SOURCE: Griffith, Philip Mahone. “Joseph Warton's Criticism of Shakespeare.” TSE: Tulane Studies in English 14 (1965): 17-27.

In the following essay, Griffith explores Joseph Warton's criticism of Shakespeare, which appeared in the form of five essays in the Adventurer, arguing that Warton's criticism is representative of the contemporary trends in Shakespearean criticism.

Joseph Warton's five papers on Shakespeare, contributed to the Adventurer between September 25, 1753, and January 5, 1754, have received perhaps more persistent notice from literary historians than any other essays in the entire journal. Like most of Warton's literary criticism, these papers, critics have observed, reveal his ambivalence between a strict neoclassicism and a more liberalizing romanticism.¹ It is well to remind ourselves, however, especially in this quadri-centenary year of his birth, that Shakespeare's “genius was fully recognized in the Eighteenth Century,” that “from beginning to end, there is one long chorus of universal praise, so loud, so strong, so persistent...