ABSTRACT
English in the time of Shakespeare being emphatically in a state of tran sition, in spelling, in pronunciation, in grammatical forms, in construction, it shows more change and variety than any other period of its growth before or after. Elizabethans wrote ytte by the side of it, yitte by the side of yet\ Shakespeare has moneth (dissyllabic) and month, eyen and eyes, hath and has, larum and alarum, broke and broken etc. Copyists and printers did not always reproduce faithfully what they had before them. We know that they un thinkingly or deliberately substituted one form for another where both were admissible, and the sophistication is not easy to discover except where it tampered with the metre or rhyme. The present chapter deals only with some of these cases of corruption without aiming at completeness.
