The Age of Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s lifetime (1564–1616) saw the rise of England under Queen Elizabeth I (r.1558–1603) and the first stirrings of an empire-building culture that was to last for the best part of 400 years. Despite external threats and internal political and religious dissent, some of which was violently suppressed, this was an era of relative tranquillity that witnessed an explosion of creativity and innovation. The English language was to be one of the main beneficiaries.

In the Elizabethan period the English language flexes its muscles. It begins to experiment, to play around, to show off. It finds innovative ways of saying old things. It creates fresh expressions. There was even a word for those new words that were considered too flashy or contrived. They were ‘ink-horn’ terms, an ink-horn being, unsurprisingly, a container for ink. Presumably they were called this because writing them required more ink or perhaps because of the association between a desk-bound man and pedantry. ‘Ink-horn’ words were generally derived from Latin or Greek. Examples from the Elizabethan period that have not survived include cohibit (restrain), concernancy (concern), eximious (excellent) and illecebrous (enticing).

The ‘ink-horn’ word was only used as a criticism and never as a compliment. The implication behind the jibe – another Elizabethan coinage – was that English did not require these new-fangled and sometimes ugly expressions. There were already good old English terms, literally Old English in many cases. What was wrong with the Anglo-Saxon roots of language? Why did writers have to go ransacking the classical tongues when better and shorter words were available?

The simplest answer is that writers used these words because they wanted to, either to impress their readers or to baffle them (sometimes the two overlap), or because they were simply exploring what could be done with the language. In response, some of the objectors deliberately revived Anglo-Saxon words that had fallen out of use.

The protests made no difference. Some new words survived, some died. The choice was made by the users of language even though the process must have been more instinctive than deliberate. Nor was there any obvious logic to the process, since it does not seem to have been based on the simplicity or the sound of a word.

Take the case of impede and expede, words deriving fom Latin and having related though opposed meanings. The verb impede has been part of English for more than 400 years, while the now obsolete impedite was recorded even earlier, in 1535. It might be assumed that the more cumbersome word, impedite, was compelled to give way to the shorter, more convenient one, impede. Perhaps so. Yet the opposite happened with expede, which is noted as a Scottish usage in the early 1500s but does not seem to have enjoyed much of a life. It is the synonymous but slightly more complicated expedite – in the sense ‘to clear of difficulties’ and so ‘to hasten or make easier’ – which has not merely survived but even become something of a commercial buzz-word.

Sometimes a word might be permitted to join the Elizabethan English lexicon even if others with identical or similar meanings already existed. This is obviously the case with examples such as absurdity or assassin or external, all of which are first recorded within a few years of each other in the mid-16th century. By contrast, other words for which there were synonyms did not last the course. For instance, terms deriving from the Latin mittere (to send) such as transmit and remit are standard modern vocabulary, yet demit was never allowed to gain a foothold by its pre-existing synonym, dismiss. It is rarely if ever possible to say why one word should flourish and another fail to catch on.

Whatever the arguments of the time over the eligibility of new words, there is no doubting that the imports into English between the late 1400s and the early 1600s – roughly speaking, the Renaissance period – added richness and variety to the language. The confidence of writers and others in using new vocabulary is paralleled by the growing confidence of England itself as the country emerged as a significant European power under Elizabeth I, and as explorers and commercial imperialists began to expand the very boundaries of the nation. From new words to new worlds . . .

New Worlds, Old Religion

Despite the stress on the new and unfamiliar in the Elizabethan period, there were some legacies from earlier years and centuries that would not be banished. Many of these legacies were religious. It was under Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII (r.1509–47), that the English Church had broken away from Rome. During the reign of Mary I (1553–8), Henry’s daughter by his first wife Catherine of Aragon, there was a shortlived realignment of England with the Catholic Church. Even though Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry by his second wife Anne Boleyn, maintained a kind of truce with English Catholics after coming to the throne in 1558, she reverted to the Protestant dispensation of her father. The expression Protestant had itself come into English around the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536–9). It derived from a dissenting ‘Protestation’ made by German rulers against Catholic edicts.

