to thine own self be true
August 22, 2013 11:37 PM Subscribe
"The perception of Shakespeare's matchless linguistic inventiveness is closely bound up with his role as an icon of English nationalism." New computerized research indicates he didn't make up so many words.
"By dissolving the myth that his great contribution was to invent English words out of thin air, we are left with a clearer focus on qualities of his work that are less reducible to numbers: namely, the beauty of his writing and the richness of his cultural milieu."
Articles mentioned in the Boston Globe:
*Ward E.Y. Elliott and Robert J. Valenza
*Hugh Craig
"By dissolving the myth that his great contribution was to invent English words out of thin air, we are left with a clearer focus on qualities of his work that are less reducible to numbers: namely, the beauty of his writing and the richness of his cultural milieu."
Articles mentioned in the Boston Globe:
*Ward E.Y. Elliott and Robert J. Valenza
*Hugh Craig
Given that Shakespeare wrote at a time of a massive burgeoning of works committed to print, it is hardly surprising to catch many first instances of words being used - not just by Shakespeare, but by his contemporaries. The rate of "invention of words" is often cited in attribution studies without any consideration of this fact.
A persistent idea has come down the centuries that Shakespeare's plays are excellent and wonderful. Luckily this one is true.
posted by iotic at 12:46 AM on August 23, 2013 [7 favorites]
A persistent idea has come down the centuries that Shakespeare's plays are excellent and wonderful. Luckily this one is true.
posted by iotic at 12:46 AM on August 23, 2013 [7 favorites]
Some people made claims about Shakespeare's vocabulary. Other people are dismantling those earlier claims. There will always be people trying to prove things about Shakespeare because there will always be Shakespeare.
posted by pracowity at 12:48 AM on August 23, 2013 [2 favorites]
posted by pracowity at 12:48 AM on August 23, 2013 [2 favorites]
I'm partial to the theory that I just made up right now that says that Shakespeare was completely insane, and his plays were incomprehensible nonsense to his contemporaries. Nonetheless, they were they were still undeniably brilliant, so eventually folks made up enough meanings for his made-up words for to make them make some kind of sense, and that's the language we speak today.
posted by aubilenon at 12:49 AM on August 23, 2013 [19 favorites]
posted by aubilenon at 12:49 AM on August 23, 2013 [19 favorites]
There is a tendency to think of Elizabethan England as a sort of a Golden Age for the English language, but academics have been hard at work over the last two decades to dismantle this myth. Shakespeare wasn't unique in coining new words (and no, he didn't coin quite as many as people like to think) - linguistic inventiveness was a key feature of the late 16th and early 17th C. I'd argue the trend lasts well into the 17th century, really.
And so instead of thinking of Shakespeare as a masterful wielder of English, try to imagine yourself living in a world where new words and concepts come flying at you from all sides. Some words stick, other words never make it. You have to make sense of it all and try to figure out just what all these people are on about.
Elizabethan England wasn't a Golden Age for the English language. It was an age of linguistic uncertainty. It's interesting how subsequent centuries have constructed a myth around it - a myth in which Shakespeare's supposed linguistic superiority plays an important part - and we are only just beginning to unpack it.
How I wish I could be around 75 years from now to see how scholars understand early 17th C England.
posted by kariebookish at 12:55 AM on August 23, 2013 [4 favorites]
And so instead of thinking of Shakespeare as a masterful wielder of English, try to imagine yourself living in a world where new words and concepts come flying at you from all sides. Some words stick, other words never make it. You have to make sense of it all and try to figure out just what all these people are on about.
Elizabethan England wasn't a Golden Age for the English language. It was an age of linguistic uncertainty. It's interesting how subsequent centuries have constructed a myth around it - a myth in which Shakespeare's supposed linguistic superiority plays an important part - and we are only just beginning to unpack it.
How I wish I could be around 75 years from now to see how scholars understand early 17th C England.
posted by kariebookish at 12:55 AM on August 23, 2013 [4 favorites]
"I'm partial to the theory that I just made up right now that says that Shakespeare was completely insane, and his plays were incomprehensible nonsense to his contemporaries. Nonetheless, they were they were still undeniably brilliant, so eventually folks made up enough meanings for his made-up words for to make them make some kind of sense, and that's the language we speak today."
