Reputation
His biography, W.G. Wills: Dramatist and Painter, was written by his brother Freeman Wills in 1898. However, even by then Wills' reputation was in decline. His works were very rarely revived or read after his death and have been subject to some scathing criticism. Richard Cordell described Broken Spells as "a flatulent Napoleonic piece", adding that Wills "wavered between uninspired verse plays and noisy melodrama". Peter Thomson calls Eugene Aram "semi poetic drivel".
James Joyce alludes to him and to his play A Royal Divorce (concerning Napoleon's divorce from Joséphine) many times in Finnegans Wake.
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Famous quotes containing the word reputation:
“I see my reputation is at stake,
My fame is shrewdly gored.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“A prince must be prudent enough to know how to escape the bad reputation of those vices that would lose the state for him, and must protect himself from those that will not lose it for him, if this is possible; but if he cannot, he need not concern himself unduly if he ignores these less serious vices.”
—Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527)
“It is said that a rogue does not look you in the face, neither does an honest man look at you as if he had his reputation to establish.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)