Shakespeare in Numbers

Nothing definitive is known about Shakespeare but Bill Bryson’s brilliant research and laugh-out-loud writing makes you feel like you’re actually strolling through Elizabethan England, dodging questionable street food and dodging the plague, while reading the Bard of Avon’s biography.

Shakespeare is believed to have been born in 1564 and died in 1616, but many records of his estate vanished in the Great Fire of London in 1666. 

More than 80 different spellings of his name have been recorded. The one we all use isn’t even the Oxford English Dictionary’s top pick (they prefer Shakspere).

It was fun to know that over 50 candidates have been proposed as the “real” Shakespeare. Some people just can’t accept that one guy achieved so much.

By his early thirties, Shakespeare was earning a comfortable 200 to 700 pounds a year – solidly upper-middle-class for the time. He married Anne Hathaway, who was eight years older (a man ahead of his time). 

Shakespeare wasn’t just a writer – he was playwright, actor, part-owner of the company, and probably the de facto director.

A leading actor those days had to memorise up to 15,000 lines in a season. Companies juggled as many as 30 plays at once with only a dozen or so actors, meaning everyone was doubling up roles.

Shakespeare has 20,000 words in his personal vocabulary. Shakespeare's vocabulary showed a more than usual interest in medicine, law, military affairs and natural history. He mentions 180 plants and employs 200 legal terms in his plays.

Source: Open Source Shakespeare

Between 1500-1550, English added 12,000 new words and this man alone gave us 2,035 first-recorded words. 

About half of them still in use today, and old words were employed in ways that had not been tried before. Nouns became verbs and adverbs, adverbs became adjectives. Expressions that could not grammatically have existed before, such as breathing one's last and backing a horse, both coined by Shakespeare, were suddenly popping up everywhere. Double superlatives and double negatives, the unkindest cut of all, troubled no one and allowed an additional degree of emphasis that has since been lost. 

In his peak plays (Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear), he was dropping a brand-new word every 2.5 lines.

Hamlet alone introduced 600 fresh words.

His favourite hack? Slapping “un-” in front of words - Unmask, unhand, unlock, unveil – and 309 more.

Anachronisms abound in his plays. He wasn't much of fact checker preferring to focus on drama instead. So, in plays he put billiards in ancient Egypt and clocks in Julius Caesar’s Rome (1,400 years too early). 

If you check the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, roughly one-tenth of the most memorable lines ever written or spoken in English come from Shakespeare. One guy. One career. That’s not just talent – that’s a statistical miracle!