30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (25 page)

But Shakespeare, unlike other of his contemporaries, was not noted in the period for his eccentric vocabulary. The description of “honey- tongued” Shakespeare suggests an ease with language. (The adjective is an interesting example of the OED problem: its earliest recorded usages are in the same year, 1598, in Shakespeare's
Love's Labour's Lost
(5.2.334) and in Francis Meres' description of Shakespeare in his
Palladis Tamia
. Is Meres using one of Shakespeare's mellifluous—Latin for “honey-tongued”—phrases back at him, or are both writers recording a word in current usage?) We might compare this with the case of contemporary dramatist John Marston, figured as Crispinus in Ben Jonson's play
Poetaster
(1601): Crispinus is given a purge and forced to vomit up his outlandish vocabulary on stage: up come “retrograde—reciprocal—incubus” and “glibbery—lubrical—defunct” in a scene of linguistic emesis which includes words we now take for granted—reciprocal, defunct—alongside the forgettable “glibbery” and “lubrical.” Jonson's satire shows that contemporary culture was alert to excessive coinages: a scornful riff on so-called “inkhorn” terms is a common feature of many early modern texts, as the debate raged over what John Cheke called English “clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled with borrowing of other tongues.” Although we have thought of Shakespeare as the most active coiner of new words of the period, it is striking that in an environment in which linguistic choices were pointedly ideological, none of his contemporaries picks him out either for praise or blame in this regard.

One way in which Shakespeare's lexical richness does manifest itself is in the manipulation of existing words. Using verbs as nouns, and vice versa—“dog them at the heels” (
Richard II
5.3.137), for example—exploits the resources of a language which has not settled into its more restricted and rule-bound form. Early modern English has nuances we have since lost: the difference between “you” and “thou” forms of second-person address, for instance, allowed the depiction of finely shaded relationships of power, solidarity, and intimacy (the use of the pronouns in the love-test at the beginning of
King Lear
is a good test-case). Compounds yoke words together in powerfully abbreviated form, linked with a hyphen, as in “Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds” (
Romeo and Juliet
3.2.1) or “summer-seeming lust” (
Macbeth
4.3.87).
The Tempest
makes extensive use of compounds, enacting at the microcosmic level of individual words the structural and thematic compression that characterizes the whole play: “still-vexed,” “sea-change,” “urchin-shows” (1.2.230 and 403, 2.2.5).

Elsewhere it is lexical variety that makes for memorable phrases. Charmian's epitaph on Cleopatra as a “lass unparalleled” (
Antony and Cleopatra
5.2.310) gets its touching combination of intimacy and regal grandeur from the unexpected juxtaposition of the Middle English, monosyllabic, northern “lass” and the less familiar polysyllabic, Latinate “unparalleled” (the
OED
dates the word from 1605; the play is only a couple of years later). An unfamiliar word can use its strangeness to denote something about the thing it signifies: Macbeth's use of the word “assassination” (1.7.2; the first citation in the
OED
) registers that what he is contemplating—the murder of a king—is so outside normal behavior as to need an estranged word, rather as Richard II mockingly coins the verb “unking” to point out the unnaturalness of his deposition by his cousin Bullingbrook (4.1.210, 5.5.37). Sometimes Shakespeare uses deliberately unfamiliar words that are difficult to pronounce to indicate mental disturbance: Leontes' cluster of hard-consonant “c” words, which do not appear elsewhere in Shakespeare's work, depicts a mind ranging crazily through its own dark imaginings: “With what's unreal thou [affection] coactive art, / And fellow'st nothing. Then 'tis very credent / Thou mayst co-join with something, and thou dost—/ And that beyond commission” (
The Winter's Tale
1.2.143–6). Something linguistically similar happens in a soliloquy by Angelo, experiencing sexual desire apparently for the first time, in
Measure for Measure
(2.4.1–17). If we find such passages difficult, that's surely the point: language—both syntax and vocabulary—is at breaking point as Leontes tumbles into the abyss of his own jealousy and Angelo into the pit of his own lust.

