As performed, that made for plays that pulsed with life for their audiences. A groundling at the Globe may have been illiterate, but he might have chuckled—or at least nodded along in historically inscribed sexism—when King Lear chided his daughter that “nothing can come of nothing.” There, right in the middle of Shakespeare’s great tragedy about parents and children and the human condition ... a joke about ladyparts.

In the 400 years since Shakespeare made his bawdy puns, though, the evolution of language—and of pronunciation, in particular—has eroded many of the embedded bits of wordplay that would have been obvious to Elizabethan ears. “Prove” and “love,” in most English dialects, no longer rhyme. This is unfortunate for Sonnet 166, also known as the “marriage sonnet,” and its now-only-semi-rhyme: “If this be error and upon me proved/ I never writ, nor no man ever loved.” Same with “hour” and “whore,” which colluded to make Maria’s now-outdated pun in Twelfth Night: “My lady takes great exception to your ill hours.” Same with “ace” and “ass,” formerly homophones that allowed Demetrius, playing a card game at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to mock a fellow player with the following observation: “No die, but an ace for him, for he is but one.”

What all that means is that contemporary audiences, often taught to approach Shakespeare’s work with the hushed reverence of ceremonial celebration, can also miss its jokes—and, as a result, can miss its full range of ambiguity and meaning. And also, quite often, its fun. David Crystal is a linguistics scholar who has pioneered an “original pronunciation,” or OP, approach to reading and performing Shakespeare. He has made a study of how much of Shakespeare’s original meaning has been, well, (p)undone. And according to Crystal’s research, at least 96 of the 154 sonnets credited to Shakespeare contain rhymes that have since been lost to linguistic history. For the plays, which together form a much larger corpus, the number is likely much higher.

Which is a shame. Romeo and Juliet’s mention of “the fatal loins of these two foes,” for example, is much richer if you know that, for Shakespeare, “loin” rhymed with “line.” Line! Written words, stellar constellations, bloodlines, inheritance, the behind-the-scenes workings of theater ... all of those, and more, come into play with the new—and old—pronunciation.

So Crystal, for his part, is trying to bring back some of the plays’ and poems’ original linguistic depth. Later this month, his lengthy reference on the matter—The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation—will be published. It’s a book, a guide to Shakespeare’s first folio, that Crystal has been working on for 12 years (on and off, because, as he notes, “it’s deadly boring” to put a dictionary together). That work involved, essentially, linguistic sleuthing: Crystal started by looking at the words that might have originally rhymed, based on rhyme schemes and the words’ current pronunciations, and then cross-referenced them against other appearances of those same words in Shakespeare’s corpus.