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“undressed, unpolished, unconcealed, unpruned, untrained or, rather, unlettered, or,rather, unconfessed fashion.” Some of these “un-” words, such as uncomfortable and unaware, rapidly became common use. He added “out-” too—outswear, outvillain, outpray, outfrown. Some of these neologisms did not catch on. There were 322 words that only Shakespeare ever used. Others, as noted above, caught on fast—bandit, for instance; ruffish; charmingly; tightly. Some words were rejected at the time but then rediscovered in his texts by romantics such as Coleridge and Keats—cerements, silverly, and rubious, for example. Sometimes Shakespeare just had fun with coining words like exsufflicate or anthropophaginian. Or he flicked off expressions in sheer polysyllabic exuberance—“corporal sufferance” instead of bodily pain, or “prenominate in nice conjecture.” Among his new, long words were plausive, waffure, concupiscible, questant, fraughtage, prolixious, tortive, insisture, vastidity, defunctive, and deceptious. (The last is a rival to “dublicitous,” coined by an American secretary of state in 1981.) But although he could be polysyllabic and prolix for effect, Shakespeare used short English words of Anglo-Saxon origin to drive the plot forward and produce action, as in the tense, tightly written murder scene of Macbeth , where everything is cut to the dramatic bone. And he used short words for beauty, too, as in what many think his most striking poem, The Phoenix and the Turtle (1601), on the chill but powerful subject of pure, deathless love. These thirteen quatrains followed by five tercets are composed with virtuosic skill almost entirely of short, usually one-syllable, words. 15
    Phoenix was clearly written to be read aloud—if well spoken it is much more easily understood—and to a musical background, possibly to be sung. Reading Shakespeare to oneself, or watching it acted on a purely spoken stage, is a falsification, for the musical dimension is omitted. The age was musical, the last spasm of the polyphonic art of the Middle Ages in which England led the world, and the theater reflected this love of music. Even the grim and gruesome Henry VIII composed music, and his daughter Elizabeth fought tooth and nail to preserve the sacred musical splendors of her Chapel Royal from the Puritan vandals. Shakespeare, as his verse—whether blank or rhymed—testifies, had a wonderful ear for sound, and that he loved music isunquestionable—it runs in and out of his plays at every available opportunity, not just in the hundred songs but at almost every part in the acting. Elizabethan theater companies included actor-musicians and professional instrumentalists who could play difficult instruments like hautboys (oboes), horns, and trumpets in a variety of ways. Music was used to accompany onstage battles, duels, processions, and ceremonies; to signal doom or increase tension (as in movie and television drama today); to mark changes in character or tone in the action; to enhance magic and masques; and in general to add depth to a play. The prosperity of the Chamberlain–King’s Men, the increasing size of their theaters, the taste of the times, and, not least, Shakespeare’s own passion for music and his ingenuity in working it into his scenarios and verse meant that music played an increasing role in his work, especially in his last plays. The Tempest is a musical play, like the earlier, experimental Midsummer Night’s Dream ; so is A Winter’s Tale . Shakespeare emphasized musical abstraction by casting his lines overwhelmingly in verse rather than prose and by stressing imagination and the metaphysical—even the supernatural—rather than realism, though, being the worldly man he was, he interpolates the earthy and the real, as in The Tempest , with vivid scenes of shipwreck and drunken comedy, to keep the feet of his audience firmly on the ground even while he was mesmerizing their senses. 16
    On many