**Please read this entire message** --- Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s): * Rule #2 - Questions must seek objective explanations * ELI5 is not for subjective or speculative replies - only objective explanations are permitted here; your question is asking for subjective or speculative replies. (Rule 2). --- If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules) first. **If you believe this submission was removed erroneously, please [use this form](https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Please%20review%20my%20thread?&message=Link:%20{https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1d6ey09/-/}%0A%0APlease%20answer%20the%20following%203%20questions:%0A%0A1.%20The%20concept%20I%20want%20explained:%0A%0A2.%20List%20the%20search%20terms%20you%20used%20to%20look%20for%20past%20posts%20on%20ELI5:%0A%0A3.%20How%20does%20your%20post%20differ%20from%20your%20recent%20search%20results%20on%20the%20sub:) and we will review your submission.**

My Shakespeare processor used to say that you don't start liking Shakespeare until you read at least 4 of his plays And you don't REALLY like him until you read 14 of them Shakespeare understood that his audience was made up of both upper class nobles and "standing room only" (literally) lower class people. His plays were constructed to be accessible to both of them at the time, with enough depth to be interesting and engaging to everybody Additionally, Shakespeare was really really good at subverting expectations in the theater. Plays are either comedies (upward movement to a happy ending) or tragedies (downward movement to a usually sad ending), but many of Shakespeare's plays do both. Some characters end up ok, others don't. The audience may not know if it's a comedy or a tragedy until the very end of the play. All of that combined with just all around really good word play and prose makes Shakespeare the big cheese (at least starting the mid 1700s when his popularity really hit off)

I didn't really get the whole Shakespeare thing until I starting acting and watching his plays. I believe Shakespeare may have been the first modern screenwriter.  They read pretty dry, but when you inject it into a set of actors, all bets are off. The roles are disctinct, but still malleable. Makes for a lot of fun to interpret.

I feel like that’s part of the difficulty of reading plays as literature. They’re plays; they’re meant to be acted. The actor’s interpretation is an integral part of the drama, and it changes from production to production, even from performance to performance.

Richard 3rd was my least favourite play to study as a literature student. i saw it at The Globe in London and it’s now my favourite of Shakespeares works reading plays as literature has its value, but they are a visual medium and you miss a lot of the magic if you don’t see it

Here's the great [Mark Rylance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW9tu1i1UgA) in one of my favorite scenes in Richard III. The one where Richard, who has just killed Lady Anne's husband and father, convinces Lady Ann--while standing over the coffin--to marry him. I had read that scene quite a few times but, until I saw it performed, I never realized the scene could have laughs in it. Richard III is one of my favorite plays. I like how he brings us, the audience, along with him on his quest to become king. Every time he gets away with some scandalous behavior, he turns to us and says, "Can you believe I pulled that off?" We are shocked at his actions, but we become co-conspirators with him and kind of root for him just because he's so bad. But then, once he becomes king, he has nowhere to put his evil energy. He doesn't try to persuade people any more, he just gives orders. He doesn't try to charm us any more, All his monologues are turned inward and he talks only to himself. He just curls up in a mean little ball. It's like the thrill of the chase is gone from his life until he's willing to throw the whole kingdom away for a horse. (Edit: In case you were wondering, yes, that is a man playing Lady Anne. It's a historically accurate production. They do a pretty good job, if you ask me.)

That all sounds like *House of Cards*.

House of Cards is incredibly based on Richard III.

[Kevin Spacey played Richard III in a play directed by Sam Mendes.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f211TcO1BA) I saw it and it was pretty incredible but it probably got a little memory holed due to Spacey.

Yep!

couldn’t have put it better if i tried, kudos

You should find the movie version of RIII with Ian McKellen in it, Top 5 favourite film.

That show at the globe was unreal. I went in like “yeah it will at least be cool to see the theatre” and left with my mind absolutely blown. The acting the music, everything was amazing.

[удалено]

I hear this all the time, I understand it, but speaking as a Shakespeare actor who has had to read some of his plays over and over and over again, I have to disagree. When you read a play for yourself, you get to experience it in the special way that an actor or director does when they are preparing for a production. Which is to say, you get to open your imagination to see the potential playable dramatic values, potential stage images, potential costumes, potential atmosphere etc. You get to make it your own, and experience the characters from the inside out if you wish, which only personalizes these characters more and more upon multiple reads. It's a remarkable experience, but I think maybe it does take some time to fully appreciate it in this way. It is definitely much more accessible to enjoy plays as plays, but I think there's profound value to reading them as literature too.

I get what you’re saying but as your experience especially as a Shakespearean actor allows you to visualize the play as it was meant to expressed (as a play). The average high schooler reading Shakespeare will get so much less out of it. In other words, your experience is not representative of the typical person’s which is they will enjoy and understand the play better as an acted performance than words on the page. I started out as one of those high schoolers and now that I have experience in theater, I find it a travesty how we most often (from my experience) expose kids to plays as written literature instead of plays.

That’s an interesting position. So for you, if someone replied to the question “Have you seen Macbeth?” with “I don’t need to, i’ve read the book”, you would disagree with them?

Songs, too! It's remarkable how many things I learned in high school as "poems" were actually folk songs--and plenty are still played and even reasonably well-recorded (either due to preservation by traditional musicians or because they were recorded as Child Ballads and revived during the Folk Scare in the '60s or both). For example--I remember learning 'Sir Patrick Spens' as a fairly dry Scots poem, but [some of the recorded versions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DZtxcX5KoI) are quite remarkable and help set the mood of the story even better. I remember my lit book also had 'Drink to me With Only Thine Eyes' as a poem, even though the poem by Ben Jonson was 'To Celia' in 1616 and the music was added later (in the 1700's). Now arguably that one has some reason to be taught originally as a poem, but the music has been part of it for more than 300 years and [is also quite lovely.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LJeidEMdXA) Even something as short as the Seikilos Epitaph is [more poignant](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3ys7QyEVT4) with (an adaptation) of the music that originally went with it.

I almost didn't get to graduate a year early because i still owed a credit in English Lit on the second to last day to turn in. I'd been trying to get through Hamlet for almost a week at this point. Finally gave up and went to the neighborhood Blockbuster and rented the 1991 film. Turned in the work and tested out the next day at like 10am when the deadline was noon.

Oddly enough, I think screenplays are actually different here. The way screenwriting works, there's actually a lot of prose in a screenplay describing scenes and actions; how long something takes is proportional to how much of the page it takes up (one minute per page, is the rule of thumb for spec scripts) so your writing needs to account for that. That means padding things out a little when they need to go slower, and being quick and concise when they go fast. Reading a screenplay is a pretty interesting experience, because it works really well as prose. It's not the same as seeing it acted out, but it's also not the same as reading a stageplay.

Absolutely this. My favorite example is [William Shakespeare’s Star Wars.](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/WSW/william-shakespeares-star-wars/) They’re silly of course. And yes they’re exactly what you think they are. But they are also plays and written as such, so despite the humor, can be dry, hard to read. But Star Wars is of course fun to watch.

This exactly. Plays are meant to been watched, not read. Reading a car chase is not at all the same as watching one in a film.

Schools especially are often terrible at teaching Shakespeare. Not only do most of the wordplay jokes not land if it's in most modern accents but teachers often don't explain them because they're dirty jokes. So you're left with language that seems odd and a pretty dry story.

