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Originally Posted by E. Shaun Russell
What's interesting is that while you're certainly not wrong about Shakespeare's popularizing of timeless themes, those themes were themselves popular before Shakespeare was writing.
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This also fits with the Dylan analogy to some extent. Many of the themes were around, but Dylan presented them in a way that pervaded public consciousness. And he was the first to do it in popular, modern music.
Maybe what we're looking at with Shakespeare is a marriage of poetic quality and mass appeal. He was good, but he also wrote many accessible and infectious lines. And he did it at the right time and place. Nowadays it's difficult to emulate the popularity of either Shakespeare or Dylan in sheer numbers because it's
all been done, so to speak. This rings true in many art forms, we're experiencing a regression to the mean across the board.
So many very good artists have existed after Shakespeare, but it's gotten harder to find those accessible and infectious lines and also bring them to a wide audience. Cohen did it with Hallelujah and to a lesser extent Suzanne, but those were rarities. What other poet has had the reach of Cohen? Shakespeare had theatre.
I can think of a number of poems that have brought me to tears, usually by acclaimed poets, but I could likely ask about 10 000 random people who the poet was and I'd get blank stares at a near 100% success rate.