Introduction
If Western literature has a Mount Olympus, William Shakespeare and Dante Alighieri sit at its summit. Shakespeare is the English language's supreme literary artist — the playwright whose works have been translated into every major language and performed more than those of any other writer in history. Dante is the father of Italian literature — the poet whose Divine Comedy is considered by many scholars to be the greatest single work of literature ever written. Together, they represent the twin peaks of the Western canon.
On JudgeMarket, their OPS prices ask a question that literature departments have debated for centuries: whose achievement is greater?
Similarities
Both Shakespeare and Dante were language-makers. Before Dante, serious Italian literature was written in Latin. His decision to write the Divine Comedy in Tuscan vernacular — the language of the streets rather than the academy — effectively created modern Italian. The Italian language as spoken today is essentially Dante's Tuscan. Shakespeare's impact on English was equally seismic. He coined or popularized over 1,700 words — "eyeball," "assassination," "lonely," "generous" — and his phrases have become so embedded in the language that most English speakers use them without knowing their origin.
Both writers demonstrated an extraordinary range of human understanding. Shakespeare's characters — Hamlet's indecision, Iago's malice, Falstaff's appetites, Prospero's weariness — feel like encounters with real human beings. Dante's Comedy contains an equally vast gallery of human types, from the lustful Paolo and Francesca to the treacherous Count Ugolino, each drawn with psychological precision that anticipates the modern novel by centuries.
Both also transcended their original contexts to become universal. Shakespeare was a working playwright writing for a paying audience in Elizabethan London; Dante was an exiled Florentine politician writing a theological poem. Neither intended to create a monument for the ages. Both did anyway.
Differences
The most fundamental difference is form. Shakespeare was primarily a dramatist — his genius expressed itself through characters speaking to each other on stage. Dante was primarily a poet — his genius expressed itself through a single sustained narrative voice guiding the reader through an imagined cosmos. Shakespeare gives us multiplicity; Dante gives us unity.
Their worldviews could not be more different. Dante's Divine Comedy is organized by a rigorous theological and philosophical framework rooted in Thomistic Christianity. Every punishment in Hell corresponds precisely to its sin. Every joy in Paradise reflects a specific theological virtue. The universe is ordered, meaningful, and ultimately just. Shakespeare's plays, by contrast, offer no such cosmic certainty. His tragedies end in ambiguity and waste. His comedies end in marriages that feel provisional. His great characters are defined by their inability to understand themselves — something Dante, who claimed to have seen God face-to-face, would never countenance.
Their personal histories also diverge sharply. We know a great deal about Dante's life — his involvement in Florentine politics, his exile in 1302, his wandering through the courts of northern Italy, and his death in Ravenna. We know remarkably little about Shakespeare's inner life, which has fueled centuries of speculation and the persistent authorship controversy.
Impact on Literature
Dante Alighieri created the template for the long literary work as a journey of self-discovery. The Divine Comedy's structure — descent through suffering, purgation through effort, ascent through grace — has been echoed in countless works from Milton's Paradise Lost to Joyce's Ulysses. Dante's method of placing real historical figures in an imagined framework essentially invented the literary technique of mixing fact and fiction that we now take for granted. T.S. Eliot called Dante and Shakespeare the two poets who "divide the modern world between them."
William Shakespeare invented modern character. Before Shakespeare, literary figures tended to be types — the virtuous knight, the clever servant, the wicked king. Shakespeare's characters think, contradict themselves, change their minds, and surprise themselves. Hamlet's soliloquies are not just speeches; they are a mind in the act of thinking. This innovation — the representation of consciousness in real time — influenced every novelist, playwright, and screenwriter who followed. Without Shakespeare, the psychological novel is unimaginable.
The Market's Question
JudgeMarket transforms an ancient literary debate into a living market. Dante's supporters will argue that the Divine Comedy is a more complete achievement — a single, unified masterwork that encompasses theology, philosophy, history, science, and poetry in a structure of mathematical perfection. No work by Shakespeare, individually, matches its scope.
Shakespeare's supporters will counter that breadth matters. Thirty-seven plays spanning comedy, tragedy, history, and romance, plus 154 sonnets and two narrative poems, represent an unmatched body of work. Shakespeare also has the advantage of the stage — his works are performed nightly around the world, keeping his language alive in a way that Dante's medieval Italian, requiring translation for most readers, cannot match.
When you trade OPS on William Shakespeare or Dante Alighieri, you are placing a bet on the oldest question in comparative literature: does the single greatest work outweigh the greatest body of work? The market is open. The verdict is yours.
