MASARYKOVA UNIVERZITA - IS MUNI

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PEDAGOGICKÁ FAKULTA

Katedra anglického jazyka a literatury

SHAKESPEARE'S REPUTATION: A HISTORICAL STUDY TO THE END OF

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Diplomová práce

Brno 2009

Autorka práce: Vedoucí práce:

Bc. Jana Wendroff PhDr. Lucie Podroužková

2

I hereby declare that I have written this work by myself, using only the sources listed

in the bibliography section.

Brno, 6.12.2009

….……………………

Jana Wendroff

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I would like to thank my supervisor PhDr. Lucie Podroužková for her practical help,

her moral support, and her just plain kindness all through this project.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface....................................................................................................................................5

I. Shakespeare’s reputation and the First Folio……………………………………….. 8

1.1 His reputation in his lifetime……………………………………………………… . 8

1.2 The First Folio…………………………………………………………………… 11

II. Shakespeare’s reputation from the First Folio to 1660 and the Restoration…… 15

III. Shakespeare’s reputation during the Restoration…………………………………18

3.1 The revived English theatre………………………………………………………. 18

3.2 Shakespeare and the Restoration stage…………………………………………… 20

3.3 Shakespeare’s adaptation in Restoration………………………………………… 23

3.4 Critical boosts to Shakespeare’s reputation in the Restoration…………………… 27

IV. Shakespeare’s reputation in the 18th century………………………………………30

4.1 18th-century landmark editions of Shakespeare--Rowe, Pope, Johnson, Malone… 30

4.2 Rowe's edition…………………………………………………………………….. .30

4.3 Pope’s edition……………………………………………………………………… 38

4.4 John’s edition……………………………………………………………………….46

4.5 Malone’s edition…………………………………………………………………… 56

4.6 Shakespeare in the eighteenth-century theatre…………………………………… 58

Annotation……………………………………………………………………………… 62

Anotace………………………………………………………………………………… 62

Bibliography section…………………………………………………………………… 63

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Preface

The topic I first proposed for this thesis was 'Shakespeare in the English and American

School and University Curriculum: A Historical Study'. I was drawn to the topic because my

bachelor's thesis focused on two of Shakespeare's major tragedies, Hamlet and Macbeth, and I

thought it would be worthwhile to learn more about how Shakespeare achieved the enormous

cultural status he enjoys today. How he became a standard--one of the most fixed standards--

in the school and university curriculum seemed like an interesting and manageable way of

exploring the subject. The subject was that much more attractive since I am myself a teacher

studying in the Masaryk University Pedagogical Faculty.

The proposal I submitted for such a study in October 2008 recognized the possibility

that there might not be enough material in print to be the basis for a master's thesis, even in

the major research library I had access to during my regular visits to New York City. Over

the next eight months I discovered that, in fact, there wasn't. As a result, I submitted a revised

thesis plan this past May in which I proposed to make Shakespeare's incorporation into the

school and university curriculum part of a much broader historical study of the development

of his reputation from his lifetime all the way down to the present. I set out ten areas that I

would explore in developing the topic, and if I didn't myself recognize at the time that I might

be proposing to take on more than I could handle in a master's thesis, my thesis advisor, PhDr.

Podroužková, who had also directed my bachelor's thesis, did.

It turned out that she was right. If there wasn't enough material to support my original

research topic, there was too much to make the revised version, with its ambitious plan,

doable in the scope of a master's thesis. I knew of course that a very great deal had been

written about Shakespeare, but until I seriously began to sift through the Shakespeare

literature I hadn't appreciated how vast and almost overwhelming it is.

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The study that I have ended up writing is, therefore, a sharply scaled-back version of

what I had in mind this past May. It carries the historical and critical description of the

growth of Shakespeare's reputation to the end of the eighteenth century and not all the way to

the present, and it leaves out discussion of a number of the sub-topics I had originally planned

to cover. This fact makes me less unhappy than I would have been at the outset because my

research has taught me that by the close of the eighteenth century the size and character of

Shakespeare's reputation--respectively, immense and godlike--were, broadly speaking,

already fixed in the form they have kept to this day. As I remark later on, although the term

'bardolatry', according to the Oxford English Dictionary, didn't appear in print until 1901, the

thing itself dates back more than a hundred years before that date. Appropriately enough, a

synonym, 'super-idolatry', was coined in 1931 by the scholar who definitively located the rise

of unqualified Shakespeare worship--Shakespeare as not just a literary giant but a cultural

hero--in the last third of the eighteenth century (Babcock, xvii).

Even with this narrowing, my treatment of the topic has had to be selective. There is

simply too much information and informed opinion out there to be able to do justice to it all in

a relatively limited space. I have divided the study into four main parts: Shakespeare's

reputation to 1623 and the First Folio; Shakespeare's reputation from the First Folio to the

Restoration; Shakespeare's reputation in the Restoration; and Shakespeare's reputation in the

eighteenth century. In the last part, the principle of selection has operated even more strongly

than in the other three: not only is the time period covered longer, but the forces that worked

to shape Shakespeare's reputation in the eighteenth century were greater in variety than before

and greater in number. The result is that the literature describing and commenting on them is

even harder to begin to get your arms around.

I have chosen to concentrate on the leading eighteenth-century editor-critics of

Shakespeare since that is where much of the literature I have drawn on concentrates. In a way

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that today may be hard to imagine, those editor-critics--among them the two greatest literary

figures of the century, Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson--were important taste-makers and

opinion-shapers of their day. Although Shakespeare, adapted and straight, was very popular

on the eighteenth-century stage, the growth of his reputation to the point where, by the end of

the century, bardolatry had set in is in great measure owing to how he was presented on the

printed page and what was said about him there.

More than one of my sources has observed how each successive eighteenth-century

editor-critic tended to remodel Shakespeare after his own image (Schoenbaum Lives, 91;

Eastman, Short History, 17). The same is probably true of each successive generation or two

of critics, readers, directors, actors, and audiences since the eighteenth century. It is the

nature of a great writer not just to allow such remodeling but to invite it. Whether we are

aware of it or not, the process must still be going on today.

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I. SHAKESPEARE'S REPUTATION TO 1623 AND THE FIRST FOLIO

1.1His reputation in his lifetime

The reigns of Elizabeth I in the last four decades of the sixteenth century and of James

I in the first quarter of the seventeenth century were a golden age of play writing and

performance in England (Brooke, 589). Many scholars and theatre people would say that it

was the golden age, with a parallel in world history only in fifth-century B.C. Greece (Brooke,

589). But Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights didn't have anything resembling the literary

and social prestige enjoyed by ancient Greek playwrights or by playwrights today. So far as

public opinion was concerned, like the writers of the anonymous popular ballads that were

published as broadsheets, most of them barely qualified as literary men (Bentley, The

Profession, 9). (They were all men.) At best they were looked upon as artisans, not artists.

(The 'wright' in playwright, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as 'an artificer or

handicraftsman; esp. a constructive workman', exactly expresses this idea. Compare

wheelwright, millwright, shipwright.)

Elizabethan and Jacobean actors enjoyed even less prestige than the playwrights

(Bentley, The Profession, 14). Their skills were described by a well-known playwright

contemporary of Shakespeare's, Robert Greene, as 'a kind of mechanical labour', and their

morals were notoriously loose (Seltzer, 35). As suppliers of popular entertainment, actors and

playwrights both belonged to a line of work (it would be misleading to call it a profession; for

a contemporary, only divinity, law, and medicine were professions [Oxford English

Dictionary]; making plays and acting in them definitely was not), the theatre, that itself was

regarded as not particularly reputable (Bentley, The Profession, 9). One probably can get

some idea of playwrights' contemporary standing if you think of them as being roughly

equivalent to the all but anonymous screenwriters working in the Hollywood film factory, or

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to television sit-com and soap opera writers. (At the close of an episode of 'Comeback' or

'Pink Garden', who bothers to pay attention to the names of the script writers as they scroll

down or flash across the screen? Probably not one viewer in a thousand could name them

afterwards.) You can get an idea of the standing of Elizabethan actors if you think of rock

musicians or hippies. (The famous 'Chandos portrait' of Shakespeare, one of only two or

three images with a claim to authenticity [Schoenbaum, 'The Life', 13], shows Shakespeare

wearing an earring in his left ear and looking altogether like a pirate.)

But there were a number of stars, and William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon,

playwright and actor--and producer and shareholder in his theatre company--was one of them.

By the time Shakespeare retired from playwriting--and, so far as is known, from literary

activity of any kind (Wells, 95)--and returned from London to the town of his birth and

upbringing sometime around 1612, when he was forty-eight, he had written and had helped to

produce thirty-six or more plays. In many if not all of those plays he had probably also acted.

Like the other members of his theatre company and of its chief rival, he had probably acted

more than one role in each (Wells, 60). A contemporary may not have wished to dignify the

theatre by calling it a profession, but Shakespeare was a professional man of the theatre

through and through.

The documentary record shows clearly that Shakespeare was also a shrewd

businessman, since both before and after his retirement he had the financial means to acquire

important property in his hometown and, once he had retired, even to buy himself a coat of

arms from the College of Heralds. For someone like himself, not of gentle birth, owning a

coat of arms was the next best thing to having been born a gentleman. When Shakespeare

arrived in London in the early 1590s, he was the modestly educated older son of a family that

had known better times. By the time he died he had become 'a man of property' and a

gentleman (Schoenbaum, 'The Life', 8-10, Lives, 22; Wells, 5).

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The theatre was good to Shakespeare not just financially. Within the small world of

Elizabethan and Jacobean England and the smaller world of Elizabethan and Jacobean

London, he was recognized as one of the leading playwrights of the time. The narrative and

lyric poetry he had written and had published in the earlier part of his London career had

earned him a reputation also as a leading poet (Murray, xxvi & n.). He was a star in the

Elizabethan and Jacobean literary sky.

But he was not the only star. The reigns of Elizabeth and James saw 'a fantastic

outpouring of plays' by hundreds of playwrights (Bentley, 706). There were plenty of

Londoners who thought the plays of Christopher Marlowe or Thomas Middleton or Ben

Jonson or of the playwriting team of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher just as good as

Shakespeare's, if not better. It was a time when the monarch did not come to the theatre, but

the theatre came to the monarch. If Shakespeare and his company gave command

performances of his works before Queen Elizabeth and King James, plenty of Shakespeare's

playwriting contemporaries did too. If Shakespeare's narrative poems, or at least parts of

them, were included in anthologies of verse published during his lifetime, the poetry of any

number of his contemporaries was featured in them just as prominently and more prominently

(Rhodes, 171). It would be a serious mistake to imagine that Shakespeare's reputation during

his lifetime, and for years after, was remotely like what it is today and has been for the last

two hundred years. William Shakespeare was by no means a neglected or underappreciated

talent among his contemporaries, but he was very far from being "the Bard'. 'Mentions of

Shakespeare's works (despite enthusiastic claims by some [present-day] students) are far from

numerous in the last decade of the sixteenth century, and for the most part are tucked away in

obscure publications put out by the lesser literati'. 'From the beginning of the new century

until his death the scattered references to Shakespeare, many of them from manuscript sources

[and, so, not publicly voiced] hardly add up to a very impressive testimonial to his

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contemporary reputation' (Schoenbaum, Lives, 26, 27). In his own time, Shakespeare was a

figure of very human proportions.

It has been said that, as the result of the work of many scholars over the course of the

past three hundred years, we today know more about Shakespeare's life than we know about

the life of just about any other English man or woman of his time, literary or otherwise. This

is especially remarkable given the fact that, although biographies of contemporary literary

figures were written, as a playwright and actor, a working man of the not very reputable

theatre, Shakespeare was not the object of any biographical interest among his contemporaries

or among the immediately following generations. In fact, the first work resembling a

biography of Shakespeare wasn't published until almost a century after his death, when all

first-hand oral evidence and a great deal of documentary evidence were already lost for good

(Taylor, 75). Not only was biography much less practiced than it is in our own time, but

when it was written it was biography of men (once again, women did not come into the

picture at all) who were felt to really matter: men of letters --of whom Shakespeare was, in the

eyes of his contemporaries, not one--statesmen, philosophers, theologians. The idea of a

serious biographical study of a mere playwright, no matter how admired and successful he

was, would probably have struck the average Elizabethan Englishman as slightly ridiculous.

