IV
JOHNSON ON SHAKESPEARE
The history of Johnson’s dealings with Shakespeare extends over the greater part of his working life. An edition of Shakespeare was the earliest of his larger literary schemes. In 1745, when he was earning a scanty living by work for the booksellers, he published a pamphlet entitled Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth, with remarks on Sir T. H.’s (Sir Thomas Hanmer’s) Edition of Shakespeare. To this pamphlet, says Boswell, he affixed proposals for a new edition by himself. Then he was discouraged, and changed his mind. When he first thought of editing Shakespeare, he believed that he had only Rowe and Pope and Theobald to contend with and to supersede. But while his notes on Macbeth were in the press, Hanmer’s edition appeared, and it became known to him that the great Warburton was engaged on the same task. Johnson allowed the specimen of his projected edition to go forward, but issued only a bare advertisement of his scheme. The proposals of 1756 cannot have been written at this earlier date, for in them Johnson speaks, with a certain pride, of his labours on the Dictionary. ‘With regard,’ he says, ‘to obsolete or peculiar diction, the editor may perhaps claim some degree of confidence, having had more motives to consider the whole extent of our language than any other man from its first formation.’ But the Dictionary
