If you scroll down you will first Stephen Greenblatt’s speech, then you will see Simon Winchester’s speech.
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Stephen Greenblatt - October 20, 2004
HOW SHAKESPEARE BECAME SHAKESPEARE
Stephen Greenblatt
Professor, Harvard University; Editor, Norton Shakespeare; Author, Will in the World
William Shakespeare created the greatest body of imaginative literature in English and, perhaps, in the whole of Western culture. The interesting thing is that he is not, like Homer, say, a mythical figure. He lived almost within reach. I dedicate Will in the World to my little boy Harry, born in 2001; Harry is named after my father, who was born in 1897, so there is 104 years' difference between the birth date of my father and the birth date of my youngest son. You just put four of those together and you're back in Shakespeare's time - it's not that far away.
He lived in a bureaucratic, record-keeping culture, and there are quite a few traces of him that have been recovered by now, centuries of the frenzied labor of Shakespeare-lovers. The trouble with those traces is that, stripped to their bare bones, the rehearsal of the known facts about Shakespeare's life can be accomplished in about 15 minutes. Where are we then? Or rather, what is it that we are actually looking for? There have been many, many biographies of Shakespeare and many distinguished collections of documents from Shakespeare's life. What happens when we assemble this material? What is it that we want from it?
The trouble is that often we read the available details of Shakespeare's life and feel vaguely disappointed. There's not enough there. What we want we can't immediately have: diaries, journals, love letters - the things that would open up this man and let us see him from the inside. We want to know not simply the details of how he got from one steppingstone in his life to another, we want to know where he came from. What were his parents like? Who were his friends? Who were his lovers? What did he read? What did he fear? What did he long for? What did he think about in the quiet moments of his life? Above all, how did he do what he did?
In the 19th century the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote in his journal about a "secret note" that would explain everything. If you could find out about someone, the secret note, you would be able to put all the pieces of a life together. That longing for the secret note has very much haunted Shakespeare scholarship and the interest in Shakespeare's life. Was it a hidden affiliation with Catholicism? Was it homosexuality in a homophobic world? Or, the best secret note of all, was it in fact someone else who wrote the plays?
I am skeptical about the very idea of the secret note, but there is a mystery to be solved. How do you get from a provincial, middle-class young man - without a university education, without a noble patron; the son of glover, illegal wool dealer and part-time moneylender - to the person who wrote these plays? Solving the mystery of this extravagant passage would not make the wonder of Shakespeare's achievement evaporate; it would only intensify the wonder by connecting what obviously is the first point of an answer, that this is an extravagant genius, an extraordinary man born with unusual, unmatched skills at language, with a flesh-and-blood person who lived in the world, who grappled with problems that ordinary human beings grapple with and confront.
In the face of talent like Shakespeare's - or the talent of Bach or Brueghel, Mozart - we can throw up our hands in pious incomprehension, we can tell ourselves that the artist was a god, he wasn't himself human or that he was in league with the devil. More plausibly, we should throw ourselves into pleasurable contemplation of a kind that professors of literature love to try to induce to create an enhanced understanding of the techniques that he used, his particular love of the alternation of poetry and prose, his way of conjuring up what seem to be living human beings, not simply Everyman but Othello. We can try to understand odd signatures that we barely would notice, little traces in his texts.
But after we've done all this, we want still something more than technical notation in enhanced form. We want to know about the creator as a human being, to observe the creator in his own world. We want to feel that we've understood something about the person who has left us this extraordinary set of not simply documents but what I think of as letters addressed to us. You open the letter, it's from someone who can't possibly have known you existed, because he's been dead long before you came into the world, and yet the letter seems to be written directly to you. How is it possible? How can you understand the person who did this?
Shakespeare in Love
About 10 years ago I was teaching at Berkeley and a screenwriter named Marc Norman called me. He took me to lunch at Chez Panisse and said he was interested in making a film loosely based on the biopic about Mozart, Amadeus. He wanted to make it about Shakespeare, and he wanted to know what to take from Shakespeare's life to build such a movie. I said, "Forget it. It's not interesting. There are real estate documents. There are tax evasion records. There is nothing for a good movie." "What you should do," I said, "is write about Marlowe. That's a great life: great artist; a wild, dangerous man; heretic, blasphemer; homosexual; double, triple, quadruple agent; and eventually stabbed to death through the eye, probably by a government conspiracy. What more do you want?" He said, "No, no. It would have to be Shakespeare." He was certain of that. So I said, "Okay, have Shakespeare have an affair with Marlowe. Then you can bring in Marlowe's life and you can have Shakespeare somewhere in the background of this." "No, no," he said. He was hoping to get money from the Disney Corporation and it was completely out of the question to write what I was proposing.
Then, in 1998, it turns out Norman had teamed up with Tom Stoppard and written Shakespeare in Love - a terrific movie. I hope I won't deeply disappoint you if I tell you it was not historically accurate. But this movie figured out how to get a very large number of people interested in how Shakespeare got from being the quite good journeyman who wrote "Two Gentlemen of Verona" to being the master who wrote "Romeo and Juliet." How is it possible? The movie's answer, of course, was Gwyneth Paltrow. Delightful as that is, there's not a lot of historical evidence for that. But the intuition that is behind that plot - Hollywood fluff as it is - seems to be fundamentally an accurate intuition.
If you want to understand how Shakespeare got from "Two Gentlemen" to "Romeo and Juliet" you have to know a lot about his technical mastery, his genius, the amount of time he spent working on his iambic pentameter, the amount of time he spent thinking about his sources. But you also have to know something about the life he lived, about the way he existed in the real world of flesh-and-blood people whom he was encountering. It's a vital link between the astonishing art, which is what fundamentally matters, and the life that produced this art.
The Life that Produced this Art
When Shakespeare was 13, Shakespeare's father, the successful businessman and civic official, ran into some kind of serious trouble. The father, just before trouble hit, had filed an application for a coat of arms. That was a significant event in the Shakespeare family because it would have meant that the family would move from the 98 percent of the population that didn't hold coats of arms to the 2 percent of the population that could be armigerous, could be classified as gentlemen. It was a huge step, and it made a difference in the life that you lived. It was something that you had to earn - or you deserved, supposedly by your blood, or in the case of Shakespeare's father, by his civic office as the equivalent of mayor of Stratford. But it was also expensive, because it had to go through an elaborate process in the College of Heralds.
Shakespeare's father had filed the application, and then something happened and the roof of his fortunes caved in. He stopped attending meetings of the town council. He started hiding in his house for fear of arrest for debt. He mortgaged his wife's property, which she had brought to the marriage. Shakespeare lost, with his father of course, most of his prospects: the social position, the possibility of being someone in the world.
When Shakespeare was 16, he left school. He could have expected, as the son of the up-and-coming mayor of Stratford, to be sent to Oxford, but that didn't happen. He seems to have been sent to work somewhere as a schoolmaster. No record of him as a schoolmaster has turned up, though there are stories circulating of him working as an illegal schoolmaster. That probably means that he was working in a Catholic household who would have to hire someone whom they could trust, because they were having priests perform mass secretly and illegally in the house.
The family had Catholic connections. Shakespeare's mother was related to one of the wealthiest and most important men in Warwickshire, Edward Arden, who was a very significant Catholic figure. The family fell upon extremely difficult times when Arden's son-in-law, a man named Somerville, took into his head to kill Queen Elizabeth, and then, an even crazier idea, decided to tell people in a tavern that that's what he was going to do. He didn't make it out of Warwickshire let alone get to London to do it. Officials in that part of the country used this occasion not only to arrest and execute Somerville but to get the father-in-law, Edward Arden, who was also arrested, interrogated, tortured and executed.
When Shakespeare was 18, he made a crucial move in his life and it seems to have been a disaster: He married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was apparently pregnant with their first child, because she delivered that child six months after the wedding. In those days they couldn't keep a six-month-old newborn alive, so we can presume for at least the three months prior to that marriage Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway knew each other in the biblical sense. So already, by the time that Shakespeare was 18, fundamental questions were on the table: What shall I do with my life? What is my vocation? What can I discover for myself? In what can I have faith? What can I believe in? What can I stake my fundamental beliefs on? Whom can I love?
Imagining Shakespeare
I've tried to explore these issues in a variety of ways, using evidence, but also using speculation or, as we like to call it, imagination - but I hope imagination based on as close an account of the truth as I can get. For one thing, I've thought a lot about recurrent patterns, apparently obsessive concerns in Shakespeare's life. All of his creative life he comes back over and over again to what I call "the dream of restoration," to a plot in which someone encounters some terrible event - a shipwreck is one of Shakespeare's favorite images for it - that casts him or her up on a shore without identity, without property, without a name, without the security of being a gentleman or a gentle lady. They have to find their way in this complicated situation, to reclaim an identity that they've lost: it's Viola and Sebastian in "Twelfth Night"; it's Orlando in "As You Like It"; it's Marina and Pericles; it's virtually all the characters in "Cymbeline"; it's Prospero in "The Tempest."
You could say that this particular plot is an entirely conventional one, so in itself it doesn't automatically tell you something about Shakespeare's life. But there are lots of conventional plots that Shakespeare could have used, lots of patterns that he could have been drawn to. This is the one that Shakespeare could think through over and over again in imaginatively compelling ways. It seems to me manifestly linked to the man who, at 13, had already lost the position that he thought was just in the grasp of his family, that coat of arms.
Twenty years after that application had been filed by his father, William Shakespeare, who is now prosperous and successful in the London theater world, revives the application for a coat of arms so that he can make his father a gentleman. By making his father a gentleman, he can make himself a gentleman and his children. He was willing to do this in the face of what he must have known would be some kind of social policing for social climbing.
Shakespeare was an actor and a playwright; an actor and a playwright was worthless in the social scale of Elizabethan England. It wasn't anything that would get you the right to call yourself a gentleman, and sure enough, Shakespeare applies through his father's claims. But there is something slightly defensive about the motto that Shakespeare wrote to go with that coat of arms: Non Sanz Droict, "Not Without Right." Well, the clerk who sat in the office writing this application when it was renewed wrote, either because he was incompetent or because he was an incredible wise guy, No, Sanz Droict, "No, Without Justification." The person who was standing next to him, who was almost certainly William Shakespeare, said, "Lose the comma, will you please?" He finally wrote it the correct way. But that wasn't the end of it.
In 1598, Shakespeare's company, The Lord Chamberlain's Men, put on a play by Shakespeare's colleague and rival Ben Jonson that has a fantastically vulgar and coarse character named Sogliardo from the countryside come and buy a coat of arms. I don't know if this happens to you but every once and a while I get in the mail an offer to buy the ancient and honorable Greenblatt coat of arms. Sogliardo does the equivalent in Ben Jonson's play. Everyone is laughing at him, and for a great deal of money, he gets the motto, "Not Without Mustard." Shakespeare got the joke you can be sure, but he did it because it meant something deep to him. But he was also the playwright who created, in his greatest comic block perhaps, the figure of Malvolio, who tries to climb above his station and is ruthlessly humiliated by his world. He understood deeply, from the inside with a form of simultaneous identification and loathing, this position that he found himself in.
Absences and Presences
What other evidence do I use? I talk about absences in Shakespeare's work. This is obviously exceedingly problematic from an evidentiary point of view because there's a lot that is absent in his work - he didn't write about stem-cell research. But I try to talk about the absences that seem interesting, plausible. I start with the assumption, Shakespeare lover that I am, that Shakespeare could represent anything if he wanted to, and so it is striking if he doesn't represent certain things, such as a sympathetic account of sainthood. Shakespeare lived in a world touched with adherence to Catholicism and with many martyrs who were going to their deaths to defend the old faith. It's interesting that Shakespeare is so weary about ideological heroism, about people who are willing to throw themselves into a desperate and dangerous position because of their adherence to an idea. When he represents Joan of Arc, she is a whore in cahoots with the devil. When he represents Henry VI, who is a saintly king, he is an idiot. When he represents Angelo, who is a very prim and proper and highly repressed gentleman, he turns out to be a miserable hypocrite.
Another kind of absence that seems striking is a sympathetic and convincing portrayal of what it's like to be married. Shakespeare is the greatest poet of courtship, of making love in the older sense of making love as wooing, in the English language and perhaps in the world. He is fantastically good at representing what it is to desire someone with all of your heart and soul, but he's not interested in representing what it is to be in a long-term marital relationship. He does it convincingly in his career twice in a sustained way: Gertrude and Claudius, the murderer and villain in "Hamlet," and Lady Macbeth and her charming husband in "Macbeth." What does it mean that those are the two sustained marriages in Shakespeare's world? They are happy marriages. Lady Macbeth and Macbeth call each other by cute names - Dearest Chuck, the equivalent of sweetie pie. What does that mean?
In addition to writing about absences, I write about presences, about fingerprints in the work; the presence of Christopher Marlowe in Shakespeare's imagination - Marlowe, who was from Shakespeare's point of view his greatest rival and whom Shakespeare thinks about throughout his entire career. But it's not only a towering genius like Marlowe who is on Shakespeare's mind, it's a scoundrel like Robert Greene, whom Shakespeare would have encountered when he first came to London. Greene, an extravagant, larger-than-life character who had cultivated a mop of red hair that came to a sharp point from which he hung a jewel in front of his eyes, would abandon his wife and children. He had taken up with a prostitute named Em Ball and her thuggish brother Cutting Ball, who on his deathbed attacked Shakespeare. Attacked him because, unlike Greene, who had degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge, Shakespeare was a mere upstart, an upstart crow beautified with our feathers. That insult stuck in Shakespeare's mind long after Greene was dead. Shakespeare thought about that insult, and he has Polonious in " Hamlet" read an intercepted letter in which Hamlet addresses the most celestial and beautified Ophelia and Polonious looks up and says, "Beautified. That's a vile phrase, beautified."
Finally, I indulge in a series of imaginative exercises to try to conjure Shakespeare at particular moments in his life. A first glimpse of play-acting when Shakespeare was 5 years old, standing between his father's legs. Or the moment at which I believe Shakespeare first kissed a boy playing a girl, in a play by Plautus that the schoolchildren used to perform and that Shakespeare used when he wrote "The Comedy of Errors." Or Shakespeare, as I speculate rather wildly, possibly confessing to St. Edmund Campion in the north of England as a good Catholic. Or Shakespeare listening to the laughter at the foot of the scaffold when the queen's physician Rodrigo Lopez, who was a good Protestant but was said to be of a Jewish family and was reviled as a Jew, said just before his execution, I love the queen as much as I love Jesus Christ. The crowd burst into laughter and Shakespeare, the aficionado of laughter, used that laughter to craft "The Merchant of Venice."
A single glimpse of my method or my madness: I talk about the first time Shakespeare crossed London Bridge. Some of my critics have taken me to task for speculation. Come on guys, there was a first time when he crossed London Bridge. I have somewhat more speculatively imagined Shakespeare crossing it from the south, coming with a troupe of actors after he had run away from his wife and three children. This then might well have been Shakespeare's initial glimpse of London:
An architectural marvel, some 800 feet in length, that a French visitor, Etienne Perlin, called "the most beautiful bridge in the world." The congested roadway, supported on 20 piers of stone 60 feet high and 30 broad, was lined with tall houses and shops extending out over the water on struts. Many of the shops sold luxury goods - fine silks, hosiery, velvet caps - and some the buildings themselves commanded attention: you could buy groceries in a two-story, 13th century stone building that had formally been a chantry dedicated to St. Thomas à Becket, where masses were once sung for the souls of the dead. From the breaks between the buildings there was splendid views up and down the great river, especially to the west; overhead there were scavenging birds, wheeling in the air; and in the river hundreds of swans plucked once a year exclusively for the queen's bedding and upholstery.
But one sight in particular would certainly have arrested Shakespeare's attention; it was a major tourist attraction, always pointed out to new arrivals. Stuck on poles on the Great Stone Gate, two arches from the Southwark side, were severed heads, some completely reduced to skulls, others parboiled and tanned, still identifiable. These were not the remains of common thieves, rapists, and murderers. Ordinary criminals were strung up by the hundreds on gibbets located around the margins of the city. The heads on the bridge, visitors were duly informed, were those of gentlemen and nobles who had suffered the fate of traitors. A foreign visitor to London in 1592 counted 34 of them. When he first walked across the bridge, or very soon after, Shakespeare must have realized that among the heads were those of John Somerville and the man who bore his own mother's name and may have been his distant kinsman, Edward Arden.
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Simon Winchester - November 6, 2003
ADDRESS TO THE CLUB
Simon Winchester
Journalist; Broadcaster; Author, The Professor and the Madman and The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary
I begin with two words that piqued my interest. I was asking one of the lexicographers in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) whether in the 20-volume completed second edition there was anything approaching wit to be found in it, anything to leaven the matter-of-fact amassment of words. This chap Peter Gilliver said, "Maybe inadvertently there's some wit in the OED. Maybe you should look in volume one, the word abbreviator. Look at the second sense of abbreviator." The first sense is fairly obvious: "something that makes something shorter." But the second sense was rather more interesting: "noun; a junior official of the Vatican whose duties include drawing up the pope's briefs." I laughed indulgently. He cautioned me, said, "No, no, no. This was inadvertent wit, because that definition was written by James Murray in 1882 - but the use of the word briefs to denote underwear only became current in 1933."
The second word makes a slightly more serious point than that and comes from a dictionary of marine terms that was written in the 18th century by a man called William Falconer. It is the definition of the word retreat: "the order in which a French fleet retires before an enemy. As it is not properly a term of the British marine, any fuller account would be entirely out of place."
This does permit me to make a fairly serious point: that the dictionaries that used to exist in the English language were, for one reason or another, somewhat wanting. The dictionary, the very idea of a dictionary, is a relatively modern thing. The word dictionary is very old. It was first used in English in about 1230 A.D. But such dictionaries as existed in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries were always bilingual dictionaries. They had a table of English words on one side and their translation into Latin or German or French or Spanish on the other. Somehow the notion of a monolingual dictionary with English words on one side, probably arranged in alphabetical order, and then what they meant also in English seemed alien, unnecessary. The English language was sort of like the oxygen we breathed - we never really cared to take much interest in how big it was or what those words actually meant.
It wasn't until 1604, fairly recently, that the first true English dictionary was created. It was created, for a rather odd reason, by an extraordinarily entrepreneurial schoolmaster from Coventry, Robert Cawdrey, who seized on an opportunity afforded to him. He looked at the way that men and women (largely men), dressed in those days. At the beginning of the 17th century most men wore full-bottomed wigs and ruffled blouses and doublet and hose and very extravagant shoes. They also spoke in an incredibly - one might say ridiculously - extravagant manner. They used really strange words which nowadays are known as inkhorn terms - long and sort of meaningless contractions to impress each other. One that I remember: bulbulcitate. Ugly. Thank God it's gone from the language. Commotrix, archgrammacian - very strange words. And Cawdrey thought, I can make a list of these words and ascribe to them meanings or appropriate places in which they might be used. And if I prepare these words in a slender volume, then these fops that attend dinner parties and salons in Chelsea and Knightsbridge could reach into their blouses and surreptitiously remove this slender volume and say to a lady in which they might be interested, "Madame, might I take you home and bulbulcitate you this evening?" So calling this book A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Usual Words ("for ladies, gentlewomen or any other unskillful persons"), it was duly published in 1604, and it became a smashing commercial success. This prompted a great flurry of imitators, such that by the middle of the 17th century there were dozens of these books - literal dictionaries, English into English - available for sale. But they were all specialists' dictionaries, like Falconer's dictionary of marine, or dictionaries of cooking terms or foodstuffs. There was one on beasts that fly - birds and insects and things like that. By 1660, 1670 there were something like 30 of these dictionaries available, but it still didn't occur to anyone for a long time yet to make a dictionary which encompassed the entirety of the English language. But it did eventually come about, a sort of logical extension of these little books.
The first of these to come about was in 1755, arguably the most famous of all dictionaries of the 18th century (and later): the great two-volume work produced by Samuel Johnson. The great traveler and journalist and parliamentary sketch writer holed himself up in a garret in Fleet Street with five Scotsmen and produced this magnificent two-volume work, The Dictionary of the English Language, which encompassed 40,000 words with, in many cases, multiple meanings ascribed to them. This essentially remained in print for a century. It was the dictionary. Any educated household in Britain would have on its shelves The Book of Common Prayer, Hymns Ancient and Modern, the Bible and the dictionary - by which people meant Samuel Johnson's dictionary.
But Johnson was a very politically inclined man, and many of his definitions show his political leanings. The most egregious example was Johnson's definition of the word oats: "A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland appears to support the people." Fine as it goes, but not exactly what you want to send your child to school with. How about his definition of the word network: "any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections." What on earth does that mean? My absolute favorite is his definition of the word elephant. I think one can fairly assume, the Channel tunnel not having been dug, that not too many elephants were wandering about in London in 1755. Johnson possibly never even saw one, but nonetheless he made a stab at defining what an elephant was. He wrote a four- or five-hundred word lyrical essay in his definition, which culminates with a wonderful paragraph which begins "In copulation." So Johnson clearly saw the value of introducing sex into his dictionary as often as he could. "In copulation, the female elephant is taken by the male lying on her back." I don't think so. Somehow the thought of a young, female elephant lying legs akimbo on the jungle floor with 20 tons of testosterone-engorged jumbo bearing down on her is just something not bearing thinking about. But he covers himself, this Mr. Johnson, because the next word he says, "And such is his pudicity." But by saying this he breeches a cardinal rule of dictionary definition writing - you're never supposed to include in the definition you write any word more complex than the word you're trying to define. And I think you probably all agree that pudicity is a more complex word than elephant. Pudicity comes from the same root as pudendum: "that of which we are ashamed." Johnson goes on, "Such is his pudicity that he never covers the female so long as anyone appears in sight." In other words, he made the whole thing up. Remember, he was a British journalist - and what do they say? You can never hope to bribe or twist the average British journalist. But when you see what he will do unbribed, there is no reason to. Despite those shortcomings, the dictionary remained popular for a long, long time.
However, come the middle of the 19th century, a society was formed in London, The Philological Society of London, with mostly men inquiring into the origin of words and the nature of the English language that they all spoke. They had this hunch that probably the English language was larger than the 40,000 words that Johnson had in. It was only a feeling; they had no knowledge. They also thought it was larger than the dictionary which had been created in 1828 in this country by Noah Webster, which had included 70,000 words. They set up a committee with a highly unglamorous name of the Unregistered Words Committee, which sought to make a list of all those words that could be found which were neither in Johnson's 40,000 or in Webster's 70,000-strong books.
It was announced that on the fifth of November, 1857, there would be a meeting of The Philological Society on the second floor of the London library. As the members were filing in, they saw a hastily tacked notice on the bulletin board which said that the man that was giving the speech, the dean of Westminster, Richard Chenevix Trench, would actually be talking on another subject. He would give a two-part speech called "On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries." He essentially said to them what I've just said, which is that dictionaries are a recent invention, but such dictionaries as we have are not terribly good. Either they don't include as many words as we believe there are in the English language, or such definitions as there are are either wrong, as with elephant, or incredibly and incomprehensibly complex, as with network, or politically inclined, as with oats. "So", he said, "we are Victorian Englishmen. We're imbued with an enormous sense of self-confidence." (One might call it hubris, but at the time, self-confidence.) "Let us gird ourselves to the task of creating a mighty new dictionary which will encompass the entirety of the English language. Every single word that is used or ever has been used, with every variant, spelling and pronunciation, with all the etymologies and all the meanings that the word has enjoyed or suffered over the centuries or decades of its existence. Let us do that.… And I will return next week," he said, "on the 12th of November and tell you how - if you think it's a good idea - this should be done." They all filed out into the fog saying, "A rather good idea. At least, it shouldn't take us terribly long. I'm sure we can do it. It would be better than Johnson used to be, better than that American Webster."
And they came back on the 12th to listen to Chenevix Trench on how it should be done. He said, "The important thing about the dictionary that I have in mind is that is shouldn't be like the French and Italian dictionaries that already exist, a prescriptive dictionary. It should not be a book that prescribes how words should be used, which seeks to preserve the linguistic integrity of the language. We don't care. We are a mongrel tongue. We accept that." We get ketchup (he didn't actually use that example) from Cantonese, amok from Malay, berserk from Icelandic. "We're happy that English should be constructed from all manner of languages. What we want to do is not produce a dictionary that prescribes how words should be used, but describes what they are and how they actually are used. To do that involves a very complex task - we have to read everything that has ever been written, so that every use of every word throughout history can be examined to see what it means."
To give you an example - this wasn't an example that he gave - look at the word dog. In the seventh century, in England, there were a lot of those animals that have a barking head at one end and a wagging tail at the other, but they were universally called hounds. It wasn't until the beginning of the ninth century that a Dutch sailor imported into London from Rotterdam a number of rather pretty hounds that he said were called dogs, from the Dutch D-O-G-G-E. That word first appeared in print in 834 A.D., so the people that were going to make this new dictionary had to look for and find that document from 834 A.D. and see the word D-O-G-G-E in an illustrative context and note it down as the first time that word appears in the English language. And then track it over the centuries, as when in 1120 it appears again but this time without that last "E," D-O-G-G. And then in Chaucer in the early part of the 15th or late part of the 14th century it appears as D-O-G with its current spelling. But then fast forwarding through reams and reams of English literature to the 1920s, when in a crime novel written perhaps in Los Angeles - Mickey Spillane or something like that - you see a reference to "give a glass of whiskey to that dog sitting at the end of the bar." And I don't mean to be offensive here, but they obviously don't mean "a canine animal"; they mean "a less than entirely attractive member of the female persuasion."
That is English, and to annotate that is all part of the job of a lexicographer. "So," he said, "everything needs to be read. You gentlemen sitting here in front of me can't do it on your own. We're not going to create a dictionary out of the minds of a small corps d'elite, a very clever people." What Chenevix Trench said - and this is the key to the OED's success - is that, "To produce a comprehensive descriptive dictionary you have to establish a huge army of volunteers to do the reading for you. You have to send invitations to anyone that's interested, in the entire English speaking world - England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland; or India, North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. Invitations to anyone that's interested to read things intelligently, to look for words - usual and unusual - and find them in sentences that illustrate their meaning. Write those down on cards or pieces of paper and send them into the dictionary offices in London." It's as if the entire English-speaking world is holding a mirror to itself and saying, This is how we speak and read. A much more democratic process, this was the idea that underpins the making of this remarkable dictionary.
What they had to do, once they had decided that they should do this and that The Philological Society of London should underwrite the effort, was appoint an editor. They turned to one of the Holy Trinity of the Unregistered Word Committee, the grandson of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Herbert Coleridge. He was a brilliant chap but, like many of the early players in this game, had no idea of the immensity of the task that lay ahead of him. He sent out invitations for these volunteers to do their work, and slips started to come in, thousands, tens of thousands - a tidal wave, because there was a huge interest internationally in this project. He thought he could probably alphabetize them and accommodate them in just 54 pigeonholes. Out of oak he made a little suite of pigeonholes, 6" by 9", which still exist in the museum in Oxford today, and with that, and with perhaps ten years of hard labor, he might, he thought, produce a book that ultimately would be four volumes long. The immensity of the task got to him very swiftly. He was a very sickly man - young, 31 - but caught a chill coming back from a meeting one night, just a year into the work, and died.
Nonetheless, the methodology was set in place. A second man from this trinity then took over, a complete rogue called Frederick Furnivall. Furnivall was a wonderful man; also a deeply flawed man. You can tell by the fact he did something unpardonable in Victorian times, which was to marry his lady's maid and then divorce her when she had become, as he put it, "indolent and dull," and then marry someone 37 years his junior. He also was fantastically interested in sculling and in enticing women to go sculling with him. There are these photographs of him surrounded by very well-proportioned young women in wet T-shirts rowing with him in Hammersmith in November. By doing this and all manner of other things, the dictionary, under his supervision, very nearly died. The slips that he was supposed to be jealously guarding and putting into an even larger suite of pigeonholes that he built - 1,024 pigeonholes - he lost lots of them. The H slips for instance, he didn't lose them entirely, but they were found in a villa near Florence for some reason. The O slips were found in the house of an incredibly rebarbative lawyer in Brixton, a man called W.J.E. Crane, who refused to give them up for some reason and said if anyone attempted to force them from his house, he'd set fire to them. The PA slips - you may not think they'd be very important until you look at the completed dictionary and see that words beginning with PA occupy 350 pages - they were found neatly folded up to be used as spills to light the fires in an enormous farmhouse in County Cavan in Ireland. Clearly, a man that's so disorganized, as well as being so obsessed with sex and other unseemly things, couldn't long stay as the editor of the dictionary. He was fired.
