Episode 170: Printers, Plague and Poets

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

This is episode 170, Printers, Plague, and Poets.

In this episode, we're going to take a look at the connection between poetry and plague in the early 1590s.

We'll see how a widespread outbreak of the recurring sickness led to Shakespeare's early career as a poet, and that poetry likely included his many sonnets.

We'll also examine how an old acquaintance from Shakespeare's hometown emerged as one of the leading printers in London, and we'll see how modern spelling was forged in those printing shops during the Elizabethan period.

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.

Now, last time, we looked at the surviving evidence to determine what's actually known about the life of William Shakespeare.

But prior to that episode, we got our first glimpse of a Shakespeare play being performed on the stages of London.

The performance of that play was documented by the owner of the Rose Theatre named Philip Henslow.

Hinslow's surviving diary records the performance of a play called Harry VI on March 3, 1592.

That entry was almost certainly a reference to the play we know to day as Henry VI, Part I.

And then we looked at Robert Greene's dying reference to Shakespeare as an upstart crow a few months later.

By that point, Shakespeare was well on his way to becoming the most famous playwright in the English language.

But when Robert Greene composed his Screed Against Shakespeare late in the summer of 1592, the theaters of London were actually closed, and they would remain closed for much of the following two years.

That was because London had experienced an outbreak of plague in the early summer, and the outbreak was so severe that the city authorities had ordered the theaters to be closed in June.

Since the disease tended to spread wherever large groups of people assembled, it was common to ban public gatherings when the plague reappeared, as it did from time to time.

If you think lockdowns are a recent phenomenon, they're not.

They've been around for centuries, and in the summer of 1592, the residents of London were living through another one.

Those closings meant that actors and playwrights were suddenly out of work, at least within the vicinity of London.

For a writer like Shakespeare, whose career was just starting to take off, it must have been incredibly frustrating.

This particular outbreak of plague in 1592 was especially bad.

It has been estimated that over 10,000 people died in London between December of that year and December of the following year.

Some estimates suggest that the total number was quite a bit higher than that.

Of course, this was a time of increased literacy, and people were interested in finding ways to prevent the contagion or cure it once it had been acquired.

So, books about preventing or curing the plague were in high demand.

A couple of dozen books were published on the subject during the Tudor period of England.

And in the middle of this particular outbreak in the early 1590s, a book called Defensive Against Plague was composed by a writer named Simon Kelway.

The book described the symptoms of the disease in great detail, and it offered a variety of questionable treatments and preventative measures.

In one passage, Kelway described the symptoms experienced at the initial onset of the disease.

He wrote in part, quote, The signs when one is infected are these.

First he is taken with a hot fever, and sometimes with a delirium, end quote.

Now that passage is notable because it contains one of the earliest known uses of the Latin word delirium in English.

In Latin, duh meant off or away from, and lira meant a track or furrow, like the track left by a plow.

So delirium literally meant the state of being off track or off course.

It meant you weren't thinking straight.

By the way, the native English word learn comes from the same Indo-European root word that produced the Latin words lira and delirium.

In English, the original sense of the word learn was to stay on course or stay on track.

But again, just as staying on course produced learning, losing track of where you were produced delirium.

As I noted, this particular book by Simon Kelway not only described the symptoms of the plague, it also offered advice to help prevent and cure the disease.

His preventative measures included keeping a clean house and clean clothing, and to fill the house with certain flowers and herbs.

He also recommended burning juniper, rosemary, and lavender in the fireplace, and breathing the smoke produced by those herbs.

And that reference to breathing smoke is notable because I mentioned in an earlier episode that tobacco had recently been introduced from the New World, and at the time it was thought that tobacco had medicinal properties.

So it appears that many people smoked tobacco to help ward off the plague.

Of course, that didn't really help at all, but it may have contributed to the rapid growth in the popularity of smoking during the Elizabethan period.

Kelway also included recipes for concoctions that would help preserve one's health and protect against the disease.

There was a great demand for foods and drinks that had medicinal properties, and there were lots of people willing to supply them even if they didn't work.

It was during this same year of 1592 that we find the first recorded use of the word herbalist or herbalist, depending on your pronunciation.

It meant a person who prepared and sold herbal remedies.

The word drugger was also first recorded during this outbreak of plague.

Again, it meant a person who sold or dispensed drugs.

We also find the first recorded use of the Latin word laboratory, or laboratory, again, depending on your pronunciation.

It referred to a room or building where people practiced alchemy and prepared medicines.

But of course, most of those medicines and remedies were completely useless against the plague.

And so maybe it isn't surprising that this period also gave us the first recorded uses of the terms grave digger and last rites.

Given that herbal remedies didn't really prevent the spread of plague, much of the advice in Simon Kelway's book could have been ignored.

But he did suggest one preventative measure that probably did work.

He wrote that one way to avoid the plague was to, quote, fly far off from the place infected, adding, quote, the farther from it, the safer we shall be, end quote.

And that was probably the best advice of all.

When the plague arrives, get out of town as fast as you can.

And that was what acting companies did in the wake of the plague that closed the theaters in 1592.

Public performances were banned within seven miles of the city of London.

Beyond that limit, the companies could get special permission to travel around the country to give performances.

But that was only an option for a few of the more prominent companies.

In fact, most of the acting companies that had existed prior to this outbreak of the plague didn't survive the two-year closure of the theaters that followed.

When the outbreak finally came to an end in 1594, only two major companies remained.

I'll deal with those developments in more detail over the next couple of episodes, but for now, we just need to know that one of those companies was closely associated with Philip Hinslow's theater called The Rose in the southern suburbs of London.

That company was the Lord Admiral's Men, and Christopher Marlowe wrote most of his plays for that company before he was killed.

Meanwhile, the other major acting company was closely associated with the oldest permanent theatre in London called the Theatre.

It was located in the northern suburbs of the city, and the acting company associated with that theatre was called the Lord Strange's Men, named after its its patron, Ferdinando Stanley, who bore the title of Lord Strange.

He actually died during this particular outbreak of the plague, though he may have actually died from a different illness.

At his death, the company was reorganized into a new company that became known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and that was William Shakespeare's acting company.