If you change "Shakespeare" to a fictional contemporary playwright, you've got the plot to a new Charlie Kaufman film.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:56 AM on August 23, 2013 [7 favorites]
If you change "Shakespeare" to a fictional contemporary playwright, you've got the plot to a new Charlie Kaufman film.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:56 AM on August 23, 2013 [7 favorites]
Icon of anglophone culture, yes: icon of English nationalism, probably not? I can't really see tommies shouting "This one's for Bill Spokeshave, Adolf!" or football fans chanting about how the Bard pisses on fucking Moliere.
On the other hand speech from Henry V and all that, granted. Still you have to set against that the claim to universality and multicultural appeal which is a prominent part of Shakespeare-boasting.
posted by Segundus at 12:59 AM on August 23, 2013 [3 favorites]
On the other hand speech from Henry V and all that, granted. Still you have to set against that the claim to universality and multicultural appeal which is a prominent part of Shakespeare-boasting.
posted by Segundus at 12:59 AM on August 23, 2013 [3 favorites]
Interesting! I did some of my Master's research on attestation dates, but I never heard that the early OED was partial to Shakespeare, which would certainly explain over-attribution. I look forward to reading the papers.
By the way, one of the fruits of my research was a list of words by date scraped from Dictionary.com - they're online if you want them.
It's a good thing Dictionary.com is relatively scrapeable since they ignored my dev key application. I would have preferred the OED, but their interface is made to avoid scraping, and when I asked about an accessible version for research they directed me to their lawyers.
posted by 23 at 1:01 AM on August 23, 2013 [2 favorites]
By the way, one of the fruits of my research was a list of words by date scraped from Dictionary.com - they're online if you want them.
It's a good thing Dictionary.com is relatively scrapeable since they ignored my dev key application. I would have preferred the OED, but their interface is made to avoid scraping, and when I asked about an accessible version for research they directed me to their lawyers.
posted by 23 at 1:01 AM on August 23, 2013 [2 favorites]
Hrm, no comments have received a favoriting thus far in the thread, methinks I shall fix that...
posted by GoingToShopping at 1:01 AM on August 23, 2013 [2 favorites]
posted by GoingToShopping at 1:01 AM on August 23, 2013 [2 favorites]
Icon of anglophone culture, yes: icon of English nationalism, probably not? I can't really see tommies shouting "This one's for Bill Spokeshave, Adolf!" or football fans chanting about how the Bard pisses on fucking Moliere.
This pretty much did happen. Read Bate's The Genius of Shakespeare for details.
posted by iotic at 1:02 AM on August 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
This pretty much did happen. Read Bate's The Genius of Shakespeare for details.
posted by iotic at 1:02 AM on August 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
I don't think Shakespeare's linguistics inventiveness is closely bound up with his role as an English icon. The list of words he invented is pretty speculative and more of a cereal box fact. He's an icon because of the juggernaut of popular and academic support for the man spanning four centuries.
What makes the man fascinating is that he appears from nowhere, produces this large and diverse canon of work, achieves moderate success and then explodes into the national consciousness above more successful contemporary peers over 100 years later in the 18th Century.
From an academic perspective he was a prodigious creator of content, and there is enough supporting documentation from the time about him to support serious scholarship and enough gaps to invite and support substantial lines of enquiry and debate. It's a perfect combination.
It's always interesting to read about new research though, because we know that the modern myth of the man is bigger than the man himself and modern analytical methods are all grist to the mill*.
* Not invented by Shakespeare
posted by MuffinMan at 1:03 AM on August 23, 2013 [3 favorites]
What makes the man fascinating is that he appears from nowhere, produces this large and diverse canon of work, achieves moderate success and then explodes into the national consciousness above more successful contemporary peers over 100 years later in the 18th Century.
