How William Shakespeare shaped modern English

Every year on April 23 we wish 'Happy Bard's Day' to the most famous Englishman ever. His 450th birthday was celebrated in 2014, and this year marks 400 years of his death. But even as we remember Shakespeare through the many stagings and screen adaptations of his plays, the regular seminars on and syllabi inclusions of his sonnets, how many of us know about Shakespeare as the maker of the English language?

It is difficult for any individual agent to influence the medium in which it functions. Yet that is what Shakespeare did. He changed the very language he worked in by varying it, sculpting it, and rendering it in its modern version, the one we speak today. Even if you've never read one of his sonnets, seen a play, or so much as watched a movie adaptation, you're likely to have quoted him unwittingly. It is almost impossible to avoid.

Lend me your ears
Take, for instance, the commonly used phrase 'in a pickle' used in the sense of being 'in a difficult situation', whose etymology is traced back to The Tempest. Similarly, 'with bated breath' goes back to The Merchant of Venice and 'wild goose chase' was first used by Mercutio in Act 2, Scene 4 of Romeo and Juliet.

Some phrases have become so well used that they are now regarded as clichés. 'A heart of gold' is from Henry V, while 'the world's mine oyster' is used in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Then there's the association Shakespeare makes between jealousy and the colour green – 'green-eyed jealousy' from The Merchant of Venice and 'green-eyed monster' from Othello.

The list of Shakespearean phrases that have passed into common parlance is a long one: 'the game is afoot', 'send him packing' and 'give the devil his due' (Henry IV, Part I); 'eaten out of house and home' (Henry V, Part 2); 'foregone conclusion', 'vanish into air' and 'I will wear my heart upon my sleeve' (Othello); 'break the ice' (The Taming of the Shrew); 'in the twinkling of an eye' (The Merchant Of Venice); 'method in madness' and 'brevity, the soul of wit' (Hamlet); 'too much of a good thing' (As You Like It); and 'be-all and end-all' (Macbeth). Almost all of them are integral to our daily speech, and all come from his pen – no mean feat for an author who died 400 years ago.

When one realises that it is the beginning of the end, claims to be more sinned against than sinning, or breathes one's last, s/he is in the company of Shakespeare. If we ponder over bubble reputation, appreciate the milk of human kindness, find neither rhyme nor reason or indulge in remembrance of things past, we are carrying on his linguistic legacy. One might never have been able to find pride of place, undergo a sea change, recall his salad days, act more in sorrow than in anger, vanish into thin air, be tongue-tied, make a virtue of necessity, insist on fair play, sleep not one wink, stand on ceremony, dance attendance, see better days or live in a fool's paradise if Shakespeare had never come to London from Stratford.

Words, words, words
Scholars say that Shakespeare used around 15,000 words in his plays – one of the largest vocabularies used by any writer. Many of these would have been neologisms in his time, words he either invented for his plays or plucked out of obscure texts for reuse in different contexts. Some of these he 'invented' or adapted from existing words, or tweaked similar words from foreign languages. There are 357 instances where Shakespeare is the only recorded user of a word in one or more of its senses. Not that he coined all of them, but no one before him had used these in writing, or at least texts that have come down to us.

Some of the ways he did this, according to Shakespeare-online, is by "changing nouns into verbs, changing verbs into adjectives, connecting words never before used together, adding prefixes and suffixes, and devising words wholly original".

The blog Aviksliterarylollipop lists two of them. "For example, Caesar is able to say: "The wild disguise has almost anticked us all." An antic is a fool, which is a noun. Shakespeare turns it into a verb 'to make a fool of'. In Love's Labour's Lost, he is able to exploit multiple meanings of one word to create the sentence, 'Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile' – 'intellect', 'wisdom', 'eyesight' and 'daylight'." And if you've ever insulted anyone as an eyesore, laughing stock, the devil incarnate, stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, you have the bard to thank for helping with le mot juste just when needed.

All the world's a stage
Over the years, other artists working with words have dipped into the wealth of his works to spark their own imagination. Many have used his phrases to title their works – Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap and the Miss Marple mystery Murder Most Foul, Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale, TS Eliot's The Hollow Men… the list is long.

Then there's Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree, taken from As You Like It, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Terry Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters from Macbeth and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World from The Tempest. Also, there's Ruth Rendell's Put on by Cunning, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Phillip K. Dick's Time Out of Joint and Jasper Fforde's Something Rotten. And how many of John Green's readers will trace back the title The Fault in Our Stars to Julius Caesar?

Musicians, too, have found their muse in Shakespeare. Nick Lowe's Cruel to be Kind is a line from Hamlet, while Iron Maiden's Where Eagles Dare (and the film of the same title), is from Richard III. When Mumford & Sons named their album Sigh No More, they were borrowing a phrase from Much Ado About Nothing. Pink Floyd sang The Dogs of War, a song which takes its name from Julius Caesar.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
The reasons why Shakespeare could do it were many. For one, he came to write at a significant time in the history of the English tongue, when the language, its grammar and the spelling of words were in a flux. Shakespeare's works and felicity of phrases became so popular that they helped set the standards for early Modern English.
With his invention of commonly-used expressions, creation of new words, borrowing or adopting a word or a phrase from another language (neologising) and use of iambic pentameter, Shakespeare was able to affect the language in a way that no person since has.

The reason lies partly in his boldness of language usage as well. Shakespeare's sentence structures were often unconventional without caring for grammatical accuracy – he was more concerned about his characters sounding credible. The vivid visual quality of his metaphors, which delighted generations of his viewers and kept his scholars busy, compensated for the minimalist Elizabethan stage space. With no artificial lighting and few props, Shakespeare created what might be called 'verbal scenery' through his words. Thus the words had to work overtime, not only as dialogue, but also to create the very atmosphere needed for a particular scene.

As Hephzibah Anderson wrote in a recent BBC feature: "Then there's the fact that these words are voiced by some unforgettable characters – men and women who, despite the extraordinary situations in which they tend to find themselves, are fully and profoundly human in both their strengths and frailties."

"He gave us uniquely vivid ways in which to express hope and despair, sorrow and rage, love and lust," Anderson adds in her article. "His impact endures not only in the way we express ourselves, but how we experience and process the world around us."

Would 'fashionable' have become a well-known word unless set in that memorable sentence in Troilus and Cressida – "For time is like a fashionable host, that slightly shakes his parting guest by th' hand"?

Shakespeare is thus a cornerstone not only of English literary studies, but also a landmark in the development of the English language. If the mark of great writers is that they're still read, then perhaps the mark of a genius is that they're still spoken, too.