Does anyone compare to Shakespeare?

[ummmm........]

Like, at all? Considering both volume and quality of work, and assuming that Shakespeare was actually responsible for everything he's credited with.

I'm mostly interested in responses from posters with knowledge of literary traditions other than English.

 

[Till]

For German literature Goethe is usually considered to be one of the most (if not the) influential writers. The quantity of his work is fairly impressive.
"Cultrued" households have "a meter of Goethe" on their bookshelfs.
I don't think the quality of his writings comes anywhere close to Shakespeare's, but then i don't hold a very high opinion of German literature in general.

Edit: A sample poem can be found here.

 

[ArneHD]

The Notwegian playwright Ibsen is probably the next best after Shakespeare.

 

[Verbose]

Pushkin perhaps.

Friedrich Schiller, besides Goethe.

Part of the problem of comparison is that Shakespeare is the darling of literary romanticism. All the three runner-ups above score pretty high on the Romantic Scale. Others don't, obeying different aesthetic agends, but can still rival Shakespeare as realists, social dramatists, philosophers etc. (Molière, Ibsen, Calderón).

For non-Europeans try Chikmatsu Monzaemon, the "Shakespeare of Japan" (a fairly silly European way of paying a great playwright a compliment).

He's the one who in the 18th c. thematised the dilemma of the life of the samurai class as one torn between "ninjo" (human feelings) and "giri" (duty). His plays all end tragically, with people killing their loved ones and themselves in order to do their duty and preserve honour. Chikamatsu is very good at leaving it to his audience to draw the conclusions as to whether this sense of moral obligation was worth the human costs or not.

Of course he wrote it all for the consumption of his audience, which was the merchant class, who considered the samurai weird and unpleasant people, stunting themselves emotionally in order to fulfill their duty. (It was actually illegal for samurai to attend the theatre, not that they always cared. Monzaemon himself was descended from a samurai family dismissed from service, which is how he knew his subject material.)

 

[Urederra]

Cervantes for the quality.

Lope de Vega for the quantity. In fact, nobody has ever written not even close to what Lope de Vega wrote in his lifetime. It was something like 2 books per month for 60 years, or some insane quantity like that. And some of them were theater scripts were all the dialogs rythmes.

 

[jonatas]

Part of the problem of comparison is that Shakespeare is the darling of literary romanticism. All the three runner-ups above score pretty high on the Romantic Scale. Others don't, obeying different aesthetic agends, but can still rival Shakespeare as realists, social dramatists, philosophers etc. (Molière, Ibsen, Calderón).

How do you define literary romanticism? English romanticism is a much later movement. Think Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth... of course they all tried to emulate Shakespeare, but it was highly artificial language and ultimately something completely foreign.

Shakespeare's strength was in sheer creativity and imagination of language, along with dazzling wit. He really was a true artist, not simply a critic of society making commentary (though he certainly did that). Also he was quite heavily and profoundly influenced by Latin and Italian stories. True high art. Take into consideration the nature of Elizabethan society in London too, with great emphasis on wit and jokes. It makes for extremely intelligent writing.

I don't see any modern writers coming close to the magnitude of Shakespeare, IMO. Maybe someone like Homer, in a different way of course.

 

[HannibalBarka]

Tolstoi is wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy better than Shakespeare. Kafka also. Shakespeare was greatest for his era though