Why is Shakespeare important?

Shakespeare is important because he almost single-handedly changed the English language. Before Shakespeare, English was still rooted in the medieval age. Many books were still being written in Latin, and written English owed its style to Geoffrey Chaucer, who had written The Canterbury Tales, the first full English epic, towards the end of the fourteenth century. After Shakespeare, English had become a modern language that would make its influence felt all over the world. Quite simply, if a word didn’t exist, the Bard made it up! Some of these words, used by Shakespeare for the first time, have survived into everyday speech: abstemious, addiction, accommodation, barefaced, discontent, downstairs, fashionable, laughable, priceless, schoolboy, silliness, soft-hearted, unreal, useful – and many hundreds more, though some of these, such as exsufflicate (meaning puffed up), used in Othello, have fallen by the wayside. His vocabulary was about 20,000 words, large for his time, and he used ...  more

Shakespeare lived life to the full. The range of his experience was vast and deep. The gift of portraying the panorama of human intrigue, romance, humor, abject heart break, passion, and drama of every life imaginable and displaying the magnitude of it on stage and in letters is the work of genius. Genius is the one word that adequately describes him.  more

You have to find how his trials and tribulations relate to you. William Shakespeare was in love with a guy, so that may be part of it, and he was severely depressed because of other things such as the death of his only son, Hamnet, who was 11 when he died, and the excommunication of Hamnets twin sister, Judith in 1616, meaning he could not speak to her, or anything like that, his death following the next month in April 1616.  more