks an author has a right to expect of his bookseller, and his bookseller, if he is

wise, will be ready to pay him, yet he does not harbour so much resentment against any of them, as to wish to hurt their interest. If unluckily it should turn out, however, that the sale of Dr. Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare should be hence obstructed, and that it should only hobble, instead of taking a run; the proprietors have nothing to do, but to engage the Reviewer, if they can, or some body else, to furnish them with a better edition. Nor will this be a difficult task, although it would be an arduous and noble one, to give the public such a commentary as the writings of this incomparable Bard deserve.

To detain the reader but a moment longer. —Dr. Johnson, having acted, in the outrage he hath committed on Shakespeare, just like other sinners, not only by doing those things he ought not to have done, but by leaving undone those things he ought to have done; his sins of omission are not less important, though much more numerous, than those of commission. Indeed, nothing is more usual with commentators in general, than to display their own sagacity on obvious passages, and to leave the difficult ones to be explained by the sagacity of their readers*. The Reviewer, however, cannot be supposed here to have given a compleat commentary himself; indeed he hath been able only to include in the following sheets some few remarks on the most glaring blunders and defects that occur in this new edition; of which such wonderful things were promised and expected; and to which, having seen the prophecy fulfilled, we may apply, with as much justice as ever it was applied to any thing, that well-known quotation from Horace.

Quid dignum tanto feret hic promissor hiatu?

Parturiunt montes: nascetur ridiculus mus!⁵

[Four examples are given here to illustrate Kenrick’s commentary on Johnson’s alleged ‘blunders and defects’: the observations on Johnson’s notes to Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1v, iii, 25; 1v, iii, 161; v, ii, 884; and Winter’s Tale, 1v, iv, 21.]

Vol. II. Page 165.

KING. So sweet a kiss the golden sun gives not

To those fresh morning drops upon the rose,

As thy eye-beams, when their fresh rays have smote

The night of dew, that on my cheeks down flows.

On this passage Dr. Johnson hath the following note.

The night of dew, that on my cheeks down flows.] I cannot think the night of dew the true reading, but know not what to offer.

That is very strange! Dr. Johnson. —Why, thou must have no more invention in thee than there is in a leaden plummet: thy pegasus must be confined and hoodwinked like a horse in a mill; or surely something would have suggested itself to a writer who declares, that ‘not a single passage, in this whole work, has appeared to him corrupt, which he has not attempted to restore!’* —I would be far from seeking to depreciate the success of our editor’s modest industry: but I am afraid the purchasers of his book will be apt to think, from many such slovenly notes as this, that both his industry and modesty are pretty well matched. It is evident, from the context, that the king, being over head and ears in love, employs himself, as people usually do in that situation,

Wasting the live-long hours away,

In tears by night, and sighs by day.

What objection then could our editor have to substituting nightly dew, instead of night of dew. If we are not absolutely certain the poet wrote so, there is a moral presumption, a great probability, of it: but whether he did or not, the alteration is certainly an amendment, and a very harmless one. It would also have served a little to save the credit of the editor; who, whatever might be his intentions before he begun his work, sufficiently shews, by the work itself, that he regarded not what he had promised when he did it; and, by his Preface, that he knew as little what he had done when it was finished.

Vol. II. Page 170.

BIRON. O me, with what strict patience have I sat

To see a king transformed to a knot!

Here, indeed! we see our editor attempting to restore a passage, which appears to him corrupt. —Mark the success!—

To see a king transformed to a knot!] Knot has no sense that can suit this place. We may read sot0 The rhymes in this play are such as that sat and sot may be well enough admitted.

What! have you lost your hearing and judgment too, Mr. Editor, as well as your memory and invention? —Do you not know that even sot

and sot cannot be admitted into any verse as English rhymes; and do you think the matter mended with sot and sat?

Besides, do you see no impropriety in Biron’s calling the King, to his face, a blockhead or fool, because truly he was in love; especially when he is conscious he is himself in the same situation? Add to this, that so gross an expression is totally inconsistent with the fine strain of raillery that runs through the whole of his speech. This attempt, therefore, of our editor at restoration, is evidently a very unlucky one, and is excusable only as the unsuccessful endeavour of modest industry.

But why doth Dr. Johnson conclude this passage to be corrupted? If he thinks the rhymes sot and sat admissible, surely he can have no objection to our pronouncing sat after the broad orthoëpy of the vulgar; in which case it would be a much less exceptionable rhyme to knot than what he is willing to admit. —But he says, ‘knot hath no sense that can suit this place.’ He might have found, however, by turning to almost any dictionary, excepting his own, that a knot is a small bird, well known in many parts of England, and is called avis Canuti by the naturalists; as it is said, because king Canutus was very fond of such birds. It is, indeed, a delicious kind of water-fowl. Now, as Biron hath said but just before, speaking of the King,

Shot, by heav’n! proceed, sweet Cupid; thou has thumpt

him with thy bird-bolt under the left pap;

I cannot, for my part, see any objection to his comparing him in this passage to a wounded knot. If my readers do, I have done. They will do me the justice, however, to own, that, if I am not possessed of Dr. Johnson’s ingenuity and modesty, I shew at least as much industry in defending the text of Shakespeare, as he does in pulling it to pieces.

Vol. II. Page 222.
SONG.
When daizies pied and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver white;
And cuckow-buds of yellow hue,
Do paint the meadows with delight.

Dr. Warburton says, we should read much-bedight, which is very proper and elegant. —The present editor quotes Dr. Warburton’s note; to which he adds the following short animadversion.

Much less elegant than the present reading.

Undoubtedly it is: and I have here only to ask Dr. Johnson, why he excludes the notes of Theobald, when they have been sufficiently exploded by other writers; and yet pesters his readers with those of Dr. Warburton, which stand exactly in the same predicament?

The ingenious author of the Canons of Criticism objected, long ago, to this proposed emendation of Dr. Warburton’s; judiciously observing, that if bedight means bedecked or adorned, the meadows being bedight already, they little need painting. —But Dr. Johnson seems to be so much influenced by the respect due to high place, that he seems determined to avoid the name of Edwards, as much as possible, for fear of offending the bishop.

Vol. II. Page 298.

PERDITA. ————even now I tremble

To think your father, by some accident,

Should pass this way, as you did: Oh, the fates!

How would he look, to see his work, so noble,

Vilely bound up!

Here Dr. Johnson hath found Shakespeare tripping again. —Hear what he says.

His work so noble, &c.] It is impossible for any man to rid his mind of his profession. The authorship of Shakespeare has supplied him with a metaphor, which, rather than he would lose it, he has put, with no great propriety, into the mouth of a country maid. Thinking of his own works, his mind passed naturally to the binder. I am glad he has no hint at an editor.

We have here also, another aukward attempt of our editor at wit and pleasantry. But, why wilt thou, Dr. Johnson, persist thus in playing at bob-cherry, when the prize hangeth so high above thine head, and such a weight of lead is incumbent on thy heels? I have already advised thee, in the fullness of my heart, and, as Cicero says, non otii abundantiâ, sed amoris erga te,⁶ not to be so forward to display thy wit. I told thee before, and I tell thee again, thou hast it not in thee, being as unable to divert the reader with thy pleasantry, as to convince him of Shakespeare’s impropriety. —Again, why, Dr. Johnson, art thou glad that Shakespeare hath no hint at an editor? Dost thou think he would have thrown out any censures that might reach thee? —No—that incomparable bard was, as thou sayest, the poet of nature, and drew his characters from the life: and nature had not produced in that age so arrogant, and at the same

time so dull an animal, as the present commentator on Shakespeare. There were pedants and pedagogues, it is true, in his day; he has depicted an Holofernes and a Sir Hugh Evans. But these were slight excrescences, mushrooms, champignons, that perished as the smoke of the dunghill evaporated, which reared them. A modern editor of Shakespeare is, on the contrary, a fungus attached to an oak; a male agaric of the most astringent kind, that, while it disfigures its form, may last for ages to disgrace the parent of its being.

But, to lay aside metaphor; not Burgerdischius, Gronovius, nor any one of the whole tribe of Dutch commentators, from the first of them to the last, hath proceeded through his author with more phlegm and frigidity, than Dr. Johnson hath gone through Shakespeare*. It is hard to say, indeed, who is the dullest scholiast of the dullest writer of antiquity. But Dr. Johnson has the singular honour of being the dullest annotator on the brightest of all those who have succeeded the revival of letters.

