From the Fifth Century to the Fifteenth
The English language in its original state arrives in the isles of Britain on the lips of the fifth-century Anglo-Saxon adventurers who waded ashore to take possession of a country the Romans had lately vacated. Until then there is no English in Britain, and therefore no England. There is instead a post-Roman colony, inhabited by Celtic tribes whose language – a forerunner of modern-day Welsh – contains to this day in much of its lexicon continuing evidence of the four-century connection with Rome.
The English at this time are a collective noun, comprising Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Friesians and eventually, after several centuries, Vikings. These last invade an England divided into separate kingdoms – Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia, Wessex – making themselves most at home in the north and north east of the country. Through a process of assimilation it is possible by 1066 to speak of an English language, an English people and an England.
The Norman invasion has two effects on the English language. First, it drives the language out of the corridors of power: for three centuries the brain-workers in England will speak French, to be served by those who speak English. Or to put it another way, those who produce the necessities of life will speak English (“pig”, “cow”, “lamb” etc), and those who consume them will speak French: “pork”, “beef”, “mutton”. Second – the corollary of the first – English is now at the back of the Status Queue, the third language (after French and Latin) in its own land.
The English monarchy continued (until the eighteenth century, in fact) to lay claim to extensive holdings in France, and in defence of these was willing to fight the Hundred Years War – though it was the English-speaking private soldier who did most of the fighting. But when the ruling class is too closely associated with the enemy (as the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas discovered in the First World War), steps need to be taken to bring distance to the mix. In 1362, English is heard for the first time for three centuries in an English parliament.
Next, two legal systems need to be condensed into one. When we speak now of a “last will and testament” or a “fit and proper person” or of something going to “wrack and ruin”, we are reviving evidence of that process, since half of these lexemes (“will”, “fit” and “wrack”) are English, and half French. The church will continue – until the Reformation, two centuries later – to spread its message through the language of Heaven (Latin, mostly) but English is now increasingly the language of the legal system, of governance and (as it develops) education.
But not yet literature. Geoffrey Chaucer (1340 – 1400) is central to the elevation of English because he is the first to integrate French lexemes into English grammar, creating a language in which nuance (a French word) is everywhere (English) – and there are always several ways of saying what needs to be said. Shakespeare inherits and extends this process, to a point where there is a word (it sometimes seems) for everything, and often many more than one.
Shakespeare’s English
The Elizabethan era is a time of profound social change and this is reflected in the burgeoning English language, in particular in its rapidly increasing lexicon. Precisely where and when emerged the thousands of new words with their roots in this period, it is now often impossible to say. We can only identify where they first appear in the written language. So we cannot say that Shakespeare “invented over 1700 of our common words” (as a well-known website claims) because, if he heard the word “unreal” at the market this morning and then writes it into a play this afternoon, that is not his invention. Nonetheless, this word appears in print for the first time in Shakespeare (“Hence, horrible shadow, / Unreal mockery, hence!” as Macbeth exclaims to Banquo’s ghost), and as such it is in excellent company, since many hundreds of new words appear in their written form in Shakespeare before they appear anywhere else.
This is not to say that all Shakespeare’s coinages caught on. When Othello announces that he cannot accept “such exsufflicate and blown surmises” as might make him doubt Desdemona’s fidelity, he is using a word which he will never use again, and in that respect he is setting a trend since it is not a word you will hear or see in use, now or in the past. But so many coinages appear for the first time in Shakespeare that, whatever else he contributes to English, it seems clear that his inventive imagination had a strong lexical dimension.
A second expression of this imagination lies in phrases. Shakespeare “coined” any number of phrases that have entered the language and bring fluency to our everyday conversation. For example, when a sports commentator predicts that the match she is reporting is a “foregone conclusion”, she is back with “Othello”. When a parent complains that he has been “eaten out of house and home”, he is quoting Hostess Quickly in “Henry IV Part Two”. When a teacher says he has to be “cruel to be kind” he is channelling Hamlet, though he may not be conscious of it. In this way we all speak Shakespeare’s English, and at times have him to thank for whatever fluency we may have.
