0:09

Welcome to the History of English Podcast,

0:11

a podcast about the history of the

0:13

English language. This is episode 174,

0:16

Speak and Spell. In

0:20

this episode, we're going to look at how plays

0:22

composed in the late 1500s provide clues

0:25

about the pronunciation of words at the

0:27

time. Some

0:29

scholars have been able to recreate much

0:31

of that pronunciation from the way words

0:33

were used in rhyming poetry. And

0:36

during a time when spellings more closely

0:38

represented the way words were pronounced, those

0:41

spellings also provide an important clue.

0:44

In fact, it was during this period that

0:46

one of the first English spelling books was

0:48

published, and it proved to be very popular.

0:52

This time, we'll look at how spelling

0:54

books helped to standardize English spelling, even

0:57

if those spellings didn't match the

0:59

pronunciations. We'll also continue

1:01

to look at the works of William Shakespeare

1:03

during this period, and we'll examine

1:05

how his rhymes and spellings reflected the

1:07

way people spoke at the time. But

1:11

before we begin, let me

1:13

remind you that the website

1:15

for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com,

1:18

and you can sign

1:21

up to support the

1:23

podcast and get bonus

1:25

episodes at patreon.com/historyofenglish.com. One

1:27

other quick note before we begin. At

1:30

the end of the last episode, I said

1:32

I was going to talk about Romeo and

1:34

Juliet in this episode, but I

1:36

was being a bit too optimistic. I'm

1:39

not actually going to get to that play this

1:41

time. The Elizabethan period

1:43

was an incredibly active time in the

1:45

history of English, and I think this

1:47

episode will illustrate that. William

1:50

Shakespeare was about to reach his creative

1:52

peak, and other poets and

1:54

playwrights were making important contributions, and

1:57

scholars were busy writing about various aspects

1:59

of So there's a lot to address in these episodes.

2:05

And to avoid making this episode over two

2:07

hours long, I've decided to save Romeo and

2:09

Juliet for next time. But I

2:12

will discuss a Midsummer Night's Dream in this episode, and I

2:14

will also look at an important text on English spelling. So

2:16

as usual, there's a lot to cover. And

2:20

let's begin by picking up where we left

2:22

off last time. In

2:26

the last episode, we looked at the reopening

2:29

of the theaters in London after an outbreak

2:31

of plague subsided in 1594. And we looked

2:33

at some of Shakespeare's early comedies that were

2:35

being performed around that time. While

2:38

Shakespeare didn't just write comedies during

2:40

this period, he also turned his attention back

2:42

to history plays. Even

2:46

though many of his plays

2:48

are difficult to date with certainty, most

2:52

scholars agree that his history plays about

2:54

King John and Richard II were in

2:57

place by this point, around 1594 or

2:59

1595. The

3:03

play about King John takes us back to the

3:05

1200s. You

3:07

might remember John as bad King

3:10

John, and Magna Carta was

3:12

composed during his reign largely to curtail

3:14

his powers. Again,

3:17

the exact date of this play is not

3:19

known with certainty, but it is among

3:21

the plays mentioned by Francis Mears in

3:23

his list of Shakespeare plays composed in 1598.

3:27

I've mentioned that list before because it confirms

3:30

that certain plays like this one had been

3:32

composed by that date. Overall,

3:35

King John is not considered to be one

3:37

of Shakespeare's better plays, and many

3:39

scholars think it lacks the skill and structure

3:41

of his later works. So they

3:43

think it was a relatively early play,

3:45

and the best guess is that it

3:47

was composed around the time the theaters

3:49

reopened, or maybe even earlier. The

3:52

play is also somewhat unusual in

3:55

that it was composed almost entirely

3:57

in iambic pentameter verse. These

4:00

lines have the the dum the dum the dum

4:02

the dum the dum rhythm. Of

4:05

course Shakespeare routinely used that rhythm in

4:07

his plays, but it was usually combined

4:09

with prose or normal speech. Here

4:12

he sticks with that standard rhythm and

4:14

rarely departs from it. So

4:17

the entire play is essentially one long poem.

4:20

I should note that even though

4:23

he used iambic pentameter, the lines

4:25

don't generally rhyme. So

4:27

you might recall from prior episodes that

4:29

this particular structure is called blank verse.

4:33

King John isn't one of Shakespeare's more popular

4:35

plays, so it hasn't had much of an

4:37

impact on the language, but

4:39

it did contribute a handful of popular

4:41

expressions. Perhaps most famously,

4:44

this is where we find the earliest

4:46

version of the maxim to guild the

4:48

lily. It means

4:50

to add something that is excessive

4:52

or unnecessary. The

4:54

play focuses on John's rivalry with the

4:56

French king, the pope, and some of

4:59

his own nobles. At

5:01

one point John has been defeated in

5:03

battle and he hands over the crown

5:05

to the pope's representative in England. The

5:08

representative returns it to John in exchange

5:10

for John's agreement to end his ongoing

5:12

dispute with the church. John

5:15

then has a second coronation for himself

5:17

in order to be re-crowned as king,

5:20

and that's the context for this early

5:22

use of the maxim to guild the

5:25

lily. John was

5:27

already king, so the second coronation was

5:29

just confirming what already existed. John's

5:32

loyal supporter, the Earl of Salisbury,

5:34

provides the notable passage where he

5:36

describes the redundant nature of the

5:39

second coronation. He

5:41

says, quote, Therefore to

5:43

be possessed with double pomp,

5:46

to guard a title that was rich

5:48

before, to guild refined

5:50

gold, to paint the lily,

5:53

to throw a perfume on the violet, to

5:56

smooth the ice, or add another hue

5:59

unto the rain. Though. Or.

6:01

With paper light to seek

6:03

a beauty is I have

6:05

heaven to garnish is wasteful

6:07

and ridiculous excess. Include.

6:10

So in his list of

6:12

redundancies, Salisbury says that it's

6:15

like gilding refined gold. In

6:17

other words, adding gold layer to

6:19

gold. And he says that

6:21

it's like painting the lily. In.

6:24

Other words: adding color to a beautiful

6:26

flower. But these

6:28

two separate examples have been blended

6:30

together over time. And. Today

6:32

we have the blended phrase

6:35

to Gild Silly. Now.

6:37

The final act of the play gives

6:40

us the first recorded use of the

6:42

maxim to fight fire with fire. After

6:45

John's reconciliation with the church, he

6:47

still finds himself at war with

6:49

a nobles. John's. Nephew

6:51

Philip leads the royal forces and

6:53

he encourages his uncle to take

6:55

the war to the rebels. Fill.

6:58

It begins the passage by asking John

7:01

quote. But. Wherefore do you

7:03

droop? Why? You sad

7:05

include. Now

7:07

as line is notable because of his

7:09

use of the word wherefore. The.

7:12

Word wherefore Mint Why?

7:14

In early Modern English.

7:17

So. And Philip asks. Wherefore do

7:19

you droop? He meant why do

7:22

you droop? Or why are you

7:24

slumping. And I mentioned that here.

7:26

Because we will encounter another well known

7:28

use of that word in the next

7:30

episode in Romeo and Juliet. Of

7:33

course that's where we hear Juliet

7:35

Famous line, Romeo Romeo, wherefore art

7:38

thou Romeo. As we'll

7:40

see, see isn't asking where Romeo

7:42

he is. She's actually asking why

7:45

he is. but again, more on

7:47

that next time. Now.

7:50

After Philip asked john, why

7:52

look so sad Philip provides

7:54

encouragement by saying quote. Be.

7:56

Great in act as you have been in

7:59

thought. Let. But not the world

8:01

see fear and sad distrust. He

8:04

then adds, quote, Be stirring as

8:06

the time, be fire with fire,

8:09

threaten the threatening, end

8:11

quote. And that's the earliest

8:13

known version of the popular maxim, to

8:16

fight fire with fire, or to meet

8:18

fire with fire. In

8:20

this case, it meant to meet force with

8:22

force. This

8:24

play also contains what may be the

8:27

first recorded use of the term cold-blooded.

8:30

The term also appeared in some other

8:32

documents around the same time, so Shakespeare

8:34

probably didn't invent it, but he was

8:36

certainly one of the first to use

8:39

it. And I mention

8:41

that term because it's a good

8:43

example of the disconnect between English

8:45

spelling and pronunciation. Notice

8:48

that the words cold and blood

8:50

are both spelled with the letter

8:52

O, a double O in the

8:54

case of blood. Well

8:57

we know that the O in cold

8:59

has the long O sound, O.

9:03

And at one time in Middle English,

9:06

double Os were also used to represent

9:08

that same sound. After

9:10

all, the best way to indicate a long

9:12

vowel sound was to double the vowel letter.

9:16

Scholars are confident that the word

9:18

blood was originally pronounced blode, as

9:20

the spelling would suggest. But

9:23

of course today we say blood

9:25

with a completely different vowel sound.

9:29

So instead of saying cold-blode,

9:32

we say cold-blood. And

9:35

in fact, the pronunciation of blood had

9:37

already started to change by the time

9:39

of Shakespeare. In the early

9:42

1500s it had become blued. Most

9:45

of the words spelled with double Os

9:48

had changed in that way by the

9:50

Elizabethan period. That's the

9:52

same sound we still hear in other words

9:54

spelled with double Os, like moon, soon, room,

9:58

food, tooth, and heart. tool,

10:00

and so on. Well

10:03

during Shakespeare's time, many people,

10:05

especially those with conservative accents,

10:08

would have still said blued instead

10:10

of blood. The

10:12

pronunciation was probably starting to shift in the

10:15

direction of blood, but it took a century

10:17

or so for that change to happen. Despite

10:21

all of those changes in pronunciation over the

10:23

centuries, notice that the spelling of

10:25

the word blood never changed. By

10:28

the late 1500s, many words had

10:31

acquired accepted spellings which were preferred

10:33

by writers and printers. Most

10:36

of those spellings were based on traditional

10:39

pronunciations that had been around for a

10:41

while, but some of those pronunciations were

10:43

starting to change, and

10:45

blood is a good example of that. While

10:48

some words, like food and

10:50

tooth, retained the long oo

10:52

sound, other words were

10:55

acquiring shorter vowel sounds, like

10:57

the oo sound in look and

10:59

book, and in some

11:01

parts of England the uh sound

11:03

in blood and flood. As

11:07

those pronunciations changed, the spellings

11:09

stayed the same, and

11:11

that disconnect between spelling and

11:13

pronunciation still persists to this

11:15

day. Generally

11:18

speaking, we spell words today like

11:20

they were pronounced in and around

11:22

London in the mid to late

11:24

1500s, and that's the

11:26

case thanks in large part to the advent

11:28

of spelling guides and dictionaries which we will

11:30

explore in a moment. But

11:33

before we look at that development, we

11:35

need to look at another history play composed

11:37

by Shakespeare around the same time. That

11:41

other play was Richard II, and for this

11:43

play we have a bit of evidence to

11:45

help date it. The

11:47

evidence comes in the form of an invitation. I

11:51

noted in a prior episode that

11:53

William Cecil was Queen Elizabeth's chief

11:55

advisor. While he was a

11:57

very old man at this point, and he would soon be succeeding in

11:59

the book, by his son Robert. Robert

12:02

was a rising figure in the government at the

12:04

time, and in late 1595 he

12:07

received an invitation from one of his

12:10

kinsmen named Sir Edward Hobie to attend

12:12

a private showing of a play. The

12:15

invitation asked if Robert was available

12:18

to attend a supper where, quote,

12:20

King Richard present himself to your

12:22

view, end quote. Most

12:25

scholars think that was a reference to this

12:27

particular play, Richard II. If

12:30

so, we can establish that the play

12:32

was being performed by the latter part

12:35

of 1595. The play

12:37

was published a little over a year later in 1597.

