The book "Hamilton: The Revolution", quotes Oskar Eustis as saying “Lin does exactly what Shakespeare does… He takes the language of the people, and heightens it by making it verse.” This quality along with the extraordinary acclaim that his musical "Hamilton" has garnered in the past year, has led many people to make this parallel between writer and performer Lin-Manuel Miranda and his predecessor William Shakespeare. But what exactly do these two men have in common?

First, both Miranda and the Bard wrote quite a bit of material. People remember Shakespeare not just for the quality of his work, but also the quantity. On top of his 37 plays, Shakespeare also wrote 146 sonnets. In a similar fashion, despite being only 36, Miranda has already written "Hamilton" as well as "In the Heights," another Broadway musical about a Latino neighborhood in northern Manhattan that won Best Musical at the Tony’s back in 2008. He also wrote some of the music for the Broadway show "Bring It On," did Spanish translations for the revival of "West Side Story", and is currently writing music for Disney’s newest princess movie "Moana". Simply, the vast amount of content created by the two men is impressive.

Writing that many plays seems even more remarkable when one takes into account the way in which the plays are written. With "Hamilton," Miranda faced the challenge of writing enough music to cover the two-and-a-half hour show. By creating musical motifs and using evolving rapping speeds to symbolize character development, he adequately covers the life of Alexander Hamilton and his contemporaries. Further expounding on his genius he writes lines with internal rhyme, and sometimes makes his end rhymes with different languages (e.g. in the song “My Shot” the line tailor’s apprentice is rhymed with the Latin phrase “loco parentis”). However, Shakespeare perhaps had a more difficult trial since he wrote his plays in iambic pentameter. This form of writing requires each line to have ten syllables, with the first syllable being unstressed, the second syllable being stressed, and then alternating back and forth to the end of the line. Both playwrights not only had to write eloquently about their subject matter, but they also had to do it in a sort of elevated format.

A final similarity between the two is the way in which they injected their work into popular culture. Granted, during Shakespeare’s time, pop culture was fairly limited; since the internet, television and radio did not exist, there were not as many different forms of entertainment. Nevertheless, Shakespeare’s plays appealed to and were attended by all audiences. Royalty, nobility, and commoners all went to the same theaters to watch the plays. Things have changed quite a bit in the last four hundred years. No longer is the theater the most popular form of entertainment; in fact, in the age of movies and digital music, live theater seems to be a sort of relic. That is until "Hamilton" opened. Once again, people of all ages and demographics flock to New York to see the show. But the show is no longer confined to the Richard Rodgers theater. Those who cannot get tickets are now able to appease themselves by listening to the cast album. Miranda has made great strides in bringing theater back to its original popularity.

So, there are some similarities between Lin-Manuel Miranda and Shakespeare, but does that make him the world’s next greatest playwright, actor and poet? Honestly, probably not. There will most likely never be another Shakespeare just like there will never be another band like the Beatles or another baseball player like Babe Ruth. "Hamilton" has had seemingly unprecedented success, and Miranda’s upcoming projects seem like more promising accomplishments. However, Shakespeare has reached near demi-god status, and it is unlikely that anyone will ever top the work he created.