Preface to Shakespeare : criticism and comments

Preface to Shakespeare : criticism and comments

Joseph Wood Krutch : In the first place, he (Johnson) is primarily concerned, not with convicting Shakespeare of vulgarity but of explaining how he has come to be charged with such a fault by persons who mistake custom for nature. In the second place Johnson is demonstrating not that time has served to render Shakespeare ridiculous but that his poetic force triumphs easily over apparent faults which changes of fashion have created.

Undoubtedly there are a few, though only a very few, occasions when Johnson’s judgement on a particular passages or event is led astray by his concern for formal moralizing. One striking example of such an occasion is a remark in the general comment on As You Like it. Most present-day readers would certainly agree that the opportunity was well lost and, if they are among those who find artistic reasons for what the vulgar take to be lapses, would certainly insist that the perfunctory treatment of the usurper’s reform is one of Shakespeare’s way of suggesting that no realism is intended in this particular play. In any event, if he had done what Johnson so unwisely wishes, we would only have had a passage more like Addison than like Shakespeare and hence open to the objection which Johnson had elsewhere made — that one is reminded of the author than of the play. Such occasional lapses from his own better judgement into the taste of his time might also be illustrated by an occasional emendation which not only weakens the text but violates Johnson’s own principle that emendation should never be made simply because one feels that an author ought to have written something different from what he did write.

George Waston : Three major inconsistencies emerge from the Preface as a whole. First, tragi-comedy is justified on conflicting grounds. This, the second section, is one of the most original parts of the Preface . Dryden too had occasionally defended mixed plays, but only as the occasion suited; he had condemned them too. And given that the neo-classic critics had abandoned, or forgotten, the Renaissance distinction between tragedy and comedy, it must indeed have seemed important to justify Shakespeare’s mixture of ‘crimes’ and absurdities’. But it will hardly do to justify tragicomedy on Dryden’s grounds that contraries set off each other, and then to excuse the rules of criticism” on the grounds that ‘there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature” and that ‘the mingled drama’ can be shown to have instructed as well as pleased “this is a characteristically Johnsonian use of the escape-clause. Second, the extravagant (or at least unqualified) praise of Shakespeare as supremely, “the poet of nature” in the first part of the Preface seems discredited in the light of some of his disparagements towards the end: “As we everything to him, he owes something to us we fix our eyes upon his graces, and turn them from his deformities, and endure in him what we should in another loathe or despise He has perhaps not one play which if it were now exhibited as the work of a contemporary writer would be heard to the conclusion’. This has the ring of sincerity but if sincere, it makes the veneration of the opening pages look prescriptive indeed. And finally, Johnson’s somewhat Coleridgean praise for Shakespeare as the poet of the “central” style, probably to be sought in the common intercourse of life, among those who speak only to be understood, without ambition of elegance”, seems out of tune with the attack that follows, in the list of Shakespeare’s defects, upon his tumour” his weak declamation, his “unwieldy sentiment”. More than once, the Preface seems torn apart by Johnson’s failure to qualify either his praise or his blame. But there are moments of scintillating perception. The refutation of the unities of time and place, and the assertion of the special status of dramatic illusion, is a model of logical demonstration, and rich in those effects of mock-simplicity which Johnson loved to affect.

Walter Jackson Bate: When the circumstances under which it was written are considered, the achievement of this work can only become a matter of conjecture for the moralist or the historian of human genius. For this triumph of sanity, of rounded understanding, was attained against an ominous background of personal experience. After the magnificent general opening occurs the famous paragraph which makes the transition to the basic premise on which the Preface is to build. In it we may sense the pull of “novelty’— of the ‘romance of chivalry” he had read as a boy and of the “irregular” agitation of his own unruly emotions. We may feel the weight of the “satiety of life” of which he speaks, the irritable and nervous “quest” for novelty which it incites, and Johnson’s own weary but constant realization that the vividness of “sudden wonder” that he craved is only too “soon exhausted’. And so hard-won is the weight of experience that the muscular laying aside of all that “novelty” signifies, in favour of the “repose”, the “stability” and ordering of experience through objective perception, is all the more final and genuine. ‘Nothing” he begins, “can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature’, of the broad, enduring aspects of external reality.

