I've been reading Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare with considerably more enjoyment than I can remember deriving when, years ago, it had a place on a syllabus in a folder in my backpack. What did I make, back then, of the defense Johnson offers against the charge that Shakespeare violated the dramatic "unities," a critical standard holding that if the running time of a play is three hours then the action depicted on the stage must represent three hours in the lives of the characters? This obviously precludes travels of any distance or scenes involving the same character set in different places. Any familiarity with Shakespeare's plays, including some of the very best known ones (say, King Lear and Othello), proves that he cared not at all for this standard, if he even knew about it. Here is Johnson's version of the complaint:
The necessity of observing the unities of time and place arises from the supposed necessity of making the drama credible. The criticks hold it impossible, that an action of months or years can be possibly believed to pass in three hours; or that the spectator can suppose himself to sit in the theater, while ambassadors go and return between distant kings, while armies are levied and towns besieged, while an exile wanders and returns, or till he whom they saw courting his mistress, shall lament the untimely fall of his son. The mind revolts from evident falsehood, and fiction loses its force when it departs from the resemblance of reality.
His rebuttal begins:
The objection arising from the impossibility of passing the first hour at Alexandria, and the next at Rome, supposes, that when the play opens, the spectator really imagines himself at Alexandria, and believes that his walk to the theater has been a voyage to Egypt, and that he lives in the days of Antony and Cleopatra. Surely he that imagines this may imagine more.
And he proceeds energetically in the same vein for a few pages, with the result that one is surprised when, indent, new paragraph, Johnson suddenly admits:
Yet when I speak thus slightly of dramatick rules, I cannot but recollect how much wit and learning may be produced against me; before such authorities I am afraid to stand . . . .
But he's just demonstrated that he's not afraid to stand against them. Is the above admission actually a sneer, the intended meaning being that there is no wit or learning on the other side of the argument? The content indicated by the ellipses tends to disprove such a notion, as does Johnson's essential conservatism, which led him to defend, on many questions, the judgments of time. The question relating to the aptness of the dramatic unities appears to be a case of his intelligence defeating his reactionary impulses—reluctantly, but with verve, and not only in this instance, he defends a view that but for his honesty and mental vigor he'd be inclined to reject. It's one of his endearing qualities.
Just how conservative his judgments could be is on display when, having summarized aspects of Shakespeare's genius, he comes to his reservations:
His first defect is that to which may be imputed most of the evil in books or in men. He sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose. . . . [H]is precepts and axioms drop casually from him; he makes no just distribution of good and evil, nor is always careful to shew in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked; he carries his persons indifferently through right and wrong, and at the close dismisses them without further care, and leaves their examples to operate by chance. This fault the barbarity of his age cannot extenuate; for it is always a writer's duty to make the world better. . . .
This seems to approach the view that only sermons and moral exhortation are permitted, and indeed Johnson went so far as to give his imprimatur to a 17th-century adaptation of King Lear in which at the end Cordelia marries Edgar, the king vanquishes his foes, and all is well in the world. The conclusion to Johnson's discussion of Shakespeare's greatness—
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.
—appears to refute his leading criticism, inasmuch as a drama that is "the mirrour of life" will inevitably offend the sensibilities of a Christian moralist. One can imagine Shakespeare replying, "Sorry, Sam, it's not me but the world that's indifferent to the progress of good and evil."
The most interesting parts of the Preface (to me) concern the passages that touch on the vexing question of Shakespeare's biography. But . . . another day.
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