The number of academic publications focused on Doyle's fiction grew appreciably beginning in the 1970s. Most criticism focused on Holmes, but the attitude of scholars was changing: Doyle's detective sto-ries were no longer viewed as simple entertainments. Additionally, during these decades Doyle's heirs waged a series of court battles to control his estate, originally managed by his surviving sons. In 1965 Adrian Conan Doyle moved many of his father's possessions to a château in Switzerland and established a Sherlock Holmes Museum there. After Adrian's death in 1970, Denis Conan Doyle's widow sued to have the estate inventoried so it could be sold, generating a long-lasting squabble over ownership and future control. Family members and relatives by marriage bickered over copyrights, memorabilia, and (perhaps most important for scholars) papers left behind when Doyle died. As long as these papers were with-held from the public, scholarly inquiry remained seriously hampered.

Two Sensational Publications

In 1974, two books were published that generated renewed interest in Holmes and Doyle among the general reading public. The first was a novel. Of course, fiction based on the Holmes stories had appeared spo-radically in the years after Doyle's death, but the principal audience for these adaptations, sequels, prequels, and “new” adventures were diehard fans of Holmes. Twenty-nine-year-old writer and film director Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974) fills in the gap in Holmes's biography between his “demise” at the Reichenbach Falls, related in Doyle's 1893 story “The Final Problem,” and his “resurrection” years later. In Doyle's 1903 story “The Empty House,” Holmes describes to Watson his activities during this period, but Meyer creates an alternative scenario to explain Holmes's mysterious absence: Holmes was not “in the wind” at all, but at Watson's insistence was committed to the care of the up-and-coming Viennese psychiatrist Sigmund Freud in an effort to treat Holmes's cocaine addiction. Unlike many Holmes stories written by oth-ers, Meyer's novel reads much like Doyle's tales, and its appeal extended far beyond that of typical mimicry. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution became an international publishing sensation. The novel spent forty weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List. It was reviewed favorably in influential popular magazines, including Time (August 12, 1974) and the Saturday Evening Post (March 1975). The novel even received notice in academic circles.

In a famous 1926 Punch cartoon, a very large figure of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is chained to a chair, head engulfed in the clouds, eyes closed on a face that displays his clear exasperation. The source of that distress is depicted beside the chair: a much smaller figure that readers of Punch and others around the world would have instantly recognized as Doyle's master sleuth, Sherlock Holmes (May 12, 1926). Little interpretation was necessary for Doyle's contemporaries, or for anyone in succeeding decades: as much as Doyle tried for the last three decades of his life to establish his reputation as writer of what he considered serious literature, he was to be chained forever to his fictional detective.

Since Edgar Allan Poe introduced C. August Dupin in 1841, thousands of detectives have entertained readers around the world. Among British sleuths, G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, and P. D. James's Adam Dalgleish have achieved cult status in some circles. American private eyes and police detectives such as Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, Walter Moseley's Easy Rawlings, Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch, and James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux are but a few of the many who have become “close friends” of millions of readers. But as David Cohen observed recently, “There is no Journal of Poirot Studies, while there are at least 40,000 books and papers on Holmes, including psychiatric literature” (2022, 28). To be more precise: currently there are two major journals devoted to Holmes studies, two publishers who focus almost exclusively on Holmes-related materials, and more than a hundred societies worldwide dedicated to a study of what devotees call “the Canon.” How Doyle's reputation has been affected by this overwhelming attention to a small segment of his prolific output is the subject of this study.

Doyle's Critical Reputation: An Overview

The dilemma in which Doyle found himself during his lifetime is the same one any twenty-first-century scholar faces in trying to assess Doyle's reputation nearly a hundred years after his death.

For all practical purposes, after Doyle's death his creative work simply stopped being of interest to academic critics. Admittedly, some of his fiction continued to be read. The Holmes stories remained popular. Additionally, three of his novels—Sir Nigel, The White Company, and The Refugees—and his short-story collection The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard were included on a list of books recommended as collateral reading for American high-school students (Cole 1932, 343). Yet the dearth of critical commentary between 1931 and 1970 lends strong credence to the notion that he was on the way to joining the dozens of other writers popular in their own day but quickly forgotten after their deaths. For years he remained alive in public memory chiefly as the creator of the most famous fictional detective in world literature. Meanwhile, a small coterie of devotees continued to celebrate Doyle's other works, attempting to place his phenomenal success with the Holmes stories in a balanced portrait of his achievements as a writer.

Memorializing Doyle

The first biography of Doyle appeared less than a year after his death. John Lamond, author of Arthur Conan Doyle: A Memoir (1931), was an activist in the Spiritualist movement. Doyle's widow supported Lamond's work, gave him access to Doyle's papers, and wrote an epilogue for the volume. Predictably, Lamond's biography is slanted toward a defense of Doyle's involvement with the Spiritualist movement—a position that, Lamond admits, alienated Doyle from many friends and associates. The Memoir is divided in two nearly equal sections. The first traces Doyle's progress from struggling physician to internationally acclaimed writer, famous for creating Holmes. Lamond is silent on Doyle's struggles with the love triangle he created by falling in love with Jean Leckie (and carrying on an affair that may or may not have been platonic) long before his first wife, Louisa, finally succumbed to the tuberculosis that made her an invalid for more than a decade. Lamond is light on literary criticism but suggests that the historical novels and the histories of the Boer War and First World War were not likely to survive the test of time.

Even in the first section of his Memoir, Lamond takes pains to trace Doyle's progress from Roman Catholicism through phases of agnosticism and materialism to a gradual acceptance and public declaration of his belief in Spiritualism.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there was certainly no slacking of interest in Holmes among an ever-increasing public hungry for anything associated with Doyle's detective. Reprints of Doyle's tales competed with new books (including graphic novels), adaptations and expansions of the original stories, pastiches, parodies, and tributes. The film industry exploited the Holmes stories for interpretations that appealed to contemporary audiences; television reaped the benefits of viewers’ familiarity with the characters to create a number of popular and critically acclaimed new productions. A new journal, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, began publication in 2008 as an outlet for creative work modeled on Doyle's detective fiction. Mystery novelist P. D. James included a chapter on Holmes and G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown in her survey Talking about Detective Fiction (2009).

Numerous authors used the instant recognition that the name “Sherlock Holmes” engenders as a hook to attract potential readers to books that have little to do with Doyle's stories (or even with Holmes). For example, Sherlock Holmes in Babylon, and Other Essays (Anderson et al. 2004) teases readers into perusing a collection of essays on ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and post-Renaissance mathematics. Jorgen Nordenstrom's Evidence-Based Medicine: In Sherlock Holmes’ Footsteps (2007) contains little more than a paragraph on Doyle's detective in a book recommending procedural methods for new physicians in investigating illness and disease. André Didierjean and Fernand Gobert's article in the British Journal of Psychology employs the character of Holmes to demonstrate differences between experts and novices in problem-solving (2008).

Doyle's other fiction and nonfiction also began receiving greater attention from critics, particularly his science fiction. In their introduction to The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Reader (2002), Jeffrey and Valerie Meyers suggest (as Hesketh Pearson argued six decades earlier) that Doyle may not have been a deep thinker; but he was “a master of the detective story and the ripping yarn,” and “he showed in everything he wrote, whether serious or lighthearted, good humor and an almost boyish trust in life” (xxxii).

In the twenty-first century, the steady growth of critical commentary on Doyle's work begun in preceding decades poured out of academic and commercial presses. Critical commentary published during the first decade of the century is an entertaining potpourri of traditional readings and ones based on a number of new theoretical approaches and the ideologies that underpin many of these approaches.

