That’s why I prefer the term word-smith instead of linguist. Much more apt depiction of what authors often do. See Shakespeare just making words up willy nilly.
This is quite a bit of a misconception, based on a few things:
Shakespeare was writing in the fairly early days of printing. Caxton’s first press in England was set up barely a century before Shakespeare was writing. This is important because academic dictionaries generally cite the earliest written version of a word that they can find, so a writer from the 16th century with books that were well known in the 18th and 19th will be overrepresented.
Shakespeare was also the odd case of someone writing for popular media (in part… his poems were absolutely targeted at elite audiences and currying favor with them) whose works were comprehensively collected. He was more often going to be the first person writing down stuff that was already seeping into common parlance.
Many of the words he’s credited with coining are compound words or “verbification” of nouns (and vice versa). This can certainly count as making up words, assuming he’s the one who did so, but it’s not willy nilly and isn’t intended to confuse his audience.
One of the reasons I love Shakespeare so much is that when you dive into it, despite anti-stratfordian nonsense, absolutely everything points to a brilliant but not traditionally-educated outsider storming onto the scene and making shit he thought was good and that people would like, with very little regard for how the established creators thought the form should be done. He came to London from the sticks as an actor, but had the beginnings of a classical education back home, but also lived near and circulated among English-language printers and their (often dubiously accurate) books. Most of the things that ended up making him special first pissed off many of the Oxbridge “wits” who were making bank on their side-hustle of writing plays they ripped off from Greece and Rome. Willy Shakes comes along and is like…
“This word doesn’t fit the meter… oh fuckin’ well, guess it’s getting a suffix! Or you know what? This next scene will be in… PROSE, motherfuckers!”
“Some asshole on SIlver Street called me WHAT? That shit’s going in the next play!”
“WTF was that Athenian guy thinking when he went batshit and killed all those dudes? I know… let’s actually tell people!”
“You know what’s fuckin’ hilarious? That all the women in these plays are dudes. How funny would it be if we had a dude playing a lady pretending to be a dude and fending off the ladies, all of whom are dudes! Also, half my poems are totally about how bi I am.”
When I was young I disliked him because I was an anti elitist. Now that I’ve grown older I appreciate how anti elitist he was. He really does remind me of skilled low brow queer artists
Frankly, given the way he was eventually embraced as the god of all writing (one of my professors was fond of saying about other Elizabethan playwrights: Their best stuff was better than Shakespeare’s worst stuff") and how thoroughly but poorly he’s taught, I don’t blame you. The language is simply not very accessible and pretending otherwise turns reading Shakespeare into a chore and liking him into a flex, and yes, I’m keenly aware that I’m not immune here. I think there’s a place, but I really do tend to think we go too hard and too early with teaching entire plays using the original scripts in middle school or 9th grade.
how anti elitist he was
This is such a tough one for me. On the one hand, he was in some ways making outsider art. Most of the “history” in his plays comes from various middle-brow English books that are full of mistranslations and Tudor propaganda, but then he dives into the psychology of these people in a way that can seem crude to modern ears but was absolutely game-changing for English literature. He finds motivation and humanity even in people who are ultimately irredeemable. He played fast and loose with iambic pentameter, and over the course of his career more and more prose crept in. He wasn’t afraid to take down the actual slang on the streets, and even insert it into the mouths of the powerful. While overstated, he absolutely did coin many words and even more famous turns of phrase that never existed before. The work absolutely had low-brow appeal, and it did piss off certain more formally trained writers. Then there’s the fact that it’s barely controversial to suggest he might have been queer (at least as we understand it), and completely banal to suggest his work often had homoerotic subtexts. It also isn’t insane to suggest that he either was a crypto catholic or or at least had sympathies in that direction.
Yet on the other hand, here’s a guy who was seeking the approval and even acceptance of powerful people for his entire lifetime. He glommed onto middling nobles and wrote sonnet after sonnet for them, about them, to them. He dedicated his “serious” work to his various patrons. Then, as the acting company took off, they absolutely dived straight into proto-capitalist adventures and sought out higher and higher patrons, until by the end they were literally “The King’s Men.” Don’t even get me started on the potentially cringy – and definitely historically dubious – efforts to get his family a proper coat of arms. He knew how the game was played, and he actually played it pretty well, basically retiring early to live in the biggest house in his hometown, getting his favorite daughter married off to a doctor, and having multiple beds to bequeath in his will.
That’s why I prefer the term word-smith instead of linguist. Much more apt depiction of what authors often do. See Shakespeare just making words up willy nilly.
This is quite a bit of a misconception, based on a few things:
One of the reasons I love Shakespeare so much is that when you dive into it, despite anti-stratfordian nonsense, absolutely everything points to a brilliant but not traditionally-educated outsider storming onto the scene and making shit he thought was good and that people would like, with very little regard for how the established creators thought the form should be done. He came to London from the sticks as an actor, but had the beginnings of a classical education back home, but also lived near and circulated among English-language printers and their (often dubiously accurate) books. Most of the things that ended up making him special first pissed off many of the Oxbridge “wits” who were making bank on their side-hustle of writing plays they ripped off from Greece and Rome. Willy Shakes comes along and is like…
When I was young I disliked him because I was an anti elitist. Now that I’ve grown older I appreciate how anti elitist he was. He really does remind me of skilled low brow queer artists
Frankly, given the way he was eventually embraced as the god of all writing (one of my professors was fond of saying about other Elizabethan playwrights: Their best stuff was better than Shakespeare’s worst stuff") and how thoroughly but poorly he’s taught, I don’t blame you. The language is simply not very accessible and pretending otherwise turns reading Shakespeare into a chore and liking him into a flex, and yes, I’m keenly aware that I’m not immune here. I think there’s a place, but I really do tend to think we go too hard and too early with teaching entire plays using the original scripts in middle school or 9th grade.
This is such a tough one for me. On the one hand, he was in some ways making outsider art. Most of the “history” in his plays comes from various middle-brow English books that are full of mistranslations and Tudor propaganda, but then he dives into the psychology of these people in a way that can seem crude to modern ears but was absolutely game-changing for English literature. He finds motivation and humanity even in people who are ultimately irredeemable. He played fast and loose with iambic pentameter, and over the course of his career more and more prose crept in. He wasn’t afraid to take down the actual slang on the streets, and even insert it into the mouths of the powerful. While overstated, he absolutely did coin many words and even more famous turns of phrase that never existed before. The work absolutely had low-brow appeal, and it did piss off certain more formally trained writers. Then there’s the fact that it’s barely controversial to suggest he might have been queer (at least as we understand it), and completely banal to suggest his work often had homoerotic subtexts. It also isn’t insane to suggest that he either was a crypto catholic or or at least had sympathies in that direction.
Yet on the other hand, here’s a guy who was seeking the approval and even acceptance of powerful people for his entire lifetime. He glommed onto middling nobles and wrote sonnet after sonnet for them, about them, to them. He dedicated his “serious” work to his various patrons. Then, as the acting company took off, they absolutely dived straight into proto-capitalist adventures and sought out higher and higher patrons, until by the end they were literally “The King’s Men.” Don’t even get me started on the potentially cringy – and definitely historically dubious – efforts to get his family a proper coat of arms. He knew how the game was played, and he actually played it pretty well, basically retiring early to live in the biggest house in his hometown, getting his favorite daughter married off to a doctor, and having multiple beds to bequeath in his will.
Damn, colour me educated as always by you. Thanks, I didn’t know all that about Willy boy there.
Tolkien was both. The linguists describe the languages, the authors create them.