A Clubbable Man: Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture in Honor of Greg Clingham

By Anthony W. Lee, Philip Smallwood, David Hopkins and 29 more

Samuel Johnson famously referred to his future biographer, the unsociable magistrate Sir John Hawkins, as “a most unclubbable man." Conversely, this celebratory volume gathers distinguished eighteenth-century studies scholars to honor the achievements, professional generosity, and sociability of Greg Clingham, taking as its theme textual and social group formations. Here, Philip Smallwood examines the “mirrored minds” of Johnson and Shakespeare, while David Hopkins parses intersections of the general and particular in three key eighteenth-century figures. Aaron Hanlon draws parallels between instances of physical rambling and rhetorical strategies in Johnson’s Rambler, while Cedric D. Reverand dissects the intertextual strands uniting Dryden and Pope. Contributors take up other topics significant to the field, including post-feminism, travel, and seismology. Whether discussing cultural exchange or textual reciprocities, each piece extends the theme, building on the trope of relationship to organize and express its findings. Rounding out this collection are tributes from Clingham’s former students and colleagues, including original poetry.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Release date: Jun 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781684483525

Book preview

Introduction

Anthony W. Lee

To quote from a private communication sent me by Kevin L. Cope, one of the contributors to this collection of thirteen essays and miscellaneous commemorations by various hands, There are few in academe, and even fewer in publishing, who have done so much to advance the fortunes of so many worthy scholars as Greg Clingham. The chronological bibliography of his works appended to this volume attests that Greg’s own scholarly achievements are considerable. More impressively striking, however, is the realization that this publication record was attained amidst his busy duties as a teacher and as the director of a major university press—many of which are detailed below, in some of the commendatory reflections by previous associates. His selfless generosity in facilitating and promoting the work of others in these latter roles absorbed many hours that might have been spent on his own research and writing projects. This sacrifice, however, has benefited countless others in the academic field: it is no overstatement to say that many students and junior scholars owe much of their eventual professional success to his patient guidance and unswerving support. Indeed, the fruits of these labors are apparent in the number of pieces collected in this volume that are penned by former students.

During his more than two decades at the helm of Bucknell University Press, Greg energetically—and almost single-handedly—navigated BUP from a relatively small regional house to one of the major forces in contemporary academic publishing. As I have written elsewhere, "He has expanded coverage to include such areas as German literature and culture, Latin American literature and theory, Irish writers, Russian and comparative humanities, as well as Africana studies. However, for many readers of Eighteenth-Century Life, the most significant consequence of his stewardship must lie in his active promotion of and tenacious support for scholarship devoted to the long eighteenth century."¹ It is fitting then, as he steps away from his administrative duties, that Greg’s accomplishments be marked and celebrated by this Festschrift. And it is particularly appropriate that such a liber amicorum would focus upon Greg’s own field of specialization—the area he so actively promoted as BUP director—the literature and culture of the eighteenth century. It is precisely this intention that the present book fulfills.

A Clubbable Man: Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture in Honor of Greg Clingham (the main title word, celebrating Greg’s extensive professional and social connections, comes from Frances Burney’s Diary and Letters, where Johnson dismisses the staid and aloof Sir John Hawkins as "a most unclubable [sic] man!"²) assembles some of the top scholars in the field to pay tribute to Greg’s many accomplishments.

The initial chapters focus upon Johnson and his circle. This choice is appropriate, given that Johnson in many respects inhabits the heart of Greg’s scholarly life, a touchstone never far away from his critical awareness. The second section comprises essays focusing more generally upon the long eighteenth century, taking up such figures as Dryden, Swift, Pope, Reynolds and others, as well as addressing such diverse topics as eighteenth-century intertextuality, life-writing, travel, eco-criticism, historical analysis, close rhetorical reading, and, perhaps most surprisingly, seismology. All the essays on important figures and topics are unified by a central concern—like Greg’s life and career—with relationships. For example, Philip Smallwood examines the mirrored minds of Johnson and Shakespeare, while David Hopkins parses intersection of the general and particular in three key eighteenth-century figures: Pope, Johnson, and Reynolds. Aaron Hanlon draws parallels between instances of physical rambling (walking) and rhetorical strategies in Johnson’s Rambler, while Cedric D. Reverand dissects the intertextual strands uniting Dryden and Pope. Robert W. Walker’s The Social Life of Thomas Cumming, or ‘Clubbing’ with Johnson’s Friend, the Fighting Quaker, extends the theme, like others in the collection honoring the title, to textual and social group formations. Whether by way of social and cultural exchanges or through textual reciprocities, each essay endeavors to use the trope of relationship to organize and express its findings in ways that mirror Greg Clingham’s own extensive academic and, ultimately, humanistic networking.

