Handing The Baton - Chaucer to Shakespeare

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When I saw this video I wondered whether all these expressions could really be attributed to Shakespeare. It turns out that many of them do appear in Shakespeare, so it’s fair to associate them with him.  But not all were necessarily invented by him. In several cases, he picked up phrases that were already around and gave them such vivid dramatic life that they stayed with us. For example, “heart of gold” and “love is blind” were in circulation earlier, but Shakespeare made them memorable. On the other hand, expressions like “wear my heart upon my sleeve” or “it was Greek to me” are much more clearly his.

It’s also useful to remember that Shakespeare didn’t work in isolation. Two centuries earlier, Geoffrey Chaucer had already done something revolutionary—he showed that English could be a serious literary language at a time when educated writing was dominated by Latin and French.

Chaucer quietly gave us many words and expressions that now feel completely natural. Everyday words like busy, gentle, gossip, virtue, fame, sentence, and tavern come into regular use through him. He also left us expressions that still sound familiar:

Time and tide wait for no man
All good things must come to an end
The truth will out

In a way, if Chaucer had not come first, Shakespeare could not have done what he did. But if Shakespeare had not followed, English might have remained capable but unremarkable. One made English possible; the other made it memorable.

Then there is the enormous influence of the King James Bible, which shaped spoken English for centuries simply because it was read aloud so often. Phrases like “the salt of the earth,” “the powers that be,” “the writing on the wall,” “by the skin of my teeth,” and “go the extra mile” come straight from Biblical verses and slipped seamlessly into daily speech.

Shakespeare’s genius was not only in inventing phrases, but in making language sound so right that it felt as if it had always existed. He expanded English’s expressive range, stretching it—perhaps for the first time—to convey interior conflict, ambiguity, emotional contradiction, and sudden shifts of thought.

It’s also heartening to know that one of our former Country Managers, now well into his eighties, has gone back to reading all 38 of Shakespeare’s plays afresh. That kind of lifelong engagement says a great deal about the enduring pull of Shakespeare’s language.

You may also want to read my piece on:  When 'Nothing' means nothing...and also everything!

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