Episode 43 - Shakespeare the Influencer

Preamble: As mentioned in the episode itself, we recorded this episode using Nvidia's Broadcast app for the first time to try and cut down on background noise. Our first tests went fine but this episode wound up coming across as a bit choppy and digitized. Our apologies - we'll be looking to smooth things out for future episodes!

Have you ever wished you (or someone else) could vanish into thin air? Ever refused to budge an inch? Ever thought the game was up? Then, whether you knew it or not, you've been influenced by Shakespeare.

Today's episode goes into the myriad ways Shakespeare still has an outsized influence on our lives, especially in the realms of the English language and literature. We're accompanied for this trip by Stephen Marche's book, How Shakespeare Changed Everything, and we hope you'll join us for the journey down the rabbit hole (not a Shakespearean phrase, to be fair) into how Shakespeare's words continue to change and shape the world today.

Notes:

A quick check in reveals that the English language now has nearly 200,000 words commonly accepted in it, and Shakespeare appears to have used about 32,000, including the 1,700 words he's credited with introducing.

Bernard Levin is the journalist whose quote about Shakespeare's phrase adequately sums up the Bard's influence on everyday speech and idioms. Also available in jpeg form in this handy little graphic.

The Chinese princess Aidan mentions is basically a footnote in the history of the Northern Zhou and Sui dynasties whose story has a bit of a Shakespearean feel to it - her name is Qianjin, and she was married off to the Turkic Khaganate in the sixth century.

Ancient Bickerings:

As we've mentioned many times on this podcast, we are both semi-pro writers who dabble primarily in fiction. So the question this week is: how has Shakespeare influenced you as a writer?

Related to this, we should give a shout out to Ian Doescher, who has done Shakespeare emulation better than anyone! We recently watched a Zoom performance of his Shakespearean adaptation of Dickens' A Christmas Carol and loved every minute of it. Most famously he turned Star Wars into Shakespearean plays, with great success.