The first heading, with three sources quoted, shows how the word has been used to mean, literally, ‘the chief personage in a drama’; the next three quotations demonstrate a subtle difference, in which the word means ‘the leading personage in any contest’, or ‘a prominent supporter or champion of any cause’. By general consent this second meaning is the more modern; the first is the older and now somewhat archaic version.
The oldest quotation ever used to illustrate the first of these two meanings was that tracked down by the Dictionary’s lexical detectives from the writings of John Dryden in 1671. ‘’Tis charg’d upon me,’ the quotation reads, ‘that I make debauch’d Persons… my protagonists, or the chief persons of the drama.’
This, from a lexicographical point of view, seems to be the English word’s mother-lode, a fair clue that the word may well have been introduced into the written language in that year, and possibly not before. (But the OED offers no guarantee. German scholars in particular are constantly deriving much pleasure from winning an informal lexicographic contest that aims at antedating OED quotations: at the last count the Germans alone had found 35,000 instances in which the OED quotation was not the first; others, less stridently, chalk up their own small triumphs of lexical sleuthing, all of which Oxford’s editors accept with disdainful equanimity, professing neither infallibility nor monopoly.)
This single quotation for protagonist is peculiarly neat, moreover, in that Dryden explicitly states the newly minted word’s meaning within the sentence. So from the Dictionary editors’ point of view there is a double benefit, of having the word’s origin dated and its meaning explained, and both by a single English author.
Finding and publishing quotations of usage is an imperfect way of making pronouncements about origins and meanings, of course – but to nineteenth-century lexicographers it was the best way that had yet been devised, and it is a method that has not yet been bettered. From time to time experts succeed in challenging specific findings like this, and on occasions the Dictionary is forced to recant, is obliged to accept a new and earlier quotation, and to give to a particular word a longer history than the Oxford editors first thought. Happily protagonist itself has not so far been successfully challenged on grounds of its chronology. So far as the OED is concerned, 1671 still stands: the word has for 300 odd years been a member of that giant corpus known as the English vocabulary.
The word appears again, and with a new supporting quotation, in the 1933 supplement – a volume that had to be added because of the sheer weight of new words and new evidence of new meanings that had accumulated during the decades when the original Dictionary was being compiled. By now another shade of meaning had been found for it – that of ‘a leading player at some game or sport’. A sentence supporting this, from a 1908 issue of The Complete Lawn Tennis Player, is produced in evidence.
But then comes the controversy. The other great book on the English language, Henry Fowler’s hugely popular Modern English Usage, first published in 1926, insisted – contrary to what Dryden had been quoted as saying in the OED – that protagonist is a word that can only ever be used in the singular.
Any use suggesting the contrary would be grammatically utterly wrong. And not just wrong, Fowler declares, but absurd. It would be nonsense to suggest that there could ever be two characters in a play, both of whom could be described as the most important. One either is the most important person, or one is not.
It took more than half a century before the OED decided to settle the matter. The 1981 supplement, in the classically magisterial way of the Dictionary, tries to calm the excitable (and now, as it happens, late) Mr Fowler. It offers a new quotation, reinforcing the view that the word can be used plurally or singularly as the need arises. George Bernard Shaw, it says, wrote in 1950 that ‘living actors have to learn that they too must be invisible while the protagonists are conversing, and therefore must not move a muscle nor change their expression’. Perhaps Fowler’s great linguistic authority was technically correct but, the Dictionary explains in an expanded version of its 1928 definition, perhaps only in the specific terms of Greek theatre, for which the word was first devised.
In the common-sense world of modern English – the world which, after all, the great Dictionary was designed to fix and define – it is surely quite reasonable to have two or more leading players in any story. Many dramas have room for more than one hero, and both or all may be equally heroic. If the Ancient Greeks were one-hero dramatists, then so be it. In the rest of the world, there could be as many as the dramatists cared to write parts for.
Now there is a twenty-volume second edition of the OED, with all the material from the supplements fully integrated with the original work, and new words and forms that have emerged in the years since inserted as needs be. In that edition protagonist appears in what is currently considered to be its true fixity: with three main meanings, and nineteen supporting quotations. Dryden’s remains unaltered, the first appearance of the word, and in the plural; and to give even greater weight to the notion that plural is a perfectly acceptable form, both The Times and the thriller-writer and medievalist Dorothy L. Sayers are quoted, in addition to Shaw. The word is thus now properly lexically set for all time, and is stated by the almost unchallengeable authority of the OED to be available for use in either the singular or the multiple.
Which happens to be just as well, considering, and to reiterate the point, the existence of two protagonists in this story.
The first one, as is already clear, is Dr William Chester Minor, the admitted and insane American murderer. The other is a man whose lifetime was more or less coincident with Minor’s, although it was different in almost all its other aspects: he was named James Augustus Henry Murray. The lives of the two men were over the years to become inextricably and most curiously entwined.
And, moreover, both were to be entwined with the OED, since James Murray was to become for the last forty years of his life its greatest and most justly famous editor.
James Murray was born in February 1837, the eldest son of a tailor and linen-draper in Hawick, a pretty little market town in the valley of the River Teviot, in the Scottish borderlands. And that was about all that he really wished the world to know about himself. ‘I am a nobody,’ he would write towards the end of the century, when fame had begun to creep up on him. ‘Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether.’
But it has long since proved impossible to ignore him, as he was to become a towering figure in British scholarship. Honours were showered on him during his lifetime, and he has achieved the standing of a mythic hero since his death. Murray’s childhood alone, which was unmasked twenty years ago by his granddaughter Elisabeth, who opened his trunk of papers, hints temptingly that he was destined – despite his unpromising, unmonied, unsophisticated beginnings – for extraordinary things.