12:42

Now this play, Richard II, was the beginning

12:44

of a new sequence of history plays by

12:46

Shakespeare that covered the period from the late

12:48

1300s into the 1400s. In a way, what

12:50

happened here was sort of

12:56

like what happened with the Star Wars films. Of

12:59

course, the original Star Wars trilogy was

13:01

released in the late 1970s and early

13:03

80s, and then several years

13:05

later George Lucas decided to go back

13:07

and produce a new trilogy that served

13:09

as prequels to the original films. Well,

13:13

Shakespeare apparently did the same thing here.

13:16

He had already produced a series of plays that covered

13:18

the Wars of the Roses in the 1400s.

13:21

I discussed those plays in prior episodes.

13:24

They were Henry VI, parts I, II,

13:26

and III, and Richard III.

13:29

Those plays covered the extended dispute

13:31

between the houses of Lancaster and

13:33

York. Well, now Shakespeare

13:36

apparently decided to pull a George Lucas and

13:38

go back and tell the story of the

13:40

kings leading up to the Wars of the

13:42

Roses. That story sequence

13:44

began here with Richard II, who was

13:47

the king in the late 1300s. He

13:50

was deposed by his cousin, Henry

13:52

Bolingbroke, and this play tells

13:55

that story. Bolingbroke was

13:57

the son of John of Gaunt, who

13:59

was the patriarch of the Lancastrians. And

14:02

when Henry Bolingbroke defeated his

14:04

cousin Richard, he became Henry

14:06

IV, the first Lancastrian king.

14:09

He was later succeeded by his son,

14:12

Henry V, who was succeeded

14:14

by his son, Henry VI. And

14:17

of course, that takes us back to Shakespeare's

14:19

original set of history plays that began with

14:21

Henry VI. So

14:23

this new series of plays covered the

14:25

lives of those early Lancastrian kings, and

14:28

they essentially served as prequels to the

14:30

original set of plays. And

14:32

if we put all of these history plays

14:34

together, what we have is the

14:37

story of the rise and fall of the

14:39

House of Lancaster. These new

14:41

plays tell the story of its rise, and

14:43

the prior plays tell the story of its

14:45

fall. Earlier, I

14:48

mentioned that list of Shakespeare plays composed by

14:50

Francis Mears in 1598. It's

14:53

an important document because it confirms which

14:55

plays existed at that time. Well,

14:58

that list includes this new history play,

15:00

Richard II, as well

15:02

as the two plays that followed,

15:04

Henry IV, parts I and II.

15:07

But it doesn't include the final play

15:09

in the sequence, Henry V. So it

15:13

appears that Richard II was composed by 1595, based

15:15

on the reference

15:17

to the play in that letter I mentioned a moment

15:19

ago. And it appears that

15:22

the following two, Henry IV plays, were

15:24

composed a short time later, since they

15:26

were included in that early playlist. And

15:29

then it appears that the final play

15:31

in the sequence, Henry V, was composed

15:34

a short time after that, since it

15:36

wasn't included in that playlist. And

15:38

that seems to be the generally accepted view

15:41

of most scholars, and it gives us a

15:43

general idea as to when these plays were

15:45

composed. Now,

15:47

just like the King John play

15:49

that we looked at earlier, Richard

15:51

II is also composed almost entirely

15:53

in verse. So once

15:55

again we have that the dumb, the dumb,

15:57

the dumb rhythm for the entire play. Now,

16:01

back in episode 134, I

16:04

talked about the real life Richard II

16:06

and the important events surrounding his reign.

16:09

And I also mentioned this particular play

16:11

by Shakespeare. In fact,

16:13

I included an excerpt of a famous

16:16

speech from that play rendered by the

16:18

Lancastrian patriarch, God of God. It

16:21

comes from his deathbed speech in the

16:23

play, and it's one of the more

16:25

patriotic passages in all of Shakespeare's works.

16:28

He describes an idealized England.

16:31

Here's the beginning of that passage, and I'll

16:34

read it in a way that emphasizes the

16:36

iambic pentameter rhythm that runs throughout the play.

16:39

Quote, This royal

16:41

throne of kings, this scepterd

16:43

isle, this earth of majesty,

16:46

this seat of mars, this

16:48

other Eden demi-paradise,

16:52

this fortress built by nature

16:54

for herself, against infection

16:56

and the hand of war,

16:59

this happy breed of men, this

17:01

little world, this precious

17:03

stone set in a silver

17:05

sea, the dumb, the dumb,

17:08

the dumb, the dumb, the dumb, every line.

17:11

Of course, the actors would not have read the

17:13

lines that stiffly, but you can see how that

17:15

rhythm would tend to get a little monotonous after

17:17

a while. Now

17:19

that speech I just read is one of

17:21

the more memorable parts of the play, but

17:23

otherwise the play hasn't had much of an

17:25

impact on the language we speak today. Of

17:29

course, Shakespeare continued to invent new words, several

17:31

of which appear for the first time in

17:33

the play. Many

17:35

of his words were formed by playing

17:37

around with prefixes and suffixes. He

17:40

would often add or delete one of those

17:42

elements to create a new word, or a

17:44

new variation of an existing word. Many

17:47

of those words never really caught on, though. For

17:50

example, immediately prior to the passage I

17:53

just read, John of Gaunt

17:55

laments that Richard has largely ignored his

17:57

advice and counsel. He

17:59

says, Though Richard,

18:01

my life's counsel, would not hear,

18:04

my death's sad tale may yet

18:06

un-death his ear." So

18:10

he coined the word un-death to mean

18:12

that Richard would actually listen to his

18:15

advice. Obviously that

18:17

word didn't survive in the language. In

18:20

an early scene of the play Richard is hearing

18:22

a dispute and to confirm his fair

18:24

judgment he says, quote, impartial

18:27

are our eyes and ears,

18:29

end quote. Well

18:31

according to the Oxford English Dictionary, that's

18:33

the first recorded use of the word

18:36

impartial. It appears that

18:38

Shakespeare coined it from the existing word

18:40

partial by simply adding the prefix M

18:42

to the front of it. In

18:45

the same way he added un to

18:47

the front of the word death. But

18:49

whereas un-death never caught on,

18:52

the word impartial did and we

18:55

still use it to this day. Now

18:58

in the play the dispute that Richard was

19:01

hearing when that passage was uttered was

19:03

a disagreement between his cousin, Henry

19:05

Bolingbroke and another noble named

19:08

Thomas Mowbray, the Duke of Norfolk. The

19:11

dispute and Richard's resolution of the

19:13

dispute informs much of what happens

19:15

later in the play. As

19:18

Mowbray defends his position before the king he

19:20

points to his own reputation. He

19:22

says, quote, the purest treasure

19:25

mortal times afford is a

19:27

spotless reputation, end quote. And

19:30

that is the first known use of

19:33

the term spotless reputation in the English

19:35

language. It appears to

19:37

be a description that Shakespeare coined in this play.

19:41

That passage occurs in a part of

19:43

the play that features not only iambic

19:46

pentameter but also rhyming verse. So

19:49

these passages actually rhyme. But

19:51

if we look closely at the rhyme we

19:53

see that some of them don't actually work

19:55

today. In this

19:58

same passage Shakespeare rhymes grave

20:00

with have, one

20:03

with done, and

20:05

the verb to tear with the

20:07

word fear. Now

20:09

each of those word pairs shares a

20:12

common spelling pattern, but the vowels are

20:14

pronounced differently today. So

20:16

for example, grave and have

20:18

are both spelled with A-V-E.

20:22

One and done are both

20:24

spelled with O-N-E, and tear

20:26

and fear are both spelled

20:28

with E-A-R. Remember

20:30

what I said earlier. Despite

20:33

the way we pronounce words today, we tend

20:35

to spell them like they were pronounced in

20:37

London in the mid-1500s. And

20:40

at the time, scholars think

20:43

grave and have would have

20:45

been pronounced grave and have.

20:48

One and done would have been pronounced

20:50

own and don, and tear

20:53

and fear would have been pronounced

20:55

tear and fair. Shakespeare

20:59

rhymed those word pairs because they still

21:01

rhymed in his day. In

21:04

that same passage, Shakespeare also rhymed

21:06

words with those double O's that we

21:08

saw in the word blood earlier. In

21:12

fact, here he rhymed the word

21:14

blood with the word withstood.

21:17

Again, blood and stood have slightly

21:19

different vowels today thanks to changes

21:22

that took place in the following

21:24

century. In

21:26

this same passage, he also rhymed

21:28

the words boot and foot. Again,

21:31

despite the similar double O's spellings,

21:33

they don't rhyme today, but they

21:35

did at the time. Boot

21:38

and foot would have probably been

21:40

pronounced boot and foot. The

21:44

pronunciation shifted from foot to foot

21:46

in the following century. So

21:49

boot, foot, flood,

21:51

and stood all had

21:53

the long oo sound during the

21:55

Elizabethan period. It's

21:58

likely that some people were already starting

22:00

to pronounce some of those words differently,

22:02

but most speakers would have recognized a

22:04

common pronunciation with that oo sound. Again,

22:08

the shared spellings are telling us something.

22:11

They're telling us how the words were pronounced in London

22:13

in the mid to late 1500s. Now

22:17

back in episode 134, when

22:19

I talked about the real life Richard II,

22:22

I titled that episode De

22:24

Lancastrian Standard, and that

22:26

was because Lancastrian England in the 1400s was

22:28

the period when

22:31

English spellings showed the first

22:33

signs of becoming fixed and

22:35

standardized. At a

22:37

time when French was still in common use,

22:40

De Lancastrians encouraged the use of

22:42

English in government documents, and

22:44

the customary spellings of the Chancery

22:46

office were really the first step

22:48

towards a fixed spelling system. Even

22:52

in the mid 1400s, the printing press

22:55

provided the next major step. In

22:58

1476, William Caxton brought the

23:00

printing press to England. He

23:03

had worked in the Low Countries, and his

23:05

first typesetters came with him from the continent.

23:08

I noted in that episode that

23:10

Dutch printers typically spelled a hard

23:12

G sound in a word with

23:14

the letters G-H, and

23:17

it's believed that that Dutch spelling

23:19

convention gave us the G-H in

23:21

words like ghost and aghast, both

23:24

of which had previously been spelled

23:26

with a simple G in English.

