Tudor Talk by Pamela Hartshorne

Today I have for you a fascinating guest post by author Pamela Hartshorne, who has written a series of ‘timeslip’ novels that move between the 16th century and the present. Her latest book, The Edge of Dark, is set in Elizabethan London and York.

Welcome Pamela!

TUDOR TALK

Pamela Hartshorne

Dialogue is one of the trickiest aspects of writing historical fiction.  How do you create characters who speak and think in ways a modern reader can understand but who at the same time feel authentic?

Nothing puts a reader off faster than ‘gadzookery’ – all those thees and thous and archaic exclamations – but you don’t want your characters chatting away anachronistically either.  One of the best sources I know for how Elizabethans actually talked to each other are the conversation manuals written by Claudius Hollyband and Peter Erondell, selections of which are reproduced handily in a little book called The Elizabethan Home. (You can see from all the post-it notes stuffed into the book how often I use it!)

Hollyband and Erondell were both Huguenot refugees who lived in Elizabethan London and taught French for a living.  The dialogues they wrote for translation into French give us a wonderfully vivid glimpse of everyday life at the period: at school, in the street or at home, entertaining guests at dinner, or the mistress of the house getting dressed and snapping at her servants.

 Claudius Hollyband starts his dialogues with a schoolboy calling for his clothes after oversleeping while the maid, Margaret, tries to persuade him to wait while a clean shirt dries:  Your mother will chide mee if you go to schoole without your cleane shirt.’ Replace ‘chide’ with ‘kill’ and knock off a few ‘e’s at the end of words, and isn’t this something we might easily say today?  The dialogues are full of phrases like this, instantly recognizable with just a word or two that give a feel for the past.

There is a similarly boisterous tone to the conversation when the boy’s father later invites guests to dine at the house.  His son complains that he has burned his tongue because his porridge is too hot, and a guest suggests he blow on it to cool it down.

‘Are those your good manners to blow your porage at the boorde?’ the father demands. ‘Where have you learned that? At your village?’

When another friend arrives with his wife, he greets them jovially: ‘Gossyp, you are welcome and you also my shee gossyp: how doo you?’

Only ‘so, so’ is the modern-sounding answer, and when asked if he has been sick, he says yes, ‘of an evill sicknesse’.  It turns out that the sickness is ‘lackyng of money’.

The dialogues are a fantastic source for meals, of the food served, and how people behaved at table, and Hollyband is unable to resist a little dig at English cooking too.  The master tells his guests: ‘They say commonly in England that God sendeth us meate, and the Devill cookes.’

The meal ends with singing and ‘good cheer’ – another intriguing glimpse of how the Elizabethans amused themselves.

The conversation pieces are designed to get in as many new words as possible.  So when Peter Erondell wants to teach the words for clothes and shoes, he imagines a lady pettishly changing her mind about what she is going to wear:

‘Give me some cleane sockes, I will have no worsted hosen, showe me my Carnation silk stockins: where laid you last night my garters? Take away these slippers, give me my velvet pantofles; send for the shoomaker that he may have again these turn-over shooes, for they be too high. Put on my white pumpes; set them up I will have none of them: Give me rather my Spanish leather shooes, for I will walke to-day … Tye the strings with a strong double knot, for feare they untie themselves .’

Later she goes to the nursery, and orders the nurse to unswaddle the baby so that she can inspect him before ordering a maid to fetch the cradle.

‘You mayd, goe fetch the childes cradle, make his bed, where is his pillowe? … Set on the coverlet, now put him in his cradle and rocke him till he sleepe but bring him to me first that I may kisse him: God send thee good rest my little boykin.’

I have used her conversation with the nurse as the basis for a whole scene in my forthcoming book, House of Shadows.  In other novels, I’ve used some of the endearments in the dialogues – my little boykin, my heart, my lover – or the way married couples refer to each other as ‘wife’ or ‘husband’, as when an over-cooked pie makes the host in Hollyband’s dialogue turn to his wife: ‘Wyfe, have wee nothing els?’

Generally, though, what the dialogues do best is give a real feel for the rhythm of conversation in the Elizabethan period.  When writing The Edge of Dark, I used some archaic words, like calsey for a road, but only if the context made the meaning clear, and I rely more on tone and word order to convey the 16th-century world my characters inhabit. It’s not truly authentic, of course, but then, it never can be.  Giving your reader a vivid sense of the past is key to historical fiction, but true authenticity is always going to take second place to the story.

 More About Pamela

Pamela Hartshorne funded a PhD on the later medieval and early modern street by writing contemporary romance, but now uses her research to write ‘time slip’, novels that move between the 16th century and the present. Her latest book, The Edge of Dark, published by Pan Macmillan, is set in Elizabethan London and York.  Find Pam on Facebook www.facebook.com/PamelaHartshorneAuthor or follow her on Twitter @PamHartshorne.