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Unread 08-13-2024, 07:34 AM
Shaun J. Russell Shaun J. Russell is offline
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Default Shakespeare

After a conversation on Shakespeare arose out of a workshop thread, I figure it can't hurt to explore how and why Shakespeare is considered one of the unrivaled masters of English literature. Full disclosure: I'm an early modernist, an English professor, and am currently writing a monograph on Shakespeare's sonnets. Early modern poetry has been my main research interest for a decade. I make that mildly self-indulgent disclaimer because I obviously have strong and informed opinions on the matter. But they're still just opinions.

A few thoughts to get the ball rolling. Shakespeare is probably considered to be the best playwright in the English language. He's credited with a veritable boatload of neologisms (many of which actually weren't neologisms, but that's another story), and his command of character, meter, plotting have fostered literally thousands of books over the past four centuries. Yet in terms of drama, I very much believe that Shakespeare's overwhelming stature over all other drama is part of a feedback loop. Shakespeare is considered great, therefore professors and teachers teach that he is great, and students learn that he is great. Meanwhile, his contemporaries (Marlowe, Jonson, Fletcher, Beaumont, Kyd, Webster, and many, many others) are taught far more infrequently, even though they, too, are arguably "great," and also have a strong command of character, meter, and plotting...though perhaps a bit less consistently. This is a subjective comment, but the "worst" of Shakespeare's plays are indeed worse than the best of his contemporaries. Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Jonson's The Alchemist and Volpone... All excellent plays that Shakespeare would love to have written. None of that detracts from Shakespeare being great -- it just highlights that even his contemporaries could sometimes "do it better."

But what about poetry? The Sonnets were published in a quarto edition in 1609, potentially without Shakespeare's involvement. We know that some of his individual sonnets circulated in manuscript form in the 1590s, and a small handful were published before Q (the standard name for the 1609 quarto)...but that's about it. There were no reprintings of Q, and the next time the sonnets were seen, they were mostly stripped of their distinction as sonnets, and reordered, repackaged, and retitled in 1640 by a stationer named John Benson. The original order didn't return (in print) until late in the 18th century, and it was only in the 19th century that it became vogue to deem Shakespeare as a master of poetry as well as drama.

We now consider Shakespeare's sonnets to be among the best in the language, and we even call sonnets with that rhyme scheme (ABABCDCDEFEFGG) "Shakespearean Sonnets," even though it was used extensively (and likely created) by Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey half a century earlier, with other contemporaries using it as well. The big heyday of Elizabethan sonnet sequences came in the 1580s and 90s, with Sir Philip Sidney receiving enormous accolades for his Astrophil and Stella, written and circulated in manuscript form (among friends and courtiers) before he died in 1586. It was published in the 1590s, right around when Shakespeare started penning his sonnets. But there were many, many sonneteers, and many, many sonnet sequences around that time. It was a literary trend. Shakespeare was part of it, but he had quite a few "clunkers" among the 154 sonnets that eventually made it to print, just as his contemporaries had quite a few "exceptional" sonnets among other poems that were arguably "clunkers" as well.

The point of all of this is that there is no denying that Shakespeare is great. Claiming he is not is like spitting into the wind on a blustery day. No one will ever take the mantle from the Bard of Avon, or whatever people want to call him. However, any mastery Shakespeare has should be considered in the context of his contemporaries, and to really feel the relative greatness of his poems, it's worth reading them alongside Sidney, Daniel, Spenser and other sonneteers of the time. When doing so, it becomes clear that maybe Shakespeare was "better," but if so, he wasn't so much better that a strong counterpoint couldn't be made for others. Holding him up as "unrivaled" is a choice we can make, but it can't truly be an informed choice unless we familiarize ourselves with what his peers were writing. I adore Shakespeare's work and love teaching, researching, and writing about it...but any claims there are no rivals to its greatness (especially in poetry) is misguided at best, and uninformed at worst.


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