think. Some of Shakespeare’s own actors went to perform in Germany in his lifetime and it’s Germany where the first translation of Shakespeare occurs in the middle of the 18th century. Such is the extent of Shakespeare’s popularity, he becomes an honorary German national poet. (Paul Edmondson, Head of Research and Knowledge here at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust)

Shakespeare's plays are frequently performed today, with directors often choosing to set the shows in different times and places. Scholars tell us this is not necessarily a new trend—the plays have been adapted and reworked for many years.

There was a period in history where the theatres were closed and then reopened in about 1660. At that time, Shakespeare’s plays were still being performed and were performed: although, were frequently amended by the next generation, sometimes quite hugely. There wasn’t at that time, any sense of reverence towards Shakespeare’s plays. They were nice blueprints that you could start with: if you wanted to add other characters, other scenes or alternate endings that was fine and up for grabs and you just did that. (Elizabeth Dollimore, Learning Manager at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust)

There are a number of factors that led to the spread of Shakespeare's work, popularity, and eventual fame.

I think it's clear that Shakespeare didn't set out to become what he became--a famous writer.  It was a perfect storm, of sorts, which thrust him into prominence.  It was a period of great resurgence for the arts (the Renaissance), the Queen of England was committed to patronage of the arts (and Shakespeare's troupe, in particular), and Shakespeare was a writer with something to say about things people were interested in hearing.  He was in the perfect environment for everything he did; despite that, he's significantly more popular today than he ever was in his own time. 

I would add that when Shakespeare got started in the London theater scene, he was trying to make money and elevate his family.  The acting and, more importantly, providing plays for the Lord Chamberlain's Men, was a business.  And he did well: not only was he able to buy the best house in his native Stratford, but also a coat-of-arms for his family.  In Shakespeare's day, "serious" poets didn't write plays; they wrote lyric poetry (sonnets or non-dramatic poems like "Venus and Adonis").

That said, I think we can point to 1595 as a turning point.  Around this year, he wrote Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night's Dream--all masterpieces.  While before this he was already popular enough to incur the jealousy of other playwrights (i.e., Robert Greene), around 1595 he started cranking out the masterpieces.  While not every Shakespeare play is a masterpiece, over a dozen (at least) are.    

Although there are all sorts of issues with the various texts of the plays, thankfully we have versions to peform and read, so Shakespeare's fame has not been limited to his own time, but has only increased over the years. 

Shakespeare's intentions were first to become an actor.  He left Stratford-on-Avon to begin a career on stage.  He worked his way up the ladder in the acting profession: first as a gopher, then a prompter, and finally an actor.  Luckily, in 1593, the Bubonic plague closed the Theatres of London, and so Shakespeare turned to writing long poems and drama full-time.

According to Enotes:

The next mention of Shakespeare is in 1592, when he was an actor and playwright in London. His actions during the seven-year interim have been a matter of much curious speculation, including unproved stories of deer poaching, soldiering, and teaching. It may have taken him those seven years simply to break into and advance in the London theater. His early connections with the theater are unknown, although he was an actor before he became a playwright. He might have joined one of the touring companies that occasionally performed in Stratford-upon-Avon, or he might have gone directly to London to make his fortune, in either the theater or some other trade. Shakespeare was a venturesome and able young man who had good reasons to travel—his confining family circumstances, tinged with just enough disgrace to qualify him to join the disreputable players. The theater was his escape to freedom; he therefore had strong motivation to succeed.

Wow - this could go in so many different directions. First and foremost, he was an excellent writer. Not only was he able to create deep tragedies, light comedies, and meaningful histories, he was able to do so using an extremely strict style of writing. I often challenge my advanced students to see how much of a conversation they can write in iambic pentameter - often, it's not very much! He was a huge wordsmith. Words and phrases that he coined are still in wide use today. There are few other plays that allow for the study of as many literary devices as a Shakespearean play. How many instances of foreshadowing, alliteration, atmosphere, irony, hyperbole, metaphor, etc. etc can be found in any one play? Very few writers are able to successfully write across many genres as WS was. This is why modern film makers are able to still sell redone movies like Romeo and Juliet and even the Taming of the Shrew (10 Things I Hate About You). If all of that wasn't already enough to make him famous, he personally oversaw the building of the most fantastic theatre of the time, the Globe, and he easily won the favor of King James I. That alone would have been enough to write his name in the books.

This question is great one to ask. I often tell my students that rather than whining about what they "have" to read, sit back and take in a few lines to see just how masterful he really was with the language. It's quite impressive.

A fine question. The short answer is, greatness.

The somewhat longer answer is, Shakespeare was successful in his own time, but not the near-god he is now. He was one of several high profile playwrights in his own time, but not the only one. However, with time most of his contemporaries faded into historical figures, while Shakespeare remained alive, with new generations finding new ways to relate to him.

The general reasons he's considered this great are the characters he created, and the amazing poetry contained in his plays. Figures like Hamlet, Othello, Iago, Falstaff, and others stay alive in the mind long after they've left the stage, and the lines from his plays… amazing.

If you're interested in a more detailed discussion of this, the April 2007 issue of Harper's magazine has an entire article on this process. (I'll include the link, but it's only available online to subscribers.)

