Shakespeare is not a dead poet who lived long ago, but a breathing spirit thrusting himself into our everyday lives. In all countries of the world, in all languages, Shakespeare continues to speak profoundly to mankind.

His poems and plays have made him an immortal in literature, but not because they are scholarly. He knew human life and human passion intimately, and told about them in a sensitive, lively and intelligible way.

Shakespeare, like us, lived in troubled years. Between 1564 and 1616 much of Europe was ravaged by war, cruelty, self-seeking, loneliness and thoughts too strong to be expressed by ordinary people.

Shakespeare came on the scene when a blending force was needed. Eight of his ten history plays present a sequence of wars in Europe and the civil war at home, covering a century of intrigue and armed rebellion. These hearty tales of adventure and glory were calculated to inspire Elizabeth's l people in their new role as a world nation.

Life and thought were speeding up among the people. There were essayists, even as today, holding forth against tobacco, alcohol, the habits of young people and the dress and primping of women. Control of traffic on the streets was a problem. A write of the time said, "In every street, carts and coaches make such thundering as if the world ran upon wheels." Men, women and children crowded the streets so that owners had to strengthen their houses to keep them from being pushed down.

Physical glories were relatively rare, but the spirit of art and of language was fertile. It was the age when Titan was painting his "Entombment", Veronese his "Calvary", Tintoreto his "Paradise", Caracci his "Fishing", and Rubens, Van Dyek and El Greco were painting their incomparable works.

It was Shakespeare who put into words, in dramatized form, the feelings, hopes, fears, frustrations and triumphs of the people of that age.

A MAN OF HIS AGE

Shakespeare was a practising theatre craftsman, a busy actor and author, and a shrewd business man. Just like most writers in our day, he was not writing for posterity but for people of his time, to make a living, and to meet a deadline. Ford Maddox Ford remarks in The March of Literature (Dial Press, New York, 1938): "Only two writers, Virgil and Shakespeare ... can be noted as having made large fortunes. Virgil acquired his by way of gifts. Shakespeare, by exploring his own gifts as a theatrical producer, stands before us not merely as the greatest of poet playwrights but as the first Anglo Saxon business man."

Some people think that it remained for our enlightened age to give Shakespeare due recognition, but that is not so. In addition to great popular favour and the applause of the court he had the satisfaction of seeing nearly half his plays in print. Hamlet was a best seller, published at least five times during the poet's lifetime. In 1623, seven years after his death, the first complete edition of his plays was published. This, called the most popular book in English literature, was issued by his fellow-actors.

Shakespeare's works quickly crossed the frontiers of countries and the barriers of language. A great poem by Shakespeare remains a great poem in whatever language it was printed.

A MASTER OF WORDS

Those who care most for Shakespeare, value him in the first place for his use of language, his verbal music.

Shakespeare was a master of all moods. He could thunder like the guns on D Day, and then in a twinkle he could turn to words so soft that they would not break a soap bubble. In the proud full sail of his verse, however, he moved with the stream of common speech. He did not drag in unusual words like peacock's feathers to decorate a fowl's tail. There is no sign of strain or out- of- character acting when his players speak in great poetry. As the great poet Dryden said, " ... when he describes anything you more than see it, you feel it too."

Shakespeare found the words to express our deepest secrets. His skill at placing one syllable next to the another gives us acute pleasure. He put life into his plays not only with the magic of words but also of thought, with an ear to the appeal of ideas as well as to the sound of things.

Some present day script writers strive to achieve that which arouses fear, and produce only what is monstrous. When Shakespeare indulged in monstrosities, it was not for the sake of their monstrosities but for their contributions to the story. When he calls up the three witches or a deformed creature like Caliban he convinces us that if there were such beings they would so conduct themselves.

His skill in transforming human character and action into, created a world of unforgettable people and phrase.

Human activities are not mere ant-like rushing to an fro. The characters are motivated by passion, reason, interest and habit, and we are made to acknowledge that their actions and sentiments are, from those motives, the necessary result. Often, they do not know their own promptings, but stumble towards their fate unconsciously. Yet, they are revealed to the audience by what they say, by their manner of saying it, by their silences, by their actions and by what others say about them.

