An Analysis of the Faults Identified in the Preface to Shakespeare (1765)

An Analysis of the Faults Identified in the  Preface to Shakespeare (1765)

INTRODUCTION:

Samuel Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare, published in 1765, stands as one of the most important critical works in the history of English literature. Written to accompany his monumental edition of Shakespeare's complete works, it represents the culmination of decades of scholarly engagement with the playwright's genius.

Johnson identifies nine principal faults in Shakespeare's art, ranging from moral negligence and structural looseness to stylistic inflation and historical anachronism.

THE FAULTS OF SHAKESPEARE

Fault 1: Sacrifice of Virtue to Convenience — Absence of Moral Purpose

Johnson's first and perhaps most fundamental charge against Shakespeare is that he sacrifices moral virtue to the demands of dramatic convenience. His plots do not reliably reward virtue or punish vice; good characters suffer without redemption, and wicked ones may prosper without reproof. The conclusion of a Shakespearean drama often distributes fortune and misfortune with a randomness that Johnson finds morally irresponsible.

Fault 2: Loosely Formed Plots

Johnson's second complaint concerns the structural integrity of Shakespeare's plots, which he finds frequently loose, episodic, and insufficiently unified. A well-constructed plot, in classical and neo-classical theory, should possess an organic coherence: each episode should arise naturally from what precedes it and contribute meaningfully to what follows. The parts should serve the whole, and the whole should be intelligible through the parts. Shakespeare's plots, Johnson observes, too often lack this discipline.

Fault 3: Neglect of the Latter Part of the Plays

Closely related to the charge of loose plotting is Johnson's observation that in many of Shakespeare's plays, the latter portions are evidently neglected. The final acts of several plays strike Johnson as hurried, perfunctory, or inadequately prepared. Resolutions arrive too quickly; motivations that have been carefully established are abandoned.

Fault 4: Disregard for the Unities of Time and Place

Johnson's fourth criticism concerns Shakespeare's complete disregard for the classical unities of time and place — those neo-classical prescriptions, derived from Aristotle and codified by Renaissance theorists, requiring that the action of a play should be confined to a single day and a single location.

Fault 5: Gross and Licentious Wit in Comic Scenes

Johnson's fifth fault concerns the character of Shakespeare's comedy, which he finds offensive to decency and propriety. In his comic scenes, Johnson contends, Shakespeare sometimes descends into a vulgarity that ill becomes the dignity of a great writer; his humour degenerates from genuine wit into coarseness, bawdiness, and licentiousness.

Fault 6: Declining Quality in Tragedy — Tumour, Meanness, and Obscurity

Perhaps Johnson's most penetrating structural criticism is his observation that in tragedy, Shakespeare's performance seems constantly to worsen as his labour increases, that the offspring of his tragic throes is tumour, meanness, tediousness, and obscurity.

Johnson argues that when Shakespeare turns his full conscious effort to the construction of high tragic scenes — scenes of formal dignity, philosophical weight, and elevated emotion, he tends toward a strained and artificial grandeur that achieves neither genuine power nor genuine beauty. The language becomes inflated, the sentiment forced, the expression obscure. In reaching for sublimity, Shakespeare grasps only bombast.

Fault 7: Disproportionate Pomp of Diction in Narration

Johnson's seventh criticism targets Shakespeare's narrative style, which he finds afflicted by a disproportionate pomp of diction and a wearisome train of circumlocution. Shakespeare, when narrating events or conveying information, habitually employs far more words than are necessary, adorning plain matter with elaborate paraphrase, extended metaphor, and ornamental digression. 

Fault 8: Cold and Weak Declamations and Set Speeches

Johnson's eighth fault concerns Shakespeare's set speeches and formal declamations, those passages where a character addresses an audience, argues a cause, or delivers a formal oration. Johnson finds these, as a general tendency, cold and weak: they lack the vital heat of genuine feeling and the intellectual force of genuine argument.

Fault 9: Anachronism and Disregard for Historical Propriety

Johnson's ninth and final fault is Shakespeare's habitual anachronism and his disregard for historical propriety. Shakespeare's historical plays are populated with characters who think, speak, and behave in ways that are recognisably Elizabethan rather than authentically ancient, medieval, or foreign. Romans discourse in the manner of Elizabethan gentlemen; Greeks hold attitudes shaped by Renaissance humanism; Danish princes wrestle with philosophical problems that belong more to sixteenth-century Protestant Europe than to pre-Christian Scandinavia.

CONCLUSION

Samuel Johnson's enumeration of Shakespeare's faults in the Preface of 1765 constitutes one of the most searching and honest critical assessments in the history of English literary scholarship. It is a testament to Johnson's intellectual integrity that he refused to allow his profound admiration for Shakespeare's genius to silence his equally profound commitment to critical rigour.