Shakespeare’s words and phrases have become so familiar to us that it is sometimes with a start that we realize we have been speaking Shakespeare when we utter a cliché such as “one fell swoop” or “not a mouse stirring.” Never mind that many of the expressions we hear most often “to the manner born,” or from the same speech in Hamlet “more honored in the breach than the observance” are misapplied at least as frequently as they are employed with any awareness of their original context and implication. The fact remains that Shakespeare’s vocabulary and Shakespeare’s cadences are even more pervasive in our ordinary discourse today than the idiom of the King James Bible, which Bartlett lists as only the second most plentiful source of Familiar Quotations.
And much the same could be said of those mirrors of our nature, Shakespeare’s characters. From small delights like Juliet’s Nurse, or Bottom the Weaver, or the Gravedigger, to such incomparable creations as Falstaff, King Lear, and Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare has enlarged our world by imitating it. It should not surprise us, therefore, that personality as vivid as these have gone on, as it were, to lives of their own outside the dramatic settings in which they first thought and spoke and moved.
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