From an academic perspective he was a prodigious creator of content, and there is enough supporting documentation from the time about him to support serious scholarship and enough gaps to invite and support substantial lines of enquiry and debate. It's a perfect combination.
It's always interesting to read about new research though, because we know that the modern myth of the man is bigger than the man himself and modern analytical methods are all grist to the mill*.
* Not invented by Shakespeare
posted by MuffinMan at 1:03 AM on August 23, 2013 [3 favorites]
I think one of the reasons Shakespeare has remained popular is - unlike Jonson, Dekker, et al - he refrained from making contemporary allusions that are easier crowd-pleasers, and wrote in an intentionally universal style.
That he was greatly concerned with posterity is clear from the sonnets, though it does make it a bit odd that he doesn't seem to have been greatly concerned with getting his works published.
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme
posted by iotic at 1:08 AM on August 23, 2013
That he was greatly concerned with posterity is clear from the sonnets, though it does make it a bit odd that he doesn't seem to have been greatly concerned with getting his works published.
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme
posted by iotic at 1:08 AM on August 23, 2013
"And so instead of thinking of Shakespeare as a masterful wielder of English..."
I'm pretty sure that independent of supposed neologisms, Shakespeare was nevertheless a masterful wielder of English. As Elliott and Valenza write in the linked paper:
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:43 AM on August 23, 2013 [5 favorites]
I'm pretty sure that independent of supposed neologisms, Shakespeare was nevertheless a masterful wielder of English. As Elliott and Valenza write in the linked paper:
People who write about Shakespeare often use much fancier language than Shakespeare did himself. One need only open a late twentieth-century Shakespeare journal to find words far more abstruse than Shakespeare's — fetishisation, commodification, poststructuralism, inferred virtual vocabulary, and enclitic microphrases, for example. Some of these inkhorn polysyllables are our own, and there is a place for them, but they are all far, far from Shakespeare. Shakespeare managed to do some of his best work with short, concrete words like ‘seething brains,’ or ‘cool reason,’ artfully combined:I think it's been easy for people to credit Shakespeare with an fantastical amount of neologisms because he was clearly a master of lyrical English. Intuitively, it's not very far from an evocative and novel turn of phrase to a compelling neologism — a facility with one seems to imply a facility with the other. That this may prove to not be demonstrably especially true of Shakespeare doesn't diminish the former achievement, which is so much more important, anyway.. . . I never may believeThe result would be the same with any set of Shakespeare's most famous lines ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen,’ ‘All the world's a stage,’ ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,’ and many others.
These antic fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
(A Midsummer Night's Dream 5 .1.2-6)
In terms of sheer numbers of words known, and by several different measures, many of us can match or exceed Shakespeare — unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the vast expansion of the language and the whole human enterprise since Shakespeare's time. So could a number of his own contemporaries who drank from the same Castalian fountain of words that Shakespeare did. Quantitatively, Muller and company were completely wrong. Qualitatively, in terms not of how many words Shakespeare knew, but of how well he used them, we would suppose that there is still plenty of room for bardolatry. Shakespeare learned early how to strike deep, not with an outsize inventory of long, inkhorn words, but with a par-for-the-course inventory, mostly of plain words, surpassingly well chosen and put together. It's not too soon, or too late, for the rest of us to learn it too.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:43 AM on August 23, 2013 [5 favorites]
As professor Alfred Hart, long the authority on Shakespeare’s vocabulary, wrote in 1943, his addition of new words play after play shows “how deep and apparently inexhaustible were the wells of his memory and invention, and how marvellous his aptitude for word-coining.”
It would seem to me that most scholars acquire the same sort of crush on their subject as teenage girls have for Justin Bieber and that this undoubtedly introduces some blind spots.
posted by three blind mice at 2:23 AM on August 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
It would seem to me that most scholars acquire the same sort of crush on their subject as teenage girls have for Justin Bieber and that this undoubtedly introduces some blind spots.
posted by three blind mice at 2:23 AM on August 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
There's a great episode of QI that covers this in detail (see here). Fry makes the point that Shakespeare can't have been simply inventing words, or no one would have known what he was on about. He was probably just the first record of a word appearing in print.
