Chapter 4 - Scholar

Summary

Throughout his life, Johnson’s heroes were the humanist scholars – Erasmus, Roger Ascham, and above all Joseph Scaliger – who had pioneered the close textual analysis of classical texts. Unlike Swift and Pope, Johnson was not satirical about true scholarship, and he produced two major feats of scholarship in their own right: The Dictionary of the English Language and The Plays of William Shakespeare. The Dictionary’s innovation was that, following the example of the humanist lexicographers of Latin, it was compiled by reading books and recording their use of English words. The book’s most striking feature is its more than 100,000 quotations; its weakest is Johnson’s etymologies. Compiling it helped to Johnson to cement his close knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays, and so to edit them – sometimes proposing imaginative emendations, but with the caution his humanist exemplars recommended. Some of his comments, meanwhile, amount to moralistic mini-essays.