[stylist] Milton: On Shakespeare

[Barbara Hammel]

|I didn't bother reading it with the Braille display--my loss because JAWS 
did a very lousy job of reading it.
Barbara

If wisdom's ways you wisely seek, five things observe with care:  of whom 
you speak, to whom you speak, and how and when and where.

--------------------------------------------------
From: "John Lee Clark" <johnlee at clarktouch.com>
Sent: Friday, April 03, 2009 12:24 AM
To: "'Writer's Division Mailing List'" <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [stylist] Milton: On Shakespeare

> 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.
>>
>>No virus found in this outgoing message.
>>Checked by AVG.
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>>6:09 AM
>>
>>
>>
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> om
>
>
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