Here's how he describes Tom, for example: "He was magnificently habited in a doublet of white satin, with a front- piece of purple cloth-of-tissue, powdered with diamonds, and edged with ermine. Twain emphasizes the time period by being highly descriptive about the surroundings and the characters clothes. (Can you imagine if he had written this entirely in 16th-century English? Perish ye olde thought.) By mixing these styles, Mark Twain gives us both a feeling of authenticity and an ease of reading that might not have been possible otherwise. The first sentence is clear as day, and the second might require the use of an English-to-English dictionary just to get the meanings of the words. He smiteth with a heavy hand, yet spareth me: he spareth me not always with his tongue, though, sooth to say. And then we jump to old-timey sentences like this: "Fathers be alike, mayhap. So what does that look like? Well, sometimes we see plain, modern sentences like this: "When we saw him last, royalty was just beginning to have a bright side for him" (30.2). Twain mixes his modern, simple prose with the archaic diction of Henry VIII's day (pretty much the kind of language you see in Shakespeare's plays). So, did you believe they were reading a novel from the 16th century? If so, Mark Twain did a pretty good job, since he was born over 200 years after the events in this novel. Simple, 16th-Century English, Highly Descriptive
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |