Can someone just tell me in short why shakespeare is so important

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Question:

so the guy is hundreds of years old and his plays are absolute jibberish to me if i don't have my teacher there to translate them for me - i've learnt a bit about him, but i'm still majorly ignorant of his importance to litrature, i see no significance in his works !.!.!. can someone please tell me (in short) why he is so important!?Www@QuestionHome@Com

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker:

i think one of the main reasons we study shakespeare is because if you get past the old fashioned english his writing was completely different from that time period i mean look at the beatles one of the main reasons they got so famous was becase they were so different

Studying shakespeare just helps you to understand the language and the writing style of his time period (and also helps you sound smart and knowledgeable if you know enough about it)

sorry i couldnt be of more helpWww@QuestionHome@Com

So!.!.!.for about 400 years Shakespeare has been the benchmark for judging modern literature!. a judgement sustained over 16 generations of the wisest, most literate readers known to Western civilization!.

Further, his singular creation of words and phrases in the English language, now the world's language, is unsurpassed!.

Consider: Have you discerned something about Shakespeare heretofore lost to all others during centuries of reading and appreciation!?Www@QuestionHome@Com

This is about squaring the circle, You don't appreciate Shakespeare because you don't understand his language because you haven't got enough education!.

So the answer is the more you study his work the more you will realise what a genius he was in English and what an ignoramus you are!.

Sorry!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

He didn't even travel to Italy, he did not write his plays even!. It's this fascination with the old continent, that's all!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

His works, written so long ago, address issues that are still relevant/controversial today!. He was "before his time"Www@QuestionHome@Com

Shakespeare was never revered in his lifetime, but he received his share of praise!. In 1598, the cleric and author Francis Meres singled him out from a group of English writers as "the most excellent" in both comedy and tragedy!. And the authors of the Parnassus plays at St John's College, Cambridge, numbered him with Chaucer, Gower and Spenser!.
In the First Folio, Ben Jonson called Shakespeare the "Soul of the age, the applause, delight, the wonder of our stage", though he had remarked elsewhere that "Shakespeare wanted art"!.
Between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the end of the seventeenth century, classical ideas were in vogue!. As a result, critics of the time mostly rated Shakespeare below John Fletcher and Ben Jonson!. Thomas Rymer, for example, condemned Shakespeare for mixing the comic with the tragic!. Nevertheless, poet and critic John Dryden rated Shakespeare highly, saying of Jonson, "I admire him, but I love Shakespeare"!. For several decades, Rymer's view held sway; but during the eighteenth century, critics began to respond to Shakespeare on his own terms and acclaim what they termed his natural genius!.
A series of scholarly editions of his work, notably those of Samuel Johnson in 1765 and Edmond Malone in 1790, added to his growing reputation!.By 1800, he was firmly enshrined as the national poet!. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, his reputation also spread abroad!. Among those who championed him were the writers Voltaire, Goethe, Stendhal and Victor Hugo!.

During the Romantic era, Shakespeare was praised by the poet and literary philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel translated his plays in the spirit of German Romanticism!. In the nineteenth century, critical admiration for Shakespeare's genius often bordered on adulation!. "That King Shakespeare," the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1840, "does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs; indestructible"!.The Victorians produced his plays as lavish spectacles on a grand scale!. The playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw mocked the cult of Shakespeare worship as "bardolatry"!. He claimed that the new naturalism of Ibsen's plays had made Shakespeare obsolete!.

The modernist revolution in the arts during the early twentieth century, far from discarding Shakespeare, eagerly enlisted his work in the service of the avant garde!. The Expressionists in Germany and the Futurists in Moscow mounted productions of his plays!. Marxist playwright and director Bertolt Brecht devised an epic theatre under the influence of Shakespeare!. The poet and critic T!. S!. Eliot argued against Shaw that Shakespeare's "primitiveness" in fact made him truly modern!.Eliot, along with G!. Wilson Knight and the school of New Criticism, led a movement towards a closer reading of Shakespeare's imagery!. In the 1950s, a wave of new critical approaches replaced modernism and paved the way for "post-modern" studies of Shakespeare!. By the eighties, Shakespeare studies were open to movements such as structuralism, feminism, African American studies, and queer studies!.Www@QuestionHome@Com