A joke I heard (or read) many decades ago went something like: "Oh I read Shakespeare, I don't know why people give him so much credit, he just seems to have strung together a bunch of well known sentences"
@@memofromessex I think you have an error in your comment, writing "the" original instead of "very original". Secondly, have you heard anyone actually say this? If so, did they grow up remote from western culture generally? I'm trying to understand why you posted this. The OP talks about something he forgets whether he read or heard, many decades ago. You seem to be talking about a recent experience, with an 40 yo internet and global distribution of cell/smart phones, or else you're imagining it for the sake of ????
@@squirlmy He was commenting on the actual 'joke'. I heard an almost identical one, also many decades ago, to the effect that "Hamlet" is nothing more than a string of quotations. (Not many jokes can stand up to detailed analysis, so it's better not to try!) PS: My mother actually said to me, about 60 years ago: "Pooh, the Beatles! Do you think anyone will have heard of them in fifty years time?"
Rob always has an expression that looks like he has a bunch of forbidden secrets that he probably shouldn't tell us, but can't help himself sharing anyway. That's probably why he's meeting us in the woods.
As an American who grew up in the 60s, I love Shakespeare to this day. Doubtless as a fan, I made the pilgrimage to Stratford-Upon-Avon. The whole town is a monument to their native son. It was an exhilarating experience. When I read his works they lift my mind up to a place few other text, except the Bible, are able to do. This was a very, very enlightening post. Thanks so much.
Even though Shakespeare's works have become high brow culture, I've often felt that he was really a person who wrote for the common people. His plays were considered popular entertainment in his time, not stuffy and sophisticated as they are sometimes presented these days. With that in mind, I've often thought that given his unremarkable upbringing and education, he probably used words and expressions that he heard around him, so many of the new words that appear in print for the first time may well have been in common use when he was writing and so he really didn't invent a lot of these words, he simply was the first, or among the first, to put them to paper.
I think it's more that there was less of a distinction. The royals sponsored his theatre company, James I attended his productions and Macbeth was written specifically for the King, they were not seen as low brow either.
Exactly this - I'm very dubious that he "invented" all these words & phrases. Truth is, other than religious & governmental/legal works, we don't have a ton of written works that aren't translations of foreign/ancient works. People weren't writing down common speech all that much - other than playwrights. I'm sure Shakespeare heard many of these supposed inventions of his.
Exactly what I thought. He was writing iambic pentameter so the meter would have naturally encouraged playfulness with words as well of course his constant punning.
exactly. A good creative writing exercise, is to fit your prose into a strict form, say a villanelle, or indeed iambic pentameter. It forces creativity and elasticity of language.
@@calartian85 Ooh, one of my favourite words! I used it in a poem once (based on "Doctor Who" audio play called "...Ish", which I highly recommend to all linguistical nerds. =:o} ) "Precision, in ellipsis and elision, is interred; And a word with no beginning is the last thing ever heard..."
The thing I've heard a lot of lately is that as English as a whole was rapidly evolving during that period, many of Shakespeare's new words are more likely words that had started being used by young people of the era than actually being invented by him. Or in other words, that Shakespeare was using contemporary slang in his plays and happens to be the first person to have recorded them.
Obviously many of the words had been spoken by others earlier. Even just putting together random syllables it would be hard to come up with something nobody had ever said before. And I'm sure many were even written down by others, but how many other people had their writings preserved as well as Shakespeare? Not many. But Shakespeare popularized them. So he gets credit for that much. I mean how many people said "for shizzle" before Snoop Dogg? I don't think there's any way to prove somebody else didn't say something earlier - and in most cases it's overwhelmingly improbable that nobody else said it earlier. But if Snoop Dogg never said it, or if Shakespeare had never written it, how much less use would the word/phrase get? It's complicated.
The Folio versions are sometimes decades after the first staging of the plays and older scripts sometimes exist and differ from the folio versions. Any discussion of who invented what needs to look at the earliest version of the scripts to avoid the possibility it's not a neologism but simply the development of language between versions of the script.
Great video, but.... You correctly say at 4:00 that Shakespeare is the first 'quoted' as using a word, but then you drop the word 'quoted' and say he was the first person to use these words. That is very unlikely. Hundreds of years from now, scholars will find the word 'selfie' in a 2003 script, and assume the author invented it because this is the first time they saw it in print. In fact, the word 'swlfie' was in common usage a year earlier. We simply don't know if words like 'devote' and 'denote' were used in spoken English around London before Shakespeare put them in his scripts. He certainly played with words and adapted them, but Shakespeare's plays would have been incomprehensible if he constantly 'invented' new words that his audiences had never heard before.
A lot of it is probably slang from Stratford-Upon-Avon, but you're right. It's important to remember though, that Shakespeare himself doesn't claim to have made up words. He doesn't have a press agent claiming he's the biggest inventor of words. That's a title bestowed on him by nineteenth century college professors looking for ways to justify their tenure.
Adding on to that, surely there must be some selection bias involved as well. Shakespeare is the most renowned writer in the history of the English language, and his writings have been widely studied and preserved for centuries. How many other 16th century writers might have used the same words in print, and never been credited for it, because no one kept a record of it for 400 years after their death?
@@adamg2031 This is the big one. We use words shakespeare used because he made good plays with entertaining stories and conclusions, not because people were going to the shows and then afterwards talking about how many new words they learned lol
Chaucer used the word "kisses", way back in the late 14th century. "Thus in this heaven he took his delight And smothered her with kisses upon kisses / Till gradually he came to know where bliss is." (from Troilus and Criseyde). Sounds like there was already a lot of kissing going on, in those days!
@@evanherkI mean, "kissing" isn't a different word from "kiss" anyway. It's just the present participle of to kiss. Shakespeare did not invent English grammar. The "inventing words" thesis is nonsense.
@@evanherk - the problem with dates is that 1,000 years before Shakespeare there are no written/printed documents to prove this hypothesis. As Great Britain did not have lots of destructive land wars, or natural disasters, there are older written text sources there, than e.g. in the Netherlands, I think, but not 1,000 years before Shakespeare and if there is something written, e.g. in non-Viking runes, it is so marginal that it's almost irrelevant here. I would not expect anything before about 700 AD. It's clear to me that a Germanic verb to kiss predates Shakespeare by a long time. The TLDR below. My etymological dictionary [1] places the Dutch word "kussen" (to kiss) in 1201~1250. It relates today's verb to Old Saxon "kussian", Old High German "kussen", Old Frisian "kessa", Old English "cyssan", and Old Norse "kyssa". The hypothesis is that the word originally was an "onomatopoeia" - a word that mimics a natural sound. My chronological dictionary [2] is in another room in the house and I leave it at that. The other Dutch word "kussen" (pillow, cushion) in this dictionary gets related to the Vulgar Latin "coximus" that references the pelvis or hips and this Dutch language meaning-variant is placed a century after kussen-kiss. In an adolescent mind - not the scientists writing the dictionary - these two might even be related via oral sex. Many noble things had a very vulgar origin long time before. Many civilised high-court dances for which noble composers wrote music, have origins in walks of life circles where women have to work lying down in order to remain standing in life. Brought back by adolescent noblemen from their grand tours. When you drink from a cup or glass, and while holding it stick your pinky out, this used to be the signal in the salons, "I have STD, if you have it too, we can have some exercise together with happy endings". When today people in modern media ask each other if they have HIV, then there's nothing new in the history of homo sapiens not so sapiens. Money makes the world go round and dopamine too. Mother (wet spot) or mamma (breasts, tits). And it happens the other way around, from noble to vulgar. Water Closet (WC) was a euphemism until nobody understood it as euphemism any longer. Rather than po, bed pan, the Dutch had idiom like "night mirror" and I guess the "porcelain throne" (Elizabeth II) came too early for the night mirror euphemism to become vulgar. Considering that, in 400 years, English got bastardised in its phonetic writing and pronunciation to the point that each word's pronunciation and writing must be taught individually, as if it is Chinese, we can see that even 400 years is a long time and that's how far my source goes back before Shakespeare. "Shift happens". "Honey-badger don't care." "Why bother, you understood what I said/wrote, didn't you?" With the bastardisation of English after Shakespeare, his texts don't rhythm and rhyme any longer. This aspect is easier to comprehend for a Dutch reader than an English one. "Folk" converted classical Greek into "koinè". "Folk" and soldiers converted classical Latin into Vulgar Latin. Franks (Germanic tribes) and Gauls (Celts) converted Vulgar Latin into French (144 transformation rules can simulate this evolution). What we call "lingua franca" [3] as reference to a "go-between" language used to be koinè in old Rome and the Middle East and is the language of the Bible's New Testament (the holy book of Christians that has an Old Testament part - Hebrew/Jewish books - as origin story). Today's worldwide lingua franca is US English. When the idiom lingua franca was invented it was the Frankish of the commons, the people, the folk and that's why Dutch is called dutch - the same word as diets [deets] in Flemish, deutsch [doitsh] in German, and duits [d?ts] in Dutch [4]. That lingua franca must have been Low West Frankish (or before WW2, "Nederduits"). And must explain why Dutch have a relatively easy time to understand neighbouring languages. By the way Northern Germany (the German low lands) also spoke something close to lingua franca until that got impacted by a Southern German bible translation in the dialect of those Southern hill billies. So a close ancestor to Dutch will have been the go-between language in Hanseatic times, in trade and harbours, between the men on the quay and on the ships. A German student of German, in Amsterdam University, answered my question "why German in Amsterdam" and the answer was, I'm from the North and it feels closer to home, and your language is cute anachronistic. I replied to that "anachronistic", that my language was more original and not a lot "improved by language zealots that want an easy time rating their students' translations from Latin" and "not a lot modified by uncivilised hill billies". We are frank after all. [1] "Van Dale Etymologisch Woordenboek". 2nd edition. Authors P.A.F. van Veen Ph.D. and N. van der Sijs. (c) 1997, Van Dale Lexicografie b.v. (1st edition 1989). This dictionary had a large scientific editorial, review, editing, etc. board. The book is a bit dated but still very much respected. [2] This is of later date than [1] and lists words in the Dutch language by oldest date found in writing or in print. [3] literally "Frankish Language" [4] dutch, diets, deutsch, duits mean "folk", "common", "of the commons". When the poet/author of the national anthem wrote that William of Orange (the legacy/inheritance never materialised ...) was "van Duitsen Bloed" he meant this as "he's one of us Dutch people" and while William's family originated in today's Germany that concept did not exist, yet, for a long time. To me the "of the commons" in this context implies "as opposed to the language - vulgar Latin - used by clergy and in some cases nobility."
@@feralbluee I'm glad it pleased you. One of my favourite couplets from Chaucer! There are a lot of other gems, on amorous themes - this happens to be one of the cleanest!
This is the definitive video on Shakespeare for me, and I'm saying that not as a diehard subscriber who has followed you on here for years or anything. Well written and explained and presented, much appreciated. Thanks Rob.
