Shakespeare's Language

Shakespeare played a major role in changing English theatre, drama and also English language. He was writing at a time when early ‘modern’ English was less than 100 years old and most documents were still written in Latin. English language rules were unsteady and the vocabulary was limited. The future of the new language was unclear.

When the Renaissance playwrights and especially Shakespeare wrote their popular plays they helped to settle ‘modern’ English as the national spoken and written language. Shakespeare himself wrote with a vocabulary of roughly 17,000 words. He is well known for giving over 3000 words to the English language because he was the first author to write them down. Except for the writers of the Bible, Shakespeare is the most frequently quoted writer in English. Among the many phrases he invented were:

• 'eaten me out of house and home'
• 'neither rhyme nor reason'
• 'wild-goose chase'
• 'dead as a doornail'
• 'brave new world'

By the time he wrote his last play in 1613, Shakespeare had helped to create a new grammar and a much wider vocabulary for the early form of modern English. With his genius for poetic technique, he vastly broadened range of the English language.

Here are some of Shakespeare’s most famous lines:

·        Sonnet 18

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date".

·        Hamlet

To be, or not to be: that is the question" - (Act III, Scene I).

"This above all: to thine own self be true" - (Act I, Scene III).

"Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t" - (Act II, Scene II).

·        King Richard III

"A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" - (Act V, Scene IV). 

·        Romeo and Juliet

"O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?" - (Act II, Scene II).

"It is the east, and Juliet is the sun" - (Act II, Scene II).

"Tempt not a desperate man". - (Act V, Scene III).

"See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand! O that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek!" - (Act II, Scene II).

·        Julius Caesar

"But, for my own part, it was Greek to me". - (Act I, Scene II).

"Beware the ides of March". - (Act I, Scene II).

·        Macbeth

"Where shall we three met again? In thunder, lightening or in rain? When the hurleyburley’s done, when the battle’s lost and won. That will be ere the set of the sun". - (Act I, Scene I).

"Fair is foul, and foul is fair". - (Act I, Scene I).

"Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble." - (Act IV, Scene I).

"Out, damned spot! Out, I say!" - (Act V, Scene I).

"Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." - (Act V, Scene V).

·        Twelfth Night

"Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them". - (Act II, Scene V).

·        A Midsummer Night's Dream

"The course of true love never did run smooth". - (Act I, Scene I).

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind". - (Act I, Scene I).