Theaters were an important part of cultural life in Elizabethan England, and they contributed many words to the English language. Those words joined thousands of other words that were pouring into English from around the world. In this episode, we look at how distant cultures were contributing to the growth of English and how Shakespeare’s acting company built a world-famous theater in the late 1500s. Works discussed in this episode include:
‘Henry IV, Parts One and Two’ – William Shakespeare
‘The Merry Wives of Windor” – William Shakespeare
‘“A Report of the Kindome of Congo’ – Abraham Hartwell, Translator
‘The Isle of Dogs’ – Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe
‘Discours of voyages into ye Easte & West Indies’
‘A Worlde of Wordes’ – John Florio
‘Palladis Tamia, Wit’s Treasury’ – Francis Meres
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Thanks, Kevin, I now realize I’m being redundant when I say “Cash Box.” It’s like saying, “Box Box”!
I’d like a list of the theaters and date they originally opened, LOL. Maybe at beginning of trancript….
You mention that a current phrase like “We are gathered here today” is a holdover example of the perfect tense formed with “to be”. But I can just as easily (or even more easily) hear such a phrase as implying the present tense, i.e. “We are in a gathering here today”, or “We are sitting here today”. Do you think I am off base, or do you share my sense of ambiguity? Oh, and thanks for the episode!
Yes. I agree. In fact, I debated whether I should include that example since it has acquired a slightly distinct sense over time. But it is one of the rare examples of a common English phrase that uses the older grammatical structure.
“Honi sout qui mal y pense” is Norman Franch not Latin.
Thanks. Since I have received several comments about that mistake, I have corrected it in the episode.
Thanks for another excellent episode.
One correction, to be pedantic. The phrase “Honi soit qui mal y pense” is not Latin, it’s French, or more precisely, it’s Old Norman French.
Thanks. Since I have received several comments about that mistake, I have corrected it in the episode.
As usual, I loved this episode. I wanted to make two comment about the perfect tense that I had while listening to your explanation of of the perfect tense and its early use of the “to be” form.
I was very interested to learn that when the perfect had just started forming in English, it sometimes used the “to be” auxiliary verb instead of “to have”, depending on the main verb. You didn’t mention this, but this is exactly the situation in French until today: The French perfect tense sometimes adds avoir (to have) and sometimes etre (to be).
Another thing that I think is worth mentioning is how, it seems, the “to be” form of the perfect of certain types of verbs wasn’t lost completely – it morphed into the *passive voice*. So while “We are gathered here” was coined as a form of “We have gathered here”, the form “we are gathered here” lives on and now implies that “someone has gathered us here”, a passive. I want to suggest that maybe for a certain type of verbs, there is little difference between the active and passive senses – the verb “to gather” is reflexive – “we gathered” without an object really means “we gathered ourselves”.