In that case the average university professor is a moron. When you’re writing books, you don’t just have access to your own limited language, you have acces to a myriad of people’s language you use as sources in a myriad of prose, so when you read their material your word base increases by the amount of books you have read, plus of course the fact that you mix with great writers who inspire you. Shakespeares command of words in literature was average at best, his ability to write prose, mediocre at best considering his peers, his diversity of work well less than even mediocre, but what he did have was imagination, a rich wife and access to lots of material with lots of verbosity.
Is there actually a method to test a writers vocabulary, over a common or day vocabulary? Is there a VQ? Do you have that test to hand? If you gave me the ability to draw all the words in all the books sitting on my bookshelf would my VQ go up?
These arguments are frankly asanine, moribund and worthless, an author who was no more prodigious than most, with no more vocabulary than most, with no more adriotness than most except in one area - to have imagination - wrote a small amount of texts, who the hell cares. It’s not a conspiracy that Shakespeare didn’t write so little, it’s a conspiracy of people who really cannot fathom how many people could of done so. Hell Phillip Marlow would of beaten him if he had lived. What sort of vocabulary did he have? If there were both Shakespeare and Marlow would we be having this discussion? You don’t like Shakespeare, boo fricking hoo, but don’t dislike a man because you cannot fathom someone ordinary who did something great, that was because he had so many sources.