“If you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a doornail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then — by Jove! O Lord! Tut, tut! For goodness’ sake! What the dickens! But me no buts — it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.”
The quotation above, from a well known article by Bernard Levin, shows us that William Shakespeare enjoys the reputation of having coined many common phrases. But did he? In this post, I’ll show that many of the phrases Shakespeare supposedly coined were really traditional sayings of his day. When we use them, we, like Shakespeare, are using folklore. Far from making him less creative, this penchant for using traditional speech is part of what has made Shakespeare’s plays and poetry so enduring.
To set the stage (as it were), I’ll note that for many years scholars have argued that Shakespeare was a linguistic anomaly, vastly greater than all other writers, both in terms of his vocabulary, and for the number of words and phrases he single-handedly coined. One of the most influential scholars to make this suggestion was the great Victorian philologist and folklorist Max Müller, who wrote in his book The Science of Language that Shakespeare “probably displayed a greater variety of expression than any writer in any language,” estimating Shakespeare used 15,000 words to Milton’s 8000, versus 3,000-4,000 for an educated Englishman of his own era, or as few as 300 for a rural laborer. This general thesis was accepted by the philologist Ernest Weekley, who, in his 1929 book The English Language, made the following audacious claim:
Of Shakespeare it may be said without fear of exaggeration that his contribution to our phraseology is ten times greater than that of any writer to any language in the history of the world.
Honestly, ten times greater? It sounds like maybe we should fear exaggeration. Weekley’s statement is surely an example of what George Bernard Shaw called “bardolatry”: excessive admiration of Shakespeare founded on ignorance.
Müller’s and Weekley’s exaggerations have been accepted by generations of popular writers right down to today, but current scholarship is disputing this received wisdom. David Crystal points out in his 2004 book The Stories of English that these statements both overestimate Shakespeare’s vocabulary and underestimate the size of an average English vocabulary. More recently, Hugh Craig has argued that Shakespeare did not really have a prodigious vocabulary, but that the large number of total different words Shakespeare used in all his writings is rather a function of the very large corpus of his writing that survives. In his article “Shakespeare’s Vocabulary: Myth and Reality,” Craig compared Shakespeare to other playwrights of his time proportionally, and found that “Shakespeare is in fact no different from his contemporaries in the number of different words he uses.” A similar study by Ward E.Y. Elliott and Robert J. Valenza,