CHAPTER VI The Preface to Shakespeare HE history of Johnson's publications upon Shakespeare extends over a period of more than twenty years. In 1745 he had published anonymously his Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth: with Remarks on Sir Thomas Hanmer's Edition of Shakespeare. To which is affixed Proposals for a new Edition of Shakespeare, with a Specimen. He received little encouragement and laid aside his plan until 1756, when he issued new Proposals. Meanwhile he had written admirably of Shakespeare in the Prologue spoken by Mr. Garrick at the opening of the Drury Lane Theatre in 1747; in 1751 he had contributed to the Rambler (168) his celebrated censure of the diction of Macbeth on the score of "lowness"; and in 1753 appeared his dedication of Mrs. Charlotte Lennox's Shakespeare Illustrated.1 He had promised in the Proposals that his edition should be published on or before Christmas, 1757, but, as was usual with him in the projection of any great work, he underestimated the labor involved. In December, 1757, he promised it by the following March, and in March he declared it would appear before summer. The subscriptions paid for and already spent, he now sank back into that dangerous indolence which was one of his besetting sins. He would probably never have redeemed his promises, had not a stinging rebuke administered to him in Churchill's Ghost roused his dormant powers. He for subscribers bates his hook, And takes your cash; but where's the book? 1. Bos. I, 255. 2. Ibid. I, 318, 323, 327. No matter where; wise fear, you know, But what, to serve our private ends, Forbids the cheating of our friends? Boswell records that in 1764 and 1765 Johnson was hard at work at the edition, and in October, 1765, it finally appeared.' The work at once received great attention. Kenrick, who had previously assailed the Dictionary in his Deformities of Dr. Johnson, the same year issued A Review of Dr. 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, and Tyrwhitt's Observations and Conjectures upon some Passages of Shakespeare, 1776, was practically an examination of Johnson's work. A good deal of the current criticism of the Preface dealt with the reflections there expressed against the "Unities," and the reviews of the day, the Critical and the Monthly, took positions respectively for and against the author's conclusions. Notices also appeared in the London Magazine, the Gentleman's Magazine, and the Annual Register. Altogether the publication of the eight volumes was considered an important event in the annals of learning. These criticisms, though they elicited no reply from the editor, yet revealed to him and to the public the defects and limitations of the work. Johnson was no great antiquary and, notwithstanding his claim to an expert knowledge of the history of the language, he possessed no special acquaintance with Elizabethan English. Indolence or chance or, more probably, defective eyesight had prevented an effective collation of early quartos of the plays with the folios, and he had contented himself with printing the greater part of the text from Warburton's unreliable edition. He recognized his shortcomings and 1. "In 1764 and 1765 it should seem that Dr. Johnson was so busily employed with his edition of Shakespeare, as to have had little leisure for any other literary exertion, or, indeed, even for private correspondence." Bos. II, 1. consented to a revision of the text by George Steevens, a far more accurate Elizabethan scholar, if not his equal as a literary critic. The revised text appeared in 1773, containing the emendations and notes which had been retained from the edition of 1765 carefully labelled as Johnson's own, and the new ones with the proper acknowledgments. The eighteenth-century appreciation of Shakespeare was genuine if somewhat grudging. Up to the publication of Dr. Johnson's great Preface, critics of the poet had, consciously or not, adopted the opinions of one or the other of two schools of criticism. Dryden's great influence as a man of letters and his splendid critical utterances had founded a kind of traditional admiration for Shakespeare's mighty though untutored genius. His own struggles to free himself from the bondage of the rules had prevented as outspoken an admiration of his idol as his inclinations might have warranted. And yet he has left us a tribute to the elder dramatist as glowing, as inspired, as any of the more self-conscious eulogies composed a hundred and twenty-five years later. On the other side stood Rymer, the strict interpreter of the rules of Aristotle, and the exemplar of narrowness and pedantry in their application. His violent onslaught upon Shakespearean