"The Importance of William Shakespeare" — an exploration of the Bard's enduring influence on language, literature, and the human condition
William Shakespeare · The Bard of Avon
William Shakespeare, born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, stands as arguably the most significant writer in the history of the English language. In Thomas Thrasher's illuminating study, the author argues that Shakespeare's importance transcends mere literary achievement — it reaches into the very foundations of how we speak, feel, and understand ourselves.
Thrasher contends that Shakespeare was not simply a product of the Elizabethan age but rather its greatest interpreter, and perhaps humanity's most profound chronicler of the interior life. His plays and sonnets gave shape to emotions that had previously gone unnamed, and invented the vocabulary through which we still navigate love, grief, jealousy, and ambition.
To study Shakespeare is not an exercise in antiquity. It is an encounter with the living tissue of modern thought — still pulsing, still urgent, still capable of disturbing and consoling in equal measure.
Shakespeare invented the human as we know it — the inward self, the self in conflict, the self capable of overhearing its own thoughts.Thomas Thrasher — The Importance of William Shakespeare
Thrasher organises his study around six essential pillars — each demonstrating a distinct dimension of Shakespeare's ongoing relevance to literature, culture, psychology, and language.
Shakespeare coined or first recorded over 1,700 words still in common use today — from "bedroom" and "lonely" to "eyeball" and "swagger." His influence on English grammar and idiom is without parallel.
He redefined what theatre could be — blending comedy and tragedy, high and low, poetry and prose into a form of drama that would shape every playwright who followed, from Ibsen to Pinter.
Shakespeare created characters of unprecedented inwardness. Hamlet's soliloquies, Iago's cunning, Lear's disintegration — these anticipate the psychological novel by two centuries and prefigure Freud's theories of the mind.
Translated into every major language, performed in every country, Shakespeare's themes — power, betrayal, desire, mortality — speak across all cultural boundaries, confirming a shared human experience.
Rather than preaching, Shakespeare poses questions. His plays are moral laboratories where the audience must grapple with justice, mercy, ambition, and guilt — and arrive at their own conclusions.
Every subsequent tradition in Western literature has had to define itself in relation to Shakespeare — whether by reverence, imitation, or deliberate rejection. His work is the unavoidable centre of the canon.
To read Shakespeare without curiosity is impossible. Each re-reading yields fresh discovery — the plays breathe, they change as we change, and they always know something we have not yet admitted to ourselves.Thomas Thrasher — The Importance of William Shakespeare
Thrasher devotes substantial chapters to the major works, examining how each play illuminates a different facet of Shakespeare's genius and enduring importance.
William Shakespeare is baptised on 26 April in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, the son of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden.
Marries Anne Hathaway at the age of 18. Their daughter Susanna is born the following year, and twins Hamnet and Judith in 1585.
Arrives in London and begins his career as an actor and playwright. His early history plays draw enthusiastic audiences at the Theatre and Rose playhouses.
The Globe Theatre opens on Bankside, Southwark. Shakespeare holds a shareholder's stake and writes many of his greatest works for this stage.
King James I grants the Lord Chamberlain's Men a royal patent, and the company is renamed the King's Men — Shakespeare's troupe now under royal patronage.
The Sonnets are published — 154 poems that represent the pinnacle of the English sonnet tradition and a uniquely intimate self-portrait.
Shakespeare dies on 23 April in Stratford-upon-Avon, aged 52. He is buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church, where his grave can still be visited today.
Thrasher's concluding argument is bold: no writer has done more to shape the imaginative life of the modern world than William Shakespeare. Not merely as a historical monument to be venerated, but as a living, breathing presence in film, theatre, fiction, philosophy, and daily speech.
From the psychological novels of the nineteenth century — which owe their inwardness directly to Hamlet and Lear — to the films of Akira Kurosawa, Baz Luhrmann, and Kenneth Branagh, Shakespeare's stories continue to migrate across forms, cultures, and centuries without ever losing their power.
His vocabulary has become our vocabulary. To be "in a pickle," to "break the ice," to act in "cold blood," to wear your "heart on your sleeve" — all Shakespeare. An estimated 10% of commonly quoted English proverbs trace back to his works, a feat unmatched by any other author.
Perhaps most significantly, Thrasher argues, Shakespeare changed the nature of empathy itself. By placing audiences inside the minds of murderers, outcasts, tyrants, and lovers — and making them understand each — he expanded the moral imagination of Western culture in ways that persist to this day.
He was not of an age, but for all time.Ben Jonson · First Folio, 1623