It was within this context of nonchalant self-promotion that conceit, once an innocent word for a thought, became irretrievably associated with stylistic posturing. Concettismo was the Italian term for extravagantly metaphorical poetry; John Donne was the form’s master in English. As conceit grew to be more and more closely associated with trickery, with the sinuous performances of wit, and with fanciful expression, it became a word of contempt – for what the OED defines as ‘an overweening opinion of oneself’ – and, as Owen Barfield notes, its degradation meant that its ancestor, the nonjudgemental Latin word conceptus, was borrowed afresh, this time as concept.12 Conceit had originally been conveyed into English by French. For two other striking examples of pairs of words that have the same Latin source but have come by different routes – one straight from Latin, the other via French – think of fact and feat, and of secure and sure. In each case the French word conveys an impression of specious certainty. Do I believe in feats, conceits and what you say is ‘sure’? Maybe. But they are less solid than facts, concepts and the promise that something is secure.
This was a period in which people asserted their individuality with electrifying vehemence. Thus a poet might be introspective, but his introspection was something to put on show. The classic example is Donne, whose many poems addressed to women seem always to be addressed at least as much to himself. Personal identity was nervously examined, and the image of selfhood was achieved through language – first through imitation, and then through invention. Words have always been read as indices of character and class, but in the Renaissance period this kind of interpretation was especially sensitive. In the first part of Henry IV, Hotspur criticizes his wife, Kate, for using the expression ‘in good sooth’. ‘You swear like a comfit-maker’s wife,’ he tells her, adding that she should leave ‘such protest of pepper-gingerbread, / To velvet-guards, and Sunday-citizens’. What he wants is for her to come out with ‘a good mouth-filling oath’. Hotspur voices a snobbery that is, in truth, a trope of the Renaissance in England. Its object is the primness of the middle classes; writers frequently sent up the quaint middle-class avoidance of religious oaths and the Puritan mannerisms of their speech. Hostpur mocks Kate for carrying on like the wife of some gauche little citizen – a woman stifled by tweeness. Any jokey antipathy specifically aimed here at comfit-makers may have been related to the popularity of a type of comfit containing caraway seeds, which was consumed to prevent flatulence. English-speakers of the period divided into those who were quite at ease with windy utterances and those who squeamishly avoided them.
Where there was opulence of language, it reflected the opulence of society. Erasmus’s De Copia (1512) circulated the idea that one should assemble personal treasuries of words and expressions for use in future speeches and letters, and the principle that abundance was excellent soon came to be applied in other areas. Consumption was overt and often outrageous – symbolic rather than instrumental, a modern economist might say. In his A Survey of London (1598) John Stow, a prolific collector, whose career had included a stint as a surveyor of alehouses, describes a feast of a couple of generations before, which included 100 ‘fat muttons’, 91 pigs, 444 pigeons, 168 swans, and an especially staggering 4,080 larks.13 It’s not quite clear how many people sat down to this repast, but it barely seems to matter. It is tempting to call this a banquet, but at that time the word could simply denote a dessert or a snack. What Stow depicts is a full-flavoured sort of gourmandise, and feasting on this scale was still known when he produced his portrait of the city and its suburbs. Possessions were displayed with pride. Portraits of the period emphasize their sitters’ material wealth. But sophistication did not preclude a taste for base entertainment. Elizabethan hedonists could watch cockfights, or see bulls and bears baited within the ‘bastard sanctuary’ of the Paris Garden in Southwark. The noun cornucopia, first adopted by the dramatist, poet and self-anointed celebrity Robert Greene (on whom Shakespeare’s Falstaff was loosely modelled), was a symbolic buzzword of the moment.14 The horn of plenty promised both flowers and filth.
