Free William Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition by William Shakespeare Page A

leaping in her grave?
     
    Several other distinctive features of Early Modern English grammar likewise present little difficulty to the modern reader. An example is the way in which a sequence of adjectives can appear both before and after the noun they modify, as in the Nurse’s description of Romeo ( Romeo and Juliet , 2.4.55-6): ‘an honest gentleman, and a courteous, and a kind, and a handsome’ [= an honest, courteous, kind, and handsome gentleman]. Other transparent word-order variations include the reversal of adjective and possessive pronoun in good my lord , or the use of the double comparative in such phrases as more mightier and most poorest . Many individual words also have a different grammatical usage, compared with today, such as like (‘likely’) and something (‘somewhat’):
    Very like, very like.
    ( Hamlet , 1.2.325)
     
     
I prattle | Something too wildly.
     
    ( Tempest , 3.1.57-8)
     
    But here too the meaning is sufficiently close to modern idiom that they do not present a difficulty.
    There are just a few types of construction where the usage is so far removed from anything we have in Modern English that, without special study, we are likely to miss the meaning of the sentence altogether. An example is the so-called ‘ethical dative’. Early Modern English allowed a personal pronoun after a verb to express such notions as ‘to’, ‘for’, ‘by’, ‘with’ or ‘from’ (notions which traditional grammars would subsume under the headings of the dative and ablative cases). The usage can be seen in such sentences as:
    But hear me this ( Twelfth Night , 5.1.118) [= But hear this from me]
    John lays you plots ( King John , 3.4.146) [= John lays plots for you to fall into]
     
    It is an unfamiliar construction, to modern eyes and ears, and it can confuse - as a Shakespearian character himself evidences. In The Taming of the Shrew , Petruccio and Grumio arrive at Hortensio’s house (1.2.8-10):
    PETRUCCIO Villain, I say, knock me here soundly.
    GRUMIO Knock you here, sir? Why, sir, what am I, sir, that I should knock you here, sir?
     
    Petruccio means ‘Knock on the door for me’, but Grumio interprets it to mean (as it would in Modern English) ‘hit me’. If we do not recognize the ethical dative in Petruccio’s sentence in the first place, we will miss the point of the joke entirely. But the fact that Grumio is confused suggests that the usage was probably already dying out in Shakespeare’s time.

GRAMMAR AND METRE
     
    Most of the really unfamiliar deviations from Modern English grammatical norms which we encounter in Shakespeare arise in his verse, where he bends the construction to suit the demands of the metre. The approach to blank verse most favoured in Early Modern English took as its norm a line of five metrical units, or feet (a pentameter ), with each foot in its most regular version represented by a two-syllable weak + strong ( iambic ) sequence, and the whole line ending in a natural pause and containing no internal break. Accordingly, the least amount of grammatical ‘bending’ takes place when a line coincides with the major unit of grammar, the sentence. This is a characteristic of much of Shakespeare’s early writing, as in this example from Queen Margaret:
    Be woe for me, more wretched than he is.
What, dost thou turn away and hide thy face?
I am no loathsome leper - look on me!
What, art thou, like the adder, waxen deaf?
Be poisonous too and kill thy forlorn queen.
( The First Part of the Contention
    ( 2 Henry VI ), 3.2.73)
     
     
    ‘Sentence per line’ is the simplest kind of relationship between metre and grammar - and ‘clause per line’ is not very different. Such grammatically regular lines are often seen in the Sonnets, where they convey a measured rhythmical pace:
    Whilst I alone did call upon thy aid
My verse alone had all thy gentle grace,
But now my gracious numbers are decayed,
And my sick muse doth give another place.
    (Sonnet 79)
     
     
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