Preface to Shakespeare

William Shakespeare's play, Samuel Johnson wrote the preface in which he displays classic critical form. His analysis of Shakespeare reveals his ideals for literature in general He wrote that Shakespeare's greatness lies in his style of representation of the general human nature. His characters are neither type of certain qualities nor are they some particular persons of distinctive individualistic traits.

Samuel Johnson explains Shakespeare has likewise faults sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit. Three defects are discussed by Johnson.1) Evil in the book or men 2) Time and place 3) plots are loose

The modern practice was always about glorifying the old and degrading the modern. Johnson says that critic of 18^th century take everything that’s old for granted whereas they doubt everything that is modern. * Johnson asks how it could decide whether a piece of literature is good or not?

v  Modern works are only for pleasure they are dialectic.  People’s taste could change because of time, fashion or because people themselves have change.

Samuel Johnson was the first to acknowledge Shakespeare’s faults.

The aim of the poetry is to teach and delight. Shakespeare’s poetry however sometimes delighted without teaching. For example, when Portia dressing up as a man who attend the trial and saved Antonio which wasn’t morally accepted for women to do so at that time. * Shakespeare wrote about Egypt, Italy and Denmark etc . However we did find real difference between the characters. Shakespeare was so good in it, but it is considered a fault.

It was comic in his sense the character speak same language. * In his tragedies, the more he tries to give us, weaker the plot becomes. For example, in Hamlet the more one gets into the play one finds the story isn't as strong as it was beginning. * In the narration of the all genres, he used many words to express a simple idea.

Shakespeare tragic heroes always a face gross end. For example- Hamlet. * The technical fault- He neglected three unities, place, time, action *

Shakespearean comedy * A comedy is often defined  as dramatic composition with happy ending. It is also defined as the play aiming at the production of the laughter, nothing but laughter. * Aristotle define comedy as : “An imitation of men worse than the average; worse, however, not as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly. The Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others…”

Comedy of Shakespeare * Shakespearean comedy in the words of Johnson and Charlton: * The comedy is not satiric, it isn’t conservative, it is creative.

Comedies like As You Like It * Twelfth Night are happy comedies. It is the mixture of romance and comedy and it also includes reality. * Loves Labor Lost is the comedy of dialogue.

Tragedies of the Shakespearean * Tragedy is the exploring of the man’s relation to the force of evil in the worlds. It seeks for the answer to cosmic problems. It is a production of the man’s desire to believe in a purposive and ordered universe. Shakespeare’s tragic development is treated accordingly as growth in moral vision. The central moral theme shapes the various elements of tragedy:

Central moral Elements of the tragedy * Action * Character * Poetry.

Part three * Samuel Johnson’s opinion regarding the three unities : * Johnson is the first English writer to express these ideas. * This is the most original idea that Johnson came up with. * Johnson agreed with the unities of the action and showed objection to the unities of time and place. *

* Johnson said that unities of time and place are not important in historical plays. It is the example about a battle, it is the move to move to the hospital. By definition history is about time, therefore it is impossible to have a one day historical play. * Shakespeare in his tragedies and comedies followed the unities of action. * Shakespeare disregarded two unities- time and place.

Mimesis. The most notable sign of Shakespeare's greatness is in the category of mimesis, or imitation.  The greatest art is that which imitates life best.  According the Johnson, Shakespeare's characters are like real people.  His greatness in this area outweighs the negatives that could be said about him.  Shakespeare's plays endure because human nature remains the same.

The Neoclassical Era was fond of rules.  When it came to drama, they looked back to ancient Greece for their rules, specifically to Aristotle's Poetics.  From that they got the idea that a drama should conform to the Aristotelian unities. 

The Aristotelian unities are unity of time, place, and action.

