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, they were all at Mermaids Tavern in London having their usual share of fresh ale. John had asked William how he came 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 a blue blood. 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 to teach 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 in school as all classes were taught in Latin except for a few 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 problem since this professor graduated from Oxford. He helped me learn the basics of teaching. We also had a common interest in the theater. He liked the theater but he couldn’t act because he was scared to be on stage. So he dedicated himself 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 you were saying, Chaucer English was only 200 years ago and the new modern English we were learning was very new and still not widely used outside of London. There were no formal books for collecting and defining 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. Later, when we went to Italy during the closure of the Theaters in 1592 and 1593, we learned more about the structure of the plays and how they built 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 begin to use the knowledge we had gained to write many more plays, many 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 have 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 then in Italy where I learned a lot in 12 short months about the structure of language and how works 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 you don’t know what he did. He was spending time formulating his abilities and improving his language. Not just during that black period, but also during his time in London, as a lot of it is undocumented.

He continued to learn the new modern English language through his circle of friends. Even his colleague and sometimes his adversary 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 learned than himself.