Introduction: Puttenham's poetic “tune” and the Lexicons of Early Modern English database.

As a research assistant for Ian Lancashire's Lexicons of Early Modern English project (LEME), I have had access to the version of the Lexicons database currently in progress.^[1]  It has been a useful research tool for my PhD thesis project, which was inspired by the use of a particular word in Early Modern English.  The word is “tune”, and it caught my attention in The Arte of English Poesie, a manual of English poetry published in 1589 and attributed to George Puttenham (I will give him the benefit of the attributional doubt and refer to George Puttenham's book from now on).^[2]  “Tune” interested me because it now belongs conspicuously not to the art of “poesie”, but to the art of music.  Puttenham's usage seemed eccentric; I wanted to know why he coined the usage, if indeed he did.  Of course, the primary resource for investigating English word usage in the Early Modern period is The Oxford English Dictionary.^[3]  However, the working copy of the Lexicons of Early Modern English database provided me with three additional kinds of important evidence.  First, the Lexicons database provides access to occurrences of a word in the works of a number of English Renaissance linguists who are not represented in the corpus from which The Oxford English Dictionary draws examples.  Second, occurrences in LEME are displayed in the context of an entire word-entry, a much broader context than printed dictionaries usually provide.  Third, because the LEME texts are documents about language, they give information about the status of a word in the language; in particular, whether the word was hard, requiring explanation, or easy, being used to explain other words.   The lexical evidence I collected led me to three discoveries: first, that Puttenham uses “tune” to refer literally to musical rhythms --the number, duration and pitch of syllables, as well as their phonetic features-- in spoken verse; second, that although his usage of the word “tune” is not reflected in the OED, it is reflected in contemporary works in the Lexicons database; and third, that the distribution of occurrences of the word “tune” in the LEME database reveals Puttenham's usage to be both current and common.   I hope to illustrate that Puttenham was not entirely eccentric.  I also hope to show how an electronic period-specific, primary-text corpus of lexical works with a search engine has been essential my to understanding of the art of (Early Modern) English “poesie”.  Finally, I hope this example will suggest other applications of the Lexicons database as well.

1. Puttenham's usage: “tune” as spoken music in The Arte of English Poesie.

George Puttenham applies the word “tune”, which he says refers to musical structure, to poetic metre.  Puttenham says, “our maker by his measures and concordes of sundry proportions doth counterfait the harmonicall tunes [my italics] of the vocall and instrumentall Musickes” (70).  He is explaining poetry through a reference to music: “poeticall proportion [...] holdeth of the Musical, because [...] Poesie is a skill to speake & write harmonically: and verses or rime be a kind of Musicall vtterance” (53).  However, Puttenham is not confusing music and poetry.  Throughout his work, he  maintains the distinction between spoken poetry and “the artificial Musicke consisting in strained tunes, as is the vocall Musike, or that of melodious instruments” (53).  In fact, whenever Puttenham means to indicate systematic pitch-patterns, he qualifies “tune” by reference to vocal music (70, 53), to instruments (70, 53), to “strained” (53) or “strayned tunes, as those of Musicke” (164), to “Musitians” (41), or to “the cuckow” (168). Nonetheless, Puttenham is applying the word “tune” to poetry literally.  He regularly emphasises the aural nature of “tunes”, describing them as discernible by the ear (5, 60, 63, 68, 69, 70, 71, 130) or affecting the ear as opposed to the mind (70, 119, 134, 136, 144, 145, 163, 164, 219).  He uses the word “tune” only in discussions of sound, the “auricular figures [...] which worke alteration in th'eare by sound, accent, time, and slipper volubilitie in vtterance” (134),^[4] and never in his descriptions of ocular figures, the visual patterns on a page of text which he believes contribute to poetic effect.^[5]  To Puttenham, a “tune” is not an abstraction or a metaphor; it is a concrete description of what he hears.  He literally hears “tunes”, musical sound patterns, in spoken poetry. 

