Shakespeare 400 Years On

400 years today since Shakespeare was buried certain fathoms in the earth, and yet his book wasn't drowned. It bobbed up, and up again, and lives on in all its word-hoarded, unfathomable glory. Thank goodness. My small act of celebration has been to record a couple of his sonnets and Prospero's speech from Act 5, Scene 1 of The Tempest. You'll find them embedded below.

I find it hard to conceive of a time when Shakespeare wasn't a part of the language - 400-odd years seems too short a time for these collected words to have been around, however much logic insists that Malory and Chaucer and whoever wrote Gawain and the Green Knight or Beowulf were there before him. A very British response, perhaps, to assume that 400 years isn't really that long a time (I remember my American aunt laughing at me for asserting that the house I grew up in - built around the time that the First Folio was published - wasn't "all that old" (I had meant by comparison to other houses in the area but, being young and incautious, let that slide into an implicit state)).

Shakespeare's impact on the language is akin to a large rock being dropped in a pond. His work has created such a tidal set of ripples that they continue ceaselessly, appearing to travel back through the lexicon as much as forward, as they propel all sorts of ideas in unexpected directions.

I have no patience with conspiracy theories about Shakespeare's non-existence, of Bacon or Marlowe or whoever having written the plays. Shakespeare exists in the words attributed to him, in the bound pages of books, in the hearts and mouths of audience and actors, in the pens of writers (be they heavily influenced or appalled by his ubiquity).

Here's to another 400 years of Shakespeare being dead and yet unquestionably, continuously alive. Long may his rippling words stir up the waters of the English language.