Shakespeare and Language

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SHAKESPEARE AND LANGUAGE

Shakespeare and language is an area of study that here includes style, speech, sound and sex. As the foremost Shakespeare publication, Shakespeare Survey has been well placed to reflect trends and developments in academic approaches to Shakespeare and to language and this collection of essays considers the characteristics, excitement and unique qualities of Shakespeare’s language, the relationship between language and event, and the social, theatrical and literary function of language. A new introduction, by Jonathan Hope, explicates the differences between Shakespeare’s language and our own, provides a theoretical and contextual framework for the pieces that follow, and makes transparent an aspect of Shakespeare’s craft (and the critical response to it) that has frequently been opaque. c at h e r i n e m . s . a l ex a n d er is Lecturer at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. She is editor of The Cambridge Shakespeare Library and co-editor of Shakespeare and Race (2000) and Shakespeare and Sexuality (2001).

SHAKESPEARE AND LANGUAGE ed ited by C AT H E R I N E M . S . A L E X A N D E R

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Contents

List of contributors Editor’s note

page vii viii

1 Shakespeare and language: an introduction Jonathan Hope

1

2 Shakespeare’s language and the language of Shakespeare’s time Stephen Booth

18

3 The foundations of Elizabethan language Muriel St Clare Byrne

44

4 Shakespeare’s talking animals Terence Hawkes

68

5 Some functions of Shakespearian word-formation Vivian Salmon

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6 Shakespeare and the tune of the time Bridget Cusack

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7 Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: the places of invention Jill L. Levenson

122

8 Shakespeare’s thematic modes of speech: Richard II to Henry V Robert Hapgood 9 Hamlet and the power of words Inga-Stina Ewbank

139 151

10 The art of the comic duologue in three plays by Shakespeare Robert Wilcher v

179

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Contents

11 Hamlet’s ear Philippa Berry

201

12 ‘Voice potential’: language and symbolic capital in Othello Lynne Magnusson

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13 The aesthetics of mutilation in Titus Andronicus Albert H. Tricomi

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14 ‘Time for such a word’: verbal echoing in Macbeth George Walton Williams

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15 Household words: Macbeth and the failure of spectacle Lisa Hopkins

251

16 Late Shakespeare: style and the sexes Russ McDonald

266

Index

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Contributors

philippa berry King’s College, Cambridge s t ephen booth University of California, Berkeley muriel st cl are byrne ∗ bridg et cusack University of Edinburgh i ng a-stin a ewbank University of Leeds robert hapgood University of New Hampshire terence hawkes University College, Cardiff jonathan hope University of Strathclyde l i sa hopk ins Sheffield Hallam University j i ll l. levenson University of Toronto ly n ne m ag nusson University of Waterloo, Ontario russ m c don ald University of North Carolina vi v ian salm on Bedford College, University of London a lbert h. tricomi State University of New York robert wilch er University of Birmingham georg e walton williams Duke University

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Editor’s note

The titles of these sixteen essays alone indicate the size and range of an area of study that elides ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Language’, a subject that here includes style, speech, sound and sex. As the foremost Shakespeare publication, produced annually since 1948, Shakespeare Survey has been well placed to reflect trends and developments in academic approaches to Shakespeare and to language and this collection of essays, covering the period 1964 to 1997, considers the characteristics, excitement and unique qualities of Shakespeare’s language, the relationship between language and event, and the social, theatrical and literary function of language. The new introduction, by Jonathan Hope, explicates the differences between Shakespeare’s language and our own, provides a theoretical and contextual framework for the pieces that follow, and makes transparent an aspect of Shakespeare’s craft (and the critical response to it) that has frequently been opaque.

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chap t e r 1

Shakespeare and language: an introduction Jonathan Hope

i tongue In ‘Shakespeare’s talking animals’, Terence Hawkes makes a fundamental claim about language and Shakespeare’s work. The plays, he says, contain ‘ideas about language’ which we neglect ‘because we are anaethetized to them by our own literacy’ (Hawkes: p. 69, this volume). Nothing could be more important in seeking to understand Early Modern ideas about language and use of language than becoming aware of our own narcotic unawareness of them. We are used to historicizing Shakespeare in every respect except his language, and, as Hawkes implies, our ignorance is matched only by our ignorance of our ignorance. But I would go further than Hawkes: as I will try to show in this introduction, there are not only ideas about language we miss; there are usages of language we misinterpret because we mistake the nature of language in the Early Modern period. From the point of view of linguistics, and taken as a product of human cognition, language can be assumed to be the same thing in all cultures, and at all times in attested human history. However, taken as a cultural entity, within literary or cultural criticism, language changes radically between the Early Modern period and our own – as radically as other cultural entities such as government, religion, and duty change. In the first part of this introduction, I will try to make language strange, to give an idea of its different cultural status in the Early Modern period; in the second, I will examine the curious reality our culture has bestowed on ‘wordes’, and what this does to our readings of Shakespeare. I’d like to begin in an alehouse. Probably in London, probably some time in the late 1590s. Across from us, a man is sitting alone, writing. From where we are, I can’t see what he’s writing, but thanks to the various technologies associated with the written word – writing itself, pen-making, ink-making, paper-making, printing, book-making, libraries, book preservation – I will be able to eavesdrop on his thoughts one day four hundred years later, in 1

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August 2003, in the Humanities 1 Reading Room of the British Library. Now, thanks to an additional set of technologies including computers and word processing packages, you can eavesdrop too: I write this in an Alehouse, into which I am driuen by night, which would not giue me leaue to finde out an honester harbour. I am without any c˜opany but Inke & Paper, & them I vse in stead of talking to my selfe . . . The first note here is to see how honestly euery place speakes, & how ill euery man liues. Not a Poste nor painted cloth in the house but cryes out, ‘Feare God,’ and yet the Parson of the Town scarce keeps this Instruction. It is a straunge thing how men bely them selues; euery one speaks well & meanes naughtily (Allen 1946: 43)

The man is Sir William Cornwallis, and the words come from his Essayes, first published in two parts in 1600 and 1601. These particular words come from Essay 22, ‘Of Alehouses’, though, as often, this essay wanders from the topic suggested by its title, in this case to meditate on the mismatch between language and observed reality. I’ll return later to Sir William’s observations on language and the world (and especially his noisy posts and cloths), but let’s consider the man for a moment. As an English essayist, Cornwallis stands in the shadow of Francis Bacon. Cornwallis is less original, not as good a writer; but he is also more modest, less sententious, an early cultural critic with refreshingly catholic interests: There is not that thing vppon the Earth, that well examined, yeelds not something worthie of knowledge (Allen 1946: 43)

And unlike George Orwell, who wrote a rather sour essay on pubs, Cornwallis comes across as someone it would be fun to sit and drink with. Now though, Cornwallis is on his own, able to avoid the embarrassment of talking to himself thanks to his possession of ‘Inke & Paper’. It is worth reminding ourselves that to write away from the study in Cornwallis’ time meant carrying equipment: a sealed bottle of ink, a pen, a knife, and paper – no biros or spiral notebooks here. In some respects, Sir William is like a modern-day laptop user: in order to write, he needs to lug around a chunk of technology. If his ink leaks, or his battery fails, we’ll lose the essay. In other respects, however, Sir William is not at all like a laptop user. In 2004, laptops are all around us: the few people not paddling touch-sensitive mousepads are keying mobile phones – especially in pubs. Not only has the technology associated with traditional methods of writing become invisible to us, but the much newer technology of computers and mobile phones is so pervasive that even our irritations with it have become conventionalized. In 1600, however, only a tiny percentage of the population had access to the technology of writing, and to see someone sitting on his own in an

Introduction

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alehouse writing must have been a wonder. Perhaps we should imagine Sir William’s equivalent in a 1960s pub off Carnaby Street, punching holes in pieces of cardboard while a mainframe hums on the back of a lorry parked outside. In 1600, when Cornwallis wrote instead of ‘talking to my selfe’, writing was a specialized skill akin to that of an electrician or plasterer today. People employed someone else if they needed something written; writing was manual labour, and nobles thought it no shame to have a poor hand, if any. This unfamiliar status of writing is important, since it is indicative of a radical difference between 1600 and our own time. Our culture is characterized by literacy: reading and writing are skills we take for granted, and those who lack them are rare, stigmatized, and virtually excluded. Things were different in Shakespeare’s London, where the highest estimates put adult male literacy at 50 per cent. Add females, and include the whole country rather than just the richest city, and the proportion of even minimally literate people must fall considerably. One consequence of the pervasiveness of literacy in our culture is that for many people, language is writing. Speech is often implicitly or explicitly not quite the real thing: a lazy, sloppy version of ‘proper’ language. This is a cultural conception rather than a scientific reality: modern linguists maintain the primacy of speech and the secondary nature of writing; but culturally, writing is predominant. There was no such cultural conception in Shakespeare’s day. Muriel Bradbrook claims that English at the time was ‘a tongue rather than a written language’ (Bradbrook 1964: 129–41) and there is overwhelming evidence to support this. In the period 1500–1700, the word ‘tongue’ appears around 600 times in the titles of books, while ‘language’ features less than 200 times. Although ‘language’ gains ground after 1700, it is still possible in 1711 to find titles like The Child’s guide to the English tongue: or, a New Spelling Book, where ‘tongue’ is used despite the book’s overt concern with written language. By default, writing on language in the period assumes that ‘language’ is sound: even the written signs in Cornwallis’ alehouse ‘cry out’. This speech-based conception is partly due, no doubt, to the strength of the rhetorical tradition, predicated on spoken performance even if often applied to writing, but it is also a consequence of the generally dominant status of speech in the period. To claim that writing was language then would have been to make a metaphorical leap akin to asserting that someone’s portrait was them. Early Modern England was a culture in transit between orality and literacy – no longer a fully oral society in Walter Ong’s terms, but still far removed from our own highly literate state. The finest linguistic work in

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the period was done on the sounds of the language: orthoepists such as Robert Robinson (who gives an Early Modern pronunciation of ‘Shakespeare’) observed and recorded the phonetic reality of English at a time when grammarians robotically tried to force English syntactic structures into a Latin template.1 Away from the specialized world of descriptive linguistics, we find evidence for a pervasive oral orientation to language even in the printing house: Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683–4) records how compositors worked orally in transferring from copy to print (Davis and Carter 1958: 204) and Philip Gaskell finds similarly oral practices in proof-reading (Gaskell 1972: 112). Finally, it is worth remembering that, in addition to oral practices characterizing the means of production of printed texts, oral distribution was arguably far more important than print for certain texts we encounter now only in printed form. As Gary Taylor notes, ‘the largest print run for a book allowed by law was less than the number of spectators that could be accommodated for a single performance at the Globe’ (Taylor 2004: 29). ii diuersitie of sound s; conformit ie in l anguage Our literacy anaesthetizes us to the fundamentally oral nature of language, and the strangeness of writing; two aspects of language plain to Early Modern culture. At the same time, however, our literacy sensitizes us to something so pervasive in the Early Modern period that it seems virtually invisible to Early Modern speakers: linguistic variation. For most modern readers, their first encounter with an unedited or facsimile Early Modern text is an encounter with variation run mad. The modern textual critic W. Speed Hill writes of editing a text whose printed original showed variation between three different forms of the letter ‘c’. Speed Hill modernized (that is, standardized) the variation, claiming that there was no gain in preserving it and a palpable gain in suppressing it: that is, the reduction of extraneous information (nonsignificant data, static) in the resulting text (Speed Hill 1993: 27)

Most of us will probably sympathize with Speed Hill’s use of the term ‘static’ here. When we try to ‘read’ an Early Modern text, often all we can see are the apparently random shifts in ‘s’ forms, and highly variable spelling (the word ‘she’ is spelled four different ways within four lines on one page of John Florio’s Florio His First Fruits (1578)). However, these data are only ‘static’ for us because we have been sensitized to variation by our

Introduction

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cultural conception of language as a standardized, written thing which is characterized by its very lack of variation. It is important at this point to stress the scientific inaccuracy of our cultural conception of language. Language in its natural state is not stable, and it is not self-evident that stability would be a good thing. Variation is not bad, and it does not inevitably make communication less precise or more difficult. Languages vary in terms of sound, vocabulary, and grammar. Any individual language will vary from place to place, over time, between classes and genders, from person to person, within the production of the same person between different contexts, and even in the same context. The ‘same’ English sound, in the same word, spoken by the same person, can have numerous different realizations even when the repetitions of the word are close together in time. Listen to the realizations of the /t/ in ‘pretty’ in the Sex Pistols’ ‘Pretty Vacant’ for an example of this: they range from the conventionally expected [t], to a voiced dental flap closer to [d], to a glottal stop, to outright deletion. Unless we are trained to hear them by a phonetics or socio-linguistics course, we are unlikely to be conscious of these different realizations of sounds. They do not affect our understanding of the word, though they may give us social or geographical information about the speaker. Just as the original readers of Speed Hill’s text were unfazed by the variation in letter forms, we can cope with a high level of variation in the spoken language without noticing it. However, our sensitivity to variation changes radically when we are faced with written language: otherwise rational people (myself included) are exercised by variation in the use of apostrophes to mark plurals and possession; teachers spend time correcting, and schoolchildren spend time learning, entirely arbitrary conventions for spelling certain words; word processing packages dutifully put wavy green lines under all usages of ‘which’; battles are fought over ‘different to’ and ‘different than’. Why have we become so sensitive to variation in the written language? The answer lies in the development of standard written English, a process which can be traced over the period 1300–1800 (Wright 2000). Languages standardize when they are written down and when the resultant texts are regularly circulated between dialect areas. When societies first become literate, scribes naturally follow their own pronunciation in spelling and their own dialect in choosing grammatical forms. With time, however, a drift towards identifying and using certain common forms occurs. Eventually, this drift produces a standard written language as the choices made by scribes coalesce (I use the term ‘drift’ deliberately here, since standardization is something that can happen without conscious intent on the part of those

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writing documents). Standardization is thus the reduction of variation in a language, and it is an uncommon, and unnatural event. Uncommon and unnatural because it cannot take place until a language has been written down, and most languages in the world today, and an even greater majority of languages in history, have no written form. The process of standardization was in its final stages in English by 1600. After that date, the amount of variation in English printed texts is low, and rapidly declines further. Then something strange happens. As the amount of variation in texts declines to negligible, the later seventeenth century sees a rise in the amount of complaint about variation in texts. Suddenly, writers on language are acutely aware of variation, and merciless in their condemnation of it – alternate spellings and grammatical forms, words seen as ‘vulgar’ – all are denounced and proscribed out of the written language. Dictionaries and grammars are published, regional accents are dismissed as ‘uneducated’: the whole apparatus of eighteenth and nineteenth-century prescriptivism is put in place, along with its central ideology: there is only one correct way of doing anything in language – everything else is wrong. However we may disassociate ourselves from crude prescriptivism now (and not all do – see Sturrock 2003), we are its intellectual heirs, and our cultural assumptions about language derive from its demonstrably false account of language. The success of prescriptivism as an ideology can be traced throughout our response to written variation. We are conditioned to associate minute variations in spelling and orthography with absolute shifts in meaning: its/it’s; affect/effect; program/programme; god/God; be/bee; catholic/Catholic. We describe the products of these orthographic conventions as ‘different words’, forgetting that they are orthographic representations of identical groups of phonemes. We have reified ‘words’ and ‘meaning’ and we associate meanings with particular spellings, and therefore the written language, in a way conceptually impossible in the Early Modern period. I will return in the next section to the question of what a ‘word’ is, and how meanings can be associated with it, but now having characterized our own response to variation on the page, I want to consider the Early Modern response to variation in sound. It seems to me that one of the most striking things about Shakespeare’s treatment of language is the lack of comment on, or representation of, dialect. Mention Henry V and Merry Wives, and an exchange in King Lear and we have listed almost all of the available data. Elsewhere, there is no sustained examination of dialect. Why should this be? It cannot be

Introduction

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because people did not have regional dialects in the Early Modern period. Rather I think it is the opposite: everyone had one, so why comment on it? If everyone has a dialect, then variation is the element speakers swim in, not commented upon because there is no non-dialectal position from which to find dialectal variation strange. Only in our own age, thanks to prescriptivism, do we have such impossible concepts as ‘accentless English’. Shakespeare’s relative lack of overt comment on dialect is not because he is unaware of difference; it is because he, like most of his culture, is unaware of homogeneity.2 Of course, there are scenes in Shakespeare where accent and dialect are apparently objectified, identified as different. Perhaps significantly, most of the varieties identified in this way are national rather than regional (for example, in Henry V and Merry Wives), but Hal’s baiting of the drawers in 2 Henry IV does seem to rest on the assumption of a standard dialect from which the drawers deviate because of low social class. Even here though, we should be wary of transposing our post-prescriptivism attitudes. The drawer scene is notoriously puzzling and inconclusive, and it is at least possible that what is being glanced at is not the strangeness of the drawers’ language, but the perversity of Hal’s alienation from it. Note too, that Hal’s satire is not directed against phonetic variation (though no doubt the drawers can be given egregious stage cockney accents if a director wishes), but against lexical and phrasal differences. Here I think we see one aspect of the Early Modern reading of variation which escapes us. They were not overly sensitive to geographical variation, but they were highly sensitive to social variation which, at a time when there is no non-regional upper class accent, is marked mainly by lexical variation, and the use of different modes of discourse. When Ben Jonson declared ‘Language most shewes a man; speake that I may see thee’ (Timber), he did not mean that accent would allow him to place someone geographically and socially as today, but that use of words and decorum of construction would reveal the speaker’s level of education and place in the Early Modern social hierarchy. Shakespeare’s characters rarely comment on accent in our sense of regional accent, but they frequently comment on discourse as revealing a person’s origins and status. The two chapters in this collection which consider most directly the social nature of language use are those by Robert Wilcher and Lynne Magnusson. Wilcher’s paper is deceptively low-key, identifying three types of comic double-act in a semi-structuralist approach: one involving two lower-class characters; one involving two upper-class characters; one with mixed-class participants. Although Wilcher focuses on the way these dualogues feed

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into character and illuminate social relationship in the plays, he also very clearly shows that the different types of dualogue use words in contrasting ways. Two lower-class characters will quibble or ‘mistake’ the word, usually with one character wittily feeding off a stooge, and moving from static meaning to static meaning. Two upper-class characters will play more fluidly with meaning, riffing off each other or ‘keeping the ball of wit in the air’. In mixed class dualogue, most often found when a licensed fool jests with a master or mistress, the quibbling has a more serious purpose, and the mistakings unfold some essential element of the situation, rather than simply illustrating the nimbleness of the fool. Wilcher identifies early examples of the fluid, playful type of dualogue between Proteus and Valentine (Two Gentlemen of Verona) and Katherine and Rosaline (Love’s Labour’s Lost), and his analysis matches a shift Jill Levenson identifies in the discourse types employed by Romeo and Mercutio as Mercutio welcomes Romeo back into what he views as ‘the most accomplished kind of social discourse’ (see p. 131): now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo: now art thou what thou art, by Art as well as by Nature (2.3.82–3)

If there are discourse types which signal social status more readily than accent for Early Modern speakers, what of the social statuses which preexist? Mercutio welcomes Romeo back into the realm of polite discourse because he knows Romeo belongs there – a lower-class character who attempts to play with meanings without the licence of the fool is likely to be dismissed as a saucy knave. Lynne Magnusson’s paper is an attempt to chart the way social status licences speaking of a certain kind, and to trace the uncertainties of negotiating status and speech. Refreshingly drawing on Bourdieu rather than the more familiar Bakhtin, Magnusson makes the important point that language generally symbolizes or marks social role, rather than being constitutive of it, and that the degree of attention paid to speech depends on the ‘symbolic capital’ of the speaker, assigned in a complex, ever-shifting market place where ‘linguistic ingenuity’ is simply one factor (p. 214). Magnusson’s approach seems to me to be particularly rewarding in the complex reading it allows of Othello’s language, which is, as Magnusson says, characterized by ‘some degree of tension’ due to his ambivalent social position (p. 219). To move back to socio-linguistics from Bourdieu’s sociology of speech, this is Othello as hypercorrector.3 Wilcher and Magnusson are both looking at the social implications of different discourse types, moving away from traditional literaryphilological concerns with individual words or linguistic items to attempt

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the characterization of larger stretches of text, and their work can be linked to two developing areas, historical pragmatics (see Jucker 1995 and the Journal of Historical Pragmatics) and historical socio-linguistics (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003). Muriel St Claire Byrne’s paper represents a very early example of historical socio-linguistics, taking the Lisle letters as a corpus of written language held to be speech-like in some respect. Byrne’s approach is likely to strike most present-day linguists as overly impressionistic and subjective, but her method is fundamentally the same as that of the Helsinki corpus teams, who have sought to approach Early Modern spoken forms via contrasting text-types (Rissanen et al. 1993) and non-literary letters (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 1996). Scholars such as Laura Wright have sought grammatical forms characteristic of speech in depositions (Wright 1995), and her work can usefully be added to accounts of the Senecan and Ciceronian models for prose (as given here by McDonald p. 273) to broaden our sense of the models available for prose writing in the period. iii wordes Writing in his alehouse, Cornwallis noted the potentially duplicitous nature of language: ‘It is a straunge thing how men bely them selues; euery one speakes well & meanes naughtily.’ He returns to this suspicion in a later essay, ‘Of Wordes’: I like no Relation so well as what mine eye telleth me; for there is in speech, as in sumptuous building, many entries, landing places, and Lucomes commended more for formalities sake then for conueniency; so ‘ands’ and ‘ifs’ and many sounding wordes stuffe vp empty periods with winde (Allen 1946: 219)

(A ‘lucome’ is a skylight.) Lying behind this is a philosophy which considers human language to be an inevitably imperfect and misleading representation of reality. The eye is taken to be a more direct route to the true nature of things than the ear: Naturally we carry matter better then wordes, in which nature telles vs she vseth words but for an interpretour because our ignorance vnderstandes not her Language, which puts vs to a great deale of paine and makes vs go a great way about in our inquisition of knowledge (Allen 1946: 219)

The idea that there is a natural language which gives access to the truth about the physical world is based on biblical accounts of Adam naming the animals, ‘each after his own kind’, with the sense that Adam’s names

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somehow tapped into and expressed the essential reality of the things he named: that his chosen names were somehow non-arbitrary. The Tower of Babel myth explains how human languages subsequently became separated from this original language and lost their ability to give access to unmediated truth: in effect, how languages became arbitrary sounds. Such ideas resurfaced most influentially in the later seventeenth century when language philosophers such as John Wilkins attempted to reconstruct a ‘universal language’ which would allow natural philosophers to manipulate ideas about the world as effectively as mathematics allowed the manipulation of numerical concepts. Early Modern texts are full of disquisitions on the duplicitous tendencies of man’s fallen language, and these chime with our own literary culture’s sophisticated theoretical engagement with meaning. However, while the Babel myth acknowledges the fallen nature of human language, the Adamic myth asserts the possibility of conveying meaning reliably, and offers a much more optimistic view of language – a view that we are perhaps inoculated against by modern theory. Cornwallis provides an example of the Early Modern distrust of language, substituting a basic non-linguistic empiricism for its Babelonian cacophony, but religious and moral writers on language could interestingly complicate this rejection of language in favour of the world. The Government of the Tongue (second impression 1674) illustrates an alternative take on language, focusing on Adam and Eve as the first users of language: tho there was this sympathy in their sublimer part which disposed them to the most intimate union; yet there was a cloud of flesh in the way which intercepted their mutual view, nay permitted no intelligence between them, other then by the mediation of some organ equally commensurate to soul and body. And to this purpose the infinite wisdom of God ordained Speech; which as it is a sound resulting from the modulation of the Air, has most affinity to the spirit, but as it is uttered by the Tongue, has immediate cognation with the body, and so is the fittest instrument to manage a commerce between the rational yet invisible powers of human souls clothed in flesh (a2r)

This elegant dissolution of the world/language dualism can be linked to the protestant emphasis on the word, but it also reveals a wider Early Modern optimism about the genuine power of language to convey real meanings and establish communicative links between people – something which Inga-Stina Ewbank emphasizes in her approach to Hamlet in this volume. As Ewbank shows, twentieth-century readings have been too quick to find disillusion with words and the possibility of meaning in the play, and it may be that the Early Modern view of language is more ambiguously rich and nuanced than our own, perhaps overly cynical one (pp. 151, 162–4).

