beauty

   In Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Wild-Goose Chase, Lugier enters and says to two young ladies: ‘Good day, fair beauties!’ ‘You have beautified us, we thank you, sir,’ replies one of them. Viola, in Twelfth Night (l:v) addresses Olivia and Maria as ‘good beauties’, a moment earlier having called Olivia ‘most radiant, exquisite, and unmatchable beauty’. This is presumably a joke, since Olivia is concealed beneath a veil at the time and Viola has no idea whether she is beautiful or not. It is also a hint that young ladies were conventionally called beauties at this time, regardless of their actual appearance. ‘My beauty’ used in modern times would be a typical form of address to a pet animal, though some speakers would still use it to a woman. In Dover One, by Joyce Porter, ‘me old beauty’ occurs twice as a friendly vocative to a man, the ‘me’ rather than ‘my’ indicating the working-class dialect speech of the character who uses it. The latter is a not very convincingly drawn rural ‘character’.