Well, about a year after the outbreak of the plague, a group of actors from both of those companies requested permission from the authorities to stage plays outside of London in other parts of the country.

The actors worked together on the tour, but what's so interesting about the license that was granted is that it mentioned most of the actors by name, but it didn't include the name of William Shakespeare.

So why was he left out?

Well, we don't know for certain.

Shakespeare isn't clearly documented with the Lord Chamberlain's men until shortly after the plague lifted the following year, so maybe he wasn't a formal member yet.

But as we've seen, his plays were already being performed around London.

A more likely answer is that he simply didn't join the other members on their tour.

Instead, it appears that he chose to remain around London, and with the theaters closed, it appears that he chose to write poems instead of plays.

During this period, poetry was still more highly regarded than drama, and a poet owned his own poems and could publish them for money, whereas plays belonged to the acting company.

So composing poems for publication could provide some much needed income while the theaters were closed.

For Shakespeare, poetry apparently paid better than the meagre income paid to traveling actors.

During those two plague years he composed two major narrative poems, both of which were published and proved to be very popular.

The first appeared in 1593 and was called Venus and Adonis.

When published, it became the first published work issued in Shakespeare's name.

The poem is based on a story taken from the writings of the Roman poet Ovid, who was a recurring source for Shakespeare's works.

The poem is about Venus, who was the goddess of love.

In the poem, she tries to seduce the handsome young Adonis, but Adonis rejects the advances and chooses to go hunting instead.

Despite Venus's warnings, Adonis is killed during the hunt, and Venus is left heartbroken.

A year later, Shakespeare produced another narrative poem called The Rape of Lucrese.

It also had classical roots and harkens back to one of the earliest Roman legends.

The poem is set during the period when Rome was ruled by by tyrannical kings.

In the poem, Lucrese is raped by the son of the Roman king.

Lucrese reveals the rape to her husband and then commits suicide.

The outrage that follows leads to the expulsion of the king's son from Rome.

In Roman legend, this was a key event in the banishment of the Roman king Tarquin the Proud and the establishment of the Roman Republic.

Shakespeare apparently had a fascination with this story because he also made reference to it in several of his plays.

Though these two early poems proved to be very popular during Shakespeare's lifetime, they've been largely forgotten over the centuries.

In modern collections of his works, they're often relegated to the back of the book, if they're included at all, so they haven't had much impact on the English language.

It's really other aspects of these two poems that have fascinated scholars over the centuries.

First, both poems were dedicated to the 19-year-old Earl of Southampton called Henry Risley.

By the way, his surname isn't spelled like it sounds.

It's spelled W-R-I-O-T-H-E-S-L-E-Y,

but he's generally known to history simply by his title, Southampton.

The dedications to him are interesting because it appears that Shakespeare was seeking his patronage.

The Earl had inherited his title from his father who had died several years earlier, but since Southampton was a minor, his guardian was the Queen's closest advisor, William Cecil.

At the time of these two poems during the plague years, Southampton was on the verge of turning twenty-one and having control over his own estate, and that's probably why Shakespeare was seeking his patronage.

But there's a little more to this story.

For reasons that we'll look at later in the episode, it appears likely that Shakespeare also composed many, if not all, of his sonnets during this same time period.

And many of those sonnets are actually addressed to a young man.

And given some of the clues that can be discerned from those sonnets, many scholars think that Southampton was the young man referenced in those short poems.

And they also think it's very possible that Shakespeare was living at Southampton's residence during this period.

Again, we'll develop some of those ideas later in the episode, but I wanted to plant that seed for you here.

So these early two poems establish a clear connection between Shakespeare and his potential patron, the Earl of Southampton.

The other interesting thing about these two poems is the printer that Shakespeare chose to publish them.

Both were printed by a printer named Richard Field.

Now Shakespeare and Field were both from Stratford-upon-Avon, and they were apparently old acquaintances.

Both had moved to London, and just as Shakespeare found success as a writer, Field found success as a printer.

In fact, this episode is as much about Richard Field as William Shakespeare.

So let me tell you a little bit more about Field.

As I noted, he grew up in Stratford.

He and Shakespeare were around the same age, and their boyhood homes were located near each other, so they almost certainly knew each other growing up.

Around the age of 18, Field moved to London, and he served as an apprentice under a printer named Thomas Valcholier.

Valcholier actually published Richard Mulcaster's textbook called The Elementary, which I discussed back in episode 163.

That book started to lay the foundation for modern English spelling, and as we'll see in a moment, those ideas were adopted by printers as well.

Valcholier died in 1587, and his wife continued the printing business alongside his young Stratford apprentice, Richard Field.

Well, the relationship between the widow and Field wasn't just a business relationship, because a couple of years later, they were married, and Field effectively took over the printing business at that point.

During his career, he printed many different types of books, including political pamphlets, sermons, Latin classics, school books, language learning books, and poetry.

One of the fascinating things about the books printed in Field's print shop is how many of them served as sources for Shakespeare's later plays.

Print shops typically maintain a copy of the books they printed in case future editions were required.

And that's led to a lot of speculation that Shakespeare would often hang out at Field's shop and read the books, thereby providing inspiration for many of his well-known plays.

And as I mentioned in the last episode, we don't have any evidence that Shakespeare himself actually maintained his own personal library.

So the idea that he used Fields' books would explain how he got access to the stories that later became his plays.

Again, we don't know for sure, but it's a popular theory among some scholars.

For example, going back to the days of Altrollier, the printing shop published Thomas North's translation of the Greek writer Plutarch.

That translation served as the primary source of Shakespeare's history plays that were set in ancient Greece and Rome.

The shop also published a Latin version of Ovid's Metamorphosis, which, as I noted a moment ago, was another major source of Shakespeare's works, including that first poem Venus and Adonis.

The shop also published a second edition of Hollandshed's Chronicles, which was the major source of Shakespeare's history plays that were set in England.

The shop shop printed a text called Treaties of Melancholy by Timothy Bright, which was a background source for Hamlet.

Robert Greene's romance called Pandosto was also printed at the shop, and it was the source of Shakespeare's play called The Winter's Tale.

Shakespeare's plays occasionally featured phrases rendered in Italian, and all of the Italian phrases that appear in his plays are also found in a handbook for learning Italian called De Campo de Fior.

