《莎士比亞：作為舞臺的世界》（節譯）

Much has been written about the size of Shakespeare'svocabulary. It is actually impossible to say howmany words Shakespeare knew， and in any caseattempting to do so would be a fairly meaningless undertaking.Spevack in his magnificent and hefty concordance--the mostscrupulous， not to say obsessive， assessment of Shakespeareanidioms ever undertaken--counts 29，066 different words inShakespeare， but that rather generously includes inflected formsand contractions. If instead you treat all the variant forms ofa word--for example， take， takes， taketh， taking， tak'n， taken，tak 'st， tak 't， took， tooke， took'stand tookst --as a single word (orlexeme， to use the scholarly term)， which is the normal practice，his vocabulary falls back to about twenty thousand， not a terriblyimpressive number. The average person today， it is thought，knows probably fifty thousand words. That isn't because peopletoday are more articulate or imaginatively expressive， but simplybecause we have at our disposal thousands of common words--television， sandwich， seatbelt， Chardonnay， cinematographer--that Shakespeare couldn't know because they didn't yet exist.