Expansion of English over the British Isles

§ 317. As Britain consolidated into a single powerful state, it ex­tended its borders to include Wales, Scotland and part of Ireland.

As mentioned before, the partial subjugation of Wales was the last stage of the Norman Conquest. It was not until the 16th c., however, that the annexation was completed. Both during the wars and after the final occupation, the English language penetrated into Wales and partly replaced the native Celtic dialect; a large proportion of the abo­riginal population, however, did not give up their mother tongue and continued to speak Welsh. (It is noteworthy that to this day Wales has preserved a large number of old Celtic place-names and the Welsh dia­lect.)

§ 318. The attempts to conquer Ireland in the 13th and 14th c. ended in failure. In Ireland, only the area around Dublin was ruled direct from England, the rest of the country being Irish or Anglo-Irish. Ireland remained divided among innumerable chiefs and turned into one of the poorest and most backward countries. Despite the weak ties with England and the assimilation of English and Welsh invaders by the Irish, linguistic penetration continued.

§ 319. The repeated claims of the English kings to be overlords of Scotland were met with protest and revolt. In the early 14th c. Scot­land's independence was secured by the victories of Robert Bruce. Feu­dal Scotland remained a sovereign kingdom until the later Tudors, but the influence of the English language was greater than elsewhere.

Scotland began to fall under English linguistic influence from the 11th c., when England made her first attempts to conquer the territory. The mixed population of Scotland — the native Scots and Picts, the Britons (who had fled from the Germanic invasion), the Scandinavians (who had stayed on after the Scandinavian settlement), and the English (who had gradually moved to the north from the neighbouring regions was not homogeneous in language. The Scotch-Gaelic dialect of the Scots was driven to the Highlands, while in Lowland Scotland the Northern English dialect gave rise to a new dialect, Scottish, which had a chance to develop into an independent language, an offshoot of Eng­lish. The Scottish tongue flourished as a literary language and produced a distinct literature as long as Scotland retained its sovereignty (see §307). After the unification with England under the Stuarts (1603). and the loss of what remained of Scotland's self-government, Scottish was once again reduced to dialectal status. In the subsequent centuries English became both the official and the literary language in Scotland.

Thus by the end of the Early NE period, the area of English had expanded, to embrace the whole of the British Isles with the exception of some mountainous parts of Wales and Scotland, the Isle of Man, Cornwall, and some parts of Ireland, — though even in most of these regions the people were becoming bilingual.

Flourishing of Literature in Early New English (Literary Renaissance)

§ 320. The growth of the national literary language and especially the fixation of its Written Standard is inseparable from the flourishing of literature known as the English Literary Renaissance.

The beginnings of the literary efflorescence go back to the 16th c. After a fallow period of dependence on Chaucer, literary activity gained momentum in the course of the 16th c. and by the end of it attained such an importance as it had never known before. This age of literary flour­ishing is known as the "age of Shakespeare" or the age of Literary Re­naissance (also the "Elizabethan age" for it coincided roughly with the reign of Elizabeth). The most notable forerunners of the literary Renais­sance in the first half of the 16th c. were the great English humanist Thomas More (1478-1535) and William Tyndale, the translator of the Bible. The chief work of Thomas More, UTOPIA was finished in 1516; it was written in Latin and was first translated into English in 1551. In UTOPIA Th. More expressed his opposition to the way of life in con­temporary England, which he defined as "a conspiracy of the rich against the poor" and drew a picture of an ideal imaginary society in which equality, freedom and well-being were enjoyed by all. More's other works were written in English; most interesting are his pamphlets issued during a controversy with W. Tyndale over the translation of the Bible.

William Tyndale was a student at Oxford and Cambridge and a priest in the church. In 1526 he completed a new English translation of the Bible. Both in his translations and original works Tyndale showed himself one of the first masters of English prose. He exerted a great in­fluence not only on the language of the Church but also on literary prose and on the spoken language. The later versions of the Bible, and first of all the Authorised Version — KING JAMES' BIBLE (produced by a body of translators and officially approved in 1611) was in no small measure based on Tyndale's translation.

§ 321. As elsewhere, the Renaissance in England was a period of rapid progress of culture and a time of great men. The literature of Shakespeare's generation proved exceptionally wealthy in writers of the first order.

Many of the great classics, both ancient and modern, were translated into English: Plutarch and Ovid, Montaigne and Thomas More. Religious prose flour­ished, not only in the translations of the Bible but also in collections of sermons and other theological compositions. Secular prose grew in the philosophical works of Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who wrote his chief work, NOVUM ORGANUM in Latin, but proved his mastery of the mother tongue in essays and other composi­tions.

In that age of poets and dramatists poetry penetrated everywhere "Poetical prose" is the name applied to the romances of John Lyly and Ph. Sidney, to the novels and pamphlets of R. Greene, Th. Nash, Th. Deloney. It is often said that Shakespeare's achievement was largely made possible by the works of his imme­diate predecessors: the sonnets of Ph. Sidney and E. Spenser, the comedies of John Lyly, the famous tragedies of Th. Kyd, the drama of Christopher Marlowe and other playwrights.

The thirty years or less of Shakespeare's career as actor, poet and playwright were also the culminating years of Spenser's poetry, the years of Ben Jonson's versatile activity as dramatist and poet, the period of the blossoming of the drama represented by many other celebrated names: Thomas Heywood, John Fletcher, Francis Beaumont. The vitality of the theatre was due to its broad contact with pop­ular entertainment, national traditions and living speech.

§ 322. William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was the chief of the Eliza­bethan dramatists as well as a genius whose writings have influenced every age and every country. Shakespeare's plays were greatly admired in the theatres but less than half of them were printed in his lifetime. The first collected edition of his plays was the Folio of 1623.

It is universally recognised that Shakespeare outclassed all his con­temporaries in all genres of drama and poetry (comedies, historical plays, tragedies and sonnets) and surpassed them all in his mastery of the English tongue. His works give an ideal representation of the liter­ary language of his day. His vast vocabulary (amounting to over 20,000 words), freedom in creating new words and new meanings, ver­satility of grammatical construction reflect the fundamental properties of the language of the period.

Great literary men of the Elizabethan age

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