Fior.

Well, that handbook was also published in the same print shop.

The shop also printed another text that influenced Shakespeare.

That text was an English translation of an Italian poem called Orlando Furioso.

The poem was originally composed in the early 1500s by an Italian poet named Ludovico Ariosto.

It's an epic poem set during the reign of Charlemagne, and it's believed to have been a source for Shakespeare's play Much Ado About Nothing.

But the English translation of that poem printed by Richard Field is actually important to English historians for a completely different reason.

And that's because the handwritten manuscript that Field's shop used to prepare the printed version has survived the centuries.

It's extremely rare to have a printer's manuscript copy from this period, and the fact that it exists allows historians to compare the manuscript copy with the final printed copy.

And the comparison confirms something that historians of English strongly suspected, that printers routinely changed the spelling of handwritten manuscripts to bring the spellings in line with an accepted standard that printers were using at the time.

And you will probably not be surprised to learn that those printers' spellings are much more in line with the spellings we use today.

In other words, printers like Richard Field helped to fix the spellings that we use today, for better or worse.

Now, I want to illustrate how Field's print shop changed the spellings used in the manuscript, but before I do that, I want to give you a little bit of background about this particular translation and the man who composed it, because it's an interesting story.

This English translation of that Italian poem, Orlando Furioso, was composed by a man named John Harrington.

And believe it or not, if you ever need to go to the bathroom and you say that you're going to the John, you may actually be referring to John Harrington.

So let me explain.

Harrington was a godson of Queen Elizabeth, and he was a prominent figure at her court.

And he was apparently a bit of an inventor.

He actually designed a toilet that flushed, which was unknown in England at the time.

Now there were similar toilets in other parts of the world, so he isn't really considered to be the person who innovated the idea, but since that type of toilet was unknown in England, he was considered to be the inventor there.

He actually wrote a book about it, which Richard Field printed.

Harrington called the toilet Ajax, which was based on a current slang term for a toilet at the time.

People called the toilet the Jakes.

Well, today many people call a toilet or a bathroom the John, and many etymologies attribute that modern slang term to the name of John Harrington.

Now, to be fair, no one really knows for certain which historical John actually contributed his name to the device.

Harrington is really just a popular guess.

But beyond his association with toilets, Harrington had a mixed history at Elizabeth's court.

He seems to have fallen in and out of favor with the Queen, and on one occasion she supposedly sent sent him away and told him that he couldn't return until he had translated this Italian poem in its entirety.

She apparently thought that would keep him away for a while, but it seems that he completed the translation very quickly.

At any rate, once the translation was completed, he submitted it to Richard Field to be printed.

And it's the handwritten manuscript of that translation that survives to this day, and it shows how the spellings were changed at Field's print shop to bring them in line with the shop spelling standards.

Again, it's extremely rare to have this type of evidence, but it's a gold mine for historians who study the development of English spelling.

It shows that some printers had adopted spelling standards to provide some consistency and uniformity among the documents they printed.

It also confirms that printers played an important role in standardizing English spelling.

But I should emphasize that these were more like general tendencies rather than fixed rules.

There was still a fair amount of variation.

So let's take a closer look at how the manuscript was changed by the print shop.

I noted in earlier episodes that many words ended in a silent E in early modern English.

The E had once been pronounced and represented the remnant of an old inflectional ending that had been reduced to a generic

sound.

But by the 1500s, that final sound was rarely pronounced in those words.

But those silent E's came in handy in print shops because they could be added or removed to lengthen or shorten a line of text.

That way printers could keep the margins even and justified.

But Fields' print shop tended to drop those final E's unless they served a specific purpose in the pronunciation of the word.

So where Harrington's handwritten manuscript spelled the word am

as AME,

the print shop dropped the E and used the modern spelling AM.

And Harrington also added an E to words like confess and flesh and tear,

but the printed version dropped those E's and brought the spellings in line with those we use today.

Now even though many of those silent E's were dropped, they were sometimes retained at the end of a word to indicate that the previous vowel sound was pronounced as a long vowel.

So in that case, the silent E was retained as a marker.

It didn't really represent a specific sound.

Of course, we still do that today.

Remember that the so-called long vowel sounds in modern English are basically represented by the name of the letter.

So the long sound of letter A is A, and the long sound of letter E is E, and so on.

So to indicate that a vowel letter is representing its own name, we still tend to mark that sound with a silent E at the end.

It's why thin with a short I sound is spelled with a simple I, but fine with its long I sound has a silent E at the end.

That was a technique that was encouraged by Richard Mulcaster in his book called Elementary, which was also printed in Fields Print Shop.

And the print shop used the same approach in its publications.

But to mark a short vowel sound, it was once common to double the consonant after the vowel.

Again, I've talked about this technique in earlier episodes, and it still survives in many two-syllable words.

We have dine with its long I sound and its silent E at the end, and we have dinner with its short I sound and its double N's after it.

If we take away one of those N's it becomes diner.

So again, the double N's indicate a short vowel sound.

Also think about the difference between ape with its long A sound and silent E at the end versus apple with its short A sound and double P's after it.

As those examples indicate, we still use that approach with two-syllable words, but we don't tend to use it as much with short one-syllable words.

In those cases, if there's no silent e at the end, we just assume the vowel letter is pronounced as a short vowel in most cases.

We don't really need to double the following consonant.

Well, Richard Field's print shop tended to use the same approach.

So, where Harrington had spelled the word sin as S-Y-N-N-E,

Field used the modern spelling S-I-N.

This also points to another modern approach in Field's books.

Whereas the letters I and Y were somewhat interchangeable up to this point, Field preferred to use the letter I to mark the vowel sound, except in limited cases.

So in Harrington's manuscript, he used the term wicked sin.

Both wicked and sin were spelled with a Y,

but Field changed both words to their modern spellings with with an I,

W I C K E D and S I N.

Similarly, Harrington's handwritten manuscript spelled words like time and vial with a Y,

but Field changed them to an I.

By the way, another common way to represent a long vowel sound in Middle English was to double the vowel letter.

That made sense at a time when long vowel sounds were actually pronounced longer in duration than short vowel sounds.

So you could represent that longer sound by just doubling the vowel letter.

