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Comment by atchoo | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many of the classic Shakespeare lines were actually popular idioms of the time rather than novel creations.

I imagine if the works of only one contemporary cliche ridden author survived in 500 years time, they would appear to be a literary genius without the context that shows them to be mediocre.

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If that were the case then we'd expect a similar level of wonderful lines in the works of his contemporaries, but he was very clearly a standout wordsmith even compared with other fine writers such as Marlowe, Middleton, Webster and Jonson etc.

It's not that his are the only works to have survived, they're simply the only ones we still speak of in regular conversation.

There's quite a lot of work on this kind of thing; any edition of Shakespeare with good notes will alert you where a line resembles something 'proverbial'. One thing you notice is that although he often alludes to proverbial sayings, he seldom includes them verbatim - more often, it is a glancing, passing suggestion of them, or he uses them with a twist, or as part of some more complex figure of speech he is developing.

edit: there's actually a great example in the article: "No man’s pie is freed from his ambitious finger".

I recently watch "Upstart Crow" which is full of jokes about this - a running gag is Shakespeare claiming he created all these phrases and another character citing exactly the date and author of an earlier reference. Well - it's funnier in execution than I just made it sound...

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