"Where the devil should he learn our language?": Shakespeare's Territorial Linguistics (original) (raw)
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Re-presenting Shakespeare: Interpretations and Translations. Ed. Sarbani Chaudhury., 2002
Abstract The phrase ‘Shakespeare’s English’ gives the impression of a homogeneous, cohesive language, complete in itself. Taking Shakespeare’s Henry V as a test case I would like to demonstrate that it is essentially a polyvalent language in the making, with tenuous relationships being established between ‘pure’ English and its dialect versions. Focus on the imperialist agenda of Henry V is now a critical commonplace. A major mode realising this agenda is linguistic imposition. Scot Jamy, Welsh Fluellen and Irish Macmorris are Englished through their contribution to Henry’s triumphant nationalism and through their learning to speak ‘King’s English’, the language of the ruler. Similarly, French Katherine’s right to become the future queen of England is determined by her ability to ‘love in English’. The colonised Other and the defeated Other can share in the dream of United Kingdom provided they ‘articulate’ their Englishness. However, their articulation is English, ‘but not quite’. It is this distance between ‘pure’ English and its inferior dialectical versions as it were, which becomes a paradigm of the fractured nationalist-colonialist discourse. Ironically, only two generations earlier, the superior purity of the English vernacular upon which the play focuses, had been categorised as an inferior and alien Other in relation to Latin, the language of the empowered in England.
Literature Compass, 2006
This contribution to Literature Compass has a threefold purpose. First, it aims to do what it says in the title, and flag up recent approaches to British identities in Shakespeare studies. Secondly, it seeks to remind readers of an earlier and now largely forgotten tradition of nationalist criticism and scholarship preoccupied with the place of Britain-nation, state and empire-that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s. Thirdly, it endeavours to excavate some of the more obscure material on the subject that, because of its place of publication, may have been overlooked. The material collected here covers issues of borders, colonialism, culture, genre, identity, invasion, language, mapping, monarchy, plantation, union, and the matter of Britain, especially in the histories, though as will be seen this work encompasses most of Shakespeare's corpus. The short introductions to each section and the accompanying bibliography of over 300 items, ranging from notes and queries to substantial essays, is divided into six sections, beginning with a brief overview of the historical debate, then focusing on criticism dealing broadly with Britain, then embracing material ordered by constituent nation: England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. That there is an even spread of material under this handful of headings suggests that each and every nation within this multi-nation state, as well as the problematic and often contested whole, has attracted its fair share of critical concern. The Historical Background In recent years, historians and literary critics have become increasingly concerned with the make-up and break-up of the United Kingdom. The specter of an end to Britain has prompted the energetic exploration of British origins and identities. For historians, the early modern period is the time when the cultural and political foundations of modernity were laid, when nationhood and statehood were mapped out. Parallels drawn between the 1590s and the 1990s mean that the Renaissance, and in particular the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, have assumed a special relationship with the present. 'Topicality', the critical preoccupation with the ways in which Shakespeare's drama responds to the circumstances of its own time, now
Language and Literature 29(3): 203-222, 2020
Shakespeare's clearest use of dialect for sociolinguistic reasons can be found in the play Henry V, where we meet the Welshman Captain Fluellen, the Scotsman Captain Jamy, and the Irishman Captain Macmorris. But what might contemporary audiences have made of these Celtic characters? What popular understandings of Celtic identities did Shakespeare's characters trigger? Recent technological developments, largely in the domain of corpus linguistics, have enabled us to construct robust but nuanced answers to such questions. In this paper, we use CQPweb, a corpus analysis tool developed by Andrew Hardie at Lancaster University, to explore Celtic identity terms in a corpus developed by the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare's Language Project. This corpus contains some 380 million words spanning the 80-year period 1560-1639, and allows us to tap into the attitudes and stereotypes that would have become entrenched in the years leading up to Henry V's appearance in 1599. We will show how the words tending to co-occur with the words Scots/Scottish, Irish and Welsh reveal contemporary understandings of these identities. Results flowing from the analyses of collocates include the fact that the Irish were considered wild and savage, but also that the word Irish had one particular positive use-when modifying the word rug. In discussing our findings, we will take note of critical discussions, both present-day and early modern, on 'nationhood' in relation to these characters and identities. We will also conduct, partly for contrastive purposes, a brief analysis of the English identity.
Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’
Shakespeare's Englishes, 2019
Shakespeare and 'the King's English' Language, History, Power An 'antiquated phrase', as Patrick Parrinder has remarked, 'the King's' or 'the Queen's English' has nevertheless continued to exert a hold as a 'notion or fiction of cultural ownership'. This chapter offers a history of the emergence and use of this trope as a context for a fresh analysis of language, history and power in The Merry Wives of Windsor and the second tetralogy. The only play in the canon to feature 'the King's English' and 'our English'two representations of ownership of the national vernacular which, I argue, are in tension in the Folio, if not the Quarto () version of the play-Merry Wives is significantly Shakespeare's one English comedy. It is too his one essay in, or engagement with, the emergent genre of citizen comedy which appropriates centre stage for citizens and citizen ideology as, I argue, 'the King's English' is mobilised to appropriate the centre of cultural ownership for citizen 'plainness'. For 'the King's English' (or its variants, 'the Queen's English', 'the king's language') is used from the first instances, not descriptively, as scholars have assumed but as a rhetorical and ideological tool in negative performative utterances which define the centre it represents through exclusions of what it is not. Patrick Parrinder, 'Shakespeare and (Non)Standard English', European English Messenger (), . As I pointed out in Chapter , the national vernacular is a focus of attention in F only. Specifically, Q features 'our English' in the important scene (.) discussed below, but not 'the King's English' (..) or the 'gallimaufry' (..), which is almost as explicit a linguistic trope. Quotations from the Q text are taken from the facsimile reproduction in The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. Melchiori, -. The assumption hampers the otherwise valuable work of Paula Blank who, though recognising that 'the precise nature of the King's English had yet to be articulated', consistently regards it as an elite variety of English that was actually practised at court and in the city of London, which she tends, moreover, to conflate, not recognising the crucial ideological differencesand tensionbetween the two. Blank, Broken English, . See too David Crystal, The Stories of English (London: Penguin, ), .
Shakespeare's Bastard Nation: Skepticism and the English Isle in King John
Shakespeare Quarterly, 2018
This essay explores the troublesome question of English national identity in Shakespeare’s King John, a strikingly skeptical history play that often appears to subvert more than support any cohesive notion of English nationhood. I argue, however, that the play’s skeptical attitude towards English identity and legitimacy ultimately leads to a surprisingly robust conception of the English nation, one based less on the monarch than on the material ground of the island of England itself. In dramatizing the historical King John’s loss of his Angevin Empire’s Continental territories, Shakespeare actually endorses the reduction of that nebulous Franco-English realm into “This England,” a providentially ordained and “water-walled” island state. Now geographically separated from its French ancestor and rival, “England” as such arrives by the end of King John at a more concrete and clearly defined sense of itself as a nation. In a play whose chief English patriot is the Bastard Falconbridge, however, this new national selfhood also involves a strong and positive sense of England as a “bastard” nation—a heterogeneous mixture of French and English roots that endows Shakespeare’s island race with its own unique character, strength, and possibilities for future adaptation.
Shakespeare and Linguistic Change
Shakespeare's status as an ultra-canonical writer often creates the illusion that he arose at a stable moment in the development of the English language. In fact, the language in which he wrote was a hybrid tongue that was only beginning to be viewed as legitimate and worthy of serious attention. It was subject to many changes, preceding, during and following Shakespeare's lifetime. In turn, Shakespeare's plays have been inherited by newer linguistic cultures in England and worldwide. The relationship of linguistic change to Shakespeare can best be framed both in very local ways, in terms of what individual words mean, as well as very global perspectives, in terms of how Shakespeare has become part of our multicultural world. Various periods can be marked to help delineate these frames of reference: linguistic change in England before Shakespeare, the changes that occurred during his lifetime, the place of his original works in shifting theatrical and critical reception, the role of translation in understanding what "Shakespeare" means, and finally shifts in poststructuralist conceptions of the role of language in literature and history.