Puttenham's spoken tunes are made of syllables which behave like musical notes but never lose their spoken qualities.  Their number, their individual durations, their stress and their pitch are all significant, and so are their segmental features, and Puttenham applies the word “tune” to each of these elements individually and to all of them in combination.  He says that the “audible tune” (134) of a metre will be altered “sometimes by adding sometimes by rabbating of a sillable or letter to or from a word” (134), “as to say [...] endanger, for danger” (135) or “twixt for betwixt” (135); “the quantitie of a verse, either long or short [...] consisteth [...] with vs in the number of sillables” (55).  But when a poet wishes “to shew the Poets art and variety of Musick [...] hauing a regard to his [...] quantitie” (69), he may also make use of the  “quantity of a word” (101).  A word may be “drawen at length [...] because the word or sillable is of such letters as hangs long in the palate or lippes ere he will come forth” (101) or may “fall away speedily” (101).  It is consequently also possible to alter an “audible tune” by “wrong ranging the accent of a sillable by which meane a short sillable is made long and a long short” (135).   Puttenham not only counts syllables, but also measures their duration.  He is aware, furthermore, that pitch and stress tend to cause a syllable to lengthen: “a sound is drawen at length [...] because he is accented and tuned hier and sharper then another” (101).  In fact, Puttenham sometimes uses “tune” to refer to stress as distinct from duration, as, for example, when the “foote Pirrichius  [...] beares in maner no sharper accent vpon the one then the other sillable, but he is in effect egall in time and tune, as is also the Spondeus” (102).  Puttenham never uses “tune” to refer to pitch independently, but he does consistently acknowledge pitch as an element of “tune”; in another example, the “stirring of tunes & their sundry times in the vtterance of our wordes” is created “when the voice goeth high or low, or sharpe or flat, or swift or slow” (64).  A syllable, like a note, has pitch, stress and duration.  Yet Puttenham's tuned syllables never lose the qualities of spoken language.  He not only contrasts spoken “tunes” with vocal and instrumental music (as I have already mentioned), but also emphasises the role of phonetic features (which belong exclusively to language), especially vowel quality, in poetic tune.  An “audible tune” (134) will be altered by “cleare exchaunge of one letter or sillable for another, as to say euermare for euermore, wrang for wrong” (135). He expands upon the role of phonetic features in his discussion of rhyme, which name, he says, we give to “tunable concord” (7) or “tunable consentes” (64) or “tuneable accent in the ende of the verse” (60).^[6]  Again, Puttenham literally hears spoken tunes in poems.  He thinks that poets manipulate the syllable-count, syllable-duration, stress, pitch and segmental features of words so that “the eare” may be “rauished with their currant tune” (164).

2. Puttenham's apparent eccentricity: “tune” as sung or instrumental music in the OED and the LEME database.

Why, then, do we need a dictionaries database?  It is clear what George Puttenham means.  But the question that interests me is, can George Puttenham be taken seriously?  As it happens, Puttenham is unique neither in making the metaphorical association between music and poetry, nor in using the word “tune” or its derivatives to describe poetic metre: William Webbe and Ben Jonson are among others who use it.^[7]  But to the twenty-first century ear, the literal comparison is faulty: poetic metre in English is almost always merely stressed and counted; very occasionally, as in certain of Thomas Campion's lyrics,^[8] it has successfully incorporated syllable duration, but the Renaissance experiments with duration are more generally famous for failing; and I know of no precedents for pitched poetry in English that is not sung.

