Note 26:1 — SOME NOTES ON SHAKESPEARE’S REPUTATION

A word may be said here of the eighteenth century anthologists. Collections of poems were numerous. That by Dodsley, with its supplement prepared by Pearch, contains nothing by Shakespeare, nor indeed does Nichols’ collection, which claimed to include no poem that had been printed in the volumes issued by Dodsley or Pearch. A collection by Thomas Tomkins, entitled Poems on Various Subjects: selected to enforce the Practice of Virtue, and with a View to comprise in One Volume the Beauties of English Poetry (1787), goes no farther back than Milton; and the well-known anthology, Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry, with remarks by Henry Headley, contains such names as Drayton, Warner, Drummond, Raleigh, Surrey, Carew, Wyat, and Browne, but Shakespeare finds no place. He does not, in fact, enter regularly collections of this kind until the beginning of the nineteenth century—the period of “Elegant Extracts.” But he is quoted frequently enough in Edward Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry (1724); and John Bowle, in his Miscellaneous Pieces of Ancient English Poetry (1765), selects from King John.