We still do that with the letter E in many words, like tree and free and C,

but it was once common to do the same thing with our common pronouns, me, we,

he, and she,

and Harrington's manuscript routinely spelled those words with double Es.

But again, fields printers shortened those pronouns by dropping the extra E and using the single E that we use today.

It isn't clear why that shortened form was preferred for the pronouns, but it may have been partially a time-saving measure since those pronouns were so common.

Dropping all of those extra E's meant that the type could be set much faster.

And of course, when we're writing, it's easier to drop those E's as well.

Notice that we do the same thing with the very common verb be,

but the insect be still uses the double E's.

Again, Field's spelling conventions were much more in line with those we use today.

Now, having said all of that, I should re-emphasize that these were general rules.

The spellings were still not completely fixed, and there were many words that were spelled differently than today.

Also, Richard Field certainly had employees who set the type for his books, and they were not always consistent.

It appears that the type in Shakespeare's two poems, printed in the shop about a year apart from each other, were set by different employees.

For example, the first poem, Venus and Adonis, spells the word she like we do to day, S H E

but in the second poem, The Rape of Lucrece, the word she is spelled with double ease about eighty five per cent of the time.

And whereas adverb endings in Venus are usually spelled LY like we do today, in Lucrese they're often spelled LIE in an older style.

So those types of inconsistencies were still common, but by examining Field's publications, we can see how printers were influencing the move toward modern spellings.

Now so far we've seen that poetry remained a lucrative art form for both writers and printers.

Shakespeare's first printed poem, Venus and Adonis, was especially popular and went through 16 editions over the following half century.

The enduring interest in the art of poetry is also reflected in another book that Richard Field published, and it remains one of the most important textbooks on poetry in early modern English.

That book was called The Art of English Posey, composed by a writer named George Puttenham.

Posy was just another form of the word poetry, and it was really the more common form of the word during the Elizabethan period.

Puttenham's work was both a history of English poetry and an analysis of its structure and form.

It was an expansive work encompassing three parts, and Field's print shop had published it in 1589, about three years before the outbreak of plague that closed the theaters.

It was actually the first book that Field published on on his own after the death of his former boss.

Since it was published in Field's print shop, it's very possible that Shakespeare read the book, and it may very well have influenced the poetic style that he used.

Putnam argued that English poetry was capable of matching the beauty and structure of Latin and Greek poetry, which was considered to be the ideal form of poetry at the time.

As I noted a few episodes back, English poets had struggled to translate those classical works into English while preserving the rhythm or meter of the original works.

You might remember that Greek and Latin poetry was based on syllable length.

Each syllable was either pronounced long or short, with the long syllables being twice as long as the short syllables.

And Greek and Latin poetry used specific patterns of long and short syllables.

Well, English doesn't work that way.

Syllable length in English is much more random, and it doesn't fit that long and short pattern very well.

Instead, English syllables are either stressed or unstressed.

So they're either pronounced loud and clear or soft and subtle.

So English poets developed a style that used certain patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables.

And as I noted in that earlier episode, the most popular rhythm or meter to develop in the 1500s was what I described as the five-heartbeat rhythm, the dumb, the dumb, the dumb, the dumb, the dumb.

That was the rhythm called iambic pentameter.

Well, Puttenham acknowledged that those types of rhythms based on stress were better suited to the English language, and could be every bit as effective as the long and short rhythms used in Latin and Greek poetry.

In other words, poetic styles should be tailored to fit the language, and throughout his text, Puttenham attempts to show how English poetry should be tailored to the language of England.

But before an English poet could compose poetry, he or she had to determine which dialect of English to use.

It's important to keep in mind that there really wasn't any such thing as standard English at the time.

As we've seen in prior episodes, English varied greatly from speaker to speaker.

People in the north spoke differently than people in the south.

People in rural areas spoke differently than people in the cities.

And the dialect of upper-class speakers was different from that of lower-class speakers.

So in an extended passage, Puttenham explained which dialect of English should be used for English poetry.

And that passage is probably the most often quoted part of the entire text.

It's notable because Puttenham argued that the educated speech of London was the ideal form of English.

And in making that argument, he outlined the parameters of what would soon be generally accepted as standard English.

First, I should note that he referred to the English that was spoken in his day as Norman English, in contrast to the English that was spoken before the conquest, which he called Anglo-Saxon.

So that shows the extent to which he recognized the foreign element in English even in the late 1500s.

He then says that poets should use the form of English that, quote, is spoken in the king's court, or in the good towns and cities within the land, than in the marches and frontiers, or in port towns where strangers haunt for traffic's sake, end quote.

So, in other words, he recommends the use of the elevated language of the English court and type of language spoken in London rather than the English spoken in rural areas or in the border regions or in port towns where different languages and dialects mix together.

He then says that poets should avoid the English found

in universities where scholars use much peevish affection of words out of the primitive languages end quote.

In other words, avoid the English used by scholars who rely on obscure multi-syllable loan words from Latin and Greek.

In a separate section, Putnam says that it's very difficult to write good English poetry with long multi-syllable words because the words don't tend to follow the required stress patterns of English.

He adds that the poet should also avoid the dialects spoken, quote, in any uplandish village or corner of the realm where is no resort but of poor, rustical, or uncivil people, end quote.

So avoid the speech used in remote places because the people there speak an inferior form of English.

He then says that the poet should avoid, quote, the speech of a craftsman or carter, or other of the inferior sort, though he be inhabitant or bred in the best town and city in this realm, for such persons do abuse good speeches by strange accents, or ill-shaped sounds, and false orthography.

So avoid the speech of manual laborers, who speak with strange accents, and often make the mistake of pronouncing words like they're spelled without understanding that those words should be pronounced otherwise.

Puttenham then says that the poet should quote follow generally the better brought up sort, end quote.

He even identifies the specific landmarks where his preferred form of English is spoken.

The river Trent runs through the middle of England and provides a convenient landmark to distinguish the north from the south.

Puttenham directs the poet to avoid

any speech used beyond the river of Trent, though no man can deny but that theirs is the pure English Saxon at this day, yet it is not so courtly nor so current as our southern English is.

No more is the far westernmost speech.

