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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