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Johnson's Preface is here reprinted from the edition of 1777, the last to appear in his lifetime. The more important of the few alterations made on the original Preface of 1765 are pointed out in the notes.

In 1745 Johnson had published his Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth: with Remarks on Sir Thomas Hanmer's Edition of Shakespeare. To which is affixed Proposals for a new Edition of Shakespeare, with a Specimen. As Warburton's edition was expected, this anonymous scheme met with no encouragement, and Johnson laid it aside till 1756, when he issued new Proposals. In the interval he had written of Shakespeare in the admirable Prologue which inaugurated Garrick's rule at Drury Lane, and had shadowed in the Rambler and in the Dedication to Mrs. Lennox's Shakespear Illustrated (1753) much of what was to appear in perfect form in the Preface of 1765. It was one of the conditions in the Proposals that the edition was to be published on or before Christmas, 1757. As in the case of the Dictionary Johnson underestimated the labour which such a work involved. In December, 1757, we find him saying that he will publish about March, and in March he says it will be published before summer. He must have made considerable progress at this time, as, according to his own statement, “many of the plays” were then printed. But its preparation was interrupted by the Idler (April, 1758, to April, 1760). Thereafter Johnson would appear to have done little to it till he was awakened to activity by the attack on him in Churchill's Ghost (1763). The [pg lx] edition at length appeared in October, 1765. “In 1764 and 1765,” says Boswell, “it should seem that Dr. Johnson was so busily employed with his edition of Shakespeare as to have had little leisure for any other literary exertion, or indeed even for private correspondence.” The Preface was also published by itself in 1765 with the title—Mr. Johnson's Preface to his Edition of Shakespear's Plays.

The work immediately attracted great attention. Kenrick lost no time in issuing A Review of Doctor Johnson's New Edition of Shakespeare: in which the Ignorance or Inattention of that Editor is exposed, and the Poet defended from the Persecution of his Commentators, 1765. Johnson was “above answering for himself,” but James Barclay, an Oxford student, replied for him, to his annoyance, in An Examination of Mr. Kenrick's Review, 1766, and Kenrick himself rejoined in A Defence of Mr. Kenrick's Review … By a Friend, 1766. The most important criticism of the edition was Tyrwhitt's Observations and Conjectures upon some Passages of Shakespeare, issued anonymously by the Clarendon Press in 1766. Though we read that “the author has not entered into the merits of Mr. Johnson's performance, but has set down some observations and conjectures,” the book is in effect an examination of Johnson's edition. Notices appeared also in the Monthly and Critical Reviews, the London Magazine, the Gentleman's Magazine, and the Annual Register. The Monthly Review devotes its two articles (October and November, 1765) chiefly to the Preface. It examines at considerable length Johnson's arguments against the “unities,” and concludes that “there is hardly one of them which does not seem false or foreign to the subject.” The Critical Review, on the other hand, pronounces them “worthy of Mr. Johnson's pen”; and the London Magazine admits their force, though it wishes that Johnson had “rather retained the character of a reasoner than assumed that of a pleader.”

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