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 with and immediate feedback from their audiences, and attempted to please both the opera-box and the pit at the same time.
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.
Shakespeare’s world is so foreign to us, with its strange speech and clothing and worldview, that to a modern audience, Shakespeare is simply a fantasist with a colorful and meticulously-constructed fantasy world, richer and more consistent than Tolkien’s, that we love to visit.
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.
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.
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’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 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 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.
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?)
(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.)
And you are naturally privileging your own expert opinion that Shakespeare’s plays like Comedy of Errors are bad.
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.
No half-baked speculation about causes of literary popularity was required to realize you don’t enjoy Shakespeare.
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.
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.
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?
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. ;)
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.
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.
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.
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 quality or contemporary opinion of your work.
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?
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’.
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.
Are there any measurable world records from the Elizabethan era that still stand?
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 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.
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.
the earlier a scientist [lives], the easier it is to make incredible discoveries and pick up low-hanging fruit.
You are ignoring the distinction PhilGoetz made in the grandparent comment:
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.
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.
The fact is that across most fields, a statistically-impossible number of those regarded as the greatest practitioners were among the very first practitioners. There are numbers; I have provided some in the case of Shakespeare, and you yourself have provided more. If you bothered to compute the odds you would find them astronomical. You acquire dozens of bits of information about who are regarded as the greatest X from dividing all people from all arts into two classes, early and not early. That’s amazing discriminatory power, and it doesn’t happen by accident. It’s a testable hypothesis, and you tested it: You listed the top-regarded practitioners in fields I didn’t mention, and they followed the same pattern.
The fact is that across most fields, a statistically-impossible number of those regarded as the greatest practitioners were among the very first practitioners.
Statistically impossible… based on what?
There are numbers; I have provided some in the case of Shakespeare, and you yourself have provided more. If you bothered to compute the odds you would find them astronomical.
Based on what am I computing these odds? What sort of absurd model assigns equal possibility to being Newton in Newton’s lifetime and right now?
That’s amazing discriminatory power, and it doesn’t happen by accident.
I agree that it doesn’t happen by accident. And I think there’s many alternate explanations besides the one you seem to hew to.
Have you considered that greatness may simply come and go with periods of particular ferment? Look at the plots over time in Human Accomplishment: clumpiness is common, but other than that, there’s no particular rhyme or reason. Arab literature clumps at a different time from Chinese painting which clumps at different times than Western Philosophy, and so on. All of this massively violates a naive model ‘everyone has an equal chance to be Newton, therefore isn’t it really suspicious that Newton was so early on’; am I supposed to believe that 1000 years later, Arab poetry is still biased by random canonizations? And the same bias hit Japanese literature for a different clump of writers? And hit a later still clump of English writers?
(This is reminding me of anthropic reasoning. ‘We get these absurd consequences from SSA/SIA! Clearly the Great Filter is near and we are doomed to die in the next 50 years!’ ‘Or maybe your theories of anthropics are filled with holes and problems, and you’ve nicely demonstrated their absurdities.’)
You listed the top-regarded practitioners in fields I didn’t mention, and they followed the same pattern.
Yes… So what’s simpler, that in all fields there are conspiracies to canonize random early participants, or that early participants really are not identical to later participants?
I’m not sure if this is the same as periods of particular ferment, but I’ve wondered if what makes great eras is that there happen to be enough highly capable people in proximity so that they can play off each other.
Proximity is surely important (why else do we have universities rather than, say, professors distributed across the country being mailed checks every month?) and may be part of the reason that cities are so important and have superlinear returns to population and explain why Murray does indeed find that major figures all tend heavily to live in or work near cities, but cities have high populations through time, not just space. Paris for centuries has had large populations, but there are still clusters of major French figures. So I don’t see how cities explain the temporal clustering of major figures.
I’m not just talking about ordinary city proximity, I’m talking about getting a handful of very sparkly people (and possibly a larger number of moderately sparkly people) with the right combination of talents and personalities to inspire each other. And possibly the ability to generate enough interesting stuff to get the attention of gatekeepers.