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As Philippa Berry (pp. 209–11) and Terence Hawkes (pp. 75–7) discuss, language was associated in the Early Modern period with the figure of Mercury/Hermes: a fittingly transitional and ambiguous figure. Berry (p. 209) quotes Richard Linche, writing in 1599 in The Fountaine of Ancient Fiction: Mercurie was often taken for that light of knowledge, & spirit of understanding, which guides men to the true conceavement of darke and enigmaticall sentences

There is an optimism here that even ‘darke and enigmaticall’ sentences have a true meaning that can be arrived at. We are some way from Cornwallis’ ‘empty periods’ stuffed up with ‘winde’. As the multiple, sometimes contradictory, associations of Mercury-Hermes show, Early Modern thought was at ease with ambiguity and fluidity, even contradiction, in a way that our own, for all its notions of post-modernity and free play, is not. Ours is a culture of the dictionary – but as Phil Benson points out, dictionaries are built on two false assumptions about language: first that languages ‘are composed of uniquely identifiable words’; second ‘that each word in the language has a uniquely identifiable sense’ (2001: 43–4). What, exactly, is ‘a word’? This is a question linguists have found embarrassingly difficult to answer. Certainly, in an everyday, common-sense sense, we all ‘know’ what a word is: this page is full of them, and they can be identified by the white spaces on either side. But these ‘words’ are orthographic conventions, representations rather than the things themselves – and even the white spaces are late developments in the history of writing. Many early manuscripts show the use of scriptio continuo, that is, a continuous stream of letters: ‘words’ are not marked off orthographically in this form of writing any more than they are marked off phonetically in speech with silences. It is much easier to formulate a linguistic definition of ‘morpheme’ (the smallest unit which carries meaning) than ‘word’, but many morphemes are not what we would want to call words: ‘un-’, ‘-ed’, ‘-s’, ‘-ly’, ‘-ing’. It is not ridiculous to argue that ‘words’ are to a large extent the product of writing: certainly our consciousness of them is highly orthographic. Many ‘words’ only exist as distinct things in their written form: to/too/two; air/heir; Barbar/ barber – and here once again we come up against a fundamental conceptual difference between our view and the Early Modern view of language. To our literate consciousness, to/too/two are three different words which just happen to sound the same – but the difference we perceive as absolute is largely a product of orthographical convention – and writing is representation, not essence. Go back to a time before our current orthographic conventions are in place, and it becomes much less obvious that these

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are ‘different’ words. Paradoxically, these words only become definitively different with the development of a standardized spelling system and the production of the dictionaries which claim merely to represent or describe difference. As Phil Benson further points out, dictionaries create the distinctions they seek to record (2001: 44). It is not the case that our literate consciousness of what words might be was absent in the Early Modern period – but we should note that those who have it are satirized by Shakespeare: c u r at A most singuler and choyce Epithat, Draw-out his Table-booke. pe da He draweth out the thred of his verbositie, finer then the staple of his argument. I abhorre such phanatticall phantasims, such insociable and poynt deuise companions, such rackers of ortagriphie, as to speake dout fine, when he should say doubt; det, when he shold pronounce debt; d e b ’t, not det: he clepeth a Calfe, Caufe: halfe, haufe: neighbour vocatur nebour; neigh abreuiated ne: this is abhominable, which he would call abbominable, it insinuareth me of in-famie: ne inteligis domine, to make frantique lunatique? (Love’s Labour’s Lost 5.1.15–25)

There are certainly also characters who ‘mistake’ the word, as Wilcher (pp. 180–1) notes, treating words as static units of uniquely identifiable meaning, and almost all of the essays in this volume touch on such punning, or play, to some degree. Puns have a bad name in Shakespeare criticism, and there is anxiety evident in these essays in Stephen Booth’s reassurances to the reader that the formal, ‘phonic’ features he identifies are non-signifying (Booth p. 23). This sense of strangeness recurs in Tricomi’s confrontation with the literal metaphors of Titus, and more generally in treatments of homophones and phonetic variation (Williams pp. 243–4, McDonald pp. 272–3, Berry pp. 201–2). As with attitudes to the nature of language, it may be that Early Modern attitudes to word play and meaning are rather more subtle and complex than our own. Our highly literate sense of what language is, is based on a category error: we take the representation (writing) for the thing itself (speech), and thus take as essential, features which are accidental fabricants of writing (for example, orthographic spaces which allow us to see ‘words’ on the page, standardized spellings which distinguish phonetically identical words). Our notions of ‘words’ and our expectation that they have stable, defined meanings, are anachronistic to the Early Modern period, which was a developing rather than an established literate culture. This is a crucial difference, but one which is very hard for us to conceptualize. When we perceive Shakespeare, or one of his characters, ‘punning’ on sole/soul, we

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see a process which makes a link between two different words on the basis that they happen to sound alike. But our fundamental understanding is that there are two different ‘words’, ‘sole’ and ‘soul’, and that they can be linked by accidental and non-signifying resemblances in sound. The apparently arbitrary nature of the link (its purely ‘phonic’ nature as Stephen Booth has it) makes us hostile to, or unmoved by Shakespeare’s ‘puns’ (Levenson quotes Mahood and Evans judging them ‘heavy-witted’ and ‘trite’ 51). However, it is only possible for us to conceive of ‘soul’ and ‘sole’ as two different words because spelling standardization and dictionaries have reified the distinction – from an Early Modern perspective, there is just as much reason to assume that this is one word which can be used to refer to two different things. It is this uncertainty and play in the relationship between words and their referents which Wilcher and Levenson find Shakespeare’s more sophisticated characters exploiting: Romeo and Mercutio, Hamlet do not engage in the heavy-handed ‘mistaking the word’ which isolates individual meanings in static positions: instead they invest language with fluidity. As Pat Parker as been arguing for some time now, Early Modern speakers and writers were alive to an endless progression of meaning, using language as a route into a flux of representations, not as a set of containers in which to bottle up meanings. Again, our writing-based, standardized conception of language leaves us puzzled when faced with what appear to be a succession of stuttering puns – we need to think of meaning as a body of liquid through which we swim, rather than a set of points about which we hop. The fluidity of language in the Early Modern period can be traced even in the apparently arid field of derivational morphology. In this volume, Vivian Salmon notes Shakespeare’s preference for deriving words using the morphemes ‘dis-‘ and ‘un-’ (p. 95). Shakespeare’s preference for these is surely because, even though they are negative morphemes, they introduce connotations of activity, agency, and process, as her examples show: ‘disbench’ – drive from a bench; ‘unshout’ – withdraw your shouts. Agency and process are the properties Shakespeare most characteristically bestows on the things he writes about – note the following lines: Thinke when we talke of Horses, that you see them Printing their prowd Hoofes i’th’ receiuing Earth (Henry V 0.0.25–6)

Here, a series of grammatical and semantic devices combine to give agency to, and personify, non-human entities. When ‘Horses’ are mentioned in line 25, they are the grammatical object, first of ‘talke’, and then of ‘see’, but

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they are also the active, if implicit, agent of ‘Printing’ in the subordinate clause. Similarly, the inanimate ‘Hoofes’ are the object of ‘Printing’, but they are personified and animated by ‘prowd’. ‘Earth’, likewise inanimate, is likewise animated and personified by its adjective: ‘receiuing’ ascribes volition, and, in its derivation from a present participle, action. This type of animation is so common in Shakespeare that it is surprising, as Williams notes (p. 248, n. 15), to find him working in the opposite direction, turning a human into an inanimate object in Macbeth: The Prince of Cumberland: that is a step, On which I must fall downe, or else o’re-leape (Macbeth 1.4.48–9)

The fluid, rather than static, nature of Shakespeare’s use of language is also shown by Salmon’s observation that Shakespeare derives words rather than borrowing them (p. 80). Recombination of existing elements to create a new word invokes a linguistic process, and involves the reader, where borrowing relies on the reader recognising the source of the borrowed word, and is likely to provoke at best passive admiration for the learning of the user (‘Acommodated, it comes of Accommodo: very good, a good Phrase.’ 2 Henry IV 3.2.66), and more usually in Shakespeare, derision (‘They haue beene at a great feast of Languages, and stolne the scraps’ Love’s Labour’s Lost 5.1.35). Involvement of the reader/hearer in the linguistic process is also achieved through the use of situational irony, as Williams notes, in the way the audience ‘hears’ echoes of words unpronounced on stage (p. 248, note 21), and, as Lisa Hopkins observes, in the way only the audience can perceive metatheatrical metaphors (pp. 253–4). And metaphor too is usually employed by Shakespeare to produce animacy and process, making Tricomi’s identification of static, almost literal metaphors in Titus particularly interesting. I found this paper highly provocative in its attempt to explain the strange quality of language in Titus, though perhaps the dichotomy between metaphor and literal language it offers is too glib, and could be revised in the light of work in linguistics on the cognitive effects of metaphor. Shen and Cohen, for example, have claimed a modality of mapping in metaphor and synaesthetic effect where ‘high’ senses are mapped onto ‘low’ (sight onto taste, for example) but not the other way round; and this might be extended to the operation of Shakespearian metaphor, where abstracts are regularly mapped onto the concrete (Shen and Cohen 1998, and see also Cameron 1998).

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Throughout these essays, there is a tension between literary and linguistic approaches to texts, which could crudely be represented as one between not counting and counting. Linguists see language as an object of study, a thing in itself, while literary scholars are more likely to treat language as a gateway to some other object of study (Pat Parker notes the tendency for literary criticism to treat language as transparent – Parker 1996: 13). Even when linguists and literary scholars both fix on language as an object of study, they are likely to read it differently: linguists for features which can be shown to be characteristic by way of their relative frequency in contrast to relatively infrequent items; literary scholars for relatively infrequent items which can be argued to be salient in some way (this distinction is explored in Hope and Witmore forthcoming). Examples of this can be seen in this volume in the different approaches to vocabulary study of Salmon (a linguist) and Hapgood and McDonald, where Hapgood and McDonald both have a tendency to make claims which linguists expect to see backed up with figures. As a linguist myself (albeit one with a literary training), I read these essays with great profit, but my most frequent marginal comment was probably ‘Figures?’ or ‘Prove it!’ We are rapidly approaching the time when all scholars of Early Modern literature will have access to electronic texts and search tools which will make the provision of figures to back up arguments a relatively trivial task. Linguists can show literary scholars what to do with the figures, but far more important is the formulation of interesting arguments and questions to seek to answer – and that is the task of the literary scholar, as evidenced by this set of highly suggestive essays. I will end, therefore, with my own question. I have tried to make a case briefly in this final section for Early Modern English generally, and Shakespeare in particular, as characterized by linguistic features which foreground process and animacy. If this is true, it might well show through in Shakespeare’s use of ‘-ing’ forms – especially in his use of them as adjectives as opposed to his use of ‘-ed’ past participle forms in the same role. This is because an ‘-ing’ form used as an adjective normally has an active paraphrase, while an ‘-ed’ past participle form typically has a passive paraphrase, so: the killing joke = the joke kills the killed joke = the joke has been killed If my characterization of Shakespeare is correct, he should use ‘-ing’ forms as adjectives more frequently than ‘-ed’ forms. I wish you joy of the counting.

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1 Robinson’s work is edited in Dobson 1957. The work of the orthoepists is magisterially chronicled and interpreted in Dobson 1968, and this work in turn can best be approached via Barber 1997: 103–41. Vorlat 1975 and Salmon 1979 give general accounts of linguistic study in the period. 2 True, there are isolated calls for a standardized dialect at the time – Puttenham commends the language of the area about sixty miles round London (Defense of Poesie, ‘Of Ornament’, book 3, chapter 4), Gill claims ‘one universal speech amongst the gentry’ in 1619 (Danielsson and Gabrielson eds., 1972: 104) – but these are the isolated roots of later prescriptivism. Sustained claims for ‘conformitie’ in language are confined to political curiosities such as the rash of unionist pamphlets which greeted James VI’s accession to the English throne, many alleging, unconvincingly, that English English and Scottish English were hardly different at all. For example, A Treatise of Union of the two Realmes of England and Scotland, by I. H. (1604, London), chapter 10 ‘Of conformitie in language’ (pages 30–2); The Ioiefull and Blessed Reuniting the two mighty and famous kingdomes England & Scotland into their ancient name of great Britaine, by John Thornborough (1604, London), which speaks of ‘two kingdoms . . . not much differing in Lawes, nor dissonant in language’ (page 2); A Sermon of the Union of Great Britaine in antiquitie of language, name, religion, and Kingdome, by John Gordon (London, 1604), which again uses the phrase ‘conformitie in language’ (page 31). 3 In socio-linguistics, a hypercorrector is an individual who aims at reproducing a certain feature of language associated with another group, but who fails to reproduce it exactly – typically overproducing the feature, or using it in inappropriate contexts. ref eren c es Allen, Don Cameron, ed., 1946, Essayes by Sir William Cornwallis the Younger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press). Barber, Charles 1997, Early Modern English (2nd edn) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Benson, Philip 2001, Ethnocentrism and the English Dictionary (London: Routledge). Bradbrook, Muriel 1964, ‘St George for Spelling Reform!’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 15, 129–41. Cameron, Lynne J. 1998, ‘Review of Andrew Goatly, The Language of Metaphor’, English Language and Linguistics, 2: 1, 162–5. Danielson, Bror and Arvid Gabrielson, eds., 1972, Alexander Gill’s Logonomia Anglica (1619), (two vols.) (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell). Davis, Herbert and Harry Carter, eds., 1958, Joseph Moxon 1683–4 Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Dobson, E. J., ed., 1957, The Phonetic Writings of Robert Robinson (London: English Early Text Society 238).

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1968, English Pronunciation 1500–1700 (two vols., second edn) (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Gaskell, Philip 1972, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hope, Jonathan and Michael Witmore, forthcoming, ‘The Very Large Textual Object: a Prosthetic Reading of Shakespeare’, Early Modern Literary Studies www.shu.ac.uk/emls/emlshome.html. Jucker, Andreas, ed., 1995, Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English (Amsterdam: John Benjamins). Nevalainen, Terttu and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, eds., 1996, Sociolinguistics and Language History: Studies Based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (Amsterdam: Rodopi). 2003, Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Longman). Ong, Walter 1965, ‘Oral Residue in Tudor Prose Style’, PMLA 80, 144–55. 1967, The Presence of the Word (New Haven: Yale University Press). 1982, Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the Word (London: Routledge). Parker, Pat 1996, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Rissanen, Matti Merja Kyt¨o and Minna Palander, eds., 1993, Early English in the Computer Age: Explorations through the Helsinki Corpus (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter). Salmon, Vivian 1979, The Study of Language in Seventeenth Century England (Amsterdam: John Benjamins). Sex Pistols, 1977, ‘Pretty Vacant’ (Virgin Records Ltd: vs184). Shen, Yeshayahu and Michal Cohen, 1998, ‘How come Silence is Sweet but Sweetness is not Silent: A Cognitive Account of Directionality in Poetic Synaesthesia’, Language and Literature, 7: 2, 123–40. Speed Hill, W., ed., 1993, New Ways of Looking at Old Texts (New York: Renaissance English Text Society). Sturrock, John 2003, ‘Call Her Daisy-Ray’, London Review of Books, 25: 17, 11.9.2003. Taylor, Gary 2004, Buying Whiteness: Race, Skin, Slavery from the European Renaissance to African American Literature (Palgrave, 2004), chapter 6. Vorlat, Emma 1975, The Development of English Grammatical Theory 1586–1737 (Leuven: Leuven University Press). Wright, Laura 1995, ‘Syntactic structure of witnesses’ narratives from the Sixteenth Century Court Minute Books of the Royal Hospitals of Bridewell and Bedlam’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 96: 1, 93–105. ed., 2000, The Development of Standard English 1300–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

chap t e r 2

Shakespeare’s language and the language of Shakespeare’s time Stephen Booth

Many things are true which only the commonest minds observe. Then I think the commonest minds must be rather useful. Middlemarch, Book i, chapter 5

Shakespeare is our most underrated poet. It should not be necessary to say that, but it is. We generally acknowledge Shakespeare’s poetic superiority to other candidates for greatest poet in English, but doing that is comparable to saying that King Kong is bigger than other monkeys. The difference between Shakespeare’s abilities with language and those even of Milton, Chaucer, or Ben Jonson is immense. The densities of his harmonies – phonic and ideational both – are beyond comfortable calculation, are so great that the act of analysing them is self-defeating, uncovers nests of coherence that make the physics of analysed lines less rather than more comprehensible. The reason it is necessary to point out Shakespeare’s poetic superiority to competing poets is, I think, that we have so long, so industriously ignored the qualities in literature that drew us to it in the first place. As a result, we – or, at any rate, the scholarly books and essays we write and read – and our students treat a Shakespeare play or Paradise Lost or Huckleberry Finn or even ‘Kubla Khan’ as if we valued it for its paraphrasable content or as a source of information about the time and society that spawned it or about its author. When I talk about what ‘we’ do, I speak not just of the ‘us’ of the last several years of sociology, sentimental anthropology, and crusading sanctimony in literary criticism but of the cultural residue of a trend that goes back in Western culture at least to Horace and Philip Sidney and their intellectually casual conclusion that value in literature resides in its supposed, rarely witnessed capacity as an agent of moral improvement. In 1990 I published an essay in Shakespeare Quarterly called ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time and All Others’ (Shakespeare Quarterly, 41 (1990), 262–8). At its core were (1) the idea that what the kind of literary 18

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criticism we call ‘academic’ does for us is offer plausible, but so far always insufficient excuses for the improbably high value society places on literature and (2) an appeal to the academic community (a), to admit that we have no good reason – that is that we have no philosophically dignified reason – for valuing the ultimately frivolous commodity that literature is when weighed against the things human beings value only slightly more – things like food, shelter, children, parents, gods, honour, and such; and (b), to admit also that we can and will and should cheerfully go on valuing art as we always have whether we have dignified excuse for it or not. This paper continues in the vein of the essay. And my first ambition for it is that it remind you that there is good reason why the word ‘poetry’ has for so long seemed to be a simple synonym for the word ‘verse’ and that it remind you too just what the qualities are that differentiate verse from prose. When we recognize something as verse, we recognize it as being organized in at least one non-substantive system, one system – traditionally a phonic one – other than the one composed of syntactic and semantic signals. Often a piece of verse will present several substantively extraneous phonic organizations, for instance, systematic rhythmic patterning, a rhyme scheme, and alliterative patterning or pattern in assonance or pattern in consonance or pattern in all three. The key fact about verse is the irrelevance of its defining, non-substantive organizations to the matter of the sentences and paragraphs in which the extra organizations sport themselves. The qualities of verse that define it are ones that – if anything is frivolous – are frivolous. As I have implied, we are beings uncomfortable with ourselves as creatures who care about what does not matter. We want to believe that what is immaterial to what is being said doesn’t matter. Witness the pathetic tradition by which apologists for poetry still sometimes attempt to comfort themselves and us with pious assertions that s sounds make us hear snakes and that rhythms imitate the substance conveyed by rhythmic lines (several generations of American high school students were regularly submitted to John Masefield’s rhythmically purposeful ‘Sea Fever’, a poem called forward by English teachers under stress and a poem that thus caused several generations of Americans to grow up thinking that the purpose of rhythm in verse is to simulate seasickness in stay-at-homes). Concentration on intellectually dignified, philosophically defensible elements in literature has left us so comfortably and so thoroughly self-deluded that we hear – and accept the underlying assumptions of – the phrase ‘redeeming social value’ without blushing – or even giggling. Moreover,

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concern with what sentences, speeches, poems, plays, and writers say (or can be said to say or once to have said) encourages attention to the kind of coherence that derives from logical relationships among elements and inattention to orderly relationships based in common factors comparable to colours and shapes, relationships that can matter to us though they convey none. By way of exemplification, I want now to talk about the editorial glosses that we are used to seeing as adjuncts to Shakespeare texts. They are a product of the assumption that only signification signifies – that only the paraphrasable matter of a sentence or paragraph or speech matters in our experience of a work. They are also prime culprits in that assumption’s preservation and perseverance. Glosses in footnotes give students the impression that Shakespeare’s language and the language of Shakespeare’s time are the same thing. And they encourage the widespread student belief that their purpose in reading a Shakespeare play is to show a teacher that they can find in it the slim little narrative it was before 400 years got in the way. Such notes also encourage the belief that a Shakespeare play is an obstacle course, encourage the assumption that the clarified, modernized versions of the plays that footnotes embody are the real thing and that simple substitution for Shakespeare’s words (and some pruning of action and assertion that make the plot hard to figure or hard to take) is desirable. The notion that Shakespeare’s language is merely a screen to penetrate on the way to something simple is a close relative of the kind of commentary that recommends Shakespeare plays to students as essentially comparable in value to modern fictions that treat of similar situations – the kind of commentary that attempts to engender enthusiasm for the great literature of the past by insisting on the likenesses between – for example – Romeo and Juliet, on the one hand, and, on the other, the comic-book teenagers Archie and Veronica. I once heard a surprisingly reputable Shakespeare scholar tell a graduate seminar that the greatness of Shakespeare was evident from the fact that, four centuries after Romeo and Juliet was first performed, newly pubescent boys and girls still like to fondle one another. No wonder students think the value of Shakespeare is as an obstacle course and a source of stuff to test them on. Anyway, Shakespeare’s language and the language of Shakespeare’s time were not the same – any more than the music of Beethoven is the same as the music of Beethoven’s time or Vermeer’s paintings are typical of the work of his contemporaries or the simple prose of Abraham Lincoln is typical of the simple prose of Lincoln’s time.

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Shakespeare’s language really is as special as people say it is. It is special in two ways. (1) Shakespeare’s sentences don’t always make sense. (2) Shakespeare’s language is exciting to the minds that hear it – exciting to minds because what is being said in a Shakespearian sentence often comes to us in a soup of possibilities, possibilities engendered by substantively negligible, substantively irrelevant relationships among elements in a syntax to which those relationships do not pertain and by which those relationships are filtered from consciousness. Number 1 is hard to take. Nonetheless, it is true that, when one hears a Shakespearian sentence or speech and understands what it is saying, one is often led to understanding by situation and by connotations of the words used – not by the demonstrable content signalled by syntax and the probabilities of the diction. That is, one is hearing sense in nonsense. And, when we do that, we do what we want to do: understand what we do not understand, what we still don’t understand. The best example I know of both kinds of specialness is the following passage from Othello; Desdemona, momentarily alone on stage, soliloquizes on Othello’s abusive behaviour towards her: ’Tis meet I should be used so, very meet. How have I been behaved, that he might stick The small’st opinion on my least misuse? (4.2.110–12)

In the third of those three lines, editors who gloss ‘opinion’ ordinarily gloss it as ‘censure’ (or ‘suspicion’ or something similar and similarly improbable in a context other than this one). The Riverside Shakespeare says simply: ‘opinion: censure’; so does David Bevington’s 1992 complete works; the revised Pelican of 1964 glosses ‘small’st opinion’ as ‘least suspicion’. What such glosses report is true, but the manner of the report distorts the truth. Such glosses casually, benevolently give readers the impression that ‘opinion’ once meant ‘ill opinion’. M. R. Ridley’s 1958 Arden edition of Othello is unusual in noting the anomaly by which context thrusts a sense upon the word ‘opinion’ that that word is not known ever to have had elsewhere; Ridley says ‘opinion must here, unusually, mean unfavourable opinion’. Ridley’s use of ‘must here . . . mean’ points in passing to a truth about the lines that is vital to an understanding, not of the lines, but of the way they work. ‘Must mean’ acknowledges the fact that a scholarly gloss on

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‘opinion’ in Othello 4.2.112 is as unnecessary as it is unavailable: context tells one – tells anyone capable of getting the general drift of the scene – that ‘opinion must here, unusually, mean unfavourable opinion’. The New Folger editors, Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, did not gloss – evidently saw no need to gloss – ‘opinion’ at all. The same was apparently true for Kenneth Muir; he too sensibly leaves Desdemona’s use of ‘opinion’ unglossed in his New Penguin edition. Although I have not attempted a full survey, I expect that those three editors have had a lot of company in their omission. That is because editorial glosses on words that act as ‘opinion’ does in Othello 4.2.112 mean to say only ‘You, reader, are right: context does indeed demand that this word be understood as if it were “– –”.’ The same is true of all editorial glosses that begin ‘i.e.’; glosses headed by ‘i.e.’ acknowledge that the sense both editor and readers take from some unlikely linguistic unit is determined by context not the syntactic and semantic signals that ordinarily govern and direct understanding. What I care about in Othello 4.2.110–12 is what it is about these particular lines that makes the anomalous use of ‘opinion’ seem so commonplace, so usual, so right that one can read across the lines without pause and hear them in the theatre without even so much as a flicker of puzzlement. When I say that the use of ‘opinion’ sounds right, the rightness I refer to is of the sort one feels in music where, at least in my purely amateur experience, one’s mind regularly hears a given note or chord in a piece of unfamiliar music as if one had predicted it ahead of time. One possible source of the rightness of ‘opinion’ in Desdemona’s soliloquy – one possible sustainer of the word ‘opinion’ as a synonym for ‘blame’ – is a bit of unstated trick logic – a logic probably generated in Shakespeare’s unconscious and, I assume, ordinarily available only to the unconsciousnesses of listeners and readers. In the case of ‘opinion’ in the present passage, the logic would run this way: since ‘censure’ is a synonym for ‘opinion’ (as it is when Leontes says ‘How blest am I / In my just censure, in my true opinion!’ (The Winter’s Tale 2.1.38–9)), and since ‘censure’ and ‘blame’ are synonyms (as in ‘the fault / Would not scape censure’ (King Lear 1.4.203–4)), ‘opinion’ and ‘blame’ must be synonyms too.1 Most of the other sources of overpowering rightness in the ‘opinion’ passage in Othello are much more ordinary in literary constructs than the subterranean chop logic by which ‘opinion’ is confusable with ‘blame’, but they are presumably just as distant – just as inevitably, just as eternally, distant – from the consciousnesses of audiences and readers. For one thing, a dusting of m sounds lies over the whole three-line passage. Only slightly more complex in its assurances of quasi-organic rightness is the recurrence

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of the third and fifth syllables of line 110 – ‘I’ and ‘be’ – as the third and fifth syllables of line 111 – where, though nearly identical with the corresponding pair of sounds in the previous line, the syllables figure in a syntax entirely foreign to the one they echo (‘I should be used’ / ‘I been behaved’). Moreover, in each of those two lines the sixth syllable concludes in a d sound; and ‘-haved’, the sixth syllable of line 111, repeats the v of ‘have’ but in combination with what in any dialect at any time must have been a different kind of a sound. In the line that actually harbours the nonce synonym for ‘blame’, ‘opinion’ is not only supported on either side by the simultaneously paired and contrasted ‘small’st’ and ‘least’, but – by virtue of its second syllable, ‘-pin’, the fourth of the line – rhymes with ‘been’ the fourth syllable of the line it follows. The last word of the soliloquy also vouches mutely for the integrity of the whole: ‘misuse’ – there referring to impropriety committed by Desdemona, not against her – is also, is entirely incidentally, an echo of ‘used’ in ‘’Tis meet I should be used so’ in the first line of the speech where ‘used’ said what ‘misused’ might have. The phenomenon that led me to lead with Desdemona’s ‘opinion’ speech here is of a kind to which I will devote the bulk of my paper: ‘stick the small’st opinion on’ enfolds within it the stuff of the familiar, here irrelevant, idea of sticking a pin (in fact sticking the ‘small’st’ pin: pins were already proverbial for both literal and metaphorical smallness – as in ‘not worth a pin’). I contend that substantively incidental irrelevant relationships like ‘stick the small’st . . . pin . . . on’ in Desdemona’s speech are worth attention. They are the sort of typically Shakespearian phenomena that prompted me to say that Shakespeare’s language is exciting to listening minds – that is, minds that listen casually the way we all do, not minds poised to pounce on the sorts of non-signifying organizations I pounce on here. Things like the locally irrelevant ‘stick’ / ‘pin’ relationship in Desdemona’s soliloquy are the spiciest ingredients of the soup of possibilities in which the paraphrasable substance, the matter, of Shakespeare’s sentences floats. Such relationships are ordinarily and properly as completely overlooked by readers and listeners as the unostentatious extra organizations inherent in blank verse or in gentle consonance and assonance among syllables that perform their overt tasks without any substantive enhancement from the extra patterning. I suggest that, where they occur, substantively insignificant semantic relationships like ‘stick’ / ‘pin’ in Othello 4.2.111–12 are like alliteration, assonance, consonance, rhythm and rhyme in being persuasive contributors to our sense of the organism-like coherence of Shakespearian sentences, paragraphs, and speeches.