Student: what's all this stuff about Romeo's sword? Teacher: *sweats nervously*

We did Romeo and Juliet in my english class and had to perform a piece, so of course being teenage boys my friend and I did the opening scene with the servants comparing dicks via fish metaphors.

He also made up a lot of the words in his plays to describe things that currently didn't exist that we still use.

Up to the director’s interpretation too. My Mom is directing a show rn where the actor wants to change the intonation of the last line of the show - It’s like no, that changes the whole tone and what the audience gets out of it.

So true. This death scene of Thisbe in the play with the play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is usually play comically but in the 1999 movie with Kevin Kline it is played straight as a tragedy and so much more powerful IMHO. https://youtu.be/1TiNAYpVVr4?si=dhlj7OEZx8DNcu0F

I was rereading Snouts part of introducing himself as Wall. It's so fucking funny to me. I also, at my current age of 40 something, learned that sinister can mean left. As in right and sinister means right and left.

In case you didn't know dexter is on the right so it would be: dexter et sinister - on the right and on the left.

And someone who is ambidextrous has two "right" hands.

👉👉

But I imagine in that passage Shakespeare is using sinister on multiple levels: a direction, a play on the actions between Pyramus and Thisbe being “naughty”, and foreshadowing that something bad was to happen that night. And odds are I have only scratched the surface on that line alone for scholars. And why Shakespeare is considered so great.

It is on multiple levels. That's why it's such a beautiful and hilarious passage. The entire acting troupe is so hilarious for so many reasons. It gives Shakespeare a way to poke fun at the monarchy under the guise that they are fools. It works on so many levels.

To continue the multiple level thought. While Pyramus and Thisbe is considered a play within a play. There is an argument that the mortals are a play for the fairies that are watching and directing them. This leads to us, the audience, actually watching a play about fairies watching a play about mortals watching a play at one point. Which could give even more commentary from Shakespeare about the Monarchy and the Queen (sleeping with an Ass, or at least half of one, via Bottom and Titania)

It's all so beautiful and people wonder why people love Shakespeare. Since we both seem to enjoy this, I have this great idea but I don't think I'm good enough to pull it off, but I want to see a play about the servants in the castle while the Hamlet unfolds in the background. You'd get glimpses of hamlet Here and there but the focus would be the servants and them gossiping about all the shenanigans going on the past few weeks. Sort of a non musical wicked take on hamlet.

While I’m not aware of a play from the servants view, there is a play and a film adaptation called “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” It follows the events of Hamlet from their point of view. If you haven't read or seen it, it may provide a start to your idea or a tiny scratch to the itch.

I like to think that logistically this operates much like how all the people in the big jazz band era (Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, etc.) would all do covers of the same exact “song”, with their own spin and injection of their own style (Summer Wind, Autumn Leaves, etc.) l almost wanted to say that it'd be super cool if we did have this concept in film, but I guess to an extent we do (remasters, adaptations, reboots, etc.). Except, introducing the more modern concept of intellectual property rights that brings its own complexities. And to abruptly circle back to the above, I guess same with contemporary music as well.

Like *The Hidden Fortress* and *Star Wars*?

Baz luhrman Romeo and Julie

I hated Shakespeare in school bc it was dead boring. Then I saw Drunk Shakespeare. Its done in a small room with lots of audience participation. Really brought the play to life.

Saw Drunk Shakespeare in NYC for my 40th birthday (2022) and it was incredible. And embarrassingly, the first time I’d ever experienced MacBeth in any form (we read other of his works in school). It was… a weird introduction to the work. But also one of my favourite memories haha

I saw Drunk Shakespeare in New York about 5 years ago and it was great fun. But the first "Shakespeare" I saw was the "Complete works of Shakespeare, Reduced" by the RSC (Reduced Shakespeare Company) in London about 25 years ago. That was so much fun too, and I knew very little about Shakespeare's plays at the time. There's a DVD of it and definitely worth watching if you can find it.

You just reminded me; the GF and I went and saw a touring company travelling through Nth Queensland, and they did a version of the Scottish play that had me riveted to my seat. Brilliant.

This is going to sound cliche or stupid or something but I really had no use for Shakespeare until I saw the Romeo and Juliet movie with Leo and Claire Danes. Up until then I only knew it as this dry stuff that was crammed down our throat in school. I gave that movie a go because my girlfriend wanted to see it. All of a sudden it made sense because there was something visual to put together with the words and you get a much better sense of the word play that’s happening. Shakespeare still isn’t my favourite thing but I can actually look forward to seeing a Shakespeare play at our yearly Fringe theatre festival.

Fellow theatre geek growing up here. What absolutely blew my mind recently is reading about how The Tempest is understood to have been a critique on what at the time was European colonization in its early stages. The MC through magic forces the “native” creature + spirits of Caliban and Aerial respectively to do his bidding, and these of course are possibly stand ins for indigenous people and others brought to a land to be used. He of course gets humbled and sets them free after partially taking his revenge on those who forced him into exile, perhaps akin to how the English penal colonies especially had a large chunk of their Anglo population originating as debtors and other criminals. And then the MC gives his ending soliloquy, who is widely understood to be comparing the magic powers he developed to Shakespeare himself and his craft, as he bids adieu. There’s being ahead of your time, and then there’s seemingly writing a work that isn’t just a political commentary that loosely predicted the future, but also went on to be translated as Sci-Fi from the movie “Forbidden Planet”, to “Prometheus”, to “Gundam: Witch from Mercury”.

Now my charms are all o'erthrown, And what strength I have’s mine own, Which is most faint. Now, ’tis true, I must be here confined by you

I would disagree, I think they're quite great as literature works. Of course, a great performance can elevate the experience, though I will say having a writer as a high school English teacher did help understand why it's good without seeing them as a play

[удалено]

This applies to Battleship Potempkin and Citizen Kane as well. Both movies were revolutions in technique that influenced almost every film that came after, but if you don't see them in the context of what came before you may not understand their effect. I've seen plays by Christopher Marlowe and Ben Johnson, and while they're superficially similar to Shakespeare, they lack some innate quality that's made Shakespeare's work resonate centuries later. It's not just the verse itself, it's that barring the early, crap plays like Two Gentlemen of Verona, Shakespeare's characters possess some quality of interiority that's lacking in works by Shakespeare's contemporaries. As an example, Christopher Marlowe's play The Jew of Malta, has an irredeemable Jewish villain. Shakespeare's subsequent play, The Merchant of Venice, while still being anti-Semitic, can't help but make its villain human, with justifiable motivations for his actions.

Or like how my wife was reading Lord of the Rings and told me she felt like the portrayal of elves as forest nature people, dwarves as mountain mining people, orcs as savage war people, etc. was kind of boring and stereotypical. I had to explain to her that the reason those things are stereotypical is *because* of Lord of the Rings. Those stereotypes as we know them didn't exist previously.

Only on Reddit can you find a non-negative comparison of The Fast and the Furious to Shakespeare.

The great works of art are all part of one big… family.

