r
several years,' wrote Downes, the prompter at Betterton's theatre, 'got
more reputation or money to the company than this.'

From 1702 onwards.

From the accession of Queen Anne to the present day the tide of
Shakespeare's reputation, both on the stage and among critics, has flowed
onward almost uninterruptedly. The censorious critic, John Dennis, in
his 'Letters' on Shakespeare's 'genius,' gave his work in 1711
whole-hearted commendation, and two of the greatest men of letters of the
eighteenth century, Pope and Johnson, although they did not withhold all
censure, paid him, as we have seen, the homage of becoming his editor.
The school of textual criticism which Theobald and Capell founded in the
middle years of the century has never ceased its activity since their
day. {332b} Edmund Malone's devotion at the end of the eighteenth
century to the biography of the poet and the contemporary history of the
stage, secured for him a vast band of disciples, of whom Joseph Hunter
and John Payne Collier well deserve mention. But of all Malone's
successors, James Orchard Halliwell, afterwards Halliwell-Phillipps
(1820-1889), has made the most important additions to our knowledge of
Shakespeare's biography.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there arose a
third school to expound exclusively the aesthetic excellence of the
plays. In its inception the aesthetic school owed much to the methods of
Schlegel and other admiring critics of Shakespeare in Germany. But
Coleridge in his 'Notes and Lectures' {333} and Hazlitt in his
'Characters of Shakespeare's Plays' (1817) are the best representatives
of the aesthetic school in this or any other country. Although Professor
Dowden, in his 'Shakespeare, his Mind and Art' (1874), and Mr. Swinburne
in his 'Study of Shakespeare' (1880), are worthy followers, Coleridge and
Hazlitt remain as aesthetic critics unsurpassed. In the effort to supply
a fuller interpretation of Shakespeare's works textual, historical, and
aesthetic--two publishing societies have done much valuable work. 'The
Shakespeare Society' was founded in 1841 by Collier, Halliwell, and their
friends, and published some forty-eight volumes before its dissolution in
1853. The New Shakspere Society, which was founded by Dr. Furnivall in
1874, issued during the ensuing twenty years twenty-seven publications,
illustrative mainly of the text and of contemporary life and literature.

Stratfor