At least in the early part of her reign, Elizabeth showed tolerance towards adherents of the ‘old religion’ (i.e., Catholicism), rejecting enquiry and persecution by saying that she had ‘no desire to make windows into men’s souls’. But later challenges to her power, ranging from the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots to the perpetual threat from Spain (realized most directly in the Armada of 1588) to various conspiracies against her life, hardened the queen’s position. She was also facing dissent from the other side, from those who believed that religious reform in England had not gone far enough, a group generally referred to as the Puritans.

The term Puritan, from the Latin for ‘pure’ or ‘purity’ (purus, puritas), enters the language during the last quarter of the 16th century. The Puritans’ campaign for a ‘purification’ of the church from excessive ceremony, as well as their austere morality and plain style of dress, made them obvious targets for mockery and the ‘puritan’ expression was more often used about them than by them. Minorities they may have been, and often derided, but the various dissenting factions that can be grouped under the Puritan banner were historically significant in two ways: they were a key component in the early settlement of America and they were the victors in the English Civil War.

Another significant consequence of Queen Elizabeth’s religious allegiance was the revival of the Book of Common Prayer. This had been compiled by Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury for more than 20 years until he was burnt at the stake for heresy in 1556 under the Catholic Queen Mary. The Prayer Book was banned during Mary’s brief reign but reissued in slightly modified form at the beginning of her half-sister’s rule. The Book of Common Prayer counts as one of the most influential volumes in English history since, following another revision after the English Civil War (1642–51), it was used for Anglican services for more than three centuries. Designed to be spoken aloud as much as read, many of its phrasings and rhythms entered popular consciousness. This was not only because they were heard during regular weekly services but because words from the Prayer Book were used for the rites of baptism, marriage and burial. Even though the language of the liturgy has been modernized and church congregations in Britain are now only a small fraction of what they once were, expressions from the Book of Common Prayer have proved extraordinarily durable, as the brief selection below demonstrates.

We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.

Give peace in our time, O Lord.

Deceits of the world, the flesh and the devil.

To have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.

In the midst of life we are in death.

Earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes.

Like the King James version of the Bible, first published in 1611, the Book of Common Prayer did not add to the resources of the English language in terms of fresh words. Indeed, it would have been surprising if a text intended to be solemn and authoritative had employed much new terminology. Rather, the style of the Prayer Book is vigorous and plain. The references are immediate and easily understood (like lost sheep, dust to dust). The language often rests on the oldest vocabulary, words deriving from Old English and not from Norman French or Latin. It is frequently monosyllabic. The excerpt above from the General Confession beginning ‘We have left undone those things . . .’ uses only one word of two syllables and not a single word that does not derive from Old English.

Shakespeare – the Myth and the Man

There is more mystery than fact in the life of William Shakespeare. Or perhaps it is the case that, because what is definitely known about him is quite ordinary, people feel the need to see shadows and create mysteries where none exist.

The biggest (and most unnecessary) mystery is over the authorship of the plays. For more than 200 years disputes have raged over whether Shakespeare actually penned the dramas that bear his name. Rival candidates range from the philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626) to aristocrats like the Earl of Derby to the playwright Christopher Marlowe (1564–93). The fact that Marlowe was murdered in a brawl at a tavern in Deptford in 1593 – shortly before Shakespeare published his poem Venus and Adonis – is no obstacle to this theory, since it is claimed that Marlowe faked his death with the help of influential friends. To avoid trouble from the Privy Council over his blasphemy and declared atheism, Marlowe was spirited away to France after his ‘death’, only to return in secret to England to write ‘Shakespeare’s’ plays while secluded in the country estate of an admirer.

