I checked out TaraShea Nesbit’s historical novel Beheld (Bloomsbury 2020) from my local library, after hearing an author interview about it on public radio. It is set in the New Plymouth colony in 1630, a decade after the Mayflower landing. As I read, my suspended disbelief keeps crashing down as characters say things like this:
I’m leaving my house, right, John and our son already out in the field. I’m getting the logs, as one doth, minding my own, when those steely faces turned to me. (p. 25)
The parenthetical “as one doth” seems questionable, but the main problem I have here is with right as an appeal for confirmation. (I don’t think it can here mean the opposite of left.) I can readily believe that such appeals were part of spoken English, then as now, but seldom if ever made it into authentic period writings. But usage of right for this purpose smacks more of my own lifetime than of the period in question, and indeed the OED dates it only to 1939:
[B. int.] 2. colloquial (originally U.S.). Appended as an interrogative to a clause, phrase, etc., inviting agreement, approval, or confirmation.
Now chiefly used as a general conversational filler.
The following seemed even more jarring:
If you want her to live, tell no one where you went or to whom you spoketh. (p. 37)
This is addressed to just one person. By 1630 the singular you was increasingly current, so that part’s right enough. The problem here is the inflected form spoketh, here used as second person simple past: I would rather expect rather you spake or you spoke, or thou spakest or thou spokest.
In order to re-locate this last instance, I did a Google Books search of the novel for spoketh, and it turned up two other seemingly wacky usages of that same form:
that part of the event was not much spoketh. [p. 90, as past participle]
So I spoketh. [p. 248, as first person singular past indicative]
I appreciate the difficulty of faking the most colloquial registers of an era when such seldom passed unvarnished into print or manuscript, and I get that the iron law of fashion demands the utmost colloquiality in fiction today; but I’m getting the distinct impression that this author is not even trying, and it sadly undermines my confidence in other aspects of her otherwise impressive reimagining.
Am I doing this author an injustice here?