Ye shall therefore take the usual speech of the court, and that of London, and the shires lying about London within sixty miles, and not much above.

So if you traveled more than 60 miles from London, you were not listening to a form of English that was appropriate for poetry.

Now, modern linguists would have a heart attack if they heard a scholar give that type of advice.

Putnam was arguing that the only acceptable form of English to be used was the dialect of a small minority of the country.

But his comments illustrate a common attitude among the educated classes of London during the Elizabethan period.

If you didn't didn't speak the language like they did, then you weren't speaking it correctly.

And that attitude would only grow stronger with time.

Of course, it's easy to dismiss Puttenham's advice as arrogant and bigoted, but we should keep in mind that he was writing a manual for poets, and he was describing a form of English that was quickly emerging as the standard form of the language.

So in that sense, he was merely advising poets to write to that generally accepted standard, and most of them did just that.

So people like Puttenham not only described that emerging standard, they also helped to make it the standard by encouraging writers and poets to use it.

Now, even if you restricted the use of English to the educated and cultivated dialect of London, that wasn't all you needed to consider.

Within that word stock, there were a lot of obscure words.

Some were older words that had fallen out of use, and some were technical loan words from Latin and Greek with a lot of syllables.

Puttinham advised poets to avoid both of those sets of words.

He wasn't opposed to all loan words, just technical and obscure words, what were commonly known as inkhorn terms at the time.

He thought that some people tried to impress each other by coming up with those types of words.

He wrote, quote, Young scholars, not half well studied, when they come to their friends, will seem to coin fine words out of the Latin.

And I mention that passage because, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, that's the first known use of the word coin to mean the creation or invention of a new word or phrase.

The text also contains the first recorded use of the word comma in an English document.

It was used in the original Greek sense of the word as a short pause in a sentence.

We also find the first known English use of the words paraphrase, anagram, and interestingly, the first recorded use of the Latin word insect in an English document.

The use of the word insect comes in a passage where Puttenham says that the poet's style and register should match the subject matter.

High and lofty subjects require an elevated style of speech, whereas low and base subjects require a much more style.

But in saying that, he notes that a poet can discuss lofty matters involving insignificant creatures.

So a poetic treatment of war between frogs or mice or insects can be presented in an elevated way because the topic is ultimately about war, not the creatures involved.

In that passage he wrote of frogs and mice and added, quote, So also is the ant or pissmire, and they be but little creeping things, not perfect beasts, but insects or worms.

That's the sentence that contains the first recorded use of the word insect in English.

Note that he begins by referring to the ant or pissmire.

Ant is an old English word, but pissmire is another old word for an ant.

It's probably native to English because the word mire is a common term for an an ant in many Germanic languages, though the form of the word varies a bit from language to language.

The term pissmire apparently comes from the idea that an ant hill has a urine-like smell.

It produced the word pissant, which appeared in the following century.

And here, Puttinum refers to ants as insects using the Latin word insectum,

which literally meant in sections, because the bodies of insects are divided into three separate sections.

Puttenum's text also contains the first or at least one of the first uses of the Italian word stanza, which is a group of lines featuring a specific rhyme scheme or pattern that's used throughout the poem.

The word stanza literally meant a stopping place.

It's related to words like stand and stance and statue, and that's because a person reading or reciting a poem would come to a brief stop or pause at the end of each stanza.

Of course, a stanza is a very basic component of a poem.

Once a rhyming pattern is established in a stanza, it tends to be repeated throughout the poem.

And in fact, repetition is a very basic component of all poetry.

One of the things that distinguishes poetry from normal speech is the organization and structure of the language used in poetry, and especially the use of repeating patterns.

Of course, one type of repeating pattern is repeating sounds.

Old English used alliteration, which was the repetition of sounds at the beginning of words.

During the Middle English period, English poetry started to rely more on rhyming verse, which was the repetition of sounds at the end of words, specifically the sound at the end of the last word in a line.

Well, in the course of Puttenham's discussion about the different styles used in poetry, he devotes a section to repetition.

He explained the different ways in which the poet can use repetition, and he gave examples from existing poems.

For example, he explained how some poets repeat the same words at the beginning of a series of lines, or the same words in the middle of the lines.

He also illustrated how some poets repeat the same word or phrase within a line of poetry.

In the course of that that discussion, Putnam used a word that has a very specific linguistic meaning today.

He used the word reduplication from Latin and French.

It is itself a form of repetition.

It contains both the prefix re meaning to do again and duplication meaning copy or double.

So reduplication literally means to double back.

As I said, the word has acquired a specific linguistic meaning over the centuries, and today it refers to a term made up of repeating words, usually with a slight change in pronunciation between the repeated terms.

It includes modern terms like hip-hop, zigzag, chit-chat, knick-knack, seesaw, tick-tock, and tic-tac-toe.

Now, Putinum didn't use the word reduplication in that way, and he didn't describe those types of terms, but I wanted to mention those types of repetitive terms here because they were starting to become much more common in the language during the Elizabethan period.

It's very rare to find those types of terms prior to the 1500s.

Chaucer had used the word haha for laughter, and he had also used the word hodgepodge, which later evolved into hodgepodge.

Hodchpotch evolved out of an even older term, the word hodgepot, which meant a pot full of a variety of ingredients, and that sense of a mixture or variety passed through from hodgepot to hotchpodch to hodgepodge.

In that evolution, we can hear how English speakers converted two distinct words into a rhyming pair which repeated the same sounds.

In the 1400s we find a few more of those terms like mishmash and riffraff, and also the term hurly burley, which meant turmoil or confusion.

Then in the fifteen hundreds we start to see lots more of those terms, like bibble babble and ribble rabble, both meaning idle or empty talk, and dibble dabble, meaning rubbish, and flim flam, meaning a trick or deception, and the Irish loan word hub up, meaning confused shouting or yelling.

We also find the word hugger-mugger, which meant privacy or secrecy, and the phrase tit for tat, which follows a similar pattern.

The Elizabethan period in the later 1500s gave us ding-dong for a ringing sound, and fiddle-faddle, meaning a trivial matter.

During this period, people took the word fable, which had been around for a couple of centuries, and they created the term fibble fable, meaning nonsense.

And by the early 1600s, that term fibble fable was shortened to simply fib, meaning a lie.

