All of these opinions were developed in Dryden’s frequent critical remarks on his favorite dramatist.  No one was more clearly aware than he of the faults of the “divine Shakespeare” as they appeared in the new era of letters that Dryden himself helped to shape.  And no man ever praised Shakespeare more generously.  For Dryden Shakespeare was the greatest of original geniuses, who, “taught by none,” laid the foundations of English drama; he was a poet of bold imagination, especially gifted in “magick” or the supernatural, the poet of nature, who could dispense with “art,” the poet of the passions, of varied characters and moods, the poet of large and comprehensive soul.  To him, as to most of his contemporaries, the contrast between Jonson and Shakespeare was important:  the one showed what poets ought to do; the other what untutored genius can do.  When Dryden praised Shakespeare, his tone became warmer than when he judicially appraised Jonson.

Like most of his contemporaries Dryden did not heed Jonson’s caveat that, despite his lack of learning, Shakespeare did have art.  He was too obsessed with the idea that Shakespeare, ignorant of the health-giving art of the ancients, was infected with the faults of his age, faults that even Jonson did not always escape.  Shakespeare was often incorrect in grammar; he frequently sank to flatness or soared into bombast; his wit could be coarse and low and too dependent on puns; his plot structure was at times faulty, and he lacked the sense for order and arrangement that the new taste valued.  All this he could and did admit, and he was impressed by the learning and critical standards of Rymer’s attack.  But like Samuel Johnson he was not often prone to substitute theory for experience, and like most of his contemporaries he felt Shakespeare’s power to move and to convince.  Perhaps the most trenchant expression of his final stand in regard to Shakespeare and to the whole art of poetry is to be found in his letter to Dennis, dated 3 March, 1693/4.  Shakespeare, he said, had genius, which is “alone a greater Virtue ... than all the other Qualifications put together.”  He admitted that all the faults pointed out by Rymer are real enough, but he added a question that removed the discussion from theory to immediate experience:  “Yet who will read Mr. Rym[er] or not read Shakespear?” When Dryden died in 1700, the age of Jonson had passed and the age of Shakespeare was about to begin.

The Shakespeare of Rowe’s Account is in most essentials the Shakespeare of Restoration criticism, minus the consideration of his faults.  As Nichol Smith has observed, Dryden and Rymer were continually in Rowe’s mind as he wrote.  It is likely that Smith is correct in suspecting in the Account echoes of Dryden’s conversation as well as of his published writings;[10] and the respect in which Rymer was then held is evident in Rowe’s desire not to enter into controversy with that redoubtable critic and in his inability to refrain from doing so.