In June 1756, he signed a contract for another substantial project, which he had been contemplating for a long time: an eight-volume edition of Shakespeare. As far back as April 1745, Edward Cave had brought out Sam’s Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth, accompanied by proposals for an inexpensive new edition, but within a week the scheme had collapsed. The Tonson family had published Nicholas Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare in 1709 and Alexander Pope’s eye-wateringly expensive edition in 1725 (£6 6s. a set); claiming that they still held the copyright in the plays, they warned Cave off, and he was daunted by the likely costs of a court case. Yet a decade on, after the remarkable achievement of the Dictionary, the mood was different. The Tonsons were now happy to be part of a group of booksellers backing his edition, who wanted the job done in eighteen months. The Dictionary had prepared him for this task, but, as before, he set out with too optimistic a view of how long it would take.
In an age when we tend to take for granted Shakespeare’s primacy among authors who have written in English, it is easy to lose sight of how much less secure his reputation used to be. At the start of the eighteenth century, readers and theatregoers commonly expressed admiration for his plays, but not much more than they did for the best of his contemporaries, such as Ben Jonson. It was in Sam’s lifetime that Shakespeare became a cultural icon. Beginning with Rowe’s six-volume edition, which came out in the year he was born, scholarly attention to Shakespeare’s works improved. Yet it was still far from unusual to believe that his phrasing could be tidied up. The same applied to his characters and plots; for instance, the conundrum-loving Fool was absent from productions of King Lear throughout the eighteenth century and did not return till 1838. Meanwhile, the appetite for staging Shakespeare owed something to expediency. The 1730s witnessed an increase in productions of his plays, partly thanks to the efforts of groups such as the Shakespeare Ladies Club, which urged theatre managers, in particular John Rich at Covent Garden, to promote him. But it was also because the Licensing Act of 1737, which meant that new plays had to be scrutinized by the censor, made older works easier to put on.
Nevertheless, by the time Sam embarked on his edition, talking up Shakespeare was a nationalist project. In 1753 the playwright Arthur Murphy could write of Shakespeare being ‘a kind of established religion in poetry’, and during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), which pitted Britain and Prussia against France and Austria, that religion took on political colour. Pride in British culture solidified. The history of French critics writing about Shakespeare in patronizing terms now met with a revulsion that was part of a broader, flag-waving hostility to all things French. Around the time of Sam’s edition, and boosted by Garrick among others, a Shakespeare industry was springing up. Its most dramatic moment of idolatry would be the Stratford Jubilee of 1769, and although that occasion, in no small part a celebration of Garrick, was ruined by bad planning and soggy conditions, subsequent Shakespeare festivities would ape its ritual silliness and cult of dubious relics.
Sam rose above such folderol. The context in which he interpreted Shakespeare was eternity, not the Seven Years’ War. His edition is now remembered mainly for its preface, written only in the last couple of months of a project that occupied him on and off for nearly a decade. Less well-known are his 5,500 notes on the text, about 15 per cent of which engage with the work of previous editors. He sees himself as an improver of the public understanding of Shakespeare, building on others’ endeavours, and in his many interventions to improve Shakespeare’s grammar, amend his stage directions and sharpen his punctuation, he seeks to enhance the plays’ immediacy. His approach is critical and informative, and his comments on individual plays contain smart insights as well as lucid explanations of tricky passages.3
He responded strongly to Shakespeare – to the plays, not the poems or the life. He likens them to a great forest, in which we can get lost, and one of the reasons he didn’t care to see them on the stage was that they were so alive in the theatre of his mind. Reading Hamlet as a child, he was terrified by the ghost and rushed out into the street ‘that he might see people about him’; the presence of real fleshly figures, some of whom he must have recognized, was enough to jolt him out of the spectral realm. Yet the play continued to transport him back there, and the ghost, he believed, always ‘chills the blood with horror’. The murder of Desdemona in Othello was ‘not to be endured’, and the shock of his first experience of Cordelia’s death in King Lear meant that ‘I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as editor’.