That said, no doubt he was a literary genius and indeed did do things with language that had never been done before.
posted by Acey at 3:20 AM on August 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
That said, no doubt he was a literary genius and indeed did do things with language that had never been done before.
posted by Acey at 3:20 AM on August 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
...substituting platitudes for an actual close encounter...
Your understanding of Issac Newton, Christopher Columbus, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Thomas Jefferson or dozens of others goes here.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 5:31 AM on August 23, 2013
Your understanding of Issac Newton, Christopher Columbus, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Thomas Jefferson or dozens of others goes here.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 5:31 AM on August 23, 2013
Elizabethan England wasn't a Golden Age for the English language. It was an age of linguistic uncertainty
Would you like to write a bit more about what constitutes a linguistic Golden Age? Since that linguistic uncertainty was caused by an expansion of English (even though some of these words and expressions didn't stick), isn't that a good era for English?
I love the Urban Dictionary and I had a lolcat-version of Prufrock printed out once.
posted by ersatz at 6:23 AM on August 23, 2013
Would you like to write a bit more about what constitutes a linguistic Golden Age? Since that linguistic uncertainty was caused by an expansion of English (even though some of these words and expressions didn't stick), isn't that a good era for English?
I love the Urban Dictionary and I had a lolcat-version of Prufrock printed out once.
posted by ersatz at 6:23 AM on August 23, 2013
he refrained from making contemporary allusions that are easier crowd-pleasers, and wrote in an intentionally universal style.
Actually, I don't think that's true. I'm no Shakespeare scholar, but FWIW, I did study a lot of his work critically as an English major and took at least one higher-level university course focused exclusively on Shakespeare, and as I recall his work is actually shot-through with inside jokes and allusions to current events and ephemeral cultural phenomena (also, dirty jokes told through puns). It's just that there are tons of allusions to older works and more universal themes, too, and all the inside-jokes and more ephemeral stuff are presented in subtle ways that make them only evident to audience members with the inside knowledge necessary to get the joke.
His work is a lot like The Simpsons in how it subtly layers different kinds of content for different audiences, actually.
posted by saulgoodman at 7:00 AM on August 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
Actually, I don't think that's true. I'm no Shakespeare scholar, but FWIW, I did study a lot of his work critically as an English major and took at least one higher-level university course focused exclusively on Shakespeare, and as I recall his work is actually shot-through with inside jokes and allusions to current events and ephemeral cultural phenomena (also, dirty jokes told through puns). It's just that there are tons of allusions to older works and more universal themes, too, and all the inside-jokes and more ephemeral stuff are presented in subtle ways that make them only evident to audience members with the inside knowledge necessary to get the joke.
His work is a lot like The Simpsons in how it subtly layers different kinds of content for different audiences, actually.
posted by saulgoodman at 7:00 AM on August 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
saulgoodman - ok yes, point taken. I shouldn't have implied his work is free of topicality (much of which we are probably not even aware of), rather his work doesn't depend on it to be appreciated.
posted by iotic at 7:25 AM on August 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by iotic at 7:25 AM on August 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
That's a good distinction.
posted by saulgoodman at 7:32 AM on August 23, 2013
posted by saulgoodman at 7:32 AM on August 23, 2013
The notion of Shakespeare as a word-coiner has always struck me as risible. Inventing new words--especially for a playwright, whose audience has to understand what is being said on the first pass and doesn't have the luxury of re-reading--would mostly be an incredibly annoying habit for a writer to adopt. Has anyone ever handed you a book and said "you should read this, the author is just amazing, she's so good at inventing new words!"? (Unless, of course, it was for some specific futuristic or Joycean word-play type project).
