SHAKESPEARE
Elizabeth I and her successor, James, reigned
for about 70 years. During that time the English Language reached heights that
have inspired us ever since and even contemporaries marvelled at. For the
English that was a time of national triumph. They were as proud of their words
as they were of defying the Pope or defeating the Spanish Armada.
Sir Phillip Sydney, the poet and
soldier, spoke for his countrymen when he wrote “for the uttering sweetly and
properly the conceite of the minde
English hath it equally with any other tongue in the world.”
To describe this “brave new world”
of discovery and invention the self-confident English vernacular borrowed a
staggering total of 12.000 new words. Men of letters like Sir Thomas More
looked back to classical models for hundred of Latin words like active, communicate, education. Men of
science, like Sir Francis Bacon, took their inspiration from the Greek and
introduced terms like thermometer,
pneumonia, skeleton, encyclopaedia. And there was
one writer whose work lies at the heart of the Elizabethan miracle, whom
Johnson singled out for what he called his mastery of the diction of common
life, or, as we would put it, everyday speech and, of course, that was William
Shakespeare.
There are many legends but almost
nothing certain is known about the greatest writer in our story.
He was born here in
Shakespeare poetry, rich with the
vocabulary of his native Warwickshire, reflects his country origins, terms like
ballow
meaning a cudgel, honey-stalks for red clover, mobled, a local
word for muffled, and gleek meaning to
sing. Shakespeare language ranges from the russet yeas and nays off fools
and rustics like Bottom the weaver, here, to the “taffeta phrases, silken terms
precise” of kings and fairies.
For many years, one of the Royal
Shakespeare Company’s leading directors was John Barton: “My obsession with
Shakespeare has to do with so many elements and I hate in a way to talk about
it because it’s the whole of those elements that I love but it’s partly,
obviously, his sense of character. It’s partly his sense of dramatic situation
and very much his story. But perhaps in the end, above all, and what first drew
me to him is his language.
Sir Peter Hall, formerly with the
Royal Shakespeare Company, now directs the National Theatre: “Shakespeare is
the most comprehensive genius in terms of sensibility and understanding of
humanity and the greatest writer, he had the greatest means of expressing that
breadth of anyone I have ever encountered. It needs saying,
it needs saying regularly but its true.”
It is impossible to quantify the
relationship between the development of the language and a writer of genius
like Shakespeare. But this, the First
Folio of his plays, the source for scores of Shakespearian words and
phrases, had a direct influence on every one of us who speaks English today. He
had an inexhaustible passion for words.
“He has the larges vocabulary of any
writer of English, approximately 34.000 words, which is about double what an
educated person uses today in their lifetime.
“I think it’s no accident that
Shakespeare spelt his own name by a whole variety of ways, I mean spelling was
a matter of taste. As part of that freedom I think we should see the fact that
you can invent words. Shakespeare invented more words than anybody who’s ever
lived and no-one apparently ever commented on that at the time. It just was a
fact. So, there was an enormous sense of freedom, creative freedom. The actors
who spoke his lines also found him playing with the grammar of English, nouns
could become verbs.
But, above all, Shakespeare gave the