The most influential man in history: Shakespeare is the exception. He was the most influential person who ever lived. He shaped our world more than any political or religious leader, more than any explorer or engineer. The gifted playwright who moves audiences to laughter and tears has also moved history. Do any other poets even begin to change our behaviour or our environment? W.H. Auden once wrote that "poetry makes nothing happen. It exists in the valley of its saying where executives would never want to tamper." Shakespeare has wandered away from the valley of his saying and hangs around in the most unlikely places, in 1950's teen rebel movies and in psychoanalysts' offices, in nightclubs and in mall food courts, in voting booths in the American South and in the trash of Central Park. The effects of his words on the world have been out of all proportion, monstrous and sublime, vertiginous in their consequences, far beyond anything he could have predicted.