Reading Shakespeare with curiosity

To see how dramatically language changes through time, the subject of John McWhorter's Words on the Move (see yesterday's post), we need only look at the works of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote his plays for the common people. The theater in 16th century England was where ordinary people went for entertainment. One did not need to be an intellectual or a college graduate to understand them. The words he used were the same words people spoke on the street.

Yet today reading Shakespeare's plays or seeing a performance of one of them can be tough sledding. We may feel we need an interpreter, a paraphrase or at least an annotated version. As an example of how English has changed in 400 years, McWhorter gives us these lines from King Lear:

                         Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother?

Huh? Study that text in print long enough and you might get a vague idea of what is being said, just as you may be able to get the gist of a passage in the King James Bible if you read it through a few times. But it's not easy, and your "vague idea" may not even be close to being right. The problem is that so many of the words Shakespeare uses no longer mean what they meant when he used them.

McWhorter explains. Wherefore doesn't mean where, as we might think, but why. Moonshines refers to months, not liquor. As for the word curiosity, McWhorter says that "in Shakespeare's time, curiosity meant 'care' in the sense of close attention."

That helps, but frankly even then the lines are difficult. The author doesn't help us with the phrases "plague of custom" or"lag of a brother." But we get the idea. Shakespeare wasn't writing on a higher plane than his audience. His audience understood him perfectly. But the English language has changed so much in 400 years that today his plays seem so difficult most of us avoid them.

Someday, who knows, the collected works of James Patterson or Mary Higgins Clark, may strike readers as tough going.