Subtitled "Exploring Shakespeare's Language" this book does pretty much that, in typical Crystal enthusiastic and engaging style (I've used some of David Crystal's other books when I did my linguistics course, and he's always good value for money). This complements his son's book nicely but is a little more focused on the language used and a little less evangelical about the plays.

Some of the things I highlighted from the book

• Shakespeare did not have the largest vocabulary of any English writer (the usual figure given is around 20,000 words, which compares to a vocabulary of around 50,000 words for speakers today)
• with regard to Shakespeare being "difficult" - sometimes complex language is used to convey a simple thought, but sometimes he uses simple language to convey complex thoughts.
• Some words are unfamiliar to us and need a gloss, but often their meaning is fairly easy to infer from the context. More awkward are false friends - words like "naughty" or "silly" which we think we recognise but had a different sense in Elizabethan times. Techniques such as collocation can be used to work out meanings.
• As in Ben Crystal's book, he quotes a figure of 5% for the number of words which need explanation. "People who argue that Shakespearean vocabulary is unintelligible and inaccessible tend to quote the hard words and ignore the easier ones. It is always good practice to read the whole of a speech before worrying about the difficulties found in a part of it"
• Explains how printing techniques of the time, and the fact that spelling and punctuation weren't standardised ("the Elizabethan spelling system was in - what we linguistics technically call - a mess"), leads to discrepancies between various folio/quarto versions
• Discusses conventions used in the printed texts that seem to be used to save space, so that columns don't get too wide, such as abbreviations and the use of tilde to indicate missing letters
• with reference to punctuation, the symbol "?" used to be called "point of interrogation", and only became "question mark" in 1905
• a fair amount on how poetry works, the fact that rhyme as an indicator of poetry went out of fashion and was replaced by rhythm. As to why pentameter, "my own view is that it is probably because the pentameter comes closest to the way our brain processes everyday speech..." he goes on to give some justification for this, finishing by saying "It is the optimal working unit for oral performance in English"
• How did they pronounce words in Shakespeare's day? Some stuff about how we work it out, including the fact that the word "July" used have its stress on the first syllable (until some time in the eighteenth century).
• Why did Shakespeare use the term "vasty"? find out on p. 150

Good book, one to keep and refer to.

Completed : 16-Mar-2009