BRAGG: In the first three programmes in this series
we've seen the English language grow
from a rough though wonderfully expressive dialect
to Chaucer's English
and a language fit for Tyndale's Bible.
Now the language makes a dramatic leap forward.
Over 400 years ago, here on London's South Bank,
lived and worked the man
who was to become the greatest English writer,
the greatest master of language of all time...
William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare wrote at the end of the 1 6th
and the beginning of the 1 7th century.
This was the period of the English Renaissance,
a word that was borrowed from French, meaning "rebirth."
During this time, the English language, too, was reborn.
English vocabulary was rapidly changing.
It expanded, grew, flowered, and exploded with new words.
This is the story of the growth of Shakespeare's English.
And it's an adventure that starts on water.
Most important changes in the English language
had come about through foreign invasions,
but in the late 1 6th century,
the legendary repulsion of an invasion
started off a new chapter in the adventure of English.
In 1 588, English ships were battling it out
with the Spanish Armada.
Elizabeth I was the queen of 3.5 million subjects
and determined not to surrender
to a much stronger and much bigger enemy.
She appeared before a crowd at the Port of Tilbury,
and using all her skill with rhetoric,
together with the power of an English language
growing rapidly in richness and eloquence,
she delivered her rallying cry.
[Indistinct shouting]
My people, I am come to live or die amongst you all,
to lay down, for my God and for my kingdom and for my people,
my honour and my blood, even in the dust.
I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman,
but I have the heart and valour of a king,
and of a king of England, too.
Not Spain nor any prince of Europe
shall dare to invade the borders of my realm.
Pluck up your hearts!
By your peace in camp and your valour in the field,
we shall shortly have a famous victory!
[Cheering]
BRAGG: Elizabeth's famous call to arms at Tilbury,
delivered here by Dame Flora Robson
in this 1 93 7 film,
has been told and retold for over 400 years.
It's because Elizabeth understood how to use
the new power and resonance of the English language
to inspire her people.
And this new power of the English language
reflected the naval strength of a small country
that was able to hold off the Spanish Armada.
But Elizabethan ships were doing something
far more important still, as far as language was concerned.
Naval supremacy opened up the world to trade.
As England imported a huge cargo of goods,
the English language imported a cargo of vocabulary alongside.
A stunning 1 0,000 to 1 2,000 new words
entered English in this period, bringing with them new ideas.
By the time of the Spanish Armada,
English was still lagging behind other European languages
in the influence it exerted
in the newly conquered territories abroad.
Portuguese had already made its mark in Brazil
and Spanish had been spoken in Cuba and Mexico
for more than half a century.
Elsewhere, Arabic had spread through the Middle East
over 800 years earlier,
and Hindi was comfortably establishing itself
as a vernacular, if not a literary language,
throughout the Indian region.
But on a very much smaller scale,
English was at least beginning to make its mark.
During the 1 6th century,
it had begun to spread to parts of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.
English was spreading, but English was also absorbing.
Some of the thousands of new words that entered the language
came from just across the Channel.
England's thriving maritime trade
was most successful close to home,
and it's not surprising that French,
which had a long history of providing words to English,
was to provide English
with many of its nautical and meteorological terms.
Words like "crew," "detail," "passport," "progress,"
"moustache," and "explore"
were traded into English from French.
Other maritime terms, like "embargo," "tornado,"
"canoe," and "port"
come to us from both Spanish and Portuguese.
We get "keelhaul," "smuggle,"
"yacht," "decoy," "cruise," and "reef,"
along with "knapsack" and "landscape," from Dutch.
And although the popular myth is
that Anglo-Saxon gave English all its swear words,
it was sailors that brought us
"fokkinge," "krappe" and "bugger" from Low Dutch,
now called Flemish, in the 1 6th century.
Anglo-Saxon is in the clear.
But these sailors brought back
more than just colourful language.
Their trading expeditions to Europe and the Spanish Main
literally bore fruit and barrel loads of other goods
that was to affect the English language
at the most domestic of levels.
MAN: [Singing operatically in Italian]
BRAGG: More of our food began to come from abroad,
and many of our food terms have Renaissance origins.
Spanish and Portuguese gave us new delicacies
and new words for them, too.
Here at Borough Market,
which would have existed in Shakespeare's day,
we can see these goods such as apricots, bananas,
limes, mandarins, yams, potatoes,
and anchovies, cocoa, maize, and port wine.
