page_title: William Shakespeare
section_title: Influence
hierarchical_section_title: William Shakespeare / Influence
caption_attribution_description: From Act IV, Scene 1 of Macbeth
context_page_description: William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's greatest dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. They also continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
  Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. At age 49, he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later.
context_section_description: Shakespeare's work has made a lasting impression on later theatre and literature. In particular, he expanded the dramatic potential of characterisation, plot, language, and genre. Until Romeo and Juliet, for example, romance had not been viewed as a worthy topic for tragedy. Soliloquies had been used mainly to convey information about characters or events, but Shakespeare used them to explore characters' minds. His work heavily influenced later poetry. The Romantic poets attempted to revive Shakespearean verse drama, though with little success. Critic George Steiner described all English verse dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson as "feeble variations on Shakespearean themes."
  Shakespeare influenced novelists such as Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, and Charles Dickens. The American novelist Herman Melville's soliloquies owe much to Shakespeare; his Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick is a classic tragic hero, inspired by King Lear. Scholars have identified 20,000 pieces of music linked to Shakespeare's works. These include three operas by Giuseppe Verdi, Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff, whose critical standing compares with that of the source plays. Shakespeare has also inspired many painters, including the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites. The Swiss Romantic artist Henry Fuseli, a friend of William Blake, even translated Macbeth into German. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud drew on Shakespearean psychology, in particular, that of Hamlet, for his theories of human nature.
  In Shakespeare's day, English grammar, spelling, and pronunciation were less standardised than they are now, and his use of language helped shape modern English. Samuel Johnson quoted him more often than any other author in his A Dictionary of the English Language, the first serious work of its type. Expressions such as "with bated breath" (Merchant of Venice) and "a foregone conclusion" (Othello) have found their way into everyday English speech.
  Shakespeare's influence extends far beyond his native England and the English language. His reception in Germany was particularly significant; as early as the 18th century Shakespeare was widely translated and popularised in Germany, and gradually became a "classic of the German Weimar era;" Christoph Martin Wieland was the first to produce complete translations of Shakespeare's plays in any language.
caption: Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head. By Henry Fuseli, 1793–1794. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington.
exif: {"Image SubfileType": "Full-resolution Image", "Image ImageWidth": "3663", "Image ImageLength": "4427", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8, 8]", "Image Compression": "Uncompressed", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "5", "Image StripOffsets": "1236", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "4", "Image RowsPerStrip": "4427", "Image StripByteCounts": "64864404", "Image XResolution": "46", "Image YResolution": "46", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Centimeter", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop 7.0", "Image DateTime": "2006:01:27 16:51:59", "Image DotRange": "[0, 255]", "Image Tag 0x8649": "[56, 66, 73, 77, 3, 233, 10, 80, 114, 105, 110, 116, 32, 73, 110, 102, 111, 0, 0, 0, ... ]", "Image Tag 0x935C": "[65, 100, 111, 98, 101, 32, 80, 104, 111, 116, 111, 115, 104, 111, 112, 32, 68, 111, 99, 117, 109, 101, 110, 116, 32, 68, 97, 116, 97, 32, 66, 108, 111, 99, 107, 0]", "Image ExifOffset": "1360", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "1498", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "2986", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "520", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "645"}