Shakespeare & The Great Vowel Shift

Añadido: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Welcome back everyone. Thank you so much um for watching the previous videos if you did. This is kind of a tackon, an add-on to the series about the identity and authorship and private life of William Shakespeare. We realized we missed out a bit of stuff with the conventions of spelling, athography, if you will. So, we thought we this would just be a little extra extension bit.

[00:00:21]Consider this a director's cut. um you know like you know that bit that Melvin Bragg does at the end of in our time when they just chitchat at the end for 15 minutes except this is with a bit of stuff. So essentially uh obviously sorry if for those who haven't seen the video this is Philip Wac author of the series books I'll let you introduce yourself if you'd like to.

[00:00:39]>> Uh Philip Wac I'm an author um and journalist mostly write children's books but also have a deep and lasting passion for William Shakespeare.

[00:00:47]>> You do that you do. So today we will be talking essentially about the great vowel shift and using that as a kind of backboard to slam dunk this final question of Shakespeare. That was a really labored metaphor. Um I can't play basketball. Anyway, um >> you'd be quite good at it though.

[00:01:03]>> I I've got the build for it. Anyway, uh without without further ado. So what is the great vowel shift? I've been doing some reading up on this, taught a little bit at school, but it's an interesting one because people don't really know except it's incredibly kind of important or at the very least fascinating and especially for what we're going to be talking about today.

[00:01:19]>> It's incredibly important because people look at different spellings of William Shakespeare and even the spelling that we have and think that it has to be pronounced in a certain way, Shakespeare. But >> that's not exactly the case because things I mean spelling basically orthography and uh phology have changed.

[00:01:36]Phenology being the study of the sound of words and it changes as spellings have. If you read Chaucser, you know, I've got one of his books here. Um, there it is. Yeah. If you read Chaucer in the original, the spelling is way off, but you can see what he means. And I'll briefly summarize. The great vowel shift is we the word singular version shift is kind of a misleading misnomer because it's actually takes place from the 15th century roughly to the 18th century. And essentially it's just the convention of how words and spellings changed. Uh the term was coined by one Otto Jesperson in 1909 I believe and essentially it means if you think about the mouth as a geography uh certain words like m way at the bottom and then certain words like a way at the top that's at the top and the bottom that's a very simple way to put it and essentially what the great vowel shift is the convention of vowel pronunciations going up and you know that's obviously vowels o e a e i o u and it goes upwards to the mouth. So the word meat nowadays would have been something like mate back in the past. So you can see it going up. And that's basically kind of summarizing what it is. Why did this happen? Some people think the black death um with a as much as maybe a third or even half of certain populations wiped out by uh the great plague. Um perhaps the uh the low supply the low worker numbers in urban areas.

[00:02:55]People moved in from rural areas bringing with them their dialects because English was fractured into many different dialects. East Midlands, the West Midlands, and so much more. And so they brought their dialects into the wonderful metropolis of London um as afflicted by the plague. And uh and then that brought in wonderful different spellings and changes and confusions.

[00:03:14]And then of course the printing press is worth mentioning that is a standardization brought to Westminster by one William Caxton in 1475 after it was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440. If my memory serves correctly, I nailed it. That's good to hear. So, um, I I'll leave it to it.

[00:03:30]There's other little things to consider, but maybe we can touch on chat along exactly and see what happens.

[00:03:36]>> So, how does this lead us on to William Shakespeare? How does this help? Why is this interesting? And what did we miss out last time?

[00:03:42]>> Lots of things as it turns out.

[00:03:46]>> Uh, William Shakespeare as a spelling is a convention. And before uh William Shakespeare was born even um centuries before the name Shakespeare was spelled in different ways and that was because there was no convention. And I'm glad you mentioned accents actually because what you've also got to remember is that London was full of people from across the country who all spoke in different ways. And that leads into a very important distinction which is that um spellings in printed matters tend to be more standardized than spellings in manuscripts. Mhm.

[00:04:17]>> So there's a scholar called David Kathman who has actually listed every single spelling of the Shakespeare name.

[00:04:23]>> Check that out.

