Are you saying that there are plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries that are as great as Lear, Hamlet, or The Tempest? I hope the answer is yes, since it would be wonderful to discover new plays that are as good as Shakespeare at his very best. I'm skeptical, but open-minded.

Weren't most of Shakespeare's contemporary playwrights* influenced by him, and he by them? So if he hadn't existed, they might have written different plays than they did. (Likewise, he would have written differently if they hadn't existed to influence him.)

* His contemporary playwrights based in London, that is. Not the wonderful Spanish playwrights active at the same time, alas. And he apparently wasn't influenced by those, either, although they probably used the same source materials for things like the Romeo and Juliet story. [See below.]

[Edited to name some names: Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), Lope de Vega (1562-1635), Juan Ruiz de Alarcón (1581-1639), and Tirso de Molina (1583-1648). Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681) was a little too young to be considered Shakespeare's contemporary, from a professional standpoint.]

(Cervantes and Shakespeare both died on April 22, 1616, but Spain and England were using different calendars; technically, they died 10 days apart.)

A Shakespeare Companion 1564-1964, edited by F. E. Halliday (Penguin 1964) has an entry on Lope de Vega containing the following information:

I think Shaun means that the work of his contemporaries is good enough that if we didn't have Lear and Hamlet to measure it against, we would venerate it the way we venerate those plays.

The more I think about it (and I'm embarrassed not to have thought much about it before) the more amazed I am at what the Elizabethan dramatists accomplished as a group. English drama before them was (I think) rudimentary. Shaun is surely right that even if Shakespeare had never existed, it would be astounding that they went in so short a time from those rudiments to Marlowe.

Can anyone point me toward books about this collective accomplishment?

Though there doesn't seem to be evidence of direct influence on English drama by Spanish drama, and specifically by Lope de Vega, before or during Shakespeare's time, I have to think that Lope's structural innovations must have trickled over somehow. Maybe through the Netherlands....

Lope probably did actually see England, but didn't set foot there. He was on one of the few ships of the Spanish Armada that made it home after the naval disaster.

A summary of Lope's most notable innovations (from Wikipedia), for the curious:

Lope and his circle were also known for including two or more plot lines and multiple locations in a single play, which had been no-no's according to the previous rules of drama.

TL;DR: Lope's loosening of those limitations clearly benefitted drama far beyond Spain's borders.

You may be right, Julie, (in the implication you tactfully avoid stating) that it's parochial to view this as an English-only accomplishment.

(I was thinking of adding to my post above to avoid any impression that I was ignoring your point about mutual influence (in my comment about how the group's accomplishments might be viewed if had Shakespeare had never existed). The generally-agreed-on chronology, I think, suggests that Marlowe accomplished great work before he could have been influenced by Shakespeare's. I agree with what you say about mutual influence.)

Yes, Max has the gist of what I was going for. Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy was written before Shakespeare was active, and possibly/probably before Shakespeare's first play was performed as well. There is an undeniable influence of Kyd's play on Hamlet, even though there's a suspected Ur-Hamlet out there too. Imagine the Ghost sitting on the side of the stage for the entire performance, openly wondering from time to time when he's going to be avenged. I would never say that The Spanish Tragedy is "better" than Hamlet, but it seems to have been a very popular play at the time (performed well into the 1590s), and had there not been a Hamlet, who's to say that we wouldn't be lauding it as the preeminent revenge tragedy? Pure speculation, I know, but most modern readers would now read The Spanish Tragedy long after they were familiar with Hamlet, and it's hard not to come away from that experience thinking "Wow, so much of that is reminiscent of Hamlet!"...even though that line of thought should rightly be the other way around.

