Shakespeare and the Poets' War
How the influence of an upstart (and his former self) made Shakespeare timeless
I wrote about Harold Bloom, Silicon Valley, and the nature of ambition for
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And so we come to Shakespeare’s miracle year. 1599-1600 is when Shakespeare becomes not just the major playwright of his own time but of all time.
So far, we have read plays from Shakespeare’s second phase. He began in the late 1580s, competing with Christopher Marlowe in plays like Richard III. After the plague closed theatres in 1593-94, Shakespeare wrote best-selling poetry, and he came back to the theatre as the lyrical playwright we have encountered in Romeo & Juliet and Love’s Labour’s Lost. In this period he was out-competing the dominant poet of the day Philip Sidney.
With plays like Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he became the star writer of romantic comedies. And with the breakthrough of the Henriad he discovered how to take the dark side of Romeo and begin to transform it into something deeper and more troubling. He developed what would become the essence of his greatest work: the ability to meld comedy and tragedy into complex, problematic new forms. And in his history plays he had gone far beyond what Marlowe could achieve.
The first stage of Shakespeare’s development was complete. He dominated the London theatre.
Then came an upstart, Ben Jonson, who, seeing this established and successful rival, eight years his senior, decided to out-do Shakespeare the way Shakespeare had outdone Marlowe. And so, in 1599, the Poets’ War began.