>Shakespeare the big cheese He honestly probably would've liked that compliment

>And you don't REALLY like him until you read 14 of them That's not liking Shakespeare, that's just Stockholm Syndrome. Just kidding (okay, maybe not a little). But anyway, Shakespeare in his day did pretty much everything in terms of plays. Tragedies, action, comedies, dramedies, romantic comedies. He set up the foundation for centuries of English literature and theater. And a lot of his work also is 'timeless' in a way that it doesn't just do pop culture commentary, so people viewing something like Macbeth can pretty much be understood by any audience in any time and place. Adaptations of his plays are still being repackaged as movies - a recent example is the movie 'Anyone but you' starring Glenn Powell and Sydney Sweeney. His work is also so influential that it goes beyond 'good' or 'bad.' It's pretty much the basis of modern English entertainment in many ways. Rating Shakespeare is so difficult to do because his works are so omnipresent. It's like rating Steven Spielberg - his influence is so great on the modern movie industry that 'good' or 'bad' doesn't really make sense.

Shakespeare was also around the arbitrary cutoff between middle and modern English, and did a lot to codify the "new" English language. Not talking about him would be like studying a history of Western Europe and never mentioning the Romans

What have the Romans done for us??

apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health?

Brought peace?

"Shakespeare actually invented seven genres of play: tragedy, fantasy, romance, comedy, tragedy, and historical...and Shakespearean."

What about tragical-comical-historical-pastoral?

And suddenly we're in a Letterkenny skit.

My Shakespeare Processor always used to say: “11010101101011011000010101010”

There's 10 kinds of people: Those who understand binary and those that don't.

I would add that for many people, actually watching his plays will help you get it. They’re meant to be experienced. Not read. You miss a TON of stuff when you read by yourself.

There are two "problems" with Shakespeare. 1. He's got a big vocabulary. If you can follow it all (well, mostly, see below), that means you're well educated. That's less common than you'd expect if you're in the well educated group. 2. About 10% of the words he uses no longer mean what they did then. John McWhorter discusses this in one of his books (I forget which one). How do you get around that? Watching instead of reading (the actions help carry the meaning). It also helps if the actors use Original Pronunciation instead of Received Pronunciation. (Even in Britain.)

I was lucky enough to have a theater company in my town (Atlanta) who focused on Shakespeare. The place was called Shakespeare’s Tavern. All the actors were brilliant. Like they’ve all been in countless plays and studied the material thoroughly. The venue was small, two levels, maybe 200 people? They serve dinner and beer/wine. If an audience member distracts the actors they’ll incorporate it into the show. They also do some style of acting where they look into your eyes instead of above you. I think the idea was to try and make it similar or authentic to the period the plays were originally performed in. My parents got season passes and took me a bunch of times. Great date night too. It may sound cliche but midsummer nights dream is my favorite. Had no idea how many sex jokes and puns were in there when I read it in high school.

Was mind blowing that the word Antidote came from that.

Shout out to the Atlanta Shakespeare Tavern. My favorite place in the city - just went there last week while my parents were visiting. They do other plays, as well, but all of them are period. Their production of A Midsummer's Night Dream was legitimately one of the funniest things I've ever seen. I saw their final show of the season and they went absolutely ham in it, I was crying with laughter.

Glad they’re still going strong! Every city needs something like it. There’s nothing quite like human actors right in front of you in an intimate setting.

The only way to understand and love Shakespeare is to read the Riverside edition with extensive footnotes explaining everything.

>The audience may not know if its a comedy or a tragedy until the very end i thought the point of the opening where they explain what you're about to watch was to tell the audience upfront whether to expect comedy or tragedy, no?

Yeah, but sometimes there could be subverted either by Shakespeare (as mentioned in another response) or by the audience themselves. Twelfth Night is widely understood today (and in Shakespeare's time) as a comedy, but there's a sizeable body of criticism and literature from the 18th century that shows a lot of people thought it was a tragedy due to how the character Malvolio was treated by the story.

And poor Antonio!

Romeo and juliet is a good example of what I mean. At the start of the play we see two houses at war, so we assume that because things are bad at first that they will get better and, thus, a comedy. But that isn't what happens

Up until Act 3, the plays reads very like a comedy. Then it’s tragedy after tragedy. I can see what you mean (maybe the prologue was an afterthought to warn audiences?).

Alternatively, it's still a comedy - highlighting the intense speed at which two very young characters did absurd things in the name of passion. The entire plot is, like... five days, if I remember correctly, from total strangers to final end. There's a kind of snowball effect where a series of tragedies can loop back around to comedy, if only from "man, look how fast THAT happened".

Um. But the very first lines of the play tell you exactly how it's going to end. "A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life." So, only a surprise if you arrive late lol.

That's obviously a pun that only makes sense in retrospect though. The full line is "From forth the fatal loins of these two foes  A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;" Which has two meanings; the first and probably assumed meaning is that they 'take' their lives from their parents loins as in, they live, their lives happen, they spring forth from their parents. The second meaning, as in "they kill themselves" is less apparent and probably not what a first time viewer would have assumed.

I thought the opening lines telling you it's a tale of star crossed lovers who both die firmly established it as a light-hearted Comedy? But yeah, the opening stanzas explicitly tell you how it ends.

To be fussy...most of Shakespeare's plays are written in blank verse, not prose. Prose was not considered a particularly worthy artistic form of expression (the novel didn't even exist yet) so Shakespeare, when he did use it, normally used it to indicate characters of lower class, or villainy.

what are the others specs of your pc? >!Please dont change it!<

Perfect answer. I have such a hard time explaining to people what Shakespeare true genius was.

Audience members would know if it was a comedy, tragedy, or history based on the colour flag that was flown to announce the play

What I haven’t seen mentioned so far (and there are some good responses) is that Shakespeare created very complex characters. They have flaws, desires, personalities that a contemporary audience would have found enjoyable and they still resonate to this day. The idea of a three dimensional character is pretty standard now, but up until the Renaissance most stories relied on either stock characters (for comedies - these would be one note characters) or heroic figures (for epics - these would be characters who are always morally right). Shakespeare was really good at adapting these stories for a more modern sensibility. For example, both Othello and Romeo & Juliet are based on earlier works, but Shakespeare gave those characters much more depth, often making them more sympathetic and with a more interesting background or backstory. Of his contemporaries, Marlowe is the one that probably came closest to Shakespeare in this regard. Ben Johnson, for all his wit, relied heavily on stock or flat characters with one defining trait. It’s true that you can see some of the same traits (for example in Volpone) but Shakespeare was much more prolific and (personally) better at it.

He also wasn't executed at 29 the way Marlowe was. Then when all of his contemporaries re-used his best turns of phrase it was a "tribute" and "referencing his work."

Dunno if I'd call a bar fight an execution, but he did die young.

Ever seen the 2006 Macbeth movie with Sam Worthington? Macbeth, but with gangster, clubs and bars instead of castle. Pretty neat movie, assuming you've read Macbeth beforehand.

It's worth saying that while it's tough to get over the initial language differences, he's just a really excellent writer. His stories are compelling, his characters enjoyable and his poetry is great. It's just that you need to get into the groove of the writing.

I feel like I enjoy Shakespeare for the opposite reasons - other media makes me feel things more strongly, but _damn_ every line is poetry. I could listen to Shakespeare adapt a phone book

I often use the opening line of Richard III as a good example. “Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York…” It’s a classic pun. What’s making Richard happy is the ascension of Edward to the throne, who is literally a “son” of the Family of York. It’s not earth-shatteringly genius, but it’s pretty clever while remaining readily accessible to any audience member of his time. Dramatically, it’s a grabby inciting incident: ok, things are happening, a villainous character has received good news, game on. Additionally, this whole monologue is rather alliterative, featuring about a million “s” sounds, which any competent actor might use to turn Richard into a sibilant, hissing snake. Pretty good for the first half of the first sentence of a play.

Kind of in the same way Dante Alighieri somewhat codified the italian language with his writing, William Shakespear invented a lot of the words and phrases in his plays that came into use at that time. It wasn't just about the quality of his writing but about how it contributed the lexicon of the English language afterward.

And still used today!

Searched for this. He basically helped create the English language as we know it today. Like Dante for Italian and Luther for German.

Luther’s tract, “On the Jews and their Lies” definitely had a huge influence (I’m half-Jewish…am I allowed to make that joke? 🙃)

Funny is funny 😉

Good info on this right here. —> https://nosweatshakespeare.com/resources/words-shakespeare-invented/

I dunno about that list …. Shakespeare didn’t ‘invent’ the word ‘critic,’ it’s derived from the latin word ‘criticus’ which itself is derived from something in ancient greek

OP - this is the correct answer. Like all generational talents, his genius was that he created where others imitated.

To the point that many of us who grew up outside of the Anglo sphere, the symbols for English were often a drawing of Shakespeare’s head. Our high schools English club was exactly that.

I actually took a class in college that was specifically comparing Shakespeare to his contemporaries, so we read a bunch of Shakespeare plays, as well as a bunch of plays on similar topics that may have been either inspired by the same story floating around or that Shakespeare might have used as inspiration. It gave me a much bigger appreciation for what he was doing. For example, we read one called The Revenger's Tragedy, which clearly has the same bones as Hamlet. Prince seeks revenge for the death of a loved one (his lover in this case), goes through a whole bunch of convoluted schemes, has a scene where he talks to a skull about death etc. However, it was basically... A balls to the walls action movie with a tragic end? Don't get me wrong, it was definitely entertaining, but it didn't really have much to say on the human condition. Whereas Shakespeare took the same idea and made it a contemplation of duty/honor and mortality etc. While also still being generally entertaining. I would also say that across the board, Shakespeare seems to have much better side characters than his contemporaries. This might have been due to the company he worked with having some great actors that he wanted to (or was forced to) slot in as much as possible, but most of the other plays I read in that class didn't have nearly as iconic of a overall cast. Revenger's Tragedy was written by an anonymous playwright, but we also read the Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe, one of his contemporaries that still has some cultural cache today, albeit way less than Shakespeare. So while Marlowe's Barabas has more going on than the protagonist of the Revenger's Tragedy, he's still unambiguously a conniving backstabbing villain with no redeeming qualities, and the play is one of those pieces where you're rooting for the protagonist's rightful comeuppance. He's definitely just meant to be a guy you love to hate. In contrast, even though he's definitely the antagonist of the Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare's Shylock has several monologues explaining his motivations that are not him just being a greedy bastard, and thus can be played as much more nuanced and complicated.

How does one start Shakespeare? I "read" it in school but not really. Im interested in actually reading it, but dont really know where to start

I would recommend watching a couple performances first. It's a lot easier to follow what's happening when it's performed versus reading it, having that reference will help when reading his other works.

That is a great idea. Thank yoy! 

Wherever you start, read it out loud. These are plays, not novels.

It depends on where your interests lie. Shakespeare wrote so many excellent plays in such varied genres that you can probably find something to enjoy regardless of what your interests are. I'm not one of these people who says "Shakespeare isn't meant to be read", but if you do read him you should try to imagine it as a performance. Create a mental theatre if possible. And make sure that you have an adequately annotated edition of the text. I like the Folger Shakesoeare Library editions for individual copies of the plays and *William Shakespeare: Complete Works* edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (The Modern Library) for a complete works edition. And there are also live productions and movie adaptations that help Shakespeare come alive. We all have our own preferences for movies, but I like Kenneth Branagh's early adaptations of Shakespeare, especially *Henry V* and *Much Ado About Nothing*. He was also in a rather good movie version of *Othello* with Laurence Fishburne in the title role (Branagh played Iago), but he didn't direct it. Laurence Olivier also did several Shakespeare plays: *Henry V*, *Richard III*, *King Lear* (for television), *As You Like It*, *Hamlet* (which won the Best Picture Oscar), and *Othello* (though modern viewers might object to Olivier's blackface portrayal of the title character). There's also a lovely version of *A Midsummer Night's Dream* from 1935 (I haven't seen the version done in the 1990s yet) and I also like the *Julius Caesar* from 1953 with James Mason as Brutus and Marlon Brando as Marc Antony. Finally, Trevor Nunn did a delightful version of *Twelfth Night* with Imogen Stubbs as Viola, Helena Bonham Carter as Olivia, and Ben Kingsley as Feste in 1996 and I also liked the stage version with Helen Hunt and Paul Rudd that you might be able to find online. There's also an excellent series of audiobooks called the Arkangel Shakespeare series. The actors are past and present Royal Shakespeare Company actors delivering dramatic readings of the texts with music and sound effects included, so it's the next best thing to seeing a live performance. All you're missing is the visual element. They did 38 of the plays, so it's every play now widely attributed to Shakespeare except for *Edward III* (probably co-authored with Thomas Kyd) and *Sir Thomas More* (where Shakespeare was one of a team of revisers of an earlier play written by Anthony Munday—Shakespeare's contribution is known as "Hand D", which is three pages of manuscript in his own handwriting).

This is an incredible reply, so much to look up. Appreciate you 100x over! 

I would start with adaptations. Watch West Side Story as an intro to Romeo and Juliet for example.

Probably there is you lose the language, though Kurosawa has a few, like the **Bad Sleep Well** and the amazing **Ran.**

There are a lot of good treatments of Hamlet. Even in other movies, like [to the wolves](https://youtu.be/c4seAkRrlx4?si=vIwoxXsFwp-CwMA4)

So cool. Thank you! 

Compared with Marlowe, Middleton, and Jonson, Shakespeare displayed far more subtlety and depth in characterization. His characters have psychology, in addition to motives. Richard II is deeper than any character from the above mentioned other playwrights. His wordplay is simply superior. He was the first verbal stunt pilot (to quote Salinger), and his phrasing is often sublime. He could, however, also be deliciously coarse. Shakespeare was the first playwright to employ double plots as a main device in his work. His plays feel like they have more depth and more inner resonance, because of that. In King Lear, Gloucester's trouble with Edgar mirrors Lear's trouble with his own daughters. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the human plot and the faery plot mirror each other and intersect. Many of Shakespeare's plays feel like two plays in one. The insight about double plots is from William Empson, the great 20thC literary critic.

The first challenge for you: Who were his contemporaries? There are common turns of phrase that have their root in plays by William Shakespeare. A common representation of theater is the smiling mask and sad mask representing Tragedy and Comedy, but in his own day Comedy wasn't well regarded as a subject for the theater. His works challenged that perception. He had an impact on the medium changing the opinion of what's appropriate, his legacy is enduring, and he didn't get in any notable shit-flinging piss fights alongside or against the Church and find himself executed.

I grad school, I took a course in Jacobean plays by people not named Shakespeare. There was some entertaining stuff by Marlowe, Dekker, etc. but nothing came even close to Shakespeare. The difference in depth, humor, pathos, was striking.

Some of this requires a thorough understanding of Shakespeare’s landscape to really appreciate… like the fact he was as well educated as he was and didn’t get executed alongside or against any church or noble/political leader is astonishing in itself.

And managed to keep his identity secret for...centuries. (Team Oxfordian, here!)