23:29

So even though spellings were starting to

23:32

reflect the way words were pronounced, there

23:34

was a disconnect in certain words. Then

23:37

I talked about the rise of etymological spellings in

23:39

the early 1500s. That

23:42

was an attempt to insert letters into

23:44

words to reflect the Latin or

23:46

Greek origins of the word. These

23:50

letters represented sounds that had become silent

23:52

over the centuries, but some scholars and

23:54

printers wanted to provide a link back

23:56

to the original root word. That's

23:59

how we got the B. in words like debt

24:01

and doubt, and the

24:03

P in a word like receipt, and

24:06

the L in salmon. Then

24:09

in the mid-1500s, we saw that some

24:12

scholars were increasingly frustrated with the state

24:14

of spelling at the time, and

24:17

they started to recommend a purely phonetic

24:19

approach. That included writers

24:21

like John Hart, who even devised his

24:23

own phonetic script to spell words exactly

24:26

like they were pronounced. But

24:28

that idea never really stood a chance. First

24:31

of all, as Hart demonstrated, the existing

24:33

alphabet wasn't sufficient to represent all of

24:36

the sounds in the language. For

24:39

example, each vowel letter represented a

24:41

so-called long sound and a separate

24:43

short sound, like the

24:45

long A in hate and the

24:48

short A in hat. For

24:51

a phonetic spelling system to work, it would

24:53

require the adoption of new letters, which

24:55

was very difficult in the era of the printing

24:58

press when printers had to work with the type

25:00

they had. Another

25:02

problem with the phonetic spelling approach

25:04

is that it assumed that words

25:06

were pronounced in one specific way,

25:09

or one way that was deemed to be correct.

25:12

But of course, as we've seen, accents

25:14

varied greatly throughout England and the British

25:17

Isles. Accents

25:19

also varied in the same place among different

25:21

classes of people, so it was

25:23

difficult to adopt a phonetic spelling system when

25:25

there were so many different ways of pronouncing

25:27

the same word. Another

25:30

problem is the fact that the pronunciation

25:32

of words changes with time. If

25:35

you adopt a phonetic spelling system, you

25:37

have to constantly revise it or it

25:39

soon ceases to be phonetic. It

25:42

was the schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster

25:45

who tried to reconcile these

25:47

competing ideas, and in

25:49

doing so, he gave us our modern approach

25:51

to spelling. Back

25:54

in episode 163, we looked at

25:56

his book called The Elementary. look,

26:00

he recognized the value of

26:02

phonetic spellings. In fact,

26:04

the vast majority of words at the time

26:06

were spelled phonetically, but as

26:08

we'd seen, there were exceptions and

26:10

limitations. Well,

26:13

Mulcaster said that the well-established

26:15

spelling conventions should be maintained

26:17

and standardized. He

26:19

said that it was impractical to adopt

26:22

a purely phonetic approach, so

26:24

it was okay to include letters to reflect

26:26

the Latin and Greek roots of a word,

26:28

and it was okay to use silent e's

26:30

at the end of a word to indicate

26:32

that the prior vowel was pronounced as a

26:35

long vowel. All that

26:37

was really needed was a standardized approach.

26:39

Once spellings were fixed, people would learn them

26:42

and use them, and that was all that

26:44

really mattered. He even

26:46

recommended the preparation of an English

26:48

dictionary to help standardized spellings. He

26:51

didn't prepare a dictionary himself, but he

26:53

did include a list of several thousand

26:55

common words to illustrate his approach. Now,

26:59

even though Mulcaster's ideas about spelling

27:02

soon became the norm, it

27:04

isn't clear how much his book

27:06

actually influenced those developments. He

27:09

was a headmaster writing to other scholars,

27:11

so his audience would have been somewhat

27:13

limited. But now, at

27:15

the current point in our overall story in

27:17

the year 1596, Mulcaster's

27:21

ideas were about to be made available to

27:23

the general public, and

27:25

that was a crucial step in standardizing the

27:27

spellings that existed at the time. The

27:30

book that brought these ideas to the

27:33

general public is known as the English

27:35

Schoolmaster. The book

27:37

was written by a schoolmaster named Edward

27:39

Cook, and it was published in 1596. As

27:43

we'll see, it was one of the earliest

27:46

spelling books, and it had a significant

27:48

influence on the way words were spelled going

27:50

forward. In fact, what

27:52

really fixed and standardized English spellings

27:54

was the advent of spelling guides

27:56

and dictionaries designed for the general

27:58

public. Koot's book

28:01

also included a long list of

28:03

words to illustrate his recommended spellings,

28:05

and many of those words included

28:07

short definitions. So this

28:09

book hinted at the development of a

28:11

proper English dictionary, which was less than

28:14

a decade away. Maltaster

28:16

had recommended the creation of an English

28:19

dictionary, and Koot showed how it could

28:21

be done. Now

28:24

I said that the title of the

28:26

book was The English Schoolmaster, but Koot

28:28

made it very clear that his book

28:30

wasn't intended solely for schoolmasters and other

28:32

scholars. He intended the book

28:34

to be made available to the general public. It

28:38

was essentially a step-by-step guide for someone

28:40

who was learning to read and write,

28:42

but didn't have a formal education. The

28:45

idea was that the book would serve as a

28:47

practical guide. So the spellings

28:50

he used were the spellings that people would

28:52

actually encounter if they were reading books at

28:54

the time. He wasn't

28:57

interested in reform or academic

28:59

arguments about phonetic spelling. He

29:02

just wanted to help people to read the books that

29:04

were coming off the presses. And

29:06

as it turned out, a lot of people

29:08

wanted that type of guide. The

29:11

book proved to be very popular. It

29:13

remained in print for over a century. It

29:16

was still being printed and read in the

29:18

1700s, and over that period

29:20

of time more than 40 editions appeared.

29:24

This established the model going forward.

29:27

Other spelling guides were published in the 1600s, and

29:30

they tended to follow Koot's approach of

29:32

using common spellings that people would actually

29:34

encounter. And the success

29:37

of those guides and the new dictionaries

29:39

to come effectively locked

29:41

in those spellings going forward.

29:44

And they gave us a spelling system

29:46

largely based on pronunciations that existed in

29:48

the 1500s, subject to

29:51

the occasional silent letters to show the

29:53

history of a word or to indicate

29:55

how a vowel sound was to be

29:57

pronounced. In

29:59

the introduction Coot made it clear that his

30:01

intended audience was anyone who wanted to learn how to

30:03

read and read. He wrote,

30:06

Coot, I am now

30:08

therefore to direct my speech to the

30:10

unskillful, which desire to make

30:12

use of it for their own private

30:14

benefit, and to such men and

30:16

women of trade as tailors,

30:19

weavers, shopkeepers, seamsters, and such

30:21

other as have undertaken the

30:23

charge of teaching others." But

30:27

this statement reflects the fact that many people at

30:29

the time wanted to learn how to read and

30:32

write, but didn't have the means to do so,

30:34

and note that he specifically addressed his

30:37

comment to men and women. Girls

30:40

were still restricted from attending schools, so

30:43

they had to learn on their own or from a private

30:45

tutor. In fact, in a

30:47

later section of the book, in a series

30:49

of dialogues which he composed, he

30:51

has one of the speakers say that he was

30:53

taught to read and spell by his dom, in

30:56

other words, by a female teacher. So

30:59

we have evidence in this book that

31:01

women were also serving as teachers and

31:03

instructors during this period. With

31:06

respect to Coot's spellings, he specifically stated

31:08

that he was using the spellings which

31:10

were generally accepted at the time. Those

31:14

were the ones used by most printers. Many

31:17

of them were phonetic and reflected the way

31:19

words were pronounced at the time, but as

31:21

we've seen, some of them contained silent letters

31:23

which weren't pronounced. And of

31:26

course, there was still quite a bit of variation

31:28

in the way some words were spelled. So

31:31

Coot said that he was only going to

31:33

focus on spellings that were generally accepted at

31:36

the time. He wrote, quote,

31:39

Also, where I undertake to make

31:41

thee to write the true orthography

31:43

of any word truly pronounced, I

31:45

must mean of it those words whose

31:47

writings are determined, for there

31:50

are many wherein the best Englishmen in this

31:52

land are not agreed. End quote.

31:56

Since the book was intended as a spelling

31:58

guide, it begins by introducing the letters of

32:00

the alphabet. It then

32:02

illustrates the sounds of the letters by

32:04

combining them into simple syllables like bae,

32:08

bee, eye, bow, and boo.

32:11

From those basic syllables, the book shows

32:13

how they can be combined to form

32:15

entire words. The

32:18

second part of the book is structured

32:20

as a series of dialogues between characters

32:23

who discuss English spelling and pronunciation. In

32:26

one of the dialogues, a master explains

32:28

how a silent e can be added

32:30

to the end of a short word

32:32

to indicate a long vowel sound. In

32:36

other words, the silent e is a

32:38

way of indicating that the preceding vowel

32:40

letter has the same sound as its

32:42

name. So for example,

32:44

when the letter a has the a

32:47

sound or the letter i has the

32:49

i sound. Those are

32:52

the so-called long sounds of the vowel

32:54

letter. So when a

32:56

silent e is added to the end

32:58

of a word, it allows us to

33:00

distinguish hat from hate, bit

33:02

from bite, and

33:05

hop from hope. As

33:08

I've noted in prior episodes, that spelling

33:10

convention emerged over the prior century or

33:12

so and Richard Mulcaster had recommended it

33:14

as a way to mark a long

33:16

vowel sound in his book for other

33:19

scholars. Now, Coot also

33:21

adopted the technique in his spelling book

33:23

for the general public. In

33:26

the dialogue, the master acknowledges the

33:28

value of consistent spelling rules but

33:30

rejects the idea that they should

33:32

replace the existing conventions. Again,

33:35

the idea wasn't to reform English spelling. It

33:37

was simply to help people understand the spellings

33:40

that were being used at the time. The

33:44

dialogue then focuses on many other examples

33:46

of the silent letters found in printed

33:48

works. Since those

33:50

spellings with silent letters were common, Coot

33:53

accepted them as the standard spellings. In

33:56

the dialogue section, the master notes that

33:58

the e is not In fact, there are

34:00

two E's in George, and neither

34:02

is pronounced. He

34:07

notes that the letter I is

34:09

not pronounced in words like shield,

34:12

brief, siege, fruit, and suit.

34:16

The letter O

34:18

is not pronounced in words like people

34:20

and unity. The

34:23

letter U is not pronounced in words

34:25

like guest, guide, build,

34:29

and tongue. Now, of

34:31

course, we know that most of those spellings

34:33

have a historical basis. It

34:35

might have been a spelling convention borrowed from French

34:38

or some other source, or it might

34:40

have been a way to distinguish different vowel sounds with

34:42

the limited vowel letters that we have, but

34:45

whatever the source of those spellings, printers

34:47

were using them, so Coot taught them.

34:51

The dialogue then presents many examples of

34:53

silent letters based on the etymology

34:55

or old pronunciations of words. He

34:59

discusses the silent B in debt and

35:01

doubt, as well as at the end

35:03

of words like lamb, comb, and thumb.