The third part divides into three subsections: remembrances by former students; remarks by administrative colleagues; and poems on eighteenth-century topoi by creative writers associated with Greg. In this respect, the book may be said to be unique, combining as it does generic categories that are typically allowed to stand on their own, alone, cross-fertilizing to produce a larger textual entity that illuminates and reflects the manifold achievements of Greg Clingham and his rich and multifaceted impact upon the world of letters.

NOTES

1. Anthony W. Lee, Bucknell University Press: Twenty Years of the Long Eighteenth Century, Eighteenth Century Life 42, no. 3 (September 2018): 1.

2. Francis Burney, The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Lars E. Troide and Stewart J. Cooke, vol. 3, part 1 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 76.

PART I

Essays on Samuel Johnson and James Boswell

Mirrored Minds

JOHNSON AND SHAKESPEARE

Philip Smallwood

Within the limits of plausible argument, the most instructive comparisons (whether of difference or similarity) are those that surprise. —Benedict Anderson

BEYOND COMPARISON

Anyone raising the topic of Johnson and Shakespeare, alongside the well-worked subject of Johnson on Shakespeare, will encounter skepticism from a number of quarters. For those whose instinctive enthusiasm must always be Shakespeare (1564–1616), over and above the genius of Johnson (1709–1784), the proposal falls at the first fence. The two authors will seem strictly beyond comparison. My attempt to present them in parallel may therefore appear fatally prone to the logical fallacy satirized by Shakespeare in the fanciful notion of Fluellen in Henry V on the similarities between two military chiefs, where he likens Alexander the Great to King Henry of Monmouth based on where they chanced to be born:

I tell you, captain, if you look at the maps of the world, I warrant you shall find, in the comparisons between Macedon and Monmouth, that the situations, look you, is both alike. There is a river in Macedon, and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth … and there is salmons in both.¹

It is not principally that different genres channeled the essential genius of each author (though they did). The objection is rather that there is a fundamental difference in symbolic value between the two writers and that comparison must appear to ignore this. Shakespeare and Johnson inhabit two starkly contrasting contexts (opposite sides of a scientific and philosophical watershed defined by Newton and Locke) and a conventionally contrasting set of social and cultural determinants: in the one case an enlarging, socially diverse public of theater-goers that has not gone away; in the other a reading public and a growing market for literary, scholarly, and critical wares that has continued to expand. Attitudes to both are colored by caricatures—not in themselves wholly untrue but not the whole truth either.

There is the Shakespearean: think variety of characters, immortal expressions that are the product of linguistic, poetic, and imaginative power, what the critic F. R. Leavis, who drew a sharp distinction between Shakespeare and Johnson at Johnson’s expense, called the exploratory creative use of language.² Then there is the Johnsonian: think a singular rhetorical and didactic manner that left its mark on an age, a sense of literature’s relation to life, a wisdom, a pithy insight or sounding circumlocution, satire, conversational flair and extempore wit, the gravity of statement. Such attributes collect conflicting systems of cultural import. Overlaps will instantly come to mind, and I’ll draw attention to them in this essay—but the bottom line is that the writers are differently esteemed because different in kind. This perception is in some ways a relic of eighteenth-century critical history itself, a legacy of the attempt by Johnson’s contemporary Joseph Warton to define a grand authorial rank order. In the dedication to his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, Warton had drawn a line between witty and satirical poetry (such as Pope’s) and the True or Pure or Sublime and Pathetic poetry of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.³ Such habits of critical categorization die hard. They are present again in the Victorian critic Matthew Arnold and his strange insistence that while Dryden and Pope may in a certain sense be masters of the art of versification, they were not poets in the sense he most valued (his standard is Wordsworth) but classics of our prose.⁴ The caricatures we have of Shakespeare and Johnson, identified by the adjectives made up from their names, permit, then, a generalizing grasp of the perceived fundamentals of each author. Literary history cannot do without such caricatures; but their necessity is at the cost of exclusions and a degree of distortion that limits the truth of such history; the terms are weighted assessments conditioned by the indispensability of generalization to critical- and literary-historical formation. Alexander Pope teaches the value of Due Distance in such assessments—the need to take in the whole picture in our estimate and, while not ignoring the detail, to avoid premature distractions.⁵ Literary history has its own dramas of major form: its progress and structure are defined by individuals standing as proxies for the ages in which they wrote; they in turn are defined by our conceptions of those ages; the progress, diversions, developments, and revolutions charted by history seem impossible without such a perspective.⁶

