To like, or not to like?

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.

1. 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).

2. 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 universal appeal, so upvoted for being something I like to think about. But your last couple sentence just seem kinda weird. (Maybe it was just tongue-in-cheek?) Like what you like.

I think people like what they like based on some combination of familiarity and signalling. Of course, some stuff will have a broad appeal because it happens to be interesting to a wide-range of demographics by the very nature of the material (sex, love, adventure, suspense, etc.). But when it is hard to put your finger on why something is liked when you don't like it, I'd suggest it is because people have gotten "used to it" and it gives them comforting, nostalgic, fuzzy feelings, relaxation, etc... or they are just pretending to like it to get the social benefits of saying they like it. They're faking in many cases, methinks. (Maybe they even fake themselves into geniune liking via familiarity? Ha.)

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 truth under your argument. There's a real rich-get-richer effect in terms of literary popularity; critics have a lot of incentives to hold particular opinions, and an author who is seen as good in one age will influence other works, which is then rather circularly taken as evidence as their quality. I think the mechanics of culture have a tendency to amplify small differences between good and great, and the pedestal Shakespeare is placed on is a particularly tall one. But I suspect he was, even objectively in his time, better than those around him - just not by as much as we treat him as.

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.

Sounds like an interesting experience. Did you enjoy going to see it? I have a friend who counts Manos: The Hands of Fate among his favourite movies, not because it's a good movie per se but because he enjoys watching it. If you didn't enjoy it, why did you think it was a favourite? Were you signalling? (Asking for information, not trying to trap you)

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?

I think the key consideration in answering this is: rationalists should win.

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 field is "best," in order to deflect unproductive arguments about an unclear term. Consider the Asimov-Clarke treaty, where each agreed to call themself second best and the other one best.

It's also not clear to me that one should ignore first-mover advantage. If I develop a nuanced theory of Hamlet after reading the play, reading Asimov's commentary on it (and Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare is really good), and then reading the play again, then I can talk with most literati about my theory of Hamlet. If I develop a nuanced theory of some niche playwright's play, even if the play is objectively better than Hamlet, there's no guarantee that I can talk about it at dinner parties with literati.

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 favoured, etc.?

2 It seems odd (this is a polite way of saying "downright wrong") to be comparing an estimate of the number of "serious writers" in Elizabethan times (estimated on the basis of what works have survived from then to the present day) with an estimate of the number of people who have submitted at least one novel to at least one publisher today. Compare serious writers with serious writers, or wannabes with wannabes.

3 I think you're wrong about what conclusions to draw from the near-unanimous admiration of Shakespeare. Yes, unanimity makes it likely that there are mechanisms at work other than objective evaluation of artistic merit. (Assuming there to be any such thing.) But it doesn't give much reason (or any) to think that artistic merit isn't an important part of the assessment.

4 It seems that this sort of issue is a big deal to you. I suggest that you might be happier if you just stopped worrying about how your cultural preferences differ from those you see as mainstream, and got on with enjoying whatever you enjoy.

[EDITED to avoid misformatting caused by LW's numbered-list magic.]

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.)

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 productions - but I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that no, Shakespeare isn't the best writer of all time, Terry Pratchett is.

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 course there are simply more of them.

If I were to name the best author in history (so far), I'm not sure who it'd be, but the authors who'd be in the running are uniformly recent. Stefan Gagne and his City of Angles, for instance, would be high on the list. Shakespeare wouldn't figure on it.

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 his works are steeped in them, makes the plays seem stronger than they are - After all, the performances are typically stronger, so that must be to the credit of the works, no? Well, no. It's to the credit of the tradition and the work. Which cannot easily be separated, because the tradition didn't glomp onto Shakespeare at random.

shakespeare is good tho

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 all if you think about it. We are all there in the audience watching a comedy and we don't want to be terrified, and we don't want to think too much. But why do people laugh at that on repeat viewings? I'll try and make a mental note to check if I laugh the next time I see it; that would be a rude surprise.

What thou seest when thou dost wake

Do it for thy true love take

. . .

Wake when some vile thing is near

adds up to one of the worst curses in the library. Shakespeare violated the prime directive of karma with this plot element and he got away with it. Who's to say whether that is the greatest genius but it certainly is skill.

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 popularity was boosted by the spread of a language. There are examples in Roman, Spanish, German, Japanese, and Persian, for instance. For each of these lucky ones, though, there were probably hundreds of authors who were forgotten as their languages were. For all we know, there could have been a literary genius in a remote tribe in Africa who was forgotten the day his village was attacked by the neighboring one.

If you change your hypothesis to "Shakespeare was the greatest English language author who ever lived", then it starts looking more likely.

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'm afraid he's mostly popular due to his genius.

I don't always like great classics myself. What little I've read of Goethe I mostly found annoying. But I could see why he's so well-regarded; he just happened to push some personal buttons of mine in the works of his I read. So I'd never try to convince anyone he's over-rated. Since you seem to be much more familiar with Shakespeare than I am with Goethe, I'm surprised you can't see Shakespeare's equally obvious strengths, even if you don't enjoy his work.

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.