See Shakespeare just making words up willy nilly.
This is quite a bit of a misconception, based on a few things:
- Shakespeare was writing in the fairly early days of printing. Caxton's first press in England was set up barely a century before Shakespeare was writing. This is important because academic dictionaries generally cite the earliest written version of a word that they can find, so a writer from the 16th century with books that were well known in the 18th and 19th will be overrepresented.
- Shakespeare was also the odd case of someone writing for popular media (in part... his poems were absolutely targeted at elite audiences and currying favor with them) whose works were comprehensively collected. He was more often going to be the first person writing down stuff that was already seeping into common parlance.
- Many of the words he's credited with coining are compound words or "verbification" of nouns (and vice versa). This can certainly count as making up words, assuming he's the one who did so, but it's not willy nilly and isn't intended to confuse his audience.
One of the reasons I love Shakespeare so much is that when you dive into it, despite anti-stratfordian nonsense, absolutely everything points to a brilliant but not traditionally-educated outsider storming onto the scene and making shit he thought was good and that people would like, with very little regard for how the established creators thought the form should be done. He came to London from the sticks as an actor, but had the beginnings of a classical education back home, but also lived near and circulated among English-language printers and their (often dubiously accurate) books. Most of the things that ended up making him special first pissed off many of the Oxbridge "wits" who were making bank on their side-hustle of writing plays they ripped off from Greece and Rome. Willy Shakes comes along and is like...
- "This word doesn't fit the meter... oh fuckin' well, guess it's getting a suffix! Or you know what? This next scene will be in... PROSE, motherfuckers!"
- "Some asshole on SIlver Street called me WHAT? That shit's going in the next play!"
- "WTF was that Athenian guy thinking when he went batshit and killed all those dudes? I know... let's actually tell people!"
- "You know what's fuckin' hilarious? That all the women in these plays are dudes. How funny would it be if we had a dude playing a lady pretending to be a dude and fending off the ladies, all of whom are dudes! Also, half my poems are totally about how bi I am."