Shakespeare, Still Talking

October 1, 2026 Colin Lawson Comments 0 Comment

Break the ice, chase a wild goose, call jealousy green-eyed: ordinary English is crowded with expressions Shakespeare used, sharpened or helped preserve. The surprise is how often he gets credit for more than we can prove.

At nine in the morning, you ‘break the ice’ in an awkward meeting. By lunchtime, somebody has sent you on a ‘wild-goose chase’. By evening, jealousy has reared its ugly head as a ‘green-eyed monster’, and you have somehow completed these things ‘in one fell swoop’.

None of this sounds especially theatrical. Yet all four expressions appear in Shakespeare’s plays: The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, Othello and Macbeth.

That does not mean William Shakespeare invented all four. His real influence is more interesting than the old picture of a solitary genius manufacturing modern English at his desk. Shakespeare was a writer with an exceptional ear, working at a particularly energetic moment in the language. He seized existing speech, stretched familiar words into new shapes, built new forms from old materials and put the results into scenes people wanted to remember.

The working writer

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 and died there in 1616. By 1592, surviving evidence places him in London as an established actor and playwright. His output eventually ranged from histories such as Richard II and Henry V to comedies including Much Ado About Nothing, tragedies such as Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth, and later plays including The Tempest. He also wrote narrative poems and the 154 Sonnets.

He wrote for mouths as much as pages. Plays had to work in a crowded theatre, carried by actors to an audience that could not rewind a difficult speech. That encouraged language with shape and snap: an image you could see, a rhythm you could remember, an insult that reached the back of the house.

Print gave those words another life. Seven years after Shakespeare’s death, his fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell helped assemble the 1623 First Folio. It contained 36 plays, 18 of which had not previously appeared in print. Without it, works including Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar and The Tempest might have disappeared.

Shakespeare’s linguistic immortality, in other words, depended partly on a wonderfully unromantic fact: somebody kept the words.

Did he really invent all those words?

Here caution matters.

Shakespeare is routinely said to have ‘invented’ an enormous number of English words. Such claims often began with dictionaries and concordances identifying Shakespeare as the earliest known written source for a particular term. But the distinction between first recorded use and invention is crucial.

If the earliest surviving example of a word happens to occur in Shakespeare, that does not prove he created it. People spoke words before anyone wrote them down. Manuscripts vanished. Books were lost. Much ordinary speech left no record at all. Shakespeare’s works have also been studied with an intensity few other writers could hope to match.

So an early Shakespearean citation is evidence, not a birth certificate.

Even so, the scale of his experimentation is remarkable. Folger research notes that his works provide the earliest recorded examples for words including ‘laughable’, ‘eventful’, ‘accommodation’ and ‘lack-lustre’. Shakespeare also turned nouns into verbs, made compounds and freely attached prefixes and suffixes to existing words.

Take ‘laughable’. In The Merchant of Venice, Salarino describes people so sour-faced that they will not smile ‘though Nestor swear the jest be laughable’. Today, something laughable need not provoke much laughter. A ‘laughable excuse’ is more likely to be hopelessly inadequate than genuinely funny.

‘Lack-lustre’ has travelled even further from the physical image behind it. Shakespeare uses ‘lack-lustre eye’ in As You Like It. A word describing an absence of brightness can now be applied to a disappointing football match, a dreary speech or a quarterly report capable of emptying a room.

Sometimes his word-building is visible without a dictionary. In Richard II, the deposed king calls himself ‘unkinged’. Take king, bolt un- to the front, and an entire political catastrophe happens inside a single word.

That is Shakespeare at his most characteristic. English is not a glass cabinet. It is a construction kit.

Monsters, ice and wild geese

His phrases show the same gift for making an abstract idea physical.

In The Taming of the Shrew, Tranio tells Petruchio that if he can ‘break the ice’ and win Katherina, he will clear the way for the suitors pursuing her younger sister. Today, breaking the ice usually means overcoming the first stiffness of a social encounter. The situation has changed; the image of getting through an initial obstacle has not.

The ‘wild-goose chase’ appears during the dizzy verbal sparring between Mercutio and Romeo. Mercutio complains that their wits are running ‘the wild-goose chase’. The phrase is now almost perfectly suited to modern bureaucracy: a long, irritating pursuit that leads nowhere.

Then there is Iago’s warning in Othello: ‘O, beware, my lord, of jealousy! / It is the green-eyed monster…’

The irony is exquisite. Iago sounds as though he is warning Othello against jealousy while carefully manufacturing it. The metaphor survives because it still does its job immediately. Jealousy is no longer a vague emotion. It has become something alive and hungry.

Macbeth gives us an expression whose modern casualness almost conceals its horrible origin. Today, you might say you completed several errands ‘at one fell swoop’. Macduff says it after learning that his wife and children have been slaughtered:

‘What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?’

The swoop is that of a bird of prey. ‘Fell’ carries the older sense of fierce or deadly. Somewhere along the road into modern English, an image of mass murder became suitable for describing an efficient Saturday trip to the chemist, supermarket and post office.

Language takes strange journeys.

Cream-faced loons and other useful people

Shakespeare’s insults have aged less successfully as everyday vocabulary, which is perhaps our loss.

