Shakespeare & English????

Shakespeare is probably the most famous of all Englishmen. One of the things he is famous for is the effect he had on the development of the Early Modern Englishlanguage. For example, without even realising it, our everyday speech is full of words and phrases invented by Shakespeare. He was able to do that because English was changing as people modernised it in their normal workaday speech.

One of the ways the grammar was changing was that inflectional endings (suffixes that indicated the word’s grammatical functions in the way that many modern languages still have) had largely disappeared. Modern English was becoming wonderfully flexible and that was the background to the Renaissance explosion of the inventive language we see when we look at the poetry of the time. Shakespeare was a leading figure in that.