I think OP was saying that knowing Shakespeare is inherently important because it transforms your ability to think.
For example, take a case where someone knows how to think, and has read relatively easy children's authors like Enid Blyton. This person would still have learnt to think from writing a a critical analysis of whatever novel they've read.
However their ability to think is still limited to merely the thought processes of an author for children ( Disclaimer: I have no intention of belittling Enid Blyton here).
By just reading Enid Blyton you can't think in terms of metaphors or similes or puns etc. By reading Shakespeare you gain an inherent ability to think in a completely new way. This is also perhaps very similar to what PG says in ANSI Common LISP about LISP's unusual appearance, to quote PG:
' You have to think in a language to write programs in it,
and it's hard to want something you can't describe. When I first
started writing programs-- in Basic-- I didn't miss recursion,
because I didn't know there was such a thing.'
Similarly if you didn't know there was such a thing as personification, you wouldn't miss it!
I appreciate the support, but I actually believe that literature in general, and Shakespeare in particular are important enough to be studied for their own sake. We are the stewards of our cultural heritage, and it is our place to keep it going. Knowing about and thinking about books makes people better in other ways than just giving them skills and tools to apply to other problems. Good art enriches life and humanity.
And having some common points, like all studying Shakespeare, is good because it means we can all talk and think about it together.
Studying the humanities is not necessary for a person to learn to think. I didn't mean to imply that. But studying the humanities can certainly help in that direction, and should be done anyway.
I asked because from the perspective of mental self improvement it seems to me that any sufficiently intricate and well formed literature ought to do as well and I was wondering if there was any reason for it to be Shakespeare in particular.