Contemporary accounts displayed unabashedly the manners and habits of the people. William Harrison’s The Description of England, composed mainly during the 1570s, is a sprawling chronicle which tells us what Elizabethans ate, what sort of pets they kept, and what they did to their criminals. Harrison’s vision is sharp-eyed: on the nobleman’s table there are glasses from Murano, and there is a choice of ‘about fifty-six sorts’ of table wine to put in them. Women’s doublets have pendant codpieces, and the colours of their garments have fanciful names like ‘popinjay blue’. Far more, he frets, is spent on bodies than on souls. Harrison mentions trade with Norway, Iceland, Portugal, Russia and China, among others. He also notes the corruption of English with foreign terms of eloquence, the skill of his countrymen in learning other tongues, the persistence of Cornish and of Gothic speech in Orkney, and the roiling argot of the street and the tavern. Another vigorous account is that of Philip Stubbes, whose The Anatomie of Abuses (1583) is a diatribe against the excesses of fashion, documenting the ‘notable vices and imperfections’ of the world – and of his own country in particular. He sounds a bit like a Grumpy Old Man, railing against the wearing of earrings and silly hats, ridiculous footwear and make-up, as well as at the impudence of poor men’s daughters, the appalling antics of drunks, the greed of fat-cat lawyers, and the savagery of football players. He identifies ‘newfanglednesse’ as a symptom of the worst kind of pride.
Stubbes, whose idea of pleasure was a tour on horseback of schools and almshouses, would have been appalled by the inventory that was taken of the wardrobe of Henry VIII after his death: it showed that he had owned 196 cloaks. Surprisingly, only 29 of them were furred. In the early part of his reign he had acquired a number of magnificent fur gowns – one, purchased in 1537, required the pelts of 350 sables. But later his taste was for rich fabrics. Whereas his father had insisted on an ermine coverlet for his bed, Henry liked linen quilts stuffed with wool. The rich men and women of the period took pleasure in silks, jewelled brocade (a fabric first mentioned by Hakluyt, and taking its name from the Italian broccato , ‘embossed’), sparkling tinsel (which can be traced to the Latin scintilla, ‘a spark’) and shimmering damask. It seems likely that improvements in heating methods, along with the wider use of glass windows, made warm clothes much less necessary indoors.15 When Shakespeare’s Lear berates his rebellious daughters Goneril and Regan, he points out that their ‘gorgeous’ apparel ‘scarcely keeps thee warm’: their modern counterparts are the young women who wear more in bed than they do to a nightclub. Floating, superfine clothes are feats of magic more than of engineering, like the mythical knickers which, tossed into the air, never return. Words too can be flyaway – delicate, temporary, brief fireworks of erudition – and amid all this period’s finery there was an extraordinary efflorescence of language. The figures and flowers of rhetoric could be like the filmiest of fine garments.
We see this in a good deal of Elizabethan poetry, which is marked by self-consciousness. Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey forged a style rich in literary devices and effects. Their poems were like exercises – experiments in introspection, at once virile and psychologically acute. What was more, their craft had practical uses. George Puttenham’s popular The Arte of English Poesie (1589) praised their polished diction and their taste for the sweet stateliness of Italian. (He was also one of the growing number of commentators who thought that the speech of London and the counties bordering it was the best kind of English.) Puttenham presented poetry as a courtly accomplishment, and emphasized that the rhetorical dexterity of the poet could be exercised in the political arena as well. Furthermore, he characterized the language of poetry in strikingly physical terms: one kind of device was a ‘privie nippe’, another a ‘rebound’, and a third a ‘changeling’ – images out of a story of political or romantic intrigue, we might think, rather than from an account of different types of metaphor.
Less an
aesthetic manifesto than an ideological primer, Puttenham’s urbane volume highlights the power of language as an instrument of persuasion and imagines the many devices of rhetoric as political tools – capable of being used to Machiavellian ends. No mere theorist, Puttenham knew the pitfalls of public life from the inside; he was imprisoned for allegedly inciting the murder of a bishop, was excommunicated from the Church of England for failing to pay alimony to his estranged wife, and had to sue his wife’s family after they arranged for his London lodgings to be ransacked. The Arte of English Poesie was published anonymously, yet its cavalcade of rhetorical skills was unmistakably the work of a man characterized by his peers as a master of eloquent mischief. It is for us to decide whether Puttenham is being mischievous, patriotic or equivocal when, in his extensive gloss of Latin and Greek rhetorical terminology, he mentions what seem to be equally useful English equivalents. What should we think, for instance, of his talking up decorum by drawing attention to the word’s existing alternatives: decencie, seemelynesse, comelynesse and pleasant approche?
It was against this background that Robert Cawdrey, a schoolmaster, published the first monolingual English dictionary in 1604.16 This somewhat limited work, entitled A Table Alphabeticall, was intended ‘for the benefit & helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other unskilfull persons’. It advocated the avoidance of ‘strange ynckhorne termes’, ‘affected Rhetorique’ and anything ‘unusually’ difficult. At the same time, it helped readers grasp the meanings of obscure, technical or foreign terms. So, for instance, Cawdrey glossed apocrypha as ‘not of authoritie, a thing hidden’, planet as ‘wandring starre’ and circumcise as ‘to cut the privie skin’.
Further dictionaries built on Cawdrey’s example. John Cowell’s The Interpreter (1607) dealt with the terms of law, which came mainly from French and Latin, with a handful from German and Greek. For example, curfew ‘commeth of two French words’ – couvrir and feu – and ‘We use it for an evening peale, by the which the Conquerour willed every man to take warning for the raking up of his fire, and the putting out of his light.’ Henry Cockeram’s The English Dictionary (1623) targeted among others ‘young Schollers, Clarkes, Merchants, as also Strangers of any Nation’, and boasted that it contained ‘some thousands words never published by any heretofore’. Another legal man, Thomas Blount, produced a volume entitled Glossographia (1656), which was a compendium of ‘hard’ terms – ‘whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Teutonick, Belgick, British or Saxon, as are now used in our refined English Tongue’. Thus comma, from the Greek, is ‘the least note of distinction, or a point in the part of a Sentence without perfect sense’, and sherbet is either a Persian term for ‘a kinde of drink … compounded of juyce of Lemons, Sugar, Amber, and other ingredients … [or] of Violets, Honey, juyce of Raisons, and the like’ or an Arabic one that ‘signifies drink in general’. Readers may have found some of the explanations puzzling: we are likely to be unhappy with the information that lurid can mean ‘pale, wan, black, and blew’, and may be startled to read that a colon is ‘a mark … made with two pricks’. Certainly, works of this kind were unable to impose standards, and tended only rather ineffectually to unpack the mysteries of modish diction.
As all this suggests, the Elizabethans and Jacobeans loved language: they made abundant use of loanwords, and were creative with the linguistic resources that already existed. Rejoicing in the vertiginous possibilities of self-expression, they were mostly opportunists, plucking fresh terms from exotic sources. One of the most arresting features of the period is the way in which lofty words cohabit on the page with plain ones. Shakespeare exemplifies this nicely. Hamlet can accuse his mother of ‘honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty’ with his uncle (a ‘mildew’d ear’), yet can speak of the earth as a ‘sterile promontory’ and of the sky as ‘this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire’; he refers to Hyperion and Hercules, and employs words as unwieldy as cerements, suspiration and malefaction, but can spit ‘buzz buzz’ at Polonius and can later say of the courtier’s corpse, ‘I’ll lug the guts into the neighbour room.’
The fondness for wordplay which characterizes so much Elizabethan drama was a practical necessity. The influence of the Master of the Revels, a royally appointed official who had licence to carry out censorship and exact hefty fines, meant that playwrights needed to find ways of dealing obliquely with delicate matters – be they sacred or profane. Shakespeare is a master of delicate periphrasis, as of riddling puns. His more suggestive puns – Hamlet’s talk of ‘country matters’, for instance – were the main reason Thomas Bowdler found it necessary to produce for nineteenth-century readers his Family Shakespeare. Dr Johnson pronounced that the art of the pun ‘was to Shakespeare the fatal Cleopatra, for which he was prepared to give away the world’. It is a typically eighteenth-century attitude: Johnson and his peers admired Shakespeare almost in spite of his language. Yet it was not the playwright’s instinct to be difficult. The reason we can still read Shakespeare quite comfortably, while struggling with many of his contemporaries, is that his language has a comparatively low level of ‘surface difficulty’.17 In his plays the ability to speak English is usually esteemed a virtue; characters who do otherwise, like Cardinal Wolsey effortfully mouthing Latin in Henry VIII, are being marked out as villains.
Nonetheless, Shakespeare, drolly convicted by Ben Jonson of possessing ‘small Latine and lesse Greeke’, takes pleasure in exploiting the root Latin and Greek meanings of English words. Moreover, he crafts phrases that have become staples of English idiom: ‘brevity is the soul of wit’, ‘pomp and circumstance’, ‘green-eyed jealousy’, ‘more sinned against than sinning’, and so on. His works contain our first sightings of some 1,700 words. These include, just to give a few of his adjectives, lacklustre and priceless, eventful and frugal, sanctimonious and fashionable. Among the previously unrecorded words that appear in Hamlet are compulsive, excitement, proposer, unpolluted, to sate, to commingle and to besmirch. Hamlet’s education – at the university of Wittenberg – makes him the ideal vehicle for Shakespeare’s linguistic daring. Yet he can also make use of a term from the game of bowls (‘Ay, there’s the rub’) and can say with consummate colloquialism that the fawning Osric has ‘got the tune of the time’ – the pop-song sensibilities of a ‘drossy age’.18 The dramatist was happy to put the Warwickshire dialect of his youth in the mouths of his characters – as when Hal, pretending to be his father, refers to Falstaff as a ‘boulting-hutch of beastliness’, or in the use of keech (‘a cake of wax’) as a term of abuse.19 Stephen Greenblatt identifies among the dramatist’s talents the ‘uncanny ability to absorb vocabulary from a wide range of pursuits’ and his ‘lightning transformation of technical terms into the intimate registers of thoughts and feelings’.20
It is possible, of course, to exaggerate a writer’s innovations. When we find in Pericles the first recorded reference to pageantry, or in Cymbeline and The Tempest the earliest mentions of a mountaineer, we may reasonably pause to ask if the novelty is Shakespeare’s or if he is merely registering the usage of his day. It is hard to be sure, but any historical account of a language will depend on the tangible documentary evidence of the written word, rather than on alluring hearsay or wispy speculation. Perhaps some contemporaries of Chaucer or Skelton spoke of pageantry, but we have no evidence that they did, and in its absence we are safest to assume they did not. There are, in any case, other reasons for emphasizing the role of literature. To quote one recent history, ‘The recorded text is the currency of the expansion of cultural markets. Texts can be sold at any time, while oral culture can only be sold at the moment of performance.’21 A literary language – recorded, sold, resold – can be taught and preserved. By looking at written works, and especially at those that have been highly valued, we can take the temperature of the society in which they were produced.
Not surprisingly, Shakespeare touches on the Inkhorn debate. In his plays there are several charac
ters whose polysyllabic effusions are clearly meant to be ridiculous. Some, like Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing (‘Comparisons are odorous’), are guilty of what we would now call malapropisms – a common enough thing when fancy new language is being juggled. In Hamlet, Polonius says he is ‘brief ’, but his rhetorical figures (‘’Tis true ’tis pity, / And pity ’tis ’tis true’) are laughably vacuous, and Hamlet himself mocks the unctuous Osric and what Horatio calls his ‘golden words’, while the showy abuse of the Latin adverb ergo is guyed when the first gravedigger comically mispronounces it argal, and the Latinate pomposity of Hamlet’s usurping uncle Claudius is a courtly mask through which audiences can see. Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost is a linguistic fusspot: besides being a snob about spelling, he relishes piling up synonyms and uses fine words to set himself apart from those who are less educated. Shakespeare used the very new word pedant to describe him; also used by Christopher Marlowe in Edward II and by Sidney in Arcadia, it derives from the Italian pedantaggine, which is defined in John Florio’s dictionary as ‘one that would fain seem wise and learnt, and is but a fool and an ignorant self-conceited gull’. The character who attaches this word to Holofernes is Berowne, who elsewhere in the play disavows the ‘taffeta phrases’ and ‘figures pedantical’ so frequently used for wooing. Another character, Don Adriano de Armado, may have been modelled on Philip II’s secretary of state Antonio Pérez; he is an amalgam of Continental pretensions, and his rhetoric burlesques the style of Perez’s writings.22 We are told he is ‘a refined traveller of Spain’, ‘hath a mint of phrases in his brain’ and exhibits a particular taste for ‘fire-new words’ – for glittering novelties still hot from the forge.
The Secret Life of Words Page 15
