My students – and their parents – often complain that they find older texts difficult to understand. Especially Shakespeare. I understand. Our language is constantly evolving and when we try to read something that was written centuries ago we realise just how much it has changed.
I think there are a couple of things that make reading older texts even more difficult. Here they are:
- When we find something a bit tricky, we tend to rush, in order to ‘get it over with.’ I am a very slow, puffy, occasional runner. When I get tired towards the end of my run, my instinct is to try to speed up, to get home and get it over with. To make the discomfort stop! In fact, what I ought to do is slow down a bit, give my legs a rest and take it a bit more easily. Easier said than done. The same happens for students trying to read tricky texts. There are words they have never seen before and some of them are in a different order. It feels difficult, so their instinct is to speed up and get to the end of the passage. This just makes it even more likely that they will remain confused about the meaning of the text. We need to slow down, but ideally this should be in the company of someone who can guide and coach the student to help them to tease out the meaning.
- I am not really in favour of reading older texts, including Shakespeare, around a classroom. It can, certainly, be helpful for an individual student to read part of a text aloud, with some one-to-one help. In a supportive setting, this can help them to get a feel for the rhythm and tone of the language. It is not helpful, however, for students to struggle, one by one, to read a challenging text in class, perhaps dreading their turn and feeling awkward and embarrassed while reading. Neither does it help them to have to listen to their classmates struggling with unfamiliar words and syntax. In my view (on my soapbox here) this experience is one of the most significant contributing factors to students disliking literature, especially Shakespeare.
So if we are supposed to slow down and if reading around the class isn’t the best approach, what can we do?
I have a couple of tips, and to demonstrate them I am going to show you how I work through various texts, starting with something a little more modern than Shakespeare.
First of all, I suggest going back in time, starting with modern texts, and gradually becoming familiar with older and older ones. If we read Wordsworth, for example, one of our best known poets, we find that his 19th century English is different from our own but not so different that it is impossible to grasp the meaning. An extract of his long autobiographical poem, The Prelude, is a set text for AQA GCSE English.
We could look at a few lines from this extract:
When from behind that craggy Steep, till then
The bound of the horizon, a huge Cliff
Rose up between me and the stars, and still,
With measure’d motion, like a living thing,
Strode after me.
Once we know that the noun form of steep means simply a steep hill or cliff, and that by ‘bound,’ Wordsworth means ‘boundary,’ we are up to date with our vocabulary. We use the word ‘measured’ today, to describe something having a slow, regular rhythm. We need to recognise that Wordsworth was not alone in using long, involved sentences. We are less used to reading as a form of entertainment today and, dare I say it, less used to concentrating on complex syntax, so this may seem daunting to us. It gets easier, however, if we look at portions of each long sentence separately. Here, we are beginning mid-sentence.
The extract above begins with a subordinate clause describing where the cliff, the subject here, came from. After the comma, ’till then / The bound of the horizon’ describes the craggy steep. This craggy steep was, up to this point, as far as the boy could see. Then comes the subject of the sentence, ‘a huge Cliff.’ The cliff appeared to do two things. The first was to rise up between the craggy steep and the sky, and the second was to move, slowly and regularly, as if it was alive, following the boy.
If we were to put this into modern English and shorter sentences, it might sound something like this:
Up to then, the steep craggy hill had been as far as I could see. Suddenly, A huge cliff appeared behind the craggy hill and seemed to rise up between me and the sky. It seemed to stride after me, moving steadily and slowly, as if it was alive.
I hope that Wordsworth will forgive me for mangling his verse, but I hope also that you can see how most of the words in my version are the same. I have simply moved the word order round a bit and simplified the syntax by using three shorter sentences. The further back in time we go, the more we see verbs at the end of sentences. It is as if we have to wait for the verb for it all to make sense. These days we tend to put the verb next to the noun, often nearer the beginning of the sentence.
Once we’ve got used to reading Wordsworth, or other writers from his time, we can used what we’ve learned to go back further in time, to more challenging texts.
