Unfortunately I think I tend to agree. The plays would most likely become a niche cult?
Now suppose Shakespeare and Mozart were born in 1995…
“Hi, I’m William. I’ve been writing a few plays and poems…”
”I’m Wolfgang. I write music…”
“Hey, perhaps we might try something together… we could form a band…”
Music critic Alex Ross once speculated that if Mozart had lived a normal life span, we’d be constantly staging his mature operas Hamlet and The Tempest while ignoring his obviously inferior early works like Don Giovanni.
I do.
It doesn’t come up very often, but whenever someone suffers richly deserved instant karma of some sort, I hoist their petard alright.
“The Merchant of Venice? Obviously a forged ‘woke’ version of The Jew of Malta!”
But you wouldn’t be saying it if Shakespeare never wrote it.
Probably not. But there is a barbican in my town, which was attacked with a petard in 1644, and the explosion was largely ‘hoist’ (dissipated upwards), so it caused little damage. The usage was almost certainly current when Shakespeare ‘coined’ it.
If we define “today” as including the 20th century (compared to the 16th), writing about Richard Nixon.
OK, so here’s what I THINK happens in a world where Shakespeare decides to be a merchant instead, but everything else remains the same.
In the immediate short term: English-language commercial drama remains a popular, money-making form, as it already was before Shakespeare came along. Talented (and less-talented) poets turn to writing plays, as they were also already doing. These would certainly include Kyd and Marlowe, who had already written most of their works before Shakespeare makes a name for himself, and it probably includes Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, and the rest of the slightly-younger playwrights who follow him. John Webster, mentioned in the OP, is more of a question mark, just because he was less prolific and much of what he did write is heavily influenced by Shakespeare’s tragedies. I don’t think The Duchess of Malfi exists as we know it. Most of Jonson’s comedies probably do; a Roman tragedy like Sejanus – in which we know Shakespeare acted one of the lead roles – might not if his company hadn’t already had a hit with Julius Caesar a few years earlier. But at any rate, lots of plays do get written and performed in this alternate universe, including some that might not exist in our world. And some of those plays are written by men who thought of themselves as men of letters, and thought their work ought to “count” as serious literature. We know Jonson did! So: probably English drama emerges as a serious literary form on the same timeline as in our universe.
But it looks different. And it is hard to predict how different, just like it would be hard to predict what rock music would look like if John Lennon and Paul McCartney had never met. Or how much staying power it would have had. We know seventeenth-century audiences admired Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher as much as they admired Shakespeare, and plays from all of these writers continued to be popular through the Restoration. Shakespeare doesn’t really emerge as preeminent among his peers until the eighteenth century, as tastes start to shift. Maybe they never do shift in this alternative world, and Ben Jonson becomes a massive cultural icon. (He’d be thrilled.) Maybe they shift too much for Elizabethan / Jacobean drama to have any lasting cultural influence at all. If I were going to guess, I’d say the median outcome is that it ends up more like eighteenth-century drama in our universe, where the occasional Goldsmith or Sheridan comedy gets performed now and again, a few words and phrases like “malapropism” have made it into the language for good, English majors might be expected to at least know the names of major playwrights, but the majority of it is forgotten.
Or is it? Jane Austen was a huge theater fan, and learned a lot about dialogue and comic writing from Sheridan and other dramatists who were popular in her day, and Austen definitely has staying power and cultural influence well outside of academia…
OK, this was a super-long and rambling post (I find this hypothetical really interesting!) TL;DR: it’s impossible to know because a whole lot of things would be different, and which writers and works become iconic is often somewhat random.
True, of course. One wonders if any English author would have become quite so iconic.. the way Goethe seems to be in German literature, for example. No doubt Marlowe et al would be known but would they have had quite the same status?
Chaucer is revered.. but his language is just too far removed from contemporary English to be considered mainstream today.
Yes. He was acknowledged in the 18th century but it was the Victorians that made him into a star. Part of this was due to the Puritan dismissal of theater as vulgar and sinful.
It is a bit surprising, however, that Shakespeare became popular in America at all. Seventeenth-century Puritans and Quakers morally opposed the theater and authorized severe punishment for stage plays, which were placed in the same category as playing dice and bear-baiting. While Shakespeare’s plays were performed in America beginning in the 1730s, the Continental Congress placed a ban on theater during the Revolutionary War. This ban essentially created an embargo on British culture just as it had on British goods. By the late 1780s, anti-theatrical laws began to be repealed. Debates over repealing these laws focused on whether the stage could be politically beneficial to the new nation. Could theater be used to shape American values? Additionally, there were questions over whether theater, as an entertainment, had ever proven harmful. By 1794, new playhouses were built in Boston and Philadelphia. The first American-printed edition of Shakespeare was published in Philadelphia by Bioren and Madan in 1795.
And:
Additionally, Shakespeare’s characters were not just kings and queens, but came from all walks of life. … finally, in the nineteenth century, people became interested in Shakespeare’s own life. They (incorrectly) described him as a man with almost no formal education who became the most important writer in the English language. To Americans, this meant that he was a self-made man who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and become successful through his own hard work and determination.