1.2 The First Folio

Out of all the great body of material that is known about Shakespeare the man,

Shakespeare the playwright and poet, and about the time Shakespeare lived in, one fact in

particular stands out as testimony to the special place he held among at least a few of his

contemporaries as not just one star in a constellation of playwriting stars, but maybe the

brightest star. This was the publication in 1623, seven years after his death, of a collected

edition of his plays. The collection, what has come to be called the First Folio, was put

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together by two men, John Heminges and Henry Condell, who had been Shakespeare's

colleagues in his acting company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and it was frankly intended as

a tribute to what they recognized as Shakespeare's special genius. It must have taken a great

deal of time, effort, and money to put together. It was 'a labour of love' (Schoenbaum, 'The

Life', 14). Of the thirty-six plays that were included in it, eighteen had never been printed

before and might have otherwise been lost altogether (Evans, 122).

Such a collection of contemporary English plays was practically unheard of in that era.

Plays were, as Sir Thomas Bodley--a distinguished Elizabethan scholar and diplomat--

expressed it, 'idle books, and riff-raffs' that he did not wish to have catalogued in the great

Oxford University library he founded in 1612 (Cambridge Guide, 895b). When plays were

collected, they were the plays of famous writers of the past like the Roman comic dramatists

Plautus and Terence (Wells, 12), not what was thought of as the more or less disposable work

of contemporary writers. What made the collection even more exceptional was the fact that it

came out in the largest, most prestigious printing format, the folio. Today the folio format is

most often met with in the large, heavy picture books that sit unread on living-room coffee

tables. In Shakespeare's time it was the format generally reserved for the weightiest subject

matter by the weightiest authors, works of history or philosophy or theology or statecraft. The

publication of Shakespeare's collected plays--the work of 'a mere actor, and not, by the

standards of the day, a learned man' (Schoenbaum, Lives, 27)--in an extraordinary folio

edition, and so soon after his death, is, looking back, maybe the earliest clear sign of the

course his reputation would take over the next almost four hundred years.

The plays collected in the First Folio were preceded by a number of what were called

commendatory poems. This was the custom. Commendatory poems in Shakespeare's time

(and before and after) served very much the same purpose served by what appears on the front

and back of today's book jackets, and often on the flaps inside too: favorable review excerpts

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and puffs by this or that expert or fellow author praising and recommending the book in

question. Just like today's book-jacket puffs, commendatory poems often went overboard in

their praise and their recommendations. It was almost a requirement that they would.

There is a surprisingly small number of commendatory poems preceding the plays in

the First Folio (Schoenbaum, Lives, 29), surprisingly small, that is, from our modern-day

perspective on Shakespeare's greatness. One of them has stood out from all the others, going

back hundreds of years. This is an eighty-line poem titled 'To the Memory of My Beloved,

the Author Mr. William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us'. It is by Ben Jonson,

Shakespeare's somewhat younger fellow playwright and poet. The generous tribute Jonson

pays Shakespeare in this poem is remarkable for its heartfelt feeling. It is all the more

remarkable because it comes from someone who was just as famous as Shakespeare and was

one of his chief rivals in the London theatre. It is also remarkable because Jonson regarded

himself and was regarded by contemporaries as Shakespeare's literary opposite, a scholarly,

painstaking literary artist in the classical tradition, a man of letters who carefully observed the

'rules' that many thought should govern dramatic composition (the so-called classical unities

of time, place, and action). Shakespeare, by contrast, was typed (and remained typed for a

long time to come) as a 'natural' talent, unlearned, [Endnote: Another famous line from

Jonson's commendatory poem, 'And though thou hadst small Latine, and less Greeke' (line

31), is largely responsible for the long-held view that Shakespeare was poorly educated. In

fact, the 'small Latine' he would have acquired at a Stratford grammar school--where all the

grammar was of the two classical languages--would have been at least equal to university-

level Latin today (Schoenbaum, 'The Life', 3).] brilliant but undisciplined, too often letting his

imagination and his pen run loose, a breaker of the rules. Jonson had himself had a folio

edition of his works published in 1616, but his standing as a classically learned man of letters

makes this a great deal less remarkable than Shakespeare's folio edition. Although, like

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Shakespeare, he had never been to the university, he was made an honorary Master of Arts by

Oxford University. Shakespeare never got anything like such recognition. Shakespeare's

death 'evoked no great outpouring of homage. That was reserved for his rival Jonson'

(Schoenbaum, Lives, 27).

Jonson's tribute to Shakespeare in the First Folio stands out from all the others because

of its heartfelt feeling and its poetic eloquence. Within the poem itself a single line stands out

as well. Looking back again, we can see that the idea expressed in this line, of Shakespeare's

timeless universality, is the idea that above all others shaped the development of

Shakespeare's reputation over the next four centuries. The result of that shaping influence

was that, from being regarded by his contemporaries as one star in a constellation of literary

stars, Shakespeare in the course of time became first a literary demi-god and finally, with no

competition to speak of, the chief god in the English literary pantheon, and the world's. After

addressing Shakespeare directly as ' Soul of the Age!' and 'the wonder of our Stage!' and

ranking him with the giants of classical antiquity, Jonson pronounces (line 43):

He was not of an age, but for all time!

The line echoes down to our own day.

When Jonson wrote of Shakespeare in his notebook of assorted literary and other

observations, Timber, or, Discoveries, first published in 1640, that 'I loved the man, and do

honour his memory--on this side idolatry' (Wells, 103), he could not have appreciated the

unintentional irony of his remark. With all his genuine admiration of Shakespeare, even he

could not have guessed at the idolatry and the 'super-idolatry' (Babcock, xvii) that were to

come.

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II. SHAKESPEARE'S REPUTATION FROM THE FIRST FOLIO TO 1660

AND THE RESTORATION

The idolatry didn't come right away. 'For many years after the publication of the First

Folio in 1623 there was little to suggest that Shakespeare would come to be regarded as the

greatest dramatist of his generation, let alone of all time' (Wells, 175). Although the

documentary record is sketchy (Sprague, 199), it seems certain that in the years between the

First Folio and the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 after a generation of Puritan

rule, Shakespeare's reputation did not grow. If it actually shrank, it is probably true to say that

it shrank in proportion to the shrinkage of theatre as a form of popular entertainment in

England during that time. Besides, it is often the case that literary reputations fall following

an author's death, and Shakespeare's was no exception.

The golden age of Elizabeth and James was past. Puritan voices denouncing the

theatre as an encouragement to vice and godlessness were louder and harder to disregard as

the Puritans grew in political power. A good number of Shakespeare's plays were revived in

the quarter century after his death by his company, which, being under royal patronage, was

still the leading theatre company in England. (From being the Lord Chamberlain's Men

during Elizabeth's reign, it had become servants of the king himself, the King's Men, shortly

after James I came to the throne in 1603. It remained under royal patronage once James was

succeeded in 1625 by his son Charles I [Wells, 74-75].) But the plays of Jonson and of

Beaumont and Fletcher were more popular (Wells, 175). The second edition of the First Folio

was published in 1632 (with a commendatory poem by the twenty-four-year-old John Milton:

'Thou in our wonder and astonishment / Hast built thyself a alive-long Monument' [Eastman,

Short History, 4]), testifying to the continuing attraction of Shakespeare for readers, at least

readers who could afford what must have been quite an expensive book. After the theatres

were closed, reading plays was, after all, the next best thing to seeing them. Some of the

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plays were printed individually, and the long narrative poems that had made Shakespeare's

reputation as a poet in the 1590s, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, continued to be

popular for a time, going through repeated editions into the 1630s, though apparently falling

out of favor afterwards (Wells, 177).

The Sonnets, which had been a publishing failure when they were first printed in 1609

(scholars agree that most were written a good deal earlier), got a somewhat mangled second

edition in 1640. An interesting bit of testimony to the continuing strength of Shakespeare's

reputation as a poet is the editor's making it appear, in his preface, that anonymous poems in

the same volume as the Sonnets by such leading poets of the preceding generation as Thomas

Heywood, Ben Jonson, and John Beaumont were all by Shakespeare and were being

published for the first time (Wells, 177). This piece of editorial deception clearly was an

attempt to cash in on Shakespeare's name. It suggests that Shakespeare was more of a

publishing draw at this time than some of his equally famous poetic, if not playwriting,

contemporaries.

Whether he was or not, his reputation, like the reputations of just about everyone else

connected with the theatre in England, playwrights, actors, or producers, must have remained

more or less frozen between 1642 and 1660. By 1642, the Puritan party had gained control of

Parliament. The party was hostile to King Charles and his Catholic queen, Henrietta Maria, to

their extravagant court, and to everything they stood for, politically and otherwise. That

included the theatre, which the king was a patron of and along with the queen personally

enjoyed (she had even taken a part in a court performances) and which the Puritans had been

denouncing for its wickedness since early in the century (Wells, 175-176). In September

1642 Parliament passed an act closing the public theatres on the stated grounds that with the

country on the brink of civil war, everything possible had to be done '"to appease and avert

the wrath of God"' (Brooke, 589).

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The threat of civil war cited by the act was real: the king and Parliament were locked

in an intense struggle for political power that led to seven years of civil war ending with the

defeat of the king's forces and the beheading of Charles I in 1649. But contemporaries must

have been just as aware as future historians that once the war had ended with the Puritans

winners, 'there was no move to re-open the playhouses' (Sprague, 199). There still were some

private theatre performances in spite of the law, and 'at least three of Shakespeare's plays were

adapted and abbreviated as "drolls", brief entertainments performed at fairs, in taverns', and

even in one of 'the more proletarian' theatres that somehow managed to survive (Wells, 183;

Sherburn, 748). But for a generation Shakespeare's plays, and his reputation along with them,

stayed locked in a theatrical deep freeze.

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III. SHAKESPEARE'S REPUTATION DURING THE RESTORATION

Shakespeare's reputation declined over the two generations following his death. 1659,

the last year of Puritan rule in England, probably marks the low point in its whole course.

The decline was natural in the sense that reputations generally do fall after an author has left

the literary scene. Tastes change and new work starts to elbow out the old. The decline is also

clearly connected to the decline of theatre during the second of those two generations. But if

the decline of Shakespeare's reputation clearly is owing at least in part to the decline of

English theatre in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, his reputation's revival is

just as clearly linked to the revival of theatre that began with the return of monarchy to

England in May 1660. It wasn't scholarship or the enthusiasm of readers that brought him

back; it was theatrical performance (Sutherland, 32).

3.1 The revived English theatre

The thirty-year-old Charles II lost no time in unfreezing the theatre. Barely three

months after he landed at Dover from France, he granted 'patents'--'grants of exclusive

privilege' (Concise Oxford Dictionary)--to two new theatre companies, creating what was in

effect a theatre monopoly (or 'duopoly') that was to last all the way to the middle of the

nineteenth century (Sutherland, 32-33; Sprague, 205).1 To lead each company, he appointed

two courtier-playwrights, Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant. Both of them were

friends of the king and both had been leading figures in the theatre a generation before.

This last fact was significant for the fortunes of playwrights of the past (Shakespeare

was now dead forty-four years) because it helped to ensure the continuation of some sort of

theatrical tradition. At the beginning, when few new plays for the newly reopened theatres

had yet been written, the companies 'competed with each other in advertising their credentials

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as reincarnations of past dramatic glory' (Taylor, 14). It was significant specifically for

Shakespeare because Davenant was a warm admirer of his who could boast that Shakespeare

was his godfather (Davenant was born ten years before Shakespeare's death in 1616), who

could point with pride to their shared given names, and who was a source of what he claimed

to be reliable facts and anecdotes about Shakespeare's life. There were even rumours, which

Davenant did nothing to discourage (and, like quite a few of the facts and anecdotes, which

scholarship has never confirmed), that he was Shakespeare's illegitimate son (Wells, 180 &

note; Schoenbaum, Lives, 63-66). It is believed that at one time he owned the Chandos

portrait mentioned earlier (Schoenbaum, Lives, 205), another testimony of his attachment to

the playwright.

The two companies were keen rivals from the start. Killigrew's company, the King's

Men, under the direct patronage of King Charles and, so, favored, got the rights to most of the

plays that had been owned by Shakespeare's old company (also the King's Men). Davenant's

company, the Duke's Men, under the patronage of the king's brother, James, Duke of York

(who succeeded to the throne in 1685), had to be content with leftovers, most of them by

Shakespeare (Murray, xx; Sutherland, 41). One writer has described them as 'the second-

string plays of the second-string playwright'. They were older and, as they had been for

decades, less popular than the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. 'Even within the Shakespeare

canon they were not the most lucrative or desirable items' (Taylor, 14-15).