I just heard that Shakespeare created 1700 words like 3 days ago so I watched like 5 videos in a row on it, words like elbow. And I thought to myself that makes no sense because how would the audience know what he was talking about if he is just manufactuuring words out of thin air. So I tried to redearch what the english word for comfortable was in the 1400's, another word I had heard he invented, because I figured it couldn't be to far off from comfortable if people were going to undsrstand him. Unfortunately, google and several dictionaries had no searchable results for my query. I am so happy you made this video to answer my question in such a timely manner. I give you all my thanks!
" how would the audience know what he was talking about if he is just manufactuuring words out of thin air"? Look at some recent coinages and how they are understood by the booboisie (H L Mencken, 1920's). Consider "normalcy" (Warren Harding, 1920's), "bigly," "covfefe" and "lamestream media" (Donald Trump, recently)
Calvin: I like to Verb words Hobbes: What? Calvin: I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs. Remember when "Access" was a thing? Now it's something you do. It got verbed. Verbing weirds language Hobbes: Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding.
but as it was one of the first written examples, we'll never know. Maybe he just literally meant room on a bed. We'd have to have contemporary examples of him using the word to mean, "bed chamber" to see if he had any knowledge of this alternative use.
He made many puns; one that I remember is in a dialog between Hamlet and Ophelia while searching a place on the floor to watch the play. H: ‘Tis a fair thought to lie between maid’s legs. O (shocked): My lord! H: I meant, my head between thy legs. Did’st thou think I meant C(O)UNTRY matters?
When I was a teenager, many decades ago, my favorite guy in my _Oxford Book Of Quotations_ was an interesting man named Alexander Pope. I think I read somewhere that he gets the silver medal for words coined in English.
I like the comedy series "Upstart Crow" It's a hilarious take on a lot of these stories and rumors around Shakespeare. David Mitchell as Will is wonderful!
@@tulliusexmisc2191 - .^_^. Yes, that is one of the conceits of the show, but remember it's a comedic TV show, not a documentary. (In _Upstart Crow,_ Marlowe didn't really die. He went into hiding.) However, it is a great show. The parodies of Shakespeare and the puns are all laugh out loud.
Upstart Crow might be the best thing Ben Elton has done. He obviously loves Shakespeare and knows a lot about him, but he wears his learning lightly and isn't afraid to poke a little fun at the "immortal bard" for his imperfections.
I'd never even heard of this show. Now watching it. One of the (many) downsides of moving to the cultural backwater that is 'Murica, is missing out on good stuff like this.
At 6:35, there may be some wordplay which motivated the new use of “gossip” as a verb, since “I’ll gossip at this feast” might sound like “I’ll go sup at this feast” when the actor says it, with “go sup” meaning to go have supper. Shakespeare loved his puns, and his audience probably did too.
Oh, absolutely! I'm glad you pointed that out. There are a lot of puns you miss in Shakespeare just by reading it, because the pronunciation of many words are key to the joke and it doesn't perfectly translate to say, posh English or American accents.
As a Dutchie, I was surprised when you said that "to rant" is from Dutch. I looked op "ranten" and it is not in the Van Dale online dictionary. We should use it again
It's still in the dictionary as 'randen', with 'to bellow' as the first meaning (Grote Van Dale 2005). But we don't really use it anymore in that sense. I'd never heard of it either. You can tell that Van Dale started as a dictionary of 19th century Dutch and kept many outdated words. Meanwhile, the noun 'rant' has re-entered our vocabulary thanks to blogs and social media.
2:55 when you buy a bigger bed, you have more bedroom but less bedroom Edit1: the sigma are y'all doin Edit2: I just want to clarify I got this from somewhere else
@@burnere633 Hate to be THIS guy, but You do realize that ethan was referring not to the total number of bedrooms being reduced, but the available space of the bedroom wherein the bed is located...
It's completely unfuckingfair that Shakespeare gets credit for making up words a half-milleneum ago, while I only get SCRABBLE challenges when I do it!
One reason why his original writings don't survive is that he tried to prevent it. There were no copyright laws like the ones we understand today. He was very worried about other theatres making money off his work .For good reason. Actors usually only got their lines and their queues. He kept the stories mostly in his head. His friends would have had to piece the plays together.
Actors generally played several characters in any production. And memories, the capacity to commit to memory, was exponentially larger back then because knowledge was not all written down in books, and the oral traditions (that every human tribe and culture passed down) were still alive and extremely important. In addition, understudies for parts were plentiful for flexibility of production. Generally, everyone involved knew the scripts by heart, including any production crew..
"Être ou ne pas être : telle est la question" Shakespeare en français ! Votre chaîne est absolument fantastique. J'adore vos vidéos et, surtout, votre sens de l'humour. Merci et à la revoyure. Et vive Shakespeare 🙂
In the early 1600s. my 10th great-grandfather sailed from England to the colony of Virginia. On the way, the flotilla of ships was struck by a massive storm (likely a hurricane) near Bermuda. Once the vessels were repaired, the voyage continued. After arriving in the New World, one of my ancestor's shipmates told him that he had maintained a detailed journal of the voyage and wanted it to be more widely published. He sent it to a writer friend in England named William Shakespeare. The journal served as inspiration for "The Tempest".
I think all these 'new words' had been in popular use before they entered into Shakey's plays. After all, the audiences of these plays were common everyday working blokes and they would not have paid money to hear words they did not understand. In the same token, Beethoven did not invent the symphony and Mozart did not invent the string quartet; they merely perfected the pre-existing musical forms.
True, but considering that they are also counting things like adding un- before a word or -ing after it. Or using an existing word in a slightly new way. Most of them were not just introduced from nowhere. It was often more like wordplay and the audience would’ve recognized it as such.
Also; a lot of them are just French. Rule of thumb; an English word ending “ally” is the same in French, but with the ending “ment”. So all of those aren't really coinages, as much as mere adoption.
As one who likes reading through Shakespeare's plays (I have a copy of Shakespeare's folio, that my dad gave me), I found this quite informative! Now, I know that Shakespeare did _not_ coin all of the 1,700 words that he is said to have created... He coined even _more_ words than that! "Foregone conclusion", "countless", "undress", "champion" as verb, "hint" as noun, "gloomy" (or "gloomie"), "bandit" (in fact, "bandetto", a variant of the Italian form, sometimes shows up in Shakespeare's works), "break the ice", "come full circle", "too much of a good thing", "for goodness sake", "neither rhyme nor reason", and more are among the words which (as I just learned) likely originated with Shakespeare! Thanks for the video!
Shakespeare wrote his plays and sonnets in the same way that Trevithick, with little formal educations, invented the steam locomotive. Many of the parts were there for both men,but both made use of them in new ways.
Exactly! That's why it's "playwright" and not "playwrite." He crafted the plays out of existing raw materials, and I'm sure many were collaborations. (They are no less works of genius, for all that.)
@@neiloflongbeck5705hmmm, but political things are so rarely as *I* would like it. If it were truly an accurate political statement, might it not be closer to “As we were able to convince someone to pass the measure”? Perhaps the third political play is therefore “Measure for Measure”? 😅
@DawnDavidson that's the problem of democracy. Not everything will be approved of by every individual. "Measure for Measure"would also be apolitical, in the same way as "Yes, Minister" was.
Sounds like having to stick within a meter, lead to innovation. Limit leading to creativity! 15:42 haha you said a version of this literally as I wrote this
I would love to see an episode were Rob explains how some words have multiple, very different meanings such as right (direction and being correct) or left (direction and past tense if leave) or lash (eyelid hairs, tie something down)
We actually (probably) do have a manuscript in Shakespeare's handwriting: his scene for Sir Thomas Moore. Granted its only a probability and a single scene, but it's more than we have of a lot of other writers.
Shakespeare, if he is anything like me, must have had such an interest in people, full stop. He must have been listening, always, and holding on to what he heard around him. How else does one learn to embody so many types of characters with a single quill?
The size of one's vocabulary is, other things being equal (i.e. schooling and having company) the best simple measure of intelligence. Was he very intelligent? He seems to have made it his business to find out about a lot of things, which is another hallmark of intelligence.
Really enjoy that you always cut right to the chase (origin: 1920s Hollywood) and give us the information without beating about the bush (from 'Generydes', an English romantic verse, circa 1440). Also appreciate your more or less mythbusting (Discovery Channel, Australia, 2002) of his authorship. So like, thanks!
I feel like you didn't give du weight to the possibility that some (or many) of the words could have been in use in the spoken language around him already. Crediting it all to him directly seems a bit unfounded, though I'm sure he came up with quite a few on his own as well. Though potentially being the first to commit thousands of new words to text is still very impressive. Great video overall though, learned a lot :)
Were you watching the same video as me? Rob makes it quite clear that any number of these words were used in common parlance prior to Shakespeare fiddling with them to produce a variety of neologisms, thus broadening the meaning of the original.
@@2eleven48 The point is he wasn't necessarily the first to use them that way either. People turn parts of speech into other parts of speech and do various other stuff with language that creates new, but understandable, words all the time, often with push-back about kids not being able to speak properly these days. It was the same then, and if he was the first to write many of them down perhaps it is because he was less fussy about "proper language" than other writers of the time.
Genius doesn't need the years of formal education normal intelligence benefits from. I have been reading and watching Shakespeare for 60 years and he can still surprise me with views and events and twists I hadn't noticed before.
[Transl. 👇] Nicht zu fassen - das Wort muß ja mit den Jüten, Sachsen und Angeln nach Britannien gekommen sein, sonst würde es nicht im Deutschen in dieser Weise parallel existieren (aus derselben Quelle). könnte aber auch sein, daß die "englische" Sprache schreibfähig zu machen noch schwieriger war, als es schon beim Althochdeutschen war - wir kennen einen (lateinischen) Brief von Otfried von Weißenburg, der sich mit vielen anderen Wissenschaftlern darum bemüht hat, in welchem er die Notwendigkeit beklagt, in manchen Wörtern drei U hintereinander schreiben zu müssen; dieses Problem löste man durch Erfindung des Zeichens "W" (Man könnte den Eindruck gewinnen, daß die Sprache der Vorfahren dem Wolfsgeheul nicht unähnlich klang). Unbelievable - the word must have come to Britain with the Jutes, Saxons and Angles, otherwise it would not exist in parallel in German in this way (from the same source). But it could also be that making the "English" language writable was even more difficult than it already was with Old High German - we know of a (Latin) letter by Otfried von Weißenburg, who endeavoured to do so with many other scholars [scientists], in which he complains about the necessity of having to write three U's in succession in some words; this problem was solved by inventing the sign "W" (one could get the impression that the language of the ancestors sounded not unlike the howling of a wolf). Übrigens, hat noch jemand das Gefühl, daß es "althochdeutsch" wirklich als Sprache nicht gegeben hat und lediglich eine wissenschaftliche Hilfskonstruktion ist (wie Dunkle Materie, - Da ist was, aber nichts Genaues weiß man nicht). By the way, does anyone else have the feeling that "Old High German" really did not exist as a language and is merely an auxiliary scientific construction (like Dark Matter, - There is something, but nothing exact is known).
Fair shake of the old spear Rob. The Bard used or resuscitated whichever word suited the moment. It isn't his fault that we might have forgotten some of the more ancient ones.
The issue here is mostly "invention", since anyone can add or remove an affixe. The time frame also helped (the invention of the printing press, the low literacy, etc.) so he did write them down and popularise them, no proof he didn't heard them by someone else. something we'll never know.
