Elizabethans often talked of going, not as now, to ‘see’ a play, but to ‘hear’ one. As the modern theatre director Richard Eyre has put it, ‘the life of the plays is in the language, not alongside it, or underneath it. Feelings and thoughts are released at the moment of speech.’ That language might be one of the most important aspects of the play-going experience – not merely a vehicle for plot or characterisation, but a thing in itself – can help us to get hold of the purpose of the density and richness of Shakespeare’s dramatic language. Then, as now, Shakespeare’s language must have seemed distant, estranged from the everyday, full of unfamiliar vocabulary or words used in ways or combinations that were puzzling or allusive. Then, as now, most people would have found paraphrasing every image or line of Shakespeare difficult, even while the overall sense or tone was clear. So we need to trust to enjoy Shakespeare’s elaborate dramatic language rather in the ways we might enjoy music or other non-representational art forms, than only in the ways we might enjoy the sparser, more realist prose style of modern fiction or journalism.

Shakespeare has, of course, the capacity to write strikingly idiomatic or contemporary-seeming lines. The exchange from Titus Andronicus in which, seeing Tamora’s newly delivered infant, Chiron accuses ‘Thou hast undone our mother’, to be met by Aaron’s riposte ‘Villain, I have done thy mother’ (4.2.75–6) is simple and darkly comic. But the reply is pleasing in part because of its rhetorical structure, repeating the rhythm and form of the statement to redirect its angry charge. Rhetoric, the art of pleasing and persuasive language, was a crucial part of grammar school education, and Shakespeare would have learned this well.