But Davenant was quicker and more inventive than Killigrew in making use of

theatrical resources that were new to English public theatre in 1660. He also had younger,

more energetic actors than Killegrew's carryovers from the 1620s, 1630s, and 1640s (Taylor,

14), one of whom was to become the brightest star of the Restoration theatre. The result was

that although he had been dealt a weaker theatrical hand than Killigrew, he played his hand

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more successfully. And as his reputation prospered, so did Shakespeare's, though sometimes

it was a Shakespeare that Shakespeare might have had trouble recognizing as himself.

3.2 Shakespeare and the Restoration stage

The new resources were actually not altogether new. Court ladies had taken roles in

and changeable scenery had had a prominent place in the elaborately staged masques of the

1620s and 1630s (Murray, xix). These were private royal and aristocratic entertainments that

blended opera with poetic drama and that relied heavily on stunning spectacle, costumes,

music, and dance--think of opera on steroids. (They had been a favorite target of Puritan

condemnation. Ben Jonson was a leading producer of them.) But until the Restoration both

actresses and scenery were unknown on the public stage in England.2

They were well known, however, in France, for example, at the court of Louis XIV in

Versailles, where Charles II had passed a good part of his exile after his father's execution in

1649. Charles, who was a lifelong theatre-lover, must have seen many sophisticated dramatic

performances there, sophisticated because they had professional actresses in female roles--and

not, as in England, boy actors--and because they made use of changeable scenery (Murray,

xx; Taylor, 18). It is generally assumed by scholars that the new king's experience of these

productions during his exile, and the taste for that kind of theatre which he carried back with

him to England, had an important influence on the form the revived theatre took from the

beginning (Murray, xx).

Not surprisingly, these theatrical innovations had an immediate and strong appeal for

producers and for audiences. You probably can get some idea of their appeal if you think of

the transformation of the movies in the earlier part of the twentieth century from silent to

talking and from black and white to color. A producer in the 1920s would not have dreamed

of putting out a silent film once the technological miracle of sound had become available, or

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in the 1950s a film in black and white after color was possible. Similarly, the producers of the

Restoration, with Davenant taking the lead, embraced the imported innovations of actresses

and scenery quickly and wholeheartedly. Everybody's plays of course were affected, not just

Shakespeare's. Just as with other playwrights of the time before actresses, Shakespeare's

already existing female roles were often enlarged by adaptors and even new roles created

(Taylor, 20; Wells, 189)), all out of a wish to (in both senses) maximize actresses' exposure.

(We like to think that today Shakespeare's text is treated with a lot more respect and we find

such mutilations a bit shocking. But today's directors, though they may not add to a role or

create a new one, often cut and rearrange what Shakespeare wrote in order to 'update' the

plays and make them 'more relevant', or to strengthen this or that political slant they want to

give Shakespeare, or out of a concern for political correctness.) It is interesting to speculate

whether, if these accommodations to the popular taste of the time hadn't been made,

Shakespeare's plays might have fallen out of the active repertory and his reputation have

suffered lasting damage from the break of a generation or more in his theatrical tradition.

The first actress to appear on an English public stage was just four months after the

reopening of the theatres, in the role of Desdemona in Shakespeare's Othello (Murray, xxiv).

But audiences, it seems, didn't take particularly well to Shakespeare's women's roles,

especially the roles that call for a female character to appear in a man's dress. Such roles 'lost

some of [their] ironic point once actresses took over the roles' in place of the boy actors

Shakespeare had written for (Wells, 195; Taylor, 19). There was compensation, however, in

the fact that such 'breeches' or 'trouser' roles put more of a woman's lower anatomy on display

than the masculine part of the audience--the overwhelming majority--usually got to see except

in a bedroom or a brothel (Murray, xxiv). '"The very best legs that ever I saw"' was the

critical judgment Samuel Pepys--a distinguished civil servant and a dedicated playgoer and

brothelgoer--set down in his famous diary in April 1669 after seeing Viola acted in a

22

performance of Twelfth Night (Wells, 187). His first experience of A Midsummer Night's

Dream left him cold except for 'some handsome women, which was all my pleasure' (Wells,

187). In an age before Internet pornography, the Restoration audience must have had many

such warmly appreciative, heavy panting males. (Interestingly and maybe not coincidentally,

the Restoration was when pornography made its first commercial appearance in England,

imported from Italy and, like the use of actresses, France. Pepys was an early customer

[Taylor, 18-19].)

Although there were famous actresses in the Restoration, and among them some

famous royal mistresses, none stood out in Shakespeare. One actor, Thomas Betterton, did.

Betterton (1635?-1710) is the second in a long line of great actors and actresses (Richard

Burbage, an almost exact contemporary of Shakespeare's, was the first) whose brilliant

performances in a number of Shakespeare's leading roles did a lot over the next three hundred

and fifty years to advance Shakespeare's reputation. Betterton was a member of Davenant's

company. He was famous for his portrayals of some of the heaviest roles in Shakespeare--

Othello, Brutus in Julius Caesar, Macbeth, King Lear, and, especially, Hamlet, which he

continued to act almost until his death at age seventy-five (Sprague, 200; Wells, 195). He and

his wife, Mary Saunderson, formed the first distinguished, and probably the first, husband and

wife team of Shakespearean actors (Wells, 197). In the roles of Henry VIII and Hamlet he

was in a direct line of descent from Shakespeare himself, since he was coached by Davenant

who claimed to have been instructed by members of Shakespeare's own company who

themselves had been instructed by the playwright (Sprague, 200). Following a generation in

which Shakespeare had been totally absent from the stage, Betterton was an especially key

link in the tradition of performing his plays and in maintaining and expanding their popularity

and the popularity of their author.

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3.3 Shakespeare adaptation in the Restoration

In fact, many if not most of the Shakespeare plays Davenant and Killigrew produced

and Betterton and other Restoration actors and actresses performed were not at all the

Shakespeare we know today. They were Shakespeare adapted, sometimes heavily. The

adaptations were not just the enlargement or addition of female roles (male roles too) and the

modernization of Shakespeare's language. A number of them are so great, the result is barely

recognizable as Shakespeare. (The plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, by contrast, stayed

relatively untouched by the adaptors [Taylor, 29], being more to the taste of the time.) In

some cases, Shakespeare's titles were changed, as with the popular Dryden-Davenant

adaptation of The Tempest, which became The Enchanted Island. In others, he was not even

given credit on the program and advertising posters for his fundamental contribution to the

finished product. Once again we may be inclined to condemn such fooling with

Shakespeare's text and to feel superior to those who engaged in it. The work over the years of

countless scholars and editors has taught us to respect its authority. But although Shakespeare

today is regarded with a reverence that was still altogether unknown to the Restoration, we

should remember how freely his plays are sometimes handled by present-day directors. We

should also be willing to recognize that free adaptation is often useful and sometimes

necessary before a work from the distant past can speak to the present.

John Dryden (1631-1700) was the leading playwright of the Restoration, though today

his plays are all but forgotten except by scholars. He was also the leading poet and literary

critic. He was an admirer of Shakespeare, although that didn't prevent him from being also a

leading adaptor. (His adaptation with Davenant of The Tempest 'kept Shakespeare's play off

the stage until the late eighteenth century' [Wells, 190].) Half a century after Shakespeare's

death, writing about the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, he observed: 'Shakespeare's

language is a little obsolete'. 'The tongue in general is so much refined since Shakespeare's

24

time that many of his words, and more of his phrases, are scarce intelligible' (Watson. I.171,

239; Sutherland, 88-89). A twenty-first-century reader coming across this remark probably

won't find it surprising, but that is because she knows first-hand that Shakespeare's language

is obsolete and difficult and that she always needs the help of a great many notes and glosses

in order to understand it. But the remark will be surprising if she stops to consider that no one

today would ever think of saying that the language of George Orwell--who is just as distant in

time from us as Shakespeare was from Dryden--is obsolete; or of George Bernard Shaw,

many of whose plays were written a century ago; or of Dickens; or even of Jane Austen

writing two hundred years ago. Dryden's own prose is much easier for a modern reader than

prose from Shakespeare's time; it isn't all that different from writing today. The fact is that

over the three generations from Shakespeare, writing at the end of the sixteenth century and in

the first two decades of the seventeenth century, to Dryden, writing in the 1660s through the

1690s, the English language had changed a very great deal. For Dryden and his

contemporaries Shakespeare's language was somewhat obsolete even though, as language

change usually goes, such a relatively short period of time had passed (Sutherland, 88-89;

Quirk, 68-69). It is not surprising, then, that one of the ways Shakespeare's plays were

adapted for Restoration audiences was to have their language brought thoroughly up to date.

In another place, Dryden characterized Shakespeare's language as 'pestered with

figurative expressions' (Murray, xxvii). It was part of the process of updating Shakespeare to

simplify, smooth out, or altogether get rid of many of what were felt to be flowery, over-rich

expressions (Jackson, 188), expressions which later generations would come to view as one of

Shakespeare's glories. The driving force behind this Restoration dislike of metaphor was the

same that was at work to make Shakespeare's language seem obsolete to Dryden: the

development of modern science and scientific habits of thought and plainness of expression

(Sutherland, 391). (Dryden, although not at all a scientist, himself was an early member of

25

the Royal Society [Cambridge Guide, 294], founded in 1662 and the leading scientific

organization of its time.) As with the other forms of adaptation and alteration, it seems

reasonable to think that if Shakespeare in his original language had been put before the

Restoration public, they would have rejected him. In that case he probably would have

slipped out of the repertory and might never have been revived. He hadn't yet acquired the

cultural authority that makes audiences today willing to cope with the real difficulties of his

four-hundred-year-old language. And if our own stage presentations of Shakespeare

generally don't go in for the degree of language modernization that was customary in the

Restoration, it is worth keeping in mind that Shakespeare lite is still the main or the only form

of Shakespeare that many people who claim to know and love him have actually experienced.

More radical adaptations of Shakespeare remodeled several of his plays to make them

reflect and comment on political events of the recent turbulent past and the sometimes

turbulent present. The Dryden-Davenant Tempest is one example (Murray, xxvii). Other

radical adaptations were in keeping with what contemporary thinking dictated about how a

play should be constructed. This 'neoclassical' thinking was based on seventeenth-century

understanding of the practice of the classical Greek and Roman dramatists and on a large

body of dramatic theory that had grown up since their time. It put a great deal of emphasis on

'the rules', especially the unities that Ben Jonson had been praised in his own day for keeping

to and was in this new critical climate praised even more. The rule of the unities said that a

play should dramatize a single story set in a single place and taking up no more time on stage

than the time represented in the story, what we would call 'real time'. The plays of

Shakespeare, 'unlearned' as he was, are of course extravagantly the opposite of all this.

Typically, they range all over space and time and complicate plot with subplot. The result

was that in the Restoration they were regularly cut and pasted and stretched and squeezed to

make them conform as much as possible to this rigid neoclassical model.

26

Shakespeare's bawdy and his use of 'low' expressions was one of the linguistic failings

his Restoration adaptors thought it was their duty to correct for the benefit of more polite

audiences (Eastman, Short History, 18). Another was his introduction of low characters like

clowns and fools into the tragedies. Such characters were felt by neoclassical taste to jar

against and undercut the tragic 'elevation' and seriousness it prized so much (Wells, 192-193).

(Modern criticism seems to take exactly the opposite view of their value in the plays.) Again

the result was major dramatic surgery. The Porter in Macbeth, the Gravediggers in Hamlet,

the Clowns in Othello and Antony and Cleopatra, the Fool in King Lear all had to go. This

neoclassical idea of tragic 'decorum' was so powerful, it wasn't until the middle of the

nineteenth century that they were allowed to return. And even then it 'took courage' when a

leading director put the Fool back into King Lear (Wells, 192-193; Sprague, 204).

What all of this seems to express is a belief among Restoration producers and the

Restoration audience that while Shakespeare was a writer of genius, he belonged to a less

sophisticated, cruder age than theirs and he himself lacked refinement, judgment, and polish.

It was felt to be necessary, therefore, to subject his plays to a great deal of 'improvement'

before they could meet the standards and satisfy the taste of a more cultivated, civilized time,

a time 'acutely conscious of its own modernity' (Sutherland, 42; Sutherland elsewhere [36]

suggests some qualification of this statement when he speaks of the 'chronic inattention to

near pandemonium' which, for all their conscious sophistication, seems to have been typical

of Restoration theatre audiences). As with the other kinds of adaptation he was made to suffer

in the Restoration, this was the price Shakespeare had to pay in order to hold his place in

English theatre and to prepare the way for the future rise of his reputation that would make

such adaptations unthinkable.

