2 . Over the centuries Shakespeare’s plays have gained a reputation for being difficult to understand. But if his work is experienced on stage as Shakespeare intended, then it can become much clearer. In fact 95% of the words used in Shakespeare’s plays are the same words we use today.

The meanings of some words have altered significantly, _________, because Shakespeare was writing at a time of great linguistic change. This gave him a certain amount of _________ license in his language.

So what can Shakespeare’s plays tell us about how people really spoke at this time? And did anyone really speak like his characters? The lines spoken by Corin to Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It probably weren’t _________ of an Elizabethan shepherd.

The first thing to remember about Shakespeare’s work is that he wrote plays to entertain. They are _________ works, and the dialogue was exploited to suit the stage. Therefore his characters’ language did not always _________ how real people would have spoken.

For instance, in As You Like It when Corin, the shepherd, talks of love, his lines are beautiful and poetic – but _________ unrealistic. The lines Shakespeare gave Corin probably wouldn’t have been used by an Elizabethan shepherd – instead they _________ to highlight the drama.

Another example of how the theatrical style enriched Shakespeare’s text can be seen in the structure of his lines. According to the practice of the time, Shakespeare wrote his poems in iambic pentameter(抑扬格五音步) so it was _________ for his actors to learn. When Shakespeare was writing, new plays were performed every day so this 10-beat structure was a great help for anyone having to learn a lot of lines for the next day’s play.

_________ this structure meant that, on occasion, Shakespeare made up or adapted words to fit. __________, on several occasions Shakespeare changed the word “vast” to “vasty” when “vast” did not fit the __________ of the line. But if we look beyond the dialogue to the words themselves we can find out a little of how people really spoke.

We can come close to this thanks to “original pronunciation” which is a system of __________ that reproduce how the Elizabethans are believed to have spoken. Today it sounds like a West Country accent, with echoes of other parts of the country. When we __________ this to Shakespeare’s dialogue, rhymes and puns(押韵与双关) that are not heard in modern English are suddenly revealed.

So through Shakespeare’s plays we can __________ a great deal about how people really spoke. His dialogue was on the whole representative of the language of the time and area and now provides us with invaluable insight into a(n) __________ language.