<i>A</i> and <i>an</i> in English Plays, 1580–1639

Abstract

Discussing Tis Pity She's Whore in A Companion to Renaissance Drama, Mario DiGangi quotes the Cardinal's disturbingly glib and unfeeling as sessment of the action of the play, which is at once the play's last line and its title: 'Tis pity she's whore (578). The determiner is an important part of the framing of the remark, which turns all Arabella's individual and passionately felt experience into dry, dismissive epithet. Later in his chapter DiGangi quotes the opening sentence of Perkin Warbeck, spoken by King Henry VII, which closes with his complaint that he is being treated [a]s if were mockery in state (580). The royal we implies that he concentrates in himself absolute plural power, but the phrase a mockery king undoes all that: he is not being treated as the king, but as king, not the single, concrete instance but an abstract member of possibly well-populated category.1 The determiner a, and its alternative form an, are inconspicuous ele ments of language—DiGangi does not mention the presence of in his two quotations—but they are powerful markers of perspective, as the two examples show. A and an are very common in John Ford's dialogue. In this his pattern fits well marked trend. Playwrights use steadily more as and ans over the six decades from the 1580s to the 1630s, and Ford's plays, written in the 1620s and 1630s, use on average more than any other playwright's from the wider period.2 Shakespeare's frequencies are some where in the middle. His plays do not show any increase in use from early to late. His characters, though, are distinguished by different levels of use in ways that correspond closely with Robert Weimann's distinctions between locus and platea modes of performance. Jonson, Middleton, and Webster also form part of wider pattern of increasing and an use, and this broader trend complements Weimann's ideas in suggestive ways. A and an use proves to be remarkably useful in generalizing about progres sive changes in early modern English drama.