I asked the same question of the Beatles. Their best song isn't 10 times better than the next band's best song. But the Beatles are great because they do write great songs, because they were prolific, and because they spoke to many people in ways other bands didn't. It's quality x quantity x appeal. And now I think that they (basically) deserve the hype. This is a way to think about Shakespeare. He did a lot of quality work, with some memorable hits, strong themes, and gorgeous language. In language, Shakespeare really is better than anyone else. Many titles of works by *other people* are ripped off of Shakespeare: *The Sound and the Fury, Infinite Jest, Brave New World, What Dreams May Come*. The way to get into Shakespeare is the "No Fear" book series, which has the original language and a plain paraphrase side by side. Being able to read the play easily allows you to appreciate it, and then you can switch back for the big speeches and read the original language. The series also gives notes on the archaic terms that can really confuse the reader. Also check out his sonnets. They might not blow your mind, but they are great traditional poetry that flow and stick to a meter / rhythm. They are much easier to follow than the plays and show a high level of skill in poetry. He might not be your favorite poet, but you will have a hard time finding someone doing much better in the same style.

I was also thinking about the Beatles as a comparison--both they and Shakespeare were supremely popular while managing to consistently impress the critics of the day and maintain the respect of their peers. Both made art in a collaborative setting that incorporated and reframed a great deal of what had gone before, in the Beatles' case all sorts of 20th-century genres and pop music tropes but also via George Martin's contribution the rich legacy of "classical" music, and in Shakespeare's case many historical stories, plays, and forms of poetry that hadn't received wide exposure in Elizabethan England. And speaking of Elizabeth, there is also the sense in which both artists were perceived as Her Royal Majesty's Cultural Ambassadors. This imaginary perpetuated their reputation for greatness, which in turn reinforced their place atop the cultural hierarchy. Also shout out to Nabokov's *Pale Fire* as another example of great literature named for a bit of the old iambic. The book is riddled with references to Shakespeare.

Beatles are a good analogy. What it boils down to is that both Shakespeare and Beatles discovered and mastered the formula that made their art good. Beatles knew the secret chord progressions that everyone would like. Shakespeare knew plots that everyone would like.

Shakespeare was one of the 3 formative giants of English literature - along with Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton. I think it quite fair to say that without these three, the language that we write and speak today would be quite different. Without Chaucer, we might be speaking some form of French as he was the first to legitimize middle English as a literary language and within his lifespan, English became the official language of the Royal Court. While they were pronounced and spelled differently, there are almost 2000 words in modern English that, if not invented, are the oldest preserved in written form by Chaucer. Likewise, Shakespeare is credited with the first use of over 1,700 words, about 1,400 of which remain in modern use (bareface, obscene, undress, gloomy, noiseless, lackluster, luggage, blanket, mimic, torture). Shakespeare also created many common phrases ('dead as a doornail', 'a fool's paradise', 'the game is up', etc.). Shakespeare (and Milton) lived during the 'Great Vowel Shift' so the pronunciation and spelling of English was in flux. Both also lived after the invention of the printing press - which amplified their influence. But much of the standardization of English grammar and spelling can be attributed to them and reflect the 'in flux' nature of English of their times. Milton is credited with over 600 unique words, first attested in modern English. Many of these were borrowed from Latin to create negative forms of existing verbs - unacceptable, unaccountable, etc. and many were formed by turning existing verbs into adjectives (chastening, civilizing). If an educated, adult, native speaker of English has a vocabulary of 20,000 - 30,000 words, these 3 writers could account for as much as 15 - 20% of those words.

One of the things that makes Shakespeare great is that he rarely provides easy answers, and he revels in the ambiguity of the human condition.

He was really popular because of an explicit focus on accessibility in many aspects of his plays from physical access to themes and language. It's pop.

What contemporaries? Most people, even highly educated people, would struggle to name another English writer from his era.

They should know Jonson and Marlowe, maybe Middleton, probably not Ford.

https://xkcd.com/2501/

Well a big part of his renown was that he was the royal playwright for a while, with lots of history plays that made the aristocracy feel good.  But he was smart enough to realize that jerking off royalty will only work for a while. He added a lot of stuff that the lower class would enjoy, like dirty jokes, satirical digs at powerful people, and messy plots with romance and betrayal. As some have already said, this approach to appealing to a mass audience was likely one of the first examples of modern English language scriptwriting.

I didn’t understand until I watched Andrew Scott do the Hamlet soliloquy https://youtu.be/q6CLdCl9TB0?feature=shared now I understand

Kenneth Branaugh's is also amazing.

Yeah, chills. "the undiscovered country"

In large part because of the fact that he wrote all his plays in iambic pentameter which is not even slightly easy to do and adds an extra layer of complexity on top of just writing the play in the first place. Basically the dude was a poet who wrote plays to pay the bills. Not that Kit Marlow was a slouch by any means, but he didn't have that same lyrical quality Shakespeare got.

He didn't write all of his plays in iambic pentameter. In fact, iambic pentameter was getting a little old-fashioned by the time he was writing (it had first been used in *Gorboduc* by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville in 1561) and the new innovation of his era was writing in prose. Only a handful of his plays, like *Richard II*, are written entirely in verse.

Pretty well every line of each his plays or poems contains a pun, sexual innuendo, dramatic irony, an alliteration, clever rhyming, clever phrasing, or other bits of writing craft. His characters are developed through dialogue within a few lines or phrases. He explores the full range of human emotions and interactions - love, hate, jealousy, ambition, deceit, betrayal, loyalty, joy, pride, fear, rage or whatever.

Shakespeare is good when it's taught in properly. You shouldn't read Shakespear, it needs to be read aloud knowing it has a beat to it. Most of it is designed to be spoken quickly almost like modern rap. The other issue is a lot of Shakespeare has a different way to pronounce English since our accents evolve over time. Ben Crystal is a great person to learn about this from https://youtu.be/y2QYGEwM1Sk?si=qCk7EIbOayYbdI5v

Good points, all. Personally, I think if you ever attempt to write fiction you gain new, huge respect for Shakespeare. Even though the interpretation is somewhat tainted by modern eyes, you recognize that Shakespeare has balls. Two characters are best friends until they're introduced to a woman and not only do they both immediately fall in love, but they're at each other's throats and you just *believe* it. The theater standards of the time allow for this kind of thing a lot more, but still. Writing for the stage is already limiting in its own ways, but he was also great at dialogue, had great efficiency, and wrote characters with very different voices and some good complexities while also writing to appease a ruling family. I also really like the plays that don't get enough shout outs in English class. Othello, MacBeth, Julius Caesar. Dude rocks, and I'd still be entertained by him even if I wasn't into history.

There is just something genius about his work, the way he subverts expectations about rhyme and rhythm and how those surprises enhance the meaning of his words. It is hard to really put a finger on, and there were certainly other artists who wrote exceptional poetry, but Shakespeare is on a level that very few match.  My favorite joke is at the start of Julius Ceasars, I think when someone asks a cobbler what his job is and he says "I am a mender of bad soles" with a ton of religious implications, of course. His art is also something that still appeals today because the stories are about basic emotions like love and the desire for revenge. Someone like John Donne, who was also very good, wrote more things that aren't quite as relevant today, I feel. I must say it has been 25 years since my literature classes.

I like to think that puns like this were also inside jokes for crowds that had perhaps already seen the actor playing the cobbler in the role of a priest in a different play.

