“Where the devil should he learn our language?”: Shakespeare’s Territorial Linguistics

Abstract

This article looks at how Spenser’s desire for an English national identity, rooted in a “kingdom of our own language,” is realized in Shakespeare’s works. I track the way early modern systems of power have used language as a colonial weapon and show how Shakespeare demonstrates the problematic effects of imagining language as a scaffold to hold oppressive social structures—such as class, gender, and nationality—in place. Throughout his works—comedies, tragedies, and histories alike—Shakespeare consistently plays with the notion that there is a “right” and a “wrong” way to speak, and I argue he connects these definitions with the colonial notion of a “right” and a “wrong” way to be “English”. The article examines language as space, in which “English” and “England” become synonymous. It explores language as a shared national identity in which language belongs to physical spaces as well as to peoples and a more abstract notion of nation. It explores the colonial imposition of the English language on indigenous populations that map the expansion of the known world in the early modern era, and looks at the tensions between the English and the Welsh—and their respective languages—in Shakespeare’s plays. Ultimately, shows us the inevitable victims of linguistic nationalism and draws attention to England’s long history of using language as a tool of abuse, oppression, and control.