Even if you've never read one of his sonnets or seen one of his plays – even if you've never so much as watched a movie adaptation – you're likely to have quoted him unwittingly. He gave us uniquely vivid ways in which to express hope and despair, sorrow and rage, love and lust. Without him, our vocabulary would be just too different. During his 52 years on Earth, he enriched the English language in ways so profound that it's hard to fully gauge his impact. That isn't a wish likely to be granted to Shakespeare himself any time soon. 'Thou art a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood' might just do it, borrowed from King Lear railing against his daughter, Goneril. Then again, perhaps he'd settle for more aloof damnation, along the lines of Orlando's insult to Jaques in As You Like It: 'I do desire we may be better strangers.' If the fact that William Shakespeare's First Folio, that legacy-defining collection of his plays, is turning 400 has passed you by, you can be sure he'd have had a zinger of a putdown to sling your way.
