Episode 177: Dressed for Success

Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is episode 177, Dressed for Success.

This time, we're going to conclude our look at the 1500s.

As we take the story into a new century, we find ourselves nearing the end of the Elizabethan period.

But William Shakespeare was just starting to hit his stride.

In fact, we are entering into the period of his great tragedies.

We'll look at a couple of his plays he composed about successful military leaders, specifically Henry V of England and Julius Caesar.

A close look at those plays reveals that Elizabethan actors weren't really concerned about historical accuracy when it came to costumes and clothing.

From the text of the plays and from other information available to scholars, it's clear that the characters often dressed like contemporary Elizabethans, even if the plays were set in ancient Rome or Greece.

So this time, we'll also look at what writers of the period had to say about Elizabethan clothing, both costumes worn on the stage and regular clothing worn on the streets.

We'll also examine the connection between clothing and language, and we'll see how clothing terms were often appropriated to refer to certain types of speech.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com and you can sign up to support the podcast and get bonus episodes at patreon.com slash historyofenglish.

Also, I want to give a quick plug to a couple of projects that I think you might find interesting.

Many years ago, I did an interview with a podcast called Silly Linguistics.

I don't think the episode is still available as a podcast, but it is available available on YouTube.

At any rate, Silly Linguistics is still going strong, and they do a magazine each month that covers topics related to linguistics, etymology, and the type of stuff I discuss here.

So I wanted to mention that.

Also, while I'm discussing projects from the past, several years ago I did an episode of a podcast called 10 American Presidents, which focused on the accents and speech of various presidents.

Well, Roy Phil Brown is the man behind that podcast, and many others as well, and he has a new podcast series out about the struggles of dealing with a close family member who's been diagnosed with dementia, in this case, Royfeld's father.

It's a heartfelt series called In Glenn's Steps, A Journey with Dementia, and I wanted to give that podcast a quick plug as well, since Royfeld has contributed so much to independent history podcasting over the years.

So, with that, let's turn our attention to the history of English.

And we find ourselves at an important point as we mark the turning of a century.

In this episode, we'll advance the story from the 1500s into the 1600s.

The Elizabethan era is about to come to an end, and English expansion around the world is about to begin.

For our purposes, the year 1599 is notable because that was the year that the Globe Theater was built.

I discussed the events leading to the construction of the theater in the last episode, but the playhouse was finally completed in May of that year.

The New Globe was located just down the street from another popular playhouse called The Rose.

I've mentioned the Rose many times in the podcast because its owner, Philip Hinslow, maintained detailed records about the business operations of the Rose, and many of those records have survived.

So modern scholars actually know a lot more about the Rose than the Globe.

In the last episode, I described the excavation of the site where the Rose once stood.

Shortly after that excavation began in 1989, researchers located the site where the original Globe Theater had existed, and they began an excavation of the Globe site later in that same year.

Those excavations confirmed that both venues were open-air playhouses, but each venue did contain a roof over the stage itself.

In the case of the Rose, it appears that Henslow had renovated the venue a few years earlier to add a roof over the stage, and in the case of the New Globe, the stage had a roof from the outset.

So why did both of those open-air venues contain a roof over the stage?

Well, obviously, London was often rainy, so the roof helped to protect the actors.

But it wasn't really the actors who were being protected.

It's more likely that the roof was intended to protect the costumes that the actors wore.

Since many of the characters featured in Elizabethan plays were kings, queens, and other members of the nobility, the acting companies needed a variety of extravagant and fancy costumes, many of which were made of expensive fabrics, like silk and velvet, and trimmed with gold or lace.

Those types of garments were incredibly expensive at the time, usually possessed only by the nobility themselves.

So it was difficult for acting companies to acquire that type of clothing.

As a result, costumes were some of the most valuable and and prized assets that an acting company possessed.

The acquisition of costumes was complicated by the fact that people had limited options when it came to clothing.

People wore the specific clothing associated with their occupation or their status in society.

And that wasn't just because of custom or tradition.

In many cases, it was required by law.

In earlier episodes, I talked about the laws that regulated what people could wear based on their class or status in society.

Those laws were called sumptuary laws.

They'd been around since the Middle Ages and they were still in effect during the Elizabethan period.

Sometimes when prominent members of the nobility died, they would leave their fancy attire to their servants.

But the servants weren't allowed to wear such garments, so in some cases the servants would sell the clothing to the acting companies to be used as costumes.

In a case like that, the acting company might luck out and get a good deal on a piece of clothing, but in most cases, the costumes were incredibly expensive.

Philip Hinslow's business records for the Rose contain long lists of costumes, apparel, and props that were used in the performance of plays.

The records reveal that he sometimes paid more for a specific costume than he paid for an entire play.

His son-in-law was a prominent actor named Edward Allen, and the records show that he purchased the velvet cloak, and the amount he paid for it was the equivalent of a schoolmaster's salary for an entire year.

The costumes were so valuable that they had to be protected at all costs, and that was probably why a roof was added over the stage.

In fact, Hinslow was so protective of his costumes that he penalized actors if they lost or damaged the garments.

One of his actors was named Robert Dawes, and a contract between Dawes and Hinslow survives.

The contract penalized the actor if he left the theater while wearing any part of a costume.

The penalty was 40 pounds, which was an incredibly large sum at the time.

Again, the restriction was intended to prevent the loss of the garments or damage to the garments through normal wear and tear.

Hinslow's desire to protect his investment in costumes made sense if we think about the nature of the Elizabethan theater.

The surviving evidence suggests that most plays performed during this period didn't have a lot of scenery.

There were probably a few basic pieces, but overall the scenery and props would have been sparse.

That meant that the costumes really stood out.

The garments worn by the actors would have been one of the most visual components of a play, and that was why theater owners and acting companies were willing to invest so heavily in them.

The surviving evidence also suggests that actors wore contemporary clothing even if the play was set in ancient Rome or Greece, or in some other part of the world.

So, in a play like Julius Caesar, which we'll look at a little later in this episode, the Roman officials would have been dressed in Elizabethan clothing.

Of course, most of the actors would have played multiple parts in a play, so they needed to change outfits over the course of the play.

And much like today, the dressing room for the theater was typically located behind the stage.

But it wasn't called a dressing room at the time, it was called a tiring room.

The term tiring room was derived from the word attire.

In Middle English attire was often used as a verb.

To attire was to dress or adorn.

And sometimes the verb was shortened to just tire.

So a tiring room was a room where people attired or put on their attire.

Now to day we would refer to the outfits worn by performers as costumes.

But that wasn't really common during the Elizabethan period.

In fact, the word costume isn't found in an English document until the latter part of the following century.

Believe it or not, costume is really just a variation of the word custom.

And this points to a link between custom and clothing that can be found in several common words in English.

That's because clothing and clothing styles are often a product of custom and tradition.

So if we consider the word custom, it originally referred to the manner or style of a particular period.

And of course that included a customary style of dress worn at a particular time or in a particular profession.

And by the mid seventeen hundreds the word custom had evolved into the distinct word costume to refer to a specific style of dress.

Now if the evolution of that word seems a little surprising, consider the word habit, which has much the same history, but in reverse.

The word habit originally referred to clothing or apparel.

It was common in the Middle Ages for people to put on their habit in the morning, or to wear a specific habit for a specific occasion.

