What people get wrong about Elizabethan English
How to sound like Shakespeare
English speakers are lucky that our language has changed relatively little since the time that some of the most exciting literature in the history of the language was written. Note that I say relatively.
There have, of course, been changes. But with enough patience, and a good glossary, ordinary people with no particular scholarly training (high school students!) read Shakespeare, an author who wrote 400 years ago.
Maybe it’s the fond memories of those high school years poring over thou’s and thee’s that makes the Elizabethan period (1558–1603) such a popular one for writers of historical fiction. But our ability to understand (more or less) the language of this period doesn’t translate into an ability to successfully recreate it.
As a result, when people try to imitate Elizabethan English, they risk falling into some common traps. Whether it’s a poorly placed thou or a doth where it doesn’t belong, it’s easy to get tripped up by the changes that separate our English from Shakespeare’s. But don’t worry, your friendly neighbourhood linguist is here to help you sound like a bona fide member of the class of 1582.
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This Saturday, I’ll be doing an in-depth investigation into English of the Elizabethan Age (and beyond), tracing the development of three major changes that took place between 1500–1700: the Great Vowel Shift, the loss of thou, and the replacement of the verb ending -eth with -es. As you’ll see, this is the period when the English language we use today was born.
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Misuse of thou/thee
In today’s English, we have it easy: the pronoun you serves for basically everyone, no matter how humble or exalted their position within society. It serves equally well in addressing strangers, intimate friends and in formal correspondence with ministers of state.
But this was not true in Elizabethan England. There were two separate words corresponding to our modern you word: you and thou.
Originally, in the early Middle Ages, thou was a singular form and you a plural, like yous or y’all in some modern dialects.
But towards the end of the Middle Ages, thou acquired some new connotations. It remained exclusively singular, but it became used when there was an emotional charge to the relationship, either positive or negative: in other words, thou began to signal either familiarity or contempt.
You, on the other hand, started to be used in the singular as well, indicating a lack of familiarity, or a lack of the more negative connotations that thou had started to pick up. You was, in a word, the polite form.
Eventually, thou dropped out of the language. But it was alive and well in the Elizabethan period, and it had all the strong connotations I mentioned above. In other words, the choice of thou vs you almost always means something, although what precisely it means depends on the social context.
Look at the use of thou vs you in the following passage from Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine, Part One, written around 1587. For context, Mycetes is the King of Persia. Look at how he addresses Menaphon, one of his generals:
MYCETES
Ah, Menaphon, why stay'st thou thus behind,
When other men prease forward to renown?
(Tamburlaine, Part One: I.i.98–99)
Compare that to how Cosroe, the king’s brother, addresses the king a few lines later:
COSROE, to MYCETES
Nay, pray you let him stay; a greater task
Fits Menaphon than warring with a thief:
(Tamburlaine, Part One: I.i.103–104)
So much social weight did thou have at the time that it could even be used as a verb, as in to thou someone, meaning ‘to use thou when addressing someone.’
The most famous case of thouing occurred in the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh (1603), when the Attorney General, Sir Edward Coke, accused Raleigh of treason. Compare how Raleigh addresses Coke to how Coke addresses Raleigh:
RALEIGH
I do not hear yet that you have spoken one word against me. Here is no treason of mine done. If my Lord Cobham be a traitor, what is that to me?
COKE
All that Lord Cobham did was by thy instigation, thou viper; for I thou thee, thou Traitor!
As you can see, the distinction between thou and you carried a lot of social weight. The savvy English Literature teacher could take advantage of this to ask students to explore the relationship between characters as they shift from formal you to familiar (or contemptuous) thou and back again.
The other thing you need to know about thou is that it’s like I, he, she, and we: you need to change it depending on what it’s doing in the sentence. Just like we say I know him but he knows me, so too do you need to change thou to thee from time to time.
It’s not random either. There’s a whole raft of technical terminology about this, but the easiest way to know how to use thou vs thee is just to ask yourself: “If I were talking about myself here, would I say I or me?”
