1609 his mother died. From 1610 he spent more time in Stratford. In February 1616
his daughter Judith married, and on 23 April 1616 he died: he was buried in the
chancel of Holy Trinity, Stratford. There, before 1623, his monument was erected.
The plays preserved
At his death in 1616, half of Shakespeare’s plays had not been printed, but in 1623
two of his fellow-actors brought out a collected edition: thirty-six plays in a book of
nearly nine hundred double-column pages in a large folio, entitled Comedies,
Histories, and Tragedies.In the poet’s lifetime, his company published nineteen of his
plays in little Quarto editions, which were often reprinted.
Without the Folio, however, English literature would have been very different.
Without the King James Version of 1611, England would still have had a Bible; but
if Shakespeare’s colleagues had not printed his plays, half of them (including
Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest) would have been lost. The Folio is
his monument. (There is ample evidence that Shakespeare wrote the plays, and no
reason to doubt it. There is no evidence for the theory put forward by an American
lady in the 1850s, that ‘Shakespeare’ was written by someone else, a lord wishing to
avoid publicity, who used the actor as a cover. This fantasy was devoutly believed in
by Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud; it has the same sort of historical validity as The
Da Vinci Code. The internet hums with actors and celebrities saying that such plays
could not have been written by an undistinguished actor. The authorship bubble
would make a good subject for a play by Ben Jonson.)
The Folio is prefaced by a poem by Ben Jonson (1572–1637), who in 1616 had
published his own Works as if he were a classical author. In To the memory of my
be love d,the author Mr William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us, Jonson prefers
Shakespeare to earlier English poets, and wishes he could show the tragedies to
Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles. But in comedy his friend Shakespeare could
stand the comparison:
Of all, that insolent Greece, or haughtie Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Triumph, my Britaine,thou hast one to showe,
To whom all Scenes ofEurope homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!The conclusion is an apotheosis: Shakespeare, hailed as ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’, is
raised to the heavens as a ‘constellation’, the ‘Starre ofPoets’. A witty poetic puff. But
the claim that Shakespeare is not only the greatest European dramatist but also ‘for
all time’ stands up well. Jonson had a high idea of poetry, and was a critic hard to
please.He wrote of Shakespeare that he ‘loved the man, and do honour his memory,
on this side idolatry, as much as any’. John Milton wrote in the Second Folio (1632)
of the ‘deep impression’ made by Shakespeare’s ‘delphick lines’ and echoes Jonson in
calling him ‘my Shakespeare’.
Milton was perhaps the youngest person to come to know Shakespeare through
the Folio. Shakespeare was much revived, in adapted forms, after 1660, when the new
theatres needed plays. In the 18th century his works were edited many times: he
became a part of English literature. Idolatry was launched at the Stratford ‘Jubilee’
of April 1769, led by David Garrick and James Boswell, when false relics of ‘the Bard’,
as he was called, were sold by the thousand. Thereafter Jonson’s witty promotion of
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 111folio Leaf of paper. A
printer’s term for a large-
format book made of leaves
of 14 inches x 20 inches (34
x 48 cm), folded once to
make 2 leaves (4 pages). In a
quartobook each leaf is
folded twice, making 4 leaves
(8 pages).