That's how the word started to acquire a more specific sense as the clothing worn for a specific purpose.

So, for example, a woman's writing outfit was called a writing habit.

That sense of the word habit as clothing worn for a specific purpose survives when we refer to a nun's habit.

Well, during the 1500s, the word habit was sometimes used to refer to a person's general appearance, and then to a person's general demeanor, and then to a person's general behavior, and then to a person's behavior that is repetitive or recurring.

And by the current point in our story in the late 1500s, the word habit had started to acquire its modern sense as a tendency to act in a certain way.

In fact, Shakespeare used the word in that modern way in some of his plays.

So habit evolved from a type of clothing to a type of customary behavior, while custom became costume by evolving in the opposite direction, from a type of customary behavior to a type of clothing.

There's actually another common word that shows this same type of connection, and that's the word garb.

It was a brand new word in English in the 1590s, having been borrowed from French.

But at the time, it simply meant a particular manner or style or custom.

So for example, if a person acted or behaved in a way that was associated with someone from Italy, you might refer to that person's demeanor or behavior as his or her Italian garb.

As we'll see, Shakespeare used the word garb in some of his plays, but it was always used in this original sense, as a term meaning meaning custom or habit or general demeanor or behavior.

It was really during the course of the 1600s that the word garb acquired its more modern sense as clothing.

So for example, when referring to a person's Italian garb, it originally referred to the general demeanor of someone from Italy.

But by the late 1600s, if you referred to a person's Italian garb, you were probably referring to a general style of dress associated with Italy.

The main point here is that there was a strong association between a person's clothing and the customs of society.

A person's clothing often reflected that person's social class or occupation or place of origin.

And those associations were so strong that the meaning of words like habit, garb, custom, and costume were extended over time to account for those connections.

Now speaking of costumes, one of the remarkable documents that survives from Philip Hinslow's records is a list of costumes and other items used in the performance of plays.

The list was an inventory of the property belonging to the acting company that normally performed at the Rose.

That acting company was called the Lord Admiral's Men, and the inventory was prepared in March of 1598.

In the list we find clothing terms that aren't really used today, or if they are used, they're not very common.

For example, the list includes references to numerous doublets.

A doublet referred to the snug-fitting garment that was worn by men on the upper part of the body.

Some of them had sleeves and some didn't.

It was a very common item of clothing at the time and was really the precursor of the modern jacket.

A similar garment worn by women on the upper part of their body over their dress or blouse was called a bodice.

Again, the word appeared in the late 1500s and is actually a variation of the term bodies, the plural form of body.

Another body term extended to clothing was the stomacher, an ornamental covering of the chest worn under the lacing of the bodice.

Again, it's another term that became common in the 1500s.

Hinslow's costume list also includes a reference to a Spanish jerkin.

A jerkin was basically a type of doublet worn on the upper body.

The list also contains several references to hose, which was the common garment worn on the legs.

Both men and women had worn hose since the Middle Ages, but women's hose often covered only the lower part of the legs since women tended to wear dresses.

For men, the hose usually covered the entire lower part of the body, reaching up to and often attached to the doublet.

In fact, the term doublet and hose was a common way of referring to the standard male attire at the time, and it's a term that pops up in several of Shakespeare's plays.

The list also includes references to various gowns, coats, and capes that were worn over the doublet and hose.

Now, speaking of hose, the fashion for men's legs changed in the early modern period.

The traditional hose worn over the legs started to be divided between the hose worn on the lower part of the legs, called nether stocks or nether stockings, and the garment worn on the upper parts of the legs, which was the precursor of our modern trousers.

For example, Henslow's list includes a reference to Venetians, which were a type of baggy hose or trousers commonly worn in Venice.

And we also find references to strawsers, which was another garment worn on the legs.

Strossers was one of many variations of the word trousers.

And this also raises an interesting question, if the garment worn over the legs is one item of clothing, why do we always refer to it with a plural term?

Whether you call them trousers or pants or breeches or drawers, the term is almost always plural in modern English.

But that wasn't always the case, and it appears that the change generally occurred during the Elizabethan period.

The common Old English word for trousers was bretch, which sounds singular since it doesn't end in s, but it was actually a plural term in Old English.

In Middle English the vowel was lengthened from breach to breech.

By that point the s was somewhat standard for plural nouns and since breech didn't end in an s it was usually treated as a singular noun.

So a person wore a breech on their legs.

It was really in the second half of the 1500s that it became common to refer to the garment in the plural as breeches.

And of course we still have that term today.

Some people pronounce the word as breeches with a slightly different vowel, but it's the same word.

It isn't really clear why the word evolved from a singular term to a plural term over the course of the 1500s, but the best guess is that breeches were thought of in the same way as socks or hose or stockings.

In those cases, a separate item of clothing was worn on each leg, so they were usually referred to as pairs.

Even though a breech was connected at the top and was a single item of clothing, it also covered the legs, so it was also referred to in the same way, and it became common to refer to a pair of breeches.

Around this same time in the late 1500s, the term Galagascan appeared.

It referred to a type of wide breeches that were popular at the time.

The word is based on a French word, though the form was altered considerably in English.

At any rate, during during the late 1500s and 1600s, the word was rendered both ways, as singular Galagascan and plural Galagascans.

That reflects how some people still thought of that type of garment as a single item of clothing, while others thought of it as a pair of garments attached at the top.

Another common term for wide trousers or baggy breeches was slops.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term was usually rendered in the plural as slops when referring to the entire garment.

But there are many references to an individual leg of the garment being referred to in the singular as a slop.

So again, that reinforces the idea that each leg was treated as a separate item, at least linguistically.

During this same time period in the late 1500s, other words started to appear for garments worn on the legs.

The verb draw had been around for centuries to refer to the act of pulling something.

To pull a pen or marker across a page was to draw it across the page, and that gave us the modern sense of the word draw as in to draw a picture.

If you pulled out a storage compartment from a dresser or a cabinet, it was called a drawer, literally something pulled out.

And that gave us the word drawer as in a chest of drawers.

And in the same way, since people pulled breeches up over their legs, they also became known as drawers.

And that sense of the word drawers as an article of clothing is first recorded in English in the late 1500s.

Today it's a term mostly associated with colloquial speech, and some people in the U.S.

pronounce it as drawers.

But again, it goes back to the Elizabethan period.

English also acquired a new term for a similar article of clothing worn in Ireland and Scotland.

That was the word truse, usually spelled T R E W S.

It referred to a common type of breeches worn in the Celtic regions of the British Isles.

The pants were tight-fitting and usually had a tartan design associated with the Scottish Highlands.

Truse was a plural term, and it probably entered English in the late 1400s.

That early date would explain how the pronunciation changed over time, because the word truse was almost certainly altered by the great vowel shift.

By the late 1500s, the word was commonly pronounced as trose, on its way to becoming trows.

Interestingly, that version of the word was singular, so you would refer to a person's trowels, T-R-O-U-S-E, as a single item of clothing.

But again, the notion that it should really be considered a pair of leg coverings soon kicked back in, and by the end of the 1500s, it was being referred to again in the plural, initially as trousers, before eventually evolving into our modern word trousers.

So trousers is ultimately a Celtic term, and at one time it was just one of many different terms for the item of clothing worn on the legs.

But it's outlived most of the other terms.