Shakespeare being concerned with spoken English, it is worth adding a note on pronunciation. In Shakespeare’s day, English spelling was in a state of flux: we have six extant signatures by Shakespeare, all spelling his own name in different ways: standardisation was still two centuries away, and spelling in a consistent way was not a value. This theme is explored in greater depth below.
But if we want to know how English sounded in his theatre, words should as a general principle be pronounced as they are spelled. That is the authentic pronunciation – it’s why they are spelled the way they are. Thus the word “knight” has been subject to two developments in its pronunciation over the centuries. The second of these – the /gh/ sound, effected in the throat as in the Scottish /loch/ and the Welsh /bach/ – was waning when Shakespeare was a young man, so he would have heard it used most likely mainly by older speakers.
A note on the /–eth/ inflection, as in “the rain it raineth every day” in “King Lear”. This form too was becoming obsolete around Shakespeare’s time, which gave him the option to use it if he chose or to employ the more modern /-s/ inflection if the rhythm of the line so demanded: “raineth” is, after all, bisyllabic whereas “rains” is monosyllabic. As a result, Shakespeare often uses both forms in a single speech, and no-one notices.
Finally, a distinction of real importance, long lost to most English-speakers. Shakespeare’s English has two words for “you, your, yours”, and he uses the alternative (“thou, thee, thy, thine”) for quite precise purposes. “Thou” and its associates are designed specifically for friendly, intimate, equal relationships, or for speaking down: a teacher to a pupil, a master to a servant. “You” belongs to the opposite class: it is for formality and distance, even perhaps distaste, or else it is used to express respect. These are broad definitions, but those whose interest is peeked by this summary might look at the way Lear addresses Cordelia in 1.1 and how he changes the way he speaks to her as the conversation goes off-piste (“thou my sometime daughter” etc), or else examine the interactions between Shylock and his Venetian friends when they are trying to borrow money from him. They change too, when things get hostile.
English Since Shakespeare
One aspect of the change in English since Shakespeare has been its extraordinary spread, which from a Jacobean perspective has been completely unpredictable. A hundred years after Shakespeare, in the early eighteenth century, not even the King of England (the rumour goes) could speak English; a further three hundred years have passed, and English is the global language, the language of first resort for all expressions of internationalism from the airport to the internet. This seems most unlikely to change.
Other developments have been more intrinsic. We have only to read one of Shakespeare’s sonnets in its original form to be conscious of significant change in the language since he dipped his quill in ink: “Rough windes do fhake the darling buds of Maie,” as Sonnet 18 observes, “And Sommers leafe hath all too fhort a date …”. The most significant of these changes has been standardisation, as mentioned above. Shakespeare (as we saw) spelt his own name in six different ways, and in general his era was notable for its free-and-easy approach to the orthography of a language which was still in the process of codification. In other words, rules governing English were thin on the ground. But change was in the air: in the eighteenth century Dr Johnson’s dictionary brought clarity and order to spelling, and Bishop Lowth’s strictures on grammar helped to define the rules (and invented some new ones). Fine-tuning of punctuation and orthography in the nineteenth century gave the language its modern look. Accent and dialect are being standardised (for better or worse) as we speak.
Still, it’s tempting to believe that nothing has changed quite as much as the language we speak since Shakespeare’s day, but this must be something of an exaggeration. Clearly much has changed: travel, food, clothing, education, recreation, sport, entertainment, music, technology, communication, sexuality, war, the justice system, the political system, hygiene, health, spirituality – all these and many more features of modern life seem quite unrecognisable seen through Shakespearean eyes. But the language – not so much perhaps, given that it remains perfectly intelligible and accessible four centuries on. As much as anything, we have the imprint of Shakespeare’s seemingly indelible influence to thank for that.
