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To say that Shakespeare's writing is incomprehensible is to say that the English language is incomprehensible. Shakespeare not only wrote his plays in the English language, he invented much of the English language as we know it today. At least one thousand words that we use currently Shakespeare invented. For instance, the word "lonely" appears for the first time in the English language in The Winter's Tale. A word that we use so readily to describe and understand a particularly poignant emotion of alienation came from Shakespeare's inventive genius.

In fact, "invention" is a central term in understanding Shakespeare's craft with language. Often he seems to invent language improvisationally just as he invents human character that endures in literature and life up until today. German romantic critics frequently refer to Shakespeare's genius with language in terms of a "spark," a lightning bolt of insight that enters his plays and changes our language and perception of the world in an instant. In the Renaissance, invention meant discovery as a result of searching or endeavoring. Although today our notion of what "essay" means is dreadfully prosaic, the word has its root in the verb, to essay, meaning to search, to discover, to taste, to try. All of Shakespeare's plays exude the sense of a playwright essaying all aspects of life, and finding, discovering, bending, contextualizing, inventing language to represent the world which he makes both strange and uncanny, while, at the same time and in an uncanny way, Shakespeare's world in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century becomes increasingly our own.

We often forget that the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages did not have a dictionary. There was no dictionary of the English language until Samuel Johnson produced one in the late eighteenth century. Words had not yet been codified and concretized. Language remained available to Shakespeare like a treasure chest of untapped linguistic wealth. It is difficult for us to imagine a world in which there was no printed archive of words and their definitions. As Shakespeare wrote his plays for performance, I imagine him creating language in the same manner in which actors improvise their parts. At the same time he labors as a poet to bring craft and order to his work. We also often forget that Shakespeare uses colloquialisms, jargon and a language that derives from London culture in the late 1500s and early 1600s. A great deal of the language we cannot comprehend in Shakespeare's

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