32. James Barclay, Examination of Mr. Kenrick’s Review

1766

Extracts from Examination, 1766, iii–viii, 57.
‘A young student of Oxford, of the name of Barclay, wrote an answer to Kenrick’s review of Johnson’s Shakespeare. Johnson was at first angry that Kenrick’s attack should have the credit of an answer. But afterwards, considering the young man’s good intention, he kindly noticed him, and probably would have done more, had not the young man died’ (Boswell, Life, i. 498). Johnson’s champion, aged nineteen, was an undergraduate of Balliol. See Introduction, p. 27.

Literary reputation, says a certain elegant moralist, is bestowed by the joint applauses of the generality, and destroyed by the malignity of individuals. Forbidding as this opinion may be to every eager candidate for literary fame, yet I am afraid the late attack upon Mr. Johnson’s character will in some measure verify the observation.

Indeed a charge urged with such confidence, and backed with such delusive sophistry, can scarce fail of hurting him with the ignorant and unwary; with the learned and ingenious, his reputation must for ever remain unshaken. ——The reader, I suppose, is ready to anticipate me in my declaration concerning the design of the following Examination. He will easily conclude, that to rescue injured merit from the hands of presuming arrogance, is the sole end of the performance before him.

Before I proceed, I must observe, that the parties attacking and attacked are equally unknown to me, and that I sat down to examine the extraordinary claims of the former, divested of any predilection for the one or prejudice against the other.

Upon the publication of Mr. Johnson’s Shakespeare, the expectations of the generality, it must be owned, were greatly disappointed: They had been induced to expect from his avowed learning and ingenuity, a compleat commentary upon the works of their immortal bard; but through the concurring circumstances of inattention in the Editor, and sanguine expectation in the reader, the performance, I am afraid, has incurred the public censure.

This being a true state of the case, the injured party has certainly a right to complain, and an open declaration of the general sense would not have been unjust: But let me add, the manner in which it is conveyed to Mr. Johnson is UNJUST AND UNWARRANTABLE.

A deference is certainly due to established fame, and decorum to those members of the community who have been honoured with the public approbation: IT is A DOWNRIGHT AFFRONT TO NATIONAL APPROBATION, TO STIGMATISE THAT MAN WITH IGNORANCE, WHO HAS BEEN SELECTED FROM THE COLLECTIVE LEARNED AS PECULIARLY DESERVING THEIR FAVOURS.

Little, I believe, did any person wish to see Mr. Johnson treated with irreverence, or attacked with malevolence, and still less think to see him represented as a self-sufficient literary impostor. Will posterity believe that an obscure man has dared to do this, and prefix his name to the libel? that he has dared to give the lie to the applause of domestic seminaries and foreign academies? Such an attempt, I hope, needs no comment with the friends of candour and merit. Would that Mr. Johnson were to stand or fall by their determination! But human wishes are not to transgress the bounds of moral probability; and as the prejudiced, ignorant, and unwary, arrogate the liberty of decision equally with the qualified judge, an analysis of the Reviewer’s offences against criticism and decency is altogether necessary.

I suppose I need not remind the reader that W.Kenrick proposed in his advertisements, to detect the IGNORANCE AND INDOLENCE of the late Editor, intending, as it is natural to conclude, to give the reader a sample of his abusive powers. What could not the public expect from a writer, who in the most summary manner informed them of that which a common genius would at least take a volume to demonstrate, viz. Mr. Johnson’s IGNORANCE? As much struck must they have been at his ingenuity, who could convert an advertisement into a VIRULENT LIBEL.

It was a natural question in every reader of such prefatory abuse, Who is this W.Kenrick? What works have proceeded from his pen sufficient to countenance this unaccountable charge? To these inter-rogatories, few, very few, could make a satisfactory answer, and the world was apt to conclude, THAT A MAN WHOM NO BODY KNEW, HAD ATTACKED A MAN WHOM EVERY BODY KNEW.

To obviate these mortifying questions, while the Review was in the press, the friends of Mr. Kenrick gave out that he was a prime hand in the Monthly Review, and consequently a man of profound erudition and extensive abilities: The consequence some may say does not flow from the premises; but in spite of such infidels, the argument was admitted by the many as conclusive, and W.Kenrick revered accordingly.

In the space between the advertisement and publication, the friends of Mr. Johnson suspended their judgments; and though they thought it passing strange that his learning and ingenuity should pass muster with Oxford, and Dublin, at home, and the academy Del Crusca abroad, and at last be insinuated as fictitious by W.Kenrick; yet reasoned they, This discovery may have been reserved for him alone, and it is unreasonable to suppose he would dogmatize in the public prints in so uncommon a manner, without great foundation for his positiveness.

