This Earth, This Realm, This England
- Episode aired Nov 13, 2003
English is forever enriched by the vocabulary of William Shakespeare.English is forever enriched by the vocabulary of William Shakespeare.English is forever enriched by the vocabulary of William Shakespeare.
Storyline
Did you know
- Quotes
Self - Presenter: This interplay of the high speech with the common play is important to Shakespeare. It was also a fertile ground for comedy. He was so inventive with just one insult, knave, that we can find fifty instances of it in his plays. Playing monosyllables with more complex formations.
Ian Drysdale: Foul knave!
Steve Sarossy: Lousy knave!
Ian Drysdale: Beastly knave!
Steve Sarossy: Scurvy railing knave!
Ian Drysdale: Gall-bellied knave!
Steve Sarossy: Bacon-fed knave!
Ian Drysdale: Wrangling knave!
Steve Sarossy: Base, notorious knave!
Ian Drysdale: Errant, marmsy-nosed knave!
Steve Sarossy: Poor cuckoldy knave!
Ian Drysdale: Stubborn ancient knave!
Steve Sarossy: Pestilent incomplete knave!
Ian Drysdale: Counterfeit, cowardly knave!
Steve Sarossy: Rascally a-forsooth knave!
Ian Drysdale: Foul-mouthed and calumnous knave!
Steve Sarossy: The lyingest knave in Christendom!
Ian Drysdale: Rascally, scold, beggarly, lousy, bragging knave!
Steve Sarossy: Big-headed, flap-eared knave!
Ian Drysdale: Three-suited one hundred pound filthy wasted stocking knave!
The period covered in this episode is roughly the whole of Elizabethan England, around 1600, and a bit more. It was a time when the English were beginning to do some colonizing on their own, after the Spanish, Dutch, and Portugese had already begun. It was a mercantile age, with trade all over the globe and the importing of exotic goods like pineapples and exotic words like "ketchup." Latin was still the language of scholarship and high office but a couple of firebrands gave English a leg up in political discourse and Latin became less common in everyday use. You can still find its scattered limbs in today's medicine and law. Amicus curiae, anyone? I suspect that Latin would disappear promptly from these fields if it didn't provide a barrier between those within the trade and those without. It now serves a social purpose different from its original purpose, which was to make communication easier between scholars whose native languages were different.
We get to see the very first English dictionary -- only a few thousand words, eight hundred years after an Arabic dictionary and a thousand years after Sanskrit. Before Shakespeare (who, I understand from other sources, spelled his name sixteen different ways), the poet/knights of the court took to writing. Sir Phillip Sidney was one of the first. Virtually nobody has heard of him, despite his originality and his giving us commonplace terms like "my better half." There's occasional wit in the narration too. Bragg has just finished listing a number of expressions handed down from Shakespeare (eg., "in my mind's eye") and then says that there are many more he could quote but since "brevity is the soul of wit", he'll "make a virtue of a necessity" and "vanish into thin air." (He does.)
- rmax304823
- Jan 10, 2015
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