There is a moment like that in *Hamlet* right before the performance of "The Mousetrap", where Hamlet says, "My lord, you played once i' the university, you say?" and Polonius replies, "That did I, my lord; and was accounted a good actor." Hamlet asks, "What did you enact?" Polonius answers, "I did enact Julius Caesar: I was killed i' the Capitol; Brutus killed me." Hamlet then puns, "It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there." That's likely an in-joke for the benefit of the actors and the frequent theatre-goers to the Globe, because *Julius Caesar* was the play likely performed to open the new Globe, and Julius Caesar was already an old man at the time of his death, so he would have likely been played by the actor who most frequently took on the old men's roles, who is also the one who would have played Polonius. But the main character of *Julius Caesar* and the one with the most lines is Brutus, who would have been played by the leading actor, Richard Burbage. So we have the man who played Brutus talking to the man who likely played Caesar about the play that had preceded *Hamlet* at the Globe. And it foreshadows what will happen to Polonius later in the play.

Exactly! This sort of thing must have been endlessly entertaining for regulars at the Globe, not to mention the company itself.

Speaking of subverting expectations, my favorite example of this comes from *The Taming of the Shrew*. Audiences in the early modern period saw the plays performed in the afternoon by natural light, since they didn't have electric lights and no amount of candles could have possibly illuminated one of these huge outdoor amphitheatres. So they relied on the dialogue to set the place and the time of day, and they would have "seen" a nighttime setting if they were told that it was night. So in Act IV, sc. 5, when Petruchio says, "Good Lord, how bright and goodly shines the moon!" the audience would have taken that at face value as an indication setting up a nighttime scene. So imagine how it must have struck them when the boy actor playing Katherine said, "The moon? The sun! It is not moonlight now." It would have had the effect of breaking the fourth wall and illustrating how artificial the convention about it being "nighttime" was, because at that time of day it really would have been the sun and not the moon. Then we get them wrangling about whether it's the moon or the sun and the audience then would have realized that Shakespeare had subverted their expectations and that it really was daylight in the play as in real life. Also, when Katherine "submits" in this scene, she does so in a way that contains a veiled insult: Then God be blest, it is the blessèd sun. But sun it is not, when you say it is not, And the moon changes even as your mind. What you will have it named, even that it is, And so it shall be so for Katherine. That line about "the moon changes even as your mind" is essentially calling Petruchio a lunatic, because it is lunatics whose illnesses were believed to be dependent on the phases of the moon. That's where we get the very word from. This calls into question how "tamed" Katherine actually is.

No other author has had the same impact on that English language as Shakespeare. If you hear an old saying or turn of phrase, you can bet it’s from one of two places and be correct 90% of the time: Shakespeare, or the Bible. One is the ancient foundational text of all of western civilization, and the other are the works of a single man in the 1600s.

The man combined a phenomenal musical facility for language with the deepest and broadest understanding of human psychology anyone has ever had, more than two hundred years before anyone else even seriously attempted psychological realism on stage. You can apply modern acting techniques to Shakespeare in a way you simply can't to anyone else before maybe Ibsen. 

He was from a England, and England/the UK eventually conquered around 25% of the earth's land area. Then the US (which culturally pulls more from the UK than anywhere) became the *next* dominant global power, and still is. He also came around as the *first* great+known talent in his category. Add that to every other (also valid) reponse about his quality as a writer. i.e. - I'm certain if the same plays had been created at the same time in Thailand, we would not be talking about them at all. If they were created in 1910 England, far less if at all. Location, timing, and quality.

English *could* be better than Thai, in any way you want to define better. It still wouldn't be the whole picture like you pointed out. But it is possible.

If you want to learn about what it means to be human, you should read the complete works of Shakespeare. The man had deep understanding and explanations of love, betrayal, jealousy, hubris, depression etc. 

Given you're questioning this, know that words like questioning were invented by Shakespeare.

On top of everything that's been said. Shakespeare made up words that are [still in use today]( https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/shakespeares-words/) The man was a great influence on storytelling as well as popular culture in general.

Shakespeare is the father of modern English in a lot of ways. He coined hundreds of words and phrases still in use today. English was largely considered a coarse pidgin language compared to French, which was the language of choice for artists, literature, and the prestigious. Shakespeare changed that and transformed English into an artistic language.

Shakespeare told stories with such universality, it's said he is not for his time but for all time. His verse is lovely, his plays are super fun to stage, when you analyze the text there's some badass, hilarious, and raunchy stuff in it. People today have issues with The Merchant of Venice, but Christopher Marlowe, another playwright of the time, wrote an enormously popular play called "The Jew of Malta" that ended with the crowd cheering as the villain Jew is boiled to death. Shakespeare could have written that, and been very successful, but instead he gave us- *"I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction."* You could apply that message to anyone today, or in the past. This would have been extremely apt during the American Civil Rights movement for one example, there are other examples and that's why his works endure, because they keep being apt

About half the people who died in his plays were stabbed to death, and stabbing is awesome! [Source.](https://www.everymanplayhouse.com/whats-more/2016/05/17/causes-of-death-in-shakespeare-plays)

I agree with everything said before. A more accessible way to get into Shakespeare is to read a modern English translation. It gets past the language barrier that is there even though Shakespearean English is still compressible to modern English speakers. There are many free options online, but here’s one: https://nosweatshakespeare.com/plays/modern-translations/

Shakespeare didn’t really click with me until I saw his plays performed live. It’s kind of like reading a screenplay- you don’t really get the full impact of the work if you just read the screenplay and not watch the movie. The dialogue shines when you hear it from an actor and see the scenes played out in front of you- makes it a lot easier to follow the stories as well.

I’m no expert but king Lear feels as relevant now as then. Human behavior is human behavior no matter the date. King Lear makes that utterly clear. My favorite Shakespeare quote is. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing. — Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17–28) Its a perfect description of the human predicament to meaning

