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Fragmentations shakespeariennes au xviiie siècle

“The Splendour of Particular Passages”: Eighteenth-Century Editorial Criticism and the Epitomes of Shakespeare’s Genius

Luisa Signorelli

Résumés

Dans sa célèbre édition des pièces de Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson refuse l’idée que le génie de Shakespeare serait illustré par “la splendeur de passages particuliers.” Malgré l’opinion de Johnson, au dix-huitième siècle l’œuvre dramatique de Shakespeare est célébrée dans plusieurs recueils de citations. Cet article retracera les métaphores architecturales du génie de Shakespeare chez Alexander Pope, Lewis Theobald, et Johnson lui-même en identifiant une influence mutuelle entre les conceptualisations de la beauté littéraire de Shakespeare et les pratiques critiques et éditoriales de l’époque. Cet article cherchera à démontrer que la variante anglaise de critique littéraire néoclassique qui émerge au dix-huitième siècle s’appuie sur un regain d’intérêt pour les extraits de Shakespeare. Introduite dans l’index de Nicholas Rowe et Pope sur leurs éditions, l’idée que les passages de Shakespeare pourraient être lus indépendamment du reste du texte trouve sa pleine concrétisation dans l’anthologie. Cet article établira une distinction entre les recueils imprimés de sentences et les anthologies qui se présentent comme des éditions abrégées, notamment The Beauties of Shakespear de William Dodd et The Morality of Shakespeare’s Drama Illustrated d’Elizabeth Griffith. Cet article soutiendra que les anthologies de Dodd et Griffith jouent un rôle de transition dans la lecture des passages de Shakespeare indépendamment de sa trame narrative.

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Texte intégral

  • 1 Samuel Johnson, “Preface to Edition of Shakespeare. 1765,” Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare(...)
  • 2 Ibid.

1According to Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare’s genius cannot be epitomised by his isolated passages. “[H]e that tries to recommend [Shakespeare] by select quotations,” Johnson writes in the “Preface” to his edition of the plays (1765), is like “the pedant in Hierocles who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen.”1 The unsystematic critic described by Johnson is a disingenuous salesman, a vendor not only of faulty synecdoche but, more crucially, of a misconceived conception of the architecture of Shakespeare’s literary beauty. Shakespeare’s dramatic genius cannot be reduced to its verbal building blocks: his “real power,” Johnson argues, “is not shewn in the splendour of particular passages, but in his fable, and the tenour of his dialogue.”2

  • 3 Jean Marsden, The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, & Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory, (...)
  • 4 Idem, p. 150.

2The opposition between Shakespeare’s “particular passages” and his ability to represent nature truthfully in “his fable” is a recurring subject of discussion of Restoration and eighteenth-century criticism, as Jean Marsden has demonstrated.3 While Shakespeare’s literary grandeur is never doubted, there is indeed a shift in the “perception of where his genius is located,” or “a question of whether the essence of Shakespeare’s talent lies in mimesis or logos,” in his fable or his words.4 While Marsden traces the effects of these shifting conceptualisations of Shakespeare’s genius on the stage adaptations, their influence on the editorial tradition is still understudied.

  • 5 Hannah More, vol. 2 Hints Towards Forming the Character of a Princess, London, T. Cadell and W. Dav (...)
  • 6 See Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the Romantic Imagination, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989, (...)

3Despite Johnson’s admonitions, the practice of repackaging Shakespeare’s dramatic oeuvre into collections of “particular passages” thrived in the eighteenth century and afterwards. By the end of the century, not only were many readers, especially women, encouraged to read Shakespeare exclusively in these abridged forms – in Hannah More’s words, Shakespeare “should only be read in parcels, and with the nicest selection”5 – but even literary criticism shifted its focus from general methods of inquiry to the analysis of specific passages.6

  • 7 Jens Bisky, Poesie der Baukunst: Architekturästhetik von Winckelmann bis Boisserée, Weimar, Hermann (...)

4This article describes the evolution of eighteenth-century attitudes towards Shakespeare’s isolated passages as adequate epitomes of his genius, a concept which underpins the idea that Shakespeare’s quotations can be appreciated independently from the rest of his text. This history begins with the structural rules of neoclassical beauties-and-faults criticism and ends with the empiricist re-evaluation of the role of subjective experience in the aesthetic and moral appreciation of the plays. Johnson’s conceptualisation of Shakespeare’s dramatic oeuvre as the house of Hierocles’ paradox is inscribed within a trend of architectural metaphors that, from Alexander Pope to Johnson himself, describe the structure of Shakespeare’s genius as variously shaped buildings. At a time when, in architecture as in literary criticism, aesthetic judgement moved from structural rules to subjective taste,7 these metaphors illustrate how aesthetic criticism informs evolving conceptualisations of the structure of Shakespeare’s literary beauty. Exploring the influence between evolving metaphors of Shakespeare’s genius and practices of Shakespeare editing and criticism, this article will identify a shift in the conceptualisation of Shakespeare’s oeuvre from an indivisible whole to its fragmentation into atomistic countless beauties, or infinite self-contained passages of intrinsic merit that can be read and appreciated independently from the rest of his text.

“Survey the Whole”

  • 8 Alexander Pope, “Preface to Edition of Shakespeare. 1725,” Smith, op. cit., p. 63.
  • 9 Dale Townshed, “Gothic Shakespeare,” A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter, Chichester, B (...)
  • 10 Pope, “Preface,” op. cit., p. 63.
  • 11 Idem.

5In the “Preface” to his edition of the plays (1725), Pope compares reading Shakespeare’s drama to looking at “an ancient majestic piece of Gothick Architecture.”8 Like a “Gothick” building, Shakespeare’s plays have the “ancient” appeal of the domestic equivalent of the Greco-Roman ruins that fascinated the neoclassical imagination, but also carry the connotations of the very lack of the “neoclassical ideals of order, balance, rhythm, and proportion that Pope himself was elsewhere keen to advocate,” as Dale Townshed argues.9 On the ground of this simile, Pope describes the plays as having “much the greater variety, and much the nobler apartments” than a “neat Modern building,” although “we are often conducted to them by dark, odd, and uncouth passages.”10 The word “passages” here pulls the reader out of the metaphor, as Pope literalises Shakespeare’s figurative decrepit corridors as his textual excerpts: while the “Whole” of Shakespeare’s plays never fails “to strike us with greater reverence,” many isolated “Parts are childish, ill-plac’d, and unequal to its grandeur.”11

  • 12 Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” Alexander Pope: The Major Works, ed. Pat Rogers, Oxford, O (...)
  • 13 Idem, p. 26.
  • 14 Idem, p. 25.

