Scarica Think on my words - David Crystal e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity!
Think on my words - David Crystal
1 ‘You speak a language that I understand not’: myths and realities
There is a story that, if you travel into the most isolated valleys of the Appalachian
Mountains in eastern USA, you will find people who still speak the language of
Shakespeare. They are said to be the descendants of those early settlers who left
England for Virginia in 1606, when Shakespeare was 42. Generation after generation
carried on speaking the tongue that the pioneers brought with them. In some
accounts, it is Roanoke Island, off the east coast of Virginia, where you will hear pure
Shakespearean English. But if you listen to the speech of young and old people from
the same part of a country, you will hear all kinds of differences in pronunciation,
grammar, and vocabulary. It was the same in Shakespeare’s day. He even refers at
one point to language change taking place within a generation. It is true that the
language used in some parts of a country will change less rapidly than others. Isolated
communities will be more conservative in the way they speak. But no community is so
isolated that it is immune from contact with those who speak differently from
themselves. The idea that the English of Shakespeare’s time is alive and well in
modern times is a persistent myth. The main problem in approaching the language of
Shakespeare is that a lot of myths has grown up around it but if the goal is a linguistic
contact with something real, they have to be removed.
The quantity myth
Shakespeare had a wide-ranging vocabulary for his time, but it wasn’t the largest of
any English writer. Any modern writer uses far more words than Shakespeare. It’s not
possible to do precise calculations about how much vocabulary was used during a
particular historical period. The best we can do is count the words in whatever texts
remain and even that is not yet possible. There were about 150,000 different words in
English by the end of the sixteenth century. Today, the Oxford English Dictionary
contains over 600,000 different words. There are simply far more words available to
be used now, compared with Shakespeare’s time. But 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. Also important is our ability to choose the
most effective words from the language’s wordstock to express our intentions. And, if
the wordstock does not have the words we need, we have to be prepared to invent
new ones to compensate for the deficiency, and to use old ones in original ways.
Shakespeare is excellent at all this. More than anything else, he shows us how to be
daring with language. However, many commentators on Shakespeare’s language
seem to be obsessed with quantity rather than creativity, probably because it is far
easier to count than to analyze. But even the task of counting is complex, so we
should never take someone’s vocabulary estimate for its apparent worth. Different
words are those which differ in their dictionary meaning. Cat , dog , and ask have
different dictionary meanings, but cat and cats , although they look different, do not
have different dictionary meanings, nor do ask , asks , asking , and asked. These are
simply different forms of the ‘same’ word, expressing different grammatical meanings,
such as singular and plural or present and past tenses. If you count all of these forms
separately, obviously you will get a much higher total than if you do not. 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. The contrast is very noticeable in
Shakespeare because the language of his time had more grammatical variants than
exist today. There are problems in deciding what words to count. 1) We have to
choose whether a word is a compound or not. 2) We don’t know whether to include all
editorial changes, modernizations, and variants between Folio and Quarto texts. The
total will grow if we include every variant. 3) Proper names are usually excluded in
word-counting exercises, as they relate more to encyclopedic knowledge than to
linguistic intuition. On the other hand, some proper names do have more general
significance, as in modern English Whitehall (in the sense of ‘the civil service’). 4)
Shakespeare used 288 Latin word-forms, 310 French word-forms, and 36 Spanish or
Italian word-forms. When characters are definitely speaking a foreign language, the
words might reasonably be excluded, but it is not always clear when something is
foreign. Sometimes it is difficult to decide which language it is. 5) We don’t know
whether to include onomatopoeic words or humorous forms, such as malapropisms.
Depending on how we answer these questions, Shakespeare’s vocabulary is so large
partly because he wrote so much, but mainly because of what he wrote about. It is the
difference between people, situations, and subject-matter which generates different
kinds of vocabulary, and Shakespeare is acknowledged to be brilliant in the range of
his characters, settings, and themes. And this is what distinguishes him from his
contemporaries.
The invention myth
Another linguistic myth about Shakespeare says that he invented a quarter, a third or
a half of all the words in the English language. Such fractions are far from the truth.
For working out the linguistic facts in relation to word-creation is even more difficult
than in the case of word-counting. Even today, with all the media and computer
resources available to us, it is rare to find a word where we can say that a particular
person invented it. The surviving texts of the earlier periods allow us to establish the
‘first recorded user’ of a word. There is no greater collection of historical lexical usage
than the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and that is the usual source of information
when someone tries to establish how many words a particular author introduced into
the language. In some cases, it would be absurd to suggest that the first recorded user
was the inventor: the earliest OED citation for the common imprecation ‘ sblood ’
(‘God’s blood’) is when Shakespeare uses it. He is the first person we know to have
written it down. It is perfectly possible that someone else wrote ‘sblood’ before 1596
but the lexicographers have not yet found it. Lexicography has its limitations: nobody
can read everything or even have ready access to everything. And when compiling a
historical dictionary, decisions have to be made about which texts to include.