A VIGOROUS AUTHOR

Shakespeare wrote vigorously without letting the effort show. He scattered the seeds of things, the principles of character and action, with a cunning hand, yet with a careless air. He rolled the genuine passions of nature on his tongue, and put them into sentences carved with powerful wit. But he was a realist, too. He tided up. Life is not always pure drama

Shakespeare was not a great original thinker. Few poets are - that is not their business. What he did was to give point to the things inside people and bring them out into the open. Someone has said that, "Shakespeare initiated nothing, but he brought all the abortive beginnings of others to a triumphant conclusion."

A MAN FOR OUR AGE

In the 1990's when the most urgent need is the need to know ourselves and the other people of the world, Shakespeare can help.

He does not give us absolute rules of conduct which we can apply for cure-alls; however, his principles stand and his characters speak to us. Johann W. von Goethe, the eminent German dramatist wrote of Shakespeare: " ... it seems as if he cleared up every one of our enigmas for us, though we cannot say: Here or there is the word of solution."

Though we have progressed in science and invention, in speed of communication and in ease of life, human nature is much what it was in Shakespeare's time. The aristocrats, tycoons, soldiers and common people are of the same sort today as they were then. We still struggle against tides whose force, strength and violence are unknown to us. We still seek the national stability that will enable us to prosper physically and expand mentally and achieve morally. The way to success for any nation is foreshadowed in Hasting's lines on England in Henry lV: " ... knows not Montague that of itself/England is safe, if true within itself?"

ABOUT READING SHAKESPEARE

New entertainment, new instructions, new illuminations; the quaint , the curious and the unexpected; all these leap up at you from nearly every page of a Shakespeare play. Even if you are not looking for anything particular in Shakespeare you will find something.

One does not need a specialist's knowledge of the plays or of the Elizabeth Age to enjoy Shakespeare. If an occasional word or allusion is lost, and a particular bit of poetical dialogue remains obscure, the reader may still get the cream of the play by reading it for no other purpose than to take pleasure in it.

One thing keeping people away from his works is that they have been lectured and expounded almost to death. William Hazlitt, the 19th century essayist, remarked, "If we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see, the insignificance of human learning we may study his commentators."

When we read a play by Shakespeare effectively, we stage it on the platform of our imagination. We can do so because he takes us so completely into his confidence. The characters may be puzzled and fooled, but the members of the audience never are.

A particular device which Shakespeare uses to keep the audience a step ahead of the procession of the play is the soliloquy, a speech by a person quite alone, who weighs rationally, yet with passion, opposing values and drastic alternatives.

Hamlet's soliloquy that starts "To be or not to be" is the most famous speech in modern literature, with an appeal that neither repetition nor parody can destroy. "Because," says H. Peterson in The Lonely Debate (Reynal and Hitchcock, New York, 1938) "it dramatizes for each one of us the baffled individual in the agony of indecision."

How important the soliloquy is to the success of Hamlet is indicated by the fact that Christopher Plummer, playing the part in the BBC production in the old castle at Elsinore, worked on it continuously for twelve hours.

A MAN TO QUOTE

The ultimate test of literary merit is survival, which is the index to majority opinion. While the great military conquerors are but ashes in an urn, Shakespeare is still moving and breathing in his writings, in our every day talk, and in the life of the world.

It is not easy to go a day without quoting him, because there are not many subjects of importance that he does not touch upon in glowing phrases.

Hamlet gave us: flaming youth, in my mind's eye, to the manner born, the primrose path, it smells to heaven, there's the rub, method in his madness, brevity is the soul of wit, more matter and less art, neither a lender or borrower be, the mortal coil. "Pomp and Circumstance" came from Othello, with a dozen more; "the dogs of war" from Julius Caesar; "hearts of gold, give the devil his due", and "he has eaten me out of house and home" are from Henry lV, Part l; "make assurance doubly sure" and "the milk of human kindness" came from Macbeth; and so on through the other plays; merry as the day is long, what's in a name? a fool's paradise, elbow room, every inch a king, a spotless reputation, something in the wind and so on and on. There are over 4000 quotations and extracts in the Dictionary of Shakespeare Quotations by D.C. Browning (Everyman's Reference Library)

These phrases came from the mint of Shakespeare's creative genius fresh, entertaining and alive, and they remain so today.

A MAN FOR ALL AGES

Shakespeare's plays were not only for his own age and ours, not for one nation or language, but for all humanity. He planted one leg of his compass in the Elizabethan era and then with the other swept the whole circumference of Time.

His plays will endure because they embody undying states of mind. They hold before us, now and forever, a conception of human dignity, a sense of the importance of human passions, and a vision of the dimension of human life. All this is embodied in Hamlet's assertion: "What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god."