“I cannot tell wat is dat”: Linguistic Conflict in Shakespeare’s King Henry V

Abstract

Shakespeare’s Henry V is unique in the way that it is a linguistically troubled and conflicted piece of writing. As one of its most recent editors put it, ‘No play of Shakespeare’s makes so much use of differences in language and has more language barriers’. The play is much more than an Anglo-French confrontation seen from an English angle. It anatomises the concept of nationhood: it is slippery, ambivalent, and fluid on the one hand, jingoistic and rigid on the other. Henry V is ideal when it comes to studying scenes in the Other’s language, as well as otherness and alterity. The two scenes this article mainly focuses on – the scene almost entirely in French (3.5), during which Princess Katherine of France tries to learn a few rudiments of English from her servant Alice, and the wooing scene between Henry V and the Princess where Alice acts partly as an interpreter between the two (5.2) – exploit and expose linguistic and cultural faultlines. Both scenes encapsulate many of the issues of the play at large. Moreover, while questioning the idea of foreignness through specific linguistic interplay, they challenge the very notion of Shakespearean scenic division in theatrically productive ways.