John Bailey: No man did more, perhaps, to call criticism back from paths that led to nowhere, or to suggest directions in which discoveries might be made. The most marked contrast between him and earlier critics is his caution about altering the received text. He first stemmed the tide of rash emendation, and the ebb which began with him has continued ever since. He neither overestimated the importance nor underestimated the difficulties of the critic of Shakespeare. With his usual sense of the true scale of things he treats the quarrels of commentators with contempt; “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 not liberty”, and in another place he characteristically bids his angry colleagues to join with him in remembering amidst their triumphs over the “nonsensical’ opinions of dead rivals that we likewise are men and, as Swift observed to Burnet, “we shall soon be among the dead ourselves’. He knows too that “notes are necessary evils” add advises the young reader to begin by ignoring them and letting Shakespeare have his way alone.

Jean H. Hagstrum : It clear that Johnson has, though in complex and often underground ways, exerted considerable influence on twentieth century criticism. As Edward Emley has pointed out,
I. A. Richards and William Empson have, in their preoccupation with Coleridge and other critics, never fully realized their own affinity with the psychology and semantics of Johnson. But the so called New Critics have more than once had to test their strength against Johnson, especially in their rehabilitation of metaphysical, and have more than once come out of the fray admiring their adversary.

T.S. Eliot: The Preface to Shakespeare was published in 1765 and Voltaire, still writing ten years and more after this event, was maintaining an opposite point of view. Johnson saw deeper than Voltaire, in this as in most matters. Johnson perceived, though not explicitly, that the distinctions of tragic and comic are superficial for us — though he did not know how important they were for the Greeks; for he did not know that they sprang from a difference in ritual. As a poet and he was a fine poet — Johnson is at the end of a tether, but as a critic — and he was greater as critic than as poet — Johnson has a place comparable to that of Cowley as a poet in that we cannot say whether to classify him as the last of one kind of the first of another.

Joseph Wood Krutch : It is hardly necessary to repeat that Johnson was not “a literary dictator.” England has never known a man to whom that title could justly be applied, for not even Dryden, whose authority was probably more widely respected in the literary world than Johnson’s ever was, never exercised anything like undisputed sway. But Johnson did take all literature for his province, and did, before he had finished his career, manage to have his say concerning most of the English writers whom he thought of as first-rate.

George Watson: With Samuel Johnson (1709-84), English criticism achieves greatness on a scale that any reader can instantly recognize. Johnson certainly believed that the object of criticism was, in a very literal sense, to lay down the law, to ascertain and apply general principles of poetic excellence.

From his earliest years, Boswell tells us, he loved to read poetry, but hardly ever read any poem to an end, and he once asked an acquaintance incredulously : “Sir, do you read books through?” This is not the language of the close critical analyst. In suggest virtues of quite another kind: momentary but brilliant insights, a gift for perceiving relationships, certainty of judgement, breadth. And these are precisely the virtues of Johnson’s criticism. And finally, Johnson is an unambiguously historical critic and the true father of historical criticism in English.

George Saintsbury: The Shakespeare Preface is a specially interesting document, because of its illustration, not merely of Johnson’s native critical vigour, not merely of his imbibed eighteenth century prejudices, but of that peculiar position of compromise and reservation which, as we have said and shall say, is at once the condemnation and the salvation of the English critical position at this time. That Johnson might have been greater still at other times need not necessarily be denied; though it is at least open to doubt whether any other time would have suited his whole disposition better. But, as he is, he is great His critical calculus is perfectly sound on its postulates and axioms; and you have only to apply checks and correctives (which are easily ascertained, and kept ready) to adjust it to absolute critical truth. And, what is more, he has not merely flourished and vapoured critical abstraction, but has left us a solid reasoned body of critical judgement We may freely disagree with his judgement, but we can never justly disable his judgement; and this is the real criterion of a great critic.