So dominant have Shakespeare and his works become that it’s easy to forget that he was not the only kid in town in Elizabethan England.
Sometimes it’s worth exploring the other channels, if only to see what was so distinctive and catchy about the Man from Avon.
Over the past week I’ve had the chance to check out a couple of the alternative voices.
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The Swan at Stratford is currently staging a play by John Middleton, best known for his sadistically dark Revenger’s Tragedy.
It’s a Mad World My Masters is nothing of that sort.
It’s an extremely rude “romp com”, set in bawdy, immoral London, in this production transferred to 1950s Soho.
Almost everyone comes out of Middleton’s drama badly – either robbed, duped or cuckolded – but then, no one deserves any better.
In the seedy back streets of the Jacobean capital, everybody is on the make, financially, socially and sexually.
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On a considerably smaller scale – at least as far as budgets go – the Blue Orange Theatre on Great Hampton Street (in Birmnigham's Jewellery Quarter) has been putting on Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe.
This is challenging stuff, and well done Blue Orange for taking a punt with it.
I’ve not seen Faustus for years. Not since a school production in Wolverhampton, in fact, when Mephistopheles fell off the stage in the second act.
Marlowe was Shakespeare’s exact contemporary, but the comparison ends there, except for the occasions when WS nicks a line or two.
There is a scene in the third act where Faustus and his demonic little helper spook the Pope and a handful of friars during a whistle-stop visit to Rome.
It’s a piece of irreverent slapstick, to be honest (Father Ted with horns on), and unlike anything you would ever find in Shakespeare.
What comes over, then, is how coy and conservative our William was, at least compared to his contemporaries.
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There’s no poking fun at religion, very little bad language, no adultery and no sign of intellectual arrogance.
If William spent his nights in the seedier spots on the South Bank, he kept his comedies well away from them.
Maybe that’s why he has stood the test of time.
Dr Chris Upton is Reader in Public History at Newman University Birmingham