Reputation of William Shakespeare book-length prose poem exploring the role of the eye in the plays. In its original printing, a second volume consisting of a setting of "The Tempest" by the poet's wife, Celia Zukofsky was also included. The growth of Shakespeare's reputation is illustrated by a timeline of Shakespeare criticism, from John Dryden's "when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too" (1668) to Thomas Carlyle's estimation of Shakespeare as the "strongest of rallying-signs" (1841) for an English identity. Reputation of William Shakespeare In his own time, William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was rated as merely one among many
History of the Shakespeare authorship question works. He believed that Derby was the principal figure behind the Shakespeare plays and was the sole author of the sonnets and narrative poems. He concludes that "William Stanley was William Shakespeare". As early as 1820 it had been suggested that, because of their "habitual resemblance of style", Shakespeare had in fact written the works of the poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe, but it was not until 1895 that this theory was reversed, and Marlowe himself proposed as the most likely author of the Shakespeare canon, with a serious case for this being made by Wilbur G. Zeigler in the