CHICAGO (WBBM) - On this, believed to be William Shakespeare's 445th birthday, Mayor Daley is urging Chicagoans to celebrate the bard by talking like Shakespeare. WBBM's Regine Schlesinger has some advice from an expert.
You might not sound like Laurence Olivier doing Hamlet, but, in an official proclamation, Mayor Daley encourages you to screw your courage to the sticking place and plunge into Shakespearean English.
How to do that? Blaine Swen is director of Chicago's Improvised Shakespeare Company, a theater group that comes up with Shakespearean plays on the fly. He says the first step is figuring out thee and thou.
And to end a conversation, you can throw in a rhyming couplet.
Shakespeare gave us so many expressions that have now become part of everyday language, Swen says you might often be quoting the bard without even realizing it.
More information at www.talklikeshakespeare.org
Some advice from that Web site:
- Instead of you, say thou. Instead of y’all, say thee.
- Rhymed couplets are all the rage.
- Men are Sirrah, ladies are Mistress, and your friends are all called Cousin.
- Instead of cursing, try calling your tormenters jackanapes or canker-blossoms or poisonous bunch-back’d toads.
- Don’t waste time saying "it," just use the letter "t" (’tis, t’will, I’ll do’t).
- Verse for lovers, prose for ruffians, songs for clowns.
- When in doubt, add the letters "eth" to the end of verbs (he runneth, he trippeth, he falleth).
- To add weight to your opinions, try starting them with methinks, mayhaps, in sooth or wherefore.
- When wooing ladies: try comparing her to a summer’s day. If that fails, say "Get thee to a nunnery!"
- When wooing lads: try dressing up like a man. If that fails, throw him in the Tower, banish his friends and claim the throne.
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