History of the Shakespeare authorship question theatre audiences, and Shakespeare's status as a "great writer" shifted. Dryden's sentiments about Shakespeare's matchless genius were echoed without a break by unstinting praise from writers throughout the 18th century. Shakespeare was described as a genius who needed no learning, was deeply original, and unique in creating realistic and individual characters (see Timeline of Shakespeare criticism). The phenomenon continued during the Romantic era, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, William Hazlitt, and others all described Shakespeare as a transcendent genius. By the beginning of the 19th century Bardolatry was in full swing and Shakespeare was universally celebrated as an unschooled
The Plays of William Shakespeare "A Dictionary of the English Language", Warburton's publishers, Tonson et al., granted him permission to work on Shakespeare. In the "Proposal", Johnson describes the various problems with previous editions of Shakespeare and argues how a new edition, written by himself, would correct these problems. In particular, Johnson promised to "correct what is corrupt, and to explain what is obscure". He would accomplish this by relying on "a careful collation of all the oldest copies" and to read "the same story in the very book which Shakespeare consulted". Unlike other editors who "slight their predecessors", Johnson claimed that "all that is