Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Essays on Poetry
There is, unhappily, no denying the variability of popular and contemporary judgments: the historical proofs are too numerous. The cultivated Athenians refused a first prize to the greatest play of their towns man Sophocles - his oedipus Rex. Elizabethan estimates of Shakespeare had an amazing way of classifying him with personages now absolutely for gotten. Thus Francis Meres, m.a., discussing in l598 English literary achievements up to that date mentions as best for tragedyh Doctor Leg of Cam bridge, Mr. Shakespeare, and eleven others! He singles out Richard I. As a fine play. You fancy it is Shakespeare's Richard Not at all; it is Doctor Leg's (or Legge's), written in Latin trimeters and abundant Senecan rhetoric. For comedy, he gives Shakespeare a kind of honourable mentionn along with a crowd of competitors. Queerer still it is to find an Oxford don drawing up, some years after Shakespeare's death, a list of England's great dramatic poets and forgetting Shakespeare altogether!
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