1. Decoding Shakespeare
Strategies for fixing confusion

2. I already know …
• Picture yourself at a wedding … what words do
the bride and groom exchange to end the
ceremony?
• “I, Janette, take thee, Demetrius, as my
lawful husband.”
• Which more common word could replace thee in
this sense?

3. Pronouns
• Shakespeare’s works use different pronouns, mostly
because he wrote hundreds of years ago when English
was slightly different.
• In the Elizabethan era, like today, pronouns changed
depending on their job in a sentence.
– Thou - Subject: “Thou art my brother.”
– Thee - Object: “Come, let me clutch thee.”
– Thy - Possessive Adjective: “What is thy name?”
– Thine - Possessive Noun: “To thine own self be true.”
– Ye - Subject: “Ye shall know me.”
• As you read, what strategy can you apply to outdated
pronouns?

4. Practice
• That in thy likeness thou appear to us!
• In your likeness you appear to us!
• Griefs of mine own lie heavy in my breast, / Which thou
wilt propagate, to have it prest / With more of thine: this
love that thou hast shown / Doth add more grief to too
much of mine own.
• My grief lays heavy in my heart / and you will expand
my pain, to be pressed / into yours. The love you
have shown / adds more hurt to my own overly
heavy burden.

5. Verb endings
• An older form of English, called Middle English, added ‘bits’ to the
end of verbs, called inflections.
• Shakespeare used Modern English (an earlier version of it), but the
language had not completely stopped using inflections. So, often,
Shakespeare’s verbs have an ‘extra’ -est or –st, and –th or -eth
– “Thou liest, malignant thing.”
– “What didst thou see?”
– “Whose misadventurous piteous overthrows / Doth with their death
bury their parents’ strife.”
– “He heareth not, he stirreth not, he moveth not.”
• Can you think of your own?
– “What time should’st thou callest?”
– “Hath thou drunk thy Coke when thou wast thirsty?”
• As you read, what strategy can you apply to verbs with inflections
(‘extra’ endings)?

6. Practice
• I would thou hadst my bones, and I thy news.
• I wish you had my bones, and I had your news.
• I do protest I never injured thee, / But love thee
better than thou canst devise / Till thou shalt know
the reason of my love
• I disagree; I never insulted you, / But will care
for you more than you can understand / you
will know the reason of my love

7. Sentence structure
• Shakespeare loved to ‘play’ with the English
language. He knew that he could be creative with
diction (word choice), figurative language, multiple
meaning words and sentence structure.
• When reading Shakespearean sentences, rearrange
and reword where necessary to understand.
• As you cluster words into sentences, you should see that
Shakespeare’s sentences can be easy to decode
• Your final sentence can be different from Shakespeare’s. His
sentence is not better; it’s just different.

8. Sentence structure practice
• Use the cards available to cluster words and
create a sentence. All the words are part of a
single sentence from Romeo & Juliet.
• Each group will read their sentence out loud
and see if anyone else has the same sentence.

9. Shakespeare’s original sentences
• Why call you for a sword? (I.i.67)
• Younger than she are happy mothers made. (I.ii.12)
• Thou knowest my daughter’s of a pretty age. (I.iii.10)
• She that makes dainty, / She I’ll swear hath corns. (I.v.18-19)
• For stony limits cannot hold out, / And what love can do, that dares love
attempt. (II.ii.67-68)
• Young son, it argues a distemperèd head / So soon to bid good morrow to
thy bed. (II.iii.33-34)
• Nay, and there were two such, we should have none / shortly, for one
would kill the other. (III.i.15-16)
• My dismal scene I needs must act alone. (IV.iv.19)
• Art thou so bare and full of wretchedness / And fearest to die? (V.ii.68-69)
• What sorrow craves acquaintance at my hand / That I know yet not?
(III.iii.5-6)

10. Strategies
• Name and explain your reading strategies for
– Pronouns (thee, thou, thy, thine, ye …)
– Verb inflections
– Sentence structure

11. Sonnet 116
Paraphrase of SONNET 116
•(Lines 1-2) Although legal marriages have barriers to prevent them [like close genes
or being currently married], I don't believe in any such barriers to the union between
true lovers.
•(2-3) Love isn't really love if it changes when we notice our beloved has changed.
•(4-5) Love doesn't vary when someone tries to lure us away from our beloved.
•(5-6) No way! Love is like a rock, and storms can't undermine it.
•(7-8) Love is a constant guide to us as we sail through life, but we can't really see its
true value even if we can quantify love somehow.
•(9-10) Love doesn't vary with time, even if the glow of youthfulness passes from our
beloved's face.
•(11-12) Love doesn't vary because of time; it stays constant even until death.
•(13-14) If I'm wrong about love, then I never wrote anything [worthwhile since
almost all my writings are about love somehow] and nobody has been in love.