What is so great about William Shakespeare?

Answer 1

He died on what we believe to be his birthday. That is perhaps not unique (the odds are it must have happened to 1 in every 365 people) but it is a little unusual.

Answer 2

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Shakespeare is important because he almost single-handedly changed the English language. Before Shakespeare, English was still rooted in the medieval age. Many books were still being written in Latin, and written English owed its style to Geoffrey Chaucer, who had written The Canterbury Tales, the first full English epic, towards the end of the fourteenth century. After Shakespeare, English had become a modern language that would make its influence felt all over the world. Quite simply, if a word didn't exist, the Bard made it up! Some of these words, used by Shakespeare for the first time, have survived into everyday speech: abstemious, addiction, accommodation, barefaced, discontent, downstairs, fashionable, laughable, priceless, schoolboy, silliness, soft-hearted, unreal, useful - and many hundreds more, though some of these, such as exsufflicate (meaning puffed up), used in Othello, have fallen by the wayside. His vocabulary was about 20,000 words, large for his time.

Answer 3

Well, Shakespeare is very important because he is an amazing poet and play writer. He practically invented his own language through his plays, and the plays and poems were so well written, it amazed people. He wrote 38 amazing plays, 154 amazing sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other bits of poetry. He is a poem master! I have recently performed in Twelfth Night, a Shakespeare play, and I am still amazed by his genius.

Answer 4

The fact that William Shakespeare writes about controversies and themes, whether it be the fifteenth century or the twenty-first they still apply, that makes him great. He writes about things like love, hate, jealousy, deceit, all these things can be applied to each and everyones life, i mean who hasn't had friends that lied to them before or a lover of which no one approved. People can relate to shakespeare and therefore his legacy will live on. Sure its all written in olden day style English but that gives us room to interpret his work in our own ways and broaden, or develope actually, our thinking skills.

Answer 5

Two things: characterization and language.

His characters are remarkably complex, even when compared to those in novels which revel in self-analysis. And he found ways to evoke sympathy for all kinds of characters, even those who are unabashedly bad.

His use of language is unparallelled. He uses a huge vocabulary and a rich wealth of literary technique, but what he is most remarkable for is being able to say very important and deep things in a very compact way. A sentence of Shakespeare tells you more than pages of other writers. And he does it in iambic pentameter to boot.

Answer 6

You so did not just say that. He wrote 38 amazing plays, 154 amazing sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other bits of poetry. He is a poem master! I have recently performed in Twelfth Night, a Shakespeare play, and I am still amazed by his genius. So, he is very special.

Answer 7

What constitutes greatness in literature is difficult to define, and still more difficult to express in a short answer as we must give here. Shakespeare excelled in writing plays. In order to truly appreciate that fact, you need to read a lot of plays, by Shakespeare's contemporaries, by those that came before and more modern ones as well. When you read or watch plays from many stages of history you find that fashions of staging, of composing dialogue, or of constructing plots come and go. If you disregard differences due to fashion, Shakespeare comes out on top in terms of the power, compactness and emotional expressiveness of his dialogue, the depth and complexity of his characters, minor as well as major, and the carefully considered dramatic structure in terms of theme, parallel incidents, foil characters and pacing.

What is particularly special about Shakespeare is his use of the English language. Words and phrases he uses in the course of building the play's structure have been found by generations to be so apt that they are constantly used (often in paraphrase) by English speakers all the time. No other writer in English comes close. No other playwright wrote lines so memorable.

Answer 8

He is the only 400-year-old English playwright whose works are known to some extent by practically everybody.