If a lost folio of some forgotten contemporary of Shakespeare were discovered, a collection of plays which were more entertaining, moving, and inspiring than the works of Shakespeare, plays which more convincingly depicted the range and depth of the human experience, which were more surprising and delightful and sobering, which were by some objective measure "better" plays than Shakespeare's, then I still think that Shakespeare's plays would probably be "greater" and more worthy of study and consumption
A big, big part of what makes Shakespeare's plays and sonnets "great" is that they've been the foremost works of English literature for hundreds of years. They're known to everyone who attended school in an English speaking country, they've shaped and influenced our language, culture, and every work of literature which followed.
Being familiar with the works of Shakespeare is necessary context for a thousand phrases and references that you'll encounter every day. And the "value" which a reader or watcher can extract from the works of Shakespeare can be enhanced by the hundreds of years of critics and audience who have already written about and engaged with his works.
This reminds me of the theory that the King James is the best English translation of The Bible because it has heavily influenced the English language. So we intuitively understand the true meaning of KJV phrases better than we do those in a more literally faithful translation.
Just passing along a fun idea and not looking for a debate.
Related to many prior translations, which are the foundation of anglicised, not latinised bible translations which tiptoed on the precipice of heresy, lacking the kings imprimatur.
Finding ur-texts and arguing their role meant combining Aramaic, hebrew, Greek and Latin, all the while watching over your shoulder for the sharp blade.
And then, there's the mistranscriptions of the breeches bible, the murder bible, the consequences of a literate non priestly class who could (and did) debate religion as informed opinion not received wisdom...
While I realize that you're overstating both cases for rhetorical purposes, (that these undiscovered works are "better", and that Shakespeare is still "greater") I think that you're short-changing "discovery". We might find that Shakespeare's works were, not just influenced by these unknown works, but outright homages, or that these undiscovered works somehow offer greater context and insight into some previously known author's works. In a similar vein, the linked article spends to much time fearing what's lost and not enough thinking about what we may yet find.
>We might find that Shakespeare's works were, not just influenced by these unknown works, but outright homages
Shakespeare's works are already known to be homages and heavily influenced by existing works to the point that the stories are pretty much considered English stage adaptations of existing literature, much of which was not originally written in English.
Hamlet is based on the Legend of Amleth, Macbeth and King Lear are both adaptations of Holinshed's Chronicles, Romeo and Juliet is based on Mariotto and Ganozza.
Shakespeare was not the only one who made stage adaptations of classic literature, there are dozens of playwrites who each have their own version of the above listed stories adapted to their specific audiences, language and cultural customs.
Ok, ok...ok. Hear me out. What about a prequel to Macbeth. Macduff and Macbeth origin stories. Hollywood is where the real money is so we'll skip the stage and go straight to film. Not film. Films. We'll split it into 3 (yes, three!) films since there is so much to be told. But since there isn't that much to be told, we'll import a few characters from other Shakespearian plays ...especially those that don't fit the timeline....Tybalt the thane of East Fife, anyone?
Shakespeare already did all of that. Prequel: Henry VI part 1 was written after the success of Part 2 and 3 (which wasn't originally called Part 2 and 3 of course). Spin-off: The Merry Wiwes of Windsor was written because of the popularity of the Falstaff character from Henry IV. It is debated whether it takes place in an alternative continuity. Then Falstaff was killed off-stage in Henry V, presumably because Shakespeare got annoyed by the actor.
This take seems a bit pessimistic about the longevity of society to me. If we still have tens or hundreds of thousands of years to go, just going with whatever was best by 2020 seems a bit ad hoc. Not that I know the future.
If I had a time machine, I’d travel to the year 2300 to read undergrad essays how the Hamlet’s deliberations intersect with the ever-enclosing wall of Fortnite’s storm.
What do you mean by “just going with whatever was best by 2020”? I don’t think this theory implies that anyone’s ‘greatest’ status is final and permanent. Just that the mechanism by which such status is attained generally involves remaining culturally relevant for long enough to develop a kind of incumbent power. I don’t see any need for pessimism over this.
The issue is that, while writing skill is rare and somewhat objective, writing performance is intensely subjective. The experiment's been done where people take award-winning novels and throw them at the submission process... and don't even get past the query stage, 9 times out of 10. This is exacerbated by a climate wherein the "book buzz" that drives quick sales is generated by people who, while narrowly specialized in their professions and therefore deservingly relevant on specific topics, haven't read for pleasure since they were in high school.
Relevance can be measured. On the other hand, aesthetic quality is not only subjective, but highly relevant writing (such as Shakespeare's) changes the aesthetics on which it, as well as everything else, is judged.
Of course, most writers secretly long to still be read 100 years after they die, but not only will they never know this (except perhaps in an afterlife) for sure, but it's highly uncorrelated to performance while alive. If you had asked people in the 1920s which books of the time would be remembered in 2022, you'd be read a litany of works almost none of us have heard of... while Great Gatsby, which probably objectively is the great (as in, most relevant) American novel, would not have made the top 20.
> A big, big part of what makes Shakespeare's plays and sonnets "great" is that they've been the foremost works of English literature for hundreds of years. They're known to everyone who attended school in an English speaking country
This is far from true, except in the sense that such people know the name "Shakespeare". The percentage of people having ever attended school in an English speaking country who can recite one sonnet by Shakespeare is going to be... low.
> they've shaped and influenced our language [and] culture
Sure, that's true.
> Being familiar with the works of Shakespeare is necessary context for a thousand phrases and references that you'll encounter every day.
