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THINK ON MY WORDS
CHAPTER ONE: ‘YOU SPEAK A LANGUAGE THAT I
UNDERSTAND NOT’: MYTHS AND REALITIES
There is a story that if you travel into the most isolated valleys in eastern USA you will find people who still speak the language of Shakespeare; this is because, probably, these people are descendants of the early settlers of Virginia in 1606. The idea that Shakespeare’s English is rurally alive and well is a remarkably persistent myth.
THE QUANTITY OF MYTH
It is never easy to understand how much vocabulary was in use during a particular historical period. The usual figure given for the size of Shakespeare’s vocabulary is about 20000 different words. It is not so much the number of words we have as what we do with those words that makes the difference between an ordinary and a brilliant use of language. Many commentators on Shakespeare’s language nonetheless seem to be obsessed with quantity rather than creativity – probably because it is easier to count than to analyse. When someone talks about the number of words in Shakespeare, then, it is always important to know what kind of word they have been counting. People who say Shakespeare has about 20000 words are grouping all the variants together. Those who say he has over 30000 words are counting all the variants separately. The contrast is very noticeable in Shakespeare because the language of his time had more grammatical variants than today. There are five types of difficulty:
- We have to decide whether a word is a compound or not.
- Do we include all editorial emendations, modernizations, and variants between Folio and Quarto text?
- Do we include proper names?
- Do we include foreign words?
- Do we include onomatopoeic words or humorous forms?
Depending on how we answer these questions, our Shakespearean total will vary. It is the difference between people, situations, and subject-matter which generates different kinds of vocabulary, and Shakespeare is acknowledged to be unmatched in the range of his characters, settings, and themes. Writing historical plays, love stories, every kind of mental conflicts, Shakespeare had the opportunity to stand out from his contemporaries. Part of this ‘more’ is the creation of new words, and this introduces another linguistic myth about Shakespeare – that he invented a quarter, a third, a half… of all the words in the English language.
In the earlier periods, the only evidence we have to go on are the surviving texts, which allow us to establish the ‘first recorded user’ of a word. There is no greater collection of historical lexical usage than the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary, and that is the usual source of information when someone tries to establish how many words a particular author introduced into the language. Of the 2200 words in the OED whose first recorded use is in Shakespeare, about 1700 are plausible Shakespearean inventions – and about half of them stayed in the language. There is a distinction to be made between ‘inventing a word’ and ‘introducing a word into the language’. Many invented words have a very short life and never achieve a permanent place in English. At the same time, it is important not to over-rate what Shakespeare was doing. The age in which he wrote (Early Modern English) was one of the most lexically inventive periods in the history of the language. Thousands of words were taken from Latin and Greek, and as there was no dictionary in which these words could be recorded, writers invented anew, in most cases unaware that someone else might have attempted the word before them.
THE TRANSLATION MYTH
a. Diachronically, over time, as people grow older b. Synchronically, at any one point in time, as people adapt their writing to suit different types of subject matter
By style I mean the set of linguistic features that, taken together, uniquely identify a language user. There are thousands of options available to us, when we use a language, and it is possible to group these into types:
- Vocabulary offers the largest number of options
- English offers us many options in the way we vary sentence length, sentence structure, word-order, and word structure
- all part of the study of grammar.
- Sounds are a third dimension, allowing us option in the way we can build patterns of vowels, consonants, syllables, rhythms, and melodies, and generating effects which are traditionally described using such notions as alliteration, rhyme, and metre.
- And there are options in the way we interact, too, when we engage in verse or prose dialogue with each other. The choices here are more flexible, including a wide range of notions such as the way we question and answer each other, interrupt, repeat, change topic, or express things politely or rudely.
We are often not sure what choices were present in Early Modern English grammar. And, unless séance science takes a huge leap forward, we have no direct access to Shakespeare’s intuition. All we have are the surviving texts, and a body of linguistic research which is patchy, to say the least. So firm statements about style are going to be elusive.
CHAPTER TWO: ‘NOW, SIR, WHAT IS YOUR TEXT?’ KNOWING
THE SOURCES
It is a common acknowledge that we know so little about Shakespeare – there are so few biographical characters. But the one incontrovertible fact is the language, as seen in the texts which have survived – the First Folio of 1623, the Quarto editions of the plays, and the editions of the poems:
- A Folio is a book made from sheets of paper that have been folded once, making two leaves (four pages), each up to about 15 inches (38 cm) tall.