Meanwhile, the words for "chocolate" and "tomato"
come to us from the French.
And as sailors and traders told tales of the New World,
words from a total of 50 other languages
joined the cargo of new words
that were integrated into English.
English now bristled with newly imported terms from overseas...
"lychee" from Chinese,
"bamboo" and "ketchup" from Malay,
and "curry" from Tamil.
During the 1 6th century,
English also imported "yoghurt" and "horde" from Turkish,
"bazaar" and "turban" from Persia,
and "coffee," "magazine," and "alcohol" from Arabic.
[Singing resumes]
80, please.
It wasn't just the traders who returned to England
bearing their exotic goods and linguistic wealth.
English artists and scholars and aristocrats
explored Italy and its culture,
which was the dominating influence of that time.
There they wondered at the architecture
and the science and the music, carrying back new ideas
and a sumptuous lexicon to describe them.
So "balcony,"
still pronounced at that time in the Italian manner...
"bal-CONE-ee"...
as well as "fresco," "villa," "cupola," "portico," "piazza,"
"miniature," and "design" are all from Italian,
as are "opera," "violin," "solo," "sonata," "soprano,"
"trill," "cameo," and "carnival."
But the biggest influx of words
came from the classical languages... Latin and Greek.
In the 1 6th century here at Oxford,
and also at Cambridge,
the Renaissance scholars wanted to revive Latin.
They founded schools
teaching pure and literary Latin and Greek,
and they also translated classical texts into English.
[Speaking Latin]
BRAGG: Latin is still used ceremonially today
at Oxford University.
In the 1 6th century,
it was not only the language of religion
but also the language of classical thought,
science, and philosophy.
In nomine Domini, Patris, Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.
BRAGG: Latin was the language of scholarship,
controversy, and diplomacy.
English scholars spoke and wrote in Latin
so that they could communicate and debate
with other European scholars.
[Speaking Latin]
Latin had been spoken by some people in England
for over 1,500 years, since Roman times.
But though it was the language of scholarship,
on an everyday basis things were changing.
Everyone, from the common people to the academics and the queen,
now spoke English and not Latin,
even though Latin was still a compulsory subject in schools.
There was a great ransacking fervour in the English language
which was at its peak for 20 years.
The decade on either side of the year 1 600
saw thousands of Latin words
come into the English vocabulary of educated people,
words like "excavate," "horrid," "radius," "cautionary,"
"pathetic," "pungent," "frugal," "dislocate," "submerged,"
"antipathy," "premium," "specimen,"
and even the words "manuscript" and "lexicon"
were absorbed into English during these two decades.
Latin and Greek were the perfect building blocks
for a new English vocabulary
to describe the new concepts, techniques, and inventions
that were coming in from Continental Europe
during the Renaissance.
This was a period
of great intellectual and scientific fervour.
During this time were invented both the ideas and the words
for "atmosphere," "chaos,"
"critic," "strenuous," and "explain,"
along with the other Latin- and Greek-inspired words
such as "paradox," "eternal," and "chronology."
In fact, "concepts" and "inventions"
are themselves words borrowed from Latin,
and "technique" is of Greek origin.
The developing field of medicine
particularly relied on classical words.
Still today medical terms are in Latin and Greek,
and many date from the Renaissance.
Amongst the words that arrived at that time
from Greek via Latin
were "skeleton," "tendon," "tibia," "larynx,"
"glottis," "pancreas," and "sinuses."
From Latin we also inherit our "temperature"
along with the "parasites" and "viruses,"
the attacks of "pneumonia," "delirium" and "epilepsy"
that plague our health.
Even our "thermometers," "tonics," and "capsules"
to cure them are all words of classical origin.
In fact, even now we use Latin and Greek
for medicine and technology.
The Greek-derived "plutonium"
or the Latin "insulin," "id," "Internet," "quantize,"
"audio," and "video" are all 20th-century inventions.
One of the most recent additions
to the Oxford English Dictionary this year
was the phrase "quantum computation,"
which is purely Latin in origin.
Latin seems set to honeycomb English,
but not everyone agreed
with what critics called new "inkhorn" terms.
Dissent was growing among the scholars.
The scene was set for the national uproar
of the Inkhorn Controversy.
The Inkhorn Controversy,
named after the horned pot which held ink for quills,
was the first formal dispute about the English language.
Never before had there been such a consciousness
of what the English language was and should be.
What began as a few testy written outbursts
culminated in a full-blown academic row.
Many scholars objected to the increasing incursion
of Latin and Greek words.
A key figure among them was Sir John Cheke,
who was provost at King's College
here in Cambridge.
He argued strongly
that English should not be polluted by other tongues.
Ironically, Cheke was a classicist
and the first Regius Professor of Greek in Cambridge.
Nevertheless, Cheke felt that English should be reappraised
as a Germanic language, going back to its Anglo-Saxon roots.
Cheke even invented words, like "crossed" for "crucified,"
"gainrising" for "resurrection," "ground-wrought" for "founded,"
"toller" for "publican," "mooned" for "lunatic,"
"foresayer" for "prophet," and "hundreder" for "centurion."
MAN: "I am of this opinion
that our own tung should be written cleane and pure,
unmixt and unmangled with borrowing of other tunges,
wherein if we take not heed by time,
ever borrowing and never payeng,
she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt."
Cheke wrote about the bankruptcy and counterfeiting
of the pure English language.
But it's again ironic that the very words he used...
words like "bankrupt," "counterfeiting,"
and, indeed, the word "pure" itself...
aren't of Anglo-Saxon or Germanic origin at all.
They are from the Latin-based languages Italian and French.
But Cheke's enthusiasm for English
brought about something else which is significant.
Here, in the Protocollum book,
are the records of admission to King's College.
The name of the book is Latin, and it's written in Latin,
but written beneath Cheke's entry,
for the very first time in this book, is a text in English.
This short English note
was the first chink in the classical armour
that had protected scholarship
and isolated it from everyday people.
Look, it starts off in Latin... if we can decipher it.
[Speaking Latin]
Which means that "This worthy man John Cheke
was admitted into the true and perpetual provostship
of the aforesaid King's College."
But underneath it is a short passage...
and this is the quiet revolution...
which is in English.
It says, "First of all, I do protest and declare
that otherwise I do not swear or promise anything thereby
that should bind me contrary
to the true doctrine of the Church of England."
But however hard he tried to promote a pure English,
Cheke and his supporters couldn't stem the huge influx
of Latinate words that people had started using.
No one could control the English language.
By the end of the 1 6th century,
over a period of some 60 or so years,
the building blocks had been laid
to create a language that we can still understand today,
that we call modern English.
In the modern English that we read and speak today,
we hear some of these Latinate words
that seemed oddest at the time, but some of these have survived.
1 6th- And early-1 7th-century words like...
Curious at the time, but we use them today.
However, Cheke may have taken some comfort
in the fact that some of the thousands
of Latin and Greek words coined during
the great Inkhorn Controversy didn't survive.
Through a process of natural selection,
"obtestate" (to bear witness),
and "fatigate" (to make tired) have been lost,
as have "illecebrous," meaning "delicate,"
or "deruncinate" (to weed).
"Abstergify" (to cleanse), "arreption" (a sudden removal),
and "subsecive" (remaining over) have all slipped out of use.
"Nidulate" (to build a nest),
"latrate" (to bark like a dog)...
pity about that...
and "suppeditate" (to supply) have also disappeared.
Whilst a word like "impede" survived,
its opposite, "expede," didn't.
As we explored the globe,
so at home we explored the world of words.
It's fun to poke fun at these creations,
but they demonstrate the intense interest
the English language inspired.
People from the queen
to a young grammar-school boy from Stratford...
William Shakespeare, of course...
were reading an English language
that was flush with thousands of new words and ideas.
It was an English that could be used as a tool of power
to rally spirits against foreign invasions.
But it was also an English
which could and did create a literature
of the most remarkable poetry and flexibility.
English already had a great author in Chaucer,
but now the English language
was to take on an even bigger challenge...
to lay the foundations for a world language.
In the 1 6th century,
English was a delicate, flowering language
that needed to be protected.
It had long been in the shadow of other European languages.
There was such an interest in these languages
that glossaries were compiled
in the form of bilingual Italian to English,
French to English,
and Spanish to English dictionaries.
English was to finally get its very own dictionary...
8 years before Italian, 35 years before French,
but 800 years after Arabic
and nearly 1,000 years after Sanskrit.