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The submerged ‘stick’ / ‘pin’ pair in Desdemona’s soliloquy would do what it does even if it were the only such pair in the canon, but, as champion of the aesthetic value and efficacy of this pair and of shadow locutions similarly submerged but unrelated to sticks or pins, I am encouraged to note other places in the plays where Shakespeare’s mind appears to toy casually with one or another of the particulars of Desdemona’s stick and pin speech. For instance, Measure for Measure 1.3.23–7: lines that play casually, gracefully, and without any demand for audience applause or acknowledgement on the verb ‘to stick’, meaning ‘to affix’ and the noun ‘stick’ meaning something akin to ‘twig’ and to ‘rod’: Now, as fond fathers, Having bound up the threat’ning twigs of birch Only to stick it in their children’s sight For terror, not to use, in time the rod More mocked becomes than feared . . .

For a final kind of casual ‘stick’ relationship, consider the incidental ‘drumsticks’ in All’s Well That Ends Well 3.6.45–6: ‘This drum sticks sorely in your disposition.’ Now I want to look at a succession of Shakespearian passages similarly enhanced by substantively extra patterning. Attention to that patterning should seem less frivolous, more reasonable than it otherwise might if you remember that I am not for a minute suggesting that there is any meaning to be squeezed out of these patterns and into the passages in which they lurk. You will be less uncomfortable than you might otherwise be, if you remember too that I do not mean for a second to imply that conscious perception of such patterning ought properly be part of your conscious experiences of Shakespeare plays. All I do suggest is that such patterns contribute largely to the eventfulness of the passages. Indeed, my principal purpose in this paper is to argue that Shakespeare’s language is more eventful than anybody else’s appears to be, that Shakespeare’s language all but bursts with activity generated by incidental relationships among its elements. The following sentence is Macbeth 1.4.33–5. Duncan, overwhelmed with gratitude to his victorious generals, comments on his response: My plenteous joys, Wanton in fullness, seek to hide themselves In drops of sorrow.

The sentence is overtly witty, hinged on the familiar irony in which tears, signs of grief, register joy; Miranda remarks on the same stock paradox

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in The Tempest : ‘I am a fool / To weep at what I am glad of ’ (3.1.73–4). But Duncan’s sentence is also full to overflowing with relationships that could have been exploited, could have been pointed up and pointed out, but are not. A Biondello or a Grumio could have leapt upon the contextually irrelevant – and therefore contextually hidden – opposition of the paired words ‘seek’ and ‘hide’ and/or upon the irony by which the embarrassed joys attempt to hide in tears: agents of display. A pun-hungry Shakespearian clown might also be imagined to pick up on the contrasting pair that ‘fullness’ makes with ‘want’, the first syllable of ‘wanton’. On the other hand, no responsible comic character would try to make something of the two uses of ‘in’ in the sentence. The ‘in’ of ‘wanton in’ says ‘with respect to’; the ‘in’ of ‘in drops of sorrow’ is literal: it indicates location. The pair of non-identical twins that the two ins present is of a sort so common in everyday speech that not even the most desperate of Shakespeare’s clowns would be likely to pick up on it, but – commonplace or not – the two ins in Duncan’s sentence give it one more charge of incidental energy. An effect need not be unusual to be. I just used the word ‘energy’ as a critical term, and I will use it several times more in the next few pages. Before going on to other Shakespearian passages, I should acknowledge some uneasiness about my terminology. I worry that I will seem to be generating a jargon, a special, especially imprecise language that behaves as if compensating for its vagueness were the responsibility of consumers. I worry in particular about my use of the word ‘energy’. I would use a more precise word if I could find it. What I wish ‘energy’ better labelled is the product of a substantively incidental organization that coexists with the syntactic organization of a sentence or paragraph or speech. I call that product energy because it resembles the heat generated by the interaction of two bodies that rub or jar against one another. I want now to look at As You Like It 4.1.191–4, a speech occasioned by a display of traditional, knee-jerk antifeminism by Rosalind in her role as Ganymede, boy physician to the lovesick. Orlando takes his leave, and Celia accuses Rosalind: You have simply misused our sex in your love-prate. We must have your doublet and hose plucked over your head, and show the world what the bird hath done to her own nest.

The passage is prose, but it has extra energy comparable to the energy that derives from phonic patterning in verse. It gets that energy first – and most obviously, given the specialized context of this paper – from the ordinarily non-obvious conjunction of ‘bird’ with the word ‘plucked’ – a word that has a specialized sense in context of birds

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and feathers but is here used – used in a context still ten syllables short of concern for birds – to mean simply ‘pulled’. Secondly and just as unostentatiously, the speech gets energy from the multiple physics it conflates and makes easy for us. For one thing, the passage lets us believe ourselves able to imagine a doublet and hose as capable of being lifted over the wearer’s head like a skirt; what is described is presumably not what a listener imagines: the action the words describe would at best result in pain to the wearer and destruction of the garment. One’s mind has to behave – and easily does behave – as if it had imagined a doublet and hose as a skirt. Interestingly then, what the passage invites one to imagine includes an incidental assertion of the femininity the speaker wants to expose. The passage rests heavily and obviously on the idea that ‘it is a foul bird that defiles its own nest’ (a time-honoured proverb to which, by the way, two details give just the sort of incidental energy that concerns me here: (1) the unexploited pun on ‘foul’ meaning ‘evil’ and ‘fowl’, a synonym for ‘bird’ and (2) the presence of ‘defiles’ doing a job that ‘fouls’ might have done: it is a foul fowl that fouls its own nest). The proverb feels straightforwardly pertinent to Celia’s speech – feels so and therefore is so, even though, if one gives the speech the sort of thought it does not invite, one would be hard put to explain its application. Two mutually exclusive thought patterns meet when Celia introduces the proverb. The two might be expected to collide, but they do not; instead they do something vaguely comparable to blending together and passing through one another. Each of the two thought processes relates to the same general private area of Rosalind’s anatomy. Given the dramatized situation in which Celia speaks, the proverb refers to Rosalind’s hidden identity as a female, but in the terms of the proverb itself what is hidden by clothes and discernible in demesnes adjacent to her telltale genitalia would be that Rosalind has fouled herself. Let me insist once again that my point about Celia’s speech is a variation on the points I have made about the passages I talked about earlier: Celia’s speech makes its listeners effortlessly capable of an experience so complicated as to seem impossible to a mechanism as limited as the human mind. The several intertwined intricacies I have laboured to describe in Celia’s speech come into our minds as smoothly as butter. They are ideational counterparts of the phonic complexities we handle with equal ease when we hear verse or rhythmically elegant prose. The next thing I want to talk about is Antonio’s big speech from the courtroom scene in The Merchant of Venice. I want to spend more time on

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that passage than any other – not because it is richer than the others or even because it is longer, but because it is at once so showy about its rhetorical flourishing and alive with unobtrusive patterning that makes no call at all for our attention. The speech, I contend, is thus like the other pieces that concern me here in letting us feel more capable mentally than human beings can be or can imagine being – lets us feel an orderliness beyond our capacities to comprehend and lets us feel capable of doing what in fact we never do – cannot do: cope with unmediated experience. These lines are openly, insistently artificial – brittle and brittly witty in the ‘hard’ (difficult)/‘hard’ (rock-like) play in 77–9: ‘You may as well do any thing most hard / As seek to soften that – than which what’s harder? – / His Jewish heart’: I pray you think you question with the Jew. 69 You may as well go stand upon the beach 70 And bid the main flood bate his usual height; 71 You may as well use question with the wolf 72 Why he hath made the ewe bleak for the lamb; 73 You may as well forbid the mountain pines 74 To wag their high tops and to make no noise 75 When they are fretten with the gusts of heaven, 76 You may as well do any thing most hard 77 As seek to soften that – than which what’s harder? – 78 His Jewish heart. Therefore, I do beseech you, 79 Make no more offers, use no further means, 80 But with all brief and plain conveniency 81 Let me have judgement and the Jew his will. 82 (The Merchant of Venice 4.1.69–82)2

The open play on kinds of hardness has lots of equally showy company here. Whatever else it may be, the parallelism of ‘question with the Jew’ in line 69 and ‘question with the wolf’ in line 72 is also brazen in its artifice. The speech is also openly artful in its organization. The standard anaphora by which one repeated phrase, ‘You may as well’, begins lines 70, 72, 74 and 77 is similarly palpable and similarly gross as an effect. At the same time, however, the speech is full of unobserved echoes and repetitions and substantively irrelevant articulations. For a simple first example, note that the play on kinds of hardness is at once enriched and rendered less openly artful by the unassertive phonic echo that ‘heart’ in line 80 is of ‘hard’ and ‘harder’ in lines 78 and 79. Similarly simple are the pattern in prominent b sounds in lines 70–4 (in ‘beach’, ‘bid’, ‘bate’, ‘bleak’, and ‘forbid’) and the accidental-sounding echoes of ‘may’ from the

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‘you may as well’ formula audible in ‘main’ (71), ‘made’ (73), and ‘make’ (75). And, at the end of the speech, the ‘Make no’ construction in ‘Make no more offers’ in line 80 is at once urgently like and urgently unlike the ‘Make no’ construction in ‘Make no noise’ back in line 75. I suggest that each of those unobtrusive patterns gives extra, non-purposeful (and thus less artificial-seeming) unity to the lines over which they spread. Consider too the casually complex, deeply uninteresting patterning that results when the fifth syllable of line 76, the en sound in ‘fretten’, is casually echoed by the fifth syllable of line 78, the en sound in ‘soften’. A similarly quiet harmony occurs earlier, within line 76 itself, when the last word of the line, ‘heaven’, echoes ‘fretten’ from its middle. The harmonies in which ‘fretten’, ‘heaven’, and ‘soften’ participate are only specialized variations on more pervasive, even less obtrusive patterning in final n sounds in the speech. All three words chime almost as precisely with ‘mountain’ in line 74 as with one another. And better than one in ten of the speech’s 143 syllables ends in an n sound (four of them in line 81 in ‘plain conveniency’ alone). Listen too to the final harmonious note the last word of the passage strikes when ‘will’ casually, quietly echoes ‘well’ from the repeated formula ‘You may as well’ (the echo would presumably have been even more audible in Shakespeare’s time than in ours because vowels like the one in ‘well’ were apparently pronounced West Texas style: ‘You may as will’). The speech, a very forest of quiet, substantively insignificant relational harmonies, is unusual not only in the density of its patterning but in the complexity of some of the patterns. However, such accounts of patterns in minutiae as I give here are hard to read about. I fear that my accounts will already have become a mere drone. Moreover, I have a strong impression that – hurrying toward a critic’s conclusion and the chance to judge that conclusion as convenient or inconvenient to their own thinking – readers of literary criticism regularly skip across the details on which the critic’s conclusion depends – even details inherently much more interesting than the muted patterns I present here. So, lest my accounts of the further harmonies nested within Antonio’s ‘question with the Jew’ speech get overlooked, I want to mark some of the patterns out with arbitrary uses of italics and small capitals. For instance, quoted below are the first lines of the speech in a typography designed to call attention to what is perhaps the most delicate, least effect-like effect in the whole passage. That effect occurs when the fourth line – ‘You may as well use question with the wolf’ – echoes first the first four words of the speech’s second line (‘You may as well go stand upon the beach’) and then the last five words of the first (‘I pray you think you question with the Jew’):

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I pray you think YOU Q U E S T I O N W I T H T H E J E W You may as well go stand upon the beach And bid the main flood bate his usual height; You may as well USE Q U E S T I O N W I T H T H E W O L F Why he hath made the ewe bleak for the lamb . . .

In addition to its bold italics and small capitals, the foregoing copy of The Merchant of Venice 4.1.69–73 uses large, bold capitals to take special notice of ‘you’ in the first line and ‘use’ in the fourth. It thereby accentuates (and thus makes cruder than it is as heard or read) the most elegant of the relationships within the complex of asymmetrical pairs that compose lines 69–72. ‘Use’ – the sixth syllable of line 72 (‘You may as well use question with the wolf’) – is the non-identical phonic twin of ‘you’ – the sixth syllable of line 69 (‘I pray you think you question with the Jew’). Similarly delicate and similarly elegant is the interaction of the word ‘question’ in line 72 with the word it so ostentatiously repeats from line 69. The rhetorically crude equation of ‘wolf’ and ‘Jew’ that the variation in line 72 of the ‘question with’ construction induces is made less crude by the semantic non-identity of the grammatical functions of the two otherwise identical uses of the word ‘question’, a verb in line 69 and a noun in line 72. This next typographically distressed copy of the speech notices unactivated potential in the speech for general play on the pronoun ‘you’, the verb ‘use’, the idea of what is usual, and female sheep – all of which occur in context of the topic of usury, and each of which echoes and is echoed in the vowel sound of the word ‘Jew’.3 I pray Y O U think Y O U question with the Jew. Y O U may as well go stand upon the beach And bid the main flood bate his U S UA L height; Y O U may as well U S E question with the wolf Why he hath made the E W E bleak for the lamb; Y O U may as well forbid the mountain pines To wag their high tops and to make no noise When they are fretten with the gusts of heaven, Y O U may as well do any thing most hard As seek to soften that – than which what’s harder?– His Jewish heart. Therefore, I do beseech Y O U , Make no more offers, U S E no further means, But with all brief and plain conveniency Let me have judgement and the Jew his will.

And here are lines 72–6 of the ‘You may as well’ speech, the lines that immediately precede the flat-footed but complexly contorted wit of the ‘hard/difficult’ – ‘hard/rock-like’ pair. A lot happens in lines 72–6:

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stephen booth You may as well use question with the wolf Why he hath made the ewe B L E A K F O R the lamb; You may as well forbid the mountain P I N E S To wag their high tops and to make no noise When they are fretten with the gusts of heaven . . .

The mountain pines that wag their high tops in lines 74–5 arrive in context of the line about the ewe bleaking for her lost lamb – arrive in context of the idea of pining for the lost lamb. Note also (1) that for reasons obvious to anyone who has seen the rear end of a lamb, the verb ‘to wag’ and the noun ‘lamb’ have a traditional association in the language at large – even though they are disassociated in the syntax in which we hear them in lines 73 and 75 – and (2) that the syllable ‘bleak’ (here possibly a dialect synonym for the verb ‘to bleat’ or – as the Folio printers apparently guessed – a mistranscription of ‘bleat’ itself ), pertains – as the contextually impertinent adjective meaning ‘cold and barren’ – to windswept mountains like the ones where these pines grow. That brings me at last to the proposition to which this long analysis has built: I submit that the swirl of substantively irrelevant coherences overrides our ability to see that ‘forbid the mountain pines . . . To make no noise’ in lines 75 and 76 is absolute nonsense: You may as well F O R B I D T H E M O U N TA I N P I N E S To wag their high tops and TO M A K E N O N O I S E . . .

I want now to talk about a number of similarly eventful Shakespearian passages. It matters that there be many. I want to give you reason to believe me when I say that passages pulsating with substantively irrelevant energy are very common in Shakespeare, reason to believe me when I suggest that a look at virtually any page in Shakespeare will yield several phenomena like the ones incidental to the passages I bring up here. Now that I have shown you the kinds of extra organization that concern me and why I bother with them, I should be able to move quickly from one passage to the next. At the first appearance in Cymbeline of the king’s lost sons Guiderius and Arviragus, their foster father regales them with some stoic posturing: A goodly day not to keep house with such Whose roof’s as low as ours. Stoop, boys, this gate Instructs you how t’adore the heavens, and bows you To a morning’s holy office. (Cymbeline 3.3.1–4)

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In the words ‘this gate / Instructs you how t’adore’, the sound of the word ‘adore’ casually echoes the sense of the word ‘gate’. This is Cleopatra pretending to rant in the third scene of Antony and Cleopatra: O, never was there queen So mightily betrayed! Yet at the first I saw the treasons planted. (1.3.24–6)

The phrase ‘treasons planted’ embodies an entirely irrelevant arboreal reminiscence that presumably goes unobserved – or is at best dismissed from a listener’s consciousness In an unrelated speech, much later in the play, Cleopatra lists the indignities that await her and her women if they are taken captive to Rome: Saucy lictors Will catch at us like strumpets, and scald rhymers Ballad’s out a’ tune. (5.2.210–12)

Although ‘tune’ is a workable synonym for a sense of ‘catch’, a sense of which the verb in the preceding line is entirely innocent, the major incidental mental event of this passage is generated by ‘saucy lictors’. ‘Saucy’: ‘ill-mannered’, ‘presumptuous’. Sure. But why lictors? As one may or may not remember from Latin class, lictors were minor Roman functionaries who carried the fasces before a magistrate. Why lictors? My guess is that Shakespeare was drawn to the word by its first syllable, ‘lick’, a word intimately related with ‘saucy’ in its literal sense. (Note, by the way, that Shakespeare took up the topic of finger licking in the opening lines of Romeo and Juliet 4.2 and that in Twelfth Night 3.4.141–3 he revivifies the long dead literal sense of ‘saucy’.)4 For a final instance of eventful language in Antony and Cleopatra, consider this exchange from act 3; Octavius and his sister are discussing her wayward husband, Antony: cae sar . . . Where is he now? octav i a My lord, in Athens. ca e sar No, my most wrong`ed sister. Cleopatra hath nodded him to her. (3.6.64–6)

Antony is not in Athens. Octavia is wrong. The first syllable of ‘wrong`ed’ says so. The word then goes on to say quite another thing – another thing that is also true.

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These next four brief passages are from Julius Caesar. In the scene where the conspirators meet at Brutus’s house and debate their coming action, Brutus rejects the suggestion that Antony be killed as well as Caesar: Our course will seem too bloody, Caius Cassius, To cut the head off and then hack the limbs . . . (2.1.162–3)

As Brutus uses the word, ‘course’ means ‘proceeding’, ‘course of action’ and nothing else, but ‘course’ is homonym to the word we now spell and pronounce ‘corpse’, and corpses are urgent to the topic under discussion. Later in the same scene, Portia kneels to Brutus: b ru t u s Kneel not, gentle Portia. p ort i a I should not need if you were gentle Brutus. (2.1.277–8)

One’s experience of that altogether straightforward, seemingly prosaic exchange is one where the verb ‘to need’ occurs in context of ‘kneel’ and thus of knees.5 In the next scene, where Caesar notes that ‘Antony that revels long a-nights/Is notwithstanding up’ (2.2.116–17), the words that say that Antony is no longer lying in bed contain the sounds of the phrase ‘standing up’. And in 5.1.110–11 the words Brutus uses to say that he will not allow himself to be taken in bondage to Rome include the phrase ‘bound to Rome’: ‘No, Cassius, no. Think not, thou noble Roman, / That ever Brutus will go bound to Rome . . .’ (compare ‘bound to Persia’ – The Comedy of Errors 4.1.3–4–and ‘bound to Tripolis’ – The Merchant of Venice 1.3.18). I am again worried that you will fear that, in presenting such demonstrations of ideational static as I have just pointed out and in presenting them as elements that matter in our experience of the speeches that harbour them, you will carelessly assume that I present them as elements that once were or should henceforth be active elements in one’s conscious experience of the passages in which they innocently lurk, that I present them as truths that should henceforth be part of the paraphrasable substance of those passages. Let me say in one more way why I think ideational static, irrelevant to analysis of a passage’s substantive content, is worth taking analytic account of in considering the value of a passage. Let me again give reasons why Shakespeare’s language is admirable for more than its sense and sounds.

