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DAVID DAUBE
 

Shakespeare on Aliens Learning English

I

For alien refugees in this country, one of the greatest problems is the problem of language. To be forced to speak a foreign tongue, not for an hour or so at a dinner party, but throughout the working part of the day, is a serious matter; particularly serious in the case of those who speak their own tongue well and are sensitive to their shortcomings in the other, and in the case of the elderly. There is a moving scene in Richard II, I, 3, when Mowbray, on receiving sentence of exile for life, breaks out lamenting the loss, not of wealth and position, but of his English.

"The language I have learn'd these forty years,

My native English, now I must forgo:
And now my tongue's use is to me no more
Than an unstringed viol or a harp,
Or like a cunning instrument cased up . . .
I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,
Too far in years to be a pupil now.
What is thy sentence then but speechless death,
Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?"

The cunning instrument is still there, the faculty of speech, that amazing power of man of giving shape to the formless and void in him. But it is cased up, unserviceable in exile: and a man past middle age cannot hope to acquire, and make fully his own, a new tongue.

This does not mean that refugees ought not to try, nor even that some of them may not be highly successful. Catherine of Aragon was able to say, when Wolsey started talking Latin to her (Henry VIII, III, 1):

"I am not such a truant since my coming

As not to know the language I have liv'd in."

The future wife of Henry V, Catherine of France, took lessons in English long before crossing the channel (Henry V, III, 4). She, however, made the mistake of choosing as teacher her lady-in-waiting, French herself, with no more English tan can be got by an occasional trip. As a result, she never heard the "th" rightly pronounced (that sound appears to have been a terror to foreigners at all times); her Alice, indeed, taught her to say, "de hand, de nails, de arm". Nor did she correct her mistress when she substituted "de sin" for "de chin" (the "ch" is another stumbling-block to the French). The moral of this for alien students of the language is obvious.

The earlier a man starts learning English, the better are his prospects: children of refugees pick it up faster and more acccurately than their parents. Owen Glendower's English was faultless, but this was the secret. He himself told Percy how he was sent to the best possible school while still a boy (Henry IV, First Part, III, 1):

"I can speak English, lord, as well as you;
For I was train'd up in the English court;
Where, being but young, I framed to the harp
Many an English ditty." (Caliban also was taught from an early age, and even he attained full mastery of the language; though, indeed, the only use he made of it was for cursing; Tempest, I, 2.)

Neither Dr. Caius, the French physician, nor Sir Hugh Evans, the Welsh parson, can have had careful instruction. The former invariably put "d" for "th," "sh" for "ch," "v" for "w," and "eer" for the ending "er"; moreover, he would throw in odd scraps of French between the English, especially when in a temper. It was a toss-up whether he would call the landlord of the Garter "mine host of de Jarteer" or "host de Jartiere" (Merry Wives, I, 4; III, 1; IV, 3). "O diable, diable, vat is in my closet?" he exclaimed when he found a man hiding in his study; and he sent a messenger to his rival with the order: "Give-a dis letter to Sir Hugh; by gar, it is a shallenge: I vill cut his troat in de park" (I,4). His feelings, on discovering that the person with whom he had run away was a dressed-up boy, instead of Ann Page, might also have been better expressed than by: "I ha' married un garçon, a boy, un paysan, by gar, a boy; it is not Ann Page" (V,4).

Sir Hugh, the cleric, with his faulty grammar, his clumsy circumlocutions, his preference of the literary word over the colloquial, and his rejection of "b" and "d" in favour of "p" and "t," was decidedly worse than his fellow-countryman Fluellen, who was only a Captain in King Henry V's army. "Ferry goot," he said, having appointed himself member of a committee to arbitrate a dispute between Falstaff and some persons robbed by him (Merry Wives, I, 1), "I will make a prief of it . . . and we will afterwards ork upon the cause with as great discreetly as we can." Again, when Falstaff, disguised as an old woman of Brentford, was cruelly beaten by one who regarded that woman as a sorceress, the parson muttered (IV,2): "I think the oman is a witch indeed: I like not when a oman has a great peard: I spy a great peard under her muffler."

