Abstract
This chapter is concerned with the multifarious ways in which error is gendered. It argues that women’s language is often represented as error despite women being the defenders of the ‘mother tongue’, the guardians of the vernacular. This association between women and nation through language remains fractious, as it relies on the necessity and even centrality of women to the nation, yet in practice women are prevented from exercising this power by the devaluation of their speech. This chapter takes the character of Errour in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590) as embodying many of the stereotypical and harmful contemporary associations about the mother tongue. It juxtaposes this orthodox representation with some of Shakespeare’s mother tongues and their relation to faultiness, such as Mistress Quickly in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597), the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet (1594–1595) and the male-mother tongue of Falstaff in 1 Henry IV (1597–1598). Rather than straightforwardly putting women in error as Spenser does, Shakespeare complicates the form, intention and semantic possibility of the female error.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Friedrich Wilhelm Daniel Brie, ed., The Brut, or The Chronicles of England (London: English Text Society, 1960), 2 Vols., Vol. 1, p. 315.
- 2.
William Tyndale, Obedience of a Christen Man (London, 1528), especially pp. xiii–xvi, EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 1 May 2018].
- 3.
Thomas Cooper, Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (1584), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 1 May 2018].
- 4.
Anthony Gilby, An ansvver to the deuillish detection of Stephane Gardiner, (1548), Fol. LLvii, EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 27 February 2018].
- 5.
Gilby, An ansvver to the deuillish detection of Stephane Gardiner, Fol. LLvii.
- 6.
John Cooke, Greenes Tu quoque, or, The cittie gallant, (1614), Sig. J4r., EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 1 May 2018].
- 7.
John Florio, His First Fruits (1578), p. 51 v., EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 9 March 2018].
- 8.
Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 9 March 2018].
- 9.
See ‘inkhorn’, OED at www.oed.com [date accessed 3 March 2018]. Ralph Lever, for example, refers to ‘the inkhorne termes deriued of straunge and forain languages’. Ralph Lever, The Arte of Reason, Rightly Termed, Witcraft Teaching a Perfect Way to Argue and Dispute (London, 1573), Sig.* vi r., EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 13 June 2018].
- 10.
Edmund Spenser’s ‘E.K.’ exploits the metaphorical associations of the ‘mother tongue’, attributing its ‘barrenness’ to the forgetting of ‘naturall’ English words. ‘E.K.’ claims that this poet ‘hath laboured to restore, as to theyr rightfull heritage such good and naturall English words, as haue ben long time out of vse & almost cleare disherited. VVhich is the onely cause, that our Mother tonge, […] hath long time ben cou~red most bare & barrein […] which default when as some endeuoured to salue & recure, they patched vp the holes with peces & rags of other languages’. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London, 1579), Sig. q.iii v., EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 13 June 2018].
- 11.
George Puttenham, The arte of English poesie (London, 1589), p. 120, EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 14 June 2018].
- 12.
Edmund Coote echoes Florio’s sentiment: ‘Since the time of Chaucer, more Latin, and French has been mingled with our tongue then left out of it, but of late we have fallen to such borrowing of words from Latin, French, and other tongues, that it has been beyond all stay, and limit, which albeit some of us do like well, and think our tongue thereby much better, yet do strangers therefore carry the far less opinion thereof, some saying that it is of itself no language at all, but the scum of many languages, others that it is most barren, and that we are daily fain to borrow words for it (as though it yet lacked making) out of other languages to patch it up withall, and that it we were put to repay our borrowed speech back again, to the languages that may lay claim unto it, we shall be left little better than dumb, or scarcely able to speak any thing that should be sensible’. Coote, The English schoole-maister (1596), Sig. Cc3 v., EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 9 March 2018]. See John Florio discussed above.
- 13.
Sir Philip Sidney, An apologie for poetrie (1595), K4r., EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 14 June 2018].
- 14.
Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), p. 3. For more on the development of English at this time, see R. F. Jones, The Triumph of the English Language: A Survey of Opinions Concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953); Manfred Görlach, Introduction to Early Modern English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Charles Barber, Early Modern English (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997); and Neil Rhodes, Shakespeare and the Origins of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
- 15.
Claire McEachern, ‘Literature and National Identity’, The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, eds. David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 313–342, 325.
- 16.
McEachern, ‘Literature and National Identity’, p. 325.
- 17.
Robert Cawdrey, Table Alphabeticall (London, 1604), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 20 June 2018].
- 18.
John Rastell, An Exposition of Certaine Difficult and Obscure Wordes, and Termes of the Lawes of This Realme (London, 1579); John Bulloker, An English Expositor Teaching the Interpretation of the Hardest Words vsed in Our Language (London, 1616). See also John Baret, An aluearie or quadruple dictionarie containing foure sundrie tongues: namelie, English, Latine, Greeke, and French (London 1580), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 14 June 2018].
- 19.
Emma Smith, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 73.
- 20.
Emma Smith, ‘“So Much English by the Mother”: Gender, Foreigners, and the Mother Tongue in William Haughton’s “Englishmen for My Money”’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Vol. 13 (2001), 165–181, p. 165. Janette Dillon concurs with Smith in broader historico-political terms: ‘The construction of “England” remained firmly entrenched in the definition and exclusion of otherness, whether racial, religious or political’. Janette Dillon, Language and Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 168–169.
- 21.
Samuel Daniel, Musophilius: Containing a General Defence of All learning (1599), ed. R. Himelick (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1965), p. 86.
- 22.
Richard Mulcaster, Elementarie (London, 1582), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 14 June 2018].
- 23.
Terttu Nevalainen, ‘Early Modern English Lexis and Semantics’, in The Cambridge History of the English Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 332–348, 332, 338.
- 24.
Puttenham advises poets to use English that is ‘naturall, pure, and the most vsuall of all his countrey’, yet one into which ‘corruptions’ can be introduced ‘that creepe along with the time’, clearly asserting that there exists a pure language which it is possible to adulterate. He worries about the ‘many straunge termes of other languages by Secretaries and Marchaunts and trauailours, and many darke wordes and not vsuall nor well sounding, though they be dayly spoken in Court’. Puttenham, The arte of English poesie, pp. 120–121.
- 25.
Juan Luis Vives, A Very Frutefull and Pleasant Boke Called the Instructio[n] of a Christen Woma[n] (London, 1529). Sig. m.ii.r.
- 26.
Potter argues that ‘the scapegoating of mothers was a rhetorical strategy by the pedagogical authors, who used it as an oblique means of targeting paternal resistance to their education programs’. Ursula Potter, ‘Cockering Mothers and Humanist Pedagogy in Two Tudor School Plays’, Kari Boyd McBride, ed., Domestic Arrangements in Early Modern England (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002), pp. 244–278, 246.
- 27.
Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 1380–1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 2.
- 28.
Rhetorical writers, such as Erasmus in Lingua (1525), codified the excesses of the male tongue as ‘womanish’. Parker, ‘On the Tongue’, pp. 446–447.
- 29.
Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, Sig. aiij r.
- 30.
Richard Rainolde, A booke called the Foundacion of rhetorike (London, 1563), Sig. Ai r., EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 14 June 2018].
- 31.
Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne eds., Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 6. Literature which advocates silencing women has been surveyed by Suzanne Hull in Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475–1640 (San Marino: The Huntingdon Library 1982).
- 32.
Richard Brathwaite, The English Gentlewoman (London, 1631), p. 90, EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 14 June 2018].
- 33.
Joseph Swetnam, The arraignment of leuud, idle, forward, and vnconstant women (1615), p. 28, EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 14 June 2018].
- 34.
Swetnam, The arraignment of leuud, idle, forward, and vnconstant women, p. 40.
- 35.
Bernard Garter and William Goldinham, The Ioyfull Receyuing of the Queenes most excellent Maiestie into hir Highnesse Citie of Norwich (London: Henry Bynneman, 1578), Sig. F4v.-r., EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 13 April 2018].