35:06

He mentions the silent H in

35:08

ghost, as well as in

35:11

words like chronicle, anchor, and the

35:13

name John. He

35:15

mentions the silent N at the end

35:17

of words like solemn and hymn, H-Y-M-N.

35:22

And he notes that the letter

35:24

combination GH was silent or lightly

35:27

pronounced in many words. Of

35:30

course, we still have lots of words

35:32

today where the GH doesn't really represent

35:34

any sound at all. In

35:36

words like light,

35:38

L-I-G-H-T, and

35:41

ate, E-I-G-H-T,

35:44

and though, T-H-O-U-G-H. Those

35:49

are mostly words inherited from Old and

35:51

Middle English where the spelling represented a

35:53

hh sound that's largely

35:55

disappeared. So a

35:57

word like light was once pronounced more

36:00

like licht. By

36:02

the late 1500s that sound had

36:04

largely disappeared in those words, but

36:07

the GH spelling was retained by

36:09

writers and printers, so Koot

36:11

maintained it as well. Interestingly

36:14

the dialogue section suggests that

36:16

some conservative speakers still pronounce

36:18

that sound very lightly. In

36:21

that section a master and student are

36:24

discussing spelling conventions and the master says

36:26

that a sound represented by GH may

36:28

or may not be pronounced by speakers,

36:31

but he adds, quote, the

36:33

truest is both to write and

36:35

pronounce them, end quote. In

36:38

a separate dialogue one of the speakers says,

36:41

quote, GH is the truer

36:43

writing and it should have a little

36:45

sound, end quote. So

36:48

Koot is recommending a light or

36:50

soft pronunciation of that sound,

36:53

but he acknowledges that many people don't

36:55

pronounce the sound at all, and of

36:57

course it would soon disappear altogether from

37:00

the standard English of London and southern

37:02

England, though it survived in some other

37:04

parts of the British Isles like Scotland.

37:09

The dialogues then note that English words

37:11

that end with an us sound are

37:13

spelled with a single u when they

37:16

consist of one syllable. The

37:18

word truss is given as an

37:20

example, but of course we can

37:22

also add words like bus, plus,

37:25

fuss, and pus. The

37:27

book then notes that when the sound appears

37:30

at the end of a multi-syllable word it's

37:32

usually spelled ous. The

37:35

words glorious and frivolous are

37:37

given as examples. These

37:40

types of examples are intended to

37:42

illustrate situations where the accepted spellings

37:44

are not strictly phonetic or

37:46

straightforward, where the spellings don't

37:49

necessarily match the pronunciation. Koot

37:52

discusses those spellings because they pose a challenge

37:54

to people learning to read and write. He

37:57

then explains that another problem occurs when people speak with

37:59

an average person. accent that's very different from

38:01

the accent used around London. Since

38:05

London's speech guided English spelling, the

38:07

spellings were more phonetic among

38:09

those speakers. But if

38:11

someone spoke with a very different accent,

38:14

especially a rural accent, the

38:16

spellings were less likely to reflect the

38:18

way that person pronounced their words. Koot

38:21

wrote, quote, I

38:23

know not what can easily deceive you

38:25

in writing unless it be by imitating

38:28

the barbarous speech of your country people,

38:30

whereof I will give you a taste, thereby

38:33

to give you an occasion to take heed,

38:35

not of these only, but of any like.

38:38

Encorrect. He then

38:41

gives examples of what he considers to be

38:43

incorrect or bad speech. He

38:45

begins by mentioning the vowel sounds in

38:48

words like mill and hill. He

38:50

says that some people wrongly pronounce

38:52

those words as mel and hell,

38:54

with a slightly different vowel sound,

38:56

more of a short e sound.

39:00

That was a common feature of the accent

39:02

spoken in Kent to the southeast of London,

39:05

and it had apparently spread to London as well.

39:08

He says, quote, some people

39:10

speak thus, the mel

39:12

standeth on the hell, for the mill

39:15

standeth on the hill. So

39:17

net for knit, bridge

39:20

for bridge, end quote.

39:23

Again, the idea was that someone who

39:25

pronounced those words in that way would

39:28

tend to spell them incorrectly with an

39:30

e rather than an i. The

39:33

passage then includes some more examples of

39:35

what Koot considered to be bad pronunciations.

39:38

For example, he criticizes people who

39:40

say a feared rather than afraid.

39:44

The feared was very common at the time

39:46

and still exists in some dialects. As

39:49

we'll see, even Shakespeare used it. But

39:52

Koot considered it to be a bad pronunciation,

39:54

which could cause people to spell the word

39:56

incorrectly. Of course, he spells

39:58

the word like we do. today, A-F-R-A-I-D.

40:04

Koot also mentions another pronunciation which he

40:06

considers to be improper, and

40:09

that pronunciation is especially notable because it's

40:11

one of the earliest references we have

40:13

to an important vowel change that took

40:15

place in English over the following century.

40:18

Koot references the words dirt, girth,

40:21

and her, which

40:23

were traditionally pronounced dirt,

40:26

girth, and hair. He

40:29

says that some people mispronounce those words. Instead

40:32

of deert, they say dirt,

40:34

which he spells g-u-r-t. And

40:36

instead of girth, they say dirt,

40:39

which he spells g-u-r-t. And

40:42

for the feminine pronoun, instead of saying

40:44

hair, he says some people mispronounce it

40:46

as her, which he spells h-u-r. Now,

40:51

obviously, the vowel sound that he thought

40:53

was incorrect is the typical vowel sound

40:55

we hear today in the standard English

40:57

of southern England and North America. And

41:00

that's because several different vowel sounds

41:03

merged into a single uniform er

41:05

sound in the 1600s. That

41:09

er sound was actually a brand new sound in

41:11

the language at the time, and

41:13

even though the r sound at the

41:16

end was later dropped in most British-English

41:18

accents, it survives in American

41:20

English. And that r sound

41:22

was really the key to this merger. I

41:25

mentioned this particular merger back in episode 160.

41:29

That was the episode where I talked about the

41:31

letter r and its pronunciation, and I

41:33

mentioned that the modern sound of that letter can

41:36

do funny things to a vowel sound that

41:38

immediately precedes it or follows it.

41:41

It appears that people sometimes anticipate

41:43

that r sound, which has open

41:46

vowel-like qualities, and

41:48

they adjust the preceding vowel slightly

41:51

to accommodate that r sound. So

41:54

in this case, the short e, i,

41:57

and u sounds were pronounced with

41:59

the tongue in very different positions. But

42:02

when those sounds appeared before the R

42:04

sound, people tended to cheat

42:06

a little bit and they shifted the

42:09

tongue into a more centralized or neutral

42:11

position to anticipate the shape required to

42:13

make the R sound. That

42:16

meant that those three distinct vowels

42:18

all merged together into the centralized

42:21

vowel that is pronounced, a, and

42:23

is commonly called schwa by linguists.

42:27

In earlier episodes, I described that UH

42:29

vowel sound as a black hole which

42:31

tends to suck in the vowel sounds

42:33

around it, and that's basically

42:35

what happened here. That

42:38

UH sound, combined with the following

42:40

R, gave us the ER

42:42

sound that's so common today. So

42:46

let's look a little closer at that change. Words

42:49

spelled with ER originally had

42:52

the ER sound. That

42:55

included words like nerve,

42:57

verve, merci, and her.

43:00

Well now they started to

43:02

become nerve, verb, mercy, and

43:04

her. Words

43:07

spelled with IR traditionally had

43:09

the ER sound. That

43:11

included words like dirht, gyrl,

43:14

beard, and fierst. Now

43:17

those words started to be pronounced

43:19

dirht, girl, third, and

43:22

first. And

43:24

words spelled with UR or WOR

43:27

traditionally had the OR

43:29

sound. That included

43:31

words like hort, norse, ward,

43:34

and worm. But

43:36

with this vowel merger, those words now

43:38

became hurt, nurse, word,

43:41

and worm. So

43:44

I hope you can hear how those vowel

43:46

sounds merged into the same general sound over

43:48

time. Coot's spelling

43:50

guide provides some of the earliest written

43:52

evidence of this change, and

43:54

even if it existed in other parts of

43:56

England prior to this point, Coot confirms that

43:58

it has started to reached London by the late

44:01

1500s. Coo

44:03

considered it to be a bad pronunciation,

44:05

but it obviously became widespread over the

44:07

course of the following century. Now

44:11

I should note that this merger didn't happen

44:13

in parts of Scotland and Ireland, so many

44:15

speakers in those regions still pronounce many of

44:17

those words with the older vowel sounds. The

44:21

merger is also important to the theme of

44:23

this episode because it shows how English

44:25

spelling preserves the pronunciations of the 1500s.

44:30

At the time, spellings with E-R,

44:33

I-R, U-R, and W-O-R

44:36

reflected different vowel sounds and

44:39

different pronunciations, but

44:41

today those spellings often represent the

44:43

same sound. As

44:45

a result, modern spelling is less phonetic than

44:47

it was during the time of Shakespeare. Note

44:51

how the vowel merger I just described

44:53

is really the opposite of the double

44:55

O examples I mentioned earlier. Words

44:59

spelled with double O's have different

45:01

vowel sounds today because the vowel

45:04

sound split into different sounds. So

45:07

instead of a vowel merger, that was

45:09

a case of a vowel split. Words

45:12

like boot, blood, and

45:14

foot were spelled with double O's because

45:16

they once had the same vowel

45:18

sound, boot, blued, and foot, respectively. That

45:22

was likely still the case when Shakespeare lived, but

45:24

in the 1600s the sound started to

45:27

move in different directions, and when

45:29

that happened, the older spellings no longer reflected

45:31

the way the words were pronounced. So

45:34

whether sounds merged together or

45:36

split apart after the 1500s,

45:39

the result was essentially

45:41

the same, a less phonetic spelling

45:43

system, and frustration for generations of

45:45

people trying to spell English words.

45:49

At the end of Coote's book, he

45:51

included a long list of words with

45:53

his recommended spellings. They

45:55

were words that he considered to be hard words

45:57

that people might not know how to spell or

45:59

might They were mostly Latinate words, and he

46:02

included short definitions or synonyms for many of

46:05

them. Some scholars have noted that

46:07

this was a major step in the

46:09

direction of an English dictionary with English

46:11

words defined with English terms, but this

46:13

word list was somewhat limited. He

46:18

only included about 1,400 words, whereas Richard

46:20

Muhlkaster's earlier book about English spelling

46:23

included a list of about 8,000 words. Also,

46:30

Koot did not feel the need to

46:32

define every word. He only

46:34

defined the words that he thought readers might not

46:36

understand. And where

46:39

a word had multiple definitions, he only

46:41

included the definition that people might not

46:43

know. He specifically mentioned

46:45

how he chose to define the word

46:47

bark. He said that

46:49

almost everyone knows that the word bark refers

46:51

to the sound a dog makes, so

46:54

there was no need to include that definition. But

46:57

bark also refers to a type of

46:59

ship, so that was the only

47:01

definition he included. While

47:04

Koot's word list with definitions came close

47:06

to an English dictionary, it didn't quite

47:08

hit the mark, but the

47:10

first proper English dictionary was just around

47:13

the corner. It would appear

47:15

just eight years later. As

47:18

I noted, Koot's spelling guide was the

47:20

first such guide to reach a wide

47:23

audience, including printers who were

47:25

obviously interested in the way words were

47:27

spelled. Printers

47:29

wanted to use spellings that people recognized

47:32

because it made their publications easier to

47:34

read and therefore easier to

47:36

sell. Other

47:38

spelling guides appeared during the 1600s, and

47:41

as I noted, that first English dictionary

47:44

appeared just eight years later. Initially,

47:47

there was still some variation in

47:49

the way those sources spelled words,

47:51

but over time the spellings started

47:53

to converge, and for the

47:55

first time in English there were resources that

47:57

people could consult to determine how it worked.

48:00

was supposed to be spelled. The

48:02

people turning to those sources included printers.

48:06

In many ways, printers had led

48:08

the way toward standardization, but now

48:11

with spelling guides and dictionaries in

48:13

place, they followed what those sources

48:15

recommended. By the end of the 1600s, modern

48:19

English spelling was basically in place.

48:22

So in the end, it was

48:24

really dictionaries and spelling guides, like the

48:26

one published by Koot, that gave

48:28

us the spellings we have today. And

48:30

those spellings largely reflect the state of the language

48:33

in the 1500s. Now,

48:36

in the same year that Edmund Koot published

48:39

his spelling guide, a writer

48:41

named Thomas Nash published a notable

48:43

pamphlet called Have With You

48:45

to Safran Walden. Nash

48:48

was a poet and playwright, and he

48:50

was also a writer of pamphlets, and

48:52

this particular pamphlet, composed in 1596, was

48:56

part of an ongoing dispute with

48:58

another writer named Gabriel Harvey. They

49:02

attacked each other in pamphlets for several

49:04

years, and this was Nash's final reply.

49:07

Safran Walden was Harvey's residence, and he had

49:09

apparently retired there a couple of years earlier.

49:11

So that explains the title

49:14

of Nash's pamphlet, Have With You

49:16

to Safran Walden. The

49:19

pamphlet is notable for our purposes because

49:21

it contains the earliest known use, or

49:23

one of the earliest known uses, of

49:25

several common idioms. For

49:27

example, in one passage, Nash wrote

49:30

that Harvey had abandoned a couple

49:32

of companions and quote, left

49:34

both of them in the lurch, end

49:36

quote. According to the

49:38

Oxford English Dictionary, that's the first recorded

49:40

use of the phrase left in the

49:42

lurch in an English document. You

49:45

might think that the phrase is derived from the

49:48

word lurch as in the lurching of a ship,

49:51

but it isn't. It's actually

49:53

derived from a completely different word. Lurch

49:56

was the name of a game played with

49:58

dice, similar to backgammon. It

50:01

came to England from France where it was

50:03

called lurch. Well

50:05

if a player was losing the game very badly to

50:07

the point that he or she had no chance of

50:10

winning, that person was said to

50:12

incur a lurch or to be in

50:14

the lurch. The term is

50:16

still used in Cribbage in a similar sense. Well

50:19

from that gaming sense of the

50:21

word lurch, it produced this particular

50:23

phrase, to leave someone in the

50:25

lurch, meaning to leave someone in

50:27

a difficult or hopeless position. Again

50:31

it's first recorded in this pamphlet by Thomas

50:33

Nash, though it was probably in common use

50:36

at the time. Nash's

50:38

dispute with Harvey also extended to Harvey's

50:41

brother Richard, and in one

50:43

passage of the pamphlet, Nash attacks both

50:45

of the brothers. He writes,

50:47

quote, I utterly despair of

50:49

them, or not so much

50:52

despair of them as count them a

50:54

pair of poor idiots, being

50:56

not only but also two brothers,

50:59

two blockheads, two

51:01

blunderkins, having their brains

51:03

stuffed with knot but balderdash, end

51:07

quote. And I mention that

51:09

passage because that's the first recorded use

51:11

of the word balderdash in English. Now

51:15

since that's the first recorded use, it

51:17

may seem like Nash coined the term

51:19

balderdash, but that probably isn't

51:22

the case. A

51:24

short time later the word popped up again

51:26

in several other documents where it meant a

51:28

frothy liquid. So the

51:30

term was probably round in common speech when

51:32

Nash wrote his pamphlet. And

51:35

when he wrote that the Harvey brothers had

51:37

brains stuffed with nothing but balderdash, he

51:39

meant that their brains were filled with froth. But

51:43

in the early 1600s the sense of

51:45

the word started to shift from a

51:48

frothy liquid to a mixture of liquids.

51:51

And from there the term was extended to

51:53

language by the end of the century. Instead

51:56

of a jumbled mixture of liquids, it came

51:59

to mean a jumbled mixture of

52:01

words. And that's the sense

52:03

of the term today when we say that

52:05

someone is speaking Balderdash. In

52:09

another part of the pamphlet there's a dialogue

52:11

section. Fictional dialogues were

52:13

common in documents during this period

52:16

and in the pamphlet Nash has his

52:18

characters debate whether burning or drowning is

52:21

worse. One

52:23

of the characters says quote, If

52:25

the worst come to the worst a good

52:27

swimmer may do much whereas fire

52:29

sweepeth clean where it sees it.

52:34

Now this is one of the earliest recorded

52:36

uses of the phrase worst comes to worst.

52:40

The pamphlet also provides the first reference to

52:42

a phrase later found in many nursery rhymes

52:44

like Jack and the Beanstalk. Nash

52:47

criticizes Harvey for being a long-winded pedant

52:49

who loves to hear himself talk. He

52:52

says that Harvey is someone who will spend

52:54

a whole day speaking about quote the first

52:56

invention of Fie-fie-fum I smell

52:59

the blood of an English man in

53:01

quote Of course,

53:04

you probably know that phrase as see five

53:06

so fum I smell the blood of an

53:08

Englishman As I

53:10

noted it appears in several later nursery rhymes,

53:12

but it was apparently common at the time

53:15

The context of Nash's statement that Harvey would spend

53:17

the whole day discussing the origin of the phrase

53:20

indicates that it must have been common in the late 1500s and

53:24

In fact Shakespeare used the same phrase

53:26

a few years later in King Lear

53:28

in That play

53:30

the character Edgar says fee

53:32

phi and thumb. I smell the

53:34

blood of a British man The

53:37

phrase is apparently derived from the word

53:39

fee or phi which many people used

53:42

to show disgust in the late Middle

53:44

Ages Interestingly

53:46

when Nash wrote Phi phi phum I

53:48

smelled the blood of an Englishman The

53:51

word blood was spelled B L

53:54

O U D At

53:56

least that's how the printer spelled it, but

53:58

when the same basic phrase appeared in

54:00

the first folio of Shakespeare's works

54:03

nearly 30 years later, it was

54:05

spelled B-L-O-O-D, and that shows how

54:07

the spellings were quickly falling into

54:09

line with the spellings we use

54:11

today. I

54:14

think Nash's pamphlet is interesting to note

54:16

because it shows how active this period

54:18

was in terms of the development of

54:20

the language. We tend

54:22

to focus most of our attention on

54:24

the major works of Shakespeare, but here

54:26

we have an obscure pamphlet written to

54:28

attack a fellow writer, and it

54:31

contains several firsts for the language. So

54:34

even obscure documents like this show significant

54:36

developments in the way words were being

54:38

used at the time. Now,

54:41

as I noted, Nash's pamphlet was published

54:43

in 1596, the same year as

54:45

Coot's spelling guide. During

54:48

this same year, there was also a

54:50

notable political development in England. In

54:53

the springtime, England sent a naval

54:55

expedition to Spain to ransack the

54:57

port city of Cadiz. This

55:00

was part of the ongoing dispute between England

55:02

and Spain. It had

55:04

been almost two decades since the Spanish Armada

55:07

had been repelled from England, and

55:09

in the years that followed, the English Navy

55:11

emerged as a powerful force in the North

55:13

Atlantic. And this particular

55:16

assault on Spain was actually successful.

55:19

The Spaniards were taken by surprise, and the

55:21

English forces were able to capture the city

55:23

of Cadiz for a brief period of time.

55:27

The local Spanish authorities actually sank many of

55:29

their own ships to prevent them from being

55:31

captured, but limited supplies

55:33

forced the English to abandon the city

55:35

a short time later. When

55:37

they left, they took a lot of Spanish gold

55:39

and silver with them, but the

55:42

sailors largely distributed it among themselves,

55:44

leaving very little for a disappointed

55:46

queen back in England. Elizabeth

55:49

needed the money to pay the cost of

55:51

the expedition, and of course, to fill

55:53

her own coffers. One

55:56

of the leaders of the expedition was Robert Devereaux,

55:58

the Earl of the of Essex, generally

56:01

known to history as Essex. He

56:04

was already emerging as an important figure

56:06

late in Elizabeth's reign and as we'll

56:08

see in the next couple of episodes

56:11

he had an up-and-down relationship with Elizabeth

56:13

and this is a good example of the conflict

56:15

that was to come. Many

56:18

people hailed him as a hero for the

56:20

attack on Cadees but Elizabeth was

56:22

furious that he didn't provide her with the

56:24

gold and silver that she expected to receive.

56:28

That Spanish expedition is important to our

56:30

story because it actually contributed a new

56:32

word to the English language and

56:35

that was the word Derek meaning

56:37

a device used to hoist or

56:39

move something very heavy and

56:42

the story of this word is a fascinating

56:44

insight into the political developments in England

56:46

during this period. The

56:49

word Derek is actually derived from

56:51

a person's name. That

56:53

person was Thomas Derek. He

56:56

was part of the crew that took part

56:58

in the siege in sack of Cadees in

57:00

1596 but during

57:02

that siege he was accused of raping

57:05

several women. When he

57:07

returned to England he was found guilty

57:09

of that offense and sentenced to be

57:11

brutally fogged but in

57:13

order to avoid that sentence he agreed

57:15

to become the executioner at Tyburn which

57:18

was the place where executions normally took

57:20

place in London. So

57:22

instead of receiving a brutal punishment he

57:25

agreed to inflict a lethal punishment

57:27

on others. Supposedly

57:29

the deal was arranged by the Earl of

57:31

Essex who I mentioned a moment ago. According

57:34

to the most commonly recited accounts Essex

57:37

pardoned Derek for the rapes

57:39

and secured his new position

57:41

as executioner. Over

57:43

the course of Derek's career he

57:45

executed over 3,000 people and

57:49

in a fascinating bit of irony one

57:51

of the people he eventually executed was

57:53

Essex himself after the Earl's

57:55

dispute with the Queen reached the level of

57:57

treason but more on that in another video.

