Why is Shakespeare Great?

Cecil Adams explains to a guy with my own name that Shakespeare is greater than Tom Clancy.

Go at it with an open mind, and with any luck you'll see what all the fuss is about. If not--well, not to be brutal, dear Mark, but the fault isn't in Shakespeare.

That would be surfer Mark from California he's talking to. It's hard to convince a student that "It's not the writer being too cryptic but that you never learned to read or think very well."