I had thought some pages of revisions of the Thomas More play were thought to be in Shakespeare’s own hand - and that we did have at least one example of his signature extant. Regardless, great video! For those wishing to hold on to the theory that no one man could be such a massive genius of vocabulary nor of the character’s life experiences, remember that theater is a collaborative art. The comic parts especially must have featured improvisational additions or rewrites. I think this accounts for a good deal of discrepancies between Folio and Quarto. Quartos may be closer to the plays as performed whereas Shakespeare may have been able to revise many of the Folio versions before his death.
We have at least six signatures extant (one on a deposition in the _Bellot v. Mountjoy_ case; one on a bargain and sale to acquire the Blackfriars gatehouse, which Shakespeare purchased in 1613; one on the mortgage to the same deal; and three on his will, one on each page) plus a possible seventh on William Lambarde's _Archainomia_ . The reason scholars are somewhat cautious about identifying this signature as Shakespeare's is merely because it's not self-verifying as a legal document that tells you the signer is "William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon in the county of Warwick, gentleman". However, it seems unlikely to be a forgery since nobody knew it existed until the Folger Library acquired the book and straightened out the crumpled title page. Moreover, the signature is on a decorative border, which makes it almost invisible to the eye (it's better seen in reverse, where the ink has bled through) and thus an unlikely place for a forger to put a signature, since they have to see what they're doing to make sure they're making a good forgery and because they want the forgery to show up clearly for any prospective buyers. However, in Shakespeare's own day, before the iron-gall ink oxidized and turned brownish, it would have shown up as a deep black against the lighter black of the decorative border (which would have been made with printers' ink composed of lampblack and linseed oil). Personally, I think the idea that this book belonged to Shakespeare and he wrote his name in it is very plausible. And, yes, on that basis of the six signatures paleographers are confident that "Hand D" of _Sir Thomas More_ is William Shakespeare's handwriting. The manuscript has multiple points of similarity with Shakespeare's signatures (in particular a unique way of forming the h-a ligature) and no disqualifying differences and it doesn't match the handwriting of any other known author or scribe who has left surviving manuscripts. Moreover, there are stylometric links to the other plays in the Shakespeare canon, links of shared imagery, shared stylistic quirks like the verbing of "shark", and two phrases appear to be self-plagiarized in later canonical Shakespeare works ("would feed on one another" in _Coriolanus_ and "ravenous fishes" in _Henry VIII_ in a scene Shakespeare is independently established to have written) even though the play was evidently unproduced and unpublished, so the only way Shakespeare could have known about these Hand D passages is if he wrote them.
Also for Dante's (Divine) Comedy and all his other works we have the full text but nothing of them by his hand. Anyway, the Poet managed to inscribe in verses his signature in the flesh of his main opera, in Purgatory XXX with the following verses of the Longfellow translation: 55-57 (Beatrice scolding) “Dante, because Virgilius has departed Do not weep yet, do not weep yet awhile; For by another sword thou need’st must weep.” ... 62-64 (Dante telling) When at the sound I turned of my own name, Which of necessity is here recorded, I saw the Lady, who erewhile appeared... ===== Dante has introduced many words in the Italian language at the point that when in conversations strange or unusual words appear, we go checking, if it is in Dante then it's Italian.
Brilliant video. Your enthusiasm for etymology is inspiring and well-informed (amateur etymologist here) but this video is quite simply your best yet. Kiu
Fwiw, it's pretty well accepted that Middleton made edits to the Folio version of Macbeth, amongst others that were edited post Shakespeare writing them.
I don't believe someone else wrote Shakepeare's plays, but what's curious is how little we actually know about the person apart from his works. The paper trail, such as bequeathing his wife his "second-best bed," is quite thin. The other thing that gives me pause is this question: "How did he know so much about so many things that were outside his experience and social class?" Terms of venery, for example. Perhaps his reading was vast, but were there that many books he could get his hands on? I suppose genius is the explanation, but it would be nice to know more about his life. Thanks, Rob, for another great program!
I recommend reading some James Shapiro. 'Contested Will' will answer many of your questions. Also, there is quite a lot known about parts of Shakespeare's life - have a look at The Lodger by Charles Nicholl.
We actually know a lot about him and his life, far more than we know about other figures from the same era. If you could read at this time, and he clearly could, then there were a lot of books you could get your hands on to learn about other places and cultures. Not to mention he would have stories told to him by his actors, who would often travel far and wide while performing. Even the lack of handwriting claim is somewhat contested, there's some writing of his that is his part of a rewrite of someone else's work. To be fair, it's really not very much at all. But I would be interested to know how much original work survives of his contemporaries as well.
I've tried to thing of something, but just got a 404 error. Actually, this would make a great RobWords episode. Traditional terms in IT have repurposed words like compile, run, open, close, file. The other terms that have leaked from their IT usage would be: bug (initially an engineering term), debug, boot, bandwidth, and references to a version number of an item (e.g. my exercise plan 2.0). I've seen a UA-camr use instantiate in a sentence not related to programming, but that could a repurposed word too. There are probably many others.
I think we will lose more than we gain because high schoolers/college students are not learning Greek and Latin where our more nuanced words come from. They also are not reading enough Shakespeare to get lots of the Anglo-Saxon words.
Hi Rob, love your videos! While it is true that we do not have a single example of an entire play written by Shakespeare’s own hand, we do have a few pages from The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore (a.k.a. “Sir Thomas More”), the script for a play that was censored and never played. It was a collaborative effort and it had many problems, including its potentially inflammatory political nature. The manuscript itself (Harley MS 7368, British Library) is absolutely fascinating, and I recommend reading one of Shakespeare’s contributions to the play, namely the monologue with which More quells a xenophobic rebellion in London. Truly amazing!
While Shakespeare’s contribution to the play was hotly debated throughout the 20th century, the consensus is quite solid today - as highlighted in the excellent Preface and Appendixes to the play in the Arden Shakespeare edition by John Jowett
[3:36] Unless you are Pedro Carolino. 😂I just watched the "English as she is spoke" video before this "Shakey's new words" video. Your work is absolutely amazing Mr. Rob. You've earned yourself a new fan all the way from South Africa (Definitely an Exonym; our Endonym is "The Great Southern African Country"). 😅🤣
I could feel my Mum turning in her urn at her second most hated misquote ‘gild the lily’. (Changing weary to wicked in ‘no rest for the’ was her most despised.) As a scientist I’d argue that earliest surviving recorded example does not invention prove. But the continuing popularity of his work may have cemented the words and phrases he used into English whilst many other contemporary terms have probably fallen out of use. So even if Shakespeare didn’t directly invent/coin them he’s still (at least partially) responsible for their survival through the centuries. I do have a particular dislike of the idea Shakespeare couldn’t possibly have been that prolific. Some authors are the Douglas Adam’s type, where each novel needs to be pried out with a crowbar, some are the Edgar “Old Fiction Factory” Wallace type, producing 24 plays, 175 novels, 900ish short stories, and countless articles in a few decades, and every point in between.
When reading Shakespeare aloud with friends, every time we catch Shakespeare using one of those cliched and hackneyed expressions, we have a drink! Cheers!
Enjoyed this. One other difficulty of coining new words is your audience has to know what they mean to be effective. This is a strong argument for the idea that he was using already known words or adapting new words from known ones.
@@tubeTreasurer not really. The suffix "-ling" is a diminutive applied to an existing word, while "bro" is the shortening of an existing word", the exact opposite mechanism.
@@CodeNascher_ according to the Real Academia de la Lengua Española, you are completely right. Then they go on saying that "mosco" comes from "mosca" (fly) and has the exact same meaning as "mosquito", so it seems that the suffix was appended to denote that a moskito is way smaller than a fly.
I got smacked down pretty hard when I was like 23 and getting my PhD in English and assumed the OED was making assumptions it didn't. People say this kind of stuff about Shakespeare, but the OED has never been a thorough philological source. That's not its point. The reason so many coinages are given to Shakespeare is that when the OED was being compiled, Shakespeare was a convenient terminus a quo, unless somebody on the desk that day super loved Chaucer.
Hi Rob. I enjoy your videos. You said in this video that we rely on the Folio for Shakespeare's plays. However about half of the plays were published in Quarto format during Shakespeare's lifetime.
I wander how many of these words and phrases were used by lower class English people and not the upper class. As a result these words and phrases did not get into any surviving letters or works other than Shakespeare's, even if they were used by people.
Even if he didn't coin all these words, he was undeniably creative and clever with his play with existing words. "Bedroom" in this case is such an interesting play of words in this situation.
Knowing every copy of Shakespeare's plays was reproduced after the fact and partly from memory is a bit disturbing, especially when we're making so many claims based on what is written in them.
Actors retained the scripts in memory, everyone involved did. It's not like now when everyone has a copy to refer to. Also, back when oral traditions were still active in England, people's memories were much much stronger. All cultures who have lost their oral traditions, people's memories are shyte compared to what they were. Along with people's ability to pay attention and remember for long periods of time.
It would seem absurd to think that Shakespeare employed 1,700 COMPLETELY new coinages, because if so, people would scarcely have understood what his actors were saying. If he had indeed radiblended the lexifunctionality of his quordlepeen, the result would have been befuddlement and dis-scransion. (See? 10% of what I write is new coinage! I must be a genius on a par with Willie Wobble-dagger himself.)
OOohhh... Thank you so much for this video. I happen to love the Bard quite a lot and have even memorized 14 of his sonnets... so I am glad to see that we share the same opinion on the veracity of his work. I am also happy to know that he did indeed coin so many words and phrases. I once read a list of words/expressions he coined that did not survive and perhaps, this could be the topic for another video?
OMG!!! I was wondering if you would get around to mentioning the Earl of Oxford! It's ludicrous to think that a small businessman in a sleepy little river town had the depth and breadth of experience of life that unfolds in Shakespeare's writing. I hope you don't have to take a lot of flack on this. Believe me, there are people out here who get it!!! Thanks for being brave enough to broach the subject!
There is a large degree of homophobia involved in the claims that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays, and you had to ignore some of the evidence to make it work. The discovery of the rough draft of Shakespeare's coat of arms (Which links him pretty concretely with the King's Men) should have put these ideas to bed, honestly.
That might be why nobody claims that John Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems. But as for his son William, he was not a "small businessman in a sleepy little river town" (that town was actually a thriving market town of 2,500 people - the New York of Warwickshire, the place where you went if you didn't want to be a farmer or shepherd for the rest of your life) but an actor, playwright, and sharer in the most prestigious theatre company in *LONDON* .
The Shakespeare Folio came out in 1624, including many new works and revisions to old ones. You need your search parameter to go to 1624 otherwise you will not get a good count.
