The Shakespeare-Expositor. Thomas Keightley

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СКАЧАТЬ ancestors' mode of forming the plural was perfectly correct and grammatical, with one exception—of which we still meet instances—that of using is and was as a plural. In my Edition of our poet's plays, I have therefore very generally preserved this structure; for we may alter orthography and punctuation, but not grammar.

      On the other hand, I must maintain, in opposition to Mr. Dyce, that the union of a single noun with a plural verb was never a rule of the language, but always an error of the copyist, or a slip of the writer. Of this I can give positive instances.

      I one day met in my own History of England the following words, "The blood of Catesby and two others alone were shed;" and on looking at the first edition I found of course that my word had been was. In Mr. Lloyd's Critical Remarks on Measure for Measure, in Singer's Shakespeare, we may read "the five acts of the first part of Promos and Cassandra concludes the iniquity of the deputy." Nor is this confined to English; in the Gerusalemme Liberata, and unnoticed by any editor, we find

      Non si conviene a te, cui fatto il corso

      Delle cose e de' tempi han si prudente.—x. 41.

      In all cases it will be found to be the consequence of a noun of a different number having intervened between the nominative and the verb. Mr. Dyce, however, tries to make a rule of it by saying that "our early writers" did it when a genitive plural intervened; but that will not apply to passages like these—

      Whose youth, like wanton boys through bonfires,

      Have skipt thy flame.—Two Noble Kinsmen, v. 1.

      The sea,

      With his proud mountain-waters envying heaven,

      When I say 'still!' run into crystal mirrors.

      Valentinian, iv. 1.

      Of others' voices, that my adder's sense,

      To critic and to flatterer stopped are.

      Shakespeare, Son. cxii.

      This last is the error of the poet, who probably had ears in his mind; yet sense may be a collective: all the others are perhaps to be ascribed to the original printers.

      The intensive particle be was prefixed to verbs much more frequently than at present. There was also a frequent ellipsis of the first personal pronoun before such verbs as cry, beseech, beshrew, &c.; and finally the habit—still retained by the vulgar—of cutting away the first syllable of a word prevailed to some extent.

      14.

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

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

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

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

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

      And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

      Of which vertue engendred is the flour.

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

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

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

      Romeus and Juliet, 1562.

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

      I am therefore of opinion that Shakespeare may be regarded as the chief agent in introducing СКАЧАТЬ