The Language of Shakespeare

When I was first given a play of Shakespeare’s, my teacher took the time to go over everything line by line when we read it in class so we would understand it easier, but when it came to trying to figure a play out for myself all I learned was that Early Modern English hurt by brain. Moreover, now that I study Shakespeare in drama, my job as an actor is to study the history of Shakespeare and his plays in order to get an insight of what the language is like and what it means in modern day language. In addition, this means adapting to the language even though it’s quite hard to memorise when you don’t understand what you’re saying or what the play is about. It’s a real challenge that every aspiring actor should try as it intrigues agencies and makes you stand out.

After a time, Shakespeare can get quite boring because you’re repeating the same thing and not much excitement is happening whereas if you were to do a modern play you can play around with the emotions of characters and change the text.

‘A great deal of Shakespeare is “heightened language”. This generally means that heightened text is anything that is more poetic than a normal speech. The style of writing is drastically different from the way we speak today and it’s different from the way people spoke when the plays were written. Heightened language was meant to stand out as a different kind of language; it is more artsy than every day speech.