has my vote been counted yet or not

And wow, I didn't expect such a turnout for Virgil...

He's great, but I was never taught him in school or college (read him on my own)...

Does my schooling just suck (probable) or did you all read him solo too?

How much is he taught?

Shakespeare: 5
Virgil: 6

Yeah, as much we're talking about impacts here, I simply *enjoy* Virgil more than Shakespeare. He's less overrated.

I counted you as the one who +1'd the Shakespeare name at the top, Thucy...was that you? If not, I haven't counted you yet.

Do tell, Warden..."less overrated"...

1. Way to backhand both participants, lol
2. How so? Invented/popularized 2000+ words/phrases in English, most celebrated author in English, plays with a huge international appeal, one of the most translated authors ever, plays and poems alike praised for character depth, psychology, feminism (in some), poetry and so on...and then Virgil's Rome's answer to Homer.

How are EITHER overrated?

yeah it was me im counted.

yeah, why are people loving Virgil so hard? what's so great about him? I haven't read him

yeah he is highly rated for a reason. those soliloquies, man. To Be Or Not To Be is such a good fucking piece of work.

what a piece of work is shakespeare, lol

in writing, how like a god!

Thucy, Vergil was Rome's Homer. Shakespeare drew heavily on him. Just about every cliche that exists was once clever original Vergil. He's influenced so much writing that pretty much any modern Western literature draws on him in some way or another. Plus, his writing's just great.

Also, can we spell his name right?

@ghug:

Well, Virgil drew on Homer as much as Shakespeare drew on Virgil...cuts both ways.

And I'd argue Homer was far more influential than Virgil, and Shakespeare's influenced the whole English language...Virgil seems the lesser of the three (still amazing) musketeers in this trio.

And I've seen it spelled Virgil and Vergil.

Homer and Vergil are very different in that Vergil was actually an author crafting works rather than a person transcribing stories. I haven't read the Homer in the original Greek, but Vergil's Latin is at the very least on par with Shakespeare's English and in my opinion much better.

Where do you get the idea that Homer/Shakespeare are more influential? Homer definitely to some extent, but that's largely due to Vergil and his contemporaries, and Shakespeare doesn't have much more influence on English than either of the other two while not having any on the rest of the Western canon.

Virgil is a Medieval English bastardization. Dude spelled his name with an E.

ghug give me some examples please? I'm not saying you're wrong, I just wish people would speak up with some justifications, or else this whole tournament will be really boring and useless

also, virgil, vergil, whatever

Shakespeare displays a vast knowledge of literature including most the Greek plays written Euripides, Homer AND Virgil. He isn't just a Virgil copycat. I really like Virgil, but Shakespeare is just incredible. Every carefully crafted sentence is a masterpiece.

Shakespeare hasn't had influence?

How much fiction is based on Macbeth or Hamlet? How often do we ourselves repeat Shakespeare's phrases sometimes without even realizing it?

Foregone conclusion... sea change... as luck would have it... woe is me... too much of a good thing.

I hate to be rude, but Latin is a dead language. English is the dominant language of the world. Maybe Vergil had a big influence on Latin... but Latin has ceased to exist.

Oh, I'm not saying he's a copycat, I'm just pointing out that Vergil's an important influence on some great literature, just as Shakespeare is if not moreso, while being an extremely excellent writer.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

well in terms of tracing influence, honestly you just have to go back as far as you can in time, and voila, automatically more influence. longetivy does matter of course, but i think it's also important to consider modern cultural impact. shakespeare is both relevant and important in modern times, AND really old, which is extremely impressive. very few can claim that. can virgil?

Can you cite some of Virgil's stuff that is culturally relevant and cited today? Because I've never heard anything specific other than he wrote the Aneid. I've heard much more about what Cicero and Aurelius said and thought than any other Roman writer.

Thucy, the most obvious examples are the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost. I can find more if you want.

That was to your first request.

I think Vergil is as relevant today as Shakespeare is unless you want to give Shakespeare credit for the overuse of plots that were already pretty standard in his time. They both created masterful pieces of literature, and they're both so thoroughly engrained in the Canon as to be indirectly used in anything written today. Vergil also wrote more than 1500 years before Shakespeare and in a Language that nobody speaks anymore (through no fault of his own) which hurts him in an Anglocentric discussion such as this one, but he's still relevant 2000 years later, which is not something we can say with certainty with regards to Shakespeare, as his greatness will be lost on someone who doesn't understand early modern English.

