10 - Shakespeare

Summary

Johnson's first acquaintance with Shakespeare gave him a shock. As a boy in Lichfield, and reading Shakespeare's Hamlet in the basement of his father's shop, he was frightened by the scene with the ghost and rushed upstairs “that he might see people about him.” Later, in the relatively unsuperstitious maturity of early middle age, Johnson published some sample notes for a planned edition of Shakespeare. In these, the Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth (1745), he lights on a passage that arouses but also scares him. Johnson compares the passage from Shakespeare with a famous passage from Dryden's Conquest of Mexico (1667):

Night is described by two great poets, but one describes a night of quiet, the other of perturbation. In the night of Dryden, all the disturbers of the world are laid asleep; in that of Shakespeare, nothing but sorcery, lust and murder is awake. He that reads Dryden, finds himself lull'd with serenity, and disposed to solitude and contemplation. He that peruses Shakespeare, looks round alarmed, and starts to find himself alone. One is the night of a lover, the other that of a murderer.

(pp. 19-20)