No they aren’t. If you have nothing to offer but the same old lies, kindly go somewhere else to spread them.
Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. Those who deny it are either ignorant, mentally ill, or hypocrites getting rich by selling garbage to suckers.
Here is a short piece on Jonson and his relationship with Shakespeare including his praise of Shakespeare in First Folio.
Here is a link about his influences
His place in the theatre after they were reopened in the late 1600s.
achievement
With Dryden
His historical reputation
18th Century
To Mr. Kennedy
crime
I would also like to tell you Mr. Kennedy, that I did not start a discussion of who wrote Shakespeare, but merely used the available evidences to show that Shakespeare didn’t not start out crowned “King of the Literary World.”
I hate internet links as they are always questionable. I tried to only use links that were from well known encyclopedias or scholarly published work.
And one last thing, you guys need to lighten up. Its not like I am a neo-nazi or something. I just don’t think Shakespeare deserves to be “crown” without a little debate. You guys really sound like you are going to lynch me. I’ll need to add Shakespeare to my list of things not to discuss at a dinner party, along side politics and religion.
wissdok, trust me. NEVER use Wikipedia as a “reliable” internet source. The thing is so full of misinformation it should always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, editable by anyone. I could, if I desired, totally change the wording in the article on Ben Johnson. As a registered editor, I have some familiarity with the, um, lack of veracity some of the articles obtain…
Also, your link to the EB is of little value to anyone who isn’t a subscriber.
Your other links do not seem to sustain any position you might have about Ben Jonson being more popular than Shakespeare, or more performed, or better thought of.
And as you appear to be relatively new to the Board, I will suggest that you will find it hard slogging here if you make proposals which attack a premise without substantial evidence to back you up, or an astounding display of logic on your side. Take it from one who knows. 
Wissdok said:
Actually he did die rich (and anyway doesn’t your own sentence contradict itself?)
It took a while for the money from the plays to start rolling in but once it did he bought himself a nice house in Blackfriars, London. He also bought one of the biggest houses in Stratford (New End) into which he moved Anne and the kids. This house had it’s own grounds but he also bought another hundred acres.
He spent £440 buying a share of Trinity church in Stratford - a substantial sum of money back then. His Will left considerable assets to various people he knew but these were just the assets that he specifically wanted certain people to have. Under English law, Anne would have got everything else. He didn’t need to specify Anne because she got everything else by default so we don’t know how much was left over.
He retired at the age of 47 and went back home to live in Stratford with Anne. It seems that he never needed to work again.
Where do you think he got the money to buy real estate? The mere fact of being a property owner back then = rich.
Some of the critics were a bit sniffy about this young upstart from the sticks but they were just pissed off
a) because he wasn’t a toff and
b) because he seemed pretty sure of his own ability (he wasn’t a shrinking violet)
Fellow writers were more charitable. Marlowe said something like (paraphrasing):
“Hey, I’m good but this guy Shakespeare, he’s off the scale man”
And I think Donne said something similar. Can’t find the exact quotes right now.
Thank you DSYoungEsq I was not aware of the credibility problem with Wikipedia. I can’t say I generally use online encyclopedias, so you live, you learn.
I am not going to spend the rest of the night searching for Jonson references. Jonson said thing about Shakespeare that was both a “pat of the back” and then follow with “a slap to the face.” That is nothing against Shakespeare, that was just who history records Jonson was. Dryden said nice things about Shakespeare, but was a student in the school of “Jonson” playwrights (check the Dryden link). Beaumont and Fletcher were also considered of that school, and both wrote with Jonson. Needless to say, Shakespeare didn’t gain his place as a genius over verse till the mid 1700s. But even with that he didn’t become revered till the 1800s{check the 18th Century link}.
The crime link is to a website that discuss the crime problem under the paragraph heading Plays and Propaganda. This is easy to validate on the web. In fact, I am sure I could have fought more linkson all this stuff, I just didn’t want to scan a thousand different Google searches to find them nor did I want to spend all night trying to find an easy was to do links. If you don’t find the what you link in my links, leave me a message and I send you a Xerox of the pages from World Book, Funk and Wagnall, Britannica or any of the other encyopedias I have in my house.
Yes,** Jojo ** that was a typing error. It should have read " didn’t die as rich as". Sorry for the confusion. The point I was making, that may have confusioned MR. Kennedy as well, was those that doubt(like Twain) Shakespeare really wrote his work challenge the fact he should have been richer. I don’t doubt he wrote what is credited to him, just that he wasn’t as popular as some would think. The fact is that a good part of his work wasn’t published till after his death. Its either he didn’t need the money or there wasn’t a market for it. As for it his real estate holdings, no matter who you believe, based on historical records most historians agree that Shakespeare was a shrewd businessman.
