It was at the start of commercial English literature and of English military, economic, and cultural dominance, and someone had to be chosen.
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.
It was the one point in time (and this is true) when florid speech, as over-ornamented as the embroidery and ruffled sleeves of Elizabethan men's clothing, was in fashion.
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.
...It was the only time since Chaucer (and this may also be true) when writers had contact
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.
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.
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.
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.
When you do the numbers and they give you an answer, you don't dismiss it as "absurd".
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?
...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 quali
Tolstoy hated Shakespeare and thought him wildly overrated. He wrote a long essay about it that'll probably resonate with you; having located it for you, I find that George Bernard Shaw shared his opinion (his letter is at the end of the book).
Nearly everything in your list of reasons why Shakespeare had to be chosen as Greatest Writer ever fails for the simple reason that Shakespeare was not thought of as the greatest Elizabethan playwright during his life and for a long time after his death. Ben Jonson was more regarded and more famous for most of the 17th century. Beaumont and Fletcher were also more widely known and more frequently performed than Shakespeare. To explain why towards the end of the 17th century Shakespeare emerges as the most regarded playwright in English you need to see how he's different from Ben Jonson &c., and none of the reasons you gave addresses that. Ben Jonson's plays also have florid speech &c.
Hypothesis: Liking and wanting are separate pathways. Shakespeare hit upon a memetic formula that made you go see his plays over and over again without really bothering with the liking part. Shakespeare was the World of Warcraft of his time.
And what do you do if you still feel that you like Shakespeare? If you logically conclude that you've been deceived into over-valuing his work, do you will yourself by force of intellect to stop liking it so much?
What if you become persuaded through mountains of hard evidence that you don't think your Mom was "good", and that you only convinced yourself of this out of convenience and necessity? Will you force yourself to stop loving her?
I'm super interested in the mechanisms whereby some seemingly subjective effort in any medium gains universa...
Comedy ages poorly in every medium and for every author, and Shakespeare's reputation is not really built on his comedies. I think it would be fairer to examine Hamlet (as overrated as I find it), or Romeo and Juliet (or my personal favourite, The Tempest). I think people really do treat the comedies differently, and in many cases go to see them explicitly because they're by Shakespeare rather than on their merits. We already know about the effects that will lead people to praise a bad book by a good author.
That said, my intuition is there's an important t...
So clearly Shakespeare has first-mover advantage, and first-mover advantage is significant. It also seems likely that there have since been authors with at least as much raw talent as Shakespeare, and authors who have the same or superior technical skill (as they've benefited from reading subsequent authors, and theoretical developments in the understanding of how to write).
But it's not clear to me that "best" has a clear meaning, or that everyone unpacks it in the same way. And it makes sense to all agree that a prominent early figure in some fi...
A few not particularly connected thoughts.
1 Why are you computing (# Elizabethan writers) / (# writers ever), specifically? I mean, why is the numerator that rather than the number of authors whose name begins with S, or the number of writers called William Shakespeare who wrote at least one play about kings and witches, or any of a zillion other sets of writers?
Because of your hypothesis #2, I suppose. But why that hypothesis rather than the hypothesis that there's something about having a name beginning with S that makes an author specially likely to be ...
Hold on: if I may back up a second, I'd like to question the premise of this post: that it even makes sense to talk about a "best author who has ever lived". Now, fair enough, this isn't your fault - plenty of people do describe Shakespeare in these terms, including those writers in the Paris Review. But the idea seems erroneous to me. It seems to entail a rank ordering of writers: if Shakey is number one, who is second best, or third? How about the fifty-seventh best, or three-thousandth? The creation of such an ordering would necessarily entail...
Some of the Shakespeare plays I've read, I've liked; I'm quite fond of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. I even liked A Midsummer Night's Dream, but I can certainly understand not liking it. Julius Caesar is definitely overrated, though, and I've heard that there are some real stinkers among his plays, too. When Shakespeare is good, though, he's damn good.
Narrative poetry is indeed out of fashion these days, so it's hard to compare Shakespeare directly to contemporary authors - it's like trying to compare an opera to a play because they're both stage production...