The word "dictionary"
is first used in its Latin form, "dictionarius," in 1 225
by an English scholar.
And in many ways, a dictionary is particularly suited
to the English language,
a language which has absorbed so many others.
The very first English dictionary
was put together in 1 604 by Robert Cawdrey.
He called it "A Table Alphabeticall,"
and this is it.
It's a list of English words, mainly of Latinate origin,
with a brief explanation.
So we can see that the very first word
in this only surviving copy of this tiny dictionary
is "abandon"...
"cast away, or yeelde up, to leave, or forsake."
We see that "maladie" is a "disease."
Or that "summarilie" is "briefly" or "in fewe words."
"Argue" is "to reason,"
and "geometrie" is the "art of measuring the earth."
"Elegance" is "finesse of speech"
and "empire" is "governement, or kingdome."
"Quadrangle" is "foure-cornered,"
and "radiant" is "shining bright."
There are only 2,543 words
in this very first English dictionary.
It was a meagre word-hoard but a first attempt at a collection.
It's by no means exhaustive.
You don't find everyday words
like "shoe," "cold," "food," or "house,"
"cow," "wet," "rain," "dress," "fish," or "love."
More than anything,
this little book was a recognition
of the new status of the English language.
As it declared on its first page,
full of "hard, usual English wordes,
borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French."
Cawdrey intended his dictionary to be used by those
who might not understand words "which they shall heare or read
in Scriptures, Sermons, or elsewhere."
This wasn't a book for scholars.
It was a book for the ordinary people to catalogue new words
and to explain the new ideas associated with these words.
This was because the English population
was growing more and more educated.
One estimate is that by 1 600
half of the 3.5 million population,
at least in cities and towns, had some minimal literacy.
But it was the good education of those brought up
around the world of the Elizabethan court
in grand homes like this one... Penshurst Place in Kent...
that was to contribute strikingly
to the adventure of English.
In Tudor England, thousands of new words
were absorbed into the English language.
With these words came an intense interest in how to use them.
The study of rhetoric...
the art of public speaking and composition...
became part of a good education.
And rhetoric had a fine spokeswoman and speechwriter
in Queen Elizabeth l, who excelled at it.
She was a literary and educated monarch.
She had private tutors.
She spoke six languages
and translated French and Latin texts.
Furthermore, Elizabeth enjoyed writing poetry.
WOMAN: "I grieve and dare not show my discontent.
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate.
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant.
I seem stark mute but inwardly do prate."
English was looking for a literature
to reflect its newly enriched status.
And it was to the courtiers...
the knights of Elizabeth's entourage...
that the role fell to turn the English language
into literature.
The gentleman-poet,
who handled the pen with as much skill as the sword.
He was called up to play his part
in the adventure of English.
The courtier wrote for pleasure,
and for him, writing, playing, and moulding the language
all became things to aspire to.
There even existed manuals of rhetoric
that advised would-be courtier-poets
on the best composing techniques.
The perfect embodiment of the courtier-poet
was a heroic nobleman
who was born here in Penshurst Place in 1 554...
Sir Philip Sidney.
By his mid-20s,
Sidney had already worked as Elizabeth's ambassador abroad
and had written the finest collection of love poems
of his age.
He died in battle when he was only 3 1
and achieved lasting fame for giving his water bottle
to another wounded soldier,
with the words "Thy need is greater than mine."
Above all, he had the leisure, education, and wit
to make English the subject of both his poetry
and his treatise about language...
"An Apologie for Poetrie."
Sidney composed music and songs
he wrote for pleasure and for art's sake,
not for a living.
MAN: "Fly, flye, my friends,
I have my deathes wound, flye;
See there that boy, that murthering boy I say,
Who, like a thief, hid in a bush doth lie
Till bloody bullet get him wrongful prey."
BRAGG: I talked to Katherine Duncan-Jones,
Oxford don and Britain's leading expert
on the work of Philip Sidney,
about his importance to the English language.
What was new about that poem?
I think what was new was the application of very bold,
still very fresh, immediate words,
to what might be called a very trite, cliched situation.
Words like "bloody bullet" and "thief"...
"Who, like a thief, hid in dark bush doth lie,"
and "that murthering boy,"
which make it sound as if the speaker has just been mugged
and fatally wounded by one of these juvenile criminals
who were very common in Elizabethan towns and villages
and, I'm afraid, are still very common now.
