Shakespeare and Language - Reason, Eloquence and Artifice in The Renaissance

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THE ARDE N S HA KE S P E A RE L IB RA RY
Shakespeare and
Language
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THE ARDE N S HA KE S P E A RE L IB RA RY
SHAKESPEARE
AND LANGUAGE
Reason, Eloquence and Artifice in the Renaissance
JONATHAN HOPE
Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Imprint previously known as Arden Shakespeare
50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway

London New York
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UK USA
www.bloomsbury.com
BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Diana logo

are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in 2010 by Methuen Drama
© Jonathan Hope 2010
Jonathan Hope has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining

from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by
Bloomsbury or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-9042-7169-7

ePDF: 978-1-4081-4374-2
ePub: 978-1-4081-4375-9
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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
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For Jennifer

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CONTENTS
preface ix
a note on texts xiii
list of illustrations xv
list of tables xvi
Chapter One
Ideas about Language in the Renaissance 1
Chapter Two
Ideas about Language in Shakespeare
1: Discourse, Artifice and Silence 40
Chapter Three
Ideas about Language in Shakespeare
2: Words 72
Chapter Four
Fritters of English: Variation and
Linguistic Judgement 98
Chapter Five
Agency and Uncertainty in Shakespeare’s Syntax 138
Chapter Six
The Language of Genre 170
afterword: tokyo, march 2010 206

notes 209
bibliography 230
index 240

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PREFACE
One of the ways to spot a good pub in Britain is to look behind

the bar – not at the beer taps, or the range of whiskies, but to see
if there is a dictionary there. Whenever I see a slightly battered
Chambers, or a one-volume Oxford, I know I am in the kind of
pub where the beer is good enough to encourage regulars to hang
around and have the sort of pointless pub discussions that end up
in arguments about semantics. Ours is a culture of the dictionary
– if we want to know what a word means, we look it up, even if
we are several pints to the good in a debate we will have forgotten
the next day. But is it not a strange situation when people defer
to the authority of a pile of thin sheets of paper sewn together
and wrapped in cardboard? Do we really not know what we want
the words we use to mean? This is a book about a different lin-
guistic culture: one that existed without dictionaries of English,
where there was no ‘authority’ on the shelf, and which therefore
had a very different relationship with language – a culture, in
fact, for which it is possible to argue that language itself was a
different thing.
Because our culture conceives of language differently to the
Renaissance, many of the ideas in this book are strange and counter-
intuitive, and the difficulties I have encountered in writing it have
generally been to do with realizing (often painfully) how my own
preconceptions about language were preventing me from under-
standing Renaissance understandings of language. Differing
approaches to creativity, the artificial, linguistic variation; different
conceptions of what the ‘stuff ’ of language is; even a fundamental
difference in what ‘words’ are – all of these separate us from
Renaissance conceptions of language. We are still, despite mod-
ernism and postmodernism, the heirs of the Romantics when it
comes to the aesthetic values we associate with language and
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x Preface
creativity. We are still, despite a rhetoric of egalitarian political

correctness, the heirs of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
prescriptivists when it comes to linguistic variation. We are still,
despite the free play of postmodernism, at a loss to understand
how the culture that produced the most beautiful and sophis-
ticated literature in the English language could place itself so in
thrall to the apparently brain-dead knee-jerking of the pun.
I examine these differing conceptions of language as they were
generally understood in Chapter 1 of the book. The next three
chapters focus on their expression in Shakespeare’s plays:
Chapter 2 considers language in relation to artifice, silence and
the iconographic tradition surrounding Mercury (the god of
eloquence); Chapter 3 considers wordplay in the light of what
‘words’ were for the Renaissance; Chapter 4 addresses the
question of dialect. Chapters 5 and 6 shift the focus from ideas
about language to what Shakespeare does with language. I show
how computer text analysis is allowing us to ask new questions
about Shakespeare’s texts (such as what might constitute genre),
and answer old ones in new ways (such as what might constitute
‘late’ style). In the end, I hope the reader will have a new appreci-
ation of the subtlety and fluidity of Renaissance thought about
language, and the seriousness, both moral and in terms of crafts-
manship, with which Renaissance authors approached its use.
I hope there is proper acknowledgement in the text and notes
of specific intellectual debts in this book, but I would like to pick
out here work by three scholars who have inspired me through-
out, in different ways. Malcolm Bull’s Mirror of the Gods, in style
and content, made me see both the deep and superficial relevance
of classical mythology to the topic; Phil Benson’s Ethnocentrism
and the English Dictionary lies behind Chapter 3, in some respects
the central chapter of the book; two essays by Margreta de Grazia
(dated 1978 and 1990 in the Bibliography) lay out the significant
ideas I try to develop: that Shakespeare (and his culture) thought
about language differently to us; and that there are no puns, and
perhaps not even any words, in Shakespeare. It was a particular
honour, while writing this book, to be asked by Margreta to write
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Preface xi
a chapter on language for The New Cambridge Companion to

Shakespeare Studies – though it did feel like being asked to dance
for Pavlova.
Brian Vickers read a first draft of the whole book, and was
immensely generous with his comments (in all senses of the
word). He has been an example to me of what serious scholarship
is, and one of the pleasures of writing this book has been learning
from him; Jonathan Sawday and Jennifer Smith also read large
amounts of text. I am indebted to all three, each of whom has
improved the book greatly, and am alone responsible for the
faults and omissions that remain. Mike Witmore, with typical
generosity, allowed me to use parts of our collaborative work in
Chapters 5 and 6. He and his wife Kellie Robertson are now in
Madison, Wisconsin, but they used to be in Pittsburgh, and that
is where I found the enamel plate illustrated in Figure 3. Margaret
Bartley has been an exceptionally patient, and supportive, pub-
lisher throughout: I am very grateful for her belief in this book.
Work on the book has been supported by an AHRC sabbatical
award, and two periods of research leave made possible by the
generosity of my colleagues in English Studies at Strathclyde
University. It is a great pleasure, at last, to be able to acknowledge
both. I began the book on the Scottish island of Giga, where Bill
and Rosemary Legg kindly invited us to house-sit, and I com-
pleted it in Japan, where my wife Jennifer Smith held a three-
month visiting professorship at the University of Kyoto. I am
grateful to the Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University, for an
appointment as a guest scholar, which gave me library access –
and for so thoughtfully placing a statue of Mercury next to the
main Faculty Library to inspire me. I would also like to thank the
staff of the Faculty Periodicals Library, where I did most of the
final work.
Wherever we went in Japan, Jennifer and I were met with
unstinting generosity and hospitality – in particular from Yoko
Iyeiri at Kyoto University, who set up the trip and was our official
host, and Akinobu Tani and Mitsume Uchida in Osaka, who
ensured we saw more of Japan than the inside of its libraries. In
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xii Preface
Kyoto we were also made welcome by Takayuki Sakai, Yuko Doi,

and all at Kansai Technology Licensing Ltd, Hikaru Saitoh of
Kyoto Seika University, Shuzo Ueda, Director of the Manga
Museum, Kaori Ashizu of Otani University, and Atsuhiko Hirota
of Kyoto University. Ryuko Kawabe had the thankless task of trying
to teach us Japanese, and, despite our poor progress, arranged for
us to see kabuki and Noh. In Tokyo we were incredibly fortunate
to be able to stay with Masako Hayashi – our sensei when it came
to the wonders of Japanese home cooking – and Aya, Neo and
Ash, who also shared their home with us. Toshiyuki Takamiya
introduced us to Shoichiro Kawai, who very kindly and gener-
ously arranged for us to see professional Japanese productions of
his texts of Macbeth and the Henry VI plays, which were running
in Tokyo during our visit. Tetsu Motoyama gave us the benefit of
his insider knowledge, and took us to the most spectacular
restaurant. Yushin Toda and Fumiko Nakabachi advised us in
Glasgow and prepared the way. ありがとうございます!
Last, but most important, thanks to you, gentle reader, for
your time, and perhaps even money. I always urge my students to
argue with what they read, and I hope you will find much to
argue with here. As I try to show in what follows, ‘language’ for
the Renaissance was simply the system which allowed humans to
engage in the more important activity of ‘discourse’ – the soci-
able, public demonstration of reason and understanding – and
something which required exchange, rather than monologue. So
I hope this is a contribution to, and an occasion for, discourse –
my email is not hard to find. I hope you enjoy this pageant of
Mercury.1
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A NOTE ON TEXTS
One of the things I have argued for in the past, and do so again
in Chapter 4, is that the ideology of standardization has made
us sensitive to, and intolerant of, textual variation. Texts in the
Renaissance varied greatly in spelling and punctuation practices,
and the absence of any expectation that texts would be uniform
or stable is an important element in the Renaissance approach to
language. This does not mean that printers, authors or readers
were careless about what texts meant, or slipshod about the
formal features of texts (as I hope I show in what follows): they
simply did not invest the degree of authority we do in the
uniformity of surface features. In writing this book, I toyed with
the idea that all the Renaissance texts I use should be quoted in
facsimile form from early editions, so that readers would see all
the features of the original text but – no doubt much to the relief
of my publisher – I decided that this was a false attempt at a kind
of textual authenticity the Renaissance would not have recog-
nized. Then, I thought about using all modernized texts – but
not all of the texts I use have been edited, and in some instances
my discussion of them relies on features of the early printing
which would disappear in modernization. I could have used old
spelling throughout, but this too seemed in danger of fetishizing
a kind of uniformity – and would have seemed strange in a book
published by Arden, a publisher of edited, modernized Shake-
speare texts. So what you will find in this book is a mixture: one
photo-quote; a lot of old spelling; and a lot of modernized texts.
Unless otherwise indicated, Shakespeare is quoted from the
Arden 3 series (when they exist) and from the Arden 2 series
(when they as yet do not). I have tried to be aware of the implic-
ations of what type of text I was using, but I have also tried not
to worry about standardization too much. I hope that the mixture
of types of text will make you more aware of the effects of textu-
ality on language. That, I think, is the Renaissance way to do it.

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ILLUSTRATIONS
1. William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost (London, 1598)

[Q1], printed book, sig. K2v. By permission of the Folger
Shakespeare Library. Page 52
2. Andrea Mantegna, Parnassus (1497), painting – tempera on
canvas, © RMN/Droits réservés, Paris, Musée du Louvre.
Page 55
3. Jean de Court, Grammatica (c. 1555-85), enamel on copper
plate (made in Limoges, France; now in the Carnegie
Museum of Art, Pittsburgh – purchase: gift of the
Women’s Committee, by exchange). Page 56
4. Andrea Alciato, Emblematum libellus (Venice, 1546), printed
book, ‘Art assisting nature’ (fo. 42r). By permission of
University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special
Collections. Page 57
5. Mercury as Hermes Trismegistus, from Achile Bocchi,
Symbolicarum quaestionum (Bologna, 1574), printed book.
By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Page 67
6. Dosso Dossi, Jupiter Painting Butterflies [also known as
Jove, Mercury and Virtue] (c. 1524), oil on canvas. Now in
Wawel Royal Castle – State Art Collection, Cracow – pre-
viously Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna. Photograph by
Stanislaw Michta © Wawel Royal Castle, Cracow. Page 69
7. William Shakespeare, Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies,
Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623) [‘The First Folio’],
printed book, page A6r. By permission of the Folger
8. Stephen Batman, Batman upon Bartholome his booke De
proprietatibus rerum (London, 1582), printed book, no
pagination or foliation [EEBO document image 14 of 456].
By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Page 174
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xvi Illustrations
9. Math. Rhodes, The Dismall Day, at the Black-Fryers

(London, 1623), single sheet printed poem. By permission
of The Society of Antiquaries of London. Page 175
10. Abraham Fleming (trans.), A Panoplie of Epistles, or, a
looking glasse for the vnlearned (London, 1576), printed
book, sig. ¶iv. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare
Library. Page 176
11. King James VI, Essayes of a Prentice, in the Divine Art of
Poesie (Edinburgh, 1584), printed book, sig. *iv. By
Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Page 177
12. Thomas Milles, The Catalogue of Honour (London, 1610),
printed book, sig. A2v. By permission of the Folger
13. Ben Jonson, The Workes of Beniamin Jonson (London,
1616), printed book, sig. ¶3r. By permission of the Folger
14. William Shakespeare, Mr William Shakespeares Comedies,
Histories, and Tragedies (London, 1632) [‘The Second
Folio’], printed book, sig. *4v. By permission of the Folger
TABLES
1. Forms of the titles of the Histories in the First Folio.

Page 182
2. Relative frequencies of ‘First Person’ forms in the folio
genres. Page 193
3. Relative frequencies of ‘Common Authority’ forms in the
folio genres. Page 198
4. Relative frequencies of ‘Think Negative’ and ‘Imperative’
forms in the folio genres. Page 201
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CHAPTER ONE
IDEAS ABOUT LANGUAGE

IN THE RENAISSANCE
It is a well-known scene. Juliet laments the unfortunate name of

Romeo, which identifies his family as her family’s sworn enemies:
’Tis but thy name that is my enemy:
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is nor hand nor foot
Nor arm nor face nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O be some other name.
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for thy name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.
(RJ 2.2.38–49)
If Romeo were not a Montague, he would still be himself: his
name is not a physical part of him like his hand or foot or arm or
face or anything else that might mark him out as a man, and
which a young girl might be interested in, in the middle of the
night. A rose would smell the same if we used a different term for
it – and so would Romeo. No, sorry – Romeo would not smell as
sweet – the syntax slyly misled me into thinking Juliet was still
harping on Romeo’s physical qualities; actually what Juliet ends
up saying is that he would still be as perfect as he is if he had a
different name. And if he gives up that airy nothing, which is no
part of him, he can have her.
2 Shakespeare and Language
I like linguistics, but I have to admit that not much linguistic

theory is as sexy as this – which is a shame, because, amongst the
sex and longing, this is a piece of linguistic theory, and consti-
tutes, as many in Shakespeare’s audience would have noted, a
decent summary of one of the two competing accounts of lan-
guage in the Renaissance. Juliet, they would have realized, is an
Aristotelian: she believes that names are arbitrarily attached to
the things they designate by human convention (‘That which we
call . . . ’), and that names have no relation beyond this to the
actual natures of the things they designate (‘Thou art thyself,
though not a Montague’, ‘thy name, which is no part of thee’).
In being an Aristotelian in these matters, Juliet is reflecting the
majority view. As we will see, almost every serious commentator
on language in the Renaissance holds that language is arbitrary,
and meaning is arrived at by ‘custom’ – but, as we will also see,
almost every serious, and most non-serious, commentators found
it difficult to entirely escape the alternative, Platonic view, which
held that, somehow, somewhere, there was a non-arbitrary element
to language. This view posited a deep, sometimes occult, connec-
tion between the form of words (their sounds or perhaps spell-
ing) and their meanings. ‘Rose’, by this view, did not just designate
a particular plant because everyone agreed that it would: it some-
how had the essence of ‘rose’ in its structure. ‘Bloggach’ or ‘sprelty’
would not do for the name of the plant, even if everyone signed
a memo to the effect that they would, because they were just not
rose-ish enough.
Juliet would not have needed to have read Aristotle or Plato to
know about these positions.1 The two accounts were interwoven
in most popular writing on language at the time, and formed part
of the common stock of knowledge drawn on by writers and
thinkers whenever names and naming cropped up in fictional or
non-fiction texts. The positions, and the evidence for and against
them, were conventionalized and familiar. Juliet is unusual only
in presenting such a consistently Aristotelian view. Elsewhere,
commentators who appear to take a firm stance for one position
are likely to revert to the other, consciously or not, a page or two

later. This was, to some extent, a consequence of the rhetorical
method which dominated intellectual life in the period. Rheto-
rical teaching tended to put more emphasis on the arrangement
and treatment of material than on reaching a conclusive answer:
in this case, it was more important to know the positions than to
come to a settled conclusion (given their theological perspective,
thinkers in the Renaissance were sanguine about the possibility of
human certainty about anything).
In this case, however, there was another reason for vacillation
between the positions. The Platonic position on meaning, irrational
as it was frequently shown to be, had an allure it retains today.
The dream of being able to do things with language – really do
things – runs through magic, religion, even much early science.
And perhaps the Platonic position is not as irrational as we might
think: after all, in Juliet’s case, if Romeo’s name was different,
then things would be too.
cogitations, words, letters

In the rest of this chapter, I am going to attempt to draw out the
set of commonplace ideas that surrounded language in the Renais-
sance. I will begin by focusing on three texts: first, a few lines
from George Chapman’s 1598 translation of Homer’s Iliad; then,
two non-fiction works: an early work of psychology, and a broad-
based compendium of knowledge. The ideas I am charting here
are not specific to these texts, nor were they originated by them
(one of the arguments I make is that the Renaissance was wary of
‘original’ ideas). I am interested in these ideas precisely because
they were general and common (we will see that ‘common’ has a
specific, and very positive, meaning in relation to language in the
Renaissance).
To begin with Chapman. In Book 5 of his translation, the Trojan
Pedæus is killed by the Greek Phylides, in a sequence which stands
out for its grotesque anatomical detail:
Phylides neare him stept

And in the fountaine of the nerves did drench his
fervent lance
At his head’s backe-part, and so farre the sharpe head
did advance
It cleft the Organe of his speech and th’Iron (cold as
death)
He tooke betwixt his grinning teeth and gave the aire
his breath.
(lines 80–84)
Chapman here develops a series of metaphors and images far

beyond anything in the original.2 Homer, grim enough, describes
a spear thrust entering at the back of the neck, with the bronze
spearhead going under the tongue, and smashing through the
teeth, leaving the jaws clamped shut on the tip. In Chapman, the
passage of the iron spear tip through the oral cavity is developed
so that, rather than simply slicing through the root of the tongue,
the iron spearhead replaces the fleshy tongue. Rather than smash-
ing the teeth, Chapman makes the spearhead protrude between
them, and, where the Homeric image ends with the mouth clamped
shut and Pedæus falling face down to the dust, Chapman has the
mouth open in a grin around its new ‘tongue’, and Pedæus’ breath
escaping into the air.
These additions are not simply Chapman elaborating on
Homer for the sake of variety. They introduce a set of themes
and images associated with discussions of language in the Renais-
sance. The most explicit is the reference to the tongue as ‘the
Organe of his speech’. A crucial difference between Renaissance
and present-day conceptions of language lies behind this. The
Renaissance conceived of language as speech – sounds rather
than letters. Languages were ‘tongues’, and even technical and
philosophical discussions of language assumed as a matter of
course that speech was the ‘real’ instantiation of language, and
writing merely a secondary representation of it: ‘Words are the
images of cogitations, and letters are the images of words’, as
Bacon has it (quoting Aristotle), jarringly, for us, distinguishing

‘words’ (purely oral and aural) from ‘letters’.3
The default position in the Renaissance was that a ‘word’
properly existed only as speech: ‘letters’ enabled you to record it,
but the shift in medium was a shift away from the word itself.
The conceptual shift that has ‘words’ as primarily marks on a
page (as I take to be the case in our culture) occurs in the
seventeenth century, and will be one of the underlying themes of
this book (see Chapter 3). For the Renaissance, writing could still
be a strange technology, with none of the necessary authority our
culture attaches to it. Views of writing were often informed by
Plato’s account in Phaedrus, 275a–276a, where he discusses the
invention of letters and the effect of writing on intellectual
capabilities. Plato has Socrates give a mythical account of the
origin of writing: invented by the Egyptian god Theuth (later
conflated with Mercury), writing was offered to the king of
Egypt, who rejected it as it would cause forgetfulness and false,
apparent knowledge by giving people access to knowledge they
had not been taught, and did not really know or understand.
Plato further characterizes writing as inferior to speech because
writing is merely an image of it – a hierarchy also endorsed by the
Aristotelian framework quoted by Bacon above.
The implications of this Aristotelian formula go further than a
relegation of writing to the status of mere representation. Spoken
words were the representations of mental images, and letters,
or written marks, were the representations of words. But mental
images (‘cogitations’) were themselves produced by, and were
representations of, actual things in the world. So language itself
was a representation of a representation. This notion encour-
aged a rather practical, functionalist view of language. It was the
job of language to represent (or communicate) ideas or cogita-
tions – which were, to Renaissance thinkers, self-evidently more
important than it was. Even those who worried about the possi-
bility that language might misrepresent ideas, assumed that ideas,
and meanings, existed independently of language.4 Furthermore,
considerations of language were driven by the notion of
communicative efficiency, which meant not just clear communi-

cation, but widespread communication. Ideas were important, and
language existed to communicate people’s ideas to other people –
so the best language was that which communicated to the largest
number of people. For most in the Renaissance, language that did
not communicate across society – that did not in fact create
society – was pointless.
Chapman’s final image, of Pedæus giving the ‘aire his breath’
evokes what were for the Renaissance the two most resonant
features of speech. First, speech, produced by the flesh of the
physical body, yet in itself ethereal and breathy, symbolized the
human position in the universe – poised between the physical
world and the divine – and also the human potential to move, as
a soul, after death, between the two. Secondly, and relatedly,
speech was closely associated with man’s reason – again a link to
the divine, since reason was given to man by God, and marked
him out from the animal world. The vision of Pedæus’ fleshy
tongue being replaced by a metal one, as his breath escapes into
the air for the last time, is a vision of reason, and humanity, depart-
ing the body with the faculty of language.
In addition to these explicit allusions to ideas about language,
there are, perhaps, others – less overt, and possibly unconscious.
It is tempting to link the cleaving of the tongue to the division of
languages (or ‘confusion of tongues’) in the Tower of Babel myth,
one of the two key biblical texts for Renaissance discussion of
language, which I will shortly discuss further.5 The vivid meta-
phor describing the neck as the ‘fountaine of the nerves’ is
presumably primarily inspired by contemporary anatomy texts,
where dissected features like nerves would be fanned out from
the body for display. Language is associated with mythological
fountains in Renaissance iconography: see, for example, the
seven-fold fountain of knowledge held by the persona of Gram-
mar in Figure 3, and also the Hippocrene fountain behind Mercury
and the horse Perseus in Figure 2 (Mercury was the god of
eloquence, also associated with the control of knowledge – hence
his association with Perseus, from whose hoof-strike the fountain
of the Muses sprang on Mount Parnassus).6 The image also calls

attention to the linkage of the brain (symbolizing reason) to the
body (earth) via the spinal cord.
Finally, it is tempting to imagine that the ‘Iron’ tongue figures
the shift from living speech to the ‘death’ of silent print, made
possible by the production of iron fonts – a glance at a mechan-
istic, technological alienation from language. The final image – a
dead iron tongue protruding through grotesquely ‘grinning’
teeth, also reminds us that Renaissance discussion of language,
while acknowledging its potential link to the divine, also recog-
nized the fallen nature of man, and language. Language could
lead you to the truth, back to God, but it could also lead you into
error and sin.
Chapman thus introduces us to a range of ideas about lan-
guage: the Aristotelian formula that set up a hierarchy of physical
world–mental ideas–spoken words–letters; the primacy of speech
over writing in conceptions of language; the subjugation of
language to ideas and the physical world; the biblical accounts of
language which provided metaphors for thinking about it; and
the iconographic tradition that linked Renaissance thought about
language to the classical world. I will return to all of these ideas
later in this chapter. Now I want to shift focus to the two non-
fiction texts I mentioned, and the key Renaissance debate about
language, which we have already seen instantiated in Juliet’s
musings.
‘a question, much hammered between

plato & aristotle’
In 1594, Richard Carew published The Examination of Men’s Wits,
a translation of Juan Huarte’s treatise on human mental capa-
bilities, Examen de Ingenios.7 In 1619, Thomas Milles published
the second volume of a compendium of knowledge, mainly based
on the work of Pedro Mexía, called Time’s Storehouse (printed by
William Jaggard, later printer of the Shakespeare First Folio).8
From their publishing histories, both works appear to have been
successful – and Huarte is known to have been highly influential

throughout Europe. Huarte’s work is an account of human psy-
chology from a rigorously Galenic viewpoint, seeking to explain
differences in ‘wit’ (intelligence and aptitude) by the relative
amounts of heat or moisture found in the bodies of people from
various nations (the Dutch, because they have very moist natures,
are good at low-level memory functions like learning languages,
and rarely go bald; the Spanish, hot and dry, have higher-level
understanding, but are less good at memorizing things, and often
lose their hair). Mexía’s work, as it appears in English, is a com-
pendium of historical and geographical facts, with a section on
‘Naturall Speech’ (Book 9). Linguistically, Huarte is a Platonist,
and Mexía an Aristotelian, but each is as concerned to summarize
and recount the conventional positions as to establish one view,
and I will trace the positions through the accounts of both.9
Taking the origin of languages as a starting point, Huarte
begins by paraphrasing the Aristotelian position that languages
are human creations, and that meaning arises purely from con-
vention and custom:
tongues were deuised by men, that they might commu-
nicate amongst themselues, and expresse one to another
their conceits, without that in them there lie hid any
other mistery or naturall principles: for that the first
deuisers agreed together and after their best liking, (as
Aristotle saith) framed the words, and gaue to euerie ech
his signification.
(pp. 103–4/sigs. Hiiijr–Hiiijv)
Words mean what people actively, or collectively, decide they will
mean: meaning is conventional, and arbitrary, rather than there
being any motivated relationship between the sound of a word
and the ‘true’ nature of what it refers to. There is no ‘mistery’
and no ‘naturall principles’ behind the ascription of certain mean-
ings to particular words. Still tracking Aristotle, Huarte then
reaffirms the conventional, arbitrary, and therefore equal, nature of
languages:
That languages are at pleasure, and a conceit of mens

brains, and nought else, is plainly prooued; for in them
all, may the sciences be taught, and in each is to be sayd
and expressed, that which by the other is inferred. There-
fore none of the graue authors attended to the learning
of strange tongues, thereby to deliuer their conceits: but
the Greekes wrote in Greeke, the Romaines in Latine,
the Hebrues in the Hebrue language, and the Moores in
Arabique, and so do I in my Spanish, because I know
this better than any other.
(p. 105/sig. Hvr)
Taking the Aristotelian position that all languages are devised by

men, it follows that all languages are equally capable of expres-
sing men’s ideas (Huarte is glancing at the fact that anyone who
wanted to be taken seriously as a theologian or natural scientist in
the period had to learn, and then write in, Latin). At this point
Huarte seems explicitly to reject the notion of any human
language being, or being derived from, a supposed ‘original’
language taught by God to Adam, or with any privileged access
to the ‘real’ nature of things. If all languages are devised by
humans (‘a conceit of mens brains’), and arbitrary (‘at pleasure’),
then they must all be equal in terms of what they can express –
and any language can express any human conceit. Huarte is
following the logic of the Aristotelian position that language rep-
resents mental images produced in the mind by the objects we
encounter in the world: if we assume that all humans think or
have mental representations in the same way, because we live in
the same world, then all languages are based on the same set of
mental representations, and there is no reason to think that any
one arbitrary set of words chosen to represent those images is
better than any other. This notion of equality amongst languages
was a strong one in the Renaissance. It was not the only possible
position, certainly, since some tried to argue for the historical or
communicative superiority of particular languages (Latin or
Hebrew frequently) based on a broadly Platonic view of language.
But I want to stress the availability of this philosophy of equality

between human languages, since the hierarchical model was to
become so dominant in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Huarte then turns to the core of the problem of the nature of
meaning, and the origin of language, which he calls, ‘a question,
much hammered between Plato & Aristotle’ (p. 117/sig. Iiijr). He
begins with an account of the ‘Platonic’ position: that words have
meaning because they are linked in some non-arbitrary way to the
things or ideas they represent. As was conventional, he links this
with the biblical example of Adam’s naming of the animals:
the one saith that there are proper names, which by their
nature carrie signification of things, and that much wit
is required to deuise them. And this opinion is fauoured
by the diuine scripture, which affirmeth that Adam gaue
euerie of those things which God set before him, the
proper name that was best fitting for them.
(p. 118/sig. Iiijv)
Huarte is referring to this passage from Genesis:
So the Lorde God formed of the earth euery beast of
the field, and euery foule of the heauen, and brought
them vnto the man to see how he would call them: for
howsoeuer ye man named ye liuing creature, so was the
name therof.
The man therefore gaue names vnto all cattell, & to
the foule of the heauen, & to euery beast of the field.
(The Geneva Bible (1583 edition), Genesis 2: 19–20)
Huarte’s ‘proper’ here carries the sense of ‘correct’ – as if the
names existed, or were predestined, before Adam spoke them.
Either Adam intuited the ‘real’ names of things because in his
prelapsarian state he had direct access to knowledge of the actual
nature of things, or God prompted him with the names. In either
case, Adam did not arbitrarily attach random sounds to each
thing: there was something in the sound that corresponded to,
and potentially explained, the nature of the thing (akin to the
difference between ‘water’, which is opaque and arbitrary, and

‘H2O’, which communicates information about the chemical
structure of the substance it names).
Huarte then gives the Aristotelian objection to this non-
arbitrary view of meaning:
But Aristotle wil not grant, that in any toung there can be
found any name, or manner of speech, which can signifie
ought of it own nature, for that all names are deuised
and shaped after the conceit of men. Whence we see by
experience, that wine hath aboue 60. Names, and bread
as manie, in euerie language his, & of none we can
auouch that the same is natural and agreeable thereunto,
for then all in the world would vse but that.
(p. 118/sig. Iiijv)
For Aristotle, as we have seen, human languages are entirely

arbitrary: meanings are conventional and are not motivated by
any essential attribute of the thing or idea named (words cannot
‘signifie’ out of their own nature – they do not carry any infor-
mation about the things they refer to). This can be shown by the
fact that things which exist across human cultures (‘wine’ and
‘bread’, for example) have different names in different languages.
If names were somehow motivated by the physical nature of the
things they denote, we would expect the names for common things
to be similar across languages: if there was a ‘real’ term for ‘wine’,
every culture ‘would vse but that’. This seems clear enough, and it
certainly accords with the account modern linguistics would give
of meaning, but the attraction of Platonic essentialism is strong,
and we immediately find Huarte shifting position:
But for all this, the sentence of Plato is truer: for put
case that the first deuisers fained the words at their
pleasure and will, yet was the same by a reasonable
instinct, communicated with the eare, with the nature of
the thing, & with the good grace and well sounding of
the pronunciation, not making the wordes ouer short or
long, nor enforcing an vnseemly framing of the mouth

in time of vtterance, settling the accent in his conuenient
place, and observing the other conditions, which a
tongue should possesse, to be fine, and not barbarous.
(p. 118/sig. Iiiiv)
God is left out of it, but Huarte will not give up the notion that
language, even if formulated by human devisers, is not entirely
arbitrary. Here, instead of divine inspiration, we have a vague,
‘reasonable instinct’ which somehow lights on sounds which
accord with the nature of the thing being named, and produce a
‘fine’ rather than ‘barbarous’ language. We should note that
Huarte not only overturns Aristotle here, but also contradicts his
own earlier assertions about the equality of human languages:
now we have a hierarchy of languages depending on how well
their first devisers fitted the sounds to the nature of things. The
Platonic position has a strong appeal to human prejudice and so-
called ‘common sense’ – against all scientific evidence, we have an
urge to believe that words express their meanings through their
sound and form as well as through arbitrary convention. Huarte
is not alone, in the Renaissance or after, in presenting a mixed,
even self-contradictory account of meaning. To further counter
Aristotle’s logical demolition of the Platonic position, Huarte
offers an anecdote:
Of this selfe opinion with Plato, was a Spanish gentle-
man; who made it his pastime to write books of chiual-
rie, because he had a certain kind of imagination, which
entiseth men to faining and leasings. Of him it is
reported, that being to bring into his works a furious
Gyant, he went manie daies deuising a name, which might
in al points be answerable to his fiercenesse: neither
could he light vpon any, vntill playing one day at cardes
in his friends house, he heard the owner of the house say,
Ho sirha, boy, tra qui tantos*, the Gentleman so soone as
he heard this name Traquitantos, sodainly he took the
same for a word of ful sound in the eare, and without any
longer looking arose, saying, gentlemen I wil play no

more, for many dayes are past sithence I haue gone
seeking out a name, which might fit well with a furious
Gyant, whom I bring into those volumes which I now
am making, and I could not find the same, vntill I came
to this house, where euer I receiue all courtesie. The
curiositie of this gentleman in calling the Gyant
Traquitantos, had also those first men, who deuised the
Latine tongue, in that they found out a language of so
good sound to the eare. Therefore we need not maruell
that the things which are spoken and written in Latine,
doe sound so well, and in other tongues so ill: for their
first inuenters were barbarous.
[*Marginal note by translator: ‘Tra qui tantos signifieth,
Bring hither tokens, or counters’]
(pp. 118–19/sigs Iiiiv–Iiiijr)
This persistence of the non-rational approach to language is

common in the Renaissance – the Platonic position, though appar-
ently disproven by Aristotle, spoke to a powerful desire on the
part of language users, and was supported by the second great
biblical text on language – the account of Babel:
Then the whole earth was of one language & one

speache.
And as they went from the East, they found a plaine
in ye land of Shinar, & there they abode.
And they said one to another, Come, let vs make
bricke, and burne it in the fire. So they had bricke for
stone, and slime had they in steade of morter.
Also they said, Go to, let vs builde vs a citie and a
tower, whose top may reache vnto the heauen, that we
may get vs a name, lest we be scattered vpon the whole
earth.
But the Lorde came downe, to see the citie and tower,
which the sonnes of men builded.
And the Lord said, Beholde, the people is one, & they
all haue one language, and this they begin to do, neither
can they nowe be stopped from whatsoeuer they haue
imagined to do.
Come on, let vs goe downe, and there confounde their
language, that euery one perceiue not anothers speach.
So the Lord scattered them from thence vpon all the
earth, and they left of to build the citie.
Therefore the name of it was called Babel, because
the Lorde did there confound the language of all the
earth: from thence then did the Lorde scatter them vpon
all the earth.
(The Geneva Bible (1583 edition), Genesis 11: 1–9)
The Babel myth was primarily used in the Renaissance to account
for linguistic variation – and we should note one significant
logical consequence of it. Before Babel, language was ‘one’; after
it, many. Logically, therefore, in the same way that Aristotelian
conventionalism implied equality between languages (because
they were all equally made up), so Babel implied that all linguistic
variation was equal (because it was all equally tainted). Linguistic
variation was all a mark of man’s pride and punishment by God.
The myth of Babel undid the notion that any current human lan-
guage – or any version of a current human language – could be
considered ‘correct’, since all languages and dialects were the pro-
duct of the ‘confusion of tongues’. Certainly, the myth implied
that a return to ‘one’ language would be a good thing from a
communicative point of view – and many commentators held this
view. And it also underpinned moves in the seventeenth century
to establish a ‘real’ or ‘ideal’ language. But Babel offered no basis
for identifying a current language or dialect as ‘better’ or more
‘correct’ than any other – and by and large, as we will see, people
in the Renaissance did not seek to do so.
Paradoxically, however, Babel also worked to reinforce the
power of the idealist Platonic/Adamic myth: when human lan-
guage was one, its empowering of humanity was such that their
potential was limitless – as God says: ‘neither can they nowe be

stopped from whatsoeuer they haue imagined to do’. Taken
together, the biblical texts offered a double account of language:
it was, at least in theory, capable of giving access to truth, and was
a mark of man’s closeness to God; but in practice it embodied, in
its variety and apparent confusion, man’s postlapsarian separ-
ation from God, and it could be as much a barrier to under-
standing ideas and the world as an aid.
The biblical myths also meant that throughout the Middle
Ages, and into the Renaissance, much effort was put into identi-
fying the remnants of the ‘original’ language of Adam, along
with its supposedly direct link to the nature of reality. With the
rise of scientific practice in the seventeenth century, the ideal of
an ‘original’ language was joined by the parallel one of a ‘mathe-
matical’ language – where there would be a one-to-one relation-
ship between words and ideas (sometimes with an implicit or
explicit desire that the relationship between those words and
ideas should be non-arbitrary). Often, interest in science and an
occult view of language went together: in 1667 the polymath
Francis Mercury van Helmont published Alphabeti vere naturalis
brevissima Delineatio where he used his considerable skills as an
experimental phonetician to construct a successful method for
teaching the deaf to speak, while also attempting to prove that
Hebrew characters are diagrammatic of the positions of the
mouth and tongue in their pronunciation (because they had been
taught to humans by God, and were therefore non-arbitrary).10
Although the Adamic theory of non-arbitrary meaning had a
powerful attraction for writers and scientists in the Renaissance,
most thinkers, perhaps reluctantly acknowledging the impossi-
bility of a return to an Edenic state, or its language, assigned
meaning primarily to the arbitrary workings of convention. The
words left to fallen man had meanings because people agreed to
them – and the attachment of a particular word to a particular
idea was entirely arbitrary. Francis Bacon, not without signs of
nostalgia for the Adamic theory, states:
some have been willing by curious inquiry, or rather by

apt feigning, to have derived imposition of names from
reason and intendment; a speculation elegant, and, by
reason it searcheth into antiquity, reverent; but sparingly
mixed with truth, and of small fruit.
(Advancement of Learning, p. 231)
The Adamic theory, that names are somehow derived by reason,
and are motivated in some way, is ‘elegant’ and even ‘reverent’,
since it posited an early, ‘real’ language from which present-day
languages have declined, losing their connection with, and ability
to express, the ‘real’ nature of things. But experience shows that
attempts to reconstruct such a language are fruitless, and, more
importantly, the theory cannot explain the ability of present-day
languages to carry meaning. Bacon is one of the sharpest and
clearest thinkers on language in the period, and he can reliably be
taken as evidence for the intellectual and logical dominance of the
Aristotelian position – but to find even him wistful for something
less logical and more mysterious is to be reminded that Platonic
non-rationalism is never far away when people think, or feel,
about language in the Renaissance.
souls, discourse, humanity

Pedro Mexía is more bluntly dismissive than Bacon of the notion
of an ‘original’ language, classing it amongst a list of ‘erroneous
and vile opinions, yet beleeued for sound truths’ (A5v). But even his
discussion demonstrates the attraction of the idea, as he recounts
the Platonic and Aristotelian theories of the soul. The Aristotelian
notion of the soul as tabula rasa fits with his conception of lan-
guage as arbitrary: we learn whatever language we first hear, and
are equally capable of learning any language (p. 898/sig. Ggggv):
Aristotle enstructeth (to singular good purpose) That our
soule is ignorant of all things, and like vnto a new Table,
neatly polished and prepared, wherein nothing hath bene
depicted or engrauen, when it was infused into the body of
man, but sent downe from Heauen as we beleeue. Shee hath

nothing but simplicity, sincerity, purity, facility and
conueniencie, with inclination and aptitude to euery Arte
and Science, and to all knowledge of things diuine and
humane (which is the true definition of Philosophy).
The Platonic conception is altogether more romantic:
Plato sayeth to the contrary, affirming; That the reason-
able soule hath knowledge of all things, when it commeth
into the body: but being plunged and submerged in the great
humidity of the body, it forgeteth all . . . But afterward . . .
the Soule also recouereth it selfe by paucity of degrees,
and comprehendeth all things demonstrated and shewne
vnto her, as in remembring and acknowledging her selfe,
and not in learning any nouelties.
(p. 898/sig. Ggggv)
For Aristotle the soul is a blank innocent, with infinite capa-
bility – but for Plato the soul begins with complete and perfect
knowledge of the universe, and the transition into human form
involves a sublime forgetting. As the body matures, what appears
to us to be the acquisition of new skills and information is really
just the soul remembering things it had forgotten. It followed
from this that the soul must know the original language which
‘came from our first Parents, Adam and Eue: and that wee should
(in time) speake the very same, if the other, which we ordinarily
heare in our houses, did not preoccupate it’ (p. 898/sig. Ggggv),
so if our natural instinct (to speak the ‘original’ language) were
not over-ridden by the languages we hear around us as we
mature, we would speak the language Adam and Eve spoke.
Mexía sceptically recounts one of the many (hopefully mythical)
experiments this belief prompted (p. 897/sig. Ggggr):
Herodotus declareth in his second book, that Psam-
meticus, a King of the Ægyptians, was desirous (on a
time) to make proofe heereof, to the end, that he might
iudge thereby, what was the most auncient and naturall
Language, of all them that were spoken in the world. He

caused two Children to bee nursed in a Forrest, where
neuer any voyce of man was, or could be heard. After
two yeeres were past, and they being brought before the
King, sometimes they could pronounce this Word Bec,
which in the Phrygian tongue, signifieth Bread. Where-
uppon some gathered, that the Phrygian was the first
language of man.
To refute this, Mexía turns to St Augustine:
But as Saint Augustine sayeth, these children might haue
learned the Word Bec (and so retained it) of Goats,
among which they were nourished. For, as hee sheweth
in his worke of the quantitie of the Soule; all manner of
speaking is by hearing, and by imitation.
(p. 898/sig. Ggggv)
The goats, of course, are not speaking Phrygian. They are mak-
ing natural goat-noises, which the children copy, and the adults
misinterpret as words. This allows Mexía to introduce the key
Aristotelian idea about speech: that it is learned by imitation,
rather than being prompted by inner instinct or knowledge. But
Renaissance accounts of language tend to shift their ground
unpredictably: we have just seen Mexía citing St Augustine in
favour of language as learned and conventional, rather than
instinctive and motivated, but he now points out that elsewhere
St Augustine himself is guilty of nostalgia for the lost ‘original’
language: ‘Notwithstanding, in his Booke of the Cittie of God,
he thinketh and beleeueth, that before the confusion of Tongues
(which happened at the building of the Tower of Babell) the
Hebrew Language was naturally to all’. Mexía is unimpressed,
not simply with the choice of Hebrew, but with the fundamental
notion that languages might be ‘natural’ in this sense:
As if words were an action proceeding from naturall
instinct, or the simple and proper motion of the soule: euen
as if they had power in themselues (and of themselues,
with some naturall inclinations) to bring forth in euid-

ence and effect speech, without any enstructing. Such
knowledge is to sucke, to cry, mourne, laugh, mouing
hands and feet, & when strength serueth, to go.
(p. 898/sig. Ggggv)
This is an important move on the Aristotelian side – and links to
a conception of language which is, in its way, almost as power-
fully resonant as the opposing notion that words might be non-
arbitrary in some way. Time and time again, those on the
Aristotelian side emphasize the difference between language and
those things that humans, and animals, do ‘naturally’, by instinct.
Speech, Mexía says, does not appear without instruction: it is not
‘natural’, is not a ‘simple’ quality of the soul. Suckling, crying in
pain or joy, moving, and (eventually) walking: these are all
instinctive and ‘natural’. They are done without instruction or
observation. Speaking, however, cannot be done without obser-
vation, and then considerable discipline. It becomes, at least
potentially, the distinguishing mark of what it is to be human.
Juan Huarte approaches the cognitive faculties necessary to
language on a slightly different tack. Human languages show
huge variation, he says, because they are conventional – made up
by humans (because he is following Aristotle, there is no use of
the Babel myth):
From hence arose so great a number of wordes, and so
manie maners of speech so farre besides rule and reason,
that if a man had not a good memorie, it were impossible
to learne them with any other power.
(p. 104/sig. Hiiijv)
And he uses this to link to his main point, that language learning
is done by memory (in his terms a relatively low-level cognitive
facility), rather than understanding or imagination (which he
regards as higher-level):
How little the vnderstanding and the imagination make
for the purpose to learne languages and manners of
speech, is easily prooued by childhood, which being the

age wherein man most wanteth these two powers, yet
(saith Aristotle) children learne any language more readily
than elder men, though these are endowed with a better
discourse of reason. And without further speech, experi-
ence plainly prooueth this, for so much as we see, that if a
Biscane of 30. or 40. yeeres age, come to dwell in Castilia,
he will neuer learn this language: but if he be but a boy,
within two or three yeares you would thinke him born in
Toledo.
(p. 104/sig. Hiiijv)
Experience and observation show that humans learn languages
most easily, and best when still children, at which point, Renais-
sance developmental theory had it, memory was the most devel-
oped faculty, and understanding and imagination were the least.
Adults have better developed ‘discourse of reason’, but find
learning languages harder than children, who were considered to
be like apes or parrots: highly skilled imitators of what they saw
and heard around them, but unable to fully understand what they
saw, or what they did in imitating it.11 Therefore, although
language was often taken as a symbol of reason, it was not reason
itself, since reason played no particular role in its acquisition.
Reason was made evident in language use, since language allowed
an adult to communicate their reasonable thoughts in ‘discourse’.
This word has a particular force in Huarte (and Renaissance com-
ment on language more generally) to refer to language employed
with ‘understanding’, rather than language used on the basis of
simple ‘memory’. Huarte makes the point again, drawing on
Aristotle to show the separation between ‘language’, and reason
or discourse (pp. 104–5/sigs Hiiijv–Hvr ):
if in the age when memorie chiefly raigneth, and the
vnderstanding and the imagination least, languages are
better learned, than when there growes defect of mem-
orie, & an encrease of vnderstanding, it falles out
apparent that they are purchased by the memorie, and

by none other power. Languages (saith Aristotle) cannot
be gathered out by reason, nor consist in discourse or
disputations, for which cause, it is necessarie to heare the
word from another, and the signification which it
beareth, and to keepe the same in mind, and so he
prooueth that if a man be borne deaffe, it followes of
necessitie that he be also dumbe.
Languages are learned by memory, or rote learning, rather than

‘reason’: and the basic physical ability to speak a language is not
the same as the ability to engage in discourse or argument. The
final point from Aristotle, that those born deaf must inevitably be
dumb, a recurring point in Renaissance discussions of language
which follow Aristotle, is, of course, incorrect – as the work of
van Helmont would show in the seventeenth century.
So, Renaissance thinkers wanted to use language as a mark of
the human, but a problem with this was the ability of birds – and
children – to speak. A conceptual way round this was to separate
‘voice’ – the ability to produce sounds – from ‘speech’, the ability
to modulate voice into communicative discourse. Voice was phy-
sical and ‘natural’ (humans and animals made noises by instinct)
– and the sounds of speech could be learned by imitation and
retained by lower-level cognitive faculties like memory (children
could do it, animals could do it – even Dutchmen, in Huarte’s
eccentric Galenic world, could do it) – but ‘discourse’ – inten-
tional, reasonable communication of ideas with speech – was
only done by fully sentient humans. Renaissance texts on lan-
guage dwell endlessly on apparent animal speech, and the pro-
cesses by which speech is learned, because this was a key ethical
and theological distinction12 – as we will see in Chapter 2, a silent
human, or one producing disordered speech, was in danger of
not being human at all.
plainness and copia: language as ethics

Away from early scientific approaches to language, the biblical
accounts of language also authorized contradictory models in
non-technical writers. It is possible to find Renaissance comment
on language which is pessimistically distrustful of it, and also
accounts which invest language with an almost divine redemptive
power. The popular essay writer William Cornwallis, for example,
is suspicious ‘Of Wordes’ because of the redundancy and
superfluity of language:
I like no Relation so well as what mine eye telleth me; for
there is in speech, as in sumptuous building, many
entries, landing places, and Lucomes commended more
for formalities sake then for conueniency; so ‘ands’ and
‘ifs’ and many sounding wordes stuffe vp empty periods
with winde.
(Essayes, p. 219)
(A ‘lucome’ is a skylight.) Cornwallis prefers the eye because it
gives a more direct access to reality than words can:
Naturally we carry matter better then wordes, in which
nature telles vs she vseth words but for an interpretour
because our ignorance vnderstandes not her Language,
which puts vs to a great deale of paine and makes vs go
a great way about in our inquisition of knowledge.
The natural language of nature here (‘her Language’) is the one
Adam tapped into when he named the animals – now we are separ-
ated from it, knowledge can be got only at second hand, through
an imperfect human language. Distrust of the superfluous nature
of language – homonyms and polysemy, for example – was a
frequent theme for those anxious about the power of rhetoric.
For some, however, language was even more dangerous than
this: the tongue was a potential source of sin, and required close
supervision – William Perkins’s 1593 A Direction for the Govern-
ment of the Tongue cautions:
The minde is the guide of the tongue: therefore men

must consider before they speake. The tongue is the
messenger of the heart, and therefore as oft as we speake
without meditation going before, so oft the messenger
runneth without his errand. The tongue is placed in the
middle of the mouth, and it is compassed in with lippes
and teeth as with a double trench, to shewe us, howe we
are to use heede and preconsideration before we speake:
and therefore it is good advise to keep the key of the
mouth in the cupbourd of the heart.
(p. 11/sig. A8r)
The tongue, as the bodily organ of speech, must be governed
by the seat of reason: the mind. Renaissance writers were
frequently anxious about the facility of movement of the tongue:
this mobility seemed almost to hint at a degree of independent,
animal selfhood, with the threat that the tongue, in theory
the means by which a man’s reason is displayed and communi-
cated, might run off on its own, speaking non-sense, or worse.
This anxiety can be found even in anatomy manuals. Writing in
his Mikrokosmographia (1615), Helkiah Crooke states of the
tongue:
although it be but a little Member yet is it of great vse,
because it expresseth al the conceites of the minde,
wherefore our wise Creator hath defended it with many
Teeth, with Lippes, and restrained it with a Bridle, that
being so carefully attended it might not runne before the
minde, which first ought to consulte and deliberate
before the Tongue pronounce any thing.
(Book 8, ch. 32, pp. 628–9/sigs Hhh2v–Hhh3r)
The ‘bridle’ Crooke refers to is the lingual frenulum, which
secures the tongue to the bottom of the mouth: ‘The tongue . . .
being naturally nimble and voluble least that it shoulde bee always
importunately prattling, is restrained by this Tye, as it were by a
Bridle’ (p. 627/sig. Hhh2r).
Nervousness about language can also be found in Juan Huarte,

who mounts a paradoxical argument in his ninth chapter (p. 120):
‘How it may be prooued that the eloquence and finenesse of speech
cannot find place in men of great understanding’. Huarte here
develops a distinction between ‘memory’ and ‘imagination’
(which, as we have seen, he takes to be lower-level cognitive
skills), and ‘understanding’ (higher-level). He regards eloquence
as the dressing up of language with rote-learned figures and
tropes – at best a trivial, and perhaps a deceitful practice. In this,
Huarte represents a minority, but significant, Renaissance view
which was antagonistic to what it saw as rhetorical ‘ornament’. A
key anxiety of this ‘anti-ornament’ school of thought was the
perceived danger that the effect of an argument on an audience
would depend not on the truth of the proposition being argued
(appealing to the understanding of the audience), but the
emotional response triggered by the use of learned figures and set
argument-structures (produced by memory and imagination).
Bear in mind that Huarte (despite appearances) does not reject
linguistic facility (or indeed, rhetoric) outright: ‘discourse’ which
demonstrates understanding is still his ideal, and the examples he
cites represent the ‘plain’ style of rhetoric – but the strong
implication of what he says is that the force of an argument
should depend on its essential truth or falsehood, not the terms
in which it is expressed (p. 120/sig. Iiiijv):
One of the graces by which the vulgar is best persuaded,
and thinketh that a man hath much knowledge and
wisdome, is to heare him speake with great eloquence, to
haue a smooth tongue, plenty of sweet and pleasant
words, and to alleage many examples fit for the purpose
that is in hand: but this (verily) springeth from an vnion,
which the memorie maketh with the imagination, in a
degree and measure of heat, that cannot resolue the
moisture of the brain, and serueth to lift vp the figures,
and cause them to boile, where-through are discouered
many conceits and points to be vttered. In this vnion it
is impossible that discourse may be found; for we haue

already said and prooued heretofore that this power
greatly abhorreth heat, and moisture cannot support it.
Which doctrine, if the Athenians had knowen, they
would not so much haue maruelled to see so wise a man
as Socrates not to haue the gift of utterance; of whom,
those who vnderstood how great his knowledge was,
said, that his wordes & his sentences, were like a wooden
chest knobby and nothing trimmed on the outside, but
that in opening the same, within it held liniamentes and
portraitures of rare admiration.
Huarte’s Galenic notion of the rhetorical figures boiling up as
memory and imagination overheat the brain, so that the under-
standing cannot be employed, is fanciful, but the fundamental
concern, that a skilled rhetorician could argue successfully for weak
or immoral positions, was widespread. Huarte goes on to give a
biblical instance of the dangers of eloquence (p. 122/sig. Ivv):
that a preacher should be eloquent, and haue great
furniture of quaint tearms, is not a matter conuenient:
for the force of the Orators . . . appeared in making the
hearers repute things false for true; and what the vulgar
held for good and behoofull, they, vsing the precepts of
their art, persuaded the contrary, and maintained that it
was better to be poore than rich, sicke than whole, fond
than wise, and other points manifestly repugnant to the
opinion of the vulgar. For which cause the Hebrues
tearmed them Geragnin, that is to say, Deceiuers.
Note that here ‘the vulgar’ are repositories of common sense –
left to their own devices, they naturally recognize what is good
and right (‘behoofull’). The danger lies, not in any foolishness on
the part of the vulgar, but in the sophistical arguments of the
trained rhetorician, which ‘repute false things for true’. This
distrust of fancy, or affected language, is not restricted to those
who reject rhetorical ornament. Throughout Shakespeare, it is
linguistic pretention and ostentation that is most regularly and

forcefully satirized – not lack of learning or country rudeness.
This distrust of rhetorical ornament is especially found in
relation to the preaching of the Gospel, which, of all things, was
held not to need the aid of rhetorical persuasion because of the
force of its inherent truth. Despite its stress on ‘understanding’
and ‘discourse’, and apparent elevation of rational thought above
the mere rote learning of ‘eloquence’, which relies on memory
and imagination, this mode of thought is constantly pushing
towards a non-rationalist position derived from Platonic essen-
tialism. The truth, it implies, will be simply ‘known’ by the man
of understanding: there should be no need to argue for it.
Implicit in these arguments, or not far away, is a fundamental
distrust of human language as it exists in the here and now. If
only we could do away with it, or get back to the ‘original’
language, our access to knowledge would be more direct – at the
very least, the less of it we use, the better.13
If ornament was a source of concern for some, others worried
about the fundamental nature of language itself. The Aristotelian
formula for language is familiar: words are the representations of
mental ideas, which are themselves produced in the mind by the
things of the world. It follows that a perfect, ‘natural’ language
would have just so many words as there are ‘ideas’ (concepts) in
the world. If there are more words in present-day human lan-
guages than there are ideas in the world (which we know there
are, since different words can mean the same thing), then words
cannot be entirely reliable and, as Francis Bacon is at pains to
point out in much of his work, we must be constantly on our
guard against the deceptiveness of fallen language. For Bacon,
the conventionality of language was inescapable – but this raised
troubling questions about the control of meaning. If meanings
were arrived at by consensus, what control did any one individual
have over the language he or she used?
let us consider the false appearances that are imposed upon

us by words, which are framed and applied according to
the conceit and capacities of the vulgar sort: and

although we think we govern our words, and prescribe it
well, ‘Loquendum ut vulgus, sentiendum ut sapientes’;
yet certain it is that words, as a Tartar’s bow, do shoot
back upon the understanding of the wisest, and mightily
entangle and pervert the judgment.
This passage relies on a concept Bacon develops further else-
where: ‘The Idols of the Market Place’ – the false appearances set
up by language. Accepting the notion that meaning is conven-
tional (words are created – ‘framed’ – and used – ‘applied’ – by
common usage – ‘the conceit and capacities of the vulgar sort’),
Bacon warns that this means that our sense that we are in control
of language (‘we think we govern our words’) is likely to be
mistaken. We may follow Aristotle’s advice, ‘To speak as the
common people do, to think as the wise men do’ (Topics, II, ii,
110a 14–22), but the conventional nature of language means that
we can find ourselves saying things we did not think – because we
cannot fully control the possible meanings of the words we use.
Consequently, the search for knowledge often becomes bogged
down in semantic debate:
So as it is almost necessary in all controversies and dis-
putations to imitate the wisdom of the mathematicians, in
setting down in the very beginning the definitions of our
words and terms that others may know how we accept and
understand them, and whether they concur with us or no.
For it cometh to pass for want of this that we are sure to
end there where we ought to have begun, which is, in ques-
tions and differences about words. To conclude therefore,
it must be confessed that it is not possible to divorce
ourselves from these fallacies and false appearances, because
they are inseparable from our nature and condition of life;
so yet nevertheless the caution of them . . . doth extremely
import the true conduct of human judgment.
Language is inherently fallible, because humans are imperfect –

the Fall and the Babel myth are strongly, if silently, present in the
background here, and note, with them, the ghost of a ‘real’ lan-
guage, in the desire for a mathematical language, fixed, and
understood in the same way by all.
Not all commentators on language were as wary as Cornwallis,
Perkins, Crooke and Bacon, however. The classical rhetorical
tradition, as developed by Renaissance humanist educators,
offered an alternative approach to language which emphasized its
potential as a route to truth and the expression of reason. Indeed,
this tradition celebrated the lack of a one-to-one relationship
between words and things in the notion of copia – the ability of
fully developed languages to elegantly vary the words used to
speak of the same thing. Polysemy and synonyms (which the
advocates of ‘real’ language saw as obfuscatory) were seen as
richness.14 The translators of the 1611 Authorized Version of the
Bible offered an unashamed defence of linguistic latitude and
variation in diction in their foreword:
wee haue not tyed our selues to an vniformitie of

phrasing, or to an identitie of words, as some peraduen-
ture would wish that we had done, because they obserue,
that some learned men some where, haue beene as exact
as they could that way . . . that we should expresse the
same notion in the same particular word; as for example,
if we translate the Hebrew or Greeke word once by
Purpose, neuer to call it Intent; if one where Iourneying,
neuer Traueiling; if one where Thinke, neuer Suppose; if
one where Paine, neuer Ache; if one where Ioy, neuer
Gladnesse, &c. Thus to minse the matter, wee thought to
sauour more of curiositie then wisdome . . . For is the
kingdome of God become words or syllables? why
should we be in bondage to them if we may be free, vse
one precisely when wee may vse another no lesse fit, as
commodiously?
They also cite God’s linguistic practice as counter-evidence to

the ‘one thing–one word’ precept of the Adamic theory:
nicenesse in wordes was alwayes counted the next step to
trifling, and so was to be curious about names too: . . . we
cannot follow a better patterne for elocution then God
himselfe; therefore hee vsing diuers words in his holy
writ, and indifferently for one thing in nature: we, if wee
will not be superstitious, may vse the same libertie in our
English versions out of Hebrew & Greeke, for that copie
or store that he hath giuen us.
– neatly offering a rhetorical gain – copia – against what some
would see as the cloudy murk stirred up by multiple names.
The rather more optimistic approach to language and meaning
found in the Authorized Version draws on an alternative rhetorical
and theological tradition which conceived of language as partially
or potentially divine: a gift from God which enabled humans to
express the sparks of divine reason, and distinguished them from
the rest of creation. The rhetorician Thomas Wilson, in The Arte
of Rhetorique (1553), seems to hint at an implicit link between the
breath which makes up speech, and God’s breathing of life into
men: ‘Man (in whom is poured the breath of life) was made at his
first being an ever-living creature unto the likeness of God,
endued with reason and appointed lord over all other things
living’ (pp. 73–4). Writing in 1617, the early linguist Robert
Robinson says that God
hath giuen man a reasonable soule to iudge and discerne
so also that all his knowledge, all his graces might not lie
hid and smothered in his owne breast, he hath giuen him
a voice composed with more rarenesse then in any other
of his creatures.
(The Art of Pronuntiation, p. 3/sig. A2v)
Speech is important because it allows the divine reason in man to
be made public. This emphasis on the public is something it is
easy for us to overlook. The rhetorical tradition was predicated

on public oral performance: in classical times in the law court and
political assembly. If, in the hands of the Renaissance humanists,
rhetorical performances were actually increasingly written (as is
shown by the importance of the letter in humanist practice), then
the theory and the handbooks still assumed oral performance as
the target for those studying rhetoric.
Something of the ethical and moral significance which the
Renaissance invested in public speech can be sensed from one of
the most familiar comments about language at the time, made by
Ben Jonson:
Language most shewes a man: speake that I may see thee.
It springs out of the most retired, and inmost parts of
us, and is the Image of the Parent of it, the mind. No
glasse renders a mans forme, or likenesse, so true as his
speech.
(Timber, p. 625)
It should be noted, as I will argue in detail in Chapter 2, that the
basis on which Jonson (and the rest of Renaissance Europe)
would have judged someone’s language was content rather than
form. Jonson is not asking his imagined addressee to speak so he
can listen for a regional accent, or non-standard grammar –
instead he will look for features of discourse which demonstrate
a rhetorical training in the selection and handling of ideas. The
quality of someone’s mind, or reason, is made evident by the way
they construct sentences and respond to argument. Nor, we
should note as an aside, is Jonson necessarily expecting new or
startling ideas from his ideal speaker: in the passage quoted,
Jonson repeats the familiar Aristotelian view of language (or
words) as the image (or representation) of the mind (or ideas).
Originality or freshness in the handling of commonly shared
material was prized: originality in and of itself was more likely to
be held in suspicion than praised – a value-system we find very
difficult to appreciate, given the emphasis on newness and
originality in our post-Romantic culture. But Renaissance values
were different: in this passage apparently celebrating the self-

revelatory nature of the individual voice, Jonson is in fact
translating Vives.15 The self was fully demonstrated in verbal
performance, not by generating something new, but by making
familiar material your own.
This sense of ‘common’ material, a shared stock of ideas on
which everyone drew, is another key element of the Renaissance
approach to language. The word ‘society’ frequently occurs in
Renaissance discussions of language because language was seen
as an essentially social practice. There were printed and written
texts, of course, which might be consumed privately, and there
was silent reading, but these were not central to the way the
Renaissance conceptualized language: language was speech, and
‘reading’ was generally assumed to mean reading aloud.16 Indeed,
‘society’ was itself constituted by speech:
Speech is the only benefit man hath to expresse his
excelencie of mind aboue other creatures. It is the
instrument of Society. Therefore Mercury, who is the
President of Language, is called Deorum hominumque
interpres.
(Jonson, Timber, pp. 620–21)
‘Society’ for the Renaissance was not an abstract or imagined set
of social relationships, but an active process of interaction
through language. Silence, or the improper use of speech, was
seen as an abandonment of society, and a voluntary or involun-
tary renunciation of humanity. Again and again in Shakespeare’s
plays, characters are depicted as outside normal society when, for
whatever reason, their linguistic performance is disrupted: when
Ajax scorns words in Troilus and Cressida, he becomes unable to
distinguish social rank; when Romeo is cured of the madness of
his love for Rosaline in Romeo and Juliet, his language is said to
be once more ‘sociable’; when Ophelia runs mad in Hamlet, her
ravings, rather than embodying the picturesque Romantic
distraction of the Pre-Raphaelites, threaten the abysm of chaos.
(I discuss these passages further in Chapter 2.)
At the level of the human, then, speech was constitutive of

society. But speech was also resonant with significance to the
Renaissance because of its dual materiality. Combining the
ethereality of air with the corporeal physicality of the tongue,
lips and lungs, speech frequently figures as the point of inter-
change of the divine with the fallen world. Writing of Adam and
Eve, Richard Allestree states:
tho there was this sympathy in their sublimer part which

disposed them to the most intimate union; yet there was
a cloud of flesh in the way which intercepted their mutual
view, nay permitted no intelligence between them, other
then by the mediation of some organ equally commen-
surate to soul and body. And to this purpose the infinite
wisdom of God ordained Speech; which as it is a sound
resulting from the modulation of the Air, has most
affinity with the spirit, but as it is uttered by the Tongue,
has immediate cognation with the body, and so is the
fittest instrument to manage a commerce between the
rational yet invisible powers of human souls clothed in
flesh.
(The Government of the Tongue (1674), sig. A2r)
Language is thus both of the world, and the means by which man
can escape from it, and Protestant theology, with its emphasis on
the word, made possible a fusion of classical rhetoric’s ethics and
Christian belief. This can be clearly seen in Thomas Wilson’s
account of the Fall and its consequences, where the Fall becomes
a separation of man from reason (and therefore language):
Long it was ere that man knew himself, being destitute

of God’s grace, so that all things waxed savage: the earth
untilled, society neglected, God’s will not known, man
against man, one against another, and all against order.
Some lived by spoil; some like brute beasts grazed upon
the ground; some went naked; some roamed like wood
woses; none did anything by reason, but most did what

they could by manhood . . . whereas man through reason
might have used order, man through folly fell into error.
(Arte of Rhetorique, p. 74)
Restitution is achieved through language, though explicitly
language guided by rhetorical principles:
God, still tendering his own workmanship, stirred up his
faithful and elect to persuade with reason all men to
society. And gave his appointed ministers knowledge
both to see the natures of men, and also granted them
the gift of utterance, that they might with ease win folk
at their will, and frame them by reason to all good order
. . . these appointed of God called them together by
utterance of speech and persuaded with them what was
good, what was bad, and what was gainful for mankind
. . . Such force hath the tongue, and such is the power of
eloquence and reason.
(pp. 74–5)
Speech, then, had a high cultural status in the Renaissance
because of its associations with God, reason and the classical
rhetorical tradition, which underpinned all education at the time.
These associations also mean that while early modern thinkers
were well aware that language could be used to deceive or to per-
suade others to do evil, the fundamental conception of language
and meaning, for many, was optimistic: language was a force for
good, and if used carefully and properly, could accurately convey
meaning. Moreover, language is frequently cited as the attribute
that raises man above the level of the rest of creation – as Wilson
says of the orator: ‘I think him most worthy fame, and amongst
men to be taken for half a god, that therein doth chiefly, and
above all others, excel men wherein men do excel beasts’ (pp.
75–6); and as Robinson notes in relation to the complexity of
human vocal performance as a means to express the abilities of
the God-given soul:
as he hath giuen man a reasonable soule to iudge and

discerne so also that all his knowledge, all his graces
might not lie hid and smothered in his owne breast, he
hath giuen him a voice composed with more rarenesse
then in any other of his creatures, whereby he may
expresse the thoughts of his heart, may praise and pray
to his God, may teach and instruct others in that which
he knoweth aboue other men.
(Pronuntiation, p. 3/sig. A2v)
The most striking image of the power of language for the

Renaissance is surely that of Hercules Gallicus, as described by
Thomas Wilson (p. 75):
therefore the poets do feign that Hercules, being a man
of great wisdom, had all men linked together by the ears
in a chain, to draw them and lead them even as he lusted.
For his wit was so great, his tongue so eloquent, and his
experience such, that no man was able to withstand his
reason.
As the iconographic tradition shows,17 this was a typically complex
set of ideas and associations, but the unification of the physically
dominant Hercules with the intellectually pre-eminent Mercury
is testament to the conceptual power invested in rhetoric – and
grammar – at the time.
grammar, error and decorum

Grammar, or more accurately grammatica, underpins all intellec-
tual activity in the Renaissance. Grammatica was understood as
forming the basis for every type of textual activity, creative and
critical: speaking, writing, criticizing, interpreting. Its roots were in
classical rhetoric, but its central role in biblical interpretation
thrust it to the forefront of debates which were for the Renaissance
not just matters of life and death on the scaffold, but salvation
and damnation in eternity. Technical grammatical arguments
could thus affect the lives, and souls, of every person – as Brian
Cummings has recently demonstrated.18 But debates about gram-
mar also informed, and revealed, popular conceptions of what
language was – especially in relation to practice and the judge-
ment of what constituted ‘good’ language, and what constituted
‘error’. I will argue in Chapter 4 that the Renaissance did not
view variation as ‘error’ (as our culture tends to, thanks to the
legacy of prescriptivism) – and shifts in grammatical theory at
the time can help explain why.
One of the defining shifts in Renaissance culture occurred in
the 1520s and 1530s, as humanist scholars in universities began
to write a new kind of Latin textbook, in reaction to a style which
had been dominant for about three hundred years, and which we
now call ‘scholastic’.19 Up to this point, Latin grammars had been
prescriptive, seeking to dictate ‘recte’ (correct) writing by appeals
to independent, self-sufficient, formal systems of grammar, often
based on ‘ratio’ (logic) rather than observation (so some gram-
marians sought to proscribe ambiguity and polysemy out of their
systems on the basis that each form should have only one mean-
ing).20 Now humanist educators shifted the basis of their teach-
ing and grammars from ‘ratio’ to ‘exempla’ (example). Although
‘recte’, or correct, writing was still the stated goal of studying
grammar, the model for what was ‘recte’ was what good writers
did – what was ‘bene’ (good or stylish) – rather than what gram-
marians thought they ought to do. Language came first: gram-
mars described what good writers did, and lists of examples
replaced lists of rules (for example, Erasmus’s De copia verborum ac
rerum), with eloquence replacing correctness as the ideal for writers.
This is a crucial moment for ideas about language in the
Renaissance, since it establishes at the core of intellectual life an
approach to language which is descriptive and appreciative,
rather than prescriptive and disciplinarian. The humanist
instinct when faced with language was to judge it on its own
terms (what was it seeking to do; did it use appropriate methods
to achieve this?), and look for felicities to praise. By the later
seventeenth century, this would be replaced by something
looking more like a rejuvenated scholasticism, as the ideology of

standardization prompted critics to measure language against an
independent formal structure (the ‘standard’), in a search for
error and failure. Shakespeare, and his characters, are more likely
to behave like humanists in the face of language – appreciative
comment is far more common than critical – and the ‘standard’
by which language is found wanting, if it is, is that of decorum
and communicative effectiveness.
‘Error’ is an interesting notion in the Renaissance.21 To us, a lin-
guistic error is straightforward – the ideology of standardization
has established variation as error, and culturally, grammatical
variants are identified as errors, despite what linguists might say
– but there was no such ideology in the Renaissance, especially in
relation to the vernaculars. As we have seen, the Aristotelian
position on language, and the Babel myth, logically rendered all
human languages equal, and equally imperfect: they were all
conventional, and they were all fallen. A Platonist might refer to
the ideal/original language as superior, but in practical terms this
was lost. Those who pointed to an existing language as retaining,
somehow, traces of the Platonic ideal, were increasingly under-
mined by descriptivist humanist studies. For those who sought to
establish Latin as an ideal, linguistic research on Greek and
Hebrew was questioning its status as the ‘perfect’ language, as it
became clear that grammatical terminology developed for the
description of Latin was insufficient to describe Greek and Heb-
rew – and comparative work, especially in biblical translation,
was turning up discomforting ideas about the ease and reliability
with which Greek and Hebrew could be rendered in Latin (some
even suggested that English was a more suitable language because
of similarities in the way the verbal system worked). At the same
time, Protestantism was demonizing Latin as the obfuscatory
language of the Catholic Church.
All of this served to undermine the notion of linguistic
authority between languages (all languages were equally good, or
equally bad) – and by implication, within them. If all language
was conventional, then there was no basis for saying that a

grammatical form or word used in place A was inherently better
or worse than one used in place B. Decorum would tell you that
using a form from place B in place A might be improper, and
communicative efficiency would rule it out too: but the ethical
imperative of maximal communication worked to favour
‘common’ rather than ‘correct’ terms. It was self-evident to most
at the time that the ‘best’ language was that which could commu-
nicate to most people – and that anything that prevented this (for
example the use of ‘strange’ words from the scholar’s study, the
court, or the wild marches) was likely to be a bad thing.
So the most readily recognized linguistic errors at the time are
doctrinal, made by scholars rather than the uneducated, and they
are inter-linguistic, between languages, rather than intra (within
them): Tyndale attacks Fisher for incorrectly rendering a verb
passive in his translation of the Bible; Thomas More in turn
objects to Tyndale’s translation because he does not use ‘ye
common knowen worde’, instead borrowing terms like ‘senior’
for ‘priest’ – of which More says ‘in our englysshe tonge this
worde senyor sygnyfyeth no thynge at all but is a frenche worde
vsed in englysshe more than halfe in mockage’.22 Despite a Latin
tradition attacking non-urban varieties,23 it is very difficult to find
unequivocal rejection of dialect forms of English in comment on
the language – and impossible to find dialects being characterized
as ‘incorrect’. As Chapter 4 will seek to show, objections to dialect
terms, where made, were generally on the grounds of them not
being commonly understood – and many were prepared to
defend dialect as a link to the past, and a source of copia.
writing
While Renaissance intellectuals might celebrate the ethical power
of the orator, and be attracted by the metaphorical spirituality of
breathy speech, they were also painfully aware of the ephemeral
nature of the spoken word:
voice . . . is but onely a sleight accident made of so light

a substance as the ayre, it is no sooner vttered but it is
dissolued, euery simple sound doth expell and extin-
guish the sound going before it, so that the eare can haue
but one touch of the ayre beating vpon it to declare the
speech vnto the mind.
(Robinson, Pronuntiation, p. 4)
The fleeting nature of speech puts at risk the ethical improve-
ments communication seems to offer:
if there were no other helpe then the voice to expresse
the minde: man could not be the better for any thing that
should be taught or spoken of longer then the very words
were speaking, or at the longest, but whilest our weake
memories could retaine the very matter spoken of . . . it
might easily be foreseene how soone all the labors of vs
and our forefathers would perish, how quickly the wise
councells, witty and graue sayings of the learned would be
forgotten . . . All our doings, all our sayings, all our cus-
tomes, and all our manners would be buried in obliuion.
Writing is the thing that will save mankind from this horror of
oblivion; a secondary, rather imperfect version of speech it may
be, but it endures: ‘the hand though it giue a dumbe and more
dull kind of speech, yet it giues a more durable. A letter is a
grosser substance, and therefore is of more continuance then a
sound’ (p. 4).
For Robinson, writing (‘the hand’) is dull, dumb and gross
when compared to the breath of speech, but this increased phys-
icality, while removing it from the spiritual associations of the
voice, allows its survival over time. Writing can also, of course,
allow communication over geographical space, as John Wilkins
notes in his Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger (1641):
Now, because Words are onely for those that are present
both in time & place; therefore to these, there hath beene
added, the invention of letters and writing: which are
such a representation of our words (though more per-

manent) as our words are of our thoughts. By these we
may discourse with them, that are remote from us, not
onely by the distance of many miles, but also of many ages.
(pp. 4–5/sigs B2v–B3r)
We can see here again the Aristotelian assumption that ‘words’

only exist in speech, and that letters represent words, while
words represent thoughts. Wilkins goes on to remind his readers
of the strange technological status of writing:
How strange a thing this Art of writing did seeme at its

first invention; we may guesse by the late discovered
Americans, who were amazed to see men converse with
books, and could scarce make themselves beleeve that a
paper should speake.
(p. 5/sig. B3r)
To this extent, Shakespeare’s society was one in transition from

orality to literacy (to use Walter Ong’s terms): no longer purely
oral, but not yet acculturated to the strangeness of writing. Our
experience of early modern society is necessarily textual – but we
need to beware that early modern society was neither fully
‘textual’, nor did it conceive itself to be so. ‘Words’ were acoustic,
not visual. A playtext was a record of, or the basis for, a spoken
performance. A legal document was most commonly a record of
a spoken pledge or piece of evidence – not, as it would be for us,
the evidence itself, or the legal contract in physical form. Of
course, texts abounded in early modern society; and the steady
rise in literacy rates, and the output of the printing presses,
meant that textuality was to become more and more central,
producing, as I will argue, a fundamental shift in the concep-
tualization of language during the seventeenth century. For
Shakespeare and his contemporaries, however, while language
was something that could be represented in writing and print, it
existed fully only in the air between the fleshy muscle of the
tongue and the hollow porches of the ear.
CHAPTER TWO
IDEAS ABOUT LANGUAGE IN SHAKESPEARE

1: DISCOURSE, ARTIFICE AND SILENCE
I have tried to show so far that whatever else they thought when
they thought about language, Shakespeare and his contemporaries
thought of it as speech: breath cast into the air. This ethereality
encouraged the notion that, inasmuch as it allowed humans
to make evident their ability to reason, language was a divine
gift, elevating humanity above the rest of earthly creation. The
gift of language could thus raise the monstrous to the level of
the human, as it does Caliban. But even here, we find the
doubleness and paradox often associated with language in the
Renaissance: one of Caliban’s new linguistic, and human, gifts is
cursing. Conversely, the voluntary abandonment of language
could suggest a descent from the human. In Troilus and Cressida
(a play with no shortage of cursing), Ajax, swollen with pride at
the prospect of single combat with Hector, loses his ability to
distinguish social rank, along with his humanity, in a mumbling
silence:
thersites
The man’s undone for ever, for if Hector break not his
neck i’th’combat, he’ll break’t himself in vainglory. He
knows not me. I said, ‘Good morrow, Ajax’, and he rep-
lies, ‘Thanks, Agamemnon’. What think you of this man
that takes me for the general? He’s grown a very land-
fish, languageless, a monster . . . he’ll answer nobody. He
professes not-answering, speaking is for beggars. He
wears his tongue in’s arms.
(3.3.260–72)
Language in Shakespeare 1: Discourse, Artifice and Silence 41
Language is social in the Renaissance in a formal, public sense we

no longer quite appreciate. There is a clear link here between
Ajax’s loss of language and his socially shocking inability to
distinguish Thersites from Agamemnon, the highest of the
Greek generals. His loss of language is not complete: Ajax can
still manage a dismissive ‘Thanks, Agamemnon’, and he can
proudly speak to say that speaking is for beggars – but he is
‘languageless’ in the sense that the Renaissance held a parrot to
be languageless: physically able to utter coherent sounds, but not
capable of reason and therefore unable to control language. He is
a ‘land-fish’, again like Caliban, and has lost his membership of
society.
In Othello, drink does not silence Cassio – would that it had –
but it robs his speech of reason, reduces him, in his own guilty
self-assessment, to the status of a talking animal:
I will rather sue to be despised, than to deceive so

good a commander with so slight, so drunken, and so
indiscreet an officer. Drunk? and speak parrot? and
squabble? swagger? swear? and discourse fustian with
one’s own shadow? O thou invisible spirit of wine, if
thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee
devil!
(2.3.273–9)
Cassio’s loss of reason is marked by more than just parrot-like

speech: he misapplies ‘discourse’, pointlessly addressing non-
sense (‘fustian’) to his own shadow – language is nothing if it is
not employed in a social context, in genuine interchange.
In Romeo and Juliet, we see the reverse journey. The play
begins with Romeo in love with Rosaline – a wholly conventional
love, which has the conventional Renaissance effect on his reason
(and therefore language). Mercutio seeks him out, mocking the
fragmented, distracted language of the stereotypical lover with a
string of asyndetic nouns (they are coordinated, but there is no
explicit marking of this by conjunctions such as ‘and’):
Romeo! Humours! Madman! Passion! Lover!

Appear thou in the likeness of a sigh,
Speak but one rhyme and I am satisfied.
Cry but ‘Ay me!’ Pronounce but ‘love’ and ‘dove’,
Speak to my gossip Venus one fair word . . .
(2.1.7–11)
Romeo deliberately avoids his friend, and by the next time they
meet, he has fallen for Juliet – and the authenticity of this love
recharges his social and linguistic energy:
mercutio
You gave us the counterfeit fairly last night.
romeo
Good morrow to you both. What counterfeit did I give
you?
mercutio
The slip, sir, the slip. Can you not conceive?
romeo
Pardon, good Mercutio, my business was great, and in
such a case as mine a man may strain courtesy.
(2.4.46–53)
This is a passage of punning wordplay of the type that has long

troubled Shakespearean critics (as we will explore more fully in
Chapter 3). Mercutio’s ‘counterfeit’ puns on ‘slip’, which could
be a term for a counterfeit coin, as well as a reference to Romeo’s
dodging out of Mercutio’s way (he gave him the slip). Romeo is
slow on the uptake, hence Mercutio’s explanation, ‘The slip, sir,
the slip. Can you not conceive?’, but he joins the game with a play
on Mercutio’s ‘conceive’ with his own ‘great’ business (‘great’
being a synonym for ‘pregnant’ – there is also an obscene mean-
ing of ‘case’, which could refer to the vagina). So the surface
meaning of Romeo’s comment is, ‘I’m sorry, Mercutio, but my
business was important, and in those circumstances it is allowable
to be impolite’ – with a possible second meaning of, ‘I was with a
woman – and that overrides everything.’
This kind of punning interplay can strike us as strained today

(even if we can understand it) but such wordplay was a sign of
intelligence and social engagement in the Renaissance – as
Mercutio explicitly recognizes, in a speech that introduces
several significant terms for thinking about language in
Shakespeare:
Why, is not this better now than groaning for love?
Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo; now art
thou what thou art, by art as well as by nature. For
this drivelling love is like a great natural . . .
(2.4.88–91)
The key terms here are ‘sociable’, ‘art’, and ‘nature’ – and if we
can come to an understanding of their connotations for Mer-
cutio, and the striking ways in which they differ from the
connotations of these terms for us, we will be some way towards
understanding the conceptualization of language in the Renais-
sance. Mercutio declares that Romeo has regained his language,
and thus has become ‘sociable’ again – fit for society. He has done
this by demonstrating ‘art’ (the artificial control of language)
through a series of puns we now find excruciating (for example,
‘O single-soled jest, solely singular for the singleness!’ (65–6)).
Mercutio’s values are (for us) unexpected: ‘nature’ is associated
with moronic simplicity (a ‘drivelling . . . natural’, or simpleton)
rather than purity and unadorned goodness. What lies behind this
is the radically different approach to aesthetics and creativity the
Renaissance inherited from the classical rhetorical tradition: as
Mercutio implies, ‘art’ (or craft) – the display of the artificial – is
what distinguishes the educated, rational being, from the ‘natural’
accident. Language is the site for the conscious demonstration of
reason and understanding (otherwise, why not talk to a parrot?).
Modern readings, and performances, thus grossly misrep-
resent Mercutio when they stress his ‘madcap’ side, and suggest
that language runs away with him (in the ‘Queen Mab’ speech,
for example – which the Baz Luhrmann film has Mercutio
deliver under the effects of ecstasy). In fact, he is a figure of
control over language (as his name, with its reference to Mercury,
the god of eloquence, suggests); it is Romeo, early in the play,
who fails to control language. The prevalence of this anach-
ronistic reading of Mercutio suggests how deeply our culture is
imbued with a Romantic notion of poetic furor, and a belief that
language at its best is almost independent of the conscious will of
the user.1 To Mercutio, and the Renaissance, performance with-
out years of studied craft, learning tropes and figures, consciously
channelling the products of imagination by art, was quite literally
nothing – it produced the empty nonsense of the moping Romeo,
and, like an illness, robbed a man of his reason, reducing his
discourse to that of a madman:
My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
Th’uncertain sickly appetite to please:
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I, desperate, now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic mad with ever more unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed:
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
(Sonnet 147)
Reason, thought and discourse are again linked here: love robs
the lover of reason, confusing his thoughts, and the result is visible
publicly in the lover’s ‘discourse’ – the public instantiation of
language. And while the ‘nothing’ that lack of reason produces
might be the harmless clichés of the lover, as in Romeo and the
Sonnets’ persona, it could also be something much more threat-
ening. In Hamlet, Ophelia’s madness is evident in an outpouring
of unconstrained, unconscious language:
She speaks much of her father, says she hears

There’s tricks i’th’ world, and hems, and beats her heart,
Spurns enviously at straws, speaks things in doubt
That carry but half sense. Her speech is nothing,
Yet the unshaped use of it doth move
The hearers to collection. They aim* at it,
And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts,
Which, as her winks and nods and gestures yield them,
Indeed would make one think there might be thought,
Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily.
(4.5.4–13; * yawne Q2, ayme F)
Ophelia talks of her murdered father, Polonius, suggests there are

plots (‘tricks’) afoot, stumbles over her words (‘hems’), makes the
gestures associated with grief and distraction, is suspicious of
harmless things (‘Spurns . . . at straws’), says things which can-
not be understood or which have no clear sense (‘things in doubt
. . . carry but half sense’). The absence of conjunctions in this
report (‘She speaks . . . says . . . Spurns . . . speaks . . .’) mimics
the confused, ‘unshaped’ nature of her speech; ‘unshaped’
carries a particular force here, and in the Renaissance generally,
where the craft of oral performance was the focus of almost the
entire educational system. Ophelia’s madness causes her to lose
control of language – to lose the ability to structure discourse
under the control of reason. While for the Romantics such a loss
of constraint might have been seen as liberating, offering the
possibility of insight beyond the everyday, for the Renaissance it
represented the potential triumph of the forces of chaos over the
order imposed by man’s rational intellect. As the report goes on
to suggest, unregulated expression is a dangerous force, liable to
introduce error and confusion into the world. Ophelia’s ‘unshaped’
language makes those who hear it attempt to reconstruct its lost
meaning (‘botch the words up’), but their conjectures are un-
certain (‘nothing sure’) and dark. Many years of Pre-Raphaelite
portraits, and post-Romantic productions, have bestowed on
Ophelia, and Shakespeare’s other mad women, an aura of cosy
scattiness accompanied by a suggestively sexy distraction. But for

the Renaissance, the disconnected nature of ‘mad’ speech was not
a promise of breaking through to some other side of enhanced
perception: it signalled the horror of the loss of reason, and
therefore humanity. As Claudius says of Ophelia:
poor Ophelia
Divided from herself and her fair judgement,
Without the which we are pictures, or mere beasts . . .
(84–6)
If there was ever ‘matter’ in the speech of the mad, it was there
by chance – a cruel joke by who-knew-what malign force,
mocking their departed humanity.
Society, reason, discourse, humanity. They can stand in con-
trast to Mercutio’s similarly asyndetic list. No serious thinker
about language would have needed the links between these to be
spelled out at the time – so they rarely are. But ‘reason’ and ‘dis-
course’, and considerations of the human and the bestial, are
often close together in Shakespeare. Hamlet takes the absence of
‘discourse’ and ‘reason’ as defining elements of the non-human
(though not the inhumane): ‘O God, a beast that wants discourse
of reason / Would have mourned longer’ (1.2.150–52); and later
speculates:
What is a man
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast – no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused. Now whether it be
Bestial oblivion . . .
(4.4.32–9)
The bestial is not simply absence of language: beasts could talk,
after a fashion. To be truly human was to demonstrate reason by
using language to engage in ‘discourse’ – linguistic behaviour that
demonstrated more than just motor control over the tongue and
vocal tract. Discourse involved understanding, and showing it in
a truly sociable manner: framing your language according to cer-
tain precepts, using a common set of figures and tropes, employing
structural templates for organizing an argument, adjusting the
style of your language to the content and audience. All of these
were ‘artificial’ in the positive sense of demonstrating a learned
craft – and for the Renaissance, the ‘artificial’ was another human
potential to be set against the ‘bestial’ chaos of nature.
‘Art’ and ‘nature’ are therefore two more terms we need to pay
attention to in relation to Renaissance conceptions of language.
When they are brought together in Shakespeare’s texts, we can
miss their significance: happily, reconstructing this significance
involves looking at some Renaissance paintings, as well as the
slightly more onerous task of paying attention to ‘the words of
Mercury’.
‘the wordes of mercurie’ 2

For a comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost ends mysteriously. Seven hun-
dred lines into the long final scene (it is over 900 lines in total),
we appear to be heading conventionally enough towards a set of
multiple weddings. Up to this point, the play has been an erudite,
but light, romantic comedy in which four young noblemen
attempt to woo, but are continually outsmarted by, four equally
young, but far more mature, noblewomen. Generic conventions,
and the highly suggestive mathematics of the pairings of men
and women assembled in the final scene, seem to point towards a
climax in which the women will, having demonstrated their
superiority, acquiesce in marriage. This does not happen, how-
ever. Suddenly, an entirely new character appears – Marcadé, a
messenger from the home court of the women:
Enter a Messenger, Monsieur marcadé.

marcadé
God save you, madam.
princess
Welcome, Marcadé,
But that thou interruptest our merriment.
marcadé
I am sorry, madam, for the news I bring
Is heavy in my tongue. The King, your father –
princess
Dead, for my life!
marcadé
Even so; my tale is told.
(5.2.711–15)
It is unusual, though not unknown in Shakespeare, for a messen-
ger with only three speeches adding up to one and a half lines to
be named – both in the stage direction, speech prefix, and in the
spoken text of the play, and it is reasonable to suppose that Mar-
cadé’s name is significant. John Kerrigan notes that it can be read
as ‘mar arcadia’ = wreck paradise – which is what Marcadé does
to the paradise of the scholars and women – but the name also
recalls Mercury: messenger of the gods, and the figure who leads
souls to Hades, doubly appropriate to this messenger bringing
news of death.3
This eruption of death in the idyll of the play produces a
crisis: the French princess resolves to leave immediately with her
entourage, but the four young men press for an answer to their
suits of love. Characteristically, the King does this in a speech of
clotted rhetoric (‘The extreme parts of time extremely forms /
All causes to the purpose of his speed . . .’ (734–45)) which makes
it impossible for the Princess to know either what he means or
even if his feelings are genuine: ‘I understand you not. My griefs
are double’ (746). The King’s companion, Berowne, tries to
explain, beginning, ‘Honest plain words best pierce the ear of
grief ’ (747), but he ends up being no less convoluted in his
speech (lines 747–70), and the Princess delivers a clear rejection
of the men’s attempts to communicate their feelings, both now,
and in the immediate past:
We have received your letters full of love,

Your favours, the ambassadors of love,
And in our maiden counsel rated them
At courtship, pleasant jest and courtesy,
As bombast and as lining to the time.
But more devout than this in our respects
Have we not been; and therefore met your loves
In their own fashion, like a merriment.
(771–8)
In other words, the women have not taken the courtship language
of the men seriously (‘bombast and lining’ means material to
stuff clothes with). As a compromise, the women agree to meet
the men again in a year’s time. Deeds, not words, must prove
their love:
Your oath I will not trust, but go with speed
To some forlorn and naked hermitage,
Remote from all the pleasures of the world,
. . . Then, at the expiration of the year,
Come challenge me, challenge me by these deserts,
And, by this virgin palm now kissing thine,
I will be thine.
(788–801)
As Berowne ruefully comments, the year’s gap is ‘too long for a
play’ (896) – too long certainly for a jump in time in the final
scene – and just at this point where the play is in danger of fizz-
ling out, Armado, a subsidiary character, re-enters, and proposes
finishing the entertainments which had been so brutally inter-
rupted by the arrival of the ominous Marcadé. Will they all, he
asks, hear a ‘dialogue’ between ‘the owl and the cuckoo’?
The characters agree, and what follows is a song presented by
Hiems (winter) as the owl, and Ver (spring) as the cuckoo. Just as
our generic expectations have been overturned by the sudden
announcement of death, and the postponement of marriage in
the plot of the play, so the associations of winter and spring in the
song are not what we would expect. First of all, spring sings first,
which is strange chronologically, and the imagery associated with
spring is not as reassuring as we might expect:
When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then on every tree
Mocks married men; for thus sings he:
‘Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo!’ O, word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear.
When shepherds pipe on oaten straws
And merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks,
When turtles tread and rooks and daws,
And maidens bleach their summer smocks,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he:
‘Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo!’ O, word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear.
(882–99)
Amidst the conventional pastoral imagery of flowers and rustic
activities, there are scenes of sexual predation. Married men are
being cuckolded: the tone is one of comic unease. In contrast, the
associations of the song of Hiems are cosily reassuring. Puzz-
lingly coming after spring, winter’s song is as follows:
When icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipped and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl:
‘Tu-whit, Tu-whoo!’
A merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
When all aloud the wind doth blow
And coughing drowns the parson’s saw
And birds sit brooding in the snow
And Marian’s nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl:
‘Tu-whit, Tu-whoo!’
A merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot
(900–17)
Although onomatopoeic bird songs like this are well known, the
details of this one seem unconventional.4 Why reverse the expected
order of winter and spring? Why associate spring with sexual
unease, and winter with cosy domesticity (the ‘crabs’ of verse two
are crab apples, heated up and added to a bowl of ale)? Reading
the song back against the play, it could be argued that ‘spring’
represents the men’s immature, indiscriminate sexuality, while
‘winter’ points to the more mature, and lasting, sensibility of the
women. Winter comes second because maturity is what triumphs
in the play: the characters’ future will be less intoxicatingly
exciting, but more reassuringly stable.
In the quarto text, the puzzles continue after the song. The
play ends with a gnomic sentence, set in larger type than the rest
of the play, and unattributed to any speaker (Figure 1, overleaf).
‘The wordes of Mercurie, are harsh after the songes of Apollo.’
What does this line mean? Indeed, is this a line of the play at all?
Are these words meant to be sung by the singers of the immedi-
ately preceding song, or are they spoken by one of the characters
on stage? Could the words be a meta-comment on the whole play,
added by author, printer or scribe for the written version only?
Why are they set in larger type than the rest of the play text? The
Figure 1. William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost

(London, 1598) [Q1], sig. K2v (5.2.918–19).
decision to use a larger typeface for the words must have been a
conscious one in the printing house: what was in the manuscript
copy to make the compositors do this?
There is, at present, no final answer to this question.5 Con-
sideration of the mystery will, however, involve us in a consider-
ation of mythological paintings in the Renaissance, translations
of classical texts and, most importantly of all, the conceptual-
ization of ‘language’ in the early modern period.
We can think about the question of what this line might mean
from two main perspectives. The first is, what does it mean in
relation to the play it either completes, or comments on from
outside? How can we relate it to what we have just seen and heard
if we are part of a theatre audience, or read if we have just read
the play (reading might be a key term here, remember, since it is
possible that the line is a comment only supplied in a written ver-
sion of the text – aimed purely at readers). The second, closely
related, perspective is, what sense can we make of this line in terms
of the classical mythology it evokes? What wider cultural mean-
ings might the line have, in addition to its relevance to the play it
ends? Why Mercury and Apollo? Why ‘wordes’ and ‘songes’?
I want to begin with the pairing of Mercury and Apollo, and
their apparent association in the line with words and songs respec-
tively. Structurally, the antithetical pairings make balanced sense:
Mercury < > Apollo
^ ^
Words < > Songs 6
And these opposed pairings echo the pairings of the song:

spring/winter. However, these pairings also echo the song in that,
while the structural logic governing the architecture of the
pairings might make sense (i.e. each element is paired with
another: the maths adds up), the cultural logic bringing the
elements together is either obscure, or off-kilter. In the song, we
have spring paired with winter: culturally entirely expected, and
even boringly conventional. There is a twist, however: culturally
we expect winter to be harsh, and spring soft, but the song turns
the expectation round. Winter is associated with images of
warmth and plenty; spring with lack and cold. Similarly in the
final line, some of the cultural logic underlying the pairings is
clear. Apollo is the god of song and music – one of his attributes
is a lyre – so there is no problem with that link. Then things
become less obviously clear. Why is Mercury associated with
‘wordes’? In mythology, as we will see, Mercury is the god of
eloquence, the messenger of the gods, associated with exchange:
legal commerce as well as theft and guile. So the beginnings of a
link with ‘wordes’ can be seen – and we will investigate this fur-
ther in a moment. But why should these ‘wordes’ be antithetical
to ‘songes’? Aren’t songs made up partially of words? And why
should Mercury’s words be ‘harsh’ when compared to Apollo’s
songs? Mercury is often seen as a playful trickster (with some of
the associations that inform our use of the adjective ‘mercurial’),
and the mythological Apollo can be very harsh indeed – just ask
Marsyas, the satyr he had flayed alive for challenging his prowess
in music.
Finally, why pair Mercury and Apollo? A more obvious pairing
for Apollo in terms of modern philosophical handling of the
metaphors supplied by classical mythology would be Bacchus/
Dionysus, with Apollo representing rational thought, and

Bacchus/Dionysus the epiphanic state achieved by the inspired
artist. Mercury, however, is closely associated with language in
mythology, and by tracing these associations, we can come to an
understanding of why he is important at the end of Love’s
Labour’s Lost.
The iconography of classical gods in the Renaissance offers
some clues as to why Mercury and Apollo should be juxtaposed
in these words. Although Mercury more commonly appears with
Jove/Jupiter, as his messenger and son, there is no contrast
implied between the two: Mercury is an extension of Jove,
generally acting under his orders. Francesco Albani’s painting
The Realm of Heaven (c. 1635) alludes to one contrastive link
between Mercury and Apollo.7 In one mythological episode,
Mercury was responsible for the theft of some cattle, at the time
guarded by Apollo. In recompense, Mercury was instructed to
give the lyre he had invented to Apollo and in some traditions, he
in turn receives the caduceus, his snake-entwined stick, from
Apollo: so the gods are linked by an exchange of their chief
attributes. One symbolic reading of the lyre story is that song is
possible only when Apollo’s musical ability is combined with
Mercury’s eloquence – that is, his mastery of artificial verbal
forms. This is a reminder of a key difference between Renais-
sance and modern conceptions of artistic production: for the
Renaissance, artistry and conscious, learned control of forms is
all; for us, unconscious inspiration, sponteneity, ‘naturalness’ are
crucial.
Apollo and Mercury are also connected in the tale of Chione,
a mortal woman they both saw and fell in love with. Mercury,
speedy as ever, visited her first, and used the caduceus to make
her fall asleep so he could rape her. That same night, Apollo
arrived disguised as an old woman so as not to frighten her, but
found her still asleep. He raped her too. The result of this double
rape was twins, two boys, each one fathered by a different god.
Apollo’s son was called Philammon, Mercury’s Autolycus –
Shakespeare borrows his name and characteristics in The Winter’s
Tale: he is a guileful thief who inherits his father’s linguistic

facility. Chione ultimately passes Mercury’s gift of language to
Ulysses (who is her, and also Mercury’s, descendant). But she is
herself undone by language – foolishly angering Diana by
vaunting her fertility at the hands of two gods, she is shot
through the tongue by the huntress.8
The relationship between Apollo, Mercury and artistic produc-
tion, linguistic and otherwise, is best expressed by Mantegna’s
painting Parnassus (1497, Figure 2).9 Here, just as they are
opposed in the final words of Q1 Love’s Labour’s Lost, Apollo and
Mercury are placed on either side of the pictorial space (Apollo
on the left, playing his lyre; Mercury on the right, accompanied
by Pegasus, the horse whose hoof struck the earth on Mount
Parnassus to create the Hippocrene fountain.10 In between the
two gods, the Nine Muses dance to the music of Apollo’s lyre,
but two or three of them are looking to Mercury, who is placed
further into the foreground of the painting than Apollo, implying
Figure 2. Andrea Mantegna, Parnassus (1497), tempera on canvas

(now in the Louvre, Paris).
Figure 3. Jean de Court, Grammatica (c. 1555–85), enamel on copper plate

(made in Limoges, France; now in the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh).
precedence. At the back of the painting, Mars and Venus stand,

with the cuckolded Vulcan angry in his cave. One possible
reading of the painting is that Apollo most immediately governs
the Muses, but their inspiration must be mediated through
Mercury (with Pegasus alluding to the frequent Renaissance
representation of human control via the image of a man in charge

of a horse). The association between fountains, inspiration,
language and knowledge can be seen again in the mythological
representation of the figure Grammatica (Figure 3). Here, in a
beautiful French enamel work, Grammatica stands in the centre
of the plate surrounded by the symbols of learning to which she
is the key: scroll in one hand, seven-spouted fountain in the other,
lamp and open books at her feet. Under her right hand, in the
background, a grammar class is taking place, with teacher and
students in a building; around the edge of the plate are the
symbols of fame and military victory (captive slaves, abundant
produce), which the knowledge made available by grammar
delivers to its owner.11
In their focus on the association between language, knowledge,
study and reward, the painting and enamel can be seen as
expanding the ideas in Alciato’s emblem 99 (Figure 4).12 The
emblem shows Mercury/Hermes, with his helmet and caduceus,
Figure 4. Andrea Alciato, Emblematum libellus (Venice, 1546),

‘Art assisting nature’ (fo. 42r ).
standing on a block (which the explanatory poem calls a ‘cube’).

