Jackdaw Collaborator

Robber and partner
We know (from academic comparisons and now computer analysis) that chunks of Shakespeare’s work was adapted, sometimes closely (nicked you might say), from the works of other writers: Plutarch, Plautus, Holinshed, Arthur Brooke, Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Chaucer to name the most obvious and famous examples. Shakespeare was a jackdaw writer, stealing fragments, adapting plots, robbing motifs and plot devices. We know also that he was a collaborator, working without doubt on some plays with Middleton, Fletcher and George Wilkins. (Possibly Marlowe, Nashe, Peele and Munday too.) (Let me know if you want the evidence for any of the statements in this paragraph….) This doesn’t lessen his achievement in my eyes. Michelin star chefs are not thought rubbish because they use ingredients that have been used before….

Collaborators and writers of Shakespeare's source material

It’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with it
Stealing from others for creative and artistic reasons is not a cop-out. As one of my favourite writers, Alan Garner, memorably wrote: “Originality is the personal colouring of existing themes.” Shakespeare’s linguistic reputation relates to what he does with his sources, what he does with the language, how he portrays characters in action and how he reveals the themes and issues in stories that thrill, surprise and delight 400 years later. Poor vocabulary, maybe, in comparison with a modern reader; but, oh my, the way he puts those words together.

You taught me language and my profit on’t is
I know how to curse…. 

Shakespeare Apocrypha.... yes, bits of Macbeth were probably not by WS.....

You Taught Me Language....

To Infinity and Beyond - quick number summary

With 200 words – you can survive (toddler language)
With 850 words – you can thrive (competent 8 year old)
2000 words – the total used by the average modern-day Jill or Joe (teenager base words)
With 4000 words – the Janet or John who reads will function successfully (educated teenager base words)
12,000 to 17,000 words – the number of base words used regularly by a modern adult with average intelligence
25,000 words – popular writers with numerous works
50,000 to 75,000 words – ALL the words known by a modern adult including all the plurals, negatives, derivations, declensions and conjugations (for example counting "is," "was" and "wasn't" as well as "be") [Some of these words will never be spoken but they will be understood when seen or heard in context.]

28,829 words....
My big reveal is that Shakespeare in fact used FEWER words than the number known and understood by many educated modern adults. He used over 65,000 words (compared to 75,000 for the highest ranking modern person) if you count all variations. With the help of computer technology, we now know he used 28,829 unique word forms and 12,493 of those words forms occur only once.  Interestingly, the top 100 most frequently occurring words (the same 100 words back in Jacobethan times as in modern times) make up 53.9% of his entire output.  Put another way, 50% of Shakespeare's work is made up of language used by the average modern 2 year old.

Not such a hot shot linguist then?
Anti-Stratfordians sometimes argue that Shakespeare’s lack of a university education is evidence that the son of a glover and a brewer descended from farming stock in the Midlands could not write the works in the First Folio.  But as I have demonstrated above, around 50% of his work is very simple, basic English.

I shall remember this bold language

Superhero-use of vocabulary

In the television series Heroes one of the characters in Season One says “you don’t have to have superpowers to be a hero.” Why is Shakespeare a hero of mine? Well, apart from

• the income generated for the country by Shakespeare tourism and culture
• the endless types of characters and plots he created that scriptwriters and other artists are still inspired by 
• the vast numbers and the scope of the themes in his plays and
• the memorable words and phrases he recorded

I'm also in awe of My Boy Bill’s superhero-use of vocabulary.

From 200 to 4,000 spoken words

A child between the ages of 2 and 3 rapidly picks up about 200 words to survive and thrive when speaking. 850 is the widely-agreed number of words in Basic English – the number that all native speakers have been shown to be able to recognize, use and understand. A less-educated rarely-reading adult eventually speaks between 2000 words and 4000 words, depending on the type of reading they do (this number is of base words, not declensions, conjugations and variations.)

If you count reading and writing, the numbers go up: 50,000 and counting

A native adult can recognize about 12,000 base words and a regular reader will take pleasure in being able to use about 17,000 words. If you count all the derivations of base words the numbers known and understood goes up to 50,000 but not all of these are actively used in either writing or speech. (Camp is a base word but it doubles if you count the noun and the verb and then quadruples if you count the subtle differences between different meanings; using “camp” to mean an iron age fort is not so familiar a noun as the verb “to camp” meaning to put a tent up and stay in it for a bit….! And as for the meanings of “camp” associated with flamboyant cultural excess, well you can see the complications of counting vocabulary use….)  

Shakespeare did not understand a Freudian slip (although they appear in his plays)

David Crystal suggests 50,000 to 75,000 is the kind of number an educated, native, 21st century reader of English would know and understand (even if they didn't use most of them.) Many of those words, of course, are based on inventions, substances, concepts and neologisms created since Shakespeare’s death in 1616. We can forgive Shakespeare if he would not recognize the words iPod or lycra or Watergate/Plebgate or Pluto (as a planet – or dwarf planet – or minor planet – even new nouns shift meaning on a daily basis.)  

David and Ben Crystal's fine book

Academic word counting

Computer technology has now allowed researchers to track with some accuracy the vocabulary in the works of different writers around the world. Average writers in any language in any era notch up around 20,000 to 25,000 words – and they are the ones who produce popular and extensive catalogues of work. Shakespeare’s total vocabulary is not actually as impressive and extensive as many people think - it's not the number of words he used that mattered - it's HOW and WHY he used them the way he did that makes him a hero to me.
 

