Shakespeare’s Impact

How Shakespeare impacted

the world

Shakespeare's works continue to influence modern western culture more than 400 years after his death. As much as any other artist from his period, Shakespeare's works have remained relevant enough to influence our language, politics, entertainment, storytelling, and even our perspective on history.

Shakespeare wrote about timeless themes such as life and death, war, honor, power, betrayal, love, hate, fate, and free will, to name but a few. With the constantly changing world we live in today these themes are perhaps surprisingly, as relevant now as they were to the English of the 1600s. 

Shakespeare’s immense brilliance is almost hard to grasp.  He wrote in a time before there was caffeine (tea and coffee arrived in England long after his death) and he not only wrote an average of two masterpieces a year for 20 years, but he was also an actor and part owner of his beloved Globe Theater. He not only taught us about ourselves and humanity, but he also invented about 1700 words that we use today. Accommodation, baseless, gloomy, dwindle indistinguishable, sanctimonious, seamy, courtship and dexterously among them.  Nouns were often transformed into verbs, verbs into adjectives, and he came up with entirely new words at the same time.

His legacy extends not only to our ability to express ourselves but also to our ability to process and experience the world around us. In the absence of Shakespeare's words, how would we describe what is going on when we feel bedazzled, gloomy, or could we even grovel?

The characters in Shakespeare's plays depict emotions and situations that everyday people might experience in order to make them more relatable. In many of his plays, Shakespeare discusses human nature. Despite their historical relevance, Shakespeare's characters are still relevant to today's audiences. Romeo and Juliet, for instance, illustrate both the beauty of deep love, and the impulsive nature of people to behave rashly. For both Romeo and Juliet, their impulsiveness led directly to their own deaths. 

There are also lessons or themes he provides that many of us can apply to our day-to-day lives. As humans, we make many mistakes. He illustrates that we aren't perfect, we will make mistakes as we go along. Despite his character's positive qualities, he lets us know about our many flaws as well. His famous soliloquies are also used to convey the inner feelings and emotions of his characters. 

Our understanding of the character would be enhanced by these soliloquies that reflect their deep and personal thoughts to better grasp their characteristics and personality. 

The way Shakespeare wrote about people and emotions will always be relatable, no matter how much time passes – because we are all human, living together on this one magnificent planet, searching for meaning until we “shuffle off this mortal coil”.  And that understanding, that we are all in this together - enjoying life’s great pleasures, and enduring life’s most unfair cruelties, is the essence of Time Out of Joint. 

By Dan Lyons with Steve Rowland