Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness 1108493734, 9781108493734

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SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLISHES Whose English is ‘true’ English? What is its relation to the national character? These were urgent questions in Shakespeare’s England just as questions of language and identity are today. Through close readings of early comedies and history plays this study demonstrates how Shakespeare resists the shaping of ideas of the English language and national character by protestant Reformation ideology. Tudeau-Clayton argues this ideology promoted the notional temperate and honest citizen, plainly spoken and plainly dressed, as the normative centre of (the) ‘true’ English. Compelling studies of two symmetrical pairs of cultural memes: ‘the King’s English’ versus ‘the gallimaufry’ and ‘the true-born Englishman’ versus the ‘Fantastical Gull’, demonstrate how ‘the traitor’ came to be defined as much by non-conformity to cultural ‘habits’ as by allegiance to the monarch. Tudeau-Clayton cogently argues Shakespeare subverted this narrow, class-inflected concept of English identity, proposing instead an inclusive, mixed and unlimited community of ‘our English’. M A R G A R E T T U D E A U - C L AY T O N

Neuchâtel.

is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of

SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLISHES Against Englishness Margaret Tudeau-Clayton University of Neuchâtel

University Printing House, Cambridge C B 2 8B S , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, N Y 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, V I C 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108493734 DOI: 10.1017/9781108643245 © Margaret Tudeau-Clayton 2020 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2020 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data NAMES: TITLE:

Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret, 1952– author.

Shakespeare’s Englishes : against Englishness / Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, University of Neuchâtel.

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Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

IDENTIFIERS: LCCN

2019037668 (print) | L C C N 2019037669 (ebook) | I S B N 9781108493734 (hardback) | I S B N 9781108725460 (paperback) | I S B N 9781108643245 (ebook)

SUBJECTS: LCSH:

Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616–Language. | English language–Early modern, 1500–1700.

C L A S S I F I C AT I O N : L C C P R 3077 .T 83

2019 (print) | L C C

P R 3077

(ebook) | D D C 822.3/3–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037668 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037669 ISBN 978-1-108-49373-4 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Goodnesse answers to the Theologicall Vertue Charitie, … in Charity, there is no Excesse: … The Parts and Signes of Goodnesse are many. If a Man be Gracious, and Curteous to Strangers, it shewes, he is a Citizen of the World; And that his Heart, is no Island, cut off from other Lands; but a Continent, that joynes to them. Francis Bacon (1625) human solidarity … is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Richard Rorty (1989) Generosity is … generative … at the beginning of prosperity, not at the end. Tim O’Reilly (2017)

Contents List of Table and Illustrations Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology 2 Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’: Language, History, Power 3 Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’: ‘Theatre’ and the Ideology of National Character 4 ‘they bring in straing rootes’: Shakespeare and ‘the straingers case’ 5 Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word: Shakespeare’s ‘extravagancy’ Bibliography Index

Table and Illustrations Table 2.1 ‘The King’s English’ (KE) / ‘the King’s Language’ (KL) / ‘the Queen’s English’ (QE): early modern instances, 1550–1700

Illustrations 3.1 Andrew Boorde, The fyrst boke of the introduction of knowledge (1555), fA.iiiv, C.71.b.29. Image provided by the British Library. 3.2 Lucas D’Heere, Theatre de tous les peuples et nations de la terre avec leurs habits et ornamens divers, tant anciens que modernes, fol. 126r, BHSL.HS.2466. Image provided by Ghent University Library. 3.3 Hans Weigel, Habitus Praecipuorom populorum, Tam virorum quam foeminarum … Trachtenbuch (1577), title page, BGE X2034 (illustration by Jost Amman). Image provided by Bibliothèque de Genève.

Acknowledgements Long in the making, this book owes much to exchanges with colleagues near and far. Research groups in Switzerland have furnished a consistently stimulating environment, especially the Geneva seminar run by Lukas Erne and Guillemette Bolens. Undergraduates, graduates and colleagues at the Universities of Zürich, Geneva, Lausanne and Neuchâtel are to be thanked for patiently listening to my ideas, and colleagues from the ‘Maison des littératures’ at Neuchâtel for inspiring conversations, especially Patrick Vincent, Jean-Jacques Aubert and Jean-Pierre van Elslande. I am also grateful to the publications committee of the Faculty of Letters for subsidising the cost of the cover image. Further afield, I have learnt much at meetings of the BSA, ISC and SAA and I have been privileged to work with outstanding scholars. Conversations with Dympna Callaghan, Ewan Fernie, Willy Maley, Jonathan Hope, Lynne Magnusson, Hugh Craig and Brian Cummings, amongst others, have fed into work on this book. Pat Parker has been consistently encouraging as has Pippa Berry. The team at Cambridge University Press, especially Emily Hockley are to be thanked for their steady guidance and the outside readers for their judicious recommendations. My thanks to the librarians at the Universities of Neuchâtel and Geneva who have been extraordinarily helpful and efficient in dealing with my requests and to Peter Schneider for his patience and skill in dealing with my computer crises. Matthias Heim and Rahel Orgis have provided precious support for many years. To Rahel I owe special thanks for stepping in at critical moments as well as for helping me prepare the text for the press. Finally, on the domestic front, my thanks to Danièlle Grimaldi for the invaluable gift of time, to Judy and Julia for their daily wake-up call and to Jean-François for his encouragement, patience and good humoured acceptance of the other man in my life.

 

Introduction Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

Whose English(es)? The last decades of the twentieth century saw the emergence into widespread use of the plural form ‘Englishes’. Used first by linguists of discrete varieties of English, perceived today as ‘everywhere’ in a constantly evolving, global multilingual ecology, it has also been used more loosely of the ‘polyphony that is English’. If, however, the current uses are relatively new, the form, as Tom McArthur has noted, is not. The last decade of the sixteenth century saw a self-conscious use of the form, in its then usual sense of English equivalents to a foreign word, by the polyglot lexicographer and translator, John Florio, in his address ‘To the reader’ in the first 



Christian Mair, ‘The World System of Englishes. Accounting for the Transnational Importance of Mobile and Mediated Vernaculars’, English World-Wide : (), ; Seamus Heaney, ‘Beowulf’, Sunday Times,  July , books section , . According to Tom McArthur this use by linguists dates from the s, though there is at least one instance as early as . Tom McArthur, The English Languages (Cambridge University Press, ), ; see P. D. Strevens, ‘Varieties of English’, English Studies : (): –. If initially baulked at by purists the form received the imprimatur of Robert Burchfield in , as McArthur points out (The English Languages, ). See Robert Burchfield, ‘Introduction’, in Robert Burchfield, ed., The Cambridge History of the English Language (Cambridge University Press, ), V, , . McArthur briefly summarises the political implications as well as the historical circumstances of the emergence of the word as does Seamus Heaney, who celebrates the practice of local varieties of English in a literature that he sees as at once reaching back and looking forward to a ‘world culture’, which is of course now with us, witness the global ecology of ‘World Englishes’, and the ‘worlding of literature’, which draws on even as it interrogates this ecology. See Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Comparative Literature and the Global Languagescape’, in Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas, eds., A Companion to Comparative Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –. McArthur notes the form ‘an English’ was used in the seventeenth century both of a sentence to be translated (OED ‘English’ c) and, more often, of ‘the equivalent in English of a foreign word’ (OED b), though his one example of this sense dates only from  (The English Languages, ). The OED is misleading since its earliest instance of the plural form in this sense, from  (N. Udall), is placed under a presumed distinct sense of a ‘translation’ (OED ‘English’ a). There is, moreover, an earlier instance of the plural form in the sense of English equivalents to a foreign word in John Holt, Lac Puerorum (London, ), sig. Civ. It is in this sense that the plural form is most commonly used until the mid-seventeenth century.



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Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

edition of his Italian–English dictionary, A Worlde of Words (). Commending his project even as he acknowledges its necessarily provisional character given the ‘yeerely increase’ of words ‘in English’ Florio proceeds to comment: ‘And for English-gentlemen me thinks it must needs be a pleasure to them to see so rich a toong [i.e. Italian] out-vide by their mother-speech, as by the manie-folde Englishes of manie wordes in this is manifest’. In a gesture of alignment with his country of adoption Florio uses the plural form to celebrate the superior lexical range of English – its ‘manie-folde’ copious character – to which, as the title page advertises, his own ‘most copious’ dictionary contributes. This copiousness which, following Pierre Bourdieu, we might call symbolic capital, is the ‘property’ of (the) English in the sense of defining character as well as of that which is owned. It is a property identified here with the male elite of ‘English-gentlemen’ who are assumed to represent the whole – the nation of English speakers – of which they are the privileged part at the centre of power, the court. Their display of this ‘property’ of ‘their motherspeech’ serves to promote their own (‘proper’) superiority as well as the superiority of (the) English in the cultural playing field of an evolving Europe in which nations are competing to define their ‘property’ – their defining character as well as their territorial domains – through their differential relations with others. For the English these are their European continental neighbours, as well as their more local neighbours, the Welsh, Scots and Irish, that make up the British archipelago. This book seeks to place Shakespeare’s dramas of the s, especially the comedies and the second tetralogy of history plays, in relation to the 



 

John Florio, ‘To the Reader’, in A Worlde of Wordes, Or Most copious, and exact Dictionarie in Italian and English (London, ), sigs. br–bv. In quotations from early modern texts i/j and u/v spelling forms have been normalised throughout unless otherwise indicated. ‘Florio is responsible for the earliest appearance of , words’ in the OED ‘ of which are unique citations’. Michael Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation (Cambridge University Press, ), . Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson (Oxford: Polity/ Blackwell, ). For an excellent survey of work on Shakespeare and these local ‘others’ see Willy Maley, ‘British Ill Done? Recent Work on Shakespeare and British, English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh Identities’, Literature Compass  (), –. The relation of the English to their European others as figured in ‘auto-images and hetero-images’ ‘in literary texts’, especially drama, is explored in A. J. Hoenselaars, Images of Englishmen and Foreigners in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: A Study of Stage Characters and National Identity in English Renaissance Drama, – (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, ), and taken up from another perspective in Lloyd Edward Kermode, Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama (Cambridge University Press, ). The specific importance of ‘vernacular languages’ in the staking out of ‘the identities of particular communities’ is foregrounded in Wyatt, The Italian Encounter, .

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Whose English(es)?



discursive struggle within post-Reformation England over the ‘property’ of (the) English: the defining ‘proper’ character as well as ownership of (the) English, especially, though not only, as this is conveyed by competing ideas of the vernacular, both as explicitly expressed and as implied in linguistic practices. Put at its baldest and boldest my claim is that these plays evoke only to resist the project of a cultural reformation ideology to appropriate for the figure of the plain-speaking, plainly dressed virtuous citizen the normative (‘proper’) centre of ‘the King’s English’ (Merry Wives, ..) (Chapter ) and the ‘true-born Englishman’ (Richard II, ..) (Chapter ). My argument will thus bear out the close relation that others have pointed out between the protestant Reformation(s) and the ‘writing of the nation’, as Cathy Shrank puts it, as well as the more specific point made by Janette Dillon that the construction of ‘English’ and the English was ‘firmly allied with plainness and transparency’ in its differential relation to foreigners. Taking up and exploring more fully these ideas I want to draw attention to how this post-Reformation construction of ‘Englishness’ is connected to social distinctions, and more particularly, ‘the prominence’ acquired by ‘the middle’, as Neil Rhodes



 

The singular ‘Reformation’ is no longer self-evident, the plural ‘Reformations’ being more or less obligatory since the ground-breaking work done in Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), especially –. See too Brian Cummings and James Simpson, ‘Introduction’, in Brian Cummings and James Simpson, eds., Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (Oxford University Press, ). Though salutary in its insistence on the complexity of the cultural and religious history of England in the sixteenth century, the use of the plural form occludes the drive to a defining cultural homogeneity to which this book seeks to draw attention. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespearean texts are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, rd edition (New York: W. W. Norton, ). Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England (Oxford University Press, ); Janette Dillon, Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England (Cambridge University Press, ), –. David Loades observes: ‘By the end of Elizabeth’s reign Protestantism was to be one of the salient characteristics of Englishness’. David Loades, ‘Literature and National Identity’, in David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller, eds., The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge University Press, ), . See too Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, – (Cambridge University Press, ). The point is underscored in Arthur Aughey, The Politics of Englishness (Manchester University Press, ), ; George Garnett criticises the neglect of the impact of protestantism in Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ); see George Garnett, ‘Riotous’, Times Literary Supplement,  June , . If there was, as Christopher Highley explores, a ‘Catholic’ ‘version of Englishness’ under Mary, this served to generate not only international solidarity amongst protestants, as Scott Oldenburg argues, but also a will to (re)appropriate the national character for protestantism. Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford University Press, ); Scott Oldenburg, Alien Albion: Literature and Immigration in Early Modern England (University of Toronto Press, ), .

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Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

puts it, and how this relates to larger questions of the future political as well as cultural history of England. As I demonstrate in Chapter , the phrase ‘the King’s English’ is first used not descriptively, as scholars have assumed, but performatively to define through exclusion the normative centre it represents. Crucially, amongst those excluded, is Florio’s centre of ‘English-gentlemen’, who are thus located as outsiders, like and with other constitutive ‘others’, especially the French. The same is done in the homologous exclusionary sartorial definitions of the ‘true-born Englishman’ examined in Chapter . Opposing the exclusionary ideology of this cultural ‘re-formation’, or what James Simpson has called ‘revolution’, Shakespeare’s plays resist the structural shift it heralds towards class inflected, cultural norms of Englishness and the attendant tsunami of socio-political breakdown and civil war which, I suggest, the second tetralogy more or less explicitly predicts. More immediately, these plays resist the xenophobia attendant on this ideology, as I take up in Chapter . This xenophobia is explicitly addressed in the contribution to the playtext of Sir Thomas More by ‘Hand D’, now widely if not universally regarded as Shakespeare’s, which engages 





Neil Rhodes, Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth Century England (Oxford University Press, ), . This ‘reconfiguration of the social order’ is illustrated strikingly by Thomas Smith who, following William Harrison’s description of England (), names ‘citizens’ after ‘gentlemen’ as the second of the four social categories into which the people of England are divided. Thomas Smith, The Common-wealth of England (London, ), . For the changing terms used of such social distinctions, see Keith Wrightson, ‘Estates, Degrees, and Sorts: Changing Perceptions of Society in Tudor and Stuart England’, in Penelope J. Cornfield, ed., Language, History and Class (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), –. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass comment in passing that there was no strong sense of English national identity either amongst the (internationally oriented) aristocracy whose taste for foreign sartorial fashions they highlight, or amongst the (locally oriented) popular classes of England. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge University Press, ), . What this implies, of course, is that, as I argue, the sense of a common national identity – a common Englishness – develops above all amongst the ‘middling sort’ of ‘citizens’. For the case that national identities are constituted by defining others rather than essences, see John A. Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), . In its exclusion of the French as well as in its close connection to protestantism this defining of the ‘true’ English will, after , morph, as Linda Colley has shown, into the defining of ‘Britons’, though not without vigorous opposition from Englishmen. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation –, rev. edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), . James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford University Press, ). As I take up below, my argument will bear out Michel Foucault’s point that the seventeenth century saw the emergence of ‘a new form of power’ disseminated through the ‘norm’. See Catherine Malabou, ‘The King’s Two (Biopolitical) Bodies’, Representations : (Summer ), –. See too the important point made by Keith Wrightson that ‘the concept of the middle sort of people came into its own in . . . the civil war period – above all, in defending the social basis of parliamentarian support against royalist accusations that the king’s opponents relied heavily upon supporters drawn from the “rabble”’. Wrightson, ‘Estates, Degrees, and Sorts’, –.

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Whose English(es)?



specifically with its local virulent manifestations in London in the early s. In Chapter  I show how the Shakespearean contribution is connected to comedies of the s and the second tetralogy not only through (well-documented) verbal echoes, but also through deep ideological consistency. For while the Shakespearean contribution to the playtext takes a stand on behalf of strangers against the stand taken by other ‘hands’ on behalf of London citizens hostile to strangers, these comedies and the second tetralogy set themselves against a cultural ideology which would appropriate for the ‘plain’, temperate protestant citizen the normative centre of the proper or ‘true’ English (nation and language) through exclusion of constitutive others. These plays do not then reproduce English ‘ethnocentrism’ as critical opinion would have us believe. On the contrary, they resist the exclusionary, centripetal ideology of a cultural reformation that would instate such a centre. Indeed, they put into question the very idea of a centre promoting as they do rather an idea of ‘our English tongue’ (Merry Wives, ..) as a ‘gallimaufry’ (..), that is, a mobile and inclusive mix of (human and linguistic) ‘strangers’ without defining, ‘proper’ boundaries. In Chapter  I show how this idea finds support in the argument made by Shakespeare’s More that ‘the strangers’ case’ is at once contingent and common in the sense of shared as well as recurrent lived experience. Borne out by the comedies, which repeatedly stage the ‘straying’ into the condition of a stranger, this argument is brought ‘home’ in the second tetralogy, which depicts England as a nation of mutual strangers. Shakespeare’s audiences are thus called upon to see themselves in ‘the strangers’ case’, as More’s on-stage audience of hostile citizens is explicitly called upon to do. This produces fellow-feeling towards the strangers amongst the citizens who turn, as Shakespeare’s off-stage audience is invited to turn, from hostility to the disinterested hospitality of the ethical and spiritual ideal of charity. Frequently evoked in these plays, if often ironically, as in Portia’s reference to ‘neighbourly charity’ (Merchant, ..), this ideal of ‘charity’, in the pre-modern sense of ‘the community building state of 



For an earlier version of this argument, see Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“This is the stranger’s case”: The Utopic Dissonance of Shakespeare’s Contribution to Sir Thomas More’, Shakespeare Survey  (Cambridge University Press, ), –. See Walter Cohen’s introduction to Merry Wives in The Norton Shakespeare, –. This opinion has been bolstered by a claim that Shakespeare wrote as a ‘spokesperson for a fundamental Englishness’, a ‘normative’ model ‘grounded’ on ‘a common – albeit not yet standardised – language’. Carole Levin and John Watkins, Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), , . This book argues almost exactly the opposite.

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Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

love towards God and neighbour’, is dramatised without irony in the scenes with which, as I discuss in Chapters  and  respectively, The Comedy of Errors and The Two Gentlemen of Verona close. Indeed, Two Gentlemen, which may be Shakespeare’s first performed play, invokes the practice of ‘charity’ as that which makes one ‘worth the name of a Christian’ (..–), and which finds expression at once in hospitality towards strangers, and in unlimited forgiveness. Produced during the period of intense citizen hostility towards strangers in London, these two comedies engage, I argue, with what Simonds d’Ewes calls the ‘weighty matter’ of ‘strangers’ in his account of the parliamentary debate of  referenced in the playtext of Sir Thomas More (Chapter ). Most importantly, Errors recalls a biblical passage from the Epistle to the Ephesians – long recognised as one of the play’s principal sources – which represents the inclusive reach of the reconciliation achieved through the mediating atonement of Christ in terms of strangers made citizens in the house of God. This inclusionary vision is expressed too through the culturally resonant figure of the Host of the Inn in Merry Wives, notably in a scene of reconciliation that I discuss in Chapter . Indeed, as I argue, the very title of ‘Host’, which evokes the means as well as the sign of universal reconciliation, itself carries resistance to cultural reformation ideology inasmuch as the word ‘host’ was expressly excluded from the sacred lexicon by protestant apologists. This figure is, moreover, explicitly associated with ‘our English’ as a mobile, inclusive, mixed language/community. This inclusive mix is, as I point out, associated with a time prior not only to the Reformation(s) of the sixteenth century, but also to an earlier political rupture – the Lancastrian seizure of power. For this was perceived as 



The replacement of this pre-modern meaning of ‘charity’ by the modern meaning of ‘an external act of benevolence to the poor and needy’ is one aspect of John Bossy’s work on the changes to the construction of Christianity in the West highlighted in Eamon Duffy, ‘Rites of Passage’, Times Literary Supplement,  February , –. See John Bossy, Christianity in the West – (Oxford University Press, ), –, ; Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), –. Strikingly, Francis Bacon inserts the ‘Gracious, and Curteous’ welcoming of ‘Strangers’ as his first instance of the ‘Signes of Goodness’, which ‘answers to the Theologicall Vertue Charitie’, in the expanded () version of his essay ‘Of Goodnesse and Goodnesse of Nature’, in The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), , . As Shakespeare’s use of ‘Christian’ in Two Gentlemen (and throughout the canon) suggests, no authorial ‘confessional identity’ may be gleaned from the plays which tend to promote social and ethical ‘Christian’ values beyond doctrinal divides. At best we might describe this identity as ‘mixed’ as Jean-Christophe Mayer does in Jean-Christophe Mayer, Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith: History, Religion and the Stage (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), .

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Whose English(es)?



coincident with a cultural break which saw the emergence of English as the national vernacular preferred over, and defined in differential relation to, the other national vernacular of French. It is indeed with this rupture that, as we shall see, the origins of ‘the King’s English’ appear to lie. In its later uses as in its putative origins the phrase, or trope as I prefer to call it, carries then an exclusionary definition of (the) English, defined notably though exclusion of (the) French and a court-centred male elite associated with the French. It is this exclusionary definition of the English/Englishness that, I claim, the comedies, especially Merry Wives, and the second tetralogy resist. In the final chapter, the focus shifts to recurring linguistic practices in the plays of the s that tend to defeat the cultural reformation project to a normative linguistic/cultural centre: borrowed new words, which Richard Mulcaster tellingly calls ‘enfranchisment’, ‘mistaking’, ‘play upon the word’ and above all ‘synonymia’ or ‘variation of an English’. Wandering or ‘straying’ across proper and proprietorial boundaries these practices tend to the production of ‘our English’ as a ‘gallimaufry’ even as they resist the project of cultural reformation ideology to a normative centre. Still more importantly, they carry emancipatory and empowering implications, as I point out in a discussion of two discourses with which they are explicitly linked. On the one hand, through transferred uses of the discourse of ‘manage’ (horsemanship), linguistic ‘straying’ is associated with the release of energy attendant on a liberation from control; on the other, through biblical references, notably to parables, especially the parable of the prodigal son, it is associated with the freedom from the ‘law’ attendant on the debt-gift economy of universal redemption in Christ. Given this second association, Shakespeare, we might say, seeks to reinstate the freedom of the debt-gift economy of universal and unconditional grace, the cornerstone of protestant theology where, as the institution of the church becomes more firmly harnessed to the state, cultural reformation ideology seeks to reinstate the ‘law’ in a centripetal drive to



 

The turn from the criterion of ‘copia’ to the criterion of ‘plainness’ or transparency has been well documented by linguistic historians, notably Manfred Görlach, Sylvia Adamson, Norman Blake and David Crystal, although they do not consider its connection with the history of ‘the King’s English’ or Shakespeare’s plays. John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton University Press, ), . See Nathalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, ), –.

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

Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

homogeneity through exclusionary definitions of (the) ‘true’ or proper English. In this the plays are set not only against xenophobia, but also against the future history attendant on this centripetal reformation project to instate ‘the law’ in cultural practices, and in particular to appropriate the normative centre of (the) English from the courtier who ‘speaks holiday’ (Merry Wives, ..–) to the citizen who aspires to the transparency of ‘a plain man in his plain meaning’ (Merchant, ..), an ideal of ‘plainness’ with which, as I show in Chapter , ‘the King’s English’ is associated. In the second tetralogy specifically, the ‘reformation’ of the future king Henry V is at once represented in linguistic terms as a casting off of the ‘gross terms’ of ‘a strange tongue’ ( Henry IV, .., ) and staged as the rejection of the ‘gross’ figure of a fat, intemperate and nomadic courtier who is short of cash but abundantly supplied with linguistic wealth. Linguistically as well as morally extravagant, associated with other ‘others’ constitutive of the ‘true’ or ‘proper’ plain English of cultural reformation ideology, as I discuss in Chapter , John Falstaff is also recurrently associated with the figure of the prodigal son, the protagonist of the parable dear to protestant exegetes for its illustration of the debt-gift economy of God’s free and inclusive redemption, as I discuss in Chapters  and . Falstaff belongs, moreover, to a family of figures discussed in Chapter  that are related by virtue of their shared function of ‘carry [ing]’ the ‘word quickly’, as one of them – the tellingly named Mrs Quickly – puts it (Merry Wives, ..), a shared function that has been occluded by editors and critics who work with their own (often class-based) criteria of distinctions. For these figures are all vehicles of an emancipatory, extravagant, or straying word, which, traversing ‘proper’ boundaries, between English and not-English, proper and ‘stra(y)nge’ senses, tends to the generation of an inclusive, mixed and expansive, mobile economy of ‘our English’ (..) without a centre. At one level then the banishment of Falstaff stages the rejection of this economy for the centripetal law which ‘the King’s English’ represents, and which, as Robert Cawdrey (also spelled Cawdry) puts it, in his preface to the first English–English ‘hard word’ dictionary (), requires that ‘we . . . banish all affected Rhetorique’ and use ‘one maner of language’ – a ‘we’ that hovers between a peremptory, executive royal ‘we’ and a hypothesised national community. As others have noted, Cawdrey’s 

Paula Blank, ‘The Babel of Renaissance English’, in Lynda Mugglestone, ed., The Oxford History of English (Oxford University Press, ), .

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Whose English(es)?



preface is taken almost verbatim from Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (), which features the first, and culturally most prominent recorded instance of ‘the King’s English’. Published four years after the Act of Uniformity, as I discuss in Chapter , Wilson mobilises the trope to extend the scope of the aggressive centripetal drive of the church–state apparatus to the production of a normative linguistic centre – ‘one maner of language’. Specifically, the trope is used performatively to define the normative centre of the ‘plainness’ with which it is associated, through exclusion of ‘outlandish’ words practised, on the one hand, by professionals (clerks, lawyers and accountants), on the other, by well-travelled, internationally oriented gentlemen, who are thus banished to the place of a ‘strange tongue’ ( Henry IV, ..) – the place where other ‘strangers’, notably the French, Dutch and Welsh, although also drunk and stuttering native speakers, are located by other performative uses of the trope, as we will see. It is this exclusionary, ideological use of ‘the King’s English’ that is exposed and interrogated in the one Shakespearean play which features the trope and which is, significantly, his one engagement with the emergent genre of English citizen comedy: The Merry Wives of Windsor. Used as it invariably is in early instances to exclude performatively, the trope is used specifically of the English practised by a Frenchman, as it is in William Haughton’s blatantly xenophobic play Englishmen for My Money (performed ), widely considered a prototype of the genre. Whether or not, as I discuss in Chapter , Haughton’s play is a specific object, Shakespeare’s play engages with the exclusionary xenophobia which it exemplifies (typical in this respect of the genre it inaugurates), and which is propagated through the linguistic ideology of ‘the King’s English’. Uniquely, however, among early instances, the trope is invoked in Shakespeare’s play by an uneducated, low-born female native speaker who is excluded by her own ‘mistaking’ practices from the normative centre it represents. Attention is thus drawn to the question of the constituency of the ‘our’ in ‘our English tongue’, a recurrent phrase in the discursive struggle over the ‘property’ of English, which might be described as a struggle around this ‘our’. More generally, the project to linguistic uniformity and stability is undercut at once by the mobility of the vernacular as a living (‘quick’) language which Mrs Quickly embodies, and by the play’s heterogeneous range of linguistic styles. This includes, without privileging, the citizen’s ‘plain’ style of speech, which is represented as it is practised by the tellingly named figure of the male citizen, George Page, who is something of a self-appointed linguistic (as well as social)

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Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

policeman, like the cultural reformers who mobilise ‘the King’s English’. Indeed, Merry Wives not only exposes ‘the King’s English’ to ironic interrogation but also sets against it ‘the gallimaufry’ (..) of ‘our English’ (..). Taken from culinary discourse this trope is regularly used of social, stylistic and generic mixes as well as, most frequently, of a (usually negative) view of English as an inclusive, heterogeneous and expanding mix, as I take up below. This view of ‘our English’ is overtly celebrated not only by the play’s centrifugal stylistic range, but also, more specifically, through self-conscious performances of ‘synonymia’ by Falstaff and the Host of the Inn where he resides. It is then in its imagined community of ‘our English’ as an inclusive and mobile heterogeneous mix – a ‘gallimaufry’ – that Merry Wives, at least the Folio version, joins the second tetralogy of history plays. Indeed, in its explicitness in this respect it may be placed, as it is in this book, at the centre of the plays of the s rather than as an occasional oddity at their periphery, which is how it is usually treated. More specifically, it points up the stakes of a cultural reformation that aspires to produce a normative centre of (the) ‘true’ or ‘proper’ English by banishing the figure of the nomadic, extravagant courtier as a stranger and his ‘holiday’ speech (Merry Wives, ..) as ‘a strange tongue’ ( Henry IV, ..).

Shakespeare and ‘reformation’ The word ‘reformation’ occurs six times in the corpus of single, or coauthored Shakespearean plays, twice in relation to Hal’s banishment of Falstaff ( Henry IV, ..; Henry V, ..), which, as I have indicated,







As Giorgio Melchiori has pointed out, the focus on the national vernacular is only in the Folio version. Giorgio Melchiori, ‘Introduction’, in Giorgio Melchiori, ed., The Merry Wives of Windsor (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, ), –. I discuss the implications of this at greater length in Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“The King’s English” “our English”? Shakespeare and Linguistic Ownership’, in Katie Halsey and Angus Vine, eds., Shakespeare and Authority (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –. This is to argue against the grain of a tradition of commentary which has insisted on differences between the Falstaff of the comedy and the Falstaff of the second tetralogy and which reaches an apogee in the speculation by Evelyn Gajowski and Phyllis Rackin ‘that Shakespeare conceived of the Falstaff who turns up in Windsor as a direct antithesis to the character he created for the history plays’. Evelyn Gajowski and Phyllis Rackin, ‘Introduction’, in Evelyn Gajowski and Phyllis Rackin, eds., The Merry Wives of Windsor: New Critical Essays (London: Routledge, ), . This is to ignore evident likenesses at once in plot – the banishment/rejection/humiliation of Falstaff – and in the linguistic practices shared by the two Falstaffs including, notably, ‘synonymia’ (Chapter ). This critical tendency is expertly summarised and countered by the new collection of essays cited in the previous note, which unfortunately take little account of the class issues in the play.

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Shakespeare and ‘reformation’



is represented in linguistic and cultural terms. Similarly telling is the staged ‘reformation’ with which Love’s Labour’s Lost closes (..). For the ‘reformation’ here is explicitly a reformation to the ideal of ‘[h]onest plain words’ (..), undertaken by a figure, Biron, who is, like Falstaff, a linguistic ‘prodigal’ (..). As in the second tetralogy, it is, moreover, a ‘reformation’ that entails a dramatised rejection of a figure that exemplifies its object. Associated with the figure of ‘hony tongued’ Shakespeare, ‘Honey-tongued Boyet’ (..), a Mercurial figure characterised as effeminate, and identified with the ‘Mercurial’ nation, the French, engages in verbal sparring matches with Biron only to be finally rejected together with the practice of elaborate linguistic forms, ‘[t]affeta phrases’, ‘[t]hree-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation’ (.., ). In his ‘reformation’ Biron renounces these for ‘[h]onest plain words’ (), ‘russet “yeas” and honest kersey “noes”’ (), a renunciation which brings together the plain dress and language of cultural reformation ideology. The confrontation between Biron and the effeminate Boyet points up how the project to instate a norm of ‘honest, plain’ English folds gender into national difference, especially between the English and the French. This bears again on the treatment of the courtier Falstaff who, as critics have often observed, is associated with the female gender as he is associated with ‘the court of France’ in The Merry Wives of Windsor (..). The gendering of this national difference is still more overt in the later co-authored Henry VIII (), which features a topically resonant conversation around ‘the reformation of our traveled gallants’, especially their ‘ridiculous’ and ‘unmanly’ ‘customs’ of speech and manners as of dress that they have picked up in France and that are contrasted with the ‘plain’ style



 



The ‘reformation’ of the prince in the second tetralogy has been discussed as a staging of future cultural and linguistic history, though from the very different anthropological perspective of new historicism, in Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage (University of Chicago Press, ), –. See Frederick W. Clayton and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Mercury, Boy Yet and the “Harsh” Words of Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Shakespeare Survey  (Cambridge University Press, ), . Biron’s words are quoted by Jones and Stallybrass on the opening page of their magisterial study of the anti-court rhetoric around forms of dress, epitomised in the opposition of native russet and kersey to foreign yellow starch, a recurring metonym for court corruption (Renaissance Clothing, ). However, they do not discuss the analogy with linguistic practices, which is illustrated by several of the texts they cite and which is a commonplace of the period, as Sylvia Adamson has pointed out. Sylvia Adamson, ‘Literary Language’, in Roger Lass, ed., The Cambridge History of the English Language,  vols. (Cambridge University Press, ), III, –. See Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, ), –; Terence Hawkes, ‘Bryn Glas’, in Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, eds., Post-Colonial Shakespeares (London: Routledge, ), –; Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation (New York: Routledge, ), –.

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Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

of the ‘honest’ Englishman. As we shall see in Chapter , it is precisely against the customs or ‘habits’ of ‘far journeyed gentlemen’, contaminated by foreign – Italian as well as French – speech and ‘apparell’ that the ‘King’s English’ is mobilised, by Thomas Wilson in , followed by Cawdrey in , in exclusionary performative moves aimed at reformation to a normative centre of a common English ‘plainness’. These moves are countered in Shakespearean plays of the s by ironic interrogation not only of ‘the King’s English’, but also of the ‘plainness’ with which it is associated, and which, as I discuss in Chapter , is exposed as an illusion, as in the case of Biron’s ‘[h]onest plain words’, and/or as a cover for a will to control/power. Cultural reformation ideology is evoked in another telling instance of the word, in  Henry VI, where it is used by the rebel leader Jack Cade who ‘vows reformation’ (..–), describing his project in highly resonant terms as ‘[a]ll the realm shall be in common’ (–) and asserting that ‘when I am king, as king I will be’ () ‘I will apparel them all in one livery’ (–). This resonates, on the one hand, with the peremptory violence of ‘from hencefurth, all the whole realme shall have but one use’ in the preface to the  version of The Book of Common Prayer and, on the other, with the idea of ‘lyke apparell’ for ‘all’ which, as we shall see in Chapter , is implied even as it is denied in a state-sponsored homily on ‘excess of apparell’ (). Specifically, the loaded words ‘common’ and ‘all in one livery’ evoke the levelling implications of cultural reformation ideology, even as the irony of the attendant will to power is exposed. As we shall see, Shakespeare’s interrogation of the normative centre of 





Henry VIII, .., –, – (emphasis mine). Significantly this scene is amongst those widely assumed to have been written by Shakespeare’s collaborator, John Fletcher. For unlike Shakespeare’s single-authored plays of the s, the norm of ‘plain’ Englishness is not ironised, or even treated ambivalently as I shall suggest it is treated by Shakespeare after  (Chapter ). As Gordon McMullan observes, Fletcher, who was born into a modest, ‘strongly protestant family’, exhibits a ‘protestant distaste for courtly extravagance’. Gordon McMullan, ‘Fletcher, John (–), playwright’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, , online edition, accessed  February . The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of , , and , ed. Brian Cummings (Oxford University Press, ), ; ‘The Sermon agaynst excesse of apparell’, in The second tome of homilees of such matters as were promised, and intituled in the former part of homelyes, set out by the aucthoritie of the Quenes Maiestie: and to be read in euery paryshe churche agreablye (London, ), sigs. v– r. Compare: ‘Levelling the “differences of English” was often an implicit goal of early modern language reformers who favoured a “common” language’. Paula Blank, Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London: Routledge, ), . The Jack Cade scenes are often considered the work of a collaborator, here a (typically sceptical) Christopher Marlowe.

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Shakespeare and ‘reformation’



plainness which ‘the King’s English’ represents and which is described by its advocates precisely as ‘commonly received’ and ‘one maner of language’ – the linguistic equivalent of Cade’s ‘one livery’ – exposes too a dissimulated will to power. Of specific relevance here is Cade’s claim regarding Lord Saye that ‘he can speak French, and therefore he is a traitor’ (.., emphasis mine). Reversing even as it recalls the ‘proverb’ ‘Jacke wold be a gentilman, but he can no frenche’, this points up not only the aspiration of reformation ideology to overturn the cultural hegemony of (the) French, notably through the establishment of the normative centre of ‘the King’s English’ (as distinct from the preferred court vernacular of French), but also the turn whereby the status of traitor, like and with the status of ‘true-born Englishman’, becomes a function not only of allegiance to the monarch, but also of conformity to the cultural ‘habits’ of a ‘true’ ‘natural’ or proper Englishness defined above all in differential relation to the ‘other’ culture/vernacular of (the) French. In Chapters  and  this is shown in relation respectively to language and dress. In Chapter  I show how the normative centre of the ‘true-born Englishman’ was appropriated for the figure of the plainly dressed ‘manly’ citizen through exclusion as ‘untrue’ of a recurring figure, or ‘meme’, which was the sartorial equivalent of the linguistic ‘gallimaufry’: the effeminate elite male dressed in a motley of foreign fashions. In this context, I argue, the three instances of the figure in Shakespearean plays of the s resist this exclusionary definition of the ‘true-born Englishman’, just as, in Merry Wives, ‘our English’ as ‘the gallimaufry’ resists ‘the King’s English’ – the trope mobilised by self-appointed cultural reformers to produce the normative centre it represents through the exclusion of ‘the gallimaufry’ practised by such as Falstaff, banished in the ‘reformation’ staged in the second tetralogy. As in this ‘reformation’, future history is evoked in the ‘reformation’ to ‘honest, plain words’ staged in Love’s Labour’s Lost. For, if ironised and 



As cited by John Ponet in a treatise urging ‘true’ ‘natural’ Englishmen actively to oppose the Marian regime and reminding them of the supplantation of the English by the French in the Norman invasion. John Ponet, A shorte treatise of politike power and of the true obedience which subjectes owe to kynges and other civile gouernours, with an exhortacion to all true naturall Englishe men, compyled by. D. I.P. B. R. VV. (Strasbourg, ), sig. LVv. The contradictory relations to the French are thoroughly explored but without reference to the Reformation in Deanne Williams, The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, ); more immediately relevant is Ardis Butterfield’s important book which demonstrates how French and English constituted two native vernaculars in pre-Reformation England. Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford University Press, ).

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

Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

undercut as an illusion, like other such aspirations to plain speech, as I take up in Chapter , the ‘reformation’ of Biron heralds closure – the end of (the) play and of an exuberant, polyglot ‘feast of languages’ (..– emphasis mine). Like and with the ‘gift’ of an ‘extravagant spirit’ enjoyed by Holofernes (.., ), to which I return in my conclusion, this image might be applied to the economy of Shakespearean ‘extravagancy’, discussed in Chapter , which is embodied in Falstaff. Holofernes indeed belongs to the family of figures which ‘carry the word quickly’ to produce an unlimited economy of a ‘feast’ of languages that the ‘reformation’ turn to ‘honest, plain words’ staged in Love’s Labour’s Lost brings to a close. Still more telling in this respect is the staged confrontation in Twelfth Night between the figure of Feste, a self-described ‘corrupter of words’ (..), and the figure of Malvolio, a ‘kind of puritan’ (..) whose announced revenge at the close has, rightly, been taken to resonate with future history. In particular, the (ill) will to curtailment takes the form of a staged interruption of extravagant night revels by Malvolio who invokes the law of propriety, a regulatory principle of art as well as life: ‘Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?’ (..–). Significantly, this principle is subsequently invoked by critics whose repetitions of the will to curtailment bear out the future history immanent in these staged confrontations. Samuel Johnson, for instance, invokes propriety in his well-known criticism of the quibble, a linguistic practice as habitual to Feste as it is to Falstaff, which Johnson associates with the suspect narrative genre of romance as well as with aberrant sexuality. Edmund Malone too associates what he calls ‘far-fetched’ forms with aberrant sexuality, notably the scandalous breach of sexual propriety in the sonnets. Bearing out the future history immanent in Shakespeare’s staged confrontations, such instances at the same time betray the implication of a normative sex-gender system in cultural reformation ideology. This is resisted in the plays, notably through such ambiguously gendered figures as Viola/Cesario,



 

On the play’s ambivalence towards its linguistic exuberance, see Paula Blank, ‘Languages of Early Modern Literature in Britain’, in Loewenstein and Mueller, eds., The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, . In a resolutely apolitical approach Robert N. Watson argues that Shakespeare at once has and forswears his ‘Euphuistic’ ‘cake’. Robert N. Watson, ‘Shakespeare’s New Words’, Shakespeare Survey  (Cambridge University Press, ), . Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), VII, . The passage is quoted in James Schiffer, ‘Reading New Life into Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Survey of Criticism’, in James Schiffer, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays (New York: Garland Publishing, ), .

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Cultural Reformation: Lenten Jonson v. Festive Shakespeare



who in his/her double sexual character embodies the linguistic equivocations that s/he practises with Feste. It is in order to limit/contain the play of desire generated by such sexual/ linguistic wandering that Johnson and Malone repeat the will to curtailment staged by Shakespeare. It is a repetition that, despite the poststructuralist ‘linguistic turn’, has largely continued to this day, if with important exceptions, as I discuss in Chapter . As Simon Palfrey has remarked, the ‘academy today’, ‘is hardly less Augustan’. Indeed, it is easier to repeat than to allow Shakespearean practice to historicise and put into question the modern ideological universe of ‘a plain man in his plain meaning’ as this is evoked in another staged confrontation, in The Merchant of Venice, between the servant clown Launcelet Gobbo and the Venetian bourgeois master Lorenzo (..–) who, in this appeal to plainness (–), dissimulates a will to curtailment and control, like other figures discussed in Chapter . A hybrid English-Italian figure onomastically associated, like other members of the family of figures discussed in Chapter , with Shake-speare, Launce-let is similarly the vehicle of a mobile, straying word, traversing ‘proper’ and ‘proprietorial’ limits through ‘mistaking’ as well as through deliberate word play. He is, moreover, accused, in this same confrontation, of the gross sexual as well as political/racial impropriety of impregnating a black woman (–), an impropriety that, as the second Arden editor unhappily notes, appears to have no other more adequate (‘proper’) motivation than the occasion it affords for equivocation on the homonyms Moor/more – an equivocation that in its copulation of heterogeneous word categories as well as in its word play performs an analogous breach of proper linguistic boundaries. The editorial move which seeks to contain such an improper irruption by identifying a possible origin in a ‘lost source’ or ‘topical’ allusion again repeats the will to control dissimulated by Lorenzo in his appeal to a ‘plain man in his plain meaning’.

Cultural Reformation: Lenten Jonson v. Festive Shakespeare The first, particularly significant, instance of repetition is furnished by Ben Jonson, who may indeed acknowledge it when he recalls that the actors   

See Jonathan Hope, Shakespeare and Language: Reason, Eloquence and Artifice in the Renaissance (London: Arden Shakespeare, ), –. Simon Palfrey, Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds (Cambridge University Press, ), . The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Methuen, ), note to ..–.

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

Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

considered ‘malevolent’ his expressed wish that Shakespeare exercise greater restraint in his writing – an expressed will to curtailment that he then proceeds to reiterate: ‘sometime it was necessary he should be stopped’. Specifically, this may recall the actors’ portrait of Jonson as (‘malevolent’) Malvolio, a likeness that has since been explored by critics. Signalled through verbal idiom, as David Riggs notes, it is signalled too through values and practices, notably, the value of propriety and the exclusionary model of the proper, private – and reading – individual self. The likeness is underscored by a self-portrait in Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels – a play that immediately precedes Twelfth Night – through which the figure of Malvolio was perhaps filtered. The authorial figure of Criticus (Crites in F) is described as a ‘poor, plain gentleman i’the black’ (..), while his companion, the figure of Arete (Virtue), is sardonically described by courtiers as ‘good Lady Sobriety’ (..), and likened to ‘a dozen of puritans’ (). What this sober couple have in view is, moreover, ‘reformation’ (..), a project of cultural as well as moral curtailment, directed at (false) courtiers who (in F) are described as without the ‘separate [i.e. individual] merit’ of the ‘true nobility called virtue’ (F .., ) and who are addicted rather to ‘extravagant jests’ (..) and far-fetched linguistic as well as sartorial practices, which are condemned as narcissistic displays of self-love. The ridiculous character of these practices is exposed (in F) on the occasion of a visit to the court of the figure of Mercury disguised as a ‘monsieur, or French-behav’d gentleman’ (F ..–), a model of ‘behaviour’ which recalls the figure of the mercurial, effeminate, French-behaved Boyet, a recollection which aligns the ‘reformation’ of the court at the end of Cynthia’s Revels with the ‘reformation’ staged at the close of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Jonson thus 

  



Ben Jonson, Discoveries, ed. Lorna Hutson, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson,  vols. (Cambridge University Press, ), VII, , lines , . Unless otherwise stated all references to Jonson’s works will be to this edition. See Ben Jonson, Poetaster, ed. Tom Cain (Manchester University Press, ), –; David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), –. Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Shakespeare’s Extravagancy’, Shakespeare : (), –. The Quarto and Folio versions of the play are significantly different, though there is no certainty as to the date of the additions to the Folio version. The two versions have been separately edited by Eric Rasmussen and Matthew Streggle, the Quarto in Works, I, –, the Folio, in Works, V, –. I quote from the Quarto indicating the quotations from the Folio version (F). See Clayton and Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Mercury, Boy Yet’, –. The key word here is ‘behaviour’: while Boyet is declared a personification of ‘behaviour’ by Biron (..), immediately after the speech in which he is likened to the figure of Mercury (–), Jonson’s figure of Mercury as the ‘French-behav’d gentleman’ specifically engages in, and wins a contest of behaviour at court. It is thus not only linguistic and sartorial practices but the larger system of cultural behaviour that is the

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

places himself where he is placed by Twelfth Night on the side of a cultural project of ‘reformation’ against the ‘extravagant’ practices of ‘Frenchified’ courtiers. He places himself, that is, on the side of a future cultural history characterised as Lenten in the second tetralogy as well as in Twelfth Night. Jonson’s place on the side of this Lenten future cultural history is borne out by the play that follows Cynthia’s Revels, just prior to, or just after Twelfth Night – Poetaster (). For Jonson here stages a linguistic purge and diet which is administered to the poetaster Crispinus by the dramatis persona of Virgil, figure of a linguistic norm which, in contrast to Cynthia’s Revels, is practised at the centre of power, the court, notably in a scene when Virgil reads to Augustus and the court a translated passage from the Aeneid. These scenes dramatise then the ideal of a linguistic norm bound to the centre of political power, the ideal, that is, which is evoked by the trope of ‘the King’s English’. This is signalled not by Jonson himself, who never uses the trope, but by Thomas Dekker in his riposte to Poetaster – Satiromastix. The figure of Horace (Jonson’s avatar) is here said to have invoked ‘the King’s English’ in a judgement of the speech of a Welshman who is thus placed where other ‘others’ are placed by similarly self-appointed cultural legislators, beyond the pale of the norm that the





 



object of the discursive struggle, or contest, over the defining ‘property’ of (the) English. Compare specifically, in Henry VIII, the critique (by Fletcher) of the ‘ridiculous’ ‘manners’ picked up by gentlemen during their travels in France (cited above, –). ‘the fresh Frenchified courtier’ is how ‘Monsieur Fastidious Brisk’ is ‘otherwise called’ in Every Man Out of His Humour (performed , published ), ..–. Every Man Out of His Humour, ed. Randall Martin, Works, I, –. See too Jonson’s Epigram  ‘On English Monsieur’ (quoted below, Chapter , note ) which criticises the Englishman whose addiction to French fashions ‘belies his nationality’ as Roze Hentschell puts it. Roze Hentschell, ‘Treasonous Textiles: Foreign Cloth and the Construction of Englishness’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies : (), . In his praise of Jonson’s avatar, Criticus, the figure of Mercury comments: ‘[h]e counts it his pleasure to despise pleasures’ (Cynthia’s Revels, ..). Peter Womack observes that Jonson belongs ‘objectively’ ‘on the side of “Lent”’. Peter Womack, Ben Jonson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), . It is of course this Lenten character rather than formal religious affiliation that Jonson shares with Puritans as the phrase used of Malvolio – ‘a kind of Puritan’ – signals. Poetaster, or His Arraignment, ed. Gabriele Bernhard Jackson, Works, II, –. Poetaster, .. For more detailed discussion see Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil (Cambridge University Press, ), especially –; Margaret TudeauClayton, ‘Scenes of Translation in Jonson and Shakespeare: Poetaster, Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Translation and Literature : (), –. Thomas Dekker, Satiromastix, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers,  vols. (Cambridge University Press, –), I, –. References throughout will be to this edition.

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

Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

trope at once represents and is mobilised to produce through such performative exclusions. While the violence of such exclusions is highlighted by the purge staged in Poetaster, the agenda Jonson shares with other cultural reformers is signalled by the ‘strict and wholesome diet’ (..) administered by Virgil. For Virgil proscribes Latinate neologisms as ‘wild, outlandish terms’ () just as the trope of ‘the King’s English’ is mobilised by Thomas Wilson and Robert Cawdrey to proscribe as ‘outlandish’ Latinate neologisms practised by professionals and far-journeyed gentlemen. Furthermore, if, in Poetaster, the normative linguistic centre coincides with the political centre of power, Jonson’s portrait of the court in Cynthia’s Revels as a place of culturally ‘extravagant’ practices indicates rather how this centre is to be produced by non-elite educated men through exclusion of the ‘outlandish’ forms perceived as the actual practice at court. This is underscored by the scenes at court in Poetaster which highlight how, in the absence of controlling institutions, including authoritative English–English dictionaries and grammars, it is incumbent on cultural actors such as translators and dramatists to produce this norm. Jonson, in short, here dramatises what he later declares, in the dedicatory epistle to Volpone, as an aspect of the ‘office’, or job, of the ‘comic poet’: to ‘instruct’ to ‘purity of language’. Jonson’s views of language in Poetaster have been compared by Tom Cain to a passage in the posthumously published notes Discoveries where ‘excess of feasts, and apparel’ are condemned as ‘notes’, or symptoms, ‘of a sick state, and the wantonness of language, of a sick mind’. He does not comment, however, on the resonances with cultural reformation discourses, notably the homily on ‘excess of apparel’, discussed in Chapter ,







The character of Tucca tells the Welshman that Horace ‘sayes because thou Clipst the Kinges English . . . thou canst not keepe a good tongue in thy head’. Satiromastix, .., . The validity of Dekker’s representation of Jonson is borne out by the work of A. H. King, who shows the linguistic policing done by Jonson in Poetaster. Pointing out that history has proved Jonson wrong with respect to only thirteen words, King argues that Jonson made a significant contribution to the production of ‘standard literary English’. A. H. King, The Language of Satirized Characters in Poetaster: A Socio-Stylistic Analysis, – (Lund: G. W. K. Gleerup, ), . Jonson, Volpone, ed. Richard Dutton, Works, III, . Jonson’s career as a self-appointed linguistic legislator finds its logical, late expression in his project for an English grammar which in his ‘Execration upon Vulcan’ is described as aiming to teach ‘purity of language’; Jonson, The Underwood, ed. Colin Burrow, Works, VII, –, lines –. For the grammar see Jonson, The English Grammar, ed. Derek Britton, Works, VII, –. Jonson, Poetaster, ed. Cain, . The passage is based on Seneca’s epistle ; see Jonson, Discoveries, ed. Hutson, Works, VII, , lines –.

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

nor how, like the purge and diet in Poetaster, such discourses aspire to institute certain cultural practices as normative by pathologising others. In Poetaster these include the linguistic practices of Shakespeare referenced through the figure of Ovid whose circle is characterised by extravagant practices, like the court in Cynthia’s Revels, a likeness which is highlighted by courtiers’ use of the first word thrown up (and out) in the linguistic purge of the poetaster, Crispinus: ‘retrograde’ (Poetaster, ..) (Cynthia’s Revels, F .., ..). Like the expressed will to curtailment and control discussed above, the pathologising of Shakespearean linguistic practices has continued, witness Park Honan’s criticism, in stern Jo(h)nsonian vein, of early Shakespeare, ‘too attracted by ringing changes on words’, ‘enamoured of . . . verbal excesses’, a criticism I take up again in Chapter . That Twelfth Night stages resistance to Jonson – and his fellow Lenten travellers – is signalled in the well-known passage in The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus, widely, if not unanimously, taken to refer to the treatment of Malvolio in which Shakespeare is claimed by the figure of Will Kemp to have given the ‘pestilent fellow’ Jonson a ‘purge’ in response to the purge in Poetaster. This is underscored by the language used by, and of Malvolio who, when he puts Feste down, is diagnosed precisely by Olivia as ‘sick’, specifically ‘of self-love’ (..), a diagnosis which ironically mirrors the diagnosis of courtiers in Cynthia’s Revels, while the treatment meted out in revenge for this put-down as well as for the curtailment of nightly revels is described as ‘physic’ (..) by Maria. The tables are then turned on Jonson and fellow cultural reformers who are diagnosed as themselves ‘sick’, like and with the idea of a bounded, separate and stable, individual self which, as I have argued, Malvolio embodies, and which Jonson repeatedly affirms through the image of a circle. Maria’s ‘physic’, moreover, proves Malvolio a hypocrite, prepared to abandon the moral high ground and transgress ‘proper’ boundaries in pursuit of his social ambitions. Once again the will to cultural reformation is exposed as a cover for a will to social power.   



Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford University Press, ), . The returne from Parnassus: or The scourge of simony (London, ), sig. Gr. For instance, in the description of the authorial figure of Crites: ‘here the man . . . / Who (like a circle bounded in itself ) / Contaynes as much as man in fulnesse may’. Cynthia’s Revels, ..–. See Thomas Greene, ‘Ben Jonson and the Centred Self’, in Harold Bloom, ed., Ben Jonson: Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, ), –. On Malvolio as a parodic instance of this idea see Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Shakespeare’s Extravagancy’, –. See Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (London: Routledge, ), –.

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Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

The aspiration specifically to a bounded, stable, ‘pure’ and proper vernacular is put into question through the figure of Malvolio’s antagonist Feste, the self-described ‘corrupter of words’ (..) who declines to use the word ‘element’ on the grounds that it is ‘overworn’ (–). As others have noted, Jonson’s use of this word is mocked by Dekker in Satiromastix where the figure of Horace/Jonson is criticised for asserting that he writes ‘out of the Courtiers element’ (Satiromastix, ..), an assertion of superiority which finds echo in Malvolio’s contemptuous dismissal of his antagonists, ‘I am not of your element’ (..). Feste’s criterion of lexical selection – he rejects a word not because it is ‘outlandish’, but because it is ‘overworn’ – together with his self-description carry an idea of the poet/dramatist’s job that is diametrically opposed to the instruction to purity of language implied in Poetaster and declared in the epistle to Volpone. Indeed, ‘overworn’ suggests that the aspiration of Jonson and fellow cultural reformers to a stable, bounded, ‘pure’ vernacular tends to exhaust the expressive possibilities of language. In contrast, the ‘corrupter of words’ aspires to renew language through ‘extravagant’ practices, which, as I argue in Chapter , tend to enlarge the expressive possibilities at once of the vernacular and of individuals. Twelfth Night affirms this cultural ‘extravagancy’, although the pervasive nostalgia, especially around the figure of Feste testifies to the imminence of the future history predicted in Malvolio’s promised revenge. It is a mood of nostalgia that, as I discuss in Chapter , pervades too the representation of an about-tobe-lost world in a scene immediately prior to the banishment of Falstaff in  Henry IV. Indeed, the antagonism between Falstaff and Hal is, as we shall see, mediated, like the antagonism between Feste and Malvolio, in terms of the cyclically recurring cultural agon between Carnival and Lent, which is turned, in the histories as well as in the comedy, as a linear, irreversible, immanent as well as imminent historical event/rupture. In the plays of the s then, especially the comedies and the second tetralogy, Shakespeare, like John Florio in the passage with which I began, celebrates even as he contributes to an expanding ‘copia’ of ‘Englishes’.   

For discussion with further examples see Twelfth Night, ed. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik (London: Methuen, ), xxi–xxii. Most explicit in Olivia’s comment: ‘Now you see, sir, how your fooling grows old, and people dislike it’ (..–). For the staging of the battle between Carnival and Lent in the Henriad and Twelfth Night see Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Routledge, ), –; François Laroque, ‘Shakespeare’s “Battle of Carnival and Lent”: The Falstaff Scenes Reconsidered ( &  Henry IV)’, in Ronald Knowles, ed., Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ), –.

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Cultural Reformation: Lenten Jonson v. Festive Shakespeare

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Crucially, however, Shakespeare’s ‘Englishes’ are not, like Florio’s, court-centred, but rather decentred, in a mobile, expanding, centrifugal mix – a ‘gallimaufry’ – which, specifically, opposes the centripetal cultural reformation project to instate a normative, stable centre – ‘the King’s English’ – by exclusion. At the linguistic level, this is done through the ‘extravagant’ practices discussed in Chapter , practices which, like and with the ‘gallimaufry’, are eschewed, or mocked by would-be cultural reformers, including Jonson. Of these practices the most important, which I discuss first, is ‘synonymia’ or ‘variation of an English’. Never practised by Jonson, as far as I have been able to establish, ‘synonymia’ is practised by a range of Shakespearean characters across the genres in the plays of the s. Prominent amongst these is the schoolteacher Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost who, as editors have long noted, on his first entrance, reproduces ‘Englishes’ from Florio’s dictionary (published in the same year as the first extant quarto of the play). This instance highlights how, as I develop in Chapter , the practice of ‘synonymia’ serves the pedagogical (and political) purpose of disseminating the elite symbolic wealth of ‘Englishes’ to the broad social constituency of the public theatre. The point is underscored by another prominent practiser whose affinities with Holofernes I discuss: John Falstaff, a member of the male elite, though without a territorial base, an extravagant wanderer, short of cash but possessed of a linguistic abundance which he spends freely in the public theatre, notably in his habitual practice of ‘synonymia’. Shadowed by his author (like Holofernes, as I suggest in my conclusion), Falstaff (like his author) might then be described as something of a cultural Robin Hood – a figure with which he is explicitly associated in the opening scene of The Merry Wives of Windsor (..) and implicitly associated in  Henry IV, as François Laroque has pointed out. Indeed, in one of the speeches in which he indulges in the practice of ‘synonymia’, Falstaff denounces the hoarding of learning as evil, like the hoarding of gold ( Henry IV, ..–). For Falstaff – and the author that shadows him – both forms of wealth should rather be put into circulation and used.

 

Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, . Laroque, ‘Shakespeare’s “Battle of Carnival and Lent”’, . The figure of Robin Hood is also associated, tellingly, with the gentlemen turned ‘outlaws’ in the forest in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (..–) and the company of ‘merry men’ around the Duke who live in the forest of Arden in As You Like It (..–). For the significance of Robin Hood as standing ‘not only for the community and brotherhood characteristic of the Golden Age . . . but also for resistance to tyranny’, see Jean Howard’s introduction to As You Like It in The Norton Shakespeare, .

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Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

Language and Dress: The ‘Gallimaufry’, the Motley-Dressed Elite Male Some twenty years prior to his celebration of ‘Englishes’ John Florio had himself proposed a view of ‘this English tongue’ as an expanding, heterogeneous mix, in his ‘first fruits’, a series of simple dialogues in English and Italian. In response to the question if the language is ‘gallant and gentle, or els contrary’, the authorial interlocutor replies: Certis if you wyl beleeve me, it doth not like me at al, because it is a language confused, bepeesed with many tongues: it taketh many words of the latine, & mo from the French, & mo from the Italian, and many mo from the Duitch, some also from the Greeke, & from the Britaine, so that if every language had his owne wordes againe, there woulde but a few remaine for English men, and yet every day they adde . . . take a booke and reade . . . and you shall not reade foure woordes togeather of true English.

Here, the lexical heterogeneity and range, which Florio later celebrates, is taken not as a sign of wealth, but, on the contrary, as a sign of the poverty of an implicitly inferior vernacular that has little that is ‘proper’ to (the) English, let alone proper to a ‘gallant and gentle’ Englishman, consisting as it does in a ‘confused’ mixture of other European vernaculars and ancient languages. The change in Florio’s perception of the heterogeneous range of English(es) is no doubt due, in part at least, to his spectacular rise from excluded foreigner to celebrated figure at the centre of power the court. Certainly it is from outside this centre that the view of English as a confused mix – ‘a gallimaufry’ – is reiterated by non-elite educated protestant men. It is from outside this centre too that the sartorial equivalent – the figure of the elite Englishman dressed in a motley of foreign fashions, which is hinted at in Florio’s ‘bepeesed with many tongues’, is reproduced as an exclusionary object in (re)definitions of the ‘true’ Englishman.

 

John Florio, His Firste Fruites (London, ), sig. Niiv. According to Matthiessen, Florio seeks in his first fruits ‘to show Englishmen the vast superiority of Italy’, while in his second fruits () the tone is ‘much mellower’ without the earlier contempt for the ‘country of his adoption’. F. O. Matthiessen, Translation: An Elizabethan Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), , –. Wyatt too comments on the ‘marginal’ position of Florio during the period of the earlier language learning books and the ‘confidence of address’ in the dictionary preface which reflects his ‘surer footing in the aristocratic circles to which he had long aspired’. Wyatt, The Italian Encounter, , . Kermode sees this passage as illustrative of ‘two stages’ in the defining of English identity through its relations to aliens, the first rejection, the second incorporation. Kermode, Aliens and Englishness, –.

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The ‘Gallimaufry’, the Motley-Dressed Elite Male



Particular instances of this recurring cultural figure, or meme, as I suggest it might be called, have received critical attention, like the first visual portraits of an Englishman from which it derives, as I will discuss, but there has been no attempt to examine its genealogy or the ideological purposes it serves. As a consequence the implications of the Shakespearean instances – in Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado about Nothing and All’s Well that Ends Well – have not been recognised. In Chapter , I trace the genealogy of the figure through late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English culture and show how the visual portraits were taken up and reworked in verbal discourses informed by cultural reformation ideology, notably hortatory or polemical texts directed at the ‘reformation’ to the cultural ‘habits’ of ‘true’ (because protestant, plain and temperate) Englishmen. Acquiring gender as well as class inflections even as it is woven into revisionary historical narratives the figure evolves into a verbal portrait of a contemporary, effeminate English gentleman/courtier clothed in a changing motley of foreign fashions, who is the object of a violent exclusionary rhetoric, and who is more and less explicitly contrasted with the ‘ancient’ ‘manly’ and temperate plain-speaking citizen, clothed in plain native dress. It is here that the normative centre of the ‘true’ Englishman is consequently located, a centre that is defined as the normative centre of the ‘King’s English’ is defined through exclusion of the ‘oversea language’, with which ‘farre jorneid jentlemen’ ‘pouder their talk’, ‘like as thei love to go in forrein apparell’. Illustrated with particular explicitness in the prequel to Richard II, Thomas of Woodstock, which, uniquely, features the figure as a dramatis persona, this exclusionary definition of the ‘true-born Englishman’ (..) is evoked in Richard II (the one play in the canon to feature this phrase) only to be undercut, first in the history play, then in The Merchant of Venice, the romantic comedy which shortly follows and which features the figure of the motley-dressed or ‘oddly . . . suited’ (..) elite Englishman. Described as a ‘proper man’s picture’ () the figure is viewed here in the ‘other’ place of Belmont/Venice as one in a collection of verbal portraits that, I argue, references the sixteenth-century cultural genre of the ‘theatre’ – a visual and/or verbal collection of national and social types – in which the figure has its origins. A ‘theatre’ within the play, this scene (.) offers a critical frame to the deadly drama which follows of culturally mediated, national and religious differences, interrogating the truth of 

Thomas Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique, ed. T. J. Derrick (New York: Garland, ), . All quotations will be from this edition.

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

Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

defining cultural ‘habits’. At the same time the play affirms the plural mixed character of (the) English which the figure of the ‘oddly . . . suited’ Englishman represents, not only through the linguistic analogy, but also through his telling name, Falconbridge, which, as I consider, recalls the figure of the ‘bastard’ who, for some critics, is the ‘true-born Englishman’ in King John, which is placed by the (New as well as Old) Oxford editors between Richard II and Merchant. The figure is thus turned against its use as an object of exclusion in cultural reformation ideology as it is in Much Ado and Richard II. A fourth, later instance in All’s Well, is more ambiguously treated, as I discuss in the conclusion to the chapter, arguing that, after the political and cultural watershed of , there is an increased ambivalence at once towards the ‘gallimaufry’ and towards the ‘plainness’ against which the ‘gallimaufry’ is set in the s. Itself, ironically, taken from French and introduced in the mid-sixteenth century in the first translation into English of Thomas More’s Utopia, the (variously spelt) culinary figure of the gallimaufry (denoting a mix of several meats) was used from the outset figuratively and negatively of mixes that traverse ‘proper’ boundaries whether social, generic, stylistic or most frequently lexical, as when, in the introduction to The Shepheard’s Calendar (), ‘E.K.’ complains about the introduction of Latinate neologisms that ‘have made our English tongue a gallimaufray or hodgepodge of al other speches’. Of particular importance for my argument is the use of the word in the polemical exchange around actors and the theatre conducted between Thomas Heywood and John Green. For this underscores not only how linguistic practice was an object in this polemic, which was reiterated in the drama, but also how one of the perceived stakes was again the character – ‘property’ – of (the) English. Thus Heywood advances, as his second argument in defence of the actors, that, as London has acquired international prestige on account of its theatres (his first argument), so ‘our English tongue’ has acquired international cultural value through its refinement by play-poets from a gallimaufry to a ‘perfect and composed language’: our English tongue which hath ben the most harsh, uneven, and broken language of the world, part Dutch, part Irish, Saxon, Scotch, Welsh, and 



See OED, ‘gallimaufry’, . Interestingly, the word is introduced to represent the breach of propriety by the radical dissenting voice of Raphael Hythloday. See Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“This is the stranger’s case”’, . ‘E.K.’, in George Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays,  vols., repr. (Oxford University Press, ), I, .

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The ‘Gallimaufry’, the Motley-Dressed Elite Male



indeed a gallimaffry of many, but perfect in none, is now by this . . . meanes of playing, continually refined, . . . so that . . . from the most rude and unpolisht tongue, it is growne to a most perfect and composed language, and many excellent workes, and elaborate Poems writ in the same, that many Nations grow inamored of our tongue (before despised).

In his reply John Green does not contest the denigratory view of English as a heterogeneous gallimaufry, even adding French to the list of ingredients. He goes on, however, to argue that far from the refinement claimed by Heywood the ‘Play-Poets’ have contributed further to the mess, making a ‘great mingle-mangle’ with their additions of ‘Greeke, Lattine, and Italian’ words. Inverting Heywood’s narrative of the amelioration of ‘our English tongue’ Green rehearses a narrative of degeneration: ‘before the Conquest by Bastard William that the French came in’ (an entry advertised by his addition of ‘French’ to the gallimaufry) ‘our English tongue was most perfect’, but once ‘corrupted’ by French it lost a ‘common Dialect’ since when it has been rendered still ‘more obscure’ so that ‘a plaine man can scarce utter his mind’ (–; compare Lorenzo’s appeal to ‘a plain man in his plain meaning’ quoted above). Green’s history of the language echoes protestant revisionary histories of the English – people and institutions – that likewise identify the Norman invasion as a rupture with, or ‘fall’ from an idealised past. According to the historian Christopher Hill this ‘myth’ of the Norman yoke fuelled the socio-political divisions leading to the civil war, a war that Michel Foucault, following Hill, described as the first ‘guerre des races’ in the West, the first war, that is, propagated by a discourse of racial difference. What this passage from Green illustrates  





Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London, ), sig. Fr. Compare the description by Florio in his ‘first fruits’ quoted above. I (John) G (reen), A Refutation of the Apology for Actors (London, ), . See Carla Mazzio, ‘Staging the Vernacular: Language and Nation in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy’, Studies in English Literature – : (), –. Summarising sixteenth-century opinion on the origin and growth of the English language Moore comments that the Norman Conquest was widely viewed as a ‘calamity’. J. L. Moore, Tudor-Stuart Views on the Growth, Status and Destiny of the English Language (Tu¨bingen: Dr Martin Sändig oHG, ), . For a particularly telling, politically charged instance, in John Ponet’s treatise which urges active opposition to the Marian regime, and which ‘in a kind of Protestant English myth of the Golden Age’, asserts that ‘before the Norman invasion’ the English were ‘natural’ as well as ‘true’, see R. S. White, Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge University Press, ), . Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), –; Michel Foucault, ‘Il faut défendre la société’, in Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, eds., Cours au Collège de France (–) (Gallimard: Seuil, ), –. Foucault’s dependence on Hill is critiqued by Franck Lessay, a conservative French critic who claims that Hill’s Marxist linear history has been invalidated by recent historians who have furnished a more complex view. But, as he admits, what has been gained in complexity has been lost in explanatory power; as

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

Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

is how a linguistic ideology, which neither Hill nor Foucault considers, proceeds from as it feeds the myth. In particular Green’s use of ‘common’ and ‘plain’, which, as we will see, are key terms in the ideology of ‘the King’s English’, serves to invest the project for a future normative vernacular with legitimising historical significance as a return to its prior ‘ancient’ character. This in turn produces the association of particular linguistic practices with a racially connoted idea of ‘true’ ‘ancient’ national identity as when George Gascoigne advises: ‘the more monasyllables [sic] that you use, the truer Englishman you shall seeme’ since ‘the most auncient English wordes are of one sillable’. The corollary to this is the association of a linguistic mix – the gallimaufry – with racial miscegenation as when, in an instance that I discuss below for its historically specific implications, Thomas Nashe attacks Gabriel Harvey as a ‘galimafrier of all stiles’ for his ‘supplanting and setting aside the true children of the English, and suborning inkehorne changlings in their steade’. In this context Green’s case against the play-poets takes on racial connotations: inasmuch as in their practice of Latinate and romance neologisms, play-poets collaborate in the further degeneration of ‘our English tongue’ into an impure mingle-mangle/gallimaufry, they are self-condemned as ‘untrue’ to the ‘proper’, ‘ancient’ character of their nation-race.



