30 Great Myths about Shakespeare

by Laurie Maguire

  Notes

  1 The lines in Shakespeare read: “The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself, / Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve; / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind.”

  2 Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1875), pp. 319–20.

  3 Lytton Strachey, “Shakespeare's Final Period,” in Literary Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), p. 2.

  4 Anthony B. Dawson, “Tempest in a Teapot: Critics, Evaluation, Ideology,” in Maurice Charney (ed.), “Bad” Shakespeare: Reevaluations of the Shakespeare Canon (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press, 1988), p. 62.

  5 Strachey, “Shakespeare's Final Period,” pp. 11–12.

  6 Gary Taylor, “Shakespeare's Midlife Crisis,” Guardian, 3 May 2004.

  7 The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Methuen, 1954; repr. 1958), p. xxv; The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, Arden (London: A. & C. Black, 2001), pp. 39–40.

  8 Reviews by Eric Shorter and Michael Billington, excerpted in John O'Connor and Katharine Goodland, A Directory of Shakespeare in Performance 1970–2005, vol. 1: Great Britain, 1970–2005 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 1357–8.

  Myth 21

  Shakespeare had a huge vocabulary

  We all know that Shakespeare's verbal creativity is a major part of his reputation and his ongoing appeal. His works—in particular the popular narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece—began being anthologized during his lifetime: Robert Allot's book of quotations England's Parnassus (1600) includes extracts from Love's Labour's Lost, Richard II, Richard III, 1 Henry IV, and, especially, Romeo and Juliet. The project of anthologizing has continued ever since. Alexander Pope's 1725 edition of Shakespeare provided a useful service to its readers: “Some of the most shining passages are distinguished by commas in the margin, and where the beauty lay not in particulars but in the whole a star is prefixed to the scene”: passages so marked included Portia's speech on mercy in the courtroom of The Merchant of Venice (4.1.181–202) and Mercutio's flight of fancy on Queen Mab in Romeo and Juliet (1.4.55–96). Shakespeare—or his publishers (see Myth 4)—had already anticipated this kind of highlighting: early printed texts also use the inverted comma in the left-hand margin to identify quotable passages. Polonius's advice to Laertes in Hamlet in both the 1603 (where Polonius is called Corambis) and 1604 texts is marked in this way (1.3.58–81). And his lines about borrowers and lenders were, of course, already proverbial: productions of the scene today often have the two adult children rolling their eyes over the familiarity of their father's list of old saws. Lists of phrases which we owe to Shakespeare are easily found on the internet and in print, and many of them are so familiar that they have lost their initial contact with their context in Shakespeare's plays: more sinned against than sinning, tongue-tied, flesh and blood, without rhyme or reason, laughing stock, more in sorrow than in anger, short shrift, Greek to me, world is your oyster, cold comfort, bated breath, discretion is the better part of valor (or Valerie, as Roger McGough memorably wrote in his Watchwords [1969]). So Shakespeare, perhaps the world's greatest wordsmith, must have had a huge vocabulary, no?

  This is a difficult question to answer, since opinions vary on how a person's vocabulary should best be quantified. But David Crystal, the expert on this question, cites a figure for Shakespeare's vocabulary of 20,000 separate words (so that doesn't double-count plural forms or tenses: “hawk” and “hawks” count as one word, not two; “fly,” “flew,” “flown” count as one word). This compares with an available vocabulary of words in English at the time Shakespeare was writing of around 150,000 words. By comparison with other writers of the time, Shakespeare has a large recorded vocabulary, but that is at least in part because he wrote across different genres which required different registers, and because his extant work is substantial: he wrote a lot. For contrast, Crystal proposes 50,000 words as an average active vocabulary for an educated person at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with an available vocabulary in English of around 600,000, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). So Shakespeare's vocabulary is less than half of your own, and represents a slightly lower proportion of the available words than yours does.1

  So what about Shakespeare as a coiner of words? Here, the OED—which is currently being revised—has been a rather misleading source. Shakespeare has been credited with the first usage of many words that are now common, among them “inauspicious,” to “embrace,” “sanctimonious.” Many of the words he apparently invented have not taken off, for example “allottery,” meaning a share (in As You Like It 1.1.69) or the word “fleshment” in King Lear (2.2.120) which the OED defines as “the action of ‘fleshing’; hence, the excitement resulting from a first success.” Crystal lists over 2,000 words from the OED in which Shakespeare is the first or only recorded user, or for which Shakespeare is credited with a different meaning.2 But these examples may be deceptive. The lexicographers who compiled the entries for the dictionary in the era before digitized and searchable texts were more familiar with Shakespeare's works than with works by contemporaries such as Thomas Nashe, and therefore they tended to overstate Shakespeare's neologisms (new words) in the dictionary. Jürgen Schäfer showed this in a landmark study published in 1980, and subsequent scholars have developed his findings, with the result that the number of new words which can be attributed with certainty to Shakespeare has substantially decreased.

