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Is Shakespeare Dead?
Or is he still a living Will?

Many Bardolators lament that the legacy of Willie Wigglestaff may be dying

The Bard lives!

Little information about William Shakespeare’s personal life is available, but from municipal records we can deduce that he was born in the English village of Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwickshire, on April 23, 1564, and that after having retired to his hometown around 1611, he died there on April 23, 1616, at exactly 52 years of age. This month marks the quadricentennial of the Bard’s death.

Many Bardolators (Shakespeare worshipers, and I am one of them) lament that the legacy of Willie Wigglestaff (slang for “William Shakespeare”) is also dying. Only 8 percent of American colleges and universities require the reading of Shakespeare — for their English majors! — and the language of his plays and poems has become increasingly inaccessible to American readers and playgoers. A multitude of publishers and play directors have translated Shakespeare into modern parlance, draining the text of its genius; and some teachers feel that Shakespeare’s body of work is no longer relevant to students of color.

Nonetheless, the Shakespeare corpus appears to be alive and well and living in our language and on our stages. Shakespeare’s plays, which he wrote in London between approximately 1590 and 1613, have been in almost constant production since their creation. Because the playwright dealt with universal truths and conflicts in human nature, his tragedies, comedies and history plays continue to draw audiences from all walks of life, just as they did more than 400 years ago. Time has proved the truth of what Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson said of him: “He was not of an age, but for all time.”

An often-neglected aspect of William Shakespeare’s genius is that his words, like his works, were not just of an age but for all time. He was, quite simply, the greatest word maker who ever lived. Ongoing research demonstrates that there are 20,138 lemmata (dictionary headwords) in Shakespeare’s published works. That figure represents approximately 40 percent of the total recorded for the English language up to the year 1623 — and Shakespeare could not have owned any dictionary in which he could have looked up these words! For purposes of comparison, bear in mind that the written vocabulary of Homer totals approximately 9,000 words, that of the King James Bible 8,000 and that of Milton 10,000.

The most verbally innovative of our authors and our all-time champion neologizer, Shakespeare made up more than 8.5 percent of his written vocabulary.

Of the 20,138 basewords that Shakespeare employs in his plays, sonnets and other poems, his is the first known use of more than 1,700 of them. The most verbally innovative of our authors and our all-time champion neologizer, Shakespeare made up more than 8.5 percent of his written vocabulary. Reading his works is like witnessing the birth of language itself.

“I pitied thee,/Took pains to make thee speak,” says Prospero to Caliban in The Tempest. “I endow’d thy purposes/With words that made them known.” Shakespeare is our Prospero; he dressed our thoughts with words and teemed our tongue with phrases. Without him, our “native English” would be, as Thomas Mowbray says in Richard II:

an unstringed viol or a harp,
Or like a cunning instrument cas’d up,
Or being open, put into his hands
That knows no touch to tune the harmony.

Consider the following list of 50 representative words that, as far as we can tell, Shakespeare was the first to use in writing. So great is his influence on his native tongue that we find it hard to imagine a time when these words did not exist:

accommodation dwindle monumental
aerial eventful multitudinous
amazement exposure obscene
apostrophe fitful pedant
assassination frugal perusal
auspicious generous pious
baseless gloomy premeditated
bedroom gnarled radiance
bump hurry reliance
castigate impartial road
clangor indistinguishable sanctimonious
countless invulnerable seamy
courtship lapse sneak
critic (and critical) laughable sportive
dexterously lonely submerge
dishearten majestic useless
dislocate misplaced  

Now add to these individual words Shakespeare’s daring originality with compounds. He created such splendid audacities as proud-pied April, heaven-kissing hill and world-without-end hour, and he bequeathed to the English language such now-familiar double plays as barefaced, civil tongue, cold comfort, eyesore, faint-hearted, fancy-free, foregone conclusion, Father Time, foul play (and fair play), green-eyed, half-cocked, heartsick, high time, hot-blooded, itching palm, lackluster, laughingstock, leapfrog, lie low, long-haired, love affair, ministering angel, pitched battle, primrose path, sea change, short shrift, snow-white, stony-hearted, tongue-tied, towering passion and yeoman’s service. The striking compound that Shakespeare fashioned to describe Don Adriano de Armado in Love’s Labor’s Lost is an appropriate epithet for the playwright himself: “a man of fire-new words.”

Orson Welles once quipped, “Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.” Unrivaled in so many other ways in matters verbal, Shakespeare is unequaled as a phrasemaker. “All for one, one for all,” and “not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse,” respectively, wrote Alexandre Dumas in The Three Musketeers and Clement Clarke Moore in The Night Before Christmas. But Shakespeare said them first — “One for all, or all for one we gage” in The Rape of Lucrece and “not a mouse stirring” in Hamlet.

