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The 16^th-century dramatist Ben Johnson generously called Shakespeare a writer “not of an age, but for all time.” And so it has proven to be, for Shakespeare’s plays are still the most translated and most _________ of any play writer’s in the world. But if you ask people what accounts for Shakespeare’s _________ popularity, you will get a number of different answers. Some will say that he was a great storyteller, others that the _________ lies in the beauty of his poetry. Some scholars point out that he was born in a lively period of England’s history, a time of great national confidence and cultural activity, particularly in the theatre. _________, they claim, he was able to produce an extraordinary volume of work.

This last explanation seems a little _________. A more interesting answer is put forward, although a little over-enthusiastically, by Harold Bloom in his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Bloom argues that Shakespeare gave us something in his writing that the world had not seen in _________ before: characters with a strong personality. These lifelike characters gave us a real insight into the human _________: Iago, the trusted advisor of Othello, whose jealousy leads him to betray his honest master; Rosalind, the heroine in As You Like It, who remains true to her friends and family in spite of the danger to herself. Through the mouths of such characters, we learn truths about life that we can all _________. These truths are made more moving and more memorable by the way in which they are _________: briefly and poetically.

Shakespeare has been dead almost 400 years, but the words and saying attributed (归功于) to him still __________ the English language today. So whether you are “fashionable” or “sanctimonious,” thank Shakespeare, who probably __________ the terms. In fact, it is amazing just how great Shakespeare’s influence on everyday language has been. Take, for example, these phrases from Michael Macrone’s light-hearted book Brush Up Your Shakespeare.

Macrone is more interested in the Shakespearean language that has survived than the reasons for its __________. According to his research, some of these sayings are slightly different from their original meaning once taken out of the __________ of the plays in which they first appeared. For example, “be all and end all” is used today to mean “the most important thing”, but in Macbeth, it means “the end of the matter”.

Regardless of such technicalities, it is still remarkable that so many of Shakespeare’s words have survived the large __________ in language between their time and the present day. The beauty of those words is certainly one reason, but as Johnson suggested, it is the humanity relevance of their __________ that brings them to life.