Quote:
Originally Posted by Roger Slater
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.
|
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?