Q: I am currently studying Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and came across your 2022 post on the use of “ph” as “f” in classical imports. I assume the “ph” in “Calphurnia” (Caesar’s wife) was pronounced as “p,” not “f,” in 1599, but I need a scholarly source to reference. Can you assist?
A: The “ph” in “Calphurnia” in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar was indeed pronounced as “p,” as confirmed by the linguist David Crystal, an expert on the pronunciation of Shakespeare’s plays during Elizabethan times.
In The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation (2016), Crystal provides the following entry for the noun and its possessive form:
Calphurnia / ~’s n
kalˈpɐ:ɹnɪə / -z
sp Calphurnia / Calphurnia’s
We previously discussed the effort to reconstruct the original pronunciation of Shakespeare’s works in a post from 2012. As Crystal pointed out, many rhymes and puns that may seem odd in modern English make sense in Original Pronunciation (OP).
The name “Calpurnia,” Caesar’s fourth and final wife, is spelled as “Calphurnia” in the earliest surviving text of Shakespeare’s play, found in the 1623 First Folio published seven years after his passing.
It is likely that the name was originally spelled as “Calpurnia” in Shakespeare’s lost original script, believed to have been written around 1599.
In fact, in Plutarch’s Lives (1579) by Sir Thomas North, a primary source for much of Shakespeare’s play, the name is spelled as “Calpurnia,” as the Romans would have written it. Shakespeare drew inspiration from the lives of Caesar, Brutus, and Antony, according to the British Library.
It is possible that the editors of the First Folio mistakenly believed that the correct Roman spelling of the name included the “ph” digraph instead of the letter “p.”
Richard Grant White, editor of The Complete Works of Shakespeare: The Plays Edited From the Folio of MDCXXIII (1899), also believed that the name “Calpurnia” had been misspelled in the First Folio. In his notes for Julius Caesar, White explained his decision to change “Calphurnia” to “Calpurnia”:
“The folio has, ‘Calphurnia,’ here and in every occurrence of the name; however, the necessary correction has not been made thus far, even though Caesar’s wife was Calpurnia, and this spelling is consistent throughout North’s Plutarch. Although changes have been made to correct ‘Varrus’ and ‘Claudio’ to ‘Varro’ and ‘Claudius,’ or ‘Anthony’ to ‘Antony’ in this play and in Antony and Cleopatra, the strange ‘h’ in ‘Anthony’ and ‘Calphurnia’ was likely silent to Shakespeare and his readers.”
As mentioned in our 2022 post about the “ph” digraph, the Romans transliterated the Greek letter ϕ (phi) as “ph” and the letter π (pi) as “p.” The Latin “ph” sounded like the aspirated “p” in “pot,” while the Latin “p” sounded like the unaspirated “p” in “spot.” (An aspirated letter is pronounced with the sound of a breath.)
Over time, the pronunciations of both the Greek ϕ and the Latin “ph” evolved and eventually sounded like the English fricative “f.” (A fricative is a consonant produced by the friction of forcing air through a narrow space.)
In the original Greek version of Plutarch’s Life of Caesar, written in the late first or early second century, Calpurnia is Καλπουρνία (with a π) and pronounced as “Calpurnia,” consistent with the classical Latin and typical modern English spelling.
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