My opinion is that Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, The Tempest, and perhaps a few others by Shakespeare are "better" than the best of his contemporaries. But I can't help but suspect that part of why I think that way is that I read and studied all of them before I read much Marlowe, or any Middleton, Ford, Webster, Fletcher, Heywood, Kyd etc. There's a formative familiarity to Shakespeare that colors my perception a bit. Then again, the only play I can recall making me truly tear up when reading it (I'm not the tearing-up type) is Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness. For whatever that's worth. But one of my strong feelings, which I expressed somewhere earlier in this thread, is that if we're not just judging by the best of Shakespeare, and judging by works beyond his "greatest hits," there are certainly many better plays and playwrights. Comedy is a flexible category that includes a lot of plays that aren't necessarily "funny," but I think I'd feel comfortable saying that several other contemporaries did humor better than Shakespeare. Jonson and Fletcher in particular, and someone mentioned Beaumont's Knight of the Burning Pestle, the text of which evokes uproarious hilarity -- you can picture the absurdity on the stage, aided by a pair of low-born "audience members" who are actually actors, constantly urging the playing company to change the script to accommodate the talents of Rafe, the grocer's apprentice.


Yes! And this is an important point that goes both ways. When we try to elevate Shakespeare to the level of a god among mortals, we have to ignore the extensive network of influences and collaborations that were a part of Shakespeare's cultural fabric. And vice versa. History has often pulled Shakespeare free of that network, which is a shame. As I've said probably a dozen times, Shakespeare really was great, "the greatest," or whatever encomium you wish to apply...but it's best to see that greatness in context, and recognize that so many parts and pieces of what made him great are evident in his contemporaries. And yes, some of their works do seem to trump some of his. Volpone and The Alchemist have come up a couple of times, but they really have such fantastic plotting that it's a wonder they're not household titles. The Duchess of Malfi is a phenomenal tragedy, as is The Renegado (technically a "tragi-comedy"). I could just keep throwing worthwhile titles out there, but you get the gist. Maybe most of these plays couldn't exist without Shakespeare's influence, but in many cases, Shakespeare's plays couldn't exist without the influence of other great dramas.


P.S. Transnational influences on the English Renaissance are beyond my scope, but I have read (and own) an excellent academic book on the matter for anyone interested in what Julie says about Spanish influences. Eric Griffin's English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain is worth checking out.

Ooh! Thanks for the book reference. (And there we go, influencing each other...)

Then why do you disagree with me? If he HAS become the greatest by any measure, why must we even entertain lesser work? What purpose is there left in being a poet when everything that can be said has already been said and said perfectly?

N., this has been covered literally dozens of times in this thread alone. I could answer it again in a dozen different ways, but at my core, I just come back to: who cares if Shakespeare's "the greatest"? I mean that question literally. Who cares, and moreover, why should we care? I think that every time I've acknowledged that Shakespeare's "the greatest," I've either done it flippantly or in passing...because it's not a thing that matters. Like Shakespeare. Dislike Shakespeare. Love Shakespeare. Hate Shakespeare. Bring a subjective experience to the table based on your initial feelings. Learn more and maybe you'll modify those feelings, or maybe they'll stay the same. I hated Faulkner the first time I read him. Later I read a Faulkner story I liked (for an undergraduate class), and then a Faulkner novel I liked, and now I would never say I "hate Faulkner." But if I did, who cares? Art's not a competition. Shakespeare is not Simone Biles. (Though yet again, as others have already noted, even the sports analogy falls flat, because taking the "X is the greatest, so why bother" approach means that we should eliminate gymnastics from the Olympics, and any little girl who is inspired by watching Biles perform aerobatic miracles should not strive to follow her path, because...why should she?)

I don't know. I don't think this thread is really having any impact on you, which is a shame. It seems like lots of others have gotten a lot out of it, and I know I certainly have. Most of us actively make art and enjoy it. We can look up to Shakespeare and say "Man, that guy was great!" But I think precious few of us would follow up by saying "So since I suck in comparison, why bother writing at all?" It's just not how most creative people think, because it's soul-crushingly unproductive. Do art. Have fun. Be great in your own eyes. If other people agree your work is great, well, hooray! If they don't, you can try to get better...or don't care about what other people think. Either option is fine, really.

I'm sorry, but I think this mentality is entirely wrong. The most important thing anyone can have is legacy. And legacy cannot exist where there is no more room. Only one person will ever be remembered as THE definitive in any field. If you can't achieve that, then I can't even fathom how anyone could justify existing.