On the opposite side of the pictorial space is the figure of For-
tune/Nature. Mercury is on a cube to symbolize the certainty and
control that comes from knowledge of the arts (which, as we have
just seen, is controlled by knowledge of language). Fortune/Nature
stands on a sphere to symbolize her unpredictability. In other
versions of this emblem she also holds a cornucopia, symbolizing
the fruits of nature which can belong to those who master her,
and implying the barren fate that awaits those who trust merely
to chance (see, for example, www.mun.ca/alciato/e099.html). As
the Renaissance commonplace had it, perfection in any area of
human pursuit was not a ‘gift of nature’ but was ‘born of applic-
ation and hard work’ (here from Cicero, De Inventione Rhetorica,
1.25). It is hard to over-emphasize the importance for us, in
reading Renaissance texts, and trying to understand Renaissance
approaches to language, of this view of language as something
artificial, whose use must be learned, and whose deployment is
conscious. It is also important for us to recognize the much less
benign associations of nature for the Renaissance: nature was
potentially the source of abundance, certainly, but at best she was
indifferent to the fate of men – and at worst was a source of
disaster.
Mercury therefore represents skilled, planned language use,
and we can see now why unskilled or unplanned language use is
not valued for its spontaneity in the early modern period: it is
more likely to be a mark of lack of education, or bestiality, or
dangerous madness. ‘Natural’ or unplanned language has only a
random chance of success: as the emblem makes clear, considered
language allows the user to mould the world and nature to his
desires. Similarly, Apollo represents poetic inspiration, the Muses,
the Bacchanal – which, like nature, is both creative and destruc-
tive, potentially dangerous if left unmediated by the education
and hard-won compositional skill which produce recognizable
forms out of formless madness. Mercury thus embodies a particu-
larly Renaissance notion of linguistic production: that it is hard-
won, and that it is artificial. Apollo represents the necessary raw
material of nature, or poetic inspiration, with Mercury’s rational,

non-fictional rhetoric opposed to irrational poetry, and this is
close to what Love’s Labour’s Lost is doing. The final line of the
quarto is recalled twice in ten lines by the minor poet Henry Petowe
in his 1598 continuation of Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander’:
Apollo’s lute bereaved of silver string,
Fond Mercury doth harshly gin to sing . . .
Why should harsh Mercury recount again
What sweet Apollo, living, did maintain?
(lines 91–2 and 109–10)
‘Apollo’ is here the dead Marlowe, and ‘Mercury’ the self-
deprecating Petowe, with the implication being that Marlowe was
the true poet, in comparison to whom Petowe is a dull proser.
It is important to emphasize, though, that Apollo and Mercury
are not inevitably placed in opposition: they can be seen as mutu-
ally dependent, two essential parts of the rhetorical–linguistic
process. Although the opposition between the two seems to be
stressed at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost, earlier in the play,
judgements about language draw on both. Ficino says that the
path to knowledge involves Mercury, Apollo and Venus – a
grouping which looks highly applicable to the path taken by the
young scholars in the play.13
In the mythology Shakespeare draws on, then, Mercury is
repeatedly associated with language and linguistic performance –
but there are more subtleties in this association to be drawn out.
Mercury (Hermes) is the messenger of the gods, especially
Jupiter/Jove, whose bidding he does, rushing off throughout the
mythological universe, generally in some task associated with
progressing one of Jove’s affairs with a mortal woman, or hiding
it from Jove’s wife Juno. It is in such a role that Mercury makes
his first substantial appearance in Golding’s translation of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses (not Shakespeare’s sole source of mythological
knowledge, or even of Ovid, but by far his most important).14
Jove, seeing the beautiful mortal woman Io, has to have her, and
creates a fog, under cover of which he rapes her:
Jove, intending now in vain no lenger time to leese

Upon the country all about did bring a foggy mist
And caught the maiden whom, poor fool, he used as he
list.
(Golding, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 1, 741–3)
Juno knows her husband all too well, however, and the sudden
change of weather on such a nice sunny day arouses her
suspicions. Note how the mood of burlesque comedy here is well
caught in Golding’s fourteen-syllable lines, which can have
difficulty dealing with weightier matter; Shakespeare was wise
enough to steal material from Golding, but leave his verse form
well alone (744–51):
Queen Juno, looking down that while upon the open field,
When in so fair a day such mists and darkness she beheld,
Did marvel much, for well she knew those mists ascended
not
From any river, moorish ground or other dankish plot.
She looked about her for her Jove, as one that was
acquainted
With such escapes and with the deed had often him
attainted.
Whom when she found not in the heaven, ‘Unless I guess
amiss,
Some wrong against me’, quoth she, ‘now my husband
working is.’
Sensing the approach of his wife, rolling pin in hand, Jove

transforms the unfortunate Io into a beautiful milk-white heifer,
and Juno is presented with the innocent scene of her husband
petting a cow (albeit a very good-looking cow). Amazingly, Juno
is not fooled by Jove’s claim that the cow has just spontaneously
generated from the ground in front of him, and she asks for the
cow as a gift, knowing that Jove cannot refuse without drawing
suspicion on himself.
Juno places Io under the guard of Argus, whose multiple eyes

allow him to watch continually: ‘This Argus had an hundred
eyes, of which by turn did sleep / Always a couple, and the rest
did duly watch and ward’ (776–7). And Io suffers the misery of
life as a cow, forced to eat grass, drink stale water, and, worst of
all, unable to communicate (787–91):
when she did devise
To Argus for to lift her hands in meek and humble wise,
She saw no hands at all; and when she did assay
To make complaint, she lowed out, which did her so
affray
That oft she started at the noise and would have run
away.
Io takes to hanging round her father, Inach, who is searching des-
perately for her, and eventually she finds a way to communicate
with him (800–6):
The good old Inach pulls up grass and to her straight it
bears;
She, as she kissed and licked his hands, did shed forth
dreary tears.
And, had she had her speech at will to utter forth her
thought,
She would have told her name and chance and him of
help besought.
But for because she could not speak, she printed in the
sand
Two letters with her foot whereby was given to understand
The sorrowful changing of her shape.
By printing with her hoof in the receiving earth the letters of
her name, Io overcomes her lack of speech. It is a scene Shake-
speare and Peele remember in Titus Andronicus – a play laden
with references to Ovid – when the raped Lavinia, unable to
speak because her tongue has been torn out, and unable to write
normally because her hands have been cut off, writes in the sand
with a stick in her mouth. That play’s fixation on ‘hands’ is also
foreshadowed by Golding’s ‘when she did devise . . . to lift her
hands . . . She saw no hands at all’ (787–9), and Io’s licking of her
father’s hands (801) – both subtly emphasized by Golding from
Ovid’s text, which has ‘arms’ at 788 and 789, and had Io ‘trying’
to kiss her father’s hand at 801 (Ovid’s line 646). Writing, or print,
can be seen as a kind of artificial tongue – an image literalized in
Titus by the stick in Lavinia’s mouth. Also prefigured in this
passage in Golding is the bathetic humour that modern readers
often find so discomforting amongst the gore of Titus – puns on
‘handle’ as severed hands are carried off stage spring to mind –
as Inach responds to his daughter’s communication (814–17):
Thou stand’st as dumb and to my words no answer can
thou give,
But from the bottom of thy heart full sorry sighs dost
drive
As tokens of thine inward grief and dolefully dost moo
Unto my talk – the only thing left in thy power to do.
Here we see how the sometimes repetitive, flabby diction encour-
aged by Golding’s long fourteen-syllable line, and the strains
imposed by the use of couplets, can undercut moments of
seriousness; but we can also see in this whole passage how early
modern imitatio, and Shakespeare’s acquisitive imagination,
work. Shakespeare and Peele respond to situational parallels: a
raped woman unable to communicate; a father lamenting before
a dumb daughter; makeshift writing providing an artificial
tongue. They also pick up on details: most obviously the focus on
hands, but also perhaps the reference to depths of heart and the
treatment of sighs as substantially physical (815) which may
underlie Titus’ vision of a drowned earth (3.1.220–34).
But what of Mercury? It is at this point in the story that Jove
loses patience. He orders Mercury to kill Argus, and the
messenger of the gods makes his long-awaited entrance (833–6):
He made no long abode,

But tied his feathers to his feet and took his charmed rod,
With which he bringeth things asleep and fetcheth souls
from hell,
And put his hat upon his head.
These attributes are entirely conventional and well-known – they
can be seen in Figure 4. The wings, on ankle or hat, symbolize
Mercury’s speed, and his role as the god, above all others, who
moves most freely through all parts of the mythological universe.
Most immediately for our purposes, Mercury’s role as messenger
is what is significant, since this links him to language, and
‘wordes’.
Arriving on the earth, Mercury hides his wings and hat, and
puts on the guise of a herdsman. He approaches Argus, and lulls
him asleep with the music of pan pipes, and stories – using his
eloquence. Once Argus is snoozing, Mercury deepens his sleep
by touching him with the caduceus, and beheads him. In
Renaissance visual art, this is one of the key events associated
with Mercury – he is often pictured standing over the severed,
many-eyed head of Argus, which becomes almost an attribute. So
Mercury is associated with disguise, guile and the use of
language to achieve hidden ends (which we can recall as forming
the basis for the Platonic distrust of rhetoric) – but throughout
the Metamorphoses, other linguistic themes circulate around Mer-
cury. The Io story ends with Io undergoing a second metamor-
phosis, and just as loss of language is often a feature of change
from human to animal or vegetable, so in Io’s re-metamorphosis,
language is key (932–8):
In fine, no likeness of a cow save whiteness did remain,
So pure and perfect as no snow was able it to stain.
She vaunced herself upon her feet, which then was
brought to two;
And though she gladly would have spoke, yet durst she
not so do
Without good heed, for fear she would have lowed like
a cow.
And therefore softly with herself she gan to practise how
Distinctly to pronounce her words that intermitted were.
A further aspect of Mercury’s relationship with language, and
therefore the possible significance of his naming at the end of
Love’s Labour’s Lost, comes in the violent role he sometimes has in
dealing with those who have not controlled their use of language.
Our post-Romantic mythology of inspiration and language-use
tends to value the irrational, or the unplanned, as ‘original’,
‘natural’ or ‘authentic’. Almost any modern writer, interviewed
about their craft, will use some form of the metaphor that ‘the
words just seem to come by themselves’ – which derives historic-
ally from Romantic poetic theory. This valuing of the unplanned
is highly historically marked – before the early nineteenth cen-
tury it would hardly have passed muster – and it is represented in
classical mythology by the four types of divine madness associ-
ated with Apollo, Bacchus, the Muses and Venus (respectively,
prophecy, mystical rapture, poetic inspiration and erotic dreams).
In classical times, these are described and distinguished as types
of divine madness by Plato, but were conflated in the Renaissance
into one, and associated with Apollo, who becomes the represen-
tation of poetic inspiration as well as music. This suggests that
one of the possible interpretations of the final words of Q1 Love’s
Labour’s Lost is that Mercury’s ‘words’ are non-poetic, non-
literary language, contrasted with Apollo’s poetry. The full implic-
ations and values associated with such a contrast are hard for us
to grasp, since we tend not to see the danger lurking in poetic lan-
guage which the Renaissance conception of this type of language
as ‘madness’ implies.15 Modern aesthetic theory has a hard time
dealing with this view because of the high theoretical value placed
on the unplanned, and the denigration of the artificial. Our
tendency to contrast Apollo with Dionysus as opposites repre-
senting rational and irrational thought (the Apollonian and the
Dionysiac) also obscures the classical association of the types of

inspiration represented by each figure as essentially similar.
In a number of stories in mythology, Mercury, although he is
the god of language (or more accurately, eloquence – not, as we
will see, the same thing), is seen apparently destroying language.
For example, in a story not in Metamorphoses, the notoriously
loquacious nymph Lara has her tongue torn out after she reveals
one of Jupiter’s affairs to Juno, and Mercury is detailed to escort
her to the underworld.16 On two occasions in Book 2 of Meta-
morphoses, Mercury punishes those who cannot keep silent. The
first occurs when Mercury steals some cattle Apollo is supposed
to be looking after. Mercury’s theft is witnessed by the herdsman
Battus, and Mercury bribes him with a cow to keep him quiet.
Battus swears that he will not talk:
T’other took the bullock at his hand
And, showing him a certain stone that lay upon the land,
Said, ‘Go thy way. As soon this stone thy doings shall
bewray
As I shall do.’
(Book 2, 864–7)
Mercury leaves, disguises himself, and returns to Battus in a
different persona, offering him a reward for any information
leading to the discovery of the missing cattle. When Battus
betrays Mercury’s theft, he is turned to stone.17
The second instance also involves misspeaking and a mortal
turned to stone. Mercury uses the woman Aglauros as a go-
between in his courtship of her sister, Herse, but Aglauros is
filled with envy and tries to block Mercury (1021–4):
At last she sat her in the door and leaned to a post
To let the god from entering in. To whom, now having
lost
Much talk and gentle words in vain, she said, ‘Sir, leave,
I pray;
For hence I will not (be you sure) unless you go away.’
Mercury turns her words against her: she is changed to stone,

unable to move, condemned to stay where she is, languageless
(1025–40):
‘I take thee at thy word,’ quoth he, and therewithal he
pushed
His rod against the barred door, and wide it open
rushed.
She, making proffer for to rise, did feel so great a weight
Through all her limbs that for her life she could not
stretch her straight.
. . . Her hamstrings and her knees were stiff; a chilling
cold had got
In at her nails through all her limbs; and eke her veins
began
For want of blood and lively heat to wax both pale and
wan . . .
even so the cold of death
Strake to her heart and closed her veins and lastly
stopped her breath.
She made no proffer for to speak, and though she had
done so
It had been vain. For way was none for language forth
to go.
Her throat congealed into stone, her mouth became
hard stone,
And like an image sat she still.
The narrator’s final comment, ‘When Mercury had punished
thus Aglauros’ spiteful tongue’ (1043), confirms the link between
abuse of language and Mercury’s censure. Mercury is not simply
the god of language: as the god of eloquence, he is, more
specifically, the representation of the arts of language, with ‘art’
in the Renaissance sense of ‘artificial’, deliberately crafted. As
early modern anatomists were anxious about the physical
mobility of the tongue, citing the lingual frenulum as a necessary
restraint, and as many commentators fretted about the misuse of
Figure 5. Mercury as
Hermes Trismegistus,
from Achile Bocchi,
Symbolicarum
quaestionum
(Bologna, 1574).
rhetoric, or the ambiguity of words, so Mercury symbolizes the

rational mind’s control of language’s tendency to run to excess.
Counter-intuitively for us, therefore, but stemming from this
role as the punisher of loose tongues, Mercury is also associated
with silence in the visual tradition. Sometimes, eloquence con-
sists in knowing when to keep silent. Figure 5 shows Mercury as
Hermes Trismegistus, with finger to his lips signifying control
over language and the secrets of Hermetic philosophy18 – and in
Figure 6 (page 69) we see Mercury shushing a nymph about to
disturb Jupiter creating life in Dosso Dossi’s Jupiter Painting
Butterflies.19 Although it might seem paradoxical for the god of
eloquence to punish speaking in some tales, and urge silence by
gesture, in fact this is entirely consistent with Renaissance
conceptions of eloquence as the mastery of language; not, as our
post-Romantic sensibility would tend to have it, profusion of
language. Although copia is a linguistic virtue for most Renais-

sance rhetoricians, copia is the product of learning, study and
control, not of spontaneous or natural free-association.
There are, therefore, frequent associations between silence and
rhetoric in Shakespeare.20 As we might expect, given that formal
rhetoric was largely (but not exclusively) a male preserve, there is
sometimes an association between silent rhetoric and women –
but note that in the following striking instance, Isabella’s ability
to move men silently with her youth and (by implication) sex, is
explicitly linked with more formal rhetorical persuasion by
‘reason and discourse’:
Implore her, in my voice, that she make friends
To the strict deputy: bid herself assay him.
I have great hope in that. For in her youth
There is a prone and speechless dialect
Such as move men; beside, she hath prosperous art
When she will play with reason and discourse,
And well she can persuade.
(MM 1.2.170-76)
Men can also use silence to rhetorical effect, as Cressida com-
plains of Troilus:
troilus
Why was my Cressid then so hard to win?
cressida
Hard to seem won; but I was won, my lord,
With the first glance that ever – pardon me;
If I confess much, you will play the tyrant.
I love you now, but till now not so much
But I might master it. In faith, I lie;
My thoughts were like unbridled children, grown
Too headstrong for their mother. See, we fools!
Why have I blabbed? Who shall be true to us
When we are so unsecret to ourselves?
But though I loved you well, I wooed you not;
And yet, good faith, I wished myself a man,
Figure 6. Dosso Dossi, Jupiter Painting Butterflies (c. 1524), oil on canvas
(now in Wawel Royal Castle (State Art Collection), Cracow, previously
in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).
Or that we women had men’s privilege

Of speaking first. Sweet, bid me hold my tongue,
For in this rapture I shall surely speak
The thing I shall repent. See, see, your silence,
Cunning in dumbness, from my weakness draws
My very soul of counsel from me! Stop my mouth.
(TC 3.2.112–29)
There is a double use of silence here: Cressida first fell for
Troilus at a glance, and now his silence brings her ‘unbridled’
thoughts into the sociable world as discourse (‘bridled’ is a term
frequently associated with control – or lack of it – over language,
as we have seen).
In Love’s Labour’s Lost the men talk a lot – and a lot of their
talk is about language, and consists of making judgements on its
public manifestations – but it is the women who make the most
stable judgements. Even in their initial assessments of the men,
the keys to the later failures of male rhetoric are present. As

Maria says of Longaville:
I know him, madam. At a marriage feast,
Between Lord Perigort and the beauteous heir
Of Jaques Falconbridge, solemnized
In Normandy, saw I this Longaville.
A man of sovereign parts, he is esteemed,
Well fitted in arts, glorious in arms.
Nothing becomes him ill that he would well.
The only soil of his fair virtue’s gloss –
If virtue’s gloss will stain with any soil –
Is a sharp wit matched with too blunt a will,
Whose edge hath power to cut, whose will still wills
It should none spare that come within his power.
(2.1.40–51)
Longaville lacks the will and judgement to fully control his lan-
guage – he deploys his wit on every target, running to linguistic
excess. Similarly Dumaine, although praised, has the dangerous
rhetorical potential to argue that ill is good (56–60):
The young Dumaine, a well-accomplished youth,
Of all that virtue love for virtue loved;
Most power to do most harm, least knowing ill,
For he hath wit to make an ill shape good,
And shape to win grace, though he had no wit.
A similar failure to govern the power of rhetorical persuasion
with understanding is what results in the men convincing them-
selves to embark on their foolish programme of sequestering
themselves from the world at the start of the play. Even Berowne,
from the start the most self-aware of the men, is ultimately
banished to learn judgement and decorum, venting his jests
inappropriately on the ‘speechless’ sick and dying (5.2.839),
while the king is sentenced to the silence of a ‘forlorn and naked
hermitage’ (789).
Just as Juliet is an Aristotelian, the women in Love’s Labour’s

Lost reveal themselves to understand the relation of the world to
language and ideas in accordance with Aristotle’s formula: the
world comes first, and its impressions on our minds can be
communicated with language. The men are locked in what, in
Aristotelian terms at least, is an erroneous model: they prioritize
a set of abstract ideas, divorced from and not produced by the
world, and attempt to mould reality to match their abstract
notions using language. The tasks the women set the men, and
the tricks they play on them, are calculated to reveal the proper
relations between the world, ideas and words. Although it can be
tempting to read the play as a Derridean dance which shows the
hermetic self-reflexiveness of language, to do so is to miss the
significance of Mercurial discourse in the Renaissance, and opt
for the nothingness of the madman, lover and poet. Richard
Linche, in The Fountaine of Ancient Fiction (1599), wrote that
‘Mercurie was often taken for that light of knowledge, & spirit of
understanding, which guides men to the true conceavement of
darke and enigmaticall sentences’ (Rir–Riv).21 And the key
implication of this is that even dark, enigmatic sentences have a
‘true’ meaning (‘conceavement’) which it is incumbent on the
reader, or hearer, to uncover – however ‘harsh’ the words may be.
CHAPTER THREE
IDEAS ABOUT LANGUAGE IN SHAKESPEARE

2: WORDS
There is one major problem with Shakespeare’s comedies: they

are not funny. Instead, they are studded with scenes where two or
more characters, one of them a supposedly ‘witty’ clown, swap
impenetrable references and obvious puns. You can always spot
the Shakespeare academics in a theatre: they are the ones laugh-
ing at these scenes. Take the following hilarious exchange from
The Comedy of Errors:
antipholus of syracuse
Well, sir, learn to jest in good time; there’s a time for
all things.
dromio of syracuse
I durst have denied that before you were so choleric.
By what rule, sir?
dromio of syracuse
Marry, sir, by a rule as plain as the plain bald pate of
Father Time himself.
Let’s hear it.
dromio of syracuse
There’s no time for a man to recover his hair that
grows bald by nature.
May he not do it by fine and recovery?
dromio of syracuse
Yes, to pay a fine for a periwig, and recover the lost
hair of another man.
Language in Shakespeare 2: Words 73
Why is Time such a niggard of hair, being (as it is) so
plentiful an excrement?
dromio of syracuse
Because it is a blessing that he bestows on beasts, and
what he hath scanted men in hair, he hath given them
in wit.
Why, but there’s many a man hath more hair than wit.
dromio of syracuse
Not a man of those but he hath the wit to lose his hair.
Why, thou didst conclude hairy men plain dealers
without wit.
dromio of syracuse
The plainer dealer, the sooner lost; yet he loseth it in
a kind of jollity.
For what reason?
dromio of syracuse
For two, and sound ones too.
Nay, not sound, I pray you.
dromio of syracuse
Sure ones, then.
Nay, not sure in a thing falsing.
dromio of syracuse
Certain ones then.
Name them.
(2.2.63–95)
Antipholus is Dromio’s master. We have just seen him beat his

servant for what he thinks is insubordination, but is really the
result of confusion attendant on the presence of twins identical
to Antipholus and Dromio in the city. In this dialogue, Dromio

takes on the familiar role of the witty servant who plays with
words, first declaring his intention to perform, and inviting Anti-
pholus to allow the performance: ‘I durst have denied that before
you were so choleric’ (‘choleric’ means ‘angry’). Antipholus
agrees to the performance, and sets Dromio up with an opening,
‘By what rule, sir?’, which asks for a demonstration of the basis
of his claim. The conventionalized, artificial nature of this type
of exchange is clear to participants and audience (‘Let’s hear it,’
says Antipholus), and both speakers cooperate in abiding by their
respective roles.
The exchange relies on a series of what we would now call
puns. Dromio begins by shifting between senses of ‘time’.
Antipholus begins with ‘time’ in the sense of ‘appropriate time’:
‘learn to jest in good time; there’s a time for all things’ (though
‘good time’ might also be taken to mean ‘quickly’ – ‘learn to jest
appropriately as soon as you can’). Dromio shifts from ‘appro-
priate time’ to ‘enough time’: there may be an appropriate time
for all things, but there is not enough time for someone who goes
bald to get his hair back. Antipholus replies with what is to us a
rather obscure reference to the legal terms ‘fine and recovery’,
referring to a process for property transfer which enabled entailed
estates to be returned to different ownership. Dromio takes these
up, understanding ‘fine’ to mean the payment for a wig, and ‘recov-
ery’ the re-use of someone else’s hair to make the wig. Antipholus
then strikes off at a tangent: ‘Why is Time such a niggard of hair,
being (as it is) so plentiful an excrement?’ – why does Time not
allow everyone to keep their hair, since it grows so freely (‘excre-
ment’ here means any outgrowth from the body). Dromio’s reply
associates hair with beasts and wit with men: beasts get lots of
hair; men get wit, or intelligence, to make up. Picking up on the
logic, Antipholus objects that not all men are that witty (‘many a
man hath more hair than wit’), and Dromio replies with what is
presumably a reference to the baldness associated with syphilis:
‘Not a man of those but he hath the wit to lose his hair’ – and
which also plays on the possible meanings of ‘wit’, which include
both the basic level of intelligence all men have, and particular,
exceptional instances of thought (‘a witty saying’).
The exchange gets denser. Antipholus again pushes Dromio’s
logic to a possible conclusion: ‘Why, thou didst conclude hairy
men plain dealers without wit.’ Here, ‘plain’ is the focus, with
two possible, but incompatible, meanings evoked. A plain dealer
would normally be an honest dealer – but here it implies simp-
listic foolishness. Dromio’s reply, ‘The plainer dealer, the sooner
lost; yet he loseth it in a kind of jollity’, takes ‘dealer’ to mean
‘user of women’: the more a man deals with women, the more
likely he is to lose his hair as a result of syphilis, and yet his loss
will be the result of the relatively enjoyable process of sexual
intercourse (‘he loseth it in a kind of jollity’). When Dromio
offers to justify this with ‘sound’ (i.e. valid) reasons, Antipholus
objects because ‘sound’ could also mean ‘healthy’ – and Dromio’s
plain dealers are clearly not that. When he offers ‘sure’ reasons,
Antipholus objects again, acknowledging the false games of logic
they have been playing: ‘Nay, not sure in a thing falsing’ (decep-
tive). When Dromio finally offers ‘Certain’ reasons, and Anti-
pholus finally accepts them, there is another joke: ‘certain’ can
mean ‘solid’, ‘proven’, but it can also just mean ‘some’, or ‘a few’.
Plentiful excrement indeed, you might think – and it is possible
to sympathize with actors required to get some kind of purchase
on such dense, obscure and apparently self-indulgent lines, in the
instant of performance. The last production of The Comedy of
Errors I saw was at the reconstructed Globe theatre in London,
and it dealt with this exchange by having Dromio and Antipholus
improvise a game of tennis with a rag, batting the ‘ball’ between
them as they swapped lines that were openly meaningless to all
concerned. Those actors, it might be noted, would have been
wearing itchy reproduction Elizabethan underwear as part of the
Globe’s commitment to authenticity – yet the production was not
prepared, or able, to trust to the ‘authentic’ meaning of the text.
Such exchanges are common in Shakespeare, and throughout
early modern drama – so we must assume that they were per-
ceived as funny, or witty, then. Hostile responses to this kind of
writing can, however, be traced from the mid-seventeenth

century onwards. In 1765, Dr Johnson memorably set out his
irritation in the ‘Preface’ to his edition of Shakespeare:
A quibble is to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are
to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures, it is sure
to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the
mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its
fascinations are irresistible . . . A quibble is the golden
apple for which he will always turn aside from his career,
or stoop from his elevation. A quibble, poor and barren
as it is, gave him such delight that he was content to
purchase it by the sacrifice of reason, propriety and
truth. A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which
he lost the world, and was content to lose it.1
Molly Mahood claims that Johnson’s objections to puns (or
quibbles, to use his term) are due to ‘a linguistic revolution’
which separates ‘his verbal habits from Shakespeare’s’.2 She
dates the first attacks on puns to the second half of the
seventeenth century: John Eachard’s The Ground and Occasions of
the Contempt of the Clergy (1670) is a plea for a plain, unacademic
style of preaching, which asks ‘Whether or no Punning, Quib-
ling, and that which they call Joquing, and such other delicacies
of Wit, highly admired in some Accademick Exercises, might not
be very conveniently omited?’ (p. 33). His rejection of puns rests
on their perceived arbitrary status: ‘I shall only desire, that the
nature of that kind of Wit may be considered, which will be
found to depend upon some such fooleries as . . . the lucky
ambiguity of some word or sentence’ (p. 35). And he claims
(incorrectly) that there is no historical tradition of valuing such
wordplay: ‘it is an easie matter to appeal to Wits both Ancient and
Modern . . . that never, I am confident, received their improve-
ments by employing their Time in Puns and Quibbles’ (p. 37).
In 1656, Abraham Cowley’s ‘Ode: Of Wit’ attempted a nega-
tive definition of wit which included a rejection of puns (lines
41–4):
’Tis not when two like words make up one noise;

Jests for Dutch men and English boys;
In which who finds out wit, the same may see
In an’grams and acrostics poetry.3
The terms of Cowley’s objection – unease with surface similarity
(‘like words . . . one noise’) and an association with the childish –
echo, and are probably influenced by, the English Renaissance
rhetorician John Hoskyns and the classical rhetorical guide
Rhetorica ad Herennium (ascribed to Cicero at the time: see p. 86
and note 13, below). The basic model he offers, that a pun involves
two words joined by a surface similarity of form, is shared by
Addison’s well-known denunciation of puns which appeared in
The Spectator in 1711 (here quoted from the OED entry for
‘pun’):
1711 Addison, Spectator 61: ‘Having pursued the His-

tory of a Punn . . . I shall here define it to be a Conceit
arising from the use of two Words that agree in Sound
but differ in the Sense’.
These elements in the definition of puns – that they are in some

sense arbitrary, and that they involve the bringing together of two
words – are most characteristic of post-Renaissance thought, and
are common to almost all hostile comment on puns.
Modern academic critics of Shakespeare at least have time and
annotated editions on their side in trying to make something of
the type of dialogue with which I began this chapter. However,
they generally have little patience for this kind of (especially comic)
interplay where jesting is jousting. A range of responses to simi-
lar scenes includes ‘vexing dialogue’ (Borinski), ‘heavy witted’
(Mahood), ‘trite’ (Evans), and ‘burlesque dialectics’ (Foakes).4
Keir Elam’s extended study of Shakespeare’s comic language
confirms a general critical unease with what is seen as an unbal-
anced foregrounding of language in Shakespeare’s comedies. He
roots this in Coleridge’s worries that ‘Sometimes you see this
youthful god of poetry connecting disparate thoughts purely by
means of resemblances in the words expressing them’.5 Note that

Coleridge too is made nervous by the notion that the connections
made in puns are arbitrary because they rely on surface
resemblance.
Coleridge’s nervousness about this arbitrary resemblance, and
the ‘self-indulgent’ language play which results, recurs in many
twentieth-century accounts of Shakespeare, and Margreta de
Grazia addresses this in a landmark essay.6 How can it be that the
linguistic practice of our greatest writer troubles because it appears
to be facile? As de Grazia shows, this paradox is fully evident in
the work of Stephen Booth, widely acknowledged as one of the
most important critics of Shakespeare, and an acclaimed editor of
the Sonnets. Building on an observation of Booth’s, de Grazia
charts a cluster of phonetic and semantic echoes in The Winter’s
Tale: in 3.3 of that play, Antigonus exits, pursued by a ‘bear’; and
a ‘bairn’ (child) is discovered in a ‘bearing-cloth’. The shepherd
who finds the child comments to his son, who witnesses Antigo-
nus killed by the bear, ‘thou met’st with things dying, I with
things newborn’ (3.3.110–11) – and as a result of their discov-
eries, the two become ‘gentlemen born’. The play as a whole, as
de Grazia points out, is concerned with the bearing of children:
Leontes worries that his son is not his; Polixenes that his son will
marry beneath him. Yet Booth, de Grazia notes, treats these
echoes as if they were radioactive, and embarrassing (pp. 146–7):
while he activates these homonymic clusters by pointing
them out, he resolutely refrains from and sternly warns
against making them purposeful or meaningful. Booth
insists that they are ‘substantively gratuitous’, contribu-
ting nothing to the routine sense-making function of
language . . . Thus while he may have done more than
anyone to animate Shakespearean homonyms, Booth
also has done more to render them unimportant, that is,
incapable of importing or delivering meaning.
Booth’s work on The Winter’s Tale appeared in 1981, but in 1997
he was still showing extreme anxiety in the face of what he has
come to term ‘eventful’ language.7 Booth notes that in Henry V’s

speech before Agincourt –
O God of battles, steel my soldiers’ hearts;
Possess them not with fear. Take from them now
The sense of reckoning, if th’opposed numbers
Pluck their hearts from them.
(H5 4.1.286–9)
– ‘steel’ in line 286 is retrospectively connected to its homophone
‘steal’ by the use of ‘Take’ (287) and ‘Pluck’ (289), before Henry
reveals his own deep anxiety about theft at lines 290–1: ‘think not
upon the fault / My father made in compassing the crown’. Booth
presents this reading in a similarly anxious manner, however.
‘Context’, he claims, ‘makes it impossible for audiences to hear
reference to theft in the sound of “steal” in “steel my soldiers’
hearts” ’ (p. 15). He cannot allow the potential meaning ‘steal’ to
be present until reinforced by ‘Take’ and ‘Pluck’. Even more
extreme, at other points in the same essay, Booth is at pains to
deny the meaningfulness of the patterns of ‘event’ he notices –
what he calls ‘non-signifying organizations’: ‘I am not for a
minute suggesting that there is any meaning to be squeezed out
of these patterns’ (p. 5). As de Grazia notes, even as he identifies
wordplay, Booth is compelled to deny that it has anything to do
with meaning (p. 147). De Grazia roots this hostility to any
association between meaning and wordplay in the Enlightenment
tradition, as exemplified for her by the Shakespearean editors
Johnson and Theobald (pp. 149–50 and note 17). Perhaps sur-
prisingly for us, she then goes on to link it to Freud and Derrida.
It may be counter-intuitive to link the rationalist rejection of
puns and wordplay with the theories of the unconscious and
deconstruction, but de Grazia shows how each mode of thought
seeks to compartmentalize puns in a safe, non-linguistic realm.
For the Enlightenment, as we have seen, the apparently arbitrary
relationships on which puns depend mean they can have no role
in meaning or logic, and they are dismissed as essentially trivial.
In psychoanalytic theory, to be sure, puns are not trivial, but they
are nonetheless explicitly placed in a realm beyond the norm: ‘In

psychoanalysis, the various homonyms occurring in dreams and
slips of the tongue reveal insights into the unconscious that
language conspires with consciousness to repress’ (p. 147). So
puns become the means for the unconscious to express itself,
allowing it to elude ‘the repressive logic and often grammar of
ordinary . . . language’ (p. 147).
In deconstructive theory, ‘resemblances among words can
release language from the strictures of epistemology it normally
upholds, delivering it into the realm of aleatory freeplay where it
inscribes its own more provisional inroads and crossroads’ (pp.
147–8). For de Grazia (p. 148), Booth, Freud and Derrida all seek
to constrain wordplay by abstracting it from ‘real’ language:
for the purposes of my argument here, all three posi-
tions are alike in abstracting puns from the language,
and depositing them elsewhere: Booth to a remote trans-
linguistic aesthetic, Freud to a repressed introlinguistic
unconscious, and Derrida to a deviant paralinguistic
writing. In these three representative, formalist, psycho-
analytic, and deconstructive treatments, puns remain on
the outskirts of language proper, as literary side-effects,
unconscious upsurges, and decentred or non-logocentric
writing.
This history of hostility to puns, or wordplay, is clear: from
Eachard, Cowley, Johnson and Theobald, to nineteenth- and
twentieth-century critics of Shakespeare; even those who seem to
celebrate wordplay, such as Booth, Freud and Derrida, can be
seen to be manoeuvring wordplay into a safely non-linguistic
space where the threat to meaning can be contained. Wordplay is
perceived as an attack on meaning because it deals in apparently
random, chance relationships between words.
The common thread in these approaches is the notion of
resemblance: in the post-Renaissance tradition, wordplay is taken
to depend on resemblances between different words. Now resem-
blance explicitly declares similarity between two things, but at the
same time, it implicitly assumes difference. A pun on ‘steel’ and

‘steal’ declares their similar sound, but requires, and implicitly
asserts them to be, different words. For the Enlightenment, and
much Shakespeare criticism, the arbitrary nature of this resem-
blance has been troubling, since it seems to undermine the logic
assumed to lie behind meaning. For Freud and Derrida, each
engaged on an essentially non-rationalist project, the arbitrary
nature of resemblance, and the trouble it poses to meaning, is the
key to undoing one or other aspect of what is seen as the false
rationality of language. As we will see, however, there is another,
pre-Enlightenment, approach to wordplay, which does not depend
on the notion of resemblance, and the implication of difference
it inevitably brings with it.
Alongside the hostile approach to wordplay sketched above,
there have been some notable exceptions to the simple rejection
of this style of language as barren (or the more sophisticated con-
ception of it as non-linguistic in some way): Molly Mahood was
an early champion of ‘wordplay’ as ‘a game the Elizabethans played
seriously’; Pat Parker has argued, across a series of articles and
books, that wordplay deserves more than a groan and invented
stage business; Russ McDonald has suggested that we give notice
to the notion of the ‘serious pun’.8 This counter-tradition is
rooted in the historicized, rhetorical approach to Shakespeare’s
language exemplified by the work of Miriam Joseph, which is not
made uneasy by the artificial nature of puns, and which does not
necessarily view the connections made in wordplay as arbitrary.9
Following this tradition, I want to suggest that if we take a
properly historicized view of wordplay, we will find that when it
comes to ‘unfunny’ puns, in performance and reading, the fault
lies not in Shakespeare, but in ourselves.
An attempt to historicize our understanding of wordplay
might well begin with a consideration of the word ‘pun’ itself.
Look up the word ‘pun’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, and you
will be told that the word appears first with its cognate verb soon
after 1660.10 In other words, there are no puns in Shakespeare in
the strict historical sense that the word seems not to have been
available to him: it appears in print around the middle of the

seventeenth century, after his death. This of course does not
mean that the thing cannot be found in Shakespeare, or that his
culture did not have other terms for the thing, but it should at
least give us pause when we try to think about how the Renais-
sance might have approached ‘puns’.
A word which was, just, available to Shakespeare, and which
significantly co-occurs with ‘pun’ frequently in its earliest OED
citations is ‘quibble’, the word Dr Johnson uses. The earliest
OED attestation of quibble is 1611, in Barry’s play Ram Alley:
‘We old men have our crotchets, our conundrums, / Our figaries,
quirks and quibbles, / As well as youth’; but the next citation in
this sense is not till 1711, and other senses, like those for ‘pun’,
are attested only from the late seventeenth century – in this case,
the 1670s. Both ‘pun’ and ‘quibble’ are of uncertain origin, though
‘quibble’ is most strongly linked with legal Latin ‘quibus’, which
becomes ‘quib’, a deceitful legal twisting of meaning:
1592 Greene: ‘These lawiers haue . . . such quibs and
quiddits, that beggering their clients they purchase to
themselues whole lordships’.
‘Quirk’ is often used in association with ‘quib’ and ‘quip’ in the
sense of ‘gibe at’:
1614 Jonson Bartholomew Fair 1.1: ‘When a quirk or a
quiblin do’s scape thee, and thou dost not watch, and
apprehend it, and bring it afore the Constable of conceit
(there now, I speak quib too)’.
If there is a Shakespearean term (in the sense of a word Shake-
speare used himself) for ‘pun’, then, ‘quirk’ would seem to be the
best candidate. Interestingly, like ‘pun’ and ‘quibble’, the word’s
origins are obscure, but it is certainly older than either of those
other two words – and perhaps significantly, the OED records
that the word seems to be native in western dialects of English,
again possibly associating it with Shakespeare. Like ‘quibble’ and
‘quib’, ‘quirk’ has a literary, legal sense – it is associated with
nitpicking, deceitful, formal argumentation, and this crosses over

easily into the verbal jousting we find so tedious in Shakespeare:
‘I may chance have some odd quirks and remnants of wit broken
on me’ (MA 2.3.227–8). However, ‘quirk’ in Shakespeare can also
mean a peculiarity of behaviour or a physical fit. ‘Quip’ is again
of uncertain origin (OED suggests analogy with words like ‘nip’
and ‘whip’), is mid-sixteenth-century, and suits well the notion of
verbal jousting, but does not have a necessary association with
twisting or double meaning.
So Shakespeare does not use the term ‘pun’ as it was not avail-
able to him. ‘Quibble’ was used during his lifetime, but only really
became established, like ‘pun’, towards the end of the seventeenth
century. The term seems to have its origin in highly Latinate, legal
English – if not in fact in Latin itself. ‘Quirk’, ‘quib’ and ‘quip’
were all available to him and he sometimes used them, but they
can have other senses than our ‘pun’, and tend to focus on either
legalistic logic-chopping, or on the competitive, jousting nature of
exchanges of wit. The definitions of the terms do not have much
to do with combining multiple or ambiguous senses, or the bringing
together of two different words, as we understand a pun today.
What about rhetorical terms? If there isn’t a readily available
native equivalent to our term ‘pun’ in Shakespeare’s day, then
perhaps it’s because there was a readily available rhetorical cate-
gory which already did the job? There are several good accounts
of Renaissance rhetorical terms for wordplay but, perhaps sur-
prisingly, there is no clear term for what we would call a pun.
Margreta de Grazia states,
Modern editors and commentators have noted the
inconsistency in seventeenth-century terminology for
wordplay, but as far as I know, it has not been remarked
that none of the traditional rhetorical classifications
exactly applied to the pun as double entendre.11
In her discussion of wordplay, for example, Miriam Joseph uses
four rhetorical terms to cover the notion of ‘pun’ (p. 165):
antanaclasis, syllepsis, paronomasia and asteismus.
Antanaclasis she defines as ‘a figure which in repeating a word

shifts from one of its meanings to another’, giving (amongst
others) the following examples:
To England will I steal, and there I’ll steal;
(H5 5.1.88)
armado
By the north pole, I do challenge thee.
costard
I will not fight with a pole like a northern man. I’ll slash,
I’ll do it by the sword.
(LLL 5.2.690–92)
Though note how these examples demonstrate one of the central
problems of definition in trying to deal with puns: it is relatively
easy to accept that ‘steal’ [= move away unnoticed] and ‘steal’ [=
take without permission] represent instances of the ‘same’ word,
perhaps with a metaphorical extension involved. However, we are
likely to find it harder to see ‘pole’ [= one of the two points of the
earth’s axis] and ‘pole’ [= stake] in these terms. Although ‘pole’
and ‘pole’ are homophones, the OED gives them separate entries,
and different etymologies (from Latin ‘polus’ and ‘palus’ respec-
tively), though OED spelling forms suggest that they have always
been homophonous in English – so for most English speakers they
have always been indistinguishable in use. It is arguable that it is
only with standardization and the fixing of spelling and defini-
tions by dictionaries that these become two ‘different’ words in
English.
Syllepsis is also defined as a figure involving one word with
more than one meaning, though it is distinguished from antana-
clasis by the fact that in syllepsis, the word appears only once, with
both meanings brought simultaneously into play: ‘hang no more
about me, I am no gibbet for you’ (MW 2.2.16 –17).
An apparently major distinction comes with paronomasia. This
involves two iterations, as in antanaclasis, but, crucially, in
paronomasia the words are not pure homophones: ‘out, sword,
and to a sore purpose!’ (Cym 4.1.22–3); ‘I am here with thee and

thy goats, as the most capricious poet, honest Ovid, was among
the Goths’ (AYL 3.3.5–7) – though it is worth noting that vari-
able early modern pronunciation meant that ‘goats’ and ‘Goths’
would have been pure homophones for some speakers: [go:ts].
Finally, asteismus, for Joseph, involves a deliberate shifting of
sense by a second speaker:
cloten
Would he had been one of my rank!
2 lord [Aside]
To have smelt like a fool.
(Cym 2.1.14-16)
However, not all of her examples rely on a shift between senses,
and so would fall outside our definition of puns:
jaques
By my troth, I was seeking for a fool when I found you.
orlando
He is drowned in the brook. Look but in and you shall
see him.
(AYL 3.2.277–80)
Joseph’s account is useful for its clarity. Her distinction bet-
ween antanaclasis and paronomasia in particular will be significant
for my argument later, but also important is her framing of a
cultural shift in relation to wordplay – a shift between the Renais-
sance and our own day in relation to what she characterizes as
figures of ‘ambiguity’:
to play upon the various meanings of a word represented
an intellectual exercise, a witty analysis commended and
relished by Aristotle, practiced by Plato and by the great
dramatists of Greece, esteemed and used by Cicero,
employed by medieval and Renaissance preachers
in their sermons, regarded as a rhetorical ornament by
the Elizabethans, but frequently despised as false or
degenerate wit from the eighteenth century to the

present day.12
Here we are back at the ‘linguistic revolution’ noted by Mahood.
Why should there have been such a shift in relation to figures of
ambiguity in the eighteenth century (or mid-seventeenth if we
date the beginning of this revolution to Eachard and Cowley)?
What causes the rise in hostility to wordplay?
There are certainly some instances of criticism of mis- or
overused figures of ambiguity in the Renaissance. Around the
end of the sixteenth century, John Hoskyns warned against over-
extending paronomasia:
that kind of breaking words into another meaning is
pretty to play with among gentlewomen, as, ‘you will
have but a bare gain of this bargain’; otherwise it will
best become the tuftaffeta orators to skip up and down
the neighbourhood of these words that differ more in
sense than in sound, tending nearer to metre than to
matter.13
And it is significant that Hoskyns here criticizes puns which rely
on similarity in sound rather than similarity in sense (‘words that
differ more in sense than in sound’). As we have seen, it is the
spectre of apparently arbitrary similarity which provokes modern
unease with puns – and Hoskyns seems to feel this too, with his
dislike of wordplay which relies on surface form (‘metre’) more
than semantic relation (‘matter’).
If we go further, and look in more detail at Renaissance and
eighteenth-century definitions of puns, we find a crucial differ-
ence, and shift in theorizing, which underlies and explains the
rejection of figures of ambiguity in the later period. Here is what
George Puttenham has to say about what he calls atanaclasis (i.e.
antanaclasis) in 1589:
Atanaclasis. or the Rebounde.
Ye haue another figure which by his nature we may call
the Rebound, alluding to the tennis ball which being
smitten with the racket reboundes backe againe, and

where the last figure before played with two wordes
somewhat like, this playeth with one word written all
alike but carrying diuers sences as thus.
The maide that soone married is, soone marred is.
Or thus better because married & marred be different in
one letter.
To pray for you euer I cannot refuse,
To pray vpon you I should you much abuse.
Or as we once sported vpon a countrey fellow who
came to runne for the best game, and was by his occu-
pation a dyer and had very bigge swelling legges.
He is but course to runne a course,
Whose shankes are bigger then his thye:
Yet is his lucke a little worse,
That often dyes before he dye.
Where ye see this word course and dye, vsed in diuers
sences, one giuing the Rebounde vpon th’other.14
Puttenham begins his definition with the claim that, ‘this playeth
with one word written all alike but carrying diuers sences’, sug-
gesting that the figure involves a single orthographic word with
more than one meaning. However, his first example (‘married’/
‘marred’) uses, as he acknowledges, two distinct orthographic
words which happen to have very similar spelling: in Joseph’s
terms, this is in fact paronomasia. His subsequent examples get
back on track: ‘pray for’/ ‘pray vpon’ (i.e. pray/prey); ‘course’/
‘course’ (i.e. course/coarse) ‘dyes’/‘dye’ (dyes/die). Puttenham’s
initial slip is suggestive of the difficulty of keeping these terms
separate, but the key element of his definition is that the figure
involves ‘one word’ which has more than one sense – something
echoed in Joseph’s definitions of antanaclasis (‘a word shifts from
one of its meanings to another’) and syllepsis (‘a word having
simultaneously two different meanings’).
We have seen from the OED that pejorative words for ‘pun’
and punlike things are fully attested only from the middle of the
seventeenth century. Here again is Addison’s definition of ‘pun’

from 1711, about a century later than Puttenham: ‘Having pur-
sued the History of a Punn . . . I shall here define it to be a Con-
ceit arising from the use of two Words that agree in Sound but
differ in the Sense’. The significant shift here is from Puttenham’s
‘one word . . . carrying diuers sences’ to Addison’s ‘two Words that
agree in Sound but differ in the Sense’. If we can take these two
definitions as representative of their periods, we can state that
there is a shift sometime in the seventeenth century, where a pun
changes from being a play on two senses associated with one
word, to involving two words with different senses linked by a
superficial similarity in form. In rhetorical terms, the model shifts
from antanaclasis and syllepsis (both involving one word with mul-
tiple meanings) to paronomasia (strictly involving similar, but
non-identical words). Addison’s model of a pun seems to be paro-
nomasia, except with identity of form in the words involved
(there are two words, but they ‘agree in sound’): and what offends
him about puns, as it offended Cowley in 1656 and Eachard in
1670, is the apparently arbitrary nature of the connection made
between the two words: Eachard rejects ‘lucky ambiguity’; Cowley
jibes at ‘two like words’ with ‘one noise’; Addison declares that
the practice ‘consists in a Jingle of Words’, and recommends a test:
The only way therefore to try a Piece of Wit, is to
translate it into a different Language: If it bears the
Test, you may pronounce it true; but if it vanishes in the
Experiment, you may conclude it to have been a Punn.
(The Spectator, 61, Thursday, 10 May 1711)
In other words, if the connection made in the wordplay survives
the removal of the arbitrary surface features of language (spelling
and sound), it can be trusted as ‘real’: if not, then it was an arbit-
rary pun, and meaningless.
This level of hostility to wordplay is, I think, new in the his-
tory of comment on language. As we have seen, rhetoricians had
previously warned against overuse of figures like paronomasia, and
had suggested that it was not a very serious figure, but they had
very specifically not ruled it out altogether. With the Enlighten-

ment comes a new disgust at the way puns were held to operate,
and a resolution to purge them from the language. Why should
this be? What had changed between Puttenham and Addison to
shift the definition of pun from involving one word with multiple
meanings, to two words with different meanings, and why was
this such a scandal to literature?
At this point, I want to break off from the main historical
argument for a moment to consider a linguistic question. What is
a word? Like many questions with apparently obvious, common-
sense answers, this is actually very difficult to answer definitively.
Perhaps the most serviceable answer (the best, but as we’ll see,
still importantly wrong in some respects) relies on orthography:
a word is a group of letters marked off by white space (or ending
with a typographic symbol such as < . > or < ! >. This is how
most computer spellcheckers and word-counters define ‘word’,
though consideration of hard cases like ‘didn’t’, ‘I’m’ and ‘fire
place’/‘fire-place’/‘fireplace’ will quickly reveal the practical
shortcomings of such a definition. And there are more problem-
atic theoretical objections to be made: as the Renaissance knew
well, writing is not ‘language’; it is a representation of language.
So using non-linguistic, orthographical conventions to arrive at a
definition of a linguistic feature (or what we assume to be a
linguistic feature) must be unsatisfactory.
If we move back one stage in the process of representation
from writing to speech, we could state that, in an empirical,
physical sense, ‘words’ can be considered to be groups of acoustic
energy – vibrations produced by the manipulation of breath and
the vocal tract. But shifting to the acoustic level does not really
help us with a precise definition of ‘word’: acoustic analysis of
actual speech shows that ‘words’ are not separated from each
other by silences. Speech tends to come in continuous bursts,
with silences or pauses at the end of groups of ‘words’. Many early
writing systems reflect this by not having white space between
words: theyuseinsteadsomethingcalledscriptiocontinua (ancient
Greek, for example).15 Orthographic, or acoustic, analysis, then,
will not supply us with a scientific definition of ‘word’. None-

theless, the concept of ‘word’ is readily available to common
sense, and is found in all languages – so there must be something
useful there somewhere. The difficulty comes when you try to be
precise about it.
We will return to the concept of ‘word’ soon, but it will be
useful here to introduce the concept of the phoneme. One of the
reasons a shift to an acoustic analysis of language away from
orthographic does not help us much in the definition of ‘word’ is
that any word is liable to have a wide range of possible phonetic
realizations. The word ‘word’, for example, has only one spelling
in standard English: <word>, but this can be pronounced [w±ïd]
in varieties of English which are rhotic (for example, Scottish,
and some American dialects) and [w±d] in non-rhotic varieties
(English English). The final sound can be devoiced to [t], and can
be realized with strong or no aspiration (a release of air at the end
of the sound). The central vowel can have any number of possible
values across the range of English accents: for example, a front
mid-vowel in Liverpool English, as in ‘air’ [w´:d], or a back mid-
vowel in Tyneside English, so ‘word’ rhymes with ‘bored’ [wø:d].
To cope with this degree of variation, linguists use the abstract
notion of the phoneme: an element which has no actual sound
value, but which abstractly represents the site where various
realizations can be triggered. Phonemes are marked with angled
lines: /w±rd/, while the actual sounds which might realize a pho-
neme are represented in square brackets: [w´dt]. This concept of
an abstract which has no actual existence, but may be instantiated
by a range of possible realizations, will prove very useful in trying
to think about puns and words in Shakespeare’s work.
Addison’s model of ‘word’ presupposes the ideal of one sense
to one form.16 He clearly assumes that where there are two senses,
but apparently one form, then we must be dealing with a case of
two identical, but different, forms. This ideal, of one form to one
sense, is what dictionaries bring to the language: dye/die is
separated into two stable, distinct forms only by orthographic
standardization. The ‘two’ words are created and maintained by
orthographic standardization – before dictionaries are available,

