Lucky’s Reviews > Shakespeare: The World as Stage > Status Update
Lucky
is on page 114 of 199
He coined—or, to be more carefully precise, made the first recorded use of—2,035 words…
Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, critical, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany, and countless others (including countless). Where would we be without them?
— 2 hours, 29 min ago
Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, critical, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany, and countless others (including countless). Where would we be without them?
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Lucky
is on page 116 of 199
Yet English was struggling to gain respectability. Latin was still the language of official documents and of serious works of literature and learning. Thanks in no small measure to the work of Shakespeare and his fellows, English was rising. “It is telling,” observes Stanley Wells, “that William Shakespeare’s birth is recorded in Latin but that he dies in English, as ‘William Shakespeare, gentleman.’”
— 2 hours, 23 min ago
Lucky
is on page 115 of 199
If we take the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as our guide, then Shakespeare produced roughly one-tenth of all the most quotable utterances written or spoken in English since its inception—a clearly remarkable proportion.
— 2 hours, 26 min ago
Lucky
is on page 113 of 199
In many ways the language Shakespeare used was quite modern. He never employed the old-fashioned seeth but rather used the racier, more modern sees, and much preferred spoketo spake, cleft to clave, and goes to goeth. The new King James Bible, by contrast, opted for the older forms in each instance.
— 2 hours, 31 min ago
Lucky
is on page 112 of 199
Much of the language Shakespeare used is lost to us now without external guidance.
— 2 hours, 34 min ago
Lucky
is on page 109 of 199
Shakespeare’s genius had to do not really with facts, but with ambition, intrigue, love, suffering—things that aren’t taught in school. He had a kind of assimilative intelligence, which allowed him to pull together lots of disparate fragments of knowledge, but there is almost nothing that speaks of hard intellectual application in his plays
— 2 hours, 37 min ago
Lucky
is on page 103 of 199
Almost the only “rule” in London theater that was still faithfully followed was the one we now call, for convenience, the law of reentry, which stated that a character couldn’t exit from one scene and reappear immediately in the next.
— 2 hours, 49 min ago
Lucky
is on page 102 of 199
In the rush to entertain masses of people repeatedly, the rules of presentation became exceedingly elastic. In classical drama plays were strictly either comedies or tragedies. Elizabethan
playwrights refused to be bound by such rigidities and put comic scenes in the darkest tragedies—the porter answering a late knock in Macbeth, for instance. In so doing they invented comic relief.
— 2 hours, 51 min ago
playwrights refused to be bound by such rigidities and put comic scenes in the darkest tragedies—the porter answering a late knock in Macbeth, for instance. In so doing they invented comic relief.
Lucky
is on page 78 of 199
Shakespeare got maximum effect from the gender confusion by constantly having his female characters—Rosalind in As You Like It, Viola in Twelfth
Night—disguise themselves as boys, creating the satisfyingly dizzying situation of a boy playing a woman playing a boy.
— Jan 17, 2026 07:47PM
Night—disguise themselves as boys, creating the satisfyingly dizzying situation of a boy playing a woman playing a boy.
Lucky
is on page 78 of 199
For many of a conservative nature, stage transvestism was a source of real anxiety. The fear was that spectators would be attracted to both the female character and the boy beneath, thus becoming doubly corrupted.
This disdain for female actors was a Northern European tradition. In Spain, France, and Italy, women were played by women.
— Jan 17, 2026 07:46PM
This disdain for female actors was a Northern European tradition. In Spain, France, and Italy, women were played by women.
Lucky
is on page 74 of 199
The patron afforded the actors some measure of protection, and they in turn carried his name across the land, lending him publicity and prestige. For a time patrons collected troupes of actors rather in the way rich people of a later age collected racehorses or yachts.
— Jan 17, 2026 07:38PM
