Introduction: Approaching Shakespeare and His Stage

Abstract

In 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, two members of his acting company, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published 36 of his plays in a volume now known as the First Folio. The collection was prefaced by a number of documents, including an elegy to Shakespeare by the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson. Jonson had been at different times a colleague and a rival of Shakespeare’s; he had written plays in which Shakespeare himself had acted, and he had also written plays for acting companies that were in competition with Shakespeare’s own.¹ In his elegy, Jonson wrote of Shakespeare, ‘He was not of an age, but for all time!’ (43) Now in one sense it is clearly true that Shakespeare is ‘for all time’, since his plays, after 400 years, are still the most popular in the English language and are still performed throughout the world. But Jonson’s words imply more than this, for, whether or not he intended to do so, he effectively characterized Shakespeare, the ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’, as the Bard, the universal figure of the poet existing in a transcendent world of Truth and Beauty: ‘But stay, I see thee in the Hemisphere / Advanc’d, and made a Constellation there!’ (75–6).