Scarlet Knights (Comics)

The first hundred or so lines of Venus and Adonis offer such striking rhyme pairs as satiety and variety, fast and haste, bone and gone, entreats and frets, swears and tears, heat and get. Elsewhere plague is rhymed with wage, grapes with mishaps, Calais with challice. (The name of the French town was often spelled БЂњCallisБЂ«or БЂњCallice.БЂ«) Whether or not it was necessary to pronounce all the letters in a word-such as the kБЂ™s in knight and knee- was a hot issue. Shakespeare touches upon it comically in LoveБЂ™s LabourБЂ™s Lost when he has the tedious Holofernes attack those БЂњrackers of orthogoraphyБЂ¦who would call calf БЂcauf,БЂ™ half БЂhauf,БЂ™ neighbour БЂnebourБЂ™ and neigh БЂne.БЂ™БЂ«Much of the language Shakespeare used is lost to us now without external guidance. In an experiment in 2005, the Globe in London staged a production of Troilus and Cressida in БЂњEarly Modern EnglishБЂ«or БЂњOriginal Pronunciation.БЂ«The critic John Lahr, writing in the New Yorker, estimated that he could understand only about 30 percent of what was said ...»