So just as we have I know John, we would say thou knowest John. (We’ll talk about that -est ending in a second.) And along the lines of John knows me, we would say John knows thee.
Bonus: this trick also works for deciding between who (which is like I, thou) and whom (which is like me, thee).
There’s also the possessive form thy, but that’s less challenging since it works exactly like my.1
Misuse of -est and -eth
As you’ve seen, if you are going to use thou, you’ll need to know how it works with verbs.
Today’s English is sparing with grammatical endings in general: one of the few times we need to worry about endings is when we stick an -s on the end of a verb in the third person singular: in other words, I run, you run, but he/she/it runs.
Elizabethan English had a slightly more elaborate system, but only slightly.
There were two additional endings to worry about: -(e)st and -(e)th (with the e’s in parentheses, since they don’t always show up, depending on the verb and the writer in question).
This is an easy place to stumble when imitating Elizabethan language, so consider this your guide to the exciting and dynamic world of Renaissance English verb conjugation.
The ending -est goes with thou and only with thou: thou knowest, thou attackest, thou inventest. In some common verbs, the -est ending coalesces with the verb, producing things like thou dost (do), thou hast (have), thou wilt (will), thou shalt (shall), thou art (be), and a few others.
Funnily enough, the -(e)st ending also shows up in the past tense as well, stuck onto whatever the normal past tense form would otherwise be: thou attackedst, thou inventedst. This works for more irregular verbs too: thou knewest, thou didst, thou wrotest. The only slightly weird past tense form you can’t predict in this way is thou wast (be).2
The other archaic ending in Elizabethan English is -(e)th. This is used in exactly the same way that today’s English uses -(e)s, like on runs, writes, attacks, invents, etc.; in other words, it marks the third person singular subject, like he, she, or it.
Elizabethan English had both endings -(e)s and -(e)th, which essentially did the same thing. Eventually, of course, -(e)th dropped out of English. But, during the Elizabethan era, it still had a place.
Generally, using the -(e)th ending was thought of as more formal than using the -(e)s ending, and might have been considered more appropriate for writing than -(e)s. By the end of the Elizabethan era, -(e)th was already the less popular option. By 1700, it was essentially dead.
One place where -(e)th hung around longer than anywhere else is in poetry, where having that extra syllable was very handy: being able to choose between the one-syllable hates and the two-syllable hateth gave poets flexibility. Shakespeare even used both in a single line:
With her, that hateth thee and hates us all (2 Henry VI II.iv.52)
The -(e)th also hung around the longest in the short irregular verbs do and have, where doth and hath persisted after -(e)th was lost in other verbs.
Overuse of do-support
Today’s English does something quite weird among the languages of the world when forming questions or denying things. Consider the following short tragedy, which contains more or less the same sentence in three variations: affirmative, interrogative (specifically, yes-no questions), and negative.
A: I love you. Do you love me?
B: I do not love you.
Notice how the verb do has intruded in the interrogative and negative sentences, where it is quite absent in the affirmative. If we try forming the interrogative and negative sentences without using do — that is, simply by inverting the verb or appending not — we very quickly start to sound archaic:
A: I love you. Love you me?
B: I love you not.
The reason this sounds archaic is that this phenomenon of adding do to negative and interrogative sentences — do-support in the jargon of linguistics — is a fairly recent development in the history of the English language.3
The use of do-support in yes-no questions and negated verbs was possible in the Elizabethan period, but it wasn’t yet obligatory as it would later become.
In questions, do-support first appears in the 14th century, but stays relatively uncommon until the 16th century, when it explodes in popularity. Nevertheless, it existed alongside the older, verb-inversion strategy for forming questions.
Verb inversion was also much more common with short, everyday verbs: know, think, say, write, speak, come, go.4 In fact, verb inversion is still possible with some of these verbs in certain fixed expressions: how goes it? what say you?
With negated verbs, the rise of do-support happened a bit later, although it was still on a rapid rise throughout the Elizabethan era. The simple use of VERB + not continued into the 18th century, especially with the common verbs mentioned above.
