I suggest that you begin by consulting Robert Greene's comments on Shakespeare (you can do a Google search), and Ben Jonson's comments in "Timber" and in the poem he wrote for the First Folio of Shakespeare, again accessible through Google search.
Shkespeare, unlike Greene and Johnson, did not have a universtiy education. Those who did, including Marlowe, possibly his only potential rival, who died young, were called University Wits, and tended to look down on S. a little. This is caught in Greene's remark that S. is an upstart crow tricked out in our feathers, by which he may have meant that S derived his knowlege of the ancient world, which he needed for his Roman and other plays, from Plutarch and other sources he read in an English translation, and that he borrowed from contemporary playwrights. Jealousy was no doubt at work, for S. was very successful on the stage. Jonson alludes to S's lack of formal classical learning when he writes that he had small Latin and less Greek. Jonson thought him a natural wonder, a born genius, though he goes on to say that he was more than that. He stresses his sweet disposition and temperament. Jonson astutely forecast S's immortality when he said that he was not just of an age but for all ages. And his prediction has come true. S. is read and staged all over the world--has been for some centuries.
I would consult too Thomas Fuller's portrait of J and S in "English Worthies," where he writes that J was ponderous and heavy in his wit and his conversation and S nimble and light, the former a slow, heavy Spanish galleon, such as had been part of the Armada the English defeated, and the latter a swift, rapidly adjusting English man-of-war, giving the superiority to S. Posterity has clearly concluded tha S surpasses all his contemporaries and indeed, possibly, all other writers.
2007-03-28 05:01:55
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answer #1
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answered by tirumalai 4
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