Respected Opinions, mostly by Editors. The oft quoted saying is that in every cultured household in the English speaking world houses predominantly the same two books: The Holy Bible and the Collected Works of Shakespeare.

  • The supreme genius that is Sh. happened a Century after his death.Now the Bible I can understand but Sh.?
    I mean the guy was an actor for heavenssakes, since when has an actor been considered more important than a slave and whore to their egos and paycheques. Even when fully dressed and as eloquent as actors can be!

  • The old Hollywood adage of the five stages of an actor is significant here.
    Who is William Sh. ?
    Get me William Sh. !
    Get me a William Sh. lookalike !
    Get me a younger William Sh. !
    Who is William Sh. ?

    This sad state of affairs has existed since the Sacred aspect of the Actor (still celebrated in other Cultures) began to die out with the Greeks. Art, Theatre and Drama used to intersect with Religion and Ritual.
    Shakespeare stems from the very beginnings of Commercial Theatre in the Western hemisphere. Just another reason why Shakespeare is so influential.

  • The 1st official record of Shakespeare is rude and mean. A presumably jealous, university trained hack writer called Robert Greene in 1592 described someone as a "shake-scene" and an " Upstart crow ". Presumably this person was Shakespeare. The trend was not to name people directly but to make an allusion as to who it might be.
    This allusion would then place Sh. in London participating in and filling the rank and file of the business of treading the boards.
    Presumably Shakespeare was also the writer, writing his early plays. Nobody knows how long he had been in London at this point, but a good estimate is five or six years.

  • The next two years show that William Shakespeare was also a poet. His first long poem 'Venus and Adonis' was printed by Richard Field, an old Stratford schoolmate (again presumably no school records exist for he or any of his contemporaries) in 1593. This V and A poem was guaranteed to give sensible young men and women red ears and a bit of a rise.
     His next poem was called 'The Rape of Lucrece' and it came out in 1594.
    Both poems were very popular. 'Venus and Adonis' went through 11 editions during Shakespeare's lifetime .

  • 6 years later, in 1598 Francis Meres published a comparative discourse of our English Poets with Greek, Latin and Italian counterparts

    He said Sh. was:
    1 of 5 excelling in lyric.
    1 of 13 excelling in Tragedy.
    1 of 17 excelling in Comedy.
    And for special mention:mellifluous and honey-tongued Sh., witness (Can I get a Witness) his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred S. among his private friends.
    This is a pretty good track record but his best stuff, Macbeth, Othello, Julius Caesar, The Tempest and Hamlet was yet to come. Meres also names the majority of his contemporaries including those supposed to be Shake-speare.

  • 14 years further on in 1612 Sh. was described as right happy and copious.
    By this time he is retired in Stratford probably sitting under the Mulberry tree legend says he planted. King James had imported thousands of them from France a few years earlier

  • 7 years after his death in 1616, his First Folio was compiled by two men he had worked with some thirty years since joining the Lord Chamberlain`s Men.
    They were John Heminges and Henry Condell.
    They wrote an introduction begging people to buy the Folio, threw together some sappy sales copy and added some Commendatory verses by various contemporaries of Sh.

  • Ben Jonson, not the Canadian athlete, said Sh. ` never blotted a line, would he had blotted a thousand. `
    (Sounds jealous to my ears).

  • 52 years after Sh. death John Dryden, a leading playwright of the Restoration period said in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy that Sh. had the largest and most comprehensive soul.
    And (I paraphrase) he was fortunate, sometimes flat and insipid; degenerating into clenches, swelling into Bombast.
    But he is always great!

    The Century of Bardolatry - as the eighteenth century is known in Sh. circles. In fact between 1709 -1799 there were some 60 Editions of his plays; including reprints. These Editors shaped the future face of Sh. scholarship.

    The Antiquarians.

  • 93 years later Nicholas Rowe brought out the first EDITED collection of the plays.
    Sh. was now Ancient and so a short biography was added.
    Rowe also revised the text, added Act and Scene headings and stage directions!!

  • Other editors followed with their editions:
    Alex Pope- author of the 1723-5 Edition said Sh. was `the instrument of Nature, she speaks through him.

  • Lewis Theobald - author of the 1733 Edition opposed Pope`s view and stressed Sh. use of Plutarch and Holinshed.
    More on him later.

  • Thomas Hanmer - author of the 1743-4 Edition was an exploiter of Sh. and culled and altered his information according to his own wants.
    He plagiarised the already published Pope.

