Why is Shakespeare Great?
Shakespeare's Verbal Resources
If there were any doubt that Shakespeare was one of the best-read, best-educated
men of his time, certainly supreme in literary background, it is dispelled
by his "verbal riches," Alfred Hart calls them, "compelling
the employment of superlatives in describing them." The philologist
Max Muller writes that "a well educated person in England ... seldom
uses more than about 3,000 or 4,000 words in actual conversation."
He adds that "the Hebrew Testament says all it has to say with 5,642.,"
while "Milton's works are built up with 8,000," but "Shakespeare,
who displayed a greater variety of expression than probably any writer in
any language," employed "about 15,000." That figure would
surely be found conservative, as would even Alfred Hart's count, which gives
Shakespeare a vocabulary of 17,677 words, twice the size of Milton's and
more than two and a half times Marlowe's.
Louis Marder points out, "Shakespeare was so facile in employing words
that he was able to use over 7,000 of them - more than occur in the whole
King James version of the Bible - only once and never again."
[...]
Never has such verbal prodigality as Shakespeare's been approached. "Shakespeare's
unmistakable sign-manual in a play," Professor Hart writes, "is
the presence of plenty of words peculiar to it alone." And he cites
six plays in each of which more than eight percent of the vocabulary consists
of words not found in any other play, a much larger proportion than Marlowe
introduced, he says. The Oxford English Dictionary credits Shakespeare with
being the first to use about 3,000 words and the list would doubtless be
longer had the compilers been aware that the plays were (as seems clear)
written well before the Stratfordian calendar allows. Lewis Theobald was
saying the least when in a preface to his Works of Shakespeare he spoke
of the dramatist's "surprising effusion of Latin words made into English,
far more than in any one English author I have ever seen." At the other
extreme, Max Mu1ler reports that Shakespeare several times used the possessive
pronoun "its," which he says Ben Jenson refused to accept in his
grammar, and since the Oxford Universal Dictionary gives "c 1600"
as the date for the word's formation, I have little doubt that Shakespeare
will be found to have coined it.
Mark Van Doren of Columbia University wrote in 1948: "Perhaps nobody
any more supposes that Shakespeare warbled words without knowing what he
did or how he did it ; but not until now have we modern readers been told
how immense a thing rhetoric was in the Renaissance - how immense in scope,
and how endlessly detailed in its numerous parts. Nor has it been apparent
how thoroughly Shakespeare was master of this rhetoric." What had made
the difference was publication by the Columbia University Press of Shakespeare's
Use of the Arts of Language by Sister Miriam Joseph, C.S.C. In this remarkable
book she devotes nearly 400 pages to showing, "how Shakespeare used
the whole body of logical-rhetorical knowledge of his time" - rhetoric
being "the art of using language to influence or persuade others."
According to Sister Miriam, "A concordance of the Tudor figures [of
speech] approximates two hundred," and few of the names given to these
will be known to many modern readers: prosthesis, proparalepsis, aphaeresis,
syncope, synaloepha, agocope, antisthecon, hyperbaton, anastrophe, tmesis,
etc., etc. Early in the book she explains that the entire "essential
general theory of composition and of reading current in Shakespeare's England
. . . , with few negligible exceptions, is illustrated from Shakespeare's
plays and poems in the following pages," And they are, satisfying her
and us that Shakespeare "utilized every resource of thought and language
known to his time" and "that his genius, outrunning precept even
while conforming to it, transcends that of his contemporaries and belongs
to all time." Although, as she says, he can "good-humoredly satirize
the pedant," as he does Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost, "Shakespeare
excels all his contemporaries in his skillful use of the topics of logic
and the flowers of rhetoric, whether for comic or serious purposes."
The author takes us through those figures of rhetoric in Shakespeare which
"proclaim his conscious and sophisticated approach to art." And
she disposes, one trusts for good, of all the Gwynne Evanses and Harry Levins
who divorce nature and art in order to deny Shakespeare - of all artists!
- the latter. She quotes the speech in The Winter's Tale in which King Polixenes
observes that "that art which you say adds to nature . . . which does
mend nature - change it rather . . . itself is nature." And she adds,
bowing to Shakespeare, "only one gifted by nature can use art supremely."
"Of Shakespeare it may be said without fear of exaggeration,"
Professor Ernest Weekley asserts, "that his contribution to our phraseology
is ten times greater than that of any writer to any language in the history
of the world." That he set about open-eyed and deliberately to develop
in the English language the incomparable richness it has had since he wrote
seems to me hardly to be questioned. Surely it was, at the least, James
J. Dwyer says, one of his "purposes to make the English language suffice
for the ideas gathered from multitudinous sources and served up for the
edification of his fellow-countrymen." My mind harks back to Hermann
Sinsheimer and his perception that "The plays are Elizabethan conquests
of territory" (page 89). The greatness that Hawkins, Drake, Frobisher,
and other sea-dogs were winning for England off distant shores, along with
Spanish bullion ships, Shakespeare was reaping for her language from the
treasures of classical antiquity, refashioned by his venturesome imagination,
turning it into what "may be the greatest symbol system the world has
ever devised," as Professor Richard Mitchell, father of the Underground
Grammarian, called it in an interview in Time. In our fixation upon the
Stratford man we have closed our eyes to the outstanding story in our cultural
history.
pp. 291-293, Charlton Ogbun Jr., The Mysterious William Shakespeare
Shakespeare Oxford
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