At length the performance appears, with the extraneous recommendations of a fine type, white paper, and the internal advantages of petulant raillery. Instead of convincing argument, it fobs us off with unmeaning sophistry; and instead of its demonstrating the author to be a critical writer, it betrays him to be the uninteresting RETAILER of trite silly ABUSIVE ANECDOTES.

It is indeed a matter of great surprise to every liberal reader, to find such a vast profusion of LITERARY DIRT spattered over the face of the Reviewer’s performance: Does Mr. Kenrick imagine a few errors of judgment can authorise the vile epithets and personal abuse with which he urges his claim? No, surely! Common decency and the general voice discountenance such proceedings.

But upon what foundation is this general charge of ignorance supported? Upon the result of a mature examination of Mr. Johnson’s collective works? By no means; for in them the critic and the scholar every where plead in his favour, and, if I may use such an argument coram Aristarcho nostro,¹ the christian and moralist.

Mr. Kenrick, it seems, was sensible of the impropriety of such an important charge proceeding from one with whom the public has not had any acquaintance in the literary walk: To obviate this, he kindly informs us, the world is obliged to him for the EPISTLES TO LORENZO, which no body reads; and a translation of the infidel Rousseau’s Emilius, which no body ought to read.²

Any man, unhackney’d in the ways of writers, would be led to

imagine, from the general good reception with which they are received, that scurrility and paradox are necessary ingredients in every composition, as most likely to introduce the Author to publick notice. To lead the reader through the inextricable mazes of a paradox, till you bring him to an unexpected meaning, like a Chinese Hah! hah! is now become fashionable. To be esteemed ingenious, we must lay down a proposition, the palpable absurdity of which stares every body in the face, and then, —do what? Assault common sense (that obstinate enemy of such heterodox opinions,) with a storm of logic and a peal of syllogisms. But where is your application, sneers Mr. Kenrick? —My application? Why, you have given into this fashion with a witness; and that your pamphlet might go down the glibber, made it one continued PARADOXICAL LIBEL. After all, perhaps, some excuse may be urged in extenuation of ‘the heresies of paradox.’ They contribute to set off the writer’s ingenuity in the eye of the reader, but even this can by no means be predicated of scurrility, for IT is A RECEIVED AXIOMATICAL TRUTH, THAT DULNESS AND ABUSE SELDOM MAKE THEIR APPEARANCE BUT IN THE ABSENCE OF REASON AND ARGUMENTATION. Such is the frailty of human nature, that when we are hard put to it for fair disputation, we cannot for the life of us keep clear from the stink-pots of Billingsgate; imitating in this respect, the ignorant and unequal boxer, who, when he cannot cope with his adversary by mere honest bruising, flies for assistance to dirt and other offensive weapons.

Many are the conjectures of the public concerning the reasons for such ungentleman-like treatment used by the Reviewer towards Dr. Warburton and Mr. Johnson. He himself declares in his preface, he has never been disobliged by either of these gentlemen. Shall I hazard a conjecture, gentle reader, and endeavour to account for such behaviour? Here it is.

Mr. Johnson, it is well known, joins to the COMPLEAT SCHOLAR, yes, the compleat scholar, Mr. Kenrick, the BELIEVING CHRISTIAN. It is well known by those who are acquainted with the creed of the Reviewer, that to the RAILING author he joins the UNBELIEVING CAVILLER*. Here then the difficulty vanishes. The Reviewer thinks it

strange, any man above the degree of a natural, should be found on the side of CHRISTIANITY; and as it is not likely Mr. Johnson should, on the instance of Mr. Kenrick, or Lorenzo’s friend, subscribe to the infidel’s articles of faith, he wants to reduce him to the degree of a natural: This we know is not very uncommon with gentlemen of Mr. Kenrick’s kidney, as may be proved from the treatment the bishop of Gloucester, and his dead friend Pope, received from the hands of the abusive, the infidel Bolingbroke.³

The Reviewer’s first attack being levelled against the two greatest supporters our religion can boast, may we not reasonably expect in a short time, a farther attempt upon other CHURCH CHAMPIONS, until at length he prove, THAT AS ALL CHRISTIANS ARE FOOLS, so, NONE BUT A FOOL WOULD BE A CHRISTIAN?