- 36.
The iconography surrounding Queen Elizabeth is diverse, complex and too large for full discussion here. For a replete survey see Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1995).
- 37.
Anthony Munday, A Watch-woord to Englande (1584), Sig. A3, quoted in E C. Wilson, England’s Eliza (London: Frank Cass, 1966), p. 218.
- 38.
John Aylmer, An harborovve for faithfull and trevve subiectes (1559), Sig. R.r., EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 2 April 2018].
- 39.
Elizabeth I, Elizabeth I: Collected Works, eds. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), p. 72.
- 40.
Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen, p. 7.
- 41.
Elsewhere Hackett argues that maternal imagery is used to naturalise female rule in the face of opposition to the monarch on sexist grounds from writers such as John Knox in his The first blast of the trumpet against the monstruous regiment of women (1558).
- 42.
Aylmer, An harborovve for faithfull and trevve subiectes, Sig. N4v., Q3v., EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 2 April 2018].
- 43.
Rhodes, The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), p. 173.
- 44.
Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England explores in intricate detail the metaphors between birth and books. As Margreta de Grazia notes ‘The textual imprint as child recurs in preliminaries to early modern books, putting into play the semantics shared by biological and textual reproduction: of issue, generation, copying, duplication, multiplying, engraving and gravidity; of textual and sexual inscriptions that survive the grave through enduring ideas and successive children; of two types of lines, scripted and genealogical which promise to extend the parent/author beyond death’. Margreta de Grazia, ‘Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg and Descartes’, Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 29–58, 35.
- 45.
Jacques Guillemeau (trans. unknown) Child-birth or, The happy deliuerie of vvomen (1612), p. 99, Sig. N2r.
- 46.
In 3 Henry VI Queen Margaret describes Warwick as ‘long-tongued’, suggestive of his great political facility in language (2.2.102), an interpretation supported by his being ‘a subtle orator’ (3.1.33). John Cox and Eric Rasmussen gloss ‘long-tongued’ as ‘having much to say’, which omits this historical meaning. Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI, ed. John Cox and Eric Rasmussen (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001), p. 262.
- 47.
Parker has explored the significance of the bridled female tongue, contesting the representation of women as ‘unflappable talkers’. Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 26. See also Lynda E. Boose, ‘Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Summer, 1991), pp. 179–213. Shakespeare employs the image of the bridle with the tongue of Cressida: ‘My thoughts were like unbridled children, grown | Too headstrong for their mother. See, we fools! | Why have I blabbed?’ (3.2.111–3). Cressida figures children as the product of the mind as well as the body, and through them the metaphor explicitly equates female sexuality with unrestrained language. Cressida’s thoughts have escaped her, leading her to speak incoherently: her excessive words are children, her thoughts and sexuality grown too large.
- 48.
Nicolas Grimald, ‘To the Reader’, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Marcus Tullius Ciceroes thre bokes of duties (1556), Sig. CC vii., EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 20 June 2018].
- 49.
Nicolas Culpepper, ‘To the Reader’, A Directory for Midwives (London, 1651), Sig. A4v., EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 20 June 2018].
- 50.
For a more optimistic reading of Shakespeare’s women marshalling the power of classical literature to deliver powerfully moving speech, see Heather James who argues that ‘Shakespeare’s learned heroines read, quote, and adapt Ovid’s work and aim for his bold eloquence if not his fame’. James, ‘Shakespeare’s Learned Heroines in Ovid’s Schoolroom’, Shakespeare and the Classics, eds. Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 66–86.
- 51.
Walter Ong, ‘Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite’, in Studies in Philology, Vol. 56, No. 2 (1959), pp. 103–124, 106. The distinction between male and female language driven by the exclusion of women from education is upheld by Rhodes, The Power of Eloquence, pp. 172–185. See also Danielle Clarke, ‘Speaking Women: Rhetoric and the Construction of Female Talk’, in Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 70–88.
