Reputation

I’m not really qualified to comment on the Taylor Swift album ‘reputation’ which is the main result of searching google for the subject. I’m not qualified to comment on the reputation of Shakespeare either but found myself being curious as to whether he was as famous back in his day as he was just a few years after his death.

bust of William Shakespeare

Apparently it is difficult to assess Shakespeare's reputation in his own lifetime in England so the facts about his reputation can only be judged from his name being mentioned in documents such as a list of contemporary lists of leading poets. 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 using the plays. His company tried to prevent his plays from being printed.

I came across the story of the publisher Thomas Pavier whose bookstall was near the Royal Exchange in London. In 1608 he was selling ‘A Yorkshire Tragedy’ a play about real life murders. And the name of the author splashed across the front page was ‘W. Shak(e)speare’.

the fake play

It was, of course, a fake but the point is that WS had by then developed, quite literally, a name.

So, if he was established by then as a playwright let’s go back a bit and we find that when he first came to the notice of readers he was far better known as a poet whose most important works were 'The Rape of Lucrece', 'Venus and Adonis', and the 'Sonnets'.

For the purposes of this article I had a go at reading some of 'Venus and Adonis'. If I could have understood the (very) long poem properly I have a feeling it was rather in the ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ territory.

Anyway by 1592 he was sufficiently well known to be subject to the famous attack on him by Robert Greene i.e. an vp=start Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey. And even though the attack seems a bit daft now Greene and his group were not stupid people. They were England’s first professional writers but I don’t know enough about them to further this argument.

The Poems of William Shakespeare

We can tell what Shakespeare’s contemporaries thought about his plays by looking at their manuscripts. (Well, I can’t but those who know can). These were handwritten documents where they would jot down notes, accounts, poems, and snippets from plays. According to the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts, early readers didn't prefer Shakespeare over other popular writers of the time, such as Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson.

One of the earliest commentaries we have on Shakespeare comes from Gabriel Harvey, a scholar and writer, who noted in the margins of one of his books that 'the younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis; but his Lucrece and his tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, have it in them to please the wiser sort'.

However, it was his history plays that seemed to make the breakthrough, to really seal his reputation. According to the Database of Early English Playbooks, the two most published plays (and likely the most popular) from the 1590s to the 1630s were 'Henry IV Part I'  – published eleven times – and 'Richard III', which was published ten times.

Henry IV part i

Although we can only guess at why early audiences were so drawn to the histories, it could be that the histories held an importance that is hard to imagine today. In a country where power was centred on the throne, the issues of sovereignty and power, dramatised in Shakespeare's history plays, would have been at the centre of society, affecting everyone within it.

I should add that the various We’s and I’s above are drawn from loads of sources on the web and are not me.

From: As You Like It

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.
And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow.
Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth.
And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part.
The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound.
Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Thanks for reading. Comments/feedback welcomed.

Terry Q.