Johnson and Stendhal: A French Connection

“Johnson’s and Stendhal: A French Connection” takes its start from Howard D. Weinbrot’s pathbreaking essay “Johnson Before Boswell in Eighteenth-Century France”(2005). I draw attention to the value of HW’s bibliographical findings in the volumes of late eighteenth-century compendiums, translations, and other French language sources and suggest their potential to change the narratives of critical history when they are seen alongside Johnson’s critical sources in seventeenth-century French criticism and his contemporary debates over Shakespeare with Voltaire. To this end I focus more concertedly than critics have hitherto on the manuscript translation made by the celebrated French novelist Henri Beyle (Stendhal) from the passage on the unities of time and place in Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare. Though dismissed simply as a “plagiat,” Stendhal, inserting new examples, in fact does much to transform Johnson’s defence of Shakespeare into a programme of radical literary reform fitted to his own critical occasion and opportunities in his Racine et Shakspeare (sic) of 1823 and 1825. With due regard to Johnson’s own interest in French writing I suggest the terms of a critical dialogue between Johnson and France that accords him a role in a genuinely European history of criticism, one he is denied by recent francophone critical eminences. The publication of a new French translation of the Lives of the Poets in 2015 heralds a possible new chapter in Johnson’s cross-Channel conversations.