But also, perhaps, when we stand back to a sufficient degree, and when in Pope’s phrase from the Essay on Criticism, we "Survey the Whole" (l.235; Twickenham Pope, 1:266), the exercise of comparing Shakespeare with Johnson appears not so doomed after all; it need suggest no blatant disregard of what is obvious to consensual valuation. The trouble is that the comparison between Shakespeare and almost anyone else can easily tend to go all one way. Shakespeare, after all, is a great theatrical genius, the greatest that ever was, a match for Homer, Mozart, Descartes, Rubens, Michelangelo, or Wagner in their respective departments. The predisposition to think of Johnson as necessarily of a lower order, before detailed questions of artistic quality are raised, may ultimately be borne out; but there is a danger of overstatement, of assumptions unexamined that underplay the mirrored minds of a Shakespeare in Johnson and a Johnson in Shakespeare. Johnson is doubtless accomplished in various secondary or experimental tasks proper to the literary sage—lexicographer, periodical journalist, and author of a stand-alone play and a solitary novel (the term novel to describe Johnson’s Rasselas fits only partly). And as his respected poetical oeuvre is small, he is celebrated as biographer and critic more than as poet, one who defined the art of judgment for posterity. Therefore, however accomplished his comments upon the creative productions of other writers, or however tireless in undertaking vast scholarly and editorial labors of an heroic order, and however seriously or unseriously we take his criticism today, including his criticism of Shakespeare, he ultimately falls foul of the prejudices conventionally reserved for the critic of art as against the primacy of the artist.

With the flowering of satire, the great (critical) tradition of finding critics ridiculous blossomed unprecedentedly in the eighteenth century, and his eminence ensured that Johnson was the victim of many assaults.⁷ The caricaturist James Gillray produced some gloriously savage satirical cartoons. The poet Tennyson in the nineteenth century would dismiss critics in general as parasites, lice on the locks of literature,⁸ and even at its best, the critical role has often seemed a literary occupation of the second or third tier. In an essay on the Metaphysical poets published in the twentieth century T. S. Eliot influentially constructed literary history as a narrative of sensibility dissociated, a process allegedly starting within the literary modes of the late seventeenth century and afflicting the eighteenth century to impoverishing effect.⁹ On these terms, a fortiori, Johnson has often appeared a sterile neoclassic. He is rule and reason-bound, deaf to music, blind to art, insensitive to drama, hostile to the wild and the free nature of Shakespeare’s unfettered creativity and Dionysian energy. He even had the nerve to suggest that Shakespeare had faults. The judgmental playing field of comparison must therefore always seem far from level. The task must be to step over this a priori obstacle to a more even-handed approach by pretending it doesn’t exist and by appealing to a curiosity underpinning experiments in literary pairing. This is the spirit motivated by the promise of bringing two great English writers together as complementary, mutually explanatory experiences and of seeing—out of curiosity—what they reveal of each other if we do. By analogy with Benedict Anderson’s practice of comparing political regimes in far distant nation states, the incentive arises from surprising likeness in radical difference. This is, in Johnson’s own formulation, the potential for discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike conventionally enjoyed by readers of the seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets.¹⁰

