by Melvyn Bragg
The educated and upper classes were travelling in greater numbers to the Continent, especially to Italy, and they returned baggage laden with old artefacts, borrowed fashions, new words and wider ambitions. In Italy they admired the way language was being explored in poetry. Poetry refined and advanced the language in a way the English admired and were determined to emulate.
To write in your own language, to play with it and mould it — these all became aims to which the educated wished to aspire. English literature became the vogue. Roger Ascham, Elizabeth I’s tutor, said that his colleagues would much rather read Malory’s mid-fifteenth-century tale Le Morte d’Arthur (in English) than the Bible. They began to copy and experiment. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, beheaded by Henry VIII, had used blank verse when translating Virgil’s Aeneid.
One of Surrey’s fellow poets, the humanist and courtier Sir Thomas Wyatt, was acquitted of treason and escaped Henry VIII’s execution machine, then travelled to Italy, France and Spain. In the French and Italian courts he found a form that would shape and fit English for its unparalleled poetic future: the sonnet. The sonnet was a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameters which had been in use since the thirteenth century. Wyatt — like so many others — looked towards the great Italian Petrarch’s sonnets and noted also the love motifs which inhabited so many of them, for which indeed they seemed made. He took the sonnet into English.
It might seem hard to argue that the English sonnet that developed from Wyatt’s raid on Europe was crucial to the development of the English language. But many do. The English language by now was a thickly plaited rope, a rope of many strands, still wrapped around the Old English centre, still embellished with Norse, lushly fattened and lustred with French, and it was now a language serving many demands. It was a language for religion, a language for law, a language for the court, a language for the fields, a language for war, for work, for celebration, for rage, for rudery and puritanical prudery, a language for all seasons but not yet confidently and fully a language exquisitely honed for the expression of the finest emotions and tuned to perfect pitch for feelings, strung to the heart. The sonnet took it along that way.
Although its rigid rules of order and arrangement might seem limiting, the sonnet became a proving ground for poets. It was the place where you could burnish the language, polish every word, dazzle your rivals. And in polishing their own work, these gentlemen poets also polished English.
Queen Elizabeth I has a fair claim to be the best educated monarch ever to sit on the throne of England. Apart from her mastery of rhetoric — demonstrated at Tilbury — she spoke six languages and translated French and Latin texts. Furthermore, she enjoyed writing poetry:
I grieve and dare not show my Discontent;
I love and yet am forc’d to seem to hate;
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant;
I seem stark mute but Inwardly do prate.
England was seeking a literature to reflect its newly enriched status and it was to the courtiers, the knights of Elizabeth’s entourage, that the role fell to turn the English language into literature. The gentleman-poet was called up, he who could handle the pen with as much skill as the sword; it was his turn now to play his part in the adventure of English. The courtier wrote for pleasure, for show and for the love of writing; it was his plumage, playing with the language, seeking lines belonging only to him, looking for immortality in verse.
The perfect embodiment of the courtier-poet was a heroic nobleman born in one of the great houses of England, Penshurst Place, in 1554, and dead a mere thirty-one years later on a battlefield fighting the Spanish in the Netherlands: Sir Philip Sidney. He achieved lasting fame for giving his water bottle to another wounded soldier with the words “Thy need is greater than mine.”
By his mid twenties, Sidney had already worked as Elizabeth’s ambassador abroad and had written and published the finest collection of love poems of his age. He had the leisure, the wealth, the education, the wit and the will to make English itself the subject of some of his poetry and his treatise about language, A Defence of Poesy. He composed music and songs, he was the very perfect courtier-poet.
One of his sonnets made a conversation about the English language itself. It is a dialogue between the poet and his inner doubts, about whether writing poetry can ease the pain of love, and what other people will make of his words. In line eleven, he tells his wit (his inner voice) to be silent, because his thoughts (also wit) are spoiling his ability to write (wit again). But the poet still has doubts, and wonders whether his writing is just a waste of ink — though he hopes that some of his words may express the qualities of Stella, the woman he loves, and the cause of all this anguish.
Come, let me write. And to what end? To ease
A burthen’d heart. How can words ease, which are
The glasses of thy dayly-vexing care?
Oft cruel fights well pictur’d-forth do please.
Art not asham’d to publish thy disease?
Nay, that may breed my fame, it is so rare.
But will not wise men thinke thy words fond ware?
Then be they close, and so none shall displease.
What idler thing then speake and be not hard?
What harder thing then smart and not to speake?
Peace, foolish wit! With wit my wit is mard.
Thus write I, while I doubt to write, and wreake
My harmes in inks poor losse. Perhaps some find
Stella’s great pow’rs, that so confuse my mind.
