Scoff power in Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Inns of Court: Language in Context

Abstract

Although recent criticism has made claims to bridge the gap between the linguistic criticism of Shakespeare and the new historicism, between close reading and cultural poetics, many questions still remain about what a historicized study of Shakespeare’s language or style should look like. Should it attend primarily to how sociohistorical contexts motivate verbal exchanges, showing how – in Bakhtin’s words – ‘the internal politics of style (how the elements are put together) is determined by [the] external politics’ of historically specific social relationships, class structures, and gender or racial ideologies? Should it depend upon a historical tool-kit for analysis, deriving, for example, from classical and Elizabethan rhetoric, or can a historicized study of language draw effectively upon modern-day discourse analysis? Should it engage seriously with the sociohistory of the English language itself, taking, for example, as work by Jonathan Hope and Sylvia Adamson does, research into period-specific grammatical changes as its starting point? Might it perhaps focus on how Shakespeare’s linguistic capital has functioned in the historical contexts of this canonical author’s reception and reproduction? These methodological questions are important ones, and each one of these directions is potentially fruitful. If, as Frank Kermode has asserted, much of ‘the life of [Shakespeare’s] plays is in the language’, then we should not be ignoring their linguistic texture or failing to provide our students with tools that can allow them to engage with its complexity and interest.