Shakespearean English

5 Key excerpts on "Shakespearean English"

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  eBook - ePub

  English in the World

  History, Diversity, Change

  • Philip Seargeant, Joan Swann, Philip Seargeant, Joan Swann(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  To say that English is the national language of England is not to say that twenty-first century England is monolingual, far from it: at the turn of the millennium, for example, a study reported that London schoolchildren spoke over 300 languages between them (Baker and Eversley, 2000). England also remains a place of great dialectal diversity, as will be explored further in Chapter 5 ; the story of English is as much about changing attitudes towards diversity as it is about actual homogenisation as far as regional spoken dialects are concerned. Finally, the history of English illustrates the inevitability of linguistic change. Although a standard form of written English has been established in England, that standard is always evolving, and as English has spread around the world, several different standard varieties of English now exist. READING A: Shakespeare and the English language Jonathan Hope Specially commissioned for this book. Introduction When Shakespeare’s plays were first printed together, Ben Jonson provided a poem describing Shakespeare as ‘not of an age, but for all time’. Subsequent criticism built on this, constructing what has been called the ‘myth’ of Shakespeare as a cultural phenomenon: a ‘universal’ genius whose qualities transcend history, and who can ‘speak’ to us across time (e.g. Dobson, 1995). The myth of Shakespeare’s universality is powerful but it is also very dangerous, especially in relation to his language. Shakespeare used English at a particular moment in its history: its vocabulary was expanding rapidly while its grammar standardised. He had choices to make about grammatical constructions, pronouns and nouns that are no longer open to us. But Shakespeare’s culture also thought about language differently, and applied different aesthetic values to it

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  The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature

  • Sean Keilen, Nick Moschovakis, Sean Keilen, Nick Moschovakis(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It shares the assumption that Shakespeare’s years at the King’s Grammar School in Stratford shaped his economic opportunities, his methods of reading and writing, and the contours of his theatrical imagination. But it will also argue that, even as we recognize the cultural and psychosocial implications of Elizabethan grammar school education, we must not lose sight of grammar as a specifically linguistic endeavor—as “talk of a noun and a verb” in a more limited but equally fundamental sense. 1 Grammar for Shakespeare and his contemporaries was not only or even principally a puberty rite or a means to professional advancement. It was the study of Latin words, their forms and structural relations, and the rules for combining them into phrases, clauses, and sentences—a set of practices and activities that amounted to an extended course in what language is and how it works. It is one of literary history’s fascinating paradoxes that England’s greatest writer did not have formal training in English grammar—indeed, English grammar as we know it did not exist in the sixteenth century—but for years Shakespeare was drilled in the grammatical structures of Latin. How did Shakespeare’s study of Latin affect the way he understood and handled English? To answer this question, this essay takes a broad view of sixteenth-century grammatical texts and grammatical theory. I begin with the premise that the training Shakespeare received in Latin was in some ways paradigmatic of larger contemporary trends but in other ways idiosyncratic and unique. Both the typical and the exceptional aspects of Shakespeare’s grammar instruction profoundly impacted his thinking about language and the forms that thinking took in his plays

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  A Preface to Shakespeare's Tragedies

  • Michael Mangan(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Only the beginnings, however. The grammar of Shakespeare and his contemporaries was still an unsettled thing, with many alternative forms and a great variety of usages. Standards of correctness in English grammar, as we understand them, had not been established, and the Elizabethans were, for the most part, not particularly interested in them. The first moves towards standardization happened, not as any kind of conscious educational programme, but in reaction to the increased richness and complexity of the overall linguistic environment. It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that rhetoricians began to develop a programme of grammatical reform. When they did, they started a grammatical revolution, which defined standards of correctness in the organization of sentences, and produced a grammar recognizably like our own. But Shakespeare was writing before that happened, and the structures of Elizabethan English are based on a grammar which is different from our own, which has its own rules and conventions, but which is also less insistent on the following of rules. If one of Shakespeare's great strengths as a poetic writer is the flexibility with which he moulds his language to his own use, it is precisely because the language which he and his contemporaries used was itself more flexible, without some of the logical rigidity imposed by later grammatical developments.

  By the time the seventeenth-century rhetoricians turned their attention to grammar, the English language had more or less won its battle for recognition. This battle, however, was fought throughout the sixteenth century. We should remember that even as Shakespeare was about to begin his career as a playwright there was a strong body of opinion which held that the English language was unworthy of serious consideration. George Pettie in his book Civil Conversation (1586) complained that 'There are some others yet who wyll set light by my labours, because I write in Englysh: and ... the woorst is, they thinke that impossible to be doone in our Tongue: for they count it barbarous, they count it unworthy to be accounted of' (quoted in Baugh and Gable, A History of the English Language

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  Early Modern English

  • Alexander Bergs, Laurel Brinton, Alexander Bergs, Laurel Brinton(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Ulrich Busse and Beatrix Busse

