The Story of English

About 150 years after the death of Elizabeth I, Samuel Johnson looked back with some pride on the achievements of her reign:

 

From the authors which rose in the time of Elizabeth, a speech might be formed adequate to all purposes of use and elegance. If the language of theology were extracted from Hooker and the translation of the Bible; the terms of natural knowledge from Bacon; the phrases of policy, war, and navigation from Ralegh; the dialect of poetry and fiction from Spenser and Sidney; and the diction of common life from Shakespeare, few ideas would be lost to mankind, for want of English words in which they might be expressed.

 

The achievements of these astonishing years - an age of national crisis, seafaring adventure, and artistic splendour - are inescapably glorious. Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558 at the age of twenty-five. William Shakespeare, her most famous subject, was born six years later. Her successor, James I, who gave his name to another English masterpiece, the Authorized Version of the Bible, died in 1615. During their reigns, about seventy years, the English language achieved a richness and vitality of expression at which even contemporaries marvelled.

But there is an irony to the commonplace that this was the golden age of the English language. For contemporaries, their native tongue was barely ready, after centuries of Latin and French, for serious literary and scholarly purposes. England was a small nation, just beginning to flex its international muscles. Its spokesmen, anxious to stake out a European reputation for its writers as well as its admirals and statesmen, tended to stray into pardonable hyperbole. Richard Carew, author of An Epistle on the Excellency of the English Tongue, compared Shakespeare to Catullus and Marlowe to Ovid. Sir Philip Sidney himself, a true Elizabethan, at once a poet, courtier, and soldier, observed: 'But for the uttering sweetly and properly the conceite of the minde. . . which is the ende of thought  … English hath it equally with any other tongue in the world.'

The reasons for this great surge in the English language and its literature lie in the unprecedented rate of change experienced by European society during these years. This short period, the lifespan of one man, saw the confluence of three immensely influential historical developments: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the emergence of England as a maritime power.

'THE NEW WORLD OF ENGLISH WORDS'

The Renaissance had different effects in every European country. In England, there had occurred, in the years since Caxton set up his printing press at Westminster, a communications revolution, prob­ably not matched until the present age of word processors and videos. The printing press transformed society. Before 1500 the total number of books printed throughout Europe was about 35,000, most of them in Latin. Between 1500 and 1640, in England alone, some 20,000 items in English were printed, ranging from pamphlets and broadsheets to folios and Bibles. The result was to accelerate the education of the rising middle class. Some estimates suggest that by 1600 nearly half the population had some kind of minimal literacy, at least in the cities and towns. The economics of the book trade also encouraged the spread of the vernacular. Outside the universities, people preferred to read books in English rather than in Latin or Greek, and printers naturally tried to satisfy their customers' demand.

Gradually, the sheer popularity of English began to tell. In 1531 Sir Thomas Elyot, statesman and. scholar, published The Book Named the Governour, perhaps the first book on education printed in English. He had plenty of new words to play with - education and dedicate, for example. Elyot himself was uneasy about some of his usages. He apologized for introducing the word maturity, which he admitted was 'strange and dark' (obscure), but which, as he put it, would soon be 'facile to understande as other wordes late commen out of Italy and Fraunce'. Besides, such borrowings from Latin were part of 'the necessary augmentation of our language'.

English could not escape the influence of the classics. The revival of learning and the study of classical models produced a new breed of scholar-writers from Thomas More to Francis Bacon, who, turning their backs on the dog-Latin of the Middle Ages, devoted themselves to the cultivation of style, often disdaining what they saw as the awkwardness of the mother tongue. When Tudor men of letters wrote in English, they embellished their prose with Latinate words. Latin, after all, was still the universal medium of the written word, and Bacon, like many of his contemporaries, actually pre­ferred to write in Latin, which he considered the proper medium of scholarship. (English, he wrote, will 'play the bankrupts with the books'.) The ransacked classical past provided new words like agile, capsule, and habitual (from Latin), and catastrophe, lexicon, and thermometer (from Greek). It is said that Thomas More coined absurdity, contradictory, exaggerate, indifference, monopoly, and paradox.

Many of these borrowings did not simply have a literary origin. The Renaissance was also a scientific revolution and English had to accommodate these changes. New discoveries and new inventions needed new descriptions, creating words like atmosphere, pneumo­nia, and skeleton. Galileo was redefining the natural world: an encyclopaedia would now be needed to explain the idea of gravity. Vesalius had transformed man's understanding of the human anatomy: excrement, strenuous, and excrescence are all new words from these years. In physics, the work of scientists like William Gilbert was introducing words such as paradox, external, and chronology. (Recourse to Latin and Greek for such purposes continues in the late twentieth century with, for example, video, television, and synthesizer,)

By no means all of these new words were Latin or Greek in origin. There were French borrowings like bigot and detail; Italian architec­tural borrowings like cupola, portico, and stucco; bellicose Spanish words (reflecting contemporary conflicts) like desperado and embargo; nautical words from the Low Countries like smuggle (smuggeler) and reef (rif). In these times sailors were the messengers of language. Part of their vocabulary would have been 'Low Dutch' words like fokkinge, kunte, krappe (probably derived from Latin), and bugger (originally a Dutch borrowing from the French), words that are sometimes inaccurately said to be 'Anglo-Saxon'. From the poetry of Spenser (who invented braggadocio in The Faerie Queen) to the slang of the sailors who defeated the Armada, there was, throughout English society, a new urge to use English to communi­cate.

The importance of the Renaissance to the English language was that it added between 10,000 and 12,000 new words to the lexicon. In i6~8, looking back on the myriad comings of the previous century, Milton's nephew, Edward Philips, summarized the experi­ence in the title of his glossary, 'The New World of English Words'.

'ENGLISHE MATTER IN THE ENGLISCHE TONGUE'

In contrast to the internationalism of the worlds of scholarship and commerce, Tudor politics - the Reformation, and the growth of national feeling - emphasized the splendid isolation of Shake­speare's 'sceptr'd isle'. Throughout the Tudor century, England fought with her continental neighbours. Henry VIII broke with Rome. Elizabeth I was threatened by the superpowers of the age, France and Spain. The spirit of the Armada - a small island beating off a huge invasion fleet - was matched by an independent-minded queen. 'I thank God,' she told her Parliament, 'I am endowed with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat, I were able to live in any place in Christendom.'

The fortunes of the English language during these years echoed the battles between England and Europe. Many were as proud of their mother tongue in all its vernacular plainness as they were of defying the Pope or defeating the Spanish. There were some who wanted to stem the flood of foreign borrowings. Thomas Chaloner, for instance, is often quoted for his attack on writers who 'serche … out of some rotten Pamphlet foure or fyve disused woords of antiquitee, therewith to darken the sence unto the reader'. Critics had a phrase for these new 'woords of antiquitee', calling them inkhorn terms - and much ink was spilt arguing their merits for the language.

The battle between 'inkhorn terms' and 'plainnesse', raging throughout the middle years of the century, even became a popular issue in the playhouses. Ben Jonson has a scene in which the poet Marston is purged of Latinate borrowings like retrograde, recipro­cal, defunct, and inflate, words that are now everyday currency. His rival, Shakespeare, summarized the debate with a typically striking phrase. When Berowne finally declares his love for Rosaline in Love's Labour's Lost, he announces that he will shun 'taffeta phrases, silken terms precise'. Instead

 

… my wooing mind shall be express'd

In russet yeas and honest kersey noes.

 

The upshot of these twin traditions, native and foreign, was the emergence of a language, to quote Logan Pearsall Smith, 'of unsurpassed richness and beauty, which, however, defies all the rules'. Almost any word could be used in almost any part of speech. Adverbs could be used for verbs, nouns for adjectives; nouns and adjectives could take the place of verbs and adverbs. In Elizabethan English you could happy your friend, malice or foot your enemy, or fall an axe on his neck. A he is used for a man and a she for a woman, along with many usages that would now be regarded as breaking the normal rules of English. And no Elizabethan wrote with greater boldness than Shakespeare. He could out-Herod Herod, he could uncle me no uncle, he used expressions like how she might tongue me, and he wrote that Lord Angelo dukes it well in his absence.

These innovations and inventions were partly coined to meet a need; and partly they exhibited the kind of cultural courage we associate with the Elizabethans. As Ben Jonson remarked in his Discoveries, 'A man coins not a new word without some peril and less fruit; for if it happen to be received, the praise is but moderate; if refused, the scorn is assured.'

THE BRAVE NEW WORLD

One man, a quintessential Elizabethan, a jack of all trades, who was not afraid of scorn and not afraid to take risks, was Sir Walter Ralegh. He, and scholar-explorers like Richard Hakluyt, and adventurers like Francis Drake, travelled far beyond the bounds of Christendom, circumnavigating the globe, plundering the Carib­bean, and exploring what they called 'the New World', the Ameri­cas. It was in these years that England first moved into that pivotal position between Europe and North America that she was to occupy so prosperously for three hundred years.

