Tragic heroes: Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Macbeth
Tragic victims: Ophelia, Cordelia, Desdemona, Lady Macduff

Not great plays for female roles, but then boys played those roles. Of course, there is a historical context.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books...8E6FB11CD72568

(Technically Duchess of Malfi is Jacobean, not Elizabethan, but that's just me being pedantic).

Pedantry aside, I think Christine's list is great. I've read most of them, and would especially recommend Tamburlaine (though both parts -- not just Part I), which feels a bit like Antony and Cleopatra merged with Titus Andronicus. Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore is brilliant, if you can stomach actual (not implied) incest among protagonists. Fletcher and Beaumont's A King and No King has a milder version of that theme in a tragicomic context. Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy is very much a precursor to Hamlet, and is very good even if it's impossible not to read it without thinking of all the connections. Massinger's The Renegado is delicious. For comedies, Jonson is somehow underrated. Volpone and The Alchemist are brilliant. I'd also recommend Fletcher's The Island Princess.


There are others, but all of the above (and the ones I know from Christine's list) are all worthwhile.

Enjoying this discussion very much. Particular faves from BITD when I was sort of an academic:

all of Marlowe (esp Doctor Faustus)
Jonson, Volpone (to start with, but why stop there?)
Webster, Duchess of Malfi (love him in Shakespeare in Love)
Beaumont, Knight of the Burning Pestle (really funny, surprisingly "post-modern" satire of other plays)

It's great to see a lot of love for Marlowe and Jonson on this thread. I very much believe that, had he not been killed so young, Marlowe could have at least had equal stature to Shakespeare in the eyes of literary history. As it stands, his works have more influence than many might suspect. Whenever I read Marlowe, I'm always struck by the feeling of danger in his plays. For most other playwrights, the buildup to an event is crucial -- foreshadowing, plot development that contextualizes the event etc. But in Marlowe, surprising things happen at seemingly random. As a reader, they shock you...so I can only imagine how they would have played out on stage. All of his plays have this quality, though The Jew of Malta is the most extreme. Marlowe's supposed atheism is on full display as Jews, Turks, and Christians are all derided relatively equally. The titular Jew (Barabas) is naturally the focal point and commits the most wickedness (including killing his newly-converted daughter and her fellow nuns in a nunnery), but the schism and anarchy throughout the play is remarkable. I've often felt that Titus Andronicus feels far more like a Marlowe play than a Shakespeare play, and I chalk it up to Marlowe's influence on his colleague and collaborator.

One of my pedagogical hopes is to someday be able to teach The Jew of Malta in tandem with The Merchant of Venice (probably in an upper-level class). The plays are simultaneously extremely similar and extremely different, and exploring those stasis points would be fascinating.

Didn't Shakespeare write Merchant because Jew of Malta was such a commercial success that he wanted to write his own "bad Jew" play? (Though the Jew of Malta was a lot badder than Shylock, of course.)

There was a wave of anti-Semitism in Britain at the time when Queen Elizabeth's court physician, a Jew himself, was accused of trying to assassinate her. I'm not familiar with the details or even if he was actually guilty, but suddenly there was a huge demand for dramas which depicted Jews as scheming and murderous.

As I recall, the Jew of Malta's daughter became a nun, so he poisoned everyone in the nunnery in order to poison his daughter. It's been a long time, so perhaps I'm wrong. But if that's so, Shakespeare's catering to the anti-semitic audience was quite mild in comparison.

I was curious, so I did a little digging.

https://imss.org/2018/05/a-note-from...urt-physician/

Another source does not mention the Earl of Sussex, instead mentioning a supposed conspiracy with the Spanish against the life of the Queen:

https://www.jewishwikipedia.info/rodrigolopez.html

It should be noted that Queen Elizabeth was using cosmetic products containing lead, antimony, mercury, and belladonna (deadly nightshade), so she was indeed being poisoned by multiple sources.

It's been a long time for me, too, but this exemplifies my feeling about the difference between Shakespeare and (what I remember of) his contemporaries. A mass poisoning is a big action, and interesting in the way the actions of bad guys in action films can be interesting, but Shylock's actions and reactions feel more human.

