ABSTRACT
TH E material for the study of Cockney in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is far from being what one would wish. Despite the prejudices of reviewers and literary men, the best observations come from solemn people. Those flashes of insight which one may always rely upon a reviewer to discover in another novelist are as often the erratic light of the ignis fatuus as a lumen siccum. One would like to have a solemn, painstaking phonetic treatise on the London speech of this period. But, although studies of English pronunciation were written from the middle of the sixteenth century, they were concerned solely with accepted speech, and it was not until the eighteenth century that the phoneticians began to consider Cockney. In default of the comments of authorities, we have to fall back on the Cockney dialogue in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays and on documents written in a colloquial style by Londoners of the time. In basing our discussion upon dramatic dialogue, we run the danger of being deceived by the usual vices (from the objective point of view)
of literary work, convention, fantasy, burlesque, and reminiscence of other literary works, and in using documents written by Cockneys we are hampered by the fact that a pen gives whoever holds it a sense of style and, therefore, modifies his native colloquialism.