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What things like, for another example, the sound of ‘piled high’ in Biron’s pious rejection of ‘three-piled hyperboles’ (Love’s Labour’s Lost 5.2.407) do for audiences presumably and properly inattentive to them is just sit there in the air, sit there as available material for puns the scripts never make. Biron’s ‘piled high’ occurs in a context that restricts the syllable ‘piled’ from any signification but the one that derives from its ancestor, one of the several Latin words for ‘hair’. ‘Three-piled’ has nothing at all to do with heaps or heaping, but the static-like shadow presence of the idea of piling high can create an exciting situation for the minds that read Love’s Labour’s Lost or hear Biron’s line spoken. Actual puns, however, have nothing like that sort of effect upon their hearers. Consider, for example, the overt pun on two senses of ‘boot’ with which Hotspur goads Glendower in 1 Henry IV. Glendower boasts that King Henry has ‘three times . . . made head’ against him and that he, Glendower, has thrice sent the King ‘bootless home, and weather-beaten book’. Hotspur’s response is ‘Home without boots, and in foul weather too! / How scapes he agues, in the devil’s name?’ (3.1.61–6). Contrast that with this exchange from the first scene of Richard II: king r i c h ard Norfolk, throw down! We bid; there is no boot. mowb r ay Myself I throw, dread sovereign, at thy foot . . . (1.1.164–5)

‘Boot’ in King Richard’s command and ‘foot’ in Mowbray’s answer relate to one another via a sense that ‘boot’ (‘advantage’, ‘profit’) does not carry in this context. That connection is based in exactly the accident of the English language from which Hotspur harvests his pun. Where, for us as audience, hearing Hotspur make his pun is merely to be a bystander, to be in the company of ‘foot’ and ‘boot’ in the Richard/Mowbray exchange is to be in a place made rich – made rich by the mere availability of a pun. The difference between hearing an actual pun and being on ground where there is one to be made is very like the difference between being the maker of a pun and being its groaning audience. Why do people on whom puns are inflicted groan at them? Because the culture has taught them that groaning is expected? I think not. There is great joy to be had from puns, but all of it ordinarily belongs to the person who senses opportunity in a linguistic situation. The joy, I suggest, is in sensing the availability of a simultaneously likely and unlikely connection, an unexpected opportunity for articulating two contexts that are and remain essentially unconnected. When the pun maker snatches at the hidden thread by which the two contexts can be

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joined, brings the connection to consciousness, and triumphantly blurts it out, he or she reveals the insubstantiality, the triviality of a relation that, until realized, might have turned out to have been profound and profoundly illuminating. What the pun’s audience hears is a mere gimcrack, a toy, something entirely irrelevant to the natures of the things so suddenly linked. What the punster feels in the air before he/she brings it forth and exposes it for the mouse a pun inevitably turns out to be is thrilling, is a sense of a previously unsuspected new order to things. A comparable feel of limitless mental possibility, I suggest, derives to us from the presence of substantively irrelevant organizations in the literary constructs we value best and longest. The passages I trot out here are in no particular order. That is because I see no reasonable basis for one. I would like to organize them by kind, and I toyed briefly with doing so, but, like most categorization projects, the attempt to organize quickly became an end rather than a means and thus proved a diversion and a waste of time. Left with no reasonable criterion for dealing with any one passage in the company of any particular other one, I will settle for an illusion of rational order and talk now about a group of passages relatable as frivolously and casually as the components of the shadow phrases I have been pointing out. I will talk about three passages that relate to one another only as they relate to the sound ‘rain’. In the third of the following lines ‘bridal’ means ‘wedding’, and ‘arraigning’ two lines later means ‘accusing’. But, since reins are a part of every bridle, the sound of ‘bridal’ and the sound of the second and third syllables of ‘arraigning’ have an extra, substantively irrelevant affinity as terms in horsemanship: Nay, we must think men are not gods, Nor of them look for such observancy As fits the bridal. Beshrew me much, Emilia, I was – unhandsome warrior as I am – Arraigning his unkindness with my soul . . . (Othello 3.4.146–50)

This next is a sentence from The Winter’s Tale: ‘Now he thanks the old shepherd, which stands by like a weather-bitten conduit of many kings’ reigns’ (5.2.54–6). ‘Conduit’ comes very close there to triggering an overt play on ‘reigns’ meaning ‘terms in office’ and the same sound as it refers to meteorological precipitation, but – if the silence of most editors is the guide I take it to be – the pun never quite emerges. The same appears to be true of essentially the same potential pun in the song Autolycus sings earlier as he makes his first entrance into the play:

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When daffodils begin to peer, With heigh, the doxy over the dale! Why then comes in the sweet o’ the year, For the red blood reigns in the winter’s pale. (The Winter’s Tale 4.3.1–4)

Context says that ‘pale’ in the last of those four lines means only ‘enclosure’, ‘preserve’. The sound of ‘pale’, however, is a sound capable elsewhere of labelling a receptacle for liquids. As a result, ‘pale’ there yearns after ‘reigns’, a sound elsewhere capable of labelling liquid that, like ‘blood’, is capable of containment in pails. Moreover, because of its conjunction with ‘red’, the word ‘pale’ figures in a shadowy conflation of the idea of paleness with the idea of enclosure. (Compare the activity of the word ‘pale’ in the following speech from King John. Austria swears that he will not go home until all the lands in dispute acknowledge Prince Arthur as their king: . . . to my home I will no more return Till Angers, and the right thou hast in France, Together with that pale, that white-faced shore, Whose foot spurns back the ocean’s roaring tides And coops from other lands her islanders, Even till that England, hedged in with the main, That water-walled bulwark . . . Salute thee for her king . . . (King John 2.1.21–7, 30)

If in the third of these lines the phrase ‘that white-faced shore’ did not intervene to gloss ‘pale’ and insist that it be understood as an adjective akin in its sense to ‘white’, ‘pale’ would remain a noun meaning ‘fence’: ‘that pale whose foot spurns back the ocean’s roaring tides and coops from other lands her islanders’.) Consciously or unconsciously, Shakespeare appears to have heard and responded to the sound ‘pence’ and its potential as the plural for the word ‘penny’. The word ‘recompense’ (in which ‘-pense’ derives from Latin pensare, ‘to weigh’, and has no etymological kinship with ‘penny’ at all) recommends itself semantically to contexts of payment and debt, but Shakespeare’s uses of the word sometimes seem to me right on the edge of overt play on ‘pence’. For example, consider the suggestions of coins evoked by ‘purse’ when Viola rejects a proffered tip from Olivia: ‘I am no fee’d post, lady. Keep your purse. / My master, not myself, lacks recompense’ (Twelfth Night 1.5.274–5). ‘Pence’ – pennies, money that could be ‘paid down’ – is and isn’t part of the experience of lines 3 and 4 of this next speech, lines

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casually complicated by ideational fluidity well before there is any whisper of coins. The speech is the first of 5.1 of The Winter’s Tale, the scene in which Leontes’ courtiers urge him to remarry: Sir, you have done enough, and have performed A saint-like sorrow. No fault could you make Which you have not redeemed, indeed paid down More penitence than done trespass. (5.1.1–4)

At the point in the third of those lines where we hear ‘redeemed’ (literally ‘bought back’), context limits its meaning to the common metaphoric one: ‘atoned for’. At the end of the line, however, ‘paid down’ takes the line into the ideational area to which the literal sense of ‘to redeem’ belongs. ‘Penitence’, the word that removes the assertion from the newly invaded realm of finance – the word that makes ‘paid down’ a metaphor – also contains the sound of ‘pence’. The first syllable of ‘penitence’, being the first of the metaphor-invited word ‘pennies’, confirms the context of finance. The next syllable undoes that confirmation. And the final sibilant of the third completes the (now alien) word ‘pence’ that, given the context established by ‘paid down’, the first syllable promised. For a simpler, but distantly similar, exercise in syllabic shuffling, consider this sentence of Cleopatra’s: ‘Think on me, / That am with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black, / And wrinkled deep in time’ (Antony and Cleopatra 1.5.27–9). The sentence approaches – but never quite reaches – play on ‘blackamoor’ in ‘amorous pinches black’. Some of Shakespeare’s limpest wit is made less so by inherent potential that lies unharnessed beside it. For instance, the following passage from The Comedy of Errors sweats to delight its audiences with sudden, minimally provoked reference to a baroque legal fiction called ‘fine and recovery’. Challenged to do so, Dromio of Syracuse provides the rule by which he rejects the proverbial truth that ‘there’s a time for all things’: drom i o Marry, sir, by a rule as plain as the plain bald pate of Father Time himself. an t i ph olu s Let’s hear it. drom i o There’s no time for a man to recover his hair that grows bald by nature. an t i ph olu s May he not do it by fine and recovery? drom i o Yes, to pay a fine for a periwig, and recover the lost hair of another man. (The Comedy of Errors 2.2.69–77)

The passage was presumably stillborn and has stayed that way – even after suffering scholarly cpr from Helge K¨okeritz, who declared play in the

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passage between ‘fine’ and the word ‘foin’: ‘fur used as trim on garments’ (Shakespeare’s Pronunciation (New Haven, CT, 1953), 107). I doubt that even an Inns of Court audience could have mustered more than a smirk of recognition for the ‘fine and recovery’ joke. My reason for bothering with it here is to say that – however dead the overt joking – the passage is livelier than it would otherwise be for the presence of available, entirely unexploited play on the relevant sense of ‘recover’ by which it means ‘cover again’ (a wig recovers a bald scalp), and by the equally inviting, equally dormant potential inherent in the conjunction of ‘to pay’ and ‘periwig’ (OED’s first citation for the English word ‘toupee’ is from 1731, but the French word toupet, ‘a tuft of hair’, goes way back). In this next passage poor spurned Helena concludes the first scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by resolving to tell Demetrius about Lysander’s and Hermia’s intention to run away. If I have thanks, it is a dear expense. But herein mean I to enrich my pain, To have his sight thither and back again. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1.1.249–51)

The last syllable’s pronunciation, distorted for rhyme (other Shakespearian rhymes suggest that the more usual pronunciation was already ‘agen’), occurs in context of what the speaker will gain. This is Macbeth 1.2.59–62: ‘Sweno, the Norways’ king, craves composition; / Nor would we deign him burial of his men / Till . . .’ ‘Deign’ is and – Sixteenth – and seventeenth-century spellings and rhymes suggest – was akin to ‘Norways’ king’ in the preceding line: its sound is the sound that labels a native of another area of Scandinavia: Denmark.6 Just before the Battle of Agincourt, King Henry prays: O God of battles, steel my soldiers’ hearts. Possess them not with fear. Take from them now The sense of reck’ning, ere th’oppos`ed numbers Pluck their hearts from them. Not today, O Lord, O not today, think not upon the fault My father made in compassing the crown. I Richard’s body have interr`ed new, And on it have bestowed more contrite tears, Than from it issued forc`ed drops of blood. Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay Who twice a day their withered hands hold up Toward heaven to pardon blood . . . (4.1.286–97)

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Context makes it impossible for audiences to hear reference to theft in the sound of ‘steal’ in ‘steel my soldiers’ hearts’. In asking God to ‘take from’ his soldiers, however, the next line asks him to do something ideationally akin to stealing. And, two lines further on, a non-imperative, non-parallel construction presents a precise echo of the contextually impossible sense that ‘steel my soldiers’ hearts’ does not convey at the beginning of the speech: ‘Pluck their hearts from them.’ Note, moreover, that that unspectacular verbal event occurs in company with even less spectacular give and take between the negated ‘give’ of ‘Possess them not’ and the effectively positive ‘take’ of ‘Take from them now / The sense of reck’ning’. When the prayer continues, its topic shifts and also does not: ‘Not today, O Lord, / O not today, think not upon the fault / My father made in compassing the crown’ (289–91). The new topic, Lancastrian guilt, maintains and makes overt the shadow topic of the first lines, theft: Henry Bolingbroke’s fault was stealing the crown. The larcenous strain in the speech runs out at that point, but careless, submerged play on giving and taking continues momentarily in ‘bestowed more contrite tears, / Than from it’ (293–4). But the potential ‘give and take’ construction that begins in ‘bestowed’ and continues in ‘from’ turns out otherwise. Instead of referring to the expense of tears exacted upon Shakespeare’s luxuriously lachrymose Richard II by Bolingbroke’s rebellion, the lines turn to his murder and his bleeding corpse: ‘more contrite tears, / Than from it issued forc`ed drops of blood’ (293–4). Consider ‘than from it issued for-’: ‘issued for-’ – which is momentarily on its way to the probable idiom ‘issued forth’ – arrives instead at another, equally appropriate locution: ‘issued forc`ed drops of blood’. The next line begins ‘Five hundred poor’; its first syllable, ‘five’, presents the ear with a sound casually akin to the sound of the number ‘four’ in the sound of ‘for’, the sound that yearned for completion as ‘forth’ but that in fact came to ideational rest in ‘forc`ed’. This next passage is also from Henry V. In a speech generally infused with variations on the idea of fathers and the idea of offspring, the French king warns his nobles against overconfidence and recalls reasons to fear the English: Witness our too-much-memorable shame When Cr´ecy battle fatally was struck, And all our princes captived by the hand Of that black name, Edward, Black Prince of Wales; Whiles that his mountant sire, on mountain standing,

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Up in the air, crowned with the golden sun, Saw his heroical seed and smiled to see him, Mangle the work of nature, and deface The patterns that by God and by French fathers Had twenty years been made. (2.4.53–62)

The words ‘air’ and ‘sun’ in ‘Up in the air, crowned with the golden sun’ (line 58) present a pair of sounds – ‘son’ and ‘heir’ – that relate to one another in syntaxes entirely foreign to the one in which they occur here but that relate to the substantive context, one in which Edward III watches the exploits of his son and heir. The next line – the line that reports that Edward III ‘saw his heroical seed, and smiled to see him’ – substitutes for the relevant sound in the preceding line, uses ‘his . . . seed’ to say ‘his son’. The word ‘seed’ is itself in a shadowy extra relationship with two forms of the verb ‘to see’: ‘see’ in ‘smiled to see him’ is in obvious phonic relationship to ‘seed’, and, if the verb ‘to see’ were a so-called weak verb rather than a strong one, its past tense would presumably be what it is in some vulgar dialects, not ‘saw’ but ‘seed’. This is the rhetorical flourish with which Othello concludes protestation that he will do his duty to Venice, even if his wife goes with him to the wars: Let housewives make a skillet of my helm, And all indign and base adversities Make head against my estimation. (Othello 1.3.272–4)

The two ‘make’ constructions in the passage are superficially alike and emphasized as such by the recurrence of ‘my’ in the second clause. The ‘make’ constructions are just as obviously different. In the first, ‘make’ says ‘fashion’, ‘manufacture’. The second ‘make’ means ‘gather’ and functions in the idiom ‘make head’, meaning ‘gather an army’. The word ‘head’ in ‘make head’ is an ideational echo of ‘helm’ in the first of the three lines – and – because its metaphoric root in the body part housed in a helmet was already long atrophied when Shakespeare’s first audiences heard it – is not. On the other hand, since helmets and armies are so closely related conceptually, ‘make head’ does indeed efficiently relate to ‘helm’ – albeit in a dimension distant from the one in which ‘head’ is an anatomical label. In the next passage Polixenes and the Old Shepherd are watching ‘a dance of Shepherds and Shepherdesses’.

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p oli xe ne s Pray, good shepherd, what fair swain is this Which dances with your daughter? sh e ph e rd They call him Doricles, and boasts himself To have a worthy feeding; but I have it Upon his own report, and I believe it. He looks like sooth. He says he loves my daughter. I think so, too; for never gazed the moon Upon the water as he’ll stand and read, As ’twere, my daughter’s eyes; and to be plain, I think there is not half a kiss to choose Who loves another best. p oli xe n e s She dances featly. sh e ph e rd So she does anything, though I report it That should be silent. If young Doricles Do light upon her, she shall bring him that Which he not dreams of. (4.4.167–81)

Because the moon is a light – and only because the moon is a light – ‘light upon’ in line 180 (where ‘light upon her’ means ‘get her for wife’) does and does not echo ‘moon upon’ in 173–4. ‘Light upon’ also relates to ‘featly’ in ‘She dances featly’. ‘Feet’ are at play in that assertion anyway (because dancing is done with feet; for the actual pun, see The Tempest 1.2.381, ‘Foot it featly here and there’). And, in context of a discussion of dancing, there is pressure upon ‘light upon her’ from a sense ‘light upon’ could have in a sentence about weight, a sentence that said Perdita was ‘light of foot’, ‘light on her feet’. Note, moreover, that, since he is dancing, Florizel might well light upon Perdita’s foot. Finally, three sentences from Romeo and Juliet : If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentler sin is this: My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss. (1.5.92–5)

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? (2.1.44)

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? (2.1.75)

The first of the three sentences is here because of the incidental pertinence of ‘red’, the first syllable of ‘ready’, to blushing lips: ‘My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand’. The next two are from what traditionally has been

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called the balcony scene and are among the most famous lines in English. I strongly suspect that the ideational companionship of glass windows and breakage is one of the sources of the popularity of ‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?’ The quiet crash between ‘soft’ and ‘breaks’ may contribute something too. As for ‘O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’ – many twentieth-century English speakers who in other contexts have no trouble recognizing ‘wherefore’ as a synonym for ‘why’, take it to mean ‘where’ in Juliet’s line – take ‘wherefore art thou Romeo?’ to be an inquiry as to Romeo’s whereabouts – and in so mistaking bring joy to English teachers who get to correct their obvious error. Not only do we all know what ‘wherefore’ means, but Juliet’s next lines make it evident that her concern is with Romeo’s name and not his location. What follows the ‘where’ of ‘wherefore’ does indeed define the function of the word. But what the word ‘wherefore’ itself follows are forty-two lines occasioned by Mercutio’s and Benvolio’s efforts to find Romeo, to find out where Romeo is. ‘Wherefore art thou Romeo’, I suggest, is an instance of just the sort of submerged, demonstrably irrelevant, dismissable content in Shakespearian locutions that I am concerned with here; it is anomalous only in having risen to the surface of popular imagination. First published in Shakespeare Survey 50 (1997) n otes 1 Compare the subscription of the Maria–Olivia letter in Twelfth Night: ‘She that would alter services with thee’ (2.5.153). The otherwise unheard-of use there of ‘alter’ to mean ‘exchange’ is made meaningful by accidents of its location. It is informed by a context relevant to ‘an altar’ – an altar in a church, sustained by the relevance of both the liturgical and sexual senses of ‘service’, and smoothed over by an implied logic that says that – since ‘to exchange’ and ‘to change’ are synonyms, and since ‘to alter’ and ‘to change’ are synonyms – ‘to exchange’ and ‘to alter’ must also be synonyms. For similarly casual nonce logic in the same play, consider Feste’s use of the word ‘welkin’ – ‘sky’ – to mean ‘proper sphere of action’: ‘Who you are and what you would are out of my welkin – I might say “element”, but the word is over-worn’ (3.1.56–8); ‘element’ can mean ‘air’ and can therefore replace ‘welkin’, but that does not make ‘welkin’ a universally available substitute for all senses of ‘element’. The phenomenon occurs earlier when Toby commends Feste’s singing voice by calling it ‘a contagious breath’ (2.3.53). ‘Contagious’, which is not known elsewhere as a synonym for ‘attractive’, is a synonym for ‘catching’, and ‘catching’ was presumably already capable of saying ‘attractive’ (OED’s first example of the adjective in that sense is from 1654, but ‘to catch’ meaning ‘to charm’, ‘to attract’, ‘to captivate’ goes back at least to

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Chaucer). In a typically Shakespearian skitter, Toby proceeds in his next speech to propose that he and his companions sing a catch. 2 In following the quarto and giving ‘bleak for the lamb’ in line 73, I deviate from the Oxford text, which follows the Folio and gives ‘bleat’. 3 A variant configuration takes shape early in the play at the first interview between Antonio and Shylock (1.3). There, however, the topic of usury, the topic of what is customary (usual), and the various words that sound like the pronoun ‘you’ are joined by the idea of sexual ‘use’: a n to n i o Shylock, albeit I neither lend nor borrow By taking nor by giving of excess, Yet to supply the ripe wants of my friend I’ll break a custom . . . (59–62) sh ylo c k Well then, your bond; and let me see – but hear you. Methoughts you said you neither lend nor borrow upon advantage. a n to n io I do never use it. sh ylo c k When Jacob . . . (67–70) a n to n i o And what of him? did he take interest? sh ylo c k No, not take interest, not as you would say, Directly int’rest. Mark what Jacob did . . . (74–7) s h ylo c k . . . the ewes, being rank, In end of autumn turn`ed to the rams . . . (79–80) a n to n io . . . Was this inserted to make interest good, Or is your gold and silver ewes and rams? s h ylo c k I cannot tell. I make it breed as fast. (93–5)

(Note, by the way, the metallurgic potential the conjunction ‘or’ gets in line 94 from the company of ‘gold and silver’.) 4 The ‘saucy lictors’ sentence is additionally crowded with energy because of allbut-inconsequential potential demonstrated in the Folio’s ‘Ballads vs out a Tune’ by the emended version I quote here: ‘Ballad’s out a’ tune’. The emendation is G. B. Evans’s and appears in his Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1974). ‘Ballad’s out a’ tune’ approximates, I think, what would have been heard from the stage. Riverside’s ‘Ballad’s’ (‘ballad us’) repairs both syntax and metre. And ‘a” acknowledges the conflation of senses the spoken sound makes and thus lets the phrase say both ‘sing a tune’ (sing what the rhymers will ballad out for them) and ‘sing out “uh” tune’ (‘sing about us out of tune’: ‘slander us in song’ and/or ‘sing out of tune – that is sing unskilfully, unmusically – about us’). 5 Spoken in the theatre and thus relatively free of punctuational persuaders, the ‘kneel’/‘need’ exchange gets further density of texture from the simultaneous parallelism and non-parallelism of ‘gentle Portia’ (indicating the person addressed), and ‘gentle Brutus’ (that is, ‘your ordinarily gentle self’) – or, alternatively, what

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punctuation would limit as ‘gentle, Brutus’ (where ‘gentle’ is again a predicate adjective, and ‘Brutus’ indicates the person addressed; ‘Brutus’ is thus parallel with ‘gentle Portia’ and, because its attendant ‘gentle’ is doing other work, is not). Moreover, there is, of course, fleeting but inevitable oxymoronic energy in the mere conjunction of the word ‘gentle’ and the first syllable of ‘Brutus’. 6 Note, for what it’s worth, that Shakespeare’s ear may have been tempted towards the verb ‘to deign’ by his source: Holinshed repeatedly refers to the army led by ‘Sueno king of Norway’ as ‘the Danes’; in the time of Hector Boece (Holinshed’s source for the history behind Macbeth), of Holinshed himself, and of Shakespeare, Norway was little more than a province of Denmark.

chap t e r 3

The foundations of Elizabethan language Muriel St Clare Byrne

This goodly speech

i ‘We speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake’ is a figure of speech rather than a statement of fact, and it has an ironic flavour in these days of the retranslation of the Authorized Version. It can imply that kinship which Shakespeare’s Queen phrased memorably, in the common idiom of her day, when she declared herself to be ‘mere English’; but no one is likely to be ‘so bold or daring hardy’ as to claim parity of esteem for the impoverished and diminishing vocabulary of our familiar speech, if they agree with H. C. Wyld that ‘“the tongue that Shakespeare spake” was the tongue which he wrote’.1 We know what it sounded like on the stage of the Globe, and that in spite of differences in pronunciation Shakespeare’s English, unlike Chaucer’s, is ‘modern’. Nevertheless, its vocabulary and rhythms apparently seemed remote enough to that sensitive artist, the late Rose Macaulay, to make her say she could never write a novel set in a period earlier than the seventeenth century, ‘because the language they talked was just too different from ours to make easy dialogue which wouldn’t sound affected’. She was discussing More’s Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation and, passing over Elizabeth’s reign and omitting Shakespeare from her argument, referred specifically to the early 1500s when she said, ‘there is much less available of colloquial talk and one doesn’t quite hear them talking’: By the seventeenth century this isn’t so. And there is such a mass of letters, diaries, memoirs, plays, essays, of this period that one can soak oneself in the language and easily reproduce it.2

Curious as it may seem, it is this omission from the argument of the richest linguistic artist of all sixteenth-century writers which arouses our instinctive protest and helps to make us aware of a residuum of simple truth in that 44

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now almost banal poetic tag. We know that Shakespeare was an extender of the power and range of our language; a creator, a coiner, a borrower, a critic of words and of men’s treatment of them; an inventor of harmonies, a connoisseur of sound and sense in words, an artist who could stretch their capacities to unimagined limits, combine five of them to sparkle like a jewel ‘on the stretch’d forefinger of time’ for ever, or take a very jelly-fish of a word and set it to shine star-like in the heavens. And yet, lord of language as he is, we regard his words as familiar and ‘household’ words, and this not because we quote him, consciously and unconsciously, in ordinary talk, more freely than any other writer, nor yet because our drafts upon the common fund of English gnomic wisdom are paid in his coin more often than we know – how many people who affirm that ‘one touch of nature makes the whole world kin’ or that ‘the end crowns all’ realize they are quoting Troilus and Cressida? – but because we sense an affinity, if doubtful how to express it. We recognize rhythms and phrasing which are still natural to our ordinary speech. Scholarship warns us not to assume, when the first recorded use of such a phrase as ‘what the dickens’ is found in Shakespeare, that it is therefore his invention. All dramatists are pickers-up of unconsidered fresh and lively trifles from the racy talk of the man-in-the-street. Ear and instinct tell us that ‘I know a trick worth two of that’, ‘a poor, lone woman’, ‘I’ll be hanged’, ‘I have not slept one wink’ are even more likely to be borrowings from the common stock; and we are equally convinced that in countless original lines which characterize an individual in perhaps ten words, we ‘hear’ the everyday speech of his time, as in the First Citizen’s rebuke to Coriolanus – ‘the price of the consulship is to ask it kindly’. The scholars are with us. Like Wyld, J. W. H. Atkins, discussing English as a literary medium, affirms that in the Elizabethan period ‘men wrote very much as they spoke; the literary language has probably never stood nearer to the colloquial’.3 F. P. Wilson attributes to Shakespeare ‘an instinct for what was permanent in the colloquial language of his day, stronger than that of any contemporary dramatist’, and believes that the conditions of the art of drama did not permit him to stray far from popular idiom, but even if they had his mind was of a cast that would still have found the material upon which it worked mainly in the diction of common life.4

