It is in Ben Jonson’s The Poetaster (1601), though, that the tooth-breaking awkwardness of the new words is most graphically satirized, when the bad poet Crispinus is obliged to spew up some of his half-digested novelties. His vomit of ‘terrible, windy’ polysyllables, caught in a basin by the poet Horace, includes some indigestible items – in one retch he brings up both turgidous and ventositous – but also some lasting ones, like strenuous, retrograde and defunct.
Jonson was one of those who envisioned a lucid path through this forest of verbiage. His The English Grammar – written before 1623, though not published until after his death, in 1640 – was created ‘for the benefit of all Strangers’, and attempted to organize English grammar on the model of Latin. Drama was a contentious arena, and its linguistic fashions were especially contentious. Jonson argued for restraint. In his view, the cream of language comprised the oldest parts of present usage and the newest of the past. Novelties were, at best, acceptable; at worst, they were to be scorned. ‘Custom is the most certain mistresse of language,’ he wrote in Timber, or Discoveries (also published in 1640), ‘as the public stamp makes the current money.’ The title of this volume is apposite: the literary and linguistic ‘discoveries’ of the Renaissance, like the discoveries of colonialists and explorers, posed problems both practical and ethical. ‘Language most shows a man,’ writes Jonson. ‘Speak that I may see thee.’ Yet confusion reigned. In his play Bartholomew Fair (1614) he presents language as a kind of chaotic game: its words are irregular, and when they are given some sort of order it is in a spirit of festive self-regard.23
Modish words were sometimes the object of self-conscious reference. In John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, first performed in 1614, the Calabrian duke, Ferdinand, is flummoxed by the Greek word lycanthropia – a popular new term for an obscure yet commonly imagined malady – and remarks, ‘I need a dictionary to’t.’ His frank admission of ignorance struck a chord with contemporary theatregoers, for whom such novelties were sometimes exciting yet often troublesome. In 1612 the playwright Thomas Heywood published An Apology for Actors, in which he defended the theatre against Puritan invective and argued that the language of drama represented the very best of English, but a few years later John Green, in a refutation of Heywood, disparaged the linguistic ‘mingle-mangle’ of English drama. According to Green, ‘before the Conquest by Bastard William that the French came in, our English tongue was most perfect,’ but in the centuries since then it had been depraved, and ‘a plaine man can scarce utter his mind, for want of Phrases … according to the fashion.’24
‘Bastard William’, not ‘William the Conqueror’: the choice of words is telling. In the last years of the sixteenth century we come across the verb to Frenchify, coined by Robert Greene; another early user is Richard Rowlands. Its thrust is pejorative: Greene pokes fun at a ‘Frenchefied’ man whose hair laps over his shoulders. Suspicion of foreigners and foreign ways was reflected in the language of the street – and above all in the language of sex. The French were the principal target: someone infected with syphilis was said to have ‘learnt French’, and syphilis itself was known as the ‘French disease’, ‘French pox’, ‘French measles’, and even ‘the French razor’, on account of its causing victims to lose their hair. But others were similarly attacked. ‘Spanish buttons’ was slang for the buboes that ravaged the body of anyone infected with venereal disease, while ‘Spanish water’ referred to infected semen. ‘Italian tricks’ was slang for buggery, as was ‘Italian sin’, and the jobbing playwright Thomas Dekker, though happy to adopt Italian vocabulary, referred to ‘backdoor Italians’.25
Soldiers, diplomats, merchants and intellectuals, who travelled in all three countries, were able to correct crude stereotypes, although often they buttressed them, complaining of brawling, duelling Parisians, of the moral laxity of Venice, of the assassins and poisoners of Rome, and of the sheer difficulty and costliness of travelling in Spain.26 Travel itself was viewed with suspicion, as it exposed pliable minds to Catholicism. This suspicion increased in the later years of Elizabeth’s reign, when those venturing ‘across seas’ were assumed to be at risk of kidnapping by Spaniards. While travel developed character, it also created artificial challenges. The pejorative word gesticulate, adopted around 1600, grew out of English tourists’ distaste for the excessive gestures of Italians, French and others.27 The English, by contrast, made little use of gestures.
