gentle

   Formerly a vocative in its own right, especially in the plural when it was used to address a group of nobles or gentlemen and gentlewomen. Examples of such usage occur in, e.g., The Merry Wives of Windsor (3:ii) and Henry the Fifth (l:i). The main use of gentle by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, however, was as a vocative element, meaning either ‘of good birth, noble’, or ‘mild, tender, kind, of a nature to be expected of one who was well-born’. Throughout the Shakespeare plays there are vocative expressions which contain ‘gentle’ as an element. A few examples will suffice to show the range, with individual plays not being mentioned since most of the terms occur passim: gentle + first name, gentle friend, gentle mistress, gentle my lord, gentle lover, gentle sweet, gentle wife, gentle lady, gentle master, gentle sir, gentle madam, gentle husband, gentle maiden, gentle cousin, etc. There is even an instance, in Henry the Fourth Part Two (3:ii), of ‘gentle gentlemen’ used vocatively. The only modern survivals of such usage are ‘gentleman’, and to a far lesser extent, ‘gentlewoman’. ‘Gentle reader’, addressed to the reader of a novel by an author, continued in late use, but that has now gone. One suspects that the value of the word, in vocative use at least, was debased by overuse. What had originally been a high compliment about one’s family background was to become devalued to the point where ‘genteel’, a development from ‘gentle’, came to have a pejorative meaning, suggesting artificially good manners as displayed by social climbers.