Shakespeare’s Contemporaries: The Writers of His Age

Shakespeare wrote in one of the most competitive literary environments in English history — and understanding who he was competing with, borrowing from, and arguing against makes the work more legible, not less.

Christopher Marlowe

No writer shaped the Elizabethan stage more decisively before Shakespeare than Christopher Marlowe, and the influence runs directly into the plays in ways that are still traceable. Marlowe developed the sustained blank verse speech as the primary vehicle of English dramatic language — expansive, poetic, capable of carrying both philosophical ambition and emotional intensity simultaneously. His overreachers — Tamburlaine, Faustus, Barabas the Jew of Malta — defined a type of protagonist whose ambition exceeds all available constraint and who is destroyed by the very forces he invokes. The tragic arc of Macbeth, the political intelligence of the Henry VI plays, the villain-heroes of the early tragedies: all of these are in conversation with what Marlowe had established.

Marlowe died in 1593 at twenty-nine, in circumstances that remain genuinely obscure — a tavern brawl, or something more complex involving his work as a government agent. His career lasted roughly six years. In that time he produced the foundational texts of the English tragic tradition and gave Shakespeare the instrument on which the mature plays are played. The relationship between the two is one of the most productive inheritances in literary history.

Ben Jonson

Jonson is the contemporary who knew Shakespeare most closely and assessed him most candidly. They worked in the same theatrical world for more than two decades; Jonson’s comment in the First Folio — “I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any” — is the most important contemporary assessment we have, and its qualification (“on this side idolatry”) is as revealing as its praise.

Jonson and Shakespeare represented genuinely different ideas about what drama was for. Jonson was a classicist who believed in the unities of time, place, and action; Shakespeare violated all three without apology. Jonson wrote “humours comedies” in which characters are defined by a single dominant trait that drives their behaviour — Volpone‘s avarice, The Alchemist‘s charlatanism — whereas Shakespeare’s characters resist such reduction. Jonson thought contemporary English settings with contemporary English concerns were the proper material of comedy; Shakespeare ranged across Illyria, the Forest of Arden, ancient Rome, and Mediterranean shipwrecks.

The competition between them was real and productive. Jonson criticised Shakespeare’s disregard for classical rules; Shakespeare probably absorbed Jonson’s discipline of comic structure even as he rejected its restrictions. Jonson outlived Shakespeare by two decades and spent much of that time continuing to comment — sometimes admiringly, sometimes critically — on his dead colleague’s achievement. His Bartholomew Fair (1614) mocks audiences who still prefer the old style of theatrical romance that Shakespeare had practised. By the time of the First Folio, Jonson had arrived at something more than respect: the recognition that Shakespeare had produced something that would outlast both of them.

Thomas Kyd

Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587) is the play from which Hamlet descends, and the family resemblance is unmistakable: the ghost of a murdered man demanding revenge, the protagonist’s delay and apparent madness, the play-within-a-play used to expose guilt, the catastrophic ending in which everyone dies. Kyd invented the Elizabethan revenge tragedy as a genre, established its conventions, and gave Shakespeare the structural blueprint that Hamlet both uses and interrogates.

What Shakespeare did with that blueprint is the measure of his development beyond Kyd. Where Kyd’s Hieronimo is driven by external circumstance and the mechanics of the revenge plot, Hamlet is driven — or rather, not driven — by something internal that the revenge plot cannot fully accommodate. The genre that Kyd invented becomes, in Hamlet, the occasion for a meditation on why action is so difficult for a certain kind of consciousness. Kyd gave Shakespeare the machine; Shakespeare asked what happens when the man inside the machine cannot make himself use it.

Edmund Spenser

Spenser occupies a different position from the playwrights — he was a poet rather than a dramatist, and his influence on Shakespeare is primarily through the language of lyric and allegory rather than dramatic structure. The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) was the most ambitious English poem of the period, a vast allegorical epic that attempted to rival Virgil in scope while incorporating the conventions of Italian romance. Its combination of moral seriousness, mythological richness, and extraordinary musical language made it the benchmark against which Elizabethan poetry was measured.

Shakespeare absorbed Spenser without imitating him. The mythological and pastoral elements in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and The Winter’s Tale draw on the same imaginative tradition; the compressed lyricism of the sonnets operates in the same cultural space as Spenser’s sonnets in Amoretti. But where Spenser sustains allegory across thousands of stanzas, Shakespeare transforms it into dramatic action. The forest in As You Like It is not an allegorical landscape but a place where real psychological change happens to specific people. The transformation from Spenser’s mode to Shakespeare’s is part of the shift from Renaissance epic to Renaissance drama.

Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert

Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (written c. 1582, published 1591) established the English sonnet sequence as a serious literary form and provided Shakespeare with both a model and a point of departure. Sidney’s sonnets are more explicitly autobiographical in their framing than Shakespeare’s, more concerned with articulating the conventions of Petrarchan desire and then examining them critically. His Defence of Poesy (written c. 1580) offered the period’s most sophisticated argument for literature as moral instruction — not despite its pleasures but through them — and set the terms in which the value of writing was discussed for a generation.

Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, is the period’s most significant woman writer and one of its most significant literary patrons. Her translation of the Psalms, completed after Philip Sidney’s death, was among the finest verse translations of the period — John Donne called it “a work too great, for almost any praise.” Her circle at Wilton House was the most important literary salon of the 1590s, nurturing writers including Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton. The First Folio was dedicated to her son William Herbert and his brother, which connects her family’s literary culture to the posthumous project of establishing Shakespeare’s canonical standing.

John Donne

Donne is slightly younger than Shakespeare and his major work comes slightly later, but his early poems circulated in manuscript through the 1590s and place him firmly in the same cultural moment. Where the earlier Elizabethans — Spenser, Sidney — worked within the conventions of Petrarchan lyric, Donne broke with them deliberately, replacing the smooth music of Petrarchan verse with the argumentative energy of metaphysical wit. His love poems are logical arguments, conducted at high speed, using images drawn from cartography, astronomy, law, and theology rather than from mythology and pastoral.

The contrast with Shakespeare is real and illuminating. Shakespeare’s sonnets work through accumulation and image; Donne’s poems work through compressed syllogistic argument. Shakespeare’s imagery is predominantly natural and seasonal; Donne’s is intellectual and technical. They represent two different answers to the same question — what should poetry be for, and how should it think? — and both answers are genuinely interesting.

What Donne shares with Shakespeare is the conviction that love is a philosophical subject, that desire generates genuine intellectual problems, and that the most direct way to address those problems is through compressed, precise language that does not simplify what it describes.

The Competitive World They Shared

What is worth resisting is the version of literary history in which Shakespeare absorbs all these influences and produces something that simply transcends them. The reality is more interesting. Marlowe’s blank verse was at least as good as anything Shakespeare produced in his first decade. Jonson’s comedies of London life were sharper social documents than Shakespeare’s ever attempted. Kyd’s revenge plots were tighter machines than Hamlet, if less resonant. Spenser’s lyric ambition was more sustained than anything Shakespeare wrote outside the plays. Sidney’s critical intelligence was more rigorous than Shakespeare’s apparent indifference to questions of literary theory.

What Shakespeare did — and what his contemporaries, for all their gifts, did not consistently do — was make drama feel like the primary arena for exploring everything that mattered about human experience. The plays are where psychology, politics, ethics, love, power, mortality, and language come together in the same space and press against each other in real time. That achievement belongs to the whole environment his contemporaries created as much as to him alone, but he is the one who most fully realised what the environment made possible.

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