We often get comments from readers about the difficulty they have when studying Shakespeare’s plays, due to the differences in vocabulary and spelling. It’s true that orthography (the way a word is spelled) has changed over the years, but by the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the way words were spelled had more or less stabilized, mostly due to the increased use of printed text, rather than hand-written text.
Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg invented a printing press that used movable type, which allowed the printers to use individual letters (or sometimes two letters together of common combinations such as TH or CH) to set up each page in a document, rather than creating a carved or cast image of the page, or hand-writing all of the pages individually. When clerks or monks hand-wrote pages to make copies, there were always errors, and in addition each person used his own idea of how words were to be spelled. With the standardization provided by the printing press, spelling rules were established gradually, and the orthographies of what we now call “early modern English” were developed. However, we modern English speakers probably still would have a hard time understanding lines like this:
“And man ought to byleue that the fayth of this artycle is deed that bereth not here the fruyte of this werke.” – from a religious text dated around 1500 CE
Note the use of the letter U where we now have a V in the word “believe” (the 5th word) and of Y instead of I (see the 8th and 11th words) and the additional E at the end of “work” (the last word). Many of these spelling changes occurred because people were beginning to develop a more “English” pronunciation of words that originally came from Greek, Latin, or German.
By comparison, look at this text from a work by Shakespeare:
Tut! she’s a lamb, a dove, a fool, to him.
I’ll tell you, Sir Lucentio: when the priest
Should ask if Katherine should be his wife,
‘Ay, by gogs-wouns’ quoth he, and swore so loud
That, all amaz’d, the priest let fall the book;
And as he stoop’d again to take it up,
The mad-brain’d bridegroom took him such a cuff
That down fell priest and book, and book and priest:
‘Now take them up,’ quoth he ‘if any list.’
– William Shakespeare, “The Taming of the Shrew” Act III Scene II (1591)
In this excerpt, the spelling is more recognizable, but there are still instances where the pronunciation differs. Take a look at the last two lines, which end in the words priest and list. Today we’d pronounce those words differently, as PREEST and LIHST, but it’s probable that when this play was first staged, the actor would have said PRIHST and LIHST.
By the 18th century, both pronunciation and spelling were generally uniform across the English-speaking world, and only some vocabulary words from that period would now strike us as outdated. For example, look at the formal use of thee and thou in this passage from the late 1700s:
“Sir Knight, whoever thou art, I bid thee welcome. If thou art of mortal mould, thy valour shall meet its equal: and if thou art a true Knight, thou wilt scorn to employ sorcery to carry thy point.” – from “The Castle of Otranto” by Horace Walpole (1764)
Though some texts from past centuries may seem difficult at first, most material written in English over the last 400 years should be fairly easy for you to read after a bit of practice. Remember, our modern English would be just as difficult for Shakespeare to read!
Cross-posted at the Ultimate Spelling blog.
