One, mentioned slightly less often. Plays circa 1600 were still considered just about the lowest of low culture, and actors were looked down on or even despised. They were seen as riffraff. You know how some adults see young skateboarders in motley clothes as deficient human beings who should be cleared away? "NO SKATEBOARDING," don't you see the sign? Wait, why isn't there a sign! [Marches off to yell at some official.] In 1572, the British Parliament officially called actors "vagabonds and sturdy beggars." There were laws against hanging out in the streets while also having acting as a profession. Peculiarly like that sign against the skateboarders, right? There were guilds for other professions, the respectable ones, but unlike today, there was no Screen Actor's Guild protecting actors' human rights and wages.
Okay, I admit I'm exaggerating slightly. It had been rough, it had been like that, but things were changing, slowly, at least for several of the very best troupes. Shakespeare's troupe would perform for King James sometimes, and this association with royalty gave them some protection and extra funding. They would constantly perform for the public in open-air theaters, people of all classes, and not just in London, but also in the countryside. We have to remember the then-recent history of theater, which was still in evidence all around the country: actors are scum, plays are trash. Today Shakespeare is often seen as high culture, such high culture that we expect to feel dumb trying to decipher his torrent of metaphors, so much that if you merely claim that your movie or novel is based on Shakespeare, that immediately makes you seem legit.
This all very loosely and associatively reminds me of "Mad King Ludwig II" of Bavaria. Ludwig was called insane by his doctors—quite suspect doctors who happened to have been bribed by his enemies to find something wrong with him. What ensued from their examinations was 19th century fake news. Their critical evaluations of his psyche were splashed over the newspaper for everyone to read. In our era, that would already be seen as a terrible breach of privacy for a psychiatrist, but worse still was the diagnosis. Actually, Ludwig was just gay—hardly a mental illness, but sadly that isn't how people saw it back then. As I mention above, Shakespeare was probably gay or bisexual, though he married and had three children. How this might have interacted with his Catholicism, which was another taboo in early Church of England times, is a fascinating question, and who knows, might have something to do with the disappearance of all his books, manuscripts, diaries, etc.
Anyway, this young monarch of Bavaria was also popularly trashed for his building projects, which almost everyone considered a colossal waste of money. To be fair, the kingdom of Bavaria was not doing so well, and more money would certainly have been appreciated. But also to be fair, these were not state funds he was exhausting, but the family's funds. Now fast-forward a bit. His castles bring more money into Bavaria today, thanks to tourism, than any other industry there. And here's a commercial trifle many people care about: Neuschwanstein, his unfinished chef d'oevre on a mountaintop, gives us the image of a fairytale castle, the one lifted directly into Disney's logo. Our so-called mad king built the Disney castle before there was a Walt Disney alive to copy it. (If you're ever in that part of Bavaria and you haven't been up that mountain, I highly recommend the visit. You will not regret it.)
While King Ludwig may not have been a very good king—he wasn't even interested in being a king—his unparalleled vision probably mists into your mind when you think "fairytale castle." Today, we would likely consider Ludwig's extravagant construction projects not so much a waste of money, but rather a series of moon shot speculations that turned out unexpectedly well. Ludwig was not only insulted and smeared for turning "insane" enough to love men, interior decorating, and co-designing beautiful architecture. Tragically, he died young by assassination. It seems obvious that he was an artist born into the wrong profession: king.
Their biggest commonality is that the enduring value of their work was not recognized, and they had to contend with fairly brutal prejudices against their sexual orientation and even talents and religion (in Shakespeare's case).
Okay, I admit I'm exaggerating slightly. It had been rough, it had been like that, but things were changing, slowly, at least for several of the very best troupes. Shakespeare's troupe would perform for King James sometimes, and this association with royalty gave them some protection and extra funding. They would constantly perform for the public in open-air theaters, people of all classes, and not just in London, but also in the countryside. We have to remember the then-recent history of theater, which was still in evidence all around the country: actors are scum, plays are trash. Today Shakespeare is often seen as high culture, such high culture that we expect to feel dumb trying to decipher his torrent of metaphors, so much that if you merely claim that your movie or novel is based on Shakespeare, that immediately makes you seem legit.