there is no stable basis on which to identify dye/die or corse/
coarse/course/cours/cors as anything other than multiple
possible realizations of a single ‘word’, which has a range of
possible meanings. This is a fundamental shift, both in the defi-
nition of ‘pun’ (from one word with two senses, to two words
with two senses), and in the definition of ‘word’. For Addison and
the later seventeenth century, ‘words’ are distinguished primarily
by having different senses (if you have a different sense, you have
a different word), and then (ideally) by formal differences – if not
in sound, then in spelling. So different ‘words’ which happen to
‘agree in sound’ can be distinguished by spelling.
As early modern English is only partially standardized, and its
orthography is not fully fixed, ‘words’ are not reified via print and
dictionaries. Writing is a representation of language, not the
thing itself for early modern speakers. So, when Puttenham defines
a pun, he says that it involves one word with two meanings
([coarse/course]=[rude]/[race track]; [dye/die]=[to colour]/[to
expire]). Either spelling (and many others) can realize either
meaning for Puttenham. Course/coarse/corse are to him all the
same ‘word’ – and there are different meanings associated with
that word which are distinguished by use. Just over a century later
when Addison considers puns, he defines them as involving two
words which just happen to have some surface similarity: essen-
tially the modern understanding of puns – but in effect, a com-
pletely different definition of what is going on. In other words,
‘resemblance’, which we have seen to be the foundational principle
of the understanding of wordplay from the Enlightenment onwards,
only comes into play as a meaningful concept after standardiz-
ation – after ‘words’ have been differentiated from each other by
fixing differential spellings. Pre-standardization, the ‘words’
involved in puns do not resemble each other: they are each other.
In the early modern period, it may be best to think of ‘words’
as abstract entities (like phonemes) which don’t have any fixed
physical existence, but which can be realized in many ways – in
sound (with all the variation we still cope with quite easily in
speech today) and in writing (again, in the early modern period,

with huge amounts of allowable variation which have now
vanished from the language under standardization). For the early
modern language user, ‘words’ are abstracts with various possible
realizations, and understanding them depends wholly on context
– users know that multiple possible physical realizations exist for
many groupings of semantic content. Only in context can you
decide which possible sense to ascribe to ‘dye’, or ‘course’.
Ascription of meaning to a word is a process which is embedded
in discourse practice – it is an essentially linguistic thing.
To illustrate this, I’ll take the notion of the linguistic sign. For
Saussure, the linguistic sign consists of two parts: a signal (which
can be the acoustic sound or the written letters) and the mental
concept this evokes (the signified). So, for example, the signal
‘time’ evokes for us a set of concepts to do with chronology, while
the signal ‘thyme’ evokes the concept of an aromatic herb used in
cooking. For us, these are two distinct linguistic signs, which can
be linked by an apparently arbitrary similarity in sound:
Signal Signified
Sign1 ‘time’ ‘concepts of chronology’
Sign2 ‘thyme’ ‘aromatic herb’
It is possible to imagine various obvious and uninteresting puns

on time/thyme – and the key here is that such puns appear to us
to be obvious and uninteresting because we feel that they would
be based on the arbitrary resemblance of ‘time’ and ‘thyme’:
there is an arbitrary formal resemblance in sound, but no ‘real’
link between the two signs. As Stephen Booth makes clear, our
cultural response to puns (the groan) is based on the assumption
that they work by bringing together two separate things in an
essentially random, trivial way. For him the ‘joy’ of puns lies in
sensing the availability of a simultaneously likely and
unlikely connection, an unexpected opportunity for
articulating two contexts that are and remain essentially

unconnected. When the pun maker snatches at the
hidden thread by which the two contexts can be joined,
brings the connection to consciousness, and trium-
phantly blurts it out, he or she reveals the insubstan-
tiality, the triviality of a relation that, until realized,
might have turned out to have been profound and pro-
foundly illuminating. What the pun’s audience hears is a
mere gimcrack, a toy, something entirely irrelevant to
the natures of the things so suddenly linked.17
Because the connection between the things joined is ‘hidden’ and
‘irrelevant’, all the joy of puns, for Booth, lies with the pun
maker. Because there is nothing beyond the initial insight of
arbitrary resemblance, only the person who spots that can enjoy
a pun: the rest of us are passive spectators.
If we consider, however, that only dictionaries and standard-
ization allow us to make a distinction between the signals ‘time’
and ‘thyme’, then the possibilities become more complex –
because in the Renaissance, before standardization, it is not at all
clear that we are dealing with two signs here: it might be better to
think of the situation as one of one signal with multiple possible
signifieds. Borrowing from the notion of the phoneme, we can
say that in the Renaissance, the sign (time) can be realized by a
large number of possible signals: <time>, <thyme>, <tyem>,
<teim>, <taim> etc., and also has a large number of possible
signifieds:
Signals Signified
Sign (time) time/thyme/tyem/teim etc. chronology/herb . . . etc.
Only in context can a reader or hearer decide which signified

is intended – and it would not occur to them (if reading) to
attempt to use spelling to disambiguate the sign, since pre-
standardization, any of the possible signals could be associated
with any of the possible signifieds.
It is only with the Enlightenment ideal of one form to one

meaning that there is a drive to pre-disambiguate signs with
multiple formal realizations (dye/die) and multiple possible
signifieds (colour/expire):
Renaissance situation
Signal Signified
Sign (die) dye/die/dy/dai/dey . . . expire/colour/period of 24 hours . . .
Enlightenment and post-standardization
Signal Signified
Sign1 (dye) dye colour
Sign2 (die) die expire
Sign3 (day) day period of 24 hours
For us, ‘words’ have been reified as dictionary entries: dye/die is

no longer two ways of realizing the same word, but two separate
words, linked only by an arbitrary similarity in sound. The only
possible physical realization of die [= to expire] is <die> – we
have given a false essentiality to the spelling because of standard-
ization and dictionaries. This reification of the orthographic form
of <die> means that context is no longer the only way to decide
what the realization of a word means. Post-standardization, as
long as we are reading, decoding can be done purely with refer-
ence to the surface form of the word – its orthographic form.
Post-standardization, we construct the myth about dye/die that
they constitute two different words which can be distinguished
by orthography. This negates context as a means for decoding
any particular realization of ‘dye’. The decoding is done by the
dictionary, and is no longer a linguistic process.
When we reify the surface features of ‘words’ (usually spelling,
but possibly sound) and make meaning distinctions depend on
them, we take the process of constructing meaning out of
context, and place it into the realm of the purely formal. In fact,
we stop it being a process at all. Thus, the perception of a pun is
the perception of an arbitrary similarity between two static and
otherwise unrelated semantic tokens.18 Because we perceive the
formal similarity as entirely constitutive of the meaning link bet-
ween the two words, the link strikes us as trivial. Puns don’t work
for us, because they seem to point to something that is (a) obvious
(these two words share formal similarities), and (b) uninteresting
linguistically (these entirely different areas of meaning are linked
by chance resemblances at the level of sound or spelling).
As Margreta de Grazia has it, it is only with the advent of dic-
tionaries that puns are excluded from ‘language’ proper because
they are ‘menacing linguistic aliens with the power to dissolve
lexical boundaries’ (p. 150) – lexical boundaries, it should be
noted, which dictionaries do not simply describe, but which they
create. As Phil Benson has argued, in order to write dictionaries
in the way that they do, lexicographers ‘must make two major
assumptions about the nature of language’: ‘First, they must
assume that languages are composed of uniquely identifiable
words. Second, they must assume that each word in the language
has a uniquely identifiable sense.’19 In fact, each of these assump-
tions amounts to a representation of language rather than a des-
cription of it. ‘Words’, as we have seen, are not easily identifiable:
the distinction between ‘dye’ and ‘die’, for example, depends to a
large extent on a spelling distinction which is not simply
recorded by dictionaries, but brought into being by them. And it
is not only formal distinctions of spelling which are produced by
the dictionaries which claim to describe them: the divisions of
semantic space, and their allocation to certain distinct spellings,
are again something dictionaries perform rather than simply
observe and report.
Margreta de Grazia (p. 151) gives the example of Johnson strug-
gling to differentiate senses of the verb ‘bear’ in his dictionary:
The verb bear . . . proved a particular embarrassment,

driving Johnson to insert an uncharacteristic admission
into the first subsense: ‘1. This word is used with such
latitude that it is not easily explained.’ In his attempt to
do so, he gives the verb two separate but hardly discrete
or coherent main entries, one of which is followed by
thirty-eight rather nebulous subsenses that attempt to
distinguish different types of carrying, suffering, endur-
ing, giving birth, and yielding. It is a wonderful example
of a lexicographer’s nightmare precisely because its usage
is too sprawling to submit to any tidy taxonomy . . . I
would like to suggest that the indeter minancy Johnson
faced in attempting to define bear was unexceptional
before dictionaries codified vocabulary and prescribed
usage.
Dictionaries thus provide a necessarily false representation of
language: they represent as discrete units things which actually
function as part of a continuum: and they arguably bring into
being the very things they claim to describe. Our notion of ‘word’
is thus completely dependent on dictionaries and the processes of
standardization. As de Grazia goes on to note (p. 153):
If a lexical definition of a word requires a prescribed
pronunciation, spelling, grammatical function, definition,
and etymology, it may be possible to argue that no word
in Shakespeare’s time fully satisfied those conditions.
The intractability now associated with puns would have
more or less characterized all words.
Puns work for Renaissance users of language because they
function as part of the linguistic system. To recognize them you
have to bring into play two or more possible meanings associated
with one signal. Normally the user selects the appropriate mean-
ing using the context in which the word appears, but in a pun, the
context brings both meanings into play simultaneously, produc-
ing an aesthetic effect of complexity. The Renaissance audience
of a pun is involved in actively maintaining the double play of
meaning: the present-day audience is a passive observer.
This allows us to begin to appreciate what Shakespeare and his

audiences might have perceived in these apparently ‘barren’
interplays of wit, and leads us on to a consideration of the ways
in which early modern users of English judged and evaluated
linguistic performance. What I want to argue here, following de
Grazia, is that wordplay was valued in the Renaissance, not
because it forced you to bring together two previously distinct
things, but because it required the language user to differentiate
two things from a single semantic space. Wordplay in the Renais-
sance does not begin with difference and seek resemblance: it
begins with identity and explores distinction. Thinking of puns
in this way challenges Booth’s witty, but intellectually bankrupt,
representation of them. In the Renaissance, at least, puns are not
trivial relations between essentially unrelated things paraded
triumphantly before a passive audience: they are active processes
of disambiguation in which the audience must engage.
CHAPTER FOUR
FRITTERS OF ENGLISH:
VARIATION AND LINGUISTIC JUDGEMENT
In this chapter I focus on what Shakespeare and his contem-

poraries thought about linguistic variation; particularly regional
variation. I have tried to make the case so far in this book that
cultural conceptions about language, and what it is, are very
different in the early modern period from those held in our own.
This is not something that has generally been acknowledged in
studies of the period – historical or literary – which is surprising,
given the stress on historicization generally prevalent in app-
roaches to other early modern cultural entities.1 Or perhaps it is
not so surprising: language is our most important route into early
modern culture; a thorough historicizing of language and ideas
about language in the period might have the effect of under-
mining a whole series of readings of cultural products which rely
on a straightforward assumption that language in the early modern
period was the same thing it is now, and that early modern users
experienced it, and thought about it, in the same ways, and with
the same terms, as we do.
These are not easy issues to think about, not least because our
experience of language as ‘natural’ (we learn our native language
unconsciously) can lead us to assume that language itself is
‘natural’ in all its forms, and that commonly held beliefs about
language are also ‘natural’ and inevitable. It is thus easy, but
dangerous, to assume that the early modern period shared our
own culture’s conceptions of language, and attitudes to it: recent
studies such as that by Adam Fox, for example, simply assume a
more or less nineteenth-century model of an established standard
version of the language, and stigmatized regional varieties, for the
Fritters of English: Variation and Linguistic Judgement 99
early modern period, and even Paula Blank’s or Carla Mazzio’s

more nuanced approaches are attracted by the incipient standard
models offered by early modern commentators on language,
tending to treat a theoretical ideal as a description of reality.2
Literary and textual criticism has generally been produced over
the years by people who have benefited from what James Milroy
calls ‘the ideology of the standard’ – the notion that Standard
English is not just a commonly agreed set of linguistic norms,
but that it is somehow better than non-standard varieties because
it is ‘correct’ and they are dysfunctional in some way.3 Pervasive
and invisible, like most successful ideologies, this one dominated
anglophone attitudes to language for most of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Critics and editors of Shakespeare have
mostly found it unthinkable that Shakespeare might have lived in
a culture which had no generally recognized standard English,
and which did not stigmatize regional varieties of English –
which did not automatically stigmatize variation at all – but there
are uncomfortable gaps in the data, and apparently inexplicable
language behaviours, which show that they are wrong.
terrible accents: voice and performance

in shakespeare
Especially in a British context, an obsession with accent and class
has been so culturally pervasive that their virtual absence from
Shakespeare’s plays (and early modern literature more generally)
has gone almost unnoticed. As Paula Blank notes, however, there
really is surprisingly little direct representation of regional
British accents or dialects in early modern literature: ‘there are
no full-scale portraits of lower-class urban dialects in the litera-
ture of the period’.4 Most readers will find this surprising, or
hard to credit, but this scepticism is a product of our linguistic
conditioning: our culture is obsessed with these things, so we
assume earlier ones were too. As a way of showing how different
the early modern experience of language, and particularly lin-
guistic variation, was, I want to consider the meanings of the word
‘accent’ for Shakespeare. Shakespeare uses the word relatively

frequently – it occurs in about half of his plays – but its central
meanings are not ours. ‘Accent’ for Shakespeare is not primarily
a set of phonetic features associated with a geographical or social
identity; rather it is a more general term, with a range of over-
lapping meanings covering ‘voice quality’, and even ‘content’. It
is strongly associated with contexts in which conscious oral per-
formance (especially of written texts) occurs. Let us begin with
the voice of Elizabeth I.
In August 1601, William Lambarde wrote an account of a
conversation he had with Queen Elizabeth on the occasion of him
presenting her with a catalogue of some of the official papers stored
at the Tower of London. The conversation is chiefly known among
literary historians because Elizabeth declared at one point, ‘I am
Richard 2d. know ye not that?’, a remark taken, not unprob-
lematically, to refer to performances of Shakespeare’s Richard II.
Before she says this, however, Elizabeth takes some delight in
demonstrating her humanist education:
Then openinge the Booke, [she] sayes, ‘you shall see that
I cann reade’; and soe, with an audible Voice, read over
the Epistle and the Title soe readily and distinctly
poynted, that it might perfectly appeare, that shee well
understood and conceaved the same.5
Elizabeth performs for the scholar Lambarde, justifying the
slightly archaic colouring she gives to ‘cann’ here, where it carries
the active sense ‘know how to’, ‘have skill in’, rather than simple
ability. Archaic too (for us) is the sense in which Lambarde uses
‘poynted’ (punctuated): here in its most usual Renaissance sense,
of ‘to read out a written text with pauses in the right places’. We
would focus on the writer or printer of a text here, and its visual
appearance: correct pointing for us means printing the punctu-
ation marks in the right places. For the Renaissance, a well-
pointed text is one which is read aloud correctly, not one printed
according to a set of standardized conventions. As with other
visual features of written texts in the Renaissance, punctuation
marks are primarily notes towards an oral performance, not ends

in themselves,6 and the degree of sophistication involved in the
interpretation of ‘pointing’ in this sense can be judged from the
affective disruption of expectations Shakespeare’s Lucrece em-
ploys when she also displays her rhetorical skills, this time in a
purely oral performance:
Her pity-pleading eyes are sadly fixed
In the remorseless wrinkles of his face;
Her modest eloquence with sighs is mixed,
Which to her oratory adds more grace.
She puts the period often from his place,
And midst the sentence so her accent breaks
That twice she doth begin ere once she speaks.
(Luc 561–7)
Here, her departures in oral performance from the norms of
delivery (‘She puts the period often from his place’) are seen to
make Lucrece’s rhetoric more effective: her ‘mis’-placings of
pauses are signs of the force of her feelings, and the authenticity
of her performance. ‘Accent’ here means voice quality – or flow
of voice: there is no suggestion of regionality or national identity.
‘Accent’ is frequently associated by Shakespeare with artificial or
for mal performance, something consciously learned and prac-
tised. Here is Duke Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
Where I have come, great clerks have purposed
To greet me with premeditated welcomes;
Where I have seen them shiver and look pale,
Make periods in the midst of sentences,
Throttle their practis’d accent in their fears,
And, in conclusion, dumbly have broke off,
Not paying me a welcome.
(5.1.93–9)
The nervousness of those with the job of making a formal wel-
come speech to the duke makes them speak unnaturally, pausing
(making periods) in the wrong place, and ultimately losing their
voices altogether (their voice, or accent, becomes throttled by

fear, and they are rendered dumb). In Love’s Labour’s Lost,
‘accent’ is again associated with formal public performance:
Their herald is a pretty knavish page
That well by heart hath conned his embassage.
Action and accent did they teach him there:
‘Thus must thou speak and thus thy body bear.’
(5.2.97–100)
The link with ‘Action’ here – the page is taught how to speak, and
how to hold himself and move while speaking – establishes this
as the part of rhetoric covered by pronuntiatio (or acte): effectively
the practical, mostly physical, aspects of speaking in public (being
audible, being understood, moving in a way that aids under-
standing and supports your argument). In both cases, ‘accent’ is
something studied formally for public performance – which is
also how Polonius uses it, praising Hamlet’s perfor mance of a
speech he wants to hear from the actors (and where the term
seems to come close to something like ‘enunciation’): ‘ ’Fore God,
my lord, well spoken – with good accent and good discretion’
(Ham 2.2.404–5).
Polonius’s use of the word ‘discretion’ introduces the notion of
decorum – the fitting of utterance style to subject matter – and
this will emerge as one of the most significant criteria used in the
Renaissance to make linguistic judgements. Its linking with
‘accent’ confirms that we are in the realm of formal rhetoric: the
artificial, skilful deployment of learned linguistic skills of com-
position and performance.7 Love’s Labour’s Lost, a play obsessed
with the oral performance of written texts, and judgements of
those performances, makes an explicit association between accent
and punctuation:
nathaniel [Reads.]
‘If love make me forsworn, how shall I swear to love?
Ah, never faith could hold, if not to beauty vowed.
Though to myself forsworn, to thee I’ll faithful prove.
Those thoughts to me were oaks, to thee like osiers

bowed . . .
Celestial as thou art, O, pardon love this wrong,
That sings heaven’s praise, with such an earthly tongue.’
holofernes
You find not the apostrophus and so miss the accent. Let
me supervise the canzonet.
(4.2.105–20)
The ‘apostrophus’ (‘apostraphas’ in the early texts) is an

apostrophe, used to mark the elision of a letter, and ‘canzonet’ is
a short song (i.e. the poem Nathaniel has just read – Holofernes
asks to be given it so he can read it himself – ‘supervise’ it).
However, it is not clear that there is an elision in the poem for
Nathaniel to have missed: Holofernes may be bandying a rheto-
rical term he does not fully understand to impress his audience.
In addition to this performance/punctuation strand of mean-
ings, a major cluster of uses presents ‘accent’ as a generic term
for voice or voice quality, again with no suggestion of regional or
class associations. Coriolanus’ ‘rougher accents’ (if we accept
Theobald’s plausible emendation of the folio reading ‘Actions’)
are professional, rather than geographical:
Consider further,
That when he speaks not like a citizen,
You find him like a soldier. Do not take
His rougher accents for malicious sounds,
But, as I say, such as become a soldier,
Rather than envy you.
(Cor 3.3.52–7)
And in Macbeth, when he speaks of ‘accents terrible’, Lennox

does not mean what we might think:
The night has been unruly: where we lay,

Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i’th’air; strange screams of death,
And, prophesying with accents terrible

Of dire combustion, and confus’d events,
New hatch’d to th’woeful time, the obscure bird
Clamour’d the livelong night: some say, the earth
Was feverous, and did shake.
(2.3.53–60)
The ‘accents terrible’ Lennox refers to here are not stigmatized

regional patterns of speech, but voices which produce terror in
their hearers. A similar displacement of adjectival scope occurs in
Othello:
roderigo
Here is her father’s house, I’ll call aloud.
iago
Do, with like timorous accent and dire yell
As when by night and negligence the fire
Is spied in populous cities.
(1.1.73–6)
By ‘timorous accent’, Iago does not mean that Roderigo’s voice is

quavering with fear; rather, the sound is likely to produce fear in
those who hear it.8 Crucially, ‘accent’ is again used of general
voice quality, not in any sociolinguistic sense.
So, in addition to its strongly performance-based associations,
‘accent’ for Shakespeare seems more likely to imply a variable
emotional quality in a voice, rather than a geographical colora-
tion, and as we have seen, it is used of voices likely to evoke
certain feelings or reactions:
Go, Sir Andrew. Scout me for him at the corner of the

orchard like a bum-baily. So soon as ever thou seest him,
draw and, as thou draw’st, swear horrible, for it comes to
pass oft that a terrible oath, with a swaggering accent
sharply twanged off, gives manhood more approbation
than ever proof itself would have earned him. Away!
(TN 3.4.71–7)
Tell thou the lamentable tale of me,

And send the hearers weeping to their beds.
For why the senseless brands will sympathize
The heavy accent of thy moving tongue
And in compassion weep the fire out.
(R2 5.1.44–8)
‘Accent’ is also used in more generalized senses to refer to
modes and even the content of speech: ‘Madam, I have a touch
of your condition, / That cannot brook the accent of reproof ’
(R3 4.4.158–9), where what is being focused on seems to be the
matter of the speech (‘reproof ’), rather than any phonetic quali-
ties. In 1 Henry IV, we find a still more general ‘speech’ sense:
So shaken as we are, so wan with care,
Find we a time for frighted peace to pant
And breathe short-winded accents of new broils
To be commenced in strands afar remote.
(1.1.1–4)
More specialized usages occur too, which begin to lead us closer
to something like our modern understanding of the word. In 2
Henry IV and King John, ‘accent’ refers to idiolect – an
individual’s characteristic mode of speech – rather than dialect or
sociolect, which are by definition shared modes belonging to
large numbers of people. So noble youths are seen mimicking
Hotspur’s idiolectal ‘thickness’ of speech:
He was indeed the glass
Wherein the noble youth did dress themselves.
He had no legs that practis’d not his gait;
And speaking thick, which nature made his blemish,
Became the accents of the valiant;
For those that could speak low and tardily
Would turn their own perfection to abuse,
To seem like him. So that in speech, in gait,
In diet, in affections of delight,
In military rules, humours of blood,
He was the mark and glass, copy and book,

That fashion’d others.
(2H4 2.3.21–32)
The word ‘thick’ is usually glossed, following OED, as ‘fast’
(which seems to be supported by line 26, where those whose
speech comes naturally ‘low and tardily’ change to mimic Hot-
spur), though there is also a folk-linguistic tradition that Hotspur
had a speech defect, the imitation of which was the source of the
Northumbrian uvular ‘R’. In King John, Queen Eleanor is the
first to guess that the Bastard is actually King Richard’s illegiti-
mate son (and therefore her grandson) on the basis of looks and
speech:
He hath a trick of Coeur-de-lion’s face;
The accent of his tongue affecteth him.
Do you not read some tokens of my son
In the large composition of this man?
(1.1.85–8)
This is a particularly interesting usage. The Bastard has never
heard his biological father, Richard, speak, so ‘The accent of his
tongue’ cannot be a reference to phonetic detail, or what Richard
sounded like. What is recognized by Eleanor, and commented on
by King John, is the Bastard’s characteristic linguistic bluntness
(‘A good blunt fellow’, 71). ‘Accent’ here refers to the manner and
matter of the bastard’s speech: verbal content rather than pho-
netic form, and the matching of res and verba (things and words)
as required by decorum. We will shortly return to this sense of
‘content’.
There are, however, usages of ‘accent’ in Shakespeare which
seem closer to our understanding of the term. In Julius Caesar,
we have imagined future foreign accents, for example:
Stoop, then, and wash. How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
In states unborn and accents yet unknown?
(3.1.111–13)
And in Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio again associates ‘accent’ with

foreign speech patterns, presenting them as affected imports (he
seems to be objecting to the overuse of ‘very’ as an intensifier):
The pox of such antic lisping affecting phantasimes,
these new tuners of accent. By Jesu, a very good blade, a
very tall man, a very good whore! Why, is not this a
lamentable thing, grandsire, that we should be thus
afflicted with these strange flies, these fashion-mongers,
these ‘pardon-me’s’, who stand so much on the new form
that they cannot sit at ease on the old bench?
(2.4.29–36)
These are minority senses for Shakespeare, but we can see our
own dominant sense of the word developing here (and once
again, we see Mercutio functioning in his true Mercurial role as
controller of language and punisher of linguistic affectation and
excess).
To these two last instances of national ‘accents’, we can add
two occasions where an association between the sound of some-
one’s speech and region and class seems to be explicit. In As You
Like It, a suspicious Orlando questions the disguised Rosalind’s
voice:
orlando
Your accent is something finer than you could purchase
in so removed a dwelling.
rosalind
I have been told so of many. But indeed, an old religious
uncle of mine taught me to speak, who was in his youth
an inland man – one that knew courtship too well, for
there he fell in love.
(3.2.329–34)
Rosalind’s ‘old religious uncle’ is an ‘inland’ man – someone
brought up with refinement (Orlando says of himself, ‘Yet am I
inland bred / And know some nurture’ at 2.7.97–8). But we should
be careful of too quickly applying our own assumptions about
language and variation here. As the earlier examples have shown,

‘accent’ in Shakespeare does not mean ‘phonetic detail’. It is
more likely to carry the more general sense of ‘verbal perform-
ance’, or even ‘content’ – and this is hinted at by Rosalind’s
‘taught me to speak’, which suggests a formal rhetorical training.
Orlando is reacting, not to the bare sound of Rosalind’s voice, but
to the witty verbal play Rosalind has just engaged in (‘I’ll tell
you . . . who Time trots withal . . . ’ 3.2.300–1): he is not com-
menting on a lack of glottal stops, but the presence of controlled
rhetorical tropes. It is significant that here, as elsewhere in Shake-
speare, when characters comment on language in similar circum-
stances, it is almost always to remark on the surprisingly high
status of the language used. Our own, highly stigmatized, notion
of accent means that comment tends to be disapproval of what
are seen as defective or sub-standard features: we are constantly
depressed by linguistic slovenliness; Shakespeare’s characters are
constantly amazed by how well people speak.
Something similar happens in King Lear, when the blind
Gloucester starts to hear through Edgar’s disguise as Poor Tom:
gloucester
Methinks thy voice is altered and thou speak’st
In better phrase and matter than thou didst.
edgar
You’re much deceived; in nothing am I changed
But in my garments.
gloucester
Methinks you’re better spoken.
(4.6.7–10)
Variation, when it is noticed, is noticed because the speaker is dis-
playing verbal arts above the ordinary: not because the speaker’s
accent (in our sense) marks them off geographically or socially.
Gloucester hears ‘better phrase and matter’ because Edgar has,
unconsciously, shifted out of his ‘Poor Tom’ persona, into blank
verse: Edgar’s content and phrasing is giving him away as edu-
cated, just as Elizabeth demonstrated her education by pausing in
the right places. Also in Lear, the banished Kent announces his
disguised voice as he enters newly clothed:
If but as well I other accents borrow
That can my speech diffuse, my good intent
May carry through itself to that full issue
For which I razed my likeness.
(1.4.1–4)
As long as he can disguise (‘diffuse’) his speech as he has dis-
guised (‘razed’) his likeness, he may succeed in his plans. Kent’s
subsequent speech is marked (or disguised) by manner and
matter (bluntness) rather than phonetics. He gives over the elabo-
rate speech of a courtly noble in favour of the ‘plain style’ we
have already seen praised in the Bastard in King John. When Kent
talks himself into the stocks, having attacked the courtly fop
Oswald, he gives an example of the courtly speech he has disav-
owed, all established by form and content rather than phonetics:
kent
Sir, ’tis my occupation to be plain:
I have seen better faces in my time
Than stands on any shoulder that I see
Before me at this instant.
cornwall
This is some fellow
Who, having been praised for bluntness, doth affect
A saucy roughness and constrains the garb
Quite from his nature. He cannot flatter, he;
An honest mind and plain, he must speak truth;
An they will take it, so; if not, he’s plain.
These kind of knaves I know, which in this plainness
Harbour more craft and more corrupter ends
Than twenty silly-ducking observants
That stretch their duties nicely.
kent
Sir, in good faith, Q orQ in sincere verity,
Under th’allowance of your great aspect,
Whose influence, like the wreath of radiant fire

On flickering Phoebus’ front –
cornwall
What mean’st Q thouQ by this?
kent
To go out of my dialect [Q: dialogue], which you
discommend so much. I know, sir, I am no flatterer.
He that beguiled you in a plain accent was a plain
knave, which for my part I will not be, though I should
win your displeasure to entreat me to’t.
(2.2.90–111)
Cornwall’s content-based satire on the plain style, which he
shows to be as artificial and affected (and rhetorical) in its way as
the courtly ostentation Kent mocks, makes this a highly
sophisticated treatment of language, but as is always potentially
the case in Shakespeare, lower-class language is associated with
plainness and honesty: the stigmatized accent (or dialect) is the
affected, courtly one. Region is nowhere relevant: social role and
status are generated by profession.9 This is one key to under-
standing the differences between early modern attitudes to lan-
guage and variation and our own: content, not phonetic form, is
used to judge the social status of a speaker; and affectation is far
more heavily stigmatized than variation.
Henry V is the play in which Shakespeare depicts the widest
range of accents, featuring those of Captains Jamy, Macmorris
and Fluellen, the French-accented English of Katherine, and the
English-accented French of Pistol – all of these accents being
represented via altered spelling (they are therefore quoted here
from the folio and quarto texts, with line references to the
through-line number (TLN) and the Arden 3 edition):
Scottish:
It sall be vary gud, gud feith, gud Captens bath, and I
sall quit you with gud leue, as I may pick occasion: that
sall I mary.
(F1623 TLN 1220–22/3.2.103–5)
Irish:
By Chrish Law tish ill done: the Worke ish giue ouer,
(F1623 TLN 1206–7/3.2.89–90)
Welsh:
for looke you, th’athuersarie, you may discusse vnto the
Duke, looke you, is digt himselfe foure yard vnder the
Countermines: by Cheshu, I thinke a will plowe vp all,
(F1623 TLN 1178–81/3.2.60–63)
English with a French accent:

De han, de arma, de neck, de cin, e de elbo, e ca bon.
(Q1600 TLN 1340/3.4.25–6)
French with an English accent:

Onye ma foy couple la gorge.
(Q1600 TLN 2497/4.4.37)
One thing to note about these representations of accent is that

they are all national rather than regional: we do not get a York-
shireman, a Geordie and a Cornish soldier. Gower, usually taken
to be the representative of England in the four Captains, does not
have an identifiable accent. In the Folio, the three captains Fluellen,
Jamy and Makmorrice are identified in speech prefixes as
‘Welch.’, ‘Scot.’ and ‘Irish.’, even though their actual names are
highlighted in the dialogue, and used in stage directions. The
stereotyped nature of the identifications is underlined by the fact
that the speech prefix for Fluellen changes mid-scene, becoming
‘Welch’ at TLN 1186, just at the point where he mentions Cap-
tain Makmorrice – though he has been given his personal name
in speech prefixes before this. There is no attempt in the play to
represent Pistol, Nym and Bardolph as speaking an English dis-
tinguished by accent: their social status is marked by the kind of
thing they say, and they have verbal tics at the level of phrase and
vocabulary which distinguish them, but the text gives no lead on
accent as it does with the three Captains (of course, Shakespeare
could simply have directed the actors playing Pistol et al. to use a
specific accent, but the question remains why there is no textual
indication of this when there is for other roles). We should also
note the superficiality of all of these representations: at most, two
or three phonetic features are specified: palatization of [s] for
Irish (‘ish’ for ‘is’); devoicing of stops for Welsh (‘plowe vp’ for
‘blow up’); ‘th’ backing to [d] for French (‘De han’ for ‘the
hand’); and the most detail reserved for the representation of
Scots, where shifts in vowel quality are indicated (‘gud’ for
‘good’, ‘feith’ for ‘faith’, ‘vary’ for ‘very’). As Gary Taylor notes
in his Oxford edition of Henry V, the features are all those fami-
liar from other plays’ stock Welsh, Irish and Scottish characters.10
Accent is used in Henry V, as elsewhere in Shakespeare and
early modern literature, as a non-realist symbol of identity. There
is no expectation that accent should be consistently or accurately
represented any more than there is an expectation that French
characters should consistently speak French to each other. The
impressionistic, suggestive use of language is exemplified by the
extraordinarily macaronic (that is, mixed-language) opening to
4.2 where the French move in and out of their own language:
orleans
The sun doth gild our armour; up, my lords!
dauphin
Monte à cheval! My horse, varlet laquais, ha!
orleans
O brave spirit!
dauphin
Via, les eaux et terre!
orleans
Rien puis? L’air et feu?
dauphin
Cieux, cousin Orleans!
Enter constable.
Now, my lord Constable!
constable
Hark, how our steeds for present service neigh!
dauphin
Mount them and make incision in their hides,
That their hot blood may spin in English eyes
And dout them with superfluous courage, ha!
(4.2.1–10)
Accent and dialect (in our sense) are thus almost always national
when depicted in Shakespeare, and only sporadic when they are
used – symbolic rather than realistic.11 Henry V is unusual in its
phonetic detail (though even this is restricted to a couple of
highly stereotyped features per character). There is, however, one
well-known, and apparently unequivocal example of an English
regional dialect in Shakespeare: in King Lear, Edgar, whom we
have already seen putting on a linguistic disguise to fool his
father, adopts a ‘peasant’s’ accent when he fights with the steward
Oswald in 4.6. This is a crucial episode in terms of understand-
ing Shakespeare’s depiction of, and attitude towards, regional
accents, and the next section will examine it in detail.
‘bold pezant!’ ‘rustice!’ ‘countryman!’

shakespeare, ovid, golding
In Act 4, scene 6 of King Lear, a disguised Edgar leads his
blinded father Gloucester across the stage, only for them to be
confronted by Oswald, steward to Gloucester’s enemies. Oswald
knows there is a price on Gloucester’s head, and means to claim
it. Edgar defends his father, adopting a new accent in which to do
it, for reasons which are unclear. I quote here from the folio text,
which is richer in its depiction of dialect features than the quarto:
Edg. Well pray you Father.
Glou. Now good sir, what are you?
Edg. A most poore man, made tame to Fortunes blows
Who, by the Art of knowne, and feeling sorrowes,
Am pregnant to good pitty. Giue me your hand,

Ile leade you to some biding.
Glou. Heartie thankes:
The bountie, and the benizon of Heauen
To boot, and boot.
Enter Steward.
Stew. A proclaim’d prize: most happie
That eyelesse head of thine, was first fram’d flesh
To raise my fortunes. Thou old, vnhappy Traitor,
Breefely thy selfe remember: the Sword is out
That must destroy thee.
Glou. Now let thy friendly hand
Put strength enough too’t.
Stew. Wherefore, bold Pezant,
Dar’st thou support a publish’d Traitor? Hence,
Least that th’infection of his fortune take
Like hold on thee. Let go his arme.
Edg. Chill not let go Zir,
Without vurther ’casion.
Stew. Let go Slaue, or thou dy’st.
Edg. Good Gentleman goe your gate, and let poore
volke passe: and ’chud ha’bin zwaggerd out of my life,
’twould not ha’bin zo long as ’tis, by a vortnight. Nay,
come not neere th’old man: keepe out che vor’ye, or ice
try whither your Costard, or my Ballow be the harder;
chill be plaine with you.
Stew. Out Dunghill.
Edg. Chill picke your teeth Zir: come, no matter vor
your foynes.
Stew. Slaue thou hast slaine me: Villain, take my purse;
If euer thou wilt thriue, bury my bodie,
And giue the Letters which thou find’st about me,
To Edmund Earle of Glouster: seeke him out
Vpon the English party. Oh vntimely death, death.
Edg. I know thee well. A seruiceable Villaine,
As duteous to the vices of thy Mistris,

As badnesse would desire.
Glou. What, is he dead?
Edg. Sit you downe Father: rest you.
(KL TLN 2666–708/4.6.215–50)
As this extract opens, Edgar is speaking to Gloucester in the

persona he first adopts earlier in the scene, at line 45, to greet
Gloucester after his supposed ‘fall’ from the top of Dover cliff.
This persona is marked by a tendency to call Gloucester ‘Father’
– in character, simply an age honorific, but of course laden with
irony in this context. Before this, from the opening of the scene,
and during their ‘climb’ to the cliff-top, Edgar speaks in the
persona of Poor Tom. As Oswald enters, therefore, Edgar has
already presented two personae to Gloucester (and us) in the
scene – and arguably a third, the real (?) voice he unconsciously
slips into when he uses blank verse in what is supposed to be
speech from Poor Tom. We hear this ‘real’ voice again when
Edgar addresses the corpse of Oswald (‘I know thee well . . . ’) –
and he then returns to the ‘Father’ voice to address Gloucester,
with no mention of the peasant’s dialect he has just used.
The linguistic features represented here are morphological as
well as phonetic: ‘Ich’ and ‘ch’ for first person (‘Chill’ = ‘I will’;
‘’chud’ = ‘I should’; ‘che vor’ye’ = ‘I warn you’), coupled with
fricative voicing (‘Zir’; ‘vurther’; ‘volke’; ‘zwaggerd’ = ‘swag-
gered’; ‘zo’; ‘vortnight’ – note, by the way, that the compositor
gets carried away and gives the steward fricative voicing even
before Edgar speaks: ‘Wherefore, bold Pezant’!). There is clearly
a class distinction made between Oswald and Edgar (‘bold
Pezant’, ‘Dunghill’, ‘Villain’): is this evidence for the stigmatiz-
ation of non-standard dialect by early modern speakers? It cer-
tainly looks like it to us, steeped as we are in the ideology of
standardization, but a couple of things should give us pause.
For one thing, we have already seen Oswald’s language satirized
by Kent in this play: he can hardly be taken unproblematically as
a representative of a proto-standard speaker. For another, it
might be more accurate to label the clash here as one between

urban and rural (or court and country), rather than higher and
lower class. Given the shifting values associated with pastoral
forms in the period, this should immediately alert us to the dan-
ger of simply assuming that rural = lower class = stigmatized,
while court = higher class = prestige. As this exchange between
the superficially socially prestigious Oswald (who is actually a
self-serving minion of Lear’s evil daughter) and the superficially
destitute Edgar (actually noble in blood as well as deed) shows, as
ever in the world of pastoral, surface appearance is no guide to
social status. The noble Kent’s blistering attack on Oswald’s
court-speak, quoted earlier, reminds us that courtliness does not
map automatically onto favoured linguistic forms in Shakespeare:
there is a rival set of values associating plainness and honesty
with the linguistic forms of the country.
A further reason to pause before we use this as evidence for
attitudes to accents in the early modern period is the fact that this
exchange presents us, not with an actual early modern dialect,
but a highly conventional literary stereotype. What Edgar speaks
here is a generalized ‘rural’ dialect, symbolic rather than realistic.
The same ‘dialect’ recurs frequently in early modern literature;
though it is sometimes known as ‘stage Kentish’, it is also found
in songs, translations, and poetry. It is a literary dialect based on
archaic, southern, rural forms of English: the voicing of
fricatives indicated by ‘Zir’, and ‘vurther’ is a feature of south-
western accents, but the ‘chud’ and ‘chill’ are features normally
associated with south-eastern accents such as Kentish.12 The
general literary antecedents and followers of Edgar’s accent here
can be traced from the Wakefield Second Shepherds’ Play
(fifteenth century), through Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1533), to
poetry collections such as Thomas Howell’s The Arbor of Amitie
(1568),13 into professional and amateur plays of the early seven-
teenth century such as the manuscript comedy Timon (1602/3?),
The London Prodigall (1605), and published song collections such
as those of Thomas Ravenscroft in his Melismata (1611) and A
Briefe Discourse (1614). The earliest examples cited here all have
the distinctive ‘ich’ forms, but fricative voicing is generally

absent from The Second Shepherds’ Play and Gammer Gurton’s
Needle (though early in the text there is one possible instance).
Voicing comes into its own later: it is fully present in Howell, and
Timon and The London Prodigall, and in the songs printed by
Thomas Ravenscroft. Ravenscroft also has ‘th’ backing to [d] (so
‘other’ appears as ‘oder’), and interestingly one of his swains in A
Briefe Discourse has the name Hodge, as if recalling Gammer
Gurton’s Needle.
Although note 12 charts some of the historical linguistic
discussion of the precise geographical location of the dialect,
there is probably no real answer to the question. Of the instances
noted above, only Howell and Ravenscroft explicitly name the
dialect as Kentish or associate it with Kent.14 To a large extent,
geographical speculation is beside the point: there is no serious
attempt to represent an actual dialect of English here, just as
there is no attempt at dialect realism or consistency: Edgar just
starts using the dialect without explanation before or after. The
dialect is literary shorthand to designate characters as rustic,
rather than an attempt to locate them geographically. For this
reason, I use the term ‘Kentich’ to designate the literary dialect
and differentiate it from actual Kentish. While we can thus place
Edgar’s Kentich within a well-established set of literary conven-
tions, it is possible, I think, to locate the immediate inspiration
for his use of Kentich here in one specific source: Arthur Golding’s
1565 translation of Ovid.
Book 2 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses features an episode we
glanced at in Chapter 2, whose main participants figure signific-
antly in the discourse of language in the early modern period.
The episode begins with the god Apollo taking some conven-
tionally pastoral time out, tending cattle in the fields, wearing a
shepherd’s cloak, and carrying a wooden staff. Distracted by
thoughts of love, the god spends his time playing music on his
reed-pipes while the cattle wander off unnoticed. Spotting this,
the wily Mercury hides the cattle in some nearby woods. Unfor-
tunately for Mercury, however, his cattle-rustling has been
observed by a genuine herdsman, Battus. To keep Battus quiet,

Mercury bribes him with a cow, and Battus swears he will not
talk. Now we come to the crucial part: in Ovid’s version, Mercury
tests Battus by disguising himself as someone looking for his lost
cattle, and offering Battus a reward for information. Battus
immediately tells all, and Mercury punishes him by turning him
to stone:
simulat Iove natus abire;

mox redit et versa partiter cum voce figura
‘rustice, vidisti si quas hoc limite’ dixit
‘ire boves, fer opem furtoque silentia deme!
iuncta suo pretium dabitur tibi femina tauro.’
(Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 2, 697–701)
The son of Jove pretended to go away, but soon came
back with changed voice and form, and said: ‘My good
fellow, if you have seen any cattle going along this way,
help me out, and don’t refuse to tell me about it, for they
were stolen. I’ll give you a cow and a bull into the
bargain if you’ll tell.’15
Golding’s translation follows Ovid’s narrative, but adds one very
interesting touch: when Mercury returns to Battus in disguise, he
talks in dialect:
Anon he comes me back again and, altered both in speech

And outward shape, said, ‘Countryman, Ich heartily
bezeech
And if thou zawest any kie come roiling through this
ground
Or driven away, tell what he was and where they may be
vound.
And I chill githee vor thy pain an heiffer an’ her match.’
(Golding, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 2, 868–72)
Note that in Golding, Mercury’s greeting to Battus, ‘Countryman’

(869), translating Ovid’s ‘rustice’, seems to have connotations of
solidarity and equality which Ovid’s term may lack (as the
condescending Loeb translation, ‘My good fellow’, implies). In
Ovid, there is no evidence that Mercury speaks with any
particular accent: the text says he alters his voice, but there is no
attempt to represent the results phonetically as Golding does,
and the implication is probably that Mercury alters his voice to
hide his identity (something he does frequently in Ovid), not to
imply social solidarity with the herdsman. In Golding, part of
Mercury’s deception is social: he presents himself as similarly
rustic. Interestingly, tracing Kentich through its literary incar-
nations, we find that it is sometimes associated with adopted
identities. Mak, the character who employs it in The Second
Shepherd’s Play, is really a northerner, and his linguistic pretence
is immediately seen through: ‘Now take outt that sothren tothe,
/ And sett in a torde!’ (lines 215–16) – which can be translated as
‘Take that southern tooth out of your mouth and put a turd in it
instead.’16 Use of the literary dialect is also typically intermittent
or inconsistent: for example, in Gammer Gurton’s Needle it is used
by Hodge, his wife Gammer Gurton, and by Tib, but not their
neighbours – and even Hodge and Gammer do not use it all the
time. In the manuscript play Timon (probably 1602/3), Lollio,
the wealthy son of the miser Philargurus, is given Kentich, not to
imply that he is lower-class, or particularly foolish, but to show
that he has been kept in the country by his father (who is afraid
he will learn the luxurious ways of the city, and so waste his
fortune). Lollio is certainly unused to the sights of the city (he
takes the painted stars on an inn-sign to be real – line 940), but
he is not uneducated: he speaks Latin (1015) and quotes the Iliad
in Greek (1138). As we might expect, given other inconsistent
depictions of dialect, his Kentich is strongest when he first
appears, and soon disappears.17 This parallels Golding’s use of it:
Battus uses dialect forms only after Mercury has addressed him
in dialect – there is no attempt to be consistent.
Kentich is, then, a purely literary form, an amalgam of stereo-
typed and archaic features passed on from writer to writer
without reference to what any real speakers actually do. In this
regard, it is worth pointing out that Shakespeare grew up in a

region where south-western dialects shaded into Midlands ones,
and would have known that this dialect was a stereotype – and
would presumably have been perfectly capable of representing an
accurate south-western dialect had he wanted to. This tells us
something about the values placed on dialects and their
representation in the early modern period. Kentich functions as
a marker of social identity: the speaker is meant to be taken as
representing a generalized notion of rustic people, with an
implied contrast to the urban. A crucial point for us to bear in
mind is that it carries no inevitable implication that the speaker is
foolish or stupid (as use of stage Mummerset would tend to do
today), since the potential values of pastoral mean that ‘rustic’
can be associated with innocent or plain good sense as opposed to
courtly sophistry. Indeed, as the case of Lollio in Timon shows, a
rustic speaker can be both educated and rich. Linguistically, in
the early modern period there is no reliable standard/non-
standard ideology in place which would allow the simplistic ‘non-
standard = stupid’ identification to be assumed. It is very hard for
us to think outside the ‘non-standard = stupid’ box however, as
almost any modern production of a play with rustic characters
will demonstrate.
It is tempting to link Shakespeare’s use of Kentich in King
Lear directly to this instance in Golding, since the situations are
so very similar. Indeed, there may be more echoes of Golding
earlier in the same scene in Lear in the exchange between the
blind Gloucester and his disguised son Edgar. Just as Mercury
disguises himself for Battus, Edgar hides his identity from
Gloucester. When Gloucester senses that something is strange
about Edgar’s speech he comments, ‘Methinks thy voice is alt-
ered and thou speak’st / In better phrase and matter than thou
didst’; to which Edgar replies, ‘You’re much deceived; in nothing
am I changed / But in my garments’ (4.6.7–10). The echo is
slight, but, given the context of a character speaking in a bor-
rowed voice, this may recall Golding’s ‘altered both in speech /
And outward shape’. Shakespeare’s echoes of Golding elsewhere
have this intensely involved quality: they are genuine transfor-

mations of moods and situations rather than simple allusions.
Jonathan Bate argues that Edgar also draws on Golding in this
scene when his ‘Father’ persona describes the supposed devil
which led Gloucester to the top of the cliff as having ‘Horns
whelked and waved like the enraged sea’ (4.6.71) – ‘whelked’
being a word used nowhere else in Shakespeare, but occurring in
Golding:
Jove’s image which the Lybian folk by name of Hammon
serve
Is made with crooked whelked horns that inward still do
curve.
(Book 5, 16–17)18
Edgar can thus be linked, via Ovid, to Mercury, and he becomes
one of a series of characters whose ‘Mercurial’ linguistic facility
consists in a display of mastery over language. This linguistic
facility is usually misrepresented in our post-Romantic stage
tradition, which sees such characters as uncontrolled, their
mouths running away with them. The tradition is misguided and
anachronistic: as we have seen, the mythological associations of
Mercury are with conscious control and manipulation of lan-
guage, not Dionysiac frenzy. Edgar’s linguistic shifts strike us as
arbitrary, as do some of Hamlet’s: but characters like Mercutio,
Edgar and Hamlet, read in the light of Mercury, emerge as skilful
and deliberate manipulators of linguistic form.
‘rackers of ortagriphie’:
pedantry and the rise of the standard
If we accept that the representation of accent in Shakespeare is
both sporadic and stereotyped, with an almost complete absence
of regional accents (as opposed to national ones), how is this to
be explained? Paula Blank suggests that the high rate of immig-
ration to London throughout the period at all social levels made
it impossible for users to fix models of upper or lower social class
accents – and that authors therefore characterize lower-class speech

by content markers such as ‘proverbial language, vulgar oaths,
and “low” salutations’.19 As we have seen, she is certainly right that
language users in the Renaissance used content, rather than accent,
to mark speech socially, but it is hard to see why, if immig ration
was preventing the identification of class-based accents, it would
not also prevent the identification of class-based content.
An alternative explanation is that early modern speakers did
not use phonetic variation to identify social class because they did
not associate the two: there is very little comment on accent in the
plays because everyone in early modern Britain had a regionally
marked accent, and there was no standard, or ideology of stan-
dardization, from which to find it remarkable that someone spoke
differently. Early modern language users were used to, and at ease
with, high frequencies of variation in the written as well as spoken
language: lack of variation is what would have been remarkable to
them.
Posting on the internet ‘Shaksper’ discussion list, Thomas
Larque quotes Yolanda Vazquez, one of the Shakespeare’s Globe
actors involved in an ‘original pronunciation’ production at the
theatre, as follows:
What I find really interesting is that every character
speaks with the same O[riginal] P[ronunciation] accent:
there’s no class differentiation. Supposedly at that time
class didn’t affect the way people spoke, which is the
same for many countries today. I know that in Spain, in
Andalusia for instance, we all speak with the same accent
and the only way that you would know if somebody’s
from a particular social strata is through their use of
language; that might show lack of education, and there-
fore you might suppose that the person is of a lower
social class – but it’s not about accent.
(www.shaksper.net/archives/2006/0257.html)20
This should remind us that the British linguistic situation, with
regional accents highly stigmatized and associated with lack of
education, is not only historically unusual, but by no means the

