On Shakespeare and Puking

Of the nearly 18,000 written words in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, over 1,700 are seen for the first time in his works. This doesn’t necessarily mean he coined all those words — and in fact many of them most likely existed in other languages, like Latin, for a very long time before Shakespeare anglicized them.

New words are known as neologisms, and the coining of new words or adopting words from other languages and making them, in essence, your own is called neologizing. Shakespeare was a master neologist.

The word “eyeballs,” for instance, made its first appearance in the English language when Shakespeare wrote:

Then crush this herb into Lysander’s eye;
Whose liquor hath this virtuous property,
To take from thence all error with his might,
And make his eyeballs roll with wonted sight.

(A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene ii)

And the word “puking”:

They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.

(As You Like It, Act II, Scene vii)

The following — an astounding and by-no-means exhaustive list – are words that according to the Oxford English Dictionary Shakespeare was the first to put in print:

addiction

admirable

advertising

aerial

alligator

amazement

arch-villain

assassination

barefaced

bedroom

belongings

bloodstained

bump

buzzer

cold-blooded

coldhearted

clangor

compact

critical

controls

critic

critical

dawn

disgraceful

dishearten

distasteful

embrace

employer

employment

excitement

eyesore

farmhouse

fathomless

flawed

fortuneteller

foulmouthed

frugal

gloomy

glow

gnarled

hurry

jaded

kissing

lackluster

laughable

leaky

leapfrog

lonely

long-legged

love letter

luggage

lustrous

madcap

majestic

malignancy

manager

marketable

mimic

misgiving

misplaced

monumental

moonbeam

mortifying

motionless

multitudinous

neglect

new-fangled

nimble-footed

noiseless

numb

obscene

obsequiously

outbreak

perplex

posture

premeditated

priceless

Promethean

protester

published

puking

radiance

rant

rancorous

reclusive

reliance

remorseless

reprieve

resolve

restraint

retirement

revolting

rival

roadway

rumination

sanctimonious

satisfying

savage

scrubbed

shooting star

seamy-side

shudder

silk

stocking

zany

And people have the nerve to ask me if “Shakespeare is all that”?

Unsex Me Here

This is a famous and often misunderstood line from Macbeth (Act 1, Scene 5), spoken by the unforgettable Lady Macbeth, who says:

The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe topful
Of direst cruelty.

She’s referring, of course, not to sex or the sex act but to the fact that her husband is becoming more and more squeamish about the business of murder, and (she fears) he may not be up to the task of killing King Duncan.

Lady Macbeth imagines herself as a kind of vessel, and her eloquent malediction is her own vivid way of praying to be stripped of the feminine and filled completely, “from crown to toe,” with “direst cruelty” — i.e. masculinity — so that she herself might help her hapless husband fulfill the dirty deed.

It is interesting to note also here that the prefix un– appears with abnormal regularity in Macbeth, almost as if the characters are continually trying to undo the horrible deeds they’ve done — “to cancel reality by appending negatives,” as the Shakespearean Michael Macrone felicitously phrased it — though of course once the deeds are done “all the perfumes of Arabia cannot sweeten Lady Macbeth’s little hand.”

Heart Of My Heart

Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favorite child. And his name is David Copperfield.

Wrote Charles Dickens.

Where does that phrase “heart of hearts” come from?

Well, nowhere.

It’s a perversion of Shakespeare’s heart of heart, which appears in Hamlet (Act 3, scene 2, 71-74):

Hamlet: Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
In my heart’s core, aye, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee.

Shakespeare — a breathtakingly levelheaded fellow whose similes and metaphors are almost always grounded in reality — coined the phrase “heart of heart” and meant it to be essentially synonymous with “heart’s core.”

Like the heart of an artichoke — like my heart — the “heart of heart” is the most tender part. And this most tender part is the part that Hamlet reserves for those who are ruled by reason, like his friend Horatio, and not by passion, as the melancholy Dane is himself, perhaps.

The bastardization of Shakespeare’s delicately rendered phrase probably comes from the equally delicate “vanity of vanities,” which we find in the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes:

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

Ecclesiastes, however, a very beautiful and Pagan-like book, lists a number of different vanities from which negative things flow — whereas, conversely, one does not in reality possess a number of hearts.

Shakespeare always preferred the apposite metaphor to the inapposite, and that is one of the primary reasons “the verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has ever known“:

He anchored his abstractions in concretes, a lead we as writers would do well to follow.

Shakespeare Glimpsed?

