envy

The grudging giver's sense: whoever envies here hands something over unwillingly, as Spenser's lady does with the cordial that could restore a lovesick heart. Begrudge now does this work. A reader today will take envy someone something as wanting it for oneself, so in older verse it pays to ask who is holding the thing and who is withholding it.

Older English could use envy for plain enmity, with no wanting in it at all. Malory's knights bear "grete enuye" toward rivals they will meet at the joust, and in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, the hope is that he will outlive the envy of this day, meaning its hostility. In early texts, read the word as ill will first and test whether jealousy fits before assuming it.

The sting is gone from this sense: it names the wish to equal someone, not to resent them. That is why John Ford, around 1631–1636, could write of a "virtuous envy" prompted by cleanliness and decency: a contradiction in the resentful sense. The meaning is obsolete; emulation and rivalry carry it now, and a modern reader takes the word as resentment unless the context plainly shows striving.

Here envy is the public hatred a deed earns, something that could be shifted onto a person like blame. Ben Jonson's Catiline speaks of laying the envy of the war upon Cicero. The meaning is long gone, and a modern reader will hear the envy of the town as what everyone admires, so old uses need a second look.

Only the grammar is old: the feeling is ordinary envy, but the verb once stood alone and took at before what was envied. Robert Burton writes "I do not envy at their wealth" in The Anatomy of Melancholy, and Jeremy Taylor asks who envy at the prosperity of the wicked. Present-day English drops the preposition, so envy at marks a text as old.

Here the feeling turns outward into open spite (railing, speaking with malice) and takes against to mark its target: Shakespeare's Coriolanus, written around 1608–1609, has a man who has "envied against the people". The construction is long dead; a modern writer says rail against or speak ill of, and the surviving verb, to want what another has, is felt rather than shown.

A verb of injury rather than feeling: to envy someone was to wrong them or run them down. In Fletcher and Massinger's The Pilgrim, a speaker who would lie to envy his mistress means to damage her good name. Harm, injure and disparage have taken the meaning over, and an old text using it reads strangely unless the reader expects an act, not a mood.

Hatred taken straight to its object. When Christopher Marlowe's rivals, jealous of the same love, envied each other, they hated each other. Because resenting someone's luck also carries ill will, the two can look alike on the page; the old sense needs no good fortune in the other person to set it off.

To hold something up as a model and try to equal it, with no resentment at all. Spenser urges a later age to envy a noble custom, that is, to keep it alive by copying it. The verb pairs with the rivalry sense of the noun; both have long since given their work to emulate and emulation.