Five. Shakespeare (II)

Johnson wrote one of his most curious pieces, Rasselas , right in the middle of his work on Shakespeare. The circumstances of its production, his mother's illness and death, are well known. But the ease and rapidity with which he wrote it contrast strongly with the guiltful indolence that accompanied his work with the dramatist. The style of Rasselas is far from light or spontaneous; nor can its subject matter be considered ‘occasional’. Rather, the work carries a sense of deliberation, the uncertainties in it are calculated, and the author confidently concludes with ‘A conclusion in which nothing is concluded’. Two aspects of Rasselas have a bearing on Johnson's work on Shakespeare. The first is that enigmatic delineation in the tenth chapter of the ‘Ideal Poet’ by Imlac, who is unquestioningly accepted by all the characters to be their leader; and the second, the general conception of the discourse in the metaphor of a journey, in sharp opposition to the mirror-image that pervades Johnson's criticism of Shakespeare. In Rasselas Johnson seems to be working out his Idea of a Poet, in contra-distinction to the Poet that was then the subject of his immediate attention.

The poem that engages Rasselas's attention in the Happy Valley is ‘upon the various conditions of humanity’. The prince is impressed with the ‘man who knew the world so well, and could so skilfully paint the scenes of life’ (R, 15). Imlac, however, had himself sought refuge from the agony of temporal hopes and fears in the sensuous stasis of the Happy Valley. As poet he had advanced only to the level of the imagination; if he was different from the other inmates of the Valley it was in so far as he had a ‘mind replete with images, which I can vary and combine at leisure’ (R, 28). In Johnson's hierarchy of the mental faculties this was yet an immature stage of poetic development. The Imlac of the Happy Valley does not measure up to his own projection of the Ideal Poet. Rasselas's reaction ‘Enough! Thou ha