- 52.
Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), p. 22. See also 15–19.
- 53.
See Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, pp. 98–105; Parker, ‘Construing Gender: Mastering Bianca in “The Taming of the Shrew”’, in The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance Studies, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 193–209; Joel Fineman, ‘The Turn of the Shrew’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 138–159.
- 54.
Jenny Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), pp. 146–147; Elizabeth Pittenger, ‘Dispatch Quickly: The Mechanical Reproduction of Pages’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Winter, 1991), 389–409; Parker, Literary Fat Ladies.
- 55.
Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion, p. 23. Jeff Dolven also centralises the impact of grammar-school training on early modern writers, arguing that it is ‘a scene to which the imagination of these writers (especially Lyly and Sidney) returns with surprising frequency and intensity’. Jeffrey Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 10.
- 56.
Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, pp. 27–31.
- 57.
Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, p. 118.
- 58.
Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, Sig. qi v.
- 59.
Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (London, 1550), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 13 May 2018], Sig. Ii v.
- 60.
Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, Sig. Biiii v.
- 61.
Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, Sig. qi v.
- 62.
Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, Sig. Biiii v.
- 63.
Thomas Elyot in The boke named the Governour (London, 1531), has an alternative fantasy of a Latin-speaking wet nurse. See Nicholson, Common Tongues, pp. 24–27.
- 64.
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. René Weis (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2012), p. 220.
- 65.
Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Norton Shakespeare, pp. 897–903, 899.
- 66.
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 125.
- 67.
See Judith Weil, Service and Dependency in Shakespeare’s Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Linda Anderson, A Place in the Story: Servants and Service in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005); Mary Ellen Lamb, The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson (London; New York: Routledge, 2008); and Jeffrey S. Doty, Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
- 68.
Lamb, ‘“Macbeth” and Old Wives’ Tales: Gendering Conflicts in Burke’s Amphibious Subject’, Literature and Culture in Early Modern England, eds. Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 179–191, 179–180. See also Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘Introduction’, in Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts, eds., Mary Ellen Lamb and Karen Bamford (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
- 69.
Pamela Allen Brown, Better a Shrew Than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 4.
- 70.
Doty, Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere.
- 71.
Brown and Laura Gowing both suggest that sexual honour was overwhelmingly a female concern. Brown, Better a Shrew, p. 45; Gowing, ‘Language, Power, and the Law: Women’s Slander Litigation in Early Modern London’, in Women, Crime, and the Courts in Early Modern England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), pp. 26–47.
- 72.
Stanley Wells, ‘Juliet’s Nurse: The Uses of Inconsequentiality’, in Romeo and Juliet: Critical Essays, ed. John F. Andrews (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 197–214, 211.
- 73.
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, p. 125.
- 74.
See note at 2.4.146, Romeo and Juliet, ed. Brian Gibbons (London: Methuen, 1980). Jill Levenson, however, in the Oxford edition (2000) does not highlight it as a problem, nor does Blakemore Evans in The Riverside Shakespeare or the Cambridge edition.
- 75.
William Weaver, Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), p. 124. He claims that her ‘seemingly gratuitous declamations and ruminations have a clear instrumentality and further illustrate not only the disciplines of rhetoric but also the historical process of becoming proficient in the adolescent study and style’, p. 125.
- 76.
Weaver states: ‘I do not wish to press the analogy between Lucrece and a schoolboy; what I wish to demonstrate is a homology between her use of the progymnasmata and their ritual function in the humanist grammar school’, p. 124. Nevertheless, he leaves her gendered speaking position unaddressed.
- 77.
Nancy Vickers, ‘“The blazon of sweet beauty’s best”: Shakespeare’s “Lucrece”’, Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds., Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 95–115.
- 78.
Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare Warriors, Wounds and Women (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 29.
- 79.
Phyllis Rackin, ‘Women’s Roles in the Elizabethan History Plays’ in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays, ed. Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 71–88, p. 73.
- 80.
