Shakespeare's reputation

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William Shakespeare was seen as merely one good poet and playwright of several in his own age, but has ever since the late 17th century been considered the supreme poet of the English language, both for his poems and his plays. His popularity on the stage lagged slightly behind, but since the early 18th century no other dramatist has been performed even remotely as often on the British (and later the world) stage as Shakespeare. The plays would often be drastically adapted; King Lear, for instance, had a happy ending between 1681 and 1838. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the era of the great acting stars, to be a star on the British stage became synonymous with being a great Shakespeare actor. The emphasis was then on the soliloquies as declamatory turns, and Shakespeare's plays threatened to disappear under music, scenery, thunder, lightning and wave machines. Editors and critics would consequently concentrate on Shakespeare the admired or even worshipped dramatic poet, to be studied on the printed page rather than performed on the vulgar stage. Beginning around the turn of the 20th century, the historic rift between poet and playwright has begun to heal.

Contents

1 Renaissance reputation 2 Restoration and 18th-century reputation 3 19th-century reputation 4 20th-century reputation 5 Critical quotations 6 References

Renaissance reputation

It is impossible to calculate Shakespeare's reputation in his own lifetime and shortly after. England scarcely had a modern literature to speak of prior to the 1570s, and detailed critical commentaries on modern authors did not begin to appear until the reign of Charles I. The facts about his reputation must be surmised from fragmentary evidence. He was included in some contemporary lists of leading poets, but he seems to have lacked the stature of the aristocratic Philip Sidney, who became a cult figure due to his death in battle at a young age, or of Edmund Spenser. Shakespeare's poems were reprinted far more frequently than his plays; but Shakespeare's plays were written for performance by his own company, and because no law prevented rival companies from stealing plays, Shakespeare's troupe took steps to prevent his plays from being printed. That many of his plays were pirated suggests his popularity in the book market, and the regular patronage of his company by the court, culminating in 1603 when James I turned it into the "King's Men," suggests his popularity among higher stations of society. Modern plays (as opposed to those in Latin and Greek) were considered ephemeral and even somewhat disreputable entertainments by some contemporaries; the new Bodleian library explicitly refused to shelve plays. Some of Shakespeare's plays, particularly the history plays, were reprinted frequently in cheap quarto (essentially pamphlet) form; others, including many of his finest, took decades to reach a third edition.

After Ben Jonson pioneered the canonization of modern plays by printing his own works in folio (the luxury book format) in 1616, Shakespeare was the next playwright to be honored by a folio collection, in 1623. The fact that that folio went into another edition within nine years indicates that he was held in unusually high regard for a playwright. The dedicatory poems by Ben Jonson and John Milton in the second folio were the first to suggest that Shakespeare was the supreme poet of his age. These expensive reading editions are the first visible sign of a rift between Shakespeare on the stage and Shakespeare for readers, a rift that was to widen over the next two centuries.

Restoration and 18th-century reputation

At the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 after the Interregnum stage ban (1642—1660), two newly licensed London theatre companies started business with a scramble for performance rights to old plays (see Restoration comedy). Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and the Beaumont and Fletcher team were among the most valuable properties, and their plays stayed popular after the fledgeling production of Restoration drama had gained momentum. The incomplete Restoration stage records suggest that Shakespeare, although always a major repertory author, was temporarily bested by the phenomenal popularity of Beaumont and Fletcher. "Their plays are now the most pleasant and frequent entertainments of the stage", wrote John Dryden in 1668, "two of theirs being acted through the year for one of Shakespeare's or Jonson's". In the early 18th century, Shakespeare took over the lead on the London stage from Beaumont and Fletcher, never to relinquish it again.

In the elaborate Restoration London playhouses, designed by Christopher Wren, Shakespeare's plays were staged with music, dancing, thunder, lightning, wave machines, and fireworks. The texts were "reformed" and "improved" for the stage, an undertaking which has seemed shockingly disrespectful to posterity. A notorious example is Nahum Tate's happy-ending King Lear (1681), which held the stage until 1838, while The Tempest was turned into an opera replete with special effects by William Davenant. In fact, as the director of the Duke's company, Davenant was legally obliged to reform and modernize Shakespeare's plays before performing them, an ad hoc ruling by the Lord Chamberlain in the battle for performance rights which "sheds an interesting light on the many twentieth-century denunciations of Davenant for his adaptations" (Hume, 20). The common modern view of the Restoration stage as the epitome of Shakespeare abuse and bad taste has been shown by Hume to be exaggerated, and both scenery and adaptation became more reckless in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

After the Licensing Act of 1737, one fourth of the plays performed were by Shakespeare, and on at least two occasions rival London playhouses staged the very same Shakespeare play at the same time (Romeo and Juliet in 1755 and King Lear the next year) and still commanded audiences. The big attraction of those performances was the competition and rivalry between the male leads at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, Spranger Barry and David Garrick. No incongruity seems to have been perceived in having Barry and Garrick, both in their late thirties, play Romeo one season and King Lear the next: age was nothing, the power to command and electrify audiences was all, and Shakespeare production was turning increasingly into the creation of star turns for star actors.