This all very loosely and associatively reminds me of "Mad King Ludwig II" of Bavaria. Ludwig was called insane by his doctors—quite suspect doctors who happened to have been bribed by his enemies to find something wrong with him. What ensued from their examinations was 19th century fake news. Their critical evaluations of his psyche were splashed over the newspaper for everyone to read. In our era, that would already be seen as a terrible breach of privacy for a psychiatrist, but worse still was the diagnosis. Actually, Ludwig was just gay—hardly a mental illness, but sadly that isn't how people saw it back then. As I mention above, Shakespeare was probably gay or bisexual, though he married and had three children. How this might have interacted with his Catholicism, which was another taboo in early Church of England times, is a fascinating question, and who knows, might have something to do with the disappearance of all his books, manuscripts, diaries, etc.
Anyway, this young monarch of Bavaria was also popularly trashed for his building projects, which almost everyone considered a colossal waste of money. To be fair, the kingdom of Bavaria was not doing so well, and more money would certainly have been appreciated. But also to be fair, these were not state funds he was exhausting, but the family's funds. Now fast-forward a bit. His castles bring more money into Bavaria today, thanks to tourism, than any other industry there. And here's a commercial trifle many people care about: Neuschwanstein, his unfinished chef d'oevre on a mountaintop, gives us the image of a fairytale castle, the one lifted directly into Disney's logo. Our so-called mad king built the Disney castle before there was a Walt Disney alive to copy it. (If you're ever in that part of Bavaria and you haven't been up that mountain, I highly recommend the visit. You will not regret it.)
While King Ludwig may not have been a very good king—he wasn't even interested in being a king—his unparalleled vision probably mists into your mind when you think "fairytale castle." Today, we would likely consider Ludwig's extravagant construction projects not so much a waste of money, but rather a series of moon shot speculations that turned out unexpectedly well. Ludwig was not only insulted and smeared for turning "insane" enough to love men, interior decorating, and co-designing beautiful architecture. Tragically, he died young by assassination. It seems obvious that he was an artist born into the wrong profession: king.
Their biggest commonality is that the enduring value of their work was not recognized, and they had to contend with fairly brutal prejudices against their sexual orientation and even talents and religion (in Shakespeare's case).
Two, mentioned rather less often than that. Shakespeare and company were using a new technology. There has to be some reason we're virtually unaware of any plays after the ones by Sophocles in ancient Greece (most of us), and then suddenly we're aware of this Shakespeare bloke from 2000 years later. Does it strike you as odd, on reflection? What happened to all the other playwrights in that time? Were there any?
Yes, of course. Something new was happening that begins to explain this misalignment, and I mean something other than the printing press. Remember, there was no printing press in ancient Greece, and some of Shakespeare's plays were likely written out from memory by his fellow actors years after his death, so "lack of a printing press" doesn't explain the 2000 year gap at all.
Curious yet? Ok, what was changing was that for the first time in history, building technology was good enough that you could actually make a theater that was difficult to sneak into without paying. A few guards couldn't stop a crowd before. For the first time, you could charge everyone a price of admission, like at the movie theater. That's so standard for us today that we don't stop to wonder whether it began at some particular moment in time. It began in Shakespeare's day. Ticket prices were low—I've heard one penny—so basically anyone could attend, and yet barring people who didn't pay—to encourage payment—allowed at least the very best troupes to make a steady living. Few respected the actors or the art form, but if you were Shakespeare enough, you could be well-off from ticket sales. This here, my friendly readers, is a very early example of middle-class culture. It wasn't just kings paying for private entertainment or free religious/moral tales for everyone. Shakespeare was something like a Kickstarter baby. His generation of playwrights was more crowd-funded than any of its predecessors. (At least, this is what I read in a scholarly introduction to Antony and Cleopatra written by the editor, A.R. Braumuller. It's called "The Theatrical World," and it appears at the beginning of every book in the Pelican Shakespeare series.)
One other shift was that though the Catholic Church had long suppressed theater, which probably explains some of the big gap, England had split from the Catholic Church in 1534 with the foundation of the Church of England. I have no idea whether that was a factor, but it seems possible.