So fib is ultimately derived from fable thanks to this type of repetitive wordplay.

We find new examples of these words popping up even during the plague years from 1592 to 1594 when the theaters were closed.

The word dilly dally is first recorded during that period, meaning to be indecisive or hesitant.

The term helter skelter also pops up during those years.

It meant to act with haste or confusion.

Another new term during those two years was snip-snap, meaning to speak in a snappy or smart manner.

The related term snipper snapper also appeared around the same time.

It was generally used to mean a young or unimportant person.

Some sources, like the Oxford English Dictionary, claim that snippersnapper evolved into whippersnapper during the following century, as when an old man refers to a young person as a young whippersnapper.

In the following years, hundreds more of these terms entered the language, like hoity-toity, flip-flop, sing-song, chit-chat, zig-zag, tip-top, criss-cross, and so on.

In the 20th century, companies figured out that these terms make great product names which are easy to remember.

That gave us products like Mellow Yellow, Slim Jim, Lightbright, Tic-Tacs, and Nutter Butters.

But linguists have studied this phenomenon and they've noticed something very interesting about these terms.

They all follow the same pattern.

In the examples where the vowel changes in the middle, like chit-chat and tip-top, the vowel changes in a very specific way.

Linguists noted that the first word usually had a short I sound pronounced i,

and the second word usually had a short a sound pronounced a

or a short o sound pronounced a.

Again, from i to a gives us terms like zigzag, chit-chat, knick-knack, mishmash, riffraff, kit-kat, splish-splash, and so on.

But it's never the other way around.

It's never knack nick or zagzig.

It has to go the other way.

And from i to ah, we have tip-top, flip-flop, hip-hop, tick-tock, wishy-washy, and so on.

Again, it's never in the reverse order.

It's never top-tip or flop-flip.

To put it in more linguistic terms, we always start with a high front vowel, i,

and then we drop down to a lower vowel sound, a or a.

We never start low and move high.

Now, in some of these terms, we start with a long vowel sound, e,

but again, that's a high front vowel, and again, we drop down from there to a lower vowel, sing song, ping pong, ding dong, and so on.

In some of these cases, we have three words instead of two.

In those cases the first two words follow the same order, and the third word has a vowel that's even lower or further back, like a or o or oo.

So we have this same movement from high to low and front to back as we progress through the sequence, like tick tack toe, bing bang boom, bish bash bosh.

They all follow the same general pattern, and they never go in reverse.

So why am I telling you all of this?

Well, it's because English, like most languages, has an inherent order and structure that we don't always realize or appreciate.

And poets tap into that structure when composing poetry.

So as I noted a few episodes back, English has its own rhythm, which poets adapted to the de dum de dum de dum rhythm of iambic pentameter.

And here we see that English speakers often create these repetitive terms, but again, they always follow the same general vowel progression.

So these repetitive terms have their own natural poetic rhythm.

And when we coin one of these terms, we're using a type of wordplay the same way poets do.

We're tapping into the natural rhythm and structure of the language.

Think about children's nursery rhymes: Hickory Dickory Dock, Higglety Piggledy Pop, Winkin, Blinken, and Nod, Little Jack Horner, Little Miss Muffet, and Ring Around the Rosie.

Even Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, they all follow the same type of vowel progression.

Some scholars have even noted it in a phrase like Big Bad Wolf.

But it isn't just nursery rhymes.

Shakespeare himself sometimes adopted this same technique.

In his play All's Well That Ends Well, a character refers to his kicky wiki, which appears to be a term that Shakespeare coined, which meant a girlfriend or wife.

And in his play Henry IV Part I, composed two or three years after the theaters reopened, he apparently coined another one of those repetitive terms.

He used the term skimble scamble to mean confused, incoherent, or nonsensical.

He used it in a scene where a character expresses frustration at another person's statements by referring to them as, quote, such a deal of skimble, scamble stuff, end quote.

And even the phrase skimble scamble stuff has that same type of vowel progression, i.

And that's what George Puttenham was trying to describe in his book about English poetry.

He was trying to explain how writers could tap into that natural natural structure of the language to create poetry.

Now, I began this discussion about Puttenham's book by noting that it was printed in Richard Field's print shop, the same shop that printed Shakespeare's early narrative poems during the plague years of the early 1590s.

And while Shakespeare may have hung around that shop and read a copy of Puttenham's book while he was there, we can never know for sure.

But we do know that Shakespeare spent those plague years writing poetry.

And that poetry probably included his well-known sonnets.

So in the last part of this episode, I want to turn our attention to those sonnets.

Now today when we think of William Shakespeare, we think of his plays and his sonnets.

So in terms of poetry, the sonnets get most of the attention.

Most people today aren't even aware of those two narrative poems that I mentioned earlier.

But while the sonnets sonnets have attracted a lot of attention, they're an enigma.

We don't really know for certain when Shakespeare wrote them, though for various reasons most scholars think they were written around the same time as those other two poems.

We also don't know exactly who they were written about.

They specifically mention a young man and a woman, but it isn't clear if they were actual people or just figments of Shakespeare's imagination, or some combination of both.

Again, modern scholars have some strong beliefs and opinions about the identity of those two people, but we don't know for certain who they were.

We also don't know if Shakespeare approved the publication of the sonnets, or if he had any involvement at all in their publication.

And for that reason, we don't know if the published order of the sonnets reflects the order in which he wrote them, or if the publisher just put them in an order that seemed logical based on the content.

So, as you can see, there are many unanswered questions about these little poems, and that mystery may help to explain why many people still find them so fascinating.

So let's begin by noting that sonnets ultimately have their origin in Italy in the 1200s and 1300s.

The word sonnet comes from the Italian word sonnetto, meaning little song.

They were short love poems, and they typically had 14 lines.

The rhyming patterns used in Italy were a little different from the pattern that was later adopted in England, but the basic concept was well established by the time English poets began to write them in the 1500s.

The form was really popularized in England by a couple of English poets named Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, who was the Earl of Surrey.

Those two men are sometimes called the fathers of the English sonnet, and their poems were published in an important collection in the mid-1500s, which proved to be very popular.

Over the following decades many poets tried their hand at writing sonnets.