Helge K¨okeritz points out, when discussing his pronunciation, that his radical reduction of unstressed syllables and his ‘nonchalant treatment of consonants’ makes his verse, as spoken, ‘more colloquial’ than we might think proper today.5 And both G. D. Willcock and Madeleine Doran6

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insist that his use of rhetorical art in the language of the plays is of a kind common to all who reached an average educational level. As the former says, ‘the “alms-basket of words” was freely scattered among the humble’. These are merely a token indication of the clouds of witness that have gathered over the subject during the first half of this century. The whole weight of competent opinion comes down in Falstaffian bulk on the side of instinct. Why, then, should Rose Macaulay have left him out of her reckoning and have felt that ‘one doesn’t quite hear them talking’ until the seventeenth century? I do not know why she omitted Shakespeare, but I can guess why she could not quite hear the sixteenth century talking. Instinct makes us all think we know when we are listening in Shakespeare to the talk of ordinary men; but I never feel confident that in contemporary Elizabethan nondramatic prose I am hearing the natural accents of colloquial speech so that I can ‘soak’ in it. The rhythms are wrong. Naturally there are exceptions: no one could miss the ring of truth in Deloney’s conversational and gossipy passages, for example.7 But the mass of prose writing is either too formal, over-elaborate and self-consciously ‘literary’, or else too forced in its verbal liveliness to be credible as speech, though enjoyable for its ingenuity and exuberance, like W. S. Gilbert’s patter songs. The explanatory simplicity of much narrative writing has that tone of patient nursery heartiness still sometimes employed in speaking to and writing for children, and the good, direct narrative writing which offsets extravagances and lumbering, heavyfooted rhythms still does not equate with talk. ‘Drab and transitional prose’ is C. S. Lewis’s apt title for his chapter on the early work, ‘adorned’ and ‘plain’; and as he so rightly insists, with reference to the flatter utilitarian style, ‘not all plain prose is good’. The effect of a ‘plain Drab’ specimen is ‘as of a man speaking with his mouth full of gravel’, referring, for comparison, the written to the spoken language – the known to the unknown; and of Edward Hall, the historian, he says, ‘Hall is deliberately trying to write better than he talked.’8 By implication Lewis has, like Rose Macaulay, an idea of the spoken language of the time; but no one has yet assembled any real body of evidence to enable us to proceed from this negative inference that speech is not like the written ‘literary’ language to a positive concept of natural writing by which to check our instinctive belief that in Shakespeare we really do hear the sixteenth century ‘talking’. That we can, as Dr Johnson suggests, take ‘the diction of common life’ from Shakespeare is a proposition which needs to be proved, instead of being treated as a basic assumption, and I think Rose Macaulay felt that the documents in the case were missing. She had not found in

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the sixteenth century the kind of material that had enabled her to get on terms of intimacy with the seventeenth – the written material that lies outside the domain of ‘literature’, such as the ‘letters, diaries, memoirs’ she mentions. ii My own obstinate questioning of Elizabethan prose found no answer; but going back to the first half of the century I realized that not the least of its attractions was that it yielded more and better information than the later years, to help towards the establishment of a general idea of Tudor speech. For the foundations of the current spoken language of the century we must catch the vernacular before it becomes critically and aesthetically self-conscious, when, on the evidence of those who loved it, from Wilson and Elyot to Ascham and Mulcaster, it was, as Florio says, ‘so written as it is spoken and such upon the paper as it is in the mouth’. Most people write colloquially and with no thought of effect, so runs their general conclusion; but it is a fine language and full of possibilities, so men must cultivate greater elegance and eloquence and acquire a greatly expanded vocabulary or more ‘copie’. If, therefore, we go back to those early decades which are almost barren of literary achievement, back to the pre-Prayer Book period, when writing is primarily a functional activity, an extension and recording of speech instead of an endeavour of art, we can see what kinds of prose rhythms and what range of vocabulary and mastery of composition, sentence structure and the devices of style characterized the writing of ordinary people of all classes before professional writers began to write better than they talked. We shall catch the vernacular before it was taken up, patronized, enthused over, criticized, lectured on and cultivated for its own good – before scholarship and national feeling combined to encourage its development and make it truly conscious of its responsibility and high destiny as a proper medium for literature. The material is available, and in more than sufficient bulk. What is needed is that most personal form of expression, the letter – especially the familiar letter – as written by ordinary men and women, of all ages, in the two generations immediately preceding Shakespeare’s. Here, and in such special documents as signed depositions containing reported speech, we shall find the manuscript material that the Oxford Dictionary and literary studies in general have perforce left practically unexplored. If we tried, theoretically, to pinpoint the most propitious moment for studying the language in this pre-literary, pre-1549-Prayer Book period we should

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inevitably choose the 1530s, historically the reign’s most significant decade. It is, therefore, a crowning piece of good fortune that the finest collection of personal letters in the whole Tudor century happens to belong to this central decade. This collection, known as the Lisle Letters, provides some 3000 items, covers the years 1533–40 and represents the major portion of the personal and official correspondence which accumulated in the household of Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle, the illegitimate son of King Edward IV, during his term of office as Lord Deputy of Calais.9 It includes some 500 letters all written by one man, John Husee, gentleman, of London, Lisle’s confidential man of business. Holograph and dictated letters are nicely balanced: there are rough drafts, with copies, showing spoken first thoughts adjusted to a final, more judiciously phrased written style: there are hastily scribbled notes, carefully calculated compositions, official as well as personal letters written by the same individuals, and letters to and from Lisle’s second wife, born Honor Grenville, their family, members of their household and all their friends, acquaintances and dependants. Practically everyone of importance in society and representatives of all classes are included. But primarily this is the right material for an investigation of ‘this goodly speech’ because, in the mass, these are the normal letters in which men and women pursue the businesses and pleasures, and face the troubles, the problems, the disasters, the frustrations and hopes deferred of everyday life, celebrate their small personal triumphs, record their fears, beg for help, advise, rebuke, persuade, and even occasionally speak the language of intimacy and affection. They handle the stuff from which dramatic art is made, and it is this that gives them the advantage, as an index to speech habits, over the great Elizabethan collections of letters, which are mainly concerned with politics, diplomatic negotiations and the business of governing the kingdom – subject-matter which does not lend itself in the same way to the rhythms and vocabulary of common speech. These later collections do not include such a wide variety of correspondents of all classes and occupations: too often the writers are infected by the general desire to write more stylishly and fashionably than they speak; and, in learning ‘to write’, forget or reject the simpler, tunable, speakable rhythms of the earlier generation. In the Lisle Letters the self-conscious stylists are few, the ‘naturals’ many. The former are impressive, the latter more relevant in this particular context, partly for their evidence of ease and fluency, but above all because such a high proportion yield passage after passage as eminently speakable as any dramatic dialogue written seventy to a hundred years later. This is only what we should expect, in the given circumstances. Though dramatic

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dialogue in prose was nonexistent until Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), what his grounding in rhetoric taught the schoolboy was to express himself in speech. Expression was speech. Instruction in rhetoric meant the teaching of style for oratory, ‘well-saying’. As Hardin Craig says, ‘the faculty of speech was dignified in Renaissance thinking as the chief accomplishment which God had chosen to bestow upon man, to distinguish him from the brute beast’.10 The writing of themes in English was no part of the educational method which reared these letter-writers, who cover an age-span of eighty to eighteen, from the middle of the fifteenth century to the grandfathers and fathers of Shakespeare’s generation; but they had learned to love and enjoy words and they applied their education in rhetoric and Latin to the practical purpose of expressing themselves effectively in the vernacular, so that to write a letter, having mastered the protocol of address and subscription, was simply to write down what one wanted to say. In the majority of cases, mercifully for us, they might never have heard of the ars dictaminis. They look in their hearts, listen with their ears, and write. Whether we call it the art or the business of letter-writing, it seems to come easily enough to the average correspondent in this collection. To some it was obviously a pleasure and opportunity to ‘open’ their minds freely to their betters and say their say. As John Hutton, quoted below, remarks, ‘He that talketh alone may say what he will’. A few are hampered by lack of skill and their own bad handwriting, like James Hawkesworth, who excuses himself because ‘I am so ill a writer causes me oft times that [I] do not write.’ But he is the exception, who may be found in any class – the tongue-tied writer of every century for whom Sir Henry Sidney ‘speaks’ when he asks Queen Elizabeth’s pardon for so seldom reporting on Irish affairs, ‘so bad a delivery of my mind I have by pen, and so illegible it is when I do it myself’. And even here, surely, in each case, is the manner of the man’s speech. Except when they compose official letters, stuffed with official jargon and bowings and scrapings of compliment, they write vigorously and simply. Some achieve genuine distinction. Only very rarely is one conscious of the striving to write better than they speak, and some of them make the connection between speech and writing explicit. John Hutton, Governor of the Merchant Adventurers at Antwerp, has ‘none other matter unto your ladyship but to devise what I may write to cause your ladyship to be merry’, so takes up his pen ‘thinking myself that I should be present with you talking’ (2 March 1537). It is in this same spirit that, nearly a hundred years later, Lady Katharine Paston concludes a letter to her son William at Cambridge: ‘I am so straited of time as I cannot tarry longer to talk with

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thee now.’11 The tradition of the familiar letter was and is the tradition of familiar talk. The editing of the Lisle Letters over a period of many years has naturally involved much wider exploration of manuscript material, and examples quoted are not all taken from them. But I believe that within the compass of this collection we can study every degree of sophistication – and the lack of it – belonging to this talking-writing – from Hutton, the conscious conversationalist who writes pleasantly about nothing at all, to the real gossips on paper, not confined to any one social class, who flow on, with no attempt at order or composition, writing as they think and speak, without premeditation, with much repetition, many digressions and abrupt transitions, a great deal of vehemence, a complete lack of punctuation and a speed and urgency betokening strong feeling. They look forward, by way of Launce and Lancelot Gobbo, to such agreeable rattles as Miss Bates and Flora Finching, and link up over the centuries with our own spontaneous talkers who lack formal educational advantages and inhibitions and pour out their hearts and grievances on paper as they do in conversation, invoking us by name in every other sentence. To quote them briefly is to ruin their effects, but they offer good evidence, such as we still meet at first hand, of the direct connection in the unsophisticated, un-literary mind between speech and letter-writing. The temptation, of course, as with Shakespeare, is to put in one’s thumb and pull out a plum and say, Look how colloquial this is! Instinct again tells us we hear the very accent of speech when Husee writes, ‘The King enquired how the man was slain, and I answered that one of them, or both, was drunk’, or when Lisle dictates, ‘Now, good Master Page, stick to me in this matter’ – ‘stick to’, in this sense, being common in the 1530s and still one of our colloquialisms, but not Shakespeare’s. We shake hands across four centuries with Sir Brian Tuke when he describes his daughters’ governess as a ‘treasure’,12 or with John Husee when he refers to the grocer who refuses any more credit as ‘a limb of the devil’. We have lost Husee’s favourite ‘off or on’ for ‘one way or the other’, but ‘too good to be true’ and ‘now or never’ are still current, and we still say ‘wouldn’t hurt’ or the variant ‘would do no harm’, like Husee urging his master that ‘a gentle letter would not hurt’. Not one of these phrases occurs in the plays. iii But the haphazard sampling of colloquialisms does not ‘prove’ that this is speech ‘so written as it is spoken’, and a more methodical approach ‘would

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not hurt’. The touchstone for speech is speakability. Does the ear say Yes as we read? Do we – would Rose Macaulay – ‘hear them talking’? And can we establish a fundamental relationship between these familiar letters and Shakespeare’s dramatic writing, verse and prose? We can certainly establish the necessary links of vocabulary and phrasing, but we also discover a lavish use of synonyms, amplification by similitudes and proverbs, and other characteristics which we tend to regard as symptoms of the self-conscious ‘literary’ style of elaborate Elizabethan writing. The real case should rest primarily, I believe, upon the evidence supplied by rhythm and by direct speech and oratio obliqua. The ordinary reader, if he ‘soaks’ himself in these letters, will be struck by the familiarity and the speakable quality of their prose rhythms. The natural ‘tunes’ or phrase-lengths of our speech, which by their recurrence give balance as well as variety and make patterns of sound within the complex sentence, are the usual five-, four- and three-beat units or timeperiods which we recognize in characteristic combinations in Shakespeare’s prose passages or in Sir Thomas Browne’s writing, to take two extremes. The predominance of the five-beat phrase, or the blank verse line, in its infinite variety of syllabic cadence, reflects a natural tendency in our speech. It is such a normal speech- and breath-length that we have to take thought to avoid it, as all writers and speakers know, even in conversational and colloquial remarks. We shall find this unit of five time-periods used in these letters with any number of syllables from nine to fifteen, as freely as in blank verse. The following examples were not chosen, but are simply odd phrases that happen to remain in memory. Shakespearian examples of syllabic equivalence are given for rhythmic comparison only. Mistress Anne is sworn the Queen’s woman (Stay! The King hath thrown his warder down) I live by hope and comfortable words (Observe degree, priority and place) Th´ere to ab´ıde the com´ıng of your l´ordship (A´ngels and m´ınisters of gr´ace def´end us) Money was never so scant since this King reigned (Injurious time, now with a robber’s haste) Divers religious men are in the Tower (Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye) Here is nothing but everyone for himself (The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre)

(9) (10) (11) 4-beat (11) 5-beat (10/11)

(11/12)

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muriel st cl are byrne Se´eing I have beg´un I would f´ain make an e´nd (The e´nterprise is s´ick. H´ow could comm´unities) Be content, Husee: thou shalt speedily be rid (As you have ever been my father’s honour’d friend) They that promised me horses to ride deceived me Privy dissimuled friends and familiar enemies (Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain) Before I hear of it again I cannot be merry The augment´ation and am´endment of my p´oor l´ıving (What h´oney is exp´ected? Degr´ee being v´ızarded)




4-beat


(12) 5-beat

(13)
5-beat (14) 4-beat

Fifteen and sixteen are the longest syllabic runs: ‘But y´et I ass´ure you I would be gl´ad to d´o him ple´asure’; ‘Your l´adyship may be gl´ad that e´ver ye b´are Mr B´asset’. I cannot recall Shakespeare parallels, nor yet an eight-syllable run from the Letters for John of Gaunt’s ‘Th´ınk n´ot the K´ıng did b´anish th´ee’. (To say that this ‘is a foot short’ may be metrical rule-of-thumb but is speech nonsense. The five stresses, with strong pauses, are clearly indicated by the first half of the next line, ‘But th´ou the K´ıng’.) There is, however, a sevensyllable line, ‘H´ere c´ometh my L´ord L´ısle’s m´an’; unless, as is sometimes said, we ought to pronounce the name as Lisley or Lesley, in which case we have our eight-syllable equivalent. ‘His Grace spake few words that day / to those that came’ is another seven-syllable example, with a concluding two-stress phrase to balance the Shakespearian parallel completely. There is no monotonous sequence of this five-beat phrasing: four- and three-beat units are equally characteristic: ‘The saying is, the abbeys shall down’; ‘Now is the time to speak or never’; ‘When we are gone, all is gone’; ‘I spake with his Grace an hour together’; ‘It is a solemn gentleman!’ (‘It is an ancient mariner’); ‘Grant me a lodging at Umberleigh’; ‘My lord, the debt is great’; ‘many and importunate suitors’; ‘sore diseased with the cough’; ‘He shall have my heart while I live’. All are eminently speakable: they have pace, and come ‘trippingly off the tongue’. Their simplicity refers this kind of basic phrase-rhythm to speech, just as surely as elaborate structure and the skilful handling of long periodic sentences, in the King’s diplomatic correspondence, place certain letters in the class of written compositions.13 Analysing continuous passages that at once strike the ear as good, we find that the pleasant, speakable rhythm of the whole derives from varying combinations of these simple units which wing and mark sense with sound, and by their recurrence balance thought against thought, phrase against phrase. These three-four-five patterns frequently have a central supporting core, existing solidly as a single thought-and-speech unit, or a prose stabilizer,

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which has no regular recognizable pattern or tune as a whole and cannot be profitably analysed in terms of sound, balance, accent, recurrence, etc. In longer passages there is sometimes more than one of these larger sense-units and they occur similarly in Shakespearian prose. The following extract, from one of Husee’s letters, though providing no exact parallel in thought or expression, has never been known to fail to draw from hearers surprise at its likeness to Mrs Quickly’s account of Falstaff’s death. Christopher Vyllers is departed . . . I spake with Crowder, his man, who shewed me that your lordship is not overseer, but he bequeathed your lordship v marks in money, and a salt of five marks. And he sayeth that iij hours ere he died he commoned nothing but of your lordship, and after he had made his executors he could never abide the sight of them. If your lordship had been here he thinketh verily that you should have had a great part of his substance, for he had more mind of your lordship than of all the world at the hour of his death. (21 August 1537)

There is one verbal link: ‘abide’ reminds us that ‘a’ could never abide carnation: ’twas a colour he never liked’; but a certain tonal and rhythmic similarity probably has more to do with the recognition that they are of the same quality, and the ‘patterns’ of both, as the reader can hear for himself, are the result of the three-four-five-beat combinations of sound units with one ‘sense-unit’ in each. Both have the absolute ring of truth to common speech. A shared idiom of valediction is established. They authenticate each other. These three-four-five tunes compose the most usual recurrence patterns, sometimes almost as obviously as in verse, at other times muted, less noticeable, but to be found when looked-for within the pleasantly harmonious general impression. In their modest way these people know how to write. Already the unit – whether sentence or paragraph – that is determined by sense, the statement made as straightforwardly and clearly as possible, which yet runs smoothly to its individual music, is just as much in evidence as these native recurrent rhythms. Take for example the following announcement of the death of one of her stepdaughters, sent to Lady Lisle in 1536 by her ‘old servant’ John Davy, in which a simple Devon gentleman illustrates the rhythmic ease and simplicity of the ordinary letter. It may please your good ladyship to perceive that Mistress Thomasine Basset is deceased, whose soul I pray Jesu take to mercy; and she deceased the Friday before Palm Sunday, full well and virtuously, with all the sacraments of the Church. She died at Bery’s house, and lieth at Dowland. She was sick at Marrais and desired to go to Bery’s, and this was about the Purification of our Lady that she came there. (11 April 1536)

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One is not really conscious of any formal stress-pattern till the three-beat phrase at the end of his first sentence. Then we get two sentences with three five-beat units in a sequence, ending with a ‘dying fall’ reminiscent of ‘to weep there’. His postscript begins with five and two: ‘I do int´end to s´ee Mistress Th´omasine’s m´onth’s m´ınd / h´onestly to be k´ept.’ ‘M´adam ye kn´ow very w´ell sh´e is your fr´ıend [or, ‘she is yo´ur fri´end’] and n´o f´ool’, is another good example of this same characteristic movement. On the other hand, Dan Nicholas Clement, a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury, will combine the melodic and the intellectual so that no accustomed pattern asserts itself. The music is his own: I am very sorry at heart that I have no good thing able to present unto you at this time; but nevertheless I have sent unto you by this child a beast, the creature of God, sometime wild, but now tame, to comfort your heart at such time as you be weary of praying. (30 April 1536)

Lisle’s own writing illustrates both tendencies. He has three styles – the familiar, the business and the high official. In the last everything is laid on thick – long involved sentences, inkhorns, nouns, verbs and adjectives in triplicate, and every possible form of amplification. One hopes and believes it had no resemblance whatever to speech. In ordinary business letters he is fluent and direct and the phrasing runs easily, as when he describes a ‘wanted’ person as ‘a man of honest conversation and of few words, being of a good age and a draper of wool, dwelling in Mechlin’, with the smooth five-five-two rhythm. In the personal letter he is brisk, spontaneous and more colloquial, with a rather impetuously run-on, simple-continuous movement; but in all three styles we find the same admixture of the free and the predictable balancing rhythms. There seems little, if any, difference between the dictated letters and those he writes himself. Making up a quarrel with his old friend, Sir William Kingston, he speaks his thoughts to a secretary: Right worshipful, In my most hearty wise I recommend me unto you, and am right sorry that any inconvenience should cause writing to be spared of so long time between us that have been of so long familiar acquaintance; ensuring you no cause on my behalf, whatsoever have been informed you: for if it had, I should neither have eaten nor yet slept quietly until I had written unto you. Nevertheless, it is forgotten on my behalf, praying you it may so be on yours: And that we may hear the one from the other after our old accustomed wont. And ye shall have me after the old fashion. (August 1534)

He ‘speaks’ in his own hand in a note to his cousin, Antony Wayte, in a similar conversational manner:

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Cousin Wayte, I commend me unto you, and have received the letter you sent to my wife,14 and well perceive the contents of everything therein, thanking you of your news concerning priests, which I would a’ been gladder of xxti year gone, that I might a’made one priest cuckold. (23 November 1535)

In the first he seems to be using an entirely ‘free’ continuous prose rhythm: in the second he falls into the accustomed four-five pattern, with a concluding nine-syllable five-beat phrase. ´ What´ever the number of s´yllables ´ıt cont´ains, | the ins´ıstence of the phr´ase that c´arries f´ıve str´esses | – as th´ese d´o when sp´oken – | rem´ains the d´ominant rh´ythmic impr´ession, | with the fo´ur-str´ess cla´use, j´ust us´ed, | as the n´ext most n´oticeable u´ nit, | and thr´ee or tw´o, for a c´oda, | e´qually c´ommon. They were and are natural to the language, and just as it is impossible to miss these same combinations in the sense structure of blank verse paragraphing, so, in a passage like the following, one can hear how easily this five-stress base lent itself to fluent ‘prose’ runs: ‘My Lord Privy Seal called me to him on Thursday | and said that it was time for your lordship now to wax grave | and not to give credit to every light flying tale.’ There is, literally, no end to the examples of this five-stress bias throughout the Letters, and it dominates their commonplaces even as it does ours. ‘Concerning news, here be none worth the writing’; (Remember me to Janet if you’re writing.) It is the way we speak, the way we have always spoken. Recognizing, then, in early sixteenth-century writing the dominance of this normal English speech-and-breath length of five time-periods, with four or five stresses, and finding in it also the same customary syllabic extensions and variations that give such infinite flexibility to our dramatic blank verse line, it seems reasonable to believe that they both reflect the speech habits of the century, and it is hard to see how the English drama could possibly have avoided blank verse as its natural medium. When the enduring rhythmic bias of our speech asserts itself thus vigorously in the familiar writing of the thirties we cannot choose but accept the contemporary verdict that it was indeed ‘such upon the paper as it is in the mouth’. More than half a century lies between the Elizabethan dramatists and these writers, and naturally, among thousands, we find many clumsy, confused, repetitive letters, much awkward syntax and occasional illiteracy. But the ready speaker, with a natural ear for native rhythms, expresses himself in sufficient numbers, without clumsiness and without reliance upon ornament or formal tricks, to show that already, before the ‘Drab Age’ of printed prose, Englishmen could write in the vernacular

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with ease and clarity, often with an individual voice and a touch of distinction, and a mastery of structure and sense-rhythm which controls and varies the basic under-hum without losing it and creates sustained complex sentence and paragraphing effects comparable to those found in dramatic writing. iv Rhythm is, of course, only one aspect of speech, but it is the most fundamental when trying to discover how men talked in past ages. Vocabulary and phrasing are a study in themselves, fascinating and important, and vital to anyone who wants to soak in the language of the period, but even less susceptible than rhythm to brief handling. One can only sample, more or less at random, to register changes or persistence of idiom. Reverberations of turns of phrase met in the Letters still echo in Shakespearian lines: ‘If they come not now it shall come with the next’ (If it be not to come, it will be now); ‘Yet did I repent me after I had delivered them’ (Yet did I repent me of my fury); ‘surest and secretst means’ (secretst man of blood); ‘I shall tomorrow in hand . . .’ (I will tomorrow – And betimes I will –); ‘Unto his speech can I not come’ (Out of this wood do not desire to go). The omission of a verb of motion, very usual in the Letters – ‘they will to Boulogne’, they ‘will over’ (to Calais, understood) – is paralleled in the plays: ‘I’ll to England. To Ireland, I’; ‘I’ll not to Rome’, etc. Among common phrases which we have lost but which continually recur in the Letters and are used by Shakespeare we may note ‘to be bold upon’ or ‘make bold with’, to ‘well perceive by’, to ‘cull (out)’, to ‘open’ a matter or one’s mind to someone, to have ‘much (little, what) ado’, ‘bolt (out)’, i.e. to sift, ‘there is no remedy’ or simply ‘no remedy’. There are also interesting changes in word usage, of which ‘occupy’ is an outstanding example, upon which Shakespeare himself comments (2 Henry IV 2.4.161). It is used throughout the Letters with the meaning of to be busy or occupied in, to work, to do business, to use something, but has dropped out of polite conversation – and the plays – by the end of the century, and has given occasion for a useful note in the Oxford English Dictionary mentioning that it occurs only twice in Shakespeare, equivocally, and means ‘to deal or have to do with sexually’ – hence his comment that ‘the word occupy, which was an excellent good word before it was ill-sorted’, is now ‘odious’. The losses – or are they Shakespeare’s rejections of colloquialisms and words and phrases which occur throughout the letters? – are equally