While Harold Orel was certainly correct to say in 1992 that “the status of Doyle's posthumous reputation is not fixed” (17), by that time a critical reassessment of Doyle's work was well under way. Doyle's science fiction, adventure fiction, and even the historical novels became subjects of critical inquiry; the Holmes stories, however, attracted the lion's share of attention from critics, particularly those approaching literary study from new theoretical perspectives. The reasons for this new interest can be traced to advances in the study of detective fiction as a major literary genre. As David Trotter observed in 1991, “detective fiction has become the most frequently and most intensively theorised of all popular genres. It suits the hermeneutic requirements of almost any form of theoretical enquiry you care to mention: narratology, Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction” (66). During the 1990s, critics employing these and other new methodologies continued a revaluation of Doyle's literary achievements and the ideology his fiction promotes. As a result, the decades-long tendency of academics to ignore the Holmes stories “because they lack the stylistic complexity, moral ambiguity, and intricate psychology that are the commonplaces of modernism” (Joseph McLaughlin 2000, 27) was replaced by close readings of the kind hitherto reserved for works considered more “serious.” As Christopher Metress argues persuasively, the Holmes stories “not only can withstand the pressure of high critical seriousness, they demand it” (1994a, 40).

Criticism of Doyle's fiction published during the decade is a mixture of traditional and new methodologies. Studies focusing on Doyle's work ranged from traditional analyses of character (Kelly 1998) to discussions of intertextuality (Sweeney 1991), psychoanalytic readings (Batail 1997), theoretical analyses of urban life and suburbia at the end of the nineteenth century (Langbauer 1999, Hapgood 2000), and examinations of narrative techniques and perspective (Levine 1997). On occasion the Holmes stories were used to illuminate the work of other authors (Moreland 1997). Other articles provided insight into the way Doyle's medical training influenced his fiction (Furst 2000, Krasner 2000). In many of these discussions, one finds frequent references to Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and other theorists (as well as to Freud, whose relationship to Doyle's detective fiction remained a subject for scholarly investigation). While the majority of these essays focus on tales featuring Holmes, others contain useful and illuminating commentary on Doyle's other writings, particularly the tales featuring Professor Challenger (Ruddick 1993, Hoppenstand 1999a, Hoppenstand 1999b).

Criticism published between 2011 and 2020 followed practices established in the preceding two decades, focusing on aspects of Doyle's fiction that reveal his and his countrymen's concerns for the literary, social, political, and cultural issues that define the era in which he wrote. One finds in criticism produced during this decade a growing level of sophistication by scholars who apply advances in literary theory to close reading of Doyle's texts, often combining theoretical approaches that produce new insights into his body of work.

An excellent example of this kind of sophisticated scholarship is Daniel Cottom's essay “Sherlock Holmes Meets Dracula” (2012). Cottom's comparative study highlights the striking differences between two popular characters that represent what Cottom describes as the poles of bohemianism: Dracula the “fantasized origin,” Holmes its “fantastic end” (537). His careful study of these larger-than-life figures demonstrates the importance of bohemianism to Doyle and his contemporaries: in tales featuring these unconventional characters, “the fate of modern civilization is put at risk,” and their stories highlight how “the definitively marginal figure of the bohemian is central to the history of modernity” (537). Cottom argues that Holmes represents the late bohemian, “singular, irreplaceable, and bored almost to death” (553), who “represents art to a philistine society” (553); in his methods, “style is what is all important” (555). Part of the pleasure of reading the Holmes stories lies in the repetition of the pattern of the bohemian encountering the trivialities of life and overcoming middle-class problems with seemingly superhuman powers. “But the paradoxical position” in which Holmes finds himself is one of “fighting what he loves and upholding what he hates” (557). Doyle's genius in creating his detective was “to make an antisocial, misogynistic, drug-addicted, perverted bohemian the only person able to know society” in all its complexities (558). “Unpredictable and irreplicable,” Holmes marks “the end of any confidence in the very existence of the social order against which the figure of the bohemian has been historically articulated” (561). Cottom's careful explication of the role Holmes plays in signaling the end of an era when a single individual might comprehend all facets of society adds a touch of gravitas to Doyle's detective fiction and suggests that careful study of it might lead to new insights into the social and cultural phenomena that defined late-century Victorian England as it grappled with the advance of modernity.