  

he also admits Hill’s line of argument, if currently unfashionable, still has its adherents. Franck Lessay, ‘Joug normand et guerre des races: de l’effet de vérité au trompe-l’oeil’, in Yves Charles Zarka, ed., Michel Foucault: de la guerre des races au biopouvoir, Cités  (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ), –. For a full account of the development of this racial discourse see Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons and Anglo-Saxons (Montreal: Harvest Press, ). Richard Bailey points out the ‘class based’ nature of the ‘linguistic dispute’ between Heywood and Green which, he says, parallels ‘the political divisions that would eventually culminate in the English civil war’, although he does not mention the myth of the Norman yoke. Richard W. Bailey, Images of English: A Cultural History of the Language (Cambridge University Press, ), . ‘Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English’, in The Posies of George Gascoigne (London, ), sig. Tivr (cited in Moore, Tudor-Stuart Views, ). Thomas Nashe, The Works, ed. R. B. McKerrow, rev. edition, F. P. Wilson,  vols. (Oxford University Press, ), I, . There is no shortage of secondary literature on the early modern ‘purists’ and their opposition to so called ‘inkhorn terms’, but work to date has largely been confined either to histories of the language, for example: Manfred Görlach, Introduction to Early Modern English, repr. (Cambridge University Press, ); Charles Barber, Early Modern English (London: Deutsch, ), –; Douglas Gray, ‘A Note on Sixteenth Century Purism’, in E. G. Stanley and T. F. Hoad, eds., Words for Robert Burchfield’s Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ), –; or to histories of attitudes towards English: for example, Richard Foster Jones, The Triumph of the English Language (Stanford University Press, ); Bailey, Images of English; Blank, ‘The Babel of Renaissance English’, –. The nearest Jones, for instance, gets to discussion of ideological implications is when he suggests that enthusiasm for Anglo-Saxon fostered ‘nationalistic pride’ (The Triumph, ).

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The ‘Gallimaufry’, the Motley-Dressed Elite Male



Essentially the same arguments had been rehearsed around linguistic practices in translation, a parallel which underscores how, as Jonson dramatises in Poetaster, theatre and translation were analogous cultural sites of the struggle over the ‘property’ of ‘our English tongue’. Particularly explicit is Ralph Lever who in The Arte of Reason, rightly termed Witcraft (published  though written earlier), condemns those who with ‘inckhorne termes’ ‘chaunge and corrupt’ ‘our mother tongue’ ‘making a mingle mangle of their native speache, and not observing the propertie thereof’, in contrast to those, like himself, who ‘devise understandable termes, compounded of true & auncient english woords’ (like the ‘witcraft’ of his title) and who consequently ‘maintain and continue’ its ‘antiquitie’. Implicit here is the narrative of discontinuity and degeneration into obscurity rehearsed by Green whose condemnation of playpoets echoes Lever’s condemnation of translators who similarly fail to observe the ‘true’ ‘ancient’ ‘property’ of English. It is from a translation that George Puttenham illustrates what he calls (perhaps inspired by Lever) the ‘vice’ of ‘the Mingle-Mangle’, which is ‘when we make our speech or writings of sundry languages’ by introducing foreign neologisms, ‘which have no manner of conformity with our language, either by custom or derivation, which may make them tolerable’. If, however, like Lever and Green, Puttenham uses the figure of the mingle-mangle to condemn the practice of foreign, especially Latinate neologisms on the grounds of a lack of ‘conformity’ to the proper character of ‘our language’, his criterion of ‘custom or derivation’ is different from their criterion of ‘antiquitie’ and implies a different idea of the ‘property’ of English. This is borne out by his explicit affirmation of the changes brought by the Norman invasion which allow ‘us very many bisyllables, and also trisyllables’. For Puttenham, that is, the property of English is irreversibly mixed and it is the mixed ‘Norman English’ as he calls it that constitutes the base of the standard that he recommends as ideally (if not



 



For further extended discussion see Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Scenes of Translation’ and Margaret TudeauClayton, ‘“Mine own and not mine own”: The Gift of Lost Property in Translation and Theatre’, in Gabriela Schmidt, ed., Elizabethan Translation and Literary Culture (Berlin: De Gruyter, ), –. Ralph Lever, ‘The Forespeache’, in The Arte of Reason, rightly termed, Witcraft (London, ), n.p. George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), , ; the translation Puttenham cites has been identified as John Soowthern’s translation from Ronsard in Pandora () (The Art,  n. ). Puttenham, The Art, .

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

Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

actually) practised at court and as what good writers should aim to produce. Puttenham here is like Jonson who similarly aspires not, like Lever and his fellow radical reformers, to the replacement of existing polysyllabic Latinate forms, but rather to the curtailment of new instances. Indeed, Jonson is as vigorous in his condemnation of the radical linguistic agenda of such as Lever as he is of the extravagant neologisms of courtiers. If then the aspiration to a centralised, stable and unifying norm, which ‘the King’s English’ represents and is mobilised to produce, is shared by these self-appointed linguistic legislators, there are different, more and less radical, positions as to where the boundaries of inclusion/exclusion are to be drawn according to different views of the ‘property’ of ‘our language’. Translation has, of course, long been recognised as a significant site of entry of new words. Early modern drama, on the other hand, has not been systematically studied for its lasting lexical impact, except in the case of Shakespeare, who tends to be treated more or less as a special case, as I take up in Chapter . However, whatever the actual lexical impact of the play-poets, the theatre was perceived – and continued to be perceived well into the seventeenth century – likewise as a site of entry of new words. In addition to the exchange between Heywood and Green cited above there is an earlier passing comment by Puttenham to the effect that one of the pleasures for ‘the common people’ of ‘playes and interludes’ are the long words ‘fetched from the Latin inkhorn or borrowed of strangers’ for 







The much quoted stricture that the language of writers be that ‘spoken in the king’s court’ is immediately qualified by criticism of the practice of ‘many dark wordes and not usuall, . . . though they be daily spoken in court’ (Puttenham, The Art, , , emphasis mine). Invariably ignored by critics this qualifier suggests again a tension between an ideal norm and perceived practice. In this, as in the other examples, it is important to stress the difficulty if not impossibility of establishing actual linguistic practice at court, as distinct from these (ideologically determined) perceptions. See for instance the satiric treatment of the language of Puritans in The Alchemist. Bailey places Jonson in the camp of those who ‘sought to enhance the “purity” of English’, adding that he had ‘quite different assumptions’ from other purists, although he does not elaborate on these. Bailey, Images of English, . Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language, th edition (London: Routledge, ), ; Norman Blake, ‘Introduction’, in Norman Blake, ed., The Cambridge History of the English Language (Cambridge University Press, ), II, . Samuel Johnson complains at the ‘licence of translatours’ which ‘will reduce us to babble a dialect of France’ in the preface to his dictionary (), as quoted in Terttu Nevalainen, ‘Early Modern English Lexis and Semantics’, in Roger Lass, ed., The Cambridge History of the English Language (Cambridge University Press, ), III, . An overview of (mostly German) work on Shakespeare is given in Bryan A. Garner, ‘Shakespeare’s Latinate Neologisms’, Shakespeare Studies  (), –. Garner describes Shakespeare’s practice of neologism as a ‘generous liberalism’ (); see too Baugh and Cable, A History of the English Language, – and Nevalainen, ‘Early Modern English Lexis’, –. See further Chapter .

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The ‘Gallimaufry’, the Motley-Dressed Elite Male



the purposes of rhyme. This pleasure is later satirised in Albumuzar (), a university drama published in the same year as Green’s treatise, which features the figure of a country farmer Trincalo who aspires to ‘confound’ his mistress with ‘complements drawne from the Plaies I see at the Fortune, and Red Bull’ (i.e. the public theatres), ‘where I learne all the words I speake and understand not’. In a play for an elite audience invited to enjoy contempt of those dispossessed by their own ignorance of the symbolic capital offered in the theatres, this echoes Green’s point about the obscurity of play-poets’ language, if from an opposed ideological standpoint. Still more explicitly telling – and in line with the cultural reformers such as Wilson and Green – is the scene of the linguistic purge and diet of the figure of Crispinus (alias John Marston) in Jonson’s Poetaster. Later, in what may be a recollection of this scene, Henry Peacham rehearses this view of the ‘Stage’ as a site of ‘ampullous and Scenical pompe, with emptie furniture of phrase’, inventing a Latinate neologism, ‘ampullous’, which exemplifies what it describes, like two of the words that Jonson invents for the purge of Crispinus: ‘turgidous’ and ‘ventositous’. As late as  the figure of a ‘phantasticall gallant’ who produces a stream of polysyllabic Latinate forms, in The Obstinate Lady, provokes the ironic enquiry: ‘You frequent Playes, do you not?’ Similar figures in earlier Elizabethan satirical comedies might rather have provoked the question: ‘You frequent the court, do you not?’ For, like and with the theatre, the court was perceived and criticised as a site of entry of new Latinate words. The likeness is foregrounded in Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels where a would-be courtier is compared to a ‘neophyte player’ (..) and subsequently praised for the ‘play-particles’ that he comes up with in his progress (..). Every Man Out of His Humour (performed , published ) features too a ‘neat, spruce, affecting courtier’ (‘Characters’, line ), Fastidious Brisk, who attributes his newly acquired words such as ‘arrides’ (..) to the ‘refined choice spirits’ that  

  

Puttenham, The Art, –. Thomas Tomkis, Albumazar (London, ), sig. Dr. This figure is characterised too by the wearing of the yellow starch band, metonym of court corruption, as Jones and Stallybrass point out, though they appear to have misunderstood the ironic thrust of his confession. Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, –. Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (London, ), –; Jonson, Poetaster, ... See Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Scenes of Translation’, . Moore, Tudor-Stuart Views, . Dekker makes a very similar barbed comment when he advises the would-be gallant to ‘hoord up the finest play-scraps . . . the onely furniture to a Courtier thats but a new beginner’. Thomas Dekker, The Guls Horne-booke (London, ),  (misprint for ).

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

Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

he frequents at court (). In Poetaster () the foolish Albius congratulates himself for his ‘speech’ ‘got . . . by seeing a play’ and resolves to ‘frequent . . . plays, now I come to be familiar with courtiers’ (..–). Patient Grisil (), which I discuss again in Chapter , features a similar figure (a similarity underscored by an explicit allusion to Fastidius [..]) in Emulo, a ‘foolish gallant visiting Italy’, who expresses the aspiration advertised in his name through a display of (again) ‘outlandish phrases’ (..), which are anticipated by the introduction of him as a walking gallimaufry: ‘Now the gallimaufrie of language comes in’ (..). Emulo is clearly reminiscent of the far-journeyed gentlemen whose outlandish forms are excluded from the normative centre of ‘the King’s English’ by Wilson and Cawdrey, an exclusion that is effected here, as in Jonson’s plays, through satire. What these instances point up is how court and theatre were both associated with the practice of outlandish – foreign – forms and the consequent effect of a corrupt gallimaufry of English(es). Rehearsed on as well as off stage, this association of theatre and court finds its logical expression in the career of the sartorial equivalent of the gallimaufry – the figure of the Englishman dressed in a motley of foreign fashions. For if, as I pointed out earlier, the figure appears as a dramatis persona in Woodstock, specifically, as I discuss in Chapter , as a courtier addicted to new foreign fashions accessorised with new words, it subsequently finds its way, complete with this courtier’s advertised sartorial item of flashy Polish boots, into a gallery of theatre spectators in Notes from Black-Fryers (), a caustic portrait of gentlemen-spectators who, in their addiction to the foreign sartorial and linguistic fashions picked up from the theatre betray the ‘true’ character of the English. Apart then from the material, economic and socio-political ties that connected them, the theatre and court are associated in discourses informed by cultural reformation ideology as places of ‘outlandish’ linguistic and sartorial practices, which mirror and mutually contaminate each other in an art/life loop, and which are frequented by those condemned by such practices as ‘untrue’ to the ‘proper’ character of their nation as of their mother tongue,  



Dekker, Description of ‘Persons’ (added), The Pleasant Comodie of Patient Grisil (London, ), in Dramatic Works, I, . John Donne asserts ‘Courts are theatres’ in a verse letter that dates from the end of the s. ‘To Sir Henry Wotton’, in John Donne’s Poetry, ed. Arthur L. Clements, nd edition (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, ), – (line ). Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge University Press, ), –; the traitorous character of the figure is underscored in Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, . See further Chapter .

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The ‘Gallimaufry’, the Motley-Dressed Elite Male



in short, as ‘traitors’. This furnishes an ideological as well as rhetorical pretext for a future history of closure (in the case of the theatre) and of violent opposition (in the case of the court) – a future history that Shakespeare’s comedies and second tetralogy at once predict and oppose. Shakespearean opposition is pointed up by revisionary reprises, such as Westward Ho (? published ), which revisits Merry Wives. Here the motley foreign fashion items proposed (Falstaff-like) by an elite male to a citizen wife are rejected as not ‘proper’ to her ‘estate’, while the practice of Latinate neologisms and the consequent ‘English Gallimafries’ are rejected by a male citizen who calls for the cutting out of ‘our uplandish Neates tongues’ and a return to the purified speech of ‘regenerate Brittains’ (evoking the politically correct though linguistically tricky option under James). As I take up in Chapter , the violence here towards finely dressed gentlemen (‘neats’) and their ‘gallimafries’ is matched by the violence towards the figure of the motley-dressed Englishman in The Seven Deadly Sins of London (), a satirical pamphlet by Dekker who explicitly associates the figure with the body of a traitor, as we will see in Chapter . Dekker also highlights the two associated objects of exclusion – the gentleman and the foreigner – in The Honest Whore (), which, as Jean Howard has noted, associates a degenerate aristocracy with Italians, while the virtuous male citizen is celebrated as the ‘pattern for a King’, as he is in Thomas Deloney’s prose narrative Jack of Newbury (c.), which likewise associates a corrupt English aristocrat with an Italian. It is precisely the plainness of the male citizen that self-appointed nonelite cultural reformers promote as the pattern for ‘the King’s English’, a normative centre of ‘common’ ‘plain’ English defined through exclusion, especially of the gallimaufry of Latinate neologisms practised



 

For a more detailed discussion see Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Shakespeare’s “welsch men” and “the King’s English”’, in Willy Maley and Philip Schwyzer, eds., Shakespeare and Wales (Farnham: Ashgate, ), . Dekker, Westward Ho, ..–, ..–, ..–, in Dramatic Works, II, –. Jean E. Howard, ‘Civic Institutions and Precarious Masculinity in Dekker’s The Honest Whore’, Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar  (), eserver.org/emc/-/howard.html, accessed  December . As the title indicates, the focus is on the figure of the male citizen as instrumentalised by the state. The Honest Whore was written with Thomas Middleton though, as Howard notes, the scenes featuring the degenerate gallants are usually assumed to be Dekker’s work (§). On Thomas Deloney’s portrait of ‘Sir George’ as an ironically named ‘antithesis of what Englishness should stand for’, see Rahel Orgis, ‘Tricking Sir George into Marriage: The Utopian Moral Reform of the English Commonwealth in Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury’, in Rahel Orgis and Matthias Heim, eds., Fashioning England and the English (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, ), .

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

Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

by ‘neats’ – elaborately dressed elite gentlemen at the centre of political power, the court. The history of this trope, its association with citizen moral virtues of honesty and temperance as well as with the defining character of English plainness, will be the focus of the next chapter. It is, however, worth mentioning here another reprise which epitomises – indeed advertises – what is at stake in cultural reformation ideology. This reprise is not of a play by Shakespeare, but of A Worlde of Words (), the dictionary by John Florio with which this chapter began. Almost a hundred years after its publication Edward Phillips produces, in , a fifth edition of his ‘Universal English Dictionary’ (title page), ‘The New World of Words’, recalling his predecessor only to advertise the difference and distance with ‘new’ as he does with ‘modern’ in a second title on the facing page: ‘The Moderne World of Words’. In a preface to this edition he criticises those who have ‘crouded the Language with a world of Foreign Words that will not admit of any free Denization’, and who thus mislead ‘the ignorant’ ‘to speak and write rather like conceited Pedants and bombastic Scriblers than true Englishmen’. Reproducing the (common) analogy between human and linguistic strangers (discussed in the next section), Phillips here announces the ‘new’, ‘modern’ character of ‘true’ Englishness as a function of a shared normative vernacular, ‘our English tongue’, defined in terms of exclusion of foreign words, which he asserts are rather ‘a Burthen than an Ornament to our English tongue’, surely a conscious rebuttal of the ‘copia’ of ‘Englishes’ celebrated by Florio as the distinguishing property of the ‘mother speech’ of ‘English gentlemen’.

Human/Linguistic ‘Strangers’ and ‘Bad’ Coin Together with the foreignised elite male the object of the exclusionary violence of cultural reformation ideology was, as I have indicated, ‘the stranger’. Tending to a generalised xenophobia this bears specifically on the context of citizen hostility towards strangers in late sixteenth-century London. This is signalled by Thomas Nashe’s use of the trope of ‘changlings’ that usurp the place of the ‘true children of the English’ in his representation of Gabriel Harvey’s use of Latinate neologisms cited 



Edward Phillips, The New World of Words: A Universal English Dictionary (London, ), n.p. Görlach comments that this ‘started the critical reaction to Latinized dictionary words’ (Introduction to Early Modern English, ), although it also continues the argument, which begins much earlier, about what was to be included/excluded in/as ‘our English’. Phillips, ‘The Preface’, in The New World of Words, n.p.

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Human/Linguistic ‘Strangers’ and ‘Bad’ Coin



above (). At the back of his comment may well lie the ‘concerted attack’ on the status of strangers’ children which culminated in  in a parliamentary bill ‘that would have prevented the English-born children of a first generation “stranger” . . . from being legally considered English’. Certainly it finds echo in The Pedlar’s Prophecy, an anonymous, blatantly xenophobic play contemporary with The Merchant of Venice, which represents the children of mixed marriages as ‘Aliant sonnes’ who have ‘altered the true English blood and seed / And therewithal English plain maners and good state’. Once again a racially inflected character of ‘true English blood’ is associated with ‘plain maners’ as well as here with ‘good state’ (presumably a reference to the parliamentary system). The recurring transfer to language of a racially inflected discourse of biological reproduction (illustrated further below and in Chapter ) points up the stakes of Shakespearean linguistic practices which traverse ‘proper’ boundaries to produce strange hybrids, notably in the trope of ‘mistaking exchange’, which Puttenham calls ‘the Changeling’, and new word formations (Nashe’s ‘changlings’). Indeed, it is no coincidence that one of the comedies in which such practices abound features the figure of a changeling – a ‘lovely’ boy ‘translated’ from East to West – and a hybrid union of ‘bottom’ and top, a ‘translated’ artisan and fairy queen, a union that has its linguistic analogue in the artisans’ mistaking exchanges with Latinate words (notably Bottom’s mistaking exchange of ‘odious’ for Titania’s ‘odorous’). The union of Bottom and Titania is, moreover, only a more striking instance of a number of hybrid unions that traverse ‘proper’ boundaries in the plays studied here – whether the boundaries of estate and nation, as in Merry Wives, of religion and race, as in Merchant, or of nation, as in Henry V. In this last case the offspring of such a union is actually represented as a hybrid, ‘a boy, half French, half English’, that Henry and Kate will ‘compound’ in an intermediary cultural space ‘between Saint Denis and Saint George’ (Henry V, ..–), a space 

   

Wyatt, The Italian Encounter, ; see Andrew Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), –; Irene Scouloudi, Returns of the Strangers in the Metropolis: , , , : A Study of an Active Minority (London: Huguenot Society of London, ), . As quoted by Pettegree, who comments that the lines manifest, as they tap into a ‘seam of naked racial prejudice’. Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, –. Puttenham, The Art, . For a full discussion of this and the following points, see TudeauClayton, ‘Scenes of Translation’, –. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, .., .., .. (‘odorous’), .. (‘odious’). The close relation between nation and estate is signalled in this gloss to Hybrida: ‘A man whose father and mother be of diverse nations, or the one comming of a worshipfull, the other of a meane stock.’ Thomas Thomas, Dictionarium Linguae Latinae et Anglicanae (London, ), sig. Ddiiiiv.

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

Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

that has a linguistic analogue in the earlier scene of the English lesson when Kate produces hybrid compounds of half-French half-English words (.), ‘mingle-mangles’ which tend to ironise Henry’s claim to an English ‘plainness’, as we shall see in Chapter . The representation of words in terms of membership of a human community, whether of tribe, nation or city, is an ancient and ongoing practice. Beginning with the Latins, as Frederick Rener has pointed out, the practice was taken up in Renaissance Europe and continues today. In England the last decades of the sixteenth century saw a proliferation of instances, notably again in relation to the practice of borrowing foreign words, which Richard Mulcaster names ‘Enfranchisment’ in an instance which underscores the analogy between human and linguistic ‘strangers’. Again, examples abound in comments on translations, whether in affirmation or in condemnation of the practice. George Peele, for instance, in , is affirmative, praising John Harington for having ‘so purely naturalized / Strange words, and made them all free denizens’ in his translation of Orlando Furioso published in . In contrast John Cheke uses the analogy to urge constraint in his letter () appended to Thomas Hoby’s translation of The Courtier (), which I take up in Chapter , though less for this reason than because Cheke combines the word/denizen analogy with another, similarly recurrent and ancient analogy (dating back to the Romans, notably Quintilian), between words and money. As I show, discourses on money and language fed into each other as they developed in tandem from the middle of the sixteenth century, notably 





Frederick M. Rener, Interpretatio: Language and Translation from Cicero to Tytler (Amsterdam: Rodopi, ), –. For other, seventeenth-century instances, see Görlach, Introduction to Early Modern English,  (),  (), – (; here the origin of the analogy in the Roman practice of admittance into the civitas is explicit). In what Paula Blank describes as ‘patriotic one-upmanship’ ‘E.K.’ gives a particular spin to the trope turning it against critics of Spenser’s archaic language, who should be ‘ashamed, in their own mother tonge straungers to be counted and alienes’. Blank, ‘Languages of Early Modern Literature in Britain’, . In a relatively recent, apparently unselfconscious but significant instance, Margreta De Grazia comments that it was ‘only after the language had been lexically codified’ that puns could be ‘ousted from standard dictionary English as menacing linguistic aliens’. Margreta De Grazia, ‘Homonyms before and after Lexical Standardization’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch  (), . The same is true of borrowed foreign words, though the ‘ousting’ of these began much earlier. Richard Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementarie which entreateth chefelie of the right writing of our English tung (London, ), . ‘Enfranchisement signifieth in our common law, the incorporating of a man into any societie, or body politicke.’ John Cowell, The Interpreter: Or Booke Containing the Signification of Words (Cambridge, ), sig. Bbr. ‘Ad Maecenatem Prologus’, The Honour of the Garter, in The Works of George Peele, ed. A. H. Bullen,  vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, ), II, , lines –.

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Human/Linguistic ‘Strangers’ and ‘Bad’ Coin



through the writings of a generation of non-elite, Cambridge protestant men, including Cheke, who sought to put the monetary as well as linguistic house of England in order through exclusionary ‘laws’. More precisely, the idea of a stable ‘good’ linguistic norm which ‘the King’s English’ represents and is mobilised to produce through the exclusion of ‘bad’ words finds a parallel in the ‘law’ to produce good coin through the exclusion of ‘bad’ named after the English financier Thomas Gresham who urged on Elizabeth in  a wholesale ‘replacing of bad money with good’. The parallel is highlighted by the recurrent collocation of ‘the King’s English’ (and its variants) with verbs denoting illegal monetary practices, punishable as treason, as we shall see. Not merely parallel, then, but homologous, these reforms by exclusion were promoted by non-elite men who shared common acquaintances as well as a s Cambridge education and (more or less strong) protestant convictions. This is pointed up by Thomas Nashe in a retrospective praise (in ) of this generation of Cambridge men who ‘repurged the errors of Arte’, and who include not only ‘the Exchequer of eloquence’, John Cheke, but also James Pilkington, author of the homily on ‘excess of apparel’ which, as I show in Chapter , was crucial to the dissemination of the figure of the motley-dressed elite Englishman as an object of exclusion through which the normative centre of the ‘true’ (plain and protestant) Englishman was (re)defined. These homologous reforms through exclusionary ‘laws’ signal, I argue, a shift of economic as well as cultural power from the court to non-elite educated men whose interests were served by the production of normative, stable linguistic and monetary systems. This is underscored by (unsuccessful) attempts, first by Elizabeth, and then by James to (re)assert authority over monetary exchanges as well as by an attempt by (or on behalf of ) James to assert his cultural authority, through appropriation of the ideology of ‘the King’s English’. The failure of attempts to assert control in both domains is a measure of the power exerted by cultural reformers in their drive to instate a normative centre through exclusion of those persons, practices and coin designated as ‘strange’ and/or ‘bad’. As Cheke’s combination of analogies bears out, the aspiration to instate the ‘law’ in monetary and linguistic practices converged with an aspiration   

Blank suggests rather that the monetary discourse furnished the terms of the debates on language. Blank, Broken English, . Glyn Davies, A History of Money from Ancient Times to the Present Day (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), –. Nashe, ‘To the Gentlemen Students of Both Universities’, the preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon (), in Works, III, .

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

Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

to control the circulation of ‘strangers’, perceived vehicles of the contamination of English ‘blood’, coin and language, and – the material, economic reason behind the ideological – a perceived threat to the interests of English merchants. A will to appropriate authority here too is clearly signalled in the historically specific turn that Samuel Daniel gives the word/denizen analogy at the close of A Defence of Rhyme (?). As Richard Helgerson has argued, Daniel’s Defence was an intervention in the polemic over native versus classical verse forms which was bound up with competing versions of nationhood, and more particularly with the conflict over monarchical power and its limitation by traditional institutions and customs, especially parliamentary prerogative. Helgerson’s argument is borne out by Daniel’s closing lines when the linguistic practice of ‘disguising or forging strange or unusual wordes’ (‘forging’ evoking again the monetary analogy) is represented in terms of this conflict, specifically in relation to the issue of ‘aliens’. Condemning the practice of ‘this idle affectation of antiquitie or noveltie’ as ‘unnatural to our own native language’ Daniel goes on to complain: I cannot but wonder at the strange presumption of some men, that dare . . . to introduce any whatsoever forraine wordes, be they never so strange, and of themselves, as it were, without a Parliament, without any consent or allowance, establish them as Free-denizens in our language.

Arbitrary and peremptory acts of particular men’s wills are here set in opposition to the authority of an established institutional apparatus for negotiation in what is a barely concealed allusion to the stand-off between court and parliament over the question of ‘aliens’. For if an act of parliament was required to grant naturalisation, ‘aliens’ could be made



 



John Hale complains in : ‘sence oure coine hath been based and altered, strangers have conterfeted our coine, and found the meanes to have great masses transported hither’. A Discourse of the Commonweal as quoted in Blank, Broken English, ; Blank also cites William Camden, who makes a similar complaint, though he does not accuse strangers so directly, in his Remaines (). M. Beer, Early British Economics, repr. (New York: Augustus M. Kelly, ), . Richard Helgerson, ‘Barbarous Tongues: The Ideology of Poetic Form in Renaissance England’, in Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier, eds., The Historical Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, ), –; Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (University of Chicago Press, ), especially –. There are many interesting parallels between my argument about opposed linguistic ideologies and Helgerson’s discussion of what he calls (rather unfortunately) the ‘clash of cultures’ (native and classical) and its relation to the question of national identity, especially the developing tension between the court and ideas of the nation. Samuel Daniel, A Defence of Rhyme, in Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, II, .

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Human/Linguistic ‘Strangers’ and ‘Bad’ Coin



‘free’ denizens by ‘Kings letters Patents’. Within living memory the court had, moreover, been successfully lobbied by the ‘stranger churches’ (the centres of the ‘alien’ communities) for ‘a major enrolment’ of strangers as denizens in , while in  the city authorities had sought from the Privy Council restraint in the granting of denizenship. Aligning himself with the city, Daniel criticises the court for its policy of accommodation of strangers, a policy imposed by royal proclamation by Elizabeth in  and actively encouraged by James. This policy was resented by citizens, especially merchants and artisans, hostile towards ‘alien’ communities whose professional skills were an economic threat. They thus sought to mobilise the city authorities and parliament through formal petitions of complaint, notably in  and  when a bill was introduced to curtail alien merchants’ trade practices, which passed the vote in the House of Commons but was thrown out by the House of Lords. As I take up in Chapter , the parliamentary debate around this bill is echoed in the playtext of Sir Thomas More in which Shakespeare’s contribution argues ‘the strangers’ case’ against the ‘case’ of the citizens, which is argued by other contributors linked to the city as Shakespeare was not. The discordant, fractured character of the playtext reflects, I argue, the irreconcilable





 



‘Denizen. A Stranger made free by the Kings Letters Patents’. Henry Cockeram, The English Dictionarie: or, Interpreter of hard English Words (London, ), sig. Dr. On this point see C. W. Chitty, ‘Aliens in England in the Sixteenth Century’, Race  (–), ; Wyatt, The Italian Encounter, ; James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, ), ; Laura Hunt Yungblut, Strangers Settled Here Amongst Us: Policies, Perceptions and the Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England (London: Routledge, ), . Scouloudi observes that there were a far greater number of patents of Denizations than acts of Naturalisation. Scouloudi, Returns of the Strangers, . See Pettegree’s excellent account of these communities, the support and protection from the court and the opposition from the commons and (from the s) the city authorities. Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, especially – (quote from ), . Yungblut suggests the court became more ambivalent towards strangers during the reign of Elizabeth, principally because of national security fears, which were finally outweighed by economic interests. Yungblut, Strangers Settled, –. It is clear from this useful study that the stand-off over aliens had a long history as a key instance of the ongoing struggle between city and crown, especially over ‘royal power and prerogative’. Yungblut, Strangers Settled, . See Chapter . Quoted by Hoenselaars who notes the contrast with policies under Mary; Hoenselaars, Images of Englishmen and Foreigners, –. In Basilicon Doron () James advises his son and heir: ‘Permit and allure forraine Merchants to trade here’ citing the example of England, ‘how it hath flourished both in wealth and policie, since the strangers Craftes-men came in among them’. King James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge University Press, ), . Chitty, ‘Aliens in England’, ; Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, –; Yungblut, Strangers Settled, .

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

Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

positions towards strangers voiced in the debate and the tension between court and city it illustrates. However, just as Shakespeare’s celebration of the ‘gallimaufry’ of ‘our English’ is not court-centred, his contribution to this playtext does not simply toe a court line any more than the parliamentary speech by Henry Finch it references. Sharing an internationalist vision of Christian community both argue rather the contingency of the strangers’ case and the consequent imperative to practise the spiritual and ethical ideal of charity. In Chapter  I take up this argument to show how the condition of the stranger is dramatised as contingent as well as common in Shakespearean plays of the s, notably through plots, which, drawing on biblical representations of the stranger as well as on pre-modern lived experience, stage the ‘straying’ into the condition of a stranger. This condition finds compressed expression in an early modern variant spelling shared by ‘strange’ and ‘straying’, which ‘bleed into each other’ in the form ‘straing’, an instance of what Peter Stallybrass and Margreta de Grazia describe as the ‘verbal vagrancy’ of the ‘semantic field’ of early modern texts. This instance is to be found outside the Shakespearean corpus as well as within it, notably in the resonant phrase ‘straing roots’ in the Shakespearean contribution to the playtext of Sir Thomas More. Used by the leader of the citizens to refer to the vegetables brought by strangers, the polyvalence of the phrase highlights the condition of the ‘straingers’ (manuscript spelling), straying at once with, and from their ‘roots’. This undermines, I argue, even as it exposes how ideology is translated into the popular stigmatisation of ‘straingers’ and their ‘straing roots’ as the origin (root) of natural and social disorders – bodily infection as well as monetary inflation – to be expelled from the city just as ‘bad’ coins and ‘bad’ linguistic forms, especially new foreign words, are to be expelled in order to (re) instate the ‘law’ in monetary and linguistic practices. The specific turn given by Daniel to the word/denizen analogy points up then the two associated objects of the exclusionary violence of cultural ‘reformation’ ideology: a ‘foreignised’ elite at court and European





Peter Stallybrass, ‘Shakespeare, the Individual and the Text’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, ), ; Margreta De Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’, Shakespeare Quarterly : (), . The word ‘reformation’ is actually used by Daniel who may specifically recall Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels, which, as I mentioned above, depicts a court ‘partial’ (F ..) to strangers as to Latinate neologisms, foreign fashions and ‘extravagant jests’ (..). For, like Jonson, Daniel locates the

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Human/Linguistic ‘Strangers’ and ‘Bad’ Coin



‘strangers’. For if, like other instances of the analogy, it illustrates the mutual implication of myths of linguistic and national purity as well as, more precisely, how the imagined totalities of (the) English – nation and language – are homologous, constructed according to a shared logic of inclusion/exclusion through the more or less arbitrary drawing of the boundaries of the ‘proper’, the specific turn given by Daniel locates the struggle over the ‘property’ of (the) English very precisely along the faultline between court and city over the issue of ‘strangers’. Like the court, the ‘stranger’ communities were, moreover, associated with a third object of exclusion: the theatre. This was not only because, like the theatres, the stranger communities enjoyed a measure of court protection, but also because they were located mainly in the same districts of London – the so-called Liberties – where they too enjoyed a measure of ‘liberty’ from city authorities. Outsiders, like the actors, and located, like them, at the limit of the municipal ban, in the ban-lieu, these strangers were similarly objects of suspicion as sources (‘roots’) of moral and social contamination/ disorder. It was, moreover, in the Liberties that the anti-immigrant riots of the s took place, provoked perhaps, as Dillon has suggested, by stage plays expressing anti-alien sentiment. Certainly the riots must have confirmed suspicions about these adjacent communities of actors and ‘strangers’ outside the city. Against this exclusionary violence Shakespeare sets plots which stage the (common) condition of the stranger as a (contingent) function of









moral origin of court corruption in the ‘deformitie’ of ‘self love’, which he castigates more generally as the ‘greatest hinderer to . . . the reformation of our errours’ in cultural and linguistic practices. The conflation of the foreign communities with the court as twinned objects of citizen violence is vividly illustrated by events in Norwich in  when ‘expulsion of the aliens’ was the ‘battle cry’ used by political ‘conspirators’ whose principal aim was to ‘turn the Queen’s officers out of the city’. Yungblut, Strangers Settled, . As Pettegree notes, the stranger communities had been granted a charter in  securing them ‘freedom from interference by the English authorities’ including the municipal authorities. Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, . The location of the immigrant communities in the Liberties is discussed in Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, , ; Yungblut, Strangers Settled, –. Steve Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge University Press, ), –; Dillon, Language and Stage, ; for the specific case of a foreign artist (Van Dyck) who chose to live in the Liberties see Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, . I am of course drawing here on the very fine work of Mullaney on the cultural and ideological significance of the location of the theatres in the Liberties. Mullaney, The Place of the Stage, especially chapters  and . Dillon, Language and Stage, –; she comments that anti-alien plays were ‘characteristic’ of the Admiral’s Men at the Rose; like other theatres the Rose was located in Southwark where the  riot took place; for a description see Yungblut, Strangers Settled, –.

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Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

straying across ‘proper’ defining boundaries, mirrored by what we might call, following John Hollander, romances of extravagant, or ‘peregrinate’ words that, through a family of figures – agents such as Holofernes (inventor of ‘peregrinate’), Falstaff, Feste, Lance, Launcelet and Mrs Quickly – traverse ‘proper’ boundaries, wandering like the prodigal son in the biblical parable. As I mentioned above and take up in Chapter , linguistic straying is explicitly associated with this parable in what may be Shakespeare’s first play, The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Indeed, it is associated, more generally, with the mode of the parable, an elusive mode, I argue, that is aligned with the mode of Shakespearean drama, especially comedy. This alignment is suggested too if less explicitly in another early comedy, The Comedy of Errors, which again references the parable of the prodigal son in an instance of verbal straying. It is, moreover, these two early comedies that stage without irony the ethical and spiritual ideal of the ‘charity’ invoked in Two Gentleman as that which makes one ‘worth the name of a Christian’ (..–). Conceived as the just response to the debt-gift economy of the plot of redemption, as I explore in Chapter , it is this ideal that animates the inclusive, heterogeneous community of strangers made citizens in the house or city of God, a Pauline (and Augustinian) poetics of community overtly referenced in Errors. Shakespeare’s plays of the s resist then the centripetal, exclusionary violence of cultural reformation ideology even as they expose the immediate xenophobia and future history of internal division and conflict – city against court – attendant on it. Against the narrow, class and race inflected model of a homogeneous community of (the) ‘true’ or proper (protestant, ‘plain’ and temperate) English they set a vision of a mixed, heterogeneous community of straying ‘strangers’ – linguistic as well as human – a mobile gallimaufry or mingle-mangle that evokes the ideal of the house or city of God as an international community of heterogeneous multiplicity. It is ultimately this (utopic) vision of an international, inclusive and mixed community animated by the unlimited energy of ‘neighbourly charity’, that is set against the exclusionary, centripetal cultural reformation ideology of the ‘true’ or proper English.



John Hollander, ‘Dallying Nicely with Words’, in Nigel Fabb and Derek Attridge et al., eds., The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature (Manchester University Press, ), .

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Shakespeare the Stranger, Our Contemporary



Shakespeare the Stranger, Our Contemporary Given Shakespeare’s later career, especially in the twentieth century, as a unifying figure of English national identity – a function captured by the use of ‘the language of Shakespeare’ to stand for English as a totality – it takes an effort of the imagination to recognise the opposition in his writing to the emergence of an ideology that, as ‘a spokesperson for a fundamental Englishness’, he will effectively serve. For similar reasons it takes an effort of imagination to appreciate his biographical social status as an outsider. For, as internal immigrant to the city of London, Shakespeare belonged to the municipal administrative category of ‘Englishmen foreign’, alongside the aliens, or ‘strangers’ from continental Europe. This adjacency was, moreover, not merely administrative. As Honan commented some years ago, Shakespeare ‘found himself comfortable with “strangers”’, lodging as he did during the s in a parish with a large (mainly Dutch) immigrant community and later in a French immigrant household. E. A. J. Honigmann drew attention to the ‘unusual number of foreigners’ amongst the ‘friends and acquaintances’ of Shakespeare, especially artisans







Levin and Watkins, Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds, . For analysis rather than reproduction of this function of ‘Shakespeare’, see, for example, Matthias Heim, ‘Olivier’s Technicolor England: Capturing the Nation through the Battlefields of Henry V () and Richard III ()’, in Orgis and Heim, eds., Fashioning England and the English, –, and, in the same collection, Dympna Callaghan, ‘Afterword’, –. These categories are pointed out by Rappaport who cites the court minutes licensing ‘Anglicani’ or ‘Englishmen foreign’ together with ‘extranei’ or ‘Dutchmen’ to work as journeymen for the Coopers’ company. Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds, . The distinction does not appear to have been consistently used. Pettegree indicates that ‘forrens’ was used of ‘all non-freemen, whether English or strangers’, underscoring the tendency to treat them together in relation to ‘privileges of the City’, which were upheld equally in respect of both groups. Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, . This is reiterated in Kermode, Aliens and Englishness, . Several scholars have noted that Shakespeare belonged to this category of ‘foreign’ Englishmen though without exploring the scope of its implications for the plays: Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, ; Ania Loomba, ‘Outsiders in Shakespeare’s England’, in Margreta De Grazia and Stanley Wells, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, ), ; John Michael Archer, Citizen Shakespeare: Freemen and Aliens in the Language of the Plays (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –. Most recently Duncan Salkeld has suggested that if ‘deeply engaged in London’s social world’ Shakespeare remained an ‘outsider’, sympathetic towards those in the position of strangers. Duncan Salkeld, Shakespeare and London (Oxford University Press, ), , , –. Levin and Watkins pointed out how Shakespeare’s status as outsider is highlighted by the well-known attack in Greene’s (or Chettle’s) Groatsworth of Wit, specifically its echo of a line from  Henry VI that describes ‘a foreigner opposed to . . . English interests’, although they proceed to suggest that the passage is one in which Shakespeare ‘presents himself as the ultimate insider’. Levin and Watkins, Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds, –. Honan, Shakespeare, . For a full account of this French immigrant household, see Charles Nicholl, The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (London: Penguin, ).

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

Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

involved in the construction of the theatres. Shakespeare would also have met with foreigners in the circles of court patronage in which he moved, again as an outsider/insider, rather like one of these acquaintances, John Florio. Shakespeare’s sympathy, or rather empathy, for the stranger is, moreover, tacitly acknowledged by Ben Jonson when he remembers him as ‘honest and of an open and free nature’. For, as Katherine Duncan-Jones has reminded us, this recalls Iago’s description of Othello as ‘of a free and open nature / That thinks men honest that but seem to be so’ (Othello, ..–). This is to remember Shakespeare not so much, as Duncan-Jones suggests, for his gullibility as for his ‘open’ generosity towards the ‘extravagant and wheeling stranger / Of here and everywhere’ (..–), an ‘extravagancy’ (Twelfth Night, ..), or straying that is once again illustrated linguistically not only by Othello’s recurrent doublets and hendiadys, in which, as George Wright has argued, he is ‘incorrigibly extravagant’, but also by Latinate inventions such as ‘antres’ (..) and ‘exsufflicate’ (..). It is such linguistic and human ‘strangers’ that Shakespeare, the ‘Englishman forren’ with an insider’s knowledge of displacement, bids us ‘welcome’, as Hamlet bids Horatio welcome that strangest of ‘stranger[s]’ (Hamlet, ..) the ‘extravagant and erring spirit’ (..) of his father’s ghost, and as Shakespeare’s More bids citizens on and off stage to welcome strangers, from inside as well as outside the nation’s boundaries, straying ghost-like with, and from their ‘roots’. 

   



E. A. J. Honigmann, ‘Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More and Asylum Seekers’, Shakespeare Survey  (Cambridge University Press, ), . As the title indicates, Honigmann takes this as biographical support for the argument in favour of Shakespeare’s authorship of the contribution by ‘Hand D’ to Sir Thomas More. In work that bears on mine, Richard Wilson has argued for the ethical significance of Shakespeare’s relations to the foreign (especially French) immigrant communities. Richard Wilson, Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows (New York: Routledge, ). For discussion of this relationship see Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“Mine own and not mine own”’, –. Jonson, Discoveries, ed. Hutson, Works, VII, . Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life (London: Arden, ), . George T. Wright, ‘Hendiadys and Hamlet’, Publications of the Modern Language Association : (), . Watson takes the practice of neologism as ‘a significant index of alienation’ for several characters including in the first instance, Othello. Watson, ‘Shakespeare’s New Words’, . With Shakespeare as one who has ‘been there’, compare the ordinary, but also extraordinary people who have welcomed refugees in the ongoing crisis in Europe – often elderly men and women who remember the massive displacement of peoples after the Second World War – and who give as a motive: ‘because I’ve been there’. Compare too the case of Kevin Tuerff one of , ‘strangers’ stranded in Gander, Newfoundland after the / attacks, who was given a generous welcome ‘in a foreign country’, which ‘opened my life to the global refugee crisis. Because we were American refugees’, and who has since ‘established a charitable initiative to promote acts of kindness and works with refugees in America’. www.thetimes.co.uk/magazine/culture/theatre-come-from-away-theshow-from-toronto-and-broadway-that-we-all-need-right-now-sjhphqz, accessed  December . Compare too Angela Merkel who, in an ‘instinctive response to the migration crisis’,

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Shakespeare the Stranger, Our Contemporary



At the turn of the millennium ‘the City of God’ as ‘a universal city of aliens’ was taken up as a model of resistance for a secular, inclusive and mixed global community beyond the nation and the nation state as these began to break down in the West together with the modern bourgeois order of things to which they belong. Inasmuch as the Shakespearean plays of the s reference this model of community they might be considered as (very far) forward looking. They are, however, also backward looking as, Hugh Craig has argued, Shakespeare’s grammar is backward looking. For they are set against an emergent ‘modern’ protestant citizen/bourgeois order which, in England, replaced a universal ‘catholic’ church with a church identified with the nation. Yet it is in this very resistance as well as in their forward looking vision that they speak to our own ‘post-modern’ moment, which is witnessing not only a crisis of the nation and nation state in general, but also the ‘break-up of Britain’, the union of England with its more local, as well as its continental European neighbours. The argument of this book offers then another instance of the merging of ‘[t]opicality’ with ‘presentism’ that Willy Maley has observed in work on Shakespeare and British identities. It is a merging epitomised here in the word ‘Englishes’ with which I began. Selfconsciously used by John Florio in the s before the cultural reformation project of ‘the King’s English’ had taken its Lenten hold, the word has returned as ‘the King’s English’ disappears into the heterogeneous and changing multiplicity of ‘world Englishes’. Indeed, like the last decade of the sixteenth century, the last decade of the twentieth saw what Florio described in  as a ‘yearly increase’ of ‘Englishes’, witness the

 

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

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‘reasoned with her heart, as an East German who moved to the West’. Catherine Galloway, ‘On Charisma’, Cambridge Alumni Magazine  (Michaelmas ), . Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), ; see further below Chapter . In a comparative analysis of the use of grammatical function words, Craig shows how Shakespeare’s language, especially in the comedies of the s, carries ‘resonances of a disappearing world rather than an emerging one’. Hugh Craig, ‘Shakespeare’s Style, Shakespeare’s England’, in Orgis and Heim, eds., Fashioning England and the English, . That a religious model of community was displaced by the idea of a nation is argued in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edition (London: Verso, ). The break-up of Britain was famously anticipated by Tom Nairn who saw it as an inevitable outcome of renewed democratic nationalisms that for him are the antidote to the ‘abyss’ of globalisation. Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism, rd rev. edition (Altona, Vic.: Common Ground, ), xx. The ‘break-up’ is discussed in relation to Shakespeare in Willy Maley and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Introduction’, in Willy Maley and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, eds., This England, That Shakespeare: New Angles on Englishness and the Bard (Farnham: Ashgate, ), –. Maley, ‘British Ill Done?’, –.

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Introduction: Shakespeare and Cultural Reformation Ideology

unprecedented publication by Oxford University Press of a dictionary of ‘new words’ in , followed by a second, revised edition in . Like the proliferating ‘Englishes’, in the more recent as well as earlier senses of the word, ‘Shakespeare’ has, moreover, become, in the third millennium, a metonym less of Englishness than of a world culture, associated as his name is with a ‘World Bibliography’, and a ‘World Congress’, and, more recently, a ‘world festival’ ‘around the Globe in  plays’ and a ‘Globe to Globe’ tour to ‘every country on earth’ of his most famous play, Hamlet. One final, particularly striking, instance of a cultural rhyme between then and now will, I hope, serve to underline the stakes of Shakespearean practice in the plays of the s. In Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry (published in ), a manifesto that was itself a response to the pressure of cultural reformation ideology, the well-known critique, on the grounds of ‘propriety’, of generic mixing in contemporary theatrical practice – ‘mingling kings and clowns’ in ‘mongrel tragi-comedy’, exemplified nowhere more strikingly than in ‘the gallimaufry’ of the second tetralogy – is followed by a critique, on the same grounds, of ‘painted affectation’ in diction, notably ‘far-fetched words’ that ‘must seem strangers, to any poor Englishman’. Mobilising the recurrent analogy between linguistic and human ‘strangers’ Sidney proceeds to bolster his critique, and the value of propriety, by drawing further comparisons between ‘figures and phrases’ and food and dress, two cultural codes which, like and with language, have always served as privileged metonyms of national identity. Comparing extravagant linguistic practices first to foreign foods – imported ‘sugar and spice’ – Sidney goes on to draw a still more telling comparison with the body-piercing practices of ‘Indians, not content to wear earrings at the fit and natural place of the ears, but they will thrust jewels through their nose and lips, because they will be sure to be fine’. There has perhaps been no more visible challenge to the modern Western bourgeois order of things than the practice of thrusting rings and other jewels through noses 

 

See globetoglobe.shakespearesglobe.com/hamlet/about-the-project, accessed  March ; Susan Bennett and Christie Carson, eds., Shakespeare beyond English: A Global Experiment (Cambridge University Press, ). Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, rev. edition, R. W. Maslen (Manchester University Press, ), , . Sidney, An Apology, . The image may reprise the ironic description of ‘Rethoriciens of these daies’ in Erasmus’s Moriae Encomium (translated by Thomas Chaloner in ): they ‘mingle there writings with words sought out of strange langages, . . . although perchaunce as unaptly applied, as a gold rynge in a sowes nose’. Desiderius Erasmus, The praise of folie. Moriae encomium, trans. Thomas Chaloner (London, ), sigs. Aiiir–v.

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Shakespeare the Stranger, Our Contemporary



and lips, a practice that has spread across nations and classes over recent decades. A scandal to the (bourgeois) equation of the ‘fit’ and ‘proper’ with the ‘natural’, this ubiquitous cultural practice exposes the equation as the arbitrary law that it is. The parallel invites us to view Shakespeare’s cultural practices in the s as a similar challenge to the then emergent, now disappearing modern, bourgeois order of ‘proper’, ‘true’ Englishness.

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 

Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’ Language, History, Power

An ‘antiquated phrase’, as Patrick Parrinder has remarked, ‘the King’s’ or ‘the Queen’s English’ has nevertheless continued to exert a hold as a ‘notion or fiction of cultural ownership’. This chapter offers a history of the emergence and use of this trope as a context for a fresh analysis of language, history and power in The Merry Wives of Windsor and the second tetralogy. The only play in the canon to feature ‘the King’s English’ and ‘our English’ – two representations of ownership of the national vernacular which, I argue, are in tension in the Folio, if not the Quarto () version of the play – Merry Wives is significantly Shakespeare’s one English comedy. It is too his one essay in, or engagement with, the emergent genre of citizen comedy which appropriates centre stage for citizens and citizen ideology as, I argue, ‘the King’s English’ is mobilised to appropriate the centre of cultural ownership for citizen ‘plainness’. For ‘the King’s English’ (or its variants, ‘the Queen’s English’, ‘the king’s language’) is used from the first instances, not descriptively, as scholars have assumed but as a rhetorical and ideological tool in negative performative utterances which define the centre it represents through exclusions of what it is not.  



Patrick Parrinder, ‘Shakespeare and (Non)Standard English’, European English Messenger  (), . As I pointed out in Chapter , the national vernacular is a focus of attention in F only. Specifically, Q features ‘our English’ in the important scene (.) discussed below, but not ‘the King’s English’ (..) or the ‘gallimaufry’ (..), which is almost as explicit a linguistic trope. Quotations from the Q text are taken from the facsimile reproduction in The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. Melchiori, –. The assumption hampers the otherwise valuable work of Paula Blank who, though recognising that ‘the precise nature of the King’s English had yet to be articulated’, consistently regards it as an elite variety of English that was actually practised at court and in the city of London, which she tends, moreover, to conflate, not recognising the crucial ideological differences – and tension – between the two. Blank, Broken English, . See too David Crystal, The Stories of English (London: Penguin, ), . The use of the phrase is imprecise in what is otherwise a very helpful examination of linguistic reformers and national identity in Cathy Shrank, ‘Rhetorical Constructions of National Community: The Role of the King’s English in Mid-Tudor Writing’, in A. Shepard and P. Withington, eds., Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric (Manchester



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Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’



This is illustrated by the twenty-one early recorded instances yielded (for the most part) in database trawls, from the first and most culturally prominent instance, in Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (), to the first instance to feature in a dictionary entry () (Table .). In every instance (including the Shakespearean) the trope is used negatively of speakers/writers and practices that are placed performatively outside the pale of the centre it represents. Always located somewhere else, the centre tends to be mystified even as the trope’s force as a rhetorical instrument of exclusion and the authority of the speaker who uses it are strengthened. It is, moreover, as an exclusionary instrument that the trope has continued to be used, although, as I indicated in Chapter , it looks set to disappear with the emergent global multilingual economy of ‘Englishes’. It has also continued to be used by self-appointed cultural legislators from the educated classes who thus ground in a sign of sovereignty – ‘the King’/ ‘the Queen’ – at once their claim to ownership of the centre and the specific exclusions that they perform. The range and heterogeneity of the objects of exclusion in the tabulated early instances suggest an arbitrariness to the use of the trope as a punctual rhetorical instrument, an arbitrariness which is covered – legitimated as well as concealed – by the sign of sovereignty. If, however, a mixed bag, many, though not all, fall within the capacious, again negatively turned definition in the dictionary entry of  where ‘to clip the King’s English’ is glossed ‘not to speak plain’. The specification that immediately follows, ‘when one’s drunk’, reproduces the most frequently recurring object of exclusion: the drunk male native speaker (five instances). This indicates

 

University Press, ), –. Bailey notes that the kings and queens of England have never been considered exemplars of the norm the trope represents. Bailey, Images of English, . The same point is made, and extended to the ‘highest class of speakers’ in relation to early (if not the earliest) uses of the phrase, in Merja Kytö and Suzaine Romaine, ‘Adjective Comparison and Standardisation Processes in American and British English from  to the Present’, in Laura Wright, ed., The Development of Standard English –: Theories, Descriptions, Conflicts (Cambridge University Press, ), . More recently, Lynne Magnusson has argued that ‘the King’s English’ in Merry Wives stands for an ‘emergent hypothesized . . . homogeneity’, that is an inclusionary rather than an exclusionary ‘national language’. Lynne Magnusson, ‘Language, History and Language-Games’, in Arthur F. Kinney, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, ), . This adds four new instances to an earlier version in Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“The King’s English” “our English”?’, –. See Chapter , –. For examples of ongoing exclusionary uses of the trope, see the annual ‘List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English’ at Lake Superior State University, www.lssu.edu/ banished-words-list/, accessed  December , and the negative forms of prescription advertised on the now dormant website of The Queen’s English Society, queens-english-society. org/, accessed  December . The ‘Death of the Queen’s English Society’ was announced by Geoffrey K. Pullum on  June , languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=, accessed  December .

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Date (publication)

Author Title

 ()

Thomas Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique

– ()

Richard Edwards, Damon and Pithias

 ()

 ()

Genre

Collocation KE/KL/QE Counterfeit KE

Object of exclusion

Comment

‘outlandishe’ words, esp. French and Italianate forms practised by clerks and welltravelled gentlemen Indistinct word forms of a drunk rustic native speaker, first mistaken as French

The first recorded and most prominent instance. The Arte went through eight editions before . After being accused of clipping the king’s language, the speaker grumbles he is unable to ‘speak plain’ because of drink. The first instance to associate the trope both with ‘plain’ speech and with the moral value of temperance. Ad hominem attack which illustrates the use of the trope as a punctual instrument of exclusion. Nashe’s use of the variant QE may acknowledge Elizabeth’s authority. The monetary analogy is explicitly elaborated: the ‘clipped’ QE spoken previously by the yeoman will be replaced by ‘full wayght, good and currant lawfull English’.

Guide to usage for those ‘studious of eloquence’ (title page) Comedy

Clip KL

Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penniless

Satirical prose tract

Abuse QE

Excessive alliteration practised by Gabriel Harvey

Gervase Markham, A health to the gentlemanly profession of servingmen

Prose tract

Clip QE

The speech of a (generic) aspirational yeoman



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Table . ‘The King’s English’ (KE) / ‘the King’s Language’ (KL) / ‘the Queen’s English’ (QE): early modern instances, –



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 ()

William Haughton, ENGLISH-MEN For my Money

Comedy (prototype of citizen comedy)

Clip KE

– ()

Anon., Look about You

Comedy

Clip KE

/? (Q ; F )

William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor

Comedy

Abuse KE

 ()

Thomas Dekker, Satiromastix

Satirical comedy

Clip KE

 ()

Thomas Dekker, The Wonderful Year

Prose pamphlet

() Clip KE () Clip KE

() A Dutchman, described as a coward and rogue () ‘[s]inne . . . in the shape of a drunkard’

 ()

Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabeticall

First ‘hard word’ English–English dictionary

Counterfeit KE

‘outlandish’ words, as in Wilson’s passage on ‘plainness’, which is reproduced almost verbatim

A (generic) Frenchman: a ‘clipper of the Kings English . . . an eternall enemie to all good Language’ A stammering native speaker ‘taken [i.e. arrested] for clipping the Kings English’ A French doctor Caius excluded by Mrs Quickly herself ‘another enemy to the English language’ (nd Arden ed.) A Welshman as judged by Horace/Jonson

Haughton’s play illustrates the insular, xenophobic nationalism of the genre it inaugurates. The instance highlights the (recurring) association of linguistic deficiency with law-breaking. Only in F. Speaker herself ‘mistakes’ hard words and is thus placed outside the pale of the norm that she invokes. Dekker highlights association of the failure of ‘others’ to speak plain with treason. (‘That’s treason’) Both instances associate linguistic deficiency with moral deviance; in the second, the monetary analogy implied in the recurrent collocation with ‘clip’ is made explicit. A very popular text; ‘hard usuall English wordes’ of title page carry contradictory implications (indicated in bold).

Date (publication)

Author Title

 ()

Henri Estienne (–), trans. R. Carew, A world of wonders

Encyclopaedic treatise

?

Alexander Hume, Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue

 ()

John Taylor (–), Divers Crabtree Lectures



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Table . (cont.) Genre

Collocation KE/KL/QE

Object of exclusion

Comment

Clip KE

Sharp Florentine merchants who pass ‘counterfeit Searge’ off as the real thing through omission of words

Grammar in MS only

Spill KL

(English) courtiers reproved by the Scottish Stuart King James for their linguistic affectation

Moralising and satiric ‘lectures’

Lisp and Clip KE

An alcoholic, bourgeois husband in a ‘temperance’ lecture given by a ‘discreet and modest wife’

This use of the trope highlights the abstract character of the norm it represents as well as the monetary analogy and the importance of a normative stable linguistic centre to English commercial interests. Perhaps imagined by Hume this scene appropriates the ideology of ‘the King’s English’ to lay claim to James’s ownership of the cultural/linguistic centre as well as to support his project of the union of England and Scotland. Once again the trope is associated with the virtue of temperance. The one other instance in which the trope is invoked by a woman, this points up the particularity of the Shakespearean instance in which the woman is low-born and illiterate (not a model of bourgeois virtue as here).

Robert Mead (–)

Comedy (performed at Oxford)

Hack KL

A ‘foolish’ and ignorant ‘Captain’ and his forced rhyme of ‘plain’ and ‘mountain’

 ()

T.M.

Prose satire

Clip KE

A whore that ‘seemed ignorant how rightly to call that, which wantonly she nicknam’d’

 ()

Matthew Locke, The present practice of musick vindicated

Prose satire

Counterfeit KE

Thomas Salmon and his ‘new way of attaining musick’

 ()

Matthew Stevenson (fl. –), The wits paraphras’d

A ‘burlesque on the several late translations of Ovids Epistles’

Clip KE

Previous translators of Ovid who collectively conspire to corrupt English

 ()

Anon., Friendly Advice to the Correctour of the English Press at Oxford

Tract

Clip KE

Would-be radical reformers of spelling explicitly associated with the radical political and religious ‘reformations’ of the recent ‘Rebellious times’



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– ()

‘Fair Lady to give you an answer plain, / As I have heard some say, it was the Poets mountain.’ The ‘answer’ is not ‘plain’ insofar as it distorts the pronunciation of the words (hence ‘hacks’ the ‘kings language’). This illustrates the association of the failure to speak plain with moral, here specifically sexual deviance from a norm. This ad hominem attack aligns the ‘stamp of Soveraign Reason’ with the KE as well as explicitly assimilating ‘counterfeiting’ with treason. The contrast is with the author who shows ‘the naked truth of the matter’ without ‘clipping’ as his predecessors have done. Another use of the trope to make a punctual attack. The instance betrays the political implications of the use of the trope to promote ‘one plain and easie way of writing true English’ even as it is (?self consciously) turned against the project.

Date (publication)



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Table . (cont.) Author Title

Genre

Collocation KE/KL/QE

Object of exclusion

Comment The norm that the KE represents is again overtly identified as an ideal of ‘plain’ speech, which articulates the ‘spaces’ between words, and again associated with the moral value of temperance. First appearance of the trope in a dictionary: ‘To Clip the King’s English, not to Speak Plain, when one’s Drunk.’

 ()

John Lacy, Sr. Hercules Buffoon, or, The poetical Squire

Comedy

Clip KE

The titular squire when he is drunk and puts ‘twelve words into one’

 ()

‘B.E. gent.’ A New Dictionary

Hard word, and dialect dictionary

Clip KE

Those who do not speak plain, especially drunk native speakers

Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’



how, as we shall see, the use of the trope serves to disseminate as normative values at once a plain mode of speech and the moral virtue of temperance. More specifically, the norm of plain speech is defined by these five instances as a mode of pronunciation. This finds echo in the ‘not blurring your words’ urged in the most recent (and perhaps last) guide to ‘the Queen’s English’. In other early instances, the norm of plainness is defined rather in terms of lexical choice, notably, in the first and most prominent recorded instance in which, as I take up below, Thomas Wilson explicitly associates ‘the King’s English’ with ‘plainness’. Like and with the trope, plainness is defined negatively through exclusion of what it is not, here ‘outlandish’ (Latinate) words used by professionals and well-travelled members of the male elite. Wilson’s exclusionary definition finds echo in the rules announced on the opening page of The King’s English, the hugely successful guide to usage produced by the Fowler brothers in , repeatedly reprinted throughout the twentieth century and reissued in  for the twenty-first: ‘Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched’ (compare Wilson’s ‘outlandish’); ‘Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance’. This continuity is important from a historical perspective for, when the Fowlers produced their book, ‘the King’s English’ actually stood for what was a (more or less) recognisable, non-regional variety – recognisable notably as a mode of pronunciation known as RP (received pronunciation) – shared by members of the educated classes of Britain in positions of real economic and socio-political power. In short ‘the King’s’ or (since the nineteenth century more commonly) ‘the Queen’s’ ‘English’ came to represent one of the ‘languages-of-power’ Benedict Anderson assumes it does when he gives it as an example of a vernacular language variety privileged as a standard through the development of bourgeois print capitalism in coalition with the Reformation, both requiring as they tended to produce the curtailment of what he calls the ‘fatality of . . . linguistic diversity’. At the moment of the first recorded uses, however, this language of power was not yet in existence, but rather the end to which the use of the trope was directed, at least in the most culturally   



Bernard C. Lamb, The Queen’s English (London: Michael O’Mara Books, ), . H. W. Fowler, and F. G. Fowler, The King’s English, rd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), . Also known as ‘the King’s/Queen’s accent’, received pronunciation was apparently first so named in the dictionary of pronunciation published in  by John Walker, who specifically identified this norm not with the court, but with the educated classes of the metropolis, as did Thomas Sheridan before him, who in  advertised the value of this ‘one common tongue’ to unite ‘the subjects of one King’. See Crystal, The Stories of English, , . Anderson, Imagined Communities, –.

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

Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’

prominent instances when it is used by non-elite, educated, self-appointed cultural reformers to appropriate the linguistic centre for a norm of citizen ‘plainness’ under the cover of the legitimising sign of sovereignty. Associated with the (English citizen) virtue of temperance, this notion of plain language comprehended not only pronunciation and lexical choice, but also an idea of transparency, on the one hand, between spoken and written word and, on the other, between word and meaning or intent, that is, between outside (expression) and inside (mind/heart). In short, ‘plain’ implied the virtue of ‘honest’ as the juxtaposition of the two words in Biron’s turn to ‘[h]onest, plain words’ (..) in Love’s Labour’s Lost suggests, and as the figure of ‘plain Thomas’ in the prequel to Richard II, discussed in Chapter , illustrates. As we shall see, there is an economic dimension to the promotion of honest plainness through this figure as there is to the promotion of the normative centre of plainness that ‘the King’s English’ represents. Indeed, the trope is explicitly associated with honest commercial practices in an early instance (from ) which I discuss below in connection with the monetary analogy signalled in the verbs ‘counterfeit’ and ‘clip’ with which the trope is usually collocated. The instance bears out what is implied by the collocation that the drive to produce a stable centre of a ‘plain’ – transparent – ‘King’s English’ through exclusion of obscure, Latinate words coincided with a drive to produce a stable, monetary system of ‘good’ – transparent – coin through exclusion of ‘bad’, ‘counterfeit’ or ‘clipped’ coins. Undertaken by a generation of non-elite, Cambridge educated protestant men who may have known each other, the drive to put the monetary and linguistic house of England in order testifies to a shift of the centre of economic as well as cultural power from the court to the merchants of the citizen class who needed honest, temperate minds and bodies as well as stable, transparent linguistic and monetary systems to carry out their business. Inasmuch as it was used to (re)produce these mutually implicated norms, the trope of ‘the King’s English’ served as a disciplinary instrument. This bears out Michel Foucault’s claim that power in Western Europe came to be disseminated through interconnected normative values.  

This collocation is presumably the reason that the monetary analogy is identified as the origin of the trope in the OED (‘English’, Ba). See Chapter , note . This is highlighted by the model of a protestant commonwealth produced by the German jurist and theologian Johannes Ferrarius, which was translated and dedicated to Elizabeth in . Ferrarius insists on the importance of ‘godly living’ and specifically, as a condition of the ‘good ordering of a commonwealth’, ‘that neither ill language, ne yet dronkennes be suffered’. Johannes Ferrarius, A woorke . . . touchynge the good orderynge of a common weale . . .

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Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’



Indeed, the collocation of the trope with verbs denoting monetary practices punishable as treason highlights the ideological turn whereby the status of traitor/‘true’ Englishman becomes a function of mutually implicated normative cultural/linguistic values, which are comprehended in a defining English ‘plainness’ to be produced through exclusion. Illustrated explicitly by Edward Phillips at the end of the seventeenth century, as we saw in Chapter , this defining character of Englishness takes firm hold in the eighteenth century, as Paul Langford has shown. Indeed, traversing differences of gender and class, this perceived defining character confers the homogeneity called for by the very idea of ‘Englishness’. At the level of language perception, ‘plain English’ becomes, as Langford observes, ‘a kind of tautology’, while the phrase ‘in English’ emerges into use (still current in British English) as an apologetic preface to an explanation of (putatively) opaque language. Even Jane Austen reproduces (without irony) the association of (monosyllabic) plainness with ‘true’ (manly) Englishness when she describes as ‘the true English style’, the brief monosyllabic greeting between its exemplars, John and George Knightley: ‘“How d’ye do George?” “John, how are you?”’. Most recently, ‘plain-speaking’ has been cited by leave voters in post-referendum Britain as one of the defining features of ‘Englishness’, while their ‘strongest image of England’ ‘is a preindustrial bucolic nation populated by well-mannered and virtuous citizens’. It is in this context that the ironic interrogation of ‘the King’s English’ in The Merry Wives of Windsor and the consistently sceptical treatment of the rhetoric/practice of plainness in Shakespearean plays of the s and beyond (discussed below and in Chapter ) acquire significance as a resistance to this ideology of ‘Englishness’ as well as to the shift of cultural and economic power it signals. It is a shift endorsed by various cultural

  



according to the godlie institutions and sounde doctrine of christianitie. Englished by William Bavande (London, ), sig. v (emphasis mine). Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character – (Oxford University Press, ), –. Langford, Englishness Identified, . Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan (Cambridge University Press, ), . Against these examples of ‘true’ Englishmen Austen sets the duplicitous Frank Churchill, who, as has often been noted, is associated with the French, notably through his use of French words, including the self-reflexive ‘outrée’ (). For an argument that the novel’s definition of ‘Englishness’ is unstable see Anne-Claire Michoux, ‘“To Be a True Citizen of Highbury”: Language and National Identity in Jane Austen’s Emma’, in Orgis and Heim, eds., Fashioning England and the English, –. Mark Easton, ‘The English Question: What is the Nation’s Identity?’,  June , www.bbc.com/ news/uk-, accessed  June .

