How is Shakespeare different?

 Hello!! Hope this blog finds you well and helps in feeding your curious mind. We read and study so much related to Shakespeare but obviously he wasn't the only one who existed during the Elizabethan Era. That would just be weird. So if he wasn't the only one, why haven't we heard about other playwrights from his time? What is it that makes Shakespeare so different from them? That's what we are going to explore in this blog. As Shakespeare says, "and one man in his time plays many parts" he is just describing himself. 

One of my friends once asked me what makes Shakespeare so special? Aren't there other writers currently who are more interesting? Undeniably there are, but there is something about the way he sums up some major themes quite quickly is what makes me interested. I think we all know what themes I am talking about here but let's take just list them. Love, death, power, conflict, hate, revenge, war, jealousy, rivalry, fear, sadness, rage, hope, laughter and disaster, and this is quite a list. 

Seven years after Shakespeare's death, a giant edition of his plays, known as the First Folio, was published. Without this, many of the plays would probably have been lost forever, and we can now pore over every word, line and speech.

But what about the other playwrights? Christopher Marlowe wrote some amazing plays. His plays are full of great poetry. Jonson wrote wonderful plays too. Maybe they are a bit too cynical to grab the popular taste. Shakespeare, on the other hand had the wit and wisdom to steal plots and ideas from a lot of the plays of that era and top them with better poetry.

He also had more insight into characters’ feelings and motives, and cleverer handling of light and dark, change of pace, and the weighing up of right and wrong. He really played with language art in the best way possible to create the masterpieces we have today. 

He was supremely gifted at selecting the right words and arranging them into convincing representations of reality in all its forms, material and immaterial. And something that i have already talked about before, if Shakespeare could not find the right word, he simply created one. Radiance, lonely, laughable, eyeball, assassination, alligator, obscene, advertising, and more than 1,500 hundred other words we use today were all coined by Shakespeare.

Another way, that Shakespeare is different, not only from other Elizabethan-era authors, but from all authors from all eras, is the large number of memorable characters he created, including but not limited to: Hamlet, Falstaff, Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, Othello, Iago, Rosalind, Romeo, Juliet, Ophelia, Polonius, Regan, Portia, Shylock, Desdemona, Ariel, Puck, Oberon. Sometimes, he allowed mysteries about the characters to go unsolved, well knowing that in real life most people do not know all the secrets about their neighbors, their fellow employees, their leaders—or even themselves