Here are some phrases from Shakespeare. Next spring, keep your ears pricked for “Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages”–whilst regaling the other holy pilgrims with a few rather racy tales…
Kiyoshi, your profile says Liverpool. You just missed the Shakespeare Festival. I’ll bet there are productions not too far from you, given the rather dinky size of the island…
For comparison, here’s the prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
You hardly need to apologize for writing clearly and correctly. 
Early exposure to Shakespeare can help a lot. I have an ex who grew up seeing every play at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival from the age of four, and I know that she understands the language much better than I do, and I work in the theatre industry! Beyond that, I’d suggest not listening to the language directly; if I sit there, listening hard and pondering what’s being said, I don’t understand a word of it. Rather, I simply have to sit back and let the language wash over me, watch the characters and their faces, and simply let the play happen. And I still don’t get everything. That’s true in Chekov, and August Wilson, and many other good playwrights. A well-written play often has layers of meaning that you may not understand without seeing half-a-dozen different productions.
The Great Vowel Shift. Reading Chaucer today, it’s clear that either he was an incompetent poet, or else he was working with words that rhymed and scanned in different ways than our modern English. Check the text samples here.
I think Macbeth takes top honors in that category.
By which you mean McKellen’s British 1930s Fascist take on Richard III, and Richardson’s House of Cards - on both of which I agree with you. Both are excellent.
Isaac Asimov, in one of his massive Shakespeare concordances, offered an interesting theory: that the evolution of the English language has actually been retarded since the Bard’s day, because subconsciously we, as a society, never want to reach a point where Shakespeare becomes gibberish to us.
One more point in Will’s favor!
Asimov also called attention to some obvious-to-him things about the plays that, it occurs to me, an Elizabethan (or modern) audience might not get. E.g., Hamlet is not just a family-revenge story, nothing about it would make sense of the main characters were not royalty; everything Hamlet does or does not do is driven by his desire not only for vengeance, but for the kingship. Romeo & Juliet is really about the folly of romance: It’s clear (from Capulet’s indulgent reaction when Romeo crashes his party) that the Montague-Capulet feud is on its last legs and only a few psychos like Thibault are keeping it alive. Romeo could easily approach Juliet’s father for her hand in a respectable way. But she is in love with the idea of a secret, forbidden love, and Romeo indulges her; the priest is, perhaps, in love with the idea of being a blessed peacemaker, using this silly situation to patch things up between the feuding houses; and it all ends in tragedy.
I’m with you Kiyoshi.
Here is my journey with Shakespeare thus far in my life:
In high school we read Romeo and Juliet and I was less than excited about it. Then we watched it and I loved it. I think it had something to do with the sword fighting and the kid that was playing Romeo. Damn was he hot!! But then the next year we read Julius Caesar and while I didn’t understand every single word, I just fell in love with that play. I feel like the play has a lot of urgency and venom that I just love.
In college we read numerous other Shakespeare plays (I can’t remember them all) and none of them really struck me. I’ve seen several productions of the plays as well and I always just feel like I’m hanging on by my fingertips trying to understand. It is only when I perform Shakespeare that I feel like I start to get it and that is because I spend hours researching every single friggin word. It is exhausting for me to read Shakespeare which is why I put it off. I feel like if I don’t look up every single word to be sure of all the double meanings and layers and puns and motives than I’m missing something vital to the story. This kind of reading drives me crazy though! I love the versions that have the “modern” English on the other side of the page because sometimes I just want to finish a page gosh darn it!
So that is my journey thus far. I love Julius Caesar and will watch any adaptation of it but I haven’t found another play of his yet that grabs like that one did.
… that were not obvious to anybody else… 
What you say is true to an extent – we do generally put the middle-to-modern English boundary somewhere around 1400 AD, and we do generally consider these different “languages”, and there are some good reasons why we classify in this way…but on another level, the evolving language is a continuum, and it’s wrong to make a cut-and-dried statement like “Chaucer spoke a different language than we do, and Shakespeare spoke the same language we do.”
Take that to its extreme, though, and you’d be forced to say that you and I don’t speak the same language that our parents did. Or that you and I don’t speak the same language at all. If you’re going to be drawing a line at all, though, I think that “coined many phrases still in common use in the language” is a reasonable enough one.
We had Julius Caesar in high school too. And watched the movie with Marlon Brando as Mark Antony. Maybe not the best casting, but it helped to actually see it being played.
Saw the latest Romeo & Juliet in LA, just after it opened. Leonardo di Caprio & Clare Danes as the starcrost lovers; psychedelic updates to the setting, props, costumes & music. But the language was pure Shakespeare…
I think the biggest problem with translations is that everyone wants to translate it to modern vernacular, when the work was never intended as such.* The goal of any translation of a work should be to preserve as much of the original as possible.
Most of it is fine, as indicated by the fact that only the barest number of footnotes are required for actual language changes (as opposed to explaining the humor based on popular culture of the time, which is more voluminous.)
I hate the no fear texts because at the very least, they make everyone sound retarded.
Here’s MacBeth’s closing verse from Act II scene i:
I go, and it is done. The bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.
The modern translation:
I’m going now. The murder is as good as done. The bell is telling me to do it. Don’t listen to the bell, Duncan, because it summons you to heaven or to hell.
laaaaaame
Yeahbut, Marlon Brando in a toga back when he was hot. Woo nelly, I remember that English class well. The dialogue was good too.
Agreed. Very lame. I’d never come across these translations before. I’m sure this is NOT what McWhorter had in mind. Like I said, “skillful”. Not crappy.
But I think the solution I stumbled on in that Mexican cinema might be better overall, for anyone who is bilingual.
While I think that this is a plausible interpretation, and I can easily picture a production that works along these lines, I think it’s wrong to say that it must be this way. The feud may be quite “hot”, and Capulet coldly and practically chooses to avoid confronting Romeo at the masque because he doesn’t want to risk the prince’s anger. Romeo may likewise be avoiding attacking Thibault because he doesn’t want to fight in the streets. I’m not saying it must be one way or the other, but rather that there’s more room for interpretation than only Asimov’s point of view.
An important thing to keep in mind is that Richard III wasn’t ancient history in Shakespeare’s time. It was recent politics.
The Tudor dynasty had replaced the Plantagenet dynasty when Henry defeated Richard at Bosworth Field but there were probably a few Britons who still thought of the Tudors as upstarts and the Plantagenets as the real royals.
So no writer in Elizabethean times would have dared portray Richard as a good king or even a noble enemy. You were better off portraying him as an outright villain.
I don’t have much time, but here’s a quick thought. There’ve been some empirical linguistic studies demonstrating the vital importance of intonation to the receiver of an utterance – even if your average groundling would have (most certainly) been hard-pressed to parse an average Shakespearean sentence grammatically, the effect of communicating using both non-verbal cues (i.e., [jon Lovitz]Acting!) and, my point, using intonation patterns of “regular” speech would seem to render advanced understanding of nuances in the grammar of Shakespeare if not null, than moot at best.
I thought David Tennant did a decent job of this in the recent PBS version of Hamlet (with Patrick Stewart). Tennant does dark, brooding humour well.
Shakespeare himself seemed to think there were some things his audience wouldn’t understand and needed explained. “I will bite my thumb at them, which is a great disgrace if they do bear it!” – R&J. Apparently an English audience (Shakespeare presumed) would be unfamiliar with the Italian insult-gesture of thumb-biting, and he could think of no precisely equivalent English gesture that would adequately susbstitute in that scene; so, use it and explain it.