Shakespeare, of course, was a special target of the first OED editors. Of the 2,
words in the OED whose first recorded use is in Shakespeare, about 1,700 are
potential Shakespearean inventions, words like assassination , disproperty , insultment
and about half of them stayed in the language. That is a remarkable total. No other
writer of the time comes anywhere near it. When we talk of Shakespeare’s influence
on the English language, we should not be thinking solely of his invented words. 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. Equally, many words and phrases which were not invented by a
particular author entered the language because he or she used them: Shakespearean
examples include dozens of idioms such as to the manner born and proverbial
expressions such as brevity is the soul of wit , both of which owe their present-day
status to their use in Hamlet. 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. The sixteenth
century saw a huge expansion of vocabulary as scholarly writers tried to make good
the deficiencies they perceived to exist in English. Thousands of words were taken
from Latin and Greek, and new words created on the basis of the patterns found there.
And as there was no dictionary in which these new words could be recorded, writers
invented anew, in most cases unaware that someone else might have attempted the
word before them. Modern English discontented , for example, is first recorded in 1548,
but before it became the standard usage others had invented discontentive (1605),
discontenting (1605), and discontentful (1615).
The translation myth
Claims about the difficulty of Shakespeare’s language are frequently made these days,
especially in relation to the teaching of Shakespeare in schools. Like schools, several
need to invent graded Early Modern English programs and to write carefully graded
introductions, phrase books, and other materials, just as we would in the foreign-
language teaching world. All fluent modern English speakers, native or non-native
already know most of the language that Shakespeare used. The remaining people
should see the question as an opportunity and a challenge to be overcome. The sense
of achievement, once the energy has been devoted to the task, is incredible, and gives
a reward which is repeated every time we go to see one of the plays.
The style myth
We can talk about Shakespeare's style if we think that there is something in the way
he writes that differentiates him from other writers. But very few authors can be
identified with reference to a linguistic feature which can be found throughout their
whole body of work. Style always varies on two dimensions: diachronically, over time,
as people grow older; and synchronically, at any one point in time, as people adapt
their writing to suit different types of subject matter. With a writing career extending
over some twenty-five years and a range of content extending from high tragedy to
low comedy, we must expect stylistic variation rather than homogeneity. If we have no
choice in the use of a feature, that feature cannot be a part of our style. For example, I
have the option in English of putting an adverb earlier or later in a sentence. If I have a
preference for one position rather than the other, that would be a feature of my style.
By contrast, I do not have an option over where I place the definite article the in
English. It has to appear before the noun. This is an obligatory feature of the language,
and it can therefore play no part in my style. All English speakers and writers have to
use it in the same way. There are thousands of options available to us, when we use a
language, and it is possible to group them into types. Vocabulary offers the largest
number of options: there is almost always room for choice, when we select a word –
I’m buying a new car / auto / automobile … – and often these choices convey distinctive
effects. In linguistics, vocabulary is part of the subject of semantics. English offers
many options in the way we vary sentence length, sentence structure, word-order, and
word structure. Adverbs, for example, are very useful in this respect, because they are
so mobile. Sounds provide options in the way we can build patterns of vowels,
consonants, syllables, rhythms, and melodies, and generate effects which are
traditionally described using such notions as alliteration, rhyme, and metre. In
linguistics, the orthographic side is handled under the section of graphology , and the
pronunciation side under the section of phonology. 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. The choice between thou and you is an interesting variable under
this section, which is often referred to as pragmatics. It is not difficult to select a small
group of features and exaggerate their use, so that they bring to mind their author.
That is how comedians and parodists achieve their effects. But this is a long way from
the comprehensive and balanced stylistic account which we need if we want to claim
we have captured an author’s linguistic identity. With Shakespeare, the task of
producing a representative stylistic statement is very difficult. Individual linguistic
marks can be established, and it only takes a single negative point to throw doubt on
an authorship hypothesis. For example, I know that I do not use the conjunction whilst.
Instead I use while. So, if someone were to present a piece of anonymous writing
which contained the word whilst , it could not possibly have been written by me, even
if there were a hundred positive characteristics in it which suggested it could have
been mine.
To be so certain, two things have to be present. We need to be sure that there is a
choice available in Modern English grammar between whilst and while. And we need to
have a clear intuition about the usage. Unfortunately, neither of these options is
available in relation to Shakespeare. We are often not sure what choices were present
in Early Modern English grammar. And we have no direct access to Shakespeare’s
intuition. All we have are the surviving texts, and a body of linguistic research which is
irregular. But careful analysis can certainly identify stylistic preferences. Take the
phrase in the midst of. Uses both with and without the definite article are recorded
during the sixteenth century. Spenser, for example, used both, depending on whether
he needed the extra syllable to make up a metrical line. Shakespeare, by contrast,
used only in the midst of ( midst , mid’st , midds’t and middest in the First Folio). It is
important to note that, even in some cases, where he wanted to drop a syllable to
maintain a strict metrical rhythm, he opted to reduce the words to i’th’ , rather than
drop the article altogether. We can thus conclude that, if we encountered a line which
contained the phrase in midst of , it could not possibly have written by Shakespeare.
