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Shakespeare Communicator for the Ages

 

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
HAMLET: Words, words, words.

The brand surrounds me as I write from my perch in Chapel Hill.  To my north, Virginia - named for the Virgin Queen by, uh, Sir Walter Raleigh, namesake of our state capital, just miles to my south.  Mark Knopfler's Romeo and Juliet adds Shakespeare to my auditory environment constant struggle, should I use the ever present phrases left us by the bard himself? Trite or appropriate?:

"Most scholars agree that [Shakespeare] coined somewhere in the vicinity of seventeen hundred words – far more than any other writer in any language. It’s an even more astonishing feat when you consider that nearly 10 percent of Shakespeare’s vocabulary of twenty thousand terms was new to him and to his audience. In a sense, he’s easier to understand now, because we are familiar with words like farmhouse and eyeball and softhearted and watchdog. We’ve lost an entire dimension of the original Shakespeare experience. Imagine going to a new play and hearing for the first time sanctimonious or lackluster or fashionable. That freshness is lost to our ears."
Stephen Marche, How Shakespeare Changed Everything

 

Go here for a list of words coined by Shakespeare.  It's hard to get past the A's without suspicion.  Come on.. really?

Auspicious

Amazement

DUKE VINCENTIO: Look, the unfolding star calls up the
shepherd. Put not yourself into amazement how these
things should be: all difficulties are easy
when they are known.

Assassination

Addiction

Wha...? No way!

Eventful

As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII

JACQUES: Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history...

And our most sticky phrases...

What a great source this is for analysis of the impact of Shakespeare's art of language on today's world.

http://shakespearesenglish.tumblr.com/

 

this poem fits the narration since love survives the tempest

just as character survives the storms of the English Channel

“Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken."

(Sonnet 116)

 

Images of Phillip 2