by Melvyn Bragg
On the other hand, he could back losers too. Everyday language might sound rather different if we were saying “appertainments,” “cadent,” “questrist,” “tortive,” “abruption,” “perisive,” “ungenitured,” “unplausive” or “vastidity.” His longest word, “honorificabilitudinatibus,” which means “with honour,” has also fallen out of fashion.
He ransacked everywhere for words. He used his own Midlands dialect to bring in regional words like “baton,” which means cudgel, “batlet,” which was still used around Stratford-upon-Avon until the mid twentieth century to mean the bat to beat clothes in the wash; there’s “keck” for “fool’s parsley” and “honeystalks” for “white clover”; “mobled” for “muffled”; “gallow” from “gally” — to frighten — and “geck” for “a fool.” He wrote: “Golden lads and girls all must/As chimney-sweepers come to dust.” Until recently in his home county the golden-faced dandelions were called “golden lads and lasses” and they do turn to dust, and in the shape of a chimney-sweeper’s brush. Children still blow them to find out if “she/he loves me, she/he loves me not.”
Shakespeare’s accent would have sounded rather like some current regional accents as used today by older speakers — unsurprising given the stubborn grip of the dialects of England which retain pronunciations older than those in “educated” English. He would have used a rolled “r” in words like “turn” and “heard.” “Right” and “time” would be “roight” and “toime.” Alert as any, though, to the passages leading to power, Shakespeare declared the court dialect of London to be the “true kind of pronunciation.”
There was little in the landscape of speech that escaped him. In Henry V he sets down what must be the first of a hundred thousand jokes about the accents of the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish, and even at this distance and in these few sentences, he catches the caricature:
CAPTAIN MACMORRIS (Irish): . . . tish ill done: the work ish give over, the trompet sound the retreat . . .
CAPTAIN FLUELLEN (Welsh): Captain Macmorris, I beseech you now, will you voutsafe me, look you, a few disputations with you, as partly touching or concerning the disciplines of the war . . .
CAPTAIN JAMY (Scots): It sall be vary gud, gud feith, gud captains bath: and I sall quit you with gud leve, as I may pick occasion; that sall I, marry.
Shakespeare reached out to include everything and so of course he had an ear for the coarse, for “country matters,” as in Hamlet.
John Barton, who has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon for almost half a century as scholar, historian and expert on speaking Shakespeare, can deliver Henry V’s great speech beginning “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more” in an accent which cries out as authentic. The best that can be managed on this page is to say that it is partly to do with where the stress is placed — in “aspect,” it is the second syllable which is hit, as -pect — partly to do with the length of the vowels and the “r,” so war becomes “waarr,” partly to do with using the full word, so ocean becomes “o-cee-on,” but mostly to do with something as rough, gruff, and tough as the most growly of our remaining country dialects.
Shakespeare rhymed “tea” with tay, “sea” with say, and “never die” with memory. “Complete” has the stress on the first syllable in Troilus and Cressida: “thousand com-plete courses of the Sun,” but on the second in Timon of Athens: “Never com-plete.” “An-tique,” “con-venient,” “dis-tinct,” “en-tire,” and “ex-treme” would all have the stress on the first syllable. “Ex-pert,” “para-mount,” and “par-ent,” on the last. There was a great deal of what might be termed “poetic licence.”
“Shakespeare was very free with words,” John Barton says, “and he would scan the same word differently within the same scene or speech.” As we can see with “com-plete” or “com-plete.” “I think we tend to look down the wrong end of the telescope if we don’t allow they were not quite settled in their spelling; that they were free to play games with words and language and it was in dispute.”
John Barton made a stunningly simple point about Shakespeare’s language:
It’s the monosyllables that are the bedrock and life of the language. And I believe that is so with Shakespeare. The high words, the high phrases he sets up to then bring them down to the simple ones which explain them. Like “making the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red.” First there is the high language, then the specific clear definition. At the heart of Shakespeare, listening to it for acting, the great lines, often the most poetic, are the monosyllables. Deep feeling probably comes out in monosyllables. He teemed with word invention but in some way the living power of the language comes from the interplay of the two.
Is it pushing this to point out that the monosyllables are or are nearest to Old English? That the deepest, most earthed of the languages in our many-layered tongue carry the deepest, most basic meanings? It is as if the foreign elaborations, the wonderful artifice of the new and the inserted words only really strike fire when they hit the flint of the old. Since Shakespeare’s time, one way to divide writers is between the embellished, the high extravagant stylists — Charles Dickens, James Joyce — and the more earthed — George Eliot, Samuel Beckett. Of course there was crossover in these as in others, but the two strands are clearly here in Shakespeare and he gorges on both.