Coriolanus’s Volumnia is another significant, embattled military mother and powerful speaker. See Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare Warriors, Wounds and Women (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 144–159.
- 81.
See Q1 (1595), Q2 (1600), and Q3 (1619) of 3 Henry VI at British Library Treasures, http://www.bl.uk/treasures [accessed 20 July 2018].
- 82.
Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, eds., Evans and Tobin, p. 744.
- 83.
There is only one other moment where it is uncertain who is speaking: between Edward and Clarence. The Second Folio allows Edward to continue speaking but the First Folio gives these lines to Clarence: ‘Since when his oath is broke; for as I hear, | you that are king, though he do wear the crown, | Have caused him, by new act of Parliament, | To blot out me and put his own son in’ (2.2.89–92). The Norton Shakespeare deems this textual variant too insignificant to mention. See ‘Textual Variants’ in Richard Duke of York, eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus (London: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 368.
- 84.
Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin identify Margaret’s emergence in response to overwhelming male dominance which would restrain women under normal circumstances. They argue, ‘Margaret’s prominence in the action immediately suggests a weakness in the patriarchal structures that should have rendered her less visible and less powerful’. Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 84.
- 85.
John Bartlett, A Complete Concordance of Shakespeare (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990).
- 86.
Alison Findlay notes that ‘[f]emale tongues are credited with the power to poison, tempt and deceive’, which is consistent with York’s description of Margaret as one ‘whose tongue more poisons than the adder’s tooth’ (1.4.113). Findlay, Women in Shakespeare, p. 401.
- 87.
Edmund Spenser, Epigraph to Book I, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas Roche, Jr. (London: Penguin, 1978).
- 88.
As Catherine Bates points out ‘it is specifically a mistaken reading which embodies error for Spenser, both in the Redcrosses misreading and the figure of Errour which represents biblical misinterpretation and misplaced faith’. Bates, ‘“The Faerie Queene”: Britain’s National Monument’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Epic, ed. Catherine Bates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 133–145, 138. Andrew Hadfield argues that The Faerie Queene has an anti-Catholic agenda and compares Errour and the later female figure of Duessa, both poisonous and destructive, with a Roman Catholic threat. Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 131.
- 89.
Thomas Cranmer, ‘A Preface to the Reader’, Defence of the True and Catholick Doctrine of the Sacrament (1550) in Writings and Disputations of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844), p. 7.
- 90.
Referring to men, women and children, Pilkington asks ‘Howe can they be learned, havinge none to teache them but Sir John mumble-matins?’ See James Pilkington, Aggeus and Abdius Prophetes (1562), EEBO available at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 29 June 2018]. As Carla Mazzio points out, ‘In Protestant polemic, the Catholic liturgy was deemed unintelligible both for individual utterance and for communal participation’. Carla Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), p. 10.
- 91.
As Mazzio claims, the phrase ‘mumble vp’ was first used by William Tyndale in 1528 to describe Roman Catholic liturgical speech. ‘Nether care they but even to mumble vp so moch every daye (as the pye and popygay speake the wote not what) to fyll their belyes with all. Yf they will not lat the laye man have the words of God in his mother tonge yet let the preistes have it which for a greate parte of them doo vnderstonde no latine at all: but synge and saye and patter all daye with the lyppes only that which the herte vnderstondeth not’. See Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christen Man (1528), Sig. xiiii r., and Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance, p. 21.
- 92.
In Literary Fat Ladies, Parker claims Falstaff as one of her ‘fat ladies’, exemplifying the connection between sexually excessive female bodies, women’s garrulity, disorder and delay. She has contributed enormously to understanding the relations between gendered rhetoric and power.
- 93.
For a discussion of the male mother see Suzanne Penuel, ‘Male Mothering and The Tempest’ in Performing Maternity in Early Modern England, eds. Kathryn Moncrief and Kathryn McPherson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 115–130.
- 94.
