Shakespeare's Legacy

Shakespeare played a major role in changing English theatre, drama and also English language. Shakespeare himself wrote with a vocabulary of roughly 17,000 words. He is well known for giving over 3000 words to the English language because he was the first author to write them down. Except for the writers of the Bible, Shakespeare is the most frequently quoted writer in English. By 1613, Shakespeare had helped to create a new grammar and a much wider vocabulary for the early form of modern English. With his genius for poetic technique, he vastly broadened range of the English language.

Many of Shakespeare’s plays have been re-writ, adapted and even been made into films, documentaries and TV series. Shakespeare movies are so numerous with over 250 Shakespeare movies produced. Shakespeare film adaptations such as Baz Luhrman's "Romeo and Juliet", the Shakespeare inspired "Shakespeare in Love" and the more recent "Hamlet 2000", prove that Shakespeare films adaptations and movies retain their enduring appeal. As an example of Shakespeare's enduring popularity, sixty one film adaptations and twenty one TV adaptations alone have been made of Hamlet, the earliest being in 1907 and the latest in 2000.