from Hacker News

Where Are All the Shakespeares?

by zug_zug on 4/6/25, 1:37 PM with 5 comments

• by rikroots on 4/6/25, 2:20 PM

  I assume this is about the Canon[1] thing? And who gets to be the Gatekeepers - the people who decide which writers and works get included and excluded in each generation's version of the Literary/Musical/Artistic Canon thing?

  As far as I can work out, it's mainly about what stuff the professors and teachers teach to the students and kids as part of their formal education. Whoever gets to set the curriculum also gets to tweak the Canon? Outside of formal education, things get a lot more fluid and fun: Canons take decades to change; Cultural tastes can evolve over weeks.

  As for Shakespeare, he wasn't considered the English language's greatest writer during his lifetime, or even after (according to Wikipedia[2]). It took him near 200 years to gain such acclaim.

  [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_canon

  [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare#Critical_r...

• by dagw on 4/6/25, 2:02 PM

  Shakespeare wasn't really 'Shakespeare' in his lifetime. He was 'just' a very popular playwright with both fans and detractors. He didn't really become 'Shakespeare' until a century or so later. My point is that we won't know who the transcendent artists who can speak across generations are until at least a couple of generations have passed.

• by beardyw on 4/6/25, 2:30 PM

  Samuel Pepys went to a lot of plays, often daily. He didn't seem to be fond of Shakespeare at all and there is no suggestion those plays were particularly notable. This was 50 years after Shakespeare's death.

  I think intellectuals created the idol.

• by watwut on 4/6/25, 4:09 PM

  Shakespeare wrote plays that were meant to be played by actors and that is how they are used till today. Todays equivalent is a movie script. So indeed, it would be better off studying books to learn how to create top selling books.

  Articles criticizing hero worship are kind of better when author can demonstrate they know a lot about history and the field they write about. I read some of those articles. But this one seems to make mane claims, compares apples with oranges and then throws around names of people that basically no one worships.

  I never seen anyone claim that Euler is the most important mathematician or spend a lot of effort learning about him as person. We do learn some of his theories, because they are actually still relevant to us.

• by JoeAltmaier on 4/6/25, 1:50 PM

  Good luck finding them, in the thousands of submissions to Amazon books every single day.