Yes, of course. Something new was happening that begins to explain this misalignment, and I mean something other than the printing press. Remember, there was no printing press in ancient Greece, and some of Shakespeare's plays were likely written out from memory by his fellow actors years after his death, so "lack of a printing press" doesn't explain the 2000 year gap at all.
Curious yet? Ok, what was changing was that for the first time in history, building technology was good enough that you could actually make a theater that was difficult to sneak into without paying. A few guards couldn't stop a crowd before. For the first time, you could charge everyone a price of admission, like at the movie theater. That's so standard for us today that we don't stop to wonder whether it began at some particular moment in time. It began in Shakespeare's day. Ticket prices were low—I've heard one penny—so basically anyone could attend, and yet barring people who didn't pay—to encourage payment—allowed at least the very best troupes to make a steady living. Few respected the actors or the art form, but if you were Shakespeare enough, you could be well-off from ticket sales. This here, my friendly readers, is a very early example of middle-class culture. It wasn't just kings paying for private entertainment or free religious/moral tales for everyone. Shakespeare was something like a Kickstarter baby. His generation of playwrights was more crowd-funded than any of its predecessors. (At least, this is what I read in a scholarly introduction to Antony and Cleopatra written by the editor, A.R. Braumuller. It's called "The Theatrical World," and it appears at the beginning of every book in the Pelican Shakespeare series.)
One other shift was that though the Catholic Church had long suppressed theater, which probably explains some of the big gap, England had split from the Catholic Church in 1534 with the foundation of the Church of England. I have no idea whether that was a factor, but it seems possible.
Three, one basically never mentioned. We give credit where it's due for words and phrases that come to us from Shakespeare. There are hundreds, thousands. But you know what's strange? When you compare Shakespeare to other top playwrights from his time, he actually invented (or recorded before anyone else) fewer words than they did. Not bad for a buncha riffraff, huh? It's just that his plays were so impactful that the words and phrases he did invent changed the whole language. Many consider his writing the beginning of modern English.
So—we especially remembered his inventions, even though there were fewer of them. Why?
There's a distant parallel in the works of the "Italians" Petrarch and Dante. I use quotation marks, because there was no Italian nation at the time, even no Italian language at the time. Those two poets spliced together the local languages, the bits they liked—kind of a "greatest hits" of ways people spoke around the peninsula—in their writings, synthesizing what eventually became modern Italian. They weren't the only good writers. But what they wrote stuck so much it defined a language, this time a language where no single language had existed before the publications. This all circa 1300, when, as I say, there was no such language as "Italian." In 1850, there still was no such language as "Italian," but Petrarch and Dante spoke up from 500 years before. Their works had gotten so much traction over the centuries that they were instrumental in standardizing a language for the new nation.
Incidentally, almost a total tangent. This "invention of a national language" is why Italian spelling is so consistent and intuitive that Italians don't even really use a word for "spelling," they just say "writing." The language "began" recently enough that the spellings haven't accumulated baggage from old pronunciation patterns. Like, "through" and "who" have baggage from ancient pronunciation patterns. Same with French words like "ancêtres," where the accent on ê denotes that the word used to be "ancestres," but the middle s is no longer pronounced. Also the final e is mostly silent, the s at the end is silent, and the n is not really pronounced anymore either, though it influences the a somewhat. None of that guff in Italian. To a native English speaker, spelling in Italian feels like cheating.
We had Chaucer and Shakespeare and then centuries of language evolution, and only then some modest attempts at standardizing and simplifying spelling, which had to honor the old and the new and countless works in between. With the new country of Italy, they just updated Petrarch and Dante and taught that to everyone. ("Just" is an atrocious disservice to how long this took and how much effort, given that only 2% of the peninsula spoke the language when the nation formed in 1861. But it sounds smoother, ha!)
Another similarly tongue-defining pair of works is the Tanakh/Old Testament (for Hebrew) and the King James Bible (for English, in fact contemporary with Shakespeare, and some believe he was on the writing team). Both have been widely read for so many generations that they've played a major role in defining and preserving the respective languages. We would have a language, but without a big culture of widely admired examples of how to express ourselves, the language would have drifted faster, and "English" words from 1600 would probably be totally incomprehensible by now. In a sense, the best writing almost conspires to keep itself remembered by sticking pins in the language. It says, "Slow down! Keep speaking my language my way so you can remember me!"
