Writing about Mark Harris (September 30), and how his Henry Wiggen novels bear the imprint of their creator's intimacy with Johnson-Boswell lore, has exerted an effect on my coffee-break reading. Yesterday it was the selection from Dr. Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare reprinted in my tattered Norton Anthology of English Literature, wherein I read:
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.
Could anything be more wrong, at least with respect to some large and justly famous subset of his dramatic oeuvre?--say, the works treated by Bradley in Shakespearean Tragedy (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth). If King Lear represents, even remotely, anything like a faithful mirror of life, then God help us all! As Lionel Trilling has remarked, the imagery--133 references to 64 members of the animal kingdom--seems calculated, no less than the brutalizing double plot, to impress upon the audience a vision of humanity descended into bestiality. As for the characters, one pities the auditor who can think they are drawn from life. They are, rather, highly stylized representations of moral extremities: the characters are all either unbelievably wicked (Regan, Goneril, Edmund, Cornwall, Oswald) or better than anyone you will ever meet in life (Kent, Cordelia, Edgar).
And King Lear, it seems to me, is only the play that lends itself most easily to refuting Dr. Johnson's point about the poet of nature. The world of Shakespeare's tragedies, its savagery and nihilism, is I trust remote from the world known to almost all of us, and, notwithstanding his difficult start in life, remote too from the experience of Dr. Johnson. Since I am not subject to withering, polysyllabic rebuttal in an 18th-century London public house, I shall make bold to ask: What plays was he thinking about?
With regard to Milton, however, English majors everywhere must concur with Dr. Johnson's assessment. Concluding his discussion of Paradise Lost, he writes:
The want of human interest is always felt. Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation. . . .
It is as if the brocaded, heavily subordinated style is for accepted wisdom. Eventually it is time for the plain truth, and for that, even Dr. Johnson has a plain style.
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