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English Text Construction - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2013
Volume 6, Issue 1, 2013
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‘If but as well I other accents borrow, that can my speech diffuse’: Multilingual perspectives on English Renaissance drama
Author(s): Dirk Delabastita and Ton Hoenselaarspp.: 1–16 (16)More LessKeywords: Functions of multilingualism; English Renaissance drama; William Shakespeare; stage dialects; Englishness vs. foreignness; interdisciplinarity
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Reading Early Modern literature through OED3: The loan word
Author(s): Giles Goodlandpp.: 17–39 (23)More LessWe may think we know what a neologism is, but it is hard to isolate the nature of the moment in which neologizing occurs. In literature sometimes this moment is enacted for effects that may not belong to the discourses of normal communication, and these effects are compounded when it is a loan-neologism. The Early Modern period was one of increasing contact between the languages of Europe, and literature responded to this in a variety of ways. This paper looks at neologistic borrowings into English literature, using a selection of canonical authors as refracted through the Oxford English Dictionary, to see if they can tell us something about the porousness of literary language in this period. Keywords: Oxford English Dictionary; Shakespeare; Jonson; Dryden; Skelton; loan word; neologism
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Neighbor Hob and neighbor Lob: English dialect speakers on the Tudor stage
Author(s): Lindsey Marie Simon-Jonespp.: 40–59 (20)More LessDrawing on scholars like Paula Blank, Janette Dillon and Tim Machan, this article argues that, in the Tudor university and court plays of Shakespeare’s youth, the stigmatization of non-standard, dialect speakers demonstrates a cultural renegotiation of the contemporary linguistic climate. By defining the English language and the English people not against a foreign Other, but rather against the domestic, servile, and dialect-speaking Other, sixteenth-century playwrights demonstrated the threat of non-standard speaking and advocated the standardization of language through education while effecting cultural change through negative reinforcement. Keywords: Tudor drama; interludes; history of English language; dialect; university grammarians
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‘Fause Frenche Enough’: Kate’s French in Shakespeare’s Henry V
Author(s): Anny Crunelle-Vanrighpp.: 60–88 (29)More LessThe English language lesson scene in Shakespeare’s Henry V has attracted more critical attention for its sexual innuendoes than for its political significance even though King Henry was historically instrumental in the demise of French in medieval England. Closely modeled on early modern primers, the language lesson is a stage metaphor of the king’s language policy, and settles old ideological scores by canceling the effects of the Norman Conquest. Traces of insular French in Kate’s morphosyntactic idiosyncrasies serve the political agenda of a play chronicling the process that took the French tongue from authority to disempowerment. Keywords: Shakespeare; Henry V; language primers; French; Anglo-French
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Female multilingualism in William Shakespeare and George Peele
Author(s): Nely Keinänenpp.: 89–111 (23)More LessWhile there is overlap in the ways that Peele and Shakespeare make use of female multilingualism in their plays, Peele’s repertoire is wider than Shakespeare’s, and he also seems to trust his audience will understand more complex code-switches from foreign languages. Shakespeare includes women who are resolutely monolingual in a multilingual context, highlighting the importance of English for personal and political identity. Both authors include characters who are shown understanding but not using foreign languages, perhaps reflecting cultural anxiety about educated women. In Peele, a wider range of women are shown code-switching, and Peele uses extended foreign language code-switches to highlight moments of high emotion, with Italian suggesting dangerous female sexuality and Latin evoking purity. Keywords: William Shakespeare; George Peele; female code-switching; women’s language
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‘Have you the tongues?’: Translation, multilingualism and intercultural contact in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love’s Labour’s Lost
Author(s): Liz Oakley-Brownpp.: 112–133 (22)More LessThis essay suggests that, as plays produced in the wake of Henry VIII’s break with Rome and the Protestant Reformation, two early Shakespearean comedies, The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1590–91) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (c. 1594–95), engage with multilingualism’s and translation’s impact on early modern English identities in striking ways. While these late-sixteenth-century texts are products of a cultural mind-set grappling with the vicissitudes of Englishness via the dramatization of deftly layered social strata and linguistic differences, ultimately, I argue that they simultaneously anticipate cultural accord. — Keywords: Shakespearean comedy; the Reformation; identity politics in Elizabethan England; social exclusion; friendship We only ever speak one language […] — (yes, but) — We never speak only one language… (Jacques Derrida 1998: 10)
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Social stratification and stylistic choices in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday
Author(s): Anita Auer and Marcel Withoospp.: 134–157 (24)More LessThe English playwright Thomas Dekker belonged to a generation of dramatists, along with Shakespeare and Jonson, who, particularly in comedy, discriminated their characters through lexical and stylistic choices. This new conception of the dramatic character is well illustrated in Dekker’s play The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1600). Written and produced in London at a time when the city attracted many migrants from all over England and Wales as well as the European continent, the speech of the characters created by Dekker represents different social groups as well as nationalities. This paper seeks to investigate socio-linguistic choices associated with selected characters and code-switching between English and Dutch in Dekker’s play. Keywords: Thomas Dekker; The Shoemaker’s Holiday; Dutch; London English; standardisation and language change; socio-historical linguistics
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Refashioning language in Richard Brome’s theatre: Comic multilingualism in action
Author(s): Cristina Paravanopp.: 158–175 (18)More LessThis paper investigates the way the Caroline playwright Richard Brome used foreign languages and dialects in his works. On the one hand, in each play he re-proposed the variety of language typical of Ben Jonson, though in a personal way, experimenting with languages such as Latin, French and Dutch, while discussing through stereotypes and comic parodies of foreign accents the relationship between England and other European countries. On the other hand, Brome was able to produce convincing imitations of regionalisms, as in The Northern Lass (Yorkshire) and The Sparagus Garden (Somerset), which contribute to the dramatization of social dynamics while offering a vivid and disillusioned picture of the age. Keywords: Caroline theatre; dialects; foreign languages; stereotypes; refashioning
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Interlinguicity and The Alchemist
Author(s): Michael Saengerpp.: 176–200 (25)More LessBen Jonson animates The Alchemist with an intersection of languages. In this moral satire, he captures the layered dialects, specialized vocabularies, and social desires of London and holds them up for view. This essay examines the play’s negotiation of ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ modes of translation, also with reference to Shakespeare’s treatment of overlapping languages, and to the use of multiple languages in a contemporary Catholic treatise on translation, A Discoverie of the Manifold Corruptions of the Holy Scriptures. Jonson’s conclusion is that the friction between languages offers opportunities for cheats to thrive onstage and off, and that the predominant language of this world is sin, from which only lucid repentance can ‘translate’ us. His satire may stand on godly ground, but his insight is also useful for the current study of translated and adapted literature, particularly Shakespeare. Keywords: The Alchemist; Ben Jonson; William Shakespeare; interlinguicity; translation Shallow: It is well said, in faith, sir, and it is well said indeed, too. “Better accomodated” – it is good; yea, indeed is it. Good phrases are surely, and ever were, very commendable. “Accomodated” – it comes of “accommodo”. Very good, a good phrase. (2 Henry IV 3.2.63–66)Falstaff: This same starved justice hath done nothing but prate to me of the wildness of his youth and the feats he hath done about Turnbull Street; and every third word a lie… (2 Henry IV 3.2.277–279)Duchess of York: No word like “Pardon” for kings’ mouths so meet.York: Speak it in French, King: say “Pardonnez-moi”. (Richard II 5.3.116–117)
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