ABSTRACT
When William Richardson’s Philosophical Analysis and Illustration of Some of Shakespeare’s Remarkable Characters fi rst appeared in 1774, the author had only recently taken his post as Professor of Humanity at the University of Glasgow.1 Described as “a man of some note in his day,” Richardson specialized in Latin, but lectured also “on the principles of classical composition and on Roman antiquities” (Clarke 143). Over the next forty years, he revised his work on Shakespeare, sometimes in apparent response to books that had come out in the interim on Shakespeare. Richardson always had a mind to advance his “philosophical” project, which he considered different from, and even in opposition to, the mainstream views in literary criticism of the time. Indeed, for him, belletristic attitudes driving Shakespeare criticism of the period were at loggerheads with the aims of “philosophical analysis,” which, Richardson believed, were meant to match “advances in other branches of science” (1774, 13).2
