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As a kid having to read Shakespeare what was lost on me, because of the language, was the language. Will worked hard to turn a phrase. "Cowards die many ti

As a kid having to read Shakespeare what was lost on me, because of the language, was the language. Will worked hard to turn a phrase. "Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once." "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." "The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream." These are catchy lines, even today.

dbtc 3y ago
He wrote for our time too
- Solvency 3y ago
  It's almost like basic human behavior transcends time.
bombcar 3y ago
Shakespeare has such influence that’s it’s almost more correct to say he wrote English than that he wrote in English.
- codersfocus 3y ago
  150+ words are said to be coined by him
  - MrJohz 3y ago
    In fairness, I think a lot of that is him writing in a vernacular English that wouldn't have been recorded much in official documents or other writings. So he probably didn't coin it so much as save it for posterity. Otherwise his plays would have been like those fantasy novels whether the author gets slightly too excited about using their made up words for everything.
    - bloak 3y ago
      I agree. There are plenty of words for which the earliest surviving example of it being used is in a work attributed to Shakespeare, but there is no reason to believe that Shakespeare was the first to use any of those words. People don't generally use a new word for the first time in a play or a poem, but published plays and poems is all we have by Shakespeare. The first use of a new word tends to be in conversation (so the first use is not recorded) or in a non-fiction work, where the meaning of the new word can be explained. Or in fantasy novels, as MrJohz points out. (But what's the earliest example of the sort of fantasy novel that has invented words in it?)
      - tialaramex 3y ago
        Some (many?) words attributed to Shakespeare follow the ordinary processes for making new words in certain open categories in English, and so you could argue that anybody might make these words as a competent English user, grasping for this specific meaning, has available the tools to make this word for that meaning. This could happen completely independently, even many times. If you need "invulnerable" or "majestic" for example you don't require the services of some specialist word inventor to come up with them, you can just make those yourself since you're a competent user and there are rules. But Shakespeare used them in a context which people remembered, so that's why it matters, and in the process Shakespeare gets to choose some parameters for these words which are not set by the rules such as their emotional valence - is this a good thing or a bad thing? The rules usually don't dictate that, but usage does and Shakespeare can set the trend.
  - speed_spread 3y ago
    It's fair to say he got his cromulation game all figured out.
  - BellsOnSunday 3y ago
    Most of those words weren't coined by him, his writing was just the earliest source that the dictionary makers could find. He didn't invent the word 'elbow', for instance.
- baud147258 3y ago
  or maybe the English he wrote was subsenquently imposed as the standard English throughout the UK...
  - geokon 3y ago
    I learned that this is actually a bit of a coincidence. English started to in effect be standardized by the publishing of the first English dictionaries shortly after Shakespeare (esp standardizing spelling - which even in Shakespeare is a bit all over the place) Not totally sure how much that plays into it. Would be curious to hear from someone that knows more
- hyperbovine 3y ago
  It really is mind blowing how deeply influential his oeuvre has become. For me, one of the most pleasurable parts of reading Shakespeare as an adult have been the umpteen “oooh, so that’s where that comes from” moments (which are totally lost on you when Hamlet is being rammed down your throat in the 11th grade).
Dalewyn 3y ago
As a kid I hated reading Shakespeare because he's a playwright: His scripts are supposed to be seen, not read. Taking certain lines out of context make for great memes, as you just demonstrated, but as a whole I simply didn't enjoy reading them and I promptly forgot it all after my schooling years.
hilbert42 3y ago
"As a kid having to read Shakespeare what was lost on me,…" What age was that? I reckon most kids think Shakespeare is difficult at the beginning because of the language, and that brings me back to a point made in the article: "For me, Richard II is the most dull of the Henriad plays." I now think so too, but when I was studying the play it was the first one I'd encountered with a solid story to it, so it encouraged me to figure out the language so I could follow the plot by myself. I was introduced to Shakespeare at age 12 and in that year we studied two plays, As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream and I was bored with both. The language wasn't difficult as our teacher explained everything well but I didn't find the stories interesting, they were a bit of a yawn really. As I said that changed with Richard II and by then I was 14. Being older helped to understand nuances in the script but that was only part of it, the play simply had more substance to it which made it more interesting and worthy of study. Moreover, by then we had to first read the text without the teacher's help which would only come afterwards in class discussions. Thus Richard II was the first play where Shakespeare actually made sense to me, it too was the first one where the language made sense without the teacher having to 'translate' every paragraph. Putting Richard II behind me as an enjoyable experience rather than drudgery was important as it made me prepared for the great plays like Lear. That appreciation may not have happened if the order of introduction to the plays had been different.
- jfengel 3y ago
  It's hard to read the comedies. A lot of the humor is hidden in the way Shakespeare encoded his "stage directions" in the text. (The stage directions as we have them are almost never Shakespeare's own writing. They were added by later editors.) An egregious example: the big gag in the play-within-a-play of Midsummer is that the "hole" in the wall is between the actor's legs. When they kiss, they're kissing his butt and his crotch. The text is really quite clear about it: "I kiss the wall's hole", "Thy stones with lime and hair". It's not much to read, but in performance, it's incredibly obvious (and juvenile) humor. (So juvenile that a lot of productions do something else, and the whole scene falls flat.) Reading the footnotes is never going to make it funny to a reader. The histories and tragedies are much more story-focused, and a lot easier to read. They're still better in performance, where the actors and director have done the "translation", and you can connect more viscerally to the moment. Reading a play is an advanced skill, and I really wish English teachers wouldn't treat it as if it were readily accessible to high school students. You do have to start somewhere, but a complete, unedited comedy is starting at the summit of a mountain.
atchoo 3y ago
I wonder how many of the classic Shakespeare lines were actually popular idioms of the time rather than novel creations. I imagine if the works of only one contemporary cliche ridden author survived in 500 years time, they would appear to be a literary genius without the context that shows them to be mediocre.
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  If that were the case then we'd expect a similar level of wonderful lines in the works of his contemporaries, but he was very clearly a standout wordsmith even compared with other fine writers such as Marlowe, Middleton, Webster and Jonson etc. It's not that his are the only works to have survived, they're simply the only ones we still speak of in regular conversation.
- dri_ft 3y ago
  There's quite a lot of work on this kind of thing; any edition of Shakespeare with good notes will alert you where a line resembles something 'proverbial'. One thing you notice is that although he often alludes to proverbial sayings, he seldom includes them verbatim - more often, it is a glancing, passing suggestion of them, or he uses them with a twist, or as part of some more complex figure of speech he is developing. edit: there's actually a great example in the article: "No man’s pie is freed from his ambitious finger".
- klik99 3y ago
  I recently watch "Upstart Crow" which is full of jokes about this - a running gag is Shakespeare claiming he created all these phrases and another character citing exactly the date and author of an earlier reference. Well - it's funnier in execution than I just made it sound...
slim 3y ago
meh. he speaks in punchlines. these days many rappers do that all day for hours /s
- bazoom42 3y ago
  Yeah, rap is probably the closest modern popular culture has to Shakespeare. The rythm, rhyming, wordplay, dirty language etc.

