History of English
Language and William Shakespeare
William
Shakespeare's influence extends from theatre and literature to present-day
movies and the English language itself. Widely regarded as the greatest writer
of the English language, and the world's pre-eminent dramatist, Shakespeare transformed
European theatre by expanding expectations about what could be accomplished
through characterization, plot, language and genre. Shakespeare's writings have
also influenced a large number of notable novelists and poets over the years,
including Herman Melville and Charles Dickens.
Shakespeare is the most quoted writer in the history of the
English-speaking world after the various writers of the Bible, and many of his
quotations and neologisms have passed into everyday usage in English and other languages.
Changes in English at the time
Early
Modern English as a literary medium was unfixed in structure and vocabulary in
comparison to Greek and Latin, and was in a constant state of flux. When
William Shakespeare began writing his plays, the English language was rapidly
absorbing words from other languages due to wars, exploration, diplomacy and
colonization. By the age of Elizabeth, English had become widely used with the
expansion of philosophy, theology and physical sciences, but many writers lacked
the vocabulary to express such ideas. To accommodate, writers such as Edmund
Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare
expressed new ideas and distinctions by inventing, borrowing or adopting a word
or a phrase from another language, known as neologizing. Scholars estimate
that, between the years 1500 and 1659, nouns, verbs and modifiers of Latin,
Greek and modern Romance languages added 30,000 new words to the English
language.
Influence on theatre
Shakespeare's
works have been a major influence on subsequent theatre. Not only did
Shakespeare create some of the most admired plays in Western literature (with
Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear being ranked among the world's greatest plays),
he also transformed English theatre by expanding expectations about what could
be accomplished through characterization, plot, language, and genre. Specifically,
in plays like Hamlet, Shakespeare "integrated characterization with
plot," such that if the main character was different in any way, the plot
would be totally changed. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare mixed tragedy and
comedy together to create a new romantic tragedy genre (previous to
Shakespeare, romance had not been considered a worthy topic for tragedy).
Through his soliloquies, Shakespeare showed how plays could explore a
character's inner motivations and conflict (up until Shakespeare, soliloquies
were often used by playwrights to "introduce (characters), convey
information, provide an exposition or reveal plans").
Characters
Shakespeare's
plays portrayed a wide variety of emotions. His plays exhibited
"spectacular violence, with loose and episodic plotting, and with mingling
of comedy with tragedy". In King Lear, Shakespeare had deliberately
brought together two plots of different origins. His closeness to human nature
made him greater than any of his contemporaries. Humanism and contact with
popular thinking gave vitality to his language. Shakespeare's plays borrowed
ideas from popular sources, folk traditions, street pamphlets, and sermons etc.
Shakespeare used groundlings widely in his plays. The use of groundlings
"saved the drama from academic stiffness and preserved its essential bias
towards entertainment". Hamlet is an outstanding example of
"groundlings" quickness and response. ‘Use of groundlings' enhanced
Shakespeare's work practically and artistically. He represented English people
more concretely and not as puppets. His skills have found expression in
chronicles, or history plays, and tragedies.
Shakespeare's
earliest years were dominated by history plays and a few comedies that formed a
link to the later written tragedies. Nine out of eighteen plays he produced in
the first decade of his career were chronicles or histories. His histories were
based on the prevailing Tudor political thought. They portrayed the follies and
achievements of kings, their misgovernment, church and problems arising out of
these. "In shaping, compressing, and altering chronicles, Shakespeare
gained the art of dramatic design; and in the same way he developed his
remarkable insight into character, its continuity and its variation". His
characters were very near to reality.
"Shakespeare's
characters are more sharply individualized after Love's Labour's Lost".
His Richard II and Bolingbroke are complex and solid figures whereas Richard
III has more "humanity and comic gusto".[19] The Falstaff trilogy is
in this respect very important. Falstaff, although a minor character, has a
powerful reality of its own. "Shakespeare uses him as a commentator who
passes judgments on events represented in the play, in the light of his own
super abundant comic vitality".[19] Falstaff, although outside "the
prevailing political spirit of the play", throws insight into the
different situations arising in the play. This shows that Shakespeare had
developed a capacity to see the plays as whole, something more than characters
and expressions added together. In Falstaff trilogy, through the character of
Falstaff, he wants to show that in society "where touchstone of conduct is
success, and in which humanity has to accommodate itself to the claims of
expediency, there is no place for Falstaff", a loyal human-being. This
sentiment is so true even after centuries.
Shakespeare
united the three main steams of literature: verse, poetry, and drama. To the
versification of the language, he imparted his eloquence and variety giving
highest expressions with elasticity of language. The second, the sonnets and
poetry, was bound in structure. He imparted economy and intensity to the language.
In the third and the most important area, the drama, he saved the language from
vagueness and vastness and infused actuality and vividness. Shakespeare's work
in prose, poetry, and drama marked the beginning of modernization of English
language by introduction of words and expressions, style and form to the
language.
Influence on the English language
Shakespeare's
writings greatly influenced the entire English language. Prior to and during
Shakespeare's time, the grammar and rules of English were not standardized. But
once Shakespeare's plays became popular in the late seventeenth and eighteenth
century, they helped contribute to the standardization of the English language,
with many Shakespearean words and phrases becoming embedded in the English
language, particularly through projects such as Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary
of the English Language which quoted Shakespeare more than any other writer. He
expanded the scope of English literature by introducing new words and phrases, experimenting
with blank verse, and also introducing new poetic and grammatical structures.
