Mind Your Language | 1 October 2005

I have been surprised by a doctor, an event I had thought impossible after all these years not being surprised by my husband. But then, the doctor admirabilis, Dr P.C.H Schofield of Croydon, goes so far as to admit being ‘astounded’. This episode of being astounded was accomplished during a viewing of The Merchant of Venice, the film with Al Pacino as Shylock. At the end of Act Three, Scene Two, Bassanio reads out a letter, part of which says, ‘All debts are cleared between you and I, if I might but see you at my death.’

At first Dr Schofield put it down to some American mangling, but then, in an act of scholarship, the learned doctor looked it up in the handy Shakespeare without which no consulting room is complete. And there it was: ‘between you and I’.

I know that this sounds like something Hyacinth Bucket, or anyone else more eager to be genteel than certain about grammar. The difficulty has been touched on here before. But Shakespeare did write it, or at least someone wrote down what was supposed to be his composition. It didn’t surprise the late Dr Robert Burchfield, though. In the New Fowler’s he was perfectly aware of this hiccup in the Merchant, and another on the lips of Mistress Page: ‘There is such a league between my Goodman and he.’

Dr Burchfield did not go as far as to say that because Shakespeare wrote it, the construction was right, but he did remark that ‘I, he and other pronouns were frequently used in earlier centuries in ways now regarded as ungrammatical.’ His predecessor, the great Henry Fowler himself, keeps Shakespeare out of it and simply notes that the use of you and I, after this ‘sadly ill-treated word’ between perhaps results ‘from a hazy remembrance of hearing you and me corrected in the subjective’.