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

Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’

forms, including, as I have indicated, the emergent genre of citizen comedy, which celebrates citizens and citizen values, including especially plainness. Though critics have questioned whether Merry Wives belongs to this genre, it is clearly engaged with the ideology the genre propagates as it may be engaged specifically with an early prototype – William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money () – as I consider again below. The one Shakespearean comedy set in England, Merry Wives is focused, uniquely in the canon, on the merchant citizen class, which is represented by the figure of George Page whose telling name evokes the coalition, discussed by Anderson, of bourgeois print capitalism (Page) and protestant nationalism (George) in the drive to cultural and linguistic homogeneity. In addition George Page is seriously rich: his ‘wealth’ is the ‘first motive’ admitted by the young courtier Fenton for wooing Page’s daughter Anne (..–), while it is the only motive for the wooing of his wife by Fenton’s older counterpart John Falstaff, who describes the two wives as his ‘East and West Indies’ (..–), a metonym for the rapidly expanding international trade at the origin of citizen wealth. Page speaks, moreover, a sober, direct and restrained prose, which has been described as a ‘plain straightforwardness’ by one critic who assumes it is the play’s implicit linguistic norm. Indeed, Page not only practises plainness, but also exercises occasional exclusionary judgements on the speech of others, as when he comments on the linguistic idiosyncrasies of Falstaff’s companion Nim: ‘Here’s a fellow frights English out of his wits’ (..–). He is thus something of a cultural/linguistic policeman, like those who mobilise ‘the King’s English’. Crucially, however, it is not Page who invokes ‘the King’s English’, which would simply have served to endorse the occupation of the centre to which he lays implicit claim. Instead, in a brilliant move, which is unique among later as well as early instances, the trope is invoked by an illiterate, low-born female who is placed by her own ‘mistaking’ speech outside the pale of the centre it represents. Through the figure of Mrs Quickly, who embodies the fatality of linguistic diversity (Anderson) as well as the unpredictable mobility, or variability (Benson),





For a striking instance of the promotion, in a prose narrative, of normative moral values, including honesty and temperance, as ‘marks of Englishness’, exemplified by a model citizen, see Orgis, ‘Tricking Sir George into Marriage’, . R. S. White, The Merry Wives of Windsor (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, ), –. See too Gajowksi and Rackin, ‘Introduction’, .

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Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’



of a living (‘quick’) vernacular (see below), the project to a normative centre is ironised even as it is invoked. The ironic interrogation of ‘the King’s English’ finds a parallel at the level of the plot, which sees the authority of George Page, who would police social as well as linguistic boundaries (..), undercut by the marriage of his daughter Anne to the young courtier Fenton. In contrast to Page, Fenton ‘speaks holiday’ (..–), according to the Host of the Inn, a culturally resonant figure, as I discuss below, who promotes this social mix or ‘gallimaufry’ of ‘high and low’ (.., ), as he promotes linguistic/cultural mixing as an irenic alternative to violence in a scene of reconciliation between the Welsh priest Hugh Evans and the French doctor Caius (.). French and Welsh speakers both feature as objects of exclusion in early instances of ‘the King’s English’ (see Table .) and this shared position as well as historical links are highlighted by the Host’s approximate ‘Englishes’ – ‘Gallia and Gaul’ (..) – for the French ‘gallois’ and ‘gaulois’. The Host’s call for reconciliation – ‘Let them keep their limbs whole and hack our English’ (..) – bears then on this shared position as constitutive others to (the) ‘true’ or ‘proper’ English as much as on any putative hostility between their respective nations. To ‘hack’ is to break up and to break up the vernacular through the welcoming of these others and their strange language is to produce ‘our English’ as a mobile, accommodating and inclusive mix – a ‘gallimaufry’ – in contrast and in opposition to the exclusionary ideology of ‘the King’s English’. A (variously spelt) culinary trope, as I discussed in Chapter , recurrently used of social and generic mixes, and especially of English as mixed through the introduction of Latinate words, ‘the gallimaufry’ is said to be ‘loved’ by George Page’s antagonist, Sir John Falstaff (..). An impecunious, linguistically extravagant, nomadic courtier, Falstaff is the principal guest at the Host’s Inn, a place of temporary passage emblematic of the idea of ‘our English’ as a mobile and inclusive – hospitable – mix, without a centre and without a defining property or essence. The Inn stands in contrast and in opposition to the other main location of the play, the citizen’s house, a place of private property constituted through





Following Bakhtin for whom variability is the inherent condition of language, Phil Benson points out that anthropological and sociological approaches to language ‘tend to reduce the inherent variability of language to language variety’. Phil Benson, Ethnocentrism and the English Dictionary (London: Routledge, ), . The French and Welsh were occasional allies against the English (as at Agincourt) and recurrent objects of citizen hostility. See Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Shakespeare’s “welsch men”’, , -.

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Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’

exclusion of others, which is emblematic of the exclusionary ideology of ‘the King’s English’. The inclusive idea of ‘our English’ as a ‘gallimaufry’ is advertised by the linguistic and stylistic range of the play, which is ‘an anthology of linguistic oddities’ as Brian Vickers aptly puts it, and in which Page’s ‘plain straightforwardness’ features as one among many other styles. More precisely, this idea is foregrounded in self-consciously performed instances of the figure of ‘synonymia’ by Falstaff and the Host who, as I discuss in Chapter , are linked by this practice to other figures including, most pertinently here, the Welsh Captain Fluellen in Henry V. Falstaff is, moreover, associated with the Welsh in the second tetralogy as he is with other ‘others’ – the Flemish (..) and the French (..) – in Merry Wives. The linguistically extravagant, nomadic courtier is thus grouped with other constitutive ‘others’ of protestant cultural re-formations of (the) ‘true’ English. In a scene of wooing in Merry Wives (.) in which he references the French court and Italian fashions in his attempt to seduce Mrs Ford, Falstaff indeed resembles the far-journeyed gentlemen singled out for exclusion from ‘the King’s English’ by Thomas Wilson in the most prominent early instance which, tellingly, represents this exclusion in terms of banishment, as I take up below. In its staging of a (generically typical) triumph of citizens and their cultural value of plainness (specifically evoked by Mrs Ford in response to Falstaff’s wooing, as we shall see) Merry Wives then draws out the ideological implications of the banishment staged in the second tetralogy. As I take up below, this is represented in culturally resonant terms as the ‘reformation’ of a prince who, on his accession as king, lays claim to English plainness in a scene of wooing that invites comparison with the scene of Falstaff’s wooing in Merry Wives. Henry’s claim to plainness is, however, ironised (like similar claims made by figures across the genres, as I discuss in Chapter ), just as the triumph of the ‘plain’ citizens and the authority of ‘the King’s English’ are ironised in Merry Wives. Similarly too, the second tetralogy, especially Henry V sets 





The play’s locations have consistently been treated as mimetic by critics who have consequently missed the play’s likeness in this respect to the romantic comedies which are structured around two dialectically linked emblematic locations. Brian Vickers, The Artistry of Shakespeare’s Prose (London: Methuen, ), . Katherine Duncan-Jones draws on one of Falstaff’s culinary images to describe the play as a ‘feast of verbal fritters’ to which the musical version produced by the RSC in  responded with a ‘joyous jumble of visual, cultural and musical styles’. Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘England’s Feast of Fritters’, Times Literary Supplement,  January , –. This resemblance is argued more fully in Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Shakespeare’s “welsch men”’, –, –.

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‘The King’s English’: Origin and First Recorded Uses



against the rhetoric/ideology of English ‘plainness’, the idea of ‘our English’ as an inclusive, changing mix, or ‘gallimaufry’. In Merry Wives, this idea of ‘our English’ is associated, through the figure of the Host of the Inn, with a moment prior to the Reformation, while in the second tetralogy it is associated rather with a dynastic rupture – the seizure of power by the Lancastrians – perceived as coincident with the emergence of ‘English’ as the preferred national vernacular. Indeed, it is during the reign of Henry V – the ostensible setting of both Merry Wives and Henry V – that the putative origin of ‘the King’s English’ lies, as I take up in the next section. There is then a continuity between this origin and the first, culturally most prominent instances of the trope inasmuch as they served a politically as well as ideologically charged struggle to separate what Ardis Butterfield has called England’s ‘two vernaculars’ – ‘French’ and ‘English’ – from their inextricably mixed condition. This mixed condition is foregrounded by Shakespeare in the comedies, especially Merry Wives, and the second tetralogy, which set the ‘multilingual history’ of (the) English against the drive of cultural reformation ideology to a normative unifying centre of ‘plainness’: ‘the King’s English’.

‘The King’s English’: Putative Origin and First Recorded Uses The singling out for exclusion of Latinate words through mobilisation of the trope of ‘the King’s English’ (or its variants), which recurs from the first to the most recent instances, is then a trace, or residual spasm of the class-inflected struggle in pre-modern England to separate out ‘English’ – the preferred language of the citizen class, centred in London – from ‘French’, the language of a ruling elite, centred at court. A crucial – real 







Blank comments that the phrase is ‘usually attributed to the reign of Henry V’ though without giving any specific evidence. Blank, Broken English,  n. ; see too Blank, ‘The Babel of Renaissance English’, , and Mullaney, The Place of the Stage, . Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy. Butterfield foregrounds the complexity of the interactions between these two vernaculars which renders any narrative of the triumph of English necessarily ideological rather than historical. That English has ‘always existed amidst a multilingual ethos in which language contact has been ever-present’ is argued in Rajend Mesthrie, ‘World Englishes and the Multilingual History of English’, World Englishes :/ (), . My thanks to Christian Mair for this reference. The early expressions of this struggle in terms of racial conflict and the colonial oppression of ‘the English’, which date from the early fourteenth century, are fully discussed in Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature and National Identity – (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). That English was from early on the preferred language of urban communities is underlined in Gwilym Dodd, ‘The Rise of English, the Decline of French: Supplications to the English Crown, c–’, Speculum  (), . Recent vestiges of this struggle are to be

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Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’

as well as perceived – turn took place under the Lancastrians. For, if the claim of John Fisher that it was official Lancastrian ‘cultural policy’ to promote English has been put into question, and the spread of English as a separate, and eventually dominant national vernacular is today viewed as a complex piecemeal process, strategic moves were certainly made, notably during the reign of Henry V, which has been described as ‘the pivotal period for the use of English by the government’. For as well as preferring English over French/Latin as the language of government Henry opted to use it in his signet letters, as well as in letters to the city of London, a strategic decision made under internal political pressure to mobilise support for his (still contested) occupation of the throne from parliament and citizens who, in addition, were financing his war effort. More pertinent still for my purposes is the evidence of an enduring popular perception of Henry as a promoter of English, illustrated notably by the recorded decision taken by the London Brewers’ guild in  to adopt English for their records, a decision first recorded in Latin, then translated into English. For this declares how in these ‘modern’ (i.e. contemporary) ‘days’ ‘our mother-tongue, to wit the English tongue’ has ‘begun to be honorably enlarged and adorned’ thanks to the use of it by Henry who has ‘procured the common idiom (setting aside others)’, ‘to be commended’, to the satisfaction of the many brewers who can read and write ‘in the . . . English idiom’, but not in Latin and French, the ‘others’







found in the efforts of the Fowler brothers, followed by Kingsley Amis to banish certain French words, or to insist on the pronunciation as English of those words that they reluctantly admit into ‘the King’s English’. Amis adds occasional jokes at the expense of the French, which also belongs to this tradition, as we shall see; Kingsley Amis, The King’s English (New York: St Martin’s Press, ), –, –. Malcolm Richardson, ‘Henry V, the English Chancery and Chancery English’, Speculum : (), ; John H. Fisher, ‘A Language Policy for Lancastrian England’, Publications of the Modern Language Association : (), –; see too Serge Lusignan, La Langue des rois au Moyen Age: Le français en France et en Angleterre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ), –. For the arguments against Fisher’s claim see Dodd, ‘The Rise of English’, which nevertheless acknowledges the importance of moves made by Henry; and W. M. Ormrod, ‘The Use of English: Language, Law and Political Culture in Fourteenth-Century England’, Speculum  (), –. My thanks to Rory Critten for these references. Fisher, ‘A Language Policy’, ; Richardson, ‘Henry V’, ; M. Benskin, ‘Some New Perspectives on the Origins of Standard Written English’, in J. Van Leuvensteijn and J. B. Berns, eds., Dialect and Standard Language in the English, Dutch, German and Norwegian Language Areas (Amsterdam: North Holland, ), ; Lusignan, La Langue des rois, –; Ormrod, ‘The Use of English’, . A Book of London English –, ed. R. W. Chambers and Marjorie Daunt, repr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), .

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‘The King’s English’: Origin and First Recorded Uses

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‘before these times used’. This narrative finds echo in one of Shakespeare’s principal sources, the chronicle histories of Raphael Holinshed, who locates the cultural turning point in the dynastic rupture in his account of the writers ‘of our English nation’ that ‘lived in the daies’ of Henry IV – Shakespeare’s self-styled ‘true-born Englishman’ (Richard II, .., see Chapter ). Naming Chaucer and Gower, who were of course more strictly Ricardian poets, and who wrote in an English mixed with French as purists complained (see below), Holinshed affirms that ‘before those daies, the learned used to write onelie in Latine or French’, and that thanks to these writers ‘our English toong’ developed ‘from a rude unperfectnesse unto a more apt elegancie’. Whether or not the Lancastrians adopted an official ‘cultural policy’ of promoting English, the dynastic rupture is then perceived as a turning point in the history of the emergence of English as the national vernacular with cultural as well as political authority. Again, whether or not ‘the King’s English’ had its origins in this perceived Lancastrian promotion of the preferred citizen vernacular, and specifically in the moves made by Henry V, the first recorded, and culturally prominent use of the trope works to instate a common plain English as a normative centre, through exclusion of Latinate forms practised, on the one hand, by professionals, especially ‘fine Englishe clerkes’ who ‘wil saie thei speake in their mother tongue, if a man should charge them for counterfeityng the kynges English’, and, on the other, by ‘farre jorneid jentlemen’ who, ‘pouder their talke with oversea language’, especially ‘Frenche English’ and ‘Englishe Italianated’. This is Thomas Wilson, an educated, non-elite, deeply committed protestant, in a passage glossed ‘Plaines what it is’ in his Arte of Rhetorique (), a highly influential guide to usage for aspiring non-elite men which went through eight editions before . Plainness is his first rule of eloquence, which is 





A Book of London English, . In the same period English delegates at the Council of Constance (–) grounded their claim to England’s status as a nation – and so the right to a vote in the Church’s principal organ of government – by asserting as ‘the most sure and positive sign and essence of a nation’ a common language and this language was English. F. R. H. Du Boulay, ‘The Fifteenth Century’, in C. H. Lawrence, ed., The English Church and the Papacy in the Middle Ages (London: Burns & Oates, ), . It has been suggested that Henry’s practices may have contributed to the emergence and spread of a standard variety; cf. Richardson, ‘Henry V’; Lusignan, La Langue des rois; Fisher, ‘A Language Policy’. Raphael Holinshed, The Chronicles of England, from William the Conquerour . . . untill the yeare  . . . And continued from the yeare  untill this present yeare of grace  (London, ), –. Wilson, Arte, .

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Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’

given a prominence it does not have in his sources, notably Cicero. As Jonathan Hope has usefully remarked, the aspiration of such as Wilson was to ‘a common standard rather than a prestigious one’ driven by ‘the need to communicate’ rather than to exclude. Wilson himself, however, recognises the need to exclude, although, crucially, it is obfuscatory, and so exclusionary, hard, Latinate words used by elite males that are to be excluded, or banished, as Wilson puts it, summoning a hypothesised community of native English speakers to urge in the peremptory mode of a ‘we’ that hovers between royal prerogative and sovereign people: ‘we must of necessitee, banishe al such affected Rhetorique, and use altogether one maner of language’. Published four years after the Act of Uniformity, which required the suppression of ‘diversitie in saying and synging in churches’ in order that ‘all the whole realm’ might ‘have but one use’, namely The Book of Common Prayer (), and a proclamation which ordered the destruction of other service books to re-enforce the ‘godly and uniform order which by a common consent is now set forth’, Wilson’s guide extends the scope of this aggressive drive to cultural homogeneity, mobilising ‘the King’s English’ in the service of an analogous, similarly coerced ‘common consent’. Crucially, however, it is not regional diversity that is to be suppressed, but the Latinate English practised by elite males as well as by professionals (the ‘lawyer’ and the ‘Auditour’ are mentioned as well as ‘clerkes’). The normative centre that ‘the King’s English’ represents thus does not coincide with the centre of political power, the court; the somewhere else its use summons is somewhere other than the court. Indeed, ‘the fine Courtier’ is dismissed here by Wilson for speaking ‘nothying but Chaucer’ (see further below). Mobilised to serve the production of a normative centre of plainness through exclusion of elite Latinate forms, the use of the trope thus effects a transfer of the centre of cultural ownership to educated non-elite males under the cover of the legitimising sign of sovereignty. 

   

As Derrick notes, Wilson takes his ‘four partes belonging to Elocution’ from Cicero’s De Oratore III, X,  (Arte, ). These are, however, adapted, notably in the priority Wilson gives to plainness, which, for Cicero, is a self-evident quality of good style. Tellingly Wilson has no equivalent for the first (again self-evident) quality mentioned by Cicero, ‘ut Latine’ (translated ‘correct’), since English is without such a normative model; it is, indeed, precisely to such an equivalent that his use of ‘the King’s English’ arguably aspires. Hope, Shakespeare and Language, . Blank suggests Wilson ‘indicts “alien” words on behalf of a democracy of English speakers’. Blank, Broken English, .  Wilson, Arte, . The Book of Common Prayer, ed. Cummings, , . Wilson, Arte, .

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‘The King’s English’: Origin and First Recorded Uses



Wilson is followed by Robert Cawdrey, a radically oriented protestant minister of modest origins, who lifts this passage (without acknowledgement) from Wilson’s Arte as the preface to his Table Alphabeticall (), the first English–English dictionary of ‘hard usuall English wordes’, which, like Wilson’s Arte, went through several editions. The trope of ‘the King’s English’ is thereby associated with the lexicographer’s work of drawing boundaries of lexical inclusion/exclusion to represent the hypothesised totality of a stable national vernacular. At the same time, the oxymoronic character of the title page description ‘hard usuall English wordes’ betrays the contradictions of such exercises in inclusion/exclusion which admit ‘hard’ – polysyllabic, mostly Latinate – words into the pale of a norm that the very existence of the dictionary denies as ‘usual’. Indeed, some of Cawdrey’s ‘hard usuall English wordes’ will strike any native speaker today as unusual, even outlandish, and certainly not plain: for example, ‘concinnate’ and ‘impetrate’. This shows how the lexical selections made by a living language escape attempts at the construction of a hypothesised totality of a common national vernacular which is what ‘the King’s English’ represents and is mobilised to produce through exclusion, like and with the first dictionaries. It is the mobile, unpredictable character of a living language that Shakespeare foregrounds through the figure of the uneducated, low-born female who invokes ‘the King’s English’ in Merry Wives. The very name of ‘Quickly’ summons the mobile, changing, polysemous character of English as a living language, ‘quick’ having two senses, the first, now almost ‘dead’, of living, the second, still current, of rapid movement. As David Crystal remarks, adverbs such as ‘quickly’ (his example, as it happens) are especially productive of variation because they are grammatically ‘so mobile’. That a living language must move, that ‘variability’ is its inherent condition, as Bakhtin argued (see above note ), is, moreover, unwittingly advertised in a hitherto unnoticed metalinguistically resonant self 



Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true writing, and understanding of hard usuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French (London, ). Crystal comments that there is a ‘system of checks and balances’ that ‘operates in language, as the centrifugal forces which introduce variation and change compete with the centripetal forces which keep people communicating with each other’, but adds, significantly, that it is ‘little-understood’, and that, in the specific case of early modern English, ‘a natural selection of Latinate vocabulary seemed to take place’, but ‘[i]t remains a lexicological puzzle why some words were accepted and some rejected’. Crystal, The Stories of English, . On the totalising ideological work of dictionaries, see Benson, Ethnocentrism and the English Dictionary. David Crystal, ‘Think on My Words’: Exploring Shakespeare’s Language (Cambridge University Press, ), –.

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

Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’

description: ‘I must carry her word quickly’ (..). The inherent, unpredictable mobility of the vernacular as a living language embodied by Mrs Quickly thus ironises the project to produce the stable normative centre that she invokes. Indeed, such mobility ironises the very idea of a centre as well as of cultural ownership. At the same time, Mrs Quickly’s linguistic practices, which are discussed in detail below, place her outside the pale of the centre that ‘the King’s English’ represents. This summons the question of who as well as what is included/excluded by such projects – the question, that is, of the constituency of the hypothesised community of ‘we’ – and, implicitly, who decides. Between the first recorded instance () and the first appearance of ‘the King’s English’ in a dictionary (), it is, as I have mentioned, the drunk, male native speaker that is the most frequent object of the trope’s exclusionary thrust, as the dictionary entry underscores. Two other recurring categories are French speakers and/or French/Latinate forms used by elite male speakers. The categories of French speaker and drunk male native are, moreover, brought together in another early instance, the first in a drama, in Damian and Pithias by Richard Edwards (performed before Elizabeth –, published ) (see Table .). The slurred speech of a drunken collier is here mistaken as French and then described as ‘clip [ping] the Kinges Language’. This is immediately glossed by the speaker himself as a failure to ‘speake plain’ under the influence of alcohol. Tellingly, it is not the regional and class inflected speech of the collier that is the object of the explicit exclusionary judgement, rather the failure to speak ‘plain’, the failure, that is, of the drunkard to articulate distinctions between words. The assimilation of this to a French speaker’s pronunciation of English raises the intriguing question of whether French speakers were heard to resemble drunk native speakers. More importantly, the instance points up how the ‘plainness’ with which ‘the King’s English’ is associated comprehends at once a mode of pronunciation and lexical preferences. On the one hand, ‘plainness’ represents the articulation in speech of distinctions between word forms as orthographically defined, thus a mode of pronunciation which would reproduce the blank spaces on either sides of a written word and so meet the cultural reformers’

 

The character of Mrs Quickly as an embodiment of linguistic mobility has been highlighted by Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, –. Richard Edwards, The excellent comedie of two the moste faithfullest freendes, Damon and Pithias Newly imprinted (London, ), sigs. Fiir–Fiiv.

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‘The King’s English’: Origin and First Recorded Uses



desideratum of transparency between written and spoken language. On the other, it represents the preference for ‘commonly received’ ‘plain’ (Anglo-Saxon) words over ‘outlandish’, polysyllabic, Latinate words. The Frenchman whose language is the source of imported polysyllabic words and whose spoken English sounds like that of a drunk native speaker qualifies for exclusion on both counts. This is underscored by William Harrison, a protestant fellow traveller with Wilson, whose contribution to cultural reformation ideology we will meet again in Chapter , in his chapter on ‘languages’ in the Description of Britain, which, from , prefaced Holinshed’s chronicle histories. For he comments that it is ‘especially the Frenchmen’ who fail to pronounce English properly or to ‘write anything that savoreth of English truly’. Indeed, in his history of the language(s) of England he uses irony to effect a reversal of the dominance of the Norman colonisers’ vernacular of French and their drive ‘to exile the English and British speeches’ when he comments, in explanation of the spread of French, that it was ‘counted no small token of gentility’, adding wryly, ‘no marvel, for every French rascal when he came once hither was taken for a gentleman only because he was proud and could use his own language’. Like the Jack Cade scenes in  Henry VI discussed in Chapter , this recalls the proverb ‘Jacke wold be a gentilman, but he can no frenche’, only to undo the association of (the) French with the status of ‘gentleman’ through irony. This exactly illustrates the aspiration to overturn the cultural hegemony of the French evoked and in turn ironised in the Jack Cade scenes, as I pointed out. Harrison proceeds, moreover, by excluding from the ‘perfection’ ‘the English tongue’ has attained under Elizabeth, those who ‘stain’ it ‘by fond affectation of foreign and strange words, presuming that to be the best English which is most 

 

Cathy Shrank groups these reformers with Thomas Wilson and discusses their shared aim of producing a uniform, shared and ‘transparent’ national vernacular in Shrank, ‘Rhetorical Constructions’, especially ; see too, Blank, Broken English, –. Blank points out the idiosyncrasies of the orthographical systems proposed by these reformers and pertinently comments: ‘the first English reformers practised a kind of sleight of hand: although they claimed to be the bearers of the royal seal, they were determined to put their private stamp on a still impressionable language. For all their talk of progressive social reform, the changes they envisioned were also implicitly designed to enhance their own claims to cultural authority’ (). It is also worth observing that the most radical of the reformers, John Hart, represented the desired reforms in terms of the cutting away of ‘offensive members’ of the body politic (Blank, Broken English, ), a violence expressed with regard to sartorial practices too, as we will see in Chapter . This highlights just how politically charged the discourses of cultural reformation were. Indeed, in an instance of the trope from  (see Table .), the trope of ‘the King’s English’ is turned against the advocates of spelling reform, who are associated with radical political and religious ‘reformations’. William Harrison, The Description of England, repr. (New York: Dover Publications, ), .  Harrison, The Description of England, . See Chapter , –.

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

Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’

corrupted with external terms of eloquence and sounds of many syllables’. This echoes Wilson, who mobilises the trope of ‘the King’s English’ to exclude from the normative centre it represents those who use polysyllabic Latinate words. Indeed, the examples Harrison gives of the ‘perfection’ English has attained under Elizabeth are contemporary writers of sober prose – John Jewel and John Foxe. This plainness finds its sartorial equivalent in the sober dress of the merchant citizens excepted by Harrison, as I take up in Chapter , from the sartorial folly of the English who remain under the cultural influence of the French. A (generic) Frenchman is the object of the exclusionary thrust of ‘the King’s English’ in William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money, a bluntly xenophobic (as well as specifically anti-Semitic) play widely regarded as the prototype of the genre of citizen comedy, performed by the Admiral’s Men at the Rose Theatre in . If there is good reason to draw comparisons with The Merchant of Venice, as Jean Howard has done, there are perhaps still better reasons to draw comparisons with Merry Wives (dated to  in the New Oxford Shakespeare), which may be the rival company’s riposte. For Shakespeare’s comedy appears to engage with Haughton’s both at the level of plot and at the level of linguistic ideology. At the level of plot the triumph of three English citizen daughters who prefer English gentlemen over the Frenchman, Dutchman and Italian chosen by their father, a Portuguese Jewish merchant, is turned in Merry Wives as the triumph of an English citizen’s daughter who prefers an English courtier, described by her father as ‘of too high a region’ (..), thus ‘outside’ or foreign to their ‘proper’ social sphere, while the young courtier’s older counterpart Falstaff is ‘othered’ through association with ‘outlandish’ foreigners, notably the French, Italian and Dutch (‘Flemings’) mocked in Haughton’s play. Pointing up the internal divisions – between court and city – attendant on the race- and class-inflected discourses of national identity propagated by Haughton’s play, typical in this respect of the genre it inaugurates, Merry Wives turns the romance plot to promote social miscegenation as, at the level of linguistic ideology, it promotes ‘our English’ as an inclusive mix, ‘a gallimaufry’. Here too there is engagement with Haughton’s play which (again typically) voices fear of national/racial miscegenation through the commonplace conflation of   

Harrison, The Description of England, –. Anti-alien plays were ‘characteristic’ of the Admiral’s Men at the Rose according to Dillon, Language and Stage, –. Jean E. Howard, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), –.

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‘The King’s English’: Origin and First Recorded Uses



biological and linguistic reproduction (discussed in Chapter ), as when one of the play’s commentators imagines the ‘generation of Languages that our House will bring foorth:’ if the English daughters marry their foreign suitors. The critical engagement is still more precise since, as in Haughton’s play, the object of the exclusionary thrust of the trope of ‘the King’s English’ is a Frenchman. Both plays may thus recall the putative origin of the trope as well as its use in the struggle to separate and assert the superiority of the preferred citizen vernacular of English over the preferred court vernacular of French. Haughton’s play, however, simply reiterates the exclusion of the French as constitutive ‘other’: the generic Frenchman is mocked throughout and his speech denigrated as when the same commentator remarks, ‘Pigges and French-men, speake one Language, awee awee’ (presumably a mocking imitation of ‘ah oui, ah oui’). By contrast Shakespeare’s comedy exposes such uses of the trope to ironic interrogation. This is done by the simple, brilliant and unique move whereby ‘the King’s English’ is invoked by an illiterate female native speaker. Bidding her fellow servant John Rugby keep watch as she talks with Master Slender’s servant Simple, the low-born, garrulous and ‘mistaking’ Mrs Quickly, fretfully anticipates the reaction of her employer, the French Dr Caius, should he ‘find anybody in the house’: ‘here will be an old abusing of God’s patience and the King’s English’ (..–) As in all other early (and most later) instances, the trope is used negatively of a speaker and practices that lie outside the normative centre that it represents and is mobilised to produce through such exclusions. However, in no other early instance is ‘the King’s English’ invoked by a female native speaker placed by her own speech outside the pale of the centre it represents. Indeed, in the one other instance (from ) in which ‘the King’s English’ is invoked by a female (see Table .), she is a ‘discreet and modest wife’, less like Mrs Quickly, and more like Mrs Page and Mrs Ford, agents, as David Landreth has pertinently argued, of a disciplinary education, which determines ‘who gets to be incorporated into the nation’. The stakes of Shakespeare’s unique move are inadvertently highlighted by the second Arden editor who places Mrs Quickly alongside her French employer and the Welsh parson as ‘another enemy of the English language’, echoing the   

William Haughton, ENGLISH-MEN For my Money: OR, A pleasant Comedy, called, A Woman will have her Will (London, ), sig. Iv. Haughton, ENGLISH-MEN For my Money, sig. Av. David Landreth, ‘Once More into the Preech: The Merry Wives’ English Pedagogy’, Shakespeare Quarterly : (Winter ), .

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

Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’

description in Haughton’s play of the Frenchman as ‘a clipper of the Kings English: and . . . an eternall enemie to all good Language’. This points up how the trope is turned by Shakespeare to expose the exclusions it is used to draw. The form, moreover, that Mrs Quickly uses – whether we classify it as syllepsis (following Puttenham) or zeugma (following Sister Miriam Joseph and Brian Vickers) – is itself a joking yoking that unsettles even as it joins. For the incongruity of the two noun phrases joined to the gerund ‘abusing’ – ‘God’s patience’ ‘the King’s English’ – generates an unsettling energy, expressed through laughter, that counters the aspiration to stabilise language. The ironic interrogation continues as Mrs Quickly ‘mistakes’ polysyllabic Latinate words that may, or may not lie within the pale of the norm as a glance at Robert Cawdrey’s dictionary suggests: while four of the words she mistakes are to be found in his list of ‘hard usuall English wordes’, one – ‘phlegmatic’ (..) – is not. Significantly, this is a ‘word of art’ picked up from the specialised discourse of the medical profession to which her employer belongs. For, unlike Haughton’s generic Frenchman, Shakespeare’s Frenchman has a name – Caius – which he shares with a celebrated member of the medical profession, the royal physician John Caius (–). Like his namesake, Shakespeare’s ‘renowned . . . physician’ ‘Master Doctor Caius’ (..–) is, moreover, an habitué of the court, as he informs us (..–). This is a reminder not only that French was historically the preferred language of the court, but also that skilled foreign professionals continued to be welcome there. By making an uneducated, low-born, female native speaker invoke ‘the King’s English’ only to ‘mistake’ polysyllabic ‘hard words’, half-learnt, as Lynne Magnusson suggests, from her socially superior French male employer who is the object of the trope’s exclusionary thrust, Shakespeare summons the question at once of what and who is to be included/excluded by the 







The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. H. J. Oliver (London and New York: Methuen, ), lxxiv; Haughton, ENGLISH-MEN For my Money, sig. Bv. An Englishman uses polysyllabic Latinate words to signal his assumed identity as a Frenchman (sig. Dr). The daughter Mathea to whom the Frenchman is destined by her father explicitly asserts the general significance of her resistance: ‘I have so much English by the Mother / That no bace slavering French shall make me stoope’, sig. Gv. Puttenham, The Art, ; Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language (New York: Columbia University Press, ), ; Brian Vickers, Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (London: Macmillan, ), –. The French physician as a recurring dramatic character indicative of the popularity of foreign doctors especially at court is pointed out in Barbara Traister, ‘A French Physician in an English Community’, in Gajowski and Rackin, eds., The Merry Wives of Windsor, –. Magnusson, ‘Language, History and Language-Games’, .

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‘Our English’ as ‘a gallimaufry’



boundaries that ‘the King’s English’ is used to draw, and who decides. Specifically, these ‘hard words’ belong to a professional discourse that (now as then) traverses the boundaries of nationally defined speech communities even as it draws divisions within them. Merry Wives thus draws attention to the difficulties if not the impossibility of the project to ‘one manner’ of English language that the trope represents and is mobilised to produce.

‘Our English’ as ‘a gallimaufry’ Not only does the play interrogate and undermine the project to a normative centre of ‘the King’s English’, it also proposes an alternative idea of ‘our English’ as a ‘gallimaufry’, a mobile, inclusive and changing mix without a centre. This is represented as it tends to be produced by two figures: John Falstaff, the cash-poor, language-rich, nomadic courtier and the Host of the Inn where Falstaff resides. It is the Host who utters what is the one instance in the Shakespearean canon of ‘English’ in collocation with ‘our’ (..), which, tellingly, features in the scene of reconciliation discussed above that proposes cultural/linguistic mixing as an irenic alternative to physical violence. His linguistic practices tend, moreover, to produce this mobile, expanding mixed vernacular as, like Falstaff, he enjoys traversing linguistic boundaries to produce words such as ‘Gallia and Gaul’ (..), the ‘Englishes’ mentioned above. Like Falstaff too, he displays the copious range of ‘Englishes’ that make up ‘our English’ in a self-conscious performance of ‘synonymia’, discussed in Chapter . In the scene of reconciliation the breaking up of ‘our English’ is, moreover, as we have seen, specifically linked to the accommodation of constitutive others to (the) ‘true’ or ‘proper’ English of cultural reformation ideology: the Welsh and the French. In addition this scene evokes the function of social reconciliation which the religious ritual of the Eucharist continued to perform after the Reformation, while the title of Host recalls its central symbol. Indeed, this title itself may carry resistance to cultural reformation ideology inasmuch as the word ‘host’ was explicitly repudiated by protestant apologists on account of its association with sacrifice and the substantial, or real difference from common bread. For instance, in an attack on the ‘wicked idoll’ ‘the  

For fuller discussion see Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Shakespeare’s “welsch men”’, –. See OED ‘host’ . This meaning derives from the Latin hostia for victim, sacrifice; the sense in which it is used in the title of the Shakespearean character is derived from the Latin hospes for guest and stranger as well as host (OED ‘host’ ).

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

Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’

Popes Masse’, the zealous protestant apologist Thomas Becon (whose vigorous investment in cultural reformation we will meet again in Chapter ) snarls: ‘yee breake your Host (I use your own tearmes . . .)’. The Host was, moreover, central not only to the Mass, but also, as Peter Womack has shown, to the urban drama cycles, which were suppressed in the centripetal drive of cultural reformation ideology, notably the Corpus Christi cycle in which the displayed Host functioned as ‘the ultimate repository of communitas’, ‘the community as both One and Many, the body in its singleness and the members in their diversity’. Evoking a suppressed (dramatic and religious) locally embedded culture as well as its symbol of universal atonement and social inclusiveness, the figure of the Host also carries a literary memory. For, as scholars have long observed, Shakespeare’s character recalls the genial Host of the Inn in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The recollection serves to mobilise the cultural authority of Chaucer, who was repeatedly described as the ‘Loadestarre of our Language’, on behalf of an inclusive idea of ‘our English’. As I mentioned earlier, Holinshed celebrates Chaucer with Gower for their role in the emergence of English as a national vernacular with cultural authority. This celebration is perpetuated by the ‘life’ which prefaces the monumental Workes published in  – itself a testimony to the cultural authority enjoyed by Chaucer at the time of the first performances of Merry Wives. This authority was, however, contested by cultural reformers. Thomas Wilson, for instance, dismisses the imitation of Chaucer as an elite affectation, like Latinate words – ‘The fine Courtier wil talke nothyng but Chaucer’ – while the purist Richard Verstegan, who was still more hostile to the introduction of Latinate words, explicitly takes up ‘the  



 

Thomas Becon, The displaying of the Popish masse . . . published in the dayes of Queene Mary (London, ), –. Peter Womack, ‘Imagining Communities: Theatre and the English Nation in the Sixteenth Century’, in David Aers, ed., Culture and History, –: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, ), –. See also, in the same volume, Sarah Beckwith, ‘Ritual, Church and Theatre: Medieval Dramas of the Sacramental Body’, . Womack underscores the cultural impact of the ‘forces of national integration’ mobilised under Elizabeth, including the books prescribed for use in the churches; Womack, ‘Imagining Communities’, –. For the recognition of this intertextual relation from the nineteenth century on, see Geoffrey Chaucer, The General Prologue, A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. II, Part One B, Explanatory Notes by Malcolm Andrew (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ), . Scholars have also detected a link (if only parodic) to ‘the Christian concept of the host’ in the Chaucerian figure (, ). Originally by John Lydgate, who was echoed by ‘E.K.’ amongst others; see ‘E.K.’, . Geoffrey Chaucer, The Workes of our Antient and Lerned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, newly printed (London, ), sigs. biir–ciiiv.

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‘Our English’ as ‘a gallimaufry’



opinion’ that Chaucer was ‘the first illuminator of the English toung’ to challenge it on the grounds that he was ‘a great mingler of English with French’. This points up the stakes of Shakespeare’s mobilisation of the memory of Chaucer for an idea of English as an inclusive, mixed vernacular against the aspiration of cultural reformation ideology to disentangle a pure ‘true’ English from French. Chaucer himself proposes an inclusive idea of ‘this language’ – tellingly without any possessive form and unspecified in terms of nation or people – in his treatise of the astrolabe (which was included in the  edition) where he describes the king (Richard) as, ‘lord of this language, and al that him faith beareth, and obeieth, everich in his degre, the more and the lasse’. Scholars have suggested the origin of ‘the King’s English’ may lie here, but Chaucer’s ‘this language’ is an inclusive totality, the limits of which are co-extensive with the territorial limits of the sovereignty of the monarch. There is no discrimination amongst regional and social varieties, which are treated as equal, as they are in The Canterbury Tales. ‘The King’s English’ is, on the contrary, consistently used, as we have seen, as a rhetorical and ideological instrument of exclusion, specifically to produce a normative centre of one manner of ‘plain language’ through exclusion of constitutive ‘others’ notably (the) French, an othering perceived to begin under the Lancastrians. The origins of the trope are then more likely to lie in the decision by Henry V to privilege the preferred citizen vernacular of English over the preferred court vernacular of French in his bid to consolidate Lancastrian occupation of power. The trope is then taken up by sixteenth-century cultural reformers who use it to appropriate the normative centre for citizen plainness through exclusion – banishment – of the Latinate, French and Italianate forms practised by far-journeyed gentlemen as well as professionals.

   

Wilson, Arte, ; Richard Verstegan, A restitution of decayed intelligence: In antiquities (Antwerp, ), . Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The conclusions of the Astrolabie’, in The Workes, sig. Bbbiiiv. John H. Fisher, The Emergence of Standard English (Lexington: Kentucky University Press, ), ; Shrank, Writing the Nation, . The tales themselves exhibit an inclusiveness not only in their range of social types but also in their generic and stylistic diversity. Most tellingly perhaps they include different varieties of English, which, as Paula Blank notes, are treated as equal. Blank, Broken English,  n. . This reflects the inclusiveness of the social practice of the pilgrimage which, Benedict Anderson argues, illustrates the pre-modern religious model of community displaced by the idea of a nation. Anderson, Imagined Communities, –.

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

Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’

‘we must … banishe al such affected Rhetorique’: Cultural Reformation Ideology and the Banishment of Falstaff The cultural significance for the s of the banishment of Falstaff in the ‘reformation’ of Prince Hal on his accession to the throne as Henry V is suggested not only by the resonances of the term itself, which I discussed in Chapter , but also by the conceptual frames through which it is more and less explicitly interpreted. Most explicitly, the reformation is represented in linguistic terms by the Earl of Warwick as a casting off the ‘gross terms’ of ‘a strange tongue’ ( Henry IV, .., ) just before it is staged as the banishment of a fat, intemperate and extravagant nomadic courtier. It is this representation that resonates most evidently with Thomas Wilson’s peremptory imperative that ‘we must of necessitee banishe’ the ‘affected Rhetorique’ practised by a court-centred male elite. Another conceptual frame, which has been pointed out by Michael Bristol and François Laroque, represents this ‘reformation’ in terms of the cyclically recurring cultural oppositions of fast and feast, lent and carnival. Highlighted in Falstaff’s speech in praise of sack in  Henry IV (.), this opposition, I want to suggest, informs the last of the scenes that take place in the country parish of Justice Shallow (.) just prior to the scene of banishment (.). The scene thus points up what is (about to be) lost as well as announcing the Lenten character of the new regime of temperance ushered in by the ‘reformation’ of a prince associated, as we shall see, with values of cultural reformation ideology, including notably ‘plainness’. Placed as it is prior to the scene of banishment, the scene then dramatises how, under the new Lenten regime, the collective, intemperate merrymaking of feast days – ‘gluttonous feasts’ as they are called by Philip  

Wilson, Arte, . While Michael Bristol describes the Battle of Carnival and Lent as ‘an explicit structuring device in the two parts of Henry IV’, Laroque is more specific in persuasively demonstrating the shaping influence of the ‘opposition between [the] . . . principles’ of Carnival and Lent. Bristol, Carnival and Theater, ; Laroque, ‘Shakespeare’s “Battle of Carnival and Lent”’, –. Given the very restricted circulation of Bruegel’s masterpieces among the ruling families of continental Europe, it is unlikely that Shakespeare saw his painting, as Laroque suggests. See Joseph Leo Koerner, Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (Princeton University Press, ), . Bruegel’s work does, however, bear comparison with Shakespeare’s for the innovations to their respective cultural forms, as I take up below. It is worth observing too the uniform cultural sobriety conveyed in the painting through the sombre dress of the figures, including pious burghers, on the side of Lent, which stands in sharp contrast to the ‘riot’ of diverse colours and figures on the side of Carnival. Bruegel’s position towards the opposition is debated, but Koerner argues that the painting suggests at least ambivalence if not veiled critique towards the side of Lent. Koerner, Bosch and Bruegel, .

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Cultural Reformation Ideology and the Banishment of Falstaff



Stubbes – are (to be) banished as a waste of time and resources. For this is a scene of just such collective merry-making which, as we shall see, is idealised as the occasion for the generation of fellow-feeling and community solidarity. Like the speech of Falstaff in praise of sack, this scene of intemperate merry-making is, moreover, redundant to the linear plot and so structurally itself a moment of ‘idleness’. In this both are comparable to verbal practices which, as I take up in Chapter , likewise suspend temporal linearity in moments of idle non-purposive play, and which are likewise destined to be banished under the regime of temperance. Placed under the shadow of imminent banishment this scene of an idealised, feasting ‘merry England’ is, finally, suffused with nostalgia, rather like the figure of Feste in Twelfth Night, who indulges in non-purposive linguistic play and whose confrontation with future history in the shape of the culturally repressive and repressed ‘kind of puritan’ Malvolio is also mediated, as Bristol notes, in terms of the agon between Carnival and Lent. Falstaff’s speech in praise of sack ( Henry IV, ..–), which might be described as an intemperance lecture, is not only a moment of idleness, but also an example of extravagant linguistic practices, notably ‘synonymia’ and ‘enfranchisment’ (Mulcaster’s term for new word forms taken from other languages). Describing how Hal is ‘valiant’, unlike his ‘sober-blooded’ brother John, Falstaff likens the ‘cold blood’ inherited from their father Henry to ‘lean, sterile and bare land’ ‘manured, husbanded and tilled’ through drinking ‘good store of fertile sherry’ (emphasis mine). Two examples of ‘the Figure of Store’, as Puttenham calls ‘synonymia’, set linguistic abundance against what they describe, bearing out the point made in an earlier example that good sack makes the brain ‘apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes’ (..–). To the fullness of the figure of store here is added a Latinate neologism, ‘forgetive’, which, as I discuss in Chapter , illustrates the inventiveness it describes. It is this expansive inventiveness that we are invited to understand less perhaps as what has characterised Hal under the influence of sack (and Falstaff ) than as what he will lack without them. The suggestion is, in short, that Hal will become like his sober-blooded, cold, pragmatic brother John. This likeness is underscored by an echo of Hal’s words to Falstaff at the end of  Henry IV (..–) in lines spoken by John immediately before Falstaff’s speech in praise of sack  

For the quotation from Philip Stubbes, The Anatomy of Abuses (), see C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (Cleveland: Meridian Books, ), –.  Bristol, Carnival and Theater, . Puttenham, The Art, ; see Chapter .

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

Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’

( Henry IV, ..–). Indeed, it is John who gives the final judgement on the banishment of Falstaff, which he describes as a ‘fair proceeding’ (..), a description shadowed by the irony of his own earlier proceeding with the rebels, which is the opposite of ‘fair’ in both senses, that is, unjust as well as ugly, and which renders the judgement of the banishment of Falstaff deeply ambivalent. Through the figure of John then, Shakespeare announces the character not only of the reformed king but also of the postReformation era: sober, pragmatic and cold. ‘The King has killed his heart’ – the pronoun prominently ambiguous – is how Mrs Quickly represents the decline and death of Falstaff in Henry V (..). Her judgement picks up not only on the desperate appeal of Falstaff to the newly crowned king, ‘My King, my Jove, I speak to thee, my heart!’ ( Henry IV, ..), but also on ‘[t]he heart’s all’ (..–), arguably the proverbial core (‘heart’) of the last of the scenes in the parish of Justice Shallow. Spoken by the servant Davy in apology for what might be lacking, ‘the heart’s all’ encompasses the generous welcome not only of guests (Falstaff, Bardolph and Page), but also of the occasion of merrymaking: ‘welcome merry Shrovetide’ (..). As Lent follows Shrovetide, the era ushered in by the ‘reformation’ of the prince and expressed in the banishment of Falstaff is proleptically characterised as Lenten, an era under the sign of temperance, a ‘project’ as Bristol puts it, which is aimed at ‘establishing a permanent sovereignty of Lenten civil polity’, and which suppresses such idle merry-making as a ‘waste’ of time and resources. Far from a ‘waste’, however, such occasions of collective merry-making are shown to be productive of mutual goodwill and bonds of fellowship. The two servants Davy and Bardolph strike up a friendship, which Shallow encourages, assuring Bardolph of Davy’s loyalty, which, he comments tellingly, is a mark of his ‘true-bred’ character, then adds, as a gloss to Bardolph’s reciprocal affirmation of loyalty, ‘there spoke a king!’ (..–). To this evident proleptic irony, he adds ‘lack nothing, be 



This ambivalence is underscored by the range of responses to Falstaff assembled in Harold Bloom, ed., Falstaff (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, ). Of particular pertinence here is W. H. Auden’s comment to the effect that Falstaff’s enchantment of audiences is such that the ‘disenchantment’ of the Lord Chief Justice (and then of Hal) ‘seems out of place, like the presence of teetotallers at a drunken party’. W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, repr. (London: Faber & Faber, ), . Bristol, Carnival and Theater, . See too Roy Battenhouse’s point that Falstaff’s self-defence in the play-within-the play in  Henry IV – ‘If to be fat be to be hated, then Pharoah’s lean kine are to be loved’ ( Henry IV, ..–) – aligns Falstaff with a ‘God-given plenty that could save England from the famine figured in lean Prince Hal’, though he does not link this to the Reformation. Roy Battenhouse, ‘Falstaff as Parodist and Perhaps Holy Fool’, Publications of the Modern Language Association : (January ), .

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Cultural Reformation Ideology and the Banishment of Falstaff



merry’ reiterating the scene’s key word – ‘merry’ as adjective or adverb recurs sixteen times in seventy-six lines – and the attendant satisfying plenitude, which is here linked to commitment to the bonds of fellowship. This is immediately followed by (ominous) knocking, which announces the arrival of Pistol with ‘tidings’, as he claims, of ‘golden times’ ‘and happy news of price’ (–). This is a searingly ironic description since the ‘times’ he announces are those of a ‘reformation’ which will see a renunciation of the bonds of fellowship and the inauguration of a Lenten age of temperance. His ‘news’ is, in short, of (the high) cultural and social ‘price’ of ‘reformation’. This irony invites us not only to take a critical view of the banishment of Falstaff – a critical view reiterated in Henry V through the figure of the Welsh captain Fluellen as well as through Mrs Quickly, Pistol and Nym (Henry V, ..–) – but also to regard the image of ‘golden times’ as appropriate less to the new world announced by Pistol’s ‘news’ than to the world broken up by it. This is not, as P. K. Ayers indicates, a world of ‘pastoral innocence’. Neither hosts nor guests are without vices, as René Weis observes, suggesting that the scene offers a ‘more realistic and adulterated version’ of the ‘pastoral world’ of the recurrent ‘garden of England’ trope. Nevertheless, it is a world that is idealised, notably through biblical resonances. Shallow’s opening description of his ‘orchard, where, in an arbor, we will eat a last year’s pippin’ (apple) (..–) evokes the enclosed, secure space of Eden, while Falstaff’s appreciative response, ‘’Fore God, you have here goodly dwelling and rich’ () carries biblical overtones and may specifically evoke the Old Testament prophecy of ‘the great prosperitie’ destined for God’s chosen people: ‘How goodlie are thy tents, o Jaakob, and thine habitaciouns, o Israel’ (Numbers :). As in this biblical passage, there is a satisfying plenitude of resources – enough and more to eat and drink – which allows the idleness of merry-making. ‘Do nothing but eat, and make good cheer’ () sings Silence, whose sudden uncharacteristic 





P. K. Ayers, ‘“Fellows of Infinite Tongue”: Henry V and the King’s English’, Studies in English Literature –  (), . The use of ‘the King’s English’ here is misleading since it is used casually of the language Henry acquires in the taverns he frequents. William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part Two, ed. René Weis (Oxford University Press, ), –. Compare Northrop Frye on ‘Falstaff’s world’ as perhaps ‘not a golden world, but as long as we remember it we cannot forget that the world of Henry V is an iron one’. Northrop Frye, ‘The Argument of Comedy’, in Leonard F. Dean, ed., Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism, rev. edition (Oxford University Press, ), . Unless otherwise stated, biblical quotations are from The Geneva Bible, a facsimile of the  edition, with an introduction by Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ). This verse is applied by protestant exegetes to the Christian elect as, for example, in Richard Rogers, Seven treatises (London, ), .

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Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’

expansiveness bears out Falstaff’s earlier praise of sack as Falstaff’s comment underscores: ‘I did not think Master Silence had been a man of this mettle’ (–). Sack indeed fuels this occasion of merry-making when the mutual, predatory self-interest earlier expressed by both parties, who had determined to ‘use’ each other (..–, ..–), yields to fellowfeeling and solidarity. Indeed, the scene bears comparison with the description in As You Like It of the company of ‘merry men’ around the Duke who ‘live like the old Robin Hood of England’ (..–) – a figure associated with Falstaff, as I pointed out in Chapter  – and who ‘fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world’ (..–). Idealised as ‘golden times’ through biblical resonances and rendered an object of nostalgia by its imminent loss this ‘merry’ England is then suggested as the (high) ‘price’ of cultural reformation ideology. This is in sharp contrast to the idealised past evoked by cultural reformers who, as we shall see in Chapter , locate England’s ‘golden age’ rather in an age of temperance and ‘plain’ cultural habits such as the ‘reformation’ of the prince inaugurates. This ‘reformation’ is, as Ayers points out, couched in distinctly protestant terms as a narrative of the ‘transformed sinner’, while the triumphant return of this ‘citizen king’ is celebrated in bourgeois terms by the chorus. Indeed, for Jonathan Goldberg, the evacuation of Falstaff makes of Henry a ‘bourgeois ego ideal’, which is illustrated by the ‘habits of thrift’ and ‘the marketing strategy’ he exhibits in his first soliloquy as Prince Hal. To this we might add his use in this soliloquy of the opposition between ‘holidays’ and 

 

An analogue is furnished by the Church of England minister Francis Trigge, who, in the dedicatory epistle of a tract against enclosure, addressed to James as ‘a second Salomon’, quotes the biblical representation of Salomon’s rule as a time of ‘eating, drinking and making merrie’ in a populous community of God’s people ( Kings :), adding: ‘But inclosure diminisheth the number of Gods people, killeth their hearts, and abridgeth both their mirth and maintenance’. Francis Trigge, ‘The Epistle Dedicatorie’, in To the Kings most excellent Maiestie. The humble petition of two sisters the Church and Common-wealth: for the restoring of their ancient commons and liberties, which late inclosure with depopulation, uncharitably hath taken away: containing seven reasons as evidences for the same (London, ), n.p. Later Trigge specifically laments the end of ‘merry England’ brought about by the practices and motives of economic self-interest and private property: ‘England hath been famous . . . by the name of merie England: but covetous Inclosers have taken this joy and mirth away; so that it may be now called sighing or sorowfull England.’ Sig. D. If the striking phrase ‘killeth their hearts’ resonates with ‘the King has killed his heart’, Trigge’s denunciation of these proto-capitalist practices and values as contrary to the Christian ideal of ‘charity’ finds echo in the plays, as I take up in Chapter . Ayers, ‘“Fellows of Infinite Tongue”’, –, . Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford University Press, ), . Robert Ornstein characterises Hal in his calculations as ‘like a clever Elizabethan shopkeeper’. See William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part I, ed. David Scott Kastan, repr. (London: Methuen, ), .

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Cultural Reformation Ideology and the Banishment of Falstaff



‘work’ ( Henry IV, ..–), which belongs to a citizen rather than an aristocratic mind-set, and his use of the language of the merchant in his promise to his father that he will ‘engross’ the ‘glorious deeds’ of Hotspur who is his ‘factor’ (agent) (..–). Indeed, as Katherine Eisaman Maus has persuasively argued, Hal reinvents prodigality – and the narrative of the prodigal son – as an investment ‘strategy’. It is, however, his claim to an English plainness that is perhaps most telling, especially given the putative origins of ‘the King’s English’ discussed above. As Prince Hal he has recourse to the rhetoric of plainness in a put-down of Falstaff, whose increasingly extravagant fictions he curtails with: ‘Mark now how a plain tale shall put you down’ ( Henry IV, ..–). The assertion of plainness is here an instrument of curtailment and control as it is for George Page in Merry Wives and the bourgeois master Lorenzo in Merchant who, appeals to ‘a plain man in his plain meaning’ (..–) in order to put a stop to extravagant word play by the servant clown Launcelet. As we have seen, the trope of ‘the King’s English’ associated with ‘plainness’ is similarly mobilised by Thomas Wilson as a rhetorical and ideological instrument to produce a normative centre through banishment of affected rhetoric practised by far-journeyed gentlemen. As I have suggested, Falstaff most obviously resembles Wilson’s far-journeyed gentlemen in a scene of (false) wooing in Merry Wives in which he evokes ‘the court of France’ and Venetian fashions in his praise of the beauty of Mrs Ford who, in plain language, prefers her ‘plain kerchief’ (Merry Wives, ..–). Falstaff, the figure of the well-travelled gentleman who practises ‘affected rhetoric’, is thus ‘put down’ by an assertion of plainness in the comedy as he is in the second tetralogy, banished as he is by a prince turned self-styled ‘plain king’ (Henry V, . ), who asserts his English plainness, first in a put-down of Falstaff, then in a scene of wooing that invites comparison with the scene of Falstaff’s wooing in the comedy. For the plainness to which Henry lays claim in this scene as ‘a fellow of plain and uncoined constancy’ (–) is defined precisely against the affected rhetoric of insincere elite male speakers, ‘fellows of infinite tongue’ () that ‘gasp out their eloquence’ (–). Henry, however, protests rather too much – he uses the word ‘plain’ three times 

 

Katherine Eisaman Maus, Being and Having in Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, ), , –. See too Ezra Horbury, ‘The Unprodigal Prince? Defining Prodigality in the Henry IVs’, Shakespeare :– (), –. The writing style of the historical Henry V has been described as an ‘early form’ ‘of English plain style’. Richardson, ‘Henry V’, . For detailed discussion of this scene see Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Shakespeare’s “welsch men”’, –.

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

Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’

in twenty-five lines – and the assertion of plainness threatens to sound as affected as the ‘eloquence’ to which it is ostensibly opposed, ‘a kind of polite cover’, as Ayers puts it, ‘for the naked reality of his demands’. Indeed, if Falstaff, a ‘whole school of tongues in [his] belly’ ( Henry IV, ..), is recalled as a fellow of infinite tongue who gasps out his eloquence in his wooing of Mrs Ford, the description, Ayers argues, might be applied to Henry himself, who changes rhetorical styles to suit his purposes and who, specifically, ‘chooses the medium of plain speech to create a part for himself’ whether as a (common) man amongst (common) men or as a plain Englishman in his courtship of the French princess Kate. The opposition of plainness to affected rhetoric thus collapses as plainness is ironised as itself a rhetorical instrument – a speech style adopted as a cover for a will to power, all the more insidious for being the opposite of what it claims to be. The claim to plainness is indeed consistently ironised in the plays of the s, as I take up in the next chapter, where I will argue that the comedies ironise the claim to plainness as an illusion as well as a cover for a will to control/power, while the tragedies offer more sinister instances, notably in the figures of Richard III and Iago. In the case of Henry the treatment hovers, like the genre of the history play, between the comic and the tragic when, first as prince, he flourishes his ‘plain tale’ in a put-down of the figure of extravagant language that he subsequently banishes, and, then, as king, lays claim to English plainness in his courtship of the French princess Kate. The critical thrust remains, however, the same: the aspiration to a normative centre of ‘plainness’, which ‘the King’s English’ represents and is mobilised to produce, is exposed as a dissimulation of a will to power. Henry’s claim to English plainness is ironised not only by this exposure, but also by the mixed marriage of French princess and English king, which follows. This is comparable to the mixed marriage of citizen daughter and courtier at the close of Merry Wives, especially given the implication of social categories (of ‘estate’/‘class’) in the difference between the English and the French. As Henry himself acknowledges, the child he and Kate will ‘compound’ in an intermediary cultural space ‘between Saint Denis and St George’, will be a mix, ‘half French, half English’ (Henry V, ..–), like the ‘compound’ words Kate produces in the scene of 



Ayers, ‘“Fellows of Infinite Tongue”’, . The point that Henry’s ‘plainness’ is a cover for a will to mastery has been made by others; see, for example, Karen Newman, ‘Englishing the Other: “Le Tiers Exclu” and Shakespeare’s Henry V’, in Essaying Shakespeare (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), . Ayers, ‘“Fellows of Infinite Tongue”’, .

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Cultural Reformation Ideology and the Banishment of Falstaff



the language lesson (.). A scene original to Shakespeare, this is tellingly placed immediately after the scene of the breaching of the walls of Harfleur. This economically signals how the breaching of linguistic boundaries attends the breaching of territorial boundaries, which has marked the shared history of the French and English. Like and with this shared history the respective languages are shown to be inevitably and irretrievably mixed, as, Ardis Butterfield has emphasised, historically they were. Indeed, the description (by the French) of the English as ‘bastard Normans, Norman bastards’ (..), following as it does images of agricultural grafting, which in The Winter’s Tale illustrates art’s improvement of nature (..–), suggests that the English enjoy vigour not despite, but because of their mixed, or mongrel character. It is a ‘bastard’ character that, as I discuss in Chapter , the English are claimed to share with the French by the figure of the ‘bastard’ Falconbridge in King John. Highlighting the fatally mixed character of (the) English, Shakespeare sets history against an ideology that aspires to a normative centre of a defining English ‘plainness’ through exclusion, notably of (the) French. In Henry V, the representation of France and the French as constitutive ‘other’ is countered by yet another discourse, which has been discussed by Lisa Hopkins and which again highlights the relation between the second tetralogy and Merry Wives. This is the discourse of what Portia in Merchant calls ‘neighbourly charity’ (..), which is prominent notably in the French king’s expressed hope that ‘this dear conjunction’ (the marriage of Henry and Kate) will ‘[p]lant neighborhood and Christianlike accord’, ‘twixt England and fair France’ (Henry V, ..–, ). ‘Highly pointed’, as Hopkins comments, in the context of the religious and social tensions of the s, this also serves to recall the unity of a Christian church prior to the divisions brought by the Reformation, a unity which, in Merry Wives, is evoked, as we have seen, through the tellingly titled figure of the Host, who orchestrates reconciliatory unions between nations as, with Falstaff, he celebrates ‘our English’ as an expansive inclusive – hospitable – mix or gallimaufry. This inclusive unity, located, as I suggested, at a moment prior not only to the sixteenthcentury Reformation(s), but also to the political and cultural rupture of the Lancastrian seizure of power, is set against the exclusionary unity represented and produced by ‘the King’s English’ the putative origin of  

Lisa Hopkins, ‘Neighbourhood in Henry V’, in Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray, eds., Shakespeare and Ireland (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ), –. Hopkins, ‘Neighbourhood in Henry V’, .

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

Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’

which lies precisely with this rupture and specifically with the privileging by the historical Henry V of the preferred citizen vernacular of English over the preferred court vernacular of French. The mixed marriages – of English king and French princess at the end of the second tetralogy and of citizen’s daughter and courtier at the end of the comedy – both ironise even as they are set against the aspiration of cultural reformation ideology to disentangle England’s two ‘native’ vernaculars.

Putting the Linguistic and Monetary House of England in Order: ‘the King’s English’ and ‘Gresham’s law’ In one of his reiterated assertions of plainness to Kate, quoted above, Henry describes himself as ‘a fellow of plain and uncoined constancy’ (..–). The notion of plain language is thus associated with the monetary discourse that runs throughout the Henriad, as critics have often remarked. Embedded in the contrast with ‘fellows of infinite tongue’ that ‘gasp out their eloquence’ (, –), the epithet ‘uncoined’ suggests not only the ‘pure’ value of unminted precious metal – the ‘true piece of gold’ ambiguously invoked by Falstaff in an earlier pertinent exchange with Hal – but also that which is not ‘counterfeit’ – the false coin which Falstaff sets against the ‘true’ uncoined ‘piece of gold’ (..–). The ambiguity of Falstaff’s utterance is appropriate insofar as neither he nor Hal can be said to be ‘true’: Falstaff is a self-confessed adept at ‘coinage’ of money (..) and of words (for example, ‘forgetive’ the self-reflexive invention discussed above and in Chapter ), while Hal is no more constant – witness his betrayal of Falstaff – than he is consistently plain in his speech. Indeed, as we have just seen, his claim to plainness is put into question as is, David Scott Kastan argues, the possibility of a ‘transparent’ correspondence between a coin’s precious metal content and its nominal value. The analogy between words and coins is of course commonplace and dates back at least to the Romans (notably Quintilian), but Henry’s pairing of ‘plain’ and ‘uncoined’ reflects the historically specific coincidence of the project to a normative defining centre of English cultural ‘plainness’ and the project to reform the monetary system proposed and managed by Thomas Gresham early in Elizabeth’s reign. In both cases the reform was to be effected by means of an exclusion of the ‘bad’ – false, counterfeit or clipped coins/words – in order to ensure the circulation of 

Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part I, ed. Kastan, –.

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The Linguistic and Monetary House of England



the ‘good’ – transparent (plain) – coins/words. The coincidence is highlighted by the verbs with which ‘the King’s English’ is consistently collocated in early instances and which assimilate the failure to speak plain to the monetary crimes of counterfeiting and clipping, both punishable as treason. In this the Shakespearean instance of the trope is again tellingly different. By choosing the verb ‘abuse’, which features in just one other instance from / (see Table .), rather than the more common collocations ‘counterfeit’ or ‘clip’, Shakespeare refrains, perhaps consciously, from the association of the failure to speak plain with treasonable offences, an association which is explicitly foregrounded in other early instances (discussed below). Similarly, as we shall see in Chapter , he refrains from associating the figure of the motley-dressed elite male – the sartorial equivalent of the linguistic gallimaufry – with the traitor to which the figure is expressly assimilated in other instances. In short, Shakespeare resists the ideological turn whereby the status of traitor becomes a function of a failure of allegiance to defining cultural habits or norms under the sign of temperance: regulated habits of the body/mind and normative, stable and ‘transparent’ linguistic and monetary systems. A diffused form of power, such norms furnished a unifying ground, or ‘home’ which, as I take up in the next chapter, was potentially an alternative to the ground furnished by the figure of the monarch. Shakespeare’s resistance to this turn is, finally, a resistance to the emergence of a new (modern and bourgeois) order of things, an order which is upheld by such mutually implicated norms as it is upheld more specifically by an enduring association of the failure to meet linguistic standards with moral/sexual/social deviance and even with crime. This system of mutually implicated norms served the interests of merchant citizens, such as George Page, who needed stable and transparent linguistic and monetary systems as well as temperate law-abiding minds and bodies to conduct the international trade which filled their coffers. This imperative is strikingly highlighted by an early instance of ‘the King’s English’ in a translation by Richard Carew of an anecdote told in a French encyclopaedic treatise by Henry Estienne, A World of Wonders (). To illustrate how ‘the coyning of new phrases and formes of speech’ permit ‘fraudulent’ commercial practices, Estienne tells how he was caught out by 

As late as  the Conservative politician Norman Tebbit asserted that a decline in linguistic standards ‘causes people to have no standards at all, and once you lose standards then there’s no imperative to stay out of crime’. Crystal, The Stories of English, . Crystal also quotes here a head teacher who in  linked the practice of correct grammar to the values of ‘honesty, responsibility, property’.

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

Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’

Florentine merchants who produced ‘counterfeit searge’ very like ‘right Florence searge’, which they first labelled (presumably in Italian) ‘Searge after the fashion of Florence’, then simply ‘Florence Serge’. This, Carew translates is an ‘abridging’ (‘maniere d’abbregement [sic]’) ‘or’, he adds, ‘rather clipping the kings English’, which ‘makes much for the profite of the seller and the cost of the buyer’. In this translation of an anecdote in French about Italian merchants, it is not, as in other early instances, the failure to distinguish English word forms (pronunciation) or the failure to use ‘plain’ English words that is the object of the trope’s exclusionary thrust, but the failure to deal plainly, in the sense of honestly, specifically the attempt to pass a counterfeit off as the genuine article through the omission of words – what we call today being economical with the truth – which is perceived as an instance of linguistic ‘coining’. Associated with honest commercial practices and specifically with the preservation of the distinction between true and counterfeit (goods/coins/words), ‘the King’s English’ suggests itself as a trust- and credit-worthy (because stable and transparent) lingua franca for the international marketplace, like and with the monetary system of ‘good’ – transparent – coin with which it is associated. Indeed, the economic historian Joyce Appleby has suggested that the system of ‘intrinsic value’ according to which the value of a coin corresponded ‘transparently’ to its precious metal content, functioned precisely as a ‘lingua franca’ of international trade in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In contrast with ‘extrinsic value’ – the value imposed by the sovereign in the minting of coin as legal tender – this was, as she points out, a system that bestowed authority on competent merchants and on the institution of the Royal Exchange (discussed below) where this intrinsic value was fixed. Authority was likewise bestowed on, 







Richard Carew, A world of wonders: or An introduction to a treatise touching the conformitie of ancient and moderne wonders . . . Translated out of the best corrected French copie (London, ), . (italics in original) Henri Estienne, L’Introduction au traitté de la conformité des merveilles anciennes avec les modernes: ou Traitté préparatif à l’Apologie pour Herodote (Lyon, ), . First published in Geneva in  the treatise was published in this corrected version by Benoist Rigaud in Lyon in . This is the edition I have consulted since Carew expressly states that he used it in ‘The Translator to the Reader’, sig. Av. Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton University Press, ), . That the varied quality of coins in circulation constituted an obstacle to commerce is pointed out in H. Buckley, ‘Sir Thomas Gresham and the Foreign Exchanges’, The Economic Journal : (), . This will be superseded by the gradual perception of value as a function of exchange during the seventeenth century; see Richard Waswo, ‘Crisis of Credit: Monetary and Erotic Economies in the Jacobean Theatre’, in Dieter Mehl, Angela Stock, and Anne-Julia Zwierlein, eds., Plotting Early Modern London: New Essays on Jacobean City Comedy (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), –.

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The Linguistic and Monetary House of England



or appropriated by, self-appointed cultural reformers who sought to instate ‘full wayght, good and currant lawfull English’, as Gervase Markham puts it in an instance of the trope from  which highlights the analogy. In the instance from Carew’s translation, ‘clipping the Kings English’ is aligned with the production and sale of ‘counterfeit’ goods. It is with the verb ‘counterfeit’ or more often, as here, with the verb ‘clip’ that ‘the King’s English’ (or one of its variants) is usually collocated in early instances. Indeed, by , the collocation with ‘clip’ had become a fixed idiom as the dictionary entry illustrates: ‘To Clip the Coin, to diminish or Impair it. To clip the King’s English, not to Speak Plain, when one’s Drunk’. Like counterfeiting, the clipping of coins was a treasonable offence as early instances of the trope highlight. In the earliest, in Thomas Dekker’s satirical comedy Satiromastix (), the figure of a Welshman, one of the constitutive others of the ‘true’ English of cultural reformation ideology, is told he has been accused of clipping the King’s English by the figure of Horace, an avatar for Ben Jonson, whose alignment with other cultural reformers is discussed in Chapter . The Welshman responds nervously: ‘that’s treason: clip? horrible treasons’ (..). Dekker thus explicitly foregrounds the association with treason of the failure to speak plain which the trope represents as, we shall see in Chapter , he explicitly assimilates the figure of the elite male dressed in a motley of foreign fashions to the dismembered body of a traitor.