[00:04:24]>> You imagine it's really worth looking at.

[00:04:26]>> And by the way, do we have a rough number of how many different Shakespeare versions there are? Do we think is it in the scores?

[00:04:32]>> There's a lot really. Okay, fair. If I can find it online, I'll give you a few.

[00:04:36]Yeah. Yeah, good idea. I'll pop it on.

[00:04:37]Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:38]>> Um so just to just to give you an example. Um so this is even before William Shakespeare was born in his family. So initially the first spelling we have of it is s a ke s p e r.

[00:04:48]>> Okay.

[00:04:48]>> So six.

[00:04:49]>> Oh >> But but that would have been said >> Shakespeare.

[00:04:56]Interesting. And so would that sounds a bit like old English cuz that's what I'm doing now. Is that we look at the SC's and S's and we pronounce thinks it's sh.

[00:05:04]Would that have been a hangover effect from a middle English?

[00:05:06]>> It would have been. Exactly. Absolutely.

[00:05:08]Because that's in the 13th century. uh we have a chap called Hugo Shakespeare in the 15th century who spells it sp also worth looking in the OED the Oxford English dictionary where you see that the word spear itself changes from sp to sp a r so that that's and that's what the name is um one really interesting bit of evidence that we have is from the herald William Candon who lists the name Shakespeare >> with a hyphen in it alongside another name called Brickspear with a hyphen in it we'll come back to that later but essentially speaking the name was thought to be about shaking spears as break spear was about breaking spears it was meant to be a sort of marshall thing so that's really important to remember >> how it was pronounced >> shakus >> shakasp is that something is that phologically quite accurate >> I was trying to say it on the way there >> trying not to look mad >> yeah sorry there's no way to avoid that if you're going shakper walking down the streets of London you're >> so you're sort of you know you what you've also got to remember is There's other accents involved. So there's there's people who roll the Rs, there's people who don't roll the R. And also my own surname, which is Wac Wk, used to be spelled in various different ways. It was spelled with an O instead of an A.

[00:06:21]It was spelled even with an H at one point.

[00:06:24]>> Oh, really? Actually interesting. My name Atkinson. I see many Atkinson as well.

[00:06:29]>> Add. Exactly. So that's misprononunciation.

[00:06:32]>> That's another really important point because the T and the D and and of course lots of sounds merge into one another. So um when William Shakespeare is born, he is listed in Latin >> in the parish register as Guilmus Phyious Johannes Shakespeare with um P E R E and that is obviously >> William Shakespeare son of John Shakespeare but um yeah so that that was in Latin and that is very very clearly William Shakespeare. Um the other thing that David Kathman has pointed out in his extensive research which really really I would urge anyone to look at um is that >> by the way what is the research called?

[00:07:09]I can pop it up on the screen.

[00:07:10]>> It's on his website which I think is called Shakespeare authorship.com.

[00:07:15]>> Yeah exactly.

[00:07:16]>> He has analyzed all the data and discovered that the Shakespeare spelling that we have at the moment is the most popular one over time in both Stratford and London.

[00:07:26]>> I see. So it's sort of a compromise/ the most likely one. Exactly. Okay. So there's no saying this is the way it was pronounced. This is just the most popular, the best one to choose.

[00:07:35]>> Exactly. Eventually over time um it standardized into Shakespeare. It took time. It didn't happen at once. And as we see there were lots of different ways. But one of the arguments that people who um don't think that Shakespeare wrote his plays often bring forwards is that there was a separate person called Shakespeare. Yes. Spelled S H A K S P E R.

[00:07:55]>> Yes. Unfortunately, that doesn't work as a theory because William Shakespeare is called that. So, if even if you are looking at spelling Yeah. as evidence, >> um it there isn't enough references to people called William Shackper.

[00:08:11]>> There isn't a neat split between Shake and Shack.

[00:08:13]>> Exactly. There is no neat.

[00:08:15]>> Gotcha. And is it the So, the name Did you say it's spelled Shakpur in the original Latin birth certificate of sorts?

[00:08:21]>> Yes, just with just with with an E rather than without.