I was educated in a small primary school and get slightly offended when people say Shakespeare couldn’t have written all his plays because he wouldn’t have had the right education for him to be a genius. My siblings and I all went to a county school and all have careers, one even being a doctor. None of us could be regarded as a genius I admit. But there lies the clue with Shakespeare - he was a genius. There are many people in the world who were regarded as genius, and they came from poor backgrounds. Bill Bryson wrote a very interesting book on Shakespeare, called Shakespeare, The World a a Stage. I have the audiobook version and have listened to it many times. Interestingly, Shakespeare didn’t write all his plays from scratch, but rewrote them, which may partially explain his very productive output. Bill Bryson also wrote a book called A Short History of Everything. Again I bought the audiobook, and have listened to it many times. He writes about geniuses of the past, some of which came from poor backgrounds…
Regarding skepticism that a man of Shakespeare’s background couldn’t have been the greatest writer in the English language: people point out that there was only one Enlightenment Philosophe who was famous both in the sciences and in letters, and that is Benjamin Franklin: a runaway indentured servant who started out with nothing. Commentators have also pointed out that the American president who was the most talented writer was Abraham Lincoln, born in a frontier cabin and without even completing an elementary education. Genius is often sui generous.
And Jane Austen attended a school for girls where she learned to sew, embroider, and the like, for only a year or two. Charles Dickens worked in a shoe polish factory as a child when his father was imprisoned. Genius is genius and English writers had it in spades. I wish I had a dab of it.
We have thousands of letters and correspondences from Franklin and Lincoln. We have not one from Will Shakespeare. Assuming they are all lost- no contemporary ever references receiving a letter from Shakespeare. It's not that genius can't spring from anywhere, it's that genius reliably leaves marks and Will Shakespeare marked nothing but his signature on court records.
15:45 I feel like the rigorous metre of iambic pentameter, & the desire to entertain with wordplay is what funnels Shakespeare into writing each of these words in novel ways. I feel like while we should give credit where it's due -- we should both talk about the nuances of evidence about what Shakespeare wrote alone (still great feats), which he plagiarized, which he collaborated on with ghost writers who couldn't publish back then, etc -- while we do that we should also reframe Shakespeare less as a great individual, but rather as the archetype of the intellectual and artistic upheavals of the time
Many of these words are also being used just in public, by humanity, whether speaking English, French, etc so you can think of "Shakespeare" rather as a symbol of collective lexical production rather than a mere person, and also rather than an isolated genius "great man".
20:00 regarding classism: being such a prolific wordsmith would probably be *aided* and even *required* by 1. Not having the obscure academic grammar 2. Having both the vulgar masses and the erudite/at least literate gentry as your audience 3. Once again, making yourself rhyme & speak in iambic pentameter.
There's a recently released book out there called 'Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies' by Elizabeth Winkler. She really copped some stick over this work. How dare she question the Bard?! 😱
Rob - great work and thank you. Just a thought. First, the old English period was made up of the creation of composite words so one way of looking at his originality is to see it in the context of following on an old way of wordsmithery (I think that's a new word...). But, more importantly for me, is that the greatest part of his genius is that he knew what worked for ordinary people, the groundlings etc. So I have to think that when we see 'new' words in Shakespeare it's not that they are always 'new' just that it's the first time they have moved from the streets to the page
Apart from the text of Sir Thomas More, which many scholars believe that Hand D is Shakespeare’s holograph, there’s a damn good reason why the playscripts have not survived: they’re not at Dulwich College, which is the repository for texts from the careers of Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn. Those very few surviving playscripts are there-but Shakespeare had an ownership stake in the competition. Besides, Rob, you might want to think about what happened in London in 1666 that was incredibly destructive of written material…
And the thing that happened in London in 1642 that wiped away the institutions that had the ownership rights to theatrical manuscripts: the Puritan-dominated Parliament banned theatre. The companies were disbanded and most of their theatres were pulled down, including the Globe and Blackfriars, where the King's Men had performed. Moreover, there's something that happened in 1623. The publication of the First Folio likely rendered the retention of Shakespeare's authorial manuscripts moot. The 18 plays that had been previously published in quarto probably had their manuscripts discarded long ago, while the remaining 18 that were new to the Folio probably got tossed as of no account after the First Folio was printed. People weren't precious about theatrical manuscripts in this era, since it was approximately 200 years before the Cult of the Author. Indeed, sometimes they still aren't. I know of someone who wanted to restage a theatrical adaptation of The Canterbury Tales that he'd seen 30 years before and the scripts were just gone. They were all tossed after the production was over, and the author didn't publish or archive the script either.
Is it that Shakespeare “invented” these words, or that he was the first to use them in writing? It seems to me it would have been odd for someone writing plays (presumably for an audience) to have used so many words people wouldn’t have known. Rather than saying he invented the words, I think it would be more appropriate to say that given his prolific career, he was the first to document these words. The French created L’Academie to standardize and document French in the 16th century, something that was never done in English. Shakespeare may have recognized in his day to capture these words and sayings in the absence of such an institution in England. Just a thought…
He was the first to write them down, but English scholars have this incessant need to lionize Shakespeare. I'm Dutch and a lot of the words and sayings attributed to Shakespeare are just regular Dutch, indicating they existed for centuries prior. Also when writing or speaking English half the words I use are just basic French with an English twist to them. It's not like Shakespeare came up with this stuff. However, one must make room for the idea that the use of language was particularly creative for the time, but a lack of sources means a lot points to one person. Let us put this in different terms: what if the accumulated innovations of the descendants of American slaves in linguistics had come to us through just a single author, how innovative would that be? We would be left with a completely different usage of grammar, thousands of new words and sayings. It would be properly Shakespearean, no? But it wasn't the author inventing these things.
Thank you for calling the idea that Shakespeare didn't write his plays a conspiracy theory. It is. All the references to him not being capable make me think of Benjamin Franklin. He was a business man, writer, scientist, organizer, diplomat, but he was only a son of a poor candlemaker, never went to a university, and had a common law wife who he impregnated after restarting their relationship after her husband ran off. Deborah Franklin who was not well educated (likely due to the times she lived in and her family) never went to Europe (possibly due to fear of sea) and died before 1776. As for the positive assertion that someone else wrote the plays, there is no direct proof. No manuscripts for Shakespeare writings in any of the candidates' papers.
Wondering what software you use to create the amazing text and graphics. Your promo for skillshare went by too quick to spot it. Absolutely love your videos. Love robwords not lost!
I’ve studied the topic at uni and there is substantial doubt that Shakespeare was indeed the man from SUA. I think the most compelling of those proofs is the lack of letters or references with other contemporary writers.
@ I would love to see it but most importantly refute the counterproofs. So letters exchanging with other writers, manuscripts, something that points to his widespread vocabulary and cultural knowledge. Again I’m aware this sounds like flatearther territory but if you look into it in detail you can find that there are enough anomalies around Shakespeare to at least raise an eyebrow or even two. I don’t claim to have the truth but I think it is clear that the topic is an interesting case of critical thinking and one worth exploring. Contrary to what most stratfordians believe I don’t think it questioning the authorship constitutes an attack against the plays and the role they play in English literature history.
A joke I heard (or read) many decades ago went something like: "Oh I read Shakespeare, I don't know why people give him so much credit, he just seems to have strung together a bunch of well known sentences"
Hahaha
Not only that, but they were all well known letters and punctuation. He copied all of them from earlier writers!
😂😂
@@memofromessex I think you have an error in your comment, writing "the" original instead of "very original". Secondly, have you heard anyone actually say this? If so, did they grow up remote from western culture generally? I'm trying to understand why you posted this. The OP talks about something he forgets whether he read or heard, many decades ago. You seem to be talking about a recent experience, with an 40 yo internet and global distribution of cell/smart phones, or else you're imagining it for the sake of ????
@@squirlmy He was commenting on the actual 'joke'. I heard an almost identical one, also many decades ago, to the effect that "Hamlet" is nothing more than a string of quotations. (Not many jokes can stand up to detailed analysis, so it's better not to try!)
PS: My mother actually said to me, about 60 years ago: "Pooh, the Beatles! Do you think anyone will have heard of them in fifty years time?"
Rob always has an expression that looks like he has a bunch of forbidden secrets that he probably shouldn't tell us, but can't help himself sharing anyway. That's probably why he's meeting us in the woods.
such a gossip...
Haha
hahaha, well worded
I had assumed it was wind (which Shakespeare also mentioned - in general, that is - he didn't know Rob)
Underrated comment
I can’t believe Shakespeare wrote the script for this video 425 years ago just for you Rob
His name is Shakee
Maybe he paid a visit to Nostradamus who told him all about UA-cam.
even the channel name sounds like what shakespear may have done.
@@NathansWargames It's clearly much older. Does not the Bible tell us, _in the beginning was the Rob-Word?_
Apparently it was supposed to be delivered after 420 but he got a little...distracted
As an American who grew up in the 60s, I love Shakespeare to this day. Doubtless as a fan, I made the pilgrimage to Stratford-Upon-Avon. The whole town is a monument to their native son. It was an exhilarating experience. When I read his works they lift my mind up to a place few other text, except the Bible, are able to do. This was a very, very enlightening post. Thanks so much.
Herman Melville...?? The Bible and Shakespeare were the bedrock of his
astonishing use of language......A true
Giant of Literature.!!
Even though Shakespeare's works have become high brow culture, I've often felt that he was really a person who wrote for the common people. His plays were considered popular entertainment in his time, not stuffy and sophisticated as they are sometimes presented these days. With that in mind, I've often thought that given his unremarkable upbringing and education, he probably used words and expressions that he heard around him, so many of the new words that appear in print for the first time may well have been in common use when he was writing and so he really didn't invent a lot of these words, he simply was the first, or among the first, to put them to paper.
Thank you. You made my point but much more eloquently.
Probably his sonnets might be considered as destined to a more educated public. The plays? Blockbusters of the time.
I think it's more that there was less of a distinction. The royals sponsored his theatre company, James I attended his productions and Macbeth was written specifically for the King, they were not seen as low brow either.
There was definitely a high-brow element to them though since noble characters spoke in rhyming couplets while commoners spoke in prose.
Exactly this - I'm very dubious that he "invented" all these words & phrases. Truth is, other than religious & governmental/legal works, we don't have a ton of written works that aren't translations of foreign/ancient works. People weren't writing down common speech all that much - other than playwrights. I'm sure Shakespeare heard many of these supposed inventions of his.
Thank you for the time you put into researching, editing and presenting these masterpieces. I also appreciate your flair for humour and engagement.
I couldn't have said it better - little linguistic masterpieces, indeed. One of my favourite channels.
For some reason my brain came up with the phrase "Cambrian explosion of English" to describe the Elizabethan Era and I love it
A perfect analogous phrase, methinks!
More like the Cambridgian explosion amirite?
brain came with Camebrain
@@einootspork honestly you're comment is better than mine, congrats 😂
@@einootspork “Cantabridgian”, please!
I wonder how many of the words Shakespeare lengthened or shortened, were changed to fit the cadence. Where “dawning” didn’t scan, maybe “dawn” did.
Exactly what I thought. He was writing iambic pentameter so the meter would have naturally encouraged playfulness with words as well of course his constant punning.
exactly. A good creative writing exercise, is to fit your prose into a strict form, say a villanelle, or indeed iambic pentameter. It forces creativity and elasticity of language.
"Dawning" invites a back formation, though. How many words end in "-ing" that aren't gerunds? So it seems completely reasonable to say "dawn".
Elision is common, no?
