Thursday, April 21, 2022

After 1606 profanities were subject to hefty fines and so largely vanished.

From Shakespeare The World as Stage by Bill Bryson.  Chapter 5 page 112.

Much of the language Shakespeare used is lost to us now without external guidance. In an experiment in 2005, the Globe in London staged a production of Troilus and Cressida in “Early Modern English” or “Original Pronunciation.” The critic John Lahr, writing in the New Yorker, estimated that he could understand only about 30 percent of what was said. Even with modern pronunciations, meanings will often be missed. Few modern listeners would realize that in Henry V when the French princess Catherine mispronounces the English “neck” as “nick,” she has perpetrated a gross (and to a Shakespearean audience hugely comical) obscenity—though Shakespeare’s language on the whole was actually quite clean, indeed almost prudish. Where Ben Jonson manured his plays, as it were, with frequent interjections of “turd i’ your teeth,” “shit o’ your head,” and “I fart at thee,” Shakespeare’s audiences had to be content with a very occasional “a pox on’t,” “God’s bread,” and one “whoreson jackanapes.” (After 1606 profanities were subject to hefty fines and so largely vanished.)

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