end in Rowe's preface; and scholarship since Steevens and Malone
has demonstrated the unreliability of most of the local traditions that
Betterton reported from Warwickshire. Antiquarian research has added a
vast amount 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