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3.4 Critical boosts to Shakespeare's reputation in the Restoration

At the close of the Restoration in the 1690s, Shakespeare's plays still took second

place in popularity behind the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. Among the cultural elite with

their neoclassical tastes, Jonson was still the favorite (Sutherland, 42; Taylor, 26). Samuel

Pepys, who is often seen as a representative man of the Restoration, ranked Shakespeare a

distant third (Taylor, 29; Levin, 214). The overwhelming majority of Shakespeare

performances had been of some adapted form of his work, so that the reputation he had by

1700 was mostly based on plays that were in varying degrees not altogether his, some very far

from that. Yet even as Shakespeare was being still overshadowed by his former rivals and

was being variously mangled by the adaptors, he was being spoken of in print increasingly in

terms which suggest that Jonson's appreciation of eighty years before, 'this side idolatry', was

beginning to move in the direction of idolatry pure and simple.

Dryden again is a good point of reference. Not only was he the leading literary critic

of the period (he is generally given credit for being the first English writer with a claim to be

properly called a literary critic), as its leading playwright too he might have been expected,

like Jonson before him, to want to run down one of his chief rivals, regardless of the fact that

that rival had been dead for many decades. And with his left hand Dryden does run

Shakespeare down. He criticizes Shakespeare's 'carelessness' and his 'wit' (Dryden himself

defines it as 'Thought and Words elegantly adapted to the subject' [Oxford English

Dictionary]), which is sometimes so deficient, 'he writes in many places below the dullest

writers of ours, or of any precedent age' (Watson, I.178). He speaks of Shakespeare's two

faces: 'You have scarce begun to admire the one, ere you despise the other' (Watson, I.178).

But what Dryden says with his left hand is far outweighed by what he says, in his critical

essays and in the prefaces or prologues to his plays, with his right. Shakespeare is the English

Homer, 'father of our dramatic poets', giving 'to Fletcher wit, to labouring Jonson art'

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(Eastman, 8). He has 'the largest and most comprehensive soul' (Watson. I.67), 'a larger soul

of poesy than ever any of our nation' (Levin, 215). He is the poet who has given 'a just and

lively image of human nature'; 'all the images of nature were still [always] present to him . . .

when he describes a thing, you more than see it, you feel it too' (Watson, I.67). He is 'the

incomparable Shakespeare' (Watson, I.63). 'I admire him [Jonson], but I love Shakespeare'

(Levin, 216).

Dryden defends Shakespeare against the charge--made in Shakespeare's own time, in

Dryden's, and for a long time to come--of being unlearned: 'He was naturally learned'

(Watson, I.67). He defends him on another common charge, his disregard of the

(neo)classical dramatic unities, calling French playwrights' exaggerated respect for them

'servile' (Watson, I.64-65). He asserts that Shakespeare's native 'genius' 'is a greater virtue . . .

than all other qualifications put together' (Watson, II.74, 178). Late in his career, he refers to

Shakespeare as 'God-like' and speaks of 'Shakespeare's sacred name', before which he retreats

in 'secret shame' over his own humble ability (Taylor, 46).

Dryden seems to have sensed that in praising Shakespeare as he does he was ahead of

his time--as we looking back can see that he was. He recognized that his views went against

contemporary popular opinion and some influential contemporary critical opinion (Eastman,

Short History, 11). There certainly must have been many fans of Beaumont and Fletcher and

of Jonson among Dryden's readers who thought his praise of Shakespeare grossly

exaggerated. (Although again we have to bear in mind that popular judgment was based

largely on Shakespeare mixed and not on Shakespeare straight.) But if nothing else, Dryden's

worshipful appraisal clearly points the way to the future. Even so, like Jonson offering his

warm tribute of praise in the First Folio, Dryden could not have guessed the heights 'our

Shakespeare' (Watson, I.68) would eventually ascend to. It was the editors and critics of the

eighteenth century who played a key role in propelling him to those heights.

29

Notes

1His acting so quickly may have been politically motivated besides being simply an

expression of a pleasure-loving young man's entertainment preferences. Bringing back a

popular entertainment that had been unpopularly banned served to symbolize to the nation

dramatically (in both senses) how completely the Puritan regime and everything it stood for

had now been swept away. Politicians have always recognized the shrewdness of such

maneuvers, and Charles was already a shrewd politician (Murray, xvii-xviii.) The move was

in keeping with the act of 'collective, willed oblivion' by which the laws of the preceding

eighteen years were simply wiped from the statute books as though they had never existed,

and Charles's reign was 'retroactively declared to have begun at the moment of his father's

death' (Taylor, 10). Historians have not accepted this fiction.

2I have not come across any attempt to explain why in the reign of Elizabeth it was

culturally acceptable for men to be on the stage but not for women, or why in the reigns of

James I and Charles I this cultural taboo was still in force even though aristocratic and even

royal women were acting in court presentations. It seems to have been a matter of class and

not religion, of the private, non-commercial entertainment of the leisure class versus the

commercial professional kind.

30

IV. SHAKESPEARE'S REPUTATION DURING THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

At the beginning of the new century, Shakespeare was still far from being the most

popular playwright in England. Among playwrights of the golden age, he was still

overshadowed by Beaumont and Fletcher and, among connoisseurs, by Jonson (Sutherland,

42; Taylor, 28). With the exception of Dryden, he wasn't a particular favourite of critics.

When the respected and influential Thomas Rymer in his 1693 Short View of Tragedy mocked

Shakespeare's ability as a writer of tragedy (he called Othello 'plainly none other than a

Bloody Farce, without salt or savour' [Parker, 158]), he was being much more representative

of his neoclassical time than Dryden. By the century's end, however, Shakespeare had not

only for decades been generally recognized as a classic--as the classic--of English drama, but

his stature was already (to borrow Dryden's term from more than a century before) godlike.

How this happened is the subject of the following chapter.

4.1 Eighteenth-century landmark editions of Shakespeare--Rowe, Pope, Johnson, Malone

The story of Shakespeare's reputation in the Restoration is mostly the story of his

performance on the stage. The story of his reputation in the eighteenth century is much more

a story of his presence on the printed page, of the publishers and editors who put him there,

and of the responses his presence there drew from readers and critics. The seventeenth

century Shakespeare is an actor's Shakespeare. The eighteenth-century Shakespeare is a

reader's Shakespeare.

4.2 Rowe's edition

A major landmark on the road to Shakespeare's becoming a classic is Nicolas Rowe's

six-volume edition of the collected plays published in 1709. This was the first in a series of

31

semi-scholarly and scholarly multi-volume editions of Shakespeare that extended to the very

end of the eighteenth century. By devoting the kind of scholarly care to the editing of

Shakespeare's works which traditionally had only been given to the works of the classical

past, these scholarly editions had the effect of helping to elevate Shakespeare to the level of

the great Greek and Roman dramatists. The eighteenth-century editor-critics were often free

enough in singling out what they saw as Shakespeare's failings, usually by judging him

according to the prevailing neoclassical standards of taste and dramatic decorum (Babcock,

45). But as with Dryden, praise tended to predominate, and the whole impressive physical

apparatus of a multi-volume scholarly edition by itself worked to give Shakespeare a prestige

until then unknown for an English playwright (Babcock, 19). A classic writer will invite

editing like a classic. But the equation also operates in reverse: to be edited like a classic

helps to make a writer classic.

Like almost all the editors who followed him through the first two thirds of the

century, Rowe (1674-1718) was not a professional scholar. He was a poet and, like

Shakespeare, a working man of the theatre whose plays in his own time and for several

generations after were highly thought of. In this respect, he and his immediate eighteenth-

century successors in editing Shakespeare were in the tradition of Dryden, who had given his

opinion that the work of poets and playwrights was best judged by other poets and

playwrights like himself (Babcock, 7)). Shakespeare was best known to the Restoration by

his tragedies (Sutherland, 88). Rowe too was best known for his tragedies, and his two best-

known tragedies were written, as he himself stated, 'in imitation of Shakespeare's Style'

(Robinson, 21). Although a non-scholar, he was in key ways a natural choice for editing

Shakespeare.

Besides a few individual plays, among which Davenant's acting version of Hamlet

seems to have been the most popular (Taylor, 46), there had been two collected editions of

32

Shakespeare brought out during the Restoration. The Third Folio of 1663 and the Fourth

Folio of 1685 were basically reprints of the first two folios, with some modernization of

Shakespeare's language and with each claiming to have corrected errors in its predecessor, at

the same time adding errors of its own (Wells, 198; Brockbank, 717). But if they didn't break

new ground in treating Shakespeare's text, the two Restoration folios assured the transmission

of 'authentic' Shakespeare (Wells, 198) and testify to the existence of a continuing market for

Shakespeare in print.

By the time Rowe's edition appeared in 1709, Shakespeare's plays 'were no longer

outnumbered on the stage by those of Beaumont and Fletcher' and more of them were being

performed in versions closer to the originals (Sprague, 200; Levin, 214). A shrewd publisher

would have seen that it was a good time to bring out a new collected edition that could make a

plausible claim to greater authenticity than the recent folios, and that would provide

supplementary material of interest to its ready-made readership who had only experienced

Shakespeare in the theatre. As a business executive today would express it, identify a

promising market niche and then come up with an attractive product to fill it.

That shrewd publisher was Jacob Tonson. Tonson (1655-1736), along with the

Tonsons of the next three generations who carried on his publishing business, probably

deserves as much credit as any of the celebrated Shakespeare editors and critics of the first

two thirds of the century for enlarging Shakespeare's reputation(Taylor, 53, 70). He was well

established, having already published a number of Dryden's works (including Dryden's

adaptation of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida), impressive editions of Milton's Paradise

Lost and of classical authors, and a series of popular poetry collections (Cambridge Guide,

996a). Tonson's brilliant business idea was to commission the foremost writer of tragedy of

the day, Rowe (Dobrée, 245), to edit the foremost writer of tragedy of a hundred years before,

setting up the editor as maybe as much of an attraction to his prospective audience as his

33

author. (Something like the double-barreled attraction seen today when a famous movie actor

or actress tries his or her hand at directing another star.) And what Tonson did with Rowe

and, sixteen years later, with the greatest poet of the age, Alexander Pope, his successors did

with four other poet-editors, of whom the last and best-known was Samuel Johnson (Taylor,

70).

Rowe started off by making a serious mistake: he took the 1685 Fourth Folio, with all

its accumulated printers' and editors' 'corruptions', as the basis of his edition, although he

didn't advertise the fact (Schoenbaum, Lives, 86). He did make use of the earlier folios 'and

even one or two Quartos' (Dobrée, 327) for comparing and reconstructing problem passages

(now a standard scholarly practise), but his editorial methods were generally 'haphazard',

'casual and unsystematic' (Butt, 4; Brockbank, 718a; Bentley, 712a-b, gives Rowe a great deal

more credit for his editorial work). On the plus side, he modernized the folio's spelling to

make Shakespeare more readable--again, standard practise today. He substituted for the stiff

woodcut portrait of Shakespeare that had adorned all the folios the much more flattering and

sexy Chandos portrait in which Shakespeare sports his earring (Taylor, 76). He included

engravings to go with the plays

--the first illustrated Shakespeare (Brockbank, 719b). Rowe's most important contributions

to creating a convenient reader's Shakespeare, however, were to 'complete the Folio division

of the plays into acts and scenes', to supply scene locations, to list the characters at the

beginning of each play (as he was used to doing in preparing his own plays for publication),

and to clarify exits and entrances (Schoenbaum, Lives, 86; Brockbank, 718a; Taylor, 86;

Bentley, 712b) Rowe wasn't a professional scholar, but a lot of his work on Shakespeare's

text made so much good sense, it became a permanent part of the tradition of presenting

Shakespeare on the printed page to the ordinary reader (Bentley, 712b). And it has been

34

ordinary readers as much as learned editors and critics who in the eighteenth century and after

have given Shakespeare his high place in the literary pantheon.

Tonson and Rowe were just as aware as the publishers and editors of today's

newspapers and magazines of '"how fond . . . we see some People [are] of discovering any

little Personal Story of great men"' (Taylor, 86). To satisfy this perennial curiosity and hunger

concerning the great, and (as Rowe goes on to state in his preface) to add to 'the knowledge of

an author [that] may conduce to the better understanding of his Book' (Taylor, 76), Tonson

had Rowe put together a life of Shakespeare to go with the collected plays. This is the first

such account that is entitled to be called a biography (Wells, 200). In preparing it, Rowe had

to deal with the fact that, almost a hundred years after Shakespeare's death, there was no one

who could supply him with first-hand information and testimony. But he was diligent and

energetic in collecting whatever might be available, even (as biographers still sometimes do

today) buying newspaper space to publish a request for contributions (Brockbank, 718a).

The biography that resulted from Rowe's efforts, Some Account of the Life, &c., of Mr.

