The Man for All Ages
by
Howard Richler
This year
marks the 400th anniversary of the death of perhaps the most
immortal of all writers. It is fitting that the phrase “We all make his praise”
is an anagram of William Shakespeare.
Moreover,
the “all” in the phrase refers not only to native speakers of English but to
all literate people on the planet. Shakespeare’s works have been translated
into more than 100 languages and it has been calculated that almost half of the
world’s students have studied parts of his oeuvre. Ben Jonson’s comment about
Shakespeare in the Preface to the First
Folio in 1623, “He was not of an age, but for all time” has been vindicated
by time.
Literary
critic Harold Bloom titled his tome Shakespeare:
The Invention of the Human because Shakespeare “went beyond all precedents
(even Chaucer) and invented the human as we know it.” Bloom argues that the Bard can be singularly
credited for creating the modern person not only in the Western word but
throughout all cultures, and he views the Shakespearean characters Hamlet and
Falstaff as representing “the inauguration of personality as we have to
recognize it.”
Shakespeare’s
contribution to our phraseology is ubiquitous. Observe: We all cite him “without rhyme or reason.” If
you are “in a pickle” because you’ve been “eaten out of house and home” by your
own “flesh and blood,” or by a “stone-hearted” “blinking idiot” or by ”strange bedfellows,”
you are quoting Shakespeare. Small
wonder you’ve been “hoodwinked” and are “playing fast and loose” and haven’t
“slept a wink” and are probably “breathing your last.” Methinks you’ve been
“more sinned against than sinning.”
While it may be “cold comfort,”
it’s also a “foregone conclusion” you
are quoting Shakespeare.
The story is
told (probably apocryphal) of an adolescent’s response upon seeing a
performance of Hamlet stating that the play is “merely a collection of clichés.”
Of course when Shakespeare coined expressions such as “brevity is the soul of
wit,” “primrose path,” “dog will have its day,” “the lady doth protest too
much,” “sweets for the sweet” and “cruel to be kind,” they were newly minted
gems.
We sometimes
forget because of Shakespeare’s transcendent phraseology that he may also rate
as the greatest word creator of all time. To wit, the OED shows that the first evidence of a word is found in his works
1504 times and the first sense of a word appears in his works on 7698 occasions. Examples of the latter are the verbal use of elbow and cow to mean “jostle” and intimidate” respectively and admired
to mean “praiseworthy “ (especially as previously it had meant “wondered about”.
The total of the above two categories exceeds his nearest competitor Chaucer by
almost 2000. George Gordon, In Shakespeare’s
English congratulations Elizabethan
writers for their willingness to use “every form of verbal wealth.”
Shakespeare was fortunate to live an era when
the language was very fluid. Gordon explains that Shakespeare was able to do
what he liked with English grammar because it had no fixed rules and he “drew
beauty and power from its imperfections.”
Many words were
created by the addition of prefixes and suffixes. Arouse first appears in Henry
VI, Part II; premeditated was
first used in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; uncomfortable in Romeo and
Juliet; useful and useless in King John and The Rape of
Lucrece respectively. Lonely
first appears in Coriolanus and reclusive makes its debut in Much Ado About Nothing. Amazement, first found in Titus Andronicus, is one of the first
uses of the suffix -ment to form a noun
from a Teutonic verb.
As a
language with deep Germanic roots, English had a long tradition of creating new
words through compounding, as German still does. Some of the Bard’s
contributions here are barefaced, hot-blooded, lackluster, dewdrop, foregone, still-born, and skim-milk.
But if
English lacked a word that could enhance his writing, Shakespeare invented it,
invariably with a Latin root. Because
many of these words were polysyllabic with a proclivity to sounding
mellifluous, Shakespeare employed them to enhance rhythm. For example, frugal comes from the Latin frugalis and is first seen in The Merry Wives of Windsor: “I was then
frugall in my worth.” Castigate derives
from the Latin castigare (to correct)
and makes its stage entry in Titus
Andronicus: “If thou didst put this
soure cold habit on to castigate thy pride, ‘twere well.” Courtship is first seen in Love’s Labour’s Lost with the sense of the behaviour befitting the court: “Trim
Gallants, full of Courtship and of state.” Besmirch
is first seen in Hamlet: “And now no
soyle… doth besmirch the virtue of his will.”
Shakespeare also borrowed from other Romance languages. Examples here
are bandit crafted from Italian bandito and torture fashioned from the French torturer.
Professor
Victor Margolin summed up Shakespeare’s linguistic genius succinctly with this
pun: “Shakespeare was great shakes and
without peer.”
Richler’s
latest book Wordplay: Arranged &
Deranged Wit was published in April 2016
