William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 and died there in 1616. In between, he wrote 37 plays and 154 sonnets that are still performed more often than any other playwright's works, in more languages, in more countries, to more people, than anything else ever written for the stage.
The language
Shakespeare's English is the reason many people find him difficult — and the reason he endures. He invented or popularised over 1,700 words that we still use today: bedroom, amazement, eyeball, generous, obscene, radiance, lonely. He did not just use language; he expanded it.
His dialogue captures something about how people actually speak: the contradiction, the self-deception, the way we say one thing and mean another. That is why it translates — not always in the literal sense, but in the human sense.
The characters
Hamlet is perhaps literature's most psychologically complex character: a man paralysed between knowledge and action, caught between grief, duty and disgust. Iago in Othello is the template for every literary villain who does evil not out of necessity but out of spite. Lady Macbeth is the study of ambition consuming itself.
These figures feel so real because Shakespeare understood that people are not consistent — that we contradict ourselves, that we are capable of greatness and pettiness simultaneously.
Why he is still performed
The plays deal with things that do not change: jealousy, power, grief, love, ambition and the question of what we owe each other. Each generation finds in them what it needs to find. The plays are large enough to accommodate new interpretations without being exhausted by them.