It was a great opportunity for the host of the Garter and his set, the quarrel between the Frenchman and the Welshman and their decision to settle it by a duel. Those wags led the two to different places, made them wait for one another for hours on end and finally brought them together disarmed -- except for their tongues. "Let them keep their limbs whole and hack our English," was the watchword on that occasion (III,1), and the dialogue that followed was queer indeed. Here it must be remarked that the instigators of the joke found Dr. Caius and Sir Hugh not only funny, but also just a little contemptible, for speaking a broken English: a point to which I shall come back.

Yet Parson Evans was a language-master himself: he taught Latin. His method, however, is not to be recommended and seems to have been considered particularly dry even in an age when the learning by heart of a list of words was not yet regarded as something that would for ever pervert a lad's mind. Only look at this sample (IV,1):

EVANS. What is lapis, William?

WILLIAM. A stone. EVANS. And what is a stone, William? WILLIAM. A pebble. EVANS. No, it is lapis: I pray you, remember in your prain. WILLIAM. Lapis.

EVANS. That is good, William.

It is hardly surprising that Evans should have been under a delusion not infrequently to be found in pedants of his type, namely, that everybody must be familiar with the elements of classical grammar. Mrs. Quickly's absolute lack of comprehension was a great shock to him (IV, 1): "Oman, art thou lunatics? hast thou no understandings for thy cases, and the number of the genders? Thou art as foolish Christian creatures as I would desires."

A knowledge of the words marked as "vulg." in the Concise Oxford Dictionary (and, maybe, of certain others not there registered at all) is essential, according to Shakespeare, for one who wishes to make himself master of the language and to be capable of juding a native by his purer or coarser vocabulary. To Henry IV, who expresses his grief about his eldest son's association with riotous fellows like Falstaff, Poins and others, old Warwick replies (Henry IV, Second Part, IV, 4):

The prince but studies his companions
Like a strange tongue, wherein, to gain the language,
"Tis needful that the most immodest word
Be look'd upon and learn'd; which, once attained,
Your highness knows, comes to no further use
But to be known and hated. So, like gross terms,
The prince will in the perfectness of time
Cast off his followers; and their memory
Shall as a pattern or a measure live
By which his grace must mete the lives of others. As a matter of fact, it is exceedingly difficult for a foreigner (and all the more, if he is of the educated class) to acquire the proper use of slang. Dr. Caius has to ask the landlord of the Garter what he means when he calls him "Mounseur Mock-water" or tells him that he will be "clapper-clawed tightly" (Merry Wives, II, 3). Even the boy who acts as interpreter between Pistol and his French prisoner, though from the lowest section of society and doubtless used to a very straight-forward manner of spech, is at his wit's end when confronted by the task of translating a pun, a technical term of the hunt and slang at the same time (Henry V, IV, 4). BOY. He says his name is Master Fer.

PISTOL. Master Fer! I'll fer him, and firk him, and ferret him: discuss the same in French unto him. BOY. I do not know the French for fer, and ferret, and firk.

 
II

Language reflects the national character. But it is dangerous to appeal to this argument in isolated instances (though, true enough, ancient authors already did it). Alien students should think twice before deciding that a certain English word is "typical," or that English has no equivalent for a certain foreign word. In Henry VI (First Part, IV, 7), the convrsation between Sir William Lucy and the Dauphin begins thus:

CHARLES. On what submissive message art thou sent?

LUCY. Submission, Dauphin! 'Tis a mere French word;
We English warriors wot not what it means.

I am not quite sure what Lucy is here declaring "submission" French in the philological sense at all; he may mean no more than that such a word, while there is a soldier left to fight, could come only from the mouth of a Frenchman. It seems more likely, however, that the philological point does play some part. The noun "submission," in the sense in which it is used in this passage, did not enter English until well in the second half of the fifteenth century. There is reason to suppose that at the time when Henry VI was written, the Latin and French words borrowed in the course of the Renaissance were not yet so fully absorbed as no longer to strike English ears as a group apart. Let us take it, therefore, that Sir William's reply to the Dauphin signifies: "The word 'submission,' strictly speaking, belongs to your language, not ours."

