Who is better, Dickens or Shakespeare? We asked nine prominent writers
Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College Oxford and author of This Is Shakespeare
It's a brilliantly preposterous thesis that Peter sets out but I disagree. What's great about Dickens is the maximalist, chock-a-block, teeming sense you get of that world. His work is like an extraordinary baroque cathedral that you could spend your life looking at, absorbed in the detail. By contrast, Shakespeare is more like a black box. There's a huge amount of potential to do these plays in very different worlds with very different outcomes. So what's great about Dickens is it's all there. But what's completely indispensable about Shakespeare is it's waiting for us to combine with it to make something new. I don't think rereading Dickens makes a new Dickens, but rereading or reperforming Shakespeare does make a new Shakespeare.
Adapted Bleak House and Little Dorrit for TV and is currently writing a book about Dickens's life
Shakespeare was just so extraordinary, so clever about so many things, that he has to be the greatest writer. He had such insight into what made people human. However, Dickens is much funnier than Shakespeare, whose comedies don't wear awfully well, and he's scary at the same time. He had this gift of retaining a childlike view of the world so that he could create these extraordinary grotesques that were larger and stranger than life, but also recognisably true. I have to say that Dickens was pretty hopeless on women, both in his life and in his work, whereas Shakespeare clearly understood women much better and was extraordinarily perceptive on what love can do to human beings.
Author of Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life and other books
Shakespeare means more to me than Dickens for several reasons. First, Dickens is rooted in a very specific world, of mid-19th-century England, whereas Shakespeare is the opposite – he couldn't, for safety reasons, write about the England of his time. He had to invent other worlds and write in such a way that the plays become adaptable to almost any circumstance. Second, Dickens is brilliant at using words, whereas with Shakespeare it feels like he's inventing language itself all the time. Also, Shakespeare takes us into psychological terrain that I don't think Dickens approaches. Dickens gives us a world in which there are good people and bad people and we know the distinction between them. But with Shakespeare, there isn't that distinction. Heroes do really horrific things – Hamlet is a thug. From moment to moment, we don't know where we stand. The characters feel like they're being invented second by second, word by word. It's just a profoundly different kind of aesthetic experience.
Author of The Essex Serpent and Enlightenment
When you compare them, I don't see that Dickens is lesser at all, and in some ways could be considered superior. The main thing is that he has moral courage. Shakespeare's work doesn't lack the scrutiny of individual morals, but he was a sort of court stooge – so much of his work was designed to endear him to the establishment. Whereas Dickens was anti-establishment and a political radical – he was instrumental in the ending of public hanging in the UK. His social justice conscience has not aged five minutes. If you read Hard Times, you think of Gove and the Gradgrindian policies in our education system. And so that's where Dickens is more radiantly necessary, because that radical spirit he had never ages.
Also, his prose was so strange. What's magical about his work is how on earth he managed to get away with gritty social commentary absolutely latched to the conditions of the day, but also being completely surreal. It's a sleight of hand that's almost impossible to pull off, or even to see how he pulls it off. It leaves me completely agog. Just look at the opening of A Christmas Carol: 'Marley was dead: to begin with.' Our modern prose seems so pedestrian in comparison.
Author of Sankofa and, most recently, Mayowa and the Sea of Words
I roll my eyes when I hear someone arguing that a certain author challenges Shakespeare's 'crown'. It is very British, very Eurocentric. To say all of literature is contained in Shakespeare or Dickens, it's like, which literature? Is Chinua Achebe there as well? Wole Soyinka? Is oral literature there? I don't even think many people would say Dickens is the greatest novelist of all time. Tolstoy would be my preference. But it's not a competition. Between the two, I do think Dickens's language is more accessible to a modern reader, but Shakespeare is more open to reinvention. There have been so many reinventions of Shakespeare that people don't even realise, such as The Lion King (a reinvention of Hamlet) or West Side Story (Romeo and Juliet). Shakespeare is not so bound to his place and his time, whereas it's very difficult to divorce Dickens from Victorian England.
Author of I Heard What You Said and co-host of BBC Radio 4's Add to Playlist
What's interesting to me is their differences. Shakespeare gives us archetypal characters that are very relatable whatever context you put them in, and that's why he persists. The problem with that, if you want to call it a problem, is that the characters themselves are almost digital in a way, in that they can be wiped clean and transferred. Dickens, on the other hand, gives us a real analogue grittiness to his characters that's very of its time. So it depends on what you like. I like Shakespeare's universality and his exploration of the human condition. But if you like a real exploration of character in context to understand Victorian England, then you can't get better than Dickens.
Author of Julia, The Heavens and other novels
Of the two, I have a greater affinity for Shakespeare. I see him as a professional who was writing plays that he intended to be popular, and writing them at speed, and so he was using the talents he had and glossing over the bits that were difficult for him. I love him for his flaws, such as writing ridiculously stupid plots. Dickens's flaws seem much more like they came from him, rather than from not finishing the job on time. I think he was a sentimentalist whose idea of psychology could be frighteningly acute or frighteningly obtuse depending on what he was looking at. The obtuseness is just as sincere, it comes from a genuine Dickensian point of view, whereas when Shakespeare's being obtuse, he's just simply not working hard enough.
Author of There Are Rivers in the Sky and other novels
In order to compare Shakespeare and Dickens better, I focused on their female characters. While both are quite sympathetic when it comes to understanding the complexity of being a woman in a patriarchal world, Shakespeare is far ahead in terms of portraying unruly female characters. There's more depth and darkness there. I love the way Peter finished his article, but I want to add a twist. If Shakespeare was far ahead in terms of depicting human emotions, and Dickens when it comes to social injustice, there's one author who brings the two together and that's Virginia Woolf. They both need to move over and make room for her.
Author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton
Is Dickens a greater writer than Shakespeare? Perhaps not. But is he a more enjoyable writer to read? I could agree with that. Dickens is the author from whom you're more likely to get the immersive reading experience I look for in a good novel. But then Shakespeare wasn't a novelist so it's a bit like comparing an apple with an orange. What I will say is that each aspired to give us all of humanity in their work, and clearly they succeeded, which is why their work endures. However, while we're pitting them against each other, we have to make sure we're also creating space for something new, for the masters of the future. That kind of reverence shouldn't dominate the landscape.
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