Fiction, Nature, and Literary Kinds in Johnson's Criticism of Shakespeare

THE DEDICATED eighteenth-century scholar must be very wary of those (like me, I confess) who peer back into his period with a sensibility tuned to, or formed by, all that comes from the other side of the Kantian revolution. And so the eighteenth-century scholar normally is, with a proper sense of his professionalism and of his territorial rights. He must warn the interloper, who may be anxious to reinterpret major figures or documents, of the dangerous likelihood that the postKantian mind may assimilate pre-Kantian attitudes only by transforming and distorting them. Yet, despite such dangers and the warnings that accompany them, I shall proceed to exercise such freedom-though I hope not altogether carelessly-on some critical notions of Samuel Johnson, in the hope that there are corresponding advantages for the period specialist to have this outsider's view, despite its occasional perversions, thrust upon him. I should like to study closely certain of Johnson's pronouncements with the (almost unscholarly) naivete of open encounter, even as I admit that such readings are affected by the alien perspective of their source. Let us examine three of Dr. Johnson's central claims, all made in his Preface to Shakespeare, together with the several, sometimes rather strangely instructive ways they tend to disagree with one another. First, the early axiom: Nothing can please many, and please long, but of general nature. Here is an august contention of more than a century and a half, the just representations echoing the French seventeenth century, as reflected in the conservative half of Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy, and the entire notion accounting

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