Whether or not you know it, you’re quoting Shakespeare

April 26, 2016 • 2:15 pm

From boingboing, Rob Brydon gives us a number of familiar phrases coined by the Bard. I thought I was pretty up on Shakespeare, but many of these were new to me as his own spawn:

A similar but more animated video, by Christopher Gaze (artistic director of Bard on the Beach in Vancouver), is here.

h/t: Barry

27 thoughts on “Whether or not you know it, you’re quoting Shakespeare”

  3. Amusing video! I remember reading “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and being amazed by “what the dickens”. Before reading that, I certainly would have guessed that it had something to do with Charles Dickens, but there it is in that play, some 250 years or so earlier.

    1. “The Dickens” was a euphemism for “the devil.” It was bad luck to mention him directly because he might show up (hence “Speak of the devil”) and then you’ll be sorry.

      1. Over the years I’ve repeatedly heard my mother say that she meant to accomplish a given goal “If it hair-lipped the Devil.”

      2. If the devil would show up one of these days, he could at least clarify whether God created him or not. It’s quite an odd superstition to be concerned about something showing up that’s never been seen.

  4. A few phrases attributed correctly to Shakespeare do in fact pre-date him.

    On the more scatological side, many fans of the Drive-in movie critic, Joe Bob Briggs (a pseudonym) -who rates movies on the basis of body count, blood, and nudity- think he originated the euphemism for sexual relations “making the beast with two backs”- it’s actually from Othello.
    However, it occurs before Shakespeare in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel as “la bête à deux dos” though there was no English translation of this is WS’ day.

    The earliest recorded use of “dead as a doornail” is William Langland 1362 “The Vision of Piers Plowman” “Faith without works is feebler than nothing, and dead as a doornail”
    But William Shakespeare certainly made it more popular with this line from Henry IV Part II “Look on me well: I have eat no meat these five days; yet, come thou and thy five men, and if I do not leave you all as dead as a doornail, I pray God I may never eat grass more.”

    1. I’ve occasionally wondered, when various everyday phrases are attributed to Shakespeare, to what extent he was the first to record them in writing, as distinct from originating them.

      E.g, the metaphor in ‘There’s a divinity which shapes our ends, rough hew them how we may’ comes from preparing blocks for stone fences.

      1. If you read Bartlett’s Quotations, you’ll find that almost every well-known expression predates the person who made it famous.

      2. Ah – only read both your comments after I wrote something similar below! Of course, Shakespeare became so widely read that it was inevitable that he would become the most quoted person in English…

  5. “Faith without works is feebler than nothing, and dead as a doornail . . . .”

    Itself from the King James version I gather, from the Book of James: “Faith without works is dead.”

    IIRC, Mon 4/25/16, NPR “Morning Edition” segment on Shakespeare. Sir Derek Jacobi and another chap disputing that Shakespeare wrote any of what is attributed to him. I took them to mean that Shakespeare couldn’t possibly have been sufficiently educated to write what he did. I guess they do not subscribe to the notion of an autodidact.

    1. It’s an English thing – unless you went to a public school and Oxbridge you are by definition thick.
      I recall an article a few months back which pointed out that given Shakespeare’s family etc he was likely to be pretty well educated – and a quick Google search seems to confirm this – unfortunately there are no records to confirm it.

      1. ‘It’s an English thing – unless you went to a public school and Oxbridge you are by definition thick’

        That’s certainly not my experience.

  7. I can’t find it right now, but I have a book that lists all the words and phrases that, purportedly, were created by Shakespeare.

    The debate about who “Shakespeare” actually was and who really wrote the works of Shakespeare has been going on for many years.
    Some people say deVere, Marlowe, royalty, etc.
    Obviously, a man of such little education as the so’called Bard of Avon couldn’t possibly have written the plays and poems of Shakespeare. In addition, much of the Shakespearean plays were written in collaboration with other playwrights. And, much of the dialogue and actions were extemporaneous and not captured in a permanent form until much later. Whoever wrote the works of Shakespeare: thank you!

    1. Shakespeare seems to have attended a strong secondary school which emphasized the classics even if he never attended a university.

    2. ‘Obviously, a man of such little education as the so-called Bard of Avon couldn’t possibly have written the plays and poems of Shakespeare.’ Well, I’m afraid I think that sentence sums up what is wrong with the anti-Shakespeare crowd: ignorance, a refusal to correct that ignorance and simple snobbery. Learn something about an Elizabethan gramatr-school education. Look into what we do know about Shakespeare’s life. Think about the example of Mark Twain. whose formal education ended at the age of 12, when he was apprenticed to a printer. Read Ben Jonson’s encomium to Shakespeare (he bloody well knew the man and admired him). Read also the list of actors who acted in Shakespeare’s company’s production of ‘Every Man in his Humour’, among whom was one William Shakespeare. Read other contemporary references to the man. Read Edward de Vere’s insipid verse and compare it with Shakespeare’s. （The man who first suggested that de Vere wrote Shakespeare’s plays was fittingly named Looney.) As for claim made for Marlowe, a poet whom I have very great admiration for, Marlowe’s feeling for language and rhythm is wholly unlike Shakespeare’s, as are his sensibility and temperament, and the British Marlowe Society (the American Marlowe Society is sane) are wholly irresponsible in their pretence that Marlowe faked his death, buggered off to Italy or somewhere, and then wrote all of Shakespeare plays and posted them back to England. The British marlines Society even went so far some years ago as to get Marlowe’s name engraved on a window in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey (something Marlowe, who was almost certainly an atheist – they are not so new – would have refused) with a question mark instead of his death-date. The cranks who would like to think that someone other than Shakespeare wrote his work are no better than the drumpfs who go on about Obama’s birth certificate, the fools who think climate change is something invented for some nefarious purpose by a vast conspiracy of scientists and ‘liberals’, and the believers in various other conspiracy theories…

  8. Having lived in a town with a Shakespeare festival (Cedar City, Utah) for seven years, I got to see many of the Bard’s plays. Yet, I was not aware that many of these came from his plays. While some of these phrases might predate him, I suggest that the reason we still know them today is probably a result of his plays.

  10. As a follower of Marston, Greene, Beaumont, Fletcher et al., I would ask, how many were actually ‘coined’ by him as opposed to being expressions of the day which he merely recorded?
    ! 🙂

  12. As far as I know this sort of analysis has only been done seriously with one other source – the KJV. (See _The Great Code_.) So we’re likely quoting that all the time too.

Comments are closed.