Shakespeare was definitely highly regarded in his own time. We have letters form noblemen referencing Shakespeare's plays (calling a rival "Falstaff" and such). Queen Elizabeth was alledgedly all about Falstaff, which is why Shakespeare wrote the Merry Wives of Windsor. And we have contemporary praise. You can read Ben Jonson's remarks on Shakespeare that attest to his talent, high regard, and Jonson's own slight jealousy over them. Both Ben Jonson and John Milton wrote poems dedicated to him in the printing of the Second Folio printed in the 17th century. These are highly respectable people to be dedicating poems to you. Especially from Milton who was not the easiest person in the world to impress and wasn't a close friend of Shakespeare like Jonson. From Milton in 1630: "Thou in our wonder and astonishment/Hast built thyself a live-long monument." Fourteen years after he died. So, he was obviously pretty well regarded. But, yes, he was absolutely not revered the way he would later be. Lots of playwrights were highly regarded.

Part of this happened in the Restoration. When Charles II returned from exile he brought the theater, which had been closed by the Protestants, back. However, no one had been writing plays in the interim. You write plays with the hope of getting paid for them. So, they had to put on a lot of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Of these, Shakespeare was quickly the most popular until current playwrights got up to speed. John Dryden attributed to his genius/success the fact that he wrote to nature not the artificial form of theater (i.e. the traditional conventions first dictated by Aristotle). And he noted how realistic his characters were, which he thought placed him above and beyond everyone else. That's a very common refrain first articulated (that I'm aware of) by Dryden. That what set him apart was how real and true his characters are (one I agree with).

Then in the 18th century, he started to become the brightest star in the sky. That's when famous admirers like Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson started to praise him. Pope, again, pointed to how real his individual characters were. In the 18th century, his plays were often performed but sometimes happy endings would be added. Romeo and Juliet would live! Cordelia would survive. Which was just horrific to later people. But it shouldn't suggest that they didn't appreciate the work. However, as highly appreciated as he was at this time, he was still one of the several playwrights of the era admired. Jonson was still highly admired although second to Shakespeare. Marlowe was, of course, highly admired. Shakespeare was considered the best of the pack but not so high above that he was his own category altogether.

Already by 1796 Goethe was writing that so much had been said about Shakespeare that there was nothing left to say. I think that's a very good indication of how ecstatic the preceding two centuries had been about him.

Then in the 19th century the Romantics took him as their own. They really idolized him as someone whose genius needed no formal education (Ben Jonson, whom they are implicitly comparing him to when they say that, left school to become a brick layer and didn't go to university but this was the impression). They also suggested he'd been unappreciated in the previous century. That is false but I think shows how each generation really tried to make him their own. By the 19th century he was THE poet and playwright of all time in Britain. Beyond that even. He was the expert in human nature. It would hard to overstate the passion for Shakespeare in the Victorian age. And, as is inevitable, it created some backlash. Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw are negative on Shakespeare. Harold Bloom has said this was professional jealousy but it could just as easily have been understandable backlash to over the top idolization.

Today he is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time but we are probably not going to consult him to give a psychiatric evaluation of a moody, college student in our family like the Victorians might.

So, yes, he was highly regarded as far back as the later years of his own life (post-Hamlet is when he really began to be seen as a genius but was still well regarded prior to that). But the appreciation, which never went away, reached fever pitch under the Victorians.

Shakespeare's reputation has certainly come a long way from Robert Greene's cranky 1592 reference to "an upstart crow" who thinks that just because he can act, he can write plays, too. But while Shakespeare won over contemporary audiences and other prominent writers, it was a long and winding path from "writer of regionally popular plays" to "veritable god of an international dramatic and literary tradition."

Most basically, in Shakespeare's day the idea of playwright as credible public persona/career was just barely in its infancy, maybe still in utero. Printed copies of individual plays were marked based on the company or even the actors that had performed them, not their authors. Nevertheless, shortly after Shakespeare's death, several colleagues published a collected edition of (many of) his plays. Their stated purpose was to correct the errors in copies of his plays circulating individually. In other words, by 1623, there existed both the idea that a playwright could have a culturally significant legacy as a playwright--and that Shakespeare had left a legacy necessary to protect.

But the course of that legacy for the first century or so was already set in Shakespeare's lifetime. Effusive praise poured forth: Shakespeare was the equal of the classic English writers: Chaucer, Gower, Spenser; no, Shakespeare was greater. But! But. Shakespeare possessed an innate, raw, rustic talent; he lacked education and refinement. He was the playwright for the people, not for the literati. His contemporary Ben Jonson, who outshone Shakespeare in reputation through the 17th century, remarked that Shakespeare's work "wanted art" (lacked). He /r/badhistory-ed the other's plays, pointing out errors in history and geography that any learned man should have known.

Shuttering the theaters during the Interregnum caused another leap in status for plays and their authors, as literary critics began to view plays as the stuff for critical analysis, not just performance. Shakespeare's early reputation as raw natural talent fared poorly. Critics pointed out all the ways his plays--even, or especially, the vaunted Hamlet--failed to measure up to the dominant neoclassical dramatic theory. (In short: nothing about the ghost makes sense)...all the while praising his innate ability to become his characters, to make fiction seem real. We revere this as art today; not so the leading literati of the late 1600s.

