William Shakespeare died just over four hundred years ago but has probably never been more popular. His works have been translated into over a hundred languages and his plays are still being performed and adapted every day across the globe. But as well as the plays and poems themselves, William Shakespeare left us all another rich legacy. Many of the expressions he used in his works have filtered into our everyday speech , without us even realising it ! “Break the ice” for example… while it sounds like modern-day corporate jargon, in fact the expression goes back to Shakespeare’s play "The Taming of the Shrew" . So how do we explain the lasting popular appeal of Shakespeare’s language?
A feeling for words We should remember that Shakespeare created his plays to be performed on stage , not studied. He was a playwright with the London theatre group The Lord Chamberlain’s Men and sometimes acted in his own plays. So he knew from experience what delivering a line to the audience felt like. And in those days if the audience didn’t like what they were watching they would give immediate feedback… in the form of shouting or throwing rotten fruit! So if a line didn’t work in rehearsals it would be cut or changed. It’s highly likely that Shakespeare’s plays started life as working scripts, used by the actors during rehearsal, full of lines crossed out or improved. Perhaps it was this feeling for the spoken word that allowed so many of his lines to make the transition from the theatre into everyday speech.
A man of the people Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, right in the centre of England, in 1564. From the little evidence there is, we know that his father was a glove maker, a respectable enough profession. The family was not poor but neither were they upper class and William went to the local grammar school where he learned to read and write and received a rigorous education in Latin. But despite his talent, the young William did not go on to study at Oxford or Cambridge University like Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe, other playwrights of his era. Instead he took a different path , setting out for London to work in the theatre, refining his skill with words through writing and performing.
A golden age of innovation And Shakespeare was certainly writing at an exciting time for English, when thousands of new words were entering the language. It was a time of playful inventiveness . People felt free to change nouns into verbs, adjectives into adverbs and so on. You might think that turning the noun “friend” into a verb was an invention of Facebook but no… Shakespeare used friend as a verb in his play Cymbeline “be friended / with the aptness of the season”. It’s commonly claimed that Shakespeare invented as many as 1,700 new words, although it’s more accurate to say that these words are recorded for the first time in Shakespeare’s work. As well as individual words, a huge number of everyday expressions like “break the ice” appear to have started life in Shakespeare’s works. Many of these are still used today, some so often that they’ve become clichés.
Everyday expressions We all know someone who is endlessly kind, patient and generous, who has “a heart of gold.” It appears on birthday cards and in song lyrics today. But way back in 1599, Shakespeare used the expression in a description of King Henry (Henry V ). Numerous singers, from Lionel Richie to Nina Simone, have borrowed the poetic expression “Forever and a day” from Orlando’s passionate declaration of love to the sceptical Rosalind in As You Like It . Still on the theme of love, “Love is blind” could be a line straight out of a modern-day soap opera but it was also a favourite of Shakespeare’s, being used in several of his plays. Although he didn’t invent this one (Chaucer used the expression “loue is blynd” some two hundred years earlier) he does seem to have popularised it.
It’s hard to pin down exactly how many expressions like these Shakespeare introduced or fixed as part of the English language, but we can be sure that it is vastly more than any other writer in history.