“Shakespeare steals stories from everybody, but what he does with those stories is clearly an act of his imagination and his will,” says Kahn.

Michael Kahn: Shakespeare, you know, I like to say he’s an explorer, he’s a scientist.  First of all, he’s always going into unchartered territory.  He steals stories from everybody, but what he does with those stories is clearly an act of his imagination and his will; and his intelligence and his observation.  I think he was a very, very close observer of people.

There are wonderful writers but there’ll never be another Shakespeare.  There’ll also never be another Shakespeare because there will never be a sort of renaissance of discovering the classical world, or discovering the use of language as there was then.  We’ll have all kinds of technological renaissances, but we probably won’t have a language renaissance ever again because language has “been discovered” and it’s not new to us.  If anything, we have to learn to be better at it and use it more interestingly than we do now.