Shakespeare and Elizabethan English

Summary

Shakespeare’s language is proving one of the most germinal topics in present-day Shakespeare studies and there is a stimulating variety of approach. For those who have wearied of the incessant detective work expended on the Elizabethan setting and in attempts to probe Shakespeare’s life-history, certain new tendencies and principles in literary criticism offer a refreshing alternative to the historical approach and seem to set the poet free from the bondage of Time and Change. Yet the language is basic and this language is Elizabethan. Wherever the critic ends, he must begin from a recognition of the Elizabethan factors in the language; he may, indeed, as in the recent rehabilitation of the pun, be moved to exploit them. In what follows I shall try to illustrate these Elizabethan factors and I have before me two primary objects or beliefs: first, the necessity of keeping continually in mind the oral aspects of Shakespeare’s language, originally conceived in the mind for an actor’s voice and published to the world on an actor’s lips; and, secondly, the conviction that the best solvent of pedantry is not less knowledge but more—that the more we know of the Elizabethan mind as it worked on and through language the more difficult it becomes to rivet on to Shakespeare certain modern pedantries.