Europe's Languages on England's Stages, 1590–1620

Marianne Montgomery

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138110168
• eBook ISBN: 9781317138969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Though representations of alien languages on the early modern stage have usually been read as mocking, xenophobic, or at the very least extremely anxious, listening closely to these languages in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Marianne Montgomery discerns a more complex reality. She argues instead that the drama of the early modern period holds up linguistic variety as a source of strength and offers playgoers a cosmopolitan engagement with the foreign that, while still sometimes anxious, complicates easy national distinctions. The study surveys six of the European languages heard on London's commercial stages during the three decades between 1590 and 1620-Welsh, French, Dutch, Spanish, Irish and Latin-and the distinct sets of cultural issues that they made audible. Exploring issues of culture and performance raised by representations of European languages on the stage, this book joins and advances two critical conversations on early modern drama. It both works to recover English relations with alien cultures in the period by looking at how such encounters were staged, and treats sound and performance as essential to understanding what Europe's languages meant in the theater. Europe's Languages on England's Stages, 1590-1620 contributes to our emerging sense of how local identities and global knowledge in early modern England were necessarily shaped by encounters with nearby lands, particularly encounters staged for aural consumption.

Chapter 1
Mother Tongues: Welsh and French in Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy

In the description of France in his Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World (1631), John Speed observes some remains of Welsh echoing in Breton French:

There is yet remaining a smacke of the Welsh tongue, which it seems the Invaders had so great a desire to settle in those parts as a trophy of their Conquests, that when they first mingled in marriage with the Inhabitants, they cut out their wives’ tongues, as many as were Natives, that no sound of French might be heard among their children.1

The Welsh in France offer a gruesomely effective strategy for dealing with the linguistic remains of the conquered, violently excising the tongues of their native wives to effect a double silencing. The tongueless women, like Philomela, no longer can speak. And, most importantly, they cannot pass their language on to their children. The survival of the wives’ language threatens to subvert the conqueror’s victory, so the Welsh respond in material terms, erasing French by cutting away the tongues that might speak it and pass it on to succeeding generations. Speed may have drawn his account from William Camden, who tells the same story in his Remains Concerning Britain (1586) and concludes that this violence was necessary “lest their children should corrupt their language with their mothers’ tongues.”2 Camden’s pronouns, the antecedents of which seem deliberately obscure, amplify the linguistic threat posed by French tongues. The first “their” refers to the Welsh, the third to the children who are both French and Welsh, but the middle pronoun could refer either to the children or to the Welsh conquerors themselves. As Camden’s syntax implies, the language of the children and the language of their fathers should be the same language. There is no room in this straight line of linguistic inheritance to triangulate with the mother’s tongue. Camden’s syntax erases the mother’s French as surely as the Welsh violence upon her tongue and person did.

This account of linguistic mutilation points to a set of larger questions: To what extent are people mastered if they still speak native languages? How can a conqueror record (and sustain) his language on their tongues?3 These questions had both historical and contemporary resonances for the early modern English. Camden’s account of the Welsh in France is framed by his assertion that the Normans in 1066 wanted to impose French on the English: they “would have yoaked the English under their tongue, as they did under their command, by compelling them to teach their children in schools nothing but French.”4 Moreover, these were immediate policy questions for Elizabethan authorities in Ireland and are considered at some length by Edmund Spenser in A View of the Present State of Ireland (1598). Spenser’s discussion of maternity, language, and conquest refashions Speed’s and Camden’s emphasis on the materiality of language by moving it from the tongue to the breast, but the threat posed by the native woman’s body for the conqueror’s linguistic victory remains constant.

In the View, Spenser’s interlocutors, Eudoxus and Irenius, discuss the bodily and cultural implications of language as they attempt to account for the degeneration of the original English settlers in Ireland, many of whom by the late sixteenth century spoke the Irish language as well or better than they spoke English.5 The degeneration of these settlers, known as the Old English, is figured as a rejection of the mother country: “Could they ever conceive any such dislike of their own natural countryes, as that they would be ashamed of their name, and byte at the dugge from which they sucked life?” Eudoxus asks with typical disgust for the Old English.6 This image of the “dugge from which they sucked life” doubles the maternal breast, making it stand both for the family name and for the English mother country that the Old English, by speaking Irish, have forsaken. Gail Kern Paster describes the negative connotations of the word dug as opposed to more neutral breast or pap: “Dugs are not aesthetic; dugs are breasts whose erotic appeal has been removed by maternity and lactation.”7 Changing speech means rejecting an English identity—one’s own name and origins—and this rejection is figured in material, gendered terms.

