and its rhetorical tone. Driven “by his typically Renaissance esteem for the English language, and by his desire to bring it to the utmost perfection,”125 Mulcaster refused to yield to an acceptance of its faults or of the impossibility of correcting them; he argued instead that the language is “as readie to yeild to anie rule of Art, as anie other is”126—much as Webster would later claim in opposition to Johnson’s tolerance for irregularity. And in Webster’s famous claim that his is the “situation the most favorable for great reformations; and the present time is, in a singular degree, auspicious,”127 we see shades of Mulcaster’s assertion that every language has a moment in which it is “fittest to be made a pattern for others to follow” and that “such a period in the English tung I take this to be in our daies, for both the pen and the speche.”128
This Renaissance orthographic debate was enough in circulation by the 1590s that Shakespeare could mine it for satire in Love’s Labour’s Lost: in act 5, scene 1, the pedantic scholar Holofernes complains of the linguistic style of Don Armado, specifically castigating him for not actually pronouncing the b in doubt or debt as they are written:
He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer
than the staple of his argument. I abhor such
fanatical phantasimes, such insociable and
point-devise companions; such rackers of
orthography, as to speak dout, fine, when he should
say doubt; det, when he should pronounce debt,—d,
e, b, t, not d, e, t: he clepeth a calf, cauf;
half, hauf; neighbour vocatur nebor; neigh
abbreviated ne. This is abhominable,—which he
would call abbominable … (lines 1750–59)
The real “racker of orthography” in this scene, of course, is Holofernes; though more accurately, it is orthoepy he places on the rack, by insisting that these graphemes be spoken. By having him do so, Shakespeare dramatizes the absurdity that can result from uttering words as they are written—particularly when, in the case of words like debt and doubt, the “b” is only present by virtue of historically recent attempts to reflect the Latin roots, debitum and dubitare, respectively.129 (Webster would respell “indebted” as “indeted.”) In other words, not only is the general linguistic practice being satirized here the exact counterpart of Johnson’s later suggestion that men ought to “speak as they write,” but these particular spellings are directly in line with the Johnsonian principle of making orthography follow etymological origin.
With this deeper history in view, then, it becomes clear why Johnson refers in 1747 to “the great orthographic contest [that] has long subsisted between etymology and pronunciation”130—acknowledging that the debate already had some historical legs—and it is also clear whom Johnson might have had in mind when offering somewhat sarcastic “honours”131 to previous attempts at orthographic reform. Most significantly for my purposes, it becomes clear that Webster’s late eighteenth-century argument in favor of the perfectibility of English was not in fact a call to “innovate” the language, but rather an attempt to restore it to an earlier and more perfect state. For all of his association with linguistic novelty, Webster was in fact placing himself in a lineage of language reformers who preceded Johnson and his contemporaries by two centuries. This was no secret; on the contrary, it was one of the explicit terms of Webster’s cultural authority. “In the essays, ritten in the last yeer,” he wrote in a 1790 preface testing out his revised orthography, “a considerable change of spelling is introduced by way of experiment. This liberty waz taken by the writers before the age of Queen Elizabeth, and to this we are indeted for the preference of modern spelling over Gower and Chaucer.”132 In the appendix to the Dissertations, Webster cites, as precursors to his own attempts, those “formerly made in England to rectify the orthography of the language,” including those of Sir Thomas Smith in 1568 and two early seventeenth-century reformers, Alexander Gil and Charles Butler.133 In this way, Webster framed his own reforms as a resumption of an unfinished Renaissance project. “Every possible reezon that could ever be offered for altering the spelling of wurds,” he asserts, “still exists in full force; and if a gradual reform should not be made in our language, it wil proov that we are less under the influence of reezon than our ancestors.”134 This was to be a rather different kind of “American Renaissance” than F. O. Matthiessen’s: not a renaissance of America’s own so much as America’s completion of a cultural rebirth that had begun in England centuries earlier but had stalled in its country of origin.
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