Shakespeare’s riddle answered

Shakespeare’s riddle is how did he learn so many words to write his plays?

Let William Shakespeare answer that question for himself.

When we last heard from the original Will.i.am, everyone was at Mermaids Tavern in London having their usual share of fresh beer. John had asked William how he got to be so educated with limited formal education.

William finished his answer the following month and started like this…

My formal education ended when I turned 15. I couldn’t go to places like Oxford because I wasn’t blue blooded. So I turned to my family to work and provide assistance to the home and family. I was lucky, I would say because one of his teachers at his school fell in love with him.

He got me a teaching job at his school teaching Latin to the younger children. With people converting from Catholic to Protestant, they did not use the Latin language and would not be able to learn it in school as all classes were taught in Latin except for some which were taught in Greek. He also spent time teaching me the new modern English. How it was structured and many of the words that were used.

It was a big deal since this professor graduated from Oxford. He helped me learn the basics of teaching. We also had a common fondness for the theater. He liked the theater but he couldn’t act because he was scared of being on stage. So he turned to dramaturgy. This is what he showed William.

He showed her the structure, how the play was written, the flow, the words, and how to make up your own words.

Remember I was saying, Chaucer English was only 200 years ago and the new modern English we were learning was very new and not widely used outside of London yet. There were no formal books to collect and define words, so it was very easy to make up the words needed to complete a sentence.

Because the Catholic church was using Latin, they would use some of those words and the Latin structure for tenses, adverbs, pronouns, etc. Then when we went to Italy during the closing of the Theaters in 1592 and 93 we learned more about the structure of the plays and how they constructed their stories. We also learned to form more words while learning the Italian language.

When the theaters opened again in 1594, we were able to start using our knowledge that we had gained to write many more plays, many of them based on what we learned in Italy. I would also say that the theaters and plays in Italy were very beautiful and that their theaters had been in use since Roman times.

So he concluded, I hope this helps you understand where I come from. I have limited formal education, but have taught myself and been lucky enough to get help from other sources. My friends here at our company have been the greatest asset to my learning. Also my good friend and tutor in Stratford and later in Italy, where I learned a lot in 12 short months about the structure of language and how plays originated and how they are written.

Many of his works were written a long time ago and many have been written recently. But the structure remains the same and is very similar to what we do here. So it just helped me do my job better and that is to provide good works for the company and our great actors.

So there you have it. William Shakespeare was very busy during those periods called the black years, where it is not known what he did. He was spending time formulating his skills and improving his language. Not only during that black period, but also during his time in London, as much of that is undocumented.

He continued to learn the new modern English language through his circle of friends. Even his colleague and sometimes adversary of his Ben Johnson. He was a very competent debater and challenged William almost every time they met. William took advantage of these occasions to learn more from a man more educated than himself.