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 comparing the merits of such incommensurates as Kafka and Chaucer, Beckett and Whitman, Chekhov and Laurence Sterne. The idea that there is any objective way to do this seems completely silly to me. I suppose you could posit some metric of merit and measure that; call it “influence quotient”, say. (I.Q. for short.) Just don’t expect it to actually correspond to anything you could point to in the real world. (I make the link with I.Q. because I think it’s an instructive comparisand on the usefulness of reducing an incredibly complex, multivariate entity to a single figure, and then claiming to have measured it.)
A second point: I’m also a little puzzled by the idea that one could peel back the layers of critical appreciation (or, if you prefer, the “reality distortion field”) that have accreted around Shakespeare, in order to somehow appraise the work in-and-of-itself. Well, my take is that in the arts, it’s impossible to appraise a work in-and-of-itself. (You mention that you like Borges; Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote is a meditation on just this: the centrality of context to the understanding of works of literature, and the impossibility of evaluating a text without considering its context.) The strength of a work is always to do with its resonances and analogies with the outside world. If—as in the case of Shakey—some of those resonances have been brought out or strengthened by particularly brilliant pieces of critical writing antecedent to the work itself—well, so what? The work now contains those strengthened resonances, and is better off for it.
In other words, I don’t see how it’s desirable (let alone possible) to separate out these after-the-fact forms of merit from those that are in some sense inherent to the work. I think all that critical appreciation doesn’t just make Shakespeare’s plays seem better; it actually makes them better. (From the fact that the phrase “raw talent” is in use in this discussion, though, I’d guess that not everyone here would agree with my hardline-subjectivist take on this last point. Luckily, you don’t have to buy my second point in order to buy my first.)
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 comparing the merits of such incommensurates as Kafka and Chaucer, Beckett and Whitman, Chekhov and Laurence Sterne. The idea that there is any objective way to do this seems completely silly to me. I suppose you could posit some metric of merit and measure that; call it “influence quotient”, say. (I.Q. for short.) Just don’t expect it to actually correspond to anything you could point to in the real world. (I make the link with I.Q. because I think it’s an instructive comparisand on the usefulness of reducing an incredibly complex, multivariate entity to a single figure, and then claiming to have measured it.)
A second point: I’m also a little puzzled by the idea that one could peel back the layers of critical appreciation (or, if you prefer, the “reality distortion field”) that have accreted around Shakespeare, in order to somehow appraise the work in-and-of-itself. Well, my take is that in the arts, it’s impossible to appraise a work in-and-of-itself. (You mention that you like Borges; Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote is a meditation on just this: the centrality of context to the understanding of works of literature, and the impossibility of evaluating a text without considering its context.) The strength of a work is always to do with its resonances and analogies with the outside world. If—as in the case of Shakey—some of those resonances have been brought out or strengthened by particularly brilliant pieces of critical writing antecedent to the work itself—well, so what? The work now contains those strengthened resonances, and is better off for it.
In other words, I don’t see how it’s desirable (let alone possible) to separate out these after-the-fact forms of merit from those that are in some sense inherent to the work. I think all that critical appreciation doesn’t just make Shakespeare’s plays seem better; it actually makes them better. (From the fact that the phrase “raw talent” is in use in this discussion, though, I’d guess that not everyone here would agree with my hardline-subjectivist take on this last point. Luckily, you don’t have to buy my second point in order to buy my first.)