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I told him that I had dined lately at Foote’s, who shewed me a letter which he had received from Tom Davies, telling him that he had not been able to sleep from the concern which he felt on account of ‘This sad affair of Baretti,’ begging of him to try if he could suggest any thing that might be of service; and, at the same time, recommending to him an industrious young man who kept a pickle-shop.
JOHNSON. ‘Ay, Sir, here you have a specimen of human sympathy; a friend hanged, and a cucumber pickled. We know not whether Baretti or the pickle-man has kept Davies from sleep; nor does he know himself.’ (Boswell, Life of Johnson)1
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Notes
Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 19 October 1769; my italics. Joseph Baretti, with whom Johnson had been friendly for fifteen or so years, was arraigned at the Old Bailey for murder, and Johnson gave evidence as to his good character.
Lamb, ‘On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century’, The Works (1904 ed.) p. 419.
Macaulay, ‘Leigh Hunt’, Essays and Lays of Ancient Rome (1902 ed.) p. 574.
W. Raleigh, Shakespeare (1950 ed.) pp. 151–2.
Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience (New York, 1971 ed. pp. 164, 169, 179.
Compare Helen Gardner, The Business of Criticism (Oxford, 1959) P. 34;
W. Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea (Cambridge, 1968 );
R. Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage (Cambridge, Mass., 1972). I return to the Elizabethan World Picture on pp. 123–4.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Dante’, Selected Essays (1951 ed.) p. 257.
Arthur Sewell, Character and Society in Shakespeare (Oxford, 1951) p. 76.
A. Harbage, As They Liked It (1947) p. 6.
J. Keats, The Letters, ed. M. B. Forman (1942 ed.) pp. 69, 227–8. Keats was probably indebted to Coleridge, who had described Shakespeare as ‘darting himself forth, and passing himself into all the forms of human character and human passion’. Coleridge’s comparison of Milton and Shakespeare also seems to lie behind Keats’ thoughts about ‘the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime’.
See S. T. Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor, 2 vols (1960 ed.) II, p. 66.
Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art (Madison, Wisconsin, 1954) p. 320. For Richard II as tragedy see Chapter 4 n.1.
W. Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1895 ed.) pp. 13, 225.
E. E. Stoll, Shakespeare Studies (New York, 1927 ) p. 331.
A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns (1970 ed.) pp. 52, 54. The passage quoted comes from a lecture delivered in 1951.
Compare E. Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare (1963) Introduction.
Compare E. Honigmann (ed.), Twelfth Night (1971) pp. 17ff. and Shakespearian Tragedy and the Mixed Response (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1971 ).
A. C. Sprague, Shakespeare and the Audience ( Cambridge, Mass., 1935 ) p. 243.
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© 1976 E. A. J. Honigmann
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Honigmann, E.A.J. (1976). Response and Dramatic Perspective. In: Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02931-0_3
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