The Oxford English Dictionary supports common sense: it confirms that a “tune”, between 1500 and 1700, was essentially and primarily a ‘pitched’ work of art.  The OED makes only the most limited reference to rhythm, and that reference is in sense 2a: “a rhythmical succession of (musical) tones produced by (or composed for) an instrument or voice; an air, melody (with or without the harmony which accompanies it)”.  This is the only sense which refers to rhythm at all, and although it is, we are told, “now the leading sense”, none of the examples from any period for this sense or for the figurative phrases deriving from it in sense 6 (we are told they are “fig. from 2”)  refers to rhythm.  All of the other senses containing examples from the Early Modern period seem ruled by the etymological source of the word, which is “a peculiar phonetic variant of tone n.”; they refer, literally or figuratively, primarily to pitch.^[9]   Sense 1a of “tune”, “a (musical) sound or tone, esp. the sound of the voice” is “= tone n.”.  So, more specifically, a “tune” is a “musical or vocal sound” (“tone, n.” 1a); that is, a tone “having the nature or characteristics of music; tuneful, melodious, harmonious; pleasing in sound, euphonious. Of sounds: Such as are used in music; having the nature of ‘tones’, as distinguished from mere ‘noises’” (“musical, a.” 2).^[10]  Senses for “music” itself similarly emphasise pitch.  After the very general sense, “that one of the fine arts which is concerned with the combination of sounds with a view to beauty of form and the expression of emotion” (“music, sb.” 1), we read “sounds in melodic or harmonic combination” (“music, sb.” 2a), “sounds in melodic or harmonic combination as devised by a composer” (“music, sb.” 3), and so on.  Definitions of derivatives of the noun “tune” (the verb “to tune”, the adjectives “tuned”, “tunable”, “tuneful” and “tuneless”, the nouns “tunableness” and “tunefulness”, and the adverbs “tunably” and “tunefully”) are similarly musical.^[11]  There is a single citation from the period 1500-1700 which suggests a reference to rhythm among all of the relevant OED entries for “tune” and variations.   It occurs in an example for sense 7 of “tune”: “their Tune-skill'd feet in so true Time doe fall” (from Josuah Sylvester's Du Bartas his divine weekes and workes, 1606).  But in the absence of an explanation (sense 7 is a list of combinations without a definition), we can only assume that the OED editors consider this usage to be consistent with those in senses 1 to 6.

The evidence in the working copy of the Lexicons of Early Modern English database partly supports the OED's evidence.  The words “tune”,  “tunable” (spelled two ways), “tunableness” (spelled two ways), “tuned”, “tunes”, “tuning”, “untunable”, and “untuned” (spelled four ways) occur 251 times in the database in combined total.  Of these, eighty-five do not give enough context to interpret the words' significations, and the remaining 165 occur in fifteen of the seventy-seven works currently in the LEME database.  Of the fifteen works using “tune” or its derivatives, only two are quoted in the OED.  (These two are John Florio's 1598 World of Words and John Palsgrave's 1530 Lesclarcissement de la Langue francoyse.)  So there are thirteen new sources of information about the word “tune”, representing the work of twelve new authors (Florio is represented in both the OED and LEME).  Six of the new works are bilingual dictionaries printed between 1538 and 1611 (The dictionary of syr Thomas Eliot knyght, 1538; Thomas Cooper's Latin-English Thesaurus linguae Romanae & Brittanicae, 1584; Thomas Thomas' Latin-EnglishDictionarium Linguae Latinae, 1587; John Minsheu's Spanish-English A Spanish grammar, 1599; Randle Cotgrave's French-English A dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, 1611; John Florio's Italian-English  Queen Anna's New World of Words, 1611); six are English hard-word dictionaries printed between 1596 and 1656 (Edmund Coote's English primer, The English schoole-maister, 1596; Thomas Speght's list of Chaucerian English wordsOld and obscure words explaned in his The vvorkes of our ancient and learned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer, 1598; Robert Cawdrey's English hard-word list, A table alphabeticall, 1604; John Bullokar's English hard-word dictionary, An English Expositor, 1616; Henry Cockeram's English hard-word dictionary, The English Dictionarie, 1623; Thomas Blount's English hard-word dictionary Glossographia, 1656); and one is a rhetoric handbook (Richard Sherry's A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, 1550).  Nine of the thirteen new works (or eight of twelve new authors) support OED readings of “tune”.^[12]  These readings account for 135 of the 165 analysable occurrences of “tune”.^[13]   That means that about 80% of the analysable occurrences of “tune” and its derivatives in the working copy of the Lexicons database are consistent with OED readings, referring directly or indirectly primarily to pitch.^[14]

