French speech as dramatic action in Shakespeare's Henry V (original) (raw)
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Babel on the Battlefield. Englishing the French in Shakespeare’s Henry V
2015
- This paper examines Shakespeare’s Henry V from the perspective of the play’s deep concern with languages and with the dynamics of their interaction. The drama is characterised by linguistic heterogeneity of various kinds, from the blatant bilingualism that sets it apart from other plays in the canon, to the welter of regional dialects, personal idiolects, and stylistic registers that are also played off against one another within it. At the same time as it enacts a confrontation between the English and French tongues, and the mentalities and cultural codes they respectively encode, it also juxtaposes different voices articulating contrasting evaluations of events and discrepant perceptions of the protagonist himself. The linguistic multiplicity of the play is therefore part and parcel of the ambivalence of attitude with which recent criticism of the play has increasingly been concerned. At the same time, it also implicates issues having to do with translation and other forms of cu...
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.
"Capapea", "comedie", and the Amleth myth: rereading Shakespeare's French in 'Hamlet'
Please contact me if you wish to read any of this work directly. Presented as part of 'Playing With Source Materials: Alterations and Shakespeare's Creative Fabric' at the NeMLA 'Global Spaces, Local Landscapes, and Imagined Worlds' conference, Omni William Penn Hotel, Pittsburgh, PA, April 12, 2018. This paper considers Shakespeare’s use of non-Anglophone sources and dialect within 'Hamlet'. Beneath the question of this play’s three texts and their chronology is a question of origin, which is made more interesting in light of the play’s narrative source, the Amleth myth. This is most likely to have reached Shakespeare via a French translation of a Latin collection of tales by a Danish academic: 'Les Histoires Tragiques' by François de Belleforest. Putting aside any questions about an ‘ur-Hamlet’, the Shakespearean "translation" of this tale exists in multiple iterations that appear to respond to a second francophone source: the 'Essais' of Michel de Montaigne. Only a hundred or so years earlier, Anglo-Norman was still a widely-spoken dialect on English soil. In light of Ardis Butterfield’s extensive work on Chaucer’s multiple vernaculars, this paper conceptualises Shakespeare’s English as a French dialect of the language. English worked – and perhaps still works – as a language between languages “based on a system of double derivation…at once Germanic and Romance” (George Watson, ‘Shakespeare and the Norman Conquest’, 617). Furthermore, the Renaissance printing industry is testament to the ways in which dialectical aspects of English were not limited to Shakespeare’s work. If 'Hamlet' is a translational act, then Shakespeare’s "Englishness" can be somewhat decentralised. Instead, his "French English" contributes an example along the continuum of English, both then and now.
Be Copy Now: Retroalimentación y dialéctica de la vida y el teatro en Shakespeare (Henry V, 3.1)
Analizamos en este artículo uno de los parlamentos del rey Enrique ante sus tropas, en "Enrique V" de Shakespeare. El análisis se centra en la imaginería sexual y la asociación simbólica de guerra, agresión y sexualidad; en la dimensión metadramática de este episodio, y en la teoría del sujeto y del drama en Shakespeare, extendiendo algunas implicaciones de su analogía entre el teatro y el mundo a la luz de una teoría de la performatividad y del acto de habla, tal como ha sido desarrollada por J. L. Austin y J. Hillis Miller.
Ferdinand: You are a good horseman, Antonio. You have excellent riders in France. What do you think of good horsemanship? The Duchess of Malfi 1.1.141-3 1 Ferdinand's characterization of Antonio as a "good horseman" in Webster's The Duchess of Malfi reflects Antonio's occupation. But "good horseman" is also a nuanced characterization that speaks to Antonio's time in France and to Antonio's relationship to Ferdinand's widowed sister, the Duchess. It is therefore crucial to remember that an early modern English audience would hear (not read) the jealous Ferdinand's dialogue. What looks to a reader like "horseman" can be processed by listeners as horseman and "whores-man"-a lascivious insult that attempts to make Antonio a panderer and the Duchess a prostitute. Yet sexually charged puns on "horse" or "horseman" are not restricted to The Duchess of Malfi. The auditory construction of Italian or French characters as hyper-sexualized stereotypes-by way of horse puns-appears in various early modern English texts and dramas. These double entendres elicit a community of insiders: in this case, an English-speaking audience who "gets" the pun on Continental outsiders. Indeed, puns on horses and horsemanship in early modern English texts such as Sidney's An Apology for Poetry, as well as in dramas such as Webster's The