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  • Reddit - r/AskHistorians - Was Shakespeare better than his contemporaries or did his work just survive?
    • Shakespeare wasn't beyond reproach in his own time and afterward, and much of the school of thought that builds Shakespeare up to be the ne plus ultra of Early Modern drama and in fact all theater ever is a later invention of the 18th and 19th centuries. That view of Shakespeare's works turns into a hazy kind of historical revisionism really fast -- there were many other authors besides Shakespeare working during Shakespeare's lifetime and people liked those other authors' works enough to pay to watch them performed. Shakespeare didn't own the game, and there were authors writing challenging and powerful plays in styles very different from Shakespeare's, as well as authors writing semi-predictable comedies and tragedies.

      I like Shakespeare a lot, but I think the popular focus on Shakespeare as the best writer in the English language ever to exist, or the best Early Modern dramatist, distorts the picture. People can be so focused on Shakespeare as the best Early Modern dramatist that other Early Modern English writers get treated like sideshows, or discussed solely in terms of how they compare to Shakespeare. Our expectations regarding Elizabethan drama have been shaped by Shakespeare, but had Shakespeare never existed there would still have been Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson -- and then John Webster, John Ford, Thomas Kyd, George Chapman, and many more. Plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries are still being studied and performed all over the world, and at their best they're really damn good. Whether these works are cumulatively or individually better than Shakespeare's works is a subjective literary judgment, but Shakespeare wasn't the sole great writer rising out of a pile of dross, he was one of many competitive, collaborative individuals working in a particular timeframe.
  • Reddit - r/AskHistorians - When did William Shakespeare become "The best playwright ever"?

He

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  • It seems this may not be totally true:
    • Merriam-Webster - 10 Words Shakespeare Never Invented
      • Summary: People got the idea that Shakespeare invented lots of these words and phrases because the 1928 Oxford English Dictionary listed Shakespeare as being the first place where lots of these words were known to have appeared.  Now that researchers are going through other documents, we're finding earlier uses of these words in other documents of the time.
    • StackExchange - Literature - How many of Shakespeare's words in his plays were new?
    • Also, common sense would suggest that making up words could make it harder for people to understand what was being said.
      • There is a similar problem in rap with slang and proper nouns: if a rapper uses slang the audience doesn't know the definition to or references a proper noun the audience isn't familiar with, the word loses its impact and the audience may end up confused.  With slang, though, a person can ask a friend afterwards who may know what the word means; but if Shakespeare is just making a new word out of thin air, that avenue to listener comprehension is gone.
      • New phrases may be more easily understood than new words since the words that make up the phrase will be understood by the audience.

He based his plays on known-to-be-good Greek tragedies

  • The idea here is that Shakespeare's works are "standing on the shoulders of giants".  So in the same way that Eminem's reputation benefited from the innovations in style that were actually first introduced by others (e.g. Rakim, Nas), Shakespeare's reputation among some people may be benefiting from people associating all of the emotional power of his stories with Shakespeare himself rather than associating some of that emotional power with the earlier Greek stories / playwrights.
  • One possible interpretation of the saying "good artists copy; great artists steal" is that "copying" is when the general public knows that you are not the first artist to introduce an idea, whereas "stealing" is when the general public thinks you are the first to come up with an idea.  Thus you become "great" in the minds of the public because you seem able to come up with lots of never-seen-before ideas.

His works have tremendous variety

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based his plays on known-to-be-good Greek tragedies

  • The idea here is that Shakespeare's works are "standing on the shoulders of giants".  So in the same way that Eminem's reputation benefited from the innovations in style that were actually first introduced by others (e.g. Rakim, Nas), Shakespeare's reputation among some people may be benefiting from people associating all of the emotional power of his stories with Shakespeare himself rather than associating some of that emotional power with the earlier Greek stories / playwrights.
  • One possible interpretation of the saying "good artists copy; great artists steal" is that "copying" is when the general public knows that you are not the first artist to introduce an idea, whereas "stealing" is when the general public thinks you are the first to come up with an idea.  Thus you become "great" in the minds of the public because you seem able to come up with lots of never-seen-before ideas.

His works have tremendous variety

  • He sets his works in lots of different places.
  • His plays cover many different aspects of life; he isn't retreading the same idea over and over again.  He made comedies and tragedies, whereas nowadays many directors will just make the same kind of movie over and over again.

He is/was (incorrectly) thought to have invented many words and phrases still in use today

  • It seems this may not be totally true:
    • Merriam-Webster - 10 Words Shakespeare Never Invented
      • Summary: People got the idea that Shakespeare invented lots of these words and phrases because the 1928 Oxford English Dictionary listed Shakespeare as being the first place where lots of these words were known to have appeared.  Now that researchers are going through other documents, we're finding earlier uses of these words in other documents of the time.
    • StackExchange - Literature - How many of Shakespeare's words in his plays were new?
    • Also, common sense would suggest that making up words could make it harder for people to understand what was being said.
      • There is a similar problem in rap with slang and proper nouns: if a rapper uses slang the audience doesn't know the definition to or references a proper noun the audience isn't familiar with, the word loses its impact and the audience may end up confused.  With slang, though, a person can ask a friend afterwards who may know what the word means; but if Shakespeare is just making a new word out of thin air, that avenue to listener comprehension is gone.
      • New phrases may be more easily understood than new words since the words that make up the phrase will be understood by the audience.

Speculative: His works are in English, the language spoken by the people you're listening to who are praising him

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  • Related links
    • Wikipedia - Shakespeare's writing style
      • Shakespeare's characters were complex and human in nature.
      • He made the protagonist's character development central to the plot
      • He changed what could be accomplished with drama (by making character development central to the plot).
  • Dramatic techniques
  • He writes lyrics that are open to more than one interpretation / ambiguous / have more than one meaning.
    • The Beatles wrote lyrics that were open to interpretation, but I think in some cases they were just writing nonsense that their listeners would interpret as containing secret meaning.
    • Shakespeare also wrote things that had full double-meanings, like double-entendres.

Misc

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