They turned to another man who had been on the periphery of The Philological Society for a long time, but who was uneducated - a Scotsman called James Murray, who had left school at 14 and had gone to work in a bank in London (and very unhappily at work in a bank) and while spending his time twiddling his thumbs learned a formidable number of languages. Despite the misgivings of a very snobbishly inclined Oxford University Press (OUP) who didn't want to hire someone without a university degree, he was hired. Eventually - he was a strong-minded man - he stood up to the constant entreaties of Oxford University Press to speed up the process. He said, "I'll go as slowly as the process demands." Slowly, the dictionary started to come out. The first volume wasn't really a volume; it was what's called a fascicle - "a soft-sided paperback 352 pages long" - and came out in 1884. It had the words between A and AM: 8,250 words. That gives a measure of the task that they had ahead of them, because if you remember, Johnson's dictionary was 40,000 words for the entirety of the English language.
The process stuttered. Occasionally there were incredible fights between OUP and Murray. He appointed another editor, a freelance journalist who had hitherto been counting cutlery in a Sheffield cutlery firm and also had very little formal education. He went on, this man Henry Bradley, to get an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, a knighthood - all the honors of the country bestowed and showered upon him, as indeed they were upon Murray. With a team of assistants and these great armies of volunteer workers, the dictionary slowly started to come out.
Queen Victoria agreed, in 1897, that she should have the dictionary formally dedicated to her, and then it really couldn't stop, because to stop a royally conceived business would be lèse-majesté of the very worst kind. The dictionary's success was essentially guaranteed from 1897 onwards.
Very slowly the dictionary progressed. Would Murray live to see it finished? No. He didn't, nor did any of the principals. Furnivall, who remained intimately associated, died in 1910. Murray died in 1915, it's commonly believed, when he was working on the word turndown. But, in fact, we find his handwriting on the entry for the word twentieth, which I think has a rather nice symmetry - he was very much a 19th century man completing a very 20th century project. Bradley then took over, but died in 1923. And the first edition of the book was completed under a man called William Craigie, who was dividing his time between Oxford and the University of Chicago where he had been appointed professor of English.
The last word in the dictionary is a Sussex dialect word, a past participle of the verb to see, zyxt. But because the Z words are relatively linguistically easy, they were actually dealt with in about 1919. It was W words with which they finished the dictionary in 1928. The very last word was the word wyzen, in the fascicle wyze, to wizen, which is a Scottish dialect word for "the esophagus, the gullet." That was done on the 6th of April, 1928. The dictionary in its entirety then went to the printer. Far from ten years and four volumes, which is what Coleridge had estimated with his 54 pigeonholes; 71 years, 12 volumes, 414,825 words - even then some words were missing. Radium and bondmaid and all manner of other words that had either been left out or new meanings that had been established during the 71 years were included in a supplement in 1933. Four more supplements were brought out in the 1970s. Then, in the 1980s, with help from IBM and the University of Waterloo in Ontario, everything was re-alphabetized and the current second edition was brought out - 20 volumes, 658,000 words, much bigger than Johnson or Webster back in the 19th century.
Now they're working on the third edition. The third edition is going to be a real monster. They're not beginning with the letter A. They're beginning, oddly enough, with the letter M. They began with M about eight years ago, and they're onto OV - overburdened was the word they were working on last week. John Simpson, the current editor, knows full well that he will not be alive and will suffer the same fate as Furnivall and Murray and Bradley - he won't see what he's completed. But that book: 980,000 words at least, 40 volumes and weighing in at one sixth of a ton, if indeed they do turn it into a book. Many people think it's environmentally irresponsible to do so and it should be only online. I think, as an owner of the OED, that it is such a beautiful, majestic thing that I would love to have - 40 dark blue, gold-blocked volumes - but we have to wait until 2037 to see whether that's a possibility.
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