As I noted, trousers were sometimes called trousers in the Elizabethan period, and if we go back and look at that costume inventory for the Lord Admiral's men, we can see that it also used that term trussers.

And in addition to trousers, it also used the term straassers, which I mentioned earlier.

It appears that strossers is just a variation of trucers.

So some people would have called them trucers, and some would have called them straassers, and some would have called them trousers, and some would have probably used the original Celtic word truse.

I should note that Hinslow's Costume Inventory is the first known document to use Straucers as a variation, though it was probably in common use at the time, and that's because it soon popped up in one of William Shakespeare's plays, called Henry V.

Interestingly, Henslow's costume list includes references to a Harry V doublet and a Harry V velvet gown.

Those items appear to refer to costumes worn during a performance of Henry V,

but remember that this inventory was prepared for the Lord Admiral's men.

That wasn't Shakespeare's acting company.

His company was the Lord Chamberlain's men.

So most scholars think that the Harry V play referenced in the costume list was a separate play performed by the Lord Admiral's men at the Rose.

The list predates Shakespeare's version of Henry V,

and in fact there are references to plays about Henry V going all the way back to the 1580s, in the early days of the Elizabethan theater.

Henry V would have been a popular subject for playwrights of the period because he was one of England's most revered kings, primarily for his many victories over the French during the Hundred Years' War.

And had he not died of dysentery at a relatively young age, Henry V would have probably been the king of both England and France.

An agreement to that effect was in place when he died.

Shakespeare apparently composed his play about Henry V at some point in late 1598 or early 1599.

For reasons that we'll look at in a moment, it's generally agreed that it was one of the first plays, perhaps the very first play, performed at the newly constructed globe when it opened in May of 1599.

Shakespeare's version of Henry V was the culmination of a cycle of history plays that he'd been working on over the prior few years.

It began with Richard II and it continued with the two parts of Henry IV.

We looked at Henry IV in the last episode and we saw that much of the story focused on the king's son, Prince Hal, and his buddy Falstaff.

Well, Prince Hal finally became king when his father, Henry IV, died, and he thereupon became Henry V.

So this is where Shakespeare's final play in the sequence picks up.

As I noted, scholars are confident that Shakespeare's version of Henry V was completed and performed in 1599 for a few reasons.

First, it wasn't mentioned in that list of Shakespeare's plays compiled by Francis Mears in the prior year, 1598, so it apparently didn't exist at that point.

But a quarto version of the play was published in 1600.

So the play must have been completed sometime between those two points, and that leaves 1599, the year that the globe opened.

And in fact, the opening lines of Henry V appear to make reference to the newly constructed playhouse.

Henry V had several military victories during his relatively short reign, but the most famous was his defeat of the French at Ashincourt, which is considered to be one of the greatest military victories in English history.

That victory is prominently featured in Shakespeare's play, but the opening chorus or prologue questions whether it's possible to present such a massive battle on such a small stage.

The opening lines read in part as follows: quote:

But pardon, gentles all, the flat unraised spirits that hath dared on this unworthy scaffold to bring forth so great an object.

Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France?

Or may we cram within this wooden o the very casks that did affright the air at Agincourt?

Within that passage, the speaker refers to the playhouse as this unworthy scaffold, and this wooden O.

Most scholars agree that those references are to the newly built globe.

The wooden O refers to the fact that the globe was circular in shape, though the modern excavation at the site revealed that it actually had twenty distinct sides.

It was very difficult to construct construct an actual circle with the wood and lumber that had been transported from the old playhouse in the northern part of the city, but with its twenty sides, the globe would have appeared to be circular from the outside.

Now, this particular play is a little bit unusual compared to Shakespeare's other history plays.

It's really the only play about the kings of England where someone isn't trying to claim the crown or defend it from someone else.

Instead, the focus is on Henry's battles against the French, and it contains some of Shakespeare's most patriotic passages and scenes.

The first two acts of the play focus on Henry's decision to invade France because he thinks he's the rightful heir to the French throne.

At the beginning of Act III, the English forces attack the walled city of Harfleur.

The scene opens with Henry inspiring his troops by uttering the famous line, Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more

He concludes the speech with another well-known patriotic line

Follow your spirit and upon this charge cry God for Harry, England and Saint George, end quote.

We're then introduced to the captains of Henry's forces.

His army includes troops from Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, and this gives Shakespeare an opportunity to play around with regional accents, as each captain speaks in the local dialect of his respective region.

We are then introduced to Princess Catherine, the daughter of the French king.

She's ultimately an important figure in the story because she eventually marries Henry as part of a truce to end the war.

But the scene in which Shakespeare introduces her is fascinating because it's composed almost entirely in French.

Of course, Catherine would have spoken French, and that's the idea behind the scene.

Princess Catherine is trying to learn how to speak English in the scene.

She's speaking with her lady-in-waiting, who's older than her and has some knowledge of English.

So the the princess asks her what certain parts of the body are called in English.

She learns several English words like hand, fingers, arm, neck, elbow, and chin.

But this entire scene is designed to set up a dirty joke, at least for those who understood French.

The scene concludes with the princess asking what the English words are for le Pied and La Robe,

Pied and Robe.

The Lady in Waiting says that that the English words are fute and con,

which was her pronunciation of the word gown.

The princess is shocked by the answer, and in French she says that those words are vulgar, and she would never utter them in front of the lords of France.

She's equated foot with the French word futre, which is a vulgar French term for sex, similar to our own F word, and she equated con with the French word con,

which is a vulgar French term that can refer to female genitalia, similar to our own C-word.

The entire scene is really set up for this punchline at the end, but none of it makes sense if you don't speak French.

Certainly this scene was designed to appeal to a portion of the audience who spoke French, which would have been a minority, but still a significant number in the late 1500s.

It's a reminder that French was still held in high regard among the literate classes of England.

and even Shakespeare could compose an entire scene in French and have it appealed to a certain portion of the audience at the globe.

It's also interesting that the scene focuses on English words for body parts, but it concludes with the French word robe and the English word gown.

Interestingly, both of those words are French loanwords, and both were common in English by the late 1500s.

But this takes us back to our theme of Elizabethan clothing.

And in fact, it's shortly after this scene where we find the French king's heir, called the Dauphin, using the slang term for stressers that I mentioned earlier in the episode.

Remember that that was a variation of the word trousers.

In a scene where the French heir speaks with his constable as they prepare for a battle with the English, the prince says that his horse is like his mistress, and that gives Shakespeare another opportunity for some naughty wordplay, as the characters joke about riding their mistresses.

The prince says that the constable must have rode one that was old and gentle so that he could ride her in his straucers.

Here, Shakespeare has the French characters speak in English and even use a bit of English slang to ensure that the audience understood the wordplay and the intended joke.

Now Act IV takes us up to the Battle of Agincourt, and it features not only the most well-known passage from the play, but also one of the most well-known speeches in all of Shakespeare's works.

It's commonly known as the St.

Crispin's Day speech, because the battle was fought on a holiday known as St.

Crispin's Day.

In the scene, King Henry delivers a very patriotic and rousing speech to his men, and it contains many references which linger in the language to this day, like Henry's reference to his men as a band of brothers.

When I talked about Henry V and the Battle of Agincourt back in episode 134, I played an excerpt of the speech from the film version of the play featuring Laurence Olivier.

And since it's probably the most well-known passage from the play, I thought I would play it again for you.

So here it is.

