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gwern comments on To like, or not to like? - Less Wrong
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Which could have been many others. Pope and Milton come to mind as critically-acclaimed figures before or near the period where Shakespeare was gradually being canonized.
Shakespeare was far from the epitome of Elizabethan Euphuism (and he mocked it). There were many far more over-ornamented works: go read Urne Buriall and tell me that Shakespeare was florid and over-ornamented*. If I may quote Miller from the Paris interviews: "Even Shakespeare was smashed around in his time by university people."
* EDIT: this should not be taken as criticism of Urne Buriall or Browne; I think it's awesome and an incredible read and anyone who possesses the ability to handle reading it (which is not very many) should read it. I'm just saying it's ridiculous to claim Shakespeare is baroque.
Leaving aside the fact that this seems to apply to most playwrights, writers routinely circulated their manuscripts among friends, acquaintances, and patrons, and could try out things and get weekly (or faster) feedback from newspapers and chaps.
By this logic, the tale of Gilgamesh should be the most popular story of all time, as it is possibly the most remote in time from us. Or if you prefer distance, we should be venerating Wu Ch'eng-en or something like that.
But you already know that Shakespeare is considered the greatest. What does this calculation mean at all? Someone has to win the lottery. This is Texas Sharpshooter - 'look how unlikely that my shot would land in this exact square foot of the barn!' And absolute production in all time periods is low - I think the usual estimate of the entire surviving Greco-Roman corpus is in the low millions of words.
I find this a strange presupposition. If everyone agreed that Shakespeare was not the greatest writer of all time, would you then conclude that he must have been? What is the right amount of disagreement?
I find this an interesting claim, because if I consult the indexes computed in Murray's Human Accomplishment from encyclopedias & textbooks etc, I do not find Shakespeare to be some extraordinary outlier who in his field is ranked so much higher than #2 than any other #1 figure is ranked higher than #2. He ranks 19 points higher in his index, but for example, in the Arabic literature index, al-Mutanabbi ranks 21 points higher than #2 Abu Nuwas. (It must be a conspiracy! Perhaps al-Mutanabbi sucked up to the Caliph, or his Arabic was just so exotic.) In Western Art, #1 Michelangelo is 23 points higher than Picasso. In Western Music specifically, Beethoven & Mozart are tied and Bach is a solid 13 points below (the same difference between Aristotle & Plato, incidentally; Chinese Philosophy sees Confucius 31 points higher than Laozi, and in Indian Philosophy it's an extraordinary 44 points from Sankara to Nagarjuna, much as I prefer the latter). In Western Physics, we find Newton 11 points higher than Galileo, not terribly far from Shakespeare's 19 points lead in his field, and in Chemistry it's 33 down from Lavoisier to Berzelius.
While I'm at it, what are the other major figures in the Western Lit category Murray compiled? In descending order, the rest of the top 5 turn out to be: Goethe, Dante, Virgil, & Homer. Quickly looking through the Google snippets for
goethe site:theparisreview.org/interviews, it seems like all the mentions of Goethe are positive - quelle horror! The conspiracy extends to #2 as well, and even embraces German literature! We all know that great writers will criticize every other writer, so the absence of criticism of Goethe may be proof of this canonization process happening for Goethe too. And what about Dante? I've seen some extravagant praise for Dante from great writers like Borges... How deep does it run...(Or, maybe, you've ludicrously overstated the extent of dissent among top writers in general? Just a thought. "Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, Fitzgerald": do any of these sound like plausible candidates for, say, 4th greatest writer of all time? Maybe there's dissent over these 4 examples because as good as they are, they aren't really in the same class as Shakespeare, Goethe, Homer, or Dante and reasonable men can differ about how great they are?)
And you are naturally privileging your own expert opinion that Shakespeare's plays like Comedy of Errors are bad.
No half-baked speculation about causes of literary popularity was required to realize you don't enjoy Shakespeare.
One person disagreeing, and now that PhilGoetz has jumped on that grenade, we have the right amount of disagreement, and I can be confident Shakespeare was the best. ;)
Glad to be of service!
The Epic of Gilgamesh was discovered in 1853 and translated in 1870. The latest known Akkadian written records are from around the 1st century CE. So it may well have been completely unknown for seventeen centuries or more, which is a problem Shakespeare doesn't have.
