The age when English could do anything
And why we wouldn't have Shakespeare without it
By some stroke of geographic good fortune, I was raised within a short school bus ride of a place called Stratford.
Situated on the river Avon, this quiet town is most famous today as the hometown of one of the most celebrated artists its country has ever produced: Justin Bieber.
I’m speaking, of course, about Stratford, Ontario.
But, like its English namesake, Stratford-upon-Avon, our Canadian Stratford has an intimate connection with another, (dare I say?) greater artist: William Shakespeare.
The town had grown up around a railway junction, but, by the 1950s, employment in the locomotive repair industry was drying up. Stratford was (and is!) a beautiful little town, and perfectly named for putting on a Shakespeare play or two, so, in 1952, journalist Tom Patterson founded the Stratford Shakespearean Festival of Canada in the hopes of bringing some economic life back to the town.
The very next summer, the first words on the festival stage were spoken, by no less an actor than Sir Alec Guinness:
Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York. (Richard III, 1.1.1–2)
Since then, summer after glorious summer, the Stratford Festival has continued, although now under a slimmed down name, and with a broader repertoire (you can see Guys and Dolls this season).
But the busloads of students carted there every year by English teachers aren’t there to see musicals, as much as some of them might have wanted to. No, they’re there for Shakespeare.
I remember the first play I saw there during the Festival’s 2000 season: Hamlet starring Canadian legend Paul Gross. (You may know him as the star of TV’s Due South)
We’d been studying Hamlet in English class, so I was primed to enjoy it (thanks, Mrs. L!), and I did not leave disappointed. In fact, I enjoyed the experience so much that I’ve never stopped attending, even after — and now long after — I no longer had an English teacher shepherding me there: Colm Feore in Macbeth, Brian Dennehy in Twelfth Night, and Christopher Plummer in King Lear, all within a short commute. Geographic good fortune indeed!
But why on earth did a small town in southern Ontario make a bet on pivoting its economy away from repairing trains towards performing the works of a nearly 400-year-old playwright born on another continent? And why did the bet actually pay off?
In other words: What’s so special about Shakespeare?
You’re reading The Dead Language Society, where 45,000+ readers explore the hidden history of the English language. I’m Colin Gorrie: PhD linguist and your guide through 1,500 years of linguistic history.
I publish every Wednesday. Paid subscribers get every issue, the full archive, and the content I’m most proud of: practical guides to reading historical texts yourself, honest takes on how language really works, and live book clubs where we read texts like Beowulf and (up next!) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
I wish I could point to some single line, some single moment that knocked me flat, so that I could tell you exactly how I realized Shakespeare is great. But that’s not how he won me over. Instead, it was a cumulative feeling that I was encountering something special in his works, and that it had something to do with his language.
But the question is what. It’s not just inventiveness: as we saw in Part 1 of this mini-series, Shakespeare coined far fewer words than he’s usually given credit for. Nor is it the breadth of vocabulary: in a study of thirteen Elizabethan playwrights, he ranked seventh in lexical range per play, behind writers most people today have never heard of.1
And yet, pick up the works of John Webster or George Chapman, and you’ll feel the difference immediately. Shakespeare’s language is doing something theirs isn’t.
Take this line from Richard II:
Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle. (Richard II, 2.3.90)
York is furious with his nephew Bolingbroke, and so he takes two perfectly good nouns, grace and uncle, and in a fit of pique, turns them into verbs. We do this sort of thing too, of course. It’s the process that gave us the verb to Google.
But there’s something about the way Shakespeare does it that stops you cold.
What accounts for the feeling that Shakespeare was unique, both within his time and in the whole history of English literature? There are many great answers to this question, but I want to give you one that you’ll only hear from a linguist.
I think the answer lies in the application of Shakespeare’s undeniable genius to a language that was exactly ready for it.
By the late 16th century, centuries of change had made English unlike any of its European neighbours, and it was still changing fast.
For a brief period, the English language could be bent into shapes that would have been impossible only a few generations earlier. A few generations later, they would either stiffen into rules or become so commonplace they lost their spark.
Yes, Shakespeare was a genius. But he also had temporal good fortune: he was born into the century when English was most ready for him.
