Episode 176: All the World’s a Playhouse

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

TRANSCRIPT: EPISODE 176

11 thoughts on “Episode 176: All the World’s a Playhouse

  1. Thanks, Kevin, I now realize I’m being redundant when I say “Cash Box.” It’s like saying, “Box Box”!

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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”.

  5. Good evening Mr. Stroud. First, let me thank you for your scholarship. Your love of English is obvious and appreciated. Second, let me offer an observation regarding Pistol’s comment in “The Merry Wives of Windsor” that the world is his oyster. Maybe this is well known in the field of Shakespeare scholarship, but it seems to me that ol’ Will was engaging in a little bawdy innuendo. The mental image of opening an oyster by inserting a knife into it is somewhat reminiscent of what Falstaff might be wanting to do to/or with the Merry Wives. Of course, even Freud said that a cigar sometimes is only a cigar…

  6. Fascinating as always.
    German still uses the verb ‘to be’ as an auxiliary verb in the perfect tense with verbs that indicate a change of place (movement) or change of state (to be born, to die, to become).
    We still use this form in English every Christmas in the Carol ‘ Once in Royal David’s City’ when we sing ‘ to the place where he is gone’.
    In German the two exceptions to this rule are ‘to be’ and ‘to stay’ – which are really the opposite idea. I would love to know why!

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