How popular was Shakespeare in his day?

Shakespeare’s plays are so frequently produced and widely studied and read today that it must seem like a foregone conclusion that he was also extremely popular in his lifetime. We also know, of course, that two of his colleagues brought together almost all of his plays in the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare, published seven years after his death, and that this large, expensive edition sold well enough that it was followed by the Second Folio, the Third Folio, and the Fourth Folio. But is the idea that Shakespeare was the most popular writer of his time an established fact, or something of a myth?

In a classic episode from several years ago, our podcast Shakespeare Unlimited explored that and some other possibly “mythical” questions as part of a fascinating interview with Emma Smith of Oxford University, co-author with Laurie Maguire of the book 30 Great Myths About Shakespeare (2013). This excerpt from the episode not only explores how popular Shakespeare was in his day, but what such a question would have meant at the time, and how one can consider it now, using the information that survives today.

NARRATOR: “Myth #1: Shakespeare was the most popular writer of his time.”

REBECCA SHEIR: Is that really a myth?

EMMA SMITH: Well, how we define a “myth” is that it’s something which gets promulgated or repeated and has gone a bit adrift from the kind of evidential basis that might prove it true or false. It’s something which exists almost as an independent fact without the back-up. So, it is a myth in those terms, and what we did in that particular chapter, we tried to think, “What would popularity mean?”

The True Tragedie of Richard III (ca. 1591). Folger Shakespeare Library: STC 21009.

If you’re a playwright, you’ve got two quite distinct forms that we might be able to trace. One is popularity and performance on the stage, and one is popularity in print. Now, of course, print is easier for us to trace now because printed books largely have survived, and we can look at how Shakespeare exists in the print market. Shakespeare has one real bestseller in print and that is the rather saucy, erotic poem, Venus and Adonis. And then he has a couple of plays, history plays, Henry IV, Part I—well, the play we call that—and Richard III, which have about six editions during the early 17th century. They look like some very steady sellers or even bestsellers for the publishing trade, so that suggests a kind of popularity.

We’re on slightly more difficult ground if we look at the number of performances on stage, partly because the evidence is not very easy to find, and partly because most plays in this period have a surprisingly restricted number of performances. We’re used to great long runs in the theater. So, if I, in February, say, “Go to this show. It’s fantastic,” you might pick it up in June, and it would be the same show. If I was saying that in Shakespeare’s London, you would probably need to go tomorrow or next Tuesday, or you would have missed it—and that would be the same, whether it were Hamlet or whether it were, you know, some play that we’ve now completely lost sight of. So, the theater industry wants new plays. It keeps moving forward all the time.

SHEIR: So, Emma, can you compare the runs of some of Shakespeare’s plays to other plays of the time? Do we have information about that?

SMITH: We’ve got some limited information and what that information shows us is that the great blockbuster hits of the theater were not Shakespeare’s. So, for example, we got a very popular, topical, provocative play called A Game at Chess, written by Thomas Middleton, who also collaborated with Shakespeare. It’s about Spanish politics. It’s quite incomprehensible to us now. It’s set on a chess board with chess pieces, but this ran for nine consecutive days, which was just a complete sensation. It had to be closed, in fact, by order of the Privy Council because the Spanish Ambassador complained. So, that was a smash hit, which they keep putting on day after day because people want to come and see it. Shakespeare doesn’t have anything like that.

Thomas Kyd. The Spanish tragedie. 1615. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Or we can think of a play like The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd, a revenge play, which has an influence on Hamlet. But it also has a big influence on Shakespeare and on the drama of the time. I think of Spanish Tragedy as being really the sort of Star Wars of the Elizabethan period; even if you haven’t seen it, you kind of know what it is, and you can do a couple of lines from it or do an impression from it. And the important thing about that analogy is that it keeps being revived, it keeps coming back, and again I don’t think any of Shakespeare’s plays works quite like that.

We also have examples of plays which are enormously popular in the theater. This speaks to the point about popularity on stage versus print. Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta looks to be a really popular stage play. It isn’t printed 40 years after its performances. That seems to be a case, perhaps where the theater company doesn’t want to print the play. They want to keep the rights to it as a performed play. Popularity on the stage equals non-existence in print. That’s an interesting example for how we think about the way we could weigh up those two spheres of publication, stage and print.

That’s one set of evidence. We looked also at how people talk about Shakespeare, whether they identify him as somebody head and shoulders above everybody else who was writing. You know, did people living in the 1590s, in the first decade of the 17th century, did they know they were living in the “age of Shakespeare”? I think the answer to that was no, they didn’t. They knew they were living at the time when theater was an enormously dynamic cultural space, but there were lots of writers who people identified as great and probably thought would survive.

So, the whole question of Shakespeare’s popularity, you know, starts to look more interesting, I think—more difficult to answer, but more interesting. And then I guess the final thing is, Why would we want Shakespeare to be popular? Why would it have been important to say he was popular in his own day?

We all know about school teachers who make reluctant kids in classrooms study texts by saying, you know, this was the soap opera of the day or this is what ordinary people went to. So it has a cultural force in our own sense of how we want to locate Shakespeare now—even though, if we looked at our own bestseller lists, we probably wouldn’t expect the things that are at the top of the bestseller list to be the things that we will still be concerned about in centuries to come. So, I think in our own cultural practice, we can recognize that to be popular and to be of literary value are not necessarily always the same thing.

SHEIR: I think a lot people would be surprised to know—something you point out in your book, speaking of that best-seller Venus and Adonis, the poem—Shakespeare was actually better known as a poet in his lifetime than as a playwright.

SMITH: Venus and Adonis is the first of Shakespeare’s texts to be published with his name attached to it, several years before that becomes the norm for his plays that go into print, and Venus and Adonis keeps being reprinted up until the 1640s. It really influences whole genres of poems by other writers.

So, I think if you’d ask people something about Shakespeare, if you asked—like Al Pacino does in Looking for Richard, you know, he has a great vox pop on the street asking people what they know about Shakespeare, and they say things like “to be or not to be”—that’s kind of in New York in the beginning of the 21st century. If you had done that in London at the end of the 16th century, people would have probably said, “Oh, the guy who wrote Venus and Adonis?”