Jul 25, 2008

Shakespeare's Work | Shakespeare's Language

Reading Shakespeare is, among other pleasures, an exercise in historical linguistics. It may not immediately seem so, because Shakespeare is normally known in modern packaging, the typographical appearance of his plays and poems resembling that of modern printed works. But even in its original form Shakespeare's text, despite the erratic spelling and odd punctuation, is in the main recognizable and graspable. Shakespeare wrote early modern English at the end of the sixteenth century, by which time most of the grammatical changes from Old and Middle English had taken place, such as the loss...