Despite their limitations, the reconstruction of the Early Modern English sound system indicates that pronunciation norms have changed greatly in the past four hundred years. Modern performances and readings, though, almost always introduce present-day sounds without comment, allowing only for cases where an earlier pronunciation is needed to satisfy the needs of the metre or to convey the effect of a pun. So the situation with speaking is very similar to that with writing: most modern readers and playgoers remain unaware of the extent of the difference. And this is why, when people discuss the distinctive language of Shakespeare, the main topics are usually restricted to the three areas of language that are present in both: grammar, vocabulary, and discourse conventions. In each case, the number of differences between Early Modern English and Modern English is relatively small, but several of the points of difference turn up very frequently - which is the chief reason that people think Shakespeare’s language is more different from Modern English than in fact it is.

Grammar

The grammatical rules of the language have little changed during the past four centuries: some 90 per cent of the word orders and word formations used by Shakespeare are still in use today. A grammatical parsing of the prose extract from Julius Caesar above would bring to light nearly two hundred points of sentence, clause, phrase, and word structure, but there is only one construction which is noticeably different from Modern English: ‘Had you rather Caesar were living’. Today we would have to say something like: ‘Would you rather have Caesar living’. A less significant difference, in that passage, is the use of the subjunctive (as in If there be any in this assembly), which is unusual in British (though not American) English today. But apart from this, and allowing for the rather formal rhetorical style, the other grammatical usages in the extract are the same as those we would use now.

There is nonetheless a widespread impression that Shakespeare’s grammar is very different from what we find today. The impression arises for two reasons: because of the way grammar operates within discourse, and because of the influence of metrical constraints.

GRAMMAR IN DISCOURSE

Grammar is different from vocabulary in the way it appears in connected speech or writing. An individual word may not be present in a particular speech - or even in a whole scene - but core grammatical features are repeatedly used. Each page of this essay will provide many examples of the definite article, forms of the verb to be, plural endings, conjunctions such as and, and other essential features of sentence construction. In the same way, Shakespearian grammar repeatedly uses several Early Modern English features, such as older pronouns (thou, ye), inflectional endings (-est, -eth), and contracted forms (is’t, on’t). It is the frequency of use of such forms which can give a grammatical colouring to a speech - often, out of all proportion to their linguistic significance, as in this extract from Hamlet (5.1.271-5):

HAMLET (to Laertes) Swounds, show me what

thou’lt do.

Woot weep, woot fight, woot fast, woot tear thyself,

Woot drink up eisel, eat a crocodile?

I’ll do’t. Dost thou come here to whine,

To outface me with leaping in her grave?

Woot, often edited as woo’t, is a colloquial form of wilt or wouldst thou. It is a rare literary usage, but here its repetition, along with the other contracted forms and the use of thou, dominates the impression we have of the grammar, and gives an alien appearance to a speech which in all other respects is grammatically identical with Modern English:

Show me what you will do.

Will you weep, will you fight, will you fast, will you

tear yourself,

Will you drink up eisel, eat a crocodile?

I’ll do it. Do you come here to whine,

To outface me with leaping in her grave?

Several other distinctive features of Early Modern English grammar likewise present little difficulty to the modern reader. An example is the way in which a sequence of adjectives can appear both before and after the noun they modify, as in the Nurse’s description of Romeo (Romeo and Juliet, 2.4.55-6): ‘an honest gentleman, and a courteous, and a kind, and a handsome’ [= an honest, courteous, kind, and handsome gentleman]. Other transparent word-order variations include the reversal of adjective and possessive pronoun in good my lord, or the use of the double comparative in such phrases as more mightier and most poorest. Many individual words also have a different grammatical usage, compared with today, such as like (‘likely’) and something (‘somewhat’):

Very like, very like.

(Hamlet, 1.2.325)

I prattle | Something too wildly.

(Tempest, 3.1.57-8)

But here too the meaning is sufficiently close to modern idiom that they do not present a difficulty.

There are just a few types of construction where the usage is so far removed from anything we have in Modern English that, without special study, we are likely to miss the meaning of the sentence altogether. An example is the so-called ‘ethical dative’. Early Modern English allowed a personal pronoun after a verb to express such notions as ‘to’, ‘for’, ‘by’, ‘with’ or ‘from’ (notions which traditional grammars would subsume under the headings of the dative and ablative cases). The usage can be seen in such sentences as:

But hear me this (Twelfth Night, 5.1.118) [= But hear this from me]

John lays you plots (King John, 3.4.146) [= John lays plots for you to fall into]

It is an unfamiliar construction, to modern eyes and ears, and it can confuse - as a Shakespearian character himself evidences. In The Taming of the Shrew, Petruccio and Grumio arrive at Hortensio’s house (1.2.8-10):

PETRUCCIO Villain, I say, knock me here soundly.

GRUMIO Knock you here, sir? Why, sir, what am I, sir, that I should knock you here, sir?

Petruccio means ‘Knock on the door for me’, but Grumio interprets it to mean (as it would in Modern English) ‘hit me’. If we do not recognize the ethical dative in Petruccio’s sentence in the first place, we will miss the point of the joke entirely. But the fact that Grumio is confused suggests that the usage was probably already dying out in Shakespeare’s time.

GRAMMAR AND METRE

Most of the really unfamiliar deviations from Modern English grammatical norms which we encounter in Shakespeare arise in his verse, where he bends the construction to suit the demands of the metre. The approach to blank verse most favoured in Early Modern English took as its norm a line of five metrical units, or feet (a pentameter), with each foot in its most regular version represented by a two-syllable weak + strong (iambic) sequence, and the whole line ending in a natural pause and containing no internal break. Accordingly, the least amount of grammatical ‘bending’ takes place when a line coincides with the major unit of grammar, the sentence. This is a characteristic of much of Shakespeare’s early writing, as in this example from Queen Margaret: