Today is Shakespeare's birthday, may his works be long remembered as doing so has given him the closest thing to life after death possible. Still, even he will be forgotten one day, be it a thousand years, 10 thousand, or even longer. He has a better chance of being taken into space than jesus, muhamad, or buddha.
Poll question: who has a better chance of being remembered in 10000 years?
Once upon a time three poets shared a house in the lake district of England, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelby. One day Coleridge comes in and hears what Shelby is telling the children. He says "My good fellow. What you have written there will live longer than anything that I or Wordsworth could ever write".So what was it that Shelby wrote for the children?....
"Once upon a time there were three bears....."
Love all, trust a few, and do wrong to no one. -Shakespeare
Political leaders are the ones whose names are most likely to be recorded or even enshrined.
Like Ozymandais?
Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes died on the same day
Yes....and....no. Same date, but at the time Spain and England were using different calendars and their dates were yet to be synchronized. I would have to look up to see which one actually passed away first.
Cervantes died 10 days earlier. England still used the Julian Calander and Spain used the Gregorian, our current one. So, technically, Shakespeare should have his death reassessed to early May.
I think it depends more on the individual and dumb luck than on profession or field.
In any case, all immortality projects are a fool's errand.
My 2nd wife was deeply upset at the notion that other than myself and her elderly mother / stepfather and uncle / aunt, she would vanish from human memory in a very short time after she died. She's been gone now for 12 years and the process is already well underway; her stepfather and uncle have died, her mother and aunt are in a nursing home, and I have remarried. She had a prickly and troubled relationship with my children and they were indifferent to her at best.
In a handful of years I alone will remember her or have known her, and then ... she's reduced to just being another ordinary person who lived and dreamed and died and was forgotten by history, who, due to illness and her pretty much total lack of maternal impulse had not even her own children to carry any form of legacy forward.
But I wish I could have gotten her to focus on what she had rather than what she didn't, what she accomplished rather than what she didn't. Scores of people came to her funeral, many from great distances and whom she hadn't had active contact with in 25 years. They came not just to show up but to convey what she meant to them and how she inspired them. If she could have only been a fly on the wall of her own funeral! She would have been pleased and delighted (and surprised).
Of course those people also hadn't given her the time of day in 25 years and it's often sadly true that you're valued and feted as a hero only when you're dead. But that's just the way of the world. The point is, she acquitted herself well and helped others and that is to be celebrated.
The reality is most of us are flashes in the pan and as the OP suggests, even those who aren't are just somewhat brighter and slower-decaying flashes. And it's okay. We're not built for eternity, though we often have the temerity to aspire to it. We each have a very small contribution to make and so long as we make it with honor and integrity, it doesn't matter to what extent and in what way it is or isn't remembered. Even forgotten impacts are there for others to build on. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, known or unknown.
many stand on the shoulders of dwarves. stocky little bastards, though.. the dwarves, that is.
If someone is remember 1000 yrs from now Shakespeare is a likely candidate, it is however uncertain that he wrote all the plays & poems attributed to him, some say Marlowe and others Amelia Bassano Lanier.
Shame on them all - Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance included!
Being that Shakespeare was a jobbing actor and writer needing to make a crust the likely scenario is that he wrote them all with a bit of borrowing here and there. There are apparently many extant versions with re-writes of several plays. This was a production factory and with the need to supply the demand it would be like a commission from the BBC.
We have to remember that Shakespeare was an average at best Elizabethan actor first who happened to be bloody good at writing and putting a play together.