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Originally Posted by E. Shaun Russell
productive questions...like this: "...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?"
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A slightly different question: why has his lion's share been so huge as to nearly starve his contemporaries?
Might part of the answer be that what they were almost as good at was writing plays very like Shakespeare's? Did the Elizabethans have a fairly restrictive idea of good dramaturgy, and did all the successful playwrights write similarly enough (for instance, using lots of characters, mostly male, since the players were all male; and writing primarily in verse, usually iambic pentameter) that this has helped the culture largely decide we need only one Elizabethan playwright?
Chekhov and Shaw were contemporaries (though not compatriots) similarly to Marlowe and Shakespeare, with one dying young and leaving a much smaller body of work. It may be that when they are as far in the past as the Elizabethans are now, middlebrow culture will only have room for one, but I doubt it, and one reason is that Chekhov's plays don't feel remotely like Shaw's, and vice versa. Marlowe's and other plays by their contemporaries do feel to me similar to Shakespeare's. That may be because I haven't read enough of them, or read them deeply enough. I'm interested in the thoughts of those who know them better than I do.