Dryden, Johnson, and Coleridge on Shakespeare, nature, and genius.These are some comments by major English critics who attempted to vindicate Shakespeare's originality and value by positioning him in a framework of concepts that contrasts "Nature" or "genius" with "art," "learning," or "the rules" by which neoclassical criticism defined artistic excellence. (Johnson is also careful to identify Shakespeare's scope as uniquely universal, in contrast to the limited, arbitrary, or particular creations of other writers.) These statements illustrate part of the process by which the canon of English literature came to be anchored in a primary, authoritative literary figure whose proximity to the sources of his inspiration was considered absolute. We'll ask: what do these statements try to say about the relationship of culture to nature? of British culture to its imagined sources (whether in the natural or supernatural world)? of dramatic art to the objects of artistic representation? Why are statements like these made, and how are they meaningful?Compare these remarks with Jorge Luis Borges' "Everything and Nothing." To which of these critics does Borges' short parable seem closest? Shakespeare . . . was the man, who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily; then he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there. ---John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poetry: An Essay (1668) Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature. Particular manners can be known to few, and therefore few only can judge how nearly they are copied. The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight awhile by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth. Shakespeare is, above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature, the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpracticed by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions; they are the general progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species. . . . Other dramatists can only gain attention by hyperbolical or aggravated characters, by fabulous and unexampled excellence or depravity, as the writers of barbarous romances invigorated the reader by a giant and a dwarf; and he that should form his expectations of human nature from the play, or from the tale, would be equally deceived. Shakespeare has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion. . . . This, therefore, is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirror of life; that he who has mazed [i.e. confused] his imagination in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him may here be cured of his delirious ecstasies by reading human sentiments in human language, by scenes from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world and a confessor predict the progress of the passions. ----Samuel Johnson, "Preface to Shakespeare" (1765) Are the plays of Shakespeare works of rude uncultivated genius, in which the splendor of the parts compensates, if aught can compensate, for the barbarous shapelessness and irregularity of the whole? . . . Or to repeat the question in other words, is Shakespeare a great dramatic poet on account only of those beauties and excellencies which he possesses in common with the ancients, but with diminished claims to our love and honor to the full extent of his difference from them? Or are these very differences additional proofs of poetic wisdom, at once results and symbols of living power as contrasted with lifeless mechanism, of free and rival originality as contradistinguished from servile imitation . . . Imagine not I am about to oppose genius to rules. No! . . . . No work of true genius dare want its appropriate form; neither indeed is there any danger of this. As it must not, so neither can it, be lawless. For it is even this that constitutes it genius -- the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination . . . . Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in forms. . . . And even such is the appropriate excellence or her chosen poet, of our own Shakespeare, himself a nature humanized, a genial understanding directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper than consciousness. ---Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lecture of 1813 |