norm in other cultures in the present.
What did early modern English speakers think about dialects?
Adam Fox, relying to a great extent on Alexander Gil’s 1619
Logonomia Anglica, and projecting forward from the fifteenth-
century written standard of Chancery English onto the spoken
language of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is certain:
‘By this time, and probably long before, there was an apparent
homogeneity in the language of the courtly learned elite, a “usual
speech” which passed for a standard English.’ Fox goes on to
claim that ‘Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
therefore, the expurgation of traces of local dialects in both
writing and speaking was an imperative of formal education.’
This is anachronistic and over-simplified: anachronistic because
it sees the early modern period in the literate, standardized terms
of our own; over-simplified because it ignores the debate about
dialect in early modern comment on language.21
There is certainly a desire in some – though not all – writers at
the time to identify a ‘usual speech’ – but there is no certainty
about what that ‘usual speech’ might be.22 Discussion of dialect
in the early modern period does not inevitably involve discussion
of relative linguistic value. John Bullokar’s 1616 definition of
‘dialect’ is strictly neutral:
a difference of some words, or pronunciation in any
language: as in England the Dialect or manner of speech
in the North, is different from that in the South, and the
Western dialect differing from them both . . . So every
country hath commonly in divers parts thereof some
difference of language, which is called the Dialect of
that place.
(An English Expositor, sigs E8v–F1r)
As Paula Blank shows, many writers on English at the time call
for a ‘common’ language, by which they mean one containing
features shared by, or understood by, all – not a ‘standard’ based
on an elite variety. In 1490, Caxton wrote (in the preface to
Eneydos) of the desirability of ‘comyn termes’; Thomas Wilson

recommends that people should ‘speake as it is commonly
received’ (The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), fo. 86r); George Putten-
ham notes that speech becomes ‘a language’ when it is ‘fashioned
to the common understanding, & accepted by consent of a whole
countrey & nation’ (The Arte of English Poesie (1589), p. 120).
There is no clear ‘ideology of the standard’ here, with variation
inevitably identified as incorrect. Certainly, Wilson warns against
‘outlandishe Englishe’, but what he cites as examples of this are
the strange ‘ynkehorne termes’ of the scholar, the priest and the
lawyer, or the ‘Frenche English’ and ‘Angleso Italiano’ of the
returned traveller. Puttenham warns against the English of ‘the
marches and frontiers’ and ‘port townes’ – but also that of
‘Scholers’ who ‘vse much peeuish affectation of wordes out of the
primatiue languages’.
These calls for a ‘common’ language are being made in the
context of the general understanding of language current at the
time, largely derived, as we have seen, from Aristotle. This con-
ception of language held that its job was to represent thoughts
(which were themselves representations of the world), and that
the relationship between language (words) and thought was
purely conventional. This model of language and its relationship
to thought encouraged a rather practical, functional view of
language: it was (at best) a secondary representational system,
and concerns about language were concerns about how well it did
its job of communicating ideas reliably, not, by and large,
concerns about how it did that job. Aristotelian conventionality
was wedded, if commentators thought about it, to the biblical
account of the confusion of tongues – the Tower of Babel – to
produce a model which, explicitly or implicitly, saw inter- and (by
extension) intra-linguistic variation as an inevitable fact of post-
lapsarian human languages. So the Aristotelian position modelled
variation as an intrinsic fact of language – not, as prescriptivism
was later to cast it, some kind of pathological condition.
This is not to say that the Aristotelian position necessarily
approved of variation: as the Babel myth demonstrated, inter-
and intra-linguistic variation reduced the ability of humans to

communicate, and was therefore, in functional terms, a bad thing.
This is why commentators stress a ‘common’ language as a desir-
able thing: it is the job of language to communicate ideas between
humans, so the more people that can understand language, the
better. But we need to remind ourselves that these ‘common’
languages are conceived of very differently from the elite
standard which was to be urged in the eighteenth century. They
are selected from general usage, rather than a restricted elite one,
and they come with no automatic implication that those items not
selected are ‘incorrect’.
What commentators tend to warn against, as we can see from
Wilson and Puttenham, are extreme or unusual words or forms,
not primarily because they are provincial, but because they are
unfamiliar and will hamper understanding. In many cases, as
Thomas Wilson’s writing attests, these writers are glancing
warily up the social and educational scale, at the elite, scholarly
practice of coining words from Latin. English is not endangered
by the errors of the ignorant masses: communication is put at risk
by the ‘outlandish’ terms of the learned. This is another feature
of early modern comment on language that we misread easily,
since we are so conditioned to expect disapproving comment on
language to be directed down the social and educational scale.
The urban/rural distinction which accompanies much of this
comment was familiar to Renaissance writers from Quintilian:
Speech must be correct, lucid, ornate, and appropriate,
and so too must Delivery. (1) This will be correct, that is
to say free of fault, if (a) the accent is easy, clear,
pleasant, and of the city – that is, free from any trace of
rusticity or foreignness.
(Orator’s Education, Book 11.3, pp. 99–101)
And it is important to realize that Quintilian lays out the axes
along which almost all early modern discussion of accent sub-
sequently ran: city versus rural versus foreign –with no overt
discussion of social class. The two most significant terms are
‘city’ and ‘rural’, and Quintilian gives more detail on the rustic,
associating it with the deliberate archaisms of some orators (pp.
89–91):
there are those who think that raw delivery, such as is
produced by the impulses of a person’s feelings, is
stronger [than planned oratory], and is in fact the only
kind worthy of a real man. These are in general the same
people who habitually disapprove of care, art, polish, and
any product of study in oratory, as being affected and
unnatural, or who claim to imitate antiquity by a rustic
vocabulary or even pronunciation, as Cicero says Lucius
Cotta did. Well, let them keep their opinion that to be
born is enough to make a man an orator; but I hope they
will pardon the efforts of those of us who think that noth-
ing comes to perfection unless nature is assisted by art.
Although Quintilian is hostile to archaism for effect, other
rhetorical traditions were more enthusiastic, and this can be seen
in an English context in E.K.’s commentary on Spenser’s
vocabulary in The Shepherd’s Calendar (especially in the ‘Epistle
to Gabriel Harvey’). E.K. notes a potentially realist justification
for the ‘rustical rudeness’ of Spenser’s shepherds’ words (‘because
such old and obsolete words are most used of country folk’), but
also claims that they ‘bring great grace and . . . authority to the
verse’.23
The key to making sense of early modern comment on English
is to remember that Gil et al. were writing before there was any
general acceptance that certain geographical or social dialects
were ‘better’ than others. South-eastern, and specifically London,
and sometimes courtly, English is praised – but these notions are
nascent, not fully formed. Linguistic value is uncertain and up
for grabs. Thus Puttenham recommends the ‘vsuall speach the
Court, and that of London and the shires lying about London,
within lx. myles’ (p. 121) – actually a very open definition (sixty
miles!). John Hart, in his A Methode or Comfortable Beginning
(1570) recommends London and court usage because it selects
the best from all the regions, producing a ‘common’ standard

rather than an elite one: ‘the generall flower of all English
countrie speaches, are chosen and used’ (sig. B1r ). Gil brings
rank into the equation, valuing the language of learned and
refined men over that of artisans – and Jonson follows him in
recommending the customary usage of the learned. But even this
bias was challenged by notions of purity and tradition which
recognized that dialects were sometimes closer to ‘original’
Anglo-Saxon than southern ones – so northern features are used
in formal poetry, and northern dialects in plays do not auto-
matically imply stupidity or clownishness. When Carew wrote
about Cornish in his Survey of Cornwall (1602), he acknowledged
that some found Cornish English strange, but defended it on the
grounds of antiquity, decorum (‘proprietie’ – it is appropriate or
decorous for people from Cornwall to use Cornish words) and
functionality (the words have ‘significancy’ – they express mean-
ing more directly than borrowed ones might), and suggested that
it could be made more readily acceptable by being used in
literature (by ‘another spencer’):
The other rude termes, wherewith Deuon and Cornish
men are often twyted, may plead in their defence, not
onely the prescription of antiquitie, but also the title of
proprietie, and the benefit of significancy: for most of
them take their source from the Saxon, our naturall lan-
guage, and continue in vse amongst the Dutch . . . which
termes, as they expresse our meaning more directly, so
they want but another Spencer, to make them passable.
(Survey of Cornwall, fos 56v–57r)24
We have already seen Puttenham’s nervousness about geog-
raphical distance – in his chapter ‘Of Language’ (Book 3, ch. 4,
pp. 120–21), he recommends that the aspirant poet should search
out ‘the most vsuall [language] of all his countrey’, specifying
that of the ‘kings Court’ or ‘good townes and Cities’ and warning
against that of ‘the marches and frontiers’ or ‘port townes’
(where foreigners lurk), and indeed that of the ‘Vniuersities’,
because scholars’ speech is affected. Geographically remote

places should be avoided, because the people are ‘rusticall’ and
‘vnciuill’ (recalling Quintilian: see p. 125 above). The language of
the ‘craftes man’, ‘carter’ or ‘other of the inferiour sort’ is also
rejected, whatever part of the country they come from.25 Archaic
language is no model (so out go the Piers poet, Lydgate, Gower
and Chaucer), and all northern forms, however high-born the
user, even though ‘no man can deny but that theirs is the purer
English Saxon at this day’.
This passage from Puttenham is a staple in accounts of the
history of English and the rise of Standard English, and is nor-
mally used as evidence for the stigmatization of non-Southern
and lower-class English at the time, but we should note the
acknowledgement of the purity of Northern English, and the
inclusion of highly educated usage as something to be avoided.
Puttenham is making an aesthetic judgement about the type of
language best suited to contemporary poetry – and he is follow-
ing the logic of the Renaissance conception of language which
saw it as justified inasmuch as it could communicate ideas and
hence bring about ‘society’. The spectre of Babel haunts this type
of thought about language: variation was introduced to reduce
the scope of communication, so writers should strive to be
understood by as many as possible. By the eighteenth century,
this communicative imperative would be used to reject regional
dialects as ‘incorrect’ – but in the Renaissance it more usually
emerges as a rejection of any type of extreme or specialized lan-
guage – especially that of scholars and those who affect obscure
foreign terms. There is no unidirectional social prejudice in
terms of what forms are rejected in the Renaissance, and forms
are not rejected because they are ‘incorrect’, but because they are
strange and little-known.
The lack of a standard ideology (which designates one set of
forms as ‘correct’, and others as ‘incorrect’) is also underlined by
the tendency of commentators on language to use instead the
principle of decorum when making linguistic judgements: forms
are rejected if they are deemed inappropriate to the situation, not
because they are deemed to be sub-standard in some way. It is

interesting to compare Puttenham’s comments above with those
he makes in an earlier chapter, where he tells an anecdote with a
linguistic point:
I remember in the first yeare of Queenes Maries raigne
a Knight of Yorkshire was chosen speaker of the Parlia-
ment, a good gentleman and wise, in the affaires of his
shire, and not vnlearned in the lawes of the Realme, but
as well for some lack of his teeth, as for want of language,
nothing well spoken, which at that time and businesse
was most behooffull for him to haue bene: this man after
he had made his Oration to the Queene; which ye know
is of course to be done at the first assembly of both
houses; a bencher of the Temple both well learned and
very eloquent, returning from the Parliament house
asked another gentleman his friend how he liked M.
Speakers Oration: mary quoth th’other, me thinks I
heard not a better ale-house tale told this seuen yeares.
This happened because the good old Knight made no
difference betweene an Oration or publike speach to be
deliuered to th’eare of a Princes Maiestie and state of a
Realme, then he would haue done of an ordinary tale to
be told at his table in the countrey.
(Poesie, Book 3, ch. 2, pp. 115–16)
Most modern readers will be misled by the mention of ‘York-
shire’ into expecting some comment on accent: in fact, it is the
Knight’s lack of stylistic awareness, his lack of decorum, which
attracts linguistic judgement. His accent is irrelevant.26
Although writers at this time are commenting in the absence of
any fixed definition of ‘standard’ spelling, pronunciation or
grammar, many have opinions on what these might be – especi-
ally spelling and pronunciation. These opinions are idiosyncratic
preferences, however, yet to harden into ‘rules’. In the ‘Epistle to
the Reader’ of his A Caveat or Warening for Commen Cursetors
(1567 – though here quoted from the second edition of 1573),
Thomas Harman comments explicitly on the correct spelling of

his borrowed Latin term ‘Cursetors’ (Aiiijv):
neyther do I write it Cooresetores with a double oo,

or Cowresetors, wyth a w, which hath an other signi-
fication: is there no diuersitie betwene a gardein, and a
garden, maynteynance, and maintenance: Streytes, +
stretes: those that have vnderstanding, knowe there is a
great difference.
But note how Harman has to repeat the spellings to call attention
to them, and perhaps ensure that his printer retains them. And
note too that while Harman is keen to insist on a difference
between ‘gardein’ and ‘garden’, ‘maynteynance’ and ‘mainten-
ance’, ‘Streytes’ and ‘stretes’ (whatever these differences might
be), he (or his printer) is happy elsewhere in the ‘Epistle’ to vary
between ‘write’ and ‘wryght’, and ‘playne’, and ‘playn’. Although
inconsistent, Harman is an example of a literate sensibility begin-
ning to affect the approach to language. The written form (spell-
ing) is starting to overtake the spoken sound, and Harman’s
assumption seems to be that differences in spelling should auto-
matically imply differences in meaning. Similarly, Thomas Elyot,
in The Book Named the Governor (1531), comments that nurses
tending for the children of nobles should ‘speke none englisshe
but that / whiche is cleane / polite / perfectly / and articulately
pronounced / omitinge no lettre or sillable / as foolishe women
often tymes do’ (fo. 19v, my emphasis).
Elyot’s assumption that pronunciation should follow spelling
is an unusual stance in the early modern period, where spelling
reformers generally advocate changing spellings to reflect the
actual sounds people use.27 The notion that speech should follow
spelling comes in for some satirical attention from Shakespeare in
Love’s Labour’s Lost, when he puts the idea into the head and
mouth of the character labelled ‘Pedant’ in the folio speech
prefixes (Holofernes is his name in modern editions; I quote here
from the folio text):
Enter the Pedant, Curate and Dull [ . . . ]

Curat. I praise God for you sir [ . . . ]
I did conuerse this quondam day with a compa-
nion of the Kings, who is intituled, nominated, or called,
Don Adriano de Armatho.
Ped. Noui hominum tanquam te, His humour is lofty,
his discourse peremptorie : his tongue filed, his eye
ambitious, his gate maiesticall, and his generall behaui-
our vaine, ridiculous, and thrasonicall. He is too picked,
too spruce, too affected, too odde, as it were, too pere-
grinat, as I may call it.
Curat. A most singular and choise Epithat.
Draw out his Table-booke.
Peda. He draweth out the thred of his verbositie, fi-
ner than the staple of his argument. I abhor such pha-
naticall phantasims, such insociable and poynt deuise
companions, such rackers of ortagriphie, as to speake
dout fine, when he should say doubt; det, when he shold
pronounce debt; d e b t, not det: he clepeth a Calf, Caufe:
halfe, haufe: neighbour vocatur nebour; neigh abreuiated
ne: this is abhominable, which he would call abhomi-
nable: it insinuateth me of infamie: ne inteligis domine, to
make franticke, lunaticke?
(TLN 1739–65/5.1.1–25)
This exchange begins with the Curate naming Don Armado –
known as ‘Braggart’ in the quarto and folio texts, indicating that
he is a stock character type: the vainglorious soldier. Throughout
the play, Armado’s bombastic language is a target – and he can be
compared with other verbose soldiers such as Pistol and Falstaff.
The Pedant’s final speech, while purporting to comment on
Armado’s language, in fact gives a list of complaints about
current pronunciations in English. We have to forget, for the
moment, that the play is set in Navarre (so that the Pedant and
Curate would ‘really’ be speaking a version of French), and that
Armado is meant to be Spanish – as is normal in Shakespeare,
topical and geographical references are to England and London,

whatever the nominal setting of the play. The Pedant’s com-
plaints are fascinating, as they offer us a glimpse of the future
face of linguistic ideology in English. The words ‘Doubt’ and
‘debt’ are spelled with the letter <b>, and this letter should
therefore be pronounced (the Pedant is unaware that this letter
was never pronounced in these words, but was added on ety-
mological grounds). Likewise the <l> in ‘half ’ and ‘calf ’ (here he
is on stronger historical grounds phonetically, but pronunciation
patterns had changed, leaving the spelling recording an older
state of speech). ‘Neighbour’, as the <gh> spelling indicates,
originally had a velar fricative (as in Scottish ‘loch’) – but this
sound was disappearing from southern varieties (similarly in
‘knight’, ‘light’, ‘night’ and so on) and the Pedant evidently dis-
likes the newer pronunciation without a velar fricative – ‘nebour’
as he represents it – but history shows he backed the wrong horse:
‘neigh’ has become ‘ne’. ‘Abominable’ was commonly held (falsely)
to derive from ab homine (‘from the human’), so Renaissance spell-
ing, and pronunciation in this case, sought to reflect that. Unfor-
tunately, the compositor of the Folio missed the point and set
‘abhominable’ in both instances. The Pedant thus mixes false
etymology with resistance to natural changes, and adds in an
unthinking trust in the sanctity of the written form over usage.
Let us welcome prescriptivism’s debut on the English stage: the
notion that there is a single correct way of doing things in langu-
age, and that those who do things differently are mad (‘lunaticke’),
bad (‘infamie’) and dangerous to know (‘abhominable’).28
And note what Shakespeare thinks of prescriptivism. The
character coming out with the prescriptivist attitudes is called
‘Pedant’, and is cruelly satirized throughout the play – far more
so than Don Armado. There’s a contrast here with the frequent
pieces of linguistic criticism found elsewhere in Love’s Labour’s
Lost: they all involve judgement of content and style, not super-
ficial orthographic or phonetic form. The Pedant’s obsession
with surface over content marks him out as a fool: he, not
Armado, is ‘poynt deuise’ (over-correct) and ‘insociable’ (not fit
for normal conversation). Although the Pedant’s prescriptive and

literal attitudes to language will become the dominant ones in
English culture by the end of the seventeenth century, at this
point they are ‘lunaticke’.
Because our own experience of language is so conditioned by
standardization and intolerance for variation, it is very hard for us
to see how strange the Pedant’s views are here. Our reading of
early modern comment on English is often skewed by the expec-
tation that we will find the kind of standard/non-standard
hierarchy we are used to; and treatments of writers like Gil,
Cawdrey, Bullokar and Coote in the work of Fox and Dobson find
evidence for a standard language at the time which looks
suspiciously like eighteenth- and nineteenth-century standard
English: a prestigious, non-geographical, sociolect. But we have
seen how these writers in fact sought a common standard (ideally
made up of the best elements of the various dialects) rather than
a prestige one: descriptions of geographical variation tend to be
neutral, while ‘prescription’, in the sense of the drive to identify
the forms people should use, is driven by the need for general
communication (not the need to exclude, which would drive later
prescriptivism). Robert Cawdrey, in the preface to his Table
Alphabeticall of 1604, says, ‘Do we not speak, because we would
haue other to vnderstand vs?’, and then urges that the words
people use should be ‘plaine for all men to perceiue’ because ‘the
tongue’ (the gift of language) was ‘giuen for this end, that one
might know what another meaneth’ (sigs A3v–A4r).
We are apt to misread pedagogy as prescriptivism. Edmund
Coote’s English Schoole-master (1596) went through frequent
editions throughout the seventeenth century, and seems to pro-
vide as clear an example as one could wish for the stigmatization
of rural speech. In a dialogue between the ‘Scholar’ and the
‘Master’, the Master informs his pupil that the only way he will
be misled in writing is if he imitates ‘the barbarous speech of
your countrie people’ – and he then illustrates a range of sup-
posedly dialectal pronounciations (pp. 30–31):
Some people speake thus:

The mell standeth on the hell, for
The mill standeth on the hill: so
knet for knit: bredg for bridg: knaw for gnaw: knat for gnat:
belk for belch: yerb for herb; grisse for grasse: yelk for yolk:
ream for realm: aferd for afraid: durt for dirt: gurt for
girth: stomp for stamp: ship for sheep: hafe for halfe: sample
for exāple: parfit for perfect: dauter for daughter: carten for
certaine: carchar for carchiefe: lease for leash: hur for hir:
sur and suster for sir and sister, to spat for to spit &c.
Now, as Dobson (English Pronunciation, vol. 1, pp. 36–7) points
out, these are certainly not all what we would regard as ‘dialectal’
forms (‘dauter for daughter’, for example, seems to imply the same
loss of velar fricative the Pedant bemoans – which we know was
a general change in early modern English). More importantly,
however, we have to realize that the Master is not condemning
these pronunciations as such: they are dangerous not in them-
selves, but because they may lead to incorrect spelling if taken as
models for writing. And they are not even ruled out of all types
of writing: as we read on in the exchange (p. 31), we discover that
the Scholar is from the country himself:
Scho. How shall I avoyd these dangers?

Mai. By dilligent marking, how you read them written.
Scho. May I then neuer vse my proper country termes,
in writing?
Mai. Yes: if they are peculiar termes, and not corrupting
words: As the Northren man writing to his priuat
neighbour may say: My lathe standeth neere the kirk
garth, for My barne standeth neere the Churchyard.
But if he should write publikely, it is fittest to vse the
most knowne words.
The scholar asks if he can use his ‘proper country termes’ – that
is, his own dialect – in writing, and rather than rule it out, the
master allows it if the terms are ‘peculiar’ – unique to the dialect
– or if the writing is to someone else from the same area. If the

writing is public, common sense dictates that commonly known
language and spelling should be used for ease of communication.
Early modern comment on language is characterized by an
ease with variation, and an acceptance that what is communicated
is not of its essence language – in other words, that you can use
different forms of words to communicate the same thing (again,
a notion that our own theoretical age might seek to deny).
In Chapter 1 (pp. 28–9), we saw the translators of the 1611
Authorized Version plotting a middle way between Puritan
linguistic absolutism – which sought something like a one-to-one
translation, where the same English word was always used for a
particular Hebrew or Greek term – and what they saw as a ten-
dency for Catholic translations to retain too much Hebrew and
Greek terminology, preventing common understanding (‘we haue
shunned the obscuritie of the Papists, in their Azimes, Tunike,
Rational, Holocausts, Præpuce . . . ’).
Likewise, James VI and I, in the manuscript of Basilikon Doron
(1595), advises against the use of ‘all affectate’ (affected) forms in
language: the ‘extremities’ of both ‘rusticall corrupt leid
[language]’ and ‘booke langage & penn & inkhorne termes’ are to
be avoided in favour of language which is ‘plaine, honest naturall,
cumlie, clene, shorte & sententiouse [pithy]’.29 In other words,
neither the translators of the Bible, nor their monarch, were in
favour of ‘high’ language of the type the Pedant takes as his model.
This approach can also be seen in grammatical description in
the period. As was noted in Chapter 1, the period saw a shift away
from medieval scholasticism. This shift involved a rejection of
the definition of grammar as a set of pre-ordained, fixed rules to
which practice had to conform, and a definition of grammar as a
description of good usage based on observation of the practice of
a set of exemplars. Recent work by Ute Dons has demonstrated
the degree to which these grammars accept, and describe,
variation rather than seeking to prescribe one form for each
function.30 One of the earliest grammarians of English, John
Palsgrave, notes variation between use and non-use of auxiliary
‘do’ in simple statements: ‘it is all one to say / I do speke / I do

thynke / I do write / I do coniecture / and suche lyke / and I
speake / I thinke / I write / I coniecture’.31
Terttu Nevalainen cites further examples, such as William
Bullokar’s Pamphlet for Grammar (1586), which gives both you
and ye as possible second person pronoun forms, and –eth and –s
as possible present-tense endings. John Wallis’s Grammatica Lin-
guae Anglicanae, as late as 1653, gives alternate past-tense forms
for abide (abode, abidd, abided) and thrive (throve, thrive, thrived).32
But figures for the number of grammars of English published in
the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries indicate a
significant shift in the extent to and perhaps the way in which
English speakers thought about their language: 4 in the sixteenth
century, 32 in the seventeenth, over 200 in the eighteenth.33
Linda Mitchell traces the ‘riotous diversity’ of definitions of
grammar in the period, which, under the influence of rhetorical
theory, shift ambiguously, sometimes applying to ‘speech’, some-
times to ‘writing’, sometimes to both.34 Additionally, definitions
shift between notions of speaking and writing ‘correctly’, and the
claim that grammar shows you how to speak or write ‘well’. The
critical difference here is that these definitions shift between an
absolute standard (use language correctly) and an evaluative, and
therefore subjective, ideal (use language well), characterized in
the rhetorical tradition by the terms recte and bene (correct versus
good speech). As Mitchell notes, the later a grammar is published
in the seventeenth century, the more emphasis there is likely to be
on the identification of a single ‘correct’ form of English (she
cites Guy Miège, The English Grammar (1688) and Christopher
Cooper, The English Teacher (1687) as examples of this).35 Effec-
tively this is a shift back to the idealist grammar of the scholas-
tics, away from the usage-based grammar of the humanists.
So we can see the roots of our own culture’s usual approach to
language in the Pedant’s obsession with surface-form and pre-
scription. The notion that there was one, and only one, way of
doing things right in language – one spelling for each word, one
grammatical form for each function, even one meaning for each
word form – was not unknown in Shakespeare’s culture, but it

was not exactly a commonplace. This attitude spread quickly in
the seventeenth century, however, driving a wedge between us
and the early modern experience of language.
CHAPTER FIVE
AGENCY AND UNCERTAINTY

IN SHAKESPEARE’S SYNTAX
The term ‘syntax’ has a range of meanings across various disci-

plines. In linguistics, it tends to refer to the highly theoretical,
abstract approach to language and grammar characterized by the
work of Noam Chomsky, with ‘descriptive grammar’ reserved for
more traditional, taxonomic studies of grammar. In literary
studies, ‘syntax’ tends to refer to high-level relationships between
sentence elements and their meanings, in a usage which can
be traced back to the classical theory of sentence construction
centred on compositio, which governed the structural order of sen-
tence parts. In the Renaissance, ‘syntax’ often had a lower-level
reference simply to the morphological agreement markers bet-
ween individual words in a sentence.1 In this chapter, I will take
‘syntax’ to mean primarily the arrangement of elements in a
sentence, and the grammatical roles those elements have. This to
some extent combines the definitions given above, though I will
not be considering Shakespeare’s syntax from a theoretical point
of view, nor will I be commenting extensively on morphology.
My concern here is to try to show, by a series of small-scale
studies of Shakespeare’s language, the ways in which syntax pro-
duces characteristic types of Shakespearean effect and meaning.
Within classical theory, compositio was informed by two areas
of knowledge and practice: grammar (‘recte dicere’ – correct
speaking), the duty of finding the correct concord between words
in terms of inflectional endings; and also by rhetoric (‘bene dicere’
– good speaking), the higher-level arrangement of sentence ele-
ments. The shift from ‘recte’ to ‘bene’ here, with the move from
objectivity to subjectivity that is implied, indicates why rhetoric
generally is such a rich area of linguistic thought, and why

aesthetics is so close to it. The shift from scholastic to humanist
grammar discussed in Chapters 1 and 4 can also be seen as a shift
from a focus on recte (the compliance with pre-determined rules
to produce ‘correctness’) to an increased focus on bene (the
emulation of exemplars of good style to produce ‘eloquence’).
This art of rhetorical arrangement was held potentially to appeal
to three areas of mental process:2
(i) intellective – the rational mind
(ii) psychological – the emotions (for example, the use of dis-
rupted word order to represent a disturbed mind)
(iii) sensual – the use of euphony, rhythm or sound patterning.
In the final section of this chapter, I will argue that Shakespeare’s
late style is characterized by an increase in rhetorical features
designed to appeal to the psychological – that this in a very large
degree constitutes what we call his ‘late style’. Before then, how-
ever, I want to consider some lower-level features, which classical
theorists would probably have included under grammar, but
which I will argue have powerful stylistic effects on the rational
mind.
‘my selfe will be your surgeon’:

agency, self and narrative
If the whole of Shakespeare were somehow wiped from the
universal hard-drive in a cataclysmic moment of careless delet-
ing, we might be able to reconstruct his most characteristic
writing patterns if someone could recall these lines from the pro-
logue of Henry V (26–7):
Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’th’ receiving earth.
What is it about these lines that typifies the essential DNA of
Shakespearean grammatical relations? The key is in the way the
lines treat the grammatical roles of subject and object, and the
associated semantic one of animacy. The default order for sen-

tence elements in English is:
[subject] + [verb] + [object]
and there is an example of a clause which matches this in the first
line quoted above:
Subject
[you] Verb [see] Object [them]
Prototypically in English, the subject is an animate noun or
pronoun, and the verb is something actively done by the highly
animate subject to the less animate, or inanimate, object.3 Here,
the human and highly animate ‘you’ (= us) does something (‘see’)
to the non-human horses (‘them’). This is not so much grammar,
as a cognitive representation of one theory about how the world
works: more animate things typically do things to less animate
things.4 So far, so good, but while most people think of clauses or
sentences as consisting of a subject, verb and object, the majority
of English sentences add at least one adverbial element to the
SVO formula:
Subject
[you] Verb [see] Object [them] Adverbial [clearly]
Adverbials are highly relevant to a consideration of compositio,

because they are usually potentially mobile, giving writers
options about the arrangement of sentence elements:
clearly you see them

you clearly see them
you see, clearly, them
you see them, clearly
Note that not all placements of the adverbial element are equally
natural – the third example here is possible, but reads awkwardly.
In the quoted lines from Henry V, there are several adverbial
elements:
Think, Adverbial [when we talk of horses], that you see them
Adverbial
[Printing their proud hoofs] Adverbial [i’th’ receiving earth]
and their status is confirmed by their mobility:

Think that you see them Adverbial [when we talk of horses]
Adverbial
[i’th’ receiving earth] Adverbial [printing their proud hoofs]
It is worth asking why Shakespeare chose the arrangement of
elements that he did here. My arrangement (the second one)
gives us a nice grammatical, structural and phonetic parallelism
between the nouns ‘horses’ and ‘hoofs’ at the end of the lines:
Think that you see them, when we talk of horses,
I’th’ receiving earth printing their proud hoofs.
This would appeal to the notion of the sensuous – euphony and
metrics – in Scaliger’s three-way division of compositio’s effects.
But Shakespeare’s version does something else, which turns out
to be highly characteristic of his manipulation of grammar and
syntax for stylistic effect. It brings ‘them’ and ‘printing’ into
contact at the end of one line and the start of the next:
Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’th’ receiving earth.
‘Them’, as we have already seen, is the object of ‘see’ – and
grammar functioning in its strict sense of morphological agree-
ment explains why we have the object form ‘them’, rather than
the subject form ‘they’ here. But notice what happens in Shake-
speare’s version of the lines: as soon as the horses are introduced
in the role of object (‘them’), they are transformed into the
subject of ‘Printing’. It is the horses (them) who are seen by us,
but it is also the horses (they) who do the printing. By a sleight of
grammatical hand, the horses are simultaneously the inactive
object of ‘see’ and the active subject of ‘Printing’:
Subject
[you] Verb [see] <Object [them] Subject> Verb [printing]
Assisting as Shakespeare’s glamorous assistant in this grammat-
ical magic, is the –ing form ‘Printing’ (also known in traditional
grammar as a present participle or, in other roles, a gerund).
Shakespeare was especially attracted to –ing forms, because they
do not require an explicit subject form, and because their non-

finite nature means that they do not specify tense. Instead, the
subject of –ing forms tends to be implied by the context (here, an
element in the preceding clause), and the overall tense of the
construction is set by the tense of the verb in the governing main
clause. So we can change the tense on ‘see’ in the quotation
without having to do anything to ‘Printing’:
you see them printing . . .
you saw them printing . . .
you will see them printing . . .
you had seen them printing . . .
In addition, the semantic content of the verb ‘Printing’ increases
the animacy being bestowed on the horses by their grammatical
subject positioning: ‘printing’ is a specifically human activity –
the metaphor functions to imply conscious volition on the part of
the horses.
The rapid shift we have just observed from grammatical object
to subject role, with an implied increase in activity and anima-
tion, is very common in Shakespeare, who seems to have a need
to animate, and activate, almost everything he mentions, however
inactive or inanimate we might think it. It is also typical of
Shakespeare that he uses both grammatical and semantic means
to achieve this (making ‘them’ simultaneously an object and a
subject, and using the semantic implications of ‘Printing’ to
increase the animacy of ‘horses’). For a further example of this,
we need only look at the grammatical object of ‘Printing’: ‘hoofs’
– surely, as hard dead tissue, just about as inert as it is possible to
get while still being attached to a living thing. Shakespeare, how-
ever, gives us ‘proud hoofs’, selecting an adjective which implies
personhood to personify the hoofs, and produce a sense of physi-
cal stance and intentional movement. Once again, a metaphor,
this time adjectival rather than verbal, associates something non-
human with a purely human activity or attribute. Tracing this
run of subjects, verbs and objects through the lines we get the
following:
Subject
[we] Verb[see] Object/Subject[them] Verb[printing] Object[proud hoofs]
In each case, the non-human item in the potentially inactive
object role is animated by metaphorical implication, and in one
case it is made the grammatical subject of the following verb. Just
for good measure, Shakespeare finishes with another adverbial:
i’th’ receiving earth
where grammatically ‘earth’ is the object of the preposition ‘in’.
Note how again Shakespeare uses an adjective (‘receiving’) which
bestows animacy on its inanimate head noun (‘earth’). ‘Receiving’
is an activity which implies volition: the earth is not simply
pierced by the horses’ hoofs; it receives them, as it were, willingly.
Shakespeare is using an –ing form again here, this time as an
adjective, and it can be seen that such adjectives will tend to be
animating (in addition to any animating semantic content)
because adjectives derived from verbal –ing forms can generally
be glossed in active constructions:
the receiving earth > the earth received the hoofs
By contrast, adjectives derived from verbal –ed forms generally

have passive glosses:
the pierced earth > the earth was pierced by the hoofs
Shakespeare is generally interested in activating inanimate things,
rather than de-animating them, hence his preference for –ing
forms in these roles. Shakespeare’s instinct generally is to ani-
mate things via metaphor, or by placing them in the subject role,
so that they are presented as if they act volitionally on the world.
This preference can be traced in the way Shakespeare also
favours un- and dis- over non- as negative prefixes: even in nega-
tivity he uses prefixes which imply agency and process (unmak-
ing, dismantling) over absence and stasis (non-ness).
One set of grammatical features in Shakespeare is therefore
used to animate the material world and bring it into theatrical
vividness: inanimate forms are placed in subject roles or given
verbs or adjectives which imply animacy and even agency. When

dealing with human subject forms, however, Shakespeare often
complicates the implied relationship between grammatical
subject and agency. Prototypically, when humans are in the
grammatical subject role, we infer that they have agency: the
ability to act on and in the world. In the tragedies, however, it is
often agency that is in question: who has acted, and who could
act, and how? Given the ability to act, is it right to do so? The
major tragedies can be seen as an extended meditation on the
common assumption that the grammatical subject is always the
agent of a sentence (‘the subject does the verb’, as the familiar
schoolroom saying has it). In fact the two grammatical terms,
subject and agent, exist because there are many sentences where
the grammatical subject is not the agent at all. Passive sentences,
for example:
Subject
[the horses] Verb[were seen] Object Agent[by us]
which we can compare with its active counterpart:
Subject
[we] Verb[saw] Object[the horses]
Agent
Strictly speaking, the grammatical subject is simply the element

of the sentence which provokes agreement on the verb:
the horses were seen by us
the horse was seen by us
There is no necessary relationship between subject and verb
beyond this grammatical one – though the frequency with which
subject role correlates with agent status means that speakers of
English tend to a default position which equates grammatical
subjects with agents – and automatically ascribes responsibility
for the action to the subject.
In Othello, Iago exploits this gap between strict grammar and
common expectation as part of his strategy to destabilize Othello’s
sense of self (and conceal his own agency in events). The crucial
scene of the play in this regard is 2.3, when, having been passed
over for promotion, Iago seeks to undermine his rival Cassio by
getting him drunk, and provoking a fight. Once he has done this,
Iago needs to find a way to blame Cassio, without explicitly
ascribing blame (or agency) directly to Cassio, while also avoiding
implicating himself in the affair. Something curious happens in
the narrative structure of the scene in relation to this: Othello
asks Iago to explain the events (‘Honest Iago . . . Speak: who
began this? on thy love I charge thee’, 173–4) and Iago, seemingly
confused and unwilling, does so. Twice.
Why does Iago narrate the same events twice? I will suggest
some possible context-specific explanations below, but, as this
chapter will go on to argue, I also want to claim that narrative,
and the syntactic encoding of the self and subjectivity in narra-
tive, constitutes one of the key features of Shakespeare’s mature
and late style – one which he develops as his plays become more
concerned with who is saying what happened, rather than simply
what happened. Iago’s double narrative plays on some of the
available linguistic strategies Shakespeare will come more and
more to use.
Here is Iago’s first narrative, with Othello’s initial prompt:
othello
Honest Iago, that look’st dead with grieving,
Speak: who began this? on thy love I charge thee.
iago
I do not know, friends all, but now, even now,
In quarter and in terms like bride and groom
Divesting them for bed; and then, but now,
As if some planet had unwitted men,
Swords out, and tilting one at other’s breasts
In opposition bloody. I cannot speak
Any beginning to this peevish odds,
And would in action glorious I had lost
Those legs that brought me to a part of it.
(2.3.173–83)
Ordered by Othello to explain the fight he has just witnessed,
Iago’s grammar deploys a range of features whose combined
effect is to efface, or downplay, grammatical subjects, and agency.

Perhaps most noticeable are the sentence fragments in the first
half of Iago’s speech, where we assume the subjects, and the
verbs ‘to be’ and ‘to have’, are ellipted:
[They were] friends all, but now, even now
[They were] In quarter . . .
[They had their] Swords out . . .
[They were] tilting one at other’s breasts . . .
Note how the time deictics (‘but now, even now . . . and then, but
now’) function in the absence of tensed verbs to produce a sense
of present-tense narrative, even though these are past events.
The use of present for past in narrative is well known to produce
an effect of immediacy, but it also tends to have a more subtle
subsidiary effect of masking the narrator: the events seem to be
unfiltered by a narratorial consciousness, a sequence of pictures,
unedited, and unordered except by simple chronology. This of
course suits Iago’s purpose: his agency brought these events
about, but his narrative, explicitly and by implication, presents
them as simple facts, incapable of question or investigation,
because they are not linked to anyone’s conscious volition. At one
point, he even ascribes the events to an inanimate source – ‘As if
some planet had unwitted men’ – and there is a suitably
ambiguous use of an –ing form in the line, ‘Swords out, and
tilting one at other’s breasts’. Is it the swords, animated and
personified by being made subject of ‘tilting’, or the constantly
ellipted ‘they’, that do the ‘tilting’?
Such grammatical ambiguity is abandoned in Iago’s closing
grotesque image: he wishes his legs had been blown off in battle
rather than that they should have brought him to such a scene.
The animate, conscious Iago is brought by his unconscious legs.
Effectively, he makes himself into the passive object of ‘brought’.
He has no volition, no agency: his legs do. Elsewhere, when Iago
dares to place himself explicitly as the subject of a verb, the
meaning is grammatically or semantically negative or indeter-
minate: ‘I do not know’, ‘I cannot speak’, ‘I had lost . . . ’
Iago’s second narrative of the fight, just 37 lines later,

introduces a new approach to agency. Instead of being ellipted, it
is emphasized via periphrastic redoubling. Once again, Iago,
prompted by Othello, speaks:
Thus it is, general:

Montano and myself being in speech,
There comes a fellow crying out for help
And Cassio following him with determined sword
To execute upon him. Sir, this gentleman
Steps in to Cassio and entreats his pause,
Myself the crying fellow did pursue
Lest by his clamour, as it so fell out,
The town might fall in fright. He, swift of foot,
Outran my purpose, and I returned the rather
For that I heard the clink and fall of swords
And Cassio high in oath, which till tonight
I ne’er might say before. When I came back,
For this was brief, I found them close together
At blow and thrust, even as again they were
When you yourself did part them.
More of this matter cannot I report.
(2.3.220–36)
Once again we have present for past narration, this time with
explicit present-tense forms in the opening lines (‘comes . . . ’,
‘Steps . . . entreats’). The effect is the same as before: this is not
(it claims) a planned narrative; events are narrated just as they
happened; the narrator is a simple conduit. Contributing to this
are frequent non-finite –ing forms (‘being’, ‘crying’, ‘following’)
which take on a present-tense coloration from the surrounding
present-tense forms. Note how the suggestion of absent or weak
agency carried by non-finite and present-tense forms hides Iago’s
Machiavellian hand in these events. He wants to say that Cassio
is responsible for this fight, but is wary of doing so directly, so
uses a characteristic Shakespearean grammatical transformation
in an uncharacteristic way: when Cassio enters, pursuing the

crying man, it is his sword, not Cassio, which is ‘determined’. As
we have seen, it is not unusual to find inanimate objects
personified by adjectives in this way in Shakespeare, but it is
unusual for the personification to be so clearly transferred from a
nearby human.
At line 226, the passage shifts from present-for-past narrative
to simple past-tense narrative:
Myself the crying fellow did pursue
The shift into simple past is underlined by the use of the

periphrastic auxiliary ‘do’ form: ‘did pursue’.5 But there is an
additional periphrasis here: Iago could have said, ‘I the crying
fellow did pursue’. Why does he instead say, ‘Myself ’? There is,
at least for a moment, a structural ambiguity in this line: reflexive
compounds like ‘myself ’ are more common as objects than
subjects, so it is just possible that this line might be initially
processed by an audience as having a fronted object:
Object
[myself] Subject[the crying fellow] Verb[did pursue]
That is, ‘the crying fellow pursued me’ (the final line of Iago’s
narrative has such a fronted object: ‘More of this matter cannot
I report’). Why has Iago placed such an unexpected form in the
subject role here? One possible answer is that it is a further
attempt to efface agency. Pronoun + ‘self ’ forms (like ‘myself ’,
himself ’, ‘yourself ’), for reasons to do with their historical
development, behave ambiguously in early modern English. It is
possible to analyse them as compound pronouns, which in this
case makes ‘Myself ’ equivalent to ‘I’ or ‘me’, depending on its
position in the clause:
I/Myself the crying fellow did pursue
The crying fellow did pursue me/myself
But they can also be analysed as full noun phrases, consisting of
a pronoun determiner (‘my’ in this case) and a full noun (‘self ’):
The crying fellow did pursue (my self)

The crying fellow did pursue (my shadow)
This latter analysis is common in the early modern period, but
disappears as the reflexive compounds are fully absorbed into the
pronominal system (and it seems to be reflected in the ortho-
graphy of English printing, which slowly shifts from printing the
compounds as two words to printing them as one).6 Treating
phrases like ‘my self ’ and ‘him self ’ as full noun phrases has
interesting grammatical and semantic–syntactic consequences,
since in many cases in early modern English we find such phrases
triggering third person agreement on the verb, whatever the
person implied by the pronoun:
My self is called for
So it is possible to read this as a further example of Iago deferring
his own agency (to his legs in the first speech; to his ‘self ’ here):
‘I did not pursue the man: my self did’. Thus the grammatical
(defined at the most restricted level of morpho-syntactic agree-
ment) ambiguity of phrases like ‘my self ’ opens up the profound
psychological–philosophical issue of the relation of the ‘self ’ to
the autonomous individual (‘I’ or ‘me’).7
Iago plays on this potential split continually. As he begins his
second attempt to make sense of the events of the fight, he says,
placing himself in subject and object position simultaneously,
Yet I persuade myself to speak the truth
Shall nothing wrong [Cassio].
(2.3.219–20)
And this relatively unmarked use of ‘myself ’ in object position
sparks a series of usages of similar forms – in increasingly
unexpected roles. The next comes just two lines later:
Montano and myself being in speech . . .
Although the ‘myself ’ form is in subject position in relation to

‘being’ here, the strangeness of the positioning is perhaps
overlooked because of the form being in second position in the

coordinated double noun phrase ‘Montano and myself ’. Iago’s
next usage, five lines later, is the potentially ambiguous:
Myself the crying fellow did pursue . . .
Iago has therefore used reflexive pronoun compound forms (my
+ self) twice in subject roles, where he could have used a single
form. Metrical considerations aside, I want to argue that this
double marking of the agent/subject role is all part of the focus
of this scene, and the play itself, on this grammatical/syntactic
category. Particularly marked here is the subject placement of
‘Myself ’ in line 226 – and this usage is soon repeated, with addi-
tions, when Iago makes an explicit identification between himself
and Othello:
I found them close together
At blow and thrust, even as again they were
When you yourself did part them.
(233–5)
Here Iago uses a triple periphrasis (‘you yourself ’), and parallels
his experience with that of Othello situationally (both men find
the two fighting) and grammatically (both verbs have an auxiliary
‘do’ form to mark them as semantically salient: ‘Myself . . . did
pursue’, ‘you yourself did part them’). Fifteen lines later, Othello
confirms that he has swallowed the linguistic bait as well as Iago’s
story, by employing ‘Myself ’ in subject position: ‘Myself will be
your surgeon’ (250). But the falseness of this assertion of
linguistic identity is shown immediately after by Othello’s
reversion to a characteristic generalized third person (253–4):
Come, Desdemona: ’tis the soldier’s life
To have their balmy slumbers waked with strife.
It is Desdemona, and himself, to whom he will eventually play
surgeon.
‘like a tangled chain’: asides, subjectivity,

uncertainty and lateness 8
If the pronouns and nouns placed in subject position, and
assigned agency, allow authors to manipulate complex effects
surrounding the external assertion of identity, other syntactic
effects allow access to constructions of subjectivity, often in quite
surprising ways. As Chapter 6 will explain in more detail, I have
recently been involved in a collaborative research project analys-
ing the linguistic texture of Shakespeare’s plays using a text
analysis program called Docuscope. The full details of what
Docuscope counts, and how it works, are given on pp. 187–91,
but in this chapter, I want to concentrate on one particular result,
and go on to look in detail at the linguistic features the result
points to. The result came out of an attempt to identify the
linguistic features, if any, that characterize the late plays. In this
work, Docuscope identified a significant increase in the
frequency of what it calls ‘aside’ strings in Shakespeare’s later
plays. This involves strings which introduce or end digressive
comments: ‘as an aside . . . ’, ‘let me digress . . . ’, ‘incident-
ally . . . ’, ‘by the way . . . ’, ‘to return . . . ’, ‘at any rate’. Note that,
for Docuscope, an ‘aside’ is not the same thing as a theatrical
aside.9 A significant marker of asides for the developers of Docu-
scope is ‘which’ as a non-restrictive relative pronoun – that is, a
relative introducing information which is non-essential, hence
termed an aside. The following examples illustrate this:10
John yearned for the book that he was reading.
John yearned for his favourite chair, which was oak with
a smooth varnish.
In the first example, the fact that John was reading the book is an
essential attribute of that book. The information allows us to
identify this one specific book from all other books in the world.
This type of relative is termed ‘restrictive’ because the inform-
ation it supplies is essential to the identification of the head noun
(it restricts its possible range of reference). In the second
example, however, the relative contains information which is

additional, rather than essential to the identity of the head noun.
The reference of ‘chair’ is already delimited by the attributive
adjective ‘favourite’. It is this which identifies which chair, out of
all the chairs in all the studies in all the world, the head refers to.
It is nice to know that the chair is made of oak and has a smooth
varnish, but this information does not restrict the reference of
the head, and this type of relative is therefore termed ‘non-
restrictive’.
When Docuscope analyses Shakespeare, ‘aside’ strings are
almost wholly made up of ‘which’ forms, and there is a signifi-
cant increase in the frequency of these strings over his career, and
particularly in the late plays. Why should this be so? Before I
consider this in detail, I need to add a couple of caveats from the
viewpoint of historical linguistics. The first is that ‘that’ and
‘which’ are not as clearly distinguished in early modern English
as they are in present-day English: so ‘which’ in Shakespearean
usage is not automatically non-restrictive, and ‘that’ is not
automatically restrictive. The present-day tendency to use ‘that’
in only restrictive relatives is present in early modern English,
though in a less strong form: around 10 per cent of Shakespeare’s
‘that’ relatives are non-restrictive. The picture is different with
‘which’, however, where no trace of the present-day expectation
that ‘which’ will appear in mainly non-restrictive relatives is found:
around 50 per cent of Shakespeare’s ‘which’ forms are restrictive.
So the figures suggest that Docuscope will be misclassifying
up to 50 per cent of ‘which’ forms as ‘asides’ when they are
arguably not (though they are still relatives).11 In addition, since
Docuscope is not a grammatical parser, it may be misclassifying
interrogative ‘which’ as an aside (though Docuscope does iden-
tify as questions phrases which begin with a ‘wh-’ word and end
with a question mark).12
These problems are not so great as to render this result non-
significant, however. Although Docuscope misclassifies many
non-aside ‘which’ forms, and misses non-restrictive ‘that’ forms,
it counts all instances of ‘which’ and ‘that’ in the same way over
all the plays. Given, then, that the rates of restrictive ‘which’ (c.
50 per cent) and non-restrictive ‘that’ (c. 10 per cent) remain
constant over Shakespeare’s career,13 Docuscope’s findings will
be as consistently right/wrong over any point in the sequence of
plays. A relative increase in uses of ‘which’ – whatever we might
ultimately say this word is doing in the plays – is an unmistakable
fact of Shakespearean linguistic practice as it develops over the
course of his career. This increasing role for ‘which’ is particu-
larly apparent in the late plays, something I will comment on in a
moment.
In addition, Docuscope’s findings for ‘which’ tie in with a
broader finding about relativization revealed in the data given in
my previous research but not discussed there.14 Over the course
of Shakespeare’s career, there is a significant increase in the
frequency of relativization of all sorts. In a sample of six plays
from the first half of his career, there are on average 137 relative
clauses per play; in a sample of five plays from the second half
of his career (a sample which contains several late plays), there
are on average 279 relative clauses per play. So there is a substan-
tial increase in the use of ‘which’ over the course of Shakes-
peare’s career, and indeed in all forms of relativization. Why
should this be, and what does it suggest about possible changes in
Shakespeare’s linguistic style?
Let us return to our example of a non-restrictive relative
clause:
a smooth varnish.
The status of the information contained in this type of relative is
rather more complex than that found in restrictive relatives. At
first reading, we might say that the material facts about the physi-
cal properties of the chair presented here (it is made of oak, its
varnish is smooth) are objective – rather more objectively ‘true’
of the chair than its status as John’s ‘favourite’. But the grammar
of the sentence cuts across this supposed distinction. By placing
‘favourite’ in the attributive, pre-head slot, the syntax presents
this as the most salient, and by implication, objective, quality of

the chair. The qualities which come in the non-restrictive rela-
tive, however physical and objective they may be in actuality, take
on a strongly subjective colouring. This stylistic effect is pro-
duced by the placement of modification, and can be illustrated as
follows: when modification is placed in the slot immediately
before the head noun, within the noun phrase, the element des-
cribed tends to be treated as an essential attribute of the head
noun, with a strong implication that the fact of the noun having
this attribute is objectively true (this is an implication only: there
is no requirement that the attribute actually be objectively true of
the noun). For example, compare:
the gory tale
where the adjective ‘gory’ is placed in the attributive slot, with:
the tale, which was gory
where the adjective is shifted from the attributive slot into a rela-
tive clause. Stylistically, the second example changes the status of
‘gory’: we are much more likely to read it as an opinion of the
narrator, subjectively applied to the tale. Similarly, compare:
John’s favourite chair
with:
the chair, which was John’s favourite
where ascribing a favourite status seems, in the second, to come
much more explicitly from the subjective consciousness of the
narrator.
If we return to our original example,
a smooth varnish
we can see that ‘favourite’ is in the attributive slot, with the
physical properties of the chair in the relativized slot. There is a
very strong implication in the sentence that the chair is John’s
favourite because it is made of oak and has a smooth varnish.

