10. The changing structure of English

The changing structure of English allowed writers the freedom to express

themselves in ways that had never existed before, and none took up this

opportunity more liberally than Shakespeare, who happily and variously used

nouns as verbs, as adverbs, as substantives, and as adjectives— often in ways

they had never been employed before. He even used adverbs as adjectives, as

with "that bastardly rogue" in Henry IV, a construction that must have seemed as

novel then as it does now. He created expressions that could not grammatically

have existed previously—such as "breathing one's last" and "backing a horse."

No one in any tongue has ever made greater play of his language.

He coined some 2,000 words—an astonishing number—and gave us countless

phrases. As a phrasemaker there has never been anyone to match him. Among

his inventions: one fell swoop, in my mind's eye, more in sorrow than in anger,

to be in a pickle, bag and baggage, vanish into thin air, budge an inch, play fast

and loose, go down the primrose path, the milk of human kindness,

remembrance of things past, the sound and the fury, to thine own self be true, to

be or not to be, cold comfort, to beggar all description, salad days, flesh and

blood, foul play, tower of strength, to be cruel to be kind, and on and on and on

and on. And on. He was so wildly prolific that he could put two catchphrases in

one sentence, as in Hamlet's observation: "Though I am native here and to the

manner born, it is a custom more honored in the breach than the observance." He

could even mix metaphors and get away with it, as when he wrote: "Or to take

arms against a sea of troubles."

It is terrifying to think that had not two faithful followers, the actors John

Hemming and Henry Condell, taken the considerable trouble of assembling an

anthology of his work, the famous First Folio, in 1623, seven years after hisdeath, sixteen of his plays would very probably have been lost to us forever. As

it is two have been: Cardenio and Love's Labour's Won.

Not a single Shakespeare manuscript survives, so, as with Chaucer, we cannot be

sure how closely the work we know is really Shakespeare's. Hemming and

Condell consulted any number of sources to produce their folio—printers'

manuscripts, actors' promptbooks, even the memories of other actors. But from

what happened to the work of other authors it is probable that they have been

changed a lot. One of Shakespeare's publishers was Richard Field and it is

known from extant manuscripts that when Field published the work of the poet

John Harrington he made more than a thousand changes to the spelling and

phrasing. It is unlikely that he did less with Shakespeare, particularly since

Shakespeare himself seemed singularly unconcerned with what became of his

work after his death. As far as is known, he did not bother to save any of his

poems and plays—a fact that is sometimes taken as evidence that he didn't write

them.

There have been many other more subtle changes in English since Shakespeare's

day. One has been the rise of the progressive verb form. Where we would say,

"What are you reading?, Shakespeare could only say, "What do you read?" He

would have had difficulty expressing the distinctions contained in "I am going,"

"I was going," "I have been going," and "I will (or shall) be going."

The passive-progressive construction, as in "The house is being built," was quite

unknown to him. Yet it goes without saying that this scarcely slowed him down.

Even in its greatest flowering English was still considered in many respects a

second-rate language. Newton's Principia and Bacon's Novum Organum were

both published in Latin. Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia in Latin. William

Harvey wrote his treatise on the circulation of blood (written in 1616, the year of

Shakespeare's death) in Latin. Edward Gibbon wrote his histories in French and

then translated them into English. As Baugh and Cable note, "The use of English

for purposes of scholarship was frankly experimental."

Moreover in Shakespeare's day English had yet to conquer the whole of the

British Isles. It was the language of England and lowland Scotland, but it had

barely penetrated into Wales, Ireland, and the Scottish Highlands and islands—

and would not for some time. (As recently as this century Britain was able toelect a prime minister whose native tongue was not English: to wit, the Welsh-

speaking David Lloyd George.) In 1582, the scholar Richard Mulcaster noted

glumly: "The English tongue is of small account, stretching no further than this

island of ours, nay not there over all."

He had no way of knowing that within less than a generation English would be

transported to the New World, where it would begin its inexorable rise to

becoming the foremost language of the world.