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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.
- 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.
- Reddit - r/AskHistorians - When did William Shakespeare become "The best playwright ever"?
- This is not to say that he was not regarded as great in his time:
- Penguin Popular Classics (1994 edition) - Hamlet - Introduction
- There was little playing in 1593 (when he was ~29), for the theatres were shut during a severe outbreak of the plague; but in the autumn of 1594 (when he was ~30), when the plague ceased, the playing companies were reorganized, and Shakespeare became a sharer in the Lord Chamberlain's company who went to play in the Theatre in Shoreditch. During thse these months Marlowe and Kyd had died. Shakespeare was thus for a time without a rival.
- By the summer of 1598 (when he was 34) Shakespeare was recognized as the greatest of English dramatists. Booksellers were printing his more popular plays, at times even in pirated or stolen versions, and he received a remarkable tribute from a young writer named Francis Meres, in his book Palladis Tamia. In a long catalogue of English authors Meres gave Shakespeare more prominence than any other writer, and mentioned by name twelve of his plays.
- Since 1601 (when he was ~37) Shakespeare had been writing less, and there were now a number of rival dramatists who were introducing new styles of drama, particularly Ben Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Marston, and Beaumont and Fletcher who began to write in 1607.
- Penguin Popular Classics (1994 edition) - Hamlet - Introduction
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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).
- Wikipedia - Shakespeare's writing style
- Dramatic techniques
- http://penandthepad.com/dramatic-techniques-shakespeare-8540495.html
- Monologues and Soliloquies
- Recurring Imagery
- Unexpected Asides
- Dramatic Irony
- http://penandthepad.com/dramatic-techniques-shakespeare-8540495.html
- 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
- 2017.02.24 - YouTube - NativLang - What Shakespeare's English Sounded Like - and how we know
- Towards the end he gives an example of Shakespeare playing around with the ordering of words, where he combines two sentences into one, so that the audience has to untangle them:
- I with death and with
Reward did threaten and encourage him,
Not doing ’t and being done - Translation:
I threatened to kill him if he didn’t and to reward him if he did.
- I with death and with
- Towards the end he gives an example of Shakespeare playing around with the ordering of words, where he combines two sentences into one, so that the audience has to untangle them:
- StackExchange - Literature - Why did Shakespeare write in iambic pentameter?
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