  • Dr. Johnson ( Samuel, not Ben, nor the other Ben) author of the 1765 Edition was the literary genius of 18th C. England.
    He created the first and foremost dictionary of English.
    One statement by the Doctor became the standard test of Shakespeare's literary merit.
    `Sh. was a poet of Nature: a faithful mirror of life and manner.`

  • Edward Capell author of the 1768 Edition collated the older Quarto and Folio versions but had little prose style. Johnson said of his enormous scholarly work , " he doth gabble monstrously."
    (Ouch! But if you look at his work you too will agree he does).

  • One counter balance was George Steevens. He was the author of the 1766, 1773, 1778, 1785 and 1793 Editions. His series started when he reprinted 20 plays from the original Quarto versions then extant, because he felt the Editors were not to be trusted. His later editions expand and defend his point of view.

  • Edmund Malone ( the Greatest Scholar of them all ) was the author of the 1790 Edition. His ordering of the Plays was already published in Steeven`s 1778 Edition.
    Edmund Malone wrote the definitive Life of Sh and also wrote an historical account of the Stage in England.
    He best of all exposed W.H. Ireland the foremost forger of his time. William Henry Ireland at age 17 conned his father, Samuel into wanting to believe certain artifacts and documents of Sh. ownership had secretly fallen into his eager and youthful hands. This young Mr W. H. also produced two lost plays of Sh. authorship ( Vortigern and Rowena, and Henry the Second or seventh ) to coup his disgrace.
    Many notable people believed in the the forgeries. Malone however along with most serious Editors demanded an examination of said artifacts and plays etc. Malone easily demolished their claims and denounced the writhing Irelands with his inquiries into their authenticity.

    The Romantics.

  • The 1800`s saw a revival in which criticism of Sh. changed its tone.
    Sh. starts his heavenly ascension here.

  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge said: 'It has been, and it still remains... the judgement of Sh. is commensurate with his Genius. So to speak of Sh. in public one must adopt hushed tones and heightened phrases appropriate to religious occasion.

  • Thomas Carlyle, the Hero-seeker, in 1840 called Sh. the Peasant who became a Prophet
    ...`Consider what Sh. is actually become...which 1,000, 000 England fans, (sorry, couldn't resist) Englishmen would we not give up, rather than the Stratford Peasant?

  • By 1875, Sh. was in decline, he is still a romantic figure but more human.
    Critics and editors felt they had ordered his works as to their true order of writing (Yeah right. Not)!

  • Edward Dowden, an Irish literary scholar made popular the notions that Sh. plays show:
    1. The development of his personality.
    2. They reflect his emotional life i.e. private not public.

    The 20th Century.

  • 1898 Sidney Lee, a jewish englishman with a chinese name-change assembled the life of W. Sh.
    Now Sidney was no Romantic.
    His conclusion was:
    Sh. was a fine specimen of the industrious boy who got on.
    Who was a village child of parents were slowly going poor.
    Who married too young an older woman.
    Who left his fledgling family for a career in London.
    Who stagestruck longed to act and write plays.
    Who gradually gained recognition as a writer because he was a bad actor.
    Whose singular industry, level-headedness, common-sense and moderate competence made him a small fortune.
    Who spent this fortune well on houses and lands in Stratford and London.
    Who finally retired in late middle age enjoying it all placidly.
    This Sidney claimed was all based on judicious possibilities.

  • Scepticism and subjectivism arrived in Shakespeare scholarship.
    The idea that Sh. was bent is ludicrously debated at the change of the century. The proof is supposed to be in his Sonnets.

  • Oscar Wilde popularised it with his story, 'A Portrait of Mr.W.H.'
    Frank Harris, the journalist spread the notion Sh. was a sycophant, sensualist and libertine of true English flesh and blood. Vive l`erection! Cherche la femme!
    Bernard Shaw, the playwright stood steadfast and true to the joyful irony of tbe Stratford pessimist. Bernard said he would have mastered the iambic pentameter and given Sh. a run for his money if he had lived back then!

  • At the other end of the spectrum of the spectre of sexual speculation, the Reverend Edgar I. Fripp was a thorough and careful Stratford Antiquarian who published books on Sh. in his Stratford context.

  • Sir Edmund Chambers wrote and published in 1930 the 4 Volume: 'The Elizabethan Stage'
    and the 2 Volume: 'W. Sh. : A study of facts and problems'.
    These mighty tomes are a monumental collection of documents, facts and legends. Invaluable to any serious student of Sh. as a source of miscellaneous and specific information.

