How did the actors speak in shakespeares plays?

Answer 1

The characters in Shakespeare's plays speak the way they do because Shakespeare was not trying to present us with the way people ordinarily spoke, but rather with the clearest, most powerful and most beautiful expression of the thoughts and feelings of the characters.

For example, Shakespeare has one of his characters see the girl he has fallen in love with silhouetted in a window at night. He does not have the character say, "Hey, check out the hot chick in the window!" or "Like, that's so . . . yeah. Wow." These might well be the kind of thing that a guy might actually say, at least nowadays, but they are neither clear, powerful or beautiful.

Instead, he has the guy say, "But soft! What light through yonder window breaks! It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!" You will notice that with the possible exception of the word "yonder", every single word in those two sentences is used every day by every English speaker there is. They are all ordinary modern English words (including "yonder") and yet the effect is totally different from the other two potential lines in the paragraph above. Why is this?

One of the things Shakespeare does with his lines is to make them conform to a set rhythm, called iambic pentameter. This is a line of ten syllables that sounds like "ta-DUM ta-DUM ta-DUM ta-DUM ta-DUM". For example, "But SOFT what LIGHT from YON-der WIN-dow BREAKS" has this rhythm. Shakespeare's contemporary Christopher Marlowe proved that using this rhythm still kept the lines sounding natural but made them much more powerful and more flowing. Shakespeare used iambic pentameter, a lot. Although many English sentences normally have this rhythm ("I think I"ll go and get myself a beer" is an example), Shakespeare went out of his way to consciously shape the rhythm of the lines his characters speak.

That is why so-called "translations" which strip away the rhythm of the lines sound like crap compared to the lines Shakespeare wrote.

Another thing you'll notice about Romeo's line is that he doesn't just say there is a pretty girl in the window. He says the window is the east and the sun is rising out of it, and the sun is his girl Juliet. That's called a metaphor, where you talk about something as if it were something else. Juliet is the light of his life (that's another metaphor, did you notice?) and she is rising from the darkness like the dawn. People do sometimes use metaphors in ordinary conversation but usually they are clich

Answer 2

Shakespeare used a large number of speech patterns in his plays, many of which were consciously unnatural. His favourite was a rhythmic pattern called blank verse, which had been established as an excellent style for significant and weighty speeches in the 1560s and brought to a very high level by Shakespeare's contemporary Christopher Marlowe. It was easy for actors to remember and not wholly unnatural, and Shakespeare was a genius at its use.

In many cases, especially in his later plays, the rhythm was still basically blank verse but was much looser, rhythmically.

Sometimes he had characters speaking even more unnaturally, by having them speak in rhyming couplets or verses. He would often have a rhyming couplet at the end of a scene to give it finality.

On the other hand, there are many characters who speak in prose, without a regular rhythm. Their language is still often heightened and richer than ordinary speech, but less artificial. It is intended to convey important ideas and impressions rather than being a mirror of the dulness of ordinary speech. Still, many lines, especially short ones, sound perfectly natural to modern ears. The first line in Hamlet is "Who's there?" Nobody would say that any differently.

Answer 3

The actors performing the roles certainly did. But no, the language Shakespeare gives to his characters to speak is much richer than ordinary speech. It is frequently in a special rhythm, and uses figures of speech and allusions to make it more powerful, beautiful and clear than everyday speech could be. It is in fact often in poetry, which is sometimes difficult to work out, but always worth the effort.