The Literary Language of Shakespeare

S.S. Hussey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317896142
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Shakespeare-Drama

Professor Hussey looks at the vocabulary, syntax and register of Renaissance English, following this with a more detailed analysis of particular kinds of language in the plays such as prose, verse, rhetoric and the soliloquy. For this new edition, the text has been revised throughout with, in particular, a completely new chapter providing detailed readings of selected plays, illustrating the ways particular aspects of language can be studied in practice.

CHAPTER ONE

Is this Shakespeare’s language?

SHAKESPEARE’S ROOTS

What the ‘real’ language of Shakespeare – his own language – was like, we will probably never completely know. He came to London from Stratford before 1592, in which year he was sufficiently established for his fellow writer Robert Greene, embittered by poverty and ill-health, to attack him in print:

… an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie.¹

In the middle of a long speech in 3 Henry VI (possibly performed the same year) York calls the Queen a “tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide!” (I.iv.137). There is no firm evidence for dating any of his plays before 1590–1. He was not a university man, as were many of his contemporaries: Marlowe, Greene and Nashe, for instance. His father, indeed, although a prominent Stratford citizen and merchant, was perhaps illiterate – at least, he signed documents with his mark. There is a tradition that, in his earlier years, William was a schoolmaster ‘in the country’. From a literary point of view this is so much more attractive, if less romantic, than the other story which has him holding horses outside the theatre. Certainly his first plays already exhibit a close knowledge of rhetorical devices of the kind found in contemporary school textbooks, but this of course is not proof. It is possible to make informed guesses at many of the circumstances of Shakespeare’s career,² but several tantalising questions must remain unanswered. Did his wife and children stay at Stratford? If so, perhaps he visited them fairly regularly; he certainly retained some business connections in the town. Yet he lived in London, close to the theatres in which he worked, first in Bishopsgate near the Theatre and later on the Bankside near the Globe in Southwark. He acted in plays as well as wrote them (Greene’s attack is on both the player and the playwright). Tradition has it that he played Adam in As You Like It and the Ghost in Hamlet; he certainly appeared in at least two of Ben Jonson’s plays. So, whatever Warwickshire may have contributed to his own language, he was presumably understood on the London stage.

We might have hoped for more from Christopher Sly, the drunken Warwickshire tinker who, in the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew, is persuaded that he is a “lord indeed” and, in the country house, “wrapped in sweet clothes”, surrounded by attentive servants, “wanton pictures” and music sweeter than that of Apollo or caged nightingales, dreams he sees a play, “a kind of history”, performed by the sort of strolling players who might have captivated the young Shakespeare. But although the local names are present (Wincot was four miles from Stratford and a Sara Hacket was baptised there in 1591):

What, would you make me mad? Am not I Christopher Sly, old Sly’s son of Burton-heath, by birth a pedlar, by education a cardmaker, by transmutation a bear-herd, and now by present profession a tinker? Ask Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, if she know me not. If she say I am not fourteen pence on the score for sheer ale, score me up for the lyingest knave in Christendom.

(Ind. II.16–23)

indications of specifically Warwickshire language are disappointingly absent, as they are from the further Sly scenes found in The Taming of the Shrew.

The large Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is compiled almost entirely from printed accounts for Shakespeare’s time and its localisations for dialect words are usually very tentative. We lack a Tudor and Stuart dictionary of the kind which might provide more extensive (and more recently documented) coverage over a more limited period. We can, however, get a little help from Warwickshire documents, such as the parish accounts recording the detailed spending by public officers. These are valuable because they are clearly localised and dated, and for most of the seventeenth century they are not influenced by the spread of standard English which reduces their linguistic usefulness later. Two examples quoted by Dr Hilda Hulme, who has made a special study of these records,³ will illustrate the kind of help they can give in appreciating Shakespearean usage. In The Merry Wives of Windsor (IV.iii.8), the retainers of a suspicious-sounding German duke wish to hire horses from the Host of the Garter inn. The Host replies:

They shall have my horses, but I’ll make them pay; I’ll sauce them. They have had my house a week at command. I have turned away my other guests. They must come off. I’ll sauce them. Come.

