Anthony and Cleopatra, written by Shakespeare in about 1606, is fascinating in more ways than one. Not only does it capture the charming worlds of Egypt and Rome, the luxurious life in Cleopatra's palace, the strained politics in Rome, the conflict between love and duty, and the tension between the political world in Rome and the love affair of Anthony and Cleopatra: but it also captures the way the English language was in the early seventeenth century, and how it has evolved into the English we speak and write today. Yet, despite this difference, the version of English exhibited in Anthony and Cleopatra and the present-day English are traditionally classified as belonging to one linguistic period known as Modern English.
Although the language of Anthony and Cleopatra is poetic, mostly iambic pentameter, it can still lend itself to comparison with present-day English in some respects. Further, it can provide clues as to the way some words were pronounced during Shakespeare's time. For example, the word cement, which is now two lines, which are written in a regular iambic pentameter:
Let not the piece of virtue which is set
Betwixt us, as the cement of our love (lll. ii. 28)
(An underlined syllable is a stressed one)
This change of pronunciation of some words is not the only linguistic change that Anthony and Cleopatra reveals. The play reveals a version of English will1 lexical, syntactic, and semantic features that are quite different from present-day English. The differences between present-day English and Early modem English, however, are less dramatic than those between modem English and Middle English, or those between Middle English and old English. By examining the language of the play, the paper attempts to track down the changes that the English language has undergone over the past four centuries: in terms of lexemes, structures and meaning. While the poetic language of the play is taken into account, a number of lexical, structural, and semantic changes are identified and analyzed.
The paper discusses the neologisms that Shakespeare coined in this play, and identifies the coinages which survived and those which did not. Structural aspects of early Modern English are also discussed as the occur in Anthony and Cleopatra. These include the way the negative was used, the use of double comparatives, noun and verb endings, the use of personal pronouns. Other aspects of Early modern English grammar that the paper analyzes include the use of the present simple instead of the present progressive in present-day English. Semantic changes are discussed under the rubrics narrowing, broadening, elevation, degradation, and semantic shifts. Examples of semantic shifts can be seen in the use of avoid in the sense of go away, clip in the sense of embrace and friend in the sense of lover.