tragedy, on the score of its violation of the neo-classical doctrine of verisimilitude, was heeded and respected by eighteenth-century editors of Shakespeare down to the time of Johnson, who finally disposed of the Rymer fetich, as he was destined to destroy many another neoclassical bogey through this same Preface to Shakespeare. But before the time of Johnson, Rymer's point of view, whether discredited as a whole or not, had induced men to lament Shakespeare's want of art and to seek subjects for praise in his strength and faithful imitation of nature as a partial recompense for ignorance of the rules. Johnson, never stooping to apologize for his author's defects, placed himself staunchly with the school of Dryden. He com mends Dryden's account of Shakespeare as a "perpetual model of encomiastick criticism" and admires the comprehensiveness of the exhibition. Later editors, he says, can but boast of having diffused or paraphrased this epitome of excellence, of having changed Dryden's gold for baser metal, of lower value though of greater bulk. He praises Dryden's remarks as the criticism of a poet, "not a dull collection of theorems, nor a rude detection of faults, which perhaps the censor was not able to have committed; but a gay and vigorous dissertation, where delight is mingled with instruction, and where the author proves his right of judgement by his power of performance." He is equally emphatic in his criticism of Rymer's roughshod methods of wholesale destruction. "With Dryden," he declares, "we are wandering in quest of Truth, whom we find, if we find her at all, drest in the graces of elegance; and if we miss her, the labour of the pursuit rewards itself: we are led only through fragrance and flowers. Rymer, without taking a nearer, takes a rougher way; every step is to be made through thorns and brambles, and Truth, if we meet her, appears repulsive by her mien and ungraceful by her habit. Dryden's criticism has the majesty of a queen; Rymer's has the ferocity of a tyrant." It is Rymer to whom he replies in the Preface, directly; now it is Rymer and Dennis and Voltaire upon Shakespeare's disregard for the decorum of his characters; again it is Voltaire and Rymer upon tragi-comedy; and finally it is Rymer and Voltaire upon the Unities. "The petty cavils of petty minds," in applying "rules merely positive" to the comprehensive genius of Shakespeare, succeed only in showing the littleness of the critics. Mr. Saintsbury's sweeping assertion, in his History of Criticism, as to the utter worthlessness of the Preface, and the contemptuous attitude of other temperamental critics toward this famous document, have tended to obscure the real critical 1. Lives, I, 412. merits underlying its somewhat declamatory style. I wish to offer a reasonable defense by a brief analysis, largely through a paraphrase of Johnson's own words, of the three or four topics he has discussed: what he has to say upon the eighteenth-century dictum that Shakespeare was above all things the poet of nature, whose plays were after all greater than the rules; his criticism of certain faults of style and construction; and his attack upon the conventional neo-classical criticism, such as the unities of time and place, tragi-comedy, and verisimilitude. I hope to be able to prove that this much scorned Preface was a most important document in the history of criticism. I shall conclude with a comparison of the promise of the author's Proposals of 1756 and the degree of their fulfillment in 1765. To Johnson, as to the whole century, just representations of general nature were the essential characteristics of the classical ideal, and Shakespeare appealed to all as the great poet of nature, who held up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life. Neither his greatness as a poet nor his delightful romantic situations came first to the minds of the critics who regarded Dryden and Pope as the supreme expression of the poetical spirit; they turned rather by preference to what they deemed his interpretation of human nature in terms of universal experience. Johnson, whose mind was stocked with principles depending on nature and truth as formulated by classical critics, and whose temper was essentially reasonable, found these sentiments too congenial for him to adopt any other approach to his poet. He looked upon Shakespeare, to paraphrase his own words, as the poet who, by making nature predominate over accident, has depicted the influence of those general passions by which all minds are agitated, and has succeeded beyond all others in painting life in its native colors. Unlike other poets, whose characters are individuals, he has commonly kept his a species, |