1 - ‘You speak a language that I understand not’: myths and realities

Summary

There is a story that, if you travel into the most isolated valleys of the Appalachian Mountains in eastern USA, you will find people who still speak the language of Shakespeare. They are said to be the descendants of those early settlers who left England for Virginia in 1606, when Shakespeare was age 42. Several settlers, it seems, moved inland and away from the larger centres of population. And there, the story goes, cut off from the changes in society and language which would take place in the seaboard cities, and rurally conservative by temperament, generation after generation carried on speaking the tongue that the pioneers brought with them.

The story varies a bit, depending on who is telling it. In some accounts, it is Roanoke Island, off the east coast of Virginia, where you will hear pure Shakespearean English – or ‘Elizabethan English’, as it is often put. In others, you do not have to leave the British Isles. Just turn off the main road in Northern Ireland, or in County Kerry, or in deepest Warwickshire, and there it will be, unchanged, unchanging.

Anyone who believes this has, as Thersites says of Agamemnon, ‘not so much brain as ear-wax’ (Tro. 5.1.49). It is a myth. Speech never stands still – not even between two generations, let alone the sixteen or so that separate the reigns of the first and second Queen Elizabeth.