The Greatness of Shakespeare

However, since the 19th century, Shakespeare's reputation has massively gained from just being rated as just another playwright among others to having a significant role in the English language and being one of the best and honored poets in all history.
             A well-respected poet and playwright named Ben Jonson- who wrote a poem introduction for the First folio in honor of Shakespeare is linked to National identity because Jonson was an Englishman; however while Jonson had been more wealthy and he was more well-known, prosperous poet and playwright, highly educated and had studied English in depth for many years- Shakespeare wasn't as recognized and he had contrastingly lower education, the reasons behind this could have been because Jonson was more upper class; upper class were seen as more superior than the middle class. If seen from a more positive perspective, this gave Shakespeare a huge opportunity and caused his popularity to increase, this lead Shakespeare to be taken more seriously and people were beginning to get influenced to giving Shakespeare interest because it implied that regardless of his education and his class, Shakespeare was capable of producing the same quality of work and even better than Jonson. National identity lead people to become interested because they had this sort of encouraged from Jonson- "I loved the man and do honor his memory on this side idolatry as much as any."- to have someone like Jonson praise Shakespeare, Shakespeare gained a new level of respect from the British. .
             By 1887, Sixty-five editions of Shakespeare's works were published and over eighty school editions of individual plays have been published. Not only this but a very known actor and playwright named David Garrick dedicated three days to Shakespeare in 1769 called the Shakespeare Jubilee where we delivered a speech at the start of the celebrations to commemorate the memory of this genius who may be the greatest poets all of time.