Milton’s Paradise Lost is one of our most important poems, an epic in 12 books chronicling the fall of Man. Books IX and X are often set for A level. In fact, many years ago, they were part of my own A level syllabus and of course I went on to study the whole of Paradise Lost and Milton’s other works during my English degree. Paradise Lost was published in 1667 and most students find the language difficult to understand at first. It is possible, however, to iron out quite a few complications straight away once we see that we need to adapt to the word order Milton used. Let’s take the lines:
….How shall I behold the face
Henceforth of God or angel, erst with joy
And rapture so oft beheld?
This is Adam voicing his shame, having eaten the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. First of all, we need to recognise that ‘behold’ means simply ‘look at,’ ‘erst’ means ‘formerly,’ and ‘oft’ is clearly ‘often.’ ‘Henceforth’ means ‘from now onward.’ Adam is asking, rhetorically, how he will be able to look at God or angels from this point on. That is the first part of the sentence and the main clause. The subordinate clause, beginning with ‘erst,’ explains that formerly, or before now, he often looked at them with joy and pleasure. If we imagine that, after the comma, Milton has omitted ‘whom I,’ and that the verb at the end could be moved further forward, we could adapt this second part of the sentence to read something like: ‘whom I so oft erst beheld with joy and rapture.’ Of course Milton would never have written it like this, and it is worth reminding ourselves that he did not write in the wrong order; rather we and our ancestors have changed the way we construct sentences, and many of the words used, in the centuries since Milton was writing.
Now we can see that with a little clarification of vocabulary and some re-ordering of words, the meaning of these lines is quite clear. Milton was saying something like this:
…How shall I look God or the angels
In the face from now on, whom I so often looked at
Before now with joy and pleasure?
And now for Shakespeare. Shakespeare was writing plays and poems a few decades before Milton, and the play Macbeth is often set for GCSE.
We are already used to dealing with words in a slightly different order from what we are familiar with, checking the meanings of archaic words and sometimes breaking up longer sentences to make them simpler. It also helps to remember that, in English, we used to have two versions of the second person singular. Thou, thee and thy were the familiar forms, and you and your were more formal as well as plural. This is similar to the usage of tu and vous that survives in French today. Let’s look at the beginning of a famous speech from Macbeth, Act II, Scene 1. Macbeth sees a ghostly dagger in front of him.
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight?
Macbeth is talking to himself at first, asking if it is really a dagger in front of him. He then addresses the dagger (using thee), asking if he can hold it. He can’t feel it, so he says ‘I have thee not,’ meaning ‘I’m not holding you,’ but he can still see the image. He then asks the dagger whether it is available to touch as well as to see. ‘Art thou not’ means ‘aren’t you’ and an archaic use of ‘sensible’ is ‘able to feel or perceive.’ He calls the dagger a ‘fatal vision’ as he senses it is leading him to murder Duncan. We could translate these lines like this:
Am I seeing a dagger in front of me,
The handle pointing towards my hand? Come here, let me hold you.
I can’t feel you, but I can still see you.
Deadly hallucination, aren’t you able
To be felt as well as to be seen?
Again, I feel quite guilty paraphrasing Macbeth’s speech, and, in my view, taking all the magic out of it, but I hope this shows how little difference there is between the original and the way it might be written today.
To sum up my suggestions for demystifying the language in these older texts:
- Remember that word order might be different from what you are used to. If you can’t find the verb, look towards the end of the sentence.
- Longer sentences can sometimes be broken up to make them easier to deal with, section by section.
- You will come across words you don’t recognise and other words whose meaning may have changed. Google can help you out in an instant.
- Remember that thee and thou are archaic versions of you and that verbs conjugate accordingly. So, for example, Macbeth says ‘art thou’ instead of ‘are you,’ and would also say ‘thou hast’ instead of ‘you have.’
- Slow down. Resist the urge to rush because it feels tricky.
- If you can, enlist the help of someone who is familiar with this type of language. Ask them to walk you through a few lines and help you unpick the sentences. This is the best way I know to start to get to grips with archaic English.
I hope these illustrations and tips have helped. Please let me know in the comments. Also, please do send me any questions, or requests for clarifying specific texts. I will help if I can!