Interesting article, but it slights the British revival. I’ll let our quilled professor handle the details, though.
Okay, my own thoughts on the my own question. And also addressing @DPRK’s point.
Shakespeare wrote plays and poetry that fitted the times he lived in. They were indeed awesome at the time. And they survived. The next generation thought they were awesome, and so did the one after that, and the one after that.
They didn’t need to be scholars to understand him. A petard was a device used in contemporary warfare. Even an uneducated person at the time knew what “hoist by his own petard” meant, and what it indicated as a metaphor.
The trouble is, over the next few centuries he became increasingly archaic. Plays in blank verse were all the rage at the time, but have passed out of fashion. Many words used by Shakespeare have shifted in meaning. Other words common at the time have passed out of usage altogether. Increasingly, people have to be taught to understand and appreciate Shakespeare.
As an example, “bloody” is a swear word in British English. I might call a foolish person “a bloody idiot.” So, when Macbeth said “What bloody man is that” I thought it was a deliberate swear, and a witty double meaning. But I was wrong. A scholar informed me that it was a single meaning: covered in blood. I’m of above average intelligence, but I frequently have no idea what a Shakespeare speech actually means.
And even scholars don’t find his comic characters to be funny.
So, in a world without a 400+ year history of praising Shakespeare, that suddenly discovered a copy of his works, I think he would not make much of an impression.
I’m afraid I have to demur – 18th and 19th-century reception history is not my field, but I don’t know of any time period when Shakespeare’s plays weren’t popular, in the sense of being widely read, performed, referenced, etc. There are definitely eras, including his own, when they weren’t high culture or regarded with particular reverence, but that’s a different thing. Samuel Pepys, for instance, writes about going to see a Shakespeare play in much the same way a modern diarist might write about going to see a movie, and he expresses some critical opinions that, to modern ears, sound entertainingly wrong-headed – but the point is that he is seeing Shakespeare, a lot of Shakespeare, because if you were an avid theatergoer in Restoration England you couldn’t avoid it, and that tells us other people were enjoying Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream much more than Pepys did. (He did like Macbeth, and saw it half a dozen times over the course of a decade.) Nobody in Restoration London was going to see a Shakespeare play because it was “good for you.” Theater was pure entertainment, and these plays wouldn’t have been revived if people didn’t find them enjoyable.
What comes later, in the 18th and 19th centuries, is the idea of Shakespeare as awesome-transcendent-genius, pinnacle of English literature, object of reverence, study, and analysis, etc. This is also when people stop adapting plays to suit audiences’ shifting tastes and start caring a lot about the “canonical” version. The version of Macbeth Pepys saw was basically a musical – it amped up the witch scenes and added plenty of singing, dancing and spectacle, because that was what audiences loved. The version of King Lear that dominated the stage until the nineteenth century had a happy-ish ending where Edgar and Cordelia marry (never mind that she’s married already!) although Shakespeare’s original version was always available in print. But that doesn’t mean Shakespeare wasn’t popular, any more than the existence of My Fair Lady means Shaw was unpopular by the 1950s. Playwrights who aren’t popular don’t get their work performed and adapted at all.
Mmm. Depends on the scholar, and on the comic character, but per this website, eight of the twelve most commonly performed Shakespeare plays are comedies – including some, like Merry Wives and The Comedy of Errors, that aren’t particularly regarded as “great” in the literary sense. I don’t think that would be happening if audiences didn’t find them funny on the stage. (And I would disagree that the language poses that much of a barrier, in general – I mean, if you’re watching Macbeth you can see the captain is wounded and covered in blood, and you don’t need a scholar to tell you that bloody means, well, bloody.)
Like I said, I don’t know if this means alt-universe Shakespeare would go over well with audiences or not. (They might be primed to like completely different things; maybe John Milton is THE canonical English author, and, as a consequence, people are attending recitals of epic poetry instead of going to the theater at all!) But, in general, I’d say his popularity in this universe rests on the fact that he knew how to write a cracking good play, and audiences still genuinely enjoy his work.
This is an example of what I was asking about. Did the 17th century have the equivalent of the groundlings (the poorer commoners who could only stand rather than sit, and were often rowdy) or had mainstream theater become more elite and restricted by then?
Good question, and I’m not sure – Restoration and 18th-century theaters were all indoors, with seating, so my first instinct would be to say they were more restrictive social spaces, but, on the other hand, they were also bigger and could accommodate more patrons (and by the end of Shakespeare’s career, that shift was already underway; his company was also playing indoors for half the year). But, yeah, if your definition of “popular” is “accessible to everybody regardless of wealth,” the theater has never been that – but neither are pop music concerts, football games, and lots of other forms of entertainment that most people don’t consider especially highbrow.
Mass entertainment is pretty much defined by its availability to all classes. The groundlings were charged a penny. “Opera houses” in the old west occasionally staged an actual opera and sometimes Shakespeare, but their audiences were so starved for diversion they went to almost every show of any description. Attendance at movies soared during the Depression because one ticket bought hours of fun. I once lacked the $4 admission to attend a rock concert while in college but they were still aimed at the masses. Popularity of individual performers, shows, and genres is a separate calculation.