“Dost thou hear?” On the Rhetoric of Narrative in The Tempest

Abstract

In his 1768 Preface to Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson famously complained about the overriding passion and obscurity of the Bard’s tragedies, pinpointing the tediousness of his narrative pieces as exceedingly pompous and artificial. In his view all narration in dramatic poetry is dull by definition, “as it is unanimated and inactive, and obstructs the progress of the action” (Johnson 331). Shakespeare’s, however, was especially burdensome and aesthetically unpalatable in that he showed “a dis-proportioned pomp of diction and a wearisome train of circumlocution, and [told] the incident imperfectly in many words, which might have been more plainly delivered in few” (ibid.). With the attitude of a literary critic and reader of plays, rather than of a spectator, Johnson deprecated also Shakespeare’s cold and weak declamatory pieces for like pedantry. And yet, all too surprisingly, he spared The Tempest, in spite of its narrative and declamatory burden; after all, what really mattered was the play’s astounding variety and theatrical magic (ibid. 345).