The eNotes Blog How to Understand Shakespeares Language

How to Understand Shakespeares Language Admit it: reading Shakespeare is not your cup of tea. At first, trying to read Shakespeares works may seem like learning a foreign language. Performed for audiences over four centuries ago, Shakespeares plays were written in Early Modern English, so it’s natural to feel confused by word choices and sentence structures that have evolved since then. However, the more you expose yourself to Shakespeare’s language, the more comfortable you’ll feel when reading his works.   Ã‚  Ã‚   Let’s take a look at 10 reading strategies that will help you better understand the Bard’s language.    1. Read out loud. It’s important to note that Shakespeare’s works were intended for the stage. His plays were written to be performed, not silently read. Reading Shakespeare’s work aloud will help you become familiar with the rhythm and language of his verse. It’s also helpful to watch performances and listen to how other people perform his work, because you may pick up on something you missed from your own readings. 2. Read to the end of the sentence. When reading verse, you should read from punctuation mark to punctuation mark. This means you shouldnt pause at the end of a line just because theres a break. Punctuation marks dictate complete units of thought. Take a short pause in your reading when you encounter a comma. Take a long pause for a period, colon, semicolon, dash, or question mark. 3. Look up unfamiliar words. Shakespeare invented many of his own words and phrases. In fact, he added about 1,700 words to the English language by invention or combination. However, many of the words used throughout his work are not used in today’s colloquial language. Reading from an annotated text can help readers bridge the gap between Shakespeare’s language and their own. In these digital texts, obscure phrases are annotated with an explanation of their origins and meanings.    4. Differentiate Thou, Thee, Thy, and Thine. Shakespeare uses these words a lot. They are considered â€Å"archaic words†, which means they’re no longer used in contemporary English. Thou means â€Å"you,† thee means â€Å"you,† and thy means â€Å"your†. Since these words are so ubiquitous, it’s crucial to know the difference between them in order to know who or what they’re referring to in the text. 5. Understand contracted words. Contracted words are words in which a letter has been left out, which affects appearance and pronunciation like dot or knowst. Shakespeare often used contracted words in order to fit his meter and rhyme scheme. If you see that apostrophe mark, it almost always means a letter is missing. So, if you’re having difficulties understanding what a contracted word, you can often use context clues to determine the meaning. 6. Reword inverted sentences. Most of the sentences we’re familiar with will start with a subject followed by a verb. Shakespeare’s sentences sometimes do not follow this simple word order. Therefore, rewording Shakespeare’s sentences to place the subject first may help you gain a better understanding of what is being stated. For example: â€Å"Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm’d[.]†(5-6) â€Å"Sonnet 18† We can rearrange the sentence above to the following: â€Å"Sometimes the eye of heaven shines too hot, and his gold complexion is often dimmed.† 7.   Follow the action Sometimes its hard to keep track of who does what to whom. Focus on keeping track of the subject, verb, and object. In Shakespeare’s longer dialogues and soliloquies, it can get confusing to follow who is doing what, especially when there are lengthy descriptions and parenthetical comments. It may be helpful to take a couple of breaks during your reading and make notes of the scene. 8. Identify wordplay. Shakespeare loved to reconstruct and rearrange words. Be sure to look out for instances where he uses specific wordplay to illustrate the landscape of a scene or to enhance a character’s identity.    Here are some different types of wordplay often found in Shakespeare’s work: Puns: a play on words in which two words are used that have the same sound but have different meanings. Double entendre: a kind of pun in which a word or phrase has a second, often sexual, meaning. Malapropism: occurs when a character mistakenly uses a word that he or she has confused with another word.  Ã‚   9. Recognize the use of metaphor. Shakespeare often used metaphors to heighten the emotional and dramatic aspects of his dialogue. In order to identify specific examples of these literary devices, you must understand how they are used. For example: When Romeo crashes the Capulet family party in act 1, scene 5 of Romeo and Juliet, he uses both a metaphor and allusion when describing Juliet’s beauty. â€Å"It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night Like a rich jewel in an Ethiopes ear (I.v). Romeo uses a metaphor, specifically a simile, to describe Juliet’s appearance to that of a â€Å"rich jewel† hanging on the ear of an African queen. 10. Note stage direction Stage directions should never be overlooked. They are extremely important to understanding Shakespeare’s plays because avoiding them can result in confusion when reading. They appear in italics, explaining who is involved with a scene and where they are on the stage. Here are some of the common stage directions used throughout Shakespeares plays: Aside: when an actor speaks directly to the audience, but the other characters on stage cannot hear them    Exeunt: indicate the departure of a character from the stage Sennett: a signal call on a trumpet or cornet to for entrance or exit from the stage Solus: when a character is alone on the stage    For a more in-depth review on Shakespeare reading strategies with specific examples, visit How To Series.