William Shakespear, was only 'forty pages of large type' that prefaced the first volume of the

Works, but it was much better than anything than had gone before (Taylor, 86; Schoenbaum,

Lives, 41). It was apparently for a long time also better than anything which came after, since

it was 'reprinted in every subsequent edition of Shakespeare's works for a century'

(Schoenbaum, Lives, 91). And though modern scholarship has been openly sceptical of

almost all of the colorful anecdotes Rowe included to spice up his life, and has shown that

some of them simply cannot be true (Schoenbaum, Lives, 89, and all of Part II), they

nevertheless played, and no doubt still play, an important role in making Shakespeare

approachable for many readers. They helped and still help to humanize a figure who reveals

almost nothing about himself in his writing; who so far as modern 'scientific' scholarship has

gone is little more than a collection of bare facts collected out of dusty archives; and who is at

35

the same time a cultural hero of such gigantic proportions that the first emotion he is likely to

inspire is awe, which, like math fear, is not a very helpful emotion for truly appreciating and

enjoying the work itself. No matter what scholarship says, the average reader is no more

willing to disbelieve the colorful legends of Shakespeare the deer poacher, Shakespeare the

lusty drinker, Shakespeare the country schoolmaster who 'swept his living from the posteriors

of little boys', Shakespeare who gave Ben Jonson his first big break in the theatre

(Schoenbaum, Lives, 68-73, 73-74, 75, 57-58), than he is willing to disbelieve the many

colorful legends of Jesus in the Bible. It is a lot easier to warm to a god who is also a man

than it is to warm to a god made of marble.

Rowe was no more a professional critic than he was a professional scholar, but in the

course of setting down the biographical facts he offered some critical opinions and judgments.

He doesn't blame Shakespeare for the faults he identifies--Shakespeare's mixing comedy with

tragedy, his carelessness in plotting--as much as he blames the undeveloped, raw literary

culture of Shakespeare's time: 'We are to consider him as a man that lived in a state of almost

universal licence and ignorance: there was no established judge, but everyone took the liberty

to write according to the dictates of his own fancy' (Schoenbaum, Lives, 89-90; Brockbank,

718b). He seems to be contradicting himself somewhat when, siding with Dryden (and with

us), he expresses the view that had Shakespeare been more learned and kept to the rules, 'the

regularity and deference for them, which would have attended that correctness, might have

restrained some of that fire, impetuosity, and even beautiful extravagance which we admire'

(Brockbank, 718b). This judgment is all the more generous and (from our perspective)

enlightened because the literary values of Rowe's own time, with its heavy emphasis on

'classical' form, restraint, and decorum, still ran strongly in the opposite direction from what

Shakespeare exemplified. Finally, Rowe eloquently singles out what later, more famous poet-

editors also singled out as Shakespeare's greatest triumph, his vivid, convincing representation

36

in his characters of the whole range of human behavior and human nature: 'His images are

indeed everywhere so lively that the thing he would represent stands full before you, and you

possess every part of it' (Eastman, Short History, 9). That of course is what ordinary readers

have always felt, without coaching from scholars and critics.

One way to suggest how Rowe's 1709 Works 'mark[s] a new stage in Shakespeare's

developing reputation' (Bentley, 712a-b) might be to say that by editing Shakespeare with

what passed at the time for scholarly care, Rowe turned him from a 'playwright'--with its

connotations of 'handicraftsman' and 'constructive workman'--into a dramatist, with all the

word conveys of a higher seriousness and a greater prestige. (No one refers to the giants of

ancient Greece as 'playwrights'; they are always and everywhere 'dramatists'.) After Rowe, it

would become much harder to think of Shakespeare as having anything more than an

'accidental connection' to the world of popular entertainment where he had started out

(Dobrée, 226). Rowe's Shakespeare 'marks a new stage in Shakespeare's developing

reputation' (Bentley, 712a-b). Joseph Welwood, a physician who has been described as

representative of 'the ordinary educated man's taste' (Dobrée, 226), wrote in 1718, in his

preface to Rowe's edition of the first-century Roman poet Lucan: 'No man of taste but pays to

Shakespeare's Memory the homage that's due to one of the greatest Genius's that ever appear'd

in Dramatick poetry' (Dobrée, 226). The statement neatly documents the point Shakespeare's

reputation had arrived at nine years after Rowe's edition and almost exactly a hundred years

after Shakespeare's death. It is notable for two other things as well. 'No man of taste'

suggests that Shakespeare was becoming more and more the property of the educated classes

as distinct from the popular audience he had originally written for, the classes who bought and

(sometimes?) read the expensive multiplying Shakespeare editions. And it indicates --'one of

the greatest Genius's'--that he had not yet arrived at the pinnacle of reputation, when the

qualifier 'one of' would simply disappear.

37

Another way of indicating Rowe's influence would be to say that his edition marks the

beginning of the Shakespeare industry. 'Beginning with Rowe's six volumes', eighteenth-

century editions of Shakespeare 'began to crowd upon one another' (Dobrée, 322), becoming

'a tangled tale of reprints and newly revised editions both of the complete works and of

selected plays' (Wells, 232). How this could be is suggested by the publishing history of Sir

Thomas Hanmer's Shakespeare. Hanmer was far from being a literary star of any kind, yet his

original 'dillettantish' 1744 edition had by the mid-1770s been reissued no less than seven

times (Wells, 229; Taylor, 130). A standard Shakespeare reference work 'records nearly

eighty eighteenth-century editions and issues up to 1793' (Brockbank, 722a), 'each successive

twenty-year period producing more . . . than its predecessor' (Taylor, 128). A visit to any

major English-language library, with its endless, intimidating ranges of books on

Shakespeare's life, his times, his plays, and his poetry gives you some idea of just how vast

the Shakespeare industry has grown.

The year after Rowe's edition of the plays was published, another poet-playwright,

Charles Gildon (1665-1724), edited Shakespeare's poems in a volume 'which passed itself off

as volume seven of Rowe's edition' (Taylor, 72). Gildon was much more of a party-line

neoclassicist than either Dryden or Rowe (or, later, Pope). In opposition to them, he

maintained in his preface that knowledge of the rules, far from tamping down Shakespeare's

creative fire, would have made him a better writer (Dobrée, 323). He faulted Shakespeare for

violating the neoclassical 'laws' of poetic justice. (Presumably, he warmly approved of

Nahum Tate's 'sentimentalized', 'immensely popular' 1681 adaptation that gave King Lear a

happy ending, and on the stage substituted for the original even longer than the Dryden-

Davenant adaptation did for Shakespeare's Tempest [Levin, 216; Cambridge Guide, 974a].)

He especially deserves mention for two things. He 'was the first to recognize the importance

of the sonnets', which none of his editorial and critical successors did until Malone near the

38

very end of the century (Dobrée, 327). And in 'berating Rowe' for his failings as both an

editor and a critic he began a practice that continued for the next hundred years or so--the

practice of picking faults and generally running down the work of the preceding editor. These

editorial quarrels 'catered to the public's new appetite for competition' (Taylor, 73). Whether

it was intended or not--probably it was--from a business standpoint they were an effective

marketing tool (Taylor, 72-73). 'The system profited the publisher--and Shakespeare--at the

expense of a succession of disposable editors' (Taylor, 73).

4.3 Pope's edition

The use of celebrities to promote products goes back a long way. Almost three

hundred years ago, Jacob Tonson put the technique shrewdly to use in marketing

Shakespeare. Eleven years after Tonson published Rowe's six-volume edition of the Works

and only six years after he had published a second edition in 1714 (Butt, 3; Brockbank, 719a),

he commissioned Alexander Pope (1688-1744) to do Shakespeare once again. Clearly, Rowe

had sold well enough to show that public demand was still strong. The Tonson-Pope

Shakespeare came out between 1723 and 1725, also in six volumes (Wells, 202).

Pope was maybe even less of a scholar than Rowe, but he was a much bigger literary

star. Whatever were the faults of his edition by modern or even contemporary editorial

standards, there could be no doubt that it had star value. That star value was what Tonson

was counting on and paying handsomely for. Pope may or may not have been six times more

famous than Rowe, but it is a fact that he got six times more for his work--two hundred and

seventeen pounds compared to Rowe's thirty-six (Brockbank, 719a). Given the landmark

status that Pope's edition enjoys in the story of Shakespeare's eighteenth-century reputation,

Tonson got his money's worth.

39

When Pope accepted Tonson's commission in 1720 he was thirty-two years old and

already England's leading poet (Robinson, 55), what today we would call a marquee name.

Why he accepted the commission has been the subject of speculation, since he was not a

scholar himself, had had no experience as an editor, and as the poetic embodiment of English

neoclassicism--the earlier eighteenth century is often referred to as 'the age of Pope'--his own

literary sympathies were even more at odds with Shakespeare's than Dryden's were

(Robinson, 54). One writer has suggested that what moved him was ordinary vanity--'which

played a large part in Pope's character' --along with the feeling that association with

Shakespeare's already illustrious name could only add lustre to his own (Robinson, 54).

There was of course also the very large sum of two hundred and seventeen pounds. Whatever

the reason for Pope's taking on the job, his own contemporary lustre certainly reflected back

onto Shakespeare.

Pope's Shakespeare has been described as 'of lovely appearance and execrable text'

(Butt, 3). Unlike Rowe's (Taylor, 75), it was a deluxe edition of 'large elegant quartos'

(Taylor, 129), and like most such editions, then as now, must have been bought (by those who

could afford such luxuries) at least as much to be put on conspicuous display in the buyer's

home as evidence of his superior culture, as to be read. There could hardly be a clearer

testimony of Shakespeare's having achieved classic status than that he had become, a century

after his death, a home furnishing for the well-to-do.

Not every scholar who has written about Pope's edition has agreed that his

Shakespeare text is 'execrable'. They all do agree, though, that it is peculiar. Actually, Pope

in some ways was a more 'scientific' editor than any of his predecessors (Wells, 202; Taylor,

82-83). He and a group of literary friends would get together, 'each with a different [quarto]

edition of a single play, and whilst one would read the others would note differences' (Butt,

4). The trouble was that this theoretically sound editorial method of comparing texts in order

40

to arrive at a best reading was carried through unsystematically. And the ultimate decision on

what in each case was best finally came down to a matter of taste, Pope's decidedly

neoclassical taste, which dictated that poetry should be as well bred and well mannered as the

model English gentleman was for whom it was written (Brockbank, 719a; Butt, 4). A further

trouble was that in basing his edition on Rowe's (Brockbank, 719a), he was ultimately basing

it on the less than reliable Fourth Folio of 1685 that Rowe had chosen.

But by the light of modern scholarship these are minor flaws compared to Pope's

practise of either silently leaving out whole passages which he thought 'might lower

Shakespeare's reputation in a modern reader's eyes' (Butt, 4), or if he didn't actually make the

offending passage quietly disappear, tagging it with three daggers as a badge of shame (Wells,

202) or sending it in disgrace to the bottom of the page where it was printed in small type

(Butt, 4). Just as strange from a modern standpoint was how Pope treated what he regarded as

Shakespeare's '"beauties"'. These are not quarantined like the 'trash', but are flagged within

the text by commas printed in the margin or, '"where the beauty lay not in particulars but in

the whole"', indicated by a star placed before the scene in question. 'Stars, however, are rare'

(Butt, 4-5).

All of this operated not so much to allow the reader 'to exercise his own judgment', as

one Pope scholar has put it (Butt, 4), as to firmly direct the reader's judgment according to the

personal preferences of the editor, who happened to be a poet of great contemporary prestige.

He also happened to be a poet who approached Shakespeare as a reader and 'man of letters',

with little understanding of or sympathy with acting and theatrical conventions (Wells, 202;

Taylor, 84-85). Pope aimed to produce a Shakespeare 'more palatable to the taste of

eighteenth-century readers' (Taylor, 83), with an emphasis on 'palatable' and 'readers'. His

practise of distinguishing the good and the bad in a very (in both senses) graphic way,

according to the dictates of his own neoclassical tastes and biases, must have had an important

41

influence on how his many readers experienced Shakespeare on the stage as well as on the

page, in Pope's own day and for some time after. (The edition remained a standard even after

Samuel Johnson famously came out with his own exactly forty years later [Brockbank,

719b].)

Here may be a good place to make more explicit the reason why modern Shakespeare

scholars have focused so much on Shakespeare's editor-critics as a way of tracing the

development of his reputation in the eighteenth century. Those editor-critics were a great deal

more a part of the literary culture and the general culture of their time than their academic

counterparts of today are, whose work typically is addressed to others within the academy.