6According to Pope, however, Shakespeare’s inconsistent “Parts” do not detract from his overall beauty. In An Essay on Criticism (1709), Pope had described the act of “Judging by parts, and not only by the whole” as one of the possible “Causes hindering a true judgement” of a literary work.12 For Pope, a critic who “makes the whole depend upon a part” is a pedant, a “verbal critic” who prioritises the words rather than the spirit of the text.13 Instead of only focussing on selected passages, a “perfect judge,” Pope argues, will “Survey the WHOLE.”14 Pope’s ideal literary critic is one who looks at the bigger picture – or at the entire building, to reprise the architectural metaphor he employs:

  • 15 Ibid.

In wit, as nature, what affects our hearts
Is not th’ exactness of peculiar parts […]
Thus when we view some well-proportioned dome
(The world’s just wonder, and even thine, O Rome!)
No single parts unequally surprise,
All come united to th’ admiring eyes;
No monstruous height, or breadth, or length appear;
The whole at once is bold, and regular.15

7Overlapping literary and architectural aesthetic criteria, Pope’s Essay on Criticism presents a view of beauty that depends on the good intentions of the critic, where a literary work – even one that can be compared to the classically beautiful dome of St. Peter’s Basilica – should be harmonised a posteriori by the gaze of a well-meaning critic.

  • 16 Jack Lynch, “Criticism of Shakespeare,” Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Fiona Ritchie an (...)
  • 17 John Dryden, “Essay of Dramatick Poesie,” vol. 17 The Works of John Dryden, ed. H. T. Swedenberg, B (...)
  • 18 John Dennis, “On the Genius and Writing of Shakespear,” Smith, op. cit., p. 25.
  • 19 Idem, p. 47.
  • 20 Idem, p. 58.
  • 21 Idem, p. 52-53.
  • 22 Idem, p. 41–42.

8Pope’s conception of Shakespeare’s genius as a “whole” interspersed by irrelevant faults rests on a specifically English variant of neoclassical literary criticism. Since the first critical engagements with the plays, English critics of Shakespeare “viewed it as a professional obligation to identify both the ‘beauties’ and ‘faults’” of his works, as Jack Lynch summarises, but did so to promote explicitly patriotic (and, most notably, anti-French) sentiments.16 In An Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668), John Dryden, for example, describes Shakespeare as “many times flat, insipid; his Comick wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into Bombast,” but, nonetheless, acknowledges that Shakespeare “is alwayes great.”17 In his letters “On the Genius and Writing of Shakespeare” (1711), John Dennis similarly balances his admiration for Shakespeare’s beauties with the description of his faults. Dennis opens his first letter by stating that Shakespeare “had greater and more genuine Beauties than the best and greatest of [his Successors],” but shortly after criticises his “want of the Poetical Art,” namely his noncompliance with the Aristotelian unities and the classical precepts of decorum and poetic justice.18 Shakespeare’s faults, according to both Dryden and Dennis, only enhance his beauty. In his closing argument, Dennis admits that he only “mentions [Shakespeare’s] Faults for no other Reason to make his Excellency the most conspicuous,”19 while Dryden concedes that between Shakespeare and a classically educated poet like Ben Jonson, he finds Jonson “the more correct Poet, but Shakespeare the greater wit.”20 By correlating the observation of the rules of classical dramatic theory with the works of contemporary French tragedians – especially Pierre Corneille – Shakespeare’s early English critics opposed, in Dryden’s words, the French “servile observations of the unities” with the natural irregularities of Shakespeare’s “variety and greatness of characters.”21 From this point of view, the deformities of Shakespeare’s fable emerge as venial faults: not only imperfections which can be justified as by-products of his originality, but the very reason of his national brand of literary excellence. In Dennis’ words, “Great Britain has but little Reason to boast of its Natives Education since the same that they had here, they might have had in another place. But it may justly claim a very great share in their Nature and Genius.”22

  • 23 Pope, “Preface,” op. cit., p. 63.
  • 24 Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, London, A. Millar, R. and J. Dodsley, 1759, p. 3 (...)

9Pope’s description of Shakespeare’s oeuvre as “an ancient majestic piece of Gothick architecture” that is “more strong and solemn,” albeit less “elegant and glaring” than “a neat Modern building”23 references this specifically English model of engagement with the classics based on originality rather than emulation. As Edward Young writes in his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), Shakespeare “low’red his genius by no vapid imitation”: his relation to the ancients is not of a “son, but brother, their equal; and that, in spite of his faults.”24 In turn, the idea that Shakespeare’s faults enhance his originality, and thus the beauty of his works, finds an alternative classical model of literary criticism in Longinus’ treatise On the Sublime. The treatise, which had been brought to popularity in 1674 by Nicolas Boileau’s French translation, contributes to shaping the notion that faults are structurally inevitable expressions of genius. In the words of Leonard Welsted’s 1712 English translation:

  • 25 Longinus, The Works of Dionysius Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. Leonard Welsted, London, J. Watts (...)

’Tis next to impossible […] that he who writes in a middling low way should commit many Faults; for as he runs no Hazards, and never attempts to Rise, he still continues safe, and as it were upon his Guard; but the Sublime of it self, and by its own natural Force, is Lubricous (sic), and full of Danger.25

  • 26 Idem, p. 147. See also William Smith, “Notes and Observations,” Longinus, Dionysus Longinus on the (...)

10By envisioning the succession of beauties and faults as a structural feature of poetic grandeur, Longinus presents the analysis of specific passages as the better alternative to fable-oriented criticism. This method, which Longinus adopts by using extensive quotations to illustrate his theories, is applied to Shakespeare starting from the first English translations of the treatise. While Dryden and Dennis limited themselves to commenting on either general aspects of Shakespeare’s language or specific aspects of his fable, the authors of the two main translations of On the Sublime identify specific passages of the plays as “pregnant Instances of […] Sublime.”26

  • 27 Nicholas Rowe, “Some Account of the Life &c. of Mr. William Shakespear. 1709,” Smith, op. cit., p.  (...)
  • 28 Nicholas Rowe, “An Index of the Most Beautiful Thoughts, Descriptions, Speeches, &c. in Shakespear’ (...)