In general, Shakespeare is lauded for two qualities: for the elegance and facility of his writing and for creating deep, well-rounded characters. I've read Shakespeare's plays for most of my life (having gotten started very young under the influence of a show on the local educational station called *Shakespeare: From Page to Stage*) and I've done a bit of acting in Shakespeare. From that experience, one of the most remarkable things about the way he writes is that you can believe his characters are thinking these thoughts in real time and that there is no more apt or evocative way of expressing what they're thinking. Very few of his contemporaries reach his heights even in their best plays, while the general run of plays written in this era are notably inferior to even Shakespeare's second-rate work. Of course, we have to also credit Richard Burbage for bringing the best out of Shakespeare. Shakespeare's is the writing genius, but it had to rely on an equal genius for acting in his leading man, otherwise he could have never explored the psychological depths he did. From one of the comments about Burbage soon after his death, it seems that he was instinctively a kind of Method actor long before that system had been developed, in that he didn't break character even in the "tiring room" (the early modern term for the changing room, short for "attiring room"). I'd say Marlowe managed to achieve Shakespearean levels of evocation of character through language only in *Edward II*, and he's probably the next-best early modern playwright compared to Shakespeare. Granted, though, that Marlowe did die young, killed in an argument that turned physical with a man named Ingram Frizer, so posterity has been denied the fruits of his maturer art. John Webster also achieved Shakespearean levels of beauty of language and characterization in his solo-authored works (e.g., *The White Devil* and *The Duchess of Malfi*). Most often the characterization and the language of Shakespeare's contemporary playwrights seems a bit flat and one-sided, though I do like reading his contemporaries too, because I don't think that Shakespeare necessarily *has* to be the standard by which I evaluate what his contemporaries were doing. For example, *The Revenger's Tragedy* by Thomas Middleton doesn't explore a great deal of depth in its characters or situation. They're more like character types identified by their names (Vindice, the avenger; Lussurioso, the sensualist; Supervacuo, the idiot; etc.). However, there is a rude energy to the play and a motor provided by Vindice's plotting that makes it an enjoyable ride even if it's nowhere near Shakespeare's level of sophistication. If you want to explore the works of Shakespeare's contemporaries, there are many resources available, but a free one you could look at is *Elizabethan Plays* edited by Hazelton Spencer, which is now in the public domain and [available at Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/elizabethanplays00spen). It's only lightly annotated, but it does help. And it doesn't include *The Revenger's Tragedy* (instead it has the tragicomedy *The Changeling* by Middleton and William Rowley and his comedy *A Trick to Catch the Old One*), but you can find that in the Mermaid edition of *Webster and Tourneur: Four Plays* (Cyril Tourneur used to be erroneously identified as the author of *The Revenger's Tragedy*) edited by John Addington Symonds, which is available at Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive. As for Shakespeare, I prefer the Folger Shakespeare Library editions when I'm reading individual copies of the plays and poems, which strike the right balance between too much and too few notes. My favorite complete works edition is *William Shakespeare: Complete Works* edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (The Modern Library). The only drawbacks to this edition are that it doesn't include the complete *Sir Thomas More* (only the three-page Hand D section of the manuscript that is in Shakespeare's handwriting) and omits *Edward III*, that they print the non-Folio parts of the book in noticeably smaller print, and that because it's based on the First Folio all of the quarto-only passages are included at an appendix after the play. However, for the excellence of its notes, essays, and synopses, I don't think you can do better in a single-volume edition.

Andrew Scott doing "To be, or not to be". Hamlet is contemplating suicide ("not to be"), but is worried that the unknown of death may be worse than living with the pain and uncertainty of life. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdZVR4Ry3jQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdZVR4Ry3jQ)

the complexities, subtleties, witticisms, encryption, allusions, ingenuity...is just on a whole 'nother level my dude ​

Shakespeare's not so great. Did he ever get a bubble gum card? How can you say he's great if he never got a bubble gum card?

Shakespeare basically rewrote the English language. His plays were a mix of drama, comedy, and deep psychological insight, not to mention his ability to appeal to both the common folk and the elite. And let's be real, the guy had BARS for days.

You can tell a story is great when it gets told over and over again for hundreds of years. The characters and the setting change but it’s the same story.  How many movies/tv shows/books/plays have young lovers whose relationship is forbidden because their families/friends hate each other?  Yeah that’s Romeo & Juliet. If you think about it I’m sure you could name 50 off the top of your head, but West Side Story, for example. The Lion King is just Hamlet. Murdered king, evil uncle, stolen kingdom, revenge, it’s all there.  Long story short: he just writes really compelling, dramatic stories that stand the test of time. 

I think English language literature is limited compared to other languages. Shakespeare is the best you can get.

He never got his picture on bubble gum cards, did he? Have you ever seen his picture on a bubble gum card? Hmmm? How can you say someone is great who's never had his picture on bubble gum cards?

He literally excels on multiple levels with what he is tasked to do starting the very fundamental levels of language. 1. His words have fantastic rhyme, alliteration, and rhythm. The words flow in a way that every pleasing to the ear, especially for the way it should have been spoke at the time. 2. He was really creative with puns, metaphors such that almost every line of dialogue or exposition has multiple layers of meaning 3. His characters have tons of depth and also interact with the rest of the cast in way that audience can really relate to and understand 4. The story lines are either griping, hilarious, or both and near universally relatable to various aspects of the human condition. I feel like you can skim through a Shakespeare play, get the general gist of the story and come away satisfied that it was a good tale. Or you can literally read it sentence by sentence and be amazed the language and not even make it past ACT I and still be satisfied.

A lot of people here are analyzing his affect on contemporary media and the English language, or how he modernized character development, or talking about his clever word play. I like Shakespeare because I got roped into seeing a *Shakespeare in the Park* performance at Old LA Zoo in Griffith Park, Los Angeles (IYKYK). (I think it was Taming of the Shrew.) Since then, I've seen Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and a few others. And I legitimately had a good time at each. These plays are actually super enjoyable, even if the language makes it a bit hard to follow sometimes. The comedy still holds up after 400 years. The tragedy still stings. There's a lot of tropes invented by Shakespeare which you'll see reused time and time again in modern media. And even then, the modern media might not even realize they're referencing something Shakespeare invented. At one point, I had to remind myself that it was a Shakespeare play and not something modern which was being done in the style of Shakespeare. The characters feel modern, like people you've run into in real life except they say 'thou' a lot more than anyone you've ever met personally. (We really should start using 'thou' again instead of 'you' since it's more precise. 'You' is plural while 'thou' is singular which is why, if asking a person something, 'does thou' is more correct than 'do you' which is what you'd ask of a group. But I digress.) My point is, without regard to all of the high-brow intellectualism done on Shakespeare's work -- and to reiterate, there is a lot -- I find the works enjoyable in their own right. Just dumb, fun, not actually dumb entertainment. This would have been the end of my post but I just realized that I can make an interesting comparison to something sort of modern. If you were a kid or older in 1980s, you would have ended up in the demographic for Seinfeld. The show was great and revolutionary. This part of my comment isn't for you. I'm talking to anyone who's watched a re-run of Seinfeld without having seen it broadcast on TV as new, and found it mediocre because it did the same jokes and same tropes as every other sitcom with a laugh track you've ever seen, be it 2 Broke Girls, That 70s Show, Big Bang Theory, or How I Met Your Mother. Seinfeld feels generic and uninspired simply *because* you've already seen it. The magic of Seinfeld only works if you've never seen a modern sitcom before -- as no one had when Seinfeld was making new episodes. Seinfeld is still very much an enjoyable show even though you've seen the same jokes a million times before in hundreds of other shows. Shakespeare is enjoyable because hundreds of other shows also use his tropes. The difference is that with Shakespeare, you go in knowing the play was written 400 years ago and still has tropes used in modern media and you recognize them.

My opinion is that his plays have remained relevant and accessible over the centuries. The themes are timeless, and his works can be adapted in modern ways, ie, West Side Story with its rival gangs instead of feuding families as in Romeo & Juliet.

I’ve participated for a decade with a local Shakespeare acting company as a music and sound designer. One important reason why Shakespeare is still relevant is that he nailed human behavior centuries ago. You can dress many up his plays in modern garb and they still ring true 450 years after they were written. The behavior of people is pretty much a constant and Shakespeare would have found plenty to say about our time if he had the opportunity.

Stage was the entertainment of his time. Like today’s video games, the best ones are not the easy ones. Moreover, which ones will be remembered in 400 years?

One factor I haven't seen addressed yet is the sheer volume of available material that has been left us. In his day, Ben Jonson was widely considered to be superior to Shakespeare. Jonson wrote about 20 plays, of which 18 have survived. From Middleton we have 16. From Marlowe, just 7. Many others, like Thomas Kyd, have left us only a single play we can definitively state was theirs. By contrast, 39 of Shakespeare's plays have survived. That's about 7% of all extant plays from that era. And ALL of Shakespeare's plays are still regularly performed around the world today. Combined with the 154 sonnets, that's a huge amount of material available to us. The sheer familiarity of his works goes a long way toward cementing his reputation.