Pope and Rowe and their eighteenth-century peers, like Dryden before them, weren't

academics at all. They were working writers just as Shakespeare was a working playwright,

writing, as Shakespeare did, for a general, non-academic audience. (The world of eighteenth-

century academics--essentially the two ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge--was

much more truly an 'ivory tower' than the world of universities today, relatively undisturbed

by the general culture surrounding it and in turn having little direct influence on that culture

[Parker, 7].) In an age before the appearance of the mass information, cultural, and

entertainment media, they were a vital part of the general cultural mix--taste makers and

opinion shapers (Butt, 13). What they thought and said mattered in a way that may not be

easy to imagine today. And when the general culture, including the general entertainment

culture, was a print-oriented culture in a way that also may be hard for us to imagine--living

as we do in an image-saturated, image-oriented world--what editor-critics like Pope had to say

about literature, taken in the broadest sense, had a powerful effect on how people thought and

felt and judged. This was true of people outside as well as inside the intellectual and cultural

elite. A growing middle-class audience of readers who 'were helping to transform the

character of English, economic life, politics and society but were uncertain of their cultural

42

footing', were only too willing to have their tastes and standards of judgment 'authoritatively

moulded in this way from outside' (Butt, 14). Pope is a particularly good example of such

influential eighteenth-century editor-critics, but there were plenty of others like him, though

they are now only footnotes in the literary histories.

Pope's generous distribution of Shakespeare beauties and Shakespeare trash on the

pages of his text mirrored the views he expresses in his preface. There the bad Shakespeare is

almost equally balanced with the good; '"Of all English poets Shakespeare must be confessed

. . . to afford the most numerous, as well as most conspicuous instances, both of beauties and

faults of all sorts"' (Eastman, Short History, 7). Dryden had expressed the same view half a

century earlier ('you have scarce begun to admire . . . before you despise'), but Pope followed

Rowe in being more lenient than Dryden. He shifted the blame for '"passages which are

excessively bad"' from Shakespeare's failings as an artist to his need to please a vulgar public

in order to earn a living (Eastman, Short History, 15; Robinson, 54). Alternatively, he

identified the problem as corruptions in the texts introduced by Shakespeare's fellow actors in

their editorial role (further evidence of Pope's deep lack of sympathy with anything to do with

the theatre), or by careless printers and publishers (Wells, 202; Taylor, 83). Like Dryden too,

Pope had no use for Shakespeare's frequent wordplay, which he thought 'barbarous' and

beneath a great poet (Eastman, Short History, 73) and which he cut out 'mercilessly' (Butt,

20), or for his extravagant style, which Pope set down to '"the gross taste of the age

[Shakespeare] lived in"' (Wells, 202). The grossness of Shakespeare's age and audience are

also to blame for his admitting into his plays characters from the lower classes; for making

use in his histories of '"common old stories or vulgar traditions"'; for spicing the tragedies

with '"the most strange, unexpected, and consequently most unnatural, events and accidents;

the most exaggerated thoughts, the most verbose and bombast expressions; the most pompous

rhymes, and thundering versification"'; and for descending in his comedies to '"mean

43

buffoonery, vile ribaldry, and unmannerly jests of fools and clowns"' (Eastman, Short History,

7).

But on the issues which, from the very beginning of serious discussion of

Shakespeare's stature, had consistently been identified as undermining his claim to greatness--

his lack of 'learning' and his disregard of 'the rules'--Pope was surprisingly liberal,

surprisingly, that is, given his 'impeccable neoclassical credentials' (Butt, 15). His eloquent

defense of Shakespeare against the two main charges usually brought against him began the

process by which, 'like a balloon tugging at its moorings', Shakespeare was 'lifted into higher

realms' (Eastman, 'Shakespearean Criticism', 735a).

The 'everlasting' Restoration and eighteenth-century debate over Shakespeare's

learning may seem less silly to us if we recognize that, for Dryden, Pope, and their

contemporaries, 'learning' in this context basically meant 'learning in the classical languages

and literatures' (Dobrée, 323; Butt, 13). And in such learning, seventeenth- and eighteenth-

century standards were very high. They could hardly have been otherwise. For those relative

few lucky enough to be able to pursue formal schooling beyond the elementary level,

education revolved largely around mastery of classical Greek and, especially, Latin and the

Greek and Roman writers of classical antiquity. (It remained so for a long time after.) For

most, the attainment of learning in this sense was more a badge of social standing than of

intellectual accomplishment. At some level, therefore, the possibility that a writer could be

great without, like Shakespeare, being learned in the traditional sense--could be, as a 1720s

'Who's Who' put it in describing Shakespeare, 'an eminent poet, but no scholar' (Schoenbaum,

Lives, 86)-- had some uncomfortable implications. However obliquely, it raised questions

about the intrinsic value of the rigorous classical training that was the foundation of English

secondary and university education and an important marker of social class. It has been

suggested that is one reason why editors, critics, and their readers kept coming back to the

44

question of whether Shakespeare could be great without being, according to the neoclassical

way of thinking, learned (Parker, 15).

Pope neatly got around the troubling question of Shakespeare's learning by making a

distinction '"between learning and languages"', by which he meant the classical languages:

'"How far he was ignorant of the latter, I cannot determine; but it is plain he had much

learning at least, if they [i.e., Shakespeare's critics] will not call it learning. Nor is it any great

matter, if a man has knowledge, whether he has it from one language or another"" (Dobrée,

323). To us this sounds very sensible. To Pope's readers it would have sounded novel, if not

slightly subversive. Such a sane, liberal view must have caused many of them to wonder

whether Shakespeare's lack of learning in the traditional sense could, after all, really be held

against him as it customarily had been.

The same to our minds commonsense view Pope took of Shakespeare's learning he

also took on the just as much debated and closely connected question of Shakespeare's

disregard of the unities. These were held to have been definitively codified by the Greek

philosopher Aristotle more than two thousand years before in his tremendously influential

treatise on poetry and drama, Poetics. At the heart of the debate was the question whether

Shakespeare disregarded them out of ignorance or intentionally (Schoenbaum, Lives, 101).

Pope's answer was it doesn't matter which, because '"To judge . . . of Shakespear by

Aristotle's rules is like trying a man by the Laws of one Country, who acted under those of

another"' (Schoenbaum, Lives, 99). Once again Pope was relieving Shakespeare of a charge

that for many was a serious drag on his claim to greatness. And all this was from the leading

poet of the age who in his own writing exemplified exactly what Shakespeare was not.

Pope had other good things to say about Shakespeare in his preface. Shakespeare's

reputation to this point rested mainly on his tragedies. Pope stood out by recognizing his

genius for comedy as well, ranking him above even Jonson (Robinson, 56). He singled out

45

Shakespeare's extraordinary power to individualize his characters: '"Every single character in

Shakespeare, is as much an individual, as those in life itself; it is impossible to find any two

alike; and such, as from their relation or affinity in any respect appear most to be twins, will,

upon comparison, be found remarkably distinct"' (Eastman, Short History, 111). For all his

insensitivity to the theatrical as distinct from the literary, he recognized that 'many so-called

defects are due not to Shakespeare's inferior judgment as a poet, but to his superior judgment,

as a player, of what is suitable for the stage (Robinson, 57). Finally, 'he describes

Shakespeare as an "Original", a term which he obviously intends to convey a great deal. In

this respect, not even Homer is superior' (Robinson, 55): '"Homer himself drew not his art so

immediately from the fountains of Nature"' (Eastman, Short History, 4).

Probably the most important way Pope's edition contributed to Shakespeare's

reputation was by being Pope's. Which is to say that Shakespeare's reputation could not help

being enhanced when the greatest poet of the first half of the eighteenth century made the

plays the object of his editorial care and critical attention. Rowe's edition was more scholarly

and presented a much more reliable text (Bentley, 713a). Lewis Theobold's edition of 1733

was more scholarly than Rowe's, what one modern writer has described as a 'very superior

edition' (Bentley, 713a). But neither Rowe nor Theobold nor Sir Thomas Hanmer, with his

'expensively produced and highly priced' Shakespeare of 1744--another high-end home

furnishing-- had the prestige and market cachet that attached to Pope's name. The result was

that the influence of Pope's edition was a great deal out of proportion to its intrinsic editorial

and critical merits (Desai, 27). And like Dryden and Rowe and other critics who came before,

despite Pope's distorting neoclassical bias and the 'trash' he silently cut out or demoted to the

bottom of the page, his appreciation of Shakespeare is generous and admiring overall. Pope

was 'anxious to increase Shakespeare's reputation amongst men of taste' (Butt, 21), and he

succeeded. If a celebrated actor like Thomas Betterton could serve Shakespeare's reputation

46

on the stage, a celebrated poet-editor could do the same on the page simply by being a

celebrated poet-editor.

4.4 Johnson's edition

A third landmark edition of Shakespeare and in the development of his reputation in

the eighteenth century is Samuel Johnson's, published in eight volumes in 1765 (Brockbank,

720b). It is a landmark not so much because of any major contribution it made to

Shakespeare scholarship, although Johnson treated Shakespeare's text with much more respect

than Pope had done, and came up with several editorial innovations that were adopted by later

editors. Like Pope's, it owes its landmark status mainly to two things: the authoritatively

stated views on Shakespeare set down in its preface, and the prestige and fame of its editor

which gave those views exceptional weight. Like Pope's too, it played an influential role in

advancing Shakespeare's reputation.

If Pope is the major English literary figure of the first half of the eighteenth century

('the age of Pope'), Johnson (1709-1784) is the major figure of the second half ('the age of

Johnson'), partly owing to the celebrated biography of him written by his young friend James

Boswell (The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 1791). Boswell first met Johnson in 1763 (Butt

and Carnall, 295). Johnson, after years as an obscure, struggling writer, had already firmly

established his reputation with the publication eight years earlier of his heroically produced

Dictionary of the English Language, in which Shakespeare is by far the most often cited

author for word usage--'an astonishing 80,000 quotations from the plays' (Desai, 24). He had

been at work on his edition of Shakespeare for the last seven of those eight years. Although

following Pope there had been no less than four new editions by four different, if less than

stellar, editors and any number of reprints (Butt and Carnall, 22), 'the house of Tonson' felt

justified from a business standpoint in commissioning Johnson in 1756 because of what they

recognized as a still growing market (Brockbank, 720b). 'The demand for Shakespeare

47

editions was great; explication and conjectural emendation of individual passages became a

pastime for cultivated amateurs conducted frequently in the pages of the Gentlemen's

Magazine, and reprints of existing editions as well as new ones flowed from the presses'

(Wells, 230). The numbers alone testify to where Shakespeare's reputation had arrived barely

two thirds of the way through the century. (Already in 1753 it could be proclaimed in another

leading London periodical that 'SHAKESPEAR is a kind of establish'd Religion in Poetry '

[Taylor, 121].)

Johnson accepted the Tonsons' commission in 1756, but his plan for a new edition of

Shakespeare dated back at least to 1745. That was when he published a pamphlet titled

Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth which was accompanied by a single-

page Proposals for a New Edition of Shakespeare that even included examples of the

typefaces he had in mind (Desai, 24). In that plan and in its expanded version published in

1756 (Proposals for Printing by Subscription, the Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare,

corrected and illustrated [i.e., elucidated] by Samuel Johnson [Desai, 24]), Johnson proposed

to make major improvements on his predecessors--on one of whom in particular, Sir Thomas

Hanmer, 'in the by now well established tradition of editorial mud-slinging', he 'poured

devastating scorn' (Wells, 229). He would create what is known as a variorum edition, an

edition which prints as footnotes all textual variants, along with the comments and

interpretations of previous scholars (Butt and Carnall, 23). Such a practise had long been

standard in the editing of the Greek and Latin authors, but had never been applied to an

English imaginative writer, let alone an English playwright (Smallwood, xvi-xvii). Today a

variorum edition is of interest mostly to scholars. In Johnson's day, when the text of

Shakespeare was still far from being well established, dabbling in Shakespeare emendation

was a gentlemanly pastime, and the squabbles among rival editors over this or that reading

were of lively general interest, it had a much broader appeal. Johnson's decision to print one

48

suggests a high level of sophistication among contemporary readers. His variorum

Shakespeare served as the basis for similar editions to the end of the nineteenth century (Butt

and Carnall, 23).