1870: so it's had no less than 143 years (a century and a half) to become popular. Shakespeare was canonized in less time, and plenty of writers from 1870 or later have become immortals (eg Dickens, Tolstoy, in the novel area).
Even if you don't like that example, there are plenty of other stories from well before 0 CE.
All this doesn't address my key observation, which is that the prior against one of the first one-hundred professional English writers turning out to be the best is simply incredible. Your list of other top-rated artists in other fields only reinforces this point. What are the odds that the best artist or practitioner in every field happened, by chance, to be one of the first 0.1% in that field? Either there is a strong bias to overrate the early practitioners, or the human race has been devolving rapidly for hundreds of years.
If the claims people made were along the lines of "X was the most influential in his field", we could expect this. But I often hear it stated as absolute ability.
I did address that, but obviously in a way you didn't understand. Let me try again: that is not an observation, that's a result of an unmotivated and unjustified model you postulated which leads to a result which you already had as a bottom-line. Your reference classes are post hoc cherrypicked to reach your desired conclusion, your data is minimal (see my point about your bizarre interpretation of the Paris interview criticisms and the comparison to other fields), and if your strategy was applied to any other field, give equally absurd results that noone before the 18th century should have been the greatest in anything because the human population has grown so much since then.
If you apply my strategy to any other field, the numbers give the result that noone before the 18th century should have been the greatest in anything because the human population has grown so much since then, yes. When you do the numbers and they give you a definitive answer, you don't dismiss it as "absurd" because you don't like it (or because you have a bug up your ass about the person who ran the numbers).
My separation of classes chronologically is, like all good models, inspired by observation. In this case, the observation that a statistically-impossible number of the people considered "best in field" came very early in those fields, even in fields like literature where coming early is a disadvantage rather than an advantage as regards the quality or contemporary opinion of your work.
Why are you always especially rude to me?
One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens. You have amply explained why you reached the conclusion you did based on idiosyncratic personal preferences and constructed an unconvincing model to try to justify it; there are no 'numbers' here, there is only absurd reference class tennis. ('Stratford-on-Avon had 0.0001% of the medieval English population; the odds against the greatest English writer coming from Stratford-on-Avon is astronomically unlikely!') I am perfectly happy saying that the result refute the pseudo-premises - not that you gave a precise model in the first place: I will ask you again, what is the right amount of criticism for Shakespeare that would satisfy you that he really was the greatest writer ever?
The damning point here is that you are willing to bite the bullet and say it applies to sciences as well, where we would, contrariwise, naturally expect the earlier a scientist to live, the easier it is to make incredible discoveries and pick up low-hanging fruit. Only an early scientists has a hope of discovering, say, gravity. Or an early mathematician something like calculus. You have to live as early as Parmenides if you want to discover something basic and extremely important like 'the moon is illuminated by the sun'.
In the cases where we have objective measures (like memorization contests) we see records being broken all the time (which is as we'd expect). A lot of this can be attributed to improved general intelligence, but we'd expect that to be correlated with creative skill too. Are there any measurable world records from the Elizabethan era that still stand?
You're measuring something here, but I don't think it's likeability. Newton may have been more historically important than Einstein, but no-one would prefer the former's theory of gravity to the latter's. If Shakespeare got pretty close to the perfect tragedy, but there was a slight refinement of the form from the 19th century that's better (if less significant), surely people would prefer to watch that, and count themselves fans of that author.
I'm not sure what sort of world record you would have in mind, and given the parlous state of science at the time, what world records would you trust? If, for example, I exhibited a Chinaman from the Ming who lived for 231 years, which is surely a world record, you would rightly reject this by saying 'it is much more likely that this world record is inaccurate than he really did live to 231, given how notoriously bad records were at the time, the cultural value set on being the oldest man in the world, etc'.
If Shakespeare helped define what the perfect tragedy was, and all later tragedies felt the 'anxiety of influence', this isn't so clearcut. See my other comment.
You are ignoring the distinction PhilGoetz made in the grandparent comment:
Is that a real distinction? When Shakespeare is the 'most influential', then in some respects, he is setting what it means to be 'able'. He is setting our norms and expectations, laying down the language we think and write in. John Keats: "He has left nothing to say about nothing or any thing." Ralph Waldo Emerson: "His mind is the horizon beyond which at present we do not see."
