...translates it as "Behold a spectacle." 60 In his Preface to Shakespeare (1765), Johnson says: "Shakespeare's plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either...or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind." See Samuel Johnson: Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose, ed. Bertrand H. Bronson (New York: Holt, Rinehart...

...Shakespeare's mixture of high and low genres) but garnered admiration a century later. 'Shakespeare's plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either...proportion and innumerable modes of combination', observed Samuel Johnson.51 Each play contains elements of the tragic and the comic, regardless of whether...