A positive and palpable appreciation of the transfixing power of language

From Shakespeare The World as Stage by Bill Bryson.  Chapter 5 page 109.

Much has been written about the size of Shakespeare’s vocabulary. It is actually impossible to say how many words Shakespeare knew, and in any case attempting to do so would be a fairly meaningless undertaking. Marvin Spevack in his magnificent and hefty concordance—the most scrupulous, not to say obsessive, assessment of Shakespearean idiom ever undertaken—counts 29,066 different words in Shakespeare, but that rather generously includes inflected forms and contractions. If instead you treat all the variant forms of a word—for example, take, takes, taketh, taking, tak’n, taken, tak’st, tak’t, took, tooke, took’st, and tookst—as a single word (or “lexeme,” to use the scholarly term), which is the normal practice, his vocabulary falls back to about 20,000 words, not a terribly impressive number. The average person today, it is thought, knows probably 50,000 words. That isn’t because people today are more articulate or imaginatively expressive but simply because 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.

Anyway, and obviously, it wasn’t so much a matter of how many words he used, but what he did with them—and no one has ever done more. It is often said that what sets Shakespeare apart is his ability to illuminate the workings of the soul and so on, and he does that superbly, goodness knows, but what really characterizes his work—every bit of it, in poems and plays and even dedications, throughout every portion of his career—is a positive and palpable appreciation of the transfixing power of language. A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains an enchanting work after four hundred years, but few would argue that it cuts to the very heart of human behavior. What it does do is take, and give, a positive satisfaction in the joyous possibilities of verbal expression.