So little is known about Johnson's activities and whereabouts in the year 1745 that enthusiasts have imagined him in Scotland serving Bonnie Prince Charlie until the Jacobite cause met its final end at the battle of Culloden. The truth about his activities in 1745 is probably much more mundane. In 1745 Johnson published his Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth, a sixty-four page specimen of what would eventually become his edition of Shakespeare's plays (1765). It has been suggested that Johnson was responsible for a bare-bones edition of Shakespeare, hastily assembled in 1745 under the auspices of London publishers eager to reclaim the copyright over his works seized by Oxford University Press with the edition of Thomas Hanmer in 1744. This hack work would not be inconsistent with much that Johnson had done before for the London publishers. Moreover, it fits roughly into the particular kind of work Johnson was doing in the early 1740s and suggests a professional transition of the kind he made in the second half of the decade as part of the ongoing compromise in his life between the “dreams of a poet” and the fiscal realities of writing for a living in the eighteenth century.