The Scrivener: Personal reflections on "Romeo and Juliet" - 3 The Words Of The People
…The story involves two families who were of neither the privileged ruling class nor the rough labouring class, but somewhere in the middle. Today, we might call them social climbers. Their sons, however, had much in common with the bikie gangs of today. Tybalt, a belligerent youth of the Capulet family, vigorously played by Michael York in Zeffirelli's film, is the sort of louring kid with whom you wouldn't want to be alone in a railway carriage late at night…
Brian Barratt investigates some of the words and phrases used in Romeo and Juliet.
This is the third of five articles on one of the most celebrated plays ever written. To read the first two articles, and more columns by Brian, please click on http://www.openwriting.com/archives/the_scrivener/
And do visit his fascinating Web site The Brain Rummager www.alphalink.com.au/~umbidas/
Before the first theatre was built in the London area in 1576, plays had to be staged in the yards of inns or whatever other premises were available. The audiences were no doubt pretty rowdy. The Puritans who governed the city objected to theatrical performances as immoral, and did not allow them in the city itself. Nice refined people didn't go to the theatre in the way we do today. They could afford to commission their own private entertainment.
When the first theatre was demolished, the material was used to build the new Globe theatre in 1599, outside the main city and in an area known for its taverns and brothels. As Melvyn Bragg points out, in The Adventure of English, this was a rough area where the people spoke the rough language of the streets rather than the polite language of the better educated ruling class.
Shakespeare might have written his play As You Like It for the opening of the Globe. He wrote Romeo and Juliet about five years before this. The story involves two families who were of neither the privileged ruling class nor the rough labouring class, but somewhere in the middle. Today, we might call them social climbers. Their sons, however, had much in common with the bikie gangs of today. Tybalt, a belligerent youth of the Capulet family, vigorously played by Michael York in Zeffirelli's film, is the sort of louring kid with whom you wouldn't want to be alone in a railway carriage late at night.
The contemporary language of the play has elements of polite speech, everyday banter, and crude slang. It's fascinating to investigate words and phrases which were common at the time but which now have different meanings or have become obsolete. Here are some of them:
swash
When a sword-fight is imminent, in Act 1, Scene 1, Sampson says, "Draw, if you be men, Gregory, remember thy swashing blow".
Nowadays, swashbuckling means reckless, boastful, flamboyant. First appearing in print in the mid-1500s, a swashbuckler was a daring or adventurous soldier. This is the language of courtiers. A buckler was a small round shield. A swashbuckler made a frightening noise by hitting his own or his opponent's shield. It is interesting to note that the First Folio (1623) of Shakespeare's plays has "remember thy washing blow". Wash was another spelling for swash, indicating its origins in the sound of splashing or crashing.
good den
In Act 2, Scene 4, we read this exchange:
Nurse: God ye good morrow, gentlemen.
Mercutio: God ye good den, fair gentlewoman.
"Den" in polite society was a shortened spoken form of evening via a middle form, deen. Conversational forms of "Good evening" included god deven, godden, good-deen, and good den. They referred to any time after noon. The same kind of shortened greeting occurs in the present-day Australian greeting, G'day.
atomies
In Act 1, Scene 4, Mercutio speaks to Romeo in poetic and figurative form, referring to Queen Mab, queen of the fairies:
Drawn with a team of little atomies.
The First Folio has, rather delightfully:
Drawne with a teeme of little Atomies,
This is the speech of an educated man. Atomies, derived from the Greek word atomus, were thought to be very tiny supernatural beings. Shakespeare used the word atomies, which came into English in the late 1500s, only three times in his plays.
O
Here's an unusual word with several possible meanings! We find it in Act 3, Scene 3:
Why should you fall into so deep an O?
The meaning here is, "Why should you fall into such deep grief?" where grief implies a feeling of nothingness, worthlessness. This is the language of a well informed person.
O is the symbol adopted from Arabic mathematics to denote zero. It is probable that Shakespeare was one of the first people to use the word, certainly in this figurative sense.
In the next article in this series, we'll have a look at some of Shakespeare's informal and bawdy language.
© Copyright Brian Barratt 2009
Sources
— Encyclopædia Britannica 2007 Ultimate Reference Suite, DVD.
— Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 2003, component of above.
Boyce, C., Encyclopedia of Shakespeare, Roundtable Press/Facts of File, New York, 1990.
Bragg, Melvyn, The Adventure of English, DVD, Granada International/ Special Broadcasting Corporation, 2002.
Hinman, C., ed., The Norton Facsimile, The First Folio of Shakespeare, Second edition, W.W.Norton & Company, New York, 1996.
Roy, K., ed., Romeo and Juliet, HBJ Shakespeare, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Ontario, 1987.
Zeffirelli, F., director, Romeo and Juliet, DVD, Paramount Pictures, 1968.