@@calartian85 Ooh, one of my favourite words! I used it in a poem once (based on "Doctor Who" audio play called "...Ish", which I highly recommend to all linguistical nerds. =:o} )
"Precision, in ellipsis and elision, is interred;
And a word with no beginning is the last thing ever heard..."
The thing I've heard a lot of lately is that as English as a whole was rapidly evolving during that period, many of Shakespeare's new words are more likely words that had started being used by young people of the era than actually being invented by him. Or in other words, that Shakespeare was using contemporary slang in his plays and happens to be the first person to have recorded them.
Did you watch the video? I don't think so.
@@squirlmy yeah I think they did no cap
Obviously many of the words had been spoken by others earlier. Even just putting together random syllables it would be hard to come up with something nobody had ever said before. And I'm sure many were even written down by others, but how many other people had their writings preserved as well as Shakespeare? Not many. But Shakespeare popularized them. So he gets credit for that much. I mean how many people said "for shizzle" before Snoop Dogg? I don't think there's any way to prove somebody else didn't say something earlier - and in most cases it's overwhelmingly improbable that nobody else said it earlier. But if Snoop Dogg never said it, or if Shakespeare had never written it, how much less use would the word/phrase get? It's complicated.
@@Psylaine64 frfr
The Folio versions are sometimes decades after the first staging of the plays and older scripts sometimes exist and differ from the folio versions. Any discussion of who invented what needs to look at the earliest version of the scripts to avoid the possibility it's not a neologism but simply the development of language between versions of the script.
Great video, but.... You correctly say at 4:00 that Shakespeare is the first 'quoted' as using a word, but then you drop the word 'quoted' and say he was the first person to use these words. That is very unlikely. Hundreds of years from now, scholars will find the word 'selfie' in a 2003 script, and assume the author invented it because this is the first time they saw it in print. In fact, the word 'swlfie' was in common usage a year earlier.
We simply don't know if words like 'devote' and 'denote' were used in spoken English around London before Shakespeare put them in his scripts. He certainly played with words and adapted them, but Shakespeare's plays would have been incomprehensible if he constantly 'invented' new words that his audiences had never heard before.
Excellent point.
A lot of it is probably slang from Stratford-Upon-Avon, but you're right. It's important to remember though, that Shakespeare himself doesn't claim to have made up words. He doesn't have a press agent claiming he's the biggest inventor of words. That's a title bestowed on him by nineteenth century college professors looking for ways to justify their tenure.
Adding on to that, surely there must be some selection bias involved as well. Shakespeare is the most renowned writer in the history of the English language, and his writings have been widely studied and preserved for centuries. How many other 16th century writers might have used the same words in print, and never been credited for it, because no one kept a record of it for 400 years after their death?
@@adamg2031 This is the big one. We use words shakespeare used because he made good plays with entertaining stories and conclusions, not because people were going to the shows and then afterwards talking about how many new words they learned lol
Rob, you are always a delight. Your editing and jokes make my day! Very well done video.
I just discovered this channel and am looking forward to going through other delightful videos.
Chaucer used the word "kisses", way back in the late 14th century. "Thus in this heaven he took his delight And smothered her with kisses upon kisses / Till gradually he came to know where bliss is." (from Troilus and Criseyde). Sounds like there was already a lot of kissing going on, in those days!
to kiss, kussen, küssen is a germanic word predating Shakespeare probably by a thousand years
@@evanherkI mean, "kissing" isn't a different word from "kiss" anyway. It's just the present participle of to kiss. Shakespeare did not invent English grammar.
The "inventing words" thesis is nonsense.
omg - LOL that’s hilarious :) 🌷🌱
@@evanherk - the problem with dates is that 1,000 years before Shakespeare there are no written/printed documents to prove this hypothesis. As Great Britain did not have lots of destructive land wars, or natural disasters, there are older written text sources there, than e.g. in the Netherlands, I think, but not 1,000 years before Shakespeare and if there is something written, e.g. in non-Viking runes, it is so marginal that it's almost irrelevant here. I would not expect anything before about 700 AD.
It's clear to me that a Germanic verb to kiss predates Shakespeare by a long time. The TLDR below.
My etymological dictionary [1] places the Dutch word "kussen" (to kiss) in 1201~1250. It relates today's verb to Old Saxon "kussian", Old High German "kussen", Old Frisian "kessa", Old English "cyssan", and Old Norse "kyssa". The hypothesis is that the word originally was an "onomatopoeia" - a word that mimics a natural sound. My chronological dictionary [2] is in another room in the house and I leave it at that.
The other Dutch word "kussen" (pillow, cushion) in this dictionary gets related to the Vulgar Latin "coximus" that references the pelvis or hips and this Dutch language meaning-variant is placed a century after kussen-kiss.
In an adolescent mind - not the scientists writing the dictionary - these two might even be related via oral sex. Many noble things had a very vulgar origin long time before. Many civilised high-court dances for which noble composers wrote music, have origins in walks of life circles where women have to work lying down in order to remain standing in life. Brought back by adolescent noblemen from their grand tours. When you drink from a cup or glass, and while holding it stick your pinky out, this used to be the signal in the salons, "I have STD, if you have it too, we can have some exercise together with happy endings". When today people in modern media ask each other if they have HIV, then there's nothing new in the history of homo sapiens not so sapiens. Money makes the world go round and dopamine too.
Mother (wet spot) or mamma (breasts, tits). And it happens the other way around, from noble to vulgar. Water Closet (WC) was a euphemism until nobody understood it as euphemism any longer. Rather than po, bed pan, the Dutch had idiom like "night mirror" and I guess the "porcelain throne" (Elizabeth II) came too early for the night mirror euphemism to become vulgar.
Considering that, in 400 years, English got bastardised in its phonetic writing and pronunciation to the point that each word's pronunciation and writing must be taught individually, as if it is Chinese, we can see that even 400 years is a long time and that's how far my source goes back before Shakespeare. "Shift happens". "Honey-badger don't care." "Why bother, you understood what I said/wrote, didn't you?"
With the bastardisation of English after Shakespeare, his texts don't rhythm and rhyme any longer. This aspect is easier to comprehend for a Dutch reader than an English one.
"Folk" converted classical Greek into "koinè". "Folk" and soldiers converted classical Latin into Vulgar Latin. Franks (Germanic tribes) and Gauls (Celts) converted Vulgar Latin into French (144 transformation rules can simulate this evolution).
What we call "lingua franca" [3] as reference to a "go-between" language used to be koinè in old Rome and the Middle East and is the language of the Bible's New Testament (the holy book of Christians that has an Old Testament part - Hebrew/Jewish books - as origin story).
Today's worldwide lingua franca is US English. When the idiom lingua franca was invented it was the Frankish of the commons, the people, the folk and that's why Dutch is called dutch - the same word as diets [deets] in Flemish, deutsch [doitsh] in German, and duits [d?ts] in Dutch [4].
That lingua franca must have been Low West Frankish (or before WW2, "Nederduits"). And must explain why Dutch have a relatively easy time to understand neighbouring languages. By the way Northern Germany (the German low lands) also spoke something close to lingua franca until that got impacted by a Southern German bible translation in the dialect of those Southern hill billies.
So a close ancestor to Dutch will have been the go-between language in Hanseatic times, in trade and harbours, between the men on the quay and on the ships. A German student of German, in Amsterdam University, answered my question "why German in Amsterdam" and the answer was, I'm from the North and it feels closer to home, and your language is cute anachronistic. I replied to that "anachronistic", that my language was more original and not a lot "improved by language zealots that want an easy time rating their students' translations from Latin" and "not a lot modified by uncivilised hill billies". We are frank after all.
[1] "Van Dale Etymologisch Woordenboek". 2nd edition. Authors P.A.F. van Veen Ph.D. and N. van der Sijs. (c) 1997, Van Dale Lexicografie b.v. (1st edition 1989). This dictionary had a large scientific editorial, review, editing, etc. board. The book is a bit dated but still very much respected.
[2] This is of later date than [1] and lists words in the Dutch language by oldest date found in writing or in print.
[3] literally "Frankish Language"
[4] dutch, diets, deutsch, duits mean "folk", "common", "of the commons". When the poet/author of the national anthem wrote that William of Orange (the legacy/inheritance never materialised ...) was "van Duitsen Bloed" he meant this as "he's one of us Dutch people" and while William's family originated in today's Germany that concept did not exist, yet, for a long time. To me the "of the commons" in this context implies "as opposed to the language - vulgar Latin - used by clergy and in some cases nobility."
@@feralbluee I'm glad it pleased you. One of my favourite couplets from Chaucer! There are a lot of other gems, on amorous themes - this happens to be one of the cleanest!
You must have worked so hard to produce this. Thank you.
This is the definitive video on Shakespeare for me, and I'm saying that not as a diehard subscriber who has followed you on here for years or anything.
Well written and explained and presented, much appreciated. Thanks Rob.
My American ears can't distinguish when Rob is speaking normally and when he's doing an Early Modern English accent. Haha!
I just heard that Shakespeare created 1700 words like 3 days ago so I watched like 5 videos in a row on it, words like elbow. And I thought to myself that makes no sense because how would the audience know what he was talking about if he is just manufactuuring words out of thin air. So I tried to redearch what the english word for comfortable was in the 1400's, another word I had heard he invented, because I figured it couldn't be to far off from comfortable if people were going to undsrstand him. Unfortunately, google and several dictionaries had no searchable results for my query. I am so happy you made this video to answer my question in such a timely manner. I give you all my thanks!
Shakespears plays were ghost written by John Florio (a bilingual polymath living in England) who created an Italian-English dictionary in 1598.
I love that you've used the term 'thin air'. First coined by...Shakespeare.
" how would the audience know what he was talking about if he is just manufactuuring words out of thin air"? Look at some recent coinages and how they are understood by the booboisie (H L Mencken, 1920's). Consider "normalcy" (Warren Harding, 1920's), "bigly," "covfefe" and "lamestream media" (Donald Trump, recently)
Calvin: I like to Verb words
Hobbes: What?
Calvin: I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs. Remember when "Access" was a thing? Now it's something you do. It got verbed.
Verbing weirds language
Hobbes: Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding.
So his use of “bedroom” was possibly a pun.
Good point!
but as it was one of the first written examples, we'll never know. Maybe he just literally meant room on a bed. We'd have to have contemporary examples of him using the word to mean, "bed chamber" to see if he had any knowledge of this alternative use.
Almost certainly.
Absolutely!
He made many puns; one that I remember is in a dialog between Hamlet and Ophelia while searching a place on the floor to watch the play.
H: ‘Tis a fair thought to lie between maid’s legs.
O (shocked): My lord!
H: I meant, my head between thy legs. Did’st thou think I meant C(O)UNTRY matters?
When I was a teenager, many decades ago, my favorite guy in my _Oxford Book Of Quotations_ was an interesting man named Alexander Pope. I think I read somewhere that he gets the silver medal for words coined in English.
I like the comedy series "Upstart Crow" It's a hilarious take on a lot of these stories and rumors around Shakespeare. David Mitchell as Will is wonderful!
I love all things David Mitchell! I’ll have to check it out.
It also Rob is wrong about 'radiance'. Because we know from Upstart Crow that Shakespeare wrote all Marlowe's plays.
@@tulliusexmisc2191 - .^_^. Yes, that is one of the conceits of the show, but remember it's a comedic TV show, not a documentary. (In _Upstart Crow,_ Marlowe didn't really die. He went into hiding.) However, it is a great show. The parodies of Shakespeare and the puns are all laugh out loud.
Upstart Crow might be the best thing Ben Elton has done. He obviously loves Shakespeare and knows a lot about him, but he wears his learning lightly and isn't afraid to poke a little fun at the "immortal bard" for his imperfections.
I'd never even heard of this show. Now watching it. One of the (many) downsides of moving to the cultural backwater that is 'Murica, is missing out on good stuff like this.
At 6:35, there may be some wordplay which motivated the new use of “gossip” as a verb, since “I’ll gossip at this feast” might sound like “I’ll go sup at this feast” when the actor says it, with “go sup” meaning to go have supper. Shakespeare loved his puns, and his audience probably did too.
Oh, absolutely! I'm glad you pointed that out. There are a lot of puns you miss in Shakespeare just by reading it, because the pronunciation of many words are key to the joke and it doesn't perfectly translate to say, posh English or American accents.
I watched this on patreon yesterday and here I am watching the whole thing again. Excellent video.
Light humor + copious examples + well reasoned thesis = RobWords. Thank you for writing so well, Rob. Give me excess of it.
"'.....that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken and so die" ?? Surely not!!
As a Dutchie, I was surprised when you said that "to rant" is from Dutch. I looked op "ranten" and it is not in the Van Dale online dictionary. We should use it again
Fellow Dutchie here: I only learned the word when I started listening to Rob and other linguists 😛 It has gone out of use completely, afaik
It's still in the dictionary as 'randen', with 'to bellow' as the first meaning (Grote Van Dale 2005). But we don't really use it anymore in that sense. I'd never heard of it either. You can tell that Van Dale started as a dictionary of 19th century Dutch and kept many outdated words. Meanwhile, the noun 'rant' has re-entered our vocabulary thanks to blogs and social media.
I appreciate that you said that Shakespeare could have written "gild the lily," since he actually wrote, "to gild refined gold, to paint the lily."
2:55 when you buy a bigger bed, you have more bedroom but less bedroom
Edit1: the sigma are y'all doin
Edit2: I just want to clarify I got this from somewhere else
Very good 👏
More bedroom but less bed-roome.
This checks out scientifically, I checked and chuckled.
Hate to be "that guy", but the number of bedroom remains the same. But yes, you will have more bedroom.
@@burnere633
Hate to be THIS guy, but
You do realize that ethan was referring not to the total number of bedrooms being reduced, but the available space of the bedroom wherein the bed is located...
It's completely unfuckingfair that Shakespeare gets credit for making up words a half-milleneum ago, while I only get SCRABBLE challenges when I do it!
I love your channel, Professor Dr. Mr. Words. Stay awesome!!
One reason why his original writings don't survive is that he tried to prevent it. There were no copyright laws like the ones we understand today. He was very worried about other theatres making money off his work .For good reason.
Actors usually only got their lines and their queues. He kept the stories mostly in his head. His friends would have had to piece the plays together.
Actors generally played several characters in any production. And memories, the capacity to commit to memory, was exponentially larger back then because knowledge was not all written down in books, and the oral traditions (that every human tribe and culture passed down) were still alive and extremely important. In addition, understudies for parts were plentiful for flexibility of production. Generally, everyone involved knew the scripts by heart, including any production crew..
In the sense you use, queues should be cues. Not being an arse, just a heads up :- )
"Être ou ne pas être : telle est la question" Shakespeare en français ! Votre chaîne est absolument fantastique. J'adore vos vidéos et, surtout, votre sens de l'humour. Merci et à la revoyure. Et vive Shakespeare 🙂
Ah, but have you heard it in the original Klingon?
a.k., tried my luck at translating just for fun .... your dog is beautiful? Oops. LOL
He is dead (Shakespeare, not Rob).
In the early 1600s. my 10th great-grandfather sailed from England to the colony of Virginia. On the way, the flotilla of ships was struck by a massive storm (likely a hurricane) near Bermuda. Once the vessels were repaired, the voyage continued. After arriving in the New World, one of my ancestor's shipmates told him that he had maintained a detailed journal of the voyage and wanted it to be more widely published. He sent it to a writer friend in England named William Shakespeare. The journal served as inspiration for "The Tempest".
Your revels now are ended....!
I think all these 'new words' had been in popular use before they entered into Shakey's plays. After all, the audiences of these plays were common everyday working blokes and they would not have paid money to hear words they did not understand.
In the same token, Beethoven did not invent the symphony and Mozart did not invent the string quartet; they merely perfected the pre-existing musical forms.
True, but considering that they are also counting things like adding un- before a word or -ing after it. Or using an existing word in a slightly new way. Most of them were not just introduced from nowhere. It was often more like wordplay and the audience would’ve recognized it as such.
Amazing how every other commenter said the same thing and believes they've come up with something noone else ever thought of.
Yes exactly lol
Also; a lot of them are just French. Rule of thumb; an English word ending “ally” is the same in French, but with the ending “ment”. So all of those aren't really coinages, as much as mere adoption.
Where you said "Beethoven" and "Mozart", I think you meant "Haydn".
As one who likes reading through Shakespeare's plays (I have a copy of Shakespeare's folio, that my dad gave me), I found this quite informative!
Now, I know that Shakespeare did _not_ coin all of the 1,700 words that he is said to have created...
He coined even _more_ words than that! "Foregone conclusion", "countless", "undress", "champion" as verb, "hint" as noun, "gloomy" (or "gloomie"), "bandit" (in fact, "bandetto", a variant of the Italian form, sometimes shows up in Shakespeare's works), "break the ice", "come full circle", "too much of a good thing", "for goodness sake", "neither rhyme nor reason", and more are among the words which (as I just learned) likely originated with Shakespeare!
Thanks for the video!
Shakespeare wrote his plays and sonnets in the same way that Trevithick, with little formal educations, invented the steam locomotive. Many of the parts were there for both men,but both made use of them in new ways.
Exactly! That's why it's "playwright" and not "playwrite." He crafted the plays out of existing raw materials, and I'm sure many were collaborations. (They are no less works of genius, for all that.)
Impressed you edit and do the graphic design on these yourself.
Great work!
16:53 lmao Rob that was awesome 😂 nice work on those phrases one after the other
Shakespeare wouldd be proud - and a bit jealous too
Your videos are witty and informative and I enjoy them very much.
He wrote 2 political plays - "Love, Labour's Lost" and "Love, Labour's Won".
😂
Maybe 3, how about 'The Comedy of Errors'
@stephenlee5929 that's more apolitical as it could be applied to any political party along with "As you Like it".
@@neiloflongbeck5705hmmm, but political things are so rarely as *I* would like it. If it were truly an accurate political statement, might it not be closer to “As we were able to convince someone to pass the measure”? Perhaps the third political play is therefore “Measure for Measure”? 😅
@DawnDavidson that's the problem of democracy. Not everything will be approved of by every individual. "Measure for Measure"would also be apolitical, in the same way as "Yes, Minister" was.
On the subject of his many phrases Shakespeare invented, I remember the first time I watched Hamlet being astounded at how many quotes I already knew!
I know! "Hamlet" is one long quote.
Sounds like having to stick within a meter, lead to innovation. Limit leading to creativity! 15:42 haha you said a version of this literally as I wrote this
I would love to see an episode were Rob explains how some words have multiple, very different meanings such as right (direction and being correct) or left (direction and past tense if leave) or lash (eyelid hairs, tie something down)
Shakespeare to Marlowe: Stop trying to make "Fetch" happen.
We actually (probably) do have a manuscript in Shakespeare's handwriting: his scene for Sir Thomas Moore. Granted its only a probability and a single scene, but it's more than we have of a lot of other writers.
Shakespeare, if he is anything like me, must have had such an interest in people, full stop. He must have been listening, always, and holding on to what he heard around him. How else does one learn to embody so many types of characters with a single quill?
And he faithfully recorded the language, full of new words he didn't invent.
The size of one's vocabulary is, other things being equal (i.e. schooling and having company) the best simple measure of intelligence. Was he very intelligent? He seems to have made it his business to find out about a lot of things, which is another hallmark of intelligence.
According to Anthony Burgess, he probably wrote with a pencil.
Really enjoy that you always cut right to the chase (origin: 1920s Hollywood) and give us the information without beating about the bush (from 'Generydes', an English romantic verse, circa 1440). Also appreciate your more or less mythbusting (Discovery Channel, Australia, 2002) of his authorship. So like, thanks!
I feel like you didn't give du weight to the possibility that some (or many) of the words could have been in use in the spoken language around him already. Crediting it all to him directly seems a bit unfounded, though I'm sure he came up with quite a few on his own as well. Though potentially being the first to commit thousands of new words to text is still very impressive. Great video overall though, learned a lot :)
Was my thought as well. Rob briefly uses the phrase “first used in print” but I do believe this deserves greater scrutiny.
Were you watching the same video as me? Rob makes it quite clear that any number of these words were used in common parlance prior to Shakespeare fiddling with them to produce a variety of neologisms, thus broadening the meaning of the original.
@@2eleven48 The point is he wasn't necessarily the first to use them that way either. People turn parts of speech into other parts of speech and do various other stuff with language that creates new, but understandable, words all the time, often with push-back about kids not being able to speak properly these days. It was the same then, and if he was the first to write many of them down perhaps it is because he was less fussy about "proper language" than other writers of the time.
What a shock -- Elizabethan theatre was collaborative, just like now. Well played, sir!
Oh come on. We ALL know that "Love's Labours Found" was written, and Dr Who (#10) saved us from the Space Witches!
I came here to find this comment.
Genius doesn't need the years of formal education normal intelligence benefits from. I have been reading and watching Shakespeare for 60 years and he can still surprise me with views and events and twists I hadn't noticed before.
He drive the churlish elitists bonkers to this day.
The earliest mention of "kissing" in OED is from 1300. (8:43) It is only "kissing comfit" (breath freshener) that is attributed to Shakespeare.
[Transl. 👇]
Nicht zu fassen - das Wort muß ja mit den Jüten, Sachsen und Angeln nach Britannien gekommen sein, sonst würde es nicht im Deutschen in dieser Weise parallel existieren (aus derselben Quelle). könnte aber auch sein, daß die "englische" Sprache schreibfähig zu machen noch schwieriger war, als es schon beim Althochdeutschen war - wir kennen einen (lateinischen) Brief von Otfried von Weißenburg, der sich mit vielen anderen Wissenschaftlern darum bemüht hat, in welchem er die Notwendigkeit beklagt, in manchen Wörtern drei U hintereinander schreiben zu müssen; dieses Problem löste man durch Erfindung des Zeichens "W" (Man könnte den Eindruck gewinnen, daß die Sprache der Vorfahren dem Wolfsgeheul nicht unähnlich klang). Unbelievable - the word must have come to Britain with the Jutes, Saxons and Angles, otherwise it would not exist in parallel in German in this way (from the same source). But it could also be that making the "English" language writable was even more difficult than it already was with Old High German - we know of a (Latin) letter by Otfried von Weißenburg, who endeavoured to do so with many other scholars [scientists], in which he complains about the necessity of having to write three U's in succession in some words; this problem was solved by inventing the sign "W" (one could get the impression that the language of the ancestors sounded not unlike the howling of a wolf).
Übrigens, hat noch jemand das Gefühl, daß es "althochdeutsch" wirklich als Sprache nicht gegeben hat und lediglich eine wissenschaftliche Hilfskonstruktion ist (wie Dunkle Materie, - Da ist was, aber nichts Genaues weiß man nicht). By the way, does anyone else have the feeling that "Old High German" really did not exist as a language and is merely an auxiliary scientific construction (like Dark Matter, - There is something, but nothing exact is known).
Which would literally mean "sweet/candy for kissing".
Fair shake of the old spear Rob. The Bard used or resuscitated whichever word suited the moment. It isn't his fault that we might have forgotten some of the more ancient ones.
The issue here is mostly "invention", since anyone can add or remove an affixe. The time frame also helped (the invention of the printing press, the low literacy, etc.) so he did write them down and popularise them, no proof he didn't heard them by someone else. something we'll never know.
I had thought some pages of revisions of the Thomas More play were thought to be in Shakespeare’s own hand - and that we did have at least one example of his signature extant.
Regardless, great video!
For those wishing to hold on to the theory that no one man could be such a massive genius of vocabulary nor of the character’s life experiences, remember that theater is a collaborative art. The comic parts especially must have featured improvisational additions or rewrites. I think this accounts for a good deal of discrepancies between Folio and Quarto. Quartos may be closer to the plays as performed whereas Shakespeare may have been able to revise many of the Folio versions before his death.
We have at least six signatures extant (one on a deposition in the _Bellot v. Mountjoy_ case; one on a bargain and sale to acquire the Blackfriars gatehouse, which Shakespeare purchased in 1613; one on the mortgage to the same deal; and three on his will, one on each page) plus a possible seventh on William Lambarde's _Archainomia_ . The reason scholars are somewhat cautious about identifying this signature as Shakespeare's is merely because it's not self-verifying as a legal document that tells you the signer is "William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon in the county of Warwick, gentleman". However, it seems unlikely to be a forgery since nobody knew it existed until the Folger Library acquired the book and straightened out the crumpled title page. Moreover, the signature is on a decorative border, which makes it almost invisible to the eye (it's better seen in reverse, where the ink has bled through) and thus an unlikely place for a forger to put a signature, since they have to see what they're doing to make sure they're making a good forgery and because they want the forgery to show up clearly for any prospective buyers. However, in Shakespeare's own day, before the iron-gall ink oxidized and turned brownish, it would have shown up as a deep black against the lighter black of the decorative border (which would have been made with printers' ink composed of lampblack and linseed oil). Personally, I think the idea that this book belonged to Shakespeare and he wrote his name in it is very plausible.
And, yes, on that basis of the six signatures paleographers are confident that "Hand D" of _Sir Thomas More_ is William Shakespeare's handwriting. The manuscript has multiple points of similarity with Shakespeare's signatures (in particular a unique way of forming the h-a ligature) and no disqualifying differences and it doesn't match the handwriting of any other known author or scribe who has left surviving manuscripts. Moreover, there are stylometric links to the other plays in the Shakespeare canon, links of shared imagery, shared stylistic quirks like the verbing of "shark", and two phrases appear to be self-plagiarized in later canonical Shakespeare works ("would feed on one another" in _Coriolanus_ and "ravenous fishes" in _Henry VIII_ in a scene Shakespeare is independently established to have written) even though the play was evidently unproduced and unpublished, so the only way Shakespeare could have known about these Hand D passages is if he wrote them.
Also for Dante's (Divine) Comedy and all his other works we have the full text but nothing of them by his hand.
Anyway, the Poet managed to inscribe in verses his signature in the flesh of his main opera, in Purgatory XXX with the following verses of the Longfellow translation:
55-57 (Beatrice scolding)
“Dante, because Virgilius has departed
Do not weep yet, do not weep yet awhile;
For by another sword thou need’st must weep.”
...
62-64 (Dante telling)
When at the sound I turned of my own name,
Which of necessity is here recorded,
I saw the Lady, who erewhile appeared...
=====
Dante has introduced many words in the Italian language at the point that when in conversations strange or unusual words appear, we go checking, if it is in Dante then it's Italian.
Brilliant video. Your enthusiasm for etymology is inspiring and well-informed (amateur etymologist here) but this video is quite simply your best yet. Kiu
The past tense of William Shakespeare is Wouldiwas Shookspeared.
😂
Yar hast biearn righteded yas
Good one!
Stole this joke from Twitter.
The future tense would be "John Falstaff" then . . . an E.D. joke.
Fwiw, it's pretty well accepted that Middleton made edits to the Folio version of Macbeth, amongst others that were edited post Shakespeare writing them.
I don't believe someone else wrote Shakepeare's plays, but what's curious is how little we actually know about the person apart from his works. The paper trail, such as bequeathing his wife his "second-best bed," is quite thin. The other thing that gives me pause is this question: "How did he know so much about so many things that were outside his experience and social class?" Terms of venery, for example. Perhaps his reading was vast, but were there that many books he could get his hands on? I suppose genius is the explanation, but it would be nice to know more about his life. Thanks, Rob, for another great program!
I recommend reading some James Shapiro. 'Contested Will' will answer many of your questions. Also, there is quite a lot known about parts of Shakespeare's life - have a look at The Lodger by Charles Nicholl.
@@chrisdavies7446 Thank you for the recommendations! I will check them out.
We actually know a lot about him and his life, far more than we know about other figures from the same era. If you could read at this time, and he clearly could, then there were a lot of books you could get your hands on to learn about other places and cultures. Not to mention he would have stories told to him by his actors, who would often travel far and wide while performing. Even the lack of handwriting claim is somewhat contested, there's some writing of his that is his part of a rewrite of someone else's work. To be fair, it's really not very much at all. But I would be interested to know how much original work survives of his contemporaries as well.
@@jameshinton2401 Thank you for the helpful reply. Good point about other figures from the same era. 🙂
Rob is a Hoot, clever as, funny as, smart as and always well dressed as. Always a pleasure to watch. Xxxx
I've often wondered, with the IT revolution, how many words have we coined in our time (and how many will outlive the era of their coining)?
If you take the hundred years from 1920 to 2019, I bet it's in the thousands.
I've tried to thing of something, but just got a 404 error. Actually, this would make a great RobWords episode.
Traditional terms in IT have repurposed words like compile, run, open, close, file. The other terms that have leaked from their IT usage would be: bug (initially an engineering term), debug, boot, bandwidth, and references to a version number of an item (e.g. my exercise plan 2.0). I've seen a UA-camr use instantiate in a sentence not related to programming, but that could a repurposed word too. There are probably many others.
@@palmercolson7037 And "computer" itself - used to be a job title for a human.
I think we will lose more than we gain because high schoolers/college students are not learning Greek and Latin where our more nuanced words come from. They also are not reading enough Shakespeare to get lots of the Anglo-Saxon words.
@homeonegreen9 try reading through a newspaper or article and highlight any words than seem new and then look them up. It's a fun exercise
Thank you again Rob for a most illuminating video. I so look forward to your postings 👍
Hi Rob, love your videos!
While it is true that we do not have a single example of an entire play written by Shakespeare’s own hand, we do have a few pages from The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore (a.k.a. “Sir Thomas More”), the script for a play that was censored and never played.
It was a collaborative effort and it had many problems, including its potentially inflammatory political nature.
The manuscript itself (Harley MS 7368, British Library) is absolutely fascinating, and I recommend reading one of Shakespeare’s contributions to the play, namely the monologue with which More quells a xenophobic rebellion in London. Truly amazing!
We don’t know this is by Shakespeare. There are quite a few significant dissenting critics.
While Shakespeare’s contribution to the play was hotly debated throughout the 20th century, the consensus is quite solid today - as highlighted in the excellent Preface and Appendixes to the play in the Arden Shakespeare edition by John Jowett
[3:36] Unless you are Pedro Carolino. 😂I just watched the "English as she is spoke" video before this "Shakey's new words" video. Your work is absolutely amazing Mr. Rob. You've earned yourself a new fan all the way from South Africa (Definitely an Exonym; our Endonym is "The Great Southern African Country"). 😅🤣
I could feel my Mum turning in her urn at her second most hated misquote ‘gild the lily’. (Changing weary to wicked in ‘no rest for the’ was her most despised.)
As a scientist I’d argue that earliest surviving recorded example does not invention prove. But the continuing popularity of his work may have cemented the words and phrases he used into English whilst many other contemporary terms have probably fallen out of use. So even if Shakespeare didn’t directly invent/coin them he’s still (at least partially) responsible for their survival through the centuries.
I do have a particular dislike of the idea Shakespeare couldn’t possibly have been that prolific. Some authors are the Douglas Adam’s type, where each novel needs to be pried out with a crowbar, some are the Edgar “Old Fiction Factory” Wallace type, producing 24 plays, 175 novels, 900ish short stories, and countless articles in a few decades, and every point in between.
Don't you mean changing wicked to weary? "No rest for the wicked" is the older/original phrase.
Ah, as a scientist, you have those nameless giants' shoulders to stand on.
When reading Shakespeare aloud with friends, every time we catch Shakespeare using one of those cliched and hackneyed expressions, we have a drink! Cheers!
Imagine finding a handwritten draft of one of his plays..... I can't imagine how much that would go for at the auction block!
A billion pounds
Enjoyed this. One other difficulty of coining new words is your audience has to know what they mean to be effective. This is a strong argument for the idea that he was using already known words or adapting new words from known ones.
i'm starting to get the impression that "sib" is for ones that're older or equal age to you, and sibLING is for the little ones
So an old version of bro?
Oooh, interesting thought! I like that as a possibility.
yeah, just like mosquito implies a larger version: EL MOSCO
@@tubeTreasurer not really. The suffix "-ling" is a diminutive applied to an existing word, while "bro" is the shortening of an existing word", the exact opposite mechanism.
@@CodeNascher_ according to the Real Academia de la Lengua Española, you are completely right. Then they go on saying that "mosco" comes from "mosca" (fly) and has the exact same meaning as "mosquito", so it seems that the suffix was appended to denote that a moskito is way smaller than a fly.
Bravo Rob! What started as a skeptical look on Shakespeare's work turned into a love letter for it. Informative, funny and nuanced. Brilliant video.
I got smacked down pretty hard when I was like 23 and getting my PhD in English and assumed the OED was making assumptions it didn't. People say this kind of stuff about Shakespeare, but the OED has never been a thorough philological source. That's not its point. The reason so many coinages are given to Shakespeare is that when the OED was being compiled, Shakespeare was a convenient terminus a quo, unless somebody on the desk that day super loved Chaucer.
Hi Rob. I enjoy your videos. You said in this video that we rely on the Folio for Shakespeare's plays. However about half of the plays were published in Quarto format during Shakespeare's lifetime.
