Overview of Preface to Shakespeare by Samuel Johnson

Hello Learners,

Here is a blog on an overview of Preface to Shakespeare by Samuel Johnson.

 General understanding of Preface to Shakespeare

Dr. Samuel Johnson’s preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare has long been considered a classic document of English literary criticism. In it, Johnson sets forth his editorial principles and gives an appreciative analysis of the “excellences” and “defects” of the works of Shakespeare. Many of his points have become fundamental tenets of modern criticism; others give greater insight into Johnson’s prejudices than into Shakespeare’s genius. The resonant prose of the preface adds authority to the views of its author.

Johnson is a true classicist in his concern with the universal rather than with the particular; the highest praise he bestows upon Shakespeare is to say that his plays are “just representations of general nature.” The dramatist has relied upon his knowledge of human nature, rather than on bizarre effects, for his success. “The pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth,” Johnson concludes. It is for this reason that Shakespeare has outlived his century and reached the point at which his works can be judged solely on their own merits, without the interference of personal interests and prejudices that make criticism of one’s contemporaries difficult.

Johnson praises Shakespeare’s art of characterization highlighting their variety, depth, credibility and, power of delighting his audience. Using his comparative method he observes, “They are the genuine progeny of common humanity…In the writings of other poets, a character is too often an individual. In those of Shakespeare, it is commonly a species.” The characters and the situations are so impressive because “Shakespeare has no heroes, his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should himself has spoken or acted on the same occasion.” This culminates in his view, that “his drama is the mirror of life.

Johnson feels that the readers of his time can often understand the universality of Shakespeare’s vision better than the audiences of Elizabethan England could, for the intervening centuries have freed the plays of their topicality. The characters in the plays are not limited by time or nationality; they are, rather, “the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find.” Implicitly criticizing earlier editors of Shakespeare, who had dotted their pages with asterisks marking particularly fine passages, Johnson contends that the greatness of the plays lies primarily in their total effect, in the naturalness of the action, the dialogue, and the characterization.

Johnson’s enumeration of faults in Shakespeare in itself is a classic piece of criticism. These faults he finds are owing to two causes—(a) carelessness and (b) excess of conceit. Shakespeare’s obscurities arise from:

(a)  the careless manner of publication;

(b) the shifting fashions and grammatical license of Elizabethan English;

(c) the use of colloquial English,

(d) the use of many allusions, references, etc., to topical events and personalities,

(e) the rapid flow of ideas which often hurries him to a second thought before the first has been fully explained.

Thus many of Shakespeare’s obscurities belong either to the age or the necessities of stagecraft and not to the man.

Written after Johnson had spent nine years laboring to produce an edition of Shakespeare’s plays, the Preface to Shakespeare is characterized by sweeping generalizations about the dramatist’s works and by stunning pronouncements about its merits, judgments that elevate Shakespeare to the top spot among European writers of any century. At times, Johnson displays the tendency of his contemporaries to fault Shakespeare for his propensity for wordplay and for ignoring the demands for poetic justice in his plays; readers of subsequent generations have found these criticisms to reflect the inadequacies of the critic more than they do those of the dramatist. What sets Johnson’s work apart from that of his contemporaries, however, is the immense learning that lies beneath so many of his judgments; he consistently displays his familiarity with the texts, and his generalizations are rooted in specific passages from the dramas. Further, Johnson is the first among the great Shakespeare critics to stress the playwright’s sound understanding of human nature. Johnson’s focus on character analysis initiated a critical trend that would be dominant in Shakespeare criticism (in fact, all of dramatic criticism) for more than a century and would lead to the great work of critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and A. C. Bradley.

---

An option

“Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, and the poet of nature, the poet that holds up his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life.”
– “Preface to Shakespeare” Para 8

One of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s most notable services to Shakespearean criticism is that he exposes the central style of Shakespeare’s plays as its universality. He passes the judgment that Shakespeare is a “poet of nature” meaning that through his works he reflects life-the real life and manners.

Shakespeare is a poet of nature who faithfully represents human nature in his plays. He does not falsify reality. Shakespeare is a poet of nature also because his characters are natural; they act and behave think and speak like human beings. His characters are faithful representations of humanity. He deals with passions and principles which are common to humanity. He does not merely depict the particular manner and customs of any one country or age. His characters are not merely kings and Romans. They are above all human beings. So, his characters have a universal appeal. But this does not mean that they do not have any individual qualities. The speech of one character can not be placed in the mouth of another, and they can easily be differentiated from each other by their speeches. The dialogue he uses “seems to have been gleaned by a different selection of common conversation and common occurrences.” They are also true to the age, sex, or profession to which they belong. They are also true to type.

In Shakespeare’s characterization, we find a realistic and convincing portrayal of human nature. Shakespeare does not depict persons of either fabulous excellence or unexampled depravity. The characters in his plays are not heroes but only human beings who act and think in the way in which the reader himself would act and think under the circumstances. Even where the agency is supernatural, the dialogue accords with real life. In his plays, Shakespeare has shown human nature not only as it acts in real solutions but as it would be found in a situation that may never arise.

