Quote:
Originally Posted by Max Goodman
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?
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I think (and to be clear, this is just an informed critical opinion) that a lot of it has to do with exposure. One fact that is often forgotten is that Shakespeare was an actor. There
were some non-actors who would write plays for hire for playing companies (Middleton is one), but often someone who was part of the playing company could and would write the plays they performed. In Shakespeare's case, he was a member of Lord Chamberlain's Men (later the King's Men), which was the preeminent company of the time. Shakespeare did indeed become the
main writer of plays, though fellow actor Ben Jonson also wrote, and they also performed some works not written by company members. As a result, with Shakespeare writing most of the work by the most popular playing company, it makes sense that he would have more exposure than other playwrights writing for less prestigious companies (such as Thomas Heywood and John Webster writing for Worcester's Men).
Of course, this reality leads to a number of other questions. First, does "most popular" automatically equate to "best"? There's no good present-day analogue, but in modern film, a summer blockbuster might be seen by millions and win few awards, while a much more limited offering might nab Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay etc. Again, not a great analogue given that Shakespeare was indeed a great writer (which is more than we might say for most blockbuster scribes), but you catch my point:
because he was a great writer and
because he had the biggest platform, Shakespeare was well-positioned to have endurance. Other play writers weren't exactly toiling away in obscurity, but even if they were superior writers (by whatever metric we might come up with), limited exposure would have given them less notability.
I should also note that the very notion of
authorship was far less rigid back then. We see more and more evidence of widespread collaboration among playwrights (which I've alluded to throughout this thread), and although Shakespeare's name
might have been a draw, it was surely more about the quality and eminence of the playing company itself that maintained the perpetual success. The playing company couldn't have been so successful without great writing, but one could equally claim that it couldn't have been so successful without great acting or a great venue (the Theatre and the Globe) either. As usual, none of this detracts from Shakespeare's greatness, but it does highlight how it's largely inextricable from his circumstances.