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Today we celebrate William Shakespeare's 447th birthday. He may or may not have been born on this date in 1564, but we know for sure he was baptised on April Photo courtesy University of Victoria
26, 1564, because of a written record (facsimile above) from Stratford-upon-Avon. In those days it was customary to christen an infant three days after its birth. It's a good thing Shakespeare never ran for President because no one has ever produced his birth certificate. Ironically, we know for sure that today also marks the 395th anniversary of his death on April 23, 1616, because there are many records of it.
Shakespeare may or may not have written 37 or 38 plays, two long poems, and 154 sonnets. Some people say he was just a front man for some highly educated noble who didn't really want to be known as The Greatest Playwright Who Ever Lived. Personally, I like the idea of the Bard being a Stratford country boy who got seduced by a 26-year old spinster, knocked her up, married her, and then went off to live the high life of the theatrical world in cosmopolitan Renaissance London where he likely had an affair with Gwyneth Paltrow.
Photo courtesy movieactors.com
One thing is for certain: Whoever wrote all that stuff had a way with words. Shakespeare (or his ghost writer) is responsible for more words and phrases entering the English language than any other writer who ever lived. For a logophile like me, that's enough to make him immortal all by itself.
Many of the individual words Shakespeare coined were foreign words that he either took intact from Spanish, French, Italian, Latin, or some other language, or words that he anglicized. For example, alligator (Romeo and Juliet; comes from the Spanish aligarto), bandit (II Henry VI; actually "bandetto", the first attestation in English of a familiar Italian word for people "banned", i.e., outlaws), and zany (Love's Labour's Lost; simply a loan-word from Italian commedia dell'arte).
Photo courtesy petcaregt.com
He also created many new forms of existing English words including unreal (Macbeth, first use of the negative), tranquil (Othello; "tranquility" was an old word), and dawn (I Henry IV, King John; first use as a noun, the standard had been "dawning").
He frequently used familiar words as a different part of speech as well, such as petition (Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus; first use as a verb), juiced (Merry Wives of Windsor; first attestation as an adjective), and accused (Richard II; first known use as a noun, meaning "person accused of a crime").
Shakespeare was also fond of coining compound words. Some of his original combinations include roadway (II Henry IV), cruelhearted (The Two Gentlemen of Verona), and eyeball (The Tempest). And then there are some words that appear to be entirely his own: whirligig (Twelfth Night), bedazzled (The Taming of the Shrew), and puking (As You Like It).
Photo courtesy mars-atp.com
However, not even the Bard was successful in having all his newly-minted words pass into common usage. Here are some that didn't make it: "crants" (a borrowing for "flower crowns"), "incorpsed" (incorporated), and "virgined" (held securely).
Nevertheless, Shakespeare is credited for many phrases that became popular and remain part of the idiom today. Some of my favorites are "wild-goose chase" (Romeo and Juliet), "too much of a good thing" (As You Like It), "milk of human kindness" (Macbeth), "elbow room" (King John), and "dead as a doornail" (2 Henry VI).
Of course, Shakespeare has been the source for a multitude of titles of works by subsequent authors. Some are great works like William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (Macbeth), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (The Tempest), and Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers (Henry V). There are also some not-so-great ones like Mary-Kate Olsen's Double, Double, Toil and Trouble (Macbeth). Some titles even come from stage directions, like Enter Three Witches, also from Macbeth and used by at least three different authors: Paul McGuire, David Leslie Murray, and Kate Gilmore.
In addition, many titles rely on puns of Shakespeare, like these variations on The Taming of the Shrew: Paul De Vries' The Taming of the Shrewd, Frank Bennett Fiske's The Taming of the Sioux, Katharine Taylor's The Taming of the Crew, and Dave Barry's The Taming of the Screw.
Photo courtesy janafordknits.blogspot.com
Shakespearean titles are very popular with mystery writers. Examples include There is a Tide by Agatha Christie (Julius Caesar), And Be a Villain by Rex Stout (Hamlet), and Cold Comfort by Robert B. Parker (The Taming of the Shrew).
Some of my favorite whodunits are the so-called Shakespeare and Smythe mysteries, written by Simon Hawke. This series includes A Mystery of Errors (2000), The Slaying of the Shrew (2001), Much Ado About Murder (2002), and The Merchant of Vengeance (2003).
In addition to creating words and phrases that entered the language, Shakespeare was also known to drop a Top Comment or two. Here are a couple of my faves:
The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
The Merchant Of Venice (IV, i, 180â187)
Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
Julius Caesar (II, ii, 32-37)
And my all-time favorite:
For God's sake, a pot of small ale.
The Taming of the Shrew (Induction, ii, 1)
Below, please feel free to share some of your favorite words, phrases, and comments by the man from Stratford. As Ben Jonson so ably expressed it long ago, Shakespeare "was not of an age, but for all time!"
Photo courtesy famouspoetsandpoems.com
Sources:
http://www.pathguy.com/...
http://www.barbarapaul.com/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
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Thanks to tonight's Top Comments contributors. Let us hear from YOU when you find "a dish fit for the gods" among those comments that are as "tedious as a twice-told tale."
TOP COMMENTS
From sardonyx:
grover points out the "truth" and "fact" do not mean the same thing, even though many think they do, in Capriccio's rescued-to-recommended dairy One Flew Over the Crucifix.
From Ed Tracey:
In the latest update by the intrepid Billl Prendergast about
your-friend-and-mine, Michelle Bachmann, commenter terra thought this summed up our troubled times. A TV poll showed overwhelming support for Medicare and SS as well as taxing millionaires. After reading the results of this poll, the newscaster proceeds to say "And now, for some perspective, here's Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann."
From BeninSC:
Rimjob quotes Shaw instead of Shakespeare in this powerful video comment in Nulwee's recommended diary Attack on Transwoman at McDonald's, While Employees Film
From JanF:
JaxDem shared a great Shakespeare insult generator that led to some downthread hilarity by Julie Gulden and belinda ridgewood and a bubbanomics legendary thread award. (All this happened in JanF's own diary J Town: Got Diary? April 23, 2011.)
From your humble diarist:
In GlowNZ's Midnight Music, Youffraita quotes Macbeth.
Phil S 33 noted the occasion by quoting from Julius Caesar in BlackSheep1's Gulf Watchers Block Party: Burning Edition.
In Shakespeares Sister's overlooked diary Happy Birthday, Brother, Diana in NoVa quotes from a sonnet.
One of Shakespeare's titles is used in this comment by moose67 in Detroit Mark's diary Dearborn Has Given Pastor Jones The Stage He Wanted.
In Seneca Doane's controversial diary This diary is not a safe place for anyone, cis or trans, enhydra lutris had this thoughtful comment, which included the title of another of Shakespeare's plays.