Ralegh was a West Countryman, born and brought up in the county of Devon. The antiquary and gossip John Aubrey wrote that, 'Notwithstanding his so great Mastership in Style and his conver­sation with the learnedst and politest persons, yet he spake broad Devonshire to his dying day.' The Queen is said to have called him 'Water', teasing his accent, but he was proud of his Devon speech, which demonstrated his roots and connections. He himself spelt his name many ways, including 'Rauley', a clue to its pronunciation. For ten years, until he married one of her ladies-in-waiting, Ralegh was the Queen's special favourite. To his rivals he was maddeningly versatile. He sacked Cadiz, he wrote poetry, flattering his Queen as 'Cynthia, Lady of the Sea', and he was above all a tireless entrepreneur and seagoing explorer. There was, of course, an element of rivalry with men like Drake and Hawkins in this, but Ralegh also had dreams of something more permanent than plunder. It was his guidance and inspiration that led to the first English-speaking communities in the New World.

The story of what was to become the first American settlement starts in the late 1570s when Sir Humphrey Gilbert, under charter from Elizabeth, claimed Newfoundland for England. Heading south, he was drowned in a storm with the famous last words 'We are as neer to heaven by sea as by land.' Ralegh, who was Gilbert's half-brother, took up the mission on his death. He chartered two ships to sail to the New World in 1584, where they made landfall on 13 July, on the coast of North Carolina, near a place soon to be called Roanoke Island. Arthur Barlowe's account (published in Hakluyt's Voyages) conveys the explorers' excitement. It was an age when, it seems, no one could write a dull sentence. The land, Barlowe noted, was:

 

very sandie, and lowe towards the waters side, but so full of grapes [scuppernongs], as the very beating and surge of the Sea ouerflowed them, of which we founde such plentie, as well there, as in all places else, both on the sande, and on the greene soile on the hils, as in the plaines, as well on cuery little shrubbe, as also climing towardes the toppes of the high Cedars, that I thinke in all the world the like aboundance is not to be founde: and myself having seene those parts of Europe that most abound, find such difference as were incredible to be written.

 

They admired the scene (unchanged to this day). Others, with an almost Conradian gesture of curiosity and confidence, fired a single shot, and, as Hakluyt wrote, 'A flocke of Cranes (the most part white) arose . . . with such a crye redoubled by many Ecchoes, as if an armie of men had shouted all together.' They met Algonquin Indians, whom they described as 'gentle, loving and faithful'. Then they came home, bringing with them two Indians, Manteo and Wanchese, to give Ralegh, who had remained in England, first-hand knowledge of the new possession which, in a typically flattering gesture, he named Virginia, after his Queen.

The next spring, Ralegh commissioned a second expedition, a colonizing mission this time. Accompanied by Manteo and Wan­chese, some 168 adventurers, including the artist John White (who was to become a governor of the colony) and Thomas Hariot, a scientist, returned to Roanoke. Hariot described what he found with the excitement of a man confronted by an exotic new landscape. The flora and fauna were in many respects completely unfamiliar. There was, for instance, a fruit we now know to be the persimmon that was 'as red as cheries and very sweet: but whereas the cherie is sharpe sweet, they are lushious sweet'. In such a situation, many new words had to be coined. There is no record of these, but we do have John White's drawings, a wonderfully naturalistic record of a continent 'sitting for its portrait'.

The wonder was short-lived. Relations with the Indians deterior­ated rapidly, as food became scarce and the Englishmen raided the Indian fish-traps. By the summer of i586, the two sides were in a state of open war. The now-besieged colonists had to beg a rescue from Sir Francis Drake, returning from a voyage of plunder in the Caribbean.

Undiscouraged by the failure of his first colony, Ralegh organized another, on an even grander scale, to establish 'the Cittie of Ralegh in Virginea'. Each man was granted 500 acres as an inducement to go. By July 1587 Governor White had established a base on Roanoke Island. A month later, White's daughter, Eleanor, married to Ananias Dare, gave birth to a girl, christened Virginia, the first child of English parentage to be born in the New World. There were few other joys. The Indians were hostile from the beginning. When they killed one of the colonists 'wading in the water alone, almost naked, without any weapon saue onely a smal forked sticke, catching Crabs', the situation became desperate. White was pre­vailed upon by the other colonists to return to England for help, mainly food and supplies.

What took place after White's departure is a mystery. He was, as it happened, unable to return as quickly as be would have liked - it was now the year of the Armada, 1588, and all ships were needed for the defence of the realm. Finally, after many delays and crises, White set sail in March 1590, about two and a half years after he had left the Roanoke colony. Arriving on the coast of North Carolina, he and his men first anchored off Roanoke Island. They blew a trumpet and sang familiar English songs to the silent landscape. There was no answer. The next day they landed. All the houses had disap­peared. A palisade had been built but there was no sign of any defenders, alive or dead. White found three letters, CR0, carved on a tree, but to this day their meaning remains a mystery.

