Ten ways in which Shakespeare changed the world

Unravel the profound impact of William Shakespeare, a literary maestro whose influence transcends time and culture. Discover ten remarkable ways his genius reshaped the world, from language and literature to philosophy and human psychology.

This week marks 400 years since the death of our national poet, William Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s characters, worlds he created, and thoughts he expressed are for all people and all time

• His unique gift to our culture, language, and imagination has been to universalize the experience of living and writing in late 16th-century England and to have become widely recognised, and loved, across the world as the greatest playwright
• As well as giving the English language a kick-start, Shakespeare can also conjure characters apparently out of nowhere, giving “to airy nothing a local habitation and a name”

Shakespeare’s plays are timeless classics

Othello (lust, jealousy, and betrayal), Macbeth (paranoid regicide), Romeo & Juliet (doomed love), and many of Shakespeare’s greatest plays were an instant hit with Elizabethan audiences

• Hollywood scriptwriters quickly latched on to Shakespeare’s (often borrowed) plots and icons
• Great stars hanker after the great roles

Psychology Shakespearean thinker: Sigmund Freud

Freud thought Shakespeare “the greatest of poets” and was always ready with apt quotations from the collected works

• His recognition of the unconscious took Shakespeare’s fascination with the mind of man to a new level and he scattered the poet’s insights throughout his own psychoanalytic writing

Refugees

Shakespeare’s handwriting in The Book of Sir Thomas More is the only surviving manuscript of the playwright’s handwriting besides legal documents in which his signature can be clearly detected.

The American Dream

Shakespeare is not just an icon of Englishness, he’s also a central feature of the American dream, in which the mirror of his great dramas gets held up to a society permanently in search of itself

• His statue in New York’s Central Park, erected by the brother of John Wilkes Booth after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, symbolizes the role Shakespeare in American life

Music

Shakespeare would have loved Cole Porter’s music for The Taming of the Shrew (Kiss Me Kate) and his celebrated Brush Up Your Shakespeare, a theme song for this quatercentenary.

• Other great classical composers who loved Shakespeare include Berlioz, Mendelssohn, and Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev.

Heritage

Two future US presidents, Jefferson and Adams, visited “the birthplace” on Henley Street and paid a shilling to see Shakespeare’s grave.

• This has never inhibited the American “bardolatry” which, during the 19th century, would morph into bizarre (and ultimately pointless) disputes about the authorship of the plays.

Celebrity

The Chandos Portrait, one of several contested images of Shakespeare.

• Captures the artist in his prime, promoting his image, and clearly enjoying his work. He understood that it was the work that mattered, not the hoopla that accompanied it. He showed no interest in posterity.

Language

Shakespeare was a writer who always seemed to be able to do what he wanted with the language, marrying Anglo-Saxon, continental, and classical traditions in a weave of poetry and storytelling

• The dramatist of the First Folio was a literary magpie, “a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles” and a master of artistic synthesis

Modern man

A skull presented by Victor Hugo to Sarah Bernhardt for her performance as Hamlet

• Shakespeare’s student prince is the first western dramatic protagonist to be conceived as an individual tormented by complex inner conflicts and desires
• To be, or not to be”, Hamlet’s contemplation of suicide, is a pioneering and sensational moment of post-renaissance drama

History

Shakespeare, the Tudor propagandist and author of Richard III, still dominates the narrative of English history

• His devastating portrait of the hunchbacked king as a “bottled spider” has had a long afterlife
• In the play, the king’s disguise of his “naked villainy” is Shakespeare at his most potent

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