Mr. Crystal is a linguist, and he is bringing a linguist’s eye to Shakespeare. In particular, he starts from the moderately common complaint that Shakespeare is difficult for modern English speakers. Rather than arguing whether it is difficult or not, or arguing that it is worth the difficulty, Mr. Crystal addresses the possible causes of difficulty. Is it the vocabulary, the syntax, the spelling, the style? He looks in great detail (sometimes incredible detail) at each of those, identifying areas that could create difficulty, assessing how great the difficulty is, and suggesting methods for easing it.
For instance, you may hear a lot about how the vocabulary for Shakespeare is large and complicated, and how Shakespeare invented some huge number of words. Mr. Crystal divides up the problems. Is it that there are a lot of different words, and if so is it more than any other text, or more than a typical modern text? Is it that there are a lot of words that are no longer in use, and if so, is the context generally helpful? Is it that Shakespeare invented words? But of course if Shakespeare invented a word and it’s currently in common use, there’s no difficulty in understanding it. Many times, it turns out, Shakespeare invented words by verbing nouns or making nounifications of verbs, or otherwise modifying an existing word, which is pretty common in modern speech as well, and doesn’t necessarily make for difficulty understanding.
And so on. I found the bit about punctuation particularly gripping, but then, that’s really just a sad bit of information about YHB. Did you know that William Shakespeare used possessive it’s? Or at least the compositor did at the print shop. As Mr. Crystal points out, with spelling and punctuation (and with some of the texts), it’s hard to tell what is Shakespeare and what is printer.
My complaint (you knew I would have one) is that Mr. Crystal has too much sympathy with the idea of getting Shakespeare right, vaddevah dat means. For instance, in the section on Pronunciation, he points out (from persuasive evidence) that Shakespeare would have pronounced the name of the month between June and August more or less the same way we currently pronounce the name Julie, with the accent on the first syllable. He then suggests that actors who pronounce the month in the modern way get the inflection wrong. This is an error. There are many factors to weigh in putting together a play; the audience should never be ignored in favor of any other sort of rightness.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.