58:00

promised Derek

58:02

was so well known as the executioner during this period

58:04

that his name soon became synonymous

58:07

with the gallows itself,

58:10

and in fact the word Derek was sometimes used as a verb meaning

58:12

to execute. By

58:17

the mid-1700s the term was extended to

58:19

cranes or other lifting devices. Those

58:22

devices used lifts and pulleys and apparently resembled

58:25

the gallows which also had a large beam

58:28

with a rope dangling from it. So some

58:31

people referred to those cranes as erics and

58:34

that eventually became the accepted term

58:36

for those devices and thereby

58:38

gave us the modern meaning of the word

58:40

Eric. While

58:43

the expedition to Spain was considered a

58:45

success, England's greatest naval

58:47

hero, Francis Drake, didn't participate

58:49

in it and that was

58:51

because he had died a few months earlier

58:54

near Panama. He

58:56

had been on an expedition to the

58:58

Caribbean and Spanish America when he contracted

59:00

dysentery and he died a short

59:02

time later in January. In

59:05

fact, despite the naval success at Cadiz,

59:07

the year 1596 was overall a bad year for

59:09

many people in England. For

59:14

the prior couple of years there had been

59:16

excessive rain and flooding which had ruined many

59:18

crops in the countryside. That

59:21

led to starvation in many parts of the

59:23

country. Many people saw

59:25

their wages plummet and the price

59:27

of essential goods like flour tripled

59:29

during this period. Vagrancy

59:32

had been a problem for many years and

59:34

now it became even worse. The

59:37

bad weather and limited food supplies may

59:39

have contributed to another outbreak of plague

59:41

and other illnesses during 1596. In

59:45

the springtime, Queen Elizabeth was reported to

59:48

be ill even though she did soon

59:50

recover. And during

59:52

the summer, William Shakespeare's only

59:54

son, Hamnet, died of unknown

59:56

causes. He was only 11 years old.

1:00:00

Around the same time, the leading

1:00:02

patron of Shakespeare's acting company also

1:00:04

died. His

1:00:06

name was Henry Carey, and he was the

1:00:08

Lord Chamberlain. You might

1:00:10

recall that Shakespeare's acting company was called the

1:00:12

Lord Chamberlain's Men. Well,

1:00:15

when Henry died, the patronage passed to

1:00:17

his son, George. No

1:00:19

one knows for certain what caused the

1:00:21

deaths of Shakespeare's son and his company's

1:00:23

leading patron, but there's been a lot

1:00:25

of speculation that they both died from

1:00:27

the renewed outbreak of plague. So

1:00:30

for Shakespeare and many other people in England, the year 1596

1:00:32

was a year of death and

1:00:35

disruption. It

1:00:38

was around this same time that

1:00:40

Shakespeare probably composed two of his

1:00:42

most popular plays, A Midsummer

1:00:44

Night's Dream and Romeo and

1:00:46

Juliet. As I

1:00:49

noted at the beginning of the episode, we'll

1:00:51

explore Romeo and Juliet next time, but

1:00:53

I want to conclude this episode

1:00:55

by examining A Midsummer Night's Dream.

1:00:59

For reasons that we'll see, modern scholars

1:01:01

think these two plays were composed around

1:01:04

the same time, though a specific day

1:01:06

is difficult to determine. Both

1:01:09

A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet

1:01:11

are included in Francis Meir's list of Shakespeare's

1:01:13

plays from 1598, a couple of years later.

1:01:18

Also, Romeo and Juliet was published in a

1:01:20

quarto edition in early 1597, so it had

1:01:22

to have

1:01:25

been composed around this time or earlier.

1:01:28

Whether A Midsummer Night's Dream was composed

1:01:30

slightly earlier or later or at the

1:01:33

same time is unclear. I

1:01:36

should also note that Shakespeare's most popular

1:01:38

and highly regarded plays started to appear

1:01:40

around this time, and it seems likely

1:01:42

that A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo

1:01:44

and Juliet were composed during the beginning

1:01:47

of this middle period when the overall

1:01:49

quality of his plays increased. Most

1:01:52

scholars agree that these two plays were the

1:01:54

work of an experienced and mature playwright, and

1:01:57

that makes it unlikely that they were holdovers from an

1:01:59

experienced playwright. earlier period of his career. A

1:02:03

Midsummer Night's Dream is set in ancient

1:02:05

Greece before the time of the Trojan

1:02:07

War. The opening

1:02:09

scene features the leader of Athens

1:02:11

named Theseus. According

1:02:14

to Greek legend, Theseus defeated the

1:02:16

Amazons and married their Amazonian queen.

1:02:19

Well, the play opens with the anticipated

1:02:22

wedding of Theseus and his soon-to-be

1:02:24

wife, Hippolyta. But

1:02:26

that's really just the backdrop of the play. They

1:02:29

aren't really involved in the main part of the

1:02:31

story. A

1:02:33

man named Begeus arrives at Theseus' court

1:02:35

and complains that his daughter, Hermia, doesn't

1:02:38

want to marry the man he prefers

1:02:40

for her to marry. He

1:02:43

wants her to marry a man named Demetrius. And

1:02:46

Demetrius wants to marry her, but

1:02:48

she's in love with another man

1:02:50

named Lysander. So

1:02:52

as the play begins, we have

1:02:54

the primary couple of Hermia and

1:02:57

Lysander, and we also have Demetrius,

1:02:59

who is pursuing Hermia. But

1:03:02

Demetrius also has a former girlfriend named

1:03:04

Helena, who is still in love with

1:03:06

him. So Helena

1:03:09

loves Demetrius, who loves

1:03:11

Hermia, who loves Lysander.

1:03:15

Well the primary couple, Hermia and Lysander,

1:03:17

decide to leave the city to go

1:03:20

to the woods to avoid Hermia's father

1:03:22

and to elope with a wedding in

1:03:24

the forest. The

1:03:26

scene then shifts to the woods, which

1:03:28

is inhabited by fairies. I

1:03:31

talked about the perception of fairies during this period

1:03:33

back in episode 168. As

1:03:36

I mentioned in that earlier episode,

1:03:39

fairies were traditionally viewed as sinister

1:03:41

figures or playful tricksters. People

1:03:44

who believed in them tried to avoid them. They

1:03:47

were also generally thought to be

1:03:49

human-sized. The modern

1:03:51

perception of fairies as tiny,

1:03:53

delicate, winged creatures didn't really

1:03:55

emerge until after the Elizabethan

1:03:57

period, and a lot of people think this play

1:03:59

might Shakespeare contributed to that modern

1:04:02

perception. In fact,

1:04:04

Shakespeare suggests that his fairies are tiny creatures

1:04:06

in the scene where he first introduces them.

1:04:09

In this scene, we're introduced to the king and

1:04:11

queen of the fairies, Oberon

1:04:13

and Titania. By

1:04:16

the way, if you're a fan of astronomy,

1:04:18

you may know that the two largest moons

1:04:20

of Uranus are called Oberon and Titania, and

1:04:23

they were named after the characters in this play.

1:04:27

Well, when we're first introduced to

1:04:29

Oberon and Titania, they are arguing

1:04:31

with each other, which frightens the

1:04:33

other fairies. A

1:04:35

fairy named Puck says, quote, But

1:04:39

they do square that all their

1:04:41

elves for fear creep into acorn

1:04:43

cups and hide them there, end

1:04:46

quote. So if

1:04:48

they were small enough to hide in acorn

1:04:50

cups, they must have been pretty small. And

1:04:53

I should note that those two lines were part

1:04:55

of a rhyming passage. So the

1:04:57

lines were supposed to rhyme, but

1:04:59

the first line ends with the

1:05:01

word fear, and the second line ends

1:05:04

with the word fair. Well,

1:05:07

earlier in the episode, I mentioned

1:05:09

a passage in Richard II where

1:05:11

Shakespeare rhymed that same word fear

1:05:13

with the verb to tear. And

1:05:16

I noted that the words were probably

1:05:18

pronounced fair and tear at the

1:05:20

time. Well, here

1:05:22

we have more evidence of that

1:05:25

pronunciation because most scholars agree that

1:05:27

the word there was pronounced much

1:05:29

like today in Elizabethan England. In

1:05:32

this same part of a Midsummer Night's

1:05:34

Dream, Shakespeare rhymes the word fear with

1:05:36

the word bear, and

1:05:38

in a separate passage, he rhymes

1:05:41

there with swear. So

1:05:43

we have really strong evidence that he

1:05:45

pronounced fear as fair. And

1:05:48

if we give that word its original pronunciation,

1:05:50

the lines I read a moment ago would

1:05:52

have rhymed at the end, like this. to

1:06:00

acorn cups and hide them there. That's

1:06:03

a good example of how modern

1:06:05

linguists have recreated Shakespeare's pronunciation. So

1:06:09

why were the king and queen of the fairies arguing

1:06:11

with each other? Well, according

1:06:13

to the fairy Puck, the queen,

1:06:15

Titania, had taken a baby from

1:06:17

a human couple and refused to

1:06:19

give the baby to her husband

1:06:21

Oberon, and Oberon was upset about

1:06:24

that. Now

1:06:26

that passage probably requires an

1:06:28

explanation. I mentioned

1:06:30

earlier that fairies were often perceived as

1:06:32

sinister or malevolent figures. And

1:06:35

according to one widespread belief, fairies

1:06:37

were the cause of mental disabilities

1:06:39

in babies or small children. It

1:06:42

was believed that babies were born healthy,

1:06:44

but in those cases, a fairy had

1:06:47

stolen the original baby and replaced him

1:06:49

or her with what was called a

1:06:51

changeling, which often suffered from disability or

1:06:53

illness. So that's what

1:06:56

Shakespeare is referencing here. The fairy

1:06:58

queen has stolen a baby, but the king

1:07:00

wants it for himself. The

1:07:03

fairy Puck then says that he's

1:07:05

Oberon's servant and trickster. He

1:07:07

makes the king laugh by performing tricks on

1:07:09

humans. He says that he

1:07:12

tricks a fat old horse by pretending to be

1:07:14

a young filly, and he tricks

1:07:16

an old woman by pretending to be a crab

1:07:18

apple in her bowl of ale so that when

1:07:20

she drinks from the bowl he bobs against her

1:07:22

lips and makes her spill it on herself. Then

1:07:25

he pretends to be a stool, and when an

1:07:27

old woman tries to sit on him, he slips

1:07:29

out from under her so that she falls to

1:07:32

the ground and cries out on coughs while everyone

1:07:34

laughs at her. Now

1:07:36

in the passage where Puck says that, Shakespeare

1:07:39

includes a couple of rhymes that seem odd

1:07:41

to us today. He

1:07:43

rhymes the words crab and

1:07:45

bob and the

1:07:47

words cough and laugh. Here's

1:07:51

the entire passage, and notice the

1:07:53

odd rhymes. Quote,

1:07:56

I jest to Oberon and make him

1:07:58

smile. An eye

1:08:00

a fat and beam-fed horse beguile,

1:08:03

neighing in likeness of a filly

1:08:05

foal, and sometimes lurk

1:08:07

eye in a gossip's bowl. In

1:08:11

very likeness of a roasted crab, and

1:08:13

when she drinks against her lips I

1:08:16

bob, and on her wither

1:08:18

doolap pour the ale, the

1:08:20

wisest aunt telling the saddest tale.