Such a case appears in the ‘Denbigh’ or ‘Danielle’ poems that are found in a collection
of verses in Welsh, English and Latin praising Sir John Salusbury and his family; they
are in the library of Christ Church, Oxford. At the end of each poem is a signature in a
different hand. Internal references to various personalities suggest that the poems
were written between late 1593 and early 1594. Nobody knows where Shakespeare
was, in the early 1590s, but several people have argued that he visited Lleweni, near
Denbigh, in North Wales, the same place where John Salusbury inherited his estates
and built up a literary circle. As a consequence, the poems were written by
Shakespeare as a kind of ‘thank you for having me’. However, if Shakespeare had
written the last lines of the first poem we would have found i’th’midst of instead of in
myddest of. A single piece of linguistic evidence based on so few examples can never
be conclusive about authorial identity, but it can be strongly suggestive. Given the
extraordinary range of character and content in Shakespeare, and the period of time
(over twenty years) over which he wrote, valid stylistic generalizations are likely to be
impossible. However, the language of characters can be compared, either in groups
(e.g. male vs female, upper vs lower class) or as individuals (e.g. Romeo vs Juliet,
Henry IV vs Henry V). So can the language associated with particular genres or themes
(e.g. comedy vs tragedy, romance vs revenge). So can the language of different
chronological periods and the stylistic effects which result from the choices made
between alternative possibilities of expression in individual lines and speeches. But
stylistically there is always going to be a difference of meaning or effect. The task
facing the stylistician is to determine exactly what that difference is.
7 ‘Think on my words’: Shakespeare vocabulary
Unlike the grammar, prosody, and discourse patterns of a language, which are subject
to general rules that can be learned in a short period of time, the learning of
vocabulary is of indefinite duration. The glossary-writers concentrate on the difficult
words, by which is usually meant words used in Shakespeare that are different from
those used today. Either the words themselves have changed (e.g. we no longer use
finical ) or the meanings of the words have changed (e.g. naughty no longer means
‘evil’). But difference and difficulty are not the same. There are, firstly, some difficult
words that are not different. Few students now are familiar with the mythology of
Classical Greece or Rome, so the use of names presents a difficulty. But this is an
encyclopedic not a linguistic problem, a lack of knowledge of the world, rather than a
lack of knowledge of how to talk about the world. The same educational point applies
to those parts of Shakespeare’s text which are indeed in a foreign language, French,
Latin, Spanish, and Italian, along with some mock-foreign expressions. In the days
when most people learned French and Latin in school, those passages would have had
no problem. Today, they often do. Secondly, there are many different words which are
not difficult. One one hand, there are words which hardly need to be glossed at all. On
the other hand, there are words where it is not possible to deduce from their form
what they might mean, and a gloss is obligatory.
Easy words
In the ‘easy’ category, we find words such as oft , sup , morrow, visage , which are still
but to learn them, as we would with new words in a foreign language. 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 broader context, as a word in the language as a whole. In any case, no edition
has space to explain all the linguistic points, and some editions may actually give very
limited information about the meaning of individual words. Also, because our study of
individual plays and our theatre visits are usually separated by significant periods of
time, it proves difficult to build up an intuition about what is normal in the vocabulary
of the period in which Shakespeare was writing. Neither is an alphabetical glossary of
synonyms the best way of complete the task of learning Shakespeare’s difficult words.
Such an arrangement does not show the words in context, and its A-to-Z structure
does not allow the reader to develop a sense of the meaning relations involved. It
therefore makes good sense to study their meanings at the same time. It is also useful
to explore the whole range of uses of a new word as soon as we come across it, for
this can help comprehension in a number of ways. Not only does the exercise help us
get to understand with the word when we next meet it, it can actually help us
understand the word’s force the first time we read it. A typical example is fardels in
the middle of ‘To be or not to be’ speech in Hamlet , and the association with ‘grunting
and sweating’, along with the general context of suicidal thoughts, can lead to the
conclusion that the word must mean ‘really heavy and depressing burdens’. It is
helpful to approach difficult words in the way that young children do when they
acquire vocabulary. Children never learn words randomly, or alphabetically, but
always in context and in pairs or small groups. Something is ‘safe or unsafe.’ Things
are ‘tiny, small, large, huge’. The words define each other, and their meanings
reinforce and illuminate each other in various ways. Pairs and clusters of words
operate in Shakespearean vocabulary too. If beget turns up in a play, the editor might
gloss it as ‘conceive’ and then make no reference to other words derived from this
form. Yet we can derive begotten , then discuss people who are first-begotten or true-
begotten. By contrast, being misbegotten is not such good news, and becomes a term
of insult. We also often find pairs of words which define each other in very specific
ways, and these need to be related too. For example, some words are opposite or
complementary in meaning ( antonyms ), such as fathered and unfathered. Here the
antonymy is shown through the prefix un-. In other cases, the oppositeness requires
that we know which words go together. There are several other types of semantic
relationship linking words, which can help us get to grip with their meaning. One is the
relationship of inclusion ( hyponymy ): ‘an X is a kind of Y’. A bass viol is a kind of viol.
Another is the relationship of similarity of meaning ( synonymy ): advantage and
vantage. The specific associations linking the words in a sentence ( collocations ) can
also give clues when we are faced with a totally opaque word. For example, it is
impossible to work out the meaning of tray-trip by considering the word in isolation;
but the collocation with play indicates that it must be some kind of game. In many
cases, it is reasonable to group words into topics ( semantic fields ), such as ‘clothing’,
‘weapons’, ‘sailing ships’, or ‘money’, so that we can more clearly see the
relationships between them. That is how we can approach the system we find in
Shakespeare.
