The Plays of William Shakespeare - Critical Response

Critical Response

After Johnson was forced to back down from producing his edition of Shakespeare in 1746, his rival editor William Warburton praised Johnson's Miscellaneous Observations as "some critical notes on Macbeth, given as a specimen of a projected edition, and written, as appears, by a man of parts and genius". Years later, Edmond Malone, an important Shakespearean scholar and friend of Johnson's, said that Johnson's "vigorous and comprehensive understanding threw more light on his authour than all his predecessors had done", and that the Preface was "the finest composition in our language". Adam Smith said that the Preface was "the most manly piece of criticism that was ever published in any country."

In 1908, Walter Raleigh claimed that Johnson helped the reader to "go straight to Shakespeare's meaning, while the philological and antiquarian commentators kill one another in the dark." Raleigh then admitted that he "soon falls into the habit, when he meets with an obscure passage, of consulting Johnson's note before the others." T. S. Eliot wrote that "no poet can ask more of posterity than to be greatly honoured by the great; and Johnson's words about Shakespeare are great honour".

Walter Jackson Bate, in his 1977 biography on Johnson, wrote:

the edition of Shakespeare - viewed with historical understanding of what it involved in 1765 - could seem a remarkable feat; and we are not speaking of just the great Preface To see it in perspective, we have only to remind ourselves what Johnson brought to it - an assemblage of almost every qualification we should ideally like to have brought to this kind of work with the single exception of patience... Operating in and through these qualities was his own extensive knowledge of human nature and life. No Shakespearean critic or editor has ever approached him in this respect.

John Wain, another of Johnson's biographers, claimed, "There is no better statement of the reason why Shakespeare needs to be edited, and what aims an editor can reasonably set himself" than Johnson's Proposal.