 

Nevertheless, as Waswo points out elsewhere, the idea of intrinsic value lingered on even in the work of Marx; Richard Waswo, ‘Supreme Fictions’, in Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner, eds., Fiction and Economy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), . ‘he must as well as he can make satisfaction for the Queenes currant English before by him clipped, he must now make it full wayght, good and currant lawfull English’. Gervase Markham, A health to the gentlemanly profession of servingmen; or, The servingmans comforts With other thinges not impertinent to the premisses, as well pleasant as profitable to the courteous reader (London, ), sig. Fv. See Table .. ‘Clip’ in B. E. Gent., A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew (London, ). The two other instances of the trope that highlight this association are post-. The second () is particularly telling since it aligns radical spelling reforms aimed at ‘one plain and easie way of writing true English’ ‘for the better uniting his Majesties good Subjects’ with the radical political and religious ‘reformations’ of the ‘Rebellious times’: ‘when some men struck at the ancient established Lawes of Chuch and State, others busying themselves in murthering or mutilating English words, which they also called Reformation’. Friendly Advice to the Correctour of the English Press at Oxford Concerning the English Orthographie (London, ), , . Mobilised to oppose these reformations as ‘the petty Treasons of clipping the Kings English, and adulterating his Language; which sober men were not wont to do’ (), the trope is, perhaps self-consciously, turned against the project of ‘one plain and easy way of writing true English’ that it had been used to serve. This clearly demonstrates how the trope is above all a highly charged rhetorical/ideological tool/weapon rather than a description. Note that it continues here to be associated with the moral value of temperance (‘sober’), and the failure to meet the standard it represents continues to be associated with deviation from sexual norms (‘adulterating’).

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

Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’

The practice of clipping debased a coin’s value by shaving off precious metal to melt it into bullion. As Glyn Davies records, Henry VIII undertook a ‘great debasement’ as a means to increase royal revenue by reducing the actual silver or (to a less extent) gold content of coins. As a result of these practices, which continued through the reigns of Mary and Edward, the ‘process of physical debasement from the original pure sterling silver standard . . . reached its nadir of  per cent under the young King Edward VI in ’ when the ‘confusion’ of this financial crisis – a distressing lived experience at every level of the social hierarchy – was at its height. On Elizabeth’s accession in  Thomas Gresham urged on her the ‘law’ which would subsequently carry his name, though known by others before him. This called for the exclusion of ‘bad’ – clipped or counterfeit – coin in order to ensure the circulation of ‘good’, that is, coin in which the value corresponded to the precious metal content (‘intrinsic value’). Under Elizabeth, a ‘curative surgery’ as Davies calls it, of ‘replacing . . . bad money with good’ took place, most intensively from –, when Gresham was heavily involved. These two years also saw the publication, first, of a revised edition of Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (), in which, as we have seen, the trope of ‘the King’s English’ is introduced in collocation with ‘counterfeit’ to work for a normative stable centre of ‘plainness’ through exclusion of ‘bad’ – Latinate, opaque – words; second, of a translation of Castiglione’s Courtier by Thomas Hoby (), to which a letter is appended by John Cheke, Thomas Wilson’s mentor and friend, which represents the practice of Latinate neologisms in monetary terms, specifically as a borrowing of foreign ‘counterfeits’ that should be rejected. Rather than ‘unknowen words’, Cheke urges that the 

 





Davies, A History of Money, –. On debasement and clipping see Appleby’s summary of the recommendations made by Gerald de Maynes in  that ‘regular checks be made of the weight and pureness of all coins to guard against debasement or clipping’. Appleby, Economic Thought, . Davies, A History of Money, , . Strictly of course the ‘law’ named after Gresham states that it is bad coin that drives out good and this is the reason Gresham gives in his letter to Elizabeth that ‘all your Fine goold was convayd ought [sic] of this your realme’ on account of the debased quality of coin in circulation, a debasement that, as Gresham points out, was very largely due to her father Henry VIII. Thomas Gresham, ‘Gresham to Queen Elizabeth on the Fall of the Exchanges ’, in R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power, eds., Tudor Economic Documents,  vols. repr. (London: Longmans, ), II, . Davies, A History of Money, . As Davies points out, Gresham was involved in obtaining a loan from Antwerp to secure ‘a reservoir of bullion’ as well as in negotiating contracts for the removal of precious metal from debased coin (). Insofar as the debased coin was called in (and the precious metal extracted) Davies suggests there was a ‘reversing of Gresham’s law’ (), but the logic remains the same – get rid of the bad in order to ensure circulation of the good. The letter, addressed ‘To His Loving Frind Mayster Thomas Hoby’, is reproduced in Görlach, Introduction to Early Modern English, –. Quotations are from this text.

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

translator should choose ‘old denisoned words’, that is, foreign words admitted into the community of (the) English by virtue of long use/ residence, since ‘our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges’ for ‘borowing and never payeng, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt’, like a bourgeois housewife (such as Mrs Page or Mrs Ford), who is better off ‘when she bouroweth no counterfeitness of other tunges to attire herself withall, but useth plainlie her own’, just as Mrs Ford asserts preference for a ‘plain kerchief’ over the extravagant foreign court fashions proposed by Falstaff in the scene of wooing discussed above. Cheke here combines the sartorial and monetary analogies with the word/denizen analogy, which highlights the xenophobia attendant on the aspiration to regulate the circulation of (foreign) words and (bad) coins discussed in Chapter . His representation of linguistic practices in terms of the economics of a bourgeois housewife’s management of her accounts highlights too the social inflections of the opposition between ‘true’ ‘plain’ (citizen) English and ‘counterfeit’ (elite) foreign words. This is reproduced by Wilson when he introduces ‘the King’s English’ in collocation with the verb ‘counterfeit’ to promote ‘true’ English ‘plainness’ through exclusion of counterfeit Latinate words practised by far-journeyed gentlemen. Like bad coin, such words are to be excluded in order to ensure the circulation of ‘good’ plain words. Cheke and Wilson may well have known Gresham since they were of the same generation of (s) Cambridge scholars that, in , Thomas Nashe retrospectively praised for their collective purging and expelling of ‘the errors of Arte’, as I discussed in Chapter . Certainly, they had common acquaintances: Philip Hoby (–), half-brother of Thomas, distinguished diplomat and administrator, and committed protestant, accompanied Thomas Gresham to Antwerp in January  on one of his trips to negotiate payment of the English crown’s debt, and in  joined John Cheke and Thomas Wilson in Padua. If there is no extant evidence of discussion between them, it is striking that this generation of non-elite Cambridge educated protestant men sought in the same decade (–) to put respectively the linguistic and monetary house of England in order by application of a ‘law’ which in both cases sought to exclude ‘bad’ forms – ‘counterfeit’ Latinate words, clipped/counterfeit coins – produced by those at the centre of political power, the court. 

Gary M. Bell, ‘Hoby, Sir Philip (/–)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, , online edition, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/, accessed  January .

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

Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’

Indeed, whether or not they were conscious of the parallel, it testifies, as I have indicated, to a shift of the centre of economic as well as cultural gravity from the court to the merchant citizen class, whose interests were equally served by a stable transparent (‘plain’) vernacular and a stable, transparent monetary system. In both cases, moreover, the shift is covered – concealed and legitimated – by a sign of sovereignty through which the criterion of the ‘true’ Englishman/traitor is covertly transferred to a set of mutually implicated defining cultural norms. The sign of sovereignty – ‘the king’ – in ‘the King’s English’ bears comparison with the epithet ‘royal’ in ‘The Royal Exchange’, the new name given by Elizabeth in  to ‘Gresham’s Burse’, the magnificent building founded by Gresham in  as a centre of international trade to rival Antwerp. This sign covers not only a gain in merchant power, but also a loss of monarchical power. For if, as Janette Dillon argues, the new name signalled crucial support from the monarch, control of the exchange of money and goods, and specifically, the fixing of the ‘intrinsic value’ of coins, remained firmly in the hands of merchants there. What is more, whether perceived as a palace, as it was by a Swiss visitor in  or as a theatre, as in Thomas Heywood’s retrospective celebration of Gresham, The Second Part of If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (performed ?–), it was a space designed, as Heywood’s Gresham comments, for ‘Marchants, and their wives’, ‘good Cittizens’. These citizens are described as occupying the centre under the gaze of ‘Courtiers’ who are admonished by the spectacle before them of ‘neat attire’ and ‘chaste eyes’. The Royal Exchange is thus verbally represented in a performed play as a theatrical space in which citizens and citizen values (plainness and temperance) are placed at the centre for the instruction of elite spectators, as they are placed not only in citizen comedies such as Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money (discussed above), but also in prose narratives such as Deloney’s Jack of Newbury in which, as Rahel Orgis has shown, the exemplary Jack’s ‘utopian workshop’ furnishes an instructive object for the gaze of the king and the noble elite. Playtexts, in turn, recurrently allude to The Royal Exchange as a monument to the figure of the wealthy citizen    

Janette Dillon, Theatre, Court and City – (Cambridge University Press, ), . Dillon, Theatre, Court and City, ; Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, ), –. Thomas Heywood, If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Part II, Malone Society Reprints (New York: AMS Press, ), sig. Cv, line , sig. Ev, line . Heywood, If You Know Not Me, sig. Ev, lines –. Orgis, ‘Tricking Sir George into Marriage’, .

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The Linguistic and Monetary House of England



benefactor, to whom, as Howard has pointed out, the figure of Elizabeth I is subordinate in Heywood’s play. Indeed, the epithet ‘royal’ is pointedly used of Gresham himself, who is celebrated as ‘royall in his vertues as his buildings’, as it is used of the ‘noble profession’ of merchants in a tract published in the same year as Heywood’s play. The epithet finds its way, moreover, into Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, where it is used (twice) of the eponymous protagonist, ‘that royal merchant good Antonio’, a title which, as Samuel Johnson remarked, may allude to Gresham. That ‘royal’ – and real – control over the circulation and exchange of money lay increasingly in the hands of merchants was recognised by Elizabeth and James as well as denounced by commentators, notably Thomas Milles, who, in a treatise published in , declared that, despite appearances, ‘(though KINGS weare crownes, & seem absolutely to raigne)’, ‘pollicies’ are controlled by societies of merchants and ‘particular bankers’ who ‘offering even Bountie to KINGS’ make ‘Kings to be subjects and vassalles to be Kings’. James himself, in Basilicon Doron (), argues that the monarch should take measures both to control merchants, who ‘think the whole common-weale ordained for making them up’, and to ensure the production and circulation of ‘good’ coin. Measures were, moreover, undertaken by both monarchs to reassert royal control. In  Elizabeth revived the office of royal exchanger and issued a











Howard, Theater of a City, –. Heywood also references Haughton’s play (Heywood, If You Know Not Me, sig. Gv, line ). The theatre is, of course, also famously described as the poets’ royal exchange by Thomas Dekker, a comparison taken up by Robert Watson, who argues, in two overlapping articles, that the evolving English language was on sale in the theatre and that dramatists were competing for a market share, Shakespeare being the most successful. Robert N. Watson, ‘Coining Words on the Elizabethan and Jacobean Stage’, Philological Quarterly :– (Spring ), –; Watson, ‘Shakespeare’s New Words’. Heywood, If You Know Not Me, sig. Fv, line ; in his praise of the ‘noble profession’, Nicholas Breton urges: ‘give them their right, say the Merchant is a royall fellow’. N. Breton, A Poste with a packet of madde letters (London, ), sig. Cv. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, .. (Graziano) and .. (the Duke of Venice). Johnson makes his suggestion in a gloss to the second instance. Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare, . Thomas Milles, The customers replie (London, ), . In  Gerard Malynes specifically seeks to reappropriate the title of ‘royal merchant’ for James, urging that ‘the Kings authority or the Royall Merchant of great Brittaine, must be the true Palynurus, and sit at the Rudder of the Ship of Traffique, to reforme abuses’, notably by merchants and their companies. Gerard Malynes, The Maintenance of Free Trade, According to the Three Essentiall Parts of Traffique (London, ), . King James VI and I, Political Writings, –. On James’s ‘little love for traders’ and his dependence on them see R. H. Tawney, Business and Politics under James I: Lionel Cranfield as Merchant and Minister (Cambridge University Press, ), –.

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

Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’

proclamation (re)asserting ‘the right of prerogative of exchange’, while, on his accession as king of England, James aggressively reasserted the monarchical privilege of ‘extrinsic value’ when he ‘caused’ a whole raft of ‘new coynes to be made’. These coins were, in addition, expressly designed to promote his cherished political project of the union of Scotland and England, none more so than ‘one piece of gold of the value of s sterling, called the Unite’ stamped on one side with his portrait and on the other with a legend declaring his mission of union, and another gold coin of ‘five shillings, called the Britaine Crowne’. Royal authority over commercial exchange as well as the project of union was promoted too by the ‘aristocratic-sponsored commercial venture’, directed by Robert Cecil, the New Exchange, which was a rival to Gresham’s burse, and which literally drew the economic centre towards the court, it ‘being near unto the court of Whitehall’. At the opening of the Exchange in  – for which Ben Jonson furnished the official Entertainment – James tellingly (re)named it ‘Britan’s burse’. Like the coin named ‘the Britaine Crowne’, ‘Britan’s burse’ bears comparison with ‘the Britan tungue’ – the advertised project of an unpublished treatise, The Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue by the Scottish schoolmaster and grammarian Alexander Hume, who explicitly aimed ‘to conform . . . the south and the north’ vernaculars as ‘dialectes of ane [i.e. one] tungue’. Produced on or around the occasion in  of James’s first and only visit to Scotland after his accession to the English throne – an occasion on which Hume gave an official speech of welcome – this grammar is prefaced by a fulsome dedication to his ‘dred Soveragne’.  

  



Beer, Early British Economics, . The assertion of the Crown’s ‘right of prerogative’ is from John Hale’s A Discourse of the Common Weal () as quoted in Blank, Broken English, . William Camden, Remaines concerning Britaine: But especially England (London, ), . The distinction between these forms of value is defined in terms of the king versus the merchant by Robert Cotton in : ‘the Extrinsick quality, which is at the King’s Pleasure . . . to name; the other the Intrinsick quantity of pure Metall, which is in the Merchant to value’; quoted in King Henry IV, Part I, ed. Kastan, . Camden, Remaines, , . Dillon, Theatre, Court and City, , quoting the lord mayor; Roy Porter, London: A Social History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), . James Knowles, ‘Jonson’s Entertainment at Britain’s Burse’, in Martin Butler, ed., Representing Ben Jonson: Text, History, Performance (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ), . It is worth noting that the entertainment was originally conceived along the lines of the typical Jonson masque with an antimasque of adulterated or false goods (merces adulterinas) banished in an exclusionary gesture at the onset of the main masque (), a structure, that is, with a modus operandi like that of the homologous projects to reform the monetary and linguistic systems discussed above. Alexander Hume, The Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue, ed. Henry B. Wheatley, repr. (Oxford University Press, ), –.

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The Linguistic and Monetary House of England



Hume here describes an intriguing scene in which James is portrayed as asserting his cultural authority, and specifically his occupation of the centre of ownership of the national vernacular. Described as ‘reproving’ (presumably English) ‘courteoures’, who, ‘on a new conceat of finnes’ (i.e. fineness), ‘spilt the kings language’, James is said to have invoked the opinion of the English lexicographer John Baret in a declaration that he ‘wald cause the universities mak an Inglish grammar’ in order ‘to repress the insolencies of sik green heades’. Stated, as Hume mentions, in the introduction to the letter ‘E’ in his trilingual dictionary of , the position of Baret is indeed that the much-needed reforms of the vernacular, especially the spelling system, cannot be achieved by private persons, but only by a collaboration of intellectual and political authorities – the universities and the prince. His position is taken up and advertised in a prefatory poem by Arthur Golding, who calls for a rational, ‘sound Orthographie / Set out by learning and advised skill, / . . . / And then confirmed by the Sovereines will’, an alliance of intellectual and political authority which he argues would serve to guarantee protection against the arbitrary errors of custom. This is a call for a stable system bound to and guaranteed by the centre of power, which is what ‘the King’s English’ represents, although, as we have seen, the trope is used in the first most prominent instances by cultural reformers in order to produce a centre of English plainness, ‘as if’ ratified by the king. Plainness – transparency between spoken and written forms and between word and intended meaning – is indeed the goal urged by Baret, while Golding is still more specifically in line with cultural reformers since he adds a call for a hypothesised community of ‘we’ to ‘clense’ ‘our owne’ native vernacular from the ‘affectation’ of foreign borrowings. Grounding themselves on this English source of authority James and/or Hume (who may have invented the scene), turn the opinion of Baret to make of the normative centre – ‘the kings language’ – an instrument to put down uppity affected English courtiers who are thus excluded as they are by Thomas Wilson. James thus appears to exploit the ideology of ‘the King’s English’ in order to bolster his occupation and ownership of the cultural/linguistic centre. This is, moreover, the very place that in Basilicon Doron he explicitly urges that the king should occupy as a model of speech and writing in the vernacular for his subjects. Indeed, his advice   

Hume, The Orthographie, . John Baret, An alvearie or triple dictionarie in Englishe, Latin, and French (London, ), n.p. King James VI and I, Political Writings, .

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

Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’

resonates with Wilson’s Arte, which he may well have read, since he recommends that the king practise a ‘plain’ ‘honest’ and ‘naturall’ language, which he defines as an avoiding of the extremes, on the one hand, of the rustical, and, on the other, of ‘inke-horne’, ‘mignard’ and ‘effoeminate’ terms. These are the ‘terms’ used, on the one hand, by the far-journeyed gentlemen excluded from ‘the King’s English’ by Thomas Wilson, who in the same passage advises against ‘sekying to be over fine’, and, on the other, by the English courtiers, who ‘on a new conceat of finnes’ spoil ‘the kings language’ in the scene described by Hume. The scene is, in turn, taken by Hume as an endorsement of his own project for a grammar of ‘the Britan tunge’, a reworking of the hypothesised totality of Wilson’s ‘one maner of language’ that would bolster James’s cherished political project of union as well as his cultural authority. Tellingly, it is not ‘the King’s English’ that is evoked here but ‘the kings language’, a variant obviously more appropriate for a project that would elide ‘English’ under ‘British’ and England as well as Scotland under ‘Britain’. The investment of James in his cultural authority is, of course, everywhere evident, as many have observed. This is not the place to enter into the debate around James and ‘the making of Jacobean culture’, but it is worth mentioning another instance of the new monarch’s assertion of cultural authority as it chimes with the scene described by Hume. In a manuscript collection put together by his son Charles and with corrections added by James around  (thus contemporary with Hume’s grammar), five sonnets on the art of writing sonnets, including one titled ‘Sonnet decifring the perfyte poete’, are followed by a sonnet addressed to Sir William Alexander, one of his Scots courtiers who wrote drama and poetry including a sonnet sequence, Aurora (). Probably composed as early as , or even before, the sonnet is here given the title: ‘A Sonett:    



 King James VI and I, Political Writings, –. Wilson, Arte, . For discussion of the (ongoing) tensions around ‘England’ and ‘Britain’, see Maley and TudeauClayton, ‘Introduction’, –. See, for example, Jane Rickard, Authorship and Authority: The Writings of James VI and I (Manchester University Press, ). Curtis Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture (Cambridge University Press, ). This study is particularly valuable for pointing out the limits of the control exercised by James over cultural productions and furnishes an important counterweight to earlier work, notably Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). See Michael R. G. Spiller, ‘The Scottish Court and the Scottish Sonnet at the Union of the Crowns’, in Sally Mapstone and Juliette Wood, eds., The Rose and the Thistle: Essays on the Culture of Late Medieval and Renaissance Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, ), –. What follows including the titles and quotations from the sonnets by James draws on this excellent essay.

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The Linguistic and Monetary House of England



on Sr William Alexanders harshe vearses after the Inglishe fasone’. Whether or not, as Michael Spiller has persuasively argued, the sonnet represents James’s reaction to the development of the English sonnet towards a more sophisticated expressive mode, James positions himself as he is positioned in the scene described by Hume as ‘royal critic’ and cultural arbiter, a position which is expressed here again in an exclusionary critique of the fashion, or modish style, adopted by an English culturalpolitical elite. The parallel is highlighted by a modification made to the sonnet in James’s hand. For the lines on the English fashion in sonneteering – ‘your neighbours (i.e. the English) have conspir’d to kill / That art’ – have been modified to: ‘your neighbours have conspired to spill / That art’. The verb ‘kill’ has been replaced with ‘spill’, the verb which, in the scene described by Hume, is used of the courtiers who, in their aspiration to fineness, ‘spilt the kings language’. Whether or not there is a conscious recollection, the two places illustrate a vigorous assertion of cultural authority through rejection of perceived elite English practice at a moment when, as Curtis Perry has pointed out, James’s political control was slipping away. Handicapped by being ‘too much inclined to giving’, as the Archbishop of York put it in , James’s interventions in the economic sphere were still more ineffective where they were not disastrous as in the ‘Cockayne project’ of , William Cockayne being, as Michael Nerlich comments, a rival to the companies of merchant adventurers with whom by  James was ‘in open conflict’. In another attempt to assert control James set up ‘a new trading company under government supervision’, as Nerlich notes, with the telling name of ‘the King’s  

  



Spiller, ‘The Scottish Court and the Scottish Sonnet’,  n. . The phrase ‘royal critic’ is from the biographical article by David Reid, who mentions another sonnet written in criticism of Alexander’s ambitious poem Doomes-Day (). He also quotes a wry comment made by Alexander in a letter to his friend William Drummond that with respect to cultural productions James ‘prefers his own to all else’, although they might not be the best. David Reid, ‘Alexander, William, first earl of Stirling (–)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, , online edition, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/, accessed  January . Spiller, ‘The Scottish Court and the Scottish Sonnet’, . Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture, –. Menna Prestwich, Cranfield: Politics and Profits under the Early Stuarts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), . This tendency to prodigal giving was fed by a fantasy of himself as an inexhaustible source of royal bounty, mirrored, as Coppelia Kahn has pointed out, in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, which was only dissipated by the ‘sight of hard coin’. Coppelia Kahn, ‘“Magic of bounty”: Timon of Athens, Jacobean Patronage, and Maternal Power’, Shakespeare Quarterly : (), . Michael Nerlich, Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, –,  vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), I, .

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

Shakespeare and ‘the King’s English’

Merchant Adventurers of the New Trade of London’. But, like Elizabeth’s efforts before him, the efforts of James to assert royal control in the economic sphere were of ‘no avail’. Specifically, his ‘attempt . . . to unify the coinage’, like Hume’s attempt to unify the language, ‘failed dismally, despite the minting of the gold “unite”’. Like and with political control, economic and cultural control was inexorably slipping away from royal hands. Yet, as we shall see in the next chapter, the political watershed of  was retrospectively mythologised as coinciding with a turn away from the forms of elite cultural extravagance represented by the linguistic gallimaufry and the sartorial motley of foreign fashions. This turn finds echo in the work of the in-house playwright to the company renamed ‘the King’s Men’ in another act of cultural appropriation by the new monarch. Whether under this immediate pressure or the pressure of larger forces of history, Shakespeare’s plays after  exhibit not only a stark shift of focus from ‘England’ to ‘Britain’, but also, as I argue in the next chapter, an increased ambivalence towards cultural extravagance, notably in All’s Well that Ends Well, which stages a scene of violent exclusion that matches the exclusionary violence of cultural reformation ideology. At the same time, the central value of cultural reformation ideology, namely ‘plainness’, is equivocally asserted at best, even in the one play in which it appears to be prominently advertised as a virtue: King Lear. 

 

Beer, Early British Economics,  (on Elizabeth’s attempts to control economic exchange). On the ‘open oligarchy of successful merchants and financiers’ that emerged under James, see Tawney, Business and Politics, –. Davies, A History of Money, . ‘There are  instances of the word “England” in the sole-author plays performed before  compared to three in the plays from the later period, and there are just twelve mentions of “Britain” in the early plays compared to thirty-four in the later ones.’ Craig, ‘Shakespeare’s Style, Shakespeare’s England’, .

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 

Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’ ‘Theatre’ and the Ideology of National Character

Forming a diptych with Chapter , this chapter presents for the first time a history of the emergence and the ideological uses made of the sartorial equivalent of the linguistic ‘gallimaufry’: the figure of the elite Englishman dressed in a motley of foreign fashions. Like the one Shakespearean instance of ‘the King’s English’ discussed in Chapter , the three, arguably four, instances of this figure in the Shakespearean canon acquire in this context hitherto unrecognised, cultural and ideological significance, specifically in relation to the ‘re-formation’ of the ‘proper’ or ‘true’ Englishman. If the fourth, and one probably Jacobean instance, is ambivalent, as I discuss at the close of the chapter, the first three resist the ideological turn taken by this ‘re-formation’ whereby the charge of traitor, like the status of ‘true-born Englishman’, becomes a function not only of allegiance to the monarch, but also of conformity to a set of mutually implicated cultural ‘habits’ of ‘true’ Englishness, defined by exclusion. Potentially separable from allegiance to the monarch, these defining normative habits furnish an alternative ground of individual and collective identity, or ‘home’, which may be (and is) used to justify political opposition. Within the time frame – I have found seventeen instances of this figure – and there are almost certainly more – in a range of kinds of text, principally protestant, hortatory or polemical, politico-religious texts, whether homily, sermon, didactic dialogue, satiric verse, epigram or prose pamphlet, but also, less overtly protestant, didactic romance, dialogue and travel writing. Deriving from verbal descriptions linked, as I show, to the first visual portrait of an Englishman, the figure is taken up and reworked as an object of (increasingly violent) exclusionary performative utterances, 

For an earlier version of this chapter see Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“The trueborn Englishman”: Richard II, The Merchant of Venice and the Future History of (the) English’, in Maley and TudeauClayton, eds., This England, That Shakespeare, -. Much fresh material has been added, including the fourth Shakespearean instance, and the argument has been modified accordingly.



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

Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’

like and, at least once, with the linguistic ‘gallimaufry’. Like the centre of ‘the King’s English’ the normative centre of the ‘true’ Englishman is thus defined through exclusion of what it is not and what it is not is represented by this sartorial equivalent of the gallimaufry. More specifically, as it is reworked, the figure acquires gender and class inflections even as it is woven into a historical narrative charged with an implicit future project of a commonwealth of ‘true’ (because protestant, temperate and ‘plain’) Englishmen. Like the linguistic centre of ‘the King’s English’ the normative centre of the ‘true’ Englishman is thus associated with the ‘manly’ ‘ancient’ estate of ‘plain’ citizen and dissociated from the male elite at the centre of power, the court, ‘othered’ as effeminate and of foreign ‘habits’. At the same time the project to re-form the character of the ‘true’ Englishman in terms of shared cultural ‘habits’ carries a levelling thrust, like the aspiration to ‘one maner of language’ that ‘the King’s English’ represents and is mobilised to produce. This is betrayed even as it is denied in what was certainly the most prominent instance of the figure in a statesponsored homily against ‘excess of apparell’ () by James Pilkington (–), who, like Thomas Wilson’s mentor John Cheke, was one of the generation of Cambridge scholars named and praised by Thomas Nashe in , for having collectively purged the ‘errors of Arte’, as I discussed in Chapter . For the idea of ‘al alyke’ is evoked in the principal source of the homily only to be rejected, first here, then in the homily itself. Asserting the imperative to dress according to ‘degree’, as I take up below, both thus conceal the levelling implications of the homogeneity that at the same time they evoke. These contradictions are exposed through the ‘reformation’ project of Jack Cade in  Henry VI (discussed in Chapter ) whose ‘will’ to ‘apparell . . . all in one livery’ and the attendant aspirations to a ‘brotherhood’ – ‘that they may agree like brothers’ – is ironically contradicted by an attendant will to power – ‘and worship me their lord’ ( Henry VI, ..–). Like the idea of 



In a chapter entitled ‘Foreign Fashion and the Transubstantiation of Englishness’, Christina Wald comments that writings ‘attempting to characterise Englishness . . . often begin by stating what it is not’, but then turns to focus on what she argues is the insubstantial ‘core’ that needs to be protected, making a (in my view tenuous) claim for a parallel with debates around the Eucharist. Christina Wald, The Reformation of Romance: The Eucharist, Disguise, and Foreign Fashion in Early Modern Prose Fiction (Berlin: De Gruyter, ), . James Pilkington, Aggeus the prophete declared by a large commentary (London, ), sig. Diiir. This source of the homily has not been pointed out, though Pilkington has been named as the author of some of the homilies including the homily on excess of apparel. See Ashley Null, ‘Official Tudor Homilies’, in Hugh Adlington, Peter McCullough and Emma Rhadigan, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, online edition (Oxford University Press, ), accessed  January .

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Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’



‘one maner of language’ the idea of like apparel for all was indeed a more radical threat to a hierarchical social order than the figure of the elite Englishman dressed in a motley of foreign fashions, purportedly, as Marjorie Garber observes, the ‘enemy of patriotism as well as of social order and legibility’, through whose expulsion Pilkington, like and with protestant fellow travellers, sought to (re)instate the ‘true’ ‘plain’ ‘ancient’ Englishman as/at the normative centre. This project to relocate the normative centre of the ‘true-born Englishman’ is evoked in Richard II, the one play in the Shakespearean canon to feature this phrase (..) and the first to feature the trope of the English addicted to foreign (here specifically Italian) ‘fashions’ (..–). It is, moreover, in one of the play’s putative sources, which is also a prequel, the anonymous Thomas of Woodstock, that the location of the normative centre of the ‘true’ Englishman in a ‘habit’ of ‘plainness’ is staged with particular explicitness. This is done through the eponymous figure of ‘plain Thomas’ (Woodstock, ..), whose entirely unhistorical character as a ‘plain, well-meaning soul’ is recalled by Shakespeare’s Duke of Lancaster (John of Gaunt) (Richard II, ..). Indeed, the striking contrast with the portrait of Woodstock in Samuel Daniel’s Civil Wars (), another putative source for Shakespeare’s play, suggests this is a conscious reminder of the prequel. For Daniel’s Woodstock is ‘one most violent, / Impatient of command . . . / Whose brow would shew, . . . / His open malice’. If this Woodstock is ‘plain’ insofar as he is ‘open’, the ‘plainness’ of the playtext’s eponymous character comprehends not only cultural (especially sartorial) ‘habits’, but also honesty (of intention as well as expression) as one of his loaded self-descriptions captures: ‘My heart in this plain frieze sits true and right’ (..).  



 

Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, ), . This is argued more substantially in Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“The trueborn Englishman”’. Woodstock belongs of course to the nobility. The social inflections of the value of plainness that he embodies are thus concealed, as the social inflections of ‘the King’s English’ (associated with ‘plainness’) are concealed. All citations are from Thomas of Woodstock or King Richard the Second, Part One, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (Manchester University Press, ). Bullough comments: ‘Historically Gloucester was quite unlike the hero of this play’. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare,  vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ), III, . Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, III, . The historical Woodstock on the contrary enjoyed an expensive life style. See Anthony Tuck, ‘Thomas, duke of Gloucester (–)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, , online edition, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/, accessed  May .

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

Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’

From this normative centre of an ‘English plainness’ (..), occupied by a ‘plain’ Thomas, the figure of a courtier dressed in a motley of foreign fashions is excluded by means of an ironic rhetorical question posed by Thomas that invites audience assent: ‘Is’t possible that this fellow that’s all made of fashions should be an Englishman?’ (..–). The one instance of the figure as a dramatis persona, the courtier is dressed, as the court and king have earlier been described, in diverse ‘strange fashions’ (..), most prominently ‘Polonian shoes’ (), the item destined to be remembered in later instances. Worn by Richard himself, who describes in detail how it has been designed by his minions, Greene, Bushy, Bagot and Scroop, ‘this fashion shoe’ (..) is also worn (ironically) by the servantclown, Nimble, who displays this ‘court fashion’ () by ‘rattling’ the chains which link toe to knee (). It is in an elaborate description of this chain that the figure of the courtier invents ‘toeify’ and ‘kneeify’ in his exchange with plain Thomas (..). ‘Strange’ foreign fashions are thus accessorised with outlandish new words by this figure from a corrupt court and king associated with Catholic culture (traditions and dress) (.., ). In an earlier comment by Woodstock – ‘Never was English king so habited’ (..) – the stress on ‘English’ emphasises the separation between Richard and the defining ‘habits’ of a ‘true’ Englishman. This is reiterated in relation to the court, when Thomas responds wryly to the summons from Richard brought by the courtier: ‘My English plainness will not suit that place’ (..). The demonstrative ‘that’ performatively effects an ousting of the court from the normative ideological centre of ‘true’ English plainness occupied by Thomas, a ‘plainness’, it is worth adding, that Richard admits is loved by the ‘ragged commons’ (..). 



Curiously, only ‘kneeify’ is given in the OED which cites this one instance as a ‘nonce’ word. In the  edition of his Survey of London John Stow comments that the fashion for ‘piked shoes, tied to . . . knees with silken laces, or chains of silver or gilt’ was introduced by Richard’s wife, Anne of Bohemia. See John Stow, Stow’s Survey of London (), introduced by H. B. Wheatley, repr. (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, ), . William Camden in his Remaines () describes what were called ‘Crakowes’ (a reference to the Polish city): shoes ‘piked more than a finger long . . . fastned to the knees with chains of gold and silver’. Camden, Remaines, . The detail of the chains has no equivalent in Camden’s historical sources. See I. Marc Coulson, ‘Medieval European Long Toed Shoes’, www.personal.utulsa.edu/~marc-carlson/shoe/APP.HTM, accessed  March . Both Stow and Camden add descriptions of this footwear, which suggests attention had been drawn to it. That this may have been thanks to the playtext is suggested by the comment made by Camden immediately after the description: ‘Wearers of such attire ought to be considered players and worthless fellows rather than barons, actors rather than knights’. The association of Woodstock with the ‘commons’ finds support in historical accounts as does his opposition to Richard, though this does not take the form it takes in the play of an outspoken critique of the irresponsible extravagance of Richard and his court (.). See Tuck, ‘Thomas, duke of Gloucester (–)’.

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Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’



This is exactly comparable to the ideological work done by another plain Thomas (Wilson) who, as we saw in Chapter , mobilises ‘the King’s English’ to claim the normative linguistic centre for ‘plainness’ through exclusion of ‘outlandish’ Latinate word forms practised by well-travelled members of the male elite at the centre of power, the court, who love to ‘go in forrein apparell’ even as they ‘pouder their talke with oversea language’. This ideological use of the figure of the elite Englishman dressed in a motley of foreign fashions is subsequently taken up, first, by the radically inclined (Cambridge-educated) Protestant Joseph Hall (–) in one of his ‘packe-staffe plaine’ verse satires ‘uttering what thing they meant’. This instance draws out the nostalgia implicit in Woodstock through an explicit, gender-inflected contrast between the corrupt present and a past golden age when English ‘men were men’, a ‘true’ English manliness signalled by habits of native plainness not only in dress (‘homespun Russet’), but also in food and in ‘words’ that ‘savor’d of thriftie Leekes, / Or manly Garlicke’. By contrast the contemporary figure dressed in a ‘far-fetched livery’ of diverse foreign fashions, accessorised again with outlandish word forms (‘Autumnitie’ and ‘gauderie’) is rejected as ‘An Englishman in none, a foole in all’. Hall is in turn echoed by William Goddard in , in a satiric epigram () on ‘Fantasmus’, ‘A compleate Foole: noe compleate Englisheman’, which, in sartorial details as well as its opening rhetorical question, recalls the figure of the courtier in Woodstock as contemptuously treated by ‘plain’ Thomas: ‘who ist would gess or skann / Fantasmus to be borne a Englishe man?’, ‘hatted spanyardlike’ ‘hose . . . Frenche’, ‘fashond pole in heeles’. Such a precise

  



Wilson, Arte, . Joseph Hall, ‘Prologue’, in Virgidemiarum sixe bookes (London, ), III, . Hall, Virgidemiarum, III, . As Jones and Stallybrass demonstrate ‘home-spun Russet’ ‘was to become a symbol of the opposition to the Cavalier court’, an oppositional significance that, however, begins to emerge much earlier, including in the satires of Joseph Hall. Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, . For the real economic stakes in the promotion of ‘homespun’ cloth, see Roze Hentschell, The Culture of Cloth in Early Modern England: Textual Constructions of a National Identity (Aldershot: Ashgate, ). This aspect of the critique of sartorial extravagance in Woodstock is discussed in Karen Newman, ‘Sartorial Economies and Suitable Style: The Anonymous Woodstock and Shakespeare’s Richard II’, in Essaying Shakespeare, –. William Goddard, A neaste of Waspes (Dort, ), sig. Fv. The sartorial details of the figure are otherwise so varied that such recurrences tend to suggest conscious echoes. The addition ‘but French in toes’ and the Italian ruff (rather than cloak) may correspond to changes in actual court fashions registered by Goddard since the first performances of Woodstock (? early to mid s).

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

Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’

recollection suggests a possible recent performance or (now lost) printed text of Woodstock. This finds support in an allusion in Ben Jonson’s The Devil is An Ass, a play produced in the following year () in which Fitzdottrell, the figure of a foolish gentleman as addicted to fashions as he is to the theatre, where he goes to be ‘looked at prettily’ (..), recalls ‘Thomas of Woodstock’ as a name picked up from ‘play-books’ (.., ). That the dramatis persona of the extravagantly dressed courtier in Woodstock, complete with outlandish Polish footwear, becomes (ironically) a model of fashion for elite male theatregoers is subsequently highlighted by Henry Fitzgeffrey, a member of the same ‘poetic circle’ as Goddard, who, in a satirical epigram published the year after Jonson’s play (), turns the figure as a verbal portrait of an elite spectator at Blackfriars: a ‘world of fashions’, sporting, again, ‘Polonian’ footwear, scorning ‘plaine dealing at his heeles’, recognisable as ‘of England’ ‘in his Habite’ thanks only to ‘his Yellow Band’, an ironic indication that, as Jones and Stallybrass point out, he is to be recognised ‘as a traitor’. What they do not point out is that this recognition is a function of a relocation of the normative centre of the ‘true’ Englishman in ‘plain’ cultural habits which elite males are represented as scorning whether at court (Woodstock) or at the theatre, where they go less to look than to be looked at. The ‘character’ of the courtier thus becomes assimilated to the ‘character’ attributed by John Stephens in  to the ‘common Player’ who ‘proves a Motley’ in his constant changes of costume and mind, his ‘chief Essence’ being ‘[a] daily Counterfeite’. The court and theatre in turn become perceived sites of a reciprocal contaminating exchange of extravagant, 

 







A slight if intriguing possible trace of a revival around this date is furnished by a book keeper’s marginal note ‘Toby’ which, as Corbin and Sedge point out, ‘may refer to Edward Tobye, whose name . . . appears in a licence granted to the Children of the Revels in ’ (Woodstock, note to ..). Jonson, The Devil is An Ass, ed. Anthony Parr, Works, IV, –. See Corbin and Sedge, ‘Introduction’, in Woodstock, . Matthew Steggle, ‘Fitzgeffrey, Henry (d. /)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, ; online edition, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/, accessed  January . Henry Fitzgeffrey, Satyres: and Satyricall Epigrams: with Certaine Observations at Black-Fryers (London, ), sig. Fv. Like Jones and Stallybrass I read ‘Mounted Polonialy’ rather than ‘Pelonialy’, as Gurr suggests. Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, ; Gurr, Playgoing, . Fitzgeffrey, Satyres, sig. Fr. See Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, . Their comment comes in a chapter which shows how yellow starch was the focus and metonymy of an increasingly virulent anti-court rhetoric by ‘radical Protestants’ (), although they miss the allusion to this rhetoric in Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well (discussed below). John Stephens, Satyrical Essayes Characters and Others (London, ),  (italics in original).

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Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’



foreign, sartorial fashions between players and courtiers, who in such daily counterfeiting betray the ‘true’ ‘habit’ ‘of England’ as, in their ‘outlandish’ English, they ‘counterfeit’ ‘the King’s English’. That elite males become thinkable as traitors for ‘counterfeiting’ is highlighted by Thomas Dekker, who explicitly likens to a dismembered ‘traitors bodie’ the sartorially dispersed body of the Englishman dressed in a motley of foreign fashions, as others have pointed out. Described as shunned by ‘the auncient Cittizen’ and accompanied by ‘women and fooles’, associated (as in other instances) with the French, and sporting again ‘Bootes’ from ‘Polonia’, the figure is turned by Dekker to illustrate the fifth of his ‘seven deadly sins’ of London – ‘Apishnesse’ (). Characterised as ‘nothing but counterfetting or imitation’ the figure is described ‘as phantastically attyred as a Court Jeaster’ and as ‘play[ing] . . . con’d speeches stolne from others, whose voices and actions he counterfeites: but . . . lamely’. This likeness to the player is highlighted in a scene in Dekker’s Westward Ho (/), a revisiting of The Merry Wives of Windsor, as I mentioned in Chapter , in which a lecherous Earl attempts to seduce a citizen wife, as Falstaff attempts to seduce Mrs Ford, by offering her various foreign fashion items including ‘Italian head-tire’, which she rejects as vigorously as Mrs Ford, denouncing it as a ‘piecing out’ of ‘wings / With borrowed feathers’ ‘[p]layer-like’ ‘[n]ot fitting mine estate’. The figure of the Englishman or (here, unusually) the English woman dressed in a motley of foreign fashions is perceived as, like the player, a threat to social as well as national boundaries. In the previous  



 



The mirror relation has of course its material counterpart in the traffic of costumes between the theatre and elite males, detailed in Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing. Thomas Dekker, The Seven Deadly Sinnes of London, ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, ), . See Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, ; Hentschell, ‘Treasonous Textiles’, –. Dekker, The Seven Deadly Sinnes, –. Compare: William Rankins, The English Ape (London, ), which follows his attack on the players, A Mirrour of Monsters (), and Samuel Rowlands, who describes the figure as ‘the world’s Ape of fashions’ in an epigram on ‘a most accomplish’d Cavaleere’ (i.e. elite male) in The Letting of Humours Blood in the Head-Vaine (London, ), n.p. (Epigram  misnumbered ). It is for ‘apish customs’ that, as I discussed in Chapter , the court is condemned in the same year, in Cynthia’s Revels by Ben Jonson, whose ‘Frenchified courtier’ in Every Man Out of His Humour (/) ‘apishly’ imitates foreign manners, like the ‘ape of form’, the Mercurial Frenchman, Boyet in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. See Chapter , –. Dekker, The Seven Deadly Sinnes, , . Dekker, Westward Ho, ..–, –, in Dramatic Works, II. For a comparison with Falstaff’s wooing of Mrs Ford with Venetian ‘head-tire’, see Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Shakespeare’s “welsch men”’, –. In the image of ‘borrowed feathers’ the portrait of the player overlaps with portraits of the translator, who similarly poses a threat to these boundaries as I discuss in Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“Mine own and not mine own”’, –.

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

Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’

scene, the linguistic equivalent to the sartorial figure – ‘English Gallimafries’ – are roundly condemned by a citizen merchant who calls for the regeneration of a national vernacular through the cutting out of ‘uplandish’ ‘Neates tongues’ and their ‘English Gallimafries’ (..–). With a hint at castration this violence towards ‘neats’ (elite males) matches the violence with which the sartorial equivalent – the elite English male dressed in a motley of foreign fashions – is treated under ‘Apishnesse’ in The Seven Deadly Sinnes of London. Dekker’s description may recall the first (least explicit) Shakespearean instance of the figure in Richard II when the Duke of York describes England as a ‘tardy apish nation’, which ‘in base imitation’ ‘[l]imps after’ the ‘manners’ of ‘proud Italy’, like and with a king and court addicted to ‘fashions . . . new’ (..–). Echoing a stage direction in Woodstock, which announces the entry in . of king and court ‘very richly attired in new fashions’, this is followed by the well-known speech on the state of England by John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (..–), who, in Woodstock, is the main figure of opposition to Richard. In Shakespeare’s play, Gaunt’s ‘complaint’-like speech evokes the structural nostalgia implicit in the prequel through a racially inflected contrast between the corrupt present and a past golden age of a pure ‘breed’ of Englishmen, although this ‘breed’ is, significantly, ‘royal’ and characterised by heroic deeds not plain cultural habits. Shakespeare thus reproduces the structural nostalgia of the prequel, which serves to fuel even as it justifies the opposition to the king, but crucially without the ideology of plainness with which it is associated and which bolsters the opposition. This is all the more telling given that this association is reproduced in another putative source or intertext to Shakespeare’s play, Thomas Lodge’s ‘Complaint of Truth over England’ (). Here a figure of Truth not only (re)produces (like John of Gaunt) an idealised view of England as ‘Paradise’, as others have observed, but also contrasts the corrupt present with a past when the ‘Prince content with plainnesse loved Truth’ and when ‘flew not fashions every day from Fraunce’ and ‘sought not Nobles novells [sic] from a farre’. This ideology is, on the other hand, evoked by Shakespeare, if more discreetly, not only through Gaunt’s recollection of the ‘plain wellmeaning soul’ (..) of the prequel’s Thomas of Woodstock (discussed above), but also through the claim to the style of ‘true-born Englishman’ 

Thomas Lodge, An alarum against Usurers . . . with the lamentable Complaint of Truth over England (London, ), sig. Liv.

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Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’



(..) made by Gaunt’s son, Henry Bolingbroke, who brings about the downfall and death of Richard. Bolingbroke’s claim, in what is the only instance of the phrase in the Shakespearean canon, asserts a difference of origin from Richard who, as the Duke of Lancaster in Woodstock insists, was ‘not English born’ (..; Richard was born in Bordeaux). More importantly, it evokes the perceived turn to English language and culture attendant on the dynastic rupture of the Lancastrian seizure of power (discussed in Chapter ). This is underscored by the differentiation of Henry and Richard through linguistic style as well as cultural manners: a linguistically extravagant, narcissistic and theatrical Richard, self-portrayed as an actor playing ‘in one person many people’ (..), yields to a consistently sober, reticent and pragmatic Henry, the ‘politician Bolingbroke’ as Hotspur later calls him ( Henry IV, ..). This change of cultural styles is subsequently underscored by the ‘reformation’ of Henry’s son discussed in Chapter . Henry’s claim to the style of ‘true-born Englishman’ in Richard II is, of course, ironised and undercut, notably through the voice of the Bishop of Carlisle in Act , who calls Henry a ‘foul traitor’ (..). The stark irony of this confrontation of ‘foul traitor’ to ‘true-born Englishman’ points up the high stakes of a relocation of the normative centre of the ‘true’ Englishman in defining cultural ‘habits’. For, as Shakespeare signals, the word ‘traitor’ acquires a sense which is not merely separable from the sense of disloyalty to the monarch, but which may justify opposition, as Woodstock clearly illustrates. Reinstating loyalty to the monarch as/at the normative centre, Carlisle’s prophetic vision of civil war may then evoke not only the dynastic civil wars of the fifteenth century, but also the future history of internal division and conflict attendant on the classand race-inflected location of the ideological centre of the ‘true-born Englishman’ in cultural habits of ancient citizen ‘plainness’ and the attendant virtues of temperance and honesty.

 



I prefer the Q ‘person’ over ‘prison’ (Q-F) given in the Norton. Dover Wilson described the seemingly ‘light’ exchange of single lines between Henry and his father (..–) as ‘very English’. See the note to these lines in William Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker (London: Thomson Learning, ). In John Ponet’s treatise (), which closes with an ‘exhortacion to all true naturall Englishe men’ and which reflects on the conditions which render ‘lawful’ the deposition and killing of a sovereign, there is implied (if circumspect) endorsement of the precedent set by the deposition and death of Richard II: ‘upon what just causes Richard the second was thrust out, and Henry the fourth put in his place, I refer it to their own [i. e. readers’] judgment’. Ponet, A shorte treatise of politike power, sig. Giiir.

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

Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’

Critical interrogation of this ideology is taken up in the two romantic comedies which feature the figure of the Englishman dressed in a motley of foreign fashions (though, in the second, he is ostensibly ‘Italian’): The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado about Nothing. Described more elaborately in both comedies, the figure is relocated in both to the very place – ‘proud Italy’ – to which, in Richard II, the ‘tardy apish’ English ‘nation’ looks in order to imitate. Thus relocated, generically as well as geographically, the figure is seen through the eyes of ‘Italians’ as it is in other instances, notably Robert Greene’s Farewell to Folly (), which the instance in Much Ado appears to recall, as I take up below. The figure is, however, dissociated by Shakespeare from the meaning it carries in all other instances as a sign of a national and/or class identity as it is turned rather as a sign of a contingent human condition that bypasses national differences – a fall into the ‘foolery’ of fancy. Turning it as a figure of a common and contingent human condition this move evacuates the figure of its specificity as a portrait of an Englishman. If this is a unique turn among verbal portraits of the figure, it finds a parallel in the visual portraits with which the verbal portraits are linked, as I discuss in detail when I map the (complicated) genealogy of the figure below. It is, moreover, in the context of these visual portraits that I want to look afresh at the earlier instance of the figure in Merchant. For the figure here, which is tellingly described by Portia as a ‘proper man’s picture’ (..– emphasis mine), is placed not only as the object of the gaze of ‘Italians’ in the other place that is ‘Italy’, but also as one of a collection of national and social types assembled as verbal objects and displayed in what might be described as a ‘theatre’ in the play, in the sense that this word carries in the title to a collection of watercolour portraits done by the Flemish painter Lucas D’Heere (–) towards the end of a stay in England (–): ‘Theatre de tous les peuples et nations de la terre’ (c.). An instance of the many visual and verbal collections of national (regional and class) character types that ‘proliferated throughout Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century’, D’Heere’s collection 

 

Robert I. Lublin, Costuming the Shakespearean Stage: Visual Codes of Representation in Early Modern Theatre and Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, ), . Lublin does not comment on the uniqueness of the Shakespearean instance in the tradition of representations to which it belongs. Lucas D’Heere, Theatre de tous les peuples et nations de la terre avec leurs habits et ornamens divers, tant anciens que modernes, BHSL.HS., Ghent University Library. Kim Sloan, A New World: England’s First View of America (London: British Museum Press, ), . See too Michael Gaudio, ‘The Truth in Clothing: The Costume Studies of John White and Lucas de Heere’, in Kim Sloan, ed., European Visions: American Voices, British Museum Research Publication  (London: British Museum Press, ), –; Marian Conrads, ‘Het Theatre van

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Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’



draws extensively on extant models, including the first woodcut portrait of an Englishman in an earlier collection (c.) by the English priest and doctor Andrew Boorde (–) (Illustration ., discussed further below). However, rather as the figure of the motley-dressed Englishman is turned as a figure of human folly in Much Ado, the portrait is turned by D’Heere as a general figure of the vanity of human fickleness and placed at the end of his collection (Illustration .). If generalised here, Boorde’s woodcut appears to have been used earlier by D’Heere as his model for a portrait of an Englishman in a gallery of national types – an architectural analogue to textual collections, likewise in vogue – commissioned by Admiral Lord Clinton for his house in London (c.) and possibly viewed by Elizabeth, as I consider below. It is the cultural genre of the ‘theatre’ and the architectural analogue of the gallery as well as more specifically the various visual and verbal portraits of the Englishman, frequently confused then as they have been since, which find echo in the ‘theatre’ within the play, a ‘kind of discursive long gallery’, as Keir Elam suggests it might be described, which furnishes an introductory frame to Merchant. Carrying the sense of an overview or ‘conspectus of some subject’ (OED ‘theatre’ ) the word ‘theatre’ implies what the title to Boorde’s collection advertises that these are books ‘of knowledge’. Described by Kim Sloan (citing Margaret Hodgen) as an ‘early form of ethnography’ they offered, as she puts it, ‘a new way of understanding the world as a theatrum mundi through people rather than through historical events’, and specifically ‘through their customs, manners and rites and dress’, a form of







Lucas d’Heere. Een Kostuumhistorisch Onderzoek’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Utrecht (), –. My thanks to Marian Conrads for sharing her work on D’Heere and to Werner Waterschoot for his (privately shared) expert advice. ‘The fashion for collecting portraits was a sixteenth-century phenomenon, and the gallery became the main room in which they were hung’. Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), . On the ‘vogue’ for the gallery amongst the ‘merchant classes and the lesser gentry’, which Shakespeare may have followed in the construction of New Place, see Paul Edmonson, Kevin Colls and William Mitchell, Finding Shakespeare’s New Place (Manchester University Press, ), –. Keir Elam, Shakespeare’s Pictures: Visual Objects in the Drama (London: Bloomsbury, ), . Elam sees this as a first picture scene which furnishes ‘a kind of prelude to the three casket episodes’ (). He also points out, though not in connection with this scene, that Venice was known for its ‘singular shew’ of diverse nations ‘each nation distinguished from another by their proper and peculiar habits’. Thomas Coryate, Coryats Crudities (London, ), as quoted in Elam, Shakespeare’s Pictures, . Sloan, A New World, ; Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), .

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

Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’

Illustration .

Andrew Boorde, The fyrst boke of the introduction of knowledge (), fA.iiiv.

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Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’



Illustration . Lucas D’Heere, Theatre de tous les peuples et nations de la terre avec leurs habits et ornamens divers, tant anciens que modernes, fol. r.

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

Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’

knowledge which the ‘theatre’ in the (today) more usual sense of the word was particularly well-placed to show, as Merchant illustrates in its ‘theatregallery’ of national types. This is combined with the topos of the list of suitors, which appears in abbreviated form in Two Gentlemen (..–), in a passage consistently taken by editors as the antecedent for this scene of Portia’s suitors. There is, however, a more pertinent passage in The Tragedy of Dido by Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe (published ). For in a scene original to the authors Dido takes Aeneas and his men on a guided tour of a gallery of portraits of her suitors, some of which are characterised as national types (..–). The theatrum mundi topos is evoked from the outset of Merchant in a way which exposes the self-alienation attendant on the relative and sceptical character of such ‘knowledge’. ‘I have much ado to know myself’ (..) murmurs the figure of the melancholic merchant Antonio, who then explicitly invokes the topos (..–). The play, moreover, interrogates throughout the ‘truth’ in cultural ‘habits’ (customs and manners as well as speech and dress), most overtly when Portia describes to Nerissa how their change of ‘habit’ – manner as well as speech and dress – will produce a collective perception of their masculine gender (..–). This deconstruction of the cultural production of gender is comparable to the deconstruction of culturally mediated national characters in the ‘theatre-gallery’ in ., which furnishes a frame of critical knowledge to the deadly drama of culturally mediated differences – the mutual othering of Jew and Venetian Christian – that follows. Sceptical and relative, such knowledge of the cultural construction of identity, furnished by the genre of ‘the theatre’, is as fatal to an essentialist ideology of a ‘true’ or proper ‘Englishman’ as the knowledge of linguistic variability is to the project of a stable, bounded and unifying national vernacular – ‘the King’s English’. Exposing the perilous character of such a ground of identity Merchant at the same time affirms the plural, mixed and changing character of (the) English, which is represented not only by the figure of the elite Englishman dressed in a motley of foreign costumes but also by the linguistic equivalent of ‘the gallimaufry’. Indeed, if Portia’s description of him as ‘oddly . . . suited’ (..) reproduces the perception of this figure of the Englishman as the object of foreigners’ mockery (discussed below), she first 

There is no equivalent in the Virgilian source, though Roma Gill has suggested that Marlowe developed a hint that Dido had several lovers prior to the arrival of Aeneas. See The Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Roma Gill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), . References are to this edition. The scene may also glance at Elizabeth I and her various, foreign as well as native suitors.

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Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’



expresses appreciation of him as ‘a proper man’s picture’ (–). Recalling the visual portraits with which the figure is associated, this description sets itself against the denial of ‘true’ or ‘proper’ English ‘manliness’ propagated by other instances, such as Hall’s satire quoted above. What is more, his ‘oddly . . . suited’ sartorial character finds affirmation at the level of the linguistic analogy, specifically the ‘odd sayings’ (..) scattered throughout the play, notably in the speeches of the servant-clown Launcelet Gobbo, a hybrid Italian-English figure dressed in motley, who ‘mistakes’ and ‘plays upon the word’ (..), improvising, for instance, ‘frutify’ (..), an invention which is comparable to the ‘toeify’ and ‘kneeify’ invented by the courtier in Woodstock to accessorise his flashy Polish boots (see above). Such linguistic behaviour undercuts the ideology of a ‘plain man in his plain meaning’ (..–) summoned by the bourgeois master Lorenzo in an attempt at curtailment, like the attempts of those who mobilise ‘the King’s English’ assimilated, as we have seen, to ‘plainness’ (Chapter ). Indeed, as we shall see, the ideology of ‘plain terms’ (..) is explicitly exposed as an illusion by Launcelet’s metalinguistic reflections as it is implicitly by his linguistic practices. The figure of the elite Englishman dressed in a motley of foreign fashions carries, moreover, a particular, and particularly telling name in Merchant as it does not in other instances, where it is either not named at all (the courtier in Woodstock) or named generically (‘Fantasmus’ in Goddard’s epigram). Furthermore, the name – Falconbridge – is a name that recurs in Shakespearean plays of the s, as E. A. J. Honigmann has pointed out, although he does not comment that it is used of French as well as of English noblemen (in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Henry V respectively, where the form is ‘Fauconbridge’, and  Henry VI parts one and three). The name itself thus highlights the irreversibly mixed character of the English and the French since the Norman invasion of  when the 





As Drakakis notes, Trevor Nunn’s  National Theatre production picked up on the implications of the word by having Portia and Nerissa ‘project the film images of the former’s suitors onto a screen’. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, ), note to ..–. Elam takes up another suggestion by Drakakis (note to ..) that Portia may be holding a miniature portrait of Falconbridge. Elam, Shakespeare’s Pictures, , see further Chapter , –. This has unaccountably been emended to ‘fructify’ in the Norton, which editors usually, though not always, assume is the intended word. There is no textual authority for this emendation. See further Chapter . ‘Introduction’, in William Shakespeare, King John, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (London: Methuen, ), xxii–xxv, see further Chapter , –

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

Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’

‘Faulconbridge title’ came to England. This is underscored by the most prominent Shakespearean instance of the name in the play placed by the (New as well as Old) Oxford editors immediately before Merchant: King John. Falconbridge is here the name of the central, largely invented figure of the ‘bastard’, who is arguably this play’s ‘true-born Englishman’, or at least, as Peter Womack argues, its spokesperson for an ‘imagined’ ‘national community’. As Harold Bloom notes, there is an exuberant vitality about Falconbridge that anticipates the figure of Falstaff. Specifically, this exuberant vitality finds expression in a stylistic heterogeneity that, for John Porter Houston, stretches to breaking point the assumption of correspondence between style and character and, for Walter Cohen, the expectation of a fictional figure’s coherence. The mixed sartorial character of Falconbridge in Merchant is thus matched by the mixed linguistic character of his namesake in King John who, in addition, underscores the ‘bastard’, in the sense of mixed, character of both the English and the French through explicit ironic commentary (..–). Dissolving in the acid of this commentary the differences between the French and English, like Portia, although her commentary is less caustic (see below), the ‘bastard’ Falconbridge exposes still more clearly than his counterpart in Merchant the perils, indeed the impossibility, of locating the normative centre of a ‘true’ Englishman in cultural ‘habits’. Affirming rather the mixed or ‘bastard’ character of the English, a view endorsed by the second tetralogy (see Chapters  and ), this figure, like the bishop of Carlisle in Richard II, (re) asserts allegiance to the political centre of the monarch as the ground, or ‘home’, of an ‘England’ ‘to itself . . . true’ (..). The name that the figure of the motley-dressed elite Englishman acquires in its journey from 

  



‘Introduction’, in Shakespeare, King John, ed. Honigmann. xxiv n. . Honigmann suggests there may be a topical or authorial significance to the name, perhaps connected to a family from the North, since the name is used of one of the allies of Northumberland in the Quarto version of  Henry IV (though not the Folio). I have suggested a connection with the falcon of the authorial coat of arms granted during the period of Merchant. See Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“The trueborn Englishman”’, –. Womack, ‘Imagining Communities’, –. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, ), . John Porter Houston, Shakespearean Sentences: A Study in Style and Syntax (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, ), ; Walter Cohen, ‘Introduction’ to King John in Norton, . Contrast Bloom’s claim that what ‘we think of as “Shakespearean character”’ begins with Falconbridge, ‘who speaks his highly individual language . . . and possesses a psychic interior’. Bloom, Shakespeare, . This is reiterated by Daniel Defoe in a verse satire which, as I have discussed, takes up the ironic treatment of Bolingbroke’s claim to the style of ‘true-born Englishman’ to expose such an idea as ‘a contradiction’ ‘[i]n speech an irony in fact a fiction’. See Tudeau-Clayton, ‘The “trueborn Englishman”’, –.

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The Englishman Dressed in a Motley of Foreign Fashions



Richard II to Merchant via King John thus highlights the resistance it carries to the ideology that would locate the centre of the ‘true-born Englishman’ in cultural habits of ancient citizen ‘plainness’ by excluding this figure as a foreignised, effeminate ‘other’. It is the history of this ideology as well as the genealogy of this figure, or meme, as we might call it, that I map in what follows.

The Englishman Dressed in a Motley of Foreign Fashions: Genealogy of a Meme This figure of the Englishman takes then its origin from visual and verbal portraits that emerge in England in the turbulent mid-sixteenth century, on both sides of the religious divide. In an early travel guide cum primitive ethnography, advertised as a book of ‘knowledge’ (?), and dedicated to Mary Tudor, Andrew Boorde (?–), a well-travelled doctor and Catholic priest, sets out to describe the ‘naturall disposicyon’ of various, mostly West European, peoples, and begins with a woodcut of an Englishman (Illustration .). Virtually naked, wearing only a plumed hat and the obligatory breechclout, with a pair of shears in one hand and a roll of cloth over the other arm, he describes himself, in an accompanying text, as addicted to ‘new fashyons’, a phrase echoed in a description of Richard and his court, in a stage direction in Woodstock, and in the speech by the Duke of York in Richard II, discussed above. An authorial commentator expresses disapproval and urges the ‘good Englyshe-man’ to pursue rather truth and virtue. This disapprobation is, however, mild compared to the vigorous condemnation of the sartorial habits of the ‘vain Englishman’ in two politico-religious texts, contemporary with Boorde’s book, A Pleasant   

Like editors of Merchant, Elam observes that the figure ‘becomes a literary topos’, but does not investigate its origins and gives only two other instances. Elam, Shakespeare’s Pictures, . Andrew Boorde, The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge, ed. F. J. Furnivall (London: N. Tru¨bner & Co., ), , . Boorde, The Fyrst Boke, . This is played down as a ‘modest failing’ by Cathy Shrank, who emphasises the ‘laudatory’ character of Boorde’s portrait. She comments that the image ‘endured’ without discussing later reworkings. Shrank, Writing the Nation, . According to Luborsky and Ingram, in their comprehensive survey of illustrated books, it is only in this text (printed again by Copland in ) that the woodcut appears. They do not mention Lucas D’Heere’s watercolour copy of it nor the woodcut of the figure of Europe that is clearly related to it (Illustration .). Misleadingly too they describe the figure as an ‘upper-class Englishman’, whereas social inflections are added only in later verbal reworkings. Ruth Samson Luborsky and Elizabeth Morles Ingram, A Guide to English Illustrated Books –, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies ,  vols. (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, ), I, – and II, illustration no. .

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

Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’

New Nosegay () and The Jewel of Joy () by the zealous Protestant Thomas Becon (/–), who returned from Marian exile to enjoy influence as ‘one of England’s leading protestant writers’ under Elizabeth, an influence indicated by the publication of his collected works by John Day in  two years after a second edition of Boorde’s book was published by William Copland. Describing as a ‘monster and . . . beast of many heads’ the ‘vain Englishman’ addicted to diverse new fashions, Becon is concerned less with the newness of these fashions than with their foreign character. For (unlike Boorde) Becon claims that these fashions are borrowed, on the one hand, from the Italian, French and Spanish (i.e. papists), and, on the other, from Turks and Saracens (i.e. infidels), that is, from those menacing, but also constitutive ‘others’ of the ‘true’ (because protestant) English commonwealth, the project to which Becon’s energetic hortatory writing is directed and which is characterised by pious inwardness and shared habits of temperate sobriety in accordance with the ‘rule of the holy scriptures’. Of modest origins Becon obtained a BA from St John’s College Cambridge in – where John Cheke had been made a fellow in . John Cheke is one of the generation of Cambridge (and specifically St John’s) scholars retrospectively praised in  by Thomas Nashe as I pointed out in Chapter . Another is James Pilkington (–), likewise a fervent protestant of modest origins, who obtained his BA from John’s in . A Marian exile, like Becon, Pilkington too became an important figure under Elizabeth contributing to the prayer book of  and to the Book of Homilies (, ), as Becon had contributed to the prayer book of  and the  book of homilies, all crucial instruments of a church–state apparatus increasingly bent on establishing itself in a centripetal drive to national integration through the regulation of individual and collective cultural ‘habits’ – ‘godly living’ – as well as 

 





Seymour Baker House, ‘Becon, Thomas (/–)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, , online edition, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/, accessed  January . Thomas Becon, The Jewel of Joy (London, ), n.p. Thomas Becon, A Pleasant New Nosegay Ful of Many Godly and Swete Floures (London, ), sigs. Eiiv–Eiiiv. Becon, The Jewel of Joy, n.p. House comments that Becon ‘addressed the pressing need to consolidate the progress of reform by suggesting that itinerant preachers be commissioned . . . whose efforts “should help very much unto an uniformity in religion”’. House, ‘Becon, Thomas’. David Marcombe, ‘Pilkington, James (–)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, , online edition, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/, accessed  January . Null, ‘Official Tudor Homilies’, .

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The Englishman Dressed in a Motley of Foreign Fashions



through the religious doctrines of the ‘true’ (because protestant) English commonwealth. It is in a homily on ‘excess of apparell’ in the second book of homilies () that Pilkington brings together the visual and verbal portraits of the naked/motley-dressed Englishman, reproducing Becon’s verbal portrait of the vain Englishman, and recounting an anecdote about an unnamed painter’s design for a naked Englishman amongst ‘other nations’. Like several passages in the homily this is reworked, as I indicated above, from a commentary done earlier by Pilkington on the Old Testament book of Haggai (). Denouncing in this commentary ‘tender Pernels’ who, in the homily, are still more explicitly gendered as ‘effeminate’ ‘men’, Pilkington describes these (implicitly elite) males as ‘alwayes devisyng new facions’ (as in Boorde) which are ‘straunge’, that is, foreign (as in Becon), ‘one of Spanish facion, an other Turky’, metonymic instances, as in Becon, of papist and infidel cultures. He then proceeds to report an anecdote he has ‘read’ ‘of a Paynter that woulde paynt everye country man in hys accusomed apparell, the Dutch, the Spanyarde, the Italyon, the Frencheman: but when he came to the Englyshe man, he paynted him naked and gave him cloth and bad him make it hymself, for he chaunged hys facion so often, that he knew not how to make it’. This may be an allusion to Boorde’s woodcut, although it actually resembles more closely the description in a later anecdote told by Karel Van Mander in a biography of his teacher, the Flemish painter Lucas D’Heere (published ), who is reported to have ‘obtained a commission’ when in England ‘to paint all the costumes or clothing of the nations’ for a gallery in the London house of Edward Fiennes de Clinton, Lord High Admiral (–), and to have painted the Englishman ‘naked’ and to have ‘set beside him all manner of cloth and silk materials, and next to them tailor’s scissors and chalk . . . because he did not know what appearance or kind of clothing he should give them because they varied so much from day to day . . . one way today the next day . . . another – be it French or Italian, Spanish or Dutch’. Though 

   

The phrase ‘godly living’ is from the preface addressed to Elizabeth I in the  translation of the work of the protestant theologian and jurist Johanes Montanus Ferrarius on the ordering of a (protestant) commonwealth, cited in Chapter , note . See too Womack, ‘Imagining Communities’, –; and McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, . ‘The Sermon agaynst excesse of apparell’, in The second tome of homilees, sigs. v–r. Pilkington, Aggeus, sig. Hiiv; ‘The Sermon agaynst excesse of apparell’, sig. r. Pilkington, Aggeus, sig. Hiiir; ‘The Sermon agaynst excesse of apparell’, sig. r. Karel Van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, from the First Edition of the Schilder-boeck (–). Vol. I: The Text, trans. and ed. Hessel Miedema (Doornspijk: Davaco, ), fol. v; note the four nations are those mentioned by Pilkington

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

Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’

there is no other trace of this portrait which was destroyed with the house (probably in the  fire of London) scholars have usually assumed that it was the model for the watercolour portrait at the end of the manuscript collection mentioned above, probably done by D’Heere towards the end of his stay in England (c.): ‘Theatre de tous les peuples et nations de la terre’ (Illustration .). As I indicated earlier, the portrait here is no longer the portrait of an Englishman but a generalised figure of human vanity, although it reproduces Boorde’s woodcut more nearly than the portrait of the Englishman described in Van Mander’s anecdote. Whether the gallery portrait resembled in its details this watercolour portrait or the portrait described by Van Mander it is impossible to determine. But it cannot be the case, as Michael Gaudio asserts, that the homily against excess of apparel refers to the gallery portrait described by Van Mander. For the homily antedates by some eight years the gallery portrait and draws largely from the still earlier commentary on Haggai (), as I have indicated. What is more, Pilkington made modifications to the anecdote in the homily, which evokes yet another version of this portrait (Illustration .). Clearly there were different visual portraits and several verbal reports of visual portraits in circulation. Indeed it may be that the anecdotes told by Pilkington in the commentary and homily fed into D’Heere’s portrait and/or Van Mander’s story, rather as, for his biography of Peter Bruegel, a near contemporary of D’Heere’s, ‘Van Mander drew on a repertoire of stereotyped episodes and fixed themes’. Particularly interesting in this respect is the close of this story (which may have been made up) according to which the queen on a visit to the gallery remarked how sartorial fickleness exposed the English to mockery by foreigners (including, implicitly, Flemish painters). For this is

 

 

in his commentary on Haggai quoted above. In the homily it is: ‘one of the Spanyshe fashion, another Turkye’. In private correspondence Professor Waterschoot tells me that the story was ‘hearsay’ as Van Mander ‘did not meet d’Heere any more after ’. Gaudio, ‘The Truth in Clothing’, –. In the commentary on Haggai the painter is said simply to have given the Englishman ‘cloth’, whereas in the homily he is said to have given him ‘cloth under his arme’. Boorde’s Englishman has a roll of cloth over his arm, while the similar figure of Europe in an image of the four continents on the title page of a (German) collection of national costumes of  has a roll of cloth under his arm (Illustration .). See Conrads, ‘Het Theatre van Lucas d’Heere’, . Intriguingly, especially for today, this suggests a perceived likeness between Europe and England as both without a defining character. In the case of Europe, this is a contrast to the Asian and African continents (see Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, ) and, in the case of England, a contrast to its Scottish, Welsh and Irish neighbours. Koerner, Bosch and Bruegel, . In private correspondence Conrads tells me that D’Heere originally planned to dedicate his ‘theatre’ to Elizabeth but changed his mind on his return to Ghent. The emblem of the Tudor Rose is to be found on one of the pages of the manuscript.