3. Puttenham's rehabilitation: “tune” as spoken music in the LEME database.

Was George Puttenham out of his mind?  To be fair to him, he is not entirely eccentric: he does use “tune” five times in OED senses.  These are the examples I referred to earlier, in which Puttenham specifies vocal music (70, 53), instruments (70, 53), “strained” (53) or “strayned tunes, as those of Musicke” (164), “Musitians” (41), or “the cuckow” (168); they emphasise musical rather than spoken pitch, as the OED does.  But thirty-two out of thirty-seven times (that is, about 85% of the time), Puttenham uses “tune” to refer mainly to rhythm but also to pitch and segmental features in spoken English.  On the basis of the OED evidence, supported by evidence in the working copy of the Lexicons database, Puttenham appears to be pioneering a new usage of the word “tune”, and if this evidence is to be believed, his new usage did not catch on.  One wonders whether using words in unexpected ways is the most effective technique to explain a difficult concept; Puttenham did, after all, feel that English metre was complex enough to warrant his massive manual, The Arte of English Poesie.

However, the Lexicons database has more than one tune in its repertoire.  There are thirty examples in the database in which “tune” and its derivatives are specifically associated with musical rhythm, the pitch of the speaking rather than the singing voice, or with prosody (that is, the endowment of “due sound”^[15] upon spoken words).  Word-entries in Cooper, Thomas and Florio tell us that “pleasant tuning” is “musical measure” (“modulatio” Cooper and Thomas; “modolantia” Florio 1598), and “a pleasant tuning” to Blount is “a singing or playing by number or measure” (“modulation” Blount).  Cooper and Thomas agree that “a tuning” is “a singing in measure” (“modulatus” Cooper and Thomas), Thomas confirms that “tuneable singing” is “singing in measure” (“melos” Thomas), and Florio tells us that “musical measure” is “tuneable singing” (“modolantia” Florio 1611).  Florio summarises that “to sing tuneable” is to sing “according to due accent and number” (“modolare” Florio 1611).  So it would not surprise Cooper, Thomas, Blount, or Florio to hear Puttenham say that a poet imitates “the vocall and instrumentall Musickes” (70) by “hauing a regard to his measure” (69).  They too hear “tunes” as rhythms; “number”, which implies count, and “measure”, which implies duration, are essential to their understanding of what is “musical”.^[16]   Blount goes further, explaining that a “tune” is “the rising and falling of the voice” in “pronunciation [...].  As in the close of a Period we let fall the voice, in a demand raise it” (“accent” Blount).  Cooper, Thomas and Cawdrey also almost certainly mean the same thing when they say that an “accent or tune” is “the rising or falling of the voice” (“accentus” Cooper and Thomas, “accent” Cawdrey).  This is likely also what Sherry has in mind when he describes “tunablenes” as “a turnyng of the voice in pleasaunte pronunciation” (“extensio” Sherry), and what Thomas means when he describes “a bowing, bending, turning or winding, the chaunging or altering of the tune of the voice in pronunciation” (“flexus” Thomas).  Cooper, Sherry, Thomas, Cawdrey, and Blount, then, would likely agree that some of Puttenham's spoken syllables could be “tuned hier” (101) than others.  Finally, Florio tells us that “to tune” is “to accent or give a due sound to any word or letter” (“accentare” Florio 1598) and “to give a true accent” (“tuonare” Florio 1598, 1611).  He does not define “due sound” or “true accent” specifically as pitch, duration, stress or segmental feature, but he is clearly referring to a spoken sound structured enough that it can be identified as “due” or “true”.  Cawdrey similarly emphasises structure in tunes when his word-entry for “prosodie” says that “tune of pronouncing of words” is “prosodie”.  Puttenham's concern with “due sound” and “true accent” in tuning is most apparent in his discussion of “ryme [...] or tunable consentes in the latter end of our verses” (64).  He says there that “there can not be in a maker a fowler fault, then to falsifie his accent to serue his cadence, or [...] to wrench his words to helpe his rime” (67); to avoid ‘wrenching’ words, he must not, for example, “rime to this word Restore [...] match[ing] him with Doore or Poore for neither of both are of like terminant [...] in naturall sound, therfore such rime is strained” (67).  Again, Puttenham is consistent with his contemporaries, understanding “tune” to be ‘prosodic’, in the sense that a “tune” is a composite of “accent” and other analysable “naturall sound[s]” heard in spoken words accurately pronounced. 

