The Shakespeare-Expositor - Thomas Keightley

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of a word prevailed to some extent.

      14.

      The pronunciation of Shakespeare's time of course differed in many points from that of the present day. Thus aspect and many other words were accented, and properly, on the last syllable; we also have obdúrate, árchbishop, cónfessor, &c. In words such as case, pace, lace, the French sound of the a seems to have been partially retained—Chaucer writes these words cas, caas, paas, laas—along with the ordinary English sound. Chaucer also writes 'made' maad, Raleigh 'safe' sauf; and as the Master of the Revels wrote Shakespeare's name Shaxberd, we may suppose that shake and terms of a similar form were pronounced shak, &c. If we do not pronounce lac'd as last in "lac'd mutton" (Two Gent. i. 2), we lose the humour of the passage. When Spenser therefore makes prepar'd, for example, rime with hard, he was probably doing nothing very unusual; for these double sounds—as we may see by the example of shew show, shrew shrow, lese lose—were by no means uncommon. I suspect that sea may have been one of these, and that besides riming with see, as indeed Chaucer always writes it, it retained the sound of the Anglo-Saxon ɼæ; for F. Beaumont in his Poems almost invariably makes it rime with such words as day, lay, ray. Waller, followed by Pope, Gay, and other poets, most improperly made ea rime with ai, ay, as tea with obey, &c. As haste, chaste, waist, &c., constantly rime with fast, last, &c., they were probably, I think certainly, pronounced as they were written, like them; or they may have had a double pronunciation like the words just quoted. As the more usual orthography was chaunge, raunge, &c., these words would seem to have been pronounced as in French, and as we still pronounce daunt, haunt, avaunt. In words chiefly from the French, terminating in ci, si, ti followed by a vowel, as in nation, fashion, passion, &c.—to which we may add ocean—the usual sound was s, not sh as at present. On the whole, the language seems to have been more euphonious than that of the present day.

      While on the subject of euphony, I must direct attention to one point. Our ancestors probably pronounced my, thy (mín, þín, A.-S.), mee, thee, with a short sound also, when not emphatic, as in by, to, &c. Owing to its falling out of familiar use, and its employment in the Bible and Liturgy, thy has long—except by the Quakers and the peasantry—been pronounced so as to rime with fly, try; but my retained its proper sound till within the last few years; Walker, for instance, knew nothing of a change. But now our ears are constantly dinned with an egotistic my like thy. I mention this because this new-fangled pronunciation is ruinous to both euphony and humour in our elder writers.

      I shall conclude with some remarks upon its, a word of which Shakespeare may almost be regarded as the originator; though Spenser, no doubt, had used it once (F. Q. vi. 11. 34) before him. Singer says it "occurs but twice or thrice" in Shakespeare; and Archbishop Trench and others say "three or four times;" while the fact is that its occurs twelve, and it, as a genitive, no less than fifteen times. We meet its only nine times in the numerous plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, and but half a dozen times in those of Jonson or Massinger.

       The Chinese language makes the genitive by merely prefixing the substantive; thus houe jin (houe kingdom) is "man of the kingdom." The same is the structure of the Teutonic and Scandinavian languages, ex. gr., day light, &c.; but while all the others make the two substantives form one word, the English sometimes keeps them separate, sometimes unites them by a hyphen, and at other times makes them into one word. Hence we may observe, by the way, that it is needless, as well as cacophonous, to add an 's to a substantive ending in that letter; even the simple turned comma is superfluous, the position alone indicating its genitive sense.

      It appears that not only nouns but pronouns were so employed. In the first page of the Canterbury Tales we have—

      And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

      Of which vertue engendred is the flour.

      Here which is a genitive, for which we should now use whose (the genitive of who), a pronoun that our forefathers used of things as well as persons.

      In like manner, though his was the usual genitive of it as well as of he, it was not uncommon to make the genitive by simply prefixing it, as in

      Lord, how it could so prettily have prated with it tongue!

      Romeus and Juliet, 1562.

      and other passages. I do not think it ever occurs in Chaucer, Gower, or Piers Ploughman.

      I am therefore of opinion that Shakespeare may be regarded as the chief agent in introducing its into the language. It is to be noticed that it never occurs in the Bible, only thrice, or rather only twice, in Milton, and but once in Waller. Chatterton used it twice in the very first page of his Poems of Rowley; yet the critics of the time did not discern this plain proof of forgery!

      On the disputed question of the use of his for the genitive, I will only observe that the fact is that the preceding noun is used absolutely. Thus, as we have "The king, he is hunting the deer," so we have "the king, his palace." The same structure precisely is to be met with in Dutch and German—we meet with it, for instance, in Schiller's Wallenstein; and Captain Burton informs us that in the Kariri language of Eastern Africa, "The Kazi's brother," for example, is Kazi-ih-zo, literally "The Kazi, his brother."

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      15.

      Chaucer introduced into English poetry the iambic verse of five feet, formed by the Provençals in imitation of the Classic Phaleucian and Sapphic hendecasyllables, and adopted from them by the Italian poets. These last, however, though they held the principle of admitting but five ictus in a line, did not limit themselves to eleven syllables, as the following examples will show:—

      Che passa i monti, e rompe i muri e l'armi.

      Dante, Inf. xvii. 2.

      L'oro, e le perle, e i fior vermigli, e i bianchi.

      Petr. Son. xxxi.

      Non danno i colpi, or finti, or pieni, or scarsi.

      Tasso, Ger. Lib. xii. 55.

      So the Greeks in their dramatic iambics admitted trisyllabic feet, Æschylus admitting one foot, Sophocles two, Euripides three; while the comic poets, both Greek and Latin, used these feet still more freely, not, however, exceeding the limit of three.

      Chaucer did not allow himself the same licence as his masters. He sometimes admits one such foot, rarely two, and three, I believe, only once. He also uses at times the Alexandrine or verse of six feet.

      The first who used this verse for the drama in England was Bishop Bale, who in 1538 published three Interludes, as he termed them, or dramatic pieces on Scriptural subjects. Here are a few lines from the one named God's Promises:—

      In the begynnynge, before the heavens were create,

      In me and of me was my sonne sempyternall,

      With the Holy Ghost, in one degre or estate

      Of the hygh godhed, to make the Father coequall,

      And thys my Sonne was with me one God essencyall,

      Without separacyon at any tyme from me,

      True God he is of equall dignytè.

      The feet, it will be seen, are here of two or three syllables indifferently; and the same is the case in the couplets which occur also

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