  • Joseph Quincy Adams wrote and published a biography called 'Life of William Shakespeare' the same year as Chambers. This book was a serious rival to the Life written by Sidney Lee.
    J.Q.Adams was an American scholar who was appointed the first director of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

  • John Dover Wilson, wrote 'The Essential Shakespeare' which attempts to sort out the different strains of life story then available about Shakespeare. His book on the Sonnets for the Cambridge University Press favours their late composition and backs William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke as the Fair Young Man.

  • C.J. Sisson refuted J.D.Wilson's subjective biography. He states four dogmas of subjective biography:
    1. That the actual evolution of Sh. personal life must be read into the poetic and dramatic work.
    2. That Dramatists write Tragedies in tragic moods and Comedies when they are pleased with life.
    3. That Shakespeare was a child of his age that he faithfully reflected its spirit in his literary work.
    4. That the spirit of his age was heroic and optimistic under Elizabeth, degenerating towards her death into cynicism, disillusionment, and pessimism which marked the subsequent reign of James the First.

  • Leslie Hotson was an archive mole and he turned up some fascinating material for speculation on Shakespeare and his friends. For example: He connected Raphael Holinshed to within ten or so miles from where Sh. was a boy. He connected the owner of the Mermaid Tavern as a business partner of Sh. in the Blackfriar's Gatehouse purchase. Unfortunately his conclusions tend to be far fetched.

  • S. Schoenbaum wrote a book in the 1980's called Shakespeare's Lives, which has excellent potential for culling information on the Bard. He analyses the stages of Sh. scholarship, editorship and biography in a fun and informative manner. However he ignores all the legends, myths and stories that make the 'real' Shakespeare.
    This book is the book I would like to have written if I had a more methodical mind. In its place I have raided its larder for some fallen crumbs and added some spittle of my own to produce this bait.
    I encountered many books I had discovered on my own search and was introduced to many others of which I was unaware. My own meanderings as a Shakespearean Post-post-modern Pop biographer are not yet over, but just begun.

    Commentaries on the Sonnets.

  • The first recorded comment on the Sonnets of Shakespeare was made by Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia: Witt's Treasury, which catalogued the English writers of the time and compared them with who Meres thought were their Latin and Greek counterparts:
    `the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, ... '
    Meres also said Shakespeare was one 'most passionate among us to bewaile and bemoane the perplexities of Love'.
    Someone since mentioned the possibility that these Sonnets may not be those published in the Quarto of 1609. (Oh God) !

  • Two Sonnets from the series of 1609 were printed in slightly different form in a book of poetry called 'The Passionate Pilgrim' in 1599. These were his most damning Sonnets showing the author to be involved in a triangle love affair.
    The Sonnets are Q138: When my love swears that she is made of truth, and Q144: Two loves I have of comfort and despair, and are reproduced at the end of the Sonnet sequence.

  • The next contemporary comment was by Leonard Digges, a poet and translator, brother to Dudley Digges, politician and colonial entrepreneur, (some think him a potential source for the Tempest story), and both stepsons to Sh. friend Thomas Russell, whom Sh. appointed overseer of his will.
    Leonard who translated spanish poems wrote on the fly-leaf of a copy of Lope de Vega`s Rimas (1613) :
    ` this book of sonnets, which with Spaniards here is accounted of their Lope de Vega as in England we should of our Will Shakespeare`.
    Leonard also contributed commendatory verses to the F.F.

  • 1640 saw the printing of another edition of the S. by John Benson, which he said were `excelllent and sweetely composed poems`.
    The problem is he omitted some, altered the Q1609 ordering, gave titles to individual S., and changed personal pronouns from masculine to feminine.

  • Although the whole trend of love sonnnets was some fifty years out of fashion, Benson`s version unfortunately became the accepted authority for Shake-speare lovers of the 17th C.

  • Gildon in 1709 complained that in the S.
    `Petrarch had a little infected` Sh. way of thinking.

  • Capell recommended the S.
    `that a single thought, vary`d and put in language poetical, is the subject of each sonnet; a thing essential to these compositions, and yet but rarely observ`d by either ancient or modern dealers in them`.

  • A reprint of Thorpe's 1609 Quarto was made by Lintott in 1710.
    Then another reprint of Thorpe's 1609 Quarto was made by Steeven`s in 1766.

  • The first real critical edition however was made by Malone in 1780.
    His predecessor, Dr. Johnson had not included the Sonnets in his edition.

