![]() 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. These “local” references build the Rome that Brutus, Cassius, and Caesar inhabit and that will become increasingly familiar to you as you get further into the play. Julius Caesar, for example, builds, in its opening scenes, a location and a past history by frequent references to the Tiber River, to Pompey and to “Pompey’s blood” (i.e., Pompey’s sons), to the feast of Lupercal, to the Capitol, to “trophies” on the “images,” to “soothsayers,” to “the ides of March,” to Brutus’s ancestor (Brutus the Liberator), to the Colossus at Rhodes, and to Aeneas and Anchises. Some words are strange not because of the “static” introduced by changes in language over the past centuries but because they are used by Shakespeare to build a dramatic world that has its own geography and history and story. ![]() In the third line of Julius Caesar, for example, the workingmen are called “mechanical” what is meant is that they are “working men.” At 1.2.328, Cassius says that he will throw writings “in several hands” in Brutus’s window we would say “in different handwritings.” At 1.2.171, Brutus says “I am nothing jealous” where we might say “I have no doubt.” Such words, too, will become familiar as you continue to read Shakespeare’s language. In Julius Caesar, as in all of Shakespeare’s writing, more problematic are the words that are still in use but now have different meanings. Words of this kind will become familiar the more of Shakespeare’s plays you read. In the opening scenes of Julius Caesar, for example, the words fain (i.e., gladly), marry (an old oath “by the Virgin Mary,” which by Shakespeare’s time had become a mere interjection, like “indeed”), and doublet (a close-fitting jacket worn by Elizabethan men) all appear in Casca’s speeches beginning in Act 1, scene 2, line 231 ( 1.2.231). 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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