It’s amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

Abrams is registering a critical commonplace with a historian’s sense of scale: Shakespeare’s reputation is not a local or temporary fashion but a recurring judgment that reasserts itself across centuries, nations, and translations. The line implies that even when literary tastes shift and rival canons arise, Shakespeare continues to be read, staged, and revalued as a benchmark of dramatic and poetic achievement. By stressing “all languages,” Abrams also points to the paradox of Shakespeare’s durability: although rooted in early modern English, his characters, plots, and verbal inventiveness survive the losses and transformations of translation, suggesting a universality of human motives and theatrical power that critics and audiences repeatedly find unmatched.