His neighbors and say,

Tomorrow is St.

Crispian.

Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars and say,

These wounds I had on Crispin's Day.

Old men forget.

Yet all shall be forgot, but he'll remember with advantages what feats he did that day.

Then shall our names, familiar in his mouth as household words, Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester, be in their flowing cups freshly remembered.

This story shall the good man teach his son, and Crispin Crispigan shall ne'er go by from this day to the ending of the world, but we in it shall be remembered.

We few,

we happy few,

we band of brothers.

For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother, be he ne'er so base.

And gentlemen in England now abed, shall think themselves accursed, they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap, whilst any

Not only does that speech give us the phrase band of brothers, it also contains the term household words.

Henry says, quote, Then shall our names, familiar in his mouth as household words, be in their flowing cups freshly remembered, end quote.

Now many sources cite that passage as the first recorded use of the term household words.

It's often considered a Shakespearean term, but like many words and phrases attributed to him over the years, it appears that he didn't actually coin it.

The Oxford English Dictionary now cites an earlier reference from the 1570s, about 25 years earlier.

But the overall popularity of the term may have been influenced by this passage in Henry V.

There's also another interesting part of that passage that I want to highlight.

It's the part where Henry says that anyone surviving the battle will live with the pride of such a great victory for the rest of his life.

The passage reads, quote, He that outlives this day and comes safe home will stand a tiptoe when this day is named, and rouse him at the name of Crispian, end quote.

Now, something about that passage might hit your ear a little wrong.

It's the last part where Henry says, and rouse him at the name of Crispian.

But rouse who?

Well, he'll rouse himself.

He that survives the battle will rouse himself at the name of Crispian.

Today we would tend to use the word himself in that situation rather than him because it makes it clear that the subject and the object of the sentence are the same person.

If we say he will arouse him, it makes it sound like him is referring to someone else.

But, as this passage makes clear, you could say it either way during the Elizabethan period.

So let me digress for a moment and explain this grammatical development.

This development concerns pronoun forms that end in self, like myself, yourself, himself, herself, themselves, and so on.

The technical term for those pronouns is reflexive pronouns, and they're called that because they reflect back on the subject of the sentence.

In other words, when we have a sentence with a subject and an object, and the subject and the object are the same person, or same place, or same thing, the object form normally ends in self to make it clear that it's referring back to the same person, place, or thing as the subject.

So if that sounds very technical, let me illustrate it with a simple example.

If I want to say, Sally saw you, or Sally saw him, or Sally saw them, I would use those simple pronoun forms, you, him, and them.

Those are the objects of the sentence, and they're all different from Sally.

Sally was looking at other people.

But if Sally was looking in the mirror, I would say Sally saw herself.

That makes it clear that she was looking at her own reflection.

And that's why we use those reflexive pronoun forms ending in self in that situation to make it clear that the subject and the object of the sentence are the same.

But prior to the 1500s, people didn't really use a pronoun form ending in self.

In the 1300s or early 1400s, I would have said Sally saw her even though she was looking at herself in the mirror.

The use of the forms ending in self didn't really emerge until the late 1400s.

They became more and more common over the course of the 1500s, but even in the late 1500s during the time of Shakespeare, people could use either form and express the sentence either way.

So the modern reflexive pronoun forms ending in self weren't standard yet.

That's why Shakespeare could say he that survives the battle will rouse him at the name of Crispian, rather than he will rouse himself at the name of Crispian.

Now Henry's St.

Crispin's Day speech precedes the Battle of Agincourt, which, as I noted earlier, was a great English victory and is really the high point of the play.

The battle concludes Act IV of the play.

Act V begins with a brief chorus or prologue which provides some additional insight into the date of the play.

The passage refers to the triumphant return of Henry and the English forces after the victory at Agincourt.

In the passage Shakspere alludes to Henry being welcomed home like a conquering Julius Caesar.

Now Caesar was the subject of Shakspere's next play, and he may have been composing that play at the same time that he was wrapping up this play.

This passage also alludes to an English expedition to Ireland, which is also important in its own respects.

Now here's the relevant passage

But now behold in the quick forge and working house of thought how London doth pour out her citizens, the mayor and all his brethren in best sort, like to the senators of the antique Rome, with the plebeians swarming at their heels, go forth and fetch their conquering Caesar, as, by a lower, but by loving likelihood, were now the general of our gracious empress, as as in good time he may, from Ireland coming, bringing rebellion broached on his sword.

How many would the peaceful city quit to welcome him?

Much more and much more cause did they this Henry?

So again we have a reference comparing Henry to a conquering Caesar.

And then the passage compares the excitement of the masses to the anticipated excitement that will fill the city of London when the leader of the Irish expedition returns home, quote, bringing rebellion broached on his sword, end quote.

Now, this is a very rare case where Shakespeare referred to a contemporary event, and it helps to determine when the play was composed and first performed.

So let me explain what was going on with that military campaign that was occurring in Ireland while this play was being composed.

For a couple of decades, the English had been trying to colonize Ireland by establishing plantations there with English settlers, but the effort had met with little success due to Irish opposition.

The English had only been able to establish a few plantations outside of the traditional English base at Dublin.

In the prior year 1598, Irish rebels had ambushed and wiped out an English force in Ireland, and it nearly brought an end to English efforts to colonize the island.

And that was unacceptable to Queen Elizabeth because she and her advisors feared that Spain would use Ireland as a base to attack England.

So in the spring of 1599, around the same time that the globe was completed, she sent a military expedition to Ireland to put down the rebellion there.

The expedition was led by the Earl of Essex, who I mentioned back in episode 174.

He was a prominent member of Elizabeth's court, and a few years earlier he had helped to lead an expedition to Spain to raid the Spanish port at Cadiz.

The Spanish expedition was successful, but the sailors sailors divided the spoils between them before they got back to England, so Elizabeth received very little from the effort.

She was upset with Essex, and in fact the entire relationship between Essex and Elizabeth ran hot and cold during this period.

His decision to lead this new campaign in Ireland was partially an effort to get back in her good graces.

In the passage I read a moment ago, Shakespeare says that Henry V was welcomed home after his victory at Agincourt in the same way that Londoners will soon welcome Essex home after his expedition in Ireland.

Now that expedition had left England in late March, and the campaign appeared to be going well through the spring.

So the optimism expressed in this passage would have had to have been composed sometime during the spring, which again was the same time when the globe opened to the public.

So all of this information appears to confirm that the play was completed and performed for the first time shortly after the theater opened.

But soon after that, the Irish expedition started to fall apart.

After losing many men due to skirmishes and disease, Essex made a truce with the rebel leader in Ireland over Elizabeth's objection.

She didn't want a truce, which she considered to be the same as defeat.

Essex then skulked back to England in September to justify his actions to the Queen, but she promptly put him under house arrest.

Now, I'll leave the story there for now, but this is an important development because Essex was later involved in an effort to depose Elizabeth, and he was executed for treason as a result.

And his attempted coup actually involved Shakespeare's acting company through a strange development, but I'll explain those events in the next episode.

Now, returning to the play about Henry V,

the final act of the play is set about three years after Agincourt.

Henry has returned to France for a second invasion of the country.

The act opens with a brief conflict between a soldier in the English army named Pistol and the captain of the Welsh forces named Flewellyn.

The two men have a personal dispute going back to an earlier scene leading up to the Battle of Agincourt.

