In the preface to his edition of the plays of Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson opposed the idea that Shakespeare’s genius might be epitomised by “the splendour of particular passages.” Despite Johnson’s opinion that Shakespeare’s grandeur lies in his fable, dedicated collections of Shakespeare’s quotations were incredibly popular in the eighteenth century and afterwards. Retracing the architectural metaphors for Shakespeare’s genius in Alexander Pope, Lewis Theobald, and Johnson himself, this article identifies a mutual influence between the conceptualisations of Shakespeare’s literary beauty and the critical and editorial practices of this period. This article argues that, starting from the first editions of the plays, interest in Shakespeare’s passages scaffolded the English variant of neoclassical literary criticism. Introduced in Nicholas Rowe’s and Pope’s indices to their editions, the idea that Shakespeare’s passages could be read independently from the rest of his text found its editorial realisation in the literary anthology. This article draws an analytical distinction between different genres of literary anthologies, arguing that William Dodd’s The Beauties of Shakespear and Elizabeth Griffith’s The Morality of Shakespeare’s Drama Illustrated distanced themselves from the form of the printed commonplace book to confer to the collection of Shakespeare’s passages an epitomic, rather than merely referential, function.
Luisa Signorelli (Wed,) studied this question.