Shakespeare the 'individual'?

A colleague questioned my assertion, in a curse description, that Shakespeare is the individual in world literature who is most prominent as a producer of world literature. The Bible and "Homer" may have had a more durable influence, but the Bible, even in the most fundamentalist construction, is confessedly of multiple authorship, and few hold to the idea of an individual Homeric author these days. (And even so. Homer's unavailability during the Western Middle Ages 'hurts' him in this respect). One could think of other figures from other linguistic traditions who have an even greater range than Shakespeare, like Goethe, but Goethe is not read the way Shakespeare is. Cervantes may be a possibility, but his chief creation may overshadow him. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky are more recent and just have not had quite the same impact either in depth or durability. One tires to avoid Anglocentric or bardolatric rhetoric, but I think the assertion is simply incontestable, Even of, as is certainly plausible, one sees the individuality of Shakespeare as an ascribed effect or readership, ideology, and reception-history, it still is an individual who is being so interpellated, and not an accretion of tradition, and there is no other individual who has been positioned this way....