A question posted today asks about the Use of “ever” in non-negated sentence, and one answer happens to mention the phrase "ever and anon." That phrase, with the meaning "occasionally or repeatedly," goes back at least as far as Shakespeare, who writes in Henry IV (act 1, scene 3):
And 'twixt his finger and his thumb he held/A pouncet-box, which ever and anon/He gave his nose, and took't away again.
But did "ever and anon" always carry this meaning? The meaning isn't intuitively obvious to me from its components because, in this setting, I think of ever as meaning "always" (though in other situations it can mean "at least once") and anon as meaning "soon" or "later." If not, what was the original meaning of the phrase? If so, how did it emerge from the separate meanings of ever and anon?
Best Answer
Indeed, ever and anon goes back at least as far as Shakespeare, who used it in Henry IV, Part 1. Wikipedia says it "was almost certainly in performance by 1597" and "was entered into the Register of the Stationers Company on 25 Feb. 1598, and first printed in quarto later that year".
But how much earlier does the phrase go?
Probably not much further, as the earliest quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary is also by Shakespeare, in Love's Labour's Lost just a few years earlier:
The OED has the first known publishing as 1598 and Wikipedia says it is "believed to have been written in the mid-1590s for a performance at the Inns of Court before Queen Elizabeth".
Often people claim Shakespeare was the coiner of this-or-that many thousand words in the English language, but it's often the case that as a writer of many famous plays, it's more likely his use has survived the ages when someone else may have written it earlier and we've lost their text. People may have already been using them in unrecorded speech for decades. His use is often the most well-known, and dictionary compilers liked to include his quotations in dictionaries.
As a good example, I found an eight-year antedating in The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (1590, Book II) by Sir Philip Sidney: