Demerits of Shakespeare:
Don’t write the bold underlined sentences. They are not compulsory. If you add some of them in your answer, you will get more marks.
If literary admiration is the corpus of a textual appreciation, literary criticism is the shadow of it, without which an admiration is nothing but incomplete. Dr Samuel Johnson’s ” Preface” to his edition of “The Plays of William Shakespeare”(1765) is considered a landmark in English criticism. It proceeds to show both the lacuna and acumen of Shakespeare. Johnson is neither afraid nor overzealous to show the flaws of Shakespeare. Sense and sensibilities of reason and art dictate his criticism.
Speaking of Shakespeare’s shortfalls, Johnson remarks that they are serious enough to drown the merits of any other dramatist. Among other major faults, Johnson accuses Shakespeare of lacking in morality. He “sacrifices virtue to convenience” and seems to write without any moral purpose. Like Aristotle’s or Horace’s emphasis upon both pleasing and instructing Johnson also uses the same Neoclassical glass to view Shakespeare. Therefore he criticizes him for preferring pleasantness before didactic instructions. His precepts and axioms drop from him casually. He does not make a just distribution of good and evil and does not observe poetic justice. He does not always present his virtuous characters being victorious over the evil ones. Rather, he takes his characters through right and wrong indiscriminately and dismisses them carelessly at the end. One may attribute this defect to the barbarity of the age but for Johnson “It is always a writer’s duty to make the world better, and justice is a virtue independent of time or place”.
His plots are ” loosely formed” and “carelessly pursued”. He often omits the opportunities of instructing or delighting during plot development. He is accused of anachronism in plays like “Troilus and Cressida” where Hector quotes Aristotle and in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” where the love story of Theseus and Hippolyta mingle with that of gothic fairies. Johnson does not accept Pope’s justification that such violations of chronology or historical fallacies are interpolations and not genuine. Its frequent presence in his plays is enough to convince us that Shakespeare himself produced them.
His comic dialogues are often coarse and the more he puts labour and strains himself for effects, the more his tragedies look tedious. He objects against the “reciprocations of smartness and contests of sarcasm” in Shakespeare’s comedies. Since a majority of the comic characters are guilty of licentious speech, the distinction between refined characters and low characters is lost. He has an irresistible love for pun or quibbles irrespective of comic or tragic situation. It leads him to utter senselessness just as the will-o-the-wisp misleads a wayfarer. Whenever he gets a chance to play with words, he forgets everything else and chases it blindly. A quibble ‘was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it.”
Other drawbacks include verbose diction, flamboyant speeches and losing intensity to feebleness. Shakespeare has the tendency to elaborate an incident unnecessarily where it can be told in fewer words. His use of undue pomp and excessive circumlocution produce a tedious effect sometimes. The final part of his plays are mostly neglected because “he shortened the labour,to snatch the profit”. Therefore his catastrophe is ” improbably produced or imperfectly represented”. He often neglects ” the equality of words to things ” because sometimes he uses rhetorical language or great imagery but the thought and idea is not subtle. However, most of this censure on Shakespeare’s style and expression is exaggerated. It is also noteworthy that Johnson defends Shakespeare’s violation of the unities of time and place and his mixture of tragedy and comedy. His literary sensibility prevents him from misjudging these characteristics to be flaws because they defy dramatic rule but follow the natural rule. He also understands the universal spirit of Shakespeare and denies the narrow criticism of Voltaire and Dennis that Shakespeare’s Romans are not sufficiently Romans or his kings are not enough royal.
Johnson’s criticism is stained by duality and classical obsession with morality. But his honesty to show the merits and demerits of Shakespeare along with defending him from baseless attacks is remarkable. Johnson himself is avowedly classical but his prudence to judge Shakespeare’s violation of unities unbiasedly proves his merit as a literary critic.
Indeed, “Johnson’s strong gasp of the main thread of the discourse, his sound sense, and his wide knowledge of humanity enable him to go straight to Shakespeare’s meanings”(Raleigh).