The 'Lost Colony' story exemplifies the adventurous, maritime side of the Elizabethans. It also shows that the settlement of the New World was extremely hazardous and difficult. In retrospect, that settlement, and the extension of the sway of the English language into a potentially huge arena, seems inevitable, obvious, and natural. At the time, Ralegh - now out of favour with the crown - was forced into bluster and self-justification. Yet he continued to express his undying faith in an English empire overseas, remarking of the New World, in a letter to Sir Robert Cecil in 1602, that 'I shall yet live to see it an English Nation.' At the time that must have seemed to many observers the kind of vainglorious boasting for which Raleigh was well known.

THE BARD OF AVON

The English writer whose imagination and vocabulary matched the discoveries of the New World was the poet and dramatist William Shakespeare. It is impossible to quantify the relationship between a writer of genius and the development of a language; it is both simple and obvious and yet difficult to define. But suppose that Shakespeare had lived before the age of printing, or suppose his fellow actors had not been able to preserve his plays in book form. It is lucky for us that Shakespeare lived during the first flourishing of the popular presses: centuries later we can still appreciate the extent of his powers, his compassion, his knowledge of the human heart, and above all his genius for words. This privilege was denied to the earlier masters of the oral tradition. Seven years after his death, the first volume of his works - the First Folio - was published, and established the legend: 'His mind and hand went together. . . wee have scarse received from him a blot in his paper.'

Shakespeare put the vernacular to work and showed those who came after what could be done with it. He filled a universe with words. Accommodation, assassination, dexterously, dislocate, indistinguishable, obscene, pedant, premeditated, reliance, and submerged are just a handful of the words that make their first appearance in the Folio. Shakespeare's impact on the patterns and stuff of everyday English speech has been memorably expressed by the English journalist Bernard Levin:

 

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare 'It's Greek to me', you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool's patadise - why, be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then - to give the devil his due - if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then - by Jove! O Lord! Tut, tut! for goodness' sake! what the dickens! but me no buts - it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.

 

The facts of Shakespeare's life are scarce, so meagre indeed that the eighteenth-century scholar George Steevens wrote, 'All that is known with any degree of certainty concerning Shakespeare is that he was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, married and had children there, went to London where he commenced actor and wrote poems and plays, returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried.'

More is known now, but not much more. In the end, in spite of a mountain of scholarship, Shakespeare the man escapes us. Of many epitaphs, in many succeeding decades, none competes with the words of his friend and rival, Ben Jonson:

 

I loved the man, and do honour his memory (on this side Idolatry) as much as any. He was (indeed) honest, and of an open and free nature: had an excellent Phantsie; brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein he flowed with that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped: . . . His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too . . . There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned.

 

This has not stopped biographers, critics, and historians creating a mountain of speculation. Why? The answer is that perhaps more than to any writer who has ever lived, the English-speaking world looks back to Shakespeare as its greatest writer, with the universality of the great. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:

 

What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of our conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What sage has he not outseen?

 

Shakespeare is universal in his appeal and sympathy not least because he wrote in a language that has become global. It is impossible, finally, to estimate his importance for the English language except to say that he is - as Dante is for the Italians or Goethe is for the Germans - an icon for speakers of his language throughout the world.

He was a country boy, born in Stratford, in the heart of Warwickshire, then a town of some 1,500 inhabitants. His poetry is full of his delight in the English countryside, and many of his plays are set in or near a wood, like the neighbouring Forest of Arden. When Oberon, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, plots his revenge on Titania, he tells Puck where he will find her in words that only a country boy could have written:

 

I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows.

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine

 

And when Puck shortly afterwards reports on the transformation of Bottom we sense that Shakespeare knows what he is talking about:

 

As wild geese that the creeping fowler eye,

Or russet-pated choughs, many in sort,

Rising and cawing at the gun's report,

Sever themselves, and madly sweep the sky;

 

Even Shakespeare's vocabulary betrays his Warwickshire roots. In his work we find words like ballow, a North-Midlands word for cudgel; batlet, a local term, used until recently, for the bat to beat clothes in the wash; gallow, meaning to frighten; geck, a word for a fool, which was also used by George Eliot in Adam Bede; honey-stalks, a regional word for the stalks of clover flowers; mobled for muffled; pash, meaning to smash; potch, to thrust; tarre, to provoke or incite; and vails, a Midlands term for perks or tips. And when, in Macbeth, Banquo is described as 'blood-bolter'd' (having his hair matted with blood) it is easy to imagine that Shakespeare was remembering that in Warwickshire snow is said to balter on horses' feet. (All these usages, in passing, suggest that Sir Francis Bacon, an East Anglian, could not possibly have written the works of Shake­speare.)