Shortly after Hound was published, a brief note in the Cambridge Review (January 1902) gave birth to a line of critical commentary that has become known variously as the Great Game or the Grand Game. Frank Sidgwick, a recent Cambridge graduate, wrote an open letter to Dr. Watson (not to Doyle), accusing “Holmes's biographer” of sloppy craftsmanship because some details in the novel did not seem to match with other information in the Holmes stories. The idea of treating the stories as history rather than fiction and assuming that Holmes and Watson were real figures in adventures that actually took place in 1890s England became a pastime for thousands of Holmes devotees and led to a deluge of books and articles known variously as Sherlockiana or Holmesiana.

Ronald Knox and the Great Game

As much of Doyle's early fan mail attests, numerous readers were con-vinced that Holmes really lived and that the stories published in The Strand recounted real adventures, narrated by Holmes's real-life friend Dr. John H. Watson. The limits of treating the stories in this fashion using critical tools available and popular at the time is nowhere better manifested than in Ronald Knox's 1912 essay “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes.” Originally delivered as a lecture in 1911 and pub-lished the following year in Oxford University's Blue Book, Knox's essay is a spoof of critical methodologies, notably the Higher Criticism, which had come into vogue during the nineteenth century as a means of decon-structing the Christian Bible. Treating the Holmes stories as a source doc-ument, Knox playfully explores the many inconsistencies among them, attempting to create a chronology of events and a biography of Holmes from evidence scattered across the tales. Knowingly poking fun at the critical tradition rather than at Doyle, he cites as sources a number of ficti-tious authorities including the French critics M. Piff-Pouff and M. Papier Maché and several scholars from Germany (where Higher Criticism first became a prominent methodology) to support his “claims.” There is little doubt Knox was writing tongue in cheek, but in succeeding decades, tak-ing the Holmes canon seriously and trying to resolve “errors” as if one were dealing with a sacred text soon took on a life of its own; its practice became known as the Great Game.

Some early examples of this form of criticism may help illustrate the methods of its practitioners.

As the newcentury began, Doyle's history of the Boer War continued to attract critical attention. In a June 1901 profile of Doyle, a reviewer for Literature reported that the book, then in its twelfth edition, was “enormously successful” (June 8, 1901, 480). It was important enough to warrant reviews in the Athenaeum (November 23, 1901) and The Dial (February 1, 1901). The London Quarterly Review deemed it “the finest book yet published on the Boer War” and a heartening endorsement of the British fighting spirit (March 1901, 391). The Edinburgh Review, however, dismissed Doyle's account as a statement of the obvious about a region and a people (the Boers) already familiar to the British reading public (February 1901, 267–268). Doyle's revised and expanded editions of his History of the Boer War also drew responses, almost all focused on the historical accuracy and political wisdom of his assessment of the conflict. Typically, however, there was little agreement on the book's merits. The London Quarterly Review praised it as a display of “true patriotism and enlightened imperialism” (January 1903, 163). Yet W. D. MacGregor, whose three-part rebuttal offers an alternative view of historical events leading up to the war, challenges Doyle's support for the imperialist aims of the British government (Westminster Review 157 [1902], 477–489; 157 [1902], 597–611; 158 [1902], 28–41).

The Boer War was merely one of a number of matters of public interest about which Doyle wrote during the next thirty years. During the first decade of the 1900s he was in the public eye expressing his opinion on matters such as British diplomatic and military policy, military strategy, free trade and tariffs, divorce, and the need to produce motor cars in the United Kingdom. He ran for parliament in 1900 and 1906—though he lost both elections. He spent considerable time, effort, and personal resources trying to set right what he considered a miscarriage of justice in the cases of George Edalji, a mixed-race young man convicted of animal mutilation, and Oscar Slater, a convicted murderer. These efforts had the effect of changing the public's view of him; he was regarded not simply as a writer but as a man of “affairs,” as The Spectator dubbed him in a 1904 review.

