Versions Compared

Version Old Version 17 New Version Current
Changes made by

Nathan Wailes

Nathan Wailes

Saved on

Key

  • This line was added.
  • This line was removed.
  • Formatting was changed.

Table of contents

...

  • 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 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

    • CheruthCutestory

      • John Dryden attributed to his genius/success the fact that he wrote to nature not the artificial form of theater (i.e. the traditional conventions first dictated by Aristotle). And he noted how realistic his characters were, which he thought placed him above and beyond everyone else. That's a very common refrain first articulated (that I'm aware of) by Dryden. That what set him apart was how real and true his characters are (one I agree with).
  • 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 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.

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.
  • Related: Shakespeare's Hamlet was apparently based on earlier works that covered the same basic plot.
    • Penguin Popular Classics (1994 edition) - Hamlet - Introduction
      • The story of Hamlet in some form is found very early in European literature.  It occurs in the Historia Danica of Saxo Grammaticus, who flourished about A.D. 1250, but the immediate source of the play is in the Histoires Tragiques of Francois de Belleforest, published in Paris in 1570.  Belleforest's story is crude and bloody.  [Description of the plot follows.]  This story was the basis of a play which was produced some time before 1589.  [Description of literary references to a Hamlet play from before Shakespeare's version came out.] There was therefore a Hamlet play in existence and popular between 1589 and 1596.  (...)  This earlier Hamlet has disappeared, but there is a crude German version known as Bestrafte Brudermord, or Fratricide Punished.
        • The fact that the earlier Hamlet play did not survive through the ages is a good example of how an artist's reputation can grow as his influences are forgotten about.

His works have tremendous variety

...

  • 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

...