Nothing about what makes Shakespeare great hangs on this question at all. You could prove that Shakespeare never used a word that he hadn't heard elsewhere and that his vocabulary was more reestricted than the average Elizabethan author and it wouldn't affect one's estimation of his plays or his poems one iota. Artists don't have to invent colors to be original and nor do they have to use every color in the rainbow to paint great works of art; just ask Rembrandt.
posted by yoink at 7:35 AM on August 23, 2013 [4 favorites]
Nothing about what makes Shakespeare great hangs on this question at all. You could prove that Shakespeare never used a word that he hadn't heard elsewhere and that his vocabulary was more reestricted than the average Elizabethan author and it wouldn't affect one's estimation of his plays or his poems one iota. Artists don't have to invent colors to be original and nor do they have to use every color in the rainbow to paint great works of art; just ask Rembrandt.
posted by yoink at 7:35 AM on August 23, 2013 [4 favorites]
My guess of why Shakespeare prevailed historically over his contemporaries is because of timing. His emergence coincides with the birth of capitalism and his portrayal of selfishness and wanton lust for power gave license to those with the predilection to pursue individual goals at the expense of society. "Hey, if this is the way kings really act then I guess I should do likewise." Yeah, most of the bad guys in Shakespeare get their due, but so did Gordon Gekko and we see what a great job that movie did at deterring careers in high finance...
posted by any major dude at 7:43 AM on August 23, 2013
posted by any major dude at 7:43 AM on August 23, 2013
This article misses the point a bit, as the worry was rather with the Oxford English Dictionary than any understanding of Shakespeare. It is often quoted that the top writer for fangling new words in English is Shakespeare, or Chaucer, or whoever translated the King James Bible. But do you notice anything about those three? They are all writers who could be found on the bookshelf of most English readers. When the call went out for submissions to the OED project, readers reached for the nearest books they could find. Many more new words are accredited to them because readers have raked through every line of their work, while also lacking access to many of their contemporaries. For every one who has Shakespeare on their shelf, how many have Jonson or Marlowe, or even Dekker or Shirley? Fewer and fewer, til none at all with the most obscure of writers. That's not to say obscure writers are missing from the OED quotations, but that they are far less thoroughly referenced.
The situation is being arighted now, but we should learn to see their linguistic genius as maybe more an artifact of the OED than truth.
posted by Thing at 8:18 AM on August 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
The situation is being arighted now, but we should learn to see their linguistic genius as maybe more an artifact of the OED than truth.
posted by Thing at 8:18 AM on August 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
Two days ago during an after dinner stroll through Lincoln Park my wife and I came across a young girl maybe 8 or 9 years old sitting on the lap of the William Shakespeare statue shouting "Marry Me William. Marry Me William Shakespeare".
It was almost as cute as the baby bunnies that are all over the place. Also the dude still has impressive game despite the inconvenience of being long dead.
posted by srboisvert at 8:54 AM on August 23, 2013 [6 favorites]
It was almost as cute as the baby bunnies that are all over the place. Also the dude still has impressive game despite the inconvenience of being long dead.
posted by srboisvert at 8:54 AM on August 23, 2013 [6 favorites]
My guess of why Shakespeare prevailed historically over his contemporaries is because of timing.
This definitely enters in to it. I think it's significant that the era of printing was just flowering. If you got printed, you were lucky. We know of dozens of lost plays by Fletcher, Kyd (Hamlet!), Jonson, Marlowe, and others that were probably never printed at all (or in the case of one by Jonson, was censored for political content), and we have almost everything Shakespeare ever wrote.
In addition, the stage suffered a huge blow when the theatres were shut down by the Puritans, about 25 years after Shakespeare's death, and remained closed for almost 25 years. That's one generation completely lost, and a second without a foundation to build on.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 10:08 AM on August 23, 2013
This definitely enters in to it. I think it's significant that the era of printing was just flowering. If you got printed, you were lucky. We know of dozens of lost plays by Fletcher, Kyd (Hamlet!), Jonson, Marlowe, and others that were probably never printed at all (or in the case of one by Jonson, was censored for political content), and we have almost everything Shakespeare ever wrote.
