I have lost count of the number of times that I have read Samuel Johnson’s Preface to his edition of Shakespeare (1765). This time, however, I came to it with some pretty sharp questions, and this post will offer a brief look at what this approach led me to in the text. The questions were, simply enough, one: ‘what role is played by French culture here?’ and two: ‘what is Johnson’s attitude to the stage?’ The French question produced little of interest: Voltaire is a part of a trinity of “petty minds”, along with Dennis and Rymer; criticisms of love plots replay debates held in France over Corneille’s intrigues; and Johnson is – unsurprisingly – well read in French literature, glossing obscure words via their French analogues, using Voltaire as a source of unjust criticisms against Shakespeare, and – perhaps – echoing Fontenelle’s thoughts on dramatic illusion.

As for the theatre, there is no way I can fit it all into a single list. First, let us begin with those passages where Johnson refers to the theatre of Shakespeare’s day. The general idea here is that the past condition of the theatre had an important effect on Shakespeare. At several points, Johnson observes that the dynamics of the theatre Shakespeare wrote for no longer exist, so that while “He has scenes of undoubted and perpetual excellence, but perhaps not one play, which, if it were now exhibited as the work of a contemporary writer, would be heard to the conclusion.” This is a controversial point in the mid-eighteenth century, given that Wilkes is prepared to argue that all the best theatre comes from skilled revivals and not from contemporaries’ pens. Elsewhere in the preface, Johnson makes his opinion clear about Shakespeare’s original audiences and their impact on his writing, being obliged to create “incidents by which the attention of a rude people was more easily caught than by sentiment or argumentation”. As well, however, as Shakespeare’s pandering to an audience, we have the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre to blame for something else, namely the corruption of Shakespeare’s text. In the Proposals for his edition of Shakespeare, Johnson justifies the editor’s work by pointing out that it was common practice for plays to be “immediately copied for the actors, and multiplied by transcript after transcript, vitiated by the blunders of the penman, or changed by the affectation of the player”. In a similar vein, Johnson also denigrates the first publishers of Shakespeare, Heminge and Condell, by calling them “The players,who in their edition divided our author’s works into comedies, histories, and tragedies, [and who] seem not to have distinguished the three kinds, by any very exact or definite ideas.”

From this brief list of all the bad Johnson finds in the theatre, be it unfortunate influence over Shakespeare’s art or corruption of his text, it is not surprising that there is much in Johnson that seeks to detach Shakespeare from the stage. When establishing Shakespeare’s reputation, it is pointed out that he is “read without any other reason than the desire of pleasure”. Further on, Johnson even goes so far as to rewrite Hamlet into praise of the author. Whereas Hamlet calls holding “a mirror up to nature” “the purpose of playing”, Johnson writes “Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life.” The poet has replaced the player. Less dramatically, Johnson clearly has readers in mind throughout this text: he talks of passages left “to be disentanbled and evolved by those who have more leisure to bestow upon [them]”, something impossible in a theatre, and suggests that comedy pleases by “thoughts and language” rather than the skill of its performance.

This is all a reasonable enough approach, and indeed one well suited to the opening pages of a book purveying edited and annotated versions of Shakespeare’s plays. Nevertheless, it does seem to be doing Shakespeare something of an injustice, not least because some of Johnson’s own criticisms of the playwright don’t hold water if you think about how they would be staged.
If Shakespeare’s “precepts and axioms drop casually from him” on the page, they need not do so on the stage; if, in comedy, “neither his gentlemen nor his ladies have much delicacy, nor are sufficiently distinguished from his clowns by any appearance of refined manners” when reading, different actors can still create distinction and delicacy; if “his declamations or set pieces are commonly cold and weak”, why then were plays like Henry VIII so popular on the stage of the time?

One last point here about the theatre, albeit rather different from all this talk of actors, stages and audiences. A famous part of the preface defends Shakespeare from the accusation of breaking the unities by pointing out that if an audience is able to delude themselves into believing that the stage is Egypt, then they should have no problem conceiving that the action has moved from Egypt to Rome. Johnson then flips the argument on its head, and points out that the breaking of the unities is also possible since “The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players.” This passage was attacked by William Kenrick in a review of Johnson’s Preface.

We do not pretend to say that the spectators are not always in their senses; or that they do not know (if the question were put to them) that the stage is only a stage, and the players are only players. But we will venture to say, they are often so intent on the scene as to be absent with regard to everything else. A spectator makes, properly assisted by dramatic representation, makes no reflections about the fiction or reality of it, so long as the action proceeds without grossly offending, or palpably imposing on the senses.

The point here, and one unsurprisingly ignored by Johnson given his efforts to detach Shakespeare from the stage, is that his blunt arguing has skirted past nuances which Kenrick lays out (at length – this is a small chunk of it). Chief among these nuances is that a spectator can still be intent, and, to all intents and purposes, deeply involved in something, even if the “players are only players”. There are degrees of delusion, and it is striking that much theorising about theatrical illusion occurs in works around Shakespeare: Montagu, Wilkes, and even – read a certain way – those texts interested in the psychology of Shakespeare’s characters, since verisimilitude is seen to underwrite the play’s ability to enthral.

I guess I may be rereading Johnson again.