The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

by Melvyn Bragg

In the eighteenth century, Dr. Johnson took a calmer perspective and a broader sweep: From the authors which rose in the time of Elizabeth [he wrote], a speech might be found adequate to all purposes of use and elegance. If the language of theology were extracted from Hooker and the translation of the Bible; the terms of natural knowledge from Bacon; the phrases of policy, war and navigation from Raleigh; the dialect of poetry and fiction from Spenser and Sidney; and the diction of common life from Shakespeare, few ideas would be lost to mankind for want of English words in which they might be expressed. No one could deny the truth of that and yet time has eroded interest in some of those disciplines and swollen interest in others, as fashion has changed and the selectivity of our hindsight scythes down the contenders. Only Shakespeare of those mentioned remains as pre-eminent in our consciousness, as the others have faded or at best held steady in the case of Spenser and Sidney. It is sufficient, I hope, to look at the works of Shakespeare in order to see, at this hinge time of English, where the language had come to since the Frisian invasion of the fifth century and what shape it was in as it set out west again, to America.