Now there is implied in this, first, that the word, being of French origin, must always rank as French; secondly, that English has no word to express the same notion; and thirdly, that the presence of the word in French proves the French inclined to, and its absence from English incapable of, the act which it denotes. None of these assumptions, I fear, bears closer examination. The third raises problems too knotty to be here discussed. As to the first, is "victory" not also adopted from French? Would Sir William say of it, too, that "it is a mere French word"? As to the second, is "to yield" not a native English word? This is not denying that, as a repartee to the arrogant words with which Charles receives him, Sir William's criticism of the enemy's character and language is entirely justifiable.

Here may be the place to draw attention to a far more primitive kind of dislike of the language of the enemy; a kind of dislike to be explained by the simple fact that, when people are at war, they are apt to hate everything peculiar to the other side. Curiously, to quite a few of those hotheads the enemy's language sounds particularly offensive if spoken, not by a real enemy across the frontier, but by somebody less intolerant than they. Jack Cade tells Sir Humphrey Stafford (Henry VI, Second Part, IV, 2) that he considers Lord Say responsible for the loss of Maine; "and more than that," he continues, "he can speak French, and therefore he is a traitor." When Stafford exclaims, "Oh, gross and miserable ignorance," Cade rejoins: "Nay, answer, if you can: the Frenchmen are our enemies: go to then, I ask but this; can he that speaks with the tongue of the enemy be a good counsellor, or no?" And the crowd shouts: "No, no: and therefore we'll have his head." While German-speaking aliens in this country would do well to pay heed to such feelings where they exist, it is interesting to note that, in Shakespeare, they exist only in Jack Cade and his rabble.

There is one thing, however, not much better than speaking the language of the enemy, and that is speaking Latin. For many centuries, Latin was in disfavour with the common people as the possession of the learned and wealthy; it was, indeed, hated and feared as the instrument of the higher clergy and lawyers. The unfortunate Lord Say, captured by Jack Cade's gang, is trying to argue with his victors (Henry VI, Second Part, IV, 7):

SAY. You men of Kent,--

DICK. What say you of Kent?

SAY. Nothing but this: 'Tis bona terra, mala gens.

CADE. Away with him! away with him! He speaks Latin.

The scene has a subtle point. On the one hand, it is the mere sound of Latin (not the meaning of the Latin words, which he is unable to grasp) that rouses Cade's anger. On the other, Lord Say has commented disparagingly upon the men before him. There is no doubt that uneducated persons, when a foreign language is being talked in their presence, sometimes have the uncomfortable feeling that the worst remarks might be made about them and they be none the wiser. The example of Lord Say shows that an impression of this kind is not always without substance.

I have already mentioned the scene from Henry VIII (III, 1) in which the queen asks Wolsey not to use Latin in submitting to her his proposals. The reason she gives is:

"A strange tongue makes my cause more strange, suspicious."All the queen can do, hard pressed as she finds herself by her husband's clever and unscrupulous counsellors, is to see that these shall not succeed in destroying her good fame with the populace. The populace (represented in this act by the women attending upon the queen), if the negotiations were conducted in a foreign language, might well conclude that something was wrong. It would certainly do so if the foreign language were Latin, the language, for the ordinary man, of involved and terrible cases. Catherine is an alien; she must not let the shadow of a doubt creep into people's minds; they all must see that "the willing'st sin I ever yet committed may be absolved in English." Things "strange" in the sense of "foreign" only too easily become things "strange" in the sense of "suspicious." The scene, by the way, seems to be based on an actual incident in the struggle between the queen and the cardinal.

Occasionally some very pretentious and unintelligible English style may be mistaken for Latin by the simple-minded; and that language may incur blame that it does not deserve. Bardolph, asked whether he is the one who picked Master Slender's purse, replies (Merry Wives, I, 1):

BARDOLPH. I say the gentleman had drunk himself out of his five sentences. . . . And being fap, sir, was, as they say, cashiered, and so conclusions passed the careires.

SLENDER. Ay, you spake in Latin then, too; but 'tis no matter; I'll ne'er be drunk whilst I live again, but in honest, civil, godly company.
 
