ABSTRACT

It is clear that Johnson had from the first a deep fascination with the critical role, its morality, situational relations and its methods. Johnson had explored the task of the critic in the essays of the Rambler with increasing confidence, first allegorically and then comically and satirically. Johnson's sense of the 'duty of criticism' is by the same token solemnly to expose the 'accidental causes' that have given rise to dubious or corrupt received ideas. Many other papers show how far and how often, in isolated theoretical or transiently verbal terms, Johnson had anticipated his later criticism. The consciously self-parodic mode of the 'Rambler' offers a succession of satirical portraits in which a professional commitment to criticism is viewed as a characteristically urban pose. Written during Johnson's most intensive period of editorial work on the plays, Rasselas is thus the most suggestive context for comprehending Johnson's criticism of Shakespeare.