But Shakespeare wrote, "“I would give all my fame for a pot of ale and safety.” (Henry V)

Well, if you have your answer, then why are you here on a poetry board? I'm asking sincerely. You have decided that no one is better than Shakespeare, and therefore there's no point in writing -- and by logical extension, anyone who came after Shakespeare is inferior, and were all fools for even trying. If you want to cling to that impossibly limited worldview, you are more than welcome to do so. But it makes it rather hard to have any kind of enlightening discussion when one person just sits there stubbornly repeating dogma very few would agree with. Honestly, if this were a Turing test, I think you would have failed awhile ago, because holding to this idea of "there can be only one!" is strange, especially when so many of us have shown that there can be many greats among the greatest. It's weird and foreign to me that anyone can think otherwise, but whatever floats your boat!

Because I had hoped there were people here who shared my view that someone needs to become a better poet than Shakespeare. Evidently, I was wrong.

I'll become a better poet than Shakespeare, if it takes the pressure off you. Happy to help.

There are many "better" poets than Shakespeare. This thread has largely become about Shakespeare's plays, and that's the context in which I've passively acknowledged that he's potentially "the greatest" playwright in the English language. There's no established criteria, and it's likely folly to try to come up with some that can be universally applied, but sure -- I can't think of anyone else who I could claim is a greater overall playwright than Shakespeare. If we start breaking it down into categories, I would feel quite comfortable saying there's likely no better English tragedian than Shakespeare. I wouldn't argue against his largely unrivaled excellence with history plays either (but let's not forget that Marlowe had a hand in much of the three parts of VI Henry). Comedies? I think there could be some strong arguments in favor of others...even among his contemporaries. But all of this is pretty arbitrary and falls in the realm of "informed opinion" because (for the millionth time), we can't really apply objective measurements to a subjective field.

Shakespeare's Sonnets have been my academic specialty for awhile now. I've published academic articles on them, have presented at conferences on them, am writing a book on them, had a dissertation chapter on them... I don't have the Sonnets memorized, and can't claim to know all 154 of them inside and out, but I do feel I can talk confidently about their relative merits. And as I said earlier in this thread (an ever-increasing refrain here, I find), I don't think Shakespeare is the greatest poet. He's a great one, sure. Venus and Adonis garnered Shakespeare his original notability as a writer -- it was far more popular then than it is now (which is saying something). But the more I think about what kind of criteria would constitute "greatest," I can comfortably shuffle a few others above him. Milton and Donne, surely. Probably Sidney. And if we're going beyond the Renaissance, there are many 19th and 20th century poets I could see getting the mantle of "greatest" -- or at least have reasonable claims I couldn't really deny. I still think it's a stupid and pointless endeavor to seriously pursue the idea that there can and should be only one greatest that the rest must aspire to, but if we're playing that game (and it truly IS a game)...let's actually play it.

I'll start. I claim that Milton is the greatest poet of all time. From his formative years through to his death, he carefully curated his development as a poet, even as he became a fervent anti-Royalist parliamentarian, often marked by his political pamphlets. His 1645 Poems is a brilliant document of his poetic development to that point, and contains arguably one of the best elegies (and "monodies") of all time in "Lycidas." His sonnets are frequently exceptional, often channeling Spenser and Shakespeare, but improving upon both. But what makes Milton the greatest is his 10565-line masterpiece, Paradise Lost. The sheer depth and breadth of this work made it essentially the final epic poem -- not in fact, perhaps, but certainly in legacy. His Satan is the archetype of most Satans (or other devils) in modern media. Paradise Lost is frequently quoted by people who have never read it, or don't even know the provenance of what they're quoting. And to cap it all off, Milton was blind when he wrote it. Sure, Shakespeare had 154 sonnets, the popular-in-its-time Venus and Adonis and the slightly-less-popular Rape of Lucrece among others...but can those really measure up to the legacy of Milton and his ubiquitous Paradise Lost?

I've been searching for ways of thinking about the speed with which European drama went from morality plays (which I--wrongly?--think primitive; or, maybe more accurately, from the plays of Ancient Greece) to the masterpieces of Marlowe (and Lope?) and then Shakespeare.