Valerie Traub reads Falstaff’s reference to his womb biologically as defined specifically by its uniquely female ability to reproduce. See Traub, ‘Prince Hal’s Falstaff: Positioning Psychoanalysis and the Female Reproductive Body’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Winter, 1989), 456–474.
- 95.
For an early modern exploration of the triangulation between ‘lingua’, ‘tongue’ and ‘language’ in drama, see Thomas Tomkis’s Lingua (1607).
- 96.
See ‘womb’, in OED at www.oed.com [accessed 20 July 2018].
- 97.
See Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters (Brighton: Harvester, 1983), p. 131.
Works Cited
Primary Works
Aylmer, John, An harborovve for faithfull and trevve subiectes (1559), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 9 April 2018].
Baret, John An aluearie or quadruple dictionarie containing foure sundrie tongues: namelie, English, Latine, Greeke, and French (London, 1580) at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 14 June 2018].
Blundeville, Thomas, A plaine and full description of Petrus Plancius and his vniuersall Map (1592) contained within Thomas Blundeville, exercises containing sixe treatises (1594), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 14 June 2018].
———, The theoriques of the seuen planets shewing all their diuerse motions (1602), EEBO all at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 19 June 2018].
Brathwaite, Richard, The English Gentlewoman (London, 1631), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 2 June 2018].
Brie, Friedrich Wilhelm Daniel, ed., The Brut, or The chronicles of England (London: English Text Society, 1960), 2 vols.
Bulloker, John, An English expositor teaching the interpretation of the hardest words vsed in our language (London, 1616), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 14 June 2018].
Cawdrey, Robert, Table Alphabeticall (London, 1604), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 20 June 2018].
Cooke, John, Greenes Tu quoque, or, The cittie gallant, 1614, EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 1 May 2018].
Cooper, Thomas, Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (1584), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 1 May 2018].
Coote, Edmund, The English schoole-maister (1596), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 9 March 2018].
Craig, John, The Mother and the Child (1611), EEBO available at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 1 May 2018].
Cranmer, Thomas, ‘A Preface to the Reader’, Defence of the True and Catholick Doctrine of the Sacrament (1550) in Writings and Disputations of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844).
Culpepper, Nicolas, A Directory for Midwives (London, 1651), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 20 June 2018].
Daniel, Samuel, Musophilius: Containing a General Defence of All learning (1599), ed. R. Himelick (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1965).
Elizabeth I, Elizabeth I: Collected Works, eds. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000).
Elyot, Thomas, The boke named the Governour (London, 1531), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 7 November 2018].
Florio, John, His First Fruits (London 1578), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 7 November 2018].
Garter, Bernard, and William Goldinham, The Ioyfull Receyuing of the Queenes most excellent Maiestie into hir Highnesse Citie of Norwich (London: Henry Bynneman, 1578), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 13 April 2018].
Gilby, Anthony, An ansvver to the deuillish detection of Stephane Gardiner (1548), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 27 February 2018].
Greene, Robert, Penelopes web Where, in a christall mirror of feminine perfection represents to the view of euery one those vertues and graces (London, 1601), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 14 June 2018].
Grimald, Nicolas, ‘To the Reader’, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Marcus Tullius Ciceroes thre bokes of duties (1556), Sig. CC vii., EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 20 June 2018].
Guillemeau, Jacques (trans. unknown) Child-birth or, The happy deliuerie of vvomen (1612), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 20 June 2018].
Harding, John, The Chronicle of Ihon Hardyng in Metre (1543), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 14 June 2018].
Kirkman, Francis, The Wits, or Sport Upon Sport (London, 1672), in the Houghton Library, Harvard University, at EEBO http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed July 2018].
Knox, John, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women (1558), at EEBO http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 21 May 2018].
Lever, Ralph, The Arte of Reason, Rightly Termed, Witcraft Teaching a Perfect way to Argue and Dispute (London, 1573) EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 13 June 2018].
Marlowe, Christopher, ‘Doctor Faustus’ and Other Plays, eds. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Melanchthon, Philipp, The Justification of Man by Faith Only (1548), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 14 June 2018].