In this area, too, Shakespeare is a good source of up-to-date adoptions. Most of his French appears in Henry V. Near the end of the play, the eponymous hero suggests to his French princess that between them they can ‘compound a boy, half French, half English, that shall go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard’. The lines are a reminder that, even amid the religious ructions of the period, there were ill feelings of a higher pitch than those between England and France. In a different spirit are the princess’s attempts to learn English words. ‘Comment appelez-vous les pieds et la robe?’ she asks. Her tutor answers, ‘De foot, madame, et de cown.’ Instead of hearing feet and gown, she hears in his mispronunciation the French foutre and con, which understandably alarms her. The words, she exclaims, are ‘de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique’. Her conclusion? ‘De tongues of de mans is be full of deceits’ – a nice summary of the imbroglios of human communication. There are dashes of French elsewhere – as when Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night corruptly renders quelque chose as kickshaw. Shakespeare’s Spanish words include hurricano, ambuscado and barricado. In The Winter’s Tale the pranksome Autolycus mentions a ballad in which a woman ‘longed to eat adders’ heads and / Toads carbonadoed’ – a preposterous exaggeration of the perversions of the Continental diet. By contrast, Falstaff is warmly receptive to foreign food and drink. When he refers to ‘sherris sack’, meaning the dry wine from Jerez, this is of course sherry. He relishes its ‘twofold operation’, conveniently believing that it warms the blood and stirs the brain, whereas we may think of other, less helpful, effects of heavy drinking.
When it comes to Italian, we should take a step back to review the terrain in all its breadth. Today it is a language commonly associated with three fs – food, fashion and football. Whether or not we can really speak any Italian, we all have a little of it at our disposal. Ordering an espresso, or intoning the names of Italian cars and fashion designers, or rolling one’s tongue around the titles of the dishes on an Italian menu, one savours the language’s apparent opulence. Carpaccio di manzo. Salvatore Ferragamo. Saltimbocca – the dish that, taken literally, jumps into one’s mouth – and tiramisu – a ‘pick me up’, though its effect is nothing of the sort, as Tony Soprano could confirm. Terms of art, too: replica, impasto, chiaroscuro. The textures of the words are, to me at least, luscious. They suggest a more romantic world. (Such feelings are not academically respectable: they smack of deep-seated prejudice or of pride, as in Anatole France’s claim, ‘La langue française est une femme … si belle … si noble … si sage.’) We have borrowed from Italian la dolce vita, Cosa Nostra and mamma mia, and each hints at the places where Italian culture and society have touched the lives of English-speakers.
Over the past seven centuries, the busiest areas of borrowing have been art, music and food, and the busiest periods have been between 1550 and 1650 and in the nineteenth century. Laura Pinnavaia, who has researched the Italian element in English, explains that in the period between 1550 and 1600 ‘the majority of Italian borrowings seem to deal with plants, man’s physical appearance and state, sensations and perceptions, actions, social groups, behaviour, war, weaponry, fortifications, armed forces, crime, linguistic expressions, poetry, geometry, mathematics, the textile industry, commerce and sports.’ If that sounds a broad range, compare the period from 1600 to 1650, where there is a particular concern with ‘physical geography and the weather’. In the second half of the seventeenth century most Italian loanwords in English regard ‘state, religion, theatre, education and finances’. Then from 1700 to 1750 ‘musi
cal terms predominate’ – we are likely to think of opera and piano, and maybe also of more specialized words such as intermezzo and pizzicato. In the next half-century opera is to the fore, and so is geology. From 1800 to 1850 ‘one sole semantic field dominates: that of entertainment, ’ and in the half-century that followed the key domains included sculpture, ceramics and the Church.28 A few concrete examples may cement our impressions. Carnival is sighted in 1549, fresco in 1598, and umbrella in 1609 in a letter by John Donne, although the first Briton to carry an umbrella was Jonas Hanway more than 150 years later (and he was ridiculed for doing so). Gusto makes an appearance in 1629, though it took almost two centuries for it to catch on. Gambit, which comes from an Italian term for tripping one’s opponent while wrestling, appears in a book about chess in 1656.29 Other Tudor imports from Italian included cameo, madrigal, motto and stucco, while violin – from violino – appears in the works of Jonson and Spenser.
