The Plays of William Shakespeare

The Plays of William Shakespeare was an 18th-century edition of the dramatic works of William Shakespeare, edited by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens. Johnson announced his intention to edit Shakespeare's plays in his Miscellaneous Observations on Macbeth (1745), and a full Proposal for the edition was published in 1756. The edition was finally published in 1765.

In the "Preface" to his edition, Johnson justifies trying to determine the original language of the Shakespearean plays. To benefit the reading audience, he added explanatory notes to various passages. Later editors followed Johnson's lead and sought to determine an authoritative text of Shakespeare.

Johnson began reading Shakespeare's plays and poetry when he was a young boy. He would involve himself so closely with the plays that he was once terrified by the Ghost in Hamlet and had to "have people about him". Johnson's fascination with Shakespeare continued throughout his life, and Johnson focused his time on Shakespeare's plays while preparing A Dictionary of the English Language, so it is no wonder that Shakespeare is the most quoted author in it.

Johnson came to believe that there was a problem with the collections of Shakespearean plays that were available during his lifetime. He believed that they lacked authoritativeness, because they:

were transcribed for the players by those who may be supposed to have seldom understood them; they were transmitted by copiers equally unskillful, who still multiplied errors; they were perhaps sometimes mutilated by the actors, for the sake of shortening the speeches; and were at last printed without correction of the press.

Although Johnson was friends with actors such as David Garrick who had performed Shakespeare onstage, he did not believe that performance was vital to the plays, nor did he ever acknowledge the presence of an audience as a factor in the reception of the work. Instead, Johnson believed that the reader of Shakespeare was the true audience of the play.

Furthermore, Johnson believed that later editors both misunderstood the historical context of Shakespeare and his plays, and underestimated the degree of textual corruption that the plays exhibit. He believed that this was because "The style of Shakespeare was in itself perplexed, ungrammatical, and obscure". To correct these problems, Johnson believed that the original works would need to be examined, and this became an issue in his Proposal. Johnson also believed that an edition of Shakespeare could provide him with the income and recognition that he needed. However, a full edition of Shakespeare would require a publisher to make a large commitment of time and money, so Johnson decided to begin by focusing on a single play, Macbeth.

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