Solecism In Shakespeare’s Merry Wives Of Windzor

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INTRODUCTION For many people today, reading Shakespeare’s language can be a problem—but it is a problem that can be solved. Modern readers may need to develop the skills of untangling unusual sentence structures and of recognizing and understanding poetic compressions, omissions, and wordplay. And even those skilled in reading unusual sentence structures may have occasional trouble with Shakespeare’s words. Four hundred years of “static”—caused by changes in language and life—intervene between his speaking and our hearing. Most of his immense vocabulary is still in use, but a few of his words are not, and, worse, some of his words now have meanings quite different from those they had in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The language of Shakespeare’s poems, like that of poetry in general, is both highly compressed and highly structured. While most often discussed in terms of its images and its metrical and other formal structures, the language of the poems, like that of Shakespeare’s plays, also repays close attention to such basic linguistic elements as words, word order, and sentence structure. Some of the problems in understanding Shakespeare's language are basic grammar differences. For instance, many words were compounded that are now spelled separately. An example is "whe'r" which is a compound of the word whether. Shakespeare "made up" many of these compounds to fit rhythmic and metrical structure. Another example of this kind of compounding is 'tis, a compound of "it is". Once you realize that Shakespeare was writing inside a fairly strict metrical system, you come to understand that he bent words to fit his needs. This was part of his genius -- many of our most common expressions today came originally from Shakespeare's pen. Ever said someone was 'dead as a door nail'? That's an invention of Shakespeare. How about the word 'eyeball'?
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