11The influence of Longinus’ treatise transposed beauties-and-faults criticism to the textual level, identifying specific passages as either “beauties” or “faults”. In “Some Account of the Life &c. of Mr. William Shakespeare,” the essay prefacing his first edition of the plays (1709), Rowe identifies Shakespeare’s beauties in his fable – his characters, dialogues, and narrative denouements – as Dryden and Dennis did, but also mentions some “passages that deserve a particular notice,”27 like Portia’s speeches on mercy (The Merchant of Venice, 4.1.181-202) and music (3.2.48-53). He also quotes Jacques’ deliberation on the seven ages of man (As You Like It, 2.7.139-166) and Viola’s speech on love (Twelve Nights, 2.4.110-118). In his second edition of the plays (1714), published two years after the first English translation of On the Sublime, Rowe lists Shakespeare’s particularly deserving passages in an index “[o]f the most Beautiful THOUGHTS, DESCRIPTIONS, SPEECHES, &C. In SHAKESPEAR’S Works.”28

  • 29 Rowe, “Some Account,” op. cit., p. 14.
  • 30 Idem, p. 10.
  • 31 On the interaction between printed and manuscript selections of Shakespeare’s passages see Jean-Chr (...)

12Rowe’s index is an extension of his criticism. It includes all those passages which he had praised in the preface to the first edition, while his choice of indexing “Fairies,” “Ghosts,” and “Witches” reflects his admiration of Shakespeare’s “very solemn and very poetical” supernatural elements.29 Similarly, by dedicating an entry to Falstaff, Rowe reiterates the admiration for the character that he had already expressed in his preface, where he had singled Falstaff out as Shakespeare’s “Master-piece.”30 While the index to Rowe’s edition identifies specific passages as the manifestation of Shakespeare’s genius, he never explicitly promotes the perusal of these passages as self-contained excerpts. The eradication of the indexed passages from the surrounding text is only potential, materialising by proxy in the implied suggestion that the reader highlight or copy the scene, perhaps in a manuscript commonplace book,31 but never actualised on the printed page.

  • 32 Pope, “Preface,” op. cit., p. 62.
  • 33 Pope, “Preface,” op. cit., p. 61.
  • 34 Alexander Pope, “Index of the Characters, Sentiments, Speeches, and Descriptions in Shakespear,” vo (...)
  • 35 Alexander Pope, “Pope to Jacob Tonson,” vol. 2 The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George She (...)

13Pope’s edition of the plays makes the suggested separation of the passages from the surrounded text more explicit. Pope prints commonplace markers next to Shakespeare’s beauties while he relegates Shakespeare’s “suspected passages” to the bottom of the page.32 His typographical interventions differentiate between two kinds of beauties: Shakespeare’s “most shining passages,” which he identifies with a comma in the margins – thus suggesting a certain degree of independence from the surrounding text – and those sections “where the beauty lay not in particulars but in the whole,” which he prefixes with a star.33 This differentiation is carried out in the “INDEX OF THE CHARACTERS, SENTIMENTS, SPEECHES, and DESCRIPTIONS IN SHAKESPEAR.”34 Although not compiled by Pope, the index to his edition maintains the structure which he had illustrated to his editor Jacob Tonson. This structure promotes a distinction between different types of literary beauty, namely the literary beauty of specific passages (like those Pope identified with a comma) and the literary beauty that emerges from certain narrative denouements (like those he highlighted with a star). In a letter to Tonson, Pope includes, as an example, his outline of two sections – “Characters” and “Descriptions” – which allude to two possible different degrees of independence of Shakespeare’s passages from the fable: while the section titled “Characters” lists specific speeches, “Descriptions” classifies recurring topoi.35

  • 36 Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, Rogers, op. cit., p. 454.
  • 37 Ibid. See also Roger D. Lund, “The Eel of Science: Index Learning, Scriblerian Satire, and the Rise (...)
  • 38 Brean Hammond, “Pope’s Shakespeare and Poetic Quotation in the Early Eighteenth Century,” Shakespea (...)

14Pope’s editorial choices apparently diverge from some of his ideas on literary criticism. While his identification of some of Shakespeare’s “most shining passages” contradicts his claim that Shakespeare’s beauty lies in the “whole,” his detailed index seems to promote a practice of which he ostensibly disapproves elsewhere. In The Dunciad (1728), Pope complains about “index-learning,”36 that is the overreliance on a work’s referential apparatus as a substitute for reading a text in its entirety. Although this practice appears more convenient for its immediacy (it “turns no student pale”), it can only make scholars “hold the eel of science by tail,” that is keep an unstable grip on the slippery – or, literally, hard to grasp – matter of science.37 Despite these seeming contradictions, Pope, like Rowe, never materialises the prospect that Shakespeare’s most beautiful passages may be read in isolation from the rest of the text. Instead, in the index to Rowe’s and Pope’s editions the spatial disjunction between the text and the paratext allows Shakespeare’s passages to retain an ambiguous position between the role they occupy in the plays and their status as isolated passages. As Brean Hammond argues, the index of Pope’s edition (but also of Rowe’s) “directs the reader back to the play itself. Simultaneously, the very act of detachment gives the anthologised passages a different ontological status from the passages in dramatic context, where the circumstances of utterance and the nature of the utterer must be considered.”38 By expanding the locus of evaluation of Shakespeare’s text from a critical to a referential paratext, Rowe and Pope collocate Shakespeare’s genius in his contextualised passages, but also acknowledge the potentially independent status that these passages acquire as an effect of their redirection of the readers’ attention.

“Ey’d Distinctly”

  • 39 See Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparat (...)
  • 40 Idem, p. 202

15Beauties-and-faults criticism plays an important role in Shakespeare editing until the second half of the century, when textual evaluation stops being seen as the chief task of the editor.39 Instead, as Margreta de Grazia notes, while the practice of noting Shakespeare’s defects declines, the identification of his beauties is relegated to another format: the anthology.40 If, by printing the plays in their entirety, the critical editions inevitably presented Shakespeare’s beauties and faults as remarkable parts of a wider “whole,” by reprinting Shakespeare’s passages in isolation, the anthology structurally – architectonically, even – emancipates the value of Shakespeare’s quotations from the surrounding text.

  • 41 Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier, “Reading and Authorship: The Circulation of Shakespeare 1590- (...)
  • 42 Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought, Oxford, Oxford Univ (...)
  • 43 For an overview, see Kate Rumbold, “Shakespeare Anthologized,” The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespea (...)
  • 44 Charles Gildon, “Shakespeariana,” vol. 2 The Complete Art of Poetry, London, Charles Rivington, 171 (...)