 
 
 

III

What is the average native's attitude towards the alien student of English? Naturally, he cannot help finding him ridiculous. A man who mispronounces the most familiar words, and who does not understand half of what you say, simply is a figure of fun; and it is too tempting to play little tricks upon him. The remarkable thing is that quite often a slighter or stronger note of contempt mingles with the mere, innocent amusement. In the Merry Wives (II, 3), they enjoy talking a kind of English to Dr. Caius which he cannot possibly cope with.

CAIUS. I shall procure-a you de good guest, de earl, de knight, de lords, de gentlemen, my patients.

HOST. For the which I will be thy adversary toward Ann Page. Said I well?'

CAIUS. By gar, 'tis good; vell said.

There is no reason to assume that the Host of the Garter knows any French whatever beyond such sorry fragments as "Mounseur"; yet, apparently, he considers himself vastly superior to Caius, the Frenchman, and Evans, the "mountain-foreigner" (as Pistol calls him [I, 1]) with their imperfect English.

This instinct of looking down on the foreigner who talks the language badly manifests itself even more clearly towards the end of the play (V, 4), when Falstaff finds the Welshman's insults more difficult to bear than anything else:
EVANS. Seese is not goot to give putter; your pelly is all putter.

FALSTAFF. "Seese" and "putter"? have I lived to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of English? This is enough to be the decay of lust and late-walking through the realm.

Two curious little observations about the uneducated native, which many aliens now in this country must have made, are, first, that he is slow to take in that there should be any grown up person, even if he be a foreigner, incapable of understanding a good English sentence; and secondly, that when he listens to foreigners talking in their own language, he tends to jump at a syllable here and there that sounds similar to an English word and to conclude that it must mean the same. The conversation (if such it can be called) between Pistol and his French prisoner, before they get the assistance of an interpreter, is a perfect illustration of both (Henry V, IV, 4).
PISTOL. What is thy name? discuss.

FRENCH SOLDIER. O Seigneur Dieu!

PISTOL. O, Seignieur Dew should be a gentleman:
Perpend my words, O Seignieur Dew, and mark;
O Seignieur Dieu, thou diest on point of fox,
Except, O Signieur, thou do give to me
Egregious ransom.

FRENCH SOLDIER. O, prenez miséricorde! ayez pitié de moi!

PISTOL. Moy shall not serve; I will have forty moys.

It is not only a sense of grim humour that makes Pistol act the fool, thus terrifying the Frenchman: he does half expect the latter to follow what he says and his replies to be interpretable as some sort of English.

Mrs. Quickly, too, believes (like certain modern philologists) that the same sound stands for the same in all tongues. She does not like young William learning cases like horum, harum, horum. "You do ill," she tells Parson Evans (Merry Wives, IV, 1), "to teach the child such words." But even the far more educated and rational princess Catherine of France, of whose lessons with Alice I have already spoken, boggles at some English words because, in French, they would be of an improper connotation (Henry V , III, 4).
CATHERINE. Comment appelez-vous le pied et la robe?

ALICE. --, madame; et --.

CATHERINE. --! O Seigneur Dieu! ce son mots de son mauvais, corruptible, grosse et impudique, et non pour les dames d'honneur d'user. Je ne voudrais prononcer ces mots devant les Seigneurs de France pour tout le monde. Il faut --, neant-moins.

It is true that the princess is aware that these words have to be avoided only in French company. I suppose, a well brought up Englishman, however sensible, may have some qualms to overcome before he freely employs the German for "bright," which is hell.

This last scene, incidentally, gives rise to the question what languages, besides Latin and Greek, Shakespeare was able to handle. In particular, what was his French like? It looks, at first sight, as if he must have known it well to make puns -- and ambiguous puns -- in it (he seems to have followed his own advice, quoted above, and taken some interest in the branches of less respectability). But then, the particular pun that he produces is rather crude, and based on vulgarisms that cannot have been infrequent at his time and in his circle. The rest of the scene is in fairly simple French.

