Shakespeare: The World as a Stage

by Bill Bryson

Francis Thackeray suggested that Shakespeare may have filled the bowl of his little clay pipe with marijuana and possibly even cocaine.

The urge to switch from subjunctive to indicative is, to paraphrase Alastair Fowler, always a powerful one.

In nearly every year for at least two and a half centuries, deaths outnumbered births in London.

The walls survive today only in scattered fragments and relic names – notably those of its gateways: Bishopsgate, Cripplegate, Newgate, Aldgate and so on

The defeat of the Spanish Armada changed the course of history. It induced a rush of patriotism in England that Shakespeare exploited in his history plays (nearly all written in the following decade), and it gave England the confidence and power to command the seas and build a global empire, beginning almost immediately with North America. Above all it secured Protestantism for England.

William Shakespeare could not have chosen a more propitious moment to come of age. By the time he arrived in London in (presumably) the late 1580s, theatres dotted the outskirts and would continue to rise throughout his career.

The money was dropped in a box, which was taken to a special room for safekeeping – the box office.

In five terse lines Shakespeare establishes that it is night-time and cold (‘unfold yourself’ means ‘draw back your cloak’), that the speakers are soldiers on guard, and that there is tension in the air. With just fifteen words – eleven of them monosyllables – he has the audience’s full, rapt attention.

paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, Shakespeare was a wonderful teller of stories so long as someone else had told them first.

In classical drama only three performers were permitted to speak in a given scene, and no character was allowed to talk to himself or the audience – so no soliloquies and no asides. These are features without which Shakespeare could never have become Shakespeare.

the three principles of dramatic presentation derived from Aristotle’s Poetics, which demanded that dramas should take place in one day, in one place, and have a single plot. Shakespeare was happy enough to observe this restriction when it suited him (as in The Comedy of Errors), but he could never have written Hamlet or Macbeth or any of his other greatest works if he had felt strictly bound by it.

Almost the only ‘rule’ in London theatre that was still faithfully followed was the one we now call, for convenience, the law of re-entry, which stated that a character couldn’t exit from one scene and reappear immediately in the next.

Shakespeare’s genius was not really to do with facts, but with ambition, intrigue, love, suffering – things that aren’t taught in school.

At the same time Shakespeare maintained a lifelong attachment to thou in preference to you, even though by the end of the sixteenth century thou was quaint and dated – Ben Jonson used it hardly at all.

Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany and countless others (including countless).

His real gift was as a phrasemaker. ‘Shakespeare’s language,’ says Stanley Wells, ‘has a quality, difficult to define, of memorability that has caused many phrases to enter the common language.’ Among them: one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, bag and baggage, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, be in a pickle, budge an inch,

If we take the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as our guide, then Shakespeare produced roughly one-tenth of all the most quotable utterances written or spoken in English since its inception – a clearly remarkable proportion.

‘It is telling,’ observes Stanley Wells, ‘that William Shakespeare’s birth is recorded in Latin but that he dies in English, as “William Shakespeare, gentleman”.’

Quite how they managed it, even when employed, is a mystery, because in sixteenth-century London working people really worked – from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. in winter and till 8 p.m. in summer. Since plays were performed in the middle of that working day, it wouldn’t seem self-evidently easy for working people to get away. Somehow they did.