O god rest ye merry gentlemen lyrics series#
In fact, ye would never have been correct, because ye is a subjective (nominative) pronoun only, never an objective (accusative) pronoun.Ī variant text was printed in 1775 in The Beauties of the Magazines, and Other Periodical Works, Selected for a Series of Years. Some variants give the pronoun in the first line as ye instead of you, in a pseudo-archaism. This is the case already in the 1775 variant, and is also reflected by Dickens's replacement of the verb rest by bless in A Christmas Carol. notes that the first line "often is mispunctuated" as "God rest you, merry gentlemen" because in contemporary language, rest has lost its use "with a predicate adjective following and qualifying the object" ( Century Dictionary). In Romeo and Juliet, the servant who inadvertently invites them to Capulet's masqued ball twice tells Romeo and Benvolio, "Rest you merry." The transitive use of the verb rest in the sense "to keep, cause to continue, to remain" is typical of 16th- to 17th-century language. However, merry is often misinterpreted as an adjective modifying gentlemen. It appears in Shakespeare's 1599 play As You Like It. The historic meaning of the phrase "God rest you merry" is 'may God grant you peace and happiness' the Oxford English Dictionary records uses of this phrase from 1534 onwards. The following version of the first verse is found in a manuscript dating from the early 1650s: It is also quoted in George Eliot's 1861 novel Silas Marner. The carol is referred to in Charles Dickens' 1843 novella A Christmas Carol.
Īn article in the March 1824 issue of The Gentleman's Magazine complains that, in London, no Christmas carols are heard "excepting some croaking ballad-singer bawling out 'God rest you, merry gentlemen', or a like doggerel".
O god rest ye merry gentlemen lyrics full#
Hone's version of the tune differs from the present melody in the third line: the full current melody was published by Chappell in 1855. It had been associated with the carol since at least the mid-18th century, when it was recorded by James Nares in a hand-written manuscript under the title "The old Christmas Carol". Soon after, it appeared in a parody published in 1820 by William Hone. The better-known traditional English melody is in the minor mode the earliest printed edition of the melody appears to be in a rondo arrangement for fortepiano by Samuel Wesley, which was already reviewed in 1815. Īlthough there is a second tune known as 'Cornish', in print by 1833 and referred to as "the usual version" in the 1928 Oxford Book of Carols, this version is seldom heard today. Others date it later, to the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries.
Some sources claim that the carol dates as far back as the 16th century. A precisely datable reference to the carol is found in the November 1764 edition of the Monthly Review. The earliest known printed edition of the carol is in a broadsheet dated to c.
It contains a slightly different version of the first line from that found in later texts, with the first line "Sit yo w merry gentlemen" (also transcribed "Sit you merry gentlemen" and "Sit yo u merry gentlemen"). 1827 publication of the melody, set to satirical lyrics by William HoneĪn early version of this carol is found in an anonymous manuscript, dating from the 1650s.
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