One thing to keep in mind with Shakespeare is that he didn’t invent all the words he was credited with creating. They were just the first records we have of them being written down. He still invented a lot of words, just not nearly as many as people say.
He did invent the Dualshock Controller™ though. Right?
Oh no doubt, no doubt. I saw it on the internet once
Shadespesre*
He was really ahead of his time when he mentioned the DualShock™ controller in his play.
I’m sorry, are we not going to talk about Williad Shadespesre?
He was known to spell his name several different ways.
Not like this though
Yeah keep it to Canon ones like William Shakespear or Elizabeth Tudor or Sir Frances Draque
Or, in the Bard’s own words:
“Let’s eat a burrito, and watch as time flies, like Cupid’s mosquitoes, ‘neath Windows 95 skies”
This will be part of a series of reminders over coming months that Shakespeare will have truly coined a smaller number of phrases than he’s given credit for, and very few words at all. Dictionaries source by earliest known written use, and Willy Shakes was a unicorn for that purpose.
He was an upjumped middle-class prodigy from barely a century after the introduction of the printing press, with a mediocre education by the standards of the day, writing prolifically for both popular and elevated audiences. He was also famous enough in his own day to have had his collected works published, and the fact that his reputation exploded after his death ensured those volumes survived. He would have been writing slightly differently from many of his contemporaries, and a much higher amount of what he wrote has survived.
It is also important that the presentation of Shakespeare is radically different than it was in history:
There was more crowd interaction, actors commonly forgot lines, and the play itself would usually have a limited run. Also, the script was considered to be a trade secret, so there were few complete copies kept.
Absolutely! I also like to point people to the father and son who worked on reconstructing the Original Pronunciation.
The Elizabethan/Jacobean drama scene could be crazy (though there were also command performances in noble or royal households which would have filed down a lot of the rough edges), and it was both popular and rowdy. Theatres were always getting shut down for censorship or indecency, tons of drama (LOL) with poaching ideas and even talent, and there was even Renaissance media piracy! I think there are at least four mostly complete extant versions of Hamlet, all a little different, and at least two just simple pirate printings from printing houses sending dudes out with their memory and maybe a pencil and notebook. Then, many of the plays would have been collaborations. Much of Shakespeare’s early and late output is thought to have involved co-writers.
Then, that’s to say nothing of the theatre people getting salty about everything, not least this rube coming down from Warwickshire, acting like he knows how to write, and upending the audience expectations.
He also invented the bubonic plague and kept bringing it back to England in several hundred year intervals to claim royalties
This was actually plagiarism, he got a copy of the plague from a Silk Road trader.