LIVES LITTLE AND LARGELY KNOWN

In the style of Fluellen there is no shortage of mere circumstantial resemblance: there are—look you—salmons in both. How we weight the comparison is the problem. Certainly, we seem to know very little about Shakespeare’s life (though many have fantasized about the detail), and most attempts at biography have much of the must have done or probably thought or most likely knew or almost certainly read about them. The massive biography by Jonathan Bate on Shakespeare as the Soul of the Age starts from historically documented ascertainables about the ravages of the plague, the general nature of Renaissance Europe, and the Elizabethan system of grammar school education that Shakespeare experienced. There is real history here; but the study is also packed with the kinds of speculative formulations I’ve mentioned whenever inferences are drawn—as they have to be in a Life—about what Shakespeare did, where he was, who he knew, what he was reading at any one time and what he was making of it.¹¹ It is a feature of history based on surviving documentary sources that we cannot judge the importance of the documents we have lost, or even know how much material has gone missing. But some things can be known for sure: we can be certain that Shakespeare was friends with Ben Jonson, that he read Holinshed, Plutarch, and at least some of Montaigne; we know Ovid mattered to him, and we know this without a shadow of doubt from surviving records, from the testimony of other writers, and from the plays themselves; but much cannot be derived, and plausibility, or probability, will often stand in for demonstrated certainty.

Of Johnson’s life, courtesy James Boswell, Hester Thrale, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir John Hawkins, and others who knew him personally, in addition to a catalogue of modern biographers at all points on the scholarly-popular spectrum, we seem by contrast to know everything—all we might ever want to know. And our confidence in what we feel we know is supported by a presumption of reliable testimony. Boswell was acquainted with Johnson first hand, corresponded with him regularly during periods of absence, and made careful records of their conversations over the latter half of Johnson’s life; they ate, talked, and travelled together over a period of many years.¹² Granted, the Life of Johnson of 1791 is a biographical edifice of true fiction and succeeds through its many constructed situations for revealing interactions. It creates the myth of Samuel Johnson while evoking his singularity and immortalizing his flaws—Boswell’s presumptuous task presents Johnson in the monumental light he wishes Johnson to be remembered.¹³ Sir, said Doctor Johnson.… Such magisterial mannerisms as Boswell accorded to Johnson are audible: few BBC actors reading from Johnson’s works or Boswell’s record of Johnson’s conversation can apparently resist putting on the silly voice.

The witness testimony of contemporaries is not entirely wanting in the case of Shakespeare. Ben Jonson writes from the heart in his famous poetical tribute To the memory of my beloved, The AVTHOR Mr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: And what he hath left vs (1623). Addressing the dead dramatist and poet, he observes how the work that Shakespeare has left behind him will survive the finite limits of the human span: Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe.¹⁴ And Ben has furnished us with an affectionate tribute to a friend and fellow playwright in his commonplace book, Timber or Discoveries (1640): I lov’d the man, and doe honour his memory (on this side Idolatry), he writes, as much as any. "Hee was (indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature: had an excellent Phantsie [fancy]; brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein hee flow’d with that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stop’d" (583–584). This, too, is intimately and pleasingly personal; Ben knew William as Boswell knew Sam, and Ben offers a tantalizingly brief glimpse of a congenial and vastly inventive personality; but in the matter of Shakespeare, we see nothing of the wide landscape of the life made known to us by Boswell of Johnson and brought vividly alive through conversations caught in numerous types of company and social situation. The researches may be scrupulous and the inferences plausible, but the life of Shakespeare remains largely an enigma by comparison. Even the best biographies have an air of desperation about them.