Something Rich and Strange

Time and Space

Retirement is a strange experience for me. Now I wonder how I ever managed to fit work into the day during my working years. What with catching up with friends, rediscovering the British countryside, trying to get fitter, reading and writing, decluttering the house, learning new recipes, cooking and cleaning, watching TIVO and Netflix, going to the cinema, playing piano, doing jigsaws, training my body to sleep properly…. And realising that, although I thought I was pretty well informed about the Man from Stratford, Planet Shakespeare remains a wonderful place to explore in life and dreams….

The collapsing shelves

The clearest analogy I have of my working life as a teacher is that my brain was filled with stacks and stacks of bookshelves and each one had to be read or edited. The books were piled up to the ceiling of my mind, most of them double-stacked, some of them triple-stacked, and as each academic year went on the piles got crazier, got wobblier, got more precarious and definitely in danger of falling. The shelves were ready to collapse at any moment and destroy my body, heart and soul. In the months since retirement, the shelves have been emptying. They’re being dusted down and I’m starting to rearrange my prized possessions on them. Shakespeare’s presence is a great retirement comfort. Was anyone more creative with language than Shakespeare?

With thanks to Bernard Levin, Robert Demeger and Assemblies "What I Wrote" for school....

If you cannot understand my argument and declare "It's all Greek to me!" then you are quoting Shakespeare. If you claim to be more sinned against than sinning or if you recall your salad days when you were green in judgement, you are quoting Shakespeare. If you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property has vanished into air, into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare. Of those phrases, "lost property" is probably the most common and it is quite true that it may have been spoken before Shakespeare used it, but it was in The First Folio that the phrase was recorded in print for the first time.

A-Level Language students know that it is when words start to appear in print that they really spread locally, nationally and internationally. No-one had used the word assassination in English Literature before Shakespeare did in Macbeth, the word assassin having its origins in 8th century Arabic – but it was Shakespeare who turned the individual killer, assassin, into an abstract noun meaning the whole event – “assassination.”

Other words that Shakespeare coined that are still in everyday use today are even-handed, far-off, hot-blooded, schooldays, well-respected, useful, moonbeam and even subcontract. We wouldn’t have the word accommodation without Shakespeare, nor abstemious, discontent, or reinforcement.

If you have ever refused to budge an inch, or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, been tongue-tied, been a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle. If you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play or not slept a wink, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool’s paradise – why, be that as it may, the more fool you, it’s a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it and as happy as the day is long) quoting Shakespeare. Even film titles steal phrases from him – Murder Most Foul, The Darling Buds of May, Under the Greenwood Tree, What Dreams May Come, Band of Brothers, The Dogs of War, The Evil that Men Do, All Our Yesterdays, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Sound and the Fury, Brave New World, This Rough Magic, Cakes and Ale, Journey’s End, All’s Well That Ends Well, To Be Or Not To Be, Something Rich and Strange.

Even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was as dead as a doornail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing-stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot! Then – by Jove!  Tut! Tut! For goodness sake! What the dickens! But me no buts! It’s all one to me! These words and phrases are all creative writing nuggets from the quilled pen of Shakespeare.

Chubbing as a nipper

Childhood freedom

As a child growing up in the 1960s on the Eastmoor Estate in Wakefield, my playground consisted of fields, dens, paths, bushes, trees, woods, a canal, a river, bridges, haunted ruins, marshes, bonfires…. On days out, my eldest brother would take me, my mum and sister to places like Brimham Rocks in North Yorkshire, a weird and atmospheric collection of rocks on the moors near Pateley Bridge. Another day might be spent exploring the ruins of the great northern abbeys – Byland, Fountains, Jervaulx, Kirkstall, Riveaulx and Roche. In winter laking out* might mean involving two gangs playing Kick Out Can in the smog-riddled ginnels** and gardens of the estate.

*laking out = playing out from the Old Norse laik – “to play”

**ginnels = snickets, alleyways

Bonfire night

TV for children was limited, computers were non-existent and so running free seemed to be the only way to live – but back for tea or for bed! Friendships, loyalties, enemies and rivalries were passionate, none more so than around bonfire night when rival gangs went chubbing*** and then jealously guarded their huge bonfires. It was a great honour to be on guard duty, especially if you were a nipper**** and you were paired up with one of the older lads. 

***chubbing = scrounging for stuff to burn on the street bonfire

****nipper = small kid

Chubbing in the 1960s. Photo property of Bill Bullock.

The giant stack – ElfNSafety nightmare
Modern health and safety regulations wouldn’t tolerate the sorts of bonfire night I remember from childhood.  The centre pole was usually an abandoned telegraph pole with discarded railway sleepers stacked around it.  Linton Road householders would shove in broken cupboards, old sofas and discarded toys so the stack looked like an immense wigwam jumble sale.  Whether the urban myth was true – that one year, one boy was burned to death because he fell asleep when on guard – I never found out.  But the nearest Saturday to November 5th always saw the conflagration go up with a roar.

A local bonfire stack that wouldn't be allowed these days

Tasty treats

Pork pies, mushy peas, baked potatoes, parkin and “bonfire toffee” appeared with paper cups of pop from the Corona van – dandelion and burdock, cola, lemonade, orangeade, cream soda, limeade, cherryade. Some “taties” were cooked on sticks in the fire itself. Did the mums all have a planning meeting to coordinate all the food and drink?

Are the memories true?

Every year someone was burned with a banger and every year someone had to stay up through the night until the embers were safe to leave. Was it really as wild and pagan as my memory conjures? Or have the phantom dangers of childhood conjured a more feral existence than really happened?