Shakespeare himself would have spoken a kind of Midlands English. Stratford lay at the crossroads of the three great regional speech areas of England. To the south and west were the r­pronouncing counties of Somerset, Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall. To the north were the counties of the old Danelaw, feeding into London English grammatical forms like tells and speaks, instead of telleth and speaketh: Shakespeare could use either. And eastwards, towards London, was the English of the East Midlands, noticeable for the weakness of the r in words like park and yard. Despite the steady process of standardization in English speech, these regional variants have remained surprisingly persistent. If you want to hear something close to the sound of Shakespeare's English, you have only to return to Shakespeare country - Warwickshire, the Cots­wolds, and neighbouring Gloucestershire. Here the local people still use forms of English that have strong echoes of sixteenth-century speech.

It is sometimes claimed that you have to go to the Appalachian hills, or the Ozark Mountains, to hear Elizabethan English. Yet the English cider-drinkers who gather every day in the village pub at Elmley Castle use many of the typical pronunciations of Shake­speare's time. One of the Elmley Castle drinkers describes his prescription for good health, 'I shall have five pints this morning, I hope, and three pints of beer tonight, and a pint of cider with my supper. And then to bed. And I don't catch a cold. . .' A word like 'cider' becomes zoider. There is the strong r in words like turrn and hearrd. 'Farmer' becomes varmer, 'right', 'life', and 'time' become roight, loife, and toime. 'House' and 'down' sound something like hoos and doon.

A few miles from Elmley Castle, Stratford itself lies in the Vale of Evesham on the river Avon. The land around the famous river is gently rolling, well wooded, heavily settled and farmed, with the characteristic black-and-white timber constructions of many old Tudor houses scattered through the landscape. Some of the bigger houses are handsomely made of brick, timber, and stone, and some, like Charlecote House (where an apocryphal story reports that Shakespeare stole deer from a certain Sir Thomas Lucy), are built in the shape of an E, a symbol of the Elizabethan Renaissance.

Stratford, the place of Shakespeare's youth and old age, was about four days' ride from London, and it was in London, during the last years of the sixteenth century, when the old Queen was ailing on her throne, that the young actor-playwright quickly caused a sensation with his plays. His brilliant forerunner, the dramatist Christopher Marlowe, wrote magnificent poetry and high-flown speeches, but his work, inspired by his Cambridge education, is formal, almost ponderous, heard best in set-pieces. With Shake­speare, literature and popular culture meet centre-stage. He writes about all classes of men and women in every conceivable situation, social and political. He has a great facility, which must have come from his experience as an actor, for headlining even his greatest, most 'poetic' speeches. When Hamlet says 'To be or not to be: that is the question' he has summarized in one line everything that follows. This is Shakespeare's mastery of what Samuel Johnson called 'the diction of common life'.

Little is known about Shakespeare's education. Though it is clear he was trained in classical and Renaissance rhetoric, he was alive to every nuance of language. He knew both about 'inkhorn terms' and about 'plainnesse'. He could write out of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, or the Anglo-Norman, or the classical. After he has committed the murder of Duncan, Macbeth laments what he has done:

 

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red.

 

His bloody hands, he is saying, will pollute the sea. But to express how the sea will be suffused with Duncan's blood, he repeats himself, first in a rolling Latinate phrase ('The multitudinous seas incarnadine'), and secondly in plain Anglo-Saxon, for the ground­lings in the pit ('Making the green one red').

A word like multitudinous is a reminder that Shakespeare had one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer, some 30,000 words. (Estimates of an educated person's vocabulary today vary, but it is probably about half this, 15,000.) He was, to use his own phrase, 'a man of fire-new words'. Shakespeare loved to experiment with new words. Allurement, armada, antipathy, critical, demon­strate, dire, emphasis, emulate, horrid, initiate, meditate, modest, prodigious, vast - all these are new to English in the sixteenth century and they all appear in Shakespeare. It is arguable that without such encouragement - the imprimatur of genius - many of these words would not have survived.

Shakespeare had an extraordinary ability to spin off memorable combinations of words. Scores of phrases have entered the language and have become, in some cases, clichés. Just one play, Hamlet, is a treasure house of 'quotable quotes':

 

Frailty, thy name is woman!

More in sorrow than anger

The primrose path of dalliance

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark

The time is out of joint

Brevity is the soul of wit

More matter with less art -

Though this be madness, yet there is method in it

The play's the thing

To be or not to be: that is the question

A king of shreds and patches

I must be cruel, only to be kind

Alas poor Yorick

A hit, a very palpable hit

The rest is silence

 

Many of Shakespeare's characters are acutely alert to the music of the English language. Some, like Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream, simply want to celebrate the poetry of language:

 

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The form of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

 

Others, like Mowbray in Richard II, cannot imagine a life in exile from it:

 

The language I have learnt these forty years,

My native English, now I must forgo;

And now my tongue's use is to me no more

Than an unstringed viol or harp;

Or like a cunning instrument cas'd up

Or, being open, put into his hands

That knows no touch to tune the harmony.

