The Nonpareil Wordsmith

   I was looking up an exact quotation by Shakespeare recently. The piece involved was on the increasing opulence bestowed on job titles, sometimes to obfuscate the true character of a job, sometimes to upgrade an ego without having to add cash recompense, and sometimes to modernize a sexist title, like "male" nurse.
     The quote I was searching for turned out to be from "Romeo and Juliet":
          "What's in a name? That which we call a rose
           By any other name would smell as sweet."
     It is almost always misquoted or at least paraphrased. But it was a fitting lead-in to the story I planned.
     However, as I searched through John Bartlett's famed Familiar Quotations, I also browsed. And it struck me again - the first time having been when I took a Shakespeare 101 class in 1943 - how modern Shakespeare remains, at least in his use of the language. He was so expert at innovating pithy slang expressions that a great number, through continued usage over the decades, have become English majors' cliches today.
     In his day not everyone was a fan of his. Voltaire expressed the French sentiment of his time when he declared that Shakespeare had genius "full of force and fecundity, of naturalness and sublimity, without the slightest spark of good taste, and without the least acquaintanceship with rules." And that is true, of course.
     Nevertheless, Shakespeare's literary outflow has been so studied that it has even been taken apart word by word for analyzation. In 1974, for instance, the Harvard University Press issued a 1,600-page tome, titled The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare, wherein each of the 884,647 words in the works of Shakespeare were entered and the context of every one of them given. (Exceptions were the 43 most common words, like "the", used 27,457 times, and ending with "now", used 3,002 times.)
     More than 500,000 quotations illustrate the 29,066 different words used. And each is identified as to source, - play, act, scene and verse, or poem - with the number of times it appears in verse and in prose also noted. I'm not sure who or how many people paid the $40 cost for this wild compilation, but it has served trivia assemblers well.

Samples

     I won't belabor the point, but my bet is that every reader will have used one or another of his quotes at one time or another, probably not even realizing he or she was quoting long-hair prose from the bard of Brittany. Check the following partial list to determine how great a plagiarizer you have been.
   One of the most used has probably been "Love is blind!" It comes from "Midsummer Night's Dream", but the actual quote is:
          "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
           And thereafter is winged cupid painted blind."
     Others?
"The course of true love never did run smooth." - Also from "Midsummer Night's Dream".
"All the world's a stage And all the men and women merely players..." - from "As You Like It".
Misery attracts strange bedfellows. - Actually stated "Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows", from   "Tempest".
"Why, then the world's my oyster..." - from "Merry Wives of Windsor".
Smooth water runs deep. - Actually stated  "Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep" from "King Henry IV".
"Something in the wind" - from "Comedy of Errors".
"True is it that we have seen bettter days" - from "As You Like It".
"Not so hot" - from "A Winter's Tale".
"The naked truth" - from "Love's Labour's Lost".
"Truth is truth to the end of reckoning" - from "Measure for Measure".
"The evil that men do lives after them..." - from "Julius Caesar".
     Still others of his works have each furnished several examples of his rapier wit. In "king Richard III", for example, we find: "How is the winter of our discontent..." and  "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" And in "King Henry IV" there are three prime examples: "He will give the Devil his due...", "The better part of valor is - discretion." and "He hath eaten me out of house and home."
     Found in "The Merchant of Venice" is "It is a wise father that knows his own child", "All that glitters is not gold", and "The quality of mercy is not strained."
     The champs incorporating the bard's wordsmithing, however, are "Othello" and "Hamlet". The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Red Letter Edition, once tallied his most quoted plays and found Hamlet" led with 79 famous passages, including: "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark", "...each particular hair to stand on end...", "Though this be madness, yet there's a method in it", "To be, or not to be? That is the question...", "Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all", and "The lady doth protest too much, methinks".
     From "Othello" we got: "But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve...", "...of hair-breadth escapes..., "Who steals my purse, steals trash...", and "It is the green-eyed monster...".
     Finally, Shakespeare also offers a great line for the columnist to hang his close on: "I'll tell the world" (from "Measure for Measure").