RALPH: Sarah, one thing I noticed about Shakespeare’s language is that he sometimes uses familiar words in a different way. Take the words “dignity” and “mutiny,” for example. 

SARAH:  That’s right, Ralph. When Shakespeare says that the two households are alike in “dignity”, he doesn’t mean that they have the same level of self-respect. He means that both families belong to the same social class--the nobility, the upper level of Verona society. They’re alike in their nobility.  

RALPH: And when he says that the families have broken into a “mutiny”, he doesn’t mean they are rebelling against authority like a group of angry sailors. He’s simply saying that the feud between them has turned violent. But how can we account for these different meanings?

SARAH:  One reason that we’re sometimes unfamiliar with how Shakespeare uses words we think we know is that the English language has evolved tremendously over the past 400 years. We simply speak differently now: we use many words quite differently than Shakespeare did, and we have stopped using other words that were common in Shakespeare’s day.  

RALPH: But we also can’t ignore the fact that Shakespeare loves to play with the various meanings of words, too.  He’s playful and inventive, and sometimes he stretches the meanings of words to make us think, or laugh, or even wince.

SARAH: True enough. When Shakespeare writes “Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean” he is using civil in two ways. The families’ hands are “civil” because they belong to upright, civilized members of society. 

RALPH:  But the blood on those hands is not the blood of some foreign enemy. It’s “civil blood,” that is, the blood of their fellow citizens of Verona.