However, if it is assumed by the uneducated native that even the most foreign speech ought to be a little like English, there are plenty of aliens who think that they must improve the speech of this country in accordance with their conceptions of a decent language; and these are by no means all of the uneducated type. Naturally enough, they are stirred up to their work of reform mainly by two kinds of defect: illogicalities of grammar, and idioms. The latter are especially irritating, for they cannot be learned systematically and crop up where you least expect them. Who will refuse his sympathy to honest Captain Fluellen (already briefly referred to), when he argues (Henry V, IV, 7) that one might just as well say "Alexander the Big" ("the Pig" he calls him, to be quite exact) as "Alexander the Great"?

 

IV

There are two short cuts, easier and safer than laborious study, which a foreigner can take and at the end of which he will be perfectly understood by all: the one is a good fight in a good cause, and the other is love. Both are popular to-day, and both, it seems, were so at all times. The twice mentioned Fluellen gave Pistol, who had meanly insulted him as a Welshman, a sound thrashing, and no further explanations were needed. "You thought," a bystander remarked to Pistol (Henry V, V, 1),"because he could not speak English in the native garb, he could not therefore handle an English cudgel: you find it otherwise." To many an alien doing honest service over here, this passage may be a comfort.

The other short cut is love. Edmund Mortimer knew no Welsh, and his wife, Glendower's daughter, no English (the latter fact is more surprising than the former, for Glendower himself, we have seen, was a past master of English; probably he held old-fashioned views on the education of women). But this did not prevent them from expressing to one another their truest thoughts. "I understand thy kisses, and thou mine," he said to her when he took his farewell before going to the battle (Henry IV, First Part, III, 1). Indeed, he was fascinated not only by her looks and kisses (an easily intelligible manner of address), but even by her outpourings in Welsh, though unable to make out the exact, literal meaning; and it is obvious that she found his English discourse no less enchanting. It can have been an emotion of no ordinary kind that made him resolve to become an adept in Welsh.
But I will never be a truant, love,
Till I have learn'd thy language; for thy tongue
Makes Welsh as sweet as ditties highly penn'd,
Sung by a fair queen in a summer's bower.

We need not ask why they used English and Welsh at all: a mother talks to her baby, and finds a lively response, long before he can be said to understand the language.

It is true that now and then Lord Mortimer got very impatient with himself for missing the precise import of his wife's remarks ("O I am ignorance itself in this!"). Moreover, it might happen that it was absolutely necessary to convey some precise information, and in that case, naturally, they had to appeal to Glendower to be their interpreter: no harmony of souls can produce a proper, working arangement as to when and how a lady is to follow her husband to the army. Whether or not Lady Mortimer was a fine singer is somewhat doubtful. She offered her husband to "sing the song that pleaseth you," and he was delighted at the prospect. Yet Hotspur, present in the same hall, confessed to his wife that "rather than hear the lady sing in Welsh, he had hear Lady, his brach, howl in Irish." However, while Mortimer may have been prejudiced by love, I think Hotspur is an even less reliable witness, given, as he was, to cheap jokes to amuse his wife.

It may be noted that Shakespeare does not prescribe exactly what Lady Mortimer has to say in Welsh; he gives (or implies) only general stage directions like "Lady Mortimer speaks to Mortimer in Welsh," or "A Welsh song sung by Lady Mortimer." This is a remarkable thing when one considers that there are more or less elaborate passages in French in several of his plays. The reason seems to be that fewer member of his audience would be in a position to appreciate a Welsh speech, and that he himself was less (if at all) versed in that language.

Henry V and Catherine of France were another pair of lovers speaking different languages (Henry V, V, 2). They were not, however, so utterly unacquainted each with the other's language as Mortimer and his wife. King Henry had a fair amount of straightforward French, despite such protestations as "French . . . will hang upon my tongue like a new-married wife about her husband's neck, hardly to be shook off"; or, "It is as easy for me, Kate, to conquer the kingdom as to speak so much more French."

In fact, the princess complimented him in very high -- and evidently exaggerated -- terms on his French performance; though he himself was painfully aware that, if he tried to express his feelings in French, the result was mere, fine-sounding phrases.
HENRY. How answer you, la plus belle Catherine du monde, mon très-chère et divine déesse?

CATHERINE. Your majesté ave fausse French enough to deceive de most sage demoiselle dat is en France.

HENRY. Now, fie upon my false French! By mine honour, in true English, I love thee, Kate.

