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