Think about this: if a video game console came out without any games, or with only completely bug-ridden, slapdash, unplayable games, then no one would bother to write any emulators for the console. No one would bootleg the games. No one would write games in the same style. Soon, no one would remember the console or the games. If there were any unique interaction idioms in those games, they'd be forgotten, and if you were to encounter them, they'd make no sense to you. This is something I like to investigate... I've toyed with many old classics whose interaction innovations simply didn't catch on, and though I find the awkwardness lovable, sometimes it's even more incomprehensible today than it was back then.
Do you remember VTech Socrates? You don't. It was my first and only game console as a kid. And it was decently educational, and the music settled so deep in my brain that when I finally heard it again recently on YouTube, for the first time since I was probably 8, it was as if I'd heard it a week ago. But there were almost no releases for Socrates, just the math/spelling/music skills cartridge that came with it and one other that could be bought. Yours truly should be the prime candidate for a person who would know what that other game was, yet I have no clue. The company went out of business quickly. You've never heard of it. Right? There is no VTech Socrates emulator. The games don't look like games from any other system.
Meanwhile so many people love Super Mario Bros (I'm not particularly a fan but I respect it), it's easy to get a Nintendo emulator. Because it's easy to get a Nintendo emulator, it's also easy to run any of the other games that came out for that system. Other games were very popular too, and keeping a clutch of these popular games alive means that less successful ones for the same console stay more hydrated and whole than they would have been otherwise. Because the "language" of that console, its style, its controllers, its interaction idioms, remains a prevalent influence, no one is going to forget how to run, play, or make any of those games very soon. That means someone who grows up playing only the newest games today will still be able to understand the old Super Mario Bros easily. The influence on the present keeps the past available. Looked at a certain way, it almost feels like a conspiracy. With religion, it feels even closer to conspiracy. But I'm just being colorful.
So yes, Shakespeare was a wordsmith and a gifted one, but his language is not more complicated than the language of his rivals (less complicated, actually), and he invented fewer words. But I suspect we remember his words (or the words of his troupe if you see the authorship as communal, and it was—plays were often written collaboratively in taverns) simply because the plays are better overall. Then again, I've never read or seen one of these rival plays by the likes of Christopher Marlowe and Ben Johnson, so I don't have more than a suspicion. Some of the rivals and rival works were more popular than Shakespeare at the time. Would I recognize the words they coined? I don't know.
For one argument that could back the "better overall" claim up, it's often said that Hamlet was the first "modern" character, the first character with so complex a personality, with realistic enough introspection and inner conflict that we don't see him as phony, abstract, stilted. The earliest high-water mark for lifelike character writing that's agreed on is Odysseus. But there's a big jump, both in time and in realism. Hamlet is kind of the Mona Lisa moment in character creation and development. All other characters before that just seem less real. Or so it's said in English departments! If that isn't a misconception, I can believe that this special incantation—the lifelike figment, the entirely believable ghost of a human machine—would be more memorable than inventing words or writing rococo sentences. Maybe "good characters" is the best explanation.
So—we especially remembered his inventions, even though there were fewer of them. Why?
There's a distant parallel in the works of the "Italians" Petrarch and Dante. I use quotation marks, because there was no Italian nation at the time, even no Italian language at the time. Those two poets spliced together the local languages, the bits they liked—kind of a "greatest hits" of ways people spoke around the peninsula—in their writings, synthesizing what eventually became modern Italian. They weren't the only good writers. But what they wrote stuck so much it defined a language, this time a language where no single language had existed before the publications. This all circa 1300, when, as I say, there was no such language as "Italian." In 1850, there still was no such language as "Italian," but Petrarch and Dante spoke up from 500 years before. Their works had gotten so much traction over the centuries that they were instrumental in standardizing a language for the new nation.
Incidentally, almost a total tangent. This "invention of a national language" is why Italian spelling is so consistent and intuitive that Italians don't even really use a word for "spelling," they just say "writing." The language "began" recently enough that the spellings haven't accumulated baggage from old pronunciation patterns. Like, "through" and "who" have baggage from ancient pronunciation patterns. Same with French words like "ancêtres," where the accent on ê denotes that the word used to be "ancestres," but the middle s is no longer pronounced. Also the final e is mostly silent, the s at the end is silent, and the n is not really pronounced anymore either, though it influences the a somewhat. None of that guff in Italian. To a native English speaker, spelling in Italian feels like cheating.
