Mad About Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate

Author:Jonathan Bate [Bate, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2022-02-23T17:00:00+00:00

No sooner had Dr Johnson finished single-handedly compiling a complete dictionary of the English language on historical principles, with a legion of quotations giving examples of the usage of every word, than he set to work on his new edition of the complete plays of Shakespeare, with commentary. Where the words of Jesus gave him his model of virtue, in those of Shakespeare he found the perfect account of human failings, especially his own. His perpetual restlessness, for example. Hurdy introduced us to the Duke’s sermon on mortality in the third act of Measure for Measure and Johnson’s footnote explaining its purport:

Thou hast nor youth, nor age;

But as it were an after-dinner’s sleep,

Dreaming on both.

This is exquisitely imagined. When we are young we busy ourselves in forming schemes for succeeding time, and miss the gratifications that are before us; when we are old we amuse the languor of age with the recollection of youthful pleasures or performances; so that our life, of which no part is filled with the business of the present time, resembles our dreams after dinner, when the events of the morning are mingled with the designs of the evening.

I could see how a quotation such as this, moving from Shakespeare to life (and death), together with the critical principles articulated in the Preface, was of value in making us better readers and writers, and indeed more thoughtful people. But I was bored, as was everyone in class, by the latter part of the Preface, in which Johnson started quarrelling with the prior Shakespearean editions of Mr Rowe, Mr Pope and Mr Warburton. There didn’t seem to be much to learn from this, other than the art of damning:

Pope was succeeded by Theobald, a man of narrow comprehension and small acquisitions, with no native and intrinsick splendor of genius, with little of the artificial light of learning, but zealous for minute accuracy, and not negligent in pursuing it.

In later years, I would encounter one or two minds of the Theobald kind. Not to mention some that resembled the authors of various other works of textual criticism mentioned by Johnson:

One ridicules errors with airy petulance, suitable enough to the levity of the controversy; the other attacks them with gloomy malignity, as if he were dragging to justice an assassin or incendiary. The one stings like a fly, sucks a little blood, takes a gay flutter, and returns for more; the other bites like a viper, and would be glad to leave inflammations and gangrene behind him.

Along with its dedicated teachers and brilliant scholars, the academic world still has its vipers and men (they are always men) of gloomy malignity. Some will strike at this book with forked tongue, hoping to infect the author with emotional gangrene.

‘Why does Shakespeare have to be edited?’ a boy asked in class. JA showed us some facsimiles of the original texts, with their weird spellings and the long printed ‘s’ that looks like an ‘f’. ‘Potentially a little problematic when Ariel in The Tempest sings Where the bee sucks, there suck I’, he joked, in order to gain our attention.

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