The First Folio
So far as we know, Shakespeare made no move to publish his plays. The sixteen plays printed separately in quarto during his lifetime appeared apparently without his help, and their texts contain more or less errors. Two of his former colleagues, John Heminges and Henry Condell, angered by these piracies, published the first collected edition in 1623: one large, heavy volume of some nine hundred two-column pages containing authoritative texts of thirty-six plays. In the preface they wrote that they had done it without ambition of self-profit or fame, only to keep alive the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow as their Shakespeare. In those days a copy cost one pound. Of the roughly two hundred copies that survive, each is now worth about seventeen thousand pounds (according to the book), far more than any other printed work except the Bible printed by Gutenberg.
The ebb and flow of his fame
Over the years Shakespeare's reputation has fluctuated in a remarkable way. In 1630 Milton praised him as sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child. But in the time of the Puritans, when the theaters were closed (the book prints a garbled date here, which we read as 1642 to 1660), his fame declined; with the return of the Stuarts it rose again. Sir John Suckling, in a portrait by Van Dyck, holds the first edition of Shakespeare open at Hamlet (the painting hangs in the Frick Collection in New York). Dryden, the oracle of the late seventeenth century, said that Shakespeare had the largest and most comprehensive soul of all modern and perhaps ancient poets, and that when a great occasion was set before him he was always great. Yet, he added, he was many times flat and insipid, his comedy falling into triviality and his serious passages swelling into bombast.
John Evelyn wrote in his diary in 1661 that the old plays began to disgust this refined age, since his Majesty had been so long abroad. Charles II and the Royalists had returned bringing with them the principles of French drama, and the old plays no longer suited. After the Restoration the most licentious dramas in modern literature held the stage. Shakespeare's plays were still acted, but Dryden, Otway and others, whose own work reflected the taste of the Restoration, usually altered them.
In the eighteenth century the plays came back in force. Nicholas Rowe brought out the first critical edition and the first biography in 1709; Pope and Johnson edited the works with commentaries; Betterton, Garrick, Kemble and Mrs. Siddons staged the plays with unprecedented popular success; and in 1818 Thomas Bowdler cut from them the passages unfit to be read aloud in a family. At the start of the nineteenth century the Romantics fell in love with Shakespeare, and the praises of Coleridge, Hazlitt, De Quincey and Lamb made him intensely popular.
Shakespeare abroad
France hesitated for a long time. By 1700 Ronsard, Malherbe and Boileau had founded literary principles on the Latin tradition of order, logical form, decorum and sensible restraint, and Racine had adopted the classical rules of drama. Shakespeare's play with hollow words, his strings of images, his violent passions, his mixing of comedy with tragedy and his clowns upset those principles. Voltaire, returning from England in 1729, was partly taken with him and was the first to show Frenchmen good passages of Shakespeare picked out of what he called a huge dunghill. But when one of his countrymen ranked Shakespeare above Racine, Voltaire rose to the defense of France and called Shakespeare a lovable savage. In his Philosophical Dictionary he partly made amends, writing that in the works of this man there are things that strengthen the imagination and settle in the heart, and that he reaches the sublime without seeking it. Madame de Staël, Guizot and Villemain worked to spread him in France, and the fluent prose translation by Francois-Victor, son of Victor Hugo, won the admiration of the French, but Shakespeare never took Racine's place among them.
In Germany the plays spread better, for no German dramatist stood anywhere near his height. The first German dramatist to tell his countrymen of Shakespeare's superiority to all poets old and new was Lessing, and Herder confirmed it. Schlegel, Tieck and other leaders of the Romantic school rose in his support, and Goethe in Wilhelm Meister discussed Hamlet with great enthusiasm. So Shakespeare grew popular in Germany, and for a time German scholars surpassed the English in clarifying details of his life and works.
Those brought up in the aura of Shakespeare cannot judge or compare his work impartially. Only one who knows the language, religion, art, manners and philosophy of Greece in the age of Pericles can grasp the unique grandeur of Dionysian tragedy, with its simplicity, firm logic, dignity of word and deed, its actors and the effect of its choral songs, and its great achievement of viewing man against the vast scene of destiny. Only those at home in the language and morals of the French and the background of the century of Louis XIV can feel the grandeur and music of Corneille and Racine, and the heroic effort of reason to restrain feeling and sudden impulse, to follow patiently the difficult classical forms and to compress the events of a drama into a few hours. And unless a man understands well the English of Elizabeth's day and knows its meters, its lyrics and its curses, which made the theater a mirror of nature and of imagination, he cannot do justice to Shakespeare. Such a man trembles with delight at the grandeur of the language and is stirred by reflecting on its meaning. These are the three great ages of the world's drama, and despite our limits we should read them to add to our knowledge and be glad to have an inheritance of Greek philosophy, French beauty and Elizabethan life. (But the book adds, in parentheses, that of course Shakespeare is supreme.)
Mary Stuart: the beautiful queen
Amid the interlocked dramas of the Scottish Reformation and the policy of Elizabeth, the tragic story of Mary Stuart ran its course, with its magical beauty, passionate love, religious and political struggle, murder, revolution and a courageous death. (The book's chapter heading gives her dates as 1542 to 1687; the end of her life was in 1587, so the last figure is a misprint, which we flag but leave.) Her descent almost doomed her to an unnatural death. Mary was the daughter of James V of Scotland and the Frenchwoman Mary of Guise; her grandmother Margaret Tudor was the daughter of Henry VII of England. So people loosely thought of her as a cousin of Mary Tudor, the Bloody Mary, and of Elizabeth; and they believed that if Elizabeth died childless she would be the lawful heir to the English throne. Those who, like the Catholics (and once Henry VIII), thought Elizabeth illegitimate and therefore unfit to reign held that in 1558 it was Mary Stuart, not Elizabeth Tudor, who ought to have sat on the English throne. To her ill luck, after Mary became queen of France in 1559 she allowed her subjects to call her queen of England as well and used the title in official documents. For some time the kings of France had vainly called themselves kings of England and the kings of England had called themselves kings of France, but this time the claim was almost universally accepted. As long as Mary lived, Elizabeth could not be sure of her crown.
Crowns were offered to Mary within a year of her birth. A week after she came into the world her father died, and the title of queen of Scots passed to her. Henry VIII, hoping to add Scotland to his possessions, proposed that the child be sent to England as bride-to-be of his son Edward, be raised (so he said) in the Protestant faith, and later become Edward's queen. But Mary's Catholic mother instead accepted the proposal of Henri II of France for the child's future marriage to the dauphin (1548), and when Mary was six she sent her under guard to France, fearing that her enemies would seize her and carry her to England. She spent thirteen years in France, growing up among the royal children; being half French, she became in spirit wholly a French princess. By the time she was grown she had a charming face, a graceful figure and a cheerful spirit, so that a lively grace shone from all she said and did. She sang well, played the lute well, spoke Latin and wrote verses that poets are said to have praised. Brantome spoke of the snow of her pure face and Ronsard of the gold of her braided curls; courtiers' hearts beat faster at her sight, and even L'Hopital, a grave and sober man, thought such beauty fit for gods. At the most brilliant court in Europe Mary Stuart outshone all women in charm and accomplishment, and when at sixteen, as the book says (she was in fact fifteen, a discrepancy we flag), she married the dauphin of France on 24 April 1558, and the next year became queen of France on the death of Henri II, all her wondrous dreams seemed to have come true.