[Barclay provides a page-by-page commentary on Kenrick’s Review. His retort to Kenrick’s remarks on Johnson’s note on Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1v, iii, 161 (No. 31) will serve as an example.]

Mr. Johnson owns himself at a loss for the meaning of Knot; and his opponent, through his sleep, tells him, ‘The Poet meant a bird called a Knot, alias Avis Canuti.’ Mr. Kenrick! awake, Mr. Kenrick. Rub your eyes and look about you. You should never sit down to criticise when you are sleepy, man; you see, what comes of it—Incoherent raving— When you are broad awake, I shall ask you, Why of all the species of birds must a water-fowl, and of these the Knot, be picked out for the King to be changed into? Indeed, Sir, you must shake off this drowsiness: I have perceived it to be creeping upon you this long time, but here we catch you napping indeed! Downright sleepy talk; I wish it may not grow into a lethargy before you doze through the eight volumes of Mr. Johnson’s Shakespeare. But now you are pretty well awake, let me ask you, how you came to dream of the Knot? Belike you sat down to write with a belly full of them: I cannot account any other way for such an expected meaning for the word—Let us however endeavour to come at the real signification, fresh and fasting.

33. Voltaire, ‘Art Dramatique’, in Questions sur l’Encyclopédie

1770

Translated from Oeuvres, Paris, 1878, xvii. 397.
Voltaire is classed with Dennis and Rymer in Johnson’s Preface; their objections to Shakespeare’s portrayal of Romans and kings are dismissed: ‘These are the petty cavils of petty minds.’ Boswell remarks: ‘Voltaire, in revenge, made an attack on Johnson…I pressed him to answer. He said, he perhaps might; but he never did’ (Life, i. 498–9).

I cast my eyes over an edition of Shakespeare produced by Mr. Samuel Johnson. I found that he describes as ‘petty minds’ those foreigners who are astonished to find in plays by the great Shakespeare that ‘a Roman senator should play the buffoon and a king should appear drunk on the stage’.¹ Far be it from me to suspect that Mr. Johnson is given to clumsy jokes or is over-addicted to wine; but I find it rather extraordinary that he should include buffoonery and drunkenness among the beauties of the tragic theatre; the reason he gives for doing so is not less remarkable. ‘The poet’, he says, ‘overlooks the casual distinction of condition and country, as a painter who, satisfied with having painted the figure, neglects the drapery.’ The comparison would have been more accurate if he had been speaking of a painter who introduced ridiculous clowns into a noble subject, or portrayed Alexander the Great mounted on an ass at the battle of Arbela and the wife of Darius drinking with the rabble in a common tavern.

34. Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature

1808

Translated by John Black (Bohn edition, 1846), 360–1, 365.
The German translator of Shakespeare and Romantic critic, August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767–1845), proposed in his lectures to rescue Shakespeare from what he regarded as the misguided criticism of English, mainly eighteenth-century, writers. Johnson was numbered amongst them. See Introduction, pp. 8, 27.

The English critics are unanimous in their praise of the truth and uniform consistency of [Shakespeare’s] characters, of his heart-rending pathos, and his comic wit. Moreover, they extol the beauty and sublimity of his separate descriptions, images, and expressions. This last is the most superficial and cheap mode of criticising works of art. Johnson compares him who should endeavour to recommend this poet by passages unconnectedly torn from his works, to the pedant in Hierocles, who exhibited a brick as a sample of his house.¹ And yet how little, and how very unsatisfactorily does he himself speak of the pieces considered as a whole! Let any man, for instance, bring together the short characters which he gives at the close of each play, and see if the aggregate will amount to that sum of admiration which he himself, at his outset, has stated as the correct standard for the appreciation of the poet. It was, generally speaking, the prevailing tendency of the time which preceded our own (and which has shown itself particularly in physical science,) to consider everything having life as a mere accumulation of dead parts, to separate what exists only in connexion and cannot otherwise be conceived, instead of penetrating to the central point and viewing all the parts as so many irradiations from it. Hence nothing is so rare as a critic who can elevate himself to the comprehensive contemplation of a

work of art. Shakespeare’s compositions, from the very depth of purpose displayed in them, have been especially liable to the misfortune of being misunderstood. Besides, this prosaic species of criticism requires always that the poetic form should be applied to the details of execution; but when the plan of the piece is concerned, it never looks for more than the logical connexion of causes and effects, or some partial and trite moral by way of application; and all that cannot be reconciled therewith is declared superfluous, or even a pernicious appendage…. In this they altogether mistake the rights of poetry and the nature of the romantic drama, which, for the very reason that it is and ought to be picturesque, requires richer accompaniments and contrasts for its main groups. In all Art and Poetry, but more especially in the romantic, the Fancy lays claims to be considered as an independent mental power governed according to its own laws….