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The Englishman Dressed in a Motley of Foreign Fashions



Illustration . Hans Weigel, Habitus Praecipuorum Populorum, Tam virorum quam foeminarum . . . Trachtenbuch (Nu¨rmberg, ), title page (illustration by Jost Amman).

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

Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’

the point that Pilkington immediately goes on to make in the homily (as he does not in the commentary on Haggai): ‘Thus with our phantasticall devyses, we make our selves laughyng stockes to other nations’. Whether or not the visit took place, it is of course eminently appropriate that the figure of Elizabeth in Van Mander’s story should speak with the same voice as one of the instruments of state regulation ‘set out by the aucthoritie of the Quenes Majestie’ (title page). In both places state authority strengthens the exclusionary force of the denunciation even as the effect of ‘othering’ is doubled by the perception of this figure of the Englishman as an object of foreigners’ ridicule. Acquiring in the homily the coercive force of official doctrine the rejection of this figure – the rejection, finally, of a model of elite English masculinity – is a function of the centripetal drive to instate the ‘moderate use of apparell’ as the norm in accordance with perceived biblical principles. This is in tension with the imperative to maintain sartorial encoding of the social hierarchy, which the homily (re)asserts by a call to dress according to degree: ‘all may not loke to weare lyke apparell, but every one accordyng to his degree, as GOD hath placed hym’. This betrays even as it denies the levelling thrust of the centripetal drive to uniformity of cultural reformation ideology. Much of the homily including the figure of the Englishman finds echo in another vehicle of this centripetal drive: the chapter ‘of Their Apparel and Attire’ by Pilkington’s (younger) protestant fellow traveller, William Harrison (–), in his description of England, which, from , prefaced Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, principal source of Shakespeare’s history plays as well as of Woodstock. Indeed, the figure is still more prominent since the chapter opens with a version of the anecdote about  

  

‘The Sermon agaynst excesse of apparell’, sig. r. See David Kutcha, ‘The Semiotics of Masculinity in Renaissance England’, in James Grantham Turner, ed., Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images (Cambridge University Press, ), –. Jones and Stallybrass point out how elite males ‘played an active role in employing painters’ usually foreign, often Flemish, ‘to compose an identity for them out of the objects that signaled their participation in different cultures’ and how they were actually ‘painted in foreign clothing’, as a ‘hybrid subject’ ‘fashioned from foreign textiles’ (Renaissance Clothing,  and ). The figure of the elite English male dressed in foreign costumes thus appears to correspond to aristocratic practice, though to assert as Jones and Stallybrass do, that the example of William Feilding as portrayed by Van Dyck, c. constituted a ‘radical undoing of Englishness’ () is to beg the question of how Englishness is defined and by whom. Elam furnishes another example, the portrait of Henry Howard () dressed ‘in his elaborate Italian doublet and hose’ which, he suggests, is recalled in the portrait of Falconbridge in Merchant, although the recollection of the verbal figure is more evident. Elam, Shakespeare’s Pictures, –. ‘The Sermon agaynst excesse of apparell’, sig.r. ‘The Sermon agaynst excesse of apparell’, sig. v. Harrison, The Description of England, –.

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The Englishman Dressed in a Motley of Foreign Fashions



the painter, which is turned as an anecdote about ‘[a]n Englishman’ who wanted ‘to write of our attire’ and who, finding this an impossible task, drew instead a ‘naked man unto whom he gave a pair of shears in the one hand and a piece of cloth in the other, to the end he should shape his apparel after such fashion as himself liked’. ‘Andrew Boorde’ is named in a marginal note – the only place where the visual portrait is linked to a named source and that source to a specified nationality (‘an Englishman’). This may be because Harrison wanted to distinguish the English Boorde from the Flemish D’Heere who had recently done his gallery portrait of an Englishman () probably modelled on Boorde’s woodcut, as I indicated above. As in the homily and Van Mander’s anecdote, the perception of this figure as an object of foreigners’ derision (not in Boorde) is reproduced by Harrison together with the homily’s call to pious interiority and a modest sobriety of dress. Appropriately, he adds an historical perspective, evoking a mythical ‘merrier’ past of sartorial plainness when ‘an Englishman was known abroad by his own cloth and contented himself at home with his fine kersey hosen and a mean slop’, in contrast with a corrupt present of ‘garish colors’ dictated by ‘the French’, a sartorial vestige of a past, political as well as cultural, dominance. This contrast is reproduced in later instances, explicitly in Joseph Hall’s satire (which may draw on Harrison) and implicitly in Woodstock, while, as I argued in Chapter , an alternative version of England’s ‘merry’ past is proposed, perhaps consciously, in Shakespeare’s  Henry IV. Like the later instances, the structural nostalgia Harrison introduces provides a legitimising historical ground for the future-oriented project of a reformed ‘true’ protestant English commonwealth. To this Harrison adds a social inflection, excepting from the general folly ‘our merchants’, whose attire ‘representeth a great piece of the ancient gravity appertaining to citizens and burgesses’, although (unsurprisingly) he excludes their wives. The class and gender inflections acquired by the figure are pointed up in the instance (from ) mentioned earlier, by Thomas Dekker, who, conflating, or confusing, Harrison’s description of Boorde’s woodcut with the anecdote (from Pilkington’s homily) of the ‘Wittie’ ‘Painter’ and his portrait of the naked Englishman among a collection of national types, uses it to represent the sin of English ‘Apishnesse’, attended by ‘women and fooles’, and shunned by ‘the auncient Cittizen’ as well as by ‘[t]he

 

Harrison, The Description of England, . Harrison, The Description of England, , emphasis mine.

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

Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’

Magistrate’ and ‘the wealthy commoner’. In addition, the sartorially dispersed body of the figure is explicitly likened to ‘a traitors bodie . . . hanged, drawne, and quartered’, as I mentioned earlier. Following the homily and Harrison’s description of England – and no doubt largely thanks to them – instances of the figure proliferate with, or more often without reference to the visual portraits, which, moreover, tend to be conflated, or confused, as they are by Dekker. Thus, in a passage very largely lifted from Harrison’s chapter, in ‘Euphues’ Glass for Europe’ (in Euphues and his England []), John Lyly replaces Harrison’s reference to Boorde with ‘the painter’, which editors have assumed is a reference to D’Heere, although it may simply echo the homily or hearsay. More importantly, Lyly drops the explicit gender and class associations as well as the historical narrative and exhibits none of the violence expressed by Harrison and his protestant fellow travellers towards the figure. Indeed the sartorial ‘enormity’ (Harrison’s word echoed by Lyly), which the figure illustrates, is here rather ‘to be excused’. This is a very different take on the figure, which scholars have failed to appreciate, and which is a function of Lyly’s orientation towards the court elite to which he looked for patronage. Indeed, England itself is here an object less of critique than of celebration as a model or ‘glass’ for the rest of Europe, especially Italy. Specifically, the ladies of the Italian court are exhorted to take as models their English counterparts at the court of Elizabeth. This very different take on the figure tends to confirm its associations with the male elite that Lyly drops from the description itself. It is with Lyly that the figure is for the first time not simply described as the object of the gaze of foreigners, but actually mediated through a nonEnglish persona: Euphues, a ‘Grecian’, who is accompanied by Philautus,  





Dekker, The Seven Deadly Sinnes, , , emphasis mine. In another instance of confused recollection William Rankins refers to ‘the Germaine that paynted euery nation’, presumably a reference to D’Heere, in a diatribe against the English followers of Italian and French fashions, in Rankins, The English Ape, . Ignoring the reference to Boorde in his source (Harrison), Lyly’s first modern editor asserted that the ‘picture’ to which Lyly refers was ‘painted in ’ in the gallery done by D’Heere, who is mistakenly described as ‘court-painter to Elizabeth’. John Lyly, The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. Warwick Bond,  vols., repr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), II,  n. . The essence of Bond’s note is reproduced by the latest editor who mentions Lyly’s source in Harrison without commenting on the reference to Boorde. John Lyly, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and His England, ed. Leah Scragg (Manchester University Press, ),  n. ,  n.  (quotations from this edition); Shrank also reproduces Bond’s note when she quotes Lyly’s description to illustrate the enduring life of Boorde’s woodcut, commenting that Lyly’s description ‘resonates’ with the portrait by D’Heere without attempting to clear up the confusion between this and Boorde’s woodcut. Shrank, Writing the Nation, .  Lyly, Euphues, . Leah Scragg, ‘Introduction’, in Lyly, Euphues, , .

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The Englishman Dressed in a Motley of Foreign Fashions



an ‘Italian’. The figure is mediated again through non-English personae in a dialogue among ‘Italians’ in Robert Greene’s Farewell to Folly (), a less ambiguous moralising dialogue in which the English are again held up as a mirror or glass by ‘Italians’ to ‘Italians’ (specifically Florentines) but here (perhaps in a deliberate revision of Lyly) as an emphatically negative example. Concerned to correct the ‘womanish’ sartorial habits of his compatriots, the figure of Peratio warns them that they risk becoming as ‘fantasticke’ as the ‘English Gentleman’ ‘painted naked with a pair of sheeres in his hand’ to which the figure of Jeronimo Farneze adds that he has seen an ‘English Gentleman so defused in his sutes’ (a list of various foreign fashion items follows) ‘that he seemd no way to be an Englishman but by the face’. The figure of the naked/motley-dressed, fantastic Englishman is thus held up as a warning to Florentines, especially Benedetto, gentleman and student at Padua, of what he will come to resemble if he continues in the addiction to gaudy apparel. This warning is redirected (‘sent’) by the title page to English ‘Courtiers and Schollers’ who are invited to see in Benedetto their avatar. In what may be a conscious recollection, it is the young ‘Benedict of Padua’ (..) in Much Ado about Nothing who is described as dressed in a motley of ‘strange disguises’ by another ‘Italian’ Don Pedro (..–), both dramatis personae embodied by English players in a comedy which, like Greene’s dialogue, draws on the form of the Italian colloquy. The play thus takes to its logical, deconstructive end the ‘confusion’ between the Italian and the English to which Greene’s (and Lyly’s) use of the figure as a ‘mirror’ tends. Indeed, as I indicated above, Shakespeare goes one step further by disassociating the figure from any national character and by associating it rather with the common and contingent human condition of the ‘foolery’ of ‘fancy’ (..). It is perhaps on account of the recurring mediations of the figure through ‘Italian’ speakers that the English narrator of Coryat’s Crudities () attributes the ‘painting’ of the Englishman ‘starke naked with a paire of shears in his hand’ to ‘the Venetian and other Italians’, who are said thus to ‘brand the English-man with a notable marke of levity’ in wearing ‘more phantasticall fashions than any Nation . . . the French onely excepted’. More particularly, if Coryat’s description of the portrait   

Robert Greene, The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse, ed. Alexander B. Grosart,  vols., repr. (New York: Russell and Russell, ), IX, –. This is more substantially argued in Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“The trueborn Englishman”’, –. Coryate, Coryats Crudities, .

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

Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’

appears to echo Greene’s, Greene’s Italians are Florentines, whereas Shakespeare’s Italians in The Merchant of Venice are Venetians and the portrait of the motley-dressed Englishman is immediately preceded (as it is not in Greene or Lyly) by a portrait of a French lord, Monsieur Le Bon, the only other suitor that is named, who is, similarly, ‘an imitator of other men’ without ‘qualities of his own’, as John Drakakis glosses Portia’s ‘every man in no man’ (..). Shakespeare’s ‘theatre-gallery’ of national characters, notably of English and French elite males, mediated by ‘Italians’ in the context of Venice may then have led to the misattribution of the origin of the figure by Coryat in a ‘travelogue’, which, as Keir Elam points out, in its treatment of Venice has (several other) parallels with the play it postdates.

The Figure of the Motley-Dressed Englishman in Shakespeare’s ‘Theatre’ Shakespeare’s ‘theatre-gallery’ tends to dissolve differences not only between the English baron and the French lord, but also between all the foreign suitors. For, if each is identified by defining national ‘habits’ (manners and/or dress), they are all objects of mocking commentary by the ‘Italians’/‘Venetians’ and this likeness is underscored when they are classed together and dismissed as ‘the strangers’ (..). The suitors are then all treated as the figure of the motley-dressed Englishman is treated in instances discussed above in which the perception of the Englishman as an object of foreigners’ mockery reinforces the ‘othering’ of the figure and its violent exclusion from the normative centre of the ‘true’ or proper’ Englishman. As I have suggested, this exclusion is specifically countered by Portia’s appreciation of the English baron Falconbridge as ‘a proper man’s picture’ (..–), a relative appreciation which may be indicative of a court-oriented position towards the figure, like that taken by Lyly 



Merchant, ed. Drakakis, note to ... It is worth recalling that Van Mander groups the French with the English as prone to this sartorial folly then goes on to comment that it is shared by most if not all Europeans. Van Mander, The Lives, sig. v. The idea endures: in  Elisha Coles claims the Norman invasion ‘forced’ ‘such a Communication with France’ that ‘our’ naturally ‘moderate’ ‘Genius’ acquired a resemblance with ‘theirs’, specifically insofar as ‘we bring home fashions, terms and phrases from every Nation and Language under Heaven’. Coles, ‘To the Reader’, in Elisha Coles, An English dictionary explaining the difficult terms that are used in divinity, husbandry, physick, phylosophy, law, navigation, mathematicks, and other arts and sciences (London, ), sig. Ar. Elam, Shakespeare’s Pictures, –. Elam does not suggest that Shakespeare influenced Coryat, just that there are significant parallels, especially with respect to ‘sights’ and ‘seeing’ in the city of the gaze, Venice.

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The Motley-Dressed Englishman in Shakespeare’s ‘Theatre’



(discussed above), and which qualifies the mockery to which the Englishman is exposed. This and other relativising perspectives in (the) play tend to undercut the ideological end to which the figure is usually put in the instances discussed above. Indeed, the most memorable – and remembered – instance may be recalled in the French ‘round hose’ () worn by Falconbridge. For ‘French hose’ features in no other prior instance of the figure except in Woodstock and the epigram by Goddard, which recalls the play, where it is the first item mentioned in the description of king and courtiers ‘suit[ed]’ in ‘strange’ ‘fashions’, who are set in contrast with the figure of ‘plain Thomas’ dressed in ‘plain’ hose, who occupies the ideological centre of the ‘true’ Englishman. This ideologically charged differentiation of the ‘true’ Englishman, from the French and a ‘foreignised’ male elite, may then be recalled even as it is undercut through this sartorial item worn by the English Falconbridge, whose name highlights the irretrievably mixed or ‘bastard’ character of the English and French. The ironic but also irenic thrust of the treatment of this figure is underscored by a comic vignette, which immediately follows the description of Falconbridge and which depicts the violence that at once reproduces and is produced by national differences, here specifically the differences between the English and their old local enemies, the Scots, and the Scots’ traditional allies, the French (..–). Couched as it is in the language of borrowing and lending, the vignette furnishes a comic prelude to the deadly drama of differences precipitated by an act of lending that follows. This deadly drama is itself recalled, or anticipated by another vignette of violence, serious rather than comic, in Shakespeare’s contribution to Sir Thomas More. For it is in part through imagined scenes of violence that, as I take up in the next chapter, the eponymous protagonist invites the audience, off as well as on stage, to see themselves in 

 

See above, –. According to Lublin ‘French hose’ was a signifier of ‘passionate inclinations’ and effeminacy in early modern drama, including Romeo and Juliet (..–). Lublin, Costuming, –. Interestingly, this passage from Romeo and Juliet, which, like Richard II and Merchant, dates from –, is part of an attack on ‘fashionmongers’ (line ) addicted to Italian and French styles in the art of fencing as well as in language, manners and literary forms, which is voiced through the figure of Mercutio. This critique, which echoes the discourse of English cultural reformers, sits uneasily not only with Mercutio’s supposed ‘Italian’ identity, but also with his exuberant, even outlandish linguistic style, which recurrently strays into extravagant word play. The misfit may be simply an authorial inconsistency, or (as I think) an indication that Mercutio is mimicking – and mocking – the reformers’ discourse as well as their objects. This could be communicated in performance. For fuller discussion, see Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“The trueborn Englishman”’, –. Unless otherwise stated, quotations throughout are taken from Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle, Sir Thomas More, ed. John Jowett (London: Methuen, ).

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

Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’

‘the strangers’ case’ (.), spurned ‘like dogs’ (.) – as Antonio spurns Shylock as ‘a stranger cur’ (Merchant, ..) – and threatened with ‘detested knives’ (.) – as Shylock threatens Antonio (Merchant ..–). This points up how in their mutual othering Shylock and Antonio become alike in a bond of hatred that is the negative double of the bond of ‘neighbourly charity’ which More’s on-stage audience is persuaded to practise in recognition of the precariously contingent character of their shared human condition, a common humanity which is denied Shylock, as he spells out (..–). The phrase ‘neighbourly charity’ (..) is used ironically by Portia to introduce the vignette of the violence between the Englishman, the Scotsman and the Frenchman, similarly locked in a bond of hatred, produced by as it reproduces their differences, even as it makes them the same. Their mutual othering is then further ironised by the dissolving of differences in the perception of them all as ‘strangers’ in Venice/Belmont (). This levelling treatment as ‘strangers’ points to the relative, contingent character of ‘the strangers’ case’, which is what Shakespeare’s More seeks to show his audience, on stage and off, as I take up in Chapter . The point is thrust ‘home’ for English spectators of Merchant by Portia’s comment that she has been unable to communicate with Falconbridge, because he has no Latin, French or Italian and she has ‘a poor pennyworth in the English’ (..–). An illusion-breaking reminder that English is a ‘strange’ tongue in the ‘other’ place of Italy/Venice, this invites English spectators to glimpse themselves as they would be in the world of the play, in ‘the strangers’ case’. The objectification of English as a ‘strange’ language is followed by ‘straying’ linguistic practices – of new word formation, ‘mistaking’, ‘play upon the word’ and synonymia – which are practised above all by the Anglo-Italian servant-clown Launcelet Gobbo, who, in addition, furnishes metalinguistic reflections in two (seemingly redundant) exchanges, first, with his blind father in . and then with the bourgeois master Lorenzo in .. In the first, Portia’s description of the Englishman Falconbridge as ‘oddly . . . suited’ is echoed by Launcelet’s description as ‘odd sayings’ of the forms of English infiltrated and expanded by Latin figures. . But I pray you, ergo, old man, ergo, I beseech you, talk you of young Master Lancelet? . Of Lancelet, an’t please your mastership. . Ergo, Master Lancelet! Talk not of Master Lancelet, father, for the young gentleman, according to fates and destinies and such odd sayings, the sisters three and such branches of learning, is indeed deceased, or, as you would say in plain terms, gone to heaven.

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The Motley-Dressed Englishman in Shakespeare’s ‘Theatre’



. Marry, God forbid! The boy was the very staff of my age, my very prop. . Do I look like a cudgel or a hovel post, a staff or a prop? (..–)

Launcelet’s objectification as ‘odd sayings’ of the language of classical culture follows his success in summoning from his (blind) father the title of ‘your mastership’ through his repeated use of the Latin ergo. Shakespeare thus dramatises how Latinate forms served to mark social differences, notably the difference of those entitled by the display of such symbolic capital to call themselves ‘master’ – a title, it is worth recalling, to which Shakespeare (to whom Launcelet is onomastically linked, as I discuss in Chapter ) had acquired the right – for his father as well as for himself. If this glances ironically at the acquisition of social status and authority through learning, there is a still more explicit joke at the expense of ‘plain terms’, the ideal norm which cultural reformation ideology sets against Latinate forms. Launcelet gives ‘plain terms’ as a prefatory gloss to the periphrastic phrase ‘gone to heaven’ which he proposes to substitute for ‘deceased’, arguably the ‘plainer’ of the two forms, as Drakakis comments. This ironic interrogation of the notion of ‘plain terms’ continues as Launcelet reactivates the metaphoric base of the two interchangeable figures used by his father – ‘staff’ and ‘prop’ – to expose the nontransparent relation between various, more and less synonymous signifiers and their putative referent(s): ‘Do I look like a cudgel or a hovel post, a staff or a prop?’ The list invites us to add ‘launce’ and ‘spear’ as Launcelet plays not only on his own name, as Drakakis notes, but also on the name of Shake-speare, a play on names as nouns which renders opaque even the seemingly most ‘plain’ relation of reference. Invited to assent in laughter spectators are called on to recognise that the notion of ‘plain terms’ is an illusion, that words are linked in substitutive chains and refer only obliquely to the world. At the same time, they are offered the possibility of increasing their lexical wealth by this instance of the figure of ‘store’ as Puttenham calls ‘synonymia’, which, as I take up in Chapter , celebrates even as it tends to produce the idea of ‘our English’ as a mixed, expanding and inclusive ‘gallimaufry’ – the linguistic equivalent of the sartorial figure. Himself dressed in motley, Launcelet Gobbo belongs then to the family of figures discussed in Chapter  that traverse ‘proper’ defining boundaries in   

For fuller discussion see Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“The trueborn Englishman”’, –. Shakespeare, Merchant, ed. Drakakis, note to ..–. Shakespeare, Merchant, ed. Drakakis, note to ..–.

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

Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’

‘straying’/‘strange’ linguistic practices which resist the project to install a normative centre of plainness even as they produce a ‘gallimaufry’. As we shall see, Launcelet practises not only ‘synonymia’, but also ‘mistaking’, new word formation and ‘play upon the word’, as it is called by the bourgeois master Lorenzo (..), in the second metalinguistic exchange. Seeking to put a stop to the servant-clown’s evasive play in order to have his dinner served, Lorenzo finally appeals to Launcelet to ‘understand a plain man in his plain meaning’ (..–). Plainness is exposed here less as an illusion than as a cover for a (barely concealed) will to control, specifically over linguistic straying/play through which those habitually controlled by masters – servants and women – recover a measure of freedom, as I take up in Chapter . It is as an illusion and/or a cover for a will to control that the notion of ‘plain terms’ is consistently treated in Shakespearean plays of the s. While in the histories and tragedies the exposure of the claim to plainness as a cover for a will to control/power is at once more conspicuous and more charged, in the comedies, plain terms are recurrently exposed as an illusion. To take another instance, at the close of Love’s Labour’s Lost, language and dress are brought together in Biron’s expressed resolve to turn from ‘[t]affeta phrases . . . spruce affectation’ (..–), to ‘russet “yeas”, and honest kersey “noes”’ (), a turn that echoes cultural reformers’ rejections of ‘far-fetched livery’ for ‘home-spun Russet’ as in these lines by Joseph Hall, contemporary with the first quarto of the play (see above). However, when Biron attempts what he later calls ‘[h]onest, plain words’ (..) – ‘to begin . . . / My love to thee is sound, sans crack or flaw’ (..) – he is met with Rosalind’s mocking comment: ‘Sans “sans” I pray you’ (). Rosalind’s use of the very word that she asks Biron to do ‘without’ suggests the difficulty if not the impossibility of speaking plain English, and specifically of excluding French forms. The ‘trick’ or habit that Biron confesses he is still not without – ‘Yet I have a trick / Of the old rage’ (..–) – is thus implied to be not merely a personal or class trait – the trait of an elite male as Karen Newman suggests – but the trait of a vernacular that cannot do ‘without’ French, as the word ‘trick’, itself of Latinate/French origin, betrays. Like and with the exclusion of French words to which cultural reformers aspired, the goal of ‘honest, plain words’ is thus exposed and mocked as an illusion. In turning now to the exposure of plainness as a cover for a will to control/power in the histories and tragedies, I take my argument briefly 

Newman, Essaying Shakespeare, .

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Shakespeare and the ‘Plain-Dealing Villain’



into the first decade of the seventeenth century in order subsequently to consider what is arguably the fourth – and one probably Jacobean – Shakespearean instance of the figure of the motley-dressed Englishman in All’s Well that Ends Well (?–), which treats it differently. For All’s Well stages a violent rejection of this figure which echoes the exclusionary violence of cultural reformation ideology and so appears to mark a turn away from the inclusive cultural mix the figure represents, although the turn to ‘plainness’ is not fully articulated until King Lear, where it is, moreover, still treated with ambivalence. As we will see, this turn may be linked to a retrospective mythologising of the political watershed of  as marked by a rupture with the cultural values which the sartorial and linguistic tropes of the motley-dressed elite male and the ‘gallimaufry’ represent, and a turn towards the cultural reformation ideal of plainness. An ideal officially espoused by the new Stuart monarch, as we saw in Chapter , All’s Well may mark then the moment when the plays of the inhouse playwright of the King’s Men begin, if ambivalently, to move with, rather than against history, with rather than against the drive to English ‘plainness’.

Shakespeare and the ‘Plain-Dealing Villain’ In the early s the idea of English plainness is unambiguously discredited through association with the eponymous protagonist of Richard III, the arch ‘dissembler’ and hypocrite who ‘treats religion as a functional tool’, as James R. Siemon, the third Arden editor puts it. As Siemon shows, the play draws on and references not only its immediate textual sources, but also the ‘discursive environment’ of the early s, including the discourses of religious and political controversy and protestant/puritan anti-theatrical discourse. Like other editors, however, he does not consider the first public instance of Richard’s dissembling hypocrisy when he complains about the ‘complaints’ (..) that have been made about him 

 

The words ‘plain-dealing villain’, in the subtitle above, appear in William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing, ... This is the self-description of Don John, who, unlike the villains discussed in what follows, does not attempt to hide his villainy. Michael Bristol groups him, not entirely appropriately, with others (including Iago) as a type of character that critiques equivocation, even as he makes the pertinent point that ‘[i]t is ironic that these claims of honesty and plain dealing are often made in the interest of malicious dissimulation’. Michael D. Bristol, ‘Charivari and the Comedy of Abjection in Othello’, in Ivo Kamps, ed., Materialist Shakespeare: A History (London: Verso, ), . William Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. James R. Siemon (London: Methuen, ), . Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. Siemon –, .

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

Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’

to the king. Claiming he has been ‘held a rancorous enemy’ merely ‘[b]ecause [he] cannot flatter, and look fair / Smile in men’s faces, smooth, deceive, and cog, / Duck with French nods and apish courtesy’ (..–), Richard plaintively generalises his case as that of a ‘plain man’ whose ‘simple truth’ is ‘abused’ by ‘sly, insinuating jacks’ (–). His language here, for which there is no precedent in any of the sources, clearly recalls the discourses of cultural reformation ideology, notably, its association, on the one hand, of smooth deceitful language and manners with the French, slavishly followed by The English Ape; on the other, of ‘the plain man’ and ‘his simple truth’ with an honest Englishman. The attendant xenophobia is, moreover, highlighted in Richard’s speech to his troops at the end of the play when the denigration of Richmond’s (imminently victorious) forces as ‘beggerlie Britans and faint-hearted Frenchmen’ (Holinshed) is reworked as a ‘scum of Bretons’ (..; F and Qq: Brittains), ‘overweening rags of France’ () and ‘bastard Bretons’ (; F and Qq: Britaines). As Siemon notes, this is ‘incendiary’ language at the time of the first productions of the play in the early s, which saw intense citizen hostility to strangers, as I take up in Chapter . The ‘bastard Britaines/Bretons’ (with no equivalent in the sources) will, moreover, be recalled in Henry V when a figure with the speech prefix ‘Brit.’ (in F) denigrates the victorious English troops as ‘but bastard Normans, Norman bastards’ (..), a recollection which underscores the irony that (the) English and (the) French are irretrievably ‘bastards’ in the sense of mixed, as the figure of the ‘bastard’ Falconbridge in King John underscores when he dissolves the differences between the English and French in the category of ‘bastards’ (see above). The effect in Richard III, with immediate resonance in the early s, is rather that the stigmatisation of others, notably the French, is discredited, like and with the ideology that produces it, through association with the figure of a dissembling hypocrite who thus conceals his will to power. The assertion of the ‘simple truth’ of a ‘plain man’ is indeed exposed as particularly ‘insinuating’ (to use Richard’s own word), because it asserts itself as the opposite of what it is: a nontransparent fiction. The critical thrust is more overt here than it is in Richard II, which, as we have seen, evokes cultural reformers’ attacks on the ‘tardy apish’ 



The title of the  treatise by William Rankins cited above; Siemon cites Thomas Dekker’s chapter on English ‘Apishness’, discussed earlier, and Mercutio’s attack on ‘fashionmongers’ in Romeo and Juliet (.) which, as I suggested above, may mockingly mimic the discourse of cultural reformers as, at one level, Richard’s ‘complaint’ does. Holinshed, The Chronicles of England, .

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Shakespeare and the ‘Plain-Dealing Villain’



(..) English and the ideal of a ‘true-born Englishman’ (..), only to put them into question through the figure who lays claim to this title and who is, like Richard III, a usurper whose dissimulated will to power likewise brings internal division and destruction. As I argued, Henry Bolingbroke’s speech style and manners suggest an English plainness, while his son explicitly and self-consciously lays claim to such plainness both as prince in  Henry IV and as king in Henry V, notably in relation to the figure of linguistic extravagance, John Falstaff. Again, the claim to plainness is exposed as a cover for a will to control/power, as it is in Julius Caesar, a tragedy probably contemporary with Henry V, in which the figure of Mark Antony skilfully presents himself as ‘a plain blunt man’ (..) in a speech designed to ‘stir’ () his hearers to do the opposite of what he ostensibly requests of them – not to ‘mutiny’ (). If, however, both Henry and Mark Antony abuse the rhetoric of ‘plainness’, neither is vicious like Richard III, or ‘Honest Iago’ (..) in Othello (?), who, as commentators have frequently remarked, ‘wears . . . with pleasure’ the ‘subtle mask’ of the ‘rhetoric of simplicity’, and who, like Richard, utters moralising complaints about the treatment he receives as a plain-speaking truth-teller: ‘To be direct and honest is not safe’ (..). With connections to ‘sweet England’ (..), where he says he learned his drinking songs, Iago’s abuse of the rhetoric of plainness, which perhaps he also learnt in England, goes with a virulent hatred of the ‘extravagant and wheeling stranger’ (..), whose language he dismisses as ‘stuffed’ ‘bombast’ (..–) echoing early criticism of the ‘upstart’ Shakespeare, as others have noted. As I discussed in Chapter , this linguistically extravagant stranger is associated with Shakespeare in a verbal portrait by Ben Jonson, who is on record as having criticised his rival for ‘bombast’. Yet, as critics have registered, there is an ambivalence towards what George Wright calls the ‘incorrigibly extravagant’ character of 







Madeleine Doran, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), . The rhetorical skills of the two (as Vice figures) are compared in Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (New York: Columbia University Press, ), . It is important to distinguish between a rhetoric of plainness, i.e. the claim to speak plainly, and practice, especially here as Iago’s claim to plainness is contradicted by a number of hard, often Latinate words used, as Honigmann points out, to ‘bamboozling effect’. William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, ), . E. A. J. Honigmann, ‘Shakespeare’s “Bombast”’, in Philip Edwards, Inga-Stina Ewbank and G. K. Hunter, eds., Shakespeare’s Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir (Cambridge University Press, ), –. An anecdote recorded by Dryden, this is quoted by Honigmann, who gives other instances of the criticism including the notorious first instance from the pen of Henry Chettle/Robert Greene. Honigmann, ‘Shakespeare’s “Bombast”’, .

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

Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’

Othello’s language which, for Giorgio Melchiori, suggests an ‘over-studiousness’, a strained purposiveness which may, as Robert Watson has argued, be indicative of an ‘alien’ and alienated condition. If the rhetoric of plainness then continues to be discredited as a cover for a vicious will to power, linguistic extravagance now too falls under suspicion. The turn from linguistic extravagance is more fully articulated, at least initially, in King Lear (–), which opens on a staged opposition between the viciously purposive extravagant language of the flattering hypocrites Goneril and Regan and the exemplary plain speech of the virtuous Cordelia and her ally the Duke of Kent, who explicitly sets ‘plainness’ against the excesses of ‘flattery’ (F ..–; Q ..). However, Cordelia’s confessed inability to practise ‘that glib and oily art / To speak and purpose not’ (F ..–; Q ..–) resonates disturbingly with Richard III’s complaint about ‘sly, insinuating jacks’ and the ‘simple truth’ of ‘a plain man’ who ‘cannot flatter, and look fair’ (discussed above). Indeed, suspicions are immediately cast on Cordelia’s claim to ‘plainness’ by Lear, who says it is merely a cover for pride: ‘pride, which she calls plainness’ (F ..; Q ..). Still more disturbingly, the claim to ‘[a]n honest mind and plain’ which ‘must speak truth’ (F ..; Q ..–) is corrosively interrogated in a self-conscious reprise of the opening opposition in an exchange between Regan’s husband, the Duke of Cornwall, and the Duke of Kent in his disguise as Caius. In this exchange (in both Q and F) each of the discursive modes – of plainness and of flattery – is mockingly mimicked by the ‘other’ side. Thus, in response to the bluntness of Caius/Kent, Cornwall mimics the plain-speaking truth-teller: ‘He cannot flatter, he; / An honest mind and plain, he must speak truth / An they will take it so; if not, he’s plain’ (F and Q ..–). He then proceeds to assume the role of truth-teller himself giving voice to the critique of the claim to plainness as a cover for vicious purposes: ‘These kind of knaves . . . in this plainness / Harbour . . . craft’ (–), a very exact gloss on the characters of Richard III and Iago. Responding in kind, the disguised Kent mockingly mimics the ‘bombastic language’ of flattery, replete with Latinate words: ‘in sincere verity, / Under th’allowance of your great aspect’ etc. (F ..–; Q ..–). Objects of mutual mimicry, the initial opposition between plainness and 



Wright, ‘Hendiadys and Hamlet’, ; Giorgio Melchiori, ‘The Rhetoric of Character Construction’, Shakespeare Survey  (Cambridge University Press, ), ; Watson, ‘Shakespeare’s New Words’, . ‘bombastic language’ is from the gloss to these lines in the Norton, .

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Shakespeare and the ‘Plain-Dealing Villain’



flattery yields to a likeness as performed, imitable speech styles. At the same time, the critical view voiced by Cornwall, which discredits the claim to plainness, is itself discredited by the character of the speaker who is as self-evidently vicious as Richard III or Iago. The opening clear opposition is thus irretrievably muddied as is the seeming disavowal of the critical view of plainness voiced in the s. Indeed, in its complexity this corrosive exchange leaves no ground on which to decide, and this is not resolved by the painfully inadequate, even nugatory call to plain-speaking at the close: ‘Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’ (F ..; Q ..). The Quarto version of King Lear was published early in . The previous year had seen the publication of Thomas Tomkis’s Lingua, a play important here for a scene at its centre when the eponymous protagonist, who is female and consequently discredited, opens her case for recognition as one of the senses with a ridiculously extravagant speech replete with foreign words and phrases (Latin, Italian, French and Greek), which is immediately condemned as a ‘Gallemaufry of speech’, and then likened to ‘your Fantastical Gulls Apparell’ made up of diverse foreign fashion items. The tropes discussed in Chapters  and  are here explicitly brought together, confirming their shared function as objects of exclusion in the drive of cultural reformation ideology to a normative centre of English plainness. Still more interestingly, a figure called Memory introduces a historical narrative in a comment that ‘about the yeare  many used this skew kind of language’, which he compares to a ‘man . . . halfe white halfe blacke’, reproducing the recurrent racial inflection to representations of English as a gallimaufry (discussed in Chapter ). This locates a moment just prior to the arrival of James as the height of a tendency to use deviant language to suggest a coincidence of a cultural with the political break. As we shall see in Chapter , Memory’s observation is borne out by a clutch of plays that date from the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, but the cultural myth it propagates also chimes with the representation of James (discussed in Chapter ) as taking a stand against those (English courtiers) who in their ambition to fineness ‘spoil’ ‘the king’s language’. On the other hand, if Lingua asserts this historically located turn away from ‘skew kind of language’, there is no affirmation of ‘plainness’ as the preferred alternative. Rather language itself (not just one ‘kind’ of 



One of ‘the articles’ in the case made by the other senses against Lingua is ‘that she’s a woman in every respect’. Thomas Tomkis, Lingua: or The combat of the tongue, and the five senses for superiority A pleasant comoedie (London, ), sig. Fv. Tomkis, Lingua, sig. Fr.

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

Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’

language) is treated as inherently suspect, the figure of Lingua being accused not only of making Rhetoric ‘wanton’, but also of having ‘imprisoned . . . Veritas’ or ‘Truth’, a sceptical view of language as occluding truth comparable to the uncertainty produced by the ambivalent treatment of the opposition between plainness and ‘strained . . . rhetoric’ in King Lear.

The ‘Fantastical Gull’ Excluded: The Figure of Paroles in All’s Well that Ends Well It is in this context that I want to look at what is arguably the fourth, ambiguously treated Shakespearean instance of the sartorial figure of the motley-dressed ‘fantastical gull’, in All’s Well that Ends Well, a ‘problem’ comedy that has been dated to as early as , the year recalled by the figure of Memory in Lingua, although it is now more usually dated to a later moment, and it is placed by the New (as well as Old) Oxford editors, tellingly for my argument, between Othello and King Lear. Like Lingua, All’s Well stages a performance of a ‘skew kind of language’, which is arguably still more skewed than the language of Lingua, straying as it does beyond recognisable national vernaculars. Represented in another common sartorial image of cultural mixing – a ‘linsey-woolsey’ (..) – this medley of strange words is produced in an ambush to punish and exclude a figure whose name resonates with that of Lingua: Paroles. Described more often than any other of the play’s dramatis personae, Paroles shares several prominent features with the figure of the motley-dressed Englishman: a ‘counterfeit’ (.., .. and ), apish (a ‘jackanapes with scarves’ [..]) effeminate (..–, ..),  





Tomkins, Lingua, sig. Fv. The phrase ‘strained . . . rhetoric’ is from Sonnet  (line ), one of the group of ‘rival poet’ sonnets dated to –, in which the speaker positions himself as the ‘true-telling friend’ (line ) who ‘truly’ represents his addressee ‘[i]n true plain words’ (line , ) in contrast with the ‘gross painting’ of other poets and their ‘strained touches’ of ‘rhetoric’ (lines ,) (Norton ). As in King Lear the apparent privileging of the truth-telling plain speaker is shadowed by the character of his speech as an assumed style/position, which is suggested by the (over) insistence of the speaker on his truthfulness. The date range – for this ‘Jacobean play’ is given in Gary Taylor, ‘All’s Well That Ends Well: Text, Date and Adaptation’, in William Shakespeare, The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, ed. Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan (Oxford University Press, ), . The New Oxford editors give much more space to the question of possible additions by Thomas Middleton. These do not include the scene which is the main focus of my analysis (.). See the chapters ( and ) by Rory Loughnane in the same volume. In the first it is specifically his ‘Tongue’ that Paroles himself represents as a prattling female – a comparison that resonates with the eponymous figure of Lingua.

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The Figure of Paroles in All’s Well that Ends Well



‘gallant’ (.. and ), a would-be ‘perfect courtier’ (..), defined by extravagant sartorial fashions including ‘scarves and . . . bannerets’ (..), and ‘sleeves’ like ‘hose’ (..). Particularly telling is the description given by one of the play’s most reliable commentators, the old lord Lafeu, towards the close of the play: ‘a snipped taffeta fellow there, whose villainous saffron would have made all the unbaked and doughy youth of a nation in his color’ (..–). Defined here by the flashy sartorial item of slashed sleeves (‘snipped taffeta’), the insidious corrupting influence of Paroles is represented in terms of what Jones and Stallybrass describe as the ‘culturally freighted colour’ of ‘saffron’ yellow (although they do not mention this instance), which, as they show, features, like and with the starch it was used to dye, as objects of an increasingly virulent protestant ‘anti-court’ discourse, and which, as we saw earlier, is associated with the figure of the motley-dressed Englishman in Henry Fitzgeffrey’s satirical portrait of the Blackfriars spectator, where it serves to underscore the identity of the figure as a traitor to the ‘true’ character of (the) English. It is precisely as a threat to the character of a nation that Lafeu represents Paroles, who would fashion the ‘youth of a nation in his color’, as he has sought to fashion Bertram. As Jones and Stallybrass note, the fashion of starch dyed in saffron yellow was claimed to come from France as, more generally, it is France and the French that are consistently cited as the principal source of contaminating cultural influence in the discourses of cultural reformation ideology. The name of Paroles of course evokes the French for ‘words’ and, like Thomas Wilson’s farjourneyed gentlemen and the courtier in Woodstock, his extravagant dress finds echo in affected Latinate words such as ‘facinorous’ (..), and pseudo-French expressions such as ‘Mort du vinaigre’ (), with which, like Wilson’s far-journeyed gentlemen, Paroles ‘powders’ his talk. Indeed, if ‘[t]he soul of this man is his clothes’ (..–), he is also said to love ‘many words’ as a fish loves water (..–). Furthermore, though the principal dramatis personae are all nominally French, it is Paroles that is singled out as representative of a contaminating French national character, notably by the recurrent (often mocking) use of the title ‘monsieur’ (used    

Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, , See above, –. Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing,  n. . In All’s Well, ‘contempt’ towards elaborate (hand-kissing, cap-donning) implicitly French ‘manners’ ‘at court’ is voiced too through the figure of the clown (..–). As we saw above, ‘taffeta’ is the sartorial figure for affected Latinate ‘phrases’ rejected at the close of Love’s Labour’s Lost by Biron, whose violent treatment of Boyet, a figure likewise associated with the French, as I discussed in Chapter , anticipates the treatment of Paroles.

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

Shakespeare and ‘the true-born Englishman’

to, and of no other figure in the play), first by Bertram (.. and ), and then by one of the play’s commentators, who identifies him after the corrective ambush: ‘This is Monsieur Paroles’ (..–). The violence of the ambush and the subsequent exclusion of Paroles match the exclusionary violence with which the figures of the linguistic gallimaufry and the elite Englishman dressed in a motley of foreign fashions are treated in discourses informed by cultural reformation ideology, which seeks to disentangle the ‘true’ ‘plain’ English character from the contaminating influence of (the) French. The implied shift towards this ideology is strengthened by an assertion of the value of ‘plain’ speech as an indicator and guarantee of truth, which is made in a speech by the virtuous Diana to the seducer Bertram, who is under the corrupt influence of the figure of French (mere) ‘words’ (..–, ). However, if plain speech is not here treated sceptically as a cover for a will to control, as it still is in Othello, it is not yet the advertised value it is in the opening scene of King Lear. In this respect All’s Well does appear to be situated ideologically where it is situated chronologically by the Oxford editors: between Othello and King Lear. More importantly, if this affirmation of plain speech and the violent exclusion of the linguistically and sartorially extravagant Paroles suggest a shift towards cultural reformation ideology after the actual political, and perceived cultural watershed of , opposition is still expressed, although it takes a different form. For, unlike other instances of this figure – all indeed except the courtier in Woodstock, whose short speeches serve only to justify his exclusion as a fantastic fool and no Englishman – Paroles is not a silent object of exclusionary violence. He is also no mere personification like Lingua. ‘Paroles’, we might say, rather than ‘Lingua’/ ‘Langue’, this dramatis persona gives voice to the personhood of embodied, particular being when he asserts, ‘Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live’ (..–), and his claim to ‘place and means’, the claim of ‘every man alive’ (), is recognised by Lafeu: ‘you shall eat’ (..). In these simple words Shakespeare powerfully evokes the absolute grounds for opposition to exclusionary violence: the sacred character of every human 



This contemptuous use of ‘Monsieur’ finds echo in Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour, where ‘the fresh Frenchified courtier’ is how ‘Monsieur Fastidious Brisk’ is ‘otherwise called’ (..–); Cynthia’s Revels, which features ‘a monsieur, or French-behav’d gentleman’ (F ..–); and epigram , ‘On English Monsieur’, whose ‘whole body should speake French’, given ‘so much skarfe of France’. Jonson, Epigrams, ed. Colin Burrow, Works V, –. The Saussurean distinction between ‘langue’ as abstract system and ‘parole’ as embodied particular utterance does seem pertinent here.

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The Figure of Paroles in All’s Well that Ends Well



life as an instantiation, or image of the Divine ‘I am’, prior to differentiating cultural habits of dress and language. The point is underscored by yet another sartorial image of a mixed state or condition, which is used by one of the play’s commentators not of a national vernacular nor of a class inflected national character, but of a shared human condition: ‘our life’ as a ‘mingled yarn’ in which ‘good’ and ‘ill’ are inextricably intertwined (..–). The ‘mingled’ character of our common condition renders the oppositions which inform cultural reformation ideology not only inadequate, but also unjust. The just response to this ‘mingled’ human condition remains accommodation, the inclusion rather than the exclusion of others, however ‘tainted . . . and full of wickedness’ (..), as the Countess describes Paroles. As Martin Luther comments, the nature of man as the image of God requires that there be ‘no hate; no matter how evil one considers him, one must not for this reason abandon him or despair of his improvement’. 



‘I am that I am’ is how the ineffable character of God is represented in the Old Testament (Exodus :). (My thanks to Kilian Schindler for drawing my attention to this reference.) This is echoed in the words of Christ: ‘before Abraham was, I am’ (John :). That the image of God in man furnishes a ground for opposition to violence is evoked in Richard III by the dying Edward, who assimilates an act of murder to ‘defac[ing]’ [t]he precious image of our dear Redeemer’ (Richard III, ..–). Roland Frye cites a pertinent comment by Calvin: ‘if we do not wish to violate the image of God, we ought to hold our neighbour sacred’. Roland Mushat Frye, Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (Princeton University Press, ), . As cited in Frye, Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine, . If, as the quotations given by Frye suggest, this ground for opposition to violence is specifically promoted by protestant theologians, there is a certain irony to its evocation by Shakespeare to oppose the exclusionary violence of cultural reformation ideology.

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 

‘they bring in straing rootes’

Shakespeare and ‘the straingers case’

In Chapters  and  I examined how Shakespearean plays, mainly from the s, engage with the exclusionary violence of cultural reformation ideology as this is expressed through two symmetrical pairs of tropes, or memes: on the one hand, ‘the King’s English’ opposed to ‘the gallimaufry’ and, on the other, ‘the true-born Englishman’ opposed to the elite male dressed in a motley of foreign fashions, ‘Englishman in none’ (Hall). Crucially, these tropes are mobilised to install the normative centre represented by the first (‘the King’s English’, the ‘true-born Englishman’), through exclusion of the constitutive ‘others’ represented by the second (‘the gallimaufry’, the motley-dressed Englishman), in a drive to produce a set of mutually implicated defining norms of ‘true’ Englishness. In this chapter and the next, I take a broader perspective to consider how Shakespearean resistance to this ideology finds expression, on the one hand, through treatment of ‘the strangers’ case’ in the comedies and second tetralogy (Chapter ), and, on the other, through ‘straying’/ ‘strange’ linguistic practices across the plays of the s (Chapter ). Hostility towards foreigners, which sometimes merged with, or served as a cover for hostility towards crown and court, is, of course, directly addressed in the contribution to the playtext of Sir Thomas More by ‘Hand D’, now widely, if not universally recognised, as Shakespeare’s, which engages with its local virulent manifestations in London in the early s. I take this up here in order to focus on the idea put forward through the speeches of Shakespeare’s More that ‘the straingers case’ (the manuscript spelling form) is both common, in the sense of recurring as well as shared lived experience, and contingent, a function of straying in  

Yungblut, Strangers Settled, . The association of ‘strangers’ and ‘the crown’ in the construction of city solidarity in the playtext is pointed out in Nina Levine, ‘Citizens’ Games: Differentiating Collaboration and Sir Thomas More’, Shakespeare Quarterly : (), . In what follows I draw on my own earlier work, though taking the argument in a different direction. See Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“This is the stranger’s case”’.



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Shakespeare and ‘the straingers case’



time or place across ‘proper’ defining boundaries. I examine how this idea finds expression in uses of the word ‘stranger’ as well as in the use of a variant spelling form shared by the adjectives ‘strange’ and ‘straying’ in ‘straing rootes’ (manuscript spelling form), a resonant polyvalent phrase in Shakespeare’s contribution to the playtext. The ‘straying’ into the condition of ‘a stranger’ is, I then argue, dramatised in early comedies, whether (more often) as an occasion of exclusionary violence or as a (utopic) occasion of social transformation and emancipation, and this condition is brought ‘home’ in the second tetralogy through the imagining of England/Britain as a nation of mutual strangers. This resonates, I argue, with common lived experience in pre-/early modern England/Britain, and with biblical figures of the stranger and of human life as an ‘erring pilgrimage’. Disseminated through The Book of Common Prayer, these biblical figures carried a potential for resistance at once to the purpose of national unity and cultural homogeneity that the ‘one use’ of the book was designed to serve (Chapter ), and to exclusionary violence towards strangers. Of particular pertinence is a biblical passage from the Epistle to the Ephesians, appointed to be read on  December, which represents the inclusive reach of God’s gift of redemption in terms of strangers made citizens in the house of God. I take this up in a concluding discussion of The Comedy of Errors, which may have been first performed a week after the day of this appointed reading, on  December . Considering the play in relation both to this passage from a biblical text long recognised as a key source and the parable of the prodigal son, which is explicitly referenced, I argue that, like, if less directly than the Shakespearean contribution to Sir Thomas More, the play is engaged with ‘the strangers’ case’. This is done through a reworking of the classical model – of the genre as well as the particular Plautine instance – according to the shape of the Christian (Pauline) plot of redemption, as this is illustrated by the parable, without the emphasis on sin and repentance that the parable acquires in the liturgical script of The Book of Common Prayer (). The play rehearses rather, I suggest, the plot structure of loss and reparation, which this parable shares with the preceding analogous   

Where I refer to the manuscript I use Anthony Munday and others, The Book of Sir Thomas More, ed. W. W. Greg, The Malone Society Reprints, repr. (Oxford University Press, ), –. Shakespeare, As You Like It, ... The comedy is taken as a ‘representation of the immigrant’s condition’, though from a different angle, in Eric Griffin, ‘Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the Stranger Crisis of the s’, in Ruben Espinosa and David Ruiter, eds., Shakespeare and Immigration (Farnham: Ashgate, ), –. See too current work by Nandini Das, first circulated as a seminar paper at the SAA in April : ‘Everyday Strangeness: The Stranger in The Comedy of Errors’.

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

Shakespeare and ‘the straingers case’

parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin. More specifically, it dramatises the straying of a son and brother from origins (‘roots’) into the condition of a stranger and the reparation of this loss with an attendant affective yield, which the parables call joy. Aligning itself with the genre of the parable, a generic alignment still more overt in The Two Gentlemen of Verona as I discuss in the next chapter, the play thus remodels comedy away from the neoclassical imperative of moral correction towards a purpose of release, like the ‘deliverance’ from the ‘heavy burden’ of the law procured in the work of redemption, evoked at the play’s close (..). Indeed, the sense of the titular ‘errors’ is neither sin nor moral deviation but ‘straying’, as in the figure of the ‘erring pilgrimage’ of life with its attendant inevitable misrecognitions or ‘mis-takes’, the other pertinent sense of the word which bears particularly on the treatment of the strangers’ case.

‘this is the straingers case’ ‘[T]his is the straingers case’ is how Shakespeare’s More summarises the vivid scenes that he has invited his audience of hostile citizens (off as well as on stage) to imagine – scenes in which they are the objects of exclusionary violence as strangers in Europe – in order to summon a sense of kinship and an attendant change of heart towards the strangers, which is then voiced collectively in terms of the injunction central to the teaching of Christ: ‘Let’s do as we may be done by’ (.; compare Matthew :). Bearing out the point made by Richard Rorty that ‘human solidarity . . . is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers’, Shakespeare’s More is successful in the persuasion of his listeners, unlike Henry Finch, the member of parliament for Canterbury, whose speech on behalf of strangers in the parliamentary debate of March  More echoes. Indeed, the fractured 





Munday and others, The Book of Sir Thomas More, , line . The phrase has now acquired a hash tag as it has been taken into the ‘flow’ of digital media. See Stephen O’Neill, ‘Shakespeare’s Digital Flow: Humans, Technologies and the Possibilities of Intercultural Exchange’, Shakespeare Studies  (), –, and shakespeareonyoutube.com////the-strangers-case-sir-thomas-moresocial-media-and-the-refugee-crisis/ accessed  June . My thanks to Stephen for sharing his work with me. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, ), xvi. Shakespeare’s emphasis on the work of imagination in fostering solidarity is developed in Jeffrey R. Wilson, ‘“You must needs be strangers”: Stigma and Sympathetic Imagination in Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More’, in Abbes Maazaoui, ed., Making Strangers: Outsiders, Aliens and Foreigners (Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, ), –. For fuller discussion of this and the following points see Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“This is the stranger’s case”’.

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‘this is the straingers case’



playtext reflects the impasse reached in this debate, which is recalled not only in Shakespeare’s contribution, but also in contributions by other ‘hands’, connected to the city as Shakespeare was not, who echo arguments made in parliament on behalf of the city and English merchants against the ‘strangers’. As Simonds D’Ewes comments in his account of the debate, this was a ‘matter’ of ‘great weight’ – a ‘weight’ to which extant copies of a leaked anonymous journal testify – since it fed into, as it illustrated the developing stand-off between the court, which encouraged strangers, mainly for economic reasons, and the city, which was hostile to them. It is on this same fault-line between court and city that, as I pointed out in Chapter , Samuel Daniel locates the struggle over the ‘property’ of English in a passage from A Defence of Rhyme (?) in which he gives a locally inflected turn to the commonplace linguistic/human analogy, criticising the practice of ‘forging strange or unusual wordes’ in terms of the admittance by royal authority of human ‘strangers’ as ‘Free-denizens’. As we will see in Chapter , Shakespeare’s ‘straying’ linguistic practices in the s, including ‘forging strange or unusual wordes’, tend to advocate the welcoming of linguistic ‘strangers’, as, in the contribution to the playtext, which may date to , as current critical opinion maintains, or (as I think) to –, the welcoming of human strangers is urged in opposition to citizens who would exclude them. However, just as the affirmation of ‘our English’ as an expanding ‘gallimaufry’ hospitable 

 

These are detailed in Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Shakespeare and Immigration’, in Annette KernStähler and David Britain, eds., English on the Move: Mobilities in Literature and Language, Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature  (Tu¨bingen: Narr Verlag, ), –.  See Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“This is the stranger’s case”’,  n. . See Chapter , –. The New Oxford editors state that the date ‘remains debated’, but they throw their full weight behind the later date of , which is likely to become orthodoxy, although there is much that needs to be clarified, including the intertextual relation to the parliamentary debate of , which they ignore. It may be that the debate is remembered in the original playtext as well as the additions since, as I have discussed, copies of the anonymous journal in which it is recorded circulated in the early seventeenth century and, as I consider below, George Abbot’s sermon which references the debate was published by Richard Field in . I do think, however, that the question needs to be kept open. See Gary Taylor and Rory Loughnane, ‘The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works’, in Shakespeare, The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, –; TudeauClayton, ‘“This is the stranger’s case”’,  n. . For the most comprehensive, balanced account, described as a ‘contribution to the discussion rather than a resolution of it’, which finds support for the later date in linguistic evidence, see Hugh Craig, ‘The Date of Sir Thomas More’, Shakespeare Survey  (Cambridge University Press, ), . Among the scholars who continue to assume the earlier date is Griffin, ‘Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the Stranger Crisis of the s’,  n. . Strong arguments are marshalled against the later date and for the earlier in Thomas Merriam, ‘Date and Authorship of the Original Text of Sir Thomas More’, The Christian Shakespeare, christianshakespeare.blogspot.com///date-and-authorship-of-original-text-of.html#more, accessed  February .

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

Shakespeare and ‘the straingers case’

to linguistic strangers, is not court-centred, so the case made through the figure of More on behalf of strangers does not simply toe a court line, any more than the case it echoes made by Henry Finch. Specifically, Finch and Shakespeare’s More both urge the contingency of the strangers’ case as a case, that is, in which anyone, including their immediate addressees, might find themselves. Crucially, however, they do not illustrate this contingency in the same way. Like others before and after him (including recently Barack Obama and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks), Henry Finch illustrates this contingency by evoking shared history as well as biblical precept and example, specifically the exile of English Protestants under the Marian regime, ‘when our Cause was as theirs is now’, before summoning a future hypothetical recurrence: ‘They are strangers now, we may be strangers hereafter’. It is this future hypothetical case that Shakespeare’s More summons through the description with which he closes his speech: turning Finch’s ‘we’ as ‘you’, and the hypothetical case as vivid scenes, he invites the citizens to imagine themselves as objects of exclusionary violence as strangers in Europe, should they be punished with exile for their rebellion. He too draws a comparison, not, however, with English Marian exiles, which would of course have been searingly ironic as well as anachronistic, but rather with English victims of enclosure, who are evoked in another vivid description of the strangers which recalls the denunciation of enclosure in the first book of the Utopia. Through this comparison, hostile citizens – off as well as on stage – are called upon to see European strangers as in the same case as internal immigrants who, as I pointed out in Chapter , were classified as ‘Englishmen forren’ in surveys by the city authorities. As others have commented, the internal immigrants were far more numerous, but they were spared the violence meted out to European strangers perceived as different from the English men and women that Shakespeare’s More suggests they resemble as 



Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“This is the stranger’s case”’, –. The argument that ‘we were strangers once too’ and the appeal to ‘Scripture’ was made by Barack Obama in his televised announcement on immigration on  November , to bolster his proposed regularisation of  million illegal immigrants. edition.cnn.com////politics/obama-immigration-speech-transcript/index .html, accessed  January ; among several religious leaders Jonathan Sacks drew attention to ‘the command’ ‘Love the stranger because you were once strangers’ in an appeal for ‘a bold act of collective generosity’ during the crisis of summer . www.theguardian.com/commentisfree//sep// refugee-crisis-jonathan-sacks-humanitarian-generosity, accessed  January . For examples of similar arguments made prior to the intervention by Finch, see Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“This is the stranger’s case”’, , especially n. , and McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, , n. . For detailed discussion see Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“This is the stranger’s case”’, –.

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‘this is the straingers case’



victims of exclusionary violence. Through this resemblance More’s off as well as onstage audience is invited to consider the origins (‘roots’) of the problems in London – shortage of accommodation and food, galloping inflation – as lying elsewhere than with the strangers and their ‘strange roots’, as popular opinion would have them believe. Indeed, it is in terms of the emergence of the values of economic selfinterest and private property and the consequent erosion of the Christian value of ‘charity’, in its pre-modern sense, that the practice of enclosure is denounced in a tract of  by church minister Francis Trigge who, as Robert Miola usefully points out, quotes approvingly the passage from the Utopia echoed by Shakespeare’s More. In this tract which, it is worth recalling, furnishes a parallel to Shakespeare’s scene of an idealised aboutto-be-lost ‘merry England’ (discussed in Chapter  and again below), Trigge condemns those who, motivated by covetousness, the ‘root of all evill’ (emphasis mine), ‘respect only their own commodities’, which they legitimate with reference to Scripture (they ‘think they may do it lawfully’), though it is ‘against charity’ thus to treat brothers as strangers. In Thomas Dekker’s The Seven Deadly Sinnes of London () too, the traditional first sin of pride is replaced by ‘Politick Bankruptisme’, a fraudulent economic practice motivated by the self-interested greed of those who, Dekker insists, are the ‘dangerous’ ‘weede[s]’ at the origin of London’s socio-economic problems, not the foreigners dwelling in the ‘liberties’ who are wrongfully blamed: ‘These are indeede (and none but these) the Forreners that live without the freedome of your City, . . .; they live without the freedome of honesty, of conscience, and of christianitie’. The origin – root – of corruption lies then for Dekker here not with foreigners but with practices driven by greed ‘foreign’ to Christian values. As we will see in the next section, Shakespeare too suggests that strangers are not the ‘root’ of the problem, while through the speeches of his More he invites recognition that they are to be viewed rather as in the same ‘case’ 

 



Peter Clark, ‘A Crisis Contained? The Condition of English Towns in the s’, in Peter Clark, ed., The European Crisis of the s: Essays in Comparative History (London: G. Allen & Unwin, ), ; Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, . Trigge, To the Kings most excellent Maiestie, n.p.; Robert B. Miola, ‘Shakespeare and The Book of Sir Thomas More’, Moreana :– (),  n. . Trigge, To the Kings most excellent Maiestie, n.p. (the title of the chapter is: ‘this Inclosure is against Christian charitie’). Trigge, who addresses his tract to James, also underlines the erosion of monarchical authority attendant on enclosure, which sees ‘Inclosers’ ‘take upon them’ ‘to be kings’, as Thomas Milles in the same year denounced bankers and merchants who take upon them to be kings (quoted in Chapter ). Dekker, The Seven Deadly Sinnes, .

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

Shakespeare and ‘the straingers case’

as evicted English men and women, dispossessed victims of the violence attendant on the emergence of the values of self-interest and private property. The contingent character of the strangers’ case is expressed through uses of the word ‘stranger’, which is preferred throughout the Shakespearean canon over the word ‘foreigner’, which is used only once. Though this preference is not peculiar to Shakespeare, as others have pointed out, the one instance of the word ‘foreigner’, in ‘mountain foreigner’, used by the English braggart Pistol of the Welsh parson Hugh Evans (Merry Wives, ..), bears out what is suggested by instances of the adjective ‘foreign’ (twenty-nine in all), that the condition of ‘the foreigner’ is conceived as a more or less fixed structural relation of outside/inside marked by a physical barrier such as mountains (as in the instance of the noun from Merry Wives) or, as in instances of the adjective, the sea (Merchant, ..–; King John, ..–). Indeed, when in  Henry IV Henry advises Hal ‘to busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels’, the reason that he gives – ‘that action hence borne out / May waste the memory of the former days’ (..- emphasis mine) – highlights the etymological origin of ‘foreigner’ in the Latin/French for outside: ‘fors’ (modern French hors). Instances of the word ‘stranger’, on the other hand, suggest this is conceived as an unfixed condition, ‘an incidental state’ as Catherine Lisack puts it, ‘dependent upon circumstances’, contingent in short. Typically, these circumstances bring a change in the knowledge or intimacy that is implied in the word ‘stranger’, as it is not in the word ‘foreigner’. It is thus possible to become, grow or be made a ‘stranger’, or ‘no stranger’, as it is not possible to become ‘a foreigner’ or ‘no foreigner’: Juliet, as a child, is ‘yet a stranger in the world’ (Romeo and Juliet, ..); Viola-Cesario, who has been ‘known’ by Orsino for ‘but three days’, is ‘already’ ‘no stranger’ (Twelfth Night, ..–); Valentine ‘counts’ the ‘world’ ‘a stranger’ when 

 



For the emergence of self-interest as a legitimate motive which, together with the ‘institution of private property’, marked the ineluctable movement towards a market economy, see (amongst others), L. A. Clarkson, The Pre-Industrial Economy in England – (London: B. T. Batsford, ), . Catherine Lisack, ‘Domesticating Strangeness in Twelfth Night’, in James Schiffer, ed., Twelfth Night: New Critical Essays (London: Routledge, ), . This permits clarification of an instance of the word ‘foreign’ which has puzzled editors, when, in Henry VIII, Wolsey is accused of having ‘[k]ept’ Dr Pace ‘a foreign man still’ (..). Given the sense I am elaborating here this might be glossed simply as having kept him out of the king’s presence. In the one instance of the plural form, ‘foreigners’, the word stands in defining relation to ‘subject enemies’, that is, enemies who come from inside as distinct from those who come from outside the realm (King John, ..–). Lisack, ‘Domesticating Strangeness’, .

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‘straingers’ as the ‘root’ of Infection



he learns of the treachery of his friend Proteus (Two Gentlemen, ..); Cordelia is peremptorily made a ‘stranger’ by her father (King Lear, F ..; Q ..). Most commonly, the condition of a stranger is a function of change of place as in the instances discussed above from Sir Thomas More and The Merchant of Venice. This is highlighted in the adjectives used of ‘strangers’: Othello is described as an ‘extravagant and wheeling stranger’ (..) and as ‘an erring barbarian’ (..–), while the ‘stranger’ that is the ghost in Hamlet is described as an ‘extravagant and erring spirit’ (..), a straying ‘stranger’ that Hamlet bids Horatio ‘give . . . welcome’ (..) as Shakespeare’s More bids his audience of hostile citizens give welcome to those who have been made (ghost-like) strangers by involuntary dispossession and displacement, like internal immigrants.

‘they bring in straing rootes’: ‘straingers’ as the ‘root’ of Infection This condition of the stranger is highlighted in a phrase which comes earlier in Shakespeare’s contribution to the playtext when the leader of the citizens, Lincoln, asserts that, in addition to the soaring prices for which they are responsible, ‘straingers’ ‘bring in straing rootes’ which are the cause of ‘infeccion’ and social disorder. As John Jowett notes, the manuscript spelling ‘straing’ also occurs in the  Quarto of A Lover’s Complaint (line ), although he does not comment on the suggestion made by earlier scholars that this is one of the ‘rare spellings’ that furnish further evidence of Shakespeare’s authorship. More significantly for my purposes, this is one of two spelling forms – the other is the less rare form ‘straying’ – in which the two, etymologically and phonetically distinct words, ‘straying’ and ‘strange’ (in modern spelling), ‘bleed into each other’ as Peter Stallybrass puts it, an instance of what, with Margreta de Grazia, he has described as the ‘verbal vagrancy’ of the ‘semantic field’ of early modern texts unconstrained by normative orthography (such as cultural reformers sought to install). Their phrase ‘verbal vagrancy’ is indeed as   



Abbes Maazaoui comments: ‘The ghost’s outsider status is a fitting metaphor for the present/absent condition of marginalized groups’. ‘Introduction’, in Maazaoui, ed., Making Strangers, xv. Munday and others, The Book of Sir Thomas More, , lines , –. Munday and Chettle, Sir Thomas More, ., note to line . G. Harold Metz, ‘“Voice and credyt”: the Scholars and Sir Thomas More’, in T. H. Howard-Hill, ed., Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More: Essays on the Play and Its Shakespearian Interest (Cambridge University Press, ), . The authorship of A Lover’s Complaint is itself of course a vigorously contested question. Stallybrass, ‘Shakespeare, the Individual and the Text’, ; De Grazia and Stallybrass, ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’, –.