These physical properties of the chair do not allow us to identify
the chair from all the other chairs in the world (that is done by
the fact of its being John’s favourite) – but they do give us access
to John’s subjective attitude to the chair (possibly via the
subjectivity of a narrator focalizing John).
So although increased non-restrictive relativization might
initially be taken to indicate a greater concern with describing
things in the world – because it tends to supply more descriptive
information about the head noun – in fact it shifts those things
from an objective reality into a reality glimpsed through some
kind of subjectivity (either that of the narrator or a character). So
a consequence of the increase in relativization of both kinds over
the course of Shakespeare’s career is that description is
increasingly located in the subjective consciousness of characters,
rather than being presented to us as objective.
As an example of this, I will take Act 5, scene 2 of The Winter’s
Tale, where the discovery of Perdita is narrated by Paulina’s
steward to two gentlemen, while the normally garrulous
Autolycus listens silently, true to his Mercurial ancestry. I have
underlined all relative clauses, and have put non-restrictive
relatives in bold:
steward Then have you lost a sight which was to be

seen, cannot be spoken of. There might you have
beheld one joy crown another, so and in such manner
that it seemed sorrow wept to take leave of them, for
their joy waded in tears. There was casting up of eyes,
holding up of hands, with countenance of such dis-
traction that they were to be known by garment, not
by favour. Our king being ready to leap out of himself
for joy of his found daughter, as if that joy were now
become a loss, cries, ‘O, thy mother, thy mother!’,
then asks Bohemia forgiveness, then embraces his
son-in-law, then again worries he his daughter with
clipping her. Now he thanks the old shepherd, which
stands by like a weather-bitten conduit of many

kings’ reigns. I never heard of such another
encounter, which lames report to follow it, and
undoes description to do it.
rogero What, pray you, became of Antigonus, that
carried hence the child?
steward Like an old tale still, which will have
matter to rehearse though credit be asleep and
not an ear open – he was torn to pieces with a bear.
This avouches the shepherd’s son, who has not only
his innocence, which seems much, to justify
him, but a handkerchief and rings of his, that
Paulina knows.
gentleman What became of his barque and his fol-
lowers?
steward Wrecked the same instant of their master’s
death, and in the view of the shepherd; so that all the
instruments which aided to expose the child were
even then lost when it was found. But O, the noble
combat that ’twixt joy and sorrow was fought in
Paulina! She had one eye declined for the loss of her
husband, another elevated that the oracle was ful-
filled. She lifted the princess from the earth, and so
locks her in embracing as if she would pin her to her
heart, that she might no more be in danger of losing.
gentleman The dignity of this act was worth the
audience of kings and princes, for by such was it
acted.
steward One of the prettiest touches of all, and that
which angled for mine eyes – caught the water,
though not the fish – was when at the relation of the
queen’s death, with the manner how she came to’t
bravely confessed and lamented by the king, how
attentiveness wounded his daughter till from one sign
of dolour to another she did, with an ‘Alas’, I would
fain say bleed tears; for I am sure my heart wept
blood. Who was most marble there changed colour.

Some swooned, all sorrowed. If all the world could
have seen’t, the woe had been universal.
gentleman Are they returned to the court?
steward No. The princess, hearing of her mother’s
statue, which is in the keeping of Paulina, a piece
many years in doing and now newly performed by
that rare Italian master Giulio Romano, who, had he
himself eternity and could put breath into his
work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so
perfectly he is her ape. He so near to Hermione
hath done Hermione that they say one would speak to
her and stand in hope of answer. Thither with all
greediness of affection are they gone, and there they
intend to sup.
(5.2.41–101)
This is a long quotation, but the scene is highly instructive of the

way Shakespeare’s late style deals with narrative, and descriptions
of the world. Indeed, the very choice to have the identification of
Perdita narrated, rather than enacted on stage, seems character-
istic of Shakespeare’s dramatic style at this point: by this stage in
his career, Shakespeare is more interested in tracking events
through individuals’ consciousness than in depicting them directly.
It is hard to imagine such a crucial scene being narrated in one of
the early plays.15
This tracking of events and objects through the consciousness
of the narrator, rather than their physical or temporal specificity,
can be seen in the way relative clauses typically involve some
form of subjective judgement or evaluation of the antecedent by
the speaker:
now he thanks the old shepherd, which stands by like

a weather-bitten conduit of many kings’ reigns.
I never heard of such another encounter, which lames
report to follow it, and undoes description to do it.
Like an old tale still, which will have matter to

rehearse though credit be asleep, and not an ear
open.
This avouches the shepherd’s son, who has not only
his innocence, which seems much, to justify him.
No. The princess, hearing of her mother’s statue, which
is in the keeping of Paulina.
that rare Italian master Giulio Romano, who, had he
work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so
perfectly he is her ape.
Not only do many of these relatives present us with subjectively
inflected description (what kind of experience and consciousness
on the part of the Steward does his comparison of the Old Shep-
herd to a ‘weather-beaten conduit’ imply?); by accident or design,
there are also many explicit references to the process of narra-
tion: at one point the tale ‘lames’ report and ‘undoes’ description;
at another it is ‘like an old tale still’. Modern linguistic analyses
of oral narratives recognize such meta- and evaluative comments
as intrinsic elements of oral narration. Here, they focus on the
subjective and highly self-conscious nature of the narration. We
are not simply being told what happened: we are being told what
the speaker’s emotional reaction to the events was, and what his
means of access to the information was (he is careful to identify
those parts of the tale supplied by ‘the shepherd’s son’ – and to
give two pieces of evidence to support his truthfulness – and
those witnessed by the ‘shepherd’). The process of narration,
and the emotional effects of the narration on the narrator, are
foregrounded by the linguistic form.
Compare this subjectively inflected description carried by
‘wh-’ relatives, with that associated with ‘that’ relatives (in italics
in the following quotations), which tend to introduce material
more likely to be objectively true of the antecedent (underlined
in the following quotations), whether in a restrictive clause:
a handkerchief and rings of his, that Paulina knows.

or a non-restrictive one:
What, pray you, became of Antigonus, that carried hence

the child?
Neither relative here gives us access to any speaker’s subjectivity

– rather, each supplies us with an objective fact about the head
noun (Paulina recognizes the handkerchief and rings; Antigonus
took the child away).
We can go further into the analysis, taking the interpretation
beyond where Docuscope can go, and back to compositio and
humanist rhetoric, by pointing out that this increased subjectivity
is achieved through more than relativization strategies. In the
above extract, there is a tendency for the sense units containing
the relatives we have been analysing to get longer as the scene
develops. The following quotations are the strongest examples of
this:
Subject
<(One of the prettiest touches of all), and (that
which angled for mine eyes – caught the water though
not the fish – )>
Verb
[was]
Complement
[when at the relation of the queen’s death, with
the manner how she came to’t bravely confessed and
lamented by the king, how attentiveness wounded his
daughter till from one sign of dolour to another she did,
with an ‘Alas’, I would fain say bleed tears; for I am sure
my heart wept blood.]
The basic clause structure of this sentence is actually quite

straightforward: Subject–Verb–Complement:
Subject
[It] Verb[was] Complement[this]
or (slightly expanded):
Subject
[One of the prettiest touches] Verb[was]
Complement
[how attentiveness wounded her]
However, a range of syntactic connectivity is used to expand each
of the elements (except the main verb) way beyond what is
needed for simple grammaticality. The initial subject, for
example, takes the form of a coordinated double noun phrase (of
which the head nouns are ‘touches’ and ‘that’):
<Noun Phrase 1(One of the prettiest touches of all), and Noun
Phrase 2
(that which angled for mine eyes – caught the
water, though not the fish – )>
Note how the second noun phrase takes us explicitly into the
subjective reaction of the speaker – and note further that it would
have been very easy to avoid this coordinated noun-phrase
structure by adding the relative from the second noun phrase to
the first:
One of the prettiest touches, which angled for mine eyes . . .
However, the coordinated structure allows the second noun
phrase to have a more complex syntactic structure: a further bout
of coordination within the relative:
that [which <angled . . . (and) caught . . . >]
This ‘angling–water–fish’ conceit is typical of Shakespeare’s late
style: an image is pursued and elaborated within a grammatically
subordinate element of the clause, with the main idea of the
clause held in abeyance (in effect, this is an ‘aside’ in the sense of
digression). A key aspect highlighted by this analysis, though, is
the subjective nature of the aside: the exterior world is not the
focus, but the interior world of the speaker is, even in a case like
this where external events are being narrated. Shakespeare’s
syntactic style is thus shifting to the psychological level of the
three-fold analysis of compositio’s effects both in terms of content
(his syntax explicitly discusses his characters’ psychological
reactions) and in terms of form. The formal structures employed
here are characteristic of the way Shakespeare’s syntax comes to

represent thought: favouring additive and ellipted methods of
element linkage over deep subordination and explicit linkage.
First, as I have shown, the splitting of the subject noun phrase
into two coordinated noun phrases gives an additive structure –
NP1 and NP2:
<Noun Phrase 1(One of the prettiest touches of all), and Noun

Phrase 2
(that which angled for mine eyes . . . )>
Within the second noun phrase, the coordination of the two

verbs (‘angled’ and ‘caught’) is asyndetic (no explicit coordinator
is present):
that which <(angled for mine eyes) (caught the water,

though not the fish)>
It is worth considering for a moment what the effect of this

would have been if Shakespeare had chosen to link these verbs
syndetically (with explicit coordination):
that which <(angled for mine eyes) and (caught the
water, though not the fish)>
The difference is subtle, but I think clear: the explicitly coordin-
ated version is much less immediate, because it is not so mimetic
of the narrator’s process of thought. The asyndetic version has
the speed of thought – the ideas appear as if by free association,
or as if the narrator were experiencing the thought simultane-
ously with the act of narration. The use of syndetic coordination
here would imply greater time or conscious distance on the part
of the narrator between the experience and the narration.
Shakespeare chooses the formal structure that makes the narra-
tive thought process most vivid and immediate.
The expansion of the subject element here is relatively simple:
coordination is used to produce a subject consisting of two noun
phrases (albeit that the structure and form of the second is highly
complex and unusual). The complement, however, is massively
expanded by various strategies, producing an extremely dense

grammatical structure:
Adverbial Clause
[when Prepositional Phrase(at Noun Phrase(the relation
Prepositional Phrase
(of Noun Phrase(the queen’s death)))) Prepositional
Phrase Noun Phrase
(with (the manner Relative Clause[how she came
Adverbial Clause
to’t]) <[bravely confessed] and [lamented
by the king]>)] Noun Clause[how Subject(attentiveness)
Verb
(wounded) Object(his daughter) Adverbial Clause[till Prepositional
Phrase
(from one sign of dolour to another) Subject(she)
Verb
(did (with an ‘Alas’) Adverbial Clause[I would fain say)]
Verb
(bleed) Object(tears); Adverbial Clause[for Subject(I) Verb(am)
Complement
(sure) Object of Complement[my heart wept blood]]
Complexity here comes in many forms (and I have not tried to

give a full analysis of the clauses): the actual complement (‘how
attentiveness wounded his daughter’) is complex in itself because
it takes the form of a noun clause, but this is the least of the
reader or hearer’s worries. Before we get to this complement, we
have to deal with an extended adverbial clause: ‘when at the
relation of the queen’s death, with the manner how she came to’t
bravely confessed and lamented by the king’ – which is prolonged
by two non-finite clauses (‘confessed’, ‘lamented’), which intro-
duce us once again to the subjective judgement of the speaker
(‘bravely’). After the complement, we have a similarly extended
adverbial clause, which again slides inexorably from the physical
world of the scene being narrated into the subjective experience
of the speaker: ‘till from one sign of dolour to another she did,
with an “Alas”, I would fain say bleed tears; for I am sure my
heart wept blood’. Again, not only is the content focused on the
experiencing of the event narrated, but the formal structures
used mimic the mental processes of experience (note the bare
‘bravely confessed and lamented by the king’ rather than ‘which
was bravely confessed . . . ’; and the parenthetical interjections
which also function as meta-comments on the narrative’s
emotional force – ‘I would fain say’).
There is no doubt that Shakespeare’s late style, as evidenced

here, is complex syntactically, and can be difficult to follow, as
many critics have claimed.16 However, it is worth noting that,
although the style uses subordination frequently, it does seem to
be aware of the difficulties it is creating, and employs some
techniques to alleviate them. Highly dense, multiply embedded
subordination is actually quite rare: subordinate clauses are more
likely to be coordinated or set in apposition to each other.
Linearity is generally (just about) retained. The basic structure
of this clause – Subject–Verb–Complement – could not be
more simple, and its organizing structure is temporal (‘When . . .
till . . . for . . . ’).
The danger of a style which mimics thought, though, is that
ideas can run away from formal syntactic structures – especially
at moments of high emotion. The next example shows that even
Shakespeare can lose control of this kind of syntactic complexity.
Although the overall sense of the passage is clear enough in
reading or performance, there is no main verb:
Subject
(The princess)
Adverbial Clause
[hearing of Noun Phrase 1(her mother’s statue
Relative Clause
[(which is in the keeping of Paulina)] Noun Phrase 2
(a piece many years in doing and now newly performed
by (that rare Italian master) (Giulio Romano, Relative
Clause
[who Adverbial Clause[(had he himself eternity and could
put breath into his work)] would beguile Nature of her
custom, so perfectly he is her ape])) [He so near to
Hermione hath done Hermione that they say one would
speak to her and stand in hope of answer])])
Verb
?
Adverbial Clause
[Thither with all greediness of affection are
they gone, and there they intend to sup]
The clause begins simply enough with a simple noun phrase,
‘The princess’, which, it is reasonable to suppose, will turn out to
be the subject of the main verb. However, this putative main

clause is immediately interrupted by a non-finite adverbial
clause, ‘hearing of her mother’s statue . . . ’, which is itself
expanded by a series of further elements, which typically expand
on the immediately preceding element, producing a multiply
subordinate structure which is never fully resolved – there is no
main verb:
Verb hearing of
Object 1 her mother’s statue which is in the keeping of
Paulina
Object 2 a piece many years in doing and now newly
performed by that rare Italian master Giulio
Romano, Relative Clause[who Adverbial Clause[(had he
work)] would beguile Nature of her custom,
so perfectly he is her ape. He so near to
Hermione hath done Hermione that they
say one would speak to her and stand in hope
of answer)])
The series of expansions here are effected with similar means to

those we have already analysed: non-restrictive relatives (‘which
is in the keeping . . . ’; ‘who, had he himself . . . ’), noun phrases
in apposition (‘statue’–‘piece’; ‘Italian master’–‘Giulio Romano’),
but here the expansions run out of control. The description of
Giulio Romano runs away with the syntax of the sentence, so that
we end up with what ought to be an independent main clause
(‘He so near to Hermione hath done Hermione . . . ’) embedded
in the structure of a main clause that is never completed
(Subject ‘The princess’ Verb ‘?’). The Arden 3 editor has, in fact,
attempted to punctuate ‘He so near to . . . ’ as if it were wholly
independent – but as readers (and hearers) we are still waiting for
the main verb to accompany ‘The princess’. This is a good
example of the risks Shakespeare’s late style runs: the sense is
there, but thought is moving so quickly, and following tangents at
such great lengths, that grammaticality gets lost. In the final

passage analysed above, the problems begin when the sentence is
diverted by a subordinate non-finite clause, and the sense takes
over, adding elements to such an extent that the original verbless
subject pronoun is forgotten about.
What Shakespeare is doing here is following the psychological
rhetorical principle: his syntax seeks to work on the emotional
rather than the rational or sensual mind. The use of adverbial
clauses, multiple coordination, and apposition produces hugely
expanded sentence elements as his characters become fixated
upon, and elaborate, trains of thought which are aside from the
main sentence structure. This is why the basic structures of these
sentences usually remain so simple: Subject–Verb–Object (SVO)
or Subject–Verb–Complement (SVC). Shakespeare’s tendency is
to massively expand either the subject or the object/complement,
or an adverbial element, to produce complexity which mimics
‘as-it-happens’ thought. This can be contrasted with an alter-
native form of sentence complexity, also found in Shakespeare
but particularly characteristic of eighteenth-century prose, where
long-distance relations are built up by increasing not necessarily
the size, but the number of sentence elements. This rhetorical
style seeks to appeal to the rational mind, aiming to represent
planning and considered execution: ‘think, then write’, rather
than ‘write as you think’.
Docuscope’s figures show that Shakespeare’s syntactic style
did not suddenly change completely with the late plays: the
features that become prominent in the late plays do not appear
out of nowhere, and the features that become less prominent do
not disappear. What happens is a shift in relative frequencies
producing a different overall texture: the ingredients are the
same, but the proportions are different. To illustrate this, and the
two syntactic styles outlined above, I want to look at two speeches
from Cymbeline. The speeches we will examine are both by
Belarius, in a scene in which he discusses country and court life
with his supposed sons (actually princes kidnapped by him from
the court). The first speech could be described as Shakespeare in
his ‘early’ or ‘unmarked’ syntactic style: there is a regular

distribution of main and subordinate clauses through the speech,
with subordinate clauses interspaced with main ones. Linkage is
hypotactic (by subordination) or syndetic/asyndetic (by coordin-
ation). The aim is to present thought as considered and planned,
with the speaker demonstrating control over long-distance
coordinated and subordinated structures (in the quotation I have
marked main verbs like this, subordinate verbs like this, and (0)
marks the elision of a verb and possibly subject form):
belarius
Now for our mountain sport, (0) up to yond hill!
Your legs are young: I’ll tread these flats. Consider,
When you above perceive me like a crow,
That it is place which lessens and sets off,
And you may then revolve what tales I have told you
Of courts, of princes; of the tricks in war.
This service is not service, so being done,
But being so allow’d. To apprehend thus,
Draws us a profit from all things we see:
And often, to our comfort, shall we find
The sharded beetle in a safer hold
Than is the full-wing’d eagle. O, this life
Is nobler than attending for a check:
Richer than doing nothing for a robe,
Prouder than rustling in unpaid-for silk:
Such gain (0) the cap of him that makes him fine,
Yet keeps his book uncross’d: (0) no life to ours.
(3.3.10–26)
This language demonstrates something like a default distribution
of main and subordinate clauses for literary English. Main
clauses occur regularly throughout the passage, occasionally with
subordinate clauses in explicit hypotactic structures, or asyndetic
coordination. The speech begins with four main verbs (one
elided) in two lines – in particular note the series of four self-
contained phrases and clauses: ‘Now for our mountain sport’, ‘up
to yond hill’, ‘Your legs are young’, ‘I’ll tread these flats’. No
great processing demands are placed on the reader or spectator
by this, and in fact, this is a frequent technique of Shakespeare’s
to introduce long speeches.
The first complex clause follows, and within the clause we have
a strict and clear grammatical hierarchy, although the structure is
highly complex: two coordinated main clauses (‘consider’–
‘revolve’) and various subordinate clauses within each main
clause:
consider when you above perceive . . .
that it is place which lessens and sets off
and
revolve what tales I have told you . . .
The speech continues to mix main and subordinate clauses: at no
point do we get more than four subordinate clauses consecutively,
and where subordinate clauses are multiple, they appear in an
explicit relation to each other, and their main verb:
this life is ——— nobler than attending . . .
——— richer than doing . . .
——— prouder than rustling . . .17
Belarius’ very next speech, however, uses a completely dif-
ferent syntactic model, one which characterizes Shakespeare’s
late style. Instead of balance and hierarchy, we have a long run of
subordinate clauses in the middle of the speech which produces
the effect of onrushing, unplanned speech:
belarius
How you speak!
Did you but know the city’s usuries,
And felt them knowingly: the art o’ th’ court,
As hard to leave as keep: whose top to climb
Is certain falling: or (0) so slipp’ry that
The fear’s as bad as falling: the toil o’ th’ war,
A pain that only seems to seek out danger
I’ th’ name of fame and honour, which dies i’ th’ search,

And hath as oft a sland’rous epitaph
As record of fair act. Nay, many times,
Doth ill deserve by doing well: what’s worse,
Must court’sy at the censure. O boys, this story
The world may read in me: my body’s mark’d
With Roman swords; and my report was once
First, with the best of note. Cymbeline lov’d me,
And when a soldier was the theme, my name
Was not far off: then was I as a tree
Whose boughs did bend with fruit. But in one night,
A storm, or robbery (call it what you will)
Shook down my mellow hangings, nay, my leaves,
And left me bare to weather.
(3.3.44–64)
This comes after the conventional (and somewhat platitudinous)
praise of the simplicities of country life in Belarius’ first speech
have been challenged by his sons. Their objections provoke
emotion in him, and this is manifest in the shift to a less explicitly
structured, highly subordinate, syntax. In the first part of the
speech, we have a run of eleven subordinate verbs in a row as
Belarius gets carried away with the thought he is following: ‘to
leave as keep . . . to climb . . . Is . . . (0 ) . . . s . . . seems to seek . . .
dies . . . hath . . . Doth ill deserve . . . s . . . court’sy’. Linkage between
the subordinate clauses is typically by asyndetic or paratactic
juxtaposition, rather than the explicit coordination of the first
speech, and the effect of breathlessness is heightened by the very
high frequency of non-finite verb forms and the elision of the
verb ‘to be’. Although this is a highly subordinate style, it has the
air of unplanned speech: an onrush of thought focused on the
moment rather than the distant end of the sentence.18
One of the features of Shakespeare’s developing style, then, is
its tendency to depict the process of thought by extending cer-
tain sentence elements, and using a set of additive subordination
strategies. Structures are extended by various means – post-head
modification in noun phrases, apposition of noun phrases,

adverbial clauses. The use of many subordinate verbs is a feature,
though the structures produced are not necessarily very deeply
embedded: coordination and other additive rather than hypo-
tactic connectivity is employed to maintain linearity. In terms of
classical rhetoric, Shakespeare’s style can be seen to shift towards
the psychological level, as his syntax seeks ways to appeal to our
emotional experience of the world, and represent the subjectivity
of his characters in play in the moment-to-moment flow of
speech and thought.
CHAPTER SIX
THE LANGUAGE OF GENRE
how to sort shakespeare

1: naming
Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men;
As hounds, and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves, are clept
All by the name of dogs:
(Mac 3.1.91–4)
In the immediately preceding chapter, I considered language at

the level of the clause and sentence – Shakespeare’s use of
syntax. In this chapter, I want to consider the linguistic texture of
Shakespeare’s works at a level beyond that of the sentence: across
whole plays, and groups of plays. Human readers are highly
efficient spotters of short-term shifts in texture (shifts between
the styles of successive speakers, for example, or Shakespeare’s
frequent juxtaposition of Latinate and Old English derived
terms), and they quickly identify the repetition of salient items at
very low frequencies (‘hand’ in Titus, for example). However,
human readers work linearly and their textual memory for lin-
guistic detail gets weaker and weaker with distance. They are
necessarily not conscious of fluctuations in the frequency of very
common items (definite articles, for example). Human character-
izations of texts at a meta-level, such as generic identifications,
therefore tend to focus on easily abstractable characteristics like
plot, mood and character.
What, if anything, is the relationship between language and
genre? Traditionally, definitions of particular genres have relied
on plot, character and subject matter rather than language – for

Aristotle, tragedy involved the fall of a significant person – but it
is clear that certain registers of language are associated with
certain genres (Renaissance pastoral attracts a relatively formal,
archaic register, for example). Certain types of plot, and certain
types of character, will entail certain types of vocabulary item –
and there may even be syntactic expectations (twentieth-century
American crime novels are characterized by the use of simple
rather than complex clauses, and highly paratactic, asyndetic
syntax, in a tradition that can be traced from Spillane and
Chandler to Ellroy). Theorists of genre, however, have rarely
tried to claim that language can be used to define a genre –
association does not become essence.
Shakespeare’s genres offer an interesting test case in this
respect. The early modern period was highly conscious of genre,
and the principle of ‘decorum’ might be extended to imply that
genres came with linguistic expectations.1 Aside from Renaissance
literary theory, economic considerations favoured the identific-
ation of the genre of a play in advertising bills and published
texts, either explicitly or implicitly.2 In a market which prized
newness, theatre companies had to find a way of communicating
the genre of their productions to potential audiences – and this
could be done most easily by stating the genre in the title; so
quarto plays frequently have titles which begin with a genre
identification, and then name the particular play: for example, A
pleasant comedie, called the two merry milke-maids (London, 1620).
With this in mind, it is instructive to consider for a while one of
the most interesting pages in the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623
(Figure 7, p. 173).
This is what we would now call the contents page: a list of the
plays contained in the volume, giving the number of the page on
which each play begins (though in this case the information is not
entirely accurate).3 To us, this is a rather unexceptional page: we
expect contents pages in the books we buy, and we expect them
to be laid out pretty much like this, in tabular form, with
information about pagination (though we might be surprised to
find a modern book restarting its page numbers with each new
generic section, as this one does). Such pages were by no means
obligatory in early modern books, however. Early modern readers
did not necessarily expect a contents page, even in collected
volumes: Samuel Daniel’s Whole Workes (1623 – the same year as
Shakespeare’s Folio) has no contents page, though it does have
prefatory matter (dedications and the like). Such prefatory
matter, including addresses from the author or publisher to the
reader, is probably more reliably present in early modern books
than anything like a ‘contents’ page. The Folio has all of these,
and they come before the ‘catalogue’ page, perhaps suggesting
something about their relative importance.
Just as there was no requirement for books to have a contents
page at the time, so there was no fixed term for one: ‘catalogue’,
‘table’, ‘table of contents’, and even ‘index’ could all be used for
what we would now call the contents page. Location too was vari-
able: an ‘index’ could come at the start of a text, as suggested by
Iago’s comment – ‘Lechery, by this hand: an index and obscure
prologue to the history of lust and foul thoughts’ (Oth 2.1.255–6)
– and Nestor’s:
And in such indexes, although small pricks
To their subsequent volumes, there is seen
The baby figure of the giant mass
Of things to come at large.
(TC 1.3.344–7)
Figure 8 (p. 174) shows an opening from a book printed in 1582,
Batman upon Bartholome.4 The prefatory materials to the book
end with two ‘tables’ – the first (not illustrated here) close to what
we would now call an index (though not alphabetical), giving a
detailed breakdown of chapter contents, and the second a more
general guide to the ‘principall matters’ and ‘where to finde
them’. This second table is then followed by a ‘necessarie Cata-
logue’ listing and glossing ‘the most hardest olde English words’
in this, and older versions, of the text which might cause
problems for a reader.
Figure 7. William Shakespeare, Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories,

& Tragedies [‘The First Folio’] (London, 1623), sig. A6r.
Figure 8. Stephen Batman, Batman upon Bartholome his booke

De proprietatibus rerum (London, 1582), n.p.
Many of the books published by William Jaggard, the printer of

the First Folio, have a similar ‘table’, taking the form of an alphabeti-
cal list of the contents with page references (for example, William
Burton’s The Description of Leicester Shire, printed at the same
time as the Shakespeare Folio, and published in 1622 – fo. Vur ).
A further feature of the First Folio contents page which modern
readers ought to find unusual, and which is key to a consideration
of the attempt the page makes to sort Shakespeare’s plays into
types, is the use of the word ‘catalogue’. In early modern usage,
‘catalogue’ most frequently refers to a list of associated items,
rather than a list of the parts of a book. These items may be listed
directly in a text, but are often merely alluded to because they are
conventional (‘the catalogue of the bishops’ or ‘the catalogue of
the nine worthies’, for example). William Bedwell’s virulently
anti-Islamic Mohammedis imposturae (1615) includes ‘A Catalogue
of the Chapters of the Turkish Alkoran, as they are named in the
Arabicke, and knowne to the Musselmans’. This list of chapters
of the Koran combines the ‘organized list’ and ‘parts of a book’
Figure 9. Math. Rhodes, The Dismall Day, at the Black-Fryers (London, 1623),
single-sheet printed poem.
senses of ‘catalogue’. A grimmer example of the ‘list’ usage comes

from 1623, the year of the publication of Shakespeare’s Folio, in
a single-sheet poem published to commemorate the collapse of a
building in the Blackfriars (where the King’s Men had played in
Shakespeare’s lifetime, and where he himself owned property),
which killed over one hundred people. The poem, by Math.
Rhodes, is entitled The Dismall Day, at the Black-Fryers, and it is
accompanied by a marginal ‘Catalogue of the Names of such
persons as were slain at Black-Friers’ (Figure 9).
Figure 10. Abraham Fleming (trans.), A Panoplie of Epistles, or,

a looking glasse for the vnlearned (London, 1576), sig. ¶ iv.
So the First Folio ‘Catalogve’ page is by no means purely

conventional, either in its existence at all, or its position, or its use
of the term ‘catalogue’. That said, it is certainly possible to find
early modern books which use ‘catalogue’ to refer to a list of the
contents of a book, as the First Folio does, though they are not
very frequent. The 1576 anthology of model letters, Panoplie of
Epistles, begins with a ‘Catalogue of such Authours, as haue
written in this Panoplie of epistles: with the number of the page
where they are mencioned’ (Figure 10).
King James VI’s 1584 collection, Essayes of a Prentice (printed
in Scotland), is particularly interesting in this regard, since it
included poetry, and can be assumed to have gained considerable
cultural capital after James’s accession to the English throne as
James I in 1603. The book begins with a ‘Catalogve of the workis
heirin conteined’ (Figure 11), which gives generic information
about each text in the title (‘The twelf Sonnets . . . ’, ‘a Tragedie’,
‘A Paraphrasticall translatioun . . .’, ‘A treatise . . .’), but does not
Figure 11. King James VI, Essayes of a Prentice, in the Divine Art of Poesie
(Edinburgh, 1584), sig. *iv.
attempt any visual grouping, simply presenting all the texts in

one list.
The use of the word ‘catalogue’ in the First Folio may have
had a more immediate source, however. The printer of the Folio,
William Jaggard, specialized in the production of heraldic books,
and seems to have had a personal amateur interest in the topic (this
is the source of his link to Thomas Milles, and the production of
Time’s Storehouse, as noted in Chapter 1). At the same time as he
was printing the First Folio, his shop worked on several large
heraldic volumes: Augustine Vincent’s A Discoverie of Errours
(1622), William Burton’s The Description of Leicester Shire (1622)
and The Theater of Honour and Knighthood (1623) by Andrew
Favine (André Favyn). Vincent’s Discoverie of Errours is especially
interesting, as Jaggard was himself a topic of the book. The
‘errours’ the book discovers are those of another heraldic text
Jaggard had printed in 1619, Raphe Brooke’s A Catalogue and
Succession of the Kings, Princes, Dukes, Marquesses, Earles, and
Viscounts of this Realme of England. Just three years after his book
appeared, Brooke published a revised edition of the work,
printed by a different printer, with a denunciation of Jaggard on
the title page: ‘with ammendment of diuers faults, committed by
the Printer in the time of the Author’s sicknesse’. Brooke’s claim
was that the many errors in his Catalogue were introduced by
Jaggard and his workmen during a period when Brooke was un-
able to supervise the printing because of illness. Augustine
Vincent’s 1622 volume, with a prefatory note by Jaggard defend-
ing his own reputation, constituted a massive refutation of this,
and supplied a line-by-line correction of Brooke’s errors. So
around 1622/3, the word ‘catalogue’ might have had a particular
resonance for the printer of the First Folio.
Even before his spat with Brooke, however, we can say that
Jaggard would have used the word ‘catalogue’ in a particular
sense, since it occurs very frequently in the titles and bodies of
books on heraldic subjects, typically introducing organized lists
of kings and nobles. For example, Jaggard printed the following
books in the years leading up to 1623:
1610 Thomas Milles, A Catalogue of the Kings of Scotland

1610 Thomas Milles, The Catalogue of Honour
1619 William Jaggard, A Catalogue of such English Bookes
1619 Raphe Brooke, A Catalogue and Succession of the
Kings, Princes, Dukes etc.
Most interesting of all in this respect is The Catalogue of Honour
(Figure 12), which has a contents page entitled ‘A Table of all the
seuerall Catalogues contained in this Booke’ – the layout and
wording of which prefigure that of the First Folio catalogue page
(‘A Catalogve of the seuerall Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies
contained in this Volume’). So the use of ‘catalogue’ in the First
Folio has a context in the printer’s familiarity with it from the
heraldic texts he produced, where it carries, as elsewhere, the
sense of a highly organized list.
Figure 12. Thomas Milles,

The Catalogue of Honour
(London, 1610), sig. A2v.
If William Jaggard’s familiarity with the use of ‘catalogue’ in

heraldic publications is one possible source for the use of the
term in the First Folio, another appeared in 1616. In that year,
‘Catalogue’ was used almost exactly as it was to be in the
Shakespeare Folio, heading a list of plays in a collected volume:
Ben Jonson’s Workes, the first collection of early modern play
texts to be printed in folio format (Figure 13).
It is notable, however, that the ‘Catalogue’ to Jonson’s plays is
not a generic statement – it is simply a bare list of the texts in the
volume, as in the examples from James VI and the Panoplie of
Epistles given above. The plays are listed, with great (and unusual)
prominence given to their dedication, but no attempt either to
name or section off genres: Sejanus and Catiline are separated.
Comparison with the ‘catalogue’ page of Jonson’s Workes
emphasizes the extent to which the First Folio of Shakespeare
foregrounds genre. One of the things that might strike modern
readers as odd about the First Folio ‘Catalogve’ page is the fact
that it groups Shakespeare’s plays by genre rather than
chronology. The conventional ordering for the collected works of
any author would now be chronological, with the earliest work
placed first. This is the ordering in two out of three of the
‘standard’ modern complete works of Shakespeare: Oxford and
Riverside (Arden has the texts in alphabetical order) – and this
in fact is the principle behind the ordering of Jonson’s plays in
the 1616 folio (allowing for the fact that Jonson excised plays he
had co-authored). The strength of our modern chronological
expectation can be seen by the frequency with which critics have
commented on the placing of The Tempest first in the folio
volume: they find this remarkable given the play’s mythological
(if not actual) status as Shakespeare’s last play. The importance
our culture places on chronology in an author’s work tells us a lot
about our aesthetic expectations and prejudices: post-Romantics
that we are, we assume that an author’s collected works will form
some kind of organic whole, with periods of similar work
developing coherently into related but distinct other periods. We
value ‘late’ work, and have very strong myths about its nature and
Figure 13. Ben Jonson, The Workes of Beniamin Jonson

(London, 1616), sig. ¶ 3r.
Page 182
Title as it appears in the ‘Catalogve’ Title as it appears at the head of play Running title in text
The Life and Death of King John. The life and death of King John The life and death of King Iohn
21:43
The Life & death of Richard the second. The life and death of King Richard the Second The life and death of Richard the second
The First part of King Henry the fourth. The First Part of Henry the Fourth,
with the Life and Death of Henry
22/9/10
Sirnamed HOT-SPVRRE The First Part of King Henry the Fourth

Shakespeare and Language
The Second part of K. Henry the fourth. The Second Part of Henry the Fourth,
Containing his Death: and the Coronation
of King Henry the Fift The second Part of King Henry the Fourth
2. Shakespeare and Language Text:Layout 1
The Life of King Henry the Fift. The Life of Henry the Fift The Life of Henry the Fift
The First part of King Henry the Sixt. The First Part of Henry the Sixt The first Part of Henry the Sixt
The Second part of King Hen. the Sixt. The second Part of Henry the Sixt The second Part of Henry the Sixt
with the death of the Good Duke
HVMFREY
The Third part of King Henry the Sixt. The third Part of Henry the Sixt The third Part of Henry the Sixt
with the death of the Duke of
YORKE.
The Life & Death of Richard the Third. The Tragedy of Richard the Third: The Life and Death of Richard the Third
with the Landing of Earle Richmond, and
the Battell at Bosworth Field
The Life of King Henry the Eight. The Famous History of the Life of The Life of King Henry the Eight
182 King HENRY the Eight
Table 1. Forms of the titles of the Histories in the First Folio.
complexity.5 The First Folio, however, is a book structured by

genre rather than chronology, in keeping with Renaissance literary
theory, which was far more interested in the genre of a writer’s
works, and therefore their external relationships to already
existing work by other writers, than the order in which they were
written, and their internal relationships to each other.6
The First Folio ‘Catalogve’ page, and the volume itself, arrange
the plays into three named genres, and a high degree of effort has
been put into making the volume appear generically coherent by
revising the titles of some of the plays specifically for the
catalogue page. Within the generic divisions, and especially that
of History,7 care has been taken to make the titles conform with
each other, with the result that the titles which actually appear
against the plays later in the volume are sometimes different (see
Table 1).
Although some variation in the folio ‘Catalogve’ titles is caused
by spacing needs (the shortenings to ‘K. Henry’ and ‘King Hen.’
in 2 Henry IV and 2 Henry VI, and the use of ampersands in
Richard II and Richard III), this is a highly internally coherent
list. Whoever wrote it had certainly read the plays, and knew that
the deaths of Kings John, Richard II and Richard III are
depicted, while those of Kings Henry V and Henry VIII are not.
The plays are arranged in chronological order of the historical
events they depict. In contrast, the head-of-text titles (at the start
of the play in the text) are less in conformity with each other –
uniquely, Richard III is a ‘Tragedy’, while Henry VIII is a
‘Famous History’ – and these titles are more focused on describ-
ing the particular play in question. So 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, 2
Henry VI, 3 Henry VI and Richard III all have notable incidents
recorded, making the titles look like the type of descriptive title
found on quarto publications of single plays. The ‘Catalogve’
titles may have been based on the head-of-play titles (which I
assume are themselves based on the title of the copy used for the
text in each case), but someone went to considerable trouble to
align the ‘Catalogve’ titles of the Histories with each other. A
measure of the care expended on the First Folio ‘Catalogve’ page
can be gained by comparing it to that of the Second Folio,

published in 1632 (see Figure 14).
In this volume, the ‘Catalogue’ is reset on a verso, rather than
recto (the back rather than the front of a page), with less impres-
sive visual division between the genres, and without pagination.
There is no ‘Comedies’ heading, and the titles of the Histories
are something of a mess typographically (there is far more
abbreviation, even of names at their first use), and in relation to
each other: 1 Henry IV is wrongly, or at least confusingly, labelled
‘The life and death of K. H. 4’, following the pattern of the two
previous plays, and not leaving much material for 2 Henry IV;
Richard III is called a ‘Tragedie’, and Henry VIII a ‘famous history’,
following the head-of-play titles in the text, rather than con-
forming to the internal coherence of the list in the ‘Catalogue’.
Interestingly, in this volume there seems to be an attempt to
rationalize and reinforce the Tragedies – Julius Caesar, King Lear
and Cymbeline are now explicitly labelled as ‘Tragedies’ in their
individual titles, which they were not in the First Folio
‘Catalogve’. Generally, the Second Folio ‘Catalogue’ titles match
those of the head-titles in the actual volume, rather than being
coherent with each other as in the First Folio – suggesting that
whoever prepared this page simply read those titles and made no
attempt to impose generic coherence via the ‘Catalogue’ page.
The 1623 ‘Catalogve’ page is far more interventionist.
The First Folio genres constitute a fascinating sorting of
Shakespeare’s plays – though one which took its final form, not
at the hands of the author, but in the printing and editing pro-
cess. Certainly Shakespeare thought generically: there are generic
labels in the titles of plays published in quarto (though they do
not always agree with those assigned by the Folio: King Lear is a
history in quarto, and a tragedy in folio). The First Folio
‘Catalogve’ page fixes a set of generic labels on the plays – and I
have traced various possible explanations for the fact of there
being such a page, with such a title, in the book. Critics some-
times assume that Hemmings and Condell must have made the
final decisions about the generic assignments of the First Folio,
Figure 14. William Shakespeare, Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories,

and Tragedies [‘The Second Folio’] (London, 1632), sig. *4v.
but we can see that Jaggard and his workers would have been used
to the terminology employed, and the assumption that a visual
organization of the contents of the book might be expected. There
are other possible literary influences too (from Jonson), but these
do not involve the specifically generic organization of the folio
page. However the page got there, it represents a claim about
similarity and difference, the presence and absence of certain
features, and it sets up expectations about content and form –
language included. Having investigated the imposition of generic
labels from sources outside the texts in the first half of this
chapter, I want to shift approaches markedly now, and look for
correlations between genre and linguistic features found within
the texts: if we know what to look for, can the texts themselves
tell us what genre they belong to?
how to sort shakespeare

2: numbering
the valu’d file
Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle,
The housekeeper, the hunter, every one
According to the gift which bounteous Nature
Hath in him clos’d; whereby he does receive
Particular addition, from the bill
That writes them all alike.
(Mac 3.1.94–100)
Clearly someone associated with the preparation and production
of the First Folio thought genre was an important thing – and the
divisions imposed there have largely been accepted by subsequent
Shakespeare criticism. But how ‘real’ are the divisions recorded
on the ‘Catalogve’ page? What, if any, empirical basis is there for
the folio genres? Could someone – or something – who did not
know the divisions, armed with some kind of definition of each
genre, assign the plays to their ‘correct’ categories? If so, what
would the definitions look like? The chances are, such definitions
would focus on plot and content: a ‘history’ would probably be

defined as a play centring on events from English history, with
kings and nobles in leading roles; a ‘comedy’ might be defined as
a play featuring fictionalized events, centring on confusions
experienced by a group of characters from varied social back-
grounds, with those confusions dispelled to a greater or lesser
extent by the end of the play; a ‘tragedy’ might be defined as a
play featuring fictionalized or historical events, centring almost
wholly on characters of high social status, which ends with death
or deaths. It doesn’t take much thought to see that someone
trying to separate the plays on the basis of these definitions might
end up unsure about plays like Troilus and Cressida, King Lear
and Cymbeline, but most would probably end up in the ‘right’
category. This is hardly surprising: ‘content’ is the major factor
in most definitions of genre.
It is possible, however, to look elsewhere for features that could
be used to identify (if not define) genres. In the rest of this
chapter, I want to investigate the extent to which genres can be
associated with distinct collocations of linguistic features. To put
it another way: do genres have linguistic fingerprints? Critics
have long claimed that there were such things as ‘the language of
tragedy’, based on a mainly subjective, impressionistic approach
to the linguistic texture of the plays, and typically focusing on
specific semantic fields. As electronic databases, and tools for
searching them, improve, and become more readily available to
individual researchers, it is increasingly becoming possible to
approach the language of Shakespeare’s plays in a more sys-
tematic, scientific way. Claims about the frequency of certain
types of items in certain types of play can be tested and verified
or disproven.
For the past few years, I have been involved in a collaborative
research project seeking to analyse the language of Shakespeare’s
plays using a computer program called Docuscope.8 Docuscope
is a text analysis and comparison program designed for use in
writing/rhetoric classes (as understood in the North American
model). It aims to allow tutors to make fast, statistically reliable
comparisons between different texts written by many students.

To enable this, the program consists of a first stage of textual
analysis tools – essentially, smart dictionaries – which comb texts
for strings of words which are assigned to a predetermined set of
rhetorical categories. The frequency statistics from this combing
are then displayed in various graphical formats by the program’s
sophisticated visual interface. These results can also be exported
into statistical packages for more complex statistical analysis. The
fundamental assumption behind the program is that certain
strings of words produce predictable textual effects, and that a
good writer is someone who can deploy appropriate strings, and
avoid inappropriate ones, to produce the intended effect. Certain
types of writing will favour the use of certain types of strings,
and disfavour others: genres will have linguistic fingerprints.
The rhetorical categories used by Docuscope are as follows.
The program organizes word strings into three high-level
categories (termed ‘clusters’). These clusters correspond to a
theoretical model of the effects texts seek to have on their readers
developed from a Hallidayan theoretical base.9 The model groups
rhetorical effects as follows:
1. Internal Perspectives: those strings used to communicate the

interior mind of the writer, or a character, to the reader (for
example, grammatical first person features, expressive and
subjective vocabulary, complex tense/aspect constructions
which imply a relation between two different times posited
on a narratorial consciousness).
2. Relational Perspectives: strings used to connect readers to the
representations within a text. For example, assumed shared
reasoning and social ties, which refer out of the text, as well
as strings which orient readers within a text, pointing
forwards or back to items within a text.
3. External Perspectives: these strings refer out of the text, but
to the physical world (rather than the exterior shared values
of ‘Relational Perspectives’) – they include types of
description of physical objects, spatial location of described

objects, representation of movement through space and time.
As I have said, a basic hypothesis of the creators of Docuscope is
that texts will vary in the frequency with which they employ
string types from each of these clusters depending on the writer’s
purpose. Broad expectations would be that fiction and
autobiography will be high in Cluster 1, while instructional writ-
ing (technical manuals, for example), will be high in Clusters 2
and 3. This is hardly an impressive or surprising finding, of
course. The real value of Docuscope comes in the fine-grained
analysis possible when comparisons are made at a far more
detailed level of string category. Within Docuscope, the three
high-level clusters are further divided into six ‘families’, and then
into ‘Dimensions’ and multiple ‘language action types’ (LATs),
which allow a high degree of interpretive distinction to be made
in the analysis of texts.10 An example is given below:11
cluster 1: internal perspectives

Family 1: Interior Thinking (strings which are involved in
exposing the audience to another’s mental activity)
Dimension 1: First person
LAT: Grammatical first person e.g. first person pronouns –
‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’, ‘mine’
LAT: Self-disclosure: e.g. first person plus simple past –
‘I went’
LAT: Autobiographical reference: e.g. first person plus
habitual past verb phrase – ‘I used to go’
Dimension 2: Inner thinking
LAT: Private thinking e.g. private cognition or thinking
verbs – ‘contemplate’, ‘decide’, ‘discover’
LAT: Disclosures e.g. verbs of speaking, some adverbs –
‘confessed’, ‘acknowledged’, ‘personally’, ‘frankly’,
‘tellingly’
LAT: Confidence e.g. ‘that’-complement, situational ‘it’,
existential ‘there’: ‘I know that the box is upstairs’; ‘It’s a

boy!’; ‘There’s an apartment down the street that you can
afford’
LAT: Uncertainty e.g. adverbials – ‘allegedly’, ‘to the best
of my knowledge’, ‘nearly’, ‘almost’
Dimension 3: LAT: Think positive
E.g. ‘loving’, ‘succulent’; attitudinally marked
prepositions: ‘up’
Dimension 4: LAT: Think negative
E.g. ‘too many’, ‘too much’; attitudinally marked
prepositions: ‘down’
Note how the shift from ‘Family’ to LAT allows the analyst to
make some very fine distinctions in the stylistic effects produced
by texts: within the family ‘First Person’, Docuscope distin-
guishes bare first person pronouns such as ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘mine’, which
produce a simple point of view within a text, from ‘pronoun +
tensed verb’ strings (‘I went . . . ’, ‘I’ll go . . .’), which produce a
particularized consciousness, self-realized in terms of time. Look
at the difference between these examples:12
I often use facts about Einstein’s laws in my work
I often used facts about Einstein’s laws in my work
In the first example, ‘I’ appears with a simple present tense, and
establishes that the text is written by a specific individual, but not
much else. The second example, however, complicates the point
of view presented considerably: the self constructed in the
sentence is one which looks back on a past state of selfhood,
analyses itself, and discloses something about that analysis. We
will see later that there are significant shifts across Shakespeare’s
works in terms of these LATs.
When it analyses texts, Docuscope assigns strings to the various
dimensions identified by the development team using a set of
dictionaries which seek out word clusters. So, for example, ‘I’ on
its own will be assigned to the LAT ‘first person’, but ‘I’ followed
by a past-tense verb will be assigned to the LAT ‘self-disclosure’.