His inventiveness was almost a disease. To take just one insult, “knave,” Shakespeare produces fifty different instances of it in his plays. I’ve set a few of them out as dialogue, as a long insulting rally:
A: Foul knave!
Z: Lousy knave!
A: Beastly knave!
Z: Scurvy railing knave!
A: Gorbellied knave!
Z: Bacon-fed knave!
A: Wrangling knave!
Z: Base notorious knave!
A: Arrant malmsey-nose knave!
Z: Poor cuckoldly knave!
A: Stubborn ancient knave!
Z: Pestilent complete knave!
A: Counterfeit cowardly knave!
Z: Rascally yea-forsooth knave!
A: Foul-mouthed and calumnious knave!
Z: The lyingest knave in Christendom!
A: Rascally, scald, beggarly, lousy, pragging knave!
Z: Whoreson, beetle-headed, flap-ear’d knave!
A: Base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave; a whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch! Pah!
It is his contemporary Ben Jonson who caught him best. Writing a few years after Shakespeare’s death, he used terms which might have been thought hyperbolic and now seem prophetically accurate. It was 1623, the year in which Shakespeare’s First Folio was published.
Thou art a monument without a tomb
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give.
Jonson ranks his contemporaries well below him; even the Greeks, Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, are called on to honour him. Jonson takes great pride in Shakespeare’s nationality. Since the joining of Scotland with England and Wales under James I, the word “Britain” had come into play:
Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not for an age, but for all time . . .
In The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last play, the main character, Prospero, uses a staff that is often seen to be an image of Shakespeare’s quill. Shakespeare called Prospero’s magic “a potent art.” And Shakespeare himself used the power of language to conjure up a multitude of enduring phrases and images. When, in Prospero’s last speech, he breaks his staff, Shakespeare could be laying down his pen, as he did when he moved from London with the intention of living
out a long hale life as a country gentleman in Stratford-upon-Avon.
. . . But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book . . .
He did put down his staff but his books refuse to drown. Editions of his works have appeared uninterruptedly since that First Folio seven years after his death. The Oxford English Dictionary lists more than fourteen thousand Shakespeare quotations. There were more than three hundred film adaptations of Shakespeare in the twentieth century and almost every person brought up in the United States or United Kingdom will have read or seen at least one of Shakespeare’s plays. At any given moment a Shakespeare play is being performed or read somewhere from Broadway to London to an amateur theatre group in Nepal. And for the first time in English history, with Shakespeare and his contemporaries, language supports the professional writer, the man of letters.
In his time, English was also beginning one of the greatest voyages in its adventure: to America, where English would discover and make a new land of words. The Plymouth Pilgrims took with them flags, Bibles and this remarkable language.
Shakespeare gave us a new world in words and insights which would colour, help, deepen, lighten and depict our lives in thought and feeling. He had to the known limit exercised that most important and mysterious faculty, the imagination. At the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus says:
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
13
“My America”
English went west once more on its most fateful journey since the fifth century. A weighty proportion of the early settlers came from East Anglia, the land of the Angles where Englalond became England. The Mayflower families and those who followed them were, on the whole, people of above-average literacy, moral certainty, religious passion and, possibly, among the most stout-hearted. It was the first mass exodus from a very small country — about three and a half million (a fifth of the population of France at that time) — and the beginning of centuries of considerable emigration, of seeding of continents with the English and the “British” and with the English language. This emigration was at the expense, many feared, of the size and quality of the English “stock” in England itself.
But there was no stopping it.
In the last year of the sixteenth century, Samuel Daniel, the court poet, inebriated on English and intoxicated about its powers, speculated:
And who in time knows whither we may vent
The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores
This gain of our best glory shall be sent,
T’inrich unknowing nations with our store?
America and Americans became the prime inheritor of the English tongue which they made their own. From Britain to America it went on to the ends of the earth, where nations were often enriched with our stores though sometimes impoverished of their own. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the English adventure took to the ships once more and sailed out for what it thought of as fertile, free and conquerable land just as it had done more than a thousand years before.
