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The MLA (Modern Language Association) 2015 Convention kicks off tomorrow in Vancouver! We’ll be at the Booth 519 and 521 with our ACP colleagues, so be sure to stop by and have a look at our featured titles on language and literature.
Speaking of which..
Michael Saenger’s INTERLINGUICITY, INTERNATIONALITY, AND SHAKESPEARE is a new collection of essays that explore the hybridity of languages that Shakespeare embraced in his writing.
Contributors from history, performance criticism, and comparative literature focus on local issues, such as community identification in the Netherlands of Shakespeare’s time and the appropriation of Shakespeare in German literature in the nineteenth century, to suggest that Shakespeare never wrote “in” English because English was not then, nor is it now, an intact, knowable system.
MQUP Editor Mark Abley spoke to Michael Saenger about language, Elizabethan theatre, and the “interlinguicity” of Shakespeare’s writing.
Mark Abley: When people think about the English language in Shakespeare’s time, what do they get wrong?
Michael Saenger: I think people have the impression that everyone spoke in thee’s and thou’s, and that Shakespeare was entirely typical of his time. In fact, most of England spoke a language that would be easy for us to understand — Shakespeare was an outlier, a cherished stylist who stretched the language. “Anon” was archaic; people didn’t actually say that to each other. But they loved hearing it in the theatre.
You say in the introduction that “We always exist in multiple languages, even if we believe ourselves to be monolingual.” Why?
Linguists have long understood that languages cannot ever be separated, in time or space. “English” is constantly changing, and it’s never been clear what precisely counts as a dialect, what counts as jargon, and so on. Uriel Weinreich made this point a generation ago, but we have a stubborn habit of ignoring it. Many of our institutions create the impression that English is one thing, French another, and so on. We have official languages for countries, for university departments, and for big dictionaries. The way we handle language often encourages us to pretend that languages have little walls around them, even when it’s entirely clear that they don’t.
I spent some time in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, noticing all the bilingual signs in French and English. I was looking for a sign that printed the exact same word above and below. It wasn’t very hard to find, of course, because French and English are particularly close cousins. They share space in the ROM, but they’ve really been sharing space since both of them were born. The term “French” was probably first used in England, and the accent aigu certainly was invented on the colder side of the English Channel. So we could save money on signage in some rooms of the ROM by simply printing one word and assuming that French speakers will, silently, read it differently than English speakers.
My point is not to make light of linguistic differences; on the contrary, they can be quite serious. A considerable factor in the recent conflict in the Ukraine was caused by the new Ukrainian government’s efforts to delegitimize the Russian language in parts of the country that rely heavily on that tongue. And in my own country, the United States, the anger directed at people who do not speak an imported language – English — has long been a serious problem. My point is to ask that we stop trying to pretend that languages are solid, pure, separate things. If there is a wall between languages it is only in the worlds of politics, universities and books. The real lived experience of people has always involved linguistic border-hopping; even if we’re not aware of it, we do this almost constantly. That’s what the term “interlinguicity” means — it’s an effort to focus on the fact that we live between languages, rather than try to pretend we don’t.
Shakespeare was famously said to have “small Latin and less Greek.” But in performance, his history plays contain passages in French and Welsh. What does this suggest about Shakespeare, and about the Elizabethan audience?
Shakespeare clearly loved his Latin education, although Ben Jonson was probably right in quipping that it was not up to university standards. But Shakespeare was not much of a believer in the hierarchies of language that we tend to take for granted now. Like Queen Elizabeth I, and for that matter Jonson too, he had an open ear and was a quick study. And London was awash in a variety of dialects and languages. Welsh people came to London and brought their language with them, as did French and Dutch Protestants. Though Shakespeare has become a symbol of the English language, in a sense in his own time he was precisely the opposite. He was a poet who heard and wrote interlinguistically. There were Welsh people and French people in the audience, and they probably loved those scenes.
Would it make as much sense to produce a book about interlinguicity, internationality, and Racine? Or interlinguicity, internationality, and Cervantes? In other words, was the linguistic situation in England typical of Europe at the time, or was it exceptional?
It would certainly make sense to have a book about interlinguicity, internationality, and Joyce. I do think that some cities bring linguistic issues to the surface more, just as some periods in history see a greater mix of languages and some authors are more fascinated by it. The issues of standing between nations, and between languages, are universal in their essence, but they’re particular in their shape to a historical and geographic environment.
At a later point in the introduction, you make a fascinating claim: In the Renaissance, “mobility was a key pleasure that the theatre sold, and it meant that audiences could never be sure precisely where they were.” Could you explain?
In the drama of the time, you see a remarkable adventurousness. Plenty of the playwrights of the time send their audiences all over the known world — often quite absurdly. You could go to the theatre to go to Naples or Madrid, but you could also easily go back in time to Roman Britain. All for a relatively modest fee. But what I find particularly interesting is that there were almost no sets, so your travel abroad was always imaginative. You had to constantly imagine yourself to be in Vienna while almost everything around you indicated that you were in the boring old London that you were so desperate to leave. Films typically put you in darkness and throw you into a new world. Books ask you to live in yours and construct a new one in your mind. Shakespeare’s theatre did not do either of these things. It opted for a third path, where you see your world and live in a new one at the same time. That’s ambitious, but it’s clear that Shakespeare loved that notion.
The English language has changed enormously since Shakespeare’s time. Does this mean that every good production of his plays is now an act of translation?
It means that every production is a translation, whether good or bad. I do think, though, that there are many ways to get it right. All the words can be kept, or some, or even none. Original practice can be aimed for, discarded, or integrated sparingly. But we cannot go back in time. Even a “traditionalist” performance is an adaptation — because it is asking us to adopt codes that are not our own, which is not what early modern dramatists did. Like many Shakespeareans, I have my favorite stage and film versions, but I think it is important that we not treat Shakespeare with kid gloves. After all, some of the best Shakespearean actors of the past century have been eager to try new tricks and new ways of seeing the bard. We may not live in Shakespeare’s world, but we can learn from his example and embrace the gaps between countries and between languages, even as we cross them.
Michael Saenger is associate professor of English at Southwestern University.
Mark Abley is an acquisitions editor at MQUP and the author of many books of poetry and non-fiction including Spoken Here, The Prodigal Tongue, and Conversations with a Dead Man.
To learn more about this book or to order a copy online, click here.
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