Learn how reading Shakespeare and the King James Bible helped Abraham Lincoln compose his best-remembered address in American history

MICHAEL WITMORE: Part of what I love about this speech is the way in which it mixes the two registers we have in English. The words that come prior from the pre-Norman conquest which happened in 1066, these words are Germanic, and they tend to be monosyllabic, direct and sometimes very tough. Anglo-Saxon words have a sense of finality, and they connect us to the earthy things that come to us from the lifeworld.

The second register is that of French and Latin which came to England after the Norman conquest. And these words are multisyllabic and they're often conceptual. They are optimistic words in the sense that they say-- there are concepts that might help us bring together something as complicated as a republic.

And I think these two key signatures are things that we expect our politicians to know how to understand and master. Abraham Lincoln learned these two key signatures from reading Shakespeare and the King James Bible. Those two documents which were so formative in the language that English speakers still speak today, taught English speakers how to mix those two registers, and how to move in between those two keys.

So from the opening sentence of the speech, "Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth"-- those are all words from the pre-Norman conquest. They're direct and they're short. And then he switches to "a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." He moves to the concepts, the words get longer, and what started out as direct and earthy is now starting to soar.

We know that Lincoln read carefully Shakespeare and the King James Bible, and that that's where he got some of his sense of rhythm and structure, but also that sense of how to mix these two kinds of English. And it's something that he brought to the speech which is full of that sense of history, and also of that sense of occasion.