It is appropriate to begin at Plymouth Rock in New England, where the Pilgrim Fathers landed in November 1620. At the end of the sixteenth century, the English had already made two settlements further down the coast. The total population in one of the settlements, at Roanoke Island, left to fend for themselves while fresh resources were brought from the mother country, had vanished completely and without trace. In the next colony, at Jamestown in Virginia, the settlers had actually been on their way back to England when a ship arrived with supplies to keep them alive. There are acknowledged claims to American-English paternity in the Jamestown area and on Tangier Island, where a quarter of America’s oysters and much valued crabs still keep alive a community of less than a thousand people whose accent is salted by an English Cornish dialect almost four hundred years old. But as one of America’s biggest holidays is Thanksgiving, in November, a celebration of the harvest and other blessings of the year 1620, the Pilgrims do not seem to be an unreasonable starting point.
The Mayflower group were religious separatists with a powerful and sustaining belief in the word of God. The Bible in English was the foundation of their faith and their works. They wished to create a new community in which they could worship as freely as they wanted. In this they were wholly different from their fifth-century Frisian ancestors, who had moved west across the sea to seize inadequately defended farming land. On the other hand, the consequences of settlement soon brought similarities into play. The Pilgrim Fathers — with all that phrase implies about seeking a promised land and mastering it once there — bound themselves by an oath, the Mayflower Compact, swearing to found a colony for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith.
They were not the first people on that continent. Native Americans had been there for about thirty thousand years and there were hundreds of different, often complex, languages. And, much more recently, the Spanish had been in South America since 1513 and spread as far as Florida, and the French had established trading posts up the St. Lawrence. These would soon grow into such large swathes of the continent that for many years the English settlement appeared no more than a sliver, the rind on the edge of a large chunk of the Franco-Spanish land mass. Even the Dutch, secure in New Amsterdam on the rock of Manhattan, seemed much better dug in. There must have been a sense in which those interminable European wars, Spain versus England versus France versus Spain versus Holland, had simply gone across the Atlantic to find a bigger field to fight in. Whose language would prevail? Would any? There were hundreds of languages already in place which were in good shape and giving good service to those who used them.
In terms of the European “competition,” the English Protestants were to score heavily because they came primarily not to plunder, which had been the gleeful purpose of the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French and the Dutch and the English before them, nor even to trade; but to settle and build a new world in accordance with God’s law and above all following God’s word. They came to stay.
And it is difficult to overemphasise the fact that they came with the Bible in English and they lived every hour of their days by that Bible. For the word of God in English, their predecessors — as we saw with Wycliffe and Tyndale — had suffered exile, persecution, torture and death. They went to America to find a better place. They wanted to stay English and they sought a true England in which to plant their courageously and obstinately claimed English Bible. They were not going to yield its language to anyone.
By what could be called a miracle they just escaped total extinction. They arrived in winter and found not Eden but what they saw as a desolate and dangerous wilderness, “wild beasts, wild men,” winter. William Bradford, first governor of the Plymouth colony and chronicler of the Pilgrims, wrote in his journal:
And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men? And what multitudes there might be of men they knew not.
One of these wild men would be the miracle.
Cold, hungry, weak, sick, unable to understand how to feed themselves in this foreign land, nearly half of that God-fearing company of a hundred forty-four had died within weeks.
There is an impressive reproduction of the first Mayflower settlement at “Plimouth Plantation” a few miles out of Plymouth
in Massachusetts. The stockaded habitation has not only been rebuilt in accurate detail — the small dark cottages, the little fort on top of the small hill, the pens and barred gates — but the place is now permanently populated by actors, each of whom has studied and impersonates one of the original settlers. They cook, they farm, the preacher preaches and they take great trouble to adopt the known English dialects of the early seventeenth century, like that of Mistress Standish, “Barbary is my name,” who came, summoned as a second wife, unusually from the north, from Ormskirk in Lancashire, and had to get used to “butchery and slaughtering.”
Yet the original village might never have survived but for Squanto.
William Bradford caught the moment. “Whilst we were busied hereabout, we were interrupted, for there presented himself a savage which caused an alarm. He very boldly came all alone and along the houses straight to the rendezvous, where we intercepted him, not suffering him to go in, as undoubtedly he would, out of his boldness. He saluted us in English and bade us ‘welcome.’ ”
What odds against the first word the Pilgrim Fathers met with in America, and from a “wild man,” being “welcome”? That having travelled three thousand miles and hit a spot on the continent they had not aimed for, they should be met in English?
The man who came out of the woods had picked up some words from English fishermen along the coast. But he was not the miracle. He introduced them to Tisquantum, abbreviated to Squanto, and it was Squanto who saved the settlement. He is a most important man in this chapter of the adventure of English.
