Shakespeare is overrated.
Wait! Hear me out. Yes, Shakespeare is an iconic playwright who made history with his works. However, so many other authors also made history. I walk into my school's library and there are two entire rows dedicated to the works of Shakespeare alongside analysis' of his works. I walk in there to find something about Jane Austen or Mary Shelley, and I'd be lucky if I could find a shelf or two.
What is so great about the work Shakespeare produced in comparison to authors like Edgar Allan Poe or Oscar Wilde? Yeah, Shakespeare had a lot of themes related to homosexuality, but Oscar Wilde was gay. Yeah, Shakespeare has plays about murder and love, but Edgar Allan Poe's entire repertoire is about love and murder and death. Yet, we don't have classes dedicated to these men. Truthfully, I didn't even know about Oscar Wilde until I stumbled upon one of his books at the bookstore one day. Want to know why? Because every literature class I have ever taken spends over half of the time on Shakespeare!
My university offers about three literature classes a semester that revolve around Shakespeare. Just literature classes, not even classes for drama students. I could understand the emphasis on Shakespeare if I was a theatre major, but I'm not. And no, I was not forced to sign up for Shakespeare classes, but if I wanted to be able to fit all of my credits in, then I had to. None of the other classes being offered fit my requirements.
My argument is not that we should forget Shakespeare entirely. He did a lot of great things in his work. I cannot deny that. However, having more emphasis on other authors would be wonderful. It would open a world to students that they have never seen before. It would give prior knowledge to some students, so when they walk into their university classes, the names they're hearing aren't entirely foreign. For example, my British Literature class textbook was about 1500 pages, and not a single one of them featured Shakespeare. I was astounded, and for an entire semester, I didn't hear a word about Shakespeare in a literature class. I learned about Percy Shelley, John Keats, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Christina Rossetti, and many others. It was wonderful, but it would have been even better if I had come into that class with prior knowledge about any of those authors. Sadly, I had never heard of any of them until that class.
It's time to put others in the spotlight. Shakespeare has been center-stage, pun intended, for so long now. His works have been analyzed, re-analyzed, and over analyzed to a point, there is nothing left to do. Let's clear off a couple of shelves and make room for authors who also did great things. Authors who shaped our culture, in other ways. Authors who invented genres we now hold dear. Authors whose characters were revolutionary for their time.
It's time to give other authors the stage.
