Clothing

The major theaters served as fashion runways, setting popular trends in clothing. Costumes were elaborate, expensive, and often borrowed from or donated by local tailors, cobblers, and jewelers. These clothiers could then advertise that they were producing the clothes being worn in the most fashionable theaters in town. And in late 1500s - early 1600s England, fashion was serious business:

In these days a wondrous excess of apparel had spread itself all over England, and the habit of our own country, though a peculiar vice incident to our apish nation, grew into such contempt, that men by their new fangled garments, and too gaudy apparel, discovered a certain deformity and arrogancy of mind whilst they jetted up and down in their silks glittering with gold and silver, either imbroidered or laced. The Queen, observing that, to maintain this excess, a great quantity of money was carried yearly out of the land, to buy silks and other outlandish wares, to the impoverishing of the commonwealth; and that many of the nobility which might be of great service to the commonwealth and others that they might seem of noble extraction, did, to their own undoing, not only waste their estates, but also run so far in debt, that of necessity they came within the danger of law thereby, and attempted to raise troubles and commotions when they had wasted their own patrimonies

• A Complete History of England: IV. The history of Queen Elizabeth I, written by Edward, lord Herbert of Cherbury in 1706, page 452.

See also:

Stephenson, Henry Thew. The Elizabethan People. New York, Henry Holt and Company, 1910. Shakespeare Online. 20 Feb. 2010. (accessed March 27, 2014) http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/elizabethanclothes.html

Language

There was no dictionary of the English language prior to 1755. In the Elizabethan period, London was teeming with foreign trade and with it came linguistic influences from many far-flung cultures. English was a fluid, dynamic language and the plays of the period are famous for their wordplay. Theaters of the day became laboratories for language with new words being adopted, adapted, or invented to convey the emotions of the characters. Shakespeare alone is believed to have invented (or at least been the first to write down) some 1,300 common words.

See The Development of Early Modern English, by Marta Zapala-Kraj, 2009.

Thought/Society

In Hamlet Act 3, Scene 2, Shakespeare describes acting (and by extension, the purpose of theater) as being an art "whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure".

Shakespeare's plays reflect the society they were written for. England was in a period of transition between its Medieval past and its Renaissance future and the growth pangs of that transition were being played out on stage. Among Shakespeare's greatest influences on the art of theatrical storytelling is the heavy use of the soliloquy as a means of allowing the audience to listen to a character's most intimate thoughts. As we listen, we meet people who are simultaneously progressive and old fashioned. They have complex, multi-faceted personalities and think of themselves as unique individuals defined as much by merit and personality as by social class. We hear superstition wrestling with science, urban sophistication clashing with provincial wisdom, and numerous variations on the eternal human question: "Given the knowledge of our own mortality, what should we do with the time that we have to be alive?"

See:

Shakespeare's Philosophy, by Colin McGinn, 2009.

From Shakespeare to Existentialism: An Original Study : Essays on Shakespeare and Goethe, Hegel and Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud, Jaspers, Heidegger, and Toynbee, by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, 1980