These three hitherto unknown significations of the word “tune” (‘musical rhythm’ incorporating count and duration, ‘spoken pitch’, and ‘prosody’ potentially incorporating all those elements) represent about 20% of the analysable occurrences of “tune” or its variations in the working copy of the LEME database, and they are used by ten of fourteen authors in eleven of fifteen works.^[17]  Eight of our twelve non-OED LEME authors support OED readings; nine support Puttenham.^[18]  So Puttenham's significations are used by other writers, and three of the works in question predate his (Sherry, Cooper and Thomas).  Four of the LEME authors only use “tune” in these (I will call them) Puttenhamian ways (Sherry, Thomas, Coote, and Cawdrey); four authors only use “tune” in ways recorded in the OED (Palsgrave, Elyot, Speght, and Bullokar); and six use it in both OED and Puttenhamian ways (Cooper, Minsheu, Florio, Cotgrave, Cockeram, and Blount), as does Puttenham himself.  Thus there is no clear division between the Oxfordian and the Puttenhamian camps of “tune” usage.  Puttenham and the others cannot be said to be inventing significations or attempting to redefine the signification of “tune”; rather, they are choosing among the range of significations for “tune” that are current in their language.  Puttenham rehabilitated.

4. Puttenham's accessibility: “tune” as a synonym for “accent” and as an easy word in The Arte of English Poesie and the LEME database.

The three new significations for the word “tune” are available because the working copy of the LEME database provides access to texts not quoted in the OED, and also because it provides fuller access to the works of authors who are quoted in the OED.  There is new information about Palsgrave and Florio, both quoted in the OED, because the Lexicons database displays every occurrence of the word “tune” in their works, and it shows the occurrences in the contexts of the complete word-entries in which they appear.  The Lexicons database cannot be more generous than its authors in this regard.  I have said that I have not been able to analyse eighty-five of the occurrences of the word “tune” in LEME because their contexts are too limited.  Some of these are occurrences in foreign-language dictionaries which consist of a foreign headword explained by a single English word; Cooper's “accentus”, for example, is simply explained as “tune”.  The others are occurrences in which the English text is longer but does not qualify the word “tune”, as in Minsheu's “insonoro, vntunable, that cannot be set in tune”.  In these cases, the contexts do not support analysis.  However, when the author of a work has provided sufficient context, it is available to the LEME user.

A further application of this kind of access is that it documents patterns of word-association.  “Tune”, it turns out, is very often associated with “accent”, a coincidence which will be familiar from the excerpts I have quoted from Puttenham.  “Accent” or its equivalent in another language (“accentus” in Cooper, Elyot and Thomas, “accentare” in Florio) is a synonym for twenty-six occurrences of  “tune”.^[19]   Thomas, Florio and Cockeram use  “accent” with “tune” to signify ‘musical pitch or tone’ (cf. “tune, n.” 1a OED),^[20] and  Florio uses it with “to tune” to signify ‘to play an instrument or to sing’ (cf. “tune, v.” 4a, 5 OED).^[21]  But “accent” also has Puttenhamian senses.  Blount uses “accent” with “tune” to signify ‘spoken pitch’^[22] and Elyot and Florio use “accent” and “tune” together with emphasis on proper pronunciation;^[23] both senses are supported by examples using “accent” alone.^[24]  Furthermore, Elyot, Cooper, Florio, Cockeram, and Blount say that  “prosody” (Cawdrey's “tune of pronouncing of words”) is “the art of accenting” or “the rule of pronouncing wordes truely, long or short”,^[25] indicating that accent incorporates syllable duration.   Finally, Cotgrave says one must “accent the last syllable, vnlesse it be feminine” (“Vistempenard”), implying that accent is equivalent to ‘stress’.  These last examples are especially significant for Puttenham because he claims, as I have said, that syllable duration and stress are aspects of poetic tune.  There are no examples in the working copy of the Lexicons database in which “tune” is used explicitly to signify ‘syllable duration’ or ‘stress’, but the overlap in the significations of “tune” and “accent” is broad enough that, if accent clearly signifies syllable duration and stress in pronunciation, spoken “tune” is likely understood by the LEME authors as incorporating syllable duration and stress also.  The evidence for “accent” provides further evidence of Puttenham's sanity: his usage of “accent” is current, and the overlap of the semantic fields of “accent” and “tune” in his work is consistent with the overlap in the work of his contemporaries; the senses ‘syllable duration’ and ‘stress’ can be added to the senses ‘musical rhythm’, ‘spoken pitch’, and ‘prosody’, the senses of “tune” about which Puttenham and his contemporaries agree.  The sympathetic authors are this time exclusive to LEME, so access to words in LEME works in their full original context has provided further essential evidence. 

