Shakespeare, In Fact by Matus Irvin Leigh; Mann Thomas;

Author:Matus, Irvin Leigh; Mann, Thomas;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2013-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

* The correct figure of Annesley’s service, according to information provided to me by William J. Tighe from his dissertation on the Gentlemen Pensioners, is forty years, from 1563 to 1603. Also see Gyles Isham, “The Prototype of King Lear and His Daughters,” Notes and Queries, vol. 199 (1954), 150.

* Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8:240. Cawley’s essay appeared in Publications of the Modern Language Association, vol. 41 (1926), 688–726.

7

Shakespeare’s Reputation

in the Seventeenth Century

Shakespeareans and Oxfordians agree that the author of the plays was a genius, perhaps the greatest genius ever. However, his own age was negligent in passing down information about this titanic figure, an omission that bothered generation upon generation of Shakespeareans not a whit. The first wave of idolators was all but entirely literary men, who were not distracted by either the modern standards of scholarship or the archival material we have today of both Shakespeare and the theater of his time. All the better to set their imaginary forces to work on his writings, augmented by a patchwork of fable and folklore, toward the creation of the Immortal Bard. When Shakespeare was finally admitted into college in the middle of the nineteenth century, scholars saw little reason to question the incredible figure that was passed down to them.

Those who doubt that the son of a glover from a Midlands market town could possibly have been the author of the plays observe, correctly, that there is scanty contemporaneous material about the man who wrote the plays and point to the absence of any explicit acknowledgment of the gentleman of Stratford-upon-Avon as the creator of those magnificent works in his hometown. Peter Jaszi wondered how it can be that

No obituaries marked his death in 1616, no public mourning. No note whatsoever was taken of the passing of the man who, if the attribution is correct, would have been the greatest playwright and poet in the history of the English language.1

The man who “would have been the greatest playwright and poet in the history of the English language”? That is certainly what he was to become. But how was he seen by his contemporaries, in the theater and outside it? What was his reputation during the great age of English theater? And afterwards? These are the questions that are at the heart of the “Shakespeare mystery.”

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