Danza, lingua e potere: (s)cortesia ne La dodicesima notte di Shakespeare

Abstract

Dance in Elizabethan and Jacobean England was a practice closely linked to the notion of power, understood both from a political point of view – especially in relation to courtly dances – and from a gender perspective – as regards popular dances in particular. The purpose of this article is to conduct a linguistic analysis of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night 1.3, where two secondary characters, Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Sir Toby Belch, compete for the woman they both love – countess Olivia – by displaying absurd terpsichorean skills. With the support of conversation analysis and cognitive linguistics, this article underlines how the concept of power (intended both as man-man and man-woman relationship) is expressed at the linguistic level with a series of lexical and morphosyntactic strategies in the discourse about Renaissance dances.