We had Chaucer and Shakespeare and then centuries of language evolution, and only then some modest attempts at standardizing and simplifying spelling, which had to honor the old and the new and countless works in between. With the new country of Italy, they just updated Petrarch and Dante and taught that to everyone. ("Just" is an atrocious disservice to how long this took and how much effort, given that only 2% of the peninsula spoke the language when the nation formed in 1861. But it sounds smoother, ha!)
Another similarly tongue-defining pair of works is the Tanakh/Old Testament (for Hebrew) and the King James Bible (for English, in fact contemporary with Shakespeare, and some believe he was on the writing team). Both have been widely read for so many generations that they've played a major role in defining and preserving the respective languages. We would have a language, but without a big culture of widely admired examples of how to express ourselves, the language would have drifted faster, and "English" words from 1600 would probably be totally incomprehensible by now. In a sense, the best writing almost conspires to keep itself remembered by sticking pins in the language. It says, "Slow down! Keep speaking my language my way so you can remember me!"
Think about this: if a video game console came out without any games, or with only completely bug-ridden, slapdash, unplayable games, then no one would bother to write any emulators for the console. No one would bootleg the games. No one would write games in the same style. Soon, no one would remember the console or the games. If there were any unique interaction idioms in those games, they'd be forgotten, and if you were to encounter them, they'd make no sense to you. This is something I like to investigate... I've toyed with many old classics whose interaction innovations simply didn't catch on, and though I find the awkwardness lovable, sometimes it's even more incomprehensible today than it was back then.
Do you remember VTech Socrates? You don't. It was my first and only game console as a kid. And it was decently educational, and the music settled so deep in my brain that when I finally heard it again recently on YouTube, for the first time since I was probably 8, it was as if I'd heard it a week ago. But there were almost no releases for Socrates, just the math/spelling/music skills cartridge that came with it and one other that could be bought. Yours truly should be the prime candidate for a person who would know what that other game was, yet I have no clue. The company went out of business quickly. You've never heard of it. Right? There is no VTech Socrates emulator. The games don't look like games from any other system.
Meanwhile so many people love Super Mario Bros (I'm not particularly a fan but I respect it), it's easy to get a Nintendo emulator. Because it's easy to get a Nintendo emulator, it's also easy to run any of the other games that came out for that system. Other games were very popular too, and keeping a clutch of these popular games alive means that less successful ones for the same console stay more hydrated and whole than they would have been otherwise. Because the "language" of that console, its style, its controllers, its interaction idioms, remains a prevalent influence, no one is going to forget how to run, play, or make any of those games very soon. That means someone who grows up playing only the newest games today will still be able to understand the old Super Mario Bros easily. The influence on the present keeps the past available. Looked at a certain way, it almost feels like a conspiracy. With religion, it feels even closer to conspiracy. But I'm just being colorful.
So yes, Shakespeare was a wordsmith and a gifted one, but his language is not more complicated than the language of his rivals (less complicated, actually), and he invented fewer words. But I suspect we remember his words (or the words of his troupe if you see the authorship as communal, and it was—plays were often written collaboratively in taverns) simply because the plays are better overall. Then again, I've never read or seen one of these rival plays by the likes of Christopher Marlowe and Ben Johnson, so I don't have more than a suspicion. Some of the rivals and rival works were more popular than Shakespeare at the time. Would I recognize the words they coined? I don't know.
For one argument that could back the "better overall" claim up, it's often said that Hamlet was the first "modern" character, the first character with so complex a personality, with realistic enough introspection and inner conflict that we don't see him as phony, abstract, stilted. The earliest high-water mark for lifelike character writing that's agreed on is Odysseus. But there's a big jump, both in time and in realism. Hamlet is kind of the Mona Lisa moment in character creation and development. All other characters before that just seem less real. Or so it's said in English departments! If that isn't a misconception, I can believe that this special incantation—the lifelike figment, the entirely believable ghost of a human machine—would be more memorable than inventing words or writing rococo sentences. Maybe "good characters" is the best explanation.