[00:08:23]>> Bang on. Okay, perfect. So people are assuming that uh the the Stratford fell different from an actual Shakespeare who wrote the thing God which is weird. Why would they choose such similar names if one was going to be like a Batman but to a Bruce Wayne or something? Sorry.

[00:08:40]>> No, no, it is it is it's interesting.

[00:08:41]It's interesting as a theory, but the thing is is that the the standard spelling appears in both London and Stratford. So um and I I've made a list here. Um, William Shakespeare is spelled like that when he buys new place in Stratford.

[00:08:55]>> Gotcha.

[00:08:56]>> So, in the Stratford documentation, he is spelled the conventional way.

[00:09:00]>> Uh, when he uh is that the in London, so you've got William Shakespeare spelled like that in Stratford in London when the king James makes his letters patent.

[00:09:08]>> Yes.

[00:09:10]>> Uh, for the king's men, he is William Shakespeare spelled the conventional way. So, there you have the two conventional spellings. Exactly. In in Stratford and in London.

[00:09:19]>> Yeah. Um, in terms of non literary references, um, I think David Cathman, oh, I have actually got a note here.

[00:09:26]There are 128 in literary references. Um, there are 119 that spell it in the conventional way. So, that's vast majority. Yeah. So, the vast majority in non literary and literary references. M >> so that's the thing to bear in mind is that a spelling doesn't matter because it was fluid and b even if you are looking at spelling it still ends up converging on the uh standardized spelling which eventually appeared over time.

[00:09:52]>> Gotcha. Perfect. Okay. So that's excellent to know. So essentially there may have been by the way there there was another William Shakespeare I mentioned we meant we spoke of in London around the same time as him working but we don't find any correlation with him in the theater and that's the thing. Uh, I guess that would have also been a Shakespeare Shakespeare or whatever it's pronounced. Okay, perfect. So, it's a common thing. This isn't, and you'll probably get to this when you get to Marlo, this isn't specific to William Shakespeare. This is not like, oh, he has many different names. Everyone has many different spellings of their own name. Right.

[00:10:27]>> Thank you, Fod. That's that's really important because um all the other playwrights, even the ones that you would expect not to, appear with different spellings. So, >> people don't say Marlo, he wasn't the one who wrote This is Well, exactly. But this is interesting because um Marlo, Christopher Marlo, so hopefully above our head will appear to uh um >> Merlin and >> Exactly.

[00:10:48]>> Uh so Christopher Marlo appears as Christopher M A R L O E as well as Merlin and Marlin. And actually if you say those names Marley >> Yeah. Marlin >> Marley Marlin, you know, you can hear that actually people with regional accents would have written them down as they had heard them.

[00:11:07]So people were essentially like nowadays that I mean we're not quite like the French in that we standardize and officialize our language quite that much but we do have a convention of spelling.

[00:11:16]If someone says pronunciation someone might correct them and say pronunciation because that's the way it's spelled and pronounced. And essentially what we're looking at here is the fact that people of different dialects are coming in. But also people write down what they think it sounds like that it's phonetic like a child spells out a word and they go you know the word home.

[00:11:36]So is that what's happening?

[00:11:37]>> That is exactly what's happening. And and actually that's my my favorite spelling of of Shacks Shakur Shakespeare is Shakbird which which s h ax bd which appears in the master of the rebels account. Yeah.

[00:11:52]Shakespeare >> Shakespeare. It appears we know it refers to William Shakespeare because it is in the master of the rebels's accounts and it refers to his plays. Uh and you can hear you can hear the sound of the accent in the way it's spelled Chucks.

[00:12:07]>> Yeah. Kind of like in a certain accent you might say looking you added the consonant where previously in other dialects there was none.

[00:12:14]>> And when you look at the rest of it the way that the plays are spelled measure for me. It's not measurement and the merchant of Venice and people have an intonation similar to I am a pentameter or something.