In some cases, his reaction was curt and unfavourable. Some of the plotting in Timon of Athens was ‘elaborately unskilful’, Julius Caesar was ‘cold and unaffecting’, the final act of Henry V suffered from ‘emptiness and narrowness’, and Cymbeline was with minor exceptions a work of ‘unresisting imbecility’. Sam is no one’s idea of a hagiographer, and his judgements can strike a modern reader, used to Shakespeare simply being praised, as alarmingly negative (or excitingly so). For instance, ‘He is not long soft and pathetic without some idle conceit or contemptible equivocation’, and ‘The plots are often so loosely formed, that a very slight consideration may improve them’. How about the claim that ‘trivial sentiments and vulgar ideas disappoint the attention, to which they are recommended by sonorous epithets and swelling figures’? Or the statement that his puns are a seductive and ruinous distraction, ‘the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world and was content to lose it’? Whether or not we agree, the attitude is instructive. Holding a writer in high esteem does not, in Sam’s view, require one to gloss over their faults. Nor does it preclude cutting the knots when their arguments are impenetrable. Undiscriminating admiration is not loyal, but ridiculous.
Given Sam’s personal take on his subject, it is no surprise that there are moments, as in the Dictionary, when a detail of his life intrudes. Sometimes this is a small matter, such as when his knowledge of Staffordshire dialect informs a note on a line of Edgar’s in King Lear.4 On other occasions he waxes philosophical, for instance prompted by a line in Measure for Measure to comment that ‘When we are young we busy ourselves in forming schemes . . . and miss the gratifications that are before us; when we are old we amuse the languor of age with the recollection of youthful pleasures or performances; so that our life . . . resembles our dreams after dinner, when the events of the morning are mingled with the designs of the evening’. Writing about Falstaff, he comments that ‘Every man who feels in himself the pain of deformity . . . is ready to revenge any hint of contempt’. Then there are times when he tells us more than he intends. In a note on King John about a character who muddles up his left and right slippers, he remarks, illuminating his own practices more than the rest of the world’s, ‘He that is frighted or hurried may put his hand into the wrong glove, but either shoe will equally admit either foot.’
More substantially, Sam’s edition and especially its noble preface put forward arguments about why Shakespeare is worth our time. He makes confident claims about Shakespeare’s whole body of work, rather than confining himself to a more gingerly discussion. His fundamental assertion is that the plays give pleasure because they contain ‘just representations of general nature’: although many of Shakespeare’s characters behave unusually, we are struck by their human traits, and in even his most extreme characters and their most extreme behaviours we see traces of ourselves. Those who want to mock fusty old Dr Johnson pretend that this means he thinks all Shakespeare’s characters are alike. In fact, he is quick to remark that ‘perhaps no poet ever kept his personages more distinct from each other’. The people who appear in Shakespeare’s plays are ‘the genuine progeny of common humanity’ – a common humanity, that is, teeming with weakness, folly and the potential for brutal, self-serving malignity.
Sam believes that the playwright’s skill lies in making familiar psychology seem blazingly vivid. There’s a rich understanding of behaviour in his observatio
n that Lady Macbeth ‘urges the excellence and dignity of courage, a glittering idea which has dazzled mankind from age to age’, and in his picture of Polonius as ‘a man bred in courts’ and ‘proud of his eloquence’, who ‘knows that his mind was once strong, and knows not that it is become weak’ and is thus a perfect image of ‘dotage encroaching upon wisdom’. A long note on the personality of Falstaff includes the following insight: ‘At once obsequious and malignant, he satirizes in their absence those whom he lives by flattering.’ Tell me that you don’t know this person, and that these words don’t illuminate a whole swathe of human conduct.
What’s radical, then, in Sam’s understanding of Shakespeare, is his conviction that the plays show us that the world is enough. As one modern account puts it, ‘What he looks for in Shakespeare above all else is the power to deliver the mind from its restless desire to go beyond what life gives, the power to bring us home to our participation in that general human nature which unites us.’5 Instead of satisfying himself with the platitude that the plays are timeless – a word that should immediately put one on high alert, ready to be sold a bucketful of Ye Olde Crappe – he finds in them a fecund timeliness, the quality of always being in season and always having something to say to us, whether about ambition, ageing, indecision, betrayal, love, conflict or transformation. At the same time, in treating the plays as if they are alive, he prizes their openness – not just a capacity to inspire new readings, but an endless soliciting of fresh interpretation.
