In Samuel Johnson's Critical Opinions, Prof. Arthur Sherbo resurrects Johnson's notes in which he expresses critical opinions that not only further illuminate his critical theories but are also of interest to those Shakespeareans who have relied on previous work by Joseph Epes Brown and Walter Raleigh.

In this groundbreaking portrait of Samuel Johnson, Nokes positions the great thinker in his rightful place as an active force in the Enlightenment, not a mere recorder or performer, and demonstrates how his interaction with life impacted his work.

The first new biography for a generation of one of the great figures of English literature Poet, essayist, biographer, lexicographer, critic, conversationalist and wit, Dr Johnson is one of the great figures of English literature, perhaps the most quoted English writer after Shakespeare. Our view of Johnson has been overwhelmingly shaped by James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, published in 1791, the most famous biography in the English language. But invaluable as Boswell is as a source, he should not be the last word. This new biography illuminates the Johnson that Boswell never knew: the awkward youth, the unsuccessful schoolmaster, the eccentric marriage, his early years in London in the 1740s scratching a living, the epic struggle to produce the Dictionary. Very much the outsider, rather than the supremely confident dispenser of robust common sense. Using material unknown to previous biographers, Peter Martin describes the psychological knife-edge on which Johnson felt he lived, caused by his severe melancholia and his physical diseases. He explores Johnson's role in the publishing and printing world of the time and he reveals how important women were to Johnson throughout his life. The Samuel Johnson that emerges from this enthralling biography is still the foremost figure of his age but a more rebellious, unpredictable and sympathetic figure than the one that Boswell so memorably portrayed.

Since the first appearance of Samuel Johnson's edition of Shakespeare's drama in 1765, its Preface has often been published separately, while the Notes have been treated as miscellaneous and fragmentary. As a result, few modern readers realize that the Notes in fact contain coherent interpretations of most of the plays and that many portions of the Preface are generalizations related to those readings. Scholars who have examined the Notes carefully have almost always used them in studies of larger issues, such as Johnson's morality or rhetoric. In this book, Edward Tomarken provides the first full-length study of the Notes to Shakespeare, showing how they raise issues of direct concern to modern critics and theoreticians. While referring to Johnson's notes on all the Shakespearean dramas, Tomarken focuses on eight plays--Henry IV, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, The Tempest, Hamlet, and Macbeth--to demonstrate the range of Johnson's editorial and critical abilities. Each chapter, devoted to a single play, moves from the particular to the general-from specific remarks about the play in the Notes, to related theoretical statements in the Preface, and finally to an axiom of literary theory. Ranging from a formulation concerning ideology in criticism to a reconsideration of aesthetic empathy, these axioms are, Tomarken contends, essential to literary criticism as a discipline and manifest Johnson's relevance to modern criticism. The conception of criticism that emerges in this book goes well beyond the theoretical premises of the eighteenth century. Tomarken submits that the ethical dimension of criticism-the moral aspect so fundamental to Johnson but so foreign to modern critics-can point to a way of mediating between the ideological differences that have become so divisive in modern criticism and theory.