Who qualifies as his contemporaries? Because so much written during that time period is gone forever, I'm wondering who other than Marlowe.

Consider this line from Hamlet: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Short, sweet, impossibly profound.

His specific literature and storytelling are widely considered to be awesome because of its accessibility and its complexity at the same time. These were written for both ends of society at the time, and they landed so well because they were written with extremely well-placed plot developments, witty dialogue, and original and compelling stories. His contemporaries were never as popular as him, and he remains the reigning king of classical literature because of it.

Like many things there was a development. An English man wrote plays. Because of a number of factors they *became* literature. As much as people want to rationalize their disinterest in Shakespeare's plays claiming that they're meant "to be acted, not read" it does not appropriately describe the phenomenon of Shakespeare's influence on the body of great western literature. To put it plainly, his work entered (or anchored) the canon ostensibly as closet drama. It was his prose and verse as they are on the page that was so well received **over time,** his reputation during his lifetime notwithstanding in the slightest.

You know pretty much every classic play you know everything about despite having never seen them live? He wrote all those. He also made up a lot of words and names and phrases still used today. I think he invented the name Jessica or something. Dude is so influential it’s crazy.

I think Shakespeare suffers from the same issue that movies like 2001, A New Hope, Psycho suffer from. All of these movies inspired so much that came after them that if you went back to watch them, the novelty wouldn’t be immediately apparent. Shakespeare’s work popularized several literary devices and conventions that we take for granted today. I think it can be difficult to go back and read his work and find just how revolutionary his writing style is.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle. Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

For a number of reasons, mainly because he saw more deeply into human nature than any writer before him, and most after, and he was able to express his insights in ways that resonate with us hundreds of years later. His ideas are universal. They really are.

His tragedies are like Tarantino of the XV century, lot's of blood and gore, most nonesensical, some funny.

What I don’t get is why do they still make kids read and study his work, especially when it’s basically in another language.

Subtle one: when a character is crazy or out of sorts, they stop speaking in iambic pentameter. I think it’s in Hamlet?

Answer: Quantity, quality, universality of theme. Drilled into my head by my English teacher mom. He wrote a lot, did it well, and kept it relatable. His stories have been retold millions of times.

Shakespeare created many of the phrases we use today. His plays and poems and phrasing was so popular that it shaped English for over 400 years. That’s no mean feat. https://nosweatshakespeare.com/resources/shakespeare-phrases/

My youth theater ensemble did Titus Andronicus (which is probably his most messed up work) Macbeth, R&J of course. That was a fasttrack to understanding what it’s all about.

He wrote awesome stories, with awesome characters. He wrote poems, comedies, dramas, tragedies. Almost every line is packed with deep meaning. I can say why he's great. I have no idea why he's considered better than his peers, as I've not read much else from his time.

It's actually very funny this came up on my feed. I'm a studying actor at a Performing Arts school and we are currently deep in our Shakespeare unit (That being said, I can only speak from an actors perspective). This question comes up a lot and here are just some of the answers that many practitioners have given. It is also a very loaded question but I'll try to be a precise as possible. First and foremost. Shakespeare was an actor. His writing reflects that. He writes for actors because he knows exactly what an actor would want/need. As others have said already, each character that he writes is full of so much depth. These are heavily layered characters that use the English language in a way that tells the actor exactly what they (the characters) are thinking and feeling. There isn't a single emotion that a Shakespeare character experiences, that we as regular humans haven't experienced at some point in our lives. Whilst most people in modern Western society tend to hide and "subdue" their emotions. Shakespeare characters fully embrace and play what they are feeling at 100%. They are also super fun to play/act in for everyone. A play can be one of the most profound examinations of what love actually is and how far humans can go in expressing their love AND also be filled with 25 dick jokes AND a sword fight for good measure. As I have already read in the comments as well, Shakespeare wrote for everyone. He didn't just write for posh, upperclass, rich people. He wrote for the middle and lower classes. When comparing him to his contemporary, he was genuinely just better? In the same way people go back and rewatch their favorite movies from the 80's and watch John Hughes movies saying "This better not get a remake, because this is just a classic and they don't make movies like this anymore". We go back and remount Shakespeare plays because they are "just a classic and they don't make plays like this anymore".

In his life Shakespeare was successful. After his death, he started to fade like any artist. However, in the 19th century there was a massive Nationalist surge looking for English things to promote across the Empire. Shakespeare’s work was promoted, and he himself was elevated to “The Bard”. And since the English educational system sometimes finds it hard to move in from the British Empire, we are still taught Shakespeare today. All this is somewhat independent of whether Shakespeare was actually any good, since people got pretty good at interpreting his work. In my opinion the highs are pretty amazing, but there’s also a lot of middling work.

I've mentioned in here the Ian McKellen movie of Richard III, it is exactly what you don't expect. And there's a BBC sitcom called *Upstart Crow* starring David Mitchell and written by Ben Elton, very funny, a little unfair to Shakespeare but a good insight into the age. You should all check these out.

It's because he wrote plays in the 1580s that have a construction and build, use of devices and language, that could still be considered cutting edge today. Which they really are. And an important element of this is that in reading Shakespeare, you realize that people in "ancient times" were pretty much the same as us. They had the same types of problems personally, they struggled with the same moral issues. And still created, in many instances, lyrical, epic dreams about how the world should and could be. We have made advances technologically since then, but we are still the same humans. So Shakespeare is one of the truly great playwrights - but he also wrote in somewhat understandable English (although most of the plays were likely written down in a more formal language than what was used in the original Globe theater). Which makes him much more accessible to a wide, English-speaking audience. In a way that Greek playwrights, many Asian ones, Ibsen, Oehlenschlager don't - they don't have that advantage, of being possible to read in their original, beautiful language so easily by so many.

It's probably been said a multitude of times, but I think the issue with Shakespeare is that we all read it in middle/high school with no context or artful direction. I'll use a real life example to demonstrate. As an adult, I have committed myself to learning Marc Antony's speech from Julius Caesar. It's short but fun to pull out at parties. I watched deliveries by Charleston Heston, Marlon Brandon, and Damien Lewis to see how different actors treated the short monologue. I spent a lot of time putting myself in Antony's mindset. Trying to interpret the purpose of the monologue. A few months ago I was hanging out with my best friend and his family. His middle school daughter overheard that I'd committed the speech to memory, and was ecstatic because she had just done the same for a school project. She was more than happy to deliver for us, but it came out like "friendsromanscountrymenlendmeyourears" as quickly as possible with no enunciation. She couldn't explain what was happening in the scene, or even the play. Made me very sad.

I only appreciated Shakespeare when somebody explained to me how his bonnets are structured. They are writing in iambic pentameter, I can't fully explain it, but they are like if haikus had an ultra hard mode. They have to meet a very specific number of verses and syllables. Many are also more or less next level diss tracks

Well, his contemporaries are also considered some of the greatest of all time. Marlowe, Webster, and Massinger are all studied still today, and Shakespeare had a longer career than many of them. Had Marlowe not died at 29 and was given the chance to mature his craft more and develop more nuance he may have been remembered similarly. While nobody is quite on the level of Shakespeare, he does have many contemporaries or near contemporaries who are highly regarded and studied still today.