The inspirations here are not obscure. The Renaissance engendered a mania for all things Italian. Traders exploited this, but relations with Italy cooled with the accession of Charles I. In the second half of the seventeenth century a fresh influx of Italian words had much to do with the waning of Puritanism and the religious tolerance of Charles II. The phenomenon of the Grand Tour and the Romantic poets’ enthusiasm for Italian literature inspired later borrowings, which revolved around leisure more than commerce.
For Elizabethans, however, Italians’ skills in trade and the conduct of state affairs were as compelling as their artistic prowess. Political thought was influenced by Niccolò Machiavelli’s Il principe (published in 1532), which argued that proper government calls for real strength but only feigned morals. Machiavelli’s name became a sort of denotative cliché for the sinister extremes of statecraft. Moreover, Machiavelli’s promotion of virtù – a combination of shrewdness, vigour, skill and effort – skewed the meaning of the English word virtue. For what virtù certainly didn’t mean was ‘goodness’, and his English readers, even if they were aware of the gap between virtù and virtue, couldn’t help conflating the two. Peggy Knapp has argued that ‘The influence of the Prince impeded the bond between power and goodness from becoming an automatic and ordinary usage in early Modern English, by treating … manly action … as working best … when it is a … charade.’ Ultimately, the adoption of what we may anachronistically call realpolitik ‘allowed some relaxation of private moral strictures in governing the nation’.30 Not insignificantly, from the time of its first adoption in the 1560s, the adjective Machiavellian has been used disparagingly.
In the drama of the period, Italy was associated with criminality and splendour – with court intrigue, wicked poisonings, and pageantry. Playwrights were impressed by the Italian touring companies and their gory interpretations of Seneca. Stephen Gosson’s Playes Confuted in Five Actions (1582) mentions the popularity in London of spectacles staged in Italian. Webster’s dramas are crammed with ostentatious Italianism. His characters describe in detail the use of a stiletto as a murder weapon and say things like ‘Me thinks, being an Italian, I trust you.’ We find the same rather fanciful local colour in John Marston’s The Insatiate Countess (published in 1613) and Philip Massinger’s The Unnatural Combat (c.1624). John Ford includes snatches of Italian song in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1633). Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women (c. 1621) is set in sixteenth-century Florence among members of the Medici family. Jonson’s Volpone is more authentic, and in his detailed presentation of Venetian quackery the playwright, perhaps drawing on the knowledge of his friend Florio, includes such words as ciarlatani, piazza, vertigine and ampulla. In the same play Proteus makes mention of a ‘Lombard proverb’ to do with financial necessity: here is our first imperfect sighting of the enduring calque cold feet.
While many of the Italian contributions to English have come via French, in the sixteenth century numerous words came from Italian directly. Trade connections were important in this, and are evident in such Italian loans as contraband, traffic, frigate and mercantile . At the same time the promise of art, music, luxury and romance inspired travellers to visit Italy, and they returned with samples and tokens of them all. William Thomas’s Principal Rules of the Italian Grammar (1550) was the first concerted attempt to help English-speakers learn Italian.31 Half a century later, Giovanni Botero’s Relationi Universali was phenomenally successful in a translation by Robert Johnson, which expanded Botero’s treatment of his country and countrymen.32
The riches of Italy at this time are suggested in the paintings of Titian, Raphael and Michelangelo and the architecture of Palladio and Giulio Romano. Thomas Coryat’s Crudities (1611), a digest of bits and pieces ‘hastily gobled up’ during five months’ travel on the Continent, affords a distinctively English and rhapsodic view of Italy: of the ‘very prety’ hats of women in Piedmont; of Padua, a city ‘as sweetly seated as any place of the whole world’; of Venice and ‘the resplendent rayes of her unparalleled beauty’; of ‘very delectable’ Verona and the ‘goodly vineyards’ between Brescia and Bergamo.33 Coryat is a faintly absurd character, who can tell us little of Turin because ‘I found so great a distemperature in my body, by drinking the sweete wines of Piemont, that caused a grievous inflammation in my face and hands … that I had but a smal desire to walke much.’34 He records what were at that time positively bizarre items like forks, and mentions the ‘place where the whole fraternity of the Jews dwelleth together, which is called the Ghetto’.35 This may come from getto, the Italian word for a foundry – the first such community in Venice was established in 1516 on a site where there had previously been a foundry – or from borghetto, a word for a small settlement outside city walls, which now seems to be a favourite name for places offering agriturismo to people who have overdosed on Under the Tuscan Sun.
