As generations of school students have discovered, Shakespeare is not always the easiest person to understand. His highly wrought style, filled with archaic, unusual and sometimes simply made-up words, means that Shakespeare’s plays are regularly printed with running glossaries to explain his meaning at difficult points.
Shakespeare’s choice of words needn’t be just an obstacle to understand him, though. Modern readers are at an obvious disadvantage compared with Shakespeare’s contemporaries, for whom his vocabulary would have been easier to understand, if not immediately comprehensible all the time. We do have a compensating advantage, however, which Shakespeare could never have foreseen. Because of the rapid changes in language since his time, even comparatively simple words can exert a poetic effect.
It has been suggested, by a group of literary critics known as the Russian Formalists, that the essential literary element of poetry is “defamiliarisation”. This means presenting a familiar object in an unusual way, which causes the reader to look at the object as if it was unfamiliar. Our perceptions of the world around us are dulled by custom, argued the Russian Formalists, and poetry forces us to re-examine what we thought we knew. For example, Larkin’s comparison of the sun to an unclenched hand and a lion’s face: by making us consider why the sun is like or unlike these, he makes us consider the nature of the sun.
A similar thing can happen when reading Shakespeare, with words rather than objects.
A fairly simple word like “peradventure” can set off a chain reaction of associations which cause us to re-examine familiar words. Translating it as “perhaps” only starts the process. Substituting “haps” for “adventure” calls into question what “haps” means – it’s obviously linked by to phrases like “by good hap” (from Love’s Labour’s Lost: “What’s her name, in the hap?” “Rosaline, by good hap.”) or “lucky hap”, but also to the modern “happens”. “Per-haps” means by chance, things which “may-be” but may not, the opposite of “as per usual”, and it can apparently be substituted for “adventure.”
A “happening” doesn’t sound much like an adventure, until we remember that “happenings” were the name given to the theatrical, chemical and musical events held in the Sixties, where experiences were “happened upon” as they "happened to” people. Whilst “happen it will” is a Northern English expression meaning an event is uncertain, Shakespere’s Hero in Much Ado About Nothing says that “loving goes by haps” and what about the syllable’s connection to one of our most familiar words – “happy”. Is “happiness” a matter of chance? Of being favoured by chance? Of being caught up in an adventure?
Of course Shakespeare couldn’t have intended these “poetic moments” to have happened with such simple words. For a start he couldn’t know how language would change, and his lines were written to be delivered at relatively high speeds. It’s only from our modern standpoint, with a glossed and edited text in our hand, that we can enjoy these unintended verbal explosions, as familiar words fragment and mingle before us. Neither, of course, is it particularly due to Shakespeare’s skill as a poet. But it is a strange and moving pleasure.