A second of Johnson's innovations in preparing his text was to recognize that a

responsible editor should immerse himself in the books Shakespeare himself was known or

believed to have read, so that he would have real knowledge and not just taste and intuition to

guide him in making his editorial choices. As the single-handed maker of his Dictionary,

Johnson was already on familiar terms with a great deal of Elizabethan and Jacobean writing,

so that in his 1756 Proposals he could confidently state his opinion (he seems to have stated

everything confidently) that 'very few of [Shakespeare's] lines were difficult to his audience',

and that 'he used such expressions as were then common' (Butt and Carnall, 22). This

amounted to a refutation of those who over the previous hundred years had blamed

Shakespeare for straining after language which even in his own day was barely

comprehensible to theatre audiences. Johnson's insight called attention to what, with the

accumulation of learned editions, was in danger of being lost sight of: that Shakespeare had

been, in both senses, a popular writer, writing in a popular idiom. He would still be difficult

for later audiences, but the fact that Johnson, in all his eminence, had now recognized and

pronounced him not to have been intentionally difficult would make those later reading and

theatre audiences more willing to make the effort needed to understand and enjoy him

(Smallwood, xxx). That it would also encourage them to buy elaborate editions like Johnson's

to aid in the understanding and enjoyment was an added benefit.

Johnson was a scholar. Maybe the most important editorial innovation of his was his

scholar's respect for the integrity of Shakespeare's text as it had been preserved in the folios

and, especially, in the quartos printed in Shakespeare's lifetime, what Johnson termed 'the

oldest copies' (Desai, 36-38). 'Whenever he suggests an emendation, it is confined to the

49

margin and the text is left unchanged' (Desai, 37). This editorial 'wariness' (Desai, 37) about

tampering with Shakespeare's text was in sharp contrast to the often high-handed, highly

subjective practises of Johnson's predecessors, especially Pope, whom Johnson admired as a

poet though not as an editor (Desai, 27). Johnson had planned to base his edition on a careful

comparison among all the existing quartos and of them with the folios. He ended up falling

far short of his original goal, but even so his practise of careful, systematic comparison set an

important example for future editors. Like the other improvements he introduced, his

editorial conservatism helped to establish a more solid textual foundation for the further

development of Shakespeare's reputation.

It is, however, by what he says in his preface, 'the crowning virtue of the edition' (Butt

and Carnall, 24), that Johnson had in his own time and continues to have the most direct and

lasting influence on Shakespeare's reputation. The preface has been called '"a classic of

Shakespeare criticism', 'still one of the best estimates of Shakespeare ever written', and 'one of

the most influential pieces of criticism in English' (Smallwood, vii; Desai, 1; Parker, 1). Its

effect has been owing to the power of Johnson's intellect and to the combined weight of his

prose and his reputation (Robinson, 125). It resembles Pope's in the way it offers a balance of

negative and positive judgments on Shakespeare and, even more ringingly than Pope's, finally

endorses Shakespeare's claim to unrivaled greatness (Desai, 27-28).

The negative judgments are mostly the by now familiar ones. Shakespeare's plots are

'"loosely formed"' and '"carelessly pursued"' (Eastman, Short History, 23). Their conclusions

are unsatisfactory, as though Shakespeare, '"in view of his reward"', had '"shortened the

labour [of a carefully thought-through ending] to snatch the profit"' (Robinson, 135). The

plays are full of anachronisms: while he excels at distinguishing men from one another,

Shakespeare '"had no regard to distinction of time or place, but gives to one age or nation,

without scruple, the customs, institutions, and opinions of another at the expense not only of

50

likelihood but of possibility"' (Desai, 100). Pope had exposed the same 'fault', but had blamed

the actors and printers. Johnson fixes blame on Shakespeare himself. Like practically all

writers on Shakespeare going back to Dryden, Johnson has no patience with Shakespeare's

punning or with his characters' witty word-duels: '"Their jests are commonly gross, and their

pleasantry licentious"' (Desai, 100-101). Surprisingly, given the fact that the tragedies were

still the cornerstone of Shakespeare's reputation, as they historically had been, Johnson rates

them a great deal lower than Shakespeare's comedies: '"The effusions of passion"' of his tragic

heroes are '"for the most part striking and energetic"', but when Shakespeare attempts tragic

grandeur and pathos, the result is '"tumour [i.e., bombast], meanness, tediousness, and

obscurity"' (Desai, 100). '"His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct' (Desai,

98).

The eighteenth-century 'bourgeois propriety' that colours Johnson's criticism of

Shakespeare's 'gross jests' and licentious pleasantry' becomes openly moralistic in his

condemnation of what he regards as Shakespeare's most serious fault: his failure to distribute

poetic justice as Johnson and his age tended soberly and unironically to think of it--with good

properly rewarded and evil properly punished--and his closely related failure to use his plays

as a vehicle for teaching sound morality (Smallwood, xxiii; Desai, 71, 99-100). Twelve years

before Johnson completed his edition, the editor of 'the first attempt at a collected reprint . . .

of Shakespeare's sources'--a three-volume work for which Johnson wrote the dedication--

declared Shakespeare's works far inferior to the works on which they are based. In King Lear,

for example, '"had Shakespeare followed the historian he would not have violated the rules of

poetic justice"' (Wells, 231). Johnson may have influenced the editor's view on the subject,

since he was an 'inordinate' admirer of hers (Wells, 231). Whether he did or not, his own

criticism of Shakespeare's failure as a moralist is harsh enough: 'His first defect is that to

which may be imputed most of the evil in books or in men. He sacrifices virtue to

51

convenience and is so much more careful to please than to instruct that he seems to write

without any moral purpose. . . . He makes no just distribution of good or evil' (Desai, 99).

The indictment continues: Shakespeare's good characters don't show enough disapproval of

the wicked ones, and his plays end without providing a clear moral for the audience to carry

home (Desai, 99). Johnson is a sterner moralist than Pope, refusing to shift blame for

Shakespeare's moral indifference onto '"the barbarity of the age"'. 'It is always a writer's duty

to make the world better', he declares. It is Shakespeare himself who is at fault (Desai, 99).

All this sounds terribly antiquated and is hard for a modern reader to swallow. To us,

Johnson seems to be hopelessly confusing the imaginative writer with the preacher. Among

contemporary readers, however, there would have been many, not just Puritan holdovers, who

in some degree shared Johnson's moral-instruction view of writers and writing, and who

regarded entertainment as only a necessary sugar coating to make the instruction palatable. (It

was a view which, in fact, had a very long history [Eastman, Short History, 27].) Such

readers would have been pleased to find their reservations concerning the moral value of

Shakespeare's plays articulated by such an eminent, and genuinely pious writer as Johnson.

That, in spite of his reservations, Johnson himself still came down strongly in Shakespeare's

favour would have had the effect of causing such readers to do the same, 'by a kind of critical

jiu-jitsu' bringing them into the camp of Shakespeare enthusiasts (Parker, 11).

Like Pope, Johnson had a low opinion of the theatre (Robinson, 130). At the same

time, he generously acknowledged Shakespeare's genius. Since Shakespeare was completely

a man of the theatre, Johnson was faced with the problem of reconciling his dislike with his

admiration. He solved it by 'suggesting repeatedly that Shakespeare despised his own

profession' (Desai, 48). The fact that there was no historical basis for such an idea didn't deter

him. (He reasoned that since Shakespeare never took the trouble to publish his plays, he must

have had little regard for them and seen them as disposable. The only reason they survived is

52

that Hemmings and Condell thought differently.) In this as in other ways, Johnson can be

seen trying to create a personal and artistic Shakespeare more like himself and his readers, to

'remodel Shakespeare along eighteenth-century lines', a gentleman of taste, refinement, and

respectability (Eastman, Short History, 17). What has been said of Pope and 'so many others'

applies with at least as much force to Johnson: he 'admires Shakespeare in his own image'

(Schoenbaum, Lives, 91). At the same time, like the colorful if undocumented anecdotes of

Shakespeare's life contained in Rowe's biography (it was included in Johnson's edition), such

a narrative gave contemporary readers and theatregoers a more approachable Shakespeare,

tamer and easier for a growing middle-class audience to warm to (Taylor, 65-66).

In his preface and in his many essay-like notes to the plays, Johnson's praise of

Shakespeare was as generous as his finding fault was blunt. Shakespeare is, above all and

'"above all writers, at least all modern writers"' (Desai, 57), '"the poet of nature"' (Parker, 1).

Shakespeare's skill in rendering 'nature', in this sense of human nature, is something Johnson

kept coming back to. Shakespeare's plays give proof everywhere of his '"skill in human

nature"' and his '"knowledge of human nature"' (Desai, 58). They are full of '"the colours of

nature"' (Desai, 8). '"Shakespeare always makes nature predominate over accident"', (i.e., the

particulars that individualize a character) (Desai, 58). Shakespeare's characters think, feel,

and act in a way '"agreeable to our daily experience"', '"as the reader thinks that he should

himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion"' (Desai, 58, 10). (Johnson regularly

speaks in terms of readers and not audiences.) 'Repeatedly Johnson salutes Shakespeare for

having alighted upon some subtle aspect of human nature' thanks to his '"intimate knowledge

of mankind"' (Desai, 56, 138). In a way that no other modern writing can match,

Shakespeare's plays are '"the mirror of life"' (Desai, 7). This, Johnson argues, is the source of

his universality (Desai, 7). Others had written about Shakespeare as the poet of (human)

nature, but none as fully and persuasively as Johnson (Desai, 59).

53

In defending Shakespeare's mixing of comedy and tragedy, Johnson did break new

ground. The neoclassical way of looking at things was that the literary genres should be kept

distinct and 'pure'. The great writers of the classical past, and the French neoclassical

dramatists who took those writers as their model and served as a model to the English, did not

mix tragedy and comedy. Modern writers who aspired to fame should follow their example

(Desai, 97; Taylor, 66). Yet Johnson, although he was 'an embodiment of the ideals of the

Neo-Classic period' (Thrall, 313), sees that if many of Shakespeare's plays are '"not in the

rigourous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies"', that is because life itself is a

mixture of the two. As mirrors of nature, the plays '"exhibit the real state of sublunary nature,

which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion

and innumerable modes of combination" (Desai, 7, 96). Johnson defends his defense of

Shakespeare by asserting what his neoclassically-minded readers must have found liberating

and what we, with our scorn for rules of all sorts, certainly find appealing: while

Shakespeare's practise of mixing the genres may be '"contrary to the rules of criticism, . . .

there is always an appeal from criticism to nature"' (Desai, 97). By being faithful to nature

rather than to 'the rules', Shakespeare again shows his universality (Desai, 7).

Johnson's lengthy defense of Shakespeare on 'the great issue . . . of the Unities'

(Schoenbaum, Lives, 99) was not novel, but it was even more emphatic than on the subject of

genre-mixing. The issue was still 'great' a century after Dryden had faulted Shakespeare for

his neglect of these restrictive 'traditional formulae' (Thrall, 499), what Johnson calls 'those

laws which have been instituted and established by the joint authority of poets and of critics'

(Desai, 101). With the exception of Pope, practically every writer on Shakespeare after

Dryden had done the same, and the issue had continued to operate as a principal check on

unqualified Shakespeare worship. How important it was to Johnson and to his audience can

be seen not just by the space he gives to it in his preface, but from the way he begins his

54

defense. He is willing, he says, to leave final judgment on Shakespeare's other faults and

alleged faults to others. But 'from the censure which this irregularity may bring upon him', he

feels called on to 'adventure how I can defend him' (Desai, 101).

Dryden had said that Shakespeare's neglect of the unities 'condemns all [his] historical

plays' (Watson, I. 247). Before going any further in his argument, Johnson says that the

histories, '"being neither tragedies nor comedies, [they] are not subject to any of their laws"'

(Eastman, Short History, 31; Desai, 101). Furthermore, Johnson points out, Shakespeare does

observe the unity of action in his tragedies and comedies (Desai, 101). That leaves the unities

of time and place. Here Johnson frontally attacks the idea that was supposed to underlie those

so-called unities, the idea that a theatregoer '"revolts from evident falsehood"' when he is

asked to believe that the story being told on stage occupies more time than the three hours of

its performance in the theatre, or when he is asked to believe '"that what he saw the first act at

Alexandria . . . he sees the next at Rome"' (Desai, 102). Johnson--with what seems to us to be

the commonest of common sense but must have seemed to his readers a daring deviation from

orthodox neoclassical doctrine (why else would he have taken the trouble to argue the issue as

fully and energetically as he does?) --boldly says that those who 'exult' in upholding the

dramatic unities of time and place know their doctrine is 'false' even as they speak it. An

audience knows perfectly well 'that the stage is only a stage, . . . that the players are only

players', and that they are not in this or that exotic city but in 'a modern theatre' (Desai, 102-

103). The only thing that matters, Johnson says, is that the drama be true to the theatregoer's

experience of the world and of himself. If it is, the imagination will take care of the rest. And

this is as true of 'a play read' as of 'a play acted' (Desai, 103-104). '"Whether Shakespeare

knew the unities and neglected them by design, or deviated from them by happy ignorance, it

is, I think, impossible to decide and useless to inquire"' (Desai, 104). After Johnson's 'heroic'

defense of Shakespeare's practise 'against the massed tradition of France and England' and in

55

opposition to the closely held beliefs of many of his readers, 'the case for the denigrators was

beginning to look much weaker; the future lay with the idolators' (Eastman, Short History, 31;

Butt and Carnall, 28).

As with Johnson's negative views of Shakespeare, his positive views, with the

exception of his defense of Shakespeare's tragi-comedies, were not particularly original.

(Johnson 'brushes aside' the long-debated question of Shakespeare's learning by declaring that

whatever Shakespeare got out of books, '"the greater part of his excellence was the product of

his own genius"' [Desai, 13].) What Johnson did accomplish was to 'magisterially' sum up

and endorse what others had said, with all 'the verbal and cultural authority of the most

respected conservative critic of the English Enlightenment'. What he said 'mattered less than

the fact that he was saying it' (Taylor, 135). If, by placing Shakespeare in a category all his

own, the great Johnson 'was abandoning neoclassical precepts', then those precepts 'clearly . . .

were no longer defensible' (Taylor, 135). Johnson's warm endorsement marks a turning point

in the growth of Shakespeare's reputation in the sense that after Johnson the old neoclassical

arguments against Shakespeare's greatness could no longer plausibly be made.

Johnson was not one of the writers who 'during the 1760s fell over one another in

proclaiming Shakespeare the world's greatest dramatist and poet' (Taylor, 121). As a critic he

was coolly-judging, 'open-eyed but warm-hearted' (Eastman, 28). The very fact that he

clearly was not, in the eighteenth-century sense, an 'enthusiast' (at the time, the word had

mostly negative connotations of self-delusion and unrestrained emotion [Desai, 79]) gave his

balanced, carefully considered, and finally admiring assessment of Shakespeare that much

more weight than if it had screamed approval. Coming as it did from someone of Johnson's

unrivaled prestige and published in a 'monumentally' impressive edition, it had the effect of

'powerfully help[ing] to open [Shakespeare] to understanding and appreciation' and to

56

reinforce the course of his reputation that already was headed skywards (Taylor, 152;

Eastman, 'Shakespearean Criticism, 735b).

4.5 Malone's edition

The fourth landmark edition of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century was by Edmund

Malone (1741-1812) and was published in 1790 in a 'still expanding and diversifying' market

(Brockbank, 722a). As a direct influence on Shakespeare's reputation it is maybe of less

importance than the preceding three, all of them edited by writers of much greater renown

than Malone. He was a lawyer by training for whom writing was simply something he

engaged in in his role as a gentleman-scholar, 'the first truly great Shakespearean scholar'

(Schoenbaum, Lives, 110-118; Bentley, 'Shakespeare's Reputation', 713a). In the longer run,

however, Malone's edition was of real importance in creating the Shakespeare who was

passed on to the nineteenth century and whom we know today. That is in part because the

biographical material he prepared for his edition, though 'dryly set forth in notes, appendices,

and treatises' and not in the coherent biography he had planned, 'marks nevertheless the

greatest single step forward, to that time, in knowledge of Shakespeare's life and theatrical

milieu' (Schoenbaum, Lives, 123; Wells, 234). Malone was the first scholar to take the

trouble of going to Stratford-upon-Avon and combing through the parish records and

interviewing townspeople for whatever information and anecdotes about William Shakespeare

and the Shakespeare family that had filtered down through the generations (Schoenbaum,

Lives, 123-124; Wells, 234). By adding new facts to what was known about the historical

Shakespeare, he gave readers and audiences a more substantial figure on which to center their

enthusiasm and admiration

Malone's other major contribution to creating the Shakespeare we know today was to

rescue the Sonnets from near-oblivion. With the exception of Charles Gildon in 1710, other

57

eighteenth-century editors had neglected them entirely as being a kind of poetry alien to their

time (Schoenbaum, Lives, 120). And even Gildon had been somewhat defensive, remarking

in his preface how some think them '"not valuable enough to be reprinted"' and calling

attention to their conspicuous omission from the First Folio (Schoenbaum, Lives, 120; Taylor,

155). As 'the first critical editor of the Sonnets', Malone revealed how they could be read

autobiographically (Schoenbaum, Lives, 120-121). In doing so, he not only did justice to

Shakespeare's art and advanced his reputation, he provided the foundation on which an

enormous amount of speculation has over time been raised concerning the identity of 'Mr.

W.H.' to whom the Sonnets are dedicated, of the young man and the so-called 'Dark Lady'

addressed in the poems, and over what, if any, was Shakespeare's relation to them. These

questions, which probably never can be answered with any degree of certainty, have supplied

an element of mystery to the Shakespeare story that has had an attraction even for those who

may never have read a word of Shakespeare in their lives. Malone took the first great step in

making the Sonnets an integral part of the Shakespeare canon and a major foundation stone of

his present-day reputation. He was 'instrumental in transforming Shakespeare from the public

dramatic poet of the Restoration and eighteenth century into a private lyric poet who could be

embraced, celebrated, and appropriated by the Romantics' (Taylor, 156). (The extra-literary

element of mystery surrounding the Sonnets is matched by the mystery generated by the

campaigns of the 'anti-Stratfordians' [Schoenbaum, Lives, 385], people of sometimes wildly

diverse backgrounds and credentials who, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and

continuing to the present, have refused to accept the idea that the historical William

Shakespeare actually wrote the plays and poems commonly attributed to him, whatever the

factual evidence may say [Schoenbaum, Lives, 355-451]. In more extreme cases, they go so

far as to deny that the historical William Shakespeare ever existed. Schoenbaum, Lives, 449,

58

cites Malcolm Little/ Malcolm X, the twentieth-century American black revolutionary, as an

example.)

Malone is further credited with going far towards establishing the chronology of

Shakespeare's plays and the features of his theatre and stagecraft, 'raising most of the

questions that have since beguiled students of Shakespeare' (Brockbank, 723a). And what he

did for the Sonnets he also did for Shakespeare's long narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and

The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare's 'most popular and respected compositions during his own

lifetime', but until Malone all but forgotten (Taylor, 156). Like the Sonnets they also were

taken up by the Romantics, as 'precursors in their own favored genres' (Taylor, 156).

Malone has been criticized for his lack of sympathetic imagination in his approach to

Shakespeare, his dry, lawyerly treatment of documents and texts (Brockbank, 723b). But by

common scholarly consent he is given credit for having made substantial contributions to the

picture of the historical Shakespeare and of Shakespeare the artist. These contributions

served to enhance Shakespeare's contemporary reputation and, in a more thoroughly scholarly

way than Johnson's, to make more solid the foundation of the next generation's super-idolatry.

4.6 Shakespeare in the eighteenth-century theatre

The growth of Shakespeare's reputation in the last third of the eighteenth century to the

point of idolatry that was itself 'the genesis of the early nineteenth-century super-idolatry'

(Babcock, xvii), was in large measure thanks to what appeared on the printed page, the work

of scholars and editor-critics like Rowe, Pope, Johnson, and Malone. But this is not to say

that Shakespeare was not also extremely popular on the very active English stage. For the

century as a whole, 'approximately one play out of every six acted was written by

Shakespeare'--7,214 out of 40,664 (Hogan, II.715). In the second half of the century, one

play in five was his (Hogan, II.715; Bentley, 713b). In 1761 at the Covent Garden theatre,

59

one of the two theatres that shared 'the monopoly of the legitimate drama in London'

(Cambridge Guide, 231b), Shakespeare's plays accounted for 73 out of 193 performances, or

almost two out of every five (Hogan, II.715). The ever-growing eighteenth-century demand

for Shakespeare on the printed page was matched by a continuing demand for Shakespeare on

the stage. (The demand extended to the Czech lands, where in 1786 the first Shakespeare

play to be performed in Czech was Macbeth, 'acted by a band of patriots and proclaiming the

end of tyranny'--somewhat prematurely, it turned out, since 'in 1790 all copies were ordered to

be sold as waste paper'. The first Czech versions of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet suffered

the same fate [Wells, 246].)

Thanks in large part to the steady stream of eighteenth-century editions and 'the

increased awareness [they created] of the plays in their original published forms', authentic

Shakespeare came gradually to take the place of the many Restoration adaptations that for a

long time had taken his place (Jackson, 191). Shakespeare adaptation for the stage was still

being done, however, and one of the busiest adaptors was also the greatest actor of the century

and 'one of the greatest and most versatile actors in the history of British theatre', David

Garrick (1717-1779) (Wells, 212). Garrick's adaptations of no less than twelve of

Shakespeare's plays, including most of the heavyweights (Wells, 216-220), in themselves do

not count as contributions to the growth of Shakespeare's eighteenth-century reputation. But

as vehicles for Garrick's brilliant 'visual and arresting' acting, which introduced a new, more

naturalistic style to the English theatre, they played a significant role (Sprague, 203).

Garrick claimed to venerate Shakespeare (Sprague, 203; Wells, 216), and he gave

evidence of his veneration off the stage as well as on it. On stage he was especially famous

for his portrayals of Richard III--the role in which he made his sensational London debut in

1741--King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth (Wells, 212-217). His genius and celebrity (he also

shined in literary and aristocratic society) were decisive in making the mid-century theatre an

60

actor's theatre, 'dominated by stars' (Sprague, 202, 203). During the thirty years (1747-1776)

he managed the Drury Lane theatre --the other of the two London theatres with monopoly

rights to Shakespeare's plays (Cambridge Guide, 294)--about one quarter 'of the main pieces

presented were by Shakespeare' (Butt and Carnall, 170).

Off stage, Garrick promoted Shakespeare's reputation by organizing in 1769 a

Shakespeare Jubilee, a three-day celebration of the poet on the banks of the Avon river at

Stratford which, among other things, featured a gigantic wooden amphitheatre 'lined with

crimson velvet draperies', a costume ball, and a 372-pound turtle cooked by a celebrity chef

imported from bath (Schoenbaum, Lives, 105). 'The Stratford celebrations contributed to the

emergence of Shakespeare as a full-fledged culture hero' (Schoenbaum, Lives, 109). In this

and in other ways, Garrick was 'a prime mover in the launching of the Stratford tourist

industry' (Jackson, 196). All in all, as actor, manager, and general all-round Shakespeare

promoter Garrick 'did much to further the cause of "Shakespeare Idolatry"', doing his full part

in 'laying the foundations for the Romantic worship' of Shakespeare (Jackson, 196; Wells,

220). With the help of such later eighteenth-century Shakespearean stars as Charles Macklin

and Sarah Siddons, and with the contributions of the greater and lesser eighteenth-century

editor-critics that were to come, 'by the end of the century the great leap has been made to the

other side of idolatry (Schoenbaum, Lives, 100), in a way that Ben Jonson, on the near side of

idolatry, could not have dreamed of.

61

Annotation

Although in his lifetime Shakespeare was hardly an underappreciated talent, he was

only one star in a constellation of brilliant Elizabethan and Jacobean poets and playwrights,

and not necessarily the brightest star. As a working man of the theatre, he earned his living

writing plays, helping to produce them, and acting in them. He would have been as surprised

as any of his contemporaries could he have guessed at the almost mythical heights his

reputation had arrived at by 1800. The present study aims to describe and comment on the

historical course of that extraordinary rise. It is divided into four main parts: Shakespeare's

reputation to 1623 and the First Folio; his reputation from the First Folio to the Restoration;

his reputation in the Restoration; and his reputation in the eighteenth century, by the close of

which the terms were firmly in place that led over the next two hundred years to his being in

our own time not just a literary titan, but a cultural hero and global icon.

Anotace

I když byl Shakespeare během svého života nedoceněný talent, byl jedním z hvězdného nebe

všech poetů a básníků v době vlády Elizabety I. Jako pracující muž si na živobytí vydělával

psaním her, jejich produkováním a hraním. Byl by velmi překvapen stejně jako kdokoliv

z jeho vrstevníků do jaké výše hvězda jeho reputace vzlétla.

Tématem této diplomové práce je popsat a komentovat vývoj reputace Williama Shakespeara

od doby kdy ještě žil a tvořil až do konce 18. století. Tato studie je rozdělena do čtyř hlavních

částí: jeho reputace do roku 1623, do roku 1660 a do doby obrození, v době obrození a

reputace v 18. století, kdy už můžeme hovořit o Shakespearovi jako o ikoně

všech dob.

62

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