 

Some, like Caliban, are highly conscious of the enslaving power of language:

 

You taught me language; and my profit on't

Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you

For learning me your language!

 

Other Shakespearian characters, Hamlet for example, simply cannot stop 'the rhapsody of words'; while those like Bottom, who are basically groundlings, are doomed to get it all delightfully wrong:

 

The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be call'd 'Bottom's Dream', because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of our play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.

 

Love's Labour's Lost, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry V, and Hamlet - these plays especially are shot through with a hypersensitivity to the richness of English, the mother tongue. At the same time, Shakespeare is acutely - almost poignantly - conscious of the gap between words and meaning. As Grandpré says in Henry V, 'Description cannot suit itself in words to demonstrate the life of such a battle.' At the beginning of the play, he uses the Chorus to apologize for the inadequacy of the theatre, and the feebleness of the playwright's pen:

 

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention …

 

Then, later in the same play, the Chorus almost answers his own regret with a speech of visual magic that again appeals to the audience's imagination:

 

Now entertain conjecture of a time

When creeping murmur and the pouring dark

Fills the wide vessel of the universe.

 

Henry V is well known for the scenes with the three captains.

Shakespeare obviously enjoys the varieties of English in his native land. Captain Fluellen, a Welshman, Captain Jamy, a Scot, and the Irish Captain Macmorris discuss the strategy of the Battle of Agincourt, and we sense that Shakespeare revels in the caricature:

 

IRISH:    . . . tish ill done! The work ish give over, the trompet sound the Retreat.

WELSH:         Captain Macmorris, I beseech you now, will you voutsafe me, look you, a few disputations with you, as partly touching or concerning the disciplines of war …

SCOTS:  It sall be vary gud, gud feith, gud captens bath; and I salil quit you with gud leve, as I may pick occasion; that sall I, marry.

 

Certain kinds of speech which deviated from the emerging standard English of London and its environs were, even in Shake­speare's day, seen as rustic, boorish, and often comic. In King Lear, for instance, Edgar, the well-born son of the Earl of Gloucester, is forced into a variety of rural character-sketches as 'Poor Tom’. Towards the end of the play, he defends his blind father from their enemy, Oswald, who challenges him as a 'base peasant'. Edgar's reply is given in what we might call Mummerset, using v for f, z for s, the rustic chill for 'I will' and chud for 'I would':

 

Good gentleman, go your gait, and let poor volk pass. And 'chud ha' bin zwagger'd out of my life, 'twould not ha' bin zo long as 'tis by a vortnight. Nay, come not near th' old man; keep out, che vor' ye, or Ise try whither your costard or my ballow be the harder. Chill be plain with you.

 

When Shakespeare moved to London he would have encountered the speech of the court, which was sufficiently different from the speech of a country town like Stratford for a sharp-eared con­temporary to note what he called a 'true kynde of pronunciation', an early reference to Standard English. In 1589 the writer George Puttenham wrote that:

 

There be gentlemen and others that speake, but specially write, as good Southerne as we of Middlesex or Surrey do, but not the common people of every shire, to whom the gentlemen, and also their learned clarkes, do for the most part condescend.

 

English class snobbery has a long pedigree. There is some controversy about what this 'usuall speach of the Court' would have sounded like, but we have some good clues. For instance, before the age of fully-fledged dictionaries there were fewer spelling regulations. People tended to write as they spoke. So occasionally we find clark for 'clerk' (as here), coffe for 'cough' and varmint for 'vermin'. Furthermore, Shakespeare's own love of word-play gives away another set of clues when we find him punning raising with reason, a word was which was then, presumably, much closer to the French original, raison. Similarly, Lafeu and the Clown have an exchange of puns in All's Well That Ends Well, based on the similarity in pronunciation of grace and grass. Shakespeare (like Alexander Pope, one hundred years later) would rhyme tea with tay and sea with say. There is probably some truth in the assertion that Elizabethan English would have sounded, to twentieth-century ears a mixture of West Country and Irish. This was the English that was soon to be taken, in ship after ship, across the Atlantic to the New World.

THE FIRST AMERICANS

London was the focus of all this excitement. Court, Capital, and City, it was also the island's greatest port, buzzing with yarns and fables about the New World and its riches. In 1605, inspired by such dreams, two companies, chartered by rival merchants, set out from London and Plymouth. Ralegh, out of favour with the new king James I, was not involved, but there was a continuity with his earlier expedition. Richard Hakluyt was among the leading lights in the London company. And among the leaders of the Plymouth group were Ralegh Gilbert and his brother John, sons of Walter Ralegh's half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert.

