"Shakespeare" is used as shorthand for supreme achievement in literature in the same way Michelangelo is used as shorthand for supreme achievement in art and Newton for science. All these figures were products of that incredible, intense flowering of post-medieval forward looking thought that we call the Renaissance, leading into the Enlightenment. They have become totems. But art, and science and literature progress and change. And all these people, were they alive today, would embrace that change, I'm sure.
Shakespeare isn't remembered because his "version of English...helps makes his works superior", whatever that means. Shakespeare wrote in early modern English and in the literary style of his time, but it is the beauty and imaginative reach of his poetry and his psychological complexity, in the plays as much as in the sonnets, that makes him stand out, not the fact that he wrote "thou hast" instead of "you have" and used the auxiliary verb "do" ("rough winds do shake", "as two spent swimmers that do cling together"). Of course modernising Shakespeare is unnecessary but in those examples, I would argue that very little would be lost in modernising "thou hast" to "you have" and the only problem with "rough winds shake" and "as two spent swimmers that cling together" would be in the metre. The genius of Shakespeare doesn't lie in his old-fashioned syntax and vocabulary because he absolutely wasn't old fashioned!! He invented words! If you want to play in the same ballpark as Shakespeare be modern.
And I'll leave it there, I think.
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