In addition, the stage suffered a huge blow when the theatres were shut down by the Puritans, about 25 years after Shakespeare's death, and remained closed for almost 25 years. That's one generation completely lost, and a second without a foundation to build on.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 10:08 AM on August 23, 2013
saulgoodman - ok yes, point taken. I shouldn't have implied his work is free of topicality (much of which we are probably not even aware of), rather his work doesn't depend on it to be appreciated.
iotic
So to build on saulgoodman's earlier analogy:
Shakespeare:The Simpsons::Jonson, Dekker, et al:Family Guy?
posted by Sangermaine at 10:14 AM on August 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
iotic
So to build on saulgoodman's earlier analogy:
Shakespeare:The Simpsons::Jonson, Dekker, et al:Family Guy?
posted by Sangermaine at 10:14 AM on August 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
This definitely enters in to it. I think it's significant that the era of printing was just flowering. If you got printed, you were lucky. We know of dozens of lost plays by Fletcher, Kyd (Hamlet!), Jonson, Marlowe, and others that were probably never printed at all (or in the case of one by Jonson, was censored for political content), and we have almost everything Shakespeare ever wrote.
Yeah, though it is really hard to disentangle these elements of luck and historical timing and so forth from the question of simple raw individual ability. I mean, we don't have the same rate of "lost" plays in the C18th and we have a pretty generous culture of publication (that is, it wasn't hard for a professional playwright to get their plays published if they really wanted to). So we have thousands of plays from the C18th but nary a single C18th playwright that almost anyone would care to suggest deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Shakespeare. And part of the reason we have a lot more of Shakespeare's plays than those of many of his contemporaries is because a good number of his contemporaries thought he was pretty damn special and that his plays were worth the effort of preserving. It's not as if the First Folio (and all the various Quartos, come to that) were the product of one deranged but wealthy fan who preserved the works by sheer luck for future generations to fetishize. Sure, Shakespeare wasn't SHAKESPEARE (tm) for about a century after his death, but he never ceased to be read and performed and many of his contemporaries identified him as an exceptional figure.
These sorts of questions ("just how much of a genius IS Shakespeare?") are, in the end, not very useful and not open to any rigorous proof one way or the other--but I think it is equally wrong to say "Oh, Shakespeare simply was a world-historical genius, and that's sufficient to explain his current status" as it is to say "Oh, Shakespeare is just a cultural invention--we needed to invest someone with this kind of uber-genius status and by sheer chance we settled on Will."
posted by yoink at 10:20 AM on August 23, 2013
Yeah, though it is really hard to disentangle these elements of luck and historical timing and so forth from the question of simple raw individual ability. I mean, we don't have the same rate of "lost" plays in the C18th and we have a pretty generous culture of publication (that is, it wasn't hard for a professional playwright to get their plays published if they really wanted to). So we have thousands of plays from the C18th but nary a single C18th playwright that almost anyone would care to suggest deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Shakespeare. And part of the reason we have a lot more of Shakespeare's plays than those of many of his contemporaries is because a good number of his contemporaries thought he was pretty damn special and that his plays were worth the effort of preserving. It's not as if the First Folio (and all the various Quartos, come to that) were the product of one deranged but wealthy fan who preserved the works by sheer luck for future generations to fetishize. Sure, Shakespeare wasn't SHAKESPEARE (tm) for about a century after his death, but he never ceased to be read and performed and many of his contemporaries identified him as an exceptional figure.
These sorts of questions ("just how much of a genius IS Shakespeare?") are, in the end, not very useful and not open to any rigorous proof one way or the other--but I think it is equally wrong to say "Oh, Shakespeare simply was a world-historical genius, and that's sufficient to explain his current status" as it is to say "Oh, Shakespeare is just a cultural invention--we needed to invest someone with this kind of uber-genius status and by sheer chance we settled on Will."
posted by yoink at 10:20 AM on August 23, 2013
we have almost everything Shakespeare ever wrote
we really don't know that. the plays and poems we have start from when he was nearly thirty ...
posted by iotic at 10:22 AM on August 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
we really don't know that. the plays and poems we have start from when he was nearly thirty ...
posted by iotic at 10:22 AM on August 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
So to build on saulgoodman's earlier analogy:
Shakespeare:The Simpsons::Jonson, Dekker, et al:Family Guy?