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Shakespeare and ‘the straingers case’

pertinent to this instance of ‘linguistic errancy’ as it is to their instance of ‘weyward’/‘weyard’ from Macbeth. Illustrated, as I shall now show, by texts outside the Shakespearean corpus as well as by two other texts within it – Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Lover’s Complaint (assuming Shakespearean authorship) – the bleeding, or blending of ‘straying’ into ‘strange’ in the phrase ‘straing roots’ combines with the polyvalency of the word ‘roots’ to furnish an alternative to the view of the strangers as vehicles of infection, which anticipates More’s speech. In A Lover’s Complaint the adjective ‘straing’, which has been consistently, and sometimes silently emended to ‘strange’ by editors, including the editors of The Norton Shakespeare and the editors of the New Oxford modern spelling edition, is used of the diverse ‘forms’ produced out of the ‘plenitude’ of the seducer’s imagination (lines –), which, if perverse in its purpose, is as ‘extravagant’ as the ‘spirit’ of Holofernes, ‘full of’ diverse ‘forms’ (Love’s Labour’s Lost, ..), straying in its character as in its effect, which is to have led the titular female figure astray. Her case might be summed up by the comment of the protagonist Promos in George Whetstone’s tragicomedy Promos and Cassandra (): ‘O straying effectes, of blinde affected Love, / From wisdomes pathes, which doth astraye our wittes’. Despite the evident link to ‘astraye’ James Halliwell here emended ‘straying’ to ‘strange’, as Richard David, the second Arden editor of Love’s Labour’s Lost notes, who follows Halliwell when he cites this passage in his gloss to ‘straying’, again consistently emended, since Capell, to ‘strange’, in Biron’s speech on the character and effects of love (in Quarto and Folio): full of vnbefitting straines, All wanton as a childe, skipping and vaine. Formd by the eye, and therefore like the eye. Full of straying shapes, of habites, and of formes: Varying in subiectes, as the eye doth roule, To euery varied obiect in his glaunce:  

George Whetstone, The right excellent and famous historye, of Promos and Cassandra (London, ), ., n.p. William Shakespeare, Love’s Labor’s Lost (Quarto I, ), ed. Timothy Billings, internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/LLL_Q/scene/./ accessed  March  (–; punctuation and spelling forms as given); William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. Richard David (London: Methuen, ), note to ... G. R. Hibbard suggests ‘straying’ may be a compositor’s misinterpretation of the ‘straing’ or ‘straynge’ of the manuscript, a suggestion endorsed in the original spelling edition of the New Oxford Shakespeare, which glosses it ‘[g]raphical error’ and which (like Hibbard) cross-references the phrase ‘straing rootes’. See William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Oxford University Press, ), note to ..; William

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‘straingers’ as the ‘root’ of Infection



As in the lines in A Lover’s Complaint, there is plenitude (‘full . . . full’) and variety (‘varying . . . varied’) in a wandering of the eye and the imagination across ‘proper’ bounds (‘vnbefitting strains’), mirrored in wandering words from ‘straines’ to ‘straying/strange’, which are connected not only orthographically but also through the anaphora ‘full of’. It is thus not necessary to refer, as David does, to what he calls a ‘parallel’ passage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (..–, the speech of Theseus on the imagination), which, he argues, would support either ‘strange’ or ‘straying’, although he does not entertain the possibility that it might support both. Both are certainly implied in the other cited, non-Shakespearean instance of ‘straying’, which comes in yet another denunciation of love in John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (). Love is here described again as a turning away from the right or proper path as well as a sickness for which various cures, including the study of theology, are proposed to the lovesick Philautus by Euphues, who adds, ‘if this seem too strait a diet for thy straying disease or too holy a profession for so hollow a person’, then Philautus should try martial arts. Here a second pair of orthographically and phonetically similar word forms with contrastive senses – ‘holy’ and ‘hollow’ – draws out the relation of phonetic/orthographic likeness and semantic contrast in the first pair – ‘strait’ and ‘straying’ – summoning the sense of ‘straying’ as wandering as well as ‘strange’ to which ‘straying’ has again been frequently emended by editors. Indeed, even when not blended in a single form, as in these instances, the words exercise a power of attraction over each other, as in Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller when an English exile in Italy interrogates the protagonist Jack Wilton: ‘Countriman, tell mee what is the occasion of thy straying so farre out of England to visit this strange Nation’. The sense of straying as well as strange in ‘straing’ together with the polyvalent word ‘rootes’ provides then, at least for readers, a metonym of the case of the strangers, who are made strange, like their food, by their straying with, and from their defining origins (‘roots’). This anticipates the view of the strangers proposed through the speeches of Shakespeare’s

  

Shakespeare, The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works: Critical Reference Edition, gen. eds. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan,  vols. (Oxford University Press, ), I, , gloss to ... The Norton gives ‘straying’. Lyly, Euphues, . Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, Or, The Life of Jacke Wilton (London, ), sig. Lv. The question of how ‘straing’ might have been spoken – and whether both words would have been heard as well as seen – lies beyond the scope of this discussion. It is, however, an important question of more general relevance, which is not considered by De Grazia and Stallybrass in the seminal essays mentioned above.

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

Shakespeare and ‘the straingers case’

More, and suggests an alternative to the view of strangers as carriers of infection, ironised as a misrecognition, or mistake, as in the comedies of the s, in which the strangers’ case is assimilated to a case of mistaken identity. The citizens’ view of the strangers is, in addition, discredited for, as critics have remarked, Lincoln and his fellow citizens are transformed here from the dignified individuals of the opening scenes to ‘a clownish mob led by an ignorant demagogue’. This allows Shakespeare to dramatise how ideology translates as a collective popular stigmatisation of the stranger as the ‘root’ of the ills of the city which, to cite Jacques Derrida on the pharmakon, ‘reconstitutes its unity . . . by violently excluding from its territory’ the figure that represents ‘the otherness of the evil that comes to affect or infect the inside’. What is dramatised, in short, even as it is discredited, is the recurrent popular scapegoating of strangers.

‘being a stranger in this city’: Straying Strangers in the Comedies ‘Thus strangers may be haled and abused’ (..) is how Vincentio of Pisa responds to the rough treatment he receives in Padua when he arrives to visit his son Lucentio in the last act of The Taming of the Shrew, another play now generally agreed to date from the early s. Vincentio, of course, does not know, as the audience does, that this treatment is due to a mistake, or misrecognition, his identity having been assumed by a pedant who, ironically enough, has been persuaded to assume this identity for the (improvised) reason that, as a stranger from Mantua, he would be in danger in Padua (..–). Framed as a comic ‘ado’ (..) by an on-stage audience (the couple Petruchio and Kate) and almost immediately resolved, the moment of conflict and violence nevertheless represents an irruption of the harsh reality of ‘the strangers’ case’ into this comic plot of ‘supposes’, which inflects the case as a function of ‘a mystaking or 







The association of strangers with infection finds expression too in official documents: in , for instance, the Lord Mayor received orders from Sir William Cecil to disperse groups of strangers where ‘moch infection grew’ because of overcrowding. See Yungblut, Strangers Settled, . Anthony Munday and others, Sir Thomas More, ed. Vittorio Gabrieli and Giorgio Melchiori (Manchester University Press, ), . For these editors this makes Shakespeare’s contribution ‘the one discordant note in a well-planned play’. As cited in John Drakakis, ‘Introduction’, in John Drakakis, ed., Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Longman, ), . That Shakespeare is consistently opposed to stigma is claimed in Wilson, ‘“You must needs be strangers”’, . Dated to ‘ or earlier’ in the Norton (), it is dated in the New Oxford ‘probable: late ’. William Shakespeare, The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition, ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan (Oxford University Press, ), .

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Straying Strangers in the Comedies



imagination of one thing for another’, as a case, in short, of mistaken identity. In contrast to the violence experienced by Vincentio, his son Lucentio and his servant Tranio discover the emancipatory possibilities of the condition of ‘being a stranger in this city’ (..) since, as they cannot ‘be distinguished by [their] faces / For man or master’ (..–), the master can ‘exchange [his] state’ (..) with the servant by a theatrical fiat: ‘Tranio is changed into Lucentio’ (..). Tranio in particular takes great pleasure in his change of state, carrying it off with such brio that even when he returns to his state of servant he is mis-addressed, if not mistaken, as ‘Signior Tranio’ (..). His pleasure echoes that of the tinker Christopher Sly in the frame to the play, who finds himself mistaken as a lord in a ‘strange’ condition (Induction , line ), although this is brought about not by change of place, but by a lord’s whim to play a practical joke. Nevertheless, a narrative of displacement is implied by the places and acquaintances named by Sly in his vigorous assertion of who he is (Induction , lines –). For, as others have noted, these locate his origins – ‘roots’ – in the vicinity of Stratford, the place of origin of his creator, who, in moving to London, found himself, as ‘Englishman forren’, in the strangers’ case. Assimilated to cases of mistaken identity, the strangers’ case is then shown in this early play to offer (utopic) possibilities for social mobility and self-fashioning as well as entailing real risks of exclusionary violence. 







This is the definition of the ‘suppose’ from the main source of this subplot, George Gascoigne’s Supposes, as quoted in William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Brian Morris (London: Methuen, ), . Morris quotes the snobbish sneer in the New Cambridge Shakespeare (): ‘This title sits oddly upon the son of a “sail-maker in Bergamo”’, referring to the origins of Tranio mentioned in ..–. Shakespeare, Shrew, ed. Morris, note to ... See Shakespeare, Shrew, ed. Morris, notes to Induction , lines , , . These references have recently been taken to suggest ‘resemblances’ with the world of The Merry Wives of Windsor, similarly ‘replete with local references that evoke the actual world the playwright and his first audiences inhabited’. Gajowski and Rackin, ‘Introduction’, in Gajowski and Rackin, eds., The Merry Wives of Windsor, . This is to ignore the distance between Stratford and London as lived by Shakespeare and his London audience. Indeed, the places evoked by Sly would have been foreign to London theatre audiences as London would have been foreign to (many if not all) members of rural communities across England, as, we shall see, the second tetralogy highlights. Shakespeare joins too the professional shape-shifters who were the players, introduced in Shrew as collaborators in the dream of social transformation lived by Sly. Of ambiguous social status officially classed as ‘vagrants’ players were regularly castigated for assuming the characters of social superiors such as lords. More generally, the player was an ‘extravagant’ or straying ‘stranger’ inasmuch as in assuming other identities he was called upon to stray across defining proper boundaries of gender and nation as well as of region and estate. See Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Shakespeare’s Extravagancy’, –. For Shakespeare’s status as ‘Englishman forren’, see Chapter , –.

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Shakespeare and ‘the straingers case’

The pleasures of the utopic occasion enjoyed by Sly are represented in terms of a dream both by the Lord (Induction , line ) and by Sly himself (Induction , line ). Sly’s amazement finds more elaborate expression in the speeches of Sebastian in Twelfth Night, who likens his reception in Illyria to a dream (..–, ..–). Like Vincentio in Padua, Sebastian is, moreover, a ‘stranger’ in Illyria (..). More precisely, he is from the city state of Messaline and, as Trevor Nunn’s  film version underscored, there is a simmering hostility between Illyria and ‘our city’ (..), as Messaline is described by Sebastian’s companion, Antonio, although it is only Antonio that suffers the consequences of ‘the danger of this adverse town’ (..), and, ironically, not because he is unknown (as Sebastian and Viola are unknown), but because he is known: ‘I know your favor well’ (..), ‘That face . . . I do remember well’ (..). Ironically too, Sebastian finds himself the object of unexpected and unprovoked violence (..–), but, unlike Vincentio in Shrew, he puts this down to a generalised madness (..), and not to the ‘[r]ough and unhospitable’ treatment that, Antonio advises him, a ‘stranger’ like him might receive ‘in these parts’ (..–). Again too the audience knows that, like the violence suffered by Vincentio, this is due to a mistaking, here of Sebastian for Cesario-Viola, rather than to his condition as a stranger. Indeed, in this later play Antonio’s advice proves irrelevant to Sebastian and a plot in which the case of the stranger as a function of straying from one’s roots into a (hostile) city-state yields to the case of the stranger as a function of the straying into fancy or love. A condition ‘full of straying/strange shapes’, as Biron comments in the speech discussed earlier, this leads to ‘error’ (Love’s Labour’s Lost, ..), a wandering into a state of self-estrangement which is recurrently dramatised in the romantic comedies as a remove not to another city but to the emblematic location of a forest or wood. In this respect, as Anne Barton pointed out long ago, Twelfth Night is anomalous since there is no ‘contrasting environment’ to Illyria, and even Messaline is ‘more shadowy than Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors’. Her comparison is instructive for the suggestion that the conflict between city-states and the advice given by Antonio about the risks run by Sebastian as a stranger in Illyria are a reminder, or remainder of the earlier play which, as observers have long



Anne Barton, ‘As You Like It and Twelfth Night: Shakespeare’s Sense of an Ending’, in Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer, eds., Shakespearian Comedy, Stratford Upon Avon Studies  (London: Edward Arnold, ), –.

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A Nation of Strangers in the Second Tetralogy



recognised, Twelfth Night resembles, and in which this conflict and the risks for the stranger are foregrounded. Indeed, the action of Errors takes place under the threat of the death penalty to which, in the opening lines of the play, the ‘Merchant of Syracusa’ Egeon (..) is condemned by the Duke as a direct consequence of the hostility between the ‘adverse towns’ () of Syracuse and Ephesus. Egeon’s son, Antipholus of Syracuse, is, moreover, only too conscious of the risks he and his servant run as ‘strangers here’ (..), and his reception, which he represents in terms of madness and sorcery as well as dream (..–, –), and which is once again due to ‘mistaking’ – here of one Antipholus (of Syracuse) for another (of Ephesus) – is linked with his status as a stranger in the city as it is not in the case of Sebastian in Twelfth Night, but as it is in the case of Vincentio in Shrew, which, like Errors, dates from the early s, the period of intense hostility towards strangers in London.

‘I am a stranger here’: A Nation of Strangers in the Second Tetralogy The common and contingent character of ‘the strangers’ case’ is brought ‘home’ in the second tetralogy of history plays, which proposes a view of (the) English – language and people – as a ‘gallimaufry’, a mix of diverse mutual strangers. As we saw in Chapter , the figure of ‘the gallimaufry’ is set against the trope of ‘the King’s English’ in The Merry Wives of Windsor, a comedy overtly, if problematically, linked to the last three plays of the tetralogy, in order, as I argued, to affirm an idea of (the) English as an inclusive, accommodating mix. This is associated specifically with the figure of the impecunious, nomadic gentleman, John Falstaff, who features prominently in the second tetralogy as he does in the comedy. Generically experimental as well as mixed, as critics have often remarked, these history plays, especially the last three, correspond to the sense of the figure of ‘the gallimaufry’ as this is used in the first recorded instance of a generic mix as well as to the subsequent more common sense of the vernacular mixed through the introduction of new, especially Latinate words. For the plays (especially the last three) exhibit a lexical and stylistic range (like Merry Wives) as well as (and corresponding to) a range and diversity of locations and social milieux. Resonant, as I shall consider, with lived 



The likeness is noted in the  diary of John Manningham. See Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, ed. Lothian and Craik, xxvi, xlvii–xlix; Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Comedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), –. See, for example, Kastan, ‘Introduction’, in Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part I, –; Lawrence Danson, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres (Oxford University Press, ), .

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Shakespeare and ‘the straingers case’

experience in pre-/early modern England, this view of (the) English as a nation of strangers implies the argument of Shakespeare’s More that the strangers’ case is common and contingent, a case in which anyone may find themselves if they stray beyond the defining boundaries of their ‘roots’. The point is explicitly foregrounded in Richard II when the Earl of Northumberland responds to Bolingbroke’s enquiry, ‘How far is it, my lord, to Berkeley now?’ (..): Believe me, noble lord, I am a stranger here in Gloucestershire. These high wild hills and rough uneven ways Draws out our miles and makes them wearisome (..–)

The stress on ‘here’ emphasises that the strangers’ case in which Northumberland finds himself is a function of his removal from the regional territorial base that defines his aristocratic identity carried in the patronym. The hostility met by strangers is projected onto the natural environment (the Cotswolds), which Northumberland describes as ‘rough’, as Antonio describes the treatment a stranger such as Sebastian might receive in Illyria, and ‘wild’. That this is a projection by Northumberland of the hostility felt by a ‘stranger’ is underscored by the irony that the Pennines of his home base are far more ‘wild’ and ‘rough’ than the Cotswolds. In the next play in the series it is Northumberland’s son Hotspur who is the stranger, a figure of wildness, ‘wasp-stung and impatient’ ( Henry IV, ..) as his father describes him, incapable of attending to what is said, as he is of recalling the (for him as for his father foreign) ‘place . . . in Gloucestershire’ to which, in the earlier scene, Bolingbroke was travelling with Northumberland (..–). His inability to attend is evident again in a later scene, which sees a confrontation between the distracted nobleman from the north and the Welsh lord Owen Glendower, who are strangers to each other. Glendower has earlier been described as ‘irregular and wild’ of ‘rude hands’ (..–), but proves in this encounter to be, as Allison Outland comments, ‘not at all as he’s been described: he’s a courtly and generous host . . . far more . . . civilized than his uncouth guest’. 



William Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Andrew Gurr (Cambridge University Press, ), note to ... Editors have expressed surprise at Northumberland’s characterisation of the Cotswolds given the character of the Pennines but they have not thought to go beyond a literal reading of these lines. Allison M. Outland, ‘“Eat a Leek”: Welsh Corrections, English Conditions, and British Cultural Communion’, in Maley and Tudeau-Clayton, eds., This England, That Shakespeare, .

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A Nation of Strangers in the Second Tetralogy



This is underscored by the figures of Worcester and Mortimer, who furnish a choral commentary on the encounter (original to Shakespeare), which depicts Glendower as ‘a worthy gentlemen, / Exceedingly well read, . . . / . . . valiant . . . / . . . affable . . . bountiful’ (..–), and Hotspur as ‘too willful-blame’ in his exhibition of ‘harsh rage’ (, ). As Outland points out, the scene furnishes a ‘corrective’ to what she calls English ‘cultural astigmatism’ with respect to the Welsh. Indeed, the English perception of the Welsh is exposed as a ‘mistake’ even as, Outland argues, attention is drawn to the uses such a view serves. This is comparable to what is done in Shakespeare’s contribution to Sir Thomas More, which seeks to ‘correct’ the popular perception of strangers as the origin of social evils. Similarly too, through the choral speeches of Worcester and Mortimer, Shakespeare urges, as he does through the speeches of More, the imperative to mutual courtesy and forbearance between those who are strangers to each other and whose differences, like the differences between the English, French and Scots in the comic vignette in Merchant (..–) and between the Scots, Irish and Welsh in Henry V (.) tend to (barely constrained) violence. The incomprehension between these mutual strangers is highlighted by Hotspur’s use of ‘Welsh’ in response to Glendower’s description, in English, of the supernatural ‘signs’ that have ‘marked’ him as ‘extraordinary’ (..–): ‘I think there’s no man speaks better Welsh’ (). The first instance in the OED of the generic sense of ‘Welsh’ as a type of unintelligible foreign tongue, this illustrates not only Hotspur’s characteristic failure to attend, but also (again) English cultural astigmatism, or rather cultural deafness. For, if critics have tended to take the speeches and the songs in authentic (as distinct from stage) Welsh performed by Glendower’s daughter as representing either the threat of the radical otherness of (the) ‘outlandish’ Welsh, or their resistance to assimilation, they may also, or rather, be read as inviting attention to the Welsh language in all its haunting, musical particularity and so the correction of the cultural deafness illustrated by Hotspur for whom Welsh is merely a type of unintelligible tongue. It is not only the language that is assimilated to a generic sense. As John Cheke observes, ‘welsch men’ was the name given by the ‘germans and our

 

Notably, though not only, in Howard and Rackin, Engendering a Nation, –. Matthew Greenfield, ‘I Henry IV: Metatheatrical Britain’, in David J. Baker and Willy Maley, eds., British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge University Press, ), –.

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

Shakespeare and ‘the straingers case’

old Saxons’ to what ‘[we] now call’ ‘strangers and outborns, and outlandisch’. This generic significance of the Welsh as type of stranger bears on Shakespeare’s Welsh characters, in Merry Wives as well as in the second tetralogy, particularly insofar as they are associated with other constitutive ‘others’ of the hypothesised communities of ‘we’ ‘English’ summoned by self-appointed cultural reformers such as Cheke. While in Merry Wives, it is, as we have seen, the French that are associated with the Welsh, in the second tetralogy it is the figure of the nomadic English gentleman and courtier John Falstaff. This association is forged specifically through a repeated remembering/forgetting: in  Henry IV Falstaff forgets the name of Glendower, but remembers his colourful idiom (..–), while in Henry V the Welsh captain Fluellen forgets the name of Falstaff but remembers his linguistic habits, notably the habit of ‘synonymia’, which Fluellen also practises (..–). Forgetting ‘proper’ names, which divide, these figures meet on the common ground of shared linguistic extravagance, and in the case of Fluellen and Falstaff, a shared practice which more than any other displays and celebrates ‘our English’ as a ‘gallimaufry’ (Chapter ). Set against the drive of cultural reformation ideology to a normative centre of plainness to be produced through the exclusion as ‘strangers’ of such practices/speakers, this idea of ‘our English’ is promoted in Merry Wives through the culturally resonant figure of the Host of the Inn. Indeed, the scene of reconciliation between ‘strangers’, in which he explicitly promotes social and cultural mixing as an irenic alternative to violence, is comparable to this scene in  Henry IV, which likewise, if less explicitly, calls for accommodation rather than repression or denial of cultural differences. As Michael Bogdanov has observed, it ‘says everything that needs to be said about racial, cultural, linguistic tolerance’. This accommodation, or tolerance, finds a ground or reason in the argument made by Shakespeare’s More that anyone may find themselves, as Hotspur and Glendower find themselves here, in the strangers’ case. The argument is implicit not only to this scene but also to the play as a whole, which, as Matthew Greenfield has finely argued, proposes a view of the nation as a nation of mutual strangers. It is indeed in the very recognition of this as a common condition that the potential for a sense of kinship – a sense of  



As quoted in Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Shakespeare’s “welsch men”’, . See too Hawkes, ‘Bryn Glas’, , . See Philip Schwyzer, ‘“The Lady Speaks in Welsh”: Henry IV, Part I as Multilingual Drama’, in Michael Saenger, ed., Interlinguicity, Internationality and Shakespeare (Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, ), . Greenfield, ‘I Henry IV: Metatheatrical Britain’.

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A Nation of Strangers in the Second Tetralogy



‘we’ – lies, as I take up below. It is, moreover, precisely such a sense of kinship that hostile citizens are moved to feel by Shakespeare’s More, who persuades them to see strangers differently by imagining themselves in their case. Furthermore, the speeches and songs in Welsh of this ‘multilingual play’, as Philip Schwyzer proposes that we consider  Henry IV, call upon (modern as well as early modern) audiences to recognise themselves as, like Hotspur, in the strangers’ case, even if, as others have argued, there may have been a ‘highly visible minority’ of Welsh speakers in early modern London. This effect is strengthened, even as it is complicated by a littlediscussed exchange between Hotspur and his wife Kate at the end of the scene, which invites London citizens to see themselves as strangers not only to the Welsh speaking nobility at England’s western limit, but also to the nobility from its northern limit. Quarrelling with Kate for the style of her oath ‘in good sooth’ (..), Hotspur proceeds mockingly to classify it with others he lists as speech forms which belong to the community of London ‘citizens’ (), whose cultural habits – food and dress as well as speech – and defining northern geographical limit (Finsbury Fields) are objectified by his outsider’s gaze. As David Scott Kastan notes, Hotspur’s speech here ‘reveals a surprising knowledge of the habits of London citizenry’, called on to see themselves as objectified and mocked strangers to the English nobleman from the north, rather as, in Merchant, English spectators are invited to see themselves as (mocked) strangers to the Italians in Belmont/Venice by the illusion-breaking moment in .. discussed in Chapter . Once again relativising as well as objectifying cultural habits this moment works specifically to dislodge citizens’ view of themselves and their cultural ‘habits’ as the normative centre of ‘the English’ – a view that tends to be promoted, as we have seen, by the centripetal drive to homogeneity of cultural reformation ideology. London is a place of strangers not only for the nobleman from the north but also for the servant from the rural community introduced in  Henry IV, although, for him, it is an object of wistful aspiration: ‘I hope to see London once ere I die’ (..). The distance between these two worlds is again cultural as well as geographical. For if, as I argued in Chapter , this rural community tends to be idealised as a ‘pre-Reformation’ Edenic 



Most recently in Marissa R. Cull, Shakespeare’s Princes of Wales: English Identity and the Welsh Connection (Oxford University Press, ); quotation from the review by David Hawkes, ‘Ram a Leek’, Times Literary Supplement,  February , . See too Hawkes, ‘Bryn Glas’, –. Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part I, ed. Kastan, note to ..–.

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Shakespeare and ‘the straingers case’

time/place in the last of the three scenes located here, it is depicted in the two earlier scenes as a self-contained, vividly full and busy world with its own demographic evoked by the many names of figures (alive or dead) who are talked about as common acquaintances, but who never appear. Specific details of daily life – a bill to be paid, red wheat to be sown, a bucket to be repaired – summon by metonymy networks of human relations and a local economy centred on regional fairs whether Stamford (..) or Hinkley (..). This vividly particularised self-contained rural world is, at the same time, imprecisely situated, as editors have frequently commented, noting the indications of Lincolnshire (Stamford) and Gloucestershire (Hinkley), without considering the generalising thrust of this imprecision, how, that is, this community in all its socio-cultural and material particularity at the same time carries representative significance as one of many such self-contained, busy rural worlds across the counties of England. In this respect these scenes bear comparison with the scenes of rural life produced by Peter Bruegel which, as Joseph Koerner has observed, fuse the general with ‘ethnographic specificity’ – the ‘style’ of a local community – and ‘[p]sychological plausibility’. Davy, for instance, is not only not portrayed as a type of ignorant rustic, but he is individualised as a competent, if venal manager who combines self-interest with the efficient running of his master’s household. As in the depiction of the Welsh in  Henry IV, the difference of the rural community is conveyed through particularity, although it is not the particularity of a different language, but a material, cultural and demographic particularity evoked in (the English) language. Indeed, the language spoken by the members of this community is tellingly not differentiated by the stage regional dialects conventionally used to render rustic figures objects of derisory laughter. In short, like Bruegel in visual art, Shakespeare depicts a rural community as it had not been depicted before on the London stage, a reminder, perhaps touched with nostalgia, of ‘home’ for internal immigrants, a larger minority than the Welsh, which included Will Shakespeare, like ‘Will Squeal, a Cotswold man’ (..), who may have known Hinkley, if not Stamford fair. 

 

Koerner, Bosch and Bruegel, . See too his comment on the ‘ordinariness’ of the depictions of ‘a village church, cottages . . . people at their everyday pursuits’, which imply ‘endlessly more places like this one’ (). See Blank, Broken English, –. Hinkley is about thirty miles north-east of Stratford-upon-Avon, while Stamford is about sixty miles. Another local connection to Shakespeare has been discerned in the name of one of the recruits, Thomas Wart, which resembles ‘Thomas Warter, carpenter of Chipping Campden near

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A Nation of Strangers in the Second Tetralogy



Again, this depiction of a rural community serves as a corrective to citizens called upon to recognise that they would be strangers in such a community as they would be in the Welsh borderlands. The rural community is, moreover, a world Prince Hal never enters – one of ‘the corners of the nation’ he does not visit in his travels – tellingly since, as I argued in Chapter , it is a world that, in the last of the three scenes, is represented as about to be lost in the centripetal homogenising drive of cultural reformation ideology with its attendant Lenten regime of temperance, dramatised in the banishment of Falstaff. It is indeed rather through this figure of the nomadic gentleman that the world of the rural community is linked to the other worlds of the play and we might consider him the ‘chorographer’ of the realm rather than Hal, as Julie Sanders has suggested, all the more so as, we shall see in Chapter , he is linked in Merry Wives to the Cornish gentleman Richard Carew, one of Britain’s more eminent chorographers. As René Weis observes,  Henry IV is dominated by Falstaff, who speaks more lines and appears in more scenes than Hal or the king and who, with his emblematically expanding girth, encompasses its diverse worlds, a figure again, as in Merry Wives, of the idea of ‘our English’ as ‘a gallimaufry’ – an inclusive, diverse and mobile mix. If recent work has drawn attention to the relation of early modern drama to travel writing, it is important to bear in mind that travel ‘was undertaken by only a small percentage of the population’ and that Shakespeare’s depiction of England/Britain as a nation of strangers corresponds to what historians have described as common lived experience: ‘most people in the pre-modern era lived in small self-sufficient communities’ with ‘little or no contact with persons outside a limited radius’ who





 

Stratford’. See King Henry IV, Part II, ed. A. R. Humphreys (London: Methuen, ), note to ... Compare the local references in the ‘Induction’ to Shrew discussed above. That the rural world with its traditional customs was becoming a world remote in time as well as place to ‘the pious tradesman’s London’ is signalled by the ‘fiction of describing a foreign country’ in Philip Stubbes’s An Anatomy of Abuses (), as Barber points out. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, . Julie Sanders, ‘Making the Land Known: Henry IV, Parts  and  and the Literature of Perambulation’, in Claire Jowitt and David McInnis, eds., Travel and Drama in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, ), . This is a blind spot in what is otherwise a useful discussion of Hal as ‘chorographer’ ‘seeking’ through travel ‘to understand and capture’ the ‘variation and diversity in the realm’. Shakespeare, Henry IV Part Two, ed. Weis, . Claire Jowitt and David McInnis, ‘Introduction: Understanding the Early Modern Journeying Play’, in Jowitt and McInnis, eds., Travel and Drama in Early Modern England, . The collection exemplifies this recent turn of attention.

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

Shakespeare and ‘the straingers case’

consequently tended to be viewed ‘with suspicion’, hence the assimilation of the ‘straying’ traveller with the stranger (see above and again below). This is borne out by early recorded instances of the words ‘foreigner’ and ‘stranger’, which are used more or less interchangeably of those from outside a given community, which could be as broad as a nation but which was usually much narrower – a county, parish, or guild. As I have mentioned, internal immigrants to London were classified as ‘Englishmen forren’ in demographic surveys carried out by the municipal authorities, while those born outside the parish where they were either baptised or buried were classified as ‘strangers’ in parochial registers across England. Benedict Anderson’s well-known phrase, a ‘nation of strangers’, thus has particular pertinence to early modern England, which the second tetralogy reflects. Anderson’s phrase has been taken up by Greenfield, who, as I have mentioned, argues that  Henry IV offers a view of England/Britain as a nation of strangers, although he does not discuss its reflection of common lived experience. He does, however, make the point that no form of mediation is offered in the play which would serve as a unifying ‘glue’ through ‘acts of imaginative sympathy’ such as Anderson proposes were generated by novels and newspapers in modern England. On the other hand, Claire McEachern has suggested that the Tudor-Stuart church-state apparatus provided just such a ‘catalyst of temporal and social synchronicity’ both in the prescribed homilies, which ‘aspired to propagate a certain synchronicity of thought and action’, and in The Book of Common Prayer, ‘whose prescriptions for the . . . uniform consumption of the vernacular Bible promote an ideal of social simultaneity’. Unlike Anderson’s novels and newspapers, however, these forms of mediation were imposed in what was a coercive centripetal drive to cultural homogeneity. In its mix of genres, places, character types and speech styles, the second tetralogy produces rather what Greenfield calls (in relation to  Henry IV) a ‘centrifugal tendency’, which carries a resistance to the centripetal drive of the church-state apparatus, setting the common lived experience of cultural difference and diversity, metonymically figured in the ‘variation of each soil’ between North and South ( Henry IV, ..), against the unity and uniformity engineered by the church-state apparatus through    

 Yungblut, Strangers Settled, . OED ‘foreigner’  and ‘stranger’ a, b and a.  OED ‘stranger’ b. Greenfield, ‘I Henry IV: Metatheatrical Britain’, . McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, , . Greenfield, ‘I Henry IV: Metatheatrical Britain’, .

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The Stranger in the Bible



the prescribed forms of this imposed ‘common’ book. Similarly, in Merry Wives, as we have seen, the ‘gallimaufry’ of ‘our English’ is set against the ‘one manner’ of ‘plain’ language that the trope of ‘the King’s English’ represents and is mobilised to produce. Indeed, together with the vernacular bible, The Book of Common Prayer served cultural reformers’ aspiration to linguistic and cultural uniformity. This is advertised in the preface to the  version, which lays claim to ‘suche a language . . . as is moste easy and plain for the understandyng, bothe of the readers and hearers’ across the nation.

‘I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner’: The Stranger in the Bible Ironically, Shakespeare’s portrait of the nation finds echo – and ground – in this very book of common prayer, specifically in readings from the Old and New Testament, to be read annually in their entirety once and three times respectively. For the figure of the stranger features recurrently: in representations of the human condition (in the Old Testament, notably the Psalms), or of the early Christian church (in the New Testament Epistles), and as the object of a divine injunction to hospitable charity (in both the Old and New Testaments). While there is a universalising thrust to the first at odds with, and resistant to the aspiration to a separate homogeneous national identity (and language) that the ‘common’ book was designed to serve, the last is in direct contradiction with the violence towards strangers propagated by exclusionary definitions of ‘true’ or proper Englishness. Indeed, as I indicated earlier, Old Testament example and precept were expressly mobilised to oppose those representatives of the city who spoke against strangers in the parliamentary debate of  when Henry Finch aligned the lived experience of the Israelites in Egypt with that of English exiles under the Marian regime to argue the contingency of the strangers’ case and to urge consequently that they be welcomed in accord with Christ’s injunction to ‘do as we would be done unto’, or ‘neighbourly charity’, as Portia calls it. Finch’s intervention is echoed not only in Shakespeare’s contribution to Sir Thomas More, as I discussed above, but also (and more fully) in a sermon preached by George Abbot 

The Book of Common Prayer, ed. Cummings, . See Stephen L. White, ‘The Book of Common Prayer and the Standardization of the English Language’, The Anglican : (), –. In a retrospective ‘observation that Swift ascribes to the earl of Oxford ()’ ‘those Books being perpetually read in Churches’, are claimed to ‘have proved a kind of Standard for language’. See Görlach, Introduction to Early Modern English, –.

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Shakespeare and ‘the straingers case’

(future archbishop of Canterbury) in the late summer of , as I take up below in my discussion of The Comedy of Errors, which was performed (perhaps for the first time) at the end of that year. As Abbot’s sermon recalls, Finch’s argument from recent lived experience had earlier been made by radical voices in , the year of the St Bartholomew massacre, which saw a huge influx of French protestant refugees. As we shall see, these radical voices also appeal to the ‘one body’ of a universal Christian church, a figure with a specific as well as general force of resistance to the exclusionary unity of the ‘true’ English of cultural reformation ideology. A figure derived from New Testament Epistles, notably those attributed to Paul, this body is represented in the Epistle to the Ephesians in terms of strangers made citizens in the household of God, as I consider in my discussion of Errors, which, through its biblical intertexts, intervenes, if less directly than the Shakespearean contribution to Sir Thomas More, in the conflict around ‘strangers’, again making the case for their inclusion. The Pauline model of the early church is elaborated by Saint Augustine who (like passages in the Epistles discussed below) joins the figure of the pilgrim to the figure of the stranger in his vision of the City of God. Like the Old Testament representation of the human condition as that of a stranger, the New Testament/Augustinian representation of the Christian community as a ‘body’ of strangers/pilgrims carries a call for a recognition of kinship, less on the grounds that ‘we may become strangers’ as on the grounds that our ‘own case and condition’ is that of the stranger, as Caleb Dalechamp puts it in a chapter on the ‘Motives to hospitality’. Once again it is a recognition that carries the imperative to practise the spiritual and ethical ideal of ‘neighbourly charity’. It is indeed ‘charity’ that animates the community of citizen-pilgrim-strangers in Augustine’s City of God as it animates the Pauline model of the church. In the Old Testament the stranger as a figure of the human condition is evoked above all in the Psalms, ‘among the most familiar texts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England’, as Hannibal Hamlin has



Caleb Dalechamp, Christian hospitalitie handled common-place-wise in the chappel of Trinity Colledge in Cambridge (Cambridge, ), , . Developing a logical relation between the contingency of the strangers’ case and the ontological condition of the human as the condition of a stranger, Dalechamp, who was himself a French refugee, rehearses arguments made earlier by Henry Finch and by George Abbot in the sermon discussed below, which is explicitly referenced (marginal note, ). For Scott Oldenburg, the treatise provides a ‘theorization’ of what he calls (unfortunately in my view) the ‘sectarian inclusivity’ of a ‘multicultural’ community constructed on shared religious beliefs. Oldenburg, Alien Albion, –, –.

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demonstrated, prescribed by The Book of Common Prayer to be read in their entirety each month in churches across England. Appointed to be read on the third Sunday after Trinity as well as in evening prayer on the twenty-fourth day of each month, Psalm  calls for collective as well as individual assent to the psalmist’s utterance, ‘I am a stranger upon earth’, and to the consequent expressed need for direction, ‘hide not thy commandements from me’. The verse is explicitly glossed in the Geneva Bible as a comment on the human condition: ‘Seing mans life in this worlde is but a passage, what shulde become of him, if thy worde were not his guide?’ It is with the ephemerality, and vanity of mankind, as subjectively experienced by the psalmist, that the figure is associated again in Psalm , appointed to be read at morning prayer on the eighth day of every month and destined to be adopted as one of the ‘processional psalms’ at the service for the burial of the dead: ‘Behold, thou hast made my days as it were a span long: and mine age is even as nothing in respect of thee, and verily every man living is altogether vanity . . . I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner’. As editors have noted, the prayerbook version of the first of these two verses finds echo in the first of the ‘civil sayings’ (..) posted by Orlando and read by Celia in As You Like It. Rendered more physically as a felt tightening of the body, even as it is verbally expanded, the psalmist’s ‘span long’ of ‘mine age’ becomes here the ‘stretching of a span’ which ‘[b]uckles in’ man’s ‘sum of age’, and which illustrates ‘how brief the life of man / Runs his erring pilgrimage’ (..–). The language of the prayerbook psalm is here joined with the figure of the pilgrim/pilgrimage with which the figure of the stranger is associated in New Testament Epistles (and by Augustine), notably in Hebrews , where the Old Testament examples of faith such as Abraham, who ‘abode . . . as in a strange countrey’, are said to have ‘confessed that they were strangers and pilgremes on the earth’, and in the first Epistle of Peter, where dispersed members of the early Christian church, addressed as ‘strangers’ in the opening verse, are urged to take their condition as ‘strangers and pilgrims’ as grounds for the practice of abstinence. In the Shakespearean reprise of these biblical/prayerbook figures, the phrase ‘erring pilgrimage’ neatly captures the combination of purposive linear     

Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge University Press, ), . Psalm :; The Book of Common Prayer, ed. Cummings, .  Marginal gloss b, sig. Vu.ir. The Book of Common Prayer, ed. Cummings, . Psalm :. The Book of Common Prayer, ed. Cummings, . Hebrews :, ;  Peter :, :.

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movement directed towards an end with non-purposive, non-linear ‘erring’ which tends to suspend (or, as Patricia Parker has argued, defer) this end. It is this combination that is dramatised in the reworking of the comic genre in the tellingly titled early instance, The Comedy of Errors. Specifically, as we will see, one of the protagonists, explicitly associated with human ‘erring’, is ‘[i]n quest’ (..) for a (re)union, delayed by ‘errors’, which augment the affective yield of joy attendant on its achievement. In this, I shall suggest, it is like the parable(s) of loss and reparation to which Two Gentlemen as well as Errors refer. ‘Psal: ’ is coupled with ‘Heb: ’, and the respective verses quoted on the title page of the encyclopaedic ‘History of the World in Sea voyages & lande Travells’, Purchas His Pilgrimage (). These textual citations are less traces of a lingering ‘medieval attitude’, as G. K. Hunter argued, than an affirmation of the pertinence of the biblical figures to the rapidly expanding horizons of knowledge produced by the development of travel, notably by those mobile professionals for whom the biblical verses corresponded to lived experience, the ‘soldiers’ and ‘merchants’ who, in another inscription, are strikingly described as ‘the Worlds two eyes to see itself’. The view mediated by these traveller-strangers is that of a world of ‘Varieties & Vanities’ as the title page (echoing Psalm ) puts it, a relative and sceptical view of the multifarious cultural diversity of the world, which we might compare to that offered by the ‘theatres’ of knowledge discussed in Chapter . Here this view is joined with biblical verses, which represent the human condition and the condition of the early Christian community as the condition of ‘erring’ strangers and pilgrims. In Edmund Spenser’s A View of the State of Ireland (probably produced in the mid-s though not published until ), a text that is unpalatable in many other respects, the striking argument is at one point made that every nation ‘in Christendome’ and ‘much further’ is ‘mingled and compounded with others’ since it was God’s purpose ‘to mingle nations . . . to make as it were one blood and kindred of all people’. The ‘one blood’ here recalls the key New Testament figure of the imagined    

Patricia Parker, ‘The Bible and the Marketplace: The Comedy of Errors’, in Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (University of Chicago Press, ), –. Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimes In five bookes (London, ). G. K. Hunter, ‘Elizabethans and Foreigners’, Shakespeare Survey  (Cambridge University Press, ), . Willy Maley, ‘“This ripping of ancestors”: the Ethnographic Present in Spenser’s A View of the State of Ireland’, in Philippa Berry and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, eds., Textures of Renaissance Knowledge (Manchester University Press, ), .

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(‘as it were’) transnational unity and attendant sense of kinship elaborated in the Pauline epistles. An indefatigable traveller of mixed origins, as Julia Kristeva has pointed out, Paul conceived of the new church as an international community of strangers whose imagined unity is figured in the ‘one blood’ and ‘one body’ of Christ, the universal ‘Un’ of what Alain Badiou calls ‘l’événement-Christ’. This is a ‘we’, Kristeva suggests, grounded on the recognition at once of the shared condition of heterogeneity (the stranger within and without) and of the imagined unity to which all aspire. Similarly, as she points out, following Peter Brown, recognition of differences as well as imagined unity as the body of Christ constitutes the ground of the community of pilgrim-citizens in Augustine’s City of God. This has been described as a ‘universal city of aliens’ by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who took inspiration from the resistance it carried to a ‘decadent Roman empire’ for their own project of ‘a universal . . . community’ ‘bringing together all populations and all languages in a common journey’ to resist the global forces of oppression today. Theirs is, however, a resolutely secular project, as they acknowledge, without the animating figures of the ‘one blood’ and ‘one body’ in which the citizen-stranger-pilgrims of a city at once immanent and to come – alike in their irreducible differences – find their imagined unity, as Augustine puts it: ‘God’s own people, . . . Body of Christ, . . . high-born race of foreigners on earth’. This ‘christological poetics’, as McEachern has finely described it, ‘which suspends worldly differences’, was taken up by early reformers, as she demonstrates, who looked to St Augustine as well as the primitive church for inspiration. Two of her instances exemplify particularly well the resistance carried by this poetics to the emergence of another imagined unity – of a separate and homogeneous church-nation. The first is a passage from the hugely popular tract The Obedience of a Christian Man (), in which, citing pertinent Pauline verses to illustrate ‘the order of love or charite’ instituted by Christ, William Tyndale applies them to the local context, declaring that ‘[i]n Christ there is nether french ner [sic]      

Julia Kristeva, Etrangers à nous-mêmes (Paris: Fayard, ), ; Alain Badiou, Saint Paul. La Fondation de l’Universalisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ), . Kristeva, Etrangers à nous-mêmes, –. See too Badiou, Saint Paul,  and –. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, ).  Hardt and Negri, Empire, . Kristeva, Etrangers à nous-mêmes, . Brown, Augustine of Hippo, –. Brown is here citing Augustine on the Psalms in his chapter on the City of God (discussed further in Chapter ). McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, –.

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english: but the frenchman is the englishmans awne selfe and the english the frenchmans awne selfe’. Summoning a suspension ‘in Christ’ of boundaries not only of separate nationhood but also, more radically, of separate selfhood, Tyndale resists the aspiration to an imagined unity of a separate homogeneous nation-church through exclusion of constitutive others, in particular the French. The argument that ‘we’ are ‘one body’ is later urged by voices of resistance in A Second Admonition to Parliament, a radical tract published in , the year of the St Bartholomew massacre, which saw a huge influx of French protestant refugees. Expressly directed at the dismantling of the (by now) more or less established church-state apparatus, including its coercive textual instruments of national unity and homogeneity – the homilies and The Book of Common Prayer – this tract specifically opposes those who ‘cry out against pore strangers’, urging recent lived experience of English exiles in Europe as well as shared identity as the body of Christ to argue that ‘pore strangers’ should be provided for, like and with the native ‘pore’, in accordance with the practice of the ‘primitive church’. Significantly, ‘the Queens majestie’ and members of her Privy Council are excepted from this critique and praised rather as those ‘by whose meanes’ the strangers are, on the contrary, ‘supported and maintained’. This highlights how from an early date a fault-line within the church-state apparatus was exposed by the issue of strangers, which would become increasingly apparent in following decades, notably in the parliamentary debate of  when the court position is taken against the city by the radically inclined member Henry Finch. Finch in turn is echoed in a sermon from late  by George Abbot, a figure from within the established church who, as I take up below, criticises those in the city who violently reject strangers and praises those who treat strangers as ‘brethren’ – another biblical figure for the one Christian 

 

William Tyndale, The obedie[n]ce of a Christen man (Antwerp, ), fo. cxxiiiv. McEachern unaccountably gives place and date of publication as London, ; as far as I have been able to establish the date of the first edition published in London is . McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood,  n. . The idea is expressed too by Augustine if in terms of souls rather than selves. See Kristeva, Etrangers à nous-mêmes, . See too Jeffrey Knapp’s discussion of the Pauline, Erasmian and Shakespearean affirmation of a Christian community that transcends national boundaries (notably, in the case of Erasmus, between French and English). Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (University of Chicago Press, ), –, –. ?Thomas Cartwright, A Second Admonition to the Parliament (?Hemel Hempstead, ), –. Finch spoke in the same year against a bill to suppress puritan sectarians. See Donna B. Hamilton, Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, ), . Praise for the queen’s ‘charity’ towards ‘displaced European immigrants’ in an anti-Spanish tract of  is cited in Wilson, ‘“You must needs be strangers”’, .

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‘body’ which is mobilised by the Shakespearean play performed at the end of the same year. In this context it is worth returning to the argument made in Chapter  about the figure of the Host of the Inn in Merry Wives, whose title evokes the sign and means of universal atonement and social inclusiveness. As I pointed out, this is highlighted in the scene in which he seeks to bring about the reconciliation of a Frenchman and a Welshman and their accommodation into ‘our English’ as ‘a gallimaufry’ – a secular figure of many in one that finds echo in the Pauline/Augustinian vision of the Christian community as ‘one body’ of pilgrim-citizen-strangers. Linked by his title to this Christological poetics of ‘one body’, the Host is linked by his profession to the practice of hospitality. This is important here because hospitality towards strangers is urged both in the New Testament, notably again the Epistles (for example, Hebrews :) and the Old (for example, Exodus :), where the reason repeatedly given is the Israelites’ lived experience as strangers in Egypt, as Henry Finch recalls in the parliamentary debate of , drawing a parallel with the lived experience of English Marian exiles in Europe, as I discussed above. In her discussion of the Old Testament verses Kristeva has suggested that they imply the motive of justice and, as Kevin Curran has pointed out, the biblical injunction belongs to a ‘philosophical tradition’ of hospitable justice (hospitality as justice) that runs from the Old Testament to Paul’s Epistles and the work of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. As he comments, ‘hospitality was framed rhetorically in terms of the famous Biblical exemplars, as free, selfless, absolute’, and in the work of Levinas this entails a revision of selfhood as ‘a state of homelessness’. Intimations of this view of selfhood are to be found in Tyndale’s representation of ‘the order of love or charite’ instituted by Christ, which suspends ‘proper’ boundaries of self as of nation, as we saw earlier. It is, as I have indicated, charity that animates the New Testament injunctions to hospitality towards strangers as it animates the community of pilgrim-citizen-strangers in Augustine’s City of God. As Kristeva has highlighted, charity here is an economy of 

  

In a consideration of the play from the angle of ‘linguistic hospitality’ the Host is viewed as a figure for a ‘host’ language that both ‘makes room and denies entry’ to the stranger in Kathryn Vomero Santos, ‘Hosting Language: Immigration and Translation in The Merry Wives of Windsor’, in Espinosa and Ruiter, eds., Shakespeare and Immigration, . See too Leviticus :, Deuteronomy : and :–. Kristeva, Etrangers à nous- mêmes, ; Kevin Curran, ‘Hospitable Justice: Law and Selfhood in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Law, Culture and the Humanities : (), . Curran, ‘Hospitable Justice’, –.

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inexhaustible giving – and forgiving – which bypasses reciprocity motivated as it is by the inexhaustible debt of God’s free gift of grace to which it is a (just) response. Indeed, for Francis Bacon (in ) ‘there is no Excesse’ ‘in Charity’, which he illustrates tellingly with the example of ‘a Man’ who is ‘Gracious, and Curteous to Strangers’. This ‘endlessly fertile’ economy ‘without property’, finds echo in what I call Shakespearean ‘extravagancy’, which I explore in the next chapter. Of the family of figures that illustrate Shakespearean extravagancy, none is more prominent than Falstaff. Though a courtier and gentleman, Falstaff is also a homeless nomad, without a regional base to furnish the defining ‘proper’ identity aristocratic males usually enjoyed. He is indeed a figure in whom, we might say, destitution and plenitude meet, as in the Pauline figure of the divine kenosis. He is, moreover, recurrently associated with the parable of the prodigal son, a parable dear to protestant exegetes, as I take up below, for its illustration of the unlimited, inexhaustible and inclusive debt-gift economy of God’s grace. Indeed, Falstaff has been taken as ‘a comic symbol of the supernatural order of Charity’ by no less a critic than W. H. Auden, for whom this significance is glimpsed in Falstaff’s ‘surrender to immediacy’ and his ‘self-giving’ as well as in the effect of ‘infinite energy’ generated by his talk. In this context the banishment of Falstaff resonates with contemporary perceptions of the erosion of charity, discussed earlier, which attribute it less to the doctrinal issue of faith versus works – the ‘common Catholic complaint that the reformed faith had banished charity’ – than to the emergence of the values of economic selfinterest and private property. Indeed, in the tract against enclosure cited earlier, Francis Trigge expressly laments: ‘charitie is now banished out of the world’. For Trigge the practice of charity entails a just relation to the land as well as to others, as it does for Shakespeare’s More, who denounces those who treat the common good of the natural environment as private property in what is a reminder of the foundational principle of the   

 



 Kristeva, Etrangers à nous-mêmes, –. Bacon, ‘Of Goodnesse’, , . Davis, The Gift, –. See the discussion of the ‘enigmatic crossing of destitution and plenitude’ in the Pauline figure of kenosis, the self-emptying of the ‘ultimate . . . gift: the descent of God in human form’ which recur in philosophical discussions of the gift, in Lowell Gallagher, ‘Waiting for Gobbo’, in Ewan Fernie, ed., Spiritual Shakespeares (London: Routledge, ), –. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand, , , . Phebe Jansen, ‘Protestant Faith and Catholic Charity: Negotiating Confessional Difference in Early Modern Christmas Celebrations’, in Jonathan Baldo and Isabel Karremann, eds., Forms of Faith: Literary Form and Religious Conflict in Early Modern England (Manchester University Press, ), . Trigge, To the Kings most excellent Maiestie, sig. Ev.

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The Stranger in the Bible

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historical More’s ideal commonwealth. For Trigge, who references More, this foundational principle of all things in common exemplifies the charity practised by the ‘Primitive church’, which he describes as a ‘multitude’ ‘of one heart’ – a figure again of many in one – while a just relation to the land is illustrated by those ‘members of Jesus Christ’ who, in imitation of Christ and Abraham before him, live ‘not as a citizen or an inhabiter’ but ‘as poore pilgrims and travailers’ (echoing Hebrews : cited above), using the goods of the earth ‘as wise travailers doe their Innes’, unlike enclosers and merchants, who ‘use the earth to the most advantage’. Anticipating the eco-Marxist perception of the emergence of both unsustainable exploitation of the earth and new forms of social injustice with the onset of capitalism, this resonates not only with the denunciation by Shakespeare’s More of those who treat the natural environment as private property, but also with the emblematic place of the Host’s Inn, a place of temporary passage where Falstaff, the prodigal, homeless wanderer, resides, a contrast, as I pointed out in Chapter , to the place of private property – the citizen merchant’s house. The banishment of Falstaff in  Henry IV is, moreover, as I discussed in Chapter , preceded by a scene of hospitality which offers an (idealised) image of a ‘merry England’ in which ‘neighbourly charity’ finds expression in good will and heart-felt generosity in the idleness of merry-making. This scene of ‘merry England’ is placed under the shadow of imminent banishment just as, in a passage quoted in Chapter , Trigge laments the passing of ‘merry England’ because of (proto-capitalist) practices and values, which have ‘banished charity’. Similarly under the shadow of the about-to-be-lost is the ‘neighbourhood and Christian-like accord’ (Henry V, ..) between England and France evoked at the close of the second tetralogy. Like the scene in  Henry IV, this evokes the past in order to resist the future, specifically, the emergence of a Lenten cultural reformation ideology which would banish perceived forms of ‘excess’ – extravagant language/dress and extravagant expressions of charity – in a drive to install a regime under the sign of temperance, a system of economic as well as cultural regulation which specifically aspires to a normative centre of plain, temperate Englishness through exclusion of ‘extravagant’ constitutive others, notably the French and ‘foreignised’ elite males.  



For fuller discussion see Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“This is the stranger’s case”’, –. Trigge, To the Kings most excellent Maiestie, sigs. Ev, Dr. The circulation of the idea of all things in common has been fully documented by Rhodes, who pertinently highlights its implications with respect to cultural property. Rhodes, Common, –. See Benjamin Kunkel, ‘The Capitalocene’, London Review of Books,  March , –.

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

Shakespeare and ‘the straingers case’

If, however, staged or invoked as ‘banished’ or absent, as in Portia’s ironic evocation of ‘neighbourly charity’ (discussed in Chapter ), the ideal of ‘charity’ is not only urged in the Shakespearean contribution to Sir Thomas More, but also dramatised without irony at the close of two early comedies, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Comedy of Errors. Indeed, as I take up in Chapter , Two Gentlemen evokes ‘charity’ (..) as that which makes one ‘worth the name of a Christian’ (–), and it is exemplified, on the one hand, by hospitality, especially towards the stranger and, on the other, by unlimited (and for critics excessive) forgiveness. Further, through biblical references, the play highlights the practice of charity as the (just and free) response to the debt-gift economy of God’s unlimited, inclusive grace. The Comedy of Errors, to which we now turn, focuses more attention on the implications of this economy for the topically pressing issue of ‘strangers’ in a (hostile) city. This is done again through biblical references, including a reference to the parable of the prodigal son, which, if more prominent in Two Gentlemen, is tellingly referenced in Errors. More telling still, however, is its referencing of the passage from the Epistle to the Ephesians which represents the inclusive reach of this economy in terms of strangers made citizens in the household of God.

‘Now therefore ye are no more strangers, … but fellow-citizens … of the houshold of God’: The Comedy of Errors and the Strangers’ Case Uttered not by one of the masters, but by one of the servants to his twin brother, the last line of The Comedy of Errors, ‘And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another’ (..), is striking for its evocation of a non-hierarchical community of brothers, like that urged by Christ on his disciples: ‘be not ye called, Rabbi . . . all ye are brethren’ (Matthew :). For Donna Hamilton this close is one of the indications of the play’s encoding of the topical ‘church-state’ issue of nonconformist sectarians, for whose inclusion, she suggests, the play argues. For Richard Dutton, on the other hand, it rather glances back at a pre-Reformation ‘undivided Christendom’, while, for Aaron Landau, the play as a whole calls for the recovery of ‘a distinctly Catholic sense of religious 



The radical egalitarian thrust here is tempered in the Geneva Bible by a marginal note: ‘Christ forbideth not to give juste honour to Magistrates and Masters, but condemneth ambicion and superioritie over our brothers faith’. Sig. DDir. Hamilton, Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England, –. She connects this too with the fact that ‘disempowered characters’ speak rather than ‘characters of high rank’ ().

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The Comedy of Errors and the Strangers’ Case



inclusiveness and unity’. The key figure in this reading is the Abbess, and mother, Emilia, which Landau describes as ‘a stock emblem of Roman Catholic identity’, although, for others, the Abbess is merely a cover for the pagan figure of Diana of Ephesus. Undoubtedly, the figure of the Abbess as well as her ‘priory’ (..), or ‘abbey’ (), which offers ‘sanctuary’ (), evoke the Old Faith. There is, moreover, a striking instance of Old Faith practices when Syracusan Dromio calls for his ‘beads’ and crosses himself (..) in response to the mistaking of the Syracusans for their Ephesian brothers by Adriana and Luciana. These practices are not mentioned by Dutton or Landau, perhaps because they are evoked in association with a perception of Ephesus as a ‘fairy land’ inhabited by ‘goblins, . . . and sprites’ (..–) and this perception corresponds to sceptical protestant representations of Old Faith figures and practices such as are to be found, for instance, in the first canto of the first book of The Fairy Queen (). The world of this canto may indeed lie at the back of Dromio’s cluster of images since it features the figure of a hypocritical Catholic Hermit who ‘knocks’ his breast and ‘bids’ his beads, and who creates magical illusions through ‘Sprites’. Contemporary religious divides are then treated equivocally at best and the closing emphasis on brotherhood cannot be taken as indicative of the play’s – or its author’s – confessional leaning. A commonplace figure of inclusive unity, brotherhood is, moreover, invoked by an authority within the established church in an instance, which, I want to suggest, is of more particular pertinence to the play. In the late summer/early autumn of 





 

Richard Dutton, ‘The Comedy of Errors and The Calumny of Apelles: An Exercise in Source Study’, in Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, eds., A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works,  vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, ), III, ; Aaron Landau, ‘“Past Thought of Human Reason”: Confounding Reason in The Comedy of Errors’, English Studies : (), . F. Elizabeth Hart, ‘“Great is Diana” of Shakespeare’s Ephesus’, Studies in English Literature – : (), –; Laurie Maguire, ‘The Girls from Ephesus’, in Robert S. Miola, ed., The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays (New York: Garland Publishing, ), . No one has suggested a deliberate conflation of pagan and Catholic female divinities, which would imply a protestant perspective inasmuch as protestant apologists such as Stephen Batman classed pagan and Catholic cultures together as ‘erroneous trumperies’. Stephen Batman, The Golden Booke of the Leaden Goddes (London, ), sig. v. Glyn Austen misattributes the lines to Antipholus, who, he suggests, is shown ‘clinging to Christian symbols of redemption’. Glyn Austen, ‘Ephesus Restored: Sacramentalism and Redemption in The Comedy of Errors’, Literature and Theology : (),  (emphasis mine). Kinney similarly treats the ‘plea to [Dromio’s] rosary’ as one of the play’s many ‘Christian references’; Arthur F. Kinney, ‘Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors” and the Nature of Kinds’, Studies in Philology : (),  (emphasis mine). Edmund Spenser, Spenser Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt (Oxford University Press, ), –. On the difficulties of establishing Shakespeare’s ‘confessional identity’ see Chapter , note .

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

Shakespeare and ‘the straingers case’

, a few months before the play was performed, perhaps for the first time, George Abbot, future archbishop of Canterbury, took up the strangers’ case in a sermon preached at Oxford (published by Richard Field in ), in which he reproduces almost verbatim – and more closely than Shakespeare’s More – Henry Finch’s intervention in the parliamentary debate of . This is important because it testifies not only to the circulation of the contents of the debate leaked, as I mentioned earlier, through copies of an anonymous journal, but also to the ongoing hostility towards strangers (especially French refugees) in London. Specifically, Abbot’s rehearsal of Finch’s speech is framed as an illustration of the ‘disposition’ towards strangers of the ‘wise and godly’ who ‘make use of those aliaunts as of brethren, considering their distresses, with a lively felow-feeling’. His praise may comprehend not only Finch, but also the Queen and her Privy Council who, as I mentioned earlier, were explicitly singled out for similar praise in the Admonition to Parliament of . Indeed, Abbot recalls the ‘great Massacre’ of that year in his representation of the contrasting ‘disposition’ of those reported to have treated the refugees ‘by a most unhospitall [sic] kinde of phrase . . . no better than French dogs’, an inhospitable name-calling echoed by Shakespeare’s More when he invites hostile London citizens to imagine themselves as strangers ‘[s]purn[ed] like dogs’ and by Shylock when he reminds Antonio how he has been treated ‘as you spurn a stranger cur’. This inhospitable treatment is then connected by Abbot to what he calls the ‘conspiracies’ repeatedly directed against strangers by ‘meaner people’ ‘in one Citie’. This is clearly a reference to London and events of the previous year when the defeat of the bill on strangers (passed in the Commons but thrown out by the House of Lords) was followed by social unrest including the posting of libels on the doors of the French and Dutch churches, which echo arguments against strangers made in the 



 



This is the opinion of Charles Whitworth who summarises the arguments made for earlier dates in William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, ed. Charles Whitworth (Oxford University Press, ), –. The New Oxford gives  as ‘most probable’. George Abbot, An Exposition upon the Prophet Jonah (London, ), –. For fuller discussion see Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Shakespeare and Immigration’, –, –. Abbot will in turn be explicitly referenced by Caleb Dalechamp in his treatise on Christian hospitality cited above. Abbot, An Exposition upon the Prophet Jonah,  (emphasis mine). Abbot, An Exposition upon the Prophet Jonah, . Munday and Chettle, Sir Thomas More, .; Shakespeare, Merchant, ... The implication of Merchant in the ‘alien’ question has been argued, though without specific reference to the parliamentary debate of , in Andrew Tretiak, ‘The Merchant of Venice and the “Alien” Question’, The Review of English Studies V (), –; see too Archer, Citizen Shakespeare, –. Abbot, An Exposition upon the Prophet Jonah, .

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The Comedy of Errors and the Strangers’ Case

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debate, even as they threaten revenge on those they blame as the cause of social ills such as soaring prices, food shortages, poverty and infection. As we saw earlier, this is reproduced as the popular perception of strangers in Shakespeare’s contribution to Sir Thomas More, where it is exposed and discredited as a collective mis-taking of the stranger, stigmatised and scapegoated as the ‘root’ of socio-economic ills. It is this ongoing hostility towards, and ‘mis-taking’ of the stranger in the city that I want to suggest is more pertinent than religious divides to The Comedy of Errors. These divides have been proposed not only as a contextual frame, but also specifically in order to explain Shakespeare’s invention of enmity between the ‘adverse towns’ (..) of Syracuse and Ephesus, for which there is no hint in any of the recognised sources. As I have indicated, the religious divides are equivocally evoked, and the focus is not so much on the enmity itself as its consequences for the stranger from Syracuse, whether Egeus, who is condemned to death in the opening scene, or his son Antipholus, who is advised to assume another origin/ identity in order to avoid having his goods confiscated (..–). The case in which he and his servant find themselves is, moreover, generalised by Antipholus when he urges their ‘being strangers here’ (..) as sufficient reason for caution. In the Plautine source the principal protagonists are identified as ‘civis’ (citizen) and ‘advena’, which is glossed in Thomas Thomas’s Latin–English dictionary: ‘[a] straunger: one that dwelleth not where we do’, in other words, an outsider liable to be met with suspicion. In the translation of the Plautine source (probably) by William Warner (registered , published ), ‘advena’ is rendered ‘travailer’ and ‘Traveller’, a merging of the condition of the stranger with that of the traveller, which we have seen illustrated on the title page of Samuel Purchas’s encyclopaedia of voyages as well as in the blending of ‘strange’ and ‘straying’ in the word form ‘straing’. That the condition of Syracusan Antipholus is the condition of ‘straying stranger’ is suggested by what appears to be an attempt at a blended defining epithet, ‘Erotes’ on his first entry (.), ‘Errotis’ at his entry in .., which are used in the Folio to  



See Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Shakespeare and Immigration’, –. For Dutton the Christian Syracuse is set against an Ephesus that is associated at once with Turk and Catholic, ‘interchangeable signifiers’ for the early modern Protestants (Dutton, ‘The Comedy of Errors’, –). For Landau the conflict evoked is that between English Protestants and continental Catholics (Landau, ‘“Past Thought of Human Reason”’, ), while for Anthony Miller it is more specifically the conflict between England and Spain. Anthony Miller, ‘Matters of State’, in Alexander Leggat, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy (Cambridge University Press, ), –. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, I, , .

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Shakespeare and ‘the straingers case’

distinguish him from his brother rather than ‘of Syracuse’, which is how he is distinguished in modern editions. As the New Oxford editors assume, this epithet evokes Latin ‘erratus’, which is glossed by Thomas Thomas, ‘[i]n the which errour is committed: . . . that hath bin wandred and strayed in’. This is blended with ‘Eros, Erotis’, the Latin word form glossed by Thomas Cooper ‘a mans name’ as well as the name for ‘love’. As I discussed earlier, the romantic comedies dramatise the condition of love or eros as ‘full of straying/strange shapes’ that lead to ‘error’ (Love’s Labour’s Lost, .., ), and this condition is evoked at the end of the play when the figure of the Abbess speculates that the ‘eye’ of Adriana’s husband may have ‘[s]tray’d his affection in unlawful love’ (..–). It is, however, his brother ‘Errotis’ of Syracuse whose affection strays when he sets eyes on Adriana’s sister Luciana, although, as Dutton comments, this romance plot is not properly concluded, and it is finally subordinate to the plot of the family drama in which Antipholus is discovered to be the lost brother and son rather than a straying stranger and romantic lover. In Twelfth Night, which manages successfully to combine a full-blown romance plot with the family drama of the earlier play it resembles, the figure of Sebastian, though a traveller/stranger, suffers only the straying effects of love which, like Antipholus ‘Errotis’ he compares to a dream (..–; compare Errors, ..). As I pointed out above, ‘the danger of this adverse town’ (..) of Illyria to natives of Messaline – a reprise of the enmity between the ‘adverse towns’ (..) of Syracuse and Ephesus – is relevant not to Sebastian, but to his companion Antonio who alone suffers from the ‘[r]ough and unhospitable’ treatment that, as he advises Sebastian, a ‘stranger’ like him might receive ‘in these parts’ (..–). With a generalising thrust, like Antipholus’s comment on the dangers of their ‘being strangers here’, Antonio’s advice bears less on the case of Sebastian and the world of Twelfth Night than on the case of the Syracusans in Ephesus and the world of the earlier play, which is thus remembered for its engagement with the ‘rough and unhospitable’ treatment of strangers in London, victims, in Abbot’s view, of popular conspiracies and ‘inhospitall’ misrepresentations. As we have seen, such misrepresentations 

  

William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Methuen, ), xxvi– xxvii; Parker proposes ‘Erratus’ and ‘Eros’ without further comment. Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, . Thomas, Dictionarium Linguae Latinae et Anglicanae. Thomas Cooper, Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (London, ). ‘Erotis’ is the genitive form conventionally given after the nominative form in many, if not all dictionaries. Dutton, ‘The Comedy of Errors’, –.

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The Comedy of Errors and the Strangers’ Case

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are evoked in Shakespeare’s contribution to Sir Thomas More, while the harsh realities of ‘the strangers’ case’, which is assimilated to a case of mistaken identity, and the attendant violence, irrupt too, if briefly, in The Taming of the Shrew, another comedy that dates like The Comedy of Errors, and like Abbot’s sermon and the parliamentary debate, from the period of high tension around strangers in London in the early s. Vincentio’s comment, ‘[t]hus strangers may be haled and abused’ (Shrew, ..) might indeed serve as a gloss to the violence provoked by ‘mistaking’ of strangers in The Comedy of Errors. In this context the irony that the mistaking is of ‘a stranger’ for ‘a citizen’ becomes highly charged as does the revelation of their original identity as identical twin brothers, especially given the ‘saturation of Plautine plot with biblical reference’ as Parker puts it. Specifically, the play is shaped according to the Pauline plot of redemption as critics have pointed out so frequently that Hamilton rehearses as a given that the play ‘tells’ ‘the . . . story . . . of mankind wandering in error until being redeemed by a grace freely given’. From this angle the wandering traveller/straying stranger Antipholus in ‘quest’ (..) of (re)union becomes a figure of man’s ‘erring pilgrimage’, like his father Egeon, who, having been ‘severed from . . . bliss’ (..), undertook the same quest, and who finds himself condemned to death under the law, unable to ‘buy out his life’ (..), but then unexpectedly delivered from ‘his bonds’ (..). Similarly, his other son, the citizen of Ephesus, having been imprisoned, sends for ‘redemption’ (..), only to be delivered without payment. It is at the close that, as others have remarked, this repeated biblical plot becomes particularly prominent, notably when, in a summarising final 







Dutton’s observation of the play’s preoccupation with ‘calumny’ is pertinent here insofar as calumny is a motivated form of misrepresentation such as Abbot implies is in circulation in his condemnation of the ‘conspiracies’ against strangers. See Dutton, ‘The Comedy of Errors’. Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, . Compare: ‘one could easily argue that Shakespeare’s play is at least as much Pauline as it is Plautine’. Joseph Candido, ‘Dining Out in Ephesus: Food in The Comedy of Errors’, in Miola, ed., The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, . Hamilton, Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England, . The fullest treatments of the ‘shaping force’, as he calls it, of biblical (and specifically New Testament) references are furnished by Kinney, ‘Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors”’, who argues for the importance of the mediation of the religious drama that Shakespeare may have seen as a child; see too Austen, ‘Ephesus Restored’, who argues that the play is a vehicle of counter-reformation ideology, and Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, who argues that, if the biblical references with which the play is crammed, align the Plautine marketplace with the biblical space of ‘delay’ before the final ‘doom’, there is a disjunction between the two universes of discourse – of market and religion – which puts the biblical narrative into question. See Austen, ‘Ephesus Restored’, .

