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.