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- Why is William Shakespeare considered possibly the greatest writer in the English language?
- Why do Hollywood movie studios continue to release movies based on Shakespeare's plays?
- Why do countless communities and theatrical groups around the world hold annual Shakespeare festivals?
- Why do actors define their careers by playing the role of one of Shakespeare's great heroes such as Hamlet and Macbeth?
- Why is Shakespeare still studied in high school and university classrooms?
These are questions you may be asking now, or questions you may have asked in the past. After all, Shakespeare has been dead for nearly 400 years, and his language, even though it is English, is so very different from the English you speak and write today.
So consider these points:
- Shakespeare is an important cultural link to our past. His plays and poems speak to a time several hundred years ago, revealing what people valued and how they thought about themselves and their world.
- His plays combined universal truths with entertainment, revealing to us important aspects of human nature. Shakespeare's characters wrestle with greed, faithfulness, love, power, popularity, danger, and patriotism-all things that audiences are drawn to, and things we see on television and on movie screens daily.
- Shakespeare was one of the first English writers of importance to talk about aspects of life important to common people, rather than writing only for wealthy nobles.
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