22
In which Samuel Johnson idles, to some avail, not least by enquiring into the soul of advertisement and our artificial passions
Editing Shakespeare is now the preserve of professional academics. But before the middle of the nineteenth century it was mostly carried out by what we would now consider amateurs – well-informed literati with an eye for commercial opportunity, or genteel antiquarians. Sam belonged to the first of these categories and, like Pope and Nicholas Rowe before him, could also lay claim to expertise as a poet. Besides possessing a deep knowledge of the language of Shakespeare’s age, he sought to understand the plays, their creation and their perspectives in the context of that age and Shakespeare’s ‘own particular opportunities’. At the same time, he saw producing an edition as a way of redeeming from obscurity the phrasing and sentiments of an author who had been dead for almost 150 years, and it is significant that, when at last set before the public, Sam’s eight volumes were available for less than half of what Pope’s six had cost forty years earlier.
Although the impulse behind the edition was pragmatic, the work proved demanding, and he soon found convenient ways of diverting himself from the task. Among these was contributing an essay each week, under the title of the Idler, to a new newspaper, the Universal Chronicle. His first Idler appeared in April 1758, and there was one every Saturday for the next two years. The early numbers feel slighter and more topical than the Rambler, as well as less assertively moralistic. The tone of the whole series is brisker and less analytical. As if acknowledging the rhetorical exorbitance of the Rambler, he commented in Idler 70 that ‘Few faults of style, whether real or imaginary, excite the malignity of a more numerous class of readers, than the use of hard words.’ In another Idler essay he seemed to poke fun at the persona he had adopted in the Rambler, portraying ‘my old friend Sober’ who trifles with experiments, derives his greatest pleasure from conversation, and in empty moments bats away his own reproaches by persuading himself that he is always either teaching or learning something.
Yet there are moments when these essays, especially the later ones, show him at his most potent. ‘Vanity inclines us to find faults anywhere rather than in ourselves.’ ‘However we may labour for our own deception, truth, though unwelcome, will sometimes intrude upon the mind.’ ‘Slavery is now nowhere more patiently endured, than in countries once inhabited by the zealots of liberty.’ He frequently strikes a satirical note, for instance mocking people who endlessly scuttle from place to place in order never to be spotted in an unfashionable location, but he concludes that we shouldn’t laugh too hard at such people’s expense and should instead be merciful, for all of us are in some way absurd.
In the Idler, Sam is attentive to the fashions of the moment. He notes the topics under discussion in newspapers and coffee houses, and responds to recent events – such as the five inches of rain that fell in July of 1758. These essays show him living in a world of goods; though a man of few possessions, he knows the objects of other people’s material cravings and is curious about the ways in which those cravings are stimulated. Idler 40, published in January 1759, reflects on ‘the true pathos of advertisements’, citing the example of mothers who feel they must buy special necklaces to relieve the discomfort of teething babies, having been told that they will never forgive themselves if they fail to do so. His comments on advertising were timely, as Britain had lately witnessed an explosion of commerce and consumption, as well as a surge in national prosperity. Controversies raged over luxury and the fickleness of fashion, yet all the while there was an eager, almost rabid promotion of stuff: toys and trinkets, household items, the wherewithal for comfort and self-indulgence – often sourced abroad. Fashions changed fast: the economist Adam Smith commented, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), that a man’s coat might be in style for a year, and that notions of what furniture a polite home should contain changed a couple of times a decade. It’s a pattern that still holds true.