Johnson has objected to Shakespeare that his pathos is not always natural and free from affectation.² There are, it is true, passages, though comparatively speaking very few, where his poetry exceeds the bounds of actual dialogue, where a too soaring imagination, a too luxuriant wit, rendered a complete dramatic forgetfulness of himself impossible. With this exception, the censure originated in a fanciless way of thinking, to which everything appears unnatural that does not consort with its own tame insipidity. Hence an idea has been formed of simple and natural pathos, which consists in exclamations destitute of imagery and nowise elevated above everyday life. But energetical passions electrify all the mental powers, and will consequently, in highly-favoured natures, give utterance to themselves in ingenious and figurative expressions. It has often been remarked that indignation makes a man witty; and as despair occasionally breaks out into laughter, it may sometimes also give vent to itself in antithetical comparisons.

35. Coleridge on Johnson’s Shakespeare

1811–16

The first two extracts are taken from Coleridge’s ‘Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton’, (Nos. 6 and 12), delivered November 1811–January 1812 (Coleridge’s Essays and Lectures on Shakespeare…, 1907, 413–4, 477–8); the third comes from a letter to Daniel Stuart, 13 May 1816 (Letters from the Lake Poets to Daniel Stuart, 1889, 262–3).

I have been induced to offer these remarks, in order to obviate an objection made against Shakespeare on the ground of the multitude of his conceits.¹ I do not pretend to justify every conceit…. The notion against which I declare war is, that when ever a conceit is met with it is unnatural. People who entertain this opinion forget, that had they lived in the age of Shakespeare, they would have deemed them natural. Dryden in his translation of Juvenal has used the words ‘Look round the world,’² which are a literal version of the original; but Dr. Johnson has swelled and expanded this expression into the following couplet:—

Let observation, with extensive view,

Survey mankind from China to Peru;

Vanity of Human Wishes.

mere bombast and tautology; as much as to say, ‘Let observation with extensive observation observe mankind extensively.’³

Had Dr. Johnson lived in the time of Shakespeare, or even of Dryden, he would never have been guilty of such an outrage upon common sense and common language; and if people would, in idea, throw themselves back a couple of centuries, they would find that conceits, and even puns, were very allowable, because very natural. Puns often arise out of a mingled sense of injury, and contempt of the person in-

flicting it, and, as it seems to me, it is a natural way of expressing that mixed feeling. I could point out puns in Shakespeare, where they appear almost as if the first openings of the mouth of nature—where nothing else could so properly be said.

Another objection has been taken by Dr. Johnson, and Shakespeare has been taxed very severely. I refer to the scene where Hamlet enters and finds his uncle praying, and refuses to take his life, excepting when he is in the height of his iniquity. To assail him at such a moment of confession and repentance, Hamlet declares,

Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge.

Act III, Scene 3.

He therefore forbears, and postpones his uncle’s death, until he can catch him in some act

That has no relish of salvation in’t.

This conduct, and this sentiment, Dr. Johnson has pronounced to be so atrocious and horrible, as to be unfit to be put into the mouth of a human being.⁴ The fact, however, is that Dr. Johnson did not understand the character of Hamlet, and censured accordingly: the determination to allow the guilty King to escape at such a moment is only part of the indecision and irresoluteness of the hero.

