Shakespeare never reached the status of admiration during his lifetime, but he received the praise he deserved.

In 1598, the writer Francis Mills selected him from a group of English writers and considered him to be "the best" in both comedy and tragedy.

Authors of Greek mythological dramas at St. John's College, Cambridge University have compared him to Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spencer. Although his contemporary, Ben Jonsson, commented on the Scottish poet William Drummond about "Shakespeare's lack of art", in his dedication to the First Folio, Jonson did not hesitate to praise Shakespeare, calling him "the soul of the age" and saying:

"O extraordinary achievement, my Britain, you have a subject worthy of boasting, to whom all the European stage should be honored. He does not belong to one age, but to all ages!"

From the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 to the end of the 17th century, classicism was all the rage. As a result, most critics at the time considered Shakespeare to be inferior to John Fletcher and Ben Jonson.

Thomas Reimer, for example, criticized Shakespeare for mixing tragedy and comedy. However, the poet and critic Dryden spoke highly of Shakespeare, saying of Ben Jonsson, "I praise him, but I like Shakespeare." 」

For decades, Reimer's views prevailed, but by the 18th century, critics began to comment on Shakespeare in his own style, extolling his talent.

A series of scholarly critical editions of Shakespeare's works, including the 1765 edition of Semere Jensen and the 1790 edition of Edmund Malone, further enhanced his reputation.

By 1800. He has been dubbed the "National Poet". In the 18th and 19th centuries, his fame also spread across the globe. Among the writers who embraced him were Voltaire, Goethe, Stendhal and Victor Hugo.

During the Romantic period, Shakespeare was praised by the poet and literary critic Coleridge, and the critic Auguste Wilhelm Schlegel translated Shakespeare's works into German, which is full of German Romantic spirit.

In the 19th century, criticism of Shakespeare's brilliance often bordered on flattery. The Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle, in 1840, after discussing the decline of the King of England, wrote: "Here I would say that there is a King of England whom no parliament can remove from power, and he is King Shakespeare! With the dignity of a king. Shining like the noblest, most genteel, and most steadfast banner, he was so indestructible, and in every sense of the word unequaled. 」

The Victorian era staged his plays on a large scale. The playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw derided Shakespeare's cult as a "bardolatry" – a portmanteau of the words "bard" and "idolatry", and Shakespeare was often referred to as a bard, a term that implied an excessive worship of Shakespeare.

George Bernard Shaw credits Ibsen's emergence of nascent naturalistic drama as making Shakespeare's style obsolete.

The artistic modernist movement of the early 20th century did not abandon Shakespeare. Rather, his work is included in the avant-garde. The German Expressionists and Muscovite Futurists brought his plays to the stage.

Marxist playwright and director Bertto Brecht designed an epictheater under Shakespeare's influence. The poet Thomas Stearns Eliot objected to George Bernard Shaw's view. The idea that Shakespeare's primitiveness actually made him truly modern.

Sir Eliot and G. Wilson and some scholars of New Criticism. A movement was advocated for a more in-depth reading of Shakespeare's works.

In the 1950s, a new wave of criticism replaced modernism and paved the way for the study of Shakespeare's postmodernism. By the 80s. Shakespeare studies are the subject of structuralism, feminism, Afro-American studies, and queer studies.

Some 150 years after Shakespeare's death, doubts about the original authorship of Shakespeare's works began to emerge. Suggested possible authors include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward Deville.

While all of these candidates are generally denied by academic circles, public interest in the subject continues into the 21st century.

Shakespeare's works include 36 plays from the First Folio, published in 1623, which are listed below as comedies, tragedies, and historical plays.

Not every word of the works attributed to Shakespeare was written by him, and some of them show signs of collaboration, which was also a common phenomenon at the time. There are two works not included in the First Folio, namely Two Noble Relatives and Pericles Prince of Tyre, and Shakespeare is now considered a major contributor to these two works and is included in the list of his works. No poems are included in the First Folio.

In the late 19th century, Edward Dowden classified the four later comedies as Shakespeare's "legendary plays," a term often cited, although many scholars believe they should be called "tragicomedies." These works, along with Two Noble Relatives, are indicated in the table below with an asterisk (*).

In 1896, Frederick Boas coined the term "problemplays" to describe four works—"One Newspaper for the Other," "Troy Ross and Cressida," "Finally Married," and "Hamlet."

"The theme of the play is singular, and the atmosphere can hardly be called strictly a comedy or a tragedy," he wrote. "So we've borrowed a convenient phrase from today's theatre and collectively called them Shakespeare's Problem Plays. The term has been the subject of much controversy, sometimes applied to other plays, and is still used today, although Hamlet is usually classified as a tragedy. Other problematic dramas are noted with a pound sign (#) in the table below. Shakespeare's co-authored plays are noted in the table below.

In 1856, the British missionary William Murphy translated Thomas Milner's Britannica in China, and the Shakespere in the book was translated as "tongue and birch."

In 1902, Liang Qichao was the first to use the translation name "Shakespeare". The 1903 publication of Shakespeare's Strange Tales was the beginning of the translation of Shakespeare's works, a translation of ten stories from the Shakespeare's Plays adapted by the great English essayist Charles Lamb and his sister Mary Lamb. In prose, the English Rulan Bu Xing is called TalesFromShakespere, and the ten chapters of the best are selected and translated. The name is the name of the present day. 」。

In 1904, Lin Hong and Wei Yi published "Yin Bian Yan Yu", which stated that "the original author is English Shakespeare, the translators are Minxian Lin Hongren and Wei Yi, and the publisher is the Commercial Press". The Swallow is a translation of Charles and Mary Lamb's Shakespearean Tales.

Lin Hong said in the preface to "Yin Bian Yan Yu", "In the rest of the night, Wei Jun occasionally held one or two notes from Shakespeare, and the rest of the lamp drafted, and the book was completed in 20 days. Among them, "The Merchant of Venice" is translated as "Meat Coupons", and "Hamlet" is translated as "Ghost Swamp".

Guo Moruo said that Lin Hong's translation of Shakespeare's drama "Yin Bian Yan Yu" "also made me feel extremely interested, and he invisibly gave me a great influence. 」

Lin Hong and Chan Ka-lun also co-translated four Shakespearean historical plays: Henry's Fourth, Raychad's (Charles II), Henry's Sixth Testament, and Caesar's Testament.

In 1921, Tian Han translated "Hamlet", the first complete Shakespearean play to be translated into Chinese in the form of a play, and in 1924 he translated "Romeo and Juliet".

Beginning in 1935, Zhu Shenghao translated 31 plays and half of the unfinished works, until his death in 1944. Between 1936 and 1969, Liang Shiqiu published all of Shakespeare's works known at the time. Fang Ping is also the chief editor of the poetic translation of The Complete Works of the New Shakespeare.

The main Chinese translation is the prose translation, the poetry translation is also the prose poetry translation, or the rhyme poem, which does not conform to the unrhymed metrical poetry style of Shakespeare's original work, Yu Bufan pioneered the translation method of isosyllabic rhythmic poetry, using the isosyllabic method to faithfully translate Shakespeare's original work, and the unrhymed metrical poetry has been reflected in the Chinese translation, and all the previous problems of Shakespeare's translation not conforming to the original work have finally been solved, and the first series of Yu's translation was published in Hong Kong in 2011. (To be continued......)