Inactive Tutor answered • 09/13/26
Dr. Johnson's "Preface to Shakespeare": How Johnson Justifies Shakespeare as a Universal Genius
Samuel Johnson's "Preface to Shakespeare" was published in 1765 as the introduction to his eight-volume edition of Shakespeare's plays. It stands as one of the landmarks of English literary criticism. Johnson was writing in a neoclassical age; an age that judged drama by strict rules inherited from Aristotle and the French critics: the unities of time, place, and action, the separation of tragedy from comedy, and decorum in language and character. Against this background, Johnson did something remarkable. He defended Shakespeare largely on Shakespeare's own terms, measuring him not by the rules but by a deeper standard: fidelity to nature. The Preface is both a defense and an honest appraisal, and its central argument is that Shakespeare is a universal genius because he represents not the customs of an age but human nature itself.
The poet of nature
Johnson's most famous judgment opens the argument: Shakespeare is "the poet of nature," the dramatist who "holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life." By "nature" Johnson does not mean landscapes or scenery. He means human nature; the permanent features of human character, passion, and conduct that do not change with time or place. Shakespeare's supreme excellence, in Johnson's view, is that he copies this general nature rather than the particular manners of Elizabethan England.
This leads to Johnson's decisive point about character. Shakespeare's persons, he writes, are "not an individual, but a species." Othello is not merely one jealous Moor; he is Jealousy itself. Falstaff is not merely one fat knight; he is appetite and wit embodied. Because the characters are universal types rather than individuals tied to a single time and place, every audience recognizes them. A Londoner of 1600, a reader of 1765, and a reader today all meet the same human beings on Shakespeare's stage. This is the heart of the "universal genius" claim: universality of character proves universality of genius.
Enduring popularity as proof
Johnson adds a second, practical argument: the test of time. "Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature." By 1765 Shakespeare had delighted audiences for more than a century and a half, and his plays were performed and read across ranks of society and across national borders. Johnson argues that such long and wide popularity cannot be an accident or a fashion. Fashions pass; what pleases only through novelty or local custom dies with the custom. The fact that Shakespeare still pleased proved that his foundation was permanent; general nature, which is the same in every age. Endurance, for Johnson, is evidence of truth.
The mingled drama: tragedy and comedy together
One of the standard neoclassical charges against Shakespeare was his habit of mixing comedy with tragedy; setting clowns beside kings, inserting jests into scenes of murder and grief. The rule demanded purity of kind. Johnson turns the charge into a compliment. Real life, he observes, is itself mingled: high and low constantly meet, solemn events are interrupted by trivial ones, and mirth and sorrow alternate in every human experience. A drama that separates the comic from the tragic by strict rule is therefore less true to nature than one that lets them collide as they do in life. Shakespeare's mingling is not ignorance of the rules but a deeper fidelity to reality. And because real life everywhere and always mixes joy and grief, the mingled drama is another mark of his universality.
Moral instruction
Johnson further argues that Shakespeare's plays instruct while they delight. They function as a kind of practical ethics: they display the passions at work, show virtue under trial, expose folly and villainy, and thereby teach readers to govern their own conduct. This moral dimension strengthens the universality claim, because moral truth; like human nature; does not change with fashion. A dramatist who teaches enduring lessons through enduring types of character earns the title of genius in the fullest sense: he serves not one audience but mankind.
Johnson's honest criticisms
What raises the Preface from praise to great criticism is that Johnson refuses to let admiration blind him. He catalogues Shakespeare's faults with complete frankness, and several of his critical phrases have become as famous as his compliments.
First, the quibbles. Shakespeare, Johnson says, had a fatal love of wordplay: "a quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it." For the sake of a pun he would sacrifice reason, propriety, and even dramatic power, letting a noble speech collapse into a jest.
Second, the plots. Johnson charges Shakespeare with writing hastily and carelessly; hurrying through his stories, neglecting fine opportunities, leaving inconsistencies and loose ends. Most seriously, he sometimes sacrifices moral justice to the convenience of the plot, allowing the wicked to prosper or the virtuous to suffer without the redress that poetry, in Johnson's view, ought to provide.
Third, the unities of time and place. Shakespeare ignores them freely: his plays span years and leap between countries in a single act. Here Johnson offers one of his most brilliant defenses. The unities, he argues, rest on the assumption that the audience must be deluded into believing the stage action is real; that spectators think they are truly in Rome or on a battlefield. Johnson denies this entirely. The spectator knows from the first moment that the stage is a stage and the players are players; the pleasure of drama comes from the willing exercise of the imagination, not from actual delusion. Since nobody is really deceived, there is no need to compress time and space to protect a deception that never existed. The unities are rules without a rational foundation, and Shakespeare was right to disregard them.
Conclusion
Johnson's final judgment balances the account. The faults are real and he names them without flinching; the quibbles, the careless plots, the lapses in moral justice. But they are faults of execution, while the excellences go to the essence of the art: fidelity to general nature, characters who are species rather than individuals, a mingled drama truer to life than any rule-bound alternative, and moral instruction that endures because human nature endures. On these grounds Johnson places Shakespeare above all modern writers. He is not the genius of an age or a nation but, in the full sense Johnson establishes, a universal genius; the poet of nature, whose "faithful mirrour of manners and of life" still reflects every reader who looks into it.