1:08:24

Time for a three-foot stool mistaketh me,

1:08:27

then slip-eye from her bum down

1:08:29

topples she, and

1:08:31

Taylor cries and falls into a cough,

1:08:34

and then the whole choir hold their hips and

1:08:37

laugh, and waxen in

1:08:39

their mirth and knees and swear a merry

1:08:42

hour was never wasted there." So

1:08:47

this is a fascinating passage because of

1:08:49

those two couplets where he rhymes those

1:08:51

words with short A sounds, crab and

1:08:54

laugh, with those words with

1:08:56

short O sounds, bob and cough.

1:09:00

Now the first two words, crab and

1:09:02

laugh, are spelled with an A, and

1:09:04

the second two words, bob and cough,

1:09:06

are spelled with an O. So

1:09:08

that suggests that historically they were not

1:09:10

pronounced with the same vowel sound, and

1:09:13

of course they're not generally pronounced with the same

1:09:15

vowel sound today. So

1:09:17

why did Shakespeare rhyme them? Well

1:09:20

the answer is that the words actually

1:09:22

did rhyme at the time, at least

1:09:24

in some common accents. So

1:09:27

far in this episode we've seen examples

1:09:29

where words that once had the same

1:09:32

vowel sounds split into different sounds after

1:09:34

the 1500s. That's

1:09:37

what happened with most of the words

1:09:39

spelled with double O's like food, foot,

1:09:41

and blood. And

1:09:43

we've also seen examples where words

1:09:45

that once had different vowel sounds

1:09:47

experienced a merger, where the

1:09:49

various vowel sounds came together and

1:09:52

merged into the same sound like

1:09:54

verb, bird, and word.

1:09:58

Well now we have an example where both of them were pronounced with the same vowel sounds.

1:10:00

those developments occurred. In

1:10:02

this case we have words

1:10:04

with distinct vowel sounds that merged

1:10:07

together or nearly merged together in

1:10:09

the 1500s, and then in

1:10:11

the following century they split

1:10:13

apart again. So

1:10:15

the distinct vowel sounds in crab

1:10:18

and bob and in laugh

1:10:20

and cough merged together in the 1500s

1:10:22

as ah. So

1:10:26

they would have been pronounced crab and bob

1:10:29

and laugh and cough. But

1:10:31

then they split apart again in the following century.

1:10:34

So for this brief period of time in

1:10:36

which Shakespeare lived these words would have rhymed

1:10:38

with each other and we can find many

1:10:41

of these types of rhymes in his works

1:10:43

and the works of other writers during this

1:10:45

period. Now I

1:10:47

say that those words had the same vowel

1:10:49

sound and some speakers probably did pronounce them

1:10:51

the same. Other speakers

1:10:53

might have made a slight distinction between the

1:10:56

two vowel sounds but they were close enough

1:10:58

in pronunciation that they could rhyme with each

1:11:00

other. Now I don't

1:11:02

have time to explore that history any further in

1:11:04

this episode but I am going to discuss

1:11:06

it in a little more detail next time. And

1:11:10

the reason why this is so fascinating is

1:11:12

that speakers who pronounced the vowel sounds in

1:11:14

those words exactly the same way may

1:11:17

provide evidence of an early American

1:11:19

accent emerging during this period. And

1:11:22

by that I mean that this feature survives in American

1:11:24

English in a way that it doesn't

1:11:26

really survive in British English. Again

1:11:30

I'll explore that issue in more detail

1:11:32

next time but I just wanted to

1:11:34

note that the short A and short

1:11:36

O sounds in a lot of words

1:11:38

were so close in pronunciation during this

1:11:40

period that Shakespeare could rhyme them. Now

1:11:45

the argument between the fairy king and

1:11:47

queen continues and in one

1:11:49

passage the fairy queen Titania says that

1:11:52

their arguments and disagreements have caused great

1:11:54

suffering over the land. In

1:11:57

an extended passage she describes how the

1:11:59

winds have sucked up the seas

1:12:01

and deposited the water over the

1:12:03

country causing great flooding and suffering.

1:12:06

The passage describes how crops have rotted

1:12:08

in the fields, and the crows have

1:12:11

become fat from eating the corpses of

1:12:13

dead sheep. She laments

1:12:15

that the seasons have switched places and

1:12:17

sickness has spread across the land. Now

1:12:20

this passage so closely describes the situation in

1:12:23

England in 1595 and 1596 that most

1:12:27

scholars are convinced that Shakespeare was

1:12:29

referencing those actual events here. Even

1:12:33

though the play was set in ancient Greece,

1:12:35

references like this were often included to appeal

1:12:37

to a contemporary audience. Remember

1:12:40

that these plays were not really written for

1:12:42

posterity, they were written for paying audiences

1:12:44

in London in the late 1500s. So

1:12:48

the inclusion of that passage about flooding, famine,

1:12:50

and disease is some of the strongest evidence

1:12:52

we have that the play was composed around

1:12:54

this time in 1596 or slightly before. Now

1:13:00

after Titania leaves the scene, the

1:13:02

fairy king, Oberon, and his trickster

1:13:04

servant, Puck, remain behind. Oberon

1:13:07

has a plan to deceive Titania so he

1:13:09

can get the baby from her. He

1:13:12

tells a story about seeing Cupid shoot his

1:13:14

arrow at a vestal virgin, but the

1:13:16

arrow missed and landed on a flower. The

1:13:19

virgin carried on unaffected. He

1:13:22

says that she walked on quote, in

1:13:24

maiden meditation, fancy free,

1:13:27

end quote. And

1:13:29

that's the first recorded use of the

1:13:31

term fancy free in the English language.

1:13:34

It appears to be a term that Shakespeare coined.

1:13:37

So what exactly does fancy free

1:13:39

mean? Well believe

1:13:42

it or not, fancy is just a

1:13:44

shortened or slurred version of the word

1:13:46

fantasy. And during

1:13:48

the Elizabethan period, the word

1:13:50

fancy literally meant a fantasy,

1:13:53

but it could also be used

1:13:55

to mean affection or love. We

1:13:58

still have that sense in English when we say that person

1:14:00

fancies someone. Well,

1:14:03

in this case, since Cupid's arrow

1:14:05

missed the Vestal Virgin, she

1:14:07

continued on Fancy-Free, meaning

1:14:10

without falling in love. Of

1:14:13

course, the sense of living without a care

1:14:15

in the world has become the usual sense

1:14:17

of the term Fancy-Free today. In

1:14:19

American English, the term is common in

1:14:21

a phrase like Footloose in Fancy-Free. So

1:14:25

how did the word fancy come to

1:14:27

have its modern meaning as something overly

1:14:29

elaborate or ornamental? Well,

1:14:32

if you fantasize about something, you

1:14:34

often imagine an ideal situation, perhaps

1:14:37

something that doesn't even exist in the real

1:14:39

world. That seems

1:14:41

to be how the word evolved into

1:14:43

a sense of something ideal or perfect

1:14:45

or elaborate, which gave us the

1:14:47

modern sense of the word. And

1:14:50

that modern sense was in place by the late

1:14:52

1700s. So

1:14:55

Fancy and Fancy-Free once had

1:14:57

a connection to love and

1:14:59

affection. And as

1:15:02

Oberon recounts his story about Cupid,

1:15:04

he says that Cupid's arrow missed

1:15:06

the maiden and landed on a

1:15:08

white flower, but the flower then

1:15:10

turned purple with love's wound. Oberon

1:15:13

says that if the juice of the flower

1:15:15

is extracted and placed on the eyelids of

1:15:18

a sleeping person, that person will

1:15:20

fall in love with the first creature he

1:15:22

or she sees when he or she wakes

1:15:24

up. He wants Puck

1:15:26

to find the juice and place it

1:15:28

onto Tanya's eyelids while she's sleeping. When

1:15:31

she awakes and falls in love, she

1:15:33

will be distracted so that Oberon can

1:15:35

take the baby from her. Once

1:15:38

he has the baby, he will then remove the

1:15:40

love spell and, with the plan

1:15:42

in place, Puck leaves to obtain the

1:15:45

juice of the flower. The

1:15:47

scene then shifts back to the humans. Remember

1:15:51

that the primary couple in the story

1:15:53

are Lysander and Hermia. They

1:15:55

are in love with each other and have fled to

1:15:57

the forest to elope. Demetrius

1:16:00

is also in love with Hermia, and

1:16:03

his former girlfriend Helena is still in love

1:16:05

with him. Well

1:16:07

Demetrius has followed Hermia into the

1:16:09

forest, and Helena has tagged along

1:16:11

as well. We

1:16:14

then hear a conversation between Demetrius and

1:16:16

his former girlfriend Helena where he says

1:16:18

that he no longer loves her, but

1:16:21

Helena says that she still loves him

1:16:23

dearly. The fairy

1:16:25

king Oberon overhears the conversation and

1:16:27

feels sorry for Helena. When

1:16:30

Puck returns with the juice that makes people

1:16:32

fall in love, he tells Puck to place

1:16:34

some of it on the eyelids of the

1:16:36

Athenian man in the forest who no longer

1:16:38

loves his girlfriend. The

1:16:40

juice will rekindle his love for her. Of

1:16:43

course he's referring to Demetrius, but Puck

1:16:46

is uncertain who Oberon is referring to.

1:16:49

Oberon then places some of the juice on

1:16:52

the eyelids of the sleeping fairy queen, Titania.

1:16:56

Well following Oberon's instructions, Puck goes

1:16:58

through the forest looking for the

1:17:00

Athenian man but Puck can't find

1:17:02

him. We then

1:17:05

have the following passage from Puck where

1:17:07

he initially says that he can't find

1:17:09

the Athenian and then suddenly comes across

1:17:11

a couple sleeping on the ground and

1:17:13

assumes this is the man that Oberon

1:17:15

was referring to. But it's

1:17:17

not. It's actually the

1:17:19

original couple Lysander and Hermia. Now

1:17:23

this is a rhyming passage, but notice

1:17:25

how almost none of the lines rhyme

1:17:27

today. Puck

1:17:29

says, quote, Through the

1:17:31

forest I have gone, but Athenian

1:17:33

found I none, On

1:17:35

whose eyes I might approve, This

1:17:38

flowers force in stirring love.

1:17:41

Night in silence who is here? This

1:17:46

is he, my master said,

1:17:49

Despised the Athenian maid. And

1:17:52

here the maiden's sleeping sound On

1:17:54

the dank and dirty ground. Pretty

1:17:57

soul she dares not lie, Near

1:17:59

this lack love, this

1:18:01

kill courtesy." So

1:18:06

within that passage Shakespeare rhymes

1:18:08

gone and none, approve

1:18:11

and love, hear and

1:18:14

wear, said

1:18:16

and made, and

1:18:18

lie and courtesy. Now

1:18:21

again, those don't rhyme today, but they did

1:18:23

at the time. I

1:18:25

am going to read that same passage again and

1:18:28

this time I am going to give the final

1:18:30

word in each line the pronunciation that most scholars

1:18:32

think it had at the time. Through

1:18:35

the forest I have gone, but Athenian

1:18:38

found I known, on whose

1:18:40

eyes I might approve this flowers

1:18:42

force in stirring love, night

1:18:45

in silence who is hare, weeds

1:18:47

of Athens he doth wear. This

1:18:50

is he my master said,

1:18:52

despises the Athenian Med, and

1:18:55

hear the mad and sleeping-soned, on the

1:18:57

dank and dirty ground. Pretty

1:19:00

soul, she dares not lie, near

1:19:02

this lack love, this kill courtesy.