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

Shakespeare and ‘the straingers case’

speech, the figure of the Abbess evokes the ‘[t]hirty-three years’ of a ‘travail’ ‘till this present hour’ when her ‘heavy burden’ is ‘delivered’ (..–). As critics have observed, this time span does not fit the time of the story, but carries obvious ‘Christological’ significance, as Parker has noted, drawing attention to ‘the Pauline lines on the creation that “groaneth . . . and travaileth” (Rom :)’. Perhaps more pertinent still are the verses in the gospel of St John where Christ compares the sorrows of the disciples to the sorrow of a woman who ‘travaileth’, which turns to joy ‘assone as she is delivered’ just as their sorrow will turn to joy when they meet him again (John .–), a joy which is ‘grounded’, as a gloss in the Geneva Bible puts it, on the ‘ressurection & the grace of the holie Gost’. Birth/life and death come together then at the close of the play in an overt allusion to the deliverance of a redemption that is not only to come, as Parker argues, but, as the Geneva gloss signals, also immanent. Given the prominence of this shaping plot, especially at the close of the play, the Plautine configuration of citizen and stranger revealed to be brothers invites recollection of a passage in the second chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians in which the inclusive reach of God’s gift of redemption is represented in terms of strangers made citizens in the household of God. This Epistle has of course long been recognised as particularly prominent amongst the play’s biblical intertexts, like and with the account in Acts of the visit of Paul to Ephesus, notably on account of the relocation of the action from the Plautine Epidamnum to Ephesus. However, apart from Parker, who sees chapter two as pertinent to the play, though not quite as I do, Nandini Das and the third Arden editor, Kent Cartwright, who notes a likeness in these verses to ‘the concluding spirit of Errors’, critics have consistently rather singled out passages from chapters four to six, as Foakes does, for instance, in his appendix of sources in the second Arden edition. Charles Whitworth too has noted that passages from these chapters were appointed to be read at Holy Communion on Sundays in the autumn of  when Shakespeare may have been ‘working on or planning Errors’, which is on record as having been performed for what may have been, as he thinks, the first time, at the

   

 Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, . Note ‘n’, sig. NNiii.v. See, for instance, Dutton, ‘The Comedy of Errors’, . William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, ed. Kent Cartwright (London: Bloomsbury, ), ; Das, ‘Everyday Strangeness’. Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, ed. Foakes, –.

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The Comedy of Errors and the Strangers’ Case



end of the year, on  December. He comments too that all six chapters of the Epistle were appointed to be read at evening prayer during October, but he does not mention the passage from the second chapter, which was appointed to be read on St Thomas’s Day, on  December, a week before the putative first (or first recorded) performance of the play. In this passage (verses –), the heterogeneous community of Gentiles that make up the church at Ephesus are exhorted to consider themselves as ‘no more strangers and foreiners, but fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the houshold of God; . . . built upon . . . Jesus Christ . . . in whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit’. This inclusive unity is, moreover, central to the first chapters, as the header in the Geneva Bible – ‘One bodie, one spirit’ – highlights. It is also the premise of the later chapters on the Christian life, although this has been obscured by the selective singling out of passages, notably the exhortation of wives and servants to obedience. For, as in Tyndale’s The Obedience of a Christian Man (), discussed earlier, obedience, like the other ethical practices urged in the Epistle, notably forgiveness, is conceived not as a prescriptive rule, but as a free response to God’s freely given unlimited grace. This is overt in a summarising transitional passage from chapter four, appointed to be read on the nineteenth Sunday after Trinity ( October in , if Whitworth’s calculations are correct): ‘be ye kind [‘courteous’ in the Geneva Bible] one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christs sake hath forgiven you’. Indeed, the Epistle turns around an imagined unity of an inclusive body/household/city, immanent as well as to come, animated by the inexhaustible debt-gift economy of freely received, freely given charity or love. It is this (Pauline) poetics of community, as we might call it, that is summoned at the close of Shakespeare’s play, which not only dramatises the perils of the strangers’ case, but also specifically invites spectators to reflect on the implications for their own community of the passage from the Epistle, which they may have recently heard or with which they were at least 

 

Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, ed. Whitworth, , . The th of December itself is Holy Innocents’ Day, and Chris Hassell has suggested the pertinence to the play of the readings appointed to be read on this day inasmuch as they are concerned with ‘the dispersal and reunion of families’. R. Chris Hassel, Jr., Renaissance Drama and the English Church Year (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), –. See too Kinney, ‘Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors”’, –.  Ephesians :–; The Book of Common Prayer, ed. Cummings, . Sig. ZZiiv. Ephesians :; The Book of Common Prayer, ed. Cummings, .

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Shakespeare and ‘the straingers case’

familiar. Like, if less directly than Shakespeare’s contribution to Sir Thomas More, The Comedy of Errors thus engages with the hostility towards strangers in London, which, as is evident from Abbot’s sermon, continued to simmer in late . Summoning the Pauline poetics of the universal, inclusive community of the many redeemed in/as one, it too calls for the practice of hospitable charity towards those it invites spectators to view not as strangers but as citizens and as members with them of one household, or ‘brethren’ (Abbot). It is as a story of members of one household divided and reunited that the play finds echo in the parable of the prodigal son, another of the biblical passages it references, which was dear to protestant exegetes precisely for its illustration of the ‘whole work of our redemption’ including the inclusive ‘free grace of God’. Though more prominent in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, another early play with which, as critics have observed, Errors has much in common, the parable is evoked at a telling moment when (Syracusan) Dromio brings gold for the ‘redemption’ (..) of Antipholus of Ephesus to his uncomprehending brother, who, baffled by the ‘illusions’ in which, he says, ‘we wander’ (evoking his epithet ‘Errotis’) calls for ‘[s]ome blessed power’ to ‘deliver us’ (..–). In a speech ‘dizzying in its compounding of biblical texts’ as Parker comments, Dromio pauses to describe the figure of the law, the ‘old Adam’ who has imprisoned Antipholus of Ephesus. Not that Adam that kept the Paradise, but that Adam that keeps the prison; he that goes in the calf’s-skin, that was killed for the Prodigal; he that came behind you, sir, like an evil angel, and bid you forsake your liberty. (..–)

Editors and critics have suggested that this evokes the ‘new man’ of chapter four of the Epistle to the Ephesians, although it is actually closer to the reworking of this passage in the baptismal service prayer, which urges that the ‘old Adam . . . may be so buried, that the new man may be raised up’. Then follows a reference to the parable of a father who ‘like Egeon “had two sons”’, as Parker comments, quoting the opening verse of this ‘paradigmatic biblical story of circuitous “error” and eventual family reunion’, which, as she observes, had already been used in attempts to 

 

Samuel Gardiner (), as quoted in Alan R. Young, The English Prodigal Son Plays: A Theatrical Fashion of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Salzburg: Institut fu¨r Anglistik und Amerikanistik, ), . Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, . The Book of Common Prayer, ed. Cummings, .

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The Comedy of Errors and the Strangers’ Case



moralise Latin comedy. The reference is, however, more specific, recalling as it does the end of the parable when a calf ‘was killed for the Prodigal’. The ambiguity of ‘for’ here invites recollection of the interpretation of the calf as a figure for Christ, ‘slayne for the redemption of the whole worlde’, as Erasmus puts it in his highly influential Paraphrases, placed by royal injunction as ‘required reading’ in parish churches across Elizabethan England. This finds echo in a note in the Geneva Bible, which highlights the inclusiveness of redemption by Christ, who ‘feedeth indifferently all them that believe in him’. The reference in Errors thus bears directly on the moment it is evoked when there is talk of redemption and deliverance from the law as well as from illusions. More generally it bears on, and consolidates the shaping of the play by the biblical plot of redemption. To single out the redemptive end of the parable was not usual among the (very many) cultural references and appropriations of the parable in early modern England, which tended to focus rather on the moral transgression and subsequent repentance of the younger son, as Richard Helgerson and Alan Young have shown in their wide-ranging work on life narratives and drama respectively. For protestant exegetes too, ‘the doctrine of repentance’ is a crucial stage in the ‘work of redemption’ that the parable illustrates. Still more importantly, the order of morning/ evening prayer introduced in the  version of The Book of Common Prayer, which Brian Cummings has aptly described as a ‘performative book’, ‘like a playtext’, opens with penitential sentences, which include the expressed penitence of the prodigal son, followed by a general confession in which members of the congregation are summoned into the subject position of the penitent son to confess, in the language of the analogous   









Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, . Erasmus, The first tome or volume of the Paraphrase, trans. Udall, sig. Cxxviiiv. Erika Rummel, ‘The Theology of Erasmus’, in David Bagchi and David C. Steinmetz, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Reformation Theology (Cambridge University Press, ), . For other examples of this interpretation, see Young, The English Prodigal Son Plays, , . Sig. KKir. It is specifically inclusive of the Jew and Gentile, understood (by Erasmus and others) as represented respectively by the elder and younger brother of the parable. See Young, The English Prodigal Son Plays, . Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, ); Young, The English Prodigal Son Plays. More recent work has focused (perhaps inevitably) on ironic treatments of the parable. See, for instance, Horbury, ‘The Unprodigal Prince?’, . ‘The doctrine of Repentance’ is the first of the ‘two poyntes’, the other being forgiveness by the ‘free grace of God’ according to Samuel Gardiner, cited in Young, The English Prodigal Son Plays, . The Book of Common Prayer, ed. Cummings, xxxiv.

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

Shakespeare and ‘the straingers case’

parable, ‘we have erred and straied from thy waies, lyke lost sheep’. As I take up in Chapter , the parable of the lost sheep is evoked in a striking structural parallel to the liturgical script at the outset of The Two Gentlemen of Verona in digressive verbal ‘straying’ which recurs throughout and which associates the ‘parable’ (genre and instance) with such ‘straying’. Like other comedies and like the Falstaff scenes in the second tetralogy, Errors too abounds in such straying, including the play on ‘ship/sheep’ (..–), which triggers the liturgically resonant instance in Two Gentlemen. The erring of characters is indeed recurrently mirrored in verbal straying, which reiterates the parabolic plot at the level of language, in ‘meaning . . . lost and . . . found’ ‘like the prodigal son’, as Barbara Freedman puts it. There is, moreover, no talk of (real) sin, or trespass in Errors, no scene of confession, repentance and forgiveness, as, we shall see, there is in the main plot of Two Gentlemen. Rather the play rehearses the plot of ‘lost and found’ which is common to the three analogous parables – of the prodigal son, the lost sheep and the lost piece of silver – as the architecture of connecting anaphora in Luke  highlights: ‘Rejoice with me: for I have founde my shepe / the piece / my sonne . . . which . . . was lost’. Indeed, in the first two parables there is no mention of sin and repentance in the narrative, while in the third, ironically given its place as a ‘penitential sentence’ in the liturgical script, the words of confession and repentance rehearsed and then uttered by the son to his father are pre-empted by the unconditional welcome he receives, which renders them redundant. The first two parables are, moreover, introduced by means of a form of direct address – ‘What man of you’ . . . ‘what woman’ (Luke ., ) – which invites hearers to place themselves in the subject position of the one who finds what has been lost and to enter imaginatively into their joy. It is into this position that spectators are summoned by the close of The Comedy of Errors, which rehearses the plot    



The Book of Common Prayer, ed. Cummings, . Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), . The word ‘sin’ is used three times, always in the context of mistaken perceptions (.., .., ..). Luke :, , ,  (Geneva Bible, sig. JJiiiiv). This plot structure is comically reiterated in one of the digressive exchanges in the play, which turns around ‘the time to recover hair lost by nature’ (..–). In its emphasis on the ineluctable process of ageing (and irredeemable loss) this serves as a comic counterpoint to the staging of the successful recovery of what has been lost in the main, redemptive plot. The Swiss theologian Lytta Basset comments: ‘on peut dire que le point commun aux trois paraboles est donc bien l’être trouvé’. Lytta Basset, La Joie Imprenable (Paris: Albin Michel, ), .

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The Comedy of Errors and the Strangers’ Case



of redemption as a plot ‘to recover that which was lost’, as Samuel Purchas puts it, adding that this was achieved by means of ‘the greatest of all peregrinations’ when ‘the word was made flesh and (leaving in a sort his heavenly Country, and his Fathers house) dwelt amongst us’. In this perhaps startling departure from dominant treatments of the parable of the prodigal son, Purchas invites comparison between the ‘straying’ younger son and the ‘straying’ Word in order to highlight God’s ‘superadmirable bounty’, the prodigal character of the gift of Christ as Word made flesh through which God ‘restored lost . . . Man to himselfe’. As I take up in the next chapter, this resonates not only with the redemptive plots of Errors and Two Gentlemen, but also with the economy of Shakespearean ‘extravagancy’ in which the straying or erring of the word, like that of characters it mirrors, generates a multiplication of possibilities of meaning and an immeasurable affective yield as well as a release or ‘deliverance’ from the ‘law’ of ‘proper’ forms and meanings. Foregrounding then ‘deliverance’ and the attendant joy of a redemptive plot which stages loss and its reparation, the play sheds the emphasis on sin and repentance acquired by the parable of the prodigal son in the liturgical script of the  version of The Book of Common Prayer. In this it selfconsciously remodels the genre away from the neoclassical imperative to moral correction, illustrated by Philip Sidney’s Apology (to cite only the most familiar instance), which urges that comedy be an ‘imitation of the common errors of our life, which [the poet] representeth in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be, so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one’. As Stephen Greenblatt comments, the ‘errors’ in Shakespeare’s play ‘are ridiculous’ but ‘they are hardly common’, nor are they moral, which is the sense that ‘errors’ has for Sidney, as the character types he immediately lists in illustration confirm: ‘a niggardly Demea . . . a crafty Davus, . . . a flattering Gnatho, . . . a vainglorious Thraso’. The one character in Shakespeare’s play that might be said to fit this model is Adriana, the ‘jealous woman’ (..) and shrewish wife corrected, as she herself acknowledges, by the ‘reproof’ of the Abbess (..), although for Joseph Candido Adriana is

 

 

Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimes, – (italics in original). There may be a trace here of reflections by Augustine on the likeness of the prodigal in his lavish spending to the generosity of God. See Charles Pastoor, ‘The Subversion of Prodigal Son Comedy in The Merchant of Venice’, Renascence : (), –. Sidney, An Apology,  (emphasis mine). In his introduction to the play in the Norton, .

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Shakespeare and ‘the straingers case’

‘deeper and more richly suggestive’ than this. Otherwise, the characters are not recognisable as moral types and, as Greenblatt puts it, ‘there seems to be no . . . lesson to be learned’. The ‘errors’ are indeed not moral deviations any more than they are sins, but ‘mistakings’ as well as and with ‘wanderings’. These may not carry a ‘lesson’, but they do acquire general significance, as we have seen, from the shaping of the plot as a parable of lost and found in the ‘erring pilgrimage’ of life with its inevitable ‘mistakings’. These ‘mistakings’ are, moreover, specifically linked to the case of the stranger in the (hostile) city and, though there may be no overt lesson, there is, as I have argued, a call to recognise and welcome as citizens and ‘brethren’ (Abbot) those viewed as strangers, a view which, from the perspective of the shaping biblical plot, is exposed as a category mistake. Less didactic finally than parabolic, a generic alignment still more overt in Two Gentlemen as we shall see, the play reshapes its Plautine base according to a Pauline redemptive plot of loss and reparation with an effect of deliverance from a ‘heavy burden’ and the attendant yield of pleasure/joy. Remodelling the genre away from a purpose of correction towards a purpose of release this self-consciously titled comedy bears out the reluctant admission of the anti-theatricalist William Rankins that playgoers looked to plays ‘to unloade [their] heavy harts’ rather than to Scripture and the figure of Christ, ‘bounde to sette us free’. 

Candido, ‘Dining Out in Ephesus’, .



Rankins, A mirrour of monsters, sigs. r–v.

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 

Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word Shakespeare’s ‘extravagancy’

It is perhaps Samuel Johnson’s much quoted irritation towards what he perceived as a Shakespearean addiction to the ‘quibble’ that marks the definitive turn of the modern bourgeois world of ‘plain’ Englishness against what I have called Shakespearean ‘extravagancy’. ‘Extravagancy’ is itself not a quibble, but a Latinate word formation introduced in Twelfth Night by the figure of Sebastian (..), whose condition as straying stranger is mirrored in this instance of what Philip Sidney calls ‘far-fetched words’ that ‘must seem strangers to any poor Englishman’. It is for their ‘straing’ character that such new formations may be grouped, as they are in this chapter, not only with the quibble, or ‘play upon the word’ (..) as the bourgeois master Lorenzo in Merchant calls it, but also what the servant clown Speed in Two Gentlemen calls ‘mistake the word’ (..), which is not so easy to distinguish as editors would have us believe either from new word formations or from play upon the word. Straying across given or ‘proper’ limits, these lexical practices/figures tend to the production of a mobile, expanding and inclusive vernacular – the ‘gallimaufry’ said to be loved by Falstaff, the most prominent figure of Shakespearean extravagancy, who, as I suggested in Chapter , might be described as something of a cultural Robin Hood since, like and with the author that shadows him, he disseminates the symbolic wealth, or ‘copia’ of ‘Englishes’ to the broad constituency of a theatre audience. With 



See Chapter , –, . Johnson’s comments are the starting point of the fine work on Shakespeare’s word play by Molly Mahood, who not only points out the ‘linguistic revolution’ that had taken place, but also how Johnson himself yields to the temptation of word play and is appreciative of its effects as later critics are not. M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay, repr. (London: Methuen, ), –. For another nuanced analysis of Johnson’s critique see Margaret Ferguson, ‘Fatal Cleopatras and Golden Apples: Economies of Wordplay in Some Shakespearean “Numbers”’, in Jonathan F. S. Post, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry (Oxford University Press, ), –. Sidney, An Apology, . For more detailed discussion of the word, Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Shakespeare’s Extravagancy’, –.



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Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word

emancipatory as well as empowering implications, these practices promote the expansion of expressive possibilities for the individual as well as for the vernacular even as they resist the imperative of cultural reformation ideology to a bounded, normative, ‘true’, or ‘proper’ centre of English plainness and its attendant virtues of temperance and honesty. Tending rather to openness, Shakespeare’s ‘straing’ – intemperate – linguistic practices summon the energy or ‘quick’ of life (recall Mrs Quickly), even as they expand the expressive possibilities of ‘our English’, with a ‘generative power’ as Margaret Ferguson observes in her fine analysis of Shakespeare’s ‘exorbitant word play’. It is then for their vital – ‘quick’ – liberating expansion of expressive possibilities as well as their resistance to the centripetal drive of cultural reformation ideology that I first discuss these ‘straying’ or ‘extravagant’ practices, beginning with the most important, ‘synonymia’, which not only tends to produce and disseminate an expanding symbolic capital of ‘our English(es)’, but also furnishes a formal figure of one in many, ‘unity in difference’. I go on to discuss the association of these practices with two highly telling discourses. On the one hand, there is the discourse of ‘manage’ or horsemanship, which is recurrently used to represent relations of socio-political and moral control (specifically temperance). This is turned by Shakespeare, most explicitly in his early narrative poem Venus and Adonis, to promote the breaking of what Arthur Golding calls the ‘bit of temprance’, in verbal prancing, which allows a measure of freedom, especially in the comedies, to those (women and servants) that are habitually controlled. On the other hand, linguistic straying is associated through biblical references with the unbounded circulation of the inexhaustible energy of the debt-gift economy of the plot of redemption, ‘la surabondance insensée de la grâce’. This is done through references to biblical parables, notably the parable of the prodigal son. Taken, as we have seen, by protestant exegetes to illustrate God’s inclusive gift of grace which, as Calvin comments, ‘exceeds the requirements of those who stand in need of it’, the parable of the prodigal son –  





Ferguson, ‘Fatal Cleopatras and Golden Apples’, . Erasmus’s celebration of ‘copia’ as summarised in Sylvia Adamson, ‘Synonymia: or in Other Words’, in Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander and Katrin Ettenhuber, eds., Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge University Press, ), . Badiou, Saint Paul, ; ‘insensée’ here carries the idea of extravagant as well as mad rather than ‘senseless’ (pace Gallagher). Gallagher links this idea to Launcelet and his father in Merchant. Gallagher, ‘Waiting for Gobbo’, . Calvin’s comment on the parable as paraphrased in Young, The English Prodigal Son Plays, .

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Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word



the longest parable in the New Testament – is the ‘most frequently mentioned’ parable ‘in the plays’, as it is, more generally, the most frequently cited and appropriated biblical parable in Western European culture. As critics have often observed, this parable is recurrently evoked in connection with Falstaff, whose banishment resonates, I have argued, with the aspiration of cultural reformation ideology to exclude perceived ‘excesses’ – of ‘charity’ as of linguistic/sartorial practices. This chapter closes with discussion of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, possibly Shakespeare’s first performed play, in which the parable of the prodigal son is explicitly referenced by the servant clown Lance and the ideal of ‘charity’ dramatised as well as invoked, again by Lance, as that which makes one ‘worth the name of a Christian’ (..–). This is done in a scene, which, also, tellingly, features the one instance in the Shakespearean canon of the word ‘parable’ (). The word is associated, again through Lance, at once with riddling verbal play and with the enigmatic signs emitted by his dog Crab, a figure, I suggest, of the unpredictable and elusive contingencies of ‘life’. Crab is, moreover, the protagonist of a serio-comic parable/comedy of canine errors told by Lance towards the end of the play (.). This is, I argue, a parable of straying and redemption, like the biblical parables of the straying sheep and the prodigal son, which are evoked at their first entrances by Speed and Lance respectively, again in instances of verbal play/mistaking, which, as I indicated in Chapter , reiterate the parabolic plot – of straying/loss and reparation – at the level of language. Through the servant clowns, then, the figure/genre of the parable as well as particular instances are aligned at once with the (likewise domestic) genre of comedy and with the elusive ‘straying’ of language and ‘life’. This alignment resonates, I argue, with Erasmus’s gloss on Christ’s practice of ‘dark speaking’ in parables, which summons the hearer’s desire to pursue possible meanings that proliferate to infinity. From this perspective, what modern critics and spectators have regarded as the play’s ‘excesses’ – its ‘excess’ of verbal play throughout and its ‘excess’ of forgiveness at its close – may be taken together as a function of its parabolic economy, specifically, the inexhaustible debt-gift economy of the plot of redemption illustrated by the analogous parables of straying sheep, (prodigal) son and dog.

 

Richmond Noble, Shakespeare’s Biblical Knowledge (London: Macmillan, ), . For the prominence of this parable, in European culture, see Young, The English Prodigal Son Plays, and in theological traditions of exegesis, which describe it as ‘Evangelium in Evangelio’ (i.e. as an epitome of the New Testament), see Basset, La Joie Imprenable, –.

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Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word

In its ‘excesses’ the play anticipates the figure of the extravagant ‘prodigal’ Falstaff whose banishment marks the turn to a modern bourgeois world of ‘true’ or ‘proper’ Englishness characterised as Lenten by Twelfth Night as well as by the second tetralogy (Chapter ). Shakespeare’s figures and parables of a ‘straing’ word resist the emergence of this Lenten world, and more specifically, the installation of a set of mutually implicated defining cultural and moral norms of Englishness, notably the ideal of ‘plainness’ and its attendant virtues of temperance and honesty. The turn to the criterion of plainness – the ‘aim’, as Molly Mahood puts it, ‘to make language perspicuous’ – which emerged to explicitness by the end of the seventeenth century, has, of course, been well-documented by linguistic historians as well as by literary scholars. For Mahood explicitly as for others implicitly this turn accounts, at least in part, for the largely negative later responses to Shakespearean word play. Indeed, the linguistic phenomena of synonymy and homonymy that Shakespeare exploits are expressly singled out at the end of the seventeenth century as obstacles to the desideratum of plainness. What is more, ‘plainness’ is, as we have seen, more and less explicitly interrogated whether in the comedies, which expose it through mockery as what David Crystal calls a ‘deceptive’ illusion, contrary to the nature, or property, of a living (‘quick’) language, or in the histories and tragedies, which expose the illusion as dangerous inasmuch as the rhetoric, or practice, of plainness recurrently serves to dissimulate a will to control/power (Chapters  and ). Most significant for the argument of this book are the two figures of citizen ‘plainness’ set against the extravagant, nomadic and impecunious gentleman Falstaff: on the one hand, the male citizen George Page in Merry Wives, who practises an implicitly normative plainness as well as exclusionary judgements on the ‘extravagant’ practices of others, and the ‘citizen king’ Henry, who, as Prince Hal, puts Falstaff down with a ‘plain tale’ before banishing him, and who, on his accession, lays claim to the style of ‘plain king’ as a cover for his will to power over the French princess, Kate. That the humiliation (Merry Wives) and banishment ( Henry IV) of Falstaff announce future history is borne out by the imperative urged in  by Thomas Sprat, who perhaps remembers Falstaff (and/or Thomas Wilson) when, in a provocative conclusion to his attack on linguistic

  

Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay, ; see Chapter , note . Crystal, The Stories of English, –; Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay, . Crystal, The Stories of English, .

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Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word



‘extravagance’, he declares: ‘eloquence ought to be banish’d out of all civil Societies’. This future history is announced too in the antagonism between the self-styled ‘corrupter of words’ Feste and the ‘kind of puritan’ Malvolio in Twelfth Night, which, like the antagonism between Falstaff and Henry, is mediated, as we have seen, in terms of the cyclically recurring cultural agon between Carnival and Lent, turned to represent a linear, irreversible, immanent as well as imminent historical event/rupture. The stand-off between Feste and Malvolio was also mediated by contemporaries as an agon between the figures of Shakespeare and Jonson, as I discussed in Chapter , where I pointed out Jonson’s ideological alignment with cultural reformers as well as more specifically his expressed aspiration to curtail the ‘prodigal hand’ of Shakespeare. Association of linguistically ‘extravagant’ figures with their creator, notably Lance, Launcelet and Falstaff, is, indeed, invited through what we might call onomastic ‘synonymia’. The figure of Lance in Two Gentlemen plays on his name through the synonym ‘staff’ (..–), and Launcelet in Merchant takes this up when he includes ‘staff’ in his list of synonyms to play on his own name as well as implicitly on that of Shake-speare, as I discussed in Chapter . The nouns ‘lance’ and ‘staff’ are juxtaposed with ‘spear’ as synonymous ‘Englishes’ in glosses to three Italian words – lancia, pentina and picca – in Florio’s Italian–English dictionary of  as well as in the gloss to lance in Randle Cotgrave’s French–English dictionary of . This association is highlighted by Jonson in his prefatory poem to the First Folio where, tellingly, the paternal analogy – ‘how the father’s face / Lives in his issue’ – is evoked immediately before a call to readers to recognise the ‘race’ of Shakespeare in his ‘lines / In each of which he seems to shake a lance / As brandished at the eyes of ignorance’. Authorial paternity of an onomastically linked ‘family’ of figures is here suggested, although Shakespeare/lance is (perhaps consciously) turned by Jonson into a menacing figure of authority who aspires to control just as Jonson aspired to control the verbally extravagant, unruly Shakespeare: ‘sometime it was necessary he should be stopped . . . His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too’.    

Crystal, The Stories of English,  (italics in original). Lance: f. A Launce; also a . . . speare, or staffe. Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London, ), n.p. Compare Florio, A Worlde of Wordes, , , . ‘To the Memory of my beloved, the AUTHOR MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: AND what he hath left us’, in Shakespeare, Norton, A–A, lines –, , – (emphasis mine). Jonson, Discoveries, ed. Hutson, Works, VII, , lines –. See further Tudeau-Clayton, Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil, .

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Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word

On the side of Lenten future history, Jonson is, as I discussed in Chapter , the first critic to express overtly the turn against his rival’s extravagant practices, which is then definitively made by Samuel Johnson. Modern critical opinion has tended to follow these two critics in aspiring to curtail where it does not ignore these practices. Particularly striking for its Jo(h)nsonian vein is Park Honan’s stern criticism of Shakespeare as ‘enamoured of . . . verbal excesses’ in what he describes as the ‘apprentice work’ of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. He thus avoids the challenge of these excesses which, as it happens, he illustrates with the example of the verbal play on ‘ship’ and ‘sheep’ through which the biblical parable of the lost sheep is referenced in a telling structural parallel with the liturgical script, as I take up below. Honan is particularly severe but his opinion is widely shared, if not always explicitly voiced. As Simon Palfrey has remarked: ‘We are always improving Shakespeare, or protecting ourselves from his excess.’ There have of course been important exceptions, at least with respect to ‘play upon the word’, or the ‘pun’, as it is later called, which tends to be treated separately – and to receive more attention – than the other figures with which it is grouped in this chapter, except when it is classed according to the system of formal rhetoric as it is, for instance, by Sister Miriam Joseph. However, where serious attention has been paid to word play, as in the brilliant work of Patricia Parker and Molly Mahood, and the clutch of twentieth-century scholars and critics cited by Mahood, it tends to be for the networks of meanings that are generated. This is how it is treated by Sigurd Burkhardt, who, nevertheless, in an early chapter of Shakespearean Meanings (published in !), celebrates the Shakespearean ‘pun’ as one of the poetic devices which ‘release words . . . from their bondage to meaning’ and which ‘fell into disrepute in the eighteenth century’ because ‘it calls into question the linguistic currency on which the social order depends’. Burkhardt’s affirmation of word play has recently been cited by Russ McDonald, who tellingly drops the reference to its emancipatory and subversive thrust when he argues that Shakespearean verbal play exemplifies a Tudor aesthetic of ornament. Still more recently, instances of Shakespearean verbal play have been celebrated    

 Honan, Shakespeare, . Palfrey, Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds, . ‘Rightly to appreciate Shakespeare’s puns, one should regard them as examples of four highly esteemed figures of Renaissance rhetoric’. Joseph, Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language, . Sigurd Burkhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton University Press, ), –. See too De Grazia, ‘Homonyms before and after Lexical Standardization’, . Russ McDonald, ‘“Pretty rooms”: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Elizabethan Architecture and Early Modern Visual Design’, in Post, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry, .

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‘Synonymia, or the Figure of Store’

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rather for their value as ‘sources and generators of dramatic life’ by Palfrey in his inimitable excursus into ‘the potentiality’ with which the plays are ‘alive’, and by Ferguson, who, as I mentioned earlier, affirms the ‘generative power’ of Shakespeare’s ‘exorbitant’ word play. Like McDonald, neither Ferguson nor Palfrey mentions the subversive, ideological or socio-political dimensions of verbal play. These are, however, addressed in an essay on Twelfth Night by Geoffrey Hartman, which dates, tellingly enough, from the heyday of theory in the s. Hartman underlines the ‘subverting character’, as he puts it, of Shakespearean verbal play, which is ‘not put so easily in the service of the nation-state and its movement towards a common language’, and which puts into question the norm of ‘propriety’. His essay has particular bearing on this book since it foregrounds not only the subversive thrust of Shakespearean linguistic practice, but also the implied unlimited gift economy: ‘the language itself coins its metaphors and fertile exchanges beyond any calculus of loss and gain’ spending ‘itself in an incredibly generous manner, as if the treasury of words were always full’. It also points to the religious/spiritual dimensions: Twelfth Night ‘is not a religious play and yet its “gracious fooling” may be full of grace’ and the play ‘aspires . . . to the gift of tongues’. I will return to Hartman’s gift of tongues in my conclusion when I will argue that a figure usually, if not always, dismissed as merely comic, illustrates the ‘charism’ of what he calls the ‘gift’ of an ‘extravagant spirit’ – a gift that gives or empties itself in a plenitude of forms, including new word formations, play upon the word and especially ‘synonymia’. This figure is Holofernes, the schoolteacher, player and producer of dramatic shows in Love’s Labour’s Lost.

‘Synonymia, or the Figure of Store’ It is with reference to Holofernes that Sylvia Adamson describes the figure of ‘synonymia’ as the ‘trademark vice of the schoolmaster’, although the diverse company Holofernes keeps as a habitual, self-conscious practiser might give us pause. Adamson herself, in her excellent overview of the    

Palfrey, Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds, , Ferguson, ‘Fatal Cleopatras and Golden Apples’, . Geoffrey H. Hartman, ‘Shakespeare’s Poetical Character in Twelfth Night’, in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Methuen, ), . Hartman, ‘Shakespeare’s Poetical Character’, , . Adamson, ‘Synonymia’, . Margreta de Grazia gives other interesting examples, notably from Richard II and Hamlet in her briefer discussion, Margreta de Grazia, ‘Shakespeare and the Craft of Language’, in de Grazia and Wells, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, –.

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Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word

figure, furnishes a more nuanced view than is suggested by this dismissive comment, which echoes John Hoskins’s guide to style (c.), where Adamson locates the emergence of a turn against the figure, which, she argues, more than any other, furnishes a measure of the gap between Renaissance and modern taste. As she argues, ‘an excess requiring extenuation’ for ‘modern readers’, the figure, promoted by the schoolroom use of Erasmus’s De Copia and valued as verbal ‘ornament’, today either registers as comic, or disappears into what she calls the ‘organic’ interpretation of instances when the ‘variations’ become a ‘sign of a mind groping for meaning’, as in the soliloquies of Hamlet (as read by Lewis) or of Macbeth (as read by Palfrey). As she observes, the turn against this figure coincided with the turn against the value of ‘copia’ with which it is closely associated. It is, as she points out, Hoskins who specifically warns his pupil against the use (‘like a schoolmaster’) of ‘synonymia’ as a figure, although he still recommends ‘the practise’ of ‘variation’ as an exercise which ‘will bring you to abundance of phrases’ and so to choice, ‘the mother of perfection’. To this end his pupil is advised to make up a ‘synonyma [sic] book’ in order to be ‘well stored’. This may recall Puttenham’s Englishing of ‘Synonymia’ as ‘the Figure of Store’, a figure ‘of ornament’ which is unambiguously valued by Puttenham because it ‘doth much beautify and enlarge the matter’. Hoskins’s ‘synonyma book’ is of course a precursor to the ‘thesaurus’ – from the Greek for ‘treasure house’ as well as ‘store’ – which, incidentally, is still valued as a stylistic resource in francophone culture. Indeed, the use of synonyms continues to be recommended, somewhat disconcertingly for English speakers for whom the assumption of one word/one meaning has become ingrained since the turn to the normative value of ‘plainness’. 

 

Adamson, ‘Synonymia’, , . Joseph gives the lines discussed by Palfrey (Macbeth, ..–) to illustrate ‘Synonymia’, which, for her, serves rather to ‘increase’ the ‘force’ of the ‘meaning’ reiterated in different word forms. Joseph, Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language, . In an earlier discussion Adamson draws a distinction rather in terms of ‘elaborative and interpretative sinonimia’, alluding to the Latin term interpretatio, which is used as equivalent to synonymia by, for example, Susenbrotus (see note in Puttenham, The Art, ). Interestingly Adamson illustrates this distinction with instances produced by Holofernes, who is treated less dismissively here. Adamson, ‘Literary Language’, –.  Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, , . Puttenham, The Art, –. In a contemporary manual for good practice the francophone reader is advised to choose synonyms in order to avoid repetition: ‘Il faut choisir des synonymes pour éviter les répétitions’. Daniel Berlion, Raphaële Bourcereau-Lequeux and Anne-Laure Chat, Le Bled. Vocabulaire (Paris: Hachette, ),  (bold type in original). Word play is also treated as intellectually respectable as it tends not to be in anglophone (cf. francophone) culture. It is frequently used, for example, in satirical writing, as in the weekly newspaper Le Canard Enchainé.

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‘Synonymia, or the Figure of Store’

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It is perhaps because of the modern English distaste for the practice that the Shakespearean instances of ‘synonymia’ have not been considered together. Yet Holofernes is joined, as I have indicated, by a diverse company of characters from across the genres in a set of highly selfconscious instances from the s. These include: the nomadic, impecunious gentleman Falstaff in both Merry Wives and the second tetralogy, the Welsh captain Fluellen in Henry V, Launcelet, Touchstone and Feste in their respective comedies and, at the turn of the century, the eponymous tragic protagonist Hamlet. This last instance is of particular interest for, arguably neither organic nor ornamental (or both), it advertises the range of possibilities of expression that are at once generated and illustrated by the figure. Specifically, Hamlet self-consciously uses four metalinguistic verbs of expression – ‘whine’, ‘prate’, ‘mouth’, ‘rant’ – to denigrate as vacuous the speech style of his opponent and rival Laertes, a vacuity which is set in contrast to the plenitude of the figure ‘of store’ illustrated by his list of verbs. More precisely, the figure of store is set against the figure of hyperbole (the ‘Overreacher’ as it is Englished by Puttenham), a Renaissance figure of ‘excess’ which is used by Laertes here as it is by the type of Marlovian protagonist referenced by Hamlet, and which is critiqued for its tendency to empty rather than expand possibilities of expression. Against this signature technique, or what we might call the ‘trademark vice’ of the Marlovian protagonist, the figure of ‘store’ is affirmed. It is affirmed again in another tellingly placed instance, discussed in Chapter , which is produced by Falstaff, who, it is worth observing, shares with Hamlet a predilection for words over action. Echoing specifically Holofernes’ praise of his ‘gift’ of an ‘extravagant spirit’, as I take up in my conclusion, Falstaff’s speech in praise of sack ( Henry IV, ..–), which I described in Chapter  as an intemperance lecture produced in a moment of ‘idleness’, glances self-consciously, in the phrase ‘good store of fertile sherry’ (..–, emphasis mine), at the figure which is used, combined here with a similarly self-conscious word formation: ‘forgetive’ 





For full discussion of this instance see Margaret Tudeau-Clayton ‘“The Lady Shall Say Her Mind Freely”: Shakespeare and the S/Pace of Blank Verse’, in Ina Habermann and Michelle Witen, eds., Shakespeare and Space: Theatrical Explorations of the Spatial Paradigm (London: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ..–. If we read this speech ‘organically’, it would represent Hamlet’s groping for the right word to characterise Laertes’ speech, if ‘ornamentally’, it would represent Hamlet’s display of his verbal resources as equal to, if not better than those of his rival. The synonyms might also be read as intensifying the force of the idea of vacuity, in line with Joseph’s definition of ‘synonymia’ (see note ). Puttenham, The Art, .

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Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word

(.., discussed below). Together, they illustrate the generative ‘virtue’ (in the early sense of ‘force’) of these fertile practices, which expand possibilities of expression. Here these are set not against the inflationary economy of Marlovian hyperbole, but against the Lenten economy of temperance and ‘plainness’ about to be inaugurated by the ‘reformation’ dramatised in the (imminent) banishment of Falstaff. A third instance of the figure, mentioned in Chapter , again produced in a moment of ‘idleness’, is likewise set against this economy, if less directly. Glancing perhaps at the reiterated textbook Virgilian example of asking ‘by variation’ if a son be ‘alive or not’, Launcelet Gobbo teases his blind father, telling him his son is ‘deceased; or, as you would say in plain terms, gone to heaven’ (Merchant, ..–). Here the substitution of a periphrastic variation for the single word ‘deceased’ mocks the notion of ‘plain terms’ that it is claimed by Launcelet, ironically, to illustrate. The ironic effect is then reinforced by the more elaborate instance of ‘synonymia’ which immediately follows. Reanimating the literal (‘dead’) base of the figures of ‘staff’ and ‘prop’ invoked by his father (..–), Launcelet invites spectators to recognise the non-transparent relation of word to world, to recognise, that is, ‘plain terms’ as an illusion, even as he adds to their lexical store by introducing two further synonyms – ‘cudgel’, ‘hovel-post’ – and implying two more – ‘launce’ and ‘spear’, nouns which play on his own name as well as that of the author, with whom he is thus associated: ‘Do I look like a cudgel or a hovel post, a staff or a prop? (..–). Linguistic linearity is again suspended together with action in a demonstration of the ‘store’, ‘treasure house’, ‘thesaurus’ or ‘copia’ of ‘Englishes’, illustrated by the practice of synonymia, which, at the same time, mockingly undercuts the notion of ‘plain terms’. That the practice of this figure served to disseminate symbolic capital – what Dekker calls the poets’ ‘light commodity of words’ – and so a form of social power to the broad constituency that, as Dekker underscores, made up a theatre audience is highlighted by two Shakespearean instances which echo dictionary entries. As others have observed, Holofernes, on his first   

OED ‘virtue’ . Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London, ), sig. Piiiir; Adamson, ‘Synonymia’, . Compare Puttenham, The Art, –. Dekker, The Guls Horne-booke, , . The first passage is quoted by Watson (‘Coining Words’, ), who does not consider the significance of the adjective ‘light’ in his discussion of Shakespeare as a canny exploiter of what he describes as the word market, although he does note that ‘vocabulary . . . is obviously harder to regulate by law’ than dress (). The adjective ‘light’ highlights the insubstantiality of this readily movable capital which playwrights could introduce in their ‘Royal-Exchange’ as Nashe calls ‘The Theater’, and disseminate at no material cost.

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‘Synonymia, or the Figure of Store’



entrance (..–), nearly reproduces the entries to cielo and terra in John Florio’s Italian–English dictionary, published in the same year as the first extant quarto of Love’s Labour’s Lost (). ‘[A] speaking dictionary’, as Hibbard comments, Holofernes thus rehearses for a theatre audience the ‘Englishes’ addressed by Florio to ‘English gentlemen’, to whom, as I indicated in Chapter , he assumes this lexical capital belongs. On the other hand, it is dictionaries (or word lists) addressed to non-elite readers that are echoed by the figure of Touchstone in As You Like It (..–). Touchstone condescendingly glosses three Latinate words, ‘abandon’, ‘society’, ‘female’, each of which is paired with a phrase variation, ‘in the vulgar’, ‘in the boorish’, ‘in the common’, when he issues his command to the (tellingly named) rustic William: ‘abandon the society of this female’ (Audrey) (..). He follows this by varying the expressions of the consequence – ‘thou perishest!’ – if William does not comply, concluding with the self-consciously ironic comment: ‘I will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways’ (..–, –). As Juliet Dusinberre notes, ‘abandon’ is the first entry in the ‘hard word’ dictionary by Robert Cawdrey, who includes Touchstone’s ‘leave’ among the four ‘plaine English words’ (as he describes them on the title page) given in his gloss. ‘Abandon’ is the first entry too in the list from which Cawdrey draws extensively, in Edmund Coote’s The English School-Maister (), although Coote only gives one of Cawdrey’s four glosses to ‘abandon’: ‘cast away’. Both lists contain Touchstone’s two other words, ‘female’ and ‘society’, though Coote gives only ‘felowship’ in his gloss to the second, whereas Cawdrey also gives Touchstone’s ‘company’. Cawdrey’s addition of ‘leave’ and ‘company’ to his glosses to ‘abandon’ and ‘societie’ respectively is perhaps a trace of the dissemination of this Shakespearean 

  

Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. Hibbard, . It is widely assumed (from the evidence of the Q title page) that there was an earlier quarto which has not survived, and from which the  quarto was printed. However, this specific speech by Holofernes might have been added to coincide with the publication of Florio’s dictionary. Though the identification of Holofernes as a caricatural portrait of Florio (made by an earlier generation of scholars) is disregarded today, there is no doubt that the play is haunted by his presence. See Clayton and Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Mercury, Boy Yet’, –; and Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“Mine own and not mine own”’, –. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Juliet Dusinberre (London: Thomson Learning, ), note to .., . Cawdrey, A Table Alphabeticall, n.p. Edmund Coote, The English School-Maister (London, ), facsimile reprint, in R. C. Alston, ed., English Linguistics, –: A Collection of Facsimile Reprints (Menston: Scolar Press, ), . Coote, The English School-Maister, . The word ‘female’ is glossed by Coote ‘the she’ () and Cawdrey, ‘the she in mankind or other’. All three words also feature in the ‘generall table’ of hard words without glosses in Richard Mulcaster’s Elementary (), on which Coote drew, though ‘abandon’ is not the first. Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementarie, –.

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

Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word

instance, which appeared between Coote’s word list () and Cawdrey’s dictionary (), or at least an indicator of shared purposes. Like Touchstone’s glosses addressed to the rustic William, and like Coote’s handbook from which the title page advertisement is lifted as well as many words, Cawdrey’s dictionary is expressly designed for those ‘unskilfull’ (including women) who may ‘the more easilie and better understand many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in scriptures, sermons, or elswhere’ (the theatre?) ‘and also be made able to use the same’ (title page, emphasis mine). In a preface Coote comments too that his word list affords an opportunity for readers to ‘learne varietie of words’. It is a variety that, in this Shakespearean instance, is highlighted not only by Touchstone’s pedagogical glosses for the unskilful William, but also by the varying of ‘thou perishest’, which follows. Indeed, Touchstone’s concluding ironic reflection, ‘I will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways’, glances at the tension between the proliferation of possibilities of expression (there are many ways of expressing how to kill man) and the limitations of action (a man may be killed only once). These instances highlight again the value of synonymia in the theatre, specifically here as a practice aimed at achieving, arguably more efficiently than word lists, the pedagogical purpose of enabling men and women without education to understand and use more words. This is to offer not only the social power attendant on the acquisition and use of such symbolic capital, as Robert Watson has emphasised, but also the pleasure of ‘enlarged’ possibilities at once of expression and of subjectivity. For, as Hoskins comments, the practice of synonymia allows choice, and this is a choice of possibilities of meaning as well as of expression. To evoke the Latin word interpretatio, used of the practice as explanatory (see note  above), the ‘store’ of words supplied by the practice offers ‘unskilful’ spectators/readers the possibility to mediate the world and their subjectivity as complex, or ‘manifold’ – to recall the phrase ‘manifold Englishes’ with which Florio celebrated the abundance (‘copia’) of his adopted vernacular (Chapter ). The importance of education to the acquisition of this ‘enlarging’ and empowering capital is explicitly dramatised in the Folio version of Merry  

 

Coote, The English School-Maister, . Compare the mocking put-down of the figure of the yeoman Trincalo, disabled and dispossessed by his inability to use the words he picks up from the theatre, in Thomas Tomkis’s Albumazar (), discussed in Chapter , . Watson, ‘Coining Words’, , . Puttenham: ‘store doth much beautify and enlarge’ (The Art, , emphasis mine).

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‘Synonymia, or the Figure of Store’



Wives in the scene of a Latin lesson (.) in which the (again tellingly named) schoolboy Will (Page), is, as Parker puts it, tempted into the production of a ‘prodigality of synonyms’ by the (standard) schoolroom exercise of double translation. This prodigality of synonyms is still more evident in the two instances of the practice performed by Falstaff and the Host, which feature (if in abbreviated form) in the Quarto as well as Folio version of the play. Comically deferring the action they call for, both disseminate even as they celebrate the range and diversity of Englishes, plundering the authorial treasure house – in part acquired, as the scene of Will’s Latin lesson advertises, through formal education – for the benefit of a public theatre audience. Early in the play Falstaff stages a theatrical dismissal of his followers Pistol and Nym, who have refused to carry his love letters, even as he prevents them from carrying out the order by a variation of its expression: ‘Rogues, hence, avaunt! Vanish like hailstones, go! / Trudge, plod away i’th’hoof, seek shelter, pack!’ (..–). In a similarly comic moment towards the end of the play the Host interrogates the servant Simple, preventing him from doing what he is bid by a sequence of three variations: a pair of nouns to characterise the addressee (as ignorant rustic), three verbs to bid him speak, and four adverbs to specify that he be brief: ‘What wouldst thou have, boor? What, thickskin? Speak, breathe, discuss; brief, short, quick, snap!’ (..–). Unsurprisingly, ‘brief’ and ‘short’ are commonly juxtaposed in dictionaries, which again indicates how the Host’s practice of synonymia, like Falstaff’s, serves to circulate Englishes to those without access to education, or dictionaries. There is, however, another more important intertextual relation, which signals what else may be at stake in the practice. For the instance performed by Falstaff echoes (or is echoed by) an instance in an essay on ‘The Excellency of the English Tongue’ by the Cornish gentleman and chorographer Richard Carew, which was first published in the second edition of William Camden’s Remaines (), but which was written much earlier, perhaps as early as –. Carew proposes ‘wee maye synnonomize’  

Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, . This is the date given by Gregory G. Smith and Manfred Görlach. Richard Carew, The Excellency of the English Tongue, in Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, II, – (quotations taken from this text); Görlach, Introduction to Early Modern English, . Unfortunately, speculation by D. N. C. Wood in  that the essay was first penned as a response to Richard Verstegan’s treatise () has hardened into assumption (as, for instance, in Bailey, Images of English, –). D. N. C. Wood, ‘Elizabethan English and Richard Carew’, Neophilologus : (), –. The evidence is, however, slender. To mention the most obvious point, Verstegan is never named, as Wood acknowledges, but it is not the case that Carew ‘named no names’, as Wood asserts (). The essay is full of names beginning with the name of Stephanus (Henri Estienne), whose celebration of

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

Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word

(a verb he invents) to furnish ‘prooffes of our copiousnes’, ‘for example, when wee would be rid of one, wee use to saye Bee going, trudge, pack, be faring, hence, awaye, shifte, and, by circumlocution, rather your roome then your companye, Letts see your backe’ (ten further idioms follow). Crucially, there is for Carew no centre of ownership to this copiousness as there is for John Florio. On the contrary, in the lines immediately preceding this example, he summons a broad inclusive community of ‘we’ coextensive with national territorial boundaries, to claim that ‘the Copiousnes of our Languadge appeareth in the diversitye of our dialectes, for wee have court, and wee have countrye Englishe, wee have Northern and Southerne, grosse and ordinary’. As Richard Bailey has observed, Carew is ‘the first on record to regard the diversity of English dialects as one of the ornaments of the language’ and, still more importantly, he puts them on ‘an equal footing’. In this Carew, perhaps consciously, takes a position exactly the opposite of that taken in ‘Doctor Wilsons Rethorick’, as he earlier refers to Thomas Wilson’s guide to usage. For, as we have seen, Wilson, in very similar terms, makes of the ‘difference of Englishe’ ‘learned . . . rude’ ‘court . . . countrey’ precisely a reason to urge that ‘we’ ‘use altogether one maner of language’, suppressing such differences, including the Latinate variety practised by the male elite at court, which, for Florio, constitutes the centre of ownership of the ‘copia’ of ‘Englishes’. For Carew, then, ‘wee maye synnonomize’ both to display and disseminate the copiousness of a broadly conceived inclusive vernacular, and to preserve the differences within this vernacular. In this respect Carew’s essay is of a piece with his chorography, The Survey of Cornwall (), a coherence



 

 

the French language (), as Görlach notes, ‘prompted’ Carew. The cultural references also clearly point to the mid to late s as I argued in Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Richard Carew, William Shakespeare, and the Politics of Translating Virgil in Early Modern England and Scotland’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition : (Spring ), –. In private correspondence Catherine Angerson, curator at the British Library, dates the one extant manuscript to ‘after ’, but comments ‘this does not rule out an earlier date of composition as this could be a scribal copy of an earlier draft’. Carew, The Excellency,  (italics in original). Erasmus includes a collection of Latin expressions for ‘Getting rid of’ (my translation of ‘Ablegandi verba’) in Desiderius Erasmus, De Duplici Copia Verborum ac Rerum, ed. Betty I. Knott, Opera Omnia, I. (Amsterdam: North Holland, ), . Carew, The Excellency, –. Bailey, Images of English, . For the exceptionalism of Carew with respect to dialects both in his survey of Cornwall, discussed below, and in the essay (dated here to c.), see Blank, Broken English, , –,  n. . Carew, The Excellency, . Wilson, Arte, . This is one of the references that suggest an early date as the height of the ‘appeal’ of Wilson’s work was in the s and it went into decline from the s. See Arte, lxxxvii–xciv.

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‘Synonymia, or the Figure of Store’



highlighted by the addition of the essay to later editions of the survey, which ‘plotteth downe Cornwall, as it now standeth, for the particulars’. Indeed, as Richard Helgerson (quoting Carew) points out, ‘where he “can say little worth the observing for any difference from . . . other shires” he passes on’. For Carew cultural diversity is of value and its preservation an imperative in the face of the threat of erasure, whether as an effect of the passage of time, or a political agenda, such as the centripetal drive to homogeneity of cultural reformation ideology. The practice of synonymia serves then the preservation as well as celebration of such diversity. That the voice of this Cornish gentleman and chorographer committed to the preservation of local cultural difference should find echo in the voice of the dramatis persona of the nomadic gentleman Falstaff is eminently appropriate since, as we have seen, the well-travelled Falstaff embraces cultural diversity and embodies a cultural and linguistic difference under the threat of banishment from the centripetal drive to homogeneity of cultural reformation ideology. Indeed, one of the two expressions he gives in his variation ‘by circumlocution’ (Carew) – ‘Vanish like hailstones’ – may reflect, if jokingly, on the purpose of preservation. For there is no recorded trace of this expression as a proverb or local idiom, which may have ‘vanished’, or been invented by Falstaff/Shakespeare as a possible idiom that might have ‘vanished’, had it not been preserved here. Still more importantly, this echo lends added significance to the association of Falstaff with another habitual synonymiser: the Welsh captain Fluellen in Henry V. Carew observes that the Welsh are ‘kinsmen’ to the Cornish – a kinship signalled, as he says, in names – ‘auncient countrimen’ ‘fostering’, likewise, ‘a fresh memorie of their expulsion long agoe by the English’, an expulsion which is remembered too by cultural reformers such as John Cheke for whom ‘the Welsh’ represent the type of ‘stranger’ whose exclusion is constitutive of a narrowly conceived ‘we’ English. Shakespeare’s own roots, it is worth recalling, lay in a small town  



 

Richard Carew, ‘To the Reader’, The Survey of Cornwall (London, ), sig. r. Richard Helgerson, ‘The Land Speaks: Cartography, Chorography, and Subversion in Renaissance England’, Representations  (Fall ), . The quotation is from Carew, The Survey, sig. Sr. Helgerson argues persuasively for the development of a loyalty to the land of England – evinced in the work of the chorographers – in tension with loyalty to the monarch. Compare Mullaney’s discussion of the Eastcheap scenes in  Henry IV as ‘a wonder-cabinet’ of ‘country proverbs, idiomatic expressions drawn from local dialects’ and preserved. Mullaney, The Place of the Stage, –. Carew, The Survey, sig. Pv, sig. Sr. See Chapter , –. Carew comments: ‘the Britons . . . the Saxons termed Welshmen, by interpretation strangers, for so they were to them, as they to the Countrie’. Carew, The Survey, sig. Bv.

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

Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word

community closer to Wales than to London, a place which, as I argued in Chapter , is shown in the second tetralogy to be a (distant) place of strangers at once for the servant class of rural England and for the nobility from its northern and western limits. Portraying the nation as a community of mutual strangers, the second tetralogy, I argued, resists the exclusions and suppressions to which the centripetal drive to homogeneity of cultural reformation ideology aspires, calling rather for mutual accommodation in a mixed and inclusive community, a social as well as cultural ‘gallimaufry’, metonymically figured in the ‘variation of each soil’ in the journey from North to South ( Henry IV, ..), a variation embraced by the figure of Falstaff and mapped by chorographers such as Carew. This ‘variation’ finds echo in the use of the words ‘variation’ (Henry V, ..) and ‘variations’ (..) in two self-conscious instances of synonymia produced by the Welsh captain Fluellen. A third instance, when he forgets Falstaff’s name even as he recalls that ‘he was full of jests, and gipes, and knaveries, and mocks’ (..–), highlights the kinship with Falstaff that Fluellen finds in the practice. Significantly, this kinship is extended to the ostensible enemy, the French, through an explicit reference to the practice in a conversation among the French nobles about the Dauphin’s horse about which, he claims, any man ‘of wit’ might ‘vary deserved praise’ (..–). In this practice, then, constitutive others of the ‘we’ ‘true’ English of cultural reformation ideology find common ground: the nomadic English gentleman, the Welsh and the French, all, it is worth recalling, objects of the exclusionary thrust of the trope of ‘the King’s English’ (see Table .). This underscores the resistance to this ideology carried by the practice in a play, which, as I pointed out in Chapter , closes on the image of ‘neighborhood and Christian-like accord’ (Henry V, ..) between the French and the English. It is an accord promoted by the shared cultural practice of synonymia, which preserves even as it celebrates unity in difference. Fluellen’s second self-conscious instance immediately precedes his remembering of Falstaff, and is prompted by the difference that Welsh pronunciation makes to the word ‘big’, which slides into ‘pig’, a slippage which, as others have commented, allows for a critique of Hal, in particular of his banishment of Falstaff. Asserting ‘is not “pig” great?’ Fluellen proceeds to list five words (including these two) to claim that they are ‘all one reckonings save the phrase is a little variations’ (..–). If the 

See, for instance, Patricia Parker, ‘Uncertain Unions: Welsh Leeks in Henry V’, in Baker and Maley, eds., British Identities and English Renaissance Literature, –.

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‘Synonymia, or the Figure of Store’



plural form may be, as Andrew Gurr suggests, ‘designed as another Welsh pronunciation’, it is itself a variation that highlights at the level of grammar (if ‘ungrammatically’, as Gary Taylor notes) the lexical plurality produced by the practice of synonymia. Indeed, Fluellen’s comment amounts to a variation of glosses on this practice, ‘when’, as Henry Peacham puts it, ‘by a variation and change of words, that be of lyke sygnifycation, we iterate one thing divers tymes’ (), which Hoskins more ambivalently describes as ‘but variation of an English’ in his manual on style contemporary with Henry V. Fluellen’s earlier self-conscious instance (..–) is still more telling, especially given where it is placed: in a scene preceded by the scenes of the breaching of the walls of Harfleur (.), the French princess Kate’s language lesson (.) and the denigration by the French of the English as ‘Norman bastards’ (..), and followed by the scene when the practice of varying is mentioned by the Dauphin (..–). As I discussed in Chapter , the first sequence of scenes (.–.) highlights the irretrievably ‘mixed’ character of (the) English and (the) French, the mutual ‘contamination’ that is a function of the contingencies of their shared history, or, as Pistol puts it in the (commonplace) image that prompts this instance of synonymia: ‘giddy Fortune’s . . . fickle wheel’ (..). Seeking to correct as well as elaborate on Pistol’s image, Fluellen explains the significance of the ‘wheel’, namely that Fortune is ‘turning, and inconstant, and mutability, and variation’ (..–). To Pistol’s ‘giddy’ and ‘fickle’ he thus adds four Englishes that include the formal term for the practice. The inclusion of this term highlights the dependence of synonymia itself on the contingencies of history, figured in Fortune’s wheel. Indeed, the practice not only preserves from the erasures attendant on these contingencies, but is also a product of them. Synchronic range, that is, is a function of diachronic change, especially the shifting boundaries between (the) English and (the) French, as this instance indicates, combining as it does the more learned Fluellen’s three Latinate words   

William Shakespeare, King Henry V, ed. Andrew Gurr (Cambridge University Press, ), note to ..; Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford University Press, ), note to ...  Adamson, ‘Synonymia’, . Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, . ‘Fortune is Unconstant’ is destined, perhaps in part thanks to this Shakespearean instance, to become one of the ‘sentences varied according to the rules prescribed by Erasmus’ in a textbook for the teaching of the vernacular by Josua Poole (published ), who himself draws on Erasmus’s varying of the theme of ‘inconstantia’ in De Copia, which Fluellen may recall. Josua Poole, Practical rhetorick. Or, Certain little sentences varied according to the rules prescribed by Erasmus, in his most excellent book De copia verborum & rerum (London, ), Sentence IV, –. See Erasmus, De Duplici Copia Verborum ac Rerum, ed. Knott, –.

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

Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word

(inconstant, mutability and variation) with Pistol’s two Germanic words (giddy, fickle) and the Latin/Germanic word ‘turning’. It is a Germanic word – ‘welkin’ – that is preferred by Feste over the Latinate ‘element’ in the final instance of the practice that I want to consider, which recalls one of the instances produced by Holofernes (discussed above): ‘Who you are and what you would are out of my welkin. I might say “element”, but the word is overworn’ (..–). If the choice of a word with an archaic, literary register suggests the purpose of preservation, Feste’s declared reason is, ironically, to avoid a word that he claims has become ‘overworn’. With a critical glance specifically at Jonson’s repeated use of the word ‘element’, as I discussed in Chapter , this instance points to the importance of the practice of synonymia for the vitality of the vernacular. A self-declared ‘corrupter of words’ (..) Feste sets varying against the repetition preferred by would-be cultural reformers who aspire to a stabilised, bounded, normative ‘true’ or proper English, which, Feste implies, tends to the exhaustion of expressive possibilities. By contrast, varying reinvigorates both the vernacular and the individual’s capacities for expression, as Hoskins, despite his ambivalence, acknowledges when he comments that the practice has ‘this certain effect that it will sufficiently testify your vein not to be dry and spent’.

‘Enfranchisment’, ‘mistake the word’ and ‘play upon the word’ That the practice of synonymia is enhanced by the introduction of new borrowed words is pointed out by Terttu Nevalainen, who comments that ‘borrowed lexis . . . increases synonymy in the language, . . . providing alternative ways of saying the same thing in different registers’. Adamson too observes that, historically, it may not be an accident that the prominence of the practice ‘coincided with the high water mark of foreign borrowing’. Indeed, two of the terms used by Puttenham in  to recommend the practice of synonymia – ‘store’ and ‘enlarge’ – are anticipated in Richard Mulcaster’s affirmation of the virtue of borrowing in his important, if today somewhat neglected, treatise on education, The first part of the elementarie (): ‘we have our tung commonlie both stored 

 

Ted Hughes argued that Shakespeare consistently joins Latinate and Germanic words in his signature technique of hendiadys, which thus carries a reconciliatory politics as do these instances of synonymia. See Neil Corcoran, ‘A Nation of Selves: Ted Hughes’s Shakespeare’, in Maley and Tudeau-Clayton, eds., This England, That Shakespeare, –.  Nevalainen, ‘Early Modern English Lexis’, . Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, .  Nevalainen, ‘Early Modern English Lexis’, . Adamson, ‘Literary Language’, .

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‘Enfranchisment’, ‘mistake the word’, ‘play upon the word’



and enlarged with our neighbours speches, and the old learned tungs’. In what is itself a highly telling instance Mulcaster names this practice ‘Of Enfranchisment’, in his title to this chapter, evoking the commonplace analogy between linguistic and human ‘strangers’, which, as I discussed in Chapter , acquired a specific charge in the conflict around the treatment of ‘aliens’ in the last decade of the sixteenth century. As I argued, this context highlights the stakes of Shakespeare’s welcoming of linguistic strangers and his affirmation of the ‘gallimaufry’, a trope associated, as I pointed out, with social miscegenation. The practice of ‘enfranchisment’ is sometimes combined with the practice of synonymia, but this is not done as ‘systematically’ as Watson claims, arguing that it is in part on account of ‘instant glossaries’ that Shakespeare ‘prevailed’ in the ‘competition’ to capture what he describes as the ‘market’ for ‘new words’. I am interested rather in how, like the practice of synonymia, the practice of ‘enfranchisment’ served to emancipate the individual subject as well as the vernacular from given or proper limits, enlarging their ‘store’ of possibilities of expression. This is signalled by an early advocate of the practice, Sir Thomas Elyot, who claims that through borrowing words he sought ‘to augment our Englyshe tongue’ ‘whereby men shulde . . . expresse more abundantly the thynge that they conceyved in theyr hartis’. The emancipatory force carried by this expansion of expressive possibilities is, moreover, suggested by Mulcaster’s coinage. For ‘enfranchisement’ is glossed in early dictionaries not only by the administrative meaning ‘in our common law, the incorporating of a man into any societie, or body politicke’, but also by the more general meanings, ‘A making free’ and ‘Freedome’. Connected at once to the noun ‘franchise’ (glossed by Randle Cotgrave, ‘libertie, freedome’) and the verb ‘franchir’ (glossed by Cotgrave, ‘To . . . free, deliver . . . also, to leape, jumpe or bound . . . over’), ‘enfranchisement’ overlaps with the French ‘enjambement’ (glossed by Cotgrave, ‘a striding over’), one of the

    

Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementarie, . Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementarie, . Watson, ‘Coining Words’, , ; Watson, ‘Shakespeare’s New Words’, –. From the preface to Of the Knowledg which Maketh a Wise Man () as quoted in Nevalainen, ‘Early Modern English Lexis’, , emphasis mine. Cowell, The Interpreter, sig. Bbr; John Bullokar, An English Expositor (London, ), n.p.; Cockeram, The English Dictionarie, n.p.

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

Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word

techniques through which Shakespeare developed blank verse into a freer fluid form. Though not classified as a formal technique until much later, enjambement is to the verse line what the practice of ‘enfranchisment’ is to the lexicon: a liberating ‘striding over’ or ‘goe[ing] beyond’ ‘ordinarie, or fit limits’ (Cotgrave’s gloss to ‘franchir’), which expands – ‘enlarges’ – the expressive possibilities of the vernacular as of the individual subject. These possibilities are largely contained where the practice of ‘enfranchisment’ is combined with the practice of synonymia, since, as Watson points out, the new word is ‘explained’, just as Latinate words are explained by the glosses in the word lists and ‘hard word’ dictionaries discussed earlier. On the other hand, possibilities proliferate where explanatory synonyms are not provided, as in Feste’s ‘impeticos thy gratility’ (Twelfth Night, ..) or Othello’s ‘exsufflicate’ (Othello, ..), to cite two of the more familiar among very many Shakespearean instances. Such ‘enfranchisments’ call for mental exercise on the part of the spectator/reader, summoned to work with the context as well as with their existing ‘store’ of words to ‘fetch’ possible meanings for these ‘far-fetched’ words, as Sidney describes new word formations. As I take up below, ‘far-fetched’ is how Puttenham describes the mode of signification of the ‘parable’, a form of ‘dark speaking’, according to Erasmus, practised by Christ in order precisely to stir mental desire and the pursuit of (infinite) possibilities of meaning. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona the ‘parable’ is associated, as we shall see, with ‘play upon the word’ and ‘mistaking’, practices which are not always easy to distinguish from each other or from ‘enfranchisments’, and which likewise summon the pursuit of (infinite) possibilities of meaning. Tending to undo ‘proper’ boundaries as it enlarges the lexical ‘store’ of the individual subject and the vernacular, the practice of ‘enfranchisment’ puts into question the very idea of ‘property’, in the sense of defining character as well as ownership. For the space of ‘the Mingle-Mangle’, as Puttenham calls the practice of borrowing from ‘sundry languages’, is a space in-between, of neither/nor, both/and, a space without ‘property’ that, for the translator John Florio and the dramatist William Shakespeare, was, I have argued, a space of creative invention, notably between (the) French and (the) English, which offers potentially infinite possibilities of 



For full discussion see Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“The Lady Shall Say Her Mind Freely”’, , –. As I point out () the first dictionary entry to feature ‘blank verse’ is the entry to sciolto in Florio’s dictionary of , which begins: ‘loose, free, at liberty’. Sidney, An Apology, .Compare William Empson on how Shakespeare’s word play sets the reader ‘groping about their network’ (as cited in Ferguson, ‘Fatal Cleopatras and Golden Apples’, ).

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‘Enfranchisment’, ‘mistake the word’, ‘play upon the word’



expression for an inclusive inter-national community. This space is evoked explicitly in Henry V in which (the) French and (the) English meet and mingle, notably in the scene of the language lesson when the French princess Kate produces linguistic hybrids that anticipate the figure of the ‘boy, half French, half English’ that she will ‘compound’ with Henry in an intermediary cultural space ‘between Saint Denis and Saint George’ (Henry V, ..–; see Chapters  and ). As I discussed earlier, the play affirms the fatally ‘mixed’ or ‘bastard’ character of (the) French and (the) English as both/and neither/nor, a ‘mingle-mangle’. So too does the practice of ‘enfranchisment’, which emancipates from the very idea of property even as it continues to breach specific national boundaries, including the boundary between (the) French and (the) English. As we saw in Chapter , the breaching of this specific boundary is urged too by William Tyndale when he describes the idea of selfhood called for by ‘the order of love or charite’ instituted by Christ, for, like the space of the ‘mingle-mangle’/ ‘enfranchisment’, this is an unbounded space of neither/nor both/and, a space of suspension ‘in Christ’ of ‘proper’ boundaries of selves as of nations, especially of (the) English and (the) French. Though the number of new words Shakespeare is recognised as having introduced into English dwindles almost daily, thanks to the technological advances of new research methods, the practice is celebrated by four selfreflexive instances (three recognised by editors) from plays of the s, which I have chosen to consider rather than to enter the debate about numbers: ‘extravagancy’, ‘peregrinate’, ‘forgetive’ and ‘frutify’. The semantically unfixed, Latinate formation ‘extravagancy’ is introduced without explanatory synonyms in Twelfth Night (..) by a figure, Sebastian, whose condition it reflects. Both are indeed ‘straying strangers’ bound to alter the world they enter, as the purist Richard Verstegan complains that words ‘strange and extravagant’ to English (i.e. Latinate words) alter its ‘proper’ (Teutonic) character. Indeed, the arrival of the human stranger 





Puttenham, The Art, . See Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“Mine own and not mine own”’, –. On the potential for translation today to produce an ‘ideal of cultural globalization’ ‘to mitigate the impact of the scary economic kind’, see Boyd Tonkin, ‘Planet of Words’, Times Literary Supplement,  January , , a review of Frank Wynne, ed., Found in Translation (London: Head of Zeus, ). The extraordinary character of Shakespeare’s vocabulary, whether considered in terms of his contribution to the English language or in comparison with the vocabularies of other writers (e.g. Milton, Spenser, Middleton), has now been definitively exposed as a myth. See, among others, Hugh Craig, ‘Shakespeare’s Vocabulary: Myth and Reality’, Shakespeare Quarterly  (), –. Verstegan, A restitution of decayed intelligence, ; see Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Shakespeare’s Extravagancy’, .

