“The Splendour of Particular Passages”: Eighteenth-Century Editorial Criticism and the Epitomes of Shakespeare’s Genius
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the preface to his edition of the plays of Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson opposed the idea that Shakespeare’s genius might be epitomised by “the splendour of particular passages.” Despite Johnson’s opinion that Shakespeare’s grandeur lies in his fable, dedicated collections of Shakespeare’s quotations were incredibly popular in the eighteenth century and afterwards. Retracing the architectural metaphors for Shakespeare’s genius in Alexander Pope, Lewis Theobald, and Johnson himself, this article identifies a mutual influence between the conceptualisations of Shakespeare’s literary beauty and the critical and editorial practices of this period. This article argues that, starting from the first editions of the plays, interest in Shakespeare’s passages scaffolded the English variant of neoclassical literary criticism. Introduced in Nicholas Rowe’s and Pope’s indices to their editions, the idea that Shakespeare’s passages could be read independently from the rest of his text found its editorial realisation in the literary anthology. This article draws an analytical distinction between different genres of literary anthologies, arguing that William Dodd’s The Beauties of Shakespear and Elizabeth Griffith’s The Morality of Shakespeare’s Drama Illustrated distanced themselves from the form of the printed commonplace book to confer to the collection of Shakespeare’s passages an epitomic, rather than merely referential, function.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".