Man of Theater: Shakespeare wrote very near the beginning of the professional theater in England. He probably acted in and wrote plays for the Swan Theater shown here, one of the first professional theaters in England. Being among the first playwrights, he helped to develop many of the dramatic techniques and devices that have been used ever since, not just on the stage but in films and other forms of popular entertainment. How do you show conflict between characters just by what they say? How do you establish connections between different scenes at different times? How do you heighten suspense in an action where the audience already knows the outcome? It is difficult to overestimate the impact Shakespeare had on subsequent writers.

As a man of the theater Shakespeare learned how to work within the limitations of his genre. He wrote plays that were filled with frank sexual talk by both men and women, but because all the female parts had to be played by young men, Shakespeare's plays show little physical affection. The stage itself was simply an empty space where the actor had to rely on the power of the language to create illusions that are often generated by special effects in the modern theater or in film.

Man of Language: Almost all scholars agree that Shakespeare wrote all, or substantially all, of 38 plays that were identified as his by his associates soon after he died. There are a handful of other plays that show some signs of Shakespeare's authorship. In addition to the plays Shakespeare wrote a sequence of 154 sonnets (14-line verses) on highly personal themes, among the best ever written. In his own day Shakespeare was highly regarded for several long narrative poems that retold stories from antiquity, such as "The Rape of Lucrece" and "Venus & Adonis."

It's important to remember that Shakespeare did not write his plays to be read but to be performed. It was only their great popularity which led to the publication during Shakespeare's lifetime of some individual plays in small quarto editions (the smaller book, about a quarter the size of the large book). About half his works were not printed at all during his lifetime. The only reason we have these unpublished works available today is that two of the actors he worked with paid to have all his plays published after his death in a folio edition (the big book).

Shakespeare was doing more than just writing plays and poems during his 20-year career. He was also adding to the English language in a substantial way. First his vocabulary in his works is an astonishing 20,000 different words, one of the largest of any writer in any age. In a recent study Jeffrey MacQuain and Stanley Malless estimate that Shakespeare contributed to the English language about 1,500 new words or meanings, among them "amazement," "baseless," "critic," "dwindle," "hurry" and "uncomfortable."

Man of Imagination: Beyond his pioneering efforts in shaping the theater or adding to the language, Shakespeare will always be best known for the vivid characters he created. In many of his plays he has his "virtual people" say startling things or behave in unexpected ways. Here we see Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, committing suicide rather than submitting to the conquering Romans. A vain woman, Cleopatra is terrified of death and has sought the least painful way to kill herself, using small poisonous snakes. In a situation where we might expect terror and morbidity, Cleopatra makes jokes and refers to the snakes she has placed on her breasts as babies sucking the nurse to sleep. These moments of surprising originality or profound insight are what we mean when we called something "Shakespearean."