What makes Shakespeare's plays so very popular, even after all these years - Research Paper Example

Shakespeare’s plays are universal in the sense that they reflect reality. This reality is not the objective reality. Rather it is a kind of inner reality that dwell within the being of a man and that shapes the objective reality itself. In apparently simplistic language, but with rich metaphors and imagery, most of the Shakespeare’s plays lay bare the existence of that very existential being before the audiences. Indeed Shakespeare was a modern artist ahead of modernism, because though “Existentialism officially emerged in the middle of the 20th century many authors expressed familiar ideas much earlier.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet posts some existentialist questions and expresses existentialist ideas” (Essay-911). Along with this exposure of a modern man’s naked inner self, his artistic bent to present the most complicated and the most clandestine truth through the simplest and the most appealing poetic language wins the heart of modern people with the least effort, as in this regard Johnson says, “Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life” (3).

His art of characterizations also takes him to the core of human heart. His characters are not confined within the norms and rituals of a particular society; rather they are shaped by the common dynamics of human nature that exists in all the societies. Shakespeare’s portrayal of the characters is “not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions” (5). Modern existentialist scholars tend to mark the universality of the characters -of Shakespeare’s plays- as the portrayal of human’s very existential self.

Such appraisal of Shakespeare’s art of characterization appears to be partial, not complete. But Johnson marks Shakespeare’s characters as the portrayal of humanity as he says,