Can Shakespeare be the best writer?

I recently finished reading Michael Lewis’s book Going Infinite, which catalogs the story of young billionaire-turned-convicted-felon Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), who went from CEO of the world’s most-hyped crypto exchange (FTX) to bankruptcy within the space of five days. It’s a fascinating character study of a man full of contradictions. Terrifically intelligent, yet lacking wisdom. Supposedly altruistic and self-sacrificing, yet obsessed with videogames. It’s easy to assume that SBF must be a conman or hypocrite, yet Michael Lewis’s account is more sympathetic. Dangerously misguided, he seems to be. Or unforgivably negligent. In either case, SBF openly admits to being atypical: He lacks happiness. He feels isolated. In keeping with his would-it-be-fair-to-call-them-psychopathic? tendencies, he also possesses a thoroughly unromantic soul. Where others may feel awe or warmth, he will feel nothing: Visiting historic cities of Europe? Nothing but boring old buildings. Smiling? An unnecessary complication of human interactions. Love? Something best discussed through dispassionate business memos; relationships to be weighed rationally for their pros and cons (like everything else in life).

The one exception was novels. It was the sole art form he enjoyed before reaching middle school, when reading began to carry the connotation of English classes.

Quoting the book:

“I objected to the fundamental reality of the entire class,” said Sam of English. “All of a sudden I was being told I was wrong—­about a thing it was impossible to be wrong about. The thing that offended me is that it wasn’t honest with itself. It was subjectivity framed as objectivity.

In high school, he starts to question the beliefs that most English teachers hold sacrosanct. For instance:

I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare . . . but really I shouldn’t need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that. When Shakespeare wrote almost all Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate—­probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren’t very favorable.

Even haters of SBF may agree with him that English classes are largely hogwash, while even apologists of SBF may think he’s completely off base.

Either way, though… What are the odds that Shakespeare could still be the greatest English writer after 410 years since his death1? Have these long centuries served as a testament of the Bard’s inestimable talent, or might there be another explanation?

Wherefore art there no other Bard?

The pessimistic explanation is this: Yes, there are many more literate and educated English speakers alive today than ever before, but they’ve been hindered.

• Modern minds have brainrotted from TV and the internet.
• Great art requires great sacrifice, which means our greater literacy rates have been balanced out by better standards of living: Our modern minds are too coddled.
• Furthermore, Shakespeare’s works were likely not the result of a single man’s genius, but rather the result of wonderful collaborations. Modern society’s isolating lack of community makes such collaborations vanishingly unlikely (which would also explain why no band has yet surpassed the Beatles).

He who doth protest, “We’re not that badly off! Modern writers can be great!” will have to contend with the followup: If Shakespeare isn’t the best English writer, who’s better?

So masterful was William Shakespeare’s use of language, so iconic were the stories he told, that it’s hard to come up with an argument for anyone who’s better, and even harder to come up with a consensus pick.

But there’s a degree of legerdemain to this framing.

Did Shakespeare write the best poem ever? No. Did he write the best epic fantasy series? Nope. How about the best murder mystery, or best blog, or best journalistic piece? The trick here is that “writer” can mean many different things.

Maybe we could fairly say that Shakespeare is still the best English playwright (though that’s not a claim I can judge personally; my favorite play is Hamilton2). It would’ve been easier to judge Shakespeare the best English writer back in 1596, when there were fewer competing vessels of English writing for the masses to consume.

Here are two useful clues to keep in mind when contemplating the mystery of Shakespeare’s 400-year reign:

• During his time, his plays weren’t high-brow material. He played to the masses. His tragedies made folk cry, his comedies made them laugh, and he wrote so many histories because histories were that era’s most popular genre.
• Shakespeare was a thief! Sort of. The plot of Hamlet was based on the legend of Amleth; Romeo and Juliet was based on a poem by Arthur Brooke, itself based on earlier Italian works; Twelfth Night also traces back to earlier Italian works, and so on.

That’s not to say Shakespeare was by any means a plagiarist. His treatment of these stories was transformative—as with King Lear, whose various prior versions had always ended happily.

In today’s world, who are the artists that play to the masses and who often adapt pre-existing material?

Hint: They’re not playwrights.

Oftentimes, they’re not even writers.

They’re directors.

I’d say the most influential storytellers of our time predominantly work in the visual medium. Like Shakespeare, they sometimes adapt stories (like Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden or Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s Project Hail Mary), and sometimes pen original stories (like everything Vince Gilligan has done). Unlike Shakespeare, they usually don’t benefit from prose so elegantly and rhythmically written, it shines like poetry. Films and TV tend to benefit more from verisimilitudinous dialogue.

That doesn’t mean there are no modern voices trying to push the English language to its limit. There definitely are, and they’re pushing it to new extremes never found before the 21st century—but not through plays, scripts, or novels.

Our society’s best lyricists are rappers, and a person could easily make the argument that the best rappers have already surpassed Shakespeare. Here’s a fun breakdown that makes this exact comparison through the lens of diction.

Which is all to say: In the centuries since Shakespeare’s time, there’s been plenty of people born with comparable talent. The problem is that none of them have been incentivized to optimize the exact same skills as his. The best storytellers become directors or novelists, while the best craftsmen that play with words become rappers, leaving Shakespeare as an odd sort of time-spanning local maximum—a particular form of GOAT unlikely to be replaced any time soon (unless AI shakes up the equilibrium).

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1

He died on April 23rd, which is also likely his date of birth, given that we know he was baptized on an April 26th and baptism usually happens three days after birth. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England, which I highlight because I think that sounds like a super cool name.

2

And to give you even more of a sense of my taste, or lack of taste, in related artforms: My favorite musical is Nightmare Before Christmas.