(The humanness of Shylock's actions and reactions, and their coinciding with existing stereotypes about Jews--his focus on money, for instance--also seem more likely than Barabas's action to exacerbate the audience's anti-semetism.)

Right. There's a parallel between JoM and Merchant in that Shylock's daughter (Jessica) abandons him and his faith to be with a Christian man. Shylock mourns this deeply but -- notably -- does not kill her. In JoM, Barabas's daughter (Abigail) is also in love with a Christian man without Barabas knowing it, and it is Barabas himself who talks her into joining the convent (to reclaim gold he'd hidden within), and when he learns that she has converted (which happens after her Christian lover dies, as I recall) he has no compunction with killing her along with all of her sisters. There is zero question in JoM that Barabas is a Villain with a capital V, though it is somewhat amusingly considered a tragedy -- not unlike how Richard III was initially billed. The parallels between Barabas and Richard III are quite stark too, incidentally.

But there's a lot to be learned from how Shakespeare's central Jew is far more humanized than the entertainingly two-dimensional Barabas. I wouldn't call either play expressly anti-semitic, even though I completely understand how they could be seen that way. The bumbling antics of the Turks and Christians in JoM suggest that all faiths were equally contemptible (even if Barabas is the one truly wicked character), while Shylock's nuanced humanness makes it very easy for audiences/readers to see him as a sympathetic character. I've taught Merchant once, and that's how the students saw him -- flawed, but sympathetic. His forced conversion in the last act is the tragic end of a broken man who has lost everything: his daughter, his money, and finally his faith. I don't like to deal much in wanton speculations about Shakespeare's motives and mindsets, but I don't think you can write such beautiful and compelling speeches for a character like Shylock without having legitimate sympathies for his situation. The character's lot is objectively unfair, and if we want to give Shakespeare extreme credit, perhaps he was carefully playing both sides.

This playing both sides seems a characteristic of Shakespeare, and it may contribute both to the roundness of (many of) his characters and to my dissatisfaction with most of the plays as wholes.

I'm helping a friend prepare to direct Henry V next year. Olivier's and Branagh's film versions famously find conflicting messages about war in the play. I should maybe rewatch Branagh's, because I'm feeling that the play presents Henry as a perfect leader--honest, brave, modest, unrelenting in attack, humane in victory, able to make decisions without worrying about bad results. (Admittedly, if overdone, some of those qualities might not be virtues.) And yet, the very first scene suggests that the clergy of his time had mercenary reasons for goading him into the war against France, and a line or two in Henry's first scene can be read as suggesting that he's not really asking for their honest opinions but directing them to argue for war. This undermines the great accomplishments celebrated throughout the play. But--unless I'm missing it--the play never circles back to this; it moves from undermining to celebration.

Honestly, I have to ask: why are we bothering?
I'm serious. If Shakespeare is THAT great, so amazing, so perfect, so above us mere mortals in terms of everything he has done... why do we need poets anymore? What else is there to say he hadn't already perfected? Why are we striving when everything we write is objectively inferior?

There are a million ways to answer this question, including pointing to the many, many posts on this thread that highlight how Shakespeare's great and maybe "the best," but is not some idol to be worshiped. Please. Go read Timon of Athens and tell me it's amazing. I'll wait.

But the easiest way to answer the question is to point out that it's not a competition. "Best" is subjective. I think I said that a few times in this thread as well, but it's worth highlighting. It's not like we're all participants in the literary Olympics and we have no hope of beating the world record at soliloquies. Art's rarely competitive. Just do art for the sake of doing art. If you're good at it, put it out there for others. If you're not, who cares so long as you enjoy it? It's a fool's errand to keep saying "I'll never be better than X so I shouldn't bother." That kind of thinking kills the soul.

Maybe I was just raised on archaic scholarship, but what I gleaned was that literature existed on a hierarchy and some are above others, and Shakespeare ranks above everyone else. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, is below him.

Even that, which you keep returning to, and which people here have suggested doesn't provide a very enriching way of engaging with literature, isn't the same as saying that a purpose of writing (let alone the only purpose) is to find a place in that heirarchy, and that all is lost if you can't be the all-time champ.

I could make a list of activities that I abandoned because I was ashamed of not excelling or afraid that I couldn’t. For example, I didn’t take to swimming as a kid and was so embarrassed by it that I stayed away from the pool. To this day, I’m a poor swimmer. It’s a life-limiting attitude.

