We’re now fully accustomed to the view that Shakespeare is an unassailable genius. In many schools, colleges and university English departments, Shakespeare may be the only writer to whom the whole of a compulsory paper is devoted. It’s still hard to imagine an English degree in which he did not have a central position and did not seem to the source of ideas of excellence in poetry by which other poets are judged.
However this isn’t how Shakespeare has always been regarded. Some of contemporaries were aware of him by name if they were writers or enthusiastic theatre-goers. But many of the writers were his rivals and keen to debunk any notion of his pre-eminence. This pre-eminence, to the extent that it existed, was commercial rather than intellectual, literary or artistic. The people who made Shakespeare famous in his own time, initially, were in many cases illiterate (as most of his contemporaries were), and grateful to him as a modern TV enthusiast might be to nameless screenwriters behind the TV series they are interested in. Literary criticism as we understand it did not exist, so Shakespeare was not appraised and elevated in that way. Writers imitated him and, by the late 17th century were busy adapting his plays (as he himself had adapted works by his own predecessors) to suit contemporary tastes. Along with the rise in adaptations came a rise in criticism, some of it (like Dryden’s and Johnson’s) admiring, but profoundly and sometimes severely critical.
As the reaction against orthodoxy in Augustan (mid to late 18th century) criticism set in, Shakespeare began to be revalued. The most obvious expression of this was a series of scholarly editions of his works, in which the opinions of Pope and Johnson, for example, were often challenged; and the beginnings of a new emphasis on the importance of performing (as opposed to merely reading) the plays becomes evident. But it is among readers of the plays – committed students of Shakespeare’s arts of language and feats of psychological inquiry – that the recognizably modern idea of Shakespeare’s as the supreme poetic genius emerges. In short, the prevailing modern idea of Shakespeare is in origin Romantic.
More recently this idea has itself been subjected to scrutiny, most aggressively in the late 20th century when radical forms of literary theory were enjoying their own period of supremacy. Something of a new compromise has now been reached, in which many of the Romantic emphases have been toned down or eliminated.
