ABSTRACT
By the final quarter o f the sixteenth century (Shakespeare was born in 1564), English had been vindicated as a language able to produce good writing in both prose and verse. It was still occasionally felt to be ‘rough’, ‘unpolished’, ‘uneloquent’ (the standard o f comparison, expressed or implied, always being Latin) but not so often as hitherto. Yet it was still considered incapable o f expressing much by way o f abstract, philosophical or scientific ideas. More had composed Utopia in Latin in 1516. It was translated into German in 1524, into Italian by 1548 and into French by 1550, but not into English (by Ralph Robinson) until 1551 - by which time More was dead. Erasmus, More’s friend and arguably the most learned European man o f his day, visited England but never bothered to learn English; were their conversations in Latin? English was not yet a subject in grammar schools, Latin emphatically was. Harvey, who demonstrated the circulation o f the blood in the early seventeenth century, lectured to the Royal College o f Physicians on his discovery in English but recorded his results in Latin. Isaac Newton (died 1727) wrote all his scientific works in Latin. The first description o f a game o f cricket (early eighteenth century) is also in Latin.