In Macbeth, the increasingly desperate king calls a frightened servant a ‘cream-faced loon’, then a ‘lily-livered boy’ and ‘whey-face’. Elsewhere Shakespeare’s characters produce such specimens as ‘beetle-headed’, ‘clay-brained’ and ‘greasy tallow-catch’.

The pleasure is largely visual. These are not clinical descriptions of another person’s shortcomings. They are tiny grotesque portraits. Shakespeare understood that ‘I disagree with you’ will rarely command a theatre when there is an opportunity to compare somebody with badly rendered dairy produce.

His language can also trick modern readers because familiar words have altered their meaning.

A Shakespearean character described as ‘naughty’, for example, might be considerably worse than a child who has drawn on the wallpaper. The word could carry the stronger sense of wicked or morally bad.

And when Miranda sees the newcomers at the end of The Tempest and exclaims, ‘O brave new world’, brave can mean splendid, fine or excellent rather than courageous. The expression later gathered a very different atmosphere after Aldous Huxley borrowed it for the title of his 1932 dystopian novel.

Words survive. Their baggage changes.

English as a playground

It is tempting to picture Shakespeare as uniquely reckless with English, but his linguistic inventiveness belonged partly to his age. Early Modern English was absorbing vocabulary, developing new forms and drawing heavily on other languages. Shakespeare was not alone in experimenting.

What made him unusually good at it was dramatic pressure.

He could turn nouns into verbs: grace, season. He could join familiar words into compounds. He could attach prefixes and suffixes where they produced exactly the effect he wanted. And, just as importantly, he could take language already in circulation and place it in such an unforgettable context that later generations associated it with him anyway.

That last point matters. Influence does not require invention.

A musician need not invent the note to play it memorably. Shakespeare did not have to create every word he used. His gift was recognising what English could be made to do.

Why did it stick?

Part of the answer is performance. A memorable expression spoken by a skilled actor to hundreds of people already has an advantage over a phrase sitting unnoticed in a manuscript.

Then came print. The quartos circulated individual plays; the First Folio preserved most of the dramatic canon in one substantial volume. Later editions made the texts more accessible. Schools taught them. Actors kept performing them. Novelists borrowed from them. Newspapers, advertisers, filmmakers and television writers discovered that Shakespeare could be quoted, trimmed, rearranged and parodied almost indefinitely.

But transmission only explains so much. The language itself had to be worth transmitting.

‘Jealous’ is an abstraction; a ‘green-eyed monster’ has claws. ‘Deposed’ is precise; ‘unkinged’ feels like a crown being torn away. ‘Everything happened at once’ conveys information; ‘one fell swoop’ gives that information movement.

That is why counting Shakespeare’s supposed inventions misses the larger achievement. English does not owe thousands of neatly patented words to one man, and Shakespeare does not need the inflated claim. What he left instead is richer: an enormous demonstration of how flexible, physical, funny and surprising English can be.

Tomorrow morning, someone will break the ice. Someone else will be dispatched on a wild-goose chase. Jealousy will turn green-eyed, and three tedious jobs will be finished at one fell swoop.

Shakespeare will be there.

Not necessarily as the man who invented the words in your mouth, but as one of the writers who gave them some of their longest and most interesting lives.

A Few More Things About Will…

Six Shakespeare facts for the interval

His famous birthday is partly tradition. Shakespeare’s exact birth date was not recorded. We know he was baptised in Stratford on 26 April 1564; 23 April became the traditional birthday. Curiously, 23 April 1616 is also the recorded date of his death.
Only six signatures are certainly his. They survive on four legal documents, including his will, and the spelling and appearance of his name vary between them. That makes arguments about the ‘correct’ way Shakespeare himself spelt Shakespeare rather less straightforward than you might expect.
The Globe really did go up in smoke. On 29 June 1613, during a performance of Henry VIII, a theatrical cannon ignited the thatched roof. The theatre burnt to the ground.
Shakespeare’s name was not always the selling point. His earliest plays could appear in print without his name prominently attached. In 1598, Love’s Labour’s Lost was among three plays whose title pages carried Shakespeare’s name, a sign that the playwright himself was becoming marketable.
The Sonnets contain one of literature’s great unidentified initials. The 154 poems were published together in 1609 with a mysterious dedication to ‘Mr. W.H.’. Centuries of speculation have failed to produce an agreed identification.
Juliet was originally played by a male actor. Women did not perform on the professional English stage in Shakespeare’s day; female roles were played by boys or young men, while some comic female roles could go to adult male performers.

Sources

Folger Shakespeare Library, Shakespeare’s Life Read the Folger biography
Folger Shakespeare Library, The Shakespeare First Folio Explore the First Folio
Folger Shakespeare Library, Publishing Shakespeare Explore Shakespeare in print
Folger Shakespeare Library, Small Latin and Less Greek: A Look at the Inkhorn Controversy Read about Shakespeare’s word-making
Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, When Was Shakespeare Born? Read the Birthplace Trust account
Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Shakespeare’s Signature See the evidence for the six signatures
Folger Shakespeare Library editions of The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Macbeth, Richard II and The Merchant of Venice were used to verify quotations and dramatic contexts.