For example, in the late 1560s a poet named Thomas Howell published a collection called New Sonnets.

They're mainly notable to-day because one of them contained the line, Count not thy chickens that unhatched be,

weigh words as wind, till thou find certainty.

Now that passage is notable because it appears to be the first attested version of the well-known proverb, don't count your chickens before they hatch.

For several decades, English sonnets varied in length and structure.

In English, the term sonnet basically just meant a short love poem, but by the 1580s the structure had been largely fixed in the form that would become standard in English.

It consisted of 14 lines of iambic pentameter.

The rhyming scheme was pretty simple.

The first four lines, the second four lines, and the third four lines each had an alternating rhyme scheme.

In other words, within each group of four, the first and third lines rhymed with each other, and the second and fourth lines rhymed with each other.

That left two lines at the end, which also rhymed with each other.

That was the structure that Shakespeare employed, and to-day it's so synonymous with him that the form is sometimes called Shakespearean, but he did not invent it.

It was already in common use.

Now, it isn't known with certainty when he wrote the sonnets, but we do have some clues.

First of all, in 1598, that's four years after the plague subsided and the theaters reopened, a writer named Francis Mears wrote a book called Palladus Tomia, Wit's Treasury.

I mentioned that book in the last episode, and it contained a list of Shakespeare's plays that had been written and performed by that date.

It also made reference to, quote, his sugared sonnets among his private friends, end quote.

So that confirms that many, if not all, of the sonnets had been written by 1598.

Again, that was four years after the plague lifted, so we know that the sonnets were composed early in Shakespeare's career, not later.

Muir's comment that the sonnets were shared among Shakespeare's friends is another important piece of information.

It suggests that they weren't really intended for publication.

They were just written to entertain friends.

And that was common for sonnets at the time.

The year after Muir's book was released, a printer named William Jaggard tried to cash in on Shakespeare's growing fame.

He published a book called The Passionate Pilgrim by W.

Shakespeare, Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music.

So on its face it purported to be a collection of Shakespeare's sonnets, but you know what they say, you can't judge a book by the cover.

The title was a little bit of false advertising.

The book mostly contained works by other poets, but it did contain two of Shakespeare's sonnets.

They were the ones that later became known as Sonnet 138 and Sonnet 144.

That collection confirms that some of the sonnets were being passed around, and some printers were interested in publishing them.

But it took another decade before the entire collection of sonnets was published.

In 1609, late in Shakespeare's career, a printer named Thomas Thorpe published the sonnets under the title Shakespeare's Sonnets Never Before Imprinted.

It contained 154 sonnets in total, and it was that collection that gave us the sonnets as we know them today, in the order we know them today.

But again, one of the enduring mysteries is whether Shakespeare himself had anything to do with the publication, and whether he had any input in the way they were presented.

It's also unclear how the poems came into Thorpe's possession.

Scholars have argued these points for centuries, but we simply don't know for certain.

I should also note that the sonnets have not always been held in high regard.

Unlike the two narrative poems that I mentioned earlier in the episode, both of which were reprinted several times and praised by Shakespeare's contemporaries, that wasn't the case with the collection of sonnets.

Thorpe never reprinted them or produced more editions, and they were barely even mentioned by other writers in the 1600s.

Even in the 1700s and 1800s, critics were not particularly kind to the collection.

It's really only been in the last century or so that critics have come around, and they're now held in much higher regard.

Over the centuries, readers have scoured the sonnets for clues about their composition and the persons that Shakespeare was writing about.

Many critics suggest that it's a pointless endeavor.

These are poems, so they may not be about anyone in particular.

But other scholars insist that they tell a story, and that story may involve the Earl of Southampton, who I mentioned earlier in the episode.

You might recall that the two poems I discussed earlier, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrese, were both dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton.

It appears that Shakespeare sought his patronage, and he may very well have served as Shakespeare's patron during this period.

Well, many scholars think that Shakespeare was living at Southampton's residence during the plague years of 1592 to 1594, or at least during part of that time.

And they think that Shakespeare composed most, if not all, of the sonnets during that same time period.

They argue that a large number of the poems are specifically about Southampton, and they base this conclusion on several clues in the lines that Shakespeare wrote.

Now, first it's important to note that Southampton had recently been involved in a dispute with his guardian, William Cecil.

Remember that Cecil was Queen Elizabeth's close advisor, and he had become Southampton's guardian several years earlier when Southampton's father died.

Well, Cecil tried to arrange a marriage between his granddaughter and the young Earl, but Southampton didn't want any part of it, and he refused to marry her.

Well, the early group of sonnets are addressed to a young man, and in them Shakespeare encourages the man to get married so he can produce children and ensure his legacy.

So the person being addressed is apparently reluctant to get married.

Shakespeare also specifically mentions that the young man's father is deceased, as was the case with Southampton.

The passage also refers to the young man's mother and implies that she is still living, which again was the case with Southampton.

From those and other clues, many scholars think that Shakespeare was writing about Southampton, the same man to whom he had dedicated those earlier two two poems.

And they think the sonnets were produced around the same time.

So let's take a closer look at that first group of sonnets.

The first 26 poems appear to be part of a related group, and again, all appear to be addressed to the same young man.

Let's look at the first four lines of sonnet number one.

In these lines, Shakespeare appears to be saying that we like it when beautiful and handsome people have children because that ensures that their beauty never dies.

And when a man gets old and dies, his legacy survives in his children.

Shakespeare writes, quote,

From fairest creatures we desire increase, that thereby beauty's rose might never die, but as the riper should by time decrease, his tender air might bear his memory.

Now this passage is interesting because in the second line Shakespeare says that beauty's rose might never die.

Well earlier in the episode I mentioned that Southampton's given name was Henry Risley, spelled W I R O T H E S L E Y.

Well supposedly the name was also pronounced Rosley at the time and that reference to beauty's rose at the very beginning of this sonnet collection is considered by many scholars to be another clue that the person being described was Rosalie, or Risley, or Southampton, as he is generally known.

Now, Shakespeare then includes a passage where he seems to be saying that the young man is obsessed with himself while he should be sharing his beauty with the world.

In sonnet number three, Shakespeare begins by telling the young man to look in the mirror and tell the face he sees that it's time to have a child.

