close of Act IV. of Henry VIII.: ‘This scene is, above any other part of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and perhaps above any scene of any other poet, tender and pathetick, without gods, or furies, or poisons, or precipices, without the help of romantick circumstances, without improbable sallies of poetical lamentation, and without any throes of tumultuous misery.’ But although this describes the kind of drama that Johnson preferred, he can praise, in words that have become a commonplace of criticism, the wildness of romance in The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and can enumerate and admire the ‘touches of Judgement and genius’ which add horror to the incantation of the witches in Macbeth. Like all great critics, he can understand the excellences of opposite kinds. Indeed, in his defence of Shakespeare’s neglect of the unities he passes over to the side of the enemy, and almost becomes a romantic.[1]
The history of Shakespeare criticism would be shorter than it is if Johnson’s views on the emendation of the text had been more extensively adopted. ‘It has been my settled principle,’ he says, ‘that the reading of the ancient books is probably true, and therefore is not to be disturbed for the sake of elegance, perspicuity, or mere improvements of the sense…. As I practised conjecture more, I learned to trust it less;
- ↑ The transformation was completed after his death. I am indebted to Mr. W. P. Ker for pointing out to me that Henri Beyle in his Racine el Shakespeare (1822) translates all that Johnson says on the unities, and appropriates it as the manifesto of the young romantics. ‘But he told not them that he had taken the honey out of the carcase of the lion.’