But who would be without a life of Shakespeare, large though the role for imagination must be? For our purpose, however lightweight the evidence on the Shakespearean side of the scales, some life parallels can be drawn. The fact that both were the most famous sons of small but important towns in the English Midlands may appear biographically and contextually trite; so too the observation that both experienced the social middle ground of the trading classes and were the offspring of local businessmen of some standing who came to know hard times financially; both tried their hand at school teaching but neither stayed the course; both married older women; for both the law and the legal profession were sources of well-documented interest (Johnson had early ambitions as a lawyer and later in life could offer Boswell, who practiced law, important advice). Shakespeare, for his part, encountered the machinery of law through litigation over property rights: to this experience, as suggested by Bate (whose insight deserves credit here), are owed such dramatic inventions as the portrait of Justice Shallow in Henry IV, Part 2 and in The Merry Wives of Windsor (Soul of the Age, 316–317). Johnson attended Pembroke College Oxford for one year, though for neither man was university the significant experience of youth that some literary contemporaries in respective generations enjoyed. But these broadly common origins, tendencies, and limitations have the potential to mean more than one might think in the measurement of temperamental inclination or the identification of cultural anchorage points, professional incentives, escape trajectories, and confident rootedness. Both departed their native county to make a glorious success of literary life in London, the center of popular theatrical culture in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods as it was the focus of the literary and critical culture of an eighteenth-century world. Among the ties that bind them is the fact that Johnson’s friend and former pupil from his Lichfield days was the great Shakespearean actor and adaptor of plays, theater manager, and dramatist, David Garrick. This is a world in which Johnson thrived and which established the canonicity of Shakespeare as it celebrated Johnson at its critical center.

Shakespeare’s Stratford property portfolio doubtless helped; the award of a pension to Johnson from the king helped likewise smooth the bumps of his own uneven, sometimes precarious financial fortunes. But both made their living essentially by writing and by the ungainsayable appeal of their works’ human interest to a public at large. Of this circumstance Johnson was extraordinarily proud. Both wrote poetry. Such primacy of poetical ambition is never completely absent from the divergent genres in which they achieved their greatest success. Both embed what are—in effect—poems in kinds of writing not conventionally regarded as poetry: hence Johnson’s moving prose description of Pope’s crippled frame in his Life of Pope—and the eccentric nocturnal personal habits that derived from the condition of being at perpetual war with one’s body (Lives, 4:54–55). The passage is recreated as an actual modern poem of great poignancy by the living American poet David Ferry. Many such prose paragraphs in the literary criticism and biography of Johnson have the control and verbal organization of poetry. The term prose poems seems apposite, and I will examine a further example later on in this essay.

A SENSE OF LIFE

Shakespeare’s poeticizing needs no particular illustration since it is everywhere. Johnson, whose idea of dramatic and theatrical production comprehends what today would go by other names, called him the poet of nature.¹⁵ By working creatively as poets in our modern meaning of the term, both gesture to classical precedents. Yet for neither writer was poetry the practice that in the main assured their lasting celebrity. If both had hopes of poetical careers, what connects most crucially the two writers does not depend on casual contingencies or accidents of background, genre, and context. It is a value vested in their respectively intense ways of seeing the world and of expressing their comprehensive vision. Here they have something more than merely circumstantial in common, something more than salmons. They are both writers of exceptional scope and range, of extensive view, to adopt as a shared attribute Johnson’s phrase from the opening lines of his second Juvenalian imitation The Vanity of Human Wishes of 1749 (l.1). Granted, experience of this quality is very different when under the spell of each author independently, but the quality itself is not different and comes down to a fascination with that part of the human that does not change. The encounter with life as the key to understanding such attributes provides evidence of humanity’s essential nature: the contrast is with the epic poet John Milton in whom, according to Johnson, the want of human interest is always felt (Lives, 1:290). And what they share with each other they are active in sharing with us. The fact that Johnson is arguably (it has been argued) our culture’s most articulate witness to the presiding human interest of Shakespeare is a complication that should not detract from the fact that knowledge of the human is an artistic ambition manifest in his own poetry and prose. As Johnson’s critical test of literary value, it is his motivation for writing on Shakespeare.