Shakespeare walks into a pub. The barman bellows at him "get out, you're bard". Thank you, I'm here all week.
Get your coat
You got to love this channel just for so thoroughly being part of the sane 20% of the internet!
I wander how many of these words and phrases were used by lower class English people and not the upper class. As a result these words and phrases did not get into any surviving letters or works other than Shakespeare's, even if they were used by people.
I’m glad you mentioned David and Ben Crystal I think it would be good for you to have an episode about Original Pronunciation in Shakespeare
Even if he didn't coin all these words, he was undeniably creative and clever with his play with existing words. "Bedroom" in this case is such an interesting play of words in this situation.
Knowing every copy of Shakespeare's plays was reproduced after the fact and partly from memory is a bit disturbing, especially when we're making so many claims based on what is written in them.
Actors retained the scripts in memory, everyone involved did. It's not like now when everyone has a copy to refer to. Also, back when oral traditions were still active in England, people's memories were much much stronger. All cultures who have lost their oral traditions, people's memories are shyte compared to what they were. Along with people's ability to pay attention and remember for long periods of time.
It would seem absurd to think that Shakespeare employed 1,700 COMPLETELY new coinages, because if so, people would scarcely have understood what his actors were saying. If he had indeed radiblended the lexifunctionality of his quordlepeen, the result would have been befuddlement and dis-scransion. (See? 10% of what I write is new coinage! I must be a genius on a par with Willie Wobble-dagger himself.)
OOohhh... Thank you so much for this video. I happen to love the Bard quite a lot and have even memorized 14 of his sonnets... so I am glad to see that we share the same opinion on the veracity of his work. I am also happy to know that he did indeed coin so many words and phrases. I once read a list of words/expressions he coined that did not survive and perhaps, this could be the topic for another video?
OMG!!! I was wondering if you would get around to mentioning the Earl of Oxford! It's ludicrous to think that a small businessman in a sleepy little river town had the depth and breadth of experience of life that unfolds in Shakespeare's writing. I hope you don't have to take a lot of flack on this. Believe me, there are people out here who get it!!! Thanks for being brave enough to broach the subject!
Thank you very much for supporting the channel!
There is a large degree of homophobia involved in the claims that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays, and you had to ignore some of the evidence to make it work. The discovery of the rough draft of Shakespeare's coat of arms (Which links him pretty concretely with the King's Men) should have put these ideas to bed, honestly.
In what way is there homophobia in the claim that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays?
That might be why nobody claims that John Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems. But as for his son William, he was not a "small businessman in a sleepy little river town" (that town was actually a thriving market town of 2,500 people - the New York of Warwickshire, the place where you went if you didn't want to be a farmer or shepherd for the rest of your life) but an actor, playwright, and sharer in the most prestigious theatre company in *LONDON* .
Another great entertaining and informative video Rob 🙏👌👍
The Shakespeare Folio came out in 1624, including many new works and revisions to old ones. You need your search parameter to go to 1624 otherwise you will not get a good count.
I was educated in a small primary school and get slightly offended when people say Shakespeare couldn’t have written all his plays because he wouldn’t have had the right education for him to be a genius. My siblings and I all went to a county school and all have careers, one even being a doctor. None of us could be regarded as a genius I admit. But there lies the clue with Shakespeare - he was a genius. There are many people in the world who were regarded as genius, and they came from poor backgrounds. Bill Bryson wrote a very interesting book on Shakespeare, called Shakespeare, The World a a Stage. I have the audiobook version and have listened to it many times. Interestingly, Shakespeare didn’t write all his plays from scratch, but rewrote them, which may partially explain his very productive output. Bill Bryson also wrote a book called A Short History of Everything. Again I bought the audiobook, and have listened to it many times. He writes about geniuses of the past, some of which came from poor backgrounds…
Regarding skepticism that a man of Shakespeare’s background couldn’t have been the greatest writer in the English language: people point out that there was only one Enlightenment Philosophe who was famous both in the sciences and in letters, and that is Benjamin Franklin: a runaway indentured servant who started out with nothing. Commentators have also pointed out that the American president who was the most talented writer was Abraham Lincoln, born in a frontier cabin and without even completing an elementary education. Genius is often sui generous.
And Jane Austen attended a school for girls where she learned to sew, embroider, and the like, for only a year or two. Charles Dickens worked in a shoe polish factory as a child when his father was imprisoned. Genius is genius and English writers had it in spades. I wish I had a dab of it.
We have thousands of letters and correspondences from Franklin and Lincoln. We have not one from Will Shakespeare. Assuming they are all lost- no contemporary ever references receiving a letter from Shakespeare.
It's not that genius can't spring from anywhere, it's that genius reliably leaves marks and Will Shakespeare marked nothing but his signature on court records.
And Herman Melville..!!
Love this video. So interesting, and well-researched, reasoned and articulated.
15:45 I feel like the rigorous metre of iambic pentameter, & the desire to entertain with wordplay is what funnels Shakespeare into writing each of these words in novel ways.
I feel like while we should give credit where it's due -- we should both talk about the nuances of evidence about what Shakespeare wrote alone (still great feats), which he plagiarized, which he collaborated on with ghost writers who couldn't publish back then, etc -- while we do that we should also reframe Shakespeare less as a great individual, but rather as the archetype of the intellectual and artistic upheavals of the time
Many of these words are also being used just in public, by humanity, whether speaking English, French, etc so you can think of "Shakespeare" rather as a symbol of collective lexical production rather than a mere person, and also rather than an isolated genius "great man".
20:00 regarding classism: being such a prolific wordsmith would probably be *aided* and even *required* by 1. Not having the obscure academic grammar 2. Having both the vulgar masses and the erudite/at least literate gentry as your audience 3. Once again, making yourself rhyme & speak in iambic pentameter.
Ooh thank you for such enlightening and entertaining videos. You make linguistics fascinating!
English is probably the most spoken word around the Globe (theatre).
If English is widespread worldwide, it is because of English imperialism, not because English drama is supposedly superior to the rest
@@Mazorca-qq3li and your point is? Because you obviously missed the joke I was making.
@@Mazorca-qq3li Nah bro, everything England is eternally best. The planet is just coping with it.
There's a recently released book out there called 'Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies' by Elizabeth Winkler. She really copped some stick over this work. How dare she question the Bard?! 😱
1:03 , Yes, lets entertain that!
God rest our Mr Waugh, a Doctor of the Obscure and Delightful.
Rob - great work and thank you. Just a thought. First, the old English period was made up of the creation of composite words so one way of looking at his originality is to see it in the context of following on an old way of wordsmithery (I think that's a new word...). But, more importantly for me, is that the greatest part of his genius is that he knew what worked for ordinary people, the groundlings etc. So I have to think that when we see 'new' words in Shakespeare it's not that they are always 'new' just that it's the first time they have moved from the streets to the page
"...the snoggy Anglo-saxons..." I think I have a new favorite adjective-noun paring, thanks.
Snog? Lol
Apart from the text of Sir Thomas More, which many scholars believe that Hand D is Shakespeare’s holograph, there’s a damn good reason why the playscripts have not survived: they’re not at Dulwich College, which is the repository for texts from the careers of Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn. Those very few surviving playscripts are there-but Shakespeare had an ownership stake in the competition. Besides, Rob, you might want to think about what happened in London in 1666 that was incredibly destructive of written material…
And the thing that happened in London in 1642 that wiped away the institutions that had the ownership rights to theatrical manuscripts: the Puritan-dominated Parliament banned theatre. The companies were disbanded and most of their theatres were pulled down, including the Globe and Blackfriars, where the King's Men had performed.
Moreover, there's something that happened in 1623. The publication of the First Folio likely rendered the retention of Shakespeare's authorial manuscripts moot. The 18 plays that had been previously published in quarto probably had their manuscripts discarded long ago, while the remaining 18 that were new to the Folio probably got tossed as of no account after the First Folio was printed. People weren't precious about theatrical manuscripts in this era, since it was approximately 200 years before the Cult of the Author. Indeed, sometimes they still aren't. I know of someone who wanted to restage a theatrical adaptation of The Canterbury Tales that he'd seen 30 years before and the scripts were just gone. They were all tossed after the production was over, and the author didn't publish or archive the script either.
We are being lied to. All the Shakespeare plays were written by Truman Capote.
No it was Mrs.nLady Sherpees Bark
Shakespeare's use of bedroom seems more like a pun on the word bedroom.
Is it that Shakespeare “invented” these words, or that he was the first to use them in writing? It seems to me it would have been odd for someone writing plays (presumably for an audience) to have used so many words people wouldn’t have known. Rather than saying he invented the words, I think it would be more appropriate to say that given his prolific career, he was the first to document these words. The French created L’Academie to standardize and document French in the 16th century, something that was never done in English. Shakespeare may have recognized in his day to capture these words and sayings in the absence of such an institution in England. Just a thought…
He was the first to write them down, but English scholars have this incessant need to lionize Shakespeare. I'm Dutch and a lot of the words and sayings attributed to Shakespeare are just regular Dutch, indicating they existed for centuries prior. Also when writing or speaking English half the words I use are just basic French with an English twist to them. It's not like Shakespeare came up with this stuff. However, one must make room for the idea that the use of language was particularly creative for the time, but a lack of sources means a lot points to one person.
Let us put this in different terms: what if the accumulated innovations of the descendants of American slaves in linguistics had come to us through just a single author, how innovative would that be? We would be left with a completely different usage of grammar, thousands of new words and sayings. It would be properly Shakespearean, no? But it wasn't the author inventing these things.
Rob neologizing: "comtemporary (n): a deliberate misspelling of contemporary to elicit more comments and engagement on a youtube video"
brilliant.
Thank you for calling the idea that Shakespeare didn't write his plays a conspiracy theory. It is. All the references to him not being capable make me think of Benjamin Franklin. He was a business man, writer, scientist, organizer, diplomat, but he was only a son of a poor candlemaker, never went to a university, and had a common law wife who he impregnated after restarting their relationship after her husband ran off. Deborah Franklin who was not well educated (likely due to the times she lived in and her family) never went to Europe (possibly due to fear of sea) and died before 1776.
As for the positive assertion that someone else wrote the plays, there is no direct proof. No manuscripts for Shakespeare writings in any of the candidates' papers.
Wondering what software you use to create the amazing text and graphics. Your promo for skillshare went by too quick to spot it.
Absolutely love your videos. Love robwords not lost!
I’ve studied the topic at uni and there is substantial doubt that Shakespeare was indeed the man from SUA. I think the most compelling of those proofs is the lack of letters or references with other contemporary writers.
There is plenty of perfectly good evidence that S was S.
@ I would love to see it but most importantly refute the counterproofs. So letters exchanging with other writers, manuscripts, something that points to his widespread vocabulary and cultural knowledge.
Again I’m aware this sounds like flatearther territory but if you look into it in detail you can find that there are enough anomalies around Shakespeare to at least raise an eyebrow or even two.
I don’t claim to have the truth but I think it is clear that the topic is an interesting case of critical thinking and one worth exploring. Contrary to what most stratfordians believe I don’t think it questioning the authorship constitutes an attack against the plays and the role they play in English literature history.
Thanks for all your great research.. Really enjoying your emails too!