Thought on Shakespeare

When Shakespeare was writing his plays back in 1600 -

The # of English speakers in the world : 4MM (roughly 0.7% of world's population)

# English speakers in the world today : 1500MM (roughly 20% of world's population)

So back in 1600, the number of people who could "understand" Shakespeare, was not much higher than the number of people who could follow Tamil or Telugu in the whole world...

Annamacharya's audience comparable to that of Shakespeare

400 years later, Shakespeare can be read by a fifth of the global population.

Most Telugu or Tamil writers by less than 1% of the world's population (no different from 1600)

Now Shakespeare is no doubt a very great artist.

But today he has this unchallenged reputation as perhaps the greatest literary figure in the whole wide world in the past 500 years. Or maybe even 1000.

Now would he have had this reputation but for the explosion of English language in the past 400 years?

If English were spoken by some 100 MM people today as opposed to 1500 MM people, would Shakespeare's stature be the same?

Of course not