Shakespeare: One Of The Greatest Writers In The

Shakespeare: One of the Greatest Writers

in the "Western Literary Tradition"

William Shakespeare wrote about romance, drama, and comedy in many of his wonderful works. Shakespeare had a skill for language, imagery, pun, and creative adaptation of myth and history, which arguably has made him one of the greatest playwrights of all time. He is also well-known for his poetry, especially his sonnets. Some of his best-known plays include Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth. Shakespeare's works were so well-thought and well-written that some scholars insist that a greater mind must have written some or all of his plays. Shakespeare is renowned as the English playwright and poet whose body of works is considered the greatest in the history of English literature. William Shakespeare is the grand literary figure of the Western world.

William Shakespeare is known for his many plays, sonnets, and variety of other poems. He created some of the most admired plays in Western literature. His plays combine popular appeal with complex characteristics, poetic grandeur, and philosophical depth. Shakespeare's plays were divided into comedies, histories, and tragedies. Some of his famous tragedies include Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello, which present clear oppositions of order and chaos, good and evil, and spirituality and animality. One of his most famous love stories was Romeo and Juliet. Although Romeo and Juliet was considered a love story, it was still know as a tragedy. A couple of his most famous epic historic plays were Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra, which through the portrayal of political leaders as tragic heroes involved the study of politics and social history as well as the psychology of individuals. "The strength of Shakespeare's plays lies in the absorbing stories they tell, in their wealth of complex characters, and in the eloquent speech-vivid, forceful, and at the same time lyric-that the playwright puts on his characters' lips" (Columbia Encyclopedia 3). His sonnets deal with such themes as love, beauty, politics, and mortality. "Many of the poems are bleak cries of emotional torment and spiritual exhaustion. They tell a story of a struggle of love and forgiveness against anguish and despair. It is this tragic portrait of human love that makes the sonnets immortal" (MacEvoy 1). These plays involve a mixture of feelings when reading them such as enlightenment and sad feelings, and most importantly they also teach and entertain the readers very well.

William Shakespeare's style of writing was very unique. He transformed English theatre by expanding expectations about what could be accomplished through characterization, language, plot, action, and genre. His poetic artistry helped raise the status of popular theatre because it was admired by intellectuals and by those simply just seeking pure entertainment. The characters and plot situations are symbolic rather than realistic. His poems are recognized by many as classics in the genre such as "A Lover's Complaint" and "Venus and Adonis." The syllabic trait of Shakespeare's work influenced the development of the English language in the way language is written. Shakespeare's metre is explained by his rule of the decasyllabic or five-foot norm, meaning ten syllable lines. The decasyllabic rule observed in much of Shakespeare's writing, even found in parts of his prose and plays, "is rather a norm than a positive rule. He always, or almost always, makes his lines, whether single, continuous, or broken, referable to this norm," (Bartleby/215, 2). This norm also applies to the way Shakespeare wrote his dialogue. Using this norm allowed him to easily create an unforced break-up in a line of dialogue. The importance of Shakespeare's blank verse, as well as, "his manipulation of all verse that he tried -- sonnet, stanza, couplet, lyric" (Bartleby/215, 1) is based on this idea of decasyllabic metre. This style was trademarked by Shakespeare and is evident throughout his writings as a whole. His blank verse was one of the most important of all his influence on the way the English language was written. Shakespeare's experimental use of trend, style, and the development of his blank verse were all evidence of his creative inventions and influences. Shakespeare is considered an influence on the development of the English language, not only in its existence with word additions, but also in the styles, form, expressions, unique choice of words, and the metre he determined while perfecting his poetry.

William Shakespeare's works have been translated into every major living