If you want to look intellectual say you love Shakespeare. Or you can quote the overused "to be or not to be" or "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo". You can say that he was the height of all English thought and etc. Well it's not that I don't like Shakespeare, I do (well more of a love/hate relationship, but you get the point). But the fact is, he made me like his writings despite myself. I was determined not to like his work, mostly because everyone else liked it (Hey, I never claimed to be perfectly logical)
But to say that he is the best English writer seems like a gross overstatement. Maybe he was the best playwright (maybe), he has brilliant poetry, he can be funny and a little crude (more than a little), and has brilliant poetry, and some really good characters. I think however that the source and summit of all of Shakespeare's works are his insults. Those alone make Shakespeare worth reading. Anything with sweet Jack Falstaff and Hal together is just brilliant.
However, going back to the gross overstatements, it is nearly impossible to compare Shakespeare to something like Middlemarch. One is a novel and the other is a play, what is better, well the authors intent is different in both works. Middlemarch may be the most brilliantly structured novel in the English Language, Shakespeare steals his stories from all over and his plot lines are not particularly impressive.
In other words I think that a person should analyze a few works of Shakespeare before they determine if he is brilliant or not. Do I understand everything of Shakespeare? No, I always have had a hard time deciphering his works, although reading it out loud helps out quite a bit.
Actually I find Chaucer a little more easy to understand, oddly enough.
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