For the record, all this is just a side issue. The real topic is why should one group in society be the judge over what is great? If the American people were to vote would they choose Shakespeare…or maybe Twain or Hemingway? In England maybe they would choose Byron, or Milton. What about Canada, South Africa, or India? Australia? I really don’t think he is as popular with the people as some might think. And again if we leave it to one group, isn’t that elitist?
It sure is, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Why shouldn’t the members of a group that is most knowledgeable about a particular subject be the ones to judge quality in that subject?
This is the bit I don’t understand. According to the evidence we have, he was both extremely rich and extremely popular within his own lifetime
If Twain thinks he should have been richer then I don’t know what he was smoking. How rich does someone need to be anyway, in order to pass the “rich test”? Shakespeare came out of nowhere, from Hicksville. He had no powerful friends or contacts yet ended up owning the Big House in his hometown.
He was so popular that the King made his troupe the official royal Acting Company. People were flocking to see his plays. It’s true that theatres were banned for a short time in the City of London but they were banned precisely because the masses were pouring in. And the City is only one square mile. Outside the perimeter of this exclusion zone new theatres sprang up and the masses flocked to them.
Even before King James made his troupe the official royal one, Queen Elizabeth I summoned him to perform one of his plays for her. He was mega popular AND mega rich.
It’s true that actors were considered a bit disreputable but poets were not. Poets were highly regarded, and Shakespeare made his name with a poem - Venus and Adonis. And his acting was just a hobby, he was a writer as his day job, so he personally wasn’t thought of as disreputable.
I don’t think any of his stuff was published while he was alive. I dunno if he was a shrewd businessman really. Yes he bought property but that doesn’t mean he was shrewd. Any fool with money can buy property. And if he was all that shrewd, he’d have arranged to have had some of his plays published. He definitely had the contacts and the money in the later years.
All he would need, after the contacts and the money, is a market. And he seems to have had a market since he built his own theatre (the Globe) to accomodate his fans. Even if he hadn’t had a market, he could have still paid to publish - he probably had the necessary contacts.
The fact he didn’t publish, in Shakespeares case, seems to be more a case of him having money rolling in and not knowing what to do with it than anything else.
If I’d written what Shakespeare wrote, I’d pay to have it published myself, market or not.
A couple of comments to make. When I was 19, I read Twelfth Night, and I thought that it was boring and not the least bit funny. About two months later, I saw a good professional production of it, and I thought it was hilarious. As other people have said, Shakespeare is meant to be seen, not to be read.
Which brings me to my second point: One of my complaints about American education – and it applies to both public and private schools – is that literature in general and poetry and plays specifically is often taught very poorly.
There are two main problems that I see. The first is that the students are typically told, “Read the poem on the bottom of page 45 silently to yourself”. No, poetry and plays should be read aloud, and by someone who knows how to read them.
The second is that all too often, students have to read things that they cannot understand. An example from Leigh Hunt, early 19th century poet (friend of John Keats):
Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief! who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in.
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad;
Say that health and wealth have miss’d me;
Say I’m growing old, but add-
Jenny kiss’d me.
Now, anyone over the age of about 40 will understand this poem. But no 16-year-old will. At 16, you are going to beat the world. At forty, you know that you won’t. However, there will be bright points, little victories such as the one that Hunt was celebrating.
I am also reminded that when I was 16, I had to read The Brothers Karamazov. At 16, it said absolutely nothing to me. I re-read it in my late 20s. At that point, I began to understand it. I read it again when I was 50 – at 50, I was prepared for Dostoyevsky. At 16, I was not.
WRT Shakespeare, I love his language and his ability to turn a phrase. “I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams” is simply magnificent writing.
While it is true that attempting to assert that any one person is the “greatest writer” is a bit difficult to do, the argument you raise has been repeatedly shown to be based upon incorrect assumptions. Shakespeare is not revered solely because of literary critics from some educational elite. We have in numerous posts shown just how popular his works are among the public in general. Numerous versions of his works show up in movies all the time, movies that are quite well attended. There is no other single author whose works are so consistently reproduced today. And none of that is because of some frowning schoolmarm or nearsighted English professor.
If you don’t like Shakespeare, that’s fine. I don’t like Dickens; he’s too wordy a bastard; but that doesn’t make him any less good a writer in the opinion of many. If your dislike of Shakespeare is a result primarily of feeling forced to read his works by some sort of cultural “elite” against whom you wish to remain in rebellion, then I can only suggest that you approach the works without some sort of preconceived notion about them, and see what you think. Watch the plays (good productions, preferably), read the sonnets, see some of the movies.
