Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England

Dillon, Janette

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511549328

Cited by 85 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…15 The most comprehensive surveys of foreign or strange languages on the early modern English stage are Hoenselaars (1992), Dillon (1998), and Montgomery (2012).…”

Section: Pistolmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2016

Shakespeare and Immigration

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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).

show abstract

“…15 The most comprehensive surveys of foreign or strange languages on the early modern English stage are Hoenselaars (1992), Dillon (1998), and Montgomery (2012).…”

Section: Pistolmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2016

Shakespeare and Immigration

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Note that Elizabeth is praised for her translating skills, not her skills in creative writing, speaking to the idea that translation was more appropriate for women than creative work. For discussions of the links between women and translation, see Hannay (1985), Krontiris (1992), and Goldberg (1997).…”

Section: mentioning

confidence: 99%

Female multilingualism in William Shakespeare and George Peele

Keinänen

2013

ETC

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

While there is overlap in the ways that Peele and Shakespeare make use of female multilingualism in their plays, Peele's repertoire is wider than Shakespeare's, and he also seems to trust his audience will understand more complex code-switches from foreign languages. Shakespeare includes women who are resolutely monolingual in a multilingual context, highlighting the importance of English for personal and political identity. Both authors include characters who are shown understanding but not using foreign languages, perhaps reflecting cultural anxiety about educated women. In Peele, a wider range of women are shown code-switching, and Peele uses extended foreign language code-switches to highlight moments of high emotion, with Italian suggesting dangerous female sexuality and Latin evoking purity.

show abstract

“…In her book, Broken English: Dialect and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writing, Paula Blank argues that the Renaissance interest in vernacular language was preceded by a new understanding of dialect and difference as represented by the numerous dictionaries and glossaries of the time with "authors competing to prescribe the bounds of the native tongue" (Blank 1996: 32). Although, as Robert Epstein (2008) reminds us, authors as early as Chaucer were exploring the roles of dialect in England, it was on the pre-professional, fifteenth-and sixteenth-century English stage that early playwrights most effectively prescribed and described the tensions created by their seemingly boundless language. 2 The stigmatization of non-standard-speaking characters as fools has limited critical study of their place in the linguistic hierarchies established by pre-professional English drama (as has the stigmatization of what have been called Tudor Interludes).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neighbor Hob and neighbor Lob

Simon-Jones

2013

ETC

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Drawing on scholars like Paula Blank, Janette Dillon and Tim Machan, this article argues that, in the Tudor university and court plays of Shakespeare's youth, the stigmatization of non-standard, dialect speakers demonstrates a cultural renegotiation of the contemporary linguistic climate. By defining the English language and the English people not against a foreign Other, but rather against the domestic, servile, and dialect-speaking Other, sixteenth-century playwrights demonstrated the threat of non-standard speaking and advocated the standardization of language through education while effecting cultural change through negative reinforcement.

show abstract

Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England

Cited by 85 publications

References 0 publications

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

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

Female multilingualism in William Shakespeare and George Peele

Neighbor Hob and neighbor Lob

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About