And, I think, like many of Sidney's sonnets,
it's a sort of trick performed with language,
that he makes us think we're reading something
very surprising and new
when it's just that tired old story
of Cupid shooting with a golden arrow.
But "bloody bullet" makes it sound completely different,
as if it's a gunshot wound.
So, what, in general, do you think Sidney did
with the language that was given him...
this courtier, this man penning what could be a new English?
What was he doing?
Well, he was enormously expanding it.
If we look at the Oxford English Dictionary online,
Iook up "Philip Sidney"...
There are 2,225 quotations from Sidney
in the Oxford Dictionary.
He was expanding it enormously,
both the usages and the actual words,
with foreign words,
probably some words that were oral,
some words that hadn't been used in literary language before...
words that he had made up, essentially,
by turning nouns into verbs
and creating new adverbs and new forms of speech.
Like describing a cat,
saying the cat is moving "scratchingly."
And nobody had ever thought of describing a cat
moving "scratchingly" before.
BRAGG: Numerous first usages are attributed to Philip Sidney...
"bugbeare";
"skummy," as a term of abuse;
"dumb-stricken";
"miniature," for a small picture.
He was fond of adding words together
to form evocative images,
ranging from "milke-white" horses,
"eie-pleasing" flowers, "well-shading" trees,
to more unusual ones like "honey-flowing" eloquence,
"hang-worthy" necks, or even
"long-with-love-acquainted" eyes.
Would you say that, around the time of Sidney,
English was becoming a modern language?
DUNCAN-JONES: I think it was,
because I think there was this sense
that very modern things of absolutely the present moment
could be done with it,
as of course happens now
with the new words we have with every...
Almost every month, new words enter our language.
I think that was that exciting sense
that is was a language which was both very historical
and carried many relics of Latin and Greek and Saxon
and yet was absolutely streetwise.
BRAGG: What ideas were Sidney bringing
that had not been expressed or as well-expressed before?
English and English culture
could be as rich as French, Italian...
even, to name the enemy, Spanish culture.
Sidney was very well informed
about Spanish literature and culture, too.
He was actually Philip of Spain's godson,
named after him.
So a confidence in the English language
as a medium in which great works of art could be produced
and everyday transactions could be carried on.
They didn't have to be in Latin
or in the kind of French used by diplomats.
The English language could actually be used
for important matters of state.
MAN: "Where be the roses gone, which sweeten so our eyes?
Where were those red cheeks,
which oft with fair increase did frame the height of honour
in the kindly badge of shame?
Who hath the crimson weeds stolen from my morning skies?"
BRAGG: Which words linger, then?
Which words do we still use a lot?
DUNCAN-JONES: Phrases.
Comic, trite phrases like "my better half"
for a much-loved spouse,
which, actually, in its context in Sidney, is tragic
and now is a sort of sitcom cliche...
"I'll see what my better half thinks about that."
And, I think, when that rather cliched phrase is used,
people have no idea it goes back to Sidney's "Arcadia."
Well, even... this is in the Oxford Dictionary...
a word like "far-fetched," as applied to a narrative.
Or even what we're doing now, Melvyn...
having a "conversation," meaning "exchange in speech,"
Sidney brought that into the language.
"Conversation" used to mean just having dealings
of an undefined kind with other people.
But the specific application
to having dealings through language was Sidney's.
MAN: "But for the uttering sweetly and properly
the conceits of the minde, which is the end of speech,
that hath it equally with any other tongue in the world."
"English hath it equally with any other tongue in the world."
There's a sense of triumph there,
of victory, even the sweet smell of success.
Sidney was one of the courtly stars of poetry.
Poetry became the benchmark for English.
By the 1 600s, poets like John Donne,
Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, George Herbert, and many more
were writing lines like Jonson's
"Drink to me only with thine eyes"
or Donne's "No man is an island."
They had become everyday expressions.
And in polishing their technique,
the poets also polished English as a language
fit for the most testing poetic and dramatic endeavours.
But the flowery sonnets of the gentlemen-poets
wouldn't have been understood in the area
that we now know as Southwark, or the South Bank.
Just outside the city of London's jurisdiction,
it was an area of disrepute,
with thieves and vagabonds, taverns and brothels.