The pioneers were lucky. In 1606, the year in which Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra, three ships financed by the London company set sail on the southern route past the Azores and the Canary Islands. They cruised in the West Indies, and then headed north, intending to settle somewhere north of the Spanish in Florida and south of the French in Canada. In April 1607, they sailed into Chesapeake Bay, then - as now - a vast, shallow tidal estuary dotted with flat, scrubby islands, and teeming with fish, crab, and oysters.

After about a month they reached the James River and moored in six fathoms of water off a wooded island which they named after their new king - Jamestown.

This time the English language took root in the New World. Unlike the unfortunate settlers in Roanoke, the men of Jamestown survived, partly thanks to the leadership and determination of Captain John Smith, who pronounced the stark but simple truth, 'He that will not work neither shall he eat.' In due course - but not until only thirty-eight of the original one hundred and five who had landed were left - they were joined by more colonists.

 

But only a few years after the English language came to the New World, quite a different emigration, notably from London and East Anglia, began to take place in Massachusetts to the north, an emigration that was to temper the fire of the southerners with the cold rigour of the Puritan mind and its inflexible ideology.

THE AUTHORIZED VERSION

Elizabeth I, the queen to whom so many of these adventurers were dedicated, died in 1603. In a surprisingly peaceful transfer of power, James VI of Scotland became James I of England. The new King spoke and wrote broad Scots, but his policy was to unite the two kingdoms with English. His coronation was an event of momentous significance. The Elizabethans had initiated a renaissance in spoken and written English. Under the Jacobeans this achievement began to be standardized and disseminated throughout the British Isles, and spread overseas to the New World as the language of a unified nation. James became, at a stroke, the most powerful Protestant king in Europe, and he adopted, for the purposes of foreign policy, the title 'Great Britain'. The language of this enlarged state was now poised to achieve international recognition. Of all the ways in which James left his mark on the English language, none was to match the influence of the new translation of the Bible ordered in the second year of his reign.

In January 1604 James presided over a special conference at Hampton Court. This was a gathering of bishops and Puritan divines to discuss and reconcile religious differences. Out of their deliberations emerged a plan which would provide the English language with one of its great Renaissance masterpieces, a work whose impact on the history of English prose has been as fundamen­tal as Shakespeare's: the Authorized Version of the Bible.

To understand the story of the King James Bible, we have to take a brief look at the earlier history of the Bible in English. The story is one of martyrdom and repression. It starts with John Wyclif's translation of the Scriptures in the 1380s, for which he was denounced as a heretic. The orthodox view was that to make the Bible accessible to the common people would threaten the authority of the Church, and lead the people to question its teaching. A scandalized contemporary wrote: 'This Master John Wyclif trans­lated from Latin into English - the Angle not the angel speech - and so the pearl of the Gospel is scattered abroad and trodden underfoot by swine.' This sentiment was echoed by the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who sourly observed: 'After the Bible was translated into English every man, nay, every boy and wench that could read English, thought they spoke with God Almighty and understood what he said.' So Wyclif and his dissident Lollard movement were rigorously suppressed. Similarly, when William Tyndale published his translation of the New Testament from the Greek in 1525, he entered into a conflict with Church and State that eventually brought him to the stake. Translating and publishing God's word in the language of the people was as revolutionary an act as, in the eighteenth century, advancing the proposition that states should be ruled by democracy not kings.

In 1534, the English Reformation reached a turning-point when Henry VIII defied the Pope and broke with the Roman Church. The following year, Coverdale, Tyndale's disciple, published his verna­cular translation of the Bible. In retrospect, these were also turning-points in the story of the English language. Several Bibles now began to appear in English. Between 1535 and 1568 no less than five major versions were published - Matthew's, Taverner's, Cranmer's (the 'Great Bible'), the Geneva, and the Bishops' Bible. All were immedi­ate bestsellers, as Bibles are to this day, and were probably the most widely read texts of the sixteenth century, with an enormous influence on the spread of English.

Around the time that the last of these early Bibles, the Bishops' Bible of 1568, was published, a certain John Bois - whose mature years were dedicated to translating the Authorized Version - was just starting his education, learning Hebrew and Ancient Greek. Bois was born in 156o, just four years before William Shakespeare, and it is said that under his father's eye he had read the entire Bible in Hebrew by the time he was six years old. At fourteen he became a classics scholar at St John's College, Cambridge, passed through his examinations at record speed, and soon became a Fellow of the College.

John Bois was the sort of scholar people like to gossip about. It was said that he would rise at four in the morning to give classes in Greek, and would work until eight o'clock at night, always reading standing up. When his Fellowship expired he was offered a rector-ship at Boxworth, a scattered hamlet a few miles to the north of Cambridge, on condition that he marry the deceased rector's daughter. This he did, and moved out into the Fens, though he would often ride his horse into Cambridge to teach, reading a book as he went.

