Unit 4: Vocabulary from Readings

Shakespeare’s plays are being rewritten as comic strips for pupils who find his poetry boring, it emerged today.

The publishers hope the comics—illustrated by artists who have worked on the Spiderman series—will inspire disaffected readers with a love of the Bard’s plays.

The firm hopes eventually to publish comic strip versions of all Shakespeare’s plays.

“The genius of Shakespeare is in the language, but for some students understanding it can be a struggle. It will be useful for teachers to have three different versions of the text.

Printing was regulated by the ecclesiastical authorities and the Stationers’ Company, although the regulations were not always enforced.

There was no law of copyright to protect their interests. Once a manuscript play had been sold to a publisher, and he had paid for its approval and licensing for printing, he had sole rights over the work.

Those which were still structurally sound were either converted into dwellings, or demolished so that their timbers could be reused elsewhere.

Most of his immense vocabulary is still in use, but a few of his words are not, and, worse, some of his words now have meanings quite different from those they had in the sixteenth century.

In the opening scenes of the main body of the play, the setting in Italy and the story’s focus on wooing are created through repeated [local references and phrases].

Shakespeare frequently shifts his sentences away from “normal” English arrangements—often to create the rhythm he seeks, sometimes to use a line’s poetic rhythm to emphasize a particular word, sometimes to give a character his or her own speech patterns or to allow the character to speak in a special way.

You will make a pauper of me!

Not in seventy-seven millennia have I ever seen such a miser! I will teach this fellow not to be so stingy.