I Don't Believe in Shakespeare

I’m not one of those people who thinks that Shakespeare’s plays were written by someone else. All I mean by “I don’t believe in Shakespeare” is that I don’t believe that Shakespeare was a genius who can never be reproduced in the history of the human race. Shakespeare is a genius who was crafted by what came after him. All the literature professors who taught him and admired him. All the writers who had read him and echoed his language and his stories. All the actors who played Hamlet because it was the hardest part, the prize to be earned after a brilliant start to an early acting career. All the translators who proved that they could make his works come alive again in their own native language.

There may never be another Shakespeare, but I don’t think it’s because no one else is ever going to be as brilliant as he was. It’s because the cult of Shakespeare has changed the English language at a particular stage in history and I don’t know if that confluence of events will ever happen again. How many other choices were there for the kind of lionization that Shakespeare got? A handful. And these days, how many choices are there? Thousands, literally, of writers who are working regularly, producing a large body of good to great work. And no one of them is going to end up changing the language the way that Shakespeare did. No one of them is going to end up being the influence that he was on generations afterward. It’s just the nature of our new world, which makes a lot of people educated and well-read enough to become writers.

In the German tradition, the figure who ends up being the most like Shakespeare is Goethe. There is this veneration of Goethe that makes me pretty sick as a PhD of German Literature who was forced to add an entire half of her dissertation so that I could bow down to Goethe and make any comparison to a female author obviously end with Goethe winning. The same thing happens with Shakespeare all the time. If you don’t admit he’s the best, you end up sounding like an idiot.

And let’s not forget that Shakespeare was a white man. Yes, he wrote good women roles into his plays (played by men). Yes, there are people of color in some of his plays. But there is a whole civilization of valuing white male literature above all others that uses him as the example of the best writer on the planet. Because the best writer humanity is capable of producing would have to be a white male, wouldn’t he?

I’m not saying I don’t like Shakespeare, either. I do. I think he is a genius. But I am aware of the ways in which society creates genius backwards in time. I suspect Shakespeare himself would be bewildered by the idea of him being the most brilliant writer of all time.