Another argument made against the use of Shakespeare in the high school curriculum is that English has changed greatly since Shakespeare's time and that therefore a good percentage of the verbal content of the plays is no longer useful. My response would be that, yes, there have been changes, but not as many as one might suppose, and that compared to Chaucer's Middle English (200 years before Shakespeare), not many at all. Isaac Asimov, in his very useful book entitled Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare (1970), argues that it was Shakespeare's work that slowed down the language's rapid evolution, as if it would've been too great a cost to move too far away from the ability to read it without relative ease. And to go a little further with the argument, it becomes clear that the body that exerts the greatest gravitational pull on English itself, its de facto source of direction, is Shakespeare. No other writer comes close to providing as many starting points for learning about the language itself. More on this tomorrow.