William Shakespeare is the most famous playwright of all time. His plays are still performed over 400 years after they were written. His topics and plots are adapted in movies today, and his influence on theater is probably bigger than any other playwright.
The first theatrical performance I can remember seeing is a college performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I can’t remember the plot or scenery in detail. I was only five. I can remember an actor that did back flips a lot on stage. I thought that was cool. My mother tells me the character was Puck. At the time my mother was going to college to become an English teacher. This was the first time she exposed me to William Shakespeare, but not the last.
On my mother’s Facebook profile under languages is says, “I understand Shakespearean English”. She likes to point out to me that certain sayings or movies are a “rip off” of Shakespeare. If I tell her we are reading a Shakespeare in class she can give me a quote from the play. Shakespeare is the playwright that I have heard about and learned about the most.
Shakespeare’s plots, characters and situations have been used as the basis for many plays, books, and movies. His plays were based on many Greek or Roman plays, but most people don’t realize that because Shakespeare is heard about and read more often than the stories and plays that inspired his writing.
The plays are still widely used or adapted today because the situations he wrote about are still interesting. Characters super-objectives for power or love or revenge can often be traced back to a Shakespeare play. These are objectives people understand and see in the real world.
The movies She’s the Man and 10 things I hate about you are based on Shakespeare’s plays Twelfth Night and Taming of the Shrew. The plays Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet have been modernized as far as clothes and settings go, but the words are the same. I think you could easily say that Shakespeare has been performed, adapted, and interpreted more than any other playwright.
Shakespeare did not just influence the theatre. He also influenced the English language. He created new words and changed other words by using nouns as verbs and verbs as adjectives. Words like moonbeam and assassination were first used by Shakespeare. There are many sayings that have been quoted over and over like “all the world’s a stage” and “love is blind” that lead back to a Shakespeare play.
A movie released this fall called Anonymous questions whether William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon was really the author of the plays. This has been a question that has been argued for a long time. Some people think the plays were written by another playwright or a high ranking Englishmen who wanted to hide his identity. The main argument is that he was not of high rank and did not have the education necessary to have written in the style the plays were written. I like to think he was the author. I like to believe that a self-educated man with an average beginning could write the plays that would influence theater for hundreds of years.
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