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Here's from Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2

What wouldst thou have, Laertes?

Laer.

My dread lord,

Your leave and favour to return to France;

This text is from the second quarto(Q2). In the first folio(F1), "My dread lord" is replaced by "Dread my lord". I checked three different annotated texts edited by Harold Jenkins, Philip Edwards, Dover Wilson respectively. All of them adopted "My dread lord". I wonder why.

I think "What wouldst thou have, Laertes?" and "My dread lord" or "Dread my lord" make a (reverse) iambic pentameter. If so, it seems to me that "Dread my lord" is more suitable.

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ivanhoescott
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  • "More suitable" for the meter, perhaps, but it's no longer clear that dread is an adjective. Dread is no longer an adjective at all (except in that horribly awkward pseudo-ancient fantasy writing style), so the question is whether usage had begun to slip at the time, and the order was required to resolve ambiguity. – bye Sep 30 '14 at 02:18
  • @bye According to a Shakespeare's glossary book "Shakespeare's Language" by Eugene Shewmaker, "dread" is an adjective meaning "deeply revered". – ivanhoescott Sep 30 '14 at 02:45
  • Yes, it was, and I'm not disputing that it ever meant that, but it is now a noun or verb meaning (essentially) fear. The question is when did that happen? Going to as a simple marker of the future popped up out of nowhere between 1600 and 1645, for instance. The language was in a tremendous state of flux at the time. – bye Sep 30 '14 at 02:53
  • The meter is "my dread lord, your leave and favour to return to France", not (as the OP appears to suggest?) split over "What wouldst thou have Laertes? My dread Lord". Whichever word order is used, the meter remains the same. – Roaring Fish Sep 30 '14 at 06:05
  • @RoaringFish "my dread lord, your leave and favour to return to France" This is not an iambic pentameter.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iambic_pentameter

     – ivanhoescott Sep 30 '14 at 07:05
  • @ivanhoescott, where did I say it was? What I am taking issue with is your assertion that the meter favours 'Dread my Lord'. Firstly because whether you take 'My dread Lord' as an extension of the Kings speech or the beginning of Laertes speech, the initial stress falls on 'my'. Secondly, because with a string of three single syllable words it makes no difference to the foot what order they appear in! – Roaring Fish Sep 30 '14 at 14:55
  • @RoaringFish "the initial stress falls on 'my'." Why do you think so? Here's a line of Hamlet's speech. "My father's brother; but no more like my father" This is an iambic pentermeter and "My" is unstressed. – ivanhoescott Sep 30 '14 at 17:27
  • So what? Telling me that in a completely different line the stress doesn't fall on 'my' means absolutely nothing. The stress pattern is governed by the iambus, not by the lexis. – Roaring Fish Oct 01 '14 at 04:47
  • @RoaringFish "The stress pattern is governed by the iambus, not by the lexis." I don't understand this. Could you explain what you exactly mean by this? – ivanhoescott Oct 01 '14 at 05:18
  • A single iamb is an unstressed syllable and stressed syllable - de-DUM. Occansionally it is reversed to DE-dum, but this is arguably the same pattern and all that changed is the starting point. The point I am making is that whether a 'my' is stressed or not depends on whether it falls on a 'de' or a 'DUM', and not on any property of the word 'my'. – Roaring Fish Oct 01 '14 at 07:18
  • @RoaringFish You seem to be saying that any sentence consisting of 10 syllable string of words can be an iambic pentameter. That is absurd of course. – ivanhoescott Oct 01 '14 at 07:28
  • No... read what I said! It needs to have a de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM pattern. – Roaring Fish Oct 01 '14 at 07:35
  • @RoaringFish How do you determine whether a 10 syllable string of words has such a pattern or not? – ivanhoescott Oct 01 '14 at 07:52
  • Look at multisyllabic words and see if the natural word stress fits the iambic pattern. For example, in "if music be the food of love, play on" the iambic stress pattern - "if MUsic BE the FOOD of LOVE play ON" - fits the natural stress pattern, as in the first syllable of music and stressing the content words. Also "Is THIS a DAgger I see BEfore ME" where again the natural stress and the iambic pattern match. Compare with "Cannon to left of them/Cannon in front of them /Volley'd and thunder'd" which is a dactylic meter of DUM da da/DUM da da. – Roaring Fish Oct 01 '14 at 09:32
  • @RoaringFish What about a sentence consisting of single syllabic words? Can it be an iambic pentameter as long as it has 10 syllables? – ivanhoescott Oct 01 '14 at 10:00

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Shakespeare used word order in many ways. Usually, we put words first for emphasis.

An online dictionary has this:

"dread: Archaic. deep awe or reverence."

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