Joho the Blog
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April 14, 2007
The Guardian has a terrific article by Jonathan Bate on how Shakespeare went from being considered one of the very best playwrights to the unique, exceptional genius of our language. Among small points: Bates says it isn't true that Shakespeare created more new words than anyone else in our history. That myth resulted from the Oxford English Dictionary's frequent citation of Shakespeare as a source because "because of his ready availability when the dictionary was created at the end of the Victorian era." [Tags: shakespeare] Posted
by D. Weinberger at April 14, 2007 04:54 AM
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Comments
Bate's argument was a bit sloppy; he showed that Shakespeare's prominence among neologists had been inflated, but not by how much - or whether he'd been dethroned as Top Neologist by A.N. Other.
The way I learned it at college, this was (for various reasons) a period of tremendous fluidity in the English language, with adjectivish nouns being verbed adverbially all over the shop, so your average writer was more likely to use neologisms than he or she would be now. (As Bate says, Shakespeare's coinages weren't of the 'quiz' or 'maguffin' variety. 'Real' existed, Shakespeare gave us 'unreal'; 'fit' existed, Shakespeare gave us 'fitful' (which first appears in Macbeth).)
What was distinctive about Shakespeare wasn't a particular hunger for neologisms but a broader love of playing with words and making life harder for himself and his audience - if you read one of the later plays after Romeo and Juliet, say, it's like going from Tennyson to Ezra Pound. And that was unusual. The ground was higher than we realise, but there were still peaks.
Posted by: Phil | April 16, 2007 06:34 AM