What do you think?
Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare
As well as containing the major texts in Wimsatt's volume, Woudhuysen includes more of Johnson's annotations of individual plays and his essay "Preface to Shakespeare". It looks at Johnson's studies on Shakespeare in their 18th century context and analyzes their significance and achievement.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1960
About the author
Samuel Johnson
4,920 books437 followersPeople note British writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, known as "Doctor Johnson," for his
Dictionary of the English Language
(1755), for
Lives of the Poets
(1781), and for his series of essays, published under the titles
The Rambler
(1752) and
The Idler
(1758).
Samuel Johnson used the first consistent Universal Etymological English Dictionary , first published in 1721, of British lexicographer Nathan Bailey as a reference.
Beginning as a journalist on Grub street, this English author made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, novelist, literary critic, biographer, and editor. People described Johnson as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history." James Boswell subjected him to Life of Samuel Johnson , one of the most celebrated biographies in English. This biography alongside other biographies, documented behavior and mannerisms of Johnson in such detail that they informed the posthumous diagnosis of Tourette syndrome (TS), a condition unknown to 18th-century physicians. He presented a tall and robust figure, but his odd gestures and tics confused some persons on their first encounters.
Johnson attended Pembroke college, Oxford for a year before his lack of funds compelled him to leave. After working as a teacher, he moved to London, where he began to write essays for The Gentleman's Magazine. His early works include the biography The Life of Richard Savage and the poem " The Vanity of Human Wishes ." Christian morality permeated works of Johnson, a devout and compassionate man. He, a conservative Anglican, nevertheless respected persons of other denominations that demonstrated a commitment to teachings of Christ.
After nine years of work, people in 1755 published his preeminent Dictionary of the English Language, bringing him popularity and success until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1905, a century and a half later. In the following years, he published essays, an influential annotated edition of plays of William Shakespeare, and the well-read novel Rasselas . In 1763, he befriended James Boswell, with whom he later travelled to Scotland; A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland , travel narrative of Johnson, described the journey. Towards the end of his life, he produced the massive and influential Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets , which includes biographies and evaluations of 17th- and 18th-century poets.
After a series of illnesses, Johnson died on the evening; people buried his body in Westminster abbey. In the years following death, people began to recognize a lasting effect of Samuel Johnson on literary criticism even as the only great critic of English literature.
Samuel Johnson used the first consistent Universal Etymological English Dictionary , first published in 1721, of British lexicographer Nathan Bailey as a reference.
Beginning as a journalist on Grub street, this English author made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, novelist, literary critic, biographer, and editor. People described Johnson as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history." James Boswell subjected him to Life of Samuel Johnson , one of the most celebrated biographies in English. This biography alongside other biographies, documented behavior and mannerisms of Johnson in such detail that they informed the posthumous diagnosis of Tourette syndrome (TS), a condition unknown to 18th-century physicians. He presented a tall and robust figure, but his odd gestures and tics confused some persons on their first encounters.
Johnson attended Pembroke college, Oxford for a year before his lack of funds compelled him to leave. After working as a teacher, he moved to London, where he began to write essays for The Gentleman's Magazine. His early works include the biography The Life of Richard Savage and the poem " The Vanity of Human Wishes ." Christian morality permeated works of Johnson, a devout and compassionate man. He, a conservative Anglican, nevertheless respected persons of other denominations that demonstrated a commitment to teachings of Christ.
After nine years of work, people in 1755 published his preeminent Dictionary of the English Language, bringing him popularity and success until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1905, a century and a half later. In the following years, he published essays, an influential annotated edition of plays of William Shakespeare, and the well-read novel Rasselas . In 1763, he befriended James Boswell, with whom he later travelled to Scotland; A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland , travel narrative of Johnson, described the journey. Towards the end of his life, he produced the massive and influential Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets , which includes biographies and evaluations of 17th- and 18th-century poets.
After a series of illnesses, Johnson died on the evening; people buried his body in Westminster abbey. In the years following death, people began to recognize a lasting effect of Samuel Johnson on literary criticism even as the only great critic of English literature.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 20, 2011
Just read Johnson's preface to his edition of Shakespeare (in the Harvard Classics, 1st edition, that my wife so wonderfully bought me). I believe I now understand the practice of literary criticism ten times better than I ever have.
Read
July 15, 2023James Boswell could have saved 1,000 pages (and so many trees) had he just used Johnson's early commentary on Macbeth as the foundation for his Life of Johnson. I suppose, however, that such a device would only work fr a reader who is already deeply familiar with Macbeth! In any case, the Johnson that Boswell needs 1,400 pages to profile is quite clearly demonstrated here in c.250 pp. All his quirks of personality and style, his ideas and ideals re scholarship, literature, and editing--even some of his friends--come through loud and clear.
July 30, 2026
Samuel Johnson is the greatest prose stylist in the English language, and reading his criticism on Shakespeare is a rewarding, though difficult, education. His vocabulary is as advanced as the language permits, which is fitting given that this is the man who single-handedly wrote the English dictionary. Some sentences require rereading and a good dictionary to decipher. The effort is worth it. The prose, once unlocked, has a weight and balance and moral seriousness that rewards the patience it demands.
The critical intelligence behind that prose is formidable — rigorous, honest, deeply humane, and filled with common sense.
Johnson stands for common sense, correctness, established systems, and accepted rules of decency and propriety. These are genuine virtues, and they make him an extraordinarily reliable guide to much of literature. But Shakespeare is not a writer who submits to those values. he flouted them, bent language to shapes it had not previously taken, violated accepted morality when his dramatic purposes required it, and used words in ways that struck language attuned readers as simply incorrect. Johnson is frequently bothered by this. He notes Shakespeare's misuse of words, his irregularities of construction, his willingness to sacrifice grammatical propriety to dramatic effect, his moral unorthodoxy.
What Johnson cannot quite see, or perhaps forgive, is that these are not failures. They are the mechanism of the genius. Both fools and geniuses break out of the box of convention and acceptability; what distinguishes them is what they find outside it. Johnson keeps misreading Shakespeare's unorthodoxy as foolishness when it is rather the evidence of a mind that simply operated at a register beyond the reach of rules. You do not read Shakespeare for correct prose. You read him for what correct prose cannot do.
The morality question is related. Johnson believes, with great sincerity and consistency, that literature ought to be morally instructive. A view similar to Sir Philip's Sidney "A Defence of Poetry", Johnson thought literature should teach virtue, that justice should be delivered, that vice should be punished and virtue rewarded. Shakespeare notoriously does neither with any reliability. The moral architecture of the plays is too complex, too honest, too tragic to deliver the clean lessons Johnson wants from them. Johnson's critical criticism is simply not a position adequate to the writer he is judging.
Johnson also believes that Shakespeare excels at comedy but falters at tragedy. I wholeheartedly believe the opposite. Nonetheless to spar intellectually with an intellectual superior of a critic is a great education. Read him slowly, dictionary at hand (perhaps even Johnson's), and argue back, with due reverence to this elder man of letters.
The critical intelligence behind that prose is formidable — rigorous, honest, deeply humane, and filled with common sense.
Johnson stands for common sense, correctness, established systems, and accepted rules of decency and propriety. These are genuine virtues, and they make him an extraordinarily reliable guide to much of literature. But Shakespeare is not a writer who submits to those values. he flouted them, bent language to shapes it had not previously taken, violated accepted morality when his dramatic purposes required it, and used words in ways that struck language attuned readers as simply incorrect. Johnson is frequently bothered by this. He notes Shakespeare's misuse of words, his irregularities of construction, his willingness to sacrifice grammatical propriety to dramatic effect, his moral unorthodoxy.
What Johnson cannot quite see, or perhaps forgive, is that these are not failures. They are the mechanism of the genius. Both fools and geniuses break out of the box of convention and acceptability; what distinguishes them is what they find outside it. Johnson keeps misreading Shakespeare's unorthodoxy as foolishness when it is rather the evidence of a mind that simply operated at a register beyond the reach of rules. You do not read Shakespeare for correct prose. You read him for what correct prose cannot do.
The morality question is related. Johnson believes, with great sincerity and consistency, that literature ought to be morally instructive. A view similar to Sir Philip's Sidney "A Defence of Poetry", Johnson thought literature should teach virtue, that justice should be delivered, that vice should be punished and virtue rewarded. Shakespeare notoriously does neither with any reliability. The moral architecture of the plays is too complex, too honest, too tragic to deliver the clean lessons Johnson wants from them. Johnson's critical criticism is simply not a position adequate to the writer he is judging.
Johnson also believes that Shakespeare excels at comedy but falters at tragedy. I wholeheartedly believe the opposite. Nonetheless to spar intellectually with an intellectual superior of a critic is a great education. Read him slowly, dictionary at hand (perhaps even Johnson's), and argue back, with due reverence to this elder man of letters.
July 8, 2021
Jul 2021. Summer reading before teaching MEASURE FOR MEASURE. Finished: Johnson is a man I want to know better. Steady, comprehensive, moral. Need to read Boswell. Skipping Wimsatt's introduction. (According to the margins I read this volume once before in graduate school; it's a bit disturbing that I don't remember doing so, and that I didn't take anything away from it.)
Takeaways:
* "Is it not certain that the tragic and comic affections have been moved alternately with equal force, and that no plays have oftener filled the eye with tears and the breast with palpitation than those which are variegated with interludes of mirth?" (p. 7, RAMBLER 156)
* "...every man, however profound or abstracted, perceives himself irresistibly alienated by low terms; they who profess the most zealous adherence to truth are forced to admit that she owes part of her charms to her ornaments and loses much of her power over the soul when she appears disgraced by a dress uncouth or ill-adjusted." (p. 8, RAMBLER 168)
* On a line from MACBETH: "...for who, without some relaxation of his gravity, can hear of the avengers of guilt peeping through a blanket?" (p. 8, RAMBLER 168)
* "Shakespeare's excellence is not the fiction of a tale [i.e. the construction of a plot] but the representation of life; and his reputation is therefore safe till human nature is changed." (p. 14, Dedication to Lennox, SHAKESPEARE ILLUSTRATED)
* "The business of him that republishes an ancient book is to correct what is corrupt and to explain what is obscure. To have a text corrupt in many places, and in many doubtful, is, among the authors that have written since the use of types, almost peculiar to Shakespeare." (p. 16, PROPOSALS FOR PRINTING...)
* The list of twelve defects in Shakespeare's plays (PREFACE)
* The refutation of neoclassical dogma, which also serves to correct one of St Augustine's errors in the CONFESSIONS: "Imitations produces pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind." (PREFACE)
* Admiration for Johnson's balanced and capacious style.
Takeaways:
* "Is it not certain that the tragic and comic affections have been moved alternately with equal force, and that no plays have oftener filled the eye with tears and the breast with palpitation than those which are variegated with interludes of mirth?" (p. 7, RAMBLER 156)
* "...every man, however profound or abstracted, perceives himself irresistibly alienated by low terms; they who profess the most zealous adherence to truth are forced to admit that she owes part of her charms to her ornaments and loses much of her power over the soul when she appears disgraced by a dress uncouth or ill-adjusted." (p. 8, RAMBLER 168)
* On a line from MACBETH: "...for who, without some relaxation of his gravity, can hear of the avengers of guilt peeping through a blanket?" (p. 8, RAMBLER 168)
* "Shakespeare's excellence is not the fiction of a tale [i.e. the construction of a plot] but the representation of life; and his reputation is therefore safe till human nature is changed." (p. 14, Dedication to Lennox, SHAKESPEARE ILLUSTRATED)
* "The business of him that republishes an ancient book is to correct what is corrupt and to explain what is obscure. To have a text corrupt in many places, and in many doubtful, is, among the authors that have written since the use of types, almost peculiar to Shakespeare." (p. 16, PROPOSALS FOR PRINTING...)
* The list of twelve defects in Shakespeare's plays (PREFACE)
* The refutation of neoclassical dogma, which also serves to correct one of St Augustine's errors in the CONFESSIONS: "Imitations produces pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind." (PREFACE)
* Admiration for Johnson's balanced and capacious style.
January 2, 2023
Well, this was a hoot! It’s a collection of Doctor Johnson’s annotations on Shakespeare and it’s a complete delight. Johnson shares his admiration of the Bard happily but also admits when he doesn’t quite get it with a fair amount of ruefulness as well. Loved it.
August 10, 2025
Dr J,
Thank you for your words, your wit, and your guidance on this journey through Shakespeare. You were a fine companion.
Thank you for your words, your wit, and your guidance on this journey through Shakespeare. You were a fine companion.
Read
December 7, 2025sure man
February 14, 2017
Dr Johnson's criticism of Shakespeare never borders on Bardolatry, but remains impartial and judicious. I have a feeling that he had a special liking for Macbeth-- he even wrote an article on the play in his "Rambler"
May 30, 2011
Doctor Johnson is one of the treasures of English letters, and some of the things in here, like his preface and some of his Rambler essays, are excellent. However, the notes on the plays themselves are far too sparse: this is an example of strange editorial choice.
April 19, 2014
A good introduction to Shakespeare - it's refreshing to see someone who isn't just extolling his virtues. Shakespeare wasn't perfect, and people tend to forget that.
There were, however, some tedious histories of various editions of Shakespeare's works - not worth reading in my opinion.
There were, however, some tedious histories of various editions of Shakespeare's works - not worth reading in my opinion.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews