Shakespeare: The World as Stage

Chapter Five. The Plays

NEARLY EVERYONE AGREES THAT William Shakespeare’s career as a playwright began in about 1590, but there is much less agreement on which plays began it. Depending on whose authority you favor, Shakespeare’s debut written offering might be any of at least eight works: The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentleman of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, King John, or the three parts of Henry VI.

The American authority Sylvan Barnet lists The Comedy of Errors as Shakespeare’s first play with Love’s Labour’s Lost second, but more recently Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, in the Oxford Complete Works, credit him with ten other plays-more than a quarter of his output-before either of those two comes along. Wells and Taylor place The Two Gentlemen of Verona at the head of their list-not on any documentary evidence, as they freely concede, but simply because it is notably unpolished (or has “an uncertainty of technique suggestive of inexperience,” as they rather more elegantly put it). The Arden Shakespeare, meanwhile, puts The Taming of the Shrew first, while the Riverside Shakespeare places the first part of Henry VI first. Hardly any two lists are the same.

For many plays all we can confidently adduce is a terminus ad quem-a date beyond which they could not have been written. Sometimes evidence of timing is seen in allusions to external events, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which seemingly pointed references are made to unseasonable weather and bad harvests (and England had very bad harvests in 1594 and 1595), or in Romeo and Juliet when Nurse speaks of an earthquake of eleven years before (London had a brief but startling one in 1580), but such hints are rare and often doubtful anyway. Many other judgments are made on little more than style. Thus The Comedy of Errors and Titus Andronicus “convey an aroma of youth,” in the words of Samuel Schoenbaum, while Barnet can, without blushing, suggest that Romeo and Juliet came before Othello simply because “one feels Othello is later.”

Arguments would run far deeper were it not for the existence of a small, plump book by one Francis Meres called Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury. Published in 1598, it is a 700-page compendium of platitudes and philosophical musings, little of it original and even less of it of interest to history except for one immeasurably helpful passage first noticed by scholars some two hundred years after Shakespeare’s death: “As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage. For comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love Labour’s Lost, his Love Labour’s Won, his Midsummer Night’s Dream, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy, his Richard the Second, Richard the Third, Henry the Fourth, King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet.”

This was rich stuff indeed. It provided the first published mention of four of Shakespeare’s plays-The Merchant of Venice, King John, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream-and additionally, in a separate passage, established that he had written at least some sonnets by this time, though they wouldn’t be published as a collected work for a further eleven years.

Rather more puzzling is the mention of Love’s Labour’s Won, about which nothing else is known. For a long time it was assumed that this was an alternative name for some play that we already possess-in all likelihood The Taming of the Shrew, which is notably absent from Meres’s list. Shakespeare’s plays were occasionally known by other names: Twelfth Night was sometimes called Malvolio, and Much Ado About Nothing was sometimes Benedick and Beatrice, so the possibility of a second title was plausible.

In 1953 the mystery deepened when an antiquarian book dealer in London, while moving stock, chanced upon a fragment of a bookseller’s inventory from 1603, which listed Love’s Labour’s Won and The Taming of the Shrew together-clearly suggesting that they weren’t the same play after all, and giving further evidence that Love’s Labour Won really was a separate play. If, as the inventory equally suggests, it existed in published form, there may once have been as many as 1,500 copies in circulation, so there is every chance that the play may one day turn up somewhere (a prospect thought most unlikely for Shakespeare’s other lost play, Cardenio, which appears to have existed only in manuscript). It is all a little puzzling. If Love’s Labour’s Won is a real and separate play, and was published, a natural question is why Heminges and Condell didn’t include it in the First Folio. No one can say.

In whatever order the plays came, thanks to Meres we know that by 1598, when he had been at it for probably much less than a decade, Shakespeare had already proved himself a dab hand at comedy, history, and tragedy, and had done enough-much more than enough, in fact-to achieve a lasting reputation. His success was not, it must be said, without its shortcuts. Shakespeare didn’t scruple to steal plots, dialogue, names, and titles-whatever suited his purpose. To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, Shakespeare was a wonderful teller of stories so long as someone else had told them first.