"Where do you get the idea that Homer/Shakespeare are more influential?"

Oh, just Homer's epics arguably being the most foundational works in Western Literature alongside the Bible and Shakespeare's being the most quoted playwright in the world, most cited English author, and the fact that he's influenced everyone who came after him, whether they loved him (Eliot, Dostoyevsky, Woolf, Faulkner) hated him (Tolstoy) or had complex feelings towards him (Lawrence, Shaw, Twain, etc.)

Shakespeare's characters are the most recognizable in the world created by a single author--really, only Dickens and a handful of others can even challenge that, and Vergil isn't in that handful.

What's more, he has influence over multiple fields, not just literature--

Freud considered Shakespeare's characters when forming his concepts of psychology...
Marx considered Shakespeare's works, using them in examples of his arguments regarding class struggle,
Just about every feminist author and theorist has turned to Shakespeare at some point.

Put bluntly--

Even if we wanted to say Vergil and Shakespeare have similar amounts of influence and talent...

Shakespeare achieved that degree of influence in just 397 years, whereas Vergil's had 2,000 or so years to accrue in popularity.

...accrue in popularity's a bad phrase, but still.

"ergil also wrote more than 1500 years before Shakespeare and in a Language that nobody speaks anymore (through no fault of his own) which hurts him in an Anglocentric discussion such as this one, but he's still relevant 2000 years later, which is not something we can say with certainty with regards to Shakespeare, as his greatness will be lost on someone who doesn't understand early modern English."

How does that work?

Vergil's language is dead, but that doesn't impede one's ability to understand him...

Whereas Shakespeare's language is not only alive but kicking, and, again, is a language he's only 397 years removed from, but folks will have a harder time understanding him in a living language than Vergil in either a dead one or a translation into English (an English that, again, Shakespeare helped forge with 2,000 words and phrases, so even if you don't read the Bard, you can't help but speak his language...if you've ever used the words "swagger," "puppy-dog," "alligator" or "eye-ball," you've used a word credited to Shakespeare--so 100% of the English-speaking world speaks Shakespeare. Can the same really be said of Vergil?)

I think that's backwards. Lasting longer shows how great he was. Vergil was more renowned when people still spoke his language, and be did it despite the numerous great Roman authors that came before him. Do you think any English author could ever write something so amazing that they could become considered THE quintessential English author within their own lifetime, before even publishing their masterpiece?

Vergil was so great that Christianity reinterpreted one of his Eclogues as a prophesy of the birth of Christ so that they could justify the greatness of a dirty pagan.

Shakespeare: 5
Vergil: 7 (someone +1'd his name back there again)

Damn, lol...Shakespeare got a tough opponent round one. :p

"Do you think any English author could ever write something so amazing that they could become considered THE quintessential English author within their own lifetime, before even publishing their masterpiece?"

No, because Shakespeare will now forever be known as the Greatest Writer in the English Language. ;)

And therein lays another point for the Bard--

Vergil can only ever be Rome's greatest author...he's not the definitive writer for his language, whereas Shakespeare, in the eyes of the world, IS the English language.

And I'd ask where Vergil's crossover into the popular consciousness is compared to Shakespeare, too...

After all, besides maybe Conan Doyle, Dickens and Austen, no one has anywhere near as many adaptations in the 20th century as Shakespeare, in dozens of languages...at a time when the world was as divided as possible in the Cold War, he was performed in NATO and Kremlin-controlled countries alike.

Vergil is most certainly the Latin language. He didn't benefit from coming before everyone else, but he was accepted as the best writer the language had ever seen nearly immediately despite the quantity of quality literature being created.

Vergil's crossover into the popular consciousness was extreme. His work was immediately canonized as the origin of the entire civilization despite an origin story already existing. Aeneas became the go-to Roman role-model. Everyone immediately started basing their work off of his.

And you needed *three* caveats there. Vergil was universal.

My vote comes down to the simple fact that I enjoy rereading Vergil more than I do Shakespeare. Perhaps this is because I was introduced to Vergil in a positive academic setting wheras with "The Bard" I never really wanted to read him; it was always something forced upon me either by a class, or myself. I had/have a bias against him just for that. For me, this vote is purely about enjoyment, not influence or other value. As a whole, I would choose to reread more of Vergil than to reread more of Shakespeare. But, I'm also a huge subjectivist when it comes to literary value, so I think it's great for people to disagree with me.