An 1850 painting by John Everett Millais depicting the scene from Shakespeare’s The Tempest in which the spirit Ariel sings to Ferdinand. An airy spirit, surrounded by others, sings into the ear of a young man amid an Edenic setting.
21 October 2021
The digital age has not been kind to Shakespeare’s reputation as a coiner of words and phrases. As more and more texts are digitized, we’re finding more terms, thought to have been coined by him, were actually coined by earlier writers. But his coining of the phrase sea-change rests on solid ground.
A sea-change is a complete transformation of someone or something into someone or something wholly new. Shakespeare uses it in The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2, c.1616, when the spirit Ariel sings of Ferdinand’s father, who had drowned at sea:
Full fadom fiue thy Father lies,
Of his bones are Corrall made:
Those are pearles that were his eies,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a Sea-change
Into something rich, & strange:
Sea-Nimphs hourly rink his knell.
The lines are occasionally quoted throughout the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, but it is in the 1830s that the phrase separates itself from the context of Shakespeare’s play and starts to be used in other contexts. Four quotations, appearing over a span of only two years, demonstrate how the phrase underwent a sea-change of its own.
A discussion of the poet James G. Percival that appeared in the New-England Magazine of 1 May 1832 uses the phrase in reference Percival’s poem The Coral Grove. Here the reviewer is quoting Shakespeare, and The Coral Grove is about the sea:
Having mentioned these two beautiful and popular little poems, we cannot help stopping for a moment to express our admiration of them. We never read them without thinking “O si sic omnia dixisset.” [Oh, if he had said all things thusly] The latter, in particular, is one of the most exquisite pieces of fancy ever wrought in the brain of man. His whole mind, in conceiving it, seems to have “suffered a sea-change.” It is one of those things which have a peculiar power over a reader’s mind, and which throw it into the same track of thought in which the writer’s must have been when he composed it. We forget the land and all its sights and sounds; we hear the dash of the waves and see their foamy crests; our imagination brings up before us all the beautiful images and forms with which poetry and nature have peopled the deep.
Then two days later, on the other side of the Atlantic in the Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette of 3 May 1832, we see sea-change being used again. This time without directly quoting Shakespeare, although the agent of the change is still the ocean:
SEA-CHANGE OF LINEN.—“I merely wish (says the Captain) to give a hint to those who never tried the experiment, that there is a prodigious difference between a shirt scrubbed in salt water, and one which has been washed in fresh. We all know the misery of putting on wet clothes, or sleeping in damp sheets. Now, a shirt washed in salt water is really a great deal worse than either.
Back to America, an anonymous poem published in the New-York Mirror of 10 August 1833, uses the phrase in a context divorced from the sea, although it still quotes Shakespeare. The context is that of a transformation of woman, the daughter of a seamstress and yarn saleswoman, into a fine lady of society via clothes and jewelry:
And there, in stanhope rolling by,
Another Phœnix I espy,
Whose mother often dandled
The little urchin on her knee,
Whilst with her hand industriously
Her scissors she has handled.How oft some “suffer a sea change,”
And “into something rich and strange,”
Adorned with glittering jewels,
Who would suppose that dashing belle
Could, if she pleased, this hist’ry tell,
“My mother she sold crewels?”
Then on 23 November 1834, we see sea-change being used without quoting or directly alluding to Shakespeare and in a context having nothing to do with the sea. It appears in a review of a production of the opera Red Mask, which compares the production to the original novel:
He supplies some motive for the action, and makes its improbabilities more improbable. Nothing can be so exaggerated and unmeaning as the main conduct of the original. The most ordinary things in it are the things most emphatically presented. The quantity of circumstance is huge, the power and quality of effect infinitely little. We always want in this author, except when he undergoes a sea-change, the charm, the one perfect charm, of verisimilitude. Mr Planché restores a little of this to his plot.
That’s a rather fast transformation.
Sources:
“Literary Portraits. No. III. James G. Percival.” The New-England Magazine (Boston), 1 May 1832, 412. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. sea, n.
“Sea-Change of Linen.” Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette (Devizes, England), 3 May 1832, 4. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest, 1.2. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (First Folio, Brandeis University). London: Isaac Jaggrd and Edward Blount, 1623, 5.
“Theatrical Examiner.” Examiner (London), 23 November 1834, 742. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.
“Thinks I to Myself—Who?” New-York Mirror, 10 August 1833, 44. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.
Image credit: John Everett Millais, 1850, Makin Collection (private collection). Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a work created before 1926.