Words can only be counted as part of one string, and the program
always counts the longest possible string. Docuscope ‘reads’ texts
in a rather different way to humans: it pays equal attention to all
the strings it finds, and, when coupled with statistical analysis, is
sensitive to features humans cannot consciously process. For
example, it can allow the identification of relative frequency shifts
in very high frequency items: a human reader would probably not
notice if text A has 100 definite articles, while text B has 200, but
Docuscope can make this kind of thing visible.
One of the first findings from running Docuscope on the plays
of the First Folio was that the statistics gathered on the variable
distribution of linguistic features allowed the identification of
genres entirely independently of ‘content’.13 That is, cluster
analysis, and other statistical tests which looked at the set of plays
in the Folio with no information about their genre, detected dis-
tinctive groupings purely on the basis of the presence or absence
of certain linguistic features. Perhaps surprisingly, it was possible
to say that each of the folio genres was differentiated from the
others on the basis of one or more linguistic feature. Perhaps
even more surprisingly, the genre with the most distinctive lin-
guistic footprint was ‘History’ – the genre least well-attested in
Renaissance literary theory, the youngest genre, the genre Shake-
speare himself had a hand in creating – and the genre the First Folio
‘Catalogve’ page puts most effort into presenting as coherent.
I will examine the linguistic footprints of the genres in a
moment, but for now I want to focus on this basic finding: Shake-
speare’s genres have an empirical linguistic existence. If you tell
me the frequency of about three linguistic features in every play,
I will be able to tell you, without reading the plays, which genre
they come from. Given the focus of genre theory on content, I
think that this is a remarkable finding. Why should it be?
One possible explanation is that the plots and situations
associated with certain genres entail certain types of interaction
on stage, and that these types of interaction entail the use of
certain types of language. For example, it could be that the kinds
of plots associated with Comedy inevitably involve complex

interactions between relatively large numbers of characters, thus
favouring short speeches, and high frequencies of those linguistic
features that accompany rapid interaction (pronouns without
past-tense verb forms, for example). Tragedy, on the other hand,
might favour prolonged interactions between relatively few
people, producing longer speeches, and a very different set of
linguistic features. Work on Shakespeare using Docuscope is
ongoing (and Docuscope itself is still in development), but the
following findings are presented here as an indication of the kind
of insight computer-based research can give us.
The Folio Genres

The sections that follow give overviews of the linguistic
fingerprints of each of the folio genres, as identified so far by
Docuscope analysis.14 Each section begins with a frequency
analysis table of the linguistic feature which most readily distin-
guishes the genre in question from the other two genres, and then
goes on to discuss this feature in more detail. Finally, other
linguistic features whose presence or absence can be said to char-
acterize the genre are considered.
1. comedy
Table 2 shows the results of Docuscope’s search for ‘first person’
forms in the folio plays, divided into their genres as given on the
‘Catalogve’ page. The plays are grouped in the column headed
‘Level’, with the initial letter identifying each genre (H =
History, C = Comedy, T = Tragedy). The next column, headed
‘N’, gives the number of plays in each genre (N = the number of
individuals or observations in a population subject to statistical
analysis). The next column, headed ‘Mean’, gives the mean value
of the observations (the sum of the observations divided by the
number of observations – the average value). The fourth column
gives the standard deviation for the sample – an indication of the
degree of variation or spread of observations on either side of the
Analysis of Variance for FirstPer

Individual 95% CIs For Mean
Based on Pooled StDev
Level N Mean StDev ——— + ———— + ———— + ———— +
H 10 2.3250 0.3337 (———— * ———)
C 14 2.7136 0.4765 (——— * ———)
T 12 2.1758 0.3183 (——— * ———)
——— + ———— + ———— + ———— +
Pooled StDev = 0.3919 2.10 2.40 2.70 3.00
Table 2. Relative frequencies of ‘First Person’ forms in the folio genres.
mean. Most important for my purposes here is the graphic which

comes to the right of these columns and effectively summarizes
the information given there. The mean score for each genre is
marked with an asterisk, while the dashes extending right and left
indicate the range of values found for each genre. This allows an
immediate comparison to be made between the values observed
in each of the folio genres. We can see, for example, that the genre
with the highest mean rate of ‘first person’ strings is the middle
one, Comedy, while that with the lowest is Tragedy. Additionally,
the fact that the lines for Comedy and Tragedy do not overlap
tells us that there is an absolute difference between the frequency
of ‘first person’ in Comedy and Tragedy: the lowest Comedy has
a higher rate of ‘first person’ than the highest Tragedy.
This means that it is possible to distinguish Shakespeare’s
Comedies from his Tragedies purely on the basis of the frequ-
ency of ‘first person’ strings: no other information would be
needed to make correct generic assignments. Notice that this is
not the case with Histories, where the frequencies of ‘first per-
son’ strings overlap with both Comedy (at the high end of values
for History plays) and Tragedy (at the low end). The finding that
comedy has a higher frequency of first person strings than trag-
edy is a surprising one in a number of ways. First, it is surprising
that the distribution of a set of linguistic items between two
genres of the same type of text (drama) by the same person (Shak-
espeare) should be so highly differentiated. There is an absolute
distinction between Shakespearean Comedy and Tragedy based
on their rate of use of first person strings: above a certain value,
a play must be a comedy; below a certain value, a play must be a
tragedy.
Secondly, the literary critic in me is surprised that the differ-
ence goes in the direction it does. Given the strong tendency in
recent literary criticism to associate Shakespeare, and specifically
Shakespearean Tragedy, with the construction of the self (see
Chapter 5, note 7), a prediction in advance of the count might
well have been that Tragedy would show a higher frequency of
first person strings. The fact that the reverse is true is unex-
pected, and invites consideration.
The key to understanding this apparent anomaly lies in the
precise distinctions Docuscope makes between different types of
string: Comedies have more ‘first person’ LAT, but Tragedies have
more ‘self-disclosure’ (‘pronoun + tensed verb’ combinations) –
in other words, the selves instantiated in Shakespearean Comedy
are textually less complex than those of Tragedy, which are
typically located in an explicit temporal frame.
It is important to stress that these claims about frequency are
relative claims: Comedy and Tragedy both have many instances of
‘first person’ and ‘self-disclosure’ – the advantage Docuscope has
over the human reader is that relative, but statistically significant,
differences which emerge over the whole surface of texts become
visible. The history of criticism shows that many human readers
have sensed a change in the way Shakespeare depicts the selves of
his central characters over the course of his career: Docuscope
pinpoints some of the linguistic means by which he achieves that.
Consider the following exchange from the opening scene of As
You Like It, where Orlando confronts his older brother Oliver. It
involves Oliver making an assertion of selfhood, in the course of
which he uses both ‘first person’ strings (bare first person
pronouns: underlined), but also ‘self-disclosure’ (first person
pronoun + verb: in bold). Note that not all pronoun forms are
counted as ‘first person’ or ‘self-disclosure’ – this is because they

are being counted as part of longer strings assigned to a different
rhetorical function:
oliver Know you where you are, sir?
orlando O sir, very well: here in your orchard.
oliver Know you before whom, sir?
orlando Ay, better than him I am before knows me. I
know you are my eldest brother, and in the gentle
condition of blood you should so know me. The
courtesy of nations allows you my better, in that you
are the first-born, but the same tradition takes not
away my blood, were there twenty brothers betwixt
us. I have as much of my father in me as you, albeit
I confess your coming before me is nearer to his
reverence.
oliver What, boy!
orlando Come, come, elder brother, you are too young
in this!
oliver Wilt thou lay hands on me, villain?
orlando I am no villain. I am the youngest son of Sir
Rowland de Boys; he was my father, and he is thrice
a villain that says such a father begot villains.
(1.1.38–55)
In this extract, we can see the way bare first person pronouns
produce a textually neutral self: ‘knows me . . . my eldest brother
. . . know me . . . my better . . . my blood . . . my father in me’.
The majority occur as determiners in noun phrases, so the self
evoked is almost implied rather than being the focus of the
language – the head nouns are more salient (‘brother’, ‘better’,
‘blood’, ‘father’) and tend to point away from the first person
narrator. When we switch to ‘self-disclosure’, however, the self
constructed by the text is emotionally charged, forefronted by
the language: ‘him I am before . . . I have as much . . . I confess
. . . I am no villain . . . I am the youngest son of . . . ’. There is
a degree of conscious self-representation here not found with bare
first person pronouns – typically we are dealing with subject pro-

nouns governing a tensed verb (‘I am . . . I have . . . I confess . . .’).
The text elaborates an aspect of the self, not, as previously, an
aspect of something belonging to, but different from, the self.
Here the two strategies are at work together in the same
passage, and indeed they are both present in all of Shakespeare’s
texts throughout his career – but Docuscope’s analysis tells us
that as Shakespeare’s career develops, there is a significant shift
in the relative balance in his use of these two types of string: ‘first
person’ becomes relatively less frequent, while ‘self-disclosure’
becomes more so. The linguistic means Shakespeare uses to
evoke selfhood in texts shift (in relative terms) from the neutral
to the more complex and engaged. The self becomes less a given
of the text, used to introduce and define other elements, and
more an object of textual investigation in and of itself (we saw a
similar shift in self and narratorial representation in Shake-
speare’s syntax in the previous chapter). As Shakespeare’s first
person pronouns shift from the determiner (‘my’) and object role
(‘me’), into the grammatical subject slot (‘I’), so they also become
the ‘subject’ of his discourse in the non-technical sense of topic.
First person strings are just one of the linguistic features that
Docuscope identifies as being characteristic of Comedy as
opposed to the other genres, though it is ‘first person’ which most
clearly distinguishes Comedy from either of the other genres.
The other LATs which figure significantly in the linguistic make-
up of Comedy are:
‘Deny Disclaim’
‘Direct Address’
‘Uncertainty’
‘Refute That’
‘Autobiography’
‘Apology’
Those significantly less frequent in Comedy than other genres

are:
‘Think Negative’
‘Immediacy’
To take the LATs whose presence is characteristic of Comedy, it
is notable that many of these code for high levels of verbal
interactivity: ‘Refute That’ and ‘Deny Disclaim’ both pick up
active negations within texts. ‘Refute That’ strings tend to make
assertions using a negative and typically consist of subject +
copula verb + negative judgement (‘it’s nonsense’) or pronoun +
refutative verb (‘I deny that . . . ’). They imply or assert explicitly
that another statement is false (‘but the reality is . . .’). ‘Deny
Disclaim’ strings strongly imply a previous statement that is
being negated (‘There is no conspiracy’). Similarly, ‘Direct
Address’ categorizes strings which challenge or directly call for
attention from an addressee: a frequent form is second person
pronoun + modal + verb (‘you should consider’) and construc-
tions such as ‘let us . . . ’. This gives us a picture of a Shake-
spearean comic language which exists mainly in the space
between individuals jointly involved in the production of dis-
course, actively exchanging opinion and information about the
world, and actively disputing other versions of the world.
2. history
Table 3 shows the relative frequency results for the language
action type known as ‘common authority’ for the three First
Folio genres. The graphic shows a very clear distinction between
the frequency range for this feature in History (shifted far out to
the right in the graph), and the ranges of Tragedy and Comedy
(which virtually coincide at the left-hand side). This finding is
one of the factors that makes History the most easily discernible
genre using linguistic features as a discriminant: in our tests so
far, it is consistently a more coherent genre than either Comedy
or Tragedy.
‘Common authority’ features are associated with calls to
exterior authorities, and it will quickly be seen why they are more
frequent in the histories. In the following extract from Henry V,
Analysis of Variance for CommonAu

Individual 95% CIs For Mean
Level N Mean StDev ——— + ———— + ———— + ———
H 10 1.5820 0.3832 (—— * ———)
C 14 0.9750 0.2093 (—— * ——)
T 12 1.0158 0.1794 (—— * ——)
——— + ———— + ———— + ————
Pooled StDev = 0.2608 1.00 1.25 1.50
Table 3. Relative frequencies of ‘Common Authority’ forms in the folio genres.
strings coded as ‘common authority’ by Docuscope are

underlined:
king
Where is my gracious lord of Canterbury?
exeter
Not here in presence.
king Send for him, good uncle.
[Exit an Attendant.]
westmorland
Shall we call in th’ambassador, my liege?
king
Not yet, my cousin: we would be resolved,
Before we hear him, of some things of weight
That task our thoughts concerning us and France.
Enter the Archbishop of canterbury
and the Bishop of ely.
canterbury
God and his angels guard your sacred throne
And make you long become it!
king Sure, we thank you.
My learned lord, we pray you to proceed
And justly and religiously unfold
Why the law Salic that they have in France

Or should or should not bar us in our claim.
And God forbid, my dear and faithful lord,
That you should fashion, wrest or bow your reading
Or nicely charge your understanding soul
With opening titles miscreate, whose right
Suits not in native colours with the truth.
For God doth know how many now in health
Shall drop their blood in approbation
Of what your reverence shall incite us to.
Therefore take heed how you impawn our person,
How you awake our sleeping sword of war:
We charge you in the name of God take heed.
For never two such kingdoms did contend
Without much fall of blood, whose guiltless drops
Are every one a woe, a sore complaint
’Gainst him whose wrongs gives edge unto the swords
That makes such waste in brief mortality.
Under this conjuration speak, my lord . . .
(1.2.1–29)
From this example, it will be seen that this category captures
strings which link the statements of the text to some kind of
conventionally recognized exterior authority: ‘the law’, ‘God’,
‘lord’, ‘shall’, ‘should’ (note here the way Docuscope categories
include semantic and grammatical features). It should be imme-
diately clear why such strings are very common in the Histories
– though note that our findings go beyond the simple fact that
‘common authority’ is frequent in the Histories. ‘Common
authority’ strings can be said to characterize the Histories in the
sense that they are statistically significantly more frequent in the
Histories than in any other genre: although all plays have some
‘common authority’ strings, any play with a frequency of ‘com-
mon authority’ strings above a certain figure must be a History.
To a certain extent, of course, this linguistic finding overlaps
with ‘content’ as a generic determinant: the use of words like
‘king’ and ‘lord’ is to be expected in history plays. But simple

content cannot be the only explanation for this: the Tragedies
also feature high-status characters, and it might be expected that
they would score higher than they do on this feature. Something
about the nature of History massively increases the use of strings
in this category.
Linguistically, History is also characterized by a relatively
frequent use of ‘Think back’, a feature which tracks past
narrative situated in a more or less explicit relationship to the
present (for example by use of a strongly focalized narrator).
Here, Docuscope distinguishes between simple past-tense verbs,
which can be thought of as presenting a neutral, or default ‘past’,
with no explicit connection to the present of the narrator (‘we
went . . . ’, ‘I saw . . . ’), and compound and complex formations
(‘we were going . . . ’ ‘I have seen . . . ’), which set up more
complex time schemes. It is easy to see why this LAT should be
frequent in Shakespeare’s Histories, which obsessively trace the
effects of past actions on the present of the characters. Also
frequent in Histories are strings which describe the physical
world: either the attributes of objects, the objects themselves, or
their relations in space. It is not clear to me why History should
be the genre of objects and spatial relationships rather than
Tragedy (or even Comedy) – but it very markedly is. This is a
topic for future examination.
Features lacking in Histories include ‘Curiosity’, a LAT
associated with verbal interaction, where speakers try to signal an
ongoing collaborative discussion. ‘Curiosity’ strings commonly
use plural first person with questions and an indication of stages
of reasoning (‘What is our next step?’), and often appear with
verbs such as ‘know’, ‘think’ and ‘decide’. That they are relatively
absent from History is a signal that language generally in the
Histories is far less interactive than in the Comedies: characters
in the Histories are not engaged in the kind of rapid interchanges
about reality we find in the Comedies. The lack of ‘Immediacy’
strings in History is probably less surprising than in Comedy:
once again it signals a lack of interest in interiority.
3. tragedy
Table 4 shows the relative frequency results for two types of
string, one of which distinguishes Tragedies from Comedies
(‘Think Negative’), and the other Tragedies from Histories
(‘Imperative’).
‘Think Negative’ is relatively frequent in Tragedies and His-
tories, and relatively infrequent in Comedies. It might be thought
predictable that negativity would be higher in Tragedy than
Comedy, but it should be remembered that certain types of
negative string, associated with highly interactive discourse, are
in fact very frequent in Comedy. In contrast to interactive nega-
tivity, ‘Think Negative’ strings code for negative judgements and
frames of mind which might be entirely personal, rather than
being the product of interactions. They imply a static, settled
opinion, rather than being characteristic of response or provoked
‘Think Negative’
Level N Mean StDev + ———— + ———— + ———— + ——
H 10 2.9600 0.5759 (——— * ———)
C 14 2.3050 0.2745 (——— * —— )
T 12 2.8683 0.4255 (———*———)
+ ———— + ———— + ———— + ——
Pooled StDev = 0.4248 2.10 2.45 2.80 3.15
‘Imperative’
Level N Mean StDev ———— + ———— + ———— + ———
H 10 0.42600
0.05317 (———— * ————)
C 14 0.54286
0.12493 (——— * ———)
T 12 0.55667
0.09257 (———— * ———)
———— + ———— + ———— + ———
Pooled StDev = 0.09887 0.420 0.490 0.560
Table 4. Relative frequencies of ‘Think Negative’ and ‘Imperative’ forms

in the folio genres.
assertion. Compare the ‘Think Negative’ strings underlined in

the following extract from Macbeth with the ‘Refute That’ and
‘Deny Disclaim’ string types cited above in the section on
Comedy:
captain Doubtful it stood;
As two spent swimmers, that do cling together
And choke their art. The merciless Macdonwald
(Worthy to be a rebel, for to that
The multiplying villainies of nature
Do swarm upon him) from the western isles
Of Kernes and Gallowglasses is supplied;
And Fortune, on his damned quarrel smiling,
Show’d like a rebel’s whore: but all’s too weak;
For brave Macbeth (well he deserves that name),
Disdaining Fortune, with his brandish’d steel,
Which smok’d with bloody execution,
Like Valour’s minion, carv’d out his passage,
Till he fac’d the slave;
Which ne’er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,
Till he unseam’d him from the nave to th’chops,
And fix’d his head upon our battlements.
duncan
O valiant cousin! worthy gentleman!
captain
As whence the sun ’gins his reflection,
Shipwracking storms and direful thunders break,
So from that spring, whence comfort seem’d to come,
Discomfort swells. Mark, King of Scotland, mark:
No sooner justice had, with valour arm’d,
Compell’d these skipping Kernes to trust their heels,
But the Norweyan Lord, surveying vantage,
With furbish’d arms, and new supplies of men,
Began a fresh assault.
duncan Dismay’d not this
Our captains, Macbeth and Banquo?
captain Yes;
As sparrows eagles, or the hare the lion.
If I say sooth, I must report they were
As cannons overcharg’d with double cracks;
So they
Doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe:
Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds,
Or memorize another Golgotha,
I cannot tell –
But I am faint, my gashes cry for help.
duncan
So well thy words become thee, as thy wounds:
They smack of honour both. – Go, get him surgeons.
[Exit Captain, attended.]
Enter rosse and angus.
Who comes here?
malcolm The worthy Thane of Rosse.
lenox
What a haste looks through his eyes! So should he look
That seems to speak things strange.
rosse God save the King!
(1.2.7–48)
Rather than the clausal structures which characterize the inter-

active negativity of the Comedies, here we have mainly single or
two-word phrases: attributive adjectives and nouns (‘damned
quarrel’, ‘whore’, ‘bloody execution’, ‘reeking wounds’), and
some adverbs and verbs (‘too . . . ’, ‘Disdaining’). This is assertion
rather than refutation or denial: negativity in the Tragedies is
presented as an objective quality of things and people in the sur-
rounding world, rather than something applied to the opinions
and thoughts of others.
The second LAT identified by Docuscope as significant in the
linguistic make-up of the Tragedies is ‘Imperative’, which codes
straightforwardly for orders and instructions. Strikingly, and I
have to say slightly perplexingly, Comedies and Tragedies both
score high on ‘Imperative’, while Histories are notably lacking in

the feature. Presumably, the relative frequency of ‘Imperatives’
in Comedy is a further product of the interactive nature of comic
language: characters in comedies argue, assert, refute and give
each other orders (which are often ignored, or become the basis
for further argumentative interaction). Tragedies, we know, are
predicated on the working out of certain moral imperatives,
especially in the subgenre revenge tragedy, and it is interesting to
see that this macro, plot-based feature is represented consistently
at the micro level of linguistic feature. Hamlet’s father’s impera-
tives echo not just thematically, but literally, at the level of
grammar, throughout the play:
If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not,
Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damned incest.
But howsomever thou pursues this act,
Taint not thy mind nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught; leave her to heaven . . .
Adieu, adieu, adieu, remember me.
(Ham 1.5.81–91)
While it is easy to account for the presence of ‘Imperative’ strings
in Comedies and Tragedies, it is harder to explain their relative
absence from Histories. Taking plot and dramatic situation into
consideration, it might be expected that Histories, with their
peremptory rulers, battles and rapidly evolving plots, would be
very high in orders and instructions. That they are not perhaps
implies something about the predetermined nature of action in
the Histories, and the relative lack of interaction at a linguistic
level. Contrary to expectation, those in charge in the Histories do
not rattle off orders: rather they make long statements about the
nature of things.
Docuscope also detects in Tragedy the presence of a cluster of
language features which can be associated with the expression of
subjectivity in the present (as opposed, for example, to ‘Think
Back’, which can be characterized as expressing subjectivity in
the past in relation to the present). These features are ‘uncer-

tainty’, ‘subjective percept’, ‘curiosity’ and ‘immediacy’. Once
again, it should be emphasized that they are not absent from other
genres, but they are relatively more frequent in the Tragedies.
‘Subjective percept’ strings emphasize the subjective nature of
perceptions, often by implying some degree of modification to an
original perception now understood to be mistaken. They
typically take the form ‘just/only/even + a/an + object’:
It was just a shadow.
It was only a dream.
This type of string can be linked to ‘Uncertainty’ strings, which
also emphasize subjectivity, typically by including adverbial
qualification of the basis for any knowledge claimed (‘allegedly’,
‘nearly’, ‘almost’). ‘Uncertainty’ can even be marked at the level
of determiner – when Horatio says of the ghost, ‘It beckons you
to go away with it / As if it some impartment did desire / To you
alone’ (Ham 1.4.58–60), his choice of ‘some impartment’ imparts
uncertainty. He could have said, ‘As if it impartment did desire’
or ‘As if it an impartment did desire’. Allied to ‘Curiosity’ and
‘Immediacy’, which I have already illustrated, this gives us a
picture of Tragic language rooted in the self in the now: the
world is present, but not in any certain form. Perceptions are
overwhelming, but the self is concerned with the problem that
they shift and are unreliable. Perhaps significantly, ‘Refute That’
is relatively absent from the Tragedies: characters may make
assertions about the world, but no one is confident enough in
their own perceptions to attempt to refute them.
AFTERWORD: TOKYO, MARCH 2010
At the end of a book that has tried to emphasize the Renaissance

approach to language over one dominant from the late seven-
teenth to the twentieth century, I have offered a brief view of a
third approach, made possible by the resources and iterative
capabilities of computer text analysis and statistical software. It
would be a mistake to think that iterative criticism (as my col-
laborator Michael Witmore has termed it) gives us access to some
Platonic realm of pure meanings, previously locked away from
limited human reading. Instead, it allows us to test the impres-
sions we get from texts, and to seek to explain the effects they
have on human readers with better evidence than we have had
before. Machines, despite what Michael and I like to suggest
playfully in our presentations, cannot do our reading for us, any
more than language can ‘mean’ without human interaction and
consensus. But machines can allow us to read in new and inter-
esting ways and places. My mobile phone, for example, has on it
the entire works of Shakespeare, in searchable form, and this
allowed me, in the final weeks of writing this book, to sit on a
Tokyo underground train at 11 p.m., after watching a nine-and-
a-half-hour production of all three Henry VI plays, reading the
following words from the final act of 3 Henry VI. Edward is add-
ressing Warwick, who has abandoned Edward’s cause:
Sail how thou canst, have wind and tide thy friend,
This hand, fast wound about thy coal-black hair,
Shall, whiles thy head is warm and new cut off,
Write in the dust this sentence with thy blood:
‘Wind-changing Warwick now can change no more’.
(5.1.53–7)15
It was salutary to sit, surrounded by adverts I could not read,
having watched plays about the bloody history of my country in
a language I could not understand, and be reminded, once again,
of the strange technology of writing. Like the American Indians
Afterword: Tokyo, March 2010 207
in John Wilkins’s anecdote recounted in Chapter 1, I was amazed

at the ability of marks on a page, and a mobile-phone screen, to
speak. There have been times in writing this book when it felt like
I was writing in the sand with the bloody stump of my own head
– but then encounters with our own ignorance are never as
comfortable as they are worthwhile. There are some who think
that Shakespeare is our contemporary, and that he speaks to the
universal; it should be clear from this book that what I find most
fascinating, and rewarding, about Shakespeare is his strangeness,
in Japanese or English. But one thing I have come to appreciate
in writing this book is that we are all, along with Autolycus,
littered under Mercury.

3. Shakespeare and Language Endmatter:Layout 1 22/9/10 13:34 Page 209
NOTES
PREFACE
1. ‘Ovids Metamorphoses, nothing else but Mercuries pageants’: a marginal

comment by Gabriel Harvey, quoted by Jonathan Bate (Shakespeare and
Ovid (Oxford, 1993), p. 270) from G.C. Moore Smith, Gabriel Harvey’s
Marginalia (Stratford-upon-Avon, 1913), p. 193.
1: IDEAS ABOUT LANGUAGE

IN THE RENAISSANCE
1. Aristotle’s main claims about language and meaning can be found in De
Interpretatione, while Plato’s are mainly in Cratylus, Protagoras, Gorgias and
Phaedrus. I am concerned here with the common Renaissance perception of
what Aristotle and Plato were thought to have said, rather than what they
actually wrote, or what subsequent philosophy has made of it: however,
accounts of their approaches to language will be found in Deborah K.W.
Modrak, Aristotle’s Theory of Language and Meaning (Cambridge, 2000);
David Charles, Aristotle on Meaning and Essence (Oxford, 2000); Raphael
Demos, ‘Plato’s Philosophy of Language’, The Journal of Philosophy, vol.
61, no. 20 (1964), pp. 595–610; David Sedley, ‘Plato on Language’, in Hugh
H. Benson, ed., A Companion to Plato (Oxford, 2006), pp. 214–27.
2. The first parts of Chapman’s translation were published in 1598, with a
complete text in 1611. I quote here from the 1998 paperback reprint of
Allardyce Nicoll’s edition. Chapman is renowned for the liberties (conscious
and otherwise) he takes with his sources (in the original, the killer is Meges,
the son of Phylides), and also for his reliance (not always acknowledged) on
Latin versions of Homer: see H.C. Fay, ‘Chapman’s materials for his trans-
lation of Homer’, Review of English Studies 2 (1951), pp. 121–8; Edward
Phinney, ‘Continental humanists and Chapman’s Iliads’, Studies in the
Renaissance 12 (1965), pp. 218–26; Robin Sowerby, ‘Chapman’s Discovery of
Homer’, Translation and Literature 1 (1991), pp. 26–51; R.S. Miola, ‘On
death and dying in Chapman’s Iliad: Translation as forgery’, International
Journal of the Classical Tradition, vol. 3, no.1 (1996), pp. 48–64.
3. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, in Brian Vickers (ed.), Francis
Bacon: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford, 1996). The quotation
is from Aristotle, De Interpretatione i, 1, 16a, 3–8. The assumption that
‘words’ are by definition spoken – and that they are entirely separate from
210 Notes to Chapter 1
‘letters’ – is common in thought at the time. John Wilkins writes: ‘Now,

because Words are onely for those that are present both in time & place;
therefore to these, there hath beene added, the invention of letters and
writing’ (Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger (1641), pp. 4–5/sigs.
B2v–B3r). While not all writers maintain the distinction at all times (Bacon
himself elsewhere has: ‘as for Gestures, they . . . are to Hieroglyphics as
words spoken are to words written, in that they abide not’ (Advancement of
Learning, p. 231)), the distinction was the norm. The study of rhetoric,
which drove the entire European educational system, naturally presupposed
oral performance, even though its precepts and materials were preserved
and passed on in written form – written, epistolary rhetoric (Ars epistolica)
existed as a minor, and distinct, subject (see Heinrich F. Plett, Rhetoric and
Renaissance Culture (Berlin, 2004), pp. 31–4), though the tendency for some
Renaissance rhetorics to concentrate on inventio, dispositio and elocutio
(invention, organization, style) and neglect the more performative memoria
and actio/pronunciatio (memory and performance) out of the five-fold
Ciceronian system, may hint at the growing dominance of textual culture
(see Plett, Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture, pp. 87–94). Also see my
‘Shakespeare and language: an introduction’, in Catherine M.S. Alexander
(ed.), Shakespeare and Language (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 1–4, and ‘Middle-
tonian Stylistics’ (forthcoming) for more discussion of the primarily oral
conception of language in the early modern period.
4. It could be argued that our culture is less optimistic than the Renaissance about
language, certainly about the possibility of accurate meaning: see Margreta de
Grazia, ‘Shakespeare’s view of language: an historical perspective’, Shakespeare
Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 3 (1978), pp. 374–88 (reprinted in A Reader in the
Language of Shakespearean Drama, ed. Vivian Salmon and Edwina Burgess,
Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, series 3,
no. 35 (Amsterdam, 1987), pp. 473–87) – in particular her argument that the
Renaissance identified problems with language as originating in the user (mis-
communication happened because people used language poorly), while from the
seventeenth century on, the problem came to be seen as inherent in language
itself (p. 480). For an essay arguing for a more optimistic view of language in
Hamlet, see Inga Stina Ewbank, ‘Hamlet and the power of words’, originally in
Shakespeare Survey 30 (1977), pp. 85–102 (reprinted in Shakespeare and
Language, ed. Catherine Alexander (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 151–78).
5. See pp. 13–14 for the biblical text, and a discussion of its implications.
Although the biblical text prefers ‘language’ here, the running title, and
head and marginal notes use ‘tongue’: ‘Confusion of tongues’; ‘The build-
ing of Babel was the cause of the confusion of tongues’; ‘By this great
plague of the confusion of tongues, appeareth Gods horrible iudgement
against mans pride and vaine glorie’. Tyndale’s 1534 translation uses ‘tongue’
throughout this section; The Bishop’s Bible (1568) uses ‘language’, as would
the Authorized Version (1611).
Notes to Chapter 1 211
6. I discuss the iconography of language in more detail in Chapter 2. Heinrich

Plett surveys iconographic representations of rhetoric and eloquence in the
period in his final section E (Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture, pp. 501–52).
7. Richard Carew, The Examination of Men’s Wits (London, 1594), translation
of Juan Huarte, Examen de Ingenios (Baeza, 1575). Carew is not named in the
published text, but his status as translator is now generally accepted (see
Carmen Rogers, Juan Huarte, ‘The Examination of Mens Wits’ [1594],
translated out of Spanish by M. Camillo Camilli, Englished out of his Italian by
Richard Carew, a facsimile reproduction (Gainesville, 1959); and S. Mendyk,
‘Carew, Richard (1555–1620)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Carew worked from an Italian translation of 1590 by Camillo Camilli (see
Rogers, Juan Harte, pp. ix–xi). Carew’s ODNB entry incorrectly states that
his translation is in verse – perhaps because Camilli’s is verse. In what
follows, for the sake of clarity and consistency, I refer to ‘Huarte’ as the sole
author of the quoted sections, though Renaissance translation practice
would certainly have allowed Camilli and Carew to adapt or add to the texts
in front of them if they had wished (I have not checked to see if they in fact
did). Some of Huarte’s ideas about psychology and physiology were idio-
syncratic and eccentric, to say the least, but his accounts of linguistic theory
are broadly conventional – and it is these theories, and their conventionality,
that I am interested in here. Carew wrote elsewhere on language: ‘On the
excellencie of the English Tongue’ appeared in the second edition of
Camden’s Remaines (1614), and he discussed Cornish dialect in his 1602
Survey of Cornwall (see D.N.C. Wood, ‘Elizabethan English and Richard
Carew’, Neophilogus 61 (1977), pp. 304–15). For discussions of Huarte’s
work in its own right, see Malcolm K. Read, Juan Huarte de San Juan
(Boston, 1981); Malcolm K. Read, The Birth and Death of Language: Spanish
Literature and Linguistics: 1300–1700 (Potomac, Maryland, 1983); and C.M.
Hutchings, ‘The Examen de ingenios and the Doctrine of Original Genius’,
Hispania, vol. 19, no. 2 (1936), pp. 273–82.
8. The full descriptive title is as follows: Pedro Mexía et al. (1619),
Archaio-ploutos [Time’s Storehouse] Containing Ten following Bookes
to the former Treasurie of Avncient and Moderne Times. Being the
Learned Collections, Iudicious Readings, and Memorable Obseruations:
Not onely Diuine, Morall, and Philosophicall; But also Poeticall,
Martiall, Politicall, Historicall, Astrologicall, &c. Translated out of
that Worthy Spanish Gentleman, Pedro Mexia, And M. Francesco
Sansovino, that Famous Italian: As also of those Honourable
Frenchmen, Anthony du Verdier, Lord of Vaupriuaz: Loys Guyon,
Sieur de la Nauche, Counsellour vnto the King: Claudius Gruget,
Parisian, &c.
As will be seen from the long list of names, the work is a compilation of
translations from various authors, though Mexía supplies the majority of
the material. For the sake of clarity, I refer to him as the sole author of
quoted passages (though as with Huarte in the previous note, I am here
interested in the fact that the ideas expressed are conventional and common-
place). Thomas Milles is not named as the translator, but his association
with the text is now generally accepted (see John Whyman, ‘Thomas
Milles’, ODNB). A companion volume, named as ‘the former Treasurie of
Avncient and Moderne Times’ above, had been published in 1613, also
printed by William Jaggard. Milles and Jaggard were linked by an interest
in heraldry – to which we will return in Chapter 6. Milles was from Kent,
which will also return, along with its dialect, and Carew, in Chapter 4.
9. I first encountered these texts in Vivian Salmon’s 1990 article, ‘Views on
meaning in sixteenth-century England’, in Peter Schmitter (ed.), Essays
Towards a History of Semantics (Munster, 1990), pp. 33–53 (reprinted in
Vivian Salmon, Language and Society in Early Modern England: Selected
Essays 1981–1994 (Amsterdam, 1996), pp. 55–75).
10. See Grace B. Sherrer, ‘Francis Mercury van Helmont: a neglected seven-
teenth-century contribution to the science of language’, Review of English
Studies, vol. 14, no. 56 (1938), pp. 420–27, especially pp. 422–3. For a more
general account of van Helmont’s life, which included conversion to (and
rejection of) Quakerism, torture by the Inquisition, and correspondence
with many key figures of the early Enlightenment, see Allison P. Coudert,
The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century: The Life and Thought
of Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614–1698) (Leiden, 1999). Van Helmont’s
book on Hebrew, published in separate Latin and German editions at
Sulzbach in 1667, was written while he was a prisoner of the Inquisition in
Rome. The frontispiece, showing van Helmont in a dungeon using callipers
to measure the opening of his own mouth in a phonetic experiment, is
reproduced in Allison Coudert, ‘A Quaker–Kabbalist Controversy: George
Fox’s reaction to Francis Mercury van Helmont’, Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 39 (1976), pp. 171–89 (image on p. 189). On artificial
languages in the period more generally, see Rhodri Lewis, Language, Mind
and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (Cambridge,
2007).
11. On children as imitators, animal-like in their linguistic abilities, see Michael
Witmore, Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance
(Ithaca, 2007). Huarte’s comments here are autobiographical: as a child, he
had been brought from the Basque country to Castile by his parents – he is
the Castilian-speaking child; they are the thirty-to-forty-year-olds (see Max
F. Meyer, untitled review, The American Journal of Psychology, vol. 53, no.1
(1940), pp. 163–4).
12. On notions of the human, animals and language in the period, see Erica Fudge,
Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture
(Urbana, 2002); Erica Fudge (ed.) Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans and
Other Wonderful Creatures (Urbana, 2004); Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning:
Animals, rationality, and humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca, 2006);

R.W. Serjeantson, ‘The passions and animal language, 1540–1700’, Journal of
the History of Ideas, vol. 62, no. 3 (2001), pp. 425–44; C. Atherton, ‘Children,
Animals, Slaves and Grammar’, in Y.L. Too and N. Livingstone (eds), Peda-
gogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 214–16.
13. An example of this type of thinking arising in an unexpected place is given
by Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation (Oxford, 2002).
Humanist, reformed theologians are usually explicitly Aristotelian in their
approach to language, but Cummings notes (pp. 60–68) the influence of St
Augustine’s conversion narrative on Luther where we are very close to the
language ‘meaning’ without being understood: somehow the words have an
effect which bypasses the normal semantic processes of encoding, decoding
and connotation. Conversion comes suddenly after a long process of reading
the Bible, but does not so much involve a rational working out of meaning,
as a sudden possession by meaning. This semi-mystical treatment of the
words of scripture by thinkers normally wedded to the Aristotelian model
can also be seen in Erasmus’s Paraclesis. As Cummings states (p. 109):
The letters of scripture inscribe the truth within their readers.
Erasmus offers to bypass the history of theology (as the interpre-
tation of the divine word) and to render in the words themselves the
imago of Christ . . . the whole premiss of Paraclesis is that the letters
of the Greek text offer direct access to the original presence of the
author. These letters . . . do not describe Christ, they are Christ.
This is typical of the wider Renaissance approach to language I have been
arguing for: that both Platonic and Aristotelian models tend to be kept in
play. Cummings gives a further example of this (pp. 151–3) when he analyses
Erasmus’s attempts to divide meaning between ‘assertio’ (fixed by God) and
‘ambiguitas’ (established by human consensus, and not capable of being
fixed). These clearly attempt to embody the Platonic and Aristotelian posi-
tions. Rachel Foxley, ‘“The wildernesse of Tropes and Figures”: Figuring
Rhetoric in Leveller Pamphlets’, Seventeenth Century, vol. 21, no. 2 (2006),
pp. 270–86, traces later resistance to formal rhetoric in Leveller writing, and
gives a good survey of the Platonic tradition of distrust of rhetoric, within
which Huarte is writing here.
14. See, for example, Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: problems of writing in
the French renaissance (Oxford, 1979).
15. See Brian Vickers, Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (London, 1970), p.
116.
16. On reading, see Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent
Reading (Stanford, 1997); and Elspeth Jajdelska, Silent Reading and the Birth
of the Narrator (Toronto, 2007).
17. The classical source for the association between Hercules and eloquence
is Lucian’s Heracles. As Malcolm Bull notes, this is developed in the
Renaissance emblem tradition by Alciato, Bocchi and Valeriano, while

Dürer’s allegorical representation of eloquence substitutes Mercury for
Hercules (The Mirror of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Renaissance Art
(London, 2005), pp. 95–7). See Edgar Wind, ‘ “Hercules” and “Orpheus”:
Two Mock-Heroic Designs by Dürer’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, vol.
2, no. 3 (1939), pp. 206–18. The connection in Renaissance thought between
eloquence and power is also seen in George Gascoigne’s motto uniting Mars
and Mercury, the soldier and the scholar: ‘Tam Marti, quam Mercurio’ –
‘(Dedicated) As much to Mars as to Mercury’ (see Roland Mushat Frye,
‘“Looking before and after”: The use of visual evidence and symbolism for
interpreting Hamlet’, The Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 45, no.1 (1982),
pp. 1–19, note 20; and Gillian Austen, ‘Self-portraits and Self-presentation
in the Work of George Gascoigne’, Early Modern Literary Studies, vol. 14,
no. 1/Special Issue 18, 2 (2008), pp. 1–34).
18. See Cummings, Literary Culture of the Reformation, especially pp. 20–21;
and Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture: ‘Grammatica’ and
Literary Theory, 350–1100 (Cambridge, 1994). Cummings gives a masterful
account of the role of grammar in theological debates at the time. Here, I
look at the implications of shifts in grammatical theory and practice for
more general conceptions of language.
19. Cummings traces this shift in his Literary Culture of the Reformation (pp.
112–38). It is worth repeating his caveat (pp. 114–18) that while humanist
scholars laid great stress on the intellectual differences between their
grammars and those of the scholastics, their actual grammars often owed a
great deal to scholastic ones in terms of detail. The important point here is
that there was a shift in attitude: the new rhetoric was significant. Also on this
shift, see Richard Waswo, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Prince-
ton, 1987), pp. 91–2; G.A. Padley, Grammatical Theory in Western Europe
1500–1700: The Latin Tradition (Cambridge, 1976); G.A. Padley, Gram-
matical Theory in Western Europe 1500–1700: Trends in Vernacular Grammar I
(Cambridge, 1985); G.A. Padley, Grammatical Theory in Western Europe
1500–1700: Trends in Vernacular Grammar II (Cambridge, 1988).
20. See, for example, Cummings’s discussion of the treatment of grammatical
mood (Literary Culture of the Reformation, pp. 124–7).
21. Carla Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of
Eloquence (Philadelphia, 2009), pp. 28–34, writes on linguistic error in the
period as exemplified by the curious mythical figure of Titivillus, who was
thought to haunt churches, collecting in a great sack all the unspoken or
broken syllables for use against miscreants on the Day of Judgement. I think
the key point about Titivillus (and it is a fascinating one in terms of the rise
of textuality) is that the errors he ‘collects’ are misreadings of written texts.
He does not punish simple slips of the tongue, or dialectalisms, but failures
to correctly verbalize the written word of God. The notion of ‘error’ in the
period has recently been discussed by Lisa Frienkel and François Rigolot.
Lisa Frienkel, ‘The Use of the Fetish’, Shakespeare Studies 33 (2005), pp.
115–22, is particularly relevant for its account of Renaissance definitions of
catachresis (misapplied metaphor) as being indecorous or inexact rather than
incorrect (pp. 116ff.). François Rigolot, ‘The Renaissance Fascination with
Error: Mannerism and Early Modern Poetry’, Renaissance Quarterly, vol.
57, no. 4 (2004), pp. 1219–34, gives away its modern linguistic prejudices by
its expectation that ‘error’ will be linguistic, and will be defined by an
ideology of standardization and correctness: ‘At a time when the commonly
recognized vernacular competed not only with Latin but with local dialects
and patois, linguistic errors were particularly noticeable’ (p. 1224) – but not
noticeable enough for the essay to include any actual examples of ‘errors’
with a dialectal basis.
22. These instances are cited by Cummings, Literary Culture of the Reformation,
pp. 187–93 and 214–15. The quotations from Thomas More are from
Dialogue Concerning Heresies in Thomas More, The Complete Works, ed.
Louis L. Martz, Richard S. Sylvester, and Clarence H. Miller, 15 vols (New
Haven, 1963–97), vol. 6, pp. 286 and 290.
23. See Edwin S. Ramage, ‘Early Roman Urbanity’, The American Journal of
Philology, vol. 81, no. 1 (1960), pp. 65–72; Edwin S. Ramage, ‘Cicero on
Extra-Roman Speech’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philo-
logical Association 92 (1961), pp. 481–94; Edwin S. Ramage, ‘Urbanitas:
Cicero and Quintilian, a Contrast in Attitudes’, The American Journal of
Philology, vol. 84, no. 4 (1963), pp. 390–414; Edwin S. Ramage, Urbanitas:
Ancient Sophistication and Refinement (Norman, Oklahoma, 1973).
2: IDEAS ABOUT LANGUAGE IN SHAKESPEARE (1)

1. For a recent example of the ‘madcap’ critical tradition in relation to
Mercutio, see Bradin Cormack, ‘Shakespeare’s Narcissus, Sonnet’s Echo’,
in Leonard Barkan et al. (eds), The Forms of Renaissance Thought: New
Essays in Literature and Culture (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 127–49, which has
Mercutio as ‘the agent of language that catches and propels him on’ (p. 128).
Cormack’s postmodern desire to give language agency, and remove it from
human users, is identified as highly anachronistic for the Renaissance by
Margreta de Grazia, ‘Shakespeare’s view of language: an historical per-
spective’, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 3 (1978), pp. 374–88 (reprinted
in Salmon and Burness, Reader, pp. 473–87). Other examples of the
‘madcap’ reading of Mercutio are the character’s entry in Michael Dobson
and Stanley Wells (eds), The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford, 2001), and
Brian Gibbons’s Arden 2 edition (1980), which insists on Mercutio as
frantic even when recognizing the rationality of his position (pp. 67–9).
2. This chapter considers the iconography of language, and Mercury,
in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Renaissance culture more gener-
ally. Any consideration of this topic has to begin with Malcolm Evans’s
brilliantly learned article (‘Mercury versus Apollo: a reading of Love’s

Labour’s Lost’, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 2 (1975), pp. 113–27) as
well as Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Mercury, Boy Yet and the “Harsh”
Words of Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Shakespeare Survey 57 (2004), pp. 209–24.
Keir Elam’s discussion of these topics is dense and rich – and possibly the
best available (Shakespeare’s Universe of Discourse: Language Games in the
Comedies (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 140–59). I have also benefited from Fred-
erick Kiefer, ‘Spring and Winter in Love’s Labor’s Lost: An Iconographic
Reconstruction’, in Clifford Davidson, Luis R. Gámez and John H. Stroupe
(eds), Emblem, Iconography, and Drama (Kalamazoo, 1995).
Other relevant essays on Mercury in Shakespeare are: Roland Mushat
Frye, ‘“Looking before and after”: The use of visual evidence and symbol-
ism for interpreting Hamlet’, The Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 45, no.
1 (1982), pp. 1–19; MacDonald P. Jackson, ‘Three disputed Shakespeare
readings: association and contexts’, Review of English Studies 59 (2007), pp.
219–31 (which also touches on the association of Mercury and Pegasus);
J.W. Draper, ‘Shakespeare’s “Star-Crossed Lovers” ’, Review of English
Studies, vol. 15, no. 57 (1939), pp. 16–34 (this covers something I do not –
the astrological implications of Mercury – and is especially interesting in
relation to Mercutio’s character); on Mercutio, see also Joseph A. Porter,
Shakespeare’s Mercutio: His history and drama (Chapel Hill, 1988).
A key consideration of the treatment of Mercury and Apollo in Ovid, and
Mercury’s role as linguistic policeman, is B.R. Fredericks, ‘Wit vs. Divine
Folly: Mercury and Apollo in Metamorphoses 1–2’, The Classical Journal,
vol. 72, no. 3 (1977), pp. 244–9. Patrick J. Gallacher, Love, the Word, and
Mercury (Albuquerque, 1975) collects a great deal of supporting evidence
for the association of Mercury with speech in the medieval period.
There is, of course, a huge literature on Mercury in visual art –
particularly relevant to me have been: Barbara C. Bowen, ‘Mercury at the
Crossroads in Renaissance Emblems’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes 48 (1985), pp. 222–9; Lauren Soth, ‘Two paintings by Correggio’,
The Art Bulletin, vol. 46, no. 4 (1964), pp. 539–44; Edgar Wind, ‘ “Hercules”
and “Orpheus”: Two Mock-Heroic Designs by Dürer’, Journal of the
Warburg Institute, vol. 2, no. 3 (1939), pp. 206–18; Ilja M. Veldman, ‘Seasons,
Planets and Temperaments in the work of Maarten van Heemskerck:
Cosmo-astrological allegory in Sixteenth-century Netherlandish prints’,
Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, vol. 11, nos 3–4
(1980), pp. 149–76; Charles Dempsey, ‘Mercurius Ver: the sources of
Botticelli’s Primavera’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 31
(1968), pp. 251–73.
Mercury also features in the iconography surrounding Renaissance ver-
sions of the lost (and probably mythical) classical painting, The Calumny of
Apelles – both in his role as god of eloquence and as god of painting (the latter
in a 1611 tryptich by Hendrick Goltzius): see Peter Hecht’s review (Simiolus:
Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, vol. 13, no. 1 (1983), pp. 57–60)
of David Cast, The Calumny of Apelles (New Haven, 1981). Cast argues
strongly for a reading of Renaissance treatments of the Apelles myth in
terms of the humanist approach to language, which is well summarized in a
long, favourable review by Norman Bryson (The Burlington Magazine, vol.
124, no. 951 (1982), pp. 370–71), and rejected in Hecht’s long, hostile one.
3. See Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. John Kerrigan (Harmondsworth, 1982), pp.
232 and 239. Henry Woudhuysen’s Arden 3 edition of the play (1998) gives
a good overview of the resonances of Marcadé’s name (pp. 34, 64–6, and 109
note 10). See also René Graziani, ‘M. Marcadé and the Dance of Death:
Love’s Labour’s Lost, v.ii.705–11’, Review of English Studies, vol. 37, no. 147
(1986), pp. 392–5.
4. As Woudhuysen notes in his Arden 3 edition (pp. 294–5).
5. The 1623 Folio deals with this problem by assigning the speech to Armado,
and adding a final sentence, ‘You that way, we this way’, which signals the
clearing of the stage (either by the actors going off in two groups, or by
referring to the different directions the actors and audience must take to
leave the theatre). Dover Wilson’s Cambridge edition of the play (1923,
revised 1962) followed the 1598 quarto, as did Richard David’s 1951 Arden
(based on H.C. Hart’s 1906 edition), but more recent editors, while
exploring the eerie resonance of the quarto version in their notes and
introductions, have sought to minimize its textual peculiarity by following
the folio text, and bringing it unequivocally into the performed text of the
play (see John Kerrigan’s 1982 Penguin edition, pp. 239 and 244–5; G.R
Hibbard’s 1990 Oxford edition, p. 235; and Henry Woudhuysen’s 1998
Arden 3, p. 297).
6. Brian Vickers suggests (private communication) that we can overlay this
square with the following:
Rhetoric > > Music
^ ^
Prose > > Verse
7. See Bull, Mirror of the Gods, p. 360.

8. Stephen Orgel gives an excellent account of the mythological background
here in the section on ‘Autolycus’ in the introduction to his 1996 Oxford
edition of The Winter’s Tale (pp. 50–53). Chione’s story, including her
punishment by Diana, is recorded in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 11, lines
301–29.
9. On this painting, see E.H. Gombrich, ‘An interpretation of Mantegna’s
“Parnassus”’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 26, nos
1–2 (1963), pp. 196–8 (though this article mainly discusses Mars, Venus and
Vulcan); on its first owner, and the collection it was part of, see Rose Marie
San Juan, ‘The Court Lady’s Dilemma: Isabella d’Este and Art Collecting
in the Renaissance’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 14, no. 1 (1991), pp. 67–78;
Egon Verheyen, The Paintings in the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este at Mantua

(New York, 1971).
11. Although neither discusses this plate specifically, the following articles give
further information on its maker, Jean de Court: David DuBon, ‘A Spec-
tacular Limoges Painted Enamel’, Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin, vol.
76, no. 329 (1980), pp. 3–17; William H. Monroe, ‘Painted Renaissance
Enamels from Limoges’, Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago 71 (1977), pp.
10–14. For other depictions of Grammatica in the period, see Plett, Rhetoric
and Renaissance Culture, pp. 499–552 (on the ‘Iconography of Rhetoric and
Eloquence’), and Rudolf Wittkower, ‘ “Grammatica”: From Martinus
Capella to Hogarth’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, vol. 2, no. 1 (1938),
pp. 82–4.
12. The emblem has the following explanatory poem:
As Fortune rests on her sphere, so Hermes sits upon his cube. He
presides over the arts, she over the varied chances of life. Art was
deeloped to counteract the effect of Fortune; but when Fortune is
bad it often needs the assistance of Art. Therefore, studious youths,
learn good arts, which bring with them the benefits of an outcome
not subject to chance.
Alciato’s work is made available by the following excellent website (from which
the above translation comes, and where the Latin original will be found):
www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/alciato/emblem.php?id=A46a078 (accesssed 2
July 2010).
14. See Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid; A.B. Taylor (ed.), Shakespeare’s Ovid: The
Metamorphoses in the plays and poems (Cambridge, 2000).
15. Some sense of the distrust of poetic language in the Renaissance can be
gained from Puttenham’s comments on the fantastic. Puttenham attacks
those who see only imagination, and not art, in poetry:
For as well poets as poesy are despised . . . for commonly who is
so studious in the art as shows himself excellent in it, they call
him in disdain a ‘fantastical’ . . . And this proceeds through the
barbarous ignorance of the time, and pride of many gentlemen
and others, whose gross heads not being brought up or acquai-
nted with any excellent art, nor able to contrive or in manner
conceive in any matter of subtlety in any business or science,
they do deride and scorn it in all others.
As Brian Vickers comments, ‘The imagination, the faculty of making
mental images, was held to be essential to the brain’s functioning, but was
also feared as being able to create images that it had not perceived’ (English
Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford, 1999) p. 200).
16. See Ovid, Fasti, Book 2, 5.599.

