![]() Shakespeare essentially wrote for two audiences: those who were educated, and those who were not. Shakespeare made great use of what people knew and what they didn’t know. Take the time to read the plays aloud, and you will gain new insights into the language of Shakespeare. A play is a dynamic thing where all the action takes place on a stage, instead of taking place inside your head as when reading a novel. The words of Shakespeare’s plays are meant to be spoken aloud. This object before verb structure is found in Germanic languages, and the inverted sentence structure reflects the English language’s Germanic roots. Translation: I sent the nurse at nine o’clock she promised to return in a half an hour.Shakespeare: The clock struck nine when I did send the nurse In half an hour she promised to return.Translation: He looks like an overly flattering tavern keeper.Shakespeare: How like a fawning publican he looks.Translation: Stop singing and leave quickly.Shakespeare: Break off thy song, and haste thee quick away.Shakespeare quite frequently wrote sentences in inverted, or backwards, order: ![]() Students of Shakespeare often have trouble understanding the sentence structure in the plays. This is why many words made rhyming sense back in this time period, such as love and prove, which make no rhyming sense today. There were also regional differences in dialect during this era. The Great Vowel Shift was the transformation of the old vowel sounds of Early Modern English into the new vowel sounds (a,e,i,o,u) that we know today in Modern English.īecause of the difference in vowel sounds during the 16th century, the accents of Elizabethan England were radically different from the accents of modern British English speakers. Shakepeare took advantage of this situation by using a lot of wordplay that incorporated the Great Vowel Shift within many of his famous puns. Early modern English was evolving into the language that we speak now, Modern English. Part of the genius of Shakespeare was that he was writing at a time when the language was rapidly changing. Learn to get the gist of Shakespeare by appreciating his word play and the syntactical (word order) differences of Early Modern English. Students of the sonnets and plays of Shakespeare often dread reading his works because of the language barrier between Early Modern English and Modern English. ![]() Take the fear out of Shakespeare by learning a few generalities of Early Modern English – the language of the Renaissance. ![]()
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