[Shaun J. Russell]

Originally Posted by N. Matheson

This has not been my experience at all and I am wondering what happened in academia in the past two years apparently. What I was taught was Shakespeare is not merely an artist, but art incarnate. His works are so far removed from us mere mortals that to even think he is capable of being measured is like trying to put a chain around the wind. I recall one quote repeated that said the only person who created more than Shakespeare was God alone. Harold Bloom, who has been mentioned, also relegated every one of his contemporaries to hacks. He dismissed works such as The Spanish Tragedy as nonsense. I fail to see how anything anyone could have written even compares to his on remotely the same level.

Max and Cameron pretty much said the thing, but I'll say it a bit more directly...


Who gives a damn what your professors said? Any professor worth their salt will encourage you to draw your own conclusions. And you are 100% wrong about Bloom. He valued Shakespeare more highly than his contemporaries, true...but that's part of why I created this thread. I value Shakespeare more highly as well, but I insist that it's not a case of Triton among the minnows -- it's more like a great white shark among tiger sharks. All of them are impressive in their own right.

And let me make something very clear: Shakespeare had collaborators. We don't actually know the sheer extent of those collaborators, but at least five of his canonical plays were actually co-written (I mentioned Macbeth above), and some critics have asserted that number can be at least doubled. Middleton, Fletcher, Peele, Marlowe -- all of them wrote sections of plays attributed to Shakespeare. It's a fool's errand to try to separate the Shakespearean wheat from the ostensible collaborator chaff (though many have gamely attempted it), so...where's Shakespeare's overwhelming singular genius in those situations? And what do we make of something like Timon of Athens? I have a soft spot in my heart for the play, and yet it's clearly very flawed -- there is virtually no plot development in the last three acts.

So again, Shakespeare's great. Perhaps the greatest playwright of all time -- you certainly won't find me arguing against that. But bardolatry is pointless idol worship, when there's a world of amazing literature out there that is not by Shakespeare. And you don't want to get me started on the relative quality of Shakespeare's sonnets; I adore them, and they've been my major academic interest for a long time...but are they the "best" ever by any objective measure? Not on your life.