A History of English Language

The renaissance, 1500-1650 231
speare’s lifetime -s became the usual ending for this part of the verb in the spoken
language.
Another feature of the English verb in the sixteenth century, more noticeable at the
close than at the opening, is the occurrence of this -s as an ending also of the third person
plural. Normally at this time the plural had no ending in the language of literature and the
court, a circumstance resulting from the disappearance of the East Midland -en, -e, the
characteristic endings of the plural in Chaucer. But alongside this predominant plural
without ending, we find occasionally expressions like troubled minds that wakes in
Shakespeare’s Lucrece, or Whose own hard dealings teaches them suspect the deeds of
others in the Merchant of Venice. These are not solecisms or misprints, as the reader
might suppose. They represent forms in actual, if infrequent, use. Their occurrence is also
often attributed to the influence of the Northern dialect, but this explanation has been
quite justly questioned, 55 and it is suggested that they are due to analogy with the
singular. While we are in some danger here of explaining ignotum per ignotius, we must
admit that no better way of accounting for this peculiarity has been offered. And when we
remember that a certain number of Southern plurals in -eth continued apparently in
colloquial use, the alternation of -s with this -eth would be quite like the alternation of
these endings in the singular. Only they were much less common. Plural forms in -s are
occasionally found as late as the eighteenth century.
We have already seen (§ 117) that during the Middle English period extensive inroads
were made in the ranks of the Old English strong verbs. Many of these verbs were lost,
and many became weak. Moreover, those that remained were subject to considerable
fluctuation and alteration in the past tense and past participle. Since all of these
tendencies were still operative in the beginning of the modern period, we may expect to
find them reflected in the language of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Among verbs
that developed weak forms in this period were bide, crow, crowd, flay, mow, dread,
sprout, and wade, and we accordingly find corresponding strong forms that have since
disappeared, still in common use. Strong forms also alternate with weak in verbs that had
begun to change earlier. Some of these are mentioned in § 118. Others were waxen, more
frequent in the Bible than waxed, sew beside sowed, gnew beside gnawed, holp beside
helped. A number of weak forms like blowed, growed, shined, shrinked, swinged were in
fairly common use, although these verbs ultimately remained strong. In certain common
verbs the form of the past tense differed from that of today. Such preterites as brake and
spake, drave and clave, tare, bare, and sware are familiar to us from the
55
Wyld, History of Modern Colloquial English, p. 340.