It was the red-light district of London in the 1 590s.
The prostitutes and thieves who prowled 'round this area
had their own street slang,
much as local gangs today have their own argot.
We know that "cove" meant "man,"
"fambles" meant "hands," "gan" was "mouth,"
"pannam" was "bread," and "skipper" was "a barn."
Not many of these words have survived,
but even today "cove" is a slang word for "a man."
Most importantly, though, the language of the streets
was a simple and direct communication
using single-syllable words and plain speech.
By the end of the 1 6th century,
theatres were a main feature in this dubious area.
And the most famous was the Globe.
By the time the Globe was built in 1 599,
people had been attending performances
in the commercial playhouses for 30 years.
And it was on these hugely popular stages
that something extraordinary happened...
The playwrights of the period echoed and transformed
the turbulent English language which they were hearing,
combining the rich vocabulary and poetry of the courtiers
with the slang of the commoners.
Because the theatres of the time
had no scenery and barely any props,
language was the means of choice on the stage
to captivate the audience.
And the scene was set
for the most famous dramatist of them all, William Shakespeare,
to make his indelible mark on the English language.
The plays that were written by Shakespeare,
as well as those of his contemporaries,
such as Marlowe, Jonson, and Nashe,
attracted enormous crowds.
The Globe could hold between 3,000 and 3,500 people.
And the other five theatres in London
could easily rival the Globe.
A 1 0-day run for a play counted as a long one,
and the London population of merely 200,000 inhabitants...
about the same population as Sunderland today...
demanded constant novelty and excitement.
It's astonishing to realise
that a box-office hit like Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus"
would have been seen by 1 in 2 men in London.
Genius and the new mix of language
was bringing together a mix of society
in the popular playhouses.
English's seeding of words was no longer restricted
to the scholars and the courtier-poets.
With Shakespeare and his contemporaries,
English had a new audience.
It was ready to travel the world.
MAN: "All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages."
This is Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare's birthplace.
English's best-selling author has served the town well.
Three million tourists visit the every year,
making Shakespeare English's biggest export.
The beauty of Shakespeare's language
is that we can still understand it today.
Shakespeare's English has become so quotable
that it's come to define English in the words that we use,
the thoughts we express, be it for native speakers,
for students of English, or for tourists.
For example, "Julius Caesar"...
"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears."
"To be, or not to be."
Most important...
"To be, or not to be. That is the question."
[Laughs]
"To be, or not to be." [Laughs]
"To be, or not to be. "That is the question."
Isn't it?
"Do thoust hear a mouse?"
Uh, "To be, or not to be."
It's a good read.
"To be, or not to be."
"That is the question."
"The quality of mercy is not strained."
"Bubble, toil and trouble." And that's about it.
He's my friend come from China.
And Shakespeare is a very famous person in Chinese.
"Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?"
"Wherefore art thou Romeo?" Yeah. Yes.
"Is this a dagger I see before me?"
We heard about Shakespeare at school
and later on at the theatre,
and we are interested in reading Shakespeare.
"Hail thee, thane of Glamis. Hail thee, thane of Cawdor.
Hail thee, king hereafter."
Shakespeare is the favourite all over the world.
Most scholars today attribute 38 plays,
1 54 sonnets, and other major poems to Shakespeare,
who was born in this house.
But his biggest contribution to English
might be the vocabulary that we find in his work...
well over 2,000 of our words, for instance, today
are first recorded there...
words which broaden the way we look at life,
tell us how we act, tell us how we think,
tell us what we value.
Although Shakespeare didn't invent them, for instance,
the words...
...all make their first appearance in his work.
As do...
Over 400 years ago,
Shakespeare already used an enormous English vocabulary
of at least 2 1,000 different words.
English was in a state of flux,
and Shakespeare was perfectly placed to make the most of it.
Shakespeare was influenced by the language of ideas
at the end of the 1 6th century.
His language still influences ours today.
In many ways, his words and images define the way we think.
Hamlet's "to thine own self be true," for instance,
explores the notion of personal identity which we still probe.
"What the dickens" has nothing to do with Charles,
but makes its first appearance
in Shakespeare's "Merry Wives of Windsor."
"As good luck would have it"... that does, too.
"Beggars all description" and "salad days"
are inherited from "Antony and Cleopatra."