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interesting. ‘God pardon his soul’ or ‘whose soul God pardon’, which always qualifies the names of the dead, has disappeared – a striking if accountable loss. The only parallels are the Nurse’s ‘God rest all Christian souls!’ and ‘God be with his soul!’ No one describes herself as ‘your bedewoman’, though there are some references to ‘beads’ and Valentine swears he will be Proteus’ ‘bedesman’ and the unhappy Richard II’s ‘very bedesmen learn to bend their bows’ against his state. Shakespeare’s characters neither write nor receive ‘gentle’ or ‘thankful’ letters, nor yet ‘sharp ones’: they do not ‘conceive any displeasure’ with their friends or servants, though they agree in ‘taking’ it (Tempest, As You Like It, Pericles), in ‘finding’ it (Lear) and in ‘running into’ it (All’s Well ); they do not ‘apply’ their learning, their books, their devotions or their business; they are never ‘at the finding’ of their employers; they do not get ‘in a fume’ or make others ‘participant’ or ‘part-taker’, in their news or their good fortune, though they ‘partake’ and are ‘partakers’. They do not ‘remove’, though Birnam Wood does, like Henry VIII in these letters and Queen Elizabeth in the letters of John Chamberlain15 (though Ralph Winwood insists on saying ‘the Queen goes back again to Richmond on Monday’).16 They do not ‘set store by’ things or people, or ‘shew’ their mind, though they ‘open’ it. They do not say ‘I ensure you’ for ‘I assure’ or ‘I promise you’; and there are only two instances of that favourite early Tudor word ‘incontinent’ to signify haste and immediate action. ‘Clean cast away’ (i.e. utterly undone), which appears in every kind of begging letter, has vanished from the language of supplication and despair in Shakespeare. But he uses ‘clean’ in ten instances as an intensive, as we do in such phrases as clean forgotten, and as the letters do in ‘clean contrary to the Act’, etc. He is fastidious in his use of colloquialisms when a word has both a serious and a slangy meaning, but like the letter-writers he accepts both senses of ‘abide’ and relishes the popular one. Master Ford ‘cannot abide the old woman’, Mistress Quickly ‘cannot abide swaggerers’ and Jane Nightwork ‘could not abide Master Shallow’, like Christopher Vyllers who could never abide the sight of his executors after he had made his will. Nothing short of systematic investigation would enable one to say with any certainty how far their Latinisms and foreign borrowings reflect current spoken usage. But if anyone imagines these are characteristic of late Elizabethan writing only, these Letters will quickly undeceive him. From any random selection an impressive list can be compiled, and it seems unlikely, therefore, that such words were not freely used in speech in an age when the schoolboy talked Latin and some of Lisle’s bailiffs still kept the manorial accounts in it. They occur even in letters obviously composed,

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if not written, by women ‘uneducated’ in the formal sense. If Maria can speak of ‘the new map with the augmentation of the Indies’, I see no reason to doubt that when in 1535 Jane Basset wrote to her stepmother for help ‘towards the augmentation and amendment of my poor living’ her writer put down the words she actually said. Inkhorn or bookish and learned terms are another matter. They may have attained some currency in speech for a time, but their use in these letters is of interest to the historian of language mainly because they are not, in this decade, the calculated extravagance of literary experiment but part of the already copious vocabulary used by ordinary writers, who were neither avowed scholars nor pedants but had an adventurous taste in words and a real love for them. Thomas Broke, of the Calais retinue, defending himself to Cromwell against a charge of sedition, produces two fine specimens: I had rather that Almighty God should by his hasty messangier Death send for me, rather than by like messangier this realm should be orbated or denudated of one so prudent and sage a counsellor as your good lordship, by your very proper deeds and industries, have from time to time approved yourself to have been. (4 August 1539)

‘Orbated’ and ‘denudated’, otherwise practically unknown to lexicography, might well be inkhorns of the nineties, of the kind Shakespeare parodies. How much of this bookish borrowing was used in ordinary preElizabethan writing could only be estimated from a general check of manuscript sources; and the process of adoption, trial and rejection tempts us to ask – does their non-appearance in the plays warrant the belief that, although the words occur in letters and literature, they had never taken root in current speech? What is it that condemns all the following, with ‘orbated’ and ‘denudated’, after a brief trial? Their appearance in the Letters argues currency at some time for ‘aggradation’, ‘charitative’, ‘obtemper’, ‘suppeditation’, ‘vilipende’, ‘inspeculation’, ‘scrupulosity’, ‘propice’, ‘occurrents’, ‘reconciliate’, ‘pre-mentioned’, ‘dilations’, but the only one of that odd dozen that Shakespeare took up was ‘occurrents’, for use, once, in Hamlet (5.2.68), though it was common enough in the seventeenth as well as the sixteenth century. ‘Aggradation’ – a word favoured by Lisle and Husee for the subscription of a letter – can hardly have been peculiar to them, though I do not recollect any other specimens. Its only recorded use is in the form ‘agrade’, employed by Florio in 1611 to translate ‘gradire’, to be pleased with (cf. Ital. aggradare). For ‘inspeculation’, which Husee attributes to Honor

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Lisle in 1537 – ‘Your ladyship saith I have good inspeculation’ – only a solitary mid-seventeenth example has been noted. ‘Propice’ and ‘obtemper’ are medieval: all of them have interesting histories; but only ‘vilipende’ survived to the last century. All we can say is that learned borrowings were never merely a literary affectation of Elizabethan style but are a noticeable feature in ordinary letter-writing fifty years earlier. Speech, directly quoted or recapitulated, is an important source of evidence for the spoken language. In certain cases it provides interesting clues to the rhythms and mannerisms of individuals, such as Henry VIII’s use of ‘Well,’ at the beginning of a sentence. Tricks of speech were repeated literally, especially the King’s or Cromwell’s, to both of whom, apparently, we must credit that habit of repetition for emphasis that we notice in Hamlet. In the following we hear Cromwell, as reported by Thomas Broke, winding his way into a pleading before the King’s Council with an adroit bit of softening-up: . . . he said himself ‘thus, Perchance, my lords, you do think that I speak thus for affection that I bear my Lord Lisle, by reason of some great rewards or gifts. But I assure you, on my faith, it is not so; nor I never received of his lordship anything, unless it were a piece or ij of wine, or a dish of fish or wild fowl. But yet I assure you I would be glad to do him pleasure; and moreover I do know so perfectly well this matter, that I must needs speak in it.’

Opposing counsel asked to have the case referred to the trial of the Common Law: With that answered Mr Secretary in this manner, ‘The King’s Grace being his good lord, say you? Yes, marry, I warrant you! He is and will be his good lord. His good lord, quod a! Marry, ye may be sure he is and will be his good lord. Doubt ye not of that.’ And thus he repeated it, iij or iiij times, that the King’s Highness was and would be good lord unto your lordship. (17 October 1534)

In the next two we listen to Henry VIII dealing first with a complaint, then with a request: (a) His Grace said a’was sure, once, twice or thrice, it was not so. I shewed his Grace it was of truth. His Grace asked me, ‘Who?’ I shewed his Grace one Leonard Snowden, your servant. Then his Grace answered incontinent, ‘What? So soon? So soon? Well,’ said his Grace, ‘resort unto us again’. (9 June 1536) (b) His Grace answered me by these words . . . ‘Well’, said his Grace, ‘think you that it is meet that I shall put both the baillyship and the searchership in one man’s hands? No, nor I will not!’ (8 January 1535)

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In the following we hear three brief specimens from Husee’s remarkable anthology of the sayings of Thomas Cromwell, though alas without any of his detailed descriptions of their interviews: He made me answer by these words, ‘If I should not remember my gentle Lord Lisle I would I were buried! Be content, Husee, thou shalt speedily be rid.’

There are innumerable examples of indirect reporting such as ‘My Lord Privy Seal shewed me this day that he remembereth your lordship oftener than he hath fingers or toes’; or, ‘And touching the Friar, Mr Secretary said he would they were all at the devil!’ A pleasant example of self-reporting, direct and indirect, is the Vicar of Bishop’s Waltham’s rebuke to an obstreperous curate: ‘Sir Thomas, this at night, and ye be not well-advised!’ and thereupon willed him to go to bed and speak with me again the next morning. (26 January 1534)

The clear way in which most of these writers can pass without confusion from direct speech to oratio obliqua gives us confidence in the accuracy of both, and the following extracts from a very long letter show how Thomas Wriothesley, a vigorous and fluent writer, so soon to become a Secretary of State, passes to and fro with ease between dialogue and narrative when sending Cromwell an account of his interview with a suspected traitor. He dramatizes the scene vividly, but the particular interest of his account lies in the illustration it gives of the practical use of their rhetorical training made by men in the affairs of public life. His method with the traitor is that of the oration in little – to win his end by eloquence, reasoning, persuasion and every kind of personal appeal. ‘I have used him very gently,’ he begins: I caused him to be brought up to my chamber and had there one or two with me in honest sort to wait upon me. When he came within the door, sitting in my chair, made towards me as though he would have taken me by the hand. ‘No Sir’, quoth I, ‘I shake no hands with such fellows as you be till I hear further’. . .

He then outlines his opening attack, while the man kneels before him, and concludes, ‘therefore I shake no hands with you till I hear of your own mouth how you be disposed and whether you do submit yourself to the King’s Majesty or no’. Phillips having duly ‘submitted’ himself, Wriothesley then continues: ‘Arise,’ quoth I, ‘and hear me Phillips. Forasmuch as I see thee, as far as I can judge, repentant, I shall say unto thee that whatsoever any knaves abroad report, thou shall, I hope, assuredly find the King’s Highness a most merciful Prince. . . But

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one thing I shall say unto thee: beware how thou goest about to colour, cloak or excuse thyself. His Majesty is wise and of great experience. He hath been a King these thirty years and was a man before he was crowned. I tell thee plainly, he hath eyes and ears in the bottom of their bellies and in the very lining of their hearts that be of that sort that thou has been.’

Finally, professing himself satisfied that Phillips is now truly repentant, he brings the scene to a triumphant climax. ‘Well,’ quoth I, ‘now that I see that thou wilt rather abide whatsoever may come than to continue an unkind person to thy Prince and Country, I shall not stick to give thee that hand that within little more than these xxiiij hours would either have taken thee or have thrust my dagger in thee, wheresoever I should have met thee.’ And so to comfort him I was content to take him by the hand. . . . He said after to others that my hand, with my words, pulled a thousand pound weight out of his heart. (7 February 1539)

Unfortunately, Phillips escaped overnight, and the changed style in which Wriothesley then expresses his chagrin is most revealing by contrast. Instead of the sustained, hortatory eloquence, he reports the facts in crisp, short, sharp sentences, building up to his climax: Phillips came as I writ in th’other letters. I used him as I writ. I talked again with him after supper in such wise (the same having supped at mine own table) that I am sure I put him in manner out of all fear . . . I put my trust in them to keep him in their chamber. Leighton promised that he should lie with himself. Joye should lie by, in another bed in the same chamber. Leighton’s man should watch without the door, and I had two others of my men that watched beneath for all the night and morning till they were up. And yet, as soon as my watchers were gone to bed, which was between vj and vij of the clock in the morning, they being all then up, they suffered him to depart. (9 February 1539)

Except for a few phrases, the natural, terse vigorous writing speaks his exasperation as we might speak it today. It has a drive that reminds one not a little of Prince Hal’s exposure of the Gadshill episode, beginning, ‘We two saw you four set on four’, and of Falstaff’s earlier speech describing it – good, sinewy prose, bristling with dramatic attack. The significant point driven home by Wriothesley’s account of his interview is that to his generation rhetoric was part of one’s mental equipment for the practical business of life that men took for granted. It is easy to find examples of rhetorical address in the grand manner in Henry VIII’s letters – some of them drafted by Wriothesley – to be read and heeded by their recipients. It is much rarer to find a personal report, made by a speaker, of what he actually said when suddenly called upon to put eloquentia to the

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test in a situation – when what he wants to do is to appeal to the emotions and to move a man of whom he says, ‘The fellow hath a great wit. He is excellent in language’. To us his metaphors seem striking: to men who cared for ‘well-saying’ such phrasing came naturally. v The use of imagery, proverbs, ‘sayings’, word-play, puns and every kind of figurative language is generally first encountered by Elizabethan students in its most exaggerated form, as in Euphues. To meet these elements of popular speech, therefore, in their natural surroundings, before they are developed as formal literary ornament, is to realize how freely and effectively ordinary folk, including men of affairs like Wriothesley or Husee, used proverbial phrasing and lively imagery in normal expression. The way Shakespeare’s use of proverbs links his writing with the diction of common life has become a study in itself; and though the imagery in these letters may be simple we see clearly how he could rely on its common appeal when men used it so instinctively in their own speech and writing. As in Shakespeare, some of this figurative phrasing is drawn from the common stock, some of it may have been invented by the writers; but all these instances from the Letters are either the earliest known or the earliest post-medieval examples. Lady Whethill’s ‘There is an old saying, Threatened men live long’ and Thomas Warley’s ‘But it is an old saying, Well is spent the penny that getteth the pound’ vouch for their own proverbial status; and Husee’s ‘It hath been an old proverb that there is no worse pestilence than a familiar enemy’ is the only example on record. How close Lisle’s ‘You and I cannot live with fair words’ comes to an original form we cannot tell, as its next appearance is in Euphues as ‘Fair words fill not the belly’ (1580). I can find no exact parallel for Husee’s ‘Time and the good hour must be tarried for’, which takes on a more individual flavour as ‘I can do no more but tarry his time and gawpe for a good hour’. (When the delays are obviously past human help he adds, ‘I trust the Holy Ghost will now work in my Lord Privy Seal to discharge me of your lordship’s long suit.’) When he quotes the old proverb, ‘a shrewd cow hath found short horns’, he adds, ‘yea, the very stumps!’ (cf. Much Ado 2.1.25 ‘God sends a curst cow short horns’: Chaucer and Heywood call the cow ‘shrewd’). Accused of ‘flitting’ from Calais, he refutes the report ‘that I should leave the key under the door and come no more there’, adding indignantly, ‘I would not gladly give the candlesticks I left there for the rent I owe him’. This, and his expression, ‘to stop two gaps

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with one bush’ are found later, so were probably already proverbial, but his description of Lisle’s useful friend, Sir Francis Bryan, who, ‘if he set in his foot with a good mind . . . hath no fellow now in the Privy Chamber’, may be original. Husee’s letters are also full of lively little phrases such as ‘This will breed a scab’, ‘It is hard trusting this wily world’. Whether they would qualify for the proverbial category if found in print I do not know. Perhaps catchphrases is the proper term, as it seems to be for the description Honor Lisle’s niece, Elizabeth Staynings, gives of her distressing plight when keeping her husband company in the debtors’ prison and expecting another child: ‘I am in the taking that I was in the last year; and if it had pleased God he might a’ sent it your ladyship, the which would a’ been more gladder than I am’ (cf. Mrs Ford in the buckbasket scene, ‘What a taking was he in when your husband asked what was in the basket’). Sir John Bonde, a Devon vicar, swears ‘I will get my fingers unto the elbow’ before he will hand over the keys of the manor house to her ladyship’s stepdaughter without orders. Lisle is ‘ready to make answer and amends to my shirt’ (1536) – perhaps an early form of ‘putting one’s shirt on’ a horse or a hunch. Wriothesley, finding that his prisoner has escaped, writes to Cromwell, ‘the loss of all I have in this world had been but a trifle to this breakfast!’ (cf. Henry VIII 3.2.202, ‘and then to breakfast with what appetite you have’). ‘Whereat the Frenchmen hangeth the lip’ is Husee’s colloquialism for looking vexed or put out (cf. Troilus 3.1.152, ‘he hangs the lip at something’). The favourite expression for imparting a confidence is ‘he told me in mine ear’, which Shakespeare uses in this way seven times. To be ‘God’s prisoner’ is a common image for sickness, and Lisle’s Hampshire cousin, Antony Wayte, uses the pleasant Old English phrase ‘the fall of the leaf’ for autumn. The instinctive liking found in this colloquial letter-writing for the homely vigour and the picturesque – or grotesque – visual quality of proverbial phrasing suggests that the genuine, popular, proverb-making mentality was as characteristic of the early as of the late decades. If medieval sources do not yield early forms of the expressions used by Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, the chances are that a considerable proportion will be found in the manuscript collections of the years between the two literatures, medieval and modern, which may ultimately prove to have been one of the most fruitful proverb-eras of this prolific century. Puns are by nature a delight of speech, but some mild punning appears now and again in these Letters. ‘Can sick men play so nicely with their

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names?’ asks Richard II when John of Gaunt puns on his own name for ten lines. The interruption is at once dramatic and critical – ten lines ‘o’er steps the modesty of nature’. Just how nicely they could and did play with words in this manner can be seen from the fun they have with one of Lisle’s gentlemen who belonged to the Devonshire family of Speccot, which naturally invited the pun of ‘spigot’. John Kite, bishop of Carlisle, in his seventies and a sick man, plays the game delicately, simply changing the spelling when he sends Lisle a tun of March beer by ‘my friend Spygott’. So light is the touch that one might perhaps query his intention; but there is no mistaking the cruder relish Mr Speccot’s fellows took in this joke when Husee sends commendations from one of them to Lisle and her Ladyship, and to Jack his brother and to all other, saving Mr Spygott, whom in nowise he will not have named. He saith the sounding of that name maketh him more than half drunk. (12 June 1537)

A delight in double, triple and even quadruple assemblages of nouns, verbs and adjectives was not a late characteristic of Tudor writing, resulting from the scholars’ admonitions to seek more ‘copie’. It was native to the language and contributed to its rhythmic effects and was encouraged by the normal education in rhetoric. The popular use of synonyms, coupled words and balanced phrases is so prevalent in the Lisle Letters as to leave no doubt that, far from being a trick of style derived from the 1549 Prayer Book, it was an established feature of the writing of educated men in the 1530s; and comparison with late medieval correspondence shows that there was no similar richness in the average letter of the preceding period. It may have been encouraged at the time by Lord Berners’ preface to his Froissart (1523–5), in which he apologizes for not having turned his original into the ‘fresh, ornate, polished English’ which he illustrates by furnishing most words with one to three synonyms and nouns with as many adjectives. One guesses that it was more a trick of writing and was used with moderation in speech, as indeed, on the whole, it is in the familiar letter, but men were accustomed to this particular form of amplification from their schooldays, and the pairs and phrases chimed naturally with the simple three-four-five speech rhythms. ‘Loss and hindrance’, ‘bawdy and unthrifty rule’, ‘proud, presumptuous and opprobrious words’, ‘the augmentation and amendment of my poor living’ slide from the tongue with an easy music and also say more, give greater expressiveness in their contexts. The third example conveys a more vivid impression of the character

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and behaviour of the rascally curate (cf. p. 60 above); ‘grunted and grudged at’, applied to an unwanted guest, says more than either verb alone. ‘High and importunate suit’ is as expressive as it is rhythmically pleasing in the context of competition at Court to obtain the conveyance of the King’s New Year’s gift to Lisle, who had the reputation for tipping liberally, ‘high’ referring to the influential suit made and ‘importunate’ to the vigour with which the requests were urged. This form of ‘copie’ may not as yet do much to enrich ordinary writing with shades of meaning and the subtle distinctions we shall enjoy when we come to Sir Thomas Browne; but its free indulgence in ordinary writing in the thirties illustrates the native and natural tendency in our speech which eventually produces such ‘household’ words as ‘the expectancy and rose of the fair state’ or ‘to grunt and sweat under a weary life’, with which the poet will enrich and raise to its highest power this ordinary and old-established habit of the diction of common life. There is, finally, one more personal argument which, for me, reinforces an inner certainty rather than the reasoned belief I have been outlining, that it is in these early manuscript sources instead of contemporary printed ones that we must soak ourselves in order to hear the sixteenth century talking. Out of a common stock of words, phrases and normal modes and devices of expression these people fashion for themselves individual, recognizable styles. And this is equally true of dozens of others encountered among these State Papers of Henry VIII who have no connection with this particular correspondence, who may write only a single letter and of whom we may ‘know’ literally nothing from any other source. There is a transparency in this writing: simple as it generally is, the style is the man, or the woman. Just as the dramatist gives us the characters of his personages by the manner of their speech and what they say about each other and the business in hand, so these personages who play their parts in the Lisle story characterize themselves for us as vividly as if they were created by an artist, and, like characters on the stage, speak in the first person directly to us of their fellows and their concerns. When Husee writes, ‘As for Warley, I assure your ladyship there is no such malice in him as you do think, for it was only his lack of wit, that which he did’ (15 September 1538), we learn something of the characters of all three, of their relationships to each other and of the situation and may find ourselves recalling such things as Costard’s excuse for Nathaniel – ‘a marvellous good neighbour, faith, and a very good bowler; but for Alisander – alas, you see how it is – a little o’er-parted’.

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Shakespeare the dramatist bypasses the formal elaboration, the cultivated boisterousness, the journalistic extravagance, the exaggeration and the fashionable affectations of contemporary style, unless he needs any of them for his dramatic purposes. With Husee or Lisle he will use the learned word when he feels like it; but Husee will ‘gawpe’ for his good hour, and Sicinius will declare ‘This is clean kam’. We know, ‘by instinct’, that in Shakespeare we are listening to the real language of men, as well as ascending the brightest heaven of invention with his muse of fire. When, therefore, we are continually reminded of Shakespearian phrasing and rhythm as we read these early letters, it is reasonable to infer that the link, the common factor, is Tudor speech as it was spoken throughout the century, except in so far as new colloquialisms, turns of phrase and fresh words replace what had become old-fashioned. The letters obviously cannot give the whole background of Shakespearian speech, but I believe they can and do provide us more effectively than any other source material with a genuine view of the foundations of the goodly current speech which was the language of that amazing century. First published in Shakespeare Survey 17 (1964) n otes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

H. C. Wyld, History of Modern Colloquial English (1920) (latest edn 1953). Rose Macaulay, Letters to a Friend (1950). Cambridge History of English Literature, iii, ch. 22 (1909). F. P. Wilson, Shakespeare and the Diction of Common Life, British Academy Annual Shakespeare Lecture (1941). Shakespeare’s Pronunciation (New Haven, 1953). Shakespeare as Critic of Language (Shakespeare Assoc., 1934); Shakespeare and Rhetoric (English Assoc., Essays and Studies, 29, 1943). And Endeavors of Art (University of Wisconsin Press, 1954). E.g. the women talking about Old Cole’s murder, and Mistress Winchcomb the second discussing with her gossip household catering problems and her new finery of French hood and silken gown. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, Bk ii, iii, 277, Oxford History of English Literature (1954). In the PRO, in Lisle Papers, 18 vols. (SP 3) and State Papers, Henry viii (SP 1): calendared in Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, ed. Brewer and Gairdner. The Enchanted Glass (New York, 1936). The Correspondence of Lady Katharine Paston, 1603–27, ed. R. Hughey (Norfolk Record Soc. vol. 14, 1941).

