| Article: | The Shakespearean sonnet When you write about William Shakespeare, you use superlatives. The greatest of all writers of English. The greatest writer of anything. The largest vocabulary, the user of most words -- 25,000, 40 percent of which he made up himself. He lived in a period (1564-1616 -- 52 years) of linguistic ferment with splendid, creative writing in the air -- Marlowe, Ben Jonson, the King James translation of the Bible. |