this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025
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This will be part of a series of reminders over coming months that Shakespeare will have truly coined a smaller number of phrases than he's given credit for, and very few words at all. Dictionaries source by earliest known written use, and Willy Shakes was a unicorn for that purpose.
He was an upjumped middle-class prodigy from barely a century after the introduction of the printing press, with a mediocre education by the standards of the day, writing prolifically for both popular and elevated audiences. He was also famous enough in his own day to have had his collected works published, and the fact that his reputation exploded after his death ensured those volumes survived. He would have been writing slightly differently from many of his contemporaries, and a much higher amount of what he wrote has survived.