Ha, yes, that sounds about right.
On an entirely different pop culture tangent, has anyone noticed how many Elizabethan dramatists' surnames crop up in reggae? There's:
Nashe -> Johnny,
Marlowe (neé Marley) -> Bob,
Dekker -> Desmond,
Shakespeare -> Robbie,
Jonson -> Linton Kwesi
Elizabethan Reggae indeed.
posted by iotic at 11:34 AM on August 23, 2013
Shakespeare:The Simpsons::Jonson, Dekker, et al:Family Guy?
Ha, yes, that sounds about right.
On an entirely different pop culture tangent, has anyone noticed how many Elizabethan dramatists' surnames crop up in reggae? There's:
Nashe -> Johnny,
Marlowe (neé Marley) -> Bob,
Dekker -> Desmond,
Shakespeare -> Robbie,
Jonson -> Linton Kwesi
Elizabethan Reggae indeed.
posted by iotic at 11:34 AM on August 23, 2013
What?!
I never thought people claimed he invented words like "eyeball" - but simply that his texts were the oldest surviving usages of those words. Easily 99.9% of surviving English texts post-date Shakespeare - heck, I'll bet that 99% of surviving English texts before 1900 post-date Shakespeare.
EDIT: Oops, should have read more thoroughly before pressing save...
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 2:15 PM on August 23, 2013
I never thought people claimed he invented words like "eyeball" - but simply that his texts were the oldest surviving usages of those words. Easily 99.9% of surviving English texts post-date Shakespeare - heck, I'll bet that 99% of surviving English texts before 1900 post-date Shakespeare.
EDIT: Oops, should have read more thoroughly before pressing save...
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 2:15 PM on August 23, 2013
Nobody with any brains or sense ever said Shakespeare coined all those words. People with brains and sense simply said he was the earliest user known, so far.
The misrepresentation, which has a tendency to be tossed into articles, books, and columns concerning language, has saved me from much reading. If they misrepresent this particular bit, I stop reading.
posted by Mo Nickels at 2:58 PM on August 23, 2013
The misrepresentation, which has a tendency to be tossed into articles, books, and columns concerning language, has saved me from much reading. If they misrepresent this particular bit, I stop reading.
posted by Mo Nickels at 2:58 PM on August 23, 2013
Oh, Shakespeare is just a cultural invention--we needed to invest someone with this kind of uber-genius status and by sheer chance we settled on Will.
Just to be clear, I wasn't saying that, just noting there were circumstances. It is, however, tantalizing to wonder what the other Hamlets were like (Kyd's and the so-called ur-Hamlet).
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 5:22 PM on August 23, 2013
Just to be clear, I wasn't saying that, just noting there were circumstances. It is, however, tantalizing to wonder what the other Hamlets were like (Kyd's and the so-called ur-Hamlet).
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 5:22 PM on August 23, 2013
And part of the reason we have a lot more of Shakespeare's plays than those of many of his contemporaries is because a good number of his contemporaries thought he was pretty damn special and that his plays were worth the effort of preserving.
Another thing is that high culture didn't take plays seriously in Shakespeare's time. People mocked Jonson for putting his plays in his collected works. It would have been like Joyce Carol Oates collecting her tweets and publishing them as equals to her novels.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 6:33 PM on August 23, 2013
Another thing is that high culture didn't take plays seriously in Shakespeare's time. People mocked Jonson for putting his plays in his collected works. It would have been like Joyce Carol Oates collecting her tweets and publishing them as equals to her novels.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 6:33 PM on August 23, 2013
Thing wrote: It is often quoted that the top writer for fangling new words in English is Shakespeare ... The situation is being arighted now ...
You think we don't see what you're doing here.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:35 AM on August 24, 2013
You think we don't see what you're doing here.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:35 AM on August 24, 2013
« Older "...I assumed that this was another such check." | 20 Historic Black and White Photos Colorized Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
This doesn't detract from Shakespeare's worth, naturally, but I do find odd, how many people want to take him out of history, you know?
posted by smoke at 12:07 AM on August 23, 2013 [2 favorites]