Why did Shakespeare get famous when he sucks?

So I read a couple of his writings (Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, Julius Caesar), I admit the plays had a good plot and conflict, but the play outline just sucked!! I mean, they are sooo hard to understand. People don't even talk like that back in those days.

Here's an example of a line: "I will not carry coals" meant "I will not be made fun of" Now that is impossible to interpret without an online helper.

Was he just famous because of his mind boggling writings?Why did Shakespeare get famous when he sucks?
No - it's because you are American. Your mind works in a different way and your history does not date that far back. It's not your fault - stick to watching films. Xenon - whatever your name - yes, I do realise that, but the posting was made at the time of day when the USA come out to play. My 'assumption' is he is American and asking on UK Yahoo due to the fact that Shakespeare was, in fact, English :-)
If you don't understand words or phrases of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries then look it up. I have a dictionary from 1920 and it has all the words that Shakespeare used. You yourself probably quote Shakespeare without even realising. Don't say that something is rubbish just because you don't understand it especially when you yourself use words out of context and with incorrect grammar - just read your own question. "Sucks" has no connection to something that is not liked and "Why did Shakespeare get famous" is about as ungrammatical as you can get. Don't criticise others unless you yourself are perfect and no one is that.Why did Shakespeare get famous when he sucks?
For the people of that time, he was a fanatical, interesting and a poetic influence on ordinary people leading 'normal' lives. He brought a bit of drama to peoples so called 'social lives'. Hats off to him! And excuse me, but were you alive around 1580 to know how the heck they spoke??

The answer is simple, your too incompetent to understand his most exquisite literature so the frustration leads you to disgrace his amazing work. There is such meaning and depth behind each line and every character he created. The beauty of his work is that its not just obvious and boring it gets your brain cells working (Clearly, yours have already been fried after reading and translating one sentence!) Such complicated characters that people couldn't even understand themselves yet Shakespeare put them on paper and then created entertaining drama from them - Genius!

You think one opinion is going to affect the immense credit upon one of history's most memorable people - Hah, take a walk... and stop moaning over the effort of having to use an online translator! (If that's what you call effort) =D
It's called Poetry, and that is why people at the time would have understood it, he came out with a nice turn of phrase, but not obvious.



The words are hard to understand these days only because many have subtly changed their meaning, and often Shakespeare sprinkles paranamasia all around so the plays give you something to chew on long after the finish.



-All the World's a stage-, a quote that has been dissected over and over, and yet people still find new or novel things to say,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts



The mere fact that he places exits before entrances, is to be debated, and yet it is a cliche, but given new life.by a simple twist.



Wonderful stuff.



Discuss.Why did Shakespeare get famous when he sucks?
He doesn't. The reason I don't think he should be as famous as he is is because he plagiarized almost all of his plays. Fans of Shakespeare will say "But he didn't "plagiarize" them. He simply rescued them from playwrights with weaker words." But seriously, he doesn't deserve as much credit as he gets. They didn't have copyrights and all those back then but still, if some person used flowery language to make a story like Harry Potter "better", he'd/she'd be sued.
Christian you have such a lot to learn yet, life must be terribly confusing for you as an up and coming adolescent living in this modern world of evermore sophisticated digital technology. I cannot imagine how I would even survive a single day unless I had at least 200 apps on my phone telling me what to do, Shakespeare must have really struggled in his day... they didn't even have electricity then.
@Pepper of the Moon: He was asking this question on Yahoo Answers United Kingdom....I'm not making assumptions or anything, but....





Anyhow, Shakespeare doesn't suck. Well, his comedies do, but I LOVE his tragedies. Especially Macbeth. That is literally one of my favorite plays ever written besides Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen.



People spoke that way in the 1500s or whenever he was writing. Study history, dude.
His writing is amazing! The conflicts, the characters, and the plots are overall amazing. You do not really understand them because the phrases are from a completely different time (mid-1600s).
The problem is that your stupidity prevents you from appreciating it.
hes been famous for hundreds of years,

and he'll still be famous when your 6 feet under.
Because people like crap that doesnt make sense. Whats the point of poetry?!? Its gay.
he was good at sucking
I agree that Shakespeare is a bit shitty in my opinion but back in those days people loved that sort of thing which was part of the current cultural movement. The way the people spoke in his plays spoke in poetry rather than basic English which again was what at the time made them epic. "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo" %26lt;%26lt; Even in those days most people would not word a sentence like that, especially if you were Italian,but it sounds much more poetic.

I think he's regarded as so popular even today because of the impact he had. If he never existed in that era and was born in this one, he wouldn't be thought of so highly. Other than that, the stories he wrote (plots) were world changing. What we may consider a clich茅; he created. He began stories which would be changed time and time again and "borrowed" for other story lines. I agree they are hard to understand which is why the next time they make one of his plays into a film they should modernise it. Henry V was a horrid film - far too much poetry for a war film.
Actually, a lot of those lines were sayings at the time, Shakespeare did use contemporary language and while they may not have talked exactly like that, they were about as close to talking that way as you are to the way people speak in modern books-which is like modern speech but tidier and more literary.



Shakespeare was famous because he not only created some of the most famous storylines of all time, he played to both rich and poor, which few other people did. There are lines in his plays that the rich snobs weren't meant to understand, they flew under the radar because they were filthy jokes for the common people to laugh at. At the same time there are phrases that the uneducated groundlings would never have understood, because they were intended for the educated people to get.

He coined something like 230 phrases that people still use all the time today

The course of true love never did run smooth, Love is blind, If you prick me do I not bleed?, To coin a phrase - all of those were invented by Shakespeare.

His characters were very real and many of his stories were incredibly daring - The Merchant of Venice and Othello for example talk about race in a way that most British people at that time wouldn't even be able to understand.

He was such a good storyteller he has distorted the way people see history - Richard III wasn't a hunchback, nor do we know if he killed any of the people Shakespeare has him murdering, but still that's how people imagine him.



He has stayed famous because everyone liked him - rich people put his work in folio so that actors could perform it to generation after generation of the common people. Even now a film of his work can still make a fortune, even when they don't update the language and modern kids understand only one word out of five, they still get the MEANING behind it.