Shakespeare sheds light on language
Alex Birchfield, a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) student, has researched the way Shakespeare used a particular grammatical construction in the female and male dialogue of his plays. Her findings show he had an acute ability to note language change taking place in society.
“The changes which Shakespeare noted in his plays are changes which took place over several lifetimes, so it is really remarkable that he was able to pick up on it as it was happening,” says Professor in Linguistics Miriam Meyerhoff.
Alex conducted research on the use of the grammatical construction known to linguists as ‘do support’. ‘Do support’ represented a major change in the English language where, in certain sentences, people brought in the auxiliary verb ‘do’, particularly in questions or negative statements.
“For example, previously if you wanted to turn the statement ‘you like Shakespeare’ into a question you would move the verb and say ‘like you Shakespeare?’. With ‘do support’, people began saying ‘do you like Shakespeare?’—the grammatical form we use today,” says Alex.
Alex focused her research on female characters who also performed in the play under a male disguise, looking at four of Shakespeare’s plays: As You Like it, The Merchant of Venice, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Twelfth Night.
“I looked specifically at female characters from these plays as they provided examples of talking in their female and male identities. By comparing what was said by the same character, while presenting themselves in two different genders, I wanted to see if Shakespeare was consciously writing dialogue which reflected this subtle grammatical change,” says Alex.
“My results showed the characters were using ‘do support’ more frequently in their male personas, particularly in regard to questions. Viola, the female character from Twelfth Night, never asked a question using ‘do support’ in female persona, but in male persona always used ‘do support’. This is not just a dramatic quantitative difference, it’s also a dramatic demonstration of Shakespeare’s powers of observation. Most people in sixteenth-century England would have had no clue this change was gradually taking place.”
“Nobody should have been able to pick up on this change, much less be able to productively switch back and forth between male and female,” says Professor Meyerhoff.
Alex says it is her fascination with the sociological aspects of language and gender that led to her studying the way language changes of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were evident in Shakespeare’s characters.
“How we view gender constantly changes and it’s now very different to how it was in Shakespeare’s time. To better understand our modern views of gender, we need to see how people who have influenced our culture, like Shakespeare, viewed gender—Shakespeare is particularly interesting because he played with gender in his plays.”
Alex plans to expand her study in the future, looking at more characters, and further investigating what was happening with the language variant historically, to better understand whether Shakespeare’s observations of the grammatical variant were correct.