[00:12:27]>> Exactly. Gosh, I wish we we could well actually you might be interested in David Crystal who does the original pronunciation of Shakespeare which is another >> thing. always fascinate because people do expect Hamlet to sound like you and I whereas he he wouldn't have. Some people assume that in southern America that's actually closer to what Jackabian English would have sounded like. And to be fair, I've heard people doing uh I don't know the out out brief candle speech in a cowboy accent and it sounds blooming good. I genuinely I'm sympathetic to that. I mean I don't know.

[00:13:00]>> I think I think there's a lot of truth in that actually because they were isolated communities so they retained their distinctive bur rather than um we we had sort of influx of people from all over the all over the world really which has actually altered how we speak.

[00:13:14]>> Yes.

[00:13:14]>> Um so one thing I wanted to bring up as well we'll come to hyphens in a minute but but going back to gosh this again we're going to open up all these going up to going back to Marley. So you have Thomas Deca whose name appears as Deca D Ker with an A R. It appears with a CK.

[00:13:29]It appears with a U. It even appears as Dickens.

[00:13:31]>> Oh really?

[00:13:32]>> Yes. So, is there a cut off point where you're like, that can't be him. But Dickens is fine.

[00:13:37]>> Well, if it's in relation to If it's obviously in relation to >> Oh, then you got to play detective.

[00:13:42]>> Exactly. Then you play detective. And this is what scholars do.

[00:13:45]>> Even Thomas Middleton, you would have thought Thomas Middleton was an easy name to spell.

[00:13:51]>> Yeah. It's there's a lot of consonants in there, >> but it appears with one D with the L and the E with the E and the L the other way around. So it's just >> so basically and the long and short of it is spelling is a mess in this time of Gotcha.

[00:14:07]>> Spelling is a mess. Printers it's very very difficult to get the print onto the page. You're reading it backwards. It's moving very very quickly.

[00:14:15]>> Printing errors creep in as well.

[00:14:16]>> Okay.

[00:14:17]>> So just because some of you may be thinking well how do we actually know this? And so I found or rather David Kathine found I will defer to David Kathman who is an expert on this property. Um David Kathman has uh found these three incidents which actually demonstrate this happening. So the first is that Richard Stanley uh bought Venus and Adonis in 1593. So on the title page of Venus and Adonis is pelt Shakespeare as we would normally okay expect it. But when he writes down in his notebook that he has bought this book he writes Venus and Adon >> P R Shakpir S H A K S P E R E. So he has the printed thing in front of him, but he's still writing down a different spelling because the two words are the same.

[00:15:01]>> We have two more instances of this. We have Edward Elaine, who was an actor.

[00:15:05]Have you heard of him?

[00:15:06]>> Al school sort of.

[00:15:08]>> I think so.

[00:15:08]>> Edward Elaine was not in Shakespeare's company, but I again in my romantic novelists, I like to think that they knew each other. Edward Elaine, the actor in609, he buys Shakespeare's sonets because they were very popular.

[00:15:21]Don't forget, everyone bought them. Oh, by the way, sorry, this is quite inconvenient to me, but uh someone said to me that Shakespeare's sets, I think this was at university, weren't meant to be published and maybe they were private writing.

[00:15:33]>> Oh, well, that is theory.

[00:15:34]>> Well, I mean that's he did write them and they were circulated.

[00:15:38]>> Good. Just wanted to know it's neither here nor there actually.

[00:15:40]>> No, no, no. It's interesting because it again it sort of points to what the world was like and a lot of poems were circulated in manuscript form >> before they were printed and and and that actually >> funny enough um the eulogy the first eulogy to William Shakespeare was circulated in manuscript form and we have 30 copies of it because it was so popular actually 30 copies have survived which is a lot. uh Edward Alen he buys Shakespeare's sonets he writes down so bearing in mind on the title page it says Shake spear spelled normally he writes down uh Shak as well um >> in it even with the conventional spelling ahead >> yeah even though he's got it in front of him and John Harrington does the same thing >> interesting >> so in fact John Harrington even spells it um s h a ks p e a r and he spells king leer l e i r >> interesting so I I was tempted like many people do when looking at historical figures of the past to think that oh, we're just we're just more learned.