The Welsh captain Flewellyn wears a leek in his hat in accordance with a Welsh tradition, and as the two men spar, Flewellyn makes Pistol eat the leek, and Pistol storms away.

A separate captain named Gower stands nearby and he taunts the hot-headed pistol.

He condemns pistol for his verbal assault on the Welsh captain and says that Pistol deserved his comeuppance.

Gower says of the Welsh captain, quote, You thought because he could not speak English in his native garb, he could not therefore handle an English cudgel, end quote.

Now, that's an interesting turn of phrase.

Flewellen could not speak English in his native Welsh garb.

What did that mean?

Did it mean that the Welshman could not speak English while wearing his Welsh clothing?

Well, no.

Remember from earlier in the episode that the word garb was one of those words along with habit and custom and costume that had broader meanings referring to tradition, habit, custom, or a way of doing things.

And as I noted earlier, the word garb also came into English with that specific meaning.

It didn't come to refer to a particular style of clothing until after Shakespeare's lifetime.

So when Shakespeare wrote that Flewellen couldn't speak English in his native garb, it meant that he could not speak English since his normal or customary manner of speech was Welsh.

But this is a good example of that earlier sense of the word garb before it came to refer to clothing or a particular style of dress.

Now the play concludes with the English and French nobles agreeing to a peace treaty that will allow Henry to become the French king after the death of the current French king, who was old and mad at the time.

Meanwhile, Henry pursues the French princess Catherine.

Catherine doesn't speak English, but Henry says that he isn't really a master of English either.

He can't write her poetry, but he can offer her strength and his love.

He says to her,

If I could win a lady at leapfrog or by vaulting into my saddle with my armor on my back, I should quickly leap into wife.

⁇

And I mention that line because it contains the first known reference to leapfrog, the game played by children.

It's then agreed between the parties to the treaty that Henry will marry Catherine, and the play ends with a planned wedding between the two, and with Henry set to unite the realms of England and France by becoming the French king when Catherine's father dies.

Now, it's interesting that Shakespeare ends the story there, on a positive note, with Henry in all of his glory.

As I noted earlier, things didn't turn out as planned at the time of that treaty.

Henry did marry Catherine, but he soon returned to France to deal with another uprising.

While there, he died of dysentery before the elderly French king died, so Henry never became king of France.

Meanwhile, the English throne passed to the infant son of Henry and Catherine.

His name was also Henry, and he became Henry VI.

His troubled reign led to the loss of the English gains in France, and ultimately led to the Wars of the Roses.

Remember that Shakespeare had told the story of that Henry about a decade earlier in the first series of history plays that he composed.

So his play about Henry V completed the cycle and brought the story back to the beginning where he began his career.

In fact, Henry V was one of Shakespeare's last history plays about English kings.

The only other other play about an English king that he composed was one of his final plays called Henry VIII.

Now, as we've seen, scholars are confident that Henry V was one of the first plays and perhaps the very first play presented at the newly opened Globe Theatre in the spring of 1599.

Well, over the following weeks, a Swiss-born physician named Thomas Platter visited London.

And that visit is important to scholars because he kept a journal of his travels.

And during his time in London he visited the Globe and attended a play there.

And his account is important because it provides a rare first-hand account by someone who actually saw a performance by Shakespeare's acting company at the Globe.

Platter was completing his education in London at the time, and he not only commented on his visit to the Globe, he also talked more generally about English society, including the way people dressed at the time.

During this period, preachers condemned people who went into debt to buy fancy clothes.

Remember that both the laws and tradition restricted what people of different classes could wear.

But those rules and traditions were apparently being ignored by many people.

Regular working-class people were spending their money on clothing that they could barely afford in order to dress above their ordinary station.

And Thomas Platter's journal confirms that.

He wrote, quote,

Now the women folk of England, who have mostly blue-gray eyes and are fair and pretty, have far more liberty than in other lands, and know just how to make good use of it, for they often stroll out or drive by coach in very gorgeous clothes.

End quote.

By the way, gorgeous could simply mean brightly coloured at the time.

He then added, quote,

They lay great store by ruffs and starch them blue, so that their complexions shall appear the whiter, and some of them may well wear velvet for the street, quite common with them who cannot afford a crust of bread at home, I've been told.

⁇

By the way, Plater wrote in German, so that's an English translation.

Now that passage is interesting in that it shows the importance of fashion in Elizabethan England, and the fact that people wanted to dress and look nice, even if they dressed above their class or normal position in life.

And some people spent all of their money doing so.

What's also interesting is the specific reference to ruffs, which were the large, disc-like collars that people wore at the time.

In fact, if there's one thing we probably associate with Elizabethan fashion, it's those enormous, ruffled, and frilly collars.

As I mentioned, they were called ruffs.

Those worn by nobles were often adorned with lace and decorated with gold, but as Platter's journal attests, those fancy collars were worn by almost everyone, men and women, and commoners as well as aristocrats.

Those fancy ruffs really began as part of men's shirts.

In fact, the earliest usage of the word ruff from the early 1500s was to a frill around the wrist of a shirt.

In fact, the decorative bands around the bottom of the sleeves were sometimes called handcuffs.

That term is first recorded by John Florio, who I mentioned in the last episode.

Remember that he composed a large Italian-English dictionary, which contains the first known use of many words in English.

Well, in a separate book he wrote that contained dialogues in English and Italian, he used the word handcuffs for the first time in a surviving document.

So it was apparently a relatively new term in the 1590s.

It wasn't until the middle of the following century that the term came to refer to physical restraints worn around the wrists.

During this period, sleeves were often detachable, and in fact they became so large and bulky in the 1500s that people would sometimes tuck items into them since pockets were still relatively small and rare.

So it isn't surprising that people started to refer to someone having something up their sleeve in the late 1500s.

It meant to have something in reserve or to have a surprise planned.

Well, over time, the word rough was extended from the fancy decorative frills at the end of the sleeves to the decorative frills around the collar of a shirt, or around the collar of a gown or dress.

At first they were relatively modest, but starch was introduced from the Netherlands in the late fifteen hundreds, and that allowed ruffs to be made firmer and thus larger.

By the end of the fifteen hundreds they were supported with wires and metal rods, which allowed them to become even larger and wider.

They were initially a sign of opulence and high standing, but lower classes soon found that they could emulate those in higher standing by wearing ruffs themselves.

And by the end of the Elizabethan period they were all the fashion, as Thomas Platter pointed out in his journal.

A similar type of elaborate collar was called a piccadill.

It tended to be thinner and open at the front, but it could be just as large and elaborate as a ruff.

The word piccadill was probably in use around the current point in our story at the turn of the century because it's first recorded in English in the first decade of the 1600s.

Supposedly, a tailor made Piccadills at his shop in London to satisfy the demand for them, and within a few years the house where the shop was located became known as Piccadilly Hall, and the street in front of the shop became known as Piccadilly.

Piccadilly extended to a major junction nearby, which became known as Piccadilly Circus.

So that well-known London landmark is ultimately named for those fancy collars worn in Elizabethan England.

Now again, Thomas Platter's journal confirms that those types of fancy collars were worn by even the common people of London in the late 1500s.

But as I noted earlier, the most interesting part of his journal occurred in September of 1599.