The common factor in these alternative Shakespeares is that they were either better born or better educated than the man from Stratford-upon-Avon, whose father was (probably) a glove-maker and who, unlike the Cambridge-educated Christopher Marlowe, never went to university. There is more than a touch of snobbery in the assumption that a mere provincial would not have been capable of imagining scenes in the palaces of English kings or Venetian doges.

The key and undisputed facts in Shakespeare’s life could be listed on a single sheet of paper and still leave room to spare: his birth (1564); his marriage (1582) to a woman who was eight years older than her teenage husband and who bore him three children; a sneering reference to him in a pamphlet which is important only because it shows that by 1592 he was living and writing in London; his involvement with the Chamberlain’s Men, later the King’s Men, soon after their foundation in 1594, a connection that lasted throughout his career; his purchase of a large house in Stratford in 1597; his death in 1616. Seven years later John Heming and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare’s fellow shareholders in the King’s Men, published the First Folio containing all but one of the plays that Shakespeare wrote.

Stories and rumours did circulate about Shakespeare during his life or shortly after his death, some of them faintly scandalous (including one that he was the father of a natural son by the beautiful wife of an Oxford innkeeper, the said son growing up to become Sir William Davenant, a playwright around the time of the Civil War). But none of the stories ever suggested that William Shakespeare was not the author he claimed to be or that he was any kind of trickster. Indeed, when he was referred to, it was in a tone of admiration touched with affection. John Aubrey (1626–97), living and writing only a couple of generations later, said of him: ‘He was a handsome, well-shaped man: very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit.’

A Question of Class and Language

William Shakespeare used a range of styles of speech in his plays to suit characters across the social spectrum, from foppish courtiers through bluff soldiers to simple country-dwellers. But the dominant manner of his speakers is elevated and rhetorical. Even when it is not outright poetry, it is closer to poetry than it is to everyday speech. Devices that Shakespeare uses widely, such as alliteration, assonance, rhythm and the extensive use of metaphorical language, may be seen as more typical of verse than of prose.

This high style is appropriate to Shakespeare’s settings and situations. In his plays he is fleshing out the lives of kings and queens, of princes and senators, bishops and generals. They are no different from other human beings in their passions and dilemmas but they are much more likely to be found debating in the council chamber than drinking in the local tavern. When Shakespeare does deal with working-class urban characters he tends to make them speak in prose and, although they may be quick-witted like the Roman citizens who appear in Julius Caesar, they are usually a bit ridiculous too. The social grouping that is notable by its absence in Shakespeare’s writing is the middle-class, although he himself was an archetypal member of it.

It is the lower-class urban figures who are more reliably the object of Shakespeare’s linguistic humour. The more sophisticated and complex a language, the more it can be played with, and by Shakespeare’s time English was very sophisticated indeed. However, Shakespeare’s jokes at the expense of his lower-class characters are somewhat one-note. They choose the wrong words, saying the opposite of what they mean. Dogberry, the watchman or constable in Much Ado about Nothing, makes remarks like ‘O villain! thou wilt be condemned into everlasting redemption for this’ and ‘Does thou not suspect my place? Dost thou not suspect my years?’ The grave-digger in Hamlet, generally a smart fellow capable of holding his own with the Prince of Denmark, mangles his Latin, coming out with argal when he should be saying ergo (the final term in a logical argument, meaning ‘therefore’). Definitely a joke for the better-educated who were occupying the more expensive seats in the playhouse.

This is one aspect of Shakespeare that has not worn well, and the laughter that greets these remarks in the theatre tends to be respectful – or, as Dogberry would probably say, suspectful – rather than prolonged. But before we start accusing the playwright of being patronizing we should remember that a large part of the audience in the Globe Theatre and elsewhere was made up of exactly those same urban working-class figures being guyed on stage. If the ‘groundlings’ didn’t mind it, neither should we. Besides, they would always have had the manners and language of their betters to laugh at. Shakespeare was very ready to mock the elaborate diction employed by courtiers or the fantastically complicated excuses and justifications of the nobility, such as the speech from the Archbishop of Canterbury at the beginning of Henry V arguing that it is morally right to go to war against France. Here is a case of language being (mis)used in a style any contemporary political spin-doctor would recognize.