False friends
In between the extremes of lexical familiarity and unfamiliarity, we find the majority of
Shakespeare’s difficult words, not because they are different in form from the
vocabulary we know today but because they have changed their meaning. In many
cases, the meaning change is very slight: intent means ‘intention’. And often the
change in meaning, though important, has no real consequence. By contrast, there
are several hundred cases where the meaning has changed so much that it would be
misleading to read in the modern sense. These are the ‘false friends’, words in a
language which seem familiar but are not. The term comes from foreign-language
teaching, where we often find examples such as French demander , which does not
mean ‘demand’, but ‘ask’ (demand is translated by requérir ). False friends in
Shakespeare include naughty (‘wicked’), heavy (‘sorrowful’), humorous (‘moody’), sad
(‘serious’), ecstasy (‘madness’). In all instances of false friends, we need to pay careful
attention to the context, which usually helps to eliminate the intrusion of the irrelevant
modern meaning. In a number of cases, the old and modern senses of a word were
both active in Shakespeare’s time. For example, bootless meaning ‘without boots’ was
one of its senses. But the more common usage in the plays has the meaning ‘useless,
pointless, unsuccessful’. Directors and actors ignore false friends. It is rare to find a
production of the play which respects the meaning of revolve. Most directors and
actors humor the modern meaning, make the actor look confused, and then have him
turn round. But revolve did not mean ‘perform a circular motion’ in Shakespeare’s day.
That sense developed in English a century later: the OED cites a first usage of 1713.
For Shakespeare, the primary meaning was ‘consider, ponder, meditate’.
Old and new words
When we study Shakespeare’s vocabulary, it is important to recognize that his period
of the language is not linguistically homogeneous. In Modern English we sense that
some words are current, some old, and some new. People refer to the older usages as
‘obsolete words’ or ‘archaisms’, the new usages as ‘coinages’ or ‘neologisms’. It is
easy to spot an arriving usage, because its novelty is noticed and usually attracts
some degree of comment. Usages which are becoming obsolete are rarely commented
upon, and tend to pass away in silence. Early Modern English was a period of dynamic
change. The consequences of the Renaissance on language spread quickly. People
were unsure of how to react to the thousands of new words being introduced,
especially from Latin and Greek. There was a great deal of self-consciousness about
usage, and the period is remarkable for its lexical inventiveness and experimentation,
to which Shakespeare made his own major contribution. From a modern perspective, it
is difficult to develop an intuition about the archaisms and neologisms of the past; but
they are always there. In Shakespeare we find iwis (‘indeed’), as well as such older
verb forms as speken (‘speak’). Other examples include eyne (‘eyes’), shoon (‘shoes’),
and eke (‘also’). All of these would have been considered old fashioned or archaic by
the Shakespearean audience. That there was a level of style in which ‘hard words’
were the norm is evident from the many mistaken attempts at these words
( malapropisms ) put into the mouths of ordinary people. Shakespeare didn’t like
pompous language, because several of his major characters mock this kind of
language.
Coinages
People sometimes say they can always spot a Shakespearean coinage on sight, when
reading one of the plays. Usages such as exsufflicate ‘puffed up’ are idiosyncratic by
any standards. But we can be easily deceived. Among unhouseled , disappointed ,
unaneled, people usually rate as a Shakespearean coinage the first and the third term.
If you thought this, then you were right about unaneled, meaning ‘without having
received the last sacraments’, but wrong about unhouseled , ’without the Eucharist’,
which was used by Thomas More seventy years before. And if you ignored
disappointed , you would have been wrong there too. In the sense of ‘unfurnished,
unprepared’, this is indeed a first recorded use by Shakespeare. Less vivid or dramatic
words, such as accessible , domineering , and indistinguishable , are usually missed
when people have to spot a coinage. Even more difficult is the spotting of a neologistic
sense in a familiar word. Take angel. In its sense of ‘divine messenger’, this is Anglo-
Saxon in origin. But in the sense of ‘lovely being’, a person resembling an angel, the
OED’s first citation is in Romeo’s reaction on hearing Juliet’s first words. One of the
most important features of Shakespeare’s word-creation is the fact that he invented
the same word twice over, and at the same time. For example, he wanted to use a
noun ( annexment ) derived from the verb annex , which had been in English since
never again. Incony is an example, meaning ‘fine, darling, rare’. This is one of those
words which keep etymologists in business, for its origins are uncertain. It probably
relates to cony , ‘rabbit’, which developed as a term of male-to-female affection. It was
pronounced ‘cunny’, rhyming with money and honey, and this pronunciation inevitably
gave it an indecent association, which was also current around 1600. It seems to have
been a popular word, but the earliest instances in the OED are ascribed to
Shakespeare. A slightly different instance is discandy , meaning ‘dissolve, liquefy, melt
away’. Antony uses it when reflecting on those who have left him for Caesar. Maybe
he is recalling the same neologism used by Cleopatra a few scenes earlier, when
Antony accuses her of being cold-hearted. She responds with violence, calling down
hail from heaven onto herself, to dissolve her completely, if the accusation be true.
The new word evidently confused the Folio compositor, who printed it as discandering.
Sometimes the double usage adds a note of confirmation to hypotheses about dating.
Dry-beat is a case in point, meaning ‘cudgel, thrash’. This isn’t a Shakespearean
neologism. It was being used around the time that he was born. But in the plays, it
appears twice, like in Romeo and Juliet.
Signposts
When Shakespeare’s coinages are examined together, interesting patterns emerge,
some of which point to conclusions of general literary or dramatic interest. His use of
the prefix un - is the perfect example. Most of the words with un - are adjectives (e.g.
uncomfortable , uneducated ), and there are a few adverbs (e.g. unaware ) and nouns
(e.g. an undeserver ), but there are no less than 62 instances where the prefix has
been added to an already existing verb, such as unspeak , uncurse , undeaf. Some of
these coinages are in just four plays, Richard II , Macbeth , Troilus , and Hamlet. Some of
the novel uses apply only to just one sense of a verb. For example, unbend in other
meanings (‘release, relax’) is known from well before Shakespeare; but he is the first
to use it in the sense of ‘weaken’. There is difference in Shakespeare’s usage, pre- and
post-1600. Using the OED’s dates, there are twenty-four instances in the twenty plays
pre-1600. Post-1600 there are thirty-eight instances in eighteen plays.
Collocations
Shakespeare’s collocations present more impressive images than we find in individual
words. Collocation refers to a group of two or more words that usually go together.
Most of the time we do not notice them, because they are so ordinary: in Modern
English, auspicious is likely to be followed by a time/event word, such as occasion.
Poets especially love to break normal collocational rules and Shakespeare is one of the
greatest rule-breakers the language has seen. A useful technique is to take a single
word, such as time , and explore its collocational range. Many temporal metaphors of
today were also around in Elizabethan English. But Shakespeare used alternative
images of time, going well beyond the everyday to change and personify time in
different ways. In some plays we find time reviving , blessing , conspiring and much
more. People in the plays also deal with time in a new way: they redeem it, persecute
it, confound it, name it, etc. Collocations are especially interesting when they relate to
a word which is itself a neologism, such as auspicious. Shakespeare is in fact
responsible for both the first and the second citations for this word in the OED. The
first is said to be in 1601 (in All’s Well That Ends Well , where fortune is described as an
‘auspicious mistris’), and the second is in 1610 (in The Tempest , ‘auspicious gales’).
Shakespeare used the word on four other occasions too: in Hamlet , in The Winter’s
Tale , in King Lear and again in The Tempest. Each of these collocations would have
made an impact on the audience. This suggestion is reinforced if we look at the other
adjectives which were being used with these nouns around that time. The adjectives
which are found in OED quotations for mistress are worthy , special , great (twice),
noble and sweet. Those for fortune are good (twice), fair , evil , and great. Auspicious
does seem to be a more creative adjectival collocation for these nouns.
Perspective
Spelling and punctuation aside, long stretches of text in Shakespeare are the same as
they would be if written today in an equivalent style. A case in point is an exchange
from Romeo and Juliet. The two recurrent features of difference, ’tis and thou / thee / thy ,
still have resonance today: ’tis may look strange in writing, but it is common in
modern English colloquial speech; and thou forms are still encountered in some
religious and regional expression. Forgot is used for modern standard English
forgotten ; but as the two forms are so close, and as forgot is still heard in several non-
standard dialects today, there should be no problem. The only possible difficulty in the
passage is the sense of still , ‘constantly’; but as this is so close to one of the modern
meanings of the word, ‘now as before’, any potential for misinterpretation is minor. In
sum, a modern intuition encountering this dialogue would understand it without
special help. At the opposite extreme, there are extracts where the difficulty is
evident. For example, when Friar Laurence is advising Juliet how to escape from her
dilemma. It is a crucial part of the plot, with the mood urgent, so the language needs
to be grasped quickly; but the unfamiliar words and phrasing can produce a problem
in the level of comprehension just when we do not want it. Every line has at least one
word which needs some glossing, and the result is a temporary uncertainty, because
later in the speech there are clearer passages which make it plain what is to happen.
People who argue that Shakespearean vocabulary is inaccessible tend to quote the
hard words and ignore the easier ones. It is always a good practice to read the whole
of a speech before worrying about the difficulties found in a part of it.
8 ‘Talk of a noun and a verb: Shakespearean grammar’
Grammar makes sense of language. Words by themselves do not make sense.