But then this was a charge that could be laid against nearly all writers of the day. To Elizabethan playwrights plots and characters were common property. Marlowe took his Doctor Faustus from a German Historia von D. Johann Fausten (by way of an English translation) and Dido Queen of Carthage directly from the Virgil’s Aeneid. Shakespeare’s Hamlet was preceded by an earlier Hamlet play, unfortunately now lost and its author unknown (though some believe it was the hazy genius Thomas Kyd), leaving us to guess how much his version owed to the original. His King Lear was similarly inspired by an earlier KingLeir. His Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (to give it its formal original title) was freely based on the poem The Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet by a promising young talent named Arthur Brooke, who wrote it in 1562 and then unfortunately drowned. Brooke in turn had taken the story from an Italian named Matteo Bandello. As You Like It was borrowed quite transparently from a work called Rosalynde, by Thomas Lodge, and The Winter’s Tale is likewise a reworking of Pandosto, a forgotten novel by Shakespeare’s bitter critic Robert Greene. Only a few of Shakespeare’s works-in particular the comedies A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Tempest- appear to have borrowed from no one.

What Shakespeare did, of course, was take pedestrian pieces of work and endow them with distinction and, very often, greatness. Before he reworked it Othello was insipid melodrama. In Lear’s earlier manifestation, the king was not mad and the story had a happy ending. Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing were inconsequential tales in a collection of popular Italian fiction. Shakespeare’s particular genius was to take an engaging notion and make it better yet. In The Comedy of Errors, he borrows a simple but effective plot device from Plautus-having twin brothers who have never met appear in the same town at the same time-but increases the comic potential exponentially by giving the brothers twin servants who are similarly underinformed.

Slightly more jarring to modern sensibilities was Shakespeare’s habit of lifting passages of text almost verbatim from other sources and dropping them into his plays. Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra both contain considerable passages taken with only scant alteration from Sir Thomas North’s magisterial translation of Plutarch, and The Tempest pays a similar uncredited tribute to a popular translation of Ovid. Marlowe’s “Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?” from Hero and Leander reappears unchanged in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and a couplet from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine-

Hola, ye pampered jades of Asia

What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day?

– finds its way into Henry IV, Part 2 as

And hollow pampered jades of Asia

Which cannot go but thirty miles a day.

Shakespeare at his worst borrowed “almost mechanically,” in the words of Stanley Wells, who cites a passage in Henry V in which the youthful king (and, more important, the audience) is given a refresher course in French history that is taken more or less verbatim from Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles. Coriolanus, in the First Folio, contains two lines that make no sense until one goes back to Sir Thomas North’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans and finds the same lines and the line immediately preceding, which Shakespeare (or more probably a subsequent scribe or compositor) inadvertently left out. Again, however, such borrowing had ample precedent. Marlowe in his turn took several lines from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and dropped them almost unchanged into Tamburlaine. The Faerie Queene, meanwhile, contains passages lifted whole (albeit in translation) from a work by the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto.

In the rush to entertain masses of people repeatedly, the rules of presentation became exceedingly elastic. In classical drama plays were strictly either comedies or tragedies. Elizabethan playwrights refused to be bound by such rigidities and put comic scenes in the darkest tragedies-the porter answering a late knock in Macbeth, for instance. In so doing they invented comic relief. In classical drama only three performers were permitted to speak in a given scene, and no character was allowed to talk to himself or the audience-so there were no soliloquies and no asides. These are features without which Shakespeare could never have become Shakespeare. Above all, plays before Shakespeare’s day were traditionally governed by what were known as “the unities”-the three principles of dramatic presentation derived from Aristotle’s Poetics, which demanded that dramas should take place in one day, in one place, and have a single plot. Shakespeare was happy enough to observe this restriction when it suited him (as in The Comedy of Errors), but he could never have written Hamlet or Macbeth or any of his other greatest works if he had felt strictly bound by it.

Other theatrical conventions were unformed or just emerging. The division of plays into acts and scenes-something else strictly regulated in classical drama-was yet unsettled in England. Ben Jonson inserted a new scene and scene number each time an additional character stepped onstage, however briefly or inconsequentially, but others did not use scene divisions at all. For the audience it mattered little, since action was continuous. The practice of pausing between acts didn’t begin until plays moved indoors, late in Shakespeare’s career, and it became necessary to break from time to time to trim the lights.

Almost the only “rule” in London theater that was still faithfully followed was the one we now call, for convenience, the law of reentry, which stated that a character couldn’t exit from one scene and reappear immediately in the next. He had rather to go away for a while. Thus, in Richard II, John of Gaunt makes an abrupt and awkward departure purely to be able to take part in a vital scene that follows. Why this rule out of all the many was faithfully observed has never, as far as I can make out, been satisfactorily explained.