It is among the feebleness of our nature, that we are often to a certain degree acted on by stories gravely asserted, of which we yet do most religiously disbelieve every syllable. Nay, which perhaps, we happen to know to be false. The truth is, that images and thoughts possess a power in and of themselves, independent of that act of the judgement or understanding by which we affirm or deny the existence of a reality correspondent to them. Such is the ordinary state of the mind in dreams…. Add to this a voluntary lending of the Will to this suspension of one of its own operations (i.e. that of comparison and consequent decision concerning the reality of any sensuous Impression) and you have the true theory of stage illusion—equally distant from the absurd notion of the French critics, who ground their principles on the principle of an absolute delusion, and of Dr. Johnson who would persuade us that our judgements are as broad awake during the most masterly representation of the deepest scenes of Othello, as a philosopher would be during the exhibition of a magic lanthorn with Punch and

Joan, and Pull Devil Pull Baker, &c on its painted Slides. Now as extremes always meet, this dogma of our dogmatic critic and soporific Irenist would lead by inevitable consequence to that very doctrine of the unities maintained by the French Belle Lettrists, which it was the object of his strangely overrated contradictory and most illogical Preface to Shakespear, to overthrow.

36. Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear’s Plays

1817

Extracts from the Preface to Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, 1817, xv–xxiii. See Introduction, pp. 8, 27.

[quotes from Schlegel’s Lectures, ‘by far the best account of the plays of Shakespear that has hitherto appeared.’]

We have the rather availed ourselves of this testimony of a foreign critic in behalf of Shakespear, because our own countryman, Dr. Johnson, has not been so favourable to him. It may be said of Shakespear, that ‘those who are not for him are against him’: for indifference is here the height of injustice. We may sometimes, in order ‘to do a great right, do a little wrong.’¹ An overstrained enthusiasm is more pardonable with respect to Shakespear than the want of it; for our admiration cannot easily surpass his genius. 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. He might in one sense be a judge of poetry as it falls within the limits and rules of prose, but not as it is poetry. Least of all was he qualified to be a judge of Shakespear, who ‘alone is high fantastical.’² Let those who have a prejudice against Johnson read Boswell’s Life of him: as those whom he has prejudiced against Shakespear should read his Irene. We do not say that a man to be a critic must necessarily be a poet: but to be a good critic, he ought

not to be a bad poet. Such poetry as a man deliberately writes, such, and such only will he like. Dr. Johnson’s Preface to his edition of Shakespear looks like a laborious attempt to bury the characteristic merits of his author under a load of cumbrous phraseology, and to weigh his excellences and defects in equal scales, stuffed full of ‘swelling figures and sonorous epithets.’³ Nor could it well be otherwise; Dr. Johnson’s general powers of reasoning overlaid his critical susceptibility. All his ideas were cast in a given mould, in a set form: they were made out by rule and system, by climax, inference, and antithesis:—Shakespear’s were the reverse. Johnson’s understanding dealt only in round numbers: the fractions were lost upon him. He reduced everything to the common standard of conventional propriety; and the most exquisite refinement or sublimity produced an effect on his mind, only as they could be translated into the language of measured prose. To him an excess of beauty was a fault; for it appeared to him like an excrescence; and his imagination was dazzled by the blaze of light. His writings neither shone with the beams of native genius, nor reflected them. The shifting shapes of fancy, the rainbow hues of things, made no impression on him: he seized only on the permanent and tangible. He had no idea of natural objects but ‘such as he could measure with a two-foot rule, or tell upon ten fingers’:⁴ he judged of human nature in the same way, by mood and figure: he saw only the definite, the positive, and the practical, the average forms of things, not their striking differences—their classes, not their degrees. He was a man of strong common sense and practical wisdom, rather than of genius or feeling. He retained the regular, habitual impressions of actual objects, but he could not follow the rapid flights of fancy, or the strong movements of passion. That is, he was to the poet what the painter of still life is to the painter of history. Common sense sympathises with the impressions of things on ordinary minds in ordinary circumstances: genius catches the glancing combinations presented to the eye of fancy, under the influence of passion. It is the province of the didactic reasoner to take cognizance of those results of human nature which are constantly repeated and always the same, which follow one another in regular succession, which are acted upon by large classes of men, and embodied in received customs, laws, language, and institutions; and it was in arranging, comparing, and arguing on these kind of general results, that Johnson’s excellence lay. But he could not quit his hold of the common-place and mechanical, and apply the general rule