Poetry and the innovation it brought in became the benchmark for what might be called High English. In his Defence of Poesy, Sidney praises a “sound stile” that cannot allow “an old rustike language.” He argues that poetry should reach for the ideal as opposed to imitating the reality. The poet can make a world more beautiful than nature did: words can change the world. This was an intoxicating challenge to the educated young gallants and would-be gallants of England and they took it up. The testing ground for English was now in its poetry.
Sidney had set a daunting example in his life. The intensity and high-flying drama of the life seemed somehow a springboard for his writing. There are two thousand two hundred twenty-five quotations from Sidney in the Oxford English Dictionary. Numerous first usages are attributed to Philip Sidney: “bugbear,” “dumb-stricken,” “miniature” for a small picture. He was fond of adding words together to form evocative images ranging from “far-fetched” to “milk-white” horses, “eypleasing” flowers, “well-shading” trees, to more unusual ones like “hony flowing” eloquence, “hangworthy” necks and “long-with-love-acquainted” eyes.
He could make a clichéd story new by the boldness of his words and his employment of fresh new terms. Thus the well-worn classical story of Cupid shooting someone with the arrow of love becomes a dark criminal event:
Fly, fly, my friends. I have my death wound, fly;
See there that Boy, that murthring Boy I say,
Who like a theefe hid in dark bush doth ly
Till bloudy bullet get him wrongfull pray.
Professor Katherine Duncan-Jones, the leading authority on Philip Sidney, has said of the poet and of the time that
I think there was this sense that very modern things, things of absolutely the present moment could be done with the language, that this was a language that was both very historical and carried many relics of Latin and Greek and French and Saxon and yet was absolutely streetwise. Sidney believed that English and English culture could be as rich as French, Italian, and, even to name the enemy, Spanish culture. Sidney was very well informed about Spanish literature and culture too, he was actually Philip of Spain’s godson, named after him. So he had a confidence in the English language as a medium in which great works of art could be produced and also everyday transactions could be carried on. They didn’t have to be in Latin or in the kind of French used by diplomats. The English language could actually be used for important matters of state.
H
e brought into the language words and phrases across the spectrum. “My better half” for a much-loved spouse, which, Professor Duncan-Jones points out, “in its context in Sidney is tragic and now is a sort of sitcom cliche — ‘I’ll have to see what my better half thinks about that.’ And ‘conversation,’ which used to mean just having dealings of an undefined kind with other people but the specific application to having dealings through language was Sidney’s.”
Sidney wrote: “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 ” (my italics).
There is a sense of triumph, even victory, in that last sentence. Partly because of Sidney, poetry, not royal commands or sermons or even the Bible itself, poetry became the benchmark for English. By the 1600s, poets like John Donne, Thomas Campion, Michael Drayton, Ben Jonson, George Herbert and many more were writing lines such as Jonson’s “Drinke to me, onely, with thine eyes” and Donne’s “No man is an Iland” which have become everyday expressions. And in enriching their writing technique, poets also enriched English as a language, fit for the most testing poetic and dramatic endeavours.
After his death on the battlefield, Sir Philip Sidney, the young man who had become the star of this movement, was borne back across to England from the Netherlands as the first English itself had been more than a thousand years before him.
Perhaps as a consequence of all this, the language of the courtier was drifting even further from the language of the people. Attitudes towards regional varieties of speech and their accents were hardening. Class was discovering a fertile home in speech differences. But by this time to be at the top table was not to speak Latin or French but English of a particular variety. The Received Pronunciation of the day was that of London and the Home Counties.
In 1589, George Puttenham, the author of the rhetoric manual The Arte of English Poesie, wrote that:
ye shall therfore take the usuall speach of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying about London within lx myles, and not much above. I say not this but that in every shyre of England 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 the learned clarkes, do for the most part condescend.
Puttenham’s distinction between written English — which could, he says, be of quality in whatever part of the country — and spoken English outside the charmed spell of Middlesex and Surrey is an early and acute insight.
How does that compare with English today? In terms of newspapers, magazines, essays, books of scholarship, and most poetry, drama, film and fiction, the language has been largely consolidated as “that of London.” Yet the written word in television drama has decisively broken away from that, and often with success: Coronation Street is Britain’s most popular soap over its forty years even though its writers use a heavily accented northern tongue. EastEnders poses an intriguing problem. Though London based, it is not written in the sort of London language George Puttenham was describing in 1589. Yet it also reaches out to millions of understanding English speakers.
There are similar exceptions in poetry, fiction and drama, but fewer. On the whole, Puttenham’s world is already recognisably our contemporary literary world and yet our most overwhelmingly popular medium is television, whose writers can claim audiences per episode of twelve to eighteen million compared with, say, the two hundred to three hundred thousand who eventually read a successful literary novel or the fifty to a hundred thousand who will read well-reviewed modern poetry. So whose English has it?
The easy way out is to dismiss television writers as “popular.” It might be relevant to note that the early East End novels of Daniel Defoe were also designated by the status-setters of the time as merely popular. Perhaps because they were poor novels. And EastEnders, like other soaps, cannot, I think, compare with the best plays, novels and films being written now. But it has never been a clever bet to disregard the potential energy in what is so very popular. Defoe went on to be one of the founders of English journalism and the English novel with The Journal of the Plague Year and Robinson Crusoe. Surely that could never happen with soaps? Yet Estuary English creeps in and shows no sign of ebbing.
Until quite recently, the Puttenham thesis would have been wholly unchallenged. Sir Thomas Elyot, of the Inkhorn Controversy on the side of tolerance and inclusiveness, advises in his Governour that the nurses who look after the children of noblemen in their infancy should speak an English which he says should be “cleane, polite, perfectly and articulately pronounced, omittinge no lettre or sillable,” rather as medieval commentators had enjoined that the women who looked after the Norman-French children should speak to them only in good French. Everybody knew what the ruling tongue was — and on the whole they knew they had to ape it to succeed. It is not quite as clear-cut today.
The struggle for the “right and proper” ways to speak was and is a continuing debate. Sir Walter Raleigh’s Devonshire accent was strongly remarked on. Local accent was a matter of comment for a long time. Wordsworth’s Cumbrian accent was noted at the end of the eighteenth century; D. H. Lawrence’s Nottinghamshire (and his dialect in poems and short stories) at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries; William Faulkner’s southern American in the mid twentieth; Toni Morrison in the late twentieth century. But on the whole these were exceptions: the standard was established in London, in New York, in capitals everywhere.
The Renaissance saw the beginning of the great writing rift, the splitting away of literature from everyday speech. Dialect words and terms often made an appearance in the work of major mainstream writers — Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy, for instance — but dialect writing was and is still, largely, thought to be below the salt. On the whole, literature still belongs to the high table, as George Puttenham indicated in 1589, and realists of the sixteenth century saw this and identified it. Writing had its own web to spin, its own written rhythms to discover, its own silent world to plumb and most of it was thought and aimed to be above common speech.
In the sixteenth century, dialect began to be considered uncouth, while at the same time it was admitted to contain energy. The story has not changed much since. In the late sixteenth century the dialect in southern Kent was possibly considered the most clumsy. It was used to indicate ignorance and foolishness on stage. Some of the early comedies like Ralph Roister Doister (about 1550) have characters using “ich” for “I,” “chill” for “I will” and “cham” for “I am.” It was considered positively rustic — and therefore funny and to be condescended to — to say “zorte” for “sort” and “zedge” for “say.”
But the juice in the dialects and local tongues did not dry up because of the laughter of London. They were to dig in for an astonishing number of years, over four centuries in some cases, and a few, even today, are going strong. Scotland provides the most vivid examples.
For centuries the streets of London had developed their own street slang. Crown and finance were centralised in London: so were rogues, thieves, prostitutes and criminals. There was so much interest in the language of vagabonds and thieves that a number of glossaries were published, such as John Awdely’s The Fraternyte of Vacabondes (1575). So we know that “cove” meant man, “fambles” meant hands, “gan” was mouth, “pannam” was bread and “skipper” was barn.
Shakespeare was to use courtly English, street slang and his own local dialect. For much of the sixteenth century troupes of actors had been travelling England, performing plays and easily incorporating local dialects to heighten the effect and please the local audiences. These performances could be dangerous events and near riots are recorded at some of them. But it was these men (all men then) who knew that the mix, the spoken mix of high and low, of the beautiful high flow of Sir Philip Sidney, set alongside Ralph Roister Doister and the fast gang slang of Southwark,
was combustible on stage.
Eventually these acting troupes settled in open-air theatres in London, the first in 1576. From 1583, the court had its own troupe of players, called The Queen’s Men, who also toured the country. Those players were not speaking the new upper-class language of the poets, nor were they concentrating on the language of the streets. They had found a theatrical language, a way to address people across class and educational lines, to reach the majority. For wherever they played they were such a unique event in that town’s history that it was the majority who turned up and paid and wanted to be pleased.
They roared into London and set up their theatres in Southwark. It was the principal nest of crime in the capital, it was filthy, crowded and dangerous, but it was cheap and next to the river for the convenience of those afraid to walk. It was also outside the City of London and hence the jurisdiction of the City Fathers who tended to deal with actors under the harsh laws against vagrancy. The Globe was built there in 1599. On these popular communal stages, something extraordinary happened which was to ornament, deepen, mine and charm English into a language capable, it seemed, of taking on anything, any thought, any action, any story, any feeling, any drama.
