The switch from verse to prose, or vice versa, can also give us insight into the state of mind of a speaker. In the case of Pandarus (Troilus and Cressida, 4.2.51-6), the switch to prose signals confusion. Aeneas calls on Pandarus early one morning, urgently needing to talk to Troilus, who has secretly spent the night with Cressida. The formal encounter and serious subject matter motivate verse. But Aeneas’ directness catches Pandarus off-guard, who confusedly lapses into prose:

AENEAS

Is not Prince Troilus here?

PANDARUS

Here? What should he do here?

AENEAS

Come, he is here, my lord. Do not deny him.

It doth import him much to speak with me.

PANDARUS Is he here, say you? It’s more than I know,

I’ll be sworn. For my part, I came in late. What

should he do here?

Something similar happens to Polonius, when he gets confused (Hamlet, 2.1.49-51). He has been giving Reynaldo a series of instructions in verse, but then he loses the track of what he is saying:

And then, sir, does a this—a does—

what was I about to say? By the mass, I was about to

say something. Where did I leave?

And Reynaldo reminds him, in verse.

In the case of Benvolio and Mercutio, meeting in Romeo and Juliet (3.1.1-10), we have two very different states of mind signalled by the two modes. The temperate Benvolio begins in verse, but he cannot withstand the onslaught of Mercutio’s prose:

BENVOLIO

I pray thee, good Mercutio, let’s retire.

The day is hot, the Capels are abroad,

And if we meet we shall not scape a brawl,

For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.

MERCUTIO Thou art like one of these fellows that, when he enters the confines of a tavern, claps me his sword upon the table and says ‘God send me no need of thee’, and by the operation of the second cup, draws him on the drawer when indeed there is no need.

BENVOLIO Am I like such a fellow?

And they continue in prose.

In another meeting, between Cassius and Brutus in Julius Caesar (4.2.80-8), the switching between verse and prose acts as a guide to the temperature of the interaction. They are accusing each other of various wrongs. For the most part they speak verse to each other; but when they are on the verge of losing their temper, they switch into prose:

CASSIUS Brutus, bay not me.

I’ll not endure it. You forget yourself

To hedge me in. I am a soldier, I,

Older in practice, abler than yourself

To make conditions.

BRUTUS Go to, you are not, Cassius.

CASSIUS I am.

BRUTUS I say you are not.

CASSIUS

Urge me no more, I shall forget myself.

And Cassius resumes in verse, until once again, Brutus drives him to explode into prose (4.2.112-118):

CASSIUS

When Caesar lived he durst not thus have moved me.

BRUTUS

Peace, peace; you durst not so have tempted him.

CASSIUS I durst not?

BRUTUS No.

CASSIUS What, durst not tempt him?

BRUTUS For your life you durst not.

CASSIUS

Do not presume too much upon my love.

People were evidently very sensitive to these modality changes, and sometimes the text explicitly recognizes the contrasts involved. In Antony and Cleopatra, the summit meeting between Caesar, Antony, and their advisors is carried on in formal verse. But when Enobarbus intervenes with a down-to-earth comment in prose, he receives a sharp rebuke from Antony: ‘Thou art a soldier only. Speak no more’ (2.2.112). And in As You Like It, Orlando arrives in the middle of a prose conversation in which Jaques is happily expounding his melancholy to Ganymede (aka Rosalind). Orlando addresses Ganymede with a line of verse, which immediately upsets Jaques: ‘Nay then, God b‘wi’you an you talk in blank verse’ (4.1.29-30). And Jaques promptly leaves.

Vocabulary

Vocabulary is the area of language least subject to generalization. Unlike the grammar, prosody, and discourse patterns of a language, which are subject to general rules that can be learned thoroughly in a relatively short period of time, the learning of vocabulary is largely ad hoc and of indefinite duration. By contrast with the few hundred points of pronunciation, grammar, and discourse structure which we need to consider when dealing with Shakespeare’s language, the number of points of vocabulary run into several thousands. As a result, most books do little more than provide an alphabetical glossary of the items which pose a difficulty of comprehension.

The question of the size of Shakespeare’s vocabulary, and its impact on the development of the English language, has always captured popular imagination, but at the cost of distracting readers from more important aspects of his lexical creativity. It is never the number of words that makes an author, but how those words are used. Because of Shakespeare’s literary and dramatic brilliance, it is usually assumed that his vocabulary must have been vast, and that his lexical innovations had a major and permanent effect on the language. In fact, it transpires that the number of words in his lexicon (ignoring variations of the kind described below) was somewhere between 17,000 and 20,000-quite small by present-day standards, though probably much larger than his contemporaries. And the number of his lexical innovations, insofar as these can be identified reliably, are probably no more than 1,700, less than half of which have remained in the language. No other author matches these impressive figures, but they nonetheless provide only a small element of the overall size of the English lexicon, which even in Early Modern English times was around 150,000.

The uncertainty in the personal total arises because it is not easy to say what should be counted. Much depends on the selection of texts and the amount of text recognized (as the present edition illustrates with King Lear and Hamlet), as well as on editorial policy towards such matters as hyphenation. In Kent’s harangue of Oswald (The Tragedy of King Lear), for example, the number of words varies depending on which compounds the editors recognize. In this extract (2.2.13-17), The Complete Works identifies 20; by comparison, the First Folio shows 22:

Complete Works: a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave . . .

First Folio: a base, proud, shallow, beggerly, three-suited-hundred pound, filthy woosted stocking knaue, a Lilly-liuered, action-taking, whoreson, glasse-gazing super-seruiceable finicall Rogue, one Trunke-inheriting slaue ...

Other editions reach different totals: one allows a three-element compound word (filthy-worsted-stocking, Penguin); another a four-element (three-suited-hundred-pound, Arden).

The number of words in a person’s lexicon refers to the items which would appear as headwords in a dictionary, once grammatical, metrical, and orthographic variations are discounted. For example, in the First Folio we find the following forms: take, takes, taketh, taking, tak‘n, taken, tak’st, tak’t, took, took’st, tooke, tookst. It would be absurd to think of these as ‘twelve words’ showing us twelve aspects of Shakespeare’s lexical creativity. They are simply twelve forms of the same word, ‘take’. And there are several other types of word which we would want to exclude when deciding on the size of Shakespeare’s vocabulary. It is usual to exclude proper names from a count (Benvolio, Eastcheap), unless they have a more general significance (Ethiop). People usually exclude the foreign words (from Latin, French, etc.), though there are problems in deciding what to do with the franglais used in Henry V. Word counters wonder what to do, also, with onomatopoeic words (e.g. sa, sese) and humorous forms: should we count malapropisms separately or as variants of their supposed targets (e.g. allicholly as a variant of melancholy)? If we include everything, we shall approach 20,000; if we do not, we shall look for the lower figure, around 17,000.