to the particular exception, or shew how the nature of man was modified by the workings of passion, or the infinite fluctuations of thought and accident. Hence he could judge neither of the heights nor depths of poetry. Nor is this all; for being conscious of great powers in himself, and those powers of an adverse tendency to those of his author, he would be for setting up a foreign jurisdiction over poetry, and making criticism a kind of Procrustes’ bed of genius, where he might cut down imagination to matter-of-fact, regulate the passions according to reason, and translate the whole into logical diagrams and rhetorical declamation. Thus he says of Shakespear’s characters, in contradiction to what Pope had observed, and to what every one else feels, that each character is a species, instead of being an individual. He in fact found the general species or didactic form in Shakespear’s characters, which was all he sought or cared for; he did not find the individual traits, or the dramatic distinctions which Shakespear has engrafted on this general nature, because he felt no interest in them. Shakespear’s bold and happy flights of imagination were equally thrown away upon our author. He was not only without any particular fineness of organic sensibility, alive to all the ‘mighty world of ear and eye,’⁵ which is necessary to the painter or musician, but without that intenseness of passion, which, seeking to exaggerate whatever excites the feelings of pleasure or power in the mind, and moulding the impressions of natural objects according to the impulses of imagination, produces a genius and a taste for poetry. According to Dr. Johnson, a mountain is sublime, or a rose is beautiful; for that their name and definition imply. But he would no more be able to give the description of Dover cliff in Lear, or the description of flowers in The Winter’s Tale, than to describe the objects of a sixth sense; nor do we think he would have any very profound feeling of the beauty of the passages here referred to. A stately common-place, such as Congreve’s description of a ruin in the Mourning Bride, would have answered Johnson’s purpose just as well, or better than the first; and an indiscriminate profusion of scents and hues would have interfered less with the ordinary routine of his imagination than Perdita’s lines, which seem enamoured of their own sweetness—

——Daffodils

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,

But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes,

Or Cytherea’s breath. —⁶

No one who does not feel the passion which these objects inspire can go along with the imagination which seeks to express that passion and the uneasy sense of delight accompanying it by something still more beautiful, and no one can feel this passionate love of nature without quick natural sensibility. To a mere literal and formal apprehension, the inimitably characteristic epithet, ‘violets dim,’ must seem to imply a defect, rather than a beauty; and to any one, not feeling the full force of that epithet, which suggests an image like ‘the sleepy eye of love.’⁷ the allusion to ‘the lids of Juno’s eyes’ must appear extravagant and unmeaning. Shakespear’s fancy lent words and images to the most refined sensibility to nature, struggling for expression: his descriptions are identical with the things themselves, seen through the fine medium of passion: strip them of that connection, and try them by ordinary conceptions and ordinary rules, and they are as grotesque and barbarous as you please! —By thus lowering Shakespear’s genius to the standard of common-place invention, it was easy to show that his faults were as great as his beauties; for the excellence, which consists merely in a conformity to rules, is counterbalanced by the technical violation of them. Another circumstance which led to Dr. Johnson’s indiscriminate praise or censure of Shakespear, is the very structure of his style. Johnson wrote a kind of rhyming prose, in which he was as much compelled to finish the different clauses of his sentences, and to balance one period against another, as the writer of heroic verse is to keep to lines of ten syllables with similar terminations. He no sooner acknowledges the merits of his author in one line than the periodical revolution of his style carries the weight of his opinion completely over to the side of objection, thus keeping up a perpetual alternation of perfections and absurdities. We do not otherwise know how to account for such assertions as the following:—

In his tragic 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.⁸

Yet after saying that ‘his tragedy was skill,’ he affirms in the next page,

His declamations or set speeches are commonly cold and weak, for his power was the power of nature: when he endeavoured, like other tragic writers, to catch opportunities of amplification, and instead of inquiring what the occasion

demanded, to shew how much his stores of knowledge could supply, he seldom escapes without the pity or resentment of his reader.

Poor Shakespear! Between the charges here brought against him, of want of nature in the first instance, and of want of skill in the second, he could hardly escape being condemned. And again,

But the admirers of this great poet have most reason to complain when he approaches nearest to his highest excellence, and seems fully resolved to sink them in dejection, or mollify them with tender emotions by the fall of greatness, the danger of innocence, or the crosses of love. What he does best, he soon ceases to do. He no sooner begins to move than he counteracts himself; and terror and pity, as they are rising in the mind, are checked and blasted by sudden frigidity.⁹

In all this, our critic seems more bent on maintaining the equilibrium of his style than the consistency or truth of his opinions. —If Dr. Johnson’s opinion was right, the following observations on Shakespear’s Plays must be greatly exaggerated, if not ridiculous. If he was wrong, what has been said may perhaps account for his being so, without detracting from his ability and judgment in other things.