The OED interprets to pay sauce as ‘to pay dearly’, but can only date this usage between 1678 and 1718. Even if we turn to As You Like It (III.v.67) where Rosalind says

If it be so, as fast as she answers thee with frowning looks, I’ll sauce her with bitter words.

we still only perceive the metaphor of an unexpectedly hot seasoning. The parish accounts of Solihull (Warwickshire) for 1666, however, contain the following record:

Thomas Palmer & my selfe went before to vew the timber & caused sawers to look on it. 0–0–4

Another time I took 2 Carpenters to looke on it and to saw it & I found ye sauce worse then the meat. 0–0–8

Surely, as Dr Hulme remarks, one would expect to pay less for the sauce than for the meat, just as the churchwardens expected to pay less (not more) to the carpenters than to the real wood cutters, the sawers. Hence the meaning can be elaborated from ‘to pay dearly’ to ‘to pay more than you expected’. The furious Host of the Garter is determined to obtain his revenge by deliberate overcharging. Again, the accounts of the Stratford Corporation for 1582–3 read

Payd to davi Jones and his companye for his pastyme at Whitsontyde xii s iii d.

where pastyme is clearly not merely ‘entertainment’ but some kind of dramatic entertainment. When Gertrude, worried about Hamlet’s melancholia, asks (III.i.15):

Did you assay him/To any pastime?

it is natural that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern should at once think of actors:

Madam, it so fell out that certain players/We o’er-raught on the way.

This is fascinating, and shows how quite usual words could acquire a special use so that a joke or an extra layer of meaning becomes apparent. Yet it is inevitably limited in its extent, nor do we know how widespread these dialectal usages were. Did they seem, to London audiences, simply ‘country’ as opposed to ‘normal’ usage and not Warwickshire dialect at all?

SHAKESPEARE’S TEXT

In one way, however, the Elizabethan play-text may come between Shakespeare’s own language and the modern reader. It is natural for the latter to assume that the text he reads is in all respects – act and scene division, lineation, spelling and punctuation – what Shakespeare wrote. An author today will correct his own proofs (or at least designate a responsible person to do it for him) so that the published version of the work will represent what author and editor have agreed should appear. But we have no fair copies of the plays which are demonstrably in Shakespeare’s own hand. The first collected edition, the First Folio, was published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, and was compiled by two of his fellow-actors and business associates, John Heminges and Henry Condell. A volume of ‘collected works’ by the author himself was a rarity at that time, and drama was perhaps not thought of as sufficient of a literary form to justify such care and exactness. Ben Jonson, whose interest in language is shown by his English-Latin grammar (covering pronunciation, morphology and syntax) and whose reputation was very dear to him, is the exception in issuing in 1616 the first volume of the Workes of Beniamin Jonson. When a playwright sold his play to a company he ceased to be responsible for it. The company in turn tended not to publish unless they needed the money or unless the play was no longer a box-office success, for publication might mean a production by a rival company.

The First Folio (F1) contains thirty-six of Shakespeare’s plays, sixteen of them appearing in print for the first time. The Sonnets, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are not included, and Pericles was added in the 1664 copy of the Folio. But during Shakespeare’s lifetime, seventeen plays were published in quarto and a quarto text of Othello appeared in 1622. The sheets of a quarto are printed on both sides and folded twice to give eight pages per gathering (or quire); in a folio each sheet is folded only once. The quarto versions which are reasonably accurate are known as ‘good’ quartos and the six which are seriously corrupt, textually, are called ‘bad’ quartos. Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet exist in both good and bad quartos, as well as in F1. In their address “To the great Variety of Readers”, Heminges and Condell claim that their texts are greatly superior to previous bad quartos and indeed represent Shakespeare’s own version:

where (before) you were abus’d with diuerse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of iniurious imposters, that expos’d them; euen those, are now offer’d to your view cur’d, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceiued them.

