What did people of Shakespeares time think of him?

Answer 1

Apparently people thought that he was crazy. In view of this, they mainly avoided and mocked both him and his work. I don't know where this comes from: in fact the evidence (such as Francis Meres's Palladis Tamia) suggests that he was well-respected and treated as such.

The Puritans (religious fanatics) thought that plays were a sin. When they came to power they closed the theatre down.

Answer 2

Shakespeare was reasonably popular in his day, and was well-liked by his colleagues and contemporaries. His work was considered to be good, but not that much better than his contemporaries. After the theatres re-opened in 1650, his works were thought to be old-fashioned, and were only staged after being considerably altered to suit the current taste. David Garrick, who organized anniversary celebrations for Shakespeare's 200th birthday five years late in 1769, immensely boosted the attention paid to Shakespeare, to the extent that people began to collect Shakespeare relics as memorabilia. By the time the 19th century arrived Shakespeare was practically worshipped and his works treated with the reverence due to holy writ, so that people tried to draw moral lessons from them. George Bernard Shaw called this "Bardolatry". Since then people are generally less silly about Shakespeare, but he is more studied and performed than ever before.

Answer 3

Shakespeare's plays were very popular with ordinary people. Shakespeare became a very rich man because so many people wanted to see his plays.

More educated people were less sure what they thought of Shakespeare. There are several references to his plays and poetry which are very critical, though there are also some which seem to approve of what he was doing. We are not quite sure, but there is probably an attack on Shakespeare in Philip Sydney's 'Apology for Poetry'.

Religious fundamentalists (Puritans) hated Shakespeare. They hated all theatre, and would close them down as soon as they gained political power (around 1642).

Answer 4

Quite well, actually. His acting company made good money playing his plays. Some of them were so popular that pirate copies of the script started appearing on the open market, including Hamlet, Richard III and Romeo and Juliet.

Answer 5

Mixed reports have come in from Shakespeare's peers. When he was young, Greene famously called him "an upstart crow." On the other hand, at about the same time Francis Meres called him "the most excellent". Ben Jonson, a fellow playwright, wrote warmly of him in the First Edition of the Folio of Shakespeare's work

Answer 6

It totally depends on which people and by whom. Asking how the Queen was treated by one of the ordinary citizens is going to get a totally different answer from asking how Shakespeare's neighbour Mr. Sadler was treated by Mrs. Shakespeare.

Answer 7

It's hard to say, because we do not have very much information about his private life. We can say that as opposed to some of his fellow playwrights (Jonson and Marlowe for example) Shakespeare was easy to get along with and not inclined to get into fights or arguments with people. We know that since there is no record of his ever missing church, he was prepared to conform with whatever was going on socially. The same can be said because of his lack of troubles with the censor. His plays suggest a lack of sympathy for the political aspirations of the common people, although he also shows sympathy for the sufferings of common people as well. We know that he was an astute businessman because he made good money and invested it successfully, and sued for it when he had to. It's still a vague and mostly negative picture (in the sense that we know what he was not better than we know what he was).

Answer 8

they thought he was a squirrel made af neon cheese cakes

Answer 9

There is not enough factual information to give a factual depiction of his home life.