Whatever the merits of the other contributions to this golden age, though, it is clear that one man, William Shakespeare, single-handedly changed the English language to a significant extent in the late 16th and early 17th Century. Skakespeare took advantage of the relative freedom and flexibility and the protean nature of English at the time, and played free and easy with the already liberal grammatical rules, for example in his use nouns as verbs, adverbs, adjectives and substantives - an early instance of the “verbification” of nouns which modern language purists often decry - in phrases such as “he pageants us”, “it out-herods Herod”, dog them at the heels, the good Brutus ghosted, “Lord Angelo dukes it well”, “uncle me no uncle”, etc.
He had a vast vocabulary (34,000 words by some counts) and