The appearance of a variety of English that began to be considered as ‘better’ or more formal favoured the use of other varieties for different literary purposes.
    It is well known that the use of literary dialects in England begins around the fourteenth century with Chaucer’s The Reeve’s Tale. Some dialectal varieties were from the beginning associated with comedy, namely Southern or South-western (e.g. Ben Jonson’s A Tale of a Tub, Udall’s Respublica), Irish (e.g. The Famous History of Captain Thomas Stukeley) and Welsh (cf. Fluellen in Shakespeare’s Henry V); however, Northern and Scottish traits did not have those comical or negative connotations. Playwriters such as Richad Brome reflected northern characteristics to add ‘local colour’ to his plays, as we can appreciate clearly in The Northern Lass (1632) and The Late Lancashire Witches (1634). The analysis of the dialect in these works shows the repetition of spelling structures and variant forms which allows us to conclude the existence of what might be considered a convention in the representation of dialect in literature already in Early Modern English.