The "Poet of Nature" and Self-Knowledge: One Aspect of Johnson's Moral Reading of Shakespeare

Abstract

Alluding in the Preface to his edition of Shakespeare to the effect of the plays on an audience, Johnson uncovers a striking picture of himself as one of its members. "As he commands us," he writes, "we laugh or mourn, or sit silent with quiet expectation, in tranquillity without indifference." No simple explanation of this involvement is, of course, possible. Johnson once wrote that he went to the theatre only to escape from himself; and surely every reader of fiction seeks to immerse himself in a more colourful, exciting, unusual or significant world than is normally present to his senses. Yet Johnson was also, by his own account, "perpetually" a moralist, who had therefore to be able to justify his appreciation of literature in moral terms. "The end of poetry," he wrote, "is to instruct by pleasing." In his perceptive book on Johnson, Professor W. J. Bate has rightly pointed out that Johnson's appreciation of literature was "meshed with the larger context of his writing on human life and experience itself," that "the growth in awareness, the process of enlightenment" was inextricably bound up with the process of "pleasing." Yet we may still ask, remembering Johnson's definite reservations about Shakespeare's seeming lack of "moral purpose," in what was this process of enlightenment thought specifically to consist? The answer to this question has also important implications for the accepted history of eighteenth-century Shakespearian criticism, though this will be less our concern here than Johnson's own position. Professor R. W. Babcock, for example, in his study of Shakespeare idolatry, quotes Johnson's stricture on Shakespeare's moral purpose and contrasts his attitude with that of the later eighteenth century, when critics "became increasingly interested in the spectacle of Shakespeare as a moral philosopher." Such a reading of the plays was, however, current by Johnson's time, who merely adds the weight of his own response to a developing tradition. Yet because of his intense preoccupation with moral questions, Johnson's remarks have a special validity. He scrutinized characters, scenes, and even whole plays in a way unattempted by less discerning critics; and he showed what relevance such a reading of Shakespeare had both for others and for himself personally.