What the hell was Shakespear on about?

Question

It's all "verily" this and "thoust not becoming m'lady" that. What an asshole.

Answer 1

Thou shouldst know that language doth change over the years. Even as you're talking, it's changing a little bit every day--new words, new expressions, new uses of old words. I'll bet, when you talk to your friends, you don't sound much like your grandparents did when they were your age. I'll bet, when you talk to your parents or older folks you respect, you don't talk the same way as when you're just hangin out with your friends. I'll bet your grandparents (and nobody else) would have referred to anyone as "an asshole" in public writing, say, fifty years ago.

Shakespeare wrote for the folks in his day. Like script writers for movies today, he had to keep the audiences coming or his plays wouldn't have been produced--and he wouldn't have made a living doing it all those years.

Street gangs used to go in droves and mess around in the pit of his Globe theater. (The upper crust sat on balconies out of their way, but they all paid their admission.) When they didn't like a play or a character they hissed and booed out loud; they brought snacks to eat or bought them from pedlars just like some folks get popcorn and sodas at movies today. If they didn't like a play they might throw scraps at the stage--apple cores, peach pits, you name it. They must have liked his "verily's" and "forsooths" all right, because they kept going and paying their money.

Shakespeare's language is now called Early Modern English. If you wanna see how language can really change, go back two or three hundred years to a popular writer of the time named Geoffrey Chaucer (nowadays in the US he would probably spell his name Jeffrey and be called Jeff). You can hardly recognize his language as English at all. His most famous work begins, "Whan that Aprille with his shores sote..." (or something like that), meaning in modern terms, "When April with its nice showers...." His language is called Middle English.

Or go back a few hundred years before that to a popular work called Beowulf. Most folks couldn't read then, but heard it recited by somebody at their get-togethers while they drank something like beer. That language is now a foreign language called Old English or Anglo-Saxon, and you would not understand it at all. It might sound to you a little bit like German or Norwegian, NOT French or Italian--or today's English.

You may not much like Shakespeare's language, but give the guy his due. Not much of what we write these days will still be in print and selling well four hundred years from now!

And, by the way, he didn't even publish his own works. He just provided scripts for actors. Some of his friends collected those scripts and had them printed up in what is called a folio edition.

Shakespeare meant these words to be acted out on a stage by really good actors, not to be read in some stuffy textbook with footnotes or to be required by teachers in a school somewhere off on the other side of the world. If he were still alive, he would probably write a play in which some of the comic characters would make fun of people who read plays that way. He would probably even call them assholes.

Answer 2

Have you seen the Bill and Ted movies? If so, then extrapolate - if that is the future and it sounds so weird to you now, then see how the past is a stepping stone to the future. Everything changes and Shakespeare (bless his little lower class heart) was trying to appeal to the educated and the ignorant of his time with words, actions and scenarios that would elicit the preferred response - laughter, emotional lift or drop whether it was comedy, tragedy or merely historical retelling. If you are a teenager, there is hope you will learn from Shakespeare as you age and have experience to gauge your reading but if you are an adult, you may have to actually work at understanding.

Answer 3

Ever read a King James Bible?There's a reason it's called middle english,"thou sallow-faced,mongrel cur,thou thick-tongued,addle-pated lumpkin."

Answer 4

In about 300 years people will probably say the same thing about the way we speak now.

Answer 5

I'm sure you would have gone over real big in the year 1600 too.

Answer 6

Dude, that's like how they talked in those days. They weren't all hip and sh*t like us, yo. Ya'll understand? Strait.

Answer 7

He was a skag fiend.