ose who
have worked with it know the force of Johnson's claim that not a single
passage in the whole work had appeared to him corrupt which he had not
attempted to restore, or obscure which he had not endeavoured to
illustrate. We may neglect the earlier eighteenth-century editions of
Shakespeare, but if we neglect Johnson's we run a serious risk. We may now
abandon his text; we must rely on later scholarship for the explanation of
many allusions; but, wherever a difficulty can be solved by common sense,
we shall never find his notes antiquated. Other editions are distinguished
by accuracy, ingenuity, or learning; the supreme distinction of his is
sagacity. He cleared a way through a mass of misleading conjectures. In
disputed passages he has an almost unerring instinct for the explanation
which alone can be right; and when the reading is corrupt beyond
emendation, he gives the most helpful statement of the probable meaning.
Not only was Johnson's edition the best which had yet appeared; it is
still one of the few editions which are indispensable.

IV.

The third quarter of the eighteenth century, and not the first quarter of
the nineteenth, is the true period of transition in Shakespearian
criticism. The dramatic rules had been finally deposed. The corrected
plays were falling into disfavour, and though Shakespeare's dramas were
not yet acted as they were written, more respect was being paid to the
originals. The sixty years' controversy on the extent of his learning had
ended by proving that the best commentary on him is the literature of his
own age. At the same time there is a far-reaching change in the literary
appreciations of Shakespeare, which announces the school of Coleridge and
Hazlitt: his _characters_ now become the main topics of criticism.

In the five essays on the _Tempest_ and _King Lear_ contributed by Joseph
Warton to the _Adventurer_ in 1753-54, we can recognise the coming change
in critical methods. He began them by giving in a sentence a summary of
the common verdicts: "As Shakespeare is sometimes blamable for the conduct
of his fables, which have no unity; and sometimes for his diction, which
is obscure and turgid; so his characteristical excellences may possibly be
reduced to these three general heads--his lively creative imagination, his
strokes of nature and passion, and his preservation of the consistency of
his characters." Warton himself believed in the dramatic conventions. He
ob