Quote:
Originally Posted by N. Matheson
I'm sorry, but I vehemently believe this is wrong. Art is a competition and exists on a hierarchy. If you don't reach the top of said hierarchy, you have failed. It's why I hold the view every poet since Shakespeare more or less failed because they could not surpass him.
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Respectfully, this thread isn't about you and your unsubstantiated beliefs. It's about Shakespeare and his contemporaries and their relative mastery. This forum is Musing on Mastery, and simply repeating some obnoxiously limited dogma (that pretty much everyone has told you in different ways is indeed obnoxiously limited dogma) is the antithesis of...musing on mastery. It adds nothing to the conversation, and causes an otherwise productive thread to devolve into folks rightly wondering why someone just keeps repeating the same oddly uncritical viewpoint without actually engaging with what others have said.
If you are serious about learning about poetry, craft, art, and any number of related interests, you'd do well to read, consider, take a few notes, and then weigh in with productive questions. A response in that vein might look like this: "So I was often taught that there is no one higher than Shakespeare in the echelon of playwrights. If what you say is true -- if some of Shakespeare's contemporaries were at the very least
almost as good as Shakespeare overall -- then why has it been
Shakespeare who receives the lion's share of critical and popular attention?"
That would be a great question, and one that could lead to a productive avenue of discussion. I have some plausible answers to that, but nothing I could say
definitively (because, as some of us have been saying for this entire thread, discussion of art rarely trades in absolutes). The point is to think through the topic, and actually
consider other viewpoints without having a fixed perspective that is wrought of falsehoods (and potentially bad teaching). I'm most certainly
not saying that as a professor of English literature and a scholar of Shakespeare and his contemporaries my own viewpoint is superior to your prior professors. But I am saying that you should be highly suspicious of anyone -- professor or no -- who tries to close your mind to any exploration of possibilities when it comes to art.
For what it's worth, while I'm not going to try to control how you post, I would urge you to respond in thoughtful paragraphs engaging with the topic rather than one or two sentences just mulishly repeating a stock perspective.