He writes,

Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest, now is the time that face should form another.

He concludes the sonnet by saying that the young man is the mirror image of his mother, suggesting that his mother is still alive.

And he adds that as the young man ages, he will see his youth in his children, but if he dies childless, his image will be gone forever.

Now we often think of sonnets as love poems, but as you can see, Shakespeare's sonnets are often more like life advice, especially the advice from a slightly older adult to a young man.

The poems continue along in much the same manner, with Shakespeare encouraging the young man to marry and have children.

In the last two lines of sonnet 13, he tells the young man that he had a father and his son should be able to say the same.

He writes,

Dear my love, you know, you had a father.

Let your son say so.

That's the passage that indicates that the young man's father is deceased.

Again, it's another clue that the poem is about Southampton.

A few sonnets later we find what is probably the most well known sonnet of all, and one of the most recited poems in the English language.

It's sonnet 18.

You've probably heard it before.

You may have even learned it in school.

And you probably thought it was about a beautiful woman.

But given the placement of the sonnet in this group of poems addressed to the young man, and how he should preserve his beauty by getting married and having children, it's generally agreed that this poem is addressed to him.

It reads,

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and summer's lease hath all too short a date.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, and often is his gold complexion dimmed,

and every fair from fair sometime declines, by chance or nature's changing course untrimmed.

But thy eternal summer shall not fade, nor lose possession of that fair thou owest,

nor shall death brag thou wonderest in his shade, when in eternal lines to time thou growest.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Then, two sonnets later, Shakespeare plays around with the idea of gender.

He says that the object of his affection has a woman's face and a woman's gentle heart.

He refers to the person as the

master-mistress of my passion.

quote.

But then he refers to the person as a man in hue, who steals men's eyes and women's souls.

He adds that Mother Nature had intended to make the man a woman, but then she added, quote, one thing to my purpose, nothing, end quote.

Now that added thing is generally interpreted as a reference to the male appendage, which Shakespeare says he has no use for.

That is at least the common interpretation of the sonnet.

It seems to refute any notion that Shakespeare desired a sexual relationship with the young man, but again it's all a matter of interpretation, and it assumes that the sonnets are about actual people.

Again, for all we know, it could all be poetic license.

As we keep reading, we find a series of sonnets in which the person being addressed has betrayed Shakespeare in some way, and expresses remorse.

In sonnet thirty-five he writes, quote, No more be grieved at that which thou hast done.

Roses have thorns and silver fountains mud.

Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun, and loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.

End quote.

Again, we see another reference to roses there, in this case a rose with thorns.

At Sonnet 40, we find out the possible discretion.

The person being addressed has taken Shakespeare's woman.

The same idea is expressed throughout this series of poems.

For example, the opening lines of Sonnet 42 read

That thou hast her, it is not all my grief, and yet it may be said I loved her dearly.

That she hath thee is of my wailing chief, a loss in love that touches me more nearly.

We then have a series series of sonnets where Shakespeare expresses worry that the person being addressed will leave him and treat the poet like a stranger.

There's a darkness and sadness that runs through those sonnets.

In the course of this sequence, he writes about the destructive effects of time and insomnia caused by unrequited love, and being in such despair that he wishes he were dead.

Then in the sonnets numbered in the late seventies, we have another group that appear to be addressed to a literary patron, which again points to Southampton as the person being addressed, at least in this group.

In Sonnet Seventy eight, Shakespeare notes that he has repeatedly invoked the person being addressed as the inspiration of his poetry, and now other poets are doing the same.

In the opening lines, he writes

So oft have I invoked thee for my muse, And found such fair assistance in my verse, and every alien pen hath got my use,

and under thee their posy disperse.

In the following sonnet, number seventy-nine, Shakespeare writes about a rival poet who is now composing poetry to the person being addressed, and is trying to win his favor.

Again, the common assumption is that Shakespeare now had competition, and these sonnets are about one or more other poets who were trying to win Southampton's favor and patronage.

Near the end of the sequence, specifically number eighty seven, Shakespeare says farewell to the person he's addressing and says that he does not deserve his love or attention.

The tone of this sequence is that the relationship has come to an end.

Now again, there are 154 sonnets in total, and out of the first one hundred twenty six, none are expressly addressed to a woman.

Some are clearly addressed to a a man, and the others are genderless.

Some scholars think they're all addressed to the same young man, while others think they're about different people, both men and women.

But it's not until sonnet 127 that we clearly have a group of sonnets composed to and about a woman.

He describes this woman as his mistress and his goddess, and he repeatedly refers to her with feminine pronouns.

He even gives us a physical description, writing that she has black eyes, black hair, and breasts that are done,

D-U-N, which meant brown.

Shakespearean scholars have historically referred to the mysterious woman as the Dark Lady, because he repeatedly describes her in that way, and it appears to be something that he found very attractive about her.

But then in Sonnet 133 we find out that she's with another man, specifically with his friend.

Whether this is the same young man described in the earlier sonnets is unknown.

Shakespeare then laments that he's lost both his mistress and his friend.

In the final few poems, he laments his loss, and he describes his mistress as cruel and as a tyrant who has twisted his mind and his perceptions of the world.

He has become world-wear and complains about his state in life.

Again, these are the sonnets composed by by Shakespeare.

They may not be what you thought they were, and scholars have had mixed opinions about them over the years.

They remain a mystery for all of the unanswered questions they raise.

There seems to be an autobiographical element to at least some of them, and much of that evidence points in the direction of the Earl of Southampton.

That evidence also suggests a link to Shakespeare's two narrative poems that were dedicated to Southampton during the plague years of the early 1590s, and that would also suggest that they were all composed around the same time.

But Shakespeare didn't just spend that time writing poems.

In the months after the theaters reopened in 1594, we have evidence that new plays by him were being performed, and that suggests that they were also written during that two-year period when the theaters were closed.

So, next time, we're going to turn our attention to those early dramas.

And they are important because they reveal a great deal about the English language at the time.

In fact one of them called Love's Labors Lost contains several passages where Shakespeare actually comments about the language of his day, including the way words were pronounced and spelled.

So next time, we'll dig a little deeper into his plays, and we'll see what they have to tell us about the state of English at the time.

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