Pre-Shakespearian English
Shakespeare
wrote under the influence of writers such as Chaucer, Spenser and Sidney. It is
also important to note the setting of Shakespeare's language. In 449, the
Germanic tribes - the Angles, Saxons and Jutes had moved to Britain to side
with the Celts in order to help them defeat their northern neighbors. After
their victory, however, the Germanic tribes gradually pushed the Celts into
what became Wales and Cornwall. The tribes introduced Anglo-Saxon, more
commonly known as Old English language (Mario Pei). Anglo-Saxon survived
despite the Norman invasion of 1066, which introduced French to England and
strengthened Latin's existing power. These events marked the beginning of the
Middle English period. Around 1204, bilingualism developed amongst "Norman
officials, supervisors, [and] bilingual children [resulting from] French and
English marriages". English was, however, still not in common use, at least
in matters of the state and clergy. King John's death indicated the end of
Norman rule. The decision of the Norman proprietors and Edward I's (Henry III's
son) conquest of Wales all contributed to increased usage of the English
language. French/Norman cultural supremacy in England waned. The increase in
the use of English resulted in the "smoothing out of dialectal differences
[and] beginning of standard English based on London dialect". Nevertheless,
French remained the official language until around the 14th century. It was not
until 1509, however, that English was recognized as the official language of
England. Until 1583, the rhetoric of the English language was deeply indebted
to Chaucer. Otherwise, given the relative lack of written records, "the
innovation of the language was uncertain". The late 15th and early 16th
century marks the approximate shift from Middle English to Early Modern
English, the language of the Renaissance. "Before the arrival of
Shakespeare to London, there was little hope for the future of English but by
1613, when Shakespeare's last work was written, the literature of modern
English was already rich in varied achievements, self confident and
mature".
Vocabulary
Among
Shakespeare's greatest contributions to the English language must be the
introduction of new vocabulary and phrases which have enriched the language
making it more colorful and expressive. Some estimates at the number of words
coined by Shakespeare number in the several thousands. However Warren King clarifies
by saying that, "In all of his work – the plays, the sonnets and the
narrative poems – Shakespeare uses 17,677 words: Of those, 1,700 were first
used by Shakespeare." He is also very known for borrowing from the
classical literature and foreign languages. He created these words by,
"changing nouns into verbs, changing verbs into adjectives, connecting
words never before used together, adding prefixes and suffixes, and devising
words wholly original." Many of Shakespeare's original phrases are still
used in conversation and language today. These include, but are not limited to;
"seen better days, strange bedfellows, chav, a sorry sight," and
"full circle". Shakespeare's effect on vocabulary is rather
astounding when considering how much language has changed since his lifetime.
Shakespeare
helped to further develop style and structure to an otherwise loose,
spontaneous language. The Elizabethan era language was written the same way it
was spoken. The naturalness gave force and freedom since there was no formalized
prescriptive grammar binding the expression. While lack of prescribed
grammatical rules introduced vagueness in literature, it also expressed
feelings with profound vividness and emotion which created, "freedom of
expression" and "vividness of presentment". It was a language
which expressed feelings explicitly. Shakespeare's gift involved using the
exuberance of the language and decasyllabic structure in prose and poetry of
his plays to reach the masses and the result was "a constant two way
exchange between learned and the popular, together producing the unique
combination of racy tang and the majestic stateliness that informs the language
of Shakespeare".
While
it is true that Shakespeare created many new words (the Oxford English Dictionary
records over 2,000), an article in National Geographic points out the findings
of historian Jonathan Hope who wrote in "Shakespeare's 'Native
English'" that "the Victorian scholars who read texts for the first
edition of the OED paid special attention to Shakespeare: his texts were read
more thoroughly, and cited more often, so he is often credited with the first
use of words, or senses of words, which can, in fact, be found in other
writers." Shakespeare created many words that are commonly used in British
lexicon today including the commonly used word 'chav', first recorded in 1602
in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Blank verse
Shakespeare's
first plays were experimental as he was still learning from his own mistakes.
It was a long journey from Titus Andronicus and King Henry VI to The Tempest.
Gradually his language followed the "natural process of artistic growth,
to find its adequate projection in dramatic form". As he continued
experimenting, his style of writing found many manifestations in plays. The
dialogues in his plays were written in verse form and followed a decasyllabic
rule. In Titus Andronicus, decasyllables have been used throughout. "There
is considerable pause; and though the inflexibility of the line sound is little
affected by it, there is a certain running over of sense". His work is
still experimental in Titus Andronicus. However, in Love's Labor’s Lost and The
Comedy of Errors, there is "perfect meter-abundance of rime [rhyme],
plenty of prose, arrangement in stanza". After these two comedies, he kept
experimenting until he reached a maturity of style. "Shakespeare's
experimental use of trend and style, as well as the achieved development of his
blank verses, are all evidences of his creative invention and influences".
Through experimentation of tri-syllabic substitution and decasyllabic rule he
developed the blank verse to perfection and introduced a new style. Shakespeare's
blank verse is one of the most important of all his influences on the way the
English language was written". He used the blank verse throughout in his
writing career experimenting and perfecting it. The free speech rhythm gave
Shakespeare more freedom for experimentation.
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