[119] It was in London, and chiefly by means of the stage, that a
thorough amalgamation of the Saxon, Norman, and scholarly elements of
English was brought about. Already, Puttenham, in his "Arte of English
Poesy," declares that the practice of the capital and the country within
sixty miles of it was the standard of correct diction, the _jus et norma
loquendi._ Already Spenser had almost re-created English poetry,--and it
is interesting to observe, that, scholar as he was, the archaic words
which he was at first overfond of introducing are often provincialisms of
purely English original. Already Marlowe had brought the English unrhymed
pentameter (which had hitherto justified but half its name, by being
always blank and never verse) to a perfection of melody, harmony, and
variety which has never been surpassed. Shakespeare, then, found a
language already to a certain extent _established_, but not yet fetlocked
by dictionary and grammar mongers,--a versification harmonized, but which
had not yet exhausted all its modulations, nor been set in the stocks by
critics who deal judgment on refractory feet, that will dance to Orphean
measures of which their judges are insensible. That the language was
established is proved by its comparative uniformity as used by the
dramatists, who wrote for mixed audiences, as well as by Ben Jonson's
satire upon Marston's neologisms; that it at the same time admitted
foreign words to the rights of citizenship on easier terms than now is in
good measure equally true.
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