The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare | English, Elizabethan
English, Elizabethan. The language community into which Shakespeare was born was one in which the majority must have spoken the regional dialect of the West Midlands—a variety of English normally limited to the spoken word. The fact that it was so restricted was remarked on by John Hart, an early phonetician and spelling reformer, in 1569; he pointed out that books should not be printed ‘in the manner of … Westerne speeches’, although the written form was an acceptable means of communication between speakers of the same regional dialect, who might write ‘according to their mother speech’, and could also do so to a friend in London, who would be ‘no more offended to see his writing so … than if he were present to hear him speak’. But if the citizens of Stratford-upon-Avon wished to converse with someone from another region, they might find it desirable to use what, by the later 16th century, had become a standard form of speech; as the...
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