dbtc 3y ago

He wrote for our time too

Solvency 3y ago
It's almost like basic human behavior transcends time.

bombcar 3y ago

Shakespeare has such influence that’s it’s almost more correct to say he wrote English than that he wrote in English.

codersfocus 3y ago
150+ words are said to be coined by him
- MrJohz 3y ago
  In fairness, I think a lot of that is him writing in a vernacular English that wouldn't have been recorded much in official documents or other writings. So he probably didn't coin it so much as save it for posterity. Otherwise his plays would have been like those fantasy novels whether the author gets slightly too excited about using their made up words for everything.
  - bloak 3y ago
    I agree. There are plenty of words for which the earliest surviving example of it being used is in a work attributed to Shakespeare, but there is no reason to believe that Shakespeare was the first to use any of those words. People don't generally use a new word for the first time in a play or a poem, but published plays and poems is all we have by Shakespeare. The first use of a new word tends to be in conversation (so the first use is not recorded) or in a non-fiction work, where the meaning of the new word can be explained. Or in fantasy novels, as MrJohz points out. (But what's the earliest example of the sort of fantasy novel that has invented words in it?)
    - tialaramex 3y ago
      Some (many?) words attributed to Shakespeare follow the ordinary processes for making new words in certain open categories in English, and so you could argue that anybody might make these words as a competent English user, grasping for this specific meaning, has available the tools to make this word for that meaning. This could happen completely independently, even many times. If you need "invulnerable" or "majestic" for example you don't require the services of some specialist word inventor to come up with them, you can just make those yourself since you're a competent user and there are rules. But Shakespeare used them in a context which people remembered, so that's why it matters, and in the process Shakespeare gets to choose some parameters for these words which are not set by the rules such as their emotional valence - is this a good thing or a bad thing? The rules usually don't dictate that, but usage does and Shakespeare can set the trend.
- speed_spread 3y ago
  It's fair to say he got his cromulation game all figured out.
- BellsOnSunday 3y ago
  Most of those words weren't coined by him, his writing was just the earliest source that the dictionary makers could find. He didn't invent the word 'elbow', for instance.
baud147258 3y ago
or maybe the English he wrote was subsenquently imposed as the standard English throughout the UK...
- geokon 3y ago
  I learned that this is actually a bit of a coincidence. English started to in effect be standardized by the publishing of the first English dictionaries shortly after Shakespeare (esp standardizing spelling - which even in Shakespeare is a bit all over the place) Not totally sure how much that plays into it. Would be curious to hear from someone that knows more
hyperbovine 3y ago
It really is mind blowing how deeply influential his oeuvre has become. For me, one of the most pleasurable parts of reading Shakespeare as an adult have been the umpteen “oooh, so that’s where that comes from” moments (which are totally lost on you when Hamlet is being rammed down your throat in the 11th grade).

Dalewyn 3y ago

As a kid I hated reading Shakespeare because he's a playwright: His scripts are supposed to be seen, not read. Taking certain lines out of context make for great memes, as you just demonstrated, but as a whole I simply didn't enjoy reading them and I promptly forgot it all after my schooling years.

hilbert42 3y ago

"As a kid having to read Shakespeare what was lost on me,…" What age was that? I reckon most kids think Shakespeare is difficult at the beginning because of the language, and that brings me back to a point made in the article: "For me, Richard II is the most dull of the Henriad plays." I now think so too, but when I was studying the play it was the first one I'd encountered with a solid story to it, so it encouraged me to figure out the language so I could follow the plot by myself. I was introduced to Shakespeare at age 12 and in that year we studied two plays, As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream and I was bored with both. The language wasn't difficult as our teacher explained everything well but I didn't find the stories interesting, they were a bit of a yawn really. As I said that changed with Richard II and by then I was 14. Being older helped to understand nuances in the script but that was only part of it, the play simply had more substance to it which made it more interesting and worthy of study. Moreover, by then we had to first read the text without the teacher's help which would only come afterwards in class discussions. Thus Richard II was the first play where Shakespeare actually made sense to me, it too was the first one where the language made sense without the teacher having to 'translate' every paragraph. Putting Richard II behind me as an enjoyable experience rather than drudgery was important as it made me prepared for the great plays like Lear. That appreciation may not have happened if the order of introduction to the plays had been different.

jfengel 3y ago
It's hard to read the comedies. A lot of the humor is hidden in the way Shakespeare encoded his "stage directions" in the text. (The stage directions as we have them are almost never Shakespeare's own writing. They were added by later editors.) An egregious example: the big gag in the play-within-a-play of Midsummer is that the "hole" in the wall is between the actor's legs. When they kiss, they're kissing his butt and his crotch. The text is really quite clear about it: "I kiss the wall's hole", "Thy stones with lime and hair". It's not much to read, but in performance, it's incredibly obvious (and juvenile) humor. (So juvenile that a lot of productions do something else, and the whole scene falls flat.) Reading the footnotes is never going to make it funny to a reader. The histories and tragedies are much more story-focused, and a lot easier to read. They're still better in performance, where the actors and director have done the "translation", and you can connect more viscerally to the moment. Reading a play is an advanced skill, and I really wish English teachers wouldn't treat it as if it were readily accessible to high school students. You do have to start somewhere, but a complete, unedited comedy is starting at the summit of a mountain.

atchoo 3y ago

I wonder how many of the classic Shakespeare lines were actually popular idioms of the time rather than novel creations. I imagine if the works of only one contemporary cliche ridden author survived in 500 years time, they would appear to be a literary genius without the context that shows them to be mediocre.

AlecSchueler 3y ago
If that were the case then we'd expect a similar level of wonderful lines in the works of his contemporaries, but he was very clearly a standout wordsmith even compared with other fine writers such as Marlowe, Middleton, Webster and Jonson etc. It's not that his are the only works to have survived, they're simply the only ones we still speak of in regular conversation.
dri_ft 3y ago
There's quite a lot of work on this kind of thing; any edition of Shakespeare with good notes will alert you where a line resembles something 'proverbial'. One thing you notice is that although he often alludes to proverbial sayings, he seldom includes them verbatim - more often, it is a glancing, passing suggestion of them, or he uses them with a twist, or as part of some more complex figure of speech he is developing. edit: there's actually a great example in the article: "No man’s pie is freed from his ambitious finger".
klik99 3y ago
I recently watch "Upstart Crow" which is full of jokes about this - a running gag is Shakespeare claiming he created all these phrases and another character citing exactly the date and author of an earlier reference. Well - it's funnier in execution than I just made it sound...

slim 3y ago

meh. he speaks in punchlines. these days many rappers do that all day for hours /s

bazoom42 3y ago
Yeah, rap is probably the closest modern popular culture has to Shakespeare. The rythm, rhyming, wordplay, dirty language etc.