Hosting Language: Immigration and Translation in The Merry Wives of Windsor

Abstract

How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve? This is the problem of immigrants … Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature 2 In The Merry Wives of Windsor, a play often described as Shakespeare's only "English" comedy, Sir Hugh Evans and Doctor Caius live in a language that is not their own. 3 As immigrants from Wales and France, respectively, Evans and Caius must engage in a process of linguistic translation that is both the direct result of their migration and analogous to the physical movement that such migration entails. Shakespeare dramatizes the linguistic predicament that Deleuze and Guattari outline in my epigraph by carving a space within the English language to register Evans's and Caius's differences and difficulties even while recognizing the possibility that English may become strange unto itself in the process of making 1 I owe many thanks to David Ruiter and Ruben Espinosa for their careful and supportive attention to many drafts of this essay. I would also like to thank John Michael Archer, Liza Blake, Jacques Lezra, and Susanne Wofford for their thoughtful comments on drafts. This work has benefitted from conversations with the audience at the Early Modern Migrations conference held at the University of Toronto in April 2012 and the members of the Shakespeare Association of America seminar to whom I presented the earliest version in April 2010. 2 Deleuze and Guattari (1986: 19). Lawrence Venuti employs a longer version of this quotation as the epigraph to a chapter entitled "Simpatico" in Venuti (2008: 237). I use it here to introduce my analysis of the linguistic effects of migration as they are represented in early modern English drama. 3 For a survey of such descriptions, see Wall (2003: 387-9). Richard Helgerson notes that in addition to its English setting, the play "also works at its Englishness, insists on it, and makes it fundamental to the definition of a domestic space that court and town can share" (Helgerson 2000: 64).