Inventing the Icon: How Shakespeare Became "Shakespeare"
Folger Education Professional Development for Teachers
Booking and details
Reserve Your SpotDates Wed, Oct 14, 2026, 8pm ET
Venue Virtual - Zoom
Tickets Free; registration required
Duration 1 hour
Scholar Talk and Q&A
How did a working playwright from Stratford-upon-Avon become the towering figure we call a genius? This free virtual session takes up that question with scholar Paul Menzer, the inaugural Folger Chair in Shakespeare Studies, whose current research at the Folger traces the writers and critics who shaped, and sometimes resisted, Shakespeare’s reputation.
Here he turns to the making of “Shakespeare” across four key dates after the playwright’s death. The figure students meet in the classroom, the universal genius whose greatness is taken for granted, was not born that way. He was built, over time, by editors, actors, critics, and impresarios, and this session pulls back the curtain on how it happened.
Following the talk, participants will have time to ask questions and think together about what this history opens up for the classroom: how to teach Shakespeare’s reputation as something constructed rather than given, and how questions of authorship, editing, and canon can become live material for students rather than settled fact.
About the speaker
Paul Menzer
Shakespeare’s Enemies
2026-27 Folger Chair in Shakespeare Studies
Paul Menzer is Professor and Executive Director of Shakespeare and Performance at Mary Baldwin University. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including The Hamlets: Cues, Q’s, and Remembered Texts, Anecdotal Shakespeare, Shakespeare in the Theatre: The American Shakespeare Center, Shakespeare without Print, The Brief Life of William Shakespeare, and The Complete Life of William Shakespeare, as well as editions of Romeo and Juliet and Doctor Faustus. A past President of the Marlowe Society of America and member of the editorial board of Shakespeare Quarterly, Menzer’s work explores how Shakespeare has been performed, remembered, adapted, and mythologized across time. He is also a practicing playwright whose works have appeared at the Blackfriars Playhouse and elsewhere. His current project is Shakespeare’s Enemies, which examines the writers, critics, reformers, and iconoclasts who opposed Shakespeare across the last four centuries.
About the talk
Across the hour, Menzer moves through four moments that turned a man into a monument.
The image that never fit
1616 and 1623
Menzer begins with the earliest attempts to picture Shakespeare, the Stratford funerary monument of 1616 and the Folio engraving of 1623, and the centuries of mockery they drew, from “pudding faced effigy” to “a self-satisfied pork-butcher.” From the very start, the gap between the man and the myth was impossible to close, and that gap is where the idea of genius took root.
Editing the author into being
1709
With Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 edition, Shakespeare’s collected works gained a biography, act and scene divisions, a list of characters, and illustrations—the apparatus that shaped how readers have encountered the plays ever since. Alongside this came a new way of reading, as 18th-century critics like Maurice Morgann began treating Shakespeare’s characters “rather as Historic than Dramatic beings,” people real enough to have lives beyond the page.
Inventing the icon
1769
By the time of David Garrick’s 1769 Jubilee at Stratford, Shakespeare had become something like a secular saint, celebrated with medals, relics, and a purpose-built amphitheater. Menzer closes on the moment Bardolatry was born, and on what it means that the greatness we now take for granted was, at some point, deliberately made by others.