Reading: (1) Excerpts from Samuel Johnson in CT, namely (i) The Rambler, no. 4 (317–319); (ii) excerpt from The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (319–320); and (iii) excerpt from the Preface to Shakespeare (320–327)
      (4) Alexander Pope, excerpt from “Preface to the Works of Shakespear” (photocopy)

      Notes:
      (1) The Rambler was one of numerous journals published in London in the 18th century on the model of the highly successful Spectator Addison and Steele. It was written entirely by Johnson. Each number consisted of a single essay, and two numbers appeared per week, usually written by the author at the last possible moment, sometimes despatching the individual pages to the printer even as he finished them.
      (2) The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia is a short novel by Johnson. The title character, finding himself unaccountably discontented in the “happy valley” in which he has passed the first 26 years of his life, sets out to learn more of the world. The speaker in our excerpt, one Imlac, is a “man of learning” and his traveling companion.
      (3) Pope and Johnson both produced editions of the works of Shakespeare, Pope in 1725, Johnson in 1765, for which each wrote a preface.

      Question (for writing): Johnson, in his “Preface to Shakespeare,” writes: “In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species” (p. 321b). Pope, in his “Preface to Shakespeare,” writes: “But every single character in Shakespear is as much an Individual, as those in Life itself” (p. 461). How can these two seemingly contradictory judgments both be intended by their respective authors as praise?

      Further questions for thought and discussion:
      1. Do the seemingly contradictory claims of Pope and Johnson about Shakespeare actually contradict each other? (We may trust that Johnson was well aware of Pope’s remark, as he discusses Pope’s edition of Shakespeare in his own preface.)
      2. In The Rambler, no. 4, Johnson grants the common opinion (of his time) that to “imitate nature” is “the greatest excellency of art”; but he goes on to say that “it is necessary to distinguish those parts of nature, which are most proper for imitation” (p. 318b). Why? What is the content of this distinction? Why are some parts of nature not “proper for imitation”?
      3. Johnson has Imlac say that “the business of a poet [. . .] is to examine, not the individual, but the species” (p. 320). This appears to have been Johnson’s own view, to judge from his praise of Shakespeare, cited above. Why? And what might it mean for a poet to examine a “species”?
      4. In what ways is Shakespeare, according to Johnson, “the poet of nature” (p. 321b)? What does Johnson mean by the “appeal [. . .] from criticism to nature” (p. 323a)?