Individual words are too ambiguous, because their multiple meanings compete for our
attention. The only way we can determine a precise meaning is by observing how the
word is used in context, which means, in a sentence. If we want to ‘make sense’ of
Shakespeare, we have to look to his grammar. As with vocabulary, the grammatical
rules of English have changed very little over the past 400 years: most of the word-
orders and word formations used by Shakespeare are still in use today. However,
there is a widespread impression that Shakespeare’s grammar is very different from
what we find today. The impression arises because of the way grammar operates
within 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. Grammar reflects the way we think and the main unit in which we organize
our thoughts is the sentence. We need to organize our thoughts into sentence
sequences too (into paragraphs, stanzas, speeches). But the basis of our self-
expression lies in the way we combine words to make individual sentences. It is the
sentence which literally ‘makes’ sense of what we are saying. And it is the overall
length of a sentence, the way we order the words within it, and the way we show its
internal structure through punctuation (in writing) and prosody (in speech), which
controls our impression of grammatical difficulty. The more complex the thing we want
to say, the longer and more internally complex our sentence is likely to be. We can try
to break our thought down into smaller elements, and keep the sentences short. There
are two branches to the study of grammar: syntax and morphology. Syntax is the
study of sentence structure, and in particular the analysis of word-order. Morphology is
the study of word structure, of the way words vary their shape to express grammatical
relationships, such as by adding inflectional endings (e.g. think > think’st , thinketh ,
thinks , thinking ), and of the way they build up complex units out of simple elements
(e.g. witch > bewitch > bewitchment ). Traditional accounts of Shakespeare’s grammar
presented detailed accounts of morphology, listing all the irregular verbs, adjectives,
and so on that differed from Modern English, and paid little attention to word-order.
Pronouns do appear rather frequently in the texts. There are only a few old uses, but
some of them are very common ( thou , thee , thy , thine , and thyself ). It therefore
beneficial ). Lower degree is always expressed periphrastically ( less interesting , least
interesting ). The choice with higher degree depends on the length of the adjective.
Adjectives of one syllable take an inflection; adjectives of three or more syllables
appear periphrastically; and adjectives of two syllables sometimes go one way
( happier is preferred to more happy ) and sometimes the other ( most proper is
preferred to properest ). This system had been established by Shakespeare’s time, but
the system had not finished developing. And from other plays we find occasional
usages as more great , more long , where today we would expect to see greater ,
longer. On the contrary, we find such forms as honester and honestest, where today
we would use constructions with more and most. Double comparatives’ and ‘double
superlatives’, where an inflected and a periphrastic form occur together ( more larger ,
most bravest ), are quite common, usually producing a more emphatic effect. But of
course, having the option of rhythmical alternatives can be an advantage to a poet
working within the constraints of a metrical line. There are a few occasions when
word-order is different from what is conventional in Modern English. We sometimes
see a sequence of adjectives in which some appear both before and after the noun
they modify.
Verbs
Most of the distinctive features of Shakespearean verb usage relate to the way these
forms are used to express time ( tenses ). There are two tenses in Modern English,
present and past ( I walk , I walked ). English of course has other ways of using verbs to
express time, such as auxiliary verbs ( I will walk , I have walked ), and these often add
other meanings, such as possibility ( I might walk ) or obligation ( I must walk ). But the
basic system is the contrast between the use of a past-tense form of the verb (regular
or irregular: I walked , went …) and a present-tense form (regular or irregular: I walk ,
go …). There is no variation in the past-tense form, when we use verbs with different
persons. On the contrary, the present tense add -s for the third-person singular form.
Great changes in this system had taken place during the Middle English period, but by
Shakespeare’s day it had settled down, and was not far from the one we know today.
The most noticeable differences are the two Middle English verb-endings which were
still being used in the Early Modern English period: - est for the second-person singular
following thou ( thou goest ); and - th or - eth for the third-person singular ( she goeth ).
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 the time Shakespeare was writing.
Sooner or later the - est form would disappear and the - th forms would be replaced by -
s. We can actually see the change in the language taking place if we order the plays
chronologically and look at the distribution of verbs with a - th ending. Using the
Shakespeare’s Words corpus, nothing much happens with hath and doth. Hath is the
dominant form and it stays frequent throughout the period. Doth is less common, but
it remains in use, though its frequency starts to drop in the early 1600s. It is in the
other verbs, such as standeth , seemeth, where we see the fortunes of the - th ending
change dramatically. The frequency drops noticeably with The Merry Wives of
Windsor , and from then the usage is irregular. Interpretation is not simple, because
collaborators had different usage preferences, compositors may have altered forms,
and editors may have modernized. The - s ending is the dominant one throughout the
whole period, and in some late plays we see nothing else. Its usage is due to the
metrical constraints. The - eth ending adds an extra unstressed syllable to a word, thus
giving the poet a second option. Sometimes both forms are used in the same line or in
quick succession. And in a few cases we have evidence of metrical alternatives
competing with each other. The metrical value of - th is also evident in the narrative
poems, where we see a much greater frequency than in the plays. There are fewer
instances in the Sonnets and they are rare, apart from two cases of rhyme. Metrical
factors cannot explain everything, however, for we see - th /- s alternation in prose too,
even in stage directions. This suggests that the two forms were in ‘free variation’. Only
in a few very restricted circumstances can we see why the older form would overcome
the newer. It would be a fixed usage in a folk song or we might expect it in
stereotypical language intended to impress and we can imagine the older - th form
being preferred in situations where a more conservative vocabulary is the norm. There
is little to say about the use of past-tense forms in Shakespeare. These forms have
changed greatly since Old English, and continue to do so today, as seen in the
occasional uncertainty in standard English (e.g. burned vs burnt ) and the variations
heard in regional dialects (e.g. I was sat there for hours ). A dictionary provides a
complete list. Most verbs are regular - ed formations, the same as today. Most irregular
verbs are also the same as today: told , saw / seen , went/gone , and so on. Some verbs
are irregular in Shakespeare which have become regular today, e.g. durst (dared),
holp (helped). Some verbs are regular in Shakespeare which have become irregular
today, e.g. digged (dug), shaked (shook/shaken). Some irregular Shakespeare verbs
stay irregular, but in a different way, e.g. was awaked (awoken), brake (broke), drave
(drove), spake (spoke), writ (wrote). As with all change, old forms co-exist for a while
alongside new ones, and we can sometimes sense a subtle difference of meaning. For
example, the availability of two forms of catch is a help to any rhymer, but catcht
seems to convey a more dynamic sense than caught.