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12 Cf. Lady Granville (1810): ‘My month nurse, a treasure, and the most respectable of dames’ (OED). 13 For easily accessible specimens see the present writer’s Letters of King Henry VIII (1936), especially pt iii, chs. i, ii. 14 On 12 November 1535, in which he says, ‘We have no news but that it is preached here [i.e. London] that priests must have wives’. 15 Letters of John Chamberlain (Camden Soc., 1861). 16 Ralph Winwood, Memorials of State (1725).

chap t e r 4

Shakespeare’s talking animals Terence Hawkes

There is a tense moment at the end of certain modern dramatic productions (it is a feature which has recently shown itself at Stratford) when the actors suddenly turn on the audience and, in the name of communication, begin menacingly to advance on them with ferocious and implacable bonhomie. But let me put you out of fear. As this conference draws to an end, it is not my intention to come smilingly amongst you in any physical sense. I know my place. Nor does the title of my paper make mocking reference to any here present in their professional capacities. Dog does not eat dog. But my subject does involve our communication with each other in a different, more general, but no less ‘contemporary’ way. For when Ben Jonson nominated language as ‘the only benefit man hath to expresse his excellencie of mind above other creatures’ (Timber, or Discoveries), he was articulating an idea that has had modernity thrust upon it. In fact the concept of man as the Talking Animal, with language his distinctive feature, marking him off from the other animals, is one of those currently fashionable notions redeemed, we might now profitably allow, by its antiquity. For the classification of man as zoon logon echon (a living creature possessing speech) enjoyed currency before Aristotle, and Cicero offers a formula no less positive than Ben Jonson’s when he claims that ‘it is in this alone, or in this especially, that we are superior to the animals; that we can converse amongst ourselves, and express our thoughts in speech’ (De Oratore 1.8.32). Such ideas obviously have particular force and relevance in societies where the act of talking, face to face, constitutes the fundamental mode of life and where speech seems not only to embody humanity, but to bring into being and reinforce all the communal social structures of ‘civilization’. In such societies, speech and man, language and culture, talking and ‘way of life’ must be very closely connected. Elizabethan society was certainly not wholly oral in character. But equally certainly it was not wholly literate in any sense that would be meaningful to us. English then, as M. C. Bradbrook puts it, was still ‘a tongue rather 68

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than a written language’1 and the most recent estimates suggest that only between thirty per cent and fifty per cent of males in Shakespeare’s London were minimally literate (this using the dubious standard of their ability to write their own names).2 In any case, as W. J. Ong argues, oral habits and traditions still played dominant roles in spheres that were only potentially those of writing, and the writing of the period exhibits a formidable and formative ‘oral residue’ that he characterises as ‘heavy in the extreme’.3 So it is not surprising to find the notion of speech as man’s distinctive and ‘civilising’ characteristic common amongst those who wrote of language at the time. ‘It is’, Ben Jonson continues, ‘the Instrument of Society. Therefore Mercury, who is the President of Language is called Deorum hominumque interpres’ (Timber). And the characteristically oral sense of identity between culture and language, man and speech, lies behind the commonplace notion that he expounds so memorably; ‘Language most shewes a man; speake that I may see thee’ (ibid.). It is difficult for us, who habitually read and write, to share Jonson’s sense of speech’s revealing inward qualities. And it is no less difficult for us fully to accept the implications of the fact that Shakespeare’s plays were written for an audience most of whom would have shared it. I am not concerned with the plays’ own use of language in this context, and the characteristically oral qualities of their style: the rhapsodic, formulaic, incremental and serial structures that occasionally baffled the highly literate Dr Johnson. But I am interested in the ideas about language and its social role which they must in consequence implicitly manifest, and which constitute a neglected part of their world view, perhaps because we are anaesthetised to them by our own literacy. And these involve, primarily, a deep and almost certainly defensive commitment to language in its oral dimension: to the ideal as well as the idea of man as the animal that talks. The history plays for example seem to embody and reinforce a fundamentally oral outlook, which of course differs markedly from our own. Frances Yates has recently brilliantly reminded us that the faculty of memory plays a crucial role in an oral setting, acting as the repository of the cultural tradition, and proving highly developed in response to that important function.4 But memory’s opposite, forgetting, is also important in the same process. Memory, it could be argued, acts as a selective filter, storing experience of continuing relevance to the society. Non-relevant experience is then systematically forgotten, in what has been termed a process of structural amnesia. As a result, the present permanently imposes its own shape on the past, so that in an oral society the world seems always to have been as it is now. Its ‘past’ looks exactly like its ‘present’. Myth takes the place of

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‘history’, and the overwhelming bias towards consistency between past and present makes such societies normally deeply conservative. Such changes as occur tend to be redressive and reconciling, reinforcing rather than innovatory, and at their most extreme take the form of rebellion rather than revolution.5 A context such as this seems to have generated the history plays’ view of the world. In them, myth and ‘history’ merge, and the shape of the present determines that of the past. The upheavals chronicled have a redressive, reconciling, re-inforcing mode, and take the form of rebellion rather than revolution. The king is rejected, but not kingship. In fact, the essence of what has been misleadingly termed the Tudor ‘revolution’ had been the establishment of the king as the vital and unifying communicative link between man and deity and man and man. Through him, men could symbolically ‘speak’ to one another, to God, and in English. And just as the Christian God is always characterised as a communicator, one who talks directly and personally to man,6 so as God’s vicegerent, the Christian king ought ideally to manifest the same ‘civilising’ quality. Richard II, of course, notably does not, and his shortcomings in this connection seem to supply Shakespeare in the second tetralogy with a crucial purchase on the past. Under Richard’s rule, civilised talking between people deteriorates beyond repair, bringing about its opposite, civil war.7 Nor does his successor fare any better in this respect. It is Bolingbroke’s son Hal who, as Prince and ‘the mirror of all Christian Kings’, demonstrates a saving capacity for simple straightforward unifying oral communication with all speakers of the language from high to low, be they knave or knight, English, Welsh, Irish or Scot. His breezy inabilities outside his native tongue (exhibited in the courting of the French princess) serve to emphasise his capabilities within it. In the course of their exhaustive probing after the nature of human reality, Shakespeare’s tragic plays seem to take as their starting point the notion that man is fundamentally a communicator; that talking (and listening) make man human. In them, the tragedy seems to involve a denial, by villainy or circumstance, of man’s communicative functions; a prohibition of the essential ‘talking and listening’ aspects of his nature. Only when these are restored is society able to function again in harmony with, and as a collective expression of, that nature. To take the single example of Hamlet, it’s clear that the attitudes towards language of the ‘mighty opposites’, Hamlet on the one hand and Claudius on the other, constitute a major dimension of the conflict that sparks the play. Under Claudius, talking at Elsinore deteriorates progressively,

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bringing with it a breakdown in exactly those personal relationships which underpin human society. From the early blandishments of Claudius, their polish concealing the truth of murder, usurpation and incest, through the ‘indirections’ of Polonius, Ophelia’s ravings, the obstructive technicalities of the Gravediggers, and the gibberings of Osric, the process is an accelerating one of descent to a level of uncommunicative brutishness, where spying replaces talking and listening, and men become hunting and hunted animals. As Laertes discovers on his return to Elsinore, linguistic chaos is come again. It is as if the world were now but to begin, Antiquity forgot, custom not known, The ratifiers and props of every word . . . (4.5.103–5)

The way of life Hamlet opposes to Elsinore is one in which talking and listening, voice and ear, hold their rightful cherished place as civilising instruments. There, the Prince finds solace in Horatio as e’en as just a man As e’er my conversation coped withal. (3.2.55–6)

There, Claudius’s poisoning of the King’s ear is seen, in symbolic proportion, to violate ‘the whole ear of Denmark’ (1.5.36). There, too, the play’s great metaphor of the theatre lays a good deal of emphasis on the oral faculties; on the notion that a professional actor’s speech makes serious demands on his audience’s ears. Hamlet’s rueful acknowledgement of the Player’s ability to communicate immediately and powerfully by means of his art, to ‘cleave the general ear with horrid speech’ (2.2.573), to ‘speak out’, to amaze indeed The very faculties of eyes and ears (3.2.575–6)

is as striking as the claims made for the play’s own capabilities in forcing oral communication on the guilty, making them ‘proclaim’ their malefactions so that ‘murder, though it have no tongue, will speak / With most miraculous organ’ (2.2.605–6). Not surprisingly, the sum of Hamlet’s advice to the Players is that they speak distinctly, paying due respect to man’s talking– listening nature, so that they do not ‘split the ears of the groundlings’ (3.2.10).

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For Hamlet, the essence of genuine humanity ultimately lies in the basic ‘playing’ situation itself, in the ‘talking–listening’ interaction of actors and audience across a stage: a process that, to an oral community, might not inappropriately seem the ultimate symbolic representation of itself. In the theatre, as outside it, people talk, others listen, as evidence of their humanity, and the player’s oral art does indeed show ‘the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’. Moreover, in a society whose investment in memory must, as has been said, be very great, the theatre will have the added function almost of a ‘memorybank’; a place where memory literally resides, is stored, and in performance is brilliantly displayed by the actors. Hamlet’s promise to the Ghost to remember thee! Aye, thou poor Ghost, whiles memory holds a seat In this distracted Globe (1.5.95–7)

has, not merely by means of the oral device of the pun, this enlarging aspect. And it hints at such a theatre’s immense but informal educative function in an oral culture as an institution serving to remind its members of accepted common values, and to confront them with a dramatic affirmation and confirmation of these, almost as a unifying and preservative act of anamnesis, of ‘bringing to mind’.8 Given this, it is an odd delusion of the literate that the non-literate are dispossessed. The reverse might even be the case. William the Conqueror was illiterate. Moreover, it takes a considerable effort of detachment for us to realise that the prospect of literacy can appear somewhat alarming to an oral culture. On the positive side, it offers the possibility of a new and effective medium of communication which, by providing a visible and lasting counterpart of speech, enables it, apparently, to transcend ephemerality and to conquer space and time. Writing seems to make speech permanent and portable. But a basically non-literate community might well take a more negative view, seeing in writing a potential subversion of its way of life. Far from reproducing speech, writing could be said to ‘reduce’ it. The full resonance of oral utterance, imbued with the personality, gestures, tone of voice and physical presence of its speaker, from whom it is never separated, vanishes in the abstracted impersonality and sheer silence of marks on paper. The solvent of written ‘clarity’ disperses the richness of oral ‘ambiguity’. When we turn to Shakespeare’s earliest comedies, exactly these tensions confront us, and Love’s Labour’s Lost in particular seems largely to re-state a much older case in this connection.

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In the Phaedrus, Plato presents a famous argument against writing. Retelling the myth of its invention, he recounts the words of the Egyptian King to Theuth, who has invented letters: If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples but only its semblance; for by telling them of many things without teaching them, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing; and as men filled, not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.9

In essence, that seems to be a reasonable account of what happens in Love’s Labour’s Lost, for in this ‘the most linguistically oriented of all Shakespeare’s plays’10 the oral world of speech is comically opposed to the silent world of books. At its simplest, the action concerns a group of men who opt out of active oral society in pursuit of immortality, and in the name of what turns out to be the ‘conceit of wisdom’. It tells the story of their realisation that true wisdom, true ‘civilisation’, true immortality, reside precisely in the oral community and its social and sexual processes which they have rejected. As ‘bookmen’ (as the play calls them) the members of Navarre’s ‘silent court’ realise they have betrayed their true nature of ‘talking animals’. It is a commonplace that the main comic characters parody Navarre’s courtiers in their various attitudes to language. The characteristically oral sense that speech is the man prevails. Armado and Holofernes have ‘been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps’, and if to speak is to be human, Armado hardly achieves that status. He does not speak, so much as utter writing, expending most of his interest literally on the ‘external marks’ of letters. His response to the inward animal disturbances of love is appropriately reductive: I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise wit; write pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio. (1.2.173 ff.)

For Holofernes, as for Nathaniel, it is writing not speech which distinguishes man from the animals, and both concur in dismissing the wretched Dull as one unredeemed by literacy’s Eucharist: he hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book. He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink. His intellect is not replenished, he is only an animal. (4.2.23–5)

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Holofernes’s contribution to the debate about orthography consists, predictably, of the assertion that the rules of writing ought to dominate speech. He ‘abhors’, he tells us, such rackers of orthography, as to speak dout, fine, when he should say doubt; det, when he should pronounce debt, d,e,b,t, not d,e,t (5.1.18 ff.)

Berowne’s rejection of ‘speeches penned’, the ‘taffeta phrases, silken terms precise’ of ‘orthography’, and his resolve to embrace their oral opposite, ‘russet yeas and honest kersey noes’, constitutes an important statement of the play’s main theme. Access to reality, he discovers, lies not in books, but in involvement with other people: not in the domain of the eye, reading and writing, but in that of the voice and the ear, talking and listening. His sonnet to Rosaline is thus a reprise of his earlier ‘reasons against reading’: If knowledge be the mark, to know thee shall suffice; Well learned is that tongue that well can thee commend . . . (4.2.109–10)

Women, in short, are the curriculum of life’s academy. In Berowne’s metaphor, They are the ground, the books, the academes, From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire. (4.3.299–300)

Knowledge, this seems to say, lies in life itself, in our interaction with others in the community, that talking–listening involvement which, the play makes clear, precedes and prefigures its necessary sexual counterpart. And like love, knowledge is no abstract entity that books can ‘contain’, or reading give access to. In Berowne’s words Learning is but an adjunct to ourself And where we are our learning likewise is. (4.3.310–11)

Our way of life, that is to say, constitutes our knowledge. And in an oral society, as way of life and language are intimately related, so the language embodies, and indeed is knowledge for the community. There is no other source. Berowne’s punishment confirms this, for the burden placed on him is emphatically a linguistic one. His early love, on his own admission ‘Formed by the eye, and therefore like the eye’ (5.2.752), has proved shallow and vain.

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Now he must engage with the speech community, not deny it; recognise its ‘theatrical’ dimension, become a ‘player’ or an ‘entertainer’. He must this twelve month term from day to day Visit the speechless sick, and still converse With groaning wretches . . . (5.2.840–2)

The former ‘. . . merry madcap lord / Not a word with him but a jest’ (2.1. 216–17) must become aware of the reciprocal ‘dramatic’ nature of speech. He must learn, as Rosaline rebukes him, that an audience’s listening necessarily complements the actor’s oral art, that A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear Of him that hears it, never in the tongue Of him that makes it . . . (5.2.851–3)

In the Phaedrus, Plato also makes Socrates say ‘anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who takes it over from him, on the supposition that such writing will provide something reliable and permanent, must be exceedingly simple-minded . . .’11 At the end of the 1598 Quarto, the earliest surviving ‘written manual’ of Love’s Labour’s Lost, this phrase occurs: ‘The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.’ It is attributed to no particular character, and is set in a type larger than that used for the printing of the main body of the play. In the Folio text the line remains, but is assigned to the ‘Braggart’ (i.e. Armado) who adds ‘You that way: we this way’ as an exit line for the characters assembled on the stage. The various editors of Love’s Labour’s Lost have responded in different ways to this choice of endings. Dover Wilson and Quiller-Couch in the New Cambridge edition, and Richard David in the New Arden edition are the exception amongst recent editors in preferring that of the First Quarto. Most others tend to assign the line to Armado, thus reducing its prominence, and the peculiar quality given it by the larger type. Possibly they share with E. K. Chambers the feeling that ‘Mercury has nothing to do with what precedes’.12 Yet Mercury, it will be remembered, was associated by Ben Jonson with language, being styled its president. In his role as messenger of the Gods, Mercury (or Hermes) was also firmly associated with writing, often as its inventor, a connection he shared with his Egyptian and Scandinavian counterparts. As the various avatars of Mercury merge into a single figure in the Renaissance, this association becomes more and more established

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so that, for example, Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1592–3), in the process of a satirical account of the history of writing, can tell how Hermes/Mercury Weary with graving in blind characters, And figures of familiar beasts and plants, Invented letters to write lies withall . . . (1262 ff.)

Apollo, of course, symbolised no less a number of disparate ideas during the same period, but in respect of the contrast with Mercury here postulated will obviously be primarily connected with language in its oral form and its tonal aspects; a relationship appropriate to his role as god of music and harmony. Robert Stephanus’s Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (1573) assigns to Apollo the specific role, amongst others, of protector of the vocal chords. In short, both Mercury and Apollo could be said to have a good deal to do with ‘what precedes’. The line ‘The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo’ perhaps constitutes not so much a comment on the subject of Love’s Labour’s Lost, in which Mercury as Mercade the messenger brings his harsh words into the Apollonian atmosphere of the play, as a comment on the form of this play, on the nature of drama which it embodies and, hopefully, on the subject of the present paper. The ‘words of Mercury’ are surely Love’s Labour’s Lost seen in written form; in its printed Quarto version. It is itself part of the world of books which the play has urged us to reject. The ‘songs of Apollo’ are those oral words heard in the actual performance of the play, of which the book is a ‘harsh’ shadow. The book cannot ‘contain’ the play, as Dover Wilson discovered for himself when he was ‘converted’ by Tyrone Guthrie’s production in 1936,13 and the words are printed in a larger type, separate from the words of the play, for this reason. They constitute a comment on the book the reader of Love’s Labour’s Lost holds in his hand. Momentarily he is like the ‘bookmen’ of the play, engrossed in a ‘reduced’ world of writing, not in the ‘real’ world of oral interchange, of which the play in performance is a compelling version. The play’s epigraph, which these words are, is perhaps intended to jolt him out of that state; to force him to raise his eyes from the ‘speeches penned’ and to encounter the world with voice and ear, in the oral spirit intended by Berowne. The words thus use the functions of Mercury to achieve the purpose of Apollo, uniting these opposites in characteristically Shakespearian fashion. It is perhaps this aspect of his work that Ben Jonson celebrates in the lines he wrote for the great ‘book of the plays’ the First Folio, which refer explicitly to ‘What He Hath Left Us’;

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He was not of an age, but for all time! And all the muses still were in their prime, When like Apollo he came forth to warm Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm!

Nor is Love’s Labour’s Lost the only item of evidence he hath left us: there are the plays at large, the condition in which they have come down to us, and the point of view this condition perhaps embodies. G. E. Bentley has pointed out in some detail that Shakespeare manifests very little interest in his plays as works to be themselves read.14 We may, as T. J. B. Spencer puts it, ‘consider it incredible that he should not have expected his plays to be read as well as performed’.15 I agree that it is incredible. Yet the very degree of our incredulity testifies perhaps to the effectiveness of the anaesthetic of literacy that has us ‘bookmen’ in its grip. For to suggest an opposite view is to do nothing more startling than affirm the theme of this Conference, and to characterise Shakespeare as an artist supremely committed to the oral art of drama. ‘He was naturally learned’, Dryden said of him in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668), ‘he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature’. He is the Theatre Poet, that is to say, not the Book Poet, and the sense of that distinction and its related commitment in these plays is perhaps one of their most underestimated ingredients. Because to be a Theatre Poet is, after all, and despite Anne Barton’s eloquent and persuasive arguments to the contrary, to manifest a personal faith in language’s oral dimension. It is to believe, perhaps, that true immortality ultimately resides more in the apparent ephemerality of speech, less in the apparent permanence of writing. As Heywood, Shakespeare’s contemporary, put it in his Apology for Actors (1612), the drama’s vested interest in speech as its raw material actually expands and improves the language: Our English tongue, which hath been the most harsh and broken language in the world . . . is now, by this secondary means of playing, continually refined . . . so that in process from the most rude and unpolisht tongue it has grown to a most perfect and composed language.

In a sense, it is that truth which we manifest at this moment: you by your tolerant listening presence, I by my intolerable talking one. What links us with Shakespeare is exactly this reciprocal process, the oral process of the language that, 400 years since he used it, is still second – even first – nature to most of us. I conclude with what must appear blatant special pleading, for my vowels have by now betrayed me. I was born and grew up in Shakespeare’s county,

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just twenty-one miles from where we now find ourselves. Although this makes me what the New Cambridge editors call a mere ‘pavement critic’ it also makes it appropriate that it is I who voice a redressive doubt, however small, concerning the advice given in the First Folio to ‘the Great Variety of Readers’. In the matter of Shakespeare’s aptest memorial we risk an overemphasis on the need to ‘reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe’. On the contrary, I propose, as one Talking Animal to others: si monumentum requiris, audi. First published in Shakespeare Survey 24 (1971) n otes 1 M. C. Bradbrook, ‘St. George for Spelling Reform!’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 15 (1964), 129–41. 2 See Lawrence Stone, ‘The Educational Revolution in England 1560–1640’, Past and Present, 28 ( July 1964), 41–80; and ‘Literacy and Education in England 1640– 1900’, Past and Present, 42 (February 1969), 69–139. Also, Carlo M. Cipolla, Literacy and Development in the West (Harmondsworth, 1969), pp. 38–61. 3 W. J. Ong, ‘Oral Residue in Tudor Prose Style’, PMLA, 80 (1965), 144–55. 4 Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966). 5 I am here drawing heavily on the essay by Jack Goody and Ian Watt, ‘The Consequences of Literacy’, in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 27–68. 6 See W. J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven and London, 1967), pp. 12 ff. and 73. 7 See my article ‘The Word Against the Word: the Role of Language in Richard II ’, Language and Style, 2 (1969), 296–322. 8 For an account of a similar process in respect of poetry and drama in Hellenic culture, see E. A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Oxford, 1963), pp. 41–3 and 48. 9 Plato, Phaedrus, 275 a 2–b 2, trans. R. Hackforth (Cambridge, 1952), p. 157. 10 Bradbrook, ‘St George for Spelling Reform!’ 11 Phaedrus, 275 c 5–d 2, p. 158. 12 E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare, a Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford, 1930), 1, 338. I am greatly indebted in connection with the point that follows to the hitherto unpublished work of my research student, Malcolm Evans. 13 J. Dover Wilson, Shakespeare’s Happy Comedies (London, 1962), pp. 64 ff. 14 G. E. Bentley, Shakespeare and his Theatre (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1964), pp. 1–26. 15 T. J. B. Spencer, ‘The Elizabethan Theatre-Poet’, in The Elizabethan Theatre, ed. David Galloway (Toronto and London, 1969), p. 6.

chap t e r 5

Some functions of Shakespearian word-formation Vivian Salmon

Many critics of Shakespeare’s style have commented on his lexical innovations, but only too often exemplification has consisted of random listing where neologisms such as bare-faced, countless, distrustful, dog-weary, ensconce, fancy-free, ill-got, lack-lustre and crop-ear have been quoted without any analysis of the patterns on which they were formed, the underlying grammatical relationships in the compounds or the purposes for which they were coined.1 Some scholars have discussed the characteristics of Shakespeare’s diction in general, without distinguishing his neologisms;2 others have concerned themselves with individual methods of word-formation, such as functional conversion,3 or have investigated the effect of particular neologisms to the neglect of general linguistic considerations.4 At the other extreme, Franz’s grammar lists all the types of word-formation exemplified in Shakespeare’s usage, but without providing any guidance, except casually, on the extent of their originality or their purpose,5 while in another comprehensive work, Jespersen’s grammar of post-medieval English, Shakespearian examples are quoted only as incidental items in a general survey.6 The lack of any reasoned account of the principles directing Shakespeare’s lexical creativity has led to the kind of vague, subjective assessment of its nature and purpose which characterizes certain neologisms in Troilus and Cressida, including conflux, protractive, persistive, appertainments, soilure and embrasures, as ‘strange and shapeless, fashioned for argument rather than delight . . . They seem endowed with a deliberate harshness to which the frequent ending of -ive, as in persistive and -ure as in soilure give emphasis’.7 Judgements of this nature, with which the linguist cannot concur, suggest that there is room for a study which will investigate the reasons for Shakespeare’s neologisms and the types of word-formation which proved most rewarding; but the immensity of the topic precludes anything but a brief survey with the minimum of exemplification. However meagre the results, it is hoped that they will illustrate one aspect of Shakespeare’s craftsmanship as a poet and dramatist – however trivial it may appear by 79

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comparison with his achievement as a whole – and assist in a more precise characterization of his style. Two initial difficulties confront students of Elizabethan word-formation. One, which has been discussed by W. S. Mackie, among others, is the extent to which one can rely on the NED’s attribution of neologisms to Shakespeare.8 His originality cannot be demonstrated with absolute certainty, but the fact that so many of these formations are nonce-words suggests that they were created for some particular linguistic context, which often reveals itself on inspection. They are at least easier to handle than loan-words, which are excluded from discussion here, partly for reasons of space, and partly because the linguistic acumen required to introduce a borrowed word into English is of a different – and perhaps inferior – order from that which is involved in creating one anew, even if from existing elements. The second difficulty lies in the choice of linguistic method; if this were a study of Elizabethan word-formation as exemplified in Shakespearian drama, it would be undertaken with all the rigour and precision of current linguistic techniques. Since the aim of the investigation is to discover the function of Shakespearian neologisms, as a contribution to the study of his style, and to present the results to readers who are critics rather than linguists, technicalities have been eschewed as far as possible. A few linguistic terms cannot be avoided, the most important of them being ‘surface structure’ and ‘deep structure’.9 The external form of a compound or derived word, for example, N + adj., is its surface structure; the underlying sentence which clarifies the grammatical relationships between the elements of the compound is the deep structure, identical surface structures often concealing dissimilar deep structures, e.g. heart-sick, ice-cold: he is sick at heart, it is as cold as ice. More familiar terms are those which refer to the three most productive methods of word-formation in Elizabethan English: compounding (the juxtaposition, usually under one strong stress, of two or occasionally more normally independent words or ‘free morphemes’);10 derivation (the formation of a new word from the juxtaposition of one or more free morphemes and one or more affixes – ‘bound morphemes’) and functional conversion (derivation by zero-morpheme) in which a word is used in an abnormal grammatical category without change of form. Many other methods of word-formation were available to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, such as ‘back-formation’ (e.g. to weather-fend, formed from weather-fended ‘protected from the weather’), rhyme (e.g. pell-mell, kicky-wicky) and ablaut (skimble-skamble) but there are too few neologisms based on such patterns in Shakespearian drama to allow useful discussion, and only the major types and their functions will be described here.11

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Before examining Shakespeare’s practice in detail, it might be valuable to distinguish the overall results of word-creation. One result is purely grammatical, when the addition of an affix does not affect the referential meaning of a word, but only its grammatical function. Thus in affixing -ment to the existing verb define Shakespeare nominalizes a concept which previously was solely verbal. This kind of formation, akin to affixation for case and tense in its demands on originality, is equally characteristic of non-poetic language. A second result of word-formation is semantically and grammatically null; where a grammatical affix is added to an existing word of the same category (e.g. an adjective-forming affix to an existing adjective) the only obvious result is in the phonetic structure of the word. This kind of formation is restricted almost entirely to poetic language, where such formations may be metrically convenient (e.g. plump, plumpy). The association of such words with metrical form may of course bestow on them the connotation of ‘poetic’, and they may eventually become an element in traditional poetic diction. Thirdly, some formations may result in the concise expression of lengthier deep structures as a result of syntactic processes present in the language as a whole (not merely in that of the poet); useful as it may be to describe these processes for a general account of the language, all that is of interest in analyzing a poet’s practice is the discovery of his reasons for selecting a compound or derived word in preference to the explicit expression of its deep structure. Shakespeare creates words, then, because they are useful to him grammatically, phonetically or syntactically; the exemplification which follows begins with a brief note on some grammatical formations. They are not specific to poetic language, but since a few of this type are sometimes quoted as instances of Shakespeare’s lexical creativity they cannot be ignored. An Elizabethan who wished to nominalize a concept hitherto expressed only as a verb could choose between suffixes of English or Romance origin; most common among the latter were -ment, -ure and -ance (-ence), while the native suffix was -ing. Shakespeare appears to have been the first to use several in -ment, which, introduced in medieval loan-words from French and Latin, had been regularly affixed to English stems since about 1300. It has always been more productive than -ure, which is first recorded as a suffix with an English base in 1545, and of which Shakespeare made some original use. (No doubt he should be credited with some formations in -ance, but few of these have been noted.) The existence of a choice of verbal-noun suffixes meant the possibility of distinguishing between their grammatical functions; although -ing, -ment and -ure could all denote concrete objects as well as abstract actions (e.g. building, reinforcements, jointure), derivations

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in -ment and -ure tended to denote ‘particular instance of an action’ rather than duration of an action. Thus an aspectival distinction evolved between the native suffix, denoting in most cases continuous and incomplete action, and the foreign suffix denoting completed action, or actions regarded as a whole. Among the formations in -ment which the NED attributes to Shakespeare are three with native bases, bodement, fleshment, bewitchment as well as allayment, amazement, cloyment, condolement, appertainment, distilment, encompassment, excitement, impartment, insultment, prevailment, recountment, reinforcement, and subduement. The usefulness of such formations becomes obvious if one tries replacing them with verbal nouns in -ing in examples such as the following: Alas! their love may be call’d appetite . . . That suffer surfeit, cloyment, and revolt (Twelfth Night 984, 986)

The like allayment could I give my grief (Troilus 2396)

In the fleshment of this dread exploit (Lear 1199)

Sweet bodements! good!

