Over at 3 Quarks Daily, Joseph Shieber has a nice piece on the Bankman-Fried Shakespeare controversy that seems to have gotten so many folks riled up: "Oh, he’s wrong. So are many of the people coming at him." Later on Shieber argues:
The appearance of a Shakespeare or a Newton is like winning the PowerBall – an almost miraculous event. Given the analogy to miraculous events, I can sympathize a bit with Bankman-Fried’s contrarian impulse. Many millions of people believe that Jesus performed miracles, but that doesn’t incline me to accept the divinity of Jesus. Bankman-Fried seems to think that the near-universal acclaim enjoyed by Shakespeare is more like the belief in religious miracles; the various testimonies on behalf of Shakespeare’s genius are not independent, and therefore cannot serve as strong evidence of that genius.
That's worth thinking about, especially that those last two clauses, about testimonies not being independent. No, they are not. They are coordinated. That's a theme I get around in the comment [below the asterisks] I made on Shieber's piece.
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Thanks for this, including the link to Bankman-Fried's old blog post. The question of Shakespeare's greatness has interested me for some time, and I've written a number of (somewhat) different blog posts on it. The most recent is in response to the contretemps over Bankman-Fried and the oldest in response to something Stanley Kaufman published in The New Republic back in 1989, where, in so many words, he observed that we don't make 'em like we used to.
Bah! Humbug!
You are correct about "genius." It doesn't follow the laws of probability. They are outliers, these geniuses. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, would call them black swans. Their occurrence is not predictable. But then much in culture is not predictable. When films are released, no one knows whether or not they'll break even much less make a profit or even become blockbusters, something Arthur De Vany has studied with some care in Hollywood Economics.
And I fear you're correct that Bankman-Fried hasn't attended to Shakespeare well enough to be entitled to a serious opinion about his greatness. He simply doesn't know what he's talking about. Still, I find it hard to believe that Shakespeare really is the greatest writer of all time, or even the greatest writer in Western literature. He's certainly very good, as good as any I warrant, but I just don't find the idea of "the best" very meaningful. There really is a lot of inertia in the system, and Shakespeare is hardly the only beneficiary of it.
Our esteem for Shakespeare reflects two things: 1) his inherent quality, which is difficult to measure and judge, but is real enough, and 2) the dynamics of a cultural system. On the latter, let me offer an observation as someone trained in literary criticism.
For professional purposes it's convenient to have a writer everyone agrees is the best. As professionals, our purview is necessarily narrow. Romanticists look at texts written between, say, 1780 and 1850 and will generally specialize on a handful of those. But what if one of us specialists wants to argue some general point? If the Romanticist hangs the argument on Keats, no one will read it except other Romanticists. But if you rest your argument on Shakespeare's mighty shoulders, then everyone will see it and be interested in it. And so we agree, tacitly of course, no vote is ever taken, that, yes, Shakespeare is the best. I suspect that Shakespeare has a similar value for the public even if, truth be told, they'd rather read Tolkien, or, I shudder to think of it (the horror! the horror!), J.K. Rowling – for empirical evidence on this point see J.D. Porter, Popularity/Prestige, Stanford Literary Lab 2018. Societies need common reference points and so cultures provide them. Shakespeare seems to have won that particular lottery. I mean, even the Klingons claim him as their own.
I suspect that the argument could be made that the audiences of the popular are so, in part, because they relate strongly in positive feeling with other admirers of the work. Hence, there is a combined value of the individual and the group in reckoning the place of the work in culture. This dynamic would not necessarily be present for the work of artist or scientists (or other) whose work is much more particular in genius -- say, William Blake, or Van Gogh, both whose work achieved genius accolade long after they died -- in large part because the community grew into the vision the artist created before "its time". Interesting that the poet Louise Gluck died on Friday, winner of the Nobel in 2020. She had a significant public following as well as literary following. I'm very familiar with her work.The austere voice has great appeal to people who finally get to read what strikes them as "the bottom" line of the internal world of struggle with despair and mortality. Gluck did not give one nth out of the stripped down and singular voice loneness -- she didn't even yield to the usual redemption of allowing solitude from loneness. Just about every obit hailed her as the greatest American poet of the last hundred years. One even headlined her greatness as perhaps even to that of Shakespeare. Weighty stuff. Time will tell.
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