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.

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