  • A.W. von Schlegel (1796) said the S. were
    ` valuable because they seem to be inspired by a real love and friendship, and because, otherwise, we should know little or nothing about the poet`s life` .
    Schlegel in 1808 reiterated that the S.
    `paint unequivocally the actual situation and sentiments of the poet: they make us acquainted with the passions of the man; they even contain remarkable confessions of his youthful errors`.

  • Another German commentator Tieck said the S. were the
    `confessions of a man about whom we know so little`.

  • The English replied with vigour to try to reset the balance of European commentators deigning to comment on their National poet.
    Wordsworth wrote in a sonnet on the sonnet form
    `...with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart `.

  • Robert Browning replied in his poem `House`:
    ``Hoity-toity! A street to explore, Your house is the exception! `With this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart, once more!` Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he! ``

  • James Boswell the Younger in 1821 said that he was
    ` satisfied that these compositions had neither the poet himself nor any individual in view; but were merely the effusions of his fancy, written upon various topicks for the amusement of a private circle`.

  • Alexander Dyce echoed this belief in 1832 saying that the S. were
    `written under an assumed character`.

  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge said in 1833 that
    ` the sonnets could only have come from a man deeply in love, and in love with a woman` .

  • Thomas Campbell too wrote strongly defending Sh. moral fibre in 1838:
    `Shakespeare`s sonnets give us no access to his personal history.....they paint his friendship hyperbolically, and mixed with jealousies that belong not to manly friendship. Nor though some twenty sonnets are addressed to a female, with whom he feigns himself in love, is it certain that his erotic language, even in these, was not tinged with phantasy....I have a suspicion, moreover, that if the love affair had been real, he would have said less about it`.

  • Another German Heinrich Heine riposted in 1838 with the idea that the S. are
    ` authentic records of the circumstances of Shakespeare`s life` .

  • The British suddenly began to agree with each other now the Europeans seemed confused. Charles Hermitage Brown called his 1838 book Shakespeare`s Autobiographical Poems.

  • Thomas Carlyle decided in 1840 that the S. ` testify expressly in what deep waters ` Shakespeare ` had waded, and swum struggling for his life`.

  • Delius in 1851 argued that the S. were essentially dramatic.

  • R.G. White agreed and added in 1854 that Sh. wrote them professionally for others to use.

  • Robert Bell in 1855 went along with the idea that all poetry is in some way autobiographical:
    `But the particle of actual life out of which verse is wrought may be, and almost always is, wholly incommensurate to the emotion depicted, and remote from the forms into which it is ultimately shaped `.

  • Masson in 1856 seemed to think there was some agreement that the S. are
    ` autobiographic- distinctly, intensely, painfully autobiographic `.

  • Furnivall in 1877 thought that only fools could think otherwise.
    Swinburne in 1880 and Dowden in 1881 agreed.
    Charles Mackay in 1884 thought the S. were dramatic.

  • Sidney Lee in 1897 covered both bases by claiming in the English edition of The Dictionary of National Biography that the S. were autobiographical;
    and in the American edition he claimed they were merely literary exercises.

  • Sir Walter Raleigh, not he of the Armada fame, pronounced the S. of Sh. his
    ` own feelings in his own person ` and to say they were not, was to accuse Sh. of insincerity.

  • Beeching in 1904 and A.C. Bradley in 1909 both argued that the missing links and the obscurities in the S. story make certain that the story is essentially true.

  • Kittredge in 1916 said the obvious but overlooked point that
    ` There is no escape; a good sonnet appears to be a confession. These are the terms from which not even supreme genius can be exempt `.

  • M.J. Wolff tried to show that the S. follow the Italian model of conventions.

  • John Middleton Murray in 1921 believed the S.
    ` contain the record of the poet`s own disaster in love `.

  • Modern editors are of course divided in their views on the truth, if they feel there is any, in the S. story.

    John Dover Wilson backs William Herbert;
    A.L. Rowse furthers Southampton and Leslie Hotson falls on Hatcliffe.
    Other editors such as Ingram and Redpath and the definitively modern Stephen Booth refuse to name names.

  • An excellent book to read is by Robert Giroux and called 'The book known as Q'.

    Probably the wisest path is the widest path. Tread carefully! Read widely!

    		•
    An Ordering of the Sonnets?
    Verse Time Muse Love Beauty
    Immortal Themes Earth, water, air, fire
    Hate Eyes Sex Music The Affair
    The Characters in the Sonnets?
    The Plot - Is there one?
    Some respected opinions