Early Modern England Encyclopedia: Shakespeare’s First Review

Shakespeare’s First Review

No alternative text available. — Title page of the book Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury by Francis Meres (1598). This book contains some of the first mentions of Shakespeare as an author of plays and sonnets. Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library. CC BY-SA 4.0

Comments on Shakespeare as a Writer

Para1 Francis Meres (1565–1647), a university-educated literary commentator about the same age as Shakespeare, published a work in 1598 that explains Shakespeare’s reputation in his own time and helps date several Shakespeare plays. It confirms Shakespeare’s positive reputation as an author of both poetry and drama before 1600.

Para2In a small book of critical reflections on English and classical authors called Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury, Meres mentions many of Shakespeare’s plays in flattering terms. Meres begins by praising Shakespeare’s poetry, the two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, and also his Sonnets. The Sonnetswere circulating in handwritten copies at this point:

As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends, etc.

(Palladis Tamia Oo1v)

Para3This is the first mention of Shakespeare as the author of poetry, including the collection of poems later published in 1609 as Sonnets. It demonstrates conclusively that the poems were written and circulated in handwritten copies in the 1590s. Meres then continues, comparing Shakespeare to the renowned Roman writer Plautus in comedy and to the respected Roman writer Seneca in tragedy:

As Plautus and Seneca are accounted for the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latins , so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds of the stage for Comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love Labours Lost, his Love Labours Won, his Midsummer Night’s Dream, and his Merchant of Venice; for Tragedy his Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, King John, Titus Andronicus, and Romeo and Juliet. (Palladis Tamia Oo2)

A Lost Play?

Para4 The Love Labours Won that Meres mentions is an unknown play which has sparked much speculation. If Meres is not referring to a play now lost, some scholars believe that one likely candidate is The Taming of the Shrew, an early comedy that Meres does not mention, in which Petruchio certainly seems to win love’s labor, even if Kate might be thought to lose it. The play does note that taming the shrewish Kate might resemble the labors of Hercules: Yea, leave that labour to great Hercules/ And let it be more than Alcides twelve (1.2.255-256).

Para5Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It have also both been suggested as candidates for this lost or mistitled play. In 2014, The Royal Shakespeare Company staged both the Love’s Labours plays and billed their production of the play best known as Much Ado About Nothing as the lost play. Artistic director Gregory Doran notes:

So strong is my sense, that I am sticking my neck out to say that we have come to the conclusion that Much Ado About Nothing may have also been known during Shakespeare’s lifetime as Love’s Labour’s Won. We know Shakespeare wrote a play under this name, and scholars have debated whether this is indeed a ‘lostʼ work, or an alternative title to an existing play, just as ‘What You Willʼ is the alternative title to Twelfth Night. This pairing, cross-cast and with a single director Christopher Luscombe, will test out this theory. (Doran)

Para6Meres goes on to refer to Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and other writers of the late Elizabethan period. He seems to especially admire Shakespeare, which is a bit surprising. Many university-educated men of the time preferred classical works as literature and thought of English writers an inferior and as writers of entertainment rather than creators of literary art.

Key Print Sources

Francis Meres. The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Michael Dobson et al. 2nd ed., Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 287-291.

Jackson, Macdonald Peter. Francis Meres and the Cultural Contexts of Shakespeare’s Rival Poet Sonnets.. The Review of English Studies, vol. 56, no. 224, Apr. 2005, pp. 224-246.

Francis Meres. Shakespeare’s Theatre: A Dictionary of His Stage Context, edited by Hugh M. Richmond. London, Bloomsbury, 2004, pp. 295-296.

Key Online Sources

Best, Michael. First Rave Review. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/life/early%20maturity/meres.html. Accessed 3 Mar. 2023.

Doran, Gregory. Winter 2014-Spring 2015 Season Guide, The Royal Shakespeare Company. http://www.stratford-upon-avon.co.uk/images/rsc-winter-14-season-guide.pdf. Accessed 4 Mar.. 2023

Hooks, Adam G. Palladis tamia: one of the earliest printed assessments of Shakespeare’s works, and the first mention of his sonnets. Shakespeare Documented. https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/palladis-tamia-one-earliest-printed-assessments-shakespeares-works-and-first Accessed 4 Mar. 2023

Image Sources

Meres, Francis. Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury. P. Short, 1598. Shakespeare Documented. Folger Shakespeare Library. https://doi.org/10.37078/161.

Prosopography

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title	Shakespeare’s First Review
Type of text	Critical
Publisher	University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series	Early Modern England Encyclopedia
Source	By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration	This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition	Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
Sponsor(s)	Early Modern England Encyclopedia Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
Encoding description	Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status	published
Funder(s)	Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University
License/availability	Unless otherwise noted, intellectual copyright in EMEE Anthology pages is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.