What might have been a more expected rate of development? How might we know?

Comparisons will be imperfect for lots of obvious reasons, but I haven't come up with a better way of thinking about this.

Are there other Renaissance accomplishments worth thinking about in this context? I think I mean artistic accomplishments. Am I wrong to think scientific development too different an animal to be helpful here?

The Greeks took longer to go from their first one-actor drama competitions to the masterpieces of Aeschylus and co. that they preserved.

Film has been offered in this thread as a basis for comparison. The development from the first sound feature to Citizen Kane was relatively quick. Silent film might give a stronger analogy--certainly for comparison with the Greeks, in terms of creating a genre out of whole cloth.

Are there other comparisons worth thinking about? Is there a better way than comparison to think about this?

If we're not limiting ourselves to artistic endeavours I think there are a lot of technological comparisons that one could make:

- 66 years from the first airplane flight to the moon landing

- ~850 years from gunpowder to the Gatling gun; ~80 years from the Gatling gun to the atomic bomb

- the first computers in the 1950s; the first web browser in 1991; the first smartphone in the mid-late aughts; generative AI in the early 2020s

Shaun, Shakespeare's plays mostly consist of poetry. I can't imagine limiting myself to his sonnets and a few longer poems to show what he could do as a poet. And the level of the poetry in his plays is mainly good, but frequently exquisite. I like Milton a lot, but he just doesn't have the range that Shakespeare has. I've read many other Renaissance dramatists with great pleasure, and I am sorry that so many excellent ones, such as Marlowe, Webster, Tourneur, Middleton, and Ford, are overlooked because of Shakespeare's preeminence. Shakespeare stands out for having greater depth to his characterization, a really astonishing grasp of human psychology, a sound sense of what works dramatically, but it is his poetry that has always knocked me out.

Susan

I would take Larkin's poems over anyone's, including Shakespeare's (though not over the poetry in Shakespeare's plays).

Larkin's "Aubade" (the best of many strong poems) captures the terror of death--a basic feature of life for many of us--more strongly than any other piece of writing I know. Shakespeare's sonnet 73, lovely as it is, can't hold a candle to it.

*

Thanks, Christine, for that thought-provoking list, including

Maybe in a generation, people will start such a list with: X years from the creation of generative AI to the first AI-written masterpiece. :)

I hope others will add to the list or otherwise share thoughts.

If we're ignoring generic distinctions -- play versus poetry -- then it's a different question entirely...though that gets to the heart of my earlier refrain about establishing objective criteria for the "greatest" being nigh on impossible. Technically, you're right: Shakespeare's plays are predominantly in blank verse. Of course, so are those of most of his contemporaries. Calling Shakespeare's plays "poetry" widens the goalposts considerably, meaning we would have to look at the "poetry" of any contemporaneous play (or masque, for that matter). But if you're using poetry in the broader, more imprecise sense of "beautiful language," that's naturally a subjective concern that is tantamount to an opinion. An educated one, an informed one, and a viable one...but if we're playing the game of "greatest poet," I don't know if calling the plays poetry is fair play.

Also, I'm not quite sure what you mean by Milton's range. He is someone who has written the most notable and studied epic in our language, as well as works ranging from sonnets to masques to elegies to poems in a variety of forms, short and long. That's not even factoring in his prose tracts and dramas like Samson Agonistes, which are chock full of poetic language. Topically, I will concede that Milton rarely writes about love on the interpersonal level of many poets...but when he does, it's gutting. Case in point: Sonnet 23.

Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,
Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescu'd from death by force, though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom wash'd from spot of child-bed taint
Purification in the old Law did save,
And such as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind;
Her face was veil'd, yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin'd
So clear as in no face with more delight.
But Oh! as to embrace me she inclin'd,
I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night.


Knowing that he is blind, and had a beautiful -- visual -- dream of his dead wife, only to awaken to a sightless, wifeless world... That has an emotional depth I have never seen in Shakespeare. Add to that the clever allusion to Petrarch via Spenser via Raleigh, and the poem is a figurative powerhouse as well.