But even by the very relaxed standards of the day, Shakespeare was invigoratingly wayward. He could, as in Julius Caesar, kill off the title character with the play not half done (though Caesar does come back later, briefly, as a ghost). He could write a play like Hamlet, where the main character speaks 1,495 lines (nearly as many as the number spoken by all the characters combined in The Comedy of Errors) but disappears for unnervingly long stretches-for nearly half an hour at one point. He constantly teased reality, reminding the audience that they were not in the real world but in a theater, as when he asked in Henry V, “Can this cockpit hold the vastie fields of France?” or implored the audience in Henry VI, Part 3 to “eke out our performance with your mind.”

His plays were marvelously variable, with the number of scenes ranging from seven to forty-seven, and with the number of speaking parts ranging from fourteen to more than fifty. The average play of the day ran to about 2,700 lines, giving a performance time of two and a half hours. Shakespeare’s plays ranged from fewer than 1,800 lines (for Comedy of Errors) to more than 4,000 (for Hamlet, which could take nearly five hours to play, though possibly no audience of his day ever saw it in full). On average his plays were made up of about 70 percent blank verse, 5 percent rhymed verse, and 25 percent prose, but he changed the proportions happily to suit his purpose. His history plays aside, he set two plays, The Merry Wives of Windsor and King Lear, firmly in England; he set none at all in London; and he never used a plot from his own times.

Shakespeare was not a particularly prolific writer. Thomas Heywood wrote or cowrote more than two hundred plays, five times the number Shakespeare produced in a career of similar length. Even so, signs of haste abound in Shakespeare’s work, even in the greatest of his plays. Hamlet is a student at the beginning of the play and thirty years old by its end, even though nothing like enough time has passed in the story. The Duke in The Two Gentlemen of Verona puts himself in Verona when in fact he can only mean Milan. Measure for Measure is set in Vienna, and yet the characters nearly all have Italian names.

Shakespeare may be the English language’s presiding genius, but that isn’t to say he was without flaws. A certain messy exuberance marked much of what he did. Sometimes it is just not possible to know quite what he meant. Jonathan Bate, writing in The Genius of Shakespeare, notes that a glancing six-word compliment to the queen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“fair vestal enthroned by the west”) is so productive of possible interpretation that it spawned twenty pages of discussion in a variorum edition* of Shakespeare’s works. Nearly every play has at least one or two lines that defeat interpretation, like these from Love’s Labour’s Lost:

O paradox! black is the badge of hell,

The hue of dungeons and the school of night.

What exactly he meant by “the school of night” is really anyone’s guess. Similarly uncertain is a reference early in The Merchant of Venice to “my wealthy Andrew docked in sand,” which could refer to a ship but possibly to a person. The most ambiguous example of all, however, is surely the line in King Lear that appeared originally (in the Quarto edition of 1608) as “swithald footed thrice the old, a nellthu night more and her nine fold.” Though the sentence has appeared in many versions in the four centuries since, no one has ever got it close to making convincing sense.

“Shakespeare was capable of prolixity, unnecessary obscurity, awkwardness of expression, pedestrian versifying and verbal inelegance,” writes Stanley Wells. “Even in his greatest plays we sometimes sense him struggling with plot at the expense of language, or allowing his pen to run away with him in speeches of greater length than the situation warrants.” Or as Charles Lamb put it much earlier, Shakespeare “runs line into line, embarrasses sentences and metaphors; before one idea has burst its shell, another is hatched out and clamorous for disclosure.”

Shakespeare was celebrated among his contemporaries for the speed with which he wrote and the cleanness of his copy, or so his colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell would have us believe. “His mind and hand went together,” they wrote in the introduction to the First Folio, “and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.” To which Ben Jonson famously replied in exasperation: “Would he had blotted a thousand!”

In fact he may have. The one place where we might just see Shakespeare at work is in the manuscript version of a play of the life of Sir Thomas More. The play was much worked on, and is in six hands (one of the authors was Henry Chettle, the man who apologized abjectly to Shakespeare for his part in the publishing of Greene’s Groat’s-Worth). It was never performed. Since its subject was a loyal, passionate Catholic who defied a Tudor monarch, it is perhaps a little surprising that it occurred as a suitable subject to anyone at all.

