AUTHOR: WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
DATE: 1623
Who could have guessed that the son of a moderately successful Elizabethan glove-maker from the English Midlands would become the great behemoth dominating the Western cultural landscape? But that has been the fate of William Shakespeare, a man of whom we know remarkably little other than the fact that he was the author of a body of literary work (at least 37 plays, 154 sonnets and a handful of longer poems) that is still read, enjoyed and analysed to within an inch of its life throughout the world to this day.
Of course, Shakespeare never set out to write a ‘book’ as such, and his works were published together, in a First Folio, only some seven years after his death. But in the four hundred years since his demise, he has been widely regarded as the single greatest and most important writer in the English language.
He is most celebrated for his plays, traditionally grouped into Tragedies, Comedies and Histories. There are several different reasons behind his ongoing impact. First, he was a supreme storyteller and creator of character. Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Antony and Cleopatra, Henry V … the list, literally, goes on and on. To imagine a cultural landscape in which Shakespeare had never written is akin to thinking of the history of popular music without The Beatles. The world would be a lesser place without Shakespeare’s work, even if over-familiarity with his oeuvre sometimes encourages it to be taken for granted.
Shakespeare also had the good fortune to write in the language that over the next few centuries would become the lingua franca for vast swathes of the planet, ensuring his work spread across the globe. But why did Shakespeare’s name become supreme so widely, and not that of some other writer? Part of the answer is surely his preternatural ability to address themes of universality – love and hate, war, peace and power, freedom, revenge, greed, lust and more. Nelson Mandela, a man whose life seemingly had little in common with that of Shakespeare, was moved to observe: ‘Shakespeare always seems to have something to say to us.’ Ben Jonson, one of the writer’s Elizabethan contemporaries, memorably described him as ‘not of an age, but for all time’. His plays transcend time and place in a unique way. He himself seems to have had in mind that he was communicating to humanity in its entirety, his Globe Theatre bearing the motto ‘Totus mundus agit histrionem’ (‘The entire world is a playhouse’).
In his characterization and plotting, Shakespeare explored archetypes, touchstone figures and ideas recognizable from theatrical tradition. But he added a layer of psychological complexity that pushed the expectations of what drama and literature can achieve. His archetypes became fully formed humans, imbued with the full gamut of emotions, strengths and frailties – all communicated in the most memorable of language. Has there ever been a more complete study of a man in crisis, for instance, than that of Hamlet? Or a single more memorable exploration of the human psyche than his ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy? If one thinks of the defining narrative of doomed love, who – even today – need look further than Romeo and Juliet? If one is accusing another of treachery, still they are likely to reach for the words of Julius Caesar: ‘Et tu, Brute?’ For evidence of his brilliance as a purveyor of psychological depth, study the works of Sigmund Freud, written several centuries later. Freud littered his writings with quotations from the playwright, whom he described as ‘the greatest of poets’.
EXPENSIVE WORDS
It is of course ridiculous to attempt to attribute a financial value to Shakespeare’s works. However, the value placed upon the 1623 First Folio of his plays might at least hint at the esteem in which he is held. The print run of the Folio was around a thousand and retailed for a princely £1 in its year of publication. Some 235 copies remain in existence, of which fewer than 20 are complete and undamaged. A copy (printed after his death, remember, and lacking any physical connection to the author such as a signature) was auctioned in New York in 2020 for US$9.98 million. Not bad for a second-hand book!
Shakespeare’s ability to communicate emotion and investigate complexity is intrinsically linked to his mastery of language – his ability to write lines unrivalled in their knack of sticking in the mind. Hamlet alone provides over two hundred quotations in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. The modern English speaker has a vocabulary of some ten to twenty thousand words, of which they will regularly use but a small proportion. Shakespeare employed just over twenty-nine thousand different words in his plays. Moreover, he invented a vast number of new ones. Samuel Johnson attributed more words to him than any other writer in his first Dictionary of the English Language, and the current Oxford English Dictionary uses two thousand supporting quotations from the Bard. It seems fair to say that he was responsible for the generation of at least some seventeen hundred new words. A small selection includes: antipathy, arch-villain, assassination, barefaced, bedazzle, belongings, courtship, dauntless, dewdrop, employer, epileptic, equivocal, fairyland, fashionable, frugal, go-between, homely, honey-tongued, impartial, ladybird, lament, leapfrog, lustrous, nimble-footed, outbreak, pander, prodigious, puke, rant, schoolboy, silliness, time-honoured, unearthly, useful, vulnerable, watchdog, well-bred and zany.
His skill at coining new phrases also beggars description (a phrase he was the first to use in Antony and Cleopatra). To give just a very few examples, without Shakespeare we would not have dishes fit for the gods (Julius Caesar), blinking idiots (The Merchant of Venice), brave new worlds (The Tempest), towers of strength (Richard III) or wild-goose chases (Romeo and Juliet). And how less rich would the world be without concepts such as the seven ages of Man (As You Like It), the green-eyed monster (Othello) or the winter of our discontent (Richard III).
By exploring the boundaries of drama and verse, examining character in terms of psychological truth and expressing it all in the most astonishing language, Shakespeare changed history. Sometimes literally so – our understanding of the character of Richard III, for instance, arguably owes much more to the Bard’s depiction of him than evidence in the historical record. But more importantly, he encourages us to ask what it really means to be human – a question he addressed so completely that his work is performed and inspires as much today as when it was first written.