Early Georgian Politics and Shakespeare: The Black Act and Charles Johnson’s Love in a Forest (1723)

Summary

The prolific playwright Charles Johnson wrote seventeen plays in the first three decades of the eighteenth century. Although they have received little critical attention, his works reveal the strategies of a dramatist who diligently offered London audiences a play almost every season. He was infamous for his plagiarism, and most of his plays are derived from other sources; his contemporary Christopher Bullock criticized Johnson for ‘diverting the Town with other People’s Writings, and endeavouring to acquire the Name of a Poet by transcribing from other Men’s Plays’. Johnson only used Shakespearian material as the basis for two plays, the 1716 afterpiece The Cobler of Preston, and the 1723 play Love in a Forest. Both adaptations were written in times of social turmoil; they are responses to specific historical conditions and events, and must be considered within that climate. This paper situates Charles Johnson’s adaptations of Shakespeare in the political context of the 1720s, specifically chronicling the connections between Love in a Forest and the circumstances surrounding the Black Act of 1723.