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This category is for English phrases which were invented by Shakespeare, and older phrases which were notably used in his works. The main article for this category is William Shakespeare . Pages in category "Shakespearean phrases"
Shakespeare introduced or invented countless words in his plays, with estimates of the number in the several thousands. Warren King clarifies by saying that, "In all of his work – the plays, the sonnets and the narrative poems – Shakespeare uses 17,677 words: Of those, 1,700 were first used by Shakespeare."
William Shakespeare's play Hamlet has contributed many phrases to common English, from the famous "To be, or not to be" to a few less known, but still in everyday English. Some also occur elsewhere (e.g. in the Bible) or are proverbial. All quotations are second quarto except as noted:
Shakespeare added hundreds of new words to the English language, including many commonly used words and colorful expressions that we still use today.
Shakespeare's standard poetic form was blank verse, composed in iambic pentameter with clever use of puns and imagery. In practice, this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable. The blank verse of his early plays is quite different from that of his later ones.
Shakespeare's funerary monument. The sonnets of Petrarch and Shakespeare represent, in the history of this major poetic form, the two most significant developments in terms of technical consolidation—by renovating the inherited material—and artistic expressiveness—by covering a wide range of subjects in an equally wide range of tones.
With the invention of textual criticism and an emphasis on fidelity to Shakespeare's original words, Shakespeare criticism and the publication of texts increasingly spoke to readers, rather than to theatre audiences, and Shakespeare's status as a "great writer" shifted. Dryden's sentiments about Shakespeare's matchless genius were echoed ...
[b] In it he found words and phrases that he thought were repeated verbatim in William Shakespeare's works, even though Shakespeare had only begun to publish nearly a half a century later. [6] In 1927 he ventured to publish this notion in an article entitled "Il grande tragico Shakespeare sarebbe italiano". [7]