It may be worth noting that there’s a fair bit of evidence that over the long-term, only some literary wors get a lot of attention, and this does not seem to be closely correlated with what at a specific time is widely read or considered great literature. Much of what we consider great works of literature from the 19th century were not as widely regarded as they are today, while other works have fallen by the wayside. Similar examples show up elsewhere and elsewhen. For example, The Tale of Genji was written in the middle of the Heian era when a lot of different literary experimentation was going on, and it took time for it to be recognized.
It may make sense therefore to use a test of time as a way of determining literary merit. This isn’t ideal: it is possible that once a work is sufficiently well-done, the actual level of acclaim more closely resembles a random walk. I’m not sure how to test that hypothesis.
For example, The Tale of Genji was written in the middle of the Heian era when a lot of different literary experimentation was going on, and it took time for it to be recognized.
Really? My impression had been that Genji was recognized almost immediately as one of the great works of Heian literature, based on the profusion of manuscripts prepared in Shikibu’s time, the countless imitators, the testimony of the Sarashina Nikki, the commentaries prepared not too long afterwards, and in particular, the very high regard of Fujiwara no Teika, one of the most important literary figures for centuries (I may be biased, since I wrote the Wikipedia entry on Teika), who worked on the manuscript.
I don’t think Teika’s work is great evidence since that’s about 150 years after Genji is written. The rest of your arguments though I think are strong: there’s way too much contemporaneous recognition of Genji to use it as an example of what I wanted it to do.
I was hoping I’d have some example from non-Western literature, I may now need to update to this sort of thing being a Western phenomenon.
How much movement of literary judgement would you consider unsurprising? Do you have a source quantifying the movement of judgement of 19th century work?
Regarding, the first question:I’m not sure. Regarding the second, I don’t unfortunately have a good source for this. I My impression on this is from talking to multiple lit professors and teachers who have mentioned this phenomenon.
Quickly looking through the Google snippets for goethe site:theparisreview.org/interviews, it seems like all the mentions of Goethe are positive—quelle horror!
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.
How much of that is due more to what you are used to, in part due to the influence of Faust?
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.
I think Goethe, Dante, Virgil & Homer are exempt from criticism as foreigners. Who comes up as your top five writers in English?
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.)
Heck, I’ll bite your bullet; I don’t think one could openly suggest Goethe was better than Shakespeare
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?)
you simply can’t suggest another english-speaking writer was better than Shakespeare in polite company.
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.
It was the only time since Chaucer (and this may also be true) when writers had contact with and immediate feedback from their audiences, and attempted to please both the opera-box and the pit at the same time.
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.
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.
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.
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:
At first glance, it may not seem reasonable to expect the United States to have 65 playwrights for every one that Elizabethan England had. But this intuitive reaction is conditioned by our knowledge that the Elizabethan playwrights included Marlowe and Shakespeare, so we tend to think in terms of 65 playwrights of their caliber. But if I were to ask the question another way—is it reasonable to expect today’s United States to have 65 times as many people who make their living from writing dramas as Elizabethan England?—the answer is of course yes. The half century from 1570–1620 had only 20 English playwrights mentioned in any of the sources, 13 of whom were significant figures.[21] Compare this with the single year of 2000 in the United States, when the Writers Guild that supplies writers for unionized television and screen projects numbered 12,735 members, about half of whom were employed during 2000.22 This figure does not count all the non-unionized people who make a living writing for television, the screen, and the stage.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
The fact is that across most fields, a statistically-impossible number of those regarded as the greatest practitioners were among the very first practitioners. There are numbers; I have provided some in the case of Shakespeare, and you yourself have provided more. If you bothered to compute the odds you would find them astronomical. You acquire dozens of bits of information about who are regarded as the greatest X from dividing all people from all arts into two classes, early and not early. That’s amazing discriminatory power, and it doesn’t happen by accident. It’s a testable hypothesis, and you tested it: You listed the top-regarded practitioners in fields I didn’t mention, and they followed the same pattern.
Statistically impossible… based on what?
Based on what am I computing these odds? What sort of absurd model assigns equal possibility to being Newton in Newton’s lifetime and right now?
I agree that it doesn’t happen by accident. And I think there’s many alternate explanations besides the one you seem to hew to.
Have you considered that greatness may simply come and go with periods of particular ferment? Look at the plots over time in Human Accomplishment: clumpiness is common, but other than that, there’s no particular rhyme or reason. Arab literature clumps at a different time from Chinese painting which clumps at different times than Western Philosophy, and so on. All of this massively violates a naive model ‘everyone has an equal chance to be Newton, therefore isn’t it really suspicious that Newton was so early on’; am I supposed to believe that 1000 years later, Arab poetry is still biased by random canonizations? And the same bias hit Japanese literature for a different clump of writers? And hit a later still clump of English writers?
(This is reminding me of anthropic reasoning. ‘We get these absurd consequences from SSA/SIA! Clearly the Great Filter is near and we are doomed to die in the next 50 years!’ ‘Or maybe your theories of anthropics are filled with holes and problems, and you’ve nicely demonstrated their absurdities.’)
Yes… So what’s simpler, that in all fields there are conspiracies to canonize random early participants, or that early participants really are not identical to later participants?
I’m not sure if this is the same as periods of particular ferment, but I’ve wondered if what makes great eras is that there happen to be enough highly capable people in proximity so that they can play off each other.
Proximity is surely important (why else do we have universities rather than, say, professors distributed across the country being mailed checks every month?) and may be part of the reason that cities are so important and have superlinear returns to population and explain why Murray does indeed find that major figures all tend heavily to live in or work near cities, but cities have high populations through time, not just space. Paris for centuries has had large populations, but there are still clusters of major French figures. So I don’t see how cities explain the temporal clustering of major figures.
I’m not just talking about ordinary city proximity, I’m talking about getting a handful of very sparkly people (and possibly a larger number of moderately sparkly people) with the right combination of talents and personalities to inspire each other. And possibly the ability to generate enough interesting stuff to get the attention of gatekeepers.
It may be worth noting that there’s a fair bit of evidence that over the long-term, only some literary wors get a lot of attention, and this does not seem to be closely correlated with what at a specific time is widely read or considered great literature. Much of what we consider great works of literature from the 19th century were not as widely regarded as they are today, while other works have fallen by the wayside. Similar examples show up elsewhere and elsewhen. For example, The Tale of Genji was written in the middle of the Heian era when a lot of different literary experimentation was going on, and it took time for it to be recognized.
It may make sense therefore to use a test of time as a way of determining literary merit. This isn’t ideal: it is possible that once a work is sufficiently well-done, the actual level of acclaim more closely resembles a random walk. I’m not sure how to test that hypothesis.
Really? My impression had been that Genji was recognized almost immediately as one of the great works of Heian literature, based on the profusion of manuscripts prepared in Shikibu’s time, the countless imitators, the testimony of the Sarashina Nikki, the commentaries prepared not too long afterwards, and in particular, the very high regard of Fujiwara no Teika, one of the most important literary figures for centuries (I may be biased, since I wrote the Wikipedia entry on Teika), who worked on the manuscript.
I don’t think Teika’s work is great evidence since that’s about 150 years after Genji is written. The rest of your arguments though I think are strong: there’s way too much contemporaneous recognition of Genji to use it as an example of what I wanted it to do.
I was hoping I’d have some example from non-Western literature, I may now need to update to this sort of thing being a Western phenomenon.
How much movement of literary judgement would you consider unsurprising? Do you have a source quantifying the movement of judgement of 19th century work?
Regarding, the first question:I’m not sure. Regarding the second, I don’t unfortunately have a good source for this. I My impression on this is from talking to multiple lit professors and teachers who have mentioned this phenomenon.
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.
There’s a scholar who becomes best buddies with the Devil… and then, in the second half of the book, they kill some elderly couple...
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.