- fair
- A favourite vocative element in the seventeenth century, forming part of many complimentary expressions. Shakespeare’s characters are constantly addressing one another as: fair sir, fair lady, fair lord, fair gentlewoman, fair coz, fair one, fair youth, fair queen, fair prince, etc. Often the word prefixes a name, as in ‘fair Diomed’, ‘most fair Katharine’, ‘my fair Bianca’. There is some justification for thinking that use of the word came almost automatically when a vocative was employed. In Twelfth Night, for instance, are examples of ‘fair shrew’ and ‘fair cruelty’. Inevitably Shakespeare plays with the word on occasion:Hermia: God speed fair Helena! Whither away?Helena: Call you me fair? That fair again unsay.Demetrius loves your fair. O happy fair!Your eyes are lode-stars and your tongue’s sweet airMore tuneable than lark to shepherd’s earWhen wheat is green, with hawthorn buds appear (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1:1).In the same play, Bottom is composing a prologue and begins ‘Ladies’. He immediately corrects this to ‘Fair ladies’. ‘My fair’ becomes the complete vocative in Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Winter’s Tale, Henry the Fifth (‘Speak, my fair, and fairly, I pray thee’) and other plays. ‘Fair’ occurs on its own in, e.g., The Knight of the Burning Pestle, by Beaumont and Fletcher: ‘Nay, do not fly me, fair.’ In such cases it is always a woman who is being addressed. As an element in vocative expressions, ‘fair’ could be compared to ‘dear’ in modern times, but ‘dear’ has been used independently far more than was ‘fair’ at the height of its popularity.
A dictionary of epithets and terms of address . Leslie Dunkling . 2015.
