This is a few days old but I did a search and didn’t see it posted anywhere. I was aware of a lot (most) of these phrases but not all of them. The uh, disadvantages of an engineering education. 
Anyway, very cool…
I’m fond of citing “son and heir of a mongrel bitch” from King Lear.
I need to memorize that in its entirety…
KENT: A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking knave; a whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; a one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.
broken meats = left-overs
worsted-stocking = inferior [because worsted (wool) stockings were inferior to silk ones]
action-taking = litigous, running to the law instead of using manly self-defence
glass-gazing = given to gazing into mirrors
superserviceable = officious, a ‘little hitler’
finical = nit-picking
bawd = whore master
the composition of = the result of combining
pandar = pimp
thy addition = your personal description
Hell of a passage, isn’t it? (I don’t know for a fact whether we get “son of a bitch” from WS, but it wouldn’t surprise me.)
And incidentally, you’re hardly alone–look what this guy has done with a degree in Astrophysics:
Hell of a passage, isn’t it? (I don’t know for a fact whether we get “son of a bitch” from WS, but it wouldn’t surprise me.)
And incidentally, you’re hardly alone–look what this guy has done with a degree in Astrophysics:
“All’s well that ends well.”
Wonder if “black-guarding” would be one? That’s a very real concept in my Scotch-Irish background, still used today. It basically means bad-mouthing your neighbor but goes a little deeper than that. Since a lot of our traditions were “brung over” lol I wouldn’t be surprised if it was coined by Shakespere.
I always thought the phrase “Make the beast with two backs” is one of the more hilarious descriptors for sex; I believe its from “Othello.”
She missed “salad days” from Antony and Cleopatra and “it’s Greek to me” from Julius Caesar. Also some sayings from Polonius, particularly “to thine own self be true” and “neither a borrower, nor a lender be”. “Gild the lily” is a corruption of a Shakespeare line.
A close runner-up is “Groping for trouts in a peculiar river,” from Measure for Measure.
Wow, interesting. Thanks for the link.
My senior high school English teacher actually told us that the reason this refers to sex is this:
A “beast with two backs” is clearly a 2-humped camel
So clearly “making a beast with two backs” refers to “humping”.
I guess he wanted to take our minds away from the obvious mental image. Or maybe he didn’t like the missionary position.
Roddy
These kinds of “words and phrases we owe to Shakespeare” are a fairly common meme, but is it really that Shakespeare coined them, or rather that his work features their earliest written occurrence? Especially for raunchier expressions, it may be that they were in common spoken usage before Shakespeare, but he was the first to dare write them into a play.
I remember my English teacher in high school had a poster with all of his sayings. It started with, “If you’ve ever said ‘I bite my thumb at you’ you’re quoting Shakespeare.”
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…
- Henry V
A fair observation, but how do we know? For example, I refuse to believe that he coined eyeball. Since ‘ball’ traces back to the 12th century, I find it hard to believe Shakes coins eyeball four centuries later.
Did Shakespeare invent this phrase? I’ve always wondered.
Child Rowland to the dark tower came,
His word was still 'Fie, foh, and fum
I smell the blood of a British man.
King Lear, Act 3, scene 4
Yup. I dislike some of those ‘if you’re saying these words you’re quoting Shakespeare…’ posters because some of them are such ordinary words; no other writer since has coined a word as common as eyeball, and they were doing exactly the same job as Shakespeare. And it’s an eye, which is in the shape of a ball; it doesn’t take Shakespeare to see that.
In context it’s as certain as can be that ‘to be or not be’ was a Shakespeare original. but even phrases like ‘sweets for the sweet’ may have been common axioms.
Still, part of the reason we know some of those words and phrases is because Shakespeare used them in his plays, which were really popular, popular enough to get saved in a written form and then revived repeatedly, so Shakespeare does deserve some of the credit.
That’s not in the verse form Shakespeare usually used - it’s in an old English verse form: iambic tetrameter for the fee, fie, fo um, I smell the blood of an Englishman [I’ve seen it as English, not British, but it scans the same]), and it also has all the traits of someone quoting something else.
Here’s a poster like that, but the one you mentioned isn’t on it. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre Gift Shop
Click on “Zoom” for a more legible image.