This has always seemed a bit of a contradiction to me. Shakespeare has been attributed to creating many of the words we still use today but his plays are also of great importance as they provide a record of common English from a time when most other written sources were in Latin. Also if so many of his words were gibberish to his audience when they first heard them would the plays have drawn such great audiences? Isn't it more reasonable he was just the first person to record slang words instead of inventing them?