“Where is she, and how doth she, and what says/My concealed lady to our cancelled love?“. Something just sounds slightly wrong in Romeo’s speech here, in the second verse. But this is easily resolved. Shift the stress in concealed from the second syllable to the first, and everything falls into place. You shift the stress because this is how the word was pronounced at the time. Romeo and Juliet is a real treasure trove for language. And this one about the stress is just a minor case. Now for something major. Sex. Romeo and Juliet, despite its reputation as an elegiac tragedy, a romantic story, is really quite a saucy play. There is sexual innuendo all over the place. Perhaps words like prick, stand, O, circle, pencil, maidenheads, my naked weapon are rather obvious examples, and they practically never occur in the play without a secondary meaning. But there are also less obvious cases: dried herring, glove upon that hand, bow in the hams, poperin’ pair – none of these words is as innocent as it sounds. But most of us need an annotated edition to see this. One wonders what a modern English spectator makes of them and how they can be conveyed if the play is translated. But there is another kind of wordplay which is even more prominent in the play: repetition of words, juxtaposition of words, use of morphologically different forms of the same stem, that kind of thing. It pervades the whole play, and you get passages like as soon moved to be moody and as soon moody to be moved or single-soled jest, solely singular for the singleness or we waste our lights, in vain lights light by day. Makes you head grow dizzy. Mine at least. There is further wordplay on the bases of ay, ‘yes‘, being homonymic with eye and I. Juliet has a good time exploiting it: Say thou but I/And that bare vowel I shall poison more/Than the death-darting eye of a cockatrice./I am not I if there be such ay/Or those eyes shut that makes thee answer ay. You tell me how a German school learner can understand this. But there’s more to confuse the reader. Shakespeare often gets his grammar wrong. Completely wrong. You get a troubled mind drive me to walk around and that crystal scales and the villain lives which slaughtered him and worser than Tybalt’s death and cruel death has catched it from my sight. One doesn’t trust one’s eyes. Or ears. And then there is learn me how to lose a winning match. Curiously, in later editions of other plays, learn in this function is replaced by teach, suggesting that learn in the sense of ‘teach’ was already losing favour. And then of course there is the obnoxious thou and you (never mind ye, which also occurs). Now one might say, no big deal, one is du and the other is Sie. But isn’t it then at least odd that Juliet, despite the age difference (she is only 13!), consistently uses thou for the nurse whereas the nurse uses you for Juliet? But then, of course, it is social distinction that this is all about. But why does Juliet’s mother, in a longer dialogue, use thou and you alternately when speaking to Juliet? The social factor does not hold here, psychology is at work here. Romeo and Juliet use thou for each other, except the first time they meet when Juliet first addresses Romeo using you, but only once. And then there is Zounds! I always thought that it was a mild imprecation, it now sounding so dated. But it was quite strong at the time, so strong that it was removed from the Folio edition of several plays. The literal meaning, ‘by God’s wounds’, was perhaps still more present. I was further confused by Good-e’en. Romeo uses it shortly after midday! Today this would sound funny, at least in English. But not perhaps in modern Italian, where people use Buona sera earlier than the word sera suggests. And finally, language as a conveyor of culture. A plate is mentioned by one of the servants as part of the Capulets’ household. Nothing to write home about? Well, there is. The plate here is a status symbol, a token of the Capulets’ affluence. Plates were only just beginning to replace the wooden trenchers (also mentioned in the play). And then there is the name of Susan. This is the nurse’s dead daughter. Sounds like a perfectly normal name to use. But at the time it carried certain undertones. It was a surprisingly Protestant name for Catholic Verona. And it was a modern name, a newcomer among English names of the period. And one the first Susans in Stratford-on-Avon was Shakespeare’s own daughter. Incidentally she was 13 when the first Quarto was printed.