Some authorities believe that Shakespeare wrote three of the surviving pages. If so, they give an interesting insight, since they employ almost no punctuation and are remarkably-breathtakingly-liberal in their spelling. The word sheriff, as Stanley Wells notes, is spelled five ways in five lines-as shreiff, shreef, shreeve, Shreiue, and Shreue-which must be something of a record even by the relaxed and imaginative standards of Elizabethan orthography. The text also has lines crossed out and interlineations added, showing that Shakespeare did indeed blot-if indeed it was he. The evidence for Shakespeare is based on similarities in the letter a in Shakespeare’s signature and the More manuscript, the high number of y spellings (writing tyger rather than tiger, for instance, a practice thought to be old-fashioned and provincial), and the fact that a very odd spelling, scilens (for silence), appears in the manuscript for Thomas More and in the quarto version of Henry IV, Part 2. This assumes, of course, that the printer used Shakespeare’s manuscript and faithfully observed its spellings, neither of which is by any means certain or even compellingly probable. Beyond that, there is really nothing to go on but a gut feeling-a sense that the passage is recognizably the voice of Shakespeare.

It is certainly worth noting that the idea that Shakespeare might have had a hand in the play dates only from 1871. It is also worth noting that Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, the man who declared the passages to be by Shakespeare, was a retired administrator at the British Museum, not an active paleographer, and was in any case not formally trained in that inexact science. At all events nothing from Shakespeare’s own age links him to the enterprise.

Much is often made of Shakespeare’s learning-that he knew as much as any lawyer, doctor, statesman, or other accomplished professional of his age. It has even been suggested-seriously, it would appear-that two lines in Hamlet (“Doubt that the stars are fire / Doubt that the sun doth move”) indicate that he deduced the orbital motions of heavenly bodies well before any astronomer did. With enough exuberance and selective interpretation it is possible to make Shakespeare seem a veritable committee of talents. In fact a more sober assessment shows that he was pretty human.

He had some command of French, it would seem, and evidently quite a lot of Italian (or someone who could help him with quite a lot of Italian), for Othello and The Merchant of Venice closely followed Italian works that did not exist in English translation at the time he wrote. His vocabulary showed a more than usual interest in medicine, law, military affairs, and natural history (he mentions 180 plants and employs 200 legal terms, both large numbers), but in other respects Shakespeare’s knowledge was not all that distinguished. He was routinely guilty of anatopisms-that is, getting one’s geography wrong-particularly with regard to Italy, where so many of his plays were set. So in The Taming of the Shrew, he puts a sailmaker in Bergamo, approximately the most landlocked city in the whole of Italy, and in The Tempest and The Two Gentlemen of Verona he has Prospero and Valentine set sail from, respectively, Milan and Verona even though both cities were a good two days’ travel from salt water. If he knew Venice had canals, he gave no hint of it in either of the plays he set there. Whatever his other virtues, Shakespeare was not conspicuously worldly.

Anachronisms likewise abound in his plays. He has ancient Egyptians playing billiards and introduces the clock to Caesar’s Rome 1,400 years before the first mechanical tick was heard there. Whether by design or from ignorance, he could be breathtakingly casual with facts when it suited his purposes to be so. In Henry VI, Part 1, for example, he dispatches Lord Talbot twenty-two years early, conveniently allowing him to predecease Joan of Arc. In Coriolanus he has Lartius refer to Cato three hundred years before Cato was born.

Shakespeare’s genius had to do not really with facts, but with ambition, intrigue, love, suffering-things that aren’t taught in school. He had a kind of assimilative intelligence, which allowed him to pull together lots of disparate fragments of knowledge, but there is almost nothing that speaks of hard intellectual application in his plays-unlike, say, those of Ben Jonson, where learning hangs like bunting on every word. Nothing we find in Shakespeare betrays any acquaintance with Tacitus, Pliny, Suetonius, or others who influenced Jonson and were second nature to Francis Bacon. That is a good thing-a very good thing indeed-for he would almost certainly have been less Shakespeare and more a showoff had he been better read. As John Dryden put it in 1668: “Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learn’d.”

Much has been written about the size of Shakespeare’s vocabulary. It is actually impossible to say how many words Shakespeare knew, and in any case attempting to do so would be a fairly meaningless undertaking. Marvin Spevack in his magnificent and hefty concordance-the most scrupulous, not to say obsessive, assessment of Shakespearean idiom ever undertaken-counts 29,066 different words in Shakespeare, but that rather generously includes inflected forms and contractions. If instead you treat all the variant forms of a word-for example, take, takes, taketh, taking, tak’n, taken, tak’st, tak’t, took, tooke, took’st, and tookst-as a single word (or “lexeme,” to use the scholarly term), which is the normal practice, his vocabulary falls back to about 20,000 words, not a terribly impressive number. The average person today, it is thought, knows probably 50,000 words. That isn’t because people today are more articulate or imaginatively expressive but simply because we have at our disposal thousands of common words-television, sandwich, seatbelt, chardonnay, cinematographer-that Shakespeare couldn’t know because they didn’t yet exist.

Anyway, and obviously, it wasn’t so much a matter of how many words he used, but what he did with them-and no one has ever done more. It is often said that what sets Shakespeare apart is his ability to illuminate the workings of the soul and so on, and he does that superbly, goodness knows, but what really characterizes his work-every bit of it, in poems and plays and even dedications, throughout every portion of his career-is a positive and palpable appreciation of the transfixing power of language. A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains an enchanting work after four hundred years, but few would argue that it cuts to the very heart of human behavior. What it does do is take, and give, a positive satisfaction in the joyous possibilities of verbal expression.

And there was never a better time to delve for pleasure in language than the sixteenth century, when novelty blew through English like a spring breeze. Some twelve thousand words, a phenomenal number, entered the language between 1500 and 1650, about half of them still in use today, and old words were employed in ways that had not been tried before. Nouns became verbs and adverbs; adverbs became adjectives. Expressions that could not grammatically have existed before-such as “breathing one’s last” and “backing a horse,” both coined by Shakespeare-were suddenly popping up everywhere. Double negatives and double superlatives-“the most unkindest cut of all”-troubled no one and allowed an additional degree of emphasis that has since been lost.

Spelling was luxuriantly variable, too. You could write “ St Paul ’s” or “St Powles” and no one seemed to notice or care. Gracechurch Street was sometimes “Gracious Steet,” sometimes “ Grass Street ”; Stratford-upon-Avon became at times “ Stratford upon Haven.” People could be extraordinarily casual even with their own names. Christopher Marlowe signed himself “Cristofer Marley” in his one surviving autograph and was registered at Cambridge as “Christopher Marlen.” Elsewhere he is recorded as “Morley” and “Merlin,” among others. In like manner the impresario Philip Henslowe indifferently wrote “Henslowe” or “Hensley” when signing his name, and others made it Hinshley, Hinchlow, Hensclow, Hynchlowes, Inclow, Hinchloe, and a half dozen more. More than eighty spellings of Shakespeare’s name have been recorded, from “Shappere” to “Shaxberd.” (It is perhaps worth noting that the spelling we all use is not the one endorsed by the Oxford English Dictionary, which prefers “Shakspere.”) Perhaps nothing speaks more eloquently of the variability of spelling in the age than the fact that a dictionary published in 1604, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words, spelled “words” two ways on the title page.

Pronunciations, too, were often very different from today’s. We know from Shakespeare that knees, grease, grass, and grace all rhymed (at least more or less), and that he could pun reason with raisin and Rome with room. The first hundred or so lines of Venus and Adonis offer such striking rhyme pairs as satiety and variety, fast and haste, bone and gone, entreats and frets, swears and tears, heat and get. Elsewhere plague is rhymed with wage, grapes with mishaps, Calais with challice. (The name of the French town was often spelled “Callis” or “Callice.”)

Whether or not it was necessary to pronounce all the letters in a word-such as the k’s in knight and knee- was a hot issue. Shakespeare touches upon it comically in Love’s Labour’s Lost when he has the tedious Holofernes attack those “rackers of orthogoraphy…who would call calf ‘cauf,’ half ‘hauf,’ neighbour ‘nebour’ and neigh ‘ne.’”

