Shakespeare coined - or at least documented - hundreds of words (like "accommodation", "puking" and "majestic") and phrases (including "a heart of gold" and "too much of a good thing") still in common use.

And many Shakespearean quotations are also familiar, even to many who've never seen or read his plays: "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"; "Off with his head"; "To be or not to be, that is the question", among many others.

One soliloquy alone in Hamlet has inspired several film, fiction and TV titles - To Be Or Not To Be, What Dreams May Come, Slings and Arrows, Outrageous Fortune, Perchance to Dream, The Undiscovered Country - just to cite those "in my book of memory" (also from Shakespeare).

He's also been written about, borrowed from and alluded to innumerable times and when the facts are not available - or even when they are - he and his circle have inspired many literary works, including Germaine Greer's book about Ann Hathaway, Shakespeare's Wife, and Maggie O'Farrell's recent award-winning novel Hamnet - about the death of the Shakespeare's son.

Unsurprisingly, given this deep and abiding cultural permeation, interest in Shakespeare shows no signs of ending - and Canberra is no exception.

But while Shakespeare has sometimes acquired an aura of academic fustiness and inaccessibility, there's plenty of evidence he can still be the popular entertainer he was in his own time, with staple elements such as romance, high drama and low comedy often co-existing in his works.

This year, we've already seen Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand in the Joel Coen film The Tragedy of Macbeth, and the new Steven Spielberg adaptation of West Side Story, the classic musical reworking of Romeo and Juliet.

Later in the year, Bell Shakespeare is planning to bring productions of Hamlet and The Comedy of Errors to The Playhouse.

As for local performances, Lakespeare & Co. will be presenting As You Like It as the fourth Shakespeare by the Lakes production this month with a mix of free and paid shows, and Canberra Repertory Society is staging Romeo and Juliet in June and, later this month, Tom Stoppard's Hamlet riff Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

And on a related note, a portrait of the playwright is a headliner in Shakespeare to Winehouse: Icons from the National Portrait Gallery, London, which will be on at the National Portrait Gallery from March.

Actor, director and producer John Bell founded the theatre company that bears his name, presenting Shakespeare's works for decades. Although he's no longer involved in Bell Shakespeare, he's well placed to discuss Shakespeare's enduring success and popularity.

"There are several elements to it," Bell says.

"He tells great stories, interesting and dramatic and often quite mythical and magical. He goes beyond mere naturalism into something more imaginative."

Some of the plays have supernatural elements - ghosts, witches, fairies, spirits - while others incorporate elements such as women disguising themselves as men.

"He's very clever with structure," Bell says.

Shakespeare's works often juggle multiple characters and storylines and he knew how to maintain and relieve tension and to write both tragedy and comedy, often in the same work.

"He knew how to write a play."

Shakespeare wrote characters that every actor wants to play, Bell says, and he gave them words to speak that were beautiful, colourful and memorable.

"But the most important thing is his humanity. He understood people more than any other writer has ever done," Bell says.

Shakespeare did not create static characters but portrayed the complexities of people from the inside, Bell says, citing literary critic Harold Bloom's claim that the playwright invented the idea of personality as we now know it.

"They're open to many interpretations," Bell says of the characters.

"There's not just one way to play them."

And, he says, he thinks there are many ways to present Shakespeare, as long as the text is respected.

That's not to say Bell thinks any approach will succeed.

He says Patrick Stewart told him of playing Othello in a production where the cast was otherwise all black, reversing the racial roles. Stewart admitted it didn't work.

While Shakespeare has sometimes been criticised as anti-Semitic and sexist, Bell says the former shows "very limited imagination" - in The Merchant of Venice, it's the cruelty of a privileged, exclusive society that marginalises Jews such as Shylock that's being critiqued, he says.

As for sexism, while acknowledging that Shakespeare lived in a time and society where women were limited in their choices, he argues there are many great female parts in the plays.

"Every actress wants to play those roles."

And cross-gender casting is often effectively employed now: for example, Kate Mulvany played Richard III for Bell Shakespeare to much acclaim.

One of the great female roles in Shakespeare is the latter character in Romeo and Juliet, which Bell says "is still the most famous love story" as well as "a mix of comedy, drama, romance and tragedy", elements that must be combined with skill.

While Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy with elements of comedy, As You Like It is lighter, Bell says, "very relaxed and easygoing" though not without its own melancholy.

The comedy also has a central female character, Rosalind, who is exiled from her home city and disguises herself as a young man for protection, in doing so gaining freedoms a woman of the time did not have.

"She's a wonderful, witty, clever, charming character."

And, this being a comedy, it's not only full of romance but mistaken identities and other complications. The play's best-known speech is "All the world's a stage", delineating the various periods of life using, as Shakespeare often did, a theatrical metaphor.

Bell notes that Shakespeare's plays, as well as being performed in many interpretations themselves, have inspired many artists in other fields to create major works, from ballet - Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet - to opera - Verdi's Falstaff - to musicals such as West Side Story, a version of which has also been in cinemas recently.

Speaking of films, there have been many other notable Shakespearean screen adaptations including Julie Taymor's Titus, Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew, Laurence Olivier's films of Henry V, Hamlet and Richard III and Orson Welles' Macbeth, Othello and Falstaff aka Chimes at Midnight (with a script combining text from four plays).

As for Shakespeare himself, the playwright - also a poet, actor and theatre-company owner - is often considered a mysterious figure, and there have been unproven theories that someone else wrote his plays.

However, Bell says, "There's a lot to find out if you dig deep enough" - and people are still digging.

Another veteran with a background in Shakespeare is Tony Knight, the former head of acting at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts. He is directing Lakespeare & Co.'s As You Like It. Knight did his doctorate on Richard Burbage, the first actor to play Hamlet.

Knight says he'd never directed As You Like It, which was one of the reasons he wanted to do it. It also helped that one of his old NIDA colleagues, Karen Vickery, was involved (she is playing the melancholy nobleman Jaques).

"It's one of the best of the comedies," Knight says.

"It's very much about love."

The characters - whether exiled from the city or pursuing those who have been - "go into the woods to be transformed into better people", Knight says.

"They've got to drop their facades, the personae they don't want any more."

And the payoff?

"Eight characters get married, more than any other Shakespeare play; there are four marriages at the end."

For this production, the text has been shortened and the style will be "very raw, very festive - a three-hour play reduced to two hours".

While the play is still developing in rehearsal, it's clear this is not attempting to be solemnly reverential, but, as in Shakespeare's time, a crowd-pleasing entertainment. Knight says, "There's going to be interaction with the audience, lots of little things ... people might even find themselves on stage."

Rosalind is Natasha Vickery's first Shakespearean role in Canberra. She says, "Shakespeare was such a revolutionary in how he got so many incredible female characters in so many of his plays."

Many of them were more than a match for the male characters, she says, even in Shakespeare's time when women weren't allowed on stage and even when, like Rosalind, they had to "take on a man's role to be free".

Directing Romeo and Juliet for Rep will be Kelly Roberts and Chris Zuber. The married couple are both school drama teachers who have acted in as well as directed Shakespeare's plays and are accustomed to getting students involved by quickly getting them on their feet. Zuber says Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet, as elsewhere, was adept at capturing and expressing people's genuine feelings and thoughts.

"He does it in a way that makes you say, 'Oh, that's the thing I felt or experienced but couldn't articulate."

It's yet another reason the popularity and the power of Shakespeare continue in people's imaginations and on the world's stages and screens.