Observation, then, attentiveness to life, is a concept enabling Shakespeare and Johnson to exist in the same cultural department after all. An expert eye for the constancy of the human resists the divisions that spring up in the mind of the literary historian, who like F. R. Leavis, thinks in terms of the Elizabethan, the Renaissance, the Augustans, or the Neoclassic and uses these classifications of period or historical concept as points of reference to construct Shakespearean and Johnsonian caricatures. But crucial to the comparability I advocate here—as an affront to the reality of these concepts—is the explanatory power of a radically antitheoretical mode of comprehending the human world. Life must be seen before it can be known, writes Johnson in his devastating review of Soame Jenyns’s Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil.¹⁶ The conclusions that might be drawn from rational deduction, or rule, or principle, are constantly tested against the conclusions that direct experience presents. These cannot be final. Nor, since they never harden into theory, can they be finally overturned. A skepticism about intellectual systems runs through the thought, or rather the literary effect of the thought, of both writers (even when Shakespeare seems hardly to be thinking at all). So it does through the writings of Shakespeare’s near contemporary in France, Michel de Montaigne.

AGAINST THEORY

The common ground between Johnson, Shakespeare, and Montaigne enables comparison to suggest a philosophically anti-philosophical fraternity enjoyed by all three writers.¹⁷ Explicit or implicit in their work is a critique of philosophical tradition evidenced in thought about the role of thinking in human life. The fact that Montaigne could have a pervasive influence within the literary life of Johnson’s eighteenth-century milieu assists their cultural convergence. So too does Shakespeare’s and Johnson’s habitual satire of the philosophical mode and their shared skepticism about the claims of rational consolation. The creative form of an Eastern Tale, Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia of 1759, is the conduit for Johnson’s sympathetic despair of established philosophical doctrines—such as stoicism. Here the philosopher of Nature whose philosophy proves no protection against grief at the loss of his only daughter resonates with the loss of Cordelia, limp in his arms, by her own father at the close of King Lear (Yale Johnson, 16:75). An aversion to encompassing theories also appears in a readiness to criticize, more abrasively sometimes, in such locations as Johnson’s scathing review of Jenyns and his source in the versified philosophy of Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–1734). The poem presumes to reason the benevolence of divinity and to assert that Whatever is, is RIGHT (l.145; Epistle 4, Twickenham Pope, 3.1. 141). Johnson is famous for refuting Berkeley by kicking the stone.¹⁸ But there is also his more measured hostility to his atheist contemporary David Hume (who had little time for Shakespeare), his dismissals of Voltaire’s criticisms of Shakespearean savagery and indecorum (Yale Johnson, 7:65, 84) and his reservations about the very many eighteenth-century dramas (mainly tragedies) that substitute ponderous moralizing for dramatic energy. The contrast, again, is with his eloquent appreciation of Shakespeare on the grounds of what makes drama dramatic: the progress of his fable and the tenour of his dialogue. While others please us by particular speeches … [Shakespeare] always makes us anxious for the event (Yale Johnson, 7:62, 83). Johnson thought that Shakespeare enjoyed an advantage that later writers did not. He composed his plays at a time before the European philosophical tradition had really developed:

The contest about the original benevolence or malignity of man had not yet commenced. Speculation had not yet attempted to analyse the mind, to trace the passions to their sources, to unfold the seminal principles of vice and virtue, or sound the depths of the heart for the motives of action. All those enquiries, which from that time that human nature became the fashionable study, have been made sometimes with nice discernment, but often with idle subtilty, were yet unattempted. (Yale Johnson, 7:88)

In that phrase became the fashionable study, there is the implicit charge of moral superficiality. Subtle enquiries into human nature can equally be idle. Shakespeare, while not a philosopher, can nevertheless be a thinker, through the sentiments he gives to his invented characters or those derived from historical originals and again in the moral design of entire plays. In the case of the former, think of the confessional soliloquies of Hamlet, à la Montaigne, or the great political-philosophical oration on degree by Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida. In the case of the latter, there are the terrible abysses of unnatural horror and desolation (chasm[s] infinitely deep)¹⁹ that open up in all of his great tragedies and what we are left with—to ponder philosophically—by them. What is and isn’t a part of Nature when we stare with unshaded eyes into the unspeakable interior of our own humanity? As a critic, Johnson especially appreciates the many explicit wisdoms to be found everywhere in the plays, as well as the many arguments or trains of reason that characters explore, as for example the famous lamentation on Tomorrow recreated in Johnsonian terms in his notes to Macbeth (Yale Johnson, 8:793). But as important are the many moral-philosophical issues that arise and are handled dramatically: conscience, causation, the nature of guilt, racial prejudice, unreason, the morality of armed combat, crime and punishment, governance, patriotism and political thought, sexual psychology, family values, ageing and death. Characters in the plays sometimes raise such topics. They may be debated; but they are best realized through that combination of character, situation, and plot that is the special province of dramatic performance and that places the emphasis on ways of saying, on the associated action, and on the human and narrative contexts in which things are said. In the devotion to abstraction, which can be the death of drama as Johnson well understood, philosophy must of necessity turn these contexts aside.

