Literary reputations

Shakespeare has been the God of Literature to English speaking readers for so long that it can be surprising to learn this was not always so. For me, the shock came as late as graduate school with a book called Hamlet and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism by Morris Weitz (like so many of my favorite books, long out of print). Weitz, a philosopher, considers the question "what is literary criticism?" by looking at how literary critics have evaluated a single work over the centuries of its life. The results are extraordinary: at some moment in time, a reputable critic has said just about anything that can be said about Hamlet, from being trash to being a work of genius.

Moreover, Shakespeare was not always considered the God of Literature. Voltaire hated his work (so did Shaw):

Despite all the praise, some writer's were not enthusiastic about his plays. Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) called A Midsummer Night's Dream "the most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life." Voltaire wrote: "Shakespeare is a drunken savage with some imagination whose plays please only in London and Canada," "Shakespeare is the Corneille of London, but everywhere else he is a great fool..." (http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/shakespe.htm)

Many who admired Shakespeare considered Marlowe the greater genius. (Marlowe, the "genius" to rival Shakespeare, is seldom produced today. This is unfortunate.) Shakespeare had faults:

Jonson's Neoclassical perspective on Shakespeare was to govern the literary criticism of the later 17th century as well. John Dryden, in his essay Of Dramatick Poesie (1668) and other essays, condemned the improbabilities of Shakespeare's late romances. Shakespeare lacked decorum, in Dryden's view, largely because he had written for an ignorant age and poorly educated audiences. Shakespeare excelled in “fancy” or imagination, but he lagged behind in “judgment.” He was a native genius, untaught, whose plays needed to be extensively rewritten to clear them of the impurities of their frequently vulgar style. And in fact most productions of Shakespeare on the London stage during the Restoration did just that: they rewrote Shakespeare to make him more refined.

This critical view persisted into the 18th century as well. Alexander Pope undertook to edit Shakespeare in 1725, expurgating his language and “correcting” supposedly infelicitous phrases. Samuel Johnson also edited Shakespeare's works (1765), defending his author as one who “holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life”; but, though he pronounced Shakespeare an “ancient” (supreme praise from Johnson), he found Shakespeare's plays full of implausible plots quickly huddled together at the end, and he deplored Shakespeare's fondness for punning. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

In a fascinating recent study, one critic argues that we have history to thank for Shakespeare's reputation more than intrinsic value in the work:

''If the English revolution of the 1640's had sustained itself,'' writes Mr. Taylor, ''if France had won its wars against England, if England like other countries had been culturally transformed by the upheavals of the late 18th century, then Shakespeare would almost certainly not have achieved or retained the dominance he now enjoys.'' Mr. Taylor further argues that ''some considerable proportion of Shakespeare's current international reputation is the fruit not of his genius but of the virility of British imperialism, which propagated the English language on every continent.'' (Reinventing Shakespeare A Cultural History From the Restoration to the Present By Gary Taylor.)

The history of literature is filled with fragile reputations. Melville's Moby Dick in our own literature comes to mind, a failure when published, but later rediscovered and re-evaluated to become our leading candidate for "the Great American Novel" (my own preference is the USA trilogy by Dos Passos).

As hard as it is to imagine today, history suggests that even Shakespeare's contemporary reputation is not raised in stone.

In another book I studied in grad school, Morse Peckham wrote, "Art is what we look at with a disposition for looking at art."