Plutons, Defined and Explained

Plutons, Defined and Explained A pluton (pronounced PLOO-tonn) is a deep-seated intrusion of igneous rock, a body that made its way into pre-existing rocks in a melted form (magma) several kilometers underground in the Earths crust and then solidified. At that depth, the magma cooled and crystallized very slowly, allowing the mineral grains to grow large and tightly interlocked - typical of plutonic rocks.   Shallower intrusions may be called subvolcanic or hypabyssal intrusions. There are a slew of partial synonyms based on a plutons size and shape, including batholith, diapir, intrusion, laccolith, and stock.   How Pluton Becomes Visible A pluton exposed at the Earths surface has had its overlying rock removed by erosion. It may represent the deep part of a magma chamber that once fed magma to a long-vanished volcano, like Ship Rock in northwestern New Mexico. It may also represent a magma chamber that never reached the surface, like Stone Mountain  in  Georgia.  The only true way to tell the difference is by mapping and analyzing the details of the rocks that are exposed along with the geology of the surrounding area. The Various Types of Plutons Pluton is a general term that covers the whole variety of shapes taken by bodies of magma. That is, plutons are defined by the presence of plutonic rocks. Narrow sheets of magma that form sills and igneous dikes may qualify as plutons if the rock inside them solidified at depth. Other plutons have fatter shapes that have a roof and a floor. This can be easy to see in a pluton that was tilted so that erosion could cut through it at an angle. Otherwise, it may take geophysical techniques to map the plutons three-dimensional shape. A blister-shaped pluton that raised the overlying rocks into a dome may be called a laccolith. A mushroom-shaped pluton may be called a lopolith, and a cylindrical one may be called a bysmalith. These have a conduit of some sort that fed magma into them, usually called a feeder dike (if its flat) or a stock (if its round). There used to be a whole set of names for other pluton shapes, but they arent really much use and have been abandoned. In 1953, Charles B. Hunt made fun of these in USGS Professional Paper 228 by proposing the name cactolith for a cactus-shaped pluton: A cactolith is a quasihorizontal chonolith composed of anastomosing ductoliths whose distal ends curl like a harpolith, thin like a sphenolith, or bulge discordantly like an akmolith or ethmolith. Who said geologists couldnt be funny?   Then there are plutons that have no floor, or at least no evidence of one. Bottomless plutons like these are called stocks if they are smaller than 100 square kilometers in extent, and batholiths if theyre larger.  In the United States, the Idaho, Sierra Nevada, and Peninsular batholiths are the largest. How Plutons Form The formation and fate of plutons is an important, long-standing scientific problem. Magma is less dense than rock and tends to rise as buoyant bodies. Geophysicists call such bodies diapirs (DYE-a-peers); salt domes are another example. Plutons may readily melt their way upward in the lower crust, but they have a hard time reaching the surface through the cold, strong upper crust. It appears that they need help from regional tectonics that pulls the crust apart- the same thing that favors volcanoes at the surface. Thus plutons, and especially batholiths, go along with subduction zones that create arc volcanism. For a few days in 2006, the International Astronomical Union considered giving the name plutons to large bodies in the outer part of the solar system, apparently thinking that it would signify Pluto-like objects. They also considered the term plutinos. The Geological Society of America, among other critics of the proposal, sent a quick protest, and a few days later the IAU decided on its epochal definition of dwarf planet that banished Pluto from the register of planets. (See What Is a Planet?) Edited by Brooks Mitchell