Why did people in the 1500 love shaksepeare's language in his plays?

Answer 1

The language is what makes Shakespeare's plays Shakespeare's. Other playwrights wrote plays about the same stories: there is another King Lear (spelled Leir), another Taming of the Shrew (called "a Shrew"), another Hamlet, and other versions of the histories including Edward IV which covers the same ground as part of Shakespeare's Henry VI Part 3.

Shakespeare left virtually no directions as to set, props, costuming or even the movement of people on stage. All we have is the hints given in the language.

Shakespeare and his contemporaries used language to describe the physical surroundings, describe the weather and the time of day, describe offstage events which could not be shown onstage, and express their emotions, as closeups were not available.

Most of all, Shakespeare's language is musical. He was very careful about what his words sounded like, and what rhythm they made. That is why we cannot substitute other words into what he wrote: it may have the same surface meaning but will not have the same music.

Paraphrases always sound flat and ugly compared to what Shakespeare wrote.

Answer 2

Language changes over time. Some changes take place rapidly, as in slang, which starts as a special lingo among an exclusive group, then spreads into the general population, then is sneered at as being the kind of thing a "wannabe" might say. A good example is the "California slang" which included such words as "tubular" to mean good (the film Finding Nemo has a particularly painful example of this).

Language can also change in meaning through ignorance. The word "alibi", which is Latin for "elsewhere" is the defence that the accused could not have committed the crime because he was somewhere else. Because in the gangster era in the US, false witnesses were frequently procured to provide such defences, "alibi" was taken to mean a false defence, and eventually a bad excuse, at least in American English.

On the other hand, the core words of a language rarely change. Of the two hundred most commonly used words in Shakespeare, all but a couple are in use today with exactly the same meaning. That is because Shakespeare's language is essentially the same as ours--it is still modern English.

It is impossible to predict what changes might take place in the English language in the next 400 years, but you can be sure that someone from that time will look at something you wrote and say, "Did people actually talk like that in the 21st century? Why didn't they talk in real English?" (or the equivalent in their dialect)

Answer 3

Shakespeare's dialect of English is pretty similar to today's dialects. Here are some differences:

1. Shakespeare makes a lot of use of the special second person singular pronouns thee thy and thou and the verb forms that go with them. Many of his contemporaries had stopped using these forms, but Shakespeare still used them.

2. Shakespeare does not as a rule use the verb "to do" when forming a question. He just reverses the subject and verb. E.g. "Where is Romeo? Saw you him today?" instead of "Did you see him today?"

3. Shakespeare does not use the progressive construction so common in today's dialects. E.g. Puck says "I go; I go; look how I go" and not "I am going; I am going; look how I am going."

4. Some words have shifted in meaning since Shakespeare's day. "Nice" is an example.

Answer 4

Because back then, that's how people talked.

Answer 5

he put two nouns together to make a new word