Shaun, if a play is written in verse, then it is both a play and verse. So I count all of Shakespeare's writing in verse--including the songs and blank verse of his plays--as poetry. When I talk about Shakespeare's range, I am alluding to the range of human experience that he covers in his plays, and the range of tone and technique that he suits to the range of content. Milton doesn't do comedy, and there are large swaths of human experience that he doesn't touch on. He is moving, impressive, and memorable in what he does cover, but Shakespeare is more versatile.

Susan

Thank you for proving my entire point.

That's just a long way of saying Milton failed as a poet.

Honestly, you are all claiming to disagree with me only to echo everything I am saying. You all agree he cannot be rivalled and there is inherently less value in reading the works of others like Milton. You are just saying everything I am, except you're not saying the quiet part aloud. You all agree you're going to make works inferior to Shakespeare and nobody can ever rival him... but you're still gonna write anyway. That's like building a tower knowing fully a gust of wind is gonna knock it down at any moment. Why are you even bothering when you know the outcome is already failure? I do not understand this!

You have developed an elaborate justification for not writing poetry. Really, you don't need one. Just don't write. Nobody will complain.

You all agree with me but insist on writing. This is my confusion. I don't get it.

N., this is patently ridiculous, and I think you know it. I think it's also why I get PM's from members saying you're a "bot" or a "troll." Nobody except you has said anything in the ballpark of "there is inherently less value in reading the works of others like Milton." I have said SO many times in this thread (as have others) that art is not a competition. It's not about who is or is not "the greatest." You have this impossibly limited view that if you can't be better than Shakespeare, you've failed. I don't think a single member here believes that. I have never written to be "better" than anyone, because that's typically not the point of writing (unless that's an inner motivator). Not being "greater than Shakespeare" is not a failure, because (again, again, again) that's not what we write for. There's a reason why the Norton Anthology of Poetry is well over 2000 pages, containing several hundred poets (and just in English). Poets before Shakespeare, poets after Shakespeare, poets few recognize, poets most recognize... Shakespeare gets quite a few pages, but it would be an awfully slim anthology if it were his works alone.

Your analogy about the tower is flawed, but I can fix it for you. What you are actually saying is that the only building in a large city that matters is the tallest one, and anyone who cannot make a tower taller than the tallest is unworthy (but is also somehow foolish to even try). You also seem to suggest that there is no point for any tower but one...and yet a city with a single tower is not a city at all: it's a barren landscape devoid of anything interesting except a single, impressively tall tower! Continuing this analogy, with a fixation on only the tallest tower, you miss the hundreds of other beautiful buildings surrounding it. Some are short, some are tall, some are historical sites, some are brand new, some have different architectural styles, some are worthwhile variations...but they're all different, all unique, and all make up a distinctive skyline, even if one tower looms a little higher than the rest. When we think of Chicago, we might think of the Willis Tower as a distinctive feature -- it's the tallest building, and a tourist attraction. But while the Willis Tower is an impressive spectacle, Chicago is far, far more than just that recognizable landmark.

I know my words here aren't going to sway you, because nothing in this thread has. It feels like a real-life example of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave," and I literally feel bad for anyone who has such a closed-minded view of the nature of art. But here's the fun irony: I created this thread as a way to address your perspective in a measured, educational way. The result has been a long, enriching, nuanced thread with some wonderful insights from dozens of Eratosphere members. I'm certain that I'm not the only one who has looked forward to reading others' responses, considering their insightfulness, and weighing in when I figured I had something reasonably intelligent to contribute. And that's thanks to you, N.! This thread wouldn't have existed without me feeling the need to push back on the notion of Shakespeare being the only worthwhile writer. Maybe the thread won't be lauded as the greatest thread of all time in 400 years, but hey, some of us have enjoyed it anyhow.

It's hard to take you seriously, N, because your logic is so ridiculous.

Let's, just for argument's sake, say that Shakespeare is the "best poet ever" and that this means there is no point in writing because nobody could ever match him. This seems to be your position. A very odd one for a member of a poetry workshop but there it is.