- A Quarto is a much smaller book, because the sheets of paper have been folded twice, making four leaves (eight pages).
- An Octavo has the sheets of paper folded three times, making eight very small leaves (sixteen pages).
Then in 1616, Ben Johnson published a folio collection of his own plays, the first Elizabethan dramatist to attempt a collected edition.
GOOD AND BAD QUARTOS
Two types of quarto have been distinguished, in relation to Shakespeare’s plays:
a. ‘Good quartos’ are those thought to have been produced using a reliable original source. Shakespeare’s original manuscripts obviously qualify, as would a ‘fair copy’ prepared from these papers for publication. b. ‘Bad quartos’ are pirated editions, perhaps compiled from memory by actors who had performed in them, or by members of rival companies in the audience, scribbling dialogue down or using shorthand.
no system of standardized spelling at the time he was writing, which did not clearly emerge until the 18th^ century.
SHAKESPEARE’S LANGUAGE?
Despite the limited size of the Shakespearean corpus and the incomplete state of the EME textual resources, considerable progress has been made in understanding both what he said and the way that he said it.
CHAPTER SEVEN: ‘THINK ON MY WORDS’: SHAKESPEAREAN VOCABULARY
The glossary writers concentrate on the difficult words, by which is usually meant words used by Shakespeare that are different from those used today. Either the words themselves have changed or the meaning of the words have changed. But difference and difficulty are not the same. There was not a linguistic problem, but a lack of knowledge of the world, rather than the lack of knowledge of how to talk about the world. There are words which need to be glossed because it is difficult to deduce from their form what they might mean.
EASY WORDS
At the ‘easy’ end, we find words such as oft, perchance, sup, morrow, visage and more others. There are words where the formal difference is too small to obscure the meaning, and in isolation these words seem to be obscure. But words are never used in isolation because the context makes the meaning perfectly clear.
METRICAL CONSTRAINTS
Some words are different solely because Shakespeare needed an extra syllable to meet the demands of the metre, but these do not usually cause any great difficulty of interpretation.
I can call Spirits from the vastie Deepe.
Vast deep would have been possible. There was large and huge, which had both been in English since the 13 th^ century. But these
were everyday words, which a creative writer might not think sufficiently expressive to express the enormity of the concept. The word immense and enormous were available, but they had the wrong rhythm too. Vast was the only word which had the right meaning, and which was sufficiently novel to make it poetically attractive. Giving vast a new ending was therefore an easy solution.
DIFFICULT WORDS
There are words where it is not possible to deduce from their form what they might mean. Traditional presentations of difficult vocabulary are not the best way of building up our sense of Shakespeare’s lexicon, because there is a natural tendency to see the word only in the context of the line in which it appears, as a literary or dramatic choice, and not to see it in its boarder context.
The Hamlet example occurs in the middle of his ‘To be or not to be’ speech, and the association with ‘grunting and sweating’, along with the general context of suicidal ruminations, can lead to the conclusion that the word must mean ‘really heavy and depressing burdens’. It is important to approach difficult words in the way that young children do when they acquire vocabulary. Word ‘families’ of this kind are always worth compiling and exploring, especially when words are really unfamiliar; at the same time, we also often find pairs of words which define each other in very specific ways, and these need to be related too. Some words are opposite or complementary in meaning, and the antonymy is shown through the prefix -un. There are several other types of semantic relationship linking words, which can help us get to grips with their meaning.
FALSE FRIENDS
The majority of Shakespeare’s difficult words can be grouped words that have changed their meaning from EME. Some of these words can be easily understood: intent for intention, glass for looking-glass, and meat to give a general sense for food. In
- Angel, in its sense of divine messenger. This is an Anglo- Saxon origin, occurring in the 10th^ century. But in the sense of lovely being – a person resembling an angel – the OED’s first citation is in fact Romeo’s reaction on hearing Juliet’s first words.
- Wicked, in its sense of bad in moral character or conduct, has an early Middle Age origin. But in a weaker sense, meaning mischievous or sly derives from As You Like It.
