No he isn’t. You’re confusing sales with popularity. Yes Shakespeare sells a lot, but he’s required reading for every high school kid in the English speaking world. To be popular people have to read your writing VOLUNTARILY, and out side of the lit nerd community basically nobody reads Shakespeare voluntarily. If most of your friends enjoyed the Shakespeare they had to read in high school then most of your friends are lit nerds.
Great he coined a bunch of words, what’s that have to do with the discussion. I didn’t say he wasn’t useful, or important, I said he wasn’t POPULAR that normal people do not voluntarily read his work.
Plot is the point of story. Literature is what lit nerds read and everybody else avoids after they get out of high school because most of it has no plot and is laden by insipid annoying “wow” language.
Popularity is being the most performed playwright in the world by far. The most adapted by far and the most quoted by far. Beethoven is more popular than Lady Gaga even though most people “on the street” voluntarily listen to the latter more than the former. Plot is an abstraction. It only comes out via language. Look at the opening sentence of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. The language is the story. Does this not give you a chill down your spine?
“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”