Which of Shakespeare’s plays were hits and which were flops? We are inclined to say that plays like Hamlet, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet have had perennial success. Establishing the frequency with which Shakespeare’s plays were performed is, however, difficult. Modern scholars can establish the popularity of some early modern plays because some theatre-owners kept careful accounts of what was happening at their theatres. On this count, Shakespeare scholars have not benefited by his association with the Burbage family. This family built the theatres in which Shakespeare’s plays were performed and managed the company of actors which performed them but they did not keep a centralised record of performances. For this reason, we do not know which of Shakespeare’s plays were returned to the theatre bills and which were sheepishly taken down.

However, The Globe, the second of the Burbage family’s theatres was built seven years into Shakespeare’s career and two decades after they had established their first theatre. It was a sizeable building, designed to accommodate approximately 3000 people at every showing. Moreover, Shakespeare was set up as a significant shareholder in the venture. We might imagine, then, that in the course of Shakespeare’s career as a playwright, his former bosses had succeeded in founding an iconic of London’s public entertainments and that they considered Shakespeare relevant in some capacity.

If we cannot establish the frequency with which Shakespeare’s plays were performed, can we establish whether he could fill out the theatres that took his plays? Theoretically, the only prohibition on attendance was the entry price. To stand in the ‘pit’ of theatres such as The Globe entailed little expense and we might therefore imagine the early modern theatre as a kind of revolving door for locals. John Taylor the Waterpoet, a scrupulous observer of his society, writes that even a beggar might “with his many / Come in at a play-house, all in for one penny”. The claim is hyperbolic and marks the couplet as satiric, but the number of spectators attending early modern plays, it must be noted, was surely much greater than the number of surviving accounts would suggest.

Moreover, some of Shakespeare’s plays had a special pull factor. For example, Shakespeare’s histories are often mentioned in conjunction with his name. Cynically, one might ascribe this to Shakespeare's dominance of the niche. But Shakespeare's histories also provided their audiences with morals tempered by bloody dramas, spectacle mixed with discerning introspection, and a unity that comes close to the modern cliffhanger. They possess a syncretism that ticks the boxes of every taste. Amongst the playbooks associated with Shakespeare’s name that survive from his lifetime, history plays constitute the majority. On my count there is, within this pool, twice as many histories as there are tragedies.

Though there were many people in attendance at Shakespeare’s plays, they rarely recorded their responses. Admittedly, playgoers of a low class in London were significantly more literate than their class correspondents elsewhere in England. Indeed, there is evidence that they were primed to record the words they heard. Early modern playwrights mock this fact. In the introductory act of The Malcontent, the actor William Sly, casted as a playgoer, says: “I have most of the jests here in my table-book”. The joke is made at the expense of playgoers who faithfully transcribed a play’s jokes in the midst of its performance. Indeed, Shakespeare’s perfumed words make their ways into compilations of verse and private communications but this metric does not aid in the sense of what would have made a Shakespeare play popular.

Moreover, the transmission of Shakespeare’s poetry into compilations does even less to contextualise the evolution of Shakespeare’s reception over the centuries. Since I cannot answer this question in full, the best thing I can do to aid other answers is to turn to fuller assessments. The tastes expressed in these sources may be those of an even slighter demographic than 'compilers of compediums of verse', but they at least offer a sense of the aesthetic standards on which some educated members of a Shakespearian audience assessed his plays.

The first example I have chosen comes from the scholar, Gabriel Harvey, who scribbles in his copy of the collected works of Chaucer that “[t]he younger sort takes much delight in Shakespeares Venus, & Adonis: but his Lucrece, & his tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, have it in them, to please the wiser sort.” Gabriel Harvey showed much respect for Hamlet, and mentions it elsewhere in conjunction with Richard III, as a play to be known by any scholar. Harvey’s judgment was discriminating and so we cannot ignore his praise for Shakespeare. As if to bring his applause of Shakespeare in the copy of Chaucer into greater relief, he capitulates the paragraph with a grave observation in Latin: “Rubbish might wonder a crowd”.

Harvey’s respect for Shakespeare is not only notable in respect of the scholar’s character, but also in respect of its degree. The purpose of Gabriel Harvey’s annotation to his Chaucer is to record the finest contemporary poets; as cross-referencing this scan with a full copy of Speght’s 1598 Chaucer shows, Harvey has added his list of poets onto “A Catalogue of translations and Poeticall devices, in English mitre or verse, done by John Lidgate”, the most prodigious Chaucerian versifier. This paragraph therefore appears to serve as a statement of English literary canon. Shakespeare makes the cut.

Another famous example comes from a 1598 commonplace book. Commonplace books were a popular form of literature in the early modern period, compiling trivia, quotes, and references into a single place. The author of the relevant commonplace book, Francis Meres, writes: “As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines: so Shakespeare among y^e English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage”. This glowing praise is made in respect to Shakespeare’s dramatic works and shows, in contrast to Harvey, that Shakespeare did not make his name through a one-hit wonder. Indeed, it appears that even Titus Andronicus is judged a great piece of literature, an assessment that might have been considered unfathomable until recently.

The division of Shakespeare's achievement into comedy and tragedy may seem strange given that I (and indeed Harvey) ascribed a special place to his histories. Meres has, in fact, often been used as a launch pad for Shakespeare scholars investigating early modern generic divisions. One of the principal findings of recent scholarship is that generic divisions were less important in Shakespeare's day than they were in later centuries, when Shakespeare's plays were often recoloured, cropped, and entirely rotated to fit the image of the generic conventions they were ostensibly meant to belong to. Indeed, Richard III is considered a history by the time Shakespeare's works were collected in the First Folio, even whilst it is recognised as a tragedy by its full title: The Tragedy of King Richard the Third. Meres' esteem for Shakespeare need not exclude his very popular history plays, then, even as it seems to base its judgement on the affective properties of comedy and tragedy.

A third and final example will show that not everyone on the early modern London literary scene was a fan. Brief mention may be given to Robert Greene’s infamous mention of Shakespeare in his Groats-worth of Witte. Its invective, which is quoted below, has recently been made famous by the comedy series Upstart Crow starring David Mitchell. He describes Shakespeare as:

an vp-start Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.

In some sense, however, Greene's famous diatribe is typical of the pamphlet culture that flourished in early modern England. One should not be too surprised that Shakespeare was the object of such a gross attack. Moreover, we need to contextualise Greene's attack on Shakespeare with the observation that Green is not making the point that Shakespeare is a bad playwright but rather that he is an actor turned playwright. The success of actors at the time was a cause for anxiety and Greene employs the tropes of such anti-theatrical writing. The focus on feathers and hide resembles the sartorial interest of Stephen Gosson, who argued against actors for their "overlashing in apparel". Indeed, an anonymous essayist believed that an actors' violation of sumptuary restrictions in his role translated into violations outside it: "[an actor's] chief essence is, A daily counterfeit: He hath been familiar so long with out-sides, that he proffeseth himself (being unknowne) to be an apparent gentlemen".