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even the obvious villains, and he speaks from inside them, allowing them to put forward their point of view and give their reasons. Charles Lamb, a keen student of Shakespeare’s characters, took the view that only the “bloat king” in Hamlet was without redeeming qualities. Yet even King Claudius is sharp and shrewd in pointing out—to himself, too—the difference between worldly standards (which are his) and divine ones: he knows the difference between right and wrong. Actors, as Shakespeare intended, have found ways to play Iago, Macbeth, and Shylock in such splendor as to turn these bad men not indeed into sympathetic characters but into powerful studies in distorted values, who grip our attention and make us shiver. And there are literally scores of figures who flick across his scenes and whose weaknesses and follies amuse rather than disgust us. They are the common stock of humanity: flesh, not stereotypes; individuals with quirks and peculiarities; men and women who have stepped out of the street onto the stage to be themselves. They form a mighty army of real people. 13
    Shakespeare gives his characters things to say that are always plausible and often memorable. “The wheel is come full circle.” “All the world’s a stage.” “There is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon!” “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie.” “Sweet are the uses of adversity.” “It was Greek to me!” “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.” “Oh,that way madness lies.” “Thy face is as a book where men may read strange matters.” “Throw physic to the dogs—I’ll none of it!” “To the last syllable of recorded time.” “Murder will out.” “A blinking idiot.” “A Daniel come to judgment.” “A good deed in a naughty world.” “Ill met by moonlight.” “Night and silence—who is here?” “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” “A heart as sound as a bell.” “Put money in thy purse.” “Thereby hangs a tale.” “The green-eyed monster.” “Trifles light as air.” “A foregone conclusion.” “This sceptred isle.” “Call back yesterday.” “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.” “I am not in the giving vein today.” “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” “A plague o’ both your houses!” “I am Fortune’s fool.” “The dark backward and abysm of time.” “A very ancient and fish-like smell.” “Time hath a wallet at his back in which he puts alms for oblivion.” “Dost thou think, because thou are virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” “Why, this is very midsummer madness.” “My salad days, when I was green in judgment.” Shakespeare fills seventy-six pages of the Oxford Book of Quotations .
    Indeed, if there is one area in which Shakespeare lacks moderation, it is the world of words. Here he is, in turn, excitable, theoretical, intoxicated, impractical, almost impossible. He lived in a period drunk with words, and he was the most copious and persistent toper of all. He was an inventor of words on a scale without rivalry in English literature—Chaucer, fertile though he was, came nowhere near. There are different ways of calculating how many words Shakespeare coined: one method puts the total at 2,076; another at about 6,700. There were 150,000 English words in his day, of which he used about 20,000, so his coinages were up to 10 percent of his vocabulary—an amazing percentage. 14 Some were words he took out of the common stock of speech and baptized in print: abode, abstemious, affecting, anchovy, attorneyship, weather-bitten, well-ordered, well-read, widen, wind-shaken, wormhole, zany. He created words by turning nouns into verbs and vice versa, or by adding suffixes. There are 314 instances of his using “un-” in this way, as when Holofernes says in Love’s Labours Lost that Dull is