Queen 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 tonge 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 hundreds 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 Elizabeth 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 Stratford on Avon, deep in the English countryside. He was educated at the local grammar school. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who lived here, and they had two children. In his twenties he left all this behind and appeared as an actor in London where he wrote poems and 37 plays.

In late middle age he returned to Stratford as a successful gentleman of means and built a large house. Only his knot garden remains.

Today Stratford is a Mecca for Shakespeare lovers, actors and audiences alike, throughout the world. [Penny Downey has come from Australia to play Titania in a Royal Shakespeare company interpretation of A Midsummer Nights Dream].

His mother was a vot’ress of my order; and, in the spiced Indian

Air, by night, full often hath she gossip’d by my side; and sat with

Me on Neptune’s yellow sand, marking the embarked traders on

The flood; when we have laugh’d to see the sails conceived, and

Grow big-bellied in the wanton wind, which she, with pretty and

With swimming gait following-her womb then rich with my young squire,
-Would imitate;and sail upon the land to fetch me trifles,

And return again as from a voyage, rich with merchandise. But she,

Being mortal, of that boy did die; and for her sake do I rear up her

Boy; and for her sake I will not part with him.

As well as such high-flown imagery, Shakespeare’s poetry, rich with the vocabulary of his native Warwickshire, reflects hi country origins terms like ballow meaning a cudgel, honey-stalks for red clover, mobled a local word for muffled and gleek meaning to sing,

the more the pity that some honest neighbours will not make them friends

nay, I can gleek upon occasion.

Shakespeares language ranges from the russet yeas and nays of fools and rustics like Bottom the weaver, here. To the “taffeta phrases, silken terms precise” of kings and fairies.

I am a spirit of no common rate; and summer still doth tend upon my state

And I do love thee; therefore, go with me; I’ll give thee fairies to attend on

Thee, and they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep and sing while thou on

Pressed flowers doth sleep; and I will purge thy mortal grossness so that

Thou shalt like an airy spirit go Peaseblossom! Cobweb! Moth! Mustardseed!

His plays have every kind of spoken English: pidgin with Caloban, philosophical with Hamlet, bawdy with Falstaff, heroic with Henry the Fifth, and pastoral-lyrical with Titiana.

The moon methinks looks with a watery eye; and when she weeps, weeps

Every little flower lamenting some enforced chastity

For many years, one of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s leading director 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.

HENRY THE FIFTH

And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,

On your imaginary forces work.

Suppose within The girdle of these walls

Are now confined two mighty monarchies,

Whose high upreared and abutting fronts

The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder;

Piece out out imperfections with your thoughts;

Into a thousand parts divide one man,

And make imaginary puissance;

Think when we talk of horses, that you see them

Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth;

For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck out kings,

Carry them here and there;jumping o’er times,

Turning the accomplishment of many years

Into the hour-glass

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.

THE TEMPEST

Our revels now are ended. These are actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits,

And are melted into air, into thin air;

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-cappd 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

We are such stuff as dreams are made on;

And our little life is rounded with a sleep.

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 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 had the largest vocabulary of any writer of English approximately 34,000 words which is about double what an educated person uses today in their lifetime.

In some famous passage, Shakespeare uses just two words from his prodigious vocabulary with arresting boldness. The murderer, Macbeth, laments that the blood on his hands would stain even the ocean “this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red”. As well as multitudinous and incarnadine the long list of new words and uses that gained currency from the folio include: accommodation, premeditated, assassination, submerged and obscene. In Loves Labours Lost he could almost have been writing his own epitaph when he describes Don Armado as a man of “fire-new-words”.

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 invited more words that 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. In Measure for Measure he writes that “Lord Angelo dukes it well in his absence”. For Hamlet, the student prince, he writes “out-herods Herod” . In Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses says “he pageants us” and in Richard II, the Duke of York says: “Tut!tut! Grace me no grace, not uncle me no uncle I am no traitor’s uncle,…”

But, above all, Shakespeare gave the London audiences who flocked to his plays at the Globe, a wealth of quotable quotes. One play alone [HAMLET] is a thesaurus of phrases that have become almost clichés: Fraility thy name is woman!, A truant disposition, take him for all in all, more in sorrow than in anger, the primrose path, to the manner born, something is rotten, the time is out of joint, by indirections find directions out, brevity is the soul of wit, more matter with less art, the play’s the thing, to be or not to be:that is the question, the lady doth protest too much, hoist with his own petar, the rest is silence.

THE TRAGEDY OF RICHARD THE THIRD:
A horse!a horse! My kingdom for a horse!

THE TRAGEDIE OF JULIUS CESAR:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me thy ears

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF KING RICHARD THE SECOND:

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE:

The quality of mercy is not strain’d

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath

THE TEMPEST:

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in’t!

THE TRAGEDIE OF KING LEAR:

Nothing,

Nothing will come of nothing