Much of the language Shakespeare used is lost to us now without external guidance. In an experiment in 2005, the Globe in London staged a production of Troilus and Cressida in “Early Modern English” or “Original Pronunciation.” The critic John Lahr, writing in the New Yorker, estimated that he could understand only about 30 percent of what was said. Even with modern pronunciations, meanings will often be missed. Few modern listeners would realize that in Henry V when the French princess Catherine mispronounces the English “neck” as “nick,” she has perpetrated a gross (and to a Shakespearean audience hugely comical) obscenity-though Shakespeare’s language on the whole was actually quite clean, indeed almost prudish. Where Ben Jonson manured his plays, as it were, with frequent interjections of “turd i’ your teeth,” “shit o’ your head,” and “I fart at thee,” Shakespeare’s audiences had to be content with a very occasional “a pox on’t,” “God’s bread,” and one “whoreson jackanapes.” (After 1606 profanities were subject to hefty fines and so largely vanished.)

In many ways the language Shakespeare used was quite modern. He never employed the old-fashioned seeth but rather used the racier, more modern sees, and much preferred spoke to spake, cleft to clave, and goes to goeth. The new King James Bible, by contrast, opted for the older forms in each instance. At the same time Shakespeare maintained a lifelong attachment to thou in preference to you even though by the end of the sixteenth century thou was quaint and dated. Ben Jonson used it hardly at all. He was also greatly attached to, and remarkably unself-conscious about, provincialisms, many of which became established in English thanks to his influence (among them cranny, forefathers, and aggravate), but initially grated on the ears of sophisticates.

He coined-or, to be more carefully precise, made the first recorded use of-2,035 words, and interestingly he indulged the practice from the very outset of his career. Titus Andronicus and Love’s Labour’s Lost, two of his earliest works, have 140 new words between them.

Not everyone appreciated this creative impulse. When Robert Greene referred to him as being “beautified by our feathers,” he was mocking a Shakespeare neologism in beautified. Undaunted, Shakespeare accelerated the pace as his career proceeded. In plays written during his most productive and inventive period-Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear- neologisms occur at the fairly astonishing rate of one every two and a half lines. Hamlet alone gave audiences about six hundred words that, according to all other evidence, they had never heard before.

Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, critical, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany, and countless others (including countless). Where would we be without them? He was particularly prolific, as David Crystal points out, when it came to attaching un prefixes to existing words to make new words that no one had thought of before-unmask, unhand, unlock, untie, unveil and no fewer than 309 others in a similar vein. Consider how helplessly prolix the alternatives to any of these terms are and you appreciate how much punch Shakespeare gave English.

He produced such a torrent of new words and meanings that a good many, as Otto Jespersen once bemusedly observed, “perhaps were not even clearly understood by the author himself.” Certainly many of them failed to take hold. Undeaf, untent, and unhappy (as a verb), exsufflicate, bepray, and insultment were among those that were scarcely heard again. But a surprisingly large number did gain common currency and about eight hundred are still used today-a very high proportion. As Crystal says, “Most modern authors, I imagine, would be delighted if they contributed even one lexeme to the future of the language.”

His real gift was as a phrasemaker. “Shakespeare’s language,” says Stanley Wells, “has a quality, difficult to define, of memorability that has caused many phrases to enter the common language.” Among them: one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, bag and baggage, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, be in a pickle, budge an inch, the milk of human kindness, more sinned against than sinning, remembrance of things past, beggar all description, cold comfort, to thine own self be true, more in sorrow than in anger, the wish is father to the thought, salad days, flesh and blood, foul play, tower of strength, be cruel to be kind, blinking idiot, with bated breath, tower of strength, pomp and circumstance, foregone conclusion-and many others so repetitiously irresistible that we have debased them into clichés. He was so prolific that he could (in Hamlet) put two in a single sentence: “Though I am native here and to the manner born, it is a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance.”

If we take the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as our guide, then Shakespeare produced roughly one-tenth of all the most quotable utterances written or spoken in English since its inception-a clearly remarkable proportion.

Yet curiously English was still struggling to gain respectability. Latin was still the language of official documents and of serious works of literature and learning. Thomas More’s Utopia, Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, and Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica were all in Latin. The Bodleian Library in Oxford in 1605 possessed almost six thousand books. Of these, just thirty-six were in English. Attachment to Latin was such that in 1568 when one Thomas Smith produced the first textbook on the English language, he wrote it in Latin.

Thanks in no small measure to the work of Shakespeare and his fellows, English was at last rising to preeminence in the country of its creation. “It is telling,” observes Stanley Wells, “that William Shakespeare’s birth is recorded in Latin but that he dies in English, as ‘William Shakespeare, gentleman.’”