Presumably, by this logic, you must think that Milton, Blake, Keats, Dickinson, Eliot, Plath (etc etc until today) should not have bothered writing either, since they came after Shakespeare. So you would like the entire history of poetry to have stopped soon after the early 17th century.

Here's where it gets really silly.

Before Shakespeare began his writing career, presumably somebody else must have been "the best poet ever". Chaucer maybe? So, by your logic Shakespeare himself should not have bothered writing because, well, how could he ever match Chaucer?

And before Chaucer...

Do you see how reductio ad absurdum all this is?

Personally, when I write a poem I don't see myself as in competition with anyone. Shakespeare is wonderful but dozens of writers, and individual poems, have given me as much joy and magic. I strive, perhaps, to be somewhere in their company and, importantly, something beyond my control makes me love the act of creation itself. The idea that there is one unattainable peak is beyond silly. It's interesting, I think, that there is no consensus on who the second best poet is. That's because there's nothing scientific or objective about this ranking endeavour. Shakespeare just happens to have been placed at the top because humans have a natural tendency to want to create hierarchies.

If you must write, you will write. It's that simple.

Shaun, Mark, Chris even,

What evidence is there that N. is even reading our responses to N. (or that N. has any interest in reading anything, including the plays or poems of Shakespeare)? What purpose is there in disputing with him, rather than continuing our discussion?

Those are rhetorical questions, though I suppose if there were answers, I'd be interested in them--maybe in a separate thread, which is where all the is-the-purpose-of-writing-to-defeat-Shakespeare? stuff, IMO, belongs.

Very little, Max, it's true. And yes, halfway through writing my post I did wonder why I was bothering. However, something about N's relentless, one-note negativity seems to have been a catalyst to a very interesting, articulate thread, almost as if in defiant contrast.

But I agree, the "is there any point writing" argument is a silly dead end.

Yes, Chaucer is far too recent. And why limit ourselves to English poetry? Quintilian wrote:

“Like his own conception of Ocean, which he says is the source of every river and spring, Homer provides the model and the origin of every department of eloquence. No one surely has surpassed him in sublimity in great themes, or in propriety in small.”

I’m sure many would still agree a thousand years later. Shaun can correct me on this, but I read somewhere that there’s no evidence Shakespeare knew Homer. If true, it may be a good thing.

We agree that Shakespeare is, as the kids say, a ballin' poet. As to the rest of your proposition, I'll let Stephen Fry answer for me, and this will be my last engagement with the topic:

Getting back to the actual thread at hand—

Over the summer I read The Odyssey, I think for the first time straight through, although I know I read bits of it in undergrad and had a general cultural-zeitgeist level of familiarity with the story. It was such a rich reading experience! I have Fagles's translation, which is pretty prosy poetry, but easily carried me right along the whole time.

We're far in time and culture from the world of The Odyssey but I doubt there are many people who haven't felt the same longing for home that Odysseus feels for Ithaca and Penelope, even to the point of giving up everything else to attain it:

It's moving thread to trace throughout the whole poem, and when he finally attains it... well, the whole latter half of Book 23 is just lovely.

Shaun, that's a beautiful (and yes, gut-wrenching) sonnet; thank you for posting it. Where would you suggest someone start with Milton?

Fair enough, Mark. I suppose I was saying exactly what I was objecting to N. saying: "Don't discuss what you're discussing! It's not worthwhile!"

As my love of Larkin might suggest, I don't object to negativity. I do object to the shallowness of N's argument and N's repeating it again and again without addressing the thoughtful objections others have raised or in any way developing it.

Mark's answer is also my answer, and echoes a comment I made a few days (or pages) ago: this thread isn't about N., and never was. Even if he (?) had a post that inspired me to create it, it's the dogmatic idea -- that there is ONE greatest and no one can ever be better, so it's not worth even trying -- that has given this thread its life. Mark's "catalyst" comment is almost literally true, because a catalyst itself doesn't change, even as it causes a reaction around it. N. doesn't seem to be changing at all, but this thread has been a joy to read and contribute to as it has evolved.