16Shakespeare’s passages had circulated in anthological format ever since his lifetime, when, in 1600, extracts from his plays and poems were reprinted in the first anthologies of English literature: Robert Allott’s The Englands Parnassus, John Bodenham’s Bel-vedére, and John Robert’s Englands Helicon.41 These publications translated into English the Humanist method of the Latin commonplace book, reprinting similarly themed passages under the same header (such as “Beauty,” or “Love”).42 In the eighteenth century, this tradition was met with particular commercial success following the favourable reception of Edward Bysshe’s The Art of English Poetry (1702, reaching its ninth edition in 1769), a printed commonplace book which also reprinted many passages from Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare maintained his popularity in the other anthologies of the vernacular literary past that were published throughout the century, from the variously titled editions of Thesaurus Dramaticus (1724, expanded and reprinted as The Beauties of the English Stage in 1737 and 1756, and The Beauties of the English Drama in 1777) to, among many others, publications such as The British Muse (1738) and Poetical Dictionary (1761).43 In 1718, Charles Gildon’s The Complete Art of Poetry included “Shakespeariana,” a section which exclusively featured passages from Shakespeare.44

  • 45 Adam Rounce, “The Difficulties of Quantifying Taste: Blackmore and Poetic Reception in the Eighteen (...)
  • 46 Margreta de Grazia, “Shakespeare in Quotation Marks,” The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renais (...)
  • 47 Pope, The Dunciad, op. cit., loc. cit.
  • 48 Kate Rumbold, Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, (...)

17These anthologies are genealogically linked to one other due to the borrowed nature of their poetic selections. As Adam Rounce puts it, “the whole culture of poetic commonplace books and anthologies was rooted in unacknowledged borrowing, where collections were constructed using their predecessors as building-blocks.”45 Practices of “unacknowledged borrowing” involved not only the compilation but also the intended use of these publications. Contemporary discussions on copyright and intellectual property imbued the anthology with a negative reputation.46 Because these publications facilitated access to literary quotations, and thus bypassed the need to read the whole works, anthologies became infamous as means of what Pope called “index-learning.”47 As Kate Rumbold argues, this attitude concerned quotations of Shakespeare in particular, resulting in the distinction between those who read the whole plays and those who derive their “banal” quotations from derivative works.48

  • 49 Daniel Cook, “Authors Unformed: Reading Beauties in the Eighteenth Century,” Philological Quarterly(...)
  • 50 Barbara Benedict, “The ‘Beauties’ of Literature, 1750-1820: Tasteful Prose and Fine Rhyme for Priva (...)
  • 51 On Dodd’s life, see Gerald Howson, The Macaroni Parson, London, Hutchinson, 1973.
  • 52 William Dodd, vol. 1 The Beauties of Shakespear, London, T. Waller, 1752, 2 vol., p. xv–xvi. BL, 11 (...)

18In contrast to the perceived low-brow status of the printed poetic commonplace book, Reverend William Dodd’s The Beauties of Shakespear (1752) claims a new subgenre of the anthology within the “accreted scholarly context”49 of neoclassical criticism. As Barbara Benedict demonstrates, the “Beauties” – “volumes of passages selected from authors, works, and genres” – were an especially common editorial genre in the middle of the century, reflecting the wider fascination with literary passages of this period, but also acting as a commercial expedient to “circumvent copyrighting regulations.”50 In his preface to The Beauties of Shakespear, the famously extravagant Dodd fiercely claims the legitimacy of his editorial endeavour.51 Dodd exalts his labour as an anthologist by comparing his selection of Shakespeare’s extracts to the work of the Shakespeare editors, and, consequently, his anthology to an edition: “It was my first intention to have consider’d each play critically and regularly thro’ all its parts,” he admits, “but as this would have swell’d the work beyond proper bounds, I was obliged to confine myself solely to a collection of poetical Beauties.”52

  • 53 Edwin Eliott Willoughby, “A Deadly Edition of Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Quarterly 5.4, Autumn 1954, (...)
  • 54 A. D. Barker, “The Early Career of William Dodd,” Transaction of the Cambridge Bibliographical Soci (...)
  • 55 Dodd, op. cit., p. xiv.

19Dodd argues that it is space and time constraints, and not his method, that distances the Beauties from the critical editions. Although he was never able to publish his own edition of Shakespeare’s plays, during his life Dodd intermittently annotated a copy of Thomas Hanmer’s 1745 edition, likely in preparation for his own.53 The rumour that he had been working on this project almost saved his life: when Dodd was sentenced to death for forging a bond, the public opinion tried to negotiate his pardon by claiming that he had committed his crime to finance his edition of Shakespeare.54 The rumour failed to save Dodd from the gallows, so that the Beauties ended up being his most complete edition of the plays. But after all, as Dodd had almost premonitorily claimed in the preface to the Beauties, his anthology may as well be seen as a complete edition, since “no single man will ever be able to give the world a compleat and correct edition of Shakespear.”55

  • 56 Michelle Syba, “After Design: Joseph Addison Discovers Beauties,” Studies in English Literature 150 (...)
  • 57 Joseph Addison, The Spectator, 8 March 1712, quoted idem, p. 621.

20Dodd’s elevation of his anthology to a wilfully incomplete edition lies on a newfound recognition of the limitations of aesthetic criticism, and especially the idea that no single critic can exhaust all the beauties of a literary work. This concept becomes particularly evident in Joseph Addison’s papers on the beauties of Paradise Lost, as Michelle Syba argues.56 Addison ends his papers with the defeated recognition of the limits of his perception, deferring a more complete judgement to a future generation of critics: “there are Multitudes of Beauties in this great Author,” he writes, “which I have not touched upon […] I question not, but any Writer, who shall treat of this Subject after me, may find several Beauties in Milton, which I have not taken notice of.”57

  • 58 Longinus, On the Sublime, Welsted, op. cit, p. 18-19.
  • 59 Dodd, op. cit., p. xvii.

21Addison’s admission to the limitations of his judgement acknowledges the possibility that literary beauty is tied to subjective taste rather than objective structural rules. This alternative model of aesthetic criticism identifies the measure of literary grandeur in reader response, finding, again, an illustrious predecessor in Longinus’ treatise. “It is an infallible Mark of Sublime,” Longinus writes, “when we find a Discourse dwells strongly upon our Minds; when at first view it has an Influence upon us, which ’tis very difficult, if not impossible, to resist, and when afterwards it remains with us, so as hardly ever to be effaced.”58 In the preface to the Beauties, Dodd appropriates this concept by explicitly paraphrasing Longinus: the mark of a literary masterpiece in general, and Shakespeare in particular, he argues, is “when persons of different humours, ages, professions, and inclinations, agree in the same joint approbation of any performance.”59 While Addison had widened the horizon of aesthetic criticism to include multiple “Writer[s],” Dodd makes Shakespeare’s beauties depend on the subjective opinion of any reader, an idea which sees aesthetic judgment as the product of subjective experience rather than learning. As Dodd explains,

  • 60 Ibid.

the old, the grave, and the severe will disapprove, perhaps, the more soft (and as they may call them) trifling love-tales, so elegantly breath’d forth, and so emphatically extolled by the young, the gay and the passionate: while these will esteem as dull, and languid, the sober laws of morality, and the home-felt observations of experience.60

  • 61 Idem, p. vxiiii.

