That

I had a few moments to kill before Cymbeline rehearsal yesterday, so, on a whim I looked up the word "that" online. I often feel the word is more important in Shakespeare than it gets credit for - which is to say, I think actors don't stress it when they should.

If wikipedia is to be believed, the word "that" has seven grammatical functions in English:

• as a complementizer/subordinating conjunction. ("He asked that she go.")
• to introduce a restrictive relative clause ("The test that she took was hard.") In this role that may be analyzed either as a relative pronoun or as a conjunction as in the first case; see English relative clauses: Status of that.
• as a demonstrative pronoun ("That was hard.") (plural: those)
• as a demonstrative adjective ("That test was hard.") (plural: those)
• as an adverb ("The test wasn't that bad.")

In the first two uses the word is usually pronounced weakly, as /ðət/, whereas in the other uses it is pronounced /ðæt/.

 Because of Shakespeare's love of long poetic comparisons, he often used the word "that" as a demonstrative pronoun. I guess modern American readers see the word and aren't clear that it isn't used in one of the first two ways. The general rule, then, I suppose, is that to convey the meaning, when the word "that" is used as a demonstrative pronoun, it should almost always be stressed, regardless of where it appears in a line of verse.