Back when I was still in HS I read somewhere (possibly a Webster’s Dictionary [there are so many, you know]) that -eth and -es are basically the same thing in English. In fact, they were even pronounced the same way. That is how this verb ending ultimately came down to us as -es. (I read it quite some time ago, so no cite. Sorry.)
The thing that I can’t understand, is Shakespeare uses both. I can provide one cite of that (but there are many examples in his works):
‘The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.’
Note the two highlighted examples. Why does Shakespeare use both spellings? They both mean the exact same thing. And as I said, in Shakespeare’s time, they were probably pronounced the same way too.
One possible answer is “spelling wasn’t standardized”. What we have of Shakespeare in his own hand doesn’t even have consistent spelling for “Shakespeare”.
Now if he consistently, or mostly, wrote blesseth and not blesses, but takes and not taketh, that might require a different answer. But I’m not going to do the textual analysis to find out.
Because that sound shift was in transition in his times, and either they’re more or less equivalent to him, or he’s using -eth when he wants to represent a more archaic / upper-class / older / northern speaker, and -es when it’s a more slang-y / lower-class / younger / southern speaker.
Meter. “It blessETH him that givES and him that takES” is iambic pentameter: u/u/u/u/u/ (blesseth = /u; gives = /; takes = /). “It blesseth him that giveth and him that taketh” would be u/u/u/uu/u/u." (“Blesses” would work in that line, but “drops” would lose a critical unstressed syllable.)
Yep, meter is a big part of it. Also, sound effects in general: writing for the stage means writing language that is meant to be spoken aloud, and one of the reasons Shakespeare is Shakespeare is that he’s good at finding the phrasing that will roll most easily off the tongue and fall most memorably on the ear. (In this case, “blesseth” avoids the repetition of two S sounds in quick succession that you’d get with “blesses,” making the world harder to slur or trip over, even though the two are metrically identical.)
I saw a list once showing about 15 different ways that Shakespeare spelled his own name.
Now, a more generic related question I’ve wondered about: What is the grammatical rule(s) regarding those old-style verbs with -eth and -est and other obsolete endings that one sees in, e.g. Shakespeare or the KJV Bible?
Are there specific (now-lost) forms for specific tenses, or distinctions for singular or plural subject, or active vs passive voice, or formal vs familiar case, or other such rules that we modern English speakers don’t know about?
In Early Modern English, there was a split between the north (-s, -es) and the south (-th, -eth). By the end of the 1600s, the northern version had mostly won out, though some very common words retained the older style (hath and doth primarily, but with the occasional art and beest thrown in just to keep things interesting). Shakespeare lived during the crux of this change.
Sure. For nouns, we’d largely lost the Germanic case system by the end of the Middle English period, but we kept plural markers and the genitive case (if you consider possessives to be genitives). We also kept the cases for pronouns, which we retain to this day.
There were rules for things like the subjunctive or imperative moods and the progressive aspect, but they (and their histories) are probably more complicated than would be suitable for this thread.
Can you give a cite or link where I can read about these thing in a bit more detail (but not too much detail)? This is something I’ve idly wondered about from time to time.
BTW, @GreysonCarlisle , welcome back after your (If I’m not mistaken) rather lengthy absence. I still have your Discourse tutorial bookmarked, and have re-posted it often in answer to other peoples’ questions.
Thanks for the welcome! Yeah, I was gone for a year and some change. I’m glad to hear that the tutorial is still useful. Hope it’s not too out of date.
The main difference is that we have MathJax now, so we do have the ability to write in glorious \small\color{cyan}\textsf{C}\color{orange}\textsf{O}\color{lime}\textsf{L}\color{olive}\textsf{O}\color{red}\textsf{R}
Purely anecdata, but when I was working in North Staffordshire (not that far from Shakespeare’s Warwickshire) 50 years ago, you could occasionally hear the old forms among local children, such as contracted forms of thou and thee, or hast, down to a’ for he/she/it. Though IIRC correctly, they might say a’ does but 'ast a…?: but it is on the margin between the Midlands and the North.
And in Yorkshire thou and thee survived long enough for a young recruit to the village cricket team to be told off within living memory for using them to a more senior member : “Sithee, lad, tha tha’s them as tha’s thee - and not afore!”
Do you have a cite for -eth and -s being pronounced the same way? Because that’s what you have an example of there, not es. The e is only there because take ends in e. -eth and -es had the same vowel, but not the same consonant, even in Shakespeare’s time. s and th were distinct sounds then just as they are now.
Both eth and s/es were in use in Shakespeare’s time. It’s possible he, and others of his time, used both, and were more likely to still be using eth is some words like those that end in an s sound (like blesseth, in your example). It could also simply be that the compilers of Shakespeare’s plays, like most people at the time, really weren’t that fussed about exact typographic accuracy, and multiple people compiled the different versions of Shakespeare’s plays, then other people changed those versions; none of the ones we have were actually written down by Shakespeare himself.
Relatives of mine from around Sheffield say thee and thou. They’re in their forties.
The first known printed editions of Shakespeare’s plays were produced starting in 1594 by John Danter. These were completely unauthorized editions, what we would now call pirated, made by Danter from shorthand notes he took during performances. These are considered very low quality by scholars.
He published only 18 plays. The other half of the canon had to wait until 1623 for the First Folio, after Shakespeare’s death.
Wikipedia lists the presumed sources of each of the plays in the Folio. Very few came directly from Shakespeare himself, the others from transcripts, earlier editions, or prompt books.
Scholars have searched every line of every publication, so somebody must know whether the use of eth varied from publisher to publisher. I can’t find anything in a quick search, because everything on eth uses the Folios. A paper claims that the use of eth vs. es dropped dramatically in the Foloio plays when viewed chronologically.
Maybe a look at the long poems might help, because Shakespeare had a hand in those in the early 1590s and so they would reveal his intentions unlike any of the plays.
There are only six signatures of Shakespeare. None are as Shakespeare. Some of them appear to be him abbreviating his name rather than spelling it out. There are a lot of different spellings of his name by other people. It wasn’t until the twentieth century than it became standard to spell it as Shakespeare. As has been pointed out before, spelling wasn’t standardized then. In a way it isn’t even standardized now, since there are many differences between American and British spellings:
I doubt that. While he’s an expert in English pronunciation in Shakespeare’s time, going through Shakespeare line by line and counting stuff is the province of grad students and young professors trying to get published. The big shots just mine them for their global views.