As performance playscripts diverged more and more from their originals, the publication of texts intended for reading developed rapidly in the opposite direction, with the invention of textual criticism and an emphasis on fidelity to Shakespeare's original words. The texts that we read and perform today were largely settled in the 18th century. Nahum Tate and Nathaniel Lee both prepared editions and performed scene divisions in the late 17th century. Nicholas Rowe's edition of 1709 is considered the first truly scholarly text for the plays, and it was followed by many good 18th-century editions, crowned by Edmund Malone's landmark Variorum Edition, published posthumously in 1821 and still the basis of modern editions of Shakespeare's plays. These collected editions were meant for reading, not staging, and some of them were even convenient for a poetry lover to carry around; Rowe's 1709 edition was, compared to the old folios, a light pocketbook. Shakespeare criticism also increasingly spoke to readers, rather than to theatre audiences.

By contrast to the stage history, in literary criticism there was no 17th-century lag time, no temporary preference for other dramatists: Shakespeare had a unique position from the first. The unbending French neo-classical "rules" for the drama and the three unities of time, place, and action of Corneille never really caught on in England, and their sole zealous proponent Thomas Rhymer is hardly ever mentioned by more influential writers except as an example of narrow dogmatism ("these are the petty cavils of petty minds", wrote Samuel Johnson). It is true, argue critics like John Dryden, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson, that Shakespeare does not follow the drama rules and does not know or care about the unities, but so what? Ben Jonson does, and look where it gets him: a distant second place after "the incomparable Shakespeare", the follower of nature, the untaught genius, the great realist of human character. The long-lived myth that the Romantics were the first generation to truly appreciate Shakespeare and to prefer him to Ben Jonson is contradicted by the praise from writers throughout this period.

The only aspects of Shakespeare's plays that were consistently disliked and singled out for criticism in the 18th century were the puns ("clenches") and the "low" (sexual) allusions. While a few editors attempted to gloss over or remove the puns and the double entendres, notably Alexander Pope, they were quickly reversed, and by mid-century the puns and sexual humor were (with only a few exceptions) back in to stay.

As quoted passages below suggest, ideas about Shakespeare that many people think of as typically post-Romantic are actually frequently expressed in the 17th and 18th centuries: he is described as a genius who needed no learning, as deeply original, and as creating uniquely "real" and individual characters. To compare and contrast Shakespeare and his well-educated contemporary Ben Jonson was a popular exercise at this time, a comparison that was invariably complimentary to Shakespeare. It functioned to highlight the special qualities of both writers, and it especially powered the assertion that natural genius trumps rules, that "there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature" (Samuel Johnson).

19th-century reputation

The myth of the unappreciated 18th-century Shakespeare was proposed at the beginning of the 19th century by the Romantics, in support of their view of 18th-century literary criticism as mean, formal, and rule-bound, which was contrasted with their own reverence for the poet as prophet and genius. Romantic critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge raised admiration for Shakespeare to worship or even "bardolatry" (a sarcastic term coined from bard + idolatry by George Bernard Shaw in 1901, meaning excessive or religious worship of Shakespeare). To compare him to his contemporaries at all, even for the purpose of finding him superior, began to seem irreverent. As the concept of literary originality grew in importance, critics were horrified at the idea of adapting Shakespeare's tragedies for the stage by putting happy endings on them, or editing out the puns in Romeo and Juliet. In another way, what happened on the stage was seen as unimportant, as the Romantics, themselves writers of closet drama, considered Shakespeare altogether more suitable for reading than staging. Charles Lamb saw any form of stage representation as distracting from the true qualities of the text. This view, argued as a timeless truth, was also a natural consequence of the dominance of melodrama and spectacle on the early 19th-century stage.

Through the 19th century, a roll call of legendary actors' names all but overshadow the plays in which they appear: Sarah Siddons (1755—1831), John Philip Kemble (1757—1823), Henry Irving (1838—1905), and Ellen Terry (1847—1928). To be a star of the legitimate drama came to mean being first and foremost a "great Shakespeare actor", with a famous interpretation of, for men, Hamlet, and for women, Lady Macbeth, and especially with a striking delivery of the great soliloquies.

20th-century reputation

Shakespeare continued to be considered the greatest English writer of all time throughout the 20th century. Most Western educational systems required the textual study of two or more of Shakespeare's plays, and both amateur and professional stagings of Shakespeare were commonplace. Shakespeare's reputation was so sterling, his preeminence so unchallenged, that it was assumed. It was, indeed, the proliferation of high-quality, well-annotated texts and the unrivalled reputation of Shakespeare that allowed for stagings of Shakespeare's plays to remain textually faithful, but with an extraordinary variety in setting, stage direction, and costuming.