This is frankly advertising copy; in fact the quality of a text available to the printer, whether of F1 or of any quarto, varied considerably. Shakespeare, no doubt, had his original rough copy (or ‘foul papers’) and this sometimes seems to lie not far below some of the good quartos. In these, the stage directions are often of a ‘literary’ nature, of the kind which might assist the author’s memory rather than be of great use to the producer, and the designation of minor characters shows that Shakespeare was thinking of the type of character rather than of an individual. The stage-direction at I.i.69 of Titus Andronicus, for example, after listing the characters who actually enter at that point, concludes “and others as many as can be”; just how many can be decided later by the producer. In the stage-directions of the quarto of Much Ado, Dogberry and Verges are sometimes given their proper names, sometimes called “Constable” and “Headborough”, and sometimes (IV.ii) “Kemp” and “Cowley”, the actors for whom the parts were written. The printer might at best receive a fair copy of the authorial manuscript, like those made for some of the plays in F1 by Ralph Crane, a professional scribe, who probably produced the copy for The Tempest, the first play in F1 and which is well set out, and others such as The Winter’s Tale and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. His copies have full division into acts and scenes, although few stage directions, and one of his identifying features is his extensive use of brackets and hyphens.

The other source of printer’s copy was the theatre prompt-book. The importance of the prompt-book was legal. It contained the authorisation of the Master of the Revels. He was an official subordinate to the Lord Chamberlain and licensed scripts for performance; sometimes he censored them too. The company was thus given legal protection. Major revisions in a prompt-text were unlikely after the play had been licensed, otherwise it might need to be re-submitted. The prompter (or book-keeper), as well as tidying up the stage-directions, especially marking entrances and exits, might himself make interpolations or cuts, perhaps for a particular performance or to reduce the size of a travelling company through the elimination of minor characters. The Folio text of Richard II, for example, was printed from a quarto that had been checked against a theatre copy. Its stage-directions are therefore businesslike, indicating entrances and exits clearly. One of the most uncompromising (yet perfectly adequate) stage directions in Shakespeare is that which begins Act II of Pericles: “Enter Pericles, wet.” The F1 text of King John, on the other hand, has infrequent stage-directions and these are not conspicuously theatrical in character; it was probably set up from a copy of an authorial manuscript.

Where we are fortunate enough to possess both the Folio and a quarto text, we can use one to throw light on the other, but even so they may vary considerably. The quarto of Henry V omits the prologue, choruses and epilogue; the F1 text of Hamlet omits one of the soliloquies, “How all occasions …”. Some bad quartos were probably put together illegally (“stolne and surreptitious copies”) by one or two of the actors. Their attempts at memorial reconstruction of the whole play show a good recollection of the parts these actors themselves played, but with a tendency to fill out the lines less clearly remembered. Here is the opening of the best-known of all Hamlet’s soliloquies as it appears in the bad Q1:

To be, or not to be, I there’s the point

To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:

No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes,

For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,

And borne before an euerlasting Iudge,

From whence no passenger euer retur’nd,

The vndiscouered country, at whose sight

The happy smile, and the accursed damn’d.

If an actor was responsible for this, it was certainly not Hamlet himself who would have remembered better.

The bad quarto of 2 Henry VI is entitled “The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey: And the banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolke, and the Tragicall end of the proud Cardinall of Winchester, with the notable Rebellion of lacke Cade: And the Duke of Yorkes first claime unto the Crowne”, and it contains echoes of Marlowe’s Edward II and Arden of Feversham. Yet bad quartos are far from useless. Occasionally they include stage directions, absent from better texts but telling us something of how the scene may have been played. Against F1’s brief “Enter Ophelia distracted”, Q1 of Hamlet has “Enter Ofelia playing on a Lute, and her haire downe singing” (IV.v.21). Elizabethan ladies arranged their elaborate coiffures on a wire frame; the hair down is a conventional sign of madness. At the close of II.v. of Romeo and Juliet, the Nurse sends Juliet off to Friar Laurence’s cell where there “stays a husband to make you a wife”. The Friar counsels patience and moderation, but at II.vi.15 Q1 has “Enter Juliet somewhat fast, and embraceth Romeo”. By the end of this short scene the Friar is convinced: “Come, come with me, and we will make short work.”

But what about a situation in which the comparative textual value of Folio and quarto(s) is unc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• List of Abbreviations
• Dedication
• 1 Is this Shakespeare’s language?
• 2 The expanding vocabulary
• 3 The uses of vocabulary
• 4 The new Syntax
• 5 Loosening the structures
• 6 Some uses of grammar
• 7 Register and style
• 8 Some Shakespearean styles
• 9 Four plays
• Select Bibliography
• Index