William Shakespeare

Shakespeare achieved his reputation as perhaps the greatest of all dramatists after his death. Although his contemporary Ben Jonson declared him “not of an age, but for all time,” early 17th-century taste found the plays of Jonson himself, or Thomas Middleton or Beaumont and Fletcher, equally worthy of praise. Shakespeare’s reputation began to eclipse that of his contemporaries some 150 years after his death. He was always popular but until the mid-18th century his reputation was not, as it would become, unrivaled. Although his works were regularly staged in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, theater companies hardly treated his plays with reverence. When they performed the plays, they most often used versions rewritten for the fashions of the age, “purged”—as their adaptors maintained—of their coarseness and absurdities. These alterations could be significant. In the version of King Lear that dominated the stage from 1681 until 1823, Lear and his daughter Cordelia are left alive at the end, transforming a tragedy into a tragicomedy (and reproducing what the historical source material suggests about their fates). While these adaptations seem odd to us today, it was this practice of adapting Shakespeare that kept his plays in the repertory while those of Jonson, Middleton, and others remained on the shelf.

Shakespeare began to assume the role of England’s national poet during the first half of the 18th century. This process reached its culmination with the installation of a memorial statue in Westminster Abbey in 1741 and the celebration of a festival in 1764 to commemorate the bicentenary of his birth. During the 19th century the romantic movement did much to shape both Shakespeare’s international reputation and the view of his achievement that has persisted ever since. Particularly important were the lectures on Shakespeare by English romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the writings of German romantic poet and dramatist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Romantic authors claimed Shakespeare as a great precursor of their own literary values. They celebrated his work as an embodiment of universal human truths and an unequalled articulation of the human condition in all its nobility and variety.

The views of the romantic movement have in many ways been cemented during the 20th century. Institutions such as the Folger Shakespeare Library, established in the United States in 1932, and the Royal Shakespeare Company, founded in Britain in 1961, have ensured that Shakespeare’s work remains a central icon of Western culture. Festival productions of the plays began in 1870 at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon. The present theater, built in 1932 after the original was burned, is the Stratford home of the Royal Shakespeare Company. It may itself be rebuilt as part of a redevelopment plan scheduled for completion in 2008. The annual Shakespeare Festival of Stratford, Ontario, presented its first Shakespeare plays in 1953. New York City has held an outdoor Shakespeare in Central Park festival since 1957. A reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe was erected on London’s South Bank and opened in 1997. By the early 2000s, numerous British, Canadian, and American towns and cities held annual Shakespeare festivals.

As Polish literary critic Jan Kott noted in the title of a 1965 work, Shakespeare is “our contemporary.” At the very least, we strive to make him so. Shakespeare plays are performed today all over the globe, not only in English-speaking countries but in lands and in languages Shakespeare never dreamed of.