But the roots of the shift were already being laid. Michael Dobson has traced how later authors' adaptations of Shakespeare (in the sense of rewriting, not "Macbeth in a Pennsylvania restaurant") were already working to smooth out perceived rough edges and bring his works more in line with ideas of neoclassical refinement. This is just one example of how Shakespeare's plays served as almost a canvas for different groups in Restoration England to project their sense of identity or politics onto. Above all, a mainstream emphasis on seeing "domestic virtue and triumphant colonial warfare" in his plays gradually led to Shakespeare's crowning as the national playwright-poet of England.

Shakespeare didn't attain the nickname "The Bard" until the 19th century and George Bernard Shaw would not coin the term "Bardolatry" until the next. But by 1769, actor and theater bigwig David Garrick could organize a "Stratford Jubilee" celebrating Shakespeare, and unsarcastically perform an ode proclaiming: "Tis he, tis he! The god of our idolatry."

So Shakespeare's enshrinement as the preeminent literary voice of England was secured in the first half of the 18th century. Up until the point, he had enjoyed basically zero international reception. Voltaire, in his obsession with English post-Restoration culture, is usually considered to have "introduced" Shakespeare to the wider European literary elite. But his 1733 assessment was ambivalent:

a fecund genius, full of vigor, ranging from simple naturalness to the sublime, without the least glimmer of taste or the slightest knowledge of the rules.

Indeed, Voltaire was toeing the 1600s English party line, the neoclassicizing Age of Reason. It was not until the nascence of romanticism in late 18th century Germany that critics and authors would claim Shakespeare as the paragon of a literary world that transcended national borders. To Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the much maligned ghost of Hamlet is a true character that made audiences believe in the enchanted world again, even in an age of reason. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe insists that if Shakespeare's dramatic logic appears illogical, the fault is in us, not the play: we need to insert ourselves into his world. Works of art make their own rules; we need not apply external ones.

These German proto-romantics' use of an English author, instead of a native one, as their exemplar by the turn of 1800 completes Shakespeare's rise from upstart crow to rustic talent to English paragon to international superstar.

Sources: Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet, is the classic investigation of how Shakespeare's reputation evolved in the first century and a half.

he had a harder time of it internationally. Samuel Johnson felt the need erect an elaborate defence* of him in the late 18th century against the prevailing classical attitude of the french academy (which he otherwise was a proponent of). the three unities (based on italian renaissance overinterpretations of aristotle)--time, place, action--were rigorously enforced, and dramatists who violated them were dismissed. His idiomatic exuberance doesn't really fit any category well, and even many romantic were uncomfortable with it. Byron claimed to dislike him. Wordsworth easily preferred Milton. Schiller, one of the first people to really attempt an imitation, wrote,

When, at a very youthful age, I became first acquainted with Shakespeare, I was displeased with his coldness, with his insensibility, which allows him to jest even in the most pathetic moments, to disturb the impression of the most harrowing scenes in "Hamlet," in "King Lear," and in "Macbeth," etc., by mixing with them the buffooneries of a madman. I was revolted by his insensibility, which allowed him to pause sometimes at places where my sensibility would bid me hasten and bear me along, and which sometimes carried him away with indifference when my heart would be so happy to pause. Though I was accustomed, by the practice of modern poets, to seek at once the poet in his works, to meet his heart, to reflect with him in his theme—in a word, to see the object in the subject—I could not bear that the poet could in Shakespeare never be seized, that he would never give me an account of himself. For some years Shakespeare had been the object of my study and of all my respect before I had learned to love his personality. I was not yet able to comprehend nature at first hand. All that my eyes could bear was its image only, reflected by the understanding and arranged by rules: and on this score the sentimental poetry of the French, or that of the Germans of 1750 to 1780, was what suited me best. For the rest, I do not blush at this childish judgment: adult critics pronounced in that day in the same way, and carried their simplicity so far as to publish their decisions to the world."

Schlegel, who provided much of the philosophical support of romanticism (Coleridge lifted a lot of his stuff), admired his naturalness but regretted his lack of christian piety compared to his spanish peers. "he has no philosophy" is the most common complaint after Ben Jonson's "he wants art."

Even at the height of his critical appreciation he was never entirely "respectable" (the plays were often heavily cut when performed). He was just very difficult to resist; Dryden hit the nail on the head when he said something like, "you admire Jonson; you love Shakespeare." Criticism still hasn't really got much further that that--a bewildered amazement at his human force (substitute multiplicity for "myriad-mindedness"; "objective correlatives" for the "bienseances"). "he showed life in its native colours" for the first time, thought Johnson; and De Quincey said he is "in the gravest sense . . . among the modern luxuries of life;" that life, in fact, is a new thing, since he came into it.

(Voltaire expresses his wonder, that our authour's extravagancies are endured by a nation, which has seen the tragedy of Cato. Let him be answered, that Addison speaks the language of poets, and Shakespeare, of men. We find in Cato innumerable beauties which enamour us of its authour, but we see nothing that acquaints us with human sentiments or human actions; we place it with the fairest and the noblest progeny which judgment propagates by conjunction with learning, but "Othello" is the vigorous and vivacious offspring of observation impregnated by genius. Cato affords a splendid exhibition of artificial and fictitious manners, and delivers just and noble sentiments, in diction easy, elevated and harmonious, but its hopes and fears communicate no vibration to the heart; the composition refers us only to the writer; we pronounce the name of Cato, but we think on Addison.)