In King Lear, Shakespeare had deliberately brought together two plots of different origins. His plays exhibited "spectacular violence, with loose and episodic plotting, and with mingling of comedy with tragedy". Shakespeare's plays portrayed a wide variety of emotions. Through his soliloquies, Shakespeare showed how plays could explore a character's inner motivations and conflict (up until Shakespeare, soliloquies were often used by playwrights to "introduce (characters), convey information, provide an exposition or reveal plans"). In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare mixed tragedy and comedy together to create a new romantic tragedy genre (previous to Shakespeare, romance had not been considered a worthy topic for tragedy). Specifically, in plays like Hamlet, Shakespeare "integrated characterization with plot," such that if the main character was different in any way, the plot would be totally changed. Not only did Shakespeare create some of the most admired plays in Western literature (with Macbeth, HamletĪnd King Lear being ranked among the world's greatest plays), he also transformed English theatre by expanding expectations about what could be accomplished through characterization, plot, language, and genre. Shakespeare's works have been a major influence on subsequent theatre. Scholars estimate that, between the years 15, nouns, verbs and modifiers of Latin, Greek and modern Romance languages added 30,000 new words to the English language.(Citation needed) To accommodate, writers such as Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare expressed new ideas and distinctions by inventing, borrowing or adopting a word or a phrase from another language, known as neologizing. By the age of Elizabeth, English had become widely used with the expansion of philosophy, theology and physical sciences, but many writers lacked the vocabulary to express such ideas. When William Shakespeare began writing his plays, the English language was rapidly absorbing words from other languages due to wars, exploration, diplomacy and colonization. Shakespeare is the most quoted writer in the history of the English-speaking world after the various writers of the Bible, and many of his quotations and neologisms have passed into everyday usage in English and other languages.Įarly Modern English as a literary medium was unfixed in structure and vocabulary in comparison to Greek and Latin, and was in a constant state of flux. Shakespeare's writings have also influenced a large number of notable novelists and poets over the years, including Herman Melville and Charles Dickens. He transformed European theatre by expanding expectations about what could be accomplished through characterization, plot, language and genre. William Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest writer of the English language, and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. 4 Influence on European and American literature.