Anticipating the final verdict, the editors of the First Folio wrote, seven years after Shakespeare’s death: ‘These plays have had their trial already and stood out all appeals.’ [327a] Ben Jonson, the staunchest champion of classical canons, noted that Shakespeare ‘wanted art,’ but he allowed him, in verses prefixed to the First Folio, the first place among all dramatists, including those of Greece and Rome, and claimed that all Europe owed him homage:
Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show,
To whom all scenes [i.e. stages] of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time.
In 1630 Milton penned in like strains an epitaph on ‘the great heir of fame:’
What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones
The labour of an age in pilèd stones?
Or that his hallowed reliques should be hid
Under a star-ypointing pyramid?
Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,
What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thyself a lifelong monument.
A writer of fine insight who veiled himself under the initials I. M. S. [327b] contributed to the Second
Folio of 1632 a splendid eulogy. The opening lines declare ‘Shakespeare’s freehold’ to have been
A mind reflecting ages past, whose clear
And equal surface can make things appear
Distant a thousand years, and represent
Them in their lively colours’ just extent.
It was his faculty
To outrun hasty time, retrieve the fates,
Roll back the heavens, blow ope the iron gates
Of death and Lethe, where (confused) lie
Great heaps of ruinous mortality.
Milton and I. M. S. were followed within ten years by critics of tastes so varied as the dramatist of domesticity Thomas Heywood, the gallant lyrist Sir John Suckling, the philosophic and ‘ever-memorable’ John Hales of Eton, and the untiring versifier of the stage and court, Sir William D’Avenant. Before 1640 Hales is said to have triumphantly established, in a public dispute held with men of learning in his rooms at Eton, the proposition that ‘there was no subject of which any poet ever writ but he could produce it much better done in Shakespeare.’ [328] Leonard Digges