We can see Shakespeare's enjoyment of what D.H. Lawrence called “such lovely language” in a play which seems almost to be
about
language itself:
Love's Labour's Lost
. The play opens with the King of Navarre declaring he and his three lords will live in “a little academe” (1.1.13), devoting themselves to study and abjuring female company for three years. Enter, right on cue, the Princess of France, visiting the court with her three ladies. As well as these symmetrically matched nobles, the play is peopled with a linguistically diverse population. First is Don Armado, a “man of fire-new words” (1.1.176), a Spaniard addicted to rhetoric: his letter to the king is nonsensically pompous in its combination of archaism and
copia
: “Now for the ground, which—which, I mean, I walked upon. It is yclept thy park. Then for the place, where—where I mean, I did encounter that most obscene and preposterous event, that draweth from my snow-white pen the ebon-coloured ink which here thou viewest, beholdest, surveyest, or seest” (1.1.234–9). Next is Costard, a quick-tongued peasant with a line in sexual innuendo, which earns him the reproach: “you talk greasily, your lips grow foul” (4.1.136). Holofernes is labeled “Pedant” in the First Folio text: his is the prissily expansive language of the schoolroom: “
Novi hominum tanquam te
. His humour is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, his gait majestical, and his general behaviour vain, ridiculous and thrasonical. He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it” (5.1.9–14). Nathaniel, the egregious curate, eggs him on, praising that final silly adjective as “a most singular and choice epithet” (5.1.15). Linguistic variety, and a satiric self-consciousness about linguistic fashion, is one of
Love's Labour's Lost
's most prominent themes, as Shakespeare simultaneously exhibits and deflates his own verbal dexterity.

Assessing Shakespeare's contribution to the language should be qualitative rather than quantitative, therefore. If the number of Shakespearean coinages and the size of Shakespeare's vocabulary are smaller than previously thought, his influence remains. But it is worth recalling that linguistic studies have shown that Shakespeare—after all, a provincial grammar-school boy who learned his language away from the more standardized London forms of English—“tended to lag behind grammatical change”: far from being always in the vanguard of linguistic novelty, Shakespeare's language might have been experienced by early audiences as slightly old-fashioned even as it is so endlessly inventive.
³

Notes

¹
 David Crystal,
Think on my Words: Exploring Shakespeare's Language
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 2–3.

²
 The list is under ‘Additional Material’ at
www.thinkonmywords.com

³
 Jonathan Hope, “Shakespeare's ‘Natiue English’,” in David Scott Kastan (ed.),
A Companion to Shakespeare
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 253.

One undeniable fact about Shakespeare is that his plays have been popular in many countries in most centuries. Certain plays come in and out of fashion, of course, but generally speaking Shakespeare the playwright has always been popular, both in print and performance. Ben Jonson was prescient when he wrote in a tribute to Shakespeare, published in the First Folio of 1623, that he was “not of an age but for all time.” From Jonson in 1623 to nineteenth-century Germany (“unser [our] Shakespeare”) to today's translation industry (Shakespeare is published in eighty different languages), Shakespeare's plays have stood the test of time.

It is worth asking why some writers stand the test of time and others do not. An easy but misguided answer to the question of Shakespeare's success is: because he was Shakespeare (see Myth 1). Gary Taylor has explored the longevity or loss of cultural achievements generally. His book title says it all:
Cultural Selection: Why Some Achievements Survive the Test of Time—And Others Don't
).
¹
In this immensely accessible study he offers a complex combination of circumstances: for example, contingency (the educational system that we examined in Myth 2, a system ideally suited, although never designed, to produce dramatists), collaborative curatorial forces (editors), and many more. Anne Coldiron has asked the question not of culture generally but of Shakespeare specifically, and in her essay she adds a number of extra ingredients to Taylor's book-long list. Shakespeare's survival has been helped, she argues, by his large canon and by his writing across many genres; this enables his reputation to survive unsullied even as individual plays rise and fall in estimation. She identifies Shakespeare's metatextual tendencies (the way he likes self-reflexively to refer to his own drama as fiction) as a factor in his survival: “The one text we know future readers will have in mind is the one they're reading or hearing.”
²
Shakespeare's adaptability to different media (different kinds of theaters, radio, film) has been a key ingredient. So too has his plurality and inclusivity: his works “treat sympathetically the concerns of more than one kind of audience. Shakespeare gives sympathetic voice to the viewpoints of rich and poor, old and young, female and male, rogue and princess, allowing many kinds of audience members and readers the pleasure of identifying with his characters.”
³
These two critics' analyses show the importance of luck in an artist standing the test of time: there is no single inherent aesthetic quality responsible for Shakespeare's transhistorical and transnational success.

