The Bard's Bards

                          The Bard’s Bards

Shakespeare lives on in our lives subtly, unconsciously and pervasively. If we were to pay more attention to our daily English conversational exchanges we would be astounded to note that our talk is sprinkled copiously with phrases from the Bard’s writings.

 Hot-blooded.
 I have not slept one wink. 
Love is blind. 
Make your hair stand on end. 
Neither rhyme nor reason. 
Too much of a good thing. 
We have seen better days

Wild goose chase

A fool's paradise

A sorry sight

Brevity is the soul of wit

To be or not to be

What is in a name

Et tu Brutus

His skilled use of certain common phrases lent them an air of extraordinariness, and he further devised many original phrases of his own, with special effects ( like the last one).  These ordinary and not-so-ordinary  words grouped together as conceptual units (phrases) have become a part of the modern English language through its evolutionary history since the time of the Bard. When we speak in English, our talk is intimately laced with Shakespearean quotes and phrases, being applied everyday to new situations, circumstances, events, places and people.

Now, isn’t that exhilarating?  Like being part of a greatness without a conscious effort, as if it’s a gift to all  humanity (since English is a global language) to be used exhaustively without even reading his extensive works.  An everyday example would be –

The wild goose chase led us to places which made our hair stand on end. We were a sorry sight by the end of it, we have seen better days, you see.

But the interesting facet is to know the origin of a phrase that one uses frequently.  The context in which  it was used by the Bard in his plays and verses.

The course of true love never did run smooth -This expression derives from  A Midsummer Nights Dream, 1598:

LYSANDER:
Ay me! for aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth;
But, either it was different in blood,--

Many a true word is spoken in jest -The first author to express this thought in English was probably Geoffrey Chaucer. He included it in The Cook's Tale, 1390:

But yet I pray thee be not wroth for game; [don't be angry with my jesting]
A man may say full sooth [the truth] in game and play.

Shakespeare later came closer to our contemporary version of the expression, in King Lear, 1605: Jesters do oft prove prophets.

Something is rotten in the State of Denmark.
A feeling that something fishy or suspicious is going on. Hamlet: The character Marcellus states this when Hamlet is hallucinating and seeing the ghost of the recently deceased king. This phrase is especially used when describing scandals.

Fair play.

 Miranda: "Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle, and I would call it, fair play." The Tempest, 1610

If music be the food of love, play on. Let us just go on dropping bard lines, ‘cause the be all and end all of all is that the World ‘s a stage and men and women mere players , who have their exits and entrances, or stuff that dreams are made on , our little life without rhyme or reason , may not be just a walking shadow, full of sound and fury , but touching heights, for what a piece of work is man .