Kastril or Kestrel, the ‘angry boy’ of Ben Jonson’s Alchemist<\/em>, calls his sister his ‘suster’ and says ‘kuss’ for ‘kiss’.1<\/sup> It is not clear whether this is meant to represent a particular regional dialect, a generalized country accent, or his own personal idiolect: commentators are mostly content to gloss both words for the unwary.2<\/sup> In IV.iv.91, he reveals his sister’s formal name, Dame Pliant, and in V.iii.38 her first name or (more likely) nickname, when he refers to her as ‘Puss, my suster’. I wonder whether that name contains a sly joke. If he says that his ‘suster’ is named ‘Puss’, does that imply that, in the usual pronunciations of the day, his ‘sister’ would be named ‘Piss’?<\/p>\n Of course, just because Kastril turns I into U does not mean that every U he speaks would be an I in other dialects and idiolects. Still, I doubt that it is entirely coincidental that Jonson gives Dame Pliant a name that is so amusingly obscene if we assume the same vowel-change as in ‘suster’ and ‘kuss’ and translate it back into standard English. I certainly laughed out loud when I first saw the play at the Blackfriars in Staunton in January of 2010 and heard Tyler Moss as Kastril say the line. Then again, Kastril also calls his suster a ‘punk device’ a few lines further on (V.iii.50), and taking ‘punk’ as a mispronunciation of ‘pink’ doesn\u2019t seem to add anything, even with at least four different Early Modern English meanings of ‘pink’ and ‘pinked’ to work with.3<\/sup> So perhaps the joke I thought I heard was the product of coincidence, not a morsel of Jonsonian wit.4<\/sup><\/p>\n Notes:<\/strong><\/p>\n (PDF Version<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Kastril or Kestrel, the ‘angry boy’ of Ben Jonson’s Alchemist, calls his sister his ‘suster’ and says ‘kuss’ for ‘kiss’.1 It is not clear whether this is meant to represent a particular regional dialect, a generalized country accent, or his … Continue reading \n