And keep in mind that, even in this day and age of computer access to so much, almost anything you read, hear or see has been filtered out from a much larger mass of potential “art” by some cultural “elite” somewhere, usually with highrise offices in New York or Los Angeles. Even Stephen King. 
DSYoungEsq post:
*While it is true that attempting to assert that any one person is the “greatest writer” is a bit difficult to do, the argument you raise has been repeatedly shown to be based upon incorrect assumptions. Shakespeare is not revered solely because of literary critics from some educational elite. We have in numerous posts shown just how popular his works are among the public in general. Numerous versions of his works show up in movies all the time, movies that are quite well attended. There is no other single author whose works are so consistently reproduced today. And none of that is because of some frowning schoolmarm or nearsighted English professor.
*
I think you are under the assumption that this board is a fair representation of the general public. This board is made mainly of those that either agree with with Cecil’s answered or just want to “bust my chops.” By your own admission in your other thread, someone had to decide that all students need to know Shakespeare. Why? Did the parents run to the schools begging for Shakespeare? the former students? business leaders? The decision was made by educators.
Gone with the Wind was the highest sell non-religionist book of all time…why don’t we read it in high school? That would be a great book that students could share with their families because there is a good likelihood that someone in there family has read it. The reason might be based on the same reasoning described in an essay released some years ago that said that generally scholars give credit to successful writers for their abililty to write entertainingly but not for writing with any literary value. Is that not elitist?
Culture influence you say. Sherlock Holmes has appeared in 213 movies by the end of the 20th Century; and number two was Dracula(163) and three was Frankenstein’s monster(121). How many movies are on Shakespeare again? This Halloween how many kids will dress as Hamlet? I don’t think Walmart sells that outfit. Writers hated by the critics like Fleming and Roddenberry, both have seen their movies out-sale all the movies ever made Shakespeare. Yes, Titanic was just Romeo and Juliet on a ship, but Tolken can be credited with creating a whole genre of movies and being the influence for ALL role playing games thanks to D&D. Boardway in New York is heavy influence by the role Gilbert and Sullivan, Rogers and Hammerstein, and Neil Simon have played on the threatre. Disney, the home of family entertainment, has made how many movies on Shakespeare?
As for Stephen King and the publishing “elite.” I don’t think publishers are part of any literary elite. If they are part of any elite group it would be in business. So next time you want a quality writer publshed call Carl Icahn or Sumner Redstone and see what they have to say.
While I rummage around for some comprehensive information…
Citations for your assertions of fact, please?
Just as a quick aside: According to the *Encyclopedia of Movie Awards * by Michael Gebert, *Out of Africa * was the 10th biggest grossing film of 1986 (and would make the top 5 if its grosses from 1985 & 86 were combined), while Three Days of the Condor was the 17th top grosser of 1975. So apparently, when it comes to Redford movies, you’re the elitist.
Again, you are starting with a very little knowledge, reading a few sentences here and there, and then making wild generalizations. Yes, Jonson was annoyed that someone like Shakespeare, with less education than him, was able to toss off two fantastic plays a year, and not even break a sweat doing it. But he also called him “Soul of the Age”, “Star of Poets”, and then “not of an Age, but for all time.”
After Shakespeare’s death, his plays began to fall out of favor; he was perceived as old-fashioned, and, after the Restoration’s tremendous influx of French customs and neoclassicism, even a little embarrassing. People started rewriting him, even to the point of speaking of the plays being “adapted for the stage”! Nevertheless, although his scripts, as they were written, largely disappeared from the theatres, they continued, in more or less their original form, to be printed for home reading.
The late 18th and early 19th centuries pretty much put an end to that sort of thing. And, of course, it was only when a few centuries of perspective had been gained that it became possible to say that Shakespeare was the greatest writer of all time. He had “paid his dues.”
At any rate, describing Beaumont and Fletcher as being of the “school of Jonson” is simply bizarre, like calling Rodgers and Hammerstein “school of Odets”.
And which doesn’t do one damned thing to support your original claim, which was that the theatres were such abhorred places that Shakespeare could not possibly have been popular among the masses. On the contrary, the constant complaint against the theatres was that they were too popular.
(Are you aware, by the way, that the “City of London” was and is the roughly one square mile of London that the Romans built the original wall around? The “City of London” is to London roughly what the Wall Street district is to New York City, except that it actually retains a distinct legal identity, which “Wall Street” does not.)