Shakespeare is most original in his portrayal of characters. Johnson says that no writer before him, with the possible exception of Chaucer, has portrayed the human character in such a realistic manner. Shakespeare gathered his knowledge of human nature from this personal observation. This knowledge has enabled him to portray a multiplicity and diversity of character and to reveal subtle distinctions between man and man. In this respect, he has none to intimate, though he has been imitated by all writers. Whether life or nature is his subject, he gives evidence of having seen things with his own eyes.

It is because of the universality of his characterization that Shakespeare’s plays are full of practical axioms and domestic wisdom. From them can be formulated a philosophy of life, of great practical value in real life. He is not great only in particular passages but the entire conduct of his action brings out his greatness as a poet of (human) nature.

Shakespeare’s realism, says Johnson is to be seen also in the fact that he does not give undue prominence to the passion of love in his plays. Dramatists in general give excessive importance to the theme of love and often violate probability and misrepresent life. Shakespeare knows that- “Love is only one of many passions,” and that it has no great influence upon the sum of life.

Johnson defends Shakespeare for his mingling of the tragic and comic elements in his plays on the ground of realism. Such mingling only serves to show us the course of the world in which “the loss of one is the gain of another, at the same time” “the reveler hastening to his wine and the mourner burying his friend.”

Nor does Johnson disapprove of Shakespeare’s violation of the unities of place and time. He defends Shakespeare o the ground of dramatic illusion. Literature is to be appreciated not in the literal sense but by the imagination. The audience’s imagination is kept very active when he watches a play. The audience knows that he is going to watch a fictitious reality. If an audience in a theatre can accept the stage as a locality in the city of Rome, he will also accept the change from Rome to Alexandria. The unity of time may likewise be violated on the same principle.

Shakespeare, says Johnson, is the originator of “the form, the character, the language and the shows” of English drama. He is the first playwright whose tragic as well as comic plays succeed in providing the dramatic pleasure appropriate to them.

Thus Johnson shows his penetrating power which probes to the very core of Shakespeare’s wit and reveals its deep humanity and its sovereign realism.

Intro to the neo-classical tenet of literary criticism:
Johnson is biased in the sense that he generally favors the neo-classical standards of criticism of his day, that is to say, standards deriving from the ideas of ancient classical writers. This leads him to express disapproval of certain features of Shakespeare’s plays – features which are nowadays regarded as being some of Shakespeare’s greatest strengths. Johnson recognizes the power of the plays in presenting an intense and truthful view of human nature and is true to his classical values in praising Shakespeare for dealing with universal truths but also castigates him for a lack of morality in his plays. For instance, in tragedies, virtue is not seen to be rewarded. Johnson’s neo-classical ideals led him to believe that the main purpose of art is to morally instruct whereas he sees Shakespeare as being primarily an entertainer. Johnson also criticizes Shakespeare for not observing the dramatic unities of time, place, and action as proposed by the influential Ancient Greek critic Aristotle and frowns upon Shakespeare’s excessive punning and wordplay. Such things do not trouble the majority of critics today.

However, overall, Johnson does recognize and praise the great power of Shakespeare’s work, and his Preface to Shakespeare did much to bring Shakespeare’s plays to the forefront of critical attention – where, of course, they remain today.

(Addition)

Johnson is the last important critic of neoclassicism, in an age where pre-Romantic ideas are more widely accepted than neoclassicism. Johnson is usually less dogmatic and more eclectic than Pope in his assertion of neoclassical values. Moreover, sometimes Johnson’s claims are contradictory: for instance, he wants at once realism and poetic justice on stage. He is not a consistent theorist, but rather a practical critic of penetrating insights, honesty, and common sense. In Johnson, we can witness both the dead weight of a tradition and the signs that a new conception of literature is emerging. Johnson had a strong classical mind and a great desire for order and coherence. But he had very little patience with whatever he perceived to be false, useless, or pretentious, and he made short work of many neoclassical prejudices. He has become an emblematic character among literary critics, as a personification of English common sense and distrust of vague abstractions or fantastic theoretical systems.

Conclusion: Johnson may have endorsed the principles of Neoclassicism, but in reality, he is a transitional critic, and he is not alien to the influence that empiricist philosophy has on critical thought in this age. And his personal taste often reveals a sensitivity towards detail, the picturesque, and the individual (for example, biography and personal morality, as opposed to philosophy) which appears obscured in his theories. There is often a gap between Johnson’s theoretical concepts and his actual critical judgments: his judgments seem to be independent of the theories he is supposed to be applying. For instance, he repeats the traditional Neoclassic view of style as an ornament. He defends the ideas of different levels of style, specifically poetic diction. But in practice, he also holds a different, more modern conception of style. In Johnson’s practical criticism, style is seen as a way of perceiving the world. This can be seen above all in his rejections of poetic clichés and worn-out, trite expressions which derive from previous literature and not from personal experience.

So, Johnson is superficially a neoclassical critic, above all in his explicit theoretical statements. But in his personal taste and his practical criticism, we can see that he is in fact a transitional critic, just like many others which will be dealt with now. “His stylistic criticism, and probably in some degree his personal taste, reveals the strain of a contradiction which he did not perceive.” This is to a certain extent the contradiction of his age; we will see how the emergence of this new literary standard in the esthetic thought of many other writers apart from Johnson.

Works Cited:- 

https://maenglishselfstudy.wordpress.com/2019/09/02/paper-iii-preface-to-shakespeare-by-dr-samuel-johnson/