Encyclopędia Britannica's Guide to Shakespeare
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Shakespeare, William

Understanding Shakespeare > Linguistic, historical, textual, and editorial problems

Since the days of Shakespeare, the English language has changed, and so have audiences, theatres, actors, and customary patterns of thought and feeling. Time has placed an ever-increasing cloud before the mirror he held up to life, and it is here that scholarship can help.

Problems are most obvious in single words. In the 21st century, presently, for instance, does not mean “immediately,” as it usually did for Shakespeare, or will mean “lust,” or rage mean “folly,” or silly denote “innocence” and “purity.” In Shakespeare's day, words sounded different, too, so that ably could rhyme with eye or tomb with dumb. Syntax was often different, and, far more difficult to define, so was response to metre and phrase. What sounds formal and stiff to a modern hearer might have sounded fresh and gay to an Elizabethan.

Ideas have changed, too, most obviously political ones. Shakespeare's contemporaries almost unanimously believed in authoritarian monarchy and recognized divine intervention in history. Most of them would have agreed that a man should be burned for ultimate religious heresies. It is the office of linguistic and historical scholarship to aid the understanding of the multitude of factors that have significantly affected the impressions made by Shakespeare's plays.

None of Shakespeare's plays has survived in his handwritten manuscript, and, in the printed texts of some plays, notably King Lear and Richard III, there are passages that are manifestly corrupt, with only an uncertain relationship to the words Shakespeare once wrote. Even if the printer received a good manuscript, small errors could still be introduced. Compositors were less than perfect; they often “regularized” the readings of their copy, altered punctuation in accordance with their own preferences or “house” style or because they lacked the necessary pieces of type, or made mistakes because they had to work too hurriedly. Even the correction of proof sheets in the printing house could further corrupt the text, since such correction was usually effected without reference to the author or to the manuscript copy; when both corrected and uncorrected states are still available, it is sometimes the uncorrected version that is preferable. Correctors are responsible for some errors now impossible to right.


John Russell Brown

Terence John Bew Spencer

David Bevington
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