Well...Troilus and Cressida is an account of events in the Iliad, though through the lens of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (when I was a Ph.D. student, I actually wrote a comparative analysis of the two). George Chapman was one of Shakespeare's contemporaries and likely a friend/acquaintance. His translation of the Iliad came out in 1598, so I doubt Shakespeare wasn't aware of it. Harder to pin down The Odyssey, however. Shakespeare loved the classics (especially Ovid), but I think (but am not 100% sure) that the general consensus is that Shakespeare didn't know Greek. His drawing from Plutarch was always from North's English translation. There's a book I've come across before that was called something like Shakespeare's Books, but I looked for that title recently and couldn't find it (there's another book with a similar title, but it's not the one I was thinking of). But yes, Shakespeare definitively knew SOME Homer through translation, but probably not all.

I would 100% suggest the 1645 Poems. I say that not because I have a particular interest in that volume (I presented on it at Renaissance Society of America's conference this past March, and will be doing so at RSA again next year), but because Milton's fingerprints are all over it, which was at least slightly uncommon of poetry editions by that time. He has a few explanatory headnotes to some poems, and one in which he admits to the reader that it was a poem that he abandoned because he had been too young to do the subject justice (which begs the question why he included it in the first place!). There's a great 20th century reprinting that's been long out of print, but is relatively cheap and available if you look for it. The editor is Cleanth Brooks. Here's a link to a copy I just located on Abebooks (my go-to for used scholarly books), but the link will probably expire when someone buys that copy, so mea culpa if it's nullified soon.

$13 for the book and $32 to ship to Canada—woof. I'll have to pass on that particular copy, but I'll definitely keep an eye out elsewhere. Thanks!

EDIT:

The collection can be downloaded as a free ebook from Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31706

For those who prefer to listen, there is a public domain LibriVox recording available as well: https://archive.org/details/miltons_...1911_librivox/

That's actually a completely different collection...which is completely fine, of course, but the 1645 Poems specifically have the poems (and two masques) in a particular order, likely curated by Milton himself (or in consultation with bookseller Humphrey Moseley). If you're just reading his poems as poems, any collection is fine...but if you want to see them as Milton first published them, you really can't beat the 1645 Poems via the edited/reprinted edition I noted above.

I think I should defend myself from people saying things about me. First of all, I hold this standard to every field, so I am not arguing this is unique to poetry or playwriting. I believe that the only thing in existence that matters is legacy. Nothing else matters. I don't think happiness, children, health, etc. any of that matters when put against legacy. And the only way to secure a legacy, truly, is to become the greatest in your field. Shakespeare achieved total mastery to the point later readers elevated him to the status of a god. He will never leave that position and will be remembered forever in that role. If he can't be usurped from the role, then you cannot acquire that legacy yourself, so there's no point in conducting your field if there's no more room. I do not know why people are disagreeing with me on this. Legacy is the only thing that can outlast you. We're all flesh and bones that will turn into dust, but legacy will outlast all of that. We should be dedicating ourselves solely to this pursuit above all other things. This is why poetry and all art is a competition, because if you fail to be remembered, then your life will have been a few decades and then dust. I don't know how else to describe that other than failure. This is why I am trying to tell you all that if you can't surpass him, there's not much point. Because if it can't surmount his legacy, then it's doomed to oblivion. A life forgotten isn't much different than a life that never existed to begin with.

I wonder if Shakespeare was very concerned with his legacy. He did absolutely nothing to preserve his plays for posterity after his death. In fact, he took pains to keep his plays from being published during his lifetime because there were no copyright laws to protect him from rival theater owners mounting productions of his plays. Shakespeare seems to have been more interested in making money to support his wife and children.

You might enjoy this short short story by Isaac Asimov, “The Immortal Bard.” It discusses how Shakespeare might react to being transported to the present day and learning about his legacy.

https://www.ntschools.org/cms/lib/NY...tal%20Bard.pdf

Then the fact he got by accident what people have bled for is even sadder. He was just so perfect, so above us pathetic mortals, he achieved godhood without even trying. If that's suppose to comfort me, it doesn't.

I'm glad you consider my existence to amount to no more than a firestarter.