But standing the test of time and being timeless are not the same thing (although they overlap). Let us take Thomas Middleton as a test case for comparison. Middleton was undoubtedly one of the most talented dramatists of his time, with an extant canon of thirty-two plays (excluding masques, civic pageants, and adaptations of Shakespeare); his plays are as generically diverse as Shakespeare's. Yet apart from two or three great tragedies—
The Revenger's Tragedy
,
The Changeling
, and perhaps
Women Beware Women
—few of his plays are performed today. This is partly because nearly half of his plays are in a very local, topical genre—satire—and in particular the form of satire known as city (i.e. London) comedy. Plays such as
Michaelmas Term
and
Your Five Gallants
satirize Londoners' appetite for litigation and for get-rich-quick schemes. These appetites are not limited to London or to the seventeenth century, but Middleton's plays are so firmly located in local references and details, with characters often appearing as types, that it is harder for them to travel outside their own period.
Your Five Gallants
opens by introducing the gallants:

Passing over the stage; the bawd-gallant, with three wenches gallantly attired; meets him the whore-gallant, the pocket gallant, the cheating-gallant … Now, for the other, the broker- gallant, he sits at home yet. (Prologue, 1–6)

The gallants are introduced as types. Although they are later given names, they are type names: Frip (the broker-gallant), Tailby (the whore-gallant), Pursenet (the pocket-gallant). When Shakespeare uses type-names the character usually acts against type. Thus, Francis Feeble is brave (
2 Henry IV
), Silence becomes garrulous when drunk (
2 Henry IV
), Speed is tardy (
Two Gentlemen of Verona
). The type asserts his individuality.

Back to our comparative test case, Thomas Middleton. Middleton's
The Witch
(1616) is a tragicomedy based on scandalous contemporary events: the convictions of Frances Howard and her second husband Robert Carr for their part in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. The story is complex and involves an arranged marriage (between the 13-year-old Frances and the 14-year-old Earl of Essex), subsequent adultery, accusations of impotence and witchcraft (the former caused by the latter), a virginity test, divorce, poisoning and murder of the powerful man who opposed the second marriage (Overbury), and remarriage with unseemly haste (Frances Howard obtained a divorce from Essex in September 1613 and married Carr three months later). In 1616, accused of involvement in Overbury's death, Howard and Carr were sent to the Tower. In the same year Middleton wrote
The Witch
, a misogynist play about female sexual voraciousness, with a central character whose name—Francisca—sounds like Frances Carr.
⁴
As the Oxford editor comments, “So topical a dramatic text has a short theatrical shelf-life.”
⁵

Interestingly, Middleton revisited this material in 1622 when he wrote
The Changeling
—a play that has not had a short theatrical shelf-life. (In the twentieth century it was the biggest Renaissance box-office success after Shakespeare.) The story of Frances Carr was made newly topical in 1622 by her release from prison. In
The Changeling
the heroine, Beatrice-Joanna, undergoes a virginity test and, knowing that she cannot pass it, enlists the help of her waiting-woman. (Frances Carr attended her virginity test—which took the unstageable but more reliable form of a gynecological examination—veiled, fueling rumors that she had suborned someone to take the test on her behalf.) But now Middleton's topical material rises above its local reading. This is a tragedy not a scandal; and it is a tragedy of entrapment, of arranged marriage, and of moral degeneration, what T.S. Eliot, William Empson, and Helen Gardner saw as habituation to crime; Gardner described Beatrice-Joanna as a soul not bad but “deformed” by “its own willed persistence in acts against its nature.”
⁶
In these respects the play sounds like
Macbeth
or Marlowe's
Dr Faustus
, to which Gardner compares it.