The writings of Shakespeare are often suffered through by
students in literature classes, and this suffering is generally paired with one
inescapable lesson: William Shakespeare is the most exalted poet to have written in
English. Ever.
Shakespeare is credited with creating (either through
the addition of prefixes or suffixes or through plain old inventiveness) about 1700
words that linger in today's lexicon, including the following: addiction, blushing,
eyeball, lonely, obscene, swagger, and my personal favorite, madcap. To have invented
one or two or even ten words that remain in common use hundreds of years after your
death would be a pretty impressive feat, but to come up with well over a thousand? Well,
that's just (to use one of Shakespeare's
words) zany.
Be that as it may, literature
students still suffer. Shakespeare's writing (along with other things, like the
translation of the King James Bible) may have ushered in modern English, but to today's
readers, it doesn't seem very, well,modern.
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