Dimitri’s Reviews > The Pleasures of the Imagination; English Culture in the Eighteenth Century > Status Update

Shakespeare became famous not as a dramatist but as an author. His editors progressively removed him from the theatre and confined him to the page. In Pope's edition of 1725 the best passages were identified by double commas in the margin & readers had analytical indexes to help them extract, as the play-goer could not, favoured speeches and scenes; a play's dramatic unity, perceived in performance, was lost.