When we attend a good performance of a play, the actors will have worked out the sentence structures and will articulate the sentences so that the meaning is clear. Shakespeare frequently shifts his sentences away from “normal” English arrangements-often to create the rhythm he seeks, sometimes to use a line’s poetic rhythm to emphasize a particular word, sometimes to give a character his or her own speech patterns or to allow the character to speak in a special way. Because English places such importance on the positions of words in sentences, on the way words are arranged, unusual arrangements can puzzle a reader. “The dog bit the boy” and “The boy bit the dog” mean very different things, even though the individual words are the same. In an English sentence, meaning is quite dependent on the place given each word. The language world of this play thus builds gradually and cumulatively, in contrast to most of Shakespeare’s plays where the dimensions of a particular world are clearly laid out in the first two or three scenes. As each new character enters, he brings a few linguistic signs of his past and his character. Ariel enters, bringing with him the language of service: “grave sir,” “hests,” “task” (i.e., put to work), “bad’st” (i.e., commanded) Caliban brings his curses. In the opening scenes of The Tempest, for example, Shakespeare quickly creates the world of the storm-tossed ship, with words like “boatswain” and with such nautical terminology as “bring her to try with th’ main course,” “lay her ahold,” and “set her two courses.” He then builds the island world in which Prospero and Miranda presently live, a world dominated by Prospero’s “art” (i.e., his magic power), a world where Prospero is master of a “full poor cell,” where he “sties” Caliban in a “rock,” a world of “urchins” and “marmosets” and “pignuts.” Simultaneously, he creates the world of Prospero and Miranda’s past, a world of “signiories,” “coronets,” and “tribute,” of “the liberal arts” and “secret studies,” of confederacy and extirpation. Some words are strange not because of the “static” introduced by changes in language over the past centuries but because these are words that Shakespeare is using to build a dramatic world that has its own space, time, and history. In the opening scenes of The Tempest, for example, the word hearts has the meaning of “hearties, good fellows,” hand is used where we would say “handle, lay hold of,” art is used where we would say “learning” or “skill,” brave where we would say “splendid,” and perdition where we would say “loss.” Such words, too, will become familiar as you continue to read Shakespeare’s language. In The Tempest, as in all of Shakespeare’s writing, more problematic are the words that are still in use but that now have different meanings. Words of this kind will become familiar the more of Shakespeare’s plays you read.
In the opening scenes of The Tempest, for example, you will find the words yarely (i.e., quickly, nimbly), hap (i.e., happen), fain (i.e., gladly), wrack (i.e., wrecked vessel), and teen (i.e., trouble). Some are unfamiliar simply because we no longer use them. Shakespeare’s WordsĪs you begin to read the opening scenes of a Shakespeare play, you may notice occasional unfamiliar words. When we are reading on our own, we 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. 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. Most of his vocabulary is still in use, but a few of his words are no longer used, and many of his words now have meanings quite different from those they had in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. More than four hundred years of “static”-caused by changes in language and in life-intervene between his speaking and our hearing. And even those skilled in reading unusual sentence structures may have occasional trouble with Shakespeare’s words.
Others, however, need to develop the skills of untangling unusual sentence structures and of recognizing and understanding poetic compressions, omissions, and wordplay. Those who have studied Latin (or even French or German or Spanish) and those who are used to reading poetry will have little difficulty understanding the language of poetic drama. For many people today, reading Shakespeare’s language can be a problem-but it is a problem that can be solved.
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