SHAKESPEARE LANGUAGE
Once you see a text of Old or Middle English you'll really appreciate how easy Shakespeare is to understand (well, relatively speaking). Take, for example, this passage from the most famous of all Old English works, Beowulf:
Hwät! we Gār-Dena in geār-dagum
žeód-cyninga žrym gefrunon,
hū žā äšelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scźfing sceašena žreįtum.
(Translation)
Lo! the Spear-Danes' glory through splendid achievements
The folk-kings' former fame we have heard of,
How princes displayed then their
prowess-in-battle.
Oft Scyld the Scefing from scathers in
numbers...
Shakespeare played a major role in the transformation of the English language. Many words and phrases were first written down in his plays. 'Elbow room' (King John), 'heart of golII) and 'Wild-goose chase' (Romeo and Juliet) - just a handful of the many well-known English phrases that we've learnt from Shakespeare and use in our day to day lives more than 400 years later.
Shakespeare's early play, Love's Labour's Lost, is known for its elaborate wordplay and puns. (Gregory Doran production, 2008)
The early modern English language was less than 100 years old in 1590 when Shakespeare was writing. No dictionaries had yet been written and most documents were still written in Latin. He contributed over 3,000 words to the English language because he was the first author to write them down. Of this number more than one tenth or 1,700 were used for the first time.
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