ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the afterlife of William Shakespeare's language: what people have said about it over time; and how Shakespeare language studies have developed, to the points that there are very few Shakespearean linguistic stones which remain unturned. The 1623 Shakespeare First Folio contains a eulogy on Shakespeare written by Ben Jonson. One of Shakespeare's most persistent seventeenth-century critics was Thomas Rymer. A particular eighteenth-century obsession was poetic diction, and Shakespeare sometimes offends. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Shakespeare had truly become part of the cultural fabric of England. The scientific methods were often put to a thoroughly Victorian purpose, to identify evolutionary processes in the development of Shakespeare's language. A full account of Shakespeare's linguistic reputation and of the growth of Shakespearean language studies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would be a lengthy undertaking. David Crystal calculates that Shakespeare was responsible for some 1,700 of these, a very high number for a single author.
