2 - ‘Now, sir, what is your text?’ Knowing the sources

Summary

It is often said that we know so little about Shakespeare – there are so few biographical facts. But the one incontrovertible fact is the language, as seen in the texts which have survived – the First Folio of 1623, the Quarto editions of the plays, and the editions of the poems. Whether you believe that a man called Shakespeare wrote or co-wrote all or some or none of the works ascribed to him in, say, the Cambridge collected works, the fact remains that we have a body of work in (a period of) the English language which has enthralled generations, both as theatre and as literature. And the bottom line, for any linguist, must be: how on earth did he do it? How can anyone manipulate language to produce work like that? As we have seen, it cannot be reduced to such simple notions as ‘having a large vocabulary’ (the quantity myth), or ‘coining a lot of words’ (the invention myth). Nor can we avoid the language question by saying such things as ‘it is the themes he wrote about’, or ‘it is the vividness of his characters’, for others can present the same themes and characters without achieving the same impact (the translation myth). In any case, the only way we know about those themes and characters in the first place is through the language he has chosen to express them.

The focus for this study of Shakespeare, then, is not so much on ‘what he says’ as on ‘the way that he says it’.