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SHAKESPEARE....Bard’s Eye View
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In the run up to his 400th death
anniversary on April 23, it’s time to remember William Shakespeare as not
just a playwright and sonneteer, but as the maker of modern-day English, says
Debnita Chakravarti in this tribute
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Every year on April 23 we wish ‘Happy
Bard’s Day’ to the most famous Englishman ever. His 450th birthday was
celebrated in 2014, and this year marks 400 years of his death. But even as
we remember Shakespeare through the many stagings and screen adaptations of
his plays, the regular seminars on and syllabi inclusions of his sonnets, how
many of us know about Shakespeare as the maker of the English language?
It is difficult for any individual
agent to influence the medium in which it functions. Yet that is what
Shakespeare did. He changed the very language he worked in by varying it,
sculpting it, and rendering it in its modern version, the one we speak today.
Even if you’ve never read one of his sonnets, seen a play, or so much as
watched a movie adaptation, you’re likely to have quoted him unwittingly. It
is almost impossible to avoid.
Lend me your ears
Take, for instance, the commonly used
phrase ‘in a pickle’ used in the sense of being ‘in a difficult situation’,
whose etymology is traced back to The Tempest. Similarly, ‘with bated breath’
goes back to The Merchant of Venice and ‘wild goose chase’ was first used by
Mercutio in Act 2, Scene 4 of Romeo and Juliet.
Some phrases have become so well used
that they are now regarded as clichés. ‘A heart of gold’ is from Henry V,
while ‘the world’s mine oyster’ is used in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Then
there’s the association Shakespeare makes between jealousy and the colour
green – ‘green-eyed jealousy’ from The Merchant of Venice and ‘green-eyed
monster’ from Othello.
The list of Shakespearean phrases
that have passed into common parlance is a long one: ‘the game is afoot’,
‘send him packing’ and ‘give the devil his due’ (Henry IV, Part I); ‘eaten
out of house and home’ (Henry V, Part 2); ‘foregone conclusion’, ‘vanish into
air’ and ‘I will wear my heart upon my sleeve’ (Othello); ‘break the ice’
(The Taming of the Shrew); ‘in the twinkling of an eye’ (The Merchant Of
Venice); ‘method in madness’ and ‘brevity, the soul of wit’ (Hamlet); ‘too
much of a good thing’ (As You Like It); and ‘be-all and end-all’ (Macbeth).
Almost all of them are integral to our daily speech, and all come from his
pen – no mean feat for an author who died 400 years ago.
When one realises that it is the
beginning of the end, claims to be more sinned against than sinning, or
breathes one’s last, s/he is in the company of Shakespeare. If we ponder over
bubble reputation, appreciate the milk of human kindness, find neither rhyme
nor reason or indulge in remembrance of things past, we are carrying on his
linguistic legacy. One might never have been able to find pride of place,
undergo a sea change, recall his salad days, act more in sorrow than in
anger, vanish into thin air, be tongue-tied, make a virtue of necessity,
insist on fair play, sleep not one wink, stand on ceremony, dance attendance,
see better days or live in a fool’s paradise if Shakespeare had never come to
London from Stratford.
Words, words, words
Scholars say that Shakespeare used
around 15,000 words in his plays – one of the largest vocabularies used by
any writer. Many of these would have been neologisms in his time, words he
either invented for his plays or plucked out of obscure texts for reuse in
different contexts. Some of these he ‘invented’ or adapted from existing
words, or tweaked similar words from foreign languages. There are 357
instances where Shakespeare is the only recorded user of a word in one or
more of its senses. Not that he coined all of them, but no one before him had
used these in writing, or at least texts that have come down to us.
Some of the ways he did this,
according to Shakespeare-online, is by “changing nouns into verbs, changing
verbs into adjectives, connecting words never before used together, adding
prefixes and suffixes, and devising words wholly original”.
The blog Aviksliterarylollipop lists
two of them. “For example, Caesar is able to say: “The wild disguise has
almost anticked us all.” An antic is a fool, which is a noun. Shakespeare
turns it into a verb ‘to make a fool of’. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, he is able
to exploit multiple meanings of one word to create the sentence, ‘Light,
seeking light, doth light of light beguile’ – ‘intellect’, ‘wisdom’,
‘eyesight’ and ‘daylight’.” And if you’ve ever insulted anyone as an eyesore,
laughing stock, the devil incarnate, stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or
a blinking idiot, you have the bard to thank for helping with le mot juste
just when needed.
All the world’s a stage
Over the years, other artists working
with words have dipped into the wealth of his works to spark their own
imagination. Many have used his phrases to title their works – Agatha
Christie’s The Mousetrap and the Miss Marple mystery Murder Most Foul, Alfred
Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale, TS Eliot’s
The Hollow Men… the list is long.
Then there’s Thomas Hardy’s Under the
Greenwood Tree, taken from As You Like It, William Faulkner’s The Sound and
the Fury and Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters from Macbeth and Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World from The Tempest. Also, there’s Ruth Rendell’s Put on by
Cunning, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Phillip K. Dick’s Time Out of
Joint and Jasper Fforde’s Something Rotten. And how many of John Green’s
readers will trace back the title The Fault in Our Stars to Julius Caesar?
Musicians, too, have found their muse
in Shakespeare. Nick Lowe’s Cruel to be Kind is a line from Hamlet, while
Iron Maiden’s Where Eagles Dare (and the film of the same title), is from
Richard III. When Mumford & Sons named their album Sigh No More, they
were borrowing a phrase from Much Ado About Nothing. Pink Floyd sang The Dogs
of War, a song which takes its name from Julius Caesar.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
The reasons why Shakespeare could do
it were many. For one, he came to write at a significant time in the history
of the English tongue, when the language, its grammar and the spelling of
words were in a flux. Shakespeare’s works and felicity of phrases became so
popular that they helped set the standards for early Modern English.
With his invention of commonly-used
expressions, creation of new words, borrowing or adopting a word or a phrase
from another language (neologising) and use of iambic pentameter, Shakespeare
was able to affect the language in a way that no person since has.
The reason lies partly in his
boldness of language usage as well. Shakespeare’s sentence structures were
often unconventional without caring for grammatical accuracy – he was more
concerned about his characters sounding credible. The vivid visual quality of
his metaphors, which delighted generations of his viewers and kept his
scholars busy, compensated for the minimalist Elizabethan stage space. With
no artificial lighting and few props, Shakespeare created what might be
called ‘verbal scenery’ through his words. Thus the words had to work
overtime, not only as dialogue, but also to create the very atmosphere needed
for a particular scene.
As Hephzibah Anderson wrote in a
recent BBC feature: “Then there’s the fact that these words are voiced by
some unforgettable characters – men and women who, despite the extraordinary
situations in which they tend to find themselves, are fully and profoundly human
in both their strengths and frailties.”
“He gave us uniquely vivid ways in
which to express hope and despair, sorrow and rage, love and lust,” Anderson
adds in her article. “His impact endures not only in the way we express
ourselves, but how we experience and process the world around us.”
Would ‘fashionable’ have become a
well-known word unless set in that memorable sentence in Troilus and Cressida
– “For time is like a fashionable host, that slightly shakes his parting
guest by th’ hand”?
Shakespeare is thus a cornerstone not
only of English literary studies, but also a landmark in the development of
the English language. If the mark of great writers is that they’re still
read, then perhaps the mark of a genius is that they’re still spoken, too.
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