The Works of William Shakespeare

Johnson first planned to edit the plays of Shakespeare in 1745, when he published his Observations on Macbeth as a specimen of the edition he hoped to produce. For a number of reasons, mostly legal, the edition was abandoned shortly thereafter. But with the Dictionary complete in 1755, Johnson once again turned his attention to Shakespeare. His work was irregular, but finally appeared in an eight-volume edition in 1765.

Johnson's Preface to the Shakespeare edition is one of his most famous pieces of writing, and has long dominated discussions of the entire edition. It is indeed one of his most interesting works, but a number of critics (most notably Arthur Sherbo) have reminded readers that much of what appears in the Preface is thoroughly conventional, and have insisted that Johnson's really interesting work appears in his notes.

Editions

The standard edition is Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, vols. VII and VIII of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968). Sherbo reproduces only Johnson's original notes, not the text of the plays. You can get the original eight-volume Works of William Shakespeare in a facsimile from AMS Press, and that can be handy; but be sure to consult Sherbo's edition, since he carefully identifies which notes are Johnson's and which are simply borrowed from earlier critics.

The Preface appears in nearly every anthology of Johnson's critical writing, either whole or in part.

Criticism

See the general works on Johnson's criticism — Hagstrum, Keast, Hinnant — in the bibliography to the Lives of the Poets. More specific works are listed below: Sherbo's is the most authoritative, if not always the most engaging.

• D. Nichol Smith, Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928).
• Arthur M. Eastman, "Johnson's Shakespearean Labors in 1765," MLN, 63 (December 1948), 512-15. Dry, but contains important material.
• Arthur Sherbo, Samuel Johnson, Editor of Shakespeare (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1956). Dry, but essential reading, and the foundation of most criticism that came afterwards. Sherbo drew critical attention away from its exclusive attention to the Preface and turned it toward the notes to the plays.
• R. E. Scholes, "Dr. Johnson and the Bibliographical Criticism of Shakespeare," Shakespeare Quarterly, 11 (Spring 1960), 225-28.
• R. D. Stock, Samuel Johnson and Neo-Classical Dramatic Theory (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1973).
• Peter Seary, "The Early Editors of Shakespeare and the Judgment of Johnson," in Johnson After Two Hundred Years, ed. Paul J. Korshin (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), pp. 175-86.
• G. F. Parker, Johnson's Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989).
• Edward Tomarken, Johnson on Shakespeare: The Choice of Criticism (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1991).
• Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725-1765 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) does a good job of putting Johnson's Shakespeare in its context.
• Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). De Grazia focuses on Malone's edition, not Johnson's, and (I argue) misrepresents much of Johnson's work. But it's a thought-provoking book on late eighteenth-century Shakespearean criticism and textual work.

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This is part of a Guide to Samuel Johnson by Jack Lynch. Comments are welcome.