Shakespeare and Dialect

Because Shakespeare rarely uses dialect or accent in his plays, the few examples tend to stand out. Like the introduction to a joke, the cast of Henry V includes among the minor characters a Scotsman, an Irishman and a Welshman, all serving as officers under the king at the time of Agincourt. Part of their function is to show that it is Britain, rather than England alone, which is fighting against the common enemy, France. Shakespeare reproduces something of their accented English, as when the Scots Captain Jamy says: ‘By the mess, ere theise eyes of mine take themselves to slumber, aile do gud service, or I’ll lig i’ the grund for it.’ He has some fun too with the volubility of Captain Fluellen, though at the same time he stresses the Welshman’s good sense and bravery.

The only time Shakespeare gives us a full-blown version of a country dialect is in King Lear, when Edgar is protecting his father from being attacked. A typical passage from this brief scene runs: ‘Nay, come not near th’old man, che vor ye [I warn you], or ise try whether your costard [head] or my ballow [cudgel] be the harder.’ In fact, Edgar is in disguise – his father has been blinded and does not know him – and he is no closer to being a country yokel than is ‘th’old man’, the Earl of Gloucester. Edgar’s words are as stagy as the utterances of some forelock-tugging peasant in an old-time farce or whodunnit, a theatrical style commonly known as ‘Mummerset’. When Shakespeare portrayed ‘real’ country characters he provided them with elevated, romantic diction, as with the lovelorn shepherd Silvius in As You Like It.

Shakespeare’s Language

Even though he is concentrating on the nobility, Shakespeare’s poetry is wonderfully flexible and, one might say, mongrel. He draws on all the resources of English vocabulary, whether its roots are in Anglo-Saxon or Norman French or Latin or elsewhere. As an example, take a few lines from the ‘Scottish’ play, Macbeth. These occur after the tragic hero-villain has murdered his way to the throne, spurred on by the witches’ prophecies, the taunting of his wife and his own ambition. Deep in blood, Macbeth begins to envy those he has put to death including Duncan, the late king. Halfway through the play, when he has had enough but cannot undo his crimes, he says to his wife:

Duncan is in his grave;
After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst; nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing
Can touch him further.

This is heartfelt stuff. It reveals Macbeth’s despair, his longing for oblivion. To convey these emotions, Shakespeare uses a mixture of basic monosyllables (grave, life, sleeps, steel) and more complex expressions (fitful fever, malice domestic, foreign levy). The most simple terms of all are found in almost identical form in Old English: is, in, he, his, him, after, well, can, further have been with us for well over 1000 years. Slightly more complicated but still everyday words also derive from Old English: for example, life from OE lif and grave ultimately from the verb grafen meaning ‘to dig’. The more elaborate words tend to be French-derived – treason, poison, malice, levy – or from Latin, in the case of domestic.

Shakespeare also added to the stock of English words. There are approximately 2000 terms that first appear in his plays. This does not mean that he invented them but a fair proportion – perhaps as much as three-quarters – are likely to be his own coinages. Some of these have fallen by the wayside (adoptitious, aidance) but others are long established (Macbeth was the first to talk of assassination and Othello refers to accommodation).

Even when Shakespeare was employing familiar English vocabulary, he had a genius for phrase-making. People who have never seen one of his plays regularly use expressions that he created, from ‘cold comfort’ to ‘all Greek to me’, from ‘blinking idiot’ to ‘good riddance’. He has always been a good provider of titles for books and films, plays and poems. A short monologue from the end of Macbeth throws up several examples from the 20th century: The Way to Dusty Death (a thriller by Alistair MacLean), Brief Candles (short stories by Aldous Huxley), The Sound and the Fury (a literary novel by William Faulkner), Out, Out (a poem by Robert Frost). Finally, All Our Yesterdays, which comes from the same speech, was the title of an episode from Star Trek as well as the name of a long-running documentary series on British TV, and has been used at least once as a book title. All this from a single speech of 12 lines!

