Why Shakespeare?

Part 1: He who would pun would pick a pocket

Photo by Taha on Unsplash

Why Shakespeare?

I asked the students in my literary criticism course this question last week, and they sat in silence for a minute before a lone quiet voice ventured forth: “He’s damn good.”

Not a bad answer—though not exactly a hot take. Actually, the silence interested me just as much as the answer. (And they did, eventually, offer some more complex and interesting answers in our discussion.) Most of them had never considered the question. I mean, don’t we just assume? It’s Shakespeare! He’s it. He’s the one. All of my students read Shakespeare in high school, and I could not find any other writer whom even half of them had read—not Homer, not Dante, not Dickens, not Hawthorne, not the Brontës, not Austen, not Toni Morrison.

But the question gives us a chance to discuss a concept that is central to my little publication here, so much so that it’s in the title: canon formation. Shakespeare wasn’t always it. He became it gradually for a variety of reasons having to do with literary criticism, fashion, politics, ideology and empire—and the fact that he’s damn good.

It is obviously a huge topic, and one that I can’t hope to cover in this small space—so I would like to focus today on one particular moment in the development of Shakespeare’s centrality: Samuel Johnson’s 1765, eight-volume edition of the complete plays (no sonnets or narrative poems), which celebrates its 258th anniversary this month. While no one consults Johnson’s edition these days, except for Johnson scholars and those working on the history of Shakespearean textual criticism, his preface is widely anthologized and frequently read as marking an important moment for Shakespeare’s reputation.

Johnson, too, asks this question. Why Shakespeare?

But because human judgment, though it be gradually gaining upon certainty, never becomes infallible; and approbation, though long continued, may yet be only the approbation of prejudice or fashion; it is proper to inquire, by what peculiarities of excellence Shakespeare has gained and kept the favour of his countrymen.

Boswell remarks on the intense, rapt state in which Johnson did his reading . . . and his eating . . . and everything else.

It is important to note that the old Stratfordian had been dead for only about 150 years when Johnson wrote this, and though he was widely admired and read, he had not yet become as central to English culture and education as he would in later centuries. In fact, the same could be said of English literature as a whole: eighteenth-century literary education in schools and universities meant reading Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek. No one went to Oxford to study Shakespeare.

However, Johnson seems to be making an ambitious claim for his subject: “The Poet, of whose works I have undertaken the revision, may now begin to assume the dignity of an ancient, and claim the privilege of established fame and prescriptive veneration.” Of course, he has a vested interest in this claim, since he wants his edition to sell, but the arguments that he makes in Shakespeare’s favor have been convincing to many, though today some of his points seem eccentric, and they may tell us more about Johnson and eighteenth-century literary theory than about Shakespeare himself.

Indeed, Johnson’s answers to the “Why Shakespeare?” question may not be entirely congruent with our own. For example, he thinks that we are much better off reading Shakespeare than watching his plays performed, because we can read in a more detached, objective state of mind than is possible in the theatre. Furthermore, his claim that Shakespeare’s “declamations or set speeches are commonly cold and weak” may come as a shock to us. We probably value the great speeches above everything: “Is this a dagger I see before me?”; “Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I”; “If music be the food of love, play on”; “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.”

Weak tea, says Johnson.

“Alas! Poor Yorick!” Dr. Johnson is not impressed. (Any excuse to sneak David Bowie into a post.)

And Shakespeare likes puns! According to Boswell, Dr. Johnson maintained that “he who would pun would pick a pocket,” though this quip has been attributed to several eighteenth-century wits.

Despite these complaints, however, Johnson argues for Shakespeare’s canonicity (though he doesn’t use that term), and in doing so, he considers three crucial ideas:

First, he affirms Shakespeare’s mimetic powers: “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 mirror of manners and of life.” In making this claim, Johnson is praising his subject in Aristotelian terms: the poet’s job is the accurate representation of reality. (To read more about Aristotle’s Poetics, check out this post.)

Second, he defends Shakespeare from attacks by Voltaire and others, that Shakespeare fails to preserve the Aristotelian unities of time and place—i.e. the notion that a play should represent no more than twenty-four hours of chronological time and should take place entirely in a single geographical location. These prescriptive attacks by eighteenth-century critics of Shakespeare are based on reductive readings of Aristotle, who was observing the characteristics of plays that he knew rather than providing an eternal and inviolable rule book for playwrights.

According to such critics, the arguments for the unities of time and place are arguments concerning credibility: since a play runs for about two hours on a single stage, it is not credible for it to represent a period of ten years with action occurring on two continents. Johnson’s refutation of these arguments is delicious:

The objection arising from the impossibility of passing the first hour at Alexandria, and the next at Rome, supposes, that when the play opens, the spectator really imagines himself at Alexandria, and believes that his walk to the theatre has been a voyage to Egypt, and that he lives in the days of Antony and Cleopatra.

The anxieties of such a delusional playgoer would make for a brilliant SNL sketch. Henry Fielding, Johnson’s contemporary, actually narrates something like this scenario in his novel Tom Jones, when Jones’s friend Mr. Partridge seems to mistake elements of a performance of Hamlet for reality. Both Johnson and Fielding are using humor to illustrate an important principle of the aesthetic experience of drama: the willing suspension of disbelief:

The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players. They came to hear a certain number of lines recited with just gesture and elegant modulation. The lines relate to some action, and an action must be in some place; but the different actions that compleat [sic.] a story may be in places very remote from each other; and where is the absurdity of allowing that space to represent first Athens, and then Sicily, which was always known to be neither Sicily nor Athens, but a modern theatre?

Third and finally, Johnson harnesses these arguments to make a claim about the nature of canon formation in general—to posit an answer to the question of “why Shakespeare?” and, by extension, why anyone? Why any text? How do we form our literary canon?

He observes that many honor simply what is old “without considering that time has sometime co-operated with chance.” In other words, luck has a lot to say about which texts survive. (This always makes me think of the only surviving manuscript of Beowulf, singed at the edges, having narrowly escaped the fire at Ashburnam House in 1731, before any modern person was able to read and understand it; we’re lucky to have the poem.) It’s not simply age that elevates a text, but rather what we keep coming back to in each generation, through a variety of cultural and historical circumstances:

What mankind have long possessed they have often examined and compared; and if they persist to value that possession, it is because frequent comparisons have confirmed opinion in its favor.

There are, of course, many reasons that people may value particular texts (personal, political, ideological), and Johnson acknowledges this, but ultimately, there is something essential to this claim about longevity, provided we properly qualify it.

Why Shakespeare? We all have our various responses to the question, but Johnson has given us a baseline—a baseline with which our subject of the forthcoming second part of this little study, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, would probably agree: we keep coming back to this elusive Elizabethan-Jacobean playwright. However, Coleridge will forcefully challenge Johnson’s aesthetic arguments and claim Shakespeare for the Romantics, as we shall see next week.

Actual photo of Shakespeare picking a pocket on the train while enjoying a pun in the local newspaper. Apparently, he shaved in order to disguise himself.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Actual photo of Shakespeare’s typewriter. It fell off the back of a truck. Photo by Johnny Briggs on Unsplash