Platter wrote, quote,

On September 21st, after lunch, about two o'clock, I and my party crossed the water, and there in the house with the thatched roof witnessed an excellent performance of the tragedy of the first emperor, Julius Caesar, with a cast of some fifteen people.

When the play was over, they danced marvelously and gracefully together as is their wont, two dressed as men and two as women.

Now, this is the earliest known account of any production at the globe, and it confirms that Shakespeare's tragedy about Julius Caesar was being presented there in September.

Platter then described what he saw inside of the globe.

He wrote, quote, And during the performance, food and drink are carried round the audience, so that for what one cares to pay, one may also have refreshment.

The actors are most expensively and elaborately costumed, because it is the custom in England that when men of high rank die, they bequeath their finest apparel to their servants, which it is unseemly for them to wear, so they offer them for sale for a small amount to the actors.

Now this passage is interesting because it confirms that the acting companies sometimes obtained their costumes from the servants of deceased aristocrats.

But it's also interesting because Platter appears to confirm that the actors were dressed in Elizabethan clothing, even though they were presenting a play about Julius Caesar set in ancient Rome.

No one was bothered by that, and many of the audiences probably didn't even realize that Roman clothing would have been very different.

So let's turn our attention to Shakespeare's play about Julius Caesar, which Platter saw in the globe in the latter part of 1599.

And before we look at the opening scene, we probably need to do a quick review of the historical events leading up to the beginning of the play.

Julius Caesar had been an aspiring politician in Rome and had conquered Gaul, which is modern-day France.

Despite his military success, his political rivals back in Rome were alarmed by his rise to power, and they ordered him to return to Rome without his troops since his commission had expired.

But Caesar ignored the order, and when he reached the Rubicon River, which marked the official Roman border at the time, he crossed it with his forces, thereby triggering a civil war.

And that's where we get the modern phrase to cross the Rubicon, meaning to take a crucial action from which there's no return.

Well, Caesar defeated his political and military rivals over the following months, and after a victory against a rival Roman force in Spain, he returned to Rome, having vanquished his enemies.

Caesar had a great deal of support among the common people, but he still had opponents within the government itself.

Now after a major military victory, it was common for the winning general to return to Rome in a great procession, and the day was considered to be a holiday.

And that's the opening scene of Shakespeare's play.

A crowd is gathered to welcome Caesar and his troops back to to Rome, but his victory wasn't over a foreign enemy.

It was actually against a domestic rival.

So Caesar's opponents are not happy with the celebration, and that includes a couple of Roman officers named Flavius and Merulus.

The play opens with them confronting a carpenter and a cobbler celebrating on the streets.

Flavius says, quote, Hence, home, you idle creatures, get you home.

Is this a holiday?

What, know you not, being mechanical, you ought not walk upon a laboring day without the sign of your profession?

Now the key part of that passage is the final part, where Flavius criticizes the two workers for not wearing what he calls the signs of their profession on a workday.

This is another Elizabethan feature incorporated into the play.

Remember that English law restricted what people could wear based on their profession or based on their class.

If it was a work day, so not a a Sunday or a holiday, the workers were required to wear the clothing associated with their occupation.

But here, in the opening scene, the workers are not wearing their work clothes because they consider Caesar's return to be a holiday.

Of course, Flavius doesn't consider it a holiday because he isn't a supporter of Caesar, so he chastises the workers for not dressing appropriately.

But again, this clothing restriction wasn't really a feature of ancient Rome, so Shakespeare opens this play by incorporating a common Elizabethan clothing convention.

One of the workers being chastised by Flavius is a cobbler.

He says, quote, I am indeed, sir, a surgeon to old shoes.

When they are in great danger, I recover them, end quote.

Of course, that was an important profession in Elizabethan England, and there were many types of shoes and boots.

In terms of language, one of the most interesting pieces of footwear from this period was a rustic shoe that was common in Ireland and Scotland.

It was called a brogue, and Shakespeare even made reference to the brogue in one of his later plays called Cymbeline.

The word is still around today, and it also survives as the word brogan in some English dialects.

But the reason why the brogue is so interesting is because the name of that particular shoe is the source of the word brogue as in a distinctive accent or manner of speech.

In fact, it's a term usually associated with Irish or Scottish accents, which reflects the origin of the shoe.

And in this word we find an interesting connection between clothing and speech, and also the connection between custom and speech, since brogue is derived from the customary shoes worn by common labourers.

Since a brogue was a common type of work shoe or work boot, many workers in Scotland wore them.

It was so closely associated with those common laborers that the workers themselves were sometimes called brogues.

As is often the case, those laborers tended to speak with an accent that was a little different and a little broader than the standard educated accent of the region.

So their particular style of speech also came to be known as a brogue, and that gave us the modern sense of the word brogue today.

So if someone speaks with a brogue, it's ultimately a reference to a type of work shoe or boot.

We see a similar development with the term hobnail.

It referred to a type of short nail with a large, wide head that was commonly used to protect the soles of heavy shoes and boots.

The word is first recorded in Shakespeare's early history play about Henry VI,

but over time the term came to be associated with the common workers who wore hob-nailed shoes, and from there it acquired a broader sense as a rural or rustic person.

A specific type of knee-high boot was called a buskin.

That's another term that appeared in the 1500s.

The word can be traced back to a type of boot worn by actors in ancient Greece who performed tragedies on the stage in Athens.

Those who performed comedies typically wore socks.

So the term sock and buskin became a common way of referring to comedy and tragedy.

In later centuries, the dramatic arts or the acting profession itself was sometimes called sock and buskin.

Again, it was a reference to the foot coverings.

Now returning to the play about Julius Caesar, the next scene presents the Roman general arriving in Rome to the gathered throngs.

The scene shifts to a festival attended by Caesar and other Roman officials where a voice calls out from the crowd.

It's a soothsayer who provides the Roman leader with the now famous warning, beware the Ides of March.

The Ides of March meant March 15th.

Ides is a Latin term, but it had been around in English since the Old English period when the Roman calendar was first adopted.

By the way, Ides didn't necessarily mean the 15th.

It really depended on the month.

For March, May, July, and October, it fell on the 15th, but for all of the other months, it actually fell on the 13th, so the Ides of January would have been January 13th.

But since the Soothsayer is warning about the Ides of March, the key date was the 15th.

Despite the warning, Caesar ignores it and calls the soothsayer a dreamer.

After Caesar moves along, two men stay behind.

They are Brutus, who is a close ally of Caesar, and Cassius, who fears Caesar's rise to power.

At this point, Caesar has amassed tremendous power, but he's not been formally declared a king.

However, Cassius fears that Caesar will soon claim that title.

So Cassius begins to formulate a plan to bring an end to Caesar's rule.

He flatters Brutus in an attempt to to bring him over to his side.

Cassius says of Caesar, quote, it doth amaze me a man of such a feeble temper should so get the start of the majestic world.

End quote.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, that's the first recorded use of the word majestic in the English language.

But the word can also be found in the works of other writers a short time later, suggesting that the word wasn't actually coined by Shakespeare.

Cassius says that Caesar has become a political giant, but there are ways to deal with such problems.

He says, quote, men at such time are masters of their fates, end quote.

Now that is a Shakespearean phrase, and today when we say that someone is the master of his or her fate, it comes from that passage.

Now as this conversation is occurring, a Roman senator named Casca is standing nearby.

