Leçons de langues dans Henry V

Abstract

This paper examines two scenes that make a deep incursion into the Other’s Language: they are taken from Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599), the conclusion and climax of a long-running historical saga which covers almost a century of English history. The first scene (3.4) is a most unusual language lesson attended by the young French princess Catherine de Valois and taught by her waiting-woman Alice, who shall prove as entertaining as she is incompetent. The second scene (5.2) is drawn from the end of the play and depicts the English King Henry wooing the Princess Catherine in a dialogue whose linguistic hybridity is particularly delectable. In each of those scenes the Other’s Language is comically mangled, and the passage from one language to the other is delightfully transgressive. We shall see that those Anglo-French episodes both present an unexpected learning situation – I offer to treat them as a coherent unit, the first scene constituting a sort of prelude to the second.