Hamlet gave us "in my mind's eye,"
"caviare to the general,"
to "be cruel to be kind," "to the manner born,"
"hoist with his own petard,"
to "hold the mirror up to nature."
As the lady said, it's full of quotations.
Shakespeare coined many of the expressions we use today,
but "brevity is the soul of wit,"
so I won't "play fast and loose,"
but I'll "make a virtue of necessity"
and "vanish into thin air."
In many ways, Stratford itself
defined Shakespeare's use of the English language.
The Stratford of the second half of the 1 6th century
was a village of merely 1,500 inhabitants.
Shakespeare is thought to have attended Stratford School.
He would initially have been taught in English,
but he'd also have studied the Latin classics...
Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid.
And by the upper forms,
it would have been forbidden to speak in English, only in Latin.
MAN: [Speaking Latin]
BRAGG: Over 400 years later, they're still teaching Latin
in the same room that Shakespeare studied in.
[Speaking Latin]
BRAGG: Later on in Shakespeare's life
it seems that he picked up both French and Italian.
The Italian story source of "Othello," for example,
never appeared in translation into English.
But Shakespeare's English education
would have been completed at church... this church...
Holy Trinity Church in Stratford,
in which he was later buried.
This is his grave.
At church, as an adolescent,
he would have had to read texts in English,
especially Tyndale's English Bible.
Shakespeare didn't go to university,
and early on he was mocked for that by the London wits
who had benefited from university tutoring.
But just a church and a grammar-school education
were to provide the young William Shakespeare
with the language base that he needed
to become English's greatest playwright.
Shakespeare also knew about the Inkhorn Controversy
and used both Latin words and "plaine" terms
in his own writing.
He used new words which had just appeared
towards the end of the 1 6th century,
like "multitudinous," "emulate,"
"demonstrate," "dislocate," "initiate," "meditate,"
or "allurement," "eventful," "horrid," "modest," and "vast."
He invented and was also fond of compound words,
like "hugger-mugger," "baby-eyes,"
"faire-play," "breake-vow,"
or "pell-mell," "smooth-fac'd," "widow-comfort,"
"canker-sorrow," "bare-pickt," "basilico-like,"
"halfe-blowne," and "ill-tuned," which are uniquely his.
But there are some words which Shakespeare used
which don't survive.
Our everyday language might sound very different
if we were saying "appertainments," "cadent,"
"exsufflicate," "questrist,"
"tortive," "soilure," "abruption," "persistive,"
"protractive," "ungenitured," "unplausive," "vastidity."
And Shakespeare's longest word,
"honorificabilitudinitatibus," which means "with honour,"
has, sadly, fallen out of fashion altogether.
Shakespeare's vocabulary also betrays his Midlands roots.
In his work, we find regional words,
like "keck" for "fool's parsley"
and "honey-stalks" for "clover stalks,"
We find "ballow," which means "a cudgel"
and "batlet," which was still used until recently
to mean "the bat to beat clothes in the wash."
We also find
the very Warwickshire "potch" (to thrust).
And "pash" (to smash).
[Indistinct talking]
- WOMAN: Keck. - MAN: Yes.
- Well, it was never called... - Called the "devil's plaything."
Sometimes they called it devil's plaything,
but the general name for it...
the everyday name for it that we used... was keck.
I'd say, "Get a bit of keck for the rabbits."
That's right. Yes.
Do you remember them saying a "batlet" tub?
A batlet tub?
Out in the yard. Yes.
We had a batlet tub out in Mere Street in the backyard.
For the washing.
Well, washing, or you could put...
Soak stuff in it, you know,
or rack wine in it or use it generally.
Yeah, yeah.
Shakespeare's regional accent
is thought to have sounded a bit like the locals today,
speaking a kind of Midlands English,
with a strong "r" in words like "turn" and "heard."
"Cider" becomes "zoider" and "farmer" becomes "varmer."
"Right" and "time" become "roight" and "toime."
Although nowadays the Stratford accent
is more influenced by nearby Birmingham,
Shakespeare's Midland accent was described
as having been a mixture between West Country and Irish.
We asked Peter Silver...
a Stratford man like Shakespeare...
to read us a passage from "Henry V."
"The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth
The feckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover,
Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank,
Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems
But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs,
Losing both beauty and utility."
