A language like no other
His language is the richest of any in literature. In it we find some fifteen thousand words, according to the book, covering the terms of heraldry, music, sport and the trades, the speech of the nobility, many dialects and plenty of slang, and a thousand inventions made in haste or in idleness. Shakespeare delighted in words and explored their corners. He loved the word in itself and would pour a handful onto the page in jest or carelessness; when he named one flower he named ten or twelve others, for words, in his view, had their own perfume. He put long, many-syllabled speeches into the mouths of simple people. He played with grammar, turning nouns, adjectives and even adverbs into verbs, and verbs, adjectives and even pronouns into nouns, and he sometimes used a plural verb with a singular subject and the reverse. We should remember that English grammar had not yet been codified in his time. And he wrote fast, with no leisure to revise.
This remarkable style, artificial and irregular, is not free from the faults of its lawless wealth: twisted, over-elaborate sentences, far-fetched conceits, tiresome play on words, puns in the midst of tragic events, piled-up and clashing metaphors, repetition, flat quips, and now and then comic bombast from characters who do not suit such talk. Had Shakespeare been classically trained he might have avoided ambiguous words; but consider what we would have lost. Perhaps when Ferdinand says of Armado (the book writes 'Adriano') that he has a mint of phrases in his brain, a man whom the music of his own proud tongue enchants like a charming tune, Shakespeare had himself in mind.
From that mint came coins that circulate almost worldwide: the winter of our discontent; the piping time of peace; the wish that is father to the thought; tell truth and shame the devil; uneasy lies the head that wears a crown; gild the lily; one touch of nature makes the whole world kin; Lord, what fools these mortals be; the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose; midsummer madness; the course of true love never did run smooth; to wear my heart upon my sleeve; every inch a king; to the manner born; and brevity is the soul of wit. That last phrase is a hint that we too should be brief. Of metaphor, thousands of examples could be given, and one will do: the sails conceiving and growing big-bellied with the wanton wind. Whole passages everyone now knows could also be named: Ophelia's rambling talk of herbs, Antony over the body of Caesar, the death of Cleopatra, Lorenzo's view of the music of the spheres; and many songs, such as 'Who is Sylvia?', 'Hark, hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings' and 'Take, O, take those lips away'. One might say that audiences came to Shakespeare's plays not only for the stories but for the splendor of their surface.
Imagination: images instead of thoughts
Shakespeare said that the lunatic, the lover and the poet are all made of imagination. He was like two of those three, and perhaps he glimpsed a fourth world as well. With each play he builds a world, and not content with that he fills countries, forests and thorny thickets with childlike magic, quick fairies, spirits and fearsome witches.
His imagination, which created his particular style, thinks in pictures rather than thoughts: every thought becomes an image, and every abstraction a concrete, visible thing. Who but Shakespeare (and Plutarch) could make Romeo, banished from Verona, envy the dogs and cats that may look on Juliet's face when he may not? Who but a poet could make the banished duke in As You Like It grieve that he must hunt creatures fairer than men? It is no wonder that so sensitive a spirit reacted passionately to the ugliness, greed, cruelty, lust, suffering and sorrow that at times seemed to rule the world.
The craft of drama
His inventive power was weakest in the craft of drama. As a man of the theatre he knew the tricks of his trade well. He opened his plays with scenes and words meant to catch the attention of spectators who were busy cracking nuts, playing cards, drinking beer and ogling the women. He made full use of props and stage machines. He considered the actors' temperaments and created parts to suit their bodies and natures. He observed all the devices of disguise and recognition, scene changes and the difficulties of staging within the play itself. Yet here he plainly hurried. Sometimes one plot set within another splits the play in two: what has Gloucester's tragedy to do with Lear's? Nearly all the stories turn on improbable coincidences and hidden identities, and the revelations are not always well timed.
In a drama or opera we may be asked to pretend for the sake of the story or the tune, but the artist should reduce the 'baseless fabric' of his dream to a minimum. Inconsistency of time or person matters less; perhaps Shakespeare, bound by speed and overwork and indifferent to publication, supposed that his excitable audience could not notice such flaws. Classical rules and modern taste also object to the bloodshed that stains Shakespeare's stage; it was meant to hold the attention of spectators who stood in the pit, and was an attempt to compete with the 'butchery school' of the dramatists of his day.
As he developed, Shakespeare mixed bloodshed with humor and learned the hard art of using wit to deepen tragedy. His first comedies are all wit and mischief; his first history plays, empty of wit, are dry and tasteless; in Henry IV tragedy and comedy follow each other but do not blend; in Hamlet the blending is complete. Sometimes the jesting seems too broad; Sophocles and Racine, classical masters, would not have joked about the majesty of man or a horse's water. A love-joke is sometimes more to the taste of people today. Shakespeare's humor usually comes from good nature, not from enmity toward mankind as Swift's did. He felt that the world was more gracious for a clown or two; he bore patiently with fools and, like God, made no distinction between them and the philosophers who argued about the world.
The living characters
Shakespeare created his greatest clown with the same mastery with which he made Hamlet, and this is the surest test of a dramatist's mastery. Richard II and Richard III, Hotspur and Wolsey, Gaunt and Gloucester, Brutus and Antony rise from the corners of history and live anew. In Greek drama, and even in Balzac, imaginary persons have not so much lasting character and vital force. The persons who seem contradictory in their make-up are the most real: Lear is both tyrannical and tender-hearted; Hamlet is thoughtful, passionate, hesitant and brave. Sometimes the heroes are quite simple: Richard III is the figure of wickedness, Timon of skepticism, Iago of hatred. Some of the women in the plays are of one mold: Beatrice and Rosalind, Cordelia and Desdemona, Miranda and Hermione drift away from the real world and then come to life with two or three words. When Hamlet tells Ophelia he never loved her, she, without wishing to answer in kind, says in sad and moving simplicity: 'I was the more deceived.' Sensitivity of feeling, a likeness of feelings, an astonishing grasp of the senses, keen sight, swiftness of transition, attention to telling details and a strong memory all come together and produce this teeming city of the dead, or of imaginary people.
In all the plays these persons become real one after another and attain complexity and depth, until in Hamlet and King Lear the poet takes on the form of a philosopher, and his dramas become magnificent compound thoughts.