Do people really speak Elizabethan English?

Answer 1

Yes, and no.

Shakespeare uses many different styles of language, such as blank verse, rhyming couplets and ordinary "vernacular" language.

He also varied the rhythms and rhymes of his language and used a particular rhythm pattern called iambic pentameter where there are five "stressed" syllables in a line of dialogue.

Generally, he used the more refined and complicated patterns for the "high class" characters and gave the more ordinary styles to "lower class" characters.

Nobody spoke the way Shakespeare wrote his high class characters - it probably takes a lot of thought and rewriting to compose such language.

Many people did, however, use the more common, lower class styles of speech.

Yes, the Middle English used around London (that you may have encountered studying Chaucer) developed into Modern English, and Shakespeare is one of Modern English's earliest and greatest users. Of course, few people were as witty of tongue as Shakespeare's characters...I doubt any potential suicide in Elizabethan England actually paused to consider aloud "to be or not to be...," but remember that Shakespeare was primarily a poet and even his plays are written with a poet's ear to the language of his time.

Yes and no. Most of the people in Shakespeare's plays talk in poetry, which is very artificial and unnatural, while some speak in prose which is closer to the way everyone spoke. Many of the lines are said in exactly the same way they would be today. "Who's there?" (Hamlet) "I am a man more sinned against than sinning." (King Lear) "We cannot be here and there too." (Romeo and Juliet) all sound pretty modern.

People tend to be wrapped up in their own reality, and so anything different from what they know seems strange. The small differences between modern speech and the speech in Shakespeare's plays are no more confusing than talking to someone from another part of the world who speaks a different dialect.

Since not all people in Shakespeare's plays speak the same way, the answer is both yes and no. Lines written in prose would approximate ordinary speech much more than lines in verse, certainly much more than lines in rhymed verse.

However, some lines have the stamp of reality to them. Almost everything Sir John Falstaff says sounds very natural.

"What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? Well, 'tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? how then? Can honour set to a leg? no: or an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is honour? a word. What is in that word honour? what is that honour? air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no. Doth he hear it? no. 'Tis insensible, then. Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? no. Why? detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it."

Answer 2

They had an accent something like that we associate with pirates. They did use some words we don't and they had slang terms of course which change from year to year (the slang of 1580 is no more incomprehensible than the slang of 1980--it has all passed out of the language).

Reading plays like Thomas Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday or Jonson's Volpone probably give an impression of the way people actually spoke, unlike Marlowe and Shakespeare who intentionally heightened the dialogue, making it more poetic.

Answer 3

As brevity is the soul of wit, I will be brief. Yes. Some grammatical forms have changed and some of the vocabulary is different. But "Elizabethan English" is essentially "modern English." Some people disagree on the grounds that "no one speaks the way that Shakespeare wrote." But they would find, on close examination, that although much of what he wrote was poetry, and some of what he wrote had the older grammatical forms that we no longer use, the language is modern -- sometimes elevated when it is out of the mouths of nobility -- but modern nonetheless.

Answer 4

Yes, even though Shakespearean English is very different from what we use today, Shakespeare wrote the way that people in his time talked. In Shakespeare's plays, noble characters speak more formally, with better grammar, and often in iambic pentameter while commoners use prose and slang.

Though people may not have spoken in iambic pentameter, a poetic rhythm, Shakespeare's English was the English spoken by Elizabethan people.

However, just as movie scripts are a little different than how we speak now, Shakespeare's plays were a little different from how Elizabethans spoke. For example, when heroes make speeches in movies, they are always near perfect. In Shakespeare's plays, when characters make speeches, they are usually powerful and eloquent. Just as in Shakespeare's time, it is easier to speak well when you have a great writer who gives you a script.

Answer 5

They do when they are acting in Shakespeare's plays.

No, people did not ever go around speaking in blank verse all the time, not that all of Shakespeare's dialogue is in blank verse. Nor did people speak in gorgeous poetry full of metaphors and classical allusions. But the point is not and never was to imitate how people ordinarily speak. The idea is to say things much more clearly, much more powerfully and much more beautifully than anything we hear in drab dull ordinary speech. Of course, individual lines like "Who's there?", the first line in Hamlet, could have been written any time.

Answer 6

First of all, the people in Shakespeare's plays do not speak Old English. They speak Modern English, the dialect called Early Modern English. Old English is a totally different language from Modern English and is incomprehensible without a lot of study. Early Modern English is as easily comprehensible to Modern English speakers as is any other dialect. Think Australian, unless you're Australian in which case think Jamaicans. Either way, Shakespeare is easier.

Secondly, a lot of the dialogue in Shakespeare's plays is difficult, not because it is a different language, but because it is poetry. A lot of the lines are written in a kind of verse called Blank Verse which has a specific rhythm. Sometimes the words get re-ordered and pronounced in unusual ways to fit this rhythm. In addition Shakespeare uses metaphors, similes, personifications and other figures of speech to try to make the language more powerful. Also, Shakespeare and his contemporaries (including the working class groundlings who watching his plays from the Pit) loved puns and plays on words, which modern readers may find hard to catch. And finally, Shakespeare was not afraid to write sentences for his characters that went on and on without losing their coherence. His audiences, which had a longer attention span and a better grasp of grammar than many modern people do, had no trouble understanding them.

Did Shakespeare and his friends speak fluent poetry? Of course not! That language was reserved for plays. Some of the characters in the plays do not speak in poetry either, and you get lines like these: "Who's there?" (Hamlet), "Where is your mother?" (Romeo and Juliet) "He is a dreamer. Let us leave him. Pass." (Julius Caesar) "Nay, come, Kate, come, you must not look so sour." (Taming of the Shrew) "Fail not our feast" (Macbeth), "I am not well" (Merchant of Venice), "Nay, faith, let not me play a woman. I have a beard coming" (Midsummer Night's Dream) and so on, on and on.

Answer 7

The plays were written more "poetically" or "lyrically" than the generic spoken word but many of the words were spoken in a similar way

Answer 8

no