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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 ma
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 cra
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 si
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.’”