Printed matter proliferated: newspapers and magazines, labels, tickets, certificates, receipts. Instead of an oral, courtly, amateur literary milieu there was now a market-driven, professional one; prose gained the upper hand over poetry, a formal understanding of copyright came into force (in 1710), and aristocratic patronage of literature faded. At the same time literacy increased, public libraries became more common, and the novel emerged as an important literary form.1 To put that in perspective, between 1660 and 1800 about 300,000 books and pamphlets were published in England; in our own age, that many titles are published every two years. But Sam saw among the defining features of his age an ‘epidemical conspiracy for the destruction of paper’ and ‘the itch of literary praise’. He was a creature of this new world – a serious and scholarly reader who nevertheless had a rare facility for producing journalistic copy. A master of the quick first draft, he prided himself on his versatility and could boast of being able, if required, to ‘write the life of a broomstick’. Acutely conscious of the book as an object and a commodity, he was conscious also of authorship as a business. And, though he would not have used the word, he was conscious of the individual author as a brand.
Where there were goods to sell and an abundance of new means to talk about them, there was advertising. Britain’s first daily newspaper was the single-sheet Daily Courant, which appeared in March 1702, with the news on one side and advertisements on the other. Soon there were plenty more publications of this kind. Joseph Addison, co-founder of the Spectator in 1711, said only half in jest that on days when news was in short supply he entertained himself by reading the advertisements, which were ‘instruments of ambition’ and allowed the purveyors of common goods or services to share space on the page with the rulers of nations. In 1712 the British government, seeking to curb the press, imposed a tax on such advertising – it would continue until 1853 – but in the 1730s, when Sam arrived in London, newspapers commonly devoted half their space to it. There one might find big talk of the benefits of fat from the carcass of a Russian bear, which was apparently good for nourishing the scalp, or of elixirs that could relieve one of bad dreams and writer’s cramp; an advertisement might promise instruction in how best to use a snuff box, not least how to offer it to a stranger, or urge the attractions of attending a bull-baiting, at which a cat would be tied to the bull’s tail.2 Other promotional methods abounded, with posters, handbills, fancy catalogues and pattern books, extravagant shop signs and souvenir trade cards all used in order to create hype around goods and services.
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Sam had witnessed a shift in advertising: from mere announcements, which told the public that articles or services were available, to acts of persuasion, which involved inflated claims about those articles and services and about the people responsible for them. He seems indeed to have been the first person to use the word advertising in its modern sense, writing in Idler 40 that ‘The trade of advertising is now so near to perfection, that it is not easy to propose any improvement.’ We may now laugh, since advertising has changed dramatically, but it’s interesting that he thinks this. The key change in his lifetime was a move towards manipulation: of the facts, inasmuch as the benefits of products and ownership were overstated, and also of the customer’s imagination. He saw it everywhere. An item in the London Magazine in 1732 explained that ‘Puff is a cant word for the applause that writers and booksellers give their own books &c. to promote their sale.’ On entering the literary life of the capital, Sam was able to observe at close quarters the mushrooming of puffs. In the Idler he writes, ‘Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises.’
The science of manipulating image and taste was only just beginning. A latter-day Johnson would shudder at modern techniques in which products are endowed with personalities and subliminal messages are pumped into the air we breathe. He would balk, certainly, at the cynicism of the stories concocted by Mad Men’s Don Draper, that Gatsby-ish peddler of toxic products, who insists that ‘Happiness is the smell of a new car’, ‘What you call love was invented by guys like me, to sell nylons’, and ‘People want to be told what to do so badly that they’ll listen to anyone.’ Yet Sam perceived the essence of the business: ‘Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.’ As an example, he cited the recent promotion of a particular type of duvet – yes, they had them in the eighteenth century – which was ‘beyond comparison’ with conventional eiderdown and had ‘many excellencies [that] cannot be here set forth’. He added wryly, ‘With one excellence we are made acquainted, “it is warmer than four or five blankets, and lighter than one.”’ In similar vein, he mentioned a ‘beautifying fluid’ that ‘repels pimples, washes away freckles, smoothes the skin, and plumps the flesh; and yet, with a generous abhorrence of ostentation, confesses, that it will not “restore the bloom of fifteen to a lady of fifty”’. The first time I saw this, I missed the twang of irony in his talk of that generous abhorrence of ostentation. How kind it is of the advertiser to tell us that the product will not achieve a huge miracle – and leave us to imagine that it will at least achieve a small one.
The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson's Guide to Life Page 17
