The Greeks make me realise what Shakespeare doesn’t do

When I read Shakespeare’s contemporary playwrights in England, or Spanish Golden Age playwrights such as Lope de Vega, I think Shakespeare’s light years ahead of them all. But I don’t think that way when reading the ancient Greeks—I think they’re great in a different way.

Shakespeare’s works may feel richer as he has the advantage of having more actors and mixes the tragic and the comic—not to mention that he can do both tragedy and comedy, and other genres—but the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are not any inferior to Shakespeare’s tragedies in terms of depth and tragic power. This is especially staggering when we consider that there’s a gap of 2000 years between them. 

More interestingly, the Greeks make me realise what Shakespeare doesn’t do. In King Oedipus by Sophocles for instance, the tension in the entire drama arises not because of what’s happening, but because of what has already happened. This is something I later see in Ibsen, but not in Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s plays also don’t question human agency. 

The Electra plays remind me again that Shakespeare doesn’t seem to take any interest in the mother-daughter relationship. He very often explores the father-daughter relationship (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest, etc) and depicts some fascinating mother-son relationships (Hamlet and Coriolanus); the only mother-daughter relationship I can think of is Lady Capulet and Juliet, which is not particularly developed, and if we stretch it a bit, the Countess and Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, but they’re not actually mother and daughter. 

He also doesn’t take much interest in the subject of incest. In Pericles, it’s only a small part at the beginning of the story, not explored, and that’s a late play that Shakespeare co-wrote with another playwright. 

Now that I’ve read Hippolytus and other versions of the same myth, I’ve also realised that Shakespeare doesn’t write about women who make false rape allegations. We know he’s fascinated by jealousy and slander, and writes multiple times about women being falsely accused of cheating (Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale), but not about the other way around. 

Shakespeare also doesn’t adapt any of the classical plays. For his plays, he uses historical accounts, poems, Ovid, Chaucer, romances (such as Pandosto), and so on, but doesn’t rewrite or revisit any of the classical plays. Even if he didn’t know Greek, I believe there were Latin translations of the ancient Greek plays available. We don’t see him adapting the Roman plays either. 

This is fascinating stuff.