Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) | Page 3

of detail about the world in which Shakespeare lived and
has raised and answered questions that never occurred to Rowe; but it
has recovered little more of the man himself than Rowe knew.
The critical portions of Rowe's account look backward and forward:
backward to the Restoration, among whose critical controversies the
eighteenth-century Shakespeare took shape; and forward to the long
succession of critical writings that, by the end of the century, had
secured for Shakespeare his position as the greatest of the English poets.
Until Dryden and Rymer, criticism of Shakespeare in the seventeenth
century had been occasional rather than systematic. Dryden, by his own
acknowledgement, derived his enthusiasm for Shakespeare from
Davenant, and thus, in a way, spoke for a man who had known the poet.
Shakespeare was constantly in his mind, and the critical problems that
the plays raised in the literary milieu of the Restoration constantly
fascinated him. Rymer's attack served to solidify opinion and to force
Shakespeare's admirers to examine the grounds of their faith. By 1700 a
conventional manner of regarding Shakespeare and the plays had been
achieved.
The growth of Shakespeare's reputation during the century after his
death is a familiar episode in English criticism. Bentley has
demonstrated the dominant position of Jonson up to the end of the
century.[9] But Jonson's reputation and authority worked for

Shakespeare and helped to shape, a critical attitude toward the plays.
His official praise in the first Folio had declared Shakespeare at least
the equal of the ancients and the very poet of nature. He had raised the
issue of Shakespeare's learning, thus helping to emphasize the idea of
Shakespeare as a natural genius; and in the Discoveries he had blamed
his friend for too great facility and for bombast.
In his commendatory sonnet in the Second Folio (1632), Milton took
the Jonsonian view of Shakespeare, whose "easy numbers" he
contrasted with "slow-endeavouring Art," and readers of the poems of
1645 found in _L'Allegro_ an early formulation of what was to become
the stock comparison of the two great Jacobean dramatists in the lines
about Jonson's "learned sock" and Shakespeare, "Fancy's child." This
contrast became a constant theme in Restoration allusions to the two
poets.
Two other early critical ideas were to be elaborated in the last four
decades of the century. In the first Folio Leonard Digges had spoken of
Shakespeare's "fire and fancy," and I.M.S. had written in the Second
Folio of his ability to move the passions. Finally, throughout the last
half of the century, as Bentley has shown, Shakespeare was admired
above all English dramatists for his ability to create characters, of
whom Falstaff was the most frequently mentioned.
All of these opinions were developed in Dryden's frequent critical
remarks on his favorite dramatist. No one was more clearly aware than
he of the faults of the "divine Shakespeare" as they appeared in the new
era of letters that Dryden himself helped to shape. And no man ever
praised Shakespeare more generously. For Dryden Shakespeare was the
greatest of original geniuses, who, "taught by none," laid the
foundations of English drama; he was a poet of bold imagination,
especially gifted in "magick" or the supernatural, the poet of nature,
who could dispense with "art," the poet of the passions, of varied
characters and moods, the poet of large and comprehensive soul. To
him, as to most of his contemporaries, the contrast between Jonson and
Shakespeare was important: the one showed what poets ought to do;
the other what untutored genius can do. When Dryden praised

Shakespeare, his tone became warmer than when he judicially
appraised Jonson.
Like most of his contemporaries Dryden did not heed Jonson's caveat
that, despite his lack of learning, Shakespeare did have art. He was too
obsessed with the idea that Shakespeare, ignorant of the health-giving
art of the ancients, was infected with the faults of his age, faults that
even Jonson did not always escape. Shakespeare was often incorrect in
grammar; he frequently sank to flatness or soared into bombast; his wit
could be coarse and low and too dependent on puns; his plot structure
was at times faulty, and he lacked the sense for order and arrangement
that the new taste valued. All this he could and did admit, and he was
impressed by the learning and critical standards of Rymer's attack. But
like Samuel Johnson he was not often prone to substitute theory for
experience, and like most of his contemporaries he felt Shakespeare's
power to move and to convince. Perhaps the most trenchant expression
of his final stand in regard to Shakespeare and to the whole art of
poetry is to be found in his letter to Dennis, dated 3 March, 1693/4.
Shakespeare, he said, had genius, which is "alone a greater Virtue ...
than all