But Shakespeare’s impact on English lies not only in individual words and phrases. He was also daring in the way he employed those words. He was and is famous for his puns and word-play – or notorious for them. In the 18th century Samuel Johnson, who was not afraid to take Shakespeare to task, said of him: ‘A quibble [pun] was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world and was content to lose it.’ There are whole books on Shakespeare’s use of bawdy and double entendres. When Gratiano at the very end of The Merchant of Venice reflects that ‘while I live, I’ll fear no other thing/So sore as keeping safe Nerissa’s ring’, it is not only his betrothed’s engagement gift he is talking about. Shakespeare did not shy away from using puns at moments of high tension, either. When Lady Macbeth plans to smear with blood the faces of the sleeping bodyguards of King Duncan, to make it appear that they are responsible for his murder, she snatches the bloody daggers from her husband’s trembling hands and says: ‘I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal/For it must seem their guilt.’

Master Manipulator

Shakespeare made words do what he wanted them to do. Adjectives were turned into verbs: ‘Thank me no thankings, nor proud me no prouds’, says father Capulet to his daughter Juliet. Another father lecturing his daughter – Prospero to Miranda in The Tempest – coins the phrase ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’, casually transforming an adverb (backward) into a noun as he talks about the distant past. In Shakespeare’s most famous play, Polonius warns his daughter Ophelia to keep away from Prince Hamlet by playing on a series of noun/verb meanings attached to the word tender (a bid made without payment, to treat with respect, to offer as a present) while, ironically, avoiding any genuine tenderness in his words to her.

Words were Shakespeare’s business. Sometimes his characters might seem weary of them, as when Hamlet is asked what he is reading and replies, ‘Words, words, words.’ At other times words assume a magical force, as in the witches’ spells in Macbeth. And in his last completed play, The Tempest, Shakespeare dealt head-on with the power of language, both for good and bad. Prospero, the one-time duke of Milan, has been exiled to the nameless island where the entire play unfolds. Until his enemies are shipwrecked on the island, Prospero is alone with his daughter Miranda, and two semi-human creatures Ariel and Caliban. Caliban is ‘a savage and deformed slave’, an original inhabitant of the island, tutored and protected by Prospero until he attempted to rape Miranda. (All this has occurred before the play begins.) Given the power of speech by Prospero, Caliban announces:

You taught me language; and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse.

And curse he does, both his master and his miserable condition. But Caliban is also gifted with some of the most strange and moving lines in the play:

Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.

Shortly before this, in graphic language Caliban has been describing how Prospero might be murdered (his skull battered with a log, a stake driven through his paunch, his windpipe cut). One moment language is being deployed to provoke violence, the next to evoke a vision of paradise.

Shakespeare was pre-eminent in the Elizabethan/Jacobean period for his capacity to make language do things that were fresh and forward-looking. His rival and fellow playwright Ben Jonson (1572–1637) could write very generous praise of Shakespeare after he was dead – saying that he was comparable only to the Greek classical dramatists, that he was ‘not of an age, but for all time’ – but the man from Stratford was just one of dozens of playwrights and poets who were enriching the language with their coinages and linguistic daring.

Coded Shakespeare

If you open the King James version of the Bible and go to the forty-sixth Psalm – the one beginning ‘God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble’ – you will find that the forty-sixth word is ‘shake’. If you go to the end of the same psalm and, leaving out the formulaic term ‘Selah’ which probably indicates a pause, count forty-six words the other way you reach ‘spear’. Put the two words together and – abracadabra! – you get Shakespear. Is this proof that the greatest English writer of all time had a hand in what has been called the most influential prose work of all time? Quite a few people think so. Is the clinching detail the fact that William Shakespeare had reached the age of 46 in 1610 when the finishing touches were being put to the Bible? Yes, the same people will seize on this as incontrovertible evidence.

