For many people today, reading Shakespeare’s language can be a problem—but it is a problem that can be solved. Modern readers may need to develop the skills of untangling unusual sentence structures and of recognizing and understanding poetic compressions, omissions, and wordplay. And even those skilled in reading unusual sentence structures may have occasional trouble with Shakespeare’s words. Four hundred years of “static”—caused by changes in language and life—intervene between his speaking and our hearing. Most of his immense vocabulary is still in use, but a few of his words are not, and, worse, some of his words now have meanings quite different from those they had in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In the theater, most of these difficulties are solved for us by actors who study the language and articulate it for us so that the essential meaning is heard—or, when combined with stage action, is at least felt. When reading on one’s own, one must do what each actor does: go over the lines (often with a dictionary close at hand) until the puzzles are solved and the lines yield up their poetry and the characters speak in words and phrases that are, suddenly, rewarding and wonderfully memorable.
The language of Shakespeare’s poems, like that of poetry in general, is both highly compressed and highly structured. While most often discussed in terms of its images and its metrical and other formal structures, the language of the poems, like that of Shakespeare’s plays, also repays close attention to such basic linguistic elements as words, word order, and sentence structure.
The New Folger Library Shakespeare editions of Shakespeare’s plays and poems offer readers assistance in understanding Shakespeare’s language with notes and images placed beside the play text. They also include essays on how Shakespeare uses language in each work. The following Web pages are adapted from four of these New Folger Library Shakespeare essays—one for a comedy, one for a history play, one for a tragedy, and one for the Sonnets.
The Comedies: Reading Shakespeare’s Language in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Histories: Reading Shakespeare’s Language in Henry V
The Tragedies: Reading Shakespeare’s Language in Hamlet
The Poems: Reading Shakespeare’s Language in The Sonnets
Adapted from Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (editors), the New Folger Library Shakespeare editions. © 2005 Folger Shakespeare Library
