4 ms·
The dated language is only part of the problem. The bigger issue in my opinion is that most of his plays are written like poems, intentionally using lyrical ra
by nfw2 4y ago
The dated language is only part of the problem.
The bigger issue in my opinion is that most of his plays are written like poems, intentionally using lyrical rather than natural language.
Consider the lines:
"Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss"
The main barrier to understanding this isn't the word choice; most readers know what these words mean (expect maybe palmer); it's the way the sentences are constructed. Shakespeare's English contemporaries like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke are much easier to decipher, whereas many modern poets are similarly opaque.
- goto11 4y agoThe lack of context make the quote hard to understand. Why is she talking about hands and why is she calling him a pilgrim? In context it makes much more sense. The verse is an answer to Romeos pick-up line.
- AlbertCory 4y agoIt's called "elevated language." That used to be what people expected from plays. It's not a "problem" unless you expect everything to read like David Mamet.
- nfw2 4y agoThe "problem" is the fact that the commenter, as well as many other readers, find Shakespeare's language difficult to parse and enjoy. Obviously this is subjective. My only point was that the difficulty is more attributable to style than vocabulary.
- themadturk 4y agoThe plays aren't written like poems, they are poems, like most plays of the era, and the language was also the literary language of the day. This is the way plays were written in the 16th and 17th centuries.