History in English words

by Owen Barfield

There are other influences, too, that must be taken into account. Discovery (it was a new word) was in the very air of sixteenth-century England. From the West came tidings of a new world; from the East news yet more marvellous of an old one; and the rebirth of Science was, in its infancy, but a single aspect of that larger Renaissance which played such an important part in moulding the subsequent life and outlook of Europe. Italy had felt the shock first, and we have a special group of words in our language to remind us of the visual arts in which the new impulse drove her to excel. Cameo, cupola, fresco, and model all reached us in the sixteenth century from or through the Italian, and the next saw the arrival of attitude, bust, chiaroscuro, dado, dome, filigree, intaglio, mezzotinto, and pastel. If these are of a somewhat technical nature, words like antic, canto, capriole, galligaskins, sonnet, and stanza build a bridge in the imagination from Renaissance Italy to Tudor England, and ducat, incarnadine, and madonna are three Italian words with pleasant Shakespearian associations. They remind us, too, that by the time the Renaissance reached England it was already in full swing. No wonder the literary world was swept off its feet. First-hand acquaintance with the works of Classical writers gradually substituted an affectionate, an almost passionate, familiarity for that religious awe with which the Middle Ages had honoured their garbled translations. One of the first results—an immediate and violent intellectual revolt against the Schoolmen and all things connected with them—is faithfully preserved to us in the unenviable immortality achieved about this time by the luckless Duns Scotus, whose patronymic has given us dunce. The history of the word conceit, which in Chaucer merely meant ‘anything conceived’, tells its tale of the wild, undiscriminating rush after elegance of thought and diction. By Shakespeare’s time the tasteless habit of piling fanciful conceit upon conceit had already become a thing to parody, the merest affectation of wit, and so the word lives to-day chiefly as a synonym for personal vanity, the language having been obliged by its degradation to re-borrow the Latin original ‘conceptus’ in the more exact form of concept.

It can readily be imagined that the restless activity which these little symptoms betoken had a remarkable effect in altering, developing, and indeed modernizing, the English vocabulary. The genius of the language sprouted and burgeoned in the genial warmth of Elizabethan and Jacobean fancy, and—most effective of all—it passed through the fire of Shakespeare’s imagination. There is an unobtrusiveness about Shakespeare’s enormous influence on his native tongue which sometimes recalls the records of his private life. This is no doubt partly due to the very popularity of his plays, which has preserved the direct influence in every age. Where the word which he employs is a new one, it has usually become so common in the course of years that we find it hard to conceive of the time when it was not. Where it is a meaning or a shade of meaning which he has added, as likely as not that very shade was the one most familiar to our own childhood before we had ever read a line of his poetry. Phrases and whole lines from the plays and sonnets are as much a part of the English vocabulary as individual words. Such are pitched battle, play on words, give him his due, well on your way, too much of a good thing, to the manner born, the glass of fashion, snapper-up of unconsidered trifles, more honoured in the breach than the observance,... The influence of such a mind on the language in which it expresses itself can only be compared to the effect of high temperatures on solid matter. As imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, each molecule of suggestiveness contained in each word gains a mysterious freedom from its neighbours; the old images move to and fro distinctly in the listener’s fancy, and when the sound has died away, not merely the shape, but what seemed to be the very substance of the word has been readjusted.

Examples are found readily enough with the help of a volume of Shakespeare and the Oxford Dictionary. As to new words themselves, it has been said that there are more in Shakespeare’s plays than in all the rest of the English poets put together. Advantageous, amazement, critic and critical, dishearten, dwindle, generous, invulnerable, majestic, obscene, pedant, pious, radiance, reliance, and sanctimonious are a few examples, but it is still more interesting to trace the subtler part of his influence. As an instance of what we may call his literary alertness let us take the word propagate. It is not found in English before 1570, and is thus a new word in Shakespeare’s time. Yet he handles it four times, now literally, now figuratively, with as much ease and grace as if it had been one of the oldest words in the language. Listen to Romeo:

Griefs of mine own lie heavy in my breast,

Which thou wilt propagate, to have it prest

With more of thine.

Again, the figurative—that is to say, the only modern use of influence—is first quoted from his works, and we can watch him gradually taking the meaning of the word sphere through its historical developments of planetary ‘sphere’, high social rank, any sort of category. A certain curious intransitive use of the verb take, as when a doctor says “the vaccination took very well,” can also be traced back to Shakespeare, and a few more of the innumerable new uses of words which appear to have begun from him are sequence and creed, with purely secular meanings; real, in its ordinary modern sense of ‘actual’; magic, magical, and charm[43], used figuratively; apology as the personal and verbal expression of compunction; positive in its psychological sense; function, used biologically; fashion and fashionable with their modern meanings; and action, meaning a battle. The fact that the first examples of these new uses quoted in the Oxford Dictionary are taken from Shakespeare cannot, of course, be taken as absolute proof that he introduced them. But there are so many of them, and the Dictionary is so thorough, that there can be no doubt of his being the first in most cases and among the first in every case.

Shakespeare’s influence on the personal relations between the sexes, as they have developed in subsequent periods of English history, is a matter for the literary and social historian; but it is interesting to reflect how the meanings of that group of Norman French words mentioned in the last chapter, and of others which were slowly drawn into their circle, must have expanded under the warm breath of his vivacious and human heroines. The ideal atmosphere of gracious tenderness which was the contribution to humanity of the Middle Ages was to some extent realized by the Elizabethans. The women towards whom it was directed became less and less mere ecclesiastical symbols, existing only in the imagination of the lover, and more and more creatures of real flesh and blood. Once again it is a case of a later age striving to live out what an earlier age—or its few best minds—have dreamed. Thus, the Blessed Virgin is partly supplanted in men’s hearts by the virgin Queen; the charming figure of Sidney—personified gentleness and chivalry—actually passes across the stage of history; the peculiarly English word gentleman appears. And we can hardly help holding Shakespeare partly responsible for what is going forward when we find him writing “the devout religion of mine eye” and making Richard III implore Anne to “let the soul forth that adoreth thee”—where the words religion and adore are both applied to humanity for the first time, as far as we know, in English literature.

Moreover, the new access to the Classics added to all this the direct influence of the Platonic philosophy which now played, through Spenser and his circle, upon the thought and feeling of the Elizabethan age. A careful reading of Spenser’s four hymns to Love, Beauty, Heavenly Love, and Heavenly Beauty will throw much light on the subsequent semantic history of the title words and of many others. We find in them the Platonic antithesis between the Eternal and its for-ever-changing outward garment:

For that same goodly hew of white and red,