Status Updates From Shakespeare: The World as S...

Whatever else he was, James was a generous patron of drama. One of his first acts as king was to award Shakespeare and his colleagues a royal patent, making them the King’s Men. For a theatrical troupe, honors came no higher. The
move made them Grooms of the Chamber and gave them the right, among other privileges, to deck themselves out in four and a half yards of scarlet cloth provided by the Crown.

Imagine what it must have been like to watch Macbeth without knowing the outcome, to be part of a hushed audience hearing Hamlet’s soliloquy for the first time, to witness Shakespeare speaking his own lines. There cannot have been, anywhere in history, many more favored places than this.

Loving this! Bill Bryson, brilliant as always!

Yet English was struggling to gain respectability. Latin was still the language of official documents and of serious works of literature and learning. Thanks in no small measure to the work of Shakespeare and his fellows, English was rising. “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.’”

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.

He coined—or, to be more carefully precise, made the first recorded use of—2,035 words…

Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, critical, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany, and countless others (including countless). Where would we be without them?

In many ways the language Shakespeare used was quite modern. He never employed the old-fashioned seeth but rather used the racier, more modern sees, and much preferred spoketo spake, cleft to clave, and goes to goeth. The new King James Bible, by contrast, opted for the older forms in each instance.

Much of the language Shakespeare used is lost to us now without external guidance.

Shakespeare’s genius had to do not really with facts, but with ambition, intrigue, love, suffering—things that aren’t taught in school. He had a kind of assimilative intelligence, which allowed him to pull together lots of disparate fragments of knowledge, but there is almost nothing that speaks of hard intellectual application in his plays

Almost the only “rule” in London theater that was still faithfully followed was the one we now call, for convenience, the law of reentry, which stated that a character couldn’t exit from one scene and reappear immediately in the next.

In the rush to entertain masses of people repeatedly, the rules of presentation became exceedingly elastic. In classical drama plays were strictly either comedies or tragedies. Elizabethan
playwrights refused to be bound by such rigidities and put comic scenes in the darkest tragedies—the porter answering a late knock in Macbeth, for instance. In so doing they invented comic relief.

Shakespeare got maximum effect from the gender confusion by constantly having his female characters—Rosalind in As You Like It, Viola in Twelfth
Night—disguise themselves as boys, creating the satisfyingly dizzying situation of a boy playing a woman playing a boy.

For many of a conservative nature, stage transvestism was a source of real anxiety. The fear was that spectators would be attracted to both the female character and the boy beneath, thus becoming doubly corrupted.

This disdain for female actors was a Northern European tradition. In Spain, France, and Italy, women were played by women.

The patron afforded the actors some measure of protection, and they in turn carried his name across the land, lending him publicity and prestige. For a time patrons collected troupes of actors rather in the way rich people of a later age collected racehorses or yachts.

Puritans detested the theater and tended to blame every natural calamity, including a rare but startling earthquake in 1580, on the playhouses. All the female parts were of course played by boys—a convention that would last until the 1660s. In consequence the Puritans believed that the theaters were hotbeds of sodomy—still a capital offense in Shakespeare’s lifetime—and wanton liaisons of all sorts.

The sight of a screeching ape clinging for dear life to a bucking horse while
dogs leaped at it from below was considered about as rich an amusement as public life could offer.

In 1587 a visitor from the country wrote excitedly to his father about an unexpected event he had seen at a performance by the Admiral’s Men: One actor had raised a musket to fire at another, but the
musket ball “missed the fellow he aimed at and killed a child, and a woman great with child forthwith, and hit another man in the head very sore.” It is astounding to suppose that actors were firing live muskets.