12

(Macbeth 1640)

That the use of forms in -ment is not merely a metrical convenience is obvious from the fact that, in this respect, the -ing forms would have been equally acceptable, as is also the case with the following instances in -ure: Though he hath fallen by prompture of the blood (Measure 1192)

That suffer in exposure (Macbeth 896)

But, with an angry wafture of your hand (Caesar 887)

Other formations in -ure attributed to Shakespeare include enacture, impressure, and insisture. He also experimented with another version of exposure, in More than a wild exposture to each chance (Coriolanus 2475)

by analogy with posture, but exposure, by analogy with closure, no doubt owes its survival to its closer association with the verb base. Shakespeare also tried

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annexment instead of the existing annexion, but both were superseded by annexation (from 1611). Once these patterns for the formation of verbal nouns were available in English, any native speaker could – and many others beside poets did – create verbal nouns at will. The actual choice of suffix depended on aspectival and no doubt phonetic considerations, although what the latter were has not yet been explained. In the same way, there was a choice in forming verbal adjectives between native -ing and Romance -ive (persisting, persistive) which may have been dependent on aspect. In creating verbal nouns and adjectives Shakespeare therefore displayed no more originality than his contemporaries; unlike his more imaginative poetic compounds, they would have been created by someone else at some time, if not by him. When Shakespeare’s lexical creativity was directed towards genuinely poetic or dramatic ends, they were outside the requirements of normal Elizabethan speech. At the simplest level, his neologisms are invented for metrical reasons, and there are three major functions of word-formation in relation to metrical stress: 1. To avoid the juxtaposition of two heavy stresses. Shakespeare provides intermediate unstressed syllables by creating nouns and adjectives with unstressed suffixes and verbs with unstressed prefixes. The affixes in question are those which normally have only grammatical function but in this case co-occur with bases whose function they cannot affect but whose phonetic form they can change for metrical reasons. Among such neologisms are: blastments (substituted for blasts) Contagious blastments are most imminent (Hamlet 505) climatures (for climates) Unto our climatures and countrymen (Hamlet 1.1.125) vasty (for vast) I can call spirits from the vasty deep (1 Henry IV 1578) brisky (for brisk) Most brisky juvenal, and eke most lovely Jew (Dream 908) plumpy (for plump) Come, thou monarch of the vine, Plumpy Bacchus, with pink eyne! (Antony 1466–7) steepy (for steep) Bowing his head against the steepy mount (Timon 95)

The contexts in which brisky and plumpy occur – one a parody of oldfashioned poetry and the other a rhymed song including an obvious

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archaism – suggest that both adjectives have taken on the connotation of ‘poetic’. With verbs, the appropriate stress-pattern was achieved by the use of the prefixes be and en; added to nouns, they did have a grammatical function, and added to certain types of verb they had a semantic one, i.e. they brought about a change of meaning, but more concisely than by the verbalization of a deep structure. En + rank n. provides enrank v., whereas en + twist v. reduces ‘twist around’ to entwist v. In some instances, however, en and be appear to have no function except a metrical one: bemeet (=meet) Our very loving sister, well be-met (Lear 2865) enguard (=guard ) He may enguard his dotage with their powers (Lear 847) endart (=dart) But no more deep will I endart mine eye (Romeo 444)

Once again, such formations have acquired a ‘poetic’ flavour, because of their association with metre. 2. To eliminate superfluous unstressed syllables. For this purpose Shakespeare adopts two expedients: functional conversion and the compounding of adj. + adj. with no medial conjunction. Strangely enough, conversion of verbs to nouns has little genuinely poetic effect, whereas that of nouns to verbs adds dramatic energy to Shakespeare’s style. Among examples of the former type of conversion (the other will be discussed later) are: dispose (Shakespeare’s alternative His goods confiscate to the duke’s dispose being disposure) (Errors 24) avouch (alternative avouchment) The sensible and true avouch / Of mine own eyes (Hamlet 72–3) attest (alternative attestation) That doth invert the attest of eyes and ears (Troilus 3116) accuse (alternative accusation) By false accuse doth level at my life (2 Henry VI 1460)

Shakespeare is also credited with the first nominal use of numerous forms which are both nominal and verbal, e.g. repair, burst, bump, dawn, howl, jaunt, reprieve; but unlike the examples just quoted, they were not in competition with polysyllabic forms which would have motivated their creation

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for metrical reasons. Adjectival compounds of adj. + adj. may be presumed to have metrical function when the two elements are semantically compatible, since their close juxtaposition produces no dramatic effect through the tension of contrast. Compounds of the following type have little merit: Had bak’d thy blood, and made it heavy-thick (King John 1342)

Be secret-false: what need she be acquainted? (Errors 801)

Nor heady-rash, provok’d with raging ire (Errors 1693)

As ever I have found thee honest-true (Merchant 1772)

an enterprise / Of honourable-dangerous consequence (Ceasar 565–6)

If ever I were wilful-negligent (Winter’s Tale 346)

That fools should be so deep-contemplative (As You Like It 1004)

To the Elizabethans these formations may hardly have seemed compounds at all. When adjectives are modified by adverbs (e.g. deeply contemplative) the structure is a normal syntactic group and not a compound. The distinction is clear in contemporary English since most adjectives and their related adverbs differ in form (except e.g. hard, as in He works hard and This is hard work). In Elizabethan English the two forms often coincided for historical reasons, the adverb (e.g. new) being derived from the O.E. adjective with adverbial suffix -e (neowe). When unstressed final vowels disappeared, the adjective and the adverb shared the same form, and often, as with newly, the adverbial function was made explicit in the sixteenth century by the addition of a further suffix, -ly. Apparently the Folio compositors were uncertain of the status of these compounds; sometimes they linked the two elements with a hyphen, e.g. headie-rash, sometimes they separated them with a comma, e.g. heauy, thicke, and sometimes they printed them entirely separately, e.g. secret false. These variations suggest that the combination of adj. + adj. was felt in some way to be non-syntactic, and its very frequent occurrence in poetry implies that it was deliberately exploited for metrical purposes, whether the omitted syllable was the adverb suffix -ly or the conjunction and.

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3. To ensure coincidence of metrical and lexical stress. Many compounds result from Shakespeare’s rearrangement of the normal order of clause elements for metrical reasons. Reversal of subject and object, for example, is common in traditional poetic style; compounding occurs when a noun (usually subject or object) is placed after a prepositional or participial phrase which it normally precedes. The Folio compositors sometimes acknowledge these phrases as compound epithets by hyphenation, but by no means invariably: modern editors usually do, e.g.: Before the always-wind-obeying deep (Errors 66)

The to-and-fro-conflicting wind and rain (Lear 3.1.11)

A jewel in a ten-times-barr’d-up chest (Richard II 188)

Nor no without-book prologue, faintly spoke (Romeo 1.4.7)

Another common rearrangement which results in a compound verb is that of verb and adverb/preposition. In O.E. verbs were commonly compounded with prefixed adverb/preposition (locative particles such as over, under, out, up), but these prefixes were normally separable, as in modern German. By 1500 locative particles normally followed the verb, except for out, under and over. Out remained highly productive as the first element of a compound verb, but with the meaning ‘outdo, surpass’ (as in out-Herods Herod); in the literal sense new formations were created as late as the sixteenth century, though Marchand questions whether they were in any but literary use.13 Over is also most productive in the sense ‘surpass’; in a literal sense neologisms are now restricted to literary or poetic language and, to judge from the examples quoted by Marchand, have been since the sixteenth century.14 The normal sense of under in compound verbs is ‘below a fixed norm’; with a locative meaning its derivative yield has been extremely slight. Thus wherever adverb/prepositions, including out, under and over, occur as first elements – in a locative sense – in verbs attributed to Shakespeare, it seems likely that he is contravening the rules of word-formation for some poetic purpose, and with compounds such as underpeep, over-veil, after-eye, uphoard in the following examples he is clearly concerned to equate lexical and metrical stress (out does not occur with a literal sense in any Shakespeare finite-verb neologisms):

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the flame of the taper Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids (Cymbeline 926–7)

Thou shouldst have made him As little as a crow, or less, ere left To after-eye him (Cymbeline 281–3)

night is fled Whose pitchy mantle over-veil’d the earth (1 Henry VI 772–3)

Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life Extorted treasure (Hamlet 133–4)

Finally, compound nouns with the required stress pattern are created by the rearrangement of adverbs normally following the noun: Which often, since my here-remain in England (Macbeth 1980)

My people did expect my hence-departure (Winter’s Tale 567)

Till Harry’s back-return again to France (Henry V 2891)

Before thy here-approach (Macbeth 1961)

Neologisms created for metrical reasons are on the whole, though not exclusively, characteristic of Shakespeare’s earlier work; in his mature style he was less concerned to avoid metrical irregularity by such obvious means. Also associated with his early style is rhetorical neologism, for antithesis and pun. Antithesis may be achieved in various ways; new compounds may be created by the juxtaposition of two elements of which one is in semantic opposition to another in an existing compound: Once to behold with your sun-beamed eyes . . . You were best call it ‘daughter-beamed eyes’ (Love’s Labour’s Lost 2065, 2068)

or compounds may be formed of two contrasted elements: This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid (Love’s Labour’s Lost 946)

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Antithetical derivatives may be formed by contrasted affixes, especially un/zero: Pay her the debt you owe her, and unpay the villany you have done her (2 Henry IV 717–18)

A happy gentleman . . . By you unhappied (Richard II 1321–2)

falstaf f What a plague mean ye to colt me thus? p r i n c e Thou liest: thou art not colted; thou art uncolted (1 Henry IV 771–3)

where there is also a pun on colt ‘cheat’ and colt ‘provide with a horse’. The suffixes -less and -ed ‘possessing’ are contrasted in: Father’d he is, and yet he’s fatherless (Macbeth 1741–2)

while antithesis may also be realized by contrasted bases with like affixes: When that which makes me bend makes the king bow; He childed as I father’d (Lear 3.6.118–19)

A more complex antithesis occurs in: Speaking in deeds and deedless in his tongue (Troilus 2660)

in which ‘words’ are opposed to ‘deeds’ while ‘positive’ (speaking) is opposed to ‘negative’ (deedless). Neologism for rhetorical purposes may result in apparent trivialities, but there is always some element of conciseness in these formations which is dramatically effective. Father’d and fatherless are the surface structures of: he has a father; he has no father, two statements which gain emotional impact by their conciseness. In puns, a single formation has two deep structures: uncolted is the surface structure of he has no colt, he is not colted. Much more effective, however, was another rhetorical device – enallage, i.e. functional conversion, when it resulted in the production of new verbs. Some examples will be discussed below. Shakespeare’s lexical inventiveness was perhaps more generally employed in the delineation of character and setting, though the relationship between character and language is too large a topic to discuss here in any detail. He himself draws attention to the ‘golden words’ of Osric, who is satirized for his affectation, but his vocabulary tends to be unusual

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or old-fashioned rather than original. The ‘fire-new words’ of another affected courtier, Armado, are mainly loan-words or compounds like blackoppressing, curious-knotted, drawn from the ‘mint of phrases in his brain’, and at the other end of the social scale are the malformations of the uneducated, like Dogberry’s dissembly and Mrs Quickly’s continuantly. There are also the accidental neologisms of ‘foreigners’ who, like Parson Evans, ‘make fritters of English’. Similarly, the relationship between language and setting can only be touched on here. Critics have discerned a high proportion of neologisms and words of Latin origin in Troilus and Cressida, among the former being the formations protractive, persistive and immures ‘walls’ (by functional conversion) and the loan-words conflux, tortive, unplausive, abruption and deceptious. But a close analysis would be necessary to prove that the proportion of words of Latin origin, and of new formations from Latin elements, is higher here than in the non-classical tragedies such as Hamlet and King Lear. It is likely that formal speeches in any of the tragedies will be characterized by a highly Latinate vocabulary. The relationship between characterization, setting and neologism needs fuller investigation, but there is one strictly limited aspect of characterization in which Shakespeare undoubtedly exercises his lexical creativity – comic and abusive nomenclature, for which he uses imperative-clause or adj. + noun patterns as personal nouns, by functional conversion. These patterns provide names which characterize their owners by reference to a typical action or attribute, of a nature eliciting contempt or derision. As Marchand notes: ‘Personal substantives have at all times had a pejorative tinge . . . A very few combinations only are neutral terms designating the holder of an office, but even then the occupation is always an inferior one’.15 Among Shakespearian inventions of the imperative-clause type are Starvelackey, Pickbone, Patchbreech, Tearsheet, Martext and Keepdown and one particularly contemptuous nickname bestowed on Claudio when Benedick challenges him to a duel – ‘my lord Lackbeard’. The emotional impact is all the greater since the term of abuse is combined with the honorific ‘lord’. Nominal phrases (adj. + noun) occur less commonly as personal names, and although they characterize with reference to an attribute, it is not necessarily pejorative. Shakespearian inventions include Deepvow and Copperspur, the deep structure being x has y (‘he has a copper spur’) as compared with the deep structure of the imperative type, x does y (‘he starves lackeys’). Some of the functions of word-formation already described are exemplified comparatively rarely; by contrast, compounding and derivation for the purpose of economy of expression characterize all periods and types of

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Shakespearian drama. While conciseness is a desirable feature of ordinary language, it is an essential one of dramatic style; in normal speech, there is usually a choice between a simple surface structure and the verbalization of a lengthier deep structure, although of course many compounds have become regularly established (e.g. able-bodied seaman, long-playing record, to select examples of a pattern of compound epithet frequently occurring in traditional poetic diction). But English poetry has generally shown a preference for compounds, not only because of their conciseness but also because their presence has come to be a hallmark of poetic language (however artificial). Consequently, it has become a convention to accept without question in poetry many compounds which would be impossible in prose. Shakespeare’s night-shriek, for example, is formed on a pattern (noun + noun) used for sub-classification of concepts, e.g. soupdinner-, breakfast-, tea-plate, and if occurring in normal language, would imply the existence of other sub-classifications, e.g. evening-shriek, afternoon-shriek, morning-shriek. Accustomed as we are to the frequency of compounds in poetry, we accept night-shriek as it stands. But the poet is more often concerned with adjectival compounds, since it is not incumbent on him to find new names for new objects (the major function of neologism in ordinary language) but rather to find new ways of regarding existing objects and concepts, their actions and attributes. In describing the appearance of living creatures, the poet’s range is limited by the number of their physical and mental characteristics; in describing the natural world, his imagination is unrestricted and, not surprisingly, it is in this area that the most genuinely poetic compounds are to be found. In creating such epithets, Shakespeare was imitating a style of diction most notably exploited by Spenser, but derived eventually from the practice of earlier English poets, the precepts of the Pl´eiade, and the Hellenistic influences on sixteenth-century English culture; from Homer English poets learned such compound epithets as ‘rosy-fingered’ dawn.16 The patterns on which they modelled their own lexical creations were those of normal speech, and often the results were not distinguishable from it; it was not the pattern, but its semantic realization, that could produce true poetry. Even for Shakespeare, much of the virtue of the compound epithet lay in its conciseness or its metrical value; the occurrence of the ‘simultaneity of apprehension’ for which the juxtaposition of two elements in a compound has been praised, is comparatively rare.17 The patterns on which Shakespeare modelled his compound epithets, for conciseness of expression and for conformity with the current ‘norm’ for poetic language, include the following:

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(1) Epithets based on activity. Noun + pres. part. + noun = object + verb + subject heaven-kissing hill (deep structure ‘the hill kisses heaven’) temple-haunting martlet earth-treading stars oak-cleaving thunder-bolts Noun/adj. + pres. part. + noun = complement + verb + subject summer-seeming lust (deep structure ‘lust befits summer’) little-seeming substance (Prep.) + noun + pres. part. + noun = prep. phrase + verb + subject beauty-waning widow (deep structure ‘the widow wanes in beauty’) sky-aspiring thoughts (deep structure ‘thoughts aspire to the sky’) summer-swelling flower (deep structure ‘the flower swells in summer’) night-tripping fairy (deep structure ‘the fairy trips by night’) Adv./adj. + pres. part. + noun = adv. + verb + subject lazy-pacing clouds (deep structure ‘the clouds pace lazily’) highest-peering hill fearful-hanging rock (By) + noun + past part. + noun = agent + verb + subject star-crossed lovers (deep structure ‘the lovers are crossed by stars’) cloud-capped towers tempest-tossed body Adv./adj. + past part. + noun = complement + verb + subject high-grown field (deep structure ‘the field grows high’) big-swoln face down-fallen birthdom (Prep.) + noun + past part. + noun = prep. phrase + verb + subject fen-sucked fogs (deep structure ‘the fogs are sucked from the fens’) belly-pinched wolf (deep structure ‘the wolf is pinched in the belly’)

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child-changed father (deep structure ‘the father is changed into a child’) Adv./adj. + past part. + noun = adv. + verb + subject rash-embraced despair (deep structure ‘despair is embraced rashly’) still-vexed Bermoothes The compounds of greatest complexity are those in which the first element represents a prepositional phrase in the deep structure, since the precise relationship between the two elements – and consequently the choice of preposition – is sometimes obscure. It is not immediately obvious, for example, that air-drawn has the deep structure ‘it is drawn in the air’, interpreted by Schmidt as ‘visionary’, and the deep structure of thought-executing almost defies verbalization (Schmidt interprets ‘doing execution in the same moment as it is thought of’). Among many other such compounds are death-practised duke (Schmidt, ‘threatened with death by stratagems’), water-flowing tears (Schmidt, ‘tears flowing like water’), water-standing eye (Schmidt, ‘eye perpetually filled with water’).18 (2) Epithets based on physical or mental attributes. The surface structure of these compounds is adj. + noun + -ed, where -ed is not the past participle suffix but means ‘possessing’. The second element is usually literal in sense, denoting a part of the body; Shakespearian compounds refer to nearly all external features, and one or two internal organs in a metaphorical sense e.g. fat-kidneyed. The second element may also denote the mind e.g. brain, wit, spirit. Epithets based on this pattern have become a commonplace in poetic diction, e.g. grey-eyed morn, sour-eyed disdain, lean-looked hunger (deep structure ‘hunger possesses lean looks’); Shakespeare uses many of the traditional ones, but exploits the pattern extremely effectively for original descriptions of nature e.g. russet-pated choughs, tawny-finned fishes, nimble-pinioned doves and for witty characterizations of human beings e.g. beef-witted, waspish-headed. The second element is occasionally metaphorical, as in wide-skirted meads, but metaphor in the first element is more common e.g. dog-hearted (‘possessing a nature as cruel as that of a dog’). The opportunities for conciseness of expression afforded by such compounds may be illustrated by a comparison of the deep structures of three with identical surface structures: honey-mouthed (not actually Shakespeare’s coinage), flap-mouthed (applied to a dog) and trumpet-tongued. Schmidt glosses flap-mouthed as ‘having broad hanging lips’, so that the deep structure would contain several elements, ‘the dog has a mouth: the mouth has lips: the lips are like flaps’. Honey-mouthed, ‘sweet and smooth in speech’, is more complex, since mouthed ‘he possesses

Some functions of Shakespearian word-formation

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a mouth’ is a metonymic usage for ‘speech’; hence the underlying elements of the compound are ‘he utters speech: the speech resembles honey: honey is sweet: honey is smooth’. While flap-mouthed depends on a literal visual image, honey-mouthed depends on metonymy and synaesthetic imagery. In trumpet-tongued, glossed as ‘proclaiming loudly as with the voice of a trumpet’ there is another metonymic use of tongue for ‘speech’, but the characteristics which suggest the resemblance between tongue and trumpet (‘he possesses a tongue like a trumpet’) are neither visual nor dependent on any inherent material quality but refer to the effects produced by the use of both. Several different statements therefore underlie this compound, which on the surface is as simple as flap-mouthed. Such epithets have a double function. Not only are they a means of concise, and therefore dramatic, expression – and as such, at their most complex, characteristic of Shakespeare’s mature style – but they also mark his language as ‘poetic’ in the tradition of which Spenser is usually regarded as the founder. Another type of compound adjective shares these functions; this has the structure adj. + adj. where the elements are in semantic contrast. Compounds with two semantically compatible elements (x and y) are created for metrical reasons; where the deep structure is x and yet y the tension between the meanings of x and y creates a powerful dramatic effect, destroying the ‘simultaneity of apprehension’ possibly suggested by compounding: There lurks a still and dumb-discoursive devil (Troilus 2481)

When truth kills truth, O devilish-holy fray (Dream 1154)

At this odd-even and dull-watch o’ the night (Othello 136)

Noun compounds are less characteristic of traditional poetic style, though Shakespeare creates many individual examples of striking effect e.g. snow-broth as a description of the blood which runs in the veins of the inhuman Angelo. One pattern, however, recurs as a means of achieving economy of expression; it contains the agent noun in -er, on the use of which there were fewer grammatical restrictions in 1600 than at the present day. British English (though not apparently American) no longer tolerates new formations which are ‘minimally nominal’ which ‘because they are minimal are dispensable, that is, they could always be replaced by One who, Those who, structures . . . Their power to attract attention is proportionate to their dispensability’.19 Shakespearian examples include:

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vivian salmon Thou monstrous injurer of heaven and earth (King John 476)

Be these sad signs confirmers of thy words (King John 945)

Hence shall we see If power change purpose, what our seemers be (Measure 345–6)

The rabble . . . The ratifiers and props of every word (Hamlet 2845)

Such formations were obviously valuable for conciseness, but what we cannot know is whether for the Elizabethans, as for us, they were marks of ‘poetic style’; since Shakespeare also uses them in prose, they were probably not: ‘The oath of a lover is no stronger than the word of a tapster; they are both the confirmer of false reckonings’ (As You Like It 173