Adams Anthology Main Points [notice and beware of Adams's strongly pro-Johnsonian biases]:
fiction should "exhibit life in its true state"
comedy of romance
"rules of cosmic poetry"
against heroic romance, imaginative writing
concerned with education of and influence on the young; "lectures of conduct"; "introductions in to life"; "nothing indecent should be suffered"; "to secure them from unjust prejudices, perverse opinions, and incongruous combinations of images"
"knowledge of vice and virtue"; "power of example"
imitate nature but "necessary to distinguish those parts of nature, which are most proper for imitation"
"many characters ought never to be drawn"
"to initiate youth by mock encounters in the art of necessary defense, and to increase prudence without impairing virtue"
"many writers ... so mingle good and bad qualities in their principal personages, that they are both equally conspicuous"
"vice ... should always disgust; nor should the graces of gaiety, or the dignity of courage, be so united with it, as to reconcile it to the mind"
"virtue is the highest proof of understanding" [cf. Augustine's theory of reading and interpretation of the biblical text]
attention to nature and to life rather than to ancient writers
"to a poet nothing can be useless"; "for every idea is useful for the enforcement or decoration of moral or religious truth"
"the business of a poet ... is to examine, not the individual, but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances"; "prominent and striking features"; "must neglect the minuter discriminations"
modes of life; "estimate the happiness and misery of every condition"; "observe the power of all the passions"
poet "must divest himself of the prejudices of his age or country; he must consider right and wrong in their abstracted and invariable state"; "general and transcendental truths"; "legislator of mankind" [notice how the transcendental truths alluded to here may well be seen as a kind of prejudice]
"Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature"
"the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth"
Shakespeare, "the poet of nature"; "faithful mirror of manners and of life"; his characters are "the genuine progeny of common humanity"; "general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion"; in Shakespeare a character is a species; "system of civil and economical prudence"
"Even where the agency is supernatural the dialogue is level with life"
"his drama is the mirror of life"
"Shakespeare always makes nature predominate over accident"
not tragedies or comedies but mixed mode, "compositions of a distinct kind"
to instruct by pleasing
"the character of Polonius is seasonable and useful"
better at comedy than tragedy; "his tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct"
"but there is a conversation above grossness and below refinement, where propriety resides" [a very bourgeois thought]
"His characters are praised a natural, though their sentiments are sometimes forced, and their actions improbable"
Shakespeare has faults: "he sacrificies virtue to convenience"; "more careful to please than to instruct"; "he seems to write without any moral purpose"
"he that thinks reasonably must think morally"
Shakespeare "makes no just distribution of good or evil, nor is always careful to shew in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked; he carries his persons indifferently through right and wrong"
"it is always a writer's dutyto make the world better, and justice is a virtue independent on time or place"
Shakespeare's "plots are often so loosely formed ... so carelessly pursued, that he seems not always fully to comprehend his own design"
"shortened the labor to snatch the profit"; "no regard to distinction of time or place"; "violator of chronology"
"jests are commonly gross, and their pleasantry licentious"; "the reign of Elizabeth is commonly supposed to have been a time of stateliness, formality and reserve; yet perhaps the relaxations of that severity were not very elegant"
"in tragedy his performance seems constantly to be worse"
"tumor, meanness, tediousness, and obscurity"
"disproportionate pomp of diction"; "wearisome train of circumlocution"; "set speeches are commonly cold and weak"
"entangled with an unwieldy sentiment, which he cannot well express, and will not reject" [cf. Eliot on Hamlet]
"terror and pity, as they are rising in the mind, are checked and blasted by sudden frigidity"
"a quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation"
"neglect of the unities"
discussion of the unities: spectators know the difference between reality and representation, "consciousness of fiction"; only unity of action is essential (not of time or place); hence forgives Shakespeare for not observing them