One of the most important features of Shakespeare’s word creation is its exploratory character. Choosing a word form is one thing; choosing which meaning to assign to it is another. And with some coinages we can see the gradual way in which a new meaning slots into the existing semantic network. The example is the following:
- Fledge is form the same root as fly, and during Middle Ages it emerged as an adjective describing the state of birds whose feathers were fully developed. In the second half of the 16th^ century it became to be used as a verb, meaning ‘acquiring of feathers’.
Shakespeare wanted to emulate the process birds did, with human beings. And for this reason, there are also occasional uses of unfledged as a verb from the end of 16th^ century (but the
adjectival use is very Shakespearean). People often see inventiveness in a language as just a matter of creating new words, but it is also a matter of creating new senses of pre- existing words.
CLUSTERS
Coinages are sporadic because, using them so often, would probably become so unfamiliar that no one will understand the real meaning of the work. Several well-established words are being used in new senses:
a. Various general senses of prepositions, such as ‘proposal for discussion’ which in Shakespeare’s words means
‘something put forward for acceptance’ – an offer. It is a usage that never survived. b. Design counts as a neologism only with its general meaning. c. Disaster is a neologism in different plays. In the more general sense of calamity, it was coming into the language in Shakespeare’s day, and there are several other people who have used it earlier. d. Divert was much older but developed new senses in 16th century, including turn awry. SIGNPOSTS
When Shakespeare’s coinages are examined together, interesting patters emerge. His use of the prefix -un is illustrative. He seemed to have had a penchant for using -un in imaginative ways:
a. Most of them are adjectives (uncomfortable, uncompassionate) b. There are few adverbs (unaware, unheedfully) c. There are no less than 62 instances where the prefix has been added to an already existing verb (unshout, uncurse, unswear) CHAPTER EIGHT: ‘TALK OF A NOUN AND A VERB’: SHAKESPEAREAN GRAMMAR
As with the vocabulary, the grammatical rules of English have changed very little over the past 400 years. The impression of the complexity of Shakespeare’s grammar arises because of the way grammar operates within the discourse, especially in verse speeches where the constraints of the metre complicate word- order. But even in prose it is not difficult to find speeches which look as difficult, from a grammatical point of view. There are two branches to the study of grammar:
e. Countable nouns (nose, fingers) f. Uncountable nouns (love) g. Common nouns (state, night, brains, love) h. Proper nouns (Mab)
There are just two differences with Modern English:
- No apostrophe making possession
- (^) Capitalization is used for some of the common nouns
ADJECTIVES
In modern standard English, to express a higher degree of an adjective we can use a word ending (inflected form) or a form consisting of more than one word (periphrastic). Lower degree is always expressed periphrastically. This system had been established by Shakespeare’s time, but it had not finished developing yet.
‘Double comparative’ and ‘double superlatives’ were an inflected and periphrastic form occur together (more larger, more bravest) are quite common, usually producing a more emphatic effect. – also used as an option of rhythmical alternative that could help for the metrical line – (As You Like It).
VERBS
The English we speak today had largely settled down by Shakespeare’s days. The most noticeable differences are in the Early Modern English period:
- -est for the second person singular following thou (thou goest, thou know’st;
- -th or -eth for the third person singular (she goeth, she hath)
The forms of the verb to be also included four older items: art, beest, wert, wast. All the earlier forms were reducing in frequency during Shakespeare’s period. If we order the plays chronologically and look at the -th ending, we could figure out the end changes dramatically. Despite this, sometimes both forms are used. The general differences are the following:
- Some verbs are irregular in Shakespeare and have become regular today (holp, helped / ought, owed)
- Some verbs are regular in Shakespeare and have become irregular today (digged, dug / having quitted, quit)
- Some irregular verbs stay irregular, but in a different way (awaked, awoken/ brake, broke) PRONOUNS
The forms thou and you are important markers of social and attitudinal differences between people. In Old English thou was singular and you was plural. But during the 13 th^ century, you began to be used as a polite form for the singular. The usual thing was for you to be used by inferior to superior, but thou was also used when they wanted special intimacy (addressing to God, for example). So, when someone changes form thou to you in a conversation, it must mean something.
WORD ORDER
The basic form of the pentameter consisted of five metrical units, the whole line ending in a natural pause and containing no internal break. ‘sentence per line’ is the simplest kind of relationship between metre and grammar and ‘clause per line’ is not very different.
The pace of reading increases when the line-breaks coincide with the major point of grammatical junction within a clause, such as between a subject and verb, verb and object, or noun and
