Shakespeare's Canon
What is it about Shakespeare that makes him one of the greatest playwrights of all time? If the First Folio had not been published in 1623, he might now have taken over the theatre world. Of the 36 plays attributed to him at his death. 18 existed in quarto editions of varying reliability and the rest had not been published. Thankfully, Shakespeare had loyal friends and admirers that sought to secure his reputation and his work. Two colleagues from the King's Men, John Heminges and Henry Condell, tracked down and edited 36 of hid comedies, histories, and tragedies which were published by Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount in the first folio. With the First Folio, all 907 pages of it, "Shakespeare"--concept and creed--was born.
The Second Folio was published in 1632 and the Third Folio was published in 1664. Seven new plays were published in the Third Folio; however, of those seven, only Pericles was accepted as authentic. The edition with the seven additional plays was reprinted as the Fourth Folio in 1685 and was the basis for the complete works published by Nicholas Rowe in 1709.
Early Criticism
The first substantial commentaries about Shakespeare came from Ben Jonson. In a poem in the First Folio, Jonson proclaimed Shakespeare to be "the Soul of the Age." Jonson recognized that Nature alone could not explain Shakespeare's achievement:
"Yet must I not give Nature all: Thy art
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet's matter, Nature be,
His Art doth give the fashion."
Despite the praise of Shakespeare, Johnson did not find the bard's talent flawless. Years later, recalling that Heminges and Condell had noted in the First Folion that "we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers," Jonson responded tartly: "My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand" lines. Shakespeare, Jonson believed, should have edited himself more strictly; however, in the end, Jonson believed: "There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned."
Problems of Genre
Some successors of John Dryden, a fellow playwright of Shakespeare's, were troubled by the bard's disregard of the classical rules, and they struggled to firt his plays into the First Folio's categories of comedies, histories, and tragedies. "Those which are called histories, and even some of his comedies, are really tragedies, with a run or mixture of comedy amongst them," wrote Nicholas Rowe (publisher of Shakespeare's complete works) in 1709. Of course, this never worried Shakespeare himself because he cheerfully blended genres within a single play. However, at the end of the 19th century a new category was created to accomodate some of the later plays: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest became known as romances. Yet there are still three plays--Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure--are still considered problem plays.
Reinterpretation
Over the past 100 years, Shakespeare's popularity has only grown steadily, challenging literary critics and directors to make his plays feel relevant to successive generations. During the early 1900s, Hamlet almost cried out for a Freudian interpretation. And since WWII, the canon has been viewed through successive intellectual prisms, from Marxism and historicism to feminism and ecocriticism. More recently, the idea of Shakespeare's universality has been reassessed, with important consequences for readings of his plays around the world. They are now more often approached not as works that statically speak for humanity, but as texts generously open to fresh reinterpretations by those who study or stage them in specific times and places.
Source: Downer, Leslie Dunton and Alan Riding. Shakespeare: his life and works. DK Publishing, 2021, pgs. 32-37.
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