When a writer is so influencing (should I say, 'distorting'?), is it really meaningful to draw a distinction between 'influential' and 'able'? Like Phil's implicit claim that every writer has an equal chance of being Shakespeare, this is not something I am willing to instantly grant without inspection.
See here (follow-up here)
I should point out quickly that I found the first half of Faust (the halves were sold as separate books, and I just got the first) to be boring. There's a scholar who wants power and knowledge, and makes a deal with the Devil to achieve them, and what happens? He seduces a young girl down the street (and, since the Devil is involved, things go poorly). How... pedestrian.
How much of that is due more to what you are used to, in part due to the influence of Faust? There's the old joke about the 9th grade student who complains that Shakespeare and the Bible are both full of cliches.
I don't get the impression that this is a significant contributor. I think it's mostly Heinlein's "an intellectual is someone who's found something more interesting than sex" not fitting Faust, despite the setup being an interesting one for that premise.
A tale of a deal with the devil going poorly isn't the part that I thought was pedestrian, but I agree that if that had been my motivator that this would be likely.
I think Goethe, Dante, Virgil & Homer are exempt from criticism as foreigners. Who comes up as your top five writers in English?
I think it's culturally acceptable to argue that Picasso was better than Michaelangelo (or to prefer Leonardo or even Rembrandt), that Bach was better than Mozart (or even that Tchaikovsky was better than both), that Plato was more important than Aristotle, that Einstein or even Darwin mattered more than Newton. In a way that you simply can't suggest another english-speaking writer was better than Shakespeare in polite company. (Heck, I'll bite your bullet; I don't think one could openly suggest Goethe was better than Shakespeare, and you'd only get away with Virgil or Homer because people haven't read them and so couldn't argue).
I've never read any of your four (except insofar as Goethe is responsible for Marlowe, or SHAFT); I can think of two friends who've read Dante, and one insufferably pretentious acquaintance who read Homer. But every schoolchild studies at least two Shakespeare plays. I think the gap really is much wider than in other fields of endeavour.
Besides Shakespeare, the top list includes Byron & Scott. Judging from later discussions, I think a longer list would have included Poe, Whitman, Shelley, Keats, & Wordsworth, but Murray doesn't include a fuller sorted listed. (He gives all the rankings for figures in Western Literature in pg562 which you could extract the full English literature ranking from if you really wanted to, but I didn't.)
It would be difficult to make that suggestion, yes, in part because Goethe himself so praised Shakespeare, and it would be a temerarious person indeed who dared disagree with the writer he was trying to claim as being better.
(That page, incidentally, is interesting reading who anyone who thinks that Bardolatry is unfounded and unrelated to his merits. Why would Milton, that most independent-minded man, praise Shakespeare so, anonymously, just 16 years after his death? What literary conspiracy could have been formed by that point?)
I think we must move in different circles. I don't think anyone I know would be particularly offended if I claimed to prefer, say, Milton to Shakespeare or to think M. objectively better than S.
I don't think that this applies to many playwrights. Shakespeare was not just playwright, but also producer. I don't think playwrights today are able to rewrite shows in the middle of a run; and they don't like it when the producer rewrites. Moreover, the producer goes to a lot more shows than the writer. Also, Shakespeare had acting experience, though that's probably not terribly rare.
Yes, many writers receive feedback, but a real audience is a much larger and honest sample. Also, the reaction while reading/watching is probably more honest than the reaction afterwards.
A modern institution that may be similar is improv.
Thanks for the Murray numbers.
My understanding is that in comparable places like Broadway, they constantly rewrite and tweak plays and musicals during the previews. Murray offers an interesting comparison:
TV shows certainly are constantly changing based on feedback and viewership numbers.
And is it really so rare? Looking down a list like http://www.theaterpro.com/majormodernplaywrights.htm I spot a few I recognize as working directors or actors: Beckett, Brecht, Coward, Gorky, Hellman, Ibsen (or possibly close enough to count, like Caryl Churchill's workshops)... I stop at I because I could use some breakfast but hopefully my point is made.