A SENSE OF THE DRAMATIC

Johnson’s writings do not lack appreciation of the dramatic mode or, in his own terms, a personal talent for dramatization, albeit that his attempt at actually writing a play notoriously fails in dramatic effect. Once he witnessed it staged, courtesy of Garrick, it was an experiment he never repeated. As Johnson freely conceded, the tragedy of Irene, learnedly based on a history of the Turks, was a disappointment and was itself the victim of a contemporary fashion for the declamatory voice. This voice Johnson could share with Shakespeare as he recognized the inconsistent nature of Shakespearean genius. Alongside some of the notes to the plays it is a fault that he critically elaborates in the Preface to Shakespeare, observing that [Shakespeare’s] declamations or set speeches are commonly cold and weak so that he seldom escapes without the pity or resentment of his reader (Yale Johnson, 7:73). In their relative success as dramatists the divide between Johnson and Shakespeare could hardly be greater; but Johnson understands the problem from the inside, as only a fellow practitioner might comprehend it. That phrase like other tragick writers turns the reference back to the self and to how far Johnson’s own stores of knowledge served ultimately to deaden the solitary drama he had nurtured. Johnson’s grasp of how drama works comes out forcefully, however, in his Shakespearean criticism, as in his famous comments on the attention-manacling power of King Lear: The tragedy of Lear is deservedly celebrated among the dramas of Shakespeare. There is perhaps no play which keeps the attention so strongly fixed; which so much agitates our passions and interests our curiosity (Yale Johnson, 8:702).

A sense of dramatic (as opposed to theatrical) form is a prominent attribute of Johnson’s critical accountings; enactment shapes a variety of Johnson’s work. This flair for dramatization appears in a lighter mode within the social vignettes and satirical narratives of the Rambler or the Idler, but moves to the threshold of tragedy in his descriptions of the individuals whose varied histories Johnson organizes in his Lives of the English Poets. The dramatic pathos of Jonathan Swift’s terminal decline in the Life of Swift combines an almost medically detached inquisitiveness with Johnson’s own psychic and physical fears; it is a particularly powerful piece of eighteenth-century tragic writing. The closing paragraphs ally the tragedy of Swift to the disintegration of Shakespeare’s King Lear:

The tumour [in his eye] at last subsided; and a short interval of reason ensuing, in which he knew his physician and his family, gave hopes of his recovery; but in a few days he sunk into lethargick stupidity, motionless, heedless, and speechless. But it is said, that, after a year of total silence, when his housekeeper, on the 30th of November, told that the usual bonfires and illuminations were preparing to celebrate his birth-day, he answered. It is all folly; they had better let it alone.

It is remembered that he afterwards spoke now and then, or gave some intimation of meaning; but at last sunk into perfect silence, which continued until about the end of October 1744, when, in his seventy-eighth year, he expired without a struggle. (Lives, 3:207–208)

There is resignation in the close of this passage, but the foregoing phrasing captures the uneven agony of Swift’s erratic demise as a proxy for his wayward life. The conjunction of mental and physical distress is acute in Johnson’s measured pauses. Johnson’s unsentimental sympathy records the lucid glimmers that punctuate Swift’s slide into extinction; the coolly bureaucratic atmosphere created by the cited dates gives inevitability to the markers of time that terminate where time itself is eclipsed. In his biographical treatment of the death of Swift Johnson shows that stage performance is not, in the event, the indispensable condition for tragedy of Shakespearean force.

