style is all

In Shakespeare’s later works character has grown unindividual and unreal; drama has become conventional or operatic; the words remain more tremendously, more exquisitely, more thrillingly alive than ever—the excuse and the explanation of the rest.

[...]

At last, it was simply for style that Shakespeare lived; everything else had vanished. He began as a poet, and as a poet he ended.

—Lytton Strachey, introduction to Words and Poetry (The Hogarth Press, 1928) by G H W Rylands