Nevalainen, Terttu, ‘Early Modern English Lexis and Semantics’, in The Cambridge History of the English Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 332–348.
Pilkington, James, Aggeus and Abdius Prophetes (1562), EEBO available at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 29 June 2018].
Puttenham, George, The arte of English poesie (London, 1589) EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 14 June 2018].
Rainolde, Richard, A booke called the Foundacion of rhetorike (London, 1563), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 14 June 2018].
Raleigh, Walter ‘What Is Our LIFE?’ in The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: a Historical Edition, ed. Michael Rudick (Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Conjunction with Renaissance English Text Society, 1999).
Rastell, John, An Exposition of Certaine Difficult and Obscure Wordes, and Termes of the Lawes of This Realme (London, 1579), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed June 2018].
Shakespeare, William, 3 Henry VI, Q1 (1595), Q2 (1600), and Q3 (1619) at British Library Treasures, http://www.bl.uk/treasures [accessed 20 July 2018].
———, Romeo and Juliet, ed. Brian Gibbons (London: Methuen, 1980).
———, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
———, 3 Henry VI, ed. John Cox and Eric Rasmussen (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001).
———, Romeo and Juliet, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
———, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (London: W. W. Norton, 2008).
———, Romeo and Juliet, ed. René Weis (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2012).
Sherry, Richard, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (London, 1550), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 13 May 2018].
Sidney, Sir Philip, An apologie for poetrie (1595), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 14 June 2018].
Smith, Sir Thomas, De republica Anglorum (1583), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 13 June 2018].
Spenser, Edmund, The Shepheardes Calender (London, 1579), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 13 June 2018].
———, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas Roche, Jr. (London: Penguin, 1978).
Swetnam, Joseph, The arraignment of leuud, idle, forward, and vnconstant women (1615), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 5 June 2018].
Tomkis, Thomas, Lingua (1607), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 12 June 2018].
Tyndale, William, Obedience of a Christen Man (London, 1528), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 1 May 2018].
Vives, Juan Luis, A Very Frutefull and Pleasant Boke Called the Instructio[n] of a Christen Woma[n] (London, 1529). Sig. m.ii.r.
Wilson, Thomas, The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 9 March 2018].
Secondary Works
Addison Roberts, Jeanne, Shakespeare’s English Comedy: ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ in Context (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1979).
Anderson, Linda, A Place in the Story: Servants and Service in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005).
Barber, Charles, Early Modern English (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997).
Bartlett, John A Complete Concordance of Shakespeare (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990).
Bates, Catherine, ‘“The Faerie Queene”: Britain’s National Monument’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Epic, ed. Catherine Bates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 133–145.
Boose, Lynda E., ‘Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Summer, 1991), 179–213.
Brooks-Davies, Douglas, Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’: A Critical Commentary on Books I and II (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977).
Brown, Pamela Allen, Better a Shrew Than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY.: Cornell University Press, 2003).
Clarke, Danielle, ‘Speaking Women: Rhetoric and the Construction of Female Talk’, in Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2006), 70–88.
Dillon, Janette, Language and Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Docherty, Thomas, On Modern Authority: The Theory and Condition of Writing (Brighton: Harvester, 1987).
Dolven, Jeffrey, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Doty, Jeffrey S., Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Enterline, Lynn, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
Findlay, Alison, Women in Shakespeare: A Dictionary (London: Continuum, 2010).
Fineman, Joel, ‘The Turn of the Shrew’, Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (London: Methuen, 1985), 138–159.
Fox, Adam Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Görlach, Manfred, Introduction to Early Modern English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Gowing, Laura, ‘Language, Power, and the Law: Women’s Slander Litigation in Early Modern London’, in Women, Crime, and the Courts in Early Modern England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 26–47.
de Grazia, Margreta, ‘Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg and Descartes’, Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 29–58.
Hackett, Helen, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1995).
———, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Hadfield, Andrew, Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Helgerson, Richard, Forms of Nationhood: the Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992).