22Since the criteria of appreciation of Shakespeare’s text depend on the readers’ experience, different readers may have different preferences. According to Dodd, the solution to this inevitably uneven appreciation of Shakespeare’s text is desultory reading: “as it was my business to collect for readers of all tastes, and all complexions, let me desire none to disapprove, what hits not with their own humour, but to turn over the page, and they will surely find something acceptable and engaging.”61

  • 62 Johnson, op. cit, loc. cit.
  • 63 Fairchild, op. cit., p. 319.
  • 64 See R. D. Stock, Samuel Johnson and Neoclassical Dramatic Theory, Lincoln, University of Nebraska P (...)
  • 65 Johnson, op. cit, p. 173.
  • 66 Ibid.

23Dodd’s suggestion that readers leaf through the plays and pick their favourite passages is the result of a new conceptualisation of Shakespeare’s oeuvre that sees his plays not as a “whole” but as a series of self-contained passages. The very existence of a volume like the Beauties implies, to Johnson’s dismay, that Shakespeare’s genius can be appreciated by only reading a selection of extracts. The coincidence between Dodd’s suggested mode of reading Shakespeare and Johnson’s admonitions against he who “tries to recommend [Shakespeare] by select quotations”62 has led some critics to believe that Johnson’s Hieroclean pedant is a portrayal of Dodd himself.63 In this context, Johnson’s architectural metaphor is in line with his overall positioning of his edition as a late specimen of neoclassical criticism.64 It is not only literary beauty that, Johnson explains, makes Shakespeare’s “real power,” but there is also “a system of civil and œconimical prudence” that lies in his “wide extension of design.”65 It is this general design that, Johnson argues, “fills the plays of Shakespeare with practical axioms and domestick wisdom,” and not vice versa.66

24Despite Johnson’s likely derision of Dodd’s neglect of the aesthetic and instructional value of Shakespeare’s fable, the Beauties do not completely overlook the plot of the plays. Instead of adopting the format of the printed commonplace book and arranging Shakespeare’s passages by theme, Dodd groups the extract by play, preserving the narrative order of the scenes. His chosen titles, which are often grammatically dependent on one other, also suggest that readers should peruse the anthology sequentially. In the section on King John, for example, the headers of the speeches of the French and English heralds to the people of Angiers (2.1.300-333) create a zeugmatic structure that makes the second header intelligible only when read after the first, thus suggesting that the two excerpts should be read in succession (and, most likely, compared to one another):

  • 67 William Dodd, vol. 2 The Beauties of Shakespear, London: T. Waller, 1752, 2 vol., p. 76-77. BL, 117 (...)

Scene IV. Description of Victory, by the French.
You men of Angiers, open wide your gates,
And let young Arthur duke of Bretagne in
[…]

By the
English
Rejoice, you men of Angiers, ring your bells
King John, your king, and England’s doth approach
[…].67

  • 68 Idem, p. 217
  • 69 Idem, p. 222.
  • 70 Idem, p. 231.
  • 71 Rowe, “An Index,” op. cit., unnumbered page.

25Dodd also anthologises several dramatic moments whose emotional charge depends on their narrative context. For example, he often mentions the names of the speakers in his chosen headers, assigning titles like “Hamlet’s Soliloquy on his Mother’s Marriage,68 “Hamlet, on the Appearance of his Father’s Ghost69 and “Ophelia’s Descriptions of Hamlet’s mad Address to her70 that suggest a situationally-dependant and character-bound understanding of Shakespeare’s isolated passages. This suggested narrative coherence is reassembled even more systematically in the character-specific entries of his index. In the case of Hamlet’s titular character, for instance, the entries that Rowe itemised under “Ghost,” “Madness,” or “Player”71 are now listed as steps of a wider character arc:

  • 72 Dodd, vol. 1 op. cit., unnumbered page.

Hamlet’s soliloquy on his mother’s marriage, 217. on the appearance of his father’s ghost, 222. mischiefs it might tempt him to, 224. they confer strongly together, 225. his mad address describ’d by Ophelia, 231. his accounts of his own melancholy, and reflections on man, 233. on the player and himself, 234. his directions and advice to the players, 241. reflections on the king’s soliloquy, 244. conference between him and his mother, 247. on his own irresolution, 261. on Yorrick’s (sic) skull 256.72

  • 73 Idem, p. 256.
  • 74 Idem, p. 258.
  • 75 Ibid.

26At the same time, Dodd’s anthological selection also liberally truncates the plot: the last appearance of Hamlet as a speaker is his “Reflections on Yorrick’s (sic) Skull,”73 while he is mentioned for the last time in Claudius’ toast in the final act of the play (5.2.221-225). Hamlet’s fate, and the first volume of the anthology, ambiguously end with “the king drink[ing] to Hamlet”74, a passage which Dodd interprets as Shakespeare’s condemnation of habitual intoxication: “Shakespear […] dwells much on the Danish drinking […] A custom, as Hamlet observes, greatly to the discredit of their nation.”75

  • 76 Line Cottegnies, “Les maximes de Shakespeare: La relecture de l’oeuvre shakespearienne comme répert (...)
  • 77 Anonymous [Elizabeth Montagu], An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakspeare, London, J. Dodsle (...)
  • 78 Thomas Rymer, The Tragedies of the Last Age, London, R. Tonson, 1678, BL, 641.b.25.
  • 79 Roger Maioli, “The Secularization of Poetic Justice in the Long Eighteenth Century,” ELH 88.1, Spri (...)
  • 80 Tom Keymer, Richardson’s Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader, Cambridge, Cambridge Universit (...)
  • 81 William Kenrick, Introduction to the School of Shakespeare, London, Printed for the author, 1774, p (...)