BRAGG: It's intriguing to think
of what Shakespearean verse would have sounded like
during the Renaissance.
John Barton, an expert on speaking Shakespeare,
thinks it would have sounded like this...
"Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ear,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage:
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let it pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon;
let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean."
Inside that wonderful speech,
have you got any particular words or stresses that you say,
"Look, this is what they did then that we don't do now"?
Shakespeare was very free with words
and would scan the same word differently
within the same scene or speech,
like whether you said "complete" or "com-plete."
That was poetic license.
And for writing more freely,
I think that we tend to look
down the wrong end of the telescope
if we don't allow that they actually
were not yet quite settled on spelling,
that they were free to play games with words and language,
and it was in dispute.
That was the culture.
The culture was a different one, which we've tended to codify.
So if you were asked to say
what you thought was unique about Shakespeare's language,
where would you put the emphasis?
It's the monosyllables
that are the bedrock and life of the language,
and I believe that that is so with Shakespeare.
The high words, the high phrases he sets up
to then bring it down to the simple which explains it.
Like making "the multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red."
There is high language...
"What the hell is he talking about?"...
specific, clear definition.
And I think that the heart of Shakespeare...
of listening to it, for acting it...
is that the great lines, often the most poetic lines,
are the monosyllables.
But do you think that the monosyllables
were what would be called common speech
and the high lines were Shakespeare being Latinate,
proving that he didn't need
a university education to be clever?
This is the paradox.
High words can be verbal show-off and rhetoric.
Deep feeling probably comes out most in monosyllables.
So I say that not to deny that he teemed with word invention,
but I think, in some ways, the living power of the language
comes from the interplay of the two.
BRAGG: This interplay of the high speech with the commonplace
was important to Shakespeare.
It was also a fertile ground for comedy.
He was so inventive with just one insult, "knave,"
that we can find 50 instances of it in his plays,
playing off monosyllables with more complex formations.
- Foul knave. - Lousy knave.
- Beastly knave. - Scurvy railing knave.
- Gorbellied knave. - Bacon-fed knave.
- Wrangling knave. - Base notorious knave.
- Arrant malmsey-nose knave. - Poor cuckoldy knave.
- Stubborn ancient knave. - Pestilent complete knave.
- Counterfeit cowardly knave. - Rascally yea-forsooth knave.
Foul-mouthed and calumnious knave.
The lying'st knave in Christendom.
Rascally, scald, beggarly, lousy, pragging knave.
Whoreson, beetle-headed, flap-eared knave.
Three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave.
In "The Tempest," Shakespeare's last play,
the main character... the magician Prospero...
uses a staff that's often seen to be an image
for Shakespeare's quill.
Shakespeare called Prospero's magic a "potent art,"
and Shakespeare himself used the power of language
to conjure up images for a spellbound audience
here at the Globe.
When, in Prospero's last speech, he breaks his staff,
Shakespeare is setting down his pen...
the instrument of his own potent and magic art.
MAN: "But this rough magic I here abjure,
and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound I'll drown my book."
And Shakespeare put down his staff.
But his language lives on in print
in the editions that have appeared
uninterruptedly ever since.
Shakespeare's English has spun around the world,
and his 38 plays have been translated into 50 languages.
"To be, or not to be," for instance,
is understood today by people of dozens of nationalities.
The Oxford English Dictionary
lists a stunning 33,000 Shakespeare quotations.
There have been over 300 film adaptations of Shakespeare,
and almost every person brought up in the United Kingdom
will have read or seen at least one of Shakespeare's plays.
At any given moment,
a Shakespeare play is being performed or read
somewhere in the world,
from London to Broadway to an amateur theatre group in Nepal.
Shakespeare's plays and Tyndale's Bible
have been the two greatest ambassadors
for the English language.
And for the first time,
with Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights,
language supports the professional writer...
the man of letters.
An English that we understand, that is modern,
is in his poetry, prose, and drama.
Old English began here in Friesland as a rough tongue,
but its latest speakers and writers...
the people of England...
learned how to exploit its potential,
and thousands and thousands of new words
were added to its store.
By Shakespeare's time, English is a rich, a glorious language.
And as the Plymouth Pilgrims set sail for America,
they took with them flags to claim foreign lands,
their English bibles, and this remarkable language.
There were new worlds for English to discover,
and English itself was poised to discover a new world of words.