discuss the significance of shakespeare's contribution to world literature
Shakespeare's influence Shakespeare is cited as an influence on a large number of writers in the following centuries, including major novelists such as Herman Melville,[8] Charles Dickens,[9] Thomas Hardy[22] and William Faulkner.[23] Examples of this influence include the large number of Shakespearean quotations throughout Dickens' writings[24] and the fact that at least 25 of Dickens' titles are drawn from Shakespeare,[25] while Melville frequently used Shakespearean devices, including formal stage directions and extended soliloquies, in Moby-Dick.[26] In fact, Shakespeare so influenced Melville that the novel's main antagonist, Captain Ahab, is a classic Shakespearean tragic figure, "a great man brought down by his faults."[8] Shakespeare has also influenced a number of English poets, especially Romantic poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge who were obsessed with self-consciousness, a modern theme Shakespeare anticipated in plays such as Hamlet.[27] Shakespeare's writings were so influential to English poetry of the 1800s that critic George Steiner has called all English poetic dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson "feeble variations on Shakespearean themes."[27]