[Julie Steiner]

There is one God, and N. is His prophet. Converting N. seems highly unlikely.

[Jim Moonan]

Originally Posted by N. Matheson

I was unaware you had the ability to read my mind and therefore can tell me exactly what I believe and don't believe.

I, too, can read your mind. It's an open book. Come on, N. Write something, for Shakespeare's sake!

To be fair, I guess we all have our idols. There was a girl, Ann, that I knew when I was twelve, who was more beautiful than anyone I've ever met since. That didn't stop me from marrying the love of my life. The Beatles will remain the standard of excellence for generations to come. I wrote songs for my children. My uncle is a beacon of who I've always wanted to be. I will never be him. I try.

.

[N. Matheson]

I have routinely shared my writing here and the consensus is my style is too archaic for this world anymore.

[Jim Moonan]

Originally Posted by N. Matheson

I have routinely shared my writing here and the consensus is my style is too archaic for this world anymore.

To be, or not to be archaic, that should be the question you ask yourself.



.

[Shaun J. Russell]

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.

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.

[Max Goodman]

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?"

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.

[Shaun J. Russell]

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?

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.

[David Callin]

Originally Posted by E. Shaun Russell

One could made a compelling speculative argument that had Shakespeare not existed, there are several candidates for playwrights who would have held a similar place in literary history.

I think your comments have been a model of good sense throughout, Shaun, but I draw the line at that one. Without Shakespeare, would we have thought of Marlowe, or Webster, or Jonson, as we do of him? (Maybe Marlowe if he'd survived, sure, but not as we have him.)

I think not.

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by David Callin

Maybe Marlowe if he'd survived ...

Ah, but he did survive and wrote Shakespeare’s plays in French exile! That’s my favorite non-Stratfordian theory, though it seems as farfetched as it is colorful. BTW, I’d be interested in knowing what Shaun or anyone else thinks of “The Marlowe Papers,” an award-winning novel in Elizabethan blank verse by Ros Barber, who’s a card-carrying Marlovian.

[Max Goodman]

An interesting theory, Shaun. Thanks for sharing it.

The popularity of his plays during his lifetime undoubtedly helped, but there's been plenty of time for the plays of Marlowe and the others to be reevaluated and claim a larger slice of attention. (Maybe that reevaluation is still to come; maybe you'll play a role in it.)

I suppose your speculation in post 65 suggests some level of agreement with the idea that Elizabethan plays are too similar for there to be room for the work of more than one Elizabethan playwright in the popular/middlebrow consciousness.

Originally Posted by E. Shaun Russell

One could made a compelling speculative argument that had Shakespeare not existed, there are several candidates for playwrights who would have held a similar place in literary history.

I'd learn a lot from that argument. I hope you'll make it on behalf of one more of the candidates. It would be a great subject for a book.