Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard (10 page)

K
ENT
: Fellow, I know thee.

O
SWALD
: What dost thou know me for?

K
ENT
: A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats, a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy-worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson glass-gazing super-serviceable finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.

Son and heir of a mongrel bitch
… Classy.

Scene 2

A library

T
he Ghost of Olde Englishe rears its ugly head. I know a lot of people think the hardest thing about Shakespeare is the difficult words.

Rather wonderfully, I can tell you it’s not a big problem. I know (because I’ve counted them) that only a very small number of the words found in Shakespeare’s works are difficult to understand.

Of the 900,000-odd words in Shakespeare, as we’ve seen, only 5 per cent of them would give someone wandering around the 21st century a hard time. What’s more, you could go through life never understanding what they mean, this 5 per cent, and still love every one of Shakespeare’s works.

Well hang on
, you might say,
5 per cent is still an awful lot of words
. But that total includes words used dozens of times, like
bootless
(= useless). There are long stretches of text where we don’t encounter any difficult words at all, or one of the easier ones, like
morn
.

If you look at the vocab as you would a foreign language – spend a little time learning, to stretch the analogy, how to ask for a drink in Shakespearian – then another level of his plays will open up to you.

The language he uses is something we need to take care of. We can’t ignore the fact that Shakespeare is over 400 years older than us, after all, and he used different slang words, different swear words, had different ways of saying
I love you
. Not only that, but he went through a completely different education system from us, read different books as an adult, and so made different cultural references in his plays.

He would have studied Greek and been fluent in Latin (he would have had to speak Latin at school every day). If you studied a foreign language like French, German or Spanish at school you probably had about 1,500 hours of study. Shakespeare would have had over
20,000
hours of Greek and Latin study, which is at least part of the reason why there are so many references to Greek gods and bits of Latin scattered throughout his plays. That was a fairly common education in those times, so a lot of his audience would have understood these references without having to think too hard about them.

The words I used that were cool when I was younger are so out of date now. No one says ‘cool’ any more. Actually, I don’t think anyone says ‘
so
out of date’, or
so
anything any more, either. Whatever. No one says ‘whatever’ any more, and I’m sure that word was still being used last year. How, though, would you explain the
meaning
of ‘whatever’ to someone in ten years’ time? In 100 years’ time? How about in 400
years’ time …?
And
you’d have to use
their
language and their cultural references. You couldn’t. At least not with out a couple of books, a flip-chart, and maybe some diagrams.

It’s the same with Shakespeare. We have to work to under stand the way he swears, the way he makes promises, the way he uses our language (and it is, essentially, still
our
language). There’s a good example about halfway through Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’ speech:

For who would bear the Whips and Scornes of time …

When he himself might his
Quietus
make

With a bare Bodkin?

(
Hamlet
, Act 3, Scene 1, lines 70–6)

There are probably two words there that you’d miss the meaning of, if you were just reading it by yourself. There’s a good chance you’d understand it fine if you saw it being acted. But even then, seeing it acted, knowing that
Quietus
means
release
and a
Bodkin
is a
dagger
helps enormously (in this instance, a
bare
bodkin means an unadorned, plain dagger). Who would live through the harshness of life, he says, when you could end it all with a simple tool like a dagger?

I have a confession to make. I just looked those words up. I used to know what they meant, but I’d forgotten. No one knows what
all
the words in Shakespeare mean, and
everyone needs to look words up – especially words like
bare
that are still in our vocabulary today but which had a variety of different meanings 400 years ago.

Exactly because of that need, I co-wrote a dictionary of all of Shakespeare’s difficult words a couple of years ago. It’s quite a hefty tome, as we made sure every word we defined included as many of the different meanings we could think of that Shakespeare might have meant – and I particularly made sure we thought of nuances from a theatrical point of view. In Shakespeare’s time,
bare
also meant
unsheathed
. It also meant
wretched
. Which sense of the word Hamlet means is up to the actor and the director working on the production, or you, the reader.

Of course, when you’re watching Shakespeare being acted, a lot of these problems won’t be a factor. The meaning of a difficult word gets buoyed up by the rest of the sentence when spoken out loud, and acting Shakespeare always helps define meaning much more than silent reading ever could.

Many of the words you’ll find in a Shakespeare play might look similar or be identical to words you use every day. If it looks even slightly like a word you know, the chances are it’ll mean what you think it means.

However. There are some words, known as
false friends
, that will mislead you.
Doubt
, in Shakespeare’s time, meant
fear
. When Regan, in
King Lear
, says to Edmund, ‘Our sister’s
man is certainly miscarried’ (my sister’s servant has definitely failed), Edmund’s response is: ‘’Tis to be doubted, madam.’ But he isn’t questioning her, he’s agreeing with her. ‘It is something to be feared’, he’s saying.

All this can take a little getting used to, but considering that (linguistically speaking) we’re travelling hundreds of years back in time, we could be worse off than 5 per cent.

Here are twenty false friends you might come across …

Scene 3

13th-century England. A field

A
sk someone to ‘speak Shakespearian’ and they’ll probably throw in a couple of phrases like
thou art a blaggard
or
thou art an arse
, without knowing why they’re saying
thou
instead of
you
. An awful lot of people coming to Shakespeare don’t know why both these second-person pronouns (to give them their official title) are there, and often want to change all the
thous
to
yous
to make everything look neat and tidy.

Why can’t we – or shouldn’t we – ignore them?

Ever learnt French? If you have, you’ll know that there are two ways of saying
you
. A polite and formal way (
vous
), which can be used to address one person or a group of people; and a more sociable and informal way (
tu
), which is used only when speaking to one person.

There used to be a similar option in the English language: in Old English,
thou
was used to address one person and
you
was used to address more than one. But from the 13th century onwards, in Middle English,
you
started to develop an added connotation of politeness, probably because people wanted to copy the respected French way of speaking; and they began to use
you
in one-on-one
conversations. The assumption was that if you spoke French, you must therefore be rich and intelligent; and those who couldn’t afford to learn French simply changed their own language to sound more learned.

So by the time Shakespeare was writing – when our language was known as Early Modern English – there was
When going through a play, you’ll find
thou
and
you
in various different forms, depending on how they’re being used: