William Shakespeare Back to Top
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A page from Hamlet, from Shakespeare's First Folio
A page from “Hamlet” from Shakespeare's First Folio
(from Hamlet on the Ramparts, originally from Folger Shakespeare Library)
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 he personally coined an estimated 2,000 neologisms or new words in his many works, including, but by no means limited to, bare-faced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, obscene, frugal, aerial, gnarled, homicide, brittle, radiance, dwindle, puking, countless, submerged, vast, lack-lustre, bump, cranny, fitful, premeditated, assassination, courtship, eyeballs, ill-tuned, hot-blooded, laughable, dislocate, accommodation, eventful, pell-mell, aggravate, excellent, fretful, fragrant, gust, hint, hurry, lonely, summit, pedant, gloomy, and hundreds of other terms still commonly used today. By some counts, almost one in ten of the words used by Shakespeare were his own invention, a truly remarkable achievement (it is the equivalent of a new word here and then, after just a few short phrases, another other new word here). However, not all of these were necessarily personally invented by Shakespeare himself: they merely appear for the first time in his published works, and he was more than happy to make use of other people’s neologisms and local dialect words, and to mine the latest fashions and fads for new ideas.
He also introduced countless phrases in common use today, such as one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, brave new world, in my mind’s eye, laughing stock, love is blind, star-crossed lovers, as luck would have it, fast and loose, once more into the breach, sea change, there’s the rub, to the manner born, a foregone conclusion, beggars all description, it's Greek to me, a tower of strength, make a virtue of necessity, brevity is the soul of wit, with bated breath, more in sorrow than in anger, truth will out, cold comfort, cruel only to be kind, fool’s paradise and flesh and blood, among many others.
By the time of Shakespeare, word order had become more fixed in a subject-verb-object pattern, and English had developed a complex auxiliary verb system, although to be was still commonly used as the auxiliary rather than the more modern to have (e.g. I am come rather than I have come). Do was sometimes used as an auxiliary verb and sometimes not (e.g. say you so? or do you say so?). Past tenses were likewise still in a state of flux, and it was still acceptable to use clomb as well as climbed, clew as well as clawed, shove as well as shaved, digged as well as dug, etc. Plural noun endings had shrunk from the six of Old English to just two, “-s” and “-en”, and again Shakespeare sometimes used one and sometimes the other. The old verb ending “-en” had in general been gradually replaced by “-eth” (e.g. loveth, doth, hath, etc), although this was itself in the process of being replaced by the northern English verb ending “-es”, and Shakespeare used both (e.g. loves and loveth, but not the old loven). Even over the period of Shakespeare’s output there was a noticeable change, with “-eth” endings outnumbering “-es” by over 3 to 1 during the early period from 1591-1599, and “-es” outnumbering “-eth” by over 6 to 1 during 1600-1613.
A comparison of a passage from "King Lear" in the 1623 First Folio with the same passage from a more familiar modern edition below gives some idea of some of the changes that were still underway in Shakespeare's time:
Sir, I loue you more than words can weild ye matter,
Deerer than eye-sight, space, and libertie,
Beyond what can be valewed, rich or rare,
No lesse then life, with grace, health, beauty, honor:
As much as Childe ere lou'd, or Father found.
A loue that makes breath poore, and speech vnable,
Beyond all manner of so much I loue you.
Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter,
Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty,
Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare,
No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honour,
As much as childe e'er loved, or father found.
A love that makes breath poor and speech unable,
Beyond all manner of 'so much' I love you.
Other than the spellings of words such as weild, libertie,