1.      Time.  The action portrayed should be able to take place during the time it takes on the stage. 

2.      Place.  The action of the play should take place in one area, not jump around to a lot of locations.  

3.      Action.  The play should have one primary plot with one major action, without major sub-plots.

Greek plays were shorter than Shakespeare's plays and were produced in trilogies; the trilogies could get around these limitations.  Each of Shakespeare's plays is more like one of the trilogies than like an individual Greek play.  Shakespeare's plays broke all these rules.  Johnson sees the problem as a problem with the rules, not a problem with Shakespeare. 

Johnson did see some problems with Shakespeare's plays, which reveal as much about Johnson as they do about Shakespeare.

Vulgarity.  Shakespeare's plays display a degree of vulgarity that Johnson finds offensive.

Morality.  Johnson dislikes the immorality of some the Shakespeare's characters and plays.  For Johnson, plays should encourage virtue, which in his own writing he does at the expense of mimesis

Important Quotes 

“The opinions prevalent in one age, as truths above the reach of controversy, are confuted and rejected in another, and rise again to reception in remoter times. Thus the human mind is kept in motion without progress. ”
― Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare

“The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.”
― Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare

“Parts are not to be examined till the whole has been surveyed; there is a kind of intellectual remoteness necessary for the comprehension of any great work in its full design and its true proportions; a close approach shews the smaller niceties, but the beauty of the whole is discerned no longer.”
― Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare

“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 mirrour of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.”
― Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare

“The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented with flowers.”
― Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare

“Shakespeare has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind, but in one composition.”
― Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare

 “Shakespeare's plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolick of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design.”
― Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare

“His comedy pleases by the thoughts and the language, and his tragedy for the greater part by incident and action. His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct.”
― Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare

 “Every cold empirick, when his heart is expanded by a successful experiment, swells into a theorist...”
― Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare

 “While an authour is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best. To”
― Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare

“In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.”
― Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare

“This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirrour of life; that he who has mazed his imagination, in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him, may here be cured of his delirious extasies, by reading human sentiments in human language; by scenes from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions.”
― Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare

“That this is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; but there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature. The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing. That the mingled drama may convey all the instruction of tragedy or comedy cannot be denied, because it includes both in its alterations of exhibition, and approaches nearer than either to the appearance of life, by shewing how great machinations and slender designs may promote or obviate one another, and the high and the low co-operate in the general system by unavoidable concatenation.”
― Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare

“While an authour is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.”
― Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare

 “Fiction cannot move so much, but that the attention may be easily transferred; and though it must be allowed that pleasing melancholy be sometimes interrupted by unwelcome levity, yet let it be considered likewise, that melancholy is often not pleasing, and that the disturbance of one man may be the relief of another; that different auditors have different habitudes; and that, upon the whole, all pleasure consists in variety.”
― Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare

Merits and demerits of Shakespeare in Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare

Shakespeare is such a poet and dramatist of the world who has been edited and criticized by hundreds of editors and critics.  Dr. Samuel Johnson is one of them. But among the literary criticisms about Shakespeare, ‘‘Johnson’s edition was notable chiefly for its sensible interpretation’s and critical evaluations of Shakespeare as a literary artist.’’  As a true critic in his Preface to Shakespeare, Johnson has pointed out Shakespeare’s merits or excellences as well as demerits.

Shakespeare’s greatness lies in the fact that he is ‘‘the poet of nature’’.  Jonson says,

‘‘Shakespeare is, above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature, the poet that holds up to the reader a  faithful mirror of human nature.’’

His writings represent the ‘general nature’, because he knows ‘‘Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.’’ Therefore his characters are ‘‘the genuine progeny of common humanity.’’ ‘‘In the writing of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.’’ Thus Johnson indicates the universal aspects of Shakespeare’s writings.

Shakespeare’s dialogue ‘‘is often so evidently determined by the incident which produces it, and pursued with so much ease and simplicity, that it seems scarcely to claim the merit of fiction, but to have been gleaned by diligent selection out of common conversation and common occurrences".

Shakespeare's treatment of love proves his following realism. Dramatists in general give an excessive importance to the theme of love. But to Shakespeare ‘‘love is only one of many passions, and as it has no great influence upon the sum of life.’’ In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Caesar, love interest hardly has any place.

