So you go to an English school and English is not your first language. At some point you will be learning Shakespeare. Nightmare right? You aren’t just learning modern English, now you have to learn Elizabethan English too? Who thought that was a good idea?!

Well don’t worry too much. I’m going to show you how to break Shakespeare down, to make it easier to understand.

Here is part of a mushy love poem, one of the great Shakespearean love Sonnets. I have broken it down, and explained the logic behind each section:

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.”

Here Shakespeare is saying don’t let me (let me not) say there are obstacles to true love (impediments are obstacles, and the marriage of true minds sounds like love to me!). When things change, love stays the same, when things bend love does not bend (change).

“O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring barque,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.”

Now he is saying dramatically that love stays the same (O is just Oh spelled in old fashioned English). When love looks at a raging storm on the sea (tempests) it still stays the same (is never shaken). A barque is a sailing ship, so he is saying now that love is like the stars that help to guide a wandering ship at sea in the storm. How pretty!

“Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.”

Now he is saying pretty pink lips and pink cheeks (rosy) change over time as we get older (within his bending sickles compass come – this is a reference to character “death” with his scythe). He is talking about how we get less beautiful as we get older. Love does not change (alter) over time, even to the “edge of doom”, which sounds like he is talking about death. It’s a love poem that’s why he is being so dramatic!

“If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”

Here he is saying if you can prove me wrong on this, then I have never written anything, and no man has ever loved anyone. This is the old-fashioned version of, “If you think I’m wrong, then I’m the queen of Sheba!”

So there you go. It looks like a nightmare to start with, and it is definitely more difficult to read, but if you think about the images he is trying to make, like death with his sickle or scythe, or the boat on a stormy sea guided by stars, it starts to make sense!