Howard, Jean E., and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (London: Routledge, 1997).
Hull, Suzanne, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475–1640 (San Marino: The Huntingdon Library 1982).
James, Heather, ‘Shakespeare’s Learned Heroines in Ovid’s Schoolroom’, Shakespeare and the Classics, eds. Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 66–86.
Jardine, Lisa, Still Harping on Daughters (Brighton: Harvester, 1983).
Jones, R. F., The Triumph of the English Language: A Survey of Opinions Concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953).
Kahn, Coppélia, Roman Shakespeare Warriors, Wounds and Women (London: Routledge, 1997).
Kermode, Lloyd Edward, Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Lamb, Mary Ellen, ‘Engendering the Narrative Act: Old Wives’ Tales in “The Winter’s Tale”, “Macbeth”, and “The Tempest”, Criticism, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Fall, 1998), 529–553.
———, The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson (London: Routledge, 2008).
———, and Karen Bamford, Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
———, ‘Old Wives’ Tales, George Peele, and Narrative Abjection’, in George Peele, ed. David Bevington (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 191–206.
Mack, Peter, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 1380–1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Mann, Jenny, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012).
Mazzio, Carla, The Inarticulate Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
McEachern, Claire, ‘Literature and National Identity’, in The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, eds. David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 313–342.
McManus, Caroline, Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ and the Reading of Women (London: Associated University Presses, 2002).
McQuade, Paula, Catechisms Written for Mothers, Schoolmistresses, and Children, 1575–1750 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) OED at www.oed.com [date accessed 3 March 2018].
Ong, Walter, ‘Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite’, in Studies in Philology, Vol. 56, No. 2 (1959), 103–124.
Parker, Patricia, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987).
———, ‘On the Tongue: Cross Gendering, Effeminacy, and the Art of Words’, Style, Vol. 23 No. 3 (Fall, 1989), 445–465.
———, ‘Construing Gender: Mastering Bianca in “The Taming of the Shrew”’, in The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance Studies, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 193–209.
Penuel, Suzanne, ‘Male Mothering and “The Tempest”’, in Performing Maternity in Early Modern England, eds. Kathryn Moncrief and Kathryn McPherson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 115–130.
Pittenger, Elizabeth, ‘Dispatch Quickly: The Mechanical Reproduction of Pages’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Winter, 1991) 389–409.
Potter, Ursula, ‘Cockering Mothers and Humanist Pedagogy in Two Tudor School Plays’, in Domestic Arrangements in Early Modern England, ed. Kari Boyd McBride (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002), 244–278.
Rackin, Phyllis, ‘Women’s Roles in the Elizabethan History Plays’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays, ed. Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 71–88.
Rhodes, Neil, The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).
———, Shakespeare and the Origins of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Richards, Jennifer, and Alison Thorne eds., Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2006).
Smith, Emma, ‘“So much English by the Mother”: Gender, Foreigners, and the Mother Tongue in William Haughton’s “Englishmen for My Money”’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Vol. 13 (2001), 165–181.
———, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Tillyard, E. M. W., The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto and Windus, 1943).
Traub, Valerie, ‘Prince Hal’s Falstaff: Positioning Psychoanalysis and the Female Reproductive Body’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Winter, 1989), 456–474.
———, Desire and Anxiety (London: Routledge, 1992).
Vickers, Nancy, ‘“The Blazon of Sweet Beauty’s Best”: Shakespeare’s “Lucrece”’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds., Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 95–115.
Weil, Judith, Service and Dependency in Shakespeare’s Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Wells, Stanley, ‘Juliet’s Nurse: The Uses of Inconsequentiality’, in Romeo and Juliet: Critical Essays, ed. John F. Andrews (London: Routledge, 2015), 197–214.
Wilson, E. C., England’s Eliza (London: Frank Cass, 1966).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Leonard, A. (2020). Error and the Mother Tongue. In: Error in Shakespeare. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35180-9_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35180-9_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-35179-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-35180-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)