Some Notes on Shakespeare's Language
 

 

This site is under construction: yet here are a few notes that may be of assistance to you.

Shakespeare did not write in "Old English." Old English, also known as Anglo-Saxon, is a Germanic language spoken by the English prior to 1000. Beowulf is written in Old English. Here's a sample:

Hwaet, We Gar-Dena in geardagum,

peodcyninga prym gefrunon

hu tha aepelingsas ellen fremedon!

(The "p"s are really thorns, pronounced "th," but I have no symbol for them in my fonts.)

 

So Shakespeare is in modern English. That should make you feel better.

 

Here is a quick note about meter. Meter is the rhythm in poetry. Each line is made up of a number of "feet"--the most common are trimeter (three feet) tetrameter (four feet), pentameter (five feet) and hexameter. Feet consist of two or three syllables, in some combination of short or long. Shakespeare mostly write in iambic pentameter: iambs are one short and one long (buh-BUH), five of them in a row.

But sometimes Shakespeare shifts and uses other feet, like spondees (two long: BUH-BUH), for effect, so it's best to check. Here's a little poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to help you remember the different kinds of feet:

  • Trochee trips from long to short;
  • From long to long in solemn sort
  • Slow spondee stalks; strong foot! yet ill able
  • Ever to come up with dactyl trisyllable.
  • Iambics march from short to long--
  • With a leap and a bound the swift Anapests throng;
  • One syllable long, with one short at each side, Amphibrachys hastes with a stately stride;-- --
  • First and last being long, middle short, Amphimacer Strikes his thundering hoofs like a proud highbred racer.

I admit to "borrowing" the "stress and unstress" graphic from the Compton's article on poetry, and it is a fabulous site for much more information.

 

For more detailed information: here is a link to Ian Lancashire's Representative Poetry On-line site. You will want to look at the glossary, especially under chiasmus and antithesis, but don't stop there.

 

 

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maaron@csupomona.edu