[Max Goodman]

My disclaimer will be more self-indulgent than Shaun's: I'm an amateur admirer of Shakespeare, but one that's spent a lot of time with his work, and written about and with it.

The sonnets interest me far less than the plays, and (probably because our view of story has changed since Elizabethan times) the plays impress me less as complete works than as holders of extraordinary things: characters, lines, thoughts, passages, scenes, actions.

Originally Posted by E. Shaun Russell

his contemporaries ... also have a strong command of character...

Character may be even more subjective and harder to talk about than the other qualities under discussion. Harold Bloom credited Shakespeare with "the invention of the human." If I understood and remember well, he meant that Shakespeare's were the first fictional characters capable of change.

It seems to me that most of Shakespeare's characters are more lifelike than most fictional characters I encounter elsewhere. It's possible, of course, that this impression results from the feedback loop Shaun mentions; there are few or no non-Shakespearean characters I've spent as much time with.