Sorry, N., but this is patently incorrect. No sets? Someone tell Inigo Jones, famous for his Renaissance set design! Showing not telling in acting didn't exist? I guess dumb shows weren't a thing! Let's not let assumptions about what Renaissance theater looked like get in the way of facts.

Okay, I will admit to being wrong. But you have to admit, whenever someone dies in an Elizabethan play, they have to vocally tell the audience they just got killed.

Jonson’s views on Shakespeare, which Carl quotes above, come from Jonson’s Timber: or Discoveries. This is in effect Jonson’s commonplace book, though one in which he draws on his reading to compose what are occasionally almost short essays. It is perhaps of interest that, as a prose writer (and in writing about both prose and verse), Jonson favours clarity and straightforwardness as against the more Ciceronian manner of balanced symmetries favoured by others in his time and before, a manner evident in some of Shakespeare’s dramatic prose. For me, the relevance of this to the present discussion is that it is yet another sign of the historically contingent nature of these matters.

It is perhaps also worthwhile remembering the difference in genre between Timber and the dedicatory poem to the First Folio. The First Folio was a major publishing venture – distinctly up-market, as we might say today. To have been critical of Shakespeare in such a place would have been a breach of literary decorum and fatal to the whole project.

Jonson has two other reported observations about Shakespeare, both recorded by William Drummond during Jonson’s visit (on foot…) to Scotland in 1619: “That Shakespeare wanted art”; and, later, “Shakespeare, in a play, brought in a number of men saying they had suffered a shipwreck in Bohemia, where there is no sea near by some 100 miles”. Interpreting these remarks is not straightforward, partly because they are second-hand., and because the first is so brief.

Clive

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I'm beginning to think you have no concept of time. The fact is, he wrote it in his time in modern language for that time. Had he written it in his time but in antiquated Old English diction he would not be remembered as he is today. If he were living today he would most certainly not have written the poem in antiquated language. Let that be a lesson: Speak in your own voice to be heard. Speak in woes if that's what you feel. Lamentations are the stuff of poetry. But trust your own voice. Aspire to be a vital poet rather than a stultified one. Evolve.

Every poem I've ever written was born as the greatest poem. I know they are not. But that's what it felt like at the moment of birth, even for a lowly poet like myself.

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I was referring to his comment on Shakespeare, not his version of English.

No. It does happen, but only occasionally, and usually when the death might be otherwise unclear to the audience for any number of circumstantial reasons. I'm honestly not sure where all of these absolutes are coming from, because they're neither correct nor helpful ways of thinking about art. To wit: technically, a sonnet is fourteen lines in a consistent meter with a consistent rhyme scheme and a volta. And yet we have sonnets of different lengths with varying meters, no rhyme schemes, and no clear voltas. Guidelines and traditions? Yes. Proscriptives? Not so much.

Still, N. Do you understand what I’m saying? My hunch is that until you evolve your thinking/perspective on what literary greatness is and where you fit in/what you aspire to become you will remain in an agonizing literary limbo.

To the thread: I’ve been following with great interest.

Out of curiosity—which of Shakespeare's plays have you read? And which (if any) of his contemporaries?

A related question for Shaun and other Early Modernists: Which Elizabethan plays, other than Shakespeare’s, should I put at the top of my list? I’ve seen, not read, Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” and Webster’s “Duchess of Malfi” and read the anonymous “King Leir,” which Tolstoy thought far superior to Shakespeare’s. None of them excited me as much as my Shakespearean favorites. While I sometimes think the Bard went too far by killing off Cordelia (an old debate, I know), “King Leir” ends happily with everyone still alive and kicking!

It's been a long time since I've dipped into these waters, but I found an old syllabus that gives a pretty broad overview:

The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd)
Endymion (Lyly)
Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1 (Marlowe)
Doctor Faustus (Marlowe)
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (Greene)
Edward II (Marlowe)
Arden of Faversham (Anon.)
Shoemaker's Holiday (Dekker)
The Malcontent (Marston)

From another course, I can't find the syllabus but I have some old essays and particularly remember enjoying:

Women Beware Women (Middleton)
The Revenger's Tragedy (Middleton... maybe)
Love's Cure (Beaumont and Fletcher... maybe)
The Roaring Girl (Dekker and Middleton)
Ram-Alley (Barry)

The first two on this shorter list are such outrageously tragical tragedies that they wrap back around to farce; I found them extremely funny.

Edit to add: the Northon Anthology of Early English Drama has a lot of these, though not all.