Spenser, Scott, and the Erroneous Origins of ‘Derring-Do’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Some words arise purely by accident. Indeed, even names are sometimes formed because of a mistake: the most famous example is probably Imogen, which is thought to have come about because the Celtic name Innogen (meaning ‘maiden’ or ‘daughter’) was misread as ‘Imogen’.

It’s all Shakespeare’s fault: the name ‘Innogen’ is listed in early stage directions for Much Ado about Nothing, where she’s the silent wife of Leonato and the mother of Hero. But she has no spoken lines and is completely cut from most modern editions of the play, so most people haven’t heard of her. What they do remember is the character Imogen (as it’s usually spelt) who appears in Cymbeline. But ‘Imogen’ was probably originally ‘Innogen’.

A fairly imocuous nnistake, you might say.

Less well-known than the Imogen-Innogen mix-up is the case of ‘derring-do’. It’s a fairly familiar noun phrase referring to brave acts (or simply ‘boldness’), but its origins are less familiar. Because ‘derring-do’ arose because of a misunderstanding.

In the Middle Ages, there was a verb phrase, ‘dorring do’, which in modern English would mean ‘daring to do’. As John Ayto points out in his Dictionary of Word Origins, ‘dorren’ was the Middle English form of our verb ‘dare’. When some medieval texts were printed in the sixteenth century, ‘dorring do’ was somehow erroneously rendered as ‘derring do’.

It was a misprint, that’s all. But it stuck.

People often misunderestimate (as George W. Bush might say) the influence that a simple misprint can have. Arguably the biggest mystery in all of English literature, namely who the elusive ‘Mr W. H.’ was who was mentioned in the 1609 printing of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, is probably the result of ‘Mr W. Sh’ (or ‘Mr W. S.’ being misprinted. As Don Foster has shown in a PMLA article, the mystery man to whom the sonnets were dedicated was almost certainly just William Shakespeare himself.

But people wanted there to be some big clue to the addressee of the Sonnets (or at least the first 126 of them) lurking in that enigmatic dedication, so they insisted on taking the ‘W. H.’ initials at face value. And the confusion and mystery are what stuck.

As for ‘derring do’, that stuck, too. When Shakespeare’s contemporary, Edmund Spenser, encountered one of these editions of medieval writings, he spotted the phrase ‘derring do’ and stored it away for future use.

It was right up Spenser’s street, as it happens, because he loved to write in archaic (even for his time) English which harked back to Chaucer and the Middle Ages. This is especially true of his vast unfinished epic poem, The Faerie Queene. This is a poem all about knights and quests and courage and … well, daring. So ‘derring do’ was the perfect phrase to describe a lot of what’s going on.

Only Spenser changed it. ‘Dorring do’ had been a verb phrase – ‘daring to do’ – and even when it was misprinted as ‘derring do’ in sixteenth-century editions, it was still a verb phrase. Spenser decided it was better off as a noun, so he used ‘derring do’ to mean ‘boldness’, such as in Book VI Canto V:

And soothly it was sayd by common fame,
So long as age enabled him thereto,
That he had bene a man of mickle name,
Renowmed much in armes and derring doe:

Earlier in the poem, we find a reference to ‘mightie men and dreadfull derring dooers’. I can think of worse titles for a new Netflix superhero series, maybe with Alan Ritchson in a lead role.

The thing is, The Faerie Queene was hugely influential on a whole host of writers who followed Spenser (who was, in many ways, the poet’s poet). This is especially true when the Romantics arrived. John Keats loved Spenser. The only reason most people don’t read it now is that Spenser only finished writing half of it, and it’s still comfortably over 1,000 pages in most editions. It’s like War and Peace, only with fewer Russians.

And then, also in the early nineteenth century, another writer who loved the Middle Ages and did much to romanticise them in his work picked up Spenser’s phrase and popularised it all over again. But he was a novelist as well as a poet: Sir Walter Scott.

Ivanhoe (1819) was enormously popular. The book’s impact was instantaneous and far-reaching. John Henry Newman asserted that it ‘had first turned men’s minds in the direction of the middle ages’, while Thomas Carlyle argued that Scott’s novel had caused a revival of interest in history in general.

In the novel, Wilfred declares, ‘I will put my faith in the good knight whose axe hath rent heart-of-oak and bars of iron.—Singular […] if there be two who can do a deed of such derring-do!’

The shift from ‘dorring do’ to ‘derring do’ – and from ‘derring do’ as a verb phrase to a noun phrase – was complete. Now, go and read all of The Faerie Queene. I double derre you.