Overuse of the present progressive
The last big difference between today’s English and Elizabethan English also has to do with verbs. It’s a bit subtle, but it goes a long way towards making something sound… not modern.
For example, when Polonius asks Hamlet what he’s reading, he says:
What do you read, my Lord? (Hamlet II.ii)5
Note that he’s not asking Hamlet what sorts of things he reads in general. He’s asking Hamlet what he’s reading at the moment. Today we’d ask the same question like this:
What are you reading, my Lord?
If we ask someone What do you read? today, we’re likely to get a general answer like novels or short stories rather than a specific answer about what the person is reading in the moment.
The reason for this is that, ironically enough, the thing called the present tense in today’s English — I read, you eat, we run — isn’t really used for actions going on at the present moment.
Instead, it’s used for habitual action:6 This train goes to London means that this train’s schedule is such that it will take you to London if you choose to buy a ticket, but the train may be fully stationary at the moment.
If we want to talk about action ongoing at the present moment, we use a form called the present progressive: I am reading, you are eating, we are running.
In Elizabethan English, the use of this present progressive form to express action in the present was not as widespread as it is today. It wasn’t entirely absent, however. Shakespeare uses both forms, even with the same verb:
What do you read, my Lord? (Hamlet II.ii)
What are you reading? (Troilus and Cressida III.iii)7
As with most things I’ve discussed in this article, the later in the period you get, the more the language resembles the language of the present day.
For example, in the Elizabethan period proper, the use of the present progressive was still relatively uncommon. But it increased dramatically in the latter half of the 17th century, and continued to do so afterwards. By 1800, the modern pattern was more or less in place.
Why care about authenticity?
Because Elizabethan English is the oldest form of English that we can easily understand today, it often stands in for a “generic medieval” dialect in popular culture: from historical fiction, to epic-sounding dialogue in movies, to people who greet you at Renaissance fairs asking “What marvel is this!?” when they see your iPhone.
I think this is great. The use of Elizabethan English casts a spell over us, evoking a distant time while remaining comprehensible. It can stand in for medieval English, when actual medieval English would be a lot harder to understand.
But the spell is broken when the rules of Elizabethan English are broken. The four features of Elizabethan English may seem like subtleties, but when they’re used properly and consistently, they go a long way towards maintaining immersion.
And they don’t require a lot of work to get right.
Writers really invested in maintaining this illusion could get obsessed with recreating a pitch-perfect Elizabethan English, but that would involve poring over the Oxford English Dictionary to find the earliest attested use of each word they want to use to make sure they’re not doing the 16th-century equivalent of having a First World War soldier say “totally tubular!”
But they don’t have to go to all that trouble: they’ll get 80% of the way there with relatively little work, simply by avoiding the four pitfalls in this article, which represent the biggest differences between Shakespeare’s English and our own.
And if any of you use this knowledge to write a Hamlet fanfic, post the link in the comments.
As a bonus, to sound extra authentic, change my and thy to mine and thine before a vowel: so my friend but mine eyes, or thy brother but thine uncle.
There was also thou wert, which is often synonymous with thou wast, although it originally had a slightly different function (a subjunctive).
This list from Rissanen (1999): 244. Rissanen, Matti (1999). Syntax. In The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume 3: 1476–1776.
The eagle-eyed reader will notice the presence of do-support here.
The present tense is also used for verbs expressing states: I like to read, I live in a small house, I have too many books.
This perfect pair of examples comes from Rissanen (1999): 216.
Interesting to see the two examples of pure inversion — How goes it? and What say you? — in modern English. The latter sounds slightly archaic or formal, while the former sounds highly *informal* and perhaps even jocularly sloppy. And oddly, the latter could be replaced by “What do you say?” even though it’s used only for a moment in time rather than an ongoing state; “What are you saying?” would mean something else entirely.
What a crazy language!
Very interesting. A bit later but when reading Jane Austen I noticed that she always put negative interrogatives, when people are speaking, with do support but never using contractions e.g., "Do not you agree, Mr Darcy?"
Was that because it was not commonly used then, or not by "those classes", or just that it was not put in printed books?