The biographical part of Rowe’s Account assembled the few facts and most of the traditions still current about Shakespeare a century after his death.  It would be easy for any undergraduate to distinguish fact from legend in Rowe’s preface; and scholarship since Steevens and Malone has demonstrated the unreliability of most of the local traditions that Betterton reported from Warwickshire.  Antiquarian research has added a vast amount of detail about the world in which Shakespeare lived and has raised and answered questions that never occurred to Rowe; but it has recovered little more of the man himself than Rowe knew.

The critical portions of Rowe’s account look backward and forward:  backward to the Restoration, among whose critical controversies the eighteenth-century Shakespeare took shape; and forward to the long succession of critical writings that, by the end of the century, had secured for Shakespeare his position as the greatest of the English poets.  Until Dryden and Rymer, criticism of Shakespeare in the seventeenth century had been occasional rather than systematic.  Dryden, by his own acknowledgement, derived his enthusiasm for Shakespeare from Davenant, and thus, in a way, spoke for a man who had known the poet.  Shakespeare was constantly in his mind, and the critical problems that the plays raised in the literary milieu of the Restoration constantly fascinated him.  Rymer’s attack served to solidify opinion and to force Shakespeare’s admirers to examine the grounds of their faith.  By 1700 a conventional manner of regarding Shakespeare and the plays had been achieved.

The growth of Shakespeare’s reputation during the century after his death is a familiar episode in English criticism.  Bentley has demonstrated the dominant position of Jonson up to the end of the century.[9] But Jonson’s reputation and authority worked for Shakespeare and helped to shape, a critical attitude toward the plays.  His official praise in the first Folio had declared Shakespeare at least the equal of the ancients and the very poet of nature.  He had raised the issue of Shakespeare’s learning, thus helping to emphasize the idea of Shakespeare as a natural genius; and in the Discoveries he had blamed his friend for too great facility and for bombast.

In his commendatory sonnet in the Second Folio (1632), Milton took the Jonsonian view of Shakespeare, whose “easy numbers” he contrasted with “slow-endeavouring Art,” and readers of the poems of 1645 found in L’Allegro an early formulation of what was to become the stock comparison of the two great Jacobean dramatists in the lines about Jonson’s “learned sock” and Shakespeare, “Fancy’s child.”  This contrast became a constant theme in Restoration allusions to the two poets.

Two other early critical ideas were to be elaborated in the last four decades of the century.  In the first Folio Leonard Digges had spoken of Shakespeare’s “fire and fancy,” and I.M.S. had written in the Second Folio of his ability to move the passions.  Finally, throughout the last half of the century, as Bentley has shown, Shakespeare was admired above all English dramatists for his ability to create characters, of whom Falstaff was the most frequently mentioned.