Say what, Mr. Shakespeare?

Shakespeare is the plague of every child's English lessons.  His language makes it so hard for anyone to understand what he is trying to say.  He might be the stuff of night-time fantasies for the English teacher but more likely to infest the nightmares of everyone else. The sentiment is heartily expressed in 'Back and Forth' where Blacadder (having gone back in time) punched Shakespeare and said:

This is for every schoolboy and schoolgirl for the next four hundred years.  Have you any idea how much suffering you are going to cause.  Hours spent at school desks trying to find one joke in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?  Years wearing stupid tights in school plays and saying things like ‘What ho, my lord’ and ‘Oh, look, here comes Othello, talking total crap as usual’. 

However, it is funny that he should raise 'lack of jokes' as the cause of suffering.  There are, for some, too many jokes in Shakespeare.  I know an English teacher in a Beis Yaakov school who has to teach Shakespeare as he is on the National Curriculum.  She has said how she has been instructed to skip over all the sexual innuendos and hope they don't ask any questions!  Here though, is where the terse language is an advantage for the Bais Yaakovs, if not the Edmund Blackadders, of this world.

As for the 'talking total crap as usual' , one might presume this is a result of the language being very old and no longer understandable.  Rather like with Bible translations, we are subjected to pathos at the expense of  understanding what is being said.  However, I very much doubt that there is a direct correlation between a decline in understanding and time passing.  I wonder: Did those who paid their penny to stand at the Globe have any idea what was going on or did they just go to leer at men in womens' clothing?  Was the theatre a place of high culture or a mere alternative to the bear baiting ring?

It is quite possible that those in Shakespeare's day wouldn't have understood his language.  The problem for them wouldn't be the antiquarian nature of his language.  In fact, the opposite would be true.  They would have been justified had the exclaimed "That guy is just making up words".   Words found for the first time in Shakespeare include:

abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, distinguishable, well-read, zany, countless

This is not to mention all the words he made up by being the first person to add un- in front of words, such like unlock, untie and unveil (unsufflicate?). Given that many of these are common words, I could (and will) exaggerate and say the only words they would have understood are the one we don't understand today!

As David Crystal (Shakespeare scholar in Bill Bryson book) says, "Most modern authors, I imagine, would be delighted if they contributed even one lexeme to the future of the language".  Shakespeare, however, was prolific.  One thing we can take comfort in, however, is that we can actually spell our name, whilst Shakespeare was a little more unsure.  In six extant signatures of his that we have, no two are spelt the same and none how we spell it!