[stylist] Milton: On Shakespeare

[John Lee Clark]

Jim:

I am not sure what you meant by your message.  Were you trying to correct
the spelling?  In Elizabethan English, Shakespear is the way it is spelled,
and the way the name appeared in print until the early nineteenth century.
Elizabethan English was in the process of moving away from the Norman
tongue, whose roots are in French, which is why English had French
word-endings and accents, even to this day, especially in British and
Canadian usage--tyre, centre, honour, colour, etc.  All holdovers from the
Norman reign of Brittany.  But Elizabethan writers were sometimes too
aggressive in moving away from the Norman accents that certain parts of
their speech and writing is more strictly "English" than even our own
English today.  Take the verbatim text of Milton's "'On Time" which has the
word "merely" instead of "merely"--this is "more" smooth English.  Or take
"morall," with two l's, which was Milton's extra effort to make sure it is
not "morale."

Anyway, that was a wild time for English's development, and yes it was a
mess, but part of the reason Milton was so famous and now not much read
anymore is that he took advantage of the shifts in language so he could
rhyme more stuff together, sometimes going one way, sometimes going the
other way in the spectrum between more Norman and more English.  The result
for the modern reader, unfortunately, is that some of what used to rhyme so
well doesn't rhyme anymore.  This is why it's better, I think, to read the
older versions, not the revised and modernized text.

I wonder how "On Time" sounded to some of you through JAWS.

John



John

-----Original Message-----
From: stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of James Canaday M.A. N6YR
Sent: Thursday, April 02, 2009 11:04 PM
To: Writer's Division Mailing List
Subject: Re: [stylist] Milton: On Shakespeare

shakespeare
s h a k e s p e a r e

jc

Jim Canaday M.A.
Lawrence, KS

At 08:47 PM 4/2/2009, you wrote:
>ON SHAKESPEAR.  1630.
>
>
>WHAT needs my Shakespear for his honour'd Bones,
>The labour of an age in piled Stones,
>Or that his hallow'd reliques should be hid
>Under a Star-ypointing Pyramid?
>Dear son of memory, great heir of Fame,
>What need'st thou such weak witnes of thy name?
>Thou in our wonder and astonishment
>Hast built thy self a live-long Monument.
>For whilst to th'sharne of slow-endeavouring art,
>Thy easie numbers flow, and that each heart                          10
>Hath from the Leaves of thy unvalu'd Book,
>Those Delphick lines with deep impression took,
>Then thou our fancy of it self bereaving,
>Dost make us Marble with too much conceaving;
>And so Sepulcher'd in such pomp dost lie,
>That Kings for such a Tomb would wish to die.
>
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