At the risk of sounding cliché, I must begin this concluding chapter with an admonition (to myself as well as others): predicting the future is risky business. That's especially true when one tries to speculate about the future reputation of an author. Tastes—and critical methodologies—change over time, and works that lend themselves to one form of critical analysis may prove of little use to scholars adopting new methodologies. Additionally, what scholars do with texts is often guided by their own critical bias. As Robert Fraser observed more than two decades ago, “We have grown used to checking the literature of a century ago against ideologies which lie midway in time between us and its creation” (1998, 4). He explains how recent psychological theories, particularly those of Lacan, as well as feminist and postcolonial approaches have shaped readings of literary texts, including Doyle’s. “The question, Fraser asks sagely, “is whether such techniques of interpretation disclose deep structures within the work, or whether they simply encourage us to acclimatize late Victorian literature to our own cultural ecology” (4).

The preceding chapters reveal that, in the past three decades especially, Doyle's works have attracted critics’ attention—although the portrait of him and his fiction is not always flattering. Nevertheless, what emerges from a consideration of recent publications (from 1991, say, until the present) suggests that, even though commentary on Doyle's detective fiction continues to dominate academic scholarship, Doyle may have finally escaped the shackles that tied him to Holmes for nearly a century and obscured his achievements in other genres. A look at a sampling of criticism published in the past few years may give a hint of what might be expected to appear in print in the coming decade or so.

Recent Scholarly Publications

It seems likely that scholarly interest in Doyle's work will continue, and, if recent publications are any indication, new publications will contain additional insight into works outside as well as inside the Holmes canon. Most promising is an essay collection, Re-Examining Arthur Conan Doyle (2021), edited by Nils Clausson, which brings together contributions by scholars associated with Doyle criticism for decades.

In All's Well That Ends Well, ‘the end is immanent’ from its opening as its mourning-attired characters enter the stage discussing death. Of course, for theatregoers, the play's end is immanent even before it begins. Through his proverbial and metatheatrical title, Shakespeare positions his audience to adopt an end-oriented hermeneutic. We read All's Well's characters and plot in view of the comic and romantic resolution that its title signals. Does Shakespeare's play achieve this end? By its ambiguous dénouement, ‘we don't know’. Gadamer phrases an apt response for us.

Ends absorbed the attention of many people in Shakespeare's Protestant England. Theology, specifically the Christian doctrine of last things – eschatology – informed this preoccupation. Eschatology shapes a way of reading for the interpreting self and a way of reading the interpreting self that incorporates epistemological, interpersonal, ethical and psychological dimensions of human being. The doctrine permeates All's Well's end-oriented hermeneutic. Act 2, scene 4 offers a glimpse of how eschatological ideas may have inflected people's day-to-day reading of ‘the progress of an individual life’ (to borrow Frank Kermode's phrase). The fool Lavatch jestingly describes the Countess as ‘very well indeed, but for two things. […] One, that she's not in heaven, whither God send her quickly! The other, that she's in earth, from whence God send her quickly!’ (II.iv.8–12).

Self-knowledge and morality are inseparable in, and central to, Troilus and Cressida – Shakespeare's caustic, ironic, genre-bending take on both the Trojan legend and the famous, ill-fated love affair of his titular characters. Via its less than savoury characters (to follow the play's frequent metaphorical allusions to taste), Troilus offers viewers and readers a sceptical, at times contemptuous, perspective on humans as ‘self-interpreting animals’, as Charles Taylor describes us. The play exudes moral suspicion as its characters’ self-regarding misreadings of themselves contort their being towards both the other characters and the exigent moral questions within the hermeneutical situations they inhabit. Shakespeare certainly does not follow Aristotle's injunction that poets should represent classical heroes as ‘good men’, even as they expose their faults. Shakespeare's Achilles, Homer's hero, comes across as anything but ‘good’ and the same can be said for nearly all the mythological figures now relocated onto the late Elizabethan stage. Troilus's audience could well take up Montaigne's words to ask of Homer's warriors and Chaucer's sympathetic protagonists: ‘what is there in thee, thou shouldest so much glory of?’

Ironically, there is nothing to glory of in Troilus's legendary characters. Shakespeare, it seems, draws upon the theologically informed, dominant and pessimistic anthropology of his day to engender doubt about these characters, and what they might represent about the interpreting self. He had done so in Hamlet. Hamlet, one could say, takes its audience to the edge of elegy as early modern Protestant accounts of the Fall's impact on human subjectivity inform Shakespeare's figuring of hermeneutical tragedy.

In acknowledging the inconclusiveness of his ‘reading’ and ‘observations’, Much Ado's Friar serves as an emblem of Shakespeare's dramatic representations of the interpreting self. This book draws on an intellectual history that connects the Reformation to modern hermeneutics to argue that the sources of the Shakespearean selves (to borrow the title of Charles Taylor's well-known book) whom we moderns find so relevant to our own self-perceptions and experiences can be found, first of all, at the heart of the playwright's theologically full culture. Hans-Georg Gadamer, modern philosophical hermeneutics’ leading light, asks about the origins of ‘our effort to understand’: ‘Why are we interested in understanding a text or some experience of the world, including our doubts about patent self-interpretations?’ Jean Grondin, cited in my third epigraph, captures the basic consensus that the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation must feature in responses to Gadamer's inquiry.

The Reformation was the most significant impetus behind a refiguring of how people know and ensuing sense that to be human is to understand through interpretation. This chapter examines how this ‘hermeneutic revolution’, with its emphasis on interpretation as ontology, developed out of Luther's ‘reforming acts’ and the theological ideas which both drove and emerged from these acts. But first, I will take us to the end of the story – to a sketch of Shakespeare's theologically full world and the interpreting self living within it. The weight of scholarly work done in recent years has (thankfully) relieved me of the need to contend for the relevance to Shakespeare of religion and the Reformation. Instead, I will highlight key aspects of the playwright and his contemporaries’ hermeneutical experiences, experiences connected to the Reformation's role in relocating sense-making into the domain of individual being.

Hamlet needs to know. So does Hamlet's audience. Is he a coward? Hamlet's problem represents one of countless occasions in Shakespeare's plays in which their characters’ fortunes are bound up with their acts of interpretation. We could take up the words of the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer and describe these characters’ ‘experience of the world’ as ‘hermeneutical’. In turn, Shakespeare's characters and the worlds they occupy compel interpretations. Our experience of them is hermeneutical.

Describing his dramas this way brings Shakespeare close to the spirit of our time. We share with him, it seems, the assumption that to be human is to be an interpreter who seeks understanding, but does not always arrive at it. Understanding is at once the mode of being ‘of human life itself’ and ‘always interpretation’. So wrote Gadamer, whose groundbreaking work in the later twentieth century continues to demarcate the field of modern philosophical hermeneutics and whose influence is felt across the humanities today. Gadamer's insistence (alongside his teacher Martin Heidegger) that interpretation is basic to being – hermeneutics’ ‘so-called ontological turn’ away from method – echoes through present-day conceptions of selfhood. It seems a given, at least in the historical and cultural context out of which I write, that the modern self is what I call an ‘interpreting self’. Otherwise put, we are always striving to know from within a ‘hermeneutical situation’, that is, ‘a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision’. The entirety of our living embodies a tension. We are ‘opened’ toward knowing, yet inevitably delimited by our ‘finitude and historicity’.