I don’t recall Twain making that particular argument, but his anti-Shakespeare rant is embarrassing enough without it. (The essay boils down to, “Shakespeare can throw around more technical terms from Elizabethan law than I can, therefore he must have been a pre-eminent lawyer.”) In any case, it’s an amazingly ignorant argument, since virtually all playwrights before the invention of copyright were poor, living mainly on charity, if they didn’t have day jobs. Shakespeare got rich because he was a “sharer” in the company that eventually became the King’s Men. (In modern Hollywood terms, he was an Executive Producer.)
As I have already mentioned, there was no such legal concept as copyright. Plays were closely held by acting companies, and only passed on to printers once they were old enough not to draw large audiences.
Which proves nothing one way or the other.
Yeah, why should the smart people have all the brains? It’s not fair!
If the election were honest, they’d chose, if we were lucky, J. K. Rowling, or, if we were unlucky, some turd like Dan Brown.
307 ‘straight’ versions, plus 41 ‘modern’ versions and “inummerable parodies,” as of 1995, according to Patrick Robertson, author of the Guinness Book of the Movies.
Didn’t expect that, did you, Wissdok?
A particularly unfortunate claim, given that this is what Dryden had to say about the relative literary merits of Shakespeare, Fletcher and Jonson in his preface to The Tempest.
He had also said much the same already in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy.
Dryden is in fact the most obvious example of someone in the seventeenth century who really did think that Shakespeare was the greatest English playwright. (Or at least second only to Dryden - his none-too-subtle implication being that he had Shakespeare’s wit and Jonson’s learning.)
wissdok, this is becoming quite the pile on, so I’ll leave this thread after this. I must admit to a certain grudging respect for sticking up for your views, wrong-headed though they are, against everyone else.
I’m not competent to discuss Shakespearean history or biography, so I’ll leave that to others. Nor do I much care what books you like or don’t like to read. The only thing that confuses me is your insistence that the masses define beauty. It still seems to me that the only person who can judge what is beautiful is the reader.
Liking something simply because a professor told you to is silly, of course, but so is liking something simply because it is popular. Surely you realize this. Surely the things you like you like because you like them, not because you read in the paper that they’re number one bestsellers or top-grossing movies.
Leave Shakespeare to one side. Star Wars epsisode one made hundreds of millions. Serenity tanked. Am I wrong for thinking the latter better than the former? If so, why? Limp Bizkit and Clutch are both hard rock bands. Limp Bizkit far outsells Clutch. I think Clutch is by far–very far-- the better band. Am I wrong? if so, why?
Jonson’s influence over younger writers–or contemporary ones–extended into the realm of the theatre as well (logically!). Those playwrights who followed in his tradition, and who came to be known as the Sons of Ben, include Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, Shirley, Nathan Field, and Richard Brome.
From Virginia Tech
http://athena.english.vt.edu/~jmooney/renmats/jonson.htm
Mr. Kennedy, I must have been mistaken, I thought earlier that you proclaimed that I was wrong about society’s fear of theatres and theatre companies. I also thought you said ”I had fallen under the spell of Puritan propaganda.” I would just like point out that NYC’s Time Square and Boardway of the 1970s, and Vegas’s Downtown of the 70s and 80s were popular areas that were greatly affected by rising crime rates…and business went down accordingly. It is fitting that when there was finally a “war on crime,” these areas were a priority. Back to Shakespeare’s time, do you really think (even with your argument of Puritan morality) that the general public flooded the Globe? Can we not logically assume that Shakespeare and his company of men had regular customers? Can we not also assume that there would be those for fear, morality, or just distain…avoided the theatre?
To 42fish, it has gone up since 1995. I think David Wallechinsky’s People’s Almanac of 20th Century said 211 and 44. I sure the number has grown since. Most in the 20th Century were in the early silent era or of limited release. I apologize for that omission. As for what I way trying to explain, Doyle influenced Gardner’s Perry Mason, Henry’s Maxwell Smart, Charlie Chan, Quincy, Colombo, and pretty much all detective dramas in our culture. Halloween is approaching and it impossible to measure Bram Stoker’s or Mary Shelley’s influence on culture.
Your other statement 42fish was about Out of Africa and Three Days of the Condor. I never said or imply that I follow the crowd. When Out of Africa was release it was advertised as “an instant classic, “ while the reviews for *Three Days of the Condor *were it was just another political drama. The references in that paragraph you took that from weren’t about popularity, but a statement on elitism. If you want to complain about that paragraph, jump on the Red Lobster bandwagon.
Note that when Dryden calls Shakespeare “the greater wit”, he meant that Shakespeare had the better, more creative mind. The word wit has endured several semantic storms since Dryden’s day.