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

Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word

in the fictional world triggers the release of blocked erotic desire, while the linguistic stranger stirs mental desire in the audience, invited to pursue possibilities of meaning. The similarly self-reflexive Latinate ‘peregrinate’ is introduced in Love’s Labour’s Lost by the figure of Holofernes, who combines it with an instance of synonymia in a critique of the excessive character of the discourse of Don Adrian de Armado, ‘too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it’ (..–). Laying claim to the invention of the new word (‘as I may call it’) Holofernes suggests that, with it, he has hit on the word he has been looking for, and this is borne out by the curate’s appreciative gloss: ‘A most singular and choice epithet’ (). The preceding list may thus be understood as an instance of ‘organic’ as well as ‘ornamental’ synonymia (to recall Adamson’s distinction), the variations not only a display of linguistic wealth, but also ‘the sign of a mind groping for meaning’, an interpretation more frequently (and predictably) applied to the putatively more complex subjectivities of tragic protagonists such as Hamlet or Macbeth. The new word Holofernes comes up with is derived from the Latin ‘peregrinatus’, which is glossed in Thomas Cooper’s dictionary, ‘Going or being abroad in straunge countries: a pilgrimage’. Like ‘extravagancy’, ‘peregrinate’ thus reflects on itself as well as on its inventor, who ironically thus exemplifies the linguistic straying he ostensibly condemns. More specifically, ‘peregrina’ is used, on the one hand, by Erasmus in De Copia of borrowed foreign words which increase the lexical store through synonymy, and, on the other, by Augustine, of the transnational community of citizen-stranger-pilgrims who, in this world, inhabit the City of God, ‘ista peregrina’, the ‘heavenly city’ which, while it ‘goes its way as a stranger on earth . . . summons citizens from all peoples and gathers an alien society of all languages’. ‘Peregrinate’ is thus a ‘straing’ word which evokes as it mirrors the condition of one who feels ‘uprooted, a passing    

See Adamson, ‘Synonymia’, , , discussed above, . Erasmus, De Duplici Copia Verborum ac Rerum, ed. Knott, , . Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, trans. William M. Green et al.,  vols. (London: William Heinemann, –), VI, . ‘Haec ergo caelestis civitas dum peregrinatur in terra, ex omnibus gentibus cives evocat atque in omnibus linguis peregrinam colligit societatem’. Augustine, The City of God, VI, . I would translate ‘peregrinam societatem’ ‘society of wandering stranger-pilgrims’ (to draw out the echo of the verb ‘peregrinatur’). In his chapter on the City of God, entitled ‘Civitas Peregrina’, Peter Brown points out the centrality of the idea of ‘peregrinatio’ to Augustine’s vision and its link to the category of ‘peregrini’, which had the precise sense of ‘resident aliens’ before the more general sense it later acquired of ‘stranger’. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, –.

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‘Enfranchisment’, ‘mistake the word’, ‘play upon the word’



stranger’ in the world, a condition Shakespeare recurrently evokes in his treatment of ‘the strangers’ case’ (Chapter ). The third self-reflexive instance of the practice is ‘forgetive’, which is introduced by the figure of the nomadic gentleman Falstaff in his speech in praise of sack in  Henry IV (..–). As I commented above, this speech also features self-conscious instances of synonymia, which celebrate the ‘store’ of Englishes that they disseminate as well as illustrate. The invented word ‘forgetive’ features in a list, though not of explanatory synonyms, but of various subtly different, if linked, effects of sack on the brain, made ‘apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery and delectable shapes’ which the tongue translates into ‘excellent wit’ (..–). Commonly assumed, as the OED notes, to be derived from the verb ‘forge’, ‘forgetive’ evokes the inventiveness it illustrates, perhaps with a hint at ‘counterfeit’, as I suggested in Chapter . But it might also be taken as a splicing of two recurrently paired, like-sounding words: ‘forgive’ and ‘forget’. Juxtaposed as it happens in Mulcaster’s word list, the two words are joined from an early date in the idiom ‘forgive and forget’, which is echoed in five places in the Shakespearean canon. Like the erasure of proper names in the mutual forgetting between Falstaff and the Welsh Glendower and Fluellen, discussed in Chapter , this suggests how erasure, possibly aided by the drinking of sack, enables the creative forging of new human/linguistic formations in an in-between space of both/and, neither/nor, the emancipatory space of the ‘mingle-mangle’ or ‘enfranchisment’. There is arguably another self-reflexive instance comparable to Falstaff’s ‘forgetive’, though it has not been recognised as such by editors: Launcelet Gobbo’s ‘frutify’ (..). Launcelet introduces the word to suggest what he hopes will be the productive – fruitful – effect of his father’s words, together with his gift, namely, the obtaining of Bassanio’s patronage. Launcelet’s invention has invariably been treated as a ‘mistake’ (or, anachronistically, a ‘malapropism’) by editors, although Adamson has pointed out the difficulty of making such category distinctions, citing the case of Dogberry, whose apparent blunders find echo in serious attempts at the introduction of new Latinate words. Launcelet’s ‘frutify’, included in the  

Brown, Augustine of Hippo, –. Adamson, ‘Literary Language’, –. Compare: ‘The very idea of “correct” and “incorrect” word choice from a well-regulated and well-documented English lexicon on which the concept of “malapropism” depends is alien to Shakespeare’s time’. Magnusson, ‘Language, History and Language-Games’, . Margaret Schlauch unwittingly highlights the self-reflexive resonances of

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

Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word

OED as a once-off ‘comic blunder’, and silently (and unjustifiably) emended to ‘fructify’ in the Norton, bears comparison with the words ‘toeify’ and ‘kneeify’ invented by the courtier in Woodstock to accessorise his flashy Polish boots, as I discussed in Chapter . More tellingly perhaps it also bears comparison with ‘netify’, one of the Englishes not included in the OED which John Florio introduces into his translation of Montaigne, just one of many such invented words. To Adamson’s point about the difficulty of deciding, we might add Norman Blake’s that editors are frequently influenced by class bias in drawing the category distinction. Thus, if Falstaff, for instance, had come up with ‘frutify’, it would presumably have been categorised as a Shakespearean/Falstaffian invention, while Orsino’s ‘rubious’ (Twelfth Night, ..), which is consistently classified as a Shakespearean invention, would presumably have been classified as a ‘blunder’, ‘mistake’, or ‘malapropism’, if used by Launcelet, or Bottom. The blurring of the distinction between ‘mistaking’ and Latinate word formation is, moreover, highlighted by the use of the formal labels ‘Cacozelia’ and ‘Cacozelon’. While Puttenham uses ‘Cacozelia’ for Latinate word formations, which he describes as the ‘affectation’ of ‘new words’ especially by those with a university education, who ‘seem to coin fine words out of the Latin’ to impress ‘the ignorant’, Henry Peacham uses ‘Cacozelon’ of mistaking, which he describes as ‘an ill imitation, or affectation’ by ‘foolish folk’ who aspire to appear ‘learned’ but who ‘apply’ ‘so contrarily’ ‘wordes borowed of the latine tongue’ that they are objects of laughter. As Manfred Görlach points out and Watson discusses at greater length, there was a ‘large market’ for providers of Latinate words, because of the social







Launcelet’s invention when she comments that the ‘obscure’ Latinate elements in English were a ‘fruitful resource’ for ‘unconscious distortion’ (which is what she assumes ‘frutify’ is). Margaret Schlauch, ‘The Social Background of Shakespeare’s Malapropisms’, in Vivian Salmon and Edwina Burgess, eds., A Reader in the Language of Shakespearean Drama (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, ), . An alternative to ‘clean’ this is singled out appreciatively in Frances Yates, John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge University Press, ), . The bias of the OED towards Shakespearean inventions is well-established. For Florio’s lexical contribution to English, see Chapter , note . Norman Blake, ‘Shakespeare’s Language: Past Achievements and Future Directions’, in Javier Pérez Guerra, ed., Proceedings of the XIXth International Conference of Aeadean (Universdade de Vigo, ), . In private correspondence Blake comments, ‘I am not sure how we should define a malapropism precisely’, adding that many forms might be regarded as malapropisms but are not ‘because they are spoken by posh people’ and so ‘the question is whether malapropism is only a class distinction’. Puttenham, The Art, –; Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence, sig. Giiv. See Görlach, Introduction to Early Modern English, .

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Shakespeare’s ‘straing’ Practices



status attached to them. Still more interestingly, Görlach describes the popular (mis)appropriation of Latinate words as ‘attempts at linguistic emancipation’, which bring about language change, although he does not develop the point, commenting simply that such attempts are ‘caricatured’ through figures such as Mistress Quickly or Dogberry. It is, however, the emancipatory as well as subversive implications of these overlapping linguistic practices – ‘enfranchisments’, ‘mistakings’ and ‘play upon the word’ – that are highlighted in Shakespeare’s plays, on the one hand, through their representation in terms of the discourse of ‘manage’ or horsemanship, and, on the other, through the alignment, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, of verbal play with the liberating plot of loss and reparation shared by referenced biblical parables, a plot which is thus reiterated at the level of language.

‘prancing words’: Shakespeare’s ‘straing’ Practices and the Discourse of ‘manage’ The discourse of horsemanship, or ‘manage’, continued to be used in Renaissance/early modern England as it had been since classical times to represent relations of control, whether of ruler over ruled (for example, Elizabeth I), men over women, or, by analogy, reason over the affections, especially sexual desire. Most important here is its recurrent use to urge the imperative to exercise control over the tongue. This use was sanctioned by biblical authority, most prominently by the Epistle of James, which includes ‘to bridel the tongue’ in its ‘argument’, and which, having declared in chapter one that a man’s religion is ‘vaine’ if he ‘refraineth

 

 



Görlach, Introduction to Early Modern English, ; Watson, ‘Coining Words’, –, –. Görlach, Introduction to Early Modern English,  (referring to Schlauch, ‘The Social Background of Shakespeare’s Malapropisms’). The contempt of cultural reformers for such practices is exemplified by the (ironically treated) enthusiasm of the stage-keeper for ‘mistaking words, as the fashion is in the stage-practise’, in Jonson’s ‘Induction’ to Bartholomew Fair. Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, in John Creaser ed., Works, IV, . ‘Now usually manège’: OED ‘manage’ . Elizabeth invokes the ‘bit of kingly rein’ to express her outrage at what she perceived as an encroachment on her privileges by parliament in . See J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments (London: Jonathan Cape, ), . In an emblem for Philip Sidney Geffrey Whitney depicts a horse ‘manag’d’ by a rider (Sidney) as a figure of the ‘grave’ men of high estate fit to rule. See Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Stepping out of Narrative Line: a Bit of Word, and Horse, Play in Venus and Adonis’, Shakespeare Survey  (Cambridge University Press, ), . Geneva Bible, sig. DDdiiv.

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

Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word

not his tongue’ (‘bridleth his tongue’ in the King James Bible) (James :), expands the analogy in chapter three, evoking the control exercised over the body of a horse by means of the bit in the mouth: ‘Beholde, we put bits into the horses mouthes that they shulde obey us, and we turne about all their bodie’ (James :). Thus to exercise control at once over the tongue and the body is to exercise the virtue of temperance, which, in a prefatory epistle to his translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (), Arthur Golding represents as ‘the bit of temprance’, which his readers are encouraged to learn to use in order to ‘correct / . . . feerce affections’ ‘least . . . / . . . lyke wilfull jades’ they ‘praunce / Away’. The virtue is, moreover, recurrently represented in visual emblems as a woman with a bit in her mouth (Peter Bruegel) or a bridle in her hand (Henry Peacham), a genderinflected representation which reproduces the commonplace conflation of female sexual temperance (chastity) and silence. An equivalent to the trope of bit and bridle is furnished for male subjects by the trope of ‘the King’s English’, a disciplinary instrument of control, as we have seen, associated with the virtue of temperance and used performatively to exclude categories of males and their practices from the normative centre of ‘proper’ ‘plain’ English: principally drunk native speakers and foreigners (especially Frenchmen), but also English elite males and their ‘outlandish’ polysyllabic Latinate words. As I pointed out in Chapter , the exclusion of such words is urged in arguments about linguistic practices, especially in the analogous fields of theatre and translation. It is also staged, notably in a clutch of plays (all, it is worth noting, performed by rivals to Shakespeare’s company) from the period  to , that is, around the date of , which is where the academic drama Lingua locates the height of the fashion for such ‘skew kind of language’ and the consequent ‘Gallemaufry’ of English. Staged as a purge in Ben Jonson’s Poetaster () and called for by the figure of the male citizen in Thomas Dekker’s Westward Ho (), this exclusion is  



  

‘refrain’ derives from the Latin refrenare, to hold a horse back (OED ‘refrain’). These verses are repeatedly echoed in a range of discourses: one instance from  is quoted in Hope, Shakespeare and Language, ; another – Henry Sidney’s advice in a letter to his son Philip – in Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, . Arthur Golding, ‘The Epistle’, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation , ed. John Frederick Nims (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, ), lines –; see Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Stepping out of Narrative Line’, . Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Stepping out of Narrative Line’, –. Only one female figure, who is tellingly a whore, features as the object of the exclusionary thrust of the trope in the instances given in Table .. See above, Chapter , –.

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Shakespeare’s ‘straing’ Practices



also advocated through satiric treatment of individual elite male figures in the collaborative Patient Grisil (performed –, published ) and in George Chapman’s The Gentleman Usher (performed ?, published ). These are important here because the extravagant language used by the satirised figures is represented in terms of the discourse of horsemanship. More important still, while the first is unequivocal in its exclusionary derision of the elite male figure and his ‘prancing’ language, the second is curiously inconsistent. This inconsistency is bound up, I want to suggest, with a referencing of Shakespearean practice, which is acknowledged to be ‘strangely good’, if not a model to be followed. In Patient Grisil the figure of Emulo, a ridiculous travelling gallant, addicted, like Wilson’s far-journeyed gentlemen and Shakespeare’s Paroles, to ‘outlandish phrases’ (..) and extravagant foreign dress, is first derisively introduced as a ‘gallimaufrie of language’ (..), then scorned as an ‘ass’ whose practice of Latinate word formations – ‘emparleance’ (..), ‘vapulating’ (..) and ‘vulnerated’ (..) – is likened to the prancing of a horse: ‘stand aside and see him curvet’ (..). In Chapman’s play there are two corresponding figures: the eponymous usher, Bassiolo, a socially aspirational figure who may recall Malvolio and whose use of Latinate language, including the Malvolian/Jonsonian, ‘out of my element’ (..), is unequivocally rejected, and a pedant Sarpego, whose language, peppered with Latin as well as Latinate English, is for the most part likewise condemned. However, in the opening scene, four lines of verse that Sarpego is said to have produced to ‘furnish’ an ‘amorous show’ (..) for the duke Alphonso’s wedding are read aloud by the duke’s son Vincentio (the reliable protagonist of the romance plot), and described, first by the duke as ‘[h]igh words and strange’ (..), then by Vincentio as ‘strangely good’, superior to mere ‘inkhorn’ productions, ‘brave prancing words’ that only need ‘action’s spur’ to be ‘ridden thoroughly and managed right’ (..–). There is nothing self-evidently ‘amorous’ in the lines themselves, but there is in the immensely popular and widely referenced ‘amorous’ narrative poem by Shakespeare – Venus and Adonis – that they  

George Chapman, The Gentleman Usher, ed. John Hazel Smith (London: Edward Arnold, ), ... Quotations will be from this edition. Dekker, The Pleasant Comodie of Patient Grisil, in Dramatic Works, I, –. As I pointed out in Chapter , an explicit reference links Emulo to the figure of Fastidius Brisk in Jonson’s Every Man Out, which identifies the court, like and with the theatre, as a site of such ‘skew’ language. Emulo resembles the figure of Paroles insofar as he is likewise a coward more concerned to display his ‘scarfe’ than his valour (..–) as well as being addicted to Latinate words.

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

Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word

appear to recall. The first two lines quoted by Vincentio consist in a classically inflected description of dawn in unrhymed iambic pentameter: ‘“The red-fac’d sun hath firk’d the floundering shades / And cast bright amel [i.e. enamel] on Aurora’s brow —”’ (..–). Though admittedly commonplace, this may evoke Shakespeare’s opening description of ‘the sun with purple-colored face’ that has ‘ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn’ (lines –) as well as the later description of a second dawn when ‘[t]he sun ariseth in his majesty’ from the ‘silver breast’ of morning, turning cedar tops and hills to ‘burnished gold’ (lines –). After the duke’s ambivalent comment ‘[h]igh words and strange’ (..), Vincentio proceeds to read the next two lines, a pair of rhymed iambic pentameter lines (like the closing couplet of the Shakespearean stanza), which describe the noise of a boar hunt: ‘“The busky groves that gag-tooth’d boars do shroud / With cringle-crangle horns do ring aloud —”’ (..–). In Shakespeare’s poem the ‘urchin-snouted boar’ (line ) features prominently, and Venus, who has warned Adonis to ‘let him keep his loathsome cabin’ (line ), is described immediately after the second dawn, as making her way to ‘a myrtle grove’ (line ) where she is alerted to the presence of the ‘blunt boar’ (line ) by the sounds of the hunter’s ‘horn’ (line ) and ‘the dogs’ that ‘exclaim aloud’ (line ). With their ‘strange’, in the sense of unusual, words, the pedant’s lines appear to recall Shakespearean predilection for such words, including specifically ‘busky’, which is used only once by Shakespeare, in a description of dawn in  Henry IV (..) in the Folio as well as Quarto versions (all except Q), including Q published in , during the period of the composition and first productions of Chapman’s play. With ‘gag-tooth’d’ and ‘cringlecrangle’ the lines appear to recall the Shakespearean practice, on the one hand, of unusual compounds (such as ‘urchin-snouted’), and, on the other, of onomastic play: the uncommon compound ‘cringle-crangle’ plays, if obliquely, on the name of the pedant Sarpego, formed from the French ‘Serpeger’, which is glossed by Cotgrave, ‘to wind, or crankle in and out’, ‘crinkle-crankle’ being a variant of ‘cringle-crangle’. Vincentio, who is a reliable commentator, takes up his father’s word ‘strange’ to turn it as praise, ‘strangely good’, which he then elaborates in terms of the discourse of ‘manage’. Chapman’s use of this discourse may owe something to the episode of the horses in Shakespeare’s poem when Adonis’s male horse under the 

Prompted by the telling indications of the names of other dramatis personae, Hazel suggests ‘perhaps a form of serpigo, the name of a skin disease causing itching’. Chapman, The Gentleman Usher, .

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Shakespeare’s ‘straing’ Practices



pressure of erotic desire breaks ‘his rein’ and ‘woven girths’ (lines , ) and then crushes his ‘iron bit’ (line ), an action that is reflected in conscious verbal play: ‘The iron bit he crusheth ’tween his teeth / Controlling what he was controlled with’ (lines –, emphasis mine). Technically a combination of the figures of tmesis and aphaeresis, this verbal ‘prancing’ suspends action in non-purposive play which, as I take up below, releases and ‘manages’ vital energy, even as it suggests the subversive and liberating possibilities of ‘prancing words’ for those habitually controlled. If Chapman’s lines acknowledge the appeal of such ‘prancing words’, the treatment of Sarpego – and Bassiolo – in the rest of the play makes it clear that while they may be ‘strangely good’, they are no model for imitation. To represent the art of writing in terms of the discourse of ‘manage’ is to draw on classical rather than biblical tradition. Most prominently in early modern England, the two arts are brought together by Philip Sidney in the opening of An Apology for Poetry, which dwells at such length on John Petro Pugliano’s praise of the art of horsemanship that one of the earliest manuscript copies was miscatalogued at an early date as ‘A Treatise of Horsman Shipp’. Sidney, moreover, represents his own writing in An Apology in terms of this discourse when, towards the end, he comments that he has ‘run so long a career in this matter’. In one of his sonnets too, he likens his ‘strange work’ as a poet writing of, and under the influence of erotic desire, to the art of ‘manage’ in which as a horseman he ‘takes delight’. Classical precedent is furnished, on the one hand, by Virgil, who, in lines in Georgics  that may lie behind the horse episode in Venus and Adonis, associates his poetic writing with this discourse, notably when, in run-on lines, he mimes, first, the galloping of the colt ‘liber habenis’, glossed by the translator Abraham Fleming ‘Free or discharged of his rains, unbridled, loose and at libertie’, and, later, the frenzied flight of mares 

   

Peacham defines apheresis (as he spells it) as ‘a taking away of a letter, or sillable, from the beginning of a word’, tmesis as a word ‘parted by the interposition of another word’. Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence, sigs. Eiir and Fiiiiv. Puttenham Englishes aphaeresis as ‘rabate’, which he illustrates by ‘twixt for betwixt’. The Art, –. For full discussion see Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Stepping out of Narrative Line’, –. Compare Watson, ‘Coining Words’, – (‘actor’ is given for ‘action’ in a misquotation of these lines). Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Stepping out of Narrative Line’, . Sidney, An Apology,  and (Maslen’s gloss citing Duncan-Jones) . Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Stepping out of Narrative Line’, ; in these references Sidney is of course playing on the significance of his first name derived from the Greek for one who loves horses. Compare the emblem done for him by Geffrey Whitney (mentioned above note ).

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

Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word

driven by erotic desire, like steeds that ‘neither bit and bridle’ (Latin ‘frena’) ‘[n]or cruell yerkings’ ‘do stop or stay’ (Fleming’s translation of Georgics , lines –), once they are gripped by this ‘amor’ by which the poet too is gripped, ‘capti . . . amore’ (line ). On the other hand, in a passage which is of added interest because it is closely translated by Ben Jonson, Quintilian draws on this discourse in a discussion of how to develop good writing, whether as poet or orator: ‘good writing brings on ready writing; yet when we think we have got the faculty, it is even then good to resist it, as to give a horse a check sometimes with bit, which doth not so much stop his course, as stir his mettle’. Here the ‘bit’ represents not only a means of control, but also a means of generating energy through a ‘check’. This is suggestive of the Shakespearean ‘let’ (brilliantly explored by Joel Fineman), which at once bars and gives ‘vent’ to the energy of desire, ‘swollen’ because ‘barred’. This economy of desire, swollen by a ‘check’, which finds release in a ‘managed’ poetic writing is also illustrated by the figure of a horse in Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, which may too have been inspired by Virgil, who gives the human example of Leander only four lines after he describes the erotically aroused steed that cannot be restrained by bit/bridle (Georgics , lines –). His desire increased by a paternal ‘check’, Leander is likened to a ‘hote prowd horse’ that ‘disdaines / To have his head control’d, but breakes the raines / Spits forth the ringled bit’ (lines –). The ‘check’ of the ‘bit’ is here explicitly associated with paternal law, as it is more implicitly in the Shakespearean instance, which, as I have argued, is specifically set against the imperative urged by such as Golding for poetic writing, especially that of Ovid and Virgil, to instruct readers to exercise ‘the bit of temprance’. The Shakespearean ‘bit’ of word play advocates rather an idea of poetic writing which releases and ‘manages’ vital energy, especially erotic desire, in ‘prancing’ straying/strange words that, as Chapman underlines, tend to suspend action. This is in contrast to the idea of poetic writing as ‘a fair house’, another recurring analogy, mentioned, for instance, by George  



 

See Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Stepping out of Narrative Line’, . Jonson, Discoveries, ed. Hutson, Works, VII, , lines –. As Hutson notes, this is a close translation of Quintilian Institutio Oratoria ... See Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, repr.  vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), IV, . Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Stepping out of Narrative Line’, –; see Joel Fineman, The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays towards the Release of Shakespeare’s Will (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), –. Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Stepping out of Narrative Line’, . Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Stepping out of Narrative Line’, , –.

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Shakespeare’s ‘straing’ Practices

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Puttenham, which is frequently invoked by critics. For this implies an idea of poetry as structure rather than as managed energy, which is what is implied by the analogy with horsemanship. This is borne out by Sidney’s Apology not only in the opening comparison, but also in a critique of contemporary love poetry that lacks the ‘right use of the material point of Poesy’, namely, ‘forcibleness’, a gloss on the Greek ‘energia’ through which the word ‘energy’ is introduced into English. In the Shakespearean corpus the discourse of horsemanship is used to represent relations of control, notably of women by men (most prominently in The Taming of the Shrew); of male sexual desire (a figure of paternal authority, Prospero uses this discourse to urge temperance in The Tempest [..–]). It is used too, in an extended instance in Henry VIII (though in a scene usually attributed to Fletcher), of the imperative to (religious/political) ‘reformation’, urged, ironically, by a figure of Catholic ecclesiastical authority, Bishop Gardiner, who calls for the vigorous suppression of protestant insurgents by invoking those ‘that tame wild horses’, who ‘stop their mouths with stubborn bits’ ‘Till they obey the manage’ (..–). Instances from the plays of the s resonate more specifically with the image in Venus and Adonis: in the opening scene of Richard II Thomas Mowbray speaks of the ‘free speech’ to which he would give ‘reins and spurs’ were he not curbed by ‘reverence’ towards his king (..–), while in the comedies the discourse is recurrently used in, and of erotically charged exchanges, as when, in Much Ado, Benedick mockingly wishes that his horse ‘had the speed’ of the ‘tongue’ of Beatrice, who, in response, derides his ‘jade’s trick’ (..–), and who later asks the teasing Margaret what ‘pace’ her tongue keeps to which Margaret answers ‘[n]ot a false gallop’ (..–). Most tellingly, in As You Like It, Celia seeks to curb her cousin Rosalind’s diversionary glosses on descriptions of Orlando (Rosalind’s object of desire) with a verbal equivalent to the bit: ‘Cry “holla” to the tongue, I prithee: it curvets unseasonably’ (..–). Rosalind is no Emulo and her verbal curvets are not marked out as objects of exclusionary derision for spectators who, on the contrary, are invited to enjoy her verbal prancing done under the pressure of the erotic desire it betrays. With a subversive thrust highlighted by her  



Puttenham, The Art, . The architectural analogy is fully explored in McDonald, ‘“Pretty rooms”’. Sidney, An Apology, . See Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“The Lady Shall Say Her Mind Freely”’, . As I argue, this is closely tied up with the development of the form of ‘blank verse’, which Thomas Nashe specifically represents in terms of the release of suppressed energy. Norton emends the Folio ‘mannage’ to manège.

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

Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word

sly comment that she cannot help herself because she is a woman (..), the lady here – to recall Hamlet’s advice to the players – speaks her mind, and her desire, ‘freely’ in a straying language which, as Celia’s use of ‘unseasonably’ signals, disrupts the ‘proper’ temporal order even as it breaks the ‘bit of temprance’. The one other instance of the verb ‘curvet’ in the Shakespearean canon is in the episode of the horses in Venus and Adonis, when, under the pressure of erotic desire, Adonis’s male horse breaks his reins and crushes his bit, then, ‘rears upright, curvets and leaps’ (line ), indifferent to his rider’s ‘flattering “Holla”’ (line ). Given the use of the discourse of ‘manage’ to represent relations of socio-political as well as affective and bodily control, the gloss on the horse’s breaking of his bit, ‘[c]ontrolling what he was controlled with’ (line ), resonates with a charge of significance, and this is highlighted in a retrospective comment by the figure of erotic desire, Venus, who praises the horse for ‘[e]nfranchising his mouth, his back, his breast’ (line ) from the ‘petty bondage’ (line ) under which he suffered when ‘[s]ervilely mastered with a leathern rein’ (line ). This is the only instance in the canon of the word ‘enfranchising’, but there are fifteen instances of the cognate forms ‘enfranchise’ (), ‘enfranchised’ () and ‘enfranchisement’ (), which are used not only of liberation from physical confinement, but also of political freedom, as in Cassius’s cry after the murder of Julius Caesar, ‘Liberty, freedom, and enfranchisement’ (Julius Caesar, ..), and Thomas Mowbray’s evocation of the ‘golden uncontrolled enfranchisement’ embraced by the ‘captive’ who ‘[n]ever with a freer heart / Cast off his chains of bondage’ (Richard II, ..–). These examples point up the significance of the image as an emblem of ‘enfranchisement’ at once for erotic desire and language, in particular for those habitually ‘controlled’ and ‘servilely mastered’. Through the self-reflexive instance of play on ‘bit’/‘between’, this enfranchisement is associated specifically with verbal play, and it is precisely through verbal play that, in plays of the s, especially the comedies, those ‘below’, notably women and servants, who are, moreover, often allied, as, for instance, Kate and Grumio are allied in The Taming of



The association of temperance with a linear temporal order is signalled by the clock carried by the figure of temperance in Bruegel’s painting as well as by Hamlet, as I point out in Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Stepping out of Narrative Line’, . Another female figure who speaks her mind and desire freely is Juliet, who, it is worth noting, gives expression to her desire by calling on the sun god’s ‘fieryfooted steeds’ to ‘[g]allop apace’ (Romeo and Juliet, ..–).

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Shakespeare’s ‘straing’ Practices



the Shrew, find a measure of freedom, a space of mastery, albeit temporary, ‘controlling’ where they are habitually ‘mastered’ and ‘controlled’. It is a freedom offered spectators too through the straying practices discussed in this chapter, which include the practice named ‘enfranchisment’ by Richard Mulcaster, which by welcoming linguistic ‘strangers’ frees the vernacular from the limits of its ‘proper’ boundaries and the individual subject from the limits of their ‘proper’ lexicon/selfhood. In one of the more telling instances we have looked at, this practice is combined with the practice of the ‘enlarging’ figure of ‘store’ in Falstaff’s speech in praise of sack, an ‘intemperance’ lecture, as I called it in Chapter , which is, structurally, a moment of idleness, like the scene of rural merry-making which follows, both, I suggested, comparable to verbal straying that likewise suspends action and temporal linearity in non-purposive play. This scene is placed, as we saw, so as to point up what is (about to be) lost with the installation of a cultural reformation regime which aspires to banish both forms of play, subsequently perceived, as Philip Stubbes perceived the merry-making of feast days as a ‘waste’ of time and resources (Chapter ). Under this Lenten regime addicted to temporal linearity as well as to the virtues of plainness and temperance, it is hard, if not impossible, to recover the pleasures of verbal straying, which tends to generate irritation, or even anxiety for modern English subjects servilely mastered by temporal linearity and the imperative to purposive action. For, as Amia Srinivasan has put it: ‘play creates its own value and makes its own meaning. It needs nothing outside itself . . . it has no purpose apart from its disruption of purposiveness’. In this Shakespeare’s linguistic practices and the implied emancipating poetics of play, which the narrative poem shares with the comedies from the same period (early s), might be compared to the ‘images of non-purposive activity’ ‘central to Bruegel’s oeuvre’ according to Gabriel Josipovici (following Joseph Koerner). Not 





See Marianne Novy, ‘Patriarchy and Play in The Taming of the Shrew’, in Harold Bloom, ed., William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew: Modern Critical Interpretations (New York: Chelsea House, ), –. It is worth recalling here too Robert Weimann’s important argument about the ‘popular sources of Shakespeare’s wordplay’. Robert Weimann, ‘Shakespeare’s Wordplay: Popular Origins and Theatrical Functions’, in Clifford Leech and J. M. R. Margeson, eds., Proceedings of the World Shakespeare Congress Vancouver  (University of Toronto Press, ), –. Amia Srinivasan, ‘After the Meteor Strike’, London Review of Books,  September , . On word play specifically, see Frederick Ahl, Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and other Classical Poets (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ). Most pertinently Ahl argues that such play offers ‘a measure of freedom from the constraints’ of social and linguistic ‘training’, and the ‘subservience to death’ (–). Gabriel Josipovici, ‘Bound to earth’, The Times Literary Supplement,  October , .

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

Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word

only do these practices resist the historical emergence of the Lenten regime of cultural reformation ideology, specifically the mutually implicated norms of ‘true’ or proper Englishness, they also invite readers and spectators today, arguably still under the dominance of this regime, to recover the pleasures of play and the freedom it offers from the addiction to temporal linearity and purposive action, and the attendant expectations of dramatic form. When Chapman’s Vincentio comments that ‘brave prancing words’ need ‘action’s spur’ to be ‘ridden thoroughly and managed right’, he voices a concern about verbal ‘prancing’ that will be echoed by later critics for whom the ‘excess’ of Shakespearean verbal prancing, especially in the early drama, is an irritant which detracts as it distracts from the action. To return briefly to the passage from the Epistle of James cited earlier, the figure of the horse controlled by the bit is immediately followed by a second, analogous figure of the ‘great’ ‘shippes’ ‘turned about with a verie smale rudder’ (James :). This pair of figures is evoked in The Merchant of Venice in one of the egregious speeches by the incorrigible talker Gratiano, who illustrates the truism that ‘things . . . / . . . are with more spirit chased than enjoyed’ (..–), first, by the figure of the horse that returns without the ‘unbated fire’ (..) with which it set out, then, by the figure of the ship that returns ‘rent and beggared’ having set out ‘scarfed’ (..–). For those who recognise the biblical subtext, Gratiano, who is said by Bassanio to talk ‘a great deal of nothing’ (..) and to be ‘too wild, too rude and bold of voice’ (..), is self-condemned. Of more interest here, however, is another, more explicit biblical reference to the figure of the prodigal son to which the ship is likened: ‘How like a younker or a prodigal’, ‘How like the prodigal’ (.., ). If the parable may be relevant to the play as a whole, as others have suggested, it is of interest here because it is specifically associated with the figure of the horse, and, like this figure, with desire, and, via the biblical subtext, with straying, intemperate, language. It is associated too with the exhaustion of desire in the achievement of a purpose or end, an association which again may be of  

Chapman, The Gentleman Usher, ..–. Most pertinently, Pastoor, ‘The Subversion of Prodigal Son Comedy’. Pastoor argues, as I do, that Shakespeare does not follow the dominant moralising tradition of exegesis of the parable, though his focus is on plot and character rather than language. Maus, whose discussion of Prince Hal’s investment in the prodigal son narrative I cited earlier (Chapter , ), observes the likeness of Prince Hal to ‘men like Antonio in The Merchant of Venice’, which may have been written ‘between Richard II () and the Henry IV plays (–)’. Maus, Being and Having in Shakespeare, .

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The Parabolic Economy of The Two Gentlemen of Verona



relevance to the play as a whole, notably the end-oriented acquisitiveness of its bourgeois protagonists, but which is here important because of the implied privileging of the play of desire over the achievement of end/ purpose. Play in straying language is exemplified in this play, as we have seen, by the figure of the servant clown Launcelet Gobbo, whose ‘play upon the word’ irritates the figure of the bourgeois master, Lorenzo, as Shakespearean predilection for such play has irritated modern critics, editors and audiences.

‘but by a parable’: The Parabolic Economy of The Two Gentlemen of Verona This brings me to my closing discussion of a comedy that has proved particularly irritating for the perceived ‘excess’ of its verbal play, The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The parable of the prodigal son is explicitly referenced here by Launcelet Gobbo’s predecessor, Lance, in an instance of verbal straying on his first entrance (..), which parallels a reference to the analogous parable of the lost sheep by his fellow servant clown Speed, again in an instance of verbal straying on his first entrance in the opening scene (..–). This reference is specifically important because it establishes a structural parallel with the liturgical script of the order of morning prayer in The Book of Common Prayer () in which both parables are embedded, as I take up below. The biblical parables are thus turned by the servant clowns from the moral ‘straying’ of the liturgical script to verbal straying. Such straying is, moreover, associated with the figure/narrative genre exemplified by these biblical instances in a scene which features the one instance in the Shakespearean canon of the word ‘parable’ (..). Taking this as my point of departure I argue that the figure/genre of the parable is associated at once with elusive verbal straying and with the elusive signs emitted by a mute figure of the indeterminate contingencies of ‘life’: Lance’s dog Crab. Crab, is moreover, the protagonist of an enigmatic serio-comic parable/comedy of canine errors told by Lance towards the end of the play (..–). Analogous to the biblical parables of the lost sheep and prodigal son, Lance’s parable also references a third biblical parable, of ‘the debt’, which highlights the logic of the debt-gift economy of the plot of redemption that the parables illustrate. As Lance suggests, this economy calls for the response of the ‘charity’ which makes one ‘worth the name of a Christian’ (.., –). Associated here with unlimited hospitality, this ethical and spiritual ideal is associated at the close with unlimited forgiveness, an unlimited forgiveness which critics

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

Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word

have viewed as excessive as they have the proliferating verbal play throughout. From the place of the scene of the ‘parable’ these ‘excesses’ may be viewed together as a function of the play’s parabolic economy, and more precisely of the unlimited, inexhaustible debt-gift economy of the plot of redemption illustrated by the biblical parables it references. The word ‘parable’ is introduced in what is another example of a more or less redundant scene, in which Speed welcomes Lance on his arrival in Milan (.). Having reassured Lance, who is anxious he is ‘not welcome’ (..–), presumably because he is a stranger in Milan, as I take up below, Speed proceeds to endeavour to extract an answer to the question whether Lance’s master Proteus and Julia are to marry. Lance evades a direct reply and in response to Speed’s frustrated ‘I understand thee not’ (..), digresses into verbal play at once on ‘understand’/‘stand under’ and on staff/lance (his name) (..–). Speed reverts to his question – ‘will’t be a match?’ (..) – only to be referred to Lance’s dog Crab: ‘Ask my dog. If he say “Ay,” it will; if he say “No,” it will; if he shake his tail and say nothing, it will’ (..–). Speed assumes this means the answer is ‘it will’, but Lance refuses to say: ‘Thou shalt never get such a secret from me but by a parable’ (..–). Though critics and editors have noted the reference here to the verses in Matthew  (:, ), in which Christ is said to speak in parables in fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy, there has been no comment on the relation to what immediately precedes: the evasive verbal play on ‘understand’, which reprises Christ’s comment on his practice as well as the disciples’ response, and the reference to the enigmatic signs emitted by the non-speaking animal. Like the parable this is a mode of signification that might be described as ‘mystical and dark, or far-fetched’, as the figure of the ‘Parabola, or Resemblance Mystical’ is glossed by George Puttenham, who gives as his principal instance, ‘all the preachings of Christ in the Gospel’. In his comment on Matthew  in the Paraphrases, Erasmus argues that Christ spoke to ‘the people’ in ‘riddelles and cloudes of parables’ ‘to thyntent that he might both excite and stirre their minds with darke speakyng and make them desirouse to learne’ and so susceptible to transformation. In the scene of the ‘parable’ 

 

‘Therefore speke I to them in parables, because they seing, do not see: and hearing, they heare not, nether understand’ (Matthew :). ‘This parable spake Jesus unto them: but they understode not what things they were which he spake unto them’ (John :). Puttenham, The Art, . Erasmus, The first tome or volume of the Paraphrase, sig. lxxviiir. For the importance to Erasmus of the transformative power of persuasion, exemplified by Christ, see Rummel, ‘The Theology of Erasmus’, –.

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The Parabolic Economy of The Two Gentlemen of Verona

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in Two Gentlemen this ‘dark’ mode of speaking which eludes ‘understanding’ is associated at once with verbal play and with the enigmatic signs emitted by a mute figure of the unpredictable contingencies of ‘life’, both of which likewise summon an active mental quest and a proliferation of possible meanings. The apparently redundant exchange – Speed never gets an answer to his question – is framed by talk of the alehouse to which the two repair at the close of the scene. At the outset Speed reassures a pessimistic Lance of the welcomes he will receive in the alehouse, ‘where, for one shot of five pence, thou shalt have five thousand welcomes’ (..–). Though unnoticed, or at least not recorded, this is surely another biblical reference – to Christ’s feeding of the five thousand by the multiplication of five loaves. Indeed, this narrative comes in the very next chapter of Matthew (), and, in the Geneva Bible, the header ‘Five thousand fed’ faces the header ‘Parables’. In his Paraphrases Erasmus calls this an ‘evangelicall feaste’, a feast, that is, which epitomises the distinctive character of the Christian religion, including its implications for social justice – ‘that no man should lacke and no man have to muche’ – even as it shows Christ ‘the feastemaker’ as ‘a feaster and a feder’ of bodies as well as of souls. In the spirit of this gloss, Speed reworks the narrative, turning the loaves to money (anticipating a much later sense of ‘bread’), which, once invested, multiplies in a yield of ‘welcomes’, even as he transfers the site of multiplication to the alehouse – a place at once of social and bodily nourishment. This may glance at in order to defend the contested traditional practice of ‘church ales’, which were occasions for the generation of collective funds for redistribution (like the five loaves), as well as community fellow-feeling, occasions, in short, for ‘promoting love and Christian charity’, as the defenders of the practice put it. This is underscored at the close of the scene when Speed’s idea is taken up by Lance, who suggests that their going ‘to the ale’ together is proof of the ‘charity’ that makes them ‘worth the name of a Christian’ (..–). Glancing in ‘worth’ at the divisive issue of justification by faith or works, Lance suggests that the distinctive character of a Christian, specifically contrasted with ‘a Jew’, metonym for the Old Testament law, lies in   

Quintilian specifically states that this figure of comparison (‘parabole’) may be drawn from dumb creatures (‘mutis’). Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, II, .  Sig. CCir and sig. BBiiiiv. Erasmus, The first tome or volume of the Paraphrase, sig. lxxxiv. François Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge University Press, ), .

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

Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word

‘charity’, an ethical as well as spiritual ideal which eliminates the faith/ works opposition even as it fulfils ‘the law’ insofar as it is conceived, as it is by Paul, Augustine, Erasmus and Tyndale among others, and practised, as the ‘just’ human response to the inexhaustible debt-gift economy of God’s universal redemption in Christ. Here this response finds expression in generous and generative hospitality towards Lance, a stranger in Milan who fears he is ‘not welcome’ (..–). That hospitality is due especially to strangers is urged in the Old as well as the New Testament, as I discussed in Chapter , and reiterated by Shakespeare, most explicitly in his contribution to Sir Thomas More. To the stranger’s anxious concern that he is ‘not welcome’ Speed responds with a reassuring reminder of the many ‘welcomes’ he will receive, recalling as he does so the narrative of Christ’s multiplication of five loaves, which he turns as an occasion for the expression of charity in (unlimited) hospitality. Itself parabolic in mode then, this scene invites understanding of the affinity of the play to the scriptural and, like comedy, domestic genre of the parable that is explicitly invoked in association with other elusive modes of signification, which tend to the multiplication of possible meanings working, as Christ’s parables work according to Erasmus, to stimulate intellectual desire. This affinity is underscored by the two biblical parables referenced, again in instances of verbal straying, by the two servant clowns at their respective first entrances in . (Speed) and . (Lance): the parables of the lost sheep and the prodigal son. As we saw in Chapter , these are two of three analogous parables sequentially told in Luke  to illustrate the plot of ‘lost and found’, the comic plot of redemption that together with the Pauline figure of strangers made citizens informs the reworking of the Plautine base of The Comedy of Errors. Here, in a striking structural parallel with the liturgical script of the order of morning/evening prayer, Speed, on his first entrance in the opening scene, responds to information from Lance’s master Proteus that Valentine has ‘shipped’ for Milan by playing on ‘ship’ and ‘a sheep’ (..–) that, as Proteus remarks, ‘doth very often stray’ (). Self-reflexive, like the invented words discussed earlier, this



Bossy notes that to defend themselves ‘against the charge that they were drying up the springs of Christian charity’ the ‘early reformers’ claimed that ‘true faith would be known by its fruits’, including ‘works of charity’. Bossy, Christianity in the West, . See too Heal’s observation that if ‘of great ideological significance’, the ‘dichotomy between faith and works’ ‘seems much less important when considered at the level of practice’. Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England, .

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The Parabolic Economy of The Two Gentlemen of Verona



verbal straying triggers a digression of some fifty lines, which suspends the linear order of plot as well as the social hierarchy of master over servant, in an instance of release from the ‘symbolic law’ in which the servant gains a (temporary) measure of control and freedom. As it happens, this is the very passage cited by Park Honan to illustrate the ‘verbal excesses’ with which Shakespeare was ‘enamoured’ in ‘his apprentice work’, a dismissive treatment which avoids the challenge of such excesses. It also misses the significance of the intertextual relation to the figure/genre of the biblical parable and the particular instances evoked first here, and then by Lance, who, on his first entrance, likens himself, on the point of departure for Milan, to ‘the prodigious son’ (..). This is one of many instances of what Speed describes as Lance’s characteristic ‘vice’, ‘mistake the word’ (..), a description which signals that such ‘mistakes’ are to be regarded (and performed) as deliberate, not as the unconscious slips of a socially aspirational, inept figure, which is what is signalled by the (anachronistic) label of ‘malapropism’ habitually used by editors to gloss ‘prodigious’. Another instance of the bias that I discussed earlier in relation to Lance’s dramatic next of kin, Launcelet Gobbo, the label serves to reassert control over such unruly figures, to put them back in their place ‘below’, rather as Lorenzo reasserts control over Launcelet. Through pointed references to the biblical parables, such verbal ‘mistaking’ is associated rather with the liberating excess of the unlimited debt-gift economy of the plot of lost and found and its attendant affective yield of joy. Indeed, this plot is reiterated at the level of language insofar as the ‘mistake’ summons near simultaneous recognition and ‘reparation’, even as it offers a release from the ‘law’ of ‘proper’ forms, including the order of the liturgical script. To reference these biblical parables in this way is then not only to allow a bit of freedom and control to those ‘below’ (to recall the emblematic image in Venus and Adonis discussed earlier). It is also to free (‘enfranchise’) the parables themselves from the limits set by the culturally dominant moral interpretations, including crucially the liturgical script of

  

Honan, Shakespeare, . See, for example, William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, ed. William C. Carroll, repr. (London: Bloomsbury, ), note to ... ‘Repair’ is the term used in interactional linguistics for the correction of recognised errors in speech; see Celia Kitzinger, ‘Repair’, in Jack Sidnell and Tanya Stivers, eds., The Handbook of Conversation Analysis (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, ), –. My thanks to Oliver Morgan for this reference.

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Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word

transgression and repentance in which the two parables are embedded in the order of morning/evening prayer in the  version of The Book of Common Prayer. For the opening play on ship and the ‘sheep that doth often stray’ establishes a structural parallel with the opening of the liturgical script when participants are summoned into the position of the penitent prodigal son, whose confession is included in the preceding ‘penitential sentences’ uttered by the minister, to confess together in the language of the analogous parable: ‘we have erred and straied from thy waies, lyke lost sheep’. Associated with verbal rather than moral ‘straying’ the biblical parables are thus enfranchised from the constraints of the liturgical script rather as the poetic voices of Virgil and Ovid are enfranchised from the imperative to moral interpretation – the ‘bit of temprance’ – in Venus and Adonis. The liturgical script is not, however, jettisoned altogether as it is in The Comedy of Errors. On the contrary, it is explicitly evoked in the main plot in which Lance’s master, the straying inconstant Proteus, leaves his father’s house to betray his mistress and his friend before finally attempting rape on his friend’s mistress. This is a prodigal straying that Proteus himself recognises early on as a ‘false transgression’ (..) before making his confession in Act  in language which echoes the liturgical general confession, though not of morning/evening prayer but of Holy Communion. This is appropriate given the subsequent movement of the play towards a close of universal forgiveness and reconciliation which, in the final line, is expressed in liturgically resonant language as a (re)unified community: ‘One feast, one house, one mutual happiness’ (..). Indeed, the close dramatises what is at once a declared condition of participation in the rite and its social purpose: to ‘be in love and charite with your neighbors’. It is, moreover, as we have seen, ‘charity’ that is said by Lance to render one ‘worth the name of a Christian’ in the earlier scene where it is illustrated by the generous welcome offered to the stranger. It is Lance too who, in his own serio-comic parable/comedy of canine errors told just prior to the end in explanatory anticipation of the general amnesty it stages, highlights the logic of ‘charity’ as the just response to the debt-gift economy of the plot of redemption.

  

The Book of Common Prayer, ed. Cummings, . See Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘“worth the name of a Christian”?: the Parabolic Economy of The Two Gentlemen of Verona’, Shakespeare Survey  (Cambridge University Press, ), . The Book of Common Prayer, ed. Cummings, .

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Lance’s Parable/Comedy of Canine Errors



‘How many masters would do this for his servant?’: Lance’s Parable/Comedy of Canine Errors This is the second tale told by Lance about his dog Crab. While the first, told on his first entrance, turns round the figure of the son who leaves his family, like the ‘prodigious son’, the second turns around the figures of master and ‘servant’ as he calls Crab (..), like a third biblical parable – of ‘the debt’. In the gospel of Matthew this follows the parable of the lost sheep, and, in the Geneva Bible, the header ‘The lost shepe’ faces the header ‘The dette’. This version of the parable of the lost sheep follows Christ’s declaration, which it illustrates, that ‘the Sonne of man is come to save that which was lost’ (Matthew :). The parable of the debt is then told in explanation of Christ’s response to Peter’s question, which comes between the two parables, as to the number of times he should forgive his brother – ‘seventie times seven times’ (Matthew :) – a response which is glossed in the Geneva Bible where it features again (Luke :): ‘manie times: for by a certaine nomber he meaneth an uncerteine’ (or indeterminate) number. The parable tells of a master who cancels the large debt of a servant who in turn refuses to cancel the much smaller debt of a fellow servant and is consequently punished by the master. It thus illustrates the logic of the debt-gift economy of God’s redemption in Christ, which calls for unlimited forgiveness as the just response: ‘forgive from your hearts, eche one to his brother their trespaces’ (Matthew :). This logic is reiterated throughout the New Testament, notably in the words of ‘the Lordes prayer’, ‘forgeve us our trespasses, as we forgeve them that trespasse against us’, translated more accurately in the Geneva Bible and the King James Bible (which cross-references the parable): ‘forgive us our dettes, as we also forgive our detters’ (Matthew :). In his second tale, or rather set of tales about Crab, Lance begins by recalling how he ‘saved’ Crab ‘from drowning’ (..), before proceeding to tell of the recent occasion when he took ‘a fault upon [him] that [Crab] did’ (–), the fault of pissing under Silvia’s table for which a death sentence was pronounced by the figure of the law, the Duke of Milan: ‘“Hang him up,” says the Duke’ (–). Taking Crab’s place by declaring, ‘twas I did the thing you wot of’ (), Lance suffers the punishment (of whipping) due to Crab as, he claims, he has suffered before, saving Crab from being ‘executed’ () as he saved him from drowning. After  

 Sig. CCiiv, sig. CCiiir. Sig. KKiv. The Book of Common Prayer, ed. Cummings, .

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

Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word

these tales of recurrent substitutive redemption(s) in which the master saves the servant by taking his place, Lance turns to the audience (and/or to Crab) to pose the (rhetorical) question: ‘How many masters would do this for his servant?’ (). Like the domestic figures of master and servant, the (rhetorical) question is a recurrent feature of the parable, as in the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin, which begin respectively: ‘What man of you having an hundredth shepe . . .?’, ‘what woman . . .?’ (Luke :, ). As I indicated in Chapter , both thus invite hearers to identify with the figure that recovers what has been lost and to imagine their joy. Lance’s question has a different effect summoning as it does recognition of the gap between ordinary masters in the real world of the theatre audience and the (extraordinary) master of the New Testament, who ‘toke on him the forme of a servant’ (Philippians :) in order to deliver those under the death penalty of the law for their ‘faults’ in a substitutive redemption like that performed by Lance for Crab. The indifference/ingratitude for which Crab is (comically) rebuked is thus associated with the unjust response of masters as well as servants to the prodigal/prodigious act of this extraordinary master/servant. As the play signals, the just response is rather the ‘charity’ which renders one ‘worth the name of a Christian’ and which finds expression in generous ‘welcomes’, especially of strangers, and unlimited forgiveness. In telling his parable Lance does not ‘mistake the word’ once. It is in the content of his tale rather than in verbal ‘mistaking’ that the parabolic plot of lost and found is rehearsed, although his tale has proved as elusive as verbal play – the meaning sketched here has escaped critics – and as ‘deliciously subversive’. Indeed, it likewise offers pleasurable release from the ‘law’, here specifically the law of ‘proper’ human social hierarchies and codes to which the mute figure of ‘life’ is absolutely indifferent. In their ‘mistaking’ of ‘proper’ verbal forms the servant clowns join this figure, prompting what Peter Berger calls ‘redeeming laughter’, in which, as he comments, there is ‘a profound discovery of freedom’. Like, but more explicitly than Errors, Two Gentlemen turns the parabolic plot from moral to verbal straying and the attendant pleasurable release from the ‘law’ of proper forms. Verbal straying is, moreover, aligned, as in Errors, though again more explicitly, at once with the indeterminate strayings of  

Kiernan Ryan, Shakespeare’s Comedies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –. Peter L. Berger, Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (Berlin: De Gruyter, ), . For Berger, this freedom is a function of the critical distance shared by comic and sacred perspectives.

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Conclusion: The ‘charism’ of Holofernes



‘life’ and with the elusive genre/figure of ‘the parable’. These all tend to a multiplication of possibilities of meaning like Christ’s dark speaking in parables, according to Erasmus. The two early comedies announce then a new kind of drama that neither teaches nor preaches, but that, parable-like, stirs mental desire to pursue possibilities of meaning, even as they invite active reflection on the nominal vocation of spectators as ‘Christian’ specifically in relation to their practice of ‘charity’, especially towards ‘strangers’. The welcoming of strangers is indeed urged repeatedly in plays of the s, as we have seen, which find echo in the Shakespearean contribution to Sir Thomas More. Interestingly, and perhaps not accidentally, it is the ‘Gracious, and Curteous’ treatment of ‘Strangers’ that in  Francis Bacon adds to his essay ‘Of Goodnesse’, as the first of the ‘signes’ of ‘Goodnesse’, which ‘answers to the Theologicall Vertue Charity’ and in which, as in Charity, ‘there is no excess’. What is more, such goodness towards strangers ‘shewes’ ‘a Citizen of the World’ whose ‘Heart, is no island, cut off from other Lands; but a Continent, that joynes to them’. In the economy of Shakespearean extravagancy there is likewise no excess as there is no excess in the charity urged in the plays of the s that we have looked at, and exemplified by the welcoming of human as of linguistic strangers. This frees from ‘proper’ boundaries, of nation as of self, even as it resists the exclusionary violence of those who would make of England and (the) English an ‘island, cut off from other Lands’ through a centripetal drive to a stable, bounded normative centre of plain and proper Englishness.

Conclusion: The ‘charism’ of Holofernes By way of conclusion I want to return to the figure of Holofernes, who, as G. R. Hibbard observed, tends to be treated as a ‘figure of fun’, but who has an affinity with ‘his creator’, notably when ‘he hymns his own inventive faculty’ in a speech in praise of his ‘gift’ of ‘an extravagant spirit’, which finds echo in the speech in praise of sack by the most prominent figure of Shakespearean extravagancy, John Falstaff. On both figures, though especially Holofernes, I want to bring to bear the notion of charisma, or rather ‘charism’. The word ‘charism’ enters English in the mid-seventeenth century with the sense of the Latin ‘charisma’ as glossed



Bacon, ‘Of Goodnesse’, , .



Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. Hibbard, .

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

Figures and Parables of a ‘straing’ Word

by Thomas Thomas in his Latin–English dictionary, ‘Grace, a thankful gifte’, while the word ‘charisma’ with the sense of a ‘gift or power of leadership, or authority’ tellingly emerges only in the twentieth century. The key reference for the earlier word/sense is Paul’s first Epistle to the Corinthians, where he expounds the gifts (Greek: xarismata) of the Spirit (chapters –). Crucially, these are gifts that are given not to be owned, but to be freely given again, ‘to profit my neighbour’, as a gloss in the Geneva Bible puts it, an expression of the love, or ‘charity’, as the Greek agape is rendered in the King James Bible, without which such gifts are ‘but vaine babling’, and which animates as it builds the heterogeneous community of the early Christian church. As if recalling the dictionary definition of ‘charism’, Holofernes declares, simply, that he is, ‘thankful’ for his ‘gift’ of ‘an extravagant spirit’, ‘full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions’ (..–). The plenitude of this gift, which is shared by Falstaff and other members of Shakespeare’s family of verbally ‘extravagant’ figures, empties itself freely in linguistic straying, whether ‘enfranchisment’, ‘play upon the word’/‘mistaking’, or, most prominently, ‘synonymia’, the ‘figure of Store’, a figure of our ‘manifold’ ‘Englishes’, which gives this book its title. The ‘thankful gift’ of Holofernes, shadowed, like Falstaff, by his author, ‘spends itself’ as Hartman suggests the Shakespearean gift does, in ‘an incredibly generous manner as if the treasury of words were always full’. For Hartman this is illustrated above all in Twelfth Night, which evokes the occasion of gift giving as well as epiphany, and which introduces the self-reflexive word ‘extravagancy’. As I mentioned earlier, Hartman suggests this play aspires to ‘the gift of tongues’, one of the gifts mentioned by Paul to which, we might say, Holofernes, polyglot citizen of the world, aspires, like his author. Indeed, the ‘extravagancy’ of Shakespeare’s ‘charism’ will always generate ‘more to say’, as Hartman observes, to which the just response must surely be: thank goodness.     

Thomas, Dictionarium Linguae Latinae et Anglicanae. Compare: ‘Grace or a thankefull gyfte’. Richard Huloet, Abecedarium Anglico Latinum (London, ). ‘charism, charisma’ , OED, emphasis mine. Sig. XX.i.r. Compare Christ’s injunction: ‘Frely ye have received, frely give’ (Matthew :). Hartman, ‘Shakespeare’s Poetical Character’,  (emphasis mine). Hartman, ‘Shakespeare’s Poetical Character’, .

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Index

Abbot, George, –, , –,  Act of Uniformity, ,  Adamson, Sylvia, , , , –, –,  Alexander, William, – Anderson, Benedict, , –, , ,  Appleby, Joyce Oldham,  Auden, W. H., ,  Augustine, –, , , –,  Austen, Jane, 

Bruegel, Peter, , , , , – Burkhardt, Sigurd,  Butterfield, Ardis, , , 

Bacon, Francis, , ,  Badiou, Alain, ,  Bailey, Richard, , , ,  Barton, Anne,  Becon, Thomas, –, – Berger, Peter L.,  Bible, Geneva, The. See also parable Corinthians,  Ephesians, , , , , – Epistle of James, –, – Epistles, –, ,  Gospel of John,  Gospel of Luke, , , – Gospel of Matthew, , , –,  Psalms, – strangers in, , , – Blake, Norman, , ,  Blank, Paula, , , , ,  Bloom, Harold,  Bogdanov, Michael,  Book of Common Prayer, The, , , , –, , , , , – Boorde, Andrew, –, – Bourdieu, Pierre,  Bristol, Michael D., , –, ,  Britain ‘Britan tunge’, – ‘Britan’s Burse’, – in Shakespearean drama,  Brown, Peter, , –

Cain, Tom,  Calvin, Jean, ,  Candido, Joseph,  Carew, Richard, , –, , – Carnival v. Lent. See Lent v. Carnival Catholicism and Englishness, – in Henry VIII,  in The Comedy of Errors, – in Thomas of Woodstock,  Cawdrey, Robert, , , , , – Chapman, George Gentleman Usher, The, –,  charity biblical references to, –, , – in Shakespeare’s plays, , , , , –, , , – perceived erosion of, ,  pre-modern meaning of, – Chaucer, Geoffrey, –, – Cheke, John, –, –, , , –,  citizen comedy, , –, –, – Coote, Edmund, – Coryat’s Crudities, – Craig, Hugh, , ,  Crystal, David, , , , , , – Cummings, Brian,  Curran, Kevin,  D’Heere, Lucas, –, , , – Dalechamp, Caleb, ,  Daniel, Samuel, –, ,  Das, Nandini, ,  Davies, Glyn, , – Dekker, Thomas Guls Horne-booke, The, , 



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

Index

Dekker, Thomas (cont.) Honest Whore, The,  Patient Grisil, –,  Satiromastix, , , ,  Seven Deadly Sinnes of London, The, , –, – Wonderful Year, The,  Deloney, Thomas, ,  Derrida, Jacques, ,  Dillon, Janette, , ,  Duncan-Jones, Katherine, ,  Dutton, Richard, – Edwards, Richard Damon and Pythias, ,  Elam, Keir, ,  Elizabeth I (queen of England), , , , , , –, –, , , , ,  Elyot, Thomas,  ‘enfranchisment’, , , –, –, – Englishes, –, –, , –, , , , , – Englishmen foreign, , , ,  Englishness and gender, –, , – and Protestant Reformation, – exclusionary definition of, , , –, , , –, ,  Shakespearean resistance to, , , –, –, –, –, , – Erasmus, Desiderius, , , , , , , , , , –,  Ferguson, Margaret, – Finch, Henry, , –, –, –, – Fineman, Joel,  Fisher, John H., –,  Florio, John and Shakespeare, –, , , ,  His First Fruites,  Worlde of Words, A, –, , , , –,  foreigner. See strangers Foucault, Michel, , –,  Fowler, H. W. and F. G., –,  French as national vernacular, , , –, , , , , ,  character of, , , –, , –, – differentiated from English, –, –, –, –, –, ,  Falstaff associated with, , ,  refugee status of, , , –

gallimaufry English as, , , , –, –, , –, , , –, , , –, –, , , ,  second tetralogy as, , – Garber, Marjorie,  Gascoigne, George,  Goddard, William, –, ,  Goldberg, Jonathan, ,  Golding, Arthur, , , ,  Görlach, Manfred, , , , , , – Grazia, Margreta de, , , ,  Green, John, – Greenblatt, Stephen, – Greene, Robert, , – Greenfield, Matthew, –, – Gresham, Thomas, –, –, See also King’s English, The Hall, Joseph, , , , ,  Hamilton, Donna B., , ,  Hamlin, Hannibal, – Hardt, Michael, ,  Harington, John,  Harrison, William Description of Britain, –, – Hartman, Geoffrey H., ,  Harvey, Gabriel, , – Haughton, William Englishmen for My Money, , , , –,  Helgerson, Richard, , ,  Henry V (king of England) promotion of English, –, ,  Heywood, Thomas, –, – Hill, Christopher,  Holinshed, Raphael, , , , ,  Hollander, John,  homilies, , –, –,  homily on ‘excess of apparell’, , , , – Honan, Park, , , ,  Honigmann, E. A. J., –, –,  Hope, Jonathan, ,  Hopkins, Lisa,  Hoskins, John Directions for Speech and Style, , –, , – hospitality, –, , –, – host and Shakespeare’s Host of the Inn, , –,  word rejected by protestants, , – Houston, John Porter, 

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Index Howard, Jean E., , , ,  Hume, Alexander, – James VI and I (king of Scotland and England), , , , –,  Johnson, Samuel, , –, ,  Jones, Ann and Peter Stallybrass Renaissance Clothing, , , , , ,  Jonson, Ben and Latinate word formations, –, – and Shakespeare, –, , , –, ,  portrait in Satiromastix, , ,  works Bartholomew Fair,  Cynthia’s Revels, –,  Devil is an Ass, The, – Discoveries, , ,  Every Man Out of His Humour, , –, , ,  Poetaster, –, ,  Volpone, ,  Joseph, Sister Miriam, , , – Kastan, David Scott, , ,  King’s English, The and ‘Gresham’s law’, –, – origin of, –, , –, ,  Shakespeare’s interrogation of, –, –, –, –, – uses of, –, –, , –, , –,  verbs collocated with, – King’s Language, The. See King’s English, The Koerner, Joseph L., , , ,  Kristeva, Julia, , – Landreth, David,  Langford, Paul,  Laroque, François, , , ,  Lent v. Carnival, , –, , – Lever, Ralph, – Lisack, Catherine,  Luther, Martin,  Lyly, John, –, ,  Magnusson, Lynne, , ,  Mahood, Molly, , ,  malapropism. See mistaking Maley, Willy, ,  Malone, Edmund, – ‘manage’, discourse of and linguistic straying, , , –



as used by Shakespeare, – Mander, Karel van, – Marlowe, Christopher, , ,  Maus, Katherine Eisaman, ,  McArthur, Tom,  McDonald, Russ, ,  McEachern, Claire, , , ,  Melchiori, Giorgio, , –, ,  Milles, Thomas,  ‘mistaking’, , , , –, , –, , –, , , , –, , – money and language, –, , – Mulcaster, Richard, , , , , –, ,  Mullaney, Steven, , ,  Nairn, Tom,  Nashe, Thomas, , –, , , , , ,  Negri, Antonio, ,  Nerlich, Michael,  Nevalainen, Terttu, ,  New Exchange, The. See ‘Britan’s Burse’ Newman, Karen, , ,  Orgis, Rahel, ,  Outland, Allison, – Palfrey, Simon, , – parable, , , , –, , , – of the debt, –, – of the lost sheep/coin, –, , –, , , , –, – of the prodigal son, , , , –, , , –, –, –, – Parker, Patricia, , , –, –, , ,  Parrinder, Patrick,  Peacham, Henry (–), , , , ,  Peacham, Henry (?–?),  Pedlar’s Prophecy, The,  Peele, George,  Phillips, Edward, ,  Pilkington, James, , –, – plainness and Englishness, , , –, –, , –, , –, –, , , , , , , –,  interrogated by Shakespeare, –, –, –, , 

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

Index

‘play on the word’, –, –, , , –, , , , –, , , – poetics of community, ,  pun. See play on the word Purchas, Samuel, , ,  Puttenham, George, –, , , , , –, , –, , , , ,  Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus), , ,  Rankins, William, , , ,  Rhodes, Neil, –,  Rorty, Richard,  Royal Exchange, The, , – Sanders, Julie,  Scots, , –, See also James VI and I (king of Scotland and England) Shakespeare, William  Henry IV, , , , –, , , –,   Henry IV, –, –, –, , , –, , –, ,   Henry VI, –, ,  All’s Well that Ends Well, , , –, –,  As You Like It, , , –, – Comedy of Errors, The, , –, –, , –, –,  Hamlet, , , –, , – Henry V, , –, –, –, , –, –, , –,  Henry VIII, –, ,  Julius Caesar, ,  King John, , –, ,  King Lear, , , –,  Love’s Labour’s Lost, , –, , , , , , , –, , , , , – Lover’s Complaint, A, – Macbeth, , ,  Merchant of Venice, The, , , –, , , , , –, , –, –, , , , , – Merry Wives of Windsor, The, , –, , , , , , –, , –, , , , , , , , , – Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, ,  Much Ado About Nothing, , , , , , ,  Othello, , –, , ,  Richard II, –, , , –, –, , , –

Richard III, –,  Romeo and Juliet, , ,  Sir Thomas More, –, –, –, –, , –, –, , , –, , ,  sonnets, –,  Taming of the Shrew, The, –, , – Tempest, The,  Timon of Athens,  Twelfth Night, –, , , , –, –, , –, , , , , , ,  Two Gentlemen of Verona, The, , , , , , , , , , –, , , – Venus and Adonis, , –,  Winter’s Tale, The,  Shrank, Cathy, , , , ,  Sidney, Philip, , , , , , – Simpson, James,  Sloan, Kim, – Spenser, Edmund, , ,  Spiller, Michael, – Sprat, Thomas, – Stallybrass, Peter, , , See also Jones, Ann and Peter Stallybrass strangers distinguished from ‘foreigners’, , – figured in Bible, , , –, ,  human and linguistic, –, , , , –, , –,  objects of hostility, –, , –, , –, , –, – Shakespeare’s treatment of, –, –, , –, –, –, – Stubbes, Philip, –, ,  ‘synonymia’, , , , , , –, –, , , , –, –,  temperance and Englishness, –, –, , , , , , , – theatrum mundi, – Tomkis, Thomas Albumazar, ,  Lingua, –,  traitor, redefinition of, , –, , , , , , –, ,  translation, linguistic and social stakes of, , –, , –, , –, ,  Trigge, Francis, , , – Tyndale, William, –, , , ,  varying. See synonymia Vickers, Brian, , 

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Index Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), –, , , –,  Warner, William,  Watson, Robert N., , , , , , , –, – Weis, René, ,  Welsh, , ,  and ‘the King’s English’, , , , ,  and Falstaff, , , –,  in Merry Wives, , , , , 



in Satiromastix, , ,  in the second tetralogy, , –, – Whetstone, George,  Whitworth, Charles, – Womack, Peter, ,  Woodstock, Thomas of, , , –, , , –, , –,  Wright, George T., ,  Young, Alan, 

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Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 26 Oct 2019 at 20:27:21, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108643245.007