Pronouns
Because of their frequency, the use of thou -forms and you -forms dominates any
discussion of Shakespearean pronouns. The thou -forms are thou , thee , thy , thine , and
thy selfe. The you -forms are you , ye , your , yours , and your selfe. The First Folio
compositors were confused on how to print the reflexive pronouns: itselfe and
themselues are always printed solid; himselfe is usually solid; my selfe, her selfe are
usually spaced. You -forms are more frequent than thou -forms. The forms for thou and
you have attracted especial attention in the linguistics literature because they are
important markers of social and attitudinal differences between people. In Old English,
thou was singular and you was plural. But during the thirteenth century, you began to
be used as a polite form of the singular, probably because people copied the French
manner of talking, where vous was used in that way. English then became like French,
which has tu and vous both possible for singulars. The usual thing was for you to be
used by inferiors to superiors, such as children to parents, or servants to masters; and
thou to be used in return. But people would also use thou when they wanted special
intimacy, such as when addressing God; and thou was also normal when the lower
classes talked to each other. The upper classes used you to each other, as a rule, even
when they were closely related. So when someone changes from thou to you (or vice
versa) in a conversation, it must mean something. The change will convey a different
emotion or mood: affection, anger, distance, sarcasm… The old grammatical
distinction between ye (as the subject of a clause) and you (as the object) had long
gone by Shakespeare’s time, as had any trace of a distinction between singular and
plural. The dominant form was you. The two forms at times seem interchangeable. In
order to understand the reason why ye was still used at all, despite the dominance of
you , metrical factors are irrelevant, with two monosyllabic words. And also unlike the -
eth forms, there is no chronological progression: the five most common uses are in
Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen , at one end of the period, Henry IV Part 1 in the
middle, and Henry VI Part 1 , Titus Andronicus , and Henry VI Part 2 , at the other. When
we see distributions like this, other factors have to be at work. Ye was not a poetic
form: it does not appear in the long narrative poems, and only twice in the Sonnets ,
both times there to provide a rhyme for me. It is partly related to character: everyone
uses it, high or low, formally and colloquially, in Henry VIII. Situational informality and
grammatical factors also have a role to play: it is likely to be used in vocatives ( ye
people , ye citizens ) and certain fixed attention-getting phrases ( hark ye , beseech ye ).
We can find instances of it reflecting an older high style. There is only one explanation
which can account for such incredible discrepancies, and that is multiple authorship.
The focus on T- and V-forms has rather taken attention away from the many other
ways in which pronouns are used differently in Shakespeare, compared with today. In
between: “The girl saw the boy”/ “The boy saw the girl”. But as soon as we deviate
from this order of elements: “The boy the girl saw”, it is no longer clear who saw
whom, and if we want to change our emphasis, we have to adopt a different
construction: “It was the boy that the girl saw”. A simple reversal, such as
Subject+Verb > Verb+Subject, is unlikely to cause a problem of comprehension; but
when several things happen at once, we can be in difficulty. Sometimes the change in
word-order can catch us off guard, as in Henry VI Part 2 when Young Clifford speaks
after seeing his dead father, and vowing revenge. Nothing, he says, will escape his
anger. A modern editor will try to make the sense clearer by substituting modern
spelling and punctuation. But line four is still a problem. A casual reading would
suggest that ‘a tyrant often reclaims (i.e. subdues) beauty’, but this makes no sense.
Tyrant is not the grammatical subject of reclaims, but its object. Only by paying
careful attention to the meaning can we work this out, and for this we need to think of
the speech as a whole, and see it in its discourse context. Metre is often thought of
simply as a phonetic phenomenon, but instead it is much more. Metrical choices
always have grammatical, semantic, pragmatic and dramatic consequences.
9 ‘Hear sweet discourse’: Shakespearean conversation
One of the aims of stylistic analysis is to explain the choices that a person makes, in
speaking or writing. I can alter the sentence structure, the word structure, the word-
order or the vocabulary or opt for a more radical rephrasing. The choice will be
motivated by my sense of the different nuances, emphases, rhythms, and sound
patterns carried by the words. Each linguistic decision counts, for it affects the
structure and interpretation of the whole. The first step in stylistic analysis is to
establish that there are effects to be explained. Once we deal with a contrast between
pairs of options, we can approach the analysis of discourse in the plays. By discourse I
mean the way in which we use sentences in interaction, when speaking and writing to
each other. The ‘each other’ might be other characters in the play or a character and
the audience. The study of sounds, letters, prosodies, punctuation marks, words, and
grammatical constructions are ways in which we can develop an understanding of
language from the ‘bottom up’. A discourse perspective makes us look at language
from the ‘top down’. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to arrive at the fullest
possible understanding of the language of Shakespeare.