The final point I would like to make is perhaps the most important.  Although it is clear that Puttenham is not unique in his use of the word “tune”, Puttenhamian usages of “tune” only account for 20% of the usages in the Lexicons database.  If the LEME texts were not language texts, and not primarily dictionaries and hard-word lists, we might be forced to concede that Puttenham's use of the word “tune” is unusual, difficult, or limited to his particular context.  However, the language texts in which Puttenhamian usages of “tune” occur are not limited to a particular topic: bilingual dictionaries, English hard-word dictionaries, and rhetoric handbooks treat the language as a whole; there are no glossaries of old, technical or slang words among them, although such glossaries are well represented in the database.^[26]  Even more importantly, “tune” in these works is never a word which is explained; it is always a word which is used to explain other words, foreign words or hard English words.  In fact, there are only two word-entries in the entire working copy of the Lexicons database for which “tune” is the headword, and they occur in the “Second Book” of Cockeram's English Dictionarie of 1623.  The “Second Book” gives a list of “the vulgar words, which whensoever any desirous of a more curious explanation by a more refined and elegant speech shall look into, he shall there receive the exact and ample word to expresse the same” (A5r).  To Cockeram, “tune” is a “vulgar” word, a word that is likely to be known by his readers, who he expects will be “ladies and gentlewomen, young schollers, clarkes, merchants as also strangers of any Nation” (A2r, title page).  Even foreigners will recognise “tune”.  (It must have come up early in continental language classes.  Perhaps Alençon wooed Elizabeth with tuneful ditties.)   The second most common hard word explained by “tune” is  “accent”.^[27]  When George Puttenham uses “tune” to open the art of English “poesie”, then, he is using an easy word, a word everybody knows, a word everybody knows better than “accent”, an ordinary word that will signify to his readers the rhythms and pitch patterns of spoken words.  He was not out of his mind; or if he was, his was a widely held delusion, for he, his readers, nine linguists, their readers, and miscellaneous foreigners could all hear tunes in spoken English. 

Conclusion: “tuned poesie” in the English Renaissance?

The Puttenhamian usage of the word “tune” is relevant to my research because it means that people in the English Renaissance may have heard language differently than we hear it today; they may have heard musical rhythms, made up of stress, syllable count, syllable duration, and spoken pitch, as well as phonetic features, in their words.  If they did, they may have written poetry differently.  Could Ben Jonson, for example, a poet who called metre “tune”, have written tunes in his own verse?^[28]  Or Shakespeare, who uses “tune” and “time” synonymously?^[29]  I do not know how long it would take to answer these questions using print sources alone; but without access to an electronic, period-specific, primary-text corpus of lexical works with a search engine, the attempt could only be described as Puttenhamian.  I hope this example will be relevant to other researchers because it is representative of the many potential applications of the Lexicons database: any number of eccentrics may be rehabilitated, any number of esoteric arts redeemed.