Samuel Johnson's Literary Criticism - Shakespeare

Shakespeare

His works on Shakespeare were not devoted just to Shakespeare, but to critical theory as a whole, and, in his Preface to Shakespeare, Johnson rejects the previous belief of the classical unities and establishes a more natural theory on what makes drama work: drama should be faithful to life. In particular, Johnson claimed that "Among other excellences it out to be remarked, because it has hitherto been unnoticed, that his heroes are men, that the love and hatred, the hopes and fears, of his chief personages are such as common to other human beings... Shakespeare's excellence is not the fiction of a tale, but the representation of life: and his reputation is therefore safe, till human nature shall be changed." Besides defending Shakespeare, Johnson was willing to discuss Shakespeare's faults, especially his lacking of morality, his vulgarity, and carelessness in crafting plots.

Besides direct literary criticism, Johnson emphasized the need to establish a text that accurately reflects what an author wrote. In his Preface, Johnson analyzed the various versions of Shakespeare's plays and argued how an editor should work on them. Shakespeare's plays, in particular, had multiple editions that each contained errors from the printing process. This problem was compounded by careless editors deeming difficult words as incorrect and changing them in later editions. Johnson believed that an editor should not alter the text in such a way, and, when creating his own edition of Shakespeare's plays, he relied on the thousands of quotations and notes that he used in crafting his Dictionary in order to restore, to the best of his knowledge, the original text.