He reports that Mark Antony had just offered Caesar a crown, three times in fact, but each time Caesar refused it in front of the gathered crowd, apparently thinking that his supporters would stand up and demand that he take it.

But instead the people cheered his decision to refuse it.

Casca says that Caesar was angry that the people didn't insist that he take the crown.

He says that Caesar fell to the ground foaming at the mouth, adding, quote, Before he fell down, when he perceived the common herd was glad he refused the crown, he he plucked open his doublet and offered them his throat to cut.

Now this is interesting in that Casca says that Caesar opened his doublet.

As I noted earlier in the episode, a doublet was a garment worn on the upper part of the body in Elizabethan England, essentially the precursor of the modern jacket, but it wasn't an item of clothing worn in ancient Rome.

So again we see how Elizabethan fashions were incorporated into the story.

Casca is then asked if Cicero said anything when Caesar was offered the crown.

Cicero was a politician and Rome's most highly regarded orator.

Casca says that Cicero spoke, but Casca didn't understand what he said because Cicero spoke in Greek.

Casca says, quote, it was Greek to me, end quote.

Now this line is probably why people still say, it was Greek to me when they don't understand something that was said.

In fact, it's often often attributed to Shakespeare, but it had actually been around for centuries.

In ancient Rome, where the story of Julius Caesar was set, many people spoke Greek because the Romans were highly influenced by Greek culture.

It was similar to the way many people spoke French throughout the Middle English period.

But the use of Greek declined in the Middle Ages after the fall of the Empire in the West.

Greek then became restricted to only the most educated and literate people.

As scribes copied old manuscripts composed in Latin and Greek, they increasingly had a hard time reading the Greek parts.

The scribe would sometimes make a note in Latin, gracem est non legatur, which meant this is Greek, it can't be read.

The text would then be handed off to a scribe who could read Greek to copy that part.

And that's how the Latin idiom, it is Greek to me, emerged as a way of referring to something that couldn't be read or understood.

Now Shakespeare was certainly one of the earliest writers to use an English version of the idiom, but it appeared in other documents around the same time, so it isn't really Shakespearean.

But his use of the phrase here in Julius Caesar probably helped to popularize the phrase.

In this particular play, the line is apparently intended as a joke, since Casca uses it literally.

After saying that Cicero spoke in Greek, Casca says that he didn't understand Cicero because it was Greek to me, so the line was true both literally and and figuratively.

Now, after overhearing the conversation among the various Roman officials about Caesar's ambitions, Brutus has started to be persuaded that Caesar's ambitions need to be thwarted.

He agrees to speak with Cassius again about the matter the next day.

Brutus is soon convinced to join the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar.

They agree to stab Caesar, but Brutus says that they must not be perceived as butchers.

They need to leave Caesar's body in a state for the gods to view.

He says, quote, let's kill him boldly, but not wrathfully.

Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods, not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds, end quote.

And that's another important line from the play, because it's where we get the phrase, a dish fit for the gods.

Today it's used to mean a delicious or high-caliber meal, but it's ultimately a Shakespearean phrase, and was first used in reference to the conspiracy conspiracy to murder Caesar.

The scene then shifts to the morning of March 15th, the Ides of March.

Caesar's wife tries to convince him to stay home because of the soothsayer's prophecy.

Caesar initially dismisses her concerns, and in doing so he utters another well-known Shakespearean passage,

Cowards die many times before their deaths.

The valiant never tastes death but once.

However, his wife eventually convinces him to remain at home.

But then, one of the conspirators arrives and convinces him to go to the Senate, where he will be formally offered the crown and made the king of Rome.

Caesar leaves, but as soon as he arrives at the Roman Senate, the conspirators gather around him and stab him.

At first, Caesar tries to fight back against the assassins, but when his friend and ally Brutus stabs him, Caesar stops.

He then utters the famous line, E tu, Brute?

Literally, and you, Brutus?

Caesar's last words are, Then fall, Caesar.

In other words, I am dead.

With Caesar's death, his loyal lieutenant, Mark Antony, knows that he's likely a target as well.

He approaches the conspirators, feigning friendship and asking why they had chosen to murder Caesar.

Antony doesn't argue with them and merely asks to speak at the funeral.

Antony is then left alone with Caesar's body.

He predicts that the murder will be avenged and lead to civil war.

He says that Caesar's spirit will, quote, cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war, end quote.

And that passage gives us the term dogs of war, which still survives to this day.

At Caesar's funeral, the conspirator Brutus speaks first and says that the murder was for the greater good of Rome because of Caesar's dangerous ambitions.

He says, quote, not that I loved Caesar less, but I loved Rome more, end quote.

But then it's Mark Anthony's turn to speak to the crowd, and his speech is one of the most famous passages in all of the Shakespeare canon.

Anthony has been told not to criticize the conspirators, so he chooses his words carefully to abide by that demand.

But the way in which he frames his speech and the way in which he repeats the line, Brutus is an honorable man in an increasingly ironic way, soon turns the crowd against the conspirators.

Here's a great rendering of the speech by the actor Damian Lewis.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

The evil that men do lives after them.

The good is oft interred with their bones.

So let it be with Caesar.

The noble Brutus hath told you Caesar was ambitious.

If it were so, it was a grievous fault, and grievously hath Caesar answered it.

Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest, for Brutus is an honourable man, so are they all, all honourable men, come I to speak in Caesar's funeral.

He was my friend, faithful and just to me.

But Brutus says he was ambitious, and Brutus is an honourable man.

He hath brought many captives home to Rome, whose ransoms did the general coffers fill.

Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?

When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept.

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious, and Brutus is an honourable man.

You all did see that on the Lupacal, I thrice presented him a kingly crown, which he did thrice refuse.

Was this ambition?

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious, and sure he is an honorable man.

The speech continues on in this manner, and as I noted, it has the effect of turning the crowd against the conspirators and presenting the murder of Caesar as an unjust act.

I should note the line in that passage where Antony says, ambition should be made of sterner stuff.

That line is the first known use of the phrase made of sterner stuff to refer to something that is very strong or determined.

It appears to be a phrase coined by Shakespeare, so if you refer to someone being made of sterner stuff, it ultimately comes from this passage.

Now Mark Antony has riled up the crowd, but now the speech comes to a climax when he pulls out the robe that Caesar was wearing when he was murdered.

This was an effective way of using clothing and costumes to tell the story.

Antony points to the cuts in the bloody robe, and he lingers on the cut made by Caesar's friend Brutus, and he says, quote, Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel.

Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him.

This was the most unkindest cut of all, end quote.

He then pulls the robe away to reveal Caesar's body, riddled with stab wounds, and it sends the crowd into a frenzy as they demand retribution against the conspirators.

Now the passage I just mentioned is notable because Antony refers to Brutus's gash as the most unkindest cut of all.

It's the type of phrase that would have English teachers grabbing their red markers today because you're not supposed to use the word most

and the suffix est

together to express a superlative.

You should use one or the other depending on the word.

But that wasn't really a rule in the Elizabethan period.

You could put both together for emphasis.

Another example from Shakespeare came from part two of his play about Henry IV, which we looked at last time.

In that play, he referred to, quote, the calmest and most stillest night.

The same was true for comparatives, where we use either the word more or the er suffix to compare one thing to another.

Today we might refer to someone who is more lovely or lovelier than someone else, but we aren't supposed to use both of those forms together.