Johnson further comments on Shakespeare's characterization.

He says,

‘‘Shakespeare has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion.’’

On the contrary, other dramatists portray their characters in such a hyperbolic or exaggerated way that the reader cannot suit them to their life.

Johnson defends Shakespeare for his mingling of the tragic and comic elements in his plays on grounds of realism ‘exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature.’’ Because, Shakespeare's plays express ‘‘the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another, in which at the same time, the reveler is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friends,(in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolic of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design.’’)

‘‘The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing’’. And the mingled drama can convey all the instruction of tragedy or comedy, for it best represents the life.’’

Johnson regards Shakespeare’s mingling of tragedy and comedy as a merit, because he can not ‘‘recollect among the Greeks or Romans a single writer who attempted both.’’

‘‘Shakespeare always makes nature predominance over accident. His story requires Romans but he thinks only on men.’’

In his Preface to Shakespeare, Dr. Samuel Johnson brings out the excellences first, then he turns to his demerits. Johnson does not consider him a faultless dramatist- even he takes the faults ‘‘sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit.’’ That is Shakespeare’s faults are serious enough to overwhelm the merits if they had only belonged to other dramatists. Discussion of Shakespeare’s demerits will better show the merits of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s first defect is –

‘‘He sacrifices virtue to convenience and is so much more careful to please then to instruct that he seems to write without any moral purpose.’’

Moreover, he lacks poetic justice-‘‘he makes no just distribution of good or evil.’’

Here we cannot agree with Johnson. He himself called Shakespeare a ‘poet of nature’. But now he cannot come out of the tradition of his age- explicit moralizing or didacticism. Actually, Shakespeare gives us a picture of life as whatever he sees. Didacticism which is expected from a true artist cannot be a basic condition of art. Thus here we see Johnson’s dualism in evaluating Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s plot construction has also faults. According to Johnson, the plots are often ‘loosely formed’ and ‘carelessly pursued’. ‘‘He omits opportunities of instructing or delighting which the development of the plot provides to him." Moreover, ‘‘in many of his plays the latter part is evidently neglected.’’

This charge is, to some extent true. The readers loose dramatic interest in the second half of Julius Caesar. But The Merchant of Venice shows a perfect sense of plot construction.

Johnson’s another charge against Shakespeare is regarding distinction of time and place. He attributes to a certain nation or a certain period of history, the customs, practices and opinions of another. For example, we ‘‘find Hector quoting Aristotle’’ in Troilus and Cressida.

However, Johnson regards that it is not a fault of Shakespeare to violate laws of unities ‘established by the joint authority of poets and critics’. Rather this violation proves ‘‘the comprehensive genius of Shakespeare’’. Actually a drama indicates successive actions. Therefore, just as they man be represented at successive places, so also they may be represented at different periods, separated by several years. And so, Shakespeare violates the unities of time and place. And according to Johnson ‘‘the unities of time and place are not essential to a just drama’’, and ‘‘they are always to be sacrificed to the nobler beauties of variety and instruction’’. On the other hand the plays scrupulously following the unities are just ‘‘the product of superfluous and ostentatious art.’’ However, Shakespeare observes the unity of action.

Shakespeare’s another faults in the eye of Johnson is his over fondness for quibbles. ‘‘A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world and was content to lose it.’’ But to say Johnson here sacrifices his strong common sense for the sake of an eloquent metaphor.

Shakespeare's comic dialogue is often coarse.  The gentlemen and the ladies in comic scenes,. show little delicacy or refinement and are hardly to be  distinguished from the clowns.

His tragic plays become worse in proportion to the labour he spends on them.

His narration shows an undue pomp of diction and unnecessary verbiage and repetition.

His declamations of set speeches are generally cold and feeble.

What he does best, he soon ceases to do. He no sooner begins to arouse the readers’ sympathy than he counteracts himself.