17. For more detail on Ovid’s portrayal of Mercury as associated with narrative
and the punishment of language, see Fredericks, ‘Wit vs. Divine Folly’.
18. See Keir Elam’s detailed discussion of Hermes Trismegistus, and his use of
this illustration, in Shakespeare’s Universe of Discourse, pp. 148–59.
19. For general considerations of Dossi, see Peter Humfrey et al., Dosso Dossi:
Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara (New York, 1998); Nicholas Penney,
‘Ferrara, New York and Los Angeles: Dosso Dossi’, The Burlington Maga-
zine, vol. 141, no. 1153 (1999), pp. 250–54; Giancarlo Fiorenza, ‘Dosso
Dossi, Garofalo, and the Costabili Polyptych: Imagining Spiritual Autho-
rity’, The Art Bulletin, vol. 82, no. 2 (2000), pp. 252–79. Giancarlo Fiorenza,
Dosso Dossi: Paintings of Myth, Magic, and the Antique (Pennsylvania, 2008),
has an extended discussion of Jupiter Painting Butterflies in its first two
chapters (pp. 21–77), with specific consideration of Mercury and his
association with silence on pp. 36–8.
20. A treatment of silence and gesture in a later period, but which is still highly
relevant to my discussion here, is Darryl P. Domingo, ‘ “The Natural Prop-
ensity of Imitation”: or, Pantomimic Poetics and the Rhetoric of Augustan
Wit’, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 9, no. 2 (2009), pp.
51–95.
21. Philippa Berry discusses this quotation in her essay, ‘Hamlet’s ear’ (Shake-
speare Survey 50 (1998), pp. 57–64, and reprinted in Alexander (ed.),
Shakespeare and Language, pp. 201–22).
3: IDEAS ABOUT LANGUAGE IN SHAKESPEARE (2)

1. Samuel Johnson, ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ from The Plays of William
Shakespeare (London, 1765).
2. Molly Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay (London, 1957), pp. 9–10.
3. Abraham Cowley, ‘Ode: Of Wit’, from Alastair Fowler (ed.), The New
Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse (Oxford, 1992), p. 551.
4. L. Borinski, ‘Shakespeare’s Comic Prose’, Shakespeare Survey 8 (1955), pp.
63–5; Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay, p. 60; Robert O. Evans, The Osier
Cage: Rhetorical Devices in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (Lexington, 1966), p. 19; The
Comedy of Errors, ed. R.A. Foakes (Arden 2: London, 1962), p. 29. See also
Russ McDonald, Shakespeare and the Arts of Language (Oxford, 2001), ch.
7, ‘Double Talk’, and especially his characterization of this kind of reaction
as the ‘remains of Augustan and Romantic discomfort with wordplay’ (p.
161).
5. T. M. Raysor (ed.), S.T. Coleridge: Shakespearean Criticism (London, 1960),
vol. 1, p. 86 (quoted in Elam, Shakespeare’s Universe of Discourse, p. 5. Elam
discusses critical approaches to Shakespeare’s language on pp. 1–6).
6. Margreta de Grazia, ‘Homonyms before and after lexical standardisation’,
Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West Jahrbuch (1990), pp. 143–56.
7. De Grazia comments on the following article: Stephen Booth, ‘Exit,

Pursued by a Gentleman Born’, in Wendell M. Aycock (ed.), Shakespeare’s
Art from a Comparative Perspective, Proceedings: Comparative Literature
Symposium (Texas Technical University), vol. 12 (Lubbock, Texas, 1981),
pp. 51–66. My further examples are taken from Stephen Booth, ‘Shake-
speare’s Language and the Language of Shakespeare’s Time’, Shakespeare
Survey 50 (1997), pp. 1–17 (‘eventful language’ is from p. 10).
8. Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay (p. 1); see also the essays collected in
‘M.M. Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay – Some Reappraisals’, in Conno-
tations, vol. 6, no. 1 (1996–7), pp. 1–45; Pat Parker, Shakespeare from the
Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago, 1996); Russ McDonald, The
Bedford Companion to Shakespeare (Basingstoke, 2001), p. 44. Two more
general favourable approaches to puns and wordplay are: Walter Redfern,
Puns (Oxford, 1984) and Jonathan Culler (ed.), On Puns: the foundation of
letters (Oxford, 1988). Also important, and fun, is Christopher Ricks, 1975,
‘Lies’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 2, no. 1 (1975), pp. 121–42 (reproduced in Ricks,
The Force of Poetry (Oxford, 1984), pp. 369–91).
9. Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language (New York,
1947), esp. pp. 165–71.
10. Though Joseph notes an antedating to this in John Taylor’s 1643 Mercurius
Aquaticus: see Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language, p. 340 note 7.
11. See de Grazia, ‘Homonyms’, p. 154 note 29, which continues:
Sister Miriam Joseph discusses four figures as wordplay, identifying
the pun with syllepsis, as does Brian Vickers in his list of rhetorical
figures, Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (London, 1970), pp.
123–50. Lee A. Sonnino lists ten figures involving wordplay, but
identifies the pun with antanaclasis in A Handbook to Sixteenth
Century Rhetoric (London, 1968), p. 260, as does Richard Lanham
in A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms: A Guide for Students of English
Literature (Berkeley, 1968). Kökeritz considers the homonymic pun
paranomasia in Shakespeare’s Pronunciation but refers to its medieval
predecessor as significatio in ‘Rhetorical Word-Play in Chaucer’,
PMLA 69 (1954), pp. 942–5. Jonathan Culler, aware of the ‘modern’
origin of the word, finds its closest approximation in classical
paronomasia or adnominatio, p. 5.
I’m not sure I agree with de Grazia that Joseph identifies the pun with syllepsis,
but this does not affect her overall point, nor the usefulness of the survey.
12. Joseph, Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language, p. 164 (and see further pp.
165–73 and 338–41).
13. John Hoskyns, Directions for Speech and Style (c. 1599), quoted from Brian
Vickers, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, p. 410. (I am grateful to
Brian Vickers for pointing these passages out to me.) Hoskyns seems here to
be recalling the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium (c. 80 bc, commonly
ascribed to Cicero), the most widely used catalogue of rhetorical figures,

which also warns against overuse of paronomasia because its ‘invention
seems impossible without labour and pains’ (i.e. it is forced) and because
‘Such endeavours, indeed, seem more suitable for a speech of entertainment
than for use in an actual cause’ (i.e., as Hoskyns implies with his reference
to women and ‘tuftaffeta orators’, the figure is not very serious or weighty):
[Cicero], Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. Harry Caplan, Loeb Classical
Library (New Haven, 1954), p. 309.
14. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), Book 3, ch.
19, p. 173 (sig. Aar).
15. Malcolm Parkes, Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West (Aldershot, 1992),
pp. 160–61 and 276–7 (plates 1 and 64). See also see Saenger, Space Between
Words.
16. For the understanding of ‘words’ in the Enlightenment, and theories of the
extent to which this depended on the newly rigorous dictionaries, see Sylvia
Adamson’s two essays on ‘Literary Language’ in vols 3 and 4 of The
Cambridge History of the English Language (gen. ed. Richard Hogg), and
more generally the work of Roy Harris on writing (for example, Signs of
Writing (London, 1995)). Two recent essays are also relevant: Kristen Poole,
‘Naming, Paradise Lost, and the Gendered Discourse of Perfect Language
Schemes’, English Literary Renaissance, vol. 38, no. 3 (2008), pp. 535–59; and
Domingo, ‘“The Natural Propensity of Imitation” ’, which is especially
useful for the notion of ‘false wit’ and the period’s distrust of ‘similitude’
(pp. 66–8), developing ideas from Roger D. Lund, ‘Wit, judgment, and the
misprisions of similitude’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 65, no. 1
(2004), pp. 53–74.
17. Booth, ‘Shakespeare’s Language and the Language of Shakespeare’s Time’,
p. 12.
18. Even those modern accounts of wordplay favourable to the notion of puns
still assume a duality of reference: that two distinct (i.e. different) things are
brought together by resemblance. Here, for example, is G.R. Hibbard, in his
1990 Oxford edition of Love’s Labour’s Lost, on the theatrical reception of
the play (p. 11):
It appealed to playgoers of the late forties – and has continued to
appeal to playgoers since – because it is, in many ways, a remarkably
‘modern’ work of art. In a world that was exploring and enjoying
the work of James Joyce its reliance on the pun had ceased to be an
irritant and became a positive asset. Good puns were being recog-
nised for what they were, a means of bringing two diverse kinds of
experience into a sudden, unexpected, and illuminating juxtaposi-
tion with one another.
19. Phil Benson, Ethnocentrism and the English Dictionary (London, 2001), pp.
43–4.
4: FRITTERS OF ENGLISH
1. As I have already noted, Margreta de Grazia’s essay ‘Shakespeare’s view of
language’ (1978) is an exemplary exception to this. Lynne Magnusson’s
forthcoming (2011) chapter on ‘Language’ for the Oxford Handbook to
Shakespeare is also careful to historicize the notion of language.
2. Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000);
Paula Blank, Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in
Renaissance Writings (London, 1996); Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance.
3. James Milroy, ‘Historical description and the ideology of the standard
language’, in Laura Wright (ed.), The Development of Standard English
1300–1800 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 11–28.
4. Blank, Broken English, p. 40. There are certainly many representations of
foreign accents of English in the literature, and I will consider these later.
5. Lambarde’s account of the conversation is BL, Additional Mss 15,664, fol.
226. I am quoting here from the transcription in James R. Siemon, Word
Against Word: Shakespearean Utterance (Boston, 2002), pp. 101–2 (and see
his note 31, p. 277).
6. See Parkes, Pause and Effect. When Edmund Coote discusses punctuation
(‘points’) in his The English Schoole-Master (1596), he does so entirely in
terms of pauses in spoken performance (p. 30):
You must obserue also those which we call *points or staies in writ-
ing: as this marke (,) like a small halfe Moone, noteth a small stay:
two prickes thus (:) maketh a longer stay, and one pricke thus (.) is
put for a full stay, as if we had ended . . . but for the true framing of
your voyce in all these, you must craue the help of your Maister.
7. The sense of ‘accent’ as a conscious feature of oral performance can be
traced to the rhetorical tradition: see especially Quintilian, The Orator’s
Education, 11.3, paras 1–9, 18, 33–9 (ed. D.A. Russell, vol. 5, pp. 85–119).
Quintilian combines the terms pronuntiatio and actio, covering verbal deli-
very and physical gesture, and explicitly linking them to the craft of acting
(paras 4–9). Renaissance literary theorists also used ‘accent’ in a technical
metrical sense, relating to stress positions in words and lines: see Vickers
(ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism, using the index entry for
‘accent’. In his Logonomia Anglica (1619), Alexander Gil distinguishes
‘grammatical’ and ‘rhetorical’ accent – by which he means respectively the
fixed stress patterns on polysyllabic words, and unfixed, performance-related
postlexical stress (pp. 174–6).
8. See my Shakespeare’s Grammar (London, 2003), pp. 46–8, for location of
effect in adjectives in early modern English.
9. Hotspur, another character whose blunt plainness comes in for satire at times,
similarly rejects the ‘holiday and lady terms’ of the effete messenger, the profes-
sional soldier scorning the affected language of the court (1H4 1.3.29–69).
10. Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford, 1984) pp. 165–70.

11. The same is true for early modern drama more generally. It is not difficult
to find examples of foreign accents: Dutch, Italian and French in William
Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money; Dutch in Dekker’s Shoemaker’s
Holiday and The Roaring Girl, Middleton’s No Wit, No Help Like a
Woman’s, and Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan; Welsh in Patient Grissell, Sir
John Oldcastle and Dekker’s Satiromastix; Irish in Captain Thomas Stukeley;
French in The Wisdom of Doctor Doddypol. And, of course, Welsh and
French in MW (where there is also talk of Germans, but no representation
of their accent). Almost always, lower-class characters are identified by the
content of their speech (stock phrases, proverbs, low reference) rather than
phonetic accent: for example, the drawers Hal satirizes in 2H4, or the
tinkers in the comedy Common Conditions (probably 1576).
Perhaps most importantly of all, where regional accents are depicted,
there is no implication of stupidity: Brome’s The Northern Lass is a good
example, and the issue of dialect in the play is discussed by Julie Sanders in
the excellent new internet edition of Brome: www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome/.
The discussion of dialect is in the ‘Introduction’ to the edition of The
Northern Lass, paragraphs 6–10: www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome/viewOriginal.
jsp?play=NL&type=CRIT. Sanders suggests that Brome is a counter-
example to my claim that there is surprisingly little extensive depiction of
dialect in early modern drama. Brome is certainly highly significant in this
regard (though he is also, I think, unusual in the detail of his dialect
depictions), but this is a less important issue than the view we share of the
non-stigmatized nature of Brome’s depiction.
12. Historical linguists note that ‘ich’ forms in the first person are generally
southern, while fricative voicing is found intermittently in Kent, but is most
strongly associated with more western accents: James Jennings, The Dialect
of the West of England; Particularly Somersetshire (London, 1869); William
D. Parish and William F. Shaw, A Dictionary of The Kentish Dialect and
Provincialisms in Use in the County of Kent (Lewes, 1888); Helge Kökeritz,
‘Elizabethan che vore ye “I Warrant You” ’, Modern Language Notes 57
(1942), pp. 98–103; E.J. Dobson, English Pronunciation 1500–1700 (1957),
vol. 1, p. 143; S.B. Palmer, ‘Origins of a Pronoun’, in What Planet is This?:
Archival URI: http://inamidst.com/notes/pronoun (2005).
13. Thomas Howell, The arbor of amitie wherin is comprised pleasant poems and
pretie poesies (London, 1568). The collection includes a number of poems,
only one of which is in dialect: ‘Iacke showes his qualities and great good will
to Ione’ (p. 36, fo. Fiiijr). The poem makes extensive use of ‘ich’ forms and
derivatives, as well as fricative voicing:
Though icham not, zo zeemlie chwot [= I wot],
as bene the Courtnoles gay:
Yet chaue a flaile, that will not faile,
to thrashe both night and day.
Though I am not so seemly I know

As are the courtiers gay
Yet I have a flail that will not fail
to thrash both night and day.
14. An explicit association with Kent is made in Howell’s ‘Iacke’ poem (‘For
once ich went, vp into Kent, / with the headman of our Towne’), and in the
songs of Ravenscroft: for example, Melismata (1611), no. 22, ‘A wooing Song
of a Yeoman of Kent’s Sonne’ (which begins, ‘I Haue a house and land in
Kent’). Ravenscroft then uses the same dialect extensively in the ‘Enamor-
ing’ section of his A Brief Discourse (1614). On Ravenscroft, see David
Mateer, ‘Thomas Ravenscroft’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.), New Grove Dictionary
of Music and Musicians (London, 1980); Joel I. Kramme, ‘ “A Country
Masque for Hodge Trillindle and His Zweet Hort Malkyn”: The Dramatic
Elements of Thomas Ravenscroft’s “Enamoring” Section of the Harmonies
from A Briefe Discourse, 1614’, www.icking-music-archive.org/scores/
ravenscroft/enamouring.html#Lyrics (n.d.).
15. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G.P. Goold, Loeb
Classical Library, 2 vols (New Haven, 1984).
16. Quoted from the annotated text given as an appendix to Kathleen Irace,
‘Mak’s Sothren Tothe: A Philological and Critical Study of the Dialect Joke
in the Second Shepherd’s Play’, Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renais-
sance Studies, vol. 21, no.1 (1990), pp. 38–51.
17. Line references are to the Malone Society edition of the play: Timon, ed.
J.C. Bulman and J.M. Nosworthy (Oxford, 1980).
18. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, p. 193. Bate’s wider discussion at this point
explores in more detail the intense and particular nature of Shakespeare’s
internalization of the language of Ovid and Golding (pp. 190–201).
19. Blank, Broken English, p. 40.
20. See David Crystal, Pronouncing Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2005) for a dis-
cussion of this experimental production.
21. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, pp. 55 and 60. The role of Chancery
Standard in the development of Standard English is questioned extensively
in Wright (ed.), The Development of Standard English.
22. These uncertainties are traced in more detail in Blank, Broken English, pp.
1–32, and Terttu Nevalainen, An Introduction to Early Modern English
(Edinburgh, 2006), pp. 13–28.
23. Quoted here from Vickers (ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism, p.
176. Vickers gives further references for this debate in English and classical
literature.
24. See D.N.C. Wood, ‘Elizabethan English and Richard Carew’, Neophilogus 61
(1977), pp. 304–15, for further discussion of Carew and the English language.
25. In parallel to this, and challenging Puttenham’s rejection of the language of
the ‘craftes man’, recent work claims a general European valuing of the
language of artisans, and those with direct, practical knowledge of things,
which accompanies the rise of scientific method at the expense of canonical,

textual knowledge. See Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and
Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 2004), and also Eric H. Ash,
Power, Knowledge, and Expertise in Elizabethan England (Baltimore, 2004), and
Rebecca W. Bushnell, Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens
(Ithaca, 2003), for more specialized studies which trace the debates about know-
ledge, experience and language in specific areas. Interesting new biograph-
ical work on Puttenham throws new light on his relation to courtliness: see
Steven W. May, ‘George Puttenham’s Lewd and Illicit Career’, Texas Studies
in Literature and Language, vol. 50, no.2 (2008), pp. 143–76.
26. A possible counter-argument to the one I make here can be found in
Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Richard Carew, William Shakespeare, and the
politics of translating Virgil in early modern England and Scotland’,
International Journal of the Classical Tradition, vol. 5, no. 4 (1999), pp.
507–27. Tudeau-Clayton argues that translations of Virgil are key in
establishing a normative standard for English (because Virgil was a symbol
of the standardization of Latin). This is an impressive article, but I
nonetheless part company with Tudeau-Clayton when she suggests (p. 512)
that decorum is effectively prescriptivism, establishing a single, ‘proper’ or
‘correct’ version of English. My feeling is that this is a direct contradiction
of what decorum actually implied, and what rhetorical practice at the time
comprised: the very notion of decorum implies an acceptance of variation
(which is excluded by prescriptivism); the very essence of decorum is
knowing when to use which variety of English (or any other language).
Perhaps decorum develops into prescription in the eighteenth century, as
writers identify only one style that can ever appear in print, but even this
would need further investigation.
27. And it can also be compared with Quintilian, 11.3, paras 33–4: ‘though
words must be pronounced in full, it is tiresome and offensive to put a value
on every letter’. For early modern spelling reformers, see Nevalainen,
Introduction to Early Modern English, pp. 31–44.
28. Even real schoolmasters were not as intolerant of variation as this: in
Edmund Coote’s The English Schoole-maister (1596, though here quoted
from the 1627 edition), a dialogue explores current spelling (p. 29 [p. 33 in
the 1596 edition]):
Robert. What spelleth b, r, a, n, c, h?
Iohn. Branch.
Robert. Nay, but you should put in (u).
Iohn. That skilleth not, for both wayes be vsuall.
Robert. How spell you might?
Iohn. M, i, g, h, t.
Robert. Why put you in (gh?) for m, i, t, e spelleth mite.
Iohn. True, but with (gh) is the truer writing, and it should
haue a little sound.
29. James VI and I, Basilikon Doron (1595), quoted from Manfred Görlach,
Introduction to Early Modern English (Cambridge, 1991), p. 311.
30. Ute Dons, Descriptive Adequacy of Early Modern Grammars (Berlin, 2004).
31. John Palsgrave, Lesclaricissement de la langue francoyse (1530), as discussed in
Gabriele Stein, John Palsgrave as Renaissance Linguist: A Pioneer in Vernacu-
lar Language Description (Oxford, 1997), p. 81.
32. Nevalainen, Introduction to Early Modern English, pp. 16–20.
33. Nevalainen, Introduction to Early Modern English, cites these figures on p.
16, based on Ian Michael, English Grammatical Categories and the Tradition
to 1800 (Cambridge, 1970).
34. Linda Mitchell, Grammar Wars: Language as Cultural Battlefield in Seven-
teenth and Eighteenth Century England (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 1–4.
35. Mitchell, Grammar Wars, pp. 23, 133–7.
5: AGENCY AND UNCERTAINTY

IN SHAKESPEARE’S SYNTAX
1. As Brian Vickers shows in a section on ‘compositio’ in Shakespeare, ‘A Lover’s
Complaint’, and John Davies of Hereford (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 176–93.
2. See A.D. Scaglione, The Classical Theory of Composition (Chapel Hill, 1972),
for a full exposition of this theory of mental process.
3. I should stress that these are not definitions of what a subject or verb are in
grammatical terms, but rather observations of the semantic nature and role
of the things most frequently found in these sentence positions.
4. We could, of course, argue about the truth of this theory: it seems plausible
that at the level of the universe as a whole, it is more true to say that
inanimate things do things to animate ones – think of time or gravity acting
on us, for example. Such links between real-world and grammatical-
semantic relationships were neither fanciful nor abstract in the Renaissance:
Cummings, Literary Culture of the Reformation, pp. 159–75, shows the
extent to which very real questions about the agency and justice of God
hinged on grammatical mood in Renaissance theology.
Other word-orders are also possible in English for various reasons, such
as poetic inversions, emphasis and Latin influence. John Porter Houston’s
discussion of SOV order in Shakespeare deserves to be more widely known
and investigated: he claims that SOV order becomes more common over
Shakespeare’s career, and extends over longer pieces of text (Shakespearean
Sentences: A Study in Style and Syntax (Baton Rouge, 1988), pp. 1–21), and
that by the early 1600s ‘Shakespeare appears . . . to have been . . . the sole
serious exponent of this’ (p. 3).
5. See Dieter Stein, The Semantics of Syntactic Change: aspects of the evolution
of ‘do’ in English (Berlin, 1990) for the role of periphrastic ‘do’ in marking
salient shifts in discourse.
6. The reflexive pronouns are usually printed as two words in Shakespeare’s

time (‘my self ’ rather than ‘myself ’), and modern editions silently elide the
two words into one (so ‘my self ’ becomes ‘myself ’). In fact, the situation is
slightly more complex than this, since many early modern printers con-
sistently print ‘himself ’ as one word, while all other reflexive forms (‘my
self ’, ‘your self ’ and so on) are printed as two. The Shakespeare First Folio
is generally consistent in this distinction, as are many of the quarto texts (so
in ‘tidying up’ what looks like meaningless variation in spacing, modern
editors in fact efface a consistent distinction in the early texts). OED
examples show that ‘himself ’ is more likely than ‘him self ’ after 1500, and
becomes more and more frequent as the century progresses, while ‘myself ’
becomes more likely than ‘my self ’ only in the late 1600s.
7. There is a huge literature on the alleged development of the self in the early
modern period: as starting points, see Jonathan Sawday, ‘Self and Selfhood
in the Seventeenth Century’, and Peter Burke, ‘Representations of the Self
from Petrarch to Descartes’, both in Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self:
Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London, 1997), pp. 29–48 and
17–28 respectively. For some sense of the controversy, see David Nirenberg,
‘Unrenounceable Core’ (a review of Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within The
Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity (Princeton, 2009)), London
Review of Books, vol. 31, no. 14 (23 July 2009).
8. ‘His speech was like a tangled chain; nothing impaired, but all disordered’
(MND 5.1.124–5).
9. ‘Aside’ is fully defined in David Kaufer, Suguru Ishikazi, Brian Butler and
Jeff Collins, The Power of Words: Unveiling the Speaker and Writer’s Hidden
Craft (New Jersey, 2004), pp. 173–4.
10. Taken from Kaufer et al., The Power of Words, p. 174.
11. Figures from Jonathan Hope, The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays: A
Socio-linguistic Study (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 40–43.
12. Kaufer et al., The Power of Words, p. 144.
13. Hope, The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays, pp. 40–43.
14. Hope, The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays, pp. 40–43.
15. Though Brian Vickers argues that Shakespeare has a more local concern in
that he is here trying to keep the audience’s responses intact ahead of the
climactic recognition scene which they will experience directly (The Artistry
of Shakespeare’s Prose (London, 1968), pp. 422–5).
16. This is of course just one example – and Shakespeare’s late style is charac-
terized by lexical as well as syntactic effects (for some of which, see Jonathan
Smith’s work below). On Shakespeare’s late style, see: Jonathan Smith, ‘The
language of Leontes’, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 4 (1968), pp.
317–27; J.P. Thorne, ‘The grammar of jealousy: a note on the character of
Leontes’, in A.J. Aitken, Angus McIntosh and Hermann Pálsson (eds),
Edinburgh Studies in English and Scots (London, 1971), pp. 55–65; Russ
McDonald, Shakespeare’s Late Style (Cambridge, 2006); Michael Witmore
and Jonathan Hope, ‘Shakespeare by the numbers: on the linguistic texture

of the Late Plays’, in Subha Mukherji and Raphael Lyne (eds), Early
Modern Tragicomedy (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 133–53; Brian Vickers, ‘App-
roaching Shakespeare’s late style’, Early Modern Literary Studies, vol. 13,
no. 3 (January 2008), 6.1–26, URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/13-
3/revmed.htm (a hostile review of McDonald’s Shakespeare’s Late Style,
but also an excellent general survey of linguistic approaches to the late plays).
For a challenge to the very notion of ‘lateness’, see Gordon McMullan,
Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death
(Cambridge, 2007).
17. John Porter Houston calls this type of sentence ‘additive or descending’,
characterizing it as one in which ‘the main clause comes early and subordi-
nates . . . continue the thought’ (Shakespearean Sentences, p. 27).
18. Houston calls this type of sentence ‘incremental’, and says that they are
‘widespread in Renaissance prose and constitute the very opposite of a
classical period: there is no syntactic suspension and often the drift of
thought meanders on with little regard for any logical relation to its point of
departure’ (Shakespearean Sentences, p. 28). He has further discussion of
this type of sentence in Shakespeare and Marlowe on pp. 40–43 and 52–9.
6: THE LANGUAGE OF GENRE

1. On decorum, see Puttenham’s treatment, usefully anthologized in Vickers
(ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism, pp. 227–31, and my discussions
in Chapters 1 (note 22) and 4.
2. See the work of Tiffany Stern on advertising early modern plays: ‘ “On each
Wall / And Corner Post”: Playbills, Title-pages, and Advertising in Early
Modern London’, English Literary Renaissance (ELR) 36 (2006), pp. 57–85;
and Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2009).
3. For example, Henry V is listed as starting on p. 69, but the ‘Catalogve’ page
also states (correctly) that 2 Henry IV starts on p. 74! In fact, 2 Henry IV
finishes on p. 102, and the first page of Henry V ought to be numbered 103.
4. Batman upon Bartholome (London, 1582) is Stephen Batman’s edited
revision of a translation by John Trevisa (died 1402) of a thirteenth-century
Latin text, De proprietatibus rerum (On the order of things), originally by
Bartholomaeus Anglicus. The text is a compendium of knowledge, covering
theology, astrology and the natural sciences.
5. For a detailed analysis of, and challenge to, our culture’s tendency to think
in this way, see McMullan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing.
6. See, for example, Vickers (ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism,
‘Introduction’, pp. 1–55.
7. Perhaps because it was the newest of the genres: see David Scott Kastan,
‘Shakespeare and History’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, ed.
Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 167–182.
8. The program was developed by Dave Kaufer and Suguru Ishiguru

(Carnegie-Mellon University, USA), and my co-researcher is Michael
Witmore (Madison-Wisconsin University, USA). A description and guide
to Docuscope phase 1 can be found at: www.betterwriting.net/projects/
fed01/dsc_fed01.html.
9. The theoretical basis of Docuscope’s organization is explained, and its
string categories described in full detail, in Kaufer et al., The Power of Words.
The Hallidayan model is explained on pp. 51–5.
10. Although its Cluster-based model of text function has been carefully
developed over a number of years, and has much empirical support from the
success of Docuscope as a text analysis device, it remains a hypothesis, open
to modification or complete rejection. In fact, all of our conclusions about
Shakespeare so far are based on a micro-analysis of relative LAT frequency,
rather than assumptions about how the LATs may group into Families or
Clusters – our conclusions would not change if theoretical objections
altered the make-up or number of Clusters, or rejected them completely.
11. Adapted from Kaufer et al., Power of Words, pp. 59–88.
12. Adapted from Kaufer et al., Power of Words, p. 60.
13. See Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore, ‘The very large textual object: a
prosthetic reading of Shakespeare’, Early Modern Literary Studies, vol. 9,
no. 3/Special Issue 12 ( January 2004), 6.1–36.
14. These findings are from our initial experiments with Docuscope, reported
in Hope and Witmore, ‘The very large textual object’; and Witmore and
Hope, ‘Shakespeare by the numbers’. New work in the project is initially
discussed on Witmore’s blog at winedarksea.org. See also, ‘The hundredth
psalm to the tune of “Green Sleeves”: Digital Approaches to the Language
of Genre’, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 3 (Fall, 2010).
15. The Japanese text of the Henry VI plays was translated by Kazuko
Matsuoka, and prepared for the stage by Shoichiro Kawai of Tokyo
University. Here, in the interests of strangeness, is the Japanese (many
thanks to Shoichiro Kawai):
帆を上げて⾵と潮の流れを味⽅につけようが、
この⼿はお前の真っ⿊な髪をむんずと掴み、
切り落としたばかりのお前の⾸がまだあたたかいうちに、
したたる⾎で地⾯にこう書き記してやる、
「⾵を変え⾵のごとく変わるウォリックももはや変わることなし」。
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———— , Shakespeare, ‘A Lover’s Complaint’, and John Davies of Hereford (Cam-
bridge, 2007)
Wallis, John, Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae (London, 1653)
Waswo, Richard, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1987)
Wells, Stanley, Modernising Shakespeare’s Spelling (Oxford, 1979)
Whyman, John, ‘Thomas Milles’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford, 2004): www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/18753
Wilkins, John, Mercury, or The Secret and Swift Messenger (London, 1641)
Wilson, Thomas, The Arte of Rhetorique (London, 1553)
———— , The Arte of Rhetorique (2nd edn, 1560), in Vickers (ed.), English
Renaissance Literary Criticism, pp. 73–124
Wind, Edgar, ‘“Hercules” and “Orpheus”: Two Mock-Herioc Designs by
Dürer’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, vol. 2, no. 3 (1939), pp. 206–18
Witmore, Michael, Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renais-
sance (Ithaca, 2007)
————, and Jonathan Hope, 2007, ‘Shakespeare by the numbers: on the
linguistic texture of the Late Plays’, in Subha Mukherji and Raphael Lyne
(eds), Early Modern Tragicomedy (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 133–53
Wittkower, Rudolf, ‘“Grammatica”: From Martinus Capella to Hogarth’, Journal
of the Warburg Institute, vol. 2, no. 1 (1938), pp. 82–4
Wood, D.N.C., ‘Elizabethan English and Richard Carew’, Neophilogus 61 (1977),
pp. 304–15
Wright, Laura (ed.), The Development of Standard English 1300–1800 (Cam-
bridge, 2000)
INDEX
accent 99–121, 222, 223 Atherton, C. 213
as non-realist symbol 112–3, autobiography (Docuscope LAT)
119–20 196–7
acte – see pronuntiatio Austen, Gillian 214
Adamic naming 10–11, 14–6 Autolycus 54–5, 207, 217
Adamson, Sylvia 221 auxiliary ‘do’ 148–50, 226
Addison, Thomas 77, 88–9, 90, 91
additive structures 161, 168–9 Babel 6, 13–5, 18, 27–8, 36, 124, 128,
adjective 103–4, 142–3, 148, 222 210
attributive 153–5, 203 Bacchus (Dionysus) 53–4, 58, 64–5
adverbial 140–1, 143, 162, 164, 165, Bacon, Francis 4–5, 15–6, 26–8,
169, 205 209–10
advertising bills 171 Barry, Lording 82
agency 138–50 Bate, Jonathan 209, 224
Aglauros 65–6 Batman upon Bartholome 172, 174,
Ajax 31, 40–1 228
Albani, Francesco 54 Battus 65, 118–9, 120
Alciato 57–8, 214, 218 Blackfriars 175
Alexander, Catherine 210 Blank, Paula 99, 121–2, 123
Allestree, Richard 32 bread 11
animacy 140–4 Bartley, Margaret xi
animals 6, 18, 21, 41, 43, 46–7, 63 Bedwell, William 174
antanaclasis 83–8, 220 beer, good ix
Apollo 52–6, 58–9, 64, 117, 216 bene (good) 35, 138–9
apology (Docuscope LAT) 196–7 Benson, Phil x, 95
apposition 164–5, 169 Berry, Philippa 219
Aristotle 2–3, 85 , 124, 171, 209 Bible (Authorized Version) 28–9, 135
concept of the soul 16–7 Booth, Stephen 78–80, 92–3, 97, 220
works: Topics 27 Bowen, Barbara 216
Argus 61–3 Brome, Richard 223
artifice, in language x, 43, 45–7, 54, Brooke, Raphe 178–9
55–9, 66–7, 102 Bryson, Norman 217
Ashizu, Kaori xii Bull, Malcolm x, 213–4
aside (Docuscope LAT) 151–69, 227 Bullokar, John 123, 133
asteismus 83, 85 Bullokar, William 136
asyndetic structures 41–2, 161, Burness, Edwina 210
166–9, 171 Burton, William 174, 178
Index 241
Caliban 40 curiosity (Docuscope LAT) 200, 205

Calumny of Apelles, The 216–7
Camilli, Camillo 211 Daniel, Samuel 172
Carew, Richard 211, 212, 224, 225 decorum 37, 102, 106, 127, 128–9,
works: The Examination of Men’s 171, 225, 228
Wits 7–13, 19–21, 24–6; Survey of de Court, Jean 56, 218
Cornwall 127 de Grazia, Margreta x, 78–80, 95–7,
Casio 41 210, 215, 219, 220, 222
Cast, David 217 deixis 146
catachresis 215 Demos, Raphael 209
catalogue 171–86 Dempsey, Charles 216
Cave, Terrance 213 deny-disclaim (Docuscope LAT)
Cawdrey, Robert 133 196–7, 202
Caxton, William 123–4 Derrida, Jaques 71, 79–80
Chancery English 123 dialect x, 37, 113–21, 123, 127–8,
Chandler, Raymond 171 133–5
Chapman, George (translation of speakers not necessarily
Homer’s Iliad) 3–7, 209 uneducated or poor 119–20
Charles, David 209 Diana 55
children 19–21 dictionary ix, 90–1, 93–6
Chione 54–5 direct address (Docuscope LAT)
Chomsky, Noam 138 196–7
Cicero 58, 77, 85 Dionysus (see Bacchus)
Coleridge, S.T. 77–8 discourse 20, 24, 26, 44–7
comedy (genre) 187, 192–7, 200, 201, dispositio 210
202, 203–4 divine madness 64–5
common 3, 31, 37 Dobson, E.J. 133
common authority (Docuscope LAT) Docuscope 151–5, 165, 187–205, 229
197–200 LAT (language action type)
compositio 138–9, 140–1, 159, 160, 189–91
226 Doi, Yuko xii
confusion of tongues – see Babel Domingo, Darryl 219, 221
Cooper, Christopher 136 Dons, Ute 135
coordination 41–2, 160–9 Dossi, Dosso 67, 69, 218
Coote, Edmund 133–5, 222, 225 Draper, J.W. 216
copia 28–9, 37, 67–8 Dutch (people) 8, 21
Cormack, Bradin 215
Cornish 127, 211 Eachard, John 76, 86
Coudert, Alison 212 -ed form 143
Cowley, Abraham 76–7, 86, 219 Edgar 108, 113–7, 120–1
Crooke, Helkiah 23 E.K. 126
Culler, Jonathan 220 Elam, Keir 77–8, 216, 219
Cummings, Brian 35, 213, 214, 215, Elizabeth I 100, 108–9
226 Ellroy, James 171
242 Index
elocutio 210 Greek (language) 36, 135

eloquence 24–6 Greene, Robert 82
Elyot, Thomas 130
error 34–7, 214–5 Hamlet 46, 121
Ersamus 35, 213 Harman, Thomas 129–30
Evans, Malcolm 215–6 Harris, Roy 221
Ewbank, Inga Stina 210 Hart, John 126–7
exempla (example) 35 Harvey, Gabriel 209
Hayashi, Masako xii
Fall, the 32–3 Hebrew (language) 9, 18, 36, 135,
Fay, H.C. 209 212
Favyn, Andrew 178 Hecht, Peter 216–7
Ficino 59 Hemmings and Condell 184
Fiorenza, Giancarlo 219 Hercules Gallicus 34, 213–4
First Folio (Shakespeare’s) 7 Hermes – see Mercury
first person (Docuscope LAT) Hermes Trismegistus 67, 219
189–91, 192–6 Herodotus 17–8
Fisher, John 37 Hirota, Atsuhiko xii
Fleming, Abraham 176 history (genre) 187, 191, 192, 193,
Fortune 57–8 197–200, 201, 204
fountains, and language 6–7, 55–7 Homer 3–4
Fox, Adam 98–9, 123, 133 Hoskyns, John 77, 86, 220–1
Foxley, Rachel 213 Houston, John Porter 226, 228
Fredericks, B.R. 216 Howell, Thomas 116–7, 223
Freud, Sigmund 79–81 Huarte, Juan 211, 212
fricative voicing 115–7 works: Examen de Ingenios 7–13,
Frienkel, Lisa 214–5 19–21, 24–6
Frye, Roland Mushat 214, 216 Humanism 34–7, 139, 214
Fudge, Erica 212–3 Hutchings, C.M. 211
Galen 8, 21, 25 Iliad 3–7, 119

Gallacher, Patrick 216 imagination 19–21, 24–5
Gammer Gurton’s Needle 116–7, 119 imitatio 62
Gascoigne, George 214 immediacy (Docuscope LAT) 197,
genre x, 170–205 200, 205
pastoral 171 imperative (Docuscope LAT) 201,
Gil, Alexander 123, 126–7, 133, 222 203–4
Globe theatre (London) 75 index 172
Golding, Arthur 59–66, 117–21 -ing form 141–3, 146–7
Goltzius, Hendrick 216–7 inventio 210
Grammar (personified) 6, 56–7, 214, Io 59–64
217 Irvine, Martin 214
grammar 34–7, 135–6, 214 Isabella 68
Graziani, René 217 Ishiguru, Suguru 229
Index 243
iterative criticism 206 22–8, 63–4, 66–7, 218; and error

Iyeiri, Yoko xi 33, 34–7; and genre 170–205; and
Humanism 28–34; judged by
Jackson, MacDonald P. 216 content not form 30, 35, 99,
Jajdelska, Elspeth 213 107–10, 122; languages (and
Jaggard, William 7, 174, 178–80, dialects) as equal 8–10, 14–5,
186, 212 36–7, 121–37; learning 19–21;
James VI and I 135, 177–8, 180 ‘natural’ or unplanned 58, 64;
Japanese 207 originality and 30–1, 64–5; plain
Johnson, Samuel 76, 79, 82, 95–6, style 109–10; Platonic approach to
219 2–3, 5, 8–21, 26, 36, 64, 213;
Jonson, Ben 30–1, 82, 127, 186 present-day conceptions of 4–5,
works: Catiline 180; Sejanus 180; 30–1, 67, 133, 206; as public
Workes 180–1 29–30; ‘real’, ‘original’ or ideal
Joseph, Miriam 81 language 9–10, 14–6, 16–21,
Jove – see Jupiter 26–8, 36; Renaissance approaches
Juliet 1–3 to xiii, 1–39, 43, 47, 55–9, 66–8,
Juno 59–61, 65 98–137, 206; scientific 15–6; and
Jupiter (Jove) 54, 59–62, 65 society 31–2; as speech 4–5, 6, 39;
variation in 28–9, 35, 36, 98–137;
Kastan, David Scott 228 as writing 5;
Kaufer, David 229 Lara 65
Kawabe, Ryuko xii Larque, Thomas 122
Kawai, Shoichiro xii, 229 late style x, 139, 145, 151–69, 180–2,
Kent (character) 109–10, 115, 116 227–8
Kent (county) 116–7, 212, 213, 214 Latin (language) 9, 35–6, 125, 225,
Kentich (literary dialect) 115–21 226
Kentish (actual dialect) 116–20, 223 letters 5
Kerrigan, John 48, 217 Lewis, Rhodri 212
Kiefer, Frederick 216 Linche, Richard 71
King’s Men, The 175 Lollio 119, 120
Koran 174 London Prodigal, The 116–7
Luhrmann, Baz 43
Lambarde, William 100
language Aristotlelian approach to Macbeth xii
2–3, 5–6, 7, 8–21, 26–7, 30, 36, Magnusson, Lynne 222
39, 124, 213; artifice in x; Mahood, Molly 76, 77, 81, 86, 219,
celebrated as divine 28–34; 220
‘common’ language 3, 31, 123–30; main clause 166–8
courtly and affected or extreme Mantegna, Andrea 55
speech 109–10, 124–6, 127–8; Marcadé 47–9, 217
disordered 21, 41–2, 44–7; Marlowe, Christopher 59
distinct from reason and Mars 56
discourse 20–1, 41; distrust of Marsyas 53
244 Index
Mazzio, Carla 99, 214 Ophelia 31, 44–6

McDonald, Russ 81, 219, 220, 227, Orgel, Stephen 217
228 Ovid works: Metamorphoses 59–66,
McMullan, Gordon 228 117–21, 209, 216, 217, 219
memory 8, 19–21, 24–5
memoria 210 Padley, G.A. 214
Mendyk, S. 211 Palsgrave, John 135–6
mental image (cogitations) 5 paronomasia 83, 84–6, 88, 220–1
Mercury (Hermes) x, xi, 5, 6, 31, 34, Parker, Pat 81, 220
47–8, 51–71, 107, 117–9, 121, Parnassus 7, 55
155, 207, 209, 214, 215–7, 218, passive forms 143–4, 146
219 past tense narrative 148, 200
and silence 65–9, 219 Peele, George 61–2
Mercutio 41–4, 46, 107, 121, 215, Pegasus 55–7, 216
216 Perkins, William 22–3
Mexía, Pedro 211–2 Perseus 6
works: Time’s Storehouse 7–13, Petowe, Henry 59
16–21 Phinney, Edward 209
Meyer, Max 212 phoneme 90
Miége, Guy 136 Phrygian (language) 18
Milles, Thomas 178, 179, 212 Pittsburgh xi
works: Time’s Storehouse 7–13, Plato 2–3, 5, 64, 85, 209
16–21 concept of the soul 17
Milroy, James 99 works: Phaedrus 5
Mioloa, R.S. 209 Plett, Heinrich 210, 211, 217
Mitchell, Linda 136 poetic furor (divine madness) 44, 58,
modernism ix 64, 71
Modrak, Deborah 209 Poole, Kirsten 221
Moncur, Bobby 8, 343 Pre-Raphaelites 31, 45
More, Thomas 37, 215 prescriptivism ix, 35, 124, 132–3,
Motayama, Tetsu xii 136
muses 55–6, 64 present tense narrative (present for
my self, myself 148–50, 227 past) 146–50
print 7, 39, 149
Nakabachi, Fumiko xii pronoun + self compounds 148–50,
narrative, narration 139–50, 155, 227
157–8, 195–6, 200 pronuntiatio 102, 210, 222
Nature 57–8 Protestant 32, 36
Nevalainen, Terttu 136 postmodernism ix, x
non-finite form 142–3, 147, 162, pub, how to spot a good one ix
164, 165, 168 punctuation (pointing) 100–1, 222
puns, wordplay x, 42–3, 72–97, 220,
object 139–50 221
Ong, Walter 39 hostility to 76–81; defence of 81;
Index 245
eighteenth-century definitions of Saenger, Paul 213

88–9, 90–1, 94–7; none in Saitoh, Hiraku xii
Shakespeare 81; Renaissance Salmon, Vivian 210, 212
definition of 86–7, 91, 94–7, Sakai, Takayuki xii
96–7; rhetorical terms for 83–9 Sanders, Julie 223
Puttenham, George 86–7, 89, 91, Sawday, Jonathan xi, 227
124, 126, 127–9, 218, 224–5 Saussure, Ferdinand 92
Scaglione, A.D. 226
quibble 76, 82–3 Schmitter, Peter 212
quib 82–3 Scholasticism 34–7, 135, 136, 139,
Quintilian 125–6, 222, 225 214
quip 82–3 scriptio continua 89
quirk 82–3 Second Shepherds’ Play 116–7, 119,
224
Ramage, Edwin 215 Sedley, David 209
ratio (logic) 35 self 139, 147–50, 194–6, 205, 227
Ravenscroft, Thomas 116–7, 224 self-disclosure (Docuscope LAT)
Read, Malcolm 211 189, 190–1, 194–6
reason 6, 20, 33, 41, 43, 44–7 sentence fragments 146
reading 31 sentence structure 159–69
recte (correct) 35, 138–9 Serjeantson, R.W. 213
Redfern, Walter 220 Shakespeare, William accent and
refute that (Docuscope LAT) 196–7, dialect in 99–121, 121–3; attitude
202, 205 to linguistic variation 99, 130–3;
relative clause 151–69 ‘early’ syntactic style 166–7; genre
res et verba 106 in 170–205; Histories 182–5; late
rhetoric 3, 34–7 , 138–9, 169, 210 style x, 139, 145, 151–69, 180–2,
distrust of 22–8, 63, 66–7, 213; 227–8; essential linguistic DNA of
‘plain’ style 24–5, 109–10; and 139–44; First Folio 7, 171–86,
silence 68–9; terms: see separate 227; frequency of relativisation in
entries 153; satirises linguistic pretention
Rhetorica ad Herennium 77, 220–1 25–6, 109–10, 130–3; Second
Rhodes, Matthew 175 Folio 184–5; syntax 139–69; no
Ricks, Christopher 220 puns in 81; lower class speech not
Rigolot, François 214–5 automatically stigmatised 116; no
Robertson, Kellie xi words in 96
Robertson, Robert 29–30, 33–4, 38 works: As You Like It 85, 102,
Rogers, Carmen 211 107–8, 194–6; The Comedy of
Romantics, Romanticism ix, 31, 44, Errors 72–5; Coriolanus 103;
45, 64 Cymbeline 84–5, 85, 165–9, 184,
Romeo 31, 41–4 187; Hamlet 31, 44–6, 102, 204; I
Romeo and Juliet 1, 31 Henry IV 105; 2 Henry IV 105–6,
182–5, 228; Henry V 79, 84,
St Augustine 18–9, 213 110–13, 139–44, 197–200, 228;
246 Index
1–3 Henry VI xii, 182–5, 206–7; subjective percept (Docuscope LAT)

Henry VIII 183; Julius Caesar 205
106, 184; King John 106, 109; subjectivity 145–69, 204–5
King Lear 108–10, 113–21, 184, subordination 160–9
187; Love’s Labour’s Lost 47–55, syllepsis 83–4, 87, 88, 220
58–9, 64–65, 69–71, 84, 102–3, syndetic structures 161, 166–7
130–3, 216, 221; Macbeth xii, syntax 138–69
103–4, 202–3; Measure for
Measure 68; The Merry Wives of table (of contents) 172–4, 179
Windsor 84; A Midsummer Night’s Takamiya, Toshiyuki xii
Dream 101; Much Ado About Tani, Akinobu xi
Nothing 83; Othello 41, 104, texts xiii
144–50, 172; Rape of Lucrece 101; that (relative pronoun) 152–9
Richard II 100, 105, 182–5; Theuth 5
Richard III 182–5; Romeo and think back (Docuscope LAT) 200,
Juliet 1, 31, 41–4, 107; Sonnets 44; 204–5
The Tempest 180; Titus Andronicus think positive (Docuscope LAT) 190
61–2, 170; Troilus and Cressida 31, think negative (Docuscope LAT)
40–1, 68–9, 172, 187; Twelfth 190, 197, 201–3
Night 104; The Winter’s Tale 54–5, Timon (anonymous play) 116–7, 119,
78, 155–65 120, 224
Shaksper discussion list 122 Titivillus 214
Sherrer, Grace 212 Toda, Yushin xii
sign 92–4 Tokyo 206–7
signal 92–4 tongue 22–3, 210
signified 92–4 tragedy (genre) 187, 192, 193–4, 197,
silence x, 21, 31, 65–9, 219 200, 201–5
Smith, Jennifer xi Traquitantos 12–3
sociable 31, 43, 47 Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret 216, 225
society 6, 31, 46 Two Merry Milke-Maids, The 171
Socrates 5, 25 Tyndale, William 37, 210
Soth, Lauren 216
Sowerby, Robin 209 Uchida, Mitsume xi
Spanish (people) 8 Ueda, Shuzo xii
speech 4–7, 19, 21, 29–34, 37–9, Ulysses 55
89–90 uncertainty (Docuscope LAT) 190,
Spenser, Edmund 126, 127 196–7, 205
Spillane, Micky 171 understanding 8, 19–21, 24–6
Standard English 99 urban vs rural speech 115–6, 119–20,
standardisation ideology of xiii, 36 125–6, 215
98–9, 122–37, 222; and puns 92–7
Stein, Dieter 226 van Helmont, Francis Mercury 15,
Stern, Tiffany 228 212
subject 139–50, 196, 226 variation 98–137
Index 247
Vazquez, Yolanda 122 Whyman, John 212

Veldman, Ilja 216 Wilkins, John 38–9
Venus 56, 59, 64 Wilson, Thomas 29, 32–4, 124, 125
Vickers, Brian xi, 213, 217, 218, 220, Wind, Edgar 214, 216
222, 224, 226, 227, 228 wine 11
Vincent, Augustine 178 Witmore, Michael xi, 206, 212,
Vives 31 226–7, 229
voice 21 Wittkower, Rudolf 218
Vulcan 56 Wood, D.N.C. 211, 224
word 4–5, 8, 39, 72–97, 209, 221
Wallis, John 136, 207, 210 none in Shakespeare 96
Waswo, Richard 214 wordplay – see puns
whelked 121 Woudhuysen, Henry 217
which (relative pronoun) 152–9 writing 5, 37–9, 89, 206–7, 221

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1.

Shakespeare and Language Prelims:Layout 1 22/9/10 13:04 Page i

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Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare

Imprint previously known as Arden Shakespeare

50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway

BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Diana logo

First published in 2010 by Methuen Drama

© Jonathan Hope 2010

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-9042-7169-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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afterword: tokyo, march 2010 206

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One of the ways to spot a good pub in Britain is to look behind

creativity. We are still, despite a rhetoric of egalitarian political

a chapter on language for The New Cambridge Companion to

Kyoto we were also made welcome by Takayuki Sakai, Yuko Doi,

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1. William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost (London, 1598)

9. Math. Rhodes, The Dismall Day, at the Black-Fryers

1. Forms of the titles of the Histories in the First Folio.

IDEAS ABOUT LANGUAGE

It is a well-known scene. Juliet laments the unfortunate name of

2 Shakespeare and Language

I like linguistics, but I have to admit that not much linguistic

Ideas about Language in the Renaissance 3

are likely to revert to the other, consciously or not, a page or two

cogitations, words, letters

4 Shakespeare and Language

Phylides neare him stept

Chapman here develops a series of metaphors and images far

Ideas about Language in the Renaissance 5

Bacon has it (quoting Aristotle), jarringly, for us, distinguishing

6 Shakespeare and Language

communicative efficiency, which meant not just clear communi-

Ideas about Language in the Renaissance 7

of the Muses sprang on Mount Parnassus).6 The image also calls

‘a question, much hammered between

8 Shakespeare and Language

successful – and Huarte is known to have been highly influential

Ideas about Language in the Renaissance 9

That languages are at pleasure, and a conceit of mens

Taking the Aristotelian position that all languages are devised by

10 Shakespeare and Language

But I want to stress the availability of this philosophy of equality

Ideas about Language in the Renaissance 11

difference between ‘water’, which is opaque and arbitrary, and

For Aristotle, as we have seen, human languages are entirely

12 Shakespeare and Language

long, nor enforcing an vnseemly framing of the mouth

Ideas about Language in the Renaissance 13

longer looking arose, saying, gentlemen I wil play no

This persistence of the non-rational approach to language is