William Shakespeare
There is no doubt that Shakespeare is the greatest genius that human nature has yet produced. He was rightly called “our myriad-minded Shakespeare” by the famous critic S.T. Coleridge.
Shakespeare is the greatest poet of the world. His most famous plays are Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard II, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline. Ben Jonson admired him in the following lines:
Soul of the age!
The applause! delight! the wonder of our stage!
My Shakespeare, rise; I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further to make thee a room.
There is no doubt that Shakespeare is the greatest genius that human nature has yet produced. He was rightly called “our myriad-minded Shakespeare” by the famous critic S.T. Coleridge. Shakespeare was not of an age, but of all ages. For example, we may take the following immortal quotes by Shakespeare:
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
In the above oft-quoted lines we find the ideas and the words born in an indestructible unity. Matthew Arnold, one of the greatest English poets and critics, praised Shakespeare in his sonnet:
Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask: Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge. ”If human nature were destroyed, and no monument were left of it except his works, other beings might know what man was from those writings” (Lord Lyttelton).