Preface to Shakespeare by Dr. Samuel Johnson

Dr. Samuel Johnson

•Samuel Johnson was born in 1709 in Lichfield Staffordshire.

•He was the son of a bookseller

•He is one of the greatest literary figure of the 18 century who also compiled A Dictionary of the English Language.

•Poverty and illness followed Johnson for most of his life.

•He contracted scrofula (also known as the King’s Evil) as a baby resulting in poor eyesight and hearing

•He attended the local grammar school in Lichfield and went to Pembroke College, Oxford

•He had to leave college after 13 months as his parents could not afford

•He was fiercely independent and refused any kind of charity.

•Once he was out from Oxford University, Johnson was depressed

•In 1732, Johnson went to Birmingham. Here the porters helped him out of his depression and regained his self confidence.

•1735 he married the widow Elizabeth Porter.

•With the help of his wife, Johnson opened a private school and David Garrick, who later became famous actor of his day, was one of his pupils.

•However the school venture failed and he and Elizabeth moved to London in 1737.

•Johnson worked as a hack writer for many years writing and editing articles for Edward Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine

•He received some critical success with his early poem London (1738) and his biography of the wayward poet Richard Savage (1744)

• 1754, turned out to be  the literary turning point in Johnson's life

•He published a pamphlet on Macbeth that won him Warburton’s praise, which he valued highly, because it came at a time of need.

•At this time he also began thinking about publishing an English Dictionary

•Johnson planned to complete his ambitious project in three years but it took him nearly 8 years to complete. This in itself was a remarkable  achievement.

•The dictionary was published in 1755. His financial condition improved once  Johnson received 1,575 pounds for the project.

•In 1756, Johnson published his proposal for printing by subscription, the Dramatic works of William Shakespeare, corrected and illustrated by Samuel Johnson.

•Once the subscription was advertised, he received a large sum of money personally.

•He foolhardily promised to bring out the work in a year’s time  but unable to bring it out at the promised time, he came under scathing attacks, especially by poet Charles Churchill.

•The upbraiding in Charles Churchill made him restart work on his edition of Shakespeare.

•It was finally published in eight volumes, octavo size  in 1765, nine years after the publication of the Proposal.

•The collection has a preface (72 pages in Johnson’s first edition), which is acknowledged as the best part of the edition and a great piece of neo-classical  literary criticism.

•His biographer and friend Boswell states:

“A blind indiscriminate admiration of Shakespeare had exposed the British nation to the ridicule of foreigners”

“Johnson, by candidly admitting the faults of his poet, had the more credit in bestowing on him Deserved and indisputable praise.”

•Johnson’s interest in Shakespeare developed early in his life.

•He read Shakespeare’s plays and poems with great intensity and involvement and his fascination continued throughout his life.

•His dictionary has more than 80,000 quotations from Shakespeare.

Johnson’s Age

•Johnson illustrates the changing position of man of letters in the 18th century England both in his life and works.

•He spoke truly for his age or the age at least which was coming to an end in his life time.

•Poet, critic, essayists, journalists, editor,  and a great Literary personality.

•He graduated from Grub street, the world of literary hacks by miscellaneous writers.

• Grub street in Johnson’s definition is a London street inhabited by the writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems.

Grub street writers

•In the 18th century the Grub street came to signify the fate of impoverished writers who scribbled for a pittance provided by bookseller-publishers.

•This was an important transitional phase for English writers between the decline of patronage and possibility of an individual writing career( where authors negotiated with publishers from a position of vantage)

• Johnson in moving out of Grub street simultaneously rejecting patronage, demonstrated how  a writer could now  achieve economic and social status on his own literary merits.

•Johnson had no illusions about poverty, suffering and human miseries.

•In 32nd number of The Rambler, he wrote, “the cure for the greatest part of human miseries is not radical, but palliative,”

•His Toryism was based on pessimism and devotion to the Church of England

•He was of the conviction that Christianity must be true if the universe is not a meaningless horror.

•He considered the order, authority and tradition of his native Church the most proper for an Englishman. 

Johnson’s literary career

•His literary career in London began  with miscellaneous writing for Edward Cave, publisher of The Gentleman’s Magazine

•His first important published work was London, a poem which appeared anonymously in 1738.

•The Vanity of Human Wishes with Johnson’s name appeared 11 years later

•In 1747, he published The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language, addressed to Lord Chesterfield (who did nothing for Johnson until the dictionary was finished)

Periodicals

•While working for the dictionary, Johnson turned to the periodical essay.

•The periodical essay was a peculiarly 18th century literary form which sprang up. For example, Steele’s Tatler (started in 1709), Henry Mackenzie’s Mirror (1779) and Lounger (1785).

•The Rambler appeared twice weekly, most of the essays had moral themes, carefully balanced and somewhat abstract.

•Some of the typical themes that appear frequently in The Rambler are “The folly of mis-spending time,” “Disadvantages of a bad education,” “Idleness an anxious and miserable state.”

