possessives - Pronunciation of 'host' in Shakespeare's time
Listening to the recent film production of Macbeth with Patrick Stewart, I noticed that Duncan says:
Give me your hand. Conduct me to mine host.
Obviously, it's in the text (Act 1, Scene 6). I'm curious as to whether in Shakespeare's time (and dialect) this would have been pronounced with an aspirated 'h', or whether the 'h' was dropped. Presumably 'honour' did not have an aspirated 'h' in the second quotation below.
This seems to appear in other works:
As to take up mine honour's pawn
and
Mine honour is my life; both grow in one:
Take honour from me, and my life is done:
Then, dear my liege, mine honour let me try;
In that I live and for that will I die.
Looking further, in 'All's well that ends well' (Act IV, Scene 2) , we have this:
Here, take my ring:
My house, mine honour, yea, my life, be thine,
And I'll be bid by thee.
Where we have my house
, rather than mine house
, which suggests to me that mine host
, would be mine 'ost
to modern ears.
I've found various references stating that 'mine' is used when a word begins with h
, however all the other examples I've seen are of silent h
s and so are effectively words starting with vowels, whereas host
is not.
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