More legends attach themselves to Shakespeare than any other great writer, perhaps because what little is known about him is so tantalizingly ordinary. Much time and ingenuity have been wasted in poring over his and others’ words to prove all sorts of things about Shakespeare. The way in which the English language lends itself to word games, including codes and ciphers, has been very helpful to conspiracy theorists. For example, Shakespeare uses the word ‘honorificabilitudinitatibus’ in his early play Love’s Labour’s Lost. Although it has a meaning to do with honour, it’s a joke word thrown in by a clownish character. Yet ‘honorificabilitudinitatibus’ has been taken very seriously indeed by those who believe that Shakespeare’s plays were written by the Elizabethan writer and philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626). For this long and nonsensical word can be rearranged to spell out, in a rough sort of Latin, hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi, translating as ‘these plays, the children of F. Bacon, are preserved for the world’. However, a quick search of an online anagram-finder shows that the word can also be rearranged in a further 37,000 ways, none of them making much sense.

Some believe that Shakespeare was a practising Catholic at a time when it was dangerous to adhere to the ‘old religion’ in Protestant England. One commentator has decoded his plays to suggest that references to being ‘sunburned’ or ‘tanned’, like his heroines Viola, Imogen and Portia, symbolize being close to God and so a true Catholic. The fact is that none of these theories can be proved in any meaningful sense, and that most of them are created by people who decide what they want to find before they go looking for ‘evidence’. Even so, the theories – whether half-reasonable or completely crackpot – make for entertaining reading.

The Elizabethan Underworld

There were other kinds of language apart from those uttered on the public stage. At the opposite end of the spectrum was the specialized slang used in the shadowy spaces occupied by vagrants, conmen and criminals. Yet the gap between the Shakespearean world and the criminal underworld was not so great, for all that Shakespeare’s company performed regularly for Queen Elizabeth and was later under the patronage of King James I.

The Globe and other playhouses were situated on the south bank of the Thames, an area of London which was outside the control of the city authorities. In addition to the theatres, the district was host to a bevy of brothels and a pit in which bears and bulls were baited for public amusement, as well as several prisons. Much of the area was under the control of the bishop of Winchester, whose London residence was in Southwark, and the local prostitutes were accordingly known as ‘Winchester geese’. No doubt many of the more prosperous inhabitants of north London who paid their one-penny fees to be rowed across the Thames or who came on foot across London Bridge experienced a pleasant frisson as they contemplated the dodgy demi-monde around them.

This interest in the culture of the underworld extended to its language, sometimes called thieves’ cant. Almost all the words used then have dropped out of use but knowledge of them survives because, from the early 16th century onwards, writers interested in language set about collecting examples. Thomas Harman was a magistrate who produced a guide to the Elizabethan underworld. He focused on one of the biggest criminal/social problems of the age, the large number of beggars and vagrants who practised violence or trickery to get money.

Harman and others defined such figures as the ‘counterfeit crank’, a trickster who feigned illness by covering himself with simulated sores or by chewing soap so as to produce foaming at the mouth in imitation of the ‘falling sickness’ or epilepsy. The idea was that the passer-by would be moved by pity to reach into his purse. The term crank does not describe an eccentric individual but is related to the modern German krank (‘sick’). Other underworld characters in the rogues’ gallery included the ‘prigger of prancers’ or horse-thief, the ‘curber’ or ‘hooker’, who carried a long hook with which to retrieve clothes from open windows, and the ‘cutpurse’ who literally cut the strings fastening the purse to the victim’s belt. To cut the string, the thief might employ a ‘horn-thumb’, a sliver of sharpened horn attached to the thumb.

