Did people really speak the way they did in Shakespeare's plays?

Yes, and no. Shakespeare uses many different styles of language, such as blank verse, rhyming couplets and ordinary "vernacular" language. He also varied the rhythms and rhymes of his language and used a particular rhythm pattern called iambic pentameter where there are five "stressed" syllables in a line of dialogue.

Generally, he used the more refined and complicated patterns for the "high class" characters and gave the more ordinary styles to "lower class" characters. Nobody spoke the way Shakespeare wrote his high class characters - it probably takes a lot of thought and rewriting to compose such language. Many people did, however, use the more common, lower class styles of speech.

Yes, the Middle English used around London (that you may have encountered studying Chaucer) developed into Modern English, and Shakespeare is one of Modern English's earliest and greatest users. Of course, few people were as witty of tongue as Shakespeare's characters...I doubt any potential suicide in Elizabethan England actually paused to consider aloud "to be or not to be...," but remember that Shakespeare was primarily a poet and even his plays are written with a poet's ear to the language of his time. Yes and no.

Most of the people in Shakespeare's plays talk in poetry, which is very artificial and unnatural, while some speak in prose which is closer to the way everyone spoke. Many of the lines are said in exactly the same way they would be today. "Who's there?" (Hamlet) "I am a man more sinned against than sinning." (King Lear) "We cannot be here and there too." (Romeo and Juliet) all sound pretty modern.

People tend to be wrapped up in their own reality, and so anything different from what they know seems strange. The small differences between modern speech and the speech in Shakespeare's plays are no more confusing than talking to someone from another part of the world who speaks a different dialect. Since not all people in Shakespeare's plays speak the same way, the answer is both yes and no.

Lines written in prose would approximate ordinary speech much more than lines in verse, certainly much more than lines in rhymed verse. However, some lines have the stamp of reality to them. Almost everything Sir John Falstaff says sounds very natural.

"What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? Well, 'tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on?

How then? Can honour set to a leg? No: or an arm?

No: or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then?

No. What is honour? A word.

What is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air.

A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o' Wednesday.

Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it?

No. 'Tis insensible, then. Yea, to the dead.

But will it not live with the living? No. Why?

Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it.

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