But that isn't. Most Anglophones, as noted above, already aren't familiar with the works of Shakespeare. But they don't have problems understanding phrases and references that may ultimately trace back to him. You can learn words without learning how the words came to be, and in fact that's the only way you can learn words.
(On a side note, this is exactly the problem with the "classic" TNG episode Darmok. The universal translator can translate any language without any prior knowledge being necessary. So it can understand that the sounds the aliens are making mean "Shaka, when the walls fell". It just doesn't know what "Shaka, when the walls fell" means.
But that's not how language works. The episode itself makes it very explicit that the aliens speak a language in which Shakawhenthewallsfell is a single word meaning "doom, defeat, and despair". You don't need to know the story of Shaka to know the meaning of the word.)
It does for us. It's not the abstract value that matters.
A few years in my country, a critic caused some minor furore by suggesting that a beloved (and recently dead) author wasn't all that good. She had been a radio personality and children's literature writer for a generation, and her stories were a kind of sweet, homely social realism, about growing up in an apartment building and playing the violin, for instance.
Now the critic suggested that she had gotten chances others hadn't, because of her politics and identity. The public broadcaster at the time definitively saw shaping the country towards the labour party's social democratic vision as their job, and the author certainly fit nicely into that.
Now the point is, even if the critic is right and this author wasn't all that great, she can't just be swapped out for me. I grew up with those books, not anyone else's. So did a generation.
And so it is with all literature. Should we try to find the authors that got less attention at the time, but maybe would have deserved it? Maybe imagine what could have been? By all means. But what happened, happened. And it's even more important to understand those things.
It’s not just fame, there is a multi-generational cultural inheritance from Shakespeare because so many people have been thinking and writing and talking about it for so long.
Any cultural work subjected to that much thought and criticism becomes a mirror, or a lens, through which other subjects can be explored. Essays about Shakespeare written 100 years ago not only enrich our appreciation of Shakespeare, they reveal how people thought about things 100 years ago. The text of Shakespeare doesn’t change, so by observing changes in analysis of Shakespeare over time, we can reveal changes in our own culture over time.
You can’t do that with a new piece of writing, even if it were “new to us” despite being written contemporaneously with Shakespeare. It would be analyzed first in the context of Shakespeare, not by itself, because that is a context we all already share.
It's also worth noting that Shakespeare's cultural significance, as with a few other cultural relics (say, the Mona Lisa), is in certain regards fairly modern.
After Shakespeare's life, his works faded from prevalence, at least as represented in the printed record, until the mid-19th century. I'm uncertain of the specific dynamics, but suspect that growing cities and want of lowr-cost and popular known entertainment resulted in a revival of his plays (out of copyright, and hence free to produce).
Similarly, the Mona Lisa ascended to popular awareness and fame after it was stolen in the early 20th century, at a time when cheap mass-market newspapers existed, and photgraphic reproductions could be printed.
Search instead for "Giaconda". Yeats include some of the following in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse:
"""
La Gioconda is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. In suggestiveness, only the Melancholia of Duerer is comparable to it; and no crude symbolism disturbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery. We all know the face and hands of the figure, set in its marble chair, in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea. Perhaps of all ancient pictures time has chilled it least.* As often happens with works in which invention seems to reach its limits, there is an element in it given to, not invented by, the master. In that inestimable folio of drawings, once in the possession of Vasari, were certain designs by Verrocchio, faces of such impressive beauty that Leonardo in his boyhood copied them many times. It is hard not to connect with these designs of the elder, by-past master, as with its germinal principle, the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo's work. Besides, the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see this image defining itself on the fabric of his dreams; and but for express historical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld at last. What was the relationship of a living Florentine to this creature of his thought? By means of what strange affinities had the person and the dream grown up thus apart, and yet so closely together? Present from the first incorporeally in Leonardo's thought, dimly traced in the designs of Verrocchio, she is found present at last in Il Giocondo's house. That there is much of mere portraiture in the picture is attested by the legend that by artificial means, the presence of mimes and flute-players, that subtle expression was protracted on the face. Again, was it in four years and by renewed labour never really completed, or in four months and as by stroke of magic, that the image was projected?
*Yet for Vasari there was some further magic of crimson in the lips and cheeks, lost for us.
The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.
"""
To add, the Bible is seen by many scholars as one of the greatest works of literature (and is on the St. John's College curriculum) not because the scholars are religious, but in large part due to its influence on other great works of literature (e.g. Milton's Paradise Lost, Dante's Inferno, much of Dostoevsky's work) and shaping human history.
It's not even about such works as Dante's Inferno, which are directly thematically related to Bible. As with Shakespeare it's all about hundreds of small things, expressions, metaphors. Without Bible words and phrases such as "forbidden fruit", "good Samaritan", "eye for an eye", "Armageddon", "wayward son" lose context, or meaning.
Like old laws that have been interpreted by the courts in many unantipicated situations - presented as obvious generalization; arguably, judicial legislation.
\taunt Arguably, the most influential work of English literature is the King James Version of the Bible.
A big, big part of what makes Shakespeare's plays and sonnets "great" is that they've been the foremost works of English literature for hundreds of years. They're known to everyone who attended school in an English speaking country, they've shaped and influenced our language, culture, and every work of literature which followed.
Being familiar with the works of Shakespeare is necessary context for a thousand phrases and references that you'll encounter every day. And the "value" which a reader or watcher can extract from the works of Shakespeare can be enhanced by the hundreds of years of critics and audience who have already written about and engaged with his works.