Plutarch wrote 'Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans' (also called Parallel Lives or Plutarch's Lives) somewhere around the second century AD and Shakespeare wrote 'Antony and Cleopatra' in 1606. Shakespeare took 'some' inspiration from Plutarch. Plutarch wrote in Greek, Shakespeare in Elizabethian English.
Here's Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's work:
"...she disdained to set forward otherwise but to take her barge in the River Cydnus, the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, howboys, cithernes, viols, and such other instruments as they played up in the barge.
Here's Shakespeare's work:
"The barge she sat in like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water_ the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which the beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes"
This is definitely no coincidence. What's more interesting is that even though it's almost a fact that Shakespeare had Plutarch open while writing this, we can actually see him doing some creative work. He added some alliteration, and for some reason we humans love to listen to a series of words that all start with the same sound.
Mark Forsyth's Elements of Eloquence uses exactly this example for alliteration, the resemblance between your comment and what he wrote is uncanny. >:(
> “The thing about this is that it’s definitely half stolen. There is no possible way that Shakespeare didn’t have North open on his desk when he was writing. But also, Shakespeare made little changes. That means that we can actually watch Shakespeare working. We can peep back 400 years and see the greatest genius who ever lived scribbling away. We can see how he did it, and it’s really pretty bloody simple. All he did was add some alliteration.”
Excerpt From: Forsyth, Mark. “The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase.”
That's within the style of that book, it has a very light tone and doesn't take itself all that seriously. That paragraph is specifically about alliteration, and I'm sure Forsyth wouldn't actually disagree with you.
In a way it's a rather strange idea, even if not taken to extreme, because his plays absolutely had to be understandable to his audiences, which would have put a limit on how many novel expressions he could have and still be understood. After all, people do sometimes forget that Shakespeare was not merely a manufacturer of devices to torture schoolchildren, but he was, in fact, also a playwright.
Is it possible that what happened was that pre-digitization research was too time-consuming, so the OED overemphasized easily available sources, like Shakespeare, when looking for first uses of words?
Even if his allegedly invented words were entirely novel, I think it's unlikely people would have had issues understanding him. The same mechanisms (combining extant prefixex, suffixex, roots into new combinations and onomatopoeias) are easily visible in slang today—just listen to hip-hop. Just this morning I heard "discriminize" instead of "discriminate" to fit a rhyme scheme. Is that really so different from creating "assassination" from "assassin"?
But, it's a narrow interpretation of the results that this is novel. Etymologists have always been extremely skittish of assigning firm origins to words, much less calling Shakespeare an inventor of them himself. His demonstrated vocabulary is simply massive, and statistically some of the words are going to be early.
This is purely speculative, but I think also that introducing new words, or novel combinations would have kept audiences' ears "on their toes" and tuned in to the dialog. The plays ran 2-3 hours. You have to keep the audience engaged.
Interestingly, one of the major contributors to the original OED was a prisoner who had lots of time to read lots of books and research first uses of words. He had a prodigious memory as well.
I suspect Shakespeare gets the nod so frequently because he wrote a lot of stuff in Early Modern English that survived and was widely available in the 19th century when work on the OED began. Other writers' works were extant, but not widely read or available. The OED notes the earliest printed use of the word meaning, so even if perhaps some dullard like Algernon Sidney used a word first, almost no one actually reads those works, nor read them in the 19th century.
"Interestingly, one of the major contributors to the original OED was a prisoner who had lots of time to read lots of books and research first uses of words. He had a prodigious memory as well."
I studied a reasonable amount of Shakespeare as part of my university English and Drama studies (Class of 2002). While I had a pretty damn good scholar running those courses, I didn't think there was anything unusual in the fact that he always described these as "words or phrases that were first written down by Shakespeare" rather than "invented by". Particularly when it comes to slang, words/phrases are often written down at some distance after they become commonly spoken.
Hopefully the digitisation of additional early modern and medieval works helps with etymology - always frustrating to search for something and get six competing theories, all of which seem equally specious.
Doesn't really support or refute his argument (which I think is good) but this reminds me of a great New Yorker cartoon from many years ago: two woman are walking out of the theatre; the placard shows they have just seen Hamlet. One woman remarks to the other, "That was just one cliche after another"
Here's Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's work:
"...she disdained to set forward otherwise but to take her barge in the River Cydnus, the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, howboys, cithernes, viols, and such other instruments as they played up in the barge.
Here's Shakespeare's work:
"The barge she sat in like a burnished throne, Burned on the water_ the poop was beaten gold; Purple the sails and so perfumed that The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver, Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made The water which the beat to follow faster, As amorous of their strokes"
This is definitely no coincidence. What's more interesting is that even though it's almost a fact that Shakespeare had Plutarch open while writing this, we can actually see him doing some creative work. He added some alliteration, and for some reason we humans love to listen to a series of words that all start with the same sound.