We aren't supposed to say that someone is more lovelier than someone else.

But again, you could say something like that in the Elizabethan period.

And Shakespeare occasionally combined those forms in that way.

For example, in Hamlet, which we'll look at next time, he used the phrase more nearer.

So as we encounter these grammatical forms in Shakespeare's plays, we have to remember that the modern rules of grammar hadn't been formalized yet, and those grammatical forms weren't considered wrong at the time.

Now, with the crowd turned against the conspirators, Brutus and Cassius are forced to flee Rome.

With Caesar's death, his grand-nephew Octavius arrives to inherit his mantle.

He and Mark Antony form an uneasy alliance, and in the remaining part of the play, they pursue and defeat Brutus and Cassius, with both of the conspirators committing suicide when faced with military defeat.

And that brings an end to the play about Julius Caesar.

Again, that was the play that Thomas Platter saw on the stage of the globe in September of 1599.

And that really takes us not only to the end of 1599, but also to the end of the 1500s as a century.

As we move into the 1600s, we find another interesting development as it relates to the overall theme of this episode.

As the new century began in the year 1600, an English clergyman named William Lee entered into a business agreement with an aristocrat named George Brooke.

Lee was a bit of an inventor, and he had created a new machine and needed an investor.

Brooke had agreed to lend the money to produce the machines in exchange for a cut of the profits.

But what was the machine?

Well, it was an industrial knitting machine known today as a stocking frame knitting machine.

It was one of the first pieces of industrial equipment to ever be produced.

Many scholars consider it to be the very first piece of industrial machinery.

And even though the Industrial Revolution was still a couple of centuries away, this was a landmark development in the move toward a society where machines did the work that was once done by hand.

In fact, it was that very concern that caused Queen Elizabeth to refuse Lee a patent for the invention.

She was concerned that it would put too many people out of work.

Lee's knitting machine featured a series of needles and hooks that opened and closed at certain stages to mimic the work typically done by people who knitted by hand.

Certain aspects of Lee's design are still used today.

Of course, England and the British Isles had been producing a variety of wool and linen fabrics by hand for centuries.

On the island of Jersey in the Channel Islands, a type of fine woolen fabric was produced.

It was popular in stockings, which were sometimes called jersey stockings.

The word jersey in reference to this particular type of cloth appeared in the late 1500s, and by the 1800s it was being applied to a type of tunic made with the cloth.

The word survives today as a type of shirt, usually a type of shirt worn by athletes or used in athletic contests.

So you might wear your favorite team's jersey.

Again, the word goes back to a kind of fabric produced in the Elizabethan period.

A type of coarse linen cloth was called buckram.

A thick coarse fabric made from cotton and flax was called fustian.

That word fustian is interesting because it has a specific connection to language and the way people spoke.

Many people equated that thick fustian fabric to the inflated and lofty language that some people used at the time, and that type of elevated speech became known as fustian, after the name of the cloth.

That same type of linguistic development can also be found in another term.

During the 1500s, cotton stuffing was used in a lot of clothing, and it was commonly referred to as bombast.

The idea that bombast referred to something stuffed or bloated was soon extended to certain types of speech.

Much like the word fustian, it came to refer to language that was inflated, bloated, or excessive.

That sense emerged in the late 1500s, and the word bombast is still used in that way today.

If someone is bombastic, they tend to use excessive or pompous language.

Again, it all goes back to the stuffing used in clothing and other items in the late 1500s.

Earlier, I noted that people of this period loved to dress up, and they were willing to spend a lot of money on clothing that was normally worn by the higher classes.

They loved colorful clothing, and they had color terms that we don't normally use today.

Clothing that had a certain greenish-yellow hue was sometimes described as goose-turd green.

A light red color was sometimes called lusty gallant.

A rose color was occasionally referred to as maiden's blush.

An archers often dressed in a green color that was called Lincoln green.

All of those color terms were first recorded in the 1500s.

Now throughout this episode, I have referred to the clothing that people wore in the Elizabethan period, but before I wrap things up, I should note that the word wore, as in the past tense of wear, was brand new during this same period of time.

Prior to the late 1500s, you would have said that someone wearied some article of clothing in the past.

And had that form of the word survived, we would probably say that the person weared that item of clothing today.

But of course, we don't normally say that.

We say that someone wore that item.

In linguistic terms, what happened is that the weak verb wear became a strong verb in early modern English.

Now I talked about the distinction between weak and strong verbs way back in episode 56, and I'll refer you back to that episode if you want a more detailed explanation about the difference.

But in general, a weak verb is a verb which has a past tense form that ends in ed.

Of course, those are most English verbs today.

It's what happens when jump becomes jumped, or walk becomes walked, or play becomes played.

But then we also have a small group of verbs where the past tense is formed through an internal vowel change or some other alteration of the word.

It's what happens when run becomes ran, sing becomes sang,

and think becomes thought.

Those are called strong verbs, and most of them are very old verbs that go back to the period before Old English.

They've always been irregular, and they continue to be irregular in modern English.

In fact, many modern linguists prefer to use terms like regular and irregular to describe those differences, rather than the terms strong and weak.

Well, many verbs that were once strong verbs have become weak verbs over the centuries.

In other words, in the distant past, their past tense forms relied on a specific vowel change, but today they just take the ed at the end.

That's what happened with verbs like to help and to snow.

At one time, the past tense of help was hope, and the past tense of snow was snoo.

So instead of saying after it snowed, Tom helped me to shovel the walkway, people would have said something more akin to after it snoo, Tom hoped me shovel the walkway.

We can imagine how many of those strong verbs became weak because it was easy to just stick an ED on the end like most of the other verbs.

And in fact, if you have small children, you'll know that they usually treat all verbs as weak verbs at first before they learn which ones have alternate forms.

So they'll say runned instead of ran, and singed instead of sang, and freezed instead of froze.

But eventually they work out which verbs have different past tense forms.

So it's easy to see how some people would have just used the ed form as a default, and some strong verbs would have therefore become weak over time.

But interestingly, sometimes the change happened in the opposite direction.

A weak verb that formed the past tense with ed

gradually became strong and adopted a vowel change in the middle.

That's what happened when digged became dug, and sticked became stuck, and catched became caught.

And as I noted a moment ago, weared became war.

It seems unusual that a standard simple weak verb would suddenly become strong, but it appears that that usually happened by analogy.

For example, the verb ring was once a weak verb.

The past tense form was ringed.

But since people said sing, sang, sung, it made sense to say ring, rang, rung, and ring adopted that strong form over time.

And it appears that the same thing happened with the verb wear.

The past tense of tear was tor,

and swear was swore, and bear, as in to bear a child, was bore.

So it made sense that the past tense of wear would be war,

and war is recorded for the first time in the late 1500s.

Now having talked a little bit about past tense verbs, I think it's time to refer to this episode in the past tense and bring it to an end.

I hope the length of this episode didn't wear you out.

Having completed our look at the 1500s, we can now turn our attention to developments in the 1600s.

And next time, we'll look at the final years of Queen Elizabeth's reign.

And we'll also look at one of Shakespeare's most popular plays, the well-known tragedy of Hamlet.

It may be the most quoted play in the entire Shakespeare canon.

We'll also explore some other interesting developments that shaped English in the early 1600s.

So, until then, thanks for listening to the History of English podcast.