The Man Who Reshaped a Language
Shakespeare didn’t just write plays. He invented words we still use every day, eyeball, lonely, swagger, and phrases like “wild goose chase” and “break the ice.” We speak his English without knowing it.Share on X
Shakespeare Day is April 23, and the date carries a strange symmetry. William Shakespeare was born around April 23, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon, and he died on April 23, 1616, on what may have been his fifty-second birthday. So the day marks both the start and the end of the greatest writer in the English language.
The numbers are staggering. In about twenty years he wrote roughly 38 plays and 154 sonnets, comedies and tragedies and histories that are still performed more than any other body of work on Earth. He helped build the Globe Theatre. His plays were collected after his death in the 1623 First Folio, and that’s why we still have them. And he did something almost no other writer has done, he reshaped the language itself.
Words we use without thinking, like eyeball, lonely, and swagger, and phrases like wild goose chase and break the ice, come from him. His contemporary Ben Jonson said he wasn’t of an age, but for all time, and four hundred years later that’s held up.
So I should love Shakespeare. For most of my life, I didn’t.
Watch: Globe Theatre: Performance during Shakespeare's time, Harvard Online
I Could Not Stand Him on the Page
Shakespeare on the page did nothing for me. Not the books, not recordings, not even comic versions. The language sat there, dead. I assumed the problem was Shakespeare. It was the format.Share on X
I never liked Shakespeare as a child. Growing up, none of it appealed to me. The way the stories were presented felt stiff and stuck in a particular old-fashioned style of acting, very mannered, very play-like in the worst sense, and it pushed me away. I lumped it in with all the other required culture that adults insisted was great and that left me cold.
And it wasn’t just the classroom. Shakespeare did nothing for me in any recorded or printed form.
Not in books, where the language just sat there like a wall. Not in filmed versions. Not even in comic book adaptations, which you’d think would make it accessible, and which I still couldn’t stand. Every way I tried to take Shakespeare in, on a page or a screen, it stayed flat and lifeless to me. For a long time I figured the problem was Shakespeare, that he simply wasn’t for me.
Then I Saw It Live
The thing that changed everything was seeing it performed live.
It started at the Renaissance fair. The fair had actors who performed Shakespeare, and these people did it right.
They did it well, on stage, in front of you, with real energy and real timing and real bodies in space. I spent years at those fairs, eventually as a photographer shooting them, so I saw a lot of these performances up close, and the good ones were a revelation. Something I’d written off completely suddenly came alive.
The same words that had bored me on a page were electric when a skilled actor delivered them ten feet away. There was even a spinoff event, a holiday-themed run the fair put on, that did a lot of Shakespearean material, and I enjoyed that too.
Then came Shakespeare in the Park. I went several times, sat outdoors, and watched the plays performed live and free under the sky. And I liked it. It wasn’t something I’d drive a hundred miles to see. But the plays were good. They were good, in a way they had never once been for me on a screen or a page. Live, there was something different, something present and immediate, and that difference is everything.
That’s what has always attracted me about Shakespeare, and it’s the only thing that ever did.
Why does Shakespeare only work performed?
Here’s the realization, and it’s no quirk of my taste. Shakespeare was never meant to be read. He was meant to be performed.
He didn’t write literature for people to study silently in a chair.
He wrote scripts for actors to speak out loud to a live, often rowdy, crowd. He timed the jokes for a room. He meant the insults to land in the air. He built the big speeches for a person to speak while breathing and sweating in front of you.
When you flatten all of that onto a page and ask a bored teenager to parse the grammar, you’ve removed the single thing that makes it work. You’re studying the sheet music and wondering why it’s not the song.
That’s why the page killed it for me and the stage saved it.
A play is a live event. The text is just the blueprint. Blueprints aren’t buildings, and you can’t feel a cathedral by reading its floor plan. Shakespeare understood he was writing for performance, and four centuries of schools have been torturing students by handing them the blueprint and calling it the cathedral.
What can writers learn from Shakespeare?
Even for a writer who works in prose, not plays, Shakespeare teaches real lessons.
The first is that form and delivery matter as much as content. The exact same words can be dead or electric depending on how they reach the audience.
That’s true of a novel too. The way you deliver a story, its rhythm, its pacing, its voice, can make strong material fall flat or weak material sing. Always think about how readers will receive your work as well as what it says.
The second is the value of the live and the human. Shakespeare endures because his work was built for real people in a real room, full of feeling and timing. The best writing keeps that pulse even on a page. It sounds like a human talking.
Read your prose out loud sometime. If it dies in the air, it’s probably dying on the page too, and you just can’t hear it.
The third is humility about taste and timing.
I dismissed the greatest writer in English for decades because I only ever met him in the wrong format. The work was never the problem. The delivery was. Before you decide something isn’t for you, ask whether you have experienced it the way it was meant to be experienced. You might be reading the blueprint and blaming the cathedral.
So on April 23, don’t just read Shakespeare. Find him live if you possibly can, at a park, a fair, a small theater, anywhere actors are saying the words out loud. That’s where he’s been waiting for you the whole time. He certainly was for me.