27The idea that Shakespeare’s isolated passages could provide useful prescriptions on moral customs especially thrived in the second half of the century.76 The emergence of Shakespeare as a “moral philosopher,”77 as Elizabeth Montagu puts it in her Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakspeare (1769), is a result of a shift that, similarly to the decline of aesthetic criticism, sees neoclassical rules being replaced by subjective experience even for the evaluation of dramatic morality. Shakespeare’s early critics read the morality of his fable against the neoclassical concepts of decorum and “poetic justice,” a term famously coined by Thomas Rymer to describe those narratives where good deeds are rewarded and wrongdoings are punished.78 In contrast to this idea of the fable as the locus of moral improvement, Lockean theories of the association of ideas assigned more importance to the didactic potential of exemplary passages. As Roger Maioli puts it, the fact that “authors who practice poetic justice can indelibly associate the ideas of vice and misery in the reader’s mind” means that it is their duty to “develop the reader’s reflex response to vice and virtue” in a succession of exemplary episodes.79 Tom Keymer explains this tendency of the eighteenth-century novel as a manifestation of “the tradition known as casuistry, which rather than laying down structure of invariable rules instead examines their practical limitations.”80 Like a novel, Shakespeare’s dramatic oeuvre is read as a coherent moral system epitomised by its exemplary passages. Shakespeare is a “moral philosopher,” as William Kenrick puts it, because his works “contai[n] a practical system of ethics, the more instructive and useful as the precept is almost every where joined to example.”81

28This view of Shakespeare’s passages as the manifestation of a wider ethical theory finds its complete realisation in another anthology, Elizabeth Griffith’s The Morality of Shakespeare’s Drama Illustrated (1775). Like Dodd, Griffith departs from the format of the printed commonplace book. She justifies this choice by arguing that preserving the narrative order of Shakespeare’s passages enhances their pedagogic effect:

  • 82 Elizabeth Griffith, The Morality of Shakespeare’s Drama Illustrated, London, T. Cadell, 1775, p. xi (...)

In all books that treat upon these subjects, the precepts are disposed methodically, under separate heads or chapters; as Ambition, Bravery, Constancy, Devotion, and so on to the end of the alphabet; which mode, though useful on account of references, or as a common-place book, cannot be near so entertaining, and consequently so well able to answer the utile dulci, as a work of this sort, where the documents rise out of the action immediately before our eyes, and are constantly varying with the quick shifting of scenes, person and subjects.82

  • 83 Idem, p. 169.

29Griffith anthologises Shakespeare’s passage in their original narrative order also because she believes that Shakespeare’s morality lies in the relationship between the events of the plays and the reader’s experience. In a statement that echoes Dodd’s ideas about how the demographic of Shakespeare’s readers determines their appreciation of the plays, Griffith also envisions Shakespeare’s morality reaching a diverse readership: “What age, what sex, what character, station, or office for life escapes the touches of Shakespeare’s plastic hand!”83

30Epitomised by isolated passages that nevertheless maintain a structural relationship with the fable, the new dominant architectural metaphor for Shakespeare’s genius is not Pope’s insistence on perceiving the “whole” but the fragmentation of reader response suggested by Lewis Theobald’s preface to his edition (1733):

  • 84 Lewis Theobald, “Preface to Edition of Shakespeare. 1733,” Smith, op. cit, p. 64.

The Attempt to write upon SHAKESPEARE is like going into a large, a spacious, and a splendid Dome thro’ the Conveyance of a narrow and obscure Entry. A Glare of Light suddenly breaks upon you beyond what the Avenue at first promis’d: and a thousand Beauties of Genius and Character, like so many gaudy Apartments pouring at once upon the Eye, diffuse and throw themselves out to the Mind. The Prospect is too wide to come within the Compass of a single View: ’tis a gay Confusion of pleasing Objects, too various to be enjoyed but in a general Admiration; and they must be separated, and ey’d distinctly, in order to give the proper Entertainment.84

  • 85 Ibid.
  • 86 Ibid.

31By recognising that Shakespeare’s genius cannot “come within the Compass of a single View” and must instead “be separated, and ey’d distinctly,”85 Theobald emphasises the importance of individual experience in the appreciation of the plays. The conceptualisation of Shakespeare’s genius as a “Dome” that can only be experienced by entering one “Apartmen[t]” at a time dethrones the all-perceiving critic envisioned by Pope. In lieu of the critic who evaluates Shakespeare’s whole oeuvre, the fragmentation of Shakespeare’s genius in self-contained passages promotes aesthetic criticism as the interpretative horizon of a demographically diversified readership, the same public which Dodd and Griffith address in their anthologies. As Theobald goes on to explain, each of Shakespeare’s “Parts” speaks to a different reader: “As in great Piles of Building, some Parts are often finish’d up to hit the Taste of the Connoisseur; other more negligently put together, to strike the Fancy of a common and unlearned Beholder.”86

“Such as existences of Sun Moon and Stars”

  • 87 See Rumbold, Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, op. cit.
  • 88 See William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, Cambridge, Cambridge University Pr (...)
  • 89 See Inger Sigrun Brodey, Ruined by Design: Shaping Novels and Gardens in the Culture of Sensibility(...)
  • 90 Anonymous, The Beauties of Shakespeare, London, George Kearsley, 1783, p. ii. BL, 1578/3551.
  • 91 Idem, p. 1.

32Although Theobald prioritises the “parts” over the “whole,” his architectural metaphor still entails that Shakespeare’s passages structurally depend on his fable, albeit with an opposite hierarchy to the one envisioned by Pope and Johnson. The relationship between Shakespeare’s isolated passages and his fable weakens in the last decades of the eighteenth-century, when Shakespeare’s passages take root in the collective imagination by means of frequent, often decontextualised, quotations.87 Especially after the abolition of perpetual copyright in 1774, Shakespeare’s isolated passages thrive in numerous anthologies.88 Aligning with the more general rise of admiration for ruins and decontextualised literary fragments alike,89 these anthologies present Shakespeare’s passages not just as epitomes of his beauty, but as exhaustive tools for the cultivation of morality. In 1783, another anthology titled The Beauties of Shakespeare, published by George Kearsley, takes the distances from Dodd’s homonymous publication. If Dodd’s intent “appears to have been intended chiefly as a vehicle, to display the Compiler’s reading, and critical talents,” this anthologist argues that the selection Shakespeare’s beauties should be a moral, rather than critical, endeavour: “The present has no higher aims than a selection useful for reference to the learned, for instruction to the ignorant, and for information for all,”90 providing useful “knowledge” for the “practice of virtue.”91 Here, the demographically diverse readership portrayed by Dodd and Griffith does not entail a different appreciation of Shakespeare’s passages, but rather different degrees of access to his moral teachings.