In 1604 Bois was forty-four, living quietly in Boxworth, a man with a brilliant scholarly reputation. At the Hampton Court Conference, Dr John Reynolds, President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, proposed a definitive translation of the Bible to ameliorate the friction between the Anglicans and the Puritans. James I, the rex pacificus, gladly assented to the idea of 'one uniforme translation', though he confessed he doubted whether he would 'see a Bible well translated in English'.

Progress was rapid. By June, it had been settled that there should be six groups of translators, two in Westminster, two in Oxford, and two in Cambridge, each made up of at least eight scholars. It was perfectly natural that the brilliant John Bois should be recruited for one of the Cambridge committees. He was put in charge of translating the Apocrypha from the Greek. As it turned out, his was a level of scholarship that made him indispensable to more than one committee. Surprisingly, perhaps, for an age that was so familiar with Latin and Greek, the six committees were instructed to base their Authorized Version upon the previous English versions, translating afresh, but also comparing their work with the other vernacular Bibles, from Tyndale to Parker.

After six years' hard work, the six committees delivered their efforts to London for a final review. Each of the three scholarly centres provided two scholars to form the review committee. From Cambridge they sent John Bois and his old tutor, Dr Anthony Downes. For nearly nine months in 1610, these six scholars worked together on the final draft of the Authorized Version, refining and revising. They had a special brief from the Commissioners: they were to go through the text, reworking it so that it would not only read better but sound better, a quality for which it became famous throughout the English-speaking world. The translators obviously relished this priority. In their preface 'To the Reader' they remarked, 'Why should we be in bondage to them (words and syllables) if we may be free, use one precisely when we may use another no less fit, as commodiously?' It's an interesting reflection on the state of the language that the poetry of the Authorized Version came not from a single writer but a committee.

During these crucial nine months, before the publication of the Authorized Version in 1611, John Bois kept a diary. In the words of his biographer, 'he, and he only tooke notes of their proceedings, which he diligently kept to his dying day'. Miraculously, these notes survive in a contemporary copy and from them we can see how the six translators on the final committee honed the Authorized Version to perfection. In the First Epistle General of Peter, chapter 2, verse 3, there is a passage in which the key word is pleasant. Bois had several choices from previous versions:

 

Tyndale:                Yf so be that ye have tasted how pleasaunt the Lorde is …

Great Bible: If so be that ye have tasted, how gracious the Lorde is …

Geneva Bible: If so be that ye have tasted how bountifull the Lord (is)…

Bishop's Bible: If so be that ye have tasted how gractious the Lord is …

Rheims Bible: . . if yet you have tasted that our Lord is sweete …

Authorized Version: . . if so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious …

Bois's note: or, how gracious the Lord is. (A variant proposed by another committee member.)

 

Not only does he make the right choice with gracious; he also makes the sentence sing.

If we compare the Authorized Version with Henry VIII's 'Great Bible', the point is made even more forcefully. In the 'Great Bible', in chapter 12 of Ecclesiastes, the preacher says:

 

Or ever the silver lace be taken away, or the gold band be broke, or the pot broke at the well and the wheel upon the cistern, then shall the dust be turned again unto earth from whence it came, and the spirit shall return to God which gave it. All is but vanity saith the preacher, all is but plain vanity.

 

In the King James Version this becomes both clearer and more poetic:

 

Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern: Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity.

 

The King James Bible was published in the year Shakespeare began work on his last play, The Tempest. Both the play and the Bible are masterpieces of English, but there is one crucial difference between them. Whereas Shakespeare ransacked the lexicon, the King James Bible employs a bare 8,ooo words - God's teaching in homely English for everyman. From that day to this, the Shakespear­ian cornucopia and the biblical iron rations represent, as it were, the North and South Poles of the language, reference points for writers and speakers throughout the world, from the Shakespearian splen­dour of a Joyce or a Dickens to the biblical rigour of a Bunyan or a Hemingway.

The King James Bible is still revered throughout the world. Bois is now almost forgotten. In 1628 the Bishop of Ely offered him a canonry at the cathedral, where he remained for the rest of his days, while his country drifted slowly into civil war. He was unusually healthy and outlived a son, whose memorial plaque can still be seen in Ely Cathedral on one of the vast Norman columns in the nave. His biographer records that 'after meat, he was careful, almost to curiosity, in picking and rubbing his teeth; esteeming that a special preservative of health. By which means he carryed to his grave almost an Hebrew alphabet of teeth.' He was buried in the cathedral on 6 February 1643.

The Lady Chapel of Ely is a superb example of the most ornate fourteenth-century church architecture and was richly decorated with stone carvings of saints and holy figures. But in 1539 every stone face, and there were literally hundreds, in the chapel was smashed by religious zealots. It was one of the earliest acts of defiance of the established church. By the turn of the century, this movement had developed into a new, revolutionary philosophy - Puritanism.