  This discussion can helpfully be situated in a historical context. There is a big spike in the number of new words during the century from 1550 to 1650. The stimulus to the vernacular given by Reformation Bible translations and by the rapid expansion of print culture, by the influx of new things and their attendant words from other cultures due to exploration and trade, and by the development of specialist languages for scientific discovery—all these factors made for exponential linguistic growth. Newly Latinate vocabulary—words such as “temperature” or “atmosphere” or “malignant”—rubbed up against words from Italian (often associated with culture: “concerto,” “sonnet,” “stanza”), from Spanish or Portuguese (often associated with New World exploration: “hurricane,” “tobacco,” “hammock”), and from other languages, often registering the import of exotic commodities (“coffee,” from Turkish, or “bazaar,” from Persian) or new ways of seeing things (“landscape,” from the Dutch). Borrowings gave early modern English a structure of lexical twins or triplets—near-synonyms acquired through borrowing from other languages. So English has a large number of related words with Old English/French/Latin derivations: rise/mount/ascend; end/finish/conclude; two/second/dual; fear/terror/trepidation; kingly/royal/regal. Using near-synonyms, in the rhetorical figure known as copia, is a Shakespearean technique enabled by this lexical density: “‘Romeo is banishèd’—/ There is no end, no limit, measure, bound, / In that word's death” (Romeo and Juliet 3.2.124–6); “The bonds of heaven are slipped, dissolved, and loosed” (Troilus and Cressida 5.2.159).

  Something of the strangeness of this influx of vocabulary is captured in the first English dictionary aimed at its native speakers. Robert Cawdray's 1604 volume suggests on its busy title page that the English language has become strange to its own people through the importation of foreign words:

  A Table Alphabetical, containing and teaching the true writing and understanding of hard usual English words, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greek, Latin or French &c. With the interpretation thereof by plain English words, gathered for the benefit & help of ladies, gentlewomen, or any other unskillful persons. Whereby they may the more easily and better understand many hard English words, which they shall here of read in scriptures, sermons or elsewhere, and also be made able to use the same aptly themselves.

  It would not have been seemly, given his high-status target audience, had Cawdray suggested it, but plays were also both a sourc
e of new words and a means by which words could become better understood. We see this in Shakespeare's works often, when an unfamiliar word or neologism is glossed, as in the dictionary, by a “plain English word”: Timon of Athens glosses “decimation” with “tithèd” and “destined tenth” (5.5.31–3). Shakespeare's characters take repeated delight in new words. Sir Andrew Aguecheek, the hapless suitor of Twelfth Night, has an ear for fine words, and gathers up “odours, pregnant, and vouchsafed” (3.1.89–90) for future use; the grandiloquent soldier Pistol in 2 Henry IV quotes Marlowe's mighty lines (2.4.160–5) and Nim in Henry V uses the word “humour” as a kind of fashionable linguistic tic (2.1.52, 57); Polonius is preoccupied by Hamlet's word “beautified” in his letter to Ophelia: “that's an ill phrase, a vile phrase” (2.2.111). These characters all—perhaps like Shakespeare himself reading Florio's Montaigne (see Myth 2)—ignore plot and content for a moment in their plays to concentrate on verbal details. And there are those characters, like Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing or Elbow in Measure for Measure, who misuse Latinate vocabulary to comic effect: what would come to be called, after the character in Sheridan's play The Rivals (1755), malapropisms.

  But Shakespeare, unlike other of his contemporaries, was not noted in the period for his eccentric vocabulary. The description of “honey- tongued” Shakespeare suggests an ease with language. (The adjective is an interesting example of the OED problem: its earliest recorded usages are in the same year, 1598, in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost (5.2.334) and in Francis Meres' description of Shakespeare in his Palladis Tamia. Is Meres using one of Shakespeare's mellifluous—Latin for “honey-tongued”—phrases back at him, or are both writers recording a word in current usage?) We might compare this with the case of contemporary dramatist John Marston, figured as Crispinus in Ben Jonson's play Poetaster (1601): Crispinus is given a purge and forced to vomit up his outlandish vocabulary on stage: up come “retrograde—reciprocal—incubus” and “glibbery—lubrical—defunct” in a scene of linguistic emesis which includes words we now take for granted—reciprocal, defunct—alongside the forgettable “glibbery” and “lubrical.” Jonson's satire shows that contemporary culture was alert to excessive coinages: a scornful riff on so-called “inkhorn” terms is a common feature of many early modern texts, as the debate raged over what John Cheke called English “clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled with borrowing of other tongues.” Although we have thought of Shakespeare as the most active coiner of new words of the period, it is striking that in an environment in which linguistic choices were pointedly ideological, none of his contemporaries picks him out either for praise or blame in this regard.

  One way in which Shakespeare's lexical richness does manifest itself is in the manipulation of existing words. Using verbs as nouns, and vice versa—“dog them at the heels” (Richard II 5.3.137), for example—exploits the resources of a language which has not settled into its more restricted and rule-bound form. Early modern English has nuances we have since lost: the difference between “you” and “thou” forms of second-person address, for instance, allowed the depiction of finely shaded relationships of power, solidarity, and intimacy (the use of the pronouns in the love-test at the beginning of King Lear is a good test-case). Compounds yoke words together in powerfully abbreviated form, linked with a hyphen, as in “Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds” (Romeo and Juliet 3.2.1) or “summer-seeming lust” (Macbeth 4.3.87). The Tempest makes extensive use of compounds, enacting at the microcosmic level of individual words the structural and thematic compression that characterizes the whole play: “still-vexed,” “sea-change,” “urchin-shows” (1.2.230 and 403, 2.2.5).