  • 92 Anonymous, Aphorisms from Shakspeare, London, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, 1812, p. xiv-xv. B (...)
  • 93 Ibid.
  • 94 Dodd, vol. 1, op. cit., p. 233.
  • 95 William Dodd, The Beauties of Shakspeare, London, Sherwood, Neely, Jones, 1818, p. 226. BL 11761.e. (...)
  • 96 See William Jaggard, Shakespeare bibliography, Stratford-on-Avon, The Shakespeare Press, 1911, p. 5 (...)

33Unlike Dodd’s anthology, the 1783 Beauties adopts the format of the printed commonplace book, arranging Shakespeare’s moral teachings according to their themes and completely neglecting, if not purposefully obscuring, the narrative structure of the plays. Many other publications follow this example. In 1812, the editor of Aphorisms from Shakespeare admits to purposefully mutilating Shakespeare’s text to make his passages acquire more universal significance: a “circumstance might occur not unfrequently in truly Dramatic Writings,” this compiler explains, “that an aphorisitc principle is so incorporated with the individuality of the character and occasion, as to lose part of its aphoristic quality; its abstractedness and general application.”92 In these cases, “those words have sometimes been omitted, in which the circumstantiation consisted: and, where necessary, words have been added or changed.”93 In 1818, Dodd’s anthology is also reformatted, omitting his extensive commentaries and replacing some of his titles with more generic commonplace headers. For example, “Hamlet’s Account for his own Melancholy, and Reflections on Man94 is now reworded as “Reflections on Man.”95 This version is met with more success than the original format, being reprinted at least thirty-two times in the nineteenth century alone in contrast to its four eighteenth-century editions.96

  • 97 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, vol. 1 Aus meinem Leben - Dichtung und Wahrheit, ed. Siegfried Scheibe, (...)
  • 98 Bate, op. cit., p. 13.
  • 99 John Keats, letter to Bejamin Bailey, quoted idem, p. 20.

34The epitomic value of Shakespeare’s passages greatly influences the Romantic imagination. Romantic critics of Shakespeare avidly read epitomic forms of the plays, but also write their own: Goethe admits to first encountering Shakespeare in Dodd’s Beauties,97 while Charles Lamb and his sister Mary famously pen Tales from Shakespeare (1818). Similarly, most Romantic criticism focusses on how “particulars, minutiae, are combined to produce the unified whole that is a Shakespearean drama.”98 From forgettable parts of a magnificent building to the rooms that make the building magnificent in the first place, during the eighteenth century the importance of Shakespeare’s passages eventually stretches way beyond architectural and perceptive constraints, reaching cosmic relevance. As John Keats writes in his private letters, “Things real,” that is those things that exist independently from outside recognition, are “such as existences of Sun Moon and Stars and passages of Shakspeare.”99

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Notes

1 Samuel Johnson, “Preface to Edition of Shakespeare. 1765,” Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare, ed. Nichol D. Smith, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1963, p. 115.

2 Ibid.

3 Jean Marsden, The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, & Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory, Lexington, The University Press of Kentucky, 1995.

4 Idem, p. 150.

5 Hannah More, vol. 2 Hints Towards Forming the Character of a Princess, London, T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1805, 2 volumes, p. 183-184. British Library (BL, henceforth) 232.f.22, 23.

6 See Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the Romantic Imagination, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 1-24.

7 Jens Bisky, Poesie der Baukunst: Architekturästhetik von Winckelmann bis Boisserée, Weimar, Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 2000.

8 Alexander Pope, “Preface to Edition of Shakespeare. 1725,” Smith, op. cit., p. 63.

9 Dale Townshed, “Gothic Shakespeare,” A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter, Chichester, Blackwell, 2012, p. 39.

10 Pope, “Preface,” op. cit., p. 63.

11 Idem.

12 Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” Alexander Pope: The Major Works, ed. Pat Rogers, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 18.

13 Idem, p. 26.

14 Idem, p. 25.

15 Ibid.

16 Jack Lynch, “Criticism of Shakespeare,” Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 43.

17 John Dryden, “Essay of Dramatick Poesie,” vol. 17 The Works of John Dryden, ed. H. T. Swedenberg, Berkley, University of California Press, 1971, 20 vol., p. 55 and 36.

18 John Dennis, “On the Genius and Writing of Shakespear,” Smith, op. cit., p. 25.

19 Idem, p. 47.

20 Idem, p. 58.

21 Idem, p. 52-53.

22 Idem, p. 41–42.

23 Pope, “Preface,” op. cit., p. 63.

24 Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, London, A. Millar, R. and J. Dodsley, 1759, p. 33-36. BL, 1087.c.40.

25 Longinus, The Works of Dionysius Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. Leonard Welsted, London, J. Watts, 1712, p. 98. BL, 1089.l.24.

26 Idem, p. 147. See also William Smith, “Notes and Observations,” Longinus, Dionysus Longinus on the Sublime, trans. William Smith, London, J. Watts, 1739, 109-189. BL, 1608/156.

27 Nicholas Rowe, “Some Account of the Life &c. of Mr. William Shakespear. 1709,” Smith, op. cit., p. 70.

28 Nicholas Rowe, “An Index of the Most Beautiful Thoughts, Descriptions, Speeches, &c. in Shakespear’s Works,” vol. 9 The Works of Mr. William Shakespeare, London, Jacob Tonson, 1714, 9 vol., unnumbered page. BL, 642.b.28.(1.).

29 Rowe, “Some Account,” op. cit., p. 14.

30 Idem, p. 10.

31 On the interaction between printed and manuscript selections of Shakespeare’s passages see Jean-Christophe Mayer, Shakespeare’s Early Readers, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018, p. 137-173.

32 Pope, “Preface,” op. cit., p. 62.

33 Pope, “Preface,” op. cit., p. 61.

34 Alexander Pope, “Index of the Characters, Sentiments, Speeches, and Descriptions in Shakespear,” vol. 6 The Works of Mr William Shakespear, London, Jacob Tonson, 1723, 6 vol., sig Ffffr. BL, 78.l.7-12.

35 Alexander Pope, “Pope to Jacob Tonson,” vol. 2 The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sheburn, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1956, 5 vol., p. 213.

36 Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, Rogers, op. cit., p. 454.

37 Ibid. See also Roger D. Lund, “The Eel of Science: Index Learning, Scriblerian Satire, and the Rise of Information Culture,” Eighteenth-Century Life 22.2, May 1998, 18-39.

