Shakespeare's Influence on English Language
William Shakespeare, an English poet and playwright, lived for 52 years as his biography confirms. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and Works of Shakespeare, is second only to the Bible in English speaking countries. William Shakespeare's influence extends from theatre to literature to present day movies and to the English language itself. In this paper, I would like to introduce Shakespeare's influence on English language in three aspects.
First, Shakespeare contributes to English language on its word vocabulary. When began writing his plays, the English language was rapidly absorbing words from other languages, mainly as Greek and Latin and so on. By the age of Elizabeth, English had become widely used with the expansion of philosophy, theology and physical sciences, but many writers lacked the vocabulary to express such ideas. To accommodate, writers like William Shakespeare expressed new ideas and distinctions by inventing, borrowing or adopting a word or a phrase from another language.
Besides introducing new words and phrases, experimenting with blank verse, Shakespeare also devotes to some basic principles of English language. Prior to and during Shakespeare's time, the grammar and rules of English were not fixed. But once Shakespeare's plays became popular in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, they helped contribute to the standardization of the English language. He expanded the scope of English literature by introducing new poetic
and grammatical structures.
Apart from Shakespeare's richness of his language, the range and depth of his characterizations, the fecundity of his imagination that make his works so important and famous, his popularity may also owe to the happy accidents of history. Without the prosperity, strength and power of Britain at that time, Shakespeare would almost certainly not have achieved or retained the dominance he now enjoys. The fruit is not only of his genius but of the virility of British imperialism, which propagated the English language on every continent.
Shakespeare has insidiously become our familiar. We daily use phrases popularized by Shakespeare like ''brave new world,'' ''the primrose path'' and ''sound and fury,'' and even those of us who have never seen a play associate Romeo and Juliet with doomed love and Hamlet with existential indecision. In fact, his influence on English language has been so pervasive that he has become part of the very literary air we breathe.