[00:16:36]We're better. But that's not at all the Yeah. No. Yeah. But I mean, as in we are just more learned in our spelling conventions, but really even with the correct version in front of them, they think, I'm going to spell it the way I want to pronounce it. It's a it's an accepted thing to alter spellings. Like, it's not just a mistake >> because it's not fluid. It's sorry, it's not fixed. It's all fluid. So, as far as they're concerned, they are the same thing. And you you couldn't have more evidence. Those are three separate people writing at three separate times, all referring to William Shakespeare >> as the man we know him of Stratford upon.

[00:17:11]>> Um the hyphen.

[00:17:13]>> Yes.

[00:17:15]>> I love my hyphens.

[00:17:16]>> A hyphen joins things together.

[00:17:19]>> One of the things that people um who like to think that Shakespeare didn't write his plays bring forwards as an argument is the hyphen. And they say, "Well, that is evidence of a pseudonym."

[00:17:28]However, >> it is not.

[00:17:32]>> Thanks for coming.

[00:17:33]>> So, they bring up somebody called Martin Marriate who was a pseudonmous author.

[00:17:38]>> However, Martin Marriate appears just as often without the hyphen as it does with the hyphen.

[00:17:43]>> I see. So, so the pseudonym essentially has nothing to do with a hyphen. It's >> just has nothing. The what the hyphen is is it shows that two parts of a word are joined together. So, the reason it's used is is for printing conventions.

[00:17:57]There are two two main reasons why it's used with Shakespeare in particular and again we use an analog which is Breakpar.

[00:18:03]>> So first of all it can fall easily into two words and that is just >> what happens and you also see that with old castle on whom for staff was based on old castle.

[00:18:12]>> He was a Lombard or something or proto Lombard had his head locked off by Yeah.

[00:18:17]Anyway >> yes he came to a very bad end.

[00:18:20]>> Yeah which >> old castle camp bull Armstrong even appears with with a hyphen >> with hyphens. And so this is essentially people not changing the name but putting a hyphen in to show by the way it's two words put together. That's essentially it's an acknowledgement of the compound noun.

[00:18:34]>> Exactly. And the printers themselves do it with their own names. So we get Wool Grave doing it. We get Aldi doing it. We get all sorts of people putting hyphens into their names.

[00:18:42]>> So it's just a convention. And remember that printing conventions are new. So they're working out.

[00:18:47]>> So they're even though we think of printing as an instant standardization, not really. They're still figuring out much like people are.

[00:18:53]>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. the hyphen Shakespeare only appears 21 times uh with a hyphen. So in all of the um uh matter all the references we have to him it only appears 21 times with a hyphen.

[00:19:06]And when it does appear it's either because it's just because they were trying to work out what hyphens were and and and it was a sort of way of showing that there were two words in a in a in a in a in a name. Um but also a more practical way was to create space between the K and the S. Um because uh especially when they use a long s which actually most people don't know about but if you look at some of the title pages >> a big f exactly doesn't it?

[00:19:31]>> So sometimes you read it and you go you know to be or not to be that is the question. Yes, exactly. That is that is the question and this happens with Brexit as well. And I actually went into early English books online which is a fantastic resource if you can access it if you're a student. Um you should be able to access it through your university and I looked for all the instances of Bricks Nicholas Brightpare who was a pope by the way. So no one's pretending that he was okay wasn't who >> this is pretty singular role that people know who he is.

[00:19:56]>> Exactly.

[00:19:57]>> And his name appears with a hyphen. It appears without a hyphen. It appears spelled P E R E instead of P E A R. It's just that the conventions were coming together.

[00:20:07]>> So that is the hyphen.

[00:20:08]>> And is that in English writing would you say? Because this is we're talking at the English language. You know the the Latinate writers of of of the popery.

[00:20:15]We'll probably actually have it more standardized but anyway. So the hyphen essentially is that put it to bed. Uh people use the hyphen as interchangeably as they do spellings or misspellings in Shakespeare, Brex, Old Castle, whatever for example. Okay. Brilliant. So that's excellent.

[00:20:30]>> The next thing um is analoges. Uh just two analoges to look at. One is Mr. Shakebag.

[00:20:37]>> Oh, I was not familiar with Shakebag.