It is also noteworthy that Henry found it less difficult to follow Catherine's French than Alice's English interpretation.
CATHERINE. O bon Dieu! les langues des hommes sont pleines de tromperies.

HENRY. What says she, fair one? that the tongues of men are full of deceits?

ALICE. Oui, dat de tongues of de mans is be full of deceits, -- dat is de princess.

HENRY. The princess is the better Englishwoman.

(I well remember the remark of an English friend of mine, after a lecture delivered at our University in English, by a foreign guest: "The only intelligible sentence was the German quotation at the beginning. . .")

As for Catherine, to whose elementary studies under Alice I have drawn attention, the progress she had made by the time she met her future husband is astounding. She was able to get the gist of long English speeches, and herself to form short, simple sentences and pronounce them tolerably well. It is a common experience that alien students, particularly those of a lively, non-academic type, learn to follow a conversation first, and to speak themselves later.

Where their philology was deficient, love would step in.
CATHERINE. Your majesty shall mock at me; I cannot speak your England.

HENRY. O fair Catherine, if you will love me soundly with your French heart, I will be glad to hear you confess it brokenly with your English tongue.

Indeed, to Henry, his beloved's faulty English was reminiscent of the playing of a harp:
"Come, your answer in broken music, for thy voice is music, and thy English broken."
Does a slip in syntax matter if the heart is constant? And what does it matter which of the two lovers is a little better at the other's language so long as they understand one another? The king, when Catherine praised his French in the most flattering manner, replied with great frankness:
"Thy speaking of my tongue, and I thine, most truly-falsely, must needs be granted to be much at one."
He held that his Kate might become a great expert in his language with the aid of no dictionary or grammar whatever.
BURGUNDY. My royal cousin, teach you our princess English?

HENRY. I would have her learn, my fair cousin, how perfectly I love her; and that is good English.

To judge by this and some similar remarks, incidentally, the king appears to have felt that the English language was more suitable for expressing, plain, genuine emotions, and lent itself less easily to shallow, polite speech, than French.

There is a point about lovers talking different languages that must not be overlooked: the situation has its subtle advantages. Henry, for one, was conscious of this. "I' faith, Kate," he exclaimed, "my wooing is fit for thy understaanding. I am glad thou canst speak no better English; for, if thou couldst, thou wouldst find me such a plain king that thou wouldst think I had sold my farm to buy a crown." (It is not suggested that any of the present guests of England made his fortune in the way of King Henry.)

However, Catherine also was quick to avail herself of the special possibilities of the case, though in a very different fashion from her suitor.
HENRY. Do you like me, Kate?

CATHERINE. Pardonnez-moi, I cannot tell vat is 'like me.'

Who believes that she did not understand? Henry put this question to her after extremely scanty introduction. She thought (and rightly) it was as well to keep him in suspense a little and make him woo her properly and at length. Later, while he was going ahead at full speed, he paused for a moment to ask, "How say you, lady?" But though his speech by now was far from easy, she answered only, "Sauf votre honneur, me understand vell"; and on he went. Alice played the same trick.
HENRY. I will kiss your lips, Kate.

CATHERINE. Les dames et demoiselles pour être baisées devant leur noces, il n'est pas la coutume de France.

HENRY. Madam my interpreter, what says she?

ALICE. Dat it is not be de fashion pour les ladies of France, -- I cannot tell vat is baiser en Anglish.

HENRY. To kiss.

ALICE. Your majesty entendre better que moi.

Observe that Catherine, Alice's pupil in English, was able to translate the rare word without difficulty; and that Alice herself heard it uttered in English and French two seconds before she professed ignorance.

V From the foregoing remarks it appears that most aliens whose English endeavours Shakespeare depicts for us are either French or Welsh. This is easily explained: of all foreign varieties of English, it is the French and Welsh that he would have come across most frequently in the streets and taverns of London. Moreover, as far as the former is concerned, we should expect it to be prominent in the histories, full, as they are, of the wars with France.

