English Playwright
On JudgeMarket, William Shakespeare trades at the ceiling of the literature tag, priced as the most over-referenced writer in the English-speaking canon and one of the few figures where consensus is near-total. The bid is structural: 39 plays, 154 sonnets, translations into every major language, and a market for performance and adaptation that has not slowed in four centuries. Traders also pay for linguistic infrastructure — ordinary modern English still runs on phrases he coined, which is a compounding brand no other writer matches. The ceiling is already here: there's very little room for upward re-rating, and most movement is quiet drift. Controversies (authorship debates, anti-Semitic readings of Shylock, colonial-era Tempest critique) trim the top but don't break the name. Against Dante Alighieri, Shakespeare trades higher on reach; against Leonardo da Vinci, they are peer blue-chips of early-modern genius. Vincent van Gogh is the tragic-arts contrast. Volatility is minimal: pure reference asset.
