This dynamic duality runs throughout Shakespeare’s life and work, making him an androgynous and timeless shape-shifter who is impossible to pin down. A few lines later, however, Jonson contradicts himself, declaring that his rival “was not of an age, but for all time”. His friend Ben Jonson, addressing “the Reader”, initially says that “gentle Shakespeare” is the “soul of the age”, placing him firmly in a metropolitan context, as “the wonder of our stage”. Shakespeare’s double life, as both an English and a universal artist (poet and playwright), begins with the First Folio of 1623. Four hundred years on, his unique gift to our culture, language and imagination has been to universalise the experience of living and writing in late 16th-century England and to have become widely recognised, and loved, across the world as the greatest playwright. That heartfelt response is, perhaps, Shakespeare’s most astonishing achievement.
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