Abstract
In The Defense of Poesy, Philip Sidney condemns England’s playwrights for inviting playgoers to laugh at stage foreigners who have limited facility with the English language: “For what is it to make folks gape at a wretched beggar or a beggarly clown, or, against law of hospitality, to jest at strangers because they speak not English so well as we do?”1 Sidney’s sense that laughter at the odd English spoken by foreign characters transgresses against the “law of hospitality” shows how closely issues of ethics and issues of language were bound up with each other. Sidney suggests that when plays incorporate the nonstandard English associated with foreign speakers onstage, they are playing host to that speech and to the people who speak it. In this essay, I will investigate a closely related linguistic phenomenon to the one Sidney describes: the representation of languages other than English on the early modern stage. Concentrating on two of Shakespeare’s plays, Henry V and Henry VIII, I will argue that Shakespeare uses foreign speech to call attention to the ethical problems attendant on an emergent nationalism in which languages and nations are coterminous.
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Notes
Philip Sidney, Miscallaneous Prose of Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 116.
Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1. Helgerson borrows the phrase “kingdom of their own language” from a letter written by Edmund Spenser to Gabriel Harvey in 1580: “Why, a God’s name, may not we, as else the Greeks, have the kingdom of our own language?”
Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 23.
For the background on early modern English see Manfred Görlach, Introduction to Early Modern English (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and The Cambridge History of the English Language, 1476–1775, ed. Roger Lass, vol. 3 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992–94).
Jonathan Hope, “Shakespeare and Language: An Introduction,” in Shakespeare and Language, ed. Catherine Alexander (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1.
Samuel Johnson, Notes on Shakespeare’s Plays, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 8, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 547. Olivier’s Henry V was released in the United Kingdom in 1944 and in the United States in 1946.
Norman Rabkin, “Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly 28.3 (1977): 279–96.
For an account of the rise and persistence of French in England after the Norman Conquest, see Susan Crane, “Anglo-Norman Cultures in England, 1066–1460,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 35–60.
Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 165.
For an account of Henry V’s contribution to the formation of Chancery English, see Malcolm Richardson, “Henry V, the English Chancery, and Chancery English,” Speculum 55.4 (1980): 726–50.
The First Folio text constitutes the only authoritative version. For a discussion of the memorial reconstruction theory, see Kathleen Irace, “Reconstruction and Adaptation in Q of Henry V,” Studies in Bibliography 44 (1991): 228–53 and Reforming the “Bad Quartos” (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 115–37.
William Shakespeare, The Cronicle History of Henry the fift with his battell fought at Agin Court in France. Togither with Auntient Pistoll. As it hath bene sundry times playd by the Right honorable the Lord Chamberlaine his servants (London, 1600), sig. E3v, Early English Books Online, accessed April 5, 2013.
For the phenomenon of “shifting of strangeness” in early modern English discourse, see Jeffrey Masten, “More or Less: Editing the Collaborative,” Shakespeare Studies 29 (2001): 120–22.
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© 2014 Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin
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Vyroubalová, E. (2014). Multilingual Ethics in Henry V and Henry VIII . In: Huang, A., Rivlin, E. (eds) Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Reproducing Shakespeare: New Studies in Adaptation and Appropriation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375773_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375773_11
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