Huh?

To anyone holding this view about poetry (or drama, or painting, or music, or tiddlywinks…) – holding it, that is, on the basis of a well-informed and thoughtful consideration of the issues involved rather than as the view represented by some supposed “hierarchy” – I suggest giving attention to a different activity.

Of course, there, too, such a person will encounter the same trap. Since X has already been determined by some supposed authority to have reached the apogee of attainment in that activity, “why are we bothering? … why do we need [participants in that activity] anymore? what else is there to [contribute] that [X] hadn’t already perfected? Why are we striving when everything we [do] is objectively inferior?” (See post 52 above.)

This is an argument for inertia, for not doing anything – in any field of life – in which someone else might be touted by some supposed “authority” as “the best”.

Back at post 24 I began as follows: “For myself, I confess that I do not find the category ‘greatness’ very useful in my experience of poetry – or of the arts more generally. It is just too diffuse. Without some agreed criteria among the disputants, I find the resulting discussion largely unenlightening. But settling the question of criteria, which seems a prerequisite to any discussion, would be a mighty undertaking indeed.”

Clive

N, Shakespeare is dead, so you're way ahead of him at this point. He won't write another word that is better than what you write. Just go for it if you feel the call. If not, don't.

I wonder, though, if Casanova and Don Juan are recognized as the best lovers in history, does that mean you plan to give up sex, since what's the use?

One would first have to be able to have sex in order to give up on it.

That's cryptic, N., but it suggests pain, which we should maybe have figured out before now.

A poetry board isn't the best place to find help when you're in pain. I hope you find the help you need.

Be well.

I mean...the essence of Petrarchism is yearning for an unattainable lover, so whatever your personal circumstances (which are nobody's business but yours), you're thematically well-positioned to write a Petrarchan sonnet sequence.

(Fun fact: after writing 60 sonnets in Delia, which starts to get fairly repetitive after awhile, Samuel Daniel ends his final sonnet in the sequence in the best way possible with the line: "I say no more. I fear I said too much." Truer words were never written.)

Positioned, yes. I lack such a skill. I do not know how people manage to churn out such lengthy sequences.

For starters, they spend more time writing, and less time talking about writing.

Your post had me running to Heywood's, 'Fair Maid of the West' - as I think context here is so important. Shakespeare arrived at a very precise time and place. And he was surely, sure-footedly, political. And an entertainer, and a great writer. But sometimes I think that we don't read enough of Johnson, and Heywood, and the writers around Shakespeare but instead leap on an easy acceptance of what the past and present deify as mastery.

Have you read 'The Pooh Perplex'? It's a great lampoon of scholarly perspectives at the mid (20. When I re-read it now, I wonder again whether it is the original author or the scholarly perspective which is more important, and how that all fits within the needs of contemporary scholars to make a living.

Honestly, if there's but one thing that anyone takes away from this thread, I hope it's what you just said so concisely. Shakespeare's greatness is beyond question, but he certainly didn't eclipse his peers. He just generally shone a bit brighter, and benefited from duration. Saying as much is not sacrilege, but simply highlights that the 1580s-1610s was a very special time in English literature -- one for which the overused term zeitgeist certainly applies. 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. That does not detract from the fact that Shakespeare is the person in that place, and deservedly so. I just agree that more of his peers deserve to be read and taught, because there's some truly exceptional drama and poetry from that condensed period.

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.

We've heard you, N. You've shared that opinion before.

No, you don't believe that. I think you're just trying to be provocative by saying very stupid things but with an air of innocence to elicit patient responses from well-meaning people. No one could possibly "vehemently believe" what you claim to vehemently believe. No one. You're just playing games here. Ultimately, you're being a troll, but a hard-to-detect one since you are not engaging in name-calling or insults. Sadly, though, you are not at the top of the troll hierachy so you probably shouldn't bother.

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

Yes, I'm sometimes quite perceptive. And what I haven't perceived is any effort on your part to respond to the substance of what anyone has posted to address your concerns. If you actually believe that all artists are complete failures if they cannot be the #1 greatest ever to practice their art, that is so self-evidently ridiculous that I once again assert that you don't believe it.

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

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.

.

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.



.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.