What made Shakespeare so great?

Question

Why were his plays concidered the best?
how did he change the renaissance?

Answer 1

He is considered so great becuase his stories are exquisitly written tales of love, lust, greed, family, death, life. It is said that all stories can be related back to a Shakespeare play. And I just found out the other day that the average vocabulary is about 8000 words... Shakespeare used over 30000 different words in all of his plays. Clearly, he was a genius!

Of course, there is some discussion as to whether The Bard actually was the one to pen all of the plays... but that is another topic. The advent of the Shakespearian play, which usually became an instant classic, created a larger desire for theater and more actors/actresses. He also made his plays available to all audiences... there are often asides and raunchy references in them to appeal to even the most base of citizens.

Answer 2

Neither. A big part of what makes Shakespeare so great (ie- the reason you are reading it in school) is that so many of his words/phrases can be read to mean different things. You can watch two different film versions of the same Shakespeare play and they might seem completely different (Henry V, one of Shakespeare's history plays, has been performed as both a pro-war story AND an anti-war story--all with the same words). When you use a "translated" version like no fear or SME, all you are getting is one person's idea of what the words mean. The ambiguity, the very value of the play, disappears. Get the Folger Shakespeare Library edition. It's not translated, but the editor, Barbara Mowat, created these editions specifically for high school students, so the footnotes are aimed squarely at someone in your shoes (as opposed to something like, say the Arden editions, which are aimed mainly at professional scholars). If you have a good relationship with your teacher, ask him/her if the class can do some of the performance activities created by the Folger Library. There's a book titled Shakespeare Set Free that has a whole unit plan for King Lear, and the Folger also has free lesson plans on its website. The best way to learn Shakespeare is by thinking of it as a text to be performed (not just reading it out loud, but approaching it like a director, actor, costume designer, etc).

Answer 3

Critically speaking, Hamlet and Othello are his "best" dramas. Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It are probably his best comedies.

But Romeo and Juliet was his most famous and beloved play at the time he was living. The Globe packed em in when R&J was on the bill.

Shakespeare's art embodies the Anglo-Saxon renaissance ideals of humanity and existential being, and his works help form the cornerstone of English literature today. His skills as a poet and dramatist remain unsurpassed.

Answer 4

He changed the English language, made it fresh, new. He created real people on the stage who resembled all of us, and not just some stupid melodramatic one-dimensional types. He brought huge amounts of knowledge and information to the plays, about Greek mythology, gardening, flowers, birds, history, medicine, human relations, psychology, music, law, architecture, foreign cities, weather, language, English government and royalty, you name it. You can learn vast numbers of things from his plays. He was head and shoulders above all other playwrights and poets in the depth of his knowledge and the precision of language that he used. How he changed the renaissance isn't the question. It's how he changed the world. How did he change how people think about and talk to one another? If he was never born, would the world be the same place? I don't think so.

Answer 5

His story line, plot, and especially his language made a great impact on a whole generation of the elizabethen age. (17th century). His plays had touches of all i.e. romance, comic releif, comedy, tragedy, mystery and especially the incorporation of supernatural elements in most of his plays.
As for renaissance, he contributed greatly to arts and literature and earned great patronage from the then kings and queens of England. His style of writing brought the language as a whole to a whole new level and is widely and extensively studied throughout the world even today. His style of introducing and conluding scenes are even used in cinematography today.

Answer 6

I think perhaps it is because he was very like Dostoevsky in that he understood the general mind of man. He knew that to the great questions of the "human condition" there are no easily expressed solutions. To the most painful dimensions of the "human condition," no one response suffices, and the most cleverly stated are the least effective.

Unlike the modern "inspirational speaker," one who has all the answers, Dostoevsky and the Bard had powerful insight into the questions themselves. They provoke us to search in our selves and our experiences when we see those same conundrums laid out before us.

The questions are general and run through all human history. The answers are specific to every individual and there is no one-size-fits-all resolution for them. So Shakespear and the great Russian, in language never again equaled, directed our attention to the commonality of the issues and left us to ferret out solutions on our own.

So unique were the corners of the human mind penetrated by Shakespear, that he invented and added to our lexicon hundreds of new words, and combined words and phrases to achieve expressive power of breath taking penetration.

Answer 7

Shakespeare said much about human condition that still rings true; his psychological penetration was very acute, and predated psychoanalysis by centuries. And all that he said, he said with a staggering poetry and beauty. So his form and content are a kind of perfection.

What's not to love?

Answer 8

He was extremely advanced for his time period and the issues he addressed are still seen in today's society. Plus, the man was a genius when it can to word play!

Answer 9

It was said he was a hermafrodite. His sense for language was beyond compare.
He must have had best plays, but I doubt someone has read them voluntary, though peaces and, again, the sense of language makes you feel there is really something going on.

Answer 10

1) his plays were build around common man
2) the phrases he used are still used commonly today that we do not realize its origin