Review of Montgomery (2012): Europe’s Languages on England’s Stages, 1590–1620

Abstract

Marianne Montgomery, Europe's Languages on England's Stages, 1590-1620 (Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama). 2012. Farnham/Burlington VT: Ashgate. ISBN 978-1-4094-2287-7. 150 pp. Reviewed by Ema Vyroubalová Trinity College DublinAs England began to consolidate a sense of itself as a state with a distinctive language and literary tradition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was drawn into new forms of contact and conflict with other languages. In this period English replaced French and Latin in numerous areas of usage such as law, religion, and political administration and the country ceased to be effectively trilingual. Latin nonetheless continued to be the lingua franca of European humanism and exerted significant influence on England's university and print cultures. English also had to compete with Celtic languages, not always quite successfully, in the so-called Celtic periphery. At the same time, a major influx of immigrants and temporary visitors made parts of England more linguistically diverse, with major European languages, including Dutch, French or Italian, commonly heard in the streets of London and other major trade centres.Marianne Montgomery's Europe's Languages on England's Stages surveys this multilingual landscape of early modern England through the lens of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. The study analyses representations of five European languages -French, Welsh, Dutch, Latin and Spanish -in a selection of English plays staged between 1590 and 1620. Montgomery has chosen to focus on performances of these plays in the public space of London's theatres because "[a]mong the potential sites for thinking about language, exchange, and English culture in the early modern period, the commercial theater stands out, since on the stage linguistic variety could be performed for a broad range of listeners" (6). Although playtexts with multilingual elements often depict confusion and misunderstanding in their plots, Montgomery posits that early modern English plays of this type would have also provided a positively charged cosmopolitan experience to those watching them. She argues that the plays "begin to imagine transnational communities based on shared values and interests" (5) and "offer audiences a cosmopolitan engagement with the foreign" (4).The individual chapters elucidate how this cosmopolitanizing process operates in the case of the specific languages featured in the selected plays. Each language (or pair of languages) is linked to a major cultural issue: Welsh and French with nationhood, Dutch with economic growth, Spanish with theatricality, and Latin with education. The book opens with a useful introduction providing