Ophelia's death

William Shakespeare — who’s remarkable for so many things that it’s easy to forget the thing he’s perhaps most remarkable for: the fact that he doesn’t reveal himself in any of his plays — was born in 1564, in Stratford, a tiny village which at that time had a population of approximately 1,500 people.

In the summer of 1579, when Shakespeare was fifteen-years-old, a young woman named Katherine Hamlet fell into the river Avon and drowned, an incident the young William Shakespeare would have for certain known about.

It’s not much, but it’s something.

Here’s Queen Gertrude’s poetic description of Ophelia’s muddy death:

Gertrude: There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

Hamlet Act IV, scene vii

The Ides Of March Are Come

Ceasar: The ides of March are come.

Soothsayer: Aye, Caesar, but not gone.

– Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 1.

But is Shakespeare really all that?

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Is Shakespeare All That?

A reader writes:

Dear Sir: Is Shakespeare all that?

— Slo Readuh


Dear Slo Readuh: No, he’s not all that. He’s all that and more.

It is impossible to overstate Shakespeare’s genius. Forget that his plots were largely borrowed. Forget that he never created a major character who didn’t have significant flaws. None of that is where Shakespeare’s genius lies. As Vladimir Nabokov — who was at times (not consistently) a good critic — once expressed it:

The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has ever known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays. With Shakespeare, it is the metaphor that’s the thing, not the play.

Aristotle believed the creation of metaphor to be the highest mark of literary genius. Shakespeare’s poetic-metaphoric skill is virtually bottomless. Even if you were to take away his plays, he’d still rank as one of the greatest sonneteers of all time.

It is, I admit, a tragedy that the Elizabethan language has become to our modern eyes and ears so difficult. Much of Shakespeare does require footnotes, which makes for some very rough going. I understand that. Yet when you push past that — which is to say, when you begin at last to penetrate Shakespeare — you’ll glimpse something you can’t quite believe.

John Keats was not speaking hyperbolically when he said that Shakespeare “smacks of the divine.” Nor was Samuel Taylor Coleridge when he said that Shakespeare “possessed myriad minds.” Shakespeare’s words contain the kind of truth that seems otherworldly. Neither is it an accident that Shakespeare is quoted more widely than the Bible.

But it was Herman Melville, who thought Shakespeare “the profoundest of thinkers,” that captures the locus of his genius most appositely of all. Melville said that Shakespeare was “master at the art of telling truth even though it be covertly, and by snatches…. It is those deep faraway things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare.”

Like Nabokov, Melville believed that it is neither the tragedies nor the comedies that make Shakespeare great: it’s the insights into humanity, which come at you constantly from among his plays and sonnets “like flashes of lightning illuminating the mysteries below.”

That’s not all: Shakespeare’s greatest living admirer (and arguably the world’s best-read human being) the critic Harold Bloom (not to be confused, as he so often is, with that hack Howard Bloom), honestly believes that in creating so many convincing characters, Shakespeare went far in creating our modern-day conception of humanity itself. It is an incredible statement, and yet I, for one, won’t argue it. In Harold Bloom’s own words:

Shakespeare, who at the least changed our ways of presenting human nature, if not human nature itself, does not portray himself anywhere in his plays.

Even more interestingly, perhaps, Mr. Bloom goes on to say this:

If I could question any dead author, it would be Shakespeare, and I would not waste my seconds by asking the identity of the Dark Lady or the precisely nuanced elements of homoeroticism in the relationship with Southhampton (or another). Naively, I would blurt out: did it comfort you to have fashioned woman and men more real than living men and women? (Harold Bloom, Genius, p. 18).

The profundity of his question is, I believe, the truest test of Harold Bloom’s sincerity, for the question is almost frighteningly subtle — and as a writer of fiction, I can personally testify that there is much to what he says: I am deeply comforted by the women and men I fashion, and in many ways can’t imagine my life without them. But apart from the insight that quote provides us into Bloom’s own brain, it illustrates something which I regard as even more significant:

It’s long been observed that one of the best measures of literature is when you can discuss the characters of a story or play as if those characters were real people: when you can talk about their personalities, when you can psychologize over them, their choice of careers, their deeds, when you can pick their brains and discuss their addictions and predispositions as if these characters were actual human beings. Many playwrights and novelists, and even many modern-day screenplay-writers, have created characters that meet this criteria. But no one — and I mean no one — has come close to creating the sheer number of these characters that Shakespeare did. Love his people or hate them, Shakespeare brought to life a gallery of women and men who are completely human — and he did it in a language whose prosody for practitioners still astounds.

That is the real power of art, and of Shakespeare.

So no, gentle Slo Readuh, Shakespeare is not overrated. He is, if anything, vastly underrated.