38 Brean Hammond, “Pope’s Shakespeare and Poetic Quotation in the Early Eighteenth Century,” Shakespeare and Quotation, ed. Julie Maxwell and Kate Rumbold, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018, p. 115.

39 See Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991.

40 Idem, p. 202

41 Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier, “Reading and Authorship: The Circulation of Shakespeare 1590-1619,” A Concise Companion to the Shakespeare Text, ed. Andrew Murphy, Oxford, Blackwell, 2007, p. 35-56.

42 Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought, Oxford, Oxford University Press 1996.

43 For an overview, see Kate Rumbold, “Shakespeare Anthologized,” The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete, Ramona Wray, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2011, p. 88-96 and Christopher Salamone, “‘The Fragments, Scraps, the Bits and Greasy Relics’: Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Miscellany,” Eighteenth-Century Life 41.1, January 2017, 7-31.

44 Charles Gildon, “Shakespeariana,” vol. 2 The Complete Art of Poetry, London, Charles Rivington, 1718, 2 vol., p. 305-362. BL, 238.h.10-11.

45 Adam Rounce, “The Difficulties of Quantifying Taste: Blackmore and Poetic Reception in the Eighteenth Century,” Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries 6.1, Fall 2014, 19-35, p. 22.

46 Margreta de Grazia, “Shakespeare in Quotation Marks,” The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth, ed. Jean I. Marsden, New York, St. Martin’s, 1991, p. 57-60.

47 Pope, The Dunciad, op. cit., loc. cit.

48 Kate Rumbold, Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 106-132.

49 Daniel Cook, “Authors Unformed: Reading Beauties in the Eighteenth Century,” Philological Quarterly 89.2-3, 2010, p. 294.

50 Barbara Benedict, “The ‘Beauties’ of Literature, 1750-1820: Tasteful Prose and Fine Rhyme for Private Consumption,” 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 1, 1994, 317-346, p. 318.

51 On Dodd’s life, see Gerald Howson, The Macaroni Parson, London, Hutchinson, 1973.

52 William Dodd, vol. 1 The Beauties of Shakespear, London, T. Waller, 1752, 2 vol., p. xv–xvi. BL, 11766.aaa.20.

53 Edwin Eliott Willoughby, “A Deadly Edition of Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Quarterly 5.4, Autumn 1954, 351-357.

54 A. D. Barker, “The Early Career of William Dodd,” Transaction of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 8.2, 1982, 217-235, p. 229-30. See also A. H. R. Fairchild, “A Shakespearean Who Was Hanged,” Western Humanities Review 7.4, Spring 1953, p. 313-321.

55 Dodd, op. cit., p. xiv.

56 Michelle Syba, “After Design: Joseph Addison Discovers Beauties,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 49.3, Summer 2009, 615-635.

57 Joseph Addison, The Spectator, 8 March 1712, quoted idem, p. 621.

58 Longinus, On the Sublime, Welsted, op. cit, p. 18-19.

59 Dodd, op. cit., p. xvii.

60 Ibid.

61 Idem, p. vxiiii.

62 Johnson, op. cit, loc. cit.

63 Fairchild, op. cit., p. 319.

64 See R. D. Stock, Samuel Johnson and Neoclassical Dramatic Theory, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1973.

65 Johnson, op. cit, p. 173.

66 Ibid.

67 William Dodd, vol. 2 The Beauties of Shakespear, London: T. Waller, 1752, 2 vol., p. 76-77. BL, 11766.aaa.20.

68 Idem, p. 217

69 Idem, p. 222.

70 Idem, p. 231.

71 Rowe, “An Index,” op. cit., unnumbered page.

72 Dodd, vol. 1 op. cit., unnumbered page.

73 Idem, p. 256.

74 Idem, p. 258.

75 Ibid.

76 Line Cottegnies, “Les maximes de Shakespeare: La relecture de l’oeuvre shakespearienne comme répertoire philosophique en Angleterre,” Shakespeare et les philosophes, ed. Isabelle Alfandary, Marc Goldschmit, Paris, Éditions Manucius, 2023, p. 75-85

77 Anonymous [Elizabeth Montagu], An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakspeare, London, J. Dodsley, 1769, p. 59. BL, 11824.dd.37.(1.).

78 Thomas Rymer, The Tragedies of the Last Age, London, R. Tonson, 1678, BL, 641.b.25.

79 Roger Maioli, “The Secularization of Poetic Justice in the Long Eighteenth Century,” ELH 88.1, Spring 2021, 83-106, p. 99 and 95.

80 Tom Keymer, Richardson’s Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 88.

81 William Kenrick, Introduction to the School of Shakespeare, London, Printed for the author, 1774, p. 15. BL, 82.e.12.

82 Elizabeth Griffith, The Morality of Shakespeare’s Drama Illustrated, London, T. Cadell, 1775, p. xiii. BL, 81.d.18.

83 Idem, p. 169.

84 Lewis Theobald, “Preface to Edition of Shakespeare. 1733,” Smith, op. cit, p. 64.

85 Ibid.

86 Ibid.

87 See Rumbold, Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, op. cit.

88 See William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 122-156.

89 See Inger Sigrun Brodey, Ruined by Design: Shaping Novels and Gardens in the Culture of Sensibility, New York, Routledge, 2008.

90 Anonymous, The Beauties of Shakespeare, London, George Kearsley, 1783, p. ii. BL, 1578/3551.

91 Idem, p. 1.

92 Anonymous, Aphorisms from Shakspeare, London, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, 1812, p. xiv-xv. BL, 11763.a.11.

93 Ibid.

94 Dodd, vol. 1, op. cit., p. 233.

95 William Dodd, The Beauties of Shakspeare, London, Sherwood, Neely, Jones, 1818, p. 226. BL 11761.e.16.

96 See William Jaggard, Shakespeare bibliography, Stratford-on-Avon, The Shakespeare Press, 1911, p. 561-580.

97 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, vol. 1 Aus meinem Leben - Dichtung und Wahrheit, ed. Siegfried Scheibe, Berlin, Akademie-Verlag, 1970-1974, 2 vol., p. 407.

98 Bate, op. cit., p. 13.

99 John Keats, letter to Bejamin Bailey, quoted idem, p. 20.

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Luisa Signorelli, « “The Splendour of Particular Passages”: Eighteenth-Century Editorial Criticism and the Epitomes of Shakespeare’s Genius »Revue de la Société française Shakespeare [En ligne], 43 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 février 2026, consulté le 17 juin 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/revueshakespeare/462 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15nnc

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University College London

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