A SHAKESPEAREAN STANDARD

Johnson’s Lives shares with Shakespeare and Montaigne a common inspiration in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives—and this series of classical pairings helps model the exactitude and equipoise of his critical comparisons between Dryden and Pope or (in the Preface to Shakespeare) the contrast between the dramatic energy of a single Shakespeare play and the formality of Joseph Addison’s popular tragedy of the noble Roman Cato. Here, famously, Addison speaks the language of poets, and Shakespeare of men (Yale Johnson, 7:84). The reservations Johnson expresses on the stilted theatricality of Samson Agonistes (Lives, 1:292–93) and on the studied ornamental poeticality of the masque of Comus in the Life of Milton (Lives, 1:280–82) imply similarly a Shakespearean test of dramatic merit, as do his reservations about narrative poems such as Butler’s Hudibras (Lives, 2:6).²⁰ In the major form of the Lives Johnson’s sense of the contrasts and continuities of the human enacts a comprehensive fraternity with Shakespearean nature. This is the quality once recognized in the paragraph from the Essay on Dramatic Poetry quoted by Johnson in his Preface. Shakespeare was the man, wrote Dryden in 1667, who, of all modern and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him (Yale Johnson, 7:112).

Johnson’s primary praise for Shakespeare rests on general nature. This is the critical concept that he had been the first to elaborate in a classic passage on nature’s combination of depth and durability:

Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species. (Yale Johnson, 7:61–62)

Johnson is held to account for these values as a critic. But Johnson’s sense of what observation will always find can also be applied to his own creative writings. Let Observation with extensive view … begins his greatest poem (Yale Johnson, 6: 91) and the satirical, or rather, tragic portraits of the Vanity of Human Wishes instantiate types inspired by individuals: Cardinal Wolsey, his fall recalling Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, Xerxes, Swedish Charles, and so on work as case histories to illuminate a pervasive existential condition and appeal to the consolations of Christian salvation in the face of human insufficiency. Here too, in anticipation of the theatrical quality of the death scenario I have quoted from the Life, Swift expires a driv’ler and a show (l.318; Yale Johnson, 6:106). In Rasselas there is no such reassurance from religion; but the form of the Eastern Tale enables Johnson to withdraw from the particularities of a recognizable everyday life, naturalistically displayed, to capture the large moral and philosophical issues that arise from all times and places and in his own style to dramatize them. Rasselas, reputedly written in the evenings of one week while Johnson worked full-tilt on his 1765 edition of the plays, offers a Shakespearean moment in its focus on variety, the quality that Johnson was to accord to Hamlet in his endnote to that play: "If the dramas of Shakespeare were to be characterised, each by the particular excellence which distinguishes it from the rest, we must allow to the tragedy of Hamlet the praise of variety. ‘Variety,’ said Rasselas, ‘is so necessary to content, that even the Happy Valley disgusted me by the recurrence of its luxuries’ (16:164; Yale Johnson, 8:1010–1011). The narrative of Rasselas shows how the experience of general nature is no more synonymous with uniformity than the spirit of Shakespeare’s play.

Through its appeal to general nature, Johnson’s Life of Savage once more particularizes the variety of humanity’s incarnations. Richard Savage, a convicted murderer and a drunk, was the poet of The Bastard and the maverick companion of Johnson in his wild early days in London, long before Boswell made Johnson’s acquaintance. But the effect of Johnson’s biography of Savage and his analysis of a gifted but delusive and self-destructive rogue, traces the arc of human aspiration, folly, and ultimate failure. The Life offers a forgiving, compassionate, but clear-sighted judgment on the simultaneous error and attractions of general humankind. This combination Johnson also explored in the mingle of warmth and undeluded moral directness (spoken, as it were, to the man’s face) that marks his portrait of Falstaff in Henry IV Parts 1 and 2: Falstaff, unimitated, unimitable Falstaff, how shall I describe thee? Thou compound of sense and vice (Yale Johnson, 7:523). Like the real-life Savage, Falstaff is a one-off instance of exceptional humanity through which the variety of general nature can be known and, if not approved, at least