Shakespeare: how one playwright shaped English

Have you ever had a heart of gold, sent someone on a wild-goose chase, or found yourself in a pickle? In English, dozens of turns of phrase like these — break the ice, all's well that ends well, the green-eyed monster, in a pickle — flow from the same pen. That of a provincial glover's son who became, four centuries after his death, the most performed and most quoted author on the planet: William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's influence on the English language is so deep that it ended up mythologized. He is credited with inventing thousands of words and expressions; the reality is more nuanced, but no less fascinating. To understand Shakespeare is to understand how a single writer could leave a lasting mark on the idiom now spoken by more than a billion and a half people.

The man from Stratford#

William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, into a modest family, and died in the same town in 1616. Between the two, a dazzling London career: actor, shareholder in a company, and above all a playwright of prodigious fertility, author of around thirty-seven plays and one hundred fifty-four sonnets.

His theatre embraces every genre: tragedies (Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear), comedies (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing), histories and romances. He wrote for a popular audience, in the ferment of Elizabethan theatre, at a time when English itself was expanding and unstable.

Shakespeare wrote for spectators standing in the mud, not for school textbooks. Perhaps that is why his language, alive and inventive, stuck so well to the mouths of a whole people.

The Globe and Elizabethan theatre#

Shakespeare's stage was notably the Globe, the round open-air theatre in London where his company performed. There, several thousand spectators of every condition — from nobles to the groundlings standing in the pit — attended performances in broad daylight, without elaborate sets. Everything rested on the text and the acting.

This constraint partly explains the richness of Shakespearean language: for lack of scenery, it is words that paint the storm, the night, the battlefield. The playwright had to say everything, evoke everything through speech, which pushed him to a rare verbal virtuosity and an intense exploitation of the resources of English.

The kernel of truth: a shaper of language#

What does English really owe to Shakespeare? An enormous amount, provided the terms are framed correctly. Shakespeare popularized, fixed and spread a considerable number of words and expressions, many of which seem perfectly ordinary to us today. Dictionaries, beginning with the Oxford English Dictionary, record hundreds of terms for which his plays provide the first known written attestation.

He handled English with a creative freedom: he turned nouns into verbs, joined words to forge new ones, played with prefixes and suffixes. Expressions like break the ice, wild-goose chase, heart of gold or in a pickle owe part of their fortune to his plays.

The kernel of myth: what must be qualified#

But beware the myth. One often reads that Shakespeare single-handedly "invented" seventeen hundred words, or even more. Linguists urge caution: "first written attestation" does not mean "invention." Many of these words were already circulating orally or in lost texts; Shakespeare is simply the first whose written trace has come down to us, because his work, unlike others, survived.

In other words, Shakespeare is less a solitary inventor than a formidable revealer and amplifier of the English of his time. His true strength was to capture the living language, to push it to its maximum expressiveness and to transmit it to posterity thanks to the immense prestige of his theatre.

The First Folio: saving the work#

If we read Shakespeare today, it is largely thanks to one book: the First Folio, the first collected edition of his plays, published in 1623, seven years after his death, by two of his former fellow company members. Without this volume, half of his plays — including Macbeth and The Tempest — could have been lost forever, for they had never been printed.

The First Folio thus fixed and transmitted a linguistic treasure, offering generations of readers, writers and lexicographers an inexhaustible source. It is through this book that Shakespeare's language could lastingly irrigate written English.

Shakespeare today: a living presence#

Four centuries later, Shakespeare is nothing like a relic. His plays are performed all over the world, translated into every language, adapted to cinema, transposed into every context — from Akira Kurosawa's Japanese King Lear to musicals and series. His plots and characters have become a common stock of the global imagination.

In everyday language, his imprint is invisible by dint of being omnipresent: quoting Shakespeare without knowing it is, for an English speaker, a daily experience. That is the mark of the very greatest authors: not to remain in books, but to dissolve into the language itself.

To discover Shakespeare is to discover English through its most prestigious source: no longer merely a utilitarian language, but a language of poetry, invention and play. To learn English is also, without always knowing it, to speak a little of Shakespeare's tongue.

FAQ#

Did Shakespeare invent English words? He popularized and fixed hundreds of words and expressions, and his plays provide the first written attestation of many of them. But "first attestation" does not mean "invention": many were already circulating orally.

How many plays did Shakespeare write? Around thirty-seven plays (tragedies, comedies, histories, romances) and one hundred fifty-four sonnets, composed mostly between the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century.

What is the First Folio? It is the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, published in 1623, seven years after his death. Without it, about half of his plays, never printed before, could have been lost.

Which common expressions come from Shakespeare? Turns of phrase like break the ice, wild-goose chase, heart of gold or in a pickle owe much of their spread in everyday English to his plays.

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