Flavorwire: In addition to his insights and his memorable poetry, Shakespeare is widely credited with inventing many words and phrases that can’t be found further back in the historical record. But perhaps he’s been given too much credit as an originator of words and phrases. Dr. David McInnis, a Shakespeare lecturer at the University of Melbourne, says some of this fallacy is due to the Oxford English Dictionary’s early editors being “biased” towards Shakespeare, ignoring previous uses of certain phrases. Examples of phrases originally attributed to the Bard that can be found earlier include wild-goose chase and it’s Greek to me, according to McInnis’s research.
6 comments:
I don't think anybody's ever told me that tShakespeare actually invented most of the idioms and unique words that appear in his plays. I've always thought, and this seems to be the general consensus among my peers, that he was simply repeating the common parlance of spoken languagefound in England at the time, and which simply was not written down. Anyways, even if his invention of these words is disputed, I believe no one can refute the fact that his plays have enabled those phrases to enter the our conversations today, regardless of their origing
My response to this article, is who cares? Because I don't. Maybe in my heart of hearts I feel for the guy that said "it's greek to me" first, and now doesn't get the credit for it as a very well known and often used phrase (it's also a the name of a really good greek restaurant around the corner from my house), but really who cares? I feel like what has to be important in this subject is who made these phrases what they are now, not who said them first. Shakespeare created a world for this words and phrases, and he did it so well, that hundreds and hundreds of years later I am writing a comment about it. What should matter to us is who made these words so popular, and who gave them life, not who said them or wrote them first. I would assume that very few people know name of the person who invented the computer, but most people know Steve Jobs, because he made the computer cultural, and that is exactly what Shakespeare did with his plays, and thats how he should be remembered, maybe not as the person who invented them, but who invented their significance.
I agree that the article didn’t change my opinion of Shakespeare and his works. I had one English teacher who liked to point out all the words and phrases that Shakespeare invented, but I have never given that much weight. (I don’t think that his plays could have lasted this long if the audiences couldn’t understand his language.) What I thought was interesting about the article was that it identified the Oxford English Dictionary’s Shakespeare bias. The way I have been taught Shakespeare in school, it would be easy to believe that he was the sole playwright in Elizabethan England. Shakespeare is extremely important in our current understanding of language. Because he is so well known, it’s easy to draw parallels between now and English in history. The other idea the article touches on is that most people don’t know of these earlier examples of word use because they aren’t mentioned in the dictionary. I personally don’t think about major dictionaries needing to go back to update established definitions of words. Really, I don’t ever consider what a dictionary uses as its sources to begin with.
I had never before heard that Shakespeare himself had created the words and/or phrases he used in his plays. I think that he is still a genius in what he created, and just because he did not originate his words and/or phrases does not mean he is less of an author than before. Through his writing, we are able to understand the human condition more and I think that proves more important than anything else. Authors today create works that are beautiful and original while still using old phrases, so why should it be different for Shakespeare? This article did not change my opinion of him and his works, and I will still thoroughly enjoy them knowing he was not the original creator of “a wild-goose chase”. If he had taken someone else’s stories and claimed them as his own, I think this is where there would be a problem. But he did create his own work and should still be the respected author that he has been for generations.
William Shakespeare, as incredibly talented and prolific as he was, is not God. Too often, I have heard Shakespeare cited as the creator of modern Western theater, the originator of a significant chunk of the English language, or the genius behind the poetic form of a sonnet. For the amount that English teachers across the world love to espouse this man's talents, remarkably little is actually known about his personal life or true lineage (or even real name). While Shakespeare's great fame makes it easy to link his ubiquitous name to achievements of all sorts, half-truths and blatant falsehoods abound (see above assertions). While there is no arguing that Shakespeare is one of the most influential writers/playwrights to have ever lived, this article demonstrates exactly why continued research of his life and work is so needed. Righting the factual wrongs that plague Shakespeare's reputation do not somehow make him less influential or less of a writer, instead they help us understand the context of his greatness, and help us more authentically understand one off the greatest literary minds of the last millennium.
I actually based my high school thesis project/ paper on something close to this topic. I searched to disprove the authorship of William Shakespeare. You can well assume that this uneducated farmer boy could have just been a genius and a playwriting prodigy. However, so many things point against these grave facts. If you do assume that it is in fact Shakespeare that wrote these amazing symbolic plays- then of course he would be taking things from other sources. He would be reading other stories and adapting them or taking pieces of them for his own because he is an uneducated boy. He didn’t go to school longer than to learn how to read. It would be remarkable if he did in fact write all of these plays on his own with that little education that he received. I am agreeing with the skeptics on this one. We need to find proof that Shakespeare is responsible for these plays before we go on accusing.
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