"After Shakespeare" by John Gross, ed.

Victor Hugo raised him in a séance, Voltaire ripped him off and Byron called him a vulgar dog. The world's great writers just can't leave Shakespeare alone.

By Jonathon Keats

Aug 7, 2002 | Some 250 years after his burial, William Shakespeare took the trouble to visit French author Victor Hugo at a Parisian seance. At first the others in attendance were perplexed that, through a planchette, Shakespeare delivered his message in perfect French. But the bard obligingly explained that, with the wisdom of age, he now found their language superior to his own -- a lucky break as Hugo himself spoke no English. Then Shakespeare went on, in measured verse, to say that he read Hugo's writing regularly up in heaven, often aloud for the benefit of the other immortals. Cervantes silenced Molière, in order to savor every last word. Aeschylus quivered, and Dante wept, at Hugo's emotional depth. "Your voice is sacred!" Shakespeare proclaimed. "Carry on the good work!"

Few writers before or since have received such a glowing endorsement from their own mothers, let alone from the author of "Othello," "Macbeth" and "Hamlet." Hugo may be unique among writers in his unstinting esteem for Shakespeare, whom he liked to imagine not only in an all-star reading group with Dante and Cervantes, but also in the spiritual company of Isaiah and Saint Paul.

Shakespeare's contemporaries were wary of lavishing too much praise, perhaps for fear of diminishing the magnitude, or undermining the endurance, of their own accomplishments. Most famously, that spirit of competition can be found in Ben Jonson's memorial to his "beloved" colleague -- prefacing the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays -- where he writes that the bard had "small Latin, and less Greek." While the same poem also gives us the line "He was not of an age, but for all time!" that five-word jibe about Shakespeare's shaky language skills has quietly inspired centuries of speculation that the great plays were written by a better-educated Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Edward deVere or even, on occasion, Mr. Ben Jonson.

Of course Jonson did not have our perspective on Shakespeare, our blinding reverence. His comment to players who admired their bard for never striking a line he wrote --"would he had blotted a thousand" -- is of a professional bitchiness such as might be found in a feud between Paul Theroux and V.S. Naipaul, as read in the pages of the New York Review of Books, rather than the impassioned rhetoric of a man proving his mettle to other mortals by heaping insults at the foot of a deity.

That inclination, what Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom has called "the anxiety of influence," didn't take hold until perhaps the next generation. Since then, as can be seen in the pages of John Gross' delightful new anthology, "After Shakespeare," it's been open season. Gross' miscellany is of the sort that few scholars have dared undertake since the 19th century, an antidote to academic tomes that throws together extracts on Shakespeare and his plays from sources as varied as the bard's 400 years of readers. The variations are staggering, but if there's one underlying theme, it's the struggle writers have had in emerging from the shadow of Shakespeare's formidable reputation.

Naturally, the first line of attack is direct insult: "I am afraid we will have no good plays now," Oliver Goldsmith confided to a compatriot in 1762, as noted by James Boswell in his legendary "London Journal." "The taste of the audience is spoiled by the pantomime of Shakespeare." Ever the reporter, Boswell refrained from expressing an opinion to the contrary, but he writes that he thought Goldsmith "a most impudent puppy."

Samuel Johnson was more direct in calling Voltaire to task; the satirist shamelessly abused Shakespeare just seven years after helping himself to material from "Macbeth" for his own 1742 tragedy, "Mahomet." Failing to attain immortality as quickly as he hoped, Voltaire appears to have blamed Shakespeare, whose work he called "a product of the imagination of a drunken savage." It was an outburst in which Dr. Johnson detected just another case of "the petty cavils of petty minds."

Hardly so petty, it must be said, as Lord Byron's snobbery. Speaking of the dead bard to a certain Lady Blessington, he contended,

"All [Shakespeare's] vulgarisms are attributed to the circumstances of his birth and breeding depriving him of a good education; hence they are to be excused, and the obscurities with which his works abound are all easily explained away by the simple statement, that he wrote about 200 years ago, and that the terms then in use are now become obsolete. With two such good excuses, as want of education, and having written above 200 years before our time, any writer may pass muster; and when to these is added the being a sturdy hind of low degree, which to three parts of the community in England has a peculiar attraction, one ceases to wonder at his supposed popularity; I say supposed, for who goes to see his plays, and who, except country parsons, or mouthing, stage-struck, theatrical amateurs, read them?"

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