Preface to the plays of Shakespeare

•Based on lecture by Dr. Anita Bhela, University of Delhi

• In the preface Johnson talks about the greatness of Shakespeare and also highlights his faults.

•Like a true neo-classicists he tries to create a balance between praise and blame.

•The Preface consists of two parts

•The first section deals with his critical analysis of Shakespeare as a dramatist

•The second section deals with an explication of the editorial methods used by Johnson in his Edition of Shakespeare.

•Johnson begins the Preface by asserting  that people cherish the works of the writers who are dead and neglect the modern.

•He says the ancients are to be honored not merely because they are ancient but because the truths that they present have stood the test of time.

•In his analysis of Shakespeare, he adopts a multi dimensional approach; examines the bard’s work from different angles; and presents him as timeless and universal but also as a product of his age and time.

•As a neo-classicists, he tries to maintain a structural balance of praise and blame  for Shakespeare.

•He tries to make a distinction between the appeal of Shakespeare to his contemporaries and to future generations.

•In his Preface Johnson points to the fact that Shakespeare is a “poet of nature.” 

“Holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life”: 

all his characters  be they Romans, Danes or kings represent general human passions and principles common to all humans.

•Shakespeare’s characters depict universal human passions, yet they are distinctly individualized.

•He deals not only with love but with all passions.

•He views Shakespeare’s plays neither as tragedies or comedies but just representations “exhibiting the real state of sub-lunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow.”

•Talking about the ancients, Johnson compares Shakespeare to the Romans and Greeks that the ancients concentrated on producing either comedy or tragedy but no Greek or Roman author attempted to do both, but Shakespeare possessed the genius to do both in the same composition.

•He further states that his mingled drama goes against the rules of dramatic writing but for Johnson realism supersedes the claim of rules:

•“there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature….. The end of the poetry is to instruct by pleasing”

•He also defends Shakespeare for mingling tragedy with comedy.

“Mingled drama may convey all the instruction of tragedy or comedy….. because it includes both in its alterations of exhibition and approaches nearer than either to the appearance of life”

•If we go a little back, Phillip Sidney did not appreciate that mingling of tragedy with comedy, while Johnson believed it added a variety to the play.

•Mingling is justified according to Johnson because it instructs and delights.

•As many critics were of the opinion that mixing of tragedy and comedy diminishes  the  passions of the dramatists aims, Johnson believes it rather contributes to the pleasure. 

Shakespeare’s Faults

•Johnson’s expectations from art was high. For him, art was to teach morals, that art should depict poetic justice.

• This is something Johnson finds missing in Shakespeare’s plays.

•He believes that being true to life is not enough, although life may not have a poetic justice but as an artists  he  should know better.

•The audience is aware of watching the play, and in this Johnson feels that Shakespeare sacrifices virtue to convenience ie he was more interested in pleasing than in instructing.

•According to Johnson “a play in which the wicked prosper, and the virtuous miscarry may doubtless be good, because it is just a representation of the common events of human life.”

•“but since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot easily be persuaded, that the observation of justice makes a play worse; or, that if other excellencies are equal, the audience will not always rise better pleased from the final triumph of persecuted virtue”

•He also finds faults with Shakespeare’s plot.

•If we go back in the past, Aristotle in his Poetics said that plot was extremely important and that it must have a beginning, middle and an end and it should be the result of cause and effect.

•According to Johnson, Shakespeare’s plots are loosely formed and not pursued with diligence.

• He also perhaps missed the opportunity to instruct.

•He finds Shakespeare guilty of violating chronology and verisimilitude relating to time and place.

•For example, Hector quotes Aristotle

•In Troilus and Cressida, the love of Theseus and Hippolyta is combined with the Gothic mythology of Fairies

•Johnson laud’s Shakespeare’s skills in writing comic scenes but doesn’t gloss over the faults in many comic dialogues: The language used is coarse.

•The meanness, tediousness, and obscurity in Shakespeare’s tragedies, the undesirable effect of excessive labour

•The narration suffers as it is often verbose and prolix, full of verbiage and unnecessary repetition.

•At times words do not match the occasion.

•He also violates the chronology and verisimilitude(the appearance of being true or real).

“Repeatedly Johnson finds Shakespeare’s tragic scenes marred by a sudden drop in emotional temperature caused by some infelicity of language- a pun, a conceit, a hyperbole”

•Shakespeare’s violation of the unities, Sidney was of the view that all dramatists, must adhere to the three unities as per the classists.

•Johnson thinks that Shakespeare rather than following the unity of time and place, he follows the unity of action.

•Johnson states that the audience is continuously aware of the play and therefore adhering to the unity of time and place in not a necessity. 

Sources:

A Critical History of English literature, volume 4, by David Daiches

 Lecture inputs from Prof Anita Bhela (University of Delhi)