![]() The public theatre was in any case no place to take trouble over linguistic accuracy. That he was inaccurate is an effect of speed of mind, surely, rather than of lack of grasp. Italian one imagines him reading, as many have done before and since, out of some half-remembered grasp of Latin acquired at school. He was hugely read his literary memory must have been one of the world’s marvels his mind could assimilate books greedily and above all he could seize the spirit of an original, whether in French, or Latin, or perhaps even in Italian. ” and he confuses “il est” and “c’est.” But then I am arguing that Shakespeare was widely read and learned rather than scholarly. ,” the French princess says to her confidante (III.v), for “Je te prie, enseignemoi. Shakespeare muddles “tu” and “vous” as no Frenchman then or since is likely to have done, and misplaces It is true that his French is boldly inaccurate, even allowing for the fact that some of it is meant to be spoken by ignorant Englishmen: “Suivez-vous le grand capitaine” is as unlikely in 16th-century French as it would be today. The French scenes in Shakespeare’s Henry V are surprising: not just that Shakespeare could write them, but that he should expect a London audience in 1599 to understand them. Shakespeare’s standing as a linguist can be established most briskly by the claim that he is the only Elizabethan dramatist to write at length in a foreign language: a claim so nearly true, when one considers the brevity of Ben Jonson’s Latin tags or of John Marston’s snatches of Italian, as to be a demonstrable fact. It is the widest gap in English studies that there is. No grammar, and no dictionary-at least, not yet. That is an odd way to treat the language of Sidney and Spenser, Marlowe and Shakespeare himself, Hooker and Bacon, Ben Jonson and Middleton, Burton and Sir Thomas Browne. Until there is a dictionary of Renaissance English as a whole, we cannot easily judge Shakespeare’s use of words: a Shakespeare concordance enables us to do no more than compare one usage in that author with another and even a big historical dictionary of Modern English like the Oxford can offer only occasional clues. Onions (1911), now revised (1986), there is none of 16th- and 17th-century English as a whole-though I have visited a workshop in a German university where a Renaissance dictionary once begun in the United States is still under way. Though there is an old glossary of Shakespeare’s vocabulary by C.T. Johnson’s day have successively recorded: it has been lost sight of, as a whole, through a sort of scholarly inadvertence. Shakespeare’s English is Early Modern, and in scholarship it has slipped through the cracks, so to speak, between Chaucer’s English and what lexicographers since Dr. ![]() There are both for Old English, or Anglo-Saxon both for MiddleĮnglish, or Chaucer’s language and for Modern English both, of course, and in abundance. Renaissance English still lacks a dictionary, and it still lacks a grammar. This is the biggest void there is in English studies. The truth is that, much as is known about Renaissance English, that knowledge as a whole is still largely unmarshaled. The difficulties that lie in the way of proving such a hypothesis are in the first instance practical. I believe that Shakespeare was a conscious linguist. Jonson may have been the better classicist, and there is a tradition supported by Milton, Voltaire, and Samuel Johnson that Shakespeare wrote more by nature than by art, “warbling his native woodnotes wild.” I want now to propose another, and less familiar, Shakespeare: one who held general views about the nature of language, who was the conscious master of more than one European language: in short, a man learned in tongues. ![]() It is easy to accept that the great dramatist of England, and of Europe, is the master of his native tongue but ever since his rival Ben Jonson made his famously slighting remark about “small Latin and less Greek,” it has been doubted if he knew much else. That question-or huddle of questions-is still unexplored. ![]()
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