Is the end of the 20th century the Age of Shakespeare? Evidence for this proposition is not hard to provide. Hollywood now regularly crafts movies based on the Bard 's plays and has even given us one, Shakespeare in Love, based on speculation about his life. Summer would not be complete in the English-speaking countries without Shakespeare festivals like the one in Ashland, Oregon. And a new generation is being force-fed large doses of his work. I suspect the current cohort of eighth-graders is as baffled by the complexities of Scottish dynastic politics and the heartbreak of adultery as my generation was.

In the realm of scholarship, Helen Vendler has recently published a painstaking analysis of Shakespeare's sonnets, while Harold Bloom, with characteristic hyperbole, has attributed to him "the invention of the human." The reductio ad absurdum of what George Bernard Shaw called "Bardolatry" may have been the late AlIen Bloom's Shakespeare's Politics, a book that argued the importance of Shakespeare as an ethical and political teacher.

Shakespeare the sage bears as tenuous a relation to the original as the magician Virgil of medieval European imagination bore to the Roman poet. In four centuries William Shakespeare has gone from being one of three great Elizabethan playwrights, to being the greatest Elizabethan playwright, to being the greatest poet in English, to being the greatest writer in any language. Like Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson, whose authority can be invoked on behalf of practically any proposition or cause, King James ' court playwright has been elevated to the status of a benevolent demigod.

It is no insult to Shakespeare's memory to question the follies of some of his more enthusiastic admirers; a reaction to their excesses is long overdue. Shakespeare was one of the world's greatest dramatists and poets, but pace the two Blooms, he did not invent the modern notion of human psychology, nor can he plausibly be enlisted to serve as a classical Legislator or culture hero, a Western equivalent of Confucius.

It is by no means even clear that all of the claims made for Shakespeare as a writer can survive scrutiny. Few would dispute the claim that he was the greatest playwright in the English language (at least to date; the future may hold surprises ). But did he take the prize in the two other genres he pursued, lyric and narrative poetry? Earlier generations did not necessarily think so.

Consider the sonnets. Generations of schoolchildren have been introduced to premodern English poetry by means of Shakespeare's sonnets. But this tradition goes back only to the 19th century. In Poetic Form and British Romanticism, Stuart Curran quotes one George Henderson as a representative of "mainstream opinion" in 1803: "Until the time of Drummond of Hawthornden, whose Sonnets first appeared about the year 1616, we [British] can advance slender claim to any degree of elegance in this species of versification. Immediately after Drummond, there does not appear to have been any writer of the sonnet of considerable consequence except Milton."

Henderson 's judgment strikes contemporary literary intellectuals as absurd yet-is anyone who has not read William Drummond as well as Shakespeare qualified to object? Along with the 18th-century poet Thomas Gray, John Milton had the greatest influence on William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who were responsible for reviving the status of the sonnet. In 1805 the prestigious Edinburgh Review, discussing the sonnet in English, declared that it was "Milton and Gray who have cultivated it with most success." According to Gary Taylor in his Reinventing Shakespeare, "In the 17th century there had been fewer allusions to Shakespeare's sonnets than to any of his plays or narrative poems; first published in 1609, they were reprinted only once, in a textually eccentric edition of Shakespeare's Poems (1640)." Alexander Pope and Nicholas Rowe, in their 18th-century editions of Shakespeare's works, included the sonnets only in supplements.

The rising reputation of Shakespeare's sonnets illustrates the tendency to promote the minor works of major writers overtime, and to ignore significant works in the same category by less famous writers. Herman Melville's reputation as a novelist has resulted in the reprinting and analysis of his mediocre poetry, but the works of better 19th-century American poets such as John Greenleaf Whittier are out of print and ignored.

In contrast to his sonnets Shakespeare's narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, both celebrated and influential in his day, have never been rehabilitated. Like Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander, Shakespeare 's miniature epics were influenced by the epylion, a style that flourished in Alexandrian and Augustan Rome and was revived briefly during the Renaissance. For different reasons, it found no place in the esthetic schemes of neoclassicists, romantics or modernists; even Bardolaters do not quite know what to make of Shakespeare's ventures in this form. Indeed, Shakespeare would probably be forgotten today if his reputation had depended on his miniature epics. There simply have been quite a number of better narrative poets in English.

At least we can agree that Shakespeare was the greatest playwright in English. Or can we? In the 17th century, he was usually joined with Ben Jonson and John Fletcher in what Sir John Denham called "the triumvirate of wit." Compared to the learned Jonson and the witty Fletcher, Shakespeare was considered crude or "natural." In 1699 James Drake expressed what was then a critical commonplace: " Shakespeare ... fell short of the Art of Jonson, and the Conversation of Beaumont and Fletcher." Between Shakespeare's death and the closing of the theaters in 1640, and again after the Restoration, London audiences preferred the plays of the Francis Beaumont-John Fletcher team.

Bardolaters may answer that this merely proves their idol 's contemporaries and near-contemporaries lacked taste. Well, I must confess I share the defect. I would eagerly attend a revival of Jonson's VoIpone, but a squad of agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms could not drag me to one of Shakespeare's tedious cross-dressing comedies. At the risk of being excommunicated by Shakespeareans (Stratfordian and anti-Stratfordian alike ), one could plausibly maintain that the great line of comedy in English runs from Jonson and perhaps Fletcher through Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oscar Wilde and No