  Chapter 17:The language of Shakespeare

  Ulrich Busse: Halle/Saale (Germany)

  Beatrix Busse: Heidelberg (Germany)

  1Introduction 2General considerations 3Phonology 4Vocabulary 5Grammar 6Pragmatics and discourse 7Recent trends and further directions 8References

  Abstract: The present chapter provides a brief outline of Shakespeare’s linguistic contribution to EModE. As a starting point, important reference works and tools for further research are introduced. Then some general considerations on Shakespeare’s language are presented, because Shakespeare’s language, or rather his use of language, can, and in fact has been defined in broader or narrower terms. The description and illustration of Shakespeare’s language begins with a section on pronunciation, then moves on to vocabulary and grammar and ends with pragmatic and sociolinguistic studies and other relatively recent trends. Each section begins by listing basic works on a topic and then presents more detailed or more advanced studies, usually in chronological order. Where necessary, illustrative examples are provided.

  1Introduction

  For the final decades of the Renaissance the works of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) and the King James Bible (the Authorized Version ) of 1611 are the dominating influences: “Dominate, that is, from a linguistic point of view. The question of their literary brilliance and significance is not an issue for this book. Our question is much simpler yet more far-reaching: what was their effect on the language?” (Crystal 1988: 196).

  Shakespeare’s linguistic quality can be seen on many levels of language. Insightful observations have turned proverbial, one among those is that love is blind . Some Shakespearean words, such as powerfully or obscenely , are still used today, others, such as indirection or incarnadine , are no longer used, but they seem to have a particularly challenging contextual quality. Generally speaking, the number of words Shakespeare invented is impressive (see Section 4 ). His word-stock is equally striking. Depending upon one’s definition of word

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  A Preface to Shakespeare (1925)

  WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS

  • George. H. Cowling(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  VIII Shakespeare's Style, Language and Versification

  SHAKESPEARE'S romantic spirit may possibly no longer charm a scientific age, his loose scenic structure may be unsuited to the conventions of modern stages, but his style is still a living force. He was the greatest writer of an age which shrank from plain simplicity and loved flexibility and vigour. Shakespeare's style is perhaps his most enduring claim to fame. A busy man, forced by press of circumstances to work rapidly, with little seclusion, one imagines, Shakespeare must have possessed amazing strength and power of concentration. He was sometimes careless in details, and some of his plays— Antony and Cleopatra and Pericles for instance—are amazingly, inexplicably, loose in structure; but in all, the interest is maintained to the end. He never put his hand to an absolutely futile plot. No play, not even Troilus and Cressida, ends in anti-climax. The poetic vein may run thin, but there is still some ore rich in the gold of orators and poets.

  The diction of Shakespeare is a miracle of ease and variety. His extensive observation, his flexibility of thought, and his quick instinct for an apt symbol of comparison, were furnished with matter for immediate utterance by a mind stored with words of every kind, ranging from the pompous vocables of the learned through the ready and almost meaningless counters of everyday speech to the technicalities of the law, the stage, and the sea, and the rude and rustic dialect of the peasant. There was no jus et norma loquendi in the Elizabethan age. There was no standard prose style, with a distinctive syntax, and a definite use of words, based upon an ideal of lucidity and order combined with grace.

  Elizabethan English was neither uniform nor exact. Even its accidence was uncertain. Shakespeare confused the use of " who," " which " and " whom "; and could employ on occasion the'-s' of the third person singular, present tense, of the verb in the plural. "Hath" was almost as good as "have," and " be " was just as correct as "are." It was not until well into the seventeenth century that English diction, accidence, syntax, and spelling became regularized; and they were not normalized until the eighteenth century. So that Shakespeare was possessed of greater freedom to exercise taste and caprice in choice of words, word-making, and composition, than succeeding poets and writers. He could make adjectives of substantives and speak of "virgin crants," or turn nouns into verbs, " prerogatived " more richly than those who write in fear of the censure of the grammarian and the lexicographer. He could make coinages from the special meanings of words, like " unquestionable " (averse to conversation) from "question" in the meaning of conversation. He could make free use or misuse of prefixes, as in bestraught (distraught), contain (retain), imbar (bar out), subtractors (detractors); and like all Elizabethan writers he constantly employed words in a restricted or specialized meaning like cashiered (relieved of cash), derivative (inheritance), graceful (gracious), informal (incoherent), justify (prove), modern (trivial), phraseless (indescribable), practice (knavery). He coined words such as cloistress (nun), confiners (borderers), cowish (cowardly), injointed (united), irregulous (irregular), inaidible (helpless), opposeless (irresistible), pew-fellow (companion), practisants (plotters), questants or questrists (seekers), seemers (hypocrites), treachers (traitors), unplausive (unapplauding), unrespective (inconsiderate), vastidity (vastness), or perhaps even confused words like impeachment (impediment), importance (importunity), memory (memorial), remember (remind), success (succession), temporary (temporal).

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