Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2010
The psychology of creative writing can be approached numerous ways, but among the most direct is to scrutinize the creativity of the single most outstanding exemplar of the phenomenon. In the case of English literature that exemplar's identity leaves little no room for doubt. The appropriate author is the person known as William Shakespeare, a writer long considered the greatest playwright and poet in the English language. So prominent and durable was his influence that modern English is very much a repository of the hundreds of words and expressions that the Bard himself devised (Macrone, 1990). For instance, he enlarged the lexicon with the verbs “blanket,” “champion,” “gossip,” “misquote,” “puke,” “swagger,” and “torture”; the nouns “eyeball,” “mountaineer,” and “pageantry”; and the adjectives “bloodstained,” “domineering,” “fashionable,” “majestic,” and “unreal.” And Shakespeare coined such durable expressions as “in my mind's eye,” “all the world's a stage,” “full circle,” “good riddance,” “in my heart of hearts,” “to thine own self be true,” “heart on my sleeve,” “hob nob,” “an itching palm,” “caviar to the general,” “the dogs of war,” “eaten me out of house and home,” “a dish fit for the gods,” “fair play,” “for goodness' sake,” “foregone conclusion,” “household words,” “a lean and hungry look,” “the milk of human kindness,” “one fell swoop,” “to the manner born,” “the primrose path,” “short shrift,” “too much of a good thing,” “what the dickens,” “neither rhyme nor reason,” “neither a borrower nor a lender be,” “more in sorrow than in anger,” “brevity is the soul of wit,” “brave new world,” “bated breath,” “uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” “what's past is prologue,” “a tower of strength,” “a spotless reputation,” “laugh oneself into stitches,” “knock, knock! Who's there?
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