1:19:07

Within those rhymes you can hear the

1:19:09

sound of Elizabethan English. Also

1:19:12

I should mention something interesting about the

1:19:14

part of that passage which refers to

1:19:16

Hermia's sleeping-quote, on the dank

1:19:19

and dirty ground. In

1:19:22

the original first folio version of the play,

1:19:24

published in 1623, the word dirty is spelled

1:19:30

D-U-R-T-Y. That's

1:19:33

the same type of spelling that Edmund Koot

1:19:35

used in his spelling guide which we looked

1:19:37

at earlier. In fact, he

1:19:39

used the word dirt as an example.

1:19:42

He said that some people

1:19:44

mispronounce dirt as dirt, which

1:19:47

he spelled D-U-R-T. That

1:19:49

was an early indication that the vowel

1:19:52

sound in dirt was shifting and merging

1:19:54

with those other vowel sounds and becoming

1:19:56

dirt. And here

1:19:58

the first folio, published about thirty

1:20:00

years later shows the same spelling.

1:20:03

That's further evidence that this vowel

1:20:05

merger had become much more widespread

1:20:07

over the intervening years. Now

1:20:11

returning to the play, Puck has

1:20:13

encountered this sleeping couple on the ground, and

1:20:15

he assumes the man is the one who

1:20:17

has fallen out of love with his partner.

1:20:20

So he places the love drops on the

1:20:23

eyelids of the sleeping man, but

1:20:25

as I noted, the band is not

1:20:27

Demetrius, but Lysander, and Lysander

1:20:29

is in love with Hermia, and they are soon

1:20:31

to be married in the forest. Meanwhile,

1:20:35

the other couple, Demetrius and Helena,

1:20:37

have gone their separate ways. Demetrius

1:20:40

is looking for Hermia, and

1:20:42

Helena is chasing after him. But

1:20:45

Helena passes by Lysander just as he

1:20:47

awakes from his nap, and

1:20:49

seeing Helena, he suddenly falls in love

1:20:52

with her. So

1:20:54

now the two couples are completely

1:20:56

mismatched. While the

1:20:58

two women are still in love with their respective

1:21:00

men, each of the men is

1:21:02

in love with the woman who is part of the

1:21:04

other couple. The

1:21:07

scene then shifts to another part of the

1:21:09

same forest, where a group of men are

1:21:11

rehearsing a play to be performed at the

1:21:14

upcoming wedding of the Athenian leader Theseus. This

1:21:17

play is intended to be part of the wedding

1:21:19

entertainment, but the men are manual

1:21:22

laborers and not very good actors. Puck

1:21:25

sees them rehearsing and decides to play a

1:21:27

trick. One of the

1:21:29

men is a weaver named Bottom, and

1:21:31

Puck turns his head into the head of

1:21:33

a donkey. Only the weaver

1:21:35

doesn't realize that his head has changed. When

1:21:38

the other men see him, they start to freak out,

1:21:40

and some of them run away. The

1:21:43

weaver, Bottom, says, Why do they

1:21:45

run away? This is knavery of them

1:21:47

to make me afeard. Now

1:21:50

here we see Shakespeare use the word

1:21:52

afeard instead of the word afraid. Remember

1:21:56

from earlier that Edmund Coot had criticized

1:21:58

people who said afeard instead afraid.

1:22:01

He thought it was a bad pronunciation. Interestingly,

1:22:04

a few lines later, Shakespeare has

1:22:07

the same character, Bottom, say, I

1:22:10

am not afraid. So

1:22:12

within a few lines the same

1:22:14

character uses both forms of the

1:22:16

word, which suggests that Shakespeare considered

1:22:18

them to be somewhat interchangeable. Bottom

1:22:22

thinks the other men are playing a joke on him

1:22:24

by pretending that his head has changed form. He

1:22:27

says, I see their knavery, this

1:22:30

is to make an ass of me. Of

1:22:33

course that was a cute little bit of wordplay

1:22:35

by the playwright since Bottom's head was now the

1:22:37

head of an ass. And

1:22:39

scholars have also noted that his name

1:22:41

is Bottom, which is a synonym for

1:22:44

ass in the sense of one's backside.

1:22:47

So there's a lot of wordplay in this passage.

1:22:51

As it turns out, Titania, the queen

1:22:53

of the fairies, is sleeping nearby. And

1:22:56

when she awakes, she sees Bottom with

1:22:58

his ass's head. Since

1:23:01

Oberon has placed the love drops on her eyes

1:23:03

while she was sleeping, she instantly

1:23:05

falls in love with Bottom and his

1:23:07

donkey's head. She tells

1:23:09

him that she loves him and orders the other fairies

1:23:12

to pamper him and do as he wishes. Puck

1:23:16

then returns to the fairy king Oberon to tell

1:23:18

him what has happened to Titania. Oberon

1:23:21

is pleased with the results, but then

1:23:23

he asks Puck if he's delivered the love drops

1:23:25

to the Athenian man. Puck

1:23:28

says that he has, and as he

1:23:30

does so, Demetrius arrives. Oberon

1:23:33

says that's the man, but Puck realizes that

1:23:35

he's made a mistake because that isn't the

1:23:37

man who received the drops. Remember

1:23:40

Demetrius was the man who left his

1:23:43

girlfriend to follow Hermia into the forest

1:23:45

with her boyfriend Lysander. Demetrius

1:23:48

was supposed to receive the love drops so he

1:23:50

would fall back in love with his girlfriend, but

1:23:53

instead Lysander got the drops and

1:23:55

fell in love with Demetrius' old

1:23:57

girlfriend Helena. left

1:24:00

the sleeping Hermia to follow after

1:24:02

Helena. Well

1:24:04

Hermia has awakened to find her

1:24:06

boyfriend Lysander missing, and

1:24:08

when she sees Demetrius in the forest she

1:24:11

assumes that Demetrius has killed him. She

1:24:14

confronts Demetrius, but he denies the

1:24:16

accusation. He says, quote, You

1:24:18

spend your passion on a misprised

1:24:20

mood. I am not guilty

1:24:22

of Lysander's blood. End quote.

1:24:26

And this is supposed to be a

1:24:28

rhyming couplet, but mood and blood don't

1:24:31

rhyme today. Of course

1:24:33

they did rhyme at the time. As

1:24:35

we saw earlier, words with those double O's

1:24:37

were generally pronounced with an oo sound

1:24:39

at the time. And

1:24:41

as I noted before, blood was

1:24:43

pronounced blued. And here

1:24:46

we have further confirmation when Shakespeare

1:24:48

rhymes that word with mood. Meanwhile,

1:24:51

the fairy king Oberon now realizes the

1:24:54

mistake that's been made, and he orders

1:24:56

Puck to find Helena so that he

1:24:58

can correct the error. Puck

1:25:00

replies with one of the more quoted lines from the

1:25:03

play when he says, Lord, what

1:25:05

fools these mortals be. Puck

1:25:08

returns with Helena, and when her old boyfriend

1:25:11

Demetrius awakes from his nap with the love

1:25:13

drops on his eyelids, he sees

1:25:15

her and falls back in love with her. Meanwhile

1:25:18

Lysander, who mistakenly received the drops,

1:25:21

is given an antidote, and his

1:25:23

love returns to Hermia. The

1:25:26

fairy king also restores Bottom's head

1:25:28

and removes the spell from the

1:25:30

fairy queen to Tania. So

1:25:33

now all has been resolved. The

1:25:36

two couples in the forest are now in love

1:25:38

with each other again. The

1:25:40

Athenian leader Theseus soon encounters the couples

1:25:42

in the forest while hunting, and seeing

1:25:45

that they are in love, he orders that the

1:25:47

couples join him, and he directs

1:25:49

that his upcoming wedding be a three-way

1:25:52

wedding for all three couples. At

1:25:55

the wedding the workers perform the play that

1:25:57

they have been rehearsing. is

1:26:00

actually a classic tale called

1:26:02

Pyramus and Thysby. It

1:26:05

appears in the writings of the Roman poet

1:26:07

Ovid, who I've noted in prior episodes was

1:26:09

one of Shakespeare's influences and the inspiration of

1:26:12

several of his poems and plays. Well,

1:26:14

this particular tale is especially

1:26:17

interesting because it features two

1:26:19

lovers, Pyramus and his

1:26:21

girlfriend, Thysby. They

1:26:23

live in adjoining houses, but their

1:26:26

parents oppose their relationship, so

1:26:28

they agree to meet in secret outside of

1:26:30

town. Thysby arrives first

1:26:32

but is frightened by a lion and

1:26:35

runs away. She drops

1:26:37

her veil, which the lion seizes in

1:26:39

his mouth. The lion

1:26:41

is just killed in ox, so his mouth is

1:26:43

bloody and he drops the veil on the ground.

1:26:46

The veil is now covered in blood,

1:26:48

so when Pyramus arrives a short time

1:26:50

later he finds the bloody veil

1:26:53

and the lion's footprints. He

1:26:56

assumes that Thysby has been killed by

1:26:58

the lion and in a state of

1:27:00

anguish he kills himself on the spot.

1:27:03

Then Thysby arrives to see her boyfriend

1:27:05

lying dead on the ground. She

1:27:08

breaks down and then she kills herself

1:27:10

as well. So,

1:27:12

spurred to desperate measures by disapproving

1:27:15

parents and a mistaken assumption of

1:27:17

death, both the young man

1:27:19

and the young woman are dead, having

1:27:21

taken their own lives. This

1:27:24

is the portion of the play that's acted out

1:27:26

at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and

1:27:29

it seems remarkably similar to another story

1:27:31

that appeared on the stages of London

1:27:34

around this same time. Of

1:27:36

course, that's the story of Romeo and

1:27:38

Juliet. Modern scholars

1:27:40

are intrigued by the possible connections between

1:27:42

that play and this play within a

1:27:44

play featured at the end of A

1:27:46

Midsummer Night's It

1:27:49

seems possible that Shakespeare was inspired

1:27:51

by this classic story of Pyramus

1:27:53

and Thysby, but Romeo

1:27:56

and Juliet isn't really Shakespeare's version

1:27:58

of that story. Even

1:28:00

though his version is the most well

1:28:02

known today, the story of the star-crossed

1:28:04

lovers from Verona had actually been around

1:28:06

for a while. Shakespeare

1:28:08

just adapted the story for the

1:28:10

stage, and in doing so,

1:28:12

he created one of the most popular

1:28:15

plays of all time. So

1:28:17

next time, we'll look a little closer at that

1:28:19

play, and we'll also examine

1:28:21

the other events of the late 1590s

1:28:24

that shaped the English language. So

1:28:27

until then, thanks for listening to

1:28:29

the History of English podcast.