  Elsewhere it is lexical variety that makes for memorable phrases. Charmian's epitaph on Cleopatra as a “lass unparalleled” (Antony and Cleopatra 5.2.310) gets its touching combination of intimacy and regal grandeur from the unexpected juxtaposition of the Middle English, monosyllabic, northern “lass” and the less familiar polysyllabic, Latinate “unparalleled” (the OED dates the word from 1605; the play is only a couple of years later). An unfamiliar word can use its strangeness to denote something about the thing it signifies: Macbeth's use of the word “assassination” (1.7.2; the first citation in the OED) registers that what he is contemplating—the murder of a king—is so outside normal behavior as to need an estranged word, rather as Richard II mockingly coins the verb “unking” to point out the unnaturalness of his deposition by his cousin Bullingbrook (4.1.210, 5.5.37). Sometimes Shakespeare uses deliberately unfamiliar words that are difficult to pronounce to indicate mental disturbance: Leontes' cluster of hard-consonant “c” words, which do not appear elsewhere in Shakespeare's work, depicts a mind ranging crazily through its own dark imaginings: “With what's unreal thou [affection] coactive art, / And fellow'st nothing. Then 'tis very credent / Thou mayst co-join with something, and thou dost—/ And that beyond commission” (The Winter's Tale 1.2.143–6). Something linguistically similar happens in a soliloquy by Angelo, experiencing sexual desire apparently for the first time, in Measure for Measure (2.4.1–17). If we find such passages difficult, that's surely the point: language—both syntax and vocabulary—is at breaking point as Leontes tumbles into the abyss of his own jealousy and Angelo into the pit of his own lust.

  We can see Shakespeare's enjoyment of what D.H. Lawrence called “such lovely language” in a play which seems almost to be about language itself: Love's Labour's Lost. The play opens with the King of Navarre declaring he and his three lords will live in “a little academe” (1.1.13), devoting themselves to study and abjuring female company for three years. Enter, right on cue, the Princess of France, visiting the court with her three ladies. As well as these symmetrically matched nobles, the play is peopled with a linguistically diverse population. First is Don Armado, a “man of fire-new words” (1.1.176), a Spaniard addicted to rhetoric: his letter to the king is nonsensically pompous in its combination of archaism and copia: “Now for the ground, which—which, I mean, I walked upon. It is yclept thy park. Then for the place, where—where I mean, I did encounter that most obscene and preposterous event, that draweth from my snow-white pen the ebon-coloured ink which here thou viewest, beholdest, surveyest, or seest” (1.1.234–9). Next is Costard, a quick-tongued peasant with a line in sexual innuendo, which earns him the reproach: “you talk greasily, your lips grow foul” (4.1.136). Holofernes is labeled “Pedant” in the First Folio text: his is the prissily expansive language of the schoolroom: “Novi hominum tanquam te. His humour is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, his gait majestical, and his general behaviour vain, ridiculous and thrasonical. He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it” (5.1.9–14). Nathaniel, the egregious curate, eggs him on, praising that final silly adjective as “a most singular and choice epithet” (5.1.15). Linguistic variety, and a satiric self-consciousness about linguistic fashion, is one of Love's Labour's Lost's most prominent themes, as Shakespeare simultaneously exhibits and deflates his own verbal dexterity.

  Assessing Shakespeare's contribution to the language should be qualitative rather than quantitative, therefore. If the number of Shakespearean coinages and the size of Shakespeare's vocabulary are smaller than previously thought, his influence remains. But it is worth recalling that linguistic studies have shown that Shakespeare—after all, a provincial grammar-school boy who learned his language away from the more standardized London forms of English—“tended to lag behind grammatical change”: far from being always in the vanguard of linguistic novelty, Shakespeare's language might have been experienced by early audiences as slightly old-fashioned even as it is so endlessly inventive.3

  Notes

  1 David Crystal, Think on my Words: Exploring Shakespeare's Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 2–3.

  2 The list is under ‘Additional Material’ at www.thinkonmywords.com

  3 Jonathan Hope, “Shakespeare's ‘Natiue English’,”
in David Scott Kastan (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 253.

  Myth 22

  Shakespeare's plays are timeless

  One undeniable fact about Shakespeare is that his plays have been popular in many countries in most centuries. Certain plays come in and out of fashion, of course, but generally speaking Shakespeare the playwright has always been popular, both in print and performance. Ben Jonson was prescient when he wrote in a tribute to Shakespeare, published in the First Folio of 1623, that he was “not of an age but for all time.” From Jonson in 1623 to nineteenth-century Germany (“unser [our] Shakespeare”) to today's translation industry (Shakespeare is published in eighty different languages), Shakespeare's plays have stood the test of time.