Once arrested and brought up before the ‘Queer-cuffin’ (Justice of the Peace), the felon might find himself doing time in a prison like the Counter near Cheapside. Here, if he could offer enough ‘garnish’ (bribes), he would be put in a cell in the Master’s Side, where straw bedding and candle-stub illumination provided the highest grade of prison accommodation. When the money ran out or he could no longer prevail on his friends outside to supply him with more, the luckless prisoner would be shifted to the Knight’s Ward, the middle grade of lodging, or put into the self-explanatory Hole.

The Elizabethans would have been very familiar with prisons, at least from the outside. There were three within a quarter of a mile of St Paul’s alone. It is not surprising that the dictionaries of thieves’ cant sold well. These underworld guides were ostensibly produced as warnings to the gullible – Thomas Harman’s had the word Caveat (a Latin injunction meaning ‘Take Care’) in the title. Their purpose was also to give out titillating information about a level of society closed to law-abiding people, beginning a fascination with criminal slang and jargon that continues to the present day.

The Queen’s English at Tilbury

Despite the religious divisions within the country and the threats from outside, there was also a growing sense of national identity and self-confidence. The language boom was clear proof of the latter. England was no longer a sliver of an island on the edge of a continental landmass but an increasingly powerful kingdom, one with foreign ambitions that combined the imperial and the commercial. The principal continental threat came from Spain, in the vanguard of Catholic Europe and immensely wealthy because of its possessions in the New World. It was 30 years into Elizabeth’s reign before the turning-point of the Armada but it was a decisive moment: Spain endured the worst naval defeat in its history while England seemed to have been preserved by some special act of divine providence.

In 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada, the nation also faced an invasion threat from forces under the command of the duke of Parma, an ally of King Philip of Spain. With thousands of troops massing on the other side of the English Channel, Queen Elizabeth ignored the advice of her councillors and went to the port of Tilbury on the Thames estuary to rally her troops. Wearing a silver breastplate, she delivered the most famous speech of her reign.

Her words were as calculated, as forceful and as brilliantly effective as anything later created by Shakespeare, whose playwriting career was, coincidentally, just beginning at around this time. The best-known part of the queen’s speech includes the lines:

I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too, and think it foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare invade the borders of my realm; to which, rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms . . .

As if to emphasize her through-and-through Englishnesss, Elizabeth employed a majority of expressions that come ultimately from Anglo-Saxon, although with a smattering of Latin-and French-derived terms (multitudes, concord, valour). There are several examples of those couplings of near-equivalent or mirror expressions that make English such a richly expansive language: faithful and loving, strength and safeguard, recreation and disport, weak and feeble, noble or worthy.

Robert Dudley, the earl of Leicester, had ordered the speech to be taken down by one of the queen’s chaplains and copies of it were widely circulated. In its defiant and stirring rhetoric, Elizabeth’s call to arms is the 16th-century equivalent of Winston Churchill’s famous broadcasts during the Second World War, which use a similar mixture of the simple and the high-flown. For Elizabeth’s hearers – and later for the readers of the circulated speech – the power of language and the appeal to patriotism are fused. Dudley was in no doubt of the impact of the Tilbury oration which, he considered, ‘had so inflamed the hearts of her good subjects, as I think the weakest among them is able to match the proudest Spaniard that dares land in England’.

KEYWORD
Politician

Politician first appears in English in Shakespeare’s time and is an obvious spin-off from the Middle English adjective politic, originally equated with ‘political’ (as in the ‘body politic’) or meaning ‘shrewd’. But politic gradually assumed the more dubious senses of ‘crafty’ or ‘prudently self-serving’. Politician was a two-faced word from the start, with the respectable sense of ‘one versed in the science of government’ first recorded in 1588 but with the meaning ‘schemer’ occurring a year earlier. Shakespeare’s use of the term is generally uncomplimentary. For King Lear, a politician is ‘scurvy’ (worthless), while Hamlet takes great delight in the graveyard scene in speculating that he might be looking at the skull of a politician, now tossed around by the irreverent grave-digger. Although in contemporary use politician often comes with an inbuilt sneer, this is a word that has become slightly more respectable – and respectful – over the centuries.