[00:20:40]That sounds like a sort of his alter ego.

[00:20:42]>> Shakebag is a character. And again, this is on David Katherine's website. Um in Ardan of Favversham, which is a play, an early Shakespeare, sorry, a pre- Shakespearean play. Some people think Shakespeare might have had a hand in it.

[00:20:54]We don't know.

[00:20:55]>> Is it just before Shakespeare?

[00:20:57]>> It's sort of quite early on. It's one of the early >> 15 whatever. I can't remember exactly the date, but um it is one of the earlier plays and it's about a real life murder and there's a villain in it called Shakeback.

[00:21:08]>> Oh.

[00:21:09]>> Oh, that's fasc Oh gosh. Oh, I'm surprised the Marloians, the people that think that Christopher Marlo wrote the Shakespeare plays um haven't cited that really cuz I will jump on that that there's a shake shake bag who killed someone.

[00:21:26]>> Problem is he was based in a real he is a real character. Ah well there is the character shake bag is based on a real villain who was actually the villain.

[00:21:35]>> Oh see some sort of figure he was a real person who um was a villainous person.

[00:21:43]>> Oh it's a sort of character >> true crime. It's like true crime I guess.

[00:21:45]>> A true crime. I was thinking that like a fictionalized true crime in which you transplant someone you hate like Yeah. I guess. Yeah. Think of I don't know Shakespeare writing Richard the third villainizing him I suppose. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:21:56]So we've got you've got your shake bag and um he appears in the same play.

[00:22:01]>> So this is in the actual play he appears as shack bag shake bag shaker bagger shack bagger shaka bag and shaka bag.

[00:22:08]>> So we have the manus almost like a rap that was poetic. I mean eat your heart out Marlo. Um >> all of these are all obviously pronounced in the same way. It's shack bag shack bag shack bag shackbag shackbag. It's just that shaka bag shack bag. It's just how quickly or how slowly.

[00:22:25]>> We find that in the same manuscript in the same printed form.

[00:22:30]>> Oh, the prints as we were saying even the printed.

[00:22:32]>> Final thing um is another analog which is another playwright called Shakily Marian.

[00:22:40]>> Oh wow. That Oh, I've got to have a field day with that.

[00:22:43]>> Ranks as one of the best names.

[00:22:45]>> Shakily Marmy.

[00:22:46]>> Shaky. Hello. My name is Shakily Mommy.

[00:22:48]>> I mean William Shakily Mommy. Yeah.

[00:22:51]Yeah. I very bond.

[00:22:52]>> He's lovely. Um he's he's one of Ben Johnson's acolytes.

[00:22:56]>> Um and he writes comedies and his name Shaker Marian is spelled sometimes as shake, sometimes as Shaq, sometimes with a ch. Uh sometimes even with an L EI at the end instead of an L E Y.

[00:23:11]>> Okay.

[00:23:12]>> And this is later on. This is after Shakespeare. So this is we're still seeing printing conventions got >> kind of coming together. We're still seeing spellings um varied. His even his surname Marian appears as M A R M I O N M A R M Y O N as well. And he comes from a gentry family. So he comes from a wellestablished family.

[00:23:33]>> Well documented, well written about the Baron's mommy and he's a cadet branch of one of those.

[00:23:40]>> So that's it really. Um >> that's about the end of it. Well, um I have a lot of editing to do with popping letters on the screen, but uh I'll be looking forward to that. And uh thank you so much for listening uh for this I don't know. It's not an epilogue. It's a sequel part two spin-off of the Shakespeare debate. Yeah, spin-off. I like um so thank you for for trekking all the way down here again, Philillip.

[00:24:01]Um it's such fun talking about this stuff. Uh I can do this till the you know till the cows come home. And uh if we have any other topics and any other suggestions that you'd like to hear, pop them in and you know I can do that or even if Philip wants to do another one then we can do that. So uh do let us know what your thoughts are, if you have anything to lend on the subject. Um thank you very much to Philillip again.

[00:24:21]Thank you for watching and ciao for now.

[00:24:24]Thank you. Bye-bye.