Other nouns that came in at this time were regatta, gondola and lottery, as well as tarot and carnival. The last of these was reckoned by Florio to derive from a Latin expression meaning ‘farewell to flesh’; the word carnival was properly applied to Ash Wednesday, the day of penitence that preceded the Lent fast. Besides festive terms, there was the usual influx of foodstuffs (macaroni, rocket), but it was in the language of manners and courtliness that Italian proved especially influential. It is to Italian that we owe such terms as the already mentioned gusto and – less obviously – gambol and disgrace. A few borrowings were even more heavily anglicized; bankrupt renders the Italian banca rotta,‘broken bench’, which recalls the stipulation that insolvent Venetian moneylenders destroy the counters from which they traded.
The embrace of Italians’ architectural style and enthusiasm for fine gardens is reflected in the imports cupola, pergola and grotto. These kept their pleasing Italian appearance, while words like pilaster and pedestal assumed less obviously exotic forms. Another architectural addition was balcony. Based on the Italian word for a scaffold, it was unsatisfactorily defined by Florio as ‘a windowe, a baywindowe, a bulke, a stall of a shop’, and its novelty was sufficient for Milton to use it only tentatively in Areopagitica half a century later.36
A final symptom of the vogue for the Italian was the enthusiasm for names like Orlando, Bianca and Juliet, all of which were popularized by Shakespeare. The dramatist had a sketchy knowledge of Italian, yet was keen to show off what he did know. His plays often have Italian settings: the names of The Merchant of Venice and The Two Gentlemen of Verona reveal their locations, and we travel to Messina in Much Ado About Nothing, to Verona and Mantua in Romeo and Juliet, and to Padua in The Taming of the Shrew, while The Tempest features the ruling families of Milan and Naples. In truth, his knowledge of Italian geography and customs was not impeccable – he locates Padua in Lombardy, for example, and imagines characters from Verona sailing right around the Italian coastline to reach Milan, even though Milan was less than 100 miles away overland.
This hardly mattered, though, when the romance of Italy and Italian was in the air. Shakespeare uses several dozen Italian words, including ma
gnifico, ben trovato, coragio, ben venuto, Diablo, perdonato and signor. In Love’s Labour’s Lost he introduces the Italian stanza and fantasim – the latter a very strange word employed by him alone, to signify a fantastic being. In the same play he uses zany, a word for a clown, which is a corruption of Giovanni, the stock name for clownish servants in commedia dell’arte. In the second part of Henry IV Pistol speaks bad Italian – no coincidence, for his name may suggest not just the obvious link with an erratic little weapon, but also connections with the Tuscan town Pistoia (which was known for its well-made daggers) and with the Italian pistolfo, a successful sort of rogue or beggar. In Pericles Thaisa quotes a motto which she believes to be Spanish although it is much closer to Italian. Falstaff derides ‘mad Mustachio-purple-hu’d-Maltwormes’, and his word mustachio blends the Spanish mostazo and the Italian mostaccio (meaning ‘face’) – both of them linked at once to the Latin mustaceus, a rhombus-shaped pastry doused in new wine and handed out at wedding feasts, and to the Greek mystax, meaning the upper lip. Bandit first appears in the second part of Henry VI. In other plays we come across capriccio, varletto, cubiculo and basta.
The Secret Life of Words Page 16