Is it OK to revive threads?
You assume what you are told (viareading) is accurate discussion point of a literary community that specializes in the determination of literary greatness. Hint: it does not and cannot and should not. Plenty of critics will join you in saying Midsummer wasn’t Shakespeares’ best work and you will feel excited to hear that they hated a lot of what you hated about it. +there are certainly technical reasons why a certain writer is considered great(not related to mass popularity)
I've read Shakespeare, and watched one of his plays, and I find him decent.
Adjusting for cultural mismatches and the number of authors back then, I find it probable that he indeed was one of the best of his time - possibly the best, I haven't read all the others. However, I have no trouble naming any number of modern stories that are far superior, even - I believe - adjusting for said cultural mismatches.
Modern authors are simply better, on a per-author basis. There are many reasons why this might be; more time, more schooling, better tools... and of cours...
I wonder if "everyone likes Shakespeare" is a product of Shakespeare writing a wider variety of types of stories than many contemporary writers, so that the famous writers can all find at least one work they really like and ignore the ones they don't? For example, two people can both say they like Stephen Spielberg movies, when one is thinking of Jaws and the other is thinking of Lincoln?
Actually, I think you missed a major explanation. Shakespeare - by virtue of being a major cultural institution - gets his plays preformed at a much, much stronger level of competence than any given random playwright. Even enthusiastic amateurs, when putting on the scottish play are not merely working from the words on the page, but from a living tradition of who the characters are, and how they should be played for maximal impact. There is no such thing as an actress who has no understanding of how to play lady M.
And this fact, that everyone preforming ...
I was sitting in the audience as they got into the part where Bottom acts like an ass and this is supposed to be funny. I was just waiting for them to get it over with, and then remembered that there was nothing after it in the play that I looked forward to anyway.
Your unease may be from the audience reaction, not the action on stage. The action on stage is black magic, in which the King of the Fairies can get away with it because he is powerful enough to escape the consequences of black magic dabbling. This is pretty damn terrifying and not funny at a...
I have no idea how you managed to generate such stochasticity in the line spacing.
I had other complaints, of course, but gwern has addressed them far better. The resulting thread (and past experience) has demonstrated thoroughly the futility of bringing them up.
Hypothesis #1 is that Shakespeare was the greatest author who ever lived
Greatest author across all time periods and all human languages? Not very likely, considering that one of the main factors of his large popularity was the spread of the English language and the spread of the British empire throughout the 17th to 19th centuries. Even if you consider Shakespeare as the best author of his period in the neighborhood of, say, a few centuries, you're still excluding all other languages and all other time periods.
There are other examples of authors who's p...
The only part of your hypothesis 2 that I find really plausible is that there is no doubt a greater likelyhood of of the well known Greatest Author in some literary tradition being early, because part of why they resonate so much is the way their influence shaped later culture and taste. So I'm willing to concede the possibility that there may be some sense in which Shakespeare is not as good as a handful of more recent authors, who get less recognition because of timing. But he was certainly far better than his contemporaries; he didn't win out by luck....
I can easily compute how likely it is that one of the Elizabethan authors was the greatest author of all time given that hypothesis 2 is false:
...Yes, the answer is 0, since hypothesis 2 is "an Elizabethan author was the greatest author of all time":
Hypothesis #2 is that something about the time that Shakespeare wrote in made it very likely that we would elevate some writer from that time period to "Greatest Writer Ever".
(I think you should reword this to clarify what you really meant, whatever that might be.)
I simple explanation is that Shakespeare simply had luck. People liked him because other people liked them instead of for reasons inherent to his work.
Do you like Shakespeare?
I've been reading the Paris Review interviews with famous authors of the 20th century. Famous authors don't always like other famous authors. Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, Fitzgerald — for all of them, you could find some famous author who found them unreadable. (Especially Joyce and Faulkner.)
Except Shakespeare. Everyone loved Shakespeare. In fact, those who mentioned Shakespeare sometimes said he was the best author who has ever lived.
How likely is this?
I have a divergent opinion. I realized this during a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I've seen the play three or four times. Every year, people perform it at Renaissance festivals, in Central Park, and in at least one high school within 5 miles of my house. I was sitting in the audience as they got into the part where Bottom acts like an ass and this is supposed to be funny. I was just waiting for them to get it over with, and then remembered that there was nothing after it in the play that I looked forward to anyway. I suddenly realized, "This... is a bad play." Up until that moment, I had somehow believed that it was one of my favorite plays without actually liking almost anything in it.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is supposed to be a magical romantic comedy. It contains nothing of the magic one finds in a Peter Beagle or Charles de Lint fantasy, less-stirring romances than the average fan-fiction, and less humor than one would find in a randomly-chosen paragraph of Terry Pratchett. It has never made me laugh or cry once. Yet even having read it, and having watched it at least twice, I somehow voluntarily paid to sit and suffer through it again when I still had unread stories by Chekov, Borges, Katherine Anne Porter, and a hundred other worthies whose work seldom failed to move me at least as much as Shakespeare's best.
I have two competing hypotheses. Hypothesis #1 is that Shakespeare was the greatest author who ever lived, or at least in the top 10, whatever that means. You would be hard-pressed to find more than a handful of literary critics who would dispute this. Hypothesis #2 is that something about the time that Shakespeare wrote in made it very likely that we would elevate some writer from that time period to "Greatest Writer Ever". For instance:
I can easily compute how likely it is that one of the Elizabethan authors was the greatest author of all time given that hypothesis 2 is false: It is the number of Elizabethan authors divided by number of authors of all time.
So how many Elizabethan authors were there? This is probably the sort of thing that shouldn't be attempted using Google, but I don't have a university library at hand. Using Google, it appears that we have about 600 plays from that time period. Most of the writing from that time seems to have been by amateur poets, mostly members of the nobility. The number of serious authors during the Elizabethan period — and I'm really guessing here; the number of distinct professional author names I've come across is about a dozen — might be around 100.
How many people write novels in English today? Hard to say, but this web page makes a reasonable case that about 100,000 novels in English are published each year. Publishers accept about one out of every thousand books submitted; it is not unusual for a book to be submitted to 10 different publishers. I will therefore estimate that 10 million novelists write 10 million novels in English every year today. Our first approximation for the prior odds for some Elizabethan author of being the greatest English writer of all time are therefore about one in 100,000. I'm going to multiply this by a factor of 10 to account for the fact that authors in Elizabethan times had no libraries, and few good writings to take as models even if they'd been able to acquire copies. I'm going to multiply by another factor of 10 to account for the strange fact that almost everyone agrees that Shakespeare is the greatest writer of all time, when this is not how appraisals of artistic merit ever work. It is almost never the case that a blinded evaluation of the works of different experts in any kind of art results in a unanimous opinion on which one is the greatest. I suppose Beethoven or Aristotle might be such cases, but I do not find the degree of unanimity regarding their merits versus Bach and Newton that I find on the merits of Shakespeare versus everyone else. This gives prior odds of one in 10 million.
(Yes, I am actually arguing that unanimity of expert opinion in this case makes that expert opinion less likely, because non-merit-based mechanisms produce unanimity much more often than objective evaluations of artistic merit.)
At this point, is there even any need to consider the proposition that Shakespeare was the greatest author of all time? For myself, I think not. There's nothing left to explain away. Sure, there are people claiming that Hamlet or King Lear are masterpieces. But I already know that some weird mechanism is at work that convinces people every day to actually pay money to watch A Comedy of Errors. Whatever that mechanism is, it can also explain our attachment to Hamlet.
Given that I know there's a powerful reality-distortion field around Shakespeare, isn't it more rational to assume that whatever fondness I have for any Shakespeare play is a result of that field, than to try to evaluate the play and trust in my superhuman ability to resist that field's force?
And what do you do if you still feel that you like Shakespeare? If you logically conclude that you've been deceived into over-valuing his work, do you will yourself by force of intellect to stop liking it so much?