A student who attended a performance of Hamlet came away complaining that the play “was nothing more than a bunch of clichés.” The reason for this common reaction is that so many of the memorable expressions in Hamlet have become proverbial. In that one play alone were born brevity is the soul of wit, there’s the rub, to thine own self be true, it smells to heaven, the very witching time of night, the primrose path, though this be madness, yet there is method in it, dog will have his day, the apparel oft proclaims the man, neither a borrower nor a lender be, something is rotten in the state of Denmark, more honored in the breach than the observance, hoist with his own petard, piece of work, the lady doth protest too much, to be or not to be, sweets for the sweet, the be-all and end-all, to the manner born, and more in sorrow than in anger.

Cudgel your brain, and you can append a sample of everyday, idiomatic phrases from other Shakespearean plays: If you knit your brow and wish that this disquisition would vanish into thin air because it is Greek to you, you are quoting William Shakespeare in all his infinite variety. If you point the finger at strange bedfellows and blinking idiots, you are converting Shakespeare’s coinages into currency. If you have seen better days in your salad days, when you wore your heart on your sleeve, you are, whether you know it or not, going from Bard to verse. If you break the ice with one fell swoop, if you never stand on ceremonies, if you play it fast and loose until the crack of doom, if you paint the lily, if you hope for a plague on both houses, if you are more sinned against than sinning because you have been eaten out of house and home by your own flesh and blood (the most unkindest cut of all), if you haven’t slept a wink and are breathing your last because you’re in a pickle, if you carry within you the milk of human kindness and a heart of gold (even though you know that all that glisters is not gold), if you laugh yourself into stitches at too much of a good thing, if you make a virtue of necessity, if you know that the course of true love never did run smooth, if you kill with kindness and if you won’t budge an inch — why, if the truth be told and the truth will out, what the dickens, in a word, right on!, be that as it may, the game is up — you are, as luck would have it, standing on that tower of strength of phrasemakers, William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare lurks in the most astonishing places. Some assert that the Porter’s speech in Act 2, Scene 3 of Macbeth is the source of the modern knock-knock joke: “Knock, knock, knock. Who’s there, i’ th’ name of Beelzebub? … Knock, knock. Who’s there, in th’ other devil’s name? … Knock, knock; never at quiet!”

Shakespeare also hides in many works of modern literature. He was a busy and prolific writer who, in 25 years, turned out 37 long plays and co-authored several others. In the process, he provided book titles to generations of authors who return again and again to the well of his felicitous phrasing.

“His contribution to our phraseology is 10 times greater than that of any writer to any language in the history of the world.”

Etymologist Ernest Weekley

Take John Green’s immensely popular teen novel The Fault in Our Stars, which was recently transmogrified into an immensely profitable movie. The title echoes Cassius’s speech in Julius Caesar to his co-conspirator: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” From that same play have been lifted the titles of Frederick Forsyth’s The Dogs of War, J.M. Barrie’s Dear Brutus, John Gunther’s Taken at the Flood, Barry Sadler’s Cry Havoc, R. Lance Hill’s The Evil That Men Do and David Halberstam’s Noblest Roman.

Take Macbeth, for another example. Near the end of the play, Macbeth expresses his darkening vision of life: “…It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.” Centuries later, William Faulkner purloined a phrase from that speech for his novel The Sound and the Fury, which is indeed told by an idiot, Benjy Compson. Earlier in the play one of the witches chants, “By the pricking of my thumbs,/Something wicked this way comes.” Agatha Christie plucked the first line and Ray Bradbury the second as titles of their bestsellers. Other steals from just the one play Macbeth include Robert Frost’s Out, Out —, Rose Macaulay’s Told by an Idiot, Ellis Middleton’s Vaulting Ambition, Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, Ngaio Marsh’s Light Thickens, Anne Sexton’s All My Pretty Ones, Alistair MacLean’s The Way to Dusty Death, Edward G. Robinson’s All My Yesterdays, Philip Barry’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Malcolm Evans’s Signifying Nothing and John Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down.

Add to these the likes of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Hamlet), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (The Tempest), Dorothy Parker’s Not So Deep as a Well (Romeo and Juliet), W. Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale (Twelfth Night), John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent (Richard III) and dozens of other bardic titles, and it becomes evident that William Shakespeare was one of the most generous souls who ever set quill to parchment. Although he himself was never granted a title, he freely granted titles to others.

The etymologist Ernest Weekley said of Shakespeare, “His contribution to our phraseology is 10 times greater than that of any writer to any language in the history of the world.” The essayist and novelist Walter Pater exclaimed, “What a garden of words!” In Sonnet 116 the Bard himself wrote, “If this be error and upon me proved,/I never writ, nor no man ever loved.” If Shakespeare had not lived and written with such a loving ear for the music of our language, our English tongue would be immeasurably the poorer. No day goes by that we do not speak and hear and read and write his legacy.

Richard Lederer headshot
Richard Lederer
San Diego Mensa | Joined 1991

Senior Bulletin columnist Richard Lederer is the author of 50 books about language, history, and humor, including his best-selling Anguished English series and his current books, The Joy of Names, A Treasury of Halloween Humor, and A Treasury of Christmas Humor. He is a founding co-host of “A Way With Words,” broadcast on Public Radio. He has been named International Punster of the Year and Toastmasters International’s Golden Gavel winner. A former president of San Diego Mensa, he has received multiple National Chairman’s Service Awards.