William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare, William (1564-1616), English playwright and poet, recognized in much of the world as the greatest of all dramatists. Shakespeare is one of the founder of realism in world literature. He is against religious persecution and racial discrimination, against social inequality and the corrupting influence of gold and money. His literature is a combination of beauty, kindness and truth, and reflects nature and reality. He can write skillfully in different poetic forms, like the sonnet, the blank verse, and the rhymed couplet. He has an amazing wealth of vocabulary and idiom. In his romantic comedies, Shakespeare takes an optimistic attitude toward love and youth.
Merits:
1) The realistic attitude in literary creation :Shakespeare makes comment on dramatic performance . Its purpose, he maintains , is “to hold , as it were , the mirror top to nature ; to show virtue her own feature ,scorn her own image ,and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure
2) The complexities and implications of the real life : give a world of full – blood people . No two figures are identified .
3) The expert in poetic forms : Shakespeare was skilled in many poetic forms : the song , the sonnet ,the couplet ,and the dramatic blank verse . He was especially at home with the blank verse .
4) Shakespeare is a great master of the English language . He commanded a vocabulary larger than any other English writer .He used about 16,000 words . Shakespeare and the Authorized version of the English Bible are the two great treasuries of the English language .
5) Shakespeare has been universally acknowledged to be the summit of English Renaissance ,and one of the greatest writers the world over.
Freed of many of the conventions and rules of modern English, Shakespeare could shape vocabulary and syntax to the demands of style. It gave his language an extraordinary plasticity, which enabled him to create the large number of unique and memorable characters he has left us. Shakespeare made each character singular by a distinctive and characteristic set of speech habits.