And Shakespeare's not the only writer to attain this stature. Homer was more influential in classical Greece, and has stayed famous for thousands of years, compared to mere hundreds for Shakespeare.

William Shakespeare became famous beyond his lifetime through the publication of the First Folio containing 36 of 37 plays. Two members of Shakespeare's company felt the need to keep his works alive seeing as he was such an important person to them. John Heminges and Henry Condell had done a great service considering that most of Shakespeare's works were just kept around the theater as scripts for future use. While Shakespeare did receive reviews and commentary on his shows during his lifetime, his main success came from the performances which greatly engaged the crowd that attended such spectacles.

He remains famous for the reason that he created characters that seem to have an existence of their own; Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet come to mind. Their spirit and the language Shakespeare used to enable them to come to life are what drew in audiences of the day and people now. The themes are also universal and do not have boundaries in time or place. Many of his plays can be set in the time for which it was written or can be set in modern times.

Think of Romeo and Juliet, the theme of love against seemingly impossible odds translates across many cultures and points in time. This is why the more modern version of this old classic did so well. The film version of Romeo and Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes was able to tell the same story of two lovers separated by fate and family, in modern day Verona Beach. Even though they used the language of Shakespeare's day, the audience was able to be just as engaged with the story as audiences in Shakespeare's time would have been.

Probably no other writer of modern times—meaning since about the year 1500—has achieved the international recognition and appreciation accorded Shakespeare.

It would be too easy to say that the reason for this is simply the fact that Shakespeare is an incomparably great writer. Few of us would be satisfied with such a simplistic explanation. It would be more useful to look at his fame as increasing in stages, aided by historical events and processes independent of the inherent value of his work—though of course, if his work didn't have such incomparable value, these events wouldn't by themselves have caused his reputation to rise to the level at which it has been for many decades now.

It's one thing for a playwright's works to hold the stage even after his death, after tastes and artistic values generally have changed. It's another situation, however, when critics and intellectuals begin to pronounce a writer as the great genius of his time or as one who has transcended his time and become a cultural icon. The latter happened to Shakespeare in the century after his death. In the eighteenth-century, both Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson produced critical editions of Shakespeare. Johnson's preface to his edition was especially path-breaking because, though he enumerated what he considered aesthetic flaws in Shakespeare's plays, he also expressed the view that the works were incomparably great and that there was almost something superhuman about their overall artistic merit, in the richness of their language and their incisive, realistic portrayal of human nature. This had not yet become a generally accepted opinion. Most English critics of the time (the 1760s) would still have considered a more elegant and "classical" writer, such as Joseph Addison, as the greatest English playwright. Johnson, though he admired Addison, stated that "Addison speaks the language of poets; Shakespeare, of men." In other words, those dramatists who had been praised by the critical establishment began, from the time of Johnson's evaluation, to be seen as stilted and as having failed to depict human emotion as honestly and directly as Shakespeare.

A few years after this, German writers and critics, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Gottfried Herder, "discovered" Shakespeare. These men not only were anglophiles in general, but they wished to break free of the French models German writers, in an age when the Germans were creating a national literature of their own for the first time, had previously been encouraged to emulate. They saw Shakespeare, just as Johnson did, as more faithful to human nature, bolder, more emotional and more honest than the French classical playwrights such as Corneille and Racine. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century, German translators, who were great poets in their own right, such as Christoph Martin Wieland, Ludwig Tieck, and Karl Schlegel, produced translations of Shakespeare's complete works. Shakespeare's fame thus began to spread across the continent, given the now European-wide reputation and authority especially of Goethe, who was in effect Shakespeare's chief "publicist" at this time, the period from 1780 to 1830.

What accounts for not just Johnson's evaluation, raising Shakespeare to a new level in the public consciousness, but for that of the German writers? Probably Enlightenment ideas and ideals are at the root. In the eighteenth-century, old notions concerning various areas of human thought, philosophy, religion, and aesthetics began to be questioned. Shakespeare, with the forcefulness and directness of emotion in his works, fit in with the Enlightenment conception of the world and of mankind. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that at this point a kind of snowballing effect occurred, eventually carrying Shakespeare's fame beyond the English-speaking world and Western Europe as a whole. The fact that Shakespeare came to be translated into so many languages and to be appreciated by foreigners, almost as if he were one of their own, belies the notion that poetry is somehow "untranslatable." One could even say that it's precisely because Shakespeare's verse is so rich and so striking that it can be translated so effectively.

Shakespeare's fame, as stated, grew by leaps and bounds as the nineteenth-century progressed. This was partly for philosophical reasons, as well as for aesthetic ones. A new sense of tragedy and pessimism, in some sense the opposite of the optimistic and self-congratulatory mindset of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, became dominant in the Romantic era. Shakespeare's tragedies, though they had been written over 200 years earlier, were a fulfillment of the Romantic view of life, just as they had been, paradoxically, of the much, much different Enlightenment. And the same can be said of the 20th century and our own time, in which there have been, in the modernist and post-modernist periods, more attempts than ever before to show the negative side of human life and the world.

This brief sketch has outlined what I believe are the major events in Shakespeare's rise through history to the position he holds as an international cultural icon, as one whose reputation and artistic authority exceed those of all other writers of the past 500 years. There are many points that could be added. But despite history and changes in thought, the most important factor is still probably the intrinsic value of his works as poetry and as drama.