Two Items of Spanish Pronunciation in Love's Labour's Lost

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ON Adriano de Armado, the braggart soldier of Love's Labour's Lost, seems to provide us with the evidence that on two occasions Shakespeare endeavored to record the sounds of X R R . gSpanish speech. First there is the pronunciation of Armado's name itself, and there is his imperious greeting Chirrahl Adriano de Armado is obviously a conscious poetic creation intended to hold up to ridicule Spain's weakness and to encourage the Elizabethan courtiers in their pursuit of challenging Spanish supremacy. The name recalls the defeat of the Invincible Armada.1 The term armado was the current Elizabethan rendering of the Spanish word armada, the final unstressed vowel of the suffix -ada being rounded to the more homely sound of an o. This can be gathered from numerous examples listed in Rudolf Grossmann's Spanien und das elisabethanische Drama.2 Shakespeare's coinage exploited the familiarity of a milestone in English naval history. The political and etymological background of the name is linked with a phonetic problem. Costard once calls the braggart (IV. i. I46) and he himself signs a letter Don Adriano de Armatho (IV. i. 89). This uncommon spelling must be due to an attempt at the native pronunciation of the word. This assumption is strengthened by the fact that the above quoted instances are not isolated forms in Shakespeare's work. In Twelfth Night we find renegatho (III. ii. 70.) and in The Tempest, we come across the proper noun Bermoothes (I. ii. 229.) for Bermudas. One of the cruxes of the comedy has been taken to be Armado's odd pronunciation of Chirrah (V. i. 33.) instead of Sirrah. Mark the use of this ephemeral form in its proper context.