If Shakespeare takes his aliens learning English from few races, there are few occasions on which he introduces any at all. In the first place, none appear in his fairy-tales, such as Midsummer-Night's Dream, Winter's Tale, Cymbeline. In the world of these plays, the problem of language does not exist. Everybody understands everybody, and everybody can talk the common tongue. The Duke of Athens converses freely with the Queen of the Amazons; the King of Sicily with that of Bohemia and the daughter of the Emperor of Russia; the King of Britain with the Roman general; and, needless to add, gods, goddesses and spirits of all descriptions and nationalities with one another and with the mortals.

How inviolable this rule is may be judged from the last scene of the Merry Wives of Windsor (V, 4). Here a little fairy play is produced by Falstaff's antagonists; and, while he is acting the fairy-king, even Sir Hugh Evans, the Welsh parson, recites most lovely English poetry.


Where's Bead? -- Go you, and when you find a maid
That, ere she sleep, has thrice her prayers said,
Raise up the organs of her fantasy,
Sleep she as sound as careless infancy:
But those as sleep and think not on their sins,
Pinche them, arms, legs, backs, shoulders, sides, and shins.
As soon as the fairy-play is at an end, the old Evans comes back again: "Sir John Falstaff, serve Got, and leave your desires, and fairies will not pinse you."

(A similar change, incidentally, comes over Mrs. Quickly who, however vulgar in ordinary life, chooses her words very carefully while representing the fairy-queen:
About, about;
Search Windsor Castle, elves, within and out:
Strew good luck, ouphs, on every sacred room,
That it may stand till the perpetual doom
In state as wholesome as in state 'tis fit,
Worthy the owner, and the owner it.')
However, even when not concerned with fairies, Shakespeare, as a rule, writes exactly as if the tower of Babel had never come down; and this is true not only of those fantastic plays the scene of which might be anywhere, like King Lear, and not only of those that take us far back into the dim past, like Troilus and Cressida; the Romans and Volsces in Coriolanus; the Romans and Goths in Titus Andronicus; the English and French again in King John and Henry V -- they all, as a rule, speak one language. It would, of course, be impracticable, on theatrical-technical grounds, to bring in the language difficulty each time when it exists in reality. That would lead to unbearably tedious complications; in fact, if the idea were logically pursued, none of the plays just named could be written at all.

Here may be seen one of the flaws of absolute naturalism. If the dictates of naturalism were observed, hardly any dramas with characters of different nationalities and languages could be written; as a result, very few political or historical dramas, for instance, would be possible (certainly none of the grand type such as Antony and Cleopatra). The so-called realistic theatre, for this as other reasons, means a tremendous contraction of the range of subjects from which an author may choose, far less truly realistic, far less of a mirror of life in all its forms, than the Elizabethan stage with its neglect for accidentals like language.

As a matter of fact, Shakespeare presents the question of language only where it is of definite advantage to him; and that is so in, roughly speaking, two cases: in the comedy (or comical interludes in a tragedy), and anywhere if a special effect is intended. In the comedy, a man speaking broken English obviously is a good character to have, always certain to raise a laugh. If a special effect is intended, the problem might be brought up anywhere: Mowbray's sorrow at being cut off from his native language is moving; Mortimer and his wife, who cannot properly talk to one another, are two sweet lovers. But, be it in comedy or tragedy, as soon as the point is no longer useful, Shakespeare simply drops it. In Henry V, at the end of that long scene between the king, Catherine of France and Alice, which I have discussed (V, 2), and where so much is made of the difference of language, the duke of Burgundy and other nobles appear: from that very moment all, English and French, once more speak one common tongue; and this even though the duke enquires how the king got on with the princess, seeing that his language is English and hers French. The problem has served its purpose, and is ruthlessly dismissed.

Shakespeare scholars may ask why I have not commented on the Irish officer Macmorris (and also, perhaps, on his confrère in Henry V's army, the Scotsman Jamy). Need I remind them how he cut short Captain Fluellen (Henry V, III, 2) when he was about to begin a discussion?
FLUELLEN. Captain Macmorris, I think, look you, under your correction, there is not many of your nation --

MACMORRIS. Of my nation! What ish my nation? Ish a villain, and a basterd, and a knave, and a rascal -- What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation?

Not me.

[Originally published in Message, Belgian Review. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.]