While the father might give the surname, the mother’s dug gives more: it gives life itself, and, more specifically, life in language. Eudoxus and Irenius’ further discussion of the Old English reveals that language is primarily carried by and therefore determined by the maternal body. Irenius claims that the Old English have allowed “two most dangerous infections,” wet nursing and intermarriage, to contaminate their speech and their culture. He conceives of the female body as a carrier of infection, a breeding ground for impure speech and cultural degeneration. The Englishness of succeeding generations is replaced by a new language carried by the milk of Irish breasts:

For first the child that sucketh the milk of the nurse, must of necessity learn his first speach of her, the which being the first inured to his tongue, is ever after most pleasing to him, insomuch as though afterwards hee be taught English, yet the smacke of the first will always abide with him; and not only of speech, but also of the manners and conditions … they moreover draw into themselves, together with their sucke, even the nature and disposition of their nurses. (71)

Language lessons cannot replace the “smacke” of the nurse’s language, carried into the body on a material vector that transports not only speech but also manners, conditions, and disposition.8 This is a nurture that determines nature, as the Irish wet nurse, usurping the role properly belonging to the real mother, transmits language and nature to the babe at her breast. Paula Blank notes the far-reaching implications of this view of language: “Speaking Irish, Spenser suggests, is not a matter of linguistic difference alone, but a sign of a ‘natural’ difference that is not fixed and determinate but dangerously subject to reform.”9 As Jeffrey Knapp puts it, for Spenser “national identity depends on a frame of mind.”10 This early nursing into language produces Irish hearts, as Irenius’s familiar formulation attests: “The speach being Irish, the heart must needs by Irish: for out of the abundance of the heart, the tongue speaketh” (71). Irenius’s chiasmic sentence prioritizes neither tongue nor heart; the two are inseparable and mutually reinforcing.

The View does suggest, however, that linguistic change accompanies and sometimes heralds cultural change, and that the Old English, as they reproduce and take Irish nurses and wives, have in some very real sense become Irish. This transformation occurs not on the level of the individual subject, but rather generationally; one generation of Old English is more Irish than the one before. Generation leads to linguistic and cultural de generation.11 Wendy Wall observes that Spenser’s view of linguistic degeneration is colored by class anxieties as much as by fears of intermarriage; Irish wet nurses triple difference by introducing feminine, Irish, and lower-class culture into the infants at their breasts.12 Michael Neill argues that Spenser’s ideas about Irish bodily and linguistic difference are a response to the Tudors’ assimilationist policy towards Ireland: “The more writers insisted on the need to subsume the Irish into the body of the nation, the more anxious those very writers became about signs of Irish resistance …. Irish difference was something that simply ought not to exist.”13 For Irenius, the degeneration of the Old English is unnatural, violating a basic tenet of conquest: “It hath ever been the use of the conqueror, to despise the language of the conquered, and to force him by all means to learn his” (70). Given the persistence of Old English words in English itself after the Norman Conquest, Irenius’ certainty is ironic; the history of his own language demonstrates that a conqueror cannot always compel a conquered people to forget their native language.14 Irenius, however, wants clear linguistic conquest, not hybridization and gradual change. He would much prefer that the English in Ireland act like Speed’s Welshmen, cutting out the tongues or perhaps cutting off the breasts of native women.

As Neill has shown, in Shakespeare’s histories “Ireland functions as a recurrent point of reference—the crucial implied term in an unstable dialectic of national difference.”15 The anxious nexus of gender, language, and identity evident in Spenser’s View can help us to make sense of Shakespeare’s representations of “native” women in 1 Henry IV and Henry V, though the languages at stake in these plays are not Irish. Shakespeare’s second tetralogy puts the contested languages of Camden and Speed’s account of the Welsh in France into the mouths of women: the unnamed Welshwoman in 1 Henry IV and the French princess Katherine in Henry V. These plays are shadowed by the Elizabethan experience in Ireland, and they use language in ways that suggest a broader inquiry into the edges of the queen’s England and the queen’s English: Where does England end, and how does the theater complicate attempts at demarcation?16 The voices of the Welshwoman and Katherine offer a point of entry into Shakespeare’s treatment of Britain.17 As women and as aliens speaking strange languages, they are doubly marked as different. Though the plays use their languages primarily for entertainment, as music or as bawdy comedy, both women are at once insiders and outsiders, figures who cross and blur borders. As such, they are British figures, speaking from and troubling England’s margins.18 Incorporating Wales and France into the history plays’ version of England requires a triumph of the English language over Welsh and French, but these women continue to speak on the stage. Their languages, rather than marginalizing them, make them central to Shakespeare’s inquiry into the past. The Welshwoman’s song sounds out the limits of English topography, the French princess’ mother tongue, of English genealogy.

Performing Wales in 1 Henry IV

I begin with the textual residue of the Welshwoman’s voice in 1 Henry IV:

Glendower speaks to her in Welsh, and she answers him in the same

…

The lady speaks in Welsh

…

The lady again in Welsh

…

The lady speaks again in Welsh

…

Here the lady sings a Welsh song

(1 Henry IV, 3.1)19

A language recorded in the First Folio only in stage directions might seem like an odd place to start. When the unnamed Welsh lady, Owen Glendower’s daughter and Mortimer’s wife, speaks in the third act of 1 Henry IV, as readers of the playtext we are left to imagine what she says. Her Welsh is treated by the text not as signifying language, but as a sound effect. The lack of semantic content in her Welsh, however, makes it an especially pure and clear example of a stage language. Neill notes that that this is “the only scene in Shakespeare where a character is made to utter words that are as entirely inaccessible to the audience as to most of the characters onstage.”20 What she says does not matter; how she says it is everything. Megan Lloyd, whose book “Speak it i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Europe’s Languages on Page and Stage
• 1 Mother Tongues: Welsh and French in Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy
• 2 Language, Trade, and Community: Three Dutch Plays
• 3 Spanish and Sundry Languages
• 4 Latin’s Social Static
• Afterword: Stage Irish, Past and Present
• Bibliography
• Index