Verse and prose
Any ‘top down’ approach confronts us with the difference between verse and prose.
Shakespeare’s practice in using verse or prose varied greatly at different stages in his
career. There are plays written entirely in verse and others almost entirely in prose,
but most plays show a mixture of the two modes. Verse is typically associated with a
‘high style’ of language, prose with a ‘low style’. This is partly a matter of class
distinction. High-status people, such as nobles and generals, tend to use the former;
low-status people, such as clowns and tavern-frequenters, tend to use the latter.
Upper-class people also have an ability to conform to those of lower class, using prose.
And lower-class people who move in court circles, such as messengers and guards, are
able to use a poetic style when talking to their betters. This lower-class ability to
conform upwards can take their listeners by surprise. The distinction between ‘high’
and ‘low’ style is also associated with subject-matter. For example, expressions of
romantic love are made in verse, regardless of the speaker’s social class. On the
contrary, ‘low’ subject-matter, such as ribaldry or teasing, tends to motivate prose,
even when spoken by upper-class people. In a play where the upper-class protagonists
tend to speak prose, it takes moments of special drama to motivate a switch to verse,
as in the scene in Much Ado About Nothing, where Claudio accuses Hero of being
unfaithful. In the same play we see a switch in the other direction. Beatrice uses
nothing but prose in the first half of the play, but, left alone after overhearing the
news that Benedick loves her, she expresses her new sensibilities in ten lines of
rhyming verse. In Othello , the Duke of Venice speaks only verse in debating the
question of Othello’s love for Desdemona, but when he has to recount the affairs of
state, he resorts to prose. There are many instances where people switch between one
and the other, and when they do we must assume it is for a reason. If verse is a sign of
high style, then we will expect those aspiring to power to use it, and disguised nobility
to use it when their true character needs to appear. An example of the first is in Henry
VI Part 2 , where Jack Cade is claiming to be one of Mortimer’s two sons, and thus the
heir to the throne. He and his fellow rebels speak to each other in prose. When
Stafford and his brother arrive, they show their social distance by addressing the
rebels in verse. But Cade is playing his part well, and responds in verse. An example of
disguised nobility is the scene in Henry V when the king speaks to his soldiers. The
long conversation between Williams and Bates is entirely in prose; but when the
soldiers leave, we see the transition from other-directed to self-directed speech in the
switch from prose to verse. The switch from verse to prose, or vice versa, can also
give us insight into the state of mind of a speaker. In the case of Pandarus in Troilus
and Cressida , the switch to prose signals confusion. People were very sensitive to
these modality changes, and sometimes the text recognizes the contrasts involved. In
all this, it is important to appreciate that the distinction between verse and prose is
not always clear. The Folio compositors did not always understand it, and there is a
famous case (page 57 of Romeo and Juliet ) where a piece of verse is set as prose.
Doubtless there was an error in the printing process. Page 58 must already have been
typeset when the compositor working on page 57 realized that he had too much text
to fit into the page. He rescued the situation by fitting thirty-eight lines of verse into
thirty lines of prose. It is a widespread modern editorial practice to print prose lines
immediately after the speaker’s name, and verse lines beneath it. However,
discrepancies between different editions show that the distinction is not always easy
to draw. And sometimes it is a problem for editors to decide when to return to a verse
layout. Individual editorial decisions are being made all the time, each one adding a
stylistic nuance to the text.
Metre in discourse
Metrical patterns are identified with reference to verse lines, and their force used to
explain some choices of words and grammatical forms. But the effect of using a
metrical structure extends into the area of discourse too, especially in the way it can
be used to capture the dynamism of an interaction. The dramatic effect of even a brief
pause can be considerable. An example is in Macbeth , when Ross knows that
Macduff’s family has been killed, and he has to break the news. Faced with Macduff’s
direct questions, a pair of lies leap into his mouth. But there is a pause (conveyed by
the missing metrical beat) before his second reply. We can almost hear his silent gulp.
In Hamlet , we see the increased tempo conveying one person’s anger, immediately
followed by another person’s anxiety. An increase in tempo is also an ideal mechanism
for carrying repartee. There are several examples in The Taming of the Shrew , when
Petruchio and Katherine first meet.
Varieties of language
It is a commonplace that Shakespeare gives us a remarkable picture of the range of
social situations in Elizabethan England. What is less often remarked is that each of
these situations would have been linguistically distinctive. Just as today we have
scientific, advertising, and broadcasting English, so then there was legal, religious, and
courtly English. In addition to archaisms and neologisms, hard words and easy words,
there is speech representing different degrees of formality, intimacy, social class, and
regional origins. In short, we encounter in the plays most of the language varieties of
Early Modern English. Because we totally depend on the written language, we shall
never achieve a complete picture of the spoken stylistic variation of the past. But the
plays quite often give us clues from the way in which characters are portrayed.
Regional variation is not as strongly represented in Shakespeare as social variation,
especially distinctions in class. People may hide their faces but not their voices. Many