Shakespeare performances reflected the tensions of the times, and early in the century, Barry Jackson of the Birmingham Repertory Theater began the staging of modern-dress productions, thus starting a new trend in Shakesperian production. Even as institutions such as the Folger Shakespeare Library in the United States worked to ensure constant, serious study of Shakespearean texts and the Royal Shakespeare Company in the United Kingdom worked to maintain a yearly staging of at least two plays, performances of the plays could be highly interpretive. Thus, play directors would emphasize Marxist, Feminist, or, perhaps most popularly, Freudian interpretations of the plays, even as they retained letter-perfect scripts.

That divergence between text and performance in Shakespeare continued into the new media of movies. For instance, both Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet were filmed in modern settings, sometimes with contemporary "updated" dialogue, and a punk version of Romeo and Juliet was made. Additionally, there were efforts (notably by the BBC) to ensure that there was a filmed version of every Shakespeare play. The reasoning for this was educational, as many government educational initiatives recognized the need to get performative Shakespeare into the same classrooms as the read plays.

Many English-language Modernist poets drew on Shakespeare's works, interpreting in new ways. Ezra Pound, for instance, considered the Sonnets as a kind of apprentice work, with Shakespeare learning the art of poetry through writing them. He also declared the History plays to be the true English epic. Basil Bunting rewrote the sonnets as modernist poems by simply erasing all the words he considered unnecessary. Louis Zukofsky had read all of Shakespeare's works by the time he was eleven and his Bottom: On Shakespeare (1947) is a book-length prose poem exploring the role of the eye in the plays. In it's original printing, a second volume consisting of a setting of The Tempest by Celia Zukofsky was also included.

Critical quotations

John Dryden, 1668: "To begin then with Shakespeare; he was the man who of all Modern, and perhaps Ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the Images of Nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learn'd; he needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature; he look'd inwards, and found her there." Essay of Dramatic Poesy

Thomas Rhymer (neo-classical "rules" and "unities" extremist), 1692: "What ever rubs or difficulty may stick on the Bark, the Moral, sure, of this Fable is very instructive. First, This may be a caution to all Maidens of Quality how, without their Parents consent, they run away with Blackamoors. Secondly, This may be a warning to all good Wives, that they look well to their Linnen. Thirdly, This may be a lesson to Husbands, that before their Jealousie be Tragical, the proofs may be Mathematical". (Rhymer's notorious attack on Othello ultimately did Shakespeare's reputation more good than harm, by firing up John Dryden, John Dennis and other influential critics into writing eloquent replies.)

Joseph Addison, 1712: "Among the English, Shakespeare has incomparably excelled all others. That noble extravagance of fancy, which he had in so great perfection, thoroughly qualified him to touch ... his reader's imagination, and made him capable of succeeding, where he had nothing to support him besides the strength of his own genius." Spectator no. 419

Alexander Pope, 1725: "His Characters are so much Nature her self that 'tis a sort of injury to call them by so distant a name as Copies of her. Those of other Poets have a constant resemblance, which shews that they receiv'd them from one another and were but multiplyers of the same image: each picture like a mock-rainbow is but the reflexion of a reflexion. But every single character in Shakespeare is as much an Individual as those in Life itself; it is as 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. To this life and variety of Character we must add the wonderful Preservation of it; which is such throughout his plays that had all the Speeches been printed without the very names of the persons I believe one might have apply'd them with certainty to every speaker." Preface to Pope's edition of Shakespeare's works

Samuel Johnson, 1765: "[Shakespeare's] adherence to general nature has exposed him to the censure of criticks, who form their judgments upon narrower principles. Dennis and Rhymer think his Romans not sufficiently Roman; and Voltaire censures his kings as not completely royal. ... These are the petty cavils of petty minds."
"That it [mixing tragedy and comedy] is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; but there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature."
"To the unities of time and place he has shewn no regard, and perhaps a nearer view of the principles on which they stand will diminish their value, and withdraw from them the veneration which, from the time of Corneille, they have very generally received by discovering that they have given more trouble to the poet, than pleasure to the auditor."
"Perhaps it would not be easy to find any author, except Homer, who invented so much as Shakespeare, who so much advanced the studies which he cultivated, or effused so much novelty upon his age or country. The form, the characters, the language, and the shows of